"Dr. Charlie"… doctor to the poor, medical man with a social conscience. A strange friend for Brightman? This was an interesting question, and I pondered it, but it wasn't so interesting that I failed to notice the passage of time. That girl never seemed to get off the phone. One of the kids, a black with beads of sweat gleaming in his hair, began to shiver, and I wondered what he was on. I closed my eyes. I did Russian verb tenses, tried to think of the book I should have been working on. But at long last the girl from the office appeared in the doorway and looked toward me. "Could you come with me, please?"
I could, and did: along the hall, through a doorway, into the staff room — cheap chrome chair, dinette table, mugs turned upside down on a paper towel to dry. I was now at the rear of he house. The girl held a door open at the back of the room. "This is his study. Could you just wait here? He'll be down in a sec."
I stepped past her. Oddly, the room I entered immediately reminded me of Brightman's though it was almost exactly the opposite — very small, very dim, with a low, cramped feeling. In a way, it was more like my own workroom in Charlottesville, for it too was a winterized sun porch: the ceiling and walls were tongue-and-groove boards, and a pair of battered French doors gave onto a weedy, tangled garden. I listened as rain rushed off the roof and slapped at the leaves. Still, despite this, it was Brightman's room that I thought of. It was a retreat, in the same way, and overstuffed in the same way — though with books rather than pictures. Bookshelves were everywhere; brick-and-board shelves teetering against a wall, shelves made from old orange crates piled one on top of the other, even an old glass-fronted bookcase shoved into a corner. I've always snooped at other people's reading, and here you could hardly avoid it. There were some medical texts, as you might expect, a sagging shelf of journals and an old encyclopedia, but mostly there were paperbacks, rows of them, thousands. Many, I saw, were very old, with that peeling cellophane stuff they used to coat them with, and a lot were ancient Penguins from the days when they had uniform covers. Orange for novels. Blue for biographies. I pulled one out. The pages felt sugary under my fingers, like the pages of The Royal Gazette I'd handled in Cadogan's office. But then, I realized, many of these books were from precisely that era. You and the Refugee, a Penguin "Special"… What Hitler Wants by E. O. Lorimer… Germany Puts the Clock Bach "A New Edition with Additional Material Added April and August 1938." That had been precisely one year before the outbreak of war, two before May's adoption — so it was possible that Brightman might have stood here and seen this very book, newly purchased, on Grainger's desk. I poked along the shelf, my eye caught by a row of uniform red hardbacks. Pulling one down, I saw they were all Left Book Club editions from the thirties: The Coming Struggle for Power by John Strachey. Soviet Communism: A New Civilization by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. A Handbook of Marxism by Emile Burns… Once upon a time, it seemed, Dr. Charlie's do-gooding had possessed an edge: he'd had at least an intellectual interest in the Left.
But just then — I still had Strachey's book in my hand — he came into the room.
I smiled. It was hard to imagine this old gentleman as a rebel or protester of any kind. Dr. Charlie was very short, with a kindly, lined face and a shock of fine white hair that sprayed up from his head. Dressed in a white doctor's gown, he was the sort of elderly medical man who might have given sage advice to a young Dr. Kildare. He eyed me. "Now, then," he said, "you're not Harry Brightman."
"I'm sorry, Doctor. The young lady misheard me. I want to talk with you about Brightman but my name's Robert Thome."
"Charlie Grainger." He stuck out his hand — small, firm, warm. Then he grinned, "To tell you the truth, I'm relieved. If you had been Brightman, I would have been seeing a real ghost from the past." He pointed. "Have a seat. You should find a chair under those books."
He went around behind a desk in front of the French windows, where he too had to clear a space for himself. I said, "You like to read, Doctor."
"Well, what I really like is understanding… not that I claim to." He looked around the room. "In fact, all these books merely add up to three questions. Number one: 'Who benefits? Who profits?'"
"Lenin's question?"
"If you like. But lots of other people have asked it. Then comes 'Who rules the rulers?' which is the wise man's question, and finally 'What the hell will they do to us next?' which is my question."
I smiled. I wondered how old he was. Well over seventy, certainly. Now, settled behind his desk, he folded his hands in front of him and eyed me with a bright, questioning concern. I almost expected him to ask: What ails?
I said, "I assume you haven't seen Brightman lately?"
"I haven't heard his name in thirty years, Mr. Thorne. Maybe more. I'm surprised I recognized it… Funny, though. I did, right away."
"Well, he's missing. That's what I wanted to ask you about. Two weeks ago, he left his home, and no one's seen him since."
"That's too bad. I hope nothing's wrong. So… you're from the police?"
"No. I'm a friend of his daughter's. She asked me to help look for him."
He shrugged. "I don't know what to say. I certainly haven't laid eyes on him. You don't think he'd come here? You realize, I only knew him very briefly, and that was a long time ago."
"I understand. But part of the mystery around Brightman's disappearance is the motive. His health was good, he had money. In fact, in the weeks before he vanished, the only thing troubling him was his daughter's adoption. He seemed to want to tell her about it."
For a moment he looked uncomfortable, which was more or less what you'd expect. But then, recovering himself, he smiled. "It was all such a long time ago, Mr. Thorne."
"Yes."
"Did he tell her about it?"
"No."
"But you want to ask me about it?"
"Yes. But I don't want to put you on the spot. Let's say that I've read the petition, talked to Harry Brightman's lawyer about it, and have therefore drawn the obvious conclusion."
"Which is?"
"The child Brightman was adopting was his own illegitimate daughter."
There was a moment's silence, but finally Grainger gave a shrug and a little wave of his hand. "I probably shouldn't comment on that… but maybe it's a little late in the day to get sticky over ethics. Let's proceed as though your conclusion were true. What difference does it make? So far as I'm aware, there was nothing about the adoption to disturb anyone."
I said, "I'm not sure what difference it makes… or that it makes any at all. I suppose that's why I'm here. His daughter — her name is May — doesn't know the true story, but I'm sure — as you say — that it wouldn't disturb her. If anything, I think she'd be pleased…"
"Is she close to her father?"
"Very."
"Then you'd think she'd definitely be pleased. And why not tell her? As I remember him, Brightman wasn't the squeamish type — perhaps some people would feel a certain embarrassment about that sort of confession, but not enough to make them disappear. After all, his daughter is a grown woman now." He leaned back, hooking his arms behind the chair. "It sounds to me, Mr. Thorne, as if you're barking up the wrong tree."
"Well, probably I am… but there are still a couple of things that make me curious."
"Such as?"
"Think about what you just said, Doctor. Why not tell her? I'm sure that most adopted children are sometimes anxious about their status, their relationship with their adoptive parents. Brightman could have allayed all those anxieties. Yet he never did. Perhaps you wouldn't have told a young girl the full story, but, as you say, May is now a grown woman. But he never told her the truth. How come?"