Azrael Page 7

  She was quite good at managing Jimmy already. Every time Trotter made a particularly telling point (the myth of the “Soviet People” for instance), and Jimmy looked likely to lose his temper, Hannah asked him to pass the salt or the butter or something. The tactic drew approving looks from Petra Hudson. Even Regina peered through her week-long haze of irritation at Trotter long enough to nod with thoughtful approval at her prospective sister-in-law.

  They were eating in a private room at The Hayloft, Kirkester’s finest restaurant, and the only money-losing proposition in the entire Hudson Group. James Hudson, Sr., had opened the place because when the Hudson Group began to take off, there hadn’t been a suitable place to take the heavy hitters they were now dealing with to lunch. It was a converted farmhouse with a lot of wood and genuine antiques around. The food was excellent. Trotter had Beef Wellington, and hadn’t had to use his knife yet. He’d noted prices when he looked at the menu, and they were quite reasonable.

  “Qaddafi isn’t really important,” Jimmy said.

  “He was to the people who got blown up at the Rome airport,” Regina put in. Trotter hadn’t even been sure she’d been listening. She was still mad at him and promised to be that way for a long time yet. She’d been upset ever since he’d used the covering noise of the presses to tell her he’d have to be her boyfriend, at least as far as the world was concerned.

  She hadn’t liked the idea. Trotter had told her if he was going to do any good at all, he had to get close enough to Petra Hudson to find out what was bothering her, and being a feature writer for the Chronicle just wasn’t going to do it.

  She still didn’t like it.

  “Why not?” Trotter had demanded.

  By this time, they had been out of the building completely, walking down a tree-lined path around the carefully landscaped grounds of the Hudson Group Headquarters. Regina kicked angrily at dry leaves as they walked. She had her hands in her pockets and her head down.

  “Why not?” Trotter said again.

  “I have a hard time getting myself taken seriously,” she said. “As a boss. As a journalist.”

  Trotter resisted the impulse to ask if the fact that at this moment she looked and acted as if she were seven years old had anything to do with it. Instead, he said, “So you think people will—”

  “I know people will,” she told him. “They always do. You’ll be hearing the whispers about my mother and Charles, if you haven’t already.

  “So I bring you in to a good job without consulting anybody—even Sally Long, who is now convinced her days as feature editor are numbered, by the way. And you turn out to be my boyfriend. It’s going to look sleazy, Mr. Trotter.”

  “Allan. I’m your boyfriend, you have to call me Allan.”

  “You are not my boyfriend!” It didn’t come out as a shout only because she strangled it through clenched teeth.

  “Believe me, Allan Trotter will turn in features the like of which this paper has never seen. Pulitzer Prize-quality stuff.” That was no lie. One of the Congressman’s many captive experts was a former Pulitzer prizewinner who had drunk and gambled himself and his family into serious, not to say terminal, trouble before the old man interceded. Cleaned up and respectable again, he wrote for the Congressman on demand whenever fine nonfiction or pseudo nonfiction was called for.

  “Sally Long will come to love me,” he told her.

  “I won’t,” Regina said.

  “You,” Trotter told her, suddenly serious, “don’t have to.”

  “That’s good.”

  He ignored her. “All you have to do,” he went on, “is decide what the hell you want. You’re the one who was so worried about your mother, you went to Rines about it. Is it worth being the subject of a little gossip to help her or not? Why do I always have to keep bringing up the deal you made? You’ve got an easy choice—go along or call it off.”

  “You bastards are never going to let me forget that, are you?”

  “Sure we will. The minute you say it’s over.” This was a lie; Petra Hudson was a line to Cronus, and no one—not Rines, not the Congressman, and certainly not Trotter—was about to let go of her, daughter or no daughter. But Regina was the best opening they had. It had been part of Trotter’s training that if you showed the right amount of hostile indifference, you almost always got what you needed.

