The Key to Midnight (26 page)

“Will you put your British contacts on the case again?”

“No. At least not by long distance. I’d prefer to deal with these Fielding Athison people myself.”

“Go to London? When?”

“As soon as possible. Tomorrow or the day after. I’ll take the train to Tokyo and fly from there.”

“We’ll
fly from there.”

“You might be safer here. I’ll bring in protection from the agency in Chicago.”

“You’re the only protection I can trust,” she said. “I’m going to London with you.”

Senator Thomas Chelgrin stood at a window in his second-floor study, watching the sparse traffic on the street below, waiting for the telephone to ring.

Monday night, December first, Washington, D.C., lay under a heavy blanket of cool, humid air. Occasionally people hurried from houses to parked cars or from cars to welcoming doorways, their shoulders hunched and heads tucked down and hands jammed in pockets. It wasn’t quite cold enough for snow. Weather reports called for icy rain before morning.

Though he was in a warm room, Chelgrin felt as cold as any of the scurrying pedestrians who from time to time passed below.

His chill arose from the cold hand of guilt on his heart, the same guilt that always touched him on the first day of every month.

During most of the year, when the upper house of the United States Congress was in session or when other government business waited to be done, the senator made his home in a twenty-five-room house on a tree-lined street in Georgetown. He lived in Illinois less than one month of every year.

Although he hadn’t remarried after the death of his wife, and although his only child had been kidnapped twelve years ago and had never been found, the enormous house was not too large for him. Tom Chelgrin wanted the best of everything, and he had the money to buy it all. His extensive collections, which ranged from rare coins to the finest antique Chippendale furniture, required a great deal of space. He was not driven merely by an investor’s or a collector’s passion; his need to acquire valuable and beautiful things was no less than an obsession. He had more than five thousand first editions of American novels and collec- tions of poetry—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Stephen Vincent Benet, Thoreau, Emerson, Dreiser, Henry James, Robert Frost. Hundreds of fine antique porcelains were displayed throughout his rooms, from the simplicity of Chinese pieces of the Han and Sung dynasties to elaborate Satsuma vases from Japan. His stamp collection was worth five million dollars. The walls of his house were hung with the world’s largest collection of paintings by Childe Harold. He collected Chinese tapestries and screens, antique Persian carpets, Paul Storr silver, Tiffany lamps, Dore bronzes, Chinese export porcelain, French marquetry furniture from the nineteenth century, and much more—in fact, so much that he owned a small warehouse to store the overflow.

He didn’t share the house only with inanimate objects. A butler, cook, two maids, and a chauffeur all lived in, and he entertained frequently. He didn’t like to be alone, because solitude gave him too much time to think about certain terrible decisions he had made over the years, certain dark roads taken.

The telephone rang. The back line, a number known only to two or three people.

Chelgrin rushed to his desk and snatched up the receiver. “Hello.”

“Senator, what a lovely night for it,” said Peterson.

“Miserable night,” Chelgrin disagreed.

“It’s going to rain,” Peterson said. “I like rain. It washes the world clean, and we need that now and then. It’s a damned dirty world we live in. Enough?”

Chelgrin hesitated.

“Looks clean to me,” said Peterson.

Chelgrin was studying the video display of an electronic device to which the phone was connected. It would reveal the presence of any tap on the line. “Okay,” Chelgrin said at last.

“Good. We’ve got this month’s report.”

Chelgrin could hear his own pounding heartbeat. “Where do you want to meet?”

“We haven’t used the market for a while.”

“When?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Of course you will, dear Tom,” Peterson said with amusement. “I know you wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“I’m not a dog on a leash,” Chelgrin said. “Don’t think you can jerk me around.”

“Dear Tom, don’t get yourself in a snit.”

Chelgrin hung up. His hands were shaking.

He went to the wet bar in one corner of the study and poured two ounces of scotch. He drank it in two long swallows, without benefit of ice or water.

