by Noel Hynd
"Good thinking, anyway," he said.
"About what?"
"Telling him we'll be gone in two hours," said Hammond.
"I suspect," said Thomas, "that we will be. You'll see when we dig the nails out of that box."
Still, the securing of the buried box was an arduous procedure.
A false top had been installed across it, solid beams which pinned it beneath the floor.
The dock dragged. The hours were unyielding.
Hammond remained in the underground mausoleum, watching his workmen slash and chip with their hammers, wedges, and chisels. Thomas and Leslie waited upstairs now, talking in the semidarkness. They held flashlights, carefully pointed away from the windows.
On the top floor the counterfeit had been inspected by Hammond. Yet now it lay ignored, an item of secondary importance.
Thomas and Leslie were in a ground-floor sitting room when they heard Hammond's footsteps on the stairs, walking up from the basement.
"Come on down," Hammond said, though urging was hardly necessary.
"I wouldn't want to miss this if I were you" When they returned through the basement, down the creaking stairs, among the dust-laden furniture and down into the altar room for the Andys, Thomas sensed a strange disquiet in his soul.
The sense that something vile or revelatory was on the brink. He'd never opened a buried box before.
Yet he had an instinct. He sensed what to expect.
When they walked into the room, there were great chunks of concrete stacked beside the altar. Great huge blocks which the two excavators had chipped away. Thomas looked at it.
"Don't worry," said Hammond.
"We recognize the principle of private property. When this is all over, we'll seal up everything like new! He paused and a sly grin crept across the leins of his face.
"Unless we find something we need to keep, of course' ' The huge oak box, discolored with age, was broken free from the concrete. From somewhere one of the excavators produced a slim iron bar with a prying device on one end. Using the hammer, hitting the end of the bar for leverage, he broke the wood and pulled the nails from the top of the box.
"Put the lights on it " said Hammond. Leslie and Thomas shone their lamps downward, onto the wooden top of the box. The two excavators reached to different ends of the lid and forced it up. A nauseating, foul stench wafted upward.
At first there was a creak. Then a crack, and the men seemed to fumble for a second, off balance when the lid came free.
They lifted.
Up it came, and they slid it away onto the concrete to the left of them. The lanterns, and every eye in the room, were directed downward into the contents.
Two dead empty eyes, undisturbed for years, stared upward absently.
The five living souls present gazed into the vacant expression of a skeleton, of one whose life had departed years earlier. Fully clad in a man's suit, the suit which he'd worn when death had come to him.
Thomas felt like throwing up. Hammond looked equally sickened. The men with the hammers and chisels looked upon the discovery with horror.
Leslie, perhaps steadiest of all, studied the skeleton as if to discern its identity. Then she, too, averted her eyes, looking toward the sealed canine tombs.
But the man in the box would not go away. He would have to be dealt with. No one spoke immediately.
Thomas squelched the nauseating feeling in his stomach. He was transfixed by the sight before him; it was so unreal and so unlike any thing he'd ever encountered that, like a crowd jockeying for position around a bloody traffic accident, a morbid streak of curiosity within him was riveted to the coffin. The hollow eyes of the skull transfixed him. The assemblage of teeth, perfectly preserved, seemed to form a ghastly smile.
But the real touch of surrealism was the disintegrating suit on the decaying body, the suit which the owner had worn to his own execution.
Perhaps Thomas sensed an affinity for the man who wore three-piece suits to work. He looked at it carefully, as if he'd seen it before.
Something made him lean down, even though repelled by the odor.
Something instinctively drew him to the corpse.
Hammond watched Daniels's reaction, as if perceiving something.
"What is it?" Hammond asked.
Thomas said nothing. He reached into the box, gingerly touching the stained shirt at the collar, carefully avoiding the neck bone Thomas pulled. Gently, as if in respect for the dead. The skull rolled slightly, as if to change its view. The teeth remained frozen in a grin.
"The identity," said Thomas in a voice shaky and not far above a whisper.
