from a bowl near the cash register inside the restaurant. The paradox of material flowing backward toward itself. In this case there was no illusion involved. He had stood on this spot, not long ago, at this hour of the day, doing precisely what he was doing now, his eyes on the old man, whose body was aligned identically with the edge of a shadow on the facade of the building he faced, his sign held at the same angle, it seemed, the event converted into a dead replica by means of structural impregnation, the mineral replacement of earlier matter. Lyle decided to scatter the ingredients by heading directly toward the man instead of back to the Exchange, as he was certain he'd done the previous time. First he read the back of the sign, the part facing the street, recalling the general tenor. Then he sat on the steps, with roughly a dozen other people, and reached for his cigarettes. Burks was across the street, near the entrance to the Morgan Bank. People were drifting back to work. Lyle smoked a moment, then got up and approached the sign-holder. The strips of wood that steadied the edges of the sign extended six inches below it, giving the man a natural grip. Burks looked unhappy, arms folded across his chest.
'How long have you been doing this?' Lyle said. 'Holding this sign?”
The man turned to see who was addressing him.
'Eighteen years.”
Sweat ran down his temples, trailing pale outlines on his flushed skin. He wore a suit but no tie. The life inside his eyes had dissolved. He'd made his own space, a world where people were carvings on rock. His right hand jerked briefly. He needed a haircut.
'Where, right here?”
'I moved to here.”
'Where were you before?”
'The White House.”
'You were in Washington.”
'They moved me out of there.”
'Who moved you out?”
'Haldeman and Ehrlichman.”
'They wouldn't let you stand outside the gate.”
'The banks sent word.”
Lyle wasn't sure why he'd paused here, talking to this man. Dimly he perceived a strategy. Perhaps he wanted to annoy Burks, who obviously was waiting to talk to him. Putting Burks off to converse with a theoretical enemy of the state pleased him. Another man moved into his line of sight, middle-aged and heavy, a drooping suit, incongruous pair of glasses -modish and overdesigned. Lyle turned, noting Burks had disappeared.
'Why do you hold the sign over your head?”
'People today.”
'They want to be dazzled.”
'There you are.”
Lyle wasn't sure what to do next. Best wait for one of the others to move first. He took a step back in order to study the front of the man's sign, which he'd never actually read until now.
RECENT HISTORY OF THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD
circa 1850-1920 Workers hands cut off on Congo rubber plantations, not meeting work quotas. Photos in vault Bank of England. Rise of capitalism.
the industrial age Child labor, accidents, death. Cruelty = profits. Workers slums Glasgow, New York, London. Poverty, disease, separation of family. Strikes, boycotts, etc. = troops, police, injunctions. Bitter harvest of Ind. Revolution.
may 1886 Haymarket Riot, Chicago, protest police killings of workers, 10 dead, 50 injured, bomb blast, firing into crowd.
sept 1920 Wall St. blast, person or persons unknown, 40 dead, 300 injured, marks remain on wall of J. P. Morgan Bldg. Grim reminder.
feb 1934 Artillery fire, Vienna, shelling of workers homes, i,ooo dead inc. 9 Socialist leaders by hanging/ strangulation. Rise of Nazis. Eve of World War, etc.
There was more in smaller print fitted onto die bottom of the sign. The overweight man, wilted, handkerchief in hand, was standing five feet away. Lyle, stepping off the sidewalk, touched the old man, the sign-holder, as he walked behind him, putting a hand on the worn cloth that covered his shoulder, briefly, a gesture he didn't understand. Then he accompanied the other man down to Bowling Green, where they sat on a bench near a woman feeding pigeons.
'How about a name?”
'Burks.”
'What Burks? What's Burks supposed to mean?”
The man glanced at a car parked across the street. Burks sat in the front seat, belted in, looking straight ahead.
'It's generic all of a sudden.”
'Do it our way, Lyle.”
'I'll live longer.”
'I wouldn't go that far, pessimist like me.”
'He colors his hair. Kinnear. I forgot to mention it last time. He may have a contact at night court, for whatever it's worth.”
'Out of curiosity, Lyle, only, where's he at?”
'Don't you have my phone wired in to the computer that runs the world?”
'Not one bit, to my knowledge, besides which I can't see as it matters because A.J.'s not about to tell you anything too, too important.”
'If you don't know, I don't know.”
'Suit your own self.”
'I might speculate, of course. Make an educated guess. Why don't you tell me something about him first? What you know, whatever. You managed to come up with his name from a voiceprint, apparently, or playing tapes to various people, I would imagine. So what else do you have?”
Burks-2 was spread over half the bench, wiping his fancy glasses with the handkerchief he'd had in his hand the past fifteen minutes. His fatigue, his weight itself, running over, made Lyle relax. He looked like a man who sponsors a women's softball team. He picks his nose with his pinky finger and has sex in automobiles.
'A.J. taught voice and diction, junior college level. He worked part-time for a collection agency. He collected. As a sideline he was involved in prison reform, talking to groups, raising money, state of Nevada. He got radicaler and radicaler, as the saying goes, although what actually transpired in the man's heart of hearts, Lyle, is open to question. There was a little razzle-dazzle in New Orleans, late spring in sixty-three. Hard to get the details straight. Somebody was supposed to get snatched, some lawyer attached to a government committee. He had information somebody wanted. There were connections, funny undercurrents. Oswald, for instance. Cuba, for instance. Missing documents. But seems the thing never got off the ground. Somebody contacted the Justice Department a convenient forty-eight hours before the attempt was scheduled. Old Kinnear disappeared at that point, just about. He resurfaced in Bogota three years later, where he got to be asshole buddies with some people involved in cocaine traffic. Next thing he disappears and right after that there's arrests by the score. Then we find him on the West Coast with a group of former campus hard rocks and they're in the travel business, running people underground or out of the country. A.J. did a little everything. Not exactly a force in the movement. He's been a courier. He's been a paymaster. As we reconstruct it, he's tried to palm himself off as operational chief of this or that terrorist unit. Wouldn't you think that was dangerous?”
'He may be in Canada.”
