“All the regulars, the old-timers, applauded,” Meg said dreamily. “But it wasn’t a rowdy scene, everyone crowding in, talking at once, trying to cop a feel or two. They stood back at the edge of the floor, politely and expectantly, as if we were royalty. Billy the bandleader announced that we would dance for them. Then—it was eerie—almost in one voice they requested a waltz. Imagine, a waltz! So we did that bit of introductory dialogue from The Perfect Gentleman, Miles and I meeting late at night in Waterloo Station. We’ll have to run that one for you sometime, kiddo. We set the scene, you could almost see the billowing clouds of train smoke, and then we danced, and it was like falling in love all over again. Everyone at Roseland seemed to be caught up in this magical spell. I saw tears as we drifted past them; we heard them whispering, ‘Welcome back,’ and, ‘We’ve missed you’—sentiments like that. Gee, did we have a swell time.”
“What was Judy Garland really like?”
“You too? Truth is I didn’t really know her, even though we were on the lot together for years. We made that one picture together, I think I had four or five scenes with Judy. What I remember most vividly about Judy is running across her absolutely naked in a dim corner of the stage behind some scenery. Oh, I don’t mean bare-assed, she had on this ponderous hoopskirt costume. I’m talking about the naked emotion she displayed, over a chocolate éclair someone had smuggled to her. You know she had a terrible problem with her weight, they just didn’t allow her any goodies when she was working, which was practically nonstop. So here was Judes clutching—fondling—this enormous chocolate éclair, it must have been a foot long, but I couldn’t tell for sure because one end of it was in her mouth: she was licking, sucking, all but ravishing it, I felt like some kind of voyeur just watching her.
“Judy almost choked on her sweet-treat when she saw me out of the corner of her eye. She stood there with that naughty thing melting and oozing in her two hands—even away from the lights it was plenty hot on the stage—and there was goo ear to ear. To add to her misery she began to cry. She didn’t know me, and she was afraid I was one of the company spies who reported every move she made to the director or to Louis B. himself. Poor miserable kid! I told her I loved chocolate éclairs myself (although I never wanted to blow one), and then I helped her get her face in order because they were hollering for First Team. There was no place to hide the rest of the éclair, but she wasn’t about to give it up. She wrapped it in a big hurry and shoved it at me and said in that inimitable voice, ‘Here, I’ll love you forever, just don’t let anything happen to it.’ ”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I was wearing this working-girl’s apron and had some storage space. I was able to stuff the éclair out of sight. I figured I wouldn’t have to keep it more than a few minutes. I forgot I was in the background of the scene they’d been resetting the lights for. A second A.D. grabbed and hustled me into place, and there I stood, babes, for an hour and a half while Judy flubbed twenty-three takes in a row beneath those big arcs they used to simulate desert sunshine. Calamity. I could smell the éclair going bad right under my nose. As soon as the shot went in the can I got out of there, but Miss Garland was right behind me, drooling. Her dressing room was full of spies, so she dragged me to another hidey-hole and demanded her éclair. I wish you could have seen the look on her face when I reamed it out of the apron. She was furious! She stamped her foot and said over and over, ‘Jesus Jumping Christ, look at it! What did you do to my éclair?’ She wanted to lick the wrapping but I wouldn’t let her. By then it was virulent enough to wipe out half of Culver City.”
Miles came back staggering under a load of succulent Cantonese vittles, but after laying out the cartons he discovered he’d forgotten egg-rolls. He was willing to trudge another ten blocks in the biting cold to redeem himself, but Hester had commercially packaged eggrolls in her freezer, and she ran down two flights to get them.
Hester had been having such a good time with Meg she hadn’t watched the clock, and she was startled to see when she entered her kitchen that it was now close to seven. She grabbed the eggrolls, charged back upstairs, ran into the Bundys’ flat, dropped the package where Meg would find it and ran out the door again.
“Phone call!” she blared. “Ten minutes! Start without me!”
Meg trailed her to the door. “Use our phone, you can eat and talk at the same—”
“Long distance!” Hester shouted back, and the apartment door slammed behind her. Meg shook her head and went back to the kitchen.
