Jigsaw (16 page)

The General had a grizzled, rather kindly face. People who looked at him might easily imagine him a retiree playing checkers or chess in Washington Square. He said, ‘Charlie. I am trying to help you.'

‘Yeah, right.'

‘Think, man.
Think.
'

‘I'm
thinking
,' said Charlie.

The General caught Charlie's ear and twisted it sharply, causing the unfortunate man to lower his face against the arm of the chair. The General smashed the back of Charlie's neck with his fist. ‘Do not protect the dickhead, Charlie. Save yourself. Now tell us. Where did he go?'

Charlie raised his face. Tears ran across his cheeks. ‘I don't know. I swear to God.'

The General stood up. He suddenly grabbed Charlie, hauled him out of the chair, threw him against the wall. That an act of violence should come from somebody of the General's age and appearance made it all the more shocking for Charlie, who hit the wall and slithered to the floor. He wiped his tears with the cuff of the plaid shirt.

‘You waste our time,' said the General. Little outbreaks of violence fatigued and depressed him. They were such an effort these days. Once, his nickname had been The Bullock. His physical strength had been legendary in the old days. ‘I am too old to squander my time. Get rid of him,' he said to the man in the black T-shirt. ‘Throw him from a high building. Do what you like with him. He bores me.'

‘Hey, wait,' Charlie said.

‘Why? Have you suddenly remembered something?'

Charlie stared at the General. ‘Streik might have mentioned he was going abroad. But he was always talking about trips he was going to take. I never paid attention. I never really listened to the guy. He always made out like he was some kind of big shot, somebody who had these great secrets. I had a way of tuning him out.'

The General ran his hand across the top of Charlie's head in a gesture that might have been one of pity. ‘Abroad is vague, very vague.'

‘That's all I know.'

‘It's not enough, Charlie.' The General gestured to the man in the black T-shirt. ‘Take him away.'

‘No,' said Charlie.

‘Take him now.'

Charlie, protesting, struggling sadly, was removed from the room. The General gazed at the closed door for a moment. He clasped his hands behind his back. He pondered the matter of Jacob Streik, whom he'd never met but whose face was familiar to him from photographs. He had a fat jowly face; ugly, but there was no denying the fact it concealed a certain animal cunning.

Saxon said, ‘Dead ends, I'm afraid. We also talked to Streik's sister. She knows nothing. He has a few acquaintances, but he doesn't keep in touch with them. A sorry life, by the look of it. His only friend – if I may stretch a definition – was Bryce Harcourt. But that relationship by its very nature was, you might say, subterranean. I doubt if they met more than four or five times. They came from two different worlds, General. A collision of circumstance. Accidents.'

The General said nothing. He stared at the walls. He wondered what the white canvas was meant to signify. Maybe some kind of mental condition, a spiritual breakdown. Western art. You were invited to read anything into it you liked. He remembered his office in East Berlin before it was seized during the unholy process called reunification. What had become of his paintings? He had been especially fond of realism. His collection consisted mainly of pastoral scenes, farm labourers, horses, haystacks.

‘Why was Harcourt not questioned?' he asked.

‘His position at the Embassy was sensitive and for that reason useful to us. To interrogate him would have been tantamount to alerting him. But he was thoroughly investigated,' said Saxon. ‘And boy, I do mean thoroughly. His letters were read. His apartment was examined. He was constantly followed. There was no area of Harcourt's life and work we didn't explore. We have no evidence Streik contacted him just before he vanished. None.'

The General spoke in a weary way. ‘Nothing is ever one hundred per cent perfect. You cannot always follow a man successfully. There are slips, failures of concentration. You always miss something. It may be small. But it's there.' The General sat down, drummed his fingertips on his knees. ‘I still say Harcourt ought to have been spared long enough to be questioned—'

‘It's beside the point now,' Saxon said.

The General was unaccustomed to being interrupted. ‘Nothing is ever beside the point,' he snapped. Restless, he rose. The white room beat inside his head like a nuisance of a child playing on a tin drum.

