Code to Zero (2 page)

The piano sounded a strident chord, and Luke looked up. Mrs. Lonegan was playing the introductory notes of a familiar hymn. She and her husband began to sing “
What a Friend we have in Jesus,
” and Luke joined in, pleased he could remember it.

Bourbon had a strange effect, he thought. He could do the crossword and sing a hymn from memory, but he did not know his mother’s name. Perhaps he had been drinking for years and had damaged his brain. He wondered how he could have let such a thing happen.

After the hymn, Pastor Lonegan read some Bible verses, then told them all that they could be saved. Here was a group that really needed saving, Luke thought. All the same, he was not tempted to put his faith in Jesus. First he needed to find out who he was.

The pastor extemporized a prayer, they sang grace, then the men lined up and Mrs. Lonegan served them hot oatmeal with syrup. Luke ate three bowls. Afterwards, he felt much better. His hangover was receding fast.

Impatient to resume his questions, he approached the pastor. “Sir, have you seen me here before? I’ve lost my memory.”

Lonegan looked hard at him. “You know, I don’t believe I have. But I meet hundreds of people every week, and I could be mistaken. How old are you?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said, feeling foolish.

“Late thirties, I’d say. You haven’t been living rough very long. It takes its toll on a man. But you walk with a spring in your step, your skin is clear under the dirt, and you’re still alert enough to do a crossword puzzle. Quit drinking now, and you could lead a normal life again.”

Luke wondered how many times the pastor had said that. “I’m going to try,” he promised.

“If you need help, just ask.” A young man who appeared to be mentally handicapped was persistently patting Lonegan’s arm, and he turned to him with a patient smile.

Luke spoke to Pete. “How long have you known me?”

“I don’t know, you been around a while.”

“Where did we spend the night before last?”

“Relax, will you? Your memory will come back sooner or later.”

“I have to find out where I’m from.”

Pete hesitated. “What we need is a beer,” he said. “Help us think straight.” He turned for the door.

Luke grabbed his arm. “I don’t want a beer,” he said decisively. Pete did not want him to dig into his past, it seemed. Perhaps he was afraid of losing a companion. Well, that was too bad. Luke had more important things to do than keep Pete company. “In fact,” he said, “I think I’d like to be alone for a while.”

“What are you, Greta Garbo?”

“I’m serious.”

“You need me to look out for you. You can’t make it on your own. Hell, you can’t even remember how old you are.”

Pete had a desperate look in his eyes, but Luke was unmoved. “I appreciate your concern, but you’re not helping me find out who I am.”

After a moment Pete shrugged. “You got a right.” He turned to the door again. “See you around, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

Pete went out. Luke shook Pastor Lonegan’s hand. “Thank you for everything,” he said.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” said the pastor.

Luke went up the stairs and out into the street. Pete was on the next block, speaking to a man in a green gabardine raincoat with a matching cap—begging the price of a beer, Luke guessed. He walked in the opposite direction and turned around the first corner.

It was still dark. Luke’s feet were cold, and he realized he was not wearing socks under his boots. As he hurried on, a light flurry of snow fell. After a few minutes, he eased his pace. He had no reason to rush. It made no difference whether he walked fast or slow. He stopped and took shelter in a doorway.

He had nowhere to go.

The rocket is surrounded on three sides by a service gantry which holds it in a steel embrace. The gantry, actually a converted oilfield derrick, is mounted on two sets of wheels which run on wide-gauge rails. The entire service structure, bigger than a town house, will be rolled back 300 feet before the launch.

Elspeth woke up worrying about Luke.

She lay in bed for a few moments, her heart heavy with concern for the man she loved. Then she switched on the bedside lamp and sat upright.

Her motel room was decorated with a space-program theme. The floor lamp was in the shape of a rocket, and the pictures on the walls showed planets, crescent moons, and orbital paths in a wildly unrealistic night sky. The Starlite was one of a cluster of new motels that had sprouted among the sand dunes in the area of Cocoa Beach, Florida, eight miles south of Cape Canaveral, to accommodate the influx of visitors. The decorator had obviously thought the outer-space theme appropriate, but it made Elspeth feel as if she were borrowing the bedroom of a ten-year-old boy.

She picked up the bedside phone and dialed Anthony Carroll’s office in Washington, D.C. At the other end, the phone rang unanswered. She tried his home number with the same result. Had something gone wrong? She felt sick with fear. She told herself that Anthony must be on his way to the office. She would call again in half an hour. It could not take him longer than thirty minutes to drive to work.

As she showered, she thought about Luke and Anthony when she had first known them. They were at Harvard when she was at Radcliffe, before the war. The boys were in the Harvard Glee Club: Luke had a nice baritone voice and Anthony a wonderful tenor. Elspeth had been the conductor of the Radcliffe Choral Society and had organized a joint concert with the Glee Club.

