A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  He must have read her thoughts. He turned and looked at her and then looked at the sky. The sun was covered now by cloud and the light looked as compressed in the absence of the sun as the air felt. The bird was maybe a peregrine falcon and it was the first living thing apart from the creep Natasha had seen from her sled in the mountains. It was flying away from them in fast, muscular swoops. The rifle was off his back and in his hands and then at his shoulder in a single movement so swift and fluid it looked predetermined, choreographed by fate. Then there was the tiniest hesitation and he squeezed the trigger and the bird was jerked out of life and plunged towards the snow in a last, ungainly dive. There was a telescopic sight mounted on the barrel of the rifle and she knew that he had seen her through it, once. He had sighted her through its cross hairs during a sunny October picnic. He turned and smiled at her and ejected the spent bullet casing and caught it before it hit the snow, with the rifle held easily in one hand.

  ‘My name is Peter Landau,’ he said. He took off his snow goggles. And she knew for certain that he would kill her having told her his name now and shown her his face.

  ‘You can shoot.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve no idea,’ he said.

  She was silent. She did not want a conversation with Peter Landau. Her mouth hurt and anyway it seemed a dangerous thing to have.

  ‘That name means nothing to you, does it.’

  It was a statement rather than a question. Landau looked around. But the rifle report had been a tiny sound and there was no one there to hear it.

  ‘You have not the remotest idea of who you are, have you.’

  She looked at him. I know who you are, she thought. I know what you are, too.

  He sniffed the bullet casing in his hand and put it in his pocket. He looked around them at the encroaching weather, at the peaks. ‘I was right,’ he said. ‘You see, you really are a ghost.’

  ‘I’m very cold,’ Natasha said. ‘I’m not dead yet, but if you don’t do something about it soon I will die on this sled and be of no use to you.’

  ‘Americans know nothing of the cold,’ he said. But he said this absently, as though to himself. ‘You’ve already been of use to me,’ he said. ‘And we are almost at our destination.’

  The blizzard hit just after they arrived. His shelter was a hut built from pine logs under a granite overhang that protected it from the worst of the wind and any risk of avalanche. He had chosen the spot well. Or he had if solitude and seclusion were what he had built it for. It wouldn’t get much light, under its high awning of ancient rock. But he had packed snow all around the hut to insulate it from the chill of granite. She could see where he had tamped the snow down with a spade. And from the single window beside his door he could cover the one approach. He’s built this place with the instinct of a sniper, Natasha thought, pulled up the merciless field of fire that formed the single route to his door. She saw that the snow flurries were thickening around her. He’s built himself a home in the mountains with a killing ground for a front yard.

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘To punish your mother.’

  ‘To punish her for what?’

  ‘Once, your father built a hide for your mother.’ Landau smiled. ‘It was a skilled construction. Cunning. But it was not so well built as this one is.’

  Her stomach pitched and rolled with revulsion. ‘Are you saying that you are my father?’

  He chuckled at that. ‘I knew your father, Natasha Smollen. I killed him.’

  He had lit an oil lamp when they arrived. A white-out was descending as they got to the hut and the snow was pouring in big flakes out of the blankness as the wind rose and made the flakes spill in frantic gusts on the hide roof and on the descending slope outside. She had studied what she could of that slope on the ascent, but, bound to the sled, it had been hard to keep her bearings. He used the bowie knife to cut her bonds and blood returned agonizingly to her feet and her hands. It was a blind, the slope, she knew. It was a trap. It ended abruptly, sheared by an abyss of black granite. That was what her skier’s instinct told her. You would snow-plough down a slope like that, cautiously, sensing the sudden drop-off with a curious sort of dread in your stomach. The route down the mountain, she was pretty sure, was to the left of it. But their tracks were being obliterated now and Landau would have utilized many of the mountain’s defences.

