“I ordered the guys to fall out to a drainage trench beside the road. A couple of us got hit on the way over. There wasn’t much cover, even in the trench. They were picking us off with rifle fire until I called in a couple of Kiowas. The helicopters cleaned things up pretty quickly, but we had eight killed in action in those first five minutes.

“My guys stewed about it overnight. The next morning we went back to the village. There was another firefight, but this time all the casualties were on the other side. There were a lot of KIAs in that village. Mostly Taliban, no question, but a few were women, and there were a couple of boys, maybe ten or eleven years old. Of course, that will happen when they come at you with AK-47s, but you feel pretty bad about it later.”

I had slumped low in the kitchen chair. Teru was watching me closely. Simon was looking out through the window.

I said, “I had been hit in the right thigh early on that second day, so I set up a command position in this little mud-brick house in the center of town and let our corpsman work me over while most of my guys went door to door through the village. They sent in a chopper for me and dropped me off at the battalion aid station. I lost a ton of blood, but otherwise it wasn’t too bad. They had me up and around in a week. I figured that was that. It was just a couple of bad days. There had been a lot of bad days, so I tried not to think about it too much. Then about a month later, my captain came over to the hooch one morning to ask questions about a video on the Internet.”

I paused to look at Simon and Teru, wishing there were some way to avoid it. I said, “The village we went back to on that second day was Laui Kalay.”

Neither of them reacted at first.

Then Teru said, “Oh no.”

Simon rose and carried his teacup to a sink. I watched as he carefully washed out the cup with a soapy cloth. He rinsed the cup, then placed it on a wooden rack beside the sink. When that was done, he didn’t return to the table. He stood still, looking down into the sink.

Teru said, “You were there? When they cut off all those fingers and knocked out all those teeth? You were really there?”

I said, “The court-martial found me guilty.”

“But I remember that video like it was yesterday. That marine with the knife, chopping off the corpses’ fingers for their rings. The others breaking out dead people’s teeth for gold. All those marines cracking jokes. They must have showed it a thousand times on television.” Teru looked at me. “You weren’t in it.”

Still staring down into the sink, Simon said, “If memory serves, the sergeant in command was convicted of filming the unpleasantness with his cell phone, so of course he was not shown in the video.”

“Holy mother of God,” said Teru. “You’re that guy?”

9

Teru, Simon and I sat silently in Haley’s kitchen. The silence was awkward. I had no doubt they were both trying to figure out what to say to a convicted war criminal. I was trying to figure out how I would answer. Finally, Teru said, “So that’s why Haley didn’t want the marriage to come out. She didn’t want the public to connect her with the Laui Kalay atrocities.”

I stared at him. The brown color of my irises is almost as dark as the black of my pupils. Some say they look like a pair of empty holes. I’ve been told they seem to take in everything and give very little away. Teru looked down and shifted in his seat.

Simon raised a fist to cover his mouth and quietly cleared his throat. He said, “Mr. Fujimoto, may I suggest that you more carefully consider the situation? A woman comes as if from out of nowhere and rises to the pinnacle of fame, not only because she’s beautiful, but also because she’s one of the finest actresses on the planet. As it happens, she is also very skilled with money. She receives as much as twenty million dollars for each motion picture. She invests well and turns her tens of millions into hundreds of millions. But her riches and her fame have left her isolated and lonely. Indeed, she finds herself so much alone that the only people she considers friends are her gardener and butler.

“Naturally, when she marries her chauffeur, a chap fifteen years her junior, she knows the world will assume she is a fool, one of those aging, desperate movie stars who trades precious dignity for a worthless fantasy of youth. They will say he is a gold digger, a gigolo, a scoundrel who seduced her for her money. And to make matters worse, the chauffeur has a disgraceful past well known throughout the world. So she agrees to marry him, but she refuses to be seen with him in public, except when he performs his role as her humble driver. She refuses to acknowledge the true nature of their relationship. She insists that they pretend this chap is no more to her than a mere servant.”

Simon walked over from where he had been standing by the kitchen sink. He sat with us and adjusted the crease in his slacks. He gazed across the table at Teru. “Mr. Fujimoto, does that sound like our Miss Haley?”

Teru frowned and looked at Simon. He shook his head. “Of course not.”

“No,” said Simon. “I should think not. Because our Miss Haley was in love, as you know. She was in love, and no power on the earth could have stopped her from shouting it from the rooftops, except for one.”

I saw understanding dawn on Teru’s face. He turned to me. “It was your idea.”

I nodded. “It was the only way I would marry her. She said she didn’t care, but I knew if news of our marriage had gotten out, it would have destroyed her career and all the good she was doing. She would have become the heartless egomaniac who married one of the butchers of Laui Kalay.”

Teru reached over and laid his hand on my forearm. “I’m sorry. I should have known she’d never be ashamed of you.”

I shrugged and offered a weak smile. “Don’t worry about it, buddy. We couldn’t have pulled it off without you.”

It was true. Without the loyal silence of Teru and Simon and Haley’s old friend Higgins, there was no way Haley and I could have kept our marriage out of the press for more than two years. Marriage licenses are public records in most of America, but in California, couples can get a confidential marriage license from a specially authorized notary public, and a court order is required to unseal the document. So Rita Silverstein, Haley’s personal attorney, had applied for the necessary legal authority.

One morning I had walked over to the rear entrance of the mansion at El Nido, crossed the kitchen and the morning room, and strolled along the gallery to the front living room, where Simon, Teru, Higgins, and my grandparents were already waiting. Haley had been angelic in a white-silk shift, with her hair golden like a halo, and I had been carefully shaved and wearing a new suit. We held hands while Rita confidentially married us by the power vested in her by the State. Then my grandfather spoke a few words about the Lord and said a prayer of blessing, and Haley and I became husband and wife in the eyes of God and California.

We hadn’t exchanged rings. We had no honeymoon. We knew reporters could find out about our little wedding if they had a reason to go looking, so we gave them no reason to look. We went to great extremes to maintain the employer-employee fiction. We avoided all physical contact unless we were alone together in a room. Haley continued to pay me by check every two weeks. She often attended gala events and public functions with male actors, producers, directors, and other business associates. And the greatest sacrifice: I never actually lived under the same roof with my wife.