Joan Grenville got out of her chair and knelt on the hearth rug, a foot from where he was standing. She took up a poker and prodded the fire, then turned her head and looked up at him. “Will you be staying here tonight, Mr. Abrams?”
“Tony.” He looked down and saw the smooth white curve of her breasts, ending in the soft pink of her nipples. “I don’t know, Mrs. Grenville. You?”
She nodded. “Yes. Please call me Joan.”
Abrams turned, avoiding Tom Grenville’s eyes, and went to the sideboard although he didn’t want another drink. “Anyone need anything?”
No one answered. George Van Dorn said, “You’re perfectly welcome to stay.”
Kitty Van Dorn added, “No one should travel on the subway to Brooklyn so late.”
“I thought,” said Abrams, “I might actually take a taxi.”
Again there was a silence. Abrams didn’t know if this was amusing or awkward, if it was democracy in action or an act of noblesse oblige. They were trying, but he was getting a bit of a headache.
George Van Dorn found his cigar butt in the ashtray and lit it. “Did Claudia get you everything you needed, Abrams?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Good.” He blew a billow of gray smoke. “She’s a client, you know. Not hired help or anything like that.”
“So she said.”
“Did she?” He settled back in his armchair. “Her grandfather was Count Lepescu—a leader of the Rumanian resistance during the German occupation. I guess that makes her a countess or something. She’s staying here for a while.”
Abrams glanced at Joan Grenville, who was sitting cross-legged contemplating the fire, her dress hiked back to her thighs. Abrams had a vision of a sorority-house weekend at Wellesley or Bennington, lots of beer, junk food, guitars, and chirpy voices. Strewn casually on the chairs was fifty thousand dollars’ worth of ski gear, and strewn casually on the floor were the skiers. There were pert little ski-slope noses and breasts to match, and dozens of pink toes with no nail polish. There was so much straw-colored hair and so many blue eyes that it looked like a cast party for Village of the Damned. There would be a huge red winter sun setting below a snowy-white birch-covered hill, and the fire would crackle. He’d never seen any such thing, but neither had he ever seen his pancreas, yet he knew it was there.
“The Reds grabbed him,” said Van Dorn.
Abrams looked at him. “Who . . . ?”
“Count Lepescu, Claudia’s grandfather. Didn’t like his title. Shot him. Shipped the family to some sort of work camp. Most of them died. Nice reward for fighting the Nazis. War is shit. Did I say that?”
“George,” reprimanded Kitty Van Dorn, “please watch your language.”
“The Russians are shits too. Like to shoot people.” He finished his drink. “After Stalin croaked, what was left of the Lepescus were released. Claudia’s father wound up in a factory. Married a factory girl, and she gave birth to Claudia. The father was rearrested and disappeared. The mother died a few years ago. We’ve been trying to get Claudia out for some time.”
“Who’s been trying?”
“Us. We finally shipped her out last autumn. Working on a citizenship now.”
“Why?”
Van Dorn looked at Abrams. “Why? We owed. We paid.”
“Who owed?”
“O’Brien, Kimberly and Rose.”
“I thought you meant your old intelligence service.”
No one spoke. Tom Grenville walked to the window. “The car’s out front. Maybe we should get moving.”
Van Dorn looked at his watch. “Where the hell is Claudia, anyway? It takes that girl forever to get dressed.”
Abrams put his drink on the mantel. “She’s coming?”
“Yes,” answered Grenville. “What table are you at?”
“I think it’s table fourteen.”
Tom Grenville’s eyebrows rose. “That’s with O’Brien and Katherine.”
“Is it?”
Van Dorn flipped a cigar ash in his glass. “That’s my table, too. The firm took eleven tables this year. We used to take twenty or thirty. . . .” He stubbed out his cigar. “One of you ladies should go hustle her highness along.”
Claudia came into the small room wearing a black silk evening dress with silver shoes and bag. “Her highness is ready. Her highness’s ladies-in-waiting are on strike. Her highness apologizes.”
