The Glendower Legacy (29 page)

Kendrick nodded, squint-eyed. Polly stroked the noses of the two kittens. “I’ve read about you two in the papers,” he said enigmatically, put the kittens back in his pockets, and opened the door with a key. “Let’s go have a sit-down and a touch of something to warm the bones.” For a moment his breadth filled the doorway, then he headed back among the dark stacks and mounds toward the single light. The room smelled of engine oil and rope and cold draughts. “Not much trade this time of year,” he said without turning around. The kittens had wormed their way out of the front window: Chandler heard the soft patter of their feet and hoped to God he could avoid stepping on any of them. Polly stooped and scooped up a couple of small, furry black creatures. Cat box! He smelled the cat box, too. Deliver me, he moaned to himself, deliver me …

The office was large and cramped at the same time, smelled of endless cigars. Kendrick took a puff and carefully laid his cigar on the wide rim of a heavy glass ashtray which was set in a rubber tire. Chandler hadn’t seen such an ashtray in years, since his childhood when his grandfather had had one exactly like it on his desk. Kendrick hung his coat on a tall rack: he wore suspenders over a plaid flannel shirt, heavy corduroy trousers. A space heater made the room dry, stuffy, and cats slept here and there, even among the papers on the rolltop desk. He pushed a cat off the rickety wooden swivel chair and pulled out a couple of scarred metal office chairs. “Sit, folks,” he said. “Now, a nip for what ails you.”

He took a bottle of bourbon out of the top drawer, lined up three glasses from a tray on top of the desk, and poured two fingers in each without seeking his guests’ approval.

“Mud in your eye,” he said and threw his into the back of his throat. Polly and Chandler sipped gingerly. “Wild Turkey. A man has to know where to spend his money … now, Bert Prosser, old Bert. Papers say you’re a historian, sir. Tell me, are you intimate with Bert Prosser, do you know
his
history? Well, I do, I know his history, all the way from India during WW Two—that was where I first ran across Bert Prosser. Clever, slippery little devil. Just the man we needed. Intelligence officer. I was a pilot … hauled Bert here and there, here and there. Why did he send you to old Kendrick?”

“He said I was simply to tell you it was a matter for Code Green. Very cloak and dagger.” Chandler shrugged self-consciously. “Does that mean anything to you?”

Kendrick lit up the stump of blackish cigar, blew out the wooden match, shook the bottle by his ear. He was running low. “Sure, it means something to me. It means plenty to me.” He exhaled a vast amount of smoke and scratched the gray whiskers along the line of his straight prominent jaw. “Plenty. Code Green.” He nodded.

“Is this something that happens every so often?” Polly asked. She had two tiny kittens tumbling about in her lap.

“Last time about five years ago …”

“What does it mean?”

“Sorry, miss, that’s part of Code Green, dates from our Indian days … part of Code Green is that I can’t tell you. Well,” he said, standing up. “It means secrecy and hurry-up.” He grunted and flung the filthy window open. The damp filled the dried-out room, Kendrick pointed out the window with his cigar. “Foggy out there. We’re going to have to wait until it lifts or thins out. My apologies to Bert Prosser, but hurry chop-chop just won’t work today.” He turned around, hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, and chewed his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.

“Does Bert really expect us to just put ourselves in your hands?” Polly looked up curiously from the kittens.

“You’d know best about that, miss. You’re certainly free to leave, with my blessings. If you stay, well, you’re in my hands all right. But I wouldn’t try to talk you into anything …” He sat down and poured another couple of fingers in his cheese glass, contemplated the fine amber bourbon.

“No, we’re in your hands,” Chandler said. “But I might as well tell you, I’m pretty near the end of my tether—”

“I’m used to that, people at the ends of their tethers. Don’t worry about that, sir. But we do have to make some preparations, you see. Code Green is not just a spur-of-the-moment thing … so, if you’re ready?”

Polly nodded.

“All right, then. We’ll take my car.” He took two tins of catfood from the splotched refrigerator in the corner and opened them with a red-handled device that didn’t want to stay attached to the can. “Now, my little beauties, you won’t have to eat each other.” He summoned up a rather ghastly, rattling laugh, placed the tins on the floor beside a large saucer of cream, and slipped back into his mackinaw.

