The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries

by Michaela Thompson

  “Now you see what it’s like to work for him. That’s the story of my life.”

  “Actually, when I talked to him about it before, he said he didn’t know anything about Singapore Metal. He was really surprised when I told him Gonzales Manufacturing had lost the contract for the gondolas.”

  Sondergard shook his head. “That was the story when he told it to you, sure. And if you talked to him today, he might tell you the opposite. Believe me. You haven’t dealt with him as much as I have.”

  The palm of her hand seemed to be pulsing. She was intensely aware that his fingers were still laced with hers. “Anyway,” he was saying, “the specifications haven’t been changed, have they?”

  When she shook her head he said, “We may be out of the woods then, anyway, if we specified hard steel and they gave us some lousy alloy.”

  “But listen, Eric. I may be wrong. The tests aren’t complete.”

  “Not you, Marina. You wouldn’t ever be wrong.” He smiled exultantly. “I know you wouldn’t.”

  Marina never went to bed with clients, and it was with a kind of vertigo that, in his car after lunch, she found herself clinging to Eric Sondergard, returning his kisses, burning. Dazed with shock and desire, she told him how to get to her apartment. In bed, she held him tightly, fervently, as if she could never get close enough.

  She watched him dress later, in the fading light of approaching evening, watched him tie his tie, shake out his jacket, comb his silvery-blond hair. Her hair and the sheet beneath her were damp with sweat. She was thirsty.

  He bent over her and kissed her. “Let me know about those tests, OK?” he said, and when she nodded, he left.

  In the first moments after he was gone she lay still, barely breathing, waiting for the first lash of self-contempt.

  13

  It was a bad night. Marina lay wide-eyed in the darkness, unable even to hope for sleep, unable to connect a train of thought. Sometimes she would forget her episode with Sondergard, then remember it suddenly, her stomach clenching each time. Toward daybreak she dozed, and woke convinced that Nagarajan was in the room. His spicy smell still in her nostrils, she sat up and looked around, terrified. The feeling persisted so strongly that she put on her bathrobe and walked through the apartment, searching. Slightly calmed by its bland, everyday emptiness, she took a shower and got ready for work.

  She was shakily sipping coffee at her desk when Don buzzed. “I wanted to tell you I picked up a call for you yesterday afternoon. Haven’t had a chance to run a message down there.”

  “Thanks. What was it?”

  “It was a hell of a bad connection, so I’m not sure I got it right. I think the operator said—wait a minute. Someone calling on behalf of Miss, um— would it be Cloud? Calling from Bombay, India. Worst connection I ever had.”

  Marina could hardly move her lips. “Are you sure?”

  “Not at all. I couldn’t hear. I kept yelling at the operator to spell it, but she just kept saying something like Cloud. Was it important?”

  “I don’t— I don’t know what to say.”

  “God, Marina, you sound like you’re in shock. If I blew something important, I’m really sorry.”

  “No. No. Did she leave a number?”

  “Not that I could hear. I don’t think she tried. In fact, the call kind of got cut off. One minute it’s all this static and a tiny voice saying ‘Cloud,’ the next minute nothing.”

  “She asked for me?”

  “I thought so. That’s what I understood. That, Bombay, and Cloud. Is it bad news? You sound awful.”

  “It’s OK. Really.”

  Marina put down the phone. Of course Catherine wouldn’t let me off the hook with one letter. She and Nagarajan between them. She writes and calls, he comes into my apartment— but listen, he wasn’t there. It was that spicy smell of his. That’s how I knew.

  It was Eric Sondergard, not Nagarajan, but Eric’s smell wasn’t the same at all. It was soapier, with lime in it somewhere. In India, she had drunk fresh lime juice mixed with soda water. The thought of its tartness made her nose prickle.

  The woman at the telephone company said that even though it was an emergency the call would be very difficult to trace. Her tone of voice said it was probably impossible. Marina left her name and number and hung up.

