He signed clearance papers, a stack of traveler’s checks. Then, on his way to find a cab to the airport, he let loose his rabbit’s foot and watched it fall, an offering to the sea.
Pierce at the wheel of the Packard was a jolly welcome-wagoneer, rocking from side to side as he hummed selections from On the Town. He’d been a few hours late picking Christo up at the terminal, but presumably had needed the extra time to deck out in the belted camel’s-hair coat, pinstripe three-piecer, taupe gloves, to grab the feel of this event and then describe it in clothes.
“So our ship comes in on the sixteenth and everything is everything. I never doubted your aptitude, jazzbo, not for a second.”
He announced they were bound for Pine Hill, Connecticut, and the Milbank family retreat. It was a proclamation rather than an invitation and Christo chafed at his lack of choice. Back behind the lines, mission accomplished, and still he was following orders. There they were, bombing up the Taconic Parkway with the top down and the threat of snow in the air. They sipped warmth from a pewter hipflask while naked trees whipped by in stripes of gray and brown, a frugal winter plaid.
Minutes from the state line, a police cruiser came up alongside and ran even with them, door handle to door handle. Every few seconds the bruiser inside would turn and stare at them out of his dark eyeholes.
“Fucking yokel,” Pierce said. “I should put him away. Done one twenty in this thing against a headwind.”
“No special effects.” Christo touched his arm. “Please.”
It was just the sort of challenge Pierce would hand himself, one more small stone in the legend he was building. But he just smiled and waved, hissing through his teeth, “Your mother’s head in a plastic bag, Nazi.”
The cruiser peeled back, U-turned across marshy median grass.
By the time Pierce turned onto the gravel drive that led through dark and aromatic woods to the house (erected in 1909 by his great-grandfather with the proceeds from a cotton mill and two tuberculosis sanatoria in the Adirondacks), snow had begun to fall. He coasted around the last curve, leaned back and let woolly flakes melt on his face. With its exposed rafter ends, incised shutters and jigsawed eaves, the house looked like a huge chocolate cuckoo clock.
“Like going back in time, isn’t it?” Pierce surveyed his patrimony from the running board. “To the golden age of the robber barons.”
Inside, Christo stared at his reflection in the dusty glass bell sheltering a stuffed canary while Pierce chased around turning on lights and thermostats. The furnace kicked on, blowing musty fumes, and Christo said he needed some coffee. Badly.
Improbably shiny copper pans and utensils hung from the kitchen beams. Pierce filled the kettle and got French roast beans out of the freezer. The coffee maker took paper filters but none could be found, so Pierce substituted a scarf that had belonged to his grandmother. The resultant brew had a faintly iridescent surface. Christo lifted his cup, blew, sipped.
“Mmmm.” He smacked his lips. “Tastes like old neck.”
It was in an upstairs corner room, at a slate billiard table with mother-of-pearl inlay and ball-and-claw feet, that Pierce and Christo convened to discuss the Morocco operation. They puffed stale cigars and played Chicago rotation by the light of frosted candleflame bulbs.
“Give me your assessment on quality,” Pierce said, lining up a knotty three-ball combination.
“Devastating. Couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.”
“You brought a sample?”
“Fuck no. I went out of there clean, baby. An investment like that, I wasn’t going to get popped at the airport for a couple of measly ounces.”
“That’s not like you.”
“Maybe not. You’re disappointed I didn’t screw up?”
“Hey, you’re my hot prospect, my rookie phee-nom. Would I let you fall short?”
Christo flubbed a delicate onion slice on the ten ball. “Not so far.”
“You’re sitting right smack on top of the biggest score of your life, so cheer the hell up. Show a little faith in yourself.”
“Tell it to the Swede.”
“What about him?”
“We were what you call incompatible.”
“Really?” Pierce appraised the end of his cigar, began to pace. “Maybe it figures. The man has the battle stars and he’s been through some hard campaigns. But I have to say I didn’t fill you in all the way on Tommy Ulrich before you left.”
“Let’s have it.”
“I heard — from a highly impeachable source, mind you — that he had a breakdown three years ago, burned out some circuits.”
“Shit.” Christo flung cue chalk across the room. “So you sent me over there without a map.”
“Take it easy. I didn’t want you to get, as it were, psyched out.”
“Thanks a lot. So who told you?”
“His wife.”
A sickening gyroscope spinning around his brain, Christo slumped onto the window seat. Always the last to know when the joke’s on you. Outside thinly layered snow had turned ghost blue under the moon. He pressed his fingers to the cold pane, then his eyes.
“You all right?” Pierce meant to be solicitous, but sounded annoyed.
“Relax. I’m not going to bleed on the furniture.” Forebodings were best left where they were. Trite phrases would do: “I’m tired out is all. Overworked.”
“Country air will take care of that. A respite among the evergreens, that’s my prescription.”
Christo moved his eyes slowly over the shadowy room. “I don’t know about this place. Too much gloom, too many spooks.”
“Exactly. That’s why I come here. The sacred ground of the ancestors. They’re my people, those spooks, and I need to get in touch, replenish the spirit now and then. Great uncle Lydon who owned half of Nova Scotia at one time and held the state record for brown trout up until the fifties. My grandfather, who appeared drunk before the Supreme Court. And Granny Syl, she gave me the money to swing my first major dope deal. I told her I needed something to live on while I wrote a novel. But they’re all gone now and I’m the only one holding on. My parents come here for a week every summer and bitch about the property taxes. So it’s me. Everything flows into me. The magic fucking power of the ancestors and I’m the only one who sees how valuable it is.”
“How valuable it is,” Christo repeated. “I despise the rich.”
They dined on a muddy goulash of canned goods and went early to bed.
These rooms were glacial with gentility, outlined in trickery and clutter, overfed on the trivial seductions of the past — yachting trophies on the mantel, seashells in a reed basket, a fez set rakishly atop a bust of Longfellow. Christo could only react to it as a job site. He’d been checking the layout all morning, conjecturing what ought to be taken and what left behind: the thief’s triage. And he was watched every step of the way by the brushstroke eyes of china statuettes, the faces in countless photographs whose posed implications were as unbending as noon light on rich wood surfaces all around, brown in a dozen languages.
On the porch in his overcoat, Pierce hunched over his typewriter, banging away at preliminary notes for a detective story. No title yet, but it would involve treachery on the international commodities market and plutonium secreted in someone’s toothpaste.
Over the last few days they had not been getting along well. Tension and close quarters: a recipe for spite. Pierce didn’t help matters any by making a point of competition — gin rummy, backgammon, twenty questions, even Candyland and Lotto, children’s board games dredged up out of musty drawers.