Asterisk Page 4

  Dilbeck said, “My daughter. Emily.”

  Sharpe nodded. “I liked your playing,” he said.

  “Really?” She smiled. It was as if her mouth came leaping right off her face, a contortion.

  “Well,” Dilbeck said, “keep me posted.”

  “Certainly,” Sharpe said.

  The daughter went with him to the door. He realized she was flirting outrageously with him, allowing her breasts to rub his arm. He stepped gladly out into the rain.

  “Come again,” she said.

  “I look forward to it,” he answered and walked back to his Buick. He drove away from the house as quickly as he could even though, on account of a failure of the windshield wipers, he could hardly see where he was going.

  No rough stuff, he thought. Just the attaché case.

  And he wondered why it was so goddamn important. Military secrets? Blueprints of a prototype bomber? In this game, you worked as if your peripheral vision were irreparably damaged.

  2

  Across the park, a dark-green Porsche drew up in the rain. The doors opened and Hollander, sitting some distance away on a damp bench, saw his kids get out. The Porsche moved off slowly down the block and out of sight. Hollander rose from the bench and began to walk in the direction of the children. The sight of them caused him more pain than usual. The architects of the divorce had stipulated that he might have access to the children once every three months—which had seemed needlessly harsh to him. But the shit in the fan of legal maneuvering had left him helpless. He wasn’t, as the judge so rightly said, much of a father: he was an inveterate absentee. It was an unkind epitaph and one he might have answered by saying: But your Honor, I was busy keeping this country safe for democracy. Ah, he might have said that.

  Now, crossing the wet grass, feeling as if the weather had conspired against him to make even this brief encounter a miserable one, he tried to keep from thinking that this might be the last time, the very last time. The pain of that prospect was sharp; it was like something about to rupture in his brain. He approached them: they looked small, abandoned, wretched in their colored raincoats. The baby, Anna, six years of age, was holding Jimmy’s hand in the fashion of a child who sees only one anchor to the familiar. The other boy, Mark, ten, was scraping his shoes on the ground and looking dejected.

  Hollander stopped. They hadn’t seen him yet. There was time, he thought. I could turn around, walk away; it would be just one more rotten unfatherly act. He shivered in the rain, turning up the collar of his coat. Anna had seen him. She had broken free from Jimmy and was running across the damp grass toward him. When she reached him he put his arms around her and lifted her up in the air. She smiled uncertainly, wanting to be raised higher but afraid of the fall. He held her close against him—the smell of a small child, how quickly he had forgotten that. It wasn’t the sweet-sour scent of milk anymore, but of soap and a suggestion of peppermint on the breath.

  “Anna,” he said.

  She had the same bright blue eyes as her mother, the same attractive mouth. Loss, he thought. It’s all a catalogue of loss, the dross of years, the drift of time, and what is there left to show at the end of the game? Three kids who barely knew him; three kids who, pretty soon, wouldn’t want ever to have known him.

  Mark, followed by Jimmy, was coming across the grass. Hollander wasn’t sure: did you shake hands with a ten-year-old son or did you kiss him? He felt a small, surprising panic, bewildered by his own indecision. Mark stopped a few feet away, hands stuffed in the pockets of his raincoat. He looked briefly at Hollander, then away.

  “Hi, Dad,” he said.

  Hollander caught his breath. If he had a favorite of the three it was Mark; a sensitive boy, someone easily hurt, someone Hollander had scarred in the warfare of his deteriorating marriage. He wanted to do something to make it up to Mark—but what? Jimmy, the oldest, his face slightly smitten with the acne of early adolescence, put his hand out to be shaken. Hollander took it and held it a moment. Jimmy was awkward, unsure of himself, and moved as though there were no muscular coordination in his body.

  “It’s terrific to see you guys,” Hollander said. “It’s really great.”

  They were all silent for a time; Hollander looked across the park. The gray drizzling rain fell through the trees; there was an elegiac quality to the landscape. Hollander felt the sadness again.

  “Okay, any suggestions about what we do?” he said.

