The Glendower Legacy

by Thomas Gifford

  He sighed, glanced out the wide thermal-pane window at the ridiculous line of people, thousands of them, snaking across the Square, half obscured by snow which seemed to hang from the low gray clouds like a curtain. Every day the line was there, the KGB lads keeping them quiet and orderly and frisking them for bombs. He winced at the thought: some nut blowing Lenin and his tomb to pieces … Talk about a public relations problem! The unnerving thing was, the friskers found a bomb of one kind or another about once a month. On the other hand, Petrov supposed that a maniac’s exploding device might be the only way he’d ever find out for sure if it really was Lenin or a wax figure … It looked like wax but you never knew. And he’d never had the nerve to come right out and ask anyone who might know.

  He finished Red Smith’s column and folded the paper back to the entertainment section. He was dying to see A Chorus Line, thought for a moment of taking up the possibility of an exchange program with the snotty bastards in Cultural Affairs. He sipped the coffee which was growing cold and beginning to taste of cardboard. It was Monday morning. He frowned at his gold Rolex. Fifteen minutes yet.

  It was a boring age and the Monday morning meetings added immeasurably to his boredom. His mind wandered back to spring training. Arden Sanger, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was a good friend but he could take baseball or leave it, a state of mind Petrov deplored. They did occasionally correspond during the football season since Arden was, predictably, an enthusiastic fan of the Washington Redskins. Like old jocks the world over, they did not shrink from the occasional practical jokes. It fit their natures.

  As Petrov walked down the hallway to his meeting, he wondered what new absurdities would come flickering his way like hot smashes to third: that’s what he felt like as he approached the large conference room, an old third-sacker whose ultimate responsibility was to get in front of those hot smashes down the line like Red Rolfe at Yankee Stadium so long ago. Well, God help Mother Russia if one ever got past him.

  Petrov tried at all times, and usually with considerable success, to keep his sense of history, perspective, and humor intact and on call. But the Monday morning staff meetings were his severest tests. Dull, very serious men each bearing a crumb and the earnest hope of an approving glance or word from Petrov himself. He tried to pass his approval around evenhandedly, tried to present a solid, interested visage upon which they might gaze admiringly for a few hours and from which they might draw some strength. But it was just plain murder as they used to say in Brooklyn, no other word for it.

  Midway into the third hour a case officer caught his attention with a report from a fieldman in Bucharest called Grigorescu.

  “I search my brain,” Petrov said, rolling a very ripe cigar between his broad spatulate fingertips, “and I find nothing about this Grigorescu.”

  “No, no, Comrade Director, you would have no reason—he’s a new man, very junior. Very, very junior, actually.”

  “God, are things really so slow these days?” He glanced at the severe face of the man scribbling in a shorthand book. “No, secretary, if you’d be so kind as to strike that … Thank you. Now, comrade, what has this infant Grigorescu to tell us?”

  The bald, portly man in a brown suit pursed his plump lips and waved a forefinger before his face like a metronome. “Allow me, please, to preface my remarks with a comment on this report—the fact is, Comrade Director, it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that you’ll believe a word of it—”

  “You find that unusual?” Petrov smiled against his better judgment. “You suppose I believe this kind of thing? Ever?” He was the only man in the room smiling. “No,” he said to the secretary, “no, you don’t need to record that. Now, Rogoshin, go on with your unlikely tale. And allow me to correct myself. The fact is, I find myself willing to believe almost anything these days. Say on …”

  “Well, let me begin at the beginning,” Rogoshin said, frowning. “The youthful Grigorescu is alarmingly thorough, I’m afraid. It all begins with an American from Boston called Underhill and another American who died two hundred years ago at a place called Valley Forge …”

  An hour later Maxim Petrov was back in the antiseptic office standing at the window, staring down at the line of people in Red Square. The line never seemed to change but Petrov was aware of his own shift in mood. He was smiling, full of wonder at how unlikely the sources of amusement can occasionally be. He was contemplating Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, not normally a cause for merriment, but in this instance pure inspiration … On his lined yellow pad he had written three words, carefully underlining them twice. He turned back from the window chuckling. He’d get the ball rolling right away. It was just too priceless … He buzzed for his private secretary and contemplated the yellow pad.

