Read Online The Reckoning by Jeff Long - Free Book Online

bar. Chairs creaked as people twisted to see. A woman started to applaud, and stopped herself. This was not like on the sidewalks where the amputees and widows leaped out at you. The monks were well washed and stately, a taste of Cambodia to go with your umbrella drinks. The waiters backed against the wall and bowed, theatrical with their white gloves pressed together at their foreheads.
    â€œTanto quiso el diablo a sus hijos que les sacó los ojos.” Duncan said.
    â€œWhat?” said Molly.
    â€œIt’s an old saying. ‘The devil loved his children so much that he poked out their eyes.’ ”
    â€œOnly it was the KR, not the devil,” said Kleat. “And they used spoons.”
    She was reminded of Brueghel’s painting, the blind leading the blind, stumbling among the rabble. No rabble here, though. Nor stumbling. The young boy’s head was shaved to the skin, a novitiate. They wove among the tables with serpent grace, gathering their alms, American dollars mostly. Molly saw one couple sign over a traveler’s check. The man and woman pressed their palms together in an awkward sampeah, but of course the monks could not see them.
    â€œThe waiters will be taking a cut,” Kleat observed.
    As the monks approached, Molly saw old scars glistening at the center of their wrinkled foreheads. Their third eyes had been ritually mutilated. They held their heads high, each connected by a few fingertips to the shoulder ahead of him.
    â€œWhat, no sins to pay for?” Duncan asked Kleat. He was opening his steel briefcase to get his wallet.
    â€œAt these prices, I’d say it’s already built into the menu,” Kleat said.
    Molly stood to get a dollar bill from her pocket.
    That was when she noticed the gypsy from their dig. He was standing in the doorway staring straight at them. She jerked with surprise.
    â€œWhat’s he doing here?” she said. The two men looked up at her. “There,” she pointed.
    Just then the line of monks passed in front of the doorway, blocking her view. When they had moved on to the next table, the opening stood empty.
    â€œNever mind,” she said.
    He’d never come within two hundred yards of them, so why would he be here? His place was in the mirages, along the horizon, in the ball of the rising or setting sun.
    She started to sit down, but he had moved, and was watching them.
    â€œThere,” she said, startled all over again.
    He had maneuvered across the room and was standing by a table with a French couple. He had gray peasant pants and a green and black camouflage T-shirt with ragged holes. He was barefoot. The French pair was not pleased by his presence.
    They all saw him now. It was as if he’d stepped out of her camera.
    â€œIncredible,” said Kleat.
    The baggy gray pants had once been black. The cuffs stood at his knees, shredded by dogs. His shins were crisscrossed with bite wounds.
    Some of the soldiers back at the dig had thought he might be a freelance journalist down on his luck, way down. Or, as Kleat had suggested, a heroin addict lost in inner space. Duncan wondered if he might be the son of an MIA, shipwrecked by a lifetime of hope. There was even the possibility that he could be an actual, living MIA, though no one on the dig really believed that. It was a powerful piece of MIA mythology, the POW who was still out there, or the defector who’d decided to stay into infinity. One such man, a marine named Garwood, had in fact surfaced in Vietnam years after the war. Ever since, Molly learned, the Garwood factor had become red meat for the MIA movement. They fed on it endlessly. The official military forensics teams viewed themselves as an antidote to such wishful thinking. Their only prey was the bones, though they tipped their hat to the MIA movement.
    The stranger didn’t nod at them. He was gaunt. A hundred twenty pounds, Molly guessed, no more. Duncan had said he must eat weeds and