The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries

by Michaela Thompson

  “The locksmith accomplished more. He put on new locks, and chains, and some sort of bar device on the glass doors to make it more difficult the next time someone wants to intrude.”

  The bitterness in Clara’s voice was evident. She sighed. “It’s the times, I suppose. I’m not the only one. There’s talk of forming some sort of block association. I’m lucky I didn’t lose anything.”

  “Why do you suppose nothing was taken?”

  “Perhaps the person was frightened off. Or perhaps it was an estranged husband, snooping in his wife’s file for ammunition to use in a divorce, and he found what he needed. Perhaps anything.”

  When Marina left Clara’s the fog had come down through the eucalyptus trees and settled around the house. The street lamps were smudges of light that illuminated nothing. The neighborhood— a neighborhood of teenagers, and well-fed cats, and Berkeley professors, and little girls who took dancing lessons— seemed alien, peopled by beings who came and went without invitation or warning and left disquiet behind them. Clara would lie in her bed tonight wondering if they would return. Marina slammed her car door hard, because she wanted to make a noise.

  8

  “Hold on,” the attendant said, and the safety bar descended over Marina’s knees and then over Eric Sondergard’s knees next to hers. Across the empty park Marina could see “Season’s Greetings” spelled out in colored lights over the entrance. The manager of the Seattle Fun World, hunched in his raincoat by the ticket booth, was gazing at the sky, which looked as if another drizzle might start any minute. Marina had always heard that it rained all the time in Seattle, and nothing in the several hours she’d been here had disproved it. On the drive from the airport, half-listening to the Seattle manager chatting nervously with Sondergard— Eric, he’d insisted she call him— she had watched the magnificent green of the landscape through a haze of droplets.

  Maybe a trip to Seattle hadn’t been strictly necessary. Certainly it hadn’t been necessary for Sondergard— Eric— to accompany her. His decision to do so had thrown her off a little, but on the other hand he was paying for the tickets.

  “I’ve looked over the records. Loopy Doops have to be inspected annually for cracks and flaws,” she had told Sandy and Sondergard at their most recent meeting in Sandy’s office. “What I don’t understand is,” —she ran her finger down the list—” the older machines, the ones that have been in service longest, have perfect records. No fatigue failures, no bends, not even a hint. On the other hand, the Redwood City Loopy Doop, which was so new it hadn’t even been through an annual inspection yet—”

  The phone buzzed and Don, who had been taking notes, said “Dammit” and went to answer.

  Sondergard leaned forward. “You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying I think the Loopy Doop leg broke because of low-cycle fatigue, yet there’s no initial flaw, and it had been operating less than a year. The older machines not only haven’t broken, they don’t show any danger signals. It’s strange.”

  Don returned and said, “The kid’s uncle again, for Marina. I told him she was out.”

  “Christ,” said Sandy.

  “If he calls again,” Marina said, her eyes still on the inspection list, “tell him I’ve gone to— to Seattle.”

  Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to ride Loopy Doop either, but it had seemed a natural outgrowth of looking at it, poking around in its engine, and running her hand along the cold, damp steel legs that showed no sign of bending.

  Sitting in the gondola, though, with Sondergard’s shoulder pressing against hers, waiting for the attendant to start the engine, she needed to swallow several times. This ride has operated three years without anyone getting even a scraped knuckle, she told herself, and swallowed again.

  The jangly music was starting, and she could feel the effect of having the legs so thin. It gave the ride a wavery, springy feel that was already making her hands clammy, and as the gondola started to swoop upward she had to stifle a scream. She glanced sideways at Sondergard, and although he looked impassive she saw that he was clutching the bar convulsively.

  The gondola descended again, fast, and her nose started to run. She dug in her jacket pocket, hoping for a tissue, and luckily found one. When had she felt like this? She squeezed her eyes shut as the gondola reared upward as if to fling them into the grove of evergreens at the edge of the park. Maybe this was how they had felt, the two chubby teenagers who’d gone plummeting down into the ticket booth. The music loud like this, a tune that pulled at her nerves with every jagged bar. She pressed the tissue to her streaming nose, then wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She had to stop acting so outrageously stupid. She blew her nose and glanced at Sondergard again, just catching him shifting his eyes away from her.

