POLLY WOKE FIRST, STIRRED HER hips against his belly and thighs, and said: “What I’m worried about is Ezzard … God, how could I have forgotten?” She scrunched around on her back. “Wake up, boy scout.”
“I am awake. I have a sore throat.” He kept his eyes closed, tried burrowing his nose against her sweater. He snuffled in his throat, coughed, feeling vividly unattractive.
“It’s just the wet, cold air. It’ll go away.” She braced an arm on his shoulder and sat up. “Good God, I’m stiff. Getting old, I guess.”
“It’s just the wet, cold air,” he said. “You’re just entering your prime, my dear.”
“I suppose after one go-round on the floor before the fire, you’re some kind of big expert on Polly Bishop.” She poked his chest. “Beware of overconfidence. One swallow does not a summer make, for instance. I’ve got a million little sayings I’ve been saving for you … Either I start on a million examples of pith or you get up.”
“All right, all right, I’ll get up.” When he cranked an eye open she was standing over him, stretching, reaching as high as she could. Fetching, quite fetching. He opened the other eye. “Saucey Worcester,” he said.
“What?”
He shook his head: “Nothing.” He blinked at the beauty of a quiet spring morning. The sun was glowing gold behind the light fog bank and it was warmer than he’d prepared himself for: he had a flash of that carefree feeling that had come and gone erratically since he’d met Polly Bishop. “Well, what do you think?”
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m on my way to use a bush for a bathroom. I’m only human, you know.” She set off and he lay quietly on his back, her coat over him, the sheepskin up tight to his chin. It smelled like spring and the scent of the damp earth and grass and trees sent his mind going, racing off across the past. He remembered his boyhood in the little town of Oregon, Illinois, the melting of the snow and the wafers of ice coating the puddles like sugar frosting, and the cocker spaniel who’d romped madly at the season’s changing as they’d climbed Liberty Hill … It was so long ago and he couldn’t really remember the boy with the dog but there was the spiral of memory that got into the brain and waited. You could never really summon it up: it just came when the button was pushed or the right string pulled.
“The highway can’t be very far,” she said as they pushed out of the stand of pines and firs, into soggy grasses that sucked swamplike at their feet. She veered off toward a hump of path, sandy and wet. Highway One was an unprepossessing, narrow gray ribbon of concrete but it would take them as far as Ellsworth, according to the map, and that was all that was required. They both knew that someone was looking for them—and they were afraid of what might have happened to Prosser. But there was no going back: they had their orders. They pushed on in silence, the new day increasing in seriousness with each step. An hour after breaking camp, they found the highway stretching emptily away on either side, the golden glow of the rising sun giving it just a swipe of the alchemist’s wand.
“Pray for no red Pintos,” he said, plopping the bag down at the roadside. “We’re really sitting ducks out here …”
“How far are we from Ellsworth?” She’d combed her hair back with her fingers and her cheeks were flushed. He’d kissed her once, and he wanted to kiss her again.
“Let’s say, too far to walk.”
“Are we just going to wait?”
“Might as well start walking …” He picked up the bag. “Listen to the birds. In the spring, a young man’s fancy … you know.”
She put her arm through his and they started off along the shoulder trying to avoid the mud.
After two cars and a panel truck had passed, she said: “Wouldn’t this be a good time to tell me the history of the macguffin? I mean, if they find us, I wouldn’t want to die without knowing …”
“Come on—”
“And what about the brown car? It’s not exactly fit to return …”
“Good God, I hadn’t thought of that—”
“So tell me about the macguffin.”
“No, you’ll get spoiled.”
“Ha!” She kicked a stone across the quiet road. The golden glow was fading as the overcast thickened. “I am really hungry.”
By midmorning they reached Rockland where they stopped at a gas station and diner where a couple of trucks were gassing up. Fog was gusting across the highway. “Food,” she said, “food.”
While Chandler picked at a plate of scrambled eggs, Polly ate the ranch breakfast, the thought of which turned his stomach. It was the fear. It was back, a dark unreasoning thing he couldn’t ignore. They sat in the booth furthest from the door: he watched the highway for a first glimpse of the red Pinto, wondered what exactly he would do if he saw it. A police car pulled in and parked. Two cops got out and stretched, clumped into the diner where they were well known. Banter, laughter, a thermos being filled with hot coffee. It would have been such a pleasant, remote place, such a fine place to be with Polly … it would have been. “Oh Christ,” he whispered. A red car … Polly shook her head: “A Toyota,” she said. “Relax.” He leaned back: “Be still, my heart.” He wasn’t kidding and knew his smile was a poor, sickly thing.
The cops finished the snappy comedy routine and left. The locals subsided into their regular laconic conversation. Chandler got up and went to the counter where a well-thumbed copy of the morning’s Boston paper lay unattended. He brought it back and slid into the booth. Polly was still eating. “I’m worried about Ezzard,” she said.
“You said that.”
“I know but I’m going to have to do something about it. I’m going to call my next-door neighbor and get him to do something.”
“How will he get in?” He was unfolding the paper in search of the front page.
“He has a key.”
Chandler’s eyes snapped up: “He does, does he?”
“He’s a very sweet boy. Very …” She smiled. “He’s gay, if that makes you feel any better.”
“I’m sorry …” He folded the paper on the table and felt his stomach do something unpleasant. It was in the lower right-hand corner of the first page.
TV NEWSWOMAN MISSING:
WAS INVOLVED IN MURDER QUERY
Polly’s picture was particularly attractive: mouth open, teeth flashing, her head caught turning toward the camera, eyes bright.
“How the hell—”
“Listen,” he said. “Presumably you missed a show Sunday night … no, they called you, or you were supposed to call in …” He shook his head, ran his finger through the article. Polly watched, nibbling a fingertip. “Oh, here it is—” He was out of breath. “Ralph Stratton—the station manager—spent Sunday trying to get hold of you—”
“Damned busybody!”
“And when he couldn’t find you he went to your apartment and found the door unlocked and evidence of a search through the apartment by persons other than Ms. Bishop—some of our little friends, no doubt …”
“Does it say anything about Ezzard?”
“Polly, somebody has gone through your apartment! It doesn’t say anything about the cat, no, but look at it this way, if they’d killed the cat it would have been in the headline. But who did the going through?”
“McGonigle and Fennerty? Porkpie and Company? I guess it doesn’t really make much difference. What do you think they wanted? Oh, hell, that doesn’t make any difference either, does it?”
“No, I guess it doesn’t. Says here you’ve played the key media role in the Harvard murders—” He gave her a sour look.
“Colin, you missed something at the top of the page.”
