Prime Target

by Hugh Miller

  ‘Oh, yes, often. That was when Desmond was around, of course. He lived in Ithaca teaching at Cornell during the week of course, but would come down to Washington on week-ends. Or Emily would go up there. Anyway, they used to go to functions here in DC and so did I, usually with whoever I was seeing at the time, so we met outside office hours on a fairly regular basis.’

  ‘Did you meet any of her friends, anyone not associated with her work here?’

  ‘No,’ Dilys shook her head. ‘I don’t think they had friends, not in the sense of relationships with people they saw regularly, nothing like that. They had each other, you see, and that seemed to be enough. And of course there was Emily’s father, whom Desmond lived with on the campus at Cornell. I know she was deeply fond of her father.’

  ‘Did she ever mention a woman called Erika?’

  ‘Erika Stramm?’ Dilys smiled, catching the look of surprise cross Sabrina’s face. ‘She was her cousin.’

  ‘Cousin?’

  ‘Well, second cousin, actually.’

  Sabrina wondered how the resources of UNACO hadn’t managed to determine that Emily and Erika were blood relations.

  ‘Emily’s father was born Johannes Stramm,’ Dilys said. ‘But he changed his name in the concentration camp where he spent three years of the war. He did it to lose his identity and save his life. When he came to America he kept the assumed name. He was known here as Johannes Lustig, so Lustig was Emily’s maiden name. Erika is his cousin’s daughter. I knew about Erika, sure. So did some of the White House administration. It wasn’t really a black mark, having a semi-violent lefty for a relative - not if you were someone as universally respected as Emily. It certainly isn’t the kind of fact that gets entered on a person’s record these days. Too tackily McCarthy-ish, you know?’

  Sabrina noted with interest Erika Stramm’s established reputation as an active leftist terrorist. ‘Do you know anything about the people Emily associated with after her husband died?’

  Dilys shrugged elegantly with one shoulder. ‘She was very close about that. I had the feeling her circle of acquaintances shrank to near nothing. That happens a lot to widows.’

  ‘I guess so. Tell me more about her as a person.’

  Dilys sucked on the cigarette and peered at the tiny Gucci watch on her wrist. ‘One thing that needs saying about Emily is, she was selfless. We’ve all heard of it. Selflessness. But Emily was the only person I actually met who had it. If two sets of interests were at issue, she would always disregard her own.’

  ‘I get the impression she was something of a saint.’

  ‘Jeez, no.’ Dilys made a face. ‘Who said she was a saint, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Nobody did. But what I’ve been told about her adds up to a picture of an unusually good person.’

  ‘She had some of the characteristics, I suppose, but she didn’t have the sickly bits that would qualify her for sainthood. What she was, I suppose, was a good scout. She was withdrawn but she was never remote, she was always there for you, and she would really put herself out. She was shy, too, but she never tried to play it like she was mysterious. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Sabrina watched the woman behind the counter make a cappuccino with a head on it an inch high. It was fluffy but firm at the same time. She wished she could do that. Whatever she did wrong, the head always came out nice and creamy, but also flat as a pancake.

  ‘Dilys, do you have any theory about why she was killed?’

  ‘I was getting around to asking you that.’

  ‘We only know how. We haven’t a clue why.’

  ‘Well. Given the way she was - good-hearted, generous, also a woman who kept pretty much to herself…’ Dilys did her one-shoulder shrug. ‘I’d say it was either a bad mistake on the part of the killer, or it had something to do with her cousin.’

  ‘Erika Stramm.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Do you know if they saw much of each other?’

  ‘In recent times they corresponded a lot. And it was serious business.’

  ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘I don’t know. But Joe Dexter - you spoke to him, right? - he used to be the mailman.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Joe has a kind of quiet life. He lives alone, doesn’t know enough about human nature to tussle with it, so he gets his fulfilment being a sysop.’

  ‘I should know what that is.’

