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The alternative was to go for his holster.

But Ted: Ted was too fast. Ted still knew his stuff.

“Okay,” he said.

“Go someplace, fire your gun a couple of times,” Hollander said. “If Sharpe wants to know, you can always say you took a couple of quick ones at me while I was running away.”

Hollander waited. He wasn't sure that Tarkington would go for it; he was counting on the fat man's inborn fear. Tarkington straightened up, dragged the Greek by the heels toward the door. The toilet flushed again.

Hollander held the knife distastefully. In the doorway, Tarkington paused, sweating. He was already thinking of Sharpe, Sharpe's face, the whole fuck-up he would have to suffer through.
The holster
, he thought.
Would there be time?

He knew there wouldn't be before Hollander was on him with the knife.

“Maybe,” Tarkington said. “Maybe we'll run into one another again, huh?”

“I doubt it,” Hollander said.

Tarkington looked down at the Greek a moment. “I'm glad you got him first, Ted. I'm glad about that much.”

2

The
Post
's editorial was sharply critical. Thorne cut it out and put it aside. Maybe, maybe not, he thought. It was headlined “Appealing to Nobody.”

President Foster, in attempting to be all things to all men, runs the grave risk of being nothing to anybody
. It would probably bring Bannerman down on his head, as well as Farrago, but he would send it up in his summary anyhow.

His telephone rang.

Farrago, on the other end, said: “Your cold better?”

“A bit,” Thorne said.

“Guys like you,” Farrago said. “You spend too much time on the nest. It weakens your resistance to germs. Take vitamins, John. Especially the B
₁₂
complex and a healthy dose of C.”

“It works for you?” Thorne asked.

“Nothing works for me,” Farrago said. “Including you. You finished yet?”

“Almost.”

When Thorne hung up he called Sally Winfield in and raced through his dictation to her. At the last moment he included the
Post
editorial. There was some critical stuff from the
New York Times
and an article in the
Star
that wouldn't do Foster's blood pressure much good. He put them all together, added something pleasant he found in yesterday's
Phoenix Gazette. He may be a Democrat but he has the solid fiscal instincts of a conservative
. There, Thorne thought: your open-ended policy is paying off in the sticks. Next thing would be a letter of praise from Senator Goldwater.

When he had finished his dictation, he put on his jacket and went out. He told Sally he would be back in thirty minutes. He drove to the same seafood restaurant he had gone to before, the
Shrimp's Hideaway
. Erickson was already at the table, a cup of coffee in front of him. Fidgeting, looking somewhat like a nervy Clark Kent.

Thorne slipped into the seat facing Erickson.

“Did you get me the stuff?”

Erickson was flustered. “Man, you're going to skin me, I tell you no lies. This is the second favor this week. I can't keep this kind of thing up, you know that.”

“I know,” Thorne said. “I appreciate.”

Erickson opened his briefcase and took out a bulky envelope. He slid it across the table, then picked up his coffee. “What the hell's going on anyhow?” he asked.

Thorne picked up the envelope and put it into his own briefcase, locking it.

“First it's Major General Whatsisname, now it's the heavy shit. What gives?”

“It's something Bannerman wants,” Thorne said.

“You expect me to buy that one? Bannerman only has to pick up his telephone. He doesn't send out an errand boy. He doesn't go in for this kind of crap.”

Erickson, narrowing his eyes in a look of both scrutiny and disbelief, finished his coffee. “Don't tell me anything. I don't want to know. Okay? And do me a favor.”

“If I can,” Thorne said.

“No more favors,” Erickson said. “Store's closed. Gone to lunch. Savvy?”

“I'm with you,” Thorne said. He watched Erickson rise and leave the restaurant. After a few moments he picked up his briefcase, went outside, unlocked the VW, drove away. A black Mercury that had followed him down Pennsylvania Avenue slipped away from the sidewalk and tracked him back to the White House.

