Asterisk Page 8

  A guy was getting a ticket for speeding just beyond the junction of 17. He stood beneath a golfer’s colored umbrella while the cop wrote out the ticket. Automatically, Tarkington looked at his own speedometer. A quiet fifty. They hated it when you handed in traffic violations and asked for a reimbursement.

  Suddenly he panicked. He had lost the VW. He had lost the fucking thing. No. Then he relaxed. He saw it slowing off the highway, going toward Fredericksburg.

  Relax, he said to himself.

  But the white crosses in his blood made his pulse and his heartbeat race in a wild way.

  She was a woman who looked as though she were thirty-seven going on sixty. Her skin was pale, the lips pinched and almost colorless, and although she had made some attempt to comb through her thick hair Thorne noticed the unevenness of the parting. Her eyes were dark, dull, reflecting little of anything. When she had opened the door there had been no smile of greeting. A recent widow, Thorne thought. You had to make allowances for grief.

  He followed her across a sparsely furnished sitting room and into a kitchen. For a moment he thought they were going to sit down to coffee, he could hear it perking, but instead she opened the kitchen door and they went out into the backyard, moving toward a broken-down gazebo. There were two deck chairs under the rusted roof. Sparrows flew up and toward the trees that surrounded the yard.

  They sat in the deck chairs. Thorne could hear the rain harping on the roof. This better be worth it, he thought. Marcia had called in to say he had a cold. Farrago would have to do his own dirty work this morning. But he felt uneasy. Absenteeism in Foster’s White House was something of an exception.

  The woman lit a cigarette. Her fingers shook. She wore a plain wedding band. Her clothes were drab, a black wool cardigan, a pair of gray slacks, a simple necklace of amber.

  For a moment, waiting for her to say something, Thorne looked across the lawn at the house. In the rain, the rear windows seemed opaque, almost as if there were no rooms beyond them, as if they had been painted directly onto the brick. It was a strange illusion. She played with her lit cigarette, moving it from one hand to the other and back again.

  Finally he said: “I was sorry to hear about your husband.”

  She looked at him quickly. He noticed pale lipstick for the first time, a smudge of cosmetic shadow under the eyes, perhaps even a suggestion of rouge on the cheeks; but nothing took away from the pallor.

  “My husband expected to die,” she said.

  Thorne sat back in the deck chair; he was beginning to feel damp. He was also beginning to suspect another aspect of lunacy. Expected to die. Planned it all.

  “I don’t follow,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked quickly now toward the house, as if she were afraid of something inside.

  “Just like I said. He expected to die.”

  “Well,” Thorne said. “I guess it’s something we all, uh, expect.…” His voice faded. A large dark bird, a crow, floated bleakly in the rain.

  “In the broad sense,” she answered, and she smiled for the first time. Brief, uncertain. “My husband did not expect to be allowed to live. There’s a difference.”

  Thorne shook his head. “I still don’t see.”

  She flicked her cigarette away. She turned toward him and there was the slightest hint of the coquette in this gesture as though, out of long habit, she were continually projecting herself to men. He wondered how often the old man had left her on her own. His overseas postings, perhaps long periods apart, how could he know? The cloistered atmosphere of an air base, other husbands, unattached young men.

  “His death wasn’t suicide,” she said. “He was a good swimmer. A strong … his death wasn’t suicide.”

  In silence, Thorne watched the house. He had caught something from her, her nervousness, that indefinable sense of an edge, as if something quite unexpected were about to happen. The windows in the rain. The still drapes. The half-open kitchen door.

  “Are you saying he was killed?” he said. “Who killed him? And why?”

  “I don’t have the answers,” she said.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “He spoke highly of your father. When we lived together—”

  “I don’t follow that.”

  “Oh. We had been estranged for more than two years. Every Friday night he would call me. Like clockwork. Except last Friday.”

  Thorne put his hands into his pockets. He was cold, this rain had a chilling effect.

  “I wasn’t aware of your separation,” he said.

