Written in Time (2 page)

and I took Haya to a movie once.”
 

“What movie did you see with Haya?”
 

John Naile thought about it, but couldn’t remember. It was probably just as well that he couldn’t, all things considered. Haya was a genuine knockout, the prettiest comptroller anybody could hope for. Finally he said, “Can’t remember what movie it was.”
 

“Right. You’ve got a memory like a steel trap, John.”
 

“No kidding, Audrey. Something old with Humphrey Bogart, I think.” Horizon was one of the first companies to pump money into Israel after independence, and—John Naile had learned only in 1960—had secretly smuggled arms to Israel while the fledgling Jewish state fought for its very existence after the British withdrew from Palestine. The man who’d run that clandestine operation for Horizon was the same man David and James Naile had used to coordinate intelligence data for Horizon during World War Two. Horizon had provided Allied Intelligence with a lot of information both the U.S. and Great Britain had cheerfully—and quietly—accepted. The intelligence data concerning the death camps, sadly, the Allied governments had largely—and quietly—chosen to ignore.
 

Even in late autumn, the landscaping within the immediate vicinity of the main house and its garage retained a pleasant degree of understated, evergreen elegance. The driveway looped toward the eight-thousand-square-foot Tudor’s three front steps. John could see the front door opening and his father and mother emerging.
 

Mary Ann Naile was still a pinup-quality beauty, her son thought. He’d seen plenty of pictures of her from the time when his mom and dad first met and through the years since before he was born. She had a reasonable amount of gray in her shoulder length hair, but didn’t dye it. And she still had her figure, too. There was a heavy cardigan sweater draped over her shoulders, beneath it a silk-looking blouse of the identical shade of gray above a black knee-length skirt, sheer stockings and medium black heels. She hadn’t fallen into the First Lady look that Audrey only occasionally affected.
 

James Naile was tall and straight as ever. Facially and structurally, he resembled the great swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in his role opposite Ronald Coleman in The Prisioner of Zenda—or so it had always seemed to John Naile. Only, unlike Fairbanks’ character of the dashing swordsman, James Naile hadn’t a nefarious bone in his body—and he had more gray hair. He wore a white shirt, blue slacks and black loafers, a pipe—unlit— clenched in the right side of his mouth.
 

John Naile stopped the car, turned off the engine and climbed out. Before he could cross over to the passenger side, his father was already opening Audrey’s door. “How are you, sweetheart?” James Naile swept Audrey into his arms and hugged her. “You look great, kid! Feeling okay?”
 

“Just fine, Jim. Never better.”
 

“Good! Good!”
 

John took off his hat, intercepted his mother and touched at her shoulder as he gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Oh, John! It’s good to see you.”
 

“What’s the matter, Mom? It’s like we haven’t seen each other for months. But it’s less than a week since—”
 

“It’s just that it’s today, and today is a funny day, John. Not funny like funny, but funny like—well, I don’t know what.”
 

“Are you guys . . . ?”
 

“We’re fine, the business is fine. Now, go say hello to your father.” John put his arm around his mother’s shoulders and she rested her head against him for a split second, then announced, “Jim! Aren’t you going to say hello to your son?”
 

“Sure, after I’m through hugging the pretty girl he came in with.” James Naile turned around and extended his hand. John took it, and his father leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “I like the new car, son.”
 

“Figured you would, Dad. It’s a Cadillac, as you’ve no doubt noticed.”
 

They were all mounting the steps, but before entering the house, Mary Ann said, “Audrey, help me out in the kitchen, will you? We gave everybody the day off, and after Jim and your husband take care of a little business, I thought we could have some lunch.”
 

“Sure, Mary Ann,” Audrey responded. “Let me take off my hat and freshen up.”
 

“I’ll meet you in the kitchen, then.”
 

John Naile caught an odd look in his wife’s eyes as she veered off along the entrance hall. She paused in front of a gateleg table in the hall, set down her purse and looked in the mirror, beginning to remove her hat.
 

John Naile looked at his father and mother. “What’s up, guys?”
 

James Naile looked at his wristwatch, a Rolex identical to the one John Naile wore. “We don’t have a lot of time, John. Mary Ann?”
 

She paused before answering, her eyes following Audrey as her daughter-in-law walked out of sight. “I know. Linger over making lunch.”
 

“Yeah.” James Naile turned to his son. “Come with me, John. Everything you want to know—actually, a lot more than that, in spades—you’ll know.” James Naile grabbed a vintage brown-leather bomber jacket from the larger of the two hall closets, donning it as he said, “Let’s cut through the house, John. It’s faster,” and started walking.
 

John, gray fedora in hand, followed his father, looking once at his mother’s face to see if he could get a clue as to what was about to transpire. She looked oddly sad.
 

“Dad? What’s going on?” John Naile quickened his pace to come even with his father. They left the main hallway, passed the base of the circular staircase and under it toward his father’s office. They passed a small bathroom, a closet, came out from beneath the stairwell and through an open space—sunlight filtered through a floor-to-ceiling bank of windows and washed the checkerboard-pattern black-and-white tiles in a pale yellow light.
 

James Naile quickened his pace, opened the double doors to his office and passed through. “Close them behind you, John.” In some ways, parents never looked at their children as getting past the age of ten or so, John Naile had often thought, and his father’s remark had just confirmed it. “And skip the ‘Gee, I thought I’d leave ‘em open’ riposte, alright?”
 

“Sure.”
 

