The Glendower Legacy (25 page)

“Mrs. Grasse,” he said softly as his cook-maid cleared the dishes, “would you please send Ogden to me? Thank you.”

He sat quietly at the table, sipping his tea, until Ogden arrived with his tightly knotted narrow tie, black suit, and pale lined eyes.

“Ogden,” he said, “would you prepare the Rolls? I’ll be away overnight.”

Ogden nodded, resisted what appeared to be an atavistic urge to genuflect, and hastened away.

The old man took off his robe in the bathroom adjoining his bedroom, weighed himself, showered, shaved, trimmed his snowy moustache, and put on country clothes: a brown hacking jacket with leather patches at the elbows, doeskin slacks that dated from the forties, a turtleneck cashmere sweater, brown suede boots. Pills, he reflected, were what kept him going.

The question was, how far out of control was Thorny? And how dangerous? And how far could the old man go in stopping him without revealing his own involvement with both idiotic sides?

He’d asked himself those questions, in one form or another, so many times over the years … It was like wanting to know if there was a God and going into a cathedral, sitting down, waiting, and never getting an answer.

But the Rolls’ purr put his problems out of his mind for the moment. Why, oh why couldn’t everything run like his lovely black Rolls?

Thorny never knew, in the normal course of things, for whom he was working on any given free-lance assignment. Sometimes it was an advantage, not knowing who it was, because you just concentrated on the task at hand, got it done, and collected your money. But other times being in the dark was dispiriting: you had difficulty getting involved in the job, staying interested. Sometimes it was a help to have some idea of the big picture, or would have been. He knew, however, that he was only a soldier, not a decision-maker. Right now he was particularly pleased because he knew he was working for himself: the old man didn’t matter anymore, it was Ozzie that mattered—he was going to raise a little hell for Ozzie and he couldn’t remember when he’d last felt quite so industrious, quite so determined.

He parked the Pinto at the foot of the driveway and glanced up at the old summer house that was playing out its hand as a resort inn. It was quiet looking but a light burned in the afternoon gloom. The water crashing behind him, the cold moist wind, the lonely old building—it all frightened him. He was a city boy and the open spaces, the lifeless feel of the coastline bothered him. Getting out of the Pinto he knocked his porkpie hat off, watched as it fell with its crown down into a puddle of muddy water. He stared at it, bent to pick it up, then swore and kicked at it. It rolled partway under the car. He had no hair on the top of his head, only a dark fringe over his ears and around the base of his skull. Shoulders hunched, hands jammed in his raincoat pockets, he trudged up the rutted driveway. His momentary flood of optimism had ebbed. But he still had a job to do.

“Mr. Davis?” he said. “Percy Davis?”

The elderly gent nodded, standing in the doorway.

“Well, thank God you’re here—is the professor still with you?”

“The professor?” Davis said, squinting from beneath white eyebrows.

“Aha, very good, very good, Mr. Davis,” he chuckled. “Can’t be too careful. I expect the professor filled you in on what it’s been like these past few days in Boston—rough, very rough.” He shook his head, wishing to God the old man wasn’t making him wait outside in the wind. “My name is Terwilliger, Claude Terwilliger. I’m sure he must have mentioned me …”

“Nope, Mr. Terwilliger, can’t say as he did.”

“Well, I have papers here, Mr. Davis, identification.” He took a leather folder from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. “CIA,” he said softly as Davis scrutinized the document. The beauty of
it
was that it was in fact a genuine Central Intelligence Agency identification card.

“Mr. Davis, I’m freezing my ass out here. Do you suppose I could just step inside? And you can call that telephone number, it’s toll-free, twenty-four hours, and check on me … I’m Professor Chandler’s protection, believe me.” He watched the old man respectfully.

“All right,” Davis said at last, “come on in.”

