Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  They wanted him gone, that much was visible in the scheme of things. They didn’t want to damage him, so it seemed, but just to get him off to the sidelines. Why? Because he was asking too many questions, because he hadn’t been particularly discreet: because of Asterisk. Okay. It made some kind of sense: it was the logic that told you that the scrambled bits and pieces of the jigsaw could be made to form a whole … if you had the plan, the overall pattern. But he had no such matrix. A few facts, a couple of hints, a couple of puzzles. His inadequacy suddenly irritated him; his ignorance distressed him. You’re the kind of person who cringes at the thought of having lint in your navel. Maybe. But this was worse. This was like stepping inside a room that you knew intimately but one in which something has been moved, something so small as to be almost imperceptible—but it would drive you mad as you looked for it. He rose from his desk and walked to the window. Well, he thought. You can at least say, with some degree of certitude, that you know roughly where you stand.

  He watched the lawn mower make a wide arc across the grass.

  Someone had been knocking on his door during the night. He had ignored it, tried to sleep; there had been footsteps in the corridor, the voice of a drunk singing. Now, the sun streaming into the room under the brown blind, he got out of bed and dressed. He went into the corridor. Here and there a few bare light bulbs were lit, bleak little nimbi. He got into the elevator and rode it to the ground floor. The desk clerk was reading a paperback book entitled Improve Your Word Power. He was mouthing words silently to himself. Psychasthenia, Hollander thought. Is that what I suffer from? The inability to resist self-questioning. To put doubts away.

  He picked up the telephone and dialed the number he had been given by Brinkerhoff. It rang only once, then it was answered, as if Brinkerhoff had been waiting beside the receiver.

  “You will be pleased to know that a clearance has been given,” Brinkerhoff said. “There are arrangements to be made, but you must be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.”

  Pleased? Am I pleased? Hollander wondered.

  “The remainder of your information is necessary,” Brinkerhoff said.

  “Naturally.” Hollander gazed at the desk clerk. Emunctory, he thought. Was emunctory in the book? Or nescience?

  “Where do we meet?” Brinkerhoff asked.

  “I always found the Pancake Palace a treat,” Hollander said. “It has a certain nostalgic ring.”

  “In one hour,” Brinkerhoff said.

  Hollander put the telephone down. He was going. He was going. He looked at the desk clerk, who had bad teeth.

  “I’m checking out,” he said.

  “Got your key?” the clerk asked. He put his paperback aside. Hollander put his key down on the desk. The clerk picked it up, handling it as though it were explosive. Going, Hollander thought. What did it really mean? He pictured Davina, wanted to call her, say something: a word of farewell. The language was inadequate. Then he thought of his kids. They would have to live with this too. Do you know what your daddy did?

  What is it, he wondered, this urge to say goodbyes?

  He smiled at the clerk, who was already buried back in his paperback. Yes: sooner or later his kids would be haunted by this. How could he ever make them see that he was doing it—when you got to the bottom line—for them as much as for anyone?

  He left the hotel, stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  Sunny D.C. morning. He walked a little way, went inside a coffee shop, drank coffee and ate a doughnut. Just think: it may be your last American honey-glazed, custard-filled special. He did not imagine they would have such delicacies where he was going.

  The waitress was smiling at him. It was as if she had never seen a defector before.

  Thorne left the White House at ten. He went to his car, drove down Pennsylvania Avenue. At a gasoline station he tried to call Erickson. It was useless. He was being fenced, boxed in; and he knew that Erickson could tell him nothing. When he got through to Senator McLintock’s office and asked for Erickson he was told that Erickson had quit. Quit, he thought. Overnight. Just like that. He hung up, returned to his VW, sat inside motionless. He was cold. The sun on the windshield was like frost. He watched the station attendant at the pump; then he drove off in the direction of the airport. There were jets in the sky high above the Potomac, vapor trails. He parked his car at the airport and went through the terminal building to the observation deck. Think. Think. Escalante. Asterisk. Fuck Paris. They could stick Paris. He had something to do here. They couldn’t just wash him away as if he were a speck of grit blown randomly into someone’s eye, an irritating touch of sand. It was this as much as anything that he hated, it was this presumption that he could be bought and sold by the power brokers if only he would learn how to stifle his curiosity and sit still in quiet corners and ask no questions. A man is killed in a swimming pool. A terrified woman thinks her house is bugged. A group of strangely unrelated, weirdly incongruous scientists are apparently dredged out of retirement to work at a missile site. The walls of silence. The offers of goodies. It wasn’t enough.

