Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

  “That’s right! What is Dzerzhinsky Square trying to get away with here? I’d better call the deputy.”

  He half rose from his chair, but Laidlaw waved him back.

  “It’s not KGB, Bill. The Russians came to me.”

  “Which one?” said Mendelsohn.

  “I have personal reasons for not answering that, Freddy, but it’s irrelevant. An authoritative source, in any event.”

  “Do you believe it, Hugh?”

  “Yes, for the most part. Bolshinin undertook a number of freelance projects, including some for us. You might use your high position to discreetly check if any of our people have been running him.”

  “No problem,” Thatcher said. “I’m pretty sure he was inactive, though. Did they give you a make on the operative?”

  “After a fashion. His name is Frank Trench. Apparently a very unpleasant person. I’ve been through his military and prison records. Not very helpful, but most depressing. Our friend Mr. Showers could be in great jeopardy.”

  Madeleine returned with Laidlaw’s martini and patted his head after handing it to him. He blinked his eyes as he watched her walk back to her chair.

  “Do you want us to ice him?”

  “Showers? No, that would ruin everything, wouldn’t it?”

  “Right. I’m not thinking. It’s this goddamn heat.”

  “And four beers,” said Madeleine.

  Thatcher grinned. Laidlaw wondered if they were sleeping together. It would be a wonder if they were not.

  “Should we get some help from the domestic security section? Or go to the Feebies?”

  “No. No FBI. Not yet. I’d like to keep this within our little group for the time being.”

  “A group that includes unnamed individuals from the KGB,” Mendelsohn said, grinning through his cigarette smoke.

  Laidlaw ignored him. “I’ll warn Showers,” he said. “But let us leave it at that for the time being.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want to abandon this, Hugh? We still have Plan C that we started with.”

  “No. Not yet. I think, in fact, that our chances of utilizing Mr. Showers may have improved. If he survives.”

  “I hope so,” said Mendelsohn. “Satellite survey has picked up more contraband in Quebec.”

  11

  For yet another night, Dennis Showers was trapped alone in his house with no one but Felicity Stuart for company. He and Marie-Claire were scarcely speaking, and before leaving she had muttered only something about two embassy parties she was certain he hadn’t any interest in attending. She was correct. He had dismissed her with a disgusted expression, knowing she would not return until early morning, and then returned to his book, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Wisdom of the Sands, and his drink, a strong gin and tonic. Too strong, yet far from strong enough.

  He had the windows and French doors open despite the temperature. He had found in recent days that to close them for the benefit of the air conditioning made him intensely claustrophobic. Yet the night was so black and thick with heat it might as well have been a wall, penetrated only by the sound of insects and an occasional passing car, but a wall, enclosing him. He put the outside noises from his mind, but found them replaced by the ticking of the mantelpiece clock. And the silence from the telephone.

  Showers sipped, twice, then returned to Saint Exupéry.

  It so happened that the judges of the town sentenced a young woman, who had committed some misdeed, to be stripped to her frail sheath of skin, and had her bound to a stake far out in the desert, by way of punishment.

  My father said to me: “Now I shall teach you what it is men seek after.” And he took me pillion behind him.

  While we rode, a whole day passed over her and the sun drank up her warm blood, her spittle, the sweat of her armpits. Drank also in her eyes the water of light. Night was falling, bringing its brief solace, when we came, my father and I, to the edge of the forbidden highland. Glimmering white and naked against the background of rocks, frailer than a young plant nourished with moisture but now cut off from the waterholes hidden in the dank silence of the earth, she twisted her arms like tendrils writhen by a fiery blast, and called upon God’s mercy.

  “Listen,” my father said. “She is discovering that which is essential.”

  But I was a child, and not craven.

  “Perhaps she is suffering,” I answered him, “and perhaps she’s frightened, too.”

  “No,” my father said, “she has passed beyond suffering and fear. Those are diseases of the cattle pen, meet for the groundling herd. She is discovering the truth.”

