Asterisk (11 page)

Escalante.

“He also mentioned the Asterisk Project,” she said.

He watched her face. She was gazing at him seriously. She sat back in her chair. The rain beat on the broken roof of the gazebo. A blackbird floated toward the trees. A pale column of smoke drifted from the roof of the house.

“What is it? What is Asterisk?” he asked.

“It's what they do at Escalante,” she answered. “It's what troubled Walter. I don't know any more.”

She stood up.

Is this it? he wondered. Is it finished now? He had come all this way through the rain—and for what? Puzzles? More unwritten manuscripts? He got to his feet and followed her across the lawn. The Asterisk Project. The mumbo jumbo of the thermonuclear mentality. Warheads capable of creating an Atlantis out of every continent. Project this, Project that, Project X.

On the threshold of the kitchen, she turned to him. “When we go inside, I'll pour you some coffee and we'll talk about the weather.”

The weather, Thorne thought. The trouble with paranoia is that you no sooner open the door of one labyrinth when another unexpectedly beckons. She thinks the house is bugged. Who's mad around here? Her? Me? Or the late Walter F. Burckhardt?

He sat at the kitchen table. She poured coffee. There was a framed photograph on the wall. He recognized it. It was gray, a souvenir of another era, and it showed his father with a group of men, one of whom was the young major general. It was signed across the bottom:
This ought to bring back memories, best wishes, Ben
.

“I hope this rain doesn't keep up,” she was saying.

“Sure,” he said. It disconcerted him to find his father's picture here. The problem with having a famous father is what other people expect of you. The dead man's shoes that have to be filled. It had dogged him through school, university, it had harried after him when he had gone to work. People expected to see a carbon of the great man. Too many people, both in the House and in the Senate, had affectionate memories of Benjamin Thorne. After his death, one newspaper obituary eulogized:
We have lost a great American
. It brought them together, Republicans and Democrats and Independents, they had been for once unanimous in their sentiments. He turned away from the photograph.
The only man Walt every truly respected
.

“I expect we'll get a little sun soon,” she said.

She laughed, a strange little laugh that was brittle, smoky from too many cigarettes.

“We could do with it,” he said.

He finished his coffee. He stood up, ready to leave. She seemed disappointed slightly, as if she wanted him to stay, as if perhaps suddenly she remembered something else she might tell him. Saying nothing, she walked with him to the front door. Outside, as he began to move to his car, she caught him by the wrist, her fingers hard and tight and desperate against his skin, she caught him and said: “Don't let him down. Please don't let him down.”

2

The captain, who had not introduced himself, sat on the edge of his desk and swung one leg back and forth, forth and back, in a manner that was strangely stiff. Myers, handcuffed, had passed a sleepless night on a hard cot in a narrow room, conscious of the guard who sat reading back numbers of
Playboy
beneath a sixty-watt light bulb. They had taken his cigarettes, wrapped up his equipment, stashed his tent away, his tape recorder, books, camera, binoculars. And now they had brought him in front of the captain.

Myers did not care for the hard look in the man's eye. There was a certain savage dullness in there. Even the small gingery mustache suggested it would pierce your skin if you touched a single bristle of it.

“We don't get many bird watchers in this part of the world,” the captain said.

“I guess,” Myers answered. He was hungry. His stomach rumbled audibly. They might have had the decency to give him coffee at the very least. But when the coffee had come there had been only one cup, and that was for the guard reading
Playboy
.

“What kind of birds are you studying?” the captain asked. He was smiling. You could hardly call it that, Myers thought. It was a motion of lip, a show of teeth, utterly mirthless.

“The cactus wren, mainly,” he said. “Look, I didn't know this place was off limits.”

The captain had Myers' wallet open on his desk. A Bank-Americard, out of date, a social security number, a borrower's ticket for a public library in Baltimore. He turned the wallet upside down and shook it. A few pennies fell out. A paper clip.

“The cactus wren,” the captain said. “An interesting bird, isn't it?”

“Really,” Myers said. One fifty a week and Hollander hadn't even paid him yet. Fuck it, he thought. It isn't any skin off my nose.