  He had shut and bolted the door. The four panes of the small single window were covered in some kind of film. It was probably the same stuff he had used on the windshield of the pickup he had first followed her and Bill in. It didn’t reflect sunlight. It absorbed light, but you could see out of it, if there was anything to see. The hut was just high enough to stand in and about eight feet long and six feet wide. The roof sloped from the rear, Natasha supposed to ease the shifting of drift snow when the weight of it got to be too great a burden. Cured meat in various stages of maturity hung in strips and bunches on wires stretched across the width of one wall. There was a cot and a chair and a metal ring had been screwed into the wall above the head of the cot and a pair of handcuffs hung from the ring. Soot spread in a stain on the roof above the lamp. And there was a patch of charred wood and grease rising from a camp stove against the wall opposite the single chair. There was a trapdoor cut into the floor, but she didn’t really want to think about that. She looked at the handcuffs. Oh well. It was better than the sled. And the sled had been better than the trunk of the car. And nobody bothered handcuffing a corpse. Not even this creep, not even Landau, would bother to take that precaution. Natasha lay on the rough planked floor and massaged her wrists and then her ankles with numb hands. The hut smelled of drying animal flesh and stove oil and paraffin and smoked cigarettes. It was cold, but warming with their body heat in the insulation of the packed snow outside. The wind out there screamed now. It sounded as though some tattered banshee railed and furied on the roof. Listening to the wind, Natasha wondered what would be her best strategy for staying alive.

  ‘Have you any coffee, Mr Landau?’

  ‘Make some,’ he said. He sat in the chair and cradled his rifle in his hands. ‘Use melt-water. There are matches next to the stove. Palm matches and I will kill you. Think about scalding me and it will be the last thought you enjoy.’

  She brewed the coffee, moving on her knees, her body perhaps two feet away from the end of his rifle barrel, amazed that she could perform tasks such as spooning coffee and adding powdered milk to a tin mug without spilling everything in fumbling panic. When it was made, she poured the coffee and then slid his to his feet along the floor. The floor was rough, but she was careful not to spill any of his coffee. He picked it up and sipped at it without comment, his right hand still holding his rifle near the trigger guard.

  ‘Go and drink yours on the bed over there,’ he said. ‘When you’ve drunk it, cuff yourself. Cuff yourself firmly, or I will punish you.’

  She nodded. She sat on the bed and sipped her coffee. It was without doubt the most wonderful drink she had ever tasted. She had promised herself, being force-fed the previous night, that if she lived to survive this ordeal, she would never in her life again drink Coca Cola or eat Reece’s Cup Cakes.

  There seemed to be some kind of lull in whatever plan Landau was carrying out. Natasha figured it had been caused by the storm that raged and billowed now in full force outside the hut.

  To punish your mother.

  That meant her mother had to know. And the longer he strung the thing out, the more her mother would be punished. He had only allowed her to make the coffee to enjoy the small sideshow of her awkwardness and subjugation. Allowing her to make the coffee had been killing time for him. He could have cuffed her straight away and made a pot for himself. It would have been quicker to do that. They were waiting for something. And that would be the worst ordeal yet for her; awaiting an uncertain fate while knowing her mom tortured herself with a mother’s frantic worry at home.

  Oh, you bastard, Landau. You sadistic piece of shit. Natasha closed h
er eyes and regulated her breathing. I’ll kill you. I swear to God I’ll kill you for this. The coffee had made her mind alert. She was his prisoner. She was not his slave. She would never be that. She would take her mind away to where it would rather be in the wait forced upon her. She would not sit worrying to interpret the creep’s every tick and gesture. A few days ago she had witnessed history. She had. She had witnessed history. In Landau’s stinking cabin, in his vile company, she would travel in her mind to visit that shimmering moment once again.