In his office he found a telephone message on his desk. It said simply:
Senator Jacobson called. Call back
. He asked Sally to get him the senator's office. What did Jacobson want? Another old friend of his father's, Jacobson had fitted neatly into the slots left vacant by Senator Thorne's death. Politically, both men had been the closest of allies; but whereas Ben Thorne had been open, gregarious, and sometimes, according to his critics, indiscreet, Jacobson was the kind of man who played whatever cards he held in a furtive way. Thorne realized that he had not seen the senator in more than a year—so why this call now?

He heard a woman's voice say, “Senator Jacobson's office.”

“John Thorne, I'm returning—”

“Ah, Mr. Thorne. The senator wanted to know if you would be free for lunch today.”

Thorne looked at his desk diary. The day was blank. He had intended seeing Marcia between her classes. But that could wait.

“I think I am,” he said.

“Fine. The senator has a meeting that ought to finish around twelve fifteen, twelve thirty. Shall I call you back when he's free?”

“Fine,” Thorne said.

Senator William Jacobson: in cartoons he was always characterized as having the collar of his raincoat turned up, as if he had something dreadful to hide. He had an oddly bland face, the kind you had to concentrate on to remember. How does a man go so far in politics with such a curious anonymity? He was in the papers a great deal, usually in connection with Senate investigations of organized crime. He had published a book on the Mafia. Before entering politics, Thorne remembered, he had been a professor of law at Columbia.

His telephone was ringing again. It was Farrago.

“I just had Bannerman chewing my balls off,” he said. “What the fuck are you playing at? Can't you find something in the fucking papers to cheer the Old Man up?”

“I'm doing my best,” Thorne said.

“Try a little harder—”

“If I tried any harder, I'd be sending up obituaries,” Thorne said. “In case you hadn't noticed it, the papers aren't exactly falling over themselves to give the Old Man merit marks—”

“Fuck,” Farrago said. “Go back to sleep.”

Thorne heard the click of a dead line.

He sat back, put up his feet, and thought about the briefcase. It was tempting to open it here and go through Erickson's envelope—but that would be running a needless risk. Farrago could come in, or the oleaginous Duncannon, or even Bannerman himself on one of his irregular tours. Later, he thought. There would be plenty of time.

“Lykiard's in the fucking Potomac,” Tarkington was saying.

But Sharpe was hardly listening; there was a time for excuses and a time for explanations, but right now was a time of planning what to say to Dilbeck. His anger was a slow fuse.

“I don't give that”—he snapped his fingers—“I don't give a monkey's fuck about the Greek. What I don't get is how two of you couldn't deal with Hollander. That's what I don't get.”

Tarkington was trying to look through the slats of the blind. He wanted to believe it was daylight out there and not the continuation of some endless night.

“I might have wounded him,” Tarkington said. “Look, he surprised us. He knifed the Greek. Before I could get my gun out …” He shrugged his shoulders. Was it going to wash? You could never tell with Sharpe. He was sitting behind his desk, his fists clenched.

“So where's Hollander now?” Sharpe said.

“I don't know.”

“You know what you're good at, Tarkington? You know what?”

Tarkington waited, holding his breath.

“You're good at sweet fuck all,” Sharpe said. “That's what you do best. You couldn't operate a pinball machine without the help of a Guide Dog.”

Tarkington screwed up his eyes. There was sun out there. Over D.C., a flat white sun. A brand-new day.

“Okay,” Sharpe said, rising from his desk.

“I said I think I wounded him,” Tarkington said.

“By the same token, Tarkington, you might have been a fucking astronaut,” Sharpe shouted at him. “You know what I'm going to do with you?”

Reykjavik, Tarkington thought. Ceylon, maybe. He had an overwhelming desire to get laid.

“I'm putting you back on Thorne as of now,” Sharpe said. “Brandt's on him, but I want Brandt back here. You can't fuck up a simple thing like keeping an eye on Thorne, I guess.”

It might have been worse, Tarkington thought. Surveillance could be a drag but Thorne didn't seem to move around a great deal so there was a chance to breathe, unwind a bit. It might have been goddamn Iceland. Or worse.

“Tell Brandt I want him in,” Sharpe said. “Now get your ass out of my office before I puke.”

Tarkington went out.

