Atropos (11 page)

There was a phone call he was supposed to make. To a woman. He felt something stronger than the wind down in his groin. He raised his head. His dick was twitching. He looked at it as though he’d never seen it before.

“What is this?” he asked it. “Nostalgia?”

He started to laugh. He rolled over and grabbed the phone and dialed. He was still smiling when the call went through.

“Regina?” he said. “Hi. This is Mark Van Horn. I understand you’ve been trying to get in touch with me.”

She who measures the thread of life ...

M
ARK WAS DOING A FAVOR
for his mother. That was the rationale. The real reason was that he had always wanted to poke around inside his father’s safe. Mark Van Horn had been forbidden very little in life, but he had been forbidden to look into that safe.

What was even more amazing was that this order came not from the housekeeper, or from Ainley Masters, but directly from the Senator himself. Mark was forbidden to mess with the safe and, more amazing still, further forbidden from telling anyone his father had mentioned it.

It was silly, in a way. At the time the safe had been put off limits, Mark had been a twelve-year-old kid with a fixation on caper movies and a toy stethoscope, with which he used to listen to all the locks in the house, and through which it was impossible even to hear his own heartbeat. If he wanted to cat-burgle any place (as he frequently did), he had to steal a key or sneak in through the window. He had about as much chance of getting into a combination lock as he had of growing up to be a member of the Other Party. All the Senator had succeeded in doing was filling his son’s mind with curiosity about that safe, and making him carry on his burglar fixation long past the time it would have died a natural death. Mark had very nearly (but not quite) been thrown out of two private schools for testing his continually developing skills on safes in headmasters’ offices.

The Van Horn name and Van Horn money smoothed over those situations, and by the time he started college, Mark had more or less lost his mania for getting into places. Or rather, the nature of the places he wanted to get into had changed. Regina Hudson had been one of the nicer places he had gotten into.

The only lock he still wanted to open was on his father’s safe. One day, on a visit to Switzerland to see his mother, he decided to break the second part of the law.

“Ella?” he said. His mother liked him to call her Ella. She said being called “Mother” made her feel too old. “Ella, what does the Senator keep in the wall safe in the bedroom?”

“What bedroom, dear?”

“The master bedroom in the Georgetown house.”

“There is no wall safe there.”

“Yes, there is.”

Ella sniffed. She had a fine, thin nose. Delicate nostrils. Very good for sniffing. “If there is, he put it in after I left him.”

“I suppose so.” Mark’s parents had split up when he was twelve, and he was thirteen before he found out the safe existed, so it was possible. He had just assumed it had always been there, since he hadn’t been aware of its installation. On the other hand, he was away at school so much, they could have installed lead lining and turned the place into a fallout shelter without Mark’s necessarily having been aware of it.

“In any case,” Ella went on, “it can’t be anything very important. Ainley Masters takes all the important things and puts them in a vault somewhere underground. I tried to tell your father that someday, Ainley will sell that stuff back to the Van Horn family for a billion dollars, but he wouldn’t listen to me.” She sniffed again. “He never listened to me. I think Ainley poisoned his mind. Would you care for a drink, dear? I’m going to ring down for one.”

Mark had checked his watch. Eleven thirty-five
A.M.
One of Ella’s better days.

“I don’t know how important it is,” Mark said, “but he told me never to go near it or he’d whip me.”

Ella’s blue eyes widened. “Your father said that?”

“He did. He also told me never to mention it to anyone. Including Ainley.”

Ella’s eyes lit up. She half-sat, half-collapsed into a chair. She spread the fingers of a bone-china hand across her chest and sat there blinking.

“Ella? Mother? Are you all right?”

“Oh,” Ella said. “I wonder if it ...”

“What do you wonder?”

“If the
letter
could be in there?”

“Letter?”

“Oh. Oh, Mark dear. I don’t know if I should tell you.”

There was a knock on the door. A pitcher of dry martinis for his mother. Mark took it, poured, and handed his mother the glass. She sipped at the top layer as if she’d never tasted gin before and wasn’t sure how she liked it. Mark knew the pitcher would be gone before the sun went down. That was one of the reasons his visits to his mother were so infrequent.

