The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  Nora raised a leather flap and looked at the driver’s license. “His name is Ernest Forrest Ernest. He lives in Hamden.”

  Dick Dart started laughing as soon as he heard the name. “That was the great Ernest Forrest Ernest?” He gave a whoop of joyful disbelief. “This day is right up there with the greatest, most supremo, days of my entire life. You don’t know who he is?” Ticking and rumbling with suppressed laughter, he slanted his head to look at her. “No, you’re too out of it to know about him. Alden would know him, though. In the great man’s presence, Alden Chancel would stain his Polo trousers.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Twenty years ago he was the lieutenant governor of Connecticut, and now he’s like the grand old man of the Republican party in this state. The distinguished pile of shit I’m proud to call my father worships him. What can I say? The man is a god.”

  At first faintly, then gaining in volume, the sound of a police siren came to them. Dart checked the rearview mirror, gave Nora a warning look, took the revolver out of his pocket, and held it in his right hand. “They can’t know about this car already.”

  Nora clenched her fists and forced herself not to scream. Disgust, hatred, and fear washed through her body. She looked back, saw that the flashing light bar was still a quarter of a mile behind them, and turned to inspect Dick Dart, for the first time really to examine him with the intensity of her loathing. Two years younger than Davey, he appeared to be at least five years older. His skin had a gray pallor. Many shallow wrinkles creased his forehead. Two small, vertical lines, now barely visible beneath dark stubble, ran down his cheek. Above the stubble fine red veins rode on his cheekbones, and larger red and blue veins had surfaced at the base of his long, fleshy nose. Dick’s liver had been putting in a good deal of overtime. His long, oval face would have had an unremarkable handsomeness except for the sneering self-regard which permeated its every inch. His eyebrows were permanently arched above his light, alert eyes, and his lashes were a row of pegs. An untrustworthiness, a sly disregard for rules and orders came like an odor from his face. If his hair had been recently washed, it would have been perfect prep hair, slightly too long, falling in soft, natural curves on the sides of his head, and flopping boyishly over his forehead. His wide, blunt hands had enjoyed a manicure a few days earlier. The tired-looking gray suit had clearly cost a lot of money, and he wore a gold Rolex watch. His old ladies had one and all found him delightful.

  “What are you doing, taking a fucking inventory?”

  “No,” Nora said hastily. “I was thinking about something.”

  “Give me that wallet and the rest of the money.”

  The wallet lay forgotten in her lap, and she was still holding the bills. She stuffed as much as she could into the money compartment and handed it all to him, and he shoved it into various jacket pockets. “Thinking about what, exactly?”

  “I was wondering how you got suspended during your fresh-man year at Yale.”

  “How did you—oh, the newspaper. Well, what I did, I beat up this pig of a townie. Lucky for me, she really was a pig, and all that ever came out of it was the suspension.” He glanced at the rearview mirror. “Here he comes. He’s gotta be looking for your crappy Volvo wagon.”

  Nora braced herself.

  The screech of the siren grew louder and louder. If Dart started shooting, she would crouch in the well before her seat. Could she grab the gun away from him? Nora remembered how he had jumped through the window and discarded the notion of trying to snatch the gun. For a person in lousy shape, Dick Dart was amazingly strong. She was in excellent shape, and she knew she could not have made that catlike leap.

  The patrol car slipped into the next lane and sped past. Neither of the policemen in the car glanced at them. In seconds, the flashing lights and the noise were five cars away, and Dart applauded himself with yips and hoots.

  “Did I call it, or what?” He held the barrel of the pistol up to his mouth. “I want to thank the members of the Academy, my mother and father, all my colleagues at the office, you guys know who you are, Leo, Bert, Henry, Manny, I couldn’t have done it without your support, and I must not fail to mention those lovely ladies, my special clients, Martha, Joan, Leslie, Agatha—love those eyes, Agatha!—dear JoAnne, who never fails to order the best Margaux on the Château’s wine list, Marjorie, Phyllis, sparkly little Edna of the pudgy ankles, and last but not least, the enchantress Olivia, who makes liver spots look like beauty marks. I wish to thank the Creator for the gifts He has lavished upon this unworthy being, and the Westerholm police force for all their assistance. But above all, I wish to thank my good-luck charm, my rabbit’s foot, my four-leaf clover, my shining star, my hostage and partner in crime, the delectable Mrs. Nora Chancel. Couldn’t have done it without you, babe, you make the magic, you are the wind beneath my wings.” He blew her a kiss with the revolver.

