Celine

by Peter Heller

  Pete rejoined her and she glanced over her head at the gate of antlers. “Come the True Dreams through Gates of Horn,” she said.

  Pete held her hand, barely. Moral support. “And False through the Gates of Ivory.” He looked up. “Definitely qualify as horn,” he said.

  “Hmm. We’ll take it as a sign. Old Penelope was even wiser than her husband, don’t you think? Women usually are.” She gave Pete’s hand a squeeze, a sign that he could release her. “Let’s sit on that bench in the shade.” They did. Celine wore a small leather belt pack at her waist and she pried from it her flip phone. She called Gabriela, let it ring. Just before she thought it would go to voice mail the young woman picked up. Celine thought she had deliberated—Pick up or not pick up?—she could hear it in the sound of her “Hello?”

  “Gabriela, hi, this is Celine. We are in Jackson on the way to Yellowstone. Are you well?”

  “Fairly well. Yes.”

  “And your son?”

  “He’s—he’s at school. Yes.” She sounded nervous.

  “Good. Before we get to Cooke City I’d like to know if you can locate your research file now. You know, it will be tremendously helpful.”

  The conversation began in fits and starts, which was another clue. Celine pressed about the file. How on earth could she misplace it? What did that mean, anyway? Gabriela at first was evasive. She tried to sound upbeat and clueless—“God, I have no idea. I wonder if I left it in the coffee shop at the corner, I was going over it, trying to organize it before I copied it to send to you, I just don’t know. I’ve been by the place half a dozen times!”—and the more hapless she acted, the more seriously distraught she sounded.

  “Just a sec,” Celine said. She stopped the girl in her tracks. She had no patience for a bad liar. A good liar, on the other hand, was someone to learn from. She dug back into her belt pack, pulled out a red plastic inhaler, and sprayed herself one, then two full doses and held them in her lungs. Pheeeeew she let them out through pursed lips. “There. Better.” She breathed two lungfuls of mountain air. “Now. I am an old woman, who knows how much time I have left. I certainly don’t have enough of the stuff to tolerate deceit from the ones who should be telling me the truth. Gabriela, can you tell me what in God’s name is really going on?”

  Gabriela said she honestly didn’t know. That rang true.

  “Okay, tell me,” Celine said.

  “I—I don’t know if I can. Or should.”

  “You are scared.”

  “A little, yes.”

  It was hard for Celine to imagine the intrepid bundle of energy she had met on the dock, the one with the clear laugh and the scent of blossoms, as frightened. Even the sadness that softened her seemed devoid of fear. “Well.” Celine waited. One beat, then two. “Is it that we are on the phone?”

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  Celine thought for a second. “You know,” she said finally, “there is probably nothing you can tell me now, about the file, that Whom It May Concern doesn’t already know.”

  Gabriela laughed, nervously, but it relieved the tension. “Yes, I guess that’s true. Well, I put it on the coffee table in my apartment a week ago. To review, as I said. I went down to the athletic club on Mission for a yoga class and when I came back I couldn’t find it anywhere. I went out of my mind. I was sure I’d left it there. And—”

  “Yes?”

  “My picture of Amana was knocked over. The one on the ferry. It is never knocked over. It sits on its own shelf. Nick can’t even reach it. And in the kitchen, the silverware tray was over on the right side of the big drawer. I keep it on the left. And—”

  “Go on.”

  “That passport was gone.”

  The phone was on speaker so that Pete could listen in. He had taken off his tweed cap and leaned his head in close, the side with the hearing aid. At twenty-two he had enlisted before he could be drafted for Korea, and though the war ended before he was ever shipped out, he went almost deaf on his right side from firing an M1C sniper rifle. He had been trained as a sniper, which was an odd specialty for a man with Pete’s gentle nature, but maybe not so odd when one takes into account his boyhood growing up on a Maine island and plinking groundhogs from impressive distances with a .22. Pete’s range instructors would have noticed it right away. His brother told Celine once that Pete could hit a flying chunk of two-by-four with a .22 just as if he were using a shotgun. A talent he never mentioned, which was not surprising as he never mentioned much.

