Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  Russian Expert in Suspected Drug Overdose

  Francine McLain, well-known Russian analyst and writer of such important works as “Soviet Suspicions” in 1982, “Soviet Sunset” in 1986 and “Roaring ‘90s: The Rise of Russian Gangster Capitalism” in 1997 has died at the age of fifty-six. Ms. McLain was found by her cleaning lady on January 3rd at her flat in Kilburn. She had been dead for several days. Although a full postmortem examination has been ordered, the initial tests showed cocaine and a trace of methamphetamines in Ms. McLain’s system.

  “Poisoned. Just like Kirk,” I said thickly. Shocked.

  “They’ve kept it quiet, but I understand she left a note.” Then after a reflective pause, “I imagine for some, Christmas can be torture.”

  “It’s got to be more than a coincidence, right?”

  “One would think so, yes.” He took a final sip of his drink. “Do call me; let me know how you’re getting on. If there’s any way I can be of assistance…”

  I walked out of Gee’s office, through his foyer, down the stairs, out into a cold drizzle carrying the page with Francine’s details. Maybe if I read it hard enough it would no longer be true. I needed and found a pub. It was half-full with the early post-work crowd. I needed a drink to honor Kirk, Hardcastle, the unknown Francine. Guinness with a Jack Daniels chaser. What I’d come to think of as a Kirk Howell special. I don’t know why. I mulled over the facts. Francine dead of the same two drugs that killed Kirk. My case was receding faster than I could close on it.

  CHAPTER 4

  I was due to meet Sula post-Gee. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Here I stood on the rim of a gaping crater where my case had been. Another death, a sense of pace, the way the gods had once again played with me, giving and taking away. Francine’s suicide had a haunting quality, a sense of immediacy, of acid in the gut, of being too close to something best avoided completely. I had, however, worked hard for this one last chance with Sula; I would have to go forward. This too was part of the pace, of the gods with their silly, serious games. If it all blew up, if I never saw Sula again, I now had the luxury of blaming it on bad timing.

  One thing I promised myself on the tube to Embankment Station, one word, that one word was slow. I was lonely here, yet strangely well-adapted. With Sula, if we stopped at friendship, I would take that for now. My demonstrated patience was the best defense against my Lothario reputation. It was like a mantra as I walked across the footbridge to the South Bank complex. Slow. Slow. Slow.

  We met at the Royal Festival Hall on the south side of the Thames, across and a few hundred yards downriver from the Houses of Parliament. It had been Sula’s suggestion.

  She was ten minutes late, her walk to me smartly confident in a well-cut black overcoat. It took forever for her to reach me; a nice forever. Just like that it was back—that pull, that tug on the fishing line, the puppy’s leash, the heartstring. I savored that confident walk, the delicious fact that I was its destination. I watched more than a few male eyes track her progress.

  She was in a good mood, and more familiar with me than I remembered, like being here with me was the most natural thing in the world. She took off her overcoat to reveal an expensive semi-formal dress, charcoal gray, modest up top, cinched in at her thin waist, before falling to just above her knees.

  “You’re going to the concert tonight? Here?” We were, after all, at one of London’s main venues for music, from symphonies to touring performers.

  She shook her head no. I was relatively well dressed from the lawyer’s, but still several notches below her.

  “I have little chance to wear a dress.”

  “So this place?”

  “I must confess to you something. I have small case of claustrophobia. Big spaces such as this are…‌better for me.”

  This was big all right, in an airport terminal way. A low ceiling, wide open spaces to counteract that weight. Lots of tile and glass, the west side giving on to a panoramic view of the Thames. The ambiance was more cafeteria than cozy little bar, though.

  “How is your detective work?”

  I made a percussive puff sound, showing my hands exploding into fingers. I explained the explosion.

  “The fates have showed their hands. Something causes such sad decision. This is positive for you.”

  “Sula, this woman took her life. It’s like radioactive.”

  “Explain to me, please, how you found her, McLain?”

  I told her about investigating my case from the Claudia angle on the theory that it would lead back to Kirk, itself based on the assumption that their proximate disappearances must have a connection. Then how I got Francine’s details from Claudia’s PA when asking about Hardcastle. That Hardcastle and Francine were romantically linked decades ago in Moscow. “The whole key is Francine. Now she’s dead. Well, the other key is Claudia. She’s not around either.”

  Sula gave me a sympathetic smile. “You are quite strong on yourself. You have made much progress. I must worry that soon you will go away to your home.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Had she just said she was worried I would leave? It was totally disorienting that after my industrial-scale rock romances, my dating skills had been thrown back to about sixteen or so, except this time my yearning, fumbling goal was not so anatomical.

  “Two major people in your story, they die in the exact same way. Yes, the fates have revealed much to you. You will find a way.”

  Like almost everywhere in London this was a self-serve bar. I had bought Sula’s first drink in anticipation of her arrival; the orange juice and lemonade from the Wrestlers. The bar was crowding now; I didn’t want to leave her by herself for the ten minutes it would take to fight my way to an order.

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Not far, please. I wear shoes to compete with you.”