  “You’re even crazier than I thought you were,” Nora said.

  “Most people can never be their real selves, they could never let themselves do what you did to Natalie Weil. The difference between you and me is that when you call someone crazy you think it’s an insult, and I understand that it’s a compliment.”

  “I don’t think I have a real self anymore,” Nora said.

  “I’ll show you your real self,” Dart told her. “Remember, you make the magic.”

  Nora groaned, but only inwardly, with her real self, and Dick Dart smiled his mockery of a human smile as he drifted onto the off ramp for the Fairfield exit.

  44

  DART STEERED THROUGH a series of narrow streets lined with two-story houses on small lots sprouting lawn furniture, plastic pools, and brightly colored children’s toys. A dancing gleam kindled in his eyes. “Dear Nora, to me has fallen the serious responsibility of freeing you from your illusions.” He rolled up to a stop sign and turned right onto nearly empty Main Street toward Fairfield’s small business district.

  “You’ll see what I see, see through my eyes. I sense—I sense . . .” He turned into an angled parking spot in front of the hardware store and leaned toward Nora, his right hand three or four inches from her face, thumb and index finger nearly touching. “You’re this close.”

  His odor coated her like a mist. Dart lowered his hand and leaned back, eyes gleaming and mouth compressed. Nora tried not to show the nausea she felt.

  “I’m going into the hardware store,” he said. An incandescent sliver of hope sparked into life within her.

  “You’re coming with me, Nora. Any appeal for help, any attempt to get away from me, will be dealt with very seriously.” He was still gleaming, as if saying these words in this way amused him enormously. “I have to make some purchases, and as yet I cannot leave you alone in the car. This is a test, and if you fail it you’ll certainly never have to face another one.”

  “You could leave me in the car,” Nora said. “I won’t go anywhere. How could I? I’m one of the two most wanted people on earth.”

  “Bad girl.” Dart patted her lightly on the knee. “There will come a time when you are allowed various freedoms, but we have to know you will not abuse them.”

  He got out and walked around the front of the car to open her door. She said, “Aren’t you afraid of being recognized?”

  “I’ve been in this store maybe once. Besides, nobody has a good photograph of me.” He leaned down smiling and whispered, “And should some unfortunate happen to recognize me, I have Officer LeDonne’s mighty thirty-eight.”

  Dart wrapped a hand around her elbow and propelled her into the hardware shop.

  The dim, cool interior instantly reminded Nora of the hardware stores of her childhood. At the far end a man in shirtsleeves stood between a wooden counter and a wall covered with battery displays, coiled hoses, ranks of scissors, rolls of tape, and a hundred other things. On the soft wooden floor between the counter and the front door stood rows of shelves and bins, each as chaotic as the rear wall. Matt Curlew had drifted entranced through such place
s. Unlike Matt Curlew, Dick Dart moved quickly through the aisles, snatching up ropes, two differently sized screwdrivers, a roll of duct tape, pliers, a hammer. He had released Nora’s elbow as soon as they entered the store, and she trailed after him, noting his purchases with increasing alarm.

  “You could set all that on the counter and let me begin totaling it up,” said the clerk. When he glanced at Nora, whatever he saw in her eyes caused him to step back from the counter.

  “Great idea,” said Dart, and moved to the counter. “Need some items from your knife case. Open it for me?”

  “Sure thing.” The owner glanced again at Nora but now apparently saw nothing to alarm him. Pulling a fat key ring from his pocket, he led Dart toward the glass case. He unlocked the metal ratchet at the front of the case, slid back one of the panels, and said, “Anything in particular?”