“God help me,” he said softly.

Chelgrin had given the servants the day off, so he drove himself to the market in his dark-gray Cadillac. He could have driven any of three Rolls-Royces, a Mercedes sports coup, an Excalibur, or one of the other cars in his collection. He chose the Cadillac because it was the least conspicuous of the group.

He arrived at the rendezvous five minutes early. The supermarket was the cornerstone of a small shopping center, and even at eight o’clock on a blustery winter night, the place was busy. He parked at the end of a row of cars, sixty or seventy yards from the market entrance. After waiting a couple of minutes, he got out, locked the doors, and stood self-consciously near the rear bumper.

He turned up the collar of his gray Bally jacket, pulled down his leather cap, and kept his distinctive face away from the light. He was trying to appear casual, but he feared that he looked like a man playing at spies.

If he didn’t take precautions, however, he would be recognized. He wasn’t merely a United States Senator from Illinois: He aspired to the office of the presidency, and he spent a lot of hours in front of television cameras and in the poor company of obnoxious but powerful reporters, laying the foundation for a campaign in either two or six years, depending on the fate of the new man who’d won the White House just two years ago. (Considering the sanctimonious and self-righteous lecturing, the numerous episodes of undisguised political duplicity, and the incredible bungling that marked the new man’s first twenty-two months at the helm, Chelgrin was confident that his chance would come in two years rather than six.) If someone recognized him, the meeting with Peterson would have to be rescheduled for another night.

Two rows away, the lights of a Chevrolet snapped on, and the car pulled from its parking slip. It came down one aisle, around another, and stopped directly beside the senator’s Cadillac.

Chelgrin opened the front passenger door, bent down, and looked inside. He knew the driver from other nights—a short, stout fellow with a prim mouth and thick glasses—but he didn’t know his name. He had never asked. Now he got in and buckled his seat belt.

“Anybody on your tail?” the driver asked.

“If there were, I wouldn’t be here.”

“We’ll play it safe just the same.”

For ten minutes they traveled a maze of residential streets. The driver watched the rearview mirror as much as the road ahead.

Finally, when it was clear that they were not being followed, they went to a roadhouse seven miles from the supermarket. The place was called Smooth Joe’s, and on the roof it boasted a pair of ten-foot-tall neon cowboy dancers.

Business was good for so early in the week: sixty or seventy cars surrounded the building. One was a chocolate-brown Mercedes with Maryland plates, and the stout man pulled in beside it.

Without another word to the driver, Chelgrin got out of the Chevrolet. The night air was vibrating with a thunderous rendition of Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places.” He got quickly into the rear seat of the Mercedes, where Anson Peterson was waiting.

The instant the senator slammed the door, Peterson said, “Let’s roll, Harry.”

The driver was big, broad-shouldered, and totally bald. He held the steering wheel almost at arm’s length, and he drove well. They headed from the suburbs into the Virginia countryside.

The interior of the car smelled of butter-rum Life Savers. They were an addiction of Peterson’s.

“You’re looking very well, Tom.”

“And you.”

In fact, Anson Peterson did not look well at all. Although he was only five feet nine, he weighed considerably in excess of three hundred pounds. His suit pants strained to encompass his enormous thighs. The buttons on his shirt met, but he had no hope of buttoning his jacket. As always, he wore a hand-knotted bow tie—this time white polka dots on a field of deep blue, to match his blue suit—which emphasized the extraordinary circumference of his neck. His face was a great, round pudding paler than vanilla—but within it shone two tar-black eyes that were bright with a fierce intelligence.

Offering the roll of candy, Peterson said, “Would you like one?”

“No, thank you.”

Peterson took a circlet of butter-rum for himself and, with a girlish daintiness, popped it into his mouth. He carefully folded shut the end of the roll, as if it must be done just so to please a stern nanny, and put it in one of his jacket pockets. From another pocket he withdrew a clean white handkerchief; he shook it out and scrubbed vigorously at his fingertips.

