Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

He said, feebly, that he had fallen in the river.

  “Your boat capsize or something?” she asked. She had the kind of face in which you find written a thousand dark suspicions after a lifetime of guests who stole lamps, paid with bad checks, vomited in toilets, threw empty beer cans from windows.

  “Yes,” he said. “I almost drowned.”

  She held the door open a little way and he stepped inside the office. She took a key from a rack and asked him to fill out the registration slip. He did so. Dead; would they think that?

  “Chalet four,” she said, smiling a quick, brittle little smile, as if she were reluctant to give anything human away. “Lucky you didn’t drown,” she added.

  “Lucky is right,” he said. He took the key, left the office, found chalet four. He unlocked the door and went inside, took off his wet clothes and looked for the dial that would bring heat into the room. He found it and turned the thermostat up to seventy-five and laid his damp clothes next to the hot air vent to dry. He showered, which did nothing to revive him, and then he fell on top of the bed and slept.

  It was light when he woke. The sun was shining into the room through the open drapes. He heard a car outside the window and for a moment he thought of the Catalina. He rose from the bed and looked out. A pickup truck was idling in the parking lot. The driver was delivering something to the motel. He carried an obviously heavy cardboard box in the direction of the office. Thorne drew the curtains and sat for a time on the edge of the mattress.

  Now, he thought.

  Now.

  You do the obvious thing. You do the obvious stupid thing. What else is there left to you? Somewhere at the heart of all this you committed yourself, didn’t you? Somehow you reached that core.

  No, he thought. No.

  He felt his clothing. Slightly damp still but he could wear it and his body heat would take care of the rest. He picked up his wallet.

  He looked at the telephone. He knew that the telephone beside which Marcia might now be sitting, half asleep, would be tapped. They would have done that. They would want to be sure of things. Tapped telephones, he thought. He had stepped through into some other dimension from the one that was familiar to him. It was as if he had opened the locked door to that room he had long considered empty, only to find—what you find, whatever it is.

  He dressed slowly. There was the faint smell of the river hanging to his clothes. How could he contact Marcia?

  I can’t, he thought. There isn’t a way.

  He left the chalet. He went to the driver of the pickup, who was emerging from the office. He was a small, skinny man with the face of a hatchet and he wore an incongruous Mexican-style mustache which gave him the appearance of some battle-weary revolutionary. He was suspicious of Thorne almost at once.

  “I need a ride,” Thorne said.

  “Where you going fella?” the driver asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Thorne said. “My boat, my boat capsized in the river last night and I’d like to get to—”

  “I’m headed for Richmond,” the driver said. He squinted his eyes and scrutinized Thorne. “It’ll cost you, though. Company policy says no riders. Taking a chance. It’ll cost you.”

  Company policy, Thorne thought. “I’ll give you ten,” he said.

  “Ten’s fine,” the driver said. “Hop in.”

  Thorne, conscious of the river in his clothing, got into the cab of the pickup. The driver climbed up behind the wheel.

  “Boat turned over, you say?”

  “Right,” Thorne said. “I nearly drowned back there.”

  “You fishing or what?”

  “Just cruising,” Thorne said, and realized how odd this might sound.

  “River’s full of shit, I hear.”

  “You better believe it,” Thorne said.

  The driver was silent. The chalets of the Revenue Motor Lodge receded, the highway flattened itself out in front of the truck. It was a gorgeous morning, Thorne thought. It was the kind of morning on which you might be justified in thinking that all kinds of promises were about to be fulfilled. He closed his eyes, listened to the rhythms of the truck.

  “Anyplace special in Richmond?” the driver asked.

  Thorne thought a moment. “The airport,” he said finally.

  “Yeah,” Tarkington was saying. “Through the head, twice. In the river. I guess maybe he’s out somewhere in the Chesapeake Bay right now.”

  Sharpe put his coffee down and looked across the desk at Tarkie’s face. Why was the fat man laying all this on him now? Was he looking for praise?