  It worked again here. She cursed him but went along. She came to his apartment and read books while he played soft music on the stereo. She went with him to the movies and suffered him to hold a cold, unwilling hand. After a week, it was time for him to meet Mother, and she’d arranged that too. Tea at the Hudson home. He had met Wes Charles and told Albright to get a full pedigree on him. He noticed the security system. And he noticed Petra Hudson. The only thing wrong with it, as far as Trotter could tell, was that it placed too much trust in the people who already lived there. It would do a fine job of keeping people out, but if somebody who was in wanted to do some mischief, there wasn’t much in the system to stop him.

  The woman burned with anger or fear, or both. Trotter couldn’t decide. He didn’t blame Regina for noticing something wrong. There were definitely things wrong to notice.

  For instance, Petra Hudson did not raise a single question about any link between Trotter’s recent hiring and his relationship with Regina. Not one. From a woman who should be protecting journalistic integrity and the family fortune with equal vigor, it was astounding. All she did was smile mysteriously and invite Trotter to join the family get-together at The Hayloft.

  That had been the last straw for Regina. From that moment, she had been barely civil, forget cooperative. Trotter had been formulating alternate plans, since it seemed that Regina was not going to let the current ploy work.

  Until now. Was she forgiving him, or was it that she couldn’t stand Qaddafi? Not that it mattered. It had come at the right time, and had been delivered in the right tone of voice, to help the illusion of their intimacy. He just hoped she’d keep it up.

  Trotter sized up Regina’s brother, hoping he could count on him to keep things going. Trotter had spent half of his still young life flying false colors; like a method actor, he could assume the attitudes and behavior patterns of any type of person, argue their politics better than they could themselves.

  He’d been a Nazi and an anarchist and a terrorist. It was one of the ironies of the current situation that it served his purpose to support positions close to what he knew as reality. It was the closest he’d been able to come to being himself (whatever that was) since before puberty.

  He’d spent a lot longer time being Jimmy Hudson. Prosperous white liberal, type IIA, the we’re-just-as-bad-as-the-Russians type. Trotter wasn’t worried. This type could be counted on to be patronizing and smug.

  Jimmy turned to his sister. “Bash, Bash, Bash,” he said.

  “Bash?” Hannah Stein said.

  Petra Hudson came back from what Trotter guessed was the vicinity of the planet Neptune and smiled in spite of herself.

  “Regina was very shy as a little girl,” Mrs. Hudson said. “My husband used to call her Little Bash.”

  “Mother,” Regina said. She was blushing. “For heaven’s sake.”

  Jimmy Hudson smiled, a very different smile from the one a few seconds ago. “Short for bashful,” he said. “I learned really early how to get Regina’s goat by calling her that. I’m sorry, Regina.” There was genuine warmth in him now; for the first time, Trotter got a glimpse of what Hannah Stein saw in him.

  “I think it’s cute,” Trotter proclaimed.

  Regina looked at him. “You would. The last thing you need is another thing to get my goat.”

  There was laughter all around. They ordered coffee and dessert and forgot about politics for a while.

  Chapter Six

  JIMMY HUDSON LAY ON his back in a darkened room, looking at ceiling shadows of the model P-51 that had dangled there in a perpetual dogfight since a few moments after he’d put it together. He guessed it
must have been when he was twelve. He had been heavily into military stuff back then. And, he had to face it, he had no intention of taking the Mustang down. It was still a masterpiece of design. It still intrigued him to study the curves of it, accented now by the glow from the security lights on the grounds.

  He held a quick inquiry on the question, Am I a Hypocrite? The answer was no. It wasn’t the plane’s fault that it had been designed to kill. The speed and maneuverability it used to accomplish its purpose could have been worthy ends in themselves. For an airplane.

  What bothered him about the world, and the Hudson Group’s (meaning his mother’s) attitude toward it, was the decided lack of worthy ends he saw being pursued by anyone. Mother could communicate her feelings to the world through her papers, could hire glib bastards like that Trotter to say and write it for her.