HARVARD PROFESSOR TORTURED, KILLS ATTACKER, NEAR DEATH HIMSELF
The story was little different from what Prosser had told him but it was all new to Polly who read it with growing amazement. She finally looked up, wide-eyed. “Prosser told you about this?”
“He didn’t want to worry you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Brennan was conscious, told the police the story. The police got an anonymous tip … I don’t see where Prosser fits in. It’s pretty weird.”
“He has lots of connections,” Chandler said. “Who knows …”
“Well, it doesn’t all hang together, not in my book.” She turned to page three. “Here you are, my dear …
WHERE IS PROF. CHANDLER?
Says here that Department Chairman Bertram Prosser was unavailable for comment. Next they’ll be wondering if Harvard can stand the brain drain—Chandler, Prosser, and Brennan.” She finished her coffee and looked brightly around. “A few days ago this would have been amazing—”
“It’s still amazing. People are still trying to kill me, Prosser may be dead … Hugh could die at any moment, according to the stupid newspaper—and we’re wandering around the coast of Maine absolutely defenseless trying to get to Bar Harbor … believe me, it’s amazing. And the most amazing thing about it is the fact that I haven’t had a nervous breakdown.” He jabbed the paper with his forefinger: “Both of our pictures are in the papers—why, hell’s bells, we could be recognized at any moment!”
“Colin,” she said calmly, “so what? We’re not wanted for anything. It’s not Cary Grant in North by Northwest. We’re just running away. Somebody spots us, they say, hey, I know you two … and what are they supposed to do? That’s the really scary part—the only people who want us, want the document, and would probably rather kill us than not. Walk into a police station and they wouldn’t even know what to do with us …” She smiled.
“Okay. Let’s get going.”
“First, I’ve got to call about Ezzard. Go powder your nose and I’ll be done.” She went to the pay telephone hanging on the wall and took a credit card from a billfold in her coat pocket.
He went outside and asked a man with a station wagon bearing the words Down East TV Repair if he knew how they might get to Ellsworth.
“Well, you might get your thumb out,” he said, winking a blue eye buried beneath a reddish brow. “You might wait for the taxi. Quite a wait, though.” He turned and saw Polly coming out, her sheepskin coat open and spread back in the breeze. “Or, since I’m heading up Ellsworth way myself, you could come with me.” He smiled, looking at Polly, then back to Chandler.
They all crowded into the front seat and made small talk: what are you folks doing up here without a car, got business in Ellsworth? Damn, but you look familiar, miss, you sure we haven’t met somewhere? Positive? Well, I’d of bet on it … TV business, repairing them, that is, pretty interesting, some folks still have you come right into their homes, expensive as hell, but say you got your big console style TV, decorator cabinet, damn things weigh a ton, how the hell they gonna get ’em to the shop? That’s the problem with a console … that’s where I’m going right now, just like a doctor, doncha see, making a house call …
He prattled on, sneaking glances at Polly’s thighs and profile, while his passengers sat in silence. It was almost an hour later that he pulled over saying, “Well, folks, it’s been mighty interesting talking to you, but this is the end of the line—showplace of Ellsworth, the Holiday Inn.” Chandler hopped out, grabbed the bag out of the back seat, and pulled Polly after him. “Much obliged,” she cried over her shoulder. Chandler waved, muttered a cheerful obscenity, and headed across the parking lot into the motel. The clerk at the desk called a cab and they waited outside under the marquee. “He wasn’t that bad,” Polly said.
“He damned near drove off the road every time he sneaked a look at your thighs. Could have killed us and then where would we be, right? Rustic sex fiend.”
“You picked him, darling.” The cab arrived and Chandler told him to head for Bar Harbor.
“Bah Habah? Bah Habah is closed up tight as a drum, tighter.”
“Just go to Bar Harbor. Please … just go.”
Shaking his head the driver overcame his own better judgment, took a right leaving the Holiday Inn and drove to Bar Harbor without another word.
Kendrick’s Sporting Goods sat with its rear door hung out over the water of the gray, flat bay. The surface of the water merged indistinguishably with the fog, the golden sun now totally obscured. The smell of the water surrounded them as they stood alone in the deserted street. A couple of skinny-masted boats clung nervously to the weathered, heavy-timbered dock. A man in a plaid mackinaw jacket knelt at the end of the dock peering down into the water, a cap pulled low over his ears.
Bar Harbor, for all its fabled social history, appeared to be a damp-stained, weather-beaten, echoing ghost town. Chandler went to the front door of the sporting goods store and tried the knob which refused to give. A light glowed dimly in the very rear of the dark interior. It was past noon. The wind off the water licked at the moist wood. The large window was stacked high and deep with fishing and boating gear that was quite meaningless to Chandler. Dust lay undisturbed on what might once have been a display but had become, over what looked like decades, nothing other than a weary, dull jumble. A tennis racquet from Bill Tilden’s era leaned against an outboard motor: a broken string had curled up, died long ago. The archaeology of sport.
Chandler rapped on the door’s split, rotted wooden frame.
“Well, it figures,” he said. “Nobody home. Brother Kendrick is no doubt basking in the Florida sun. I knew I was going to regret this—”
“That’s not true,” Polly interrupted his wail. “You said that whatever Bert Prosser said was good enough for you. Now be honest with yourself.” She cupped her hands and peered into the store. “You’re just tired and sick of carrying the duffel bag. Here, kitty, kitty …” She tapped on the glass. “Kitty, kitty, kitty.”
Chandler dropped the bag, walked to the corner of the building, and looked out across a vacant lot overrun by dark brown, matted weeds. Sand filled the cracks in the broken sidewalk. Nothing moved. The man who had been crouching at the end of the dock appeared now on the beach, emerging from among the warped black pilings, walking with hands in mackinaw pockets, cigar jutting from beneath a hooked beak. Chandler watched him turn abruptly, felt the eyes seeking his own, felt the stare. The man began walking toward him, reached some ramshackle wooden stairs which rose from the beach to the sidewalk where Chandler stood.
He was a large, square-shouldered, square-jawed, deeply wind-burned man of sixty or so, red veins crisscrossing his face with its day-old gray stubble. The cap was a battered yachtsman’s that looked like it belonged in the window display. His eyes were deep-set and light gray and his voice had a strength Chandler had heard before in men who were used to solving their own problems in their own way. He had the steady gaze of a comic book hero, the same strong, obvious features.
“How are you?” he said, reaching the sidewalk. “Gloomy morning, gloomy day. Always puts me in a good mood. You looking for somebody?”
“Kendrick.”
“Ah, Kendrick.” He moved toward the store. “Old Kendrick … what could you want with an old duffer like him?”
