by Garbo Norman
“I believe,” she said with gentle innocence, “that in some places there is.”
He laughed and started to dress. “Now, I’d like you to do me just one more small favor, child. Would you please ask the manager to come in.”
He was just putting on his jacket when there was a knock on the door and Hank Ryan came in. “You asked to see the manager?” he said to Burke’s back.
“Funny,” said Burke, turning then so that Ryan was able to see his face, “you don’t look Chinese.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” said the fighter.
“Shhh … I’m here incognito.”
They embraced. And feeling those great, heavily muscled arms across his back, Burke thought, with some surprise, my God, I’m glad to see this guy.
“Where the devil you been hiding?” said Ryan. “You’re not in the damn phone book and information never even heard of you.”
“You mean you missed me?”
“Hell, I was broke and figured you for an easy touch.” . Still grinning, they automatically checked out each other’s face, members of a secret fraternity exchanging high signs. We must be worldwide, thought Burke; a vast undercover network of .anonymous face jobs, hidden hopes, and invisible nightmares.
“Hey, you know about Doc?” said Ryan, no longer grinning. _ Burke nodded. “Too bad. He was a helluva guy.”.
“You could puke, I swear. What a town this is getting to be. Full of hopheads and creeps. A man like that.”
“Have any cops been asking you questions?”
Ryan shook his head. Then he frowned. “Hey, how’d you ever find me in this joint? I thought no one even knew I was working here.”
“You keeping it a secret?”
“Damned right, you think I’m proud of it?”
Burke did not answer.
“Listen,” said Ryan. “I was right up there, with three good shots at the title. And how do I wind up? As house pimp in a goddamned Chink jerk off joint.” He laughed but it was not a happy sound and Burke could feel the pressure underneath. “What a year.”
Burke remembered what Pamela had said that afternoon. “It was that bad?”
Ryan laughed again. It was a conditioned reflex. You took a belt in the gut and you either cried, vomited, or laughed. He had found laughing better suited to his style. “You kidding? In eight months of pounding pavement, I got exactly three job offers. Know what they were?” He counted them off, one finger at a time. “Collector for a Greek loan shark, bouncer in a waterfront gin mill, night manager in this slant-eyed pussy parlor. And that’s even with my beautiful new puss.”
Burke sat down on a rubbing table and lit a cigarette. When he offered the pack to Ryan, the fighter shook his head. Then suddenly aware that Burke had never answered his original question, he asked it again. “So how did you find me here?”
“It was easy. I just found out where you lived from the phone book, waited for you to come out tonight, and followed you here. Then I called up the Orange Lantern, asked if Hank Ryan worked there, and was told you were the night manager. And other than for that relaxing little fringe benefit with Lotus Lee, the rest is, as they say, history.”
Ryan stared at him with the same mixture of confusion and concern he might have shown for an escaped mental patient.
“And to answer the other questions you’re about to ask,” Burke went on, “I didn’t speak with you on the phone because I had no way of knowing if your wire was tapped. And I didn’t approach you at home or on the street because I wasn’t sure if you were being watched.”
Ryan frowned, “You stoned, or something?”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“Then would you mind telling me what the hell this is all about?”
“That’s exactly why I’m here.” Burke slid off the rubbing table. “Do you have an office somewhere? I don’t want Lotus Lee to think I’ve gone queer for the manager.”
Ryan led him along an empty hall to a small, windowless office that held a desk, two chairs, a file cabinet and a great deal of dust.
It was different, spilling to Ryan. David and Pamela had been awestruck enough to listen without interruption. While whatever it was that Hank Ryan felt on hearing Burke’s saga, awe was clearly no part of it, and he kept cutting in with questions.
“You mean you’ve been a goddamned spy all these years?” he said at one point.
“No. I did use different covers, but I wasn’t really a spy. At least not in the accepted sense. Although sometimes I did that too.”
“Then what the hell were you?”
“Whatever I had to be. Or whatever I was ordered to be.’ The Service took a very loose view of job guidelines. In fact, officially, none of us even existed. We were considered illegal, unconstitutional and immoral. We never had any real funding. Our operating money was scavenged from assorted catch-all military appropriations and never showed up on budgetary listings.”
“You keep talking about the Service,” said Ryan. “I never heard about anything with that name.”
“Neither has anyone else, outside of a chosen few in the executive branch.” Burke suddenly noticed a change in the fighter’s speech. Absorbed, taken out of himself, he seemed to lose the New York colloquialisms and street slurrings he usually used. Burked filed the fact mentally. “I told you,” he said. “Officially, no one in government will even admit there is such a thing. Yet we’ve always had a twenty-four hour hotline into the Oval Office itself.”
Ryan’s eyes were flat. He stood up and leaned against a wall that suddenly looked too small and weak to hold him. “And now they want to bury you?” he said.
“Something like that.”
“Christ! And I’ve been bitching to you.”
Burke shrugged. “We’re not exactly famous for our retirement benefits. Someone can always get nervous about what we know. It’s one of our occupational hazards.” He smiled faintly. “Like busted noses are yours.”
“But isn’t there someone back there who can help you? A friend, for Christ’s sake?”
