by Taylor Smith
Lindsay is still fast asleep upstairs, her copper curls a striking contrast to the white down pillows and the shimmering blue-black fur of the cat curled up at her side. She has inherited Emma Korman’s fat tomcat. The Korman sons, it turns out, are allergy-prone, so Mr. Rochester is going to live in Virginia. Lindsay has already begun to spoil him shamelessly, and Rochester is in love. Hotel management is turning an indulgent blind eye to his presence. The cat is unobtrusive, after all, unlike others in this ever-changing entourage.
Mr. Rochester is not the only orphaned animal to have found a new home this week. Detective Scheiber has decided to adopt a tricolor basset hound named Kermit. He told Mariah he only meant to take the dog home overnight, but his six-year-old stepson refused to give it up. He and the boy have decided they will enroll Kermit in obedience classes, which may not do the headstrong, lovable dog much good, but could help cement a new bond that seems to be forging between father and son.
The dog was spotted—or rather, his mournful baying was heard—late Friday night by a fisherman, who came across a sixty-foot sloop called the Wright Think’r, floating adrift and apparently unmanned about a mile off the coast. On boarding her, he found not only the dog, but also the body of the owner, Douglas Porter. The UCLA cleaning lady, shown a photo of the tall, bullet-headed Porter, conceded that he could well have been the man she saw outside Urquhart’s office the night the professor died. Forensic testing has confirmed the architect died by his own gun, found next to the body. A brief suicide note also showed up, although Scheiber is troubled by the fact that the apparently left-handed Porter was shot in the right temple.
It’s not the only unsolved mystery of this affair. Porter’s erstwhile partner on the Nova Krimsky casino project, Nolan Carr, has vanished since the incident on the Aleksandr Pushkin. A small yacht tender belonging to him was found the next morning, hung up on the rocks below his estate. There is speculation that he was trying to slip back into the cave boathouse under cover of night, possibly to get some emergency cash discovered hidden behind a false panel in an equipment shed—nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in mad money stashed away for such a time as this. However, Scheiber himself had closed the doors of the boathouse when trying to stop Tucker’s escape in the Zodiac, inadvertently hitting the security lock, which prevented the door being opened from the outside. Newport police have kept the house under surveillance ever since, but Nolan has not shown up.
Hunter Carr assets have been frozen, meantime, pending investigation by the FBI, the IRS, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department. Their creditors are screaming. Arlen Hunter, it seems, should have spent less time indulging his only child and more teaching her to manage his murky empire. His heirs have dissipated his fortune in about a third the time it took the old brigand to build it. Young Nolan managed to dazzle their bankers temporarily with predictions of fabulous profits from Nova Krimsky, but with him now unaccounted for and yesterday’s announcement in Moscow that Nolan’s development consortium has been dumped from the project, the vultures are beginning to circle over what remains of Arlen Hunter’s empire.
Mariah approaches the sun-dappled water. Wide, tiled steps lead into the shallow end of the turquoise pool, but she prefers the deep-water plunge. She hesitates at the edge for a moment, stretching out her muscles, gingerly massaging her temples. Her head aches a little. The doctors have told her the concussion will take a few weeks to heal completely. In the meantime, it is a painful souvenir of Nolan Carr’s fury at finding out she’d convinced his mother to turn him in.
It could have been worse, Mariah thinks. Nolan might have killed her outright when he snuck up behind her that night. Maybe he held back a little because the gilded wooden icon he’d grabbed from the hall table was irreplaceable and had once belonged to Catherine the Great. Or maybe he just didn’t want to deal with the mess. That was Lermontov’s job, after all. Nolan had borrowed the big Russian enforcer and brought him home as an unsubtle reminder to Renata of the importance of keeping her mouth shut—only by the time they got there, it was too late. His mother had already betrayed him.
Nolan’s attack on Mariah and Porter’s spontaneous decision to kidnap Lindsay were the knee-jerk reactions of weak men who were in over their heads. Having dealt profitably with Arlen Hunter for decades, Zakharov had learned too late that the grandson was not cut of the same cold cloth. It was his second biggest mistake, Mariah decides. The first was murdering Anatoly Orlov. Of all Zakharov’s victims, Orlov was the one who would come back to haunt him. A nation does not forgive the murder of its heroes.
Yuri Belenko has been by to apologize to Mariah for what she and her daughter have been through. Zakharov, he says, went back to Moscow expecting to be named premier, next step to the presidency itself, only to find his backers beginning to desert him in droves. The mob also considers him too great a liability to be a figurehead for Nova Krimsky any longer. Belenko confides that he suspects Nolan Carr has been permanently silenced. He thinks Zakharov will need to watch his back, too, because organized criminals do not care for the kind of public attention he is getting.
In publicizing the Orlov/Bolt file, Frank Tucker has done exactly what the Navigator hoped. As for Belenko, he was Deriabin’s spy inside the Zakharov camp, it seems. Arranging for Mariah to be introduced to the foreign minister was, he admits mischievously, an unsubtle but perversely pleasing bid to rattle the man. And by the way, Belenko adds, he is grateful for Mariah’s offer of alternative employment, although he won’t take her up on it at the moment. Things are in a state of flux where he is, and opportunities abound. But who knows what the future will bring? He only hopes the two of them will run into each other again.
