Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  “This is rather awkward, Mr. Wesley,” said the professor when the waiter had gone. “I wish I had known you were coming to town.”

  “So you could disappear again?”

  “Precisely.” He sipped his water. “You must be wondering what’s going on.”

  “Good guess,” said Eddie.

  Mellor ignored the belligerence. “You thought I was dead. The world thinks I am dead. I would be grateful if you would be so kind as to leave the world with its illusions.”

  “You faked your death for—what? Self-protection?”

  “Precisely. Everyone involved was dying—being killed—and I saw that I had better run or I would be joining them. Matty. Kevin. All of them. I ran—I had some help—and, well, here I am, established in society.” He looked around the club with satisfaction. Over on the tennis court, Ambassador William Colby, said to rank high in the Central Intelligence Agency, was limbering up for a match. A Vietnamese millionaire was arguing with a famous reporter from one of the American television networks. Waiters scurried and bowed. “You can make a fortune in a war, Mr. Wesley. All you need is a little bit of brains and a little bit of guts. I think I wasted my intelligence teaching lawyers. It’s the things you can do without the lawyers that make you rich.”

  “Everyone involved in what?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You said everyone involved was being killed.”

  Benjamin Mellor had finished his mineral water. He signaled the waiter, ordered something stronger in bad French. His linen suit was soaked with sweat. Either he had been drinking for a very long time or he was very nervous—quite possibly both. The tables nearest theirs were emptying. Eddie felt naked, and unprotected.

  “Well, I suppose you’re entitled,” said the professor finally. “You’re here, after all, and I suppose you could make trouble for me, tell them where I am.” The waiter brought him a gin and tonic. Mellor lapped at it sloppily. “The thing you have to understand, Mr. Wesley, is that the Council is not the only, ah, entity concerned. So you understand my caution.”

  “The Council?”

  “Dear me, you have fallen behind, haven’t you? They call themselves the Palace Council. The group you’re looking for, Mr. Wesley. Now, may I please continue?” As if addressing the classroom dunce. “Where was I? The Palace Council. Yes. The Council is searching for the testament. So are you, from what I gather. But so is somebody else. A third party, you might say. A third force, Mr. Wesley, that has not yet shown its face. And that third force is exterminating the Council members.”

  Eddie suffered a moment’s vertigo. First Benjamin Mellor comes back to life, then he sits sipping gin and mineral water at a posh club in the middle of a war and confirms all the worst suspicions of the American left, and, at times, the right—the secret organization, behind the scenes, hiding its hand, manipulating destinies—

  And, at the moment, being wiped out.

  He counted on his fingers. “Burton Mount. Matthew Garland. Kevin Garland. Joseph Belt. Phil Castle—”

  “And others. Quite a few others. One of the rules of being on the Council is that you designate an heir to take your place. But the deaths were happening so fast, not everybody had the opportunity. So the Council is smaller, and weaker.” He stroked that luxurious beard. “You do see the point, don’t you, Mr. Wesley? The Council started things in motion, then lost control of the monster it created.”

  “The monster being what?”

  But the professor preferred to pursue his own lesson plan. “The Council lost control, and now its members are being killed.”

  “Is it Perry Mount who’s doing this?”

  “No. Perry helped me hide here. He has connections over Southeast Asia.”

  “Not Perry,” said Eddie, marveling at how badly he had misjudged matters. Assuming always that the professor was telling the truth. “Wait,” said Eddie, struck by a thought. “This Council—is its symbol by any chance an inverted cross?”

  Mellor was, for once, impressed. “The Cross of Saint Peter. Yes. How did you know that?”

  “It doesn’t matter how I know,” said Eddie. He had been right in his guess so many years ago. Poor Philmont Castle had indeed been trying to ward off evil the night he died, frantically waving the cross to signal his membership in the Council, not realizing that his membership provided the motive for his murder.

