The bell sounded and the doors opened onto the reception area of Putnam & Stearns. I brushed past several of my colleagues, barely acknowledging them, and found my way to my office.
Darlene looked up as I approached. As usual, she was wearing black, but today it was some sort of frilly high-necked thing that she probably imagined was feminine. It looked as though she’d picked it up at a Salvation Army.
As I neared her, I heard: “something seriously wrong with Ben.”
She started to say something, but I waved her away. I entered my office, silently greeted the Big Baby Dolls who kept their silent vigil against one wall, and sat down at the desk. “Hold my calls,” I said, closed my office door, and sank into my chair, safe at last in the solitude. For a very long time I sat in absolute silence, staring into the middle distance, squeezing my throbbing temples, cradling my head in my hands, and listening only to the hammering of my heart.
A little while later I emerged to ask Darlene for my messages. She looked at me curiously, obviously wondering whether I was all right. Handing me a pile of pink message slips, she said, “Mr. Truslow called.”
“Thanks.”
“You feeling any better?”
“What do you mean?”
“You got a headache, right?”
“Yeah. A nasty migraine. ‘A headache so bad it shows.’”
“You know, I’ve always got some Advil here,” she said, pulling open a desk drawer that revealed her stash of medications. “Take a couple. I get migraines, too, every month, and they’re like the worst.”
“The worst,” I agreed, accepting some of the pills.
“Oh, and Allen Hyde from Textronics wants to talk to you as soon as possible.” Mr. Hyde was the beleaguered inventor of Big Baby Dolls who was on the verge of making a settlement offer.
I said, “Thanks,” and scanned the messages. Darlene had turned to her IBM Selectric-yes, we still use typewriters at Putnam & Stearns; in certain instances the law requires typewriters, not laser printers-and returned to her frenetic typing.
I could not stop myself from moving close to her desk, then leaning forward and trying.
And it came, with that same damned clarity. Looks like he’s losing it, I heard in Darlene’s voice, and then silence.
“I’m okay,” I said quietly.
Darlene spun around, her eyes wide. “Huh?”
“Don’t worry about me. I had a tough meeting this morning.”
She gave me a long, frantic look, then composed herself. “Who’s worried?” she said, turning back to the typewriter, and I heard, as if in the same conversational tone, Did I say anything? “Want me to get Truslow on the line?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I’ve got forty-five minutes before Kornstein, which goes right into Lewin, and I need to get some fresh air or my head’s going to explode.” What I really wanted was to sit in a dark room with the blankets over my head, but I figured that a walk, painful as it might be, would do as much to alleviate the headache.
As I turned back to my office to get my overcoat, Darlene’s phone trilled.
“Mr. Ellison’s office,” she said. Then: “One moment, please, Mr. Truslow,” and she punched the hold button. “Are you here?”
“I’ll take it.”
“Ben,” Truslow said when I picked it up in my office. “I thought you’d be returning to chat.”
“Sorry,” I said. “The test ran on longer than I anticipated. I’ve got a crazy day here. If you don’t mind, let’s reschedule.”
A long pause.
“Fine,” he said. “What did you make of this Rossi? He seems a bit thuggish to me, but maybe I worry too much.”
“Didn’t have much of a chance to size him up.”
“In any case, Ben, I understand you passed the lie detector with flying colors.”
“I trust you’re not surprised.”
“Of course not. But we need to talk. I need to brief you fully. The thing is, a little wrinkle has turned up.”
There was a smile in his voice, and I knew.
“The President has asked me to go to Camp David,” he said.
“Congratulations.”
“Congratulations are premature. He wants to talk things over with me, his chief-of-staff says.”
“Sounds like you got it.”
“Well…” Truslow said. He seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then he said, “I’ll be in touch very soon,” and he hung up the phone.
I walked up Milk Street to Washington Street, the pedestrian mall sometimes called Downtown Crossing. There, along Summer Street, the gulf between the two great, rival downtown department stores, Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, I wandered aimlessly among pushcart vendors selling popcorn and pretzels, Bedouin scarves, Boston tourist T-shirts, and rough-knit South American sweaters. The headache seemed to be subsiding. The street was, as usual, teeming with shoppers, street musicians, office workers. Now, though, the air was filled with sounds, a bedlam of shouts and mutterings, sighs and exclamations, whispers and screams. Thoughts.
On Devonshire Street I entered an electronics shop, blankly examined a display of twenty-inch color television sets, fended off the salesman. Several of the sets were tuned to soap operas, one to CNN, one to a Nickelodeon rerun of a black and white TV show from the fifties that may have been The Donna Reed Show. On CNN the blond anchorwoman was saying something about a United States senator who had died. I recognized the face flashed on the screen: Senator Mark Sutton of Colorado, who had been found shot to death at his home in Washington. The police in Washington believed the slaying was probably not politically motivated, but instead committed during an armed robbery.
The salesman approached again, saying, “All the Mitsubishis are on sale this week, you know.”
I smiled pleasantly, said no thanks, and went out to the street. My head throbbed. I found myself standing close to passersby at stoplights and crossings, listening. One attractive young woman with short blond hair, in a pale pink suit and running shoes, stood next to me while the Don’t Walk sign flashed at Tremont Street. In normal circumstances we all keep a certain social distance from strangers; she was standing a few feet away, immersed in her own thoughts. I bent my head toward her in an attempt to share some of those thoughts, but she scowled at me as if I were a pervert, and moved quite a distance away.
People were bustling past too quickly for my feeble, novice efforts. I would stand, craning my neck this way and that as unobtrusively as I could, but nothing.
Had the talent disappeared? Had I simply imagined the whole thing?
Nothing.
Had the power merely faded?
Back on Washington Street, I spotted a newsstand, where a clot of people were buying their Globes and Wall Street Journals and New York Times, and when the Walk sign flashed, I crossed over to it. A young guy was looking at the front page of the Boston Herald-MOB HIT MAN NABBED it said, with a picture of some minor Mafia figure who’d been arrested in Providence. I moved in close, as if contemplating the pile of Heralds in front of him. Nothing. A woman, thirtyish and lawyerly, was scanning the piles of papers, looking for something. I moved in as close as I could without alarming her. Nothing there either.
Was it gone?
Or, I wondered, was it that none of these people was upset enough, angry enough, scared enough, to be emitting brain waves-is that how it worked?-of a frequency I could detect?
Finally, I saw a man in his early forties, dressed in the natty apparel of an investment banker, standing near the piles of Women’s Wear Daily, blankly staring at the rows of glossy magazines. Something in his eyes told me he was deeply upset about something.