Walberg had the lugubrious face of a professional mourner. His cheeks and hands were covered with freckles; his thin ginger hair was carefully combed across the baldness of his scalp. He appeared more doleful than indignant. Soft as a Number One pencil, Lime thought.
“Mr. Lime, I’m Chaim Walberg, I’m the fa——”
“I know who you are, Mr. Walberg.”
“It’s kind of you to see me.”
“It wasn’t my choice.” Lime went around his desk, spun the chair, sat. “Specifically what do you want to ask me to do?”
Walberg inhaled deeply. If he’d had a hat he’d have been rotating it in his hands. “They won’t let me see my children.”
“I’m afraid they’re the Government’s children right now, Mr. Walberg. It’s a security matter.”
“Yes yes, I understand that. They don’t want people leaking messages to or from the prisoners. They told me that. As if they think I’m in league with anarchists and assassins. In the name of God, Mr. Lime—I swear.…”
Walberg stopped to compose himself. Now he summoned dignity. “There has been an error, Mr. Lime. My children are not——”
“Mr. Walberg, I haven’t the time to be your wailing wall.”
It stung Walberg. “I was told you are a cold man but people think you a fair one. Evidently that was not correct.”
Lime shook his head. “I’m only a faceless assistant to an assistant, Mr. Walberg. They shunted you onto me to get you out of their hair. There’s nothing I can do for you. My job consists mainly of making out reports on the reports other people have made out. I’m not a cop, I’m not a prosecutor, I’m not a judge.”
“You are the man who arrested my children, aren’t you?”
“I’m responsible for the arrests, if that’s what you wanted to hear.”
“Then you can tell me why.”
“You mean why I singled out your son and daughter?”
“Yes. What made you believe they were guilty of anything? Were they running? Because my children have had misunderstandings with officers, they’re afraid of the police—you know how the young people are. But to run away from a uniform and a gun—is this proof that——?”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Mr. Walberg, but I’m not at liberty to divulge the Government’s case. You’d have to see the Attorney General, but I doubt he’d tell you very much. I’m sorry.”
“Are you old enough, Mr. Lime, to remember the days when you could tell good from evil?”
“I’m afraid I’m very busy, Mr. Walberg.” Sorry, the number you have dialed is not a working number. Lime walked to the door and held it open.
Walberg stood. “I’m going to fight for them.”
“Yes. I think you should.”
“Where has morality gone, Mr. Lime?”
“We still eat meat, don’t we.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Walberg.”
When Walberg was gone Lime emptied his In box. Intermittently for a half hour or so he thought of Walberg’s stupefying naiveté: the twins had posted plenty of storm warnings, they hadn’t rotted overnight, but the handwriting on the wall was always a message for someone else. Not my children.
Lime’s son was eight years old this month, an Aquarius, and it was vaguely possible to hope Bill would be allowed to reach maturity alive and without finding it necessary to explode buildings and people. Until two years ago Lime had enjoyed fantasies about the things he would do with his son as he grew up; then there had been a point to it but now the boy lived in Denver with Anne and her new husband and Lime’s visiting privileges were severely curtailed not only by court order but also by the distance to Denver.
He had been out just before Christmas. On the airplane he had dozed with his head against the window and at the airport the three of them had met him—Bill and Anne and the fool Dundee who hadn’t known better than to tag along: a thin hearty Westerner who told the same jokes time and time again and manipulated fortunes in shale oil leases and evidently didn’t trust Anne out of his sight with her ex. An awkward weekend, Anne forever smoothing down her skirt and avoiding everyone’s eyes, Dundee bombastically fathering Bill and calling him “Shorty,” both of them covertly eyeing Lime to make sure he was getting the point—that they had established a “real home here for the boy,” that “He’s much better now, David, with a full-time father.”
Bill surrounded by ten thousand acres of grass and a herd of real cowponies had been singularly unimpressed by the toys Lime had bought at the last minute on his way to the airport. Last summer he had taken Bill camping and there had been rapport of a kind but this time in ankle-deep snow there was no place to take the boy except for an afternoon’s ice skating and a Disney movie on East Colfax.
Sunday night at the airport he had pressed his cheek to the child’s and rocked his head so that his whiskers scraped Bill; the boy had squirmed away and Anne’s eyes had been filled with a glacial rebuke. She had presented her cheek for his ritual kiss with Dundee standing by, watching; she had smelled of cold cream and shampoo; and whispered savagely in his ear, “Keep it up, David, keep it up.”
He was an unpleasant complication, she wanted him to stay away, but she wouldn’t send the boy to him—Lime had to come to her if he wanted to see Bill. It was a way of keeping him on her leash. She was a possessive woman.
She had been a tall girl with cool hazel eyes and straight blonde hair, more comfortable than challenging; they had got married because there hadn’t seemed any overpowering reason not to. But it had quickly got so each of them was bored with knowing what the other was going to say before he said it. In time that became the trouble with their marriage: they never talked about anything at all.
It became too much for both of them and finally she had walked out, walking heavily on her heels, leading the boy by the hand.
They had lived in one of those towns the existence of which was defined in terms of how many miles it was from Alexandria. He had kept the house six months and then moved to the city, a two-room walk-up.
Now the Executive Office Building was emptying and he did not want to return to the two-room walk-up. There was always Bev. But he went to the bar of the Army-Navy Club.
A vodka martini, very dry. Once, he had found comfort in bars, dim impersonal chambers where football and old movies provided conversational sustenance.
Lime had developed a passion for old movies: he could name character actors who had been dead for twenty years and all you needed was one fellow film buff to kill an evening with enjoyable trivia. “Eugene Pallette in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” “No that was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” “I thought that was Claude Rains.” “It was. They were both in that one.” Remember the beautiful cloaked melodrama of Mask of Dimitrios, Greenstreet and Lorre and was Claude Rains in that one too? He was in Casablanca with them but was he in Dimitrios? I don’t know but it’s running on one of the UHF late shows next week, I saw it in TV Guide.…
A slough of boredom. Halfhearted anger toward the rutting man and woman who had accidentally given him his ticket into the world. Too young, during the war, for anything but Dave Dawson novels and radio melodramas and sandlot baseball and junior rifleman badges. Too old, afterward, to join the concerned generation: Lime had graduated from college without ever asking his roommate’s politics.
He had known too many bars. They had become too familiar. He left the club.
In the Fifties the Cold War had seemed real and he had enjoyed matching himself aganst the best the other side had to offer. Are you old enough, Mr. Lime, to remember the days when you could tell good from evil?
In those days American Intelligence was an infant modeled on the British system and things went on in a peculiarly arcane British fashion, as if nuclear superpowers could be treated in the same way as internecine Balkan intrigues of the Twenties. But gradually cynicism set in. Courage became suspect. It was fashionable to plead cowardice. If you chose to face danger for sheer thrill you were singled out as a case of masochistic guilt. No one was supposed to look for risks. Bravery became contemptible: if you did something dangerous you were expected to say you did it for the money or for a cause. Not because you liked it. To prove you were normal you had to boast you were chicken. They had effectively outlawed courage. Crime, and driving cars recklessly, had become just about the only outlets left.