“I didn't see any signs,” he said.

“Maybe you didn't look hard enough,” the captain said. “What other birds you expect to find around here?”

“Buzzards.”

“Buzzards, huh?” The captain picked up Myers' social security card and stared at it. “Jackson Myers,” he said. “Jackson Myers.”

“Look,” Myers said. “I don't want to appear, you know, pushy, but you don't have any grounds for holding me here. So—if you just let me have my equipment, I'll take off. No problem.”

Stupidly, he found himself winking at the captain, as if between the two of them there might be some tacit agreement, a minor conspiracy. But the captain only stared; a look of frosted metal.

“Buzzards,” he said to Myers. “And maybe you're also interested in the turkey vulture?”

“Sure, sure,” Myers said. “Both kinds.”

“Buzzards and turkey vultures.” The captain sat down behind his desk, placed the tips of his fingers together, stared at Myers a moment, then said: “Bird-watching my ass.”

“I don't get it,” Myers said.

“Buzzards and turkey vultures. Two names. The same bird. Think again.”

Myers looked at the ceiling. A bare light bulb burned. The room was windowless, formal, barren. He felt a moment of panic, fought against it, let it pass.

“I told you my specialty was the cactus wren,” he said.

“And my specialty is the life cycle of the salmonella,” the captain said. “Come on, Jack. Think again.”

“Jesus,” Myers said. “I told you. How many times do I need to keep saying it?”

“The cactus wren,” the captain said, touching his mustache. “You crack me up, Jackson. You're a real stand-up comedian. I don't think you could tell a cactus wren from a pair of Jockey shorts.”

Myers wondered if there was violence in all this. He was too old for the rough stuff. If they came on real strong he knew he would tell them anything; and more, if they wanted to hear it. He had had all that. This was meant to be a quiet outing in the desert, no sweat, two weeks in a tent. Think of it as a paid vacation. Hollander had said that.

“Who's behind you?” the captain asked. “Who's running you, Jackson?”

“Shit, I told you,” Myers said. “I came out here in all innocence—”

“If you're innocent, I'm the Pope's wife,” the captain said. “You might as well let it all hang out, Jack. Because we'll get it anyhow. One way or another.”

Violence: was that implied here? Myers could feel the palms of his hands begin to sweat.

The door opened. The black MP from the chopper came in and put some papers on the captain's desk, then went out again. The captain looked at the papers quickly, then, as if they were a hand of cards and this a game of poker, he turned them face down.

He looked at Myers and laughed.

“Modern communications, wonderful things,” he said.

Myers wondered about the papers. They've run me through. They've checked me out.
They know
.

So much for my feathered friends, he thought.

“So you retired in seventy-four,” the captain said. “They put you out to pasture, huh? The usual pension.”

Myers looked at the floor. Bare tiles. They suggested imprisonment to him.

“Operated in Turkey.” The captain turned the papers over and looked at them. “Bangkok. London. A stint in Korea. Well. You certainly moved around, Jack. I guess you saw a lot of birds on your travels, huh?”

Myers said nothing. They had him. They had him cold. He was the dunce made to stand in the corner wearing the conical hat of humiliation.
Christ, what now?

“When did you change sides, Jackson?” the captain asked.

“I never changed sides—”

“No? You were just hanging out there with your field glasses for the benefit of your health? That it?”

“You can't fucking accuse me of changing sides.”

“I didn't realize you were so sensitive, Jack. Take it easy. I'll put it another way. When did you enter into a contract of gainful employment with a certain foreign power who, for the present, shall remain nameless?”

“I did none of that,” Myers said. “You can't fucking hang that on me.”

“That so? You're freelancing? You're solo? Where's the bread coming from? A rich aunt in Connecticut just named you in her will and you thought, Hey, I'll take a jaunt in the desert and check out one of our military installations? That it? Come on, Myers, I didn't sail up the fucking Potomac on rubber wings. Who's behind it?”

Myers got up from his seat. Awkwardly, he scratched the tip of his nose with his handcuffed hands.

