by Paula Champa
“I was trying to find out why she wants the car. That’s what you asked her when we met her, right? And you asked it again after I talked to Arthur Quint. So I was getting an answer for you.”
He appeared attentive when I paused in my mopping, but he said nothing.
“I think she’s desperate,” I went on, wanting to convey the extent of her professional difficulties. I recounted her visit to the Beacon Company’s new owner in Germany and the turn of events that had led her to us.
“It sounds superstitious—she said so herself—but it’s like she can’t function without it. Not just in her art but her life. She wanted me to tell you—” I summoned the exact, peculiar words I’d forced myself to memorize. “She said: ‘Tell him I’m trying to make something whole again, from my youth. Something pure, that gave me the greatest happiness.’”
The information appeared to have no effect on him. He remained impassive while I put away the mop and took a quick look through the medical supplies on his bookshelves to see if I needed to reorder anything the next morning. I was about to accept defeat and go to the guest room when Emerson spoke again.
“She said she’s trying to make something whole again?”
I nodded.
He launched himself off the pillows, his voice ringing with fury. “That bitch!”
“What’s the matter?”
His eyes were on fire, his lips quivering with indignation.
“I knew it. Beth, get the files in the office on the Beacon. And whatever’s on my desk, any faxes—”
“Why are you so upset?”
“She’s taking us on. She thinks she can beat me. She announced as much to you. But I’m going to get it.”
“You own the car,” I reminded him.
“No, it’s—get the files. Please.”
I feared that the meds had eaten through his last tethers to reality. Still, at his insistence, I gathered whatever papers I could find and paged through them with him: a bill for a set of tires the previous summer, insurance forms . . . He seized on a piece of fax paper covered with a neat grid of typewritten German and some handwriting in English.
“Look at the part I underlined,” he said. “That’s the engine number of the Beacon I own. Next to it is the number on the car’s chassis—what the body attaches to. And below that, someone from the Heritage Trust confirmed that they should match.”
“I don’t get it.”
He frowned at my obtuseness. “It’s not the right engine.”
“But doesn’t the car run?”
“Of course!”
“If it has the wrong engine, how can it run?”
He shook his head at my limited understanding. “Another engine of the same type can make the car run. That doesn’t mean it’s the original engine that was put in the car at the factory. And in this case, it’s not.”
“Why would the engine be different?”
“I have no idea. It was replaced for some reason. It’s not easy to track down something like this. But I had a feeling when we met her. And now we know: She has it.”
“Hélène?”
“Yes. That’s why she wants the body, Beth. She’s trying to put them back together herself.”
I was having trouble picturing this. “I’m confused.”
Emerson went on, “Or if she doesn’t have the engine yet, she’s looking for it. We need to—I need you to find out from the previous owners in this file if they know anything about the original engine. Where it went, if it’s ever turned up anywhere . . . Ask them if they’ve had any contact with Hélène or know anything about her.”
“You want me to spy on her?”
He nodded.
It was true, then: The plot of intrigue I’d dreamed up for myself to escape the strain of his care was more than an imaginary game. I cringed at the thought of Hélène laughing at me over her drink after I left the hotel bar—cringed at the confession of my awkwardness—as if she cared about my death, my life or my plot in any way. I imagined her concocting the sob story I fed to Emerson in order to persuade him to relinquish the car. I had started to trust her, bared myself to her, and now I was a little afraid of her. I didn’t know what was more disturbing, her behavior or the seemingly ridiculous reason for it. But my duty to Emerson was clear.
“All right.”
At his insistence, I began to read through the auction records and the copies of the title certificates from some of the previous owners. In one of the auction catalogues, I saw that the car had undergone restoration work in August 1974 and that in March 1992 it had gone to a restorer in England for a second, more thorough, overhaul at a cost of $23,000. At that time, the car was logged as having the “correct engine.”
“That means ‘not original,’” Emerson pointed out when I read it to him. “It’s a replacement.”
“So, wouldn’t that mean the original engine has been destroyed?”
“Not at all. No, it could be in another car—that might be how she got it in the first place. She’s probably displaying it on a pedestal in her studio in Paris, like a Duchamp ready-made.”
He seemed pleased with himself for having suspected her all along. More incredible to me was the fact that he immediately looked healthier. He launched himself out of bed again, as he had done the night when Hélène first phoned, and handed me an envelope from his bookcase.
“And there’s this, Beth,” he said, falling back onto his pillow.
Inside the envelope was a color brochure showcasing a range of new AG automotive models. He directed my attention to the engraved card slipped inside:
You are cordially invited to celebrate the relaunch of the Beacon Motor Company
A SPECIAL EVENT FOR COLLECTORS
26 July 1996 8:00 P.M.
The Zeppelin Museum
Friedrichshafen, Germany
I ran my fingers over the raised lettering. “This is a party.”
“Yes. But it’s a way to do research. For you to do research. All I can do is fax. Put yourself in my shoes, Beth. I’m tired of faxing.”
He handed me the cordless phone next to his bed—a dying man with a simple request: “Why don’t you book a flight?”
