Descendant by Graham Masterton Page B

how my mother had died, but I was already feeling a devastating loneliness, as if I had lost not only the woman who had given birth to me, but part of my ancestry, too.

Mill Valley, 1943
    I was swinging in the hammock in my parents’ backyard when my father came walking through the overgrown grass and said, “There’s two military guys want to talk to you.”
    I sat up a little and shaded my eyes with my hand. Two middle-aged men in sharply pressed army uniforms were standing by the kitchen steps with their hats tucked under their arms. One had a silvery-gray crewcut and the other had horn-rim glasses and a heavy black mustache.
    “They wouldn’t tell me what they wanted,” said my father. “If you’d prefer me to say that you’re not at home, well, I’m more than happy to. You know my views on the military.”
    My father was what you might call a professional nonconformist. He always reminded me of Groucho Marx in
Horse Feathers
when he sang “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” He looked a little like Groucho Marx, too, in his slopy-shouldered cardigans and his baggy corduroy pants, with his pipe always sticking out of the side of his mouth. He was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley, but he was also a writer and afly-fisherman and when he played the piano on summer evenings with the parlor windows open his music was so sentimental that he could make you choke up.
    The officer with the silvery-gray crew cut raised one hand and called out, “James Falcon Junior? Need to talk to you, sir!”
    I looked at my father and my father shrugged. I clambered out of the hammock, catching my foot so that I staggered on one leg for the first couple of paces, but I managed to hold on to the apple I’d been eating.
    The officers approached me. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Bulsover and this is Major Leonard Harvey.”
    They stood with their backs like ramrods and they almost had
me
standing up straight. Not long ago, I found some photographs of myself that my brother took around that time, and you’ve never seen such a skinny, lanky, twenty-five-year-old streak in your life, in a baggy pair of jeans and a striped shirt that was five times too big for me.
    “We need to talk in private,” said Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover. He didn’t look at my father and at first my father didn’t understand what he was saying.
    “This is just about as private as you can get,” he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “There isn’t another house for half a mile. Hey—we could beat a pig to death with baseball bats and nobody would hear us.”
    Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover looked at him as if were mentally deficient. “When I say private, sir, I mean that I need to talk to your son confidentially. On his own.”
    “Oh?
Oh
. What for? This family doesn’t have secrets.”
    “That’s as may be, sir. But this is wartime, and this country has secrets.”
    “Oh.”
    My father hesitated for a moment and then he put his pipe back in his mouth and walked away across the grass, jerkily turning around now and again as if half expecting us to call him back. Eventually he climbed the steps and disappeared into the kitchen. The screen door banged.
    Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover placed his hand in the small of my back and gently steered me down toward the far end of the yard, where the tangled raspberry canes grew. It was very hot and still that day, and I remember that everything looked magnified, as I were seeing it through a lens.
    “Major Harvey and I, we’re attached to the Office of the Coordinator of Information in Washington, DC. About three weeks ago we received some information from a resistance agent in Belgium. He confirmed something that our intelligence agents have been suspecting since the early days of the war in Europe.”
    “Oh, yes?”
    Major Harvey cleared his throat with a single sharp bark. “Mr. Falcon—what Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover is about to tell you now is absolutely top secret.