Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  She approached him across the room and held his hands a moment, looked at him sympathetically.

  “Think,” he said. “Think what it means. Just stop and think about it.”

  “I’m trying, John.”

  “It isn’t simply a space revolution,” he said. “Having Asterisk, understanding it, how it got here, what made it move, how it communicated with its own base, there would be hundreds of technological details so advanced that any power possessing Asterisk would be—”

  “I see that, John,” she said quietly.

  She leaned against the blackboard. There was a half-rubbed-out phrase written in chalk behind her: The area of Sarawak in square miles is roughly equivalent to … The rest was gone. I’ll never know now, he thought.

  Then he said: “The question is, what do I do now?”

  “What do you think you should do?”

  He rubbed his jaw, leaned against the desk, then he crossed the room and embraced her. He said: “I think it’s too important to sit on. I don’t think it’s something that should be kept back from the rest of the world …”

  “I had a feeling you’d say that,” Marcia said.

  He kissed her. The lips were cold, the hair still wet from the rain.

  “And the consequences?” she asked.

  “I can’t predict them. All I know right now is that they want me dead.”

  “You’d make a God-awful corpse, Thorne,” she said. “Even in your glad rags you look way too healthy.”

  “I have no intention of shuffling off just yet,” he said. “So the question right now is, what’s the best way of proceeding? What’s the strategy?”

  “The newspapers?”

  “Which newspaper? Who’d print it? Do you think anybody would believe me?”

  “Sure,” she said. “You’ve got some good contacts in the press. It would be the easiest thing in the world, my love, to find out your credibility quotient, no?”

  “I guess,” he said. He looked up at the rainy window. “What bothers me is that they’re out there and they’re looking hard and I can’t keep running on my luck forever.”

  “Where do we go?” she asked. “Our apartment is obviously taboo, my office is off limits, my mother’s place would be charming as a hornet’s nest right now and we can’t just hang out in here …”

  Thorne thought for a moment. He thought of them tracking him and her through the wet city, the slow-moving cars, the radio communications, footsteps on stairs, the sound of knuckles on doors. His luck could not continue forever: crossing a street, waiting for a walk signal, catching a taxi, a bus, sooner or later they would see him. And now that Marcia was with him he felt doubly conspicuous.

  “Where’s the nearest telephone?” he asked.

  “I guess outside the Student Union,” she said.

  “Let’s go there.”

  He took her hand, they left the classroom together, climbed the stairs up from the basement and began to walk across the campus. The rain was constant, drumming, lashing across the university. They reached the callbox outside the Union. Inside, with Marcia crammed against him in the tiny space, he thumbed through the yellow pages of a rather dilapidated directory and found the number he wanted. He pressed in his coins, dialed, waited.

  “Who are you calling?” she asked.

  Before he could speak to her, the telephone was answered. A girl’s voice. He asked quickly to be put through to Donaldson. The girl said that Donaldson wasn’t expected back until five. He hung up.

  “Who’s Donaldson?” Marcia asked.

  “A columnist. He has an amazing phobia about the present occupants of the White House. Total loathing would be more appropriate, I guess. If I’m going to talk to the press, it might as well begin with someone like Donaldson.”

  Marcia drew a shape with the tip of her finger in the steamed-up window. “What now?” she asked.

  “We’ve got some time to kill before Donaldson is expected back—”

  “It’s five past three,” she said, looking at her watch.

  “Is there a movie house nearby?”

  “If you’re fond of subtitled lasciviousness I know the very place.”

  They left the phone booth and walked. Momentarily, Thorne wondered if what he intended to do was the right thing; he wondered about the validity of the old adage that concerned sleeping dogs and how they are best left to lie. But Burckhardt obviously hadn’t thought like that, Burckhardt hadn’t been deterred by that kind of doubt. And what was Asterisk finally but a discovery of such enormous importance that it couldn’t be left, like some cheap secret, some minor advance in nuclear gadgetry, in the hands of a few militants whose patriotism was simply an extension of their need for adequacy? No, Burckhardt hadn’t been irked by doubts like that. Whatever else Asterisk might be, it was something that had to be shared, something that had to be given to the world. Thorne was suddenly sure of this now, certain that what he planned to do was the right thing, finally the only thing.

