Castle Danger--Woman on Ice

by Anthony Neil Smith

  I heard a voice, subdued and chattery. Thought I might be walking into an ambush after all. I swiveled my head in all directions, blinded by my damn hood, started choking on my rising dread. Then I spotted a photographer heading towards me on the trail, tripod tucked under his arm, clearly here for shots he could never achieve in the daytime.

  The last stretch of the walkway up to the top was icy, hard to get a grip on, and at least twice I only just avoided a painful fall, the gun digging deeper into my back each time. But there at the summit, as promised, was a familiar figure waiting for me. She wore a long black fur coat but no hood, so her long dark hair was dusted with snow. I wondered how long she’d been here. Looked like a bear coming out of hibernation. But her face? Her face looked like Paul Stanley from KISS.

  So, okay, her. Thinking of the ice, the Falls, my last beating, I stopped a good fifteen feet out. Took another look around.

  “It’s just me,” she said, same voice as on the phone.

  “I hope you understand that I’m a little leery.”

  She smiled. “Trust me. I’m just as afraid as you are.”

  “Somehow I find that hard to believe.”

  “Please.” She beckoned me with a gloved hand. An old Hollywood film-noir move.

  Sigh.

  I climbed the last fifteen feet and had to hold onto my knees to keep from passing out. Chest was tight, breath thin and wheezy. When I was able to stand straight again, I got a better look. She was something, strong featured and yet almost feline. A “handsome woman”, maybe? It worked for her.

  She extended the gloved hand. “Hello, Manny. I’m Paula.”

  I shook. “So, it’s no accident. You know.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “And not your real name.”

  “It’s as real as I am. It’s the only one I answer to anymore.”

  All around us, the sounds of cracking ice, cracking tree limbs. The wind was blowing harder. One glance at the bridge above revealed a stream of snow as if filtered through a jet engine, but down here we were sheltered.

  “Alright,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened. We were told — all of us who knew Hannah — that you might be dangerous. That you might be looking to expose us, or, worse, blackmail us. We knew what was going to happen to you, but we thought … we thought it was the right thing to do.”

  The last few words made me feel as though I’d been kicked all over again. I must’ve flinched, because Paula reached out to me, hand on my shoulder. “Okay?”

  I cleared my throat and rolled my shoulders. She took her hand away. “Fine. You were told wrong. I’m just trying to give a lost soul some peace. I’m trying to understand how no one has pieced it together yet, and why I got my ass kicked for trying to help.”

  Paula’s eyes widened. “You pieced what together?”

  “Hannah,” I said. “She was Hans Marquette, wasn’t she?”

  Clearly, she hadn’t expected that. She was visibly rattled, looked everywhere but at me, tried to shake the snow from her hair but just managed to get it in her eyes, like she was being swarmed by bees. But then she lurched forwards, almost fell into my arms and embraced me, speaking softly into my ear: “Let me tell you a story.”

  As it turns out, I was right about Hans and Hannah. More importantly, though, I hadn’t used the info against any of her “Club”, and when Paula did some digging of her own into my life, the more she discovered, the more she believed I had good intentions.

  She knew I wouldn’t give up on Hannah. But she also knew she needed to be careful, hence the coded message. There were some who never wanted this story to get out. Those people were invested in doing whatever it took to keep what she was about to tell me a secret.

  Paula met Hans at one of his older brother’s campaign events. This was when Andrew was running for his first term as State Representative, and even though his family had tremendous wealth and influence, so did almost everyone else in the race, four of them altogether. Andrew was Republican, and this year the House was leaning Republican again, very unusual for Minnesota, but the force of Andrew’s damn near scientifically magnetic personality promised the sort of political dream campaign no one had seen the likes of since JFK.

  He was … electric. Every word he said — though no doubt practiced and tested to the point of tedium — still sounded authentic, spontaneous, and from-the-heart. An amazing illusion, one that made the party — and even his opponents — feel warm inside. A godsend for the Republicans, one who could win elections because he captured the minds and hearts of morons at both ends of the political spectrum — a conservative, yes, but one who could convince liberals that he truly cared about the rights of gays, lesbians, and transsexuals, and that he supported gay marriage!

  And yet, he was accepted by those with money and power, as they saw him as a real — and rare — chance to bring the parties together. That made him dangerous, but perhaps not “Obama” dangerous. More like … “Bill Clinton” dangerous. Andrew Marquette was a low-down dirty seducer, and when he got you, you liked it.

  He was, at the time, helping the gay marriage bill become law, a step ahead of the Supreme Court decision, and that as a straight man, happily married with two kids, and with no skeletons in the closet. He was also supporting reproductive rights, despite being a strong Episcopalian, and the father of a special needs child who could have been aborted and saved his wife some health troubles, but had decided to bring the boy into the world and do their best. Most marketable, though, was the fact that he was drafting tax policies which made more sense than what Washington was trying to push.

  Paula said, “What do I know about that, right? But I’d heard that once he won this first seat, once he’d gotten his foot in the door, he would begin to make changes for people like me. He wasn’t just looking to make gay marriage legal. He was looking for a level playing field for all of us. So those of us who could afford it drove down to see him in the flesh, see if he gave off that vibe.”

