She arrived there one day
To her great dismay
Society had got up and went.
He remembered Polly’s voice as they drove the rental car from Sydney to Halifax, doing the limericks as they pushed on through the mud and snow of the early Nova Scotia spring: winter in disguise. Somehow they’d left the boat, wounded and beginning to take on water through several bullet holes and the damage from the hag’s tooth, at a small fishing village on the Cabot Trail where they got a ride Wednesday morning from a lonely fisherman heading for the hospital in Sydney. Getting to the Cape Breton coast: Polly had managed that through choppy seas, smothering fog, and God only knew what else. How had she done it? The reincarnation of Bogart. He couldn’t recall ever holding anyone in such awe: perhaps he’d never know how she’d done it, but the fact was that she’d gotten them safely to shore over miles and miles of inky, terrifying sea. She told him that everything he said was nonsense, that he was grossly exaggerating her accomplishment, but there was a pleased grin that went with the disclaimer. “I wasn’t great,” she insisted slyly, glancing backward at his theory of history, “merely heroic … there’s a difference.”
Worries danced before him like taunting, malevolent gnomes, in and out among his memories of Polly’s steadfastness and the surging of the gun in his hand and the dash through the narrows with the huge cold teeth rising around them. James Bond stuff. Worries: Where was the Glendower document? Had Prosser survived? What had been happening on the island when they escaped? And what of Hugh? Was he still alive, or had the ridiculous charade claimed him?
The sun’s glare off the water turned the inside of his eyelids a hot, scalding red. He leaned away from the window, rested his head on Polly’s shoulder.
Maxim Petrov read the decoded message, rubbed his eyes, and fought off a yawn which was in no way a reaction to the message which would have required, if anything, a fit of screaming. No. His office was overheated and as a result he felt tired within an hour of arriving at his desk. Tell them it was too hot and you’d be frozen stiff inside of twenty-four hours and you’d stay that way until summer. There was, he reflected numbly, no way to win.
He put the sheet of paper down, stroking it briefly with his fingertips, as if coaxing it to make sense, and looked at his list of appointments and tasks. Bureaucratically, he faced the day. He supposed there was no avoiding giving the Intourist guides some sort of pep talk: their morale was even lower than was customary. And there was the black market in Levi’s which seemed to be entering one of its peak periods: his wife had bought him two pairs and the price had been truly outrageous. And there were the informers who wanted an increase in privileges. And now, this—this utterly crazy business in Nova Scotia.
He sighed and lit a Havana and decided to see if he could smoke it all the way to the end without disturbing the ash.
Everything in Russia, Mother Russia, eventually landed on his desk—at least everything that went wrong. And that was very nearly goddamned everything. It always came back to the same thing. The KGB was too big. But from its ever-increasing size he derived his power.
The Nova Scotia affair, a perfect example. Inevitably the KGB’s hind legs were tripping over one another while the front end wasn’t in the least aware of any difficulty. Oh, it wasn’t a perfect analogy, but in an imperfect world you took what was offered.
Nova Scotia … that involved the Canadian group, the American group, tangentially the young eager beaver in Bucharest—God, his career was over before it began! And now, here it was on his desk, a first class disaster involving nothing but the silliest kind of trivia … How had he ever let it all happen? Why did he always have to see the humorous possibilities? He felt like a boor at the party who couldn’t be restrained from telling the same tedious jokes, week after week, year after year. Now, if World War III were started as a result of the Nova Scotia contretemps, guess who would get the blame? Madame Petrov’s brightest son, Max!
His secretary, Maya, brought in his suitcase, packed. Maya was a sturdy, fetching blonde of thirty, rather far down the list of women who were cleared to serve him. He frequently fantasized about her in the washroom.
“You’ve heard of the American fascination with what they call Women’s Liberation, Maya?”
“Yes, sir.” She gazed at him levelly, expressionless.
“I was just told a new slogan of theirs. ‘Support Women’s Lib … Make him sleep on the wet spot.’”