Best friends, Luke and Anthony had made an odd couple. Both were tall and athletic, but there the resemblance ended. The Radcliffe girls had called them Beauty and the Beast. Luke was Beauty, with his wavy black hair and elegant clothes. Anthony was not handsome, with his big nose and long chin, and he always looked as if he were wearing someone else’s suit, but girls were attracted to his energy and enthusiasm.

Elspeth showered quickly. In her bathrobe, she sat at the dressing table to do her makeup. She put her wristwatch beside the eyeliner so that she would know when thirty minutes was up.

She had been sitting at a dressing table wearing a bathrobe the first time she ever spoke to Luke. It was during a panty raid. A group of Harvard boys, some drunk, had climbed into the dormitory building through a ground-floor window late one evening. Now, almost twenty years later, it seemed incredible to her that she and the other girls had feared nothing worse than having their underwear stolen. Had the world been more innocent then?

By chance, Luke had come to her room. He was a math major, like her. Although he was wearing a mask, she recognized his clothes, a pale gray Irish tweed jacket with a red spotted cotton handkerchief in the breast pocket. Once alone with her, Luke had seemed embarrassed, as if it had just occurred to him that what he was doing was foolish. She had smiled, pointed to the closet, and said, “Top drawer.” He had taken a pair of pretty white panties with a lace edging, and Elspeth felt a pang of regret—they had been expensive. But the next day he asked her for a date.

She tried to concentrate on her makeup. The job was more difficult than usual this morning, because she had slept badly. Foundation smoothed her cheeks and salmon-pink lipstick brightened her mouth.
She had a math degree from Radcliffe, but still she was expected to look like a mannequin at work.

She brushed her hair. It was reddish-brown, and cut in the fashionable style: chin length and turned under at the back. She dressed quickly in a sleeveless shirtwaist dress of green-and-tan-striped cotton with a wide dark brown patent-leather belt.

Twenty-nine minutes had elapsed since she tried to call Anthony.

To pass the last minute, she thought about the number 29. It was a prime number—it could not be divided by any other number except 1—but otherwise it was not very interesting. The only unusual thing about it was that 29 plus 2x
²
was a prime number for every value of x up to 28. She calculated the series in her head: 29, 31, 37, 47, 61, 79, 101, 127 . . .

She picked up the phone and dialed Anthony’s office again.

There was no reply.

Elspeth Twomey fell in love with Luke the first time he kissed her.

Most Harvard boys had no idea how to kiss. They either bruised your lips with a brutal smackeroo, or opened their mouths so wide you felt like a dentist. When Luke kissed her, at five minutes to midnight in the shadows of the Radcliffe Dormitory Quad, he was passionate yet tender. His lips moved all the time, not just on her mouth but on her cheeks and her eyelids and her throat. The tip of his tongue probed gently between her lips, politely asking permission to come in, and she did not even pretend to hesitate. Afterwards, sitting in her room, she had looked into the mirror and whispered to her reflection, “I think I love him.”

That had been six months ago, and the feeling had grown stronger since. Now she was seeing Luke almost every day. They were both in their senior year. Every day they either met for lunch or studied together for a couple of hours. Weekends they spent almost all their time together.

It was not uncommon for Radcliffe girls to get engaged in their final year, to a Harvard boy or a young professor. They would marry in the summer, go on a long honeymoon, then move into an apartment when they returned. They would start work, and a year or so later have their first baby.

But Luke had never spoken about marriage.

She looked at him now, sitting in a booth at the back of Flanagan’s Bar, arguing with Bern Rothsten, a tall graduate student with a bushy black moustache and a hard-bitten look. Luke’s dark hair kept falling forward over his eyes, and he pushed it back with his left hand, a familiar gesture. When he was older, and had a responsible job, he would put goop on his hair to make it stay in place, and then he would not be quite so sexy, she thought.

Bern was a communist, like many Harvard students and professors. “Your father’s a banker,” he said to Luke with disdain. “You’ll be a banker too. Of course you think capitalism is great.”

Elspeth saw a flush rise at Luke’s throat. His father had recently been featured in a
Time
magazine article as one of ten men who had become millionaires since the Depression. However, she guessed he was blushing not because he was a rich kid but because he was fond of his family and resented the implied criticism of his father. She felt angry for him and said indignantly, “We don’t judge people by their parents, Bern!”

Luke said, “Anyway, banking is an honorable job. Bankers help people to start businesses and provide employment.”

“Like they did in nineteen twenty-nine.”

“They make mistakes. Sometimes they help the wrong people. Soldiers make mistakes—they shoot the wrong people—but I don’t accuse you of being a murderer.”

