Players (12 page)

Pammy bare-breasted on the redwood deck watched Ethan row toward shore, varying light between them, fire opal and conifer bronze, a checkered shade from house to water’s edge, curt blue noon beyond. She sat on a bench while Jack Laws cut her hair. The house was all glass and cedar shingles, built vertically, its reflecting surfaces dense with trees. Jack muttered instructions to himself, thinning out an area behind her left ear. She looked west toward silhouetted hills, the mainland.

“What are you up to back there?”

“You wanted drama, right? A change. Don’t interrupt.”

“What’ll we do for lunch?”

“That’s all we do here. We plan meals at great length with all this business about fresh vegetables, fresh lobster, country-fresh eggs, this bullshit routine. We talk about it, right? Then we actually plan it, the specifics. Then we do it, we make it. Then we sit down and eat it, talking about it all the while.”

“I don’t want you doing things to my hair in this mood.”

“Then we, what, clean up, throw away, wash and dry. And then it’s time to discuss mealtime, foodtime, the next meal. Quick, drive out to roadside stands. Blueberries, squash, corn, hurry.”

“It’s not a life-enhancing mood you’re in. I sense little warmth there, Jack.”

“After dark,” he said. “The quiet.”

“I don’t like scissors in your hand.”

“Do you believe how dark?”

“It’s called night, Jack. We call that night.”

“I didn’t know it would be like this. I thought swimming at least. Do you believe this water?”

“Cold, I know.”

“I thought morning swims. I thought at last, freedom from crowded beaches. But this water. Who knew?”

“It’s not totally out of the question.”

“It’s the pits.”

“Try again,” she said. “Maybe it was just that day.”

“You have nice breasts.”

“A bit hairy right now.”

“Nice breasts for a girl.”

“I still want to know what we’ll do for lunch.”

“If he ever gets here to supervise.”

“He rows well, I think.”

“The supervisor,” Jack said. “If the supervisor ever gets here.”

“Anytime Ethan wants to rent a house this nice in a setting this lovely, cetra cetra, I’m perfectly happy to have him supervise.”

“What’s he got in that boat, four tons of pig iron, the way he’s rowing?”

“I like watching him. People rowing. People rowing and people bicycling. They’re nice to watch. Once we were in England and somewhere near Windsor Castle we saw these boys
rowing, prep school, in racing boats, rowing as teams in these sculls, and along the shore there’s the instructor going along on this little path right along the shore on his bicycle, this towpath, calling out instructions.”

“I’m doing this par excellence.”

“So rowing and bicycling together,” she said. “Boy, what a treat for my jaded cranium.”

“This is drama extraordinaire.”

“All I want’s a new head.”

“You got it, charley.”

She’d always lived in apartments. This was a house in the woods at the edge of a bay, a house that inhaled the weather, frequent changes in temperature. She heard noises all night long. Animals lived in the roof and cellar. There were bats in the unused chimney. In bed, curled under blankets and quilts, she couldn’t tell the difference between the sounds of wind and rain, or bats and squirrels, or rain and bats. There were ship-creakings everywhere and charred wood hissing in the fireplace, sputtering up at times, never quite still. When fog worked in from the bay it seemed to suggest some basic change in the state of information. The dampness in foul weather was penetrating. Birds flew into the huge glass windows, seeing forest within, and were stunned or killed.

They watched Ethan step out of the dinghy and pull it onto the stony beach, up over the tide line. He came up the make-shift steps and along a bending path, disappearing in the trees once or twice, head down when he emerged, trudging. Pammy went inside to find a shirt.

Lyle watched television, sitting up close, his hand on the channel selector. Near midnight he got a call from J. Kinnear. He imagined Kinnear looking out the window as he spoke, down at the dark yard.

“Where will you be Tuesday, eleven-thirty, night?”

“Happening fast.”

“If I were an intelligence officer putting you through a prerecruitment phase, I’d be inclined to move very slowly. I’d be inclined, I think, to let you discover your limit of involvement at a much more reasonable pace.”

“How far I’d go.”

“Correct.”

“My clandestine potential.”

“Be at night court, Centre Street. I may want you to meet someone.”

“Any idea how I can reach Rosemary?”

“None,” J. said.

Two days later, after the close, he saw the green VW turn into Wall from Broadway. Marina pulled over and he got in. She drove out to the gray frame house. Kinnear was sitting out back, legs crossed, writing on a legal pad. From the small porch Lyle looked back in for Marina, seeing her through a series of doorways as she passed the entrance to the basement, near the front of the house, apparently talking to someone. Kinnear approached Lyle, gripping his upper arm as they shook hands and flashing that quick wink, an expression that said “trust, solidarity, purpose.”

