Asterisk (5 page)

“In all likelihood,” Sharpe said. He had kicked Tarkie's ass, but the guy was super-upholstered. Thick. You couldn't always make your point with Tarkie.

“It's simple, then,” Dilbeck said. “We get it back.”

Sharpe concurred by nodding his head.

“Then again, it's not so simple, Sharpe.”

Sharpe, once again, agreed.

“Our young friend is well connected. That's always a problem. Bad publicity. Leaks. He has friends in high places.”

Sharpe was beginning to feel suffocated, as if the plants were robbing him of something vital, strangling him.

Dilbeck smiled. He had beautiful white dentures. The piano went on playing. It was a joyless version of “The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls” and every alternative note she hit was a bummer.

“My daughter,” Dilbeck said. “Learning. A little ham-fisted too.”

Sharpe smiled now. He wanted to agree and at the same time to disagree. He wanted to say: She's coming along real fine.

“It should be no great problem to recover the case. I assume your people are capable of that?”

Breaking and entering, simple. “Yes,” he said.

“That damned Burckhardt,” Dilbeck said suddenly. He grinned. “Kept your people on their toes anyhow. I give him that.”

There was a silence. Dilbeck continued to draw patterns in the condensation.

“But we don't know what the case contains, do we? We don't know what kind of information the old man passed along to our young friend. We don't know. We don't know what Thorne knows right now, do we?” Dilbeck turned his hands over, then rubbed them against the sides of his shapeless gray flannels. “There's a whole area of sheer ignorance here, Sharpe. How are my colleagues going to take it?”

Sharpe was tense. He wished himself miles away. He wondered vaguely if he had accumulated any sick leave, or if there was a vacation coming up.

“Simple breaking and entering,” he said. “We'll get it.”

“Yes,” Dilbeck said. “But anything else, for the moment, is out of the question. You understand that? You must impress that on your people in the strongest terms. Am I making myself plain? No accidents, no accidents in swimming pools or automobiles, or anywhere else. Not for the moment.”

Sharpe understood. He reassured Dilbeck. He would have gone down on his knees to reassure Dilbeck. Mercifully, the piano stopped. He turned and saw the daughter come into the conservatory. She was dressed in blue jeans with a blue cotton shirt that hung outside. She was plump, her teeth the kind usually referred to as buck, and she moved with a strange self-consciousness, as if all her life she had inadvertently bumped into things.

“Hi,” she said.

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 think 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.