Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

  “They won’t stay on that track.”

  “No, but my Cuban friends are leading them on a bit with some enticing addenda, and we shall have several days at least; possibly a week or more.” He grinned triumphantly.

  “Thank you, Freddy. You did well,” Thatcher said.

  Madeleine nodded approvingly.

  “Maddy thinks I ought to go to the deputy with what Lesser told us. To make use of his vice-presidential connections.”

  “She is, as always, quite sensible,” Mendelsohn said, his grin gone. “You have no other choice. Though this comes much sooner than Hugh would prefer.”

  “Can’t be helped.”

  “Quite so, I talked with Hugh this evening, on a clean phone. It’s going well up there.”

  “Good. I’m glad it’s going well somewhere.”

  “I was able to give him a partial answer to his question. The computer has opined that Miss Reston’s initial attraction to Mr. Showers was primarily sexual.”

  “But he’s a straight arrow. Almost a Puritan.”

  “Yes, but he’s married to a woman who demonstrably isn’t. He must have learned something.”

  Alixe and Showers lay side by side, warm naked bodies touching. Though both were weary and satisfied sexually, neither could sleep. Finally, Showers sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  “No, stay close, Toby. I need you by me. My insecurities are quite out of control.”

  “It’s almost time. We have to get you to the airport.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s remarkable you stayed this long.”

  “I’m sorry. Those burning men in that truck, I … I’ve never seen a dead body before except at a funeral. I’ve never had anyone I knew die. All of my grandparents are alive. Now, Lila, those horrible men, screaming. It’s all so dreadful I can’t put it from my mind.”

  “Of course not. If I were a more decent person, I would have sent you back long before this—immediately after I saw that murdered woman in California with Felicity’s driver’s license.”

  “Toby, you are a very decent person, but you haven’t the right to send me anywhere. I came because I wanted to; I’m going because I want to. Well, no. I want to stay, I’m just too damned scared to. Who were those men who threw the grenade? How could they do that and save our lives and then just disappear?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know anyone who could possibly answer that question, except for that Laidlaw. They are professional men, and I want nothing to do with their profession.”

  She sat up, and held her head. “You gave me too much to drink,” she said. “I’ll fall asleep on the plane. That’s probably just as well. It’s going to be a very long, lonely flight.”

  “That flight is going to make me very lonely, too.”

  “We’ll be together again soon.”

  Showers said nothing.

  “Hold me, Toby. Please.”

  “I need a drink. I’m sorry, but I do.” He went to the table and filled a glass halfway with whiskey, then reached to pull one of the curtains a small ways aside. He stood staring out the opening, drinking, saying nothing, then returned to his seat on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry.”

  She began stroking his back, her hand tender by his scar. “Why do you drink so much, Toby? It’s not just your melodramatic experience in Africa.”

  “No, that’s not all of it. I suppose it’s hereditary. My mother was a heavy drinker. Very Russian of her.”

  “Russian?”

  “My deep dark secret. I’m only half the yankee WASP you seem to have fallen in love with. The other half is Russian. My grandfather was a university professor in Leningrad. It was St. Petersburg then. They fled the country after the first revolution in 1905. Does that bother you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “They were czarists. Quite well off. Catholics, not Russian Orthodox.”

  “Tobias. It wouldn’t matter to me if they were Russian Jewish immigrants.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “I’m afraid to say that it would matter to me, if it were true of you. It’s a disgusting thing to say, but I’m being honest. I fight it, but there’s anti-Semitism there. It comes with Westchester. It comes with Russians. It troubles me. Jordine is Jewish. My friend Guy Porique is Jewish.”

  She said nothing, but she took her hand from his back.

  “I find so much disgusting in myself of late,” he said, after drinking. “I loathe guns. I despise guns and the kind of people who keep them and the untold pain and suffering they’ve inflicted. But there I was, yelling at Joyce to use his pistol. Here I am now, wishing I had one. Feeling naked, helpless, powerless without one. Feeling less than a man.”

  “Can you stop drinking now, please?”

  “I can. I’m perfectly capable of putting this down and not having anything more than an occasional glass of wine for an entire year. I’m secretly proud of that. But I won’t. Not now, Alixe. Right now there is nothing real in my life but you and alcohol and whatever is out there waiting for us. For me.”

  “And Felicity Stuart.”

  “I hope.”

  “I hope so, too, Toby, because you’re never going to be free of her until you find her.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I love you, Toby.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m not going on that plane.”

  “Alixe, please.”

  “Stop that. Just get me a drink. I’m still very scared.”