  She was silent, twisting her fingers together, turning her hands over and over. She could not be still.

  “Your father was perhaps the only man Walt ever truly respected,” she said. “He had met you, I believe, only once—”

  “At the funeral,” Thorne said.

  “Of course. The funeral.” She looked down at the grass, shifted her feet, rearranged her hands in her lap. “Something about you. He liked you. He thought he could trust you. I imagine he saw something of your father in you.”

  Thorne closed his eyes briefly. She was skirting the margins of something, touching on a nerve and then flitting away again.

  “Why do you say he was killed?”

  “They wouldn’t let him live,” she said.

  “Who wouldn’t? Who are you talking about?”

  She faced him, her expression imploring: Don’t you know? Can’t you work it out?

  He put his hand on her wrist and found her skin unexpectedly warm.

  “Who?” he asked.

  She shrugged and pulled her hand away from him and began to rummage in the pocket of her cardigan for cigarettes. She brought out crumpled Kleenexes, a couple of books of matches, a pack of Rothmans. She lit one, blew smoke into the rain, watched it drift.

  “I can’t answer you,” she said.

  “What do you expect of me?” he asked, conscious of a vague desperation in his own voice. Why had he come all this way? To confront a bereaved nut? A fruit bat? In his mind’s eye he could see his empty office. A pile of newspapers. Farrago walking up and down, cursing him out.

  “My husband thought you would know what to do,” she said.

  “His legacy to me was an attaché case filled with blank paper,” Thorne said. “What am I meant to do with that?”

  “He thought you would do the right thing—”

  “The right thing? What is the right thing?”

  She sighed, as if she were irritated. “He was afraid. Do you understand that? He wasn’t a man easily scared, he was a brave man in many ways, Mr. Thorne, and although I had stopped loving him I never stopped respecting him. But he was scared.”

  “Scared of what?” Thorne was uncomfortable in the chair. He slumped back, watched the rain, wanting to leave. The major general had been scared. Okay. The major general had been killed. Okay. Why?

  “But you wouldn’t be interested in the personal history,” she said. She smiled again, in a rather sad manner this time as though she were remembering some delicious moment from the past and suffering regret because nothing had worked out.

  “He was at a place called Escalante.” She looked at Thorne in an urgent way. “Something there scared him. That was what it was. Something at Escalante scared him. He told me very little. When he called me, the very last time he ever spoke to me, he said he was going to contact you. He had knowledge—”

  “Knowledge?”

  She nodded her head: “Knowledge he felt was important. But he didn’t know what to do with it.”

  Thorne watched her fidget with her cigarette.

  She said, “He told me that if anything were to happen to him, I was to tell you—Escalante.”

  Escalante, Thorne thought. A hard missile site. He turned the thing over in his head. You could come to the conclusion that the old man had gone soft, become pacifist, didn’t like the missiles much anymore, wanted an end to the whole nuclear horror show. You could reach that one by an easy route. What t
hen? He was going to blow the whistle on something? But what? A new missile? Germ warfare? Something, something he didn’t like. He was going to blow the whistle and they didn’t take kindly to that, so they put him away in a swimming pool.

  Escalante.

  “He also mentioned the Asterisk Project,” she said.

  He watched her face. She was gazing at him seriously. She sat back in her chair. The rain beat on the broken roof of the gazebo. A blackbird floated toward the trees. A pale column of smoke drifted from the roof of the house.

  “What is it? What is Asterisk?” he asked.

  “It’s what they do at Escalante,” she answered. “It’s what troubled Walter. I don’t know any more.”

  She stood up.

  Is this it? he wondered. Is it finished now? He had come all this way through the rain—and for what? Puzzles? More unwritten manuscripts? He got to his feet and followed her across the lawn. The Asterisk Project. The mumbo jumbo of the thermonuclear mentality. Warheads capable of creating an Atlantis out of every continent. Project this, Project that, Project X.

  On the threshold of the kitchen, she turned to him. “When we go inside, I’ll pour you some coffee and we’ll talk about the weather.”