In spite of his great size—or perhaps because of it—he was compulsively neat. His clothes were always immaculate, never a spot on shirt or tie. His hands were pink, the nails manicured and highly polished. He always looked as if he had just come from the barber: Not a hair was out of place on his round head. Occasionally Chelgrin had eaten dinner with the fat man, and Peterson had finished double servings without leaving a solitary crumb or drop of sauce on the tablecloth. The senator, hardly a sloppy man, always felt like a pig when, after dinner, he compared his place with Peterson’s absolutely virginal expanse of linen.

Now they cruised along wide streets with half-acre estates and large houses, heading out to hunt country. Their monthly meetings were always conducted on the move, because a car could be checked for electronic listening devices and stripped of them more easily than could a room in any building. Furthermore, a moving car with a well-trained and observant chauffeur was almost proof against an eavesdropping directional microphone focused on them from a distance.

Of course it wasn’t likely that Peterson would ever become the target of electronic surveillance. His cover as a successful real-estate entrepreneur was faultless. His secret work, done in addition to the real-estate dealing, was punishable by life imprisonment or even death if he were caught, so he was motivated to be methodical, circumspect, and security conscious.

As they sped toward the countryside, the fat man talked around his candy. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you engineered the election of this man in the White House. He seems to be determined to set himself up so precisely that you can knock him down with a single puff of breath.”

“I’m not here to talk politics,” Chelgrin said shortly. “May I see the report?”

“Dear Tom, since we must work together, we should try our best to be friendly. It really takes so little time to be sociable.”

“The report.”

Peterson sighed. “As you wish.”

Chelgrin held out one hand for the file folder.

Peterson made no move to give it to him. Instead, he said, “There’s nothing in writing this month. Just a spoken report.”

Chelgrin stared at him in disbelief. “That’s unacceptable.”

Peterson crunched what remained of his Life Saver and swallowed. When he spoke, he expelled butter-rum fumes. “That’s the way it is, I’m afraid.”

The senator strove to control his temper, for to lose it would be to give the fat man an advantage. “These reports are important to me, Anson. Very personal, very private.”

Peterson smiled. “You know perfectly well that they’re read by at least a dozen other people. Including me.”

“Yes, but then I always get to read them too. If you just summarize them instead ... then suddenly you become an interpreter. It’s not as private that way. I wouldn’t feel as close to her.”

Everything he knew about his daughter’s current activities was third-hand information. In twelve years not one spoken word had passed between him and Lisa; therefore, he jealously guarded these few minutes of reading, the first of every month.

“That day in Jamaica,” he said, “you promised I’d get written reports of her progress, her life. Always written. You hand it to me, I read it by a flashlight in a moving car, then I give it back to you, and you destroy it. That’s how it works. I haven’t agreed to any changes in the routine, and I never will.”

“Calm down, dear Tom.”

“Don’t call me that, you bastard.”

Peterson said, “I’ll take no offense. You’re distraught.”

They rode in silence until Chelgrin said, “Do you have photos?”

“Oh, yes. We have photos, as we do every month. Though these are exceptionally interesting.”

“Let me see them.”

“They need a bit of explanation.”

The senator’s mouth went dry. He closed his eyes. All anger had been chased out by fear. “Is she... is she hurt? Dead?”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that, Tom. If it was anything like that, I wouldn’t break the news this way. I’m not an insensitive man.”

Relief brought anger back with it. Chelgrin opened his eyes. “Then what the hell is this all about?”

As the driver slowed the Mercedes, turned left onto a narrow lane, and accelerated again, Peterson picked up his attaché case and put it on his lap. From it, he withdrew a white envelope of the type that usually contained photographs of Lisa.

Chelgrin reached for it.

Peterson wasn’t ready to relinquish the prize. As he undid the clasp and opened the flap, he said, “The report is spoken this time only because it’s too complex and important to be committed to paper. We have a crisis of sorts.”