"The second identity that your missing spy slipped into."
Leslie stared distastefully at the skeleton, a sickened feeling growing in her stomach. Hammond did Dot yet understand. Not completely.
"The spy inhabited the identity of another man, Arthur Sandler, in the first nine years after the war," said Thomas.
"Then that didn't work anymore. A new man was put into Sandler's identity That man was killed, freeing the spy. But the spy needed somewhere else to go. A little research, a lot of plastic surgery, an ocean of nerve, and he slipped into another man's life. Who'd look inside another man for a missing spy?" Thomas paused.
"How fast can you get a small airplane?" he asked.
"Within an hour or two answered Hammond.
"From La Guardia Why?" Hammond was frowning, massive bags forming beneath his eyes.
"We'll need it right- away. Your spy is planning his escape. He may already be gone."
"I don't follow."
"Don't you?" asked Thomas, standing.
"It was all over the front pages of the newspapers this week."
"Oh, my God!" Leslie suddenly gasped.
"The fishing fleets!"
Thomas managed a half smile and a nod.
"Exactly." He turned back to Hammond.
"Shine the light in there)' he said, motioning to the oak box and its crumbling inhabitant.
"It reads like an engraved invitation Hammond leaned over. Leslie, transfixed by the sight as much as she was disgusted by it, peered over Hammond's shoulder. They both crouched for a closer view.
At the collar of the suit was a store label, Dunhill Tailors of New York, dated 1954. It had been a new suit. The man who'd worn the suit had been of the opinion that top-quality clothing would last forever and survive even longer than the wearer. Time had proven him correct.
Beneath the tailoes trademark was another label, the client's name. The letters were faded and stained by blood two decades old.
But they were legible.
Hammond and Leslie read at once.
The letters read simply A. ZENGLER.
Part Eight
Chapter 37
"A different man," said Thomas.
"As complex and simple as that."
There was no smile on his face, not even a hint of one. Only tension and fatigue. It was five A.M. They stood, the three of them, on the edge of a small windswept landing field at the Marine Air Terminall" a small sub port of New York's La Guardia Airport. Leslie shivered slightly and pulled her coat tighter. Hammond dropped a half-smoked cigarette, muttered something about having to quit sometime soon, and extinguished the butt with a toe. They watched a small plane belonging to the United States Treasury Department, taxiing slowly toward their end of the runway. It had been fueled, a pilot had been hauled out of bed. The craft was ready.
Hammond motioned with his head toward the small plane, the door to which had opened.
"We're ready," he said.
They walked toward the airplane. Leslie boarded first. Hammond and Daniels stood before the steps to the plane. Hammond reached into his coat and pulled from it a small thirty-eight caliber pistol.
"Know how to' use one of these?" he asked.
"Unfortunately, yes' "Take it."
"Will I need it?"
"I doubt it" "Then I don't want it" Hammond slid it into Thomas's coa
t pocket.
"Keep it as a good luck charm. I'll catch hell in Washington if you go along and I don't equip you with something' "What about you? It's your profession' "I'm protected," Hammond said simply. He was. He wore an identical small handgun on his belt. And within the plane, should it be needed, a specially equipped long-range rifle, disassembled and in its case.
Minutes later, the plane was airborne.
Gradually, his entire life made sense. Thomas understood the man his father had wanted him to become.
As the coastline of the northeast unraveled with infrequent yellow lights below the window of the airplane, Thomas was lost in thought. He had the disquieting sense of having never known his father at all. It was as if he'd spent his life standing too close to a mural, never having stepped back to gain the proper perspective.
The image of the saint in the iron coffin, the one in the church at North Fenwick in Devonshire, appeared before him. The iron image of the man on the outside, the shell presented for the world to see. But within? The soul of an entirely different inner man. And what eyes could see that, obscured as it was by a lead mask and illusory image?
Illusion, never reality, he thought. Distance, never scrutiny. An interior of betrayal and treason, disguised by an iron mask of patriotism.
