The smaller man called to the big one from the kitchen, asked the other to come out and hurry up. The big man struggled over onto all fours and staggered upright like an apparition from an abattoir, smeared with blood and his face running, melting on the side. He rumbled out of the room and Brennan sank onto the floor himself and crossed on his knees to the sideboard, reached out with the remains of his hands, and picked up the heavy blackthorn shillelagh. He felt nothing but had to wipe the palms of his hands to get a good grip. They should have killed me, he thought, the dumb bastards.
He levered himself into a standing position, passed a mirror on the way to his post in the shadow beside the archway. What looked back frightened him, blood-stained, godawful hands wrapped around the stick, robe lank and wet and hanging open, mouth a black hole. He waited with the patience of the damned until he heard them coming back.
They were walking quickly, talking urgently, but Brennan did not give a damn what they were saying.
He timed his swing perfectly as they came through the archway. He heard himself give a hideous banshee wail, saw the deathly expression of fear on the short one’s face, and felt the fat of the knobbed, gnarled stick catch the big one square in the middle of the face. One second the man was there, the next he wasn’t, and Brennan’s momentum carried him through the archway. As he went, robe half off, he collided with the falling body which was going down limp, the nose and eyes smashed together, the face collapsed inward. The body hit the floor and Brennan collapsed just past it with a red fog across his eyes, the cries of the small man’s terror in his ears.
Then he was gone, hearing nothing … feeling only an instantaneous stab of lightning in his chest …
The old man’s fluttering heart made sleep effectively impossible: at times, like tonight, he felt as if a couple of mice were scampering around his innards like happy, scuttling, anthropomorphic creatures by Walt Disney. He had enjoyed the concert, though the conversation with Liam and Andrew had been far from encouraging, and he had retired early with a Kenneth Roberts novel, Arundel, which had been signed for him years ago by the author and was growing tattered from rereadings. His sherry beside his bed, the thick novel in his lap, and Die Fledermaus on the FM band, the old man sat propped against several pillows trying to ignore the irritating commotion in his chest.
He had managed to shut out his international communications of recent days, had put flaps over the interchange with Sanger; he was losing himself in Roberts’s story of Benedict Arnold. His eyes grew heavy: the inevitable thought followed—go to sleep and you might not awake in the morning. He was so accustomed to it by now that he feared if the notion failed to cross his mind that would be the night without end. Fears. The fears of the old, the infirm … He drifted off but the fluttering woke him and, heavy-lidded, he fought his lonely way through the night.
It was just past three-thirty Sunday morning when the green telephone rang. He winced: those goddamned butchers from out of town! He licked sherry from his lower lip, set the glass down, and picked up the offending object.
“Yes,” he said coldly, his white moustache quivering as he clenched his jaw.
What followed pushed his credence to the limit. He listened earnestly: if his face had held any color in the first place it would have drained away as the recital continued.
“Shut up,” he suggested forcefully. “Whom have you killed? Make it clear because I want to get it absolutely straight. It matters … now, pull yourself together.” In his mind he had already signed the death warrant for these two bunglers, just as he’d promised Sanger. His white eyebrows knitted as he waited for the second telling: “I see,” he said slowly. “You haven’t killed anyone … Ozzie is dead? What do you mean, dead? How?” He reached for a bottle of tiny white pills which, he was convinced, were placebos, though he took them anyway. They never seemed to have the slightest effect. “Professor Brennan killed him … with a stick?” He placed the tiny tablet under his tongue, letting it dissolve. “I don’t mean to seem unkind, you understand, but we must agree that Ozzie certainly ran afoul of higher education this week … No, of course, it’s not funny. But I’d have thought he’d have been able to hold his own with a pair of out-of-shape Harvard professors … Never mind, never mind … You ran, yes I appreciate your situation … You don’t know whether Brennan is alive or dead … This was Ozzie’s idea of an interview, I take it, a few hours of intense torture. I see … Let me say that he deserved killing, Mr. Thornhill. I only wish I could have had a hand in it …” He sipped sherry. “Calm yourself, for heaven’s sake. I know he was your partner but that doesn’t make him any less the homicidal maniac, if you see my point … Now, I want you to get to the safe house, do you understand? What? You know where Chandler’s gotten to? … All right, do nothing, I say, do nothing … no, do not go to Kennebunkport … Thornhill? Thornhill? …”
He replaced the telephone and shut his eyes, stroking the white moustache. “God damn you, Thornhill,” he whispered, wondering what in the name of God he was supposed to do now. He wished he knew how many bodies were cluttering up Brennan’s house in Cambridge. He supposed he would have to find out … And what about the elusive Chandler?