  Tarkington took a cone of water from the cooler and lit a cigarette. His eyes shining, he looked at Sharpe, then in a coy way, as though he were a child who had done something that deserved to be rewarded, lowered his eyes to the floor and scraped his feet back and forth.

  “Yeah, magnificent,” Sharpe said. “Truly stunning.”

  He gazed at some papers on the desk. Thorne was one thing, sure, one problem less, but the night had not yielded up the plane and that was the biggest headache right now. He picked up the report of Strachan and read it a second time:

  To: Control

  From: Vernon P. Strachan

  April 7, Friday; 0216 hours

  Investigation of Damascus airstrip revealed the deaths of both Brandt and Mulholland. The latter had been shot through the head. His car is written off. Brandt had been shot in the chest. Mulholland’s gun had not been fired. There were three rounds remaining in Brandt’s gun.

  Further investigation reveals Damascus airstrip owned by one Thomas Surr but there are no records relevant to his ownership obtainable locally and no knowledge of his whereabouts. According to local sources the airstrip is used only by the North Maryland Flyer’s Society and then only on an irregular basis.

  Sharpe let the flimsy paper fall from his fingers. When he had sent the name of Thomas Surr through the data banks, the answer had come back: Unknown. So there was a blind; and who knew where that plane which Brandt had reported might be by this time?

  Poor Brandt, Sharpe thought. Poor Mulholland.

  He couldn’t keep losing men at this rate. He looked at Tarkington, who was still beaming, and he wondered: Why hadn’t he lost Tarkie instead of somebody like Brandt?

  He got up and went to his window and opened the slats of the blind. He stared up into the morning sky. Up up and away, he thought. Like Ted Hollander.

  Thorne got out of the pickup at Richmond Airport. He booked a seat on the next flight to Phoenix: Eastern Airlines to Dallas, the connection from Dallas to Phoenix by American. He used a credit card which the girl behind the desk looked at for a time as if it might be a forgery. She consulted a booklet, a list of credit cards reported lost or stolen or otherwise useless. She checked the number of Thorne’s card and he wondered if they had managed to do this too, if they had somehow contrived to invalidate his charge cards. He watched the girl’s face. She was without expression. She checked the number, seemed satisfied in an uneasy kind of way, then she wrote out his ticket for him. He took it, looked at the clock, realized he had an hour to kill before the Dallas flight. He went inside the cafeteria and halfheartedly picked at some scrambled eggs, ate a slice of dry toast, drank two cups of coffee. His hand trembled perceptibly. You don’t have to try and go through with this, he thought. You don’t have to make an attempt that can end only in futility.

  After all, who do you owe anything to?

  He thought of Congressman Leach again.

  You could call him. Take it all back.

  Swallow it.

  It would have the taste of the river to it.

  He finished his coffee. How much chance did he have anyhow? Was there a hope in hell he could even make it to the fence.

  Madness.

  When he heard his flight number being called for Dallas he hesitated, conscious of the ticket that lay in his pocket with the immediacy of a weapon. If you step away from this, he told himself, how can you ever bring yourself to look at anything e
lse again?

  A week ago, he thought.

  He was aware of his powerlessness, his inability to turn clocks back to an earlier and better time, to that point where ignorance begins to shade into knowledge. A little knowledge, he thought. A dangerous thing.

  When he boarded the airplane and tightened his seat belt he realized that he understood now how the major general had felt waiting in the cocktail lounge with his worthless attaché case.

  Sheer futility.

  He felt the plane begin its run. He closed his eyes as he always did during takeoff. It was the sensation of rising and the possibility of falling that, in their hideous combination, bothered him.

  Sunlight came back, in sharp glints of light, from the wing of the craft.

  I can’t pull this off, he thought.

  During the layover at Dallas he did two things. He arranged to rent a car in Phoenix and he sent a telegram to Marcia care of the Department of English at George Washington. The message read:

  SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO TAKE A LITTLE SUGAR IN SPITE OF IT ALL—THE PHILISTINE

  2

  Dilbeck’s consciousness of dread had been deepened by Sharpe’s telephone message and now, as he hesitated outside the conference room, he imagined the clamor of his colleagues. They would want blood for this one. They would want heads to roll.

