The Chancellor Manuscript

The cold snap came, turning autumn into winter. The election was over, the results as predictable as the frost that covered the Pennsylvania countryside. Mendacity and Madison Avenue had prevailed over vascillating amateurs. Nobody won anything of value, least of all the republic.

Peter had not paid much attention to politics. Once the players were fielded, there wasn’t much that interested him. Instead, he was consumed by the novel. Each morning was his personal adventure. He had refined the plot; the characters had sprung to life.

He was into the seventh chapter, the point where decent men were gradually reaching an indecent decision: murder. The assassination of J. Edgar Hoover.

Before the actual writing of a chapter he always outlined it; then he put the outline aside, barely if ever referring ring to it. It was a technique suggested by Anthony Morgan years ago:

Know where you’re going, give yourself a direction so you’re not floundering, but don’t restrict the natural inclination to wander.

It was strange about Tony, thought Chancellor as he bent over the table. They had talked several times since the incredible madness at the Cloisters several weeks before, but Morgan had never mentioned it. It was as though it had not happened.

Still Morgan had read the first hundred pages of the novel. He said it was the best writing Peter had ever done. That was all that mattered. The book was everything.

Chapter 7—Outline

A rainy afternoon in a Washington hotel suite. The senator sits in front of a window watching the rain splattering against the glass. He is thinking back thirty years ago, to his days in college when the incident had taken place that when revealed three decades later would take him out of the presidential race. It was the indiscretion Hoover’s messenger had confronted him with. He couldn’t recall how or when it had happened. His emotions had run high and wild and indiscreet. But there it was: his youthful signature on the card of an organization later revealed to be part of the Communist apparatus. Innocuous, of course; defensible, certainly—laughable, actually. But not in terms of the presidency. It was enough to disqualify him. It would not have been, of course, had his present political philosophy been in tune with the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s.

The senator’s thoughts are interrupted by the arrival of the newspaperwoman, the columnist silenced by Hoover, now part of the Nucleus. The senator rises and offers her a drink.

The woman replies that if she could accept, she would not be there in the first place. She explains she is an alcoholic; she has not had a drink in over five years, but prior to that she was often drunk for days at a time. It was Hoover’s hook into her. During one such binge, photographs were taken.

“Committing unnatural acts with various unsavory gentlemen is the easiest way to describe them. But for the life of me, I don’t remember. Good God, how could I?”

Hoover has the photographs. Her dissent has been effectively muted.

The third member of the Nucleus arrives. This third person is the former cabinet member described in the first chapter, whose indiscretion is the fact that he’s a closet homosexual.

He brings alarming news. Hoover has made a temporary pact with the White House. Every viable candidate in the opposition will be reached and eliminated. Where facts do not exist, conjecture under the FBI imprimatur will be used. The bureau’s name is sufficient to wreak havoc among politicians. By the time defenses are mounted, the damage has been done.

The opposition will field its weakest candidate; the election of the incumbent is assured. Inherent in this agreement is that Hoover has no less damaging weapons to use against the White House. In essence, the director will soon control the pressure points of the country; he’ll be running it.

“He’s gone too far. The corpses are piling up too fast, too dead. He has to be removed, I don’t care how. Even if it means killing him.”

The senator is appalled at the cabinet officer’s words. He knows what it is to feel Hoover’s knife, but there are legitimate ways to fight him. He takes Meredith’s report from his briefcase.

The decision is made to reach the messenger, the man who operates with Hoover’s private files. Whatever’s required will be used to recruit him; above all, the files must be taken.

“First the files. If they can be used the way Hoover uses them, they can be turned around. They can be used for good! Then the execution. There is no other way.” The cabinet officer will not waver.

The senator will not listen further; he refuses to acknowledge the statement. He leaves, saying only that he is going to arrange a meeting with Meredith.

He picked up his pencil and began.

He was oblivious to time, lost in the accumulated pages. He leaned back on the couch and looked up at the windows, mildly astonished to see tiny flakes of snow drifting downward. He had to remind himself that it was late in December. Where had the months gone?

Mrs. Alcott had brought him the newspaper an hour ago and he felt like taking a break. It was ten thirty; he had been writing since quarter to five. He reached for the paper on the edgo of the coffee table and snapped it open.

The headlines were the usual headlines. The Paris negotiations were stalled—whatever that meant. People were dying; he knew what that meant.

Suddenly Peter stared at the one-column head in the lower right-hand corner of the front page. A sharp pain shot through his temples.

GEN. BRUCE MACANDREW APPARENT MURDER VICTIM

Body Washed Up on Waikiki Beach

Waikiki! Oh, my God! Hawaii!

The story was macabre. MacAndrew’s body had two bullet holes in it, the first piercing his throat, the second entering his skull below the left eye. Death had been instantaneous and had occurred some ten to twelve days before.

Apparently no one knew the general had been in Hawaii. Hotels and airlines showed no reservations in his name. Interrogations within the island’s military establishment produced no information; he had not contacted anyone.

Reading further, Peter was startled again by a paragraph head near the bottom of the page.

Wife Died Five Weeks Ago

The information was scarce. She had simply died “after a prolonged illness that restricted her activities in recent years.” If the reporter knew anything more, he had charitably omitted it.