Andrew Fennerty’s tight little mouth had drooped open slightly and a small tobacco-stained chip of tooth showed through between his lips. Behind his round glasses his lids were closed; behind his lids his eyes were flickering rapidly as he slept. He had developed deep purple pouches which made him look like a sick man. He lay fully clothed but for his heavy brogans on his bed at the Ritz-Carlton; he had drawn a blanket up as far as his belt. On the other bed Liam McGonigle lay on his side with his back to Fennerty. His snores were hearty and rasping and may have been the cause for Fennerty’s rapid eye movement.
The telephone brought him awake like a kick in the ribs. The little ferret’s eyes clicked open like a doll’s and he struggled to sit up, further entangling himself in the blanket. An attacker would already have killed him by that time and Fennerty was well aware of it, proving to himself once again what he already knew: he was too old for this crap and belonged at his desk where they had put him until CRUSTACEAN had gotten the wind up and called for him.
He knew perfectly well that it would be the old man himself on the telephone.
“Andrew,” the distant voice said, free of emotion and sounding tired, “I want you to check Brennan’s house … I thought I had made that utterly clear.”
“But we’ve been there,” Fennerty said. His mouth was dry and he reached for the warm, dust-laden tooth glass full of water on the stand between the beds. “We used that miserable shotgun mike and believe me, Brennan was watching television and sneezing. Nothing else.”
“Don’t try me, Andrew. Do as I say. You will find that a somewhat different situation obtains. Don’t argue, just do as I say, and let me know precisely what you find. Do you understand? Precisely.”
“Yes, I understand.” Fennerty sensed a spasm or two of adrenalin; it wasn’t the quick business it once had been, though.
“Point two, then. I’ve discovered that Chandler may be holed up at a resort hostelry on the Kennebunk coast, the Seafoam Inn.” The old man sounded—what was it?—nervous. Fennerty couldn’t recall such an instance in the past. They were all getting older. “Lum and Abner may know—”
“Lum and Abner?”
“Wake up, Andrew. The two gentlemen we’ve been observing, or trying to observe. They may know where Chandler is and I think they’ve contracted bloodlust, like sharks, I sense a pink thrashing about … So, you’d better get a move on. Andrew?”
“Yes …”
“I’m not quite sure but I believe what I’m saying is this—if Chandler gets killed it will be your asses. Chandler and the TV woman, Polly Bishop, he’s got with him—I want them kept alive … and do what you can to relieve him of his package …”
“Which is more important at this point,” Fennerty said peevishly, “the people or the package? If I have to make a choice, that is?”
But he received no answer. The line was dead.
Fennerty lay rumpled and confused for several moments, wondering what the hell it was all about, what he was seriously supposed to do. It was so jumbled, chaotic, and in the field you never saw it all, but only the little funny-shaped pieces that gave no clue as to the whole. In the field you knew what you were working on, the rest was all a blur, and he supposed it had always been that way. Of course it had. And that was why he wanted to get the hell out of the field forever and into an office where you could feel like a grown-up. It was about time.
He had once known a man who played football for the Washington Redskins, an elderly man for a football player, nearly forty with a face that looked closer to fifty, particularly around and behind the large, vulnerable, hurt brown eyes. And the man had once told him what it was like out there on the field.
