Players

by Don DeLillo

  “How long have you been doing this?” Lyle said. “Holding this sign?”

  The man turned to see who was addressing him.

  “Eighteen years.”

  Sweat ran down his temples, trailing pale outlines on his flushed skin. He wore a suit but no tie. The life inside his eyes had dissolved. He’d made his own space, a world where people were carvings on rock. His right hand jerked briefly. He needed a haircut.

  “Where, right here?”

  “I moved to here.”

  “Where were you before?”

  “The White House.”

  “You were in Washington.”

  “They moved me out of there.”

  “Who moved you out?”

  “Haldeman and Ehrlichman.”

  “They wouldn’t let you stand outside the gate.”

  “The banks sent word.”

  Lyle wasn’t sure why he’d paused here, talking to this man. Dimly he perceived a strategy. Perhaps he wanted to annoy Burks, who obviously was waiting to talk to him. Putting Burks off to converse with a theoretical enemy of the state pleased him. Another man moved into his line of sight, middle-aged and heavy, a drooping suit, incongruous pair of glasses—modish and overdesigned. Lyle turned, noting Burks had disappeared.

  “Why do you hold the sign over your head?”

  “People today.”

  “They want to be dazzled.”

  “There you are.”

  Lyle wasn’t sure what to do next. Best wait for one of the others to move first. He took a step back in order to study the front of the man’s sign, which he’d never actually read until now.

  RECENT HISTORY

  OF THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD

  CIRCA 1850–1920 Workers hands cut off on Congo rubber plantations, not meeting work quotas. Photos in vault Bank of England. Rise of capitalism.

  THE INDUSTRIAL AGE Child labor, accidents, death. Cruelty = profits. Workers slums Glasgow, New York, London. Poverty, disease, separation of family. Strikes, boycotts, etc. = troops, police, injunctions. Bitter harvest of Ind. Revolution.

  MAY 1886 Haymarket Riot, Chicago, protest police killings of workers, 10 dead, 50 injured, bomb blast, firing into crowd.

  SEPT 1920 Wall St. blast, person or persons unknown, 40 dead, 300 injured, marks remain on wall of J. P. Morgan Bldg. Grim reminder.

  FEB 1934 Artillery fire, Vienna, shelling of workers homes, 1,000 dead inc. 9 Socialist leaders by hanging/strangulation. Rise of Nazis. Eve of World War, etc.

  There was more in smaller print fitted onto the bottom of the sign. The overweight man, wilted, handkerchief in hand, was standing five feet away. Lyle, stepping off the sidewalk, touched the old man, the sign-holder, as he walked behind him, putting a hand on the worn cloth that covered his shoulder, briefly, a gesture he didn’t understand. Then he accompanied the other man down to Bowling Green, where they sat on a bench near a woman feeding pigeons.

  “How about a name?”

  “Burks.”

  “What Burks? What’s Burks supposed to mean?”

  The man glanced at a car parked across the street. Burks sat in the front seat, belted in, looking straight ahead.

  “It’s generic all of a sudden.”

  “Do it our way, Lyle.”

  “I’ll live longer.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, pessimist like me.”

  “He colors his hair. Kinnear. I forgot to mention it last time. He may have a contact at night court, for whatever it’s worth.”

  “Out of curiosity, Lyle, only, where’s he at?”

  “Don’t you have my phone wired in to the computer that runs the world?”

  “Not one bit, to my knowledge, besides which I can’t see as it matters because A.J.’s not about to tell you anything too, too important.”

  “If you don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “Suit your own self.”

  “I might speculate, of course. Make an educated guess. Why don’t you tell me something about him first? What you know, whatever. You managed to come up with his name from a voiceprint, apparently, or playing tapes to various people, I would imagine. So what else do you have?”

  Burks-2 was spread over half the bench, wiping his fancy glasses with the handkerchief he’d had in his hand the past fifteen minutes. His fatigue, his weight itself, running over, made Lyle relax. He looked like a man who sponsors a women’s softball team. He picks his nose with his pinky finger and has sex in automobiles.

  “A.J. taught voice and diction, junior college level. He worked part-time for a collection agency. He collected. As a sideline he was involved in prison reform, talking to groups, raising money, state of Nevada. He got radicaler and radicaler, as the saying goes, although what actually transpired in the man’s heart of hearts, Lyle, is open to question. There was a little razzle-dazzle in New Orleans, late spring in sixty-three. Hard to get the details straight. Somebody was supposed to get snatched, some lawyer attached to a government committee. He had information somebody wanted. There were connections, funny undercurrents. Oswald, for instance. Cuba, for instance. Missing documents. But seems the thing never got off the ground. Somebody contacted the Justice Department a convenient forty-eight hours before the attempt was scheduled. Old Kinnear disappeared at that point, just about. He resurfaced in Bogotá three years later, where he got to be asshole buddies with some people involved in cocaine traffic. Next thing he disappears and right after that there’s arrests by the score. Then we find him on the West Coast with a group of former campus hard rocks and they’re in the travel business, running people underground or out of the country. A.J. did a little everything. Not exactly a force in the movement. He’s been a courier. He’s been a paymaster. As we reconstruct it, he’s tried to palm himself off as operational chief of this or that terrorist unit. Wouldn’t you think that was dangerous?”