  The weather, Thorne thought. The trouble with paranoia is that you no sooner open the door of one labyrinth when another unexpectedly beckons. She thinks the house is bugged. Who’s mad around here? Her? Me? Or the late Walter F. Burckhardt?

  He sat at the kitchen table. She poured coffee. There was a framed photograph on the wall. He recognized it. It was gray, a souvenir of another era, and it showed his father with a group of men, one of whom was the young major general. It was signed across the bottom: This ought to bring back memories, best wishes, Ben.

  “I hope this rain doesn’t keep up,” she was saying.

  “Sure,” he said. It disconcerted him to find his father’s picture here. The problem with having a famous father is what other people expect of you. The dead man’s shoes that have to be filled. It had dogged him through school, university, it had harried after him when he had gone to work. People expected to see a carbon of the great man. Too many people, both in the House and in the Senate, had affectionate memories of Benjamin Thorne. After his death, one newspaper obituary eulogized: We have lost a great American. It brought them together, Republicans and Democrats and Independents, they had been for once unanimous in their sentiments. He turned away from the photograph. The only man Walt every truly respected.

  “I expect we’ll get a little sun soon,” she said.

  She laughed, a strange little laugh that was brittle, smoky from too many cigarettes.

  “We could do with it,” he said.

  He finished his coffee. He stood up, ready to leave. She seemed disappointed slightly, as if she wanted him to stay, as if perhaps suddenly she remembered something else she might tell him. Saying nothing, she walked with him to the front door. Outside, as he began to move to his car, she caught him by the wrist, her fingers hard and tight and desperate against his skin, she caught him and said: “Don’t let him down. Please don’t let him down.”

  2

  The captain, who had not introduced himself, sat on the edge of his desk and swung one leg back and forth, forth and back, in a manner that was strangely stiff. Myers, handcuffed, had passed a sleepless night on a hard cot in a narrow room, conscious of the guard who sat reading back numbers of Playboy beneath a sixty-watt light bulb. They had taken his cigarettes, wrapped up his equipment, stashed his tent away, his tape recorder, books, camera, binoculars. And now they had brought him in front of the captain.

  Myers did not care for the hard look in the man’s eye. There was a certain savage dullness in there. Even the small gingery mustache suggested it would pierce your skin if you touched a single bristle of it.

  “We don’t get many bird watchers in this part of the world,” the captain said.

  “I guess,” Myers answered. He was hungry. His stomach rumbled audibly. They might have had the decency to give him coffee at the very least. But when the coffee had come there had been only one cup, and that was for the guard reading Playboy.

  “What kind of birds are you studying?” the captain asked. He was smiling. You could hardly call it that, Myers thought. It was a motion of lip, a show of teeth, utterly mirthless.

  “The cactus wren, mainly,” he said. “Look, I didn’t know this place was off limits.”

  The captain had Myers’ wallet open on his desk. A Bank-Americard, out of date, a social security number, a borrower’s ticket for a public library in Baltimore. He turned the wallet upside down and shook it. A few pennies fell out. A paper clip.

  “The cactus wren,” the captain said. “An interesting bird, isn’t it?”

  “Really,” Myers said. One fifty a week and Hollander hadn’t even paid him yet. Fuck it, he thought. It isn’t any skin off my nose.

  “I didn’t see any signs,” he said.

  “Maybe you didn’t look hard enough,” the captain said. “What other birds you expect to find around here?”

  “Buzzards.”

  “Buzzards, huh?” The captain picked up Myers’ social security card and stared at it. “Jackson Myers,” he said. “Jackson Myers.”

  “Look,” Myers said. “I don’t want to appear, you know, pushy, but you don’t have any grounds for holding me here. So—if you just let me have my equipment, I’ll take off. No problem.”

  Stupidly, he found himself winking at the captain, as if between the two of them there might be some tacit agreement, a minor conspiracy. But the captain only stared; a look of frosted metal.

