The Mad Conductor

PROLOGUE

COULD THERE EVER BEFORE HAVE BEEN A NIGHTMARE like this? Of course, the thing could hardly have been a true nightmare, I suppose, since it happened in broad daylight — warm, comfortable, sunny, early fall daylight — and came just as I was strolling across Clare Bridge.

After all, I was wide awake.

Wide awake, yes, but no less terrified than if asleep.

And — humiliating thought — I find that I am still terrified.

Dear God in Heaven ... What does it mean simply to be walking to prayer service in King’s College Chapel, thinking of nothing in particular, and then to see such things as I saw this day? What could it mean? What must I do? How should I be?

Oh, You’ll insist that I know quite well.

Right, then. Martha Clark, ordinary Christian person, shall proceed to set down, here on paper, just what I saw, leaving out nothing, and then I shall read my story to Paul when he comes home, and then to Elisabeth and Jason. And then we four, together, can think, and pray, and, perhaps, do ... if doing is somehow called for.

Yes. That’s the thing.

And so here I will begin, in this little book. Here is everything that I saw this morning, just as I remember it. And if these words make me appear (to my husband and friends) a crazed woman, well, that’s just how it will need to be.

I came across the little bridge, intending to walk into town through Clare College, and just as I reached midpoint and turned to look downriver — the Cam is so tranquil at that time of day — my view of the water was, first, interrupted, and then, by degrees, completely obscured by what I can only call a vision. I began to see a picture before me, one with bright outlines and clear contrasts. It formed itself right in front of my gaze, blocking out the Cam, and then it began to grow and grow until it occupied my whole field of sight. I remember that I held on to the railing as tightly as I could, because I was afraid I might actually fall prostrate on the bridge.

And then the nightmare proper began. I was not at first so much frightened as I was confused. After all, it was, when it started, just a perplexing optical phenomenon — as my psychologist husband might call it — that scared me in one way (What could be happening? I thought to myself.) yet not in any other way.

At least I don’t think it scared me, at first, in any other way.

But following a perfectly innocuous beginning — with, in the center of the dreamed landscape, perhaps a dozen men stacking little books, hundreds or thousands of little books, in a small clearing in a woodsy place — the thing changed. It all became somehow bigger than that. Everything became quite large: the men, the individual books themselves, the number of books ... all perfectly huge ... and all somehow perfectly horrid. (I can’t quite say how.)

And then suddenly there was fire. The books were burning. And the men seemed to cheer and clap their hands. And I tried — we all know how frustrating dreams are — to cry out to them that they should stop, and when I did, they stopped cheering and looked right at me. One pointed toward me, and several of them began to advance in my direction. Quite menacing, really. I tried to cry out, but, of course, it was just a dream and nothing happened when I tried.

And then the thing began to go away, and yet, before it was quite completely gone, I saw that the fire was spreading from the books to some buildings that I had not noticed before. I don’t know if they had been there at the start of the vision, or if they were made present while my attention was drawn to the men. But the buildings were, I’m quite certain, churches. Big ones, tiny ones, ancient ones, young ones, stone ones, frame ones ... all shapes and sizes and types ... but quite definitely churches, every one of them. And I saw the fire beginning to run toward them.

And that was the end.

The vision just vanished, and I was left there on Clare Bridge, holding on to the railing for dear life. There were people around me all the while, mostly students, I believe, crossing the bridge and, as I think, paying me no mind.

And when it was all over, I felt so weak I could hardly stand. And so, I didn’t try to walk for some time. I remained and looked over the Cam, and tried not to be so frightened. I suppose I appeared to others altogether normal the whole time. No one stopped to inquire. People just continued to pass behind me.

I stayed a long time, just standing, looking, thinking. And, of course, praying. And praying desperately, I’m ashamed to admit even to this page of my own writing. After all, when something like that happens to a Christian person, one can’t just say, Father in Heaven, I’m terrified by something that just visited my mind and I am awfully keen on never seeing such a thing again.

So, my desperate praying was quite silly, I now think. Whatever the thing — the vision or nightmare — actually was, reason suggests to me that it should be regarded as holy, in some fashion, and that my prayers should take the line that I require assistance in understanding what it all meant. It’s not as if God is to be regarded as unaware of the event, after all.

