The Key to Midnight (32 page)

Harrod’s Telex address had long been “Everything, London.” In two hundred departments, the legendary store carried everything from specialty foods to sporting goods, chewing gum to Chinese art, from rare books to rubber boots, faddish clothes to fine antiques, nail polish to expensive oriental rugs—a million and one delights.

Alex and Joanna ignored all the exotic merchandise as well as most of the mundane stuff. They purchased only two sturdy umbrellas and a set of plain but well-made steel cutlery.

In the privacy of a stall in the ladies’ room, Joanna unwrapped the package of cutlery. She examined each piece and chose a wickedly sharp butcher’s knife that she concealed in her coat pocket. She left the other knives behind when she departed.

Now both she and Alex were armed. Carrying concealed weapons was a more serious offense in London than it would have been almost anywhere else in the world, but they weren’t concerned about spending time in jail. Walking unarmed into Tom Chelgrin’s hotel room would have been by far the most dangerous course they could have taken.

Outside Harrod’s they hailed another cab and followed a winding, random course through rain-slicked streets, until Alex was certain that they were not being followed. They got out of the cab three blocks from the Churchill.

Using the umbrellas to hide their faces as much as to shield them from the rain, they approached the hotel from its least public aspect. Rather than barge through the front entrance and across the Regency-style lobby, where they were most likely to be spotted by a lookout, they used an unlocked rear door meant for hotel deliveries, and they quickly found a service stairwell.

“Better leave your bumbershoot here,” Alex said. “We’ll want our hands free when we get there.”

She stood her umbrella beside his, in the corner at the bottom of the stairs.

“Scared?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Want to back out?”

“Can’t,” she said.

Though they were whispering, their voices echoed in the cold stairwell.

He unbuttoned his coat and withdrew the 9mm pistol that had been jammed under his belt. He put it in an overcoat pocket and kept his hand on the grip.

She put her hand on the butcher’s knife in her pocket.

They climbed the stairs to the fourth floor.

The corridor was brightly lighted, deserted—and too quiet.

They hurried along the hallway, glancing at room numbers. In spite of the elegant decor, Alex couldn’t shake the feeling that he was in a carnival funhouse and that a monster was going to spring at them suddenly from a door or out of the ceiling.

Just before they reached 416, Alex was stopped abruptly by a vivid premonition: an intense vision like the brief but commanding burst of a camera’s electronic flash. In his mind’s eye, he saw Tom Chelgrin spattered with blood. Never before had anything like that happened to him, and he was shaken both by the weirdness of it and by the wet, red vividness of the image.

Joanna stopped beside him, gripped his arm. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s dead.”

“What? The senator? How do you know?”

“I just... I do. I’m sure of it.”

He took the pistol from his coat pocket and continued along the corridor. The door to 416 was ajar.

“Stand behind me,” he said.

She shuddered. “Let’s call the police.”

“We can’t. Not yet.”

“We have enough proof now.”

“We don’t have anything more than we had yesterday.”

“If he’s dead—that’s proof of something.”

“We don’t know he’s dead,” Alex said, though he knew. “Besides, even if he is—that’s not proof of anything.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“We don’t have anywhere to go.”

He used the pistol to push the door all the way open.

Stillness.

The lights were on in the suite.

“Senator?” he said softly.

When no one answered, Alex stepped across the threshold, and Joanna followed him.

Thomas Chelgrin was facedown on the drawing-room floor.

Tom Chelgrin was unquestionably dead. The quantity of blood alone was sufficient to eliminate any doubt.

The senator was wearing a blue bathrobe that had soaked up a great deal of blood. The back of the garment was marred by three bloody holes. He had been shot once at the base of the spine, once in the middle of the back, and once between the shoulders. His left arm was extended in front of him, fingers hooked into the carpet, and his right arm was folded under his chest. His head was turned to one side. Only half his face remained visible, and that was obscured by smears of blood and by a thick shock of white hair that had fallen across his eye.

