Asterisk (6 page)

I'm going to betray my country, he thought.

Since I've betrayed everything else, does it make any difference now?

Anna tugged her hand away. She paused to scratch her leg. Then she looked at him.

“You look nicer when you smile,” she said.

He watched her a moment. And then he smiled.

3

Thorne didn't go to his office. While Marcia worked, he lazed in front of the TV and idly watched some of the action of a women's golf classic. Sunny California. It was tedious. He tried the other channels. A rerun of
Lucy
, a religious drama produced by the Paulist fathers about an alcoholic wife, and on the public channel a dreary analysis of the Martian surface. Outside, it continued to rain. He stood on the balcony for a while and watched it fall, possessed with the notion that it was somehow better than Sunday-afternoon TV.

When Marcia announced that she had had enough of Coleridge they went out to eat. They drove around for a while in his VW, debating restaurants. She wanted Chinese, she didn't want Chinese. French then? American? Greek?

They ended up at a MacDonald's, eating hamburgers and french fries in the car.

“I wonder how much sugar there is in a Big Mac?” she asked.

“They don't put sugar in Big Macs,” he said.

“They put sugar everywhere,” she answered. “You just can't escape it.”

“You're out of your mind,” he said.

“The book was called
Sugar Blues
and I suggest you do yourself a favor by reading it, buster.” She licked her fingers.

“Cranks,” he said. “Health-food faddists and three almonds every day will prevent cancer and you don't dare eat more than two eggs a day because of the fucking cholesterol.”

“What a world,” she said. “Pretty soon they'll leave us nothing.”

They drove out toward Andrews Base.

He parked the car. They got out. Marcia pulled up the hood of her raincoat. In the gathering dark they could see the distant lights of planes and beyond, through spaces in the rain-clouds, the occasional star.

“Do you know the names of the stars?” she asked.

“In grade school I did.” There were thin, silvery vapor trails. He put his arm around her shoulder. She was shivering slightly.

“Twinkle, twinkle,” she said. “I'm beginning to freeze my ass off.”

“Let's go home then,” he said.

They got back inside the VW. The clutch slipped in first and he promised himself he would have it repaired. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the next day.

Do something right, Tarkington thought. There is such a thing as making amends. The door was no problem. What was the problem was how it had to look good. He stood in the darkness. No lights, he thought. He had never been quite able to overcome the curious sensation of trespassing, no matter how many times he did this kind of thing. A sense of intrusion. But orders, after all, were exactly that. He was thinking of Sharpe and how Sharpe's face had had the look of thunder about it. One day he'd like to tell Sharpe: Go fuck yourself, buddy. Just stick the job up your ass. You could easily console yourself with thoughts like that. Sharpe turning white as a sheet. Sharpe having a coronary occlusion. Before Sharpe, there had been Hollander, and even if Hollander had been a bit of a disciplinarian in his own way at least he had been human. He understood that you sometimes caught a cold or you had a grandmother who had just died and was about to be buried, things like that. But fucking Sharpe worked on the assumption that you weren't human and you had no human attachments.

I had a wife one time, Tarkington thought.

He gently knocked a desk over.

He opened drawers.

He scattered clothing around.

He put a portable typewriter into his canvas bag. He took the electric percolator. The stereo receiver. He didn't fuck with the records, they were too bulky. I wish Hollander was in charge again, he thought. I wish Sharpe would come down with mono or something. He took a china vase that he knew to be worthless. He dumped flowers and water on the rug.
An amateur job
, Sharpe had said.
Shouldn't be too hard for you to do that, Tarkie
.

When he was finished he left without closing the door behind him.

The two uniformed cops were blasé. They had been in too many burgled apartments and listened to too many irate citizens and now they took notes and made noises they had been trained to make.

“My goddamn thesis,” Marcia said.

“Thesis?” one of the cops said. “Can you describe it?”

Thorne wandered around the apartment. The stereo was gone. The Olivetti. It had been battered pretty much anyhow. In the bedroom a few drawers had been rifled, but nothing was missing.