Sharpe unclenched his fists, noticing that the blood had drained from his fingers, that his fingers now looked the way they did after a long swim, white and drained and wrinkled. They were everywhere: you only had to knock once on the woodwork and there were incompetents everywhere. He would have to face Dilbeck again, maybe even the daughter.

Hollander, he thought. I ought to have known better. The old dog had learned all the old tricks. And he hadn't forgotten them.

It was a cheap hotel, a place for rummies, potential suicides, cut-rate whores, the unretreadable rejects of a Great Society. Hollander had checked in during the hours of darkness, noticing that the thin neon that burned outside had shed some of its letters, leaving impenetrable gaps in the sky: Hotel T j na. An inscrutable hieroglyphic, like something seen on the side of a passing boxcar. The clerk had been asleep at his desk. Hollander had paid in advance for one night, gone up to the fifth floor in an elevator he had last seen in a 1940s movie, locked himself in a room decorated in faded chintz, and fallen asleep. He slept for three or four hours and when he woke it was daylight and the sun was coming in beneath the brown blind. He woke thinking of Davina, how she had been sitting in a scared crouch in the corner of the bedroom, quite beyond explanations. Well. It could only have come through Myers, he thought. It could only have happened that way. But it was insignificant to him now, a trifle; it was enough for him to know that they had uncovered him.

They want me dead, he thought. It was quite a discovery to know that somebody had your number. But even that seemed unimportant. The only real thing was how Brinkerhoff's people would react to his offering. How quickly they would respond. And then there was Escalante; the realms of endless speculation. Since they had failed to kill him, would they go to the trouble of moving it from Escalante? Would they go to that trouble?

He pulled up the blind. His body was stiff. There was a white sun over the tenements and, in the street below, a black in a long coat crossing the pavement with a brown bag clutched against his chest. The room smelled. The flowers on the wallpaper had long faded. There was a stain on the white sheets. It was a place you came to when there was nowhere left to go: a dead end.

But how much did they think he knew? Just how much? Enough, obviously, if they wanted him dead. Enough.

Did they know about Brinkerhoff? They couldn't, unless from time to time they exercised a little random surveillance. But he hadn't ever felt that strange intuition he always experienced when he was being followed. Maybe that meant nothing except the fact he was getting old, loosening up, letting his guard down.

No. They couldn't know about Brinkerhoff. If they did, they wouldn't have put out the death warrant. They would have hauled him in for questions. They would have wanted to know how much of it had gone to Brinkerhoff.

Reasonable. But this wasn't a place for reason.

If you started in on the hunt for reason, you wound up on a paper chase. I would have to look back into the crystal ball of my infancy, he thought, to understand why I'm doing what I'm doing. Selling out my country. Going over the wall. Giving things away, things they didn't want to give away, the Secrets. Later, they'll say: He must have been a communist, a red, why the fuck didn't anybody notice?

He smiled faintly. Streaks of light from the morning sun glinted on the windows of the tenements. In Moscow there would be snow. A cold wind coming off the Volga.

All I am, he thought, is the plus sign in a necessary equation.

Tired, he lay down on the bed. He had a picture of the Greek coming at him, the blade going in, the quick escape of Lykiard's breath from his open mouth and that look, that weirdly stunned look, in the eyes, like the astonished expression of a prizefighter who has walked straight into a sucker punch. It had been a long time since he had killed. What he hoped was that he wouldn't have to do it again. Ever.

They ate a lunch of lobster and salad. The senator talked small talk, a craft at which he was a master. Thorne imagined him moving with ease through fund-raising barbecues or cutting ribbons for new shopping malls. It was an art, this small talk. A part of it was how you paused, drew your breath, used your eyebrows during the silences; as if you were assimilating information of colossal import.

How have you been? What do you like about Foster? How is the work? Have you seen your mother lately?

They drank white wine and Thorne looked around the restaurant. It was the kind of place that made him uncomfortable; the waiters were gliding flunkies who seemed to approach your table on roller skates. And the senator had obviously developed a form of imperceptible semaphore with them; they came to the table even when it was not apparent to Thorne that Jacobson had called them. He felt somewhat suffocated by it all, the silent rugs, the heavy curtains, the burnished brass of the interior.