Celine

by Peter Heller

  He saw them at Christmas. And he took each one out on their birthdays—took off from work in the afternoon and took them out to the park, the Met, the circus, ice-skating, and then always to a Broadway show in the evening, followed by a very late dinner at Sardi’s. At which the girls invariably fell asleep at the table. There were other weekend days scattered here and there, and an occasional trip out to Montauk to go fishing, which Celine adored. Even with such a limited apprenticeship, she and Bobby got pretty good at surf casting.

  Celine missed her father. She missed him with an ache that she could feel in her growing bones. She knew, she knew, how much he loved her, knew that in a parallel universe he was at home every night and would sweep her up in his arms every time he came through the door, and would teach her again to fly cast in the park, and to sail on Fishers—she’d a million times rather have Harry teach her than the gorgeous Gustav—and she saw him in this parallel life even help her with her math homework and teach her to be a banker. She railed against the circumstances that prevented this from occurring and sometimes cried into her pillow, but she stopped at some point blaming Baboo. She knew in her bones as she knew the other things that Baboo had not been the cause of her bereft childhood.

  One day, when she was fourteen, right before she went off to boarding school, Harry took her to lunch at Mortimer’s on Lex. It was the first week of September, still hot and summery but with the longer light gleaming nostalgically off the locusts and maples the way it never does in July; she was due to take Amtrak up to Vermont in a few days, for her first term at Putney. They sat on opposite sides of the little table by the front window and talked sparingly and watched the passersby. She was digging into a Dusty Miller with sprinkles and he was watching her with real pleasure, and she was just happy to be soaking up his approval and attention. He was extremely handsome, and she noticed the effect he had on the elegant maître d’ and the younger waitresses. He had the bearing of an athlete, and the wonderful Watkins jaw, which Celine inherited, and also the strong hawk’s nose that many blue bloods shared. She had inherited that, too. She was not unaware, happily devouring her sundae, that the two looked exactly like father and daughter. And this made her exceedingly proud. They were playing a slow game of How About That One? One of them would point a spoon at an oncoming pedestrian and they would guess 1) what the person did, 2) whether he or she were married or unmarried, and 3) one eccentricity or attribute or achievement. They had developed the game over the years and Celine thought it was a testament to Harry’s integrity and his aversion to ever taking the path of least resistance that he didn’t seem to play the same game with her sisters.

  She slurped an extravagant mix of melted ice cream and chocolate and marshmallow, and pointed her spoon at a woman coming down the sidewalk. The woman was tall—taller in her showy strapped sandals with very high heels—and she walked with the rhythmic hip swing of a metronome, and her nylon or silk summer dress clung lovingly to her flat belly. She was pretty, too, with wonderful auburn hair that spilled in curls to her shoulders, and a wide sensuous mouth. “That one!” she said. Celine had her own opinion, she thought she must be an actress, maybe even a movie star. “How about that one?”

  Harry turned in his chair and as he did the woman glanced over into the big picture window and their eyes met and her father’s face tightened as she’d never seen it tighten before—with alertness, ears coming forward and eyes sharpening exactly like a wolf when it smells prey—and she thought she actually felt a pulse of heat on the air, and the woman’s mouth opened in an O, and her eyes widened, and she turned into the front door. A second later she was overwhelming the elegant maître d’ with charm, and a second after that the severely dressed hostess was leading the beauty to their table. Celine thought with delight that it looked like a handsome blackbird leading a brilliant tanager. She turned to her father who was not so amused. She had never seen him at a loss. The wolf on the hunt had gone into a defensive crouch. He was master enough of himself that no one but his daughter would have seen it, for his bearing was the same, his uprightness in the chair, his chiseled, reserved expression, the light of recognition in his blue-gray eyes. But there was something. And then the woman thanked the maître d’ and chattered out a big “Hello” and leaned down to kiss his cheek and covered his face with her bountiful locks and the whole table with her rich perfume, and she effused that it was so nice to see him, and “Oh, this must be your daughter. Which one is it? Barbara? I should say Bobby? How utterly lovely! What a beauty she is going to be when she grows into those legs, wow! Why don’t you call me, you big lunk? It’s been, what? At least a week. The show is running into the second month, it’s ghastly, I’m practically worn out. I could use some entertainment of my own!”

