Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (3 page)

That was fun
,
he thought as he regained his composure, smoothed his shirt and tie, and arranged the trousers and jacket of the smart suit he had bought from the hotel tailor in Hong Kong. Though his adrenaline was racing, he unfolded the newspaper and willed himself calm. He memorized the headlines above one or two columns. Then he opened to page three and settled on a story about oil ministers meeting in conclave at that seven-star hotel in Dubai. What was it called? He'd been there. He should know. The Burj Al Arab! Well, that hadn't taken him too long to summon up. Perhaps he was in better condition than he thought. The hotel flew over the Arabian Gulf like a huge sail of glass and steel, and he remembered with pleasure the underwater seafood restaurant that could be accessed only by a simulated submarine.

To his left a shadow was approaching. The windows were tinted—not quite Mafia black from the outside, but darkened to a shade that made it difficult for passersby to peer through. Finally the trooper appeared at the driver's window. He waited for a second, then rapped the glass with his knuckles.

“Yes,” Billy said.

When the driver's window failed to retract, the officer eased open the door, stepping back behind it as it swung out. This must have been standard operating procedure, Billy decided; nevertheless, it looked pretty silly. Hadn't the cop noticed that the door was already unlatched?

“Where's the driver of this car?” the trooper demanded, firmly but without belligerence. As Billy expected, he was a young man. It was probably the first Bentley he'd ever seen, much less pulled over. So he had to be credited with a certain degree of nerve. Still, in his soft features Billy saw not just the short horizons of the trooper's life but their consequences.

He put down the paper, looked up, and smiled. “How the hell should I know? You pulled us over. He panicked and ran off. This was only his second day on the job.”

The cop looked at him sharply but without the incredulity Billy had feared. Billy returned his gaze—old man to young, rich man to wage earner. One of the factors that had decided him upon the Continental Flying Spur was that both driving and being driven in it felt appropriate. He hadn't expected to test that proposition so soon. “Sir,” the cop said, “in that case you are going to have to drive this car home.”

“I'm sorry, Officer, but that's just not possible,” Billy explained, seeming to take the patrolman into his confidence. It wasn't a fact that Billy had ever spoken out loud, but he prided himself on his disingenuousness, his talent for disguising his true feelings. He could put an arm around another's shoulder, draw him—or her—into his most intimate confidence, establish the deepest bond on the spur of a moment, while behind this endearing mask he himself felt only contempt. It was part of who he was; he understood that, just as he understood how to tune it out when necessary. “You see,” he added with a wink, “I've just come from lunch, where I had one or two adult beverages, shall we say, with a friend of the opposite gender. I don't know what the limit is, only that it's lower than it was when I was your age, a hundred years ago, and that I'm probably over it. It's one reason I employ a driver.”

The cop hesitated. “What's your name?” he asked at last.

“Claussen. Wilhelm Claussen.”

“Say that again.”

Billy did.

“You're
the
Wilhelm Claussen, as in Claussen Field House?” So the boy had been at State.

“Don't look so surprised. What was your sport?”

“Football, sir.”

“My favorite. Always wished I'd been better at it.”

“I don't know,” the cop said, as much to himself as to Billy. “Just a minute—please.” He did a hesitant pivot, returned to his car. Billy sat still, making his patience obvious. He suspected it wouldn't be too long before a second patrol car dropped off another trooper and the two of them together would be back alongside the Bentley. That's what he would have done in the rookie's position.

Soon enough they were there. “This is Trooper Larrabee,” the first cop explained, introducing a tall recruit close to his own age. “With your permission he will take the wheel and drive you home. How far would that be?”

“Not far at all.”

“I didn't think it would be—very far, that is. This is certainly the neighborhood.”

“Are you sure?” Billy asked. “It's most kind of you, but I don't want to get you into any trouble.”

“Your driver, though. How long has he been with you?”

Billy smiled. “Two days, as I said. Johnny was brand new on the job.”

“Johnny?”

“My chauffeur—that's ‘chauffeur' with a very small
c,
I'm afraid. Anyway, I doubt he'll show his face around here for some time, if ever.”

“And yet you trusted him to drive a car like this?”

“He had good reflexes.”

“He must have,” the trooper said. “But, if he should turn up—”

“I'll call you, of course. Right after I fire him.”

“You beat me to it.”

“I can't tell you how much I appreciate your help, Officer—”

“Darnall.” the trooper replied. He pointed to the neat metal nameplate pinned above his shirt pocket.

It was too far away for Billy to read. “Officer Darnall,” he repeated slowly, in order to give the impression that he was storing the name in his memory. “I'm most grateful to you.”

