Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  The captain smiled.

  Hollander woke while the girl was still asleep. As he dressed he watched her. She lay lifelessly, arms spread; she might have been a marionette to whose strings someone had taken a pair of scissors. Last night she had been full of activity, yet it was mechanical; not cold exactly, not that, going through the motions. He went into the small kitchenette of her apartment and stared at the telephone messages scrawled on the small blackboard beside the phone. Charlie 226-3354. Make it 3. 4:30. Hairdresser. Karate class 7.

  He filled the electric percolator with coffee, plugged it into the wall. Mechanical affection. Could there be such a thing?

  He watched the coffee spring into the plastic top of the lid. She came into the kitchenette, yawning, naked; he thought of his own daughter, a flash of her face, an image of a snapshot he had received last Christmas in the mail. I love you, Daddy—Anna.

  “What’s the time?” she asked.

  He found his wristwatch on the kitchen table. “It’s past eleven.”

  “Already?” She yawned again, stretched, sat down at the table. He poured two coffees.

  He sat facing her, watching her as she sipped the coffee. She smiled at him in a way that softened her features, as if all at once she were offering him some glimpse of a vulnerability she preferred to keep concealed, then looked around for a cigarette. He gave her an English Oval. In a day or so, he thought, he would have to bring Myers back, then debrief him. Debrief: he had caught himself at the ridiculous language of another time in his life. Traces remained, bits and pieces, the items of your history that clung to you like lint to cotton. Debrief. The desert was a drag, Myers would say. Pay me.

  “Not bad,” the girl said, tasting the cigarette.

  He watched her face. It was young and yet in some manner hard; it was as if she wanted to be older than what she claimed to be. Even the dark roots that showed through the fair hair suggested some valiant effort on her part to make herself appear older, wiser, in some way nonchalant. Nineteen years, he thought. He had loved once. Maybe that was it, his share for a lifetime, maybe you couldn’t ever hope for more.

  You’re married to the goddamn job, Ted. Where do I figure? Where do the kids figure? The lover had come later, quiet drinks in the afternoon with Rowley, who was a certified accountant and therefore safe, certain, predictable as the migratory passage of a lemming. Nifty little cocktail bars in the suburbs. The whole bit. I’ll give it up, I’ll quit. I’ll resign. Too late, Ted, too damn late.

  Rowley and me.

  He laid his hand over the girl’s bare arm. She looked at him, her eyes wide in some surprise, as if this touch were the last thing she expected, this curious tenderness stunning. She had glorious eyes, a mixture of colors, greens and grays that changed as the light changed. What am I getting into? he wondered.

  “I woke feeling sentimental,” he said.

  “You ought to be careful of that,” she said. She blew a stream of smoke directly at him.

  He looked at his watch again. 11:30.

  The girl inclined her head and let her lips touch the back of his hand. The gesture surprised him somewhat: it seemed somehow both subservient and yet proud, as if she were uncertain of her own emotions. He looked at the dark roots of her hair: now, instead of suggesting an attempt on her part to look older, harder, they made him feel a strange moment of pity for her, a passing thing. She raised her face, looked at him, then laughed.

  He ruffled her hair with the palm of his hand. Then he stood up and went into the bedroom and looked around for his shoes. She came in at his back. She put her arms around him and, pursing her lips, blew lightly on the back of his neck.

  “You know what that does to me,” he said.

  “I heard a rumor,” she said.

  He turned to face her: “When are you free?”

  “After seven thirty,” she said.

  “I’ll come back.” He fastened his cuff links, knotted his tie in front of the mirror and experienced, as he caught her body in the reflection, an unusual desire. It wasn’t the time, he thought. He had to think of Brinkerhoff now. He had to show Brinkerhoff a sample.

  “Where did you put my envelope?” he asked.

  “I’ll get it for you.” She went to the kitchenette and came back carrying a plain brown envelope with a wax seal. He took it from her. It felt cold.

  “I kept it in the refrigerator,” she said. “Under the vegetable tray.”

