by Peter Heller
“That’s right,” said Spiderwebs. “Back off. Be a good granny.” And he grinned, flashing the awful gold teeth.
“I think you should apologize,” she said. “To the girl. You can do it to me. I will represent my gender.” Celine straightened. She looked straight at the man, her eyes very serious, completely devoid of fear. She was very regal.
The space in the bar went taut. Pete heard a faucet behind the bar turn off, heard water dribble in a metal sink. He smelled now the full brew of sweat, unwashed clothes, beer, a lit cigar.
Spiderwebs licked his dry lips. Slowly, as if in a trance, he slipped something out of his leathers pocket—a clip knife, five-inch blade—and he thumbed it open. No hurry, almost savoring the practiced movements. Celine understood that the man was very dangerous.
“Granny,” he murmured, “do you want to die? I can help you with that.”
The faces of the men watching went to stone. No more big smiles. It was the anticipation of serious blood, or the fact that in three minutes they might all be running from a murder beef in Montana. That would take some fast tactical maneuvering. They were watching and listening with an intensity that was as ferocious as their death’s-heads.
Celine did not break his gaze. She licked her own dry lips. Everyone in the bar saw the gesture, tried to read it. “Young man,” she said finally, very clear, “I am already dead.”
The words hit the assembled watchers like a gust. It was the Samurai creed. The Legionnaires’. Their own. It hit them with a force of recognition: It was uttered with conviction, with simplicity, and with a total lack of fear. In every warrior’s heart is an absolute respect for simple courage, and every Son saw it in the woman, and it cut through even Spiderwebs’s trance. The knife no longer looked at home in his hand. Celine thought he could go either way.
“Just a minute,” she said. Her high cheeks had gone hollow and her eyes were shiny. She held to the back of a chair and breathed. Nobody moved. She nodded to Pete. He switched on the little condenser and handed her the cannula, which she pressed to her nose. She breathed for a full minute, handed it back.
She looked around the room. “I strongly suggest you boys quit smoking while you still have the best of life ahead of you.”
It was like letting air from an overinflated tire. Bikers all around the room let out a breath, shook their shaggy heads, murmured “Fuck was that?” One or two laughed, awkwardly, but nobody was having fun anymore. The bearded elder touched Spiderwebs on the shoulder and he folded his knife and jerked his head like he was clearing it from a dream. Pete heard somebody say they better saddle up if they were going to make it to Big Timber for happy hour. A giant man with a chevron patch, the sergeant at arms, paid the tab. One by one the Sons of Silence filed out. The jukebox was mute. In the suspended stillness left by their absence Celine and Pa heard the cough and roar of fourteen Harleys thundering to life.
TWENTY-TWO
The Red Lodge public library was a new building with a deep porch looking over the river and a bronze grizzly bear looking over the parking lot. Where a young hippie couple was openly smoking pot. The cars parked there seemed to be an even mix of beat-up Subarus and pickups with gun racks—hippies and rednecks, the oil-and-water demographic of many small Western towns.
Pete set up their laptop in a carrel and Celine asked the librarian at the front desk where she might find thirty-year-old National Geographics. The woman wore a turtleneck and turquoise earrings and rimless hexagonal reading glasses. Her long gray hair was in a ponytail. Her blue eyes came up and settled on Celine with a certain recognition, the way one blue heron might look at another in a marsh. She was probably raised in Connecticut. “You know,” she said, “I’m old enough to remember when young boys would ask the same question. And they weren’t at all interested in tectonic plates or cave paintings.”
“Well, I’m actually terribly interested in both of those subjects, how did you know?” Celine said. The woman came from behind the counter—she was wearing Danish clogs—and Celine knew she had an instant ally. “What year?” the librarian said over her shoulder. “Actually,” said Celine, “it’s five issues. March 1973, January 1974, February 1975, September and October 1977.”
