The Chancellor Manuscript (17 page)

“I asked you a question. Now, you answer me! Where can I find Longworth?”

“I don’t know! I met him in California.”

“Where in California?”

“He doesn’t live there. He lives in Hawaii. Damn it, let go of me!”

“When you tell me what I want to know!” MacAndrew pulled Chancellor forward, then slammed him back into the wall. “Is he in Honolulu?”

“No!” Peter’s head ached beyond endurance, the pain spreading across his right temple, shooting down to the back of his neck. “He’s in Maui. For Christ’s sake, you’ve got to let
go
of me! You don’t understand—?”

“The hell I don’t! Thirty-five years down the chute. When I’m needed.
Needed
. Can you understand that!” It was not a question.

“Yes.…” Peter grabbed the soldier’s wrists with all the strength he had left. The pain was awful. He spoke slowly. “I asked you to listen to me. I don’t care what happened; it’s not my business. But I
do
care that Longworth used you to get to me. No book’s worth it. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?
It’s a little late for that!” The soldier ex-ploded again, smashing Peter back into the wall. “This happened because of a goddamned book?”

“Please! You can’t—?”

There was a crash beyond the door. From the living room. It was followed by a terrible moaning—half chant, half mad, a toneless singsong. MacAndrew froze, his eyes on the door. He released Peter, throwing him into the desk as he reached for the doorknob. He pulled the door open and disappeared into the living room.

Chancellor supported himself on the edge of the desk. The room was spinning. He inhaled deeply, repeatedly, to regain his focus, to lessen the pain in his head.

He heard it again. The moaning, crazy singsong. It grew louder; he could distinguish the words.

“… 
outside is frightful but the fire is so delightful and since we’ve no place to go
, … 
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
 …”

Peter limped unsteadily to the study door. He looked into the living room—and wished he hadn’t.

MacAndrew was on the floor, cradling a woman in his arms. She wore a torn, disheveled negligee that barely covered a faded nightgown, itself old and worn. All around were fragments of shattered glass. The tulip stem of a smashed wine goblet rolled silently on a small rug.

MacAndrew was suddenly aware of his presence. “Now you know what the damaging information is.”

“… 
since we’ve no place to go, Let it snow! Let it snow!
 …”

Peter did know. It explained the old house way out in the country, the unlisted telephone, and the absence of an address at the Pentagon Directory. General Brace MacAndrew lived in isolation because his wife was mad.

“I see,” said Chancellor quietly. “But I don’t understand. Is this why?”

“Yes.” The soldier hesitated, then looked back at his wife, lifting her face to his. “There was an accident; the doctors said she had to be sent away. I wouldn’t do that.”

Peter understood. High-ranking generals in the Pentagon were not permitted certain tragedies. Other varieties, yes. Death and mutilation on the battlefield, for instance. But not this, not a tormented wife. Wives were to remain deep in the shadows of a soldier’s life, interference denied.

“… 
when we finally kiss good night, how I’ll hate going out in the storm
 …”

MacAndrew’s wife was staring at Peter. Her eyes grew wide, her thin, pale lips parted, and she screamed. The scream was followed by another. And another. She twisted her neck and arched her back, the screams wilder, uncontrollable.

MacAndrew held her tightly in his arms and stared up at Chancellor. Peter backed further into the study.

“No!” roared the general. “Come back out! Go to the light! Get by the light; put your face above the shade. In the
light
, goddamn you!”

Simply, blindly, Peter did as he was told. He edged his way toward a lamp on a low table and let the spill wash up into his face.

“It’s all right, Mal. It’s all right Everything’s all right.” MacAndrew swayed back and forth on the floor, his cheek hard against his wife’s face, calming her. Her screams subsided.

They were replaced with sobs. Deep and painful.

“Now, get out of here,” he said to Chancellor.

Old Mill Pike swung west out of Rockville before turning south into the Maryland highway that led to Washington. The highway was nearly twenty miles from MacAndrew’s house, the old road to it cut out of the countryside, twisting and turning around massive boulders and rock-dotted hills. It was not rich country. But it was remote, isolated.