  “Pretty secure,” he said. How had he come to trust her with this material? When had that happened?

  “I figured nobody looks under vegetables,” she said. “You’d have to be burgled by a rutabaga freak.”

  He smiled at her. “I guess you’re right,” he said. He took his overcoat from the wardrobe and put it on. She held it for him, helped him into it. He felt old, as if he were passing beyond that stage when he could get into an overcoat without a struggle, a rebellion of sinew and muscle and joint.

  “You think I can’t manage this by myself?” he asked.

  “If I thought that, I wouldn’t be tactless enough to help you, would I?” she said.

  He turned, put his arms around her, kissed her on the forehead.

  “I like you, Ted,” she said. “I hate it when you call and I’m busy. Like last night. It makes me depressed.”

  “Years ago I might have been jealous,” he said.

  “Not now?”

  “A little. A little.”

  He kissed her again, then left. In the elevator he tucked the brown envelope inside his coat. A single page: that would have Brinkerhoff’s people humming. They would come around then. They would know this was real and not some blind, some sleight of hand. You had to make them look beyond the darkness of paranoia.

  He felt the elevator fall. He looked at his own reflection in the metal plate that surrounded the buttons. Distorted, out of joint, like an image in the Hall of Mirrors. What was he? From the outside, sometimes even from the inside, it was pathetic: a retired intelligence officer who had found a Cause and whose only tenderness was directed toward three estranged kids and a whore with the impossible name of Davina. It was funny, funny-sad. But what else lay beyond it all except that familiar ocean of loneliness? You had to build dikes, all the time you had to build walls and barricades.

  3

  Congressman Leach was one of the Capitol’s fixtures. Those who opposed him every two years did so with a kind of fatalism: you might just as well try to change Mount Rushmore. When he rose from behind his desk to greet Thorne, Thorne realized, with something of a shock, that in the two years that had passed since their last meeting Leach had aged dreadfully. A certain vibrancy had gone out of him; his handshake was no longer firm but slack, slack and icy, and when he moved his limbs were stiff. He was wasting away; cancer? Thorne wondered. What else took such a quick hold and wasted a man so visibly? Leach smiled, dropped his hand, went back behind his desk.

  “It’s not often, John,” he said. He was looking at his watch. Between committees, Thorne thought. A minute to squeeze in old Ben’s boy.

  “How have you been?” Thorne asked.

  “Can’t you tell?” Leach tilted his head to one side, raised his eyebrows. In the light that fell between the slats of the blinds the whites of the eyes were yellow, jaundiced.

  “Have you been sick?” Thorne couldn’t find a tactful way of getting to the question.

  “What you’re seeing is one of the pillars of the legislature crumbling,” Leach said, smiling as if the act were painful. “I won’t be running for office again, I can tell you that. Keep it to yourself. I don’t want to read about my own retirement in the Post until I’m ready for it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Thorne said. Washington without Leach would be a merry-go-round minus a horse.

  “It comes to us all, John,” Leach said. He coughed, took a handkerchief from his pocket, brushed his lips with it. “Can’t hobble along forever. Not made that way.”

  Thorne was silent. If the old
man was sick, then this visit was altogether wrong. Time running out; he would have affairs more pressing to attend to.

  “How are things in the Big House?” Leach asked.

  “Fast, furious.”

  “Fast furious Foster, eh,” Leach said. “Between you, me, and the gossip columns, I don’t trust that sonofagun. Like old Harry used to say about Nixon, I’m from Missouri as far as he’s concerned.”

  “I only talked to him once,” Thorne said.

  “And?”

  Thorne shrugged: what was there to say? The familiar smile was warm, the handshake firm, the first name assuredly used. You could not know what was genuine and what were just tricks of the trade.

  “I liked him,” he said.

  “Well. One man’s fish cake,” Leach said. “He gets everybody around here riled up, I’ll tell you that. He thinks we’re a freeway and he’s a damn bulldozer.”

  Thorne looked at the photographs around the walls of the congressman’s office. There was one of his father and he wondered if there was an office in this whole city that didn’t have a picture of the late Senator. Leach was rising, looking at his watch, wheezing slightly as he moved.

