The Glendower Legacy (37 page)

“This joint has never, repeat,
never,
looked this good before,” he said. “But the elves who came by night were stuck when it came to my George Washington … Some things can’t be replaced.” The thought gave him a certain self-satisfaction. They weren’t infallible, whoever they were.

Polly smiled. “When they do things like this, they usually do very well. I’d say they’ve done well by you. Whoever they are …”

“You say that as if you know—do you?”

“In my business you get a feel for this kind of thing, the alias program, new identities, stories that are hushed up, murders and kidnapings and you name it … there are people who do this kind of thing for a living. I don’t know their names …”

Chandler gave her a long, sideways look, then figured the hell with it. Maybe he didn’t really want to know.

After inspecting the entire house, which had been cleaned and polished top to bottom, they went to the study and began calling hospitals. The fourth call paid off. Sort of. Hugh Brennan was a patient.

“Please ring his room,” Chandler said, thanking God.

“I’m sorry, sir, but that’s impossible.”

“Impossible? Is his telephone broken? Is he too ill?”

“I cannot release any information about his condition, sir.”

“All right. Can I visit him?”

“No visitors, I’m sorry.”

“Is he dead or alive?” Chandler fumed.

“I’m sorry. I can’t give any information on his condition.”

“But he is alive …”

“I’m sorry—”

“Why the hell did you tell me he was there?”

A pause. Then: “Look,” the girl whispered, “I’m a student nurse and I only answered this phone because there was nobody on the station as I came by. I wasn’t supposed to tell you, or anybody, that there is a Mr. Brennan here … We’ve all had strict orders and I’m really going to get it if you tell on me, do you understand? So, please …”

“Sure,” Chandler sighed. “Sure, sure, sure.”

He hung up and turned to Polly:
“They
have got Brennan. He’s not a patient. He’s a prisoner … a blackout.”

She nodded: “I’m not surprised. They’re very thorough once they start.”

He called Prosser’s home. No answer.

“My God, maybe he’s dead. Up in Maine.” Chandler had wanted Prosser to be there, had protected himself against the possibility that he could actually be dead: now the fear was no longer lip service.

They walked down to Sage’s on Brattle Street in the late afternoon and bought groceries, walked back.

In the kitchen, the daylight faded, Chandler took her soft-skinned face in his hands, held her, searched her eyes. “Stay,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

He kissed her, held her close.

“This is scarier than anything so far,” he whispered. “It’s all so damned sanitized. But we
know
what’s been happening—how can they make it like it never happened? What the hell ever happened to doing what’s right?”

“Maybe the breed is dead,” she said.

In bed that night he held her, stared at the streetlights outside, said: “I’ve fallen completely in love with you.”

“Fallen in
like,”
she said. “That’s enough for now, Professor.”

But he didn’t dream of love. He dreamt of Prosser and Brennan and they were dead. And it dawned on him slowly that he, too, was dead.

H
E LOOKED AT HIS WATCH
and leaped from the bed, panic-stricken by his dreams and the break in his normal routine: he was late for a ten o’clock lecture. But as he came more fully awake he realized that his world was no longer the same. Polly Bishop was asleep in his bed and no one expected him to make his lecture. He was missing and forgotten, at least for the moment. Were his students still showing up for his lectures, checking to see if he’d turned up alive and well? Or had he been replaced?

“What are you doing?” Polly shaded her eyes against the morning sun which hit the pillow and was probably what had awakened him in the first place. “Why are you staring into space like that?”

“I’ve got a class at ten. I’m going.” He was taking off his pajama top and reaching for one of his ten blue button-down oxford-cloth shirts. “I’ve got to find out what’s going on.”

“Good idea.” She threw back the covers and stood up, naked. “I’ll go with you.” She stretched, brushed her hair back over her ears,

“As a reporter?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe.”

They made it to the Yard in five minutes. The lecture room was full, some two hundred students, the one meeting a week which was a large group because it served three interlocking but separate courses. The speaker’s lectern sat at the bottom of an amphitheater pit and the staging area was empty. It was two minutes until the time the students would begin to get up and leave but there was no more restlessness than was customary: the loud babble of voices, people craning over the canted rows to chat, stragglers loping down the steep aisles. Chandler and Polly sat at the back, far to one side, melting in at the end of a row of nondescript students, none of whom Chandler recognized from his own small group.

