The Sandler Inquiry Part 109

She was reclining in her seat, as motionless as the death that had long been intended for her. Leslie McAdam, he thought, turning over the sound of her name in his mind. Trapped in a world of terror and duplicity, locked into an ident.i.ty which was hers but wasn't hers. Gifted with the paternal talents of the artist, d.a.m.ned to the vengeance of the bogus father. Unwilling to use her real name of Sandler, unable to advertise the name of McAdam. A life on the run, jumping from shadows, until protection could be purchased from a bunch of sleazy white-collar headhunters in Was.h.i.+ngton.

Sell us your soul, theyd told her. Help us kill. We'll give you your own life in return. Thomas weighed the exchange. He probably would have made the same decision himself. What are ethics when your life is at stake? Crucify your ethics on a cross of expediency.

Why not?

He thought of his father, the man living a lifetime of illusion and deception. In retrospect, it seemed so clear. So obvious. Why had no one ever seen it? ' A committed Marxist, probably from boyhood.

Growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, racism and ethnicism and @ inequity all around him. The sweatshops. The Depression.

Educating himself in the Public Library as a teenager. Scrounging admittance to City College, where the brilliant radical thinking would hone his scalpel of a mind. Somewhere there he'd been recruited.

Somewhere then he'd turned into a spy. Was it a Calling he had sought for himself or was he, like a priest, Chosen?

It must have happened early, thought Thomas. Sometime in his father's nineteenth year. As a freshman. Thereafter the guise started. The guise of the self-made right-wing zealot, the criminal lawyer . seeking to bilk the legal structure for all it was worth, at the same time undermining it; sending despicable wealthy capitalists off to combat n.a.z.ism in Germany, then cas.h.i.+ng them in, arranging for their slaughter, and introducing a master spy as a replacement.

The master spy who inhabited the ident.i.ty of Arthur Sandler, then leaped, like a possessing demon, into the ident.i.ty of Adolph Zenger.

"The ruthless b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Thomas caught himself thinking, conjuring up the image of his father, tousle-haired, center stage in the courtroom, cunning, arrogant, shrewd, brilliant as ever. An image that lived in Thomas's mind, an image of the father whose blood flowed in Thomas's veins. Yet could Thomas indict him for his principles, for believing so fervently in a system other than what Thomas believed in? The real failure of the father, Thomas realized, was within a force that no man could control.

The force of nature and human character. The father was an extremist, the son a man of moderation. No lifelong ruses, no connivances, no deceptions or calculations could in the end swerve Thomas Daniels. He was a man of the sane center, or at least liked to think he was. So now he was in an airplane with dawn breaking over Rhode Island, on his way to undo-or end-what his father had spent a lifetime helping to construct.

The pilot threw a switch in the cabin. Soft lights flickered on above the heads of Hammond, Leslie, and Thomas.

The pilot spoke to them.

"Better be waking up" he said; 'we'll be setting down in another twenty minutes' Leslie came quickly to consciousness . Hammond had already been awake and jittery. Daniels yawned. Good advice from the pilot, he reasoned. An airplane should always have as many safe landings as takeoffs.

They touched down a few minutes before dawn on the southern coast of Nantucket Island. By prearrangement an empty, unmarked Ma.s.sachusetts State Police car had been left for them at the airfield.

The keys were in the backseat ashtray.

Hammond tossed the rifle and its carrying case into the rear seat.

Leslie joined it. Thomas, after a moment's hesitation, sat in the front with Hammond.

"Know the way, huh?" asked Hammond.

"Let's hear it.

Thomas began to direct them. Halfway through the ride, he became again aware of the loaded pistol, safety catch in place, which Hammond had given him.

Two images flashed before him.

He thought of Leslie whirling, pistol in hand, in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Sandler mansion, a finger squeeze away from killing an innocent man by accident. And then that image was replaced by a separate vision, one resurrected from longer ago. In a forest in Pennsylvania, Thomas stood, rifle in hand, watching a struggling deer coughing blood and trying to flee though a shoulder had been shattered by Thomas's bullet.

He remembered the terror in the animal's eyes, the blood it had coughed, and his father's hand on the rifle, prohibiting Thomas from firing a merciful second bullet.

"Let the blood flow," Daniels, Senior, had said.

"That's the way of nature " His father had owned a deer rifle with an American flag carved on its stock.

Leslie leaned forward to Thomas and spoke.

"I was meaning to ask you . . " she said.

"How did you have the nerve to bring Whiteside face to face with me' - "There was no nerve at all," he admitted, She was perplexed.

"But he was insisting I was an impostor. Suppose he continued to claim-" He was already shaking his head.

"I went on the a.s.sumption that he and Hunter were who they said they were" Thomas explained.

"And by that time I knew you probably were, too."

"How?"

"You appeared for all the world to be an elaborate hoax," he said.

"There's no way I couldn't have drawn that conclusion."

"And so?"

He motioned to Hammond, bleary-eyed and steering the car.

"Then you didn't have me shot, despite the fact that you'd already shot someone that same day."

"What did that prove?"

"Maybe nothing. But I figured an impostor would have had me killed. I knew too much" She leaned back in her seat, thinking.

"Clever," she said.

"Call it a lucky guess' he conceded.

"I was still pretty nervous" Dawn was breaking. @'re almost there," he said to Hammond.

Chapter 38 The borrowed State Police car pulled to a halt before the old house inhabited by the man known as Zenger. Between Hammond, Leslie, and Thomas they continued to refer to him as Zenger. They had no other handle for him.

The radio in the car, in the ten-minute drive from the airport, had been turned to a Cape Cod station. The lead story continued to be the heavy acc.u.mulation of Soviet and Polish fis.h.i.+ng trawlers in Cape Cod waters, just beyond the territorial limits a hundred miles south of Nantucket. The fis.h.i.+ng vessels, equipped with elaborate antennae and radar devices not usually necessary for fis.h.i.+ng, had drawn attention not just from the local radio and fishermen. Virtually every spare Coast Guard boat was monitoring their movements. Their presence was that unusual. It had to signify something As the State Police car pulled to a halt, the three of them stepped out briskly. Their breaths were in small clouds before them on the cold, windy morning.

"Curtains are down" said Hammond, his eyes set back from the bags beneath them an the lines which surrounded them.

"He's expecting us."

"A lot of people sleep with the shades down" Leslie suggested.

"Yes' said Hammond in thought, as if reminded of the obvious and embarra.s.sed that he'd slipped and missed it.

"Of course ' Hammond looked at the rifle case on the backseat of the car and seemed to make a decision.

"We're close in" he said.

"No need for this" He closed the car door on the left rear side and left the long black case on the seat.