“I’d better tell Kendrick about that.”
“A closemouthed man,” he chuckled. “I like a closemouthed man.” At the window he stopped: “You like the little kitties, miss? They’re such defenseless little mites.” Four kittens had appeared in the window, stumbling and falling and earnestly getting back up, nosing onward. “You care to say good-afternoon to these two fellows?” He withdrew huge hands from his jacket pockets: each fist held a kitten.
“Why, they’re just darling! Babies …”
“Ah, I always had a weakness for cats, everywhere I’ve gone, all over the world—a cat’s a cat.”
“Are those your cats, then?”
“Aye, seems I’ve got twenty or so.” He looked at Chandler. “I’m Kendrick, and who would you folks be?”
“Bert Prosser sent us here, to see you.” Chandler frowned, wondering why Kendrick had bothered with the charade over his name. “My name’s Chandler and this is Miss Bishop.”
Kendrick nodded, squint-eyed. Polly stroked the noses of the two kittens. “I’ve read about you two in the papers,” he said enigmatically, put the kittens back in his pockets, and opened the door with a key. “Let’s go have a sit-down and a touch of something to warm the bones.” For a moment his breadth filled the doorway, then he headed back among the dark stacks and mounds toward the single light. The room smelled of engine oil and rope and cold draughts. “Not much trade this time of year,” he said without turning around. The kittens had wormed their way out of the front window: Chandler heard the soft patter of their feet and hoped to God he could avoid stepping on any of them. Polly stooped and scooped up a couple of small, furry black creatures. Cat box! He smelled the cat box, too. Deliver me, he moaned to himself, deliver me …
The office was large and cramped at the same time, smelled of endless cigars. Kendrick took a puff and carefully laid his cigar on the wide rim of a heavy glass ashtray which was set in a rubber tire. Chandler hadn’t seen such an ashtray in years, since his childhood when his grandfather had had one exactly like it on his desk. Kendrick hung his coat on a tall rack: he wore suspenders over a plaid flannel shirt, heavy corduroy trousers. A space heater made the room dry, stuffy, and cats slept here and there, even among the papers on the rolltop desk. He pushed a cat off the rickety wooden swivel chair and pulled out a couple of scarred metal office chairs. “Sit, folks,” he said. “Now, a nip for what ails you.”
He took a bottle of bourbon out of the top drawer, lined up three glasses from a tray on top of the desk, and poured two fingers in each without seeking his guests’ approval.
“Mud in your eye,” he said and threw his into the back of his throat. Polly and Chandler sipped gingerly. “Wild Turkey. A man has to know where to spend his money … now, Bert Prosser, old Bert. Papers say you’re a historian, sir. Tell me, are you intimate with Bert Prosser, do you know his history? Well, I do, I know his history, all the way from India during WW Two—that was where I first ran across Bert Prosser. Clever, slippery little devil. Just the man we needed. Intelligence officer. I was a pilot … hauled Bert here and there, here and there. Why did he send you to old Kendrick?”
“He said I was simply to tell you it was a matter for Code Green. Very cloak and dagger.” Chandler shrugged self-consciously. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Kendrick lit up the stump of blackish cigar, blew out the wooden match, shook the bottle by his ear. He was running low. “Sure, it means something to me. It means plenty to me.” He exhaled a vast amount of smoke and scratched the gray whiskers along the line of his straight prominent jaw. “Plenty. Code Green.” He nodded.
“Is this something that happens every so often?” Polly asked. She had two tiny kittens tumbling about in her lap.
“Last time about five years ago …”
“What does it mean?”
“Sorry, miss, that’s part of Code Green, dates from our Indian days … part of Code Green is that I can’t tell you. Well,” he said, standing up. “It means secrecy and hurry-up.” He grunted and flung the filthy window open. The damp filled the dried-out room, Kendrick pointed out the window with his cigar. “Foggy out there. We’re going to have to wait until it lifts or thins out. My apologies to Bert Prosser, but hurry chop-chop just won’t work today.” He turned around, hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, and chewed his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.
“Does Bert really expect us to just put ourselves in your hands?” Polly looked up curiously from the kittens.
“You’d know best about that, miss. You’re certainly free to leave, with my blessings. If you stay, well, you’re in my hands all right. But I wouldn’t try to talk you into anything …” He sat down and poured another couple of fingers in his cheese glass, contemplated the fine amber bourbon.
“No, we’re in your hands,” Chandler said. “But I might as well tell you, I’m pretty near the end of my tether—”
“I’m used to that, people at the ends of their tethers. Don’t worry about that, sir. But we do have to make some preparations, you see. Code Green is not just a spur-of-the-moment thing … so, if you’re ready?”
Polly nodded.
“All right, then. We’ll take my car.” He took two tins of catfood from the splotched refrigerator in the corner and opened them with a red-handled device that didn’t want to stay attached to the can. “Now, my little beauties, you won’t have to eat each other.” He summoned up a rather ghastly, rattling laugh, placed the tins on the floor beside a large saucer of cream, and slipped back into his mackinaw.
They drove along a narrow, slippery dirt road which swung down from the paved road toward the water, but circuitously so. The tires slid, fog blew treacherously across their path, wet grasses slapped at the sides of the car. Kendrick obviously knew the road, but faith in Kendrick was hardly sufficient to keep Chandler from clutching at the dashboard.
“What the hell’s the hurry?”
Kendrick laughed harshly: “No particular hurry. I just don’t dawdle, that’s all. Know the road in the pitch dark, coming or going.”
The dirt had gone to sand and the trees had given way to nothing but beach grass. A small weathered gray house sat starkly, alone, in the sand of the beach, about fifty feet back from the road, precariously near the water. The house sat on stacks of cement blocks at each corner and at midpoints, as if expecting a halfhearted floodtide.
“No place like home, eh,” Kendrick said, pulling off into softer sand. Kendrick’s own dock projected out into the little protected bay and by the end of the dock an elderly seaplane bobbed softly on its fat pontoons. The outlines of the plane, only a hundred yards from where they stood, were badly smudged by the fog.
The interior of the house was comfortable and spare: a couple shelves of paperbacks, a large shortwave radio on the kitchen table, an old wicker couch in what must have once been a breakfast nook, stove and refrigerator, a rubber rack with dishes neatly dripped dry. The other room contained a bed, a dresser, and several rifles mounted in a rack on the wall.
“Travel light, that’s my motto,” Kendrick said by way of conversation. “Don’t own anything you don’t need.” He moved quickly around the kitchen turning on lights, putting water in a tin coffeepot, switching on a gas space heater. There was no sign of cats. “Miss, if you’re hungry you can raid the icebox. Coffee’s perking. It’ll warm up right quick …” He rubbed his hands briskly, looked around him. “Well, I’ve got work to do. You make yourselves comfortable and we’ll proceed with Code Green as soon as we get a little weather going our way.” He left the kitchen, disappeared into a small toolshed out back.
