The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

  Skip looks inside. “You always liked Peanut Butter Cups,” he says, and for an instant, he’s her brother again. He pushes the bag back toward her. “I think I know what else is in there. I saw The Bear. In Dubai.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “Not a chance. Dad insisted on no connection. Told The Bear to stay far away from both of us.”

  “Is that why all his killings were in Dubai and Canada?”

  “Nothing that was near us, not even in the same country. Like I said, alibis.”

  Hazel nods. “That’s the reason you went to Dubai.”

  “Now you’re seeing it. Better to be far away while everything was going to craptown here. Also, I thought The Bear was coming right back to the States, though that changed too. He stayed in Dubai for a reason.”

  “Do we know that reason?”

  “If I’m right, what’s in that bag is a gift for me too,” Skip explains. “Still, the way he was waiting for you in Dubai, part of me thinks he wanted you out there, back into his world. Ever since you tracked him down all those years ago, you’ve always been The Bear’s favorite.”

  Hazel thinks about this. “So when Dad hired The Bear to protect us…? Did Dad know how The Bear felt about me?”

  “Y’mean, did he know The Bear was in love with you? What do you think?”

  Hazel had no idea. But the more she rolled it around her head, the more she wondered if there was anything her father didn’t know.

  Skip looks out his window, at the blackness of the Atlantic. “I didn’t kill Dad,” he adds, “you realize that, right?”

  “I do,” Hazel says. “So that was the one truth: a heart attack?”

  “He was quitting the show, quitting his life. He thought it might make them back off, but let’s be honest—if I went down for what I did in Libya, they were taking him down with me. Can you imagine the pressure?”

  Hazel can’t.

  “I told him not to go to Moten. I knew Moten would do something to take advantage.”

  “It was his wife,” Hazel says. “He wanted to get her treatment for her cancer. She was practically dead already.”

  “Dad would’ve done the same for Mom,” Skip says.

  They both stay silent. It was true, Hazel recognizes. Dad would have done anything for her, even if it was beyond reason.

  “Y’know,” Skip says eventually, “it used to take six weeks to sail from England to America? Took the pilgrims sixty-six days to make landfall. And we’ll make it in six hours, if you don’t count that time on the tarmac. Time isn’t the same anymore. I really believe that.”

  “Redeeming the time,” Hazel says, “because the days are evil.”

  “From an old book, right?”

  Hazel nods.

  “I should read more old books,” Skip says, not for the first time.

  “Is it even real?” Hazel asks. “Benedict Arnold’s bible?”

  “Have we not been having the same conversation?”

  “No,” Hazel says. “I mean the actual book that George Washington sent back. Is it real? Is it out there?”

  “Dad thought it was, and he was the expert. So I’m going with yes. Maybe it has something good in it. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “It would be,” she says.

  The flight attendant comes by and asks Hazel if she’d like some champagne, or some warm nuts, or crostini with a salmon pâté. “All of it,” Hazel says. “Bring me all of it.”

  “Two of everything,” Skip says.

  “Yes,” Hazel says, “make it three.”

  “I thought you couldn’t taste anything,” Skip says when the flight attendant walks off.

  “I think I had a breakthrough today.”

  Skip grins, then looks at his watch. “We’ve got three more hours on this flight, and then when we get to London, I’m leaving you. People might be looking for me by then. I mean really looking for me. So that bag there with my hair and nails?” he says, pointing to the bag with The Bear’s final gift. “Hold on to that. Every now and then, I’m going to want you to leave a little evidence. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “How’s your brain doing?”

  “It’s pretty mucked up.”

  “Y’know, in the end, you actually figured out who killed Kennedy. Get it? Killed Kennedy? I mean, even Dad never did that.”

  “I just remembered,” Hazel says, “I never found you funny.”

  There’s the kilowatt smile. There’s Skip Nash. The flight attendant drops off the nuts and champagne. Hazel has a thousand questions for her brother, because there are a thousand mysteries left to be solved. Who was their mother? Was she even dead? What other damage did Hazel do? What other jobs were done by their father? What mysteries were real? She needs these answered.

