Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  Francine knows she must get rid of it. That can only be to Claudia, and that hand-off will take some time. In the meantime, she tries to accommodate it in her life.

  Amid this drama, Kirk arrives. Ross mentions the flat. Kirk connects with Claudia. Best guess is that Kirk mentioned he was looking for a Castle (or he has the full name). Claudia offers her assistance. One way or another they get there: Kirk knows about Charles Hardcastle. Claudia offers to get the contact details from her client, Francine McLain.

  On Claudia’s introduction, Kirk visits Francine at her flat for details about Hardcastle. Kirk knows little about Hardcastle. He was too far gone when Kirk visited him at Sunnydown Hills. It’s like those thrillers where two spies produce separate halves of a torn dollar bill. Francine knows that Hardcastle has fathered a child from his time in Hawaii; Kirk knows something about Hardcastle, enough to bring him to London. Kirk’s parents had split up a year and a half before; suddenly, unexpectedly. He may have picked up the Hardcastle hint then. Possibly he knows little about Hardcastle, but one of those things has to do with Hawaii.

  That spark across the blackness.

  Francine will be interesting for Kirk; they will talk desultorily about any number of topics. Eventually their conversation focuses on Hardcastle. Francine tells Kirk about her Moscow days, career highlights, a character sketch. She will be subtle, but at some point she will turn to his interest more directly. “You are an American from the opposite side of the world. I’m not entirely certain whether Charles ever visited the West Coast.”

  “He knew my parents. I think he was a friend of my mother’s.”

  Well, that was certainly possible, given our Lothario’s MO.

  “So your mother visited Britain? Often?”

  “Not that I know of. I think this was in Hawaii.”

  Spark. She knows who he is now. It’s obvious he doesn’t. Well, she’s not going to tell him. This knowledge, however, starts working in her. This man before her is the product of a lover’s betrayal, living, when the other product of that time had been rudely scraped away. Kirk, this human bar graph of how long ago that was; how mature her child would now have been. She pushes all that away. Tries to. The long-buried is ever more forceful for its delayed reappearance.

  Francine, shaken, needs to talk. She tells him about her new book, the one obliquely about Hardcastle. “He was a friend of mine too, back then.” This is as far as she will go. It feels right to divulge this much. A product of that time has a right to know of that time.

  Kirk is sharp. He knows exactly what “friend” means. He is also beginning to figure out the Hawaii part. Deep down he has known for some time. At least suspected. There’s also something in the way she says “friend,” a complicated wash of import, touchiness, loss, vulnerability.

  Kirk needs time to mull over where this is heading. He comes back with a question; getting her to talk while he thinks. It will be a typical Kirk Howell comment; penetrating, sharp, deadpan. Accidentally the exact wrong thing to ask. Let’s see.

  “You have a son, too?” It’s perfect. He has blurted this out without thinking, so he is forced to face the ramifications of that “too.” Francine is forced to face the opposite of “too.” To see again those lonely, black days of baby-no-more, forced to acknowledge her missing son by listening to this wrong one.

  A crack like night lightening. Soon they will both be dead.

  The rest is impenetrable. Somehow that vial comes into play. Somehow, however impossibly, Kirk tries the compound. He’s okay, leaves. Then he’s not okay.

  Francine learns of the death, hardens her heart. She must contact Claudia, the only one who knows of Kirk’s visit, having set it up. She avoids the phone; gets to Claudia. Partly confesses. He was fine when he left my flat.

  Claudia has taken the long and painful journey to yes; she will take that vial. She will go away with Lyubanov to get him away from Natalie. She may or may not be able to put the compound in play. The only uncertainty is exactly when she will leave. It’s just like those days when her father was dying a painful, undignified death from cancer. Soon, but not quite yet.