  Celine considered. If the file had been stolen, which sounded like the case, then this investigation had just become much more interesting. And they had barely started. A frisson of excitement went through her.

  Celine’s close friends had long ago determined that she was not constructed like other people. Where others might shrink or panic she seemed to get larger, to become more focused. Perhaps it was her years with Admiral Halsey, Baboo’s longtime companion, who was known and feared for going straight into the teeth of battle. It was a trait his critics dissected with relish. But what they often missed in their analyses of battles and tactics was a streak of imagination and creativity that came straight out of a zest for boyhood mischief. Celine must have told Hank the story half a dozen times: When Halsey was an upperclassman at Annapolis he was given command of a patrol frigate during a live-ammo battle exercise on the Chesapeake. There were two teams. There was also heavy fog. The live ammo were rubber torpedoes. Halsey used his enemy’s convoy as radar cover—they just assumed the blip was theirs as no enemy in his right mind would fall into the fleet like a duckling—and he maneuvered undetected so close to a Farragut-class destroyer—feet not yards—that when he loosed his rubber torpedo he put a hole in the hull of the brand-new ship. He was reprimanded and commended by the same commander—who had a distinct twinkle in his eye as he gave the cadet his dressing-down.

  Hank, who loved to think about character, sometimes wondered if that spirit in the face of long odds, and the unorthodox approach, may have rubbed off on Celine when she was a child. He thought of the two of them walking up that dirt road together in mud season in Vermont, the distraught girl holding the old admiral’s hand, the cold wind through the bare woods blowing her hair so that it covered her tear-stained face, the aged sailor barely noticing, his wandering mind maybe coming at last to focus on his young charge, this current mission: To console and protect. To educate. To love. Which he did. He adored Celine—Baboo had said so. He may have seen in the skinny girl—in her courage and mettle and imagination—a little of himself. What he might have said to her that afternoon: something about when we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.

  One of Hank’s favorite stories of Celine was years after Admiral Bill died. She was in her forties. One of her cousins, the curator Rodney’s younger brother Billy, was dying of pancreatic cancer at St. Luke’s up in Harlem. She went to say goodbye. They had grown up together and shared many summers on Fishers Island and he was enduring probably his last day on earth and she stayed late and did not let herself fall apart in his room. And she lost track of time. It was two a.m. when she finally kissed his cheek and said, “I’ll be seeing you, Billy,” and went out into the November night. It was windy and cold, much like that day with Admiral Bill years ago. She was lost to memories of childhood as she made her way down a deserted Amsterdam Avenue. This was back when that part of the city was much more dangerous than it is today. She had a vague thought that she might catch a cab at 110th Street. Litter blew across the street. The heels of her pumps clicked on the pavement and her bracelets jingled. Suddenly two large men leapt out from a doorway and loomed in front of her. They were very rough. Without thought Celine said, “Oh! You must be freezing!” Addressing the larger of the two, she said, “You’ll catch your death of cold. Your shirt is all ripped. Let me see if I have a safety pin.” With that, she opened up her purse and began rifling through it.

  The men stared. They were dumbfounded. “
Here, found one!” she said and pulled it out and reached up and deftly folded back the edge of the rip, smoothing it carefully so that it made a neat edge the pin could catch, and she did the same on the other side of the tear, and with wonderful concentration pushed the pin through both sides and secured it. She patted it neatly down. “There,” she said. “You’ll be much warmer.” The men stared. When they could speak they told her that this, ah, neighborhood was really really dangerous and what was she doing out here all alone?

  “Saying goodbye to someone at the hospital who has been very special to me.”

  They insisted on walking her to the corner and waiting with her for a cab. Hank could see the two towering men in tatters, and little Celine in her long wool coat and beret and gold earrings. Of course no cab would stop, the men were too formidable. So she finally turned to them and said, “You two were on your way to doing something, why don’t you go do it. I’ll be fine. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.” And as soon as they left she hailed a taxi.

