A French Country Murder

by Peter Steiner

  “See for yourself,” said Milton, leaning back in his chair.

  Louis opened the folder and found a small stack of typed, unsigned notes, each one clipped to the envelope it had arrived in. The envelopes had been slit open at the top. The notes were on the same ordinary paper, but they had obviously been typed on several different machines. Like the notes, the envelopes were all without any return address or other indication as to the identity of the sender. They were filed in reverse chronological order. The notes had been dated, but not by year, so Milton had carefully added the year in the top right-hand corner of each note. Each note was addressed simply to “Milton.”

  July 25

  MILTON:

  A secret meeting between representatives of revolutionary groups from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia and American intelligence agents took place recently at the Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris.

  April 12

  MILTON:

  On August 13, 1993, an executive assistant in the attorney general’s office signed a receipt for three boxes of documents from the office of the deceased presidential special assistant Vincent Foster. These three boxes, whose existence has never been made public, contain, among other things, papers with then Governor and Mrs. Clinton’s signatures granting tax waivers in exchange for forgiveness of certain loans.

  February 1

  MILTON:

  Papers in the possession of the CIA Office of Middle Eastern Affairs make it clear that a small task force under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North met with conservative elements from the Iranian government at the Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris. The meeting was witnessed by two CIA agents who have documents signed by the participants locating them at Charles DeGaulle Airport.

  “These memos?” asked Louis.

  “Are from Hugh Bowes,” said Milton, taking the folder back. “He has been sending me information for years.”

  “You’re certain they’re from him.”

  “He calls to make certain I’ve received them.”

  “He calls in person?”

  “He calls in person.”

  “And otherwise?”

  “Otherwise? We never meet or talk, if that is what you mean. He is extremely careful, extremely discreet. As I always advise him to be. His enemies, and mine, are experts at disinformation. They plant lies, vicious rumors, stories, disinformation. I’m only telling you this, Louis,” said Milton, leaning forward, suddenly taking Louis’s hand gently in both his hands, as though Louis might have been a distraught lover, or a child in need of comfort. Milton’s hands were soft and warm. “I’m only telling you this, Louis, because I trust you.” Louis wondered why Milton trusted him.

  “And his protection of you, Milton? How can you be so sure?”

  Milton smiled and spread his arms at his sides. He looked from one side to the other and said: “Here I am. I’m still here. I’m still working.”

  “The top memorandum in the file mentions a meeting,” Louis said, then thought again. “What do you do with the information Hugh Bowes sends you? Is it useful?”

  “It is often very useful,” said Milton. All the strain had gone from his voice. “Not always, but often. The top memo, for instance, the one you mentioned about the North African meeting? That one? An American CIA agent—I don’t know his name—seems to have turned up missing. There may be a connection.” Milton rubbed his hands enthusiastically and smiled at Louis.

  “It is all about building cases, Louis. Putting things together. Very often Hugh Bowes’s memos don’t so much give me information as they point me in a direction. I’ve found that if I follow the lead, I can often find what I need in public documents or from other sources, and a case starts to build itself.”

  “Why Charles DeGaulle Airport?” asked Louis. “Why does so much go on at Charles DeGaulle Airport?”

  “Well,” said Milton, rubbing his hands again, “airports are busy places, but with very few regular visitors. They’re easy to get in and out of without leaving tracks. And so many places in the world are within eight hours of DeGaulle. You can claim you were far away and witnesses can place you where you claim to have been. Assassins like to work in airports for those reasons. You’re in—pop!—then you’re out.”

  “What rumors?” asked Louis. Milton looked puzzled. “You said Hugh Bowes’s enemies, and yours, plant rumors,” said Louis. “What kind of rumors do they plant?”

  “Vicious rumors. The most vicious rumors, Louis. You can imagine what it’s like. But, then maybe you can’t. You’ve never lost a wife.”

  “Rumors about Ruth Chasen?”

