Claim the Crown

by Carla Neggers

  “Thirty years ago, we were both forced to run,” the man in black said quietly. “To protect ourselves, perhaps to protect others, we ran from the truth. From finishing this.”

  “No.” She slammed the suitcase shut. “No, dammit. I’m already being manipulated by Crockett and Balaton. I won’t be manipulated by you. I don’t owe you a thing. If anything, you owe me. Now get out.”

  His gaze was level and enigmatic, unforgettable. She noticed the deep lines in his face, the toughened skin, the calluses on his browned, blunt hands. “I am not here to force you to do anything,” he said. “You are right: you owe me nothing. But what do you owe yourself, Lillian? What do you owe the memory of your friendship with Judith Land?”

  “I don’t deserve anything—and Judith was stubborn and reckless. She was my friend, and I loved her. But I know what she was. And she’s dead.”

  “Sometimes we cannot choose what we must do.”

  “Don’t get self-righteous with me. I know the lies you’ve told.”

  He nodded solemnly, his eyes never leaving her face. “You must do as your conscience dictates.”

  He started to leave.

  Lillian put out a hand, but didn’t touch him. “Wait—what about you?”

  He refused to answer.

  “Ashley and David—they call you Barky. It’s difficult to imagine you with them. Raising them from infancy. Did you bounce them on your knee? Change their diapers? Play the tooth fairy and Santa Claus? I almost envy you, Bartholomew Wakefield.” She dropped her hand. “I don’t want anything to happen to them. Please. Save them.”

  He turned. “Then you must help me.”

  A pain started inside her, low, deep. She was having trouble breathing, but the man in black made no move toward her. She found the strength to stand up straight. “I could be ruined, you know.”

  “You could be killed.”

  She felt the blood draining from her face. “What can I do?”

  “You can stop MacGregor Stevens. He will be on Badger Rock Island tomorrow.”

  22

  The bath was Jeremy’s idea. He had said, blandly enough, that he was tired and stiff and, frankly, smelled. And, innocently enough, she had shown him to the bathroom adjoining her room. It was the one with the big tub, she’d said, and she pointed out her shelf of bath salts and potpourri and oils.

  “Anything that produces bubbles?” he asked.

  “The milk bath.”

  “Shall we try it?”

  She met his eyes. “We?”

  He smiled. “Shame to waste hot water and bubble bath on just one person. What would Barky say?”

  “We never had bubble baths.”

  “I should have guessed.”

  “In the winter, we’d heat water on the wood stove and use that.”

  “The virtues of frugality.” He was standing so close. “I suppose you feel guilty every time you fill the tub more than two inches?”

  She grinned. “Unless it’s for a good cause.”

  “And what would a good cause be?”

  “My physical and mental well-being.”

  He kissed her softly. “Then turn on the faucet and get your clothes off.”

  The bathwater was still hot when they could stand it no longer, and they fell onto the cool sheets of her huge bed. Their skin was damp and soft from the bath. She kissed him lightly, everywhere, and then he lifted her by the hips and brought her toward him, so that she was leaning over him, her hair dangling nearly in his mouth. And she realized she enjoyed him for who he was, for his argumentativeness and his unreasonableness and his pigheadedness, and for his intelligence and his sense of humor and his strength of personality—and for the way he poked fun at her faults, without ever asking her to change. And his eyes, of course. She adored his eyes.

  “What are you smiling about?” he asked, holding her still.

  “You.”

  And they made love. Ashley did things she had never done before, because she didn’t want the feeling to stop, the sensations, the waves of passion that drowned the questions and the ugly presence of reality. Over and over she threw herself into him, deeper and harder, with the sort of wild reckless abandon that springs from wanting and fear and love. Finally, they were both spent, and they snuggled close together, warm and sweaty, smelling of each other.

  Jeremy smiled. “I take back what I said.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re not a prude.”

  It was right that they should be together, she thought. For no one else, then, could have made her smile. She buried her face in his chest, and she hoped he wouldn’t be able to distinguish their perspiration from the tears that streamed down her cheeks.