  “John, it’s real good to see you, but I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes, you know how these things are,” he said. “Did you come to ask me something special? Or is this just a courtesy call?”

  Thorne hesitated. The next step could be an impossible blunder. He held his breath. He rose from his chair and felt suddenly tense. Leach crossed the floor, walking awkwardly, like someone accustomed to a cane. He paused in front of Thorne and asked: “What’s on your mind?”

  “Is there anything you can tell me about the Asterisk Project?” he said.

  Leach took out his handkerchief, coughed, spat into the folds of the handkerchief, put it away.

  “The what project?” he asked.

  “Asterisk.”

  “Asterisk.” Leach seemed to be thinking, remembering, searching his brain.

  “It doesn’t ring a bell, John. Sorry,” he said. “Should it mean something?”

  “It’s just something I ran across,” Thorne said.

  Leach shrugged. “I wish I could help. But I never heard of it. Still, there’s a whole lot going on around here that I never get to hear about. Half the time you’re working with blinders on. You burn the midnight oil and you send your aides all over the whole goddamn place and then you find out the guy next door’s been doing the same thing on exactly the same problem. The left hand and the right hand. You know how it is. But I never heard of—what did you call it?”

  “Asterisk,” Thorne said.

  Leach shook his head. “Sorry.”

  He walked Thorne to the door. He was still shaking his head, as if he had forgotten how to stop.

  “Thanks for seeing me at such short notice,” Thorne said.

  “Nothing,” Leach said. “Anything for old Ben’s boy.”

  The left hand, the right hand. What Thorne could not get out of his head was the look on Anna Burckhardt’s face, her fear when she opened the kitchen door and they had gone back into the house. Could you work yourself into the state? Could you fabricate it?

  Marcia said, “There’s a great big stain where that creep who robbed us dumped the vase of flowers. It won’t come out. I always thought water never left a stain. Mother’s sage sayings, book one.”

  He watched her as she studied the mark on the rug.

  “Anyhow, the lady I spoke to at the White House was very nice in a businessy kind of way,” she said. “Hope John gets well quickly, so she said.”

  She sat on the arm of the sofa, one hand on Thorne’s shoulder. In her other hand she held a yellow sponge which looked soiled and muddy.

  “So Mrs. Burckhardt wasn’t out to seduce you, huh?” She rubbed his neck. “Instead she wound you up and set you off on some clockwork conspiracy.”

  “Looks that way,” Thorne said. “But she seemed so … Jesus, so fucking upset.”

  “She just lost her husband,” Marcia said.

  Thorne shook his head. “Yeah, yeah. The estranged husband.”

  “So what? If I was estranged from you and you turned up dead in a swimming pool I wouldn’t exactly die laughing at the idea.”

  Thorne got up from the sofa. He went to the balcony door and looked out. The same gray sky turning toward gray evening. The Asterisk Project. He thought about Leach. No. Leach hadn’t known anything. That was a blank. He heard Marcia singing at his back.

  “She said he was scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of being killed, I guess.” Outside, through the grayness of the cloud mass, there was a sudden weak watery beam of sunlight. It lasted a moment, then was gone. “Look, if he was being followed—”

  “Okay. I’ll play,” she said.

  “If he was really afraid, I mean, afraid of being killed, would he carry anything of value in his case?”

  Marcia shrugged: “People do the weirdest things.”

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Okay. I guess he wouldn’t.”

  “But he left the case for me, knowing there was nothing of value inside it, right?”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Marcia said, “Let me get my deerstalker.”

  “Be serious.”

  “Okay. I’m serious. The funny fit has passed. He left you the case because because because … he wanted to arouse your curiosity?”

  Thorne turned to look at her. She was holding the sponge at arm’s length, as if it were an offensive dead fish.

  “Why not,” he said. “He wanted me to know something.”

  “Yep,” she said. “And years in the armed services had deprived him of straightforward speech. So he only knew the language of cloak and dagger, right?”