She stared at him, expectantly.
“Do you get it, Maya?”
“I’m afraid not, Director.”
“All right, then, Maya,” he said sourly. “Back to work.”
“Thank you, Director.”
He stacked his desktop debris, glumly regarded the suitcase. No one knew where he was going, at least no one in the KGB, though Leonid had had to give a personal okay. With his approval and connivance the trip could be carried out in true secrecy, an increasingly scarce commodity in Moscow these days. The Americans thought they had problems—everybody in Moscow seemed to know everything. Everything.
But Leonid had been helpful. Extreme secrecy, he’d said, and what Brezhnev wanted he normally got.
And now Petrov would get away from his everyday problems and nobody would know he was gone. On the drive to the airport he had a disturbing thought. If no one knew where he was going but Leonid, what if Leonid wanted him out of the way? For good? Who would there be to ask questions if he never came back?
Fennerty and McGonigle had arrived at the island by motor launch from Cape Breton, following a backbreaking automobile drive during which they kept an eye out for Chandler and the girl. They’d begun early on to forget what they knew, didn’t know, and could only surmise about the entire mission. In any case, the time had come to let the old man do their thinking for them … not the Old Man, but Sanger, God love him.
Fennerty had watched Chandler and Miss Bishop wander the grounds of Stronghold, holding hands in the fog. McGonigle had been in charge of concealing the tent which had provided them with meager shelter indeed against the nasty wet weather. And it was McGonigle who had fired the flares to bring the submarine in with its commando landing party.
When it was over, Fennerty and McGonigle were the last to leave.
The house was full of bodies. The walls and floors were pitted and burned and blown away in places, streaked and spattered with blood. Along with the two survivors from the landing party, they had gotten back down to the beach and been picked up by the submarine.
Waiting in the wet cold Fennerty had said: “Nothing has gone right, has it? Not from the beginning.”
“Like Dunkirk. It’s like a bad farce, really,” McGonigle said quietly, “that becomes a tragedy before you know it. And then it’s too late.”
The commando leader, who had been shot through the thigh, lay on the bench with his back against a slab of stone. The rain blew across his face and he whimpered in pain.
Orders were waiting on shipboard for Fennerty and McGonigle. The submarine would take them to Boston Navy Yard, from where they would be escorted to a commercial flight leaving Logan airport for Washington. They arrived at Dulles late Wednesday night—or was it Thursday morning? Time meant nothing anymore. The director himself debriefed them for several intensely uncomfortable hours.
It was enough, as McGonigle remarked to Fennerty, to make a grown man cry.
Fennerty replied that he was well short of tears, thank you, but very seriously considering getting out of The Company with a nice pension and getting into his brother’s travel agency in Atlanta.
McGonigle allowed as how he suspected the director would applaud, if actually not hasten, the impulse and its result.
The sun was still shining brightly when the Halifax flight touched down at Logan. From far away Chandler had seen the crystalline glow of the John Hancock tower reflecting the warm sun of an early, false spring. He felt strangely revived, as if the brief flight had been a tonic, as if getting back to Boston aliv
e was enough to give wing to his spirit.
But waiting for the taxi, wearing his dirty clothes which had been only partially sponged and laundered, he felt the weakness in his legs and an undeniable lag in his reflexes. His mind kept calling his body to do simple tasks but the body was on a protest strike, a slowdown. He felt as if Polly were his keeper.
The apartment on Chestnut Street was much as they had left it, but for the neatly barbered, boyishly handsome lad sitting at the kitchen table sniffing his tea while it steeped.
“Oh, hello, darling,” he said with a wave. “So glad you’re not dead or something. I have a cold and inhaling jasmine tea is a godsend to the sinuses.”
“Peter—”
“You must be the professor. I’m Peter Shane, neighbor, confidant, dogsbody, loyal friend to Ezzard Charles, the cat.” Ezzard leaped to the tabletop and Peter pushed a dish of cream his way. “Some bash you had before leaving, I must say.”
