Chapter Three The Wedding He Never Planned
In which a disguise, a mistake, and a stranger's tears change everything
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Almost directly in front of the Halifax house stood a long black limousine, its driver leaning out toward the door of the house next door as though watching anxiously for someone.
At the sound of Graham's footsteps on the sidewalk the man startled, caught his eye, and swung half out of his seat to throw open the rear door.
In the space of a single heartbeat Graham understood that he had been mistaken for whoever the car was waiting for — and in the space of the next heartbeat, he had decided to let the mistake stand.
"Don't get out," he called, already moving.
"We're dreadfully late. I'll manage the door myself — just drive, and drive fast." He swung in and pulled the door shut behind him, and before he had even found his seat the car was pulling away from the curb with a smoothness that spoke of a driver used to obeying command without question.
A glance through the rear window showed him the Halifax doorway crowded now with excited figures, arms flung out, pointing after his retreating car.
Somewhere behind that lit doorway, he did not doubt, Halifax himself was already on the telephone to whatever private muscle his fortune could summon on short notice.
Graham could hardly credit that he had come this far — mission accomplished, cipher in hand, and still moving.
But he knew better than to call it safety yet.
He had no idea where the car was taking him, and for the moment he found he did not much care, so long as it was away from that house.
Once he judged himself far enough clear, he would give the driver proper direction. First, though, the paper.
He worked quickly in the dim, jouncing interior, rolling the cipher into a tight cylinder no thicker than a pencil and sliding it down into a small hollow gold case the Director had included in his envelope of oddments — the kind of thing that might pass, at a glance, for an ordinary fountain pen.
A fine chain ran through it; he looped the chain over his head and let the case drop inside his collar, against his chest, where it lay cool and strange and, he told himself, wonderfully safe.
Only over my dead body, he thought grimly, and found the thought did not comfort him nearly as much as he'd hoped.
He fitted on the false eyebrows and mustache next, working by feel in the dark, and drew on a pair of thin gloves. Whatever came next, he meant to meet it looking as little like Caleb Graham as a man could manage.
He had just begun composing, in his head, the instructions he'd give the driver for the station, when a set of headlights swung up close alongside the limousine and held pace with it.
Graham shrank back into the shadowed corner of the seat, but not before he'd caught, in the brief wash of streetlight, the unmistakable thick-set silhouette of the man who had sat across from him at Halifax's table not twenty minutes before.
His stomach dropped. If that man had found him already, then whatever hope he'd had of a clean escape was very likely gone.
A limousine, however smooth its ride, was no match for a car built for speed, and he was one man against a city he did not know, full — for all he could tell — of Halifax's friends and hired watchers.
He measured, with his eye, the distance to the far door, and the darkness of the street beyond it, and had very nearly resolved to take his chance and drop from the moving car when a motorcycle roared up out of nowhere directly into the gap he'd meant to use — its rider in a patrolman's uniform, of all things, turning a pale, startled face toward the limousine's window as it passed.
Graham jerked back into the shadows, his heart slamming against his ribs.
So this is how it ends, he thought, with a strange, cold clarity — not with the paper in Washington, but in the back of a stranger's car on a street I couldn't name if my life depended on it.
And his life, he understood now with perfect certainty, did depend on it.
Men who trafficked in the kind of secrets he now carried against his chest would not consider a bit of unpleasantness in a dark street too high a price for silencing him.
His hand found the weight of his revolver inside his coat.
He thought, with a strange detachment, of simply destroying the cipher rather than risk its recapture — of chewing the thin paper to pulp rather than letting it fall again into Halifax's hands.
But the Director's voice rose up against the thought, steady and absolute: get the paper, and get back with it.
He would carry it whole to Washington if he possibly could, and fight for the chance to do so.
He was gathering himself to make a desperate break from the car when it swung, without warning, into a wide, lit driveway, and the pursuing car and motorcycle both fell back, as if uncertain what to make of the sudden turn.
The limousine rolled to a stop before a great stone building with an open, brightly lit doorway, high walls rising on either side.
For one wild moment Graham thought he had been delivered, quite literally, to a prison — that the whole elaborate carriage-trick had been nothing but a trap sprung shut.
He had his hand on the revolver and every intention of fighting for his liberty when the driver came round to fling the door open — and instead of guards or handcuffs, Graham found himself surrounded, in the space of a single breath, by six young men in evening dress, all talking at once, all radiating a kind of frantic, delighted relief.
"Here he is at last!"
"Where's the best man?" someone called from the lit doorway. "Has he even come?"
"He's here! He's come!" one of the men by the car shouted over his shoulder. Before Graham could react, another seized his arm with a grip that allowed no argument.
"Come on—there isn’t a second to lose. But first, sign this, o’ man."
A sheet of paper was shoved into his hand, a pen pressed into his fingers. Still dazed, he scrawled his real name before the implications even flickered across his mind.
“The organist’s about ready to walk out on us, and Cecilia’s people are half frantic,” another man chirped, already steering him forward. “Never mind explaining—just come.”
Somewhere above the confusion an organ was playing, and even as Graham registered it, the music swelled into the unmistakable, triumphant opening bars of a wedding march.
It broke over him all at once — not a prison, but a church; not a court-room, but a wedding — and worse, infinitely worse, that these six anxious young men had mistaken him, disguise and all, for the missing best man. … so he thought.
"Let me explain—" he began, with no earthly idea what he meant to say next.
"No time for explaining, man! The processional's already started — Jeff's waiting at the front and we're supposed to be walking that aisle this very minute. Everybody knows your flight got in late. Nobody expects you to explain a thing till after."
Just then an usher stepped aside from the church door, and the light fell full across a familiar, thick-set face peering in after him with open, hungry suspicion.
Graham's choice, such as it was, made itself: better a church full of strangers than that man's hands on his collar in an open street.
He let the ushers sweep him — quite literally sweep him, brushing the little pursuing man aside as though he were no more than an inconvenient gnat — up the stone steps and through the tall church doors.
Light and music and the heavy sweetness of massed flowers closed over him all at once, disorienting as a wave. One thought held steady through it all: get through this somehow, and out again, before the real best man appears to unravel the whole mistake.
An usher fell into step beside him, murmuring low and urgent instructions meant for a groomsman's ears alone.
"Rough getting here in time, I know, but never mind that now — it'll all come off fine.
You and Jeff go in together with the minister.
He's got the ring, so don't trouble yourself over that.
Nothing for you to do but stand where you're put and walk out when the rest of us do. Nothing to be nervous about."
Surely, Graham thought, half wild with the absurdity of it, someone will see through this in a moment.
My mustache is crooked. My voice must sound entirely wrong to anyone who knows the real man.
But every second that passed without discovery was a second's grace, and he found himself, despite everything, absurdly grateful for a well-glued mustache.
A pleasant-faced young man — evidently the groom, and evidently the "Jeff" of the ushers' whispers — came forward and seized Graham's hat and coat, depositing them without ceremony on a nearby chair.
"Here you are at last! Ten years, can you believe it — you're looking well, old man, truly well. No need to fret over a thing; we'll have this knot tied inside the half hour."
Graham fell into step beside him, mechanically, studying the young man's open, happy face with something that felt uncomfortably close to envy.
Would I look like that, he wondered, with a strange lurch of feeling, if I were walking up an aisle to meet Judy Bristol?
Or would I be walking as a man walks to his own execution?
His soul recoiled from the thought before he had even finished forming it, and the honesty of that recoil startled him more than anything else that whole extraordinary evening.