Stronghold Page 7

  I fall asleep angrily thinking that, and when I suddenly come awake, it is the first thing in my mind, the resentment along with it.

  Then I realize Coco is poking me and whispering in my ear, “It’s time, man. It’s time. And the car is coming.”

  Just light enough now to show outlines but not colors. In the break-of-day silence—the crickets having tuned out and the birds not yet tuned in—I can make out the sound of a car moving along in low gear, the gravel crunching under its tires.

  Coco is already dressed. I put on slacks, shirt, and sneakers, shove the gun into my belt, buttoning the shirt over it. The only other equipment necessary are the already measured lengths of Venetian-blind cord, the roll of adhesive tape, the extra handkerchiefs, and the knife, all of which I work into my pockets.

  The trick in going down a creaking staircase under such conditions is not to make a big deal of it. It is the surreptitious nature of sounds being made too carefully which cuts through to the unconscious. An even, light-footed walk is what is called for, and that’s how Coco and I make it down to the inside foyer. I open the bolt on the front door almost noiselessly, and we go out on the porch just as the LeSabre pulls up.

  Harvey and Lester get out, leaving the doors open, and with a finger to my lips I wave them into the house. We’ve charted this out, step by step, rehearsed it so many times, no one has to say a word, and no one does. The three of them wait there at the foot of the staircase to the second floor while I go down the hallway to the kitchen. The door of the maid’s room opens from the kitchen, but open is the wrong word, because when I try it I find it’s locked. No surprise. I allowed for this.

  I knock on the door panel with one knuckle and wait. We are still not past the point of no return. If anything goes wrong, we’re in a position to introduce the Shanklins as our traveling companions come to pick us up earlier than expected. Depending on how wrong things might go, that leaves us free to either take off or stay with it.

  I almost rocket through the ceiling when I feel a pressure on my shoulder. A hand. Hell, Coco’s hand. Trust him to count three and start worrying. Count three more and come to check up. I shove his hand away and wave him out of the kitchen so violently he must know he was close to blacking me out. He holds up both hands in a placating gesture, then moves out to the hall again.

  I rap on the door once more, and this time hear the sounds of someone moving around in a bed which creaks as wickedly as the staircase. “What?” I hear the old biddy say. “What is it?” From her voice, she’s still half asleep.

  I put my mouth close to the door. “It’s Jimmy, Sarah Frisch. I’m sick. Do you have the doctor’s number?”

  “Number?”

  As she unlocks the door I pull the gun out from under my shirt, heft it by the barrel. It has to be handled quick and clean, this particular part of the operation, so there’s no use menacing her with the gun. The first thing she’d probably do if she sees it poked at her is let out a yell. And no sense trying to take her out by slamming her with the barrel, because there isn’t enough heft in it to guarantee the knockout. Anyhow, I hadn’t specified to the Company how I would do it. I just said it would be done without damage, and damage is a relative word.

  So when she opens the door and stands there, I slam the butt of the gun on her skull, and down she goes. I grab at her, trying to get both arms around her, but she slithers through them, her nightgown pulling right up to her skinny shoulders as she hits the floor.

  I haul her into the middle of her bedroom. There is light enough now to get a good look at her face, and for an instant I think I have by some freak caved in her whole jaw with that wallop on the head. Then I realize she had come to the door without her teeth in—they’re in a glass of water on her dresser—so the only damage done is the knockout itself. I don’t have to check her pulse to know she isn’t finished off. Her loud breathing, a kind of slow, heavy snore, tells me that.

  I use a handkerchief and plenty of tape gagging her while she is stretched out there on the floor, then get her into the bed, tie her wrists behind her, bind her ankles, and throw the cover over her.

  We have now passed the point of no return.

  Marcus Hayworth

  Emily, as usual, is sound asleep minutes after I turn out the light, but I lie there beside her wide awake and sick in spirit to brood over Janet’s revelation of that ten-year-old episode with Jimmy Flood.

