Helen McCloy Read online

  Tatiana ‘Tash’ Perkins, a brilliant young journalist, is sent by her paper to interview the State Governor’s wife, and a strange interview it is: the woman behaves like a zombie, and when they are alone together she slips a letter to Tash and asks her to post it. But before Tash can do so, her handbag is snatched and the letter with it.

  Yet the governor charms her, and soon she is accepting a job as his campaign speech-writer. But Tash is soon drawn into a frightening sequence of events, ranging from the killing of a canary to murder by arson, and an assassination at a political rally.

  HELEN MCCLOY was a member of a speech-writing committee for a Vice-Presidential candidate a few years ago and so has had a backstage view of political campaigning.

  She received her first check for writing when she was fourteen and has been writing ever since. After nearly ten years as an art critic in Paris she returned to this country to write fiction. Her recent novels include The Sleepwalker and A Change of Heart.

  MINOTAUR COUNTRY

  A Novel of Suspense

  HELEN McCLOY

  DODD, MEAD & COMPANY • NEW YORK

  Copyright © 1975 by Helen McCloy

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form

  without permission in writing from the publisher

  Printed in the United States of America

  by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., Penna.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  McCloy, Helen.

  Minotaur country.

  I. Title.

  PZ3.Ml3358Mg [PS3525.A1587] 813'.5'2 74-28370

  ISBN 0-396-07004-3

  To Halliday Dresser with love

  There are other things, animals crashing around in the forest. I can hear them, but I can’t see them.

  —SENATOR HOWARD BAKER,

  December 30th, 1973.

  PART I

  Leafy Way

  1

  IT WAS A Border state between North and South on the Eastern seaboard, embracing ten thousand square miles. It had been one of the thirteen original colonies, but not one of the eleven Confederate states. It had nineteen counties, one great university, and one good newspaper.

  Tatiana Perkins worked for the newspaper.

  She was named Tatiana because her artist father admired the heroine of Eugene Onyegin. The moment she began to talk she called herself “Tash,” and she had been Tash ever since.

  By the time she was twelve, her parents were divorced. They still loved each other and Tash, but her father was in love with someone else. She heard him explain it to her mother:

  “I didn’t want this to happen. Try to think of me as if I had been driving a rickety car too fast on a rough mountain road.”

  That was when Tash decided that she herself would never fall in love.

  No rickety cars on rough mountain roads for her. She liked men, but she did not like the havoc of passion. She was going to be happy.

  Tash’s father went to live in Rome with a mistress he couldn’t marry because of her Catholic conscience. Tash’s mother settled in Boston with a new husband, the last green shoot on old, dry, Brahmin stock.

  Tash herself did not feel at home in either household. When she left college, she drifted to the capital city of the Border state.

  She had trouble getting a job because she looked so much younger than she actually was. She had the half-starved face of a street urchin: big eyes sunk too deep, thin cheeks too hollow, wide mouth too thin-lipped.

  She finally landed her newspaper job because there happened to be a vacancy when she applied. She was soon trapped on the Women’s Page, which bored her. One day she chanced to read a new novel advertised as “excitingly different” and “daringly original.”

  Oh, if only she were a book reviewer! She let off steam pounding out on her office typewriter the review she might have written.

  A copy boy assumed it was for publication. A makeup man slid it into a slot on the daily book review page between two small ads. It glided past copy readers and assistant book editors without being noticed, and no one else saw it before publication. Next morning a furious book editor-in-chief asked the managing editor to fire Tash.

  The managing editor refused.

  “It was the copy boy’s mistake, not hers. I’ve read the book. It’s all she says and worse. I’m going to take her off the Women’s Page. She needs more scope.”

  Two years later Tash had a syndicated column under her own byline and license to write about anything she pleased from sport to politics.

  The first time she appeared as a guest on a television show, the producer gasped. “Isn’t there anything—anything—you can do about your hair?”

  She tossed the tangled, black mop out of her eyes and said, “No.”

  In a week the “mop cut” was all over town.

  So she had done exactly what she set out to do. She had made a safe, little niche for herself in a brutally competitive world by her own efforts, and she had not fallen in love with anybody.

  She was sitting at her desk one cold, sunny morning in April when a copy boy told her that the Old Man wanted to see her.

  “Hi, Tash!” The managing editor, Bill Brewer, leaned back in the scruffy, swivel chair he cherished, both hands clasped behind his neck. “I’m going to make you mad.”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “Oh, yes, I could. I’m going to ask you to do one more story for the Women’s Page. An interview.”

  Tash gritted her teeth. “When ICBMs are falling, will you ask me for five hundred words on annhilation from the woman’s point of view?”

  “Our readers would love it.”

  Tash sighed. “All right. Who am I to interview? Miss Hayseed, 1956? Or the champion chicken-fryer of Backwoods County?”

  “Neither. What do you know about Vivian Playfair?”

  “The Governor’s wife?” Tash whistled, an accomplishment she had cultivated ever since she was told as a child that whistling girls and crowing hens never come to very good ends.

