Dark Eyes

by William Richter

  Jason had called the apartment dozens of times, but Wally had ignored the messages. He had also shown up at the apartment building, but Wally had told the doormen to turn him away.

  “It’s up to you, Wally,” Natalie said. “You’re a big girl. But … for all his flaws and transgressions, I do believe Jason cares about you very much. He did let you down, but also remember that Claire’s secrets were kept from Jason as well as you. With no trust in the marriage, the cards were stacked against him. Anyway, as I say, it’s up to you. He wants to come to Claire’s service, but he’ll stay away if you say he’s not welcome.”

  Wally considered this. She wondered if there was still any room in her jaded heart for trust, for faith.

  “Let him come,” she said.

  Natalie could not suppress a hopeful smile.

  “Way to go, Wally.” Natalie gathered her things and stood to go. “I’m going to head out and give you some time.”

  “Thanks. Sorry to be so—”

  “Are you kidding? Wally, I would give anything to be as strong as you are. Truly.”

  Wally nodded her thanks.

  Natalie hovered for a moment, looking anxious, as if debating something in her own head. Wally could see the woman struggling.

  “What is it, Natalie?”

  “I just couldn’t figure out if I should wait on this or what. Your first few days, you were pretty raw. You still are, I know.”

  Wally tensed again. “God, Natalie,” she said. “What next?”

  Natalie pulled out a letter-size envelope and passed it to Wally. For Wally was written on the front, in Claire’s hand. The envelope was sealed.

  “Your mother wrote a new note to you every six months or so and asked me to hold it … you know, just in case. I have the old ones in a file back at my office, if you ever want them.”

  Holding the letter in her hand, Wally almost laughed.

  “The real thing,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” Wally said. “Thanks again for everything. I’ll see you at the service on Saturday?”

  “Of course,” Natalie said. “I’ll see you Saturday, but no doubt we’ll talk on the phone before then.”

  “Thanks again, Natalie.”

  Natalie gathered up her things and showed herself out of the apartment, leaving Wally alone, the envelope from Claire sitting unopened on the coffee table in front of her.

  Wally found Atley Greer at Pier 63 in Chelsea, his left arm in a sling, struggling mightily to wrap a tarp around some sort of boat, a long and sleek craft that barely looked big enough to float a full-size man.

  “What the hell is that thing?”

  “It’s an outrigger canoe,” Atley said. “It’s taken apart right now, but the hull, right there, and the float connect together. Then you’ve got a helluva boat.”

  “This is the end of your season?”

  Atley nodded. “I’ve been so busy chasing miscreants around the city, I never had my last paddle.” He looked out over the water of the Hudson, sparkling in the bright midday sun. The current was slack and the wind gentle. “Damn. Look at that water. Today would have been it, but not with my busted wing.” He held up his broken arm, worthless for paddling as long as the cast was on.

  “Nice water to look at, though.”

  Atley gave her a look and shrugged. “You gonna help me with this, or what?”

  Wally pitched in and the job went much faster. They zipped the canvas tarp around the boat and its elements to make a long narrow package, then carried it together to a boat rack, where they locked it down.

  “I got your invitation for the service on Saturday,” Atley said. “Thank you.”

  “You’ll be there?”

  Atley nodded.

  “I was wondering—”

  “About your brother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Long gone. He left a blood trail that disappeared at the Hatches’ house, and after that … we got nothing. Every local and federal agency on the eastern seaboard is looking for him. Three days and not one sign.”

  Good, Wally thought. She didn’t say it out loud, of course, but Atley caught the look on her face and knew.

  “And my mother. Is anyone trying to put together her story? I guess the details don’t matter much now, but … you know. I’m thinking about her a lot, everything she went through.”

  Atley nodded his understanding. “The FBI is piecing her timeline together. A friend of mine is heading up that side. They’ve got a good handle on her, I think.”

  “All the way back to Russia?”