  All right, no harm done to her or the boy. A boy of sixteen, as I can vividly recall from my own youth, which doesn’t seem that long ago, is ready and rampant for sexual experience. A girl of eighteen, well, she probably is curious enough about it to at least want to experiment. But to Janet at eighteen, tall, not unattractive, seemingly sophisticated, this undersized sixteen-year-old boy must have seemed a child. Was she that much afraid of the full-fledged men who, on occasion, used to show up at the house seeking her company?

  In recent years, since she got her degree at Wharton and came to work as my assistant at the bank, there have been very few men showing up for that purpose. I pitied her for it, worried about it, but now I’m not so sure. If she could keep that ancient secret about Jimmy locked in her so tightly, how can I know what goes on when she’s away from the house for any length of time? Those trips to Europe, those week-long visits to New York and Philadelphia to renew acquaintance, so she says, with classmates and teachers who are just names to me, are these the manifestations of a sexual life the family isn’t supposed to know about? Or, most infuriating thought of all, am I alone not supposed to know about it? Do Emily and Deborah and even David share a secret I am not privy to? Am I regarded as some kind of caricature Victorian who would fling his unmarried daughter out into the cold because she has perfectly normal instincts?

  Do I really project that image?

  Well, if I do, it is not my fault. It is the fault of a world off-center where anyone who believes in marital fidelity and who is repelled by sexual license and its pornographic, orgiastic trimmings is made to look an utter damn fool. A doddering, antiquated prude.

  On the other hand, can I be imagining all this? Is it simply that Janet, hair-triggered when it comes to questions about her personal life, was bound to feel especially sensitive about that episode with Jimmy, was driven to hitting out at me as hard as she could for my unwittingly rattling that skeleton in her closet?

  Even as a child she had been the difficult one. Deborah had been the chatterbox, the noisily confiding spirit in the house. Janet had been silent and remote, her own hardest taskmaster, fanatically neat and orderly in her ways, a supervisor of the children in First Day School when she was hardly older than they were. Born like that? Made that way because Deborah, eight years younger, was plainly destined from infancy to be the family pet?

  I am in a trap of my own devising. I am no happier in Janet’s company than she is in mine, yet the proper solution, her going off to marry and make a home of her own, seems to be thwarted by her place in the bank. I had wanted a son who would be the fourth generation of Hayworths to take over the family business, but I had gotten a daughter, and then after a long barren period another daughter. Which meant that the elder would have to be, to use David’s term, the birthright banker, and she became aware of that, I think, as soon as I did.

  So there is not only our uncomfortable proximity in the house, but also during working hours, too much of it, in fact, and no escape from it.

  I fall asleep with this thought futilely circling around and around in my mind.

  I wake up in the light of dawn and see, incredulously, that Jimmy Flood is standing at my bedside, one finger to his lips gesturing silence, the other hand holding a pistol aimed at my head.

  It is not the first time I ever had a gun aimed at me.

  Once while I was serving my wartime sentence in prison as a conscientious objector, a guard, drunk with alcohol and rabid patriotism, had wound up a harangue of me by drawing his gun and threatening me with it.

  Another time I had interce
pted a couple of hunters trespassing in the woodland on the western slope of Scammons Ridge, away from the Lake George side. This was not only my property and conspicuously posted against hunting, but the entire ridge had, over a couple of generations, become a sort of unofficial game preserve, and the few deer which still inhabited it were as trusting as cows in a barnyard. The two interlopers, both done up in gaudy Abercrombie and Fitch big-game-hunter style, reacted to my explanation of the situation as if I had threatened to assault them. In effect, I was warned off my own property, and when I refused to move, was threatened with a rifle leveled at my chest. It was a frightening moment, but trusting in the theory that if one behaves bravely, he will seem brave, I held my ground, and in the end it was the hunters who departed downhill to the highway where their car was parked.

  But in both these cases I was the only possible victim if the trigger were pulled. And in both cases I sensed that I only had to survive a bad minute or two. Tempers were high, but given a few ticks of the clock, they would cool enough to let logic prevail.

