Asterisk (25 page)

Congressman
, he could say.
I'm sorry. You're right
.

He could say that.

He could pull over into some gasoline station and go to the telephone and call Leach and presumably some magic wand might be waved and the pile of shit transformed to gold, Leach had the power, the personal alchemy that could transmute violence into serenity. If that was what he wanted. He could do it easily.

Congressman, I've reconsidered, he could say.

Or: Senator, that offer we discussed the other day.

Or: Paris might be rather fine this time of year, Mr. Bannerman.

Options: they yawned like caves in front of him.

He glanced in his mirror, saw the green car.

It seemed he had spent his life being followed.

To hell with them, he thought. To hell with them and their needs and desires and conspiracies and their wretched compulsions to secrecy.

He put his foot down hard on the gas.

He turned onto the Beltway, drove past Andrews Base, turned again where Pennsylvania Avenue led toward Chaneyville and, beyond that, the mouth of the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay.

Yes, to hell with them all.

Tarkington had a small furry mascot dangling from a string inside the windshield. It had belonged to the Greek. Lykiard had considered it lucky. Fat luck. Now it bounced like some spider against the glass, imposing itself between Tarkington and his view of the taillights of the red bug. That dipshit—Tarkington had almost come undone when he had seen the red car coming straight at him. But now he knew his man was running scared—knowledge that was a decided advantage in the survival stakes.

Somewhere he had crossed the Calvert County line and was traveling the leg of land that led south to Cove Point and Chesapeake Bay—and beyond that, he realized, there was no place left to run. He had a picture of Marcia sitting by the telephone in her mother's house in Alexandria, waiting, waiting. Lives just fall apart; they break in the whirl of chaos. How had she pictured their lives? Growing old and frail and bound together by memories and snapshot albums?

Goddamn
.

The VW was slowing to a halt.

He shoved his foot down on the gas pedal.

The gasoline gauge registered empty. The needle had fallen beyond the reserve capacity. He had nothing left.

Goddamn.

He pulled it over onto a grassy verge.

The moon was concealed by trees. He could see it, a translucent disk sliced by bars. The trees, he thought. What else? What else is left?

He began to run again.

From behind, he heard the door of the green car slam shut. He ran. He ran toward the moon as if he were a moth magnetized by an irresistible light. Branches of trees slapped against his face. The air was clear, cold, it reminded him of a night of impending frost, one of those autumnal nights that fall just before the dark of winter. His heart seemed to slide back and forth against his ribs. His lungs burned. He could hear the undergrowth break beneath the feet of the fat man and he was conscious of a flashlight feebly penetrating the black around him. A gun, a flashlight, what would he have given for those items now? He stopped running, he had been zigzagging between the trees, now he ached.
Take up tennis
, Marcia had told him.
You'll go to the dogs real quick unless you exercise
. He had asked:
Doesn't screwing count?
The voices belonged, like facetious echoes, to a past he had drifted away from, and he was scared again, he was scared and adrift and insubstantial. Through the dark he heard the sound of a frightened bird flap, he imagined the tips of feathers brushing the topsides of branches. He had to run again. He saw the pencil-thin beam of the flashlight through the trees. He had to run again.

The trees yielded to a clearing of some kind.

He saw an abandoned truck in the clearing. It had been left to rot. The vandals had come. Tires gone, hubcaps gone, windows smashed, doors yanked off. He leaned against the truck a moment, straining for breath, conscious of the smell of rust from the vehicle, the scent of damp upholstery, aware of the moon high above the clearing. Beyond he saw more trees. Looking back the way he had come, he saw the trembling light of the flash.

There was a sound suddenly.

In moonlight, he had become a perfect target.

He heard the violent, abrupt rap of metal on metal. There was the echo of an explosion. It receded backward through the trees, sucked away. There was another shot. He lowered his head, he ran awkwardly around the side of the truck and into the trees again.

Whenever he paused he could hear the fat man doggedly coming forward. Fight, he thought. Ambush. Quit running. He came out of the trees.

