The Glendower Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page A

actually.”
    “God, are things really so slow these days?” He glanced at the severe face of the man scribbling in a shorthand book. “No, secretary, if you’d be so kind as to strike that … Thank you. Now, comrade, what has this infant Grigorescu to tell us?”
    The bald, portly man in a brown suit pursed his plump lips and waved a forefinger before his face like a metronome. “Allow me, please, to preface my remarks with a comment on this report—the fact is, Comrade Director, it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that you’ll believe a word of it—”
    “You find that unusual?” Petrov smiled against his better judgment. “You suppose I believe this kind of thing? Ever?” He was the only man in the room smiling. “No,” he said to the secretary, “no, you don’t need to record that. Now, Rogoshin, go on with your unlikely tale. And allow me to correct myself. The fact is, I find myself willing to believe almost anything these days. Say on …”
    “Well, let me begin at the beginning,” Rogoshin said, frowning. “The youthful Grigorescu is alarmingly thorough, I’m afraid. It all begins with an American from Boston called Underhill and another American who died two hundred years ago at a place called Valley Forge …”
    An hour later Maxim Petrov was back in the antiseptic office standing at the window, staring down at the line of people in Red Square. The line never seemed to change but Petrov was aware of his own shift in mood. He was smiling, full of wonder at how unlikely the sources of amusement can occasionally be. He was contemplating Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, not normally a cause for merriment, but in this instance pure inspiration … On his lined yellow pad he had written three words, carefully underlining them twice. He turned back from the window chuckling. He’d get the ball rolling right away. It was just too priceless … He buzzed for his private secretary and contemplated the yellow pad.
    JOKE ON ARDEN!
    His secretary found the great man laughing aloud behind his immaculate desk.

Boston: March 1976

Monday
    B ILL DAVIS SAT AT THE counter of the Zum Zum restaurant around the corner from Harvard Square, sucked at a Lucky Strike, and pushed the egg-smeared breakfast plate away from the cuff of his red-and-black flannel lumberjack’s shirt. He was trying to place the face of the man at the next counter: he’d seen the guy before but he couldn’t quite remember where, when. But you couldn’t miss a black-and-white houndstooth porkpie hat, not in the 1970s. It had a little green feather sticking out of the band and the houndstooth motif was carried on in the pattern of the gray raincoat. He couldn’t remember seeing a costume like that since he’d been a little boy and his father had been similarly gotten up. The man was sipping steaming coffee and writing with a Bic ballpoint in a little brown spiral notebook. Bill focused on him, blurring several dangling sausages which were hanging between them, presumably for decorative effect. As if cued in to Bill’s curiosity the man looked up from his notebook and smiled, open and disingenuous like an on-the-go insurance salesman about to undergo a mid-life crisis. There was a vaguely anxious, friendly, not absolutely trustworthy look to the man’s face, particularly around the eyes and at the fixed, upturned corners of his mouth. He smiled again at Bill across the fifteen feet, nodded fractionally as strangers do when their eyes happen to meet. Standing closer he’d have commented on the weather.
    Bill smiled back, took another hit on the Lucky, and slid off the stool. His corduroy jacket was damp still. He wrapped the maroon-and-white muffler around his throat. The man still sipped his coffee, staring out at the midday traffic working its way, headlamps on, through the cold rain. Bill decided the guy would have voted for Nixon. He picked up his green baize bookbag and headed for Adams House where he lived on the top