  JOKE ON ARDEN!

  His secretary found the great man laughing aloud behind his immaculate desk.

  Boston: March 1976

  Monday

  BILL DAVIS SAT AT THE counter of the Zum Zum restaurant around the corner from Harvard Square, sucked at a Lucky Strike, and pushed the egg-smeared breakfast plate away from the cuff of his red-and-black flannel lumberjack’s shirt. He was trying to place the face of the man at the next counter: he’d seen the guy before but he couldn’t quite remember where, when. But you couldn’t miss a black-and-white houndstooth porkpie hat, not in the 1970s. It had a little green feather sticking out of the band and the houndstooth motif was carried on in the pattern of the gray raincoat. He couldn’t remember seeing a costume like that since he’d been a little boy and his father had been similarly gotten up. The man was sipping steaming coffee and writing with a Bic ballpoint in a little brown spiral notebook. Bill focused on him, blurring several dangling sausages which were hanging between them, presumably for decorative effect. As if cued in to Bill’s curiosity the man looked up from his notebook and smiled, open and disingenuous like an on-the-go insurance salesman about to undergo a mid-life crisis. There was a vaguely anxious, friendly, not absolutely trustworthy look to the man’s face, particularly around the eyes and at the fixed, upturned corners of his mouth. He smiled again at Bill across the fifteen feet, nodded fractionally as strangers do when their eyes happen to meet. Standing closer he’d have commented on the weather.

  Bill smiled back, took another hit on the Lucky, and slid off the stool. His corduroy jacket was damp still. He wrapped the maroon-and-white muffler around his throat. The man still sipped his coffee, staring out at the midday traffic working its way, headlamps on, through the cold rain. Bill decided the guy would have voted for Nixon. He picked up his green baize bookbag and headed for Adams House where he lived on the top floor, with an angled view of The Lampoon building.

  He sat at his desk beneath the Escher poster with the birds somehow flying in both directions at once and lit another Lucky. In the circular glow from the old goosenecked lamp he carefully cut strips of masking tape, fixed the cardboard backing to an antique framed likeness of one of his ancestors, a woman who had been young and shy-appearing long before the revolutionary war. The contents of the frame bulked thickly and the taping went slowly, punctuated by exhalations of shit! and goddamn it! He squinted against the smoke, finally ran his thumbs along the backside of the frame, satisfying himself that the tape was secure.

  Stubbing out the cigarette, he tore the cellophane from a package of plain brown wrapping paper. Still working with meticulous care he covered the framed picture with several thicknesses of wrapping, taped the folded ends and concluded his operation by trussing up the entire parcel with stout white twine. He held it before him, dropped it flat on the desk to test the padding of paper, and sighed contentedly. He looked at his watch. He had just enough time to get up to the Square, stop at the Coop, and get to Chandler’s office in the history department before the office hours ended. He emptied several books and pens out of the bookbag and slid the brown parcel in, cinched the bag tight.

  He was leaving the cluttered, frenzied activity of the Coop, standing in the s
pacious portal across from the newspaper kiosk and subway entrance, watching the rain and tightening his muffler, when he saw the man again. You couldn’t miss the silly hat and the matching raincoat. He was leaning against one of the pillars near the sidewalk reading a newspaper. Now there was a second man with him, large, well over six feet, more than two hundred pounds, wearing one of those tan rain hats with the little plaid band, the brim turned down all the way around. Hat freaks … Maybe it was some new fag thing, hats, like signet rings on your little finger and keys on your hip pocket. Bookbag over his shoulder Bill pushed through his fellow shelterers, past the two in their funny hats. The big one caught his eye this time, quickly looked away, yawning nervously, covering his cavernous mouth. Bill Davis shrugged and jogged across the rainslick street to the kiosk, heading for the Yard past mounds of discolored snow piled along the curbsides like garbage.

