by Mitch Silver
So Scott and Amy found themselves having vending machine coffees they didn’t want at an Exxon just off the interstate. The machine’s lighted graphic showed a pot pouring steaming coffee into a cup through the words “Happy Motoring Café.” It didn’t feel like happy motoring to Amy. Not with the night coming on and Brian Devlin out there somewhere ahead of them and an addict of a cabdriver hunched over, huffing a cigarette about ten feet away while they drank warm brown water. Amy was calculating whether she could read Fleming’s final pages by the light from the vending machine when Sonja abruptly yelled, “Let’s go.”
Back in the car, Scott took Amy’s hands and kissed them, gently. He didn’t let go until they reached the Yale exit off I-95 and Amy needed to point out the way to Edgewood Avenue, just north of the campus. Their house was one of the “painted ladies,” the Victorians that line both sides of the street leading out to the Yale Bowl. Her grandparents had lived in the house for forty years, and now it would be hers and Scott’s.
Sonja saw them first. “Cops.”
Two men were sitting in an unmarked Chevy across from her house. Amy said, “Keep going.” She wanted to talk it over with Scott, but not with Sonja right there. “Take a left on Howe and a right at Elm Street.” Scott understood. They were going to the library.
Amy grabbed a pen and ripped a sheet from the trusty day planner she took from her purse. She wrote, “If they’re at the house, they could be at our Art History offices too,” and showed it to Scott. He nodded.
Sterling Memorial Library is often mistaken by visitors for Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Both are mammoth neo-Gothic structures that take up most of a city block. Both are filled morning to night during the school year with sweating Yalies—one group working on their abs, the other on psych and English lit. Once final exams are over, though, the main library goes on “summer hours” and at five sharp locks up tight. (Unless, of course, you grew up at Yale and have a few tricks up your sleeve.)
Amy had the money out before Sonja had reached the High Street intersection. “Thanks. We’ll get out here.”
The cabbie popped the trunk so Scott could retrieve Amy’s suitcase. The woman, who looked to be a couple of years younger than they were, seemed to have adopted them. “Okay if I smoke on the way back? You’re paying for the ride.”
Stressed as they were, they had to smile. Scott said, “They’re your lungs.” He was pulling the handle out of the bag so he could roll it onto the sidewalk.
Amy hurried around to the driver’s side. “To get back to Ninety-five, stay on Elm and follow the signs.”
“Got it, thanks. And one more thing.” Sonja started the engine. “I’m pretty sure that same Chevy from your house just pulled in a few cars behind us.” She moved out into traffic. “Good luck.”
Chapter 58
When her grandfather died, no one wanted to intrude on the family’s grief with a petty request like the return of his university keys. Later, no one remembered that they hadn’t asked.
Amy and Scott were standing under the sixty-watt bulb that lit the area in front of the side door to Sterling Memorial Library. Amy was fumbling for the key that would open the old-fashioned Schlage lock. Funny how most of the locks at Yale aren’t Yale locks.
In a minute, the thick wooden door heaved inward and they were inside. It was dead quiet, like a monastery. Without the lights on, the place looked and felt monastic too, with its vaulted ceilings and huge spaces.
There would be security guards making their rounds. Guards with walkie-talkies that could summon…who, Devlin? All Amy wanted was a ten-minute piece of all this quiet so she could finish the papers. Then maybe she and Scott could figure out what to do next.
They were quietly moving past the entrance to the stacks when a siren set up its wail directly outside the library’s main doors on High Street. Amy and Scott could see the red light from the dome of the squad car as it intermittently illuminated the one-eighth inch of space between the huge central doors. She could hear footsteps somewhere above them, running along the narrow balcony that looks down on the card catalog area: one of the guards was reacting to the noise.
Still holding on to her suitcase, Amy ran over to the nearest elevator and stabbed at the button. She couldn’t remember if it set off a ringing sound somewhere. It didn’t seem to. The problem was, the elevator itself rumbled on its way down and threw in a few extra thumps when it stopped and opened. Still, with all the noise outside, most likely no one would know where they’d gone.
That was until the guard burst out of the stairwell and switched on the lights. Once the man had crossed in front of the circulation desk, he had a perfect view of the two of them in the open elevator, standing stock-still and looking straight ahead like a Grant Wood portrait, but with an American Tourister two-suiter. The elevator door closed.
Even before they got to the second floor, they could hear the noise a lot of people make when they run into a library at night. Was this the time to go back down and explain? Probably not.
Scott took Amy’s suitcase and got off the elevator as soon as it opened on two, but Amy stayed behind to push all the buttons to the top floor. Maybe it would confuse the police. Maybe it would just delay the return of the elevator to the main floor. Maybe.
Amy knew that she and Scott had the home court advantage. Only people as familiar with the library as they were—which naturally included the security guards but not the city cops—would know you can’t reach the mezzanine floor from the main elevators. Either you run up the little stairway from the second floor as they were doing at the moment, or you use the back elevator.