  But this is different. I am not alone. Emily, soundly sleeping beside me, might be the victim if I make a false move. And I am not confronted by a case of bad temper. I am confronted by a smiling young man who looks as if he waked me up to give me news about good weather ahead. As if this is some kind of game we’re playing.

  A false impression. I start to sit up, and next instant Flood jams the muzzle of the gun brutally hard under the angle of my jaw, shoving my head back on the pillow. He bears into the jaw steadily, as if he intends to thrust that steel right through the flesh—the pain is agonizing—and then slowly withdraws the gun.

  No game. No magical religious conversion either, because in the doorway appears the Reverend Digby—the supposed Reverend Digby—gun in hand. A hoax. An elaborate, deadly hoax.

  Digby says in a loud whisper, “The girl’s room is locked. The other was open. They are out in the hall now.”

  Flood says to me, “Do you hear that?” and I nod. He says, “There’s another man out there with them, Marcus. A bad man. You won’t try anything foolish, will you?”

  I shake my head. Then I realize that Emily’s eyes are open and staring at me fearfully. I say to her quickly, “It’s all right. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Wrong,” Flood says. “There’s plenty to worry about.” He aims the gun at Emily’s head. “It’s ready to go off,” he tells me. “Make a sudden move, and it will. Got that straight?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, out of bed, both of you.”

  He backs away a couple of steps, the gun still pointed at Emily, as we get out of bed. I am enormously relieved when Emily says to him in an even voice, “Do you mind if I put on a robe?” Obviously she is in complete possession of herself. She always did have a good, quick mind, and despite her gentleness, a certain toughness of spirit.

  “Put it on,” Flood says, and when she has he motions us both out of the room. I am due for another shock in the hallway. Deborah and David are standing there in their nightclothes under guard, both of them gagged and with their arms bound behind them. I have an impulse to sharply protest this, but the sight of the huge, powerfully built, vacuous-faced man guarding them, gun in hand, strikes me dumb. That vacuous expression especially, and the stoniness of Digby’s features and the malevolent coolness of Flood give me a despairing sense that they aren’t human. Are, in the deepest sense, unfeeling. In the face of that, all one can do is play the game their way, yield every point, trust that in the end they will depart without hurting anyone. Without killing anyone. That’s what it really comes down to, without killing anyone.

  Flood gestures at the door to Janet’s room. “Get her up,” he says to me. “But easy.”

  I knock tentatively on the door, put my mouth close to it. “Janet?” No response. I stand there uncertain what to do next, and Flood says, “Go on. Try again.”

  I do, knocking harder this time, but still drawing no response. I sense the mood of our captors changing, becoming a little uneasy, and it is even more menacing that way. Digby says to me, “She did not go away last night and lock that door behind her, did she?”

  “No,” I answer, “sometimes she has trouble getting to sleep. She takes a barbiturate for it. She probably took one late in the night.”

  “Downers,” Flood says contemptuously. “Stoned out of her head until it’s time to punch in at the bank, right?”

  Digby says to him, “Perhaps not, man. Perhaps she is on the phone in there right now. I told you these upstairs phones had to be knocked out first thing.”

  “How?” Flood says. “You’d have to knock out the whole house to do that.” He turns to me. “Do you have a key to this door?”

  “No.”

  Again he smiles at me. The smile gives him the look of a bearded death’s-head. “I don’t believe you, Marcus.”

  My throat constricts as I watch Digby press his gun against Emily’s head. I manage to say, “I don’t have the key. But you can break it open. Break it open, for God’s sake.”

  Flood turns to the huge man guarding Deborah and David. “You hear him, Harve? But no dry run.”

  It takes just one blow of that massive shoulder to accomplish the job, the slide bolt inside snapping clean off as the door flies open and smashes back against the wall with a noise to wake the dead. But it does not wake Janet. She lies there naked, bedraggled, beaded with perspiration, in a twitching, apparently uncomfortable sleep. Maybe the noise we made intruded into her dreams, whatever they are.

