Lord Valentine's Castle

by Marge Piercy

  “Phil’s pissing himself with fear.”

  He snorted. “I’m not surprised. Anyhow, Jamal’s cool with keeping stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “My zip discs. My backups. Printouts.”

  “How do you know Jamal will cover for you?”

  “I’ve covered for him.”

  Maybe the gun was Jamal’s. She wanted to think so. “So what are you worried about?”

  “I ran a good erasure program over my hard drive, but I think a hacker type could still find my data. But I would have to ask my hacker friends in Williamsburg, and I’m nervous about calling. I’d have to go out of town a ways and use a pay phone to be safe. And you can’t tell if they’re under surveillance.”

  “Can’t you ask them without being specific?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Will they know who you are if you don’t say your name?”

  “I’m Caped Crusader.” He grinned. Strangely enough, she thought, he seemed less frightened than she was. Maybe things would be all right. Maybe his parents could get him out of trouble.

  “If we do get through all this safely”—she touched his cheek—“then we should retire from the spy business. We should work on our lives instead. We should get on with school and just be married and together.”

  He smiled, a crooked, almost aloof grimace. “That would be pleasant, wouldn’t it?”

  “I hope you think so.”

  “Sure. A quiet student life together worrying only about what should we eat for supper? Sounds like paradise. But we have to get through this battle first.”

  “The timing just sucks. I’m supposed to go to Philadelphia next Friday.”

  “We have to figure out how to turn that into a way to help us.”

  “They wouldn’t help you if you were drowning and they were standing there with a life preserver.”

  “They might not help me. But they might help your husband. They might want to prevent a big scandal.”

  She sat up, rubbing her scalp and setting the hair on end. She felt a stirring of hope that had not visited her since Jamal had brought her news of the raid. “That’s possible. That’s really and truly a possibility. Rosemary hates scandal….”

  “How much does she hate it?” He stared at his joined hands. “More than she hates me? Doubt it.”

  “There’s a chance we could reach a compromise where they would drop charges and do a neat cover-up if we agree to stop going after my father. That they would agree to in order to keep things quiet.”

  They were sitting cross-legged on his unmade bed, facing each other. “Is that what you want to do?” Now he was staring into her eyes again.

  “I want you not to go to jail. I don’t fancy going myself. I think we do have some leverage if we play it just right with them. I can’t promise anything. They might let us both swing.”

  “So how would we play this?” His head was cocked to one side.

  She could tell she had not convinced him, but she was surprised and pleased he was willing to listen. Maybe they would come out of this mess right side up. “I’ll go there for Christmas like always. In Philadelphia while he mends fences and butters up backers and makes a show for his constituents…”

  “And I’ll be there with Si and Nadine. So what’s the plan?”

  “It’s a better place than Washington for pulling something off, because there’s less staff to shield them. Alison, of course. We’d have to pick a time when they’re not putting on an event or a party because Rosemary just won’t pay attention. ‘Oh, you’re married, fine, did the flowers come yet?’”

  “We’ll have to play it by ear. So you’ll make your big announcement.”

  “That’s the idea.” She shuddered. “All hell will break loose.”

  “Look, let’s modify a bit. You let me in. I hide somewhere like your room until you’ve raised the subject. Then I appear and we both plead for our lives.”

  “Would you do that?”

  “If we have to. I want to hang loose about this until I know what the feds have been able to extract from my computer.”

  “Maybe we won’t have to do anything. Maybe this will blow over.”

  “Maybe John Lennon and John Coltrane and John and John-John Kennedy will all rise from the dead and do a circle dance around the Washington Monument. Or maybe not.”

  “You don’t think you managed to erase enough?”

  “I have no idea. Tomorrow I’ll get an estimate from my hacker buds.”

  “Don’t you just feel exhausted with all the being afraid and all the waiting and the tension? I’m just overstretched and like I’m going to snap.”

