by Garbo Norman
Burke was silent, feeling his face rigid and aching.
Professor Kreuger shook his head and closed the album. “They wouldn’t let me look at him. They said there was too much damage, that it was better that I didn’t see him. Even so… even so I see him.” He stared off again. “My son, the patriot.”
Burke sipped his brandy and was aware of a faint nausea, very like the depression with which he had been waking lately. Ah, why don’t I just go away and leave him in peace? he thought But he knew there would be no peace for his friend’s father no matter what he did, and that this way there might at least be some hope of repayment.
“I don’t know how you’ll feel about this,” Burke said slowly, “but if you want to, there may be a way you can help.”
Kreuger had control again. “You mean help you stay alive?”
“Yes, and maybe get to whoever was to blame for Tony.”
“My God,” whispered the old man.
Chapter 9
Burke decided that about the only thing Tony Kreuger had failed to adequately prepared him for in recruiting him, twenty years ago, was the waiting. He had warned him about all the other, more obvious joys of the profession, such as the loneliness, the danger, the absence of material reward or even of appreciation. And once he had even lectured him on the proper philosophical approach to the Service. “You don’t have to believe in it as a creation of high moral purpose.” he said. “And certainly don’t expect any of the more common forms of justice from it. At best, all you can reasonably hope for is that it will take care of you up to a certain point, and do its utmost to preserve our form of government.” All proven true and accurate enough over the years, thought Burke, but never a word about the damned waiting.
The waiting was what he was doing now, although in a very different cause. It was nearly midnight and he had been waiting for more than two hours. He stood in a dark cluster of bushes and trees, standing the way professional waiters and watchers’ stand all over the world — legs straight, weight balanced equally on both feet. From here he could see the college’s administration building, the roads and walks approaching it, and the security guard making his rounds. Burke had clocked the guard twice and had him pegged at about fifty-minute intervals. The campus was quiet. A chapel bell tolled the hours and an occasional car or pedestrian drifted by. That was all. It was a small but old and very prestigious college, (not unlike the one at which Professor Kreuger taught) its growth deliberately stunted in the belief that in education, bigger had nothing to do with better. And from the fall of ‘52 to the spring of ‘56, Tony Kreuger had been a student there.
Burke watched the lighted, first-floor windows of the registrar’s office. With the rest of the building dark around him, a man worked alone at a desk. Burke sent him a telepathic message. Go home and go to sleep. The man rumpled his hair tiredly, but remained bent over whatever problem was holding him there this late. Burke shifted his feet in the soft earth and settled in to wait some more.
Burke’s thoughts drifted to Angela. In a sunlit haze, he recalled one of the few vacations they had ever taken together, a single week on Martha’s Vineyard which, in retrospect, seemed to stretch through the summer, through the year, and through every summer he had known since. They had eaten lots of clam chowder, lain on the warm sand, and gone to the movies almost every night. In bed their flesh smelled fresh and clean from the sun and they could not seem to get enough of each other. I love you, she told him, I’ll always love you. He told her the same. Then the week was over and he was sent to Peru for a long, hard, bad time from which he almost did not return. Some of the things that happened there were in the papers, and although not all of it was true, a lot of it was. And he had not been able to explain any part to her.
Did she ever think of those few days on the island? It was so brief, gone so fast. Everything they’d ever had was brief. Still, he was lucky to have had that much, he thought. You could go through fifty years with someone, and the good might not add up to as much as they’d had. So he had no right to complain — at least, not about that. Then about what? About being dead, he thought. He had plenty of right to complain about that. He smiled sourly in the dark. At best, it was unnatural.
He had arranged to see her twice more since the night he had stood outside her bedroom window. Once, he had gotten on the same rush-hour bus as she rode to work, brushing past her in the crowded aisle, actually touching her, breathing her perfume. How could she not have known he was there? Surely she should have felt something on the back of her neck. What exquisite torture. At that moment he was able to understand some hint of the sweet pleasures of martyrdom experienced by the early saints. When the soul passed a certain threshold, a condition approaching nirvana was apparently reached. Burke’s nirvana ended when Angela left the bus at Fifty-Fourth and Madison, followed, an instant later, by the inevitable watcher at her back.
The second time, she was having lunch in a restaurant and lie watched her from a table across the room. She had a particular way of eating, of using her knife and fork, that lent a rare grace to an essentially graceless act. “All people but you,” he had once told her, “should eat in private, should be shut from public view. Only you can make eating seem lovely.” She had laughed. “That’s just because you love me.” Which was how she thought. She believed that love, or the lack of it, was at the center of everything. The good was good because love was there, and the bad was bad because it was not. You needed a brave and true heart to live with such a concept. He never doubted that she had it While he, evidently, did not. So that looking at her that afternoon from across the restaurant, (carefully, since the watcher was watching) he thought of this as her eyes, passing his, seemed to hesitate and hang there for one… two… three beats, a few split seconds, no more, before they moved on. But only to come back and go through it again. And he had felt all of her there in those well-loved eyes, and all of himself too, along with an insane need to whisper, ‘Ah, love, sure, it’s me,’ an urge so strong that he could almost feel himself leaving his chair, crossing the length of the restaurant, taking her hand and leading her out as the watcher followed, until he got him off alone somewhere and put him away. Lovely. Then the insanity passed and he hurriedly paid his check and left, not daring to risk so much as another glance in her direction.