  The telephone shattered the silence like a sudden crack of lightning. Trembling slightly as he recovered from his start, Showers carefully set down the book and picked up his glass, then walked to the still-ringing phone, cautiously, as though approaching something that might explode.

  It was Lila Merridew, their neighbor on the other side, somewhat taken aback at the strange manner in which he answered. He recovered his poise, and spoke calmly. She wanted to talk to Marie-Claire about borrowing something for a luncheon she was having the next day for her theater board. Showers said he would leave a message. For a moment, he hoped she might ask him over for a drink. For another, he tried to bring himself to the point of asking her over for one. She was a very very elegant WASP American blonde, slender and delicate, a bit superficial, but clever. She had flirted with him once, after a fashion. She was married to the head of one of the more successful Washington foreign policy consulting firms.

  She extended no invitation. He said good-bye pleasantly and hung up unhappily, then began to pace the room. His few close friends were all abroad in one country or another, some of them utterly vanished like Guy Porique. He had seen no need to replace them during his temporary return to Washington. Now he needed a friend desperately. There was Jack Spencer, but Showers feared his ridicule, even if it were silent.

  He wondered if he was reaching some breaking point. He still had no clear idea of what it was the White House was embroiling him in, or whether it was the White House or merely Max Diehl, but he was in it up to his neck, and he knew that, whatever it was, there’d be no way he could cut free. The hounding by his superiors and by the CIA was becoming unbearable. His wife was becoming unbearable. Ottawa still seemed his only escape, but Ottawa might as well be a million miles away. He was here, not there, seemingly eternally here, caught in another black night.

  He had been thinking about those two men, the white man in the blue car in Westchester, the black man in the old Cadillac on his very own street. There was no sane reason to dwell on two incidents so unrelated, but he was, and thinking of them as one, thinking about them whenever he had nothing else to think about, especially when he was anywhere near automobile traffic. He was becoming paranoid.

  When the telephone rang this time he was on it in an instant. The voice was female, young, and southern, asking for a Bobby. Testily, he informed her of the wrong number, and slammed down the receiver.

  His pacing now became quite rapid. He had to get out of the house, yet he had to stay near the telephone. He didn’t want the street, in any case. Surrendering to compulsion, he went to the kitchen and refilled his drink, entirely with gin, going from there out to the patio. He needed a hilltop vista, a sweeping array of lights in the far distance, a clean wind blowing at him. Here was only a hot Georgetown garden among cramped houses. Showers tilted back his head to look straight up at the sky. The stars were few and dim in the humid haze.

  There was a splash. The Reston house was darkened. A single underwater light was on at one end of the pool, but he had seen or heard no one and presumed Alixe was not home.

  “Good evening, Mr. Showers.”

  He stepped to the hedge. She was at the edge of the pool, resting on her elbows, her head and shoulders in dark silhouette against the turquoise of the lighted water.

  “Alixe,” he said, laughing with some nervousness. “It’s a nice night for a swim.”


  “Oh, it’s a lovely night, Mr. Showers. Why don’t you join me? Or is Mrs. Showers home?”

  “No, she’ll be out till quite late. I … I’m waiting for a telephone call.”

  “Well, wait for it here at poolside. I’ll join you in a drink. Is that a G and T? I’ll have one.”

  As his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, he could see her in detail, the glistening of water on her shoulder, the luminescence of her eyes. She was pressed close against the side of the pool, but it seemed he could see the cleavage between her breasts. She was wearing a very low-cut bathing suit.

  “I’ll be back in a moment,” he said.

  He had been waiting desperately for the telephone to ring, but as he made her drink, he found himself hoping it would not, not for a while. He mixed hers as strong as his own, and for a fleeting instant, felt guilty about it.

  “Thank you very, very much, Mr. Showers.”