  Francine comes to Claudia on the Tuesday after Kirk’s death. Francine’s a mess. My God, both boys from that time are dead. “Could it be,” Francine asks, “that I wanted him dead? You know, subconsciously?” Claudia would have accepted the poison just to get it away from Francine’s dark impulses. Also, Claudia’s perfect murder has now been previewed, stolen. You had to assume the police would figure it out, only a matter of time. Lyubanov will hear of it. By that weekend, Claudia’s gone.

  Two months pass. Jim Shalabon arrives. His agent puts him in that flat, probably gets a commission from Wormsleigh.

  We can only try to imagine Francine’s emotional state. Kirk dead; her son re-animated; Claudia gone. It isn’t pretty how she ditches Moira, but Francine is a different person now. By mid-December, two months after Kirk’s death and Claudia’s disappearance, Francine has stabilized. Certainly she has a robust and acrobatic intellect. She gets a call from Moira, a voicemail. That way she can play it again and again. It says: Jim Shalabon is here; he’ll be calling; wants to meet you. It’s important. He says his friend Kirk Howell was murdered.

  Poor Francine, pushed over the edge by my unthinking comment.

  CHAPTER 23

  The following week, Detective Superintendent Hill visited me at my flat. They had found Lyubanov’s body. It had been in a morgue in Mexico City. It arrived there on November 19th, kept for almost three months, then buried. The Mexican authorities had sent pictures and DNA samples. There had been some cosmetic surgery around the nose, but Hill was confident that, through advanced computer analysis of facial features, they had their man. The DNA results, still a week away, would nail it.

  Hill had let me off the hook, but that was only temporary. I had to tell him about Francine’s book treatment, Dr. Catherine Drysdale. Kirk. My theory about how it all fit together. I asked him about Drysdale, what he thought would happen. (Everyone else in the story was dead.)

  Hill thought the links between the deaths and the vial were tenuous. He didn’t think Drysdale could be arrested as an accessory before the fact. Most likely she would be interviewed; the police would scare her with possible arrest to ensure she stayed away from any further experiments with doomsday drugs.

  That left Claudia Steyning. She was free of Lyubanov, but had not been heard from. Not a good sign. Witnesses had put her, Hill told me, at the apartment where Lyubanov’s body had been found. If there was a case that she murdered Lyubanov, that was a Mexican affair. Normally, he said, they would assume a drug misadventure and leave it at that. But in Mexico, he explained, the police are rarely straightforward.

  The only remaining issue was the vial. Could it be kept under wraps? Why besmirch Claudia’s reputation at this late stage over something that might have happened? Hill said he would try, without much conviction. They would have to divulge that Claudia Steyning had been traced to Mexico City. That would be in the morning papers. They could hold back on Lyubanov until the DNA results confirmed his identity. After that it was anyone’s guess—much depended on how much press interest there was in an old story.

  Hill had played me well, outwaited my anger, gaining my cooperation. He said, “What about the phone call from Soho? What do you make of that?” He asked as if he knew the answer, testing me.

  It’s funny, I should have no problem at all giving him Ravenhall, but I didn’t. I had acquitted myself well with Hill. Anything more would have been showing off. Another part was that Ravenhall didn’t matter. I said, “Imagine a perfect murder. There’s only one thing wrong with it. There is no such thing, so its very perfection tells you it’s fabricated. A real perfect murder needs something that doesn’t fit, because all murders have that.” I have no idea where I got this from, presumably a detective novel.

  Hill smiled, as if proud of me. “You know the biggest difference b
etween a so-called professional such as me, and an amateur like you?” He let that settle for three beats. “Time.”

  ***

  I had Matthew Steyning’s cell number from our joint clean-up project. I told him an abbreviated form of the Mexico story so he could talk to Natalie. We agreed that with Lyubanov gone, it was ominous that Claudia had not been heard from. It was clear he was expecting problems with Natalie. I said he could drop by the next evening if he thought that would help.

  Natalie was ringing my door intercom at a little after eight the next morning. I’m not sure why I figured eight was inappropriate for a visit to my flat, whereas four in the afternoon was okay. I came down and we walked to a nearby café that wasn’t open yet. They knew me by now and let us in while they were getting ready to open.