  “To when she was a kid, yeah. Your grandmother worked in the dean’s office of the Emerson School for over twenty years. Yalena attended the school for free and pretty much grew up with American kids.”

  Wally considered this. “That’s why the good American English. I don’t remember ever hearing an accent in her voice.”

  “Not just the language,” Atley said. “Seems like she learned most everything about American culture. That’s gotta be the main reason the transition to her American identity was possible.”

  “My grandmother … the one who worked at the Emerson School?”

  “I’m sorry. She passed on about ten years ago. We’re not sure how much family you have left back there, if any.”

  Wally nodded stoically.

  “Yalena made her way to New York with Hatch’s help,” Atley went on. “Because of his import business, he had some bent contacts at Customs. She stayed in the Shelter Island house with him before moving off on her own. Claire Stoneman came into being then, with the help of some minor facial surgery to be sure, and Yalena Mayakova disappeared for good. Her first months here—staying at Hatch’s, healing up from the surgery—Yalena used that time to practice her English until she could completely pass.”

  “That’s impressive, I guess. …”

  Atley nodded. “From then on, Yalena’s life reads like a perfect American resume: husband, real estate license, successful career, high-rise apartment on the Upper West Side … and all in record time.” Atley paused for a moment. “You know why, don’t you? Why she did all that?”

  “She was creating a character,” Wally said. “Someone who could return to Russia and bring me back.”

  “Yes. The family friend she left you with, at the orphanage, her name was Irina Ivanova. She made sure you wouldn’t be adopted by anyone else. She actually became the director of the orphanage. Do you remember her?”

  “I don’t know,” Wally said. “Maybe. How did Johanna get involved in all this? She wasn’t Russian.”

  “Apparently, she and your mother formed a strong bond after you moved into that building. Yalena certainly needed someone she could trust, and Johanna obviously became a good friend; she knew all your mother’s secrets and held them close. When Johanna showed up at the Quonset-hut safe house—it seems she did that from time to time as a favor to Yalena, to pick up mail and so forth—Klesko obviously knew she was not Yalena, but she was the only resource he had, and Johanna gave up the information about the Shelter Island caches. It seems like that was their plan all along, Yalena and Johanna: if the worst-case scenario ever happened and Klesko came looking for Yalena, she would lead Klesko to the caches. The first one they’d booby-trapped with a homemade aluminum flash grenade. It sounds kind of harebrained now, but it could have worked if Klesko had come alone.”

  Atley could see Wally struggling with all the information.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sure it’s all too much.”

  “Yeah, it is. But I need to hear it anyway.”

  “Well, there’s something else you need to know.”

  “What?”

  “Klesko …”

  Wally’s pulse quickened at the mention of the name. Tiger’s bullet had barely missed Klesko’s heart, and, against all odds, the bastard had survived. Apparently the cold and snow of Shelter Island had been the deciding factor, preserving the man’s vitals until the medeva
c arrived.

  “You’re not going to tell me he escaped,” Wally said. “I saw the size of the hole in the man’s chest.”

  “Not escaped, exactly. Vanished is more like it. Call it extraordinary rendition, or whatever term the feds are using these days. Klesko knows too much about the international arms trade to let him ever appear in a regular American courtroom. They grabbed him right up. No doubt he’s already overseas in a secret detention facility. I hear the one in Thailand is a favorite these days. But this is not something you should worry about—even if he survives the interrogations, they’ll put him in a hole so dark and deep he’ll be lost to the outside world forever.”

  The idea of Klesko alive and on the mend—no matter how far away or how securely held—was chilling to Wally, and Greer’s assurances meant exactly nothing to her. Alexei Klesko would haunt Wally’s thoughts forever.

  After a few moments of quiet, Wally looked up and was surprised to find Atley smiling at her.

  “What?”

  “You get the prize, Wallis,” Atley said. “You’re about the only person involved in this case who didn’t ask about the goddamn stones. That’s what they usually want to know about first.”