  He stepped back as she drank, uncomfortably yet pleasurably reminded of what he had once fancied as a sophisticated practice of his as a young man in his twenties in New York. He would arrive early for dates and, mixing drinks for them both, would join his young lady while she bathed—usually with the shower curtains discreetly drawn, but not always, and not always did he confine himself to his dates. Sometimes the girl’s roommate would appreciate this novelty.

  They were all middle-aged women now. The girl in the pool was twenty-five. He looked away.

  Alixe coughed slightly. “Why, Mr. Showers. This is not a G and T for polite company. You must think me highly adventurous.”

  She set down her glass and began to swim, with long, easy strokes. There was no doubt now. She was perfectly naked, her full buttocks white in contrast to the tan of her back and legs as she reached the lighted end of the pool and turned.

  “You really should join me, Mr. Showers. On a night like this.”

  It had not been all fantasy, all flirtation. Alixe Reston wanted him. And he wanted and needed her, urgently and ardently. He was intoxicated with the thought of what was about to happen. Her family was irrelevant, his wife be damned.

  The idea of removing his clothes in front of her, of clumsily unknotting tie, tugging at underpants, pulling socks from feet, was most unappealing, but abruptly he began doing so with noisy haste. The instant he was free of them, he dove into the pool with a noisy splash.

  She had moved to the shallow end, and was sitting only waist deep in the water on the set of three curved steps at the corner, her shoulders back, her breasts an offering.

  He swam to her, and then all was kisses, hungry kisses, and hands, and warm water and bare flesh, the flesh of breasts and back and buttocks, and the inside of her thighs, and higher, and her hands too, on his chest, and sliding lower, and everywhere. He was ready. He quickly made her ready too, then stood and rolled the both of them out of the pool onto the flagstone of the terrace, rolling onto his back and pulling her on top of him. Her head went up and back as she settled upon him, and then her long hair began to fly. He reached to take her breasts in his hands and closed his eyes. As the time drew nearer he pulled her nearer, a hand lost in her hair, the other gripping the satin flesh of her bottom. At once he clutched her tightly, tightly against him, until she cried out. He held her a moment longer, then released her, gasping.

  They lay on their backs on the cool stone, her head on his arm, looking up at the heat-filled night sky, and the lines of the opposite rooftops. There must have been a dozen windows from which they could be seen.

  “What have I done?” Showers said aloud, but to himself.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’ve done gloriously, Mr. Showers.”

  He covered his eyes with his hand.

  She rose and turned on one elbow, pulling his hand away and looking intently into his face.

  “Mr. Showers. In four and a half years I am going to be thirty years old. In my life, I’ve made love to two boys, three young men, and now, a man. There is nothing wrong. There is absolutely, wonderfully, marvelously nothing wrong.”

  She leaned closer, lowering her lips to kiss him, but just as they touched, he stiffened. His telephone was ringing, insistently and reproachfully. Apologizing, he got to his feet and ran, naked and foolish, into his house.

  Alixe heard the phone cease ringing, and lay there waiting. When Showers did not return as quickly as she expected, she sat up, and then rose and wrapped her towel around her. When he still did not come, she gathered up his clothing and stacked it neatly on a patio chair. Finally, she picked up the bundle and went to Showers’ house.

  He was in a chair by the telephone, which had been hung up. He was still undressed, but had poured himself another drink, straight gin quite probably. He scarcely looked up when she entered. “Joyce is such a strange man,” he said. “He kept talking about how he wouldn’t have written her obituary this way; how it didn’t square with her picture.”

  “What?”

  He drank some of the gin and then looked at her, quite directly, something of a childlike astonishment in his eyes.

  “Felicity Stuart is dead,” he said. “In California.”

  Alixe seated herself gently on the arm of the chair and touched the back of his neck.

  “Oh, Mr. Showers …”

  “She called just a few days ago, asking for help, and now she’s murdered, quite horribly murdered. A shotgun or something. In the mountains down the coast from San Francisco. She was with some man. He was murdered, too. It’s some lunatic, some lunatic wandering the mountains. He’s killed some other people.”

