Winter Kills Read online

  “That is a transparent lie, David.”

  “What? Will you repeat that, please?”

  “Write this down,” Nick snarled.

  “Try to speak more clearly, Nick.”

  “I arrive at Heathrow at ten o’clock Tuesday morning on BOAC 713 from Singapore,” Nick shouted. “Go to my flat and pack a bag with winter clothes for me. Meet me in the VIP lounge and bring me a heavy overcoat, a muffler, a hat and long woolen underwear. What I am wearing now could kill me in Philadelphia in January.”

  “What about the Teekay?”

  “I’ll tell you about it Tuesday morning. And don’t take that tone of voice.”

  “Your father will not be at all pleased, nonetheless.”

  “Did you make a list, you twit? Did you write it all down? You sound all doped, and I need those clothes.”

  “Not to worry.”

  “Next—pay attention, goddammit—call Miles Gander at the Petroleum Club in Philadelphia and ask him to hold breakfast for me Wednesday morning.”

  “He’s about to go bankrupt, you know.”

  “Just call him. Save your comment.” Nick detested Carswell doubly each time he was forced to talk to him, because Carswell’s whole air made him act like such an ass.

  When Carswell disconnected he was wide awake enough to put in a direct-dial call to Thomas Kegan in Palm Springs.

  Nick’s call to Pa was still delayed, but the charter was waiting to fly him to Singapore. He told Daisy to talk to Pa and to tell him that Nick had finished the tests on the Teekay and was on his way to Palm Springs. When he got outside, Keifetz was waiting to drive him to the Shell airport.

  “What did you decide to do?” Keifetz asked as they drove away.

  “Find the rifle.”

  “Better take a couple of witnesses. But lay off newspaper guys.”

  “I’ll have Miles Gander as a witness.”

  “Poor Miles,” Keifetz said. “He’s going bankrupt.”

  “That’s certainly the world’s worst-kept secret. I’m going to ask Miles to find me a Philadelphia police official as the other witness.”

  “The Philadelphia police didn’t smell very good in 1960.”

  “It can’t be helped. The rifle is a murder weapon, and it’s their turf. Anyway, we’ll outnumber him.”

  “Then what?”

  “If I find the rifle?”

  “What else?”

  “Then I’ll take Fletcher’s deposition and prints and photographs—which you will airmail out to Palm Springs by tomorrow afternoon—together with the rifle, and my father and I will go to the President and ask that the investigation be reopened.”

  ***

  Keifetz was coming in the office door after seeing Nick off when Pa’s call came through. He told Daisy he’d take it.

  “What’s up, kiddo?” Pa said.

  “Nicholas is on his way to the States.”

  “What about the Teekay?”

  “He finished the tests.”

  “Maybe he thought he finished, but he doesn’t finish until I say he’s finished.”

  “Anyway, Mr. Kegan, he’s on his way.”

  “Why is he having breakfast with Miles Gander?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Kegan.”

  “Listen—you know, and I know you know.”

  “Mr. Kegan, how do I know? Maybe he meant to tell me, but he was out of here like a shot this morning.

  “But you saw him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay. Why is he having breakfast with Miles Gander?”

  “A man who worked here died last night. Before he died he confessed that he had been the second rifle when they killed President Kegan.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Nicholas wants to tell yon himself.”

  “What’s Nick going to the States for?”

  “The guy who was dying told Nicholas where he hid the rifle. Nicholas is going to Philadelphia to get the rifle, with Miles Gander and a police official as witnesses.”

  “No press!”

  “No, Nicholas won’t call in the press. He also got a deposition and fingerprints of the man who died—Arthur Fletcher. Those are going out to him by registered mail to your address—probably tomorrow night.”

  Pa hung up on him.

  9:20 A.M., MONDAY, JANUARY 28 1974—SINGAPORE

  Nick loved Singapore, but he wouldn’t see it on this trip. Something eccentric happened to him every time he got to Singapore. The last time, there had been an epidemic of over four hundred Chinese believing that their penises were retracting into their bodies. Rickshaws had rushed past him from all directions carrying appalled men whose friends, sitting beside them, held on firmly to the imperiled part to prevent it from disappearing up into the lower abdomen.