Kitty Van Dorn said, “You look absolutely stunning.”
Abrams thought he would have bet a week’s paycheck that someone was going to say that.
Claudia looked at Abrams. “Will you ride with us?”
Abrams nodded. “If there’s room.”
Van Dorn said, “Plenty of room. Let’s go.”
They put on their coats and stepped into the cool wet night. A stretch Cadillac was waiting at the curb, and a chauffeur in gray livery held open the door. Abrams climbed in last and took a jump seat facing the rear.
George Van Dorn found the bar quickly and began to make himself a drink. “This stuff seems to taste better in a moving vehicle—boats, planes, cars . . .”
Kitty Van Dorn looked apprehensive. “It’s going to be a long evening, George.”
Joan Grenville said, “Not if he keeps drinking like that.” She laughed, and Abrams saw Tom Grenville kick her ankle.
As the car moved off, Van Dorn raised his glass. “To Count Ilie Lepescu, Major Henry Kimberly, Captain John Grenville, and to all those who are not with us tonight.”
They sat in silence as the limousine made its way up Park Avenue. Claudia leaned forward and rested her hand on Abrams’ thigh. He sat back and regarded her. She looked vaguely Semitic in the dim light, and he thought it was his fate to become involved with women who were mirror images of himself. There were no Joan Grenvilles or Katherine Kimberlys in his life, and there were not likely to be. Which, he thought, was probably—definitely—for the best.
George Van Dorn looked as if he were going to propose another toast but instead handed Abrams his glass. “Kill it,” said Van Dorn.
His wife patted his hand as though he’d done something fine and noble. Van Dorn, too, looked pleased with himself for resisting the temptation to arrive at a destination with most of his faculties impaired.
Yet there was something about Van Dorn that belied his outward self-satisfaction and shallow good fellowship. Abrams saw it in his eyes, in Van Dorn’s manner when Van Dorn and O’Brien were together. Patrick O’Brien did not suffer fools, and therefore Van Dorn was no fool. He was part of that inner circle that Abrams called the Shadow Firm—the other O’Brien, Kimberly and Rose, the one that defended intelligence agents pro bono and sent and received encoded telex messages. George Van Dorn was one of the few people who had access to the room marked DEAD FILES.
Abrams lit a cigarette. He was, he thought, good at mysteries. That had been his job and his life. He’d never tired of the mysteries—he’d tired of the solutions, which were, in almost every case, insipid, disappointing, and commonplace.
If he’d had a flaw as a detective, it was this tendency to imagine or hope that at the end of the trail there would be something interesting or complex. But there never really was. The human drama was more often unintended comedy; the motivations for human action were depressingly trivial.
Still, he had followed the clues and had run the foxes to ground and accepted the pat on the head, while wishing the fox had been a larger beast that when cornered would fight back with the same cunning it had shown in evading him. He had always wished for a dangerous beast.
If one analyzed and thought about it—which he had been doing since the first of May—then there were logical explanations for every suspicion he had about this firm. Yet it was the sheer mass of circumstantial evidence that, in a cumulative form, refused to be explained away. He was still too much of a cop to ignore what he saw, what he felt, and what O’Brien had said to him on the observation roof.
The car slowed as it approached the mass of veh
icles around the armory.
Abrams stubbed out his cigarette. Yes, tonight would be revealing. And on Monday, Memorial Day, when he entered the Russian estate in Glen Cove, he might have some answers.
The driver got out and opened the curbside door.
George Van Dorn announced, “Last stop.”
Abrams got out first and walked by himself to the sidewalk. He had the gut feeling that the Carbury business was not just another of O’Brien’s odd cases but was a piece in the larger puzzle. Carbury, O’Brien and Company, these people from 36th Street, the OSS, Katherine Kimberly, Glen Cove, and O’Brien’s musings about Wall Street being vaporized. What a jumble of clues and pieces. But if you twisted and turned them a bit, he was certain, they would all start to fall into place.
