by Ward Just
She had left him a note, on his desk when he returned in the evening from the embassy. I’m off for a few days, back Sunday morning. XOXO, M. He had a hint something was in the wind because the night before she had commenced a long reminiscence about her life in Slother, affairs of the family, the time her father broke his wrist arm-wrestling at the August carnival. She was a small child, six, seven years old. The broken wrist did not stop her father, who continued on, seemingly oblivious, until he fainted. He never complained about it then or later. The family generally was subject to injuries, and of course she herself had fevers around the ides of March. We were often in a state of crisis, May said. Was your family in a state of crisis? Not that I remember, Harry said. Perhaps we were distracted by world crises. I had the usual childhood diseases. Injuries were not common in my family. The ides of March did not figure on our calendar. Lucky you, May said. We had all the childhood diseases and more, except for Belle, who was the picture of health. She was proud of it, too, her clean bill of health.
My father worried about money, Harry said, which was absurd. He had plenty of money. He had a trust officer at a bank in New York who was supposed to do the worrying. How did that work, exactly? May asked. Harry explained about trusts, how they were established and who was responsible for the investments and so forth and so on, a vague answer because there was an edge to May’s voice. So, she said, your father asked the trust officer for money and he sent some? I suppose that was it more or less, Harry said, in a manner of speaking.
That’s the way to go about it, I suppose, May said.
My father worried anyhow, Harry said.
When your father goes, does the trust come down to you?
Yes, Harry said.
How much? May asked.
I have no idea, Harry said.
There wasn’t much talk about money in our house, May said, probably because there was so little of it. Just enough to get by. We were never hungry or anything, but every few months we went on short rations. That was what my father called it, short rations, and that meant soup for dinner on Tuesday nights. I don’t know why he chose Tuesday. Of course the pot garden helped. Harry said, What’s a pot garden? May looked at him sideways and said, The garden where we grew pot, for God’s sake, Harry. We sold some of it in the neighborhood but kept most of it for ourselves. Or themselves, I should say. As youngsters Belle and I were not allowed to smoke, even cigarettes. In some ways our parents were strait-laced. But you know Vermont. Always on the cutting edge.
They were taking an early-evening stroll in the park around the corner from the residence, an orangey light still strong from the west. They could have been in a remote country forest except for the industrial hum nearby. There were only a few other couples about. Harry was contemplating the pot garden in Slother. That was new. May had never spoken of it before and how many years had they been married? Another of her buried memories that from time to time went off like a tiny time bomb. Harry had never thought of Vermont on the cutting edge of anything except self-satisfaction. They did think well of themselves in Vermont.
I miss it sometimes, May said.
Do you?
I miss evenings on horseback. We had wonderful trails.
You do that here, Harry said.
It’s not the same, May replied.
Why not?
It’s in America, for one thing.
Oh, yes. That’s certainly true.
Uncrowded, May said.
Except for the pot gardens, Harry said.
Those, too, May said.
Harry yawned deeply. He had had a tiring day, two meetings in the morning, three in the afternoon. A congressional delegation—“codel” in the parlance—was due at the end of the month, wives included, and the embassy staff was busy with addresses for museums and art galleries, boutiques, decent restaurants, and journeys of a historical nature away from the capital, a dossier for each congressman. It had been a while since the last codel. There was also a schedule of meetings with government officials, Harry the guide. The defense minister was giving them lunch. At the same time, Department security specialists were arriving to conduct an examination of the embassy’s security procedures to assure themselves that the new protocols were being observed, and if they weren’t you got a demerit on your report card. At that moment Harry considered himself the principal of a second-rate high school that had unaccountably lost its accreditation, or was about to.
I miss its simplicity, May said.
Harry had not been listening. He said, I beg your pardon?
Vermont, she said. I was talking about Vermont.
Yes, of course. Sorry. What did you say?
I miss it sometimes, May said. I wish you’d listen. May was silent then, her hands jammed into her armpits. A wind had come up. Harry was conscious of the click of his cane. She moved a little ahead, then turned to face him.
She said, You’re being tiresome.
I’ve never heard you express nostalgia for Slother.
It wasn’t all bad, she said.
I’m sure it wasn’t.
I wish I’d been able to patch things up.
I know, he said. I don’t want to be tiresome. I had a lousy day.
I don’t even have a memento of those years, only a few photographs. Belle took everything. I suppose her children have them now, stuff that was around the house. Prizes won at Carnival. My mother’s needlework. Odds and ends. I’ve been thinking about them for days. When the house burned down everything was lost except the things Belle had. May was silent a minute and then she said, So you had a lousy day.
I did, he said.
The codel?
Among other things.
You must learn to delegate.
I’m trying, Harry said.
Try harder.
They walked back to the residence quite out of step.
That was Thursday. When they reached the residence gate Harry thought to look at his watch, a premonition, and was startled to see the date, March 13. He opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it.
