CHAPTER NINETEEN

DARROW stood in The Balance Room, soggy money squishing beneath the soles of his white buck shoes. “Sweet Jesus,” he murmured.

Hine had discovered the robbery when he’d routinely let the collators in at eight. He immediately summoned Darrow, not telling him what was wrong because he wanted the pleasure of Darrow’s reaction.

Darrow put his hand on Hine’s arm to steady himself.

Hine drew his arm away.

“Get security up here,” Darrow said to everyone. His voice had more please than authority in it. His eyes traveled up the knotted rope to the opening in the ceiling, the opening in the roof, the sky.

The clouds that had been solid for the last twenty-four hours chose that moment to break and display some blue high above them. Darrow did not like the looks of it.

“How much do you think is missing?” he asked Hine.

Hine did a little shrug with his hand. “It’ll have to be counted.”

“Will you do that for me?”

“Glad to,” Hine said.

“Better not touch anything until security’s had a look.”

Darrow closed his eyes, turned, slipped a bit in the greenish-gray mush and left The Balance Room. He walked slowly down the hall, as though his feet were lead, unaware of the smile from Hine that was hitting him in the back. He trudged down the main stairs and into the dining room. Sat for breakfast across from Lois Hine.

“Someone got into The Balance,” he told her, subdued.

She was having something to eat before she went up to bed. She yawned and then crunched a corner from a piece of crustless toast with her perfect front teeth.

“It appears they took a lot of it.”

“Tant pis,” she said. So much the worse for dear Darrow. She removed the top from a sterling jam server, ate a straight spoonful of conserved strawberries that had once grown wild in a field in Scotland, got up, took her coffee with her. Not the saucer, just the cup that dripped from its bottom onto the Kirman carpet as she left Darrow sitting there.

He sat slouched, brought himself up but only to slouch again. Couldn’t keep his legs still under the table. The sunny-side up eggs that were placed before him were an inappropriately light-hearted color. He unfolded the Wall Street Journal as he usually did. His hands seemed detached, two separate performers. The couple of headlines he read got only as far as his eyes.

Steve Poole appeared in the doorway, waited for Darrow’s permission to enter. A nod brought him to the table. He assumed a parade rest stance, hands clenched together behind him as though hiding something. Poole was supervisor of security at Number 19. He had once been Secret Service assigned to the White House and before that with Defense Intelligence. This Number 19 job was softer, paid more. Darrow himself had taken him on nine years ago.

“What have you found?” Darrow asked.

“We’re still looking, sir.”

“So far.”

They had found the dry ice, the pulley, the slide, the hoist-truck on the airport side of the wall. They had found the security man in the shed with his head nearly cut off, the looped alarm circuits, four laundry bags of money among the roses in the rear garden. “There’s a lot to go on,” Poole said.

A drop of encouragement in Darrow’s bucket of despair.

“Right off, sir, I would say those who did it were extremely experienced professionals.”

Darrow tried to imagine what such professionals would look like. Ugly, sneaky types.

“And,” Poole added, “they must have had some inside knowledge of the place, first-hand or otherwise … the way they avoided our alarm systems.”

“Someone now working here?”

“Possibly …”

The faces passed through Darrow’s mind like a rogue’s gallery, including Hine and Sweet.

“… but more likely someone who used to work here,” Poole said.

Darrow had dismissed only three security men since he had been at Number 19, and a couple of collators. Three or four others had quit. They all seemed prime suspects now that he remembered them. He told Poole that.

“We’ve kept track of them,” Poole said. “All we have to do is reach out.”

Darrow felt a sudden rise of rage, like severe actute indigestion. He wanted to tell Poole it was security’s fault, that security had been incompetent, probably asleep all night or watching television or jerking off one another. He wanted to say that he blamed Poole, personally, for misleading him into believing the alarm systems were impenetrable. However, his anger would have to wait. He needed Poole and the security people now more than ever, their expertise. His only hope was that the money, at least most of it, might be recovered and back in The Balance Room before anyone between himself and the High Board got wind of it.

“We’ll keep this to ourselves, won’t we, Poole?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do whatever you must, spend whatever is necessary.”

“I understand.”

“When will you get back to me?”

“By the end of the day.”

Poole hurried out.

Darrow flexed his legs beneath the table and complained that his eggs were cold.

What else could he do?

THE Gulfstream II jet that touched down at Westchester Airport at three that Friday afternoon seemed too imposing to be carrying only one passenger. However, only one man stepped out down out of it and transferred to the Lincoln stretch limousine waiting on the apron.

Five minutes later the Lincoln passed through the gates of Number 19, made the climb and stopped at the front entrance. The man got out, went up to the door and walked right in. His two pieces of luggage followed.

