Silver Bullets

by Douglas Greene et al.

  “Indirectly. We need to go for a drive.”

  The beaming smile as she rose from her bench. “I like you for my guide, John Francis.”

  THREE

  From the passenger’s seat in my old Honda Prelude, Freydis Karlsdottir said, “I do not understand why we go first to construction place and not to lawyer?”

  I maneuvered around some orange traffic cones, which, since Boston’s “Big Dig” road-and-tunnel project began, have become as much a part of our local scenery as the cobblestones at Quincy Market. “Even my computer expert couldn’t find a residential address for Mr. Ragnarsson in the Massachusetts official records. Before I approach a lawyer who might be suspicious of us, I’d like to have a little more background on your father’s friend.”

  In my peripheral vision, I caught a frown.“Hogni’s inheritance would be ‘suspicious’ to his lawyer?”

  Now I looked over, noticing that her English was improving as she used it more with me. “In this country, Freydis, people are wary of unexpected gifts. Not in Iceland?”

  The bleak smile. “So many of us there know each other—are ‘related’ by distant blood to each other—that we have few surprises.” Even the bleak smile faded now. “An expression on our island is, ‘Who are his people?,’ which means the man’s family history. We are much guided by our history.”

  I dredged up what I could from a college course on European History. “Here in the United States, we learned about your Leif Eriksson discovering North America before Christopher Columbus.”

  A grunt, which took me a moment to realize stood for Karlsdottir’s laugh. “Only a very small part of this history, John Francis. Iceland held its first parliament, avoided civil war over religions, and discovered North America, all before the year one-thousand after Christ.”

  Deciding my own heritage didn’t pose a real comeback to that, I concentrated on my driving.

  Karlsdottir warmed to her subject. “We have the stories of such things told by our sagas, books of ancient days in an institute of culture, the pages to be read through boxes of glass. Our men of Iceland left to explore in their ships, with atgeir and sax.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Ah, no. I should be sorry. The ‘sax’ is a sword, short with only one side made sharp.”

  I thought of a pirate’s cutlass.

  “And the atgeir is…when you put the blade of the hatchet on a short also spear?”

  “Halberd, I think is the word in English.”

  A nod. “Hal…berd. Good. But when our men are away, the women must grow strong to work the farm, even to become war chieftains to defend the home.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Karlsdottir nodded. “If in ancient days someone did a crime of violence, the family of the victim takes the blood vengeance. Later days, the criminal was made ‘outlaw,’ to receive no food or water, horse or aid from any other Icelander. Three years for less crime, forever if bad crime. But now, even for beating of wife or taking of children for sex, no real punishing for ‘outlaw.’”

  I thought about Boston’s horrendous priest-rape scandals, somewhat resolved by recent settlements totaling nearly a hundred million dollars. “Modern civilization has a blind-spot about some things, Freydis, but eventually, justice kicks in.”

  “Justice.” She turned to me, then turned back. “Perhaps, John Francis.”

  * * *

  “Hey, you can’t come through that gate without a hardhat. And a pass.”

  There was a slight Southern lilt to the man’s words. Outside the open gate in the chain-link fence, Freydis Karlsdottir turned to me, a confused expression on her face. “What is…’pass?’ Like for the entering of airplane?”

  “Stay here and let me handle it.”

  I walked halfway to the burly black guy who’d challenged us, in a hardhat himself. Despite the dusty bluejeans and a torn flannel shirt, he held a clipboard in one hammy hand, and I drew the impression of a foreman, not a laborer. “This young lady and I would like to ask some questions.”

  “Don’t have time for questions, man.” He waved the clipboard at the skyscraper-in-progress behind him that was producing one hell of a symphony. Assuming jack-hammers, welding equipment, and nail-guns were your idea of orchestral instruments. “Got an ‘unparalleled tower of luxury condominiums’ to build.”

  If the guy was cynical enough to quote company hype, a bluff might work. “Look, it’s about one of your workers who got injured here. You can answer my questions now, conveniently, or traipse into a lawyer’s office for a few days of depositions. Your choice.”