  “Just a good knife or two.”

  “We’re no fancy knife shop, but I got some good German stag handles, that kind of thing.”

  “I like a nice knife,” Dart said.

  The man stepped back, and Dart slid the panel farther along and reached in to pick up a brutal-looking, foot-long knife with a curved blade and a thick black handle.

  “You got one serious knife there,” said the owner.

  Dart scuttled along the case to select an eight-inch knife which folded into a handle carved from an antler.

  “That’s the one I told you about, that one there’s a real collectible.”

  “Pop for one more.” Dart stood up to inspect the smaller knives at the top of the case. Humming to himself, he danced his fingers over the glass without actually touching it. After a few bars, Nora recognized the song he was humming, “Someone to Watch Over Me.” “Here we go.” He bent down to remove a short, double-edged knife with a utilitarian black handle. “Got a sheath for this?”

  “A belt sheath? Yep.”

  The owner placed the knives and a black leather case beside the other purchases, looked up the tax on a chart, and added the column of numbers. “Well, sir, that comes to two hundred twenty-eight, eighty-nine. Cash or charge?”

  “Hey, I’m an old-fashioned American, cash on the barrelhead.” Dart took the bulging wallet from his jacket pocket and put two hundred and forty dollars on the counter.

  The owner grunted and began bagging the items on the counter.

  “Separate bags for the knives,” Dart said.

  “Didn’t do too badly, Nora baby.” Dart was driving up a side street toward the Fairfield railroad station, the smallest of the knives concealed under his jacket in the leather sheath, which he had clipped to his belt. The other two knives were in a bag on the backseat, the rest of the purchases in the trunk. “You gave that old dodo one hell of a look, though. Have to watch out for that, have to control yourself.”

  “I did control myself,” Nora said. “What are you doing? I don’t suppose we’re going to take the train.”

  “Daddy is looking for something, and, wonder of wonders, I believe he has just found it. You’re a fucking rabbit’s foot.” He slid past a dark blue sports car with tinted windows and swerved into the curb next to an empty lot. “Get out of the car and stand next to me.”

  She joined him at the back of the Lincoln. While Dart leaned into the trunk and removed a screwdriver from the bag, Nora glanced up and down the street, praying for the arrival of a police car. Before them, on the other side of a long, narrow parking lot, lay the railroad station” back toward Main Street, beyond the empty lot, stood the flowered walkway and green-striped canopy of a restaurant called Euphemia’s Diner.

  Dart closed the trunk without latching it. “Stand between me and the street. Don’t let anybody see what I’m doing.” He grinned at her, and with his right hand reached around to the small of his back.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Buy a little time.” He led her toward the rear of the little blue car. “You’re not going to take a stupid pill, are you?”

  “No,” she said. A small, bright blade projected from his palm.

  He knelt beside the rear bumper and jabbed the blade into the tire. The blade slipped out, and the tire hissed and softened. “If anybody happens along, we’re inspecting our flat. Don’t look at me, watch the street and tell me if anybody comes along.” He slipped the little knife back into its sheath.

  Nora moved to shield him from the sidewalk. “I don’t get what you’re doing.”

  “Swapping plates. It’s not as easy as it used to be. All these idiots treat their plates like oil paintings. This was the first one that didn’t have a frame around it.” The screwdriver clicked against metal. Dart grunted, then began humming “Someone to Watch Over Me” again. Heat poured down on them. The police car for which Nora continued to pray neglected to appear.

  “Now the front.” She followed him and stood in the road as metal rubbed against metal. “Want to hear a little-known fact about our old pal Ernest Forrest Ernest? This great man fancied the Nazis during the Second World War, though it was of course a deep dark secret, and afterward he was part of a splendid little group of ultrawealthy men who tried to promote Fascism right here in our good old cradle of liberty. . . . All right!”

  He went two paces to the rear of the Lincoln and started to remove the screws in its license plate. “They didn’t use the nasty F-word, of course. They called it the Americanism Movement, which lasted about five minutes until Joe McCarthy came along and put them in his pocket and they had to pretend they liked it. But the point of this”—he slapped the other car’s plate into position and fit the screws into place—“is that little Davey’s grand-father was behind the whole show.”

