Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

  “No.”

  Jordine gave him one of his unhappy looks, a more typical expression. “Dennis, does this have anything to do with the White House?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “You’ve been over there quite a lot lately; almost every day.”

  “It all has to do with the summit, as I told you. They also seem interested in what I know about Canada.”

  “What you know or what they know?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What do you talk about? Do they ask about us? About the secretary?”

  “Arthur, it’s all to do with Canadian policy. They’re worried about the York government.”

  “None of this was cleared through me. You just went off on your own.”

  “Arthur, it was the White House.”

  “There are proper channels.”

  “Arthur, this isn’t the army.”

  “Don’t tell me about the army,” Jordine snapped. “I was a lieutenant in Korea.”

  Showers was weary of hearing that. Jordine, the only Harvard ROTC man Showers had ever encountered, had indeed been a lieutenant in Korea, in 1962, the supply officer of a Signal Corps company. At the same time, Showers, a mere civilian with a special draft deferment, was getting shot at and nearly blown to bits with a grenade in the Congo. At times, Jordine could be very tiresome.

  “If we are going to play army games, Arthur, may I have permission to leave?”

  “What’s going on between you and the White House?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why are you leaving for Canada so early?”

  “As I said, you know there are some serious problems for us up there.”

  “The White House hasn’t paid any attention to Canada before.”

  “It is now.”

  “They’ve put up an incompetent fool for ambassador. I don’t think he even has a college education.”

  “Stop that, Arthur.”

  Jordine’s face began to quiver slightly. He clasped both his hands on his knee a moment, then abruptly leaned forward, gripping the edge of the table tightly, the blood gone from his nails. “I won’t have backstabbing, Showers! You’re a foreign service officer. Your first loyalty is to the department.”

  “It thought my first loyalty was to something a little loftier.”

  “Don’t you be patronizing with me! Your posting to Ottawa can be stopped, you know!”

  “No it can’t.”

  “Yes it can! Damned quick!”

  Showers rose, bewildered. What was wrong with Jordine? Was he a secret drinker? Was he having a nervous breakdown? Showers now doubted that Marie-Claire was having an affair with Jordine. The man was too frustrated.

  “It’s all arranged, Arthur. I’m going to Ottawa as DCM. There’s nothing you can do about it. There’s nothing you can do to me.”

  “This administration won’t be here forever.”

  Showers turned toward the door. “I’m taking the afternoon off,” he said.

  Jordine swore, vulgarly, most unlike him. Showers shook his head. As he stepped into the outer office, the three secretaries there began typing furiously, one of them snarling her keys.

  His own secretary, a blond Lithuanian girl named Judy Sadinauskas, had a curious message for him. A Mr. Hugh Laidlaw had called on urgent business, leaving a number, but nothing else.

  “He didn’t say where he was from?”

  “No, Mr. Showers. But I checked out the number. It’s the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “Thank you, Judy.”

  He crumpled the message and dropped it in her wastebasket. He would rather spend a week talking to Arthur Jordine than five minutes with anyone from the Agency. “Take the afternoon off, Judy. I am.”

  Next day he’d tell her about his early departure for Canada. If she wanted, she could come with him. It would keep Jordine from firing her or sending her to El Salvador.

  Showers walked to Dominique’s, slowly because of the awful heat. There were few customers and he was given an excellent table, at once, a table for one, or so he had thought.

  “Mr. Showers?”

  Showers looked up to see a somewhat short, very neat and trim man in late middle age with perfectly cut white hair, a well-scrubbed pink face, and cold gray eyes behind metal-rimmed glasses.

  “My name is Hugh Laidlaw, sir. I telephoned you earlier this morning.”

  “From the agency. You failed to mention that in your message.”

  “I’ve retired from the agency, actually, although I’m called back occasionally to serve as a consultant. I would like to speak to you if I could, Mr. Showers. It’s important.”

