Exile Hunter

by Preston Fleming

  On Larry Becker’s return from Bismarck, Linder waited several days before his next visit to the public library to check the refugee message board but found nothing in it from Ruth. Meanwhile, his concerns for Patricia and Caroline mounted with each passing day, as he heard nothing from them or Mrs. Unger. While the landlady had reported the week before that Patricia’s drinking appeared to have abated, possibly with the help from Alcoholics Anonymous, Mrs. Unger’s communications had intimated in no uncertain terms that she would prefer to handle relations with Patricia her own way. Whatever might be brewing between them, Linder knew it would be wise for him to stay away. His job would be to deal with the aftermath.

  Linder’s assessment was confirmed when the landlady left him a voicemail at work to call her. When he did, she told him that Patricia and Caroline had left the bungalow by mutual agreement with her and had moved into a rental cottage not far away, on 100th Street East, near the middle school. Linder knew the house, as he had seen the ‘for rent’ sign in front and recalled Patricia admiring it.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Sharon,” Linder replied with a proper note of sympathy. “I hope it all ended amicably.”

  “Oh, yes, everything turned out for the best,” came the chill reply, which conveyed the exact opposite meaning.

  “Not to pry or anything, but is everyone doing okay?” he inquired gently. If Patricia had moved out, he feared, her drinking was the probable cause and a relapse might well send Patricia into a tailspin.

  “It would seem so,” Mrs. Unger answered with an audible sigh. “Of course, I will miss Caroline terribly. We grew rather close, you know. And her mother isn’t exactly the best example...”

  “And Patricia?” Linder interrupted. “Is she back on her feet?”

  “For the moment, at least,” Mrs. Linder replied. “And that’s not to deny the ordeal that poor woman has been through. I have nothing but sympathy for her.”

  “Yes, of course,” Linder agreed. “And I appreciate your taking them in when they needed a place to stay. But now that they’ve moved out, let me change the subject for a moment. By any chance, you wouldn’t have rented out their rooms just yet, would you?”

  “Not quite yet,” the landlady answered coyly. “Why, do you have a tenant in mind?”

  “I might,” Linder replied. “Unfortunately, Jay’s sofa isn’t doing my back any good, and I do miss your cooking, Sharon.”

  “Very well, then,” she replied with the hint of a smile in her voice. “Come by some afternoon and we’ll talk.”

  * * *

  For the entire next week, after moving back into his old room at the bungalow, Linder could think of nothing else but paying a visit to Patricia and Caroline Kendall at their new home. Not having heard from Patricia since she received the letter from Roger, and not being sure of her state of mind, he mapped out every conceivable permutation of his planned approach to her until he was confident of being able to handle them all. And so, on his next day off, he trailed mother and daughter from the middle school to their cottage before retreating to place a phone call.

  “Hi, Patricia, it’s Tom,” he greeted her. “It’s been a while, so I just thought I’d call to check in.”

  “Well, hello, Tom,” she answered with more warmth than he expected. “It’s lovely to hear your voice.”

  “And yours,” he replied. “Congratulations on finding your new place. Mrs. U gave me the number. Is it the white cottage with the gray shutters on 100 East that you liked so much?”

  “That’s it,” Patricia acknowledged. “We’ll have you over to see it once we’ve finished cleaning the place. Right now it’s in pretty bad shape since the owners left it vacant so long.”

  “I’d be happy to help, if you need a handyman,” he offered. “I’m pretty good at moving furniture. Strong back, weak mind, you know.”

  He heard Caroline’s stage whisper in the background: “Invite him! Invite him!” and Patricia’s muffled “Hush!” in response.

  “Well, actually, that might not be a bad idea,” Patricia proposed. “We’re going to be cleaning all evening, but the owners are bringing over some furniture tomorrow and we might need some help finding room for it after dinner. Might you be free to join us tomorrow evening, say, around seven? I don’t know what we’ll eat yet, but Caroline will think of something, I’m sure.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I could adjust my schedule to fit it in,” he teased.