  Milton looked up sharply. “I can’t say any more, Louis.” Then: “I don’t know what you’ve heard, Louis, or how. But don’t let yourself be fooled. And don’t let yourself be used, Louis. Don’t let yourself be used for destructive purposes. I can’t say any more.” And he was silent.

  Louis thought for a long moment. “Milton, the rumor I heard about Hugh goes beyond imagination. I’m telling you as my friend . . . and as Hugh’s friend.” Louis paused. Milton did not try to stop him from continuing. “The rumor I heard is that Ruth Chasen did not die at home. It is that on July twenty-fifth she and her lover, a CIA agent, a black man, were killed together; that Hugh, on discovering her infidelity, had both their throats slit. He is supposed to have had it done at Charles DeGaulle Airport.” Milton’s face was without expression. He was listening, so Louis continued. “The rumor has it that the lover’s body was disposed of in one place and that Ruth Chasen’s body was disposed of somewhere else so they could not be connected, and that the reports of her death by stroke were inserted into the record by Hugh Bowes.”

  The room was silent. You could hear the roar of rush-hour traffic passing outside the apartment, a steady stream of cars in both directions, taking their drivers and passengers home to supper, to families, to lovers, to ordinary lives. “I am telling you this as your friend,” said Louis again, “and because you are Hugh Bowes’s friend.”

  Milton looked across the table at Louis. Now there was a slight smile on Milton’s face. He looked to be far away in his thoughts. Then he suddenly roused himself and, looking quickly around the room as though someone else might have been there to listen, he said, “I have heard something of the kind, Louis, with somewhat different details. I have heard it in bits and pieces. Your version is worse than what I heard, though not by much. Hugh Bowes’s enemies will stop at nothing to destroy him.” Will stop at nothing. The words sounded as though they were not Milton’s own words, as though they might have arrived in an unsigned memo. “Don’t allow yourself to be used, Louis. You have been away for a long time. It is a much rougher game now than it was back then.”

  Louis had not expected that his improvised rumor would be confirmed in any way. He had combined what he knew, which was very little, with what he imagined or suspected, which was a great deal, and had inadvertently hit the bull’s-eye. Nor had he expected that his rumor’s confirmation by Milton would lead him to feel the intense sorrow that flooded over him now. Solesme’s figure passed through his mind, and he tried not to think of the danger she was in because of him. But the fear remained, like an ache behind his throat.

  Milton once again went to the file drawers. The file he now placed in front of Louis was marked RUTH CHASEN, DEATH. It contained photocopies of the following documents: the police report of the emergency call made from the Chasen house at 9:16 on the evening of July 25; the report of the emergency rescue effort begun at the Chasen house that same evening at 9:28, signed with a flourish by Sergeant Phil Reed; the death certificate issued by the coroner at Walter Reed Hospital citing the cause of death as massive cerebral hemorrhage and the time of death as approximately 9:00; and the burial certificate from the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Westhampton, New York, dated July 26. “The family was eager that she be buried quickly, to spare the mother any unnecessary grief,” said Milton.

  What family? Louis wondered. And, he wondered, aside from the obvious ex
planations about Milton’s penchant for assembling proof of every event whose circumstances were in any way doubtful or suspicious, why did Milton have a file documenting Ruth Chasen’s death so soon after the event? And how had he obtained the police and rescue reports? The Walter Reed coroner’s report? Louis did not ask.

  Louis looked at Milton across the table. Sweet, deluded Milton. If he had, in fact, sent the anonymous memoranda and documents, Hugh Bowes was pointing Milton’s nose around the compass at will, and Milton gratefully cooperated by wandering off in the direction he was pointed, happily finding his way into some tangled and utterly harmless conspiracy. Meanwhile, he looked on Hugh Bowes, possibly the one evil person in his entire world, with unfettered and blind admiration.

  The next morning when Louis telephoned the Chevy Chase Fire and Rescue unit which, according to the report in Milton’s file, had responded to the emergency call at 9:16 that evening, Louis was not particularly surprised to be told that Sergeant Phil Reed had left the service, and no one knew where he had gone.

