The Heirloom

by Graham Masterton

  I parked the Impala in one of the condominium’s underground parking areas, and then we walked across the wide paved courtyard around the swimming-pool until we reached the entrance to the apartment where David was staying. Beside the pool, a hugely fat man was sitting on a sun-lounger with a cigar clenched between his teeth and a copy of The Wall Street Journal spread over his belly like a tent.

  We came to the door marked discreetly Eads. I pressed the doorbell and heard a distant chime. Then David’s voice called, ‘Just a moment!’

  After a minute or two, David opened the door and invited us in with a bow. He had showered and shaved, and dressed himself in a blue shirt, dark blue cravat, and cavalry-twill pants. He looked so English he looked like an American trying to look English. ‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘Ted Eads is away this afternoon, which is a pity… but come on in and help yourself to his cocktail cabinet. Sara – it’s so good to see you. How’s Jonathan?’

  ‘The same,’ said Sara, flatly. ‘No worse, but no better.’

  We walked along a corridor lined with expensive modern paintings – two Barnett Newmans and a Morris Louis – and then found ourselves ankle-deep in a cream-coloured shag-pile carpet that seemed to stretch away on all sides for almost a quarter of an acre. It was one of those condos you see on the cover of glossy magazines – all chrome Italian tables and frondy ferns and little throwaway touches like Giacometti sculptures used as bookends. Outside of the tinted windows, there was a view of Mission Bay, blue and hazy, with rows of sailboats and palm trees. Silent air-conditioning and humidity control kept the inside of the apartment at seventy degrees, and dry.

  ‘Not a bad little pied-à-terre,’ I remarked, picking up a gold-and-emerald turtle and peering into its ruby eyes. ‘What does Mr Ted Eads do for a living? Print his own money?’

  ‘He’s a banker. Something to do with financing construction projects in Central America. He only lives here for three or four weeks of the year. He also owns a Tudor mansion in England, a small château in France, and three floors of that new condominium in Manhattan.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  I went to the cocktail cabinet, which was a converted French secretaire, crested by an ormolu clock. All the drinks were in matching antique crystal decanters, with silver labels hung around them on chains.

  ‘Do you want a drink, Sara?’ I asked her.

  ‘Just a Campari, please.’

  I mixed the drinks. ‘I must say, David, this place is almost unbearably ostentatious. Almost unbearably ostentatious, but not quite.’

  ‘It does lack a certain cosiness,’ David admitted. ‘But would you forgive me for a moment? I have to make a couple more telephone calls to New York before close of business.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I told him. ‘We’ll just wait here and luxuriate.’

  We sat side by side on an Italian settee upholstered in soft white kid. The opulent atmosphere made us fall silent, and we drank our drinks as if we were distant and unpopular relatives who had dropped in unannounced. David disappeared into a room at the far end of the living area which I took to be a study, because I could just see the edge of a gilded desk, and a row of books. Every now and then, I heard his clipped English voice raised in a laugh, or level off into a long persuasive monologue.

  I was swilling the last of my whisky around with the ice in the bottom of my glass when there was a soft warbling noise from a mahogany box on the table beside me. Sara looked at my surprised expression and grinned. ‘It’s a phone, dummy. Answer it.’

  I unlocked the box with the gold key that protruded from it, and lifted out a gold-plated telephone with a mahogany handle. ‘Ritzy,’ I remarked, and then said, ‘Hallo? Can I help you?’

  A curiously familiar voice on the other end of the line said, ‘Is Mr Sears there? Mr David Sears?’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s on the other line right now. Can I take a message, or ask him to call you back?’

  ‘Well… I don’t think so,’ said the voice.

  ‘Can I ask who’s calling?’

  ‘No, don’t worry. Listen – just tell him that it’s all fixed up for the day after tomorrow.’

  I frowned. ‘It’s all fixed up? Will he know what that’s supposed to mean?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Tell him the carrier arrives at Escondido a little after ten.’

  ‘The carrier? Okay. I’ve got it.’

  The caller put down the phone, and I was left with a gold-plated, mahogany-trimmed, and very dead receiver.

