Escapade

Chapter One

The Great Man was skating the big Lancia around blind turns on the slick road as though he had received a personal telegram from God that guaranteed his immortality.

“You’re driving too fast, Harry,” I said. I had said it before and it hadn’t accomplished anything. I didn’t really expect it to accomplish anything now. But occasionally you want to put these things on the record.

The Great Man smiled at me. He had a wide, wild, charming smile. It made you believe that he felt extremely lucky to be in your company, and usually it made you believe that you were extremely lucky to have your company to offer. It hadn’t been working so well since he got behind the wheel.

“Phil, Phil,” he said. “You worry too much altogether. I have spent countless years honing my reflexes. As you know. With a lesser man, yes, for certain, you would be in jeopardy. But with me, you are as safe as a little tiny baby in its cradle.”

That was the way he talked.

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “Look at the road.”

“Peripheral vision,” he said, and he smiled again without taking his eyes off me as he coasted around another turn. His teeth were white. His eyes were grayish blue and shiny and the smile deepened the lines that angled from their corners. “That, too,” he said. “With practice, with work, it can be brought to a level of achievement most men would never believe possible.”

“Harry,” I said. “Look. At. The. Road.”

He laughed. But he turned to face the road, showing me his profile. Curly black hair, a bit unruly and a bit gray at the temples. A strong nose, a wide mouth, a strong chin. Not a handsome face, in fact almost an ugly face. But a dynamic face, as forceful as the blade of an axe.

I squinted through the smeared windshield. The wipers squeaked back and forth, slapping water around the glass without ever getting rid of it.

We had left Dartmoor behind us, the cold gray mist and the endless rollers of bald gray hill. It had been grim and empty, but at least you could see the cars that were coming your way. It had been better than this.

This was gray rain ahead and tall black hedgerows looming up on either side, and endless possibilities of collision. Sometimes there were trees just behind the hedgerows, left and right, and their black branches and black leaves arched over the road and formed a long dark tunnel. The headlights were on but they weren’t working any better than the wipers.

I sat back and sighed.

Usually I was the driver. It was part of the job I had been hired to do. Usually, the Great Man and his wife sat in the back seat. But the Great Man’s wife had been too ill to leave Paris and we had gone to Amsterdam and then to London without her. The Great Man hadn’t cared for that.

He had sulked until Lord Endover offered him the Lancia- “Keep her as long as you like, old boy.” The Great Man had glanced out the window of Lord Endover’s Belgravia town house at the Lancia parked at the curb, its long white body as sleek and as promising and as dangerous as a banker’s second wife. A gleam had come into his eye and at that moment I knew I would probably never get behind the wheel of the beast.

The rain sizzled along the hood of the car, splattered along the glass. The wipers chirped.

In England, you’re supposed to drive on the left. But on this road there wasn’t much difference between left and right. If I stuck my arm out the passenger window, I could have touched the hedgerows. Except they weren’t really hedgerows. Hedgerows were plants and they gave way when you hit them. These were stone walls thinly screened with ferns and bushes and they would have snapped my arm in two.

Once again now, he went racing through a left-hand turn. But this time the Lancia’s rear wheels slid away beneath us and the car lurched toward that towering wall on the right. I stopped breathing and I braced myself.

As though being braced would make a difference when a ton of speeding metal met a hundred tons of rooted rock.

The Great Man eased up on the gas pedal, steered ever so slightly into the skid as the Lancia swept within inches of the wall. Black branches snatched at the bodywork, scrabbled at my window. Then, in the last possible fraction of a second, just when I knew it was all over, the tires bit into the road again. The Great Man downshifted, punched the pedal, and the car surged forward into the gray rain. He turned to me and laughed. “Reflexes,” he announced gaily.

He was a wonderful driver. He was better than I was, and I was good. But enough was enough.

I exhaled. Then I inhaled. Then I said, “Okay, Harry. Stop the car.”

He turned to me and he frowned. “What?”

“The car. Stop it. Now.”

The frown reached his eyes. “You want me to stop?”

“Now.”

“But…”

“Now.”

He stopped the car and looked over at me, still frowning. I grabbed my fedora from the back seat. I opened the door, stepped out into the rain, and slammed the door shut behind me. I screwed on the hat. I tugged up my coat collar, buttoned the buttons, tied the belt, and I started marching back the way we’d come.

The rain wasn’t all that heavy when you weren’t racing through it at sixty miles an hour. But it was as wet as rain usually is, and it was cold. The air temperature was probably in the forties. This was August. Oh to be in England now that summer’s here.