  They came to a street crossing, moving quickly to the other side against the don’t-walk signal. A few hundred yards from the sidewalk, pale neons glimmering in the rain, was the marquee of the small cinema. Adults adults adults!!! An undiscovered French beauty, her photographed face tinted in a somewhat surreal way, stood in cardboard cutout with her legs splayed and her hands on her breasts.

  “That’s the place,” Marcia said.

  “You been here before?” Thorne asked.

  “I wasn’t always sweet and innocent, buddy,” she said. “That only happened when I met you.”

  They began to run through the rain.

  About twenty yards from the cashier’s booth, twenty yards from the cardboard model, twenty yards from the security of the dark interior, Thorne suddenly stopped.

  “No,” he said.

  It was all a question of plotting lines, rather like one of those puzzles kids did when you joined dots until you had a picture of a donkey, or an elephant, or a horse. These were more complex lines, of course, than in some simple juvenile drawing, but the principle was not vastly different. A florist, a cab driver, you used the memories of people instead of a pencil; you drew your lines on the basis of recollections. What it narrowed down to for Sharpe was the campus where the girl was employed. A taxi driver remembered dropping off a young man whose appearance was similar to that of the person who had ordered roses to be sent to the girl; and that person, according to the charge card, had been John Thorne.

  Sharpe put the receiver down and, rubbing his forehead with the flat of his hand, turned to look at Dilbeck.

  “I think we’ve got them,” he said.

  Dilbeck sighed. It seemed to him that it was a song he had been hearing for so long that its melody now was suggestive of a familiar lament.

  “One of my people has seen them in the vicinity of George Washington,” Sharpe said.

  Dilbeck, his raincoat smeared with a moist film, his black scarf knotted tidily at his throat, picked up his gloves. He had a sudden overwhelming urge to look at John Thorne, to come face to face with the person who had caused them all so much grief. One quick look, that was all; a form of recognition. As if to say, Good try, too bad, it’s been a long haul. He stood up and rainwater slicked from his coat to form an oily pool at his feet.

  “Get your car, Sharpe,” he said.

  Sharpe seemed puzzled. “Why?”

  “Let’s see if we can prevent another fiasco.”

  Sharpe made a gesture of frustration: “But who’s going to run control if I leave my desk?”

  “Find somebody. It doesn’t matter who. I think we have to be in on whatever’s going to happen.” Dilbeck moved to the door, pulling his leather gloves on. They were English gloves, he had bought them at a shop in the Burlington Arcade in London, in the year 1954; his second assignment to London, which he remembered just then with a slight touch of nostalgia, recalling his admiration for British cool, his enjoyment of their unflustered approach to things. He wished he had broug
ht some of that home with him and imparted it to his own people; instead, what he had brought back was a taste for Typhoo Tea, marmalade on toast, and leather patches on the elbows of tweed jackets. He pulled the door open. Sharpe was fumbling into his coat.

  “Let’s go,” Dilbeck said. “While the iron, as it were, is hot.”

  “Why aren’t we going inside?” she asked.

  He looked up and down the rainy street; then he grabbed her by the hand and, pulling her after him, walked away from the movie house.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  He drew her into the doorway of a small crafts store. Raffia baskets, planters woven out of bamboo, Mohave rugs, hung in the window behind her head. He had seen a car pull up in front of the cinema, the door open, a man in a felt hat get out and go up to the cashier’s desk. It might have been nothing, it might have been perfectly innocent, but the car was a certain green Catalina he had last seen driven by the fat man. He was sure of it. He was sure. He looked back down the street. A light from the window fell across his eyes. He blinked. Rain was falling from his hair, across his cheeks, his nose, a taste of chemical on his tongue. A green Catalina, a nightmare.

