Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

  He stood up straight, his hands on the railing.

  “You will someday reach an age, Alixe, where you will find yourself everlastingly grateful for not having married the men you didn’t marry.”

  “But you aren’t truly grateful for not having married her, are you? I think it’s like Felicity, something you really regret.”

  “You’re right of course. I realized some time ago that the only reason she didn’t marry me was the one she gave. She didn’t love me. If she had, I’d probably be here still, working at some crummy little job, living in some crummy little seaside house filled with cats and dogs.”

  “What happened to Stephanie?”

  “She married a photographer. They live around here someplace. I call her up every few years.”

  He put his arm lightly around her waist again.

  “On the other side of Capitola are some mossy cliffs,” he said. “We climbed down them one night, a very dark night, with only the lights in Capitola to see by. We made it down to the beach, but the tide was in and the waves chased us back up the cliffside. So we sat up there—I think I fetched her a wild flower from one of the crevices—for what seemed like half the night, sitting in the dark with only us and the sea. Do you know the Debussy, orchestration of Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopédie’?”

  She nodded.

  “That music has that night in it.”

  “I think we’d better go now, Toby.”

  Joyce drove the car onto the pier, meeting them more than a third of the way out. He opened the right-hand door with some urgency.

  “You got the police mighty excited, my man,” he said. “There were numerous detective types gathered in your name, making numerous telephone calls, asking numerous questions. Asking them of Stansfield Joyce, who was trying to ask them questions.”

  “What do you mean?” Showers asked.

  He got into the front seat, next to Alixe. The intimacy of their walk to the end of the wharf now eluded him. He would settle for mere closeness.

  Joyce turned the car around as he spoke. “They asked me about you. I am at least logical to them. I have an investigator’s license. I have been out here doing all the things that investigators logically do on missing persons traces. You are not logical, my man. You they find very suspicious, very screwball. They will indeed be desirous of conversing with you further. I never got to practice much law, but I got the strong impression that you may have reason to be grateful for the constitutional protection of habeas corpus. My legal advice to you right now is that we get the hell over those mountains and out of this county.”

  “Shall we go back to the hotel?” Alixe asked.

  “A good idea,” Joyce said. “Back to the hotel, and move out of the hotel, and get back to D.C.”

  “Not yet,” Showers said. “I want to go to where Felicity lived. I have the address. It’s near the college.”

  “I know. I checked it out last night. It’s an apartment in an old house.”

  “Did you get inside?”

  “No.”

  “I want to look inside. Can we do that?”

  “We can try. But first let’s check you out of the hotel.”

  “I don’t want to go back to Washington yet. And I don’t want to conduct myself like some fugitive.”

  “Look, man. We’ll all move to some other hotel. But let’s just get ourselves scarce from those people. If you want to keep on with this, let’s try the easy way for once. The law here has ways to inconvenience us greatly.”

  They repacked quickly. Joyce urged them just to leave and let the desk clerk deal with their room charges later, but Showers insisted on settling up the account in person. As he signed the American Express form, paying for the full night, he explained an emergency had come up. The clerk accepted that without comment.

  The house was in the oldest part of San Jose, the neighborhood a relic of the days before World War II when the city was merely a small college town set among the prune orchards, and not a sprawling metropolis with more inhabitants than San Francisco. It being summer, there were not many students on the street; just a few vacant-eyed, ill-dressed people who looked as though they might sometime have been students but had turned to an even easier life.

  The woman who answered the door of the house, presumably Felicity’s landlady, had a vacant look to her eyes as well. She was about thirty, wearing blue jeans, a man’s shirt, and dirty tennis shoes. Her hair needed washing. In the cluttered room behind her, a television set was on. Thumping rock music was coming from some other part of the house, and there was the acrid smell of marijuana smoke.

  “We’ve come about Felicity Stuart,” Showers said. “I’m a friend of the family in New York. This is my attorney, Mr. Joyce.”

  “I didn’t know she had any family.”

  “We’d like to look through her things,” Showers said. “There may be some personal items her family would be interested in. We’ll leave everything else.”

  “The police said I wasn’t to do anything with her stuff, at least not until the end of the month.”

  “We just came from the police,” Joyce said. “In Santa Cruz. We had to identify the body. We’ll only be a few minutes; then we’ll be out of your hair.”

  The woman stood there, confused, as though not knowing what to do, as though incapable of finding her way back into her house from the vestibule.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “We’ll only be a few minutes,” Alixe said, reaching into her purse. “Here. Let this compensate for our inconveniencing you.”

  She handed the woman a twenty-dollar bill.

  “All right. Just a minute. I’ll get the key.”

  After opening Felicity’s door, she went back to her own rooms. Felicity’s apartment, two small rooms and a bath, was stale-smelling and dark, but surprisingly neat. Joyce and Alixe at once began looking through the closet and drawers.

  “You seem to know what you’re doing, lady,” Joyce said.

  “I’m a woman. I know where a woman would put things.”