  A disgusted expression for me, then an appraising one as he looked to Karlsdottir. “It’s the guy from Iceland, right?”

  “Good guess, Mr. ?”

  “Monroe. Lionel Monroe.”

  I took out my leather ID holder and showed him the laminated copy of my investigator’s license.

  Monroe shook his head. “Mr. Cuddy, anything like this is supposed to go through the office folks first. They say okay, then I can talk to you.” Seemed a reasonable policy, though not very helpful for my purposes. “It’s not about the comp’ claim. We’re just trying to locate Hogni Ragnarsson.”

  “Hogni,” with a grunted laugh, nearly like Karlsdottir’s. “All the whites on this site who make fun of Afro first names like ‘Latrell’ or ‘Deoncey,’ and this guy’s is ‘Hogni.’” Another look to Karlsdottir. “She family of the man?”

  “No. Just trying to give him something from a friend of his.”

  Monroe used the thumb of his free hand to push back the cuff of his shirt. “Watch says I got five minutes, but outside the gate, or the boss’ll have my ass for a ‘significant safety violation.’”

  We moved shoulder to shoulder back to where Karlsdottir waited. I said, “This is Mr. Monroe, and—”

  He cut me off with a sidelong look as he spoke to her. “Hogni, he told me you Icelanders like first names, right?”

  The beaming smile from my client, and I sensed we had Monroe won over.

  She said, “Yes. And Freydis is mine.”

  Karlsdottir stuck out her right hand, and, after slapping his palm against a blue-jeaned thigh, he shook with her.

  “Then I’m Lionel. Now, what can I tell you?”

  “Where Hogni now lives in your city?”

  Monroe continued ignoring me to focus on her. “Don’t know, Freydis. I recollect that he used a post office box,” another wave of the clipboard back toward the building, “but I never ran into him outside the site here.”

  The P.O. box might at least indicate Ragnarsson’s local neighborhood. “Lionel, do you—”

  He snapped his head toward me this time. “I told Freydis she could use my first name, not you.”

  Didn’t want to lose him. “Sorry, Mr. Monroe.”

  “I mean, like, it’s their custom to use first names, not ours, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay.” Monroe huffed out a breath and returned to Karlsdottir. “Let me tell you all I know about Hogni, and then you both be on your way.”

  “Yes?” she replied, in a tone that implied she was also trying to keep him talking.

  “We’re not a union shop here, and your Hogni was big and strong enough, I thought we could use him. Went fine for maybe a week. Matter of fact, he went on about how in Iceland everybody works account of it’s your way. Two, three jobs even, stuff being so expensive on an island because everything’s got to be imported. Hogni told the boys stories about eating horse steaks and smoked eels and—what did he call it? Oh, yeah:‘wind-dried puffin,’ that cute little bird looks kind of like a duck crossed with a penguin.”

  “Our tradition from ancient days.”

  Another huff. “Then one morning I hear him on our coffee break, asking the other guys questions about what happens, you get yourself hurt on the job. And, what do you know, next afternoon, Hogni takes himself a fall. I saw it, would have hurt anybody, but before the end of the week, man’s filing for workers comp’,
claiming he can’t move on his leg.”

  Like a huge pigeon, Monroe bobbed his head forward. “Freydis, I’m sorry if he’s a friend of yours, but I don’t think that ‘work ethic’ stuff from back home sunk into Hogni too well.” Now to me. “Okay, that’s it.”

  “Not quite, Mr. Monroe.”

  “Say what?”

  “Do you remember the local post office where Mr. Ragnarsson rented his box?”

  A final huff. “No.You can call the company office and ask, but I’ll tell you now, they won’t give it out.” Lionel Monroe turned away from us. “‘The privacy rights of our employees are paramount.’”

  * * *

  Back in the car—and the bumper-to-bumper traffic—I said to Karlsdottir, “You must be pretty tired, the jetlag and all.”

  She blinked a few times, then rubbed the heels of her hands over both eyes. “For true, but also we must see Hogni’s lawyer, yes?”

