“Mark, one of the terms of our agreement…”
“To hell with our agreement! Will you tell me or won’t you?”
The small man looked even smaller now. He seemed to be shivering. He rose, backed toward the door of Jenner’s suite. His hand fumbled for the opener button.
“Where are you going?” Jenner demanded.
“Away. I don’t dare let you keep asking me about him. You’re too convincing. And you mustn’t make me tell you. You mustn’t find out who he is. Not ever.”
“Holly! Come back here! Holly!”
The door slammed. Jenner stood in the middle of the room staring at it, slowly shaking his head. Hollis had bolted like a frightened hare. He was afraid of me, Jenner realized. Afraid I’d make him talk.
“All right,” Jenner said out loud, softly. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to find out for myself.”
It took him ten days to find out. Ten days in which he delivered eleven sterling performances in No Roses for Larrabee, ten days in which he felt the increasing encroachment of the stranger in his mind, ten days it which Mark Jenner and the stranger blurred even closer together. Or the seventh of those ten days, he received a phone call from Helene long distance. He stared at her tired face in the tiny screen and remembered how like a new-blown rose she had looked on the morning after their wedding, in Acapulco, and he listened to her strangely subdued voice.
“…visiting New York again in a few weeks. Mind if I stop up to see you, Mark? After all, we’re still legally married, you know.”
He smiled and made an empty reply. “Be glad to see you, Helene. For old times’ sake.”
“And of course I want to see the play. Can I get seats easily?”
“If you try hard enough, you can scrape up a seat in the balcony for fifty bucks,” he said. “But I’m allotted a few ducats for each show. Let me know the night, and I’ll put a couple away for you.”
“One’s enough,” she said quietly.
He grinned at her, and they made a bit of small talk, and they hung up. She was obviously angling for a reconciliation. Well, he wasn’t so sure he’d take her back. From what he’d heard, she had done a good bit of sleeping around in the past three years, and she was thirty-four now. A successful man like Mark Jenner might reasonably be expected to take a second wife, a girl in her twenties, someone more decorative than Helene was now. After all, the other had married again, and he had done it only because his first wife did not mix well with the party bigwigs—not primarily because she had been cheating on him.
Three days later, Jenner knew the identity of the nameless man in his mind.
It was not really hard to find out. Jenner hired a research consultant to do some work for him. What he wanted, Jenner explained, was a list of members of the House of Representatives who fulfilled the following qualifications: they had to be in their early forties, more than six feet tall, residents of an eastern state, married, divorced, and married again, with two children by the second wife. They had to be in their second term in the House, and had to be considered likely prospects for a higher political post in the near future. These were the facts Hollis had allowed him to retain. Jenner hoped they would be enough.
A few hours later, he had the answer he was hoping for. Only one man, of all the 475 representatives in the one hundredth Congress, fit all of the qualifications. He was Representative Clifford T. Norton, Republican, of the Fifth District of Massachusetts.
A little more research filled in some of Representative Norton’s background. His first wife had been named Betty, the second Phyllis. His children’s names were Clifford Junior and Karen. He had gone to Yale as an undergraduate, then to Harvard Law, thereby building up loyalties at both schools. He had been elected to the House in ’86 after a distinguished career as district attorney, and he had been returned by a larger plurality in the ’88 elections. His term of office expired in January of 1991. He hoped to move into the other wing of the Capitol immediately, as junior senator from Massachusetts. In recent months, according to the morgue file Jenner’s man consulted, Norton had shown sudden brilliance and persuasiveness on the House floor.
It figured. Now Norton was a politician with the mind of an actor grafted to his own. The combination couldn’t miss, Jenner thought.
Jenner felt an odd narcissistic fascination for this man with whom he was a brain-brother; he wanted anxiously to meet Norton. He wondered whether Norton had managed to uncover the identity of the actor whose tape Hollis had crossed with his own; and, Jenner wondered, if Norton did know, was he proud to share the memories of Broadway’s renascent idol?
It was the last week in March 1990. Congress was home for its Easter recess. No doubt, Representative Norton was making ample use of his new oratorical powers among the home folks, as he began his drive toward the Senate seat. On a rainy Tuesday afternoon Jenner put through a long-distance phone call to Representative Norton at his Massachusetts office. Jenner had to give his name to a secretary before Norton would come to the phone.
Norton’s voice was deep and rich, like Jenner’s own. He did not use a visual circuit on his phone. He said, “Hello there, Jenner. I was wondering when you were going to call me.”
“You knew about me, then?”
“Of course I knew! As soon as that play opened and I read the reviews, I knew you were the one!”
They arranged a meeting for two the following afternoon, at the home of Walt Hollis in Riverdale. Hollis had once given Jenner a key, and somehow Jenner had kept it. And he knew Hollis would not be home until five that afternoon, which gave them three hours to talk.
That night, Jenner phoned the theater and let the stage manager know that he was indisposed. The stage manager pleaded, but Jenner stood on his contractual rights. That evening Lloyd Lane played the part of Jack Larrabee, to the dismay of the disgruntled and disappointed audience. Jenner spent the evening pacing through the five rooms of his suite, clenching his hands, glorying masochistically in the turmoil and hatred bubbling inside him. He counted the hours of the sleepless night. In the morning, he breakfasted late, read till noon, paced the floor till half past one, and took the undertube to Hollis’ place.
He used the key to let himself in. There was no sign of Norton. Jenner seated himself in Hollis’ neat-as-a-pin living room and waited, thinking that it was utterly beyond toleration that another man should walk the earth privy to the inmost thoughts of Mark Jenner.
At two-fifteen, the doorbell rang. Jenner activated the scanner. The face in the lambent visual field was dark, strong chinned, square, powerful. Jenner opened the door and stood face to face with the only man in the universe who knew that the nine-year-old Mark Jenner had eaten a live angleworm on a dare. Clifford Norton stared levelly at the only man in the universe who knew what he had done to twelve-year-old Marian Simms in her father’s garage, twenty-nine years ago.
The two big men faced each other for a long moment in the vestibule of Hollis’ apartment. They maintained civil smiles. They both breathed deeply. In Jenner’s mind, thoughts whirled wildly, and he knew Norton well enough to be aware that Norton was planning strategy too.
Then the stasis broke.
The animal growl of hatred burst from Jenner’s lips first, but a moment later Norton was roaring too, and the two men crashed heavily together in the middle of the floor. They clinched, and one of Norton’s legs snaked between Jenner’s, tumbling him over; Norton dropped on top of him, but Jenner sidled out from under and slammed his elbow into the pit of Norton’s stomach.
Norton gasped. He lashed out with groping hands and caught Jenner’s throat. His hands tightened, while Jenner tugged and finally dragged Norton’s fingers from his throat. He sucked in breath. His knee rose, going for Norton’s groin. The two men writhed on the floor like raging lions, each trying to cripple and damage the other, each hoping to land a crushing blow, each trying ultimately to kill the other.