The Glendower Legacy (18 page)

“What the hell do we do now? Knock?”

“Sure, knock,” Thorny gasped.

“What should I say if somebody answers?”

“Just knock for Chrissake! I’ll do the talking—”

But the sudden hammering produced no audible result.

Thorny picked the lock and eased the door open: he had no idea what he’d say if Polly came airily around the corner demanding to know what was going on. And he wasn’t at all sure he could control Ozzie, given his gigantic colleague’s present state of mind. Oh, to be clear and away and safe with nobody mad at them …

They stepped into the apartment’s vestibule, moved cautiously on into the sitting room. The music played, the lights cast a cheery, warm glow. Tiptoeing Thorny peered into the kitchen, then the bedroom, which was when he heard Ozzie’s strangled scream. Returning to the sitting room he found Ozzie squared off facing a cat which had reared up, back arched like a curved handle, on the back of a chair.

“I’m gonna kill this fuckin’ cat,” Ozzie moaned deep in his throat. “Little bastard scared me … I’m gonna wring its neck …”

“And the old man will wring yours, meathead!” He put his hand on Ozzie’s arm: “Forget the cat.” Ozzie yanked away.

“I wanna do some damage, goddamn it!” He still eyed the cat which had begun to stretch, ignoring the bandaged man as merely a large sputtering, harmless creature.

“Not here. Not anyplace.” Thorny spoke in gasps. “Use your head.”

Ozzie turned away from the cat and kicked viciously at the couch.

“The question is, where the hell are they?”

“And how did they get out …”

“Everybody’s disappearing,” Thorny said, heading for the kitchen where he took a glass from the cupboard and filled it with tap water. “Underhill’s secretary …” He sipped water, swallowed carefully, grimacing. “Now these two. And we’re still in the dark.” He sipped again. “Who’s left? We need a lead. You want a drink?”

“Shove your drink,” Ozzie said.

“Let’s go back to Cambridge,” Thorny said at last. With his handkerchief he wiped the glass clean, the cold water tap, and, as they left, the doorknobs.

At Kenmore Square Chandler nosed the brown car through the mist, straining to watch the traffic in the penumbra of his headlamps, blurring in the mist. Down Commonwealth to Arlington, then right with George Washington still on horseback, watching him. Around to Boylston, left on Charles Street, right up Beacon, irresistibly into Chestnut … The red Pinto was gone. The yellow glow still shone in the bay window of Polly’s apartment. The wipers beat past his gaze. The red Pinto was gone! He turned back onto Beacon Street, crested at the State House, cast a glance down toward Nat Underhill’s shop, and pointed into the perpetual traffic clog where School Street intersected Tremont. Past the Parker House with the doorman in breeches and tricornered hat sheltering beneath a black, glistening umbrella, he took a left and jogged through the area of pale, futuristic, massively antiseptic government buildings.

As always there was activity on Union Street and behind the glassed-in Faneuil Hall flower market. Crowds were heading toward Durgin Park and the Union Oyster House, swirling damply through Faneuil Hall and emerging with packages and paper cones full of bright bouquets. He stopped at the curb, waiting. He couldn’t see her and, of course, she wouldn’t recognize the car. Finally he got out, leaving the motor running and went inside among the flowers and ferns and trees.

“Hey, mister—over here.”

She was peering from among what seemed to be a pot full of swaying, dyed ostrich plumes. She winked as he stared.

“Get out of there,” he said. “This is no game—”

“But we must retain our senses of humor when those around us are losing theirs,” she said, taking his arm as they went back to the car. “What kind of car is this, anyway?” He held the door for her.

“Brown,” he said. “Hurry up.”

“Nora’s safe at the Parker House,” she offered as he pulled away.

“But not having any great deal of luck. The time is all wrong to be calling Europe. It’ll be better for her Monday … but she’s all right, settled in for the duration.”

“The red Pinto was gone. I just checked.”

They drove northwards in silence, pushing slowly through the seemingly endless trails of brightly lit restaurants, furniture stores, shopping centers, the Bunker Hill monument to the left, on and on through the steady drip of the rain and the smack of the wiper blades. Slowly, traffic began to thin out and the night began to grip them.