  Showers went to Felicity’s small bookshelf, at once feeling pleased, cheered, and redeemed. She had not become some morally misshapen political and intellectual ruin. Not entirely, at any rate. Anatole France’s Thais was there, as was The Republic of Plato and Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. There were several works by Colette, a worn copy of a biography of Elinor of Acquitaine, a rather new copy of Manon Lescaut. Showers took it out, and leafed through the pages. Something fell out, a photograph. He retrieved it from the floor. It was of Felicity, looking more the age he had expected, standing with a man who had his arm around her. A lake and some trees were in the background.

  “I’ve found some letters!” Alixe said. “They’re in French. They’re all from Vancouver. They’re all from the same address in Vancouver. And very recent.”

  Showers glanced at her, but quickly returned his attention to the photograph. He sat down in the dusty chair and held it close, turning it toward the window light. There was no doubt. The man standing with Felicity was his old friend, Guy Porique.

  There was little else of interest, nothing personal except clothing. They took the letters, the photograph, and an old lace handkerchief Showers wanted to keep as a memento, and left. Joyce drove them to a Holiday Inn, but remained behind the wheel, leaving the engine running.

  “And now you’ll be wanting to go to Vancouver,” he said.

  “Of course. We have nowhere else,” Showers said.

  “We ought to try to get a plane out this afternoon.”

  Alixe looked at Showers.

  “No,” he said. “We need sleep. And a shower and something to eat. And drink. I’ve a lot to think over.”

  “I’m going to take care of a few loose ends. I have a friend from Nam with the Oakland PD. I think I can get some questions answered,” Joyce said.

  “When will you be back?” Alixe asked.

  “Couple hours. Don’t go anywhere.”

 
“You needn’t worry about that, Mr. Joyce,” she said.

  This desk clerk also dealt with them routinely, though he stared at Alixe appreciatively when Showers asked for adjoining rooms. Once in them, they opened the connecting doors. Showers attended to his list of needs in reverse order, starting with Scotch whiskey from a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label he had brought in his bag. He poured one for her.

  “Shall I order sandwiches?” he asked.

  “Not yet. Let’s wait for Mr. Joyce. There’s not much water in this scotch and water, Toby.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why do you always make your drinks so strong?”

  “It’s how I like them. And need them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m something of an alcoholic, Alixe. When I was much younger, we just called it being a heavy drinker, a man who could hold his whiskey. But it’s the same thing. I drink compulsively, and dependently.”

  “Bosh. At our parties, you’ve never had more than a glass of wine or two.”

  “A glass of wine or two I can control. And sometimes that’s difficult.”

  She looked at him over the rim of her glass as she took another sip, her large brown eyes full of grave assessment. She seemed very much a mature, adult woman, and of course she was. He had become so used to thinking of her as his neighbor’s child. Now he was becoming used to not thinking that.

  “If this is so, why are you drinking now, when you need your wits about you?”

  “Because this is how I keep my wits about me, in some situations. It goes back to the Congo.”

  “The mysterious Congo again.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Please stop saying ‘sorry.’”

  He drank.

  “When did you last see Guy Porique?”

  “More than three years ago. In Brussels. He was with a party of environmentalists lobbying the EEC about endangered species. The same group that bought a ship and rammed and sunk a Japanese whaler a year later. He was still a member of the Canadian Parliament then, but he’d lost his cabinet post and had been all but drummed out of his party. He was a very bitter man.”

  “Could he have met Felicity through something that had to do with you?”

  “I can’t think of anything, not at all. I’ve been trying.”

  “But they’re trying to reach you, or she is at least.”

  “Yes. I’m going to see this through. I’m not going back until I talk to both of those people, or find out what’s become of them. You don’t need to stick it out, Alixe.”

  She smiled, the first time he had seen her smile that day. “I have all summer, Mr. Showers.”

  He finished his drink. Ignoring his extreme craving for another, he rose, finding himself enormously tired.

  “Mr. Showers needs a shower,” he said.

  “I’ll just finish my drink.”

  He closed the bathroom door behind him, something he would not have done with Marie-Claire. Remembering Alixe in the pool, he wondered at his shyness.

  Turning the water as hot as he could stand it, he stood for a long while letting it beat against his back muscles, especially over the long, jagged scar that ran along his left shoulder blade. After eighteen years, the once mangled muscles still pained him when he was fatigued.

  He didn’t hear her open the door, and was startled when the shower curtain was suddenly drawn back and she stepped quickly into the steam in front of him, completely and wonderfully naked.

  “This isn’t the most comfortable place to make love,” he said.

  “No. But it’s a terrific place to start.”

  Afterwards, despite the afternoon’s warmth, they pulled the bedsheet over them, to maintain their intimacy. They lay in each other’s arms, stroking each other’s back. They were utterly relaxed, yet so close her breasts still pressed against his chest.

  “Tell me about this,” she said, softly, running fingertips along his scar.

  “I thought I had. It’s my souvenir of the Belgian Congo. We were in a dusty provincial capital upriver, trying to find some Americans. There were four of us, two of us from our embassy, a United Nations officer, and a French journalist. Someone threw a grenade at us. Fortunately, it was a shrapnel grenade, not a concussion. We all hit the ground when we saw it. I caught a lot of the stuff. The UN man was killed. It was the first time in my life I really, really hated anyone.”