  Father and daughter stared at her, their beautifully shaped jaws slack and their mouths open. It wasn’t so much the fact that Harry had lovers, which Celine must have guessed, or sensed with her infallible nose, but that here in the flesh was a woman who was absorbing, even demanding, his attention, and clearly occupying a space in his life that could have been devoted to her. Celine got to see him every few months and here was some starlet fussing over not seeing him for a week.

  The tears sprang unannounced and irrepressible into her eyes and down her cheeks and she excused herself and got up quickly, knocking into the woman who teetered on her heels, and Celine muttered “Powder room” and fled. She could sense her father standing behind her. She stayed in for much longer than anyone ever did who was powdering her nose, and when she washed her face and finally emerged Harry had paid the bill and was standing by the front door with his hat in his hands. His inscrutable mask had returned, the one he used to cover his embarrassment, even his love. They didn’t speak once as he walked her home, and she later thought it was a testament to their odd closeness that they didn’t need to.

  Celine and Pete walked slowly back to the Yellowstone Lodge. The pace belied their excitement. For the first time in their hunt they both felt that they were properly on the scent. That within a very short time they might have their man. If he lived, that is. If they did.

  How many ice mountains are there? The one he had spoken and sang of often to Gabriela when she was small was “up by Canada, in the borderlands.” Poetic but probably accurate. How many ice mountains by the Canadian border. Well. Glacier National Park was a good place to start. Wherever it was would have to be glaciated, because Lamont told Gabriela in the fairy tale that the Ice Mountain was ice even in the hottest summer. So where were there glaciers? In the park. That made it easy. But. If there really was a cabin where he longed to raise his family, then it could not be on public land, especially not in a national park. On Forest Service land maybe, if it was grandfathered in.

  Suddenly they were not tired, not anymore. They were both wide awake. Pete fetched the laptop from the truck. He set it up on the desk–slash–TV stand and pulled out the one chair for Celine. Who had started up her portable oxygen condenser and was letting the flow cool her sinuses while she sat on the bed and cleaned her Glock. She had a superstitious belief that the extra oxygen would empower her brain. O2 IQ. Pete watched for a minute, surmising his own surmises, and said, “I don’t think that would do much good. For this kind of bear.”

  She looked up and smiled. The condenser growled like a little generator. “Moral support.” She did not field strip the handgun but just ran a solvent brush through the bore. Which she’d already done since she’d last shot it. But. It calmed her.

  “You think we might need those hunting vests soon?”

  “Definitely,” she said.

  “Shall we try to find Fernanda de Santos Muños?”

  “Just a sec.” She finished cleaning the barrel, then she touched the action with two drops of military-grade gun oil and racked the slide. One of her favorite sounds in the universe. Reminded her of one thing she was really good at. Everyone needs one of those, she thought. Then she took the plastic cannula off from behind her ears and presse
d the Off button on the machine.

  It took Pete all of four minutes to log on and find the leading Chilean artist Fernanda Muños’s gallery in New York, to learn that she was indeed still alive, that she had had to flee the Pinochet regime, and that she now split her time between New York and Valparaiso. It was the shoulder season and so no telling where she might be. Five more minutes searching their data banks and they had her unlisted home numbers—at an apartment in SoHo and a cottage on the coast in Chile. Pete handed his phone to his wife. “I don’t see why we can’t make this call from here. For some reason I have one errant bar. Honors? New York first? It’ll be almost eleven there. Too late?”

