The Art of the Devil (19 page)

‘I've never had one dirty,' Glashow answered.

‘Well, your time has come. My treat.'

Shadows flickered; then Hart saw himself sitting beside Glashow at the bar, checking his watch. ‘Got to get back to my hotel before the witching hour,' he said, ‘or I'll turn into a pumpkin. It's just down the street …'

Arthur Glashow checked his own watch. ‘Gee, it's about my time, too.'

They settled the bill and left the lounge together, stepping out into a balmy Indian summer night. After casting a cautious glance over his shoulder, Hart reached for the man. Of course, Hart was no queer. He did what he did in that alley only for the cause. Earlier in life, he had done it when necessary only for a roof above his head on a rainy night. And back in the hotel, he continued doing it only for the sake of the camera hidden behind the one-way mirror …

You know what they say about a boy who can't whistle, Daddy!

And two weeks later, when he put a single bullet into Glashow's hairline just below the right ear, dismembered the corpse, and scattered it between three bodies of water, he did it only for the senator. By then he had grown somewhat fond of Glashow, who had faithfully followed instructions, and had deserved better than a shot in the back of the head. But the senator came first. The senator always came first.

Through slatted blinds, headlights continued to shift, advancing and receding. Again, the cracks in the ceiling dissolved, swirling to form a new picture … but this time, Hart's attention remained on the window, behind which lights moved. An instinct was clamoring, from the deep place where superstitions take root. Nothing seemed to have changed …

… but something was wrong.

He levered himself off the mattress in darkness, following an intuition which hardened in the space of a heartbeat to a certainty.

They're here
.

He got a crutch beneath himself, crossed the room, and pulled down one slat of the blinds. There – by the hedges on the far side of the parking lot, beside his Buick, beneath a few plump flakes of falling snow: a police cruiser.

And inside the lighted motor court office: a blue-suited officer, talking with the desk clerk.

As Hart watched, the clerk pointed toward his room.

GETTYSBURG

M
ost of the revelers seemed to have gotten a head start on the celebrating; well-oiled voices and laughter drowned out the music from the phonograph.

Weaving back and forth through the throng, hauling armfuls of lambswool and Harris Tweed, Elisabeth saw much giggling, flirting, and slapping of rumps. Scotch flowed freely, along with wine and beer and Martinis and highballs. From the kitchen doorway Miss Dunbarton watched over the proceedings ceremoniously, skirt ballooning out above an absurd crinoline.

Just before seven, someone switched on a floodlight mounted outside the north-facing window, catching the year's first snowfall in an unexpected frieze. The party-goers paused, overcome with the timing. For a few seconds Bing Crosby's was the only voice in the parlor, singing, appropriately enough, ‘White Christmas'.

Then girls shrieked, men laughed, and a cheer was raised, along with countless glasses.

When their shift ended, Josette led Elisabeth by one elbow to the powder room.

As she touched up her make-up, the younger girl babbled on nervously about the men at the party – Bill Brennan was looking particularly handsome tonight – and the fact that James had not yet made his arrival. Probably, he was waiting, she said, to make a dramatic entrance. Everything was a calculation with him. That was the problem with attractive men; they thought of nobody except themselves. Next time she fell in love, she would find someone intelligent but ordinary – why not? What did she care for looks, really? At one point in her life, sure, but you only had to burn yourself so many times before you learned not to reach for a hot stove. What she needed was a good
average
man, a Jim Anderson type, a hard worker and steady provider, not some kind of film star gigolo. And speaking of hard work, had Elisabeth noticed what a lousy job Jane Carlson had done cleaning the parlor that afternoon? A good half-inch of dust remained everywhere. The Hummel figurines looked as if they stood in a snowdrift. Jane was a nice enough girl, but you could only cut corners for so long before it came back to haunt you … but here she went, blabbing again: her very worst trait.

Adding a final unnecessary flourish of mascara, Josette batted her eyelashes in the mirror. ‘Now,' she said bravely, ‘let's join the party.'