Harry turned from the window and made a fresh whiskey. Seated once again, he was annoyed by more questions. Was she speeding? Did she fall asleep at the wheel? What would he do now? He had no idea and tried to dismiss the thought, a nagging voice. He shut a door on it but the door refused to stay shut and the voice went on, sentence fragments. Resign from the foreign service. Move to France. Visit his father in Connecticut. The standard advice was to do nothing, wait for the dust to settle. Harry could not corral these thoughts that bucked and quartered in his head. He blew another smoke ring in an unsuccessful attempt to find repose. He was tired but not ready for the bedroom. He sat quietly waiting for things to settle. He did not know why he had gone on so about Berlin, one pessimistic thought after another about a city he had visited only a few times. Berlin was divided then, and when he and May made the passage to the East via Checkpoint Charlie they were followed by a goon in a black leather coat, little wire spectacles on his nose and a black beret on his shaved head, a sneer from the atelier of George Grosz. May was amused by him, his clumsy attempts at intimidation. She said he reminded her of the biker boys at the Slother Carnival except for his Baltic-blue eyes, lady-killer eyes. He did remember East Berlin, as grim a city as he had ever seen, worse in its way than the broken-down cities of central Africa because here and there were mementos of what it had been before the war. A few buildings from that time still survived, even Schinkel’s buildings, shrapnel-pocked. A few damaged people also, stooped as if they bore heavy burdens, unspeakable burdens. They looked as if they still lived in the war’s context. The city was gray. The people were gray. The sky was gray, too, and spitting down rain. Even the rain looked exhausted, as if it were, like him, the last of its line, the final shower before the flood. The goon in the black leather coat was replaced by another goon in blue leather, his yellow hair reminding May of a Vermont haystack. They strolled for an afternoon, visiting the Pergamon, eating a drea
dful lunch, trying and failing to find a souvenir. Harry suggested they kidnap one of the goons, take him home and civilize him like Huck Finn. They hurried back to their hotel in the West, enjoyed a tumble, arrived on time for the Berlin Symphony that night. Grieg. Mahler. Solti guest-conducting. They had one more day in Berlin and remarked to each other what a fine weekend it had been, despite the rain and the goons. The music had been sublime. And how happy they were to leave.
The room was silent except for the March wind, and Harry considered reprising Brahms, then decided against it. To repeat the German Requiem would be an indulgence, and there had been enough of that for one night.
The ambassador arranged a brief ceremony at the embassy, staff only. The ground-floor reception room was filled with flowers, the arrangement by the press attaché and her husband. Harry had never liked the room, its wintry atmosphere, low ceiling, narrow windows, Balkan art on the walls. The pictures were nineteenth-century rural scenes, a country wedding, happy peasants at work in the fields. Harry and May had planned to replace the art but never got around to it. But the flowers transformed the room into something almost elegant. Harry said a few words of welcome, as did his deputy chief of mission and the head of the political section. May and the station chief were great friends, and he would have spoken too, but he was scheduled to brief the codel, arrived from Trieste that morning. He knew several of the members personally and wanted to spare Harry the chore. The wives of two staffers spoke, remembering May fondly. The cook and the housekeeper chimed in. Ramon read a sentimental poem in his own language, beautifully spoken. Listening to them, the ambassador was certain that May would have been pleased. They all spoke of her as a free spirit, a thought not quite true but affectionately meant. Harry rose again at the end to mumble a few short sentences, something about chance and misfortune, something more about finding a safe place in the world, the difficulty of it in a business where your destinations were directed by others. Where you were, for the most part, at the mercy of events. May had seen many distressing sights in Africa. Nothing had prepared her for them. An ambassador and his family were sent somewhere and they went, conscious always of the responsibility, and the honor, of representing their country. Harry told an amusing story about May on horseback some years ago, the horse spirited but not as spirited as she was. Another story of a reception in an unnamed country, May presiding with aplomb until the foreign minister, filled with whiskey, stumbled into a potted palm and collapsed into May’s arms. Fortunately he was six inches shorter than she was, so May was able to catch him unassisted and lay him out on the couch until his driver could come fetch him. Four dozen roses arrived by courier the following morning, along with an antique cup said to originate in Carthage. Harry concluded with a mystifying reference to the painter Goya, his superb understanding of grief. His compassion. His loathing of cruelty and indifference. The company was silent for a long minute, uncertain how to respond. The ambassador seemed at a loss. Then everyone gathered for drinks and hors d’oeuvres and by nine p.m. the ambassador was alone in his silent office once again, undone.
Some mysteries were inevitable and more or less bearable, others not. One had a responsibility to clear the fog of doubt, the loose end left dangling. To do otherwise was careless. The next morning Harry summoned the station chief and described May’s accident, its approximate location, and the few facts he had in hand. He wanted to know what happened to cause his wife’s car to plunge off a road in clear weather. The car was at the bottom of a ravine, all but inaccessible.
He said, Can you help me out?
Of course, Herb Schroeder said.
Can you do it now?
Not with the team I have here, Herb said.
Harry said, Shit.
But I can get a team together from our European stations. Take a few days.
