He stopped to drink some beer and think about the story. She watched intently but didn’t prod him.

“A few minutes later my charges went off and the tunnel, at least the part I had been in, came down. Whoever was in there was dead and buried. We waited a couple hours for the smoke and dust to settle. We hooked a Mighty Mite fan up and blew air down the entry shaft, and then you could see smoke being pushed out and coming up out of the air vents and other spider holes all around the jungle.

“And when it was clear, me and another guy went in to find Meadows. We thought he was dead, but we had the promise; no matter what, we were going to get him out and send him home. But we didn’t find him. Spent the rest of the day down there looking, but all we found were dead VC. Most of them had been shot, some had cut throats. All of them had ears slashed off. When we came up, the top told us we couldn’t wait anymore. We had orders. We pulled out, and I had broken the promise.”

Bosch was staring blankly out into the night, seeing only the story he was telling.

“Two days later, another company was in the village, Nhuan Luc, and somebody found a tunnel entrance in a hootch. They get their rats to check it out, and they aren’t in that tunnel more than five minutes when they find Meadows. He was just sitting like Buddha in one of the passageways. Out of ammo. Talking gibberish. Not making sense, but he was okay. And when they tried to get him to come up with them, he didn’t want to. They finally had to tie him up and put a rope on him and have the patrol up there pull him out. Up in the sunlight they saw he was wearing a necklace of human ears. Strung with his tags.”

He finished the beer and walked in off the balcony. She followed him to the kitchen, where he got a fresh bottle. She put her half-finished bottle on the counter.

“So that’s my story. That was Meadows. He went to Saigon for some R and R but he came back. He couldn’t stay away from the tunnels. After that one, though, he was never the same. He told me that he just got mixed up and lost down there. He just kept going in the wrong direction, killing anything he came across. The word was that there were thirty-three ears on his necklace. And somebody asked me once why Meadows let one of the VC keep an ear. You know, accounting for the odd number. And I told him that Meadows let them all keep an ear.”

She shook her head. He nodded his.

Bosch said, “I wish I had found him that time I went back in to look. I let him down.”

They both stood for a while looking down at the kitchen floor. Bosch poured the rest of his beer down the sink.

“One question about Meadows’s sheet and then no more business,” he said. “He got jammed up at Lompoc on an escape attempt. Then sent to TI. You know anything about that?”

“Yes. And it was a tunnel. He was a trusty and he worked in the laundry. The gas dryers had underground vents going out of the building. He dug beneath one of them. No more than an hour a day. They said he had probably been at it at least six months before it was discovered, when the sprinklers they use in the summer on the rec field softened the ground and there was a cave-in.”

He nodded his head. He figured it had been a tunnel.

“The two others that were in on it,” she said. “A drug dealer and a bank robber. They’re still inside. There’s no connection to this.”

He nodded again.

“I think I should go now,” she said. “We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

“Yeah. I have a lot more questions.”

“I’ll try to answer them if I can.”

She passed closely by him in the small space between the refrigerator and counter and moved out into the hallway. He could smell her hair as she went by. An apple scent, he thought. He noticed that she was looking at the print hanging on the wall opposite the mirror in the hallway. It was in three separate framed sections and was a print of a fifteenth-century painting calledThe Garden of Delights. The painter was a Dutchman.

“Hieronymus Bosch,” she said as she studied the nightmarish landscape of the painting. “When I saw that was your full name I wondered if-”

“No relation,” he said. “My mother, she just liked his stuff. I guess ’cause of the last name. She sent that print to me once. Said in the note that it reminded her of L.A. All the crazy people. My foster parents… they didn’t like it, but I kept it for a lot of years. Had it hanging there as long as I’ve had this place.”

“But you like to be called Harry.”

“Yeah, I like Harry.”

“Good night, Harry. Thanks for the beer.”

“Good night, Eleanor… Thanks for the company.”

PART IV

By 10A.M. they were on the Ventura Freeway, which cuts across the bottom of the San Fernando Valley and out of the city. Bosch was driving and they were going against the grain of traffic, heading northwest, toward Ventura County, and leaving behind the blanket of smog that filled the Valley like dirty cream in a bowl.

They were heading to Charlie Company. The FBI had only done a cursory check on Meadows and the prison outreach program the year before. Wish said she had thought its importance was minimal because Meadows’s stay had ended nearly a year before the tunnel caper. She said the bureau had requested a copy of Meadows’s file but had not checked the names of other convicts who were part of the program at the same time as Meadows. Bosch thought this was a mistake. Meadows’s work record indicated the bank caper was part of a long-range plan, he told Wish. The bank burglary might have been hatched at Charlie Company.

Before leaving, Bosch had called Meadows’s parole officer, Daryl Slater, and was given a rundown on Charlie Company. Slater said the place was a vegetable farm owned and operated by an army colonel who was retired and born again. He contracted with the state and federal prisons to take early release cases, the only requirement being that they be Vietnam combat veterans. That wasn’t too difficult a bill to fill, Slater said. As in every other state in the country, the prisons in California had high populations of Vietnam vets. Gordon Scales, the former colonel, didn’t care what crimes the vets had been convicted of, Slater said. He just wanted to set them right again. The place had a staff of three, including Scales, and held no more than twenty-four men at a time. The average stay was nine months. They worked the vegetable fields from six to three, stopping only for lunch at noon. After the work day there was an hour-long session called soul talk, then dinner and TV. Another hour of religion before lights-out. Slater said Scales used his connections in the community to place the vets in jobs when they were ready for the outside world. In six years, Charlie Company had a recidivist record of only 11 percent. A figure so enviable that Scales got a favorable mention in a speech by the president during his last campaign swing through the state.

“The man’s a hero,” Slater said. “And not ’cause of the war. For what he did after. When you get a place like that, moving maybe thirty, forty cons through it a year, and only one in ten gets his ass in a jam again, then you are talking about a major success. Scales, he has the ear of the federal and state parole boards and half the wardens in this state.”

“Does that mean he gets to pick who goes to Charlie Company?” Bosch asked.

“Maybe not pick, but give final approval to, yes,” the PO said. “But the word on this guy is out. His name is known in every and any cellblock where you got a vet doing time. These guys come to him. They send letters, send Bibles, make phone calls, have lawyers get in contact. All to get Scales to sponsor them.”

“Is that how Meadows got there?”