Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  “You made the choice,” Brinkerhoff said. “Nobody made it for you.”

  Hollander was silent now. The waitress approached their table, smiling, ready to please. He tried to remember what he had heard or read about service in Soviet restaurants. It was bad, nonexistent.

  “Now,” Brinkerhoff said. “The remainder of your documents. Do you have those?”

  Hollander finished his coffee. “I have to go to the bank before we do anything else,” he said.

  Brinkerhoff looked at his watch. “We have plenty of time.”

  Hollander ordered a second cup of coffee. He watched the waitress—Barbara Ann—cross to the coffeepot and pour. He looked up at the illuminated menus that hung on the walls. A world of waffles, pancakes, doughnuts, all lit in scrumptious color. Havana, he thought. Then Moscow.

  “You’re tense,” Brinkerhoff said. “Don’t be.”

  “I’m trying,” Hollander said. He shut his eyes. When did you first feel you could save the world? I don’t know, Doc. Have you always wanted to sacrifice yourself? I don’t know, Doc, I don’t know. You really think what you’re doing will help sustain the balance of power? I wish I could be sure, I wish I could be sure. Hollander, I think you’re a fool.

  He was aware of Brinkerhoff watching him.

  He was trying to be sympathetic, understanding, he was stretching every fiber in a heart unaccustomed to feeling so that he might make Hollander be at ease.

  “I’m fine,” Hollander said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  Sharpe took the call when it came: he had been lying on the office sofa, trying to catch up on his sleep, idly watching a game show on the color TV he had recently fetched from his apartment. It was called Wheel of Fortune. Contestants spun a wheel and got to buy prizes. Sometimes they went bankrupt. I’ll have the his and her dressing gowns, a woman was saying, a faceful of avarice. I’ll have the Gucci travel bag. I’ll have the rest in a Tiffany gift certificate. The wheel spun. The telephone rang. He was thinking, somewhat detachedly, of giving up the apartment and moving full time into the office. Think what you’d save. He reached for the receiver.

  It was Richard F. Drucker. An old cold-warrior. He saw commies under the lids of saucepans and thought the long-dead senator from Wisconsin America’s only modern saint. But Drucker was good with the electronic stuff; he had been born to eavesdrop.

  “I’ve got something for you,” Drucker said.

  Sharpe, watching the wheel of fortune spin, listened. When he got off the line, he called Dilbeck. From here on in it was a matter of speed.

  In the public library Thorne opened the atlas at a table in the reference room. American states, American states. Arizona. He ran his finger down the list of cities and towns.

  Eden89

  Ehrenburg93

  Elfrida700

  Elgin247

  El Mirage3258

  Eloy5381

  Escalante72

  Seventy-two, Thorne thought. It was your original one-horse settlement.

  Escalante72C4

  He checked C4 on the map.

  Escalante lay somewhere between a place called Congress and a place called Dixon. He estimated it to be about a hundred and twenty miles northwest of Phoenix.

  He closed the atlas.

  He had been running all day, he had been scrambling like a thing caught in quicksand. Now he was tired and hollow. He massaged his eyelids, blinked, looked around the library. Empty tables, a middle-aged woman on a step-ladder, piling books on a high shelf, a clerk behind the desk stamping something on paper. There was a profound silence in here; you could not imagine noise, save for the whisper of turning pages. A fat guy was standing at the stacks of crime thrillers. To Thorne, he looked remotely familiar, a fact he dismissed from his mind.

  Three, four days ago—it was like ancient history to him now. Three, four days ago, there had been a normality, a sense of things being in their right place. Not now. What could you say to describe the now: an awareness of flux? He thought of the midday flight for Paris. By now they would know he hadn’t gone. They.

  Things in the woodwork of Washington.

  The termites that nibbled on the timbers of your life.

  They.

  Who were they?

  More significantly, who were they not?

  He laid his hands on the cover of the atlas. The fat man by the crime stacks was leafing through a book. He wasn’t reading; he had an abstracted, distant expression on his face.

  The doughnut shop!