  ‘That was odd,’ I said.

  ‘What was odd about it?’ asked Sara.

  ‘I don’t know… but I have the distinct feeling that I’ve talked to that guy before.’

  ‘You have? Well, maybe you have. Did he sound young or old?’

  ‘It was hard to tell. Thirtyish, I think. But his voice was kind of muffled… like he was holding the phone funny, or maybe he had a handkerchief over the mouthpiece.’

  ‘Why should he want to do that?’

  ‘Search me.’

  At that moment, David came out of the study, scratching the back of his head with his ballpen and squinting at a heap of papers that he was carrying.

  ‘You know something,’ he said, abstractedly, ‘I really thought the recession was going to help us… encourage people to invest their money in antique furniture…but it seems like they’re spending as hard as ever.’

  ‘There was a call for you,’ I said.

  He looked up. ‘Oh, yes? Leave a message?’

  ‘Only some kind of code that I couldn’t understand.’

  He was reading his papers again, and he suddenly blinked at me and said, ‘Code? Sorry?’

  ‘The message your caller left was couched in cryptic language. That’s what I’m trying to say.’

  ‘Well?’ asked David, rather impatiently. ‘What was it?’

  ‘Your caller said that it was all fixed up for the day after tomorrow, and that the carrier arrives at Escondido a little after ten.’

  David stared at me. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Did he?’

  ‘Yes. Those exact words.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything else? Nothing about a starting time?’

  I slowly shook my head. ‘Nope. Nothing about a starting time. Just that it was all fixed up, and that the carrier arrives at a little after ten. He said you’d understand what he meant.’

  ‘Yes, well I do,’ said David. ‘Partly.’

  I pushed my hands into my pants pockets and strolled through the shaggy cream rug to the window. Outside, a large silvery helicopter was circling over Mission Bay like a dragonfly. The helicopter was quite close, but inside the apartment it was utterly silent. Silent enough for me to be able to hear David breathing slightly more quickly than usual.

  ‘Only partly?’ I asked him.

  He gave an ambiguous, flurried gesture that seemed to mean, well, it doesn’t actually matter, and in any case I don’t particularly want to talk about it.

  ‘You could always go ask him to explain himself in more detail,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, well, that’s not possible, really,’ David said quickly. ‘As a matter of fact he was calling from rather a long way away.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call Escondido too far to go,’ I replied, dryly.

  ‘Escondido?’

  ‘That’s where he was calling from, wasn’t it? I recognised his voice. He was trying to disguise it, I think, but I’ve only talked to one man who sounded anything like that recently, and that was Sam Jessop.’

  David looked at me with an expression that I couldn’t begin to understand. For a moment so fast that I almost missed it, what the Germans call an Augenblick, all his upper-crust self-control appeared to slip, and what I saw instead was an untidy kaleidoscope of fright, worry, and ruthlessness.

  Then he turned away, and went to the French secretaire to pour himself a full tumbler of whisky. As the decanter clinked against the glass, Sara looked at me wide-eyed, but I reassured her with a small shake of my hand.

  ‘Well?’
I demanded. ‘It’s true, isn’t it? You knew Sam Jessop long before last night.’

  ‘Does it make any difference?’

  ‘Of course it makes a difference! If you knew Sam Jessop before yesterday, then you must have known him for a reason. And the only reason that would have led to you both pretending in front of me that you’d never met each other before – the only possible reason is that goddamned chair.’

  ‘I hate to send your little theory crashing down in flames,’ said David, sitting down on a chrome-and-canvas chair and crossing his legs, ‘but the verifiable truth is that I had never met Sam Jessop before last night, nor talked to him, nor had anything to do with him whatsoever.’

  ‘Then who was that on the phone? It sounded too much like Jessop to be anybody else.’

  ‘Well, that’s where you’re right, old boy. It was Jessop – but not Sam Jessop. It was his son, Martin.’

  ‘You know Martin Jessop? But how?’

  ‘How does one ever get to know anybody? I met Ted Eads through my friend Williams in England, and I met Martin Jessop through Ted Eads. Ted put up a great deal of the money that Martin has been spending on uprating the Jessop cruise missile.’

