The photograph was recent one, less than a month old. She’d caught Pete unawares in profile as he stood in the kitchen one Sunday morning staring out the window at the sliver of Manhattan skyline that was on offer. He looked like a jazz musician or a Marxist priest.
He’d heard the guillotine of the shutter and turned to her and smiled and she’d set the Leica down on the wooden kitchen table and walked to him. They’d kissed and he’d served the breakfast he’d been preparing: eggs Benedict with chive flakes and toast and Bloody Marys.
They’d got a little loaded the night before, for no good reason, and had listened to music until nearly dawn—his music, Sinatra and Johnny Hartman and a little Chet Baker.
She’d always felt that her husband was quintessentially American (more American than she, with her cosmopolitan pretentions), but an American of another era, even though he was her contemporary, really, just five years older, and had grown up with the same movies and TV shows and music—rock, pop and funk, and, God knew, disco.
But he seemed like a man from an earlier age with his lounge records and his haircut and his clothes. Even his name, with its blunt syllables, came from a simpler time, a time of greater certainty. Pete took care with the outer trappings, the surface details, the shirt label from a bespoke tailor down in the Garment District, the Sinatra LP on the phonograph, the brand of Scotch, all the little signifiers that, paradoxically, gave him the illusion of depth.
She’d liked that vaguely anachronistic air when she’d first met him. She still liked it, even though now she wondered if, rather than being some appealing affectation, it masked a deeper emptiness in him, an inner void that only his work, with its deception and its lies, had been able to fill.
Their meeting had been dramatic. Well, not the meeting, really, but the events surrounding it. On the morning of what all too soon became known as 9/11 they were seated beside one another in business class flying American Airlines from Frankfurt to New York. Around six hours into the flight there was an announcement that a small technical issue required them to land at Gander in Newfoundland.
It was only when they were on the ground, joining the suspiciously large flock of passenger jets that already roosted on the apron of this minor Canadian airport, that the captain told them the little he knew about the attacks on New York and Washington D.C.
The man beside her, a man she’d merely nodded to when they’d been seated, and thanked when he’d stowed her carry-on bag beside his in the overhead bin, stood and went forward. He spoke to a flight attendant, showing her some kind of identification, and she took him through to the cockpit.
A few minutes later he reappeared and opened the bin to remove his bag.
He hesitated, looked down at Ann and said, “This is the only luggage you’re traveling with?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Want to get out of here?”
“Yes,” she said again and he handed Ann her bag and she followed him to where the flight attendant stood by an open exit, a set of stairs docked in place, ignoring the other passengers who were irate at this preferential treatment. Once Pete and Ann had disembarked the stairs were removed and the exit was locked again.
Their fellow passengers, along with more than six thousand others, would end up stranded in Gander for days before flights resumed, the recipient of the largesse of the Canadian townsfolk.
Ann followed Pete Town into the terminal, which looked as it had been mothballed circa 1959, with its yellow modernist sofas and sleek blue chairs and Mondrianesque marble terrazzo floors. They stood in silence at a wall-mounted TV set, watching the Towers falling. He walked away until he was out of earshot, and, framed by a massive futurist mural—an allegory to flight—made a call on his cell.
Pete magicked a rental car from somewhere and so began a thirty-six hour trip across Canada and New England by road and ferry. They stopped only to refuel and grab snacks and coffee, sharing the driving, catnapping when the other took the wheel.
They exchanged very little personal information, but at times of crisis family is inevitably mentioned and he volunteered that he had been divorced for decades and she that she’d never married. Pete told her he was in the foreign service of the State Department, but never revealed how he’d managed to get them off that plane. When she said that she was a photographer it turned out that he’d seen some of her pictures and, with understated skill, he kept the conversation focused on her work as they drove.
They caught up on news broadcasts on the radio, the full extent of the catastrophe becoming apparent as they made their way through New Brunswick, Maine and Massachusetts and arrived in New York to see the dust cloud still hanging over Manhattan, Ground Zero still smoldering.
He took her home to Park Slope, shook her hand a little awkwardly, and drove away. She went through to the kitchen and looked out at the skyline, at what was missing, and for the first time she cried.
She thought she’d never see him again, but he called a few days later and invited her to dinner and they saw each a month later when he was again in the city on business. That was the first time they slept together and it was surprisingly intense and she found herself looking forward to his visits every few months.
After a year Pete took her out one night and, looking her squarely in the eye, said, “I haven’t been entirely honest with you, Ann.”
She stared at him. “No?”
“No. I’m not with the State Department.”
“Oh? Then who are you with?”
“I’m a CIA case officer.”
She felt as if a series of trapdoors were opening up beneath her and waited for the inevitable.
He took her hand and said, “Now that that’s out of the way, I have a question for you.”
“What?” she said, her voice unsteady.
“Will you marry me?”
Still fearful of her old allegiances she knew she should refuse, but she heard her voice, seemingly without her volition, saying, “Yes.”