  XIX

  MILTON HAMSHER HAD EQUIPPED HIMSELF TO DISCOVER CONspiracies—governmental conspiracies, international conspiracies, military conspiracies. But, like most of us, he was ill equipped to face the abyss—the mystery, where every answer you arrive at uncovers larger, even more unsettling questions, where there is no solution to be found, where order is an illusion, a thin layer cast over the writhing turmoil to disguise it, to hide it from our own eyes, to make it seem as though it could somehow support our weight.

  Conspiracies are comforting. They offer solace and protection. Conspiracy implies forces at work which can be sorted out and dealt with. It implies puzzles to solve, questions which can be answered, difficulties one can eventually lay to rest. Conspiracies are tangled enough to seem lifelike, but not so tangled that they will not eventually yield to steady scrutiny and work. If there is a conspiracy, then there are reasons and motives and explanations which to the patient investigator will ultimately make logical sense.

  Conspiracy implies solutions. But who of us can truly bear to look at the bedlam that is life? Life, where human behavior is an unsolvable riddle, where enigma is the rule, where there is no final meaning. To look at that bedlam for long would be like staring into the sun. The heat and the light of it would scar our eyes and make us blind.

  “The sordid world.” The words sounded almost quaint to Louis now. They were, he realized, a phrase he had used in the same way Milton used his conspiracies. It had helped him keep his intuitive and truer understanding of life’s utter chaos from himself. Louis thought of Solesme, lost, doomed for all he knew, and far beyond his meager reach. Then he thought of his children, and then, in almost the same moment, he desired their company—one or the other or both of them—with such unfamiliar and fervent intensity, that he called them both from the first phone he found after leaving Milton’s apartment building.

  Jennifer was not there. He did not leave a message on her machine. At Michael’s number, a young woman answered. She called to Michael, “It’s your father.” And then again more insistently: “Michael, it’s your father.”

  “Where are you?” asked Michael when he finally came to the phone.

  “I am in Arlington,” said Louis, regretting that he hadn’t told either Michael or Jennifer that he was coming. In fact, at that moment he regretted everything. “I need to see you,” he said. He was startled that he had said it. He was more startled still that it was true. The cab driver, a Sikh with a turban, a splendid gray beard, and a wide mustache, found the address with some difficulty. Michael was waiting on the front steps of the building. Despite trying to look alternately stern and worried, he smiled as he stood to greet Louis. He looked taller and stronger than Louis remembered.

  Louis held out his hand. But instead of taking it, Michael embraced him. It was an awkward and ungainly embrace. However, when Louis considered it later, when he thought about the time and distance Michael had sought to bridge with that embrace, it seemed to him a brave and exceedingly generous gesture, especially from a son to his persistently absent father. It was the best thing anyone could have given Louis at that moment. It was also the best moment of their visit. Their conversation soon lapsed into awkward and uneasy phrases, which were meant more to help the time pass than to bring them closer.

  Louis explained that business had brought him to Washington. He was leaving in a few days. Michael introduced Rosita, a dark, round-faced girl with small, dark eyes and a quick, cheerful smile which, for some reason, Louis found irritating.

  Louis tried to talk with Michael about art. He told Michael about his own painting, how he had never meant to be a painter, but how where he now lived everything looked like a painting, so that, at some point fairly early in his life there, painting came to feel like a natural and necessary thing to do. It was almost a way of orienting himself to his surroundings. He did landscapes and still lifes and an occasional portrait because he lacked the imagination to do anything else. He regarded this lack of imagination as a blessing. It spared him the delusion that he might have anything important or even useful to say in his art. Perhaps there were new things to be said in painting, though he doubted it. However, history suggested he was wrong. In any case, he was fairly certain that he had no answers, no wisdom to impart. “There are already too many answers in the world. The best I can hope for in my paintings is to maybe formulate a good question.” That had come out sounding pompous and dogmatic, and Louis immediately regretted having said it.