There was the spread. He was not in the other magazines, but he had a huge feature in January 1974. Oh, he was good. He was very very good. This was another, later, story on Chile, but this time entirely shot in the Manso River valley in Patagonia. The one Gabriela had mentioned. The place must have made an impression on Lamont the first time around. More shots of huasos on horseback in their signature flat hats, the farms along the river linked by horse trails and shrouded in low clouds, women sharing a cup of maté at an outdoor fire, one of a cowboy pushing horses up into the treeless saddle of a mountain pass with nothing but a storm-black sky as backdrop. Stunning. And there he was, Paul Lamont, his picture on the contributors’ page, hatless in the sun, handsome and solidly built in a black T-shirt. The short graph said he had spent the entire previous Chilean winter photographing in the Manso valley. That is not the only place he had been, Celine thought. I’d bet my hat. There was no mention at all of the political upheaval in the country that had taken place at the end of September.
She brought the magazine back to Pete who began a search on Chile in the winter and spring (Southern Hemisphere) of 1973. He quickly selected and saved a score of articles. On the morning of September 11th, General Augusto Pinochet ordered an infantry and armor assault on La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago. Pinochet would dislodge, once and for all, the socialist government of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. In the afternoon, when the palace’s defenders finally surrendered, the sixty-five-year-old Allende was found dead in the Independence Salon—the official version of events being that he committed suicide with an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro. The coup installed a military junta of which Pinochet soon became the sole leader, and he launched one of the darkest periods in the history of any modern nation: a regime of torture, disappearances, and political murders that inflicted tens of thousands of casualties.
The U.S. government had been implicated in laying the groundwork of Allende’s overthrow, and a report directed by the National Intelligence Council in 2000 concluded that while the CIA did not “assist Pinochet to assume the presidency,” it had “ongoing intelligence-collection relationships with some plotters, and—because the CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970—probably appeared to condone it.”
“Appeared to condone it,” Celine repeated dryly. She swiftly scanned the rest of the articles. “Lamont saw something he shouldn’t have seen. Or recorded it. Call Gabriela,” she said, finally. “I’ll call her. We need to know if her father had access to La Moneda. If he ever mentioned it. Jesus.” She coughed, loud and long, holding her arm up to her face. Some kids and parents on beanbags in the Kids’ Corner looked over.
“Sorry,” she breathed. “Will you call her now?”
“What about the ta—”
Celine nodded, her hand still covering her mouth. She caught her breath, barely, and got out, “Maybe ask her to call you back using the phone of a nearby coffee shop. Have her call the library number. Maybe offer them twenty dollars. They couldn’t set up a tap—wait, yes they could. Hmm—” She gasped for breath, coughed again. “Look,” she said. “The Chile link is the key to this whole thing. He was there. Those rumors about his sideline work. It makes sense. Explains our friend, young Mr. Tanner. Wow. Wow, Pete. You couldn’t make this stuff up.”
Pete smiled. Wow is what she said when she was really impressed. She was really impressed. So was he. Pete lay his hand gently on her back and let the convulsions pass. He was used to this. When she could breathe easily again he rubbed her back and said, “Maybe we don’t need to call her and put her under more scrutiny, or danger. What more can she tell us now?”
Celine breathed. She stood unsteadily and looked over the carrel around the rest of the li
brary. The kids and mothers had gone back to their reading aloud. There was a mountain-man type checking out a book at the desk, an elderly woman carrying some quilting magazines to the counter, and the stoned hippie couple from outside was now on one of the desktop computers at the front of the large open room. That was it.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “There are no secrets. Not anymore, not by now. Who really cares? Everybody kind of knows what the CIA did down there.”
“Maybe not.”
She raised an eyebrow. She was swift. Pete could almost hear the finely tuned gears—Swiss watchmaker gears—ticking. She said, “All these stories point to funding for disruption of the socialists, encouragement of the plotters, intelligence. What if there was more? Something even more…shameful?”
“More direct,” Pete said. “You think Lamont was involved?”
“Seems to be heading that way. Or he was there. He was a photographer. He had a photograph. I’d bet my hat. Oh, Pete.” She sucked in a few more breaths. She was too excited.