I heard the car come up behind me.

“Phil?”

The car was in reverse. He had the window down and he was leaning across the seat so he could talk to me through it. Rain was pattering onto the leather seats, but I doubt that he noticed, or cared. If the seats were damaged, he would buy Lord Endover a new Lancia. He could afford it.

I saw all this without looking at him directly. Peripheral vision. I kept walking and he kept driving. The car remained at exactly the same distance from me all the while, about two feet away. He was a wonderful driver, even in reverse.

“Phil? Where are you going?”

I didn’t look at him. “Back to New York.”

“But what about your job?”

“I can’t do my job if we’re both dead.”

“But what about Bess? What will I tell her?”

Bess was his wife. It had been her idea to hire me.

I said, “Tell her whatever you want.”

“Phil,” he said. “You’re upset.”

He said it as though he had just now figured it out. Probably he had. He was one of those men who honestly believed that everyone was as thrilled by him as he was.

“Yeah,” I admitted. I still hadn’t looked at him.

“Why don’t you drive the car, Phil?”

I stopped walking and he stopped driving. I turned and looked down at him. Some water toppled from my hat and splattered onto my shoes. He was peering up at me through the window, blinking against the rain. His face was earnest.

He hadn’t apologized. Why should he? He hadn’t done anything wrong. He couldn’t do anything wrong. Ever. But I was upset, for whatever reason, and he liked me, and so he would mollify me. He was a generous man.

Despite myself, I smiled. His self-involvement was so total it was almost a kind of innocence.

“Harry,” I said, “you are really a piece of work.”

He smiled up at me, that wide charming smile, and he nodded. He already knew that.

We reached the narrow gravel driveway to Maplewhite at a little after nine-thirty that night.

The rain had stopped, darkness had come. The full moon was a dull gray blur behind dark scudding clouds edged with silver. Leaning toward us on both sides was a dense forest of tall black trees, oaks and elms and pines. We drove up through these into the smell of damp earth and moldering leaves, the drive turning back and forth upon itself like a grifter’s alibi. At the top of the hill the trees fell away and all at once we were among the clouds and not below them. In the moonlight they were slowly rolling across acres and acres of parkland.

Directly ahead of us, with more clouds streaming like pennants from its towers, was the house.

It was black and it was huge, as big as a cliff. The towers, one at each side of the main building, were taller than the giant twin oak trees that flanked the entrance. The lighted windows were tiny narrow vertical slits in the craggy mass of rock.

It looked like the kind of place you couldn’t get into without an invitation, and maybe not even then. That was fine with me.

“It’s big, eh?” said the Great Man.

“Yeah,” I said.

“In the thirteenth century, it was built. The Normans. Observe the towers.”

“Hard not to.”

To the right of the building was a carriage house-slate roof, stone walls, two broad wooden doors. In front of this was a graveled area for cars, roofed over to protect them. Six cars were parked there. I wheeled the Lancia in and parked it beside an elegant Rolls-Royce tourer.

I turned off the ignition reluctantly. The big automobile had driven beautifully. A couple of times, rain or no rain, I had been tempted to hit the gas and see what the car could do. I hadn’t mentioned this to the Great Man.

We got out of the car and I put on my hat. I went around to the trunk and opened it. The Great Man joined me, rubbing his hands together. Even in the dimness I could see his smile. He was excited. He was about to make an entrance.

Impatiently, he waved a hand at the trunk. “Leave the bags, Phil,” he said. “The servants will take care of them.”

“Why should we bother the servants?”

I pulled my bag out of the trunk.

He was shorter than I was, by almost a foot. But his shoulders were as broad as mine and he could pick me up and hold me in the air for pretty much as long as he liked.

It wasn’t merely strength, although he had plenty of that. It was a refusal to recognize that, for him, anything at all was impossible.

If he decided he didn’t want to carry his bag, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Except carry the bag myself, to prove a point.

He grinned up at me and he clapped me on the shoulder. “You are a pure democrat, Phil. A true American. That is what I like about you. I am exactly the same myself.” He reached in and swung his bag out of the trunk. Black alligator leather, with gold fittings. The kind that all true Americans carried. I had stashed the bag in the trunk, so I knew that it weighed about seventy-five pounds. He handled it as if it were filled with popped corn.

I slammed the trunk shut and together we walked to the enormous wooden door at the entrance to the house.

