Firebird

by Helaine Mario

  The waiter appeared with their food, and Alexandra was relieved to end their unsettling conversation. Bad idea to talk about personal lives. For God’s sake, romance? She didn’t even know what romance was! Except, apparently, that it had been dangerous – and redemptive? - for Garcia. She was shocked to realize, suddenly, that she wanted to know why. Irritated with her unexpected reaction, she turned away to gaze up at the waiter. “Has Satin arrived yet?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” he promised. “Enjoy your salad, my lovely Laydee.”

  Garcia’s eyes followed the waiter. “It’s possible he knew your sister, especially if she was a regular. I’ll talk with him before we leave.”

  “Good idea.” Back on firmer footing now. She took a bite of her salad. “And I want to follow up on something tomorrow before I return to New York. I met with the detectives today. Eve died in Great Falls Park, but the taxi driver took her to an inn that night. The River Falls Inn. It’s about a mile away from the river. They kept it from the media.”

  She thought of the note she’d found in her sister’s bedroom. Meet me tonight, after eleven, near the river. You know the place. “I want to talk to that driver.”

  “I’ve read the official report. The police went to the inn, Alexandra. And they questioned her driver.”

  “About a suicide, yes. But I found the cab receipt -” she took a deep breath - “among her things. It doesn’t cost $200.00 to drive ten miles from Georgetown to Maryland’s Great Falls Park. I want to know where else they went, and what that driver told the police.”

  He set down his fork, raised an eyebrow. “You could be on to something. Worth checking out.”

  Three wizened old black men settled on the stage. Coltrane’s soft jazz spilled into the room, and Alexandra looked around the darkened club. “This is my sister’s kind of place,” she said softly. “And somehow I think Eve knew I’d find my way here.”

  “Why, because of a ‘sister connection’? You and Eve were that close?”

  Her head swung up.

  “Ah,” he said, “I can see by your face that you weren’t.”

  “We were close, once. Eve gave me my first artist’s paints.” You have eyes the color of a misty Maine morning, Zan. This color, here, in your paint box. “And that sketchpad you saw. I adored her, followed her everywhere. Until...”

  “Until?”

  She gazed down at her salad, not ready to answer. “Ironic, isn’t it? The sister whose love I lost has made me remember how much I was loved once. And how much I loved her.”

  He was very still and those dark, serious eyes on her were as intense as a touch on her skin. She looked away self-consciously. Her sister had been right about his damn magnetism. But these ‘moments’ between them were too damned unsettling. Very deliberately, she shifted her chair to put more distance between them, and then turned to him. “What?” she demanded. “What are you thinking?”

  “Just wondering what makes you tick.”

  She shrugged. “How can two sisters be so different? Eve was so electric, so daring, always getting into trouble. And taking me with her! I was the younger one, but I was always watching out for her, giving in to her, protecting her. Even after she crawled inside a bottle of Jack Daniels and refused to come out.”

  “Fate?” he said. “DNA? Or just different choices…”

  She shrugged. “We had to raise ourselves. We had each other. But then - ”

  “But then?” he prompted.

  She pushed a hand through the spikes of hair. “I fell in love for the first time my seventeenth summer. But then he met Eve. They eloped just before my birthday.” Her lashes came down to hide the hurt. “My sister loved men. But I think it was more about the power rush, the danger. The same reason she loved heights, said it was closer to flying.”

  “So you just let your sister take the man you loved without fighting for him? Betrayed by the sister you adored... but perhaps she did you a favor, Chica.”

  Staring into her glass, she shook her head slowly. “Or maybe love just turned into anger.”

  “Anger hides hurt, Alexandra. You know it. It hurts to love someone who is never going to stop disappointing you.”

  She stiffened, staring at him.

  He leaned closer. “But I think there is more. Much more you are not saying.”

  She turned away from him, looked at her watch. “Where is our waiter? Satin should be here by now.”

  “I finally talk about feelings, you talk about waiters.” His eyes looked like dark clouds reflected in the sea.

  She shifted uncomfortably. “Because talking to you is like trying to cross a frozen lake in early spring,” she said darkly. “With every step I take, the sounds of ice cracking beneath me grow louder and louder.”

  “Sink or swim,” he murmured. He smiled down at her. “Come, you can’t stop the movie before the big moment, Red. So what did you do when your sister stole your life?”

  Just shoot me, she thought. “I made a new life for myself. I went to Berkeley, got my masters in Fine Arts, stayed in California and worked and painted.” She looked away. “And three years ago I married a man who’d never heard of Eve Marik Rhodes.”

  “So you ran as far away as possible from your sister’s shadow.” His eyes were challenging.

  “Yes, I ran! But I came back.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “You did.”

  She stared at his hands, cradling his wine glass. Jesus, Marik! What was she doing, confiding in this man she hardly knew? “You must be a good lawyer,” she said suddenly. “You have a way of getting people to open up to you.” When they don’t want to…

  “It’s the easy charm.” He wagged his eyebrows at her. “But if it’s any consolation, it’s taken me much longer than usual with you.”

  Alexandra gripped her glass, leaned toward him, and lowered her voice. “Much bigger wall,” she said softly. This time the challenge was hers.

  Shining mahogany eyes locked on hers, and she could tell he wanted to say something more. But he only said, “Another conversation I won’t win? Back to your sister, then. Since she is the reason we are here. You may remember something that will help us.”

  Yes. Safer ground to talk about Eve. Or was it? She pushed her half-finished salad away, lifted her wine glass. “My sister stayed in Maine after I left, filed for divorce within the first year. Then she took off, immersed herself in la dolce vita. Juliet was the child of husband number two. Eve was drinking way too much by then.” She looked at him. “She was still drinking when she married Anthony