“My dearest Peter, what are you talking about?” Polly threw her coat on the back of a chair. “That tea smells good. Would you like some, too? Colin, I mean you—”
“Oh, sure, tea’s fine. I’m going to sit down, I think.”
“You’d better, old lad,” Peter said, pushing a chair back from the table. “You have the look of a man who requires a chair.”
Chandler sank thankfully downward. Polly was fussing at the counter, collecting cups and saucers, pushing English muffins into the broiling rack. “What’s this about a bash, Peter?”
“Well, my God, what a mess this place was! Nasty … Ezzard was clutching the top of a door, staring like a mad thing—”
“Oh, that’s just Ezzard,” she said airily. “It’s his mad thing stare … but we left the place neat as a pin.”
“Our pursuers,” Chandler grunted.
“Well, I tidied up,” Peter said, inhaling deeply, then sipping from the cup. “God in heaven, I hate a stuffy nose.”
“I’ll do the same for you another time.”
“Please, Polly, I would never allow things to get in such a state—”
“Are we still in the papers?” Chandler said. Polly placed a hot buttered English muffin and a cup of tea before him.
“You know, that’s the odd thing.” Peter nibbled at his thumb. “Not a word for days, all very mysterious. Your whole bizarre story has completely disappeared—I’ve squirreled away the papers, I’ve read them thoroughly, and one day you were there and the next you weren’t. I’m dimly aware that fame is fleeting, but my goodness! It’s weird, it’s as if you’d never been written about at all … as if the Davis boy and the old man hadn’t been murdered after all …” He sipped tea, watching them over the rim of his cup. Ezzard crept toward Chandler’s English muffin, staring like a mad thing.
“I don’t understand,” Chandler said. “Which hardly comes as a surprise, I’m well aware.”
“Somebody has put the lid on,” Polly said. “Tight.”
“And no mention on television of either of you,” Peter said. “I called the station and they said you were on a special assignment—well, that was silly. So I asked to speak with the manager or the news director, someone in authority, and the bitch put me on hold for an eternity, then cut me off … mortifying! I wrote a letter at once—”
After a nap, Chandler showered, dressed, and listened to Polly sing Let’s Put Out the Lights and Go to Sleep while she bathed. For a while he stood in the doorway watching her soap her breasts, then blow bubbles with the filament of soap rubbed between her hands. As the afternoon waned they squeezed into the Jaguar and headed for Cambridge.
They approached his house with considerable hesitancy: it seemed normal from the safety of the car, but he needed only to see it to think again of what had happened to him there, and all the fear that had come to him since. Standing on the porch, he peered through the window, said: “What the hell—” and unlocked the door, stormed inside.
The mess had been carefully cleaned up, a new television set installed, furniture arranged neatly, shelves dusted and contents straightened. The smell of furniture polish lingered in each room. The coffee stains were gone. The kitchen was immaculate. Not a mote of plaster dust remained of George Washington, but the pedestal had been polished and a huge, luxuriant Boston fern had replaced the bust.
“This joint has never, repeat, never, looked this good before,” he said. “But the elves who came by night were stuck when it came to my George Washington … Some things can’t be replaced.” The thought gave him a certain self-satisfaction. They weren’t infallible, whoever they were.
Polly smiled. “When they do things like this, they usually do very well. I’d say they’ve done well by you. Whoever they are …”
“You say that as if you know—do you?”
“In my business you get a feel for this kind of thing, the alias program, new identities, stories that are hushed up, murders and kidnapings and you name it … there are people who do this kind of thing for a living. I don’t know their names …”
Chandler gave her a long, sideways look, then figured the hell with it. Maybe he didn’t really want to know.
After inspecting the entire house, which had been cleaned and polished top to bottom, they went to the study and began calling hospitals. The fourth call paid off. Sort of. Hugh Brennan was a patient.
“Please ring his room,” Chandler said, thanking God.
“I’m sorry, sir, but that’s impossible.”