“After the size of your reaction, I’d say you have to tell me, now.”

She sampled the liquor again, rolling it around in her mouth and looking heavenward, still trying to decide if she liked it. This would go on for five minutes. Then she’d decide she loved it.

Ella sighed. She had a good nose for sighing, too. “I suppose you ought to know. You’re not my little baby anymore, you’re a strong man now. I should trust you to take care of me.”

Mark smiled sadly. The habit of loving his mother had not been broken, but he knew that habit was all it was. His mother was weak and venal and ineffectual, everything he despised.

“Tell me about the letter, Ella,” he said.

She told him. It was after one of the Senator’s multitudinous extramarital flings, but “before he burned up that Italian girl, of course.” Instead of facing the situation with her usual resignation, Ella had gotten angry and, worse, had threatened to make a fuss. She knew how the Van Horns felt about fusses.

The Senator had been contrite. He wrote her a letter, begging forgiveness.

“It was quite sweet, in a way,” Ella said. “He said it was a weakness that grew from the strength of his Dutch sea-captain forebears, and other romantic lies. The truth, of course, is that your father’s brains are in his testicles. In any case, he begged me to forgive him, and while he couldn’t promise to conquer the weakness once and for all, he did say I was the only one he had ever loved, and if he ever did anything to drive me away, he would quit politics and sign over completely his entire share of the family businesses.”

“He didn’t,” Mark said.

“Oh, he did, dear, and signed it. The whole thing, in fact, was in his handwriting.”

“He must have been crazy. You could destroy him at any moment. You still can.”

Ella looked horrified. “I never would!” she said. “If I let your father throw it all away, he can’t leave it to you, can he, dear? I know you’ve been preparing yourself to be everything it means to be a Van Horn.
I’m
certainly not going to ruin it for you.”

She sniffed, then took a long pull at her drink. This martini stuff was pretty good, after all. “Besides,” she went on, “I couldn’t if I wanted to. He got the letter back somehow. I used to keep it in my overnight case, you know, the one I kept packed for when your father would be just
too
outrageous with some woman. Then came that Italian girl. I waited a decent interval after he managed to get himself cleared—protecting the family to the last, you see—then walked out for good. When I got to my hotel, I looked for the letter. I was going to mail it back to your father, you know, a noble gesture. But it was gone.”

“He had ample opportunity to take it back,” Mark said.

“I know, I know. It’s just that you wondered about the safe. That was all I could think of that he’d want to keep secret from Ainley Masters.”

Ella smiled at her son. “But, of course, that’s foolish. Lord knows your father isn’t Einstein, but even he wouldn’t be stupid enough not to burn that letter once he got hold of it again.” She looked up from her drink. “Would he?”

Mark smiled back. “You’d like to find out, wouldn’t you?”

“If it still exists, I’d like to get it back again and send it to your father. I owe myself the grand gesture, don’t you think?”

Mark continued to smile. “Next time I visit him,” he said, “I’ll do what I can to find out. If the letter’s there, I’ll mail it back to him in your name.”

Ella pouted. “But Mark, dear, it’s supposed to be
my
grand gesture.”

“You might forget.”

“Listen to you talk. A person would think you didn’t trust me.”

“What kind of son wouldn’t trust his own mother?”

“A smart kind,” Ella said flatly, and suddenly, it was impossible to tell she’d had anything to drink at all. “You just keep it up, dear. And remember to take care of your mother when you’re running the country.”

There had been nothing to it. All he had to do was arrange his end-of-term visit to D.C. so that he
just missed
his father, who’d be back in the home state keeping them happy in the outposts of the empire, or off on a fact-finding trip to some balmy place with a comely member of his staff to take notes or whatever else the Senator was dishing out. No suspicion was aroused. That sort of thing happened often enough by accident. Mark would do what he always did—let Mrs. Rodriguez spoil him for a few days, then take off himself. The only thing he had to worry about was being caught in the master bedroom with a stethoscope.

