by Robert Stone
The woman from the star-finder booth returned fifteen minutes after Browne got back to his own booth. She seemed pleased with herself and he thought somehow it must have been she he had seen sporting among the stacked boxes. The exposition could be a wild scene, the top of the year for certain people. Browne had heard stories about the casual sex but he had never seen any evidence of it before.
A little before six o’clock, Pat Fay, the designer whom Browne had pressed into service at the Staten Island yard, came up and looked at the stand-up ad for the Altan Forty that had Matty Hylan’s picture on it.
“You might as well take it down,” Fay said.
“Why?” Browne asked. He could see that the designer had been drinking.
Fay handed him a copy of the New York Post, open to page three. The headline over a three-column story inquired, “Where’s Matty?”
There was a metal chair handy at a table piled with Altan brochures, so he sat down to read the story. Its substance was that in the face of bankruptcy and mounting scandal, Matty Hylan, bon vivant and captain of commerce, had vanished.
“They might have that race,” Fay said. “Matty won’t be in it.”
“What I’m wondering,” Browne said, “is what does this mean to us?”
Fay shrugged and walked away.
Browne stayed seated at the table for a while, trying to ponder the results of Hylan’s disappearance. All at once the idea came to him of volunteering to enter the race on his own. If he could not sail the boat Hylan was having made in Finland, he might sail the stock model on the floor in front of him. He was sure it was a good boat. He felt a surge of confidence in his own abilities as a sailor. Immediately he began composing, with a pencil on a sheet of lined yellow paper, a letter to Harry Thorne.
He had finished the letter and pocketed it when he saw the woman who sold star-finders still lounging before her stall. She sat on the ledge of industrial carpeting at the corner of the booth with one leg folded under her. Browne thought she was watching him suggestively.
“Matty’s gone,” she said. “How about that guy?”
“Off for more congenial climes,” Browne said.
“I guess he won’t be sailing.”
“Too bad,” said Browne. He began to gather up his papers. There were very few show-goers about. “It was a good boat.”
“If I was Matty,” the woman said, “I would have disappeared during the race. I’d vanish at sea.”
“Guess he couldn’t wait,” Browne said.
The dark woman looked at him with a kind of affectionate insolence. He thought she must be on something.
“Or I’d give them something to bellyache about. I’d not sail around the world but say I did. Hole up in Saint Barts and let the other guys sail and cross the finish line first.”
“I don’t think that’s possible anymore,” Browne said.
“Matty could do it,” the woman said.
Browne told her good evening and went home.
11
NO WORD awaited Strickland in Helsinki. Hylan was not booked into any of the major hotels. Since it was the weekend, he called Joyce Manning at home to leave a message on her machine. No reply was forthcoming. On Sunday, he arranged a meet with a local cinematographer and a sound man. They met a few blocks from Strickland’s hotel, in a place called O’Malley’s. As an earnest of their seriousness, everyone ordered soda water.
The Finns were called Holger and Pentii. They had recently worked on location in Florida for a Finnish-language TV thriller; they read Variety and were conversant with the picture business. Strickland explained his needs to them; he was charming and hesitant and they were patient with his stammer. Once satisfied with his assistants’ bona fides, he became more composed. Everyone relaxed and called out to the Irish girl behind the bar for Harp lager. Her name was Maeve and Holger said she worked for the Marxist-Leninist wing of the IRA.
They spent the rest of the evening talking movies. Pentii was a Russ Meyer fan and his favorite among the master’s oeuvre was Faster Pussycat. For Holger, who seemed the more thoughtful of the two, it would always be Heaven’s Gate. When they broke up, Strickland told them to meet him in Sariola the next evening. He would drive himself there in the morning for some preliminary conversations with the boatyard management.
After breakfast the following day, Strickland telephoned the yard in Sariola. The man with whom he spoke was very polite but cautious to the point of evasion. It was all very odd. Around mid-morning, he piled his gear into a rented Saab and took off down the autobajn for Sariola.
The town lay deep in scented oak forests along the Gulf of Finland. It was an old place, with a Swedish cathedral, cobbled squares and rambling wooden houses that suggested Chekhovian Russia. The air was clean and dry and the skies overhead as blue as June in California. The dark woods around the town were losing their winter silence but a surprising cold lurked in the groves and shadows.
At his new pastel plastic hotel, Strickland changed into clothes which he hoped seafaring types might find congenial: Topsiders, khaki slacks and a bulky naval sweater. Then he shouldered his camera case and set off on foot for the boatyard. Before he had gone a mile, he was light-headed with the sun and the smell of warm evergreen, his eyes dazzled, his nose and forehead reddening.
At the sign of Lipitsa Ltd., he followed a dirt road off the highway. Bird calls of a mystical complexity seemed to announce his passage. He walked out into the seaside meadow in which the Lipitsa yard stood to find three men waiting for him. Behind them a freshly laminated boat with a sexy curved transom and a shark-fin keel lay up on blocks. Beside it stood a graying, flaxenhaired man with the build of an oak stump and eyes the color of wild grapes.
“I’m Strickland,” Strickland told him. “I’ve come to film.”