  “Wear your overalls,” she joked in return.

  Linder appeared promptly at seven the next evening bearing a bouquet of local irises to match his blue coveralls with “Tom H.” embroidered on a patch above the breast pocket. Patricia answered the kitchen door in jeans and a sweatshirt, mop at her side, having just finished swabbing the floor.

  It had been a hot, dry summer day, typical of late June in the Wasatch Mountains, and her face was beaded with perspiration from the work. She held an icy glass of lemonade in her spare hand and offered to pour him one from a pitcher on the kitchen counter. The kitchen was spotless and the kitchen chairs were still stacked upside down on the breakfast table.

  “Let’s move furniture later,” she suggested with a conspiratorial wink. “I’ve done enough work for one day and would like to freshen up. Why don’t you go in and ask Caroline to show you around?”

  “Sounds great,” Linder agreed, and followed Patricia into the spacious but sparsely furnished living room, where Caroline slouched by the empty stone fireplace in an easy chair, listening to a Joan Baez recording from the 1960s.

  “Wow, I think I’m having a déjà vu moment!” Linder declared in a voice loud enough to be heard over the music.

  Caroline lowered the volume and gave him a quizzical look.

  “Déjà vu? Right now?” she asked in disbelief.

  “Did you realize that Joan Baez was your mother’s absolute favorite when she was your age?”

  Aghast at the thought, Caroline stuck out her tongue as if to gag.

  “Where did you find an old CD like that?” Linder inquired.

  “A friend of mine gave it to me,” she answered evasively.

  “Just between you and me, I wouldn’t let that one out of the house,” he advised. “Owning banned music can get you into more trouble than you think.”

  “I don’t care,” she said defensively. “Besides, it’s nobody else’s business what I listen to in private.”

  “It wasn’t when I was your age, but it is now,” he cautioned. “Just be careful, okay? You’ve already seen where they send people who insist on acting as if this were a free country. You don’t want to go back there.”

  Caroline scowled and drew her knees up toward her chest. Then he saw her eyes glisten and felt he might have laid it on too thick.

  “Here, let me play you something I think you’ll like,” he proposed.

  He pulled a plastic compact disc case from a zippered cargo pocket in his overalls and inserted it into the player. Out of the speakers came the hammering piano chords of Jerry Lee Lewis’s rock-and-roll tour de force, “Great Balls of Fire.” In the next moment, Linder peeled the blue coveralls from over his khakis and sport shirt and launched into a frenzied jitterbug on the parquet floor. He held out his hands for Caroline to join him.

  “But I don’t know how!” she giggled.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he answered breathlessly, “I’ll show you!”

  Moments later, he had her swinging and twirling to the music, doing steps she had never imagined she could do. When the music stopped, both were beaming and breathing hard.

  “Want to try something totally different?” he coaxed. It’s fantastic, I promise.”

  He swapped the disc for another and selected a track.

  “Okay, now, I want you to listen to the first thirty seconds of this and see if you can keep your feet from moving.”

  It was the big-band Latin dance number, “A Bailar Meringue” by the great 1950s Cuban bandleader, Xavier Cugat. After a few bars of understated percus
sion to set the beat, the brass and woodwinds blared out a driving dance rhythm, with the male chorus joining in soon after. Linder stood facing Caroline and asked her to watch and imitate as he bent his knees slightly and dipped his hips from left to right in a sinuous movement.

  “Now, imagine being feather-light on your feet while feeling the beat in your hips,” he directed.

  Once she had mastered the basic meringue step, he led her sideways across the floor while remaining opposite her, then circled her in small steps. Before long, she was doing the same, and then they moved into a closed position, with Linder extending his right hand to Caroline’s waist while taking her right hand with his left and holding it at shoulder level. And from there, Linder led her into a series of complex turns without releasing her hand so that, before long, their arms became twisted like pretzels.