The Hawaii police are reportedly looking into rumors that a former high-ranking American Army officer was involved with criminal elements operating out of the Malay Peninsula through Honolulu. There are many retired military men and their families in the Hawaiian Islands. Whether or not these rumors are in any way related to the homicide victim could not be established.

Then why include the information? thought Peter angrily, remembering the pathetic sight of the soldier cradling his wife. He flipped the pages to find the continuation of the article. There was a brief biography devoted to MacAndrew’s military record, culminating in mention of the general’s sudden and unexpected resignation and his differences with the Joint Chiefs, speculations as to the extramilitary cost of his wife’s illness, and the subtle insinuation that the maverick general had been subjected to extreme psychological pressures. The connection between these “pressures” and the previously mentioned “rumors” was for the reader to draw, and no reader could help doing so.

The last part of the article took another turn, surprising Peter. He had not realized MacAndrew had a grown daughter. From the description in the paper she was an angry, independent woman.

Peter understood what she was saying. If MacAndrew traveled anywhere with his mentally ill wife, he would of course use an assumed name to protect her. But MacAndrew’s wife was dead. And Chancellor knew the general had not gone to Hawaii for a vacation. He had gone to find a man named Longworth.

And Longworth had killed him.

Peter let the newspaper drop from his hands. Revulsion swept over him, part fury, part guilt. What had he done? What had he let happen? A decent man killed! For what?

A book.

In his messianic drive to assuage his own guilt Longworth had killed again. Again. For he was responsible for Rawlins’s death at the Cloisters as surely as if he had pulled the trigger that took the congressman’s life. And now half a world away, there was another death, another murder.

Chancellor got up unsteadily from the couch and walked aimlessly about the room, the protected sanctuary where fiction took place, life and death only products of the imagination. But outside that room life and death were real. And they touched him because they were a part of his fiction; the marks on paper had sprung from the motives that drove other lives, brought about other deaths. Real life and real death.

What was happening? A nightmare, more realistic and grotesque than anything he might have dreamed, was being played out in front of a backdrop of fiction. A nightmare.

He stopped at the telephone as if somebody had commanded him to remain still. Thoughts of MacAndrew triggered images of a silver Mark IV Continental and a mask of a face behind the wheel.

He dialed information for the Rockville area code. Thirty seconds later he was speaking with a desk sergeant named Manero. He described the incident on the back road, gave the date, and identified Officer Donnelly.

Manero hesitated. “Are you sure you want Rockville, sir?”

“Of course I am.”

“What color was the patrol car, sir?”

“Color? I don’t know. Black and white, or blue and white. What difference does it make?”

“There’s no Officer Donnelly in Rockville, sir. Our vehicles are green with white stripes.”

“Then, it was green! The patrolman said his name was Donnelly. He drove me back to Washington.”

“Drove you into—Just one minute, sir.”

There was the click of a hold button. Chancellor stared out the window at the wind-blown flakes of snow and wondered whether he was losing his mind. Manero came back on the line.

“Sir, I’ve got the police blotter for the week of the tenth. There’s no record of any accident involving a Chevrolet and a Lincoln Continental.”

“It was a silver Mark Four! Donnelly told me it was picked up! A woman driver in dark glasses hit a mail track.”

“I repeat, sir. There’s no Officer Donnelly—?”

“Goddamn it, there is!” Peter could not help shouting. Perspiration broke out on his forehead; the pain in his temples increased. His memory raced back. “I remember! He said she was a drunk! With a record of violations, that was it. She was the wife of a Lincoln-Mercury dealer in—in Pikesville!”

“Just a minute!” The desk sergeant raised his voice. “Is this some kind of joke? My in-laws live in Pikesville. There’s no Lincoln dealer there. Who the hell could afford one? And there’s no police officer named Donnelly in this station. Now, get off the line. You’re interfering with official business!”

The phone went dead. Chancellor stood immobile, not believing the words he’d heard. They were trying to tell him he had lived a fantasy!

“Yes, of course, I remember our conversation, Mr. Chancellor. I enjoyed your last book very—?”

“Did you get the car back?”

“Yes, we did.”

“Then someone had to take a tow truck out to Rockville. Did he see a police officer named Donnelly? Can you find out for me?”

“It won’t be necessary. The next morning the car was back in our parking depot. You said you thought there might be damage, but there wasn’t. I remember the dispatcher saying that it was about the cleanest automobile ever returned.”

Peter tried to control himself. “Did whoever brought back the car have to sign anything?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Who was it?”

“If you’ll hold on, I can find out.”

“I’ll hold.” Peter gripped the phone with all his strength; the muscles in his forearms ached. His mind went blank. Outside, the snowflakes fell.

“Mr. Chancellor?”

“Yes?”

“There was a mistake, I’m afraid. According to the depot, the signature on the invoice was yours. Obviously there was a misunderstanding. Because the car was leased to you, the man who returned it probably thought—?”

“There was no mistake,” interrupted Peter quietly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Thank you,” he said, hanging up the telephone.

It was suddenly clear. Everything. The terrible mask of a face. The silver Continental. A clean, repaired Chevrolet in a Washington parking depot. A spotless Mercedes in front of his New York apartment. A note on the door.

It was Longworth. It was all Longworth. The grotesque, powdered face, the long dark hair, the black glasses … and memories of a horrible night of death a year ago in a rainstorm, Longworth had done his research; he was trying to drive him mad. But why?

Alison MacAndrew.

15