He paused in the reception hall to survey the place. He’d never been to Number 19 before, but it was close to what he had expected.

His name was Horridge, Leland Porter Horridge.

A man in his early fifties. Slight but with a paunch. Business length gray hair beneath a gray homburg that matched his gray vested suit. His chrome wire-framed glasses were bifocaled. His plain eighteen karat cufflinks had belonged to his grandfather. His briefcase was the old-fashioned expandable sort but relatively new, made of fine black calf.

Horridge removed his homburg, placed it and his case respectfully on the hall console. He did not look at himself in the mirror above the console, merely stretched his neck to ease down a bit the starched collar of his shirt.

He went looking for Darrow.

Found him in his downstairs study, at his desk reading the New York Post, trying to get his worry off the robbery by going over the football opinions of the sportswriters and some of the more seamier items. Only the black cook knew he read that paper, brought it secretly to him each morning and disposed of it for him before she left each night. This was the first time he’d ever been caught with it. A social felony.

Horridge reintroduced himself.

Darrow recognized Horridge before hearing his name. They had met several years ago in Newport during America’s Cup Week.

Handshake.

Chair offered.

Horridge conveyed with a brief downcast of his eyes that nothing would follow until that New York Post was out of sight. He looked aside long enough for Darrow to drop it into a wastebasket.

“I understand you had somewhat of a calamity,” Horridge began.

“Can I get you a drink?”

Horridge declined but then on second thought decided he’d have some port. “Any kind not Spanish,” he said.

Darrow called for it.

“Is that correct?” Horridge asked.

“I beg your pardon.”

“You’ve had a calamity.”

“Nothing that can’t be dealt with.”

“A robbery, I believe.”

“A robbery.”

“How much was taken?”

Darrow had received the figures from Hine just a half hour ago. It had been painful enough reading them, now he had to say them aloud, “One billion, eighty-two million.”

“That’s distressing,” Horridge said with about as much emotion as someone observing a dented fender.

The port was brought.

Sips.

That bastard Hine, Darrow thought. Couldn’t wait to pick at his bones, had to call Boston. Well, on the reverse side of every problem was an opportunity. He’d always gone by that, at least said it. Perhaps this would turn out to be a chance for him. To demonstrate his efficiency at dealing with crisis. If … no, when security recovered the stolen money. “We’re rectifying the situation,” he told Horridge stiffly. “In fact, only minutes ago I received a report from my security people telling me they were onto something that looked very promising.” That was a lie. When Horridge arrived Darrow was anxiously awaiting word from Poole.

“How long is it now that you’ve been with us, Edwin?” Horridge asked.

“Twenty-two, going on twenty-three, years.” Horridge knew damn well, Darrow told himself. He would have been briefed.

“How many years here at this installation?”

“Since 1970.”

“And before that?”

“With Coville, Blankhard and Biggar.” The Boston law firm.

“Then surely you’re aware of how we prefer to handle such nasty matters as this.”

“Yes.”

“It’s just not prudent to go chasing after people, stirring a private mess into a potentially public one.”

“I hope to have it tidied up in a day or two.”

“But the question and the point is how tidy?”

Darrow knew how precarious the line was under him. The most he could do was buy time from Horridge. Horridge had the authority to grant that. He wasn’t High Board, never would be, but he was its direct emissary, its secretary of state, so to speak. “I’ve kept that in mind, of course,” Darrow said.

“Have you now?”

“I’ve always carefully abided by our procedures. There can’t possibly be any marks against me, certainly no major ones—”

“Until now, no.”

“That ought to count for something—”

“There you go, thinking like an outsider. That’s exactly what I’m apprehensive about.”

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

Horridge tilted his head back and looked down his nose at Darrow. His eyes became magnified by the bifocal-lensed lower portion of his glasses. “It’s most distressing,” he said. “How much did you say was taken?”

“One billion, eighty million.”

“Eighty-two million,” Horridge corrected. He cleared his throat, his fingers were precisely laced in his lap. “The loss itself, even though it is a sizable amount in this case, does not concern us that much. In fact, we’d prefer to just forget the money part entirely.”

Darrow wished it could be as easy as that for him.

“Money,” Horridge continued, “has a way of replenishing itself, particularly money of this sort. A cash loss is only a temporary wound that more cash quickly heals. Do you understand our thinking, Edwin?”

“I believe so.”

Silence hung between the two men.

Darrow couldn’t read which way Horridge was leaning. If his way, it was only very slightly.

“I did not come expecting to settle this in an hour,” Horridge said. “I’ll be staying on a day or two. If in that time you happen to recoup the stolen amount, then we’ll take a look and see how trimly you’ve managed to do it. Yes, we’ll see …”

That was Friday.

On Monday, Poole made his summary report.

