Players (13 page)

She parked near the station.

“What did J. tell you?”

“There’s been a penetration.”

“We believe.”

“Yes, a feeling, he said.”

“Do you know he colors his hair?”

“I love it.”

“It’s the kind where the color changes gradually, a little a day. Then you touch up.”

“Comb your gray away.”

“He used to be a counselor,” she said. “What do you know about that?”

“Nothing.”

“He used to be a counselor with a group up in the mountains somewhere, out west. Group sessions.”

“Encounter.”

“Encounter,” she said. “It was clearly the thing. He conducted sessions. They all found God, et cetera.”

“That’s where He lives, you know, in the mountains.”

“What can you add to this?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing about a kidnapping? About when he was involved with a group in New Orleans?”

“No.”

“But he told you what we discussed.”

“Disinformation.”

“If you get a phone call and hear my voice, and if I stumble and mutter and tell you that I think I’ve dialed the wrong number, and if I then say the number I intended to get, write down and memorize the first, third, fourth, fifth and seventh digits. You’ll be hearing again eventually.”

“First, third, fourth, fifth and seventh.”

“The rest is padding,” she said.

Later he went to Centre Street. Night court consisted of policemen in and out of uniform, occupying the front rows, and about sixty others, families of the accused and of victims, spread elsewhere. There was no judge at present. Lyle watched a legal aid lawyer, a young woman in a J. Edgar Hoover sweat shirt. She talked to people seated through the courtroom and to others clustered in the aisles, Kafkian lawyers, scavenging. A judge walked in and people began to assume various stances. As cases were heard, there was a general sense of men and women straining to understand what was going on—what forces, exactly, had caused this cruelty and ruin. A cop turned in his seat, yawning. It was well past the time Kinnear had mentioned. Lyle watched the woman conferring with three black men in a far corner of the room. They were in their twenties, one of them sitting in a wheelchair. Lyle waited half an hour longer, the voices around him sounding as though they’d been generated by machine, some regulator of flawed destinies.

At home he drank two glasses of ice water. He started to call McKechnie, despite the hour, when he remembered Frank’s wife was ill, his oldest child was behaving strangely, there were problems, problems. He closed all the windows and turned on the air conditioner and the TV set in the bedroom. All the lights were out. He smoked, watching a film about glass blowing, with perky music, and tried to imagine what Kinnear was doing or saying at the moment, or what he’d do tomorrow, whom he’d call, where he’d go and how he’d get there. Kinnear was hard to fit into an imagined context. Lyle could not reposition him or invent types of companions or even the real color of his hair. He occupied a self-enfolding space, a special level of exclusion. Beyond what Lyle had seen and heard, Kinnear evaded a pattern of existence.

Lyle switched to a movie about a man suspected of embezzlement. The man’s wife, a minor character, wore low-cut blouses. She had brightly painted lips and kept taking cigarettes out of a silver case and then tapping them against the top of the case, totally bored by her husband’s crime. Out-of-date sexiness appealed to Lyle. He stayed with the movie, bad as it was, waiting for glimpses of the wife, her low-cut blouse. When the movie was over he began switching channels every ten or fifteen seconds, drinking Scotch. At three in the morning he called Pammy on Deer Isle.

“Ethan, it’s Lyle.”

“Good God, man.”

“Don’t tell me I woke you. I didn’t wake you.”

“I was reading.”

“This is New York on the phone.”

“By the fire,” he said. “I was pretending to be reading by the fire.”

“The city’s in a state of incipient panic. Invasion of strange creatures. Objects are hovering in the air even as I speak.”

“You don’t know how unfunny that is.”

“I think I do, actually.”

“Jack claims he saw a UFO tonight. Naturally we were mildly skeptical. Well, this upset him. Jack’s upset. Nobody believes his story.”

“Wouldn’t finish his veggies.”

“Went to bed without his Calder penguin.”

“Is she up?”

“I’ll get her,” Ethan said.

Lyle turned to watch the TV screen.

“So that was you,” she said. “You like waking people up. How are you?”

“Having fun?”

