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 called The 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
Wednesday, May 23
By 10 A.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