  “But it does matter,” said the professor. “It matters a great deal. I’m afraid you’re at the center of all this. Well, no. Not you precisely. Your sister. Junie. The Council wants to find Junie, and so does this—this third force. Some of the Council members were tortured before they died. Whoever is looking is in a hurry, and willing to do what’s necessary. But you—”

  He stopped, drank, drank some more. Over on the tennis court, Colby was trouncing his opponent.

  “Do you know where my sister is?”

  Benjamin Mellor put the glass down, hard. He wiped his mouth with his blinding-white sleeve. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It isn’t ridiculous to think you’d be interested in what happened to—”

  “Mr. Wesley, please. Allow me to make my point.” All the Harvard arrogance was back in his voice. “Whoever it is out there, looking for the testament and killing the Palace Council—this third force—well, they need to be stopped.”

  “We agree on that much, anyway.”

  Mellor toyed with his empty glass. “Don’t judge me too harshly, Mr. Wesley. I’m neither as foolish nor as selfish as you seem to think. Before I tried Perry, I went to the FBI, like a good citizen. I went to Hoover, I told him what I knew—some, not all, but enough to whet his appetite.”

  “Hoover knows?”

  Mellor nodded. “Oh, yes. I was interviewed half a dozen times. I thought, at the very least, the Bureau would offer some kind of protection to me and my family. After a while, though, it became clear to me that Hoover was never going to lift a finger. All he’s going to do is sit on the sidelines and let things play out. To be sure, he was interested in my information, but only because he wanted, ah, a lever to move, ah, powerful people.”

  Eddie remembered Stilwell at I Street, asking him about the various Kennedy rumors. “Go on,” he said.

  “When I realized that the Hoover business was going nowhere, I tried Perry. And, as I said, he settled me here. So far, I’ve been undiscovered. As far as I can tell, even that third force out there thinks I’m dead.”

  “And your family?”

  For the first time the professor seemed uneasy. Here was a burden his agile mind had been unable to shift. “They’re better off. I was a poor husband. A ridiculous father. They have the insurance, they have the assets, or most of them.”

  “Less what you needed to get started on whatever you’re doing over here.”

  A plea for understanding. “I could hardly bring them with me, Mr. Wesley. One man, on the run, alone—he can hide for a very long time. But how long could I hide my family? Or, if this third force knew I was alive, how long before they would use my family against me? You do see my dilemma?”

  “I’m not sure I do,” said Eddie, gathering confidence from the professor’s sudden tumble toward the maudlin. “You don’t know where my sister is. You said that’s what this third force wants. Why are they killing off the Palace Council? Why would they kill you? If the Council can’t find Junie, why would this third force of yours care?”

  “It’s complicated,” said Mellor, again to his glass.

  “I’m listening.”

  The professor gave the patio a quick scan. Eddie followed his uneasy gaze. A new group had settled into the nearest table, three or four women gossiping about their husbands. Two fit young men had taken over the tennis court. A teenaged girl was swimming laps, under the shouted instructions of her mother. Mellor plainly felt hemmed in. He said, “Not here.”

  Mellor was on his feet. Eddie followed. He chose not to argue with the hunted man’s instincts, which had preserved him for four and a half y
ears on the run.

  “Where, then?”

  “Tonight. Teri will pick you up at ten.”

  “The curfew—”

  “She has a pass. Be ready.”

  Mellor sat again, but Eddie was plainly dismissed. Teri was at his side. She led him to the sandbagged front gate. He felt the law professor’s gaze the entire way.

  (II)

  THE PRESIDENT of the Republic of Vietnam had ordered all civilians to stay off the streets of Saigon after nine. But this was the same President who had ordered all soldiers to stay out of the city’s teeming nightclubs. For all the effect of his decrees, he might as well have been Canute. Nevertheless, Eddie worried. Vietnam might be small, but its penal code, he had learned from Pratt, was both extensive—even dancing in public was forbidden—and punitive. Benjamin Mellor had said that Teri would have a pass. Eddie hoped it was the right one.

