Charney shuddered at the thought he had become one of the faceless men, playing with numbers and making cuts of a different variety. He didn’t relish that power but accepted it. It was part of the job and the job was him. He glanced at the phone on the coffee table in the gloomy room. One call and the wheels would be in motion, irrevocable from that point.
Christopher Locke had a wife and three kids. Charney wondered why Calvin Roy hadn’t asked about that. Then he realized. Roy didn’t want to know. The less said, the better. Charney glanced again at the phone. The choice, the decision, was his. He leaned back and squeezed his eyes closed, fighting back the pain that had started in his temples, only a dull throb now but certain to grow into a pounding ache.
I‘m looking out at—
What had Lubeck seen?
Christopher Locke was the man to find out, Charney told himself as he poured another glass of Chivas.
Chapter 2
“In the news this afternoon—”
Christopher Locke turned the radio off. Traffic was backed up all the way along 16th Street and the LTD’s air conditioner was on the blink as usual, leaving him a victim of the sweltering spring air.
Locke hit the horn out of sheer frustration.
The news from the tenure hearing shouldn’t have surprised him. He’d seen it coming for months now. The signals were all there. The department chairman didn’t like his methods, and popularity with the students didn’t count for anything. Of course he was popular, they told him, his courses regularly produced the highest percentage of A’s in the entire English department. Locke never cared much for grades. The academic pressure at Georgetown was sufficiently high without his adding to it. He wanted students in his classes to relax, to be able to learn and enjoy without worrying about their grade point average. So he was an easy grader, albeit a consistent one who never passed papers to his graduate assistants for marking.
But that apparently didn’t help his cause with the tenure board. His philosophy was the exception, not the rule, and so he was out of a job again. He would certainly have time now to work on his novels. Why kid himself, though? The truth was that all the time in the world couldn’t salvage them. He was a failure as a novelist and now, apparently, a failure as a professor as well.
A horn blared to his rear. Locke realized traffic was moving again. He waved an apologetic hand behind him and gave the LTD a little gas. His shirt was sticking to the upholstery now.
In the end, he thought, everything came down to security. You worked your whole life to reach a stage where worry was nonexistent, where the rudiments of happiness were available and, with a minimum of unpleasant effort, attainable. What would happen to that security now? Without the Georgetown salary and benefits, how would his family survive? Much of his savings would have to go toward the kids’ educations, and there was still the mortgage on their home in Silver Spring to consider. The bills came in piles Chris just barely managed to lower with the help of the check his wife had started bringing home from her real estate job. It was life on a shoestring and now even that was about to be severed.
And how was he to tell his family of his dismissal? His wife Beth, he guessed, would calmly remind him of all the times in the past she had urged him to go into business. He had always shrugged her off, saying he preferred the academic life. Practical as she was, she could never really understand his refusal even to consider leaving college for a “real” job. His oldest children, a seventeen-year-old boy and fifteen-year-old girl he knew less and less everyday, would brush the news off casually, becoming concerned only after considering how the dismissal might affect them. Only his youngest son would show Locke the love and support he so sorely needed. Just past twelve, Greg was the pride of his life. Chris wanted to freeze the boy just as he was, keep him forever from middle adolescence when hugs disappear and soft smiles are replaced by impatient frowns.
Locke would like to have been a better father, just as he would like to have been a better writer, professor, and husband. It was easy to see how people could live their lives for their children: It blotted out their own failures and missed opportunities. But Locke wasn’t going to fool himself. His oldest children were strangers and he couldn’t expect to hold on to the youngest forever.
Those thoughts had tied a knot of anxiety in his stomach by the time he pulled into the driveway of his Silver Spring home. He lingered briefly before moving from the car. His heart was thumping crazily against his chest.
“Hi, Daddy!” Whitney greeted him with an affectionate hug as he stepped through the door, leaving the phone dangling by the front hall stairway.
“Hi, beautiful.”
She seemed not to hear him. “You’re not gonna believe what happened to me today! I was asked to the prom, the junior prom! Do you believe it? And the guy is absolutely gorgeous, definitely tops in the whole junior class. I can’t believe he asked me. Of course, I knew he liked me ’cause Marcia knows someone who sits near him in study period and she overheard him mention my name….”
Locke looked closely at his only daughter as she moved back toward the phone, still jabbering away. She was wearing faded jeans and had tied her flowing blond hair atop her head in a bun. There was a naturalness about her beauty. It wasn’t hard to figure out why boys drooled over her. But she was only a freshman. Could she handle it? Locke wanted so much to discuss that issue with her but knew he’d botch things if he tried.
Whitney held the phone against her shoulder. “I’ll have to get a new gown for the prom, you know,” she said softer, as tentatively as she could manage.
“What about the one I bought you for the Christmas dance?”
“That old thing? Daddy, be serious, you can’t wear the same dress to two formals. Nobody does.”
“Maybe they just trade off so nobody notices.”
Whitney frowned, impatient to get back to her phone call. “Be serious, Daddy.” She whispered something into the receiver, then looked back up at Locke as he sorted through the mail. “Can I eat at Debbie’s tonight?” she asked.
“What does your mother say?”
“This is Monday, Daddy. Mom works.”
How could I not know that? Locke asked himself.
“Okay.” He shrugged.
“Thanks, Daddy!” Then, without missing a breath, Whitney was back in her conversation.
Still shuffling through the mail, flinching at each bill, Chris moved into the kitchen, realizing suddenly how thirsty he was. He found Bobby sitting in one chair with his feet up on another sipping Coke and scanning the latest rock magazine.
“What do you say, Pop?”
Locke sighed on his way to the fridge. He had never gotten used to Bobby calling him “Pop.” Somehow the word seemed demeaning. He grabbed a Diet Coke and joined his oldest son at the table.
“How was school?”
“Okay, I guess,” Bobby replied with his eyes still on the magazine. “Usual shit.”
“Give any more thought to that talk we had?”
“’Bout college, you mean? Not yet. I will for sure. But the band’s just starting to get it together and I just haven’t had time. We’ve got two gigs scheduled. Not much money but it’s a start. Things are really beginning to happen for us.”
“I’m glad,” Locke said lamely, and realized Bobby wasn’t wearing the usual bandanna tied around his forehead. Its absence allowed his sandy hair to fall almost to his eyebrows in tight curls that hung perfectly. He had never been much at sports, and as he grew older had never grown out of his boyish prettiness. A must for rock stars, Locke figured, as was the earring that dangled from his left lobe. Bobby’s jeans were thin and faded with the ragged bottoms tucked partially into a pair of battered high-top sneakers. His ever-present jean jacket was just as faded, barely blue anymore, stuck here and there with pins that Chris thought might be holding the material together. On the back was sewn an embroidered eagle, symbol of some band Bobby had once been fond of.