  On this visit all there was to do was to climb down out of the Bonanza and climb up the first-class ramp of the BOAC flight. He had thirty-four hours of sitting ahead of him to Philadelphia, with a three-hour-and-forty-minute layover in London. There were six other passengers in the first-class section, all men. The man in the window seat ahead of him was an unconscious hummer who was improvising Grieg over and over again. It was crazing. Nick moved to the last row in the section, but it was a long time before he could no longer hear the humming.

  He decided not to eat or drink until he got to Philadelphia, hoping that that would help him to survive better. He was flying in the wrong direction for minimum jet lag, because as the plane went westward it got earlier and earlier, but his body clock couldn’t understand that. Eating and drinking only made it worse. His head had to be clear when he got to Philadelphia. Goddam Keifetz and Fletcher, he thought uselessly. Responding to them like an altar boy, he had reverted to the most obvious comic-book cliché—his brother’s avenger. He decided that he must be afraid of Keifetz’ contempt, with all that hissing steam about marching on the White House. How old does a man have to be before he stops finding things out about himself, he thought. He knew more about himself than he had ever wanted to know by the time he was twenty-one. Well, there were clouds and there were silver linings. When he got to London he’d be able to call Yvette Malone. That almost made the whole devious business worth it. No poking and probing (in a psychological investigator’s sense) there. He knew all he had to know about Yvette Malone. She was beautiful. She had a disposition as soft as the down on angels’ wings. She was from Texas, but that was an accident of birth, and even so it wasn’t all bad because, in its unmysterious way, Texas had made her very rich. As far as Nick was concerned, that was all anybody needed to know about anybody. Find out who her mother’s aunt was, and the first thing you know, you discover you are sleeping with the sister of a first cousin of yours. Besides, marginal information about anybody merely reduced to the least the ecstasy of concentration upon the center of the warm sun. Yvette felt the same way. He was just another oil man, and she collected oil men. She liked the way he looked and tasted, she figured he was not from Texas, because he talked like a Yankee. That’s all she wanted to know. It was gratifying to wallow in the generous gifts of pleasure of a woman like Yvette and know that she was giving because she wished to, not because it made her a peripheral part of history to screw the half brother of the late, great Timothy Kegan, once President of the United States.

  Yvette Malone lived an idyllic life anywhere it was the comfortable, fashionable place to be. She had a big, fat house on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais (on the right side of that privileged street), and she was willing to fly anywhere except Texas. She insisted on screwing on an “exchange of presents” basis. She always gave Nick gaudy underwear. He had seventeen sets of silk underwear in five pastel colors. After the first time, when she had explained her policy, he had given her a Hiroshige print. After that she had guided him toward stockings. She said stockings were more impersonal. He didn’t think he really understood her, but he liked barter-banging very much.

  Nick was unmarried; had never been married. He was forty-one
years old. More and more he had been thinking he should marry Yvette Malone. He couldn’t think of even one small reason against it. They could breed some people to whom he could leave all that underwear. Marriage was a tricky business. When Tim had married Mary Elizabeth McGlade he had certainly never expected he would be a widower at twenty-two, while he was still at Yale. And he had remained a widower, because Pa had underlined that since the tragedy had happened anyway, and terrible as it was, no one could change it, it should be viewed as a political asset: The Man Who Had Remained True to a Precious Memory. Tim had agreed, partly because he felt that way (at the time), but even more because it meant big action with the hundreds of women who had wanted to console him.

  Tim had appreciated women because they brought out the actor in him. When he got bored with himself he changed women and got himself a new personality. Except for Pa’s implacable resistance, Tim would have been an actor. Tim had been a wholesomely vulgar man who had believed in a good mirror when he saw one.

  Tim’s women always ended up sad, Pa’s mad. Nick preferred his own women glad. Not that it always worked out that way, thank God.