  She had not been in command of a frigate that night, and her motive was not a vanquishing of any kind, but the instinct to go straight ahead where others wouldn’t dream to go seems in sympathy with her surrogate father.

  Now she covered the phone in her lap for a second and was on the verge of speaking to Pete when she picked it up again and said, “I’ll call you back in just a minute. I promise. Pete is right here and we need to talk it over,” and she hung up.

  TEN

  The chat may have lasted five minutes.

  The deductions were obvious. If someone had stolen Gabriela’s twenty-three-year-old research file on her missing father then 1) the timing suggested that they didn’t want Celine and Pete to have it, and 2) they couldn’t know that the two were just now launching an investigation unless Gabriela had told someone, or her phone was tapped. They’d clear that up in just a minute.

  On the next bench, in full sun, was a family of four tourists feeding popcorn to Canada geese. The little boy was hurling the kernels overhead like he was trying to hit the birds with shot, and in his other hand he held a chocolate ice-cream cone that was melting all over his wrist.

  “It’s very hard to be a boy,” Celine commented dryly. “You’re never sure whether to love something or kill it.” Pete followed her gaze. “This is a very self-respecting town, Pete. The pigeons here are wild geese.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Remind me to tell you a story later about peppering birds with shot.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Which, if you will stop interrupting me, brings us to further ideas on the matter. It’s very hard to concentrate when you are so effusive.”

  He held her hand and rubbed the back of it with his thumb.

  “Let’s assume that the file didn’t get up and walk of its own accord out of Gabriela’s apartment. And that she didn’t just leave it at the coffee shop. I’d be very surprised if she took it there in the first place. She would handle something like that with extreme care.”

  “It was stolen,” Pete said flatly. “And I don’t believe she told anyone about enlisting us. I didn’t get the sense that she has a wide circle of confidants.”

  “Right. And we’ll just ask her in a minute.”

  “Which means her phone was tapped—”

  Pete was interrupted by an alarmed blatting and honking. The little boy, unable to arouse love or inflict death on the geese by hurling popcorn—they just happily ate the stuff—had dropped his cone and charged headlong at the little flock. He’d stubbed his toe on a root and hurtled like a surface-to-surface child at the birds who were at least as big as he. That was the first commotion. The alpha goose, if there is such a thing, was on top of the prone boy in a flash, beating his great wings and hissing and pecking at his neck. You could see that the goose had snapped. Psychologically. He’d had enough of obnoxious little boys and junk food, this goose was going postal. Enough was enough. That was the second commotion. The mom screamed, the dad leapt up and rushed; the goose, to his credit, gave no quarter and flew into the man’s face. The dad looked like he was beating himself about the head and shoulders. The goose landed on the grass, stumbled sideways, recovered, stretched his tremendous neck, took two strides, and in sync with his tribe, flapped his great wings, this time for flight, and with dignity and improbable slowness took wing. He and his flock rose over the trees muttering and circled north, out of sight.

  In the shocked silence that often follows mortal combat, Celine and Pete looked at each other.

  “Goose two, Smiths zero,” Pete said quietly.

  “I had no idea their wings creak like rusty hinges. Didn’t it sound just like that, Pete? The boys look all right,” she added, very dry, meaning the kid and his father who were taking their humiliation out on each other.

  “A valuable lesson in Don’t Feed the Animals. Could prove a lifesaver in bear country.”

  “We’re going to bear country, aren’t we, Pete?”

  “Yes we are. I’m looking forward to it. I’m a little tired of being at the top of the food chain.”

  “You sound like that Neruda poem I love so: It so happens I am tired of being a man…Somewhere in there he knocks out a nun with a lily. Sorry, you were saying?”

  Pete squeezed her hand. “Her phone is tapped.”