  “He may be in Canada.”

  “In truth, Lyle, I don’t care, really, cross my heart. A.J.’s in Limbo, Arkansas, far’s I’m concerned. It’s out of curiosity, only, I asked. Passing the time.”

  “He may be in Canada or on his way to Canada. I’m not sure. I could be way off. But I think Canada.”

  Bread sailed out of the woman’s hand and a dozen pigeons came down among the fragments. Burks-I rolled down his window, yawning. Lyle yawned too, leaning over to read the car’s plates.

  “We’d like some input on Marina Vilar.”

  “She still wants to do the Exchange.”

  “Where’s she located at?”

  “I don’t know. No idea. I think she lives in her goddamn car.”

  “Who’s with her, how many?”

  “Don’t you know any of this from Vilar?”

  “Myself, Lyle, I couldn’t tell you if Vilar’s a Mexican or a Swede but everything I hear leads me to believe he’s ready for the basket-weaving class. A mental. Not adjusting well to present surroundings.”

  “I only know of one possibility, one other person, and he’s probably the one who’ll actually assemble the explosive.”

  “Have a name, does he?”

  “Luis Ramirez, maybe. I say maybe. I can’t be sure. J. more or less indicated he did passports, he falsified passports. He’s spent time with groups in other countries, if he exists, if that’s his name. All three of them may be related one way or another. It’s a little confusing.”

  “Who’s J.?”

  “Kinnear.”

  “A.J.”

  “Your information’s a little out of date.”

  “All three who, the Latins?”

  “Right, except they’re Swedes.”

  “I don’t see as this is funny.”

  Burks gave him a number to call as soon as Marina got in touch with him. When someone picked up the phone, he was to give his own phone number and then relate whatever information he had. Everybody was giving him numbers or proposing to give him numbers. He liked it. He had a feel for numbers. He didn’t have to write anything down. He’d developed ways to re
member, methods that went back to early adolescence. He did it every day on the trading floor, applied these methods. They were secret mnemonic devices. No one else used precisely the same ones. He was certain of that. The formulas were too idiosyncratic, situated too firmly in his own personality, to be duplicated elsewhere.

  “Is there a date that sticks in your mind?” Burks said.

  “She didn’t say when. Not the slightest anything. Don’t know what kind of explosive either.”

  “What’s their background, anything?”

  “They did something in Brussels once and they did the airport in West Germany—West Berlin, I mean. What’s it called?”

  “Shit, I don’t know.”

  “Anyway they hit the wrong plane.”

  “Must have been hell to pay.”

  “They hit the DC-9.”

  “What did they hit it with?”

  “Rockets.”

  “Must have been hell to pay back at the office.”

  Lyle got to his feet. The original Burks responded by starting up the car.

  “Aren’t you required by law to tell me what organization you’re with, exactly?”

  “If I had the energy to lift up my foot, Lyle, you’d be required to get kicked in the balls. That’s the only requirement in effect right now.”

  7

  On the floor Lyle attended to the strict rationalities of volume and price. Close attention was a benign characteristic, mild eyes everywhere, sanity inhabiting the faces he encountered. This was solid work, clear and sometimes cheerful, old-world in a way, men gathered in a square to take part in verbal exchange, openly, recording figures with pencil stubs, the clerks having to puzzle over handwriting. Paper accumulated underfoot. Secret currents, he thought, recollecting Marina’s concept of electronic money. Waves, systems, invisibility, power. He thought: bip-bip-bip-bip. A floor broker cuffed him on the side of the head, jokingly, a mock boxing match. Lyle went to the smoking area and called his firm’s offices from one of the public booths, asking for Rosemary Moore. When Zeltner answered, he hung up. Frank McKechnie was standing nearby. He smoked with his arms crossed, bouncing on his heels, rapidly. There was an aura about him of manly suffering, things gone so far wrong they could no longer be expressed in coherent verbal form, needing commentary impossible here, tears or shouts.

  “Well, then, Frank.”

  “The world’s still turning.”

  “I see you shaved.”

  “The outside world.”

  “It turns, still.”

  “That much is obvious, even to me.”

  “It’s good that it turns,” Lyle said, “or there wouldn’t be this stillness in here. We need that motion, see, exterior flux, to keep us safe and still.”

  “This is what takes getting used to.”

  “Because they never told you. Mummy and daddy. Your old pap. You know, flicking his suspenders. Never told you.”

  “Where do I want to be, Lyle?”

  “Inside.”

  “Correct,” McKechnie said.

  “About that call I wanted you to make. It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have asked. Everything’s taken care of.”

  “Don’t tell me about it.”

  “It’s all okay. Nothing to tell. Finito.”

  “Because I can’t give it my undivided attention, Lyle, you know?”

  “It’s a religious matter, Frank. Uttering certain words, the names of certain people. It’s a deeply personal thing.”

