The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  “Hey,” said the man. “Who are you?”

  Grace had not run like this in years. It was blisteringly hot and already her chest and head hurt, but it was better than nausea. On the next street some men were gathered in front of a white house with dirty siding in front of a car with its hood open.

  “Guys, can I run through your yard?”

  “No goddamn way,” said an obese man with a Harley-Davidson shirt and a Dolphins cap.

  She did it anyway, and the man cussed at her as she ran up a gravel driveway and over another fence, through a blessedly empty yard and into a quiet cul-de-sac. There was a liquor store at the end of the block with two taxis parked out front. With a final burst she ran into the parking lot and waved her arms in front of the taxis.

  The taxi drivers’ doors were open. The drivers had been talking to each other but now they both stared at her. The man on her right, with black hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, leaned out. “You need taxi? Where you going?”

  “Away from here.” Grace bent over and put her hand on her heart.

  When she looked up, neither of the two men seemed keen to take her away from there.

  “Russian killers.” She pointed in front of her and behind, unsure of where they were. “They’re after me, in an SUV, and—”

  The man with the beard clapped his hands once, stepped out of his car, and opened his back door. “Get in, lady.”

  25

  NEW YORK, 1984

  At an awkward ceremony in 1982, Elena had been named senior vice-president of design for the automotive division of Craig International. The New York press had made fun of it for weeks. How was a ditzy foreign housewife remotely prepared for the impossible job of selling Americans something they did not want?

  Anthony hired a public relations firm to tell her story: Olympic athlete, communist defector, born of a long line of female automotive executives. Soon it was rare for a month to pass without a photo or an article about the scrappy yet glamorous young Craigs in one of the newspapers.

  Then it was almost every week: Elena in a cocktail dress; Elena performing a perfect cartwheel in Central Park; indefatigable Elena in the design lab; Elena with her daughter, little Kristína.

  She led the team in Manhattan three days a week, sometimes more often, and she worked in the design lab on Long Island. You can’t just draw the most luxurious car in the world: you have to sit in it.

  Where she really wanted to be though was in her apartment, playing with Kristína. Anthony had never changed a diaper or given voice to a Cabbage Patch Kid, he had never attended one of Kristína’s pretend tea parties, yet it was not possible to make him feel a whiff of guilt about it. Most aspects of parenting were inefficient drains on his time. He was worth thousands of dollars an hour. A nanny could take care of it all for a hundred bucks a day.

  And that’s for a good nanny, the best.

  He began work early in the mornings and usually finished late. He traveled across the country and back to New York in the course of a day—once or twice a week. Tonight was the first night in twelve they were not going to a business dinner, a gala, or a fundraiser.

  That Tuesday night, when Anthony’s assistant arrived with two boxes from Pizza Hut, Kristína cheered and danced. It was the closest thing to family time they could manage: a pepperoni and a three-cheese. Sancerre for Mommy and Diet Coke for Daddy.

  The television news was on.

  Walter Mondale, the former vice-president, had won the Iowa caucuses and carried a massive lead over the other Democrats keen to take on Reagan.

  “Look at those eyes.” Anthony ate standing up, his hands shiny with grease because he picked the cheese off his pizza and left most of the dough. He pointed a crust at the television. “There’s something wrong with Mondale’s eyes. He’s a boring guy, I’ve met him, fucker never stops talking, lips don’t move, weird whistling thing when he hits an S, but those eyes. Smart guy, smart and boring. But those eyes make him look stupid. Stupid Eyes Mondale. Reagan’s as stupid as Mondale’s eyes look, but here’s the difference: he understands show business. He’s a movie guy. What does Mondale think this is? Debate class? Who told that boring stick he should run for anything? If Jesse wasn’t black he’d take this. But you know what? He’s black. You hear what Jesse called the Jews? Elena, hey, hello? It was in the Times today. You hear it?”

  Kristína climbed up on her lap. The sweetie wanted to pick a slice of pepperoni from Mommy’s pizza. Of course Elena had seen the article. “No.”

  “No what? No to the kid or no to the Jesse thing?”

  “To Jesse.”

  “Hymies he calls them! And it was on tape or something, the dumb fuck.”

  “Language, Tony.”

  “You know what? Jesse’s dead. He might as well roll over for Stupid Eyes Mondale right now. I should run.”

  “You have to run, darling. It’s your destiny.”

  “And there’s Reagan. Podunk would vote for his corpse. It doesn’t matter what he says. He could recite Hop on Pop. And Mondale thinks Joe Lunchbox is gonna vote for him? Dream on, Stupid Eyes.”

  “When you run for president, you will be like Reagan.”

  Anthony threw his crust into one of the boxes, and chose another piece of pepperoni. He pulled the cheese and meat off and rolled it up and ate it.

  “This is why Mr. Joe Lunchbox will love you, Tony. You are a secret savage.”

  Elena was the only human being permitted to call him Tony. He thought it made him sound Italian and insignificant, a bit of a midget, like an olive oil sales rep in 1962. “Say that again.”

