“Okay.” Thorny folded down the corner of the page and put the book in his raincoat pocket. “First, let’s just ask him for the fuckin’ bookbag. Polite …”
“Right.” Ozzie opened the door and began the task of levering himself out of the cramped front seat.
It didn’t go well.
Right off the bat the kid saw them, recognized them. Ozzie’s rain hat caught on the roof of the car as he struggled upward; it rolled onto the sidewalk. Thorny had gotten around the car and was standing on the sidewalk, between the kid and the front lawn of his parents’ house.
“Bill Davis?” Thorny inquired politely. “Excuse me, Bill—”
“You guys!” Bill Davis stood still. “Who the hell are you guys? I’ve been seeing you all day …”
Ozzie had retrieved his hat, stood up feeling the weight of the pliers in his coat pocket. Pliers weren’t going to be worth a good goddamn tonight. His head ached, he hated the taste of the cherried tobacco. He focused on the boy.
“Look, son,” Thorny said, taking a step toward the kid. “Listen to me very carefully, son. We’re police officers … we’ve got to have a word with you, Bill.”
“About what?” Bill backed off warily.
“About your bookbag,” Ozzie said. He was upright, rain hat jammed down on his large round head. Smartass Harvard kid … fairy …
“Goddamn it, I knew it!” Bill peered through the gloom at the two men. “But why? What the hell do the police—”
Thorny moved closer: “We’ve got to have your bookbag, son … we need your cooperation.” He reached for the bookbag, calmly, slowly, anything to keep Ozzie from losing his grip. “Be reasonable, son.”
“All I’ve got is some magazines, creepo—”
“Come on, son. Just hand it over—”
Bill Davis assumed a karate stance: “Don’t fuck with me, asshole! I’ll break your goddamned neck!”
“You’re not going to give us the bag, right?” Ozzie loomed behind Thorny. “Am I right, Bill?” Ozzie’s deep voice was toneless: he stood quietly, one hand jiggling in his raincoat pocket.
“You bet your ass. Buy your own goddamn Penthouse …” He began to edge onto the lawn, his hands raised like chopping devices. Lunatics on the streets of Brookline, for God’s sake.
“Shit,” Thorny said. “Don’t be stupid, there’s no point—”
Ozzie took an automatic equipped with a screw-on silencer from the quivering pocket and shot Bill Davis in the heart. As the boy fell backward the second bullet caught him in the side of the head, blowing him sideways into the grass. He went down on his face, dead. Ozzie wrenched the bookbag from his limp hand. He scowled at Thorny: “Nothing’s ever easy …” Thorny watched, frozen, too slow to have done anything to stop it. Christ … he needed a drink.
The street was still deserted, low ground fog appearing like instant shrubbery. They got back into the Pinto and drove slowly away. The street was still. In the car, Thorny couldn’t think of anything to say and Ozzie wore a mask of satisfaction, fingers rhythmically tightening on the pliers in his pocket. Sometimes the pliers took too long …
“The fact is, Thorny old pal, you fucked up.”
They sat in the all-night cafeteria. An ancient wino was mopping one corner of the long, narrow, white-tiled floor. Above, the fluorescent lights flickered aggravatingly. The floor was covered with tracked-in slush. In the back behind the counter, the man yelled, “Toast the English!” for the twentieth time in ten minutes. Thorny himself stared at his toasted English muffin.
“You killed him,” he said disconsolately.
“Harvard fairy bastard … You weren’t getting anywhere, that’s for damned sure.”
“Well, I’m still sure it was in the bookbag. I’m positive. So he must have gotten rid of it after we lost him … but where?” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
“Don’t cry, Thorny,” Ozzie cautioned. “We’ll get it. Just like the old days, we’ll kick a little ass, show ‘em how it’s done.”
“My eyes are tired. I’m getting a cold.”
“I’ve got a feeling that people are going to be mad as hell at us.” Ozzie’s mood darkened too quickly. Thorny saw the signs, wondered what to do: could he use Ozzie’s state of mind? God, what a thought. …
“I wouldn’t be surprised, Oz.” He took a swig of coffee. With a glass of ice water he washed down three Excedrin. “Goddamn stroke books,” he mused. “He could have mailed it to somebody … He could have given it to somebody in Boston, it was the Park Street car—”
“If he got off at Park Street.”
