The Glendower Legacy

by Thomas Gifford

  Percy walked outside with them: “Now take care of yourselves,” he said. “You remember what I said about getting to Johnston? You didn’t leave anything behind, did you? Well, I’m going to miss you two—now you let me know how this all turns out, Professor. Call me. Or come up here for a weekend … Don’t make me get my news on the television, y’understand?” He finally rapped on the top of the bedraggled brown car, the signal to pull out. “Take care, young lady.” He waved as Chandler swung the car in a tight circle and headed down the driveway. “Take care …” Chandler nodded, giving him thumbs up, and they were back on the road.

  They clung to the slower, less traveled highway which skirted the coastline and wound through one town after another. It was tedious going but he figured that the crucial thing was simply to get away from their last stopping place; once they’d gotten clear, it struck him that any follower would assume they’d head for the quicker freeway route—though how they’d recognize the brown car wherever it was was beyond him.

  The sky stayed gray over a gray knifeblade ocean. The ground was still spotted with sadly discolored snow or with the dirty brown earth and matted-down grass that sprouted through rather grimly. What would have been a lovely drive in June or October was now something mainly to be gotten through.

  The conversation came in patches too.

  “Well,” she said, “what do you think after a good night’s sleep?” There was no hint of the justified adversary in her voice, a fact which proved to be a considerable relief. “Is it real or a fake?”

  “I’ve been at work on that in the back of what passes for my mind.” He glanced over at her: “And I took your advice, I pulled up my socks and looked at it from the standpoint of a dispassionate historian, not a guy grinding an ax for George Washington.”

  “And?”

  “I keep trying to fit him into the situation, put myself in his shoes. England was such a reality to those people and by all odds they should have won the war … And the Americans were so English themselves. In June of 1775 Congress appointed a dozen generals besides Washington, a dozen—and Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island was the only one who hadn’t held a commission under the crown! And of the twelve, Richard Montgomery and Charles Lee and Horatio Gates had all been born in England and had served in the British Army.

  “Now Washington was an American through and through, but that was more a matter of the specific circumstances of his life. He could very easily have been on the other side. For instance, there was the case of Beverley Robinson—he grew up with George in Virginia, his dad was acting governor of Virginia under the crown. Beverley raised troops for the expedition against Canada in 1746 and while passing through New York he met and married Susanna Philipse … After Braddock’s defeat, on the way back, George met Susanna’s sister Mary who was a very prominent heiress to the family’s holdings in Westchester and Dutchess counties. Washington courted her but for one reason or other, it came to nothing—but, if he’d married her he would almost certainly have become a loyalist officer under the crown. Which was precisely what Beverley Robinson did.”

  He stopped for a light in a buttoned-down village where nothing stirred. The trees were bare and snow melted, stained the gray sidewalk. Polly was listening intently. He moved through the quiet village, past an early gardener scratching at his wet, muddy lawn with a spindly rake.

  “Beverley couldn’t bring himself to side with the rebels,” Chandler went on, as if he’d known the man, as if it had all happened only yesterday. “So he hung on quietly at his estate in Dutchess county until 1777 when John Jay put it to him, one gentleman to another, that he simply had to choose which side he was on. Well, Beverley said no, he couldn’t take the oath of allegiance as required, so he was obliged to pack up and move his entire family within the British lines in New York—his decision was made.

  “But later in the war, when the colonists seemed to be winning, Beverley became the perfect emissary to try and arrange a peace stating that it was time to call a halt and end the fighting with a fair share of honor and safety and leniency.”

  “And you think this was the sort of thing Washington was faced with?” Polly chewed a fingernail, stared ahead at the cramped countryside between towns. Clouds seemed to be pushing down on them. A dog watched as they sped past. He was turning, walking away before the brown car was fully by him. No bark, no flicker of interest. “It was that common?”

  “Oh my, yes,” Chandler said, “it was that common. People were always making dippy little overtures to Washington—he always gave ’em the gate, but he was so goddamned important, so visible, that there were always rumors, innuendos, smears.”

  “Has there ever been any documentary evidence that Washington was ready to join the British?”

  He shook his head: “Not a trace, not a shred.”

  She tapped a finger on the package in her lap. “Are there any pieces of paper, anywhere, like the one we’ve got?”

  “It all depends on what it is we’ve actually got. If I knew what exactly this thing is, then I could tell you—”

  “Don’t be infuriating and obscure,” she said. “You must know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean, all right. Let’s have some lunch.”

  He pulled across the highway to a Howard Johnson. They were surprisingly hungry, ordered fried clams to start and then a couple of steaks. They poured copious amounts of coffee into their stomachs, and they kept talking in low voices. It was Chandler who did most of the talking while Polly finished her steak and began to nibble at his.

  “Look,” he said, “the point is this—George Washington was not a traitor, not a British spy. Any other conclusion is outright absurd. No, there has never been any valid evidence indicating that Washington was anything but utterly, absolutely, indisputably incorruptible …” He raised a palm to stop her: “Don’t talk with your mouth full, please. No valid evidence, that’s what I said … which is not to say that there hasn’t been invalid evidence. Because there hasn’t been a lack of that—”

  “Never taught me that in school,” she said primly.

