Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  “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.

  They could be outside, he thought.

  Or anywhere.

  Anywhere.

  He filled the washbasin, splashed handfuls of cold water on his face and eyelids, brushed his short hair. He looked at his reflection and thought of the others: Harley, Garfield, Wilkinson, McLean. Were they all dead? How many more? McLean had committed suicide in a hotel in Mexico City. Garfield had died in an auto accident. Wilkinson in a fire. Harley—but he could not remember. Harley now, he could not remember the man, his face, mannerisms, anything. Natural causes, accidents, suicides. They said. They said.

  The slaves who had constructed the secret chambers of the Great Pyramids were said to have been killed. So that the secrets would be kept.

  Asterisk, he thought.

  He mopped his face with one of the antiseptic towels of the motel. He was tired. The sleep hadn’t done much for him. A dream, maybe the edge of a dream, something fading away like old parchment. A tapestry of mind. It was Escalante. That was the place. The desert. Why was he having this problem in remembering? The fatigue, the fear.

  Had McLean been afraid in his hotel room in Mexico City?

  I could fight, he thought. In the past that is what I would have done. I would have fought like all hell. But then you couldn’t make it after a while. The sinews failed you, the muscles let you down, your memory began its inevitable disintegration, and something in your dead center—soul, life—sagged.

  He held his hands out in front of him. They were steady. He walked to the window, peered out. There was no sign now of the young man who had been diving earlier. He was beset by a consciousness of solitude, thinking suddenly of how hard he had tried to talk Morgenthau into coming with him and how the old man’s nerve had failed at the last. I don’t have what it takes to be a hero, Morgenthau had said. I wish I did—but I don’t. Heroes, Burckhardt thought. Why do they have to be so damnably alone? Do I have what it takes?

  He sat on the edge of the bed. John Thorne. Thorne would know what to do with the contents of the case: Yes, Thorne would have to know. There was nobody else, nobody.

  He sat for a moment, tired now. If he thought back on his life, if he went down the years with a checklist of rights and wrongs, he could at least tell himself: This is one right thing. This. Then
he remembered the faces of all the others, faces seen drifting in firelight. How many of them had tried to break the silence? How many? I want it broken.

  He stared at his suitcase, which lay open on the rug. His clothing was piled neatly to one side; on the other side lay various files, indications of order, of that kind of compulsion to tidiness a man might feel when—What did they say about putting your affairs in order? He bent down, flicked through the files. Certificates of existence, of the tiny scratches and indentations you make on your way through life. A file of insurance documents, another containing mortgage papers for the house in Fredericksburg, birth certificates, marriage—all that was missing was the one nobody ever saw: the death certificate.

  And then, shaken, he let the files fall from his fingers. No, dear God no—He rummaged again through the pile of manila folders. No. How could it be? How could he have done this? Of all things this? He lifted one file, flicked through the pages. Asterisk. How could he have done such a damnably stupid thing? Telephone, he thought, telephone, call Thorne, tell him, tell him—whatever I left for you isn’t what I meant to leave, I screwed it up, whatever you’ve got isn’t what you’re supposed to have, dear God—

  He picked up the telephone. There was a noise at the door. He put the receiver down, listened. The racing of his own blood. The curse of his own fear, his stupidity. Someone was trying to turn a key in the lock. Outside, trying to come in. He stared at papers in the manila folder. Do something. Now. Quickly. For a moment, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t think, there was only the rise of some savage panic inside him. The scraping at the door. Oh dear Christ, Christ. He took the papers from the folder. Thorne—what did I leave for John Thorne?

  He rushed into the bathroom. Cigarette lighter. A flame. He held the papers over the bowl, put the flame to the edge of the papers, watched the papers catch and curl and blacken, saw cinders drift into the water. His fingers burned. Flame darkened his fingernails. It was pain, but not pain. He stuffed cinders, charred paper, even the bits that had not caught fire, deep into the water and then he flushed the cistern. The papers rose up and for a moment he thought they wouldn’t go away, they would simply float there, but then he saw them sucked downward as the water receded. He lowered his head, hearing the door of the room open. He stepped out of the bathroom and looked at the man who had come in, a dark middle-aged man, a picture of some mindless viciousness. And he couldn’t move, couldn’t make himself move. All he could think of was his own mistake, his own utter stupidity and, behind that, behind that on some other stratum of awareness, how everything now was so senselessly lost.