Together they left the powder room. The bash was on an upward swing, with groups of girls waiting to be approached for a dance, and groups of farmhands and agents drinking, trying to gain courage to approach them. In the center of the parlor, an area near the Christmas tree served as a dance floor for those bold or drunk enough to make use of it.

Smiling with determination, Josette headed straight for the bar, where she downed one scotch in a gulp and then took another to mingle. Elisabeth stuck close, holding an Old-Fashioned she didn't plan on touching. As long as she stayed near Josette, she could avoid falling into any conversations of her own. Getting through the evening with the least possible interaction was her goal. As soon as escape seemed feasible, she would claim a headache and slip off to bed.

They floated through the crowd, picking up threads of conversation. ‘You'd think some of the glamour of having him around might rub off,' one girl told another, ‘but you'd be wrong; the old battleaxe makes sure of that.' Two farmhands engaged in a lively, not to say contentious, debate, with one giving credit for the Bums' recent victory to Johnny Podres for pitching his game seven shutout, and another loudly yielding that honor to left-fielder Sandy Amoros, for running down Yogi Berra's long fly ball and thus enabling Pee Wee Reese to catch Gil McDougald at first. A clutch of Secret Service agents, looking ill-at-ease in checkered sports coats, watched the snowfall through a window. ‘Question is,' said one sagely, ‘will it stick? If it warms up just five degrees, you won't find anything on the ground by tomorrow afternoon.'

Josette sidled up behind Bill Brennan, who was examining Jane Carlson's stocking. ‘Well, you just can't see the seam at all,' he asked, ‘can you? Here, lift that ankle up a little bit higher and let me take a closer look …'

Becoming aware of a presence behind him, he turned. ‘Why, if it isn't Sister Rosetta Tharpe. My, but you clean up nice.'

Josette giggled. ‘You ain't so bad yourself, Bill.'

He slung an arm over her shoulder. ‘How's tricks, dollface?'

‘Now that my shift's over,' she said, ‘just fine. Bill, I want you to meet my friend Elisabeth. Libby, Bill Brennan.'

Brennan drank in Elisabeth appreciatively. ‘Hubba, hubba. Are your legs tired, honey?'

She blinked. ‘Sorry?'

‘Because they will be. You're going to be running through my dreams tonight.'

Josette rolled her eyes. ‘Bill's a charmer – in his own mind.'

‘I have my days,' he admitted.

As Josette chatted with the man about
Howdy Doody
and Buffalo Bob, Elisabeth felt a knot of tension loosen in her gut. If this buffoon was their head of security, she thought, she had given them altogether too much credit.

THE TREASURY BUILDING

Dry-swallowing a pill, Isherwood spent a pensive moment examining the vial in his hand.

The doctors had prescribed codeine – so why couldn't he take a drink instead? As soon as the idea occurred, it began to seem terribly reasonable. He'd already proved he could function without booze. The whiskey would be purely medicinal. One good slug would clear his head; he pictured clouds parting, clean sunlight shining through. Even the accouterments of the act – the burst of cork leaving bottle, the woody smoky flavor hitting his nose before his tongue – would do him a world of good.

Something inside him gave an ugly clench.
It is the greatest art of the devil
, Baudelaire had said,
to convince us that he does not exist.

Slipping the vial back into his pocket, he looked up and saw that from behind the desk the Chief was watching him intently. When the phone rang, Spooner reached for it without taking his gaze from Isherwood's face.

‘When?' asked the Chief. ‘And,' he prodded. ‘And.' He took out his pack of Winstons, shot one onto the floor, crooked the phone between chin and shoulder to retrieve it. ‘How many? … Right. You know where to find me.'

He hung up, tightly smiled. ‘Hart,' he said, and crossed his fingers.

GETTYSBURG

Philip Zane listened to a series of clicks as the operator patched through the call, a weird underwater peeping, and then the ringing of a faraway telephone. Three rings, four – a woman answered sleepily. ‘Hello?'

‘Person-to-person from Mister Zane,' interrupted the operator, ‘for Missus Zane.'

A microscopic pause. ‘This is she.'

‘Your party, sir,' said the operator, and rang off.

‘Honey,' said Zane eagerly.