  “Buzzards,” he said to Myers. “And maybe you’re also interested in the turkey vulture?”

  “Sure, sure,” Myers said. “Both kinds.”

  “Buzzards and turkey vultures.” The captain sat down behind his desk, placed the tips of his fingers together, stared at Myers a moment, then said: “Bird-watching my ass.”

  “I don’t get it,” Myers said.

  “Buzzards and turkey vultures. Two names. The same bird. Think again.”

  Myers looked at the ceiling. A bare light bulb burned. The room was windowless, formal, barren. He felt a moment of panic, fought against it, let it pass.

  “I told you my specialty was the cactus wren,” he said.

  “And my specialty is the life cycle of the salmonella,” the captain said. “Come on, Jack. Think again.”

  “Jesus,” Myers said. “I told you. How many times do I need to keep saying it?”

  “The cactus wren,” the captain said, touching his mustache. “You crack me up, Jackson. You’re a real stand-up comedian. I don’t think you could tell a cactus wren from a pair of Jockey shorts.”

  Myers wondered if there was violence in all this. He was too old for the rough stuff. If they came on real strong he knew he would tell them anything; and more, if they wanted to hear it. He had had all that. This was meant to be a quiet outing in the desert, no sweat, two weeks in a tent. Think of it as a paid vacation. Hollander had said that.

  “Who’s behind you?” the captain asked. “Who’s running you, Jackson?”

  “Shit, I told you,” Myers said. “I came out here in all innocence—”

  “If you’re innocent, I’m the Pope’s wife,” the captain said. “You might as well let it all hang out, Jack. Because we’ll get it anyhow. One way or another.”

  Violence: was that implied here? Myers could feel the palms of his hands begin to sweat.

  The door opened. The black MP from the chopper came in and put some papers on the captain’s desk, then went out again. The captain looked at the papers quickly, then, as if they were a hand of cards and this a game of poker, he turned them face down.

  He looked at Myers and laughed.

  “Modern communications, wonderful things,” he said.

  Myers wondered about the papers. They’ve run me through. They’ve checked me out. They know.

  So much for my feathered frie
nds, he thought.

  “So you retired in seventy-four,” the captain said. “They put you out to pasture, huh? The usual pension.”

  Myers looked at the floor. Bare tiles. They suggested imprisonment to him.

  “Operated in Turkey.” The captain turned the papers over and looked at them. “Bangkok. London. A stint in Korea. Well. You certainly moved around, Jack. I guess you saw a lot of birds on your travels, huh?”

  Myers said nothing. They had him. They had him cold. He was the dunce made to stand in the corner wearing the conical hat of humiliation. Christ, what now?

  “When did you change sides, Jackson?” the captain asked.

  “I never changed sides—”

  “No? You were just hanging out there with your field glasses for the benefit of your health? That it?”

  “You can’t fucking accuse me of changing sides.”

  “I didn’t realize you were so sensitive, Jack. Take it easy. I’ll put it another way. When did you enter into a contract of gainful employment with a certain foreign power who, for the present, shall remain nameless?”

  “I did none of that,” Myers said. “You can’t fucking hang that on me.”

  “That so? You’re freelancing? You’re solo? Where’s the bread coming from? A rich aunt in Connecticut just named you in her will and you thought, Hey, I’ll take a jaunt in the desert and check out one of our military installations? That it? Come on, Myers, I didn’t sail up the fucking Potomac on rubber wings. Who’s behind it?”

  Myers got up from his seat. Awkwardly, he scratched the tip of his nose with his handcuffed hands.

  “You’ve got to be working for them,” the captain said. “Otherwise, where’s the sense? Where’s the profit motive?”

  “You got a key for these fuckers?” Myers asked. The metal was cutting his skin.

  The captain took out a key, undid the cuffs. Myers rubbed his wrists. He shrugged. The cactus wren was shot to shit, and he wasn’t working for the Russians. So what the hell.

  He sat down and said: “Okay. You got me cold.”