The Key to Midnight

by Dean Koontz

  Alex and Joanna ignored all the exotic merchandise as well as most of the mundane stuff. They purchased only two sturdy umbrellas and a set of plain but well-made steel cutlery.

  In the privacy of a stall in the ladies’ room, Joanna unwrapped the package of cutlery. She examined each piece and chose a wickedly sharp butcher’s knife that she concealed in her coat pocket. She left the other knives behind when she departed.

  Now both she and Alex were armed. Carrying concealed weapons was a more serious offense in London than it would have been almost anywhere else in the world, but they weren’t concerned about spending time in jail. Walking unarmed into Tom Chelgrin’s hotel room would have been by far the most dangerous course they could have taken.

  Outside Harrod’s they hailed another cab and followed a winding, random course through rain-slicked streets, until Alex was certain that they were not being followed. They got out of the cab three blocks from the Churchill.

  Using the umbrellas to hide their faces as much as to shield them from the rain, they approached the hotel from its least public aspect. Rather than barge through the front entrance and across the Regency-style lobby, where they were most likely to be spotted by a lookout, they used an unlocked rear door meant for hotel deliveries, and they quickly found a service stairwell.

  “Better leave your bumbershoot here,” Alex said. “We’ll want our hands free when we get there.”

  She stood her umbrella beside his, in the corner at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Scared?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to back out?”

  “Can’t,” she said.

  Though they were whispering, their voices echoed in the cold stairwell.

  He unbuttoned his coat and withdrew the 9mm pistol that had been jammed under his belt. He put it in an overcoat pocket and kept his hand on the grip.

  She put her hand on the butcher’s knife in her pocket.

  They climbed the stairs to the fourth floor.

  The corridor was brightly lighted, deserted—and too quiet.

  They hurried along the hallway, glancing at room numbers. In spite of the elegant decor, Alex couldn’t shake the feeling that he was in a carnival funhouse and that a monster was going to spring at them suddenly from a door or out of the ceiling.

  Just before they reached 416, Alex was stopped abruptly by a vivid premonition: an intense vision like the brief but commanding burst of a camera’s electronic flash. In his mind’s eye, he saw Tom Chelgrin spattered with blood. Never before had anything like that happened to him, and he was shaken both by the weirdness of it and by the wet, red vividness of the image.

  Joanna stopped beside him, gripped his arm. “What’s wrong?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What? The senator? How do you know?”

  “I just... I do. I’m sure of it.”

  He took the pistol from his coat pocket and continued along the corridor. The door to 416 was ajar.

  “Stand behind me,” he said.

  She shuddered. “Let’s call the police.”

  “We can’t. Not yet.”

  “We have enough proof now.”

  “We don’t have anything more than we had yesterday.”

  “If he’s dead—that’s proof of something.”

  “We don’t know he’s dead,” Alex said, though he knew. “Besides, even if he is—that’s not proof of anything.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We don’t have anywhere to go.”

  He used the pistol to push the door all the way open.

  Stillness.

  The lights were on in the suite.

  “Senator?” he said softly.

  When no one answered, Alex stepped across the threshold, and Joanna followed him.

  Thomas Chelgrin was facedown on the drawing-room floor.

  50

  Tom Chelgrin was unquestionably dead. The quantity of blood alone was sufficient to eliminate any doubt.

  The senator was wearing a blue bathrobe that had soaked up a great deal of blood. The back of the garment was marred by three bloody holes. He had been shot once at the base of the spine, once in the middle of the back, and once between the shoulders. His left arm was extended in front of him, fingers hooked into the carpet, and his right arm was folded under his chest. His head was turned to one side. Only half his face remained visible, and that was obscured by smears of blood and by a thick shock of white hair that had fallen across his eye.

  Alex closed the door to the hall and cautiously inspected the rest of the small suite, but the killers were not to be found. He had known they would be gone.

  When he returned to the drawing room, Joanna was kneeling beside the corpse. Alarmed, he said, “Don’t touch him!”

  She looked puzzled. “Why not?”

  “It won’t be easy to walk out of here and into our hotel if you’re covered with bloodstains.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “You’ve already got blood on the hem of your coat.”

  She glanced down. “Damn!”

  He pulled her to her feet and away from the corpse. With lus handkerchief, he rubbed at the stain on her coat. “It doesn’t look good, but it’ll have to pass.”

  “Shouldn’t we check him over? Maybe he’s alive.”

  “Alive? Look at those wounds. They used a weapon with a hell of a punch. All this blood. He’s dead as a man can be.”

  “How did you know he’d be here like this? Out there in the hall, how did you know what we’d find?”

  “Hard to explain,” he said uneasily. “I’d call it a premonition if that didn’t sound too crazy. But it does sound crazy, and I’m no clairvoyant.”

  “So it wasn’t just a hunch, professional instinct, like you’ve said before?”

  He recalled the alarmingly vivid mental image of the blood-spattered corpse, and although the position and condition of the real body did not perfectly match the details of the vision, the differences were not substantial.

  “Weird,” he said.

  She stared at the cadaver and shook her head sadly. “I don’t feel a thing. No grief.”