  ‘System operator,’ Dilys said. ‘On a dial-up bulletin board service. He sits by his board most evenings. The board is a computer with a whole clutch of information that people can download or add to, and sections where members can have written discussions with each other. The sysop’s the bulletin board manager.’

  ‘How does someone communicate with the board?’

  ‘It’s reached with a phone and a modem. The thing is, Joe can receive e-mail on his bulletin board from anywhere in the world, via the Internet. So he received e-mail for Emily from Erika, and Emily would send stuff through Joe to Erika’s electronic mailbox, wherever it is.’

  ‘She talked to you about that?’

  ‘No, and I didn’t ask her,’ Dilys said. ‘But if you want to see the irregularities in a pattern all you have to do is stare long enough, right? About six, seven months ago, I began to think Joe was no longer just researching for Emily. So I watched. There were definitely new and much more frequent transactions between them. That was the change in the pattern.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I cornered Joe and pumped him. He admitted he carried mail back and forward, but he had no idea what it was. The messages were coded, and he never tried to jemmy the code.’

  ‘I can believe it.’

  ‘Sure. He had too much respect for Emily to do anything like that. I think he was in love with her.’

  ‘Do you think he suspected he was doing something wrong?’

  ‘No, not at all. He believed what he was doing was confidential, just plain private. He didn’t even think he had been secretive the way he handled the e-mail traffic. How he looked at it was, he had just been discreet.’

  Dilys drained her cup and stood up. ‘Listen,’ she said, nodding in the direction of two customers who had taken a table nearby, ‘I’ll get us more coffee, but do you mind if we go out on the little veranda there to drink it?’

  ‘You need a smoke?’

  ‘Have pity. I’m an addict.’

  ‘No problem.’

  They took their fresh coffee to a small table at the end of the veranda, beside a canvas sheet tied between two uprights to make a windbreak.

  Dilys said, ‘When I stop to think about this, it makes me laugh.’ She cupped her hand around the lighter and puffed several times, sending up a big flame on the last drag. She sat back and exhaled slowly. ‘The ironies. As you get older they accumulate like luggage. Every day, at some point, I will do this. I will go out in the fresh air, so I can have an opportunity to fill my lungs with smoke.’

  Sabrina tasted her coffee, waiting for Dilys to volunteer whatever she still wanted to say about Emily Selby.

  ‘Have you ever been married, Sabrina?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘I have. Twice. And divorced twice. Each breakup was a wrench, even though I was at the point of hatred in one case and disgust in the other. I was a long time recovering, both times. I thought of that when I tried to imagine what Emily went through, with her husband actually dead, the man who happened to be what she loved most in the world. God…’

  ‘Her father, too.’

  ‘She talked to me about it.’

  ‘About her father?’

  ‘About the two men dying.’ Dilys drew on the cigarette and blew smoke out over the veranda. ‘She also asked me not to say anything to anybody.’ Dilys looked straight at Sabrina. ‘Maybe it’s important now that I do.’

  Sabrina waited.

  ‘I think she talked to me because she had to spill it to somebody. It seemed like
a straightforward tragedy. Her husband Desmond and her father were out fishing on Lake Cayuga, which is inside the campus at Cornell, and within view of the house Desmond and Emily’s father lived in. Emily was taking a week’s vacation up there at the time. On the afternoon it happened, she came back from the university library with a stack of references for a book she was working on, and from the sitting-room window she could see the empty boat out on the lake. Her first thought, she told me, was that it had drifted. Des and Dad, she assumed, were having a couple of quiet ones at the tavern, like they sometimes did at that time of day.

  ‘But it dawned on Emily there were no signs in the house that the men had come back from the trip. She looked everywhere. Finally, when she got frightened and was frantic with worry, she called the police. They mounted a search straight away and they found the bodies around sunset.’

  ‘It happens,’ Sabrina said. ‘I had a school friend died the same way.’

  ‘Me too, a cousin. The boat capsized, he was in heavy fishing clothes and couldn’t swim as far as the shore.’

  ‘But the accident wasn’t what Emily asked you to keep quiet about, was it?’