  “Whatever you’re talking about, I agree.”

  “It touches a nerve in the darkest places.”

  Already Kinnear seemed very distant in time and space. Lyle’s two visits to the gray frame house were spots of fog now, half myth, the living room and yard, the basement arsenal. It was as though he’d overheard descriptions of these areas, never having been there, physically, himself, scratching his ribs, a little dry in the throat. He searched his memory for details of place, a sense of texture and dimension. There wasn’t much more than soft-footed Kinnear, his perfect little features and grained hair. Friendly crinkles when he smiled. His voice, mature and professional: two credits, noncompulsory. It was reducing itself, the whole series of events, his own participation, to this one element, J.’s voice, the carrier waves relaying it from some remote location.

  He called again that night. When the phone rang Lyle knew at once it was J. and felt deeply relieved, as if he’d feared being abandoned to Marina and Burks, to the blunter categories of reality. Kinnear, speaking without inflection, wasting not a breath, reminded Lyle that he’d given him a phone number to use only at his, Kinnear’s, specific instruction. This was to be taken as such instruction and he asked Lyle to make the call from a public phone booth, using whatever precautions seemed advisable. Before hanging up, he added that the three-digit number on the telegram Lyle had received was the area code, digits reversed.

  Lyle changed clothes, not knowing quite why. He took a cab, then walked several blocks to Grand Central. He got four dollars’ worth of silver and stepped into a booth.

  “I think we’re operational.”

  “Which means?”

  “A two- or three-day holiday, if you can manage.”

  “Starting when?” Lyle said.

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “No problem.”

  “Figure thirty-five hundred dollars.”

  “What form?”

  “There’s no limit to the amount of cash you can take across the border.”

  “I talked to Burks again. Burks isn’t all that interested anymore. It makes sense, J. They had an informer and they lost him. They have no reason to be sending dogs.”

  “It’s my ass,” Kinnear said.

  “Marina, I don’t think Marina’s capable of finding you. She’s got all she can do to get somebody to put together a thing that’ll make a noise when they light it.”

  “Lyle, it’s my ass.”

  “True.”

  “She’s capable. Marina’s capable. The secret police know my name. They know my background. They’d very much like to chat is my impression.”

  “I seriously question.”

  “Are we operational or not?”

  “But it’s your ass.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So how do we do it?”

  “Figure thirty-five hundred buys me documents, travel, necessities of life for a while.”

  “You’re not staying.”

  “Only as long as it takes to buy some paper. The requisite name and numbers. Ever travel by freighter?”

  “Then what?”

  “For a scuffler like me?”

  “You’ll be back, I guarantee it.”

  “Could be, Lyle.”

  “Burks talked about New Orleans.”

  “See, told you, they know.”

  “Not very much, J.”

  “They spent time on me, those people. They know who and how to scratch, they really do. Goddamn, they mentioned New Orleans, did they? That was how many years ago. Lifetimes is more like it.”

  “Burks said something interesting.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said Oswald.”

  “Did he now?”

  “He said Cuba, stolen papers, I don’t know.”

  “They’re good,” Kinnear said. “They spend time.”

  “Was Burks saying you knew Oswald before Dallas?”

  “Lyle, chrissake, everybody knew Oswald before Dallas.”

  They both laughed. Lyle turned toward the row of facing booths. Only one was occupied, this by a black woman, middle-aged, in a polka-dot dress.

  “Maybe we can talk about it some more.”

  “Concerning the money, Lyle, I don’t know if I’ll be able to pay you back.”

  “No problem.”

  “Is it a problem? Because if it is, Lyle.”

  “Forget.”

  “I shaved it down to the absolute bone. That’s the sheer minimum I’ll need to get clear of here. Not a
dime extra.”

  They made arrangements. Lyle stepped out of the booth and headed down Lexington. It was late. A car turned toward him as he moved off the curb. The driver braked, a man in his thirties, sitting forward a bit, head tilted toward Lyle, inquisitively, one hand between his thighs, bunching up fabric and everything beneath it. Clearly a presentation was being made. Lyle, who was standing directly under a streetlight, averted his eyes, looking out over the top of the car as if at some compelling sight in a third-story window across the street, until finally the man drove off.

  8

  Pammy stepped onto the deck. Ethan was still trying to clear his throat, standing at the rail with a mug of coffee. It was bright and warm, already past noon. Jack was at the other end, stacking firewood. Nasal cavities, sinus membranes. She went inside, poured a cup of coffee and returned to the deck, sitting on the rail, head back, her face on a nearly inclined plane.

  “But don’t you love it?” Jack said. “Every morning it goes on. The exact same thing. As though nobody else was around. Gagging, hawking, the retcher, Mr. Retch. You think he’d do something.”

  “Get quick relief. Breathe easily, freely.”

  “Anything, for God, I mean it’s, this thing I listen to every morning, every morning, nonstop.”

  “I like to hawk,” Ethan said. “It’s one of the last great hallmarks of a sensuous human presence on the planet. I like to expel phlegm.”