  It was pure shit.

  He watched an American Airlines flight take off at the end of the runway. It was followed almost at once by a TWA jumbo. The sky was filled with activity. They expect me to smile, he thought. Nod my head, be grateful. He looked upward into the sun. A wind blowing in across the tarmac made him shiver. Where did he turn now? What was he left with?

  You’re on your own, he thought.

  He went back into the terminal building. The girl at the TWA desk was uncertain about the possibility of a refund at this late stage. Thorne said it wasn’t that important anyhow. It was something he didn’t have to do, he could simply have become, in the parlance of the airlines, a no-show, but it gave him some small, tight feeling of pleasure to watch the girl remove his name from the passenger list and punch this deletion into her computer.

  “I hope we can serve you again sometime,” she said. She had toothpaste teeth, a manicured smile, her eyes were glazed with artificial delight.

  “Maybe,” Thorne said.

  He went back to his car.

  The undersecretary was not absolutely pleased with the decoded cable; he had an inbred dislike of American intelligence. He enjoyed the country and hoped his stay would be a protracted one, but so far as intelligence went he had all the feelings of a pheasant who smells a fox on the downwind. He wasn’t even happy with the way Brinkerhoff had become convinced by this Hollander. But what could he do except give it his stamp of approval? Vashilikov, Zakunin: you did not trifle with these names.

  “I meet him in one hour,” Brinkerhoff said.

  The undersecretary sighed. It had to be important. They hardly used Route 6 unless it was something unusual.

  “I have already arranged the transportation,” Brinkerhoff said. “I took the liberty of assuming your approval.”

  “Very efficient,” the undersecretary said.

  Brinkerhoff looked at his watch. The undersecretary noticed, with a slight pulse of envy, that it was one of those watches you had to press before the time lit up. He wanted one for himself.

  “You will travel with him?”

  Brinkerhoff nodded. “Yes. Yes, I will travel with him.”

  The undersecretary got up from behind his desk. It was an absurd desk anyhow; it made him feel like some wretched dwarf. He stared at the folders that lay across the surface. The constant chatter of intelligence reports. The file on Hollander. Everything checked out. That was what worried him.

  “Brinkerhoff,” he said, in a confidential manner. “You really trust Hollander? Really?”

  “I hedge my bets,” Brinkerhoff said. “At first I imagined him to be stupid. Now I think perhaps. Perhaps. It’s a gamble.”

  “A gamble,” the undersecretary said.

  “The odds are even.”

  The undersecretary watched Brinkerhoff press his watch again and look at the time.

  “How does that work?” he asked. “C
ould I see?”

  Out to the airport. Back again. In to the White House. Out again. The guy maybe had ants in his pants today, Tarkington thought. He was wracked by fatigue. He was thankful when he saw the red Volkswagen pull up outside Dunkin’ Donuts and Thorne go inside the shop. He got out of the Catalina and, though this wasn’t strictly by the book—but when you were this tired you didn’t need to be told what to do by any goddamn book—he followed Thorne inside. He sat six stools away and ordered a black coffee. He wondered about Thorne. Well-dressed (yawn: Jesus Christ), clean-cut, you would have put him down as an up-and-coming young lawyer, something like that. The strangest people broke the rules, though. The most unlikely dudes did all the wrong things. He sipped his coffee. Hollander, for example: never in a million years would he have thought of a warrant coming down for Ted Hollander. Ah, well, it was beyond him. He had become too accustomed to unanswerable questions. After a time, you didn’t even want to ask.