Watching him go, Polly said: “I rather resent all this, Colin. Just who or what does Prosser think he is? This is little more than kidnaping—”
“Voluntary. We could have left …”
“Oh sure, wander off into the wilderness! Colin, I’m scared, too, every time I look up I think I’m going to see that damned red Pinto … he’s out there, he wants us.” She shook her head forcefully. Kendrick emerged from the toolshed carrying a metal case, trundled off head down toward his dock. “No, Prosser got us into this and now we’re stuck with it. I simply don’t see the point of all this Code Green nonsense—what would have been wrong with simply telling us where we were headed? It’s childish …” She paused, struck by a thought: “Childish or governmental! Code Green sounds like something the idiots in Washington would come up with—”
“Look, he’s been involved with the government in the past, off and on, advisory capacity, consultant, kitchen cabinet. He probably uses terminology out of habit. Stop worrying.”
“Stop worrying,” she said, making a face, pouting. “That’s wonderful.”
He put his arm around her, tilted her face up: “Now, look. I realize fully that I am not exactly a movie hero. But I do know Bert Prosser and if there’s one thing in this world you can depend on, it’s Bert Prosser and Bert Prosser’s brain. When the man has a plan, it is a plan to count on. You can bet on it.” He cued up what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
Polly pulled away, her face serious: “If we knew where we were going, then if they caught us, and started pulling out our fingernails, we might tell them where it was—that’s right, isn’t it?”
“The thought never crossed my mind—”
“Well, it’s right—”
“I admit there’s a sort of nineteen-forties Gestapo-movie logic to it.”
“So, he didn’t tell us,” she said emphatically. “And now he’s probably dead …”
“Morbidity will get us nowhere.”
“Oh, don’t be a Pollyanna!”
“Another archaism! You’re giving away your age, my dear. What’s your favorite song—‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ … ?”
“ ‘You came to me from out of nowhere,’” she sang softly. “It’s from a forties’ movie, You Came Along … I wanted to be exactly like Lizabeth Scott, I even practiced a little lisp. She had those great, deep eyebrows, and that’s the only part of her I wound up with. That movie, it was like Love Story, Robert Cummings was a flier dying of a funny wound and Lizabeth loved him. I cried and cried, she’d have to go on living without him. And then I grew up. And why the hell are we talking about this?”
“Archaisms …”
Polly nibbled at a fingernail, went to the kitchen window.
“What is he doing out there?”
Kendrick was climbing down onto the pontoon, carrying the metal toolbox.
“Going to play with his toy,” Chandler said.
“Why do you suppose we’re waiting for the fog to clear? Christ, he’s going to fly us somewhere in that contraption …” She slammed her fist against the window frame.
The fog blew off in the evening after Kendrick had prepared a dinner of canned beans and toast washed down with beer. He rinsed the dishes and stacked them, dried his hands, and opened the kitchen door. “Stars are out,” he said quietly. “We’re in business.”
Chandler carried the bag down the wooden dock, heard their footsteps sounding hollow like people walking on a drum. The water slapped softly at the pilings. The night air was wet and cold and he gulped it, trying to calm his stomach. A ladder with slippery rungs dropped down to a wooden catwalk leading away at right angles to the door. At the end of the catwalk the seaplane sat bobbing sluggishly in the dark water. Kendrick carried a flashlight. Chandler felt like Captain Midnight and the plane looked as if it were of that vintage, about 1940. The paint which appeared once to have been white was dirty, blistered in cancerous patches like a scrubby garden gone to weeds, peeling and hanging like abbreviated confetti from the undersides of the fat wings.
“Don’t worry,” Kendrick said clairvoyantly, stepping ahead of them and fiddling with a tiny doorway. “It isn’t how it looks, it’s how it flies.” He swung the doll’s-house door open and pointed: “Up we go, miss.”
Chandler heard Polly swear, watched her climb up, then followed her, pushing the bag ahead of him. He stuck momentarily, had a vision of flying off into the unknown with his ass and most of the rest of him hanging out to dry. Then he felt Kendrick’s hand forcing him on into the cramped compartment, if that was what it was. Polly took his hand. He stood up with a cramp in his back and hit his head resoundingly on the top of the fuselage. If that was what it was, which he doubted. “Come on, man,” Kendrick growled, “make way for the bloody pilot.” Chandler settled into a tiny, inadequately upholstered seat with a metal, naked back. Kendrick joined them, kicked the bag out of his way, and pulled the door shut, slamming something metal into place with a solid click. With every step and shove and shrug the plane seemed to bob and shift in the water. Polly kept hold of his hand, squeezing hard.
“Why doesn’t he get it going?” she whispered.
“Miss,” Kendrick said edgily, “you read the news, I’ll fly the effing plane. Deal?”
“Right, right, deal,” she said.
Eventually the two engines were throbbing, rattling his teeth, then whirring smoothly and they were moving, half bouncing across the water. The instrument panel had lights of green, red, and white and the glow cast an unreal set of shadows across Kendrick’s craggy, stolid face. He could have been chiseled from stone, ageless. Then they were free of the water and out ahead of them the black night sky yawned …
Arden Sanger was stealing an evening away from Company business, engaging in an activity that, were it known, would quite probably lead to his early demise. He was writing his autobiography and, though he had only completed the section dealing with his football exploits, he was fully aware that the mere existence of such a document required the darkest secrecy. Consequently he followed no pattern in the time spent writing, altered his normal evening procedures as little as possible, and so far as his staff was concerned he was working in his locked study, just as he habitually did. But he was reliving the great Illinois game in his senior year, when Iowa City was his toy and a pair of pert little cheerleaders his post-game playmates. Jack Carson, indeed!
He had been sitting motionless at his desk for ten minutes, remembering the textures and scents of that remarkable evening, when the gentle buzzer on his desk hummed, unobtrusive but insistent, pulling him back across more than forty years.
“Yes, Dennis,” he said, having capped his fountain pen and depressed a lever on the plastic box.
“Sorry to bother you, boss, but I’ve got Liam on the scrambler and he’s very insistent on speaking directly to you …”
“Dennis, this is not remotely a priority matter. You realize that, don’t you? I am busy, you realize that, I trust?”
“Yes, sir. But Liam suggested that you and he were friends while I was nestled at my mammy’s breast … and he went on to imply that if I failed to put this call through to you he would personally rip my nuts off and hang them on my widow’s Christmas tree—”
“Nothing to worry about, then. You’re not married.”
