Asterisk (36 page)

“I'm not trying,” Thorne said. Horribly, his mind was a blank: his mind was an empty cartridge, a dud. Something you fired but that didn't make a dent on any target.

“What the hell
are
you trying?”

“Major General Burckhardt—”

“Yeah?”

Pause: Marcia's pulse. “He left me an attaché case.”

Leach laughed. “I heard.”

“You heard?”

“Yeah.” The congressman wiped his mouth with the corner of a handkerchief. Inside, from a deep point, he was coming apart; some central seam was unraveling.

“You heard about the case.” Thorne looked at Marcia a moment. “He wasn't a great stylist, was he?”

Marcia shook her head. “Dangling participles and mixed metaphors, all over—”

Leach interrupted quickly: “John, John, John. I've been around too long. I don't have milk behind my ears. I have other people's bullshit, that's all.”

It wouldn't work: but there was nothing else left to play. Thorne stared at the congressman: “Still, the man's grammar isn't what should interest you, Leach.”

“What should I be interested in?”

“The whereabouts of the manuscript,” Thorne said.

Leach paused a moment. “John, there were blank papers in that case. I
know.
”

“No, Congressman. There were no blank papers except for the ones I put in there.”

Leach smiled. You old shit, Thorne thought: you're suddenly enjoying yourself, getting off on all this.

“You're asking me to believe, if I can get this straight, that Burckhardt left you a manuscript?” Leach laughed again, then coughed, and went into his routine with the handkerchief, flapping it around his lips. “What was it, John? The story of a flying saucer? Huh? Aliens from space?”

“Something like that.” Thorne felt a chill, an emptiness of the heart. What more could he offer?

“Let me get it together, John. Burckhardt thought the saucer was for real. Okay? So even if I believe in this manuscript, and I don't, what could it be but the stupid ramblings of an old guy we'd have no trouble in proving was off the wall in no uncertain fashion?”

Answer that, Thorne thought: answer that. Lost at the crossroads. Mapless in bad territory. Which way did you go? A coin tossed in the hair or a random sequence of bones thrown on the rug—what the hell difference did it make? There was no UFO: only Asterisk. Only the counterfeit.

But the sole logic here is that of survival.

The only valid syllogism is the one that concludes:
We're alive
. What else?

“Congressman,” he said, “I don't believe I'm getting through to you. Burckhardt's papers—”

“Bull
shit
.”

“Okay. Okay.” Thorne feigned a resignation he didn't feel. Have it your way, Leach. “I just wanted you to know.”

“Tell me, John. Tell me what it is you want me to know about these—these papers.”

“You're being obtuse, Congressman.”

“How?”

“Names. Names and dates and places. That's how fucking obtuse you're being.”

Leach motioned with the gun. “You're asking me to believe that when your young corpses turn up, or if you should suddenly vanish off the face of the earth, then this ridiculous manuscript becomes public? How? Donaldson?”

“You don't expect me to answer that, do you?” Thorne heard himself laugh, a high-pitched quirky noise. “The problem for you, Leach, is how to get your own ass out of it—”

“No,” Leach said. “I don't buy it. If Burckhardt had left you anything but blanks, if he had left you this … let's jokingly call it information … why didn't you blow it before now?”

Easy, Thorne thought. The structure is weakening.

From somewhere in the building he could hear the sound of an elevator rising in its shaft.

“Why? Because I thought it was totally crazy, that's why. I wanted to check it. Wouldn't you?”

Leach said nothing.

Press it, Thorne thought. Go straight to the target. You could see the doubts begin. All you could hope for now was that the congressman was so far gone into a world of treachery, betrayal, and madness, a world in which truth values were assigned to phony propositions, in which lies were truths, in which conspiracy was standard behavior, so far gone into the demented mythology of power, that even a mythical manuscript would be believed. Play that card, he thought. It's Leach's world: turn it around against him, throw it back in his face.

“Names,” he said. “Why do you think I came to see you and mentioned Asterisk? Why? You think I did that out of some weird coincidence, Leach? Names. Burckhardt's names. I was checking.”

Leach looked at him a long time, as if he were calculating, sifting all the possible consequences. True or false, Thorne thought: the horror was that it didn't matter a shit. It was a lottery: it was your last chance at the big spinning wheel.

“Pull the trigger, Congressman,” he said. “Pull the fucking trigger. Go on. What's stopping you?” He heard his own voice. Hysterical all at once. What am I doing? Why am I pushing this? Why? “Go on, Leach. God damn you. Why don't you pull the trigger? Why don't you?”
Tempting. Goading
.

Leach stared at him in silence.

“Kill us. Kill us. Isn't that what you want?”

Leach looked at the small gun in his hand. “I don't think I believe you, John.”

“No?”

The congressman shook his head slowly, side to side; he might have been looking down into an open grave at the funeral of some valuable old public servant.

“Then why don't you shoot?”

The silence. The elevator rising in the shaft. There was suddenly no air in the room. A vacuum now.
Believe it, Leach
, he thought.
In your world anything is possible, anything likely
. Trust in that universe of shadows and lies that you helped fabricate yourself. The elevator rising in the shaft. Believe that the shit finally hits the fan for which it is destined. Why not?

“Blank pages,” the congressman said. “All they found were blank pages.”

He was saying it more to himself than to any audience, as if what he were looking for, and failing quite to find, was a conviction in his heart. Thorne wondered what he believed in; if he believed in anything. If you got down to that last long haul which ends in a casket, a mumbled eulogy, dirt falling with the inevitability of forgetfulness, if you got down there and there was nothing at the end to believe. Was that it for Leach? The paranoia that dictates to you:
For every valid statement there is an opposite of equal validity?

