Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  Tarkington was looking through the slats of the blind at the night sky when the telephone rang. He turned around, saw Sharpe pick it up. Tarkington felt tense. He was aware of perspiration on his forehead, his upper lip. He thought: Stupid fucker. Screw yourself. What did they teach you?

  Observe, observe, observe.

  At all times.

  There can be no relaxation of vigilance in the field.

  He stared at Sharpe’s knuckles. They were white beneath the glow of the desk lamp.

  Sharpe said into the receiver: “You got the case?”

  Tarkington waited.

  Sharpe was quiet for a time, then he put the receiver down slowly, deliberately, as if he were afraid of missing the cradle.

  “Lykiard?” Tarkington asked. He poured himself a cone of ice water from the cooler, watching the bubble rise and burst.

  “Lykiard, right,” Sharp said. “Lykiard. But no sign of the case. Anywhere.”

  Tarkington felt blank, dizzy.

  “It’s got to be somewhere, Jesus,” he said.

  Sharpe smiled at him coldly: “I wonder where, Tarkie.”

  2

  Sunday, April 2

  The man with the high-powered binoculars had been waiting for the sun to come up and an end to the long, cold desert night. He had lain most of the night in his down-filled sleeping bag in the tent, shivering, now and then sleeping, waking intermittently because the cold had gotten through to him. When he emerged from his tent it was dawn, the landscape beginning to fill with a soft red light.

  He had camped in an arroyo. Now he scrambled up out of the dry wash, binoculars hanging from his neck, his hands gloved, a balaclava hat around his ears. He lay flat on his stomach. In the east the rising sun was the color of molten lava. But still there was no warmth. The saguaros cast long flattened shadows that were strangely motionless in a way that suggested they would never change, regardless of how high the sun might climb. A terrible landscape, the man thought. He had read books in praise of it, he had read the works of those who had come to love such a place, but he knew that he himself would always feel alien out here. It was hostile. The only book he had come to trust was the one he had in his backpack: Desert Survival.

  He looked through the binoculars.

  Out of focus. He adjusted them for a time. The sun climbed almost perceptibly. There was not a cloud anywhere in the sky. In the west there hung a fading moon and beyond that the stars were one by one going out. The sun and the moon together in the sky: didn’t that mean some form of calamity?

  He looked through the lenses. He swung the glasses slowly left to right, then back again.

  Beyond the perimeter fence that lay some distance away he saw a stationary truck, a jeep, and a solitary figure in uniform stroll along the inside of the electrified fence. The man had an automatic weapon slung against his side, presumably an M-16. From this perspective he could not see the man’s face but he could guess easily at the expression on it: bored, dutifully watchful, longing for his relief to come.

  He trained his lenses now on the building beyond the sentry. Low, flat, painted white: no sign of activity. He was restless because for days there had been no special activity. Guards came and went. There was a black one, tall and powerful in his build. There was a short Caucasian who wore glasses. There was the one with red hair. But nothing ever seemed to happen around the building itself. There were no windows. The guards went inside. The guards came out. Night followed day and the sun and the moon appeared simultaneously in the sky.

  He watched for a while, then went back down the slope to his small tent. He had a portable tape recorder with a cassette of the sounds of desert birds. He had a book on the habits of the cactus wren and another on the vulture. He had a small loose-leaf notebook in which he was meant to record his observations of the behavior of these birds.

  Precautions. Blinds. He was a bird watcher.

  He boiled some water on a Coleman stove and made coffee. As he drank it, he thought: Thirteen days now. Thirteen days of nothing. I have begun to feel like Robinson Crusoe.

  He sympathized with the sentries inside the fence, but they at least had the comfort of knowing for sure when they would be relieved. And presumably they existed on a more attractive diet than raisins, dried apricots, chocolate and coffee. He poured himself a second cup.

  He had been told to stay fifteen days. After that, somebody else would come to take his place. Sometimes he wondered what would happen if nobody came, if Hollander simply forgot all about him. I sure as hell wouldn’t hang out around here until I starved, not for one fifty a week, expenses, and a suntan.