“Shall I put him through, sir?”
“For your sake, Dennis, yes, you may put him through.” He stood up, picked up a pair of spring-loaded handgrips, and began squeezing them as he walked toward the French windows. Outside the spring night rested lightly on his patio, garden, pool, and tennis courts. Two men stood on the lawn, arms folded, looking up at the roof. The range of the television cameras was being given the monthly check.
“Arden, you there?” The voice came through the room speakers, having made its way into and out of the scramblers.
“Liam, this had better be good—” he began.
“You sound like you’re at the bottom of a well, which is funny, as you’ll soon understand—”
“Don’t worry how I sound, Liam, Just get on with it. I’m terribly busy. And, Liam, before I forget it, don’t frighten Herman that way.”
“Herman? Who the hell is Herman? Herman who?”
“Dennis Herman, the young fellow you just spoke to. What is it that you want, Liam?”
Liam McGonigle’s voice grew considerably less gruff as he groped along the slippery skeleton of his story, feeling for figurative chinks into which he could anchor the unlikely narrative, keep it from dropping away into unsalvageable absurdity.
“So, the first point is,” Liam broke the lancetip of his story, “we cannot actually find CRUSTACEAN … that is, Bert. He just snaffled, he’s gone.”
“I know his name, Liam. And what makes you think he’s actually gone …”
“Because there’s funny stuff going on. We’re at his place in Maine right now, I’m standing in his study … we’ve been here all afternoon and, well, some pretty weird shit went on here last night—”
“How weird?” Sanger waved to the two men who had strolled over to another section of the lawn and were standing, quietly chatting. They returned his gesture. “Liam, how weird?”
“Well, the window here in the study is broken, glass all over, no effort made to clean it up. The slug that broke the window came from outside—Andrew found it, dug it out of the spine of a volume of Montaigne’s essays. There are three sets of car tracks outside, the Rolls and a small car, a Dodge or a little Ford, I don’t really know. Whatever it was, it burned up last night … I mean, there was one hell of an explosion and fire in the driveway last night and it was a car, no doubt about that, the smell won’t go away.” Liam took a deep breath; Sanger waited. “There’s another set of tracks, too. Big tow truck, came and carried the wreckage away. Oh, the third set belongs to a red Pinto in the garage …”
“Hmmm.” Sanger felt sure there was more to the story but couldn’t imagine what it might be. Prosser was simply too old: he’d thought so for several years, but they shared a generation and he hadn’t wanted to simply cut the old man off. As usual, sentiment was an unlucky master. Still, this operation had hardly seemed significant at the start. Simple observation, information gathering, and then it had begun to go wrong. The college kid had been killed and from then on, from Sanger’s point of view, none of it had made any sense. “Go on,” he said smoothly, changing his tone, not wishing to inhibit poor old Liam who, while many years Prosser’s junior, was certainly not much of a fieldman, never had been, not even in his highly questionable prime. Liam belonged at a desk but Prosser had requested him, as well as Fennerty, and it had all seemed so harmless.
“Well,” Liam hesitated, “then we found one of the opposition, that is, the remaining member of the opposition team, the little one—”
“Ah, the one with the porkpie hat …”
“You really amaze me, remembering that,” Liam said admiringly. Sanger smiled at himself in a round, gilt-framed mirror over a bowl of yellowish flowers. “Well, we found him down the well … that’s what I meant when I said you sounded like you were—”
“Down a well? Whatever prompted you to look down a well?”
“Just looking around—blood speckled on the side. Anyway, we took a peek down and there he was, not so deep, and most of his head was missing … in fact, we found a good bit of his head on the rim, once we looked a little closer.”
“And what did you do about the body?”
“Left it. It’s nothing to us, one of Moscow’s boys, just a—”
“Moscow,” Sanger said sharply. “Why Moscow?”
“I don’t know, a guess … whoever he was working for, we can always find him if we need him.”
“You think Bert killed him?”
“Well, who else?”
“Chandler. I assume you haven’t found Chandler yet …”
“No, we haven’t. You think …”
“Why not? They were chasing Chandler, they want Chandler, maybe they were unlucky enough to catch him. Let’s say, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Chandler and Brennan,” Liam mused. “What a thought.”
“Am I right in saying that as of this moment you don’t know where anyone is?”
“You could say that …”
“And we still don’t know what everybody’s after? That’s right, isn’t it? Tell me, Liam, do you know anything about Stronghold? Does the word mean anything to you?”
“No, means nothing to me.”
“My God, this whole thing is the damnedest mess, no definition to it, sloppy … You know what it smacks of, Liam? Real life, that’s what. All fouled up, unpredictable, sloppy, no order to it. I hate things like this, to be frank. Hate them … and this thing has been sloppy from the start …”
“Look, Arden, we’re not that crazy about being out here … there’s nobody left to die but us, you see what I mean? We want to come in out of the cold. Heh, heh.”
“Don’t talk like that. You can fly back here whenever you want. This whole blasted thing was busywork, you know that. Come in out of the cold! Nonsense!”
“Well, what do you want us to do? We’re still hired hands. Andrew says to tell you it’s a matter of—what, Andrew? Ah, self-respect, Arden. A matter of self-respect …”
“I see. Well, Liam, if I tell you about Stronghold, you’ll have some exercise ahead of you. Are you two up to that?”
“We’re not senile, for Christ’s sake. You just tell us what to do …”
“All right. First thing, you’ll need flares, red flares …”
Liam groaned. Arden Sanger smiled to himself. He was going to straighten this out quick. Damn quick. The autobiography would just have to wait …
Bert Prosser was exhausted. He knew what he looked like, there was no need to look in the Rolls-Royce mirror: face gray, eyes bloodshot, mouth terribly dry, hands shaking if he removed them from the steering wheel. He only weighed a hundred and thirty pounds and he felt as if there was no flesh on the bones: he felt like something hung in a doorway on Halloween to scare children. The fear of his own death hung about him, like the odor of old meat. Soon, he was going to die soon: everything had gone wrong, it had all blown up in his face.
