Code to Zero (3 page)

After a while he drew away from her and sighed heavily. “I wonder how married people ever get bored,” he said. “They never have to stop.”

She liked this talk of marriage. “Their children stop them, I guess,” she said with a laugh.

“Do you want to have children someday?”

She felt her breath come faster. What was he asking her? “Of course I do.”

“I’d like four.”

The same as his parents. “Boys or girls?”

“A mixture.”

There was a pause. Elspeth was afraid to say anything. The silence stretched out. Eventually he turned to her with a serious look. “How would you feel about that? Having four children?”

It was the cue she had been waiting for. She smiled happily. “If they were yours, I’d love it,” she said.

He kissed her again.

Soon it became too cold to stay where they were, and reluctantly they drove back toward the Radcliffe dorms.

As they were passing through Harvard Square, a figure waved to them from the side of the road. “Is that Anthony?” Luke said incredulously.

It was, Elspeth saw. Billie was with him.

Luke pulled over, and Anthony came to the window. “I’m glad I spotted you,” he said. “I need a favor.”

Billie stood behind Anthony, shivering in the cold night air, looking furious. “What are you doing here?” Elspeth asked Anthony.

“There’s been a muddle. My friends in Fenway have gone away for the weekend—they must have got the dates mixed up. Billie has nowhere to go.”

Billie had lied about where she was spending the night, Elspeth recalled. Now she could not return to her dorm without revealing her deception.

“I took her to the house.” He meant Cambridge House, where he and Luke lived. Harvard men’s dormitories were called houses. “I thought she could sleep in our room, and Luke and I could spend the night in the library.”

Elspeth said, “You’re crazy.”

Luke put in, “It’s been done before. So what went wrong?”

“We were seen.”

“Oh, no!” Elspeth said. For a girl to be found in a man’s room was a serious offense, especially at night. Both the man and the woman could be expelled from the university.

Luke said, “Who saw you?”

“Geoff Pidgeon and a whole bunch of men.”

“Well, Geoff’s all right, but who was with him?”

“I’m not sure. It was half dark and they were all drunk. I’ll talk to them in the morning.”

Luke nodded. “What are you going to do now?”

“Billie has a cousin who lives in Newport, Rhode Island,” Anthony said. “Would you drive her there?”

“What?” said Elspeth. “But it’s fifty miles away!”

“So it will take an hour or two,” Anthony said dismissively. “What do you say, Luke?”

“Of course,” Luke said.

Elspeth had known he would comply. It was a matter of honor for him to help out a friend, regardless of inconvenience. But she was angry all the same.

“Hey, thanks,” Anthony said lightly.

“No problem,” Luke said. “Well, there is a problem. This car is a two-seater.”

Elspeth opened the door and got out. “Be my guest,” she said sulkily. She felt ashamed of herself for being so bad-tempered. Luke was right to rescue a friend in trouble. But she hated the thought of his spending two hours in this little car with sexy Billie Josephson.

Luke sensed her displeasure and said, “Elspeth, get back in, I’ll drive you home first.”

She tried to be gracious. “No need,” she said. “Anthony can walk me to the dorm. And Billie looks as if she might freeze to death.”

“Okay, if you’re sure,” Luke said.

Elspeth wished he had not agreed quite so fast.

Billie kissed Elspeth’s cheek. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said. She got into the car and closed the door without saying goodbye to Anthony.

Luke waved and drove off.

Anthony and Elspeth stood and watched the car recede into the darkness.

“Hell,” said Elspeth.

Stenciled on the side of the white rocket is the designation “UE” in huge black letters. This is a simple code—

—so UE is missile number 29. The purpose of the code is to avoid giving clues as to how many missiles have been produced.

Daylight crept stealthily over the cold city. Men and women came out of the houses narrowing their eyes and pursing their lips against the biting wind and hurried through the gray streets, heading for the warmth and bright lights of the offices and stores, hotels and restaurants where they worked.

Luke had no destination: one street was as good as another when none of them meant anything. Maybe, he thought, he would turn the next corner and know, in a flash of revelation, that he was someplace familiar—the street where he was brought up, or a building where he had worked. But every corner disappointed him.

As the light improved, he began to study the people he passed. One of these could be his father, his sister, even his son. He kept hoping that one of them would catch his eye and stop and embrace him, and say, “Luke, what happened to you? Come home with me, let me help you!” But perhaps a relative would turn a cold face to him and pass by. He might
have done something to offend his family. Or they might live in another town.

He began to feel he was not going to be lucky. No passer-by would embrace him with glad cries, and he was not suddenly going to recognize the street where he lived. Simply walking around fantasizing about a lucky break was no kind of strategy. He needed a plan. There must be some way to discover his identity.

He wondered if he might be a Missing Person. There was a list, he felt sure, of such people, with a description of each. Who kept the list? It had to be the police.

He seemed to remember passing a precinct house a few minutes earlier. He turned abruptly to go back. As he did so, he bumped into a young man in an olive-colored gabardine raincoat and matching cap. He had a feeling he might have seen the man before. Their eyes met, and for a hopeful moment Luke thought he might have been recognized, but the man looked away, embarrassed, and walked on.

Swallowing his disappointment, Luke tried to retrace his steps. It was difficult, because he had turned corners and crossed streets more or less at random. However, he had to come across a police station sooner or later.

As he walked, he tried to deduce information about himself. He watched a tall man in a gray homburg hat light a cigarette and take a long, satisfying drag, but he had no desire for tobacco. He guessed he did not smoke. Looking at cars, he knew that the racy, low-slung designs he found attractive were new. He decided he liked fast cars, and he was sure he could drive. He also knew the make and model names of most of the cars he saw. That was the kind of information he had retained, along with how to speak English.