They drove along a narrow, slippery dirt road which swung down from the paved road toward the water, but circuitously so. The tires slid, fog blew treacherously across their path, wet grasses slapped at the sides of the car. Kendrick obviously knew the road, but faith in Kendrick was hardly sufficient to keep Chandler from clutching at the dashboard.

“What the hell’s the hurry?”

Kendrick laughed harshly: “No particular hurry. I just don’t dawdle, that’s all. Know the road in the pitch dark, coming or going.”

The dirt had gone to sand and the trees had given way to nothing but beach grass. A small weathered gray house sat starkly, alone, in the sand of the beach, about fifty feet back from the road, precariously near the water. The house sat on stacks of cement blocks at each corner and at midpoints, as if expecting a halfhearted floodtide.

“No place like home, eh,” Kendrick said, pulling off into softer sand. Kendrick’s own dock projected out into the little protected bay and by the end of the dock an elderly seaplane bobbed softly on its fat pontoons. The outlines of the plane, only a hundred yards from where they stood, were badly smudged by the fog.

The interior of the house was comfortable and spare: a couple shelves of paperbacks, a large shortwave radio on the kitchen table, an old wicker couch in what must have once been a breakfast nook, stove and refrigerator, a rubber rack with dishes neatly dripped dry. The other room contained a bed, a dresser, and several rifles mounted in a rack on the wall.

“Travel light, that’s my motto,” Kendrick said by way of conversation. “Don’t own anything you don’t need.” He moved quickly around the kitchen turning on lights, putting water in a tin coffeepot, switching on a gas space heater. There was no sign of cats. “Miss, if you’re hungry you can raid the icebox. Coffee’s perking. It’ll warm up right quick …” He rubbed his hands briskly, looked around him. “Well, I’ve got work to do. You make yourselves comfortable and we’ll proceed with Code Green as soon as we get a little weather going our way.” He left the kitchen, disappeared into a small toolshed out back.

Watching him go, Polly said: “I rather resent all this, Colin. Just who or what does Prosser think he is? This is little more than kidnaping—”

“Voluntary. We could have left …”

“Oh sure, wander off into the wilderness! Colin, I’m scared, too, every time I look up I think I’m going to see that damned red Pinto … he’s out there, he wants us.” She shook her head forcefully. Kendrick emerged from the toolshed carrying a metal case, trundled off head down toward his dock. “No, Prosser got us into this and now we’re stuck with it. I simply don’t see the point of all this Code Green nonsense—what would have been wrong with simply telling us where we were headed? It’s childish …” She paused, struck by a thought: “Childish or governmental! Code Green sounds like something the idiots in Washington would come up with—”

“Look, he’s been involved with the government in the past, off and on, advisory capacity, consultant, kitchen cabinet. He probably uses terminology out of habit. Stop worrying.”

“Stop worrying,” she said, making a face, pouting. “That’s wonderful.”

He put his arm around her, tilted her face up: “Now, look. I realize fully that I am not exactly a movie hero. But I do know Bert Prosser and if there’s one thing in this world you can depend on, it’s Bert Prosser and Bert Prosser’s brain. When the man has a plan, it is a plan to count on. You can bet on it.” He cued up what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

Polly pulled away, her face serious: “If we knew where we were going, then if they caught us, and started pulling out our fingernails, we might tell them where it was—that’s right, isn’t it?”

“The thought never crossed my mind—”

“Well, it’s right—”

“I admit there’s a sort of nineteen-forties Gestapo-movie logic to it.”

“So, he didn’t tell us,” she said emphatically. “And now he’s probably dead …”

“Morbidity will get us nowhere.”

“Oh, don’t be a Pollyanna!”

“Another archaism! You’re giving away your age, my dear. What’s your favorite song—‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ … ?”

“ ‘You came to me from out of nowhere,’” she sang softly. “It’s from a forties’ movie,
You Came Along …
I wanted to be exactly like Lizabeth Scott, I even practiced a little lisp. She had those great, deep eyebrows, and that’s the only part of her I wound up with. That movie, it was like
Love Story,
Robert Cummings was a flier dying of a funny wound and Lizabeth loved him. I cried and cried, she’d have to go on living without him. And then I grew up. And why the hell are we talking about this?”

“Archaisms …”

Polly nibbled at a fingernail, went to the kitchen window.

“What is he doing out there?”

Kendrick was climbing down onto the pontoon, carrying the metal toolbox.

“Going to play with his toy,” Chandler said.

