Asterisk (18 page)

“John,” Bannerman said. “I want to wish you the very best in your new position. I'm sure you'll find Paris stimulating and Cunningham a good man to work for.”

The chief of staff looked at his watch, walked to the door. There he paused, swung around, and added: “Be on the flight. Okay?”

He went out.

There was a silence in the room for a time. Farrago, politely making a funnel of one hand and pressing it to his lips, cleared his throat. Then he said: “Well. Congratulations.”

Thorne went to the window. He saw the lawn mower below, flakes of clipped grass flying behind the driver of the vehicle.

“Congratulations?” he said. “What's behind it?”

“Behind it?”

“I didn't ask for it, did I? And you never said you were unhappy with my work here. So what the fuck's behind it?”

“Like the chief said, John, it's a promotion for you—”

“Promotion my ass.” Thorne turned to look at Farrago, who suddenly appeared pathetic, ineffectual, fingering his floppy bow tie with a gesture that suggested nervousness succumbing to panic.

“France, Jesus,” Farrago said, smiling in a watery way. “Wish I could get over there.”

“Go in my place then,” Thorne said.

He slammed the door. He went down to his own office.

There weren't the usual newspapers piled on the desk.

There was an airline ticket in a blue envelope. He picked it up. Paris, midday flight, one-way. He twisted the thing in his fingers. Then he sat down behind his desk, laid his hands on the bare surface, and noticed a cardboard box in the corner of the room. He went to it, looked inside.

His desk had been cleared out. The pictures had been taken down from the wall. Everything had been shoved into the box. Jesus, they wanted him out of the way fast. On top of the box there lay the photograph of Senator Thorne. The face seemed darker than before, more stern, as if some disillusionment were beginning to move across the features. Thorne took out his address book and flipped through the pages. His hand was shaking as he dialed a telephone number; anger, fear, some bad combination of the two—he wasn't sure. He called Leach's home number. There was no answer. He tried the congressman's office. A girl asked his name, then said the congressman was in a meeting. Be on that flight, Thorne thought. He shoved the telephone down. In a pig's ass. Okay, try Jacobson. What could Jacobson tell him? He dialed the senator's home number in Fairfax. Mrs. Jacobson told him that the senator was attending a conference in Wichita. He put the telephone down, then he sat back, thinking, thinking of the moves.

They wanted him gone, that much was visible in the scheme of things. They didn't want to damage him, so it seemed, but just to get him off to the sidelines. Why? Because he was asking too many questions, because he hadn't been particularly discreet: because of Asterisk. Okay. It made some kind of sense: it was the logic that told you that the scrambled bits and pieces of the jigsaw could be made to form a whole … if you had the plan, the overall pattern. But he had no such matrix. A few facts, a couple of hints, a couple of puzzles. His inadequacy suddenly irritated him; his ignorance distressed him.
You're the kind of person who cringes at the thought of having lint in your navel
. Maybe. But this was worse. This was like stepping inside a room that you knew intimately but one in which something has been moved, something so small as to be almost imperceptible—but it would drive you mad as you looked for it. He rose from his desk and walked to the window. Well, he thought. You can at least say, with some degree of certitude, that you know roughly where you stand.

He watched the lawn mower make a wide arc across the grass.

Someone had been knocking on his door during the night. He had ignored it, tried to sleep; there had been footsteps in the corridor, the voice of a drunk singing. Now, the sun streaming into the room under the brown blind, he got out of bed and dressed. He went into the corridor. Here and there a few bare light bulbs were lit, bleak little nimbi. He got into the elevator and rode it to the ground floor. The desk clerk was reading a paperback book entitled
Improve Your Word Power
. He was mouthing words silently to himself.
Psychasthenia
, Hollander thought. Is that what I suffer from? The inability to resist self-questioning. To put doubts away.

He picked up the telephone and dialed the number he had been given by Brinkerhoff. It rang only once, then it was answered, as if Brinkerhoff had been waiting beside the receiver.

“You will be pleased to know that a clearance has been given,” Brinkerhoff said. “There are arrangements to be made, but you must be prepared to leave at a moment's notice.”