Even through the blur of alcohol, Billy could see that the policeman's eyes were wide. The driveway that sloped and curved upward toward his house was paved with brick squares, each bordered by Bermuda grass. After spring, roses grew along the outside wall. At one point, just before the Tudor mansion came into view, a canopy awaiting them arched over the road on a high trellis. Billy's father had bought the house for him when Billy had just turned twenty-one and become engaged—to Maggie, the first of his three expensive, now-withering wives. That had been a clever piece of generosity: the old man's means of keeping the young buck close to home. If Billy had been smarter about things, he might have done something of the sort for his own son, Luke. But Luke showed no sign of settling down or assuming responsibility. How had he put it the last time they'd spoken by phone? He'd “always
love
but didn't really
like
” Kansas City. Something like that!

Reputation had two sides. The advantageous one had just been demonstrated by the ease with which Wilhelm Claussen had had his story accepted and so wiggled out of a charge of driving while intoxicated. The disadvantageous side was that it made you an easy mark. Luke, who had good looks and a mind that was far better than average, if undisciplined and frequently too curious, had not seen through most of the friends, especially the girlfriends, he'd attracted. Their alloyed motives would have been plain as day to Billy, and certainly to his own father, but they remained invisible to the innocent Luke. There was no use denying it. Luke was not going to cut it in this world—not in any way that Billy understood or valued. Luke was a wanderer. He would become a hundred different people in his life, but none fully. Right now he was probably still in Palm Beach, playing with other trust-fund boys from the Midwest, striving without any prayer of success to emulate the easy, guiltlessly dissolute style of Eurotrash. There was nothing Billy could do. Luke was his mother's son. She had always forgiven his bad habits and, by forgiving, encouraged them. She was not much better herself. She would have taken Billy's house, the house his father gave him, but for slipping up with his friend Jack Andrews and getting caught in the act. What the hell, she'd been a prize in the sack in her day. Billy never looked back for very long, always forward. And she had bequeathed Luke those high cheekbones of hers. They might help him in some unpredictable way one of these days.

Billy looked at the two young police officers one last time, even considered asking them inside before quickly deciding against doing so. He had made his sale. It was time to walk away.
Officers Darnall and Larrabee,
he thought,
if only you knew how fervently I wish my son had something of you in him.
Then he waved them good-bye, found his key, and turned it in the front door's lock.

Chapter Two

“Riley,” he called, then
quickly remembered that he had given his houseman the day off.

He hurried toward the staircase, whose banisters, like the lintels above every door, had been festooned with swags of fragrant pine and holly, then through the shadowy reception hall, in which could be heard only the measured swing of his grandfather clock's pendulum, and finally down the corridor to his library. There was mail on his desk, but he ignored it on his way to the bathroom tucked beyond the final of three alcoves of yew bookcases. As he relieved himself, his eye examined the photographs that lined the walls. It was a tiny cube of a room, but there must have been two dozen: Uncle Jimmy with Jubelea in the winner's circle at Churchill Downs; the house he'd grown up in, not half a mile from here, dripping with afternoon sunlight in the spring before it burned down—his mother's azaleas were in bloom; his frat brothers posed impishly on the eve of graduation—and Vietnam; most amusing of all, a black-and-white glossy of his father and several of his father's friends at a finca in Cuba taken sometime in the fifties. Twelve gentlemen, members of an exclusive fishing club on their annual expedition to tropical seas, stood in white dinner jackets and black tie on an esplanade. These men, who had once looked old to his eyes, now looked half a generation younger than him. The finca's “staff,” all of them stunning girls in their early twenties, stood behind and to each side of the fishermen. Their smiles were open to interpretation.

One thing was for sure, he thought: It had been a better world, easier, more fun. Maybe Luke was right after all, to go where impulse and testosterone led him.

Billy looked in the mirror as he washed his hands. By God, he was showing his age! His hair, which had begun to gray at thirty-nine, he and his barber had at once done something about. His skin was another matter. There were crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes. His brow had creased and the folds above his lip sunk, extending toward his chin. The skin itself appeared older, thinner, here and there traced with blue, almost translucent. The sharpness of his features, which had made him such a confident young man, had been all but erased beneath the deposit of years. So what? He detested complainers and had no intention of turning into one.

Drying his hands, he glanced again at the finca—in particular into his father's eyes. Billy missed his father. Even as he prized the freedom he had inherited along with his father's shares and other worldly goods, he wished the old man had stayed around longer. The company he'd founded had grown thirtyfold over his son's tenure as chief executive. The perks of such a position had also become more polished. If not the Continental Flying Spur, which Adolph Claussen would have found too flashy, Billy would like to have shown his father the fleet of company jets in their own hangar at KCI. The hangar was meticulously kept, and the planes saved thousands of hours of employee time traveling to and from Claussen sites across the world.

