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There had been two blurry years at Harvard doing law: what could you say about that? Humdrum: anathematic to him—the stifling weight of legal judgments, the dust of dilapidated precedents. It was followed by the obligatory year of doing Europe in a VW bus; a drifting time, a fragile existence at best, one day shading pretty much into the next. There was a lack of adhesive, of a glue that would hold the experiential things together. And what he had come to realize, almost as something of a shock, was that he needed an epoxy of some sort to keep the passages of time together in a purpose.

A purpose.

He went to the window. The Secret Service agent, as though he anticipated an outbreak of demons, a plague of protesters, appeared to be crouching in the shrubbery, his face turned in the direction of Penn Avenue. Thorne watched a moment; the raincoated figure stood suddenly upright and moved off in long exaggerated strides.

Journalism, he wondered: what had attracted him to that?

He had done the upstate New York newspaper bit—funerals, flower shows, Eagle scout awards, graduations, weddings: the minuscule events that were finally sandwiched between the ads that paid for the paper. He remembered long hours, bleak snowy winters, a dreary sense of a system enduring in a vacuum. Where was the outside world? the real world?

His telephone was ringing.

It was Duncannon, one of the legal aides, suggesting a lunch. Thorne declined. He knew the nature of these lunches, the floating conspiracies, the tiny struggles for position, for power, for the opening that would suggest a foothold on the Way Up. He put the receiver down and thought:
What am I doing here?
What part do I have in the whispers in the men's rooms, the quiet words in nearby restaurants, the confidences—both false and true—that are exchanged in the mess?

What indeed?

You had to be ambitious to make it around here; you had to want it badly, you had to
hurt
for it. Where the hell do I fit in this scheme of things? he wondered. Where do I fit? where do I go from here?

He had been in Albany, doing some press work for the Democratic Party, when Max Farrago had called. Out of the ether. It's basically a scissors-and-paste deal, Farrago had said, but keep in mind that it's White House scissors and White House paste. It was a tough thing to decline: the only thing that mystified him now was why
he
had been singled out. His father, of course—the recommendation of some old family friend, some power broker, whom he had never been able to identify. Even the dead, he thought, don't necessarily lose their touch.

He sat behind his desk again and idly picked up the
Post
. He leafed through the inside pages.

And there it was.

There it was.

An inside page, lower left column, no more than a couple of dark inches of type.

He read it once, twice, a third time.

Then he picked up his telephone and called Marcia.

She answered yawning, still half asleep.

“Did you see the morning paper?” he asked. “My old warrior apparently killed himself in a swimming pool at a motel.”

She was silent for a time. He could see her stretched across the bed, the telephone in her hand; he could feel her fumble for something to say. What
do
you say? he wondered.
Suicide by drowning
. By drowning, he thought.
Major General Walter F. Burckhardt had had a long and distinguished career in the Air Force
. He picked up his scissors in one hand and thought: Do people choose that as a way out?

“I'm sorry, John. Was there family?”

“It mentions a wife somewhere,” Thorne said. Drowning: what kind of fucking sense did that make?

“I'm sorry,” she said again.

He mumbled something, hung up, snipped the item from the newspaper. Why? Jesus, why? Why did anybody want to kill himself? Loneliness, despair, the end of a long line of rejection, intolerable humiliation, dishonor—were any of these applicable to Burckhardt? He saw a small middle-aged man at a funeral. A handshake on a rainy dying day. A clap on the shoulder, a touch. Gentle, solicitous, sincere. Of all things, sincere.
Ben Thorne was a great man
. It was misty, uncertain, the intangible web of a memory. You step to the edge of the pool, then what? Do you jump in? or do you walk the steps at the shallow end and just keep on strolling? What state of mind? Christ almighty, what state of mind?

And the wife, the wife he had never seen. Had she been with Burckhardt in the motel? Had she discovered him lying in the pool?