  Apart from my “let’s get a coffee,” I don’t think either of us had said one word yet. We sat in the unopened café while the owner, Esme, and her assistant got ready for the day. Finally Natalie said, “Dad got a call from the police about Mom.” She held that for a moment. “But he got a call from you an hour before that.”

  I gave her a weak smile. Man, did I ever need some coffee.

  Natalie said, “I need to know everything.”

  I gave her another hesitant smile. I was no child psychologist. I had no experience breaking bad news. I was awful at consoling. And I’m definitely not a morning person. I tried to summon up some subtlety, but my morning crustiness prevailed. I asked, “What are you so angry about?” I meant angry with me.

  “All this delicate flower rubbish.” Here, she adopted a high and mocking tone. “Why, she’s only a mere child. Oh, I know; I’ll call her father and he can decide how much of the truth she should be…‌told.” Now she changed back to her normal tone, still hot. “He…‌he washed his hands of her.” (She was talking about her father.) “What’s she to him? She’s my mum.”

  “Look, Natalie, it’s down to your father, not me, to tell you the facts.”

  “Can I ask you to imagine something? Can you stretch your mind and imagine that we’re friends? Friends, yeah? Imagine that it doesn’t matter that I’m only fourteen and you’re whatever decrepit age you are. Or that you’re a randy rock bloke and I’m this…” She waved this last part away. “Just friends. Okay?”

  “I thought you were thirteen.”

  “Time moves on.”

  “Well, happy birthday.”

  “Birth; that takes us back to my mum, doesn’t it?”

  I gave Natalie an abridged version of the true story, itself a blend of fact, conjecture, and some speculation. Lyubanov was a boyfriend who wanted her mom to himself, and when she refused to abandon her daughter, he forced her to go away with him.

  She chewed that over for a minute. Finally my coffee and Natalie’s tea arrived.

  “So, it was this Russian who broke into our house?” She was too sharp for an abridged version to work.

  I smiled positively. The coward’s way of being able to claim I didn’t tell her this.

  “That’s why Mum was so…‌not herself those last few weeks?”

  Another smile.

  “But why would Mum go away with him? She’s strong enough to tell him to fuck off.”

  I bought some time by going for my coffee. No, I decided, I wasn’t going to tell Natalie that she was Lyubanov’s leverage. She was sharp. Maybe she would figure it out; or maybe in the complicated machinery of knowledge and denial she would avoid a head-on collision with the facts. “All that matters is she did.”

  “So…‌you know why, but you won’t tell me?”

  “No, I don’t know. I have my ideas. You’re smart. Yours might be better than mine.”

  “What about Mum now?”

  “She will be free of Lyubanov. That’s about the only thing you can say.”

  We exchanged a dark look.

  Natalie went off to school; I got the morning papers on the way back from the café. Fortunately, the Claudia Steyning affair missed the front page. That was taken up by the gruesome execution in Pakistan of the journalist Daniel Pearl. The Steyning story sputtered for a few days, but stayed within the confines of Mexico, cocaine, Russian bad guy, and Claudia Steyning still missing.

  CHAPTER 24

  Over the bleak month of February, Sula and I settled into a routine. She stayed over most nights. She had moved out of the Mountjoy Hotel shortly after her father’s treachery, renting an expensive month-to-month flat a short walk from Imperial College. She had a moderately generous monthly income from her trust. Big money was coming her way when she hit twenty-five. We didn’t talk about that.

  By March I was at a watershed, a dry one. My case was over. Just one or two loose ends to tie up. There was a deeper level to it. Francine could have been connected to Lyubanov more directly. Then there was Hardcastle’s possible framing. The three of them went back to that dark, tyrannical land of my father. Now all three were dead. They were gone and I was done. I’d solved the Kirk mystery, at least the part about where the drugs came from. There was still Claudia. I had promised Sula I would stay away from Mexico. She was worried about drugs and their Mexican lords. She had a point—as usual.