She took his arm. A peculiar sense of exhilaration overcame him, simultaneously, as if they were children: the funny, off-guard sort of moment when a sense of well-being and inevitable happiness swells, fills your chest. It had a good deal to do with her and something to do with the snug, warm interior of the brown car, and the sense of adventure which finally struck Chandler as lacking in danger. They were free of the men in the red Pinto. No one knew where they were going. The macguffin was waiting at the other end and, once they had established what was actually going on, things would just naturally sort themselves out. And he’d have the time to do something about this unusual creature holding his arm.

It was five o’clock on a Sunday morning when Maxim Petrov was wakened at his
dacha
outside Moscow. He was routed from bed by the ringing of the telephone; then he’d had to wait for Krasnovski to arrive with a briefing on the problem which was to Petrov’s way of thinking—at least in the beginnings of the day’s events—typically trivial, unclear, and desperately boring. Two hours later, he’d begun feeling as if he’d somehow stuck his foot in it, though he wasn’t quite sure how.

“If you’ll excuse my saying so, sir,” Krasnovski had said, crossing his legs and brushing nonexistent lint from his perfectly pressed slacks, “it’s your sense of humor that’s done it.” The word
again
was implied in his young associate’s tone of voice.

“Shut up, will you?” he said testily. The white kitchen reminded him of an operating room, modern and spotless with a bluish tinge to the light. “You sound like a wife—my wife. My sense of humor is all that keeps me sane. It may well be my best quality.” He watched impatiently as the last of the coffee dripped into the pot. Outside, much to his amazement, there seemed to be a swatch of lightness across the horizon where for weeks there had been only a dull, dark gray. A touch of spring was enough to pull him back from a severe slackness of mind, even a depression, at just such a time as this. He poured coffee and cream, added sugar, and motioned to Krasnovski to pour his own.

Pulling his heavy terrycloth robe tight around his lean, well-muscled body, he left the kitchen for the heated sun porch which presented the view of a broad field, still snow-covered, leading down to a gentle stream where in the summer, beneath the vast oaks, he sailed toy boats with his grandchildren. He was still watching the horizon when he heard Krasnovski padding up behind him. He wondered if this young man looked at him as he in his time had looked at Beria? With the yearning to break his neck? But, of course, that was ridiculous: Beria had had no sense of humor whatsoever.

“You are going to have to do something, you know.” Krasnovski sipped his coffee noisily.

“Don’t lecture me,” he said.

The younger man shrugged: “It’s a matter of mutual trust. We can’t have our people killing innocent civilians … It’s bad for Sanger’s people, it’s bad for us, and we certainly don’t want the police getting too curious. A wave of murders—”

“Two is not a wave,” Petrov said wearily. But there was no point in quibbling. “There’s no doubt that they’re our people?”

“None. They have no idea who they’re working for, that goes without saying—”

“Then don’t say it.”

“CANTAB hired them—”

Petrov glowered at his reflection in the window: “They couldn’t possibly be working for somebody else, too?”

“It doesn’t make any difference, does it? We’re getting the blame.”

“A point, I grant you.” He swallowed a shot of coffee and noticed that his hands were shaking when he replaced the cup in the saucer. He turned to Krasnovski, smiled: “It did start out as a joke, you know.”

“I know.”

“A joke on Sanger.” He made a wry face and moved slowly along the windowpane, poking a finger into the dry, dusty earth in the flowerpots. Everything was dead, crackled like flames licking at parchment. “And now we’re littering Boston with bodies. That’s the trouble with this business. You come up with a clever little idea, a joke even, and the incompetents in the field fail to grasp the subtleties, get their guns loaded and go running amok … Look at this plant, whatever the hell it was—you can’t even trust people to water your plants.” He held up a dusty finger. “Well, it’s a joke no more. We’ve got to keep them from killing anybody else. Get word to CANTAB and have him put the lid on these guys immediately. Did all this come to us through CANTAB?”

“I believe so. I was led to believe he was worried.” Krasnovski was bored by his superior’s houseplants, dead or alive.

“Did he suggest any plan of action?”

“I got the impression that he wouldn’t have objected too strenuously to a termination.”