At precisely the last moment, the lecturer arrived: the esteemed chairman of the history department, Bert Prosser. He wore a heavy tweed suit in russet brown, a red tie, clumping red brogans, came toward the lectern banging the bowl of a shiny briar into his palm. He laid the pipe down, hooked the tiny microphone around his thin, pipestem neck, and cleared his throat. Before speaking—he had no notes, as was his custom—he jammed his fists down into his jacket pockets to hide the slight palsy Chandler had been noticing the past couple of years. Chandler felt Polly’s fingers tighten on his arm.

“I know that my colleague, Professor Chandler,” Prosser began, signaling the room to silence by the quality of his voice, “who by the way, will be back among us come Monday—” He raised a pink palm to quiet the audience: “No cheering, no demonstrations, I beg you. I know that he has been treating many of you to his well-known and rather remunerative theories concerning the espionage aspects of the American revolutionary period.

“But since I’ve gotten the floor away from him for today, I thought I’d subject you to some quavery, old man’s thoughts. And I know quite a lot about espionage and heroism. But if I were to live up to the legends which persist about me around this place, I would fall somewhere among J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, who is not a man in a Cadillac cruising Boston’s combat zone … but, of course, the truth is somewhere else altogether and I intend only to touch on it today …” He paused, clicking the stem of the pipe against his front teeth.

“Like Professor Chandler, I believe in great men,” he went on, coolly surveying his audience, “and if you don’t, it is because you are foolish and cynical, if not actually wicked, children. The Revolution produced several undeniably great men on our side—not simply because they were on the winner’s side, but because they made huge commitments, risked everything … You may make the comparisons which leap so readily to your minds—Ho Chi Minh, of course, and Mao, of course, no sin in that, though I must say that our revolution was an even prettier example of great men and great principles.

“I’m sure that Professor Chandler has already told you that great men set our revolutionary period apart, full as it was of what one side or the other called treachery and treason …

“Now, what can I possibly add to Professor Chandler’s thesis about these great men he’s always going on about?

“Believe him!”

As Prosser droned on Chandler’s mind wandered, but to no great effect. Prosser was wending his way through his often expressed contentions that we were living in an age overrun by moral pygmies … moral clones. The fate of the planet had been pretty well left to the technologists and their various contraptions, thereby robbing modern man of an even nodding acquaintance with greatness as it was known in the past. “A machine,” Prosser said, “whether a computer or a tiny eavesdropping microphone or a heat-seeking missile, a machine cannot exceed its specific limits … and exceeding limits is at the heart of any kind of greatness … Greatness is behind us, I’m afraid …

“Adlai Stevenson said something to me once, summed it all up … ‘Our Victorian ancestors felt embarrassed,’ he said, ‘in the presence of the base. We feel embarrassed in the presence of the noble.’” Prosser sighed and began unhooking his microphone. “I don’t expect you to understand what I’m talking about … why should you? What could you know of greatness? We are faced with a peculiar proposition which is part of your life … them and us, don’t you see, there’s no longer any difference that matters …” Without saying another word, he walked slowly off the stage.

Polly tugged her scarf tight, looked up at Chandler. The sun’s brilliance bathed the Yard in a kind of life-giving light but the warmth had gone. She brushed her hair back against the nippy wind, her tight brown gloves against her cheek.

“These are the same steps,” he said. “We came out and you stuck your damned microphone in my face and before I knew it I was in it up to my ears …” He looked out across the Yard at the scurrying students. “Ah, I’m an older but wiser man today.”

“Colin, what the hell was Prosser doing up there? What kind of a lecture was that?”

“Rambling off the top of his head … it’s his style. Famous man, chatting with the boys and girls. He was just filling in …”

“It had the sound of a valedictory of some sort,” she said.

“He was in a mood.”

“Pretty damned strange—here he is, Colin.”

