The Glendower Legacy (36 page)

A
S WAS THE CASE WITH
a great many other things in his life, Chandler was no longer quite sure as to the day of the week. But they took the plane from Halifax back to Boston on what he strongly suspected was the late morning of Thursday. The voice of the captain wafted from the speakers, seemed however to be coming from another planet, and the stewardess leaning toward him with a half-ton of gleaming teeth may well have been an earthling but she might as well have been mouthing Swahili; or not speaking at all for that matter. He felt he was smiling at her but he wasn’t even sure of that: he felt like a deaf man who believed himself to be shouting at the top of his lungs but couldn’t be sure, couldn’t hear himself. He had gone altogether beyond tiredness, achieving what surely had to be a new state.

Next to him Polly was sipping an old-fashioned, her face glimpsed from the corner of his eye calm and cool and perfect. Though he would have enjoyed watching her for a very long time, his head kept lolling back and finally he gave it up, looked out at the ocean below, pale blue and glaring silver where the bright sunshine hit it. He knew he wouldn’t quite sleep, couldn’t release his grip enough to sleep, but he closed his eyes anyway and let the memories of the past couple of days blur inside his exhausted brain …

A man from Cape Breton, MacBride

Possessed a wrecked auto, his pride

It sat in his yard

It rained awfully hard

Next day it went out with the tide.

Limericks, they’d made up limericks. He remembered the desolate shacks, the lawns of mud and the filthy old derelict automobiles up to their axles in the muck, as they drove …

There was an old dowager from Kent

Her last fling at Bar Harbor was spent

She arrived there one day

To her great dismay

Society had got up and went.

He remembered Polly’s voice as they drove the rental car from Sydney to Halifax, doing the limericks as they pushed on through the mud and snow of the early Nova Scotia spring: winter in disguise. Somehow they’d left the boat, wounded and beginning to take on water through several bullet holes and the damage from the hag’s tooth, at a small fishing village on the Cabot Trail where they got a ride Wednesday morning from a lonely fisherman heading for the hospital in Sydney. Getting to the Cape Breton coast: Polly had managed that through choppy seas, smothering fog, and God only knew what else. How had she done it? The reincarnation of Bogart. He couldn’t recall ever holding anyone in such awe: perhaps he’d never know how she’d done it, but the fact was that she’d gotten them safely to shore over miles and miles of inky, terrifying sea. She told him that everything he said was nonsense, that he was grossly exaggerating her accomplishment, but there was a pleased grin that went with the disclaimer. “I wasn’t great,” she insisted slyly, glancing backward at his theory of history, “merely heroic … there’s a difference.”

Worries danced before him like taunting, malevolent gnomes, in and out among his memories of Polly’s steadfastness and the surging of the gun in his hand and the dash through the narrows with the huge cold teeth rising around them. James Bond stuff. Worries: Where was the Glendower document? Had Prosser survived? What had been happening on the island when they escaped? And what of Hugh? Was he still alive, or had the ridiculous charade claimed him?

The sun’s glare off the water turned the inside of his eyelids a hot, scalding red. He leaned away from the window, rested his head on Polly’s shoulder.

Maxim Petrov read the decoded message, rubbed his eyes, and fought off a yawn which was in no way a reaction to the message which would have required, if anything, a fit of screaming. No. His office was overheated and as a result he felt tired within an hour of arriving at his desk. Tell them it was too hot and you’d be frozen stiff inside of twenty-four hours and you’d stay that way until summer. There was, he reflected numbly, no way to win.

He put the sheet of paper down, stroking it briefly with his fingertips, as if coaxing it to make sense, and looked at his list of appointments and tasks. Bureaucratically, he faced the day. He supposed there was no avoiding giving the Intourist guides some sort of pep talk: their morale was even lower than was customary. And there was the black market in Levi’s which seemed to be entering one of its peak periods: his wife had bought him two pairs and the price had been truly outrageous. And there were the informers who wanted an increase in privileges. And now, this—this utterly crazy business in Nova Scotia.

He sighed and lit a Havana and decided to see if he could smoke it all the way to the end without disturbing the ash.