  (And what was with this Trotter character and Regina? He used to have hopes for that girl, but if she’d taken up with him, it was all over.)

  The maddening thing was that Jimmy couldn’t even make people see what he meant face-to-face. When he said that the editorial policy of Worldwatch and the rest of the Hudson Group was way out of step with the vast majority of important journalism in America, it came out as if he were calling for his mother to adopt some kind of herd mentality, when all he meant was that she might take at least a look at what her peers thought. When he tried to say that America should make sure its own hands were clean before sounding off about other countries, he sounded as if he were excusing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or Qaddafi and his terrorists.

  He wondered sometimes if this was some sort of curse, or if God was testing him in some way. He didn’t talk about that, either. Jimmy was, in a private sort of way, quite religious. He wasn’t a staunch Witness for Christ or anything. Up at school, some of the guys made fun of him just for going to the chapel on Sunday. Like a Good Little Boy, they said. He just smiled and said it was what kept him on the dean’s list.

  He didn’t tell anyone he was serious about it. No one except Hannah.

  Thank God for Hannah, he thought.

  Jimmy loved and respected his mother, despite their disagreements, and he had always felt protective of Bash, despite her being four years older than he was.

  But he couldn’t talk to them. Mother ran the papers, and Regina was being groomed to take over, and if Jimmy ever said their whole business was based on the evil men could do, they’d look at him strangely and ask him if he expected them to change the world.

  If he told them he guessed he did, it would be even worse.

  Hannah understood. She once said, “To you the world is a lost puppy,” but she had (miraculously) not made it seem as if she thought he was a wimp for feeling that way. Instead, she loved him for it. She helped him with ideas making his projects for the Hudson Foundation sixty-seven percent more efficient. And she kept him from making too big an ass of himself. She’d done it tonight, when Trotter had been taking him over the jumps. Jimmy chuckled softly and rubbed his eyes. He had to be tireder than he thought, to start making puns like that. He should go to sleep.

  He didn’t want to go to sleep. He wanted to be with Hannah, just to talk to her, talk to the one person who let him be his inadequate, insecure self, instead of guilting him somehow into acting the way they expected a decent-looking boy from a family with some money should act.

  He shook his head in the dark. After he’d dated Hannah the first few times, before anyone had told her who the Hudsons were, he became aware of a strange feeling. It had taken him a week to figure out what it was: For the first time in his life he was relaxed. The idea that he would be spending the rest of his days with her was what he needed to make something of himself. Aside from the physical attraction (and Jimmy didn’t deny its importance; thank God they both felt it), what he loved about Hannah was the way she made him feel about himself. She made him feel capable of doing some good in the world. She made him feel worthy.

  It didn’t matter that she was Jewish, at least not to him. It was the fact of the belief that was important, not the form. All that mattered was that she was not so devout that it would keep her from marrying him. What he and Hannah felt for each other wasn’t so common that it should be destroyed by anybody’s traditions.

  He was rambling. He wished he could be saying all this to Hannah. It all seemed so much more coherent when she was listening. He wished she hadn’t been so tired.

  Mother was taking this all surprisingly well, he thought. Not that he’d expected anything dramatic. Petra Hudson had never been one for dramatics. And he knew there’d be no trouble about Hannah’s religion. Unlike a lot of people he knew, Jimmy had learned firsthand that being conservative did not automatically mean being a bigot.

  But his mother had said nothing, except the equivalent of “Bless you, my children.” Not a word about springing it on her like this, not a word about letting the family meet the girl before he proposed.

  Regina hadn’t said anything, either, but that could be because of the way she’d sprung her honey on everybody.

  But Mother was preoccupied in a way that was almost awe-inspiring, if not downright frightening. It was as if she had things on her mind so huge that simple things like her only son’s decision to get married paled to insignificance.

