The Glendower Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page B

man in the porkpie hat and the man with the rain hat who were stopped by traffic on the Yard side of the street. He picked up a Christian Science Monitor at the kiosk and dived down the stairway, bookbag banging his back. The train to Park Street was waiting when he burst through the turnstile; he leaped aboard as the doors were closing. Turning, he saw them. The houndstooth hat stood out from the crowd. They were waiting in the line to purchase tokens. Bill Davis felt an unaccountable, unpleasant shiver along his spine.
    Porkpie hat turned to rain hat as they stepped back from the token window. Rain hat drew a Tiparillo, cherry flavored, from its pasteboard packet, sniffed it, applied a match struck on his thumbnail. Porkpie hat coughed in the smoke, batted the fumes away.
    “Brookline,” he said. He was wearing black plastic-rimmed glasses now and they were speckled with rain. He looked up at his companion. “We can wait for the kid in Brookline … I know damn well it’s in the fuckin’ bookbag. That’s why he went to the history office, to see his adviser—what’s-his-name, Chandler.”
    “You don’t know anything …” The big man’s voice was deeper than Ivan Rubroff’s. His face was round and jowly, permanently flushed, and beneath the little hat he looked like any of a million suburban golfers on a cloudy, threatening afternoon. But an edge of worry slid across Thorny’s mind as he watched the smoke curl up from the Tiparillo: the big man’s lips trembled, his hands shook. Thorny had seen it happen before to men in their line. Nerves going, age creeping up, too much booze, a wife who walked out: Ozzie didn’t have much future, but the trick was to get him through one more job … keep his temper under control.
    “I know it’s the bookbag. Trust me, Ozzie.”
    “I’m too hungry to trust you.”
    “That doesn’t make sense.”
    “Right, that’s how hungry I am.”
    “We’ll stop at a McDonald’s. On the way to Brookline. He always goes home to see his folks on Tuesday nights. Never misses.”
    They walked through the drizzle to Brattle Street. Miraculously they’d found a parking place near Design Research. There was a ticket on the windshield, soggy beneath the wiper blade. The smaller man tore it in two, dropped it in the gutter. Ozzie had a tough time cramming himself into the red Pinto.
    “Say, Oz, you know what I’m thinking?”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    “What? Smartass—”
    “You want me to be sure I’ve got the pliers.”
    “Sometimes you amaze me.” He wiped his glasses with a Kleenex from a tiny package on the dashboard. “You’re a damn good pardoner …” It was a lie, or a memory. Once he had been a good man and in those days their friendship had been forged; now it was a question of getting through the job, one day at a time.
    “Then you can buy the Big Macs, Thorny.”
    Bill Davis was frightened and he didn’t know why. They were the same men, but what the hell sense was there in finding anything ominous in them? They were 1950s, harmless, middle-aged. He wouldn’t even have noticed them if they hadn’t worn the hats. He hadn’t seen them more often than he’d seen twenty other people in the Square that day; it was just that these two stuck in his mind. So why should two guys in funny hats spook him? It didn’t make any sense.
    He ran up the stairs at the Park Street station, pushed through the customary pigeons who permanently inhabited the corner of Park and Tremont, and went up the hill toward Beacon Street. He took a right just short of the State House and entered a narrow doorway, past a window with discreet gold lettering. A second door, polished wood and a brass plaque, and he was in the coziness of the old man’s office and showroom. There were two dark-green leather wingback chairs, a small table, an electric fireplace, and a middle-aged woman in a Rosalind Russell vintage ’39 suit and a graying bun. She looked up and paused at her first sight of the