And I can’t believe that it was all just the result of my failure to have a proper breakfast this morning. This wasn’t about bad digestion or no digestion or running a fever or slipping into an elaborate daydream at an inconvenient moment. No, this was something done to me, or with me, or for me, with clear purpose and exquisite timing. There is holiness here somewhere, and I must come to understand it.

There. I’ll have done with this now. It is all set down here on paper. I only wish I could know what will be next.

Then, after nearly three decades, a new generation has come, and a new story — the new generation’s own story has begun ...

CHAPTER ONE

THE DAY THAT CHANGES our lives forever does not introduce itself by that name. It just comes.

We awake. We arise. We move about. We may pray. If we do, we may ask God for His protection. From what, we do not yet know.

United States Navy Lieutenant Matthew Clark, age twenty-seven years and one day, stretched to his full six-foot four-inch length on the upper bunk of his diminutive stateroom. He smiled as the aircraft carrier’s steam catapult, anchored within the flight deck’s superstructure just above his head, slammed an F-4 Phantom into a summer morning. This was the flyoff of the air group to Oceana Naval Air Base after a seven-month patrol in the Mediterranean, and it meant that in twenty-four hours the ship would be berthed at Norfolk and he would begin processing out, his active duty at an end, and on his way to Charlottesville to begin graduate school.

Matt was genuinely excited. He had enjoyed his military experience even though it had meant enduring Naval ROTC in the years of an unpopular war, especially so on university campuses. And it had meant serving on active duty at a time of low morale throughout much of the United States military. But his country’s involvement in an Asian morass had finally come to an embarrassed, miserable end, while the resignation of a United States president had seemed to place an exclamation mark on an interminable paragraph in the nation’s history. The chance to return to his alma mater as a graduate student was delicious to him.

He was proud of his military service and happy with his prospects. He felt that his British parents, Martha and Paul Clark, were, too, at least to the extent of endorsing graduate studies as a worthwhile post-Navy step. His father had loved his academic career in psychology, first at Cambridge, then, after their immigration to New York City shortly before Matt’s birth, at Columbia. Matt, as an only child steeped in his parents’ love of ideas and, especially with regard to his mother, of books themselves, understood academic life. His intention was to complete graduate studies, then immerse himself in the business world just long enough to achieve a financial platform. He told himself that at that point he would, having proven himself in that fast-paced, competitive world, move into academia for a second career of teaching and research in economics, marketing, or international finance. Matt had thought it through with his usual intense care. He relished this future, played it out in his mind often, and at times could scarcely contain his impatience to begin after five years in the military. His father shared his excitement. His mother did not, but only because, he felt, she did not really value either business or money. She would come around soon enough once he began to find his way.

Another F-4 cranked its twin jet engines to a fury directly over his head, engines capable of driving the huge fighter plane into a completely vertical ascent when necessary. Matt had not been counting the launches that morning, but he knew the flyoff had been underway since 0600. It was now 0745 on this June Thursday, and, even at the relatively leisurely launch pace of an end-of-cruise flyoff to Oceana, he knew that by now few of the carrier’s eighty-five warplanes would still be on board. He swung his long-muscled frame out of the upper bunk and dropped to the polished deck. He would go topside as soon as the secure from flight operations announcement came. He intended to walk the flight deck one last time while still at sea. He wanted to stroll aft, to the fantail, and watch the seventy-five-thousand-ton vessel’s enormous wake churning toward the bow of the dutiful rescue destroyer, a mile to stern.

As he laced on his scuffed brown shoes, the telephone at his elbow emitted its jangling alarm, a unique sound he despised, even though, in comparison with the roar of steam catapults and Navy jet engines, it ranked far lower on a decibel scale. He lifted the receiver.

Mr. Clark speaking, sir, Matt responded with practiced military elocution.

Matt? This is the XO. Can you come down right away?