Thomas understood that his father had never done anything without a reason, other than perhaps being born and dying. subject to (Thomas examined those events, too; everything was question now.) Equally he understood what sort of a man his father had tried to create in his only son. Tried and failed.
The private schools, the mingling with the very rich, the exposure to the criminal dregs of capitalistic American society, the blood sports, the guise of an extreme right-wing father, the easing into the legal profession, the engendered reaction to white-collar criminals, and the inheriting of a law office with no further criminal clients to represent. It was as if every image of greed, every exposure to opulence, every suggestion of inequality and unlawfulness, had all been carefully Lyeared to create a reaction in Thomas Daniels. A reaction left war sympathy (overt? covert? Thomas could choose) to the destruction of the American system. Sympathy to the beliefs of the father, whether or not those true beliefs were ever known to the son.
Thomas saw the sky brightening in the east. The sky had an illuminated glow, though not yet light, the grayish-blue brightness before dawn.
He looked around the airplane. The pilot was steady at the controls, smoking a cigarette and appearing in charge. Every once in a while the airplane would buffet slightly.
Hammond was wide awake, on edge, an exhausted man with worn nerves and a winding-down body. Too tired to sleep, too sleepy to converse. He was probably thinking of his wife, of his retirement, of the so-called sunset years that would follow. Would he approach them with enthusiasm or fear? Thomas wondered. He studied Hammond in the darkness. He was a tired man, the sort of man who makes mistakes -unthinking and expensive mistakes.
Could Hammond pull a trigger if he had to? Could he pull one fast enough? Or did he carry a weapon simply to inflate his fading courage?
Thomas's eyes moved a quarter inch. He saw Leslie.
She was reclining in her seat, as motionless as the death that had long been intended for her. Leslie McAdam, he thought, turning over the sound of her name in his mind. Trapped in a world of terror and duplicity, locked into an identity which was hers but wasn't hers. Gifted with the paternal talents of the artist, damned to the vengeance of the bogus father. Unwilling to use her real name of Sandler, unable to advertise the name of McAdam. A life on the run, jumping from shadows, until protection could be purchased from a bunch of sleazy white-collar headhunters in Washington.
Sell us your soul, theyd told her. Help us kill. We'll give you your own life in return. Thomas weighed the exchange. He probably would have made the same decision himself. What are ethics when your life is at stake? Crucify your ethics on a cross of expediency.
Why not?
He thought of his father, the man living a lifetime of illusion and deception. In retrospect, it seemed so clear. So obvious. Why had no one ever seen it? ' A committed Marxist, probably from boyhood.
Growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, racism and ethnicism and @ inequity all around him. The sweatshops. The Depression.
Educating himself in the Public Library as a teenager. Scrounging admittance to City College, where the brilliant radical thinking would hone his scalpel of a mind. Somewhere there he'd been recruited.
Somewhere then he'd turned into a spy. Was it a Calling he had sought for himself or was he, like a priest, Chosen?
It must have happened early, thought Thomas. Sometime in his father's nineteenth year. As a freshman. Thereafter the guise started. The guise of the self-made right-wing zealot, the criminal lawyer. seeking to bilk the legal structure for all it was worth, at the same time undermining it; sending despicable wealthy capitalists off to combat Nazism in Germany, then cashing them in, arranging for their slaughter, and introducing a master spy as a replacement.
The master spy who inhabited the identity of Arthur Sandler, then leaped, like a possessing demon, into the identity of Adolph Zenger.
"The ruthless bastard," Thomas caught himself thinking, conjuring up the image of his father, tousle-haired, center stage in the courtroom, cunning, arrogant, shrewd, brilliant as ever. An image that lived in Thomas's mind, an image of the father whose blood flowed in Thomas's veins. Yet could Thomas indict him for his principles, for believing so fervently in a system other than what Thomas believed in? The real failure of the father, Thomas realized, was within a force that no man could control.
