The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  “I don’t know. Jean-Yves de Moulin, in Strasbourg, thinks he is in danger and I am in danger—and I guess you’re in danger too, William—until this comes out.” Grace read through her notes, from their visit with Manon. “I’m already halfway through an article, if I can sell it.”

  “If you can sell it? I’m not even a publisher and I’d buy it.”

  The Uber stopped in front of the offices of the newspaper, they ran in, and Grace asked for her friend Lucy. Lucy had been the Herald’s librarian but in 2010, her hours had been cut to one day a week, and Lucy had become a part-time, casual employee and lost her benefits. Four days a week she volunteered for a corporation owned by a coalition of hedge funds that had transformed Canada’s most esteemed journalistic institutions into a New York–based debt servicing scheme. Grace’s feeling on the matter: this was criminally insane. After two glasses of wine she had told Lucy how she felt at one of their quarterly Women in Journalism meetings at the Upstairs lounge. Why, Lucy? Why would you do this for a horrible company, horrible people?

  The answer was simple, and the conversation stopped for a while after Lucy said it. “Why? This is all I have.”

  Grace admired this answer, but the conversation had been so flinty afterward that Lucy had never forgiven Grace for the question. In subsequent Women in Journalism meetings they had sat at opposite ends of the table.

  On any other day Grace would be nervous about seeing her, about asking this favor. She leaned on a hunk of marble. There was so much marble in downtown Montreal, in buildings like this no one cared about. If Grace had money and understood a thing about making more of it, she would buy up all the ignored marble of Montreal, mush it together, and build something fabulous in Florida. She pulled her hands away and there was a layer of moist dust on them.

  The elevator door opened. Lucy was a three-hundred-pound woman with a wilted poinsettia for hair. She wore a brown muumuu.

  “How are you, Lucy?”

  “Criminally insane, didn’t you say? Nothing much has changed in my world.”

  “I was an idiot for saying that.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I need to search something in the archives.”

  “Of course. We have some forms. It takes two to three weeks, and there is a standard fee.”

  “Please, Lucy.”

  “Please what, Grace?”

  William stepped between them and introduced himself with a bow. “Madame Lucy, Grace and I are caught up in something frankly…unprecedented. My university has sent me here, from London, to help solve a mystery. It has a Montreal Herald connection, a Lucy connection.” He put his arm around her. “You tell us what an hour of your time is worth and we’ll double it.”

  “Kovály? Of the West Island Koválys?”

  William’s arm remained around her significant shoulder. He led her past the elevators and around the corner.

  A few minutes later they reappeared. Lucy pressed the up button on the elevator. She would not look at Grace. “You have an hour.”

  Upstairs, it didn’t take nearly that long. There were a number of hits, in Lucy’s system, for Elena Klimentová, Elena Straka, and Josef Straka between 1972 and 1977. But the clippings and photo files themselves weren’t there. They could not even find a copy of the article Jean-Yves de Moulin had sent.

  Lucy stood in a corridor between two metal shelves, where the material should have been, and shook her head.

  “This isn’t possible.”

  “Why not?” Grace joined her.

  “I’m the only one with access. I’m the only one who’s here. I know how to find things. If someone were to take a bunch of files…” She turned to Grace. “I’m the someone. It’s just me.”

  “When did you start working here?”

  “I was nineteen. It was right after Christmas break in 1971.”

  “Well.” William sighed. “These people are certainly consistent.”

  “Who? What people? You know who did this, don’t you?” She looked at William.

  William stepped in close, to comfort her. “If someone were to break in, Lucy, or if someone were to pay a staff member to come in on a weekend, how might they find and steal files?”

  “I have the passwords.”

  “Before computers?”

  She led them to a bright wooden cabinet and asked Grace and William to turn away. Then she entered a combination and pulled out the card catalogue. “This hasn’t been opened in years. But even then the only other person who had the combination, ever, was the editor in chief.” She lifted out a card. “We computerized in 1985. All we did, at that time, was enter this information into our system.”

  “But the actual files could have been empty, even then.”

  “It’s possible.” Lucy returned the card, closed the drawer, and spun the combination to lock. She turned away from the drawer and reached for a huge chair on wheels, pulled it close, and sat down. “One of our editors in chief was crooked. It must have been him—one of the men, surely, from the great era of drunken men. It’s the only answer. Unless—”

  “Unless what?” Grace sat on the edge of a desk.

  “Last spring the police were here. They wanted a look-see, and could not tell me what they wanted.”

  “The Montreal police?”

  “I can’t…” Lucy’s hands were in her messy hair. She looked at the floor. “Maybe RCMP? What’s the Canadian version of the CIA called again? It’s not on TV. If it were on TV we’d know. This damn country.”

  “Was it men or women?” Grace made notes. “Can you remember what they were wearing? What were they looking for? What did they say?”

  “It was police business, they said.”

  “Did you see what they were doing?”

  For the next five minutes Lucy tried to describe the men and what they had done. Grace took down every word, but Lucy had turned small and regretful in her chair, mourning a shocking loss. She was vague and apprehensive. “They told me not to talk to anyone about their visit. They said it could compromise…”

  “The integrity of the investigation?” said William. “Of course they did.”