“You've got to be working for them,” the captain said. “Otherwise, where's the sense? Where's the profit motive?”

“You got a key for these fuckers?” Myers asked. The metal was cutting his skin.

The captain took out a key, undid the cuffs. Myers rubbed his wrists. He shrugged. The cactus wren was shot to shit, and he wasn't working for the Russians. So what the hell.

He sat down and said: “Okay. You got me cold.”

The captain smiled.

Hollander woke while the girl was still asleep. As he dressed he watched her. She lay lifelessly, arms spread; she might have been a marionette to whose strings someone had taken a pair of scissors. Last night she had been full of activity, yet it was mechanical; not cold exactly, not that, going through the motions. He went into the small kitchenette of her apartment and stared at the telephone messages scrawled on the small blackboard beside the phone.
Charlie 226-3354. Make it 3. 4:30. Hairdresser. Karate class 7
.

He filled the electric percolator with coffee, plugged it into the wall. Mechanical affection. Could there be such a thing?

He watched the coffee spring into the plastic top of the lid. She came into the kitchenette, yawning, naked; he thought of his own daughter, a flash of her face, an image of a snapshot he had received last Christmas in the mail.
I love you, Daddy
—
Anna
.

“What's the time?” she asked.

He found his wristwatch on the kitchen table. “It's past eleven.”

“Already?” She yawned again, stretched, sat down at the table. He poured two coffees.

He sat facing her, watching her as she sipped the coffee. She smiled at him in a way that softened her features, as if all at once she were offering him some glimpse of a vulnerability she preferred to keep concealed, then looked around for a cigarette. He gave her an English Oval. In a day or so, he thought, he would have to bring Myers back, then debrief him. Debrief: he had caught himself at the ridiculous language of another time in his life. Traces remained, bits and pieces, the items of your history that clung to you like lint to cotton. Debrief. The desert was a drag, Myers would say. Pay me.

“Not bad,” the girl said, tasting the cigarette.

He watched her face. It was young and yet in some manner hard; it was as if she wanted to be older than what she claimed to be. Even the dark roots that showed through the fair hair suggested some valiant effort on her part to make herself appear older, wiser, in some way nonchalant. Nineteen years, he thought. He had loved once. Maybe that was it, his share for a lifetime, maybe you couldn't ever hope for more.

You're married to the goddamn job, Ted. Where do I figure? Where do the kids figure?
The lover had come later, quiet drinks in the afternoon with Rowley, who was a certified accountant and therefore safe, certain, predictable as the migratory passage of a lemming. Nifty little cocktail bars in the suburbs. The whole bit. I'll give it up, I'll quit. I'll resign.
Too late, Ted, too damn late
.

Rowley and me
.

He laid his hand over the girl's bare arm. She looked at him, her eyes wide in some surprise, as if this touch were the last thing she expected, this curious tenderness stunning. She had glorious eyes, a mixture of colors, greens and grays that changed as the light changed. What am I getting into? he wondered.

“I woke feeling sentimental,” he said.

“You ought to be careful of that,” she said. She blew a stream of smoke directly at him.

He looked at his watch again. 11:30.

The girl inclined her head and let her lips touch the back of his hand. The gesture surprised him somewhat: it seemed somehow both subservient and yet proud, as if she were uncertain of her own emotions. He looked at the dark roots of her hair: now, instead of suggesting an attempt on her part to look older, harder, they made him feel a strange moment of pity for her, a passing thing. She raised her face, looked at him, then laughed.

He ruffled her hair with the palm of his hand. Then he stood up and went into the bedroom and looked around for his shoes. She came in at his back. She put her arms around him and, pursing her lips, blew lightly on the back of his neck.

“You know what that does to me,” he said.

“I heard a rumor,” she said.

He turned to face her: “When are you free?”

“After seven thirty,” she said.

“I'll come back.” He fastened his cuff links, knotted his tie in front of the mirror and experienced, as he caught her body in the reflection, an unusual desire. It wasn't the time, he thought. He had to think of Brinkerhoff now. He had to show Brinkerhoff a sample.