The Talbot Odyssey (24 page)

REVELATIONS

At 8:30 A.M., Katherine Kimberly entered the town house on 36th Street with her own key. She glanced into the sitting room and saw Tom Grenville sprawled on the couch, his dinner jacket and shoes lying on the floor.

She went into the small back kitchen and put on a pot of coffee.

Tony Abrams, dressed in his dark business suit, came through the rear door that led out to the courtyard. He watched her, her back to him, pouring cream into a small pitcher. She was dressed in a white sweat shirt, khaki trousers, and jogging shoes. Like most business associates one sees on a weekend for the first time, Katherine looked, he thought, not like Katherine. He said, “Good morning.”

She turned and smiled at him. “You
are
awake. You look awful. Rough night?”

He looked into her eyes for any sign that she was surprised or disappointed he was still alive. He said, “I’ve had worse.” He found two coffee mugs in a cupboard. “I was concerned about you.”

She opened her handbag and extracted an automatic pistol.

Abrams looked at the piece, a Browning .45. He had expected something a bit smaller, but he could tell by the way she gripped the pistol that she was comfortable with it. He said, “You heard about Brompton Hall of course?”

She returned the automatic to her bag. “Yes. The dead have been identified. Lady Eleanor Wingate, her nephew Charles Brook, and Mr. O’Brien’s friend Ronald Hollings. Autopsies are being performed.”

Abrams poured two cups of coffee. He asked, “Were you alone last night?”

“That’s a leading question.”

Abrams stared at her, then said, “Am I on the case or not?”

She replied coolly, “I went back to my apartment on Carmine Street. I was alone. You were in the car when—”

“You may have been discreet about it. Why didn’t you go back to the Lombardy?”

She seemed annoyed. “I didn’t feel like staying there.”

“Did Thorpe suggest you go home?”

She nodded.

Abrams sipped on his coffee. “Do you have your own room there?”

“Yes.”

“And your street clothes and things were there. Then doesn’t it seem odd that he should send you home, all the way down to Carmine Street? Didn’t he know you had an appointment with me in midtown this morning?”

“My, you
are
a cop.” She took some coffee. “No, it didn’t seem odd. The apartment at the Lombardy, if you must know, is what’s odd. It’s a CIA safe house, or substation or something. One doesn’t question the accommodations or lack of them.”

Abrams nodded, then put down his cup. “How’s your stomach this morning?”

“My stomach . . . ? Fine. . . .”

Abrams walked to the back door and motioned her to follow.

She went with him into the courtyard. Below the rear dining room window was a white wrought-iron bench with two legs broken off. On the bench was sprawled, faceup, a black-clad body. The body’s back was arched over the bench to such a degree that it was obviously broken, and the head was touching the paving stones.

Katherine stared at the figure.

Abrams said, “A burglar, by the looks of the outfit.”

Katherine glanced up at the top of the four-story town house, but said nothing.

Abrams bent over the body and pulled back the ski mask. The deathly white skin contrasted against the dark black stubble on the face and the dried red blood around the mouth. The face was that of a man in his mid-thirties, and the features could be described as vaguely Slavic. Abrams peered into the open, blood-caked mouth, then pulled off the mask, revealing a thick growth of swept-back black hair. “Along with the haircut, and what I can see of the dental work, I’d make an educated guess that the man is foreign. You don’t recognize him, do you?”

Katherine came closer and stared into the dead man’s face. “No. . . .” She turned quickly and walked back to the kitchen.

Abrams followed. They sipped on their coffee in silence, then Katherine spoke. “What were you doing on the roof?”

“I never said I was on the roof.” He picked up the telephone and dialed Captain Spinelli at home. “Abrams here.”

Spinelli’s voice sounded groggy. “I don’t have anything new on Carbury.”

“Come to 184 East Thirty-sixth Street. Corpse in the backyard.”

“Oh, Christ, Abrams, what the fuck is going on with you?”

“I’ll call you later.”

“Where are you?”

“At said address.”

“Is this related to Carbury?”