“What we’ve got here, Oz, is a shitload of imponderables.”
“He could have left it with Chandler … If he had the stroke books in the bag we wouldn’t have noticed if the picture was gone.”
They sat quietly, staring into the almost empty, discouragingly cold and dirty street beyond the huge naked windows. A truck rumbled by and drenched the Pinto with clinging gray crud.
“You know,” Thorny said, tapping his fingers on the stack of magazines, “I sometimes wonder what the hell is so important about the picture … what makes them want it.”
“Hell, I wonder who’s putting up the money for the job—ten grand for a snatch like this.” He sighed deep in his vast chest. “And now we got a dead guy and no picture—”
“I don’t know about you but I’m scared to tell them.” Thorny seemed to be shrinking inside his coat. He blew his nose and stared into the Kleenex.
“What else can we do?” He pleaded with his eyes, like a dog. “I need this payday, Thorny, y’know?”
“Well, let’s think of something …”
“How mad are they gonna be? Really?”
“Mad. But they’ll forget it when we find the stuff … But, Ozzie, for Chrissakes, we gotta be careful. You dig? Careful …”
In the upper reaches of the bedeviled John Hancock Building, towering over the genteel antiquity of Copley Square like a frozen shaft of silver-blue ice, three men sat around a stark table which fit perfectly with the spirit of the building. The slab of glass forming the tabletop was an inch thick, fifteen feet long, anchored well off center to a massive, squat cylinder of marble. There were three leather-and-chrome armchairs drawn up, each occupied by a tweedy gentleman who would have looked more at home at the Harvard Club on Commonwealth Avenue. Other than a chrome lamp reflecting the scene in its conical reflector, the room was empty but for some scraps of lumber, a sprinkling of sawdust, and two large sheets of plywood. As it was, there was only one remaining pane of glass, floor to ceiling; as was so common in the sixty-two-story building, the others had been blown out by the wind and replaced with plywood. From the outside it gave the building a visage not unlike that of a gap-toothed village idiot.
The oldest gentleman rubbed his palms on the bowl of his tan Dunhill Bruyere, warming them. It was cold in the naked room. Their breath hung in the air before them.
“Do you have the foggiest idea what’s going on?”
“I must, Andrew. I called the meeting.”
“Well, what is it? I’ve got to get back to Washington tonight … We do work for our living down there.”
“You won’t make it tonight. I have plans for you—and Logan’s fogged in. Look …” He pointed out the single window. The moon shone brightly through a partly cloudy sky. “Up here, clear … but on the ground, rain and dense fog. We’ll put you up at the Ritz.” He puffed, clicking the stem against his teeth. “Liam, you too.”
“The Ritz is fine.” Liam had once had a full head of red hair, though now it was a rusty-gray fringe of memory riding low over his ears like a dust ruffle.
“So tell us what’s up …”
“I don’t actually know what’s up, of course, but there are some disturbing alarums going off in odd places … most curiously here, Boston. Two mercenaries—that is, no sustained allegiance to anyone—arrived at Logan a couple of days ago. By some miracle one of our airport personnel recognized them, let
us know, and we had them followed. They haven’t given any indication they’ve spotted us …” He tamped the pipe with a tiny bronze Mr. Pickwick, sucked it moistly.
“Who are they working for? Why are they here, for Christ’s sake?” Andrew interrupted himself, making a tiny circle, an O, with his neat little mouth. He blinked behind wire-rimmed spectacles.