  “Maybe better if she is just dozing off.” She took the phone and dialed.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Hank drove back from Putney under reefs of black cloud heavy with snow. The walls of trees on either side were nearly leafless and bleak. He prayed the storm would hold off until he got to Hanover, but by Bellows Falls the first wind-driven squalls were flecking his windshield. He felt as clueless as he had before, even more so. Because each of his interviews had yielded more possibilities, rather than less. Not the way an investigation was supposed to work. For all he knew, the woman who smote him—by simply standing in an open door in a flour-dusted apron—could be his sister. Celine had adored Bob Mills, she had mentioned him more than once, one couldn’t rule him out. Maybe for the sake of propriety they had raised her as their niece. And the creepy artist: The ambiguous pedantic relationship with his mother was almost a cliché. A perfect setup. Yuck. But the young herdsman, the kid in the barn and milk house—Hank tingled to his image almost as if he were remembering Silas Cooper-Ellis himself, he could almost smell, across the decades, the warmth between the two of them, the gawky empathic girl and the shy and awkward boy—smell a connection the way his mother might have. But. Of course young Cooper-Ellis was dead.

  It was not comforting, none of it was. Where there had been no fathers, now there were too many. Fathers upon fathers, marching on his filial landscape, and not a single one forthcoming. He got to Hanover in a full blizzard, and that night he called information in Blue Hill, Maine, and asked for Mills. He didn’t know Libby’s maiden name, and if the bread-baking woman at the Lower Farm was truly a niece, then there was a 50 percent chance that she was from Bob’s side. So Mills it was. The operator asked, “Frank or Harrieta?” On a hunch he said, “Frank” and then made the call. The voice that boomed “Hullo” might have belonged to his old teacher Bob, and he asked quickly if the man was Bob Mills’s brother, and he shot back, “Times I wish I weren’t, not often.” The same gruff chuckle, the same thick down-east accent, and Hank blurted, “Do you have a daughter? Leah?” “Only for thirty-one years. Who’s asking?” Hank had no idea what to say. In a great panic, and with almost equal relief, he hung up the phone. He could imagine the old Mainer staring at the receiver in his hand and shaking his head.

  Two weeks later he drove over to Sandwich. The cemetery was on a high ridge, woods giving onto big fields, with a view across the valley to Mount Chocorua. It was pretty, as the farmer had said, and lonely, and cold under four inches of fresh powdery snow. Hank walked the headstones, some so eroded and lichen-covered that they would never again reveal their markings, others from the mid-eighteenth century still barely readable. After a few minutes he found the family Cooper-Ellis, three simple granite stones, the smallest belonging to Silas Henry. DECEMBER 5TH, 1931—JANUARY 29TH, 1951. MEN’S DOINGS ARE SMALL, GOD’S GLORY GREAT.

  Nineteen years old. He died midway through Celine’s senior year. Had they stayed close? The old farmer had said that the shy boy had been in Korea two weeks. Why did it hit Hank so hard? The epitaph was as eloquent in what it left out: no “In loving memory,” no “Beloved son.” He took off his gloves and brushed the night’s snow off the top of the stone with his bare hands and then he surprised himself. It was as if grief had just touched him on the shoulder and he cried.

  An hour later he stepped into the tiny post office on the tiny square and asked the postmaster if he knew any Cooper-Ellis still extant and the man shook his head. He wasn’t much older than Hank. Hank asked him who was the oldest old-timer still in town. Dottie Caulkins, must be ninety-plus. He got directions, and a mile from town, in a dark pine wood beside a black-water creek that was not yet frozen, he knocked on the door of a run-down farmhouse with an ancient and rusted log skidder parked to the side. The house had once been white and the skidder yellow, and they were both weathered now to almost the same nameless dun. She came to the door on the fifth knock. She held a bent-handled cane and did not invite him in.

  “Cooper-Ellis?” she said in a strong, frayed voice. “I knew ’em all.” Nothing about the way she said it betrayed good nor bad.

  “Are there any relatives still—”

  “Alive?” She actually laughed. “Alive is all anybody cares about. Might be overrated.” The laugh again. It occurred to Hank that she might be crazy—with years, with watching so many things pass.

  She took a tissue from a pocket on her dressing gown and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “No, they ain’t. Not any I know about. The boy died—in the war—then the parents died. Stove fire they said.”

  “The house?”

  “Gone. Gone gone gone. Where Dr. Dixon lives now with that pretty wife.”