  She felt his breathing change as he fell asleep. A little while later, exhaustion overcame her, and she, too, slept.

  * * *

  Sarah let David talk her into spending the night at the farm, and, because of his leg, she cooked supper for him, on the wood stove. They ate fried apples and ham and butternut squash from the garden, and she told him about life as a Balaton, and he told her about life as a Wakefield. The Liechtenstein trust hadn’t changed him, she decided. He was so tall and sinewy and wild looking, and she shuddered when she thought of what it would be like to have his brown callused hands on her breasts. He wouldn’t be a three-minute bang. He would give as much pleasure as he took. But his leg—damn his leg.

  “Are you going to tell me how you broke your leg?” she asked as she did the dishes. She’d banished him to a chair at the big pine table.

  With a shrug, he grinned and said, “Rampaging cow.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Then you wouldn’t believe a rampaging chicken, either.”

  She laughed at his irreverence: he was well aware she knew he was lying, and just didn’t give a damn. “I hope it’s nothing I caused.”

  “You were a thousand miles away in Houston when this happened. Go easy on yourself, Sarah.”

  “That’s something I’ve never been able to do,” she admitted wistfully.

  “Too many standards to live up to.”

  “And nowhere I belong.” She placed a plate, a supermarket special, in the rack; the water was hot and sudsy. “When I was a little girl, there were days—lots of days—when I would have traded all my parents’ wealth for an obscure ranch house in a middle-class suburb, someplace where there were parents who really loved each other and neighbors you could count on to be there for twenty or thirty years and with whom you could trade recipes and whose kids you’d play with. I’ve never had the identity a sense of place can give you—that feeling of roots.”

  David nodded. “And no one sympathizes with you because you’re rich.”

  “Most of my friends have backgrounds similar to mine, but they don’t see themselves as rootless. They say I look at things the wrong way. I don’t belong to a place, I belong to a group—and that’s just as special. It’s a different kind of community, that’s all. We can afford to move around and have friends in faraway places. We don’t have to rely on a geographical community.”

  “Not me. I’m tied to the land. Guess I always will be.”

  “What about people?”

  “They’re around.”

  She smiled at him. “I sensed that about you, David. It’s an appealing quality. What about your sister? I don’t see her as someone who’d drive a beat-up Land Rover with a ‘Massachusetts grown and fresher’ bumper sticker on it.”

  “Nah. She’s got a Jeep.”

  They both laughed, and finally he got up on his crutches and hobbled through the living room to the stairs. “Ash’s room is the one with the blue-flowered wallpaper. Mine’s the one that smells like chicken crap and looks like a pigsty.” He grinned. “Take your pick.”

  “Where will you sleep?”

  “Barky’s room. I’ll keep the fires going so you don’t freeze your ass off in the morning.”

  She couldn’t quell the giddiness she felt at standing s
o close, smelling the male sweat on him. “I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re too good to be true.”

  “No, I’m not. I can be just as big a jackass as the next guy. But I’ve learned to go on and be myself. That’s what I like my friends to do, too.”

  “I hope we can be friends.”

  “We already are.”

  “So easily?”

  “I’m a quick judge of character. Night, Sarah.”

  “Good night.”

  He was right: his room did stink of farm smells, and it was a glorious mess. She gathered up some of the clothes on the floor and took them into the bed with her, and she held them close as she snuggled down in the lumpy mattress, into the hole that had been made over the years by his long body. She stared out across the moonlit room, listening to the quiet of the night breeze rustling in the trees, and she felt the loneliness inside her.

  23

  At the blare of her intercom, Ashley stumbled out of bed, grabbing her ratty bathrobe. Adrenaline rushed through her, quickening her pulse and making her hands shake. Her bruised neck ached. Funny, she thought, how it hadn’t bothered her in bed. She pressed down the intercom button in the foyer. “Yes?”

  “It’s MacGregor Stevens.”

  Ashley froze.

