The Old Boys Read Online Free PDF Page A

curious enough and rich enough and, let’s face it, nervous enough, to go back to a life of folly. Because that was what I was going to do, what I “had” to do unless I wanted to wait for the knife, the bullet, the bomb that would cut me off from the answers to the last questions I considered worth asking. Where had Paul Christopher gone? What had he learned? What trail had he left for me?
    Already I was through the looking glass. Yesterday I would have thought that I was alone as I walked along this genteel street. Now, with darting eyes, I saw figures in the shadows, heard them mutter into cell phones, saw them vanish, and wondered if I was being passed along a chain of enemies and what awaited me at the last link.

7

    It was seven o’clock in the morning when, in theory, Paul was laid to rest. The troops, the riderless horse, the caisson bearing the coffin moved among tombstones through sunshot mist. A funeral at Arlington is the closest thing to pure patriotic pageantry that survives in twenty-first-century America. Troops in dress blues and white gloves, martial music, the nervous black horse with boots reversed in the stirrups, the curiously muffled sound of what General MacArthur called the mournful mutter of musketry, “Taps,” the endless muster of tombstones—all this stirs the memory and moves the heart. Dying for one’s country
is,
after all, a noble thing. Paul Christopher had not done that, exactly, but it was not for want of trying. The urn containing Paul’s ashes had been placed inside a gunmetal coffin. I wondered as the box was lowered into his grave whether Stephanie had transferred the ashes into a more appropriate container. If not, archeologists of the future would have something to wonder about when they unearthed a vermilion-and-gilt porcelain Chinese urn from the grave of an American hero. Christopher’s last mystery.
    Stephanie had made the arrangements. Everyone present was an Outfit person; she knew them all because she was an Outfit brat—her late father had been Paul’s case officer and she claimed that she had fallen in love with Paul when she was still a child.Yet there was no mention of the Outfit. Paul was not being buried in hallowed ground because of any secret derring-do. The Outfit had never publicly acknowledged his existence or his decorations or his time in prison. His gravestone read
Paul H. Christopher, First Lieutenant USMCR, Silver Star, Purple Heart
, and the dates
.
The graveside ceremony had been preceded by a funeral service in the Navy chapel, conducted by a hearty Episcopalian chaplain who hadn’t the foggiest notion who or what Paul had been. That would have suited Paul just fine, but as the purpose of a eulogy is to praise the deceased and list his accomplishments, I’m not so sure he would have liked what came afterward in the Fort Myer officers’ club. I made my speech as short and matter-of-fact as possible, but the Old Boys present had known Paul—many of them by reputation only, because his work had been so compartmented that he had operated in a kind of bureaucratic quarantine from Headquarters. As I spoke about his life, which could have been described (though I refrained) as a death of a thousand cuts, I could practically feel the audience responding in one weepy collective thought:
They don’t make men like this any longer
. Actually, with rare exceptions, they never had. But these were old men to whom a past that never really existed was more real than the lives they had actually led. A death in the family made them remember the old days, and if the deceased was someone like Paul, it made them proud of having touched such a hero. The fact that he seemed to have died an unnatural death in the field added to the poignancy of the loss. Most Outfit alumni his age were keeling over with heart attacks or liver failure.
    Stephanie provided an open bar, which did a lot to lift the mood of the mourners. I worked my way through the crowd, saying hello to