Everything in Russia, Mother Russia, eventually landed on his desk—at least everything that went wrong. And that was very nearly goddamned everything. It always came back to the same thing. The KGB was too big. But from its ever-increasing size he derived his power.

The Nova Scotia affair, a perfect example. Inevitably the KGB’s hind legs were tripping over one another while the front end wasn’t in the least aware of any difficulty. Oh, it wasn’t a perfect analogy, but in an imperfect world you took what was offered.

Nova Scotia … that involved the Canadian group, the American group, tangentially the young eager beaver in Bucharest—God,
his
career was over before it began! And now, here it was on his desk, a first class disaster involving nothing but the silliest kind of trivia … How had he ever let it all happen? Why did he always have to see the humorous possibilities? He felt like a boor at the party who couldn’t be restrained from telling the same tedious jokes, week after week, year after year. Now, if World War III were started as a result of the Nova Scotia
contretemps,
guess who would get the blame? Madame Petrov’s brightest son, Max!

His secretary, Maya, brought in his suitcase, packed. Maya was a sturdy, fetching blonde of thirty, rather far down the list of women who were cleared to serve him. He frequently fantasized about her in the washroom.

“You’ve heard of the American fascination with what they call Women’s Liberation, Maya?”

“Yes, sir.” She gazed at him levelly, expressionless.

“I was just told a new slogan of theirs. ‘Support Women’s Lib … Make him sleep on the wet spot.’”

She stared at him, expectantly.

“Do you get it, Maya?”

“I’m afraid not, Director.”

“All right, then, Maya,” he said sourly. “Back to work.”

“Thank you, Director.”

He stacked his desktop debris, glumly regarded the suitcase. No one knew where he was going, at least no one in the KGB, though Leonid had had to give a personal okay. With his approval and connivance the trip could be carried out in true secrecy, an increasingly scarce commodity in Moscow these days. The Americans thought they had problems—everybody in Moscow seemed to know everything.
Everything.

But Leonid had been helpful. Extreme secrecy, he’d said, and what Brezhnev wanted he normally got.

And now Petrov would get away from his everyday problems and nobody would know he was gone. On the drive to the airport he had a disturbing thought. If no one knew where he was going but Leonid, what if Leonid wanted him out of the way? For good? Who would there be to ask questions if he never came back?

Fennerty and McGonigle had arrived at the island by motor launch from Cape Breton, following a backbreaking automobile drive during which they kept an eye out for Chandler and the girl. They’d begun early on to forget what they knew, didn’t know, and could only surmise about the entire mission. In any case, the time had come to let the old man do their thinking for them … not the Old Man, but Sanger, God love him.

Fennerty had watched Chandler and Miss Bishop wander the grounds of Stronghold, holding hands in the fog. McGonigle had been in charge of concealing the tent which had provided them with meager shelter indeed against the nasty wet weather. And it was McGonigle who had fired the flares to bring the submarine in with its commando landing party.

When it was over, Fennerty and McGonigle were the last to leave.

The house was full of bodies. The walls and floors were pitted and burned and blown away in places, streaked and spattered with blood. Along with the two survivors from the landing party, they had gotten back down to the beach and been picked up by the submarine.

Waiting in the wet cold Fennerty had said: “Nothing has gone right, has it? Not from the beginning.”

“Like Dunkirk. It’s like a bad farce, really,” McGonigle said quietly, “that becomes a tragedy before you know it. And then it’s too late.”

The commando leader, who had been shot through the thigh, lay on the bench with his back against a slab of stone. The rain blew across his face and he whimpered in pain.

Orders were waiting on shipboard for Fennerty and McGonigle. The submarine would take them to Boston Navy Yard, from where they would be escorted to a commercial flight leaving Logan airport for Washington. They arrived at Dulles late Wednesday night—or was it Thursday morning? Time meant nothing anymore. The director himself debriefed them for several intensely uncomfortable hours.

It was enough, as McGonigle remarked to Fennerty, to make a grown man cry.

Fennerty replied that he was well short of tears, thank you, but very seriously considering getting out of The Company with a nice pension and getting into his brother’s travel agency in Atlanta.

McGonigle allowed as how he suspected the director would applaud, if actually not hasten, the impulse and its result.