They were married at the Brooklyn Marriage Bureau with two acquaintances of hers—an ex-assistant and a pictures editor—as witnesses, and spent their honeymoon in a shack on one of the more remote Florida Keys, swimming and making love. Even her discovery that the owner of the place, an old friend of Pete’s, was a Bay of Pigs veteran had not dimmed the sheer bliss of that week.
Ann finished rinsing the print and squeegeed water from its surface and clipped it to a line to dry. It would be a gift for Pete when he came home. An olive branch. Not an apology, she had nothing to apologize for, but a signal that she was prepared to accept the divergence of their views on what he had done in Los Angeles.
She poured a glass of white wine and went through to the living room and sat by the phone and told herself that she wasn’t expecting it to ring. Which was just as well, because it did not.
She clicked on the TV and surfed the news channels, watching the Catherine Finch story unfold. Fewer people were finding it credible that she was alive and the administration was doing some uncomfortable tap dancing. In a media briefing the White House Press Secretary tried to stay noncommittal but increasingly hostile questions forced him to flee the podium.
Ann suspected that her husband would soon return and it would be her job to manufacture a gracious smokescreen of food and drink and sex that would allow him to pretend that he had never gone away.
FOURTEEN
Richard Finch stood in the dark at the window of his living room and looked out at the street, which was empty of media. The only car out there was a black Dodge Charger. Amy Branch’s underlings. He hadn’t seen or heard from Special Agent Branch since the night before, but he was still being monitored. Of course they would say that they were out there for his protection.
Finch was drunk and stoned, the only way he could deal with the stress. He wished there was some way he could reach out to the man in the gray suit, the author of his anxiety, but the man had faded away like the aura of stale smoke that’d clung to him like a win
ding sheet.
Finch stepped away from the window and went through to the kitchen and freshened up his drink. He was drinking Jack Daniels with, of all things, black cherry Fresca. Christ knew why—his body must have some nutrient or electrolyte deficiency.
Hungry and out of liquor he’d ventured from the house late in the afternoon and walked down to Eagle Rock Boulevard, too drunk to drive and too witless to call a cab or an Uber. The Dodge had shadowed him like a shark in deep water and he’d done his best to ignore it.
A battered car swooped in beside him and an unhinged-looking guy emerged with a video camera and started shouting questions about Catherine, calling her “an Islamic State fifth columnist.” Finch walked out into the street to avoid him and nearly got flattened by a soccer mom in a minivan who, swerving and braking, displayed a longshoreman’s flair for verbal abuse.
The suits in the Dodge appeared and flashed ID at the cameraman who started ranting about his First Amendment rights but the agents got him back into his car and gone and then cruised along with Finch as he stopped at a liquor store. When he’d emerged they’d tailed him to Pat & Lorraine's Coffee Shop, the retro diner made famous by Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, where a group of villains had met to discuss, among other things, Madonna’s "Like A Virgin" and the virtues of tipping.
Finch sat in a booth away from the window and ordered country sausage and gravy with scrambled eggs, home fried potatoes and biscuits. The waitress, a blonde with eyes as faded as an L.A. summer sky, recognized him and though she didn’t say anything her look expressed her sympathy. For a crazy moment he wanted to take her home, but he looked out at the black car parked beneath a sugar palm, the two agents in their dark suits and shades watching the door of the diner, and he broke eye contact with the woman.
When his food arrived his appetite disappeared and he merely toyed with it before grabbing his bag of booze and exiting, listening to the low rumble of the Dodge as it followed him home.
He went inside and hit the bottle hard and smoked a few blunts and found himself wandering into what he laughingly referred to as his writing room. A room that he seldom ventured near these days, because when he did he felt a sense of shame.
But he seated himself and fed a piece of paper into his Remington Super Riter—that old familiar ratcheting sound of the roller—and hammered out two words and sat and stared at the dented paper for a minute before he lifted his hands from the keyboard as if in surrender.
He had typed My wife and now could think of nothing to add.
Finch sat and scratched at his stubble and ran a furry tongue over his bitter teeth. He had his Yeezy hoodie zippered, and even though he wore a T-shirt underneath he was cold. A by-product of premature middle-age, perhaps, or the creeping ennui that seemed to chill him to his marrow. He had posed and postured for so long that he felt that whatever essence, whatever substance, he may once have had had leaked from him like sawdust from a manikin.
He was all show.
Seriously, who wrote on a typewriter these days? On a computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone, even by hand in a Moleskine with a Montblanc—but on fucking typewriter? That was the grossest kind of affectation.
But he did. Or had, back when he’d actually written, not just thought or spoken about writing. Hunting and pecking at the keyboard of the old Remington.
Remington. A manufacturer, long ago, of both firearms and typewriters. Also the name of a painter of Western scenes: cowboys, and cavalry and Indian wars.
The typewriter, a manly instrument that required vigorous striking, was a relic of the late fifties, and he’d bought it, on impulse, from a junk shop in Lawrence, Kansas.