Yes, sir, Commander. He replaced the receiver, making sure the heavy weather clamp was in place. The clamp, designed to prevent the telephone receiver from being dislodged from its cradle in turbulent seas, served no purpose on a ship the size of a Forrestal-class aircraft carrier, a ship almost completely impervious to the sea’s violence. But it was a useful reminder that this was indeed a warship, one that could be as susceptible to other kinds of threats as the smallest minesweeper in the fleet.

Matt finished with his laces and straightened his uniform, careful to align his shirt buttons’ vertical seam with his slightly tarnished gold belt buckle. When he had the alignment perfect, thereby calling the eye’s attention away, he hoped, from the wrinkles his khaki shirt had developed during his fully clothed, two-hour post-mid-watch attempt at sleep, he snatched the clipboard from his desk and stepped gingerly into the brightly lit passageway. The last time he had been in the ship’s executive officer’s cabin had been two years previous, when he had first reported aboard after having served nearly three years on a new frigate. Matt assumed that the XO had summoned him for the same sort of procedural conversation with which he had been greeted twenty-four months ago.

Yet, there was something in the XO’s voice that did not suggest routine. An edge. A slight discomfort, undefined. Matt pushed the disquiet from his mind with practiced dispatch. He stepped purposefully through two of the regularly spaced watertight hatches that interrupted the carrier’s longitudinal corridor, wheeled left into the starboard escalator shaft, and waited for three of his junior officer colleagues to reach the top. As they cleared the ascending escalator with nods of morning recognition, he twice slapped the rubber-coated directional switches to reverse the gears, descended the now rapidly downward-moving stairway at full gallop, switched off the escalator mechanism with a deft open-hand punch, and, fifteen seconds later, stood at the executive officer’s closed door. Matt squared his shoulders, breathed deeply one time, knocked twice, and heard the basso response: Come in.

As he entered the spacious living and working area of the XO, three senior officers rose to meet him. The XO was one. Matt’s immediate superior, the operations division officer, was another. The third was the ship’s Protestant chaplain, a Methodist minister with the rank of commander. None was smiling. The sight of the chaplain sent an alarm to Matt’s brain. Why would the chaplain be present for a routine exit interview? He tensed, eyes narrowing. He turned slightly to face the executive officer.

But it was the chaplain, whom Matt scarcely knew, who spoke, without preliminaries and with all four men still standing at a sort of informal attention. Matt, he said with set jaw and what he may have thought was a don’t-be-alarmed voice, something may have happened at home. It may be nothing, but we wanted to relay the information to you immediately. Your parents’ whereabouts ... That is, it appears that your parents have been missing for several days now. Police just now reached us.

Matt, unmoving, stared, first at the chaplain, then at his division officer, the only one of the men whom he knew more than superficially. But they simply turned their own eyes back to the executive officer. When Matt’s eyes followed theirs, the XO spoke.

The flyoff is finished, Matt. We’re holding the mail plane for you on the flight deck. Grab your shaving kit out of your stateroom and go. We’ll take care of your gear and of your processing out in Norfolk. Here’s the name and phone number of the New York detective who spoke with me by radiotelephone half an hour ago. He paused. He stepped forward. Good luck, Matt. You did a fine job for us. Let us know if we can help.

With that, the XO thrust a folded piece of ship’s notepaper into Matt’s hand, then attempted to shake that same hand with his own. Matt did not reciprocate. He stared down at the paper in his right hand, still unmoving.

Then he felt his division officer’s hand on his arm. I’ll fly with you to Oceana, Matt. Let’s go.

Seven minutes later, at 0802, only two minutes behind scheduled departure, the ship’s twin-propeller mail plane lumbered down the flight deck, assisted not by catapult, but only by the thirty-five knots of wind streaming over the deck as the ship’s massive engines drove her through the green swells of the Atlantic. Near the bow, the stubby craft rose and, reluctantly airborne, lifted into the June sky. Matt Clark, near-civilian, was going home.

At 0945, standing at a telephone placed on the edge of an otherwise bare metal desk by the teen-age yeoman serving as receptionist in the lobby of the Oceana Naval Air Station BOQ, Matt fought the infuriating rotary dial with an adrenaline-driven index finger. Plowing through a formidable long-distance bureaucratic barricade comprising abrupt New York City questions and surly transfers, he heard finally the guttural, two-syllable response, spoken as a well-rehearsed challenge.