  “Some history major!”

  “It wasn’t American history. It was English history … I came late to George Washington. Late and just on the surface.” She made a face. “The Plantagenets I know. Can I finish your baked potato, my dear?”

  “Well, there were all kinds of plots and dirty tricks—they weren’t invented by Nixon, you may be sure—back then. I mean, you wouldn’t believe some of them … everybody had a plot, in Paris, in London, in Philadelphia, in Boston, in New York, on the goddamned high seas … King George got a crazy letter to Franklin in Paris, for example, told him to go to the choir at Notre Dame on July sixth, a Monday it was, and meet a man who would be drawing pictures on a pad and wearing a rose in the buttonhole of his waistcoat … Franklin was requested to come in person … well, he never went, the little man was seen to come, wait, and go … and nobody could ever prove he was from the king, this little man, Jennings was his name. Maybe nobody cared, there were so damned many plots …”

  The brown car was back on the road, nosing through the beginnings of a fog blowing in off the Atlantic. The cold clean smell filled the car. He pushed back against the seat, straightening his arms against the steering wheel, feeling it bow slightly. He was seeing things the right way now, it was all making sense … thank God, he had to have his head on straight for Prosser, Bert could be a son of a bitch if you didn’t have your head on straight, no matter what you’d been through. He’d probably learned that from all those presidents he’d told what to do at times of crisis … Truman, Ike, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford … Well, Chandler was ready.

  Polly sat next to him still fingering the package, trying to sort out its real value in her mind.

  “I suppose every large man would have looked like Washington to Davis after his experience in the woods, once he’d seen the signature … And how are we going to figure it out now?”

  “That’s th
e trick this magician can’t do,” Chandler sighed.

  “You mean, what it may come down to is—you either believe the signature is a forgery or you don’t … is that what you’re saying?”

  “Maybe. Unless Prosser can come up with something.”

  “So, we’ve got a thing people are getting killed over but, one it doesn’t really prove anything, and, two it doesn’t really mean anything …”

  “Well, it means something to somebody,” Chandler said.

  “It’s a macguffin,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “I’m going to take a nap,” she said. “It makes my brain tired.”

  “You wanted to come along.”

  She slid across the seat toward him and curled up against him, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Does this bother you?” she murmured.

  “Not at all. I could get used to it.”

  Thorny woke with a groggy, moist feeling as if he’d been on fire and someone had doused him with a pail of water. He opened his eyes slowly, stared at the beige ceiling, the gray clouds over the bus and subway terminal next door, heard the grinding and clanging as an MTA car struggled up the incline and into daylight like a gargantuan, mechanical, clockwork mole. A bottle which had once contained a quart of indifferent gin lay empty on the nightstand, pointing its accusing neck at him like the barrel of a cannon. His head ached unbearably. There was nothing quite like a gin headache. And then he remembered about Ozzie, got a flash, an afterimage, of the huge body, open-mouthed with the gold tooth glittering, going down without a whimper, lying there looking like a blood-stained raincoat ready for the dry cleaners.

  Thorny took a certain pride in his insensitivity to death. Mostly, his involvement with death had centered on inflicting it. He’d inflicted it for the mob in Chicago as a boy, then for the mob in San Diego and New Orleans, then as a free lance in Texas and Mexico and Nicaragua and Paraguay, then some contracts for people he didn’t know and had no desire to identify. A man built a career, made something of his life, protected his reputation, and he was bound to get good referrals. That’s what this whole Boston thing had been, a referral to this old man. And now Ozzie was dead: fucking Harvard professors! He still had trouble getting his breath from the first one, and he was on his own as a result of dealing with the second one … Shit. He’d known Ozzie for better than ten years and they’d worked together ever since 1970: not too heavy on the brains, Ozzie wasn’t, but a good piece of muscle, good to have on your side in a fight. Or he had been up until the last fight.

  Yes, he was insensitive when it came to inflicting death here and there in the name of duty, but Ozzie’s death had upset him. Oz may have been cracking up, but that could happen to anyone. He sighed. They were the same age—forty-four—and it made Thornhill realize just how fragile a thing life was, or could be, once somebody was sufficiently pissed off.

  Oz had been pissed off, particularly about the burns and pain Chandler had given him in such full measure, and as a result, Oz, who was not too awfully high on the evolutionary ladder though he was one hell of a diligent worker, would have been glad to kill Brennan once he’d gotten all the fingernails extracted. It was like therapy for Oz, like basket weaving or needlepoint, the business of removing fingernails. It was easy for the old man to sit back and blow a fuse about things getting out of hand, but you had to be in the field, you had to be getting your nose rubbed in it to know what the hell was going on …

  Thornhill recognized the trouble spots in his own personality and he knew he was facing one of the worst. The more he thought about what Chandler and Brennan had done to Ozzie and him, the more he began to shake with anger, quite an irrational anger: or was it irrational, really? The victims had risen up, struck back at the predators, and in Thorny’s experience that was unheard of when you were dealing with civilians. Soldiers in another army were expected to fight back, but civilians were expected to crack with a tap, like delicate translucent eggshells found in a robin’s nest.