  She couldn’t sit here. She paced her office. Catherine and Nagarajan had died years ago. Marina had to figure out— she had to figure out what caused the Loopy Doop disaster, that’s what she had to figure out.

  She rushed out of her office and half-ran across the pier to the testing division. When she walked in a young man in a smudged white coat said, “You’re late. I thought you’d be storming in yesterday afternoon.”

  She didn’t smile. “What about the tensile test?”

  “To tell you the truth, I had a little trouble locating the specimens, but it’s almost done. I’m about to load the last one now.”

  She followed him to the tensile testing machine, an apparatus that looked like two columns with steel crossbars holding grips shaped like metal bells, one upended a few inches above the other. He picked up the specimen, a piece of machined steel about two inches long, from a plastic tray. The specimen was threaded at both ends and very thin in the middle. He screwed one threaded end into the top bell grip, the other into the bottom one.

  As he worked Marina studied the graph lying beside the tray. “What do the results look like?”

  “Checks out fine so far,” he responded absently as he adjusted the specimen.

  Why couldn’t she breathe? “Fine?”

  “It’s supposed to be 4140, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks to me like that’s exactly what it is.”

  Before she could stop herself she burst out, “How could it be? The hardness test—”

  He turned to her, raising his eyebrows, and she cut herself off. Of course hardness was just a guide. The tensile test was the definitive measure of alloy strength. “Let’s see how this one does,” she said, and he nodded.

  He turned on the motor that would draw the crossbars in opposite directions and pull the specimen apart. If Loopy Doop had been made out of soft steel, that would’ve explained everything. If the steel checked out, then what? Then Eric couldn’t blame Singapore, for one thing. For another, she’d be back to square one. Watching the thin steel being pulled inexorably to the breaking point, she felt the stretch in her own body.

  The specimen snapped in the middle. “There she goes,” the technician said. He studied the settings on the computer that controlled the machine and wrote down numbers on the chart. He shrugged. “Looks like 4140 to me.”

  Oh God. “OK.”

  “I don’t know what hardness results you got, but it should’ve come in at about thirty-five on Rockwell C.”

  “I got sixty-five on Rockwell B.”

  “Jeez, you know what I bet?” A smile flashed across his face. “I bet you had the C penetrator in the hardness tester. It’s so easy to screw that up. And then you read the B scale instead of the C scale.”

  How stupid. How incredibly, unutterably stupid, but it was possible. A sixty-five on the B scale would be right above thirty-five on the C scale. What an idiotic, bush-league mistake. Her face felt scalded. “Maybe so,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell Sandy.”

  She walked back to her office and dropped into her chair. Results of the chemical analysis, which would give her the exact components of the alloy, hadn’t come in yet. There was still some hope, but not much. She’d wait till she got the word on that before telling Eric. In the meantime, she’d better start thinking about what besides weak steel would cause Loopy Doop’s leg to break.

  Who had called? Miss Cloud in Bombay, her own Cloud Sister. Or somebody else. You could tell the police about harassment. Maybe it was against the law to pretend to be a dead person, to try to call your dead sister— no, she was mixing it up. It wasn’t against the law to call your dead
sister. It was against the law to call your living sister. If you were dead. She laughed, then clamped her teeth down hard to stop herself. When the feeling subsided, she reached for the Loopy Doop file.

  14

  That night, Patrick came over. She started violently when the buzzer for the downstairs door sounded, and stared at the speaker box on the wall, her heart surging. When she answered, would Catherine’s voice say it was Cloud Sister? She wouldn’t answer. After a minute the buzzer sounded again and she pushed the speaker button. “Yes?”

  “It’s Patrick.”

  She pushed the button to let him in and collapsed against the wall in the hallway, waiting for him to get the elevator up to her floor.

  When she opened the door to his ring, she was amazed at how familiar and at the same time how alien he looked, in his jeans, running shoes, sweater, and glasses, a copy of his favorite magazine, The Gramophone, in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. “I finished rehearsal early,” he said.

  “Come in.”