  “Did the boy, the boy Silas—”

  “Died in the war.”

  “Yes. Did he have a…a child?”

  “A child? He died in the war. How could he have a child? Don’t you remember a thing? If he saw a girl a half mile away he’d run the other way. The boy never said a word. Not a damn word.”

  Hank thanked her and she slammed the door.

  For the next two years, while he was still in New Hampshire, he drove over and visited Sandwich and the cemetery maybe half a dozen times. He never found out anything he could ever use in connecting Silas to his mother, but he liked walking the dirt road along the stone wall above the big field, and for some reason he liked visiting Silas’s grave. He’d sit and speak about whatever was on his mind, and if it was summer he’d often stay to watch the swallows hunt in the long light of the late afternoon.

  Fernanda Muños was not at home in New York. Or she did not answer her phone. Nor did she pick up at the number they had in Valparaiso. Dead end, for now. Celine sat on the bed. She did not look frustrated. She pursed her lips and dialed the New York number again. This time an answer.

  A sleepy voice said, “Bueno?”

  “Hello, Señora Muños? My name is Celine Watkins. I am an artist, just about your age, and I am also a private eye…”

  Safe to say that in the richly colored life of Fernanda de Santos, she had never heard an introduction like this before. She was not put off. Even through a phone line, one could tell immediately that Celine Watkins had heft: She was not going to waste your time. The two chatted for almost fifteen minutes. The conversation might have concluded sooner, except that Fernanda sometimes lapsed into Spanish. She said, “Yes, I remember Paul Lamont. Who wouldn’t? The famous photographer from National Geographic. He was brilliant. But even so, even then, if he had not been so good…Pues—todavia el nos hubiera encantado. Even Allende.”

  “You mean that he came to the palace? The presidential palace.”

  “Yes, he came to some of the parties. It was not unusual. Many illustrious visitors came. All the embassies invited whomever was in town.”

  “My God,” Celine whispered. She coughed once, cleared her throat. “Excuse me. You say you fled the country before the coup?”

  “An anteater could have seen what was coming. You know I did a large and rather famous Chilean Guernica. This was an echoing of the disgust with Franco, with all fascists. My affiliations were well known. No, I was not at all popular with the generals.”

  “Wow,” Celine murmured to herself. And to Señora Muños: “This is hugely helpful. Thank you so much.”

  Pete had learned that the hotter the chase
became, the more his wife’s mind clarified, like warming butter. Now she seemed dazed. “He was there,” she said. Her voice was husky. “Lamont. He was a great charmer, greater even than we had imagined. He charmed himself right into the presidential palace.” It occurred to Pete that the case had become personal. They all were, to an extent. But this one had become more so; it had had a certain charge right from the beginning, and the Quiet American now understood that Lamont may have been as charming, and as prodigal, as Harry Watkins.

  She coughed. She patted her mouth with a Kleenex and straightened. “There is a photograph, Pete. What all this is about. I know. Now we have to call Gabriela. We’ll use the phone in the motel office.”

  The owner of the Yellowstone Lodge was home. He had a gray beard to his sternum and rivaled Pete in volubility. Not much could impress him or ever would. Celine got the impression that when the Grim Reaper showed up with his scythe the proprietor would show him to one of the rooms with a moose print and tell him to cool his bony heels. He waved them to a phone.

  Celine had a strong hunch and she was eager to test it. From what she was learning of Lamont, of how his mind worked, she was certain that he would place the two most important photographs of his life in the same frame. The one, of the darkest thing he had ever witnessed; the other, of the greatest love he had ever known, and lost. There was a weird and awful logic there that Celine, who coupled death and beauty in her own art, could appreciate. She would have bet a significant sum. When Gabriela answered, she was brisk. “Remember how your dad would give you pictures of Amana? How he’d slip the one picture behind another?” she said. “I want you to check the one on the ferry, your favorite. Open the frame. And call me back in five minutes at Poli’s Restaurant.” She hung up. They walked across the street. Celine walked fast and her breathing was clear. The phone rang as soon as they got to the counter.