He was standing on the black edge of the river.

Fight, then what? If I win, what then?

He heard the water swirling past and in moonlight saw some illuminated scum float toward the bank. The pollution of the world. The disgorgement of some chemical detritus floating on out to sea. He could swim the river, get to the other bank, and hope that the fat man could not make it.

What then?

He was aware of the stars overhead. They had the sharply real appearance of theatrical props.

He waded into the river.

The water smelled. It was as if he had disturbed something long rotted, broken the hard surface that had grown over ancient excrement.

There was an outrage of light through the dark.

He heard the water around him whip briefly up, a quick circle of foam erupting in the manner of some tiny aquatic volcano. He lowered his head, fell forward, began to swim.

The fat man had reached the bank. He was flashing his light over the surface of the water. He fired his gun twice. Thorne felt the air crack around his head. He fired again. Asterisk, Thorne thought. You reached a point where you were devoured by your own curiosity. The water stung his eyes and tasted vile in his mouth. He was gasping, striving for the opposite bank. The fat man fired again. Thorne felt his clothes suck at his flesh. Devoured, he thought. Swallowed whole, nothing left to spit out.
Asterisk
.

The fat man was silent for a time.

He was swinging his flashlight back and forth.

Thorne pulled his face beneath the water and, feeling that his heart might burst open in his chest, let the undercurrent carry him downstream.

Tarkington played the beam over the surface of the river. The light rippled like some slight, illuminated fish emerging. No sign of Thorne. No sign now. Tarkington put his weapon away. I got him, Christ, he thought. I got him with the last two shots. Because then his head had vanished and he had gone under and out of the glare of the light. Tarkington sat on the bank, following the motion of his flashlight. There was no Thorne. Scum, eddies of foam, no Thorne. He would wash down the river past Solomons, then past Point Lookout, then down through the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, drawn by tides and currents down past Tangier Island, Cape Charles, past Cape Henry Lighthouse, and finally what was left of him, the bleached remains, would wash on out into the dark Atlantic.

Tarkington had no more uncertainty.

It was hard to breathe, and his body ached, but he felt he had done something right.

Dilbeck was wakened from a dream of starlings by the sound of his telephone ringing. He had been watching a flock of the birds coming across a rather strange, flat landscape. He had been watching them grow and knew they meant him some menace—but now he reached for the receiver and he heard Sharpe's voice on the other end of the line.

Sharpe had a somewhat needless
gloating
quality to his tone. “Thorne's finished,” he said. He might have been rubbing his hands in glee.

“That's something,” Dilbeck said, yawning. “And the other thing?”

Sharpe hesitated. “We're still working on the other thing,” he said at last.

“Typical,” Dilbeck said. “You solve the minor problems and leave the major ones undone. You sometimes remind me of the man who's insulating his attic while rats are gnawing at the timbers in the basement.”

“Believe me,” Sharpe said. “We'll work all night if we need to.”

“You may need to,” Dilbeck said and hung up. He waited a moment, then he dialed a number.

“Congressman,” he said.

He heard Leach's distant, fragmented response.

“Our young friend is out of it,” he said to Leach.

“I'm glad to hear it,” the Congressman said. “I'm also sorry to hear it.”

“Nobody is ever entirely happy with this kind of thing,” Dilbeck said.

“Why should they be?” Leach asked. “But they happen. From time to time.”

“From time to time,” Dilbeck said. He put the receiver down. He was thinking of Thorne's girl now, a lovely young thing. It was no tangible consolation to think that, at least, they had not made a widow out of her. But that was it nowadays; young people did not perceive marriage as his generation had done. They
shacked up
. She would move on, of course. She would move on, and the memories would grow more and more feeble. He knew.

7

Friday, April 7

He did not know how long he had lain on the bank after coming up out of the river. He was exhausted, the current in places had been strong, pulling at him, drawing him away, and the struggle against it had left him drained. He lay with his eyes open and looked up into the night sky and he thought: The longest day of my life is just finished. The stars were hard and bright. The moon burned on his blurry vision. When he closed his eyes he thought of the whole nightmare as though it had happened to someone else. He was becoming detached from the experience; or was this detachment simply a consequence of how he had come to accept events? Nothing else could happen to him now. Could it? Could it? He lay on the bank and looked at the sky and he laughed. Damn right it could, he thought.

