The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  “It’s on reruns.”

  “Aleksandr likes it very much. He quotes liberally from it.”

  “I study ancient fighting systems.” Mironov’s face was an odd color in the light of dusk. “I’m an actual kung fu master.”

  Elena did not know what to say to that, so she took some tapenade. The waiter returned to fill their flutes, his hand trembling.

  Sergei coughed to announce his intention to speak. “Tell Aleksandr more about the quality of your Anthony’s ambitions.”

  “If the right person tells him he ought to do something, ought to make something, he will do it.”

  Mironov dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. “Who is ‘the right person’?”

  “Someone he admires,” said Elena. “A successful capitalist, someone with ‘old money.’ The CEO or the chair of a media enterprise: for a man like this he would do anything. Give up the bearings and automobile businesses and go wholeheartedly into the manufacture of toilets. If the owner of the New York Times were to befriend him and call him a titan of business, a genius, and tell him to make toilets, I believe Anthony would do it.”

  “Is he unfaithful?” said Mironov.

  “He is the most unfaithful man in America.”

  “Is there a risk he will leave you?”

  “No.”

  Sergei interjected. “Elena can handle him. She will not divorce him. This is a partnership, a business partnership, more than a marriage.”

  Elena was now on the design team for the line of Craig cars that would launch in 1980. She had chosen the exterior colors and crafts for all the interiors. The Craig Swift, the upcoming “woman’s car,” was based eighty percent on her designs, inside and out.

  But it was not entirely true, what Sergei had said. Anthony had romanced her in the beginning. He had taken cross-country ski lessons and had traded a vacation in the Caribbean for a cold week in Colorado. Despite his infidelities he was loyal, in his way, and proud of Kristína, though he rarely saw her.

  Anthony and Elena had found excuses not to make love.

  “Nothing suggests the CIA or FBI have any idea about you. Not from our end. At least the files we can access.” Mironov looked at Sergei and back at her. “Have they ever approached you, Mrs. Craig?”

  “Never.”

  “I know you are an intelligent and capable woman,” said Mironov, continuing to study her. “But you have to play dumber than you have, as things progress.”

  “Why?”

  “You are Czech. Craig married you because you are beautiful, not because you are smart. You are a ‘trophy wife,’ an aesthetic consideration, the status symbol of a rich man.”

  “It does not have to be so. In America, women—”

  “If you are too smart, Mrs. Craig, and everyone knows him to be stupid…”

  “I don’t think they do.”

  “Never interrupt me.” Still there was no anger in his eyes. “Never.”

  Elena did not understand what was happening.

  “I am sorry, Mrs. Craig. This is probably difficult for a woman of your age and intelligence, living in New York City, to hear: but we are only interested in your husband. And we are patient. He has enormous potential for us and we will not jeopardize it for any reason. Do you understand?”

  Elena looked at her champagne, at the bubbles. What did he mean by “we”? This man was a non-entity in the KGB, like Sergei. Young and mean and, so far, powerless. This was not even a real meeting. A champagne bubble popped out of the flute and fizzed on her hand. She wanted to be away from this place. She wanted to tell Anthony, so he could…no, there was nothing he could do. Besides, if she confessed, Anthony would see only the risks to himself, to his reputation.

  There was no running from Moscow Center, no running from Sergei and this new man, Mironov. There was not a village in the jungles of South America where they could not find her and destroy her, let alone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She would die of a drug overdose, a heart attack, a car accident.

  Her parents would be eliminated. Kristína.

  “Tell us, Mrs. Craig, about our plans as you understand them.” Mironov filled her flute and his, and he did not fill Sergei’s. “Be frank with us. Tell us why you are in New York, married to this buffoon, where you intend to take him.”

  Despite the champagne her mouth was dry.

  “Kingfisher,” Mironov said, sternly. “We are waiting.”