  “Why should you?”

  “He was my father.”

  “No. He surrendered all those rights and privileges a long time ago. He didn’t mourn for Lisa. He let them do ... all they did to you. You don’t owe him any tears.”

  “But why?” she wondered.

  “We’ll find out.”

  “I don’t think so. I think maybe we’re in some sort of gigantic Chinese puzzle. We’ll keep climbing into smaller and smaller boxes forever, and there won’t be answers in any of them.”

  Alex wondered if she might go to pieces on him after all. He wouldn’t blame her if she did. She was right: This was her father, after all. She appeared to be calm, but she might be suppressing her feelings.

  Realizing that he was worried about her, Joanna conjured a ghost of a smile. “I’ll be okay. Like I told you—I don’t feel a thing. I wish I did. I wish I could. But he’s a stranger to me. They took away all memory of him.” She turned away from the body. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Not yet.”

  “But what if they come back—”

  “They won’t be back. If they’d known Chelgrin had made contact with us, and if they’d wanted to kill us, they would’ve waited right here. They think they got to him before he got to us. Come on. We have to search the place.”

  She grimaced. “Search for what?”

  “For anything. For everything. For whatever little scrap might help us solve this puzzle.”

  “If the maid walks in—”

  “The housekeeper’s already been here this morning. The bed’s freshly made.”

  Joanna took a deep breath. “All right, let’s finish this as fast as we can.”

  “You follow me,” Alex said. “Double-check me, make sure I don’t overlook something. But don’t touch anything.”

  In the
bedroom, Chelgrin’s two calfskin suitcases were on a pair of folding luggage racks. One case was open. Alex pawed through the clothes until he found a pair of the senator’s black socks. He pulled them over his hands: makeshift gloves.

  Chelgrin’s billfold and credit-card wallet were on the dresser. Alex went through them, with Joanna watching closely, but neither the billfold nor the wallet contained anything unusual.

  The closet held two suits and a topcoat. The pockets were empty.

  Two pairs of freshly shined shoes were on the closet floor. Alex slipped the shoe trees out of them and searched inside. Nothing.

  A shaving kit stood beside the sink in the bathroom: an electric razor, shaving powder, cologne, a comb, a can of hair spray.

  Alex returned to the open suitcase. It also proved to contain nothing of interest.

  The second suitcase wasn’t locked. He opened it and tossed the clothes onto the floor, piece by piece, until he found a nine-by-twelve-inch manila envelope.

  He took off the makeshift gloves and emptied the contents of the envelope onto the dresser: several age-yellowed clippings from The New York Times and The Washington Post; an unfinished letter, apparently in the senator’s handwriting, addressed to Joanna. Alex didn’t take time to read either the letter or the newspaper pieces, but from a quick scan of the clippings, he saw that they were all fourteen or fifteen years old and dealt with a German doctor named Franz Rotenhausen. One of the articles featured a photograph of the man: thin face, sharp features, balding, eyes so pale that they appeared to be all but colorless.

  Joanna flinched as if she had been bee-stung. “Oh, God. It’s him. The man in my nightmare. The Hand.”

  “His name’s Rotenhausen.”

  “I’ve never heard it before.” She was shaking badly. “I... I never thought I’d s-see him again.”

  “This is what we wanted—a name.”

  She looked toward the open door between the bedroom and the drawing room, as if Rotenhausen might walk through it at any moment. “Please, Alex, let’s get out of here.”

  The face in the grainy photograph was hard, bony, vampiric. The pale eyes seemed to be staring into a dimension that other men couldn’t see.

  Alex felt the hairs bristling on the back of his neck. Perhaps it was time to leave.

  “We’ll read these later,” he said, stuffing the clippings and the unfinished letter back into the envelope.

  In the drawing room, the dead senator still lay where they had last seen him. Alex had half expected the corpse to be missing. Or standing up, swaying, grinning at them. After recent developments, anything seemed possible.

  51

  Alex and Joanna ate lunch in a busy café near Piccadilly Circus.

  Heavy rain sluiced down the windows, blurring modern London until only the ancient lines of the city were visible. The inclement weather was a time machine, washing away the years.

  Over thick sandwiches and too many cups of tea, they read the old clippings from The New York Times and The Washington Post.

  Franz Rotenhausen was a genius in more than one field. He had degrees in biology, chemistry, medicine, and psychology. He’d written many widely recognized and important papers in all those disciplines. When he was twenty-four, he lost his hand in an automobile accident. Unimpressed with the prostheses available at that time, he invented a new device, a mechanical hand nearly as functional as flesh and bone, controlled by nerve impulses from the stump and powered by a battery pack. Later, he’d spent eighteen years as a lecturer and research scientist at a major West German university. He was mainly interested in brain function and dysfunction, and especially in the electrical and chemical nature of thought and memory.

  “Why would they let anyone work on this?” Joanna asked angrily. “It’s George Orwell time. It’s 1984, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s also the route to ultimate power,” Alex said. “And that’s what all politicians are after. So of course they funded his work.”