Part II
The Engine
11
“HOW DOES AN ENGINE become separated from the chassis? And by what means does it go on to drive another vehicle? Many different ways.”
The gray-bearded gentleman spoke with an English accent. Like me, he was lighter than air—dressed in formal attire and eating hors d’oeuvres inside the gondola of a zeppelin suspended over the main hall of a museum in southern Germany.
The Englishman thought for a moment. “If it’s a racecar and the driver leans on it too hard, the engine can blow up and need to be replaced. That’s something!”
He clinked his champagne glass against mine.
“Or, if the force of a collision drives into the front fan, the generator, you might put a different engine in. The original engine probably goes to a rebuilder, to be sold as a replacement. Believe it or not, the more valuable the car, the more likely the engine is to get separated.”
His name was James M. C. Cook, according to his badge, and he did not need to tell me he was a Beacon owner. Along with most of the other guests around us, he wore an ornate gold lighthouse pin on his lapel, like initiates into a secret club. I complimented him on his pin before continuing my interrogation.
“Do you know of a Beacon collector—an artist—named Hélène Moreau?”
He shook his head and stared ahead vacantly, stumped after having answered my other questions so easily.
“I’m trying to find out if she has the engine from a 1954 roadster. You’ve never heard of her?”
As I began to describe Hélène’s Speed Paintings, he looked relieved to see his wife returning from the ladies’ room. They excused themselves to go down one level, to the B deck, where the zeppelin’s smoking lounge and passenger bar were located.
From the panoramic window I
watched a projected lighthouse beam moving in a pattern across the walls of the museum, nervously wondering, as I had done on my flight to Germany, how I was supposed to fulfill Emerson’s assignment there. I had tried to tell him: It was a party, not a research facility. I was surveying the crowd, deciding which corner of the room it would be best to wade into, when I picked out an oddly handsome man. I’d noticed him earlier, walking into the party. He had an alert, intelligent face. His brown hair was spiked into high, uneven points, casually offsetting the old-fashioned cut of his tuxedo. In line, on the way in, he had greeted the people behind me in French, then spoken with a passing woman in Italian, while a second man remained constantly at his side. The second man was larger and more homely, with a massive, cartoonish jaw that dominated the lower half of his face. I wondered if he was the bodyguard of the spiky-haired man. At least one of them smelled of a spiced after-shave—an aromatic, herbal blend that might have wafted down the hills of a Mediterranean island on a hot day, the notes of green shade mingling with a darker scent of cloves and burnt cinnamon. Now, from my lookout in the zeppelin, I watched the spiky-haired man move through the room, shaking hands like a politician, until the crowd swallowed him up again.
I shifted to another window inside the airship, a full-size replica of a starboard section of the Hindenburg, moored by long ropes to the walls of the building. The vessel swayed gently in the air currents rising from the circulating partygoers below. I closed my eyes, picturing Emerson in his bed and wishing he were with me, knowing he would be enjoying himself so much more than I was.
Something poked me in the arm and my eyes flew open. A man costumed in a chauffeur’s uniform stood before me, extending a silver tray stacked with headsets.
“For translation,” he explained.
Like the others around me in the zeppelin lounge, I selected my language and hooked the headset over one ear. On a circular stage below, a pokerfaced gentleman was introduced as the chairman of AG. He addressed the room in German, his words echoing through my headpiece in English, relayed by a male translator.
“When we are considering the future of the automobile, we ask ourselves: How will we power it, and how will it operate?”
As he spoke, tuxedos and evening gowns rustled toward the stage like metal filings around a magnet.
“What do you think the future will look like?” the executive asked the crowd. “Already we are approaching the year 2000, the turn of a new millennium. Market and regulatory pressures are pushing us—and will continue to push us—to seek alternatives to carbon dioxide–producing power trains. What is at stake? Let’s start with countries like China and India . . .”
Someone passed close to me in the floating lounge. I guessed who it was as soon as I smelled the after-shave—that smoky mixture of cinnamon, cloves and green shade. He stood at the window taming the spikes in his hair, parting them to one side absent-mindedly with long fingers, graceful in their movements. He waved away the offer of a headset from one of the chauffeurs—he was apparently fluent in everything. The homely bodyguard did not appear to be with him any longer, and he watched the proceedings below with obvious interest—much more than I could summon for the dry presentation.
“In the coming years, our present business model will no longer be sustainable,” the executive announced to the crowd. “You are here tonight to preview an early concept for what may be the first new Beacon in thirty years: a clean-burning Beacon. The natural twenty-first-century successor to some of the most refined and powerful cars in the world.”
Cameras flashed around the room as the executive pulled the drape off a mysterious form crouched on the stage. I could not tell one car model from the next, but from my viewing position in the zeppelin, the new Beacon did not look particularly friendly. It did not look angry either, like so many of the cars I saw on the street. Down on the stage, the new concept appeared to be vaguely shaped like a camel’s head in profile, raised higher in the back, with an inscrutable, technical face.
