I let it pass for a moment. I didn’t answer him immediately and let his tea steep. I brought him his mug. Now he wanted to get to the place in the computer where he could type a message for Dennis. I switched him over. Then he asked me how often I was sending word.
I said to him, “What is Dennis saying? I don’t think about these things anymore, so you better tell me.”
“You know it, my friend,” he spoke grimly. “I don’t have to.”
“What am I doing?” I said. “Why are you here, Jack?”
“My friend.”
I said, “What am I doing?”
His shoulders softened. “Dennis wants more word. Simple. He deserves more contact. You could come up to Westchester sometimes.”
“I’m not going up there again.”
“Fine. You could make a gesture, however. For example, he said he has heard nothing from you about what happened at the church. He is very agitated, you know. Patiently he has been waiting. What do you have to say about this?”
“I’ve been processing it,” I told him.
“What is there to process?” he cried. “It should be so simple. You see it and you write it down. A prank by schoolboys!”
“You know what those boys’ lawyers are saying.”
“Ah!” he groaned. “They will say anything. Do you really believe somebody would trust two eleven-year-olds to disrupt an event? With smoke bombs, no less? Sheer insanity. Who would pay fifty dollars, or five dollars, to little boys to do a man’s job?”
“I know a man who might.”
“Ah!” He threw up his hands. “You are becoming a very fine neurotic, my friend.”
“I have good training.”
“Perhaps,” Jack said, his feet and hands restless. “Dennis might not agree at this point. He is agitated. I should tell you he looks ill. He is saying the firm is not getting enough business lately. He wants all our present work to get done by the numbers. No more playing around. He is serious. He made a speech to us.”
“I’m sorry I missed it.”
“I mean it. For your sake you should know. You know how he wears his anxiety on his sleeve. You can see how terrible he would be out in the field. And he has been privately lecturing the others. Reminding them about the great investment he has made in the business. He passed out a listing of all that he has given up for them. Of course he hates being a technocrat. Pete and the others are so bored with him. They joke and whisper old fart Lear behind his back. I haven’t asked them yet what this means.”
“It means we’re headed for family trouble,” I said. “The meanest kind.”
Jack answered, “Not necessarily.”
“Then why are you here?”
Jack snorted. “I am too old. I am tired. I just wanted to see your face. If that is a crime. What Dennis wants I won’t quarrel with. You know how I felt at the start of this business. You were not in the right state of mind anymore. Luzan made certain things difficult for you.”
“Luzan, Luzan.”
“No jokes. I want to be serious now. Let me be serious with you.” He took a last sip of his tea. “Listen to me. Be quiet and listen. You should have left us then but you started this thing. I suppose it cannot matter now. You are on the assignment. So now I say, see it through. Present your man Kwang. Give Dennis what he is paying you for. Find something he can use. What about these rumors of a money operation? People sending him money. That Spanish kid you name, corner him.”
“No angle there,” I said. “He’s just a good kid. He’s a mascot. There isn’t anything.” So far Kwang was clean, as far as I knew. There was the street money, certainly, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. And the constant rumors about massive secret contributions to Kwang were nothing I could see.
“Then perhaps you should go straight home,” Jack said. “Go home to your wife if there is nothing.”
I said, “Help me, Jack.”
He waited, opening his arms.
I asked him, “I want to know if he can be put in danger.”
“You sound like a rookie,” he said. “This is a rookie interest.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
He frowned a little, his melancholic Jack-face. “What can I say? He is a very public figure. Luzan was not. This is not to say I know anything. This is not a nuance. But people think of John Kwang. He is in the language now. The buildings and streets there are written with him. In this sense he exists.”
I said, “It ought to mean something.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t seem convinced.”
He looked away from me. “Well, then perhaps you should operate as if he is in danger.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“You know as well as anyone that we are not an answer business.”
“Jack.”
“What are you going to do, Parky, hold me down and pummel me?”
“I may. You have seventy-five pounds on me but I may.”
Suddenly he looked hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
“I have been tortured before,” he said gravely. “By more persuasive people. Not a sweetheart like you. And they got nothing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget it,” he said, but I knew his quick answer, if anything, was just an American convention, an easy idiom. He got up to put on his raincoat but I asked him to stay a little longer. There must have been something desperate or pitiable in my voice, for he slung his coat back over the partition. He said while he was here I might as well go over a few things. Show him the protocol.
I was supposed to come here every few nights and write out the daily register. As trained, I would follow the journalistic method, naming the who, the what, the where, when, and then very briefly interpret it, offer the how and why of what Kwang did or said. I would then by modem transmit my pages directly to the main-office computer, from which only Hoagland could download files with his password. Jack, being my assignment operator, my wing, was seeing whatever Hoagland let him, which was likely everything. Jack probably knew that the registers I’d been sending were useless. And even they had been growing infrequent. My coverage wasn’t daily anymore, as it had been for the first few weeks. It was more like every other day, or every third, that I sent something.
I could probably assume that there was the onset of a worry again, concern at the office about good Henry, good Harry, Parky. All my good names. Hoagland had always let everyone there know how good I was at writing the daily register. I wasn’t slick Pete with the subjects, or Jimmy Baptiste when things got rough, or Grace with her nose for the potential mistake or breakdown. I simply wrote textbook examples of our workaday narrative, veritable style sheets that Hoagland even used to remind the other analysts of how it ought to be done. He’d periodically tape them on the wall near the coffeemaker and I’d see graffiti markered across the pages in Pete’s or Jimmy’s laughing hand: Teacher’s pet, and Korean geek, and Oh what talent.
For a brief time, I even harbored a little pride.
And sometimes I will write them out now, again, though for myself, those old strokes, unofficial versions of any newcomer I see in the street or on the bus or in the demi-shops of the city, the need in me still to undo the cipherlike faces scrawled with hard work, and no work, and all trouble. The faces of my father and his workers, and Ahjuhma, and the ever-dimming one of my mother. I will write out the face of the young girl I saw only yesterday wearily unloading small sacks of basmati in front of her family’s store, a baby wrapped tightly to her back with a sheet of raw cloth, the very sheet being her shirt, the warm hump now her back, her brother or sister the same thing as her weight.