After the First Death (10 page)

Let me say how I first saw my father when he finally arrived today. It was exactly 11:25
A.M.
when I saw him emerge into the quad. My mother wasn’t at his side. I didn’t recognize him immediately. Oh, I recognized him, I suppose: he was six feet tall, as usual; he walked with his head slanted to one side, as usual, as if he were listening to something far away.

But there was something else I didn’t recognize. Something new about him and so strange that I could not pin it down right away.

An air of tentativeness about him.

He was walking at his usual pace, not fast and not slow, but—different.

As if he were walking for the first time in a long time.

As if he were breaking in a new pair of legs.

Or walking on stilts.

And there was also a fragility about him.

He came across the quad as if he were made of glass and was afraid that he would shatter into a million pieces if he bumped into something.

His face: a blank.

I couldn’t make out his features at that distance and I imposed my own version on his face. Which was terrifying, of course.

As I watched his progress across the quad, walking fragilely on the new snow, I thought: This is what I have
done to him. This is what my action on the bridge did to him.

I sat and waited, although I wanted to run out of there.

If he had come this far to see me, how could I deny him this last look?

My mother was right: he looked terrible. Gaunt, Abraham Lincoln but without the height or the beard. I never realized how deep in the sockets his eyes were set. Or had they sunk to those depths since I saw him last?

I greeted him at the door and we shook hands, firmly but awkwardly. We probably had not shaken hands a half dozen times in our lives.

“Ben,” he said, and immediately looked away, glancing around the room, commenting on its size and roominess, etc., and I admired him for the heartiness he had injected in his voice. My father, the actor.

Finally, he swiveled and looked at me. Really looked. As if he were studying me. I wondered what he hoped to see—the kid I’d been a long time ago when a child is innocent, without blemishes? Or was he seeing me as the kid who used to strike out in the Little League games, although I did hit a triple once in a crucial game and scored two runs and heard for the first (and only) time the cheers of a crowd? Or was he seeing me as I was last summer before the Bus and the Bridge? Before the betrayal.

“Well,” he said, standing back and still inspecting me. “I see you’ve gained weight, Ben, and I’ve lost some.”

“Great food here,” I said, automatically, meaninglessly. Because I hadn’t gained any weight that I know of, although I must admit I don’t go running to the scale every day like some denizens of the gym around here.
And then I realized that it was going to be
that
kind of conversation, filled with interpretations, hidden meanings, second guessing on what was said, the search for a tone of voice and what it means, ad infinitum. And I told myself: patience, get through it, play the game, act the part of the dutiful son, follow his lead and try not to hurt him anymore.

And now it was my turn to say something because I realized a great big silence had developed in the room, so deep and awful that it was suffocating. As usual, my mouth began to work and the words started to come out, the way it happened that day I met Nettie Halversham and talked nonstop, and I went on and on about Castle and the guys and Elliot Martingale and the classes and, Jesus, I thought somebody better stop me before I lost my breath and fell in a dead faint at his feet. Finally, I wanted to shatter that awful stare of his, the expression I could not interpret. And out of me erupted the words that had hounded my days and nights since last August.

“Was Inner Delta saved, Dad?”

You couldn’t find the answer to that question in the newspapers or in the television newscasts. I couldn’t ask anyone else about it, not even my mother. The only one was my father. I had never heard of Inner Delta before the hijacking and I had never heard of it since.

“It was saved, Ben,” he said. “Oh, there was some damage, of course. The problem with an operation like Inner Delta is that it depends entirely on secrecy, and that’s what the hijackers were counting on—making it public, focusing publicity on it, and therefore rendering it useless. Plus their other demands.” His voice trailed off. I knew how difficult it was for him to speak of things he had been pledged to be silent about.

He had first explained Inner Delta to me on the afternoon of the hijacking. He came to the house after lunch and told the bodyguard to wait outside. I had just finished a tuna fish sandwich—it was tasteless because Nettie Halversham had made my entire world tasteless, odorless, and colorless—and I offered to make him one. He said that he did not have time to eat, that he had come home for a few moments to talk to me.

“Did you locate Mom?” I asked.

“Yes, in Boston. She’s staying with Sarah Thomspon in Weston. I want her to remain there today and tonight at least.” He hesitated. “There have been reports of possible bombings at the entrances to Delta and I don’t want her on the highways in this area. She’ll be safer with Sarah.” Sarah was an old school chum of my mother’s, and Weston is a suburb of Boston, a few miles west of the city.

For the first time I sensed the drama going on about me. The radio had been sketchy about the hijacking, interrupting the record sessions with bulletins that told us nothing, really. And television had continued with its endless daytime game shows. But seeing my father tense and pale, hearing him talk of possible explosions and providing for my mother’s safety, gave the day’s events sudden immediacy in my life. I also looked at my father for the first time in my life as not my father: General Rufus Briggs.…

Maybe he saw that look.

Because he said: “I’m going to confide in you, Ben. And tell you as much of what’s going on as I can. Within the limits to which I am confined. As you know, some unidentified men are holding a busload of children
hostage. That happened about nine
A.M.
today. We have since received their demands. The demands were made by letter, the letter delivered by a private messenger service out of Boston.”

“What do they want, Dad?”

“They’ve made three demands,” he said, relaxing now for the first time, as if he were preparing to put his thoughts in order, not only to provide me with information but to sort out his own feelings about it all. “Number one, they’re demanding the release of fifteen so-called political prisoners serving various sentences in this country. Two, they’re asking for ten million dollars in cash. Three, they’re demanding the dismantling of what is known to some people as Inner Delta. By dismantling, they mean make a public confession of its existence, reveal the names of its agents around the world, recall them from their assignments.” He paused, sighed, rubbed his neck as if he were trying to loosen the tension there.