Saxon said, ‘Streik vanished. Harcourt did not. The implication is obvious. Streik didn't tell Harcout he was disappearing. It's safe to assume Harcourt knew nothing about Streik's decision. Otherwise, we could also assume that Harcourt would have followed our fat friend into obscurity.'

‘Assume assume,' said the General. It was his least favourite English word. He was unhappy in a world of assumptions. They were altogether too flimsy.

‘There was no area of Harcourt's life we didn't work over with a fine-tooth comb, General.' Saxon made a funnel of his hand and coughed into it. ‘His women. His work. His habits. Everything. Dawn to dusk, somebody was watching him.'

The General realized for the first time that the room was windowless. It was a bare white box suspended at the top of a building.

‘Harcourt's life was an open book,' Saxon said.

‘An open book is fine, so long as you can read the language in which it is written.' The General closed his eyes. He was drifting a little, remembering all that had once been his to control, the power he'd had, the freedom power afforded him. Old Honecker, in the good years before his shameful disgrace, had once said to him:
To have power is to live in a magnificent house that may not withstand bad weather
. Poor Honecker, maligned by history, condemned by an illegal new order, exiled in sickness. The General felt restricted, obliged to work with people whose backgrounds were different from his own, whose ways of doing things were often strange to him. Men like Saxon had been raised without a knowledge of true fear, and so they lacked a dimension. They had no experience of midnight callers, no understanding of everyday terror, of the awesome reaches of State security. Sometimes it seemed to him that Americans considered themselves immortal, as if God had smiled on them.

Saxon said, ‘Anyhow. The book is now closed on Bryce Harcourt, as I understand it.'

The General was suddenly frustrated. But what could he say or do? He wondered how the assassination had been arranged. In the old days, these were exactly the kinds of details he would have supervised himself. But now … now he was obliged to go along with the plans of other men. Ask no questions. Harcourt is dead. The book is closed and you are not expected to ask how.

The General beat the palms of his hands together. ‘Find Streik,' he said. ‘I don't want anything to endanger Helix.'

Saxon said, ‘We have a great many people looking for him in a number of countries. We know the names of his associates. It isn't what you'd call a long list. The man's been a loner all his life. An outsider. We're keeping tabs on anyone he's likely to contact. It isn't going to be difficult, General.'

The General stared at Saxon a moment. ‘Just find him,' he said, then strutted toward the door. Saxon moved behind him quickly, flapping an envelope he'd taken from his pocket.

‘Your airline tickets, General. Mustn't forget them. First class, of course.'

The General seized the envelope, folded it carefully in the inside pocket of his overcoat. He left the room, walked the glass bridge to the elevators. He rode to the ground floor. The snow was still heavy, collecting in mounds along the sidewalks. He got into his car and drove away.

A couple of blocks from the building two police cars were parked raggedly, rooflights flashing in the white night. The General glanced as he passed. He saw briefly the shape of a man on the ground, the body already covered with a light layer of snow. Charlie, he thought. Your only misfortune lay in knowing too little about the wrong man.

The General drove through the illuminated grids of Manhattan, past sleeping figures in shop doorways, winos huddled cheerlessly on corners, bag ladies pushing shopping carts, the sorry detritus of the city. America, he thought. A land of the most astonishing contrasts. He enjoyed certain aspects of the diverse American scene – Disneyland for one, where he'd been particularly taken by the holographs in the Haunted House. He was also amazed by the unusual preponderance of seemingly useless consumer items such as toilet-roll holders that played Yankee Doodle Dandy when you tugged the tissue or some kitchen gadget that grated, pulverized, pulped or sliced whatever was introduced into its maw. He admired the endless cartoons on morning TV, especially Magoo, whose blundering shortsightedness he thought symbolic of a certain national trait. At times the General pondered what his fate might have been – perhaps a mock trial, years of imprisonment, brutal treatment at the hands of misguided men who despised him. Ah, they had been so easily misled, he thought. They had discarded social order in favour of some amorphous notion of freedom, but what they had really encountered was a very old goddess, Chaos, whose handmaidens were unemployment, poverty and crime.