  “We’re a little late in the day for that, Freydis. Can I buy you dinner—or whatever other meal your body clock’s telling you it wants?”

  “My body…clock?”

  “Do you feel like lunch instead of dinner?”

  “Ah. No, John Francis. My…body clock makes the sound for dinner.”

  “‘Chimes.’”

  I sensed the confused look without turning toward her. “The sound a clock makes on each hour. We say it ‘chimes.’”

  The silhouette in profile of her solemn nod. “A lovely word. It is to the ear as the sound it describes.”

  I agreed, though I thought we might save ‘onomatopoeic’ until the morning.

  * * *

  “You are a good guide for restaurants as well, John Francis.”

  I’d brought her to Silvertones, a restaurant and bar roughly halfway between her hotel and my office, so I could leave the Prelude in a parking space I rent behind the building. Silvertones is in a cavernous basement and serves mainly comfort food, but it’s well prepared by the husband-and-wife team who run the place, and not knowing much about Icelandic fare beyond “horse/eel/puffin,” I’d hoped Karlsdottir could find something on their menu that she’d like.

  Over a second glass of wine, and halfway through our meals, my new client hooded her eyes, I thought at first from fatigue. Then she said, “The African man at the construction fence. He stood…above you?”

  I recalled the “first-name” exchange. “Stood up to me, Freydis.”

  “Just so.” A sip from her glass. “Confrontation. But what made him

  offended?”

  How to provide her a short version? “Africans first came to this country as slaves, kidnapped from their villages over there.”

  “This I know of.”

  “Their white masters here would give them first names, but broke up—separated—families to sell them. At auction.”

  Karlsdottir’s eyes grew wide. “As in a… place of market?”

  “Yes.” Fast forward. “More recently, there were many aspects of discrimination, and one was for a white person to call a black person by a first name instead of ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’ and the last name.”

  “As though still the black person is a… slave?”

  “Or that would be the insult the black person would assume.” I tried to lighten things a little. “Different in your country, eh?”

  “As to the tradition of first name, yes.” The bleak smile, and she seemed to really be crashing on our differential in time zones. “About the slavery and the race, not so different, perhaps. In ancient days of the Vikings, my people raided and pillaged in their boats to the south, bringing women—and girls—of Ireland back to our island, as slaves and forced wives. And my father told me that when NATO first came with an Air Force base at our Keflavik just fifty years past, the Iceland government required no black soldiers be sent to us. But we have grown. One family in twenty in my country—the word is ‘adopt,’ yes?—the Vietnam people who leave by boat after your war there is over.”

  And it had been my war, all right. But one in…? “Freydis, five percent of your population adopted those children?”

  “I tell you before, John Francis: We believe in family. And courage, to do the right thing. I carry the name of a woman from the Saga of Eirik the Red. That Freydis was pregnant but joined battle with her men against the Native Americans who fought us in your ‘new world,’ yes? When the natives attacked her, she lifted the sword of a killed Viking, pulled her clothing down to display one of her breasts, and hit the side of the blade against it.” Karlsdottir mimed smacking herself there with the palm of her right hand. “The natives run away from Freydis then.” The things you learn. But Karlsdottir now used her hand to stifle a yawn, and I thought it was time to call it a night. “Can I walk you to your hotel?”

  A tired, but beaming, smile. “Please, yes.”

  I settled our tab, and we climbed up Silvertones’ internal stairs to the street. Two more blocks, and we were at the entrance to her hotel. Karlsdottir turned to me and said, “In the duty-free shop, I purchased a bottle of brandy. Would you share some with me?”

  “In your room?”

  “Just so, John Francis.”

  “I don’t think we should.”

  The eyes hooded again, though differently. “My name is Freydis, but I am not pregnant, and I will not defend myself with a sword.” Now the trace of her beaming smile. “Also, I am not so tired as you may think.”

  “I’m flattered. And honored, Freydis. But even if you were not a client, I lost my wife to cancer, and I still grieve for her.”

