Winter Kills Read online

  The marvel of the Presidency, Tim told Nick over and over, was the dramatic acceleration of the action. By his records, until the time he had entered the House he had scored four hundred and seventy girls. By the time he entered the Senate, only five years later, he had scored nine hundred and three girls, which was pretty fantastic acceleration itself, Tim said, considering it had taken him a lifetime to make it to four seventy. However, from the day he had announced for the Presidency until the day he was inaugurated the score had soared to nearly sixteen hundred (three the morning of Inauguration Day)—which showed what the power of entering the highest political office could do. “Boy, when you enter, you really enter,” Nick had said admiringly.

  Because of his interest in the theater and related arts Tim tended to screw actresses more than others, but his favorites had also included a Belgian princess, an Eastern chief of government, thirty-four heiresses, one hundred and fifty-three models, nine professional tennis players, many lady lawyers, doctors, astrologers and chiropractors, two hundred and ninety-one newspaper and television women, some ordinary taxpayers, a population of the wives of senators, ambassadors, congressmen and the more powerful businessmen, labor leaders and industrialists in the United States, Western Europe and the coastline cities of South America—and one lady astronaut.

  When Nick was in his early twenties and Tim was in the White House manufacturing acutely dangerous missile crises during his first eleven months in office, Nick had counted and concluded that all the great leaders had done that sort of quantity copulating—Julius Caesar and Atatürk were examples. Nick was forty-one now, and he marveled at how little effect this consideration had had on him, thus separating him from leadership, perhaps because he had not over-screwed. He calculated that he had slept with about twelve or sixteen women in his life—and he didn’t have any idea whether this was average or underaverage. He didn’t envy Tim, because of the prodigious complications arising from Tim’s copulations along the way, although Tim had said that most of the betrayed husbands felt honored. It was the goddam press, Tim said, that cost him the most ass. They had forced spectacular strains on Tim in making him try to find places to screw. Eluding the press had been a superhuman feat. Therefore, most of the time there was an air of catch-as-catch-can, of improvisation, about Tim’s sexual feats. Many times he would have despaired that he would ever meet the circumstances in which he could screw a lady when, suddenly, walking with her alone in a White House corridor and spotting an empty cloakroom, he would push her in there, enter her among the overcoats and furs, standing, then put them both together again and continue along the corridor to the reception, the lady almost unable to believe that such a thing had happened to her. The White House Secret Service detail learned to cooperate with maneuvers like that, although the Chief was ever nervous that one of those women could be a plant, and he would have borne the blame if the President had got himself stabbed or shot in some employees’ rest room.

  Just the same, all the horrible difficulties notwithstanding, sometimes late at night while he tried to sleep under mosquito netting beside a field of pumping rigs four hundred miles from places only about eleven people had ever been to, knowing that the native women with their smells were not for him, Nick would become wistful. But when he got back to the cities he refused to make any big effort to get women into bed, because it made him feel Pa inside him, and he could not live with that. Early on, he had concentrated on the piano instead. It wasn’t a substitute, but it was a comfort.

  10:05 A.M., MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 1974—ENROUTE TO GERMANY

  He got off the plane to stretch his legs at New Delhi. He stayed in his seat at Beirut. When the plane was airborne to Frankfurt he decided to risk having a half bottle of champagne. After the wine he fell asleep, and slept until the plane reached Germany. In Frankfurt he marched the letter to Yvette straight to the airport post office and sent it as registered mail. He used registered mail only for love letters. As the plane headed out toward London he felt the old bafflement again—a permanent confusion of doors slamming in his face, lights going off, distant voices singing that there was absolutely nothing to worry about, all of it repeated over and over again until, manipulated and bored, he had turned away, along with most of the rest of the people, telling himself, as they had told themselves, that the Pickering Commission was the receptacle of the consciences of seven wise men, seven just men who had pored themselves almost blind over every scintilla of the evidence, which had at last filled twenty-six volumes. These great men had finally decreed, separately and together, that there had been no conspiracy, that there had been only one lone, mad killer. Repeat: no conspiracy. Repeat: no conspiracy. With the help of the reassuring press—that greatest single continuing conspiracy of modern civilization—life had gone on, the nonconspiracy untroubled. Nothing could change except the truth.

  The plane began its descent into London.

  TUESDAY MORNING, JANUARY 29, 1974—LONDON

  David Carswell was easy to spot in the VIP lounge at Heathrow. He was the opposite of a jolly fat man. He was a mean fat man who explained away his fat by claiming he had diabetes. He was eating buttered sugar buns, slurping coffee and pouting like the spout of a pitcher when Nick came up to him. In greeting, after two years of separation, he said, producing an even more intense reaction than usual from his employer, “I am frightfully worried about this Teekay desertion.”

  “You don’t look it,” Nick said.

  “Your father isn’t going to like it at all. Not one bit.”

  “We are not going to talk about it.”

  “It took you five months to set it up, and now you just walk away from it.” His accent was plum-perfect Oxbridge with just a soupçon of Hammersmith.

