by Justin Scott
There was plenty of that: motion detectors to turn on the floodlights, laser eyes between the gate posts, a seven-strand electric deer fence that took up where the walls ended. There was even a pressure plate in the driveway, which curved up into the deep woods that blocked any sight of the house. On the gatehouse roof a TV camera panned the approach.
“I’m not going to tell you my name.”
“Then we can’t let you in.”
I picked up my cell phone. “If you don’t open that gate I’m going to tell our mutual cousin Pinkerton Chevalley to bring the new wrecker.” (The “new” wrecker was a 1973 Peterbilt for hauling tandem tractor trailer trucks out of deep ditches.) “We’ll hook that goddammed gate right off the posts and drag it up the driveway and tell Mr. King you and Dennis made us do it.”
Cousin Pink was a full-size Chevalley, very large indeed, who set standards of disorganization and willfully unsocial skills Albert and Dennis could only dream of. The death of his brother had left him in charge of Chevalley Enterprises’ seven repair bays, two tow trucks, and a dozen drivers and mechanics. A lot for a man who operated on impulse, which made his short fuse shorter.
I, too, had been known to get wild on occasion—my reputation pegged to a youthful skirmish involving Trooper Moody’s state police car and a very long logging chain.
“Aw, come on Ben, give us your name.”
“Benjamin Constantine Abbott III.”
I helped them spell Constantine. He was the China Trade pirate who had enriched Aunt Connie’s branch of the family. I got stuck with it because for two centuries Abbotts of modest means have hoped they couldn’t go wrong naming kids after wealthy relatives. (There is no evidence that as much as a penny was ever shifted from one Abbott to another by this maneuver, and Connie’s will leaves her considerable fortune to charity.)
The gate swung on silent machinery.
“What’s with the security?” (Corporate titans have reason to fear violence in our time. But any terrorists who attacked Henry King ran the risk of at least half the nation applauding their efforts. Although, come to think of it, as a fund-raising ploy….)
Albert tossed a shaggy-minotaur nod toward the Butler farm, hidden behind the brow of the mountain. “Old Man Butler’s making trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Neighbor trouble,” said Dennis. When I pressed for details, the brothers got all glowery and said they weren’t supposed to talk to the guests. Which was certainly the basis on which I would have hired them.
“Don’t get sucked in,” I said. “Dicky’s out.”
Their response to my warning was pure Chevalley: broad, gap-toothed grins at the prospect of a bloody fight.
I drove on through the gate and entered Fox Trot onto land I hadn’t seen since I’d snuck over the fence with Dicky Butler back when we were twelve.
Chapter 2
Henry King had gone private after the first of the Bush mobs shut him out for badmouthing their international tomfoolery. Criticizing his boss publicly had seemed to me a clumsy mistake by a diplomat so smooth he was known as the Silver Fox. Being right hadn’t helped his cause and the Fox had found himself out on his silver ear—a disaster he had turned to remarkable advantage when the Soviet Union’s collapse opened half the planet to American business.
To nervous executives, Henry King, Incorporated offered top drawer connections and insights into an often baffling, always frightening world. When GM wanted to tilt again at the Japanese market, they retained Henry King to instruct them in matters Japanese, which he was current on because Toyota had paid him for introductions in Europe where Muslims hired him to deconstruct Christian rhetoric and Christians crossed his palm with gold to steer them toward compliant Muslims, et cetera. The Economist swore the scam was taking down twenty million a year.
Add weekly speeches at fifty grand a pop to the tax advantages of paying for pleasantries like the helicopter and the Georgetown townhouse through the non-profit “Henry King Institute of Geopolitics,” and the man was accumulating a lot of money. Much of which he appeared to be spending on construction.
His estate resembled a war zone. The driveway followed the same elegant sweep it had before the place got a name, disappearing up the meadow and into a deep woodlot, but the meadow had been extended by obliterating several acres of trees. Cratered where Chevalleys had dynamited stumps, it looked like B-52s had emphasized NATO’s impatience with a Balkan dictator.