  While she had experienced none of the depression some women experience after childbirth, for months there had been a shroud of sadness over Elena. It wasn’t just her marriage, the prospect of being with a man like Anthony the rest of her life. She had lost touch with Danika, who had fallen into a life of drugs and mayhem when Sergei did not allow her to divorce Carlos. She disappeared one night in November, after calling Elena from a payphone. Her husband was not successful enough to be happy yet he was not enough of a disaster to abandon—not yet. Carlos’s family connections were worth a lot to Sergei.

  Elena had wanted to tell her friend to quit, to run away. But they both knew there was no quitting. There was nowhere to run.

  Danika’s body had been discovered in the East River. Carlos spoke through his tears at a press conference, using Danika’s struggle with pills and her death as an opportunity to cast himself as a soldier in the war on drugs even though Elena knew he had introduced every pill and powder to her.

  * * *

  —

  The morning after the pizza night, in Anthony’s Challenger, Elena flew with three of her closest friends—two swallows from Ukraine and one from Bulgaria—to Bozeman, Montana.

  Lone Mountain Ranch was the best place to cross-country ski in America. Elena was never a great skier but she had done it with her father and grandparents from the age of four. The four women were a bit buzzed from champagne on the tidy little jet, but the cold, dry mountain air woke them out of it.

  They arrived at a six-bedroom cabin in the snow, full of blonde wooden beams. A fire was burning and the women spoke of it reminding them of a much cleaner, much more beautiful and better-smelling version of home. After dinner the rest of the girls changed into their pajamas to watch a movie together: Risky Business. They made popcorn in the microwave.

  “I think I’ll go for a walk,” Elena announced, when the others were already cozy on the couch.

  Are you sure? I’ll go with you! You shouldn’t be alone out there!

  Of course, Elena could not allow company and none of the women really wanted to join her. They had been through almost three bottles of wine together and out in the shadows of the mountains it was well below freezing. None of them was quite sure whether or not the bears were still hibernating.

  His cabin was a ten-minute walk through the snow. The curtains were closed and she looked in her purse one last time to be
sure she had everything. Not bothering with their secret knock, she opened the front door and went into the bedroom. Blue and orange lights flashed on the body on the bed, naked but for white underwear and a pair of socks. A fire burned. Cheers was on TV.

  Without a word of greeting Elena took off her parka and sat next to him on the bed.

  Sergei had called this reunion a month earlier. He had just returned from Moscow. At the Center, the leader of the First Chief Directorate had presented the heads of stations’ own work back to them. He had been angry. There were plenty of recycled news stories and unsubstantiated rumors, but Sergei and his peers had produced almost no actionable intelligence. They were still trying to find assets based on 1960s thinking. No one in America or Great Britain was enamored with communism anymore, and those who were—divorced professors, mostly—had no access to power. They were social dunces. Entirely useless.

  From now on it did not matter if their assets had any affinity whatsoever with the founding principles of the Soviet Union.

  Sergei imitated the man in charge of the First Chief Directorate. “This is a new world and we need new strategies. We will be bold. We will be creative. We will win because we are willing to try anything, do anything. They will not see us coming.”

  “He sounds like Tony. With an accent.”

  “You know them, Elenka, what they could do to my parents. To my wife. I’ll end up in a salt mine in Surgut, if I am lucky.”

  “I hear Surgut is very beautiful in August.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “I was joking.”

  “You’ve become such an American. I don’t know when you are joking.”

  For the past week, and on the plane, she had tried to remember what it had felt like to be in love with Sergei. Her ultimate goal back then had been: a place in Prague or Moscow and a country home, a dacha on the Black Sea. The children in her dreams had always been their children.

  “I brought drinks,” she said now.

  “I have drinks.” Sergei reached for a glass beside the bed and gulped the last of his whiskey. Elena took the empty glass from him and carried it into the kitchen. In her purse were six airplane vodkas and a bottle of tomato juice.

  “Have you ever had a Bloody Mary?”

  Elena’s hands were shaking. Sergei looked across the room at her.

  The light in his small kitchen came from above the stove. She poured two ounces of vodka into a tall water glass and filled it with the tomato juice. In a sandwich bag she had packed Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce, celery powder, two sticks of celery—and a tiny container of ricin salt. Danika had made it based on a chromatography technique they learned in Prague, from a slurry of castor beans and a few chemicals her drug dealer had found for her. Elena had kept it safe for the day her friend found the courage to mix it into her husband’s cocaine.

  Now she opened the vial. For hours he would suffer. She wanted him to suffer.

  “Come, Elenka,” Sergei called.

  “What do you need me to do? I mean, to help? Is it something with Anthony?” She dropped it in and stirred. More vodka. “Do you want a stick of celery?”

  “I already had dinner.” Sergei turned off the television. “We don’t need fancy drinks.”

  She carried the Bloody Marys on a tray. He was sitting up in bed, and looked better in the flickering orange of the fire, his posture straight, his eyes on her.

  “They think Reagan is planning a pre-emptive strike,” he said. “Moscow and Leningrad, military installations.”

  “Is it…is that something you want me to find out?”

  “Put down the tray.”

  She slid it onto his desk, next to a novel by Gabriel García Márquez translated into Russian and a pile of newspapers: the Times, the Post, The Guardian.