  That was enough to put her back in control. For the rest of the ride she clung to the bar and managed, she thought, to look calm as the world tossed around her and Loopy Doop performed perfectly. When she climbed out of the gondola, though, her legs wobbled and nearly gave, and she clutched the edge of the car to steady herself. Holding onto it, she noticed something. She studied a scratch on the gondola’s metal side, pulled a pencil-like magnet from her “doctor bag,” then turned to Sondergard. “This is aluminum.”

  Sondergard’s face was very white. He shrugged slightly. “Oh?”

  “The gondolas for the Redwood City Loopy Doop are steel.”

  He was patting his brow with a handkerchief. “What’s the difference?”

  “Well— weight for one thing— the main thing. Steel is a lot heavier.”

  “You mean the gondolas on the other ride—”

  “Were heavier, that’s all. Maybe a hundred pounds.”

  “Could that have made the difference—”

  “I doubt it. It’s funny that it was changed, though. You don’t know anything about it?”

  She watched a crease deepen between his brows. “I can’t swear I hadn’t heard about it, but right now— I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll take another look at the specifications when I get back.”

  The drizzle started. She felt Sondergard’s hand on her back as he guided her toward the waiting limousine, where the Seattle manager had already taken shelter. The Loopy Doop attendant, standing nearby, said, “What did you think, Mr. Sondergard?”

  Sondergard shook his head. “Too much for me.”

  “Just as well you shut that one down. Nobody would ride it anyway, now. Except on a dare.”

  They got into the limousine, and Sondergard told the driver to take them to the airport. The Loopy Doop ride had silenced everybody, even the Seattle manager. Marina gazed out the window at the darkening landscape and listened to the click of the windshield wipers and the hiss of the tires on the freeway. By the time they reached the airport, she had almost stopped shaking.

  9

  Bobo patted his mouth with a napkin printed with a sprig of holly. His eyes were vague. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  Marina cleared her throat. “What I was asking,” she said, raising her voice and speaking slowly, “was whether you knew anything about this decision to change from aluminum to steel gondolas in the Loopy Doop rides.”

  She waited. Bobo patted his mouth a few more times. She plowed on. “The specifications say that a little over a year ago Fun World didn’t renew a contract for aluminum gondolas that you had with Gonzales Manufacturing in Fremont. You now get steel gondolas, and all your specialty steel, from Singapore Metal Works, in Singapore.” She was practically yelling. Out near Alcatraz, a barge wallowed laboriously, slowly, through choppy green water. That was what it was like to deal with Bobo.

  Bobo’s distant look, however, had been replaced by a more thoughtful one. “Gonzales? Al Gonzales?” he said.

  “I don’t know the first name. It’s in Fremont.”

  “Sure. Al Gonzales. Took me out to the best Mexican dinner I ever ate. Al does some work for me.”

  He was out of it, but what else was new? “Not any mor
e. Gonzales Manufacturing lost the contract over a year ago. The new supplier is Singapore Metal Works.”

  Bobo rubbed a spot in the middle of his forehead, his eyes closed. “That can’t be right. I would never dump Al. Nobody talked to me about it.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to—”

  Bobo turned abruptly and barked, “Pete!” He looked almost animated. A young man with razor-cut hair, one of the several Fun World employees who were always around, appeared. Bobo said, “What’s this about you boys dumping Al Gonzales?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mr.—”

  “Find out. And bring me a report.”

  As Pete disappeared, Bobo said, “Al Gonzales bought me the best margarita I ever drank. The best…” His voice trailed off, and Marina gathered her things. Another exercise in futility. She doubted it was significant, anyway.

