The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  I was working at the flat that evening, trying to write a story about fishing the River Drake—not naming it, of course. The phone rang and I answered.

  “Bowie Rhodes?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Danny, from New York.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m calling on a pay phone,” she said hurriedly, “so please listen.” Her voice was shaky and bordered on shrill. “I found a way to get information about emigrants. Your Key is listed as going to Switzerland in 1938. I also found an FBI bulletin with him on the list of wanteds. Same year. The funny thing is that he was only on the list one week. We got weekly bulletins from the FBI for about twenty years and archived them all so I could look down the road to see if there were further listings and there weren’t.” She was talking fast.

  “I called the State Department about Key and the next thing I know I was visited by two fascists who said they were with one of the alphabet agencies of the federal government. They had credentials, but I couldn’t find any reference to the agency later when I looked in our government index. I’m sorry to unload like this, but these jerks told me that M. J. Key was a national security matter and that I should, and I quote, ‘cease and desist’ from my search. They gave me a lecture about how private citizens should not be disturbing things they knew nothing about and they made it clear that if I continue, I’m gonna have some serious problems, including getting admitted to the bar. I’m probably paranoid, but after they left I went to check the card file on Key and his listings had all been removed. I checked around. Nobody here will own up to doing it and nobody knows why. Now I’m wondering if the fascists have my phones bugged at home and work so I came over here to Staten Island to use a pay phone. Bowie, I can’t help you anymore. I’m a coward.”

  “I’m amazed you’ve gotten as far as you have. You are not a coward, Danny.” In her shoes, I’d feel paranoia too. References removed from the New York City Public Library? What the hell was going on? And, more important, why?

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m real sorry about this, okay? Take care of yourself and maybe you ought to forget about Key too?”

  After I hung up, I poured a glass of Scotch and sat down. General Centre was warning me away from Key in England and now some government jerks were doing the same to Danny in New York. If I had possessed good sense, I would have quit. But I was convinced that solving the mystery of Key was the way to solve the snowfly, and I refused to be deflected.

  Several days later, the news finally broke on Daly’s daughter. She had been missing for weeks and was believed taken by one of the warring factions in Northern Ireland, but no group had claimed credit and nobody knew where she was.

  Meanwhile, I began to pursue Anjali to no avail. I asked her to dinner, but she was busy. I asked her to breakfast; same answer.

  •••

  One afternoon I went to Brogger’s office and caught him on the way out.

  “Brogger,” I said. “Congratulations are in order. You’ve finally sold the Oxley books.”

  “That’s a private matter,” he said, backing away.

  “I spoke with Gretchen.”

  I saw signs of confusion. Then fright. His face flushed, the red deepening to crimson. He would not fare well in a poker game.

  “I know nobody by that name,” he said, his eyes darting around anxiously.

  “Well, she knows you. Says you pay handsomely for her personal services. Or should I say intimate? I’m thinking your wife might like to know.”

  “I will not be intimidated,” he said weakly.

  “This isn’t intimidation,” I said. “I’d like to know the name of the buyer and I’d like it to check out. Otherwise I go to your wife. You can use whatever word you like to describe this transaction. I call it a promise. It’s the books I’m interested in,” I added, “not your personal business.” He looked a little relieved, but still skeptical.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I simply cannot help you.”

  I countered in a reasonable tone, “Then help yourself.”

  Brogger stared daggers at me, but took a pen out of his coat, scribbled a note on a small piece of paper, and handed it to me. There was a name written in a crooked hand.

  “Mikhail Peshkov,” I said out loud. “Who is he?”

  “Peshkov bought the entire collection. He’s in the Soviet embassy here in London.”

  “Why would a Russian want the collection?”

  “The Russians do read,” he said sharply.

  “I know. But why Peshkov?”

  “Like it or not, Rhodes, the books are out of reach.” Brogger looked miserable. “I can tell you that Mister Peshkov is exceedingly well known to Her Majesty’s government. He acquires various items from time to time. As a representative of certain personages in Moscow, if you take my meaning.”

  Meaning Kremlin big shots? “For whom, exactly?”

  Brogger gave me a malevolent smile. “You’ll have to take that up with Comrade Peshkov.”

  “The books are in the Soviet Union now?”

  “This has been most unpleasant, Rhodes. Now you really must excuse me, and I hope we never meet again.”

  I left feeling dirty. I had not intended to play dirty, but sometimes you had no choice.

  •••

  Joe Daly’s daughter was discovered dead in early December in a hotel room in southern Spain. The death was attributed to an overdose of drugs.

  Daly handled the news better than I would have. “She didn’t use drugs,” he said. “The fucking lunatics got her is what happened.”

  She would be buried in Massachusetts. There was a lot of news coverage and speculation about her disappearance from Northern Ireland. Joe Daly announced he would take a month off.

  Dolly handed me a memo as I left the office that night. “Miss Anjali Toddywalla telephoned you today.”