“Impossible? Is his telephone broken? Is he too ill?”
“I cannot release any information about his condition, sir.”
“All right. Can I visit him?”
“No visitors, I’m sorry.”
“Is he dead or alive?” Chandler fumed.
“I’m sorry. I can’t give any information on his condition.”
“But he is alive …”
“I’m sorry—”
“Why the hell did you tell me he was there?”
A pause. Then: “Look,” the girl whispered, “I’m a student nurse and I only answered this phone because there was nobody on the station as I came by. I wasn’t supposed to tell you, or anybody, that there is a Mr. Brennan here … We’ve all had strict orders and I’m really going to get it if you tell on me, do you understand? So, please …”
“Sure,” Chandler sighed. “Sure, sure, sure.”
He hung up and turned to Polly: “They have got Brennan. He’s not a patient. He’s a prisoner … a blackout.”
She nodded: “I’m not surprised. They’re very thorough once they start.”
He called Prosser’s home. No answer.
“My God, maybe he’s dead. Up in Maine.” Chandler had wanted Prosser to be there, had protected himself against the possibility that he could actually be dead: now the fear was no longer lip service.
They walked down to Sage’s on Brattle Street in the late afternoon and bought groceries, walked back.
In the kitchen, the daylight faded, Chandler took her soft-skinned face in his hands, held her, searched her eyes. “Stay,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” she said.
He kissed her, held her close.
“This is scarier than anything so far,” he whispered. “It’s all so damned sanitized. But we know what’s been happening—how can they make it like it never happened? What the hell ever happened to doing what’s right?”
“Maybe the breed is dead,” she said.
In bed that night he held her, stared at the streetlights outside, said: “I’ve fallen completely in love with you.”
“Fallen in like,” she said. “That’s enough for now, Professor.”
But he didn’t dream of love. He dreamt of Prosser and Brennan and they were dead. And it dawned on him slowly that he, too, was dead.
Friday
HE LOOKED AT HIS WATCH and leaped from the bed, panic-stricken by his dreams and the break in his normal routine: he was late for a ten o’clock lecture. But as he came more fully awake he realized that his world w
as no longer the same. Polly Bishop was asleep in his bed and no one expected him to make his lecture. He was missing and forgotten, at least for the moment. Were his students still showing up for his lectures, checking to see if he’d turned up alive and well? Or had he been replaced?
“What are you doing?” Polly shaded her eyes against the morning sun which hit the pillow and was probably what had awakened him in the first place. “Why are you staring into space like that?”
“I’ve got a class at ten. I’m going.” He was taking off his pajama top and reaching for one of his ten blue button-down oxford-cloth shirts. “I’ve got to find out what’s going on.”
“Good idea.” She threw back the covers and stood up, naked. “I’ll go with you.” She stretched, brushed her hair back over her ears,
“As a reporter?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe.”
They made it to the Yard in five minutes. The lecture room was full, some two hundred students, the one meeting a week which was a large group because it served three interlocking but separate courses. The speaker’s lectern sat at the bottom of an amphitheater pit and the staging area was empty. It was two minutes until the time the students would begin to get up and leave but there was no more restlessness than was customary: the loud babble of voices, people craning over the canted rows to chat, stragglers loping down the steep aisles. Chandler and Polly sat at the back, far to one side, melting in at the end of a row of nondescript students, none of whom Chandler recognized from his own small group.
At precisely the last moment, the lecturer arrived: the esteemed chairman of the history department, Bert Prosser. He wore a heavy tweed suit in russet brown, a red tie, clumping red brogans, came toward the lectern banging the bowl of a shiny briar into his palm. He laid the pipe down, hooked the tiny microphone around his thin, pipestem neck, and cleared his throat. Before speaking—he had no notes, as was his custom—he jammed his fists down into his jacket pockets to hide the slight palsy Chandler had been noticing the past couple of years. Chandler felt Polly’s fingers tighten on his arm.
The Glendower Legacy Page 29
