Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  “That’s what I thought.”

  The trip was long, and Mikey got cranky, then slept; the baby howled; the dog threw himself on the floor and panted and gasped and whimpered. On and on, through Massachusetts and into New York, stopping to buy junk food and to piss and to walk the dog, then west along the Thruway and at last, as it was getting dark, to the little house in the Italian streets where she had grown up. Mikey, awake again, was eager.

  “The first thing your grandmother will say is, ‘You’re later than you said.’”

  “Grampa will tell her to shut up.”

  Kids hear a lot.

  “You’re late,” her mother said. “You said seven o’clock.” They kissed. “Dinner’s ruint,” her mother said.

  “How’s my girl?” her father shouted, embracing her. He was a small man, wiry even in old age, a fair singer and a great ballroom dancer. “Shut up, Marie, she drove all this way, she done great.” He began to sing, Rosie, she is my posy—

  “I’m starved, Ma,” she told her mother. “Just starved.” She wasn’t, but she knew her mother wanted to feed her. Singing, her father took her in his arms and began to dance her around the driveway. Rosie, she is my joy—

  Rose winked at her father, and they went into the house with their arms around each other’s waist, Mikey holding his mother’s hand. It was only after another ten minutes of shouting and trading news that her mother said, “Oh, your father forgot, you got a phone call! It’s his business to tell you, I guess, but he forgot.” She drew herself up. “Not bad news, I hope.”

  “Nah, nah, Jesus H. Christ, Marie! Give her a break, she just drove three hundred miles!” He turned to Rose.

  “It’s some goddam military Mickey Mouse, I’d of told you tomorrow. Probably you didn’t dot the i on an exam paper.”

  “She better call,” her mother said.

  “Call tomorrow. Tonight’s for fun!”

  “I’d of had her call the moment she got here.”

  “Goddamit, Marie—”

  Rose was laughing at them, because nothing bad could happen and she knew her father was right; it was some Mickey-Mouse nothing. Still, she knew her mother wouldn’t let it go until she called, so she asked where the number was and her father said by the phone. As soon as she saw the number, she knew it was her detailer’s, and her confidence that nothing bad could happen gave a little hiccup. There was a second number, as well, with “home” written next to it in her father’s precise writing.

  Her confidence stumbled. Why did he want her to call at home? Or was that simply something that her father, a thorough man who had been a machinist and always worried about details, had asked for?

  There was no privacy in that house. Even her father believed that if you needed privacy, you’d done something bad. She walked out to her car and got her cellphone from a box of office stuff that she’d shoved in the back, and she dialed the detailer’s home number from there, leaning her buttocks against the back end of the car and looking up and down the twilit, familiar street.

  “Anders,” the male voice said.

  “Hi, uh,—this is Lieutenant-Commander Siciliano. You called me?” Letting her voice go up in that crappy, little-girl way that women affected now. Christ, what was wrong with her? “Something wrong?” she said, not able to keep from saying it, not even able now to keep the anxiety out of her voice.

  “Oh, yeah.” He sounded as if she had ruined his evening. “Thanks for calling.” She could hear papers moving, an insect sound. He had her file next to the phone! “Your orders have been changed.”

  It made no sense to her. Then it made only trivial sense—the reporting date had been changed, or the time. Or she should go to a different office. But a warning voice was murmuring, Just like Alan, just like Alan—

  “Your orders have been changed from Houston,” he said. He was going slowly, but she said, her voice steely now, “Give it to me.”

  “The Houston orders were changed, I don’t have the reason here—now don’t shoot the messenger, okay, Commander—”

  “Cut the crap. What are you trying to tell me?”

  She heard a sigh, then words spoken to somebody on his end, something like I’ll be there in a minute. Then he said, “The orders to the space program have been canceled. You have a new set of orders to a command in West Virginia. The, uh—Inter-Service Word Processing Training Center. As XO. Look, I had nothing to do with this; I just got a priority message—”

  She stopped listening.

  Her life stopped.

  She wasn’t going to astronaut training.

  But why?