  Wally shrugged. “I don’t care about the stones.”

  “That’s good, ’cause they’re all gone. Have been for almost fifteen years, as close as the feds can figure.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “In the end, Yalena ended up splitting them evenly with Hatch. They both needed money but knew that if they put the stones on the market, they would be traced back to them. Hatch found a dealer in precious stones—a guy in Atlantic City, we think—who agreed to list them by a slightly different description. Turns out there’s a mine in Madagascar that turns out alexandrite with a similar vein of amber. Not exactly the same, but close enough. They gave the guy a twenty-percent discount on their value if he listed them as coming from the Madagascar mine. Your mother was sensible and invested her money well. Hatch wasn’t so smart and, over time, blew most of his money.”

  “So much damage caused …” Wally began to say, but didn’t finish her thought. None of it seemed to matter anymore. She and Atley stood together in silence for a while, their eyes on the Hudson River, flowing by.

  “I like this better, Wally,” he said. “With no fence in between us.”

  “Whatever, Cop,” she said, then gave him a little smile before walking away.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Wally slept. She was out for six or seven hours, feeling disoriented when she woke on the living room couch in the small hours of the morning. Home, she reminded herself as she had the previous three mornings, taking a moment to remember where she was and the wild series of events that had brought her there. She got up and peed and washed her face, then went to the kitchen and started boiling water for coffee. She watched the pot until it boiled and took her coffee into the living room. She sat down on the sofa, where she had slept, and wrapped herself inside her mother’s favorite blanket. Halfway through her coffee, Wally finally reached for the letter from her mother and opened it.

  The letter was dated just a month earlier and could not have been more different than the flowery missive from the Brighton file.

  My Dearest Wally, the letter began. Mostly, these days, I’m just worried and angry. Where are you? Why won’t you come home to me? I know I am to blame for this situation we are in. The lies I told, the truths I held back. The only peace I find comes from this knowledge: whatever mistakes I have made, whatever wounds I have caused, the result of everything—good and bad—is you, my Wally, and I can say without doubt that you are perfect as you are. I have never known anyone as strong or smart or capable of giving love. Do you know that about yourself? I hope you find out before it is too late. What you are doing with your life now is something I cannot condone or understand, but my grief about that does not change my certainty that it is within you to make a difference in this world. Please find a way to share your gifts with people you care about. If you do that, all that has come before will have been a journey worth taking. I am only sorry I will not be there when you reach your destination. I hope there is a heaven, for one reason … so that I can witness what you become. All my love, Yalena.

  Wally read it all the way through, twice, then returned it to the envelope and set it back down on the coffee table. Under any other circumstances, the contents would have brought her to tears, but on that dark November morning they did not. The main reason, Wally knew, was that no emotional outpouring could possibly match the farewell scene in the snow on Shelter Island, where Wally and her mother had been reunited and said goodbye forever, all at once. That experience and the subsequent days of solitary mourning had wrung her out. The grief and the tears would no doubt revisit her in days and weeks and years to come, but for now Wally Stoneman was done crying.

  Wally’s other reaction was to remember the poetic, emotional letter in the Brighton Beach package and wonder where exactly it had come from. Wally tried to imagine ATF Agent Cornell Brown—the man she had known as Panama—sitting down and composing a letter so authentic and emotionally complex, but she simply could not wrap her mind around that possibility. But if Brown himself had not written the note, who had? One of the corrupt hatchet men on his ATF team? Doubtful as well. Wally could not shake her instinctual response to the note: it had been written by a genuinely passionate person who had firsthand experience of loss and grief.

  If this doubt about the Brighton Beach letter were the only issue bothering Wally, she probably could have overlooked it. In the truth, however, she had felt a nagging doubt during the previous few days, and the letter question only added to her anxiety.

