Asterisk (9 page)

“Let's be interested in every
thought
Thorne thinks,” Dilbeck said. “A man's observable behavior can only take us so far. How do we begin to learn what he thinks?”

Sharpe put out his hand as if to touch the glass case, then he remembered he was still holding the stub of a lit cigarette. How the hell do I get rid of this?

“Pressure,” Dilbeck said. “When the time is right. If the time is
ever
right.”

Sharpe watched as Dilbeck moved down the tables.

“In your book,” he was saying, “in your book pressure usually means one thing. But there are other kinds. More subtle kinds.”

Sharpe thought of Tarkington slumped asleep behind the wheel of a car.

“Your predecessor was a man of some finesse,” Dilbeck said.

“Hollander?”

“He would have understood this situation rather well,” Dilbeck said. “But as he grew older he began to develop certain sensitivities. In your job, a poet is the very last thing you need to be. He had ceased to have the soul of a cement mixer.”

Sharpe felt the butt burn into his thumb. He had met Hollander only once, during the changeover. He had no particular impression of the guy. Quiet, withdrawn, too well liked by the people in the field. He had lost his sense of distance. But apart from that—what else? Nobody really knew why Hollander had quit anyhow. Tired, maybe, just plain worn out.

“I liked Ted Hollander,” Dilbeck was saying. “As a matter of fact, I still do. But liking isn't the whole kettle of fish, is it?”

Sharpe waited until Dilbeck had turned his back, then he surreptitiously dropped the butt and stepped on it.

“The soul of a cement mixer, that's what you need,” Dilbeck said, and looked around. “No fears, no regrets, no attachments. Only an awareness of
grinding
. Do you follow me?”

“I think so,” Sharpe said.

Dilbeck picked up a potted plant and held it to the light. One leaf was touched by brown spots. He ripped it away from the stalk and crumpled it in his hand and looked at Sharpe.

“Why didn't you ask for an ashtray?” he said.

There were perhaps fifty people in the lounge. Some sat on chairs, others squatted on the rug in front of the dais. Marcia took Thorne's hand and raised it to her lap and let it settle there, smiling at him quickly as if to say:
You'll like this. Be silent and listen
. The poet, a fat young man with a slight beard and a dark beret, began to read from a poem called
Auschwitz
. Thorne barely listened. This was Marcia's world and he wondered why he had agreed to be dragged along when, in the briefcase that sat now between his feet, there was Burckhardt's file—a fact that was burning a hole in his attention.

The young poet had a droning delivery. Marcia listened carefully, her head inclined slightly forward. Sometimes she made notes in the margins of the program; sometimes she shook her head from side to side, as if she disagreed with a line, a phrase, a meter.
The barracks here are always gray
, the poet said.
It rains. My mother stands in a doorway wearing a white apron
. Thorne opened the program notes. The poet's name was Roger Weleba—a curious name, Thorne thought. As he listened he played anagrams in his head. Weelba. Blewea. Baleew.
I remember, but memory is no exit
.

He was becoming restless. Marcia squeezed his hand tightly and whispered something to him. He couldn't catch it but didn't want to ask her to repeat it. There was an awful quietness, the kind of stillness he experienced in the reference rooms of public libraries: the turning of a page could have the timbre of a sneeze in a place like this. The poet finished. There was scattered applause, more of politeness than enthusiasm. The poet started another. It was called
The Death of a Soldier on the Russian Front
. He droned. Thorne reached down and touched the clasp of the briefcase. Then he picked up the program and drew sunglasses on the photograph of the poet. Marcia stared at him a moment, then looked back in the direction of the platform.