Killing the drunken man—his employee, for Christ’s sweet sake, a man who wisely or not had depended on him—had set him off. He’d thought, jerking awake in the middle of the night, hallucinating, that he was already dead, that he was locked in his coffin and water was seeping in at the bottom. When he woke, he’d still been able to see the man in the coffin with the water licking at him … but it was the man he’d killed and it wasn’t a coffin, it was the damp, stinking well …
Then there’d been the mess of getting rid of the burned-out car, bribing a man with a tow truck, throwing his own slight weight around, making up a story. God, it was so tiring and he couldn’t depend on the man to keep quiet. Too many loose ends. He had no idea where Andrew and Liam were, assumed they were befuddled, somewhere out there, and would finally work their way back to Boston and get in touch with him. Yes, it was sloppy, terribly sloppy, but he was only human. Very old, very human. He would never have let things dribble off like that, not in the old days. But in the old days he didn’t get the silly operations, the crazy ones: jokes, fieldmen called them. And this had been one of the worst jokes, no planning, utterly reactive, and made no sense either from Petrov’s side or Sanger’s. Petrov never should have gotten involved and Prosser wondered how he had, knowing that he would never know. And Sanger had responded, taking Bert’s own estimate of the situation.
Shit! He’d handled it all so badly. Indecisive. Old … He reached Cambridge a little after nine o’clock, put the Rolls in the garage, and went in by the outdoor entry which led to his private quarters. A light burned in the kitchen and he ignored it, sought no conversation with Ogden or Mrs. Grasse. He would call Sanger on Tuesday. For tonight, he would take some sleeping pills and blot out the worries. Chandler was safe, the woman was safe, he couldn’t do anything about Brennan, and he was eventually going to have to show up at his office. What he needed was time to restore himself, his vigor, however much remained.
It was rather more than forty-eight hours since Krasnovski had visited the dacha and Maxim Petrov had more or less forgotten the messy result of the joke on his opposite number. In fact, once Krasnovski had departed the country house, Petrov had contemplated just how the whole ugly business might be blamed on the younger man who needed a severe lesson in humility if anyone ever had. But the means eluded him. So he’d turned his attention to somewhat more meaningful problems in Helsinki and Zurich where two of his employees had muffed the ball rather badly. As a result of trying to scour the floor after those two while keeping his own fingers clean, he had worked so late that a midnight snowstorm had caught him, made sleeping in the Kremlin preferable to going home.
Consequently he was at his desk at an altogether ungodly hour the next morning, appropriate he supposed glumly for a godless state, when Krasnovski appeared bright-eyed, pink of cheek, full of helpful suggestions. Petrov hated helpful suggestions.
“Don’t speak,” Petrov said. The Sporting News, which Krasnovski had been told was the peculiarly obscure key to a code regarding the United States which only Petrov knew, was spread flat on the desk. The Yankees had beaten Cincinnati in Florida and Petrov thought they just might possibly meet in the World Series.
“I regret to say that I must,” Krasnovski said, smiling.
Petrov marked his perusal of the box score with a forefinger and stared balefully up at Krasnovski: “All right then. Speak.”
“You recall the situation in Boston that we discussed Sunday morning?”
“If I must.”
“Well, we seem to have stopped killing their people …”
“We weren’t killing their people. We were killing plain, ordinary, innocent citizens.”
“As you wish—”
“No, no, as it is. Or was. But, in any case, you say we’ve stopped?”
“Apparently.”
“That’s good news.”
“Not altogether, sir.”
“And why not, you irritating fellow?”
“Because now they have killed our people.”
“Oh.”
“Two of them. The freelances.”
“Who killed them?”
“A Harvard professor, who may die from the attempt, killed one. We’re not altogether sure who killed the other.”
“Source?”
“CANTAB.”
“He probably killed them himself,” Petrov said, laughing bleakly.
“Is that humorous, sir?” Krasnovski’s innocence deserved a grenade.
“It was a test, Krasnovski, and I regret to inform you that you failed. We will have no discourse whatsoever regarding my sense of humor.” He returned to The Sporting News, moving his finger. “By the way,” he said casually without looking up, “before our fellows were killed, did they happen to get what they were going after?”
“No. We are informed that the item is now out of our reach.”
“Out of our reach?” Though he no longer saw the box scores, he kept his head down. His focus had shifted: he was thinking and trying to keep from screaming aloud. “Out of our reach?”
“So said CANTAB.”
“From where did he contact us?”
“Via New York. From a roadside telephone in Maine.”
“Our people are dead and the point of our efforts is out of our reach.” He finally got up, went to watch the fresh snow cover, the pale light of morning, hardly light at all. It looked as if the world had been plunged back into winter. “What about the Chandler fellow? And wasn’t there something about a woman who went with him?”
“Source informs us that they are missing. He cannot find them.”
“Either he has rather badly lost his touch or … well, he may not be absolutely candid with us.” Petrov impatiently folded The Sporting News.
“Might we not just abort the whole thing?”
“No, Krasnovski, we might not. Now go on about your business while I attend to this. Go on …”
Krasnovski departed reluctantly, pouting, eyes downcast.
Out of reach.
Petrov finally allowed himself a smile. Out of reach. That was a phrase he’d heard before from CANTAB. It had a meaning and the meaning came down to a single word: Stronghold.
He leaned back, regarded the graying sky, the snow which whitened everything he saw from his window. The question in his mind was hardly anything new: who was CANTAB actually working for? Petrov had always assumed that the old man was a mercenary, an expert who was called upon only at times when no one else would do. Did he perform the same sort of function for Sanger? But, then, why not? So long as jobs of work did not conflict: and surely this business had had nothing to do with Sanger. It was only a scrap of paper, nothing Sanger could possibly have known about … No, it was a matter of bad luck. Bad luck that Sanger’s people had gotten into it … if they were in it, if they had killed the two thugs working in Boston. He squeezed his temples between his fingertips: his days were never really less than complex, but ill-defined, long-distance problems such as this one, which found details growing more ornate rather than less so, were the things he hated most. Unimportant by themselves, acquiring importance only because they were strangely executed.
Strangely executed, indeed.
He contemplated calling Sanger on the direct line and finding out what the hell was going on. But what if Sanger wasn’t in on any of it? Then his curiosity would become a wild-eyed demon, thrashing about, stirring up trouble where there had been only confusion.
He tried with considerable determination to think logically.
Did he care about the dead fieldmen?
No, not really. Bunglers, CANTAB had wanted to terminate them for the bungling alone.
Did he care about what games CANTAB might be playing?
No, not really. He was an old man who’d gotten into this business only because it seemed so simple and harmless. CANTAB would never be trusted with anything major … He would surely blow too easily and, anyway, his greed might long ago have made him a double agent. He just wasn’t important to Petrov.
What was important, then?
The document. And the people who had it. And CANTAB had said out of reach … Stronghold. It had to be Stronghold.
He called Krasnovski back into the office.
“Get me the Montreal section man, please.”
Not yet midnight.
Fennerty and McGonigle, awake and blinking with the aid of pills, a trunkful of red flares, headed northward on the best road. They would switch places every couple of hours to ensure the pace.
