The Door to December

oppressiveness.
     Furthermore, Dan could not help but grimly wonder how Palmer Boothe could possess the refinement and taste to appreciate a house like this — and still be capable of condemning a little girl to the horrors of the gray room. That contradiction would seem to require a personality so duplicitous as to be virtually indistinguishable from schizophrenic multiplicity. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The great publisher and liberal and philanthropist who, by night, stalks the mean streets with a bludgeon disguised as an innocent walking stick.
     The butler opened one of the heavy, paneled doors to the library and stepped through, announcing Dan as he went, and Dan followed with more than a little trepidation, passing between bookcases into which the entry was recessed. The butler immediately withdrew, closing the door behind him.
     A twenty-foot-high, richly paneled mahogany ceiling curved down to ten-foot-high mahogany shelves filled with books, some accessible only with the aid of a library ladder. At the far end of the room, enormous French windows occupied the only wall not given completely to books; they presented a view of lush gardens, though heavy green drapes were drawn across more than half the glass. Persian rugs decorated the highly polished wood floor, and groupings of heavily padded armchairs offered elegant comfort. On a desk almost as big as a bed, a Tiffany stained-glass lamp cast such rich colors and exquisite patterns of light that it seemed to be made not of mere glass but of precious gems. Around the side of that desk and through the red-yellow-green-blue beams of filtered lamplight, Palmer Boothe came to greet his guest.
     Boothe was six feet tall, broad in the shoulders and chest, narrow in the waist, in his mid- or late-fifties, with the physique and aura of a much younger man. His face was too narrow and his features too elongated to be called handsome. However, a certain ascetic quality in his thin lips and straight thin nose, and a trace of nobility in his chin and jawline, made it impossible to deny him the approbative 'distinguished'.
     Holding out his hand as he approached, Boothe said, 'Lieutenant Haldane, I'm so pleased you could come.'
     Before Dan realized what he was doing, he found himself shaking Boothe's hand, though the very idea of touching this evil lizard of a man should have repelled him. Furthermore, he saw himself manipulated into reacting to Boothe partly like a vassal unaccountably admitted to the court of the king, partly like a valued acquaintance answering the summons of a nobleman whose approval he wished to elicit by the performance of any favor asked and whose friendship he hoped to gain. How this subtle manipulation was accomplished remained a mystery to him. Which was why Palmer Boothe was worth several hundred million and Dan, by contrast, did far more shopping at K Mart than at Neiman-Marcus. Anyway, he sure as hell hadn't initiated their encounter in the manner of a hard-nosed cop who had come to break someone's ass, which was the impression he had intended to make straightaway.
     Dan noticed a movement in a shadowed corner of the wood-dark room and turned to see a tall, thin, hawk-faced man rise from an armchair, a glass of ice and whiskey in one hand. Although he was twenty feet away, the hawkish man's unusually bright and intense eyes conveyed everything essential about his personality: high intelligence, strong curiosity, aggressiveness — and a touch of madness.
     As Boothe began to make introductions, Dan interrupted and said, 'Albert Uhlander, the author.'
     Uhlander apparently knew that he did not possess Palmer Boothe's uncanny manipulative powers. He didn't smile. He made no attempt to shake hands. That they were of opposing camps and hostile ideologies seemed as apparent to Uhlander as it was to Dan.
     'Can I get you a drink?' Boothe asked with a misplaced gentility and excessive civility that was beginning to be maddening. 'Scotch. Bourbon? Perhaps a glass of dry sherry?'
     'We don't have time to sit here and drink, for God's sake,' Dan said. 'You're both living on borrowed time, and you know it. The only reason I want to try to save your lives is so I can have the great pleasure of putting both of you bastards in prison for a long, long time.'
     There. That was better.
     'Very well,' Boothe said coldly, and he returned to his desk. He