  Those ghost eyes welled with tears. “Grieve I know of, John Francis.” She turned halfway to the entrance. “So, I go to my bed, and you go to yours.”

  Yes, but not yet.

  * * *

  The cemetery staff is pretty good about leaving the gates open at night, so that people with demanding work schedules can still visit. I walked up the hillside to her row and then to her stone, knowing I could find it even on a starless night.

  “No flowers, John? I guess the honeymoon really IS over.”

  I looked down at the etched letters that would forever form “MARY ELIZABETH DEVLIN CUDDY,” even though the absence of light made them unreadable. “I tried, Beth.The florist shops were all closed.”

  “What made you so late?”

  I told her.

  “The woman comes all the way from Iceland to find this ‘Hogni,’, but she doesn’t have the envelope with his P.O. box on it?”

  “She couldn’t find it, and besides, there are other ways.”

  “I don’t know, John. Doesn’t feel right somehow.”

  I looked down at the harbor. A police boat was out with its distinctive blue running lights, but otherwise a quiet autumn evening.

  “Well,” I said, “worst thing, I’m helping a stranger keep a promise to her dad.”

  “My poor widower and his sense of ‘promise’.”

  I thought back to Freydis Karlsdottir’s “brandy” offer, and now it was my turn to nod solemnly.

  FOUR

  “What’s that?” I said the next morning, still behind the wheel, Freydis Karlsdottir not allowing the teen-aged doorman outside her hotel to help with a rectangular wooden case—about long and wide enough to hold a croquet set—that she clutched to her chest.

  “Part of Hogni’s inheritance.” Karlsdottir inclined her head to the trunk of the Prelude. “We can put this in your boot?”

  I’d long ago disabled the lid release next to the driver’s seat, so I had to get out to open it, the doorman doing his best to keep a straight face over the old fart in the old car picking up this exotic beauty of a hotel guest.

  After Karlsdottir laid the case carefully into the trunk, and we were on our way, she turned to me. “If you have the mobile telephone, John Francis, we call Hogni’s lawyer first?”

  I slipped my right hand into the side pocket of my suit jacket and flashed the little Nokia at her. “We could. However, I’ve generally found that it’s best to surpr
ise people.”

  “Surprise.” The beaming smile as she turned forward again. “Perhaps not in Iceland, but in America, ‘surprise’ works good, yes?”

  * * *

  The lawyer’s office proved to be a flat-faced store-front in a four-story building on the main drag of East Boston, a traditionally Italian-American neighborhood that had become a mixing pot—if not melting pot—of first-generation immigrants from a number of different countries, even continents. As I parked on the opposite side of the street and we got out of the car, a Delta airliner on its landing path roared low enough over our heads that you could almost expect tire-tracks on the roof of the Prelude.

  Karlsdottir reflexively ducked and blurted out something that wasn’t recognizable. Then, “I hope we are near to your airport.”

  “Very close.”

  She looked around at the evident, if modest, apartments above the commercial level. “How do the people sleep with such noise?”

  I thought about smaller, slower planes rattling the window frames of my family’s rowhouse in South Boston when I was growing up. “It’s an acquired skill.”

  We crossed the street to the Law Offices of Michael A. Nuzzo. His picture windows were pasted with decals reading “SE HABLA ESPANOL” and I guessed similar messages from several other languages. Inside the doorway stood three desks and as many young women behind them forming their own miniature United Nations. The placards in front of them were printed with “ITALIAN,”

  “SPANISH,” and “CAMBODIAN,” small cribs of clear plastic holding business cards nearby. Ringing the floor space around the reception area were four-drawer file cabinets. Lots of them.

  The first two women were on the telephone, leaving the third— staffing the Cambodian station—to look up at us from a computer screen.

  A professional smile before, “May I help you?” I said, “We’d like to see Mr. Nuzzo, please.”

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “No,” I showed her my ID, “but he’ll want to see us nonetheless.”

  The smile wavered, but she took my license holder in one hand while she hit a number on the telephone pad with her other. Swinging in the swivel chair away from me, she spoke softly into the receiver, then nodded and turned back. “That door.”