His father’s office was as he always had seen it since his childhood: big, expensive wooden desk; big, expensive leather desk chair; big, expensive leather couch and easy chairs; a coffee table that matched the desk; the side walls of the fifteen-by-fifteen room obscured floor-to- ceiling with built-in bookshelves; the library steps and a ladder on casters (he could never remember the proper name for one of the things, but thought there was one). The far wall was consumed at its center with double French doors leading out onto a small patio; on either side of the doors stood glass-fronted cabinets. The one on the right was a beautifully executed piece showcasing about a dozen long guns, rifles and shotguns evenly mixed, all premier grades from FN/Browning, Beretta, Winchester, Remington and some of the English gun makers. His father never touched them except to clean them; they were investments only.
 

“Should have offered you a coat, John, or had you get your overcoat from the Cadillac. Long walk to the bomb shelter, and it’s a little cold out.”
 

“The bomb shelter? Why are we—?”
 

“You’ll know. Trust me, son.”
 

The cabinet on the left, as they walked through the double doorway and onto the flagstones beyond—”I know! Close the doors.”—held a solitary bolt-action Remington, a lever-action Winchester, a lever-action Marlin, a Remington pump shotgun, various knives and an assortment of handguns, some of them cowboy-style single actions, all except the four long guns heavily engraved and, like the guns in the flanking cabinet, investment quality.
 

“You ever shoot any of those things, Dad?”
 

“Why? I keep that ‘97 Winchester pump of your grandfather’s in our bedroom, and I’ve got 1911s stashed all over the house, as you’ll recall, I believe.”
 

Once, as a child, John Naile had committed the allbut-unpardonable sin of attempting to show a couple of his buddies one of his dad’s .45 automatics. No Roy Rogers matinees for a very long time after that, and a serious feeling of being considered untrustworthy. His father was not a hobby shooter, John Naile had learned, but a dead shot when he needed to be.
 

That was proven once and forever when they walked into a bank together and the bank was being robbed. John Naile hadn’t even known his father ever carried a gun on his person, but suddenly a little pistol just appeared in his father’s right hand and the bank robber went down with a single shot in the throat.
 

That was the first time—John Naile was twelve—that he had realized that there was more to his father than met the eye.
 

“Why are we going to the bomb shelter?” John Naile plopped his gray fedora on his head, snapped up the collar of his suit and hunched his shoulders as they started into the gardens.
 

“To watch a soap opera on television.”
 

“What?”
 

“Remember what they say about asking silly questions, son?”
 

“I remember, Dad.”
 

“Walk faster. We’ll miss the commercial.”
 

“Are we advertising on television? Hey! You can’t get television reception underground.”
 

“No shit, Sherlock! Come on.”
 

John Naile reached into his coat and pulled out a Lucky Strike, then lit it with his Zippo. “Television? I haven’t liked anything on television since Have Gun—Will Travel went off in September.”
 

“Try Richard Boone’s new show. An anthology kind of thing. It’s pretty darn good.” Still trying to keep pace with his father, John Naile heeled out his cigarette.
 

They passed the tennis courts and the pool and pool house and the garden shed and turned at the end of the line of privet hedge and started toward the small structure that looked like a pump house but was really a disguised entrance to the family bomb shelter.
 

“Why can’t we watch television up at the house? Is this some kind of dirty program Mom and Audrey can’t see?”
 

“Your mother already has the TV on. I bought one of those portable ones and put it in the kitchen. They’ll see what we see.”
 

“I don’t understand, Dad!”
 

“Good! You’re not supposed to. Yet! You ever wondered why I built the bomb shelter in the first place, John?”
 

“Oh, gee whiz, I don’t know, Dad! Maybe to protect the family and the servants from blast, fallout and radiation in the event of an attack by the Soviet Union?”
 

His father was opening the pump house door; a flashlight appeared in James Naile’s hand just as suddenly as that pistol had seventeen years earlier.
 

“There won’t be a nuclear war, at least not until sometime after the mid-1990s, John.” The light switch inside the pump house went on, and James Naile pocketed the flashlight. “And it certainly won’t be the Soviet Union we’ll be fighting.” James Naile actuated the entrance mechanism into the bomb shelter and the fake rear wall of the pump house slipped left; visible beyond it in the lights James Naile turned on was a wide metal stairwell winding downward.
 

“I know you were a confidant of President Eisenhower, Dad, and that you get along okay with Jack Kennedy and most of the Kennedy clan, but I didn’t realize you knew Khrushchev and those guys, too.”
 

Unbidden, John closed the shelter door, sealing them inside. He could hear the subtle hum of the ventilation system. During normal times, when the structure was occupied, all electrical systems ran off ordinary household current. There were diesel generators standing by that would take over if the shelter was ever to be used for real. As a kid, John had considered the bomb shelter a kind of tree house, only underground. And, like an elaborate tree house, it consisted of several levels.
 

James Naile took the steps downward, and John Naile followed him. “I built the bomb shelter in order to mask what’s on the fourth level, John.”
 

“Fourth level?”
 

“I do have special knowledge of the future, John. On days like today, I wish to God that I didn’t.”
 

They reached the first level of the shelter, some eighteen feet below the surface.
 

Half of this level was given over to things such as the diesel generators and their backups, with a separate fuel- storage area, sealed off from the rest of the level for safety reasons, on the far end.
 

James Naile opened another doorway, flipped another set of switches, and John Naile followed him into the next stairwell.
 

The second level housed, on one side, living and working quarters for the family and, on the other end, similar but more modest accommodations for the staff, as well as sleeping quarters. At the center were common rooms and storage areas. Within the storage areas were food, water, toilet paper and everything else one might need for a stay of three months, with certain items regularly rotated out of stock and replaced so that everything would be fresh. There was also a vault. James Naile didn’t open it, but John Naile glanced at it while his father opened the next doorway. Within the vault were a dozen each M1 Garand rifles, Colt 1911A1 pistols and Remington 870 pump shotguns. Ammunition and all other necessities for the guns were housed within the vault as well.
 

John Naile closed the door behind them, and they descended to the third level.