  “You should let me win, just this once.” I glanced at her shoes as I did the matador maneuver with her overcoat. I was thinking pencil-thin stilettos, but these were just your average heels.

  She took my arm, awkwardly my left one, and we crossed the Hungerford Bridge back to the north side of the river. It’s one of the finest views in London, despite the heavy foot traffic, squealing, banging, rumbling trains on the rail bridge next to it, the mendicants and musicians, the weaving you had to do because London has no obvious two-way pedestrian system. We wound up on a bench down on the Embankment next to a permanently docked ship. It was one of those charged nights, the energy palpable in the air. My sixteen-year-old self was trying to figure out what to do next. My goal was simply to prolong the evening. Spend time with her. Outside was my only immediate answer to her claustrophobia.

  “Tell me about physics?”

  She gave me a tolerant smile, looked out towards the river, unseen over a concrete wall. “Allow me to escape from this for a few hours.”

  “You will go back to it tonight?”

  She sighed, a frustrated nose-only one. “Just now, when I am walking over that bridge…” her eyes swept up to the bridge we’d just crossed, “an idea came to me. An interesting one. I need to test it.”

  I thought of putting myself forward as her inspiration. Impertinent, no doubt, to connect my influence to the building blocks of the universe.

  “Do you need to write something down?” That’s what I always had to do.

  She met my eyes, softening them to show her poor, trapped self. Then she smiled to paste over that, but also in recognition that my question had experience behind it. She was quick.

  This sequence had spoiled the magic of that early evening. It was clear I came second to her professional interests. I knew what it was like to have an idea that called to you like an addiction. Also those fallow times when weeks passed with nothing. You begin to wonder if your well is dry. Then, bang, at the most inconvenient time—once it was when I was being arrested—it’s back. The haunting knowledge that one day it will leave and not come back, that this one precious time, now
, may be the last one.

  “I hope it’s a hit,” I said. The charge in the night between us had completely dissipated. Better to let her go. I didn’t want her associating our being together with this now flat time. My consideration must be redeemable for a future meeting with more liveliness in it. What had been getting closer was now distant. Earlier I thought we had been building something.

  She nodded, a bit heavily.

  I waited with her just behind the bench for a taxi. One pulled up in an instant, forcing a rushed rhythm of our hug good-bye.

  Later the same night I was processing the shock of Francine’s death and of my truncated date, if that’s what you could call it. The first was a complex hall of noises that I couldn’t compress into any form of sense. I concentrated on Sula.

  If phrases were chords there’d be three in her song. “I’m not the girlfriend type” so make that an inversion on G. “I must worry you will go away” so some type of A chord, minor or major to be determined. And “to compete with you” a straight-ahead C. The whole show worked best up around the fifth fret. Was it a song? If so, a happy one? Or was it just garbled noise like, in another medium, paint, where the novice mixing pigments usually ends up with some muddy, indistinct brown. It was like a no, a yes, and a difficult maybe. How could they do anything but combine into nothing?

  CHAPTER 5

  I met Moira at our pub, The Shepherd. She had given me Francine, and now Francine was dead. It was an electric jolt out of nowhere. In one sad act all had changed: gone a vibrant, intelligent woman who was the center of my case, connected as she was to both Hardcastle and Claudia Steyning. It took me back to The Seattle Five, the young suicides who were allegedly provoked by Kirk and me. That took me back to Kirk. I needed to commiserate with someone who had known Francine McLain. There was only Moira.

  She approached my table tentatively, bang on time. She was wearing another aggressively unattractive outfit. Orange sweater and green checked skirt, both scratchy wool. Victorian boots, the kind that lace up to mid-shin, holding her feet, ankle and legs like twin corsets. Her eyes, usually in avoidance mode, were now able to look at me, but that’s because they were inwardly blank.

  She surfaced briefly, and in a quick eye dialogue established from my serious demeanor that yes, I knew about Francine, and, yes, that was what I wanted to see her about. Then she said, into the table, “I am so angry. She could have called. She knew I would have done anything to help her. Anything.”

  Apart from a brief Internet sketch, I knew next to nothing about Francine McLain. But I wanted to think of her as a durable, resourceful spy and not some flicker of a flame needing Moira’s cupped hands as protection. “Does it surprise you? What I mean is, did you see her as someone who could do this kind of thing?” By now Francine’s suicide was public.

  “I don’t know.” She said this as you swat at a fly, annoyed, but with not much hope of relief. “I don’t understand how anyone can do that. She had her moods, and those could be dark. She liked to be by herself then. In the last few months she wanted to be alone more and more. At least from me.”

  “When was the last—”

  “She dumped me.” She put her hand down hard on the table. “That hurt.” Then in arguably the most shocking thing that had happened to me in London so far, she took my hand. Hers was moist. Maybe she was afraid I’d walk out on her too. “Don’t you get the wrong idea. We were…‌I don’t know…‌she helped me.”

  “So…‌she was in a dark mood all the time?”

  “She cut me off, don’t you see? For all I know she could have been skipping through the rose garden the next day. I had no way to her.”

  “Do you know why the black moods?”