  But then she realizes she may never see her brother again, so she says, “Tell me what you remember about my first birthday.”

  97

  Havana, Cuba

  1975

  Season 1, Pilot Episode (1975): “The Instigator”

  Jack Nash should be scared to death, but instead he’s excited. Life? It’s happening now.

  He’s twenty-nine years old and he’s sitting in a hotel bar in Havana, Cuba, the last place on earth, other than maybe East Berlin or Moscow, where an American should want to be.

  Last week, he was in New Haven, Connecticut, with Ingrid Ludlow, and it was, he thought then, the sort of thing he could get used to. His show, The House of Secrets, wasn’t even on the air yet, but already he had the sense that traveling the world with Ingrid, solving a few mysteries along the way, that was not a bad way to spend his time.

  Everything seemed…vivid. Yes. That’s what he thought. Everything in sharp focus—the future, the past, right now, all of it.

  His father, Cyrus, he’d done a bit of this sort of thing back in the day, working in the Army Signal Corps and as a journalist covering the odd and the unusual, and then on the radio doing the same, before settling in as the host of the “creature feature” Friday nights on Channel 2 in Portland for the last ten years, always wearing a cape or a smoking jacket or a black turtleneck, always staring off vaguely into some middle distance. And really, that’s all Jack had been doing in the tiny local news studio in Burbank these last few years—parroting his father’s shtick—until the network decided he’d be better off in the field, seeing the world.

  “You know one thing you should take a look at,” Cyrus had told him a few months before, at the beach house there in Seaside, where Cyrus spent most of his downtime now, most of his uptime too, “is Benedict Arnold’s bible.”

  “Not that,” Jack said. Cyrus had been going on about it for years, the fringe mysticism of the Revolutionary War, one of those things Cyrus could expound upon for hours. It was the sort of thing he read about in those crappy mimeographed books he bought from people in their garages, or through the mail, then he’d sit in the backyard, smoking Pall Malls, drinking boilermakers, underlining passages.

  “No? Oh, it’s quite a mystery,” Cyrus said and told him, again, about the legend behind it: that whoever held it could gain great power, that it showed up in the worst places, that it presaged some of the greatest disasters and stopped even more, moving covertly through the hands of the most powerful people on the planet.

  “That part is new,” Jack said. “The bit about the world leaders and such.”

  “No? I never mentioned that before?”

  “Somehow you failed to,” Jack said. They were sitting outside, it was late afternoon, the Pacific at full roar, a storm somewhere out there sending wave after wave to the beach. “How exactly did this transfer take place?” Jack asked, curious to see what conspiracy his father would cook up, and aware too of the way Cyrus’s hands were beginning to shake a little.

  “Usually,” Cyrus said carefully, using The Voice, the same one he employed to scare small children on TV, “inside dead bodies.”

  “You don’t believe that old story,” Jack said. It wa
sn’t a question, but already Jack could see that, oh, yes, his father did indeed believe.

  “Of course I do,” Cyrus said.

  “Okay,” Jack said, “devil’s advocate—if the bible is such bad luck, why doesn’t someone just burn it? All these years, someone should have had that idea by now.”

  “It’s guarded by some of the fiercest creatures alive,” Cyrus said. Jack thought his father sounded like he actually had convinced himself of this absurdity. “You come for Benedict Arnold’s bible, be prepared to fight a bear.”

  “Dad, come on,” Jack said. “You sound crazy. Like someone on my show. Worse, like someone on your show.”

  “Crazy,” Cyrus said, “or exceptionally observant?” Cyrus smiled then, patted Jack on the leg, and told him he’d see one day. Then he changed the subject to how Sirhan Sirhan was likely a government agent.

  And yet, here Jack was, in Cuba, by way of Toronto since he couldn’t legally get into the country from the United States. Jack was here scouting locations for their very first show, about how in the weeks before JFK was killed, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to get a visa into Cuba. The irony wasn’t lost on Jack.

  For any American able to get here, it was truly an opportunity.