  Unless he was badly mistaken, he had seen the same fat man inside the doughnut shop a while back. It would make sense. They would have somebody watching him.

  Thorne closed his eyes and wondered: Have I gone mad?

  Is this lunacy? People following you, men drowning in swimming pools, wives afraid of their own kitchens, blank pages on a manuscript, a burglary, sudden unemployment. It had all the connected elements of a dream.

  Somebody else’s dream. Not his own.

  He got up from the table and went outside. He crossed the parking lot and sat inside the VW, watching the library steps. The fat man came out a moment later, walked in a leisurely way down the steps, turned his head this way and that, looked at the VW, then lit a cigarette. It figured, Thorne thought. He wasn’t very good at it. But maybe there were ramifications to that too, maybe he was supposed to know he was being followed because—because? Because of what? There might be more than one. There might be another he didn’t know about. He was meant to notice the fat man, a kind of diversion that would keep him from spotting the other.

  If there were an other.

  Dear Christ, he thought.

  They have me going in circles.

  He started the engine of the VW. The man went to a pale-green Catalina. Yeah, Thorne thought: it was the same car that had picked him up just after dawn. The same damn car.

  He drove out of the parking lot.

  After a moment the Catalina followed.

  He watched it in the mirror. It was as if the sight of it were the only tangible proof he had that he wasn’t going completely out of his mind.

  “It defeats me,” Dilbeck was saying. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Why doesn’t it make sense?” Sharpe said. “He called his former wife, sometimes a guy does that kind of thing—”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Dilbeck said. “Hollander knows the methodology, Sharpe. He knows the operation, the modus operandi. He knows we’re looking for him. He must know we put the taps on all the numbers he’s likely to call. He isn’t a stupid man. Why call his wife?”

  Sharpe was silent. He felt the sunlight beat down on his scalp, wished he had worn his hat. He watched Dilbeck look down in the direction of the trees; a slight breeze made the stalks shiver, the branches shift.

  “Going away,” Dilbeck said.

  “That’s what he told her.”

  “Going away,” Dilbeck said again. “He calls to say goodbye.”

  “Like he’s never coming back,” Sharpe said.

  “Mmmm,” Dilbeck said.

  Mmmm, Sharpe thought. The sound of wisdom.

  “But he knows he’s going to be tapped, dammit.” Dilbeck waved vaguely in the direction of the house. Sharpe swung around, expecting to see the daughter, but the old man was simply gesturing in an idle way.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know,” Sharpe said.

  “No,” Dilbeck said. “It’s almost as if he wants us to catch him.”

  “That doesn’t make any better sense,” Sharpe said.

  Dilbeck shrugged. “You traced the call?”

  Sharpe nodded. He smiled as if to say: We’re no slouches. Dilbeck put his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

  “He wants to be caught,” he said, more to himself than to Sharpe. Then he looked at Sharpe. “It isn’t all just black and white, Sharpe. Sometimes the colors run and you’ve got indeterminate grays.”

  Sharpe looked away. He hated this feeling he always got that Dilbeck was trying to
lecture him on the subtleties of life.

  Dilbeck looked inexplicably sad all at once. “Grays,” he said again. He wasn’t thinking about Hollander now: he was thinking about John Thorne and his girl. Pretty girl, pretty name. It was sometimes a pity what you had to do.

  3

  Fredericksburg. The Catalina had been behind him on I-95 all the way. Thorne tried to accept it: it was a fact of life, a stubborn Catalina that would not be shaken. He parked the car in a side street in Fredericksburg and went into a bookstore; he browsed, seeing nothing, among a pile of glossy, hardbound, cut-rate novels. The fat man came in, the bell above the door tinkled, and Thorne rushed abruptly past the guy back into the street, noticing the look of surprise in the plump face, the raising of eyebrows, the way the mouth was suddenly distended in anxiety. Outside, Thorne walked quickly along the street, turned, turned again, found himself hurrying across a small park where kids played on slides and built castles in a sandpit. He moved under the shadow of the trees, sat down on the grass, looked back the way he had come. The kids screamed. The fat man was nowhere. Running in a panic through the streets of Fredericksburg. Thorne closed his eyes: all he could think of was Anna Burckhardt. It was as if he had all the pieces save the final one without which nothing would make any sense at all. Anna Burckhardt. Why did he think she knew more than she could tell? The face filled with dread, the motion of a cigarette, the rain on the broken-down roof of a gazebo. Frightened. Scared unto death. She had to know more. She had to know more about Asterisk. He had no other cards to play. He had an empty hand except for Anna Burckhardt.