  “Brought some Gamay Beaujolais.” He put the wine on the kitchen table, got the corkscrew out of the drawer, and opened the bottle. She watched the light sift through his straight, silky hair as he bent over his task.

  He poured and handed her a glass. “You’re wondering why I’m here.”

  She was almost too numb to care. “Yes.”

  He looked at her closely. “Are you all right? You look wiped out.”

  For a second, maybe less, she wanted to tell him everything, to babble it all out like a child and beg him to help her. He would help her. She knew that. The impulse flashed, exploded, died before she could speak. “I’m fine. Working hard.”

  He sipped and put his glass down. After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Over the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing somebody. Her name is Nancy.”

  A nerve pulsed in Marina’s throat. “You have?”

  “Yes. On the rebound, I guess you might say. She’s very nice. But I didn’t come here to try to make you jealous.”

  “You came because—”

  “I came because I can’t let you go. I can’t let you go, and it isn’t fair to her, and I guess I have to hear you tell me one more time that we’re finished.”

  “It must be a serious thing with her, then.”

  “It could be. Sometime. Not the way things are now. What I’m saying is, if there were any chance with you—”

  “I know what you’re saying.”

  Marina refilled their glasses. She could tell Patrick she had had a change of heart. She saw the two of them, surrounded by golden light, receding to a tiny black dot and obliterated in a burst of brightness. “It can’t happen, Patrick,” she said.

  His expression didn’t change. “So Catherine and Nagarajan are stronger than I am. You’ll hold onto them and let me go.”

  Hearing him speak their names was a physical shock. As if he had invoked them, she felt Catherine and Nagarajan hovering.

  I could tell him. He might understand better if he knew they were still real. She stared at the floor.

  He put his glass down. “I’m off.”

  She walked him to the door. As he opened it she said, “I’m sorry.”

  His head bobbed in a quick nod. “Goodbye.”

  She leaned against the door, listening to his footsteps recede. The bottle of wine sat on the table, along with the two glasses. His copy of The Gramophone lay on a chair. She wouldn’t call him to give it back to him. She sat down again, poured more wine into his glass, and sipped it slowly.

  15

  “Try to think,” Marina said.

  Don closed his eyes. Marina crumpled and threw away the message to call the phone company. The woman had sounded only slightly regretful when she told Marina they’d done what they could, but they couldn’t trace the call.

  “It was person-to-person for you. I think the operator said, ‘Marina Robinson, please. Miss Cloud calling.’ No, wait. She said ‘Miss Cloud’ after I said you weren’t here.”

  Marina wiped her palms on the front of her skirt. “Maybe she said it was Bombay calling the first time,” Don said. He screwed his eyes closed tighter. “Anyway, after that there was even more static on the line, and a lot of clicking. I was yelling about leaving a message, and I couldn’t hear her much at all, except at one point I thought she was spelling something for me, because I heard her say something about a comma.” His eyes opened. “That’s it.”

  “You have no idea what she was spelling?”

  “I wish I did, but no.”

  She turned away, not wanting him to be able to read in her face her desire to hit him, to batter him until he was bruised and pulpy and would be forced to tell her even if he didn’t know. Sandy emerged from his office and gestured to her. “You can come in now.”

  It was only a routine briefing on Loopy Doop, but she wasn’t getting through it very well. She couldn’t quite connect her thoughts, explain what she’d been doing. What had she been doing? The business about the steel and the tests. She started through the story, feeling that she was carrying a heavy bundle and things kept falling out and she had to stop and pick them up. Like a donkey on a dusty road on a hot day, loaded with— oh, mangoes, say, and first one mango and then another tumbled out of the basket and rolled in the dust—

  Sandy’s eyes were shadowed. “What about the chemical results?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I should get them today.”

  “You’re telling me that you thought there was a question of low-strength steel but you’ve got almost nothing to back you up.”

  “I guess so.”

  Sandy leaned back in his chair. “You aren’t showing me much, Marina.”

