OMEGA–10

ROSEN AND I SAT IN THE AURA OF THE FIRE. EVEN AS A SILENCE IS COMposed of small sounds—the gossip, to put it so, of unseen events—so did the hearth prove equal to a blazing forest. I was giving attention to the transmogrifications in burning wood. Universes curved toward one another, universes exploded; ash thickened from a membrane to a shroud. I could hear each fiber spit its curse into the flames.

Rosen was slumped morosely in my favorite chair. I thought of a joke that had made the rounds of CIA just before the expected summit meeting in 1960 between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, the one that never took place because Gary Powers’ U-2 plane was shot down over Russia. Khrushchev said to Eisenhower, “I love you.”

“Why do you love me?” asked Eisenhower.

“Because you are my equal. You are the only equal I got in the whole world.”

Rosen was my equal. Harlot was a manifest of the Lord, and we had known him together. “How could he have done it?” Rosen exclaimed.

“I know,” I murmured, which is to say, I did not.

“He literally carried me into Christianity,” said Rosen. “I converted because of Hugh Montague. Do you know what it means for a Jew to convert? You feel like a Judas to your own people.”

I tried to search my starched soul—starched, I had to recognize, in its likes and dislikes—to determine whether I had been over-hard on Rosen. I had always assumed he converted to advance certain professional pursuits. Did I do him an injustice? Had I remained censorious over all these years merely because I had once felt so superior to him? In the old days of slavish training at the Farm, our group of stunts (as we called ourselves, in comparison to Marine Corps grunts) used to look upon Rosen as a bagel-baby from the middle-class purlieus of the Bronx. I, however, used to be grateful he was there. Luck of the draw, Rosen and I had been assigned to a training platoon with an undue allotment of heavy-duty stunts. Half of them could climb a twelve-foot wall somewhat faster than I could look at it. With Rosen present, they could laugh at him instead of me. That is a good fellow to have around. Of course, they might also have laughed because he was their token Jew doing gentile’s work, and I think that burned his soul. I know I suffered with him, since I had something like an eighth of Jewish blood by way of my mother, just enough never to know quite what to do about it. At this moment, however, Rosen was my only equal in the world. Had Harlot defected? How could one ever seize the meaning of that? As soon plunge one’s hand into water and seize a minnow.

Sitting before the fire, I was living with the memory of Harlot as he used to look in full health, not yet fifty, equal in trim to his mustache. Over how many years at Langley had I sat next to him while a projector threw up the faces of KGB men on a screen? The opponent looks astral when magnified so. I had seen faces four feet high whose light of eye seemed to go inward as if one were shining a flare down the dark halls of their deeds. So did Harlot’s face appear to me now in the fireplace, four feet high and full of force.

Out of the silence, Rosen asked, “Do you think it would be possible to talk to Kittredge?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Can it wait?” I asked.

He took his time considering this.

“I suppose it can.”

“Ned, she knows nothing about the High Holies.”

“She does not?” He seemed surprised.

It was the quality of surprise that disturbed me. He seemed at an odd loss.

“You find that peculiar?” I asked.

“Well, she has been in Washington a good deal lately to see Harlot.”

“Just old chums,” I said.

Like wrestlers whose bodies have become so slippery with exertion that they can no longer hold a grip, so were we at this moment sliding around each other.

“Do you really believe he told her anything?” I asked.

I had had no inkling she was seeing Harlot. Every few weeks she would leave me to visit her father, Rodman Knowles Gardiner, now approaching the magical age of ninety, magical I say because such common events of the day as slumber, evacuation, and alimentation could be accomplished only by charms, spells, and the endlessly repetitive rituals of the old. “What did you say your name is, girl? .  .  . oh, yes, Kittredge .  .  . that’s a nice name .  .  . that’s the name of my daughter. What do you say your name is, girl?”