As his wife catalogued her latest complaints – aching back, bloating and blotching, torrential sweating, inadequate bladder – he made sympathetic noises, keeping one eye on the Eisenhower house through the window of the Secret Service office.
Upon finishing, she segued without missing a beat into a touchy subject: ‘I had lunch with my father yesterday. He says Melvin's on his way back to California come the new year; his mother's ailing.'

Zane felt his stomach bottom out, as it did every time this subject came up. ‘I'm sorry to hear that,' he said carefully.

‘About his mother, or about the spot opening up?'

Both.
‘What do you think? The mother.'

‘I think you meant both.'

No fooling Trudy, of course. But it didn't take Einstein to figure out that Zane, having achieved the pinnacle of the American Dream, would not eagerly abandon the position to work as a manager in his father-in-law's hardware store.

‘We talked about this,' Trudy was saying.

‘We did,' he conceded.

‘You said you'd think about it.'

That was before he had gotten out from behind the desk. ‘I'm thinking.'

‘Honey, we can't bring a baby into this world without a father. At least in the store nobody's asking you to step in front of a—'

‘
Zeeskyte,
I've got to run. Sorry. Love you.'

He hustled back toward Farm Two beneath the light snowfall, dodging baleful looks sent his way by the skeleton crew on duty watching the President – anyone who could slip away to join the party had done so.

Entering the herdsman's home through the kitchen door, he avoided the thick of the festivities – men and women swaying in clinches as Nat King Cole murmured ‘A Blossom Fell' – and reached the staircase. Settling back down in his chair by the bedroom window, he risked lighting a cigarette: against the rules, but the house matron would have her hands full downstairs.

He should have known that Trudy would press the issue. But he had hoped for a few more pleasant moments of conversation before they got there.

His wife had grown up in Westchester, he reminded himself, playing tennis and croquet, attending cotillions and mixers, serving Martinis to her father each night when he came home from work. Her parents had no memories of the old country, no pogroms, rapes, or murders in their past, no recollections of hiding in cellars to express political or religious opinions. America would never mean to Trudy – or to their unborn child – what it meant to Philip Zane. And that was good, of course. He would not take away her sense of security for anything. Still, he sometimes wished that she understood more what America, and so this job, meant to
him
.

He sighed. The sound of tipsy merrymaking drifted up from downstairs. Companionship, a drink, a festive atmosphere to balance out the solitude … the party was what had made him sneak away to call Trudy in the first place. But, of course, this was the job for which he'd signed up. This was the job he wouldn't trade for the world.

Angling his chair slightly in the direction of Farm One, he cracked open the window, exhaled smoke into a cold swirl of snow flurries, and settled in.
Watch and wait.

CENTREVILLE

Hurrying away from the motor court, leaning against the one crutch he'd had time to grab – the only thing, except for coat and wallet, he'd saved from the room – Richard Hart felt a sweet, sugary fear coursing through his body, a fear glutinous in its purity.

Neon signs lining the highway tinted the falling snow aquamarine, coral pink, emerald, and tangerine. Despite the proximity of a major thoroughfare, the night possessed the preternatural stillness of the moment before an automobile accident. Reaching the edge of the road, Hart paused to look back behind himself. Two more patrol cars had pulled into the parking lot. Beneath fat, tumbling flakes of snow, four officers were massing outside the room he had just clumsily vacated via the bathroom window. Two others approached the parked Buick, guns drawn. The desk clerk stood outside the motor court's office, beetling his brow and wringing his hands.

A car came whizzing down the highway. Licking bloody lips, Hart propped himself against the single crutch and stuck out a thumb.

The car whickered past.

He set the crutch and moved off, humping down the road's gravel shoulder. His pulse beat in the hollow of his throat. Cold wind sliced surgically through his coat, clothes, and skin. Despite the chill, clammy sweat-spiders crawled over his chest and back. The crutch slipped against ice, and he nearly fell. Cursing, he regained his balance. His broken leg beneath the cast sent a pulse of distress. A sense of unreality descended. These were the ingredients, he thought, of a particularly lurid nightmare.