  Sharpe’s office was air-conditioned, a fact for which Tarkington was thankful. Sharpe had his feet up on the desk. His eyelids were heavy, half lowered, giving him the appearance of some kind of lizard. His mouth was tight, like a rubber band drawn to its limits. Tarkington looked at the green filing cabinets and wondered what they contained. Secrets. The reasons for everything. You took orders because of what passed across Sharpe’s desk and went into those fucking cabinets. One day, Tarkington thought, I’d like to look.

  He felt uneasy here. The inner sanctum. Sharpe by nature. You had to keep on your toes or else it was Shanghai or Warsaw or bloody Reykjavik. Tarkington had had his fill of faraway places. He rubbed his huge hands together and slipped a thumb inside the white belt of his leisure suit. Getting fat, he thought. Time for the rubber suit.

  He gazed back at the cabinets.

  “When he went to the restaurant what was he carrying?” Sharpe suddenly asked.

  “He had a case. One of the small square kind. You know.”

  “When he left, what was he carrying?”

  Tarkington felt a certain dryness in his mouth.

  “Was he still carrying the case?” Sharpe asked. He had picked up a yellow pencil and was pointing it toward Tarkington.

  “Sure he was,” Tarkington said. “I saw him.”

  Reykjavik, he thought.

  The restaurant had been crowded. The day hot. He had dreamed at times. He had watched the hostess. He had watched her tits and the movement of her buttocks beneath the long dress.

  “Did you see Thorne arrive?”

  “I was gone by then,” Tarkington said. “I followed the old man outside. I called you.”

  Sharpe closed his eyes. He gave the impression of a man who has spent a lifetime suffering around clowns, incompetents, and plain old-fashioned jerks.

  “Then Lykiard will get the case later?”

  “When he goes through the room, sure,” Tarkington said.

  “Sure,” Sharpe said.

  Tarkington lit a cigarette, watching Sharpe’s face for some sign of disapproval, and finding none. He relaxed a little. He hadn’t seen the old geezer leave the cocktail lounge. He just hadn’t noticed. A moment’s distraction. You turn your head away, a split second. The balance is gone. He stared at the half-open slats of the Venetian blinds. The sky over D.C. was growing dark.

  Sharpe smiled unexpectedly, slyly: “Then it’s going to be clean. Clean as a whistle.”

  “Sure,” Tarkington said. He watched the smile fade, the soporific expression come back. Christ, he thought. You never know where you stand with this baby. A case, an attaché case, he tried to remember, he tried to sift the snapshots of the recent past. Zilch. Christ. He felt a sudden hopelessness. You go along, you take orders, you assume there’s some sense, some deeper meaning, to them, you don’t ask questions, you don’t know, maybe you’re curious and maybe not, but you do what you’re told anyhow—then one time you look away. A girl’s tits. The sight of her thighs. And you’re screwed.

  Let there be a case in the old man’s room.

  Sharpe looked at his watch again. He glanced at some papers in front of him, then at the telephone. Tarkington thought of Lykiard. Lykiard never asked any questions either.

  They drank martinis and watched TV, but Thorne could not concentrate on the movie. It was something of Eisenstein’s; dark shadows and melodramatic eye close-ups and surging music. He looked at Marcia. She was wearing cut-offs and a halter top, lounging on the sofa with her legs crossed. Earlier, after the shower, they had discussed marriage. It wasn’t something either of them particularly felt they needed; and yet there seemed an inevitable drift toward it. He watched the black-and-white images change.

  Marriage, he thought. Should I get married, should I be good? Who was it that had written those lines?