  He stood up, still looking back the way he had come.

  There was no fat guy. The kids playing, the mothers of Fredericksburg patiently watching, sitting on sunlit benches and talking among themselves and God’s in his heaven. He crossed the park. The sun was warm now. He walked along streets that suggested picture postcards of a lost America: thirty miles and a hundred light-years from Washington. People sat on porches, watched the street, the occasional passing car; the sidewalks were lined with trees, nothing altered here, the patterns remained the same regardless of the occupants of the White House coming and going, regardless of change. There was a magnificent indifference here, Thorne thought. Save in one particular house where a scared woman sat at a kitchen table and mourned the passing of something … Thorne hesitated at a street corner. A kid leaning against a fire hydrant looked at him, shading his eyes from the sunlight. Thorne crossed the street. Faintly, a breeze blew through the trees. He could hear birds. He suddenly thought of his own childhood, summers at the Cape, the precious times he spent with his father. My father, he thought. The genetic attachment, the freak whim of nature. Another man’s son wouldn’t be here right now, wouldn’t be doing this, wouldn’t be ensnared in any of this.

  He stopped outside Anna Burckhardt’s house. It was still, it had the appearance of emptiness, the windows blind and unyielding and drapes drawn across them. He looked up and down the street. Nothing. No Catalina, no fat man, nothing. He went onto the porch, rang the doorbell, waited. She didn’t come. He rang again, nothing. He tried to look in through the windows, through the spaces in the drapes, but he saw only dimness and the outlines of furniture. He went around the back of the house. The kitchen door was closed. He tapped lightly on the glass. Something moved in the gazebo; spinning round, he saw a crow rise from the rotted roof and fly into the trees. He tapped a second time. She didn’t come. Why did he have this feeling that she was inside?

  “Mrs. Burckhardt,” he called out. “It’s me, John Thorne. Please open your door.”

  He peered through the windows of the kitchen. He tried the kitchen door. It opened. The house smelled musty, stale, old perfumes trapped and decayed.

  He crossed the floor. There were dirty dishes in the sink. Saucepans, knives and forks, glasses. The faucet dripped. He tightened it.

  “Mrs. Burckhardt,” he said.

  His own voice came back in a dull echo. He stepped into the living room. He stopped.

  Whatever he had hoped to find here was lost to him.

  He sat down, his hands shaking.

  Whatever she knew, whatever it was, belonged in a realm he could not enter.

  She lay face down on the sofa. A bottle that had once contained pills or capsules lay on the floor, just under the fingers of her dangling hand. Her skirt was bunched up at the back. She had worn no underwear. He got up, pulled the garment back in place, but he did not turn her over to look at her face. The room had that queer vibration of recent death, as if some singular element of life, having failed to escape, remained trapped between the walls. He stood over her. Suicide, of course. Estranged wife depressed over husband’s recent death.

  He didn’t buy a word of it.

  It was a fabricated headline that might convince forensic medicine, a coroner’s court. But he knew she had not died from her own hand. He was sickened, sickened by the needless waste, another life gone.

  He sat down, turned his face from the sight of the woman, found himself thinking suddenly of Marcia. Of how it would be if he stepped into his apartment and found her face down on the sofa, the empty bottle of pills, the pallid skin—

  Marcia.

  It would be so simple for them.

  Marcia.

  He got up and went out through the front door and walked quickly to his car.

  He noticed the Catalina idling a little way down the street.

  They came out of the First National Bank, Hollander with the envelope in his coat pocket. Beside him, Brinkerhoff walked in an oddly stiff manner, as if he were afraid of the contact of concrete on the soles of his feet. They paused at the edge of the sidewalk, waiting to cross. The light was against them. Traffic flowed past in a hundred reflections of sunlight. Hollander glanced at the buildings on the other side of the street.

