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He looked at the bored face of the patrolman as he passed. He felt some sympathy: it was a dumb way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

12:49. The major general rose from his table, wiped his lips with a napkin, and called to the waitress for his check. She was young, pretty, anxious to please. New on the job, the major general thought. He took two five-dollar bills from his wallet and laid them on the table. His check came to three dollars.

“I want you to do something for me,” he said.

She looked at the notes, then at his face, as if she were encountering for the first time the kind of drunk customer she had been warned about. But she smiled still. The major general placed the attaché case on the chair.

“I am about to forget my case,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows.

Mad, he thought. She sees madness in me. Or senility. He looked quickly at his watch. 12:51. Even if Thorne were not like his father, whom else could he trust at this stage of the game? He remembered a fifteen-year-old boy in a cemetery. A day of grief, but the boy had carried it well. He was hurting inside, he wanted to weep, but he had carried it the way a man might. Was that what he was trusting? A fading, fifteen-year-old memory?

“Why would you want to forget your case?” the waitress asked. She was blond and had her hair bunched back and behind the smile there was the edge of some suspicion.

“I'm leaving it for somebody, do you see?” the major general said. It had to be enough for Thorne.

He looked across the tables. The man in the maroon leisure suit sat stiffly over a glass of beer which clearly he had no intention of drinking. He was not looking in the major general's direction. It could be anyone, he thought. It could be more than one.

“Somebody called Thorne will come here,” he said to the girl. He was conscious of speaking too quickly. There was a tightness in his chest. “He will ask for me. Burckhardt. You will say that I had to leave. You will give him the attaché case.”

“Sure, no problem,” the girl said. She was looking from the case to the two five-dollar bills.

The major general nodded. “All my life I've been a great tipper,” he said. He winked at the girl. She picked up the notes. He walked away from the table. It was a constant thing, he thought: you begin to worry when you don't feel menaced. He reached the front door and went outside. For a moment he forgot where he had parked the car, a rented Ford, nondescript. What color was it? What did the damn thing look like?

He crossed the parking lot. When he found the car he fumbled his keys from his pocket, opened the door, and got inside. He drove to the motel where he had stayed the previous night. He parked the car, stepped out, and looked around.

A young man stood on the edge of the diving board above the pool. He raised his arms over his head, then, in a series of burnished twists, he was gone. The major general heard him hit the water. He took out his key and went inside his room. It was cool, the drapes drawn, the air conditioner blowing. He sat on the edge of the bed and smoked a cigarette. The telephone, he thought. Yes. Why not? You never knew if there would be another chance.

He asked the operator to place a collect call to Mrs. Anna Burckhardt in Fredericksburg, Virginia. “Your name?” she asked. “Who shall I say is calling?”

Momentarily he hesitated. A shadow, passing on the outside, crossed the drawn drapes. Anna, he thought: too much has been lost, too much has simply leaked away. He put the receiver down: where was the point to it now? He walked to the window, parted the drapes a little way. He saw the colored parasols around the pool. A long time ago he had told the boy: Be true to those things your father stood for. Be true. Now he could hope. He dropped the drapes back in place.

It was the perfect bitch, Tarkington thought. Nothing is simple in daylight. But there hadn't been an encounter, at least he could tell them that. He had seen an expectancy of death in the man's eyes. It was what you grew accustomed to. You recognized it as such.

He sipped some of his beer, left a few coins on the table, then went outside. He found a telephone booth on the far side of the building. The number. His memory for numbers was pitiful. He took a small dark notebook from his inside pocket, leafed through the pages, made a call.

He heard Sharpe's voice, sleepy as always. You couldn't trust that, though. What was that joke around the place? Sharpe by name, Sharpe by nature?

“They didn't meet,” Tarkington said. “Don't ask me why because I don't know.”

“Where did the old man go?” Sharpe asked.

Tarkington looked across the parking lot. The white sun glinted on windows, mirrors. He had forgotten his shades. He was forever buying sunglasses and leaving them places. He squinted.