  Rama. Rama. Rama, not comma. The hotel in Bombay where Catherine had stayed when she first went to India. I wrote her there, at the Hotel Rama. For you to leave without telling me, taking the money we had agreed was for school, is indefensible. I realize that Nagarajan is your god, your guru, or something, but…

  Sandy stopped in the middle of a sentence. “Forgive me if I’m boring you.”

  “No. I mean, you’re not.”

  “I want to see something solid. I don’t have to tell you how important this case is, do I?”

  “No.” It was the Hotel Rama. She could find out the number, maybe call back.

  “—Bobo notwithstanding,” Sandy was saying.

  “All right.” She stood up. She noticed that Sandy was frowning as she left.

  An envelope from the lab was lying on her desk. The chemical analysis. It could wait, couldn’t it, until after she called international information and got the Rama’s number? No, better open it. She sucked in her breath.

  The steel was 4140. Chrome, molybdenum. Lower-strength alloys wouldn’t have those. She dropped the paper on the desk. It had looked so good, so perfect, all because she’d made a mistake on the hardness test and built a theory around it. The whole case was in fragments again. She sat down and reached for the phone, not to call international information but to call Eric Sondergard.

  “Oh Jesus, no,” he said when she told him.

  “I can show you the figures.”

  “I’m stuck here. Can you bring them over?”

  Sondergard’s office was in an Embarcadero Center highrise, walking distance from Breakdown. She clutched her portfolio and bent her head against the chilly, wet wind. She didn’t want to see Eric. She didn’t want to think about it— about him, with his long, pale limbs, his soapy smell.

  On the Embarcadero Plaza, despite the wind and overcast sky, stands were set up to sell T-shirts, ceramic pots, decorated mirrors, lithographs of San Francisco, to appeal to whatever tourists might venture out. In India, tourists would be surrounded by hawkers selling toys—articulated wooden snakes, serious-looking whips made of braided leather thongs, jointed wire puzzles that could be bent in many shapes. Little-boy peddlers demonstrated the puzzles, going through their singsong “Is ball, is lotus, is bowl, is water jar—” In India there would
be a cobra, its hood flared open, swaying to the disturbing music its charmer played.

  Sondergard’s office had a view of the Golden Gate Bridge rearing into the fog above gray-green swells topped with foam. He closed the door behind her and slid his hand across her back. She shivered from attraction or revulsion.

  She didn’t look at him as she took the test results from her portfolio, and barely glanced up as she explained that these were definitive, much more so than the hardness test, and that she’d probably blown the hardness test anyway.

  He listened, his fingertips placed lightly together, gazing at the papers. When she finished he said, “I was so sure.”

  “So was I. It had the right feel about it, somehow.” As soon as she said the words she was engulfed by grief. As it rushed over her she clung to the tiny voice of rationality that said, You’ve had theories shot down before. What is this? Then the voice was silenced in the overwhelming conviction that everything was lost, everything, finished, no good. She wanted to say something about how she’d keep trying, but she couldn’t say it.

  His fingers were under her chin, raising her face to his. “I’d like to come see you again,” he said.

  She still couldn’t speak. For a long moment she stared at him, feeling herself stretched more and more taut. When it was almost unbearable he let her go. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  ***

  When she got home that afternoon and opened her mailbox the feeling of the onionskin envelope in her fingers was entirely expected. She carried the letter upstairs. Bombay postmark again, everything the same.

  Rain Sister,

  The Rig Veda says, “Now, Agni, quench and revive the very one you have burnt up.” Do you understand, Rain Sister?

  Cloud Sister

  She sat on the edge of her bed. She knew the Rig Veda was a collection of Hindu holy texts. From the smattering of information she had picked up during her days with Catherine she remembered that Agni was the god of fire. If Agni was fire, Catherine was the one who had been burnt up, whom the fire must quench and revive. Catherine quenched, revived. Catherine had walked out of the fire that had been kerosene-fed by a mob, leaving her ring behind. Her ring and her bones and her teeth. Reconstituted now, like instant soup, sitting in a hotel room in Bombay tapping out notes and making phone calls.