  As he left the hotel, he expected to be warned, but the porter did not even notice. The whole downtown was alight with neon. A cyclo pulled up at once. Eddie declined. A policeman across the street ignored him.

  Teri arrived at ten on the dot.

  “Hurry up, man,” she said.

  Teri’s eyes had that empty look again, and Eddie supposed she must be pretty stoned. Her attention to the lane markings was intermittent. Outside the Notre Dame Cathedral she almost hit a cyclo. They were waved down by American military police, but the pass on the dashboard got them through. Roaring off, Teri began to fishtail again.

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “You could tell me.”

  “No,” she said, and kept on weaving.

  “The military pass. A gift from Perry?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, man.”

  They stopped in front of a low whitewashed building in the city center, catercornered with the huge Park Lane cigarette billboard above the Sony sign. Eddie climbed out of the car. Teri stayed in her seat. “Third floor. Apartment twelve. Take the stairs. The elevator is a death trap, man.”

  She sped away.

  Eddie stepped into the lobby. The concierge was watching television. She never looked up as he headed for the stairs. The windows were covered in wire mesh, like windows all over the city, to reduce the damage should a shell explode just outside. If it exploded inside, there was nothing to be done.

  On the first floor a couple was arguing in what might have been Khmer, and on the second floor he heard the sound of scratchy music from an old record player, but when he reached the third, silence reigned. There were four apartments, and number twelve was right next to the stairs and directly opposite the elevator, just the place for a man on the run. Nobody answered his knock, but the door was hanging open anyway, only one hinge intact after whatever had happened.

  Eddie stood in the hallway listening to the silence. There should be sirens, rushing feet, a gesticulating crowd. There was nothing.

  He stepped into the apartment. It was easy to follow the course. They had knocked the door off, and Mellor had made a stand in the hallway, where a lot of worthless artifacts had been smashed when somebody fell hard. There was blood in the hall and in the kitchenette, where they must have subdued him. There were two other rooms, and they had torn everything to shreds. The closet was half empty. The dresser drawers were overturned. There was no sign of a body. Had they taken him with them?

  Some of the Council members were tortured before they died.

  Eddie shivered. Better to have drowned in the boating accident.

  Back in the hallway, he started to pick up the artifacts, to set them on the overturned shelf. He did not know why. A last salute to a desperate man who had pretended to die before and was now somewhere dying much more slowly. He stood up. Probably there were clues everywhere if he knew what to look for. Probably he was standing on top of valuable evidence, to say nothing of leaving his fingerprints everywhere.

  He wondered what Mellor had wanted to tell him.

  Time to go.

  Standing, he noticed, in the midst of the mess, a shattered picture frame holding a photo of the Harvard Law School class of 1957. Junie’s class. He picked it up, brushed off the broken glass, then squinted at the faces until he found, in about the third row, the only black woman. He touched her image with his fingers. That this was the only Harvard class whose photo Mellor had kept spoke to—what?—an unexpected sentimentality? He took another look, and noticed, this time, that his sister was not gazing at the camera. She was smiling down at the faculty in the first two rows, and in particular at Benjamin Mellor.

  After all that the professor had done, Junie had smiled at him.

  Eddie decided to take the picture along. He slipped it out of the broken frame, and that was when he saw the words on the back. The searchers had looked inside the frame but, in their haste, had not studied the picture itself.

  I can’t stop them, Junie had written. You’ll have to do it.

  Nothing more.

  Was the note recent? Did this mean Mellor knew where she was? Might he, at this very moment, be spilling her location to his captors? He folded the photograph and slipped it into his jacket. He took a last look around, then stepped into the hall, and hurried down the stairs.

  In the lobby, he was stopped by two Vietnamese men in Western-style business suits. There were a lot of flashing lights outside. The men flashed their credentials.

