“From which I can escape whenever I wish.” Somehow he managed to draw himself still taller. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I refuse.”
“Harry, you told me-”
He shoved his hands into his pockets. He raised his strong chin. “I know what I told you. That I would do whatever you said, whenever it involved matters of security. But this does not. You’re insisting on this because you wish to punish me for that silly article in the Times.”
There was maybe some truth in what he said.
“That was Carlyle,” he announced. “I had nothing to do with it. If I had been responsible, the article would have been more than an insignificant little filler.”
I didn’t really believe that he was innocent, but I believed that, right now, he believed it. “So you’re suggesting what?”
“That I come along while you inspect the grounds.”
I shook my head. “It’s too open out there.”
“But Chin Soo is not there. He cannot be. You said so. And what if he is? Tell me, Phil, am I in any less danger inside the building? What about the Hotel Ardmore? Was it not you who pointed out that he nearly reached me there? What happens if he comes for me here, in my room, while you are outside?”
He had a point.
I walked over to the bed and sat down. I looked over at him. “Harry. Listen. Maybe it’s time to bring the cops in on this.”
“No. I told you. That is out of the question.”
“Or at least let me wire New York,” I said. “Have them send some people from London.”
“And how would I explain those? Shall we tell Lord Robert and Lady Alice that they are all my secretaries?”
“Why not just tell them the truth, tell them-”
He shook his head. “Absolutely not.”
“Harry, why is seeing the grounds so damned important?”
“The grounds of Maplewhite are celebrated, Phil. The forest, the extensive lawn, the fabulous gardens.” He pulled his hands from his pockets and held them out to me. “Would you deny me a chance to see all these, to drink in their legendary beauty? And what will I say when people ask me about them? Shall I say that Houdini never saw them, because he was busy cowering in his room?”
I slipped my watch from my pocket. Ten minutes to eleven.
It was probably safe out there. Better to give way now, I told myself. If I did, maybe he would listen to me later, when it wasn’t safe.
“An hour or two,” he said. “Only an hour or two. And then we can return to the rooms.”
I sighed again. “Okay,” I said.
“Ah, Phil, wonderful!” He stepped over to the bed, clapped me on the shoulder. “ Wonderful!” When I was sitting down, his eyes were level with my own. They were shimmering with pleasure.
He was easy to please. All you had to do was give him whatever he wanted.
“Okay, Harry,” I said. “Okay. Go on downstairs. I’ll be right there.”
“Certainly, Phil,” he beamed.
When he left, I opened my traveling bag and lifted the false bottom. I removed the small automatic Colt and one of the spare magazines. I replaced the bottom, closed the bag, dropped the magazine into the left pocket of my coat.
I hefted the Colt. It wasn’t much of a gun and it didn’t really have much heft. But that was why I’d brought it along-if anyone found it, it would seem like the sort of gun that might be carried by the sort of person I was supposed to be.
I pulled back the Colt’s slide and released it. The slide jumped forward, chambering a cartridge. I flicked on the safety and slipped the pistol into the coat’s right pocket.
The Manor House sat broad and monumental in the center of six or seven acres of mowed lawn, a solitary square mountain in the center of a rolling green prairie. There were some trees scattered around, alone or in clusters, and a garden or two, and some fountains. But most of it was open space. If I could stick a couple of men in each of the two towers, no one would be able to approach the building during the day without being seen. I didn’t have a couple of men to stick in the towers.
The Great Man and I walked along a gravel path that ran around the perimeter. We kept the trees to our left. Even in the sunshine, the woods were dark. Tall shaggy pines crowded the ragged maples and oaks. Black plumes of fern drooped in the dense gray shadows. An entire army could hide itself in there, and some dancing girls, and all their relatives.
Walking beside me, the Great Man was drinking in the legendary beauty. He strolled with his head held high and his eyes wide open beneath the brim of his fedora. His arms were behind his back, left hand clutching right hand.
He took a deep breath and he hummed for a moment with pleasure. “Smell that air, Phil,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“It is a magnificent place, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“And a magnificent day.”
It was. The air was warm and clear and it smelled of new beginnings, fresh starts. Birds chattered and chittered in the trees. The blue of the sky and the green of the grass were as bright and slick as fresh paint. I resented it. I had things on my mind and all that brightness and beauty were distractions.
I said, “Yeah.”
“You know,” he said, “being here, amidst this loveliness, this serenity, makes me think that perhaps I should begin to consider my retirement from the stage.”
“Yeah?”
“Have I not produced enough astonishments for mankind to marvel at? Have I not sufficiently baffled the most sophisticated audiences in the most cosmopolitan cities of the world?”
“Probably.”
He sighed. He shook his head. “You cannot imagine how fatigued I sometimes become, Phil. How weary. Always creating some new way to enthrall and astound them. Always devising some new and even more impossible escape. Sometimes I actually wish that I could…” His voice trailed off. He sighed again, shook his head again.
I smiled. “Escape from it all?”
He turned to me and nodded. “Exactly, yes. Exactly. Perhaps the time has come for me to live as other men do. Perhaps, finally, the time has come for me to think only of myself. And of Bess, too, naturally. Perhaps it’s time for the two of us to find a haven of our own, a place where we can-” He stopped walking. “Look there, Phil!”
I stopped and I looked. A squirrel bounded across the lawn, a ripple of red fur atop the grass.
I said, “It’s a squirrel, Harry.”
He grinned, excited. “But it is an English squirrel, Phil. My first English squirrel.”
“You’ve been in England before.”
“Yes, but I was trapped in London then. I’ve never seen the countryside, never seen the wildlife.”
“It’s a squirrel, Harry.”
“Think of it, Phil. Ancestors of that squirrel may have witnessed the signing of the Magna Carta.”
“Maybe even signed it themselves.”
He looked at me and frowned. “You have no romance in you, Phil.”
“Probably not,” I said.
We kept following the gravel walkway around that immense sunswept lawn. To our right, a hundred yards away, beyond some clumps of trees, the rear of Maplewhite rose up like a castle.
I kept telling myself that it was safe out here. That there was no one around who represented a threat. Not yet.
We were about halfway around the walkway when I saw someone coming toward us. On horseback, about a quarter of a mile away, at the far curve of the gravel path.
The Great Man had stopped drinking in the legendary beauty. He was telling me about the time he had jumped from the Belle Isle Bridge into the Detroit River. It had been in December, he said, and the river had been frozen, and he had jumped into a hole in the ice wearing handcuffs. The current had been stronger than he expected and it had carried him away beneath the ice, seven inches thick, and he had survived by breathing the thin layer of air just beneath the ice’s surface. Not much of this was true but I didn’t bother to point that out.
Then he said, “Someone is coming, Phil.”
“Yeah,” I said. “A woman.”
She was dressed in black. The big black horse beneath her moved in a lazy walk as they came toward us along the gravel path.