  When she had first been to Hyannis Port at the age of fifteen the Kennedys had seemed to her like characters from a Scott Fitzgerald story. They personified that combination of effortless grace and incalculable wealth that seemed so romantic on the pages of his fiction. Their lives in Cape Cod seemed to the adolescent Natasha a pageant of tennis games and sea bathing and voyages on the ocean aboard sailing boats with crisp, white sails. There were Labrador dogs and ancient, unfunny family jokes and cocktails to sip watching idle sunsets while somnolent waves lapped the shore. She was fifteen and liked to think of herself as a radical and she thought them all very pampered and self-indulgent.

  But that was how they played rather than how they lived. Over time she realized there was a seriousness to them and their ambitions, most particularly to those surrounding Jack. The Fitzgerald comparison was seductive, but it was misleading. Jay Gatsby’s fictional life was a failed striving after a certain style. Jack Kennedy’s factual life was a successful striving after substance, marked all the way by a characteristic certainty.

  People had laughed when he first revealed to them he wanted to become president. He’d told her so himself. She had been in the family library, which she used with old Joe Kennedy’s grumpily granted permission. The library had a big carved pendulum clock and some horrible deco bronze figures her mother referred to as Old Joe’s Xanadu Collection. There were pictures, too, of Jack in his PT Boat and Joe Junior at the controls of the navy bomber he died in. But it was a working library. Among the morocco-bound collections and first editions of Gibbon and Macaulay and Dickens and Thoreau were thousands of proper, well-thumbed books. Jack came in with that taciturn brother of his to look up some congressional fact or senatorial statistic. She knew them well enough by then to know the motive for the search could equally be the plotting of a strategy or the winning of a bet. Politics absorbed them.

  She had been crying. Jack came over to her straight away, left Bobby searching the shelves, pulled up a chair next to hers and put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. It was summer and he had a tan and freckles and the concern in his pale blue eyes was genuine.

  ‘What’s the matter, kid?’

  It was silly, really. She had been talking about poetry to her mother. Her mother took her poetry straight. She loved Thomas Hardy. Natasha said she thought Thomas Hardy should maybe have lightened up, gone to the village tavern, had a few brews with the farm boys. Drunk a glass of cider or something with the milkmaids. Might have given him a whole new outlook.

  Her mother had smiled. ‘And which poets do you read, darling?’

  Allen Ginsberg, she’d said. And her mother had quoted the first couplet from Howl, the famous lines where Ginsberg said he’d seen the best minds of his generation basically beaten and disillusioned and abused.

  ‘Which best minds do you think he meant?’ her mother asked. ‘The intellectual giants he consorted with flunking his course at Columbia University? Or the Benzedrine and heroin junkies he mixed with in Times Square?’

  Kennedy laughed, when Natasha told him this, but the laugh was kindly. ‘Your mother has a point. But so do you. It’s a rare poem that brings its author to the attention of the FBI.’

  She wished she’d thought of saying that.

  Jack Kennedy enjoyed her mother’s sometimes caustic wit, she knew. With her adolescent sensitivity in full quiver, a fifteen-year-old Natasha was less of a fan.

  He squeezed her shoulder. ‘You need to have the courage of your convictions, ’Tasha. You must learn to come out of your corner fighting.’ (Only Kennedy said it ‘kornah’.) He winked. ‘To extend my absurdly inapt metaphor, you need to come back off those ropes punching hard.’

  ‘Always aim for the knock-out, Natasha,’ Bobby said from over the other side of the room. ‘Fight dirty. There’s no referee in the boxing bout of life. Hit low and hit late.’

  And Jack laughed, this time at his brother’s making fun of him. That was the thing about him. At fifteen she thought his politics conservative and cautious and lacking altogether in glamour. But he was funny and kind and wise and humble and had time for everyone and he never, ever patronized her.

  And he had the courage of his convictions, too. When Humphrey and Stevenson and Johnson among the Democrat heavyweights referred to him contemptuously as ‘that boy’, mocking his youth, calling him callow and inexperienced, he came out fighting. And he out-punched all of them.