  So case over, except for a few loose threads like my father’s book of poems. All this London mystery had done was postpone the question of my life after the Eyebeams. I needed an idea of what was next on my playlist. Whether I had one.

  To buy some time, I worked a distant tangent to my case. Since Jolanta Rawicz ignored my calls, I would fly to Krakow and try the Drysdale maneuver. I took a cab from the airport straight to her address, left a message with the concierge at her large apartment building, in which I mildly threatened to hang around her doorstep, and continued on to the Hotel Copernicus on the outside of a right angle bend of the Vistula.

  The next morning I met Jolanta’s partner, Tomas, at a café near the University Hospital. He was a doctor there, he had explained on the phone, and he thought he should be able to sneak away for fifteen minutes around ten o’clock, his good manners mostly hiding his annoyance at his mission of keeping me away from Jolanta’s doorstep. It was a cool but sunny day; I had stuff to read and to work on. Instead, I watched life passing by in this pleasant city, not European the way I knew it, larger in scale than other medieval Old Towns, with brick churches and squat buildings with Slavic touches. It had its own contained world of brisk businessmen and nice-to-look-at blonds, all in a hurry to be somewhere important.

  Tomas was only five minutes late. He had unruly, white-blond hair and a nose whose tip looked like a sack of clothes. His brown eyes showed intelligence and a certain distracted benevolence. He had a gold ring on his right ring finger.

  “Jolanta sends to you her apologies.”

  I nodded. “She is your…‌wife?” For some reason I tripped over this simple question.

  “She wears my ring, yes.” Something internal stopped him here. “Still she listens to his music.”

  Not much I could say to that. We were silent for a moment, finding our way. Tomas commandeered the waitress and spouted Polish at her, some of which sounded conversational.

  “So?” he said.

  Yes, so. I wanted to ask him why Jolanta refused to see me, but that would be too direct. “I guess Kirk’s death was difficult for Jolanta.”

  “Yes.” He sighed here. I have given you the short answer. I don’t want to go into the long one and I suspect neither do you. “She says you were her competition. You took him away from her.”

  “I had no power over Kirk.”

  “Jolanta says that your respect was very important to him. This is your power.”

  It couldn’t be pleasant for Tomas to talk about his wife’s former lover. He was doing the noble, disagreeable thing. He read me reading this; we exchanged a mutually wistful acknowledgement of the things men have to do sometimes. I didn’t want to like him, some misplaced allegiance to Kirk. But he was doing this difficult thing as best he could. />
  I said, “If I hadn’t kept them apart they might still be together. You have me to thank for that.”

  “This assumes our marriage is successful.” He laughed here; I think to show he was joking. “She says you have come here because you want to know about his mental…‌climate from the time that they talked on the telephone.”

  “Her advanced psychology serves her well.”

  “She is an intelligent woman. The psychology…” He dismissed that with a swat. “I am to tell you that your friend was not in a good mind when they talked. He does well to hide this. He wanted to see her. He said it was important. She knows she must go to him, but she cannot. It would be too difficult for her to do this.” He looked around now, as if worried that someone might overhear him. “She whips herself that if she had gone to your friend he might still be alive. These are heavy thoughts.”

  I sipped my coffee, practicing the difficult art of making it last as the Europeans do. There was a squeal of brakes: a young, white-blond bicyclist (he could have been Tomas’ much younger brother) had nearly been run over. It neatly punctuated Tomas’ story. We traded half-smiles in mutual acknowledgement of that.

  The waitress arrived with Tomas’ coffee.

  “I told her to go to him if she wanted this,” Tomas continued, intent now on finishing his story. “I told this to her even though I know it is a mistake. I should fight to keep her; I should make the decision for her; I should say, ‘Do not go to him; I do not allow this.’ In this way his death would have been my guilt.”