  Vietnamese National Police.

  “Do you live in this building, sir?”

  “No.”

  “May I ask why you are out after curfew?”

  Eddie realized that Teri had driven off with the pass. He improvised fast, but not cleverly. “Visiting a sick friend.”

  “Does he live in this building?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what is his name?”

  Stuck. He had no idea what name Mellor was living under. As it happened, the plainclothesmen did not seem to care if he had any idea or not, because by this time they had the cuffs on, and were marching him toward a squad car that had materialized, spinning lights playing across the lobby. When Eddie got outside, he saw that there were actually three or four vehicles, the white-gloved officers armed to the teeth, as if expecting resistance. There might have been an American standing with them. He could not get a good look before they ducked him into the back of the car and sped off.

  At the barracks, they turned him over to the jailers, who slapped him around a bit because that was the form, stole what cash he had on him but left the crinkled photo, then tossed him into a filthy holding cell to sit on the floor alongside assorted pickpockets, rapists, drunks, and druggies, until a nearsighted, frightened child from the Embassy, responding to Eddie’s call, showed up to vouch for his bona fides. By that time, hours had passed. Nobody apologized. The guards returned his seized property, other than the money, but when Eddie took a cyclo back to the Duc, he found his notebooks missing. He telephoned the Embassy and asked for the man who had bailed him out, but the Embassy duty officer might never have heard of the Vietnamese police.

  “I would like to have my property returned,” Eddie said, holding one ice pack on his split lip and another on his battered fingers.

  “What property would that be, Mr. Wesley?”

  “Somebody will know.”

  The duty officer hung up. When Eddie turned around, the young Embassy staffer who had bailed him out was sitting quietly in the rickety chair beside the open window, playing with a cigarette lighter.

  “I know all about you, Mr. Wesley,” the man said. The comically thick glasses were gone, and he no longer looked frightened. “I knew about you before you arrived.”

  Eddie Wesley was oratorical master of most situations, but no words came. He stood very still, more frightened than at any time in his life since the night he was dragged off to meet Scarlett: worse, for example, than the night he was shot on the Hill of Angels. His tongue seemed to swell. The intruder waited patiently. Outside, a tropical ra
in exploded into life, not a slowly increasing patter but an unannounced drenching that drowned even the noise of the geckos, and most of the traffic.

  “The name is Collier. George Collier.” But already Eddie had recognized him, and cursed himself for not piercing the disguise when they met two hours ago. Collier did not extend a hand, and his steady blue eyes dared Eddie to try. The lighter flicked on. Eddie’s eyes followed the flame. The lighter flicked off again. Collier smiled. “I think it’s time we had a little talk.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Plea Bargain

  (I)

  EDDIE DID NOT WASTE TIME WONDERING how Collier had gotten into his room. He had chosen the hotel, after all, because it was practically owned by the Central Intelligence Agency. “Yes,” was, at first, all he could manage. His voice was screechy. He tried again. “You look a little young for your reputation.”

  “Do I? Oh.” Collier had long thin legs and arms, a short torso, and the shining yellow teeth of a career smoker. “I’m thirty-five, let’s say. Yes. Thirty-five.” Nodding thoughtfully, as if he had a lot of ages to choose from, which perhaps he did, for in the gaudy neon glow from the street he looked ten years older, but in a duller light could probably look ten years younger. “And you’re—what? Forty?”

  Eddie was certain that George Collier knew precisely how old he was. “What happened to Benjamin Mellor?”

  “What does it look like happened to him?” A grin appeared suddenly, like a conjurer’s trick. “Did he leave you any souvenirs, Mr. Wesley? The police didn’t find anything on you. Maybe they didn’t look hard enough.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “Too bad about his girlfriend, though. That Teri.” He shrugged. “Well, people should read the consular warnings. There are just some neighborhoods Americans should stay out of, especially in the middle of the night.”