  “Is he, Sergei?”

  “You think the man who played Papa in Bedtime for Bonzo wants to be known, for the rest of time, as the man who destroyed the world?”

  She was having trouble focusing. “Anthony’s been talking about Jesse Jackson. We had dinner with Mario Cuomo. Ed Koch—”

  “Soon there will be a new general secretary, Elenka. It will be someone who cares more about the economy than ideology.”

  “So…”

  “So your Anthony is no communist. There is no turning him. If he were to design a political system it would be an absolute monarchy. As long as he is monarch.”

  When Anthony spoke to his daughter, it was to tell her she was the prettiest and the smartest in America. No one could ever be prettier or smarter than Kristína. Because she was a Craig. You’ll be the toughest negotiator in New York. You’ll kill them. Destroy them. You’ll be on the news every night. The queen. The queen!

  Six years old: the queen.

  Sergei took the Bloody Mary without the celery and brought it to his mouth. Just as he was about to drink it he placed the glass on the bedside table.

  “Take off your clothes.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Elena laughed. “You’re acting strange.”

  “Take off your clothes.”

  She started with her shirt.

  “Slowly.”

  Elena slipped one side of her jumper off her shoulder.

  “Don’t act like a whore. Just undress.”

  In the airplane she had tried not to think about his death. Now she wanted to watch it.

  Sergei sat up tall, reached for his Bloody Mary. “Would he come to Moscow?”

  “Who? Anthony?”

  “The coming change means opportunities for foreign investment.”

  She waited for him to drink. Just a sip.

  “Our license with Fiat could end anytime. I’m not talking about luxury cars. Just…manufacturing cars. We can make sure it is profitable for him.”

  Elena was in her bra and panties now. Though she had worked hard to rid herself of the extra pounds since giving birth, in the light of the fire she wanted to cover herself.

  Drink.

  “Well?” The Bloody Mary was still in his hand.

  “It doesn’t fit the brand, Sergei. Communist cars. Maybe Volkswagen…”

  “We wouldn’t use ‘Craig.’ It would be something else. You can come up with the name.”

  “The car business isn’t doing well. The bearings keep Craig International alive.”

  “We could do a bearings deal.”

  “He hates the bearings business.”

  “Okay, cars.”

  Drink, God damn it.

  “You remember Aleksandr Mironov, in Prague?”

  “Of course.”

  “He is obsessed with your Anthony.”

  “But Aleksandr is not important.”

  “He will be. Take off the bra.”

  She did.

  “And the panties.”

  Elena was feeling bashful so she lifted the covers on the bed.

  “Don’t move.”

  “What? Why?”

  Sergei took his time slipping off the bed in his underwear and brown socks. With the drink in his hand he walked around to her. Again she tried to get into the bed, and this time he shouted. “Don’t fucking move!”

  Whatever happened, no one would hear. For a while he stood behind her but she did not turn around. Then he reached around, with the glass, and held her tight with his free hand.

  “All I have to do is splash this on your face. It could go up your nose, just a few grains, and that would be enough.”

  “What are you talking about, Sergei?” Elena’s voice was shaking.

  “Bend over.”

  “Please. No.”

  “You know I can do it anytime to you, to your daughter, to your parents.”

  “Sergei, I didn’t—”

  “Shut up. I don’t even want you to tell the truth. We didn’t train you to be a truth-teller. You’re angry about Danika? Vengeful? You think you’re next?”

  He had taken off his underwear. Not the socks. Now he released her and put th
e poisoned drink beside hers on the bedside table. She could tell, by his breathing and by the sound of it, what he was doing. Then without warning he began to shove himself into her.

  She pulled the sheets off the bed to her face, to stifle a sob.

  “You think you’re next, Elenka? You’re right. Remember your place, what you are here to do, or you are definitely next.”

  26

  MIAMI, 2016

  The taxi driver was from Azerbaijan. He loved to drive fast and he hated Russians. Grace watched through the back window, for the SUV, as her driver told her about Black January, when the Russians came into Baku and killed his father in the street. And for what? For nothing! It was 1990 and the communists had already lost.

  “And, lady,” he said. “Have you heard of Khojaly Massacre?”

  There was still no sign of the SUV. Grace had asked the driver to head in the direction of Pompano Beach and her mother’s retirement home. She did not want to lead her pursuers there, but they already knew where to find her. They knew everything.

  “No,” said Grace. “I haven’t.”

  “Everyone in the world should know!” They were on the South Federal Highway, Highway 1, not the interstate, and her driver was going seventy miles per hour, weaving in and out of traffic. The highway was lined with skinny palm trees, warehouses, and cheap apartments. “Over 160 Azerbaijanis killed by Russians and Armenians. You Americans don’t know anything. You think after fall of Berlin Wall everything was sunshine and dancing? This was 1992, my friend.”

  They stopped at a set of lights next to a school in Dania Beach. Thirty or forty children, dressed in costumes, crossed the highway. The black SUV, glinting in the sunlight, sped up the highway.

  The terror gripped her again. “Oh God, no. How did they find us?”