  Thorne went outside.

  Tarkington finished his coffee. Here we go again, he thought. Here we go again. Wearily, he got behind the wheel of the Catalina and slipped into the lane behind the red bug.

  Dilbeck received a telephone call from the congressman, which he took on the conservatory extension. He was deeply concerned with the mealybugs, deeply so; it was a regular blight. What really irritated him was the prospect of chemical killers because no matter how good they claimed to be he knew they did some damage to the plants. Still, you had to go sometimes with the lesser evil for the greater good.

  “Our boy just isn’t biting,” Leach said. His voice was barely a whisper.

  “I didn’t think he would,” Dilbeck said. He suspected Thorne had some integrity. It would have disappointed him to learn otherwise.

  “Is there some other way you can deal with this?” Leach asked. “Like yourself, I would prefer not to involve the other committee members. A little containment would be a good thing.”

  “I can deal with it,” Dilbeck said. He watched a bug, looking like a slow-motion drop of spit, cross the back of his hand.

  “Without, uh, needless violence,” Leach said.

  “Of course,” Dilbeck said.

  The congressman wheezed into the line. For a moment, Dilbeck held the receiver some inches from his ear.

  “You had better keep me posted on Hollander too,” Leach said. “I wish …” His voice trailed off as if there were some unspeakable regret in his mind.

  “You wish the way I wish,” Dilbeck said.

  “Dammit,” Leach said. “Ted Hollander. After all.”

  When Dilbeck had put the telephone down he went into the house. He climbed the stairs to his study. He passed the closed doors of his daughter’s bedroom. Her stereo was playing Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata. He listened for a moment. It was cacophony to him, as if someone were dropping stones on the piano keys from a great height. He climbed the second flight and when he reached his study he was out of breath. He went inside the room, locked the door behind him, opened a green metal filing cabinet, fiddled through the files, took out the one that had been hastily assembled on John Thorne.

  Now, he thought. Sharpe would never have understood this approach. With Sharpe you had two solutions: money or the gun. If it was too expensive to buy somebody off, you had to resort to the pistol. Well, it worked for some. Dilbeck preferred other avenues. It was a difference in philosophies. He opened the file.

  She was a pretty girl. A very pretty girl. A long time ago you might have waved a bottle of acid under her face. She had long dark hair, expressive eyes, intelligent eyes, a soft mouth.

  He looked at the photograph for some minutes. Then he closed the folder and laid it on his desk.

  2

  Mrs. Rowley Salladin hated marketing. Of all the chores that were involved in the smooth running of a five-bedroom house in Arlington, marketing was the worst. It was not so much the actual visit to the supermarket, no, it was the unpacking of brown bags when you finally got home. She stashed the new spices on the rack, the paprika, the cracked black pepper, the bay leaves. Into the freezer she put the cans of orange juice, the waffles, the lamb cutlets, the bag of ice cubes. She emptied carrots, lettuce, a bag of tomatoes, a bunch of celery, into the vegetable tray. When she was finished she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table and looked around the glossy waxed kitchen, as if she were suspicious of the existence of some dirt speck in a place she could not see. Only the other day she had found a cobweb in a high corner of the upstairs bathroom and, at its center, a large spider. She had gone for the Raid, sprayed the spider—horrified by the way it twisted, curled, dropped out of its lair—then knocked the web out with the end of a straw broom. She tapped her fingers on the table. The house was silent. Now, she thought, what was her project for the day?

  The yard. She wanted to plant corn for this year. Yes, she would do something with the yard. She already had the seeds.

  She finished her coffee, rinsed the empty cup, set it to dry on the yellow plastic rack.

  The telephone was ringing.

  The sound quite startled her, breaking as it did into the silence of the large house.

  She picked up the receiver.

  After all these years his voice was a shock to her.

