‘No! It’s not like that at all. Not just anyone can join. You have to be asked.’
This all made sense so far. Oxford was no different: it too had its drinking societies, like the Assassins or Piers Gaveston or the Bullingdon Club. They were secretive, too, in that they didn’t exactly publish the minutes of their meetings, but most undergraduates had a pretty good idea of who belonged to which. The Bullingdon even had its own costume, with navy blue tails and a garish, mustard-coloured waistcoat. Membership tended to be wealthy and aristocratic, young men rich enough to reduce the private room in a restaurant to rubble and pay the repair bill on the spot and in cash.
But the Yale societies — Wolf’s Head, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key — sounded different. For one thing, they had their own buildings in the heart of Yale. ‘Oh, they’re extraordinary, you gotta see them,’ the bar boy said. ‘They look like ancient Greek temples. Doric columns and all that. They call them “tombs”.’
‘So they’re not secret at all, then.’
‘Oh, they are. Completely secret. No one knows what goes on inside. And only a handful of people are allowed to join. I think Wolf’s Head only has fifteen or sixteen members at any one time. Mainly juniors.’
‘But however exclusive they are, whatever it is they do can’t be that important if these groups are — with all due respect — made up only of undergraduates.’ James smiled.
‘But they’re not, not really. That’s the whole point. After your year as a member, you become a past member. And you keep that for life. They say President Taft was a Skull and Bones man.’
‘And, what, they meet afterwards?’
‘They help each other out. Like a secret network.’ That too was familiar. Oxford academics pretended to be above such things, but James knew of the Freemasons and their cat’s cradle of connections, one man giving another a leg-up, the beneficiary then lending a hand to a third, who in turn would help the first — a perpetual motion machine of favours and patronage.
James had just pressed the bartender for a few specifics when the door opened and two men came in, instantly demanding martinis. James left a coin on the counter and hurried out.
Once outside, he reached for the notebook he had kept in the inside breast pocket of his jacket: he hadn’t wanted to scribble notes while the bartender had been talking, fearing it would look odd or at least break the young man’s flow. Instead he had relied on a mnemonic technique he had used a couple of times during his brief, abruptly-terminated career in intelligence in Spain. If discretion barred him from using a pen and paper, he would take in information — nodding along, absorbing what he heard — and then, in his mind’s eye, visualize it in written form, the words appearing one by one on an imaginary page. Once the page was full, he would snap a mental photograph of it in his head and commit that to memory.
He now jotted down what he had just heard, rather than risk losing it: the locations of those three secret societies. As he walked he checked his notes against the Yale street map he had picked up from Walters earlier. Wolf’s Head was not far at all; he would pass Skull and Bones en route.
The boy from the bar had not been wrong. If most of Yale looked like a transatlantic transplant from Oxford, the ‘tomb’ of this secret society appeared to have been grafted on twentieth century America from ancient Greece or Rome. It consisted of identical twin buildings, each in reddish stone, smooth and windowless, save for two strips of dark, leaded glass framed by a flat, pillared portico: fake entrances. Buckling the two buildings together was a real entrance, similar in design to the other two — with pillars that were flat, rather than round — but with a genuine, solid door. There were no markings and no sign. It could have been a house of worship for an anonymous religion. And while James was tempted to mock the vanity of such a structure, as he probably would have done had this housed a student society back in Oxford, he could not deny the effect here. The closed austerity of this place exuded secrecy — and power.
He continued west on Chapel Street, then turned right almost immediately on York. At first, he couldn’t see what he was meant to be looking at. There was none of the immediate grandeur of Skull and Bones, no imposing, temple-like entrance. Instead, there were just glimpses of amber stone behind the lush green foliage of a garden full of trees. He would have guessed this was the home of a wealthy recluse, newly-built, like the Sterling Library, from stones given an artificial patina of age.