“I don’t know how much he may have told you,” Thorny began quickly, hoping to divert Davis’s attention from the telephone, “but he’s behaved admirably through this whole thing. The man’s got guts to burn—funny when you think about it, a Harvard professor, but he’s all heart, I’ll tell you. Could you spare a cup of coffee, by the way? I’ve been up all night …” He followed the old fellow inside, past the lobby desk, and into the kitchen where a television set was blaring on the countertop and the coffee was ready. Percy Davis pointed toward a row of cups and leaned against the sink, arms across his chest. He looked down at Thorny who poured and talked. “Right now, Mr. Davis, and I’m going to rely on your discretion in this—” He glanced up, stirring cream into the thick brew. “Right now, there are two men lying dead in a house in Cambridge …
They were after Chandler!”
He sipped, his tiny dark eyes watching Davis. “That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to guard Chandler from … I don’t mind telling you, the way he keeps slipping away from us—he’s so resourceful, but damn it, these guys are playing hardball, y’know?—we’re spread pretty thin just trying to keep track of him. Why, my God, the only way I found out he came here was from Hugh Brennan … yeah, Hugh’s a great guy, a great
friend,
he’ll do anything to help Chandler …”

“Is there something I can do for you?” Percy Davis regarded the small man calmly, trying to remember what Chandler had told him during the long, densely packed night. There had been so much … George Washington clouded his specific memory.

“There’s something you’ve just
got
to do for me, Mr. Davis—” He spread his arms, the abject supplicant. “You’ve got to tell me where the heck he went from here …” He scowled, rubbed his eyes. “The guys who did the dirty work in Cambridge last night, they’re after him … and the sources of information they’ve got, well, you wouldn’t believe them—Mr. Davis, I’ve got to get to Chandler before those bastards do.” He sighed beneath the weight of the world: he felt the solid heft of the gun in his pocket and wondered if he was going to have to do something ugly to this scrawny old fart. “Did he tell you, Mr. Davis? Do you know where he is?”

Percy Davis thought it over.

“Yes, Mr. Terwilliger,” he said at last. “I know where he is.” He started back out toward the front lobby. “I can show you best on a road map.”

Back in the Pinto Thorny pulled a bottle of gin out of the glove compartment. He was whistling “Hello, Dolly” which he interrupted once the bottlecap was unscrewed. Things were going right for a change. Too damned bad Oz was missing it. He started the car and backed up, grinding the porkpie hat into the mud. He took another hit on the bottle as he passed on through Kennebunkport. He turned on the lights. It was getting dark outside and he felt alone, but secure, with the fingers of light prying at the gathering gloom.

Chandler was sitting with his arm around Polly, half awake, watching the fire burn down to embers, not wanting to move, or come fully to life, when he saw the darkness speared by the automobile’s lights. He shook his head, whispered into her ear: “He’s here, Prosser is here, honey … rise and shine. The old man is upon us.”

He went outside onto the stone balustrade and waved.

The black Rolls-Royce purred up in front of him, the side window slid down, and the old man leaned across the front seat, smiling. Chandler felt better just seeing him.

“Bert,” he called, going to the window, using the slightly unfamiliar first name. “Bert, I’m so damned glad to see you …”

The old man nodded. “It’s going to be all right, son, we’re going to make sure of everything … I’m just going to put this venerable Rolls-Royce to bed and then we’ll get down to the bottom of things. Just give me a moment, Colin.” The window slid back up and the Rolls moved slowly back beneath the stone archway toward the garage. Chandler heard the electrically controlled garage door open. He stood alone on the balustrade, breathing in the night air. He didn’t know who to think about, Polly or Bert Prosser … For a man in the middle, he was unreasonably happy.

Chandler watched Prosser at his worldly, charming best with Polly. He’d been rumored for years to be in precarious health and now, holding Polly’s hand, he looked his age, seemed to bear out the rumors. The pouches under his eyes were fuller, darker, and he seemed thinner than ever in his country clothes, The turtleneck couldn’t hide the lined, loose flesh of his throat; while he lit his Dunhill the blue-veined hands trembled with the tobacco pouch and the wooden kitchen match. But his voice was still strong, retained the metallic harshness when he had a point to make, could soften, loosen into a plumminess when he chose.

The charm having been sufficiently dispensed, he cupped a palm over the bowl of the pipe, drawing deeply until the gray smoke wreathed his small, eggshell head. “Now, my boy,” he said in his resonant, plummy voice, “let’s see Exhibit A and start getting to the heart of the matter. I’m a disciplined man, I think, but what you told me this morning—well, let’s get on with it …” He sat down at the library table and tilted the shade on the old brass-based lamp so that he might have the document in the best light.

“Here goes, then,” Chandler said. “First, the portrait by Chandler.”