  “Mmm. Probably for a while, God knows why. And nothing happens, no trigger, until she hires us to find her father.”

  “Right. He disappeared twenty-three years ago. I think there’s a good possibility that someone has been eavesdropping ever since.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow,” Pete repeated dramatically.

  “Waiting for him to call. Because they don’t believe he’s dead either.”

  “Right. And there are scores to settle.”

  “Accounts to balance at the least.”

  “Hmm.”

  They listened to the vanquished little boy’s older sister scold him for getting whipped by a bird and dropping a perfectly good chocolate cone on the grass, and they watched the Family Smith tromp off to their car and new adventures in engaging the world.

  Celine said, “Instead we triggered the action. So then why…” Celine wore large glasses in dark tortoiseshell. They were a bit like Jackie O’s sunglasses but bigger, even more of a statement. She didn’t mean them to be, she shied from anything show-offy, but she had an innate and inarguable sense of style. She took off the glasses, eyed them critically as if they were smudged, which they weren’t, and put them back on, settling them on her not at all diminutive, aquiline nose. “Why wouldn’t they want us to have the file?”

  “You mean if they wanted to find Paul Lamont?” The two were beginning to pronounce the “they” with vague distaste.

  “Yes,” she said. “They could simply follow us to him. After all, we have a better find rate than the FBI.” Which was true.

  “But do we have a better success rate than the CIA?”

  They looked at each other. “Probably,” Celine said. “That’s just it. They can’t find him. Whoever they are. And they’ve seen the file. You can bet they’ve broken in before and copied it. She didn’t know but she does now because they wanted her to know. They wanted us to know. The fallen picture, etc.—that was a warning.” Celine took a pocket mirror from her purse and checked her lipstick. “No, they’ve wrung the leads dry. The file is no more to them than an artifact. And we come along with our impeccable track record. They don’t want us to find him or they’d let us have the file. The risk, whatever the risk is, is just too great.”

  “What’s the risk?” Pete said.

  “I’m not sure.” She snapped the mirror closed and smiled at her husband. “I thought the silverware tray being moved was an interesting detail, didn’t you? Spy craft is spy craft I suppose.”

  They had worked together for so long, had conducted so many of these inquiring conversations, that they knew the pacing down to the last long notes. Like musicians who nod at each other before the f
inal measures, they shared a long look that meant: That’s all for now. This too shall be revealed. And then Celine raised the cell phone and called Gabriela back.

  ELEVEN

  Jackson Hole was pleasant. Nothing more. Celine pointed out that an entire town bent on leisure and fun was very tiring.

  “I take that back,” she said as they strolled across to the Cowboy Bar for lunch. “Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, don’t you think? I mean if you enjoy it.”

  “Well,” Pete said. He held her hand and guided her across the street. He looked a little out of place in town, but only because he always dressed as if he were going to build a boat. In Maine. The attire did not change for formal affairs except that he might, just might, throw on an old tweed jacket. What he wore summer and winter, for woodwork in his shop, for dinner with one of Celine’s fancy childhood friends, was loose khakis, often stained with a little varnish or a spatter of paint; worn leather deck shoes, often without socks; a canvas shirt, blue or green or cranberry, from L.L.Bean. That’s it. A little like Fidel Castro always wearing army fatigues. Pete refrained from quoting Thoreau, but he told Hank once that his sartorial habits saved a lot of time and energy and expense.

  Now he said, “It’s why I always felt coming back to the States after traveling was a bit stressful. I mean our job as citizens, apparently, is the pursuit of happiness. Something I always have to gird myself for. I’d much rather just be happy, or not.”

  To prove her point about the pursuit of fun, they had to wait for a table behind a group of road bikers who wore bike shoes that clumped and tight bike shorts that didn’t clump nearly enough. According to Celine. “You will never ever be truly happy if you wear those shorts,” she said. “You are telling your manhood that you wish he were an internal organ.” One of the men overheard her and began to laugh, and insisted that the two of them slide in front of the group in line.