Hot Ticket

by Janice Weber

  Ah, what might have been. I would never fill in the final date on Fausto’s grave: he wasn’t dead yet. Just frozen. Tucked a few bills into Hiram’s crusty pocket. “Keep the grass cut for me, would you?”

  We walked back to the chapel. The dogwoods surrounding it had already lost their leaves. The heaps of garbage had disappeared. “Trucks came by the other day,” Hiram explained. “Some lady senator startin’ a committee to put everythin’ back in its proper place.”

  Don’t stop righting those headstones, Hiram: your patron saint quit this morning. Then he said, “I told them to start with the chapel. I know for a fact there’s an antique piano in the basement. Seen it goin’ in with my own eyes just a few weeks ago, before they board the place up. What a waste.”

  Beyond the hedges, an ambulance wailed toward the hospital, a police cruiser flashed toward the jail. I bade Hiram good night and left the neglected dead. Back to noise, color, mischief: dear life. Traffic crawled past the Jefferson Memorial as if it had been unveiled only yesterday. Got even slower as I neared the airport.

  Flag outside the terminal at half-mast. I doubted that was in honor of Vicky Chickering so I joined the somber huddle beneath the nearest television. Jojo Bailey was dead. His heart had finally gotten tired of giving blood and never getting any of it back. I stood through long, reverent footage of his life from Boy Scout to vice president: compared with Jojo, George Washington was just a hack. Tonight, anyway. Next week at this time, Bailey would be just another obstacle for the graveyard lawn mower. The news anchors were already getting tired of acting personally bereaved for an ineffective drunk, especially when there was so much more exciting and unexpected news, like Vicky Chickering’s tragic accident, Senator Perle’s resignation, and, this just in, Justine Cortot’s fall from her Georgetown balcony. She was not expected to live. What a hellish week for the Marvels! No one had seen Paula since yesterday but her doctors, the official ones anyway, reported her to be resting well. As for Bobby, the day had taken its toll. When he’d made his first announcement that morning following Aurilla’s resignation, he’d looked numb. Early that afternoon when he’d made his second announcement about Jojo, he’d looked worse. But when he made the last announcement moments ago about Justine Cortot, I felt for him. He had lost his bedrock … join the crowd, sugar. Sorry I couldn’t be there for you tonight. Soon as Bobby could handle it, Maxine would let him know what had really happened. He’d calm down once he realized what a favor I had done for him.

  As I walked to the gate, the wayside televisions puzzled over Justine’s mysterious fall. She had been under impossible stress lately and had perhaps developed a dependency on alcohol and chemical relaxants. Flash to a psychologist explaining what normal Americans could do about job-related stress besides topple off balconies. Nice move, Cecil: a man had to protect his investment and Justine had definitely crossed the line from slingshot to loose cannon. Poor Duncan.

  I called Maxine. “I found Barnard.” Told her where to look and who was responsible then, time being short, boarded my flight with a load of Germans who had more interest in the booze cart than the sorrows of young Amerika. I didn’t look out the window as the plane lifted over the Potomac, a dark thread through a city of splendorous, unnatural light.

  Chapter Sixteen

  cURTIS PICKED ME UP at the airport in Berlin. Hadn’t seen his calm, black face in aeons. I had missed him. He stared for just a second at my swollen jaw, then my eyes: damage assessment. I could have looked worse, all things considered. At least this time I wasn’t returning from the field with two dead lovers and a pack of reporters on my tail. For that, I got a long, strong hug. “Good flight?” he asked, taking the violin. “Where’s Duncan?”

  “Stuck in Cleveland. He should be back tomorrow.” In fifty pieces.

  Beautiful autumn morning, just nippy enough to warrant fur collars and felt hats. Curtis looked superb in both. As we walked to the car, my manager told me where and with whom I was supposed to be playing in the next few weeks. All orchestra dates, thank God: I wouldn’t be needing an accompanist. Neither Duncan nor I was ready for that yet.

  Pulling out of the parking lot, Curtis noticed the rock on my left hand. “Souvenir of Washington?”

  It wasn’t a trophy. “From Fausto. He drowned in Belize four days ago. No one knows yet.”