  That was something else he’d like to talk to Hannah about. Jimmy wasn’t a sexist, but he had to admit that throughout his life he’d never been able to make sense of things he saw girls and women do. Maybe it had to do with his father’s dying when Jimmy was so young; maybe fathers were supposed to explain women to their sons, or at least help them deal with the ignorance. Jimmy, growing up among women, had felt the lack. It was another empty part of him Hannah had been able to fill. Not only did she make sense herself, but she was able to explain the actions of other women to him in a way that he could almost grasp.

  God, he loved her.

  Well, he thought, the sooner I go to sleep, the sooner it will be morning, and I can see her again. He rolled over and went to sleep with a smile on his face.

  Petra Hudson knew it was useless even to try to go to sleep. She shuttled between her bed and the window seat, smoking cigarettes she’d cadged from the humidor in one of the guest rooms. Every puff was like a little inhalation of self-contempt. Petra Hudson had given up cigarettes years ago, and here she was.

  She had given up many things years ago. And here she was.

  She left the window and threw herself back on the bed. Some ashes spilled from the ashtray and landed on the sheet. All the beds in this house had white sheets. Petra Hudson insisted on them, though they were hard to find these days. She brushed at the linen with her hand, removing the ashes but leaving a gray smudge.

  She looked at the smudge, hating it. Then she got off the bed (carefully, this time) and went back to the window. She pressed her face against the glass. It felt cool on her forehead, but it did nothing for the pressroom clamor in her brain.

  She was going to lose everything. She was supposed to be one of the most powerful women in America—one of the most powerful Americans, period. It was a power she had striven for, earned, and, she thought, had used responsibly and well. Anything underhanded she had done in the beginning to get to this point had been redeemed dozens of times.

  She had told herself that the first time at the side of James’s deathbed. That bed over there, the one in which her children had been conceived. A plain, square, king-size bed with a dark oak, unornamented headboard. Too plain for the room, really, but as comfortable as a mother’s arms. The bed she had soiled with the wastes of a bad habit she thought she had put behind her.

  She was going to lose everything, in spite of her power. Because of it. She was going to lose her children. How comforting were a mother’s arms? If the woman who had become Petra Hudson was the mother in question.

  It had been a simple adventure when it started. Training, then a possibly dangerous assignment overseas in the service of her country. The Motherland.


  Cronus had sent her out; Cronus now claimed her. The children who had been killed in this town, the town she dominated, the children of her employees, had been killed as a message to her, with no more concern for them than for a sheep killed to have parchment made of its skin.

  Those poor parents. She shared their grief; the guilt was hers alone. With the greatest guilt yet to come.

  This was not a society where a mother could order her children into her protected home with her, or force bodyguards on them, or restrict whom they saw. Regina and Jimmy were in horrible danger, and she had put them there. Simply by giving birth to them, she had endangered their lives. She had been an agent of Cronus, and Cronus had been the Titan, the father of the Greek gods of Olympus, who had swallowed his children.

  There was no way to protect her children except by persuading them that caution was necessary. There was no way to do that without telling them the truth.

  And if she told them the truth, she would lose her children as surely as if Borzov, or his successor if Borzov had finally died, had them shot in the back of the head in the cellars of Lubyanka.

  For all she knew, the killers were already in place. Her children might hold hands with their killers before her eyes. They might lie naked next to them. Charles was using all his contacts to check into this Allan Trotter and this Hannah Stein, but she needed to know now. Hannah Stein was young, but no younger than the girl who was to become Petra Hudson when she went to work for the Chekists. Hannah Stein was under Petra Hudson’s roof at this moment.

  Petra looked up for a second, and saw that wasn’t true. From her window, she could see Hannah Stein appear through the columns of the front entrance. Her son’s fiancée cast a guilty look back at the house, and Petra, with an instinct born of a lifetime of deception, pulled her head back from the window. When she looked again, Hannah was disappearing down the drive, walking off to one side, on silent grass instead of crunching gravel.

  Petra had to know where she was going. There was no time to dress, no time even to call Charles. She went barefoot through the house and out after Hannah.