How MacAndrew must have searched for such a location! thought Chancellor. The setting sun was directly in front of him now, filling the windshield with blinding light. He pulled down the visor; it didn’t help much. His thoughts returned to the scene he had just left.

Why had the disturbed woman reacted so hysterically to the sight of him? He had been in shadow when she’d first seen him. She calmed down when he followed MacAndrew’s command to go into the light Could he have resembled someone so completely? Impossible. The windows of the old house were small, and the trees outside were full and tall, blocking the late afternoon sun. The general’s wife could not have seen him that clearly. So perhaps it wasn’t his face. Yet what else could it have been? And what nightmares had he evoked?

Longworth was despicable, yet he had made his point. What better way than to offer the pathetic figure of MacAndrew as the object of the most ruthless type of extortion? Taking Longworth’s premise that Hoover’s private files survived and could be used viciously, the general was the perfect subject The man in Chancellor was outraged, the writer primed. The concept was valid; there was a novel in the premise. He had a beginning based in recent events, Daniel Sutherland had provided the facts. And an example of what might have been; he himself had observed it.

He felt his energy flowing. He wanted to write again.

A silver car pulled alongside; Peter slowed down, allowing it to pass in the blinding yellow sunlight. The driver must know the road, thought Chancellor. Only someone familiar with the curves would pass, especially with the sun filling the windshield.

The silver car, however, did not pass. It stayed parallel; and if Peter’s eyes were not playing tricks on him, it narrowed the space between them. Chancellor looked
across the diminishing gulf. Perhaps the driver was trying to signal him.

He was not—
she
was not. The driver was a woman. Her dark hair, crowned by a wide-brimmed hat, fell over her shoulders. She wore sunglasses, and her mouth was a splash of red lipstick emphasizing her pale white skin. An orange scarf billowed out from the top of her jacket. She stared straight ahead as if oblivious to the automobile beside her.

Peter pressed his horn repeatedly; the cars were inches from each other. The woman did not respond. A sharp downhill curve to the right appeared in the road. If he braked, he knew he would slide into the silver car. He held the wheel firmly to negotiate the turn, his eyes switching back and forth from the road to the automobile perilously close to him. He could see more clearly; the sunlight was blocked by trees.

It was an S curve; he swung the wheel to the left, his foot cautiously on the brake. The blinding light returned to the windshield; on his right he could barely make out the gully that lay beyond the road’s shoulder. He remembered seeing it when he’d driven out an hour before.

The impact came! The silver car collided with the side of his. It was trying to force him off the road. The woman was trying to send him into the gully! She was trying to kill him!

It was Pennsylvania all over again! The silver car was a Mark IV Continental. The same make of car he had driven that terrible night in the storm. With Cathy.

There was a flat stretch of road at the bottom of the hill. He stabbed the accelerator with his foot; sending his car forward in a burst of speed.

The Continental kept pace; his rented Chevrolet was no match for it. They reached the foot of the hill, the flat road now the course. Chancellor’s panic prohibited clear thought and he knew it He should simply stop the car … 
stop the goddamned car
 … but he could not. He had to get away from the horrible silver apparition.

His breath came erratically as he held the pedal against the floorboard. He drew slightly ahead of the Continental, but the silver mass of steel surged forward, its gleaming grill pounding the side of his door.

The dark-haired woman stared straight ahead impassively as if unaware of the terrible game she played.

“Stop it! What are you doing?” Peter screamed through the open window. She acknowledged nothing.

But the Mark IV dropped back again. Had his screams gotten through? He gripped the wheel with all his strength; perspiration covered his hands and rolled down his forehead, adding to the blindness of the sunlight.

He was jolted; his head snapped back, then crashed forward into the windshield. The impact came from behind. Through the rearview mirror he could see the glistening hood of the Continental. It crashed again and again into the trunk of the Chevrolet. He swung to the left side of the road; the Mark IV did the same. The pounding continued. Peter weaved back and forth. If he stopped now, the larger, heavier car would plow into him.

There was nothing else he could do. He spun the wheel violently to the right; the Chevrolet lurched off the road. A final crash propelled the rented car into a lateral spin; it swerved, the tail swinging to the forward left side, causing it to smash sideways into a barbed-wire fence.