  ‘This is getting too complicated for me,’ I told him.

  David untied his cravat, as if he felt suddenly hot. ‘Do you really want to hear the truth?’ he asked me. ‘The reason why I came looking for the Devil’s chair, and the reason why I’ve stuck around for so long and done so much to lay my hands on it?’

  Sara said quietly, ‘I don’t think it’s a question of wanting to hear the truth, David. I think it’s a question of having to. Our whole lives are at stake, especially Jonathan’s, and if you’re holding anything back from us then you’ll be guilty of Jonathan’s death, just as surely as if you’d gone up to the hospital with a gun and shot him.’

  David was silent for a while, staring at the rug. Then he said, ‘Very well. I didn’t want to tell you any of this until much later, but I suppose now is as good a time as any. Believe me, I wasn’t doing anything to hurt you. I was simply trying to do my job, the job that I was assigned to do, and to protect you from some facts that you may not be able to face. I was also trying to get something for myself, but I’ll tell you about that in a moment.’

  I checked the clock over the secretaire. It was five past three. ‘I’ll just call the hospital and tell them where we are,’ I said. ‘Then you can unburden your bosom for as long as you want.’ I rang the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy and left a message for Dr Rosen, née Gopher. Then I fixed myself another drink and sat down next to Sara to listen to David’s explanation.

  ‘I first heard about the chair in England, when my friend Williams bought it at a private auction, in Gloucestershire,’ said David. ‘He only went to the auction out of curiosity, because there was a rather lurid story connected with the sale of the house and its contents. Apparently, the house had belonged to a very wealthy and successful British carmaker – there were such creatures in those days! – one of those inspired engineers who used to build handmade sports cars in which wealthy young men could kill themselves with rather more panache than usual.

  ‘Well – the carmaker had a bit of a reputation for womanising – and it was fairly common knowledge that his wife hated him for it, and did everything she could to embarrass him. Eventually, she threatened him with divorce, which could have meant the loss of his house, his treasured collection of paintings and furniture, and possibly even the closure of his carmaking business.

  ‘Within a week, though, his wife was found in a restored sixteenth-century flour-mill in the grounds of the house, crushed into a pulp between the millstones. The carmaker was arrested, of course, and remanded in custody, but – he managed to evade justice.’

  There was a silence. Neither of us asked, ‘How?’

  David gave a brief and painful little smile at our hostility towards him. ‘He evaded justice by cutting his wrists when he was in Strangeways prison,’ he said. ‘And that was why the house and all of its contents were up for auction.’

  ‘Did your friend Williams know anything about the chair’s reputation?’ I asked David.

  ‘Not at first,’ he said. ‘But soon after he’d bought it, and taken it back to his house in Woking, in Surrey, he became conscious of its aura. Odd things started to happen around the house. Dishes were inexplicably broken, and his wife boiled her hand by holding it in a saucepan of bubbling potatoes for over a minute. His cat died, although he never told me how. Presumably in the same terrible way that your dog was killed. And it was after these incidents that he came to me and asked me to look into the chair’s history. What I found out, I’ve already told you.’

  ‘You said your friend Williams became very successful,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right, he did. I’m not quite sure how, but at some stage of the proceedings he came to terms with the chair, and the chair began to help him. He pulled off two incredible mergers in the City of London, and he made over a million pounds sterling on some deal with Nigeria that was so complicated that the Department of Trade are still trying to unravel how he did it. He also found himself a mistress… and a very beautiful girl she was too.’

  ‘So what he wanted was money and women… and the chair gave them to him.’

  David nodded. ‘For a while, he was one of the most sought-after dinner-guests, one of the ten wealthiest and most stimulating men in the country. But then, at the very height of his achievement, he was involved in a car crash, and he lost the use of his right leg, and badly scarred his face. He hardly ever went out in public any more. He became bitter and cantankerous. What was worse, his mistress, whom he had grown to love almost fanatically, began to see another man, and although she still clung on to Williams for his money, it was quite obvious to him that she didn’t love him any more.