14
Katherine put her street clothes neatly inside her suitcase. The beige guest room had a forlorn look, and for all its luxury there was something of the government facility about the entire apartment. She had a few minutes before she had to dress for dinner. She lay down, naked, on the bed, stretched, and yawned.
Peter Thorpe’s adoptive father, James Allerton, actually owned the apartment and the furnishings. Peter’s late adoptive mother, Betty, had decorated all the rooms sometime before the war, when it had been her home. Many of the pieces were antiques or had become so in the intervening years. There were original Turners on the walls, bought in the 1930s when Turner was out of fashion and the world was out of money. There were also sculptures by Rodin and a Gobelin tapestry. If one thought to put a price tag on the artwork here, it would exceed a million dollars. Yet, to the best of her knowledge, not so much as a towel had ever been missing despite the heavy flow of transients. This was one company from which one did not steal.
Katherine thought of the housekeeper, Eva, a Polish woman in her fifties. Katherine reflected that the housekeepers changed periodically as a direct consequence of the political or military situation’s going to pieces somewhere. For the last few years there had been Polish women. For a long time before that there had been Southeast Asian women. Before her time, she imagined, there had been Hungarians, Cubans, Czechs. They were, she thought, women who had made a political and moral decision to risk their lives for an ideal. They had betrayed their country and were therefore traitors, and were traditionally treated with ambivalence and suspicion by all intelligence agencies. But Eva and the rest of them were owed something by the Company, and the Company paid.
And what these women lacked in housekeeping ability, they made up for in dedication; in any case, a day maid did the real work, and the housekeepers mostly wrote their reports or memoirs and kept an eye on the guests. This was the looking glass through which Katherine had to pass every time she stepped out of the elevator.
Katherine went to the dressing table and absently arranged her makeup, then looked into the wall mirror. Her hair was in disarray, and there was a small scratch on her neck, a result of their lovemaking.
On an emotional level she knew this place was all wrong, but on an intellectual and professional level she accepted it. What went on when she wasn’t here fell into that very gray area of expedient morality, sanctioned by national security. What went on here was also none of her business. On the other hand, it might be. She thought about the third floor.
She rose and walked to the bathroom. She listened for the sound of the shower on the opposite side of the wall but heard nothing. She opened the medicine cabinet and saw a bottle of astringent, which she dabbed on her neck. “Damn.”
Katherine heard a hallway door shut and walked quickly into the bedroom. She peered through a fisheye peephole and saw Peter Thorpe, dressed in his evening clothes, rapidly descending the staircase. She opened the door and stepped out. She was about to call after him but decided against it.
She began to shut the door, then paused. A few doors down was the narrow staircase that led to the third floor of the triplex. She took a robe from her closet and stepped into the hall.
Katherine climbed the narrow, unlit staircase and stood at the top landing, facing a door made of some type of synthetic material. There were two Medeco cylinder locks on the door and probably an alarm device as well. She hesitated, then turned the knob and pushed. The heavy door swung inward, and she took a step into the room.
The long garretlike room was not fully illuminated, but there were eerie blue-white fluorescents hanging above ten or twelve different machines positioned around the room. Katherine identified a telex, a shortwave radio, a stock printer, several video screens, a computer terminal, and something that could have been a polygraph. In a far corner was a table on wheels, a hospital gurney with loose straps hanging from it. She did not like the looks of that.
The other machines, large and small, she could not identify. She stepped farther into the room and let the door close quietly.
Her eyes grew accustomed to the uneven light, and she noticed, almost directly in front of her, a large electronic console of some sort. Behind the console sat a figure. The figure rose and turned toward her.
Katherine caught her breath and stepped backward toward the door.
“Yes?”
Katherine let out a long breath. It was Eva. The tall, big-boned woman with stringy gray hair moved toward her.
Katherine partially regained her composure. “I’d like a look around.”
“Mr. Thorpe permits this?” Eva came closer.
“I never asked.”
“I think you have no business here.” She stood directly in front of Katherine.