  As they danced, Linder sensed the syncopated rhythm penetrating stiffened muscles and sinews that had known beatings, hard labor and frostbite, and had carried him on a trek of nearly two thousand miles to this place. He felt his limbs relax to a degree not enjoyed since his youth, when he had danced to the same music with a dark-haired girl not much older than Caroline. It was as if his spirit had left his body and cast aside the hardened shell of reserve he had accumulated over more than a decade of undercover work for the CIA and the DSS.

  Suddenly Linder noticed Caroline was out of step and had turned her gaze toward the kitchen, where her mother stood in the doorway with an amused look that slowly faded into a dull stare. To Linder’s surprise, Patricia had changed from her sweatshirt and jeans into a sleeveless floral dress with a hem several inches above the knees that displayed her tanned limbs to stunning advantage. The transformation left him momentarily speechless.

  Linder stopped the music and noticed a cowed look on Caroline’s face before he turned to address her mother.

  “Can you recall any of the steps?” he asked Patricia, offering her his hand. “I remember how the rumba and the meringue came so naturally to you.”

  “Heavens, no. It’s been far too long,” she replied without moving toward him. “But you certainly haven’t forgotten,” she added almost wistfully.

  “It’s been just as long for me,” he answered. “Are you sure you won’t give it a try?”

  Patricia shook her head and Linder wondered what lay behind her hesitation. Since she appeared to have noticed the dance’s remarkable effects on him, might she fear its possible effect on her? She was, after all, a married woman with a young daughter, which required keeping up appearances in a traditional town like Coalville, where the locals preferred things and people to stay in their proper place.

  But Patricia was also a strong-willed woman in the prime of life, whose ailing husband had been condemned to a long sentence in a labor camp system from which few prisoners emerged whole. And in front of her was a reasonably attractive man of her own age, who once had feelings for her and might harbor them still. If the music had indeed sparked the same glow in her that it had in him, how might she have interpreted it? Under his expectant gaze, a smile came to her lips but her eyes did not join in.

  Linder, still flushed from dancing, spoke now to Caroline as if he might be addressing her mother at the same time.

  “Don’t think that you’ll be stuck in Coalville for the rest of your life,” he told her. “Somewhere out there, in the night clubs of London, Beirut, and Havana, it’s after dark and people are dancing their hearts out to a live band. Make up your mind that you’ll dance in one of those clubs someday while you’re still young. Find a way. There’s nothing else like it on earth.”

  “Do you have a favorite club? Tell me what it’s like,” Caroline urged, apparently no longer inhibited by her mother’s presence.

  But Linder shook his head.

  “To describe how it feels to dance to a great dance orchestra in a top-notch night club is, well, it’s like trying to capture a brilliant sunset by drawing in the sand with a stick. You just have to be there.”

  Caroline gave a final glance at Patricia before returning to her chair to gather her CDs.

  “I guess I’d better pack if I’m going to be on time for the sleepover at Ella’s house,” she said as she turned to leave. “Thanks for showing me those steps, Tom.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he replied, following her with his eyes until she left the room.

  Without speaking, Patricia led Linder back to the kitchen, where, to Linder’s surprise, the lights were dim and the table was set for two. On a hunch, he had carried the portable CD player with him and set it on the kitchen counter before taking his seat. Surveying the table before him, he noted at once that to the right of each place setting was a full water glass and an empty wine glass, and in place of wine, a pitcher of lemonade lay at the table’s center. Since his primary reason for arranging a visit was to check on Patricia’s state of mind after learning that Roger was trapped at Kamas and to see if her drinking was under control, Patricia’s buoyant spirits and her teetotaling put him in a jovial mood.

  Over a dinner of lamb curry and stir-fried vegetables, Patricia opened up in a way he could never have anticipated. From the moment they sat at the table, she evoked shared memories of Cleveland and dance class, then launched into a rambling monologue about growing up in a prominent family and being sent off to boarding school soon after the death of her mother.

