by Garbo Norman
At such moments, wherever Burke happened to be — whether standing up the block, sitting in his parked car, or walking or driving slowly past — he felt so bright a pain in his arm and chest that it seemed to be threatening to tear a nerve. Sometimes, then, he would close his eyes and almost be able to imagine himself dead and in his private Hell. Since boyhood, he’d had his own personal vision of Hell, with mobs of naked people running through the snow, just running; no hellfire and brimstone, as in Dante, but only this frozen white landscape with all these poor slobs running and never stopping and never getting anywhere either. But not anymore. In his current vision of Hell, Burke was tied to a tree on a sun-dappled hilltop, while Ludlow kept snapping pictures of his ungrateful dead.
When the time was right, when Ludlow and his wife were off dancing at an embassy ball, and the housecouple were safely at their weekly church bingo festival, Burke went into the house with his equipment. Five generations of Ludlow wealth had gone into the house and its furnishings but to Burke, getting his initial breath of the close, overheated air, it was like being the first to enter a dead Pharoah’s tomb. A fragrance had been left behind, faint as the whispers in a bank vault, and he felt a stir of pity for the woman who had worn the perfume. He had seen the second Mrs. Ludlow leaving and entering the house, a beautiful woman of perhaps half Ludlow’s age, who probably needed no one’s pity, least of all his. Nevertheless, he felt sorry for her. He had no idea why. Unless he sensed that no ultimate good could possibly come to anyone through close association with this man.
He worked quickly and well, pleased again at finding he had lost none of his skill. Like swimming and bike-riding, he thought You just don’t forget. He bugged two rooms: the upstairs master bedroom and the downstairs study, including the telephones in each. He carefully counted his tools as he put them back into their bag. Seven out, seven in. Forget a screwdriver in this business and you had an earthquake. Then he ran fine, barely visible wires into an unused basement storeroom of the adjoining house on the right, where he had set up his recording equipment two nights before. He made the necessary connections, flicked on the master switch, and left the dusty storeroom through the same rear, basement window he had entered fifteen minutes before.
It was a full week before he returned to the basement. Anxiously, he checked his equipment. The four specially made, oversized, voice-activated reels he had used were almost completely full. Together, they would carry more than forty hours of recorded sound. Burke removed them from the machine, replaced them with four fresh reels as possible insurance, and drove back to New York with them that same night. He was tempted to stop off at Angela’s before going to his own apartment, but it was almost 4:00 A.M., her watchers would be coining on duty in another few hours, and he decided that for once in his life he needed sleep more than love.
He parked his car and carried his four precious reels of tape upstairs. A weak, sick perspiration seemed to leak from his body as he undressed. He felt drained. But there was also a soft, pleasant singing in his head. An angels’ choir? More likely the devil’s own glee club tuning up. Yet sliding into sleep, there was one beautiful, euphoric moment when he was sure things were going to turn out all right. But he did not remember this afterwards. When he awoke, there was only that confusing mixture of pain and expectation — and, of course, the four reels of tape beside his bed.
“If you really want to learn about people,” Tony Kreuger had once told Burke during the early years, “just listen to them speak. And I don’t mean only what they say. I mean the way they say it.”
Burke recalled this as he listened to the first of the tapes. If he knew nothing at all about Tom Ludlow, if he had never met or even heard of him, he wondered what sort of image he would get from simply hearing him speak. For a while he tried listening coldly, dispassionately, pretending he was hearing the words of a stranger. But he soon gave up the attempt; both futile and stupid. This was no stranger he was hearing. It was Tom Ludlow. There was no way he could make himself forget that. And why would he want to try?
Still, there were surprises. There always were, Burke had found. They were all walking icebergs… two-thirds under water. Some hid even more. But rarely in the bedroom. And it was here that Ludlow turned out to be curiously abandoned, with a whimsically playful approach to sex that Burke would never have expected from him.
“Whose big, hot pistol are you?” purred the second Mrs. Ludlow.
To which came the heavily sugared reply, “I’m lil’ pink pussy’s big hot pistol.”
Burke picked at his shoulder as he listened to a long run of heavy breathing and sweet mouthings.
“Big … hot… pistol’s … all primed to go off,” came the rhythmically passionate grunts.
“Go … go … go … !”
“Ride … ride, lil’ pink pussy!”
“I’m ridin’ . .. I’m ridin’ . ..”
“Oh … oh … oh … !”
End of that segment.
Okay, big hot pistol, let’s get on with it. Burke poured himself some fresh coffee. History books should be written with greater focus on the bedroom, he decided. It would help humanize the world’s leaders. It was very hard to strike awesome poses while approaching climax.
A phone call from his daughter must have wakened Ludlow later that night.
“Did I wake you, Daddy?”
“No… no. It’s all right. What is it, honey? What’s wrong?” Ludlow’s voice was instantly anxious and alert.
“I was dreaming about Mom again.”
“The same things?”
“Pretty much. Only this time it was about that week we all went to Virginia Beach together. It was when we had the sailboat. Remember?”
“Of course. It was a lovely time.”