  Showers drank again, quickly, as though to stifle a sob.

  “She called a few days ago,” he repeated. “Twenty years, and she’s dead.”

  He drank and did sob, but quickly regained control. He sighed and looked up at her. Alixe was deeply, deeply infatuated with him beyond any consideration of his age. But, at this moment, he definitely looked his years.

  “This is all so absurd,” he said. “I’m sitting naked in my living room with the daughter of my neighbor, whimpering about a woman I haven’t seen in twenty years. Getting drunk. Hiring private detectives. What’s happened to me?”

  “It’s not absurd, Toby.”

  He smiled and touched her hand.

  “It’s not absurd,” he repeated. “Perhaps even I am not absurd. Alixe, that poor girl. Poor Felicity. They could find no next of kin. There’s no one to claim the body.”

  “There’s you.”

  “Yes, I know. I told Joyce I’d be out there as soon as possible. There’s an overnight flight from Dulles. But I have only credit cards, no cash. I’ll have to wait till the bank opens tomorrow.”

  “No you won’t, Toby. I have plenty of cash, in Daddy’s safe. And I’m going with you.”

  Marie-Claire was entertaining Arthur Jordine in the bedroom of his apartment in the Watergate, if somewhat grimly, with great athletic effort. When she was done with her bouncing and thrashing and skillful pummeling, she let him lay in her arms until they had both caught their breath, then moved away from him, scooting up against the pillows and sitting cross-legged, sullenly.

  “Get me something to drink, Arthur.”

  “Pernod?”

  “Cognac. A large one.”

  While he was gone, she stared thoughtfully at the telephone, tentatively reached for it, then snatched back her hand.

  There was a flash in the doorway.

  “Merde, qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “It’s a camera, Marie-Claire. A Polaroid.”

  He plucked a white rectangle from the bottom. An image was already beginning to form.

  “Give me that.”

  “Marie-Claire. It’s just a souvenir. For when we’re apart.”

  “Give me that, you bastard! Now!”

  Sheepish, he handed it to her. She ripped it from his fingers and tore it into very small pieces.

  “You fool, don’t you know what could be done with such a picture? M
e, naked, on your bed. Your prized Chinese painting here. Don’t you understand what damage this could do?”

  “Marie. Forgive me. I …”

  “Get me my drink! I asked for a drink.”

  He hastened away, returning with two large snifters half-filled with brandy. She glowered at him as she drank, then lowered her eyes.

  “I am sorry, Arthur. I’ve been feeling very irritable today. It’s not been going well with Dennis and me. I’m afraid he may ask for a divorce.”

  He seated himself carefully next to her.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “How many times must I explain this to you? My father would be outraged if I was divorced. He would cut off all my money!”

  “I met your father in Paris once. He seemed a very reasonable man.”

  “He is very reasonable about money. He is very unreasonable about religion. His religion, not mine. He would never forgive me. He would never again speak to me. He would ruin me. Mon Dieu, he even likes Dennis.”

  Jordine laughed.

  “This is serious,” Marie-Claire said, tilting back her head as she sipped again, her blond hair falling over her bare shoulders. “Dennis has been writing strange letters, inquiring after some woman in New York. He has hired a private investigator.”

  “To investigate us?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s doing. He may have come to hate me, now. He may be wanting to kill me.” She said it almost casually, but Jordine blanched.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Why does he want to go to Canada so soon, Arthur? He says it’s something to do with the White House, but he won’t say what. Is it this New York woman? Does he talk about her in the office?”

  “He avoids me in the office.”

  “Does he talk to anyone? Is there gossip?”

  “No. You’re married to a very straight arrow. There’s not even talk about his secretary. Though there should be. She’s quite a little number.”

  “A Latvian,” Marie-Claire said, making a face. “What about the White House, Arthur? Who there wants to send him to Ottawa so soon?”