  Through the clouded glass on his door, Professor Chandler’s office was dark. The office hours on the card were being precisely observed: he’d arrived two minutes late. Crap … He stood by the door fuming, considered penciling an obscenity on the thumbtacked card, then walked back down the musty-smelling, overheated hallway to the secretary’s office. She was sitting at a wooden desk copy-editing a typewritten manuscript, chewing on a blue pencil.

  “Chandler’s gone,” he said.

  “You got it,” she said without looking up.

  “Will you take a message for him?”

  “Why don’t you just give him a ring tomorrow?” She glanced at him quizzically. “He might not stop in here for his messages, y’know?”

  “Look, it’s important. Gimme the pencil, okay?”

  She made a face at the extended interruption. He scribbled: Prof. Chandler—Please call me at KL-5-8786 as soon as possible. Big Deal! Bill Davis. He handed it back to the girl.

  “If he comes in, y’know?” he said.

  She read the note: “Big deal to you, not him.” She shook her head.

  “Don’t worry about making value judgments, okay? Just fight fiercely, Harvard.”

  “You know it.” She was already back in the manuscript.

  He left shaking his head. It was the tail end of winter and everybody had cabin fever. Next thing he’d be wearing a nifty little porkpie himself.

  When he left the building he turned toward the Square, hurried through the slowly diminishing drizzle past Matthews Hall. He beat the light to the subway entrance, failing to notice the man in the porkpie hat and the man with the rain hat who were stopped by traffic on the Yard side of the street. He picked up a Christian Science Monitor at the kiosk and dived down the stairway, bookbag banging his back. The train to Park Street was waiting when he burst through the turnstile; he leaped aboard as the doors were closing. Turning, he saw them. The houndstooth hat stood out from the crowd. They were waiting in the line to purchase tokens. Bill Davis felt an unaccountable, unpleasant shiver along his spine.

  Porkpie hat turned to rain hat as they stepped back from the token window. Rain hat drew a Tiparillo, cherry flavored, from its pasteboard packet, sniffed it, applied a match struck on his thumbnail. Porkpie hat coughed in the smoke, batted the fumes away.

  “Brookline,” he said. He was wearing black plastic-rimmed glasses now and they were speckled with rain. He looked up at his companion. “We can wait for the kid in Brookline … I know damn well it’s in the fuckin’ bookbag. That’s why he went to the history office, to see his adviser—what’s-his-name, Chandler.”

  “You don’t know anything …” The big man’s voice was deeper than Ivan Rubroff’s. His face was round and jowly, permanently flushed, and beneath the little hat he looked like any of a million suburban golfers on a cloudy, threatening afternoon. But an edge of worry slid across Thorny’s mind as he watched the smoke curl up from the Tiparillo: the big man’s lips trembled, his hands shook. Thorny had seen it happen before to men in their line. Nerves going, age creeping up, too much booze, a wife who walked out: Ozzie didn’t have much future, but the trick was to get him through one more job … keep his temper under control.

  “I know it’s the bookbag. Trust me, Ozzie.”

  “I’m too hungry to trust you.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Right, that’s how hungry I am.”

  “We’ll stop at a McDonald’s. On the way to Brookline. He always goes home to see his folks on Tuesday nights. Never misses.”

  They walked through the drizzle to Brattle Street. Miraculously they’d found a parking place near Design Research. There was a ticket on the windshield, soggy beneath the wiper blade. The smaller man tore it in two, dropped it in the gutter. Ozzie had a tough time cramming himself into the red Pinto.

  “Say, Oz, you know what I’m thinking?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “What? Smartass—”

  “You want me to be sure I’ve got the pliers.”

  “Sometimes you amaze me.” He wiped his glasses with a Kleenex from a tiny package on the dashboard. “You’re a damn good pardoner …” It was a lie, or a memory. Once he had been a good man and in those days their friendship had been forged; now it was a question of getting through the job, one day at a time.

  “Then you can buy the Big Macs, Thorny.”

  Bill Davis was frightened and he didn’t know why. They were the same men, but what the hell sense was there in finding anything ominous in them? They were 1950s, harmless, middle-aged. He wouldn’t even have noticed them if they hadn’t worn the hats. He hadn’t seen them more often than he’d seen twenty other people in the Square that day; it was just that these two stuck in his mind. So why should two guys in funny hats spook him? It didn’t make any sense.