  The last time, he thought.

  My country, ’tis of thee—What did he feel? Why couldn’t he fetch the feelings up from inside himself, examine them, attach labels to them? This process of emotional regurgitation appalled him: he had reached his decision, there was no way of changing it now.

  The very last time.

  A smell of fried food floated out of a nearby franchise. He looked at the tinted windows of the restaurant, at the silhouettes of diners, the white ghosts of girls moving between the tables with trays of hamburgers, french fries, carbonated drinks in waxy containers. The last time, he thought: should I feel a sudden bleak regret? He was numb. He experienced nothing now.

  He felt Brinkerhoff’s hand on his elbow. Maybe, Hollander thought, maybe he expects me to run. A failure of nerve at the very last hurdle. He watched the shadows in the buildings. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Would he find life insurance in Moscow? A department store. A window filled with dummies in raincoats and a banner that said: Be Ready for When Those April Showers Come Your Way!!! A woman selling flowers on the corner. She sat hunched over colored petals in the manner of someone at prayer. Hollander looked at the signal change. WALK DON’T WALK. WALK. He crossed to the other side, Brinkerhoff still attached to him by the elbow.

  Their car was parked a little way down the street. They had jettisoned Hollander’s; wherever they were going they were going in Brinkerhoff’s black Fiat. He felt edgy again, the movement of his nerves; it isn’t something a man does every day of his life, he thought. It isn’t every day you decide to go over the wall.

  Stop, he thought.

  Stop.

  The face in the parked Chevrolet. The face behind glass, turned away from him slightly, but it was a face he knew. He walked quickly, Brinkerhoff striding beside him. How had they picked him up? He knew the answer to that one. He knew he had been trapped by his own sentimentality. It was falling to pieces all around him.

  “Quick,” he said.

  Brinkerhoff unlocked the door of the Fiat. Hollander got inside. Brinkerhoff steered the car away from the sidewalk.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

&nb
sp; “Something is very wrong,” Hollander said.

  Brinkerhoff bit his lower lip. “What have you seen?”

  Hollander felt the shadows of the tall buildings fall across his face, the occasional stabs of sun that burst between the concrete.

  “What have you seen?” Brinkerhoff asked again.

  Hollander turned around in his seat.

  The Chevrolet was behind them. It was Brandt. Brandt, human flypaper. Brandt whom he had once sent to Mexico City to dispatch a man called McLean in a hotel room. He remembered: It has to look like he did it himself, Brandt.

  I can make it look any way you like, Ted.

  McLean, Hollander thought. McLean and all the others who had died on account of Asterisk.

  He felt he was looking into a cracked mirror; and what he saw there was bloodless and without life.

  Thorne entered the apartment; what he wanted more than anything else was a drink, something stiff and bracing.

  “Marcia,” he said.

  The apartment was unlit. Outside, the afternoon was giving way, the sun going.

  “Marcia,” he said. She wasn’t on the balcony. He saw her books in a neat pile on the desk. An unusual sense of order, no sprawl—

  He was horrified. It was so atypical, so totally uncharacteristic, that he felt a sudden falling sensation in the center of his chest as though his heart had slipped abruptly from its mooring. He saw Anna Burckhardt’s face again.

  “Marcia,” and his voice was hoarse.

  There was no answer.

  He walked across the living room.

  “Marcia.” He heard his own feeble cry. This wild apprehension, the leap of his nerves, a pulse laboring beneath his eyes: Marcia.

  He found her in the kitchen.

  She was sitting at the table. There were suitcases on the floor beside her. She looked pale, pinched, there was something altogether spaced out in her appearance; the glazed expression in the eye he had come to associate with the times when she smoked dope.

  “Marcia—”

  “I thought it over, John,” she said. “I don’t see any future for us.”

  What

  He laughed, relieved that nothing had happened to her and simultaneously shocked by her sentences, by the sight of the cases, the way she looked, the chill in her voice.