“It wouldn't much matter,” Tarkington said.

There was silence. Tarkington could see Sharpe behind the desk in his office. A sterile room. Sharpe was a workhorse. Saturdays even. A man gets ahead. Tarkington felt the sun burn on his forehead. In the field, you tired easily: Sharpe had presumably forgotten that.

“Lykiard is with him,” Tarkington said. “It doesn't make a lot of difference now.”

“Loose ends is what I hate,” Sharpe said.

“Loose ends is what you don't get with Lykiard.”

An anxious-looking woman, chewing on her lower lip, fidgeting with her purse, was pacing up and down outside the telephone booth. She had the appearance of someone with an emergency on her mind. Locked out of her car, Tarkington thought. Needs a locksmith. Good luck, lady.

Tarkington put the receiver down and stepped out of the booth. The woman rushed past him and slammed the door behind her. He walked to his car. It's the waiting, he thought. Always the waiting. But it was Lykiard's baby now. It was a job for the human eraser.

He hadn't waited after all.

Thorne asked the hostess if a Mr. Burckhardt had left a message for him. She was wearing a long dress, suggesting this place had some claim to class. She looked like a forlorn bridesmaid.

“Are you Mr. Thorne?”

Thorne said he was.

“Your party had to leave,” she said.

“Did he—”

“He asked us to give you this.” She reached behind her desk and brought out a brown leather attaché case. Thorne took it.

“No message? Didn't say where he was going?” he asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “Just the case.”

Saturday, Thorne thought. The sheer waste of it. He smiled at the hostess, who was leaning against a sign that read
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
. He needed a drink. He was led to a table, ordered a gin and tonic, drank it slowly. He found a small key attached to the handle of the case by a piece of string. He opened the case, glanced inside. A manila folder containing sheaves of paper. What was it? The old boy's memoirs? An analysis of the faults of our defense system? He closed the case and locked it. He stirred his drink, then finished it. There are better things to do on a Saturday, he thought. Better ways of passing time.

He got up from the table, paid the waitress, and went outside. He walked to his Volkswagen, slung the case in back, and drove away. On Interstate 95 he saw a plane begin its ascent from the runway of Washington National Airport. A DC-9. Beyond, on the other side of the Potomac, there were disintegrating jet vapors in the sky above Andrews Air Force Base.

2

Marcia was sunbathing on the balcony of the apartment when he let himself in with his own key. He put the attaché case down, took off his jacket, shirt, and necktie, and stepped through the glass door to the balcony. She smiled without looking at him. She was staring up at the sky, her eyes hidden by sunglasses.

“Welcome,” she said.

There was a pitcher of lemonade, in which the ice had already melted, on a small table. He poured a glass for himself and deliberately spilled a few drops on Marcia's stomach. She grimaced.

“Keep you awake,” he said.

“I'm not asleep,” she answered.

She was wearing a black two-piece swimsuit. Her skin was turning red. Later, it would darken to brown and she would look … terrific, Thorne thought. But then she always looked terrific. He sipped the lemonade, which was bitter. He remembered that lately she had begun a campaign against the use of sugar after reading a book in which sugar was said to be a killer. Now, when she wanted a sweetener, it had to be honey.

“Did you see your old warrior?” she asked.

She sat up, sliding her sunglasses down, leaving them balanced on the tip of her nose.

“There was an accident on the freeway,” he said. “When I finally made it, he was gone.”

“Ah,” she said. She was clutching her knees with her hands.

“He left me an attaché case.”

“The plot thickens,” she said. “What's in it?”

Thorne shrugged.

“Why don't you look?” she asked.

“Later,” he said. He felt a sudden exhaustion, drained by the heat, the humidity. He finished the lemonade and went inside the apartment, put some music on the stereo. It was late Bob Dylan. When he returned to the balcony, Marcia was making a face.

“What a goddamn dirge,” she said.

“When I think of your lack of taste, I wonder what I see in you,” he said.

She threw a book of matches at his head and he ducked.

