“Sounds fascinating.”
“It was, actually,” McBride said. He rapped out a rhythm on the table with his fingertips. Tippety tip tip! Five taps. “Something as abbreviated as that could do the trick.”
“Really. Well, not so surprising, I guess. Aural memory tends to be sequential so that once you initiate a progression of sounds, the mind tends to complete the sequence. So, where else did you go?”
“I was supposed to go on to Jamaica.”
Shaw waited for McBride to continue. When he did not, the psychiatrist broke the silence. “Yes?”
Suddenly, McBride couldn’t speak. There was an ache in the back of his throat that had to do with flying back to San Francisco from Port-Au-Prince, bringing home his tapes and photographs and notes. It was expensive, flying back, but his apartment was a good place to write and, what was even more to the point, it gave him a chance to spend time with Judy and Josh. They could be a family—if only for a few days each month.
The news of Judy’s pregnancy had come hard on the heels of the news that he’d won the fellowship, and they’d agreed that he couldn’t pass up the chance it represented—that they’d just make the best of it. He would come home, as often as possible, and that would be that.
And that’s exactly the way it was. In the months before Josh was born, Judy had come to join him for a week here and a few days there—whenever she was able to take time off from her own career as a graphic designer. But that stopped when Josh arrived because… well, for one thing, they couldn’t afford it and, even if they had been able to, the places he was going were no place for a baby.
“Lew?” Doctor Shaw leaned forward, his forehead wrinkling with concern.
McBride could hear a helicopter outside and, down the street, a siren moving closer, with its fluctuating wail. Sunlight poured through the slats of the venetian blinds, striping the bloodred, oriental carpet.
No place for a baby.
“Lew?”
He had the sensation that the pattern of light and shadow had risen up from the floor, and shone through his brain. And that the wail of the siren was the inconsolable bawl of an infant.
A baby.
He heard Shaw’s voice, but it was very faint, and muffled, as if it were traveling a long distance, or moving through layers and layers of insulation.
“Jeff? What’s going on? Are you all right?”
He didn’t reply. He was in the ochre room. The nursery. The abattoir. He had the bat in his hand, the Louisville Slugger that Judy kept in the umbrella stand by the door. He could feel it cracking bone, then sinking into the soft melon-flesh of, first, his son, and then his wife. The blood was flying, misting the air. He was skating in it, slipping and swinging until there was nothing left of Joshua and Judy but pulp.
Chapter 31
Finding out about Calvin Crane was about as easy as taking a cab to the New York Public Library. Walking past the magnificent stone lions that guard its entrance, Adrienne climbed the stairs to the third floor reading room, where she found a much-thumbed copy of Who’s Who among a shelf of reference books. Taking the burgundy tome to a mahogany conference table, she sat down beside an elderly man with a nimbus of flyaway hair, and searched for Crane’s entry. Finding it, she began to read:
Philanthropist, foundation head. B. July 23, 1917, Patchogue, N.Y. Yale, ‘38. Harvard Law, ‘41. Atty., Donovan, Leisure (New York), 1942, 1945. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), London, Basel, Maj., 1942-5. Central Intelligence Group (CIG—Washington, D.C.), 1946-7. Foreign Service Officer, Dept. of State (Zurich), 1947-9. Secretary-Treasurer, Institute of Global Studies (IGS), 1949-63 (Zurich). President and Treasurer, IGS, 1964-89; President Emeritus, IGS, 1989-. Legion d’Honneur, 1989. Member, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderburger Society. Clubs: Yale, Century, Athenaeum. Residence: Longboat Key, Florida.
Adrienne sat back in her chair, and drummed her fingertips on the open page. As she did, the old man to her right gave her a sidelong glance, then returned to the book he was reading: Secrets of the Great Pyramid.
The Who’s Who entry required a certain amount of deconstruction, Adrienne thought. Harvard and Yale suggested money. Then a job at some law firm, interrupted by the war. OSS. That was spy stuff. Then back to the law firm. Then a spy again, and then a job with State—in Switzerland where, she noticed, he’d been before. After that, the foundation job. For forty years. Prestigious clubs and honors, capped by a Florida retirement.
Prematurely ended by her crazy sister.
There had to be more. Getting up from her chair, she went to the reference desk and asked directions to the periodicals reading room, which turned out to be just down the corridor. With a librarian’s help, she selected microfiche spools from the New York Times, Miami Daily News, and the Sarasota Star-Tribune. Each of the spools covered the same period in October when Crane had been killed.
Sitting down at one of the readers, she went from obit to obit until she had a sense of the man—if not an understanding of her sister’s relationship to him.
The references to the OSS were especially interesting. From what she read, the organization had been formed under the influence of British intelligence at the outset of World War II. Like its European counterpart, it had recruited from the country’s upper classes, drawing as much as possible from the best schools and most prestigious firms on Wall Street. According to the Times, the OSS was “at once the principal precursor of the CIA, and a transatlantic Old Boys network par excellence.”
As if to emphasize the point, there was a page of photographs—billed as “a visual tribute”—in the Star-Tribune, showing Crane at different ages. As a young man, he’d been almost movie-star handsome, with bold eyebrows, a strong chin, and a shock of thick dark hair that fell, Kennedyesque, over his forehead. He was shown shaking the hand of Franklin Roosevelt; posing on the slopes around Gstaad with Allen Dulles; clinking champagne flutes with de Gaulle; and escorting Audrey Hepburn through the front doors of the Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb. Forty years in Switzerland, give or take a day. Lawyer, spy, foundation head. How do you make that transition, Adrienne wondered. And then Florida. Where he supported a slew of good causes, including the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra, the Conch-House Preservation Society, and Native Ground, an ecological group dedicated to combating the overthrow of native flora by invasive species. Before his confinement in a wheelchair, those causes and the game of golf seemed to constitute the major parameters of the old man’s life.
It was all very interesting, Adrienne decided, but it didn’t tell her anything about why her sister took a train to Florida and shot him. It occurred to her that Nikki might have imagined Crane to have been one of the men who’d “abused” her, but it seemed a stretch. In fact, if his Who’s Who entry was accurate, Crane had been living in Switzerland all during the time that Nikki had been growing up.
Returning to her hotel, Adrienne found the red diode blinking on the telephone next to the bed. Retrieving the message—Call ASAP, any hour—Ray Shaw—she phoned him at his home.
“We’ve had a breakthrough,” Shaw told her.
“Fantastic! So… “ She cleared her throat. “So come on, who is he?”
“Well, he’s a very troubled man.”
“Doc…”
“His name is Lew McBride—Lewis with an ‘e.’ That’s the good news. The bad news is: he beat his wife and son to death with a baseball bat.”
“What!?”
“I think you heard me, though whether this is another fantasy of his—or something else—we can’t be sure.”