  He hadn’t seen Yvette Malone for more than four months. He took her picture out of his wallet and propped it up in front of him. What a beautiful thing she was, he thought. She had kind of burnished brown hair—red hair, really—and eyes as green as avocados. She was so smart she could speak Italian, French and German with a Texas accent. He was suddenly direfully needful to be in some kind of contact with her, so he asked the steward for some notepaper and began to write her a letter. “Dear Yvette,” he wrote, “I am wearing the lime-colored silk underwear and thinking of you. But when do we get out of the underwear phase? Not that I want ties. But pajamas would be nice. You must be yearning for a letter like this. You have ninety-six pairs of stockings I know of. Why don’t we switch? I’ll give you underwear and you give me navy-blue lisle socks, size eleven.

  “Disaster has struck. When I explain it I realize everything is going to sound like a bad movie, but are there any more good movies—were there ever any? This family secret has to come out sometime (between us, that is), and the whole framework of the events leading to the reason why I am on my way to Philadelphia and Palm Springs without the slightest chance that I can stop over in Paris long enough to make love gives me as good a chance to let the skeleton out for an airing as I guess I’ll ever have. To put the whole thing bluntly: Timothy Kegan, a President of the United States, was my half brother, and now a man has just died in Asia who said he was just one of the people hired by somebody to kill my brother, so now I have to rush into the labyrinths of this melodrama, extract the answer to the enigma (which is probably that a man named Z. K. Dawson was the man who hired the killers), confront my unpredictable father with all that is happening, and, generally as well as particularly, have my life light up TILT for the next month or so. It is brutally stupid because it is so wastefully silly. There is not one chance in a million that, after fourteen long years of covering tracks ruthlessly, the man (Dawson, if it is Dawson) or men who paid for Tim’s death can ever be found. But I have to do it as the Avenging Brother, because entertainment has taken over culture and we all live in a movie, or worse, in a mid-morning TV soap outcry.

  “I cannot imagine that you will continue to stay on in the coldest city in the world (in January). You are probably on the beach at Grenada right now. I can’t wait to get to London to call you to find out.”

  He put Yvonne’s letter aside, because writing about Pa and what he would be walking into with Pa had brought out his never-absent dread of seeing Pa again. He would be in the worst sort of a position: the fink who brought bad news to Thomas Xavier Kegan about his most sacrosanct property—the dead son who had made him the revered father of the late President.

  He didn’t remember knowing either Pa or Tim until he was nine years old. For the seven years before that he had been a Thirkield, not a Kegan, because his mother had divorced Pa and had made him pay her a huge sum of money without a murmur. Whatever Pa had done to deserve the loss of such a lady (and all that money) must have been at least slightly disreputable.

  Nick had known Tim for eighteen years. Then he subtracted the three years when he had been nine then twelve and Tim had been off to war. Then he subtracted one of the two years at the end of their time together, because he had fled Pa and America to go into the oil business in the Middle East when he was twenty-five. Tim was dead two years later. The salvaged single year had been made up of fragments of disconnected pieces of time—short bursts at the White House, at Palm Springs, at Camp David, at the Walpole, or on the yacht—and always it had been tacitly agreed that Pa wouldn’t be there. All told, he had known Tim for only fourteen years out of the forty-two of Tim’s life. Fourteen had been plenty. Tim was Pa and Pa was Tim. What had made Tim such a glorious achiever (Pa, always Pa) had made Nick faceless. Tim was gloriously dead at forty-two. Nick was merely indefinably alive. Even Yvette Malone had never remembered him long enough to write him a letter spontaneously. True, she always answered his letters—which was a different thing altogether. Nick brooded that he might live to be twice Tim’s age and exist as a sort of vegetable unless he could master Tim’s knack for living so warily. But he’d be damned if he would, because it was a knack Pa also had. Pa’s idea of being lusty and alive was to fart at a state dinner, then nearly laugh himself into a hernia. He supposed that both he and Tim had been born with souls resembling Pa’s soul. Then, by a great stroke of luck, Nick’s mother had taken him away from Pa and he had been saved. After his mother had been killed in the car with Gabriel Thirkield, Pa had ordered Nick to come home, although Pa wasn’t there, because there was a war on and serious money to be made. Nick had been nine. To his great relief (and even greater joy after Tim got to the White House) Nick kept the name Thirkield, because Mama’s will said if Pa tried to change it back, Nick wouldn’t get one cent of her money (which had all been left to him). Pa deeply respected that kind of logic. Tim was off in the war. The head of the house at Palm Springs was Pa’s Chinese butler. It had been a big change from the leafy, green, temperate coolness of Harmonia, New York, to Pa’s fortress house in the desert. It was all like another planet.