He shut his eyes: a man floating in the fake aquamarine of a pool, a corpse drifting through filtered chemicals, what condition of the heart, what poisoned state of mind, what emotional disintegration, spiritual decay—madness?

It's vital I see you, John
.

Vital, he thought.

Well: it couldn't be vital now, could it?

He fingered the clipping and looked at the photograph of his father that hung near the window. It was a stern portrait taken some months before the senator's death. The eyes were humorless, lifeless, the expression in them numb and at the same time vaguely inquisitorial, as if the man had spent his life asking questions to which he knew there were no answers. It wasn't the man Thorne remembered. He had been upright, moral, qualities that might have been tedious in themselves, but they had been offset by a sense of humor.

The only thing Ben Thorne had never been heard to joke about in his life was the Constitution of the United States. He knew the document backward, forward, sideways, by heart. Thorne remembered how, as a child, he had been obliged to listen again and again to the historic background of the document … a memory burned into him like a cinder in his brain. The question-and-answer sessions. The quizzes.
Who was the first postmaster of the United States? Who printed the Declaration of Independence? Why was Sam Adams not chosen to be a delegate to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention?
Even now the names were imprinted in Thorne's mind, indelible, heroes all to his father: Patrick Henry, Roger Sherman, the giants Paine and Jefferson.

His father.

The slow demented dying of the man, the profound disintegration, the long and terrible nights of pain when it had seemed to Thorne that no one person should be allowed to suffer in such a way. Touching the cold hands, seeing the hollow cheeks, wiping saliva from the corners of the mouth with a handkerchief, listening to the monotonous, crazed monologues that had been prologues to dying. Christ: the death was a relief, the tears a release, the loss an end to anguish. I watched him, Thorne thought, I watched him die, I saw him go down, I saw a man I loved sink, a man who was at times a stranger, at times a friend, but always loved, always that. The old man.…

He turned away from the photograph. He picked up the clipping again. The fading of old warriors, he thought. The senator and the major general: what kind of young men had they been? What had they hoped for? What disillusionments had they lived through? A man walks into a swimming pool fifteen years after his close friend has succumbed to the misery of brain cancer. Finished, done with, over.

He put the clipping down. The garbled voice on the telephone had been trying to tell him something. And maybe, just maybe, if I hadn't failed to keep the appointment, if there hadn't been an accident on the freeway, the major general would be alive now. No: you can't blame yourself. How could you predict the urge to self-destruction from a few hasty words on a telephone? You needed a special kind of clairvoyance for that.

He looked once more at the picture of his father, almost as if he felt the photograph were accusing him of something. He put the clipping in his wallet and sat without moving for a long time. Then, finally, he shrugged, made a phone call, and arranged a lunch date and a favor.

2

In the Sunday edition of
The New York Times
, which he looked at propped up against a Heinz ketchup bottle, Hollander surveyed the usual front-page despair. There was fresh evidence linking the CIA with insurgency in a South American republic. Communism and bananas, Hollander thought. An indefatigable combination. Sleep easy, America. There was a story about President Foster's press conference of the day before.
The American people deserve open government. We don't want government by secret in this country
.

He looked through the window of the restaurant into the street. A truck had stalled in the center of the road and irate drivers were banging their horns.

He turned back to the newspaper.

Photographs of the Martian surface. No apparent sign of vegetation. Tough titty, he thought. You spend millions to send some flimsy craft out there only to discover a Sahara with rocks. The taxpayer was John Sucker.
We're still receiving pictures, still analyzing the data
.

Hollander doused his one remaining pancake with artificial maple syrup. The Russians were making noises in Africa while Amin was continuing to sever heads. The Cubans were discussing nothing, as usual, while supplying troops to cheapshit kingdoms in unlikely places. Without a sense of balance, Hollander thought, and a touch of humor, you could go whacko.

He drank some of his coffee, which tasted as if it were brewed entirely of chicory, and then he sat back and lit a cigarette. He watched the street again. The truck hadn't budged from the center of the road and the driver was giving the finger to the motorists behind him. A waitress loomed up at his table, a plain girl with intense acne.

