The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  Grace shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”

  More time passed in silence. The sun disappeared behind a cloud and reappeared. It smelled good in his magnificent garden.

  “My instinct is to send you away, madame.”

  “Please don’t.”

  After a moment, de Moulin spread his hands, allowing her in. He led her around a grand staircase and along a corridor. The architects and builders of the house had done brilliant things with wood, creating loops and swirls and lattices on the staircase banister and along the ceiling. There was a fleur de lys pattern on the parquet floor. The French impressionists had either inspired the paintings on his walls or they had created them.

  “Is the art authentic, monsieur?”

  Instantly Grace understood it was a question somewhere between naïve and insulting. She was in the house of a wealthy aristocrat. They passed the kitchen: stylish and modern, a hint of Scandinavia in all of this Franco-Prussian adornment.

  “Did you grow up here, Monsieur de Moulin?”

  He ignored the question and ushered her into his library and office, a festival of leather and dark wood. The moment she stepped inside, and thanked him, there were other footsteps in the hall. Slow and creeping, and then quite fast. Another man stood in the doorway now, younger than Monsieur de Moulin, in black pants, a black vest, and a black tie.

  It took a moment for Grace to register that the metal object the man held in an awkward but sure angle and pointed in her direction was a handgun.

  “Jesus.” Grace backed into the books.

  “This is Nicolas, my bodyguard.”

  “Tell Nicolas to put his gun down.”

  “Who are you really?” De Moulin spoke a sort of French she rarely heard in Montreal. “Whom do you work for?”

  Grace took deep breaths. She scanned the room for objects she could use as a weapon. “Monsieur, in my day job I work for Steadman Coe, the publisher of the National Flash. Search my name online, if you like. Search his.”

  Nicolas came into the library. Grace ducked, to put the desk between herself and Nicolas’s gun.

  “And who are you to Elena Craig?” said de Moulin.

  “I am her ghostwriter.”

  “This makes no sense. If you were a ghostwriter, you would simply write what she tells you to write. And she would certainly omit her time in Strasbourg. Another journalist called, back when Elena and her buffoon of a husband were divorcing. He called. He certainly did not arrive without an appointment. Would you like to know what happened to him, this British journalist? He jumped off the Clifton Suspension Bridge, in Bristol. I would say he had help.”

  Monsieur de Moulin nodded at Nicolas, who moved around the desk. Grace raised her hands.

  “Easy, Nicolas.”

  “He is simply going to search you for weapons.”

  She picked up a stone stork. “If you search me in the wrong spot, Nicolas, I’ll smash your head in.”

  “Noted.” Nicolas was a dainty and respectful searcher. He touched her pockets and squeezed her ankles. When he was finished, he shrugged and Grace put the stork back on the desk.

  Monsieur de Moulin motioned toward a leather chair and sat across from Grace. His socks were the current socks of young men, with a whimsical blue and yellow pattern. Nicolas stood at attention just inside the door.

  “Why are you nervous about me, monsieur?”

  Jean-Yves de Moulin looked up at his patterned ceiling. “Because of the past,” he said. “Much of it will have been burned and shredded and hidden away in the vaults of extraordinarily powerful people for the purposes of blackmail. But still: there may be something, some errant file, sitting in the wrong drawer. I can imagine one of Elena’s former colleagues looking for one of those files in my home.”

  “Former colleagues?”

  “Current colleagues. Perhaps, madame, I am one of their errant files. A truth-teller. These colleagues are men without the capacity for empathy. And I am an old man: ripe for a stroke, a cerebral hemorrhage, a jump off a bridge.”

  “Elena married you to escape Czechoslovakia, to get a Western passport. Once she—”

  “Madame, when are you publishing this book?”

  “Books take years to write and publish.”

  “So this conversation is pointless, really.”

  “Pointless?”

  He leaned forward. “Nicolas, can you bring Madame Elliott and me a bottle of Gewürztraminer, with some tapenade and Muenster-géromé and crackers?”

  Nicolas left the room.

  “Madame, if Anthony Craig wins this election, your visit and your book project are worthless. They win. You see? It will be too late.”

  Grace laughed. “The election is in a little more than a week, monsieur.”

  “Yes, it is both the most and the least comical thing at once, is it not? This notion that she married me for a passport…” He pointed at Grace’s notebook. “When Elena began showing up in the press, in the late 1970s, one of her lawyers or a man posing as one of her lawyers paid me five hundred thousand American dollars to go along with this story.”

  “It’s not true?”

  “I did not need the money. But I do not want to go to sleep at night worried if I will wake up or not.”

  Nicolas arrived with a tray. On it there was a tall bottle, open and sweating, two crystal glasses, and a platter with black tapenade, cheese, and some rice crackers. He poured the wine.

  “Elena did not need me to escape from l’Empire soviétique. She had already escaped, if that is the word one can use. She never did get a French passport. She never needed one.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  It did not seem right to propose a toast or even to touch the rims of their glasses, so they just drank. The wine was bright and sweet.

  “She makes it appear we had a sham marriage, an unconsummated business arrangement of some sort. I was to be a friend of a friend, a sports acquaintance. There is some truth in this. We met and began dating, grew close to one another through a shared interest in physical activity. I had been a serious swimmer, she a gymnast.”