  ‘No.’ Dilys flipped away her cigarette and lit another. ‘After it happened Emily’s neighbours, her colleagues, the authorities at Cornell and the police were all saying the same thing. It was what we just said - it was the kind of accident that’s always happening. But Emily didn’t believe it was an accident at all.’

  ‘Did she have any reason?’

  ‘The pathologist who did the autopsies gave her one. His evidence was skimmed at the inquest. There was pressure on the system, cases were backed up, so it was more like a rubber-stamping than a hearing. Cause of death, drowning. No evidence was brought to show that the deaths could have been anything but a mishap. But the pathologist tried to object, he had misgivings and he wanted to air them. No dice. Emily heard him complain to a police officer that the inquest had been rushed, and she went to see him.’

  Dilys broke off and pointed to her cup. ‘Look, I know I’m a sad old thing, but the truth is I’m also addicted to caffeine. If you wouldn’t mind hanging on…’

  She made to get up but Sabrina insisted it was her turn. She went inside and asked for two more coffees. Before she returned to the veranda she went to the rest room and put through a call to UNACO on her mobile. Philpott’s secretary came on. Sabrina gave her the names and rough date of the Selby-Stramm boating accident, and asked her to get a printout of the autopsy report.

  She walked slowly back with the brimming cups and sat down opposite Dilys.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

  Dilys explained that Emily had gone to the hospital where the pathologist worked as a teaching consultant. At first he had been reluctant to speak to her, because in his view, as an accredited Medical Examiner for the State of New York, he would be committing a breach of ethics if he expressed a controversial opinion of any case to an interested party.

  ‘But she had no trouble wearing him down,’ Dilys said. ‘He was miffed at the way the court steam-rollered him when he tried to raise a few points. His sense of justice was injured and his pride was, too. So in the end he told Emily about his uncertainties.’

  There was no doubt, the pathologist had said, that both Emily’s husband and her father had died of drowning. But he was not at all sure they had simply fallen out of their boat when it capsized.

  ‘Both bodies showed signs of trauma,’ Dilys said, ‘things like bruising on the neck, a gash on Desmond’s forehead and one on the old man’s scalp. There were grazes, contusions around the eyes and even a sign of hip dislocation in Desmond’s case. The pathologist said the marks and injuries were not the kind he would associate with an accident of that sort. These looked like the signs of assault and serious struggle with an assailant.’

  ‘What did Emily do about that?’

  ‘She told me she tried to get the case re-opened, but the authorities brushed her off. For a while the pathologist tried to help her. He made representations to the police. He prepared a long statement explaining that in addition to the unusual marks on the bodies, the men also showed strange internal signs, the kind of thing that just didn’t chime with what was supposed to have happened to them. But he was up against a wall, same as Emily, and a month after he started lending her his support, he was diagnosed as having some kind of cancer. She called it by initials, NLH, something like that.’

  ‘NHL,’ Sabrina said. ‘Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’

  ‘Whatever. He died soon after. So Emily’s one and only ally was gone. She was bitter then, but she went quiet and I never found out any more. After the pathologist died, though, I don’t think she tried to get the case re-opened.’

  ‘Do you think she knew of a reason why somebody would kill her husband and father?’

  ‘I’m sure she had suspicions,’ Dilys said. ‘I mean, she found the suggestion of foul play easy to accept, didn’t she? The one thing she mentioned to me on that angle was about her husband’s death. She said she believed he died because he got in the way of a person or persons sent to kill her father.’

  ‘She actually said that?’

  ‘Once only. Afterwards, she seemed to regret it, and she wouldn’t discuss it any more.’

  They sat in silence for a minute, drinking their coffee. Finally Dilys looked at the clock and said she had to rush.

  ‘I’ve got a date, and at my time of life I take such an event very seriously. I go to extravagant lengths to look right. I’m at the stage where it takes me an hour just to prepare the ground.’

  ‘Don’t sell yourself short,’ Sabrina said. ‘You look great.’

  ‘If I looked even a tenth as good as you, honey, I’d let up on myself.’