  “And did he?”

  She took in a deep, dreamy breath. “Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. When he shook my hand, it was … a real handshake. It was a moment. He was there, right there, shaking my hand, and nothing else mattered. And the same with the hand before mine and the one after.”

  She was sold, yes she was. It wasn’t that she had money to give him, or that she had any celebrity to trade on, but that she had befriended many political players over the years, men attending that very party who acted as if they’d never seen her before in their lives. She’d met them all because they had wanted to meet her, not as a one-night stand, not as a prostitute, but as a human being. These men, they were as “normal” as any of the other suits-and-ties there that night, but what they asked for in the night, they would deny during the day. Paula understood. She didn’t like it, and she hoped the world would change sooner, rather than later, but she understood.

  “If I was supporting Andrew Marquette, if I believed in him, then they could, too, and they could breathe a little easier about their secrets. If they could never tell their families and friends the truth, at least they were voting for a world where their children and grandchildren wouldn’t care.”

  Then there was Hans. Initially Paula thought he was hitting on her. But it was just a Marquette thing: the charisma was overflowing, and with a couple of whiskies, it felt like love at first sight. Hans was very different from his brother. He had “hardened” at a younger age, it looked like. Same upbringing, same genetics, but Hans already had permanent lines on his face, around his mouth and eyes. Nothing that made him unattractive. “Like, and don’t take this the wrong way, the way Lyle Lovett, god bless him, has that … look, but at the same time is … striking, you know?”

  Hans and Paula got talking, just chit-chat at first, drifting into his love of the outdoors, the North Shore, and Paula’s ability to move in and out of circles of power, known by everyone, invisible to everyone. And right then she kne
w that he understood who she was. He had picked up on it almost immediately. And he had wanted to meet her so much, as he admitted later, through a toothy smile, that he was trapped. His public persona, the bachelor with a different woman on his arm every week, a bit of the ol’ George Clooney Syndrome, the rich guy who worked hard and played harder, all that, just a disguise.

  He’d told Paula, “I guess I’m a tomboy. Because I love it all, the skiing, the climbing, the hiking. I just enjoy it as a woman.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “If a man tells you they want to be a woman, amongst a roomful of people who would love to embarrass the Marquettes for the hell of it, damn right I believe him.”

  They talked well into the night, when on a whim he invited her to his cabin in Castle Danger, situated on the grounds of an exclusive lodge only a couple of miles from the Falls. A four-star hotel at the center of it all, with near-million dollar cabins to rent or, in Hans’ case, own, scattered along the shore. Three in the morning, a drunken two and a half hours in the car, sharing perhaps too much about their lives, not that Paula could or would remember it now, but they eventually made it to the cabin, where Hans showed her his “real” closet. His “real” bathroom. The ones that belonged to “Hannah”.

  He … She dressed up for Paula. She put on her make-up. What she wanted to know, and had been afraid to ask or look into, was … was it real? Was Hannah feeling what Paula and so many others had been feeling for years, hiding it because of course it was crazy, of course it was. The two women somehow stayed awake, curled up on opposite ends of the couch, sobering up together well into the next day. But nothing Paula said could really make Hannah feel safe enough to come out.

  “She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t. Her family, her brother, she really couldn’t. I told her it would be wonderful! Hannah would reveal her true self, and Andrew would support her, and as a politician, of course it would make sense that he would support LGBT rights. No one could say anything bad about a politician who just wanted a normal world for his sister, right?”

  This seemed to me a pretty naïve view of politics, but I let it slide, while Paula pressed on with her story. “And I thought that was all there was to it. A woman trapped in a man’s body, with all the privileges of wealth and power, but afraid to come forward.”

  “Because of his brother?”

  “That’s what I thought at first. But, then, recently … first, see, it was beginning to get better.”

  It wasn’t about sex for Hannah. It began that way for so many trans-women — and I might have been able to relate -, but it was so much more than that, of course it was. Their brain chemistry didn’t match the bodies they were trapped in. Their emotions, their worldviews, their hopes and dreams for the future. Their desire for children, for family. Their fears. The very act of walking out of the house each day was to lie to the world, hour after hour, day after day, on and on for the rest of their lives.

  Hannah didn’t want to dress up as a woman to suck cock and get fucked up the ass. She wanted to be a woman, period. She wanted to center herself and survive the storms that would surely hit her — the loss of her friends, the destruction of her career, and the repercussions for all the other Marquettes, which would no doubt be on a seismic scale.

  But, up on the North Shore, Paula introduced her to more transwomen, never saying a word about the man under the skirt. He didn’t exist on those weekends. And then it became weeknights. Paula took Hannah to the Club, introduced her to men who enjoyed the company of transwomen, some of them familiar faces from Hans’ job in fundraising or his family’s social circle. They had no idea. Hannah could read the relief in their faces at being able to drop the charade of daily life and accept themselves. Marvelous, she told Paula. Marvelous.