When he glimpsed his reflection in a shop window, what he saw was a bum of indeterminate years. But when he looked at passers-by, he could tell if they were in their twenties, thirties, or forties, or older. He also found he automatically classified people as older or younger than himself. Thinking about it, he realized that people in their twenties seemed younger than he, and people in their forties older; so he had to be somewhere in between.

These trifling victories over his amnesia gave him an inordinate sense of triumph.

But he had completely lost his way. He was on a tawdry street of cheap shops, he saw with distaste: clothing stores with windows full of bargains, used furniture stores, pawnbrokers, and grocery stores that took food stamps. He stopped suddenly and looked back, wondering what to do. Thirty yards behind him, he saw the man in an olive-colored gabardine raincoat and cap watching the TV in a store window.

Luke frowned, thinking, Is he shadowing me?

A shadow was always alone, rarely carried a briefcase or shopping bag, and inevitably appeared to be loitering, rather than walking with a set purpose. The man in the olive cap matched the specification.

It was easy enough to check.

Luke walked to the end of the block, crossed the street, and walked back along the other side. When he reached the far end he stood at the curb and looked both ways. The olive raincoat was thirty yards behind him. Luke crossed again. To allay suspicion, he studied doors, as if looking for a street number. He went all the way back to where he had started.

The raincoat followed.

Luke was mystified, but his heart leaped with hope. A man who was following him must know something about him—maybe even his identity.

To be sure he was being followed, he needed to travel in a vehicle, forcing his shadow to do the same.

Despite his excitement, a cool observer in the back of his mind was asking: How come you know exactly how to check whether you’re being followed? The method had popped into his head immediately. Had he done some kind of clandestine work before he became a bum?

He would think about that later. Now he needed bus fare. There was nothing in the pockets of his ragged clothes; he must have spent every last cent on booze. But that was no problem. There was cash everywhere: in people’s pockets, in stores, in taxicabs, and houses.

He began to look at his surroundings with different eyes. He saw
newsstands to be robbed, handbags that could be snatched, pockets ready to be picked. He glanced into a coffee shop where a man stood behind the counter and a waitress served the booths. The place would do as well as anything. He stepped inside.

His eyes raked the tables, looking for change left as tips, but it was not going to be that easy. He approached the counter. A radio was playing the news. “Rocket experts claim America has one last chance of catching up with the Russians in the race to control outer space.” The counterman was making espresso coffee, steam billowing from a gleaming machine, and a delicious fragrance made Luke’s nostrils flare.

What would a bum say? “Any stale doughnuts?” he asked.

“Get out of here,” the man said roughly. “And don’t come back.”

Luke contemplated leaping the counter and opening the cash register, but it seemed extreme when all he wanted was bus fare. Then he saw what he needed. Beside the till, within easy reach, was a can with a slit in the top. Its label showed a picture of a child and the legend “Remember Those Who Cannot See.” Luke moved so that his body shielded the box from the customers and the waitress. Now he just had to distract the counterman.

“Gimme a dime?” he said.

The man said, “Okay, that’s it, you get the bum’s rush.” He put down a jug with a clatter and wiped his hands on his apron. He had to duck under the counter to get out, and for a second he could not see Luke.

In that moment, Luke took the collection box and slipped it inside his coat. It was disappointingly light, but it gave a rattle, so it was not empty.

The counterman grabbed Luke by the collar and propelled him rapidly across the café. Luke did not resist until, at the door, the man gave him a painful kick in the ass. Forgetting his act, Luke spun round, ready to fight. The man suddenly looked scared and backed inside.

Luke asked himself what he had to be angry about. He had gone into the place begging, and had not left when asked to. Okay, the kick was unnecessary, but he deserved it—he had stolen the blind children’s money!

All the same, it took an effort for him to swallow his pride, turn around, and slink away like a dog with its tail between its legs.

He ducked into an alleyway, found a sharp stone, and attacked the can, venting his anger. He soon busted it open. The money inside, mostly pennies, amounted to two or three dollars, he guessed. He put it in his coat pocket and returned to the street. He thanked heaven for charity and made a silent promise to give three bucks to the blind if he ever got straight.

All right, he thought, thirty bucks.

The man in the olive raincoat was standing by a newsstand, reading a paper.

A bus pulled up a few yards away. Luke had no idea where it went, but that did not matter. He boarded. The driver gave him a hard look, but did not throw him off. “I want to go three stops,” Luke said.

“Don’t matter where you want to go, the fare is seventeen cents, unless you got a token.”

He paid with some of the change he had stolen.

Maybe he was not being shadowed. As he walked toward the back of the bus, he looked anxiously out the window. The man in the raincoat was walking away with his newspaper tucked under his arm. Luke frowned. The man should have been trying to hail a taxicab. Maybe he was not a shadow, after all. Luke felt disappointed.

The bus pulled away, and Luke took a seat.

He wondered again how come he knew about all this stuff. He must have been trained in clandestine work. But what for? Was he a cop? Perhaps it was to do with the war. He knew there had been a war. America had fought against the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. But he could not remember whether he had been in it.

At the third stop, he got off the bus with a handful of other passengers. He looked up and down the street. There were no taxicabs in sight, and no sign of the man in the olive raincoat. As he hesitated, he noticed that one of the passengers who had got off the bus with him had paused in a shop doorway and was fumbling in his pockets. As Luke watched, he lit a cigarette and took a long, satisfying drag.

He was a tall man, wearing a gray homburg hat.

Luke realized he had seen him before.