  Flood lifts one of her arms as if hefting it. When he releases it, it falls back limp. He stands looking down at her, shaking his head as if baffled. Then he slaps her hard across the face.

  “Oh, please!” Emily cries out, but when Digby thrusts the gun hard against her head again, she has sense enough not to make any further protest.

  The blow stirs Janet out of her lethargy. She mumbles something unintelligible, tries to raise her head from the pillow and fails. Flood turns to the big man. “Wake her up, Harve. Get her under a cold shower.”

  “We are wasting time,” Digby says to Flood.

  “No sweat,” Flood says. “She has to be in on this from the start so there won’t be any mistakes made.”

  Harve picks up Janet as if she is weightless and carries her into the bathroom. Flood motions at the rest of us. “Downstairs,” he orders. “Into the kitchen.”

  As we move to the head of the staircase, I see in the foyer below still another man at least as big and heavily muscled as Harve and with a striking resemblance to him. Both have the same neat features in a face which seems too large for them. Both have shoulder-length blond hair. The effect is grotesque, as if female heads have somehow been transplanted onto those powerful bodies.

  The man in the foyer is laying out weapons and ammunition cases on the floor, an arsenal of them. For a robbery? What sense does that make? I have been sustained by my idea that this is a robbery, that once this gang gets whatever it wants from the house, that will be the end of it. But now I have the chilling thought that this is no mere robbery, and that we are far from the end of it.

  Flood says to the man, “Everything inside?”

  “Uh-huh. And I put the car alongside the garage. No room inside.”

  “We’ll take care of it later,” Flood says.

  He herds us down the stairs and into the kitchen, his gun and Digby’s close at our backs every step of the way. The sun is up now, but the kitchen, its shades drawn, remains dimly lit. Flood switches on the overhead light, leaving the shades drawn.

  For the first time I think of Sarah Frisch in her room off the kitchen. There is nothing that Flood—this man who had been little Jimmy Flood—doesn’t know about the house. He must know that there behind him is the door to Sarah Frisch’s room. She is a spry and gingery woman for all her years, yet faced with this invasion, she might panic. All it needs for disaster is to have a finger involuntarily t
ighten on a trigger.

  I say to Flood, “Sarah Frisch is in that room. If you want her out here, let me take care of it.”

  He studies me from head to foot. “I didn’t give you permission to speak, Marcus, did I?”

  “Jimmy, be reasonable. You can see we’re doing whatever you want us to do, but that woman in there—”

  My appeal dies in my throat as he raises his gun and levels it at Deborah. She closes her eyes against the sight. I say explosively, “All right, no, you didn’t give me permission to speak.”

  “That’s right,” Flood says. “So if you want permission, just raise your hand first.”

  I know I must sit loose. I must be gentle in my manner. I must not make a blood-spattered tragedy out of this nightmare.

  I raise my hand, and Flood says gravely, “Yes, Marcus?”

  “I don’t want Sarah Frisch alarmed. I’d like to explain this to her my own way.”

  “Go right ahead, Marcus,” Flood says, and motions at Sarah Frisch’s door with the gun.

  I hesitate, wondering if he’s just baiting me, then go to the door and open it. Sarah Frisch is asleep under her coverlet despite the disturbance going on around her. I rest a hand on her shoulder and whisper, “Sarah Frisch,” but get no response. Then I realize that it’s not the coverlet drawn up almost to her nose, but a gag. I pull back the cover and see that her wrists and ankles are bound. And she is still not moving. She is plainly unconscious, breathing heavily and unnaturally.

  I wheel to face Flood. “What did you do to her?”

  Flood holds up his gun by the barrel, displaying the butt to me. “This.” Then he sights the gun at me, squarely between my eyes. “But if I had to, Marcus, it would have been this. Loud and conclusive. You believe that, don’t you?”