Alex closed the door to the hall and cautiously inspected the rest of the small suite, but the killers were not to be found. He had known they would be gone.

When he returned to the drawing room, Joanna was kneeling beside the corpse. Alarmed, he said, “Don’t touch him!”

She looked puzzled. “Why not?”

“It won’t be easy to walk out of here and into our hotel if you’re covered with bloodstains.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You’ve already got blood on the hem of your coat.”

She glanced down. “Damn!”

He pulled her to her feet and away from the corpse. With lus handkerchief, he rubbed at the stain on her coat. “It doesn’t look good, but it’ll have to pass.”

“Shouldn’t we check him over? Maybe he’s alive.”

“Alive? Look at those wounds. They used a weapon with a hell of a punch. All this blood. He’s dead as a man can be.”

“How did you know he’d be here like this? Out there in the hall, how did you know what we’d find?”

“Hard to explain,” he said uneasily. “I’d call it a premonition if that didn’t sound too crazy. But it does sound crazy, and I’m no clairvoyant.”

“So it wasn’t just a hunch, professional instinct, like you’ve said before?”

He recalled the alarmingly vivid mental image of the blood-spattered corpse, and although the position and condition of the real body did not perfectly match the details of the vision, the differences were not substantial.

“Weird,” he said.

She stared at the cadaver and shook her head sadly. “I don’t feel a thing. No grief.”

“Why should you?”

“He was my father.”

“No. He surrendered all those rights and privileges a long time ago. He didn’t mourn for Lisa. He let them do ... all they did to you. You don’t owe him any tears.”

“But
why?
” she wondered.

“We’ll find out.”

“I don’t think so. I think maybe we’re in some sort of gigantic Chinese puzzle. We’ll keep climbing into smaller and smaller boxes forever, and there won’t be answers in any of them.”

Alex wondered if she might go to pieces on him after all. He wouldn’t blame her if she did. She was right: This was her father, after all. She appeared to be calm, but she might be suppressing her feelings.

Realizing that he was worried about her, Joanna conjured a ghost of a smile. “I’ll be okay. Like I told you—I don’t feel a thing. I wish I did. I wish I could. But he’s a stranger to me. They took away all memory of him.” She turned away from the body. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Not yet.”

“But what if they come back—”

“They won’t be back. If they’d known Chelgrin had made contact with us, and if they’d wanted to kill us, they would’ve waited right here. They think they got to him before he got to us. Come on. We have to search the place.”

She grimaced. “Search for what?”

“For anything. For everything. For whatever little scrap might help us solve this puzzle.”

“If the maid walks in—”

“The housekeeper’s already been here this morning. The bed’s freshly made.”

Joanna took a deep breath. “All right, let’s finish this as fast as we can.”

“You follow me,” Alex said. “Double-check me, make sure I don’t overlook something. But don’t touch anything.”

In the bedroom, Chelgrin’s two calfskin suitcases were on a pair of folding luggage racks. One case was open. Alex pawed through the clothes until he found a pair of the senator’s black socks. He pulled them over his hands: makeshift gloves.

Chelgrin’s billfold and credit-card wallet were on the dresser. Alex went through them, with Joanna watching closely, but neither the billfold nor the wallet contained anything unusual.

The closet held two suits and a topcoat. The pockets were empty.

Two pairs of freshly shined shoes were on the closet floor. Alex slipped the shoe trees out of them and searched inside. Nothing.

A shaving kit stood beside the sink in the bathroom: an electric razor, shaving powder, cologne, a comb, a can of hair spray.

Alex returned to the open suitcase. It also proved to contain nothing of interest.

The second suitcase wasn’t locked. He opened it and tossed the clothes onto the floor, piece by piece, until he found a nine-by-twelve-inch manila envelope.