“Obviously I have neither answer. The point that concerns me is this, our Masters tell me nothing, neither confirm nor deny employment—which means that these two blokes could be working for us this time … Now I spent the day on the scrambler talking myself blue in the face, trying to get a simple yes or no, and couldn’t get even a soft belch. They aren’t telling!” He sighed heavily, yanked his scarf tighter at his throat. He was far from a young man; if the fact were known, he was far from well, but that was something he could handle later on. “Whoever they may be working for, they checked in at the Harvard Motor Hotel—”
Andrew expelled a long groan through the tiny circle: “This sounds like one of those goddamn defections … Harvard or MIT.” He shook his round head and whistled softly: “Jesus, I hate those … the worst one, I’ll never get over that—”
“Setting up a fatal car crash on one-twenty-eight,” Liam mused, “is a one-time thing.” He shuddered at the memory. “What a mess.”
“Let’s not immediately leap heavy-booted into violence. These men may be working for us, you really mustn’t forget that. Somehow we’re going to have to find out …”
“‘Nobel Laureate Defects,’” Andrew said. “I can see it now …”
“How do we find out? If our side won’t tell us?”
The oldest man, pipe clamped between his teeth, stood up slowly, pushing his gnarled, blue-veined fists into the pockets of his gray herringbone jacket. He went to the one glass window, stared into the night. Below him Boston was a pink and yellow blur through the groundfog.
“We know two things. First, they’ve been following a Harvard student by the name of Bill Davis. Second, three hours ago they killed him and stole his bookbag …”
“Killed him?” There was surprisingly little emotion in Liam’s voice.
“Yes, Liam. Now, I no longer am moved to give the slightest fuck in the universe what our Masters are playing at … I want to know who these sods are working for and I want to know why they killed Bill Davis. Find out who the boy was close to at Harvard, dig around, and watch these men … I want to know everything. Understood?”
Liam and Andrew nodded quietly. Liam knocked a clot of ash from the thickly caked bowl of an old black pipe.
“Andrew, you’ll go back to Washington when we’re done here.”
The old man slipped into his heavy Burberry and picked up his umbrella. “I’ll be in touch. Enjoy the Ritz, gentlemen.”
Wednesday
BEYOND THE STREAKED WINDOWS OF the overheated classroom Harvard Yard was soggy and dirty with late winter snow and a slanting cold rain that made things even worse. It was Professor Colin Chandler’s favorite time of the year: he was an indoors person and this kind of weather offered no lures at all, nothing to pull him away from his fire and his books and the clutter of his own mind. He found also that his students seemed to have less on their own minds than at other, more exuberant seasons.
While he folded his late edition of The Boston Globe and placed it carefully next to his gloves and scarf on the plain wooden desk, they shuffled in blowing their noses and stacking rundown backpacks against the walls and stomping wet sludge from their boots. He looked down at them from his six feet four inches; at forty-five he was beginning to feel less a physical presence than his students and the arrival of middle age had taken him rather by surprise. They had more ahead of them than he did and he wasn’t overjoyed by the thought.
Waiting for them to get settled he caught sight of himself, reflected in one of the windows, and watched for a moment. In outline he didn’t look any different than he had twenty years ago: tall, broad, slightly stooped shoulders, brown Harris tweed jacket that went back to Adlai Stevenson, foulard tie, striped button-down blue shirt, heavy brown horn-rims, dark vaguely wavy hair, a hawk’s nose separating dark brown eyes, heavy eyebrows, blah blah blah—he lost interest. There he stood, Tradition in its forties, a stalwart old gunslinger in the path of change. Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter with Skip Homeier lurking, Frisbee behind his back … He smiled, squinting a little, took off his glasses. He knew he was a comparatively handsome man and the knowledge made lecturing more fun, made him feel freer. It was all an illusion but you had to go with what you had.
“Good afternoon,” he said, nodding. There seemed to be about twenty-five on hand, almost all of the registrees for his favorite upper-class course, history majors only (others by permission of the instructor). “You will note by the hissing radiators and the fact that this place will soon begin smelling like a locker room, you will note that at Harvard there is no energy shortage … other, perhaps, than among its servants. For now, I will provide the energy and you can just lie there, soaking it up. Your turn, I need hardly add, will come.”
“Did you have that memorized?” Sheila, one of the nine Radcliffe students, was a frank and candid member of the Frisbee and backpack and Earth Shoe generation. “I mean, it sounded like you were leaving little spaces for the laugh track.” She seemed troubled.