Before sitting down to his desk, he looked out from the window behind it at the long, formal garden Maggie had planted. Terraced into the hillside, it was fallow now, but he had no difficulty imagining it in bloom. It was from just above the far tree line—although, seen from the other direction, the house he'd been born in—that a tornado had swept in when he was nine years old. He had never been more frightened; his heart had never beaten more rapidly. But even as he'd sprinted all those yards for shelter, a part of him had savored the idea of havoc, as if whatever was destroyed might be put back together again, improved.

On shelves on the opposite wall, his parents' collection of Hehe Boys, Chinese figurines, were arranged exactly as they had been in the gallery of the old house. He was not fond of them as works of art, never had been. Yet as evocations of another time—an era with its comfortable certitudes in place—they possessed for Billy a value beyond price. For a delicious moment, he looked around his library, a room none of his wives, no one but he, had ever touched. It was perfect, a chrysalis of his past.

There was not much in the day's mail to warrant his attention: a monthly newsletter from his New York club, a statement from one of the three personal checking accounts with which he paid for periodic indiscretions and which for that reason he always balanced himself. In the last month, sadly, there had been no such indiscretions, so he placed the red-and-white envelope in a drawer.

As he closed the drawer, the carillon of the hall clock chimed the quarter hour, eight smoothly ascending and then descending notes to which he'd been so accustomed since childhood that they now hardly registered. But it was the sound that came next and was at once followed by an absence of sound that alarmed him: a sharp creaking of the floor above, then quick skidding that ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Billy drew his breath and stood, attuned to the silence of his house. Moving toward the library door, he kept his steps light until he had positioned his right hand over the alarm button disguised in the intricate Greek-key molding.

“Hello,” he called out, then waited in vain for an answer. “Hello,” he called again. “Who's there?”

No answer came back.

“Riley!” he shouted again, wondering if he might have mistaken his employee's day off. He let go of the library-door alarm, fixing his sights on the wainscoting just inside the front door. On the left, beneath its uppermost molding, there was another button, and Billy moved toward it rapidly, as though it were the next base in a dangerous game of tag. At the foot of the staircase, he managed to flick both light switches with a single stroke, at once illuminating not only the clear-and-russet crystal chandelier that hung suspended on a velvet-wrapped chain in the oval stairwell but the second-floor gallery. Yet the light revealed nothing out of the ordinary, no clue as to what he'd heard, and so, as it continued, the stillness grew ever more unsettling. Again he drew a long breath but this time held it, counting as he struggled to hear inside the silence.
Eight, nine, ten,
he told himself.
Eleven
—oh, what the hell, it was no use. As he exhaled, a high-pitched wail issued from over his shoulder. He spun immediately and saw his five-year-old grandson, Stuart, mounting the mahogany banister at its summit, laughing, ready to slide.

“Don't do that,” Billy told him. “You'll wreck the garland.”

“I'll put it back,” Stuart pleaded.

“No you won't. It's not that easy. It took them hours to install, to get it just right.”

Stuart hesitated.

“Come down here,” Billy said. “Let me have a look at you, young man. You've grown again, haven't you?”

“Yes,” Stuart said as he jumped from the railing, then raced noisily down the uncarpeted stairs.

Billy hugged him, kept his hands on the boy's shoulders as they separated as if to study him anew. It had never occurred to him that he would have a black grandchild—but then why shouldn't it have? he mused. In her choice of a husband, as in just about every aspect of her life, his daughter, Cynthia, had broken with convention. “Where are your mother and sister?” Billy inquired. “I didn't know you were here.”

“We came early,” Stuart said.

“And you didn't hear me come in?”

“No way! We were watching a video.”

“What were you watching?”

“I don't know. One Emily wanted.”

“I see,” Billy said.

“She has a crush on the guy who's in it.”

“How do you know?”

“She told her friends. I heard her. Do you know Ty Hunter?”

“Not personally. I know who you mean, though.”

“He's the one.”

“He's a bit old for her, don't you think?”

“He's very old,” Stuart agreed.

“I mean, he must be thirty, or even in his early thirties by now,” Billy said, intending his sarcasm for his own ears only.

“Yeah, probably,” Stuart said. “Anyway, Emily used to have his picture on her wall.”

“Did she? When he was just starting out?”

“I guess.”

“Now that you mention it, I think I do remember that.” Actors as a rule were a group of which he took little notice. But only a few years earlier, the bank on whose board he sat and for which he'd reluctantly agreed to do that ad had considered using Ty Hunter in a campaign for its Captiva
credit card. While the board had dithered, Hunter's career had taken off, and the new movie star's agent and manager had nixed any projects other than feature films. Which was a shame, Billy had always felt, because no matter how much they reminded him of carnival people, matinee idols were one step ahead of card issuers, having captured the hearts and loyalties of their customers well before they were of age to spend money or borrow with discretion. Since he'd been on the bank's board, Captiva had sent out millions of “preapproved” letters to college freshmen and the first-time employed. If such communications had come from a familiar performer rather than an impersonal financial institution, he suspected they might have yielded dramatically higher success rates.