  “Sorry.” Curtis wedged the M6 into heavy traffic on the ring road. Instead of conversing, we listened to the radio: even the Germans were trying to figure out why Aurilla Perle had left Washington hours before Jojo finally ceded his job to her. Family reasons? Very few correspondents even knew she had a daughter. Ah well, after the cold war fizzled, no European could figure out American politics. Its only recent constant seemed to be Bobby Marvel’s libido. Rumor was he had been wandering again, with a much younger woman. “Tired?” Curtis asked, shutting off the radio before we might hear my name mentioned.

  “No. Maxine around?”

  “She just left. Back in a day or two.”

  I inhaled Berlin. It was so much … older than Washington. More compact, razed more often: rodents here foraged closer to the ground. Dahlem looked like Fausto’s neighborhood but not as hilly and my neighbors never threw breakfast parties. Shut my eyes as Curtis parked the M6 next to my Harley in the garage. Home. That’s where I had wanted to be. Now that I was here, I wasn’t so sure.

  He brought my things upstairs and left me alone to pull out the computer and send Maxine a travelogue. When I came down again, he was in the kitchen making apple strudel: my appetite would eventually return. I sat at the table watching his thick, expert fingers at work. They were like Fausto’s but a different color. A few people from the papers called, asking if I had been in Washington recently. Curtis would only tell them I had played a concert at the White House then had moved on to New York and no, I had nothing to say about either occasion. I opened mail, practiced, napped, waited: Duncan came barreling in that evening as we were eating supper. I had never seen him look this bad, not even after his comeback recital bombed last spring. If he had bathed recently, it had been in sour milk. He wore a strange outfit that seemed to come half from Justine, half from his mother. “Have you been listening to the news?” he screeched, plopping into a chair.

  “Sure. They’re expecting riots during the Oktoberfest.”

  “American news, you horse! Justine’s in a coma!” He collapsed over a placemat. “ It’s my fault! I should have taken her back to Berlin!”

  I put an arm around his quivering shoulders. “She had a lot of problems that Berlin wouldn’t have solved.”

  “Oh shut up! You never liked her!” He thunked the tabletop with his cast. “I don’t believe for one minute she fell. We had too much to look forward to!”

  “She was spaced-out, Duncan.”

  “No! The pager did it! She was terrified of the pager!”

  I tried to look mystified. “You mean that guy who called her at six in the morning?”

  “He called her all the time! She was supposed to be keeping an eye on him. A secret witness or something. Justine said he was extremely dangerous and all hell would break loose if anyone knew about him. She was a total wreck. We had an awful time in Cleveland. Shit! I knew this would happen!”

  “Did she tell you his name? What she was doing with him?”

  “No. It was for my own protection. I’m going to find out who he is. Then we’ll see who falls off whose balcony.”

  I sighed: another half-assed Lancelot. “I’d be careful, Duncan. You’re going to need proof first.”

  “I’ve got proof. That morning Justine rushed out of my house to get back to Washington, she dropped her diary. My mother found it wedged in the car seat. She’s sending it to me Express Mail.”

  Curtis slid a dish of strudel in front of the distraught lover. “I’d take a few days to calm down before doing anything rash.”

  “You don’t understand! Justine was all I had! Someone’s going to pay for that!”

  Correct, Duncan
: you were. I filled my dry mouth with apples. “When’s your cast coming off?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You two can get back to work, then,” Curtis said cheerfully.

  “How can you be so obtuse? Can’t you see I’m in mourning?”

  “Get a grip, Duncan. Justine’s not even dead yet.”

  My accompanist raged out, slamming many doors. After a moment, Curtis slid Duncan’s untouched strudel onto his own plate and began eating it. “Is that diary trouble?”

  “Depends on what she wrote. I can’t imagine it’s going to be a model of clarity.” The grandfather clock in the hall struck eight. If Maxine had flown right to Washington after I called her yesterday, she could have hauled that piano out of the chapel in the cemetery by now. She could have had a chat with Wallace and maybe Bobby and be on her way back to Berlin. I wondered if she’d get back in time to intercept that Express Mail package or whether I should start thinking about blowing up the post office: if nothing else, Agent Smith was a thorough girl.