  Jeremy walked down the hall, stark naked. She told him who it was, but added, “Unless he’s lying.”

  “Ask him his wife’s name.”

  She did. The static-distorted voice said, “Elaine Melanie Stevens.”

  “It’s him.”

  She buzzed him up. Jeremy put on his jeans and met her in the living room. When the knock at the door came, she insisted on opening it herself; it was her house.

  The clear-eyed, confident man who walked in surprised her. Somewhere, MacGregor Stevens had found clean clothes, and he’d managed to bathe and shave. There was considerable discoloration at the back of his neck—although she hadn’t been hit as hard, Ashley could sympathize—but the rest of his color was good. He appeared to have gotten more sleep in the past few days than she or Jeremy had.

  Of course, she thought, spies could probably sleep through anything.

  She offered him the wingback chair; she herself sat next to Jeremy on the camel-back sofa. She was wide awake.

  “What is it, Mac?” Jeremy asked.

  Mac took out a pack of cigarettes and looked at Ashley for approval. She nodded, although normally she wouldn’t have permitted smoking in her apartment. There was nothing normal, however, about meeting a former intelligence officer in the dead of night.

  “I want you both to get the hell out of this,” he said as he patted out a cigarette.

  Ashley kicked out her bare feet and stretched her toes. “At least you and my uncle agree on something. What are you going to use for persuasion, Mr. Stevens? More lies?”

  Jeremy leaned forward. He was bare chested in the cool night; Mac Stevens would have to be an idiot, Ashley reflected, not to have guessed already what had been going on earlier in the evening. Jeremy said, “You know we’re going to Maine tomorrow?”

  “That’s right. And I’m here to persuade you to change your minds.” He looked at Ashley. “By telling you the truth.”

  “As you know it,” Ashley nit-picked, watching him light his cigarette with a cheap disposable lighter.

  “You’re an attractive woman, Miss Wakefield, but difficult. I probably should have told you the truth from the beginning. I have the feeling you’re a survivor. Am I right?”

  She looked at him in irritation. “Suppose you just talk?”

  He blew out a cloud of smoke. “I met the man who calls himself Bartholomew Wakefield thirty years ago, in Budapest, Hungary. Your ‘uncle.’” His eyes were mocking. “As you’ve perhaps deduced, he’s neither English nor Polish and he never had a brother named Richard or a sister-in-law named Mary Winston. He’s Hungarian. Thirty years ago, I knew him only as orült szerzetes. The mad monk.”

  Ashley said nothing. Numbly, she got up and went into the kitchen for an ashtray, and handed it to Stevens. He looked up at her with compassion in his face, but he didn’t smile. She sat back down in another chair so that they were in a triangle.

  “I was in Budapest on a special mission.” Mac flicked an ash into the bowl. “In the mid-fifties, I traveled between West Germany and Austria, doing legal work—intelligence gathering, I suppose you could say—for the United States. I knew languages, and I knew the situation in Hungary. Our people thought the revolution might succeed without our direct involvement—at best, wishful thinking. We were too intent on seeing even the Communist reformers as the enemy. But that’s neither here nor there. I’ll let history speak for itself on that score.”

  He paused, dragging deep on his cigarette, and when neither Ashley nor Jeremy interrupted, went on, his tone unchanged. “I was asked to go to Budapest to help one of our people there get out—someone who was in an untenable situation with both the Soviet Union and the revolutionaries. It was supposed to have been an easy job, but, of course, the revolution turned into a bloodbath—and I was in deep over my head. I had to act—fast, secretly, successfully. I couldn’t screw up. I’d heard about this Hungarian, this mad monk who had been a legend during the Stalinist era. He was said to have been one of the few to escape Recsk prison alive, and for ten years had been a thorn in the side of the Hungarian secret police, sort of a modern-day Scarlet Pimpernel.”

  “Was he actually a monk?” Jeremy asked.

  “He was—is—a traitor, a murderer, a torturer and a thief.”

  Ashley could neither move nor speak.

  “Ashley.”