The alterations were subtler inside the woodlot, where tree surgeons had judiciously thinned and pruned. Weed trees had been culled, and dead limbs removed from the stately red oaks. It was unusual to see a managed forest in Newbury and to my eye it looked a trifle too managed, like a PlayStation version of Robin Hood’s Sherwood. But I had to admire the views designed to highlight handsome specimens. Beech and shagbark hickory and sugar maple reveled in the clean new space.
Rounding a curve I ran into more security. The real thing, this time. A spike barrier blocked the driveway with foot-high razor-sharp steel prongs that would make hamburger of my tires if I didn’t stop beside a speaker box and stifle the impulse to order a Whopper and fries.
“Ben Abbott.”
“You may continue,” said the box.
The spikes sank into the macadam.
I continued.
Now hemlocks began speckling the forest, denser and denser until they formed an impenetrable wall, which opened suddenly on a long view of the main house that hit the eye like a frozen snowball.
I stopped the car and stared. The new main house, I realized, a monumental stone and stucco structure built in the neoclassical style the New York Times long ago dubbed “Corinthian avant-garde.”
Four columns supported a massive pediment over the two-story entrance. Palladian windows arched heroically. Majestic chimneys dominated an elegant mansard roof. It wasn’t ugly. There was too much ordered symmetry for that, too many finely executed details. But it did look like a banker had commanded his architects to build something solid around a pile of money.
The original dwelling, Mr. Zarega’s 1920s country house—pleasantly shingled, and draped in porches—that had looked so big and sprawling to adolescent eyes, stood dwarfed at some distance. Here, too, construction was in progress and both buildings were surrounded by frozen mud studded with construction trailers. Plank paths criss-crossed the mud, which was thawing stickily in the afternoon sun. I didn’t recognize any of the workmen plodding through it, as King’s contractors were from down on the coast of the Long Island Sound.
They had finished the motor court. I parked my elderly Oldsmobile in a herd of Range Rovers, hobbled across the cobblestones, and mounted an imposing flight of marble stairs. The doorbell played a ragtime tune that Aunt Connie later identified for me as having been composed by Harry Fox, the bandleader who had invented the fox trot before even she was born.
King’s butler wore a swallowtail coat and a grimace for the sea of mud. He whisked me inside where it was warm and dry. Perhaps he saw in me a sympathetic spirit, or maybe he’d had a bad day, but he shuddered visibly and sighed, “‘The country,’” leaving no doubt where his preferences lay. “Welcome, Mr. Abbott. I’ll take you in to Madam, and the others.”
Henry King and fourteen guests were still at the lunch table, in a heated sun porch that overlooked the valleys to the west. The butler led me to an empty chair, slightly below the salt, between a fellow about my age, who looked familiar, and a raven-haired woman who looked lovely.
King, short and broad-shouldered, rose with a charming smile. He greeted me in a low, heavy voice and if he was miffed that I hadn’t come as early as Ms. Devlin had demanded, no hint escaped the thick brows that hooded his bright, deepset eyes. Everything in his manner seemed intended to suggest that a splendid lunch had just gotten better because I had arrived.
“Just in time for coffee, Mr. Abbott. Let me introduce you.”
His wife, a very nice-lookin
g blonde who hosted a Washington TV interview show, smiled from the foot of the table. Her immediate neighbors, a younger Harvardy-Yalish bunch, looked like King Institute employees. King had kept the big guns for himself.
At his right hand sat former Secretary of State Bertram Wills, whose Connecticut family had staffed the Foreign Service since the XYZ Affair. Even friendly biographers agreed that Henry King had emasculated him during negotiations with the Red Chinese.
To King’s left was Josh Wiggens, a blandly handsome gentleman who could have had “CIA Station Chief” tattooed on his forehead. Another early retiree, unless I missed my bet, probably one of the many sacked for failing to notice turncoat Aldrich Ames driving a Jaguar with KGB vanity plates.