It was Bern’s turn to look wounded. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War—he was older than the rest of them by three or four years—and Elspeth now guessed he was remembering some tragic error.

Luke added, “Anyway, I don’t aim to be a banker.”

Bern’s dowdy girlfriend, Peg, leaned forward, interested. Like Bern, she was intense in her convictions, but she did not have his sarcastic tongue. “What, then?”

“A scientist.”

“What kind?”

Luke pointed upward. “I want to explore beyond our planet.”

Bern laughed scornfully. “Space rockets! A schoolboy fantasy.”

Elspeth leaped to Luke’s defense again. “Knock it off, Bern, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Bern’s subject was French literature.

However, Luke did not appear to have been stung by the sneer. Perhaps he was accustomed to having his dream laughed at. “I think it’s going to happen,” he said. “And I’ll tell you something else. I believe science will do more than communism for ordinary people in our lifetime.”

Elspeth winced. She loved Luke, but she felt he was naive about politics. “Too simple,” she said to him. “The benefits of science are restricted to the privileged elite.”

“That’s just not true,” Luke said. “Steamships make life better for seamen as well as for transatlantic passengers.”

Bern said, “Have you ever been in the engine room of an ocean liner?”

“Yes, and no one was dying of scurvy.”

A tall figure cast a shadow over the table. “Are you kids old enough to drink alcoholic liquor in public?” It was Anthony Carroll, wearing a blue serge suit that looked as if he had slept in it. With him was someone so striking that Elspeth uttered an involuntary murmur of surprise. She was a small girl with a petite figure, fashionably dressed in a short red jacket and a loose black skirt, with curls of dark hair escaping from under a little red hat with a peak. “Meet Billie Josephson,” said Anthony.

Bern Rothsten said to her, “Are you Jewish?”

She was startled to be asked so directly. “Yes.”

“So you can marry Anthony, but you can’t join his country club.”

Anthony protested: “I don’t belong to a country club.”

“You will, Anthony, you will,” said Bern.

Luke stood up to shake hands, nudged the table with his thighs, and knocked over a glass. It was unusual for him to be clumsy, and Elspeth realized with a twinge of annoyance that he was instantly taken with Miss Josephson. “I’m surprised,” he said, giving her his most charming smile. “When Anthony said his date was called Billie, I imagined someone six feet tall and built like a wrestler.”

Billie laughed merrily and slid into the booth beside Luke. “My name is Bilhah,” she said. “It’s biblical. She was the handmaiden of Rachel and
the mother of Dan. But I was brought up in Dallas, where they called me Billie-Jo.”

Anthony sat next to Elspeth and said quietly, “Isn’t she pretty?”

Billie was not exactly pretty, Elspeth thought. She had a narrow face, with a sharp nose and large, intense, dark brown eyes. It was the whole package that was so stunning: the red lipstick, the angle of the hat, the Texas accent, and most of all her animation. While she talked to Luke, telling him some story about Texans now, she smiled, frowned, and pantomimed all kinds of emotion. “She’s cute,” Elspeth said to Anthony. “I don’t know why I never noticed her before.”

“She works all the time, doesn’t go to many parties.”

“So how did you meet her?”

“I noticed her in the Fogg Museum. She was wearing a green coat with brass buttons and a beret. I thought she looked like a toy soldier fresh out of the box.”

Billie was not any kind of toy, Elspeth thought. She was more dangerous than that. Billie laughed at something Luke had said and swiped his arm in mock admonishment. The gesture was flirtatious, Elspeth thought. Irritated, she interrupted them and said to Billie, “Are you planning to beat the curfew tonight?”

Radcliffe girls were supposed to be in their dormitories by ten o’clock. They could get permission to stay out later, but they had to put their name in a book, with details of where they planned to go and what time they would be back, and their return time was checked. However, they were clever women, and the complex rules only inspired them to ingenious deceptions. Billie said, “I’m supposed to be spending the night with a visiting aunt who has taken a suite at the Ritz. What’s your story?”

“No story, just a ground-floor window that will be open all night.”

Billie lowered her voice. “In fact, I’m staying with friends of Anthony’s in Fenway.”

Anthony looked sheepish. “Some people my mother knows, who have a large apartment,” he said to Elspeth. “Don’t give me that old-fashioned look, they’re terribly respectable.”

“I should hope so,” Elspeth said primly, and she had the satisfaction of
seeing Billie blush. Turning to Luke, she said, “Honey, what time is the movie?”

He looked at his wristwatch. “We’ve got to go,” he said.

Luke had borrowed a car for the weekend. It was a two-seater Ford Model A roadster, ten years old, its sit-up-and-beg shape looking antiquated beside the streamlined cars of the early forties.

Luke handled the old car skillfully, obviously enjoying himself. They drove into Boston. Elspeth asked herself if she had been bitchy to Billie. Maybe a little, she decided, but she was not going to shed any tears.