  24

  MIAMI, 2016

  At Miami International Airport, sleep-deprived and exhausted from worry, Grace bought an American SIM card and more data for her phone. She texted Jason with her new number, and coordinated a pick-up location. Waiting near the doors, she Googled William Kovály and found his staff photo on the website for London South Bank University School of Law and Social Sciences. His hair was tidy in the picture and his big, open smile obliterated any mystery or intrigue. He was an associate professor of history, and his two-paragraph bio listed his degrees and papers published and his area of specialization: totalitarianism and revolution.

  Of course, this did not prove or disprove anything. It would take ten minutes to invent a name and a personality profile for a skilled agent, a morning to create a web page for a university. Everything that had seemed natural, up until this moment, could have been manufactured: their meeting, his friend Milan with the Einstein hair, the beer hall, dinner at a Czech-Indian fusion restaurant, the uncomfortable moment next to the spice shop when she decided not to invite him back upstairs after dinner. His gallant response: “Perhaps, in Montreal, we will come to know one another better.”

  Goodnight, goodnight, sleep well, you too, bon voyage. It felt like he prolonged this exchange on the medieval street to hide his true message inside a series of banal words of departure. She did not trust her instinct in this matter because no one had tried to pick her up in any obvious way since the summer of 2012.

  Her suitcase arrived with new scrapes and wounds, and she rolled it out into the hot sandwich between wet and dry season. After the slate gloom of Prague the impossibly sunny, cloudless joy of late afternoon in Miami was almost too much. When had she last slept a full and proper night? Latin pop bounced from the open windows of clean, new cars. No one, not one person, wore a down jacket. She understood why her mother and ex-husband and twenty-one million other people loved it in Florida, although for Grace the brightness and clarity of the place now hid something sinister.

  She texted Jason and five minutes later he pulled up in his frosty white Buick SUV. He hopped out of it in a pair of tan shorts and a purposely faded yellow beach shirt. He jogged around the front and hugged her and kissed her ear. “You look fabulous.”

  “I look old. My nose is swollen and puffy. And I stink. But thanks.”

  “What happened to your chin?”

  “Scraped it.”

  “What? How?”

  “On cobblestones.”

  Jason took care of her bag. Inside the Buick, a shiny black universe of elegant dials that smelled of leather and freshly opened plastic, it was ten degrees cooler. Before she could ask her ex-husband to ease up on the air conditioning, there was a harmonic mini-chorus of, “Hello, Aunt Grace.”

  The two little girls, eight and ten, were in princess costumes.

  “Hi, Claire. Hi, Kellie,” Grace said, a little uneasily. This had not been part of her plan. “Was there a Halloween party at school today?”

  “Yes, there was.” Kellie, the ten-year-old, made a stern face. “Guess who I am.”

  “A princess?”

  “Yeah, but which one?”

  “Oh sweetie, I can’t keep track of them all.”

  “Elsa from Frozen?”

  “Of course. You look just like her.”

  The girls began singing “Let It Go,” and as they pulled into the mad airport traffic, Jason asked them gently to sing a different song. “This is only the fiftieth time they sang that one today.”

  “Can we turn down the air conditioning, Jay?”
<
br />   “And I’m Ariel.” Claire sang a few bars. “Remember that one? The Little Mermaid? I’m when she isn’t a mermaid for a little while.”

  “Because she made bad choices.” Kellie leaned forward and her polyester dress swooshed. “Can you turn up the music, Papa?”

  Jason turned up “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift.

  In the back seat, the girls grooved and sang along. They merged onto the interstate. Jason and Caitlyn and the girls lived in a lakefront mansion in Coral Springs, thirty minutes from her mother’s retirement community in Pompano Beach. Her ex-husband visited the formidable Elsie Elliott far more often than Grace, which was noted in phone calls and in selfies Jason helped Elsie to send.

  With his daughters consumed by Taylor Swift, Jason gently elbowed Grace. “How do you scrape your face on cobblestones? And what work were you doing in Prague of all places?”

