Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  “I said I think I wounded him,” Tarkington said.

  “By the same token, Tarkington, you might have been a fucking astronaut,” Sharpe shouted at him. “You know what I’m going to do with you?”

  Reykjavik, Tarkington thought. Ceylon, maybe. He had an overwhelming desire to get laid.

  “I’m putting you back on Thorne as of now,” Sharpe said. “Brandt’s on him, but I want Brandt back here. You can’t fuck up a simple thing like keeping an eye on Thorne, I guess.”

  It might have been worse, Tarkington thought. Surveillance could be a drag but Thorne didn’t seem to move around a great deal so there was a chance to breathe, unwind a bit. It might have been goddamn Iceland. Or worse.

  “Tell Brandt I want him in,” Sharpe said. “Now get your ass out of my office before I puke.”

  Tarkington went out.

  Sharpe unclenched his fists, noticing that the blood had drained from his fingers, that his fingers now looked the way they did after a long swim, white and drained and wrinkled. They were everywhere: you only had to knock once on the woodwork and there were incompetents everywhere. He would have to face Dilbeck again, maybe even the daughter.

  Hollander, he thought. I ought to have known better. The old dog had learned all the old tricks. And he hadn’t forgotten them.

  It was a cheap hotel, a place for rummies, potential suicides, cut-rate whores, the unretreadable rejects of a Great Society. Hollander had checked in during the hours of darkness, noticing that the thin neon that burned outside had shed some of its letters, leaving impenetrable gaps in the sky: Hotel T j na. An inscrutable hieroglyphic, like something seen on the side of a passing boxcar. The clerk had been asleep at his desk. Hollander had paid in advance for one night, gone up to the fifth floor in an elevator he had last seen in a 1940s movie, locked himself in a room decorated in faded chintz, and fallen asleep. He slept for three or four hours and when he woke it was daylight and the sun was coming in beneath the brown blind. He woke thinking of Davina, how she had been sitting in a scared crouch in the corner of the bedroom, quite beyond explanations. Well. It could only have come through Myers, he thought. It could only have happened that way. But it was insignificant to him now, a trifle; it was enough for him to know that they had uncovered him.

  They want me dead, he thought. It was quite a discovery to know that somebody had your number. But even that seemed unimportant. The only real thing was how Brinkerhoff’s people would react to his offering. How quickly they would respond. And then there was Escalante; the realms of endless speculation. Since they had failed to kill him, would they go to the trouble of moving it from Escalante? Would they go to that trouble?

  He pulled up the blind. His body was stiff. There was a white sun over the tenements and, in the street below, a black in a long coat crossing the pavement with a brown bag clutched against his chest. The room smelled. The flowers on the wallpaper had long faded. There was a stain on the white sheets. It was a place you came to when there was nowhere left to go: a dead end.

  But how much did they think he knew? Just how much? Enough, obviously, if they wanted him dead. Enough.

  Did they know about Brinkerhoff? They couldn’t, unless from time to time they exercised a little random surveillance. But he hadn’t ever felt that strange intuition he always experienced when he was being followed. Maybe that meant nothing except the fact he was getting old, loosening up, letting his guard down.

  No. They couldn’t know about Brinkerhoff. If they did, they wouldn’t have put out the death warrant. They would have hauled him in for questions. They would have wanted to know how much of it had gone to Brinkerhoff.

  Reasonable. But this wasn’t a place for reason.

  If you started in on the hunt for reason, you wound up on a paper chase. I would have to look back into the crystal ball of my infancy, he thought, to understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. Selling out my country. Going over the wall. Giving things away, things they didn’t want to give away, the Secrets. Later, they’ll say: He must have been a communist, a red, why the fuck didn’t anybody notice?

  He smiled faintly. Streaks of light from the morning sun glinted on the windows of the tenements. In Moscow there would be snow. A cold wind coming off the Volga.

  All I am, he thought, is the plus sign in a necessary equation.