  Last night, Jack checked into the Santiago, an old hotel on the western edge of the city, and was told he’d be met the next day by an attaché from the Canadian embassy who could guide him through the morass of regulations the Cubans had before he’d be able to film.

  What Jack notices, however, is that everyone in this hotel bar, other than the employees, is foreign. Russians. French. Germans. Eastern European. He’s the only American.

  “You must be the guy I’m looking for.”

  Jack turns at the sounds of English and finds a heavyset man about his age pulling out the chair next to him, plunking himself down. He’s wearing a linen suit, white collared shirt, no tie—it’s too damn hot for that—and he’s got a thin, light brown, leather valise, stamped with the maple leaf emblem of Canada.

  “Louis?” Jack says.

  “That’s right,” Louis Moten says. He extends his hand and Jack sees he’s got a class ring from Yale, bulky, a little gaudy, but somehow Moten makes it work. He’s maybe twenty-seven, but carries himself like he’s older, a kind of weary seen-everything-done-everything air.

  “What’s an Ivy League man from Canada doing in Cuba?” Jack asks.

  “Saving the day, seems like,” Moten says, then gives Jack a slap on the shoulder, a little harder than Jack was expecting.

  “I appreciate your help,” Jack says.

  “Not a problem,” Moten says. “Always happy to help our little brother to the south.” He unzips the valise and hands Jack a stack of documents. “I need you to sign those before we go any further.”

  Jack glances at the papers. They’re thick with legalese, but what Jack thinks he’s reading is that if anything bad happens to him, Canada isn’t to blame. In fact, no one is to blame. His body will be left behind, because technically, he’s not here.

  “I don’t know,” Jack says. “This doesn’t seem right.”

  “SOP,” Moten says, and when Jack doesn’t respond, he says, “Standard Operating Procedure. You weren’t in Vietnam?”

  “No,” Jack says.

  “Deferment?”

  “Yeah,” Jack says. It’s not something he likes to talk about; he’s pretty sure his father pulled some big strings. Ropes, most likely.

  “Aren’t you the fortunate son,” Moten says.

  There’s a hint of twang in his voice. More than a hint of derision too. Something doesn’t add up. “You don’t sound Canadian,” Jack says. “Or look Canadian.”

  “No? What does a Canadian look like?”

  “Less linen,” Jack says.

  “Father’s Texan,” Moten says. “Spent my summers there. I come by it honestly.” Then, “You drinking?”

  “Not yet,” Jack says.

  “Let’s rectify that.” Moten waves at the bartender, shouting, “Dos cervezas,” and a few seconds later, a waiter drops off two bottles of beer, ice cold. “One good thing about the Communists,” Moten says, “they still like to drink.” He takes a pen from his pocket. “Sign the papers, Jack, so we can have a good time, all right? Before you betray your government.”

  Jack Nash is twenty-nine years old. Life is happening all around him. Ingrid is waiting for him fifteen hundred miles away. He can still taste the salt of her sweat. What the hell.

  * * *

  Ninety minutes later, Jack’s drunk and he and Moten are fast friends, or at least that’s what Jack thinks, his head starting to spin a little. They’ve moved from beer to rum.

  “Let me show you something,” Moten says. He again opens his valise, and this time comes out with a black-and-white photo that he hands to Jack. “You recognize that person?”

  Jack shakes his head.

  “This man is staying in your hotel,” Moten says. “In fact, is sitting right there.” Moten gestures to his right, to a table with an older man, blond, blue eyed, maybe fifty, his skin as pale as porcelain. Looks East German. He’s sitting with a woman in her twenties, wearing a yellow sundress, maybe his daughter.

  “I don’t know them,” Jack says.

  Moten taps his index finger on the rum bottle, nearly empty now, so it makes a pong-pong-pong noise. “They’re dangerous people.”

  “I’m just here to do this show, get back on a plane, and go home. I’m not looking for trouble.”

  “That’s a good outlook, Jack,” Moten says. “You’ll go far in this business.” He downs a shot of rum, pours himself another, and one for Jack too.

