The Line Up (28 page)

“She doesn’t talk about it, and I don’t talk about it. But I’ll tell you this much—when she reaches for her knee? She’s thinking about it. She has a scar there, where she fell on a piece of broken glass the night she was almost killed. Sometimes I think the memory lives in that scar.”

Not a Lone Wolf

The private detective has been a sturdy archetype in American pop culture for sixty-plus years, and it’s hard not to harbor romantic notions about Monaghan. But she is quick to point out that she has little in common with the characters created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and not just because Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade are fictional.

“I’m not a loner, far from it. I live with someone; I have friends. I have so much family it’s almost embarrassing at times. My father was one of seven, my mother one of five. I was an only child, but I was never a lonely one. In fact, most of my clients are referrals from people I know.” A rueful smile. “That’s made for some interesting times.”

A favor for her father, in fact, led to Monaghan’s identifying a Jane Doe homicide victim—and unraveling an unseemly web of favors that showed, once again, that Maryland is always in the forefront when it comes to political scandals. Her uncle Donald asked her to find the missing family of furrier Mark Rubin. And it was Talbot who, inadvertently, gave Monaghan the assignment that almost led to her death. Once one pores over Monaghan’s case work, it begins to seem as if almost all her jobs have been generated by nepotism.

“Whew,” she says. “Strong word. A loaded word, very much a pejorative. How did you get your job?” When no answer is forthcoming, she goes on: “How does anyone get anywhere, get anything in this world? I got into Washington College on my own merits, I guess, but otherwise I’ve needed family and friends. Not to pull me through or cover for me, but to help me here and there. Is that wrong? Does it undercut what I have done?”

Then what’s her greatest solo accomplishment? What can she take credit for?

Monaghan waits a long time before answering. We are in the Brass Elephant, her favorite bar, and she is nursing a martini—gin, not vodka, to which she objects on principle. Monaghan is full of such idiosyncratic principles. She won’t drink National Bohemian since the brewery pulled up stakes in Baltimore. She says Matthew’s serves the best pizza in town, but confesses that her favorite is Al Pacino’s. She doesn’t like women who walk to work in athletic shoes, or people who let their dogs run off lead as a sneaky way to avoid cleaning up after them. She hates the Mets even though she wasn’t alive for the indignity of 1969, and has a hard time rooting for the Ravens because of “bad karma.” (Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell brought the team here in the mid-’90s, and although the NFL made sure Cleveland kept its name and records—a concession not made to Baltimore when the Colts decamped for Indianapolis—it still bothers Monaghan.)

“I’ve managed, more or less, to live according to what I think is right. Not always—I can be unkind. I’ve indulged in gossip, which should be one of the seven deadly sins. I’m quick to anger, although seldom on my own behalf. Overall, though, I’m not a bad person. I’m a good friend, a decent daughter, and a not-too-infuriating girlfriend.”

She slaps her empty glass on the counter and says, “Look at the time. We have to go.”

Where?

“Just follow me.”

She runs out of the bar, down the Brass Elephant’s elegant staircase and into Charles Street, heading south at an impressive clip. In a few blocks, she mounts the steps to the Washington Monument, throwing a few dollars into the honor box at its foot.

“Come on, come on, come on,” she exhorts. “It’s only 228 steps.”

So this is the run that Monaghan planned to take this evening. The narrow, winding stairwell is claustrophobically close and smells strongly of ammonia, not the best fragrance on top of a gin martini, but Monaghan’s pace and footing seem unaffected by her cocktail hour. She jogs briskly, insistent that everyone keep up.

At the top, the reason for her rush becomes clear. The sun is just beginning to set, and the western sky is a brilliant rose shade that is kind to the city’s more ramshackle neighborhoods, while the eastern sky is an equally flattering inky blue. To the north, Penn Station is a bright white beacon dominated by the monstrous man-woman statue with its glowing purple heart. To the south, lights begin to come on along the waterfront. Monaghan points out the Continental Building on Calvert Street.

“Hammett worked there, as a Pinkerton. And the birds that are used as ornamentation, the falcons? They’re gold now, but it’s said they were black back in Hammett’s day, so we might be looking at the birthplace of the Maltese Falcon. Look to the southwest, toward Hollins Market, and you can see where Mencken lived, and Russell Baker. Anne Tylerville is out of sight, but you were there this morning, when you visited my home. That church, virtually at our feet? It’s where Francis Scott Key worshipped, while his descendant F. Scott Fitzgerald liked to drink at the Owl Bar in the Belvedere, only a few blocks to the north.”

She inhales deeply, a little raggedly; even Monaghan isn’t so fit that the climb has left her unaffected. She seems drunker now than she did at the bottom, giddy with emotion. She throws open her arms as if to embrace the whole city.

“I mean, really,” she says. “Why would anyone live anywhere else?”

DAVID MORRELL

David Morrell is the author of First Blood, the award-winning novel in which Rambo was created. He holds a PhD in American literature from Pennsylvania State University and taught in the English department at the University of Iowa until he gave up his tenure to devote himself to a full-time writing career. “The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer described him, Morrell is a cofounder of the International Thriller Writers organization. His numerous bestselling novels include The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries), The Fraternity of the Stone, The Fifth Profession, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). He is also the author of The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing.

Morrell has been called “the father of the modern action novel.” He is a three-time recipient of the distinguished Bram Stoker Award, the latest for his novel Creepers. ITW honored him with its prestigious ThrillerMaster Award. To learn the full story of his relationship with Hemingway scholar Philip Young, please read his foreword to American Fiction, American Myth: Essays by Philip Young, which Morrell coedited with Sandra Spanier. You can also visit his website at www.davidmorrell.net.