  In the elevator, on the way down, Grace asked William what he had said to Lucy to persuade her to help them.

  He pushed his heavy glasses up his nose and crouching to look at his reflection in the elevator mirror he combed his black hair with his fingers. “I told her she could help stop Anthony Craig.”

  31

  MOSCOW, 1987

  Elena and Anthony Craig looked out the window of Room 107 of the Hotel National. He was in the final stages of a cold and kept wiping his nose with a thin handkerchief he had bought at the airport in Berlin. It made him seem—to Elena—almost Slavic. Their assigned guide, Yuri, was officially from the state tourism agency but in her opinion he was far too knowledgeable about the whims of his American clients to be anything other than an entry-level KGB officer.

  She knew the plan, what came next, and she didn’t like it.

  Back in New York Anthony would have told Yuri to fuck off a number of times by now, but here they were in the most prestigious suite of the most prestigious hotel in Moscow with a view of the Kremlin in the late afternoon sunshine, all of it courtesy of the Soviet government.

  Friends had warned Anthony that the communists were easily insulted, so he pretended to be interested in Yuri’s commentary about Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, whose room they were staying in, pretended to know all about Pablo Neruda and Anatole France, who had also slept there.

  “What year was it again, Yuri, the big show?”

  “Our revolution was 1917. All leaders of the new government stayed in the Hotel National the following months because the Kremlin was damaged in fighting. Lenin himself. Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky…”

  “Okay, okay.” Anthony waved the soiled handkerchief at him and looked back out the window at the Kremlin. “I can’t keep track of all the -skys but thanks, pal, it’s a big help knowing this.”
>
  Elena sat on the edge of the bed and laughed. She knew that men and women were listening to them in the ugly concrete Intourist tower next door. She imagined them wearing headphones, looking at one another. This is what a fancy capitalist sounds like? It had been a long time since she had been taught to find bugs in a room, fifteen or sixteen years ago, but even she found the listening devices in Room 107 crudely hidden: they were in the bathroom medicine cabinet, on the bedside lamps. The video cameras above the bed and in the salon were visible. All you had to do was look up.

  “Is there anything else I can help with, Mr. Craig?” Yuri placed his hands together, as though he were praying. “Any facts?”

  “What do you mean, facts? I’m a car guy, I love cars, they’re all I ever think about, but this square—it’s just a huge road and dumpy buildings. And those cars! Elena, they’re even uglier than you said, belching diesel. Jesus. And Red Square? Where’s the red you people are always blabbing about? And this is supposed to be the best spot. It’s a capital city, Yuri. Have some pride. Live a little. You know what might help with this view?”

  Yuri joined him at the window.

  “A tree or two, that’s what.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Look down there! Why isn’t anyone smiling? It’s summer. Don’t you guys have winter ten months a year?”

  Anthony opened the window and shouted over the seven or eight lanes of Mokhovaya Street, over an orchestra of engine noise. “Live a little!” He closed the window again and wiped his nose. “And what’s with all the damn concrete? There’s other stuff to build with, you know.”

  Yuri looked over at Elena, for guidance. She shrugged.

  “Tonight, Mr. Craig, you will meet with very important people in politics and economics and manufacturing and automotive. I will brief you.” Yuri reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out an envelope. He cleared his throat and unfolded some papers. “Many of these men and women are crucial in the Communist Party and very close to Mr. Gorbachev himself.”

  Elena’s job at the dinner meeting that night would be to assure the Soviet leadership they would open an auto manufacturing plant in Russia if the terms were good enough and if the brand was entirely separate from Craig International. The conversation would move naturally in the direction of Anthony’s political ambitions. Mayor of New York? Maybe. Governor? Maybe, but Albany? This was difficult to imagine. If only they could move the state capital to the Florida coast.

  “How about president of the United States?” one of them would say.

  It was not a state secret that the Soviets were unhappy with Ronald Reagan, who was no longer a young man. Sergei spoke of Gorbachev with a mixed tone. Communism in its current state would not, could not, last forever. Gorbachev and his staff were studying capitalism, and the possibility of a peaceful transition, earnestly and carefully. They had begun quiet conversations with the Americans on potential scenarios. There was only one dominant issue for everyone on the Soviet side of the negotiating table: these changes could not humiliate and degrade the Russian people or the Russian soul.

  Yet in seeking perestroika and glasnost so transparently, Gorbachev had announced his weakness. Sergei had called it “kneeling before America.”

  What did Reagan do? He made arrogant demands, in exclamation points, from Berlin. Berlin! A city whose people would rule America today were it not for Soviet strength and sacrifice in the Great Patriotic War.

  It demonstrated what Reagan knew. Enough intelligence had leaked out, through the sieve of KGB drunks and defectors: the Soviet war machine was an overhyped joke. The American strategy, to bankrupt the state through the arms race, had worked. Communism, what they called communism, had failed.

  In Room 107 of the Hotel National, Anthony sighed and stepped away from the window. He put his arm around Yuri and led him to the door. “No offense, but I’m good on meetings. There’s a lot of things I’m good at. Wouldn’t you say, Elena?”