  “What I don’t understand is how she got here.”

  De Moulin shook his head. “She made it sound like a great escape, in the middle of the night, over the Austrian border. Sneaking past gunmen in towers, dodging the searchlights, tiptoeing over minefields. We all loved this story. We were young and it was very romantic. She was a gorgeous, funny, intelligent woman from an exotic place. We believed every word. It was only later, long after she left me, that I suspected the truth: no regular small-town girl was getting across that border in 1971 without help. I suspect she flew over it in a government plane.”

  “You met in 1971?”

  “Shortly after she arrived. Elena had a modeling contract with an outfit from Paris, and she came to a big fundraising dinner my friends and I organized twice a year. She sat at my table. I was not terribly keen on my date and she was not terribly keen on hers. For good reason. He was gay as an antelope. We had sport in common, as I said, and she seemed to understand my financial position.”

  “Which was?”

  “Family wealth. Back then I was rather involved in the community, as a young lawyer and as a philanthropist I suppose. I managed my grandparents’ trust fund. And I was planning to get involved in the Council of Europe, politics.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Very little. I worked…less. We traveled a lot, to Paris and London and Edinburgh. The Côte d’Azur. I have friends with rather lovely properties in various places. We stayed with them. I thought it would impress her, a peasant Slavic girl.”

  “It sounds great.”

  “Doesn’t it? But it wasn’t nearly enough for our Elena. I wasn’t her idea of ambitious. She had not risked her life, crossing an uncrossable border, to drink champagne and play charades in Saint-Tropez. I had promised her politics. I had promised her power. Though I don’t think I actually promised her any of that.”

 
“How long were you together?”

  “Less than one year, but it was glorious. The best months of my life. It truly was. And I know she thought so too. She left in 1972, for Montreal.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Two cars arrived. One of the cars had a driver and a man in the back. The driver put her luggage in the boot while the man in the back watched me in the window. We did not speak but I understood what he was saying.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The men in the second car came in without an invitation and they made it quite clear indeed. They stayed four hours. It was, I suppose, an interrogation. They had photographs of me with a prostitute. These photographs were the grounds for divorce. They had the divorce papers already prepared. My only job was to sign them. I owed her nothing, they told me. No money, none of the things we had purchased together. I did not know the woman was a prostitute, and the photographs were taken three nights after I met Elena before we had even gone on a date. They said the photos were taken during our marriage, that the prostitute had attested to it, and were therefore grounds for a no-contest divorce. It was so obviously a lie. When I disputed it one of the men slapped me in the face with the back of his hand. I remember one of them said, ‘From now on if you live, you live at our discretion. Do you understand?’ ” Monsieur de Moulin looked up again, took a deep breath. “I think about them every day, these men, how they diminished me in my own home. I did not seek another wife or a family, despite all my dreams and desires, to spare them the…danger and darkness, I suppose, that has hung over me since that night in 1972.”

  He paused and removed his glasses, wiped them with a little red cloth. His eyes had gone glassy.

  “Do you have any proof of this?” said Grace.

  “These men were professionals. Are professionals.”

  “You said it was an interrogation. What did they want to know?”

  “They wanted what I knew about Elena’s past. What had she revealed? She was a model, a gymnast, a lovely and clever girl who had a degree from Charles University. For some reason she had chosen me, though I was not nearly her equal in energy or ambition. When her modeling career was over she planned to work with athletes, with sport in some way. She was, as I said, deeply interested in politics and power. I was, increasingly, not. My inheritance provided everything I needed. My career did not interest me as much as Elena did. I was interested in our friends, the family we might build together. We talked about it, the children we would have.”

  “Who were they, these professionals?”

  “Years later I came to have a friend in the DGSE.”

  “What’s that?”

  “La Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure. You’re American? The DGSE is the French equivalent of your CIA. This friend, my friend in the French secret service, I told him, in confidence, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, what had happened on the night Elena left me. He said they were KGB, most likely, or the Czech equivalent under orders of the KGB.”

  “The StB.”

  De Moulin nodded.

  “The man in the back seat of the car, who drove away with her, what did he look like?”

  “About my age, back then, in his late twenties but somehow going on sixty. You know what I mean? High cheekbones, pale skin, eyes without expression. I don’t know. It was rather an upsetting night and I’d had a few drinks by then.”

  “Who do you think he was?”

  “Her handler. Her boyfriend. Her secret service pimp. How am I supposed to know? You must publish this book. Soon or never.”

  “But like you said, monsieur, the Berlin Wall came down. All of those men are irrelevant now, aren’t they?”

  He looked at his watch. “Don’t taunt me. You’re here because those men are more relevant than ever. Elena found what she was looking for, not in Montreal but in New York City. I suppose it didn’t turn out exactly the way she wanted. The divorce was certainly off-script. But I hear she and Anthony remain quite close.”

  Jean-Yves de Moulin stood up with some effort, a hand on his lower back. “It seems to me, Madame Elliott, that you won’t be safe and I won’t be safe until this—whatever it is—becomes public. Do you agree?”