  He opened the door and saw the faces at the table turn toward him. Whorley, in uniform, was standing at the window lighting a cigar. Burlingham, the man from RAND, was absentmindedly debating the baseball season with Marvell and Nicholson, his spectral self, was scribbling something in a notebook. Leach appeared half asleep, drawn into himself with sickness and fatigue.

  Dilbeck looked around the room.

  They’re waiting for me, he thought.

  They want to know why I called this meeting.

  He went to his chair and put down the manila folder he had been carrying. It contained Ted Hollander’s file and a sheaf of reports from Sharpe and his people, all neatly held together by a bulldog clip. This won’t hold so neatly together, Dilbeck thought.

  This is going to fall apart all around me.

  He opened the file, cleared his throat. He could not even begin to salvage anything from the fact that Thorne had been terminated because this was something he shared only with Leach. The others knew nothing of Thorne.

  “We have a problem, Gentlemen,” he said.

  Silence.

  “It appears that Ted Hollander has defected to the Soviet Union.”

  Silence.

  And then, as he had known it would, the room seemed to explode.

  “Dear God,” Whorley said.

  Nicholson stood up and thumped his fist on the table. “How much does he know? God damn it, Dilbeck, what has he taken with him?”

  Dilbeck, swaying slightly on his feet, closed his eyes. He could hear them out there squabbling, shouting, banging on the table.

  “Gentlemen, please—”

  The congressman raised one hand for silence, which came after a minute or two. He was staring straight at Dilbeck but addressed him in such a way as to suggest that Dilbeck was present in only the grammatical third person, like a shadow of a real self.

  “Perhaps Mr. Dilbeck will inform us as to the extent of his knowledge concerning Hollander’s information,” Leach said, patiently, quietly.

  “That isn’t known yet,” Dilbeck answered.

  “When will it be known?”

  Dilbeck didn’t know the answer to that either. There were hours of research to plow through, masses of intelligence reports that would be flowing in over the next few days; there could not be a complete picture until everything had been studied.

  “I’m not certain, Congressman,” he said.

  “Will we ever know what Ted Hollander has given to the Soviets? Will we ever know?” Burlingham asked, his voice almost hysterical, like the grinding edge of a saw on a recalcitrant length of wood.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Dilbeck said.

  There was more furor over the table.

  “What can we do to the stable door now that the horse has bolted?” the congressman asked.

  Dilbeck shrugged. “Very little. I’m sorry, but there you have it.”

  “Sorry!” Whorley was walking around the room. “Do you understand the consequences if the Soviets have Asterisk? Do you?”

  “I do,” Dilbeck said. “In my own defense, I might say that I’m not responsible for the weaknesses, such as they are, in Ted Hollander’s psyche—”

  “You went on record, if I may remind you, as saying he had no connection whatsoever with the Soviets,” Nicholson said.

  “And that was my mistake, I agree,” Dilbeck said. “But there was nothing in his record—”

  “Records mean little,” Marvell said.

  Burlingham, with a steady hand, was lighting a pipe. “How do the Soviets know Hollander is on the level?”

  “They check, then they double-check, then they check again,” Dilbeck said. “And even after that they run another check, just as we do ourselves—”

  “Asterisk,” Whorley said, his voice low and hushed, as if what he were pronouncing were the secret name of the Holy Grail, something arcane and strangely solemn.

  There was another silence in the room.

  Dilbeck coughed. His head was swimming; he was peering at things through some viscous substance. He looked across the faces; there was the kind of silence in which you might hear the growing of grass.

  “I will, naturally, resign forthwith,” Dilbeck said.

  The congressman was on his feet. “No. I don’t believe we can accept your resignation. I speak for myself, sure, but I think you’ve done some valuable work here and I don’t think any blame for Hollander’s idiosyncrasies can be attached to you.”

  Dilbeck looked down at the table. Burlingham concurred; Marvell, too, sided with the congressman. Nicholson, after a moment, came round to the same way of thinking. Only the general appeared upset with the whole business of Dilbeck staying on the job. A vote was taken. Dilbeck retracted his offer to resign.