  From there, Paula led Hannah into the theater world back in the Twin Cities. So many small troupes performing such extraordinary plays, experiments, breaking new ground, so many new, vibrant, open-minded people. It was going so well! She was so happy! She’d even met a special someone at the Club. She was making so many new friends at the theater.

  “Until, well, something happened. Something she thought would ruin everything she had been working up to. She was conflicted. She didn’t even tell me what it was, but I knew it was big.”

  “Any guesses?”

  Paula nodded. “One. But it’s not fair. I shouldn’t … She left me this.” Paula pulled a set of keys from her coat pocket, one key singled out between her fingers. “The cottage. When she gave these to me, she said it was for safekeeping, while she was away on a trip as Hans. She said I was welcome to use it if I liked, but to at least keep an eye out in case she didn’t come back within a couple of weeks. And then …”

  Paula swallowed hard. Right on the edge. She cleared her throat. “She had told me that if something happened to her … well, she sent this.”

  A letter, folded into quarters. I unfolded and held it close to my face, blinking away the snow. Handwritten, big letters, sloppy. I focused on part of the note: I wasn’t able to put it all into safe hands. I’m sorry. But it’s you now. It’s at the cottage. Don’t let them find it first.

  I looked up. “The cottage?”

  “The envelope was dated one day before they … before you found her. I’ve been to the cottage, but, but, Jesus, I can’t find anything. I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

  “But you have some idea, you have a guess.”

  It was tearing her up. “Damnit, sweetie, please.”

  I stepped closer, whispered, “It’s life or death, you know. One life already lost. And that beating I got, no one pulled any punches. I’m just as scared as you are.”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. It seemed as if the cracking ice was even louder now, the tree branches too, straining under the weight of the snow and the force of the gale.

  “You know the story? About Hans being a donor baby? A collection of spare parts saving Andrew’s life?”

  “Yeah?”

  “But what if Hans wasn’t the only child they … bred for that reason? What if there were other ‘spares’ out there? And what if anyone found out that a god loving republican family, a political dynasty no less, were mass-producing human replacement parts?”

  This whole time, that possibility hadn’t even occurred to me. But the story made sense. Hans was the miracle baby that saved Andrew’s life. He was key to Andrew’s health and a major part of his latest campaign story. Two brothers, so different, and yet so deeply connected.

  “How would … how would it even … I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t either, but the answer is in that cottage, and I need help finding it.”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Let’s go. I’ll follow you.”

  We’d been standing out there for a long time, but I’d been too riveted to Paula’s story to realize how numb my fingers were getting.

  Paula had given me a few more tidbits on the walk from the top of the Falls down to the parking lot. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to see Gooseberry Falls the same way again. No longer would this place be innocent, a spot where I could lose myself in the sound of rushing water and the breeze that came with it. From then on, I’d always wonder what I was missing. Who in my life could I trust? Could I even trust myself?

  And why trust Paula? I still wasn’t quite convinced that this wasn’t an elaborate prank. But if I was good at any particular cop thing, it was reading people at the scene, knowing within a minute or two whether or not they were lying. Thanks to the Sarge for teaching me. And Paula was scared. Paula was cautious. Paula was searching me for answers the same way I was searching her. I was also pretty sure she knew more than she was saying, but needed me to see it with my own eyes.

  In the car, I blew warm breath on my frozen fingers before checking my phone. A few missed texts, from just a minute or two ago, as we’d walked down the trail to our cars. All from Joel. All just a string of question marks.

  I typed in the name of the lodge an
d the cottage number.

  He responded with an exclamation point.

  He’d driven up in his own truck and found a place where he could see us through the scope of his hunting rifle, far enough away not to be noticed. Close enough to make the kill shot if I needed help.

  Okay, so I may have let you think he didn’t have my back, and for a while there, back at his girlfriend’s place, I’ll admit I had my own doubts, but in the end … Like I said: partners regardless.

  I pulled out of the spot and followed Paula’s black Infiniti to Hannah’s cottage, the swirling snow adding another layer of confusion to Paula’s story.

  By the time we pulled up in front of Hannah’s cabin — a particularly cozy way to spend nearly a million bucks -, I still hadn’t received a text buzz from Joel telling me he’d gotten set up again. But I couldn’t wait any longer. We were here, and Paula was already out of her car, waiting for me. Time for a leap of faith.

  I climbed back out into the howl, the melted snow on my face instantly refreezing. Something about that wind, some scary shit. It bit you like piranhas, but sounded like guitar feedback slowed down by a thousand. The cottage was one among several, built to resemble an old Scandinavian village, I supposed. Neat patches of grass, cobblestone walkways twisting between them, even scaled-down lampposts made to look like old gas burners, but obviously electric. Probably LED. In other words, a rich person’s fake authenticity. Which is fine. I couldn’t fault that. Who didn’t enjoy a bit of Disney World every now and then, right? A good fake is a good fake.

  The snow hadn’t piled up high enough to be a worry yet, but we didn’t have long. I had no idea if I could even get back to Duluth that night. We were way past the point of safety here.