“Everything okay?” she said. Her lapel badge said her name was Theresa.

“Just dandy, Theresa,” he said.

She smiled and passed on to the next table. Hollander looked at the faces of the other diners. There was a mindless quality to them all. They shoveled and chewed and swallowed. Sometimes you had to remind yourself that they experienced pain and sorrow and grief as well as joy and buttermilk pancakes. Only a humanist had the right to detest the species. He folded his newspaper over and wondered why it was so bulky. It could be reduced to a couple of sheets if it weren't for Bloomingdale's and Altman's and all the others. He opened the book review section, flipping the pages to the best-seller list. He hated this: it reminded him he had a contract with a New York house for his memoirs. He hadn't written a single page. He wasn't likely to. He hated the idea of words as mirrors.

As soon as you write about yourself, he thought, you start to wonder who the fuck you are.

He closed the book review, finished his coffee, lit another English Oval. Through the window, across the parking lot, a neon sign said
PANCAKE PALACE
.

We meet in the most hideous places, Hollander thought.

He looked at his watch. It was almost ten. Myers would be in his little tent. Probably masturbating. Myers had the slightly gray, somewhat jaded look of the inveterate jerker.

“I'm late. Sorry.”

The man who sat down facing Hollander was tall, almost bald. What little hair he possessed was smeared with brilliantine and combed back flat and slick. He had long, anemic fingers. Hollander knew he could pass himself off as an undertaker.
This way to the crypt, Ladies and Gentlemen
. He wore a black coat that sparkled with raindrops.

“A few minutes,” Hollander said, and shrugged.

The other man studied the menu. “Is a pancake like a blintz?” he asked.

“Try it and see,” Hollander answered.

“And maple syrup,” the man said. He looked questioningly at Hollander, one eyebrow arched. He had hollow cheekbones and the complexion of a worm. The All-Slavic Boy. I keep strange company, Hollander thought.

The other man, whom Hollander knew only as Brinkerhoff, called to the waitress. He ordered a short stack of buttermilk pancakes with butter and syrup. He put his hands flat on the table, one alongside the other, and studied them a moment, as if they were not his own and might at any second leap up in the air.

The truck was being towed away outside. There was the flashing orange light of a breakdown vehicle. Brinkerhoff watched it for a time.

Then he turned to Hollander and said: “Your position strikes me as slightly strange. As indeed it strikes my superiors. Your motivation, to say the least, is highly questionable.”

A world of cynics, Hollander thought. Everywhere you went you collided with the disbelievers and the skeptics, who wouldn't recognize a logical position if they saw one.

“I made my position plain, I think,” he said. “I haven't changed.”

“What you have to offer …” Brinkerhoff paused. His pancakes had arrived. He stared at them.

“Everything okay?” Theresa asked, smiling. She replenished Hollander's cup with a brown liquid that he looked at distastefully.

Brinkerhoff bit into the pancake. He suggested somebody sampling wine. Hollander put out his cigarette. “You've had my credentials checked, of course.”

“Of course. They are as they say. Your credentials are not what concerns us.”

Hollander waited. He thought of Myers again inside his pup tent. April; the cold desert mornings would be freezing his ass.

“It's altogether vague,” Brinkerhoff said. “You promise us—”

“Revolutionary information, was the phrase—”

“Naturally, you don't specify. That is fair enough at this stage. Why give something away for nothing?” Evidently tired of the American delicacy, Brinkerhoff pushed his plate aside. He inserted a finger into his mouth and picked at something.

“Your own position is what puzzles us,” he went on. “You ask for no money. You run the risk of being called a traitor. All you want from us is the assurance that we will allow you to come to the Soviet Union. Why doesn't it add up?”

Believe, don't believe, Hollander thought. He was suddenly tired. There was too much tension. He could feel a tightness in his chest. I didn't give up the job just because I wanted to run into more of that old hypertension, I wanted peace.