  “Sometimes you’re impossible,” he said.

  “In my perverse roundabout way I’m trying to help you, John,” she said.

  “And the burglary,” he said. “It stinks. When you think about it, it really stinks.”

  “Burglaries do,” she said.

  “This one especially. Why this apartment? Why at that time? Why steal an utterly worthless attaché case? It smells.”

  Marcia stared at him. “Romantic poetry is less of a labyrinth. I’ve got work to do.”

  She went out into the kitchen and he turned once more to look from the window. Night over the Nation’s Capitol. Tourist attractions were being lit. Floodlights played on monuments. It was a great city of lights.

  And dark corners, Thorne thought. Dark corners.

  4

  The food in the Greyhound station was malicious. Hollander could find no other word to describe the concoctions that lay before him. Hot dogs simmering in water, peas that had the appearance of tiny eyes plucked from the heads of extinct birds, cole slaw that was flaky and dry. Beside him in the line Brinkerhoff studied these things in a puzzled way. He passed them over and, like Hollander, settled only for coffee. They went to a table. A voice on the loudspeaker was reading off bus departures: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago.

  “You assure me that such food is eaten?” Brinkerhoff asked. He was watching Hollander over the rim of his cup.

  “Devoured,” Hollander said. “With great relish.”

  The feeble pun was beyond Brinkerhoff, who was looking around the cafeteria at the faces of the various travelers obliged to spend thirty minutes or three hours between connections. Young people with backpacks and suntans returning from the South, foreigners who stood around with perplexing timetables and phrase books in their hands, solitary middle-aged men going out to visit married sons and daughters in Omaha or Sacramento. There were even a couple of freaks, de rigueur in Greyhound stations, Hollander thought, who mumbled to themselves.

  Brinkerhoff put his coffee down and made a face. “It is remarkably similar to hot water,” he said.

  Hollander considered the sealed white envelope that lay in his coat pocket. He had t
aken it from the file and photocopied it in a post office, and now what he was about to give Brinkerhoff was a photocopy of a photocopy, a bad reproduction, but it would be enough. It meant nothing very much without the rest of the file, but if Brinkerhoff’s people had any sense they would understand the significance of it. The rest of the file he had placed in a safe deposit box in the vault of the First National. But as he thought of the envelope, he hesitated.

  “You asked me for a little evidence,” Hollander said.

  “You have it?” Brinkerhoff’s pale eyes moved slightly. There was a certain reptilian quality to the eyes, Hollander thought, in the way they were spaced, as if his vision were entirely peripheral.

  “I have something,” Hollander said. “A hint. That’s all. A foretaste.”

  Brinkerhoff put his cup down, licked his lips. “This is going to take a little time, you understand that. Your … offering will have to be analyzed with some care, naturally. And then. Who knows?”

  Hollander looked around the cafeteria. “I don’t have time to waste,” he said.

  “Patience,” Brinkerhoff said. “A day or two. I can’t say.”

  Both men were silent. Hollander looked at his watch. It was 8:30. A day or two. He couldn’t feel safe, he couldn’t feel any sense of certainty in the outcome of this. He took out the envelope and slid it across the table to Brinkerhoff, who picked it up and put it in his coat pocket.

  Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago. This is the last call for passengers for those destinations. Gate number three.

  “Life in the Soviet Union will be somewhat different,” Brinkerhoff said, smiling. “If it comes to that.”

  Hollander pushed his coffee aside. What would he be leaving? Greyhound stations and Pancake Palaces and the iconography of Colonel Sanders and Mickey Mouse watches and a democracy gone to the dogs? Maybe. But there were three kids. There was a girl called Davina. There was the solitude. Certainly that.

  Brinkerhoff stood up. “I’ll call when I have a response, Hollander.”

  Hollander watched him go quickly from the cafeteria. Then he looked at the faces of the passengers at other tables, thinking of how they appeared stranded, as if they too were uncertain of ever reaching their destinations. Moscow, he thought. None of them are going to Moscow.