“Bloodthirsty. First he hires them, then he wants to kill them …” He went back to the living room and put a Frank Sinatra recording on his Bang and Olufsen turntable. The room filled gently with the words of
In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.
“Has anyone ever mentioned the whereabouts of the document we’re in pursuit of? I don’t mean to harp … but there was a point to this unhappy exercise which ought not be entirely lost. Aside from my vaunted sense of humor, there was the question of a public relations coup which would not merely discomfit Arden Sanger but the United States as a whole—”

“If I may interrupt, sir—”

Petrov nodded. Sinatra’s melancholy flowed around him as the sun fully cleared the horizon. Drawn to the sunrise, he stood at the living room window to watch its cleanliness fall across the snowcrust.

“No one knows exactly where the document is, but apparently there’s a Harvard professor who may have it—indeed, CANTAB feels this man either has it or knows where it is—”

“Well, why not simply take it from him? Or follow him?”

“Because he seems to have disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” This was becoming increasingly troublesome: it had begun as such a lark.

“Disappeared. But not before badly beating up our two operatives—”

“A Harvard professor? What are you telling me?”

“He did them rather a lot of injury.”

“Incredible. Proves my point, though. Impossible to get decent help these days. In a way, it’s too bad he didn’t kill them …”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“But since they are still alive, I suppose the professor must be found. Does he have a name, Krasnovski?”

“I suppose he does, unless they’ve beaten us to the numbering system, sir.” Krasnovski bit off a short smirk.

“Do you know the man’s name?”

“We did not receive that information, sir.”

“Then, go, Krasnovski. Stop this killing and find the stupid bloody document, get the word to CANTAB. For the time being, we’ll sit tight and hope that Arden doesn’t get worked up.” He saw Krasnovski to the door. “Arden has an unfortunate tendency to believe everything out of the ordinary is a prelude to World War Three.”

While Chandler and Polly Bishop were heading northward from Boston through the rain, and while Maxim Petrov was being awakened at his
dacha
outside Moscow with the bad news, Arden Sanger, director of the CIA, was entertaining a few friends at his heavily guarded estate in Virginia, ten minutes by helicopter from his office at Langley. He also had two offices in Washington and a town house in Georgetown. He was a rich man. He’d been born that way, sixty-five years ago in Orange City, Iowa, the son of a man whose every touch seemed to produce money. Farming, insurance, land, mining, oil. It was all that money that had enabled young Arden to pursue a career as a lawyer who devoted himself to public service. Franklin Roosevelt spotted him in the late thirties, brought him to Washington, and that had pretty much settled Arden Sanger’s fate.

He’d always been an amiable young fellow, well over six feet tall, given to overweight which had been curbed by a football career at the University of Iowa where he’d been an All-American fullback in the years before Nile Kinnick eclipsed his fame. As he grew larger in the years after football, people kidded him about being a big, dumb football player, and when
The Male Animal
was turned into a movie it was widely believed that the character played by Jack Carson was based on the old All-American Arden Sanger. His striking resemblance to Jack Carson did little to quell the rumor but he was never particularly bothered by it. For all he knew or cared, the character
was
based on him. Big deal. Nile Kinnick and Jack Carson were both dead and Arden Sanger was head of the goddamned CIA.

All this personal history was in his mind because an attractive young woman, the daughter of an old friend, had been flattering him with her attention all evening. He rather enjoyed talking about himself; he was skilled at never saying anything that he shouldn’t concerning his professional life. All in all, it was a pleasant evening, sufficiently springlike to open the French door onto the broad flagstone patio with the pool and tennis courts beyond, the tree line beyond that, and the patrolled, electrified, and television-monitored fence beyond further still. It was, in fact, the sort of evening which found him forgetting for the moment just who and what he was. His guests had dined well and were conversing happily in his sunken party room as he and the pretty little blonde returned from a stroll around the tennis court.

“Let me tell you, Elise,” he said, watching her nibble at the rim of her champagne glass, “if I’d met someone like you forty years ago I’d never have turned into a bachelor.”

“Look at it this way,” she replied confidently, “as a bachelor you’ve been able to spend forty years playing the field. Very successfully, I’m sure.” She took his hand in hers in a gesture which just conceivably could have been interpreted as an invitation. His mind was flickering through the range of possible responses and consequences when he heard his aide, Dennis Herman, clearing his throat, touching his arm.