“There was. But not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“They killed him a few days ago.”
“Just like that?”
“Not exactly. They took a little trouble with it. They put a gun in his hand and made him a suicide.”
“Holy shit. The Mafia are kids next to your boys.”
“But we’re more polite. We’ve always been very proud of our good manners.”
“And he was the only friend you had there?”
“I was lucky to have him,” Burke said, and thought this was true and was glad he had never treated it lightly or taken it for granted. Which happened between friends, but never with Kreuger. Not that they ever spoke.much about it. They never had to. Still, there probably were some things he might have said that he never had.
Ryan was looking at him curiously. “You must be one pretty tough boy yourself. I mean, you’re still alive, aren’t you?”
It almost sounded like an indictment. And how often, Burke thought, had he indicted himself over the years? Kreuger had lectured him about it early in his career. “I’m warning you,” he once told him. “If you don’t stop punishing yourself every time you have to do something unpleasant to someone, you’re simply not going to last. Just remember this. There are only two concepts of human ethics and they’re diametrically opposed. One is humane and considers the individual sacred and inviolable. The other believes any sacrifice of the individual that advances the common good is not only justified, but necessary. Since governments must function according to the second concept, and since we’re committed to work for our government, we must either work according to that ethic or not work at all.” Finally, of course, he had chosen not to work at all.
“Yes,” he admitted almost apologetically to Ryan, “I’m still alive.”
“Okay, so tell me what I have to do to keep you that way.”
“You don’t have to do anything, Hank.”
Ryan straightened agains
t the soiled and dusty wall. Burke had the feeling that this was pretty much the way he must have looked in the last minutes of a bad fifteen-rounder, when he knew it was all gone anyway and he had nothing left but will and a hatred for his own failing body. “Listen,” he said softly. “You’re one real bright boy and you know an awful lot. But one thing you sure as hell don’t know, is how much I have to do this.”
“Well,” Burke said, feeling curiously awkward and touched, “I want you to know I appreciate it”
“If you dare kiss me, you sonofabitch, I swear I’ll scream.”
Chapter 6
It was nearly 3:00 A.M. when Lilly Moraine left the tall, Greenwich Village apartment building Burke had seen her enter several hours before, and started walking briskly towards Fifth Avenue. A few moments later, Burke drew up beside her in the tan Plymouth. “How about a lift from an old friend?”
She was able to recognize him in the light of a nearby streetlamp. “Well I’ll be damned!”
“Don’t be damned. Just get in and be blessed.
“If this isn’t crazy,” she said when they were moving. “I almost feel I conjured you up. I’ve been thinking of poor Obidiah so much lately. Then of course I’d start thinking of you and the others and all the rest of it. Then shazamm! Here you are.”
“Well, all that thinking didn’t hurt your performance tonight. You were great.”
She was indignant. “You bum! You were at the theatre and you didn’t even stop back to say hello?”
“I’m saying hello now. There were too many people around before. I wanted to -see you alone.”
“But how did you know where I’d …” Then it broke through and she grinned. “You’re kidding! You’ve been following me ever since I left the theatre?”
Burke nodded. There was little traffic and he drove slowly east, past high-stooped tenements and darkened loft buildings.
“But what if I hadn’t come out for hours and hours?”
“Then I’d have waited for hours and hours.”
“It’s that serious?”
“It’s that serious,” he said. Then after learning she had not yet been questioned by anyone, he launched into it for the fourth time in twenty-four hours, feeling almost as though he were one of the performers in that night’s play, routinely mouthing someone else’s words. If you repeated something often enough, he thought, it finally lost its passion and meaning. With his first recital to David, he’d had to yank each word out like a bad tooth. Now, with Lilly, he actually felt bored with the telling. Still, the facts remained the same, and their impact was just as strong on her as on the others.
She lit a cigarette, and in the flare of the lighter the shadows beneath her eyes looked back at Burke with a rare fatigue. “I knew this was going to be a really special night. Do you believe in omens?”
“Only when I’m drunk or desperate.”
“Not fifteen minutes ago,” she said, “I left the bed of a man whose last name I didn’t even know and whom I suddenly decided I hated. It took me a long time to get to that point, but I got there tonight. Then as soon as I walked out, you came along and hit me with this.” She paused and tried to peer up through the windshield. “Hey what sort of moon we got up there anyway?”
“A full one, I think.”
“It figures.” She laughed and, throwing back her head, howled. When they came to a break in the skyline, the view opened up and the moon was there, all right, full and radiant. Lilly blew it a kiss. “You know something? I’ve never met a real live spy before.”
Burke did not bother with denials. It was simpler to just be a spy. “Am I a disappointment?”
“You’re perfect. Just the right air of reserve, of quiet control, of strength and courage under pressure.”
“That’s just the new look Obidiah gave me. Underneath, I’m pure jelly.”
“No, not you.” Touched by an occasional street light, her face looked half grave, half mocking. “You see, I’m not easily fooled. I’m an orphan, which gives me strange mystic powers. It’s nature’s way of compensating. Instead of parents, I got a small private angel to look after me.”