“Why do you suppose we’re waiting for the fog to clear? Christ, he’s going to fly us somewhere in that contraption …” She slammed her fist against the window frame.

The fog blew off in the evening after Kendrick had prepared a dinner of canned beans and toast washed down with beer. He rinsed the dishes and stacked them, dried his hands, and opened the kitchen door. “Stars are out,” he said quietly. “We’re in business.”

Chandler carried the bag down the wooden dock, heard their footsteps sounding hollow like people walking on a drum. The water slapped softly at the pilings. The night air was wet and cold and he gulped it, trying to calm his stomach. A ladder with slippery rungs dropped down to a wooden catwalk leading away at right angles to the door. At the end of the catwalk the seaplane sat bobbing sluggishly in the dark water. Kendrick carried a flashlight. Chandler felt like Captain Midnight and the plane looked as if it were of that vintage, about 1940. The paint which appeared once to have been white was dirty, blistered in cancerous patches like a scrubby garden gone to weeds, peeling and hanging like abbreviated confetti from the undersides of the fat wings.

“Don’t worry,” Kendrick said clairvoyantly, stepping ahead of them and fiddling with a tiny doorway. “It isn’t how it looks, it’s how it flies.” He swung the doll’s-house door open and pointed: “Up we go, miss.”

Chandler heard Polly swear, watched her climb up, then followed her, pushing the bag ahead of him. He stuck momentarily, had a vision of flying off into the unknown with his ass and most of the rest of him hanging out to dry. Then he felt Kendrick’s hand forcing him on into the cramped compartment, if that was what it was. Polly took his hand. He stood up with a cramp in his back and hit his head resoundingly on the top of the fuselage. If that was what it was, which he doubted. “Come on, man,” Kendrick growled, “make way for the bloody pilot.” Chandler settled into a tiny, inadequately upholstered seat with a metal, naked back. Kendrick joined them, kicked the bag out of his way, and pulled the door shut, slamming something metal into place with a solid click. With every step and shove and shrug the plane seemed to bob and shift in the water. Polly kept hold of his hand, squeezing hard.

“Why doesn’t he get it going?” she whispered.

“Miss,” Kendrick said edgily, “you read the news, I’ll fly the effing plane. Deal?”

“Right, right, deal,” she said.

Eventually the two engines were throbbing, rattling his teeth, then whirring smoothly and they were moving, half bouncing across the water. The instrument panel had lights of green, red, and white and the glow cast an unreal set of shadows across Kendrick’s craggy, stolid face. He could have been chiseled from stone, ageless. Then they were free of the water and out ahead of them the black night sky yawned …

Arden Sanger was stealing an evening away from Company business, engaging in an activity that, were it known, would quite probably lead to his early demise. He was writing his autobiography and, though he had only completed the section dealing with his football exploits, he was fully aware that the mere existence of such a document required the darkest secrecy. Consequently he followed no pattern in the time spent writing, altered his normal evening procedures as little as possible, and so far as his staff was concerned he was working in his locked study, just as he habitually did. But he was reliving the great Illinois game in his senior year, when Iowa City was his toy and a pair of pert little cheerleaders his post-game playmates. Jack Carson, indeed!

He had been sitting motionless at his desk for ten minutes, remembering the textures and scents of that remarkable evening, when the gentle buzzer on his desk hummed, unobtrusive but insistent, pulling him back across more than forty years.

“Yes, Dennis,” he said, having capped his fountain pen and depressed a lever on the plastic box.

“Sorry to bother you, boss, but I’ve got Liam on the scrambler and he’s very insistent on speaking directly to you …”

“Dennis, this is not remotely a priority matter. You realize that, don’t you? I am busy, you realize that, I trust?”

“Yes, sir. But Liam suggested that you and he were friends while I was nestled at my mammy’s breast … and he went on to imply that if I failed to put this call through to you he would personally rip my nuts off and hang them on my widow’s Christmas tree—”

“Nothing to worry about, then. You’re not married.”

“Shall I put him through, sir?”

“For your sake, Dennis, yes, you may put him through.” He stood up, picked up a pair of spring-loaded handgrips, and began squeezing them as he walked toward the French windows. Outside the spring night rested lightly on his patio, garden, pool, and tennis courts. Two men stood on the lawn, arms folded, looking up at the roof. The range of the television cameras was being given the monthly check.