  “You seem impressed.”

  “I am. She never gives interviews.”

  “What else do you know about her?”

  “She and the Governor are a matched pair. They have everything that most people want: health, youth, looks, power, position, money. All but one thing: children.

  What makes you think she’s willing to be interviewed now?”

  “I met the Governor’s aide, Carlos de Miranda, at a party last night. He finessed the idea that I should send someone to interview her this afternoon.”

  “Finessed?”

  “He made the suggestion so adroitly that I thought it was my own suggestion until I had time to think it over.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “That’s one of the things I’d like to find out. Maybe you can find out for me this afternoon.”

  “I doubt it. An interview with a woman like that has to be the usual guff. How she looks, how she dresses, how she plans menus and guest lists, and how strongly she feels that the wife of of a man in public life should give him every moral support while keeping herself modestly in the background. I could write it without going near her. A computer could write it. Even a good electric typewriter could write it. It writes itself.”

  “Tash, I want more than the usual guff. That’s why I’m sending you.”

  “Thank you kindly, sir.”

  “I want to know why she is giving an interview for the first time. I want to know why Carlos de Miranda went out of his way to plant the idea of this interview in my mind. Is he trying to establish something? Or leak something? Or cover up something?”

  “Would he leak something through the Governor’s wife?”

  “Pr
obably not, but he might use an interview with her to distract attention from something else.”

  Bill’s gaze went to the window where he could see the gilded dome of the State House above the tree tops along the Mall. “Do you know why I got this job? Because I have what they call a ‘nose’ for news. I feel things in my bones before they happen and now my bones are telling me that something is going to happen over there. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it.”

  Tash let the silence grow a moment, and then said: “What is it you haven’t told me yet?”

  “She disappears.”

  “Vivian Playfair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Often?”

  “Three times in the last year. The boys on the State House beat think she leaves town, but no announcements are made about her going away, and she’s never seen in airports or railway stations. Even her car stays in the garage when she’s . . . invisible.”

  “She could be ill.”

  “It would leak to the papers fast enough if a doctor were making regular visits or if she were in a hospital, but there’s nothing. Not even a rumor. She just. . . isn’t there.”

  “But he is?”

  “Oh, yes. Whatever she does, she does alone.”

  “Now you’re getting me interested. What time am I supposed to see her?”

  “Three o’clock.”

  “I’ll need a photographer.”

  “Take Sam.”

  Tash rose. To her surprise, Bill rose, too, and walked over to the elevator with her. Busy newspaper editors cannot often spare time for minor courtesies.

  When the elevator door started to shut automatically, Bill stayed it with one hand. “Tash . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t do anything foolish.”

  “What do you mean? Is there something more you haven’t told me?”

  “Nothing I can put into words, but . . . be careful.”

  2

  ABOUT THE TIME people started calling the President’s House in Washington the White House, the Governor’s House in this state became known as Leafy Way, the name of the road where it stood at the edge of the capital city.

  It was a winding road where tree branches met overhead to form a natural tunnel. On a spring day like this, the pavement was freckled with sun patches and leaf shadows that danced in each vagabond breeze.

  They came suddenly to two brick pillars linked by carriage gates and an archway of wrought iron. Each pillar was crowned with a lantern of glass set in a rococo iron frame. A third lantern dangled from the apex of the arch.

  “No brick walls? No electrified wire fences?” said Tash to Sam Bates, the photographer, who had often been here before.

  “No,” said Sam. “Just that hedge. Leafy Way is an old-fashioned place. There’s an old right of way through the orchard to a back road where there’s no gate and no guard at all. Just a chain across the roadway does the trick. This isn’t Chicago or Dallas. This is a quiet, law-abiding, country neighborhood. Always has been and always will be.”

  “Are you sure?” Tash was looking toward the gates where a bored state policeman stood in front of a sentry box, and two lines of people trudged up and down in opposite directions, crossing and re-crossing as if they were performing a figure in a decorous old-fashioned dance.

  One line carried signs that read: NO FOOD FOR MURDERING COMMIES!

  The other line carried signs that read: DEATH TO CHILD-STARVING FASCISTS!

  Sam shifted the heavy camera on his knees and peered through the windshield. “They don’t mean any harm. It’s just the dock strike. A sort of crossruff. Group One are political exiles from the Caribbean island of Barlovento. They claim the government there is commie and oppose all trade with the island. The local dockworkers’ union, strongly anti-Communist since the thirties, is supporting their blockade by going on strike rather than load or unload ships to or from Barlovento. Group Two are Barloventan immigrants, mostly naturalized Americans, living in the barrio, the Spanish-speaking ghetto. They claim the island government is not commie, merely reformist, and the island people will starve next winter unless they can import food and fertilizer from us now.”

  “How do we get through?”

  “Blow your horn and they’ll probably let you through.”

  Tash touched her horn lightly. Both lines fell back. The sentry glanced languidly at the press cards Sam showed him and turned a key in a lock-mechanism that automatically opened the gates.

  “That was easy,” said Tash. “Perhaps too easy from a security point of view.”

