The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  The driver looked in the rear-view mirror. “This is the fuckers?”

  “Maybe I should get out and run again.”

  “The Russians follow with drones, lady. There is no running.”

  “I don’t want to put you in danger.” The last of the children ran across the highway as the light changed.

  “Put me in danger?” Her driver floored it the instant the light turned green. The newer and more powerful SUV had no trouble keeping up. “Let’s give them danger for a change.”

  Grace had never gone so fast in a car. She wanted to hide her eyes, to jump in the nearby ocean, to check into a passing Best Western and sleep for three days. She longed for her old worries: to feel like a failure, to lose her job, to hurt Johnny Depp’s feelings. Instead, they roared past an IHOP and a busy little kiosk called a Dairy Belle so fast that people turned and lined up in the parking lot to watch them go.

  Suddenly, the SUV was only a few feet behind them, and the man with the pretty eyes and the awful nose was pointing a gun through the windshield, at her. Grace ducked.

  While he drove, at blistering speed, her driver spoke calmly of his father, whom the Russians had shot in a crowd, unarmed, like an animal. “My father they killed for nothing, worse than an animal. An animal, at least, we kill for sausage. All he wanted was freedom.”

  Grace dialed 911.

  “What is your emergency?” said the operator.

  “I am in a taxi, driving north on Highway 1,” said Grace. “And men with guns in an SUV are chasing us.”

  “Stay calm, ma’am. Can you describe the SUV?”

  Grace began to describe it as the man with the pretty eyes aimed his gun at her again. It seemed a game to him. He smiled as he did it. She ducked a second time.

  “Lady,” said the driver. “Hang up.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Maybe they listen.”

  Grace hung up. Calmly, as his speedometer reached eighty, the driver reached forward and opened his glove box and pulled out a handgun.

  “When I tell you, open your window and point it.”

  “Point it?”

  “Point it at the driver. When I tell.”

  They were approaching a construction area with barricades and fences. Grace opened her window. Only two of the lanes were open on the left side of the four-lane highway, and each side was marked with heavy concrete barriers. On the right side of the barrier there was a deep hole. Cars were coming in the opposite direction toward them.

  Grace wanted to scream. At this speed, how would her taxi driver make it through an unusually thin lane with cars on the left and heavy concrete on the right?

  “Now.”

  “Now what?”

  “Point the gun!”

  Grace pointed her gun at the driver of the SUV, and screamed as she did it. The sun shone into the SUV from the west and she could see the shock on his face and then, for an instant, his fear.

  Grace’s taxi made it past the construction site as the driver of the SUV swerved. His partner reached for the wheel but it was too late. The SUV ripped into the concrete and flipped high into the air. It rotated and landed on its roof, on an empty patch of Highway 1.

  Grace’s taxi driver slowed down, then stopped. He opened his door and Grace opened hers. They got out and looked back at the wreck. It had made a terrible crunch when it landed. Glass had shattered. Now it hissed. There was no sign of the man with the pretty eyes or his companion.

  “Are you okay, lady?”

  She hugged him. He was about her age and smelled of his cherry air freshener. “Thank you. I’m so sorry.”

  “If those fuckers are not dead they will want to be dead.” The taxi driver had gone stiff from the hug. It seemed to make him more nervous than driving eighty miles an hour on a secondary highway.

  In only a few days, Grace thought, she had been responsible for the deaths of four people.

  A small crowd had gathered around the black SUV. A man shouted not to get too close. “We better go, lady. Pompano Beach?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  Looking at the handgun on the seat next to her, Grace thought maybe her pursuers would be severely injured—not killed. Maybe they had wives and children who were dependent on them. They had been children once themselves.

  But as they started north toward the interstate, the SUV exploded behind them.

  * * *

  —

  Jason stood next to his white Buick, waiting for her, when she arrived. Her bag was on the sidewalk. She insisted on giving the driver from Azerbaijan another hug, after paying her bill and giving him a fifty-dollar tip.

  “I should give you tip, lady,” he said, shaking off the hug. “My father is proud of me now.”

  He drove off and Grace pointed at the Buick. “The girls are still inside?”

  “They are,” said Jason. “I’ll take them to crisis counseling shortly.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I told them Aunt Grace is mentally ill, that we should pity you. They learned a new word today. Delusional.”

  “Nice one.” Now she hugged Jason. “You really are a good man. And I’m so glad things have worked out the way they have, for you and Caitlyn. Those girls of yours. They’re lovely, and it really seems like…I mean, I never could have.”

  “Sure you could have,” he said. “You could do anything.”

  Grace hugged him harder, and held him a moment too long. “Okay. Are you sure you can do this for me?”

  “Of course. Just make it kind of snappy. The moment it starts getting dark, the girls will want to be getting free candy they’re not allowed to eat.”

  She jogged toward the front doors of the complex, Vaucluse by the Sea.

  “Grace?”

  “Yeah?” She stopped and turned.

  “Should I be worried?”

  “No, absolutely not.” Grace dished a fake smile at her ex-husband. “I’ll be right back.”