  They made their way back through the coffee shop. At the door Sabrina held out her hand.

  ‘Thanks for your time, Dilys.’

  ‘It was a pleasure. Have I been any help?’

  ‘A great help. I’ve got a clearer picture of Emily now, and you gave me some avenues to explore.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, huh?’

  ‘It’s more than I expected,’ Sabrina told her.

  8

  At approximately the time Sabrina Carver was leaving the White House, Peter Leder was finishing dinner at Alfons, in Blisse Strasse in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. It was almost 10.20 in the evening, and Leder always tried to be in bed by eleven. He decided he had had enough pudding and put down his spoon.

  ‘That was excellent,’ he said. ‘This is the only restaurant I know where they put vanilla in the zabaglione.’

  In 1969, at the age of thirty-four, Peter had undergone an emergency gastrectomy operation following the rupture of a duodenal ulcer. He almost died of the haemorrhage, but the operation was a success and after a long period of recuperation he was restored to health.

  After the operation Peter’s stomach was smaller than a tennis ball. He had to eat very small meals for the rest of his life. If he ate too much at one time the results were distressing, and by the time he was forty he had learned never to swallow another morsel, or drink another drop, once the pressure in his gut told him he had touched his limit.

  ‘This has not meant I can’t enjoy my food and my wine,’ he said now, after explaining to his dinner companion why he had such tiny portions, and why he took so long to eat them. ‘I simply have to be prudent, and rely on the patience of those unfortunate enough to be dining with me.’

  His guest, Stefan Fliegel, said he had hardly noticed anything unusual. It was obvious that could not be true, since the host had gagged, spluttered and hiccuped his way through the entire meal. But Fliegel knew that Peter Leder was susceptible to boot-licking. It had helped engineer this meeting, and Fliegel saw no reason to abandon the tactic.

  ‘My only regret,’ Leder said, ‘is that my condition has aged me in a number of ways. Doctors have explained that it is a nutritive defect, a failure of the body to take in nourishment at the rate I
need it. My reliance on food supplements, while sustaining me, has meant my tissues have aged ahead of their time.’

  ‘You don’t look any older than your years,’ Fliegel said smoothly. ‘I happen to know you’re sixty-one, which is a year younger than I am.’

  ‘There you are, then!’ Fliegel said, fluttering his napkin. ‘Look at the difference in us.’

  ‘I was about to say, Herr Leder, that I observed no apparent age difference at all.’

  The truth was that Stefan Fliegel could have been mistaken for Peter Leder’s son. Leder looked twenty years older than his age, while Fliegel, who spent a portion of every year bronzing himself at the Italian lakes, looked like a man of fifty. Fliegel was also good-looking and moderately athletic in his build. Leder was stooped and pot-bellied; he had blotchy skin, his face was deeply lined, and his teeth were discoloured by years of drinking iron tonic.

  ‘Ahem.’ Leder dabbed his mouth with his napkin, heralding a change of subject. ‘I see no need to delay telling you this any further - I have decided that your application for funding should be approved.’

  ‘Oh…’ Fliegel sat back, mouth slightly open.

  ‘The fact that I asked you to dinner was no indication of my approval, as I warned you when I issued the invitation.’

  ‘I understand that, Herr Leder,’ Fliegel beamed.

  ‘I have frequently entertained men to dinner on occasions when I have had to decline their applications. I simply feel that the dinner table is an excellent place to conclude an item of business, one way or the other.’

  ‘I’m very grateful you’ve seen fit to help our foundation, sir.’

  ‘Well now, any properly-run organization aimed at improving the quality of life and outlook for disadvantaged young Germans is bound to have the support of myself and my directors.’

  ‘It is through the foresight and generosity of people such as yourself that we are able to carry on our work.’

  Fliegel was proud of the way he could match Leder’s stuffy manner of speech. He also sat forward when Leder sat forward, and folded his hands when Leder did. Mirroring, he had learned, was a way to lower the other fellow’s guard.