  Talking to Bobo was something to do during the Christmas doldrums, at least, while everything else came to a standstill. Tensile tests on Loopy Doop’s steel couldn’t be done, because the machined specimens couldn’t be made, because half the technicians were on vacation. The chemical analysis couldn’t be done because the laboratory’s Christmas party was apparently using up everybody’s energies.

  In the meantime, nobody but Marina seemed to think any of this was urgent. “Hell, the suits haven’t even been filed. All the lawyers are off skiing,” said Sandy, who, naturally, was preoccupied with keeping his tuxedo in good shape and other matters of significance.

  Even Sondergard, when she ran into him in Sandy’s office one day talking with Don, said, “Listen— give it till after New Year’s.”

  “It’s falling on deaf ears, Eric. Marina’s the original Scrooge,” Don said.

  Marina grimaced. It wasn’t that she disliked Christmas, it was that she could never understand why, when there was work to be done, everybody should tacitly agree that things could come to a standstill for three solid weeks. Sure, have parties, give presents if you had anybody to give them to, but— it was useless to complain. She couldn’t change the situation, so she might as well do something silly like drive to Fremont and visit Gonzales Manufacturing.

  With a feeling of playing hooky, she drove out of the parking garage, headed down Nob Hill on California Street, and took Battery toward the Bay Bridge. The city was jammed with shoppers, and trees blinked everywhere. By the time she returned from Fremont it would be too late to go back to the office. As an extra bonus, the Christmas party was this afternoon, and she’d miss it.

  The midafternoon traffic on the Bay Bridge was light, and as she drove she thought about the switch from aluminum to steel gondolas. It probably wasn’t important, but it was curious. When you had a design that in any case depended on thin legs of high strength steel, why give the legs extra weight to carry, even if they could carry it easily? She’d ask Sondergard about it again, in case he’d remembered something.

  She made good time, and in forty minutes was taking the exit closest to the industrial park where, she had learned from the map, she would find the street Gonzales Manufacturing was on. The way led through wide, anonymous streets strung with plastic Santas and lined with taco stands and used-car dealerships. She turned off into the industrial park with its rows of small, anonymous factories of beige- or cream-colored concrete, the newer ones landscaped with spindly young trees.

  Gonzales was in an older section, and the only things growing near it were blackberries forcing their way through cracks in the empty parking lot. Marina left her car beside the weathered redwood sign with “Gonzales Manufacturing” painted on it in yellow and walked to the front door.

  A heavy bar lock and chain hung across it. Peering through the glass, she could glimpse part of an empty office and a bare gray metal desk. Apparently Gonzales wasn’t manufacturing anything these days.

  The factory next door was still in business. Marina walked across the parking lot to it. A dark-haired young woman, sitting behind a receptionist’s desk covered with standing Christmas cards, glanced up as she entered.

  “I was just over at Gonzales,” Marina said. “Where’ve they gone?”

  The girl shrugged. “Closed down.”

  “When?”

  “Couple of months ago, I guess.”

  “Do you know where I could find Mr. Gonzales, who used to run the company?”

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t know anything about it.” She hesitated. Marina didn’t move. After a moment the girl said, “We hired their foreman. He can probably tell you.”

  Marina had learned that standing her ground a little longer than was strictly polite often got results. She said, “I’d like to speak with him for a minute.”

  Gonzales’s former foreman was a graying man in his fifties, dressed in khaki. Marina told him who she was. When she mentioned Fun World, his face hardened. “If it wasn’t for those bastards, Gonzales would still be in business,” he said. “The only good that came out of it was, at least we weren’t involved in that accident. But when Fun World didn’t renew the contract, that was it. A lot of good people out on the street. I was lucky, got another job. Not like some of the rest of them.”

  “Gonzales closed down because of Fun World?”

  “Not exactly.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “We were in trouble already. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, if you know what I mean.”

  “What happened to Mr. Gonzales?”

  “Enrique? I think he’s still trying to pick up the pieces. He’s got an office in the Fremont Plaza building, downtown.”

  “Actually, I meant Al.”