Pleased? Am I pleased?
Hollander wondered.

“The remainder of your information is necessary,” Brinkerhoff said.

“Naturally.” Hollander gazed at the desk clerk.
Emunctory
, he thought. Was emunctory in the book? Or nescience?

“Where do we meet?” Brinkerhoff asked.

“I always found the Pancake Palace a treat,” Hollander said. “It has a certain nostalgic ring.”

“In one hour,” Brinkerhoff said.

Hollander put the telephone down. He was going. He was going. He looked at the desk clerk, who had bad teeth.

“I'm checking out,” he said.

“Got your key?” the clerk asked. He put his paperback aside. Hollander put his key down on the desk. The clerk picked it up, handling it as though it were explosive. Going, Hollander thought.
What did it really mean?
He pictured Davina, wanted to call her, say something: a word of farewell. The language was inadequate. Then he thought of his kids. They would have to live with this too.
Do you know what your daddy did?

What is it, he wondered, this urge to say goodbyes?

He smiled at the clerk, who was already buried back in his paperback. Yes: sooner or later his kids would be haunted by this. How could he ever make them see that he was doing it—when you got to the bottom line—for them as much as for anyone?

He left the hotel, stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Sunny D.C. morning. He walked a little way, went inside a coffee shop, drank coffee and ate a doughnut. Just think: it may be your last American honey-glazed, custard-filled special. He did not imagine they would have such delicacies where he was going.

The waitress was smiling at him. It was as if she had never seen a defector before.

Thorne left the White House at ten. He went to his car, drove down Pennsylvania Avenue. At a gasoline station he tried to call Erickson. It was useless. He was being fenced, boxed in; and he knew that Erickson could tell him nothing. When he got through to Senator McLintock's office and asked for Erickson he was told that Erickson had quit. Quit, he thought. Overnight.
Just like that
. He hung up, returned to his VW, sat inside motionless. He was cold. The sun on the windshield was like frost. He watched the station attendant at the pump; then he drove off in the direction of the airport. There were jets in the sky high above the Potomac, vapor trails. He parked his car at the airport and went through the terminal building to the observation deck. Think.
Think
. Escalante. Asterisk. Fuck Paris. They could stick Paris. He had something to do here. They couldn't just wash him away as if he were a speck of grit blown randomly into someone's eye, an irritating touch of sand. It was this as much as anything that he hated, it was this presumption that he could be bought and sold by the power brokers if only he would learn how to stifle his curiosity and sit still in quiet corners and ask no questions. A man is killed in a swimming pool. A terrified woman thinks her house is bugged. A group of strangely unrelated, weirdly incongruous scientists are apparently dredged out of retirement to work at a missile site. The walls of silence. The offers of goodies. It wasn't enough.

It was pure shit.

He watched an American Airlines flight take off at the end of the runway. It was followed almost at once by a TWA jumbo. The sky was filled with activity.
They expect me to smile
, he thought. Nod my head, be grateful. He looked upward into the sun. A wind blowing in across the tarmac made him shiver. Where did he turn now? What was he left with?

You're on your own, he thought.

He went back into the terminal building. The girl at the TWA desk was uncertain about the possibility of a refund at this late stage. Thorne said it wasn't that important anyhow. It was something he didn't have to do, he could simply have become, in the parlance of the airlines, a no-show, but it gave him some small, tight feeling of pleasure to watch the girl remove his name from the passenger list and punch this deletion into her computer.

“I hope we can serve you again sometime,” she said. She had toothpaste teeth, a manicured smile, her eyes were glazed with artificial delight.

“Maybe,” Thorne said.

He went back to his car.

The undersecretary was not absolutely pleased with the decoded cable; he had an inbred dislike of American intelligence. He enjoyed the country and hoped his stay would be a protracted one, but so far as intelligence went he had all the feelings of a pheasant who smells a fox on the downwind. He wasn't even happy with the way Brinkerhoff had become convinced by this Hollander. But what could he do except give it his stamp of approval? Vashilikov, Zakunin: you did not trifle with these names.