In the Atlantic a submarine floated like a dead fish, gleaming darkly beneath the moon. The officer in charge had spent an hour decoding the oddest communication he’d ever received: there was no alternative but to request a confirmation. So far as he could tell, the highly secret maneuvers which were to have been carried out against a small, uninhabited island used for practice by the Navy were now supposed to become operational—that is, real, for Christ’s sake. So far as he could tell, there was only one possible conclusion, inescapable, but it was a tough pill to swallow … Behind all the bullshit and razzmatazz, it looked like the United States had gone to war!
Against Canada …
In Montreal a fat man’s late evening dinner was ruined: his chief aide found him in a warm, fragrant, second-story Italian restaurant, tucking into pasta with dark sauce, a chilled bottle of Soave Bolla uncorked and waiting. Struggling into his overcoat, he hurried back to his office. He quickly had to validate an order, select the individuals to carry it out, and get word to them. It was, after all, no easy thing to carry out an offensive mission, mounted on the spur of the moment, within a sovereign nation so far from home. The instructions were long and detailed and required something akin to a miracle from the man in Montreal. He was however given considerable incentive: his career, and quite possibly his life, depended on his success. “Crazy,” he thought to himself as he began preparations, “it gets crazier all the time.” The telephone number in Halifax did not answer for nearly an hour … In the meantime he threw up twice.
Chandler was dreaming about something red and oozing, like oil sealed in a plexiglass cask, swirling and turning around and around itself. In his dream he was too close, couldn’t make it out, then seemed to be dollied slowly backward so that he recognized the slippery red things as hands with shredded stumps where fingers should have been. It was Brennan, mouth closed tightly, a silent scream trapped in his wide eyes, bulging … no, it was Prosser, an old man, hands chewed to the bone, blood smeared like warpaint across his old, sunken face. Or could it be Sir Redvers Redvers himself, not Prosser at all, but the old cad in the baggy tweeds, his man watching from a respectful distance as his master’s life dripped from hoses where his fingertips had been … Then Chandler felt the touch of cold steel on his own hands, heard the scream strangling inside his own mouth …
He jerked awake, his hand asleep in a cramped position draped around Polly’s shoulders, little needles stinging him. They were huddled in their few feet of space, jostling against naked, sharp-edged bits of the plane’s skeleton, muscles rigid from bracing themselves in the nasty passenger seats. Chandler blinked, eased his hand out from around Polly and shook the bad dream out of his mind. Christ. He took the measure of his situation: cold, draughty, hideously stiff, duffel bag clamped between his knees, a boggish taste in his mouth, generally dispirited, rather surprised he was still alive, harboring a headache being hammered into his skull by the twin engines roaring in the night.
Kendrick was bellowing something over his shoulder, his voice cracking against the unsettling racket of the engines. The plane bounced occasionally, without any warning, and when it did Chandler closed his eyes, forced a deep breath, and prayed he wouldn’t die, not this time. God, just save me this once and I’ll always be good …
“Fog,” Kendrick’s voice reached him. “I’m going to drop down … Hold on.”
Chandler heard the rain pelting the airplane, rattling what seemed like tin, and focused his eyes on the windshield in the odd glow of the instrument panel, saw the water beading up, streaking the glass as the plane slid on through the night. It was like batting your way through gray, wispy cotton: he could barely see the lights at the wingtips. With an involuntary gasp, he felt the plane sinking like a man on a funhouse slide, vapor filtering upwards, windswept past the little oval windows: each movement, whatever the direction, seemed to shake the frame of the aircraft, communicating an endless series of quivers and tremors which any sane man would assume would sooner or later result in the disintegration of the plane. Polly sagged against him, brushed at her face with a tight-gloved little fist. Chandler wondered what you’d do if you had to take a leak on this airplane …
He looked at his watch: they’d been flying for about two hours and he couldn’t imagine where they were: “Where the hell are we?” he bellowed hoarsely.
“Well, I sincerely hope we’re about a hundred and fifty feet above the water, but you never can be sure, you’ve got to let instinct take over on a night like this—”
“Oh,” Chandler moaned. “We could get killed—”
“Definitely. But, then, I’ve never been killed yet, either. Look at it that way.”
“Ah, where else are we?”
“We oughta be just about ten miles from the Nova Scotia coast, on the Atlantic side … Halifax off there to the left.” He waved an arm in the general direction.
“What if we run into another plane?”
“We’d crash, probably die … burn up or drown, something in that line. Why?”
“Natural curiosity.” Engines throbbing, head aching: why pursue the conversation? What difference did it make anyway? They’d live or die.
“Morbid, I’d call it.” Kendrick shifted his weight, the leather of his chair squeaking. He drummed on the instrument panel.
“Halifax, Nova Scotia,” he pondered. “Is that where we’re going?”
“Can’t hear you when the engines are running,” he said, laughing abruptly like bursts from an automatic weapon.
“Are we going to goddamn Halifax or not?”
“Oh no, no,” with much hilarity, or what passed for it in Kendrick’s circle, as if no thought so amusing had cropped up in years. “No, not Halifax.”
“Come on, Kendrick, you’ve got us at your stupid mercy. Be a sport, where the hell are we going?”
“Another hour or so, up around the top of the island, Cape Breton, up thataway. Can’t fly overland, though. No flight plan … We got to just mind our own business, stay low, just get where we’re going, make the drop and get out …”
“The drop? What the fuck are you talking about, the drop? You’re not dropping anything you’ve got on board this crate, you can be damned sure about that, my good man.”
“Don’t break out in a sweat, Professor! It’s a figurative expression meaning that we’ll land, I’ll see to your departure, and I’ll then leave.”
“You’re going to leave us?”
“Calm down, man. Mr. Prosser’s taken care of everything.”
The plane dropped another seventy-five feet before Chandler could see at all and then only odd pinpoints of light flickered against the mound of the land mass. Cape Breton. He’d never been there, knew nothing about the place other than the warning of a lady traveler he knew: “It’s not worth anything until mid-June when it becomes quite wonderful if you like rusticity.” Well, it was a hell of a long way from mid-June, and he shivered at the temperature in the plane. Wind shrieked outside in the darkness like the hounds of hell scraping at them, trying to rip their fragile craft from the sky.
Polly woke finally, spoke thickly: “Are we dead yet?”
“A little longer. We’re going to crash-dive in the raging surf where Smilin’ Jack here plans to abandon us—everything’s fine.”
She yawned, pulled herself upright: “I want a glass of water.”
“No.”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Sorry.”
“Are we there yet?”
“Shut up, little girl.”
“Jesus! Is that the water down there?”
“Mmm.”
“It’s right there.”