  “Aarrgghhh!” Nick said.

  “I think that is a desperately unfriendly attitude to take, Nick. It is hurtful and really uncalled-for.”

  “Did you bring my clothes?”

  “Marian could not find the winter underwear in your flat.”

  “Did you buy me some winter underwear?”

  “The shops were not open. It was far too early.”

  “You brought everything else?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Whether you think so or not, Nick, I am entitled to an explanation about the Teekay.”

  “If you had brought the winter underwear you would be entitled to an explanation.”

  “You are being monstrous.”

  “Do you have any silver?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call Marian. Send her to my flat. Tell her to look in the bottom drawer of the highboy in the second bedroom. Tell her to bring the underwear here.”

  “Who will run the office?”

  “I don’t care if it burns. Get me that underwear.”

  Carswell got up. He waddled away three steps, then turned. “I can have them bring a telephone to me here.”

  “Oh, no, you won’t. Go to a booth and shut the door.”

  Nick glared at his back. The twit. He ordered tea. He was impatient to get Carswell out of there for good so that he could talk to Yvette at his leisure. It took Carswell twenty minutes to get back.

  “Marian will be here in about an hour,” he said.

  “Did you talk to Miles Gander?”

  “He will be charmed to have breakfast with you tomorrow morning.”

  “Good.” He decided to fire Carswell as soon as he could find a replacement. “That’s all. You may go, David.”

  “It is Monday morning. I do have an extraordinary amount of work to do.”

  “Well, go and do it.”

  They shook hands limply. David waddled away. Nick asked for a telephone. He dialed Yvette’s number in Paris and instantly she was on the line.

  “Yvette? Nick.”

  “Nick? Oh, boy! Are you in town?”

  “London airport.”

  “Oh.”

  “I am dazzled to know that I am this close to you. The Channel and a l
ittle hunk of France is all. Nothing like half the world between us.”

  “How come you’re at the London airport?”

  “I put it all in a letter to you and mailed it in Frankfurt.”

  “I may not see it—I mean for a couple of months. I’m going to the States in about two days.”

  “Where to?”

  “New York first.”

  “How long will you be there?”

  “Through January. Then Jamaica or something.”

  “Can we have dinner Thursday night? I have to go to Palm Springs but I can make it to your place by eight on Thursday.”

  “Oboyoboyoboy.”

  “It’s been almost four months.”

  “I know.”

  “Just talking to you is too much. I don’t know how I can be this close and not see you.”

  “Don’t even say it, Nick.”

  “Okay. So long.”

  “I love you, Nick.”

  He hung up in a pink daze. He drifted to the newsstand and bought paperbacks and magazines. Marian arrived with the underwear in a plastic shopping bag. She was a short, thin girl in a miniskirt. If she couldn’t afford to wear a long skirt in London in January, Carswell must be underpaying her.

  “I had a crazy cabbie,” Marian said. “He must be fleeing the police. Aren’t taxis supposed to have speed governors?”

  “How much do we pay you, Marian?”

  “Twenty-three pounds a week. Why? I didn’t miss finding the underwear the first time round. David forgot to tell me.”

  “Give me your notebook.”

  In fullest holograph he wrote a note to Carswell saying that henceforth Marian was to be paid thirty pounds a week. That should annoy the repulsive twit, he thought. Marian stared at the note. “But—why, Mr. Thirkield? I’m really not very good at anything in an office. Honestly, I could have missed your underwear the first time this morning even if David had told me.”

  “You weren’t good at anything in an office because you were underpaid,” Nick said. “Now that you will be paid properly you will improve enormously.”

  “But I don’t want to spend my life improving at this. If I could find a husband I’d be away from you like a shot.”

  “Perfectly all right.”

  “You may not understand it, but you are trying to obligate me, Mr. Thirkield. It’s as though thirty pounds a week were my price. This could change my life. This could make me so obligated that I would stop looking for a husband and turn into an office creep like a girl David Carswell.”

  “What do you want me to do, Marian? I’ll do whatever you say.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Thirkield.”

  “I’ll take it back. Here, we’ll tear it up.”

  “No,” she said glumly. “That’s all right. It’s my problem now, innit?” She turned away from him and walked toward the exit of the lounge.

  The pink haze had lifted again.

  JANUARY 29 AND 30, 1974—PHILADELPHIA

  Nick’s plane touched down at Philadelphia at four thirty-five that afternoon. He checked into the Petroleum Club.

  “You are looking worse than I have ever seen you look, sir,” the reception clerk said genially.

  Nick was very much pleased. “I’ve been on an airplane from Borneo.”

  “Travel is terrible punishment, sir.”

  “Please tell the operator to post Do Not Disturb signs all over the switchboard. That includes my father—I mean, most of all my father.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And please send a man up to wake me at eight thirty tomorrow morning.”