Belton!

Detective Sid Belton?

Belton!

This is Lieutenant Matthew Clark, said Matt, dropping the pitch of his voice and placing emphasis on his Navy rank. My executive officer gave me your name. I’ve flown to Norfolk from the ship. What’s happened to my parents?

Despite his effort to match the detective’s brusqueness with his own, the words began to tumble from his lips, faster as he spoke each one, words competing nervously with each other and progressively weakening themselves in contrast to the detective’s finely honed bark. There was a pause at the other end of the line. Matt could hear drawers opening and closing, papers shuffling, and finally the leather-and-rusting-spring complaints of an ancient swivel chair. When Sidney Belton spoke again, his vocal demeanor had changed. He was no longer speaking, it would seem, to an inconsequential distraction to his midmorning paperwork. His voice maintained its guttural tone, but the pace of his words now traced a measured trajectory, one filled, it seemed to his listener, with omen.

Twenty-four hours ago, we got a call from Columbia. Your father’s department chairman told us that Dr. Clark had not come to work on the day before, that he had also missed an eight o’clock meeting that morning, and that there had been no response to repeated phone calls. Asked us to check on him. We did. Found nobody at home. Interviewed several people in your parents’ apartment building, and three of Dr. Clark’s colleagues at the university. No one could say they had seen either your father or your mother since Monday morning, almost seventy-two hours ago now. We wanted to go in the apartment yesterday, but your father’s colleagues wanted us to wait until we talked to you. It took us a few hours overnight to track you down through the Navy. I finally got your boss on the line about 7:30 this morning. You want us to go in the apartment, Lieutenant? We can be in there fifteen minutes from right now, and I can call you back from inside the apartment.

When Matt did not respond immediately, the detective resumed his original tone. Hey! Are you there? We got missing persons here!

Matt, accustomed for five years to being spoken to with some deference by all those not clearly of higher rank than he, was instantly livid. Why don’t you go to the devil! Why, you ...

Hey! Take it easy, kid! We’re on the same side here. Just gimme a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We go in the apartment now, then give you a call? Or not? What do you say, kid? Just gimme an answer.

Matt was easily chastened. The word kid had done it instantly. He felt like a child and responded in kind. Well, I suppose it’s the best thing. Sure. What? Oh, here’s the yeoman. He’ll give you this number.

Just over an hour later, the same yeoman handed the phone to Matt, and Matt’s ear was assaulted by the same rough New York City rasp: Lieutenant Clark? Belton here. No luck in the apartment. No sign of a struggle. Nothing out of place. The detective paused, then modulated his voice to a caricature of persuasive intimacy. "Understand from your boss that you’re practically out of the Navy now? Yes? Come on up to New York, Lieutenant. Go through everything here in the apartment and see if you can come up with anything. We’ll notify police and highway patrol personnel across the country. We’ll find ’em ... I always find ’em."

Ten minutes later, Matt replaced the receiver with a certainty that he must not stop and think about anything at all. Experience told him that when things seemed most confused to him, he needed to delineate a course of action and move on it immediately. This New York detective’s suggested course would do just fine. If he stopped to think ... to try to sort everything out ... to imagine the possibilities of foul play that his parents might somehow have encountered on the streets of Manhattan ... to weigh the consequences of this unforeseen emergency for his life, for his entry into graduate school, for his imagined sequence of careers ... above all, to decide how he actually felt about any of this ... he would become frozen, mentally and physically inert. So, thinking about little other than the next five minutes’ demands, he moved efficiently from one step to the next: meeting with the base transportation officer, securing passage on a Navy cargo flight that evening to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, arranging for lodging that night on the air base, and reserving a civilian rental car for early next morning. It would have been possible to drive from Norfolk to New York immediately, but he had served the midwatch the previous night, with less than two hours’ sleep just before the XO had summoned him, and now, in late afternoon, he knew he could not start an eight-hour-plus drive that would bring him to New York City well after midnight. He would accept the military cargo flight, sleep for several hours at the Air Force Base in Delaware, and then start the three-hour drive from Dover to Manhattan. He did not want to think. He only wanted to rest, to gain his parents’ apartment by noon tomorrow, and then, in that familiar sanctuary, begin to make sense of this catastrophic intrusion.