  He ran up the stairs at the Park Street station, pushed through the customary pigeons who permanently inhabited the corner of Park and Tremont, and went up the hill toward Beacon Street. He took a right just short of the State House and entered a narrow doorway, past a window with discreet gold lettering. A second door, polished wood and a brass plaque, and he was in the coziness of the old man’s office and showroom. There were two dark-green leather wingback chairs, a small table, an electric fireplace, and a middle-aged woman in a Rosalind Russell vintage ’39 suit and a graying bun. She looked up and paused at her first sight of the long blond hair and the patchy plot of beard. She’d not been in place on his previous visits.

  Working up a smile, she managed, “Yes? Is there something?”

  “Is Mr. Underhill in?” He smelled the old man’s cigar smoke but that didn’t mean he was present. He’d been smoking in the same offices for a very long time.

  Before she could answer, Nat Underhill appeared in the doorway, thumbs hooked in his vest. He smiled, his watery blue eyes twinkling; he was a small man but erect, fit.

  “Bill! How are you?” He motioned Bill through the doorway to his private office, hot, dry, cluttered with memorabilia, bits and pieces of a lifetime spent digging at the past. “You may lock up now, Miss Thompson, and get a head start home. Nasty weather. Be sure to take your bumbershoot, that’s the girl. Now, come on, Bill, have a chair. Don’t tell me you’ve made another find …” He settled down in the leather swivel chair behind the broad gleaming desk.

  “Nope, same find, sir. But to tell you the truth—ah, it makes me a little nervous carrying it around.” He swallowed drily. “Y’know what I mean? Say I lost it or something, the glass got broken and cut it up … And I don’t like to leave it in my room either. No damned security, stuff always disappearing, y’know?” He put the bookbag on the desk, pulled it open, and withdrew the package. “I mean, look, I don’t know if it’s as valuable as you say—no offense, Mr. Underhill, I’m sure it is—”

  “No offense taken, I assure you. Go on.”

  “But the value, that’s your business. My interest is historical, what it means to all of our scholarship if it’s true …” He shrugged. “Look, can I leave it here with you? You’ve got a place, a safe, something?”

  “Of
course, of course.” Nat Underhill poured tea from a china pot and offered it to Bill who shook his head no. Methodically he poured cream, dipped a tiny spoon of sugar. “Did you show it to Professor Chandler?”

  “No, I went today but missed him. Anyway, he can come down here and the two of you—both experts, you can look it over together. It makes sense to me …”

  “That’s fine with me, Bill. We’ll get together on it. No problem.”

  They chatted a few minutes while the heavy ormolu clock ticked loudly and the clouds darkened over Beacon Hill. They both knew the documents packed inside the frame, knew them backwards and forwards, and there was nothing left to say. And neither one of them knew just what to do with them. They’d gotten used to their staggering implications but they were at a loss as to the future … You couldn’t just have a press conference and blurt it out, not something like this … The thought was absurd. But what to do? Perhaps Chandler would know.

  Back outside in the rain which had become a spitting drizzle and was making the steep sidewalk slippery as night fell, Bill Davis felt relieved. Getting the damned thing off his hands was the best thing he could have done. Now it was Underhill’s problem. At the newsstand among the pigeons he bought a Penthouse, a Playboy, Time, Newsweek, and The Village Voice; he stuffed them into the green bookbag, looking forward to crawling into his old bed at home with the Celtics playoff game on the radio and no class on Wednesday until noon. With luck Chandler would call him at Adams House in the afternoon. Now that the picture was gone he’d forgotten the two men in funny hats.

  The smell of Big Macs and fries lingered in the Pinto’s interior. Ozzie was making it worse with another cherry-scented Tiparillo, nervously chewing the mouthpiece, working his hands one on the other in his lap. The trees along the Brookline residential street were bare, grasping, streaked with rain, black in the glow from the streetlamp. Thorny had opened his window a couple of inches in an attempt to air out the car. Ozzie coughed: “God, these things really do taste like shit. Well, here he comes.” He was sweating.