“It doesn’t matter, does it? The Section is finished.”
“Where is he now, Hanley?”
Each waited for the other to speak; the silence of the huge old building was deep and profound; Washington dozed in the darkness.
“I don’t know,” Hanley said at last.
“All right. Is that the absolute truth?”
Hanley looked at him directly.
“Yes,” he said.
They both knew it was a lie.
35
The red journal was stuffed under a sweater at the bottom of the green-and-gold canvas tote bag that said Back the Pack on it.
Rita Macklin was almost there.
She swung the bag on her shoulder and started across Walnut Street against the lights. Traffic was light downtown; it was midweek suppertime in the old city. Across the way, City Hall squatted on the corner; the wide lawn was brown and the flowers that had decorated the building all summer were long dead, cut and gone.
Rita had been in Green Bay for thirty hours.
For most of that time, she had waited in the little east side apartment on Smith Street that belonged to Ruth.
Ruth and Rita had gone to school together a long time ago and then, after a few years, found each other again in Green Bay. She had gone to Ruth because she trusted her and because Ruth had no link to her present life.
Ruth had been generous without asking questions. Her apartment was on the second floor of a white frame private house; the separate entrance was at the back of the building, at the top of a stairway in an enclosed hall.
Rita had parked her car on the street but Ruth reminded her of the city’s overnight parking ban and Rita moved it then into the driveway. She didn’t want a parking ticket now, to attract the attention of the city police; Rita had a queer sense that she was moving beyond the law.
After tea and talk of other things, Rita had slept her first deep and drugless sleep in three days. She had dreamed of Kaiser and Devereaux.
Ruth did not want to know the truth; Rita did not tell her.
“I’ve had some difficulties. I’ll tell you about it later,” Rita had said. Ruth smiled. Rita had always been a wild one. They talked of college days and double dates long ago. Ruth was settled in the city as a schoolteacher and she seemed very set to Rita now, a part of life already fading into memory.
Ruth had a date tonight. It would be a good time for Rita to slip away. Perhaps when she returned, everything would be all right and Rita would be able to extricate herself from Ruth’s life without ruining anything for her. She had had the thought all the way from Florida, on the plane, in the car on the long drive along the lake to Green Bay, that something could go wrong at any moment.
During the day, when Ruth was at work, Rita had sat alone in the little apartment, at the kitchen table, drinking endless cups of tea, reading the red journal.
“I’m supposed to give you this,” Mrs. Jones, the housekeeper, had said after marching into Rita’s room at the motel. It was just two hours after Rita had managed to stagger there, half-drugged. “This is from the old priest,” Mrs. Jones said. “He gave me your name and address.” She held up a small card; Rita saw that it was one of her own, the card she had left in the sacristy when she had encountered Tunney there on her third day in Clearwater. Father Tunney had surrendered to her at last: He had given up the journal and its secrets.
Get it out; tell it all. The words merged in her mind: Sometimes it was Tunney. Sometimes it was Kaiser.
Rita became very frightened as she read, from the first sad, profound pages through to the hurried handwriting in the last thirty pages, covered with line after line of quick, crabbed scratchings, the words cold and precise. Words that gave exact locations and meanings; the eyes of a watcher, she thought. The eyes of a spy:
“I had intended to speak of none of this. What is it to me or to my soul? Or to the memory of my beloved, Phuong, whom I will not repent loving?”
So it began.
From time to time, the handwriting would stop, something would be scratched out, and when it resumed, it would be with a new clarity, as though the words had pursued difficult thoughts through a maze and, finding no way out at the first turning, were trying another path.
“They are evil who wish this journal only to examine it as they have examined me; to see what secrets I can tell them that they already know. They wish to suppress this and its secrets; to suppress me; or to use this for leverage against those who are still not finished in their attempt to inflict suffering on my people.” The words stopped; when they resumed, the handwriting was different. “My people are in Asia.…”
She knew, after a day of reading, how much the secrets were worth. They were worth murders to them; even more.
She had called her old friend at the Press-Gazette and they were expecting her.
She swung down Walnut Street and paused for a moment. Two hundred feet away was the old cream-colored brick building that housed the Green Bay Press-Gazette. But something was not right. There in the entranceway, between the double set of glass doors, across the faded lawn, were two men. Standing like soldiers. Watching her.
“That’s her.”
The two men pushed through the glass doors. Rita turned. Two more men were behind her, standing in the shadow of City Hall. They started for her. They were running.
No. Not now. Not when she was this close.
She turned and saw them and saw the police car at the end of the street. She couldn’t speak or scream; she dashed suddenly into the traffic. A bus shot out in front of her and the driver slammed its brakes and twisted the wheel; the bus skidded on the pavement and smashed into a parked car, careened into a second, and struck one of the men running from City Hall. He flew into the side of the building and his body broke through an office window with a tinkling crash.
Cries and shouts rose on every side of her in the early evening darkness.
She ran past a row of little shops. At the corner, a tavern’s lights beckoned. She ran inside.
Men wearing parkas or flannel shirts stood in groups along the bar; the television set in the corner was blaring and the jukebox was pounding out a country song. The bar smelled of peanuts and stale beer, all layered with smoke from a dozen cigarettes.
She pushed through the crowd at the bar, along the gauntlet to the back of the narrow room.
“Hey, there, looky what come in—”
At the back were three doors marked Kings, Queens, and Private. She pushed through Private and found she was in what resembled a living room. A woman sat in an easy chair watching television. She didn’t look up.
“You got the wrong door, honey—”
Past her, into a kitchen, past the kitchen through the back door. Garbage cans on a concrete step. Down into the alley, along a row of fences separating yards. Across a lawn and another; she could hear shouts in the distance behind her. She turned into a gangway between two buildings; the way led to a service alley.
Dead end.
The shouts were closer. A police car, flashing lights with menace, snarled into the alley.
No way out except over a locked gate. A nail protruding from the gate ripped her jeans, scratched her leg. She slid down into a second gangway. Through to the next street, residential now, across a yard and into a driveway. Through the wooden gate into a small backyard.
She didn’t see the dog until it came galloping toward her.
The shepherd was big. She raised the tote bag and it stopped for a moment, confronting her. She held the bag in front of her as she edged slowly along the fence. The dog barked ferociously.