  They had loved her in Houston. Her fitreps were great. Her physicals were perfect—the doctor’s own word, “perfect,” “You’re a perfect type for space.” She was perfect for space from the Navy’s PR viewpoint, too—combat experience, a mother, attractive.

  The detailer was asking her a question. Fax—did she have a fax?

  “No. No, they don’t have a fax here.” Her voice surprised her with its steadiness.

  “Well, get a fax number there someplace so I can send you the orders. The reporting date’s been put back, so you’ve got a couple of weeks to, you know, adjust things.”

  Adjust things? That did it!

  “Like my household goods, which are all on the way to Houston?” She was angry now—her one great failing. Was that it, they’d washed her out because she got angry? “I just bought a fucking house in Houston, and my household goods are going there, and I’ve got two kids and a dog and nowhere to live!”

  “Look, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this isn’t my doing—!”

  “Well, who the fuck’s doing is it?”

  “I don’t know. This came from CNO’s office.”

  What the hell did the Chief of Naval Operations care about her astronaut training? Jesus Christ! Just like Alan, and they didn’t explain to him, either—

  “This isn’t fair. I want to appeal. This isn’t the way the Navy does things! Goddamit, I’ve followed the rules; I believe in the system; they can’t just—just—They’ve ruined my fucking career!”

  He spent a minute or two talking her down, and the anger ebbed, turned into that steely calm again. Her mind was racing on, however, leapfrogging over anger and fear and hatred of the Navy, already seeking explanations, because there had to be an explanation, and when she found what it was, blood was going to flow.

  “Okay,” she said. “Don’t jerk me around. I want answers.”

  “Absolutely.” He wasn’t a bad guy. He knew that something, somebody, had decided to destroy her.

  She turned the phone off, then back on, and tried to call Alan at the BOQ at Aviano, but he wasn’t there. Already on his way to Trieste, she thought, kicking ass as he went. Just as well—he had enough problems already.

  She put the phone away and slammed the tailgate and stood there. It was so dark now that she hardly noticed her father at the corner of the car. How long had he been there?

  “Rosie—what’re they trying to do to you? I’ll kill ’em, no kidding.”

  She laughed. “Oh, Dad—” Then she threw herself on him and wept.

  Suburban Washington.

  The corridors of the hospice smelled of potpourri and soap, with the scents of the dying only vagrant hints, an occasional whiff of antiseptic or bleach. The bowels loosen before death, but the system that transported air through the building was brilliant and powerful, and the grosser reminders were sucked away. It was an expensive place.

  Heartbreak Hotel, he thought. He was even humming it to himself, not the Elvis version but Willie Nelson’s: I get so lonely, baby/ I get so lonely I could die.

  Heartbreak Hotel with a dedicated staff. George Shreed was a tough man, utterly unsentimental, but he knew when he had fallen among saints. If what they gave her was not love, it was such a counterfeit of love that it was, he thought, worth any price.

  Shreed used two metal canes to walk. He heaved himself along on powerful shoulders and arms so ropy wi
th muscles he might have been an iron-pumper. Thirty years before, he had crashed a jet in Vietnam, and he would have died there if his wingman hadn’t stayed overhead, calling in the medevacs and taking AA fire and keeping the Cong off him. Now, planting his canes and pushing himself up on them and dragging his legs along, he thought grimly of that day when he thought he was going to die, and of that wingman of long ago—Alan Craik’s father. Now Mick Craik was dead and he was still alive, and his wife, who was ten years younger than he and whom he loved to distraction, was almost dead.

  “Oh, Janey,” he muttered with a sigh. There he went, saying it aloud again.

  “Hi, Mister Shreed!” The night nurse smiled, truly smiled, not a plastic smile but a real one. The smile slowly cooled, and she said, “You may want to stay with her tonight.”

  “Is it—? Is she—?”Is she going to die tonight? he meant. These people knew when death was waiting.

  “You maybe just want to be there with her.”

  Janey lay on sheets from her own house, wearing a nightgown she had bought at the old Woodie’s. The room had a real chair and a decent imitation of a Georgian chest of drawers, and one of her own paintings hung on a wall. Der Rosenkavalier was playing on her portable CD—the music she said she wanted to die to. It was on a lot.