“But it’s all supposition,” she said. “All bits of hearsay, coincidental timing. There must have been thousands of Americans in Chile in the winter of ’73, many with reactionary political inclinations.”
“Sure,” Pete murmured. “But young William Tanner is real. And he seems to have gone dark.”
They checked for Tanner on the tracking screen and there was no pulse, nothing. Well. He may have parked in a narrow canyon, or in a structure, underground. It was easy to temporarily lose a signal. They took a walk. Something in the library, maybe a cleaning solvent, was aggravating Celine’s breathing, and at this point in their discussions it would be good to clear the air. Take a fresh look. They needed a plan of action and they didn’t have one.
They had always found that walking together was an excellent stimulator. Often at home they walked up along the East River, around the River Café, by the old brick spice warehouses, and into the cobbled streets of Dumbo. They’d walk past the little stone beach and up into the Navy Yard and back. Sometimes they’d stop for a thick hot cocoa at the chocolate shop on Water Street. And more times than not these ambles brought them a fresh perspective on a case.
So they walked up Red Lodge’s main street, slowly, past Gents Barber Shop, and the Butte Diner, and Faye’s Taxidermy, and Ben’s Sporting Goods, and they turned right down Elk Street and walked to the banks of Rock Creek. The cottonwoods and alders were every shade of fire-orange and pumpkin and yellow squash. The sky was clearing, showing blue, and sunlight swept the trees of the far bank like wind, and the wind smelled sweet of falling leaves. Celine thought that sometimes it was sheer wonder to be alive. What more could there be than this?
Well. There were great mysteries. Wouldn’t it be good to solve at least one?
What they talked about when they talked was the efficacy of any next step. They would have to tread delicately now. Several things were becoming clear: 1) Gabriela’s phone had been monitored. 2) Something in her first phone calls with the two of them triggered a break-in. 3) Her file of her own research on her father’s disappearance had been taken. 4) A man named William Tanner who was a trained SEAL sniper was following them, and likely not because he was a groupie or wanted to write an approved biography. 5) The official on-site investigation into the disappearance of Paul Lamont was screwy and had been skewed for some reason toward a conclusion of Death by Bear when evidence pointed, possibly, toward other explanations. 6) The man in charge of that investigation, Ranger Tim Farney, had acted uncharacteristically brusque in hastening that conclusion, showing signs of possible outside pressure. 7) Paul Lamont had been in Chile on assignment for National Geographic in the winter of 1973. 8) At the end of that winter a U.S.-backed coup, with help from the CIA, toppled a democratically elected government and installed a dictator.
“Let’s think of two more, Pete, there must be two more. Wouldn’t it be elegant to have an even ten?” Pete’s murmur. They walked slowly.
“What is that bird we keep seeing?” Celine said. “Flying back and forth along the bank, lilting like that? He’s lovely.”
“That’s a kingfisher.”
“He’s very beautiful.”
So: 9) Something about Tanner. The man is really disturbing. Oh, of course: He was practically in their faces as he followed them, and then as soon as they turned the tables and began to hunt up information on him, he went dark. Just vanished.
“It makes me uneasy.”
“Me, too.”
10) The sum of all these bits of fact and supposition suggests that someone with substantial resources and power wanted Paul Lamont to stay dead.
They got ice-cream cones at the Big Dipper on Cooper. Pete got a chocolate cone and Celine taught the young staff how to make a Dusty Miller, which she strongly advised they make for themselves, “But be careful, it is highly highly addictive. Enough said!” It was the sundae she and her sisters clamored for every weekend at the beach club on Fishers, named for the low, dusty green plant that spread over the sand dunes. Baboo adored it, too, and allowed herself one a week, and she always got one for Gaga, who pretended indifference. Coffee ice cream, marshmallow sauce, Hershey’s chocolate syrup, a generous dusting of malt powder on top. Enough said.
They sat at a picnic table in the shade of a big cottonwood in front of the ice-cream shop and ate. The day had turned almost warm. What Celine loved about fall: You could only depend on it being wildly unpredictable. She was enjoying herself now, greatly.