Next branch of a Fleming decision tree: hide up here among the PQ–PZ books and hope nobody follows you, or keep going and try to take the back elevator down before anyone takes it up? Scott decided for both of them by picking up the suitcase in his two arms and running even faster. “Come on!”
Scott, who was a little gawky when he walked, was beautiful when he ran: head held up, long legs rhythmically interchanging with each other like those of the gazelles on the Discovery Channel.
Amy promised herself that if they ever got out of this, she would exercise every day. And floss. And—
“Come on!” The door to the back elevator was open and Scott already inside, the suitcase still in his arms. His flight response had kicked into overdrive. The door started closing even as Amy was getting in.
Scott pressed L, for the lower level. This elevator was a good deal older than the ones in the main section of the library and it made more noise on its descent. There was an eight-by-ten-inch rectangle of safety glass in the door, so Amy could see how much the car shook from side to side as it dropped. Worse, anyone looking in from the outside could see them. They squeezed themselves into the front corners to minimize their visibility.
Scott reached up to unscrew the naked light bulb from the old sconce in the elevator cab’s ceiling. It was hot. “Bloody hell!” He briefly cradled the scorching bulb in the material of his jacket and then laid it on the floor so he could put his burned fingers into his mouth. But at least it was dark.
Coming down to the main floor, Amy had only a split second to see the top of a man’s head come into view—one with slicked-back, almost black hair—and for her to recognize him: Brian Devlin. And even less time to realize that, if he had pressed the down button, their goose was cooked. The elevator would open and it would be row 39 all over again. Nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide.
But no. They sailed right past him on their way to the lower level. Devlin must have pressed just the up button. Amy and Scott could hear him clearly yell, “What?” as they dropped beneath him. And then, “Where does this thing go?” And, “No, you two stay here.”
There was only one thing to do. As soon as the elevator door opened, run as fast as they could for the door leading to the Cross Campus Library. And that meant keeping the computer case and ditching Amy’s suitcase, leaving it behind to the tender mercies of the New Haven police.
The Cross Campus is usually open later than the main library to accommodate the nocturnal studying habits of the locals, and it’s connected to its big brother on the other side of High Street by a thirty-yard-long tunnel. Amy and Scott ran through the tunnel, leaving behind them the warren of vending machines the students called Machine City and hearing only the sounds of their own running footsteps and ragged breathing.
And then other footsteps were echoing off the corridor walls. One man’s. Who else?
Almost out of breath, Amy and Scott could see the subterranean reading room just ahead and—Thank God for graduate students! Now that Yale College finals were over, the undergraduates had all cleared out, leaving a skeleton crew of graduate students working on their dissertations, playing video games on their cell phones, or just plain sleeping. The librarians had gone home for the day, but at least if anything happened, there’d be witnesses.
Running past the librarians’ desk and then past the shelf of atlases, Scott and Amy came to the Arts and Languages area. Scott was carrying the computer case so Amy could run faster, which by now wasn’t very fast. All over the place there were tables and chairs and stacks of books and backpacks to negotiate. A couple of the students looked up in surprise at the two middle-aged people trying to sprint past them.
Amy and Scott had just reached the narrow interior stairs that lead down to the History and Social Science level as well as the copy machines when Devlin’s voice came from behind them. “Stop or I’ll shoot.” He was aiming Macken’s gun directly at Amy, and he said the words so matter-of-factly, a few people may not have heard them. But Scott knew they had to stop and so did Amy. It was all over.
Chapter 59
No it wasn’t. As Devlin started to walk toward them, all hell broke loose. The students in the probable line of fire tried to take cover under the tables. Others ran for the exit. A few people screamed. And Amy and Scott got a major piece of luck: one of her students from the previous year chose that moment to amble up the stairs from the copiers, holding a couple of art books and totally engrossed in the copies he’d just made. Jordan Something-or-Other. A big guy. Jordan looked up and saw only Amy. “Oh, Dr. Greenberg, I hoped I’d run into you.” Without realizing it, he’d walked exactly between his teacher and the man with a gun: Jordan the human shield. “I’ve hit a bit of a snag and—”
Scott yanked Amy’s arm and pulled her around behind the Romance Languages bookcases. The two of them took off for the fire exit, followed immediately by three of the people who had been crouching under one of the tables. Amy could hear the disappointment in Jordan’s voice as he said, “It’s only a little snag. No biggie…,” which Devlin drowned out with his shout of “Stop or I’ll fire!”
The fire exit on the east side of the sunken library has twenty-four steps leading up to street level. The students behind them were stampeding Amy and Scott upward, but still shielding them from Devlin down below. If security people were monitoring the library, each step was probably leading them closer to the waiting arms of the police.
When they reached the top, they saw that they had come up maybe twenty yards from the main Cross Campus entrances, on the south side of Berkeley College, one of the undergraduate residences. A knot of cops had gathered around the main west stairwell. Apparently, the first reports of a man with a gun had come from the panicked students who’d stumbled out of that side. Good. Two of the people who’d been running behind them, a young man and a woman, now sprinted ahead and up across High Street. A couple of policemen who’d been guarding the entrance to Sterling Library took off after them. Better.
