The Prodigal Spy

by Joseph Kanon

  “Nick-”

  “Mom was still asleep. He didn’t want to wake her.” Nick thought of the shirt, floating down the drains. Now he had lied to the police too.

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  Nick shrugged. “A meeting, I guess. He took his briefcase.” That was stupid. They’d find it upstairs. “The little one,” he added, digging deeper.

  “I see. Eight o’clock. He get a taxi out front?”

  Nick saw the trap. They’d already asked the reporters.

  “A taxi?” he said, pretending to be puzzled. “No, he went out the back. He always does that when he doesn’t want to talk. To the guys out front. You know.”

  The policeman smiled. “No, but I can imagine. Must be like living in a fishbowl here sometimes.” This as a kind of apology to Nick’s mother. “Well, we don’t want to bother you,” he said again, as if he really meant it. “Oh, Mrs Kotlar, one last thing? You didn’t go to the United Charities ball last night?”

  “No.”

  “You and your husband were in all evening, then?”

  He saw his mother waver again.

  “We played Scrabble,” Nick said.

  “Oh yeah?” the policeman said, friendly.

  “I won,” Nick said, wondering if it was another trap. Who would believe that? “My dad lets me win.”

  And then they were gone, in a small confusion of thank-yous and promises to call, swallowed up by the reporters’ hats outside.

  “That was Dad,” Nick said flatly when he heard the door close. His mother looked at him nervously, afraid to answer. “Is he all right?” She nodded.

  “Would someone like to tell me what’s going on around here?” Nora said. “Making cereal,” she added, scoffing.

  But his mother’s eyes were filling with tears. “Do you think they knew?” his mother said to him. “I tried-”

  “No, just me,” Nick said.

  “What?” Nora said again.

  “She’s worried about Dad,” Nick said, answering for his mother. “He said he’d be back for lunch.”

  Nick’s mother looked up, helpless to correct him.

  “Lunch,” Nora said, working at a puzzle.

  The phone rang again and Nick’s mother slumped, covering her eyes with one hand. Nick nodded to Nora, who raised her eyebrows and answered it. He led his mother to the couch, sat down beside her, and put one arm around her shoulder.

  “When is he going to come back?” he said, almost in a whisper, so Nora wouldn’t hear. His mother shook her head. “But he has to,” Nick said.

  “He’s not coming back, Nick,” his mother said wearily. “I wasn’t sure until now.”

  Nick looked at her in confusion. “The police will come again. He has to be back before that. They’ll look for him.”

  His mother put her hand to the side of his face, shaking her head. “It’s just you and me now. You don’t have to lie for him, Nick. It’s not right.”

  But she still didn’t understand; her mind was somewhere away from the immediate danger. “He was here last night,” he said, looking into her eyes. “You have to say that.”

  “What are we doing to you?” his mother said in a half-whisper, still holding the side of his face.

  “Call Uncle Larry,” Nick said.

  “Larry?”

  “He’ll know what to say. Before they come back.”

  His mother shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, dropping her hand.

  “It does. They’ll blame him. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, Nick.”

  “I’m good at secrets. I’ll never tell. Never.”

  “So many secrets,” his mother said vaguely. “You don’t understand. I don’t know.”

  “But he’s safe?”

  She nodded.

  “Mr Welles won’t get him?”

  She looked at him, and then, as if she were starting to laugh, her voice cracked and she sobbed out loud, so that Nora looked over from the phone table. “No,” she said, her voice still in the in-between place. “Not now. Nobody will.”

  “Why not?” Nick whispered, his voice throaty and urgent. “Why not?”

  Then she did laugh, the other side of the crying. “He’s gone,” she said wispily, moving her hand in the air. “He’s fled the coop.”

  Before Nick could take this in, Nora loomed in front of them, her face white and dismayed.

  “I’ll take her upstairs,” Nick said quickly. “She’s upset.” It was his father’s voice.