  “Thank you, Gentlemen,” he told the committee. “Now I think we wait on the intelligence data that we can expect in the next few days from the Soviet Union, which, together with a complete picture my people will put together, should give us a clear idea of what Hollander has taken over with him.”

  The room was silent again.

  Dilbeck picked up his folder.

  He went out into the corridor. It was a close-run thing. For a time there they had really wanted his head; only the congressman had brought the situation around. Momentarily, he felt a conspiratorial affection for Leach.

  It was midafternoon, mountain time, when the plane carrying Thorne arrived in Phoenix at Sky Harbor Airport. There was a bloody-looking sun in the sky, a strange coppery tint to the air, a slight wind blowing through the palms. Inside the terminal he went to the Avis desk for his car rental; the girl led him outside to a Pinto and handed him the keys. He drove out of the airport to the nearest gasoline station, where he obtained a map of Arizona. Next, he went to a shopping plaza and in a department store purchased a dark three-piece suit, a pair of black shoes, a white shirt, a conservative tie that was black with pale-gray stripes. He used his credit card, expecting all the while that the salesman would refuse to accept it. A touch of deeply rooted paranoia, Thorne thought. He had felt it even inside the changing rooms when he had been trying the new clothes on and had looked at the door handle almost as if he expected to see it being turned. A clear mind, he thought. Clarity. Calm.

  He sat down in his new clothes at the cafeteria in the department store and drank coffee, studying his map. Two hours, he reckoned. Two hours to Escalante. He took his wallet out of his pocket. He looked at his security clearance pass, which was stamped WHITE HOUSE PERSONNEL. Did it still have any power? Was it still useful? He looked at the photograph of himself and he was seeing a younger man, the light of some optimism in the eyes, a firmness to the mold of the ja
w: a face of some strength or what, more quaintly, was called character. He didn’t look like this anymore. He put the pass back into the wallet and realized that he was both nervous and afraid; that the lines between these sensations had blurred to the point where there wasn’t a difference. Calm, he said to himself again. You can only pull this off with some kind of cool, an impertinence, a quality he wasn’t sure he had in any abundance.

  He walked outside to the Pinto. No green Catalinas, he thought. Not now. He drove, following the map, in the direction of Interstate 17, then he took the turning for Highway 60. He was traveling in a northwesterly direction out of the city. The midafternoon traffic was heavy. The highway, burned by the unexpectedly strong sun, shimmered in front of his eyes. The buildings of downtown Phoenix went past, a scattering of skyscrapers in the desert. He could see through a haze the mountains to the north, ragged, lunar, like a landscape you might encounter only in some dream of alienation. There were great pockets of shadows, like caves, in the sides of the mountains. He drove past ramshackle collections of trailer parks, shantytowns that existed under the shadow of the highway, boxcars stationary on railroad sidings, scattered factories, brand-new industrial estates. They had taken the desert and turned it into another form of wilderness. Marcia, he thought; what would she have had to say about all this? The ecological substructure was being, quite simply, ripped away.

  Marcia.

  He glanced in the mirror. It had become habit. A truck was in behind him in the slow lane. He saw the driver’s face in silhouette.

  Then the urban sprawl yielded to a few sparse dwellings, a small township, a hamlet, and finally to the desert itself. It was strange: he had the feeling that he had stepped out of a bleak Eastern spring into the riot of summer all in one day. He saw the saguaros, monsters beyond the highway; he saw rocks and rubble and cholla as if they had been deliberately placed in position centuries ago by some divine act, a cosmic hand, and had not been changed since. Everything cast long shadows.

  Towns came and went as he drove.

  Wittman, Morristown, Wickenburg. They passed, seeming little more than traffic signals and a few dwellings with a temporary look to them. He had the unsettling sensation that one day the desert would finally take back everything that had been wrested from it. It was a feeling that suggested violence, some implicit force. An earthquake, a drought, a cataclysm of some kind—and then there would be only desert and nothing else.