The old man inspected the frame, the backing, the canvas itself. “If you say it’s a Winthrop Chandler, I’m willing to go along with you. It’s more your field than mine.” Methodically he read carefully through Underhill’s letter to Percy Davis, then Bill Davis’s account of how he found the portrait and the contents thereof, then William Davis’s letter which he handled with great delicacy and read with solemn concern, his eyes never flickering away from the papers. Then he considered the scrap bearing the signature. Chandler’s eyes met Polly’s; she winked. “Well,” Prosser said, placing the papers flat before him, “I’m rather at a loss.” His mind seemed to be working behind the pale eyes, sifting, distilling, deciding precisely which of his thoughts to reveal. “We have several murders on the one hand, these bits of paper on the other. There can be no reasonable doubt that the murders and the papers—especially the signature of Washington—are related causally. But we don’t seem to know why or how …” He looked up and smiled faintly at Polly, tamping down the ash in his pipe with the small figure of Mr. Pickwick. “My dear, what do you make of it?”

Polly shook her head: “We’ve theorized ourselves into a corner, we’re lost, I’m afraid. We don’t know if the document is genuine in the first place … and we don’t know why it’s worth killing people for.” She shrugged, sat down on the tabletop, ran a finger along the edge of the portrait.

“Bert, why would anyone want this piece of paper so desperately?”

“A thousand reasons,” Prosser said. “Money, for one. It would be worth a fortune to a collector, a museum … an institution like Harvard … aside from a well-preserved signature, there’s the historical implications which are potentially highly explosive … my goodness, I detest being so wretchedly obvious!” He pushed back from the table, sucked a match flame down into the bowl. “But there are moments when there is nothing for it, but to be obvious.”

“Do you call it real?” Chandler asked.

“Impossible to say so quickly, Colin,” he said. “You know that as well as I do, you know the tests … No, what we need is time. Time and not being interrupted by the incompetents following you. I’ve got to put out some feelers. In Washington, I mean. Among my old chums … and their successors. Ah, mostly successors, wouldn’t you know.”

Chandler watched the old man sink into a somber silence, sucking the black stem, clicking it against his narrow stained teeth. He looked very old just then, and not at all well: there was a sallowness to his once-pink face, the cheeks were sunken, giving his face something of the look you associated with headhunting peddlers of the Amazon, skulls strung on a rope. Polly propped her elbows on the table and rubbed her huge brown eyes. Chandler would never look at her now without thinking of kissing those eyes, making love with her the first time. Watching her from across the table, he could feel the texture of her flesh on his fingertips.

Prosser shook his head as if yanking himself up from the bottom of a stupor. He blinked, looked around him with a quirky grin as if admiring a very private secret, ran the tip of his tongue along the fringe of his white moustache. His wandering eyes struck Chandler as too cloudy, his sudden loss of attention as disconcerting: in the instant, Chandler thought he saw the shadow of a dead man.

“The only safe thing to do,” Prosser said slowly, “is to get you two a bit further out of the way until we get this settled. I have the most awful premonition that this is going to go off with a great clang and clatter and I’d like you two well away from the blast.” He turned the pipe down in the heavy ashtray and tapped it carefully, building a mound of flaky ash. “Can you possibly manage that? If I can find the hiding place for you?”

Polly nodded; Chandler said: “I mainly want to keep us alive, Bert. If you think we should hide a little deeper, a little longer, that’s good enough for me …”

“And there’s the matter of all this,” Prosser said, frowning at the goods on the table. “I think it will be safest with you two—I don’t need it for the moment, my word is good with the people I’ll be speaking to … once we come down on the desperadoes, then we’ll decide if old George was a British spy.” He smiled crookedly. “Now, as to where you’re going … I want you to get going straightaway, drive to Bar Harbor, sleep in the car because I’m afraid you won’t find any hostelry open, and then pay a call on one Howard Kendrick in Bar Harbor … Howard is an associate of mine from the old days, a man who can be trusted to keep his shirttail tucked in and his mouth closed. He’s got a sporting goods store down on the harbor, runs some boats, and he’s got a seaplane, and it’s the seaplane that’s going to get you well away from all this carnage.” He rubbed his chin and looked from one face to the other. “Just give him the word
—code green—
and he’ll do the rest.”