And the other files Deriabin gave Frank? Belenko has told Mariah they were mere filler—accurate enough in their portrayal of Zakharov’s crimes over the years, but useless in terms of getting rid of him. Then why not just give Frank the one file that mattered? Mariah asked. Because, Belenko explained, the Navigator calculated that Tucker would resist such blunt manipulation. He had to believe he was picking his own battle. From what he knows of Mr. Tucker, Belenko is not surprised to learn he destroyed the rest of the files rather than let them fall into the wrong hands.
Belenko has also given Mariah a gift—her father’s papers, including the manuscript for his novel, Man in the Middle, stolen from Chap Korman by Porter, his killer, to hand over to his new Russian friends. And it is Ben’s novel, Belenko says firmly, handing her at the same time another yellowed, Russian-language manuscript—Man at the Edge, by Anatoly Orlov. This is the novel smuggled out of the Soviet Union and entrusted to Ben Bolt in an act of defiance that got both men murdered. The KGB, hidebound bureaucracy that it was, had filed Orlov’s novel away rather than destroy it. Now, says Belenko, it’s time for this great joint project of two brilliant writers, conceived during that long-ago meeting in Paris, to be published as they always hoped it would—as a tandem set, parallel visions of a Utopian future. Creative, hopeful hands clasping across a great ideological divide.
Mariah, unspeakably moved to know the truth at last, has promised to deliver them both to her father’s publisher.
She knows there are tears running down her face when she dives into the pool, but as her body tenses at the first shock of the plunge, they are quickly washed away. Ben did not betray Orlov. And he had wanted to come home.
She surrenders to the buoyant, silken cool, and her feet kick off the smooth tile. She does two laps of breaststroke to warm up before settling into the rhythm of a strong freestyle, feeling more contented with every stroke than she can remember having felt for a very long time.
She’ll do her laps, then go up and have breakfast with Lindsay. The hotel has moved them to a larger, two-bedroom suite—partly because it is on a floor with more security, which they need right now, given the media onslaught they are going through.
One reporter is conspicuously absent among those clamoring for interviews, however. Paul Chaney did telephone af
ter news broke of the incident on the Pushkin. The brief message he left on her hotel voice mail said he hoped Mariah and Lindsay—and Frank, he added reluctantly—were all doing well, and that he and Mariah would have a chance to talk soon to clear up any misunderstandings between them. In light of the breaking scandal, clips from his interview with Zakharov—probably the Russian’s last—are getting wide airplay. But Chaney has announced he feels honor bound, in the name of objectivity and given his personal link to some of the players, to refrain from commenting on either the fall of the Arlen Hunter empire or the much-anticipated final literary triumph of Benjamin Bolt. Only Mariah knows how humiliated Paul must be at having misjudged things so badly, but she will never mention it.
The other reason Mariah and Lindsay have changed hotel suites is in anticipation of Frank’s release from hospital in the next few days—maybe even tomorrow, the doctors have said, amazed as they are by the man’s indomitable constitution. In the meantime, Mariah and Lindsay will head down to Long Beach Memorial Hospital later and spend the afternoon with him, as they’ve done every day since he rescued them from the Pushkin.
The bullet Frank took passed almost right through him, finally coming to rest a scant two millimeters from his spine, breaking a rib and nicking his diaphragm en route. But he looks set to make a complete recovery. Even Ms. Latham, who was ready to have him arrested only a few days earlier, asks after him every day and wants Mariah to apprise her of anything he might need when he arrives at the hotel.
Frank thought he was resting up in preparation for his inevitable incarceration, but that seems unlikely. Jack Geist was in town on Sunday. While he is not pleased with Frank’s unilateral decision to destroy the Navigator’s files, he seems willing—almost eager—to promote the view that they consisted of unreliable material, possibly even outright disinformation. In any case, legal action against Frank is out of the question. The CIA, Geist said firmly, does not air its dirty linen in public. Congress does not want to hear about rogues inside an agency that receives billions of dollars annually from the public purse.
After Geist had left Frank’s hospital room, Mariah cornered him privately in the hall, pressing him to reveal what he had planned for Frank. After all, she pointed out, the man could hardly be relegated to a danker pit than he’d already been occupying before this happened. Geist thought about this. It was true Frank’s talents were being underutilized, he said. Perhaps that was part of the problem, and needed to be rectified. But first, Frank needed to decide that the agency was still where he wanted to be. If so, there would be a position waiting for him appropriate to his experience and seniority. In the meantime, Geist said briskly, Saddam Hussein was once more massing tanks in the Middle East, and the president required briefing. He had to get back to Washington.
Mariah has also noted that since Geist’s departure and the end of her assignment to recruit Belenko, she has lost her ever-present tail.
She starts down her final lap of the pool. Frank has to decide about the future. So does she. Whatever decisions they make, she suspects, they will be making them together. She smiles at the notion. There is a certain comforting inevitability about it, a sense of events running a course they were always meant to follow.
Lindsay is already trying to convince her mother they should drive back home across country. All of them—Mariah, Lindsay, Mr. Rochester and Frank. She could help with the driving, Lindsay has hinted broadly. Maybe they could stop in Las Vegas. It’s not a place Mariah has any great desire to visit, but Lindsay thinks it would be great to see the Strip and catch some shows and Elvis impersonators. Maybe check out those drive-through wedding chapels, she added mischievously, her dark eyes dancing from one to the other as Frank and Mariah find themselves un-characteristically red-faced, suddenly tongue-tied and shy with one another. How did that daughter of hers ever get to be so clever? Mariah wonders.
She reaches the end of the pool and hauls herself out, energized. Ready to start the day.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-6475-8
THE INNOCENTS CLUB
Copyright © 2000 by M. G. Smith.
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