  Nora remembered the passages about Fascism in the chapter of Daisy’s book she called “the fantasia.”

  “Lincoln Chancel was the badass’s badass.”

  “So I gather.”

  Dick Dart looked up at her in amused surprise. “I don’t think Davey knows a quarter of the stuff the old man did.”

  “He knows he wasn’t a saint.”

  Dart stood up, went to the front of the Lincoln, and knelt down while Nora posted herself to shield him from the empty street. She had been in Fairfield perhaps thirty times during the two years of her marriage, she had shopped on Main Street for her jeans and Ann Taylor dresses, she had bought veal chops and crown roasts from the excellent butcher, enjoyed lunches and dinners at three different restaurants, and in all that time, it came to her now, she had never seen a single policeman.

  “We behold an unhappy degeneration in the Chancel line,” Dart said. “Lincoln Chancel wouldn’t have used Davey for a toothpick. Lincoln was one dangerous son of a bitch, and Davey doesn’t have the guts of a teddy bear. Alden is sort of halfway between them, a thug and a bully, but not a real thug or a real bully.”

  “He has his moments,” Nora said.

  “You never met the real thing. Alden thinks he’s a big shot and he prances around talking tough, but I think his old man cut his nuts.” He stood up and motioned for Nora to follow him to the rear of the sports car.

  They were walking side by side down the street like any ordinary couple. The man beside her looked like a stockbroker or lawyer after a rough night, and she probably looked like his wife.

  The old plate came off, the new one went up. “If Alden Chancel hadn’t inherited Chancel House, what would he be doing? He has one great editor, Merle Marvell, and a lot of blockheads. One dead writer, Hugo Driver, keeps the company solvent. His royalties bring in about forty percent of the company’s total revenue, and almost all of that is generated by one book, Night Journey. Alden’s a disaster. Right now he’s negotiating a deal to sell the company to a German publisher—to get a lot of money out of the business before he runs it into the ground. The only reason the German publisher is interested is Night Journey.”

  “Alden’s trying to sell the company? How do you know about this?”

  “We’re the lawyers, baby. Remember? As we go along putting dents in dear
old Dart, Morris, I am going to give you an education. Before I begin, I have to do something, but after that, tutorials in the real world are in session. Okay, let’s wrap up this tedious bullshit.”

  He stood up and shook out his arms, then produced a wrinkled, distinctly unclean handkerchief from a trouser pocket and swabbed his forehead.

  “He’s selling the company?”

  “Trying to.” Dart pulled her up the street and knelt in front of the Lincoln. “I’m going to tell you something little Davey never heard about his grandfather. The guy wasn’t born rich, you know, he got there by himself. Did many, many nasty deeds. Even murdered someone once.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said, although what she knew of Lincoln Chancel nearly made it possible.

  “Old Lincoln was a brute, baby. My sainted daddy, who has been privy to the real history of the Chancels for the last forty years, told me in a moment of imperfect sobriety that Lincoln Chancel once tore a man to pieces—turned him into hamburger with his bare hands. Lincoln was caught short playing too many ends against the middle, threat of scandal, and the only way out was the removal of one man. He arranged a confidential appointment with the guy, canceled it on the morning of the day they were supposed to meet, and showed up unannounced around the time of the meeting he canceled. Nobody knew he was supposed to be there, and the guy was all alone. Got away scot-free.”

  Dart said, “Good for another day, anyhow. Let’s go to Main Street and pick up a couple of bottles.”

  45

  POLICE CARS SWEPT past them, most of them silently, several flashing and wailing. Dart amused himself by pointing the revolver at drivers and passengers in other cars and pretending to shoot them. Hartford loomed up alongside the expressway, and Nora sped upward to fly through the office towers at seagull height. Dart lolled, half in his seat, half against the door, and sneered his smile at her.

  “Why do you have your window down? What happened to airconditioning? Save-the-planet kind of thing?”