“Lipitsa,” the man said softly. He seemed to hesitate for a moment before extending his hand.
“Is that the boat?” Strickland asked. They looked at the shiny creature in its perch.
Lipitsa nodded.
“I’ve been trying to find Mr. Hylan,” Strickland explained. “He doesn’t seem to be available.”
The old man’s eyes twinkled over his high cheekbones, alight with boreal suspicion.
“I was hoping to ask you about that, sir. Can you come inside?”
Lipitsa’s offices were on the second floor of a converted farmhouse, a solemn exercise in wood whose silent varnished spaces held a churchly resonance. There was an oak desk, some ancient photographs that appeared to represent the age of sail, and a long line of model boats in token of the ones he had designed. Strickland took a chair and faced the old man across the stern surface of his desk.
“Tell me what you want to do,” Lipitsa said.
Strickland explained that a documentary film had been commissioned by the Hylan Corporation and that he was there to shoot it.
“Do I understand you to mean,” old Lipitsa asked him, “that you have been paid?”
“I’ve been paid a retainer. And I’ve been given expenses.”
“And you have no idea where our Mr. Hylan has gone?”
“Absolutely none,” Strickland said. “I didn’t know he was missing.”
“You last saw him when, please?”
Strickland began but had to start over.
“I . . . I’ve never seen him. Now that you mention it.”
“Ho,” old Lipitsa said gravely. They looked at each other in silence for a moment. “I’m ahead of you,” said the Finn. “I saw him in London two months ago. But you have been paid and I have not. So there you are ahead of me.”
“What,” Strickland asked him, “do you think is going on?”
“Don’t think me impolite,” Lipitsa said. “But I’m very curious and you are coming from over there. What do you think?”
“Quite honestly,” Strickland said, “I have no idea what to think.”
Old Lipitsa passed him a copy of the Financial Times. There was a story on the front page which reported
growing concern as to the whereabouts of the youthful tycoon in question. The story contained, as rumor, a report that a number of grand juries in the United States had also expressed interest. Strickland did not bother to read the details. He realized that there would be decisions to make.
“What did he say? When you saw him in London.”
Lipitsa curled one of his considerable eyebrows. “Wonderful things only.”
Strickland folded his arms and looked at the floor. Abandoning the project now would cost him nothing. At the same time, it bothered him to abort something under way. There was also the possibility that little by little a film might come together for him that was more interesting than the one conceived. Disasters fascinated. It might just be worthwhile, he thought, to shoot until the money ran out and then see what manner of film was taking shape.
“What about the boat?”
“It’s not paid for,” Lipitsa said. “Barely half.”
“Then,” Strickland said, “I suppose he can’t race.”
“He has stolen our design,” the Finn said solemnly. “This is what I think.”
“Tell me the story,” Strickland said. “Let me film it.”
Old Lipitsa shook his head.
“We shall have to go to court in America. American courts are strange. I have nothing to say.”
Strickland understood that he would not yield on the issue. In the end he persuaded Lipitsa to allow them to film the boat and the interior of the old man’s office the following afternoon. The office walls were hung with photographs of Lipitsa as a young seaman aboard one of the grain ships that plied between northern Europe and Australia before the Second World War. They were the last four-masted sailing ships in commercial service.
On the walk back to town, Strickland was passed by a young woman in leather on a motorcycle. He went back to his hotel and put in a call to Duffy. It was still early in New York. Later in the afternoon he walked down to the main square of Sariola. One of the cafes had put a table out and it was just warm enough, with an ample sweater, to sit outside. The sun was low over the treetops and the Gulf of Finland.
He was sipping a lemonade when the door of the adjoining establishment opened and the leather-clad young woman he had seen on the road came out. In one hand she held a hefty stein of beer. The other held a sausage which she was endeavoring to eat on the fly. The sight of Strickland occasioned her a hasty swallow.
“Is it Mr. Hylan?”
“I’m afraid not,” Strickland said politely. He rose. “Would you like to sit down?”
The young woman took a seat and gestured at him with the sausage. “I would like to ask questions but first I must finish.”
Strickland was tempted to ask whether he should look the other way. He stood by with a pleasant expression as she annihilated the wiener and washed it down with a long draw on the brew. The young woman’s name was Mari Hame; she was, as Strickland at once suspected, a journalist.
“And Mr. Hylan,” she demanded, “where is he?”
“No one knows. Not in America and not here.”
“But this is strange,” Mari said.
“Yes, it is strange,” Strickland agreed. “He’s missing.”
Strickland found himself somewhat fascinated by the young reporter. The word for her, a word that graphically insinuated itself, was homely. She had long dark hair; her face was extremely pale and a little too full. Much of its character attached to the huge horn-rimmed glasses she wore, the lenses of which appeared as thick as the February ice on Lake Ladoga. But behind them her eyes were a treat, dark blue and utterly fanatical.
“Everyone is interested,” she confided to Strickland. “An American millionaire disappears.”
“I understand,” Strickland told her. “An American millionaire is a significant contemporary figure.”