  Helped Curtis with the dishes then practiced violin a few hours. The phone rang four times but my housemate wasn’t putting any calls through. After the fifth, he came to the music room. “Maxine’s on her way.”

  Already? I didn’t know whether that was good news. “How’d she sound?”

  “Normal.” Curtis delicately cleared his throat. “President Marvel phoned a while ago. I told him you were asleep.”

  Queen’s orders, of course. “How’d he sound?”

  “Wouldn’t know. I’m not as familiar with the man as you are.”

  Ah Curtis, still protecting me after all these years. He would be crushed to know I had married someone else, however briefly. “Bobby was part of the job,” I said, putting away my violin. “The job’s over.”

  I was polishing the chrome on my Harley when I felt the air change in the garage. No forewarning footsteps, no scents, just a dip of the antennae followed by a whap of adrenaline: I was in the jungle again, running for my life. Looked up. “Hey.”

  Maxine straddled my narrow workbench. “Thanks for finding her.”

  I had only provided directions. Didn’t have the stomach for lifting the lid: even Barnard wouldn’t have looked good after three weeks in a piano. “If it’s any consolation, Chickering almost got me, too. I should have figured it out sooner.”

  “You were concentrating on Louis,” Maxine said diplomatically. “He’s back in Belize, I take it.”

  Saw green, felt tons of water crash on my chest. Kept buffing chrome. “Working on Tuna’s poison. He was also working on a cure for Fausto’s seizures. That’s why the two of them needed him out of jail and back in the saddle.”

  “They went to a hell of a lot of trouble to do it. The sheer gall of impersonating a president does impress me, though. I suppose that was Fausto’s style.”

  Why play Chopsticks if you could hack Clair de lunel “You’d have to be a philosopher to appreciate it.”

  “Who would have thought Louis and Fausto were just your starting point?” Maxine handed me a fresh chamois cloth. “This job needed a traffic controller. So many 747s going for the same landing strip. But that’s Washington.”

  I buffed the rear fender until it felt hot. “Bendix and Aurilla almost got away with it. I would never have figured out the mosquitoes if they hadn’t dragged Gretchen to that dengue ward in Belize. They probably couldn’t find a baby-sitter.”

  “I had a chat with Wallace,” the Queen said. “She confessed that she and Chickering moved the piano out of Watergate to the cemetery. On Paula’s orders.”

  “Someone’s got to protect that buffoon of a president.”

  “Wallace and Chickering were old friends. Aurilla knew that when she hired Wallace. She probably thought she’d be getting a direct feed to the First Lady. Never considered that Wallace might be spying in the opposite direction. Which brings us to our next pair of misfits.” A short pause. “Did you really have to off Chickering?”

  “Pardon me. I was paralyzed, if you recall.” Checked the Harley’s rearview mirrors. “Rhoby did the dastardly deed.”

  “After you egged the old girl into a fight. You could have walked out without a scratch.”

  “Look, you told me to find out who killed Barnard. Did you really expect me to stop there? These cocky Rasputins think they can get away with everything all the time. If it weren’t for me, they would have.”

  “What can I say? Bravo.”

  At least I hadn’t killed anyone on purpose. I just had a special gift for handing the knife to the lunatic with a better grasp of black and white. So was I evil? Couldn’t answer that without a philosopher. “No doubt you visited Bobby. How’d he take your horror story?”

  “He was stunned, to put it mildly. He had no idea Aurilla was about to screw him. Or that you had no intention of doing so. He wasn’t pleased about the double.” Maxine sighed. “Which takes us back to Fausto. Bobby wants his head.”

  “He ain’t gonna get it.” I swung a leg over the leather pillion. “Fausto’s dead.”

  “Accident?”

  “He didn’t get back to Belize in time for Louis to make enough fresh medicine. It was a long shot in any case. He was terminally ill when we met.” I snapped on my helmet. “Duncan’s back in Berlin. I wouldn’t call him refreshed from his road trip. He thinks Cecil pushed Justine off her balcony. He’s probably right.”

  “Duncan knows about Cecil?”