  Fifteen years ago, at the peak of a brilliant career, Franz Rotenhausen had made a terrible mistake. He’d written a book about the human brain with an emphasis on recent developments in behavioral engineering, contending that even the most drastic of techniques-including brainwashing—should be used by “responsible” governments to create a dissension-free, crime-free, worry-free Utopian society. His greatest error was not the writing of the book but his subsequent failure to be contrite after it became controversial. The scientific and political communities can forgive any stupidity, indiscretion, or gross miscalculation as long as public apologies come loud and long; humble contrition doesn’t even have to be sincere to earn a pardon from the establishment; it must only appear genuine, so the citizenry can be allowed to settle back into its usual stupor. As controversy grew in the wake of the publication, however, Rotenhausen had no second thoughts. He responded to critics with increasing irritation. He showed the world a sneer instead of the remorse it wanted to see. His public statements were given an unusually threatening edge by his harsh voice and his unfortunate habit of making violent gestures with his steel hand. European newspapers were quick to give him nicknames—Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Frankenstein—but those soon gave way to another that stuck: Dr. Zombie. He was accused of wanting to create a world of mindless, obedient automatons. The furor increased. He complained that reporters and photographers were hounding him, and he was intemperate enough to suggest that they would be his first choice for behavior modification if he were in charge. He steadfastly refused to back down from his position, and thus he was unable to take the pressure off himself.

  “I can usually sympathize with victims of press harassment,” Alex said. “But not this time.”

  “He’d like to do to everyone what he did to me.”

  “Or worse.”

  The waitress brought more tea and small cakes for dessert.

  The lunch crowd was thinning out.

  Beyond the windows, the rain was coming down with such force that London had been blurred back into the eighteenth century.

  Alex and Joanna continued to read about Rotenhausen:

  In Bonn, back in that time before reunification, the West German government was exceedingly sensitive to world opinion. Rotenhausen was widely viewed as Hitler’s spiritual descendant. The brilliant doctor ceased to be a national treasure (not so much because of his work but because he’d been unable to keep his mouth shut about it), ceased to be even a national asset, and became a distinct liability to the German state. Pressure was brought to bear on the university that gave him a research home, and eventually he was dismissed on a morals charge involving a student. He denied all wrongdoing and accused the university and the girl of conspiring against him. Nevertheless, he was weary of wasting time on politics when so much research awaited. He departed gracelessly but without challenging the powers that had gone after him with such success, and eventually the morals charge was dropped.

  “He might not have been guilty of molesting that girl, but he was probably guilty of molesting others. I know him well. Too well.”

  Unable to endure the haunted expression in her eyes, Alex stared for a moment at the half-eaten cake on the plate in front of him, and then he took another yellowed clipping from the stack.

  Six months after Dr. Zombie was forced out of the uni versity, he liquidated his holdings in West Germany and moved to Saint Moritz, Switzerland. The Swiss granted him permanent residency for two reasons. First, Switzerland was a country with a long and admirable tradition of providing asylum for prominent—though seldom ordinary—outcasts from other countries. Second, Rotenhausen was a millionaire many times over, having inherited a fortune and later having earned substantially more from his dozens of medical and chemical patents. He reached an agreement with the Swiss tax authorities, and each year he paid a tithe that was meager to him but that covered a substantial percentage of the government’s expenses in the canton where he lived. It was believed that he continued to do research in his private laboratory in
Saint Moritz, but because he never wrote another word for publication and never spoke to newsmen, that suspicion couldn’t be verified.

  “With time he’s been forgotten,” Joanna said.

  “Too many new monsters to excite the media every day. No time to keep track of the old ones.”

  Finished with the clippings, they turned to the unfinished, unsigned, handwritten letter from Chelgrin to his daughter. It was two pages of half-baked apologia: an ineffective, self-justifying whine. It provided no new information, not even a single fresh clue.

  “How does Rotenhausen connect with the senator and with whatever happened in Jamaica?” Joanna wondered.

  “I don’t know, but we’ll find out.”

  “You said the senator mentioned Russians when you spoke to him on the phone.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know what he meant. It seems ridiculous. The Cold War was still on in those days, but it’s over now.”

  “What would Rotenhausen have been doing in a deal with the Soviets, anyway? He sounds more like a Nazi than a communist.”

  “Nazis and communists have a lot in common,” Alex said. “They want the same thing—absolute control, unqualified power. A man like Franz Rotenhausen can find sympathy in both camps.”

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now we go to Switzerland.”

  52

  As a hard wind blew shatters of rain against the café windows and as London seemed to dissolve toward prehistoric rock formations, Joanna leaned across the table. “No, Alex. Please, let’s not do that. Not Switzerland. Not into... into his lair. We can turn this whole thing over to the police now.”

  “We still don’t have enough proof.”

  She shook her head adamantly. “I disagree. We’ve got all these clippings, this letter, a dead body at the Churchill Hotel, and the fact that my fingerprints match Lisa’s.”

  Alex reached across the table and put his hand over hers. “I understand your fear. But what police should we go to? The Jamaican police? The Americans? Chicago police? The FBI, the CIA? Japanese police? The British? Scotland Yard? Or maybe the Swiss police?”