But he was off the road!

He slammed his foot back onto the accelerator.
He had to get away
. The car bolted into the field.

The sickening thud of a collision came. Peter ducked, hovering over the wheel, his whole body lifted off the seat. The motor raced thunderously, but the Chevrolet had stopped.

He had crashed into a large rock in the field. Involuntarily, his neck arched back on the seat; blood ran down his nostrils profusely, mingling with the perspiration on his face.

Through the open window he saw the silver Continental racing away to the west down the flat stretch of road in the sunlight. It was the last thing he saw before his eyes closed.

He could not tell how long he’d been there, slumped in his own darkness. In the distance he heard the sound of a siren. Then soon a uniformed figure was outside the window. An arm reached in and turned off the ignition.

“Can you respond?” the patrolman asked.

Peter nodded. “Yes. I’m all right.”

“You’re a mess.”

“It’s just a nosebleed,” replied Chancellor, fumbling for a handkerchief.

“Do you want me to radio for an ambulance?”

“No. Help me out. I’ll walk around.”

The officer did. Peter limped into the field, blotting his face, finding his sanity again.

“What happened, mister? I’ll need your license and registration.”

“It’s a rented car,” said Chancellor, taking his wallet from his pocket, withdrawing his license. “How come you’re here?”

“Headquarters got a call from the owner of the property. Over there. That farmhouse.” The patrolman gestured toward a house in the distance.

“They just called? They didn’t come out?”

“It was a woman. Her husband’s not home. She heard the crash and the racing motor. The circumstances were suspicious, so headquarters told her to stay inside.”

Chancellor shook his head, bewildered. “The driver was a woman, too.”

“What driver?”

Peter told him. The officer listened; he pulled a notebook from his pocket and wrote it all down.

When Chancellor had finished, the patrolman studied his notes. “What are you doing in Rockville?”

Peter did not want to mention MacAndrew. “I’m a writer. I often take long drives when I’m working. It clears the head.”

The officer looked up from his notebook. “Wait here. I’ll radio in.”

Five minutes later, the man returned from the patrol car, shaking his head.
“Jesus
! What they let on the road these days! They got her, Mr. Chancellor. Everything you said checked out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Crazy bitch was spotted outside of Gaithersburg. She played chicken with a goddamned mail truck! Can you beat that? With a mail truck! They got her in the drunk tank. Her husband’s been called.”

“Who is she?”

“Wife of some Lincoln-Mercury dealer in Pikesville. Got a record of drunken driving; her license was revoked a couple of months ago. She’ll get off with probation and a fine. Her husband’s a wheel.”

The irony was not lost on Peter. Ten miles back a broken man, a career soldier with no future, cradled a tormented woman in his arms. Ten or twenty miles ahead
an automobile salesman was racing down the highway, the fix already begun.

“I’d better get to a phone and call the rental agency about the car,” said Chancellor,

“No sweat,” replied the patrolman, reaching into the Chevrolet “I’ll take the keys. Give them my name, and I’ll meet the tow truck. Tell them to ask for Donnelly, Officer Donnelly in Rockville.”

“That’s very nice of you.”

“Come on, I’ll drive you into Washington.”

“Can you do that?”

“Headquarters cleared it. The accident took place within our municipal limits.”

Peter looked at the patrolman. “How did you know I was staying in Washington?”

For an instant the officer’s eyes went blank. “You’re pretty shook up. You mentioned it a few minutes ago.”

The silver Continental came to a stop beyond the bend in the road. The wail of the siren diminished in the distance. Soon it would fade, and the man in uniform would do his job. A man hired to impersonate a nonexistent police officer named Donnelly, to provide Peter Chancellor with erroneous information. It was part of the plan—as was the silver Continental, the sight of which would have to terrify the novelist, evoking memories of the night he had nearly been killed.

Everything had to be orchestrated swiftly, thoroughly; each thread of truth, half-truth, and lie woven quickly throughout the net so that Chancellor would not be capable of distinguishing one from the other. All had to be accomplished within a matter of days.