“Well, this house belongs to, or is used by, O’Brien et al, and some of those folks are sleeping here. What do you think, Sherlock?”

“I think I want to grill your ass. Stay there.”

“I’ll speak to you.” He hung up.

Abrams and Katherine left the town house. The day was clear and mild, and smelled of the night’s rain. Abrams looked at her in the full sunlight. She had probably gotten less than five hours’ sleep, but showed no signs of it.

Katherine sensed he was studying her in some new way. She said, “Why don’t we walk?”

Neither spoke until they reached Lexington Avenue, where they waited for a light. She said, “What do you suppose that man was after?”

“The silverware.”

They crossed the avenue and turned north. Traffic was light and the city had that Saturday-morning look of sleeping off a collective hangover. They turned west into 42nd Street. Katherine said. “You’ll like Arnold. He’s eccentric and devious.”

“What do you expect to find there?”

“You never expect to find anything in the archives. Yet, everything is there. What’s missing is as important as what’s on file. It’s a matter of deduction, intuition, and luck. Are you good with archives?”

“No one has ever asked me that. I’ll think about it.”

They walked silently through the Grand Central Station area, which Abrams thought of as some sort of prewar time warp, barely changed since he was a youth—stately banks, older hotels, shoeshine stands, news vendors, tobacconists, Brooks Brothers, the Yale Club. Very masculine. Wasp Central he called it; trains from Connecticut and Westchester disgorging tons of preppies and hale-fellows-well-met.
Rus in urbe.
Scarsdale and Westport in midtown. You almost expected to see Holden Caulfield eating a chicken salad on white at the Oyster Bar. Abrams said, “I don’t trust Peter Thorpe.”

Katherine didn’t respond immediately, but when she spoke, there was no reproach in her voice. “Of course you don’t. Who does? He’s an intelligence officer. He lies, cheats, and steals. But we don’t speak of trust in this business. We speak of loyalty. Peter is loyal.”

“To whom?”

“To his country.” She looked at him. “Any suggestion to the contrary would be a very serious matter.”

Abrams replied, “It would be imprudent of me to make such a suggestion.” He changed the subject. “By the way, thanks for suggesting I sleep at the town house. That was convenient.”

“I thought it might be. Feel free to use it any time.”

They walked to Fifth Avenue and crossed to the north corner beside the Public Library. Abrams noticed black markings on the sidewalk: an arrow pointing south at a stenciled silhouette of the Empire State Building. Beside the arrow were the words GROUND ZERO, 0.4 MILES. Katherine noticed it and said, “What drivel.”

He’d seen these all over the city, with arrows pointing toward the Empire State Building and the distance given. “People are afraid,” said Abrams.

“There’s nothing to fear,” said Katherine, “except fear itself.”

“Oh, I think a ten-megaton missile falling on Thirty-fourth Street would give me the jitters.”

“This nuclear hysteria feeds on itself.”

“Mr. O’Brien is very worried about something,” he said.

“Not nuclear missiles.”

“What then? Fluoride in the water?”

“Something . . . not biological or chemical warfare . . . something more lethal . . . I can’t imagine what.”

“Neither can I.”

They continued up Fifth Avenue toward Rockefeller Center. He said, “What happens to Talbot if you find him?”

“What do you think?”

“And if Talbot turns out to be Patrick O’Brien, for instance?”

She answered without hesitation, “It wouldn’t matter if it turned out to be my best friend. He dies. She dies. They die.”

Abrams looked at her. He said, “Back in the thirties, E. M. Forster wrote, ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’”

“Idiotic.”

“But interesting. The whole concept of treason is interesting. Read the Declaration of Independence. It was the most treasonous document of its time. King George had every legal right to hang all fifty-six traitors who signed that document.”

She stopped walking at the entrance to the Rockefeller Center promenade. “All right. What’s the point? That we have no legal right to dispose of Talbot?”

“That’s your problem. A moral problem. My point is a practical one. Talbot does not have corruption in his heart, or guilt in his eyes, as James Allerton suggested. He does not lose his soul when the full moon is upon him, or grow hair, or stink of blood. He wears a halo and smells of roses.”