  Showers reminded himself that, if nothing else, he was a man of manners and civility. He was also curious, and not a little uneasy. What the CIA deemed important could never be anything pleasant. He gestured to the opposite chair. The waiter came as Laidlaw was seating himself.

  “You might as well have lunch, since you’re going to be here,” Showers said, reaching for a menu. “A glass of white wine, please.”

  Laidlaw ordered a very dry martini, straight up, from a shaker, very chilled, and with three olives.

  “You followed me here,” said Showers.

  “An unfortunate intrusion for which I apologize. But it was imperative. Time in this matter is of extreme consequence.”

  “What matter?”

  “Canada. You are going there very soon.”

  “As DCM. I am a career diplomat, Mr. Laidlaw. If this has to do with some covert operation, I would suggest you have the wrong man. Do you understand what I mean? I’m being as polite about this as I can.”

  “Your attitude is well known to us, Mr. Showers.”

  “Why, then …”

  The drinks came. Laidlaw took a sip of his martini, and seemed extremely happy with it, as if surprised.

  “Mr. Showers. We understand your concerns about the integrity of your position. Nevertheless, we urgently need your help.”

  “No.”

  “It concerns a Canadian friend of yours, Guy Porique.”

  “No. Nothing to do with my friends. And I haven’t seen Guy for two years or more. He’s left the government.”

  “He is in very serious trouble. It’s trouble that could cause devastating problems for the security of the United States.”

  “Now where have I heard that plaintive cry before?”

  Showers glanced around the room. Seemingly half The New York Times bureau was gathered around two nearby tables. At a corner table, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune was with seemingly half the Irish embassy.

  “This concerns the secessionist movements in Quebec and the western provinces,” Laidlaw said. “I presume you are well acquainted with the subject.”

  “I’m the DCM, remember? Not the ambassador.”

  The faintest flicker of a smile showed that Laidlaw appreciated the subtlety. “Canada is held together only by a fading allegiance to the English queen, Trudeau’s lamentable constitution, and an obsolete transcontinental railroad,” he said. “It won’t take much to tear it apart. Your friend, Monsieur Porique, is among those trying.”

  “That’s a crock.”

  “It is lamentably true, Mr. Showers. As you know, he is an ardent environmentalist.”

  “I am an ardent environmentalist. I’m a director of the American Wildlife Committee. That doesn’t mean I want to start a civil war. Not every environmentalist is an extremist, no matter what the Interior Department seems to think.”

  “He is also a separatist.”

  “He is not a separatist; he is a French Canadian. He is no more a separatist than Martin Luther King was a separatist. I don’t know what trouble Guy Porique is in, but I hope you keep your hands off him. I don’t know what dirty tricks you have in mind for Canada, but you’ll get no help from my office.”

  “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of lives potentially at stake. Do you realize what a calamity for the United States a civil wa
r in Canada would be?”

  “Why don’t we just for once let a country take care of its internal problems by itself. Just once. Let’s not treat everybody like the Congo.”

  “The Canadian government is part of the problem. Prime Minister York cannot cope with the problem, yet he’s been obstructing our assistance at every turn.”

  “Our uninvited assistance,” said Showers, rising. He took a ten-dollar bill from his Dunhill black leather wallet and placed it on the table to pay for the drinks. “If you’ll excuse me. I’ve lost my appetite.”

  “There’s another reason. You …”

  “I don’t want to hear another word, Mr. Laidlaw. You have come to the wrong man.”

  He was out of the door before anyone at The New York Times tables recognized him. Laidlaw sat sipping his martini, quietly drumming his fingers. He had certainly not gotten the wrong man.

  Showers hailed a taxi and went directly home, surprised to find Marie-Claire there, surprised even more to find her completely naked, standing in the kitchen.

  “Dennis! I was about to take a bath. It’s so hot.”

  “We have air conditioning.”

  Without another word, he went to the living room. The mail, as always, was on the little desk. As always, it had all been opened, although most of it was addressed specifically to him. He riffled quickly through the envelopes, hope against fatalism, dread mingling with anger, disappointment at once becoming wonder and amazement as he saw the letter from Scarborough State University. Marie-Claire had put it at the bottom of the stack, after opening it.