“As protection against omens and full moons?”
“Exactly. And against the evil enemies of good spies.”
“You only have my word for that. I might be the evil one.”
“My little angel tells me different.”
“Is your angel always so dependable?”
“When I find she isn’t,” Lilly said, “then I’ll know I’ll soon be dead.”
Whatever mockery may have been in her face before was gone now. And suddenly primitive feathers of doubt stirred in Burke’s brain and he wondered if he was driving a hearse. “It may be best if you could just manage to disappear for a while,” he said.
“Why?”
“Then you wouldn’t have to lie or answer any questions. And it would certainly be a lot safer for you.”
She was silent for a moment. “Have you spoken to any of the others yet?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“All three of them.”
“Are they going to disappear?”
Knowing what was coming, he hesitated. “No.”
“Then what makes you think I’d be the one to run off and hide?”
“I gave Pamela and Hank the same option. There was no reason to treat you any differently.” He smiled.””! certainly didn’t intend it as an insult. If it came out that way, I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” she said, “but you may as well know the truth of it. I’d take to the hills in a minute if I didn’t have a sensational part in the best play of the season. And ain’t nothin’ gonna make me run out on that. So since I’m stuck here anyway, you may as well tell me what I’m supposed to do if any of the baddies come around.”
Burke told her pretty much the same things he had told the others. Yet somewhere in the middle, out of fatigue and tension and the exhaustion of every lie and subterfuge, every possible disaster that might lie ahead, like a bonus he did not truly deserve, a vague hope began in him, sweet and subtle and impossible to follow, and he thought, I’ve just finished putting my life in the hands of four people I don’t really know at all, yet I feel better about it than anything I’ve done in years.
Then with a faint smile, he wondered what Tony Kreuger, who had lived through a solitary lifetime of nondependency and nontrust, and had died the same way, would have thought about that.
Chapter 7
If I’m insane, thought Burke, then so is the rest of the species. But he had to admit that the evidence against him at this particular moment was pretty specific and personal. For there he stood, alone in a midtown New York garden in the dark of a late autumn night, peering through the lighted bedroom window of his ex-wife like an overaged peeping-Tom. Having discovered that the surveillance on her was lifted at midnight and kept off until 8-00 A.M., he had arrived at 12:15 through a connecting basement and alley, and established his beachhead.
The window was protected by steel bars, offering Burke the sensation that he was watching Angela in a comfortably furnished, private prison cell. Good, he thought. A just and fitting punishment. For the sin of abandonment, for the heinous crime of walking out on a devoted and loving husband, you, Angela Burke, are hereby sentenced to a life of solitary confinement within your own bedroom.
Ah, Angela … I never blamed you for leaving.
Yet she was there now, no more than five yards from where he stood, his feet on a pair of oversized clay pots, emptied of their summer flowers and turned upside down. Breathing carefully, fearful she might hear him, Burke watched her. She was wearing a white quilted robe and the same kind of fuzzy slippers she had always enjoyed at home. Her blonde hair, still fine and smooth even with the years of touching up, hung loose as she moved between the dresser and a pile of laundry she was putting away. Burke studied the curved, delicate line of her profile, the soft flesh under her chin as she stood for a moment, folding some towels. He coul
d see the color in her cheeks and the green of her eyes. He had painted her portrait often over the years, and the eyes were probably the only feature of her face he had ever gotten right.
What he was not able to see was her tender and vulnerable heart. If she were aware of the state of his life right now, he was sure she would cry. Instant tears. Her eyes had a way of filling and drowning without any of the usual preliminaries. Yet she was not by nature an unhappy person. Quite the contrary. When Burke thought of her, she was usually smiling or laughing. And she loved to sing — sweet songs usually unfamiliar to Burke. Angela adored baths. She believed in them as a cure for all ailments, and insisted that Burke believe in them too. They were her penicillin, her infallible chicken soup. They were also her psychiatrist’s couch. Whatever the problem to be faced or worked through, it never failed to come out better in the tub.
Burke’s foot slipped off the edge of one of the pots, tipping it over with a clatter. He grimaced in the dark. Terrific. Now just let some paranoic neighbor look out the window and scream for the police. What in God’s name was he doing here? Was this really possible? Had a lifetime of service to his country, to the democratic ideal, to all its passions, virtues, and traditions finally brought him to this? As if anyone cared. As if the irrational behavior of Richard Burke affected the fate of the nation. What he “felt for Angela was his own business.
Gazing through the barred window, he ached with tenderness for her. Yet what did he hope to accomplish with this silliness? She had looked at his face in the museum and had not recognized him. As far as she was concerned, he had been dead for more than a year anyway. With Kreuger’s help, he had managed to change her from a divorced wife to a divorced widow. So when her alimony payments stopped with his alleged death, Tony was able to work a substantial lump-sum settlement for her out of the contingency funds. Good old Tony. But good old Tony had not been happy about the whole thing. “You bastard!” he complained afterward. “That was one hell of a job you handed me.” Burke wanted to hear all about it of course. How many men, after all, were ever in the unique position of being able to learn how a loved one was affected by the news of their death?