I had once been on a visit to Oneonta, New York, Dr. Gardiner’s birthplace, and now the site of his abode in a rest home. That solitary occasion was sufficient for me. There were always enough tolls to pay in marriage without the drear surcharge of watching a senile father-in-law whom one has never liked nor been liked much by, as he takes an endless meander through the last of his time. Somewhere in the reservoirs of aged animal cunning, I believe old Dr. Gardiner was trying to decide just which of the seven doors of death he would choose to go through. Numbers can be as ambivalent as disturbed beauties, and none more so than seven, the seven doors of the Keep for good luck, and the seven doors of death, or, at least, that is how I saw it: termination by such natural causes as cancer, heart attack, stroke, hemorrhage, suffocation, infection, and despair. I speak like a medievalist, but not wholly in jest—it did seem natural to me to be able over the course of a slow demise, to be able to choose one’s exit, to perish, for example, by way of the liver or the lungs, the brain or the bowels. So, no, I did not wish to watch Dr. Gardiner continue to deliberate before the too-patient doors of death while his daughter had to cross those great reaches of apathy between one quotidian burp and the next in a very old man, five senses just about gone, the sixth weaker than ever.

I commiserated in spirit with her each weekend she was away, and was grateful she had not requested me to go along nor even suggested that she really needed my company for so dreary a voyage. (Mount Desert, Maine, to Oneonta, New York, is, by any mode of travel, a time-squandering trek!) And I, in my turn, loved her while she was gone, missed her, and on the one or two occasions I had profited by her absence to take a trip to Bath, felt such guilt over Chloe as to put the profit on Kittredge’s side; never did I feel more devoted to my wife than after biting into the wild garlic of treachery. No wonder I never sniffed it on her. Not if I was eating of it myself!

Now, however, her telephone calls came back to me. She was the one who always rang in from Oneonta—“It’s easier that way”—but, then, she did not phone that much. What, after all, was there to talk about—the lack of change in her father’s condition?

At this point, I could keep, however, from unpleasant questions no longer. Was she seeing Harlot because her love for him was ineradicable? Or was it from pity? No. She would not make fortnightly visits, full of matrimonial deceit, for the sake of pity. Was she, then, part of the High Holies and did not share the fact with me because Harlot did not want either of us to know of the other’s participation? (Unless she did know—another question!) I felt like some rebellious slave caught in the building of the pyramids, each new question a heavy stone laying a further cruelty on my back: For what is cruelty but pressure upon the piece of flesh that aches the most, even as confusion is intolerable to a tired mind. I would throw down all the stones. I could not tolerate another question. “If you wish,” I said to Rosen, “I’ll go upstairs for Kittredge.”

He shook his head. “Let’s wait a minute. I want to be sure we’re ready.”

“Why? What now?”

“Can we look at our case again? From the viewpoint that it may be Harlot’s body after all.”

I sighed. I sighed truly. We were not so different from two midwives examining the birth of a monster—to wit, a large and ugly obsession. What is obsession but the inability to know whether the strange object that has just entered our lives is A or Z, good or evil, true or false? Yet it is certainly there, and right before us, an inescapable gift from the beyond.

“I don’t think it’s Harlot’s body,” I said.

“Just take up the possibility,” he said. “Please.”

“Which mode? Murder? Suicide?” I must have barked this forth.

“Suicide seems dubious to me. On the facts,” said Rosen. “He was used to swinging himself around the boat by the use of his arms, but, still, he would have had to get into position on the railing without the aid of the lower spine and thighs. I believe it would have required holding on to a stay with one hand, while firing the sawed-off shotgun with the other. Then he would have had to fall over backward into the water. Why commit suicide from so awkward a position?”

“In order not to mess up the boat with your blood.”

“That’s a telling point. We could move from a 10-percent possibility of suicide to 20 percent.”

“Every bit helps,” I said. I was wretched. The drinks had turned on me again. I could feel the first warnings issue from another monster. Once or twice a year, no more, I would come down with a prodigious headache, royal cousin to a migraine, which would leave me next day with a short-term case of amnesia—I would be unable to remember the last twenty-four hours. Some such storm seemed to be mounting now in the tropics of my brain. Tropic of Cerebrum. Tropic of Cerebellum. “The key thing, Arnie,” I said, “is to keep your medulla oblongata clean.”

“Harry, you’re a class act. It’s what you have to offer. Please don’t go off on tangents.”