“This place is so great. Of course I have to say that—he’s five feet away. But it is, it’s just great. Gets a little cold at night, I’d say. Yes, a little nippy. Like I’m freezing to death. But we’re coping well. How are you?”

“The city’s in a state of incipient panic.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“So what it’s like, trees?”

“We went to this terrific place today. Weaving, they did weaving, quilting, pottery. The whole schmeer, you know? I’m pretending to like it—he’s five feet away. No, seriously, did you ever see how glass is blown?”

“No, tell me.”

“So, okay, it’s a little boring. No, it’s not, I’m teasing Ethan. Listen, I’ll wake up Jack. If he’s still here. You can talk to him. If he hasn’t been spirited away in a little green capsule.”

“I heard.”

“We’ll make an event out of it. I’ll get Jack.”

They talked a while longer. She didn’t get Jack. After he hung up he watched television. As time passed it became more difficult for him to turn off the set. He knew an immense depression would settle in between the time he turned off the set and the time he finally fell asleep. He would have to resume. That’s why it was so hard to turn off the set. There would be a period of resuming. He wouldn’t be able to go to sleep immediately. There would be a gap to fill. It caused a tremendous wrench, turning off the set. He was
there
, part of the imploding light. The room he occupied was unfamiliar for a moment. He had to learn it all over again. But it wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. Only a routine depression settled in and he was asleep within the hour.

Rosemary was at her desk, sorting mail. These surroundings no longer made sense. He’d seen her in a half slip, in panties, naked. He’d stood in the toilet doorway and watched her dress, an itemizing of erotic truths, until she’d spotted him and turned, off-balance, to elbow the door. At her desk, passing time, he marveled at the ease with which they fitted into slots of decorum. People must be natural spies. The desk, the broadloom were absurd. Her letter opener, neatly slitting. His tone of voice.

He waited for her after work in front of her house. They went inside and drank for several hours. He held her hand, occasionally putting his lips to the ends of her fingers. He realized this was an endearment.

In the kitchen he took another look at the picture of her with Sedbauer and Vilar. He studied Vilar’s face. It was shiny and lean, a high forehead, tapered jaw. He heard her in the bedroom, Rosemary’s clothes coming off.

Curled into herself she waited, an animal void, white body, deep stillness, the thing he tried to hand-grip and eat. He wouldn’t urge her toward some vast shuddering fuck or recollect the touch of her hands at the end of a passive afternoon, some months off, paper sailing as his soul wandered from the floor. She extended her limbs. He could see breasts now, her face and neck, her arms and small hands, half cupped, and the wrinkled sheet between her thighs. He’d never before seen how different a woman’s body was from his own. This fact, somehow, had been hidden from him. Am I drunk, he wondered. Supine she seemed enormous, nearly outsizing the small bed. That was good, that was right, deep stillness, organic void. Her breathing caused a perceptible cadence, body’s periodic rise and fall, a metronome of his calculated lust. Slightly misshapen feet. Small bumps, flesh points, at the rims of her nipples. He undressed slowly, knowing neither of them would reach an interval of fulfilling labor, or whistle a bit, breathing nasally, and cry a name, all perspective burnt from their faces. She touched her ribs where a fly had landed. This automatic motion revealed her, briefly. In a haze he understood at last. But what? Understood, at last, what? The fly settled on a window sill. He watched it, trying to retrace its
connection to the huge body on the bed, the bone and muscle structure of a dream. There were pale veins on her legs, sun lines and natural indentations. Knees up, head way back over the curve of the pillow, she might have been half yielding to, half defending against, some clumsy lover. He crawled, literally crawled between her legs. Then he rested his forearms on her raised knees and watched the way her throat lightly pulsed.

“Tell me some more about George,” he said. “What did he do besides make you laugh?”

He crossed the street to the candy store tucked in at 77 Water, red and yellow awning, a homey footnote to the mass of steel and anodized aluminum. There was gray everywhere, wetness suspended, a day the color of the district itself. He bought cigarettes and chewing gum and then stood outside the candy store, under the bulk of the skyscraper, and unwrapped a stick of gum, listening for foghorns, a sound he associated with foreign cities and sex with other men’s wives. It didn’t take him long to realize he was being stared at. Man near the entrance to the lobby. Checked sportcoat, solid tie. Lyle had the impression the man wanted him to walk that way. He was stocky and boyish, a frozen jaw, wisps of hair curled down over his forehead. Lyle decided to go in the other direction. About two blocks away the man came alongside. Lyle stopped, waiting for a light to change. The man looked at him again, clearly intent on conveying some tacit information, a connection or message he expected Lyle to perceive. They walked another half block. Two women up ahead raised umbrellas simultaneously.