When the reading was over, Thorne was introduced to a couple of people in Marcia's department. A young man in a leather waistcoat whose specialty, it seemed, was
Moby Dick
, and who spoke with a nervous enthusiasm that suggested he had just come fresh from a seminar with Melville himself; an ancient hippie, behind whose features you could detect an aura of academic middlebrow respectability: beads and beard, Thorne thought—he must have been introduced to mescaline on his fiftieth birthday; a skinny woman with protruding teeth and plum-shaped amber decorations at her throat. Thorne understood that she was running Christopher Marlowe through a computer to assess the quantity of his vegetable imagery. Hands were shaken; the poems were discussed. Weleba's contribution was considered minor, it seemed. Thorne tried not to yawn. The briefcase, he thought. The goddamn briefcase. Compared to the major general's file, this gathering was slightly more than unreal. He thought: A man drowns in a swimming pool in a suburban motel and a poet writes of a concentration camp he didn't experience: there was a division of possibilities here, a kind of concussion that resulted from a head-on collision of the significant and the minor.

Outside, as they walked to the VW, Marcia said: “I think you're a Philistine.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “It was altogether a moving experience for me—”

“Moving, my ass.”

He took the car keys from his pocket. “Did you
really
enjoy it?”

She looked at him, smiling slightly, tossing a strand of hair back from her face. “Weleba just got a Rockefeller.”

“That's an evasion.”

“Some people think highly of him—”

“What do
you
think?”

She leaned against the car in a manner that he knew was calculated to be deliberately provocative: “I think they throw Rockefellers around, love. Like Frisbees. He isn't exactly my cup of java, if you must know.”

They got in the car.

“My problem is I don't like poetry,” he said. “I never liked it. Even in school.”

Marcia said nothing.

“Weleba, I figure, is on a par with Valium,” Thorne said.

She laughed. She laid the flat of her hand against his leg. He turned the key in the ignition; momentarily the headlamps dimmed as the motor labored.

“As for your colleagues,” he said.

“What about them?”

He edged the VW slowly across the parking lot. At the entrance to the street, he turned to look at her: “How do you put up with them?”

She stroked the side of his leg and said: “I've developed a certain immunity. They practice their eccentricities and I practice mine. It's simple.”

“What are your eccentricities?” he asked.

“I get these overwhelming urges to commit oral sex in automobiles. Except it makes for dangerous driving.”

There was a red light just ahead; something that Thorne almost failed to notice.

In the green Catalina Tarkington was saying: “I wander lonely as a cloud.”

Lykiard, driving, nodded.

“Shelley,” Tarkington said. “I got an A in junior high for Shelley.”

Hollander climbed the last narrow flight of stairs to his apartment. He fumbled with his key, unlocked the door, stepped inside the darkened room, and turned on the lights. It was tacky. It was what the realtor called a studio apartment; Hollander had come to understand that this meant it had one window somewhat larger than average. He sat on the edge of the sofa and undid his shoelaces and he remembered Rowley in the green Porsche, the shadow behind the windshield, the way the kids had scrambled into the car after the movie, how their faces had been faint shadows thrown upon the glass, their hands raised in stiff gestures of farewell … Shaking his head, he went into the kitchen. When he turned on the light the congregation of roaches dispersed, scuttling for the darker places. He opened the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, pulling it from the plastic collar of the six-pack. He popped the tab, took a couple of quick swallows, then returned to the other room and lay down on the sofa. After a moment it came, it came as it always did—a stranger, yet familiar to him in its own dreadful way. Loneliness. He got up from the sofa—as if movement, any kind of movement, might defeat the specter—and walked to the window, passing the typewriter in which there was a piece of paper with the sentence:
My career began, unexpectedly, in the winter of 1949
.

We want drama, the editor of the book had told him. What we don't want in this kind of book is any moralizing or philosophy. We want a lot of action.

Action, Hollander thought.

I could give them action.

He looked from the window at a street of tenements. In some windows there were lights, shabby lights, as if they originated from bulbs that hung suspended inside frayed shades. Over the buildings the sky was impenetrably black.

He suddenly wished he had never seen the Asterisk file. He wished he had never known.

But you couldn't go back.

Once you had knowledge you couldn't go back to ignorance.