Ex-diplomat Wills and ex-spy Wiggens might have been twins: lean, well-dressed patricians in the classic New England mold of long faces with fine bones, sandy hair (temples graying gracefully), and piercing blue eyes. Both had the big hands you get from a lifetime of horses, tennis and sailing. Both, the genteel cragginess that comes from active leisure out of doors. But where Secretary Wills appeared to be all dignified accommodation, Josh Wiggens looked like a man with a taste for naked force: Wills like a ceremonial saber, Wiggens a boarding cutlass—metaphors which could be misleading, as neither man, I suspected, was to be trusted in a dark alley.
Way below the salt, down at Mrs. King’s end, was a writer from The New Republic who looked glad to be invited. King Institute staffers surrounded him like kitty litter sopping up an oil spill.
Directly across from me sat an up-and-coming Connecticut congressman whose career I’d followed with interest. I asked for his father, who had given me my senatorial appointment to Annapolis Naval Academy. A look I knew too well glazed the congressman’s eye as he recalled how Ensign Abbott’s post-commission financial career had grounded on the shoals of insider trading.
The fellow who looked familiar turned out to be Gerald Wills, Secretary Bert’s son, a gossipy genealogist, and an amazing snob for one so young.
The raven-haired woman who looked lovely was Julia Devlin. She asked if I’d like dessert. The others had finished, so I said coffee would be fine.
Pressed to classify Julia Devlin on a scale of cold to hot beauty, I’d have rated her a cool beauty. I pictured her on horseback five hundred years ago: aide de camp to a Spanish grandee, her father; their army harassing Moors—something about her dark eyebrows.
A pretty velvet vest cinched her waist. A white blouse accented the faintest olive cast to skin I felt a very strong desire to explore.
“Mr. Abbott!” King called down the table. “How do you call the first selectman’s primary?”
Faces that had frowned upon the fate of nations turned to me now. I answered, “Vicky McLachlan is the best first selectman Newbury’s ever had.”
“Better than your father?” asked Gerald Wills.
“It was an easier job in my dad’s day.”
“Why?” asked King. His brows lifted like the curtain at Radio City Music Hall and when he looked straight at me the intelligence radiating from his eyes was almost blinding. “I’m told your father was responsible for our beautiful Main Street.”
He’d been told half. Back in the Fifties, when my grandfather was still first selectman, his handpicked zoning board had shown remarkable prescience by banning commercial development on Newbury’s historic Main Street. When population pressure hit in the Sixties, Dad was running things. His handpicked zoning board zoned modern conveniences out of sight down Church Hill Road. As a result, we are the prettiest town in northwest Connecticut, unblemished by gas stations, Subways, or McDonalds.
“When my dad served, he could concentrate on local matters because federal and state government still faced up to their responsibilities.”
“I met Ms. McLachlan’s challenger in his liquor shop. He promised to cut my property taxes. Definitely a candidate with my interests at heart.”
Former Secretary Wills placed a manicured hand firmly against his rib cage and chuckled, without seeming to move his lips or jaw, “Very funny, Henry. Very funny.”
I said, “Voters’ incomes are falling; they see taxes as their only chance to save a buck. Our discount Ribbentrop knows this and makes promises he cannot keep.”
King raised a bushy gray eyebrow, indicating he appreciated the reference, and wagged a friendlily mocking finger. “I wonder if you’re biased, Mr. Abbott. Haven’t I heard that you and the first selectman are an ‘item’?”
I thought that was a bit intrusive. But he had intruded with a smile. So, wondering how much he’d had me checked out, and why, I answered, “No such luck. We’re only friends.” No longer what Aunt Connie, born of another age, called “dear friends.”
Wiggens, the CIA guy, who since I had arrived had demolished an after-lunch Scotch and signaled for another, ventured the opinion that Americans were fed up with government and that in most of the countries he had visited—he actually used the word “visited”—the natives would be burning police stations.
Mrs. King deftly changed the subject, and young Gerald Wills said to me in a low voice, “I’ve always wondered what your great-aunt Constance thought when your father married a Chevalley.”
