At least the place looked clean and in reasonably good repair. The furnishings were new, or nearly so. An air-conditioning unit in the window waited silently, ready to deal with the day's heat when it came.
None of the masked people who were bustling in and out, carrying baggage and checking provisions, seemed to be watching the prisoners at all closely. Their baggage was promptly carried into the one small bedroom. Radcliffe, feeling exhausted, his mind wavering near hysteria, had the crazy notion that someone was going to expect a tip.
There was no mirror in the bedroom, but one in the bathroom, in the expected location over the sink.
"Phil, what… what…?" June was whispering. She made a gesture indicating desperation.
He spread out his hands helplessly. "I don't know what I don't know any more about this than you do."
Radcliffe and June had not long to wait before Mr. Graves came to speak to them politely.
"There is a videotape, which will explain much. You must watch it." He lifted in one pale hand a small black case which had been lying on the table beside the television and VCR.
"A videotape."
"Indeed. This will lay the groundwork for the explanation you very naturally demand. When you have seen it through, and considered its contents, we shall be able to talk to some purpose. Your many questions will be most swiftly answered if you will watch the tape."
"Wouldn't it be easier just to tell us?" June put in.
"I think not. A face-to-face discussion would inevitably involve arguments, demonstrations, a tedious business for which I will not have the time today, nor probably tomorrow. These hours I must devote to more important things." The dark eyes fixed on Phil. "You may place little value on either your blood or your life, but I have sworn a serious oath that I will save them both."
Phil nodded slowly. He knew the expression on his own face must indicate that he was seriously impressed. And indeed he was. This man Graves is as nutty as a fruitcake factory.
Chapter Three
Having thus sternly admonished his pair of prisoners, Mr. Graves, moving with the brisk pace of a senior executive who had important business everywhere, walked out of the little house, leaving the Radcliffes in the care of his masked assistants and Connie.
All of these continued their policy of referring to their leader, whenever he decided to return, June's and Phil's continued demands for explanations. The disguised ones oozed bland reassurances, and responded to questions by repeating Graves's urging to watch the tape.
Within a few minutes most of the masked guardians, as if seeking escape from the ongoing barrage of their victims' demands, had left the house. There remained on guard only one man and one woman, and this pair had discreetly withdrawn, like unobtrusive servants, into the small kitchen.
The two prisoners found themselves left alone in the small living room.
"All right." June's fear was being increasingly absorbed in anger. She sat down in one of the cheap armchairs, then immediately, too wired to admit weariness, bounced to her feet again. "Then let's take a look at the damned tape."
Her husband, who shared her mood, nodded. No other course of action seemed likely to help them in the least. "It had better be good." He picked up the cartridge, noted that it was unlabeled, and loaded it into the VCR.
In another moment June and Phil were seated side by side on the sofa in front of the television. Philip picked up the remote control and turned on both machines.
When the tape began to play, Radcliffe's immediate hopes were dashed. The opening scene did not offer any dazzling enlightenment. It showed Mr. Graves, seated behind a table in what appeared to be the same room where the audience was now sitting, and looking earnestly toward the camera. Graves's image was dressed in what looked like the same dark suit in which he had carried out the kidnapping of the couple who were now his audience.
"Pay close attention," the taped image urged the two prisoners. "For I am about to introduce you to the man who has sworn to drink the blood of Philip Radcliffe." A pause. "And to cut off his head."
That last line was followed by a longer pause, which Phil thought must have been calculated, scripted, for dramatic effect. Certainly it got the full attention of the small audience for whom it was intended.
Mr. Graves's image on the TV screen looked into the camera, speaking quietly and unhurriedly. He admitted at the start, with disarming casualness, that he had not been present at many of the events which he was about to relate. "But there is enough information to reconstruct certain important scenes with a high degree of reliability."
Mostly he spoke while looking directly into the camera, but now and then dropped his compelling gaze to some scribbled notes on the table before him. The earnest tone of the presentation put at least one of the audience in mind of a speech from the Oval Office.
As the first minutes passed, the keen attention of the audience began to waver, and they looked at each other unhappily; the session began to seem an ordeal by nonsense.
Already the very gentleness and consideration in minor matters with which the Radcliffes were being treated had begun to arouse in them suspicions that the whole kidnapping might be a monstrous joke, perpetrated by some of their supposed friends.
"Junie, is this all a gag?" Philip hissed, at a moment when he thought he would not be overheard. "Some kind of a gigantic… put-on?"
June looked back at him in quiet desperation. "I don't know. The thought crossed my mind, too. But who do we know who'd do a thing like this?"
Despite the inroads of weariness, even with hysteria not far away, it was difficult to think of anyone.
The tape played on.
Philip and June sat side by side on the cheap sofa, holding hands most of the time, frequently exchanging looks but seldom comments, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. On the small screen the videotaped image of the man who seemed their chief persecutor was now well into what was evidently going to be a long narrative of the past.
And it wasn't working.
It was not that the speaker raved or rambled. No, he spoke coherently and calmly enough. Having got a brief introduction out of the way, he began the body of his story by recalling another year that, like 1996, had once been called the best of times and the worst of times.
Still, Phil and June were looking at each other in dismay; far from offering any reasonable explanation, the story seemed only to confirm that they were in the hands of hopeless lunatics.
The scene opened (according to the narration of the thoughtful, dry-voiced image on the screen) in the city of London, in the year 1790, just as the Revolution and its Terror were taking over across the Channel in France. Months earlier, the Bastille had fallen to the Parisian mob, and in that country all titles of hereditary nobility had been abolished. King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were prisoners of the new government in all but name, though still clinging, tenuously, perilously, ambiguously, to some pretense of authority.
"The very year," observed the image of Graves on screen, "of the death of Benjamin Franklin—who, as I am sure you know, Mr. Radcliffe, is your own ancestor." The dark eyes looked into the camera…
Yes, he, Philip Radcliffe, had known that about Franklin. He had been well aware, at least, that it was an old tradition in the Radcliffe family. But what connection could there be between randy old Franklin and the craziness of Mr. Graves and his associates two hundred years later? If the ancestral Franklin really had something to do with their behavior, maybe he, Radcliffe, could talk them out of it… but with the best will in the world, it was hard to concentrate under these conditions of captivity. Radcliffe fidgeted on the sofa, moment by moment expecting one of their deranged kidnappers to come in and say or do something outrageous. Nothing of the kind happened, but he kept looking for it all the same. And June, beside him, was in no better shape.