“Yes, but why didn’t I know it then?”
“You knew it,” said Ludlow.
“No I didn’t. Not really. I kept fighting with Mom all the time. And over such stupid little things.”
“We all do that.”
“Sometimes it seems all I ever did was scratch at her.”
“She knew how you felt.”
“I don’t know whether she did, Daddy. And that’s what bothers me more than anything.”
“She knew. I’ve told you that before, darling.”
“I wish I could believe it”
“It’s the truth.”
“I still miss her very much.”
There was a pause. “So do I,” said Ludlow.
Burke speeded up the tape. There was obviously going to be nothing in this portion that would be of any help to him. If anything, the reverse was true. This sort of thing only blurred his focus. He already knew that everything in life was not clearly black or white, that the human psyche had many varying sides. He needed no further lessons in that. All he needed now was some sign that this cutesy-pie stud and sensitive caring father was Somehow involved with a great many people wanting him dead.
It was a long process. Because the tapes had been voice-activated, because when no sound was being picked up by the microphones, the recording machinery did not roll, the reels carried no blank places. The almost forty hours of tape carried almost forty hours of voices. The only thing that Burke could do to hurry the listening procedure along was to speed up the tape during those sections that carried the housecouple’s voices or Ludlow’s wife, gossiping with friends or speaking to local tradespeople. There appeared to be very little of that. But even this area proved to be not entirely without interest.
Rushing the tape through one of Ludlow’s wife’s calls, Burke abruptly slowed it to normal speed.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to cancel out Tuesday,” Jeanne Ludlow was saying. “Tom is flying to New York with the President for that United Nations thing and he wants me with him.”
The unidentified male voice said, “Suddenly?”
“The President is taking his wife, and Tom wants me along to hold her hand.”
“Oh, shit,” said the man.
>
“Exactly. You know I’d much rather hold yours, darling.”
“My what?”
She laughed coquettishly. “Whatever — it will have to wait for Friday.”
“Unless Tom decides he needs you somewhere else.”
“Don’t be bitter, love. A husband does have some rights.”
“Do you know it’s been almost ten days? If this keeps up, you’ll have me playing with myself.”
“Don’t you dare. That’s criminal waste.”
“This is the third time in two weeks you’ve had to cancel out because of Tom. What’s this sudden need for your presence?”
“I don’t know. But he does seem to be under especially heavy pressure lately. Even his moods have been strange.”
“Do you think he suspects anything?”
“About you?”
“No. About those three other guys.”
She giggled. “He doesn’t think of me enough to suspect anything. Between his work and his daughter’s calls, he’s lucky if he gets a chance to breathe.” Her voice took on a whining note of complaint. “You’d think the kid would have him climbing walls by now. But when it comes to her, he has nothing but patience. Her and her poor, dead mommy. I don’t blame her for feeling guilty. She ate her mother’s heart out while she was alive. Now that the woman is dead, she whines day and night.”
“You’re a tough lady.”
“Am I? I don’t mean to be. But I suppose I am kind of resentful of Susan.’-‘ She paused. “How could you love such a tough lady?”
“You have a tender ass.”
“Well, that’s telling it like it is.”
“It was supposed to be a joke.”
“Freud says nothing is said in a joke.”
“Oh, fuck Freud.”
”For that,” she sighed, “I think I’d rather have you.”
Burke moved through the remainder of the segment quickly. In one form or another betrayal was apparently the order of the day. But of course it always had been. Many years before, he had been assigned to a full month of electronic surveillance and it had left him slightly paranoic on the subject. Whom could you trust? Were people really like nests of hibernating snakes? Or was the potential for betrayal an endemic part of the human condition and therefore acceptable on that basis? As he grew older, he stopped wrestling with such troubling philosophical .concepts. He found it bad for his wort as well as his psyche. He finally settled on a manageable peace. For sanity’s sake alone, he decided, you had to stop trying to judge and understand the species, and just do your best to survive it. Some joke. But the segment of tape had at least contributed three additional features to his gradually rounding image of Tom Ludlow — namely, that he did seem to be under especially heavy pressure lately, his moods had become strange, and that his wife had apparently given him a large, pointed pair of cuckold’s horns.
The hours ground on and the tape ran, stopped, speeded up, slowed, and ran again. It was like taking a long trip through someone’s life, Burke thought. And he was so deeply immersed in it, that when the sound of police sirens or other traffic noises occasionally intruded from the streets below, it took him a moment to realize he was in his own apartment. Food was not important to him at any time, and he bothered even less with it now. When he thought about eating at all, when the gnawing in his stomach became a distraction, he chewed on some bread and cheese. He became, in turn, impatient, bored, and worried. What if he followed the tape to its end and came up with nothing? What if this whole concept of Ludlow’s involvement was actually no more than that — a concept? What if he found himself right back on square one? What if, what if, what if? Easy, he told himself. You’ve done this kind of thing before. You’ve grown middle-aged and half-senile doing it. You know the nature of the work. You know you have to dig through tons of crap to come up with even a gram of the shiny stuff. So just stop nagging at yourself and listen.