“Lyle in his work duds.”

“Best tie too.”

“Big-time trading duds.”

“She forgot the Cheerios.”

Memory stirring in J.’s eyes.

“Yes—yes, she did, matter of fact. The Cheerios. Ruined two breakfasts.”

J. went back to his chair, his right hand trailing a sense of their recent handshake, and Lyle sat on the porch steps.

“How are you?”

“There’s a feeling we’ve been penetrated. Consequently a certain amount of disinformation is being handed out. It gets a little complex at times.”

“Disinformation is what?”

“A term used by intelligence agencies. Meaning’s clear enough, no?”

“Plausible but erroneous information.”

“So,” Kinnear said, “there’s a slight taste of cat piss in the air. Ambiguity, confusion, disinformation. What next, right?”

“Do you head up this group or whatever?”

“I don’t confirm, I don’t deny. Yes and no, but don’t quote me on that. I’m a little bit of a Jesuit, Lyle. Jebbies know how to play position. They don’t leave you with a good shot.”

“You weren’t told of the first attempt.”

“Yes, well, the brother-sister act comes to us with a fair measure of self-righteous zeal attached to it. But that’s all right, perfectly all right. We don’t have a prospectus and we don’t put out an annual report. Any rate, I wasn’t supposed to tell you about the penetration. But I want your trust, Lyle. I may be needing it, frankly. I’ve been living in pavement cracks for a number of years now and you get so you trust the
near stranger or at least go out of your way to vie for his trust because that’s one of the things that happens. You get some complicated feelings about your own people. When somebody’s picked up, wow, you can’t imagine how quick you are to forget all that clan solidarity you’ve been building for years. It’s assumed he or she will furnish names and places. Things change and maybe it’s advanced communications, I don’t know, but today there’s just one terrorist network and one police apparatus. Thing is, they sometimes overlap.”

Kinnear walked over to the steps and put his hands to Lyle’s face, framing it. He recited a phone number, speaking with exaggerated distinctness. He asked Lyle to memorize the number and instructed him to use it only at his, J.’s, specific request. Then he went back to the chair, openly venting his apprehensions in a pasty smile. He was vulnerable in the special way of men who still inhabit the physical structure and display the mannerisms of their early twenties, a relatively blameless age. J. had no less trouble being slender these days, or light afoot, and there were signs, still, of an ingenuous eager warmth in his eyes. This honesty was cruel, however, a suggestion of some essential deficiency in the man, his failure to understand deception, perhaps, or anything besides deception.

“Somebody like vilar,” Lyle said, “would be an example, I take it, of one network.”

This was the evening he was supposed to show up at night court to meet Kinnear’s friend or associate or contact. He thought it would be “professional” not to mention it unless J. did.

“Vilar—good example. A man, the story goes, who’s
wanted in x number of countries. Linked, as they say, with separatist groups here, with exiles there, with nationalists, guerrillas, extremists, leftist death squads, whatever they are. I hope for his own sake the man isn’t double-celled. A mite touchy and high-strung.”

“What about somebody like George? I speak as a George myself. How exactly did George get involved?”

“How George got involved was this. We were using Rosemary as a courier. She was flying then, New York to San Francisco and New York-Munich, I think. It’s safer and obviously cheaper to use crew instead of regular travelers. Anyway she and George Sedbauer met somewhere and he gradually became part of things, more or less. I wouldn’t say she recruited him. It wasn’t that carefully diagrammed. He told her he was in debt. She brought him to us. We promised him money, which we never delivered on and which he made only halfhearted requests for. I guess he enjoyed all that photocopying.”

“But drew the line at bombs.”

“George is paged,” Kinnear said. “He goes out to the desk and sees Vilar. Things are kind of quiet today so George picks up a guest badge, which Vilar slips over his breast pocket, and they walk past the security guards and onto the floor of the Exchange. There’s a conversation. George gets suspicious. What is this guy telling me? They talk some more. It dawns on George. This guy wants to leave explosives, a battery and a timing device in some fairly central part of the Exchange. Vilar hasn’t told him this in so many words. But George is on to it; he knows, finally. There’s no question but that he’ll abort the attempt. Next thing, he’s walking away from Vilar, who
goes after him. There’s a struggle. Vilar takes out a gun and fires, hitting George once in the lungs. Or is it twice?”

