18

OF the four agents that David Ogden chose to carry out his last requests, Gemstone was the one least motivated by a blind loyalty or by the money involved. True, she was loyal to Ogden and indebted to him, and true, she welcomed the sizable sum that had been deposited into her Zurich account, but Gemstone would have done the job for virtually anyone, and for nothing, if necessary. She would have burned down your barn for five bucks and the cost of the kerosene, and she would have burned down an orphanage just for the hell of it. Gemstone, whose name was Louise Abruzzi, was a firebug, a torch, a pyromaniac, and burning things down was more than just a job to her. It was her food, her drink, and her love life rolled into one.

She came into Glen Grove on the twenty-fifth of February, three days before the beginning of the time frame, and she spent those three days observing the Southern Manor from a room in a similar establishment directly across the street. By the end of the third day she knew exactly how she was going to do the job, and she spent the next day assembling the equipment she would need. With that accomplished, she left the rooming house and checked into a decent hotel on the other side of town. She was ready to roll on the job, but she was safe in the time frame and she could afford to give herself a day to let the anticipation and the excitement build inside of her. The anticipation was part of it for her, and she relished every minute of it.

Whenever time allowed, her routine for the day before a job was unvarying. She made it a time of complete relaxation as she drifted into a dreamlike state, thinking about the fire the next day, and of all the fires that had sparked her life over the years. This time was no exception. She started with a dip in the hotel pool, pleased that at her age she was still able to wear the most radical of bathing suits without embarrassing herself, then a light breakfast, and then she stretched out in the sun beside the pool to drift and dream. As usual, she let her thoughts wander back to when it all had begun. She no longer wondered why she was the way she was, but she still found it odd that she had been twenty-eight years old before she had become aware of the fires that were burning inside her head.

The year was 1970, and she was stationed at the Third Surgical Hospital at Binh Thuy, which was not a good place for an Army nurse to be that year. It wasn't the shelling so much. They were rarely shelled closely at Binh Thuy, the Air Force unit a few miles away drew most of the incoming, but they were operating around the clock and the strain was heavy. It wasn't just the wounded, either, not the legitimate wounded. There was a lot of dope going down at that time, medics coming to work stoned on horse, shooting up in the bathrooms, shooting up the patients who could pay for it. And the other kind of shooting, the gunfights. Guys coming into the hospital full of holes that the VC never put there. Gunfights among themselves almost every night, and always when the town was off-limits and the guys couldn't get in to see the girls. Stoned MPs and stoned GIs shooting it out in the compound; it was scary, and later, after she had set the fire, they tried to make a case that she had cracked under the strain. It's nothing to be ashamed of, it can happen to anybody, they told her, and she finally went along with it although she knew it wasn't so. She said, yeah, that must have been it, I must have flipped, because she wasn't going to tell them what really had happened, and she had to say something.

What she did was burn down the supply building at Binh Thuy. She did it in the middle of the night, and she did it by pouring gasoline around the base of the structure and setting it off with a homemade Molotov cocktail. It was an amateurish way to do it, but she didn't know anything about setting fires then. The foundation was cement block and the roof was tin, but the rest of it was wood, and it cooked up quickly. By the time that the fire squad arrived the roof was glowing pink; there was nothing to be saved, and later the CID investigators told her that she had roasted a half-million dollars worth of government issue.

She didn't try to deny it. She told them exactly what she had done, but when they asked her why she had done it, she went silent. She wasn't going to tell them that at the moment it had seemed like the most satisfying, pleasurable thing in the world to do, and so she had done it. She wasn't going to tell them that she had done it the way she would have eaten an apple if she had been hungry, or taken a drink if she had been thirsty. She wasn't going to tell them how she had felt when the flames went up.

"What's going to happen to me?" she had asked. There were two of them, a major and a captain, and both had been civilian cops.

"All we do is file the report," said the major. " Saigon makes the charges."

"How bad could it get?"

"You could pull some time. Why did you do it?"

It was perhaps the tenth time they had asked the question. As she had all the other times, she shook her head silently. The major nodded to the captain, who got up and left the room. When he was gone, the major said, "I'm old enough to be your father."

"No, you're not."

"Maybe an older brother. You want to tell me, just me, why you did it?"

She shook her head.

He shrugged. "I'm going to put down in my report that you cracked under the strain. Otherwise, you're looking at some heavy time."

"What strain?"

"You joking? All the wounded, all the shit that goes down here? You cracked, that's all."

"I've been a nurse for seven years. I don't crack."

"Suit yourself."

"If I say that I cracked, that makes me a nut case. They put me in a psycho."

"Not necessarily. What do you say we stop horsing around. You want to tell me what it felt like?"

His eyes were laughing at her, and she realized that he knew. She managed to say, "I'm not a nut case."

"Oh, yes you are. I've been a cop long enough to know exactly what you are."

"How much time am I looking at?"

"Could be five to ten."

"That much?"

"Could be."

"I guess I cracked under the strain. I just flipped. It's been hell around here."

"Now you got it."

The report was filed in Saigon, and while the wheels of justice were turning she was confined to her quarters with an MP on guard outside the door. She welcomed the confinement. It took her away from the physical and emotional pounding of the war, and it gave her a chance to think about what she had done, and what her future might be. She figured that if she was lucky she would be booted out of the Army, which meant an end to her nursing career, and that at the worst she would wind up in jail. She was wrong on both counts. Seventeen days after the report was filed she was visited by a middle-aged civilian with a warm smile and an easy manner who introduced himself as David Ogden. The interview took place in her room. Ogden took the only chair, and she sat on the edge of the bed.

"First of all, let me assure you that I'm not with the CID," he said. "I represent a civilian organization that's interested in your case." "Which organization is that?"

"We'll get to that in a while. First, I'd like to ask you a few questions." The questions he asked were about her childhood, her education, her vocation for nursing, and her feelings about the war. She answered them easily, warming to the man. Like the CID major, he was almost old enough to be her father, but unlike the major, he gave off an air of trust and confidence. For the first time since the night of the fire she started to relax.

"These questions," she said. "All that stuff is in my file."

"I know," he agreed, "but asking questions is a way of getting to know someone. Now I'll ask you for something that isn't in your file. When was the first time you ever felt like setting a fire?"