Katherine had to look up to meet Eva’s eyes. She felt exposed, defenseless, with her arms wrapped around the robe to keep it from falling open. Katherine controlled her voice. “And you do?”
“I work here. For Mr. Thorpe. Not the same way as you—”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“Pardon me . . . my English . . . that maybe sounded—”
“Good evening.” Katherine summoned her courage and turned her back on the woman. She reached for the doorknob, half expecting to be restrained, but wasn’t. She opened the door and stepped onto the landing.
Eva followed. She took a key from the pocket of her housecoat and quickly double-locked the door, then caught up to Katherine on the stairs. “It was not wise to enter that room.”
Katherine didn’t answer. She descended at a normal, carefully measured pace.
“This is secret, this room. Government secret. Mr. Thorpe has not told you?”
Again Katherine didn’t answer. She reached the balcony and turned toward Eva. Eva stood a few feet away, towering a full head over her. With a barely discernible movement, Katherine assumed a guarded stance.
Eva seemed to notice, and a smile passed over her thin lips. She spoke in a tone that a teacher would use in lecturing a child. “In my country you would be shot for spying.”
“We are not in your country. We are in my country.”
Eva seemed slightly annoyed, then resumed an impassive attitude. “True. But I must make the report.”
“Do what the hell you want.” Katherine walked quickly past the woman and went to her bedroom. She closed the door, then looked out through the peephole and saw Eva’s face very close, staring at the door. Katherine hesitated over the bolt, then angrily threw it shut. At the sound of the bolt, Eva smiled and turned away.
Katherine sat on the edge of the bed. She was upset, humiliated, furious. Never again would she make love in this apartment. In fact, she thought, she would never set foot in the place again. Her eyes rested on a bottle of chilled Principessa Gavi left on the night table. She pulled out the cork and poured the wine into a long-stem glass, then drank it.
Katherine settled herself back in a chaise longue and closed her eyes. She steadied herself and tried to clear her mind. No, she thought, it would be wrong not to come back. She owed Peter at least that degree of trust, she told herself. Also, she was curious. More than that, Patrick O’Brien had suggested in a very oblique way that h
e found Peter, and Peter’s operation, a bit odd.
She felt herself drifting off, and her mind became confused. . . . There was a key somewhere; she’d always felt that. A key such as Eva possessed, and which Arnold possessed, and it was a master key to many locks, many doors and closets and chests. And inside were secrets and ciphers, skeletons and scandals. Everyone else seemed to know this—O’Brien, Peter, James Allerton, her sister, Ann, her sister’s fiancé, Nicholas West. . . . Her father had known it too, and Colonel Carbury knew it. It was like a great family secret that the children sensed but did not know, that the adults lived with but never mentioned.
Tonight, she thought, they would hold a family council. Tonight little Kate would be told.
15
Peter Thorpe walked into the second-floor cocktail lounge of the University Club and sidled up to the bar. “Good evening, Donald.”
The bartender smiled. “Evening, Mr. Thorpe.”
“Sorry about the other night.”
“Hey, no problem.”
“I remember looking into the bar mirror there. . . . I saw myself leaning into a force-ten gale wind that no one else in the room seemed to feel.”
The bartender laughed. “What’s your pleasure?”
“Just a wimp water, please.”
The bartender laughed again and poured a Perrier.
Thorpe pulled a copy of the Times toward him and flipped through it. “I can’t believe the number of murders committed in this town. Crazy.”
“Yeah, but most murders involve people who know each other. Did you know that? And not our kind of people, either. Banjos and bongos.”
“Banjos and bongos?”
Donald smiled as he polished a glass. “Yeah, you know.” He looked at a Hispanic busboy near the tables and lowered his voice. “Blacks and Ricans. Banjos and bongos.” He winked.
Thorpe smiled back. “You have an excellent command of the modern vernacular, Donald, and a good ear for idioms and jokes. I loved the definition of a woman. Have any more?”
“Yeah. What do you get when you cross a black with a Frenchman?”
The Talbot Odyssey Page 10