He walked around to get a different view. Now he could see that, where Skull and Bones reached tall and high, the Wolf’s Head ‘tomb’ was spread lower and wider, its edges softened by gentle lawns all around. It could have been a chapel in the English countryside.
He followed the low wall around until he saw a path, shrouded by trees, leading up to a side door. He was sure that few outside the clandestine, gilded circle of Wolf’s Head members dared to tread here and that he was breaking a dozen different secret society rules, but if he was to find Harry and Florence, Lund’s promise — I can help you — was the closest he had got to a clue. The Assistant Dean’s last act, embedding that pin into his cheek, had been to point here, to the Wolf’s Head, so James had little choice but to find out why. This was the best lead he had, largely because it was the only lead he had.
At the door he found a simple push-button bell on the right. He pressed it but heard nothing. He pressed it again, assuming he had not pushed it hard enough. Still nothing. Perhaps it was broken. Or else the bell was sounding in some distant room, the doors thick, the floors lushly carpeted, from which no sound could travel. He leant in, pressing his ear against the wood. The place seemed utterly empty.
He walked a few paces back, his eye seeking out windows, drainpipes, ledges. Without planning to, he had begun sizing up the building for a break-in. He retreated further, to see if there was a path leading around the back, when he heard the sound of a twig breaking under foot. He swivelled to his left and saw nothing, then round the other way and there, standing right by him, much closer than he expected, was a woman — watching him with a calm, steady gaze.
She was tall, with hair that was neither blonde nor brown but somewhere in between, the colour of honey, tumbling loosely onto her shoulders. To add to his confusion, she was wearing trousers, wide at the bottom, wider than any he had seen worn by a man, but unmistakably trousers. She was young too, perhaps one of Yale’s select population of female graduate students. In one hand she held a notebook, in the other a cigarette. She brought it to her lips, drew on it hard and then released a wreath of smoke. Then, unhurriedly, she discarded the cigarette, ground it out with a neatly-shod foot and extended a hand. ‘I’m Dorothy Lake of the Yale Daily News. How do you do, Dr Zennor?’ The emphasis on the second syllable, Zenn- or.
James was about to answer reflexively, but caught himself. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘Well, you just confirmed it. Thanks. But I’d worked it out. What other Englishman would be sniffing around outside Wolf’s Head except the man Yale police were questioning this morning over the death of-’
‘How do you know about that?’
‘I’m a reporter. My job is to know what’s going on in this city. Just like your job is to know what’s going on in people’s heads.’ She tapped an index finger at her temple. He noticed that her nails were painted blood red. ‘Besides, the editor has very good links with the Yale police department. Very good.’
James tried to reply, but the words would not come. He was flummoxed, and not only because Dorothy Lake had wrong-footed him with that reference to his academic field. There was something about the way she stood which suggested a confidence, bordering on aggression. He was used to that in men; he saw it all the time. But he had never before encountered it in a woman.
Finally he spoke. ‘When the police mentioned my name, I hope they also told you I had been released. I had nothing to do with Lund’s death, Miss Lake.’
‘Yeah, I heard that. But an innocent man would put the whole thing behind him, don’t you think? Get on with his work, reading Sigmund Freud, analysing ladies’ fantasies or whatever it is you psychologists do. But here you are.’
‘I’m here to find my wife and child.’
‘What here? At the Wolf’s Head tomb?’ She cocked her head at him in a way that was downright impudent.
James could think of no reply. Instead he turned and walked down the path and was almost back on the street when he felt her hand on his arm, lightly at first, then with greater force. ‘Stop,’ was all she said, but her eyes said more, a tiny concession. ‘I think we should talk.’
‘So that you can get a story for the student rag? I don’t think so. Now if you’ll excuse-’
‘You don’t need to worry about that, Dr Zennor. We don’t publish during the vacation. I’m just gathering string for the first edition of the next semester: “The strange death of Dr George Lund.” I might not mention you at all… if I don’t feel like it.’