The door. Get to the door. Get the fuck out.

He took Marcia by the arm and turned with her toward the door. What did he anticipate now? The bullet in the back? The slug in the aorta? Was that it?

I misjudged Leach, he thought.

He saw Marcia's hand go to the door handle.

He saw the handle turned, the stark corridor beyond. He realized: It could come right now. You could have your number called just at the point of the greatest optimism. From behind, he could hear Leach come across the floor, his cane tapping rapidly.

“It can never be made public, John. You realize that, don't you? True or false, Asterisk can never be made public.”

Thorne wanted to say: There's nothing to go public with. Nothing. A mythical manuscript. Nothing. Just like Asterisk.

The elevator had stopped moving. The building was silent. He stepped out into the corridor and he heard Marcia moan beside him.

Along the white corridor, by the elevator door now sliding shut, two men appeared.

He put his hand on Marcia's elbow. Burckhardt's hand on his mother's elbow: death repeats itself. Leach's stick tapped, tapped again, again and again. The snapping of a hundred wishbones.

The older of the two had a vaguely pedagogic air: you could see him give lectures on tree rings or microspores; the other had the kind of face you expect to meet in the loans departments of stuffy banks.

And it was this one, the anonymous one, who had drawn a revolver from his raincoat and was down on one knee, holding the gun, police fashion, two-fisted.

No, Thorne thought

No.

He heard the fluorescent tubes buzz above, as if their source of light were a million trapped fireflies. He heard Marcia's breathing, Leach's stick from behind, taptaptap.

This corridor.

Hadn't I felt I might die here.

He looked at Marcia: her expression—something of an impossible bleakness. Coleridge couldn't help you in this shifting, haphazard world. Romantic poetry couldn't give you a sense of definition. You were defined by the appearance of a revolver held in the hand of some fucking stranger in a raincoat.

Forgive me, he wanted to say. Forgive me, Marcia. The unfinished thesis, the general wreckage, the ruins. He stared at the man with the revolver. What was he waiting for? Some flag to fall? The checkered square to drop? And the older one was smiling in some terrible way.

No more running, he thought.

This is it.

You come this far to find a gun in front of you and a madman with a cane at your back.

Taptaptaptaptap.

He looked at the revolver. Twenty-five yards away. You couldn't miss.

Taptaptap.

The noise of the cane stopped.

From behind, Leach was saying something.

He was saying, “No. No. No.”

No no no:
over and over.

The gunman, looking puzzled, lowered his weapon.

The older guy stopped smiling.

There was silence, silence.

9

Sunday, April 9
A
.
M
.

Dawn, the first streaks of light were visible in the Eastern sky. Outside, an early bird was singing monotonously. All night long, unable to sleep, he had watched the night sky, the moon that had come out when the rain stopped—he had watched the stars, the dust of constellations, imagining that if you learned to read the patterns of the universe all kinds of questions would be answered. A cosmic shorthand. A celestial cryptogram.

He turned to look at Marcia, who was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Ever since they had come to this hotel room she had gone inside the shell of some silence, some withdrawal. Was it fear still?

He walked across the floor, sat on the edge of the bed, lifted her hand: a deadweight. He wanted to say something. But what? After a moment he rose and went back again to the window. The stars were fading over Washington, a ritual extinction of light that would go on long after Asterisk was buried and forgotten. The same universal drift, the flux, the coming and going. Men made fumbling gestures to grasp some power: what did they amount to?

He heard Marcia suddenly say, “All for nothing. For shit. A zero. A stupid plan thought up by stupid men.”

Hands in his pockets, he looked at her.

Yes: a zero. He suddenly remembered something of Roosevelt's his father had been fond of quoting:
This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny
. He wasn't sure now if it was meant to be funny.

“A zero,” he said.

He lay down on the bed beside her, closing his eyes. He could feel sleep; it was like the sound of wings brushing the walls of a room. A great disk from space, he thought. Crossing the estuaries of darkness, spinning and spinning. And a zero.

“What good is it?” she asked. “I mean, what goddamn good?”

He could feel sleep.

She sighed: he barely heard her.

“We traded our silence for our lives,” she said.

He wanted to say: Would you rather be dead?

Would you?

“We played the same shitty …” Her voice seemed to come to him from a faraway place.

The same shitty game, yes: but there would be a tomorrow, a sunrise and a sunset, and none of these things would smell of betrayal and death.

She was silent now, as if turning over something in her mind: he could sense vibrations of concern, worry, from her. We're alive, he thought. What else counts? Silence, okay: you know what kind of world you're in, don't you?

“What if they find out there isn't a manuscript?” she asked. “I mean, what if Leach finally decides that it's a chance he's got to take?”

What if, Thorne wondered.

“John?” she said.

She repeated his name.

But this time he didn't hear, this time he had drifted off into sleep, into that darkness which has its own space, its own configurations and black holes and starry passages.

She said nothing for a time.

Then she switched off the bedside lamp and laid her face on the pillow beside him.

To nobody in particular she said: “Sweet dreams.”

Acknowledgment

Grateful acknowledgment is made to my friends who helped: Ralph Himself Jarson, who was in at the start, TeeJay, K Winchell, and Eileen, best of all.

About the Author

Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these,
White Rage
and
Butcher
, were nominated for France's Prix du Polar. Armstrong's novels
Assassins & Victims
and
The Punctual Rape
won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.

Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.