An electric light glowed above the door. Poking through the door’s center was the head of a big brass lion who was chewing on a big brass knocker. The Great Man lifted the knocker and rapped it once, hard, against its brass plate. The lion didn’t seem to mind.

For a moment we stood listening to drip-water plop against the puddles. Then the door swung open and a butler stood there in the light. A tall man, heavyset, white haired, in his sixties. His round English face was red, the face of a man who knew where they hid the cooking sherry. He was dressed in black, elaborately. If kings wore black, they would dress the way he did.

“Gentlemen?” he said. His features were blank and expressionless.

“Harry Houdini,” said the Great Man, like Santa Claus announcing Christmas. “And Phil Beaumont,” he added. Remembering the reindeer.

The butler nodded without changing the look on his face, or adding one to it. “I am Higgens,” he said. “Please come in.”

He stood back. I moved to one side, to permit the Great Man his entrance. He stepped in grandly, sweeping off his hat with a flourish, and I followed him. We set down our bags. To the right of the butler was another servant. This one was also dressed in black, but not as magnificently. He glided smoothly forward, as though he were wearing roller skates, and he began to help the Great Man with his coat. The Great Man smiled pleasantly. He liked having people help him with his coat.

The butler said, “Lord and Lady Purleigh are in the drawing room, with their other guests. Would you like to join them now, or would you prefer to go to your rooms first?”

“Go to the rooms, I think,” said the Great Man. “Don’t you agree, Phil?”

I shrugged.

The servant glided toward me, but I had already taken off my hat and coat. If this was a disappointment, he didn’t show it. He just nodded and took them, his features as blank and expressionless as the butler’s. But he was shorter, and younger and much thinner, with black hair and a pale, pinched face.

“Very good,” said the butler. “You’ll be staying in the east wing. Briggs will take you there.”

Briggs had hung up the coats and hats. Now he lifted both our bags and said, “Please follow me, gentlemen.”

We had been standing before a hall big enough to land an airplane. An electric chandelier hung from the center of the beamed ceiling, but the ceiling was so high and the walls so far apart that the room’s upper corners were cobwebbed with darkness. Below the chandelier a long wooden table ran for twenty-five or thirty feet. The walls of the room were made of pale brown stone and they were draped with murky oil paintings of dead people wearing old costumes. Embroidered curtains hung at the sides of the narrow mullioned windows. The pale gray marble floor was covered with broad dark Oriental carpets, seven or eight of them.

Ahead of us, Briggs glided across the marble floor toward another wide, open doorway. I noticed that the far wall of the hall, off to my left, held no paintings. It held weapons: lances, pikes, broadswords, cutlasses, rapiers, wheel-lock muskets, flintlock rifles, an enormous blunderbuss, some shotguns, a Sharps buffalo gun, a scoped Winchester Model 1873, a selection of handguns. Most of the handguns, like most of the long arms, were black powder antiques. But there was a Peacemaker Colt, a long-barreled artillery officer’s Luger Parabellum, a Colt Army 1911 automatic, and what looked like a Smith amp; Wesson. 38 caliber revolver. If the Apaches attacked tonight, we would be ready.

I don’t know what the Great Man noticed. Maybe everything. He was glancing around, calmly appraising, like someone who was mulling over the idea of adding all this to his private collection.

We followed Briggs up some stone stairs and through a wide doorway, then down a wide hallway with parquet wooden floors. More dead people hung from the walls. We climbed up a wide, worn, wooden stairway and we went down some more hallways. The place was a maze.

Carpets flowed along the wooden floors. Cabinets and chests and tables clung to the stone walls. Perched on these were vases and bowls and lacquer boxes, statuettes of porcelain and ivory and alabaster. I’ve been in museums that owned less bric-a-brac. Maybe most museums did.

We came to another corridor. On our way down it, we passed ornate wooden doors, left and right. Each door had a small card thumbtacked to it. On the cards, names had been written in a flowing cursive script. Mrs Vanessa Corneille, said one. Sir David Merridale, said another. Mrs Marjorie Allardyce and Miss Jane Turner, said the card on the door opposite. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, said the card on the last door to the left. On the door opposite, the card said, Mr Harry Houdini and Mr Phil Beaumont.

The corridor ended up ahead, about thirty feet. In the stone wall was another door, unmarked. Probably it led to a stairway.

Briggs set down the Great Man’s bag, opened the door, and gestured for us to enter. As usual, I followed the Great Man. Briggs picked up the Great Man’s bag and followed me.