“When I think of your lack of intellect, I wonder what I see in
you,
” she said.

“Want me to show you?” he said.

“Here? On the balcony?”

“She's the shy, retiring sort,” he said. “She never likes to screw in public.”

He lay alongside her and closed his eyes. He could hear the drone of traffic from the freeway. He put his hand against the base of her neck, rubbing lightly. She turned over on her front and said: “Get some oil. Massage me.”

“I can't fucking move,” he said. “This heat paralyzes me.”

“Do you know it's April Fool's Day?”

“I heard.”

“Maybe your old warrior was playing a trick on you, huh?”

“I don't recollect him having a sense of humor,” Thorne said. He opened his eyes. There was a merciless quality to the brightness of the sun and he longed to be cool, to immerse himself in water. He got slowly to his feet and went back inside the apartment. On the desk beside the stereo Marcia's books lay open. Eng. Lit. Wordsworth, Coleridge's
Biographia Literaria
. Shelley. There was a copy of
Frankenstein
. Ever since he had known her she had been trying to complete her doctoral thesis at George Washington.

He went into the bathroom and stepped out of his pants. He took his wallet from his back pocket and laid it beside the washbasin. It fell open: a flash of credit cards, gasoline cards, his social security card, his classified pass. He removed his underwear, got into the shower, adjusted the flow of water for lukewarm. The old warrior, he thought. He felt the cooling stream of water on his body and he shut his eyes. This was better, refreshing, away from the unseasonable humidity of April.

The glass door slid open and Marcia handed him a towel.

“Join me,” he said.

He wiped drops of water from his eyes.

“In a minute,” she said. “I think your old warrior was really goofing on you, John. A real April Fool's Day trick.”

“How come?” He looked at her.

“I just looked inside his case—”

“And?”

“Come and see.”

He threw the towel over the rail and followed her into the living room. The record was still playing. She picked up the briefcase and took out the manila folder.

“Take a look,” she said.

He opened the folder. Blank. Page after page after page, absolutely blank. He took out one page, went to the balcony door, held it up to the light. There was only a watermark.

“See what I mean?” Marcia said.

“Yeah.” Page after page: nothing.

“Was he senile?” she asked.

“Looks that way,” he said.

“He drags you all the way out to the back of beyond just to leave you a pile of nothing? I call that prime dotage behavior.”

He looked at her. She was standing with her hands on her hips, her legs slightly splayed. Her sunglasses were still balanced on the tip of her nose, pinching the nostrils.

“I guess,” he said. “I guess he's finally flipped.”

“Understatement,” she said. “Unless, of course, the sheets are covered with invisible ink.”

“Big joke,” he said. He looked inside the attaché case, he put his hand in to feel the lining. Nothing. A manila folder that contained maybe twenty-five sheets of nothing. He put the folder and the papers back into the case, then locked it.

“Well? What do you think?” she asked.

“I think we get back into the shower,” he said. “As a twosome.”

“Deal.”

He took her hand and led her into the bathroom. He turned the faucet on and undid the top of her swimsuit. She stood with her back against the tiled wall, parting her legs for him.

He listened to the roar of water, the rattle of drops upon the tiles, the sound of her quick breathing on the side of his face. She put her arms around him, the tips of her fingers digging into his shoulder blades. He glanced at her face, at the exquisite distance in her eyes.

“Am I good,” she said. “Am I good, am I.”

“The best,” he said. Yes, the best, definitely the best.

Undeniably so.

The major general woke, startled by something. He'd had no intention of falling asleep. He was still fully dressed. For a moment he did not recognize his surroundings—the plastic room, the drawn drapes, the chain at the door. A motel, yes: a room that emerged in his memory like a Polaroid print. He went to the window, his limbs a little stiff, and he looked out. There had been a young man before, hadn't there? Someone diving from the high board? The sun was gone, the afternoon darkening down, twilight. He walked into the bathroom and turned on the light. An extractor fan grated in the ceiling as if a blade were bent.