  16

  Arthur Jordine’s apartment in the Watergate overlooked the Potomac and included an ample balcony, which Marie-Claire did not use, as she was completely naked. Instead, she reclined on the living room couch, reading the morning Washington Post and then The New York Times as she sipped coffee. There was a warm breeze off the river, strong enough to reach her through the open sliding door to the balcony, a gentle giant blowing softly over her skin. Dennis had become immediately suspicious that one afternoon when he had come home unexpectedly and found her in the kitchen wearing nothing, and correctly so. But he didn’t necessarily have cause. In the hot weather, Marie-Claire often went about the house nude, simply because it made her feel good.

  She had moved into Jordine’s apartment. After Dennis’ call, she and Jordine had both decided it was the best thing to do. The Watergate provided both security and anonymity, for no one but the police knew she was there. If Showers wanted to communicate with her, he would have to do so through Jordine at the State Department.

  Marie-Claire was still very nervous. She had stopped taking the sedatives, except for just before she went to bed, but found herself frequently needing a glass of wine to deal with her jumpiness, as her husband had suggested to Jordine. She smiled. Whatever else Dennis was, he had always been thoughtful and considerate to her. If dull, he was probably the nicest man with whom Marie-Claire had ever had a relationship. And now, of course, he could no longer be considered dull.

  The thought of wine produced an appetite for it. She put the newspapers aside and padded into the kitchen to pour herself some chilled chablis from the refrigerator. Like everything else about his way of life, Jordine’s jug wine was deliciously expensive.

  She took the slender glass to the open doorway, leaning happily against the door frame in the soft breeze, sipping and thinking. Whatever proved to be Dennis’ ultimate fate, the bombing of the Mercedes had shattered what remained of their marriage. As soon as was appropriate, she would have to talk to a lawyer, and the nice baron in Belgium. The dear man. After that, she might contemplate a future that included continued residence in the United States, probably as Mrs. Arthur Jordine. She could make herself amenable to that. Jordine was wealthy enough.

  There had been nothing of interest in the Washington papers. She had asked Jordine to bring some Canadian newspapers home with him, but that would not be for many hours. She had become not a little b
ored. Though very large, the apartment, like all apartments, was confining. Some more pleasant way would have to be found to pass those many hours before Jordine’s return.

  And then a delightful idea occurred to her. It was the first time she had ever been alone in Jordine’s apartment. She paused to refill her glass, then begain a playful but thorough search of the place, starting in the bedroom.

  She discovered the photographs, in two long, flat boxes, on a closet shelf. All of the pictures were of women, and all of them were undressed. Most of the women had been photographed while asleep or otherwise unaware of the camera. Two appeared startled and another startled and angry, though apparently not angry enough to get the film away from him. Several of the ladies had apparently posed willingly, for they had posed quite obscenely. Marie-Claire recognized one of them as the somewhat plump wife of a former ambassador, and laughed. She looked through the collection again, judging from some of the hairstyles that it ranged over at least twenty years, searching for other familiar faces, or bodies.

  She found only one, a sleeping blond lady with long hair, a deep tan, magnificent buttocks, and a mole on her hip. Herself. The bastard had sneaked a picture on some earlier occasion, another trophy head for the wall. Her impulse was to destroy the thing—to destroy every damn one of them—but she wisely restrained herself. At this point, the last thing she needed to do was end her relationship with Jordine with some intemperate act.

  Returning the photographs to their hiding place, she pressed on with her task, taking more than an hour before she was done. She found that Jordine kept a loaded revolver in his desk; that he wrote poetry, mostly bad; that he apparently suffered from constipation; and that he had won some fairly important yachting races. Her most interesting discovery was a thick manila folder full of correspondence, some of it in French. Jordine had written to dozens of important people, American senators and congressmen, rich and influential businessmen friends, other diplomats, and even the French foreign minister, keeping a copy of every letter. He had used language fawning and cloying, in one all but offering a bribe, all of this in furtherance of the same goal. Arthur Bernard Jordine desperately wanted to become ambassador to France and was apparently willing to do absolutely anything to win that appointment. Marie-Claire wondered if he thought of her as a potential asset in that pursuit. She could be, of course. Dennis had found her one.

  She went through the apartment again, making certain that everything had been put back in the proper place, then went to the telephone and began making calls, two of them in French.