“You’re McKechnie’s friend, aren’t you?”

“Is life that simple?” the man said.

“I kept waiting for you people to contact me. I talked to Frank McKechnie about the situation. About what certain people knew. Frank talked to someone to pass the word along. I expected earlier contact. In the meantime I decided to find out what I could.”

“That was outstanding, Lyle.”

“What’s your name?”

“Burks.”

“Burks, your tone of voice isn’t encouraging.”

“We do what we can.”

“They have contacts on the West Coast. I know that. They use Ohio plates, at least at the moment. I know the number if you want it. A green Volkswagen, or do you have all this?”

“What can you tell us about A. J. Kinnear?”

“It’s J. Kinnear at present.”

“We have A. J.”

“It’s just J. now.”

“Just J.,” Burks said.

“I don’t know how many people are involved. If they have units or teams or whatever, I couldn’t tell you how they’re set up. Kinnear is a complex individual, I think. They’re out in Queens. I know the street name and house number.”

“Is Kinnear tall, short, what?”

They walked up and down the streets near the river. Lyle described Kinnear, speaking slowly and then listening with care, trying to memorize his own remarks and what Burks said in reply. It was like a conversation with a doctor who was reporting the results of significant tests. Questions and answers floated through each other. One’s life seemed to hinge on syntax, inflection, points of grammar. He thought Burks said
something about a voiceprint but wasn’t sure of the context, whether it applied to Kinnear or not. It was also a little like his early conversations with Rosemary Moore, photographs of his own mouth, the sense of her remarks eluding him not only as they were uttered but later as well, in his attempts to narrate to himself the particulars of each encounter. He saw a barge in the haze, perhaps midriver, sliding toward the harbor. Burks’ shoes gleamed. He was young, probably younger than Lyle.

“They may take another crack at the Exchange.”

“We’d be interested.”

“What else?”

“What else—what do you mean?”

“Is there anything else you want to know?” Lyle said. “They have a basement full of retread weapons. I can describe them if you want. I have this annoying faculty.”

“What’s that?”

“Compulsive information-gathering.”

“It must be a burden.”

“Tone of voice,” Lyle said.

“Fuck you, cookie.”

“Are you McKechnie’s friend or not?”

“You talked to Frank McKechnie. He said he’d talk to a friend of his. If you want to believe my presence here is a direct result of McKechnie’s communication, feel free, Lyle. But there’s a question I’d like to pose.”

“What’s that?”

“Is life ever that simple?”

“Nice.”

“We do what we can.”

“No, nice, really, I like it.”

“Good, Lyle.”

“What can you tell me about Vilar?”

“I can tell you to eat shit off a wooden stick,” Burks said.

Just another Fordham or Marquette lad. Studied languages and history. Played intramural sports. Revered the Jesuits for their sophistication and analytical skills. Voted for moderates of either party. Knows how to strangle a German shepherd with rosary beads.

Lyle walked crosstown to busier areas. It was getting dark. He moved to one side to avoid some people stepping off a bus. One of them made momentary contact, putting an arm out to ward off a collision, a man with a mustache and wiry hair, muttering something, his head large and squarish. Keep yer distance, mon. Lyle looked around for a public phone as he walked on. It started raining hard and the streets gradually emptied out. Don’t be settin’ yer hands on honest folk. He found a bar, ordered a drink and went back to the phone booth. One of McKechnie’s daughters answered, saying she’d get her father.

“That friend of yours.”

“What about him?”

“Burks,” Lyle said. “Is that his name?”

“No.”

“Call him up, Frank, and find out if he knows who Burks is.”

“I made my call.”

“You can do that.”

“I made my call. That was it.”

“Call him. I’ll get right back to you.”