  He pulled her toward him, turned her around and began to knead her neck and shoulder muscles. “Got to keep it under wraps, babes. No use in combusting. We need all our smarts to get through this one.”

  THEY RODE OUT in midday on his motorcycle to a mall on the edge of Middletown, where they found a pay phone. She waited, perched on the edge of a planter filled with frozen earth and dead chrysanthemums. Someone, maybe Alison, had told her that the chrysanthemum was the flower of death. Alison sometimes said strange things like that. She read a lot. Melissa remembered gladiolus being the common flower at funerals of her childhood, and now people seemed to go for roses or lilies.

  When he got off the phone, he was looking worried. “They say it’s likely that someone who knew what he was doing could reconstruct my data. That would pretty much do me in. They aren’t sure how much could be reconstructed, because the parts of the hard drive that were erased and then recorded over would be cool. But the parts that were erased and not recorded over, someone who knew what he was doing might get a fair amount of data off the drive.”

  She wrung her hands. “It just gets worse and worse.”

  He smiled at her, a forced smile, but still he looked so handsome standing there it seemed impossible that anyone could bring him down, that anyone would want to. Even when she dreamed of him in her sleep a couple of times a week, he had a radiance. It was different from that glow that surrounded her parents in public. It was not so much a glittering surface as something that shone through his skin from within. She had tried to explain that to Emily, who said, “Girl, you are in love. He’s a guy, not a saint. Come off it.”

  Now he could be taken from her. Locked up for years. Brutalized. Tortured. Men got raped in prison. There his handsome face and lithe body would work against him. He could not go to prison. She had to stop the process, but only Dick and Rosemary could do that. Did she have any leverage with them? She frankly did not know.

  “I have to go Christmas shopping,” she said.

  “We do a little of that, not much,” he said. “There are real advantages to being Jewish. We give each other one present and quit while we’re ahead. Grandma calls it Chanukah gifts, but it’s really just a nod to the rest of society.”

  “I have to get presents they’ll like, as if I could afford anything that Rosemary would really want. But it’s a way of ingratiating myself.” Strangely enough, Rosemary actually did care for presents. Melissa imagined that in the lower-middle-class family in which her mother had been raised, presents had been severely practical. Mittens, gloves, scarves, socks. Rosemary loved jewelry. How could she find something her mother would feel was a worthy present? Rosemary wasn’t the sort of mother who cooed over her children’s lopsided bowls made in pottery class or their daubs from art class. Back when she had been in a Brownie troop, she had given her mother an apron she had sewn out of blue calico for a merit badge. Rosemary had barely been able to hide her displeasure. An apron! Melissa had been crushed.

  She had to find something to give each of them that would put them in a good mood. She tried to explain the problem to Blake, but he didn’t understand. He tended to give his parents books he was sure they’d find interesting. She couldn’t imagine giving Rosemary or Dick a book. Or Rich or Laura or Billy. Perhaps Merilee. No, she had to come up with something that would curry fa
vor. It was going to be a big project.

  It was going to empty the cash reserve she had, but she could put expensive items on her credit card. By the time the bills came in, the crisis would have been resolved one way or the other, one way or the other. Emily could understand. Melissa enlisted her and her car in the search. In an antiques barn two towns away, they found a necklace that Melissa thought Rosemary would approve of. She also found a World War II cartridge box she thought Dick would like. For Rich she got cuff links; for Laura, earrings; and for the baby, a stuffed toy. Her credit card was going to be maxed out. Billy was easy. She got him some CDs. Merilee would receive a burned-out-velvet scarf. What about Alison? She had to get her something. Every year Alison joined their Christmas. She ended up getting her a scarf too. A Middletown woman made pretty ones. She was out of ideas as well as money. It was bribery, but she needed every bit of goodwill she could muster from her family.

  BLAKE JUST DIDN’T get it. “You think giving your mother a necklace from the twenties is going to fix marrying me, you’re thinking upside down.”

  “I think we need every bit of edge we can find. It’s going to be murder.”