For that was still Matthew Clark’s first response to nearly every unexpected, uninvited interruption, small or large: resentment that his time had been encroached upon. It was not that he did not love his parents. It was not that he was not desperately worried about them. It was that his habitual response to unplanned events was irritation borne of a sense that, once something was planned, the time thus allocated for it had become, quite simply, his own.

And so it was an angry, irritable Matt Clark who began his journey north to New York, a Matt preoccupied more with this newly unsettled quality in his own life than with the ominous uncertainty surrounding his parents’.

Still clad in the clothes he had been wearing on board ship when the executive officer’s summons had come the previous morning, Matt Clark entered the borough of Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel, extricated himself from the snarl of tunnel traffic, and raced north surrounded and buffeted by a flight of New York City Yellow Cabs toward his parents’ West Side apartment. As agreed, Sid Belton and several uniformed city police officers awaited his arrival. Two police cars held a place for his rental car in front of the apartment building. Matt stepped from the car, self-conscious in his now thoroughly disheveled at-sea working uniform, and shook hands with a stooped, rumpled mid-fortyish man nearly a foot shorter than he. I’m Belton, Lieutenant. Glad you made it. You tired? Hungry?

Detective Belton’s physical presence was a revelation to Matt. Heretofore the disembodied voice of arrogant, authoritarian rudeness, he seemed in person almost cuddly, with a crooked smile that by itself softened the harshness of the voice, and with deep-set, almost black eyes peering with something like naïve inquisitiveness at the world at large. Matt’s long-distance anger and frustration dissolved in a surge of wholly unexpected gratitude at the detective’s demeanor and at the extraordinary preparations he had engineered in anticipation of Matt’s arrival. Not only had he been waiting as promised, and personally solicitous, he had assigned one police officer to turn in Matt’s rental car, another to pick up a ham sandwich for his lunch, and still another, after having estimated Matt’s height and girth with the critical eye of the gendarme, to go to one of the neighborhood haberdasheries to buy a few civies with taxpayer money, on the correct assumption that Matt’s clothes — military and civilian — were still on his ship or in storage. When Belton explained all of this, Matt found himself staring at the detective, stunned by such generosity and thoughtfulness. Belton smiled his crooked smile again: Hey, kid, we’re rude, but we’re not bad people. We do try to help, y’know?

Together, the two of them went up in the elevator to the ninth-floor apartment. They were silent as they entered, using Matt’s own key. Matt shivered involuntarily as he stepped into the familiar living room. He had a sense of somehow entering his parents’ tomb. An uncanny feeling of abandonment enfolded him in the silence. The door closed behind them.

Belton spoke: "We’ve dusted for fingerprints, and tried to find out if valuables have been taken. I don’t think we have anything, but that’s why we need you to go through their things and see if anything looks wrong. And another thing, son. Everything we can find out about your parents leaves me confused as to why anybody would kidnap them or do anything to them at all. There is such a thing as randomly targeted crime and violence, of course, but your parents ... they’re boring, son. Know what I mean? They’re not rich; they’re not controversial; they don’t hang out with anybody except their university and church friends; they don’t gamble; they don’t have anything to do with drugs. I don’t know what they left behind in England, but in more than twenty-five years in the U.S., they haven’t done a thing that makes them targets for anybody ... for anything. And, of course, if they were actually kidnapped for any reason, we’d expect the kidnappers to contact somebody long before now. So, I don’t get it. But I want you to look carefully at this apartment, and then I want you to just sit down and think. Think about their lives. Think about anything they may have written to you recently that meant nothing to you at the time, but might fit into this puzzle somehow.

I’ll leave you to it. Your lunch and a few clothes will be here in a couple of minutes, and we’ll station one officer just outside your door and his partner out front in their squad car. You come up with anything at all, you tell the guy at the door. Okay? You need anything at all, you ask for it. Okay?

Matt nodded. All right, Detective. I might as well get started. He thought for a moment and spoke again. Detective? Why all this trouble? I don’t mean the sandwich and the clothes, which, believe me, I do appreciate. I mean ... why are you ... why are the police so ... interested in this? Is there something that you suspect that you haven’t told me? I need to know. Really. I want to know.