  “Not completely. But he might after reading Justine’s diary. His mother’s sending it from Cleveland. Apparently Justine left it behind in her rush to get back to Bobby.”

  Maxine considered the implications. “Duncan’s a big boy,” she said finally. “Let him read it first. Are you aware that Bobby’s coming to Berlin in a few weeks?”

  “What for?”

  “NATO meeting. He likes to look military before elections. You’re going to see him. Says he’s got a few questions for your ears only.” The bench creaked as she slowly left it. Without comment she watched me zip on a black leather jacket. She was probably trying to figure out how, out of seven brilliant and ruthless agents, I could be the only one left. “Did you really marry Fausto?”

  “Yes. Any more questions?”

  “None that you could answer.” Maxine stepped aside as I gunned the Harley into the night.

  For a few days, the newspapers went mad. I was reading a hilariously mendacious interview with ex-senator, mother-redux Perle at her new residence in Switzerland when Duncan shuffled in. He looked awful.

  “Hey, your cast’s off.”

  Only a dispirited grunt in reply. I brought him to the kitchen, where Curtis was making Wiener schnitzel. “Look who’s just in time for lunch.”

  “What can I get you, Duncan?” Curtis asked, wiping his hands on his apron.

  “Beer and a switchblade,” Duncan moaned, drooping into a chair. He drank half the beer in one go. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life.”

  Curtis brought a pile of noodles to the table. “Eat. You’ll feel better.”

  Duncan obliged, but his mood did not improve. My manager and I kept up the small talk until the third bottle of beer. “Say, did you get Justine’s diary?” I finally asked. A dismal nod. “Read anything about the pager?”

  Duncan burped. “Nope. All she wrote about was Bobby Marvel. She was obsessed with him. They were going to ditch Paula the second he left the White House. Move back to a farm, raise tobacco, ride horses, all that crap. Of course he was the stud of her life. This wasn’t a diary. It was a porno fantasy.”

  “You mean you didn’t even get mentioned?”

  “A few times. I was Doofus Dunko. My mother was Ma Blimp.”

  “What a bitch! After all that dancing.”

  “I should have listened to you. She was beginning to hallucinate at the end. Imagined she was screwing two Bobbys at once. Sick.”

  “One way of dealing with pressure,” Curtis said. “Poor girl. I understand she had a substance abuse
problem.”

  “She had a Bobby problem! Mentioned you a few times, Les.”

  “Highly complimentary, I’m sure.”

  “Different ways she’d like to kill you for turning Bobby’s head. I had no idea Justine had such a violent imagination. She wasn’t too fond of Fausto, either. He’s lucky she didn’t gas him.” Duncan reached for another mound of noodles. “I wish I had never read the thing. At least I would have been left with my delusions of grandeur.”

  “Can’t win ’em all, Duncan. You’ll meet someone else.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said softly. “Not like her.”

  “So what are you going to do with the diary?” I asked.

  Duncan tossed a small notebook on the table. “Burn it for me, would you, Curt?” He flexed his wrists. “Maybe we could read through some Brahms. See how far out of shape I am.”

  My pianist followed me to the music room.

  I played a dozen concerts. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Jojo Bailey got a huge funeral. Chickering’s was barely covered, Fausto’s never even mentioned. After lying in a coma for weeks, Justine opened her eyes and moaned, “Bobby.” He picked a new vice president, this one a vegetarian senator who had recently married an Asian heiress. They’d look great in Jojo’s mansion. Meanwhile, a Middle East arms dealer dropped dead in Jerusalem right in the middle of a manicure. No one could figure out what had happened to him.

  Maxine called. “Looks like Louis finally earned his five million bucks. He’s back in Richmond, at any rate.”

  Two days later she called again. “Bendix Kaar was found dead this morning. Doctors think he had a heart attack. The cleaning lady found him slumped over his desk.” The Queen chuckled. “He had been composing a two-part invention.”

  Nice going, Louis: a few more hits and that poison might win you the Nobel Peace Prize. “Maybe he died happy,” I said. “Poor bastard.”

  I phoned the café in San Ignacio and said I’d call every day at this time until I got through to Ek. Eventually he was there. “I hear Louis went back to the States,” I said. “What are you doing for the winter?”