  He was sitting on a bench next to her, kneading a snowball in his gloves. Then he let it fly against an oak, stripped for the winter to a few raggedy leaves still clinging like torn paper bags to its hefty limbs. He hit the oak trunk dead center.

  “Good shot,” she said, trying to defuse things.

  “You really think we’re going to get someplace with your parents? By suddenly persuading them how nice we are?”

  “I think a combination of polite blackmail about scandal and trying to persuade them how cute and puppylike we are is the only way to go.”

  “The case has dropped out of the papers. Nothing. I think King Richard’s going to get away with it. We had him dead center, and nobody cares.”

  “Blake, we’ve got to let that drop. We must! You don’t want to go to prison. I don’t want you to go to prison. I sure don’t want to go. We took it as far as we could. We’re just a couple of college kids, not detectives, not investigative reporters with a national newspaper behind us hiring lawyers.”

  He did not answer. He scooped up more snow, shaped it hard and let fly again, hitting the same oak.

  “Promise me, Blake, that you’ll try to let this go, at least for a while.”

  Another snowball hit the oak. “I gave it my best shot. I thought we had him. I thought we did.”

  “Blake, if you try to continue, we’ll end up in worse trouble.”

  “You really want to try throwing ourselves on their tender mercies?”

  “I don’t see another way to go. They are my parents.”

  “We’ll be in Philadelphia, the whole cast assembled. You, me, Phil and his father, Dick and Rosemary, your siblings, Si and Nadine, all of us. All there gathered round full of holiday spirit. What a cozy thing to look forward to.”

  “If we end up getting through this free and together, it will be. We just have to feel our way very carefully.”

  “Careful,” he repeated. “Full of care. That’s how I feel. Really overstuffed and loaded with care. Four more days and we all go to the City of Brotherly Love.”

  She looked sideways at his guarded face, praying that she had got through to him and he wasn’t going to persist in a mad scheme of exposure and revenge. She could imagine an afterward when they were free just to be who they were, husband and wife together, openly. If this was close to hell, that looked to her close to heaven.

  • CHAPTER THIRTY •

  Melissa found the household in a very different mood than they had exhibited at Thanksgiving. Dick and Rosemary were upbeat. “I think we’ve weathered this little storm,” Rosemary said. “The leak has been stopped and the attacks staved off.” She was sitting in her office, at a small desk with a bouquet of Persian lilies to her left. She was wearing a pale blue suit and her hair was slightly lighter than usual. Nobody seemed to be around, not even Alison. The office was crowded with two desks, one for Rosemary and one for Dick, but his real office in Philadelphia was downtown, where his local staff worked.

  “Did they catch anyone?” Melissa stood before her mother wondering if she should take a seat or stay prepared for a hasty retreat.

  “We don’t feel it behooves us to look over the shoulders of the police and the FBI. They’re holding that homosexual campaign worker who stole and altered papers. I imagine he’ll go to prison eventually. These things take time, and that’s just as well. The longer the process takes, the more the situation is defused.”

  “So they’re proceeding against the reporter from the Inquirer and the campaign worker.” Melissa noted that, even with contempt edging her voice, Rosemary would say “homosexual” and never “fag” or “queer.” She did not use slur words she considered vulgar. “Did they catch anybody else?”

  “They are still looking for the conduit between that man and Roger. I think they have someone likely, but as I said, I have been letting them do their work. I’m expecting to be brought up-to-date shortly after Christmas.”

  That’s when the shit would likely hit the fan. Melissa tried to keep a blandly interested expression on her face. “So you’re feeling better?”

  “Your father has been getting some good press lately. The Washington Times ran a piece calling him one of the rising stars of the Senate. Someone who has quickly established his presence and is being mentored by powerful senators. We also had a small but favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal last week.”

  “Great. So how’s everyone else?”

  “We fired Yolanda in Georgetown. We caught her taking home food—”

  “Leftovers?”