  When I called, Anjali seemed pleased to hear from me. She wondered if I would escort her while she did some Christmas shopping. I readily agreed and took a few days off to trail around with her. She was a careful shopper with expensive tastes. She bought a fly reel for Charlie that cost the equivalent of three thousand dollars American. It was called a Carlysle and she told me that the maker produced only about twenty of them a year.

  I had Christmas dinner with Anjali and Charlie at Nolan’s. They were very gracious about the food. Anjali gave me one of the same reels she gave Charlie, explaining that she didn’t want him to have an unfair advantage, him being so competitive and such. I gave her a painting I had chanced upon in a London shop. It was of a brace of trout, finning in green water that flowed languidly over them carrying flies. It had cost me nearly two weeks’ salary, but it was worth it and she made a great fuss over it.

  “A Victor,” she said after scrutinizing it silently for the longest time. “Not signed that I can see, but this is his work.”

  “Victor?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know,” she said in a scolding tone.

  “I found it in a secondhand shop and liked it.”

  She stared at me, aghast. “Found it? How much?”

  “It’s a gift. You’re not supposed to ask that question.”

  “Bollocks. How much?”

  I told her. She started laughing and covered her face.

  “Share the joke?”

  “Good God, Rhodes. Alistair Victor is one of the country’s greatest painters of fish and pastoral scenes. Ranks with Turner. I should think this is worth twenty thousand.”

  “Dollars?” I asked faintly.

  “Pounds sterling.”

  I did the mental calculation and redid it.

  “We must get it appraised,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Doesn’t hurt to know what one has. Sure you want to give it as a gift?”

>   “That hurts.”

  She kissed me chastely on the cheek. “Feel better now?”

  “Almost,” I said. She only smiled in response.

  As fate would have it, the painting indeed turned out to be an unknown Alistair Victor and was worth an estimated forty thousand pounds as an auction starting price. But Anjali hung it in her bedroom in the cottage and said she would admire it at the start of every day for the rest of her life.

  On New Year’s Eve I was invited to join them at Charlie’s town house for a party he was throwing. The gathering featured a real assortment of characters: footballers, professors, cops, peers, several men in kilts, sailors in uniform. And, of course, more women than men.

  It got very drunk out that night and we brought 1970 in through a thick haze and lots of laughter and singing. As the other partygoers collapsed in various parts of the house, with arms and legs intertwined and snores buzzing like a summer thunderstorm in the offing, Anji and I found ourselves alone and staring at each other.

  “I’d like very much to see where you live,” she said.

  We took a cab to my flat and she methodically looked over my belongings, especially the strange painting of five women making love.

  “Amazons,” she announced.

  “What?”

  “No right breasts. The Amazons had them removed so as not to interfere with shooting their bows. Very practical women, I must say.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe her.

  What happened after this was less sequential than simultaneous. It began with Anji asking if I was familiar with the “wants,” and transferred directly and expeditiously to bed where we let loose with such intensity that during a momentary lull, Anji clung close and asked in a whisper, “Know why lovers feel so good?”

  I had an idea, but said, “Tell me.”

  She said, “Because you never know when you will lose it all. This is what makes every second precious. Time is the essence of love, Bowie.”

  As was normal, my flat was devoid of food. We decided to go out to a place I knew that served early risers.

  “Perhaps we can even catch the sunrise?” I suggested.

  Anji laughed out loud. “You mean purple smog?”

  As we slowly descended the stairs arm in arm, Anji asked, “What took us so long to get together? Is it my imagination or have you been avoiding me?”

  “I could say the same thing about you.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “We are compatible, are we not?”

  “You have to ask that after what we just experienced?”

  She smiled and squeezed my arm. “Point well taken. What then has held us back?” adding quickly, “I will readily admit that I share culpability. As you have just seen, I have entertained certain prurient thoughts, but simply couldn’t muster the courage to talk about them, much less act on them.”

  “You don’t lack courage,” I said.

  She stepped to the stair below me, stopped, and leaned her head back for a kiss.

  “I love your tallness,” she said.

  “And I love yours,” I replied.

  “I am more the timid rabbit than you can imagine, Bowie dear,” she said.

  “Perhaps you fear attaching to a nomadic journalist?”

  “I can’t picture me chasing you around battlefields like some sort of common camp follower,” she said. “Can you?”

  “I doubt you could be a common anything,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Please, we are attempting to have a serious conversation. Could you see yourself settling down in England, perhaps writing a book or two?”

  “I can’t see that,” I said, and immediately wondered if I was too selfish for another person.

  “Oh dear,” Anjali Toddywalla said. “We seem to be at an impasse. Now what?”

  I didn’t know. “Make every second precious?” I ventured.

  “Such a lovely thing to say,” Anjali said.

  I wanted to spend the day with her, but I had a story waiting for me at the office. It wasn’t earth shattering, but I thought of myself as a pro, so we took a cab to Charlie’s, had a passionate leave-taking in one of his bedrooms, and I headed for work.

