During the weekend, Mr. Nakama Otani had been able to conduct meaningful surveillance on only two of the three properties owned by the Drackman Family Trust of Chicago: a nine-story office building in the district known as the Triangle, catering to medical professionals—ophthalmologists, dermatologists, endodontists, and the like—and an eight-story upscale apartment building in Bingman Heights, with only eight through-floor units. The second had appeared more promising than the first, though at neither address did he glimpse even one of the five persons of interest or see any suspicious activity.
He took Monday as a vacation day, and by seven o’clock in the morning, he had the third property in his sights: one of the grand old houses lining the streets around Riverside Commons, a four-story Beaux Arts structure of limestone, featuring bronze windows and a flat roof with a balustrade as a parapet. Through the first half of the century, there would have been black-tie parties at this house, bejeweled women in the most stylish of gowns, horse-drawn carriages with candled lamps aglow and liveried drivers waiting, and later fine motorcars, limousines. Now perhaps the residents were thieves and thugs and mad bombers.
During the weekend, most of Mr. Otani’s surveillance had been conducted from a parked car, not a comfortable post in the heat of July. But because this house faced Riverside Commons, he was able to take up a most pleasant position there. He sat just inside the park, in the deep—and masking—shade of a mature and spreading chokeberry tree. On the bench beside him were a folded newspaper, a hardcover of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, a thermos of iced tea, and a canvas tote that contained packages of snack crackers, two candy bars, and his Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special in a holster. The tote also contained a pair of binoculars, which he would use only if absolutely necessary.
Sitting on a cushion he’d brought with him, dressed in athletic shoes without socks, Bermuda shorts, and a colorful Hawaiian shirt, Mr. Otani was the very picture of a man on his day off, settled in for a morning of nature and literature.
People passing on the paved path that wound through the park didn’t give him a second look until she came trotting along, tanned and glowing, taking her morning exercise in white short shorts and a yellow halter top, long-legged and healthy and jiggling precisely where she should. Mr. Otani didn’t forget many faces, and hers was especially memorable, even more than half a year after he had chatted her up in the nightclub on New Year’s Eve, before Tilton Kirk had joined her there. And of course he had seen her photograph from the City College demonstration. Aurora Delvane.
He saw her glance at him in the shade, and he might have picked up the book and ignored her if he hadn’t seen her do a double take and start to smile. The least suspicious thing that he could do was seize the initiative, so he called out to her, “Hey, hi there! Great day, huh? Remember me?”
She did remember him, in part because Mr. Otani could be quite charming but also because his physique was atypical for a Japanese American. At six foot two, weighing two hundred pounds, with hands as big as those of a pro basketball player, he couldn’t make himself inconspicuous even sitting down in chokeberry shadows.
He rose to his feet as she came to the bench, and she said, “New Year’s Eve. Did you ever find him?”
“No. The bitch stood me up. Pardon my French. He’s history.”
On that night of celebration, Mr. Otani had not approached her as if he were a guy hoping to score. He was a happily married man. Besides, any woman who looked like Aurora Delvane had been hit on so many times, there wasn’t a pickup line that she wouldn’t turn away from dismissively. So he had posed as a gay man whose significant other was late for dinner. He’d employed a similar ruse on other occasions. Women tended to like gay men and feel comfortable with them. Maybe it was the novelty of a male companion to whom they felt they could speak as frankly as they might with a girlfriend.
“I don’t have to ask if your fella showed up,” Mr. Otani said. “He’d crawl a mile on hot coals to be there for you.”
As they talked, she kept dancing from foot to foot, perhaps to keep her heart rate up or maybe because she couldn’t resist bouncing the merchandise to tease him even though he was gay. She liked to be flattered, and she was a habitual tease.
Fortunately, she didn’t have a morning to kill. After a minute of talk about the weather, she returned to the path and sprinted off.
He sat on the bench and picked up his book and sat reading, really reading, never once obviously staring at the house across the street. About fifteen minutes later, Aurora Delvane appeared again from his left, having made another circuit. He looked up at the sound of her feet pounding the path, and she waved, and he waved. She ran out of the park to the sidewalk, paused at the curb to look both ways, and then dashed across the street illegally, in the middle of the block. She bounded up the limestone steps and into the mansion owned by the Drackman Family Trust.
Mr. Otani consulted his wristwatch. Seven-twenty-four. He had been at his post less than half an hour.
Packing up now and going away would be a bad idea. His cover was that of a man at leisure on a summer day, settled into his favorite shaded park bench with everything he needed for the morning. If the woman had been in the least suspicious, they could watch him fr
om the house, with binoculars if they had them. If at any moment he seemed to be something other than what he’d presented himself to be, they might bail out of that house and go to ground in another place, one that was unknown to him. In a couple of hours, he could gather up his things and wander off as though the time had come to trade the shade for a bench in the sun.
He opened the thermos and poured a cup of iced tea.
The Capote book was engrossing, and he returned to it.
Confident that he would be able to open a case file in the afternoon, he savored the possibility of obtaining a search warrant by that evening.
73
In spite of having concocted a story that he thought entirely convincing, Dr. Mace-Maskil dithered through Sunday evening without picking up the phone and calling his star pupil. He mixed a pitcher of martinis but recognized the danger, and he poured the contents down the kitchen-sink drain without taking one sip.
He slept badly, several times waking from dreams that he could not entirely remember, except that they involved bloody hammers and a decapitating machete. He abandoned his bed before dawn, pulled on the silk robe, stepped into his slippers, and shuffled to the kitchen to brew coffee.
As a true believer in the Cause, as one who was convinced that he had been a revolutionary and great fighter in a previous life, he refused to acknowledge that he feared calling his former student. But every time he moved toward the telephone, his hands began to shake and tremors worked his mouth as if he had come down with Parkinson’s disease overnight.
His dread was at last overridden by shame when suddenly the professor smelled himself. Disgusting. He realized that he hadn’t bathed since coming home from the confrontation in the dry-cleaning shop on Thursday afternoon. He’d been squirreled away in this house for three and a half days, and much of that time had left shockingly little residue in his memory.
Having fortified himself with half a pot of black coffee and an English muffin slathered with peanut butter and jelly, he went into the master bathroom and dared to look at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. A witch’s broom for hair. If he had wanted to go away for a week, he wouldn’t have required suitcases; everything he needed would fit in the bags under his eyes. His teeth were stained; they not only felt furry, they looked furry. And that smell.
He brushed his teeth and then brushed them again. He took a long shower, as hot as he could tolerate. With a styling brush, he shaped his hair as he blew it dry, until it was a prematurely white, leonine mane. That hair made some women think of their fathers and fantasize transgressive sex, whereupon they became insatiable. He looked in the mirror again and saw a demigod.
After putting on clean underwear and fresh clothes, he went into his study, sat in the studded-leather chair behind the teak desk with the black granite top, swiveled toward the phone, and was gratified to see that his hand didn’t tremble. He’d had touch-tone phones for three years, but he still found them odd. Somehow they didn’t seem as authentic as rotary-dial phones, and Dr. Mace-Maskil was all about authenticity.
He placed the call to the number that he’d most recently been given, wondering if perhaps Lucas might be unavailable—wondering, not hoping—but the familiar voice answered: “Who’s this?”
“It’s Robert Donat,” the professor said, referring to the actor who had played the heartwarming title role in the 1939 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Set in an English boys’ school, the movie had been about a Latin teacher who starts out a bumbler but over the decades becomes a beloved school institution.