Perhaps most mothers and grandmothers her age do not like change much, or sudden swerves, or bearded assassins on their tail. Celine loved it all. She pretended that Tanner made her nervous, but Pete knew that she was thrilled. She thrived on it. He was the most immediate challenge and he sharpened her focus. He did not just fall off the map, give up, go home. She could smell him, as she could often smell coming rain and danger and goodness.
“Pretty good,” Celine said as she scooped up another spoonful of heaven, dusted in malt. “I bet if we come back in a year it’ll be on the menu. And all those kids will be fat.”
Pete was serious. He said, “It seems to me that our concern right now should be making sure we’re around in a year. I think we are beginning to touch on events and sensitivities that are bigger than Gabriela and her lost father.”
Celine frowned. Casual passersby—like the teenage couple walking along the river path—might have thought that Celine was angry. A very glamorous older woman perhaps peeved at the shoddy service in a Podunk dairy stand. Her lips were tight and her eyes were big and her cheeks taut. She breathed heavily. She was not angry. She was steeling herself for a fight, as she had had to do her entire life. She was certainly not going to let this one go. When she took the case, she had nothing to lose. Mimi’s extra morphine had beckoned from the gun safe.
Now she had the safety of the girl to think about, and Pete’s safety, too. Her husband’s course was not yet run, not in the least; she knew he could live out the next two decades happily writing memoirs about life on an island in Maine, and about being a Finder of Missing Persons. She was mad, part of her, that anyone would have forced the situation to the point where a father felt he had to abandon his daughter. Danette certainly had something to do with that, and Lamont’s self-destructive behavior as a dad, but so probably did larger pressures and circumstances—Celine felt sure of it. Lamont, she suspected, had gotten himself in too deep and wanted out of it all, and the only way to do that was to die.
But he was not dead. She smelled it on the wind. She did. Just like a scent hound.
“We need to find him,” she said. “Now. I want to call Gabriela.”
“What about Tanner?”
“Tanner will be Tanner. That’s one thing we can be sure—”
The streetlight over their table exploded. The air thinned and cracked—could only be a second bullet. That whanged hard off the steel post. And glass rained. It bounced off the picnic table like bad hail. Shards hit their hats and stuck
on their chocolate sauce in glittering sprinkles. Celine was mid-spoonful. Her head jerked up and the spoon dropped to the rough wood—and in her hand as if conjured was the black Glock. It was not the response one would expect from an older woman, or anyone, really. The kids in the open window of the ice-cream shop crouched and gawked at the customer holding the handgun.
“Whoo,” murmured Pa. “It’s as if he heard us.”
“Maybe he did. We’ll have to sweep.” Her face was hard. “I do not like glass in my Dusty Miller. I like it less than geen.”
“Ey-yuh.”
“Anyway, I feel safer. If he had wanted to kill us he would have.”
“Um, not so sure. That might be the next move.”
“Fuck Tanner. I hope he hears me. We better scoot before the police come and make us fill out forms. Life is definitely too short.”
Pete let his thudding heart slow down, chewed on the inside of his mouth, and quietly assessed his undaunted wife. So far, she hadn’t gotten either of them killed. She squeezed his arm. “I don’t think they have any interest in doing real harm to two little old people, do you? It’s scare tactics.”
“Hmm.”
“I just had an idea,” she said as she holstered the handgun. “Getting shot at clarifies the mind.”
“For me it has more to do with the bladder.”
“Remember that artist, Pete, the one in the National Gallery in Santiago, whose painting Lamont photographed in that big feature on Chile? Remember? The one they called a national treasure? She was there. He may have known her. She would have moved in elite circles. I wonder if she is still alive, Pete. If she is, we need to call her. It’s a stretch, I know, but we need to place him there.”
They shook the glass out of their clothes and drove straight back to Cooke City. They could try to call the artist from the Poli’s phone. And there were a couple of Afrikaner refugees they needed to talk to.