  She nodded.

  “But my very best thing is meeting a bunch of strangers and making a deal. If anyone can make a deal with a room full of communists, I’m the guy. Okay? Really thankful for the chaperone duties and for organizing Elena’s thing.”

  “Her tour of the Kremlin,” said Yuri.

  “That’s it, chum. Really, really special. But now I’ll get a nap in. Come back in four hours, all right, and I’ll listen to you talk about all kinds of people, all the -skys and -ovs you can find for me. Great people. The greatest. Folks back home should know. But right now I just can’t. Okay? What’s your name again?”

  “Yuri,” the entry-level spy said, for the twelfth time.

  “Am I upsetting you, Yuri? It’s not what I want to do here.”

  “No, Mr. Craig. Assuredly not.”

  When he was out and the door was closed again, Anthony opened his arms in disbelief. “They are so stiff.”

  “Tonight they’ll drink too much vodka and loosen up,” said Elena. “They’re just nervous around you, Tony. Most of these people have never met an American, let alone a rich and famous American, a powerful one.”

  He walked across the salon to the window again. “That’s a good point.”

  “In Russia, there is only one kind of power. Political power. You represent another kind, and they’re just not used to it.”

  “I succeed using this beautiful thing right here.” He pointed at his head and blew his nose again. “You’re taking Alicia with you, to see the bodies of dead pinkos?”

  “I don’t think you can actually see them. It’s a mausoleum.”

  “No offense, but these Slavs are creepy.”

  Alicia was Elena’s assistant and, probably, her best friend. Anthony lusted after her, and he wasn’t remotely sneaky about it.

  “Does he have any strange fantasies?” Sergei had asked her, in his violin shop on West Sixty-eighth Street, as they planned the trip to Moscow.

  “Like what?”

  “Anything with body waste, with animals? Does he like to hurt or be hurt?”

  “He is very conventional. Of course, Anthony likes to be told he is the greatest lover in the history of earth. Just as he is the greatest automaker. If he had only focused on it, he would be the world’s greatest golfer as well.”

  Would the room smell strangely, when she returned? While she and Alicia walked through Red Square and the Kremlin, three of “Yuri’s nice young friends” would arrive to entertain Anthony. The video cameras would record everything. The one consolation was he would certainly spread his cold virus to his visitors.

  Now that Elena was in her late thirties, with a healthy and wonderful daughter, it did not matter so much that he did what he did. She had Kristína. In ten years of marriage to him, in a business partnership with him, she had learned how to build a company. She did not have love but she had ideas. She had influence.

  Now that she was in Moscow, she could not believe she once imagined herself living here. Anthony was right. It was bleak and the people were uniformly miserable. Even with a weekend dacha on the Black Sea, there was no way she could have spent her life in Moscow.

  Elena knew who was on the guest list tonight. They had talked about inviting Gorbachev himself, but that would have aroused too much curiosity back home.

  When they learned about the trip, two men from the CIA had visited them in New York for a briefing. Don’t talk about politics. Don’t allow any money to change hands until you’re back home and we can help you. Don’t reveal anything personal about yourself.

  Elena had insisted on joining the meeting with the CIA so she could steer the conversation away from how hot Russian girls could compromise naïve Western men.

  There was a knock on the door. Elena looked through the peephole to see Alicia in a simple white dress and a hat. She put on a light sweater and her sunglasses. “Have a good time, Tony.”

  “It’s just a nap.”

  “Maybe something interesting will happen while I’m gone,” she said,
as she opened the door.

  But he was already looking back out the window, his thoughts far away on what he might conquer.

  32

  MONTREAL, 2016

  “Baby It’s Cold Outside” played from outdoor speakers on Sainte-Catherine Street as Grace and William made their way to Josef Straka’s apartment. The Christmas shopping season begins officially on the first of November and shopkeepers were already putting up trees and garlands. And the early snow was becoming serious. They climbed Peel Street. A white transport truck slid into another white transport truck in front of Chez Alexandre et fils.

  Both drivers stepped out of their vehicles. In New York they would have cussed at each other. Here, with their sweet union contracts, they sparked cigarettes and said local variations on bien.

  Grace had paid the security guard at the Herald two dollars to borrow his cellphone for a local call. On Josef Straka’s card there were two numbers. William dialed the landline and hung up when Straka answered.

  They turned west on Sherbrooke Street, back into the wind and the worst of the blizzard. It was beginning to stick on the sidewalks now. Grace took William’s arm instead of his hand. When they reached the Ritz-Carlton and the blue chemical ice melt, to cross the street, it was no longer slippery but William would not let her take her arm back. They walked like young lovers.

  There was a black metal awning in front of the Acadia, Josef Straka’s building. Under it, they shook and slapped the globs of wet snow from their hair and jackets. “It’s been so long.” Grace looked at the arms of her black wool jacket instead of William’s eyes. “Years and years, since I held a man’s hand.”

  “That, Grace, is a terrible shame.”

  A gentleman in a fur coat opened the gold-plated door and led them to his desk. “Madame Elliott and friend? I’ll call up to Monsieur Straka so he knows you’re coming.”

  “We’re not expected.”