RAMBO

BY DAVID MORRELL

From 1966 to 1970, I lived in a town surrounded by mountains in the middle of Pennsylvania. The town was State College–University Park, the main campus of Pennsylvania State University. I was a graduate student in the English department. More important with regard to the creation of Rambo, I was a Canadian, born and raised in the twin city of Kitchener-Waterloo in southern Ontario.

The path that led me to Penn State was unusual. In high school, I was hardly what you’d call a motivated student. I liked English classes. I enjoyed acting in local plays. Otherwise, I spent eight hours a day watching television. Truly, I didn’t go to bed until our local station signed off for the night. My high school principal once summoned me from a trigonometry class (merciful salvation) and told me that I would never amount to much.

As things turned out, television showed me the way. At 8:30 p.m. on the first Friday of October in 1960, I watched the premiere of a new television series, Route 66, and my life changed. That series was about two young men in a Corvette convertible, who drove across the United States in search of America and themselves. It was filmed entirely on location. It was brilliantly acted and photographed.

But what I grew to care about was that the majority of the scripts—a blend of intense action and powerful themes—were written by Stirling Silliphant. They so impressed me that at the age of seventeen, I decided that I wanted to be a writer and that Silliphant would be my model. I wrote to Silliphant to tell him so and received a two-page, single-spaced letter that encouraged me to pursue my ambition. Realizing that a writer ought to have an education, I suddenly wanted to get a BA.

St. Jerome’s College (now a university) was then an affiliate of the University of Waterloo in southern Ontario. It was so small that the English honors program consisted of six students. Often, in the manner of an Oxford tutorial, one of us was required to teach a class while the professor watched and made comments. I received a wonderful education there, but in the process, I forgot my ambition to be Silliphant. At the start of my fourth year in the BA program, I got married. I planned to become a high school English teacher, but then another writer changed my life.

St. Jerome’s had a library the size of a large living room. One afternoon, expecting to be disappointed, I looked for books that analyzed the work of one of my favorite authors, Ernest Hemingway. To my surprise, I found one. Written by Philip Young, this is how it began:

On the Place Contrescarpe at the summit of the rue

Cardinal Lemoine, Harry remembered, there was a room

at the top of a tall hotel, and it was in this room that he

had written “the start of all he was to do.”

If you’ve ever studied literature in college, you know that scholarly books don’t start that way. But Young’s book had so much tone and vitality that in parts it had the drama of a novel. His style was spellbinding. He made me feel that he was talking directly to me, and he not only informed me, he made me smile. Indeed, a couple of times, he made me laugh, causing a librarian to give me a disapproving look.

By the end of the afternoon, I was so overwhelmed that I went home and said to my wife, Donna, who was a high school history teacher, “I read this amazing book about Hemingway. It’s written by Philip Young, who’s a professor at Penn State, and it’s so fabulously written that I suddenly have this crazy idea. I’d like to go to graduate school at Penn State. I’d like to study with Young. Would you be willing to quit your teaching job and go there with me?”

Donna, who had just learned that she was pregnant, answered, “Yes.”

Thus, in the summer of 1966, shortly after Donna gave birth to our daughter, we packed everything that was important to us into our green Volkswagen Beetle and set off on our odyssey to the United States, where I eventually became Young’s graduate assistant and, under his supervision, wrote my master’s thesis on Hemingway’s style.

This is where Rambo comes in. Penn State paid me to teach freshman composition courses. It also provided reasonably priced apartments at a place called Graduate Circle. Shortly after we moved into one of the units, I met a neighbor, and almost the first thing he said to me was “This damned Vietnam War is getting worse and worse. If it keeps up, the government might stop giving out student deferments.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. The only time I’d heard about Vietnam was three years earlier, in a 1963 Route 66 episode, “Fifty Miles from Home,” in which Silliphant had written about a US soldier who returned from Vietnam (wherever that was) and had trouble shutting down his war mentality. (The episode illustrates how ahead of its time that series was.) In Canada, I’d never paid attention to any news about the Vietnam War. It simply wasn’t on my radar. But at Penn State, typical of universities across the United States, I soon discovered that the war was a constant topic.

Unwilling to admit my ignorance and stand out as a foreigner, I headed for the library, where I discovered that North and South Vietnam were in Southeast Asia. Since 1959, the United States had been involved in a conflict between the two, siding against the Communist regime of the north. In 1964, two American destroyers claimed to have been fired upon by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. An outraged US Congress issued the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson the power to conduct military operations against North Vietnam without declaring war. (Many years later, declassified documents revealed that the torpedo boat attacks did not occur and that members of the Johnson administration knew they hadn’t occurred but preferred to use bogus intelligence reports to justify the attacks on North Vietnam.)

I also learned that increasing numbers of young American men were being conscripted and sent to Vietnam. The burden of the draft fell on the unemployed and the uneducated, while college students tended to be given deferments. The pressure to receive scholarships and earn higher-than-average grades was intense, and some students, such as my Graduate Circle neighbor, worried about a time when students would no longer be exempt (this eventually happened in 1971). I didn’t share the same concerns because, in addition to being a student, I was also married with a child, and on top of that, I was foreign, but I didn’t want to set myself apart by admitting that. Moreover, the documentation that came with the temporary-resident card allowing me to stay in the United States made it clear that as a guest, I should refrain from expressing political opinions, and of course, political activities were out of the question. Failure to meet this requirement could result in deportation.

The result was that I fell into a habit of listening to what my fellow students said about the Vietnam War and of studying news reports about it while keeping my opinions to myself. As the decade continued, demonstrations against the war increased across the country. At Penn State, some student teachers made Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, a required reading assignment in freshman courses.