Marcia was sifting among the papers that lay on the rug. The desk had been overturned. Thorne wondered why. What was he—or they; maybe more than one—looking for? A wall safe? The two cops were listing the missing articles. Marcia began to put papers together.

“God damn it,” she was saying. “It just isn't right.”

One of the cops agreed. “Lady, we get an average of three like this every night of the week … you know? And I ought to tell you confidentially that the chances of getting your merchandise back, well, they're pretty slim.”

The other cop stuck a slab of pink chewing gum in his mouth. He masticated audibly. Thorne went to the balcony and looked out. It was still raining.

“I don't give a shit for merchandise,” Marcia said. “I'm only interested in my thesis.”

Frantically, she was piling papers and books together. Thorne watched her. He had never seen her so upset.

“Has it been taken?” the cop chewing gum asked.

“How the hell will I know until I get this goddamn mess straightened out?” she said. She looked at him with exasperation. He scribbled something in his notebook.

“You make a list of what's missing,” the other cop said. “Make a complete list. Serial number of the stereo, the typewriter, you know? Make a complete list.”

When the cops had gone, Marcia flopped down on the sofa. Her fists were clenched.

Thorne sat beside her. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, relax, relax.”

“Shit, it pisses me off to think of some creep coming in here while we're gone and just …” Her voice trailed off.

“I know,” Thorne said. “Why don't you relax and I'll straighten things out?”

“You mind making me a drink?”

He mixed her a scotch and soda and one for himself. He sat on the arm of the sofa and looked across the mess. He could understand burglary; it was your ordinary larceny. But he couldn't understand the destruction that went with it. The mess, the chaos. What made somebody want to do that?

“I was fond of that Olivetti,” Marcia said. “I was attached to that typewriter.”

“I'll get you another,” he said.

“Pica, not elite,” she said.

He was silent for a time, looking across the apartment. A stranger, he thought. It made him uneasy. He couldn't imagine a face, a shape, someone forcing the door. Then he laughed.

“What's so funny?” she asked.

“I just realized he took the major general's case,” he said. “Can't you picture his disappointment?”

“Yeah,” Marcia said, and finished her drink.

3

Monday, April 3

It was irresistible. You could try to be skeptical about it, even cynical, but it remained irresistible. And Thorne had not become accustomed to the curious, somewhat discreet sense of power, the odd hush of history, that hung over the place. His own office was tiny, tucked away at the end of a corridor, but even when he closed his door and sat behind his desk he could feel the vibrations of the building, as if the center, the Oval Office, were the heart of a web from which all the strands were being spun. It wasn't as if he were familiar with that particular office, since he had been inside it only once and had talked directly with Foster only once, but the sensation—from the moment of passing the guard, showing your pass, entering—remained the same.

He had once tried to explain all this to Marcia. But so far as politicians, especially presidents, were concerned, she was a committed cynic. It's all greed and fear, she had said.
What you think is the reverence of history comes down to the crummy business of getting your ass reelected
.

It was more than that, he had tried to say.

It was much more. But he had begun to feel foolish in front of her. He had dried up.
Just don't let it go to your head, kiddo
.

When he got to his office on the morning after the burglary, the newspapers had already been stacked on his desk by Miss Grunwald, who came in at some ungodly hour and who took some perverse delight in staying as late as she could at night. Fiftyish, her gray hair dyed purple, she had survived the comings and goings of administrations. She dated as far back as Eisenhower. Then she had been a junior secretary in the typing pool, a mere stenographer. Now she was Bannerman's own private secretary and, in that capacity, she was virtually the assistant chief of staff.

She didn't like Thorne; nor did Thorne have any special affection for her. She was a martyr, a complainer, she always worked harder than anybody else and for small thanks. In her eyes was the light of some profound belief in a sacred mission: that of keeping the White House running. He knew it gave her a personal pleasure to have the morning newspapers on his desk long before his own arrival at 7:30. It was a task she could easily have delegated but didn't.