  The message was brief. H. Felicity Stuart had taken a job with the New York City school system upon graduation in 1963. According to the alumni association, she had married a Paul Bleriot in 1965. Her last address, still under the name Bleriot, was on Third Street in Manhattan’s East Village. She had taken herself off the alumni association mailing list in 1970.

  So long ago.

  “What is that letter, Dennis?” said Marie-Claire, who had done nothing to cover her nakedness. “Who is that woman?”

  “It’s something to do with my high school. Never mind about it.”

  “But you are trying to find her, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Never mind! Go put some clothes on.”

  He looked from the letter to where she was looking, the couch. There was something white beneath it. The French doors were wide open, admitting flies. Showers went to the couch, picked up the white thing, then dropped it in disgust.

  “Marie-Claire! Damn you to hell!”

  “It’s … it’s just an old rag. A pair of your old …”

  He left the house, slamming one of the French doors back against the wall, walking out the back gate of the patio, oblivious to where he was or where he was going, until he found himself on Wisconsin Avenue just up the hill from M Street, crowds of people on the sidewalk despite the heat. A horn was honking insistently. His vision unsure in the fume-laden glare of sunlight, he saw a small blue foreign sports car, a Fiat. A tall young woman was waving to him, calling his name.

  “Alixe!” He hurried across the street.

  “Do you like the car?” she said. “I just bought it. Daddy told me to pick out what I liked. It took about a minute.” The driver of a large produce truck idling behind her gunned his engine impatiently.

  “Yes,” he said. “Am I to get in?”

  “That’s the idea, Mr. Showers,” she said, swinging open the door. “I’ll drive you home.” The truck driver began mashing his horn.

  He lowered himself into the small seat. She was wearing another of those billowy dresses.

  “No, not home,” he said. “Not now.”

  “I’ll take you wherever you want. The State Department?”

  “A phone call. I have to make a phone call and then go see a man. If you don’t mind.”

  “My day is yours,” she said, smiling. The Fiat spun, shrieking rubber, then roared on up the hill, leaving the truck far behind.

  Stansfield Joyce had a habit, when walking down the street, of looking at people’s faces and giving them imaginary obituaries. Maybe not so imaginary. Joyce tried to guess how each might go, how each might be written up on the Post’s obituary page, beneath pictures of the faces he looked at. The blond woman with the wide face in the blue suit and white blouse he killed off with cancer at age fifty-four, giving her a home in Silver Spring and noting she was active in charity work. The bald man with white hair and a gray vested suit he did in that very day, heart attack in the Metropolitan Club. No, the Rotary Club. The man’s briefcase was only vinyl. The messenger on the bicyle, a youth of eighteen or nineteen, he dispatched at twenty, the victim of a large truck.

  Sometimes, to his surprise, he’d actually see one of the faces he encountered turn up on the obituary page a few days or weeks later. Once, a deceased succumbed to the same end Joyce had imagined. That made him feel guilty for a while, but not for long. Everybody dies.

  A wheezing fat woman dragging a grocery cart and smoking came along. She was easy. Dead of a stroke within the year. Twelve thousand dollars in cash found in the mattress.

  Joyce turned the corner by the Temperance Fountain and entered Apex Liquors. Normally Joyce did his drinking on the end stool at Turner’s ABC Bar, but the press of business was cutting that short. His page beeper had summoned him to the phone and his answering service had connected him with a client. The six-pack of Molson ale from Apex was in case the client was late.

  Press of business. All he had working was a divorce case and all the protagonists were up on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Joyce sat at his desk doing nothing but drinking Molson for about twenty minutes, then took out his. 32 automatic and began to disassemble it on an opened page of the Post, the obituary page in fact. He set the slide spring down on a picture of an attractive middle-aged woman, then pushed it aside. She was no one he had ever seen.

