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The inside of the chamber was like an oversize sardine can. The space was rectangular. Two doors at the far end—toilets, maybe. Cabinets on the wall. A camp stove. Bottled water in one corner. Propane canisters. Fire extinguisher.

And on the ground, close to the stairs, was an upended Mosler safe. The door to that was open, too, and the safe was on its side.

“That belong to the husband?” Sim asked.

“Good bet.”

Sim bent to inspect it. “Yeah, look,” he said, pointing to three small holes near the tumbler. “This sucker been drilled open. Wonder how much green was in this mother.”

Only then did I begin to notice the trash on the floor. Beer and soda cans and balled-up waxed paper, a dozen cigarette butts. There was also a folding table and a few wooden milk crates that had obviously been used for seating.

Sim was motioning to me. I joined him at the far corner of the chamber, where he was using the toe of his boot to poke at the three duffel bags lined up next to one another like mushrooms at the base of a rotted tree.

“Army issue,” he said.

I tipped one over, undid the elaborate rope knot that fastened the duffel and began to shake out the contents. The clatter was so loud I jumped away in alarm. But then I could see they were just rods of metal and wood. “What is this junk?” I said.

Sim seemed to be intrigued with the stuff. I went about opening another duffel while he got down on his haunches. When I looked up a minute later, Sim was no longer squatting. He was on his feet, and he was raising the business end of a semiautomatic.

I fell away from him, shrieking. “What the fuck are you doing? Where did that come from?”

“What you called the junk in this bag. I just put it together. Nothing to it.”

“How do you know how to do that? You were in the army?”

“My brother was. Korea.” He spread the bag open for me to look inside then. “There’s five disassembled carbines in there. Plenty of ammo, too. Even a few smoke grenades. Somebody was expecting company down here.”

There weren’t any guns in the second bag. What we saw when we emptied it were telephone books for a variety of American cities, road maps, manila folders with densely scribbled notes inside them.

I opened one of them, spread the pages out. I saw the word COPY stamped across most of the sheets. Sim was reading over my shoulder. “This doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“Yeah, it does. It’s a DD-214.”

“A what?”

“A soldier gets one when they discharge him. That’s your service record. You need it to get a job after you get out of the army.”

“Like I said, this makes no sense.”

One of the maps was for Lincoln, Nebraska. There was another for Shreveport, Louisiana. But not all the maps were for your typical American town. I was holding a hand-drawn one, done in colored pencil, almost childlike. It was shaped like a giant fantail shrimp. Here and there on the map were crosses and notations.

“You know what that is?” Sim asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, I do. It’s Vietnam.”

That third bag was the kicker. The end. When Sim turned it over and shook it, nothing came out at first. So I reached in. I felt the slick surface of the material, pulled at it. A dark blue jacket with a heavy zipper and a fake fur collar plopped out of the duffel. The collar wasn’t the only fake thing about the garment. A badge was on the front of the coat. I wasn’t an expert on police gear, but the metal seemed too lightweight to be real. A fake Chicago PD shield.

I was holding it in my hands, but I could feel the slick, wet surface of that jacket on my neck and face, scent the breath of the big man who’d mauled me in the apartment that night. And I felt the powerful hand in the small of my back as I was shoved into the closet.

I flung the coat onto the ground. Sim was now shaking other items out of the duffel. A couple of dozen pamphlets featuring the August 4 logo flopped out. And there were several photos of white men, some young, others older, some in uniform, some in civvies. But the notes written on the back of each shot told me all the men had been U.S. Army officers: