The Glendower Legacy (24 page)

“Well, there were all kinds of plots and dirty tricks—they weren’t invented by Nixon, you may be sure—back then. I mean, you wouldn’t believe some of them … everybody had a plot, in Paris, in London, in Philadelphia, in Boston, in New York, on the goddamned high seas … King George got a crazy letter to Franklin in Paris, for example, told him to go to the choir at Notre Dame on July sixth, a Monday it was, and meet a man who would be drawing pictures on a pad and wearing a rose in the buttonhole of his waistcoat … Franklin was requested to come in person … well, he never went, the little man was seen to come, wait, and go … and nobody could ever prove he was from the king, this little man, Jennings was his name. Maybe nobody cared, there were so damned many plots …”

The brown car was back on the road, nosing through the beginnings of a fog blowing in off the Atlantic. The cold clean smell filled the car. He pushed back against the seat, straightening his arms against the steering wheel, feeling it bow slightly. He was seeing things the right way now, it was all making sense … thank God, he had to have his head on straight for Prosser, Bert could be a son of a bitch if you didn’t have your head on straight, no matter what you’d been through. He’d probably learned that from all those presidents he’d told what to do at times of crisis … Truman, Ike, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford … Well, Chandler was ready.

Polly sat next to him still fingering the package, trying to sort out its real value in her mind.

“I suppose every large man would have looked like Washington to Davis after his experience in the woods, once he’d seen the signature … And how are we going to figure it out now?”

“That’s the trick this magician can’t do,” Chandler sighed.

“You mean, what it may come down to is—you either believe the signature is a forgery or you don’t … is that what you’re saying?”

“Maybe. Unless Prosser can come up with something.”

“So, we’ve got a thing people are getting killed over but, one it doesn’t really prove anything, and, two it doesn’t really mean anything …”

“Well, it means something to somebody,” Chandler said.

“It’s a macguffin,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said.

“I’m going to take a nap,” she said. “It makes my brain tired.”

“You wanted to come along.”

She slid across the seat toward him and curled up against him, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Does this bother you?” she murmured.

“Not at all. I could get used to it.”

Thorny woke with a groggy, moist feeling as if he’d been on fire and someone had doused him with a pail of water. He opened his eyes slowly, stared at the beige ceiling, the gray clouds over the bus and subway terminal next door, heard the grinding and clanging as an MTA car struggled up the incline and into daylight like a gargantuan, mechanical, clockwork mole. A bottle which had once contained a quart of indifferent gin lay empty on the nightstand, pointing its accusing neck at him like the barrel of a cannon. His head ached unbearably. There was nothing quite like a gin headache. And then he remembered about Ozzie, got a flash, an afterimage, of the huge body, open-mouthed with the gold tooth glittering, going down without a whimper, lying there looking like a blood-stained raincoat ready for the dry cleaners.

Thorny took a certain pride in his insensitivity to death. Mostly, his involvement with death had centered on inflicting it. He’d inflicted it for the mob in Chicago as a boy, then for the mob in San Diego and New Orleans, then as a free lance in Texas and Mexico and Nicaragua and Paraguay, then some contracts for people he didn’t know and had no desire to identify. A man built a career, made something of his life, protected his reputation, and he was bound to get good referrals. That’s what this whole Boston thing had been, a referral to this old man. And now Ozzie was dead: fucking Harvard professors! He still had trouble getting his breath from the first one, and he was on his own as a result of dealing with the second one … Shit. He’d known Ozzie for better than ten years and they’d worked together ever since 1970: not too heavy on the brains, Ozzie wasn’t, but a good piece of muscle, good to have on your side in a fight. Or he had been up until the last fight.

Yes, he was insensitive when it came to inflicting death here and there in the name of duty, but Ozzie’s death had upset him. Oz may have been cracking up, but that could happen to anyone. He sighed. They were the same age—forty-four—and it made Thornhill realize just how fragile a thing life was, or could be, once somebody was sufficiently pissed off.

Oz had been pissed off, particularly about the burns and pain Chandler had given him in such full measure, and as a result, Oz, who was not too awfully high on the evolutionary ladder though he was one hell of a diligent worker, would have been glad to kill Brennan once he’d gotten all the fingernails extracted. It was like therapy for Oz, like basket weaving or needlepoint, the business of removing fingernails. It was easy for the old man to sit back and blow a fuse about things getting out of hand, but you had to be in the field, you had to be getting your nose rubbed in it to know what the hell was going on …

Thornhill recognized the trouble spots in his own personality and he knew he was facing one of the worst. The more he thought about what Chandler and Brennan had done to Ozzie and him, the more he began to shake with anger, quite an irrational anger: or was it irrational, really? The victims had risen up, struck back at the predators, and in Thorny’s experience that was unheard of when you were dealing with civilians. Soldiers in another army were expected to fight back, but civilians were expected to crack with a tap, like delicate translucent eggshells found in a robin’s nest.

So what the fuck was going on with Brennan and Chandler?

Maybe Brennan was dead, he didn’t really know. He’d left too damned fast to check on the state of Brennan’s health. He couldn’t quite understand why he’d been so frightened, but there, out of nowhere, had come the gory spectre of Brennan who should have been passed out cold in the other room … swinging the club and grunting with blood flying and that wet, solid sound from inside Ozzie’s head … he hadn’t had such a fright since he’d seen
Psycho
and the old lady with the butcher knife had run out on the stairway landing.

With the image of Brennan killing Oz corroding his brain, Thornhill got out of bed and staggered, head splitting, into the bathroom. Half an hour later he had eaten a breakfast of doughnuts and coffee in the glass-enclosed lobby and gotten the red Pinto filled at the gas station across the street. He also picked up a road map of New England and plotted the course northward to Kennebunkport.

Impatiently he fought it out with Sunday’s family, pleasure-driving traffic. Interminably he pushed at the bonds of the Boston area, but it was useless to try to force the issue. It took just so long to get free of Boston and that was that. The turnpike signs confused him. Natives honked angrily as he switched lanes. He wondered if the old man had gone to Brennan’s house: he wondered if anyone had even found the human refuse … he wondered how many fingerprints he’d left scattered around the apartment.

He was having a very bad day. He tugged the black-and-white checked porkpie hat down tight on his head and swore at the Pinto’s lack of acceleration. It was a rotten day and somebody would have to pay. The anger and frustration kept building and he finally gave up trying to cope with it. Fuck the old man. Fuck Brennan and that goddamn Chandler and the TV bitch … Arnold Thornhill had had enough.

He was back to being a competent killing machine by the time he got to Kennebunkport and asked at the Rexall drugstore where the Seafoam Inn might be.

“Well, he wasn’t kidding when he said we couldn’t miss it.” Polly was watching as he negotiated the turn off the highway into Prosser’s driveway which rose steadily toward a huge shape, a mansion that seemed to glower down on them from the top of the hill as the light faded behind the blackish clouds on the western horizon. They had slid through Johnston, a village with not more than ten standing structures, just as the grocery store connected with the filling station was being locked up. Polly had managed to buy a few scraps for dinner and Chandler had gassed the car. Then in the growing gloom they had passed on through and seen Prosser’s summer home in its remote baronial splendor.

The headlights cut through the darkness and it became clear that the house was built mainly of immense gray stones with a slate roof, a dark-green wooden turret with a pointed steeple at the right, and a similarly colored wing spreading off to the left. He drove the car under a mammoth stone portcullis and stopped. Wide stone steps led up to the entryway. Chimneys protruded from the roof at irregular intervals, like fingers thrust out of a grate, stretching for freedom. Orson Welles as Harry Lime, at the end of
The Third Man,
about to die.

Chandler got out and hurriedly jogged alongside the house in the glare of the headlights, toward the woodpile by the shed Prosser had described. On his knees he ran his hand under the bottom row of logs, touched something that moved, a spider, and found the keys. Breathing hard he ran back to the car, dangling the keys before him. He grabbed the bags from the back seat while Polly took the groceries and, dropping the key only once, swung the heavy oak door open.

“Colder in here than outside,” Polly said, sniffling. The front hall was stuffy, smelled of being locked up for the winter, and Chandler saw Polly’s breath as she spoke. He tried the switch and the hallway was dimly illuminated by a gray light.
“Seven Keys to Baldpate,”
she said. “Come on, let’s get our bearings.” And she headed off toward what turned out to be the vast, cold, echoing kitchen. All the light bulbs seemed to be forty watts. The shadows held monsters, quite possibly. Ghosts, at the very least. “Cheery, fun place,” she said. “Prosser must be a cheery, fun fellow—what do you do if he invites you for the weekend?”

“It’s a summer house, priceless—”

“I wish it were summer.” She unpacked the groceries and tested the stove. No gas. The refrigerator was unplugged. But a coffeepot responded to being plugged into a wall socket and she quickly found a can opener and got the coffee perking. “Thank God the water is running. He must have a man who comes in, keeps an eye on the place.”

A quarter of an hour later, fortified with mugs of hot coffee and a plate of Twinkies, they were seated on the floor in the room at the bottom of the round turret which turned out to be a comfortable old-fashioned library with books lining the walls, flat expanses of tabletops, and overstuffed chairs. Chandler brought in logs and the fire thawed them through, made them tired and safe. Chandler felt quite safe for the first time in days. He looked up from the curling flames, feeling her gaze. She’d taken off the heavy sweater and rolled up the sleeves of her checked shirt. She smiled lazily, shaking her head.

“Well,” she said, “now would seem to be the time, wouldn’t it? Unless you still hate me, my profession, and my theory of history …” She brushed the thick hair back over her ears, grinned a trifle dangerously, just a bit of incisor showing. A forefinger tweaked a button on the front of her shirt.

“I could probably put aside my prejudices for a moment or two,” he said, “if pressed.”

“And precisely where would you have to be pressed, Professor?”

“That’s dirty,” he said. “Did you make that up? Just now?”

“I’m a grown-up. I’ve been around, I’ve said dirtier stuff than that …” Her voice had slowed, lost its clipped, precise enunciation. It sounded as if she’d had just one drink too many, but it was sex that was talking. And she was also laughing at them, gently.

“Don’t keep reminding me of your past, please.”

“Don’t be sensitive, silly.” She shifted back against the pillows she’d dragged onto the floor from the couch. Matter-of-factly she unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it out of her Levis, opened it wide. “I’m not sensitive about these tiny little things—you’ll find they perform admirably, whatever that means.”

“My expectations are up,” he said, leaning across, covering a large, tight nipple with his mouth. He whispered against her flesh. She began to hum softly. He heard her unzip her Levis, wiggle them down past her hips. Behind his closed eyes he saw it all, the swell of flesh, the deep darkness between her thighs as he explored her, the clenching of her jaw as he kissed her and she pushed herself against him.

“That’s nice, isn’t it?” she said. “Making new friends.”

“Making a new friend, singular …”

It took an hour and when they lay back they were both pleasantly aware that the job had been done well, indeed. He watched the fire burning down in the grate. She punched his arm lightly, grinned in the flickering shadows.

“Happy? I am. Everything is nice and natural now, we’ve been together so much … now it all makes sense.” She slid her hand down his arm, touched his hand.

“So who does all the shaving gear in your bathroom belong to?”

“Would you believe my brother?”

“I guess I don’t really care.”

“Thatta boy, I’m proud of you.” She giggled.

He suspected that he was rather proud of himself, too, but only time would tell about that. For the moment he put his arm around Polly Bishop and pulled her close and figured that worrying about somebody else’s shaving cream was kid stuff.

The old man was a creature of discipline and when the going got a little, well, dicey, that was when you drew on the extra store of discipline. After his conversations with Thornhill and Fennerty, he’d taken several pills with Perrier water and forced himself to sit at the dining table while Mrs. Grasse prepared his breakfast. He read the New York
Times
and the Washington
Post
and the Boston papers. He wondered what the hell was happening at Brennan’s and then Fennerty called him and told him what had happened at Brennan’s and the old man told him what to do about it and took an altogether different pill, a “mood elevator,” and ate three strips of crisp bacon, two poached eggs on wheat toast, and two cups of Twining’s. Not until all this was gotten through did he consult the waferlike face of his Piaget wristwatch.