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“Do we make coffee or love?” she said.

“It's got to be coffee first.” He turned the pages. He heard her sigh, then run water into the coffeepot. The sheets in front of him contained details that were cold, sparse, colorless. You could not build a rounded character from the chill of these photostats. He tried to remember Burckhardt's face. He got nothing. Just that handshake, the strength in the fingers, the clap on the shoulder.
Chin up
.

He read through the pages. The details of a career, a life. Somewhere in all this there were the reasons for self-destruction, somewhere.

Spouse: Anna Fleming. DOB 6.5.40
.

Twenty years between them, he thought. They always said it makes a difference. Not at first, but later, when the man is closing on sixty and the woman touching forty.

Marcia set down a cup of coffee in front of him.

“If you're going to burn the midnight oil,” she said.

“This won't take long—”

“I'm going back to Coleridge, who at least is a faithful old fucker.”

He heard her go out of the kitchen. He heard her turn the pages of a book. He drank some coffee, stared at the file.

The war years were covered, pretty much as he remembered them. Liaison officer to General Clay. The congressional committee. Then Korea.

Wounded in action, 1952
.

It didn't specify the nature of the wound nor even the nature of the action. Shot out of the sky? Thorne wondered. What exactly? Whoever completed these records and kept them up to date had had no eye for detail.

Promotion: Major General, 1954
.

Marcia came back into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, added some milk to her coffee, smiled at him, retreated.

Tattershall Air Force Base, England 1954–1957
.

USAF Liaison Officer, Polaris Site, Garelochhead, Scotland, 1957–1959. Lowery Bombing Range, Colorado, 1960–1962. Naval Air Test Center, Maryland, 1962–1965. Griffis Base, N.Y., 1966–1967
.

Dull, Thorne thought. What would somebody like Marcia be able to read between these dull lines? A career officer, a commitment. But Erickson had said:
Something of a radical
. How?

He turned to the final page.

An appointment to Aerospace Defense Command.

October, 1969, appointment to the staff of General Whorley,
Project Blue Book
.

Blue Book, Thorne thought. They had recently scrapped that, hadn't they? Tired of watching the night sky. Nothing out there.

Whatever, Burckhardt had been sent to Oscura, New Mexico, a classified site. His appointment there had apparently lasted for a year. In 1972, he had been posted to Escalante, Arizona, another classified site.

And that was it.

That was it.

Except for a handwritten note attached to the last page by a paper clip. Thorne set it aside, read it.

This officer is not recommended for further promotion
.

Beneath the sentence there were the initials:
WHW
. General William Harold Whorley, Thorne thought. Who else? He stacked the papers together, closed the folder. Now, he thought. Why would Whorley block any future promotions for the old man? Too old? Too much of a
radical?
Why does a man drown himself? Why anything?

He yawned. He put the folder into his briefcase. He went into the living room. Marcia was still at her Coleridge.

“Any revelations, Sherlock?” she asked.

Thorne shrugged. “Dull City,” he said. He was tired. He sat down on the sofa. “If I get myself a beret, could I become a poet too?”

“Eat it,” she said.

He rubbed his eyes. He wanted to sleep.

The telephone rang. Marcia reached for it, then she covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

“It's for you, John. Female. Who do you know that talks in low, sexy whispers?”

Thorne took the receiver from her.

He heard a woman ask: “John Thorne?”

“Speaking,” he said.

There was a short silence. Then the woman said: “My name is Anna Burckhardt. I think we should meet.”

4

Tuesday, April 4

It was raining, a thin, drifting April rain that covered the Eastern seaboard all the way from Providence to Savannah. The traffic on Interstate 95 was slow, crawling. Outside Alexandria a school bus had slammed into the concrete support of an overpass; a Volvo, unable to brake, had gone into the back of the bus and was smoldering now on the center strip. Tarkington, who had gone to a motel the previous night, leaving Lykiard outside the apartment complex, was driving alone in the Catalina. On waking, he had taken a couple of tabs of speed, white crosses, and he was beginning to feel them jangle the edge of his nerves. They always fucked him over, upsetting his stomach, making him shake, but on the plus side they guaranteed him alertness.