  Another fifteen minutes passed. Joyce opened another Molson and then began to reassemble the freshly oiled gun parts. His secretary, Lucianne, was away on vacation—for an entire month at Rehoboth Beach, with her boyfriend. Joyce was not exactly becoming a rich man out of this private investigation business, but was able to afford two indulgences. One was a lemon yellow Jaguar XKE that he wrote off on his taxes as a company car. The other was Lucianne, the most blue-eyed, buxom, and good-looking blond white woman he could find willing to take the job. She had asked a generous sum. Because of it, she could afford the month at Rehoboth and he could not.

  Grinning, he took the slightly beaten-up Polaroid photograph out of his wallet, holding it carefully to the light. After joining him in too many Molsons one slow day, Lucianne had posed for it in the nude, reclining on his Naugahyde couch. But that’s as far as he had ever got. Damn it to hell.

  The new client sounded like a real gent over the phone, calling with what sounded like a missing person’s case. Those were a good gig; lots of expenses, lots of time on the road.

  Joyce had once had a chance to become a real gent himself. He had gone to law school after Vietnam and walked out of there into a $25,000-a-year job with one of the richest firms in Washington. But it hadn’t taken long for it to become painfully clear to him that all he had to do to earn his money was sit there and be black. That warn’t no fun. Practicing on his own as a black lawyer in Washington, grabbing cheap court-appointed criminal cases on Fifth Street, warn’t no fun either, and was a quick way to starve to death. So he became a private investigator. Sometimes he starved, sometimes he took Lucianne or some other foxy lady to dinner at the Palm, but he always had fun.

  Now if only he could figure out how to reinsert the trigger spring.

  The client came in a full hour late, and, with one look at him, Joyce quickly got the idea he was at least going to be able to pay the rent that month, and maybe lay in a few dozen cases of Molson. The man was a good-looking dude about forty, an uptown high roller in a blue pin-striped suit, twenty-dollar haircut, Rolex watch, the works. He had a girl w
ith him, a real high-class fox in her twenties—a big girl, nice face, beautiful body, beautiful eyes, money written all over her. She sure as hell was not the man’s wife, and the man was wearing a ring.

  “I’m Dennis Showers,” said the man, politely. “This is my friend, Miss Reston.”

  “Alixe Reston,” said the girl, shaking Joyce’s hand.

  He motioned them to chairs, then quickly swept his .32, its still unassembled parts, and the Polaroid of Lucianne into his desk drawer. The obituary page he crumpled up and tossed basketball style at the corner wastebasket. It missed.

  Joyce studied the man a moment. Metropolitan Club. Heart attack. In his eighties. Sherry glass still clutched in his hand. He gave the fox another look-see, but for a different reason.

  “My problem,” said the man …

  Joyce interrupted to offer them both a Molson. The man, with a little cough, declined, the stuffy bastard. The girl, to Joyce’s surprise and delight, accepted.

  “Before you start,” said Joyce, sliding the opened bottle across the desk. “I charge two hundred dollars a day.” This was a sizable increase over his usual fee, but then, he would be devoting his full time to this one. “Plus expenses,” he said.

  The man seemed surprised, though Joyce could not tell whether happily or unhappily. “That’s fine,” said the man. He handed Joyce an envelope.

  “I want to find an old friend,” he said. “From high school. A woman. I haven’t seen her in twenty years. What’s in there is all I have of her.”

  Joyce found two letters and a photograph in the envelope. The photograph was of a pretty, dark-haired teen-age girl, sitting on a lawn, but it was very old. One of the letters was very old, too, three stiff, stained pages filled with error-strewn typing. The other letter was new, from a college.

  “School teacher,” Joyce read. “New York City. She ought to be fairly easy to trace.”

  The address given for the missing woman was on East Third Street in New York’s hell-hole East Village. Yet she had gone to school with this elegant gent. Something was screwy.

  Joyce figured it would take a couple of days, at least. “I’ll need a week, maybe more.”