“I’ll put the eggrolls in, would you close the other window in there, Miles? It’s getting drafty.”
“The place is shaping up,” Miles observed, crossing the half painted living room. “Hester’s been a lot of help, hasn’t she?”
“Hester is a goddamn jewel,” Meg said from the kitchen.
Miles put the window down but he didn’t lower the blinds. He stood with his hands behind his back looking out until, below, he saw Hester hurrying down the front steps of the brownstone, getting into her parka. He looked at his watch.
“Hester’s gone out to make her phone call,” he observed.
“Uh-huh.”
“That makes every night this week, at seven o’clock on the dot.”
“Do you want a little moo goo gai pan, or a lot?”
“A lot.”
“Tummy, tummy,” Meg admonished.
“I’ll work it off in bed,” Miles advised her. In the kitchen doorway Meg clutched at her heart, miming terror. With a smile every bit as endearing as Fred Astaire’s, Miles gave her the finger, then lowered the blind and closed the slats. After turning on another lamp he visited the bathroom. He returned to the table rubbing his hands together in anticipation of a feast.
“The loo looks terrific; how do you suppose she does it without leaving any brush marks?”
“Deft,” Meg said. “Hester is deft.”
“We’ll have to do something for Hester,” he said, sitting down.
“I know.”
“What?”
“I’m giving it some thought,” Meg said, pouring strong tea.
Peter had warned her to use only the public telephones on the street, but there was a scarcity of those in her immediate neighborhood; she had to run all the way to Thirty-sixth and Lex. Hester arrived almost completely out of breath, her face scalded by cold. Her watch, which kept excellent time, told her it was already twenty-one seconds past the hour. She tore off a glove and pressed her dime into the slot and began poking the stainless steel buttons. When she had punched out the number she huddled up against the phone box, trying to keep her face out of the abrasive wind.
Hester let the phone ring nineteen times before she gave it up for the night.
By then she was sobbing. She had not seen Peter since shortly after 2 P.M. on New Year’s Eve, when he left her alone on Long Island. All she knew about his subsequent problems she had inferred from a few paragraphs in the Daily News: a priest, obviously mistaken for Peter, shot and killed. It was a brief story, not followed up. A full week had passed, without a word or a sign from Peter himself. She wanted to scream at the unresponsive phone.
Alive? Dead? Where are you, Peter?
Tonight she didn’t even get her dime back.
No longer in the mood for company but feeling the pressure of a social obligation, Hester walked back to her building between Second and First. When she rejoined the Bundys she was still falsely radiant from the cold, but even so they could tell Hester was more than a little heartsick. She was thankful that Meg and Miles had the class to respect her privacy and make no mention of her sadly altered mood.
While there was snow in the streets of New York City, the state of Virginia south of Charlottesville was enjoying an unusually balmy week.
From the Puma helicopter flying at four thousand feet, a soupy red sun could be seen as it set behind the Blue Ridge. Near the sun in the faded sky, but perhaps a thousand light years from our solar system, was an object bright as an
evening star, an exploding nova.
Nick O’Hanna, one of the supergrades aboard the chopper, pointed it out to his chief. Byron Todfield looked up from the fresh file of intelligence grist he was studying, but he wasn’t all that interested in something which was happening outside his sphere of operations. Another supergrade, the druidical Bose Venokur, was reading Mishima on the trip down to the Plantation; he quoted from Spring Snow: “History is a record of destruction. One must always make room for the next ephemeral crystal.” Nobody paid any attention to him. One of the bodyguards from Watchbird Section swore under his breath; he was losing at blackjack. The mighty helicopter flew on at a cruising speed of 165 miles per hour.
They reached the Plantation a little before six and the helicopter landed in the compound on the south bank of the James. The night sky was clear but already there was a haze over the fallow land, thickening to mist in the low-lying bends of the river. Around them as they hurried into waiting vehicles, lights burned like droplets of napalm. O’Hanna shivered momentarily, crisis-conscious. He didn’t know much about what went on at the Plantation because it hadn’t been his business to know. Still, he’d heard a few lurid stories.