  “We were expected,” said Sam. “It might not have been so easy otherwise.”

  The driveway twisted through a small park of rolling turf and scattered shade trees to a gravel horseshoe in front of a portico with white pillars. The house was brick and stood on a grassy knoll high enough to look over treetops to the roofs of the city beyond.

  “Nice view,” said Tash. “What do we do now?”

  “Ring a doorbell.” Sam was climbing out of the car.

  “Butler and footmen?”

  “You forget this is 1975. They have a chief usher and ushers now, all under civil service and racially integrated.”

  Tash gave their names to the man who opened the door and they stepped into a hallway, where a wide-flung curve of stair rose like a jet of water from a fountain to the floor above.

  On the wall facing the door was a picture painted on silk. Tash recognized a favorite subject of classic Chinese art: Dragon Playing with a Pearl. Who but the Chinese would think of a dragon as playful? Who but the Chinese would give a dragon a plaything as tiny and precious as a pearl?

  “Must be part of the Governor’s private collection,” said Sam. “The state couldn’t afford anything like that.”

  “You mean the state has to spend its money on more essential things,” retorted Tash.

  They followed another usher from hall to corridor to still other corridors until they lost all sense of direction.

  “How big is this place?” asked Tash.

  “Small compared to the White House,” said Sam. “Just forty-two rooms. The indoor staff is only twenty-eight.”

  The usher threw open a door and announced them:

  “Miss Tatiana Perkins, Mr. Samuel Bates.”

  They walked out of the dim corridor into a blaze of sunshine.

  It had once been a terrace. It still had a stone floor, but now it had a slate roof and glass walls like a conservatory. Beyond the glass was a view of lawn and trees and faraway hills. There were potted plants everywhere: on shelves, on stands, even dangling on chains from the ceiling. Chairs were rattan; cushions, flowered chintz; tables, iron frames topped with glass.

  A hearth in the house wall looked as if it had once been an outdoor fireplace, but now it had a mantel of tawny marble. Ferns, growing in earthenware pots, hid the hearthstone.

  A canary was singing. His cage was a fantasy of fine wicker twisted into baroque shapes that suggested a Chinese pagoda.

  A woman rose.

  “I’m Hilary Truance, Mrs. Playfair’s social secretary. She will receive you in a moment. Do sit down.”

  She was a formidable woman, no longer young. Hair in smooth coils the color of polished steel. Eyebrows like the Empress Eugenie in her Winterhalter portraits: thin, arched, permanently raised. Drooping eyelids so she looked out at life through a thicket of sandy lashes. When she was not smiling, her mouth was petulant. Her voice had authority and her clean-cut vowels suggested good schools.

  She spoke to Sam. “Will this light do for photos?”

  “Perfect.” He eased the camera strap off his shoulder and set his camera down on one of the glass-topped tables.

  A door opened and an usher’s voice said: “Mrs. Playfair.”

  “I’m so sorry to be late, Hilary.” It was a small, breathless voice.

  Hilary Truance ignored the apology. “May I present Miss Perkins and Mr. Bates?”

  “How do you do? And please sit dow
n. Hilary, I think we would all like some tea.”

  “Thank you, I’d love it,” said Tash.

  “Me, too. Please,” said Sam.

  Nothing in Vivian Playfair’s photographs had prepared Tash for the dull skin, lifeless hair, and empty eyes. The ghost of a lost beauty lingered only in her felicitous bone structure. She was exquisite but lifeless, like a delicate sea shell when the sea creature has died and dried to mere dust blown along the beach.

  Hilary Truance poured the tea, kept the conversation brisk, helped Sam vary the light by raising and lowering Venetian blinds, suggested various poses for Vivian.

  When Sam had got all the shots he wanted and they settled down to the interview, Hilary tried to run that, too.

  “Are you going to take notes, Miss Perkins?”

  “I’d rather tape the interview, if I may.”

  “You may if you’ll send us a transcript to okay before publication.”

  Tash relished that royal “us.”

  “Will you give me the okay in writing? That will protect me.”

  “I suppose so.” Hilary’s voice was grudging as if she disliked the idea of giving anybody anything.

  Tash switched on her tape recorder. It was no bigger than a handbag and ran on batteries.

  “Have you any particular topic in mind, Miss Perkins?” demanded Hilary.

  “No.” Tash deliberately by-passed Hilary. “May I ask if you have any topic in mind, Mrs. Playfair?”

  Dutifully, Vivian brought her gaze around to Tash, but the eyes were still empty. “Not really. After all, this interview wasn’t my idea.”

  Tash ventured her first probing question, trying to soften the directness with a gentle voice. “Whose idea was it?”

  Hilary intervened at once. “Anyone’s. No one’s. What could be more obvious than interviewing the Governor’s wife? Isn’t that what you newspaper people call a ‘natural’?”

  “This interview is not what this newspaper person would call a natural,” returned Tash. “Mrs. Playfair has always refused to be interviewed before, but this time, the suggestion came from the Governor’s aide, Mr. de Miranda.”