Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  He still wasn’t certain.

  He sat up on the edge of his bed.

  From another cubicle he could hear the sound of a man drunkenly weeping, repeating the same word over and over and over. Life life life life life. A litany of desperation. He wanted to go to the man and offer some crumb of comfort, but it was Marcia he had to see first.

  He left the flophouse. The street outside was a narrow passageway of decrepit tenements, forlorn figures sitting on steps and passing brown paper bags back and forth, seemingly immune to the slashing rain that, driven by a slight wind, fell in diagonal lines. He walked quickly up the street. He was looking for a telephone but the first one he came to, located outside a run-down gas station, had been vandalized. He continued to walk. His muscles ached. His strength threatened continually to ebb away from him and, weakened every so often, he would pause, lean against a wall, wait, as if he were hanging to some slender thread that kept him attached to awareness.

  He found a main thoroughfare of small stores, pawnshops, a gospel church, cheap eating places where darkening chickens hung barbecuing in windows. There was a telephone box on a corner. He stepped in, shut the door, inserted coins, dialed Marcia’s home number. He heard her voice and, as soon as he did, he hung up. Good, he thought. I know at least that she’s home. He opened the door and stood for a moment in the street, looking this way and that, thinking: Nobody would believe that only a few days ago this bum was working in the White House. Nobody would buy that one in a hundred years. He began to walk. He considered the possible problems. Her telephone would be tapped, one; her place of residence would be under constant surveillance, two. Therefore, to get in touch with her he would have to circumvent these difficulties.

  Okay, he thought.

  Okay.

  I’ve come this far. What’s a few yards farther?

  Dilbeck was wakened by the sound of his telephone ringing. He picked it up. Sleep hadn’t eased his headache any; he felt he had been struck by a hammer on the cranium.

  “I thought you’d like to be kept posted,” Sharpe said.

  Dilbeck said nothing. He could hear his daughter singing somewhere in the house.

  “We know that Thorne spent several hours in one of those flophouses for down-and-outs—”

  “Is he still there?” Dilbeck asked, hearing his own voice as if it were coming from his gut. He looked out of the window of his bedroom at the falling rain.

  “No.” Sharpe could be heard coughing. “A bus driver remembers dropping him off this morning in that neighborhood. I had my people do a door-to-door of hotels. I don’t think we’re far behind him now.”

  “Good,” Dilbeck said. “Keep it moving.”

  Sharpe hung up.

  Dilbeck put the receiver down. My head, he thought. He opened a bottle of aspirin that lay on the bedside table, spilled a few into the palm of his hand and swallowed them with a mouthful of stale water. Closing in, he thought. Closing in.

  His bedroom door opened. His daughter stood there grinning.

  “I’ve made you a poached egg for lunch,” she said brightly.

  “Splendid,” he said, thinking: The last thing I need is a poached egg.

  Thorne went inside the florist’s, fully aware of the disdain his appearance would arouse in the smug face of the assistant. She was middle-aged, her face both self-satisfied and sour, as if life had come to her as an unwanted gift.

  Thorne heard the tiny bell ring above his head as he stepped inside. The air was scented, heavy with a variety of perfumes. He selected roses, red roses, and carried the bunch to the counter.

  The assistant stared at him. “You want to buy these?” she asked, as though the possibility of a man in a shabby overcoat having any need for such delicacies as flowers was quite beyond her comprehension.

  “I want them delivered,” Thorne said. “I understand you have a speedy delivery service.”

  “I believe that is what it says in the window,” she remarked, touching the roses in such a way as to suggest that she suspected Thorne had contaminated them.

  “I want them delivered immediately,” Thorne said.

  “Anything to oblige,” she said, curtly.

  “I don’t expect to pay for sarcasm,” he said.

  She stared at him in a chilly way, then apparently chose to jettison his rudeness from her mind.

  “You wish to write a card, sir?” she asked.

  “I do.” Thorne was given a small card and a pen. He thought for a moment, considered the risk, then wrote anyhow. I love poetry and the places where poetry is read. But it is a cautious thing. I hate lint in my navel. He slipped the card across the counter to the woman, having added the address. She scrutinized the message.

  “How long will it take?” he asked.

  “To that part of town?” She frowned a little. “An hour, perhaps less.”

  “It’s very important,” he said.

  “It always is.” She slipped the card into a small envelope and attached it to the wrapping around the flowers. “Cash or charge?”

  “Charge,” he said.

  She appeared dismayed. He gave her a bank card, a driver’s license, but held back his White House pass out of the fear that, given his appearance, she would consider him a total fraud and call the police. She made out the slip, he signed, she checked the picture on his driver’s license against his face, and finally looked up his bank card account number in her book of lists.

  “Thanks,” Thorne said.

  “Call again, won’t you?” she said.

  Thorne went outside, hoping the roses would be delivered, hoping Marcia would understand both the message and the terrible need for caution. He looked up and down the street. It was still raining hard. The street glistened, the gutters ran, litter and debris rushed in a crazy way to the drains. Now, he thought. The poetry room. Where, with his fingers crossed, he would wait for her.