  He slept for fifteen and a half hours, until the bell captain shook him awake. At nine fifteen he shambled into the baroque Victorian dining room with its magnificent portrait of Edward VII as a young man, by James Richard Blake the immortalist. The room was a womb of the past in deep green and heavy gold. Miles Gander was waiting for him, a thin and melancholy man with a high bald head and heavy black-rimmed glasses. They told each other that each was looking very well indeed. Nick was ravenous. He hadn’t eaten for two days. They ordered at once.

  “Somebody said you ran into a string of dry wells, Miles.”

  “Quite an advertisement for an oil geologist, wasn’t it?”

  “Need any money?”

  Miles shook his head in a melancholy way and went on nibbling at a piece of toast. He was smallish, with a birdlike face and a squamulous nose, as though he were an evolutionary map of reptile-into-bird-into-man.

  “I cannot stand David Carswell any longer, Miles.”

  “He is impossible. But he knows everything.”

  “We are too small an operation to fit in a fellow like that.”

  “But whom would you get?”

  “I thought I’d ask you.”

  “A desk job? No,” he said sadly. “I’m a geologist, Nick—but I thank you.” Every shading of Gander’s manner was melancholy, indicating that bankruptcy can be depressing but also that he had deeper malaise than the loss of money. “If you can’t bear Carswell, try Ed Blenheim in Tulsa.”

  The food arrived. Nick attacked an enormous pile of scrapple, about which Edward VII had said (in that room), “Philadelphia is filled with people named Scrapple, and they all have biddle for breakfast.”

  After a while Miles said, “What did you want to see me about, Nick?” He coughed lightly. “It couldn’t be about the job, because you wouldn’t have had David call me if it were.”

  “I need your integrity,” Nick said.

  Miles winced.

  “A man who was working for Keifetz fell off a crane in Brunei. He knew he was dying. He confessed that he had been one of the two men who had shot my brother.”

  “My God!”

  “He told us where he hid the rifle. Here in Philadelphia. So I wanted to ask you for two favors. Can you arrange for me to meet a high-ranking police official? Second, will you come along with us as witness that the rifle has been found—if it is found?”

  Miles wet his lips. He took a sip of water. He had a mouthful of black coffee. He dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, drying it. “Yes,” he said. “I can do those things.”

  “Thank you.”

  “When do you want me to do this?”

  “Now, if you can.”

  “I’ll go out to the hall and telephone.” He got up abruptly and left the table. Nick thought he had become a different man since the bankruptcy. He had to need money. He decided to press it on him. He ordered more scrapple, with poached eggs and fried apples, and more hot toast and coffee. When he was in Asia, he had dreamed of scrapple—a divine marriage of American Indian cornmeal with the genius of German sausage.

  “Well, we were lucky,” Miles said when he came back. “An inspector of police named Heller is on his way over.”

  Nick said, “I don’t believe you when you say you don’t need money. Let’s get this straight, Miles. I am your friend, and there are things you have to make yourself accept from friends. I am worried about you. I want you to tell me how much money you will need, and that will be that.”

  Miles’s eyes suddenly brimmed with tears, but they held. He looked away, and after a time the tears were gone. “The fact is, Nick,” he said, “I would have grabbed that offer last night. But everything was settled last night. I have the money. I don’t need to be a bankrupt.”

  ***

  Deputy Inspector Frank Heller came into the dining room in full uniform, fruit salad across his left chest and a gold badge that gleamed like a searchlight under the commendations. He was a beefy, red-faced, heavy man with hard eyes. He shook hands as though it were a karate maneuver. He sat at the table, refused breakfast, because he never ate breakfast, he said, grudgingly accepted some coffee, then asked if there was any raisin bread, then asked if he could have some red currant jelly to go along with the raisin bread.

  “Why not have some lamb with the red currant jelly, Frank?” Miles asked.

  “The scrapple is great,” Nick said.

>   “Scrapple? Well. I’d like to try some scrapple.” He nodded to the waitress. “What’s up?” he asked Miles.

  “This is all very delicate and confidential, Frank, as you will see,” Miles said.

  The inspector grunted. It was like a random hit on a bass drum. He looked quickly from one face to the other. His eyes had large pouches of blackness under them, as if he had rubbed them with sooty mittens. “Everything is,” he said.

  “Mr. Thirkield is the half brother of the late President Kegan,” Miles said. “We work together in the oil industry.”

  Heller nodded with automatic, sympathetic appreciation, then he caught himself and went on the defensive.

  “We did everything humanly possible to protect your brother here, Mr. Thirkield. But you can’t protect anyone from a nut. I hope you realize that.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Nick said. “Two days ago in the Far East a man confessed to having killed my brother.”

  “Impossible.”

  “And he told us where he had hidden the rifle. In Philadelphia.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “His name was Arthur Turkus Fletcher.”

  Heller grunted again. It had a threatening sound. Boar hunters have heard the sound. The food arrived, so they stopped talking until the waitress left. Heller attacked the scrapple as if it were trying to devour him first. He finished everything on the plate before he spoke again. “You read the Pickering Report?” he asked Nick.