  Their breakup involved no betrayals or secrets or sneaking about. Three years into their marriage, Jason wanted children and Grace did not. Not yet, anyway. They had entered their thirties and he was becoming nervous about it. He had imagined his life a certain way: coaching soccer, joining parent council, crying at animated movies, tucking someone in every night, singing Taylor Swift in a white, American-made, late-model SUV. He was more than ready to move away from Montreal: the language, the fashion, the politics. For their fifth anniversary, he joined Grace on a trip to Vermont, where she spent one day working on an article and three with him. In a sushi restaurant in Burlington, where the snow was melting, he said he needed something more than maybe, about children, about Montreal, and maybe was all she could give him.

  Over a carafe of warm sake Grace had surprised herself by suggesting they break up and remain friends. Jason cried. She didn’t. Less than a year later he had met Caitlyn in New York. She worked in the property development industry with her father. A short while later they moved to Coral Springs for Caitlyn’s career, the climate, and North Broward Preparatory School.

  Before Grace answered his questions about the chin scab and Prague, she checked the side mirror. There was a black SUV behind them.

  “Can you take a weird turn-off in a bit, and then get back on the interstate?”

  “Why?”

  “This story I’m working on, it will upset some people. They’re trying to intimidate me.”

  “Who is?”

  “The people I’m writing about.”

  “Writing about for the National Flash? Nobody even believes it. And you can’t threaten an American citizen for exercising free speech. The Constitution is pretty clear on that. Have you gone to the cops?”

  She pulled down her sun visor and inspected her chin. The wound looked like a large spider. “I think it might have been the cops who did this, Czech cops.”

  “So? Tell our cops.”

  “I tried. They wanted me to fill out forms.”

  “You should fill out those forms, Grace. Look, surely you can tell me what you’re working on.”

  She looked behind her again. The black SUV was still following them. Of course, half of Florida’s population drove enormous black SUVs. “Turn off soon.”

  The girls knew all the words to “Bad Blood” too. Grace sat back, determined to remain calm. “Kellie, you don’t wear uniforms to school?”

  “Yes, Aunt Grace. That is why today is special. We get to stay in our costumes all day.”

  “We’re trick-or-treating.” Claire had trouble making the -ing sound. Treat-en.

  “But you’re only keeping three choices of candy each, right girls?” Jason winked at Grace. “They put the rest in a bag and hang it outside on the branch of our eucalyptus. Then in the night the switch witch comes.”

  “The switch witch trades our candy for books.” Kellie folded her arms. “I don’t know why.”

  At a suburb called Ives Estates Jason turned off the interstate. The black SUV followed them.

  “Go slow, Jason, please.”

  The strip malls offered manicures, fast food, computer repair services, and loans. As a girl growing up in wintry Bloomington, Grace had always imagined Florida as an endless beach with white and perfect towers, palm trees, swimming pools, and glistening boys of many colors. When her mother decided to move here, Grace was shocked to discover a bland grid of unloved homes and palm trees.

  “Turn right.”

  “Grace?”

  “Please, Jason, now.”

  Jason raised his arms in defeat and pulled into a loop of trailers and trailer-like houses where men and women drank beer on white plastic chairs. Several front yards had more than one vehicle parked on them, right on the grass amid the tropical vegetation. They did not look like vehicles that moved anymore. A hot wind blew a hint of dust over everything. Even with the windows closed and Taylor Swift going full blast, Grace could hear a couple shouting at one another on a stoop. Kellie and Claire watched them as they passed. Jason sighed. Grace thought of their final two months together, when he was already in New York but insisted on meeting once every two weeks in an upstate hotel room to make sure this divorce was right for them.

  “What’s happening to you, whatever it is, it’s in your control to alter it, Grace. It’s no one else. It’s just you. And you’re powerful.”

  The SUV turned in behind them.

  “Okay.” Grace tried not to sound terrified, or even agitated. “Now back to the interstate.”

  Jason turned back on to Ives Dairy Road. “You’re scaring me.”

  “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  “How long are you in town? Can we have you for dinner? Not tonight, with the Halloween madness, but maybe tomorrow?” The SUV had fallen three and then four cars behind them. “I’m just here for a few hours.”

  “Why don’t you change it up? Have a bit of a holiday? Caitlyn’s really plugged into the wellness community in Coral Springs. A couple of spa days couldn’t hurt. I would be delighted to take care of it for you, an early Christmas present.”

