“That’s okay,” I said. “I just wanted to talk about some silly stuff that’s been going on over here in the ambassador’s house.”
“Ooh!” she shouted. Then, in a hushed whisper that still somehow shouted her enthusiasm, “Political gossip!”
“Well, I don’t know how political it is. And, anyway, I know you have to get back to—“
“Why don’t you come to dinner tonight,” she suggested.
“But won’t I be intruding on your family?” I asked.
“What family?” she said. Then, “Oh. You must be thinking of Britta. She’s the one who still lives at home. I’m the one who lives by herself with a dog and three cats.”
“Of course,” I said, as if I’d known all along. “But wait a second—I thought they still lived with your family.”
“They took pity and gave the pets to me, but not the sisters. So, you see,” she said, “you’d be doing me a favor. This way, I won’t have to dine alone. Well, except for the dog and three cats.”
I recalled her saying, on the first night we’d met, that living alone could be too much like living without people.
“Glad I can be of service, then,” I said.
Lars Aquavit offered to drive me, but I’d told him I wanted to walk. The address Gina had given me didn’t look too far away on the map.
But as I trudged through the cold night, hostess gift of a bottle of wine in hand, I regretted my impulsiveness. Who was I trying to be, outdoorsy Bebe Iversdottir?
“Fucking cold Iceland,” I muttered to myself as I trudged. “Can’t somebody do something about this?”
“Your face is so red!” Gina observed, opening the door for me.
“That’s because it’s freezing cold outside!” I said, not wanting to remove my head scarf, not ever.
“It is?” she asked.
“Oh…never mind.”
Sullenly, I relinquished the scarf. She was never going to understand. We were at a cultural divide.
Gina was thrilled when she saw the wine.
“Wonderful!” she said. “We can bind some more!”
“Do you mean bond?”
As she went to open the bottle and get glasses, I took in my surroundings. They were charming, if a little sterile. The living room was painted a green that I instantly free-associated with hospital rooms, and my hand rose involuntarily to my absent tonsils. But that was made up for by the sweetness of the selection of items in the vitrine: tiny glass animals making up their own three-tiered menagerie. Who would have guessed Gina could be so wistfully girlish? On the walls, there were several photographs, all in matching teak frames. I looked at them more closely: everyone in the pictures was blond, not a dark head in sight. I realized they were all members of Gina’s family; not looking just generally like Icelanders, they looked specifically like her. As she reentered the room, I was studying a particular one in which she looked to be about half the age she was now, with two much older women beside her.
“Your aunts?” I asked.
“My sisters,” she laughed, handing me a glass. “Lina is ten years older than me and Nina is twelve years older. My parents always said I was a delayed reaction. What about you, do you have sisters?”
I explained how I’d grown up in a household with my three younger cousins and how I’d never felt like siblings with them.
“Well, you might not be missing much,” she said.
“But I thought you missed them,” I said.
“Oh, I do, but the fighting used to make me crazy.”
“Fighting?”
“Oh, yes. They used to fight like crazy. And not just verbal, but physical, too.”
“They hit you?”
“Oh, never. I was too small. But they were always hitting each other and kicking, still do sometimes. Why, I remember one time, when Lina was breast-feeding her first baby—” she indicated a picture of one of the older girls with a tiny Icelander in her arms “—Nina said something to really piss her off.”
“So what happened?”
She giggled. “Lina pulled out her other breast and sprayed Nina with milk.”
“She didn’t!” I wasn’t sure if I was amused or horrified.
“Oh, yes…” She giggled some more. “Then she sprayed all the clothes in Nina’s wardrobe—the family still laughs about it!”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
“Women,” she said, at last controlling herself. “Put too many of them under one roof, and all hell breaks loose.”
As she spoke, for the first time I saw the three gray kittens curled up as a single mass on the beige sofa. They were girl kittens. I could tell from the way they were licking each other’s genitals as the rather large dog looked on. I didn’t even want to think about it.
“I think I see what you mean,” I said.
She brought out appetizers and then dinner—something vaguely fishy that I longed to decline, but knew etiquette dictated I must eat—and we talked about safe subjects, like deconstructing translations of ancient texts.
I tried to pretend that I didn’t mind the fact that the fish still had its head attached to its body, and I’m fairly certain I failed miserably, but at least Gina didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy getting a buzz off the wine and digging into her own fish head.
“So,” she said, her face taking on an expression of sheer pleasure as she put the first bite of flaky white flesh into her mouth. “You wanted to discuss the new doings in Ambassador Rawlings’s house? You have some good gossip for me?”
I filled her in on everything since the last time I’d seen her: the house party, the advent of Bebe Iversdottir, the dance, the talk, the dream, the nightmare. And how Ambassador Rawlings had now gone off with Bebe to the Westman Islands.
Gina dropped her fork in the fish’s belly.
“But wait a second,” she said, eyes wide, “what about his wife?”
“That’s what I’m wondering, too,” I said. “If there’s a Mrs. Rawlings, and he’s a public figure, how can he just go off with this other woman? Doesn’t he care what people think?”
She looked at me closely, then her eyes widened.