Finch had loved it, years ago, when the words had flowed and the type hammer had struck the paper with a percussive whack, and the carriage return had clanked when he’d rammed it home, the ringing bell like the signal of a fresh round in a blood sport.
But the words had not flowed in a long time and the thing had sat in this unused room collecting dust.
My wife.
He reread the two words and scratched his face and farted and, at last, leaned forward and typed, is dead.
My wife is dead.
Finch had been waiting for news of Catherine’s death for years. Waiting for the phone call or the men at the door. He’d expected a beheading, back when all the hostages were being executed thus. He’d wondered if he’d find the courage to watch the video, watch the knife being taken to her throat by some Jihadi John or George—bizarrely named after the Beatles, these British Islamic State lunatics, speaking with working class London accents, not that he was a connoisseur.
But here she was dead as the result of an extrajudicial killing.
An accident.
Collateral damage.
And he should be mourning his wife.
But, pondering the sentence he had written, he hadn’t been able to find any pity for Catherine, only for himself, and he’d scrolled down to a fresh section of paper and typed, without thinking and without knowing why, the spoils go to those with the fewest fucks to give. Then he’d stood and wandered into the kitchen to find the whiskey.
The day had died without him noticing, and now he lurked in the dark at the living room window, finding a little oasis of chemical calm amidst the turmoil.
His cell phone rang. That was nothing new, the media had gotten hold of his number and their calls had been incessant, so he checked out caller ID, and to his surprise saw a familiar name: the girl journalist of the other night.
Okay, her he would talk to.
He swiped a sticky finger across the face of his phone and said, “Hey.”
“Mr. Finch?”
“This is he.”
“This is Margo Banner.”
“Yes.”
“I interviewed you for the Huffington Post.”
“I remember.” Well, misremembered, really.
“I was wondering if I could maybe talk to you again, in the light of recent developments?”
Finch looked out at the Dodge and knew that this call was being monitored and said, “Ms. Banner I’m sorry but I’ve been advised not to talk to the media right now.”
He killed the call and stood for a moment, something scratching at his memory, and he sloped through to the bedroom and got to his knees and fumbled under the bed. His fingertips touched the pimply sophomore’s phone that he vaguely recalled seeing—through the veil of booze and blow—tumble from her pocket when he’d fought her skinny jeans free of her body a few nights ago.
He snagged the phone, congratulating himself on his mental chops. Struggling to get to his feet he felt dizzy and had to sit on the bed until the tilt-a-whirl stopped spinning.
Then, with one eye closed better to focus, he found the journalist’s number on his phone, and painstakingly punched it into the girl’s Samsung. He miscued and got a funeral home which made him laugh.
He tried again and this time Margo Banner answered.
“It’s me,” he said, “Rick Finch.”
“Hi, yes.”
“My phone’s being monitored.”
“Right.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in a hotel. In Westwood.”
“Give me the address and I’ll come to you.”
“Now?”
“Yes. I’ll be there in an hour.”
“You’ll give me an interview?”
“Yes.”
“On the record?”
“Yes, Margo. On the record.”
She gave him her address and he went into the shower and stood under the hot and cold jets and washed his hair. He quit the stall and decided he should shave which he regretted once he started because he cut himself repeatedly, as if he were making carpaccio of his face, but by then it was too late and he had to finish the job, sticking balls of toilet paper to his chin and cheeks to stanch the blood.
He rummaged through the mess in his bedroom and put on his cleanest dirty shirt. Who was that? Johnny Cash? Kris Krist
offerson? Kristofferson, he decided.
Finch returned to the living room and clicked on the light and fired up the TV and surfed to Netflix, leaving Lost in Translation flickering as he got down on all fours and crawled like a mutt to the back door where he let himself out into the dark and hurried across his small yard.
The house behind was separated from his by a wall as high as his shoulder, and, still wasted, it took a few attempts before he got himself over, scraping his elbow and tearing his pants.
Finch was creeping toward the road when a big motherfucker of a dog, a beast straight out of Stephen King, came at him snarling. The owner shouted something from inside the house and curbed the dog and Finch made it to the street unscathed.
He stood on the sidewalk, getting his breath back, and searched the sophomore’s phone. Finch could have kissed her all over again when he saw she had downloaded the Uber app.
FIFTEEN
Pete Town carefully folded the gray suit jacket and slipped it into the open bag. He folded the pants and laid them atop the jacket. Next he packed his shirts and the three ties he had brought with him from New York. His Dopp kit was already packed. His dress shoes, inside a plastic laundry bag to stop them soiling his suit, he inserted last and closed the bag, the wasp’s nest buzz of meshing teeth biting through the chatter of the TV.
For a moment he caught himself staring at the tube, hypnotized by an almost incomprehensible exchange, a brittle blonde anchor in conversation with a young man with gelled hair who said, “Rest assured, the conservative media are going to go full missing plane on this story.”
The blonde flashed a terrifying smile and said, “As always, Trent, a master of the ten second word salad. But straight question, straight answer: is Catherine Finch alive or dead?”
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