Hard Rain

by Peter Abrahams

  Squirting from number 22’s grasp, the ball bounced over the chalk sideline onto the track. The jogger, a big man in a plain gray sweatsuit and all-purpose ten-dollar sneakers from J. C. Penney, kicked it back without breaking stride. He didn’t appear to aim it anywhere, didn’t appear to kick it very hard, but the ball flew straight to the referee, standing at midfield. The referee eyed the jogger for a second or two. Then he signaled fourth down and blew his whistle.

  Three laps to go. Ivan Zyzmchuk’s feet thudded softly on the red cinder track, very softly for a man of his build. He wasn’t much over six feet tall, but he weighed two hundred and twenty pounds and none of them moved independently as he jogged.

  “Jogging” was not a word he himself would use. “Roadwork” was his name for it. He’d started putting in roadwork a long time ago, before the discovery of Lycra, waffle soles or runner’s high. Training. Three miles a day. Back then he’d been fighting for a place on the school boxing team. Later he’d been schoolboy light-heavyweight champion of his country. Then had come an interruption: a long interruption that still hadn’t ended. But he’d kept up his training.

  “Hut one, hut two, hut, hut.” Zyzmchuk, who had been gazing with unfocused eyes at the red cinder track, looked up. A coach with a square jaw and a round belly sent number 22 back in the game and ran him off-tackle. Perhaps the coach was testing the Get-Right-Back-on-the-Horse Theory. The test yielded immediate results: the boy fumbled the ball away and returned to the bench with his head down. He became invisible to the coach, his teammates, the few dozen spectators clustered along the sidelines—to everyone except Zyzmchuk, circling the field. It wasn’t that Zyzmchuk was a ghoul, or was attracted to others’ humiliation, or was particularly interested in the boy—it was just that he had an eye for seeing things as they were. It was a talent mentioned on all his fitness reports, in one way or another.

  As he ran, Ivan Zyzmchuk’s mind wandered from the game being played beside him to memories of the other kind of football, the kind he had played. Not many of these memories remained: the image of a faded blue singlet, patched many times by his mother; bloody fragments from a match played in pouring rain against a team of German cadets; the bony face of a wonderfully quick goalie named Miro, who’d once shared a bag of stolen chocolates with him.

  Zyzmchuk kept going. He felt damp patches spreading under his sweatshirt. The chill snapped his reverie. Just as well. The blue singlet had finally fallen apart; they’d lost the match to the German boys; Miro had been shot against a wall in 1944. Two laps to go.

  Zyzmchuk heard footsteps coming up behind him and moved to the inside. A young woman in orange jogging tights glided by. He glimpsed her effortless body, her determined eyes, her bare ankles, lovely and slim—the Achilles tendons contracted like perfectly machined springs with every stride. She reminded him of the mountain girls from his boyhood summers, but the mountain girls had never had that determined look. His body sped up, all by itself. He slowed it down. This wasn’t a footrace, he wasn’t built for footraces, and even if he caught up to the woman in the orange tights, what then? The object of her determination was unlikely to be him. It was more likely to be making the payments on a Saab, or making the right connection, or making partner. Zyzmchuk couldn’t help her. He soon lost sight of her perfect ankles.

  One lap to go. He was straining just a little now. Running wasn’t his sport. Football, soccer, whatever they wanted to call it hadn’t really been his sport either. His sport he’d had to give up when they fled Prague after the war. No time for boxing in America. They’d had too much catching up to do, too much, in the end, for his father or his mother. But Zyzmchuk had caught up.

  He finished the last lap and walked down to the river. A cold breeze blew across the water from Virginia. It knocked dried leaves out of the trees and carried them on spiraling descents. Zyzmchuk lay under an oak. His eyes closed. Miro’s face drifted across his eyelids. He opened them.

  Mat work. Twenty push-ups. Twenty sit-ups. Twenty leg raises. Thirty push-ups. Thirty sit-ups. Thirty leg raises. Forty push-ups. Forty sit-ups. Forty leg raises. Enough, Zyzmchuk thought: enough for a twenty-year-old, and I’m going to be fifty-seven in two months. The thought made him do a few more. But not fifty, fifty, fifty. Those days were gone.