“Andy,” he’d said softly, peaceably, as they sat on the player’s town house patio in Georgetown, “you’re just a fart and you believe all that shit you read about football … the six hundred plays in the old playbook, the infinite variations, the blocking styles, the fine timing, the incredible finesse and skill, all the human chess game crap. Well, that’s all a load, Andy, the intellectualization of football, making it all respectable, so that assholes like Nixon can turn football slang into the words used to describe foreign policy …” He’d made a disgusted face but he never raised his voice, just kept the slow jock’s drawl coming, slippery with Wild Turkey. “Football is about one thing and only one thing, Andy. It’s about kicking ass.” He had chuckled softly to himself. It had been spring and he’d probably already known he was through, going to retire. “Nothing fancy. Just blood and pain and half of the guys foaming at the mouth from some kind of dope, eyes like pinheads … fuckin’ jungle, Andy, total chaos, and while we’re up there grubbing around in the dirt and piss with bloody crap dripping out of noses, we don’t know what the hell is going on in the game as you see it. And if we make sure they hurt more than we do, well, hell, about four o’clock on Sunday afternoon we wipe the shit out of our eyes and look up and people are standing and cheering and that means we won …”
Fennerty had often thought of that speech, treasured it in his memory, wished he’d had a recording of it, because it could have been him talking about his own job. It could have been Andrew Fennerty telling somebody what it was like to work for The Company. But you could never do that. Never. And nobody ever stood and cheered for The Company.
In any case, that was how he felt lying there at the Ritz in the dark with the light from the bathroom glowing softly. Grown man who always slept with a night-light. What would happen if he had to go up against one of the really good ones? One of the Russians’ number one boys? Or, God forbid, one of the Nazis’ lads from Texas or South America or South Africa? He sighed doggedly and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His mind was wandering and he’d have to get a grip on himself. He and Liam had their hands full with these two jerks, Lum and Abner, and a Harvard professor and a woman …
“Liam,” he said, “Liam, old sock, time to get up …”
Chandler woke up slowly hearing the surf and Polly breathing through her mouth on the other bed, not quite snoring. The rest had done him good: his mind felt sharp again, he knew exactly where he was and why and what he had to do. It was just past eight o’clock. He got out of bed gingerly, happily aware that the stiffness wasn’t half bad and the boxed ear felt better. He went to the window, looked out into the gray light filtering through the clouds hanging low over the steely Atlantic. The surf threw itself halfheartedly at the rocky-layered shingle dropping away below the roadway. Lonely gulls dipped and swooped against the cold opaque gray sky. It was quite the loneliest, emptiest vista imaginable.
“It’s obviously a hoax,” he whispered in the stillness. “The British were trying to set him up. Maybe blackmail him … or maybe it wasn’t a hoax, maybe they were already blackmailing him and he had to go along with it, feed them useless information.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “Maybe he could even pick up helpful bits and pieces for his own cause …” Polly moved and turned onto her back, covering her eyes with a hand. Still asleep. No point in waking her yet. He tiptoed across the small room, picked up his bag, and beetled off down the hall to the cold comforts of the unheated bathroom.
In the calm reflections of morning the certainty of the document’s validity seemed to fade, though his memory of the shock at the first sight of the signature remained clear, like the memory of jagged lightning crackling across the innocent summer nights of boyhood. It was quite impossible for him to cope with the fact of George Washington’s treachery: how could it be? He had no more of an answer in the morning than he’d had at night.
He returned to the bedroom, gathered up the documents and the Winthrop Chandler portrait, all of which Polly had brought up and carefully arranged on the chest of drawers. The woman’s face was arresting even across two centuries: it was as if she were watching him. His subconscious was, he knew, addressing itself to the historical problems raised by the documents, while he consciously turned over the more immediate difficulties of his and Polly’s situation.
Downstairs he found Percy Davis in the kitchen banging a couple of black cast-iron frying pans about on the stove. The smell of bacon frying hung tantalizingly in the large room and Percy Davis waved a good morning with a spatula. “I’ve already breakfasted and had a stroll down by the water,” he said with a wintry smile, “I’ll run you up some bacon and eggs, soon as you give me the word.” He drained a cup of tea and jiggled a teakettle on the back burner. “Sleep well? Behave yourself?” His watery eyes danced an instant.
“Too damned tired not to, sir,” Chandler said.
“Mustn’t let Harvard down,” Davis said, straight-faced.
“No need to make this a matter of that import. I do need a telephone.”
“Use the one at the desk. No charge, either.” The dry voice rustled with pleasure. “Excitement does me good. Feel damned fine this morning—takes me back, all this business. Sorry Bill had to die … Ah well, use the phone at the desk. I’ll get some bacon over a low heat.”
“Colin Chandler, as I live and breathe!” Prosser’s ripe sarcasm flooded across the telephone line, fruity and intensely welcome. So worldly, so peculiarly reassuring. “You’ve been a rather naughty boy of late, you know. Harvard doesn’t mind its name in the papers but not as part of this grand guignol farce … bodies all about, the last act of Hamlet. How are you, my boy? And where are you? Well and in a safe, comfy nook, I hope …”
“Well enough and safe enough for the moment,” Chandler began, smiling eagerly as he spoke. Prosser in all his remote, well-heeled, elegant trappings still had something about him of the father Chandler had had to do without most of his life. It was to Bert Prosser that he had brought the trophies of his accomplishments, his scholarly successes, his popular books and articles, and it was Prosser who had sat him down and poured the brandy and shared the congratulatory cigar. It wasn’t that he was close to Prosser: the great man was too much the confidant of heads of state to allow easy access, but Chandler was as close to him as anyone from without the real corridors of power. “But as you’ve been reading, I’ve gotten mixed up in something pretty damned sticky. Frankly, I need your advice … I’m at the end of my string.”
“Nonsense, it only feels that way. But take it from me, there’s always more string than you think—however, I’m at your service, Colin. What’s the story? I’ll help if I can.”
Twenty minutes later Colin’s recital ended leaving him breathless and doubting if he’d made any sense. “God help me, it’s all true,” he said.
“Indeed, I’m sure it is. Most importantly, you and Miss Bishop are safe. Secondly, you have the document everyone seems to want—I think perhaps I can help you there. And there seem to be several people searching for you and it … Delicate situation, on the whole.” Chandler heard him sipping coffee, heard the rustle of papers
. “Always a way out, always a way out. As to this piece of paper, well, I hardly know what to think—is it real, or isn’t it? I’ll have to have a looksee and I still won’t know, I expect. As to what you should do, let me tell you I think speed is of the essence … you must get away from this Seafoam place at once. These birds on your tail, don’t be too sure you’ve left them behind—in my experience, that’s often more easily said than done. They have their means, ways you’ve never dreamed of, connections you’d hardly countenance. Take my advice without so much as a moment’s quibble, dear boy. I’ve got a summer home up north of you, way up there … Johnston, Maine, on the far side of town.” He described the house: “You can’t miss it. It’s empty now—I always leave a key under the stack of wood closest to the door outside the woodshed itself. You’ll find it, just feel around for it. Then get inside, get settled, get a fire going, open a bottle of wine … both of you, of course, make yourselves at home … I’ll be there as soon as I can, just hang on and wait for me. Have you got all that, Colin?”
“Yes, Bert, and I don’t know what to say—I knew you’d have the answer …”
“Hardly the answer, dear boy. But at least we’ll have some time to think and see what we’re about. Now, get going.”
Half an hour later Polly and Chandler were tucking into scrambled eggs with mushrooms and onions, the better part of a pound of extra-thick bacon, English muffins running with melted butter and strawberry jam, and New England coffee served “reg’lar” as Percy Davis called it, meaning with lots of cream and sugar. Percy was quizzing Polly about her job and Chandler was thinking ahead, wanting to get back on the road. Bert Prosser knew about these things; God only knew what kind of inside jobs he’d done for the government back during the forties, and if Bert said not to be too sure the bastards had lost you, then he was right, it was time to get a move on.
The Glendower Legacy Page 18