The Ghost (17 page)

I reached across and handed them to Emmett, who performed his affected little piece of stage business again, pushing up his glasses so that he could study the pictures with his naked eyes. I can see him now: sleek and pink and imperturbable. His expression didn’t flicker, which struck me as peculiar, because mine certainly would have done, in similar circumstances.

“Oh my,” he said. “Is that what I think it is? Let’s hope he didn’t inhale.”

“But that is you standing behind him, isn’t it?”

“I do believe it is. And I do believe I’m on the point of issuing a stern warning to him on the perils of drug abuse. Can’t you just sense it forming on my lips?” He gave the pictures back to me and pulled his spectacles back down onto his nose. Tilting farther back in his chair, he scrutinized me. “Does Mr. Lang really want these published in his memoirs? If so, I would prefer it if I weren’t identified. My children would be mortified. They’re so much more puritanical than we were.”

“Can you tell me the names of any of the others in the picture? The girls, perhaps?”

“I’m sorry. That summer is just a blur, a long and happy blur. The world may have been going to pieces around us, but we were making merry.”

His words reminded me of something that Ruth had said, about all the things that were going on at the time the picture was taken.

“You must have been lucky,” I said, “given you were at Yale in the late sixties, to avoid being drafted to Vietnam.”

“You know the old saying: ‘if you had the dough, you didn’t have to go.’ I got a student deferment. Now,” he said, twirling in his chair and lifting his feet off the desk. He was suddenly much more businesslike. He picked up a pen and opened a notebook. “You were going to tell me where you got those pictures.”

“Does the name Michael McAra mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?” He answered just a touch too quickly, I thought.

“McAra was my predecessor on the Lang memoirs,” I said. “He was the one who ordered the pictures from England. He drove up here to see you nearly three weeks ago and died a few hours afterward.”

“Drove up to see
me
?” Emmett shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Where was he driving from?”

“Martha’s Vineyard.”

“Martha’s Vineyard! My dear fellow,
nobody
is on Martha’s Vineyard at this time of year.”

He was teasing me again: anyone who had watched the news the previous day would have known where Lang had been staying.

I said, “The vehicle McAra was driving had your address programmed into its navigation system.”

“Well, I can’t think why that should be the case.” Emmett stroked his chin and seemed to weigh the matter carefully. “No, I really can’t. And even if it’s true, it certainly doesn’t prove he actually made the journey. How did he die?”

“He drowned.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it. I’ve never believed the myth that death by drowning is painless, have you? I’m sure it must be agonizing.”

“The police never said anything to you about this?”

“No. I’ve had no contact with the police whatsoever.”

“Were you here that weekend? This would have been January the eleventh and twelfth.”

Emmett sighed. “A less equable man than I would start to find your questions impertinent.” He came out from behind his desk and went over to the door. “Nancy!” he called. “Our visitor wishes to know where we were on the weekend of the eleventh and twelfth of January. Do we possess that information?” He stood holding the door open and gave me an unfriendly smile. When Mrs. Emmett appeared, he didn’t bother to introduce me. She was carrying a desk diary.

“That was the Colorado weekend,” she said and showed the book to her husband.

“Of course it was,” he said. “We were at the Aspen Institute.” He flourished the page at me. “‘Bipolar Relationships in a Multi-polar World.’”

“Sounds fun.”

“It was.” He closed the diary with a definitive snap. “I was the main speaker.”

“You were there the whole weekend?”

“I was,” said Mrs. Emmett. “I stayed for the skiing. Emmett flew back on Sunday, didn’t you, darling?”

“So you could have seen McAra,” I said to him.

“I could have, but I didn’t.”

“Just to return to Cambridge—” I began.

“No,” he said, holding up his hand. “Please. If you don’t mind, let’s
not
return to Cambridge. I’ve said all I have to say on the matter. Nancy?”

She must have been twenty years his junior, and she jumped when he addressed her in a way no first wife ever would.

“Emmett?”

“Show our friend here out, would you?”

As we shook hands, he said, “I am an avid reader of political memoirs. I shall be sure to get hold of Mr. Lang’s book when it appears.”

“Perhaps he’ll send you a copy,” I said, “for old time’s sake.”

“I doubt it very much,” he replied. “The gate will open automatically. Be sure to make a right at the bottom of the drive. If you turn left, the road will take you deeper into the woods and you’ll never be seen again.”

MRS. EMMETT CLOSED THE
door behind me before I’d even reached the bottom step. I could sense her husband watching me from the window of his study as I walked across the damp grass to the Ford. At the bottom of the drive, while I waited for the gate to open, the wind moved suddenly through the branches of the high trees on either side of me, laying a heavy lash of rainwater across the car. It startled me so much I felt the hairs on the back of my head stand out in tiny spikes.

I pulled out into the empty road and headed back the way I had come. I felt slightly unnerved, as if I’d just descended a staircase in the darkness and missed the bottom few steps. My immediate priority was to get clear of those trees.

Turn around where possible.

I stopped the Ford, grabbed the navigation system in both hands, and twisted and yanked it at the same time. It came away from the front panel with a satisfying twang of breaking cables, and I tossed it into the foot well on the passenger’s side. At the same time I became aware of a large black car with bright headlights coming up close behind me. It overtook the Ford too quickly for me to see who was driving, accelerated up to the junction, and disappeared. When I looked back, the country lane was once again deserted.

It’s curious how the processes of fear work. If I’d been asked a week earlier to predict what I might do in such a situation, I’d have said that I’d drive straight back to Martha’s Vineyard and try to put the whole business out of my mind. In fact, I discovered, Nature mingles an unexpected element of anger in with fear, presumably to encourage the survival of the species. Like a caveman confronted by a tiger, my instinct at that moment was not to run; it was somehow to get back at the supercilious Emmett—the sort of crazy, atavistic response that leads otherwise sane householders to chase armed burglars down the street, usually with disastrous results.