  When he sat up, he saw the woman in the orange tights, stretching nearby. She was watching him. Surprise. She looked away when she saw he noticed, finished her stretching and walked to the parking lot on the other side of the field. Zyzmchuk rose and followed.

  The football game was over, the field deserted. The woman got into her car—a Peugeot, not a Saab—and drove away. Zyzmchuk had time to memorize her license number.

  He went to his own car, a Blazer with one hundred and twenty-two thousand miles on the odometer and an engine he’d rebuilt himself, and paused, his hand reaching for the keys. He looked around and saw no one. Then he got down, lay flat on his back and looked under the chassis, like a used-car buyer checking for rust. He found plenty of it, plus a loose bolt on one side of the muffler and a perforated catalytic converter that wouldn’t last the winter. He unlocked the door, got in, stuck the key in the ignition and turned it, all without disappearing in a ball of fire.

  Zyzmchuk switched off the engine. He opened the glove compartment, took out a Thermos and unscrewed the top. The smell of coffee filled the car. He poured a cup, not hot, but still warm at least. A blessing, coffee. One of the great blessings of his life. Count your blessings: one. He took a sandwich from a paper bag. Smoked salmon on fresh pumpernickel. Two and three. The smells blended with the coffee smell, harmonious as a Beethoven trio. Ivan Zyzmchuk ate his lunch.

  1:30. Time to get back to the office. Zyzmchuk caught himself thinking of going to the gym for a steam instead. He was amazed. Maybe he was changing. Change was coming, whether he liked it or not. “It’s nothing personal, Zyz. A question of dollars and cents, that’s all.” Oh well then.

  He picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Grace,” he said, “I’d like you to check a license plate for me. Maryland, SEO 833.”

  He sat in the car, waiting for her to call back. A pair of ducks, male and female, glided down from the sky in a graceful curve and landed beneath one of the goalposts. Their heads bobbed back and forth. Then the male mounted the female. She tried to get away. He pinned her head down with his bill. Another male flew down, pushed the first away and took his place, bill planted on the back of her head. The first male bit the second’s neck. The three ducks wove under the goalposts in a bad-tempered scrum. “Nature,” he remembered Leni saying, “is what we’re put on earth to rise above.” He felt a warmth, cozy and domestic, spreading through him. It always did when he thought of Leni, but he knew from experience not to encourage it. Zyzmchuk pushed her out of his mind. In the backseat he had some brochures. He put on his glasses and reached for them.

  Arizona Sunset. Condo Country. The Time-Sharing Experience. Zyzmchuk studied the glossy pictures of sunburned old people playing tennis and eating ice cream cones. Being old was a gas. Zyzmchuk could hardly wait. He rolled down the window and tossed the brochures into a trash barrel.

  They’d started appearing in his mailbox a few days after he’d been asked to take early retirement. Condo Country had its own intelligence capability. “It has nothing to do with the way you do the job, Zyz. Nothing like that.” Oh no. “It’s a budgetary matter. You’ve seen the figures, you know what I’m talking about. It’s time to get some younger men in. We’ve got to think of the future. You know how long people last in this business. You’re our Satchel Paige already.”

  “Zyz didn’t play baseball.”

  “Our Pele then. Our Archie Moore.”

  “I know who Satchel Paige was.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  And more palaver like that. But they all knew the real reason. Ivan Zyzmchuk wasn’t cut out to work in an office, and there was nothing else for him to do. That was departmental policy—no one in the field after fifty.
Zyzmchuk had hung on for an extra six years thanks to a series of special six-month contracts, but now it was over. Assets: a pension of $2,272.65 a month (but it didn’t start until he was sixty), a savings account with a little over three thousand dollars in it. Liabilities: an apartment that cost eight hundred a month, car insurance, medical insurance, food and drink for one. Conclusion: he had to find a job. Credentials: a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Chicago, 1951, and a twenty-five-page resume. Its contents were top secret.

  The phone buzzed. Grace had been quick. “Yes?” he said.

  But it wasn’t Grace. “Caught you, Zyz,” said Keith.

  “Caught me?”

  “In the middle of an old-fashioned three-martini lunch. Am I right?” He paused, waiting for Zyzmchuk’s reply. Zyzmchuk said nothing. He didn’t like being called Zyz. “Well,” Keith said, “you’ve earned it, if anyone has.” There was a longer pause. When Keith spoke again, his voice had lost its bonhomie. “Stop by the office this afternoon. We’ve got something to show you.”