Thorne took his jacket off, hung it on the back of his chair, took out his notebook, and began to go through the newspapers. The secretary from the adjoining office, Sally Winfield, came in with his coffee.

“What's new in the news?” she asked.

Her regular greeting. He watched her set the coffee down. She was a skinny, pretty girl of about twenty-two who thought it was “a riot” to work in the White House. It was said she had slept with someone over in Justice, who repaid the favor by recommending her for this position.

“More of the same,” Thorne said. He was opening an advance copy of
Newsweek
. There was a long article critical of Foster's handling of the economy. Inflation, unemployment. The same old song. He didn't even bother to abstract it because he had sent it up before and Bannerman himself had called to suggest he might save himself the trouble of such summaries unless—as the great man put it—it was something “bright.” He flipped through
Newsweek
, marked an article about the proposed price rises in steel, then opened
The New York Times
. A critical article on the op-ed page: “Does Foster Understand Black Africa?” He cut it out, put it to one side, read the letters. Foster sometimes liked to look at stuff from correspondents: the compliments from Out There.
I'm delighted to see we have a president strong enough to stand up to the OPEC countries
, one of them began. He began to snip it out; it would make the Old Man happy.

His telephone rang. It was Farrago, the press officer. Droopy Max, the corps called him; his sartorial inelegance had prompted the name—floppy bow ties that belonged to the dark ages of the polka dot fad, pepper-and-salt tweeds of the kind you might only encounter these days on the bodies of retired missionaries.

“You got the summaries?” Farrago asked.

“Just about,” Thorne said.

“Lazy fart,” Farrago said. “You guys that live in sin misdirect all your energies.”

Thorne put the receiver down, and picked up the
Star
. Joseph Donaldson's syndicated column regularly machine-gunned the administration.
It has sometimes crossed my mind that our president's secrecy in government, despite all the fanfare and hype about openness, is almost a match for the furtive machinations of his near-namesake in South Africa. Take the recent strange decision to cut $3.3 billion from the defense budget.…
Thorne finished reading, skimmed the
Post
, then called Sally Winfield back when he was ready to dictate.

She sat with her slate-gray dress hitched up her thigh; her small breasts were always highlighted by tight sweaters that suggested to Thorne some atavistic longing for the fashions of the late 1950s. He watched her take shorthand and listened to the sound of his own voice droning …
Campaign promises … trust … already broken.…
When he had finished it was already 9:30 and Farrago was on the telephone again.

“Quit fucking around, Thorne. Bannerman's been chewing my ear off.”

“She's typing right now,” Thorne said.

“Is it true she can turn out eight words a minute if she's really hammering?” Farrago hung up.

Thorne walked into the adjoining office and watched the girl type. On a wooden stand beside her desk there was a bottle of nail polish, a nail file, two apples in a plastic bag.

“You better hurry it,” he said.

She looked at him lazily: “It's not my fault if it's late, is it?”

He shrugged and went back to his own office. He stood at the window and watched a Secret Service agent playing with his walkie-talkie, moving along the edges of the lawn and muttering into his device. Overhead, a helicopter with the Air Force seal came into view. Thorne saw it hover a moment and then go out of sight.

He sat down behind his desk, put his feet up. Later, the provincials would start to come in. The Old Man always liked to know what was happening in the sticks and would read the summaries before going to bed. But the pressure's off, Thorne thought: it's off for a while. He closed his eyes, tried to relax. He could hear telephones ringing, the persistent clatter of IBMs, voices from the corridor. At times he found himself struggling with a sense of some weird incongruity, moments of uneasiness when he wondered what he was doing in this place at this particular time and where, in the long run, it might all be leading. If somebody had told him a year ago that he would be working in the White House he would have consigned this prediction to a category of things that included belief in a flat earth, the notion that the moon was made of Gorgonzola, and the idea of coming one fine day to love the poetry of S. T. Coleridge.