  Cornell Brown’s boastful narrative, as he marched Wally and Claire through the woods to the site of the last cache, did not really hold together. If Wally believed his version, he had singlehandedly solved the Yalena Mayakova mystery, right down to the exact orphanage where Wally had been raised and her eventual destination in the United States. From her earlier efforts to unravel her own personal history, Wally knew that that information was heavily protected by privacy laws—in both Russia and the United States—sometimes buried so deep that the answers were lost forever. Even with the government resources available to him, it was highly unlikely that Cornell Brown had suddenly, after fifteen years of fruitless searching, come upon all the answers at once.

  Then who had? Who had the massive resources to unlock the Yalena Mayakova mystery? If someone had helped Cornell Brown with his scheme, it seemed probable that the same person had also composed the deeply affecting Brighton Beach letter. Did Wally know anyone even remotely capable of accomplishing all that? For the next few hours of the morning, Wally remained folded up in the sofa, staring out the apartment window until the first hint of sunrise spread a peach-colored glow to the east. She wondered if there really was someone out there who could explain how and why her life had been torn apart.

  It was just a few minutes after seven that morning that Wally came up with an answer. She had a good idea who had revealed her identity to Cornell Brown, and she thought she knew why. Wally brewed a fresh pot of coffee to help keep her awake and got dressed. The thermometer on the balcony window read twenty-one degrees, so Wally dressed warmly, wrapping up in Claire’s favorite cashmere overcoat. It was still early, so Wally decided to walk across the park. By nine o’clock, she had made it to Lexington Avenue on the Upper East Side, her cheeks pink from her long walk in the cold morning air. She found a coffee shop at the corner of 91st Street that gave her a good view of the building across the street, and she waited.

  At 9:23 that morning, Lewis Jordan finally appeared, walking north on Lexington Avenue. He wore a dark blue overcoat and a wide-brimmed black fedora, his breath fogging in the cold air as he moved up the street with a wariness that was not surprising for an eighty-five-year-old man on an icy morning. As she watched his approach from the window of the coffee shop, it seemed to Wally that there was something less
vital about the man—out in the open air of the city—than when they had first met inside the Ursula Society offices.

  Wally watched Jordan enter the society’s building and then paid her bill with the coffee shop cashier. She exited the shop and jaywalked across Lex, entering the building just two minutes or so after Jordan. She climbed to the third floor and walked down the long hallway to the office door that said THE URSULA SOCIETY, the logo of a bear silhouette underneath. Wally entered without bothering to knock. The office was the same, nice enough but nondescript, with a wooden desk on either side of the room that each held a computer monitor. Wally was confused, for a moment, to find no one in the office, but she soon became aware of noises coming from behind a door, slightly ajar, at the back wall of the room. Within just a few seconds, the door opened all the way and Lewis Jordan emerged, a short stack of file folders in his arms.

  Wally watched the man closely, wanting to mark the exact expression on his face once he saw her. He was startled at first to find someone else in the office with him, but once he recognized Wally, he seemed gladdened.

  “Oh, Wallis! Good to see you. I didn’t realize we—” But Lewis soon cut his cheerful greeting short. He read Wally’s expression and understood that a shift had taken place. His face lost much of what little color it had, and the smile fell away from him.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Tell me what you did, Lewis.”

  Lewis sighed deeply and shuffled over to his desk, setting down the stack of file folders and then sitting down himself. The old, wooden swivel chair creaked loudly beneath him as he reached out and held the edge of his desk, bracing himself. Lewis looked up to meet Wally’s relentless gaze.

  “I made a choice,” he said. “There’s a man, an agent for—”

  “The ATF? Agent Cornell Brown. Tell me what you did, Lewis.”

  Lewis took a deep breath. “Agent Brown is a source of ours. Some years back we helped him locate a nephew, his sister’s child that she had given up for adoption. As a result, he offered himself as a resource for us, in future searches. Two years ago, when you first came in with your situation, I knew that Brown had served in Eastern Europe as part of some sort of criminal task force and might have connections in that part of the world.”