“But
you
said you could see guilt in a man’s eyes—”

“But my observation was to make a contrary point. Criminals look guilty. Talbot is not a criminal, he is a patriot. Ask him.”

“I see. . . .”

“My parents . . . yes, they were traitors . . . but they were people who fed the poor when they were able, took in indigent friends and relatives, laughed, made love, and made potato pancakes. Talbot is a blue-blooded version of that. He could very well be O’Brien, Allerton, George Van Dorn, or a dozen others I met last night. His progeny could be . . . anyone.”

She nodded. “Okay . . . thanks for bringing some cold, hard objectivity into this.”

“That’s what I was hired for.” He turned into the promenade and walked toward the RCA Building. She walked beside him. Abrams said, “I don’t trust you either.”

She forced a smile. “Do you mean professionally or personally?”

“Both.”

“How about Nick?”

“Academic background. Shaky from a security point of view. Never trust an egghead. Also, he’s stayed too long on a job he doesn’t seem to like. Very suspicious.”

“The Grenvilles? Claudia?”

“Joan Grenville’s energies are directed toward betraying Tom Grenville. Tom Grenville gives the outward impression that his idea of oral sex is talking to E. F. Hutton. But underneath, there’s a quite different sexual persona, and this may be indicative of other types of impersonation. As for Claudia, never trust a foreigner.”

They walked around the skating rink. Katherine stopped in front of the RCA Building. “Do you think I had something to do with that man last night?”

“The thought occurred to me.”

“But I’ve been pushing for you to join us.”

“True. But if I were under suspicion, I too would push for an outside man. Diverts suspicion. But I’d be certain he met his end if he seemed too sharp.”

“You’re not that sharp.” She smiled.

Abrams held the door open for her and they entered the lobby of the RCA Building.

Abrams said, “But for the sake of argument, if someone
did
try to murder me, then that would prove I was real sharp, wouldn’t it?”

She suppressed a laugh. “Maybe. By the way,
murder, as
you know, is a legal word connoting wrongdoing. If someone tried to
kill
you, they may be, as you suggested, just patriots doing their duty to the people.”

He smiled tightly and thought,
Bitch.

The main concourse level of the RCA Building was pristine Art Deco, thought Abrams, another prewar time warp but strangely modern after half a century, like a set in a Flash Gordon movie.

The lower concourse had a coffee shop where Abrams sometimes sat and watched the skaters in the sunken rink through a plate glass window. The upper mezzanine held shops, as did the main concourse. Abrams had once noticed a shop that specialized in military artifacts and Americana: pictures, statues, plaques, and such. There were bronze busts of General Donovan for sale, whose principal customers he thought, must be young attorneys at Donovan Leisure, O’Brien, Kimberly, or one of the dozen or so other firms with OSS connections. Presumably these upward-bound lawyers placed the bust in a small office shrine tucked between file cabinets. Abrams smiled at the thought of a lunch-hour group of young lawyers genuflecting in front of the bust.

Katherine said, “Is that a smile I see? Did you just remember something unpleasant? Perhaps a close friend is sick?”

Abrams looked at her and let his smile widen. “God knows why, but I like you.”

“Makes my day.” She walked to the elevator and stopped at a small desk. She wrote their names and destination in the weekend book. They rode up and got off on the forty-fourth floor, which was wholly occupied by O’Brien’s firm. A private guard in the corridor nodded to her in recognition and indicated yet another sign-in book on a rostrum. Abrams said, “I’m glad I didn’t stop in to use the bathroom.”

Katherine seemed not to hear as she studied the book. A few attorneys had come in, she noted, and Arnold had signed in at 8:00 A.M.

She and Abrams walked down the long, turning corridor and stopped in front of the steel door marked DEAD FILES. She knocked.

Abrams said, “Will Arnold let me in?”

She smiled. “I’ll use my charm.” She knocked again. From behind the door they heard the shrill whistle of a teakettle, a furiously boiling teakettle that should be taken off the burner.

Abrams reached out and turned the knob. The door opened with its familiar unoiled creak. Abrams peered inside.