  “She said she had to go back to being a spy. I assumed that meant something about a Russian.”

  “When was this?”

  “After the summer.”

  “Any other details about the Russian?”

  She shook her head. She still had my hand. It felt wrong, but anything in the cause of greater truth.

  “Just the slightest little thing?”

  She was tearing up now. I needed to back off. She let go of my hand.

  “I am a woman,” she said, as if this explained something.

  I waited.

  “It’s all mixed up. What Francine told me; what I made up myself; no, not made up—what’s wrong with me?—intuition?” She came up to my eyes now and said firmly, “There was trouble with a Russian, but it wasn’t Francine’s trouble.” She was becoming frustrated with her awkward explanation. “She was intervening, like maybe she did when she was with her top-secret employer.”

  “You’re thinking Claudia?”

  “I don’t know. How can I? But yes.” She placed her hand, recently in mine, on her heart. “It’s what I think, here.”

  “So what about Claudia? Did she show signs of needing intervention?”

  “Claudia was different after the summer. She would snap at me, then she’d apologize. I can’t ever remember her apologizing before that. She was smooth, didn’t need to.”

  “It seems backward. Hardcastle and Francine have the Russian connections, yet Claudia is the one who gets caught up in some intrigue?”

  It was then, out of nowhere, that Hardcastle’s admonitory “ahnov” came back to me. To warn me like that, Hardcastle must have been involved in the intrigue. That didn’t make sense. He had been at Sunnydown Hills months before the “after the summer” that Moira kept referring to.

  “Also, there’s her mobile. She had two, business and personal. They had different ring tones. She used to get several calls a day on her personal one. By September it was only Natalie.”

  “Claudia had a lot of boyfriends, right? I guess one of them could have been Russian.”

  Moira didn’t bother answering. “See, she was trying to help her friend.” She meant Francine helping Claudia.

  “How long have you known Francine?”

  During Moira’s year-and-a-half stint at Iken, Francine had been in the office twice. The first time—she couldn’t remember the exact date, but a year ago—they got to talking while Francine waited for Claudia to become available. “She was so generous, so patient with me.”

  Now the floodgates opened. Moira was sobbing, head down, shoulders juddering.

  The lady behind the bar came over to see if everything was all right, as in, is this man bothering you?

  “There’s been a death,” I explained to the bar lady. “A rum and Coke would be a big help.”

  The bar woman looked at me dubiously, then retreated.

  Moira was still shaking her head when her drink arrived; her crying had lessened. She had taken my hand again. Hers was full of the tears she had just rubbed out of her eyes.

  “She still loves him. She told me this as if, can you believe it?”

  “Hardcastle?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s like thirty years ago.”

  “‘When you get to be my age, you go back to the things that worked.’” She was quoting Francine here. “I could tell something was bothering her, the way she was looking back on her life like that. She was usually such a forward person, you know, all future.”

  Well, the Moscow lovers would soon be reunited in a better world. I’d better not acquaint Moira with the impending death of another character in this drama.

  “Francine was ever so helpful. Gentle.” She looked down, gulped. “It’s so hard, writing. Perhaps I’m not…‌well, it’s nearly finished now.”

  I asked her what she was writing.

  “Queen Lear,” she said, a neutral statement. “That’s only the working title.”

  “A play?” She didn’t deny my guess. “What’s it about?”

  “Oh, nothing.” She looked down. “It’s a satire, actually. It’s so difficult, because you have to blend that with human drama and get that balance right. Francine understood.” Her confidence was growing. Her
head was now up, her drink hovering near.

  “Sounds ambitious.”

  “That’s the exact adjective Francine used!”

  “So Francine didn’t like it? You used the word ‘gentle’.”

  “She liked the idea; that, and the main character. It needed re-writing in places. I’ve never pretended it didn’t.” She took a sip of her drink, gaining composure. “The men needed work, that’s what she told me. It’s about a powerful woman who is dividing her holding company between her three sons.”

  Talking about her project brought Moira back to something approaching equanimity. I asked her if Claudia had met Francine during the week before the former’s disappearance (and the week after Kirk’s death). She promised to investigate even if it was to report on blocks in Claudia’s planner marked “personal.”

  I also asked whether Claudia was the type who could walk away and disappear.

  “That’s what a lot of people think. The police asked me that about three times. Just ‘cause she’s got a lot of money. Money! That’s nothing compared to Natalie. Claudia was devoted to her.”

  “I thought Iken was in financial trouble.”

  “I don’t know the full story; you know how you pick up things from the police? Claudia had a lot of money—on some island. From Madeline Crowell, our one best-selling author. Don’t ask me how it all works.”

  It was time to leave. The pub had filled up. We were conversing in a subdued shout now. Moira said, “She was such an intelligent person, so knowledgeable, so generous with her time. Dead. Gone. It haunts me. I knew something was wrong. I should have gone to her. Done something.”

  We said good-bye outside the pub, her face still mottled, yellowed by the streetlights.

  “I like your play; the idea of it.”

  She came close to me now, her breath misting in the cold air. “I killed her.” She was sniffling now. She shook her head, turned, and started to walk away.