  “It’s raining,” Jimmy said.

  “That’s not news.” Anna looked at her brother with some disgust.

  “What can you do in the rain?” Jimmy asked.

  “Well—what do you guys want to do?” Hollander asked. He was thinking of the inside of a movie theater, the comfort of darkness, the lack of any need to communicate. For a moment he felt he wanted to say: This is probably the last time. The last time. No, he thought. Not that. He could feel the rain slither across his face.

  “Ice cream,” Anna said.

  “Aw,” Jimmy said. “That’s all you ever think about.”

  “Mark,” Hollander said. “What about you?”

  Mark looked at his father a moment; and Hollander saw it in the eyes, the undeclared sentence: You killed something in me. Hurt, he had to look away from the kid’s face. His heart was beating quickly, he felt dizzy, upset. What did I do to them? What am I about to do? Is there any more hurt left?

  Mark stared down at the grass: “I’m easy,” he said.

  “A movie?” Hollander asked, hoping.

  Jimmy said. “We went to a movie last time.”

  “I remember,” Anna said. “The Bad News Bears. I’d like to see it again. Can we see it again?”

  Jimmy mumbled something.

  “Let’s walk,” Hollander said. “Then we can decide, okay?”

  There was a duck pond, deserted in the rain. A few bedraggled birds, looking as if they had barely survived a tempest, floated bleakly on the surface. Hollander held Anna’s hand. It was hot and damp and small and vulnerable. You could make out a convincing case, he thought, for the merits of self-hatred.

  They paused by the pond. So far as Hollander could see there was nobody else in sight. It was a moment of extraordinary emptiness, as if the day had been accidentally inverted and all manner of living things spilled away.

  Mark asked, “Are you still writing your book, Dad?”

  Hollander looked at the boy. He had mentioned the book last time and the kid hadn’t forgotten. The child’s mind, he thought; like flypaper sometimes. He thought of blank pages in a typewriter. The old intelligence operative spills his guts. Tells all. Dazzling exposé of the dark underside of the law. Exclamation points. Even as you sleep, America, your agents are frequently performing scummy deeds. Even as you snore.

  “It’s slow,” he said.

  “I guess,” Mark said.

  “Do you think ducks like Juicy Fruit?” Anna asked.

  They continued around the pond. Anna tried to feed a stick of chewing gum to a duck, who circled it warily before swimming away. The rain increased. They went inside a shelter and sat silently on the bench. Mark looked at the graffiti on the walls.

  “How’s your mother?” Hollander asked.

  “She got a new hairstyle,” Anna said.

  “Is it nice?”

  “It’s okay,” Jimmy said. “She’s okay.”

  Hollander was silent. He stared through the rain, thinking of Myers out there at Escalante, the sunshine. Myers was a risk, he supposed; but so was everything connected with Asterisk. So was everything. He had to be sure. They had moved it once before, in the darkness they had transported it from Oscura, New Mexico, to Escalante. And if they moved it again, he wanted to know where it was being taken. But it was a risk. He looked at his daughter and realized she had been asking a question he hadn’t heard. Myers, he thought: I have to find somebody to relieve Myers pretty soon.

  “I asked why some birds swim and some don’t,” Anna said.

  “I don’t thin
k I know the answer,” Hollander said. “Do you, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy shrugged. He picked up a pebble and threw it toward the pond. There was a bird in flight, a small dark bird heading for the trees.

  “Nobody answers my questions,” Anna said.

  Hollander put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently, conscious all at once of the child’s fragility. Easy to break, to wound. She laid her head against his arm, closing her eyes a moment. He was aware of the sound of rain in the trees, the slow movement of a wind: the noises of solitude, uneasy, uncertain. He reached inside his pocket and took out a pack of English Ovals and stared at the emblem on the lid of the box.

  Asterisk, he thought. And he imagined waking one morning to find the planet aflame, everything lost, cindered, swept away in a final rage of violence. These kids, these vulnerable kids.… He was afraid all at once, afraid for himself, afraid because of the innocence of children. It could happen, he thought. That was the trouble. Sometimes, sometimes in the worst of moments, he would see himself as an actor in some play that is turning, inexorably, to reality, something more sharp, more dreadful, than mere fantasy. And sometimes he would wake shaking in the mornings. He put his arm around Anna; she moved closer to him.