  “Your attacker?”

  “No. Winslow, the other man from our embassy. As we dropped to the ground, he pulled me in front of him. Grabbed my arm and pulled me in the way of the blast.”

  “He may only have been trying to get you down.”

  “No. We were already moving. It was a deliberate, cowardly, despicable thing to do, and I’ve hated that man ever since. If I thought it possible for me to kill another human being, he would be the one I’d pick.”

  “Why did he do it? Was he afraid?”

  “No, I think it was just his view of America’s priorities. He was one of the CIA men in my section.”

  “Whatever happened to him?”

  “I thought he died in Vietnam, but he survived. He survived Iran. The son of a bitch lives on in McLean. Sometimes I hope I’ll run into him. Sometimes I’m afraid that I will.”

  She eased herself back, lifting herself on an elbow, looking at his face as though it were some happy gift.

  “Do you mind that I call you Toby?”

  “I like it very much. No one has ever wanted to call me Toby,” he said. “Not even my mother, who gave me the funny name.”

  “I don’t like Dennis, really.”

  “Pity I don’t have the customary State Department McGeorge Bundy.”

  “What?”

  “The middle family name used as a first. There was a fellow in the consular section in Brussels born Willie Scaggs in West Virginia. He took his mother’s maiden name and became Sedgwick Scaggs. That, a striped suit, and a Penn State education made him into your quintessential FSO.”

  “I will call you Tobias sometimes, too. It has dignity, something you might see chiseled on a memorial in Chatham, Massachusetts.”

  “I love you, Alixe.”

  “I am very, very glad to hear you say that, Tobias Showers.”

  He pulled her close and kissed her, gently. She closed her eyes.

  There was a voice. No, two voices, strangely near. No. One voice was near, the other distant, yet the one that was distant was louder, the conversation punctuated with short bursts of static. He rolled over and looked at the open window. The voices continued their peculiar dialogue, then, with sudden silence, ceased.

  Showers went to the window, standing to the side, and peered around the curtain. There was a police car outside. The rooms they had been given were just down the corridor from the lobby.

  The policeman got out, putting a clipboard under his arm, and started toward the lobby entrance.

  “Alixe. Go to your room. Get dressed as quickly as you can. Just throw your things into your bag. Hurry. We have to leave.”

  She gave him one quick look, then left the bed. He quickly began to pull on his own clothes, not even pausing to pull out a clean shirt.

  Alixe was dressed before he was, apparently wearing nothing but her white sundress and sandals. Showers jammed his tie into his blazer pocket and reached for his suitcase, but he was too late. There was a sharp, insistent rapping on the door.

  They would drag him back to Santa Cruz, and tie him up for hours or weeks. But there it was. He hadn’t any choice.

  He slowly opened the door and found himself looking into Stansfield Joyce’s face.

  “The car’s by the back door, my man. We’re gonna have to run.”

  They came off the ramp onto the freeway going sixty, heading west toward San Francisco. Joyce steered nimbly through the thickening late-afternoon traffic, moving fast, but not so fast as to attract undue attention.

  “There are still no police,” said Alixe, watching through the rear window.
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br />   “There will be,” Joyce said.

  “Why?” said Showers. “Just because they want to question me some more? Isn’t this a bit excessive?”

  “They ran a fingerprint check on the DOA you looked at in Santa Cruz. According to my friend in Oakland, they got her ID’d as a Mary Schwartz, a.k.a. Mary Sands, a.k.a. Marlene Simms. She was a hooker, my man. A very active lady of the San Francisco streets. She was busted in North Beach just three days before she got blown away.”

  A big green sign marking an exit appeared. Joyce abruptly slowed and pulled off the freeway, hurrying down to the stop sign at the cross street below. With a smoky screech of tires, he roared into the dark of the underpass, then turned skidding onto a ramp that put them back onto the freeway in the opposite direction.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Evasive action, my man. I thought you went to antiterrorist driving school. This is just the interstate highway version of the slam-skid one-hundred-eighty-degree turn. And I think it’s going to pay off. Yup. Here come de law.”

  A San Jose police car rapidly approached and flashed past them in the opposite lanes. Its emergency lights were off but it was traveling at high speed, pursuit speed. The policeman driving it did not look at them in the instant they were abreast, nor did he turn off at the exit.

  Joyce pulled into the slow lane and settled into the general flow of traffic, as though they were car-pooling commuters bound for home.

  “Next stop Sacramento,” he said.

  “We’re going to Vancouver!” Showers said.

  “Vancouver it is, but I don’t think we’d get much farther than the door at S. F. International. What I’m thinking is that we catch the next puddle jumper out of Sacramento no matter where it’s going, and work our way on short flights to Seattle from there.”

  “I don’t understand why you think the police have such an interest in me.”

  “The fingerprint check on the male victim turned up nothing. Nada. Not even an army record. But they’re carrying a new ID on him. Guy Porique. Canadian national. They found a suitcase and all kinds of shit with his name on it in that hotel in San Francisco. He was renting a room there by the month.”