The drive to the manse took a couple of minutes. It was a brick Colonial house with a veranda that overlooked the river valley. There were smaller outbuildings in the style of the main house, boxwood hedges that had been planted before the Revolution. A houseboy in knickers was at the door to take their coats.
Their host, a small man wearing mirror sunglasses, came down the wide curving staircase to greet them. His name was Marcus Woolwine. He was pleasant, even effusive, and though he shook hands well he bothered O’Hanna: but then Nick had never liked looking at a man and seeing little more than his own badly posed and eavesdropping reflection. Woolwine’s assistant, by contrast, was a milk-fed slab of young farmer, cornshock hair and red cheeks, but O’Hanna didn’t care for the set of his mouth, a lip that met his underlip sharp and slanted as the blade of a guillotine. O’Hanna felt uneasy again; no, he didn’t like these men, and the implications of their power disturbed him.
“How’s Peter?” O’Hanna asked.
Woolwine smiled. “Your friend is working out in the gym.”
“What?” O’Hanna said, amazed. “He was pretty sick when he—”
“Dangerously ill, I would say: dwelling far out on the ragged edge of nervous exhaustion. A temperature of a hundred and three. Spot of pneumonia in the left lung, no doubt from the ingested filth of the river. We also discovered a good-sized duodenal ulcer. But he’s fit again—”
“After five days?”
“I’ve been called on to perform much more difficult feats of regeneration in seventy-two hours or less,” Woolwine replied tartly. “The mind heals the body far more effectively than any drug. Come see for yourself. Mr. Todfield, will you be speaking to him at this time?”
“By all means,” Todfield said.
They reached the outlying gym via an enclosed and heated walkway. Peter, wearing a red sweat suit, was lifting weights. He was assisted by a lovely blonde with intriguing ginger ale-and-verdigris eyes. She was the sort of girl who could be sunny and indomitable without triggering insulin shock. Peter lay on his back on a bench doing leg lifts, twenty pounds on each leg. He had worked up a healthy sweat. He had a good sunlamp tan going, and seemed in a bonny frame of mind.
O’Hanna, Todfield and Venokur crossed the maple floor. The blonde girl glanced at them, then touched Peter’s shoulder. He got up and flashed a smile at Nick O’Hanna, studied the other men.
“Peter? Goddamn, if you don’t look great!”
Peter shook the offered hand. “I’ve never felt better, Nick.”
“I want you to meet my boss, Byron Todfield. And this is our chief of Hothouse Section, Bose Venokur.”
Peter shook hands all around. “Just get in?”
“A few minutes ago,” Todfield said.
“I suppose Nick told you what’s happened to me—and to my son.”
“The full story. Of course we’ve always known a great deal about you, Peter. You’re a resourceful and valuable man. I wish we’d had you on our team. It’s absolutely amazing how you’ve survived Childermass’s treachery, not to mention a full-scale manhunt.”
Peter looked at his friend O’Hanna.
“I might not have pulled through this time. But for Nick.”
O’Hanna said, “We’ve wondered why you didn’t come to me sooner, Pete. I mean, opposite sides of the fence and all, but you know I would’ve believed you.”
“My old Navy buddy,” Peter said with nostalgia. “But there’s an axiom they drill into us at MORG, from the very beginning. You can’t trust the FBI, or NSA. Above all you can’t trust the Langley gang. I was afraid you’d hear me out politely, then turn me over to Childermass.”
O’Hanna scowled. “Jesus! That madman. Not a chance.”
“The important thing now is—” Peter turned to Todfield. “Do you think you can help me, sir?”
“You bet,” Todfield replied vigorously. “But I have to say to you, Peter, that as of this moment we still don’t know where Robin is. We’ll keep trying to locate him. In the meantime—you’ll have all the moral support and material help you could ask for.”
Peter nodded soberly.
“Thank you. Thank you.” He couldn’t stop nodding then; his face became pinched-looking and his eyes were blurry. “Thank you. Because the important thing is, the thing is, I have to find my son. My son. I’ve got to. Find him. Find Robin. Find Robin.” He turned to the wall and began hammering it with a fist. “Find Robin.”