“The English,” I said, “have one test for vulgarity. It is: Do you descend the steps properly? Glenlivet, old pal?” I poured the Scotch. Screw the oncoming headache. Some hurricanes blow out to sea. I took the drink in two nips, filled my shot glass again. “All right. Murder. Murder by our people.”

“Don’t dismiss the KGB.”

“No, let’s talk of murder by our good people. It’s been on your mind, hasn’t it?”

“I keep coming back to what you said,” Rosen now told me.

Yes, I could feel how real it had been for him ever since I said it. “Billions,” I said. “Somebody who stands to lose a billion bucks and more.”

“When the sums of money are that huge, individuals don’t get killed,” Rosen said.

“Not individuals. Indians. Twenty or forty Indians. All gone.” Was I thinking of Dorothy Hunt?

Something had happened, however, to Rosen. I thought he was having an outsize reaction to my last remark, until I realized someone was speaking to him from a walkie-talkie outside. His right hand pressed against the buff-colored earplug and he nodded several times, then reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a black wireless microphone the size of a fountain pen and said, “Are you certain?” listened, then said, “Okay, out.”

Now Ned started to speak to me. His voice was not merely small in volume, but close to inaudible. He had begun to rattle the stem of his pipe against his whiskey glass in a disconcerting tattoo, a time-honored method for jamming any state-of-the-art electronics that might be tapping into the room.

Why, however, had he begun to do it now? It seemed likely to me that one of the guards out in the rain would have brought along additional electronic gear to detect any unscheduled approaches. Rosen had just been fed an alert. That seemed the simplest explanation for his behavior. Certainly his voice emerged in a thin whistle as if weighty forces had descended on his chest. Finally, his speech became so impoverished that he took out a notebook, wrote a sentence on it, held it up to me to read, then threw the paper in the fire.

“There is one man I can think of,” Ned Rosen had written, “who has acquired the kind of fortune you name while working with us. However, he’s not on board anymore.”

I stood up to poke the logs. I felt timeless in my heart. Each beat of blood seemed to take its great and deliberate pause. I could feel the bellows of my lungs on their rise and on their fall. The confirmation of a hypothesis is one of the richest emotions left to our modern temper.

There was one man Ned could name, but he was not about to. His breath would not permit it. The hound of fear was in his lungs. And I could not name the man, not yet. My memory bore too much resemblance to those old brass tubes which once carried the cash and change for one’s purchase up and down floors in department stores. The name might be already inserted in its tube and on its way, but, oh, my brain!—there were floors and floors to climb.

Then the name of the man did come to me, and sooner than expected. There was an undeniable pop-out in my head.

I reached for Rosen’s note pad. “Are you thinking of our old friend on the Farm?” I wrote.

“PHENOMENAL!” Rosen printed in capital letters.

“Can it really be Dix Butler?” I wrote.

“How long since you’ve seen him?” asked Rosen aloud.

“Ten years.”

He picked up the pad. “Have you ever been to Thyme Hill?”

“No,” I said aloud, “but I’ve heard of it.”

Rosen nodded, threw the page into the fire, and as if fatigued by the weight of this transaction, lay back in his chair.

I wondered at his travail. It is an odd word, but I think appropriate. He was reacting as if engaged in hard labor. It occurred to me that he must be carrying more than one full weight of anxiety. Until now, however, he had not shown the burden. Not until now. The significance of the three men in the woods redefined itself. They were not there for me. They were waiting for someone to arrive.

Rosen sat up, nodded as if to assure me that all was well—what was well?—and then removed a silver pill box from his breast pocket, took out one white pill so small I assume it was nitroglycerine for his heart, and lay it under his tongue with a certain tenderness as if he were handing a small, carefully trimmed morsel of food to a pet. Then he closed his eyes to absorb it.

Probably he had been waiting for Dix Butler all night. Why else would he write: PHENOMENAL!

PRIMITIVE, I should have replied. Who was to say we do not receive messages from each other without signing the receipt? Had I begun to think of Dix Butler because Rosen was preoccupied with him?

We sat there, each to his own, and who could know what was shared? Millions of creatures walk the earth unseen. The interval of silence lengthened once more.