  But it was Burckhardt who was uppermost in his mind. The old man had reached the rank of major general, but what was his history? Thorne seemed to recall that, during the war years, his father and Burckhardt had been involved in an intelligence-gathering agency. Later, after Truman had come into office and Thorne’s father had been elected to the U.S. Congress for the first time, they had worked together on a committee responsible for financing and overseeing the success of Operation Vittles against the Russian blockade of Berlin. Burckhardt, at that time, had been a liaison officer between the congressional committee and the staff of Lucius Clay, the American commander in Germany. Later still, after Thorne’s father had been elected to the U.S. Senate, they had continued their acquaintance, building it over the years into a friendship.

  This much Thorne knew: the periphery of the major general’s career where it came in contact with that of his father. But what about the spaces? What had Burckhardt done during the late 1950s, the 60s, and in recent years? What then? It would be relatively easy to find out—if he wanted. It would also be reasonably easy to assume that the major general had, as Marcia suggested, freaked out. Blank pages, after all. The suburban restaurant, the out-of-the-way rendezvous. You could see the shadowy outlines here of some imagined conspiracy on the old man’s part. If that was what you wanted to see.

  “Doesn’t this flick interest you?” Marcia was asking.

  “I haven’t been following it,” Thorne said.

  Marcia finished her martini. “Seminal in the history of film, Philistine,” she said. She got up from th
e sofa to mix fresh drinks. He watched her move around in the half-dark of the living room.

  She brought him a drink. “Notice the olive impaled on the toothpick,” she said.

  “Which I loathe.”

  “Exactly.” She sat on the arm of his chair. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering if it should be a civil or a religious ceremony, right? It’s befuddling your brain. How many guests, where do we honeymoon, crap like that.”

  “You’re a regular mind reader,” he said.

  “Ah-hah.” She touched him lightly beneath the chin. “The old warrior’s empty manuscript, no?”

  “Something like that.” He tasted his martini.

  She was silent for a time, watching him, the palm of one hand flat against the side of her face. “I never thought I’d love somebody like you,” she said.

  “Who did you imagine loving?”

  “Dunno. A professor of English lit, maybe. You know the kind, spectacles, quiet manner, bookish. But a thunderball in the bedroom.”

  “Are you complaining?” Thorne asked.

  “Uh-huh.” She leaned forward and kissed him. She tasted faintly of vermouth, olives.

  When she drew her face back she said: “Maybe the old guy was trying to tell you something. It’s like how we students of lit are always being told to read between the lines.”

  “Except there aren’t any lines,” Thorne said. “There aren’t any lines.”

  Now, now there was no more running, nothing to run for—beyond fear there was a vacuum, a place where you accepted your end. His assailant’s eye, a bird’s eye, the predator. He felt strong hands on his shoulders, a vise around his neck, and he was being dragged to the edge of the swimming pool. Survive, goddamn, survive. It came back, when you didn’t need it and couldn’t do a damn thing with it, when you had become resigned to an ending, it came back. He scratched, kicked, bit. Thorne, he thought—Thornethornethorne thorne. It was useless.

  The edge of the pool. Blue water. Parasols overhead, umbrellas tilting, the dark sky beyond, hazy stars over the city. Kicking, clawing. Live. To die like this without a fight. A rat, a dog, nothing more. And what had he left behind him but silences? His face was held beneath water and he was confused—had he been dragged out of the room? that iron hand clamped across his mouth? dragged, drawn, it was a dream, it was a nightmare of falling from impossible heights. A file, a folder, everything important just sucked away—his face was being held beneath water. Panic, the urge to fight, no strength left, nothing remaining. He opened his eyes. The underwater lights blinded with the intensity of fireworks exploding in his brain. Thorne—He attempted to raise his face from the water. No. Couldn’t do it. No. Nothing left. He saw his own limp hands sink in swirls of foam under the surface, he felt himself drift and drift and dream—and the dream was taking him round the edges of some impermeable darkness toward which, inevitably, he was sinking.