  There were a few palm trees and some cacti in the dusty inner courtyard of Vaucluse by the Sea but almost no vegetation that required actual gardening. The pump on the central fountain had been broken for eight months.

  Her mother had fled the Minnesota winter and could not abide living somewhere colder, in a foreign country, just to be close to Grace. So it was a monthly commute, and not a terribly uncomfortable one. With half of Quebec retirees escaping to Florida for the winter months, there were daily flights between Montreal and Miami.

  Pompano Beach had been walloped by the subprime mortgage crisis, with unemployment figures still over thirteen percent and plenty of surplus real estate, which is how Grace could afford Vaucluse by the Sea. But the adjacent waterfront was now a massive construction site after years of seeming the saddest place in Broward County, and Grace was sure her monthly bills would soon go up. Even now, it came with the shame of knowing this place, with its grumpy nurses and ninth-tier visiting doctors, its 1980s furniture and its smell of chlorine, medicine, and feces, was the best she could do for her mother. Soon her mother would be blind after some years of mismanaging her diabetes. In July Grace had toured assisted living facilities north of Miami and she thought afterward that it might have been the most melancholy afternoon of her life.

  “Honey.” Elsie Elliott stepped out of her apartment with her arms out. When Grace took her hand, at the circle of cacti, her mother finally looked in the right direction for eye contact.

  The small consolation of her mother’s worsening sight was she could see neither the chin scab nor how sweaty and disheveled Grace looked.

  After a hug and a kiss, her mother took her arm. “You have to tell me all about Europe. Can we have dinner? There’s a Mexican place in the strip mall called Dos Amigos. It was started by two friends.”

  Grace led her back into the one-bedroom apartment that carried the scent of smokers long departed. “Mom, we have to pack you a bag.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re staying with Jason and
his family for a few days.”

  “No, I am goddamn well not.”

  Grace told her just enough as she packed her mother’s bag: that she was working on a story that will make some powerful people very angry, that she had already been threatened. “Once it’s published, I’ll get you right back here.”

  “If they know about me, sweetheart, surely they know about Jason.”

  “It’s just better. I’d put you in a hotel but they’d find you by your name anyway. It’s the best possible solution.”

  “Does Jason have a gun?”

  Grace sighed. “He’s a man in Florida. Of course he has a gun.”

  27

  MONTREAL, 2016

  Back at the airport, waiting for her 11:55 p.m. flight, Grace scanned the crowd of retirees, families, and deeply tanned young Québécois. She could find no one who looked like obvious replacements for the Russians, who had surely burned up on Highway 1. Three or four of her fellow passengers wore Halloween costumes, but they were too young and too happy to be pursuers.

  She texted Steadman Coe, Manon, and William with the number from her new SIM card. On the airplane, before she dozed, she opened the Elena file on her computer and added everything she remembered from her stolen notebook and from the printouts. When she landed in Montreal, more exhausted than at any time in her life, she turned on her phone to see a text from Coe, sent at 4:22 in the morning:

  The office at 8, non-negotiable thanks

  After sitting on the tarmac inexplicably for almost an hour, and waiting in customs, there was no time to go home first so Grace took a taxi straight to the office in Old Montreal. It was not yet seven in the morning and still dark in the warehouse. She opened her laptop in her cubicle and imagined she had to file a front-page story for the Times, on a deadline.

  How would she write the lede? For ten minutes she stared at the white screen, at her airplane notes. All she knew for sure was that Elena’s parents were in the Cibulka book, along with other Russian informants and spies, that her mother’s code name was Vrba, and that other files had been removed or destroyed. William had said Elena never graduated from Charles University. Yet Grace could not link anything she had learned about Elena to the fire that had killed Katka and her father, Coach Vacek. Officials in Prague and Moscow were unlikely to take her calls for confirmation. She could write nothing about the men stalking, threatening, attacking, and stealing from her because she had no idea who they were let alone who they represented.

  Then there was Sergei Sorokin. Who the hell was he?

  Records uncovered in the former Czechoslovakia show connections between Elena Craig, ex-wife of presidential candidate Anthony Craig, and the country’s Cold War secret police organization, the StB.

  Grace knew what her professors at Austin would say about this: it was not enough to show connections. Rather than changing it to a more precise, more dangerous verb phrase or reconstructing the opening sentence altogether—with the word spy or even swallow—she continued writing.

  The sun rose over the St. Lawrence. French hip hop growled to life from the northwest corner of the building, where the video game developers liked to start early. It was loud enough that she didn’t hear Steadman Coe sneak up behind her. By the time she spotted his bald head in the reflection of her screen he had already read too much.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  She slammed the laptop shut. “Nothing.”

  “The eternal plea of the innocent. Let’s go.”

  Grace followed him to his office, her computer under her arm.

  They were almost two months past Labor Day, in the northern bit of the northern hemisphere, yet Coe wore a suit in between white and tan. His cologne was musky fresh and his shoes were new. It only added to her fatigue, that she knew all of her boss’s shoes.

  At his door he stopped and turned. Grace stopped too. His freshly shaved chin shone in the fluorescent light. “Have you looked in the mirror recently?”