The hoist-truck was traced back to Teeterborough Airport in New Jersey. No one had witnessed it being stolen. It had just been there one night and not there the following morning. Number 19’s security men had gone over every inch of the truck inside and out. There were palm and fingerprints all over it, some old, others recent. The problem was too many prints. It would take months to lift them all and run them through for identification. Security had, at random, lifted eight recent prints. All eight, as it turned out, belonged to Federal Aviation Administration maintenance personnel. Poole had connections inside who verified that.

A second truck had been used in the robbery. Evidently a heavy transport van of some sort, an eighteen-wheeler. Tread marks identified its tires as Michelin II-245’s. There were no usable footprints either on the airport side or the garden side of the wall, on account of the rain.

The guards at the airport gate were questioned on the pretense that there had been a theft of some radar equipment from one of the corporate hangars. One guard recalled admitting the hoist-truck, had it entered in his log, but could not give a helpful description of the men in it. The log showed no entry for the transport van, only normal airport vehicles. Poole had thought it best not to go nosing too deep around the airport.

However, he had taken the swimming pool slides all the way. Traced them to Elite Products, a plastic manufacturing firm in Brooklyn. The owner of Elite had excellent recall of the sale of the slides. They were bought with cash by a man named James Bishop. Forty-five to fifty years old, gray hair, gray bushy mustache, a bit on the plump side, stoop-shouldered, sloppy dresser, dirty-collared shirt, ketchup stains on his tie. Bishop had taken the slides away in a station wagon bearing North Carolina license plates.

The electronic looping devices used to neutralize the alarms were especially designed for that purpose. Poole considered himself highly knowledgeable in the area of surveillance and alarm systems, but he had never seen anything like these loops.

Poole himself had put the word out discreetly to key informants in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. A hundred thousand dollars was promised for a substantial lead, proportionately as much for any lesser information. This, in Poole’s opinion, was where their best chance lay. Predictably, criminals let money burn holes in their underwear. They would be spreading it around, making impressions. Someone would take notice and capitalize on it sooner or later. One might be able to physically hide a billion eighty-two, but to psychologically keep it from surfacing was impossible, Poole said.

Nothing.

Darrow sat there feeling hope abandoning him.

“You don’t intend to pursue this any further do you?” Horridge asked.

“Whatever you advise,” Darrow replied.

“I believe it best to drop the matter. We certainly don’t want a network of dubious types chattering about us, no matter how subterranean they happen to be.” Horridge addressed Darrow as though Poole wasn’t in the room.

Darrow nodded submissively, told Poole to resume his regular duties, get security back on normal schedule.

“There was no robbery,” Horridge put in.

Poole said two “yes sirs” and left.

OVER the next two days Darrow did everything possible to charm Horridge. They had lengthy conversations that Darrow subtly steered to topics Horridge knew most about. Dogs, for example. Horridge owned and bred water spaniels, proudly recited the geneaology of his champions. Horridge also recited Emerson, whom he referred to as Ralph Waldo. He’d read Emerson entirely, many works over and over. Some of the essays were canon to him. His favorite was “Conduct of Life.”

Darrow was not normally a good listener, but as Horridge went on and on about water spaniels and Ralph Waldo, he remained apparently interested, his eyes directly on Horridge’s, and managed not to fidget. After all, he was listening for his life.

Monday came.

Horridge had said he’d be leaving on Monday. Darrow expected that at any moment Horridge would just pick up and go, with a handshake and a thank you like any other guest. Probably no mention of Darrow’s fate. Darrow wondered exactly how it had been handled with his predecessor, Gridley.

They were in the library. A smaller room than the others on the ground floor, seldom used. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling leather bound books, a fireplace of Antique Verde marble, leather upholstered chairs. At the moment Horridge had his collar unbuttoned, tie knot slipped loose two inches. Darrow believed that a good sign. He thought if only he had time he’d go into the city for a goddamn first-edition Emerson, possibly one that was autographed.

A bird flew onto the window screen, clung to the wire mesh with its talons. Common sparrow, white underside exposed.

“Well …” Horridge said within a sigh.

Silence.

“Edwin?”

“Yes?”

“Leave the room.”

“Certainly.”

Darrow went out, closed the door behind him. He walked down the hall to his study, through and out to the south terrace, down the wide stone steps and across the lawn to a huge copper beech. Paused beneath it, touched the bark of it, gray and textured like elephant hide. It had been thirty years since he’d touched any part of a tree, Darrow realized.

He returned to the house.

The library door was open.

Horridge was seated in a different leather chair now, nearer to a window. He had a book resting open on the thigh of his crossed-over leg.

Darrow noticed the telephone, a change in its position on the side table.

Without looking up, Horridge told him: “Don’t get your hopes too high, but I’ve arranged for an appeal. We leave for Florida in the morning.”