Any way you can stop the locals from tainting the evidence?
I’ve done that, Harry.
How did you do it?
I’ve had two of my lads at the car since the accident. Every hour or so they’re running off some local thug who wants to steal the battery, the windshield wipers. The tires. How they thought they would get tires out of the ravine is something else again. The slope is almost vertical. But, you know, their plans are not fully thought through. They don’t think much beyond the theft itself.
Thanks, Herb, I appreciate it.
What’s to be found, we’ll find. How about you? Are you all right?
I’m all right.
You look like hell.
Harry’s eyes strayed to the leaded windows and the garden beyond. He said, Does Alice like pearls?
All women like pearls, Harry. Pearls are the coin of the realm.
May had a pearl necklace—
No, Harry. Out of the question.
Not out of the question. Very much in the question. Ramon will bring it over this afternoon. My thanks. May didn’t wear them often. I don’t know why.
Two days later Herb Schroeder was back, a thick file under his arm.
He said, How much do you want to know?
Harry said, Everything you’ve got.
Herb smiled at that and began with the condition of the road, good enough, and the weather, also good. There were no skid marks on the road and the car appeared to have hit the guardrail full force, a direct hit. He described the condition of the car. There was nothing to indicate mischief, meaning foul play, an arranged accident, but the car was so torn up that nothing could be ruled out. Nevertheless, Herb said, I am ruling it out. He went on to describe the interior of the car, May’s leather purse stuffed under the passenger seat, money and credit cards intact. Nothing suspicious. Herb handed over the purse.
Let me ask one question. Did May smoke? I never remember her smoking.
Once in a while, Harry said. She liked to smoke while she was driving, as a matter of fact.
What brand?
Pall Mall, Harry said.
Only Pall Mall?
That was her brand.
There were two Gitanes in the ashtray.
She never smoked a Gitane in her life.
A workingman’s cigarette for sure. Filthy stuff.
No Pall Malls?
The Gitanes appeared to be at least a week old, maybe more than that. My people are working on it but, frankly, there won’t be much more to learn. The Gitanes were smoked all the way down to the filter.
Harry was silent a moment. Wasn’t life full of surprises? And one mystery so often led to another. He said, What do you make of that?
I don’t know what to make of it. Would she pick up a hitchhiker?
Very doubtful, Harry said. Unless the hitchhiker was a woman. Then she might.
We have only the cigarette stubs, not the package they came from. No way to find the provenance, a tax stamp to show what country they came from, for example. Do you know where she was driving to? Or from?
No idea, Harry said.
Herb paused a moment. She go away often?
From time to time she would go away, Harry said. He said nothing more, uncertain how far to go with Herb Schroeder, who was a friend but not a close friend. They were colleagues more than friends but he had gone out of his way to help. Harry said, Usually two or three days. She always came back to me. It’s only happened a few times. This was the third time. Sometimes she needed to get away from the embassy. Me.
We’re checking the hotels in the vicinity, Herb said. There aren’t many. Nothing has turned up so far. The locals are cooperative, by the way. And that’s what I know. Sorry. It’s not much.
I appreciate what you’ve done, Harry said. Anything turns up, let me know. Otherwise—and Harry let the thought hang. Otherwise what? He stepped to the window and looked down into the embassy garden, the plants wilting in the cold. The trees were barely coming into leaf. Beyond the trees he could see Christina Noiret standing in the doorway of her house, pulling on her gloves. She was dressed in slacks and a fur coat and in a moment disappeared into the open door of t
he ambassador’s car. The driver eased the door shut and the car purred away, trailing a little plume of exhaust. Harry watched this ceremony with a smile. He knew he was through with the diplomacy business.
I don’t think there’s anything sinister about it, Herb said. That’s my instinct.
Your instincts are good, Harry said.
Have been in the past, Herb agreed.
Still, Harry said. The Gitanes—
There’s always a loose end, Harry. Always. No exceptions.
He looked him in the eyes. None?
In my experience, Herb said.
He slept badly and was listless in the mornings as if his circulation were laboring in first gear. He was asked out every night but usually declined, pleading work, and after a few weeks the invitations stopped except for Henri and Christina Noiret, the French ambassador and his young wife, the invitations arriving by hand from the embassy next door—come for lunch, come for drinks, come for supper, come any time but do call ahead, Christina wrote. We miss May but we miss you, too. You should not be so much alone. Harry went once, taking supper with them in the kitchen, Christina’s succulent rabbit stew, remaining until midnight drinking a superb marc de Bourgogne. The ambassador was reminiscing about his naval days, the various ports of call. In thirty years he had never had occasion to fire his cannons in anger. Made him wonder if the country actually needed a navy. But it had the force de frappe with its airborne missiles and it didn’t need those, either. Yet there they were, a source of pride to the nation, when the nation thought about them, which it seldom did. Harry thought the admiral was leaving something out, he was a highly decorated sailor. You loved your boats, Christina said. Admit it. Of course I loved my boats, the admiral said. Who wouldn’t?