  “We better get out of here,” he said. “Fast.”

  He gripped her hand, then moved out of the shop doorway and down the street away from the theater. They came to a corner, turned, stopped beneath a dripping awning that hung above a bookstore.

  She was rubbing rain from her eyes.

  “What now?” she said. “What now?”

  He tried to get his brain to work; but beyond, on the dark edges of his awareness, he was haunted by tiredness. He wanted all at once to sleep and wondered where he could find a further shot of energy. He put his arms around her.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “I wish we would.” She put her hand up to her hair, which, soaked now, hung like thick black strands of a fine metal.

  They hurried along the street. And then it came to him, it came to him in a flash. Why not? he thought. It was nearby. It was only a few blocks away. The irony of it wasn’t lost on him either. And besides, would anybody think of looking for them there?

  He laughed in the rain.

  “Don’t flip out on me, John,” she said.

  “I don’t intend to,” he replied.

  They continued to hurry.

  A strong, violent wind was beginning to blow behind the rain, bringing cold, a touch of ice, a sense of winter at the heart of a sodden spring.

  Dilbeck looked at the advertising neon hanging above the cinema. Trash, he thought. He was far from being puritanical, at least in his own eyes, but it seemed to him that the world was armpit-deep in garbage these days. The glossy mouth of a nude young woman beckoned to him from a photograph; she had her tongue upturned against her teeth. He glanced at Sharpe, who looked like a drowned ferret in this downpour. The third man, whose name Dilbeck didn’t know, whose name Dilbeck didn’t want to know right then, was holding a wet photograph of John Thorne.

  “They didn’t come in here,” he was saying.

  “But you saw them?” Sharpe asked.

  “I saw them go down the block that way,” the man said.

  “Are you positive?” Dilbeck asked. He suspected that he was hearing, once more, the tune of a wild goose. A rude, atonal honk that, in his imagination, he thought resembled John Thorne’s laughter at having slipped away once more.

  “Okay,” Sharpe said. He gave the man some instructions to put through on his radio concerning a search of the immediate area, then he looked at Dilbeck. “What now?”

  “We follow in their footsteps, what else?” Dilbeck said.

  Sharpe shrugged. He trailed behind Dilbeck as they walked quickly down the block. He was breathing heavily, occasionally pausing to spit out mouthfuls of dirty rain.

  5

  With the revolver in his jacket, Brinkerhoff went into the room where Ted Hollander lay. He closed the door quietly behind him, trying not to disturb the American; but Hollander was awake, alert, sipping milk through a straw. Hollander put his glass down on the bedside table and smiled. He thought that there was a curiously opaque expression in the Russian’s eyes, as if something were badly out of place, something distressingly disjointed. Brinkerhoff sat on the chair by the bed.

  “Okay,” Hollander said.

  Brinkerhoff looked at him strangely.

  “What’s bugging you?” Hollander asked.

  “It’s a small matter,” Brinkerhoff said after a pause.

  Hollander saw the misshapen lump in the jacket. It was unmistakable. To Die in Havana, he thought. It would have been a good drugstore title. He watched Brinkerhoff, wondering now why he felt no panic, no great desire to know what, if anything, had gone awry.

  Brinkerhoff took the revolver out. He held it in the palm of his hand and looked at Hollander rather sadly.

  “You’re going to use that on me?” Hollander asked.

  Brinkerhoff contrived a pale smile. “My undersecretary called. He is badly disturbed.”

  “By what?”

  “By you. By this whole thing.”

  “You want to explain?”

  “It’s the total lack of response, Hollander. It makes him uneasy. In his experience, you see, people who choose to make the trip oneway from the U.S. to the Soviet Republic are usually the subject of considerable intelligence activity after the event. You know the kind of thing? It’s an operation in undermining the credentials of the defector. The wires usually hum with all kinds of data. It’s all perfectly standard in cases of defection.”

  “Yeah,” Hollander said. He looked at the gun. He turned his face to the side, feeling the sunlight come through the window, warm on his flesh.

