into staying.”I let a silence fall over this last remark. We ordered beer all around. When the food came we examined each other's dishes. After some discussion Lindsay and I traded plates.'Have they told you,' Hardeman said, 'how Karen used to spend her evenings?”I said I wasn't sure. Karen used to spend her evenings sitting on a stool near the right-field line in Fulton County Stadium, Atlanta, Georgia, running down foul balls hit that way by National League stalwarts. She was sixteen years old, a golden girl on grassy turf, hair reaching her waist. He met her six years later in a revolving restaurant.'I thought it was the left-field line,' David said.'Right-field.”'She told me left.”'Couldn't have been left. It was left-handed hitters she feared most. Who was active then? You're the expert. Give us some names.”David went back to his curry. When we finished the beer, Hardeman ordered another scotch. And when he asked where the men's room was, I said I was heading that way myself.The only water was cold. We stood with our backs to each other. I held my hands under the tap, talking over my shoulder to Hardeman, who was at the urinal.'Did I understand you to say that Andreas is leaving the firm?”'Correct.”'I thought I understood he was moving on to London with other key people in the region.”'Not so.”'He wants to stay in Athens then.”'I don't know what he wants.”'Is he looking for a job, do you know? Has he said anything to you at all?”'Why would he? We don't interact at that level. I'm in manufacturing.”'I'd be interested in finding out what his plans are. It would only take a phone call.”'Make it,' he said.'I wonder if you'd do it for me. Not to Andreas. Someone in the sales department or personnel.”He was finished at the urinal and slowly wheeled in my direction. I turned my head toward the blank wall in front of me.'Why should I?' he said.'I'd like to know why he left, who he plans to work for. If he doesn't have plans for a new job, I'd be interested in knowing why. I'd also like to know if he intends to remain in Athens.' I paused, letting the water run over my hands. 'It could be important.”'Who do you work for?' Hardeman said.'I'm sure David's told you.”'Does he know?”'Of course he knows. Look, I can't go into details. I'll only say Andreas may have a sideline. He may be connected to something besides air cooling systems in Bremen.”'Andreas was a valuable member of the firm. Why should I involve myself in an unauthorized read-out? We work for the same people. And if he's chosen to leave, he may also choose to return someday.”'What do you know about him that may not be in his personnel file? Anything at all. One thing.”'It's not his identity I have doubts about.”'Very funny.”'I don't mean it to be. Sure, David's mentioned political risk insurance. He's also mentioned the scrambled telexes he occasionally sends your way, unscrambled, which I told him I thought was unconscionable, regardless of content, regardless of friendship. I may not know anything about Andreas' private life or his politics but I know the firm he's worked for these last three or four years. What do I know about you?”What could I say, we were fellow Americans? I felt foolish, staring at the wall, my hands turning in the stream of water. My attempt to learn something was less useful than the dumbest amateur's because this is what an amateur enjoys, a men's room meeting with clipped dialogue. I wasn't even good at clipped dialogue.He was waiting to wash his hands.The news that Andreas was not going to London would lurk vaguely in my mind in the days to come like the knowledge of some unpleasantness whose exact nature will not surface when one tries to recall it. Maybe London was his clumsy way of ending the affair with Ann, inventing a distance between them. Maybe the story revolved around her. It was all part of the same thing, that rapt entanglement I'd spoken to her about a couple of days earlier (only to be made fun of). The world is here, the world is where I want to be.'We promised ourselves an early night,' Lindsay said.Hardeman ordered another drink. He described the house he was renting in Mayfair. He spoke slowly but very clearly and his sentences began to extend into an elaborate and self-conscious correctness, a latticework of clauses, pure grammar. Drunk.He and I shared the back seat in David's car. We hadn't gone two blocks when he dropped off to sleep. It was like the death of a machine-tooled part. At a red light David looked at me in the rearview mirror.'I have an idea. Are you ready for this? Because it's one of the great ideas of my career. Maybe the greatest. I started thinking about it during dinner when I saw how much he was drinking. It came to me then. And it's developing, refining itself even as we sit here waiting for the light to change. I think we can bring it off, boy, if we're cunning enough, if we really want to do it.”'We're cunning enough,' Lindsay said, 'but we don't want to do it.”The idea was to put Hardeman on a plane to some distant city. There was a flight at 3:50 a.m. to Tehran, for instance, on KLM. He wouldn't need a visa to get on the plane. He would only need a visa to get out of the terminal once he was there. This was beyond our purview, David said. All we wanted to do was send him somewhere. We'd need his passport, which David was certain he'd be carrying, and a ticket, which David would purchase with one of his credit cards.We passed my building. A moment or two later we passed their building. Lindsay stared into the window