  He thought about Hollander and wondered if what he had heard on the grapevine were true—that Hollander had gone soft, lost his touch, that retirement from service had rendered him senile. Maybe there was something to it; maybe this desert jaunt was symptomatic of some kind of decay in Hollander. After all—where was the point to the exercise? The installation was a hard missile site, so why the fuck did Hollander want it kept under observation like this? Afraid the Russians might just sneak down like vultures from the great desert sky and wing off with a couple of nifty secrets? Or maybe Ted Hollander had had bad dreams of the Yellow Menace bellying across the dust to the perimeter fence and making away with an ICBM? You couldn’t tell with old patriots, he thought: they went one way or another, especially when, like Hollander, they had time on their hands and not much to think about except a dead career and a bad marriage. Old patriots: it was either the hammer and sickle route or a lonely walk into a kind of madness.

  Madness. I must be mad. Not Ted Hollander. This god-forsaken place, this shitty desert. Christ, how he loathed Escalante.

  Why had he ever allowed Ted Hollander to talk him into this?

  He stared at the khaki walls of his pup tent, sipped his coffee, and lit a cigarette from his dwindling supply.

  Why?

  When Thorne woke, Marcia was already up. She had made coffee and was sitting at her desk in the living room, reading Coleridge. Thorne walked through and looked at her sleepily.

  “Truth is the divine ventriloquist,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  He gazed at her a moment, scratched his head, and went out into the kitchen for coffee. When he returned she was sitting with her bare feet up on the top of the desk. He had often wondered how such a beautiful woman could possess such ugly toes. They were short and stubby and stunted. If they had been fingers, you would have guessed arthritis.

  “I’m quoting Coleridge,” she said. “When he was accused of plagiarism, he answered by saying that truth is the divine ventriloquist. It’s charming. I wonder what he would have been like in bed.”

  Thorne sat down on the sofa. All night long he had dreamed. Strange, jumbled images. His father dressed in robes and receiving an honorary degree from the Barbershop Singers of America. His mother leaping off the Brooklyn Bridge. Marcia turning the pages of a book with blank after blank. What are you reading? he had asked. An interesting novel, she had said.

  It was fading.

  He got up and went to the balcony doors. The sky was gray, the morning drizzled rain. Marcia came and stood beside him and hooked her thumbs in the loops of her jeans.

  “You snored all night, my love,” she said.

  “I never snore,” Thorne answered.

  “Last night you did.” She put an arm lightly around his waist. “You look positively inelegant in the morning, you know that?”

  He yawned, pressing his face against the glass.

  He felt inexplicably depressed. The dream, the sense of something disturbing him, some revolt of the unconscious: it was as if he had dreamed the dream of a stranger. He glanced at Marcia, who was pushing her dark hair away from her face.

  She was watching him in an anticipatory way that made him feel uneasy. At times it seemed to him that she had an uncanny capacity for seeing straight into his head, an ability to know what he was thinking or feeling; a creature of intuition. He reached for her
hand and held it. Loving her had come easily to him, so easily that he could not remember with any exactitude the shape of his life before he had met her. He saw, stretching behind himself, a dreary texture of days, hours spent on one or another of the anonymous subcircuits that pass as Washington social life, the harmless cocktail parties and dinners that conceal, just beneath the surface, a curious sense of desperation—he had gone beyond all that now. Whatever emptiness, whatever absences, had existed before, Marcia had managed to fill.

  He looked beyond her at the litter of papers spread across the desk, the pile of opened books, blunt pencils, the yellow felt-tipped pens she used to outline passages; he loved even this, the mess of her life, the incoherent traces she left lying around her.

  She had turned her face away from him; she was looking through the glass at the gray day. He leaned toward her and kissed the side of her face. She smiled.

  “What was that for?” she asked.

  “It was a simple impulse,” he said.

  “Do it again,” she said. “I like simple impulses.”

  He put his arms around her and held her against himself a moment. He was conscious of rain on the glass falling in slow lines, of the smell of her dark hair, of how her hands pressed against the base of his spine. He looked at the desk once more. Her books, her studies, they were somehow locked away from him—like secrets. It was as if there were an aspect of her life he didn’t quite know how to explore.

  And then he noticed, beneath the desk, the major general’s attaché case. The sight of it surprised him in some way, almost as if he had expected it to vanish in the night and the enigma of the major general with it. He stared at it. For a moment he was tempted to pick it up and go through it again, but he resisted: he had done that whole bit already. The lining, looking for some secret compartment and feeling quite ridiculous. Nothing but the manila folder and the blank papers that had been so vital to the old man. What am I meant to do with it now? he wondered. Keep it until the old fellow decides he wants it back?