  “What?”

  “Show, not tell. I think you’ll be interested.”

  The line went dead. Zyzmchuk looked across the river; he could make out a square gray building halfway up a hillside. From a distance, it looked like any other government building designed by middle-echelon architects for middle-echelon workers. Perhaps it had a little more rooftop equipment than most. Zyzmchuk started the car and drove toward the bridge.

  He was on the Virginia side when the phone buzzed again. “Mr. Zyzmchuk? It’s Grace. Maryland SEO 833 is registered to a Ms. Lisa Turley. She lives alone at 483 Hawthorn Street, Bethesda, and is employed as an analyst at the Bureau of Economic Indicators. She’s divorced, twenty-nine years old and graduated from Wellesley College. No federal or state arrests or convictions, no known travel to any Soviet bloc countries. She had an abortion in nineteen eighty-three and owes fifty-five dollars in overdue D.C. parking tickets. Do you want more?”

  “What more could there be?”

  “I could do some digging on her ex-husband for starters.”

  Zyzmchuk laughed. “Only for your own fun,” he said.

  “What a suggestion, Mr. Zyzmchuk!”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Zyzmchuk drove to the gray building on the hillside and pulled into the small parking lot at the back. The lot was marked with numbered spaces. Zyzmchuk parked in number 9, although it wasn’t his; 31 was his space, but 9 was closer to the door and its owner in the hospital for tests.

  The gray building had no nameplate, just a carved stone over the door—an eagle that looked more like a vulture holding a banner that read 1952. Inside there was no security check, no guard, no office directory. The sole decoration was a big mirror on the rear wall of the lobby; a woman was pursing her lips in it. The RAG, as it was called by those working there who enjoyed sufficient clearance to know the name of their employer—the Research Analysis Group—was a mediocre, unpretentious office building that made no statements, unless you knew about its hidden cameras, metal detectors and plastics sensors, and the two men watching on the other side of the mirror, one with a logbook, the other behind a fifty-caliber machine gun.

  Zyzmchuk took the elevator to the top floor and entered his office. Grace was sitting at her desk, eyes on her VDT, hand fishing in a can of Almond Roca.

  “Caught me red-handed, Mr. Zyzmchuk,” said Grace.

  “It’s one of those days,” Zyzmchuk said, although he caught Grace red-handed every time he went in or out. She weighed more than he did. The soft pounds sagged in folds from her chin to her ankles. Grace also had glossy chestnut hair and a flawless complexion. She popped another Roca in her mouth. Zyzmchuk went into the inner office, pulled off his sweatsuit and put on gray flannels and a tweed jacket.

  “That’s a nice tie, Mr. Zyzmchuk,” Grace said when he emerged. “Are those ducks?”

  “On the wing, at least,” he said.

  Grace raised an eyebrow. She had alert, dark eyes that didn’t miss much. “As opposed to what, Mr. Zyzmchuk? Flat on their backs?”

  “That kind of thing.”

  Zyzmchuk went out and walked down the hall. He heard Dahlin and Keith laughing before he was halfway to the corner office. They liked a good joke. You could tell that from their satellite picture of Gorbachev pissing outside his dacha.

  Dahlin, sitting on the arm of a deep-red leather couch that might have come from the bankruptcy sale of a second-rate men’s club, had a magazine open in his hands when Zyzmchuk walked in; Keith was looking at it over his shoulder.

  “What a character!” said Dahlin, shaking his head.

  “The worst and the dullest,” said Keith.

  They laughed again. Dahlin closed the magazine: Harvard. They’d been browsing through the class notes section at the back. They looked up at Zyzmchuk. Both wore pinstripe suits, wing-tip shoes, horn-rimmed glasses: the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of prepdom. It was easy to underestimate men like them. Zyzmchuk had watched a lot of Europeans make that mistake.

  “Ivan,” said Dahlin, “nice to see you.” They’d last seen each other, Zyzmchuk recalled, the day before. Dahlin rose and held out his hand. Zyzmchuk crossed the room and shook it. Dahlin had a firm, dry grip, not that it mattered. Anyone in his position had long ago mastered the handshake, just as he knew which fork to use for the kiwi fruit and how to say no. The only interesting part of it was that they’d never shaken hands before.