If I had been a different kind of person, maybe … He stared at the dark sky in the manner of someone who expects to find solutions to problems in the patterns of stars. It's the only world we've got, he thought. And who were you to trust? Hungry presidents, crazed generals, the hawks of that calcified crew known collectively as the Joint Chiefs of Staff? No. Emphatically no.

He walked around the apartment, thinking now of Brinkerhoff's overlords. They weren't any different from the rest, they listened to the same frenetic melodies of global paranoia, they were eager participants in the same race to destruction. Build the bombs, build them bigger and better with more and more megatons, more and more of the bleak capacity for violence. He sometimes thought of his own kids blown apart. The worst part. And then at other times he imagined that his mentality was still in some way hooked to the notion of a cold war, that he was stuck in a repetitive groove of thinking—he was being alarmist without any reason.

Balance, he thought. Yes. The equalization. One side light-years ahead of the other was a true prescription for disaster. He couldn't let that happen. He couldn't. He would give Brinkerhoff everything. The whole damn thing. If history ascribed treason to him, then it was too bad.

He sat down on the sofa, drained the beer can, looked around the bare walls of the room. They menaced him: they were bare in the way he associated with rubber rooms in sanitoriums, padded cells where you could scream until you no longer heard the sound of yourself. Impulsively, he picked up the telephone. He dialed a number: he needed to see the girl.

“I'm busy, Ted,” she said. “Why don't you call me back in a half hour?”

“Okay,” he said. How old was she? Eighteen? Nineteen?

He put the telephone down.

He went to the window. In the blackness of the night sky above the tenements he could see, in a faint way, the stars, the smear of the Milky Way. The sources. Beginnings never mattered much to him, only endings, only how things turned out.

He drew down the blind. Loss: that was what lay at the heart of loneliness. A sense of loss.

At the kitchen table Thorne opened the file and looked at the stats. Marcia hovered around him, looking over his shoulder.

“What's that?”

“Burckhardt's file,” he said.

“I shouldn't be looking, right?”

“I shouldn't be looking either,” he said.

“All that secrecy junk,” she said. “Sometimes I don't see any difference between how this country is governed and how the Freemasons run their lodges. You know that? The cult of secrecy.”

He glanced at her, then he began to flip through the photocopies. They felt greasy, as if the letters might come away in his hands.

Walter F. Burckhardt. DOB 2.2.20
.

Rank, current: Major General
.

Marcia said: “Why the interest?”

“It's my kind of poetry,” he answered.

“Seriously,” she said.

Thorne looked at her. Why indeed? “I want to find out if he really was deranged or …” He let the sentence trail away into silence. Or what? What was the alternative? The doomed man's last testament: work it out from twenty-five pages of nothing. It was a hell of a thing to leave behind if you knew you were going; a suicide note without purpose.

“He was an old friend of Daddy's, after all,” she said. “Boys must stick together, huh?”

“You know what they say about sarcasm,” he said. “Put this down to my curiosity—”

“And your upright sense of duty,” she said. “Yours is the kind of head that hates loose ends. I think the word is fastidious.”

Fastidious, Thorne thought. It sounded strangely dull; it was an adjective he associated with female career librarians, a life spent lurking in the bookstacks where the gothics and the romances met in some nebulous area of the heart, and where all your passion was distilled in a single drop of perfume placed in the folds of a lace handkerchief that you continually wanted to let float down to some man's feet. Fastidious.

“You're saying these terrible things all because I thought the poetry reading was dull,” he said.

“Thank you for ascribing motivations to me—”

“Thanks for calling me fastidious—”

“But you are, my love,” she said. “You're the kind of person who can't sleep at night unless he knows that the mothballs are still operative in the wardrobe where he keeps his suits. Just the thought of lint in your navel makes you cringe.”

“That's how you see me?”

“Part of the picture,” she said. “Because of some perversity of nature, though, you're also warm and kind and loving, et cetera. I like that.”

He watched her a moment. She was standing by the stove, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Her legs were parted slightly; her left eyebrow was arched and she was staring at him in a way he found totally distracting.