They went to see Alfred Hitchcock’s latest film,
Suspicion,
at the Loew’s State Theatre. In the darkness, Luke put his arm around Elspeth, and she laid her head on his shoulder. She felt it was a pity they had chosen a film about a disastrous marriage.

Around midnight they returned to Cambridge and pulled off Memorial Drive to park facing the Charles River, next to the boat house. The car had no heater, and Elspeth turned up the fur collar of her coat and leaned against Luke for warmth.

They talked about the movie. Elspeth thought that in real life the Joan Fontaine character, a repressed girl brought up by stuffy parents, would never be attracted to the kind of ne’er-do-well Cary Grant had played. Luke said, “But that’s why she fell for him—because he was dangerous.”

“Are dangerous people attractive?”

“Absolutely.”

Elspeth turned away from him and looked at the reflection of the moon on the restless surface of the water. Billie Josephson was dangerous, she thought.

Luke sensed her annoyance and changed the subject. “This afternoon, Professor Davies told me I could do my master’s degree right here at Harvard if I want.”

“What made him say that?”

“I mentioned that I was hoping to go to Columbia. He said, ‘What for? Stay here!’ I explained that my family’s in New York, and he said, ‘Family. Huh!’ Like that. Like I couldn’t possibly be a serious mathematician if I cared about seeing my little sister.”

Luke was the eldest of four children. His mother was French. His father had met her in Paris at the end of the First World War. Elspeth knew that Luke was fond of his two teenage brothers and doted on his eleven-year-old sister. “Professor Davies is a bachelor,” she said. “He lives for his work.”

“Have you thought about doing a master’s?”

Elspeth’s heart missed a beat. “Should I?” Was he asking her to go to Columbia with him?

“You’re a better mathematician than most of the Harvard men.”

“I’ve always wanted to work at the State Department.”

“That would mean living in Washington.”

Elspeth was sure Luke had not planned this conversation. He was just thinking aloud. It was typical of a man, to talk without a moment’s forethought about matters that affected their whole lives. But he seemed dismayed that they might move to different cities. The solution to the dilemma must be as obvious to him as it was to her, she thought happily.

“Have you ever been in love?” he said suddenly. Realizing he had been abrupt, he added, “It’s a very personal question. I don’t have any right to ask.”

“That’s okay,” she said. Any time he wanted to talk about love, it was fine with her. “As a matter of fact, I have been in love.” She watched his face in the moonlight, and was gratified to see the shadow of displeasure flicker across his expression. “When I was seventeen, there was a steelworks dispute in Chicago. I was very political in those days. I went to help, as a volunteer, carrying messages and making coffee. I worked for a young organizer called Jack Largo, and I fell in love with him.”

“And he with you?”

“Goodness, no. He was twenty-five, he thought of me as a kid. He was kind to me, and charming, but he was like that with everyone.” She hesitated. “He kissed me once, though.” She wondered whether she should be telling Luke this, but she felt the need to unburden herself. “We were alone in the backroom, packing leaflets in boxes, and I said something that made him laugh, I don’t even remember what it was. ‘You’re a gem, Ellie,’ he said—he was one of those men who shorten
everyone’s name, he would have called you Lou for sure. Then he kissed me, right on the lips. I nearly died of joy. But he just went on packing leaflets as though nothing had changed.”

“I think he did fall in love with you.”

“Maybe.”

“Are you still in touch with him?”

She shook her head. “He died.”

“So young!”

“He was killed.” She fought back sudden tears. The last thing she wanted was for Luke to think she was still in love with the memory of Jack. “Two off-duty policemen, hired by the steelworks, got him in an alley and beat him to death with iron bars.”

“Jesus Christ!” Luke stared at her.

“Everyone in town knew who had done it, but nobody was arrested.”

He took her hand. “I’ve read about that kind of stuff in the papers, but it never seemed real.”

“It’s real. The mills must keep rolling. Anyone who gets in the way has to be rubbed out.”

“You make it sound as if industry were no better than organized crime.”

“I don’t see a big difference. But I don’t get involved anymore. That was enough.” Luke had started talking about love, but she had stupidly moved the conversation on to politics. She switched back. “What about you?” she said. “Have you ever been in love?”

“I’m not sure,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t think I know what love is.” It was a typical boy’s answer. Then he kissed her, and she relaxed.

She liked to touch him with her fingertips while they kissed, stroking his ears and the line of his jaw, his hair, and the back of his neck. Every now and again he stopped to look at her, studying her with the hint of a smile, making her think of Hamlet’s Ophelia saying: “He falls to such perusal of my face, as he would draw it.” Then he would kiss her again. What made her feel so good was the thought that he liked her this much.