  The SUV was right behind them again.

  “It was happening to me, in the year after we broke up, in crazy New York, before I met Caitlyn. I was working too hard. I had fallen deep into my own head, if that makes sense. My world, the way I saw and felt it, had so little to do with the real world. With actual energy, if you get my meaning, all we feel but cannot see, and I know this will sound like hocus-pocus, Grace, especially to you, but…”

  In the rear-view mirror Grace realized the two men in the SUV were her pursuers from Prague and Strasbourg. Her stomach curdled. They were not being coy or sneaky. They wanted her to see them. The passenger, with the pretty eyes, mimed writing something down. Or maybe he was writing something down: their license plate.

  Grace imagined reading it online, or receiving a balled-up copy in a set of Russian nesting dolls. A tragedy on Halloween night, carbon monoxide poisoning in a mansion in Coral Springs, Florida: Jason, Caitlyn, Kellie and Claire Kroeker.

  “Can you drop me off here?”

  “What? On the interstate?”

  “It was crazy to involve you in this, beyond selfish. I was so tired and scared when I called you. I wanted to feel safe, I guess, like something normal could happen. These men were following me in Prague and Strasbourg, and they’re following me again.”

  “Are they the reason your chin is scabbed?”

  The girls were no longer singing along to the music. “Papa?” said Kellie. “What’s happening?”

  “I’m taking you straight to the police station in Coral Springs.”

  “Pull off the interstate.”

  “Grace, no.”

  “Jason, the girls are not safe.”

  This was too loud. Kellie leaned forward as far as her seatbelt would allow. “What girls aren’t safe? Us?”

  Jason shook his head and clenched his jaw, looked straight ahead at the I-95 traffic. The next exit was for Hollywood, Florida, and he clicked his indicator on decisively. Grace had never been to Hollywood, Florida.

  “Why aren’
t we safe? Daddy?” Kellie slapped his arm. “Daddy?”

  “Sit back and be quiet, princess. We’ll talk about this later.”

  She did. Claire, in her booster seat, began to cry.

  “I didn’t mean it, girls.” Grace felt monstrously ill prepared for this moment. When she was around children, she tended to speak to them like adults. “I’m just a funny person to have around. I don’t mean you girls aren’t safe with me. I just mean it’s weird to be in a car with me, and that weirdness can feel unsafe.”

  “Can you say that again, Aunt Grace?” said Kellie. “I don’t understand.”

  Jason turned off the interstate and they rounded into another secondary route of strip malls and schools, randomly dotted with palm trees.

  “Just take a right.”

  “Just take a right.” Jason repeated her phrase with incredulity. “Grace, can I say something without you getting mad at me?”

  “How am I supposed to respond to that?” Grace watched the SUV creep closer.

  “You haven’t changed. You haven’t grown. It takes courage, yes, but we’ve reached middle age and we have to realize that nothing is going to go our way unless we take action. Montreal isn’t right for you. It wasn’t right for me. It isn’t right for any Americans. I’m just going to say it because I’ve said it before and it’s based entirely in love for you: you’re too good for the National Flash.”

  “Can you turn left and then speed up?”

  “All I have ever wanted to do is help.”

  “Turn left slowly, keeping it cool, and then speed up. When I say stop, stop. I’ll call you in a while, to get my bag. I’m really sorry I put you through this.”

  In the back seat, both girls were now quietly crying.

  “Sweeties? I’ll make it up to you two somehow, okay?”

  “Okay, Aunt Grace,” said Kellie, through her tears.

  Jason turned left.

  “Now floor it!”

  He did, down a slightly more prosperous suburban street.

  “Stop!”

  Jason put his foot on the brake so abruptly that the Buick skidded on the dusty road.

  “I love you all. So sorry. Thank you!” Grace opened the passenger door and Jason began pulling away before she closed it. She sprinted into a private yard, into the back, and scaled a chain link fence. Then she climbed down the other side into another yard, where a man and a woman were drinking bottles of beer with their feet in a wading pool. She could hear the roar of an engine and squealing tires behind her.