“I meet him in one hour,” Brinkerhoff said.

The undersecretary sighed. It had to be important. They hardly used Route 6 unless it was something unusual.

“I have already arranged the transportation,” Brinkerhoff said. “I took the liberty of assuming your approval.”

“Very efficient,” the undersecretary said.

Brinkerhoff looked at his watch. The undersecretary noticed, with a slight pulse of envy, that it was one of those watches you had to press before the time lit up. He wanted one for himself.

“You will travel with him?”

Brinkerhoff nodded. “Yes. Yes, I will travel with him.”

The undersecretary got up from behind his desk. It was an absurd desk anyhow; it made him feel like some wretched dwarf. He stared at the folders that lay across the surface. The constant chatter of intelligence reports. The file on Hollander. Everything checked out. That was what worried him.

“Brinkerhoff,” he said, in a confidential manner. “You really
trust
Hollander? Really?”

“I hedge my bets,” Brinkerhoff said. “At first I imagined him to be stupid. Now I think perhaps. Perhaps. It's a gamble.”

“A gamble,” the undersecretary said.

“The odds are even.”

The undersecretary watched Brinkerhoff press his watch again and look at the time.

“How does that work?” he asked. “Could I see?”

Out to the airport. Back again. In to the White House. Out again. The guy maybe had ants in his pants today, Tarkington thought. He was wracked by fatigue. He was thankful when he saw the red Volkswagen pull up outside Dunkin' Donuts and Thorne go inside the shop. He got out of the Catalina and, though this wasn't strictly by the book—but when you were this tired you didn't need to be told what to do by any goddamn book—he followed Thorne inside. He sat six stools away and ordered a black coffee. He wondered about Thorne. Well-dressed (yawn: Jesus Christ), clean-cut, you would have put him down as an up-and-coming young lawyer, something like that. The strangest people broke the rules, though. The most unlikely dudes did all the wrong things. He sipped his coffee. Hollander, for example: never in a million years would he have thought of a warrant coming down for Ted Hollander. Ah, well, it was beyond him. He had become too accustomed to unanswerable questions. After a time, you didn't even want to ask.

Thorne went outside.

Tarkington finished his coffee. Here we go again, he thought. Here we go again. Wearily, he got behind the wheel of the Catalina and slipped into the lane behind the red bug.

Dilbeck received a telephone call from the congressman, which he took on the conservatory extension. He was deeply concerned with the mealybugs, deeply so; it was a regular blight. What really irritated him was the prospect of chemical killers because no matter how good they claimed to be he knew they did some damage to the plants. Still, you had to go sometimes with the lesser evil for the greater good.

“Our boy just isn't biting,” Leach said. His voice was barely a whisper.

“I didn't think he would,” Dilbeck said. He suspected Thorne had some integrity. It would have disappointed him to learn otherwise.

“Is there some other way you can deal with this?” Leach asked. “Like yourself, I would prefer not to involve the other committee members. A little containment would be a good thing.”

“I can deal with it,” Dilbeck said. He watched a bug, looking like a slow-motion drop of spit, cross the back of his hand.

“Without, uh, needless violence,” Leach said.

“Of course,” Dilbeck said.

The congressman wheezed into the line. For a moment, Dilbeck held the receiver some inches from his ear.

“You had better keep me posted on Hollander too,” Leach said. “I wish …” His voice trailed off as if there were some unspeakable regret in his mind.

“You wish the way I wish,” Dilbeck said.

“Dammit,” Leach said. “Ted Hollander.
After all.
”

When Dilbeck had put the telephone down he went into the house. He climbed the stairs to his study. He passed the closed doors of his daughter's bedroom. Her stereo was playing Prokofiev's Seventh Piano Sonata. He listened for a moment. It was cacophony to him, as if someone were dropping stones on the piano keys from a great height. He climbed the second flight and when he reached his study he was out of breath. He went inside the room, locked the door behind him, opened a green metal filing cabinet, fiddled through the files, took out the one that had been hastily assembled on John Thorne.