  Tired, he lay down on the bed. He had a picture of the Greek coming at him, the blade going in, the quick escape of Lykiard’s breath from his open mouth and that look, that weirdly stunned look, in the eyes, like the astonished expression of a prizefighter who has walked straight into a sucker punch. It had been a long time since he had killed. What he hoped was that he wouldn’t have to do it again. Ever.

  They ate a lunch of lobster and salad. The senator talked small talk, a craft at which he was a master. Thorne imagined him moving with ease through fund-raising barbecues or cutting ribbons for new shopping malls. It was an art, this small talk. A part of it was how you paused, drew your breath, used your eyebrows during the silences; as if you were assimilating information of colossal import.

  How have you been? What do you like about Foster? How is the work? Have you seen your mother lately?

  They drank white wine and Thorne looked around the restaurant. It was the kind of place that made him uncomfortable; the waiters were gliding flunkies who seemed to approach your table on roller skates. And the senator had obviously developed a form of imperceptible semaphore with them; they came to the table even when it was not apparent to Thorne that Jacobson had called them. He felt somewhat suffocated by it all, the silent rugs, the heavy curtains, the burnished brass of the interior.

  Over coffee, the senator lit a cigar and sat back in his chair.

  “Are you happy with your work, John?” he asked.

  “It’s interesting,” Thorne said. He placed an invisible “sir” at the end of each sentence he spoke, while he tried to keep in mind Marcia’s distaste: They’re only interested in the freebies that go with the job, John. They’re the number one fuckers of the democratic ideal.

  “You sound, ah, not altogether fulfilled,” Jacobson said.

  “I don’t imagine myself doing it for the rest of my life, if that’s what you mean,” Thorne said.

  “Of course not.” Jacobson touched his spectacles. He was looking furtive all at once, turning his head this way and that; a world of potential eavesdroppers. “It’s a start, not a bad start, some might say.”

  “It’s a start,” Thorne agreed. Where was this going?

  “I daresay you entertain other ambitions.”

  “Well,” Thorne said. “I guess.”

  “Politics?” The senator was smiling in a benign way.

  “Maybe, I don’t know.”

  “It isn’t a bad life,” Jacobson said. “If you’ve got the constitution of a buffalo, don’t need much sleep, and don’t court scandal.”

  Court scandal, Thorne thought. Quaint was the word for that one. This was Scandal City.

  Jacobson blew a smoke ring and watched it drift off. Thorne was tempted to put his finger through it. From the corner of his eyes he noticed a waiter about to pounce on their table.

  “There’s a matter I’ve been asked, ah, to approach you about,” the senator said.

  Thorne looked suitably perplexed.

  “It’s not my province, of course. But since I know you personally, I agreed to speak with you—”

  “Yes?” Thorne leaned forward, elbows on the table. What was coming next?

  “Are you interested in running for the House of Representatives?”

  “Do I hear you right?” Thorne asked.

  “You do,” said the senator. “I was approached, if that’s the word, by a certain party. They sounded me out, so to speak. I told them frankly that I didn’t know your feelings. This is all pretty much backroom stuff, John, and I’m not happy with it, but I think it’s what your father might have expected of me.”

  Congressman Thorne, he thought. It would m
ake a good TV series. He watched Jacobson relight the cigar with a slight flourish of his gold lighter. Why did everybody speak of his father as if they were talking about the pope? It was always the same reverential hush.

  “The point is, Lindstrom is not running this year,” Jacobson said. “And since that’s your father’s old congressional district, you can see how useful your name would be.”

  “I can see,” Thorne said.

  “Lindstrom’s retiring. He would have been reelected anyhow. It would be a safe thing for you, I imagine.” The senator stared at the tip of the cigar as if it suddenly irritated him. “If you’re at all interested.”

  “I don’t know,” Thorne said. It sounded off somehow, it didn’t ring true to him. What was behind it? Or was it just the family name? Was he catching that contagious paranoia that had begun, like some wretched virus, in a leather attaché case?

  “Of course, it would mean full-time campaigning,” the senator said. “You would have to resign from the White House.”