  Louis asked Michael about his art, but Michael was cagey and uncomfortable with his father’s questions and said little. “Would you show me some of your drawings?” said Louis.

  “They’re all around you,” said Michael, folding his arms in front of him, annoyed that his father had failed to notice them on the walls.

  “Will you tell me about them?” said Louis, and stood to examine them.

  “They’re self-explanatory,” said Michael, and then added, “they’re about surface and texture.” Louis took his time looking. He stepped from one drawing to the next, leaning over the couch where Michael and Rosita sat uncomfortably. He found the drawings tight and overdrawn, just as Sarah had said they were. Michael had the same problem he had, pushing something too far, not letting go of it soon enough. But he was surprised that Michael could draw at all. “They’re beautiful, Michael. You draw really well.”

  “You sound surprised. My gallery has the best ones.”

  “Where is your gallery?”

  “Not far from here. Ten minutes. In Tacoma Park. It’s called the Easel Gallery. It’s co-op. I may have a show. Next spring. I’ll send you an announcement.” Michael looked at Louis, then at his own hands, then at Louis again. Rosita held his arm and smiled.

  “Send me an announcement,” said Louis. The telephone rang. Rosita answered.

  “It’s for you, Mister Morgon,” she said.

  “Hello, Louis,” said Hugh Bowes. “How nice to talk to you after so many years. I received a message that you wanted to see me, and I certainly would enjoy seeing you. Can we meet tomorrow evening for supper, at seven? That’s not too early for you after all these years of late dinners in France?

  “Where are you staying? In Arlington? There’s a steak house on Wilson Boulevard, just by the Virginia Square Metro station. Bennie’s. Was it there when you lived here? I don’t think so. I’ll see you at seven, then. I’m looking forward to it.”

  Louis hung up the phone. He fought to regain his composure. “I hope you don’t mind, Michael, my getting a call here.”

  “No big deal, Dad. Who was it? What kind of business brings you back here?”

  “It’s not very interesting, Michael. I’ll tell you about it someday, when it’s over. Right now I’m happy to see you, to get to meet Rosita.” She smiled at Louis. “And to see your drawings. I’m glad that you’re an artist.”

  “When it’s over? What are you talking about, Dad? Are you sick or something? Are you here see
ing a doctor or something?”

  “I promise you it’s nothing like that. It’s just not something I can tell you about right now. Do I look sick?” The three of them laughed uneasily.

  Jennifer had a similar reaction when Louis reached her the next morning. “Dad, are you sick? Did you come back to see a specialist?”

  “I know it sounded urgent, Jenny,” he said apologetically as they were having lunch in her apartment. The sun shone on them through the big kitchen window as they ate tuna salad sandwiches Jennifer had made. Louis was able to imagine for a moment that they were sitting together at his old metal table looking out over the sunflowers. “I’m sorry I made it sound so urgent. In a way it was urgent that I see you, but not because I’m sick or anything like that. I promise you I’m not sick.” Jennifer stiffened her back and looked down uncomfortably. She, too, was taller than he remembered, but nothing like he had imagined her. She was thin. Her blond hair was pulled back loosely. She wore a flowered dress. She was pretty.

  “I’m glad to see you too, Daddy,” she said in a tone that suggested more reluctance than gladness.

  “Tell me a little about your work, Jenny,” said Louis.

  “Well, you know what I do, don’t you, Daddy?” she said.

  “No, Jenny, I don’t really. I know that you work on the Hill, but. . .”

  “I’m an aide to a congressman, the agriculture committee chairman, so I do some research, some word processing—typing—some public and press relations. I get to travel a little, but it’s mostly to the Midwest. Not to France. It’s pretty interesting really. I’m sure I wrote you all this. Only I’m thinking of going back to school.”

  “What do you want to study?”

  “Promise you won’t laugh. I think I want to be a nurse.”

  “I think that’s wonderful, Jenny.” Seeing her uncertainty, he added, “I really do. I think that’s wonderful.”