  Jack reaches for the shot, then thinks better of it, not liking the way he can’t quite focus. He’s not much of a drinker, not like this half-Texan, who doesn’t seem even slightly buzzed. Then he downs it anyway, because that’s what his father Cyrus would do, and if there’s one thing he’s learned from his father it’s that when you’re asked to be a man, be a man.

  “Attaboy,” Moten says.

  Jack feels like the world is tipping, like he’s already asleep and this is a dream. “Have I been drugged?”

  “Little bit,” Moten says.

  Jack looks around the bar. Everything in his vision leaves streaks of light when he turns his head, like tracers. LSD? Maybe. Everything seems slower, like he’s operating inside of a memory.

  “Tell me something, Jack. Do your daddy and you ever talk any shop? He ever tell you about the work he did overseas? During Korea? That ever come up?”

  “No,” Jack says.

  “Good. Then he gets to live. Can’t have your father telling stories about my father.”

  “Wait, our fathers knew each other?”

  “Signal Corps. They worked together. My dad gave yours orders, though sometimes it might’ve been the other way around.” Moten finishes off the last inch of rum, waves the empty bottle in the air, shouts, “Por favor, por favor.”

  “You’re not Canadian, are you?”

  “Today? Yes.”

  Jack tries to stand up, an uneasy proposition, but Moten grabs him by the wrists, yanks him down hard, keeps hold of him. Jack is aware of the man’s strength. This guy is nobody’s attaché.

  “Calm down, Jack,” Moten says, his voice hardly above a whisper. “You don’t want to make a scene.” He applies subtle pressure to Jack’s wrists. “You know what’s a bad way to die? Severing your radial artery with your own shattered wrist bones. You don’t want that, do you, Jack?” Jack shakes his head. “Now I’m going to let go of you. Let’s act like gentlemen, all right? Say ‘We’re gentlemen,’ Jack.” He squeezes, and pain shoots into Jack’s eyes. A pressure point, Jack knows, but it hardly matters. Pain is pain.

  “We’re gentlemen,” Jack says, and Moten lets go of him just as the waiter comes over and drops off more drinks without even looking in Jack’s direction. Jack could be naked and bleeding from the eyes and no one would look at him twice, not in this place.

>   Except the girl in the sundress, who has angled her chair so that Jack can see her in his peripheral vision. She’s watching him with no compunction whatsoever. She is beautiful and, Jack can see now, pregnant. Just a bump, barely showing at all.

  “I have a job offer for you,” Moten says.

  “I have a job already. I’m making a TV show.”

  “I’ve got a better job for you. One that’ll keep your show on the air longer than you ever anticipated. Longer than even my dad kept your dad’s show on the air,” Moten says. “You wanna get married, Jack? You see that in your future? Big family, bunch of kids?”

  “One day,” Jack says, and he’s not sure why he’s answering so candidly, why everything he says is the truth.

  “You think that girl over there is pretty?” Louis nods toward the pregnant woman and the East German man.

  “She’s beautiful,” Jack says.

  “You think you could spend your life with her? At least three or four years of it?”

  “I don’t even know her name,” Jack says.

  “What’s your favorite name?”

  “Ingrid.”

  “Then what’s your second favorite?”

  “Claire.”

  “Your lucky day,” Moten says. “Her name is Claire.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “With a boy. You can give him a name too. Something strong, like William or Thomas.”

  “Nicholas.”

  “Perfect. Like the saint.” Moten motions with two fingers, and Jack can hear chairs sliding on hardwood. Then the pregnant woman and the East German man are gone.

  Moten pours Jack another shot. “Why don’t you have a drink, Jack. We need to talk about your future.” He pours himself another shot too. “Let me tell you a story I once heard—I think my father heard it from your father, or maybe it was the other way around,” he continues. “It’s about a dead body with a bible stuffed inside of it. You’ll love it. Big mystery.”

  Epilogue

  Los Angeles

  Now

  Hazel Nash decides, at noon on a Sunday, Los Angeles filled with the smell of pumpkin spice lattes, to try jogging for the first time since her accident. She’s living at her father’s house in Studio City, a life of quiet avoidance.