“Good question.”

“Or,” Kinnear said, “George had two visitors on the floor that day. There was a second gunman. It was a bullet or bullets from this second man’s gun that killed George. Not only that but he made it to the street. If I recall, early reports mentioned a chase through the streets.”

“True.”

“And for quite a while the police had trouble identifying the killer.”

“Equally true.”

“The second gunman was Luis Ramirez. He not only made it to the street; he escaped clean. Who is Ramirez, exactly? Let’s say he’s a rather obscure figure who’s spent time in the Middle East and Argentina, presumably assisting the local movements and maybe picking up some handy bits of know-how. An exchange program, let’s say. Known heretofore as an expert in falsifying passports. He’s also Vilar’s brother-in-law. An investigation will reveal the usual police inefficiency. It will show, specifically, that the bullet that killed George came from a seven point six-five millimeter Mauser automatic, not some starter’s pistol, which is what they found at the scene.”

Kinnear crossed out a line or two on the pad before him. Lyle wanted a cold drink. He’d had a craving for something cold to drink since leaving the Exchange. Kinnear crossed out something else, this time with a little flourish of his ballpoint pen.

“Or,” he said, “George ambles onto the floor. In one of his pockets is a miniature explosive device that includes detonator
and receiving set. He has acquired it with the help and encouragement of his lover, Marina Ramirez, and it’s no larger, really, then a ten-blade dispenser. The plan is simple. Leave the device in a message slot in one of the booths. Stroll casually out the front door of Eleven Wall. Get into the waiting Volkswagen. Drive, with Marina, to a point about half a mile away. Activate the device with a radio signal sent from a transmitter in the car. Explosion, death, chaos. What actually happens is George is followed onto the floor by Rafael Vilar, a man George has met at various places maybe half a dozen times, a sort of fringe figure, last seen at Lake Placid, where he spent a whole weekend panting after Rosemary Moore. Turns out Vilar is a police operative. Or, better, an extremist who turned. Naturally he aborts the attempt. The rest you know, more or less. A struggle. A shot or two. George dead. Vilar hauled into custody, temporarily, in an effort to safeguard the integrity of his role, prior to his retirement north of the border. Admittedly the weakest scenario. George’s motive, for one thing, is unknown. We have to assume Marina was the activating force. Passion for Marina, et cetera, made him willing to comply. He’d been passed on, you see, from Rosemary to Marina. Sort of a promotion, with all the attendant responsibilities and risks.”

“Does Luis Ramirez exist in this scenario?”

“Doesn’t enter into it, no. But I wouldn’t say he doesn’t exist.”

“Is Marina married to him?”

“Could be; I don’t know.”

“Is she related to Vilar?”

“Absolutely not.”

“In this scenario.”

“Or,” Kinnear said, “Vilar in his revolutionary fervor decides it’s time for the ultimate gesture. He will give his life for the cause. Perfectly in keeping. Vilar has always had tendencies. The rightist kills his own leader. The leftist kills himself. Taking as many people with him as can be accommodated in a given area. In this case a superb sadomasochistic coup. Half the Exchange goes with him. This, in its surface aspects, is scenario one, minus the timing device. George aborts, et cetera.”

“I think there has to be a reason besides revolutionary fervor why he’d commit suicide.”

“Check with Marina on that.”

“Did the bomb they found on Vilar really have a timing device?”

“No idea,” Kinnear said.

“The papers must have said. I don’t recall, though.”

“Don’t ask me, Lyle. You were there.”

“I was there, correct.”

“In your well-pressed suit.”

Marina took him to a different train this time. She wore baggy clothes, smeared with paint and varnish. He watched her extract a crushed cigarette from the pack in her trouser pocket, leaning far to one side as she drove through heavy traffic. Vengeance, he thought. She would be the type who dedicated herself to exacting satisfaction for some wrong. She would work on personal levels, despite the sweeping references to movements and systems. It was possibly at the center of her life, the will to settle things, starkly. Coercive passions sometimes had a steadying element in their midst. To avenge,
in a sense, was simply to equalize, to seek a requisite balance. There was forethought involved, precision of scale. Lyle watched her put a match to the bent cigarette. He’d never felt so
intelligent
before. His involvement was beginning to elicit an acute response. They had no visible organization or leadership. They had no apparent plan. They came from nowhere and might be gone tomorrow. Lyle believed it was these free-form currents that he found so stimulating, mentally. They gave no indication of membership in anything. They didn’t even have a nationality, really.