Still, now that he recalled it, he remembered that something about that poster had stopped him in his tracks, as if the young movie star, with his fetching smile, his hair the color of butter and eyes the blue of Windex, might be more than an innocent object of affection—indeed, might be likely to infect his granddaughter with unrealistic dreams.

“Look, Stuart, do me a favor, will you?” Billy asked. “Tell Cynthia and Emily I'm home.”

“Sure,” Stuart said, and scrambled enthusiastically for the stairs.

“Where are we going?” Emily inquired a few minutes later, examining her fingernails as she hugged her grandfather. She had painted them chartreuse two days before, and the enamel was beginning to crack.

“The club,” Billy said.

“Can't we go to Paolo's instead?”

“I thought you liked the club.”

“I do, but Paolo's has the best music—and the cutest waiters.”

“Only in the summer,” Billy said. “Their patio's closed this time of year. You know that. And right now the guys who work out there are either in school or in Florida perfecting their tans.”
And getting laid,
he thought, although he did not say so.

“Never mind,” Cynthia said. “I've had a wicked week. For that matter, I'm sure your grandfather has as well. We'd like to have a drink and some decent food and conversation, in peace and quiet.”

“I'll take your word for it,” Emily said.

“Enough,” Billy said, but quickly thought better of it and decided to relax. He did not want their holiday to dissolve into argument or sullenness. “Let me ask you a question, Emily,” he continued. “Suppose we go to Paolo's another night.”

“
Not
on Christmas.”

“Of course not on Christmas. On Christmas we'll be here. When does your father get in, by the way?”

“Christmas Eve, I think,” Emily replied, searching her mother's face for affirmation.

Cynthia nodded.

“How about the day after Christmas?” Billy suggested, smiling reluctantly. Only yesterday she had been a little girl, uncritical, adoring. How could he help resenting the displacement of her affection to someone else, someone younger, an object of fantasies that were not platonic? Time was passing more quickly than he'd expected, that was all. And Emily, as had her mother so many years before, was simply going through another stage. There was nothing anyone could do but grin and see her through it, as they'd seen her through her recent difficulties at school, in French and science classes. A girl's sexual awakening was no easier to manage than a boy's, he supposed, especially one as pretty as Emily promised to become.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she said.

“Then that's settled,” Billy proclaimed, wondering, as he invariably did—as he couldn't help but do—how genes could contrive to make siblings so different: one male, a future fullback and black, the other female, with a dancer's delicate bones and the pinkest cheeks he'd ever seen.

At seven o'clock, after baths, they gathered in the living room before a fire.

“Would you like a drink?” Billy asked.

“In fact, I think I would,” Cynthia said. “The usual.”

He went to the bar built into a nook opposite the large bay windows, and made two Rob Roys, mixing the Johnnie Walker Black, red Lillet, and Angostura bitters with an apothecary's precision. When he had finished and poured the liquor and crushed ice into sterling-silver Jefferson cups, he felt Cynthia beside him, her cheek fleetingly against his shoulder. Was this an apology for her mood or an expression of her exhaustion? As usual, Billy could not be sure.

“Have you done much hunting this year, darling?” he asked finally.

“I always do, don't I?” Cynthia replied, taking the cocktail from him. A taste for Rob Roys was something she had inherited from him. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, all season, whenever I can. What's the point of living where I do and not?”

Billy nodded. Horses—the entire equestrian life—bored him, but foxhunting filled him with fear. He knew better than to say it out loud in his daughter's presence, but he was pleased that Stuart showed signs of sharing his disinterest and hoped that Emily, suddenly faced with the distractions of adolescence, might herself be growing less keen. There was a reason they called it “breakneck” speed, and he could think of no other sport in which experience so increased the risk of injury, even paralysis. Years in the hunting field seemed to embolden people, causing them to forget that it was not only their skill at play but also the simpleton brain of a fast and heavy animal in whose custody they had placed their lives. “None, I expect,” he told her, not quite mastering a laugh and raising his glass slightly before sipping from it.

“Always have and always will.” She took his hand, squeezed it, then let it go. Billy was still imagining his daughter on horseback. He couldn't help it. Fear had seized him, as occasionally it was apt to. What would he do if she fell? How would her high-powered lawyer husband manage the children without her? If she were to die, would his next wife, who would no doubt be younger, like them or even want them around? Why, for heaven's sake, didn't Cynthia sense the risk as acutely as he did? Why didn't she concentrate her energy on one of her other loves, such as gardening or yoga or paddle tennis?