I didn’t dare breathe. Or move. I had a feeling he had forgotten I was there, and if I did anything to remind him of my presence he would instantly shut up and go off to Inner Delta, wherever that was.

“We have until tomorrow morning at nine to meet the demands. Or, they say, the children will die, one by one.” He looked at me again and, again, seemed to react to the expression on my face. “I’m not telling you any deep secrets, Ben. Most of this will be on the newscasts later in the day. We’re trying not to turn this into a media circus but we can’t keep it all under wraps.”

“Can you meet the hijackers’ demands, Dad?” I asked.

“From a practical standpoint, Numbers One and Two can be met. Those political prisoners could be released without any threat to the public or great uproar. They’re not members of a conspiracy or anything. They
have a wide range—from a trio involved in arson during a civil rights demonstration back in the Sixties to a pathetic character who threw a homemade bomb on the lawn of the White House. The bomb never exploded.

“The money isn’t a problem, either. Ten million dollars is a drop in the bucket as far as government spending goes. It may take some doing to round up that amount in a short time, but it’s not a major concern.

“The third demand is the stickler, Ben. Inner Delta. I can’t tell you what Inner Delta is—I can only say that its work is secret, highly specialized and important in the defense of this nation. I have given my life to it. And, in a sense, gave you and your mother’s lives to it by bringing you to Delta. And the dismantling of Inner Delta is the major reason why the children have been abducted. We are convinced of that. The release of the prisoners and the demand for the money are smokescreens. The major issue here is Inner Delta.”

We were sitting in the living room and it was as familiar as my own face when I look into a mirror. But suddenly the familiarity took on a strangeness. Because of what my father was saying. Some kids had been hijacked and might be killed, and a secret U.S. agency was involved. And suddenly so were we—my father, my mother, and me. Not directly involved, of course. And yet, I reminded myself, there was a bodyguard standing outside and my mother was being detained out of town because the highways were dangerous for her to travel. I took a deep breath and felt a little dizzy, giddy, as if I were living in one of those little glass scenes that you shake to start the snow whirling around. There was no snow here, but our world was shaken up. I weighed the one question I wanted to ask my father but dared not.
Are you General Briggs, Dad?

My father placed both hands on his knees and looked
directly at me again. He seemed more relaxed now. That old hands-on-his-knees move always was a prologue to some decision, it seemed. Like: let’s go out and throw the ball around. Or: why don’t the two of us take in a movie? Now he said: “So there you have it, Ben. I wanted you to know the truth. There’s going to be a lot of stuff on radio and television and in the newspapers. A lot of it will be garbled and wrong. Some of it we will mean to be wrong. We have to guard Inner Delta. And it’s going to mean withholding certain information or”—he sought the right word, one he wanted me to hear, and found it—“or obscuring the information. But I don’t want you to be confused by anything you hear. I’ve told you the facts of the case. I want to assure you that your mother’s safe and so are you. But we have to take all precautions, as a matter of procedure, Ben.”

But there was one question I had to ask, whether it involved secrecy or not. And I asked it:

“Are you going to meet the demands of the hijackers, Dad?”

He didn’t answer for a long moment and looked tired suddenly.

“We have to wait for official policy to be announced,” he said. “But I can’t envision giving in to the demands of hijackers. This would set a precedent that could touch off mass hijackings, the way it’s happened in other countries.” He shook his head.

“But what happens if you don’t give in?” I asked, thinking of the kids on the bus and remembering all the hijackings in the world in which innocent people, including kids, died.

“We’re not completely helpless, Ben,” he said. “We’ve launched one of the most massive investigations in the history of our country. It involves thousands at all levels
of law enforcement. Federal, state, and local authorities are at work. We have clues—the method being used by the hijackers. There are informers out there, ready to give information. We’ve set up a national center to receive and correlate information. It’s a race against time, of course, but we’ve already made progress. Meanwhile, we have to prepare to bargain. Or make a pretense of bargaining. And there are other possibilities I can’t go into now. Anyway, we are proceeding on the assumption that we won’t have to meet the demands and the children will be saved.”

He stood up then, slowly, achingly, as if his own body was making demands he was finding difficult to meet He sighed again. “One child has already died, Ben.”

“They killed him?” I asked, stunned. Were there really people in the world who killed children?

“We aren’t certain yet. One of the hijackers lowered the body from the bridge. After doing a crazy dance with the child in his arms.”

“Was the hijacker in plain sight? Why didn’t someone shoot him?”

“Their messages said that a child would die for every one of the hijackers who was killed, either by sniper fire or any other way. We can’t take chances, Ben. And we’re not sure about the death of the child. There was no evidence of violence on his body. It appeared that he had been drugged. They’re carrying on tests right now. But the fact remains—a child has already died. And there are fifteen more on the bus, plus the girl who was driving it.” He came across the room and placed his arm around my shoulder. He had not touched me in years, except to shake hands on occasion, like when my report card was unusually good. “I’ve got to get back,” he said. “But I’ll keep in touch. Your mother will be through to
you on the phone a little later. We’re arranging special lines. But stay in the house, Ben. And be patient. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He stood there in his proper shirt and tie, the colors subdued, the style muted, touches of gray like small pale slivers in his hair. He did not look like a general and he did not look like a man heading a secret agency with operatives all over the world. All that seemed impossible. It seemed almost impossible, too, that a bunch of kids whose lives were in peril had anything to do with me, with us, here in our house on Fort Delta, which always had seemed to be a quiet and placid place. Even boring sometimes. Again, I had the feeling that someone had turned our world upside down, topsy-turvy, and the pieces had not yet settled into place. I wondered if they ever would.