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know,” Stone said. “His brother went up to Connecticut to see him this morning.”
    “He has a brother?”
    “Yep.”
    “If Colonel Cabot needs anything, will you let me know?”
    “Have you kept in touch with him over the years?”
    “No. He dropped out of sight after he got home. I heard he’d resigned from the Corps. I just want to know that he’s okay. The man saved my life four or five times.”
    “That’s a lot.”
    “We got shot at a lot.”
    “Bob, Cabot’s brother tells me he was in line to make general. Do you have any idea why he resigned from the Marine Corps?”
    Cantor looked away. “Maybe,” he said.

9

    Stone looked across the table at Cantor, who seemed to be hav- ing trouble establishing eye contact. “Bob, what do you mean by maybe ?”
    “You know what maybe means, Stone: It means ‘maybe so, maybe not.’ ”
    “Is that why you invited me to lunch, Bob? So you could jerk me around?”
    “Look, all I want to know is if the Colonel is all right.”
    “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.”
    A rather attractive woman at the next table looked at Stone, shocked.
    “Just a figure of speech,” Stone said to her. “All zippers remain at high mast.”
    She looked back at her salad, blushing.
    Stone turned back to Cantor. “You first.”
    “This goes no further?” Cantor asked.
    “No further.”
    “I don’t think he would want his brother to know.”
    “I won’t tell him,” Stone said.
    Their food arrived, and Cantor took the moment to fiddle with his napkin and sip his beer.
    “Our food is getting cold, Bob,” Stone said.
    “All right. Toward the end of our third tour together the Colonel came across something valuable, something that belonged to the South Vietnamese government.”
    “What was it?” Stone asked, wondering if the South Vietnamese government had possessed an eighteenth-century mahogany secretary from Goddard-Townsend of Newport.
    “Let’s just say it was a fairly liquid asset.”
    “Stop being coy, Bob.”
    “Look, I’m trying to clue you in without causing you any problems, all right?”
    “Problems?”
    “It would not be conducive to your personal safety to know everything I know.”
    “Well, I’m very fond of my personal safety, so just tell me what you can without getting me killed.”
    “Like I said, we came across this fairly liquid asset, and we figured that the South Vietnamese government was about to be overrun by the North Vietnamese government, and we didn’t want to see it fall into their hands, so that they could use it against Americans.”
    “So your motives for… liberating it were entirely patriotic?”
    “Not entirely,” Cantor admitted, “but we did see that it remained in American hands.”
    “Whose hands?”
    “Our hands.”
    “How many of you were there?”
    “Six,” Cantor said, “including the Colonel.”
    “And you all benefited equally from this item or items remaining in American hands?”
    “Not exactly equally, but everybody was pretty much satisfied with the arrangement.”
    “ Pretty much satisfied ? That means that at least one of you was pretty much dissatisfied, doesn’t it?”
    “You could look at it that way.”
    “Bob, how much did you, personally, benefit from this… patriotic act?”
    “Let me put it this way, Stone: You’ve been in my shop.”
    Stone had indeed been in Cantor’s shop, which was filled with exotic electronic equipment. “I have.”
    “You and I are on pretty much the same pension. Where did you think I got the wherewithal to own, say, two, three hundred grand’s worth of gear?”
    “I suppose it crossed my mind. I thought maybe you inherited something from somebody.”
    “My father pressed pants on Seventh Avenue. Inherit?”
    “Okay, I get the picture. How much better did the Colonel do than you?”
    “It was the Colonel’s deal: He took half; the other five of us took equal splits of the other half.”
    “And how did you transport this windfall back to