No one answered. George Van Dorn said, “You’re perfectly welcome to stay.”
Kitty Van Dorn added, “No one should travel on the subway to Brooklyn so late.”
“I thought,” said Abrams, “I might actually take a taxi.”
Again there was a silence. Abrams didn’t know if this was amusing or awkward, if it was democracy in action or an act of noblesse oblige. They were trying, but he was getting a bit of a headache.
George Van Dorn found his cigar butt in the ashtray and lit it. “Did Claudia get you everything you needed, Abrams?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Good.” He blew a billow of gray smoke. “She’s a client, you know. Not hired help or anything like that.”
“So she said.”
“Did she?” He settled back in his armchair. “Her grandfather was Count Lepescu — a leader of the Rumanian resistance during the German occupation. I guess that makes her a countess or something. She’s staying here for a while.”
Abrams glanced at Joan Grenville, who was sitting cross-legged contemplating the fire, her dress hiked back to her thighs. Abrams had a vision of a sorority-house weekend at Wellesley or Bennington, lots of beer, junk food, guitars, and chirpy voices. Strewn casually on the chairs was fifty thousand dollars’ worth of ski gear, and strewn casually on the floor were the skiers. There were pert little ski-slope noses and breasts to match, and dozens of pink toes with no nail polish. There was so much straw-colored hair and so many blue eyes that it looked like a cast party for Village of the Damned. There would be a huge red winter sun setting below a snowy-white birch-covered hill, and the fire would crackle. He’d never seen any such thing, but neither had he ever seen his pancreas, yet he knew it was there.
“The Reds grabbed him,” said Van Dorn.
Abrams looked at him. “Who…?”
“Count Lepescu, Claudia’s grandfather. Didn’t like his title. Shot him. Shipped the family to some sort of work camp. Most of them died. Nice reward for fighting the Nazis. War is shit. Did I say that?”
“George,” reprimanded Kitty Van Dorn, “please watch your language.”
“The Russians are shits too. Like to shoot people.” He finished his drink. “After Stalin croaked, what was left of the Lepescus were released. Claudia’s father wound up in a factory. Married a factory girl, and she gave birth to Claudia. The father was rear-rested and disappeared. The mother died a few years ago. We’ve been trying to get Claudia out for some time.”
“Who’s been trying?”
“Us. We finally shipped her out last autumn. Working on a citizenship now.”
“Why?”
Van Dorn looked at Abrams. “Why? We owed. We paid.”
“Who owed?”
“O’Brien, Kimberly and Rose.”
“I thought you meant your old intelligence service.”
No one spoke. Tom Grenville walked to the window. “The car’s out front. Maybe we should get moving.”
Van Dorn looked at his watch. “Where the hell is Claudia, anyway? It takes that girl forever to get dressed.”
Abrams put his drink on the mantel. “She’s coming?”
“Yes,” answered Grenville. “What table are you at?”
“I think it’s table fourteen.”
Tom Grenville’s eyebrows rose. “That’s with O’Brien and Katherine.”
“Is it?”
Van Dorn flipped a cigar ash in his glass. “That’s my table, too. The firm took eleven tables this year. We used to take twenty or thirty… ” He stubbed out his cigar. “One of you ladies should go hustle her highness along.”
Claudia came into the small room wearing a black silk evening dress with silver shoes and bag. “Her highness is ready. Her highness’s ladies-in-waiting are on strike. Her highness apologizes.”
Kitty Van Dorn said, “You look absolutely stunning.”
Abrams thought he would have bet a week’s paycheck that someone was going to say that.
Claudia looked at Abrams. “Will you ride with us?”
Abrams nodded. “If there’s room.”
Van Dorn said, “Plenty of room. Let’s go.”
They put on their coats and stepped into the cool wet night. A stretch Cadillac was waiting at the curb, and a chauffeur in gray livery held open the door. Abrams climbed in last and took a jump seat facing the rear.
George Van Dorn found the bar quickly and began to make himself a drink. “This stuff seems to taste better in a moving vehicle — boats, planes, cars…”
Kitty Van Dorn looked apprehensive. “It’s going to be a long evening, George.”
Joan Grenville said, “Not if he keeps drinking like that.” She laughed, and Abrams saw Tom Grenville kick her ankle.
As the car moved off, Van Dorn raised his glass. “To Count Ilie Lepescu, Major Henry Kimberly, Captain John Grenville, and to all those who are not with us tonight.”
They sat in silence as the limousine made its way up Park Avenue. Claudia leaned forward and rested her hand on Abrams’ thigh. He sat back and regarded her. She looked vaguely Semitic in the dim light, and he thought it was his fate to become involved with women who were mirror images of himself. There were no Joan Grenvilles or Katherine Kimberlys in his life, and there were not likely to be. Which, he thought, was probably — definitely — for the best.
George Van Dorn looked as if he were going to propose another toast but instead handed Abrams his glass. “Kill it,” said Van Dorn.
His wife patted his hand as though he’d done something fine and noble. Van Dorn, too, looked pleased with himself for resisting the temptation to arrive at a destination with most of his faculties impaired.
Yet there was something about Van Dorn that belied his outward self-satisfaction and shallow good fellowship. Abrams saw it in his eyes, in Van Dorn’s manner when Van Dorn and O’Brien were together. Patrick O’Brien did not suffer fools, and therefore Van Dorn was no fool. He was part of that inner circle that Abrams called the Shadow Firm — the other O’Brien, Kimberly and Rose, the one that defended intelligence agents pro bono and sent and received encoded telex messages. George Van Dorn was one of the few people who had access to the room marked DEAD FILES.
Abrams lit a cigarette. He was, he thought, good at mysteries. That had been his job and his life. He’d never tired of the mysteries — he’d tired of the solutions, which were, in almost every case, insipid, disappointing, and commonplace.
If he’d had a flaw as a detective, it was this tendency to imagine or hope that at the end of the trail there would be something interesting or complex. But there never really was. The human drama was more often unintended comedy; the motivations for human action were depressingly trivial.
Still, he had followed the clues and had run the foxes to ground and accepted the pat on the head, while wishing the fox had been a larger beast that when cornered would fight back with the same cunning it had shown in evading him. He had always wished for a dangerous beast.
If one analyzed and thought about it — which he had been doing since the first of May — then there were logical explanations for every suspicion he had about this firm. Yet it was the sheer mass of circumstantial evidence that, in a cumulative form, refused to be explained away. He was still too much of a cop to ignore what he saw, what he felt, and what O’Brien had said to him on the observation roof.
The car slowed as it approached the mass of vehicles around the armory.
Abrams stubbed out his cigarette. Yes, tonight would be revealing. And on Monday, Memorial Day, when he entered the Russian estate in Glen Cove, he might have some answers.
The driver got out and opened the curbside door.
George Van Dorn announced, “Last stop.”