He came to a brownstone on West Eighty-Seventh. The Buick skidded slightly as he parked. He stepped out. The snow was ankle-deep. A figure shuffled out of shadow and approached the General, a black man in a ruined overcoat.

‘Say, bro, got some spare change?'

The General shook his head. He never encouraged beggars. He stepped past the panhandler, who was persistent.

‘I ain't asking for much. A buck or two. You look like a guy of substance, my man. Difference it gonna make to yo life?'

The General stared into the beggar's face. ‘Out of my way,' he said quietly.

The panhandler, mistaken in the belief that he'd encountered a friendly old dude, an easy touch, seemed to perceive, with the instinct of the streets, an unexpected element of resolution in the General's face. He raised both hands in a gesture that meant
take it easy
, then melted back into the shadows.

The General kept moving. New York, he thought. Beggars and thieves, cut-throats and madmen. A whole social order had broken down here.

He climbed the steps to the brownstone, rang a bell, heard a voice on the intercom. He spoke his name, a buzzer sounded, and he opened the big front door. He climbed a flight of stairs. The door on the second floor was already halfway open. He went inside the room. The air smelled of popcorn. A TV played
Fantasia
from a VCR. The General took off his overcoat, sat down, watched Mickey Mouse assailed by animated broomsticks. Remarkable.

He smiled when the young woman came in from the kitchen. She wore tight blue jeans and a dark red ribbon in her hair and carried a large glass bowl of popcorn which she set before him. He dug into it at once. His fingertips became smeared with butter. The girl handed him a paper napkin.

‘This is good,' he said.

‘I know you like
Fantasia
,' she said. She sat beside him. ‘I think it's groovy.'

‘A work of art,' said the General. Groovy, he thought. ‘The fusion of music and images – admirable. I had this videotape in Berlin.' In his buttery hand, he held the girl's fingers. ‘I think of Berlin too often for my own good. I think of Europe, the way things were. I think of the way things are now. Is such nostalgia permissible at my age?'

‘You're not old, General. You make out like you're prehistoric or something.' She pushed his knee in a chiding way. ‘A brontosaurus. That how you see yourself?'

‘Sixty-six is not old?'

‘Age depends on what's in here.' She tapped him on the chest. ‘In the heart.'

The General supposed this was true enough in a metaphysical way. But the problem lay in an accurate reading of the signs in the heart. A moment of melancholy affected him. He was remembering old comrades, some of them dead at their own hands, some of them imprisoned, others disappeared. But they hadn't all lost the will to continue, they hadn't all just withered away in the greenhouse of history. He considered those who remained in the field, dedicated to the task, those who'd worked all their lives for the Staatssicherheit, STASI, Vanderwerker in Geneva, Bohl in Frankfurt, his name changed, a new identity assumed, daring Bohl; he thought of old KGB allies in other parts of Europe, Lisenko in Leningrad (the General would not give credence to the sacrilegious renaming of that city), Vassily, living in the very centre of Moscow still, Sheshkin in Helsinki. In his mind he might have been studying a map of a fierce river into which countless powerful tributaries ran.

The girl looked at him brightly. ‘You seem down. Sad.'

He shook his head. ‘Not sad, no. Perhaps a little anxious.'

‘Anxious how?'

The General thought a moment. ‘Perhaps anxious isn't altogether correct. Impatience is also involved.'

She placed a hand on his knee in a comforting kind of way. ‘My mother always used to say tomorrow is another day. I used to think, shit, that was a real dumb thing to say. But now I kinda guess she had a good point.'

The General stared at the TV. Tomorrow is another day. And all the tomorrows after that are other days too. He tried to see into the future. Clouds, here and there some flicker of sunshine. He thought of the man called Jacob Streik, worried over it a moment, then dismissed him from mind – although it wasn't easy because Streik persisted in a corner of his brain like an ache. But where could Streik run to in the end? To whom could he go? He had to be very lonely wherever he was. And very scared. A scared man, the General knew, could also be a dangerous one. If Streik somehow talked to the wrong people …

‘Are you hungry?' the girl asked.

‘Hungry for what? I have many kinds of appetite.'