  “Oh. The old man died right after the plant went belly-up. Stroke or something. Shame.”

  10

  Enrique Gonzales tapped a piece of paper with his pencil point, gazing out the window of the tiny office. “I just wish my father hadn’t lived to see the day, that’s all,” he said.

  Marina didn’t reply. The atmosphere in the room was oppressive with Enrique Gonzales’s anger.

  “I swear to God,” Gonzales said. “Sometimes I think that accident is God’s way of punishing Fun World for what they did to us. Let them find out what it’s like to struggle. Let them feel shame.” He turned back to Marina. He was a solidly built man in rolled-up shirtsleeves, with a broad face. A lock of straight black hair fell over his forehead. “There was never any trouble with anything we did for them. We worked with them for years. From Bobo’s very first park. My father and Bobo—” He held up two fingers pressed together. “Then they pull the rug out from under us and take their business to Singapore.”

  “Nobody said why?”

  “Not a word. After all those years. My father, sick as he was, tried to get Bobo on the phone. The secretary said Bobo was unavailable.” Gonzales gave the last word a bitter twist.

  “Why do you think—”

  “Money, lady.” Gonzales’s lip curled. “Don’t you know that’s what everything’s about? What do they live on over in Singapore, rice or something? They don’t have to pay wages like we do here. Unemployment? Workmen’s comp? They never heard of it.”

  He had a point. Still, why not get aluminum gondolas made in Singapore, instead of steel ones? “Thanks,” she said.

  “I pray for the ones who died, for the ones who were hurt,” Gonzales said. “But to see Fun World in trouble— It’s the only thing that keeps me going.”

  Marina stood up, anxious to get away. She left him bent over the desk, writing numbers on a sheet of paper.

  11

  The letter arrived the day of a storm— another in a procession of storms that started at Christmas, continued through New Year’s, and showed no sign of ending. Marina was almost accustomed by now to waking up in the early morning to the sound of spitting rain and in the evening creeping home with her headlights illuminating the downpour, always hoping her car or somebody else’s wouldn’t skid on a hill.

  When, damp and tired, she opened the mailbox in the lobby of her apartment building and her fing
ers touched the onionskin envelope, she felt the same flash of irritation she used to feel and the accompanying thought: a letter from Catherine. She wasn’t even surprised to see the Indian stamps, the Bombay postmark. An instant later, her mouth filled with bitter fluid and she sat down abruptly on the concrete ledge of the planter next to the mailboxes. She put the letter on her knee. Her name and address, typed with a faint ribbon. No return address. Don’t sit looking at it, open it.

  The single sheet of onionskin rustled as she tried to unfold it. The typed message was brief:

  Rain Sister,

  You told me trees write stories on the sky and only you can read them. What do the trees tell you now? Can you read the sky?

  Cloud Sister

  She stared at the spongy green moss in the planter. She must have been about seven then, and Catherine four. They were kneeling on the bed, looking out the window at bare winter limbs. “The ends of the branches are pencils,” Marina had said, her breath condensing on the cold glass, and she “read” to Catherine the story written on the sky, repeating something from a book the teacher had read at school. Catherine listened, rapt, her eyes huge and blue. After that she had often asked Marina to read what the trees had written.

  Rain Sister and Cloud Sister. What had that game been about? They had played it over and over. To become Rain Sister she had wrapped herself in their mother’s fringed gray silk shawl with its border of pink roses. Catherine, Cloud Sister, had worn a white angora sweater.

  She’d been sitting here a long time. She got up stiffly and took the elevator to her apartment.

  Catherine was dead. She had died ten years ago, when the Palika Road ashram burned— was burned by an angry mob after the sacrificial killing of a young neighborhood boy named Agit More. Marina put the letter on the kitchen table and walked, hugging her elbows, through her low-ceilinged anonymous apartment, with its bare white walls, its expanses of glass overlooking rain-slick streets and in the distance beyond the lights the black stretch of the bay. She went back to the table and picked up the letter.