on her side.'Once we have the ticket,' David said, 'we come back out to the car and get him on his feet and walk him between us into the terminal. We get him a seat in the nonsmoking area, which I'm sure he'll appreciate upon reflection, and then we face our biggest problem, which is how to get him through passport control.”Lindsay began to laugh, a little warily.'By this time he is probably semiconscious. He can walk but can't think. If we stick the boarding pass, ticket and passport in his fist, it's possible he can make it past the booth through habit alone. But what happens then? We can't follow him through passport control. It's too much to expect that he'll look at the boarding pass and walk automatically to the right gate.”I told him there was a simple solution. We were on the airport road, doing a hundred kilometers, and he looked at me in the mirror, briefly, to make sure I was serious.'Breathtakingly simple,' I said. 'All we have to do is buy two tickets. One of us takes him through the entire process, right to his seat on the plane.”Lindsay thought this was very funny. It could work after all. There was a huskiness in her laugh, the slightly surprised dawning of the idea that she was mean enough to want it to work.'Then the one who accompanies him simply turns around and goes down the ramp and gets back on the shuttle bus, feigning illness. They'll cancel the ticket. It won't cost a dime.”David whispered, 'Of course, of course.”I felt all along we wouldn't do it. It was too grand, too powerful. And as many times as I'd traveled with a visa, I didn't know whether he was right about that. I thought they examined visas at the airline counter before issuing boarding passes. But David kept on driving, kept on talking, and Lindsay began to sag in her seat as if to hide from the enormity of it all. Tehran. They would think he'd come to hold a service for the hostages.In the end we couldn't even get him out of the car. He kept hitting his head, falling away from us, limbs floppy. It was interesting to see the concentration in David's face. He viewed the formless Hardeman as a problem in surfaces, how and where to grip. He tugged at him, he wrestled. The door-opening was small and oddly shaped and David's considerable bulk was a problem in itself. He tried kneeling on the front seat and scooping Hardeman out to me. He tried a number of things. He was completely involved in the idea, the vision. He wanted to send this man to another place.
The figure appeared in a blizzard, moving toward the house from the other side of the park, a skier in bright banded colors coming in diagonal stride, the only clear shape in that dead-even light, a world without shadow, a winter's worth of snow on the streets and cars and laid over the park benches and the bird bath in the yard, the skier digging in, working across that dreamlike space, red-hooded, masked.You can't walk down Bay Street and pick out the Americans from the Canadians. They are alien beings in our midst, waiting for a signal. This is the science- fiction theme (SF for semi-facetious). They're in the schools, teaching our children, subtly and even unintentionally promoting their own values- values they assume we share. The theme of the corruption of the innocent. Their crime families have footholds in our cities -drugs, pornography, legitimate businesses-and their pimps from Buffalo and Detroit work both sides of the border, keeping the girls in motion. The theme of expansionism, of organized criminal infiltration. They own the corporations, the processing plants, the mineral rights, a huge share of the Canadian earth. The colonialist theme, the theme of exploitation, of greatest possible utilization. They are right next to us, sending their contaminants, their pollutants, their noxious industrial waste into our rivers, lakes and air. The theme of power's ignorance and blindness and contempt. We are in the path of their television programs, their movies and music, the whole enormous rot and glut and blare of their culture. The theme of cancer and its spread.I stood in the window as she removed the skis and carried them up the steps. The sight of her cutting through that blown snow, appearing out of the invisible city around us, the craft and mystery of it filled me with deep delight.
George Rowser stepped out of the elevator at the Hilton in Lahore, looking pale and rumpled. He put his briefcase down, setting it between his feet, then used both hands to adjust his glasses, raising the hands toward his face, fingers extended, palms turned toward each other, in a gesture that started out as a blessing of multitudes. When he saw me in a lobby chair he walked toward the coffee shop, pigeon-toed. We ordered Kipling burgers and fresh fruit juice. Gatherings of more than six people were forbidden.'Why am I here, George?”'Where were you?”'Islamabad.”'So I wanted to talk. It's not as though you were on the other side of the world.”'Couldn't we talk on the phone?”'Be smart,' he said. 'In addition to which, this city has architecture. Go look at the public buildings. What would you call this architecture? Gothic, Victorian-what else, Punjabi? Why do I have the impression you know things like this?”'Maybe it's Moghul. Or Moghul-influenced. I don't know really.”'Whatever, it's a nice blend. A very happy blend. Who were the Moghuls?”'They came sweeping out of Central Asia.”Four or five ballpoint pens stuck out of the breast pocket of his suit coat. His briefcase was under the table, upright, wedged between his