He seemed utterly unaware that an uncharitable soul might invite him outside for such a crude reminder that my mother came from the wrong side of the tracks. I was, in fact, grateful to my parents for bridging the social divide between Frenchtown and Main Street. The boldest act of my father’s sober life and my mother’s timid acquiescence had allowed me to roam everywhere. (Widowed after half a century, she had fled home to Frenchtown.)
Which put me in mind of Patty’s mother excluding little Alison. I resolved then and there to sic Aunt Connie on the woman: a coveted invitation to tea; an icily polite lecture on the obligations of privilege.
King called out to me, again. “What do you think of Fox Trot, Mr. Abbott?”
“Astonishing changes.”
“You’ve see it before?”
“Once. Years ago, when I was a kid.”
“Oh, you knew old Zarega?”
“No. He was a recluse. Couple of us snuck over the fence. We had to have a look.”
“What did you expect?” asked Mrs. King.
“Probably looting the place,” growled the former spy.
“When I was growing up, it was an article of faith among small boys that Mr. Zarega—whom no one had ever seen—owned seven Cadillacs, a different color for every day of the week.”
“Did you see them?”
“Something better.”
“What?”
“He had a bear.”
Julia Devlin looked over at me. “A bear?”
“A pet bear. Roaming around like he owned the place. Housebroken. Very affectionate. Shook my hand.”
“A very civil bear,” said Julia: a phrase that aroused another memory of earlier times and prompted me to say, “I think you read my favorite writer.”
“Patrick O’Brian! Isn’t he wonderful? I’m trying to get Henry started on Master and Commander, but he’s so busy—”
She was leaning closer, her eyes bright, when up the table, where people were ohhhing and ahhhing over the bear, things got suddenly loud. King, red in the face, had raised his voice to the butler.
“If I wanted coffee in a filthy cup I’d order coffee in a filthy cup. Get back to the kitchen and bring a clean one!”
There was a shocked silence. The butler, a tall man, stared fixedly down at Henry King and for a second seemed to threaten physical attack. I felt Julia Devlin coil beside me, tensing like she would vault the table to King’s defense.
King countered the threat with a pugnacious, “I’m waiting!”
The butler took the offending cup and marched stiffly to the door. There he clicked his heels and gave Mrs. King a stiff, jerky bow, his eyes cast firmly at the floor. “Madame, forgive me.”
He lifted his gaze to Henry King. �
��Sir. You may take this job and shove it.”
King found himself in the untenable position of yelling at his houseman’s back. Julia Devlin uncoiled. And Gerald Wills redeemed himself forever by murmuring, “Third butler this year and it’s only March.”
When King finally shut up, his wife said, “Oh, Henry.”
King rounded on her. “You hired him!”
Mrs. King lowered her eyes, and slid the smallest glance up the table toward Bertram Wills. For a second I thought he would come to her defense. But instead, his hand fell to his side again and he tried to console King with a lockjawed joke, “Difficult to find a butler who’s a hero to his man, Henry.”
King glared at him like a monkey that had sprung its cage. Then he turned on me. “Mr. Abbott! Would you join me in the library? There’s something I’d like to discuss.”
That was what I had come for, so I followed him out of the room, pausing to thank Mrs. King for the coffee. She gave me her very soft hand and a bruised up-from-under blue-eyed smile. I hoped to catch a better smile from Julia Devlin, but she had fixed the New Republic man with a gimlet stare. He was smiling the smile of a writer who had the lead for his story, a smile that faded as Julia advanced on him for what looked like a severe recital of the ground rules under which journalists were invited back to Fox Trot.
King was waiting in the hall. “Let’s go, Abbott.”
“I think I’ll come back later.”
“What for?”
“You’re a little upset and you’ve just demoted me from Mr. Abbott to Abbott. I have to go see someone. So why don’t we connect around four when everyone’s calmed down?”
King surprised me with a big laugh. “They told me you were a pisser.”
“Who told you I was a pisser?”
“Let’s talk. I’ll behave. You want a drink?”
“Little early for me.”
“Yeah, me too.” He took my arm in a warm, friendly gesture and we walked down a broad hall and into an absolutely exquisite library.
“I’m nuts for this room,” he said. “You like it?”