  Much about him was more mythic than real. His athleticism was far more of the heart than the body. He was a jock in his mind. But Natasha was in Hyannis Port often enough to know that he suffered terribly with his back. He wanted to swim and sail his boat and to play tennis and sometimes he scorned his doctors and did so. But he always paid a dreadful price afterwards in pain. Doctors attended to him in relays, sometimes it seemed to her in teams. They were a grim-faced, squabbling lot. But they didn’t cure the ailments. She asked her mother about it once, back at the beach house they were lent, after seeing him hobble between two outbuildings at the compound on crutches. The shock was that he seemed so practised using them.

  Her mother had been combing her hair for a reception and she stopped, the comb still poised in her hair. And Natasha knew she had blundered into an area kept secret among the loyal.

  ‘People say Jack is young to want to be president,’ her mother said. ‘What they don’t realize is that in four years, it might already be too late for him.’

  He looked wonderful at his inauguration, though. There seemed something so fundamentally right about the ceremony taking place on that chilly, lucid day. Natasha was no longer fifteen and her opinions had matured. She put this down to the bomb, which sobered your thinking quickly if you were an American. In the biting cold and sunshine of Pennsylvania Avenue that day, it seemed like America had got the president the country needed and deserved. Her mother sat beside her in her coat with the ermine collar and a perfect bloom pinned to the fur. She had a pillbox hat with a short veil and her hair tied in a chignon. She looked impossibly sophisticated and glamorous, her mom. She smelled of Joy perfume. And she cried when Robert Frost read his poem, tears splashing down the cheekbones that usually gave her face its look of frosty hauteur. And Natasha realized all at once what the words of the poem must mean to someone like her mother, an immigrant, a refugee, making her brave, lonely way in the new world Frost spoke so eloquently about earning the right to be worthy of. Her mother fumbled Kleenex out of her bag, but the tears didn’t stop. And Natasha didn’t comfort her. The dignity of the moment, its august and martial formality, prevented her from doing so.

  She was shocked out of her happy reverie by the pain and suddenness of a hard slap across the face. And Peter Landau stood in front of her where Robert Frost had been, an angry face looming out of the backdrop of his homemade mountain hovel. She lowered her mouth to her cuffed hands and saw blood from her lip on her fingers.

  ‘You are such a jerk,’ she said. ‘You are a total creep.’

  He hit her again, harder, and her jaw was numbed by the force of the blow and black lights flared briefly before her eyes. She swallowed, swallowing blood and pride and rage. She would have to stop. His anger was rabid. She did not want to be beaten to death. She did not want him to remember the gag. She did not want him to remember in his anger what pliers could do to a healthy young mouth.

  And she had a plan. It was true that her plan would require a degree of compliance on his part. But ju jitsu was said to need some compliance in its victims. And
Natasha had heard what that could do, when Elvis Presley demonstrated his ju jitsu skills on one of Frank Sinatra’s bodyguards at one of Sinatra’s parties. She had overheard Bill laughing about the occasion with her mom. Bill said Frank went into a terrible sulk and started mumbling about Presley’s Cadillac and a sledgehammer he claimed to own. The King didn’t get invited back after that. But he made a terrible mess of the bodyguard. The poor guy was in traction for weeks. Her plan needed Landau’s compliance to work, but that could be arranged, was part of the preparation and the skill. She would go over her plan in her mind a thousand times if necessary before timing the moment of its execution. And it would be necessary. Landau was a disgusting excuse for a human being but he was methodical and careful and clever, too. She would need to be better than him. She would need to be far quicker and stronger. Her plan would only get one chance to work and she would certainly be dead if it didn’t.

  ‘Time for a history lesson,’ he said, sitting back in his chair with his rifle across his skinny lap. Blood dripped from her chin onto the coarse blanket underneath her on the cot. The wind howled and snow hit the walls of the hut in frenzied clumps that seemed to make its pine walls shudder. He wanted to give her a history lesson. He was mad. He was barking mad, as one of the two very posh English girls at her school might have said. He was absolutely barking, dear. She was buoyant, now, because she finally had a plan.