There was a low stone wall nearby. They crouched behind it, totally spent. Music was coming from the college behind them, suggesting some sort of function was under way on this nice spring Tuesday evening. Or maybe just someone’s stereo was turned way up. The deepening shadows were enough to keep Devlin from catching sight of them when he ran up out of the library an instant later. He did see the cops running after two people on High Street and joined in the chase. Another reprieve.
The craziness of their situation wasn’t lost on Amy. She had a sheaf of papers in her computer case—some of them original documents of historical importance—that Devlin wanted and obviously would do anything to get. Maybe if she hadn’t been an art historian, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. Then again, she couldn’t just ditch them somewhere, like behind this stone wall, because Devlin wouldn’t go away without them.
What would Chief have wanted her to do? Just stop and hand them over? Scatter all the pages from the tallest building? Above all, she wanted it to be her choice and not some bully’s. But it wasn’t shaping up that way.
Then again, what debt did she owe Ian Fleming, that she should put herself and Scott in harm’s way? What debt did she owe something as abstract as History, for that matter? What if the world never finds out that the Windsor family had a black sheep? What if they just let sleeping sheepdogs lie?
Across Wall Street, another of those city byways that were closed to vehicles within the Yale campus, Amy could see that the security floodlights on the roof of the administration building had just come on. There was enough light to read by, if you stood right next to the corner of the building. So, two minutes later, Scott was standing guard as Amy, still out of breath from all the running, read Fleming’s final words.
Chapter 60
PROVENANCE
I’m typing this final chapter on my portable in the gazebo here at Goldeneye. When I’m done and on my way home in a couple of months, I’ll tuck the whole thing under my arm and see it securely to rest in a vault I’ve picked out in the Emerald Isle.
Now, for my news. I was quite out of sorts after my lunch with Wallis and I tried to clear my head by walking around the British Museum. It seemed to me, as I stood planted in front of the Elgin Marbles, that too many of the wrong people had found out what I was doing and might try to impeach these pages’ authenticity. My whole intention, as I’ve said, has been to present you with a time capsule that you will open a half century from now in the certain knowledge that all the players concerned have left the stage. I want you, little Amy, to be free to act as your heart and mind direct you.
After a quarter hour or so of staring at them, it dawned on me that the Marbles were trying to tell me something. Not the usual story of ancient Greek gods and heroes. It was something else, something they had in common with the Duke of Windsor’s letter.
In 1806, while Greece was still under the thumb of the Ottoman sultanate, our own Lord Elgin declared himself the protector of the marble statuary of the Parthenon, claiming it as part of our priceless Western heritage. With the sultan’s connivance (and the payment of a hefty bribe) he helped himself to half the pediment and a good chunk of the frieze, literally sawing marble blocks in two. Then he had the sculptures loaded on ships for England. Well, one of the ships sank during a storm and the marbles had to be pulled out of the Mediterranean after two years under water. So, unlike their Greek cousins still sitting in Athens, the pieces I was looking at now in the Museum had gone through many hands to get here. Just as the Duke of Windsor’s letter had been passed from hand to hand.
It suddenly occurred to me that though I had tested Blunt’s forged copy for fingerprints, I had never asked Q to examine the actual, authentic left-hand side of the note, the one that we’d originally lifted from the Friedrichshof that night almost twenty years ago. The one Ann purloined from Blunt’s bank. Would it reveal any prints that hadn’t appeared on its right-hand twin? Did I know everything there was to know?
That was a couple of days ago. This morning, within the past hour, I received a trunk call from my old friend Q back in London
, with the report of the one last test I had asked him to conduct.
Q had been his irascible self when I had given him the sheet of notepaper. “Haven’t I already tested this thing for you? We know the results; I’ve got them right here.”
I was at some pains to explain that what he had tested previously was a forgery, and that this was the genuine article. He gave me a lifted eyebrow every bit as accomplished as Blunt’s had been before he relented. I was to expect his oral report within forty-eight hours. Ann and I were flying that evening to Jamaica, so I gave him my telephone number here on the island and asked him to reverse the charges. Which, ungraciously, he did.
The connection wasn’t a very good one. Q was in a state such as I have never heard before. His first words were almost shouted down the line: “I think I may have one of the prints!”
Well, that didn’t seem awfully remarkable. There must have been many prints on the page. Windsor’s, Hitler’s…
“No, Ian, I may have one of the Prince! A partial thumb and a bit of forefinger. I can’t be sure, there’s so little print to work with. Only a five-point match. Not enough for a court of law, but UNIVAC says it’s Prince Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-
Glücksburg.”
“And just who is Prince Philip Schleswig-
Holstein-whatever–you-said?”
Q’s voice lost its hysteria and assumed its customary tone of disapproval. “Really, Ian, pay attention. He’s Philip, the Prince of Greece and Denmark. The Earl of Merioneth. The Baron Greenwich.”
I’d heard that litany before, but I was slow to put two and two together, so Q did it for me, his excitement rising again with every syllable. “Philip, the Royal Consort. The Duke of Edinburgh. The Queen’s husband, for God’s sake!”