  Nora stared at him, more startled by his self-possession than by his mother’s behavior. When he took his mother’s elbow to lead her out of the room, Nora moved aside, stepping back out of their path.

  He led her down the hall, but at the stair railing she stopped, slipping out of his hand. “I’ll be all right,” she said softly, her voice coming back. “I’ll just lie down for a while.”

  But Nick stopped her, placing his hand over hers on the rail. “Why won’t they get him?”

  His mother turned her head, looking for Nora, then lowered it. “He’s not here,” she said finally. “He’s left the country.”

  She took in his wide eyes, then looked nervous again, so that Nick knew she hadn’t meant to tell. He felt lightheaded, the same frightened giddiness as that time when their car had skidded on the ice coming down the hill from the cabin, spinning them sideways. Steer into the slide, his father had said aloud, giving himself instructions, gripping the wheel hard until finally they connected with the road again and he heard the solid crunching of snow. There wasn’t time to think, just to steer.

  “Mom?” he said, looking into her frightened eyes. “Don’t tell anyone else.”

  By the next day his father was no longer unavailable for comment: he was missing. There were more men outside, and Nick saw that one was now watching the back too. Nora moved into the guest room, bringing her things over in a small valise, settling in for a siege. The radio said his father had been distraught at the news of the Cochrane suicide, but how did they know? Mr Benjamin came, and Uncle Larry, and the police again, two men from the FBI. The phone rang.

  Each day that week, as the spill spread, the headlines grew larger, so that the mystery itself became the news, begging for an answer. Welles appealed to his father to come out of hiding, implying that he had become guilty simply by being absent. Still, there was a new hesitancy in his voice, as if, having pushed one victim to a desperate act, he did not want to be blamed for another. Walter Kotlar had eluded him after all. There was an article about the rot in the State Department, the pumpkin field again, the China lobby, the unaccountable disappearance, proof of some larger conspiracy. But the story refused to stay political. The mystery seemed too complete for that-it frightened people. Nobody ran away from a hearing. It seemed to belong instead to the tabloid world of personal scandal and WANTED posters and cars speeding away in the night, a more familiar fall from grace. Was he still alive, sitting in some hotel room with his own open window? One day the papers ran some old family pictures. Nick and his mother, she squatting next to him proudly on the pavement as he showed off his new suit to the camera. His father as a young man, smiling. The house on 2nd Street. The car, still parked in the garage. All the pictures of a crime story, without any crime.

  All week, as the newspapers grew louder and louder until finally, like a fire out of oxygen, they choked and went out, what struck Nick was the quiet in the house. With all the phones and visitors and black headlines that seemed to carry their own sounds, hours went by when there was nothing to hear but the clock. People spoke in low voices, when they spoke at all, and even Nora walked softly, not wanting to disturb the patient.

  His mother was the patient. She spent long stretches sitting on the couch, smoking, not saying a word. Her silence, her intense concentration on nothing at all, frightened him. At night, alone, she drank until finally, her eyes drooping, she would curl up on the couch, avoiding her bedroom, and Nick would wait until he heard her ste
ady breathing before he tiptoed over and covered her with the afghan. In the morning, she never wondered where it had come from. She seemed to forget everything, even what had really happened. She told the police-a relief- that his father had left Sunday morning, just as Nick had said. Yes, they’d played Scrabble. No, he hadn’t seemed upset. When Uncle Larry suggested she get away for a few days until things died down, she said to him in genuine surprise, “I can’t, Larry. I have to be here, if he calls.” The secret, at least, was safe. She had begun living in Nick’s story.

  “Are you all right for money?” Larry said.

  “I don’t know. Walter took care of all that.”

  “You have to know, Livia. Shall I go through his things? Would you mind?”

  She shrugged. “It’s all in the desk. At least I suppose it is. The FBI went through it yesterday. I don’t think they took anything away.”

  “You shouldn’t let them do that, Livia,” Larry said, a lawyer. “Not without a warrant.”

  “What’s the difference, Larry? We don’t have anything to hide,” his mother said, and meant it.