The sun was still shining brightly when the Halifax flight touched down at Logan. From far away Chandler had seen the crystalline glow of the John Hancock tower reflecting the warm sun of an early, false spring. He felt strangely revived, as if the brief flight had been a tonic, as if getting back to Boston alive was enough to give wing to his spirit.

But waiting for the taxi, wearing his dirty clothes which had been only partially sponged and laundered, he felt the weakness in his legs and an undeniable lag in his reflexes. His mind kept calling his body to do simple tasks but the body was on a protest strike, a slowdown. He felt as if Polly were his keeper.

The apartment on Chestnut Street was much as they had left it, but for the neatly barbered, boyishly handsome lad sitting at the kitchen table sniffing his tea while it steeped.

“Oh, hello, darling,” he said with a wave. “So glad you’re not dead or something. I have a cold and inhaling jasmine tea is a godsend to the sinuses.”

“Peter—”

“You must be the professor. I’m Peter Shane, neighbor, confidant, dogsbody, loyal friend to Ezzard Charles, the cat.” Ezzard leaped to the tabletop and Peter pushed a dish of cream his way. “Some bash you had before leaving, I must say.”

“My dearest Peter, what are you talking about?” Polly threw her coat on the back of a chair. “That tea smells good. Would you like some, too? Colin, I mean you—”

“Oh, sure, tea’s fine. I’m going to sit down, I think.”

“You’d better, old lad,” Peter said, pushing a chair back from the table. “You have the look of a man who requires a chair.”

Chandler sank thankfully downward. Polly was fussing at the counter, collecting cups and saucers, pushing English muffins into the broiling rack. “What’s this about a bash, Peter?”

“Well, my God, what a mess this place was! Nasty … Ezzard was clutching the top of a door, staring like a mad thing—”

“Oh, that’s just Ezzard,” she said airily. “It’s his mad thing stare … but we left the place neat as a pin.”

“Our pursuers,” Chandler grunted.

“Well, I tidied up,” Peter said, inhaling deeply, then sipping from the cup. “God in heaven, I hate a stuffy nose.”

“I’ll do the same for you another time.”

“Please, Polly,
I
would never allow things to get in such a state—”

“Are we still in the papers?” Chandler said. Polly placed a hot buttered English muffin and a cup of tea before him.

“You know, that’s the odd thing.” Peter nibbled at his thumb. “Not a word for days, all very mysterious. Your whole bizarre story has completely disappeared—I’ve squirreled away the papers, I’ve read them thoroughly, and one day you were there and the next you weren’t. I’m dimly aware that fame is fleeting, but my goodness! It’s weird, it’s as if you’d never been written about at all … as if the Davis boy and the old man hadn’t been murdered after all …” He sipped tea, watching them over the rim of his cup. Ezzard crept toward Chandler’s English muffin, staring like a mad thing.

“I don’t understand,” Chandler said. “Which hardly comes as a surprise, I’m well aware.”

“Somebody has put the lid on,” Polly said. “Tight.”

“And no mention on television of either of you,” Peter said. “I called the station and they said you were on a special assignment—well, that was silly. So I asked to speak with the manager or the news director, someone in
authority,
and the bitch put me on hold for an eternity, then cut me off … mortifying! I wrote a letter at once—”

After a nap, Chandler showered, dressed, and listened to Polly sing
Let’s Put Out the Lights and Go to Sleep
while she bathed. For a while he stood in the doorway watching her soap her breasts, then blow bubbles with the filament of soap rubbed between her hands. As the afternoon waned they squeezed into the Jaguar and headed for Cambridge.

They approached his house with considerable hesitancy: it seemed normal from the safety of the car, but he needed only to see it to think again of what had happened to him there, and all the fear that had come to him since. Standing on the porch, he peered through the window, said: “What the hell—” and unlocked the door, stormed inside.

The mess had been carefully cleaned up, a new television set installed, furniture arranged neatly, shelves dusted and contents straightened. The smell of furniture polish lingered in each room. The coffee stains were gone. The kitchen was immaculate. Not a mote of plaster dust remained of George Washington, but the pedestal had been polished and a huge, luxuriant Boston fern had replaced the bust.