Hell Gate [antikvár]

1In the late winter of the year my brother died I came back to Washington for the first time in many years. I came because my brother had telephoned me to say that our father was seriously iU and that it might be cancer. I flew into Dulles International Airport from London by jet, caught a taxicab into Washington, and registered at the httle Marlyn Hotel in N Street, where so many British Embassy and Foreign Office peoole stay because it is inexpensive and because it reminds them of small English inns.I had a quick shower and shave before going to meet my brother at the National Press Club for a drink and dinner. We were to drive down to Warrenton, in Fauquier County, Virginia, after dinner to see my father and my sister who had flown in from San Francisco.This much of the thing was unavoidable. From there on it was a nightmare of especially luminous quality, shimmering with the peculiar slime of betrayal, bullheadedness, and stupidity. I say this in the full knowledge that two good things came of it, and even they were none of my doing.Stuart Dunbar, the battered news correspondent who works for United Publications and lives in my flat in London in Stratton Street when he is not looking for trouble in other parts of the world, is an odd beast, admittedly. The Dunbar, like so many of his ancestors, is a romantic, always ready to take a broken heart as a trade for sense, ape-proud of the white plume that floats over the bloodied head, seemingly capable of learning only by his own experience, seldom able to see how other men have blundered into mavhem for want of ordinary intelligence.You would think I might have picked up a modicum of rudimentary good sense out of the way I got my Navy8