  De Moulin walked her to the door. Grace did not know how to shoot a gun but for the first time in her life she understood why so many of her fellow Americans insisted on carrying one.

  Before they said goodbye, he put a hand on her arm. “Perhaps, as you write, I’ll take this opportunity to visit one of our overseas territories.”

  “In school, back in Minnesota, I had a pen pal from Martinique,” said Grace. “That’s still a French territory, isn’t it?”

  Nicolas opened the door and the sun shone in on the parquet floor. Monsieur de Moulin smiled and looked outside. “Martinique.” The birds called from the Orangerie. Slowly his smile crumbled and he walked back into his home.

  When his door closed, and Grace stepped down into de Moulin’s garden, she looked around and felt small and fragile and alone.

  16

  MONTREAL, 1975

  It was the fifth day of a damp, windless heat wave in Montreal. Elena Klimentová filled a bowl with ice and rigged it so the fan would blow cool air at their naked bodies. Every twenty minutes, she would empty the meltwater and refill it with ice. Their neighbor at 2311 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest was so in love with the Bee Gees she played their latest album over and over again, and now “Jive Talkin’ ” was playing so loudly the floor thumped.

  In the middle of the song, at almost two in the morning, there was a knock on the door. Neither Elena nor Josef Straka, who lay beside her, had slept.

  “Maybe she’s come to apologize for the party.” Elena sat up.

  “That woman does not apologize.” Josef refused to move. It was Elena’s job to cook dinner on their faulty stove, to wash the dishes in their tiny sink, to take out the garbage, to answer the door. Josef worked long hours at an American consulting firm while he finished the courses and examinations that would make him a chartered accountant. This was all Josef could manage, along with camping trips and nights of mariáš with his Czech and Slovak buddies, a card game from back home that she considered an utter waste of time.

  She tied a terry robe around herself and walked barefoot to the door. The floorboards were the coolest things in the apartment.

  For a moment she did not recognize the man in a suit, standing in the hall, when she opened the door. The fluorescent light had burned out. Behind him, the thumps of feet and the voices of the Bee Gees were punctuated by the occasional whoop from their neighbor and her friends.

  “May I come in?”

  Sergei Sorokin’s crooked smile had not changed, and neither had the darkness in his small eyes, though his hair had thinned to a wisp. This was the look Elena imagined on his face when he sentenced a man to death.

  On the first of every month Elena received a check for $3,000 from Kara Modeling Canada, no matter how many modeling jobs she had done. With Josef’s salary and the extra money she earned from teaching gymnastics in the winter months they had nearly saved enough for a down payment on an attached house in Westmount, where the wealthy English-speakers lived.

  She and Josef were a normal couple, on the way to Canada’s upper middle class. In the special program at Charles University they were always told the same story: once you are out in the world, we may never call on you. You may never hear from us.

  But you probably will.

  Elena took a breath, to calm herself. “Of course, Sergei. It’s lovely to see you. Please.”

  His black shoes were, as always, perfectly shined. The only accommodation he made for the punishing heat was a cotton suit.

  Elena turned on the lamp in what served as their living room and dining room. There was a television in the corner, next to the fireplace.

  Josef stood at the entrance to the bedroom, a towel around his waist. His voice quivered slightly. “What are you thinking, coming here at this hour?
How dare you?”

  Though he looked larger, Sergei was not nearly as tall as Josef. Slowly he walked toward the bedroom. Josef backed up as Sergei approached. They whispered at one another, rather grimly, and then with his right hand on his arm Sergei led Josef through the apartment and to the door, opened it, shoved him into the hall with only the towel around his waist.

  The door closed. “But she is my wife,” Josef shouted, feebly.

  Josef was her gift from Sergei after her time in Strasbourg: her old friend and gymnastics companion could help her find her mark in Montreal. The marriage itself had been Josef’s idea. He had assured her Sergei was not coming back. Who knows if he was even alive? These Soviets, these spies, they disappear without a word, they eat one another for dinner.

  The dining-room table was a mess of newspapers and dirty dishes Elena had not cleaned up. And what was dinner, in this heat, but tuna sandwiches with onion and cheese, a six-pack of Molson Export? She was suddenly embarrassed by the state of the apartment, the smallness of it and the disorder. Sergei sat at the table and considered it all, smiled up at her.

  “Lovely.”

  “Let me just…” Elena gathered up the plates and took them into the kitchen, dropped them into the sink. Back in the living room that was also a dining room she folded the newspapers and wiped the crumbs onto the floor. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sit, please, Elenka.”

  She sat and he stared at her.

  “Sergei, I didn’t know what else to do. I was lonely. I met men, but they were men like Jean-Yves. Nice men, regular men, wealthy but…I don’t know, satisfied. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing. They lack a certain—”

  “You’re not even twenty-five. You’ve hardly begun.” Sergei gestured toward the door. “Josef is not your equal. You will divorce him and we will reward him. He will have a good life, a fine career. We will remove all trace of this error. When I saw the article in the newspaper—”

  “That was so stupid.”

  “It was below you, Elenka. Boasting about your quiet married life, the life of a model and sportswoman. Did you think I would not see it?”