  The FBI came often now. In an unexpected seesaw of attention, as the newspapers grew bored with the story, the FBI became more interested. They went through his father’s papers, opened the wall safe, asked the same questions, and then went away, as much in the dark as before. His father had signed a power of attorney for her on Saturday, which seemed suspicious, but his mother didn’t know anything about it. And what, anyway, did they suspect? In the quiet study, everything was in order.

  Nick grew quiet too. He wanted to go over things with his mother, plan what to do, but she didn’t want to talk, so he sat listening to the sounds of the house. He thought of everything that had happened, every detail, studying the Cochrane photograph to jolt him into some idea for action, but nothing came back but the creak of floorboards, a windowpane shaking back at the wind, until it seemed that the house was giving up too, disintegrating with them. He read the Hardy Boys books he had got for Christmas, with their speedboats and roadsters and mysteries that were always solved. They rescued their father in one, wily and resourceful. One day, after the snow melted, he walked down A Street to check on the drain, but the shirt was gone, and he barely paused at the corner before turning back.

  It was his decision to go back to school, stifled finally by the airless house. When he opened the door that Monday, the reporters swarmed around, expecting his mother, then backed away to let him pass, like the water of the Red Sea. “Hi, Nick,” one of the regulars said, and he gave a shy wave, but they let him alone. At school, the lads backed away too, nodding with sidelong glances, deferential to his notoriety. His teacher pretended he’d been out sick and apologetically piled him with back homework. She never called on him in class. He sat quietly, taking notes, then went home and worked all evening while his mother sat smoking, still drifting. He finished all the make-up work in three days, turning in assignments that were neater and more complete than before, because now it was important to be good, to be blameless.

  In the weeks that followed, nothing changed at home, but outside the reporters dwindled and at school people began to forget that anything had happened. When Welles suspended the hearings, the papers barely noticed. As Uncle Larry had predicted, things moved on. And it was Larry who brought his mother back.

  “You can’t just sit in the house. I’m taking you to New York for the weekend.”

  “To do what?”

  “Go to a show, go out to dinner. Get dressed up and show your pretty face all over town,” he said, winking at Nick, Van Johnson again, cheerful and take-charge.

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Livia, you can’t sit here. You’ve got to get on with things.”

  “By going to New York with you?”

  Larry looked at her and smiled. “For a start. We’ll take the train. I’ll pick you up here at five. Five, no later. And no buts,” he said, waving his forefinger.

  Surprisingly, she went. Nora stayed the weekend and she and Nick went to the movies, treating themselves to tea at the Willard. In the long lobby of red carpets and potted palms, no one noticed them. On Sunday, when they went to meet his mother at Union Station, he glanced at the telephone booth, then averted his eyes, as if he were being watched. But his mother seemed better, the quiet around her beginning to thaw, like the melting snow.

  It was only at night that it came back, the dread. It was the not knowing. Everyone acted as if his father were dead, but Nick knew he wasn’t. He was somewhere. Nick lay under the covers watching the tree branch and tried to play the cabin game. Over the years, they’d thought of a lot of places where the wind was blowing-the cabin in the mountains, a tent in the desert, that big hotel at the Grand Canyon where they’d gone one summer-but Nick couldn’t picture any of them. Instead there was the committee room, Welles glowering and accusing. A body falling in the cold. The strange walk to the telephone booth. And then, always, the back courtyard filling with snow.

  I hope you die, his mother had said. But she hadn’t meant that. Nick just wanted to know, and then he could rest. It seemed to him that their lives on 2nd Street had ended without any explanation. There had to be a reason. The hearings were starting again. They were looking for more Communists. So things went on. Was that all it had been? Politics, a piece of history? The trouble with history, his father had said, is that you have to live through it. But he hadn’t meant this, half-living in a mystery. One day it will all seem like a dream. But it wouldn’t, just the same mystery. That was the dread: he would never know.