  “Rowley never does that,” she said.

  “Doesn’t he?”

  “Well, he’s not a real father anyway,” she said.

  Mark began to whistle quietly, then broke off. There was a long silence. Then Jimmy said: “Rowley’s all right.”

  Mark scuffed his feet on the ground and said: “It’s a drag just sitting here. Why don’t we go to a movie?”

  Hollander looked at the boy. He felt a sense of jealousy suddenly—an unexpected sensation—at the thought of Rowley embracing these children, trying to behave like a father toward them; and the feeling had been quickened by Jimmy’s defense of the man. Rowley’s all right. Sure he is, Hollander thought. He’s got my wife, my family, everything—what am I left with? Nothing save for some mad sense of mission. Why me? Why do I have to deal with it? Why not somebody else?

  Self-pity, self-hatred: how much further down the ladder could you slide? And now Mark had suggested a movie for the same reasons, Hollander suspected, that he himself had made the suggestion before. For the darkness, the safety, the blinding of any awkward sensations.

  “Well? How about it?” Mark asked.

  “Let’s put it to a vote,” Hollander said. “Who wants to see a movie?”

  Jimmy was the last to put his hand up.

  “Okay, it’s settled,” Hollander said.

  They walked out of the shelter. He was conscious of how, as they walked through the rain, the kids seemed to cluster closely around him, as if he were a form of protection for them. He held Anna’s hand and wished, with the kind of wishing that is a futile mental exercise in regret, that he had done more for them—been a better parent, a better person, perhaps even a value that they might hold up for themselves in the times that lay ahead. But it wasn’t going to be anything like that. The only prospect he could see was their denunciation of him, followed by the protective veneer of amnesia.

  I’m going to betray my country, he thought.

  Since I’ve betrayed everything else, does it make any difference now?

  Anna tugged her hand away. She paused to scratch her leg. Then she looked at him.

  “You look nicer when you smile,” she said.

  He watched her a moment. And then he smiled.

  3

  Thorne didn’t go to his office. While Marcia worked, he lazed in front of the TV and idly watched some of the action of a women’s golf classic. Sunny California. It was tedious. He tried the other channels. A rerun of Lucy, a religious drama produced by the Paulist fathers about an alcoholic wife, and on the public channel a dreary analysis of the Martian surface. Outside, it continued to rain. He stood on the balcony for a while and watched it fall, possessed with the notion that it was somehow better than Sunday-afternoon TV.

  When Marcia announced that she had had enough of Coleridge they went out to eat. They drove around for a while in his VW, debating restaurants. She wanted Chinese, she didn’t want Chinese. French then? American? Greek?

  They ended up at a MacDonald’s, eating hamburgers and french fries in the car.

  “I wonder how much sugar there is in a Big Mac?” she asked.

  “They don’t put sugar in Big Macs,” he said.

  “They put sugar everywhere,” she answered. “You just can’t escape it.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” he said.

  “The book was called Sugar Blues and I suggest you do yourself a favor by reading it, buster.” She licked her fingers.

  “Cranks,” he said. “Health-food faddists and three almonds every day will prevent cancer and you don’t dare eat more than two eggs a day because of the fucking cholesterol.”

  “What a world,” she said. “Pretty soon they’ll leave us nothing.”

  They drove out toward Andrews Base.

  He parked the car. They got out. Marcia pulled up the hood of her raincoat. In the gathering dark they could see the distant lights of planes and beyond, through spaces in the rain-clouds, the occasional star.

  “Do you know the names of the stars?” she asked.

  “In grade school I did.” There were thin, silvery vapor trails. He put his arm around her shoulder. She was shivering slightly.

  “Twinkle, twinkle,” she said. “I’m beginning to freeze my ass off.”

  “Let’s go home then,” he said.