Belton shook his head. Nope. Don’t know anything that you don’t know. But it’s not every day that a Columbia professor and his wife go missing for a week, son. I don’t know if anything bad has happened to them or not, but I don’t like it. When someone does something to good New York citizens, I take it personally, son. Understand?

As soon as Matt was alone, he quickly walked through the apartment, scanning every surface for something amiss. Then he dropped to his hands in front of each piece of furniture, peering under each. He did not know why. He did not know what he was looking for. But he had immediately trusted the detective, once he was face to face with him, and he wanted to comply with Belton’s directives as best he could.

After nearly two hours, he sank into his father’s living room chair, and allowed his mind to run free in his parents’ past. He tried to do what Belton had asked, tried to think of anything his mother and father had said in their letters during his seven months’ cruise in the Mediterranean. He tried to imagine sinister meanings behind their stories of university politics and church pettiness. Campus intrigue. Parish scandals. He laughed aloud, softly. His parents were so ... upright. What had the detective said? They’re boring, son.

His gaze, unfocused until now, absently scanning the rooftops and balconies visible just across the street, moved idly to the left of the window. Without conscious effort, his eyes brought into focus a framed print. The print was a striking, snowy depiction of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge University.

Matt sat straight up in his father’s chair. His eyes narrowed again as they had in the XO’s cabin thirty hours previous. King’s College. Cambridge University. It was long ago, but ... if there did happen to be any intrigue in his parents’ past, perhaps it lay there, in England, not here in New York. What had Belton said? I don’t know what they left behind in England. ...

What had they left behind in England? He searched his memory. They had left Elisabeth and Jason Manguson, their best friends. They had left Dr. and Mrs. Ashford, their campus parents. They had left that strange story of a war, something to which they alluded from time to time, usually somewhat cryptically, his father, lightly and jokingly, his mother, always with deadly seriousness. Waged just after the real Second World War, this apparently clandestine conflict had somehow been conducted above and below and behind the public’s consciousness. Yet, it had been fought, if one could accept his parents’ characterizations of it, in deadly earnestness and would have become real enough, and public enough, had it turned another way. And Matt knew even as he thought it through that he actually knew almost nothing about it. He had listened to his parents’ accounts of the conflict with the polite interest with which he listened to his history professors’ accounts of Persians fighting Greeks. His war interests had always been kindled by aircraft carriers and aerial torpedoes and dive bombers ... modern Naval warfare. Real warfare. But this other thing, the Cambridge War, as his parents had termed it, or the Prayer Book War, as Matt himself had once jokingly called it, seemed to Matt to have been fought over some ludicrously obscure threat to the Christian church in England, something about corrupting or replacing the Anglican prayer book. He had never even tried to understand any part of the story. Religion had never taken with Matt. He had no idea what all these religious conflict tales had been about. And none of it had ever mattered to him in the least. Until now. He frowned. Detective Belton hadn’t known what they left behind in England. Well. Neither did he.

Matt rose quickly from his chair, crossed the room, and stopped at the doorway of his mother’s study. He stood for seconds, looking around the compact room with new eyes. He knew his mother wrote here, always at the small desk tucked just inside the doorway. He knew she prayed here daily, a fact that made him uncomfortable at this reminder of her unabashed piety, the image of her here in this room suddenly highlighting by way of contrast his own breezy and cynical materialism in a fashion that made him flush with an unexpected and unfamiliar sense of shame. He brushed the feeling away with a characteristic, nearly imperceptible wave of his right hand. It was a skill borne of long practice.

He let his eyes fall to the floor while he processed the prior thought. He knew nothing about this room, precisely because he knew his mother prayed here, read Scripture here, wrote in her diary here. And he wanted nothing to do with any of that. He shook his head slowly.

Then he looked up sharply. Her diary. Where was it? He knew she wrote in her diary each day, but he could not recall ever having actually seen it. He turned to face the desk. It was orderly, of course. His mother’s Bible was placed carefully just to the right of the lamp, itself on the left corner. To the right of the Bible was her red