So instead of sensibly trying to find my way back to the interstate, I followed the road signs to Belmont. It’s a sprawling, leafy, wealthy town of terrifying cleanliness and orderliness—the sort of place where you need a license just to keep a cat. The neat streets, with their flagpoles and their four-by-fours, slipped by, seemingly identical. I cruised along the wide boulevards, unable to get my bearings, until at last I came to something that seemed to resemble the middle of town. This time, when I parked my car, I took my suitcase with me.

I was on a road called Leonard Street, a curve of pretty shops with colored canopies set against a backdrop of big bare trees. One building was pink. A coating of snow, melted at the edges, covered the gray roofs. It could have been a ski resort. It offered me various things I didn’t need—a real estate agent, a jeweler, a hairdresser—and one thing I did: an internet café. I ordered coffee and a bagel and took a seat as far away from the window as I could. I put my case on the chair opposite, to discourage anyone from joining me, sipped my coffee, took a bite out of my bagel, clicked on Google, typed in “Paul Emmett” + “Arcadia Institution,” and leaned toward the screen.

ACCORDING TO WWW.ARCADIAINSTITUTION.ORG,
the Arcadia Institution was founded in August 1991 on the fiftieth anniversary of the first summit meeting between Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland. There was a photograph of Roosevelt on the deck of a U.S. battleship, wearing a smart gray suit, receiving Churchill, who was about a head shorter and dressed in some peculiar rumpled, dark blue naval outfit, complete with a cap. He looked like a crafty head gardener paying his respects to a local squire.

The aim of the institution, the website said, was “to further Anglo-American relations and foster the timeless ideals of democracy and free speech for which our two nations have always stood in times of peace and war.” This was to be achieved “through seminars, policy programs, conferences, and leadership development initiatives,” as well as through the publication of a biannual journal, the
Arcadian Review,
and the funding of ten Arcadia Scholarships, awarded annually, for postgraduate research into “cultural, political, and strategic subjects of mutual interest to Great Britain and the United States.” The Arcadia Institution had offices in St. James’s Square, London, and in Washington, and the names of its board of trustees—ex-ambassadors, corporate CEOs, university professors—read like the guest list for the dullest dinner party you would ever endure in your life.

Paul Emmett was the institution’s first president and CEO, and the website usefully offered his life in a paragraph: born Chicago 1949; graduate of Yale University and St. John’s College, Cambridge (Rhodes scholar); lecturer in international affairs at Harvard University, 1975–79, and subsequently Howard T. Polk III Professor of Foreign Relations, 1979–91; thereafter the founding head of the Arcadia Institution; president emeritus since 2007; publications:
Whither Thou Goest: The Special Relationship 1940–1956; The Conundrum of Change
;
Losing Empires, Finding Roles: Some Aspects of US-UK Relations Since 1956
;
The Chains of Prometheus: Foreign Policy Constraints in the Nuclear Age
;
The Triumphant Generation: America, Britain, and the New World Order; Why We Are in Iraq
. There was a profile in
Time
magazine, which described his hobbies as squash, golf, and the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, “which he and his second wife, Nancy Cline, a defense analyst from Houston, Texas, regularly call upon their guests to perform at the end of one of their famous supper parties in the prosperous Harvard bedroom community of Belmont.”

I worked my way through the first of what Google promised would eventually prove to be thirty-seven thousand entries about Emmett and Arcadia:

When I got bored with the same old stuff about seminars and summer conferences, I changed my search request to “Arcadia Institution” + “Adam Lang” and got a news story from the
Guardian
website about Arcadia’s anniversary reception and the prime minister’s attendance. I switched to Google Images and was offered a mosaic of bizarre illustrations: a cat, a couple of acrobats in leotards, a cartoon of Lang blowing into a bag with the caption “soon to be humiliated.” This is the trouble with internet research, in my experience. The proportion of what’s useful to what’s dross dwindles very quickly, and suddenly it’s like searching for something dropped down the back of a sofa and coming up with handfuls of old coins, buttons, fluff, and sucked sweets. What’s important is to ask the right question, and somehow I sensed I was getting it wrong.

I broke off to rub my aching eyes. I ordered another coffee and another bagel and checked out my fellow diners. It was a light crowd, considering it was lunchtime: an old fellow with his paper, a man and woman in their twenties holding hands, two mothers—or, more likely, nannies—gossiping while their three toddlers played unheeded under the table, and a couple of young guys with short-cropped hair, who could have been in the armed forces or one of the emergency services, perhaps (I’d seen a fire station nearby), sitting on stools at the counter with their backs to me, engaged in earnest conversation.

I returned to the Arcadia Institution website and clicked on the board of trustees. Up they all came, like spirits summoned from the vasty transatlantic deep: Steven D. Engler, former U.S. defense secretary; Lord Leghorn, former British foreign secretary; Sir David Moberly, GCMG, KCVO, the thousand-year-old former British ambassador to Washington; Raymond T. Streicher, former U.S. ambassador to London; Arthur Prussia, president and CEO of the Hallington Group; Professor Mel Crawford of the John F. Kennedy School of Government; Dame Unity Chambers of the Strategic Studies Foundation; Max Hardaker of Godolphin Securities; Stephanie Cox Morland, senior director of Manhattan Equity Holdings; Sir Milius Rapp of the London School of Economics; Cornelius Iremonger of Cordesman Industrials; and Franklin R. Dollerman, senior partner of McCosh & Partners.