  3

  Brinkerhoff picked up the telephone. The call that was coming through was long distance, his second of the day. He switched the scrambler button on and heard the undersecretary’s voice on the line, although it was distant, fading, sucked away at times by static.

  “I think you should know, Brinkerhoff, that since we last spoke, nothing has happened. Absolutely nothing,” the undersecretary said. “How do you explain that away?”

  “I’m not sure,” Brinkerhoff said. He was frowning, and noticed that he had twisted his fingers in the telephone cord.

  “Consider,” said the undersecretary. “Consider the silences. Aren’t they unusual? Consider, too, our previous experiences in situations similar to this one—”

  “There haven’t been situations similar to this one,” Brinkerhoff said. He gazed up at the obligatory portrait of Lenin, then away, looking at the sunshine on the window.

  “Defectors, man, defectors,” said the undersecretary. “We’ve had them before. And in every case, every case, as soon as we had the defector safely in our possession our intelligence people began to pick up on the desperate attempts of the CIA to discredit the defector. Obviously, they would have to try to undermine the credibility of someone who has, so to speak, jumped the wall. It’s a part of the game …”

  The undersecretary was silent a moment.

  Brinkerhoff stood up. He paced around the large room, passed the overstuffed furniture, the trappings of a diplomatic mission. It was stuffy, the air stale, and he found difficulty in breathing.

  “Why, then, have there been no attempts so far to discredit your Hollander? Why? Why this huge silence? Do you have an explanation?”

  “No,” Brinkerhoff said. “Of course, it’s early, their machine may not have begun to work—”

  “I don’t buy that,” said the undersecretary. “Their machine never stops working. No sooner do we have a defector than we start to receive reports, reports we are meant to intercept, of course, saying that the defector is a sexual pervert, or he’s had electric shock therapy, or he hasn’t got information that’s any good
or that he has a history of lunacy—So why haven’t we heard anything on Hollander?”

  Brinkerhoff was silent. He stared at his long white fingers, turning them over, as if there he might find written the answer he needed. The undersecretary, for once, had a good point.

  “I ought to say that this is a special case,” he said eventually. “When have we ever had someone like Hollander come across? When have we had this kind of information before?”

  “Still, Brinkerhoff. Don’t you think that would be all the more reason for them to grind up their propaganda machine? Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” Brinkerhoff said. “They may be playing it this way simply to throw us. Isn’t that possible?”

  The undersecretary was heard to sneeze twice.

  “I want you to know, I want you to hear this for the record, I was never keen on Hollander from the beginning.”

  Brinkerhoff thought of the tape that would be recording this talk. The undersecretary liked to hedge his bets.

  “What do you suggest?” Brinkerhoff asked.

  “I suggest you decide,” said the undersecretary. “You started this. You therefore finish it.”

  “I believe in Hollander—”

  “And I don’t. It smells to me. It’s a dead fish.”

  “They’re trying to confuse us—”

  “We shall see. I believe that everything comes out in the wash, Brinkerhoff.”

  The line was dead.

  Brinkerhoff, troubled, put the receiver down.

  It was a double bind. Either Hollander was real or he was not. After all, hadn’t he seen with his own eyes Hollander kill his own countrymen? Hadn’t he seen that? But how could one explain the silence? Either the Americans erected this silence to imply that Hollander wasn’t of any significance or they were doing it because he was. How did one choose? How?

  Brinkerhoff sat down.

  After a moment, he rose. He opened the bottom drawer of the desk, took something out, closed it again. Either/or, he thought. It was always either/or and their complicated twists, their complex ramifications, their elaborate little possibilities and perplexities. Sometimes, he thought, it would make more sense to toss a coin or roll a die. Sometimes, you simply could not fathom any of it on the basis of logic alone.

  A florist’s delivery van, embroidered with painted flowers and the slogan LET A FLOWER SPEAK FOR YOU drew up outside an apartment complex in the suburb of Chevy Chase. The driver got out, carrying a bunch of flowers, and went inside the building. In a parked car across the street, a man in a gray overcoat noted the arrival of the van. He stepped out of his car, waited for the delivery man to reappear. In the lane at the back of the apartment building there was another parked car, a black Marina. Nobody could enter or leave without being seen either back or front.

  The man in the gray overcoat saw the van driver come out. This time he was carrying no flowers. The man in the gray overcoat walked quickly toward the van. He showed credentials which established him as a lieutenant in the District of Columbia police. The van driver, a small man with a reddish beard, appeared impressed.

  “Who did you deliver the flowers to?”

  “Second floor,” the driver said. “Name of Emerson.”

  “Emerson?”

  “Marcia Emerson, right.”

  “Was there a message?”

  “I guess. I don’t read them, you know.”

  “Where would the order have originated?”

  “From the store—”

  “Okay. You can go.”

  The driver got into his van and drove away.

  The lieutenant went back to his parked car and spoke on the radio. He knew that a check would be made with the store where the flowers were bought. Then he switched his radio off and waited. He watched the apartment building.