  “I was so skinny and shy and self-conscious in those days,” she recalled. “I worried constantly about what other people thought about me, whether I had the right friends and was invited to the right parties. I cringe at how I used to turn up my nose at perfectly nice boys in favor of boys from the right families who weren’t nice to me at all. In college, I found myself liking men from backgrounds that were more ordinary, but I feared losing status if I were seen with them. I’ll never forget how enraged I was in my sophomore year at Penn when my uncle predicted that I would end up marrying someone who attended my coming out party. I hated him for saying that. And yet, that’s exactly what I did.”

  Patricia reached for her water glass and took a long draught as if craving something stronger.

  “How did that happen?” Linder inquired.

  “I was fresh out of Wharton and had just begun the Citibank training program. I went home for the Christmas holidays and met Charles at a party. He was a few years older than I was and had gone back to Cleveland to work in the bank that his relatives founded.

  “I don’t know how to describe it,” she continued, pausing to take another sip. “One day I was an ambitious career woman in New York and a few days later all I wanted was a big Tudor house in East Cleveland with an up-to-date kitchen, three or four kids, and enough charity work to keep me out of the house a few mornings a week. I really can’t explain it, except maybe as a reaction to my own mother’s total lack of maternal instinct.”

  “I remember seeing the wedding announcement,” Linder commented. “You both looked very happy. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a very enjoyable period for me.”

  “Oh?” Patricia replied with a puzzled look. “And why was that?”

  “It was right after the Crash of 2008,” Linder explained, “and I was one of those newly minted MBAs whose hopes of a lucrative Wall Street career vaporized on contact with the global financial crisis. As it turned out, the only job I could find before graduation was in pharmaceutical sales and I hated every minute of it.”

  “I can imagine,” she agreed. “But what I remember hearing about you then was that you had some mysterious job overseas in the Middle East. We used to joke that you had joined the CIA.”

  “You heard that I left sales to join the government?” Linder asked, taken aback.

  “I met some people who knew you from Exeter and Columbia. They told me.”

  “And here I thought that you had completely forgotten about me,” he teased, happy that she had not.

  “And did you ever marry?” she asked, toying with her water glass.

  “No,” he replied, waiting
for her to look up. “And I regret that.”

  Patricia blushed. “Don’t,” she answered firmly. “You spared yourself a world of pain. When Charles died in the riots after the Battle of Cleveland, I truly wished I had died with him. Suddenly my entire life was turned upside down. Because my father was suspected of helping the rebels, Caroline and I had to flee for our lives with nothing more than a small backpack for each of us.”

  “Those were terrible times for Cleveland,” Linder acknowledged without disclosing that he had been present then. “I remember thinking of you then and wondering whether you were safe. How did you manage to get out?”

  “We hid in the cargo hold of a freighter for days while it made its way through the St. Lawrence Seaway into the North Atlantic,” Patricia answered. “And even after we arrived in London and my father took us in, none of us dared mix with strangers for fear of being kidnapped by the Unionists and spirited back to the U.S. for one of their show trials. If I hadn’t met Roger then, I don’t know how I would have stayed sane. Poor Roger, if I had only known then how unhappy his life would become, I might have spared him the anguish.”

  Patricia refilled her water glass reflexively, drank most of it, and cradled the half-empty glass in both hands.

  “And have you had any news from Roger?” he asked, aware that the question might upset her.

  Patricia eyed him warily.

  “Would you have asked if you didn’t already know the answer?” she said.

  “I heard about an envelope. I don’t know what was in it,” Linder lied.

  “A postcard was inside. Roger wrote that he had been sick and was back at Kamas to be processed out on parole. Except that now, with the revolt, that seems like a cruel joke. People say the government is going to move in with tanks and level the place. I’m told they want to set an example to the other camps.”