That smell again: cinnamon and cloves and green shade. Then I heard a male voice coming not through my headset but directly into my left ear. His voice.
“Have you seen a proper 135 roadster?” the voice asked. “The original—what this car is loosely based on?”
He had an English accent, not German. But his inflection was mixed with disappointment. And a trace of something else. I glanced at his nametag.
Jorge.
Spanish?
“Yes, I’ve seen one,” I managed to answer. I didn’t tell him it was a scale model on Hélène Moreau’s desk.
Below us, the men in chauffeurs’ uniforms were walking through the crowd with microphones, taking questions from the audience.
“Why would you start with a roadster?” someone asked.
“Obviously, we are not, as you can see,” said the AG executive, sending a wave of laughter around the room. “We are reviving the memory of a classic R-135 roadster, but updated as an SUV for the future, with a realistic capacity for five passengers . . .”
Again I felt his breath close by my ear: “Cars like the original Beacon were the reason why the world fell in love with the automobile.”
His smile was inviting, wide, made wider as his lips curled in a soft ruffle, like ravioli. Up close, he looked to be not much older than me. Mid-thirties? But he had an air of authority unlike anyone I knew, except maybe Emerson. I attributed this to his unusual accent.
Down on the stage, guests began to swarm around the car. The man I now thought of as Jorge stood with his arms crossed, surveying the movements of the crowd as intently as a shopkeeper on Saturday morning. It occurred to me that he might be the best way for me to wade into my research assignment. He seemed to know enough people . . .
I ventured a step closer. “Is this your blimp?”
“This isn’t a blimp,” he said matter-of-factly, leaning in and pointing over my head. “It’s a rigid airship. It has a structural skeleton, which you can see from outside this gondola—that is, if you ever decide to leave it and join the party.”
I stared at him in surprise. Had he noticed me here earlier?
His lips ruffled into another grin. “But no, it’s not mine,” he went on. “A man named Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin developed ships like these in the early 1900s. I believe this is his airship.”
“Is this your party?”
“No, not really. I’m here to make up for the sins of others, you could say. My father drove the original Beacon Motor Company into the ground. Pardon my rubbish pun.”
“You’re related to Beacon?”
He closed his eyes and nodded wearily. “My grandfather founded the company. And, as I say, my father ruined it. I’m helping AG revive the brand.”
I looked at his nametag again. Jorge Miguel Beacon.
“Congratulations, Jorge.”
“I’m called Miguel. My mother was Spanish, though I mostly lived in England.” He nodded to himself at the memory. “With my grandfather.”
“These tags are so formal.”
“What about you, Bethany? What brings you to this zeppelin? You’re a collector, are you?”
“Beth,” I said, covering the end of my nametag. “I’m here . . . I’m representing the owner of a 135-M from 1954.”
He nodded again. “Someone with good taste.”
“We found out . . . we don’t have the original engine in the car, and we’re trying to find it, if it still exists. I was just asking another gentleman here, another Beacon owner, about how the engine might have gotten separated.”
“Quite likely it’s lost. There are countless reasons why engines go. They even get nicked. Have you gotten in touch with the Heritage Trust in Schnell?”
“I think—the owner—was working on that. We know the engine number. We’re trying to find out if an artist named Hélène Moreau has it. Or if it’s in another car,” I was careful to add.
He glanced at my nametag again. “I’d love to help you, Beth. If you want me to
. Do you fancy some dinner?”
He was offering his help, if I wanted it. Would it be like stepping into the racecar with Emerson? I wondered if my exit would be more graceful as he led me across a short bridge connecting the zeppelin to a restaurant on the museum’s upper level.
“Did you say you represent the owner?” he asked, shepherding me through a throng of waiters preparing for the dinner service.
“Yes.”
A look of concern crossed his face. “Are you a lawyer?”
“No, more like an assistant.”
“Why are you smiling?” he asked.
“I was just wishing that someone I know was here tonight. He would have loved it.”
“I think once someone is gone from your life, they might as well be dead.” He grinned at me oddly.
“Oh,” I said with an embarrassed smile, “you’re talking about romance. I wasn’t.”
“No, not necessarily. Though I suppose it applies to that, too.” He pulled out a chair for me at one of the banquet tables.
“The difference with romance,” I said, by way of conjecture, “is that the person is still out there—as far as you know. You have to live with the lost chance.”
“You’re a romantic,” he said with evident satisfaction.
“I don’t know what I am.”
“I’m a romantic myself,” he said. “I’m doing what I dreamed of, and I’m alone.” He thought for a moment. “Though I’m not quite sure why.”
I couldn’t help laughing. His way of speaking gave him a strange charm. It wasn’t only his accent, it was as if he were channeling someone much older, from another time.
“I find that hard to believe, Miguel—that you’re alone.”
“It’s true,” he said good-naturedly. “And your sympathy has been noted. Being alone is romantic, you know, in the sense of the love we think of as ideal. Or chivalric. It relies on having passed through a long state of immense frustration, don’t you think? The greater your anticipation, maybe, the greater your awareness of love.”