  “Of course,” Thorne said.

  “And other, ah, pursuits would be out of the question, naturally.”

  There it was. There. Laid on the line. Visible as all hell. Other pursuits.

  Other pursuits.

  “I don’t think I follow,” Thorne said. Push it, he thought. “Other pursuits?”

  “What I mean is that congressional campaigning isn’t just a matter of shaking hands.” Jacobson laughed, as if at some intensely private joke. “It’s demanding, it can be grueling, it consumes most of one’s time. There just isn’t the time for much else besides.”

  It was clumsy and obvious. Thorne felt awkward. He sat back in his chair and realized he was sweating, that his forehead was damp, his armpits moist. Diversionary tactics, didn’t they call it that? You simply change the road signs around. They wanted him to change direction. Somebody else was sweating apart from himself.

  “I’d like to think it over,” he said.

  Jacobson put out his cigar and looked apologetic. “I’m afraid it’s not like that, John. There just isn’t time. My party wants an answer immediately. I regret the haste of all this, but sometimes these things won’t wait. What’s it to be? Yes or no?”

  He looked into Jacobson’s eyes, saw there a blatant discomfort; it was as if he had a rash he was unhappy about scratching in public. He had been pressured. He had been pushed into this. It was all written on his face.

  “No,” Thorne said.

  “Think again, John.”

  Thorne was silent for a moment. “I’ve thought,” he said.

  “Say yes, John.”

  Thorne got up from the table. “I’m too young for politics, Senator,” he said. “But convey my thanks to your party, please.”

  He walked out of the restaurant.

  The sunlight on the street was unexpectedly hot on his face. He went in the direction of his VW. He unlocked it but didn’t step inside immediately. He allowed the warm trapped air to escape, leaving the door open awhile. The United States Congress. What in the name of Christ had he stumbled into here?

  He got inside the car, closed the door, remembered sitting with Anna Burckhardt in the rain and watching the back of the house as if there were unwanted strangers inside—that was the feeling he had now. That there were rooms you expected to be empty until you opened doors and crossed thresholds.

  From the coin-operated telephone in the lobby of the Hotel T j na, Hollander dialed Brinkerhoff’s number. He got a girl who spoke English as if she had devoured a phrase book.

  “Brinkerhoff,” he said.

  “One moment, if you please,” she said.

  There was buzzing, static, then Brinkerhoff came on the line.

  “Have you decided?” Hollander asked.

  “These things take time,” Brinkerhoff said.

  “Time isn’t what I’ve got,” Hollander said. “They’re on to me.”

  Brinkerhoff was silent a moment.

  “How did it happen?”

  “Does that matter?” Hollander looked along the lobby. A redhaired woman was talking to the desk clerk. She had her arm around the waist of a man who was so drunk that any sexual performance on his part would have been a minor miracle.

  “They know about our conversations?” Brinkerhoff asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good.”

  “When can you come through?” Hollander asked.

  “You must be patient. Bureaucracy is an elephant.”

  “You better start cracking whips, baby,” Hollander said.

  “Cracking whips?”

  “I’ll call you back.” Hollander put the telephone down. The woman was helping the man into the elevator. He glanced in a bleary way at Hollander; momentarily, Hollander felt the edge of suspicion. I can be certain of nothing from here on in, he thought. Trust nothing, accept nothing. Out there, somewhere, they’re looking for me.

  “Our friend may very well be anxious,” the undersecretary said. “It does not alter the fact that until the situation is clarified I can do nothing.”

  Brinkerhoff gazed up at the portrait of Lenin. The sun struck it, causing the glass in the frame to gleam.

  “When can we expect this … clarification?” Brinkerhoff asked.

  “I’m not a mind reader,” the undersecretary said. “Does our friend think we just open our arms and embrace anybody who wants to defect? Does he imagine that just because he’s an American we will be ecstatic to have him? A defector is an expensive commodity, Brinkerhoff. They don’t come cheaply.”