The first night, he went to his father’s empty room just to look the thing over. It had been years since he’d seen it, and he’d known nothing about safes at the time. Comparing his memory of it with what he’d learned since, he didn’t think it would be much trouble, but if he was going to need anything special, better to know now.

There was a mirror in front of the safe, rather than a picture. Mark was sure that had never aroused any suspicion, either. The Senator’s major asset as a Senator was his Senatorial good looks, and he was quite well known for never missing an opportunity to admire them. People would have been more surprised if Hank Van Horn
hadn’t
had an extra mirror hanging on the wall of the bedroom.

The mirror swung away from the wall on hidden hinges. The knob read “MasterSecure 500.” Nothing great, but not total garbage, either. Not much harder than what a headmaster might keep in his office, at any rate. Mark wasn’t going to do this with just his fingertips, though. If he was really serious about getting into this thing, he might have to drill it. Nitro, of course, was out of the question. Mark smiled and shook his head at himself for even thinking of it. He must have wanted into that thing even more than he’d been willing to admit to himself. Well, he’d have to go back to his room and decide just how badly he did want to get in there, because he wasn’t about to do it tonight.

Unless ...

How stupid
was
his father? Or, how mentally sloppy had a life of effortless power, of having all his messes cleaned up after him, made him? Maybe they were both the same question. Either way, Mark’s answer was “Quite a bit.” So he stood there for a while and twiddled knobs.

This kind of safe would carry a four- or five-digit combination. The Senator certainly wouldn’t carry a slip of paper around with the combination written on it. He’d want something that would be easy for him to remember. That was the kind of thinking that had let burglars into a thousand safes. The Senator usually got better advice than that. Ainley Masters, for instance, wouldn’t have let him get away with it for a second.

But this was the Senator’s own secret. Ainley Masters was to know nothing about it. No one was to know anything about it. Mark had found out only because he had been a nosy little kid, poking into everything. The Senator had figured him harmless.

Even now, Mark wasn’t sure that he intended his father any harm. His mother’s story had given him the impetus to do this after years of merely wanting to, but Mark wanted to get into this safe as much to find something to admire about his father as about anything else. What was it, he wondered, after a lifetime of letting his life be run by his grandfather, his older brother, Ainley Masters, that had led Hank Van Horn to his first act of defiance? Since, Mark was sure, it would fall to him to run his father’s life, it was his duty to the family to find out.

He tried combinations. He tried his father’s birthday. He tried his mother’s birthday, which might have been suitable if all this really turned out to be that stupid letter. On the same theory, he tried the day his parents had been married, and the day they split up. No luck. Mark tried his own birthday, then 7-4-7-6 in the hope that the Senator had set the combination in a fit of patriotism.

Nothing. Mark frowned and started to turn away. He’d be back with a drill. Or not. It all depended on how this escapade looked in the light of the morning.

Then he had a hunch. He didn’t know, and would
never
know, where it came from. It was just
there,
and it refused to be ignored.

Mark spun the dial to 8-8-7-4. August 8, 1974. The day before the resignation of Richard Milhous Nixon as President of the United States. The date Miss Giuseppina Girolamo had been reduced to a few greasy ashes. He could almost feel the tumblers meshing.

Mark felt something crawling on his forehead. Sweat. He grabbed the handle, hoping that it wouldn’t move when he pulled it.

It practically jumped in his hand. The door swung open before Mark had even told his muscles to pull.

Inside was a small, rectangular parcel wrapped in stiff white paper that was yellowing at the bent places. Mark could see bumps and lines embossed in the side of the paper toward him. Typewriting. Not just a piece of paper. A letter.

Not, however, the letter his father had written to his mother. That, according to Ella, had been handwritten.

Mark reached inside the safe and removed the parcel, then swept his hand around to see if there was anything else inside. Nothing, not even dust.

The paper had been neatly folded around whatever was inside, but it hadn’t been sealed. It was stiff, but not brittle enough to break or tear when Mark removed it. He was grateful for that. All he needed to do was to leave little flakes of paper on the floor in front of the safe. It would be nice to be able to refold the thing and put it back the way it was, if that’s what he decided to do.