  The next night, a Thursday, the phone rang. When I finally answered it, I heard Anjali’s muffled voice; she sounded scared out of her wits. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m alone at Charlie’s,” she whispered. “There’s an intruder!”

  “Where are the servants?”

  “Off tonight.”

  “I’ll call the police,” I said.

  “Oh my God,” she said. I heard a clunk and we were cut off. My heart was racing, my adrenaline pumping. I called Dolly Aster at home and asked her to call the police while I caught a cab to Charlie Jowett’s place. The lights were off in the house and the front door was standing open. I was shaking badly as I approached the front door and eased my way in.

  I called softly to Anjali but got no answer and proceeded up into the house until I heard noise on the third level. A loud thump and a muffled squeal. I pushed through a door and saw a man with a black truncheon. Anjali was on the floor, her hair glistening with fresh blood. I charged the man, who deftly stepped out of my way and whacked me in the side of the head not once but several times as I fell.

  Once I was down, the man drove kicks into my ribs and I rolled around trying to avoid further punishment; as I lay there in a defensive curl I realized that I recognized my assailant. It was the man named Thigpen, the enforcer for the gang Charlie had told me about.

  “’Ere it is, guv,” the man said. “You been givin’ a lot of good people a pain in the arse. I’m to tell you that you back off now or the woman ’ere will be the one to pie the price. Capice?”

  He ended his speech by kicking me in the small of the back.

  The police entered with whistles shrilling seconds after he left.

  Anjali was taken by ambulance to a private hospital. I spent the night at Scotland Yard with the police. I did not identify Thigpen. I knew that if I did, someone else would hurt Anjali. I was sick that she was hurt and more than a little confused. Why had this happened? Simple revenge for Thigpen, or had Hedge sent him? Or was it Brogger or Wonbrow or General Centre? Shelldrake? I had no idea and every direction I turned, I saw enemies. Anjali was seriously injured and had to have her spleen removed. I had a cracked rib and some nasty contusions.

  •••

  Daly retired and never returned to England. In taking his leave, he informed only Dolly, who was quite distressed. As far as the rest of us on staff knew, Joe was on vacation and would return any day. Then, the day after the beating, his office was cleaned out.

  Grady Yetter arrived a few days after we learned about Joe Daly and took me out to dinner. Over drinks he looked at my battered face. “Something I should know about?”

  “Nope.” Yetter smartly changed subjects. “I guess Joe couldn’t deal with the loss of his kid,” he told me. “Good thing you didn’t go over there. That could have been you.”

  “Bullshit. You can’t project like that. Different people, different styles. Besides, I’m an orphan now.”

  He shook his head. “You’d stick your nose up the devil’s ass if there was a story in it.”

  The comment struck too close to home and I let it pass.

  “There’s a new chief coming in,” Yetter said, looking very unhappy.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Puffit,” he said.

  Del Puffit, my asshole superior from Manila. “You’re putting me on, right?”

  “I wish I was, but I’m not that cruel.”

  “He’s an incompetent slab of shit.”

  Yetter’s head bobbed. “Politics.”

  “Politics! That’s your fucking explanation for everything!”

  “Politics are always behind
shit,” he said weakly.

  “Puffit will can my ass,” I said.

  “There’s a whole world to work in.”

  “Yeah? What about Moscow?” It was out before I could think about it.

  “Moscow?” he said. “I was thinking New York.”

  “New York’s not in the wide world. It’s its own little one. What about Moscow?” I repeated.

  “I can’t,” Yetter said.

  “Then fuck it,” I said. “I quit.”

  He looked surprised but remained calm. “Think it over. I’ll get you something sweet. I don’t know what’s got your crank turned, but stick with me.”

  “A job without politics?”

  “I can’t promise that,” he said.

  “Then forget it.”

  I parachuted my napkin onto the table, pushed my chair back, and stalked out of the room. I was done with UPI and writing stories that resulted in the death and injury of innocent people.

  •••

  I went to see Anji in the hospital every day that I was able. She was sore and silent and I sat beside her bed and we did not talk. After nearly ten days, she was released. I went to visit her at Charlie’s, bringing flowers for her and Scotch for him, my meager offerings for forgiveness. Charlie had changed toward me. He blamed me for Anjali’s injuries and told me that I needed to curb my ambition. The words stung, but there was no discussion. I was guilty of her getting hurt; I didn’t know how, but I knew it was true and I made no attempt to defend myself. Not only had Anji been beaten, my friendship with Charlie had been damaged. Everything seemed to be imploding on me.

  Yetter called me just before he left London and announced, “Puffit won’t have you, so I’ve arranged for you to have a slot in New York. Think of it as temporary duty until we find something more suitable for you.”

  “Shove it, Grady. It’s Moscow or nothing.” Moscow. I had nothing to lose.