1975 - Night of the Juggler Read Online Free PDF Page A

back at her father, and he realized from the sad maturity in her expression that she had guessed at the core of the abrasive estrangement between himself and Barbara.
    “Does she blame you because Buddy got killed?”
    He had no ready answer for this question, and feeling helpless, he stared in silence at the backs of his big, powerful hands. Then he glanced about the room as if seeking some escape from Kate’s troubled eyes, noting irrelevantly how the last of the daylight had coated the surfaces of the furniture and carpeting with a fine veneer of rose and lemon reflections. At last Luther Boyd did the thing he feared to do (which was something his father had always commanded him to do without hesitation), and that was simply to turn away from the familiar, sustaining volumes of his military library and to look steadily into his young daughter’s troubled and faintly accusing eyes. “Yes, it’s got something to do with Buddy’s death,” he said.
    “But it wasn’t your fault that Buddy got killed.”
    “I’ll try to explain it to you, although I’m not sure I can,” he said.
    “But it wasn’t your fault,” she said, and there was a tone of stubborn loyalty in her voice. “How could it be?”
    “That’s one of the questions I’m not sure I can answer,” he said wearily.
    After she had gone off with her Scottie, Luther Boyd stood and paced the floor restlessly, rubbing his jaw with the wedge formed by his thumb and forefinger. He tried not to think of Barbara. To distract himself, he thought of General Carmichael, whose problems at least presented a fair and reasonable challenge. One of the general’s most serious flaws stemmed from a paradoxical stylistic ingenuity; he was, in fact, an excellent persuasive writer, but this was a talent best served in the breach in the writing of military manuals. War was not a debate, with issues to be decided by closely reasoned arguments. The object was not to win on paper and lose in combat, or to study maps and ignore the battlefield. He took a volume at random from a shelf and flipped through the pages until he came to this quotation: “The enemy is badly beaten, greatly demoralized and exhausted of ammunition. The road to Vicksburg is open. All we want now are men, ammunition and hard bread. . . .”
    That was the kind of writing soldiers understood, clear and unequivocal, General Grant to Sherman.
    From another volume he read: “It is 132 miles to the Rhine from here, and if this army will attack with venom and desperate energy, it is more than probable that the war will end before we get to the Rhine. Therefore, when we attack, we go like hell.” General Patton to the 95th Division in October, 1944.
    And from yet another volume he read wise words from a statesman who was not only a military but a political strategist: “The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.” That was the British bulldog with the cigar, Sir Winston Churchill.
    But as he replaced the volume on the shelf, Luther Boyd realized he was committing a mistake which he would not permit in any officer in his command; he was postponing the decision of what and how much to tell his daughter, Kate, and that was an unforgivable and cowardly indulgence.
    John “Buddy” Boyd had been Barbara Boyd’s son by a first marriage to a man who had been killed in an automobile accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when Buddy (then Buddy Shaw) had been four years of age. When Luther Boyd married Barbara Shaw, he had adopted Buddy, and when the boy was old enough to discuss the matter, they had mutually agreed to change his name legally from Shaw to Boyd.
    Luther Boyd had loved Buddy as he would have a natural son and had gloried in his triumphs and suffered with his defeats, caring for him as wisely and completely as he cared for their daughter, Kate.
    Buddy Boyd had enlisted in the Army four years before, despite a perforated eardrum, which would have