It was shortly after midnight when the light finally went out in the registrar’s office, and the man who had been working there left the building, got into his car, and drove off. Burke waited until the security guard came through and completed his next round. Then he slipped around to the rear of the building, picked the lock on the basement door, and let himself in.
The air held the same stale, bookish, overheated smell of every school building, kindergarten through college, that Burke had ever been in. They must use some sort of special academic spray, he thought. He had a small flashlight in his pocket but did not have to use it. The glow from the exit lights was enough to show him the way to the registrar’s office and the record room behind it. It was a large, shelf-lined storage area and since there were no windows, he was able to turn on a desklight without fear of being seen from outside. Still, he found himself sweating and his heart beating like that of a sparrow held in the hand. Which bothered him. Was he really that far gone?
More than a century of files and records were arranged in long, dusty rows. He chose the 1953 through 1956 yearbooks and sat down with them at the desk. Then he spread out the college photographs he had taken from the Kreuger family album and went to work. Without knowing exactly what he was looking for, he understood the value of following routine investigative procedures when there was little else to go on. “Take care of the small details,” had been Tony’s early advice, “and the big breakthroughs will take care of themselves.”
He began trying to match up the faces in Tony’s album photographs with those in the yearbooks. Then he tried to identify them by name and background data. A few faces were too small or too faded to recognize, but after hal
f an hour Burke did have a list of eleven names. He went over each one slowly, scraping his memory, trying to reach back for possible points of recognition. He came up empty. Not. one face or name meant anything to him. But he had not really expected much here. These were the faces left in the Kreuger album. The single photograph taken out was more likely to hold some connection to something.
At about the time he expected the security guard on his next round, Burke switched off the desklamp to avoid showing any light under the corridor door. Waiting again, he sat there in the silent dark, wishing he had a drink, and hating the smell of the past around him. He felt as though he had fallen asleep in a fire and was silently burning. He could not even scream. And if he could, who would hear him? He thought of those he had involved … David, Pamela, Hank, Lilly, his four changeling innocents, and wished there were some way to wipe them clean of him. If he never came out of this room, he thought, if he somehow quietly burned in here, it would be the best gift he could offer them. Except that some notice would have to be left, or those who wanted him dead would have no way of knowing their hunt was over. In his mind, he composed a properly formal note: To-Whom-It-May-Concern … Please let it be known that I, as you find me, am the man once known as Richard Burke, and that although I still have no clear or reasonable idea of why you want me dead, I am nevertheless doing my dying here, in this place, as well as I know how. In return, I ask only that those whom I have inadvertently implicated be held blameless in this entire matter and that they be allowed to live out in peace those new lives they so naively hoped would offer them a change for the better.
Amen, thought Burke.
But he was not yet dead, and his problems, and those of the others, remained the very real affliction of the living. During the past days he had learned what was happening to all four of them. He had heard first from David. Following Burke’s pre-arranged procedures, David had called from an outside line, given a message and a false name to an answering service operator, then gone back to the same booth exactly three hours later to take Burke’s return call. “They’re following me,” he said and there was obvious panic in his voice. “They’re all over the damn place.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen this same blue Ford in three different places, there’s a pink-faced bald man I’ve noticed at the library and the counter where I eat, and a blonde woman is walking her dog past my house at all kinds of crazy hours.”
“It’s okay,” Burke told him, “You’re supposed to know you’re being watched.”
“What do you mean?”
“If they didn’t want you to know, you wouldn’t know. This is just another way of putting on the pressure, of trying to scare you into making some kind of move.” ?
“Oh, Jesus!”
“Don’t worry,” Burke assured him. “So far they haven’t a thing.”
There was a pause. “I did something stupid. I told Dolores about shooting those two guys.”
“Who’s Dolores?”
“That little hooker — that girl I told you about. I guess I had to brag. You know. Play big macho. I’m sure she won’t say anything. She … she cares about me. I’m even asking her to move in. I didn’t tell her your name, or anything like that, but I know it was stupid.”
Burke said nothing.
“Listen,” David said, “I know it sounds crazy — her being a hooker and all — but I swear I’d trust this kid with my life.”
“You already have,” Burke said.
Pamela and Hank were getting their own share of the heat Hank reported coming home from work and finding his place totalled — drawers and closets emptied, upholstery ripped, furniture smashed, clothing shredded. It was more than just a thorough search. It was a wasting. Fearing Pamela had gotten the same treatment, Hank had rushed over to her place at six in the morning. “But she was okay,” he told Burke. “Just scared.”
“I’m glad you went over,” Burke said. “She’s a woman alone. Keep an eye on her if you can.”
“Damned right I will. Those sons of bitches. I’d like to tear their balls out by the roots.”
“I’m sorry, Hank.”
“Shit, it’s not your fault. But Christ, there are some real dolls around. This stuff been going on long?”
“Long enough.”