“Oh my God!” she said. “Charlotte!”
“What?” I asked, concerned.
“You are in love with him.”
“What?” I shouted so loud, my uneaten fish jumped on the plate. Hey, wasn’t that thing supposed to be dead?
“You’re out of your tiny Icelandic mind!” I screamed.
“Perhaps,” she laughed, “but not over this. Why else would you be so concerned with Ambassador Rawlings’s private affairs if you weren’t in love with him?”
“I can think of a lot of reasons.”
“Oh?” She crossed her arms. “And they are?”
“I’m concerned about Annette. I’m worried how she’ll take it.”
“From everything you tell me about Annette,” she spoke reasonably, “she is a remarkably well-adjusted and happy child.”
“Okay, then I’m worried about his reputation,” I said.
“His reputation doesn’t appear to be suffering,” she said. “Did you see other people at the party running to get away from him?”
I admitted that I had not.
“Fine,” I finally said. “It’s because I’m an American. We take a prurient interest in these kinds of things.”
“Now, that I believe,” she said.
“See?”
“But I don’t believe for a second that it’s the reason you are so obsessed with his private affairs.”
“‘His private affairs,’” I echoed. “You keep using that phrase. Could you stop saying that?”
“See?” Her “see” was a lot more triumphant than mine had been just a few short seconds ago. “None of this would bother you if you were not yourself in love with him.”
“How about we go back to saying this is because I’m worried about Annette?” I suggested.
“You can view it your way, if you want to—” she smiled k
nowingly “—but please allow me to view it mine.”
“But you don’t understand,” I spoke with some urgency. “If somehow it turns out that Ambassador Rawlings can marry Bebe Iversdottir, it will be the worst thing in the world for Annette.”
“How so?” she asked.
“Because that ice princess wants to send Annette away to Switzerland to boarding school!”
“Oh no!”
“Then you agree that would be awful?”
“Absolutely! No child should be separated from her parents at such a young age.” Then she stopped herself, looked at me more closely. “That’s what happened to you, was it not?”
“It was,” I said.
“And you hated it?”
“Still hate it whenever I think about it.”
“Then you must do whatever it takes to stop this.”
“But how?” I practically whined. “What am I supposed to do? Sure, he told me he wouldn’t send Annette away, yet, but who knows what Bebe might get him to do later? I can’t just tell Ambassador Rawlings what to do. He’d never listen to me—I’m only the governess!”
“Of course that’s true, but you’re getting ahead of yourself. The first thing you need to do,” she counseled, “is find out if there is in fact a Mrs. Rawlings and what the status of their relationship is. If there’s still a Mrs. Rawlings somewhere then it’s entirely possible that whatever Bebe Iversdottir’s nefarious plans concerning Annette are, they will fail.”
“How do you figure?”
“If they are not divorced, maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to be.”
Ouch! That hurt almost as much as thinking of him with Bebe.
“If they are,” Gina went on, “then perhaps the threat of a new woman moving in would be enough incentive for Mrs. Rawlings to take on a larger role in Annette’s life, preventing her from becoming a boarding-school orphan.”
“I think I see what you mean,” I said.
“The important thing,” Gina said, “is to gather as much information as you can, so you know what you’re up against. Once you do that, you’ll be able to stand on a leg.”
“Thanks for the help.”
“Honestly,” she said, looking stunned, “I cannot believe you have forgotten all about Nancy Drew! What do you think she would do in your situation?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “She would gather and assemble all the facts,” she said. “Nancy wouldn’t sit on her thumbs, twiddling them while Rome burned. She wouldn’t let her imagination race helter-skelter all over the place.”
Actually, I seemed to recall Nancy having quite a big imagination. It was what enabled her to take seemingly innocuous events, like a truck rushing by a little too quickly, and extrapolate it into, “Gadzooks! There must be a den of art thieves around here!” Of course, she was always right.
When I pointed this out to Gina, she had a ready answer for this too.
“Yes,” she said, “Nancy does have quite an imagination, but it always takes her places. And once that imagination starts to take off, she immediately starts looking for facts and clues. That is what you must do, too.”
I could see that she was right.
Then she looked at me with real sorrow in her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Charlotte,” she said. “You would undoubtedly be better off if you had not fallen in love with him.”
“I’m not—“
“As you Americans are so fond of saying, bullshit.”
“Hey!”
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot—” she winked “—this is all about Annette.”
The bracing walk back to the embassy should have killed any residual wine buzz, but we’d drunk so much after dinner, arguing all the while—“You are so in love with him!” “I am not in love with him!”—that I still felt pretty intoxicated as I let myself in the door. We’d argued so strenuously, it occurred to me ruefully that it was a good thing Gina wasn’t one of her lactating sisters.
If the bracing walk didn’t kill the wine buzz, the wine buzz should have made me drowsy enough to go right to sleep, but this proved not to be the case. My mind was so unquiet as I moved through the quiet household that I knew I’d have to do something first to tire myself out.
Then I had a brilliant idea. Gina’s advice came back to me and I realized there was no time like the present.
Hey, kids? Want to put on a little drunken detection show?
