Players

  3

  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, wit
h 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.

  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 sc
reen.

  “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.

  4

  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.