Players

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.”

'Sure, get right back.”

'I'll call you in fifteen minutes.”

'Sure, call, Lyle, anytime.”

He went to the bar and sipped his drink. A man with crutches stood nearby, a near derelict, it seemed. It wasn't much of a place. Two elderly women sat at a far corner of the bar, sharing a cigarette. Lyle finished his drink. It was too soon to call McKechnie again. He ordered another Scotch and went back to phone J. Kinnear, realizing, with profound surprise, that he didn't know how to get in touch with Kinnear. The listing would be in another name, obviously, and Lyle had never thought to check the number on the telephone in the frame house in Queens. Dumb, very dumb. When he got back to the bar he saw someone walk past the front door, hurrying through the rain, a man holding a newspaper over his head.}ust a glimpse was all. Wee glimpse o' the laddie's mustache. A little later a woman came in and greeted the man on crutches, asking what had happened.

'I got runned over by a learner driver.”

'Did you sue his ass?”

'What sue?' he said. 'I was like on the brink.”

'You could collect, Mikey. People do it. You could make a nice little something for yourself.”

'I was like seeing cherubs.”

Or an M.A. in economics, he thought. Big Ten fencing titles. Square head, wiry hair. Author of a study on trade regulations in Eastern Europe. Does push-ups with his knuckles.

Lyle walked down Nassau Street. The district was a locked sector. Through wavering layers of rain he saw it that way for the first time. It was sealed off from the rest of the city, as the city itself had been planned to conceal what lay around it, the rough country's assent to unceremonious decay. The district grew repeatedly inward, more secret, an occult theology of money, extending ever deeper into its own veined marble. Unit managers accrued and stockpiled. Engineers shampooed the vaults. At the inmost crypt might be heard the amplitude pulse of history, a system and rite to outshadow the evidence of men's senses. He stepped out of a doorway and hailed the first free cab he saw, feeling intelligent again.

At home he heard from Kinnear almost immediately. He stood holding the phone, concentrating intently, determined to understand what was being said, the implications, the shad-ings, whatever petalous subtleties might be contained in the modulations of J.'s voice.

'I'm not where I usually am.”

'Right.”

'I'll be sort of transient-I would say indefinitely.”

'Before that, there's something that happened. I talked to a Burks, if you know the name. He asked about you.”

'Not unsurprisingly.”

'Do you know who he is?”

'I may have talked to him on the phone. I talked to several of them. I wasn't given names. I had a number to call. We did our talking exclusively over die phone.”

'I told him everything I know.”

'That was clever, Lyle, actually.”

'I thought I should tell you.”

'I'm one of those people you've read about who's constantly being described as 'dropping out of sight,' or 'resurfacing.' As in: 'He resurfaced in Bogota four years later.' Right now it's the former condition that prevails.”

Lyle tried to imagine Kinnear in some specific locale, an airport (but there was no background of amplified voices) or remote house (where, what room) in a well-defined landscape. But he remained a voice, no more, a vibratory hum, coming from nowhere in particular.

'I asked him about Vilar,' Lyle said. 'He outright refused to tell me anything.”

'Makes sense.”

'They don't like me.”

'Well, I talked to them, you know. We had talks about this and that.”

'My name came up.”

'I was very selective. That was part of the appeal of the whole experiment, from my viewpoint. It was interesting, very much so. I told them only certain things. They're quite a group-quite, let's say, adaptable, I guess is the word.”

'They know my recent history.”

'They know your recent history.”

'And they didn't contact me earlier because they had someone inside.”

'Now that I've severed all connections, Lyle, they've become very interested in you. You're their remaining means of tying into the little terror seminar.”

'Can't they just go in and seize weapons and arrest people for that, if nothing else?”

'They'll find nothing there but weapons. I was the only person who spent any appreciable time in that house. Won't be anybody there, now or later.”

'I thought Marina.”

'Marina was out there maybe half a dozen times, never for longer than a couple of hours.”

'Why pick now to travel, J.?”

'I was getting bricked in, old man. The element you think of in the person of Marina was clearly aware that information was trickling. The element you think of in the person of Burks was getting a touch possessive. It was time to do a one-eighty out the door.”

Lyle suspected J. was getting ready to hang up.

'How long have you been giving information?”

'Matter of a few months.”

'Get paid?”

'That was to come, eventually. Extremely doubtful I'll ever see it.”

'Fair amount, I assume.”

'Pittance.”

'Why all the risk then?”

'People make experiments, Lyle. They're very adept at certain things, so aware of shadings, our secret police. I wanted to get inside that particular apparatus, just a step or two.”

'They got your name slightly wrong.”

'I didn't know they had it at all. That's interesting. See what I mean? Techniques. I wonder how they managed it. They must have spent a great deal of time on me. I used to wonder about that. Are they really interested in what they're getting? Do they know who I am ? Their secrets are worse than ours, by far, which goes a long way toward explaining why their techniques are so well developed.”

'What happens now?' 'I continue to ask for your trust.' 'Don't go just yet, J.' 'God bless,' he said.

Lyle put down the phone, then dialed McKechnie's number. The little girl said her daddy didn't want to talk to him.