He passed the smoking Volvo carefully. The front of the school bus looked like crumpled yellow paper in the rain. There were a few kids with lunchboxes standing in the rain, an anxious driver, two or three cops, flashing lights, the whole bit. Up ahead in the fast lane he saw the red VW. He lit a cigarette, using the dash lighter, and he switched the radio on. Commercials, the jingles of salesmanship. Anything was better than Lykiard's company, he had to admit. The Greek never spoke unless it was to mumble some incoherency. It was Tarkington's feeling that the Greek had been in the field too long and needed a break. Like in a home for the criminally insane.

During the Second World War, Lykiard had strangled Nazis with his bare hands. Jesus. Where were they recruiting these babies from nowadays? Just sitting beside the Greek made him feel chilly.

He heard the voice of Dolly Parton. She sounded like a girl with a nylon rope stuck in her throat. Tits, though, you had to say that. And those glossy lips. Tits and lips.

He drove past the turning for Dumfries and Joplin.

The rain was constant, thin, and steady, the kind you could stand out in and not feel falling but that soaked you just the same. He glanced at his eyes in the mirror. Bags. They looked like small purple grapes. Quantico U.S. Marine Base. Somewhere to the west. Hemp, Morrisville, Remington. Where was Thorne going, anyhow?

A guy was getting a ticket for speeding just beyond the junction of 17. He stood beneath a golfer's colored umbrella while the cop wrote out the ticket. Automatically, Tarkington looked at his own speedometer. A quiet fifty. They hated it when you handed in traffic violations and asked for a reimbursement.

Suddenly he panicked. He had lost the VW.
He had lost the fucking thing
. No. Then he relaxed. He saw it slowing off the highway, going toward Fredericksburg.

Relax, he said to himself.

But the white crosses in his blood made his pulse and his heartbeat race in a wild way.

She was a woman who looked as though she were thirty-seven going on sixty. Her skin was pale, the lips pinched and almost colorless, and although she had made some attempt to comb through her thick hair Thorne noticed the unevenness of the parting. Her eyes were dark, dull, reflecting little of anything. When she had opened the door there had been no smile of greeting. A recent widow, Thorne thought. You had to make allowances for grief.

He followed her across a sparsely furnished sitting room and into a kitchen. For a moment he thought they were going to sit down to coffee, he could hear it perking, but instead she opened the kitchen door and they went out into the backyard, moving toward a broken-down gazebo. There were two deck chairs under the rusted roof. Sparrows flew up and toward the trees that surrounded the yard.

They sat in the deck chairs. Thorne could hear the rain harping on the roof. This better be worth it, he thought. Marcia had called in to say he had a cold. Farrago would have to do his own dirty work this morning. But he felt uneasy. Absenteeism in Foster's White House was something of an exception.

The woman lit a cigarette. Her fingers shook. She wore a plain wedding band. Her clothes were drab, a black wool cardigan, a pair of gray slacks, a simple necklace of amber.

For a moment, waiting for her to say something, Thorne looked across the lawn at the house. In the rain, the rear windows seemed opaque, almost as if there were no rooms beyond them, as if they had been painted directly onto the brick. It was a strange illusion. She played with her lit cigarette, moving it from one hand to the other and back again.

Finally he said: “I was sorry to hear about your husband.”

She looked at him quickly. He noticed pale lipstick for the first time, a smudge of cosmetic shadow under the eyes, perhaps even a suggestion of rouge on the cheeks; but nothing took away from the pallor.

“My husband expected to die,” she said.

Thorne sat back in the deck chair; he was beginning to feel damp. He was also beginning to suspect another aspect of lunacy.
Expected to die. Planned it all
.

“I don't follow,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

She looked quickly now toward the house, as if she were afraid of something inside.

“Just like I said. He expected to die.”

“Well,” Thorne said. “I guess it's something we all, uh, expect.…” His voice faded. A large dark bird, a crow, floated bleakly in the rain.

“In the broad sense,” she answered, and she smiled for the first time. Brief, uncertain. “My husband did not expect to be
allowed
to live. There's a difference.”