  Brinkerhoff sat down. What could he do but wait? He chewed on a fingernail, then, annoyed with himself, put the hand inside a pocket where it might be safe from further mastication.

  3

  She was scared. It was not the physical punishment, it was the fear that came from not knowing how it would end, a terrible consciousness of dying. Over and over she had told them she knew nothing. She had screamed it at them. Now, while one of them stood in the bathroom doorway and watched her, she examined her own reflection in the mirror. Her upper lip was swollen, there was a cut beneath her eye, a bruise on her throat. She splashed cold water on her face. What was the other one doing? Going through the apartment as if he might still be here?

  She turned to the man in the doorway: “Why don’t you look under my bed?”

  The man said nothing, watched her impassively.

  She moved past him. He followed her into the living room. She sat down, took an English Oval from the pack he had left behind, lit it.

  “You guys have really cramped my style, you know that?” she said. She could not keep the quiver out of her voice no matter how hard she tried.

  The other guy came out of the bedroom and glared at her. It was this one, the one with the square, clean looks of the hometown jock, who had hurt her the most. Now he looked as if he might hit her again.

  “Are you jokers through?” she asked.

  “One more time,” the jock said. “He left no address. You don’t know where to get in touch with him.”

  “Yeah yeah,” she said. “I told you once, I told you like a thousand times. He went. Under the circumstances, I didn’t expect him to hang around.”

  The man stared at her. She had rarely seen, even in her short lifetime of encountering kooks, such an open expression of violence. He could kill, she knew that at a glance. He could kill, go home, eat dinner as if nothing had even happened. Her lip really hurt. She would be out of work for days. She stubbed the cigarette, desperately trying to keep her hand from shaking. She didn’t want them to know they had got through to the target, she wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.

  “Okay,” the jock said. “You better keep your nose clean.”

  The two men went to the door.

  She said, “Stick it, jack. Stick it up your ass.”

  The jock laughed, the other goon looked grim. They closed the door quietly behind them.

  Hollander, she thought. You must have done some
thing pretty bad in your time.

  Sharpe let Dilbeck ramble on for a time, barely listening to the man’s tirade. He lowered his eyes, like a schoolboy in trouble, studied the floor, shifted his weight around. Finally, when it seemed Dilbeck had run out of power, he said: “I lost a man, a good man.”

  “Do you want me to say my heart bleeds for you, Sharpe? You may have lost a man. But I’ve lost Ted Hollander, which is far more important—”

  “Look,” Sharpe said, shutting his eyes, fumbling around in the darkness of his head as if he were trying to locate an extra shot of strength; “Look, I have my people going through this town right now. I have them looking for Hollander. And if he’s still around we’ll find him. You can be assured of that—”

  “Your assurances have a hollow ring, Sharpe, if I may say so.” Dilbeck turned to a plant like someone seeking solace after a funeral. He picked up the pot, held the plant to the light. Something he saw on a leaf displeased him. He held it between thumb and forefinger, rubbing the tips of the two fingers together. “God, a mealybug. All I need right now is an epidemic of that.”

  “Listen,” Sharpe said, thinking: Screw your mealybug. “I’m understaffed and underbudgeted—”

  “Damn your budget. Appropriate what you want. Ask. Just ask. You’ll get it.”

  “I don’t need money, I need well-trained men,” Sharpe said, his voice rising. “You know how long it takes to train a guy? It takes forever. These aren’t the old days, if you don’t mind my saying. We don’t get men like we used to—”

  “It’s a familiar song,” Dilbeck was saying. He had wandered off between the trestle tables, and it looked as if he was intent on examining every leaf in his search for the bugs. “It’s a familiar song and it’s rather late in the day to be singing it.”

  “Okay,” Sharpe said. He wanted badly to sit. There was nowhere to sit. He felt a quick muscular pain in his left calf. “Okay, I agree. But we’re doing everything we can.”

  “With incompetents, clowns, and buffoons,” Dilbeck said. He was reaching into a plant that looked to Sharpe like some kind of ivy. “Got you!” he exclaimed, rubbing out another bug.