The Key to Midnight

long-extinguished fire; and the two thirds of her life spent as Lisa Chelgrin had been thoroughly, painstakingly eradicated beyond recall.
        The dashboard fans pushed warm air through the vents, and the patches of condensation on the windshield shrank steadily.
        Finally Joanna said, 'I can accept that I've forgotten… Lisa. They stole my other life, but Joanna Rand is a good person to be.'
        'And to be with,' he added.
        'I can accept the loss. I can live without a past if I have to. I'm strong enough.'
        'I've no doubt about that.'
        She faced him. 'But I can't just pick up and go on without knowing why?' she said angrily.
        'We'll find out why.'
        'How? There's no more in me for Inamura to pull out.'
        'And I don't believe there's anything more to be discovered here in Kyoto. Not anything important.'
        'What about the man who followed you into that alleyway - or the man in your hotel room, the one who cut you?'
        'Small fish. Minnows.'
        'Where are the big fish?' she asked. 'In Jamaica - where Lisa disappeared?'
        'More likely Chicago. That's Senator Tom's stomping grounds. Or in London.'
        'London? But you proved I never lived there. That entire background's fake.'
        'But Fielding Athison is there, the place that fronts on the phone as United British-Continental Insurance. I'm pretty sure they aren't just small fish.'
        'Will you put your British contacts on the case again?'
        'No. At least not by long distance. I'd prefer to deal with these Fielding Athison people myself.'
        'Go to London? When?'
        'As soon as possible. Tomorrow or the day after. I'll take the train to Tokyo and fly from there.'
         'We'll fly from there.'
        'You might be safer here. I'll bring in protection from the agency in Chicago.'
        'You're the only protection I can trust,' she said. 'I'm going to London with you.'

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    41
        
        Senator Thomas Chelgrin stood at a window in his second-floor study, watching the sparse traffic on the street below, waiting for the telephone to ring.
        Monday night, December first, Washington, D.C. lay under a heavy blanket of cool, humid air. Occasionally people hurried from houses to parked cars or from cars to welcoming doorways, their shoulders hunched and heads tucked down and hands jammed in pockets. It wasn't quite cold enough for snow. Weather reports called for icy rain before morning.
        Though he was in a warm room, Chelgrin felt as cold as any of the scurrying pedestrians who from time to time passed below.
        His chill arose from the cold hand of guilt on his heart, the same guilt that always touched him on the first day of every month.
        During most of the year, when the upper house of the United States Congress was in session or when other government business waited to be done, the senator made his home in a twenty-five-room house on a tree-lined street in Georgetown. He lived in Illinois less than one month of every year.
        Although he hadn't remarried after the death of his wife, and although his only child had been kidnapped twelve years ago and had never been found, the enormous house was not too large for him. Tom Chelgrin wanted the best of everything, and he had the money to buy it all. His extensive collections, which ranged from rare coins to the finest antique Chippendale furniture, required a great deal of space. He was not driven merely by an investor's or a collector's passion; his need to acquire valuable and beautiful things was no less than an obsession. He had more than five thousand first editions of American novels and collections of poetry - Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Stephen Vincent Benet, Thoreau, Emerson, Dreiser, Henry James, Robert Frost. Hundreds of fine antique porcelains were displayed throughout his rooms, from the simplicity of Chinese pieces of the Han and Sung dynasties to elaborate Satsuma vases from Japan. His stamp collection was worth five million dollars. The walls of his house were hung with the world's largest collection of paintings by Childe Harold. He collected Chinese tapestries and screens, antique Persian carpets, Paul Storr silver, Tiffany lamps, Dore bronzes, Chinese export porcelain, French marquetry furniture from the nineteenth century, and much more - in fact, so much that he owned a