“No, my dear, I made it up myself as I went along. In real life we often find ourselves doing that, thinking and talking, thinking and talking. You might say that most of us write our own material.”
“Well, it sure wasn’t funny. Maybe you should hire a writer …”
He enjoyed this bunch; he let the conversation banter along. As he listened he noticed a woman sitting at the back of the room, clearly not a student, though her face was strangely familiar. Huge eyes, a thin French mouth, high cheekbones, short hair, a dampened raincoat. She sat attentively, by the door, hands folded on the desk. She’d taken a tissue from a Vuitton bag, dabbed her nose. He smiled at her when their eyes met, then straightened up and went to stand behind the lectern. He undid the buckle on his Rolex and placed it on the lectern and began to talk about illusion and reality. The grayness outside was being obliterated by the steam edging up the windows.
“We live in an age of easy handles and instant analysis,” he said, “the present becomes history in a matter of seconds, the transistorized, lightweight, handheld color television cameras put us right there where it’s going down—listen to me, ‘where it’s going down.’ That, my young friends,” he grinned sourly, “is television talk … that cop show, the short muscle-bound guy with the bird? He always says that and now I’m saying it and I am neither a cop nor a street person. It’s instant, subliminal influence, and it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether it’s street talk on cop shows or John Dean ‘at that point in time’ or Lockheed payoffs or Nixon going to China … We look up from our everyday lives and get a fast half-minute summary of the history of Sino-American relationships, or corruption in government, or the role of the spy throughout Western Civilization—life is becoming an endless, unbroken stream of Bicentennial Minutes, brought to us by Shell Oil, and racing through the years ever more urgently—”
He stopped and watched them. They were a television generation, one of the early ones, and he wondered for the thousandth time if they really understood what he was talking about. They were what they’d spent their lives watching. Could you blame them? Could Harvard undo the damage in four quick years?
“Now I’m not saying that’s all bad,” he went on, shaking his head, “not by any means. But it’s not enough—that one view of who we are and how we got here, it’s just not enough. Since television time is money, the answers and analyses have got to be quick, strong, and even entertaining. Quick, strong, entertaining … not necessarily intelligent or thoughtful or valid. An illusion is being created by TV—it has created the great communal living room where we all sit around the electric sages and soak up the same stuff, each one of us,
the same stuff, right or wrong. And the very numbers of us who soak it up have the power to make all this stuff fact—the truth, as seen by CBS and NBC and ABC. But it’s not the truth, it’s just a piece of it, a corner of the truth …
“So where is the truth? In The New York Times? Well, some of it is in The New York Times. And some of it is in Newsweek and some more of it is in Rolling Stone and there are bits and pieces in the volumes of memoirs which are auctioned off to the highest bidding publisher.” He leaned forward and tried to fix a few of them with his eyes. “But mainly what we read and see today, about ourselves and people who lived centuries ago, is part of the salable illusion called ‘history’ … and far too little of it has anything to do with reality. It’s history cut to order, conveniently fitted into any of the various chic theories which happen to be—to be going down at the moment …
“And with the American revolutionary war we’re back to illusion and reality. You’ve got to get yourselves into their eighteenth-century shoes, see what they saw, see how much they knew and how much they were missing of what went on around them, what they thought was real … The easy labels we pin on men who turn the course of history are seldom very accurate, are more often merely convenient.”
He let the flow of his ideas carry him along, ideas he’d carefully worked up over the years, and it was largely automatic. At least it was today. He spoke of great men and cads and why they were what they were and he watched the woman in the back row. Familiar … someone he knew? No, not that … but familiar … when he looked at her she was always watching him closely, but then why not, he was the lecturer.
He strode across to the radiator and kicked it, having learned several weeks before that no rational attempts to control its output had the slightest effect. He put his hands in the pockets of the tweed coat, ran his fingers through the lint, loose shreds of tobacco, movie ticket stubs, and waited. He always liked to give them a chance to get the point of things clear in their minds before he began to get specific. Damn, she was still staring at him. Why did he feel that her name was only just out of reach?
The Glendower Legacy Page 4