  ‘To begin with, Williams didn’t know the identity of his mistress’s new lover; and the lover, taking advantage of this fact, approached Williams in a roundabout manner and attempted to acquire the Devil’s chair from him… so that he, too, might be as rich and successful as Williams, and attract Williams’s mistress away from him for good.

  ‘Williams, who had grown to believe that his financial talents were so superior that he no longer needed the chair, agreed to the sale. But no matter how often the chair was taken away from his house and delivered to the house of his mistress’s lover, it always returned… just as it keeps on returning to your house.’

  ‘Did Williams ever find out who the lover was?’ asked Sara.

  David nodded. ‘Oh, yes. Because Williams’s moods and his behaviour grew so bad that his mistress eventually left him, and married her new lover. Williams was eaten up with jealousy, and tried everything from legal action to kidnapping to get her back. He became so twisted up about her that he was sent for a while to Cane Hill sanatorium outside of London, which is a mental hospital. As it turned out, however, neither he nor her lover got her in the end. The day after Williams came out of the sanatorium, his onetime mistress was at home, helping her maid prepare an evening meal, when a pan of oil caught fire on the stove, and somehow the blazing fat was splashed all over her. She died of her burns within an hour.’

  There was no mistaking the tremble in David’s voice, nor the glisten of tears in his eyes. He leaned forward in his chair, holding his whisky glass in both hands, and he took a deep breath to recapture his English equilibrium.

  ‘The lover was you, wasn’t it?’ I asked. ‘And Williams’s mistress was the girl who became your wife?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said David, snappily. He tossed back the rest of his drink. ‘All damned bad luck, really.’

  ‘Did you try to buy the chair from Williams a second time, after your wife was dead?’ asked Sara.

  ‘There wasn’t any point, was there? At least, I didn’t think so at the time. And besides, I was beginning to suspect what one of the principal conditions for getting rid of the chair happened to be, and I didn’t like it.’
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  ‘You mean – every time the chair was passed on – somebody died?’

  ‘Somebody had to die. Like a sacrifice.’

  ‘And that’s why you didn’t want to tell us this before?’

  David nodded. ‘As far as I know, the only way in which you will ever shake that chair off is for one of you to die.’

  I was silent for a long time. I looked at David and David looked back at me. Then I said, ‘What about Sam Jessop? How did he get rid of the chair? Nobody died in the Jessop family that I know of. Nobody even close.’

  ‘Sam Jessop… made an arrangement,’ said David.

  ‘What arrangement?’

  ‘Listen, Ricky, I’ve already told you more than I intended to. I can’t betray a professional confidence.’

  ‘What arrangement?’ I barked at him.

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  I stood up, walked across the room to a huge red-and-white abstract by Mark Rothko, and raised my fist in front of it.

  ‘So help me, David, if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to punch this painting full of holes.’

  David half stood up in his chair. ‘That’s a Rothko,’ he said, in a drained voice. ‘That’s worth – well, damn it, I don’t even know how much it’s worth. That’s how much it’s worth.’

  ‘My son’s life is worth more than any painting, David.’

  David sat down again. ‘You’re making this very difficult,’ he said.

  ‘I’m making this difficult? You’ve told nothing but lies and half-truths since I first met you.’

  ‘I had a professional confidence to respect.’

  ‘I don’t give nuts for your professional confidence,’ I said, acidly. ‘Tell me what arrangement Sam Jessop made.’

  ‘Well… this is only second-hand…from Martin…and Martin got it from his mother.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, David.’

  ‘Very well,’ said David, soberly. ‘It seems that the price of seeking your heart’s desire from the devil’s chair is that you get physically and mentally burned up much more quickly than you would if you made your way through life normally. Remember the Earl of Beckenham, who died at the age of fifty-four? That wasn’t particularly young in those days, I grant you, but it wasn’t particularly old, either. Then there was Charles Dickens, who was said to have owned the chair for a while. His health deteriorated appallingly. And I recently saw an old British press photograph of the chap who crushed his wife in the flour-mill, the car manufacturer. He was only forty, according to the news story, but you would have taken him for a man of sixty.