  “I haven’t, actually.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  His office was vast and faced southeast, into the rising sun. Instead of sitting, as he usually would when they discussed a dumb feature or a bit of gossip, his sex life, or the whims of the owners of the company, Coe turned away from her and into the sun.

  “Close the door.”

  She did.

  “Grace: I’m firing you.”

  “What?” She looked at him for signs it was a joke. No, he was serious. “Why?”

  “Insubordination.”

  “What are you talking about, Steadman? I’m stupidly loyal to you.”

  “You work for the National Flash. You traveled to Prague on my dime.”

  “I traveled to Prague on Elena’s dime.”

  “On assignment for my magazine. And instead of doing the work you were assigned to do, you harass Elena about a book project that is entirely outside the scope of your contract.”

  “What contract?”

  “Outside of your…purview.”

  “That’s made up, and it’s entirely relevant to what I do. The better I know her, the better I can mimic her voice. And I won’t miss any deadlines.”

  “You’re fired. Three months’ severance is already in your account, as of 7:45 this morning.”

  “Steadman.” She slapped the top of his desk. “Turn around and look at me!”

  “No.”

  “What is this?”

  He shook his head.

  “Please tell me what’s going on. Is the Flash in trouble? Is—”

  He whispered something she could not quite hear.

  “Pardon? Steadman, what?”

  “Please go. I’m sorry.”

  “Is this for real?”

  Coe put his hands on the window and removed them. They left a moist print.

  “There’s nothing I can say to change your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Because this isn’t your decision. Is it?”

  Finally he turned. Grace had known Steadman Coe a long time but she had never seen him afraid.

  “Steadman, the more of us who know, the safer we are, and—”

  “Grace, you don’t understand. This isn’t journalism anymore.”

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head and pointed at the door.

  * * *

  —

  All she packed from her desk were framed photographs of her mother and of Jason, of her cat Zip, and the cat before Zip. When she was nearly finished, Coe showed up to carry her box downstairs.

  He didn’t say anything and she didn’t either, not on the third floor and not in the elevator. They did not pass any of their co-workers in the lobby. No one started until ten on non-production days.

  Out on the street Coe waited with her while she hailed a cab. It was a cold and drizzly morning with a discouraging wind howling up off the river.

  A red Prius pulled up.

  They had never hugged and they never would. Coe put the box in the back seat and spoke softly. “Let this go, Grace.”

  “I’m not letting it go and you shouldn’t either.” As she spoke, she did not have to remember to stand up straight. “What did they say they’d do to you?”

  Coe looked like he might answer the question for a moment. Then it passed and he walked toward the lobby of the old warehouse without looking back. Grace was tempted to call out to him that he was a coward and a scoundrel, but she loved Steadman Coe in her way and knew this would not accomplish anything. She changed her mind and opened the passenger door of the taxi.

  “You coward!” she yelled. “You scoundrel!”

  He seemed to shrink a little bit as he opened the door.

  * * *

  —

  She checked her phone as the Prius pulled away, and there was a text from William.

  Just arrived, knackered. You ready to start? Where should I go?

  Grace was too knackered herself to come up with a better solution so she wrote, “My place,” and her a
ddress.

  She added her personal email account to the phone. The latest email to arrive was from Jean-Yves de Moulin, with an attachment. He wrote in fancy French that out of a morbid obsession in the days after their “divorce” he had kept track of Elena. The attachment was a black-and-white page from the Montreal Herald, February 7, 1975. Grace opened and enlarged it. There was a photograph of the gymnast and glamor girl Elena Straka.

  “I no longer compete. I model and I work, these are different things for me, and I have my life at home with my husband.”

  William had already sent her several entirely British texts about staying with her.

  My intentions are entirely professional and I certainly have no unction about booking into a hotel. If you could give me a recommendation?

  I think I used unction incorrectly.

  Grace of course I do appreciate it, if the invitation stands.

  Living in an authentic Montreal apartment. An honour! Ha ha.

  That said if this makes you feel remotely awkward in the remotest manner…

  Grace ignored it and sent him the JPEG of the clip from the Herald. He texted back:

  Husband? My God. Elena Straka? Does the newspaper have an archive? You think Straka’d speak to us? Do you know where he lives?

  Grace settled into her seat, unemployed for the first time since her twenties. She did know where Josef Straka lived, and she was looking forward to visiting him—with William.

  28

  HORKY NAD JIZEROU, 1986

  The air in Bohemia was so clean it had a taste. Every night Elena and Kristína fell asleep in silence, in her parents’ country home, and woke up to birds singing. There was no traffic, no sirens, no gunshots, no madmen shouting in the streets.

  Elena had been concerned about her father for years, but the day before they were scheduled to leave he carried a haunted and distracted look she had never seen in him. While he was no madman shouting in the streets, Petr Kliment was not healthy.

  “We live two separate lives, Elenka.” Her mother, Jana, crossed her legs in her reclining chair in the garden. It was a sunny late afternoon and they were sharing a pot of cold, sweet tea. “I stay in the city and he stays here, with his fishing poles and his dirty boots.”