The girl stepped in protectively and put her hands on Peter’s shoulders.
“Peter, don’t,” she said. She looked at the incredulous men. “He’s a little tired,” she explained
Peter sobbed once, a wild gulping sound, and then he was motionless as the winsome girl slipped an arm around him. She cupped his raised fist with her free hand.
“Your friends will be having dinner now,” she said softly. She addressed O’Hanna: “Is there anything else you’d like to say to Peter?”
O’Hanna swallowed bitterly.
“The boss is sticking around for a couple of days, Pete. We’ll—we’ll be talking to you.”
As they walked away Peter turned: he seemed to have recovered totally from his frenzied agitation over his son. He was grinning. “Hey, Nick.”
Nick turned distractedly. “Ole buddy.”
“How are they biting for you?”
“Oh—just fair, I guess.”
“Keep at it,” Peter advised him.
“Sure. You keep well, Pete.”
“I’ve never felt better, Nick. Listen, we’ll be out on the flats first thing in the morning.”
“How about a dip now?” the girl said to Peter: her voice had acquired a seductive furriness. “The ocean’s warm as spit this time of night; great for a long lazy swim.”
They heard Peter laugh, deep in his throat, as they left the gym. Outside Woolwine and his young assistant joined them. Woolwine was itching with self-satisfaction.
“Gentlemen?”
“Jesus,” O’Hanna muttered, shaking his head. “To see him like this—you should have known him—that was always one hell of a man. Where does Peter think he is?”
“Fishing with you, in the Florida keys. The two of you left Falls Church on Sunday afternoon, flying down in your Cherokee to your lodge on Lower Matecumbe. You’ve been there ever since. It was useful to provide Peter with a continuous memory beginning moments before he collapsed on your living room carpet on New Year’s night. So bear in mind when you talk to him that you’re catching bonefish and boozing a little and soaking up sun, getting decently but not gaudily tanned—we don’t want Peter calling attention to himself in the dead of winter when he’s turned loose in New York again.”
Venokur said thoughtfully, “For a robot he seems altogether too emotional.”
“What a curious idea,” Woolwin
e said, looking at him in mild surprise and then (as if he hadn’t seriously observed Venokur before) with contempt. “I don’t create robots. That’s hackwork. Mr. Sandza is engaged in a life and death pursuit, a quest of epic proportions. He must find his son. Our primary aim is to strengthen his resolve, to make him even more single-minded and resourceful. We don’t want to do anything to blunt the cutting edge of his high purpose; he mustn’t lose a jot of animal cunning. His outburst seemed somewhat theatrical, I grant you, but you should remember that he is in a stage forty trance, and will remain at that deep level until we finish our implant counseling. Let us say, Wednesday of next week. By Wednesday I assure you he will be without flaw.”
“You can do some amazing things here,” Todfield said respectfully.
Woolwine chuckled, mollified.
“I think we can at that, sir.”
The limousine carrying Dr. Irving Roth and his Paragon associate Dr. Maylun Chan We paused at the gates of Sutton Mews and was waved through as soon as the guard verified that it had the correct number of passengers.
“So this is Sutton Mews,” Maylun said. She had the not-uncommon physical perfection of Oriental peoples: clean, spare, eyes like matched black pearls—she seemed too exactingly made to have come from any womb. A small tooth-white scar on her forehead was a valuable flaw, a hint of fallibility. “I’ve seen these houses from the deck of the Circle Line. I always wanted to know who lived here, the lucky devils.”
“Nothing but goddamn Bellavers,” Roth said. “The whole block.”
“Not what you’d call a pretentious house. But oh, so charming.”
“He’s not a pretentious man.”
To prove Roth’s assertion Avery Bellaver met them at the door. He took their coats and hung them up, then escorted his guests to the library where Katharine was waiting.
Roth saw immediately that Katharine Bellaver was under a bone-breaking strain; she looked glazed by opiates. Nevertheless she was still a dazzler, and he smiled warmly at her.
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