  “What’s up?”

  “Sit down, Ivan, sit down,” Dahlin said, crossing his legs.

  Zyzmchuk sat.

  Keith got up and looked out the window. He reminded Zyzmchuk of George Will, somewhat rounder and a little younger. Zyzmchuk noticed that he had ducks on his tie, too. They looked like a better class of duck.

  “Nice to see you,” Dahlin repeated. He took out his pipe and began reaming it. “You’re going to be missed.”

  Zyzmchuk nodded. He wasn’t about to say that he’d miss Dahlin, too. Dahlin was the fifth director he’d worked for. He’d lost track of the number of deputies that had come and gone in that time; usually, like Keith, they were political appointees. They came, learned secrets, spent money, departed. Perhaps Keith had more pretentions than most. In his first month on the job, he’d written a monograph called “The Role of Disguise in the Modern Intelligence Matrix,” had it classified, then widely distributed in the intelligence community. Zyzmchuk had an inscribed copy: “To an old pro.”

  “I was talking to someone the other day who spoke very highly of you,” Dahlin said. “He referred particularly to Budapest in ’fifty-six.”

  “Who was it?”

  Dahlin named a name that was in the papers almost every day.

  “He wasn’t there,” Zyzmchuk said.

  “I know that,” Dahlin said, a little sharply. “He’d been going over some of the reports from the time.”

  “Why?”

  “Now Ivan,” said Dahlin, “how would I know a thing like that? Don’t you ever stop working?”

  “Sure. Five o’clock every day. And all day Saturday and Sunday, since Gramm-Rudman.”

  Dahlin’s mouth opened. It made laughing motions, but no sound came out. He stuck his pipe in it. Keith turned from the window, glancing at his gold watch. I might be funny, Zyzmchuk thought, but not screamingly, like Gorbachev or the Harvard class notes.

  Dahlin’s mouth stopped doing whatever it was doing. “We’ve got something that looks like your kind of thing,” he said. “It’ll get you out of the office, at least, for these last few …” Dahlin abandoned that approach, without substituting a replacement.

  He needn’t have been so careful: getting out of the office sounded fine to Zyzmchuk. “What kind of something?” he asked.

  Dahlin nodded to Keith. Keith picked up a remote tuner and touched a button. Light glowed from the big screen on the wall. It took the shape of a face, the face, Zyzmchuk saw, of a woman about his own age, poised, well-cared-for, but slightly uneasy: the k
ind of face you might see in the waiting room of the best dentist in town.

  A man on the screen leaned over and blocked the view. He had a fat neck, recently shaved clean by a barber’s razor. He did something to the woman, saying, “This won’t hurt a bit.” He did a few more things. Zyzmchuk glimpsed one of the woman’s eyes as the man bent forward. It had widened very slightly: a little hole through which poise could start leaking away.

  “Follow the Redskins?” said the man, with his back to the camera.

  “Is that the first question?” the woman asked, sounding very puzzled.

  The man on the screen laughed, the kind of laugh children provoke when they ask if God put the baby in Mummy’s tummy. “Nope,” he said, “just making conversation.” He took out a notebook and moved offscreen.

  The woman ran her finger across her upper lip, as though wiping sweat away, but there was no sweat to see. “Must it be so tight, Mr. Brent?”

  “Excuse me?” said the man, turning. The camera caught his face in profile. Zyzmchuk could see that he had heard the woman perfectly well.

  “He can’t stop being tricky,” Dahlin said. “They’re mass-producing boobs like that at Langley.”

  “But boobs who enjoy their work,” Zyzmchuk said.

  “That’s what makes them boobs,” Keith said and laughed, drowning out the video. He had his hands folded comfortably across his belly, like a customer with a good seat at a Neil Simon hit.

  The man from Langley had moved offscreen. “Pro forma?” he was saying, as though he couldn’t believe what he’d heard. The woman’s face tensed. The man announced that he was about to ask a series of questions, then put the first one: “What is your name?”

  There was a long pause. The woman cast a quick look in the direction of the man; then she balled her right hand into a fist and said, “Alice Frame.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Zyzmchuk said. “Is that the senator’s wife?”

  “You’re quick to see the problem, Ivan,” Dahlin said.