  “In your case—” Brinkerhoff broke off.

  “In my case you’ve heard nothing? Is that it?”

  Brinkerhoff nodded. “It’s odd.”

  “They’re trying to throw you, isn’t that obvious?”

  Brinkerhoff got out of the chair and shrugged.

  “That may be,” he said. “But the risk is strong. You understand that?”

  Hollander felt his hands become tight and, looking down, saw the upraised white bones of his bloodless knuckles. Go on, he thought. Use the gun, use it if you’re going to.

  “Our arrangement was for you to live in the Soviet Union,” Brinkerhoff said. “In return for the information you provided. Customary in such situations as these. You provided the material. We were ready to keep our part of the bargain—”

  “But now?”

  “It’s too much of a risk, Hollander. How can I explain the silence from the Americans? Why aren’t they singing about you? Why?”

  “To confuse you. To make it seem like I’m not on the level—”

  “We have the file. We can assess the information. But what do we do with you? What do we do if we find out that you are indeed a plant? My head would come rather swiftly under the ax. And the poor undersecretary, well, wouldn’t he look bad? After all, he is my immediate superior—”

  Hollander closed his eyes. “You want to save your own goddamn neck. And I’m just too much of a risk. Is that it? You don’t trust me.”

  “Look, whatever my own feelings, they don’t matter. They don’t mean a damn thing. I do trust you, as a matter of fact. But the undersecretary has left this matter to my own discretion, a situation that doesn’t mean anything very much. He is telling me that I need to protect myself. Do you see?”

  Hollander stared at the Russian. Shit, he thought. Oh, shit, to come this far, to come this far and to get no further, to be slain like some bewildered animal in a hospital room miles from anywhere—He wondered what it would be like. To die. He wondered if there might be a moment when, in that last sharp echo of pain, there would be the outraged panic of knowing that you are slipping away toward a point where there is no return … He turned his face away from Brinkerhoff.

  He had a misted image of his kids in the rainy
park, Anna trying to feed chewing gum to a duck, Mark staring at him with an expression of hurt, Jimmy with his hands in his pockets. He was suddenly overwhelmed with love. He was abruptly pained by the depth of the love. It was as if he saw all the mistakes, all the losses of his life create a jet stream behind him, and he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t take it. He had made it one huge, unholy mess and, in his book, you didn’t get a second chance at things. He felt he wanted to weep. But his eyes were dry, his throat tight, his life—in any real sense—already over and dead.

  He looked at Brinkerhoff.

  He raised one eyebrow. He thought: It’s going to make the surgeon’s work redundant.

  Brinkerhoff fired the revolver. Once, twice.

  He watched Hollander slump down the pillow, his body turning to one side. There were enormous bloodstains seeping through the fresh bandages. Brinkerhoff put the pistol back into his jacket. He went to the door, opened it, stepped into the corridor.

  He felt a touch of sadness.

  It was waste, necessary waste.

  Still, he had the file and what it all came down to in the long run was that documents were more important than people. He had the file; he had erased the risk.

  6

  Inside the apartment building Thorne remembered how he had last felt when he had walked down past the white walls, the sharp fluorescent lights; afraid, afraid, it all seemed such a long time ago now. He paused at a right-angled turn in the corridor and looked at Marcia. When he spoke he did so quietly. “That door over there,” he said. “Number eighty-six.”

  She looked in the direction of the door. It was painted a dull gray, exactly like all its neighbors. There was a cloying smell of disinfectant in the air.

  “I want you to go over. Knock. Okay? When he opens the door I’ll be right behind you.”

  She moved toward the door.

  Thorne, following, pressed his back against the wall and nodded his head. When the door was opened, he wouldn’t be seen immediately. The virtue of surprise. He watched Marcia, noticing how small she appeared, tiny and fragile and anemic beneath the silent fluorescence. He shut his eyes. Fatigue, out on the edge of his awareness, was like some relentless tide that came and kept coming, harrying him. He looked at Marcia again. She raised her hand, knocked on the door.