  They got back inside the VW. The clutch slipped in first and he promised himself he would have it repaired. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the next day.

  Do something right, Tarkington thought. There is such a thing as making amends. The door was no problem. What was the problem was how it had to look good. He stood in the darkness. No lights, he thought. He had never been quite able to overcome the curious sensation of trespassing, no matter how many times he did this kind of thing. A sense of intrusion. But orders, after all, were exactly that. He was thinking of Sharpe and how Sharpe’s face had had the look of thunder about it. One day he’d like to tell Sharpe: Go fuck yourself, buddy. Just stick the job up your ass. You could easily console yourself with thoughts like that. Sharpe turning white as a sheet. Sharpe having a coronary occlusion. Before Sharpe, there had been Hollander, and even if Hollander had been a bit of a disciplinarian in his own way at least he had been human. He understood that you sometimes caught a cold or you had a grandmother who had just died and was about to be buried, things like that. But fucking Sharpe worked on the assumption that you weren’t human and you had no human attachments.

  I had a wife one time, Tarkington thought.

  He gently knocked a desk over.

  He opened drawers.

  He scattered clothing around.

  He put a portable typewriter into his canvas bag. He took the electric percolator. The stereo receiver. He didn’t fuck with the records, they were too bulky. I wish Hollander was in charge again, he thought. I wish Sharpe would come down with mono or something. He took a china vase that he knew to be worthless. He dumped flowers and water on the rug. An amateur job, Sharpe had said. Shouldn’t be too hard for you to do that, Tarkie.

  When he was finished he left without closing the door behind him.

  The two uniformed cops were blasé. They had been in too many burgled apartments and listened to too many irate citizens and now they took notes and made noises they had been trained to make.

  “My goddamn thesis,” Marcia said.

  “Thesis?” one of the cops said. “Can you describe it?”

  Thorne wandered around the apartment. The stereo was gone. The Olivetti. It had been battered pretty much anyhow. In the bedroom a few drawers had been rifled, but nothing was missing.

  Marcia was sifting among the papers that lay on the rug. The desk had been overturned. Thorne wondered why. What was he—or they; maybe more than one—looking for? A wall safe? The two co
ps were listing the missing articles. Marcia began to put papers together.

  “God damn it,” she was saying. “It just isn’t right.”

  One of the cops agreed. “Lady, we get an average of three like this every night of the week … you know? And I ought to tell you confidentially that the chances of getting your merchandise back, well, they’re pretty slim.”

  The other cop stuck a slab of pink chewing gum in his mouth. He masticated audibly. Thorne went to the balcony and looked out. It was still raining.

  “I don’t give a shit for merchandise,” Marcia said. “I’m only interested in my thesis.”

  Frantically, she was piling papers and books together. Thorne watched her. He had never seen her so upset.

  “Has it been taken?” the cop chewing gum asked.

  “How the hell will I know until I get this goddamn mess straightened out?” she said. She looked at him with exasperation. He scribbled something in his notebook.

  “You make a list of what’s missing,” the other cop said. “Make a complete list. Serial number of the stereo, the typewriter, you know? Make a complete list.”

  When the cops had gone, Marcia flopped down on the sofa. Her fists were clenched.

  Thorne sat beside her. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, relax, relax.”

  “Shit, it pisses me off to think of some creep coming in here while we’re gone and just …” Her voice trailed off.

  “I know,” Thorne said. “Why don’t you relax and I’ll straighten things out?”

  “You mind making me a drink?”

  He mixed her a scotch and soda and one for himself. He sat on the arm of the sofa and looked across the mess. He could understand burglary; it was your ordinary larceny. But he couldn’t understand the destruction that went with it. The mess, the chaos. What made somebody want to do that?

  “I was fond of that Olivetti,” Marcia said. “I was attached to that typewriter.”

  “I’ll get you another,” he said.

  “Pica, not elite,” she said.

  He was silent for a time, looking across the apartment. A stranger, he thought. It made him uneasy. He couldn’t imagine a face, a shape, someone forcing the door. Then he laughed.