“And they can get away with it?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And that’s your lousy government?”
“It’s yours too.” How sad to see that sort of old-fashioned faith destroyed, thought Burke.
“Hell, I ain’t voted in fifteen years.” He thought about it. “So maybe I got no real right to bitch, huh? All this time … all this time and the only things I cared about were fighting, eating, taking a crap, and getting laid. But that don’t stop me from being sore as hell anyway. What’s happening to the fucking country?”
“Just take it easy.” Burke told him.
“Shit!”, said Hank.
But it turned out that Lilly was the one actually approached next. Reporting it to Burke through their usual telephone procedures, she said it had happened very much as it had with David, except that there was only one of them, not two. He was waiting for her as she left the theatre after an evening performance, a big man, thick through the shoulders and chest, who introduced himself as Detective Frank Harkevy of Homicide and said he was .investigating Obidiah Stern’s murder. He drove her home from the theatre and was so pleasant, so friendly and flattering about her performance, that she invited him up for a drink. When he finally got down to the questions, they were essentially the same as those asked David and she answered them without problem. In response to the question of what Burke looked like, she told Harkevy she believed she did have a snapshot somewhere, taken at the hospital, and after a suitable period of rummaging through drawers, produced Burke’s composite of his own body crowned with the head of David’s late uncle.
“And that was all?” Burke said when she had finished her recital.
“Pretty much. Except for having a few more drinks. Actually, the guy was kind of cute.”
“I’m sure.”
“I mean it. He looked like an All-American linebacker from about ten years ago. And I think he really went for me.”
“Why not? You’re very easy to go for.”
“He wants to see me again. He invited me out to his beach house in Amagansett on Sunday.”
“In November?”
“He said November’s the best month for the beach.”
“This is no game, Lilly.”
“Maybe I can find out a few things for you. I think I might be able to really help.”
“You’ve already helped, and I appreciate it. Now please, just leave it alone.”
“I’ve already accepted the invitation.”
“Then cancel it.”
She giggled and it had a light, girlish sound over the wire. “I really think I like being a spy. It’s exciting. And stop worrying so much. I’m a big girl. Besides, you’ve forgotten. I’ve still got my private angel to watch over me.”
“Lilly!”
“I’ll let you know how I make out.”
Now, Burke sat in the dark, college storeroom and waited for the security guard to go by. After he finally heard his steps approach, pass, and fade away, he turned on the desklight and went back to work once more. This time he started through the yearbooks page by page, studying every photograph, name, and caption. Nothing. Then, as he was looking at a picture of Tony taken with other members of the 1954 debating team, he suddenly whispered a soft, “I’ll be damned,” and bent closer.
Alongside Kreuger, at the very center of the picture, was the team’s faculty adviser. He stood straightbacked and tall above the others, his leonine head and sweeping mane of hair unmistakable even in the quarter-of-a-century-old photograph. The hair had been grey, not dark, when Burke had last seen it, and the face beneath had grown lined and puffy. But he did not even have to look at the name in the caption to know it was Arthur
Montgomery Millang.
He checked through the other three yearbooks. Tony had been on the debating team through all four of his undergraduate years, but Millang had apparently been his faculty adviser for only three. A different faculty member was pictured with the team in ‘56. Looking through other records for that period, Burke found that Millang had taught political science for five years, but had left the faculty in 1956 to become a Washington political pollster. Which was the only professional capacity in which Burke had ever known him. He had also known him, through Tony, as an occasional bridge, tennis, and drinking companion. But this was Burke’s first awareness that the two men went back more than twenty-five years together. And for no reason other than it was his first awareness of it, the fact was suddenly important.
Burke put everything back in order and left the room, the building, and the campus.
Driving, home through a pale pink sunrise, he tried to make some sense of it. He had taken a wild shot in the dark because it was the only shot he had, and he may just have hit something. He had no way of knowing whether Millang had been on the picture missing from the Kreuger album, or whether it was even Tony who had removed it. But that part no longer mattered very much. What did matter was that Tony and Millang had known one another for more than a quarter of a century, that Millang had left an academic career to start a business in Washington, and that Tony had followed him there immediately upon graduating. And it was additionally significant that in all the years Burke had known Tony, and as close as they had been, Tony had somehow failed to mention these facts.
All of which meant what?
Perhaps nothing, thought Burke. But he did not really believe that. Again, he refused to trust coincidence. He preferred his own suppositions. And it was working at these that helped keep him awake during the long drive back to New York.
Chapter 10
Richard Burke was indulging himself. He was taking a break. After days of driving, thinking, digging, plotting, and just plain worrying, he was rewarding himself by spending at least part of that day, a Saturday, with Angela at the Metropolitan Museum. Angela, of course, did not know he was with her. Just as he himself had not known an hour ago, that they would again be at the museum together. He had simply awakened that morning, decided he wanted to see her, waited unseen down the block until she left her house, and followed her and her watcher (a different one this time) as they walked their separate sides of the street to Fifth Avenue, then uptown to the museum. Taking foolish chances? Sure, he thought. But they were at least controlled foolish chances, and he had finally learned to accept them as part of his needs.