  No tubes and no heroics, she had said. She had a morphine drip in one arm and a Heparin lock in the other; she was dying of hunger now as much as of cancer.

  She looked like a baby bird. Janey Gorman, who had been the prettiest girl at Radford College, had a beak for a nose and a scrawny neck and curled hands like claws. Shreed rested his canes against the chest of drawers and pushed the armchair over to the bedside, leaning on it for support, and he took one of her hands, and her eyelids fluttered and for a moment there was a sliver of reflection between the still-long lashes.

  “Janey, it’s George.” He kissed her, feeling the waxy, faintly warm skin, then squeezed her tiny, bony hand. “Here again.” The unsentimental man felt constriction in his throat, heat in his eyes. “Janey?” Der Rosenkavalier swelled up, that incredible final duet. Once, she had played it as they had made love, whispering Wait and Wait, and then as it rose toward its final too-sweet fulfillment, she had laughed aloud as they all reached it together. He listened now, let the music die, let silence come.

  “Janey, I have to tell you something.” He could see a pulse beating in the skinny neck, nothing more. “Before—you know.” He stroked her hand. “I want to tell you something about myself. You never knew all about me. You didn’t want to; we agreed on that right at the beginning. But it’s not—not what I did for a living.” The word living stuck a little in his throat, in that place. And, anyway, he hadn’t done it for a living; he’d done it for a passion. “Janey—listen. Janey, a couple of years ago, you came into my study and you saw that there was—” He sighed. “Some pornography on my computer screen. You turned around and walked out and we never talked about it.” Her cancer hadn’t been identified then, but aging had made sex difficult for her despite the hormones that helped to kill her, so sex was not an easy subject between them. “You see, the truth, Janey, was worse than what you thought. And—” He sat.

  “I want you to forgive me, Janey. Not for the porn—that was nothing—but for what I was really doing. I was sending classified information to a Chinese case officer. We used pornographic photos to embed the data in so we could send it over the Internet.” He sighed. “I’m a Chinese agent.” He waited. There was only the hum of the air-conditioning.

  “I had a reason, Janey—I have a reason, I’m not just some goddam two-bit traitor! I have—my own goal.”

  He put her hand down on the flowered sheet and sat back.

  “Remember the first tour in Jakarta? I was running agents against the Chinese mostly. I had a guy I called Bali, he was Straits Chinese, he was one of those footboxers. Tough. I found he was a double; he was being run from the Chinese interest office, so I played him for a year until I got a line on his control and I busted him. It was one of those macho things to do—guy who walks on two canes muscles a Chinese case officer, pretty stupid now that I think of it, but at the time I was a high flier, remember?

  “I picked up his control in the apartment of one of Sukarno’s buddies. He had the place wired like a concert hall. So I scoped it out and had a techie blank the mikes and play dead sound, and I went in and told him he was going to work for Uncle or he was going to be one dead Chink when Sukarno’s buddy came home.”

  He looked at her. Was there something like a smile? “Remember Jakarta? The first time? Fantastic fucking. We were young.” Her eyelids trembled.

  Shreed sighed. “So—The guy’s name was Chen. Bao Chen—Zhen, we’d say now. I was going to recruit Chen, and he recruited me. Not the way you think, though. He made me a deal. We’d trade. I’d give him stuff, he’d give me stuff. We were on the same level in our agencies; we’d help each other up the ladder. We’d both know the stuff wasn’t first-class, not the stuff that would really hurt, so we wouldn’t be traitors. More like scratching each other’s back.”

  Shreed made a face—mouth opened in a snarl, tongue pressed first against the inside of an upper molar, then against the teeth in front, like a chimpanzee. His head went back and he breathed in and out. “I knew when he made the offer that it was really why I’d busted him—so he’d recruit me. You see, I didn’t care about going up the ladder that much. What I cared about was becoming a Chinese agent! Because I knew that the Chinese were my real enemies—the fucking Soviets were on the ropes, I knew it even back then—and I knew that if they made me an agent and trusted me, I could fuck them good!” He closed his eyes, then popped them open. “It disgusted me then. It disgusts me now. But I had to do it. Do you see? Do you see, Janey?”