Bert Prosser came through the door, puffing his pipe. He stopped on the top step and smiled down at them. He tamped the bowl of his pipe with Mr. Pickwick. “You two,” he said. “I am so glad to see you.” He came down the stairs, dapper and pencil-thin in his velvet-collared chesterfield. “My dear,” he said to Polly, acknowledging her. “I must say, you’ve given me a good deal of concern these past few days—”

Polly laughed harshly, shook her head: “I think we’re due an explanation, Professor. It’s only by damned fool luck we’re alive and here at all.”

“Aha,” Prosser nodded. “She has a point, hasn’t she, Colin?”

“Offhand, I’d say she does have a point.”

“Where are the Glendower documents?” Polly said. Colin felt her energy and anger.

Prosser glanced at his watch. “Are you free for a late lunch at the Harvard Club? All will be revealed, I promise you. But I do have an appointment first—”

“There’s a very involved cover-up going on here,” Polly said.

“Patience, my dear,” Prosser said. He puffed on the pipe, produced a wintry smile.

“What about Hugh Brennan?” Chandler said.

Prosser smiled enigmatically: “Lunch, say one-thirty?” He nodded to them and went on past, out of the Yard, leaving the cold sunshine behind.

Beyond the window of the Harvard Club, on the grassy strip dividing Tremont Street which was just beginning to show a niggling but of green, a man and a woman knelt beside a black briefcase of the old-fashioned kind and withdrew a tiny black cat. The woman stood then, hand on hip, and smiled as the man placed the kitten on the ground. It took a few gingerly steps and looked up for comments. Chandler turned away from the window and the scene which reminded him of something that had happened a long time ago and watched Prosser. Though the pinkness had returned to the old man’s face there was still the sunken, less-than-healthy look about him that Chandler had noticed that night in Maine. Chandler watched him sip post-prandial sherry which was brown and translucent in the glass: the small brass Pickwick stood by the ashtray where a freshly packed Dunhill reposed, gleaming. A leather tobacco pouch completed the still life. A cold draught played across the windowsill.

“Well,” Prosser said quietly, “I call that a civilized luncheon. And, Miss Bishop, I appreciated your patience as to my explanations. You’ve told me of your excursion to Cape Breton and you both seem to be taking all these little inconveniences with exceptionally good grace …”

“Not for much longer,” Polly said. “Don’t forget that I’m a reporter. All my professional instincts are giving me a run for my money—I’ve been through the kind of stuff that gets you on the
Today
show—”

“Don’t underestimate me,” Prosser said, smiling faintly. “Your occupation and instincts have been much in my mind lately. Let me anticipate some of your questions, if you don’t mind. Is that all right with you, Colin? In the matter of the Glendower documents, arrangements have been made for them to go to Harvard where they will be buried for another two hundred years with several thousand other documents, collecting dust … the portrait will go to you, Colin, since it is a Chandler … Good. Perhaps first we should deal with your most recent hairbreadth escape, the affair at Stronghold. Oh, yes, I know all about it, the number of dead, the works … you were caught between CIA and KGB raiding parties—no wonder you survived! What a bunch of muttonheads!”

“But what makes you so sure?” Chandler blurted. “How could—”

“Please, Colin. It will be easier if I just tell you what’s been happening. No matter how queer you think this all has been, you can’t even imagine how queer the truth actually is. You wouldn’t ask the right questions, you see. Go back to the night at my place in Maine. Before that imbecile put on his show—my plan was to salt you two away at Stronghold, give you a couple days of rest while I checked on the Glendower documents, then have Kendrick drop back in on you and bring you back. Simple, a logical plan, though I regret my little falsehood about the oilskin package of newspapers. But you wouldn’t have understood my keeping them while my home was under siege from a band of homicidal maniacs—”

“I still don’t,” Chandler said. “You
were
under siege and you could have been killed and the documents could have been taken.”

“So it would seem, Colin, but appearances are not always quite what they seem. You see, I knew who was laying siege to the house and I had no reason to fear him … quite the contrary, in fact. He had every reason in the world to be afraid of me. I was his boss.” Prosser, enjoying the moment, lit his pipe with a wooden match, watching his two guests past the billowing smoke.