  So what the fuck was going on with Brennan and Chandler?

  Maybe Brennan was dead, he didn’t really know. He’d left too damned fast to check on the state of Brennan’s health. He couldn’t quite understand why he’d been so frightened, but there, out of nowhere, had come the gory spectre of Brennan who should have been passed out cold in the other room … swinging the club and grunting with blood flying and that wet, solid sound from inside Ozzie’s head … he hadn’t had such a fright since he’d seen Psycho and the old lady with the butcher knife had run out on the stairway landing.

  With the image of Brennan killing Oz corroding his brain, Thornhill got out of bed and staggered, head splitting, into the bathroom. Half an hour later he had eaten a breakfast of doughnuts and coffee in the glass-enclosed lobby and gotten the red Pinto filled at the gas station across the street. He also picked up a road map of New England and plotted the course northward to Kennebunkport.

  Impatiently he fought it out with Sunday’s family, pleasure-driving traffic. Interminably he pushed at the bonds of the Boston area, but it was useless to try to force the issue. It took just so long to get free of Boston and that was that. The turnpike signs confused him. Natives honked angrily as he switched lanes. He wondered if the old man had gone to Brennan’s house: he wondered if anyone had even found the human refuse … he wondered how many fingerprints he’d left scattered around the apartment.

  He was having a very bad day. He tugged the black-and-white checked porkpie hat down tight on his head and swore at the Pinto’s lack of acceleration. It was a rotten day and somebody would have to pay. The anger and frustration kept building and he finally gave up trying to cope with it. Fuck the old man. Fuck Brennan and that goddamn Chandler and the TV bitch … Arnold Thornhill had had enough.

  He was back to being a competent killing machine by the time he got to Kennebunkport and asked at the Rexall drugstore where the Seafoam Inn might be.

  “Well, he wasn’t kidding when he said we couldn’t miss it.” Polly was watching as he negotiated the turn off the highway into Prosser’s driveway which rose steadily toward a huge shape, a mansion that seemed to glower down on them from the top of the hill as the light faded behind the blackish clouds on the western horizon. They had slid through Johnston, a village with not more than ten standing structures, just as the grocery store connected with the filling station was being locked up. Polly had managed to buy a few scraps for dinner and Chandler had gassed the car. Then in the growing gloom they had passed on through and seen Prosser’s summer home in its remote baronial splendor.

  The headlights cut through the darkness and it became clear that the house was built mainly of immense gray stones with a slate roof, a dark-green wooden turret with a pointed steeple at the right, and a similarly colored wing spreading off to the left. He drove the car under a mammoth stone portcullis and stopped. Wide stone steps led up to the entryway. Chimneys protruded from the roof at irregular intervals, like fingers thrust out of a grate, stretching for freedom. Orson Welles as Harry Lime, at the end of The Third Man, about to die.

  Chandler got out and hurriedly jogged alongside the house in the glare of the headlights, toward the woodpile by the shed Prosser had described. On his knees he ran his hand under the bottom row of logs, touched something that moved, a spider, and found the keys. Breathing hard he ran back to the car, dangling the keys before him. He grabbed the bags from the back seat while Polly took the groceries and, dropping the key only once, swung the heavy oak door open.

  “Colder in here than outside,” Polly said, sniffling. The front hall was stuffy, smelled of being locked up for the winter, and Chandler saw Polly’s breath as she spoke. He tried the switch and the hallway was dimly illuminated by a gray light. “Seven Keys to Baldpate,” she said. “Come on, let’s get our bearings.” And she headed off toward what turned out to be the vast, cold, echoing kitchen. All the light bulbs seemed to be forty watts. The shadows held monsters, quite possibly. Ghosts, at the very least.
“Cheery, fun place,” she said. “Prosser must be a cheery, fun fellow—what do you do if he invites you for the weekend?”

  “It’s a summer house, priceless—”

  “I wish it were summer.” She unpacked the groceries and tested the stove. No gas. The refrigerator was unplugged. But a coffeepot responded to being plugged into a wall socket and she quickly found a can opener and got the coffee perking. “Thank God the water is running. He must have a man who comes in, keeps an eye on the place.”

  A quarter of an hour later, fortified with mugs of hot coffee and a plate of Twinkies, they were seated on the floor in the room at the bottom of the round turret which turned out to be a comfortable old-fashioned library with books lining the walls, flat expanses of tabletops, and overstuffed chairs. Chandler brought in logs and the fire thawed them through, made them tired and safe. Chandler felt quite safe for the first time in days. He looked up from the curling flames, feeling her gaze. She’d taken off the heavy sweater and rolled up the sleeves of her checked shirt. She smiled lazily, shaking her head.

  “Well,” she said, “now would seem to be the time, wouldn’t it? Unless you still hate me, my profession, and my theory of history …” She brushed the thick hair back over her ears, grinned a trifle dangerously, just a bit of incisor showing. A forefinger tweaked a button on the front of her shirt.

  “I could probably put aside my prejudices for a moment or two,” he said, “if pressed.”

  “And precisely where would you have to be pressed, Professor?”