  Several minutes elapsed. Then a middle-aged woman appeared in the doorway of the building. She carried a shopping bag. She looked in the direction of his car. She crossed the street. The man with the police credentials prepared to open his door. He was ready. Whatever might arise, whatever, he was ready for it. The woman was good-looking, well dressed, respectable; a suburban matron.

  She knocked on his window.

  He unrolled it.

  She spoke quietly. “I understand you’re looking for John Thorne—”

  “Where did you get that impression?”

  “Please. There isn’t time. My daughter just received a message from him. She’s arranging to go and meet him, I think.”

  The man got out of the car. “You sure?”

  “She said so,” the woman said. “I told her to hand the message over to the police.”

  “You did right, lady,” the man said.

  He followed the woman into the apartment building. They went up to the second floor in the elevator. The woman, biting her lower lip, said: “My motive in doing this is simple. I don’t like John Thorne. I don’t like him associating with my daughter. Is that clear?”

  “Clear,” the man said.

  “And I knew you were watching the building because you expect him to come here, don’t you?”

  The man shrugged.

  The elevator stopped. He followed the woman along the corridor toward the apartment. She took a key from her bag and unlocked the door. They went inside.

  “She’s in the bedroom,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I do believe she’s locked herself in.”

  The man rapped on the bedroom door. “Come out,” he said. “Come out. Don’t waste my time.”

  She had used the service stairs. She crossed the foyer of the building quickly. Outside, in the rain, she ran to the corner, diagonally crossed the street, turned right, turned right again, and when she was sure she hadn’t been seen she stopped running.

  It was twenty minutes past two when Sharpe got the message. He swore, then with a feeling of the most acute reluctance, he was obliged to telephone his master. Banishing Tarkington—well, he thought, that was like simply taking a cancerous lung out of a body that had already succumbed to the ravages of the same disease in other organs. It was correct and it was futile. He listened to the telephone ringing.

  4

  Thorne was alone in the lounge when the door opened and she came in. She saw him and she started to cry. He put his arms around her and she cried against his shoulder for a long time. He smoothed her wet hair away from her forehead and thought how pale, how frail, she looked. There were dark circles under her eyes. When she had stopped crying she raised her face to look at him and then she began, with some small hysteria of relief, to laugh. She said his name over and over. He led her to a sofa and they sat down.

  She regained her composure slowly.

  “John, oh Christ,” she said. “I thought, no, I don’t know exactly what I thought. Then I got the flowers. I—”

  “Easy,” he said. “Were you followed here?”

  She laughed again, brushing her eyes with the cuff of her raincoat. She shook her head. “I don’t think so. My mother, I hope she won’t get into any trouble, but when the flowers came she suddenly got this amazing idea on how to get me out of the building. I didn’t think she had it in her or that she cared. Christ. I was scared. Really scared.”

  “Your mother helped?” Thorne asked. There was something melting in the New England frost.

  Marcia laid her face against his arm. She said, “Your sartorial taste is bewildering. Where are you shopping for coats these days?”

  He kissed her lightly on the forehead, suddenly aware that with her presence his strength had come back, that the erosion of his spirit wasn’t complete.

  “The coat was necessary,” he said. “I’ll explain all that to you later, love. Right now, I need to talk with you.”

  The door of the lounge opened. A student, dressed in the bell-bottom jeans, complete with cuff embroidery of the late hippie period, stepped into the room. He went to the bookshelf, sifted through some periodicals, then sat down in the faraway corner of the room.

  “S
hit,” Thorne said. “Is there someplace we can go?”

  “There’s my office—”

  “It’s out. As soon as they find you gone, they’ll be swarming around your office—”

  “Okay. Do you think you could drink some coffee?”

  “Where?”

  She stood up. “Come with me.”

  They went down into the basement of the building, using the stairs. There was a coffee machine in the basement corridor. Marcia put some coins in, selected two black coffees, then they walked to an empty classroom. They went inside, shut the door, sat down at a desk.

  “Okay,” Thorne said. “This ought to do for a time.”

  Marcia was smiling at him.

  He looked at her for a moment.

  Then he told her.

  He told her about Asterisk.

  She listened without interrupting, her eyes never leaving his face. When he had finished, she was silent for a long time.

  She looked at him incredulously.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  He paced round the room for a time, sipping coffee from the waxed cardboard container. She continued to watch him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I know how it sounds. But I can only tell you what I saw, Marcia. But it explains—it explains why Burckhardt was killed. He was sitting on information that was explosive, only he didn’t know what to do with it, and because of his own sentimentality, because he thought of me as some carbon of my father, he imagined I’d know the best thing to do. Maybe he wanted it all brought out in the open, maybe he just wasn’t sure.”

  She had her eyes closed. She said: “It’s wild—”

  “More than wild,” Thorne said. “It explains that weird personnel list at Escalante. Jesus! I should have known. Linguists, a cryptanalyst. The possibilities of extraterrestrial life, language. It makes sense.”

  He crumpled his coffee cup and aimed it at the wastebasket. She was watching him now, as if she were observing the edges of lunacy.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “I know what I saw.”