He took off the makeshift gloves and emptied the contents of the envelope onto the dresser: several age-yellowed clippings from The New York Times and The Washington
Post;
an unfinished letter, apparently in the senator’s handwriting, addressed to Joanna. Alex didn’t take time to read either the letter or the newspaper pieces, but from a quick scan of the clippings, he saw that they were all fourteen or fifteen years old and dealt with a German doctor named Franz Rotenhausen. One of the articles featured a photograph of the man: thin face, sharp features, balding, eyes so pale that they appeared to be all but colorless.

Joanna flinched as if she had been bee-stung. “Oh, God. It’s him. The man in my nightmare. The Hand.”

“His name’s Rotenhausen.”

“I’ve never heard it before.” She was shaking badly. “I... I never thought I’d s-see him again.”

“This is what we wanted—a name.”

She looked toward the open door between the bedroom and the drawing room, as if Rotenhausen might walk through it at any moment. “Please, Alex, let’s get out of here.”

The face in the grainy photograph was hard, bony, vampiric. The pale eyes seemed to be staring into a dimension that other men couldn’t see.

Alex felt the hairs bristling on the back of his neck. Perhaps it
was
time to leave.

“We’ll read these later,” he said, stuffing the clippings and the unfinished letter back into the envelope.

In the drawing room, the dead senator still lay where they had last seen him. Alex had half expected the corpse to be missing. Or standing up, swaying, grinning at them. After recent developments, anything seemed possible.

Alex and Joanna ate lunch in a busy café near Piccadilly Circus.

Heavy rain sluiced down the windows, blurring modern London until only the ancient lines of the city were visible. The inclement weather was a time machine, washing away the years.

Over thick sandwiches and too many cups of tea, they read the old clippings from
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post.

Franz Rotenhausen was a genius in more than one field. He had degrees in biology, chemistry, medicine, and psychology. He’d written many widely recognized and important papers in all those disciplines. When he was twenty-four, he lost his hand in an automobile accident. Unimpressed with the prostheses available at that time, he invented a new device, a mechanical hand nearly as functional as flesh and bone, controlled by nerve impulses from the stump and powered by a battery pack. Later, he’d spent eighteen years as a lecturer and research scientist at a major West German university. He was mainly interested in brain function and dysfunction, and especially in the electrical and chemical nature of thought and memory.

“Why would they let anyone work on this?” Joanna asked angrily. “It’s George Orwell time. It’s
1984,
for God’s sake.”

“It’s also the route to ultimate power,” Alex said. “And that’s what all politicians are after. So of course they funded his work.”

Fifteen years ago, at the peak of a brilliant career, Franz Rotenhausen had made a terrible mistake. He’d written a book about the human brain with an emphasis on recent developments in behavioral engineering, contending that even the most drastic of techniques-including brainwashing—should be used by “responsible” governments to create a dissension-free, crime-free, worry-free Utopian society. His greatest error was not the writing of the book but his subsequent failure to be contrite after it became controversial. The scientific and political communities can forgive any stupidity, indiscretion, or gross miscalculation as long as public apologies come loud and long; humble contrition doesn’t even have to be sincere to earn a pardon from the establishment; it must only
appear
genuine, so the citizenry can be allowed to settle back into its usual stupor. As controversy grew in the wake of the publication, however, Rotenhausen had no second thoughts. He responded to critics with increasing irritation. He showed the world a sneer instead of the remorse it wanted to see. His public statements were given an unusually threatening edge by his harsh voice and his unfortunate habit of making violent gestures with his steel hand. European newspapers were quick to give him nicknames—Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Frankenstein—but those soon gave way to another that stuck: Dr. Zombie. He was accused of wanting to create a world of mindless, obedient automatons. The furor increased. He complained that reporters and photographers were hounding him, and he was intemperate enough to suggest that they would be his first choice for behavior modification if he were in charge. He steadfastly refused to back down from his position, and thus he was unable to take the pressure off himself.

“I can usually sympathize with victims of press harassment,” Alex said. “But not this time.”