  He walked to the window.

  Marcia said: “I’m going to work for a bit. Do you mind?”

  “I might go into the office, I don’t know,” he said. He felt the uselessness of a rainy Sunday all around him; Marcia trapped inside her books, incommunicado. A tourist could find something useful to do in this town, but he had seen it all. He shrugged.

  “This damn thesis is beginning to feel like a kid that’s been in my womb for five years,” Marcia said, more to herself than to Thorne. She read, turning pages with her left hand, making notes with her right. He wondered where it would finally lead: an assistant professorship at Old Dominion University or a lectureship at St. Cloud State College? Whatever.

  He turned once again to the balcony door. There were great rain clouds across the city and not a trace of sun; and yet there was heat compressed into the day and he had the feeling that sooner or later an electrical storm might break.

  Sharpe parked his car, a 1975 Buick, in the gravel driveway and walked up toward the house. It was pseudo Tudor and it depressed him. He expected the rain that now fell across the frontage to wash the black beams away. That was how they looked, as if they had been painted weakly on a white surface. He plunged his hands into the pockets of his raincoat. He went around the back of the house, feeling like a tradesman, like a boy delivering something.

  He looked through the misted glass of the conservatory that had been built onto the house at the rear. He tapped lightly on a pane, waited, nothing happened, then he tapped again. He looked across the expanse of the back lawn and thought: Flawless. Flawless the lawn, the rockery, the fountain, the trees that stood like a great green screen against the cedar fence.

  The conservatory door opened.

  He went inside. He felt damp and miserable but he knew Dilbeck would not ask him to take his coat off or have coffee. Dilbeck wouldn’t even invite him to sit down.

  “Terrific weather,” Dilbeck was saying. He was doing something to a plant. Sharpe encountered a whole world of ignorance: who cared about plants? Dilbeck was cutting, with the quiet precision of a surgeon, against the stem.

  “Propagation by stem cutting,” Dilbeck said. He wore glasses low on his nose, like some decrepit schoolteacher. His manner was similar. He lectured in a condescending way, as if everyone around him were mindless and incapable of even momentary concentration.

  Sharpe watched him. He was old and stooped and he wore an unfashionable tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. From somewhere inside the house there was the sound of scales being played on a piano. There was an unmarried daughter, Sharpe remembered, an ugly girl with teeth beyond the assistance of orthodontia. She must have taken up the piano; probably because nobody had taken her up the aisle.

  “Propagation,” Dilbeck said. He put aside his knife and held in the palm of his hand a stem to which was attached a couple of leaves. What’s the fuss? Sharpe wondered. He understood that, through Dilbeck’s eyes, something of a botanical miracle was going on.

  Dilbeck wandered through the plants. Trestle tables were covered with them, a regular jungle. The old man paused here and there, with Sharpe in dutiful attendance, indicating this plant or that. A pomegranate he had grown from seed. An unusual coffee plant already about to flower. What with the cost of coffee these days, Sharpe thought. Grow your own beans. An exquisite crossandra, a magnificent taffeta. Do re me fa sol la ti do. She was as awful on the piano as she was to behold. Clink, miss, clank, clink.

  Dilbeck wrapped his new cutting in a moist plastic bag.

  Sharpe watched rain slither down the conservatory windows. Miserable, miserable day.

  “Something about an attaché case,” Dilbeck said.

  “Yes,” Sharpe said.

  “Your people are sometimes rather ham-fisted, Sharpe.” Dilbeck took off his glasses, put them inside a case, snapped the case shut. “Don’t you teach them how not to be bulls in china shops?”

  Sharpe said something feebly inaudible about the quality of recruits. Can’t get the men these days, not like it used to be, blah, blah blah.

  Dilbeck listened in silence. Then he said, “We must get the damn thing back, mustn’t we?”

  “Yes,” Sharpe said.

  “The problem is that it is now in all likelihood in the possession of our young friend Thorne.” Dilbeck frowned. He raised a hand and began to inscribe patterns in the condensation upon the glass.

  “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 k
now 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.