When he climbed up the bank away from the edge of the river, he found himself walking through trees. He paused. He was sick. The amount of the river he had swallowed came back up in quick spasms. He sweated a cold sweat. He was shivering, suddenly feverish. What was in that fucking river? The rejects of some factory manufacturing tetrasodium pyrophosphate or some other chemical of the kind Marcia always said they put in food to kill off the American public? He leaned against a tree. When the sickness had passed, he continued to walk.

He reached the highway after about thirty minutes. His clothes stuck to him, his shoes were waterlogged, he could taste in his mouth the garbage of the river once again and thought he was going to throw up another time. The moment passed. He walked along the edge of the empty highway. But he stayed as close as he could to the trees, as if out of the fear that the fat man might make a reappearance or that the green car would emerge from nowhere. He kept walking. He had no notion of time: after midnight? It was as if the calendars had fallen away from him, and day and time were left without significance. His mind seemed to have frozen over like some calculating device he could not get to work. An amnesiac moment. Why was he walking here? Why wasn't he back home in the apartment with Marcia? But all that had changed, hadn't it?

He stopped, took off his shoes, shook them out, then walked a little way in his socks. A truck came rumbling past. He turned to face it, stuck his thumb out, and it vanished into the dark ahead. Would I give
myself
a ride? he wondered. You see a miserable, drenched figure in the night; do you stop? No. You think an escaped convict, maybe a lunatic, and you just keep on driving. He kept walking. The cold seemed to have reached his bones, gotten into the marrow. Another truck slid on past, followed by a car that was not a green Pontiac. Maybe the fat man thinks he killed me, Thorne thought. Maybe. Maybe right now he imagines I'm slipping down the river and out into the ocean. It was a slender prospect. But it consoled him a moment.

He walked for what seemed like an hour, two hours, he couldn't be sure. He tried to get his brain to work but it was like the first gear of the abandoned VW: it kept slipping and slipping and it wouldn't engage. How far had he walked? It was still dark, dark in a fashion that suggested there might never be a morning; You couldn't imagine a dawn coming up through this. It was stars and moon, the whole celestial gallery of constellations and clusters burning away out there, how could you foresee a morning?

He reached the outskirts of a town. The sign said
REVENUE, POP 980
. It was an odd name for a town, he reflected. Revenue. He walked. He passed some houses. Silent front porches. Unlit windows. Where was Revenue in relation to anything else? He saw a darkened shopping plaza of the kind one sees on the edges of small, anonymous towns, a supermarket, an ice-cream store, a small department store, a crafts store. A few machines were lit outside the supermarket. He walked toward them to see what they had to offer. Chocolate milk. Ice water. Chicken noodle soup. He found some wet coins in his pants and pushed them into the machine for the soup. It was probably a chemical facsimile of the metabolism of a dead hen, Marcia would have said that, but it was hot and wet and he drank it down quickly. Then he felt sick again. He crumpled the cardboard cup and went back across the deserted plaza to the highway. There he paused, checked his wallet in the reflection of the glimmer of a streetlight. Wet credit cards, his ID, about forty dollars in cash. He put the wallet away and continued to walk.

Revenue Motor Lodge
.

The sign was unlit and it was a rather grandiose name for a couple of wooden chalets but he went toward it. The office was shut. He rang a bell. Nobody came. He rang again. He heard a noise from within the office and a light was turned on and through the lace curtain at the window he saw a woman in a dressing gown coming to the door.

She looked at him coldly.

He said, feebly, that he had fallen in the river.

“Your boat capsize or something?” she asked. She had the kind of face in which you find written a thousand dark suspicions after a lifetime of guests who stole lamps, paid with bad checks, vomited in toilets, threw empty beer cans from windows.