  Rain was falling on the streets outside the hospice. The night was warm; few people were out, yet one man had walked by the building three times. He had a dog with him, perhaps the reason for his walking, but the dog, a long-haired mutt, was miserable and was being dragged on its leash now. Still, the man walked.

  He was Ray Suter, George Shreed’s assistant. He was not there out of concern for his boss or his boss’s wife. He was there to listen to the monologue being radioed to him from a microphone hidden in Jane Shreed’s room. What he was hearing so excited him that he had forgotten the dog, and, hands plunged deep in raincoat pockets, he was striding along with the leash looped over a wrist and the dog trying to keep up on its short legs. The dog had given up sniffing bushes and posts and was simply trying to survive.

  Suter was stunned by what he heard. All he had wanted was “something on his boss”—the words he had used in getting somebody to plant the bug. What he had expected was something ordinary, perhaps sordid but not monumental—a confession to his dying wife of a woman on the side, or maybe office gossip, inner resentments of people above him, or ways he had screwed other people in the Agency. Something you could turn to good account when you wanted more power for yourself, more money, a leg up.

  And now this. Suter was in a kind of shock—oblivious to the dog, the rain. The man was talking about treason.

  From time to time, Suter pressed his right ear. He had a hearing-aid-sized speaker there; the sound varied as he walked by the building and was sometimes so faint he lost it. At last, when there was no sound at all, he hurried away to the next street, where a closed van with a neighborhood parking permit stood among the bumper-to-bumper cars.

  “I’ve lost him!” he snapped to the man who huddled in the back. A rich odor of pizza, doughnuts, coffee, and flatulence filled the van.

  “It comes and goes.” The man was sitting in the dark with a cassette recorder and a couple of serious-looking electronic boxes. Suter could hardly see him in there, and he wanted to see him right then because he was thinking, He’s heard everything I’ve heard. The full impact of that made it hard for him to speak, and he had to draw a deep breath to say, “He just fades away sometimes.”

  “What’d I
just say?”

  “Goddamit, this is important! Shreed’s spilling his guts! Move the van closer.”

  “No way. I tole you, there’s no place over there the cops won’t notice me. Here, I’m golden.”

  “I want you to move the van.” He didn’t really care about the van; what he cared about was that suddenly he feared and therefore hated this man, this on-the-cheap private detective.

  “You want me to get the goods on your boss. Well, that’s what I’m doing. Djou feed that dog?”

  Suter glanced at the cassette recorder. He had wanted a tape so that if there was something good, he could lay it on Shreed’s desk if he had to, even play it for him. Now, the tape was like a bomb. “You’re making only the one tape, right?”

  “I promised my neighbor I’d feed the dog at eight. Gimme the can-opener.”

  “I said, you’re making only one tape! Right?”

  “What’d I just say? I promised to feed the fucking dog, now gimme the can-opener. It’s right under your ass.”

  Suter had left the driver’s-side door open, and the dog was sitting on the pavement in the rain. When it heard the can-opener start to operate on the can, it wagged its tail and then vaulted into the back seat, using Suter as a platform. He took a swipe at it with a hand and disentangled his wrist from the leash.

  “Keep the fucking dog! Nobody’s out there, anyway. We never should have brought it.”

  “So whose idea was it? ‘Get me a dog for cover,’ you said. Looka her eat! She’s fucking starved.”

  “Tony, I don’t want a word of this getting out of that mouth of yours. You understand me?”

  “What’d I tell you when we joined up? ‘I hear, I don’t listen. Absolute confidentiality is my stock in trade.’ Looka that doggie eat.”

  Suter looked into the darkness at the sound of the dog’s slurping. “If any of this gets out, you’re dead.” The word boomed in Suter’s mind like a low-pitched bell: dead, dead, dead—

  “What’d I just say?” In the dark, the other man patted the dog. “What’d you do, try to drown her? She’s fucking soaked! My fucking neighbor’ll have a cow, I bring her back like this. You’re a cruel guy, you know that, Suter?”