  “You shouldn’t have called,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”

  He was silent. Had he changed? What did he look like now? Was he different? She felt an unexpected longing in her heart; it was as if she had never stopped loving him, as if he were always somewhere in her mind, and all the rest of it, everything else, was a form of emptiness you had to get through. This large waxed kitchen, her spotless life. She remembered how they had loved and she felt the sickness of a great loss.

  “You shouldn’t have called,” she was saying.

  “I had to,” he said. “It’s the last time.”

  “I don’t understand you,” she said. “What do you mean?” She was conscious of her own weird hysteria; of herself, seen as if from a height, a blob of a figure in a glossy, shining kitchen. She was herself a stain, something spilled and about to spread.

  “I’m going away,” he said. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

  “Where? Where are you going?”

  “You’ll hear about it, I guess.” He paused again. “I suppose the kids are in school?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Ted, where are you going? You make this sound so … final.”

  “That’s the word,” he said. “Final would be a good word for it. I want you to tell the kids that I love them. I want them to try and understand.”

  “Please,” she said. She was crying, despite herself she was crying, clutching the telephone as if afraid that it might, like some horrible kite, be tugged from her hand and blown with the wind. The cord was twisted around her wrist. She couldn’t see, her eyesight was blurred.

  “Please, Ted,” she said. “I don’t understand you. Tell me what you mean. Tell me.”

  But the line was dead and she was talking to nobody and it all might have been some dream, something that came in the depth of the night to touch her and make her wonder if, all those years before, she had made the mistake of her life.

  Folly, Hollander thought. Sheer folly. But you don’t take your leave without making a sound of some kind. He put the telephone down and stood with his face pressed against the glass inside the booth and felt the movement of a pain inside him. Then he recovered, the moment passed, he wasn’t the father of three children again, he was Hollander about to defect. He could have called Davina. But they would have her telephone bugged by this time, expecting him to call her. He wasn’t even sure of Mrs. Rowley Salladin’s phone; a slight chance, maybe not much of one, not after all this time.

  He went into the Pancake Palace.

  Brinkerhoff was already at the table, picking gloomily at a blueberry waffle. Hollander sat down. He hoped they would understand, when it all came out he hoped they would not think too badly of him.

  Brinkerh
off smiled. “I urged our undersecretary to use a telephone,” he said. “He isn’t a telephone person, Hollander. He enjoys writing notes. It gives him time to wait for replies and think up countermoves.”

  Hollander ordered coffee.

  Brinkerhoff waited until the waitress had gone, then he said: “I hope you’re ready for some protracted travel.”

  “I’m ready,” Hollander said.

  “We will drive early in the afternoon to an airfield near Damascus—”

  “We?” Hollander asked.

  “I would not let you travel alone, would I?” Brinkerhoff smiled; it was mirthless and yet Hollander saw, obliquely, some clumsy attempt at friendliness. Brinkerhoff trusted him, wanted to know him: he could see that now.

  “Then what?” Hollander asked.

  “Havana.”

  Passports, visa, the necessary vouchers for foreign travel: Brinkerhoff appeared to have the means of transcending these nuisances.

  “After Havana, Moscow,” Brinkerhoff said. “How do you feel now?”

  “I’m ready,” Hollander said. A shadow crossed his mind, it floated through then was gone, a sense of doubt—could he step away from all this now? Could he stand back and free himself from the route he had chosen? Did he want to? He noticed Brinkerhoff’s funereal hand pass across the cuff of his coat.

  “I understand,” Brinkerhoff said. “I don’t think I entirely understand you, Hollander. But to leave your own country … I understand that.”

  “It’s not just the leaving,” Hollander said, feeling a somewhat unexpected warmth toward the other man. Your only ally now, he thought. Your only comrade. “It’s the knowledge you can never come back.”

  Brinkerhoff stabbed his fork into the blueberry waffle, as though he were killing some domestic pest. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. There’s that.”

  “But I made the choice, didn’t I?”