As things turned out, Strickland spent the night with Mari. She told him of her adventures in Africa as a foreign aid worker. She reminisced about her first trip to Paris in the course of which she had consumed fourteen Pernods in succession at a sidewalk café. She asked Strickland if he knew a person named Charles Bukowski.
Next morning his telephone rang. Joyce Manning was on the line.
“We’ve had a change of plans, Ron. Come back as soon as you can.”
“Where’s Hylan?” he asked.
“Nothing on the phone, please. Just come back, O.K.?”
“Tomorrow,” he promised. “If I can finish up today.”
“Soonest,” Joyce told him.
That day, he hired a plane to overfly the Lipitsa yard and filmed from the air. Mari went along. In parting she gave Strickland a picture of herself at the Evangelical Mission station on the banks of the Okavango. Strickland thought it a marvelous photograph. Drawn and pale beneath a thorn tree, she faced down all the ironies of the Third World. Haunting her blue stare was the silent, unappeasable rage of the Lutheran God, His utter incomprehensibility, His furious impatience with the contradictions of inferior beings. Back in New York, he pinned Mari’s picture to his bulletin board, beside his pictures of starveling cattle, birds and the dead.
12
ONE DAY they went up to Stonington to get the ferry for Steadman’s Island. The day was as warm as predicted but drizzly and gray. Anne started out in fair spirits, favoring her mild hangover. Owen drove in silence.
During the crossing, they sat together atop a gearbox on the lee side, eluding the listless rain. The fog was heavy and the horn sounded at three-minute intervals all the way across.
Years before, in a different world, they had met on the island. She had been a counselor at a sailing camp and Owen an instructor. They had started dating the summer after his plebe year and the ferry had figured in their courtship. Often they had gone back and forth to the mainland for the ride, only to be alone in each other’s company. In those days a band played for dancing during the summer months. She had taught him to dance, after a fashion. They had spent whole crossings necking on the same gearbox, starboard aft.
Now side by side, not touching, they seemed to be avoiding each other’s eye. Secretly she glanced at him as he looked over the local morning paper. His silent, indifferent manner made her suspect him of being embarrassed at all these reminders of their old love. For a moment she felt the remnants of that breathless romance strewn around her, demystified and ironical with time, exposed to the gray rain.
Their house was two miles from the village, set above clay bluffs, a rambling Victorian relic surrounded by wind-dwarfed dark pines. Next to the house stood an old gazebo, its broken latticework rattling in the breeze. Immediately they set about the tasks of occupation. Browne lit the furnace, stripped tape from the seaward windows and made a fire in the fireplace. Anne opened the water and the gas.
When they were finished she put water on for coffee.
“Christ,” he said, “there’s so much to be done around this house.”
“For God’s sake, Owen, don’t start tinkering or I’ll be sorry we came. You’re going to do the brochures, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” he said. She watched him obsessing and rebelled.
“Well, you can’t do everything at once.” She went around the table at which they had been sitting and put a hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t you finish them off and then keep company with me?”
Her touch seemed to liberate him from his own stony state. He took her hand.
“Good idea,” he said. While he was setting up on the dining room table, she put on her raincoat and went outside to walk beside the cliffs.
The rain had stopped and fog was gathering to take its place. Following the sandy trail through stands of bayberry and wild roses, she could not see the ocean two hundred feet below nor much of the way ahead. The break of the waves sounded muffled and distant. On a misty promontory a half mile from the house, she bent to gather winter weeds and grasses for the house. She had a sense of the fog reflecting her own inwardness. She felt drawn to old obvious questions that had been put asid
e. Who inhabits me? What do I feel?
The unfamiliarity of the place and the weather out of season combined to produce in her a vertiginous confusion. She stayed where she was, afraid of falling. The fall she feared was deep and dark, more frightening than the empty space between her clifftop and the sea. For a moment she was paralyzed with nameless dread.
She walked in the fog for the rest of the morning. Back at the house she made some toast and read the Stonington paper. There were stories about a suspected cat poisoning, about a movie being filmed in the next town and about a proposed amendment to the village laws governing the sale of liquor. The paper also carried a syndicated story about Matthew Hylan’s disappearance and the impending collapse of his corporate network. Anne skipped over it. She had followed the story in the Wall Street Journal and the Times.
An hour later, she was curled in a living room chair reading Middlemarch when she saw Owen get up from the table and head for the door. She put the book down and went after him.
“Owen?”
He looked at her blankly, getting into his lumber jacket.
“Are you finished?” she asked him.
He shook his head.
“Where are you going? I thought we had a date.”
“I’m not finished,” he said. “I want to walk and think.”
“Well, really,” she said, unable to keep from saying it. “What is there to think about, writing that crap?”
“It’s my job,” he said. She had to admit he had her there. She had been more angry than she realized.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I resent the time it takes you. I wanted to walk with you before dark.”
“I’ll be back,” he said, “before dark.”
She returned to the living room, broke out her Smith-Corona portable and started work on her article about their Cape Sable crossing. Around three, a call came from a secretary at the Hylan Corporation. Harry Thorne wanted to speak to Owen. Anne told her to call back later.