  It was Jeremy. His voice seemed to come from a distance. She wouldn’t look at him. Barky was a farmer, she repeated to herself. He didn’t know anything about spies and mad monks. He wouldn’t know how to murder someone.

  The image flashed in her mind, treacherously, of Barky’s sharpened butcher knife slicing through the hen’s neck. The scrawny headless body racing madly across the yard. Blood spurting. Barky grabbing the carcass, plunging it into hot water, plucking the feathers.

  She grabbed her stomach, suddenly nauseated, sweating, trembling, pale.

  “I went to him,” Mac said. “I had no choice. I had to trust him. And he agreed to help. He made all the arrangements for the escape, and then he asked me to follow his instructions—no questions asked. On the night we left, he refused to come along. He couldn’t, he said, but he wouldn’t give any explanation. He’s not the type to bother with such trivia. By then, it was too late to abort. We were desperate.”

  “How many people were involved in the escape?” Again, it was Jeremy who thought of the question.

  “Four, including myself.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were betrayed. Just before we got to the border, a search party found us. The others had gone on ahead. I tried to buy them some time. I was shot. The soldiers left me for dead—and so did the others. To this day I don’t know how they did it, but they got away.”

  Jeremy had paled. “And you?”

  Mac patted out another cigarette. “I was found by some Hungarians making their way to Austria. They brought me to a nearby village, and I was hidden and nursed back to health by an old widow—or that’s the story I was told, at least. I remember very little. I nearly died, Jeremy. There was no hospital, no medicine. If I’d been caught by the Russians...well, God only knows what they’d have done. Certainly they could have made great political hay with my presence there.”

  “But you weren’t found.”

  “No.”

  “And you’re positive this ‘mad monk’ is the one who betrayed you?”

  “There’s no other explanation.”

  Jeremy nodded. “But you got out.”

  “I was able to escape across the border the following March.” He lit his cigarette, dragged deep, exhaled at the ceiling. “By then, the Soviets had mined the border and there were regular patrols—it was even more treacherous. When I returned to
the West, my career was in ruins, and as far as I was concerned, my life was over. I went out to San Diego. I met Elaine, and she gave me a new life. I started over. That’s it. That’s the whole story.”

  Ashley didn’t believe that for a minute and, loosening the grip on her stomach, managed to ask, “Who were the three you got out of Hungary?”

  He shook his head. “Can’t say.”

  Jeremy exploded. “Mac, you haven’t explained anything. If Bartholomew Wakefield is the mad monk, how did he get out of Hungary? When? How did he get hold of Ashley and David as infants? Who the hell are they? Why did he choose to raise them? Why has he been living the life of a simple farmer for thirty years?”

  “Thirty years ago, Jeremy, I gave up any hope of finding the man who betrayed me. I gave up the idea of revenge, of bringing him to justice. I satisfied my conscience by telling myself he was dead and I would have to forget the past and build a new life. So that’s what I did. Then I saw his picture in You magazine.”

  “Mac.” Jeremy regarded his friend seriously, closely. “Mac, are you sure?”

  Mac smiled nastily. “You don’t easily forget the face of the man who sent you into a hell that only by the grace of God and the love of a good woman you escaped.”

  “All right. So he’s the mad monk. So he betrayed you. You must have some clue about what he wants out of this, who he is—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Mac!”

  “All right.” Angrily, he stubbed out his cigarette. “My best guess is he’s KGB.”

  Ashley simply shut her eyes. More spies, more spooks, more ghouls and goblins. She wouldn’t think. Don’t think...don’t think...don’t think... That’s what she used to say to herself, over and over, when she’d wake up obsessed with thoughts of death. It occupied her mind, and she’d go back to sleep.

  “He’s probably a sleeper,” Mac went on, as if he were talking about someone ordinary, a butcher, a mailman, a farmer. “Or an agent in place—whatever the hell you want to call him. Orült szerzetes was always a lie, a tool of the Soviets. He’ll stop anyone who gets in his way.”