Feeling like the queen of stealth—“Hee, hee,” I couldn’t help giggling to myself—I removed my boots, tossed my wet outdoor things in the general direction of the coatrack.
I missed.
Oh, well. Who said I needed great aim to find information? I’d only need great aim if I ever needed to hit somebody with something.
Where to start? Where to start?
Imagining myself to be like Steinway, I tiptoed toward the back of the first floor. Ambassador Rawlings’s office seemed like the logical place. Turning the doorknob gently, I was surprised to hear the door squeak.
Shouldn’t an embassy be better oiled than this?
I giggled again, then shushed myself sharply, “Shh!” It was like I was two separate people, conflicted by what I was doing. Take it too lightly, take it too seriously, take it too…
Only after I’d carefully shut the door did I realize how dark it was in here. It was a room I’d rarely entered before, having no business there—“And what business do you have here now, hmm?”—and I stumbled over a chair on my way to where I remembered the desk was.
“Ouch!” I rubbed my shin.
“Be quiet!” I cautioned myself again.
“Okay,” I said. “But you don’t have to be so grouchy about it.”
Achieving the desk, I played my hands around the edges until I felt the outline of a lamp on the far corner. I pulled the cord and the area immediately surrounding the desk was bathed in a romantic illumination.
“Gee,” I said, “if only I had someone to make out with in here, this could be fun.”
When I got to the far side of the desk and looked up, I noticed for the first time the switch on the wall beside the seam of the door I’d just entered. Damn! If I’d thought of that earlier, I could have saved myself from barking my shin.
Nancy Drew would never have missed that, I thought.
I started going over the items on the top of the ambassador’s desk, trying to be careful to leave things just as I’d found them. Not sure exactly what I was looking for, I was sure I would know it when I found it.
There was a part of me that was uncomfortable with what I was doing. Wasn’t it wrong for me to be snooping around in here like this? But then I figured that so long as I confined my investigation to what was already on the desk, it was okay. I mean, if someone keeps something out in plain sight, isn’t it fair game? Feeling more virtuous by the minute, I resolved not to go through any of the drawers, which really would qualify as snooping.
Besides, the drawers were locked and I had no idea where the key was kept. Perhaps it was under Ambassador Rawlings’s pillow? I giggled to myself. After all, Nancy Drew always said that if you needed to keep something safe, you should sleep with it under your pillow. She also always said that if you were trapped in a closet, you should look for something to use as a lever.
I picked up the stapler and contemplated it as an evidentiary device.
When is a stapler really just a stapler? I pondered.
Gee, it felt kind of spooky, being in here all by myself while the rest of the house slept on around me.
And then spooky started to feel like lonely.
I addressed the stapler, “Alas, poor Stapler, I knew him well. He was an office tool of infinite jest—”
What would Nancy Drew look for? I wondered.
She’d look for correspondence, I decided.
There were certainly a lot of papers on the desk. Didn’t this guy ever get anything done in here?
All of the correspondence looked official. Well, I supposed that figured. It was his of
fice. But as I looked at the return addresses, I saw a surprising number of pieces were from the CIA.
That was odd.
But how annoying! All of the letters were unopened. These must just be new items from the day’s post that had arrived after he and Miss Bebe had taken off. I didn’t know what to do. If I were Nancy Drew, I was sure I’d know how to steam these babies right open so that I could take a peek inside. But if I knew nothing else, I knew that no matter how intrepid I ever became, I’d never be enough of a sly boots that I could steam open a letter and reseal it without getting caught. Why, I never even bought clothes that weren’t wash-and-wear, because I sucked with an iron!
Besides, I yawned, placing the letters back, this wasn’t getting me anywhere. What I needed to find was some personal correspondence, something that would help me get a handle on the ambassador’s personal life.
But, wait a second: there wasn’t any personal correspondence here! Wasn’t that kind of odd? I mean, even I got the occasional letter from my father, and Mrs. Fairly got letters from Ireland all the time.
I yawned a second time, replacing everything, including my new best friend, Mr. Stapler, exactly as I’d found it, switching the light off on the way out.
I made my way upstairs in the dark, thinking about turning in. But when I got to the top of the stairs, I caught my second wind.
I hadn’t found anything out yet! What kind of detective was I?
Back to tiptoeing, I stealthed my way to that secret door, the room from which I was sure that strange laughter always came. As I turned the knob, I could have sworn I heard a slight whirring sound coming from inside. But, as always, the door was still locked.
Damn! Where was a hairpin or credit card when a girl needed one?
Then I had a sudden inspiration.
No, I wasn’t going to break into the room. That would constitute criminal behavior, right?
But Ambassador Rawlings’s room was right next door and Ambassador Rawlings was busily away in the Westman Islands. So, how hard would it be to turn the knob on his unlocked door, like so? How hard would it be to sneak around, no matter how incriminating that sounded, hoping to find evidence of the kinds of personal effects I hadn’t found below?
Was there a picture of Mrs. Rawlings anywhere in here? Were there some papers, perhaps, evidence of a divorce in progress or better yet a divorce decree?
How Nancy Drew Saved My Life Page 16