  Porique had left her in the cabin, curled asleep on the chesterfield by the big stone fireplace, looking happy in her dreams. Surprised and pleased by her contentment, he had gone across the long meadow to a place by the creek he had come to favor, a grassy ledge full in the sunlight. It overlooked a deep turning in the creek and commanded a sweeping view of the hills to the east. He sat a long while, listening for the wildlife, large and small, he knew to be all around him, experiencing their innocent world to the fullness of his senses. Then he took out the book, a small volume he had been carrying in his back pocket all morning.

  Albert Camus had written The Myth of Sisyphus in 1940, a dead, dark time for France and for intellectual Frenchmen. Even at the thousandth rereading, it was difficult for Porique to take his mind past the first sentence of the essay:

  There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.

  As always, he stopped to ponder, to search through the vast catalogue of philosophical questions that had concentrated his mind since at a small age he had first conceived of his own death. He looked at the sky. He studied his hands. He stared into the water. As always, Camus was right.

  He read on:

  Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—come afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.

  A snatch of recollection from the night before distracted him, something she had said when they were lying by the fire, something about her at this late stage becoming an honorably married woman. He had said nothing in reply.

  Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding.

  Emotion and lucidity. An act of thought and passion.

  He read and thought for more than an hour. Certain phrases lingered longer than the others: “In a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world.… We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.… Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject.… In reality there is no experience of death.”

  The passage that he ultimately went back to, that he concluded his reading with, was this:

  And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine.

  The sun’s warmth intruded. He lay back against the grass, urging his mind to the battle of his thoughts, but shortly wearying. At length, he dozed, and did not hear her approach. Her kiss startled him. He looked at her vaguely at first, then warmly. He was so pleased that she had returned her hair color to its natural auburn darkness. He returned her kiss, then sat up.

  “I feel wonderful,” she said. She was wearing a white shirt, blue jeans, and Indian moccasins, the clothing flattering to her slender figure. Kneeling by the creek, she reached to touch the cold water, then stood, her hands on her hips, looking all about her.

  “I love this place, Ric. We should have come here days ago. Weeks ago. We should have come here directly from Vancouver.”

  “I wish that had been possible.”

  “It’s so much like home, like what was once my home. Where I grew up. We had hills like this. I had a favorite place like this, one that I went to when I needed to be alone, one that I took only my very few favorite friends to.”

  “And the first man you loved.”

  “A boy. Now I’m here, with you.” She smiled, then sat down next to him, plucking a long sheath of grass. She ran its tassled tip along the thin curve of her lower lip.

  “What have you been doing here?”

  “Thinking,” he said. “Reading.”

  She glanced at his book. “God,” she said. “The existentialist.”

  “One of them. Perhaps the wisest.”

  “The most like you, Ric.”

  He laughed.

  “Philosophers are no damn good, Ric. The only answers they have are to their own questions.”

  “Their own questions are the hardest.”

  �
�They’ve never answered mine.”

  She looked at the title of the book, then picked it up. “I haven’t read this for years,” she said. “Not since college.”

  She turned through a few pages, then returned the book to the grass. Her eyes clouded.

  “You’ve got the wrong one, Ric. The Camus essay you need now is The Rebel.”

  He stared at her, darkly, saying nothing. In The Rebel, Camus attempted to resolve the philosophical question of murder.

  Showers and Alixe were in the very first row of first-class seats on the Air Canada jetliner, Alixe by the window, Showers by the aisle, his long legs stretched out before him. The extravagance again irritated her, but with the sight of two burning human beings still vivid in her memory, she was not inclined to argue with him over anything he did for the sake of security. They had used her American Express card to purchase the tickets, signing in as Mr. and Mrs. A. Reston, letting the “Alixe” on the card stand as a man’s name unremarked. The ticket agent had paid little attention. They weren’t very interested in things French in Vancouver.

  Showers had made sure they were the last to board the plane at Vancouver. Occupying the seats closest to the forward cabin door, they were assured of being the first to leave. But then they would be at risk again, in another strange city, no doubt another dangerous city. Alixe hungered for that California coast, where there was no one to fear but the police.

  She had slept and read, from a good but overlong paperback bestseller she had bought at the Vancouver airport and knew she would never finish. She had eaten the acceptable food and drank a cocktail and two lingering glasses of wine. She had gazed endlessly out the window at the vast, dull expanse of empty green, brown, and blue that was Canada, a seemingly limitless expanse that stretched away to a horizon marked only by a vague blue-gray haze.

  “In a country with so much space and so few people, you wonder how there can possibly be political problems,” Dennis had said, looking past her. “Yet with so much separation, and so little commonality, it’s a wonder there aren’t more.”