Chapter 22
The Seventh Chair
They searched him for eleven minutes in a small cold room off the hall, and they were thorough.
He stood with his arms out. Two men in rubber gloves cut the lining from his coat and laid the burgundy strips on a table. They snapped his heels. They felt his collar and belt and the seams of his trousers. They found a handkerchief, a wallet with nobody's name in it, a key, and, in his inner pocket, a single blank white card.
"I'll have that," said Strake. He took it between finger and thumb and slid it into his own breast pocket. "I'm told it's a calling card."
"It's a souvenir."
"I'll keep it safe. I'll ask you to take off the gloves."
His hands were long, brown and fine, with a scar at the base of one thumb. A man pressed each fingertip with a pad of cloth and sniffed it. Strake watched with an odd, intent, almost courteous look.
"They're just hands. I'd somehow thought there'd be more."
"There's never more," said David. "That's what makes it difficult."
Strake smiled. It was the first time without irony.
The first thing David heard in the Salon of Clocks was the ticking of seventy-one clocks, none agreeing with another, a dry soft forest of them from floor to painted ceiling. Beyond tall windows lay a terrace and, in the dark, the lake.
In the middle stood a long walnut table laid for seven, with a candle at each place. Six chairs were filled. At the head, in carved oak, a napkin at his throat, Conrad Aldermoor rose with his arms out like a man welcoming a son.
"There he is. Oh, my dear boy. I am so glad."
David had imagined this moment a hundred ways, and in every one he was angry. He wasn't. He felt only a great clear calm, like water on a windless day, and far down in it something that was not grief and not pity.
"You'll forgive the search. Gideon is so thorough. You've not been hurt? Good. My friends, this is Mr. David Morgan, also Mr. Daniel Hale, a person of rare gifts, who has caused each of you a great deal of expense."
Dry polite laughter. He was introduced round the table like a row of portraits. Dame Honor Wickes, seventy, tweed, a face like a clever horse, who built bridges. Rafael Ortuño, sleek, velvet-jacketed, owner of three newspapers. Baron Dietrich Haller, ramrod straight, who owned ships. Lucia Moretti-Hart, glossy, in claret, who owned most of southern Italy's pharmacies and a number of people in Washington. And at the end, unshaven, with a vodka, Nikolai Vesely, whose business was energy. They looked at him the way people look at a performing animal, brought in after the fish.
He sat on Aldermoor's right, across from the seventh chair, empty.
Dinner was long and absurd. David ate nothing. He watched six people eat the fruits of their crimes with perfect manners, talking about a ski lodge and an opera and the difficulty of finding a gardener.
At twenty to twelve the footmen withdrew. Aldermoor unlocked a mahogany cabinet with a small gold key on his watch chain and took out a book.
It was a quarto in dark green morocco with brass corners. Stamped in gold on its front, no bigger than a hand, was a small perfect emblem.
An anchor.
"We take it out once a year. It is the only evening it leaves its place. It is brought to me in April with the year's accounts entered up, and we read it over like the minutes of an old club." He laid it before the empty chair, then pushed it across to David. "You've waited so long."
The newest pages were ruled in columns, in a small dense upright hand in black ink: dates, initials, sums in six currencies. Lenoir. Doruk. Each entry ended in a nine-digit number beginning AF. It was the neatest hand he had ever seen. A hand taught by a nun in Cardiff to cross every seven.
In the margin beside the Portuguese minister, in the same tiny script, two words stood alone, in Welsh, as if to nobody.
Da iawn, bach.
Very good, little one.
The room went away. It didn't go dark. It went distant. The clocks ticked as though through glass, and in the middle of the silence he heard a kitchen door open in a house in Cardiff, and a man's voice, gentle and hoarse, saying over the washing-up to a small boy in pyjamas who had done his sums: da iawn, bach.
"Yes," said Aldermoor softly. He had been watching him, hands folded, kind and grave. "He has kept it twenty-five years. Every figure. I have never had to correct him once. A prison is not hard to leave if the warden has been paid, and I needed a man who could not be wrong. He lives quietly, in a flat above a bookbinder's, with a garden. I saw he was never short. I'd like you not to think us unkind. I never told Gideon. He believes the keeper is a clerk in Zurich. I always meant, when the time came, to say: here is your father. He is well. He has missed you. I thought you'd understand that it had been a form of care."
"You killed my mother."
"Your mother died of a fever."
"A broken heart."
"My dear boy, there is no such thing. That is the great mistake of the young."
David looked across at the empty chair. It was set for a guest, with a napkin, a glass, a candle, and a small card with a letter in tiny upright script: G.
And far away in another part of the house, a telephone rang.
Strake, who had stood against the wall behind Aldermoor's chair an hour, saying nothing, crossed to the door in six silent paces and took the receiver from a footman. It was five past twelve.
"Odile."
David sat still, eyes on the card, counting. One. Two. Three.
À la voiture, said a voice far down a crackling line, in the nasal lilt of Lyon, with a breath of tobacco. Oui, elle est dans la voiture. On est partis. Elle est très calme.
Nell, he thought. Oh, Nell. He let out his breath.
"Thank you," said Strake. "Drive carefully." He came back and closed the doors. "She's on her way to hospital. A Dr. Evans is expecting her."
"I wanted to thank you for keeping your word," said David. He looked slowly round the table. "Since I've been so long in coming, may I give you a little something? A performance. It's the only thing I can do."
Moretti-Hart leaned forward, lazily. "How delicious. A rabbit?"
"Nothing so grand."
"You must," said Aldermoor, his whole face lit. "I have been waiting twenty-five years. The ring. Your master did it, in the loaf. I've told them so often they've begun to doubt me."
A round warm loaf lay on a silver tray on the sideboard. David set it on the white cloth in the candlelight. The old man drew off his heavy gold signet, worn nearly smooth, with small shy delighted fingers, and put it in David's palm. David closed his hand.
"Now," said David Morgan, softly, to the whole bright room. "Which of you is watching the other hand?"
And from the corner, with a small dry click, Gideon Strake stepped forward.