  The object Nick missed most was his mother’s dear old Rolls, which her father had bought for her in 1927. Mama had worked on it herself, fiddling with the engine, changing tires and oil, washing it like the family pet it was. Every other day Mama and he would drive the cook, who sat on the back seat, to the meat market in the village. The butcher would bring the meat out of the shop to the car on tray after tray so that Mama and the cook could look it over and choose. Then Mama would drive the Rolls back to Harmonia Hall, and the butcher’s boy would pedal out to deliver the meat, arriving an hour after them.

  He remembered the epergne at the center of Mama’s table on which she would place the bowl filled with homemade caviar on the one day a month when she would invite the locals in to be enthralled by her music. Mama made caviar out of tapioca, fish broth, squid ink and lemon juice, which allowed each guest to have as much caviar as he or she wished. “It would be a cruel thing to give these good, provincial people a real caviar habit,” Mama had explained.

  Tim had been twenty-four when he went into the war, in London, on the staff of Major General James Nolan, head of the socially blessèd Ultra action group, which plotted and wove behind locked doors that were themselves within a series of locked doors. No one but General Nolan knew what anyone in Ultra was doing. Long after the war it was finally revealed that Tim had been Nolan’s cryptanalyst. Nolan was a Texan and a West Pointer and a former roommate of Pa’s at Notre Dame. General Nolan awarded Tim a Presidential Citation for, he said in the accompanying recommendation, breaking a Spanish code that transmitted Spain’s African intelligence about weather conditions around the Ouagadougou region of French West Africa. Four months before the war ended, well after the invasion, Tim was transferred to General Patton’s (colorful) Third Army as aid
e-de-camp to Major General Anthony “Tuffy” Godwin. Here Tim had won, on General Godwin’s personal citation, the army’s Silver Star for leading a Tank Medium M4-A3-E8 into an action across the Rhine near Martonsburg in the Hilda Hess sector “at immeasurable personal risk in a feat of incomparable daring.” After the war Tuffy Godwin had joined Thomas Kegan’s bustling, belching rabbit warren of subornment in Washington as Procurement Officer in charge of Pentagon entertaining. Pa was very proud of Tim’s military decorations.

  Tim had gone to Yale law school before the army, because lawyers screwed up the country best. After the war Pa okayed two years for him at the Yale drama school, because the theater was good training for politics, but he made Tim finish off with a master’s degree in political science at Harvard nonetheless. Cross an American lawyer with a political scientist and you get a mad scientist, Tim told Nick.

  Pa had had General Nolan made a papal count, and the General agreed to manage Rockrimmon, a Kegan estate in Connecticut, for all his years after the war. Rockrimmon was the one family property Nick had never been invited to visit. General Nolan was the one old family friend he had never met. Tim said General Nolan provided Pa with “disreputable diversions” there. Tim had used Rockrimmon now and then as a hideout when he attended out-of-town tryouts of musicals in New Haven (“Not since Woodrow Wilson has an American President shown his degree of passion for the American popular theater”) so he could take the young ladies of the casts to Rockrimmon and screw them.

  By 1950 Tim had been elected to the House of Representatives. By 1955 he was in the Senate. At the end of his first week in the Senate, Pa opened Tim’s active campaign for the presidential nomination. Before Pa masterminded a presidential campaign, a successful candidate had pretended to wait for his party’s nomination to come to him. Pa said that was a lot of shit. He said Tim would have to go into a few primaries to make everything look good, but that was what the party system was for: to let the bosses handle the rest. He said it was a waste of time and money to run in all the primary convention states except where a candidate had to to keep up appearances. Sometimes winning a few primaries could punch up the whole script and fool all of the people all of the time, was how he felt. Pa believed in using his money and his power where it could count most—in nonprimary convention states where the political professionals really controlled their people. For three years Pa had been spending big money to find out, state by state, what it was that made each key delegate jump. When he needed their votes for the first big ballot at the nominating convention, his supply of jumping beans proved to be inexhaustible.