Thorne shook his head. “I still don't see.”

She flicked her cigarette away. She turned toward him and there was the slightest hint of the coquette in this gesture as though, out of long habit, she were continually projecting herself to men. He wondered how often the old man had left her on her own. His overseas postings, perhaps long periods apart, how could he know? The cloistered atmosphere of an air base, other husbands, unattached young men.

“His death wasn't suicide,” she said. “He was a good swimmer. A strong … his death wasn't suicide.”

In silence, Thorne watched the house. He had caught something from her, her nervousness, that indefinable sense of an edge, as if something quite unexpected were about to happen. The windows in the rain. The still drapes. The half-open kitchen door.

“Are you saying he was killed?” he said. “Who killed him? And why?”

“I don't have the answers,” she said.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“He spoke highly of your father. When we lived together—”

“I don't follow that.”

“Oh. We had been estranged for more than two years. Every Friday night he would call me. Like clockwork. Except last Friday.”

Thorne put his hands into his pockets. He was cold, this rain had a chilling effect.

“I wasn't aware of your separation,” he said.

She was silent, twisting her fingers together, turning her hands over and over. She could not be still.

“Your father was perhaps the only man Walt ever truly respected,” she said. “He had met you, I believe, only once—”

“At the funeral,” Thorne said.

“Of course. The funeral.” She looked down at the grass, shifted her feet, rearranged her hands in her lap. “Something about you. He liked you. He thought he could trust you. I imagine he saw something of your father in you.”

Thorne closed his eyes briefly. She was skirting the margins of something, touching on a nerve and then flitting away again.

“Why do you say he was killed?”

“They wouldn't let him live,” she said.

“Who wouldn't? Who are you talking about?”

She faced him, her expression imploring:
Don't you know? Can't you work it out?

He put his hand on her wrist and found her skin unexpectedly warm.

“Who?” he asked.

She shrugged and pulled her hand away from him and began to rummage in the pocket of her cardigan for cigarettes. She brought out crumpled Kleenexes, a couple of books of matches, a pack of Rothmans. She lit one, blew smoke into the rain, watched it drift.

“I can't answer you,” she said.

“What do you expect of me?” he asked, conscious of a vague desperation in his own voice. Why had he come all this way? To confront a bereaved nut? A fruit bat? In his mind's eye he could see his empty office. A pile of newspapers. Farrago walking up and down, cursing him out.

“My husband thought you would know what to do,” she said.

“His legacy to me was an attaché case filled with blank paper,” Thorne said. “What am I meant to do with that?”

“He thought you would do the right thing—”

“The right thing? What
is
the right thing?”

She sighed, as if she were irritated. “He was afraid. Do you understand that? He wasn't a man easily scared, he was a brave man in many ways, Mr. Thorne, and although I had stopped loving him I never stopped respecting him. But he was scared.”

“Scared of what?” Thorne was uncomfortable in the chair. He slumped back, watched the rain, wanting to leave. The major general had been scared. Okay. The major general had been killed. Okay. Why?

“But you wouldn't be interested in the personal history,” she said. She smiled again, in a rather sad manner this time as though she were remembering some delicious moment from the past and suffering regret because nothing had worked out.

“He was at a place called Escalante.” She looked at Thorne in an urgent way. “Something there scared him. That was what it was. Something at Escalante scared him. He told me very little. When he called me, the very last time he ever spoke to me, he said he was going to contact you. He had knowledge—”

“Knowledge?”

She nodded her head: “Knowledge he felt was important. But he didn't know what to do with it.”

Thorne watched her fidget with her cigarette.

She said, “He told me that if anything were to happen to him, I was to tell you—Escalante.”

Escalante, Thorne thought. A hard missile site. He turned the thing over in his head. You could come to the conclusion that the old man had gone soft, become pacifist, didn't like the missiles much anymore, wanted an end to the whole nuclear horror show. You could reach that one by an easy route. What then? He was going to blow the whistle on something? But what? A new missile? Germ warfare? Something, something he didn't like. He was going to blow the whistle and they didn't take kindly to that, so they put him away in a swimming pool.