  His mother ended it that spring by selling the house. They would start over in New York, where nobody cared, and Nick would go to Rhode Island, where Father Tim had arranged for a place at his old school. Tim was taking them there himself, in the big DeSoto he drove like a carriage, hands on either side of the wheel as if he were holding reins.

  Nick went with him for gas while his mother finished packing-an excuse, Nick suspected, for one of Father Tim’s chats. But Tim was bubbly, as far away from homilies as a man on a picnic. They drove around the Mall, a last tour. “You’ll like the Priory,” he said. “Of course, people always say that about their schools. I suppose they’re really remembering themselves when they were young.” Nick looked over at him, unable to imagine the ruddy face over the white collar as anything but grown up. “But this time of year,” he continued, taking one hand away to gesture to the tree blossoms, “well, you won’t find a finer sight. And then you’ve got Newport down the road. All the boats. I used to love that. Hundreds of sails, all across the bay.” He stopped, aware of Nick’s silence. “You’ll like it,” he repeated. “You’ll see.”

  “My father wouldn’t like it,” Nick said. “He didn’t want me to go to a Catholic school.”

  Father Tim didn’t say anything to that. Nick watched him shift uncomfortably in his seat, avoiding the subject, his father’s name like a cloud over the bright day.

  “Well, give it a chance,” Father Tim said. “You’ll see. But a fair chance, mind. You don’t want to be a burden to your mother. Not now. She’s had worries enough to last a lifetime. Rose isn’t as strong as she looks. It’s been a difficult time for her, you know.”

  What about me? Nick wanted to say, but he was quiet. Then, “Why do you call her Rose?”

  Father Tim smiled. “Well, she was Rose when I first knew her. She hated ‘Livia’ in those days. Like a Roman wife, she said. You know, Calpurnia. Names like that.” He smiled again, glad to reminisce. “She was just Rose Quinn then. The prettiest girl at Sacred Heart.”

  “Maybe you should have married her,” Nick said, curious to see if his father’s joke had been right.

  “Well, I married the church,” Father Tim said, but he’d misunderstood Nick and looked at him, troubled. “He’s still your father, Nick. No matter what.”

  This was so far from what Nick had been thinking that he didn’t know what to say. Instead, he changed the subject. “Is it a si
n to wish somebody would die? To say it, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Father Tim said, “a great sin.” Then, misunderstanding again, “You don’t wish that, do you? No matter what he’s done.”

  “No,” Nick said. “I don’t.” But he was disconcerted. Tim had opened a different door. What did Tim think his father had done?

  They stopped for a red light and Nick looked across at the Smithsonian, surrounded by flowering trees.

  “Of course you don’t,” Father Tim said. “Anyway, that’s all past now. You’ll both have a fresh start.”

  But not together, Nick thought. He remembered the night his father went away, his mother clinging to Nick. He’d imagined going on like that, just the two of them. Now it seemed she’d be better on her own, putting Nick behind her with everything else. Maybe it was because he looked like his father, a visual reminder of what they were all supposed to forget.

  “It’s not easy making a new life,” Father Tim said, as if they’d already disposed of the old. “But she’ll have you to help her now.”

  This struck Nick as unfair, coming from the man who’d arranged to send him away, but he said nothing.

  “You’ll settle in before you know it,” Father Tim went on. “And it’s just a train ride from New York. You’ll make new friends. It’ll be a fresh start for you too.”

  “They’ll know,” Nick said. “At school.”

  Father Tim paused, framing an answer. “It’s not Washington, Nick. They’re a little out of the world up there. That’s one of the nice things about the old Priory. They don’t hear much.”

  “I don’t care anyway,” Nick said, looking out the window at the Mall. They were climbing the hill now, up toward the Capitol.

  “You mustn’t mind what people say, Nick,” Father Tim said gently. “We’re not responsible for what our parents do. There’d be no end to it then. God only asks us to answer for ourselves.”

  Nick said nothing, staring up at the Capitol, where everything had started. The flashbulbs and microphones. Maybe the committee was meeting now, banging gavels on the broad table, driving someone else away.