Then he came upon a fairly good stretch. Perhaps not gold, but with enough glitter to make him listen more closely. It was a telephone conversation with a man whom Ludlow addressed as Chris, with whom he was on familiar terms, and who evidently had something to do with running his financial affairs.
“What about the stocks?” Ludlow asked at one point “Have you started unloading them yet?”
“A few small blocks. It’s a shaky market We have to be careful not .to unsettle it even more.”
“I don’t care about the market. I just want it done. And as quickly as possible.”
“We’re going to get hurt on the price that way.”
“So we’ll get hurt.”
“I don’t understand why you insist on …”
“Chris…” Ludlow cut in quietly. “It’s not necessary that you understand.”
“Unless that appointment of yours is closer than rumors have it, you’re not going to have to worry about possible conflict of interest problems for some time yet.”
“I’m giving you a month. No more. At the end of that time I don’t want to have a single share of common stock listed in my name. Is that understood?
“You’re crazy. It’s going to cost you a fortune.”
“Is that understood?” Ludlow’s voice had taken on a cutting edge.
“If you’d only put some of that stock in trust…”
“Chris!”
“Okay, okay.”
They clicked off.
Burke thought about it as he speeded the tape through some bedroom conversation followed by the usual sex. Interesting. It looked as though the rumors were true. Apparently Ludlow was going to be the next Secretary of State. And what plans had been made, what secret sessions held in Oval Office cabals to get rid of the current Secretary? He would probably hand in his resignation at the proper moment, Burke thought, for the customary personal reasons. Which meant what, as far as he, Richard Burke, was concerned? Probably nothing. Unless, and this was really reaching, since the Senate’s approval of the appointment would be required, there might be some fear of his suddenly bursting forth with embarrassing accusations about the hilltop massacre.
Unlikely.
To begin with, who would believe so wild an accusation? Especially when brought by an unfrocked, faceless agent against so illustrious a national figure as Ludlow. And it would hardly be important enough for so much activity on the part of the Service.
They wouldn’t want him dead just for that. Or would they? What was it that Machiavelli, in his infinite political wisdom, had once said? “He who establishes a dictatorship and does not kill Brutus … or he who founds a republic and does not kill the sons of Brutus, will only reign a short time.”
A bitter and cynically wise quote. But he was not even near to being Brutus, no Secretary of State had yet to be a dictator, and the republic had been well founded more than two hundred years ago. So much for Machiavelli, as applied to Richard Burke.
Nevertheless, there was enough built-in abrasion in the segment to hold his attention a while longer. Or maybe, he thought, it was just having the rumor, of the possible appointment confirmed that really hit him in the gut. So the wages of sin were finally high and honorable office. You murdered twenty-three men, women, and children, and eighteen years later they made you Secretary of State. Like a delayed-action fuse, a sudden sickness broke loose in him, as if something dead and rotten from the past was spreading through his system. Leaving the tape running, he went into the bathroom, knelt, and retched into the bowl. Eighteen years came up out of him along with the suddenly soured cheese and bread, came out with all the stink and crud of its long festering. Finally, there it went. Then kneeling there on the hard, tile floor, he was afraid the poison had infected his brain as well as his stomach because he seemed to be hearing the voice of Tony Kreuger. Easy, he told himself for the second time in as many hours, or you’re going to turn yourself into one very sick boy. This was no time to be imagining voices. This was a time for coolness and control and quiet, passionless thinking. This was a time for cold facts.
“Anything new?” Ludlow asked without amenity.
“Nothing good.”
“What’s happened?”
“We’ve lost a few more people and we’re worse off than ever. We don’t even have any promising lines out anymore.”
“Congratulations.”
“Well, we knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” said Kreuger.
“Marvelous. That makes me feel immeasurably better.”
“I have an idea I’m going to try.”
“Yes?”
“We’ve been using his wife, his ex-wife, much too subtly. We can’t be that cautious anymore. It’s been a waste. I don’t believe he knows she’s even in the city.”
“So?”
“So I want to make sure he knows. And I want him worried enough to get a little careless.”
“And how are you going to manage that?” Ludlow’s voice was cold. “Right now I’m the one who’s worried enough to get a little careless. We’re going to run out of time if this drags on much longer.”
“We’re all doing our best, Tom,” Tony said quietly. “And we’ve lost some good people doing it.”
“I know, I know. This whole business is making me impatient and edgy. There’s so much at stake I’m starting to have nightmares about it. Imagine. One man.”
“I suppose there is an almost classic irony to it.”
“If I was less directly involved, I might be able to appreciate it more. As it is, I sometimes wonder whether we’re not getting a bit paranoid about him. We could be exaggerating the threat, you know. There is that possibility.”
“We’ve gone over that a hundred times. Are you willing to take that chance?”
Ludlow did not answer.
“I’m not,” said Tony.
“I know Richard. And I don’t think we’re exaggerating the threat in the slightest. He’s a walking timebomb. If I wasn’t wholly convinced of that, I’d never have gone this far to begin with. You know how I feel about him. So you also know no part of this has been easy for me.”