Kendrick let out another banshee cry: “Get those belts fastened! Won’t be long now.” He had turned on hooded yellow lamps which illuminated the fog still blowing across their path, and below them the frieze of waves strained to meet the pontoons and undercarriage, the curling water looked solid, like tortured cement ready to rip the plane to pieces at first touch. The water was a solid wall, close enough for scraping …
Down, they kept dropping down, his stomach lifting, the gap between plane and water tightening, thinning, fog whisking past the windows, ahead of them only water and absolute blackness where he supposed Cape Breton waited. How the hell did Kendrick know where he was? The question terrified him … Polly was gripping his arm, her eyes peeled wide and fixed on the oval window beside her: he saw her face in profile as he leaned forward, and put his mouth next to her ear, whispered something he couldn’t hear himself, and kissed her soft, peach-fuzz cheek …
The seaplane smacked into the water with a shudder and a screech of metal fatigue, was hurled upwards and sideways, seemed to float dangerously away then smashed back against the flat, rockhard water, skidded, skipped again like a child’s skimming stone, then it keeled forward precariously—or so it damn well seemed to Chandler—before settling back against the waves, in a kind of trough of its own making, slowing down, the metal continuing to groan and howl but quieting down as it rushed onward.
When the plane was at last dead in the water, Kendrick turned around and grinned weakly, face white in the ghastly instrument glow. “Little roughness tonight,” he said apologetically. “But the important thing is, we’re here, eh? Safe and sound, eh?”
“Do put a sock in it, will you?” Polly croaked, her mouth dry.
“Well, I don’t blame you, miss,” he said, his voice kindly, as he extricated himself from the confines of the pilot’s bucket, levering himself up and out, crouching where they were. “Spot of rain out there, I’m afraid.”
Kendrick dragged a package out from the rear recesses of the plane’s passenger area, hugged it to him and backed wobbling past them, unlocked the hatch and opened it and pushed it all the way back against the fuselage where it clicked into a bracket. Rain blew in fine, sniping, gusting sprays through the opening, spattering their faces. Kendrick, holding tight to the packet, squeezed through the narrow doorway and climbed down the ladder, swearing at the rain and his burden until he was out of sight. Chandler hunched down and went on hands and knees to the opening. Rain lashed at him: he covered his eyes, peering down. Suddenly, with a swoosh of air, the contents of the package began to inflate, becoming a rubberized raft: when it was filled, a great awkward balloon larger than he was, Kendrick struggled with a flap which he hooked around the strut. Still swearing, he fitted the telescoping handles of the oars together, then made them fast with straps which held them secure inside the shell of the craft.
Moving slowly he began the climb back up. Chandler gave him a hand, hoisted him into the cabin.
“Miserable bloody raft,” he sighed, smiling happily at his exertions: a man in his element, Chandler reflected, contrasting the pilot with himself. He sat down on a toolbox and wiped his face with an oily rag close at hand. “Now to be specific, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you just exactly where we are and what’s going to happen. We’ve just come in across the Cabot Straits toward the northern shore of Cape Breton; off to our right, up around the corner of the Cabot Trail is Pleasant Bay, to the left is Aspy Bay—we’re head on toward Cape North … but I’ve put you down at an island, not Cape Breton itself. Got it?
“All right, then. Sorry about this rain but once you’re in the raft you’ll see we’re only about forty yards from the beach. It’s sandy all along this little inlet, rocks curving out to the sides but you won’t get involved with them, not if you do as you’re told. Just head straight on in, use your light …” He stopped and pulled a large, square, red, rubber-cased, highpowered flashlight from beneath him, patted it affectionately, like a pet. “This little baby will see you through, you’ll be fine … there’s a little weather, a little movement in the backwater, so it’ll take you a few minutes to get there, but you’ll be all right, just try to keep from falling out of the raft because getting back in could be a problem. Cold and dark in the sea on a night like this,” he concluded, sounding as if he were quoting.
Kendrick pulled a plastic flask from his coat pocket and Polly took the first nip of brandy. Chandler followed, Kendrick gurgling happily as if it were water. “Now, then, once you reach the beach, you’ll have to get to the house as soon as you can, if you want to avoid pneumonia—it’s up on top of the cliffs, but there’s a good path, about a hundred yards down the beach, to the left, cut out through the bracken and rock, you’ll find it, just follow it up the hill—once you’re on top, you’ll see it, big monstrous place called Stronghold, faces out to sea with cliffs in the same direction, just like this side … the place is empty.” He took something out of his pocket, pressed it into Chandler’s hand: “Here’s the key. Put it in your pocket and enjoy your stay …”
“Stronghold,” Polly said.
“Foggy, wet place, very private, quite a nice spot, actually, if you like seabirds and storms and being alone …”
Chandler backed into the hatchway on his hands and knees, felt with his foot for the first rung of the ladder, then descended with considerable trepidation, making sure each foot was anchored securely before lowering the next. Everything was rapidly getting very wet: his face, glasses, hair; it was like standing in a flood. He clutched the large flashlight, clung to the handguard, slowly groping downward, refusing to look into the swirling black water. The flashlight was on and the light created a halo of spray, beyond which there was nothing but darkness, the sound of the water lapping against the pontoons. “Don’t stop, man,” Kendrick shouted from above. “Fuck yourself,” Chandler called back, afraid to look up, afraid he might lose his concentration and slip on the oily wet metal.
At the bottom he hung from a strut and clambered into the treacherously bobbing, raking lifeboat. Kendrick lowered Polly, holding her hand as she went over the side; Chandler stretched, reached back up for her as she came closer, felt her hand grab his firmly. Then she was in the boat beside him, wiping rain from her face. Lithely, Kendrick came down carrying the duffel bag: “Stow this damn thing,” he said, heaving it to Chandler. “Now get the light pointed in the right direction … inland, don’t you see, there we go.”
“I still can’t see a damned thing,” Chandler cried over the wind. The waves seemed heavier, higher with each sweeping crash.
“You keep it pointed that way, lad, and you soon will see something. Just keep paddling that way,” he pointed like the ancient mariner gone to sea again, soaked, windblown. “I’ll wait until you’re well under way, closing on the beach, then I’m gone. Just keep paddling.”
“Can you take off in this weather?”
“Don’t worry about me, sport, I’ll be in my own bed yet this night.”
“What do we do when we get to the house?”
Kendrick laughed, his head shaking, rain flying: “Wait. You’re stuck, the chief’ll be in touch with you … Now get going.” He turned away and fought against the rain and wind to climb back up into the plane. Before he pulled the hatch after him, he turned, gave them the thumb’s-up signal. Then the door slammed shut and he was gone.