  “More than that.” Rosemary’s mouth thinned. “I can’t abide thievery. We have to be able to trust anyone who comes into the house here or in Washington. Too many sensitive things. Besides, someone who steals a steak one day might help themselves to the silverware tomorrow and a watch the day after that.”

  Melissa sighed. “But she sure was a good cook.”

  “Cooks are plentiful. Honesty is what I value above all. Loyalty.”

  “So how’s Alison? I haven’t seen her today.”

  “She’s at the doctor’s.”

  “Is something wrong with her?” Melissa felt she should pretend an interest in Alison she had never actually experienced. Yolanda made the kitchen smell like paradise. Alison was just a busy extension of Rosemary.

  “We had a scare.” Rosemary steepled her fingers on the ebony surface. “She had a bad Pap smear. Her results came back with a possible problem this November, right after Thanksgiving.”

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “There seemed a possibility of cervical cancer—not often fatal these days. Still, cancer is cancer, and we were very concerned.” Rosemary sighed, her forehead creasing. “Fortunately, she had her ultrasound Wednesday, and everything is normal. A great relief! I couldn’t do without my Alison.”

  Melissa felt a pang of jealousy. Rosemary had actually been worried about Alison. She cared about Alison, she really did. “You’ve had other assistants.”

  “But never one so loyal, so devoted. And bright. She’s almost perfect, Melissa. She does the job of a secretary, an administrative assistant, a general all-around helper, a researcher, a computer person. No one has ever taken such good care of me.”

  Enough of that. “Is Billy home yet? Merilee? The house feels empty.”

  “You arrived at an off time. Alison should return in forty-five minutes, depending on traffic. Merilee is still in Foggy Bottom, but she’ll arrive tomorrow. Billy got in last night, but he’s off ice-skating.”

  “And how are Rich and Laura and little Dickey doing?”

  “Fine.” Rosemary’s gaze flickered.

  Something wrong there. Something off. “The baby’s all right?”

  “Spectacular,” Rosemary said, beaming now. “Cutest little boy. He’s going to be big, you can tell already. Laura is a
first-rate mother, I will give her that.”

  “Is Rich’s campaign going well?”

  “He’s gathering support.” The phone rang. Rosemary looked at her caller ID and picked up at once. “Frank!” It was her geisha voice, and she waved Melissa out. Frank was Senator Dawes. He seemed to call daily. Melissa supposed he was lonely and probably bored back in North Dakota: she would be, she was sure.

  Melissa could not help but wonder what was wrong in the Rich sector, where any trouble that would attract Rosemary’s attention and divert it from her could only be helpful. She would keep her ears open and listen at doors. Usually she had to acquire information by stealth—one reason she used to go snooping, long before she met Blake. It was time to go upstairs and use her temporary privacy to call him.

  Her room here she had actually come to prefer to her larger room in Washington. It was too small to share with Merilee. Up at the top of the house, she had a measure of privacy. Here, Alison was the only staff on a regular basis. Meals in were catered, but the caterers brought the food in and, after setting up the meal, departed, a discreet service that required little contact. A cleaning service appeared twice a week for the down-stairs. They stormed through the upstairs every Friday, so Melissa was forewarned to clear out. Almost as many people came through the downstairs as in Washington, but she could generally keep out of their way. The town house had a narrow back stairway, probably intended for servants who had lived up in the attic, where she had her room. She could slip down and out without interference. Blake suggested she get herself out to the Ackerman house in Mount Airy, and she planned to do that once she figured out the holiday schedule. Emily expected her on the twenty-ninth, but she would just have to see how things went and when the best window of opportunity might open to approach Rosemary and Dick about Blake.

  The next morning, she could hear from the thump of rap music from the floor below that Billy was in. Maybe she could feel out her younger brother to see if he would ally himself with her. Down the back stairs she went to knock on his door. At first there was no response. She banged again and yelled, “Billy! It’s me, Lissa.” She tried to open the door but it was locked.