The force of nature and human character. The father was an extremist, the son a man of moderation. No lifelong ruses, no connivances, no deceptions or calculations could in the end swerve Thomas Daniels. He was a man of the sane center, or at least liked to think he was. So now he was in an airplane with dawn breaking over Rhode Island, on his way to undo-or end-what his father had spent a lifetime helping to construct.
The pilot threw a switch in the cabin. Soft lights flickered on above the heads of Hammond, Leslie, and Thomas.
The pilot spoke to them.
"Better be waking up" he said; 'we'll be setting down in another twenty minutes' Leslie came quickly to consciousness. Hammond had already been awake and jittery. Daniels yawned. Good advice from the pilot, he reasoned. An airplane should always have as many safe landings as takeoffs.
They touched down a few minutes before dawn on the southern coast of Nantucket Island. By prearrangement an empty, unmarked Massachusetts State Police car had been left for them at the airfield.
The keys were in the backseat ashtray.
Hammond tossed the rifle and its carrying case into the rear seat.
Leslie joined it. Thomas, after a moment's hesitation, sat in the front with Hammond.
"Know the way, huh?" asked Hammond.
"Let's hear it.
Thomas began to direct them. Halfway through the ride, he became again aware of the loaded pistol, safety catch in place, which Hammond had given him.
Two images flashed before him.
He thought of Leslie whirling, pistol in hand, in the basement of the Sandler mansion, a finger squeeze away from killing an innocent man by accident. And then that image was replaced by a separate vision, one resurrected from longer ago. In a forest in Pennsylvania, Thomas stood, rifle in hand, watching a struggling deer coughing blood and trying to flee though a shoulder had been shattered by Thomas's bullet.
He remembered the terror in the animal's eyes, the blood it had coughed, and his father's hand on the rifle, prohibiting Thomas from firing a merciful second bullet.
"Let the blood flow," Daniels, Senior, had said.
"That's the way of nature " His father had owned a deer rifle with an American flag carved on its stock.
Leslie leaned forward to Thomas and spoke.
"I was meaning to ask you.. " she said.
"
How did you have the nerve to bring Whiteside face to face with me' – "There was no nerve at all," he admitted, She was perplexed.
"But he was insisting I was an impostor. Suppose he continued to claim-" He was already shaking his head.
"I went on the assumption that he and Hunter were who they said they were" Thomas explained.
"And by that time I knew you probably were, too."
"How?"
"You appeared for all the world to be an elaborate hoax," he said.
"There's no way I couldn't have drawn that conclusion."
"And so?"
He motioned to Hammond, bleary-eyed and steering the car.
"Then you didn't have me shot, despite the fact that you'd already shot someone that same day."
"What did that prove?"
"Maybe nothing. But I figured an impostor would have had me killed. I knew too much" She leaned back in her seat, thinking.
"Clever," she said.
"Call it a lucky guess' he conceded.
"I was still pretty nervous" Dawn was breaking. @'re almost there," he said to Hammond.
Chapter 38
The borrowed State Police car pulled to a halt before the old house inhabited by the man known as Zenger. Between Hammond, Leslie, and Thomas they continued to refer to him as Zenger. They had no other handle for him.
The radio in the car, in the ten-minute drive from the airport, had been turned to a Cape Cod station. The lead story continued to be the heavy accumulation of Soviet and Polish fishing trawlers in Cape Cod waters, just beyond the territorial limits a hundred miles south of Nantucket. The fishing vessels, equipped with elaborate antennae and radar devices not usually necessary for fishing, had drawn attention not just from the local radio and fishermen. Virtually every spare Coast Guard boat was monitoring their movements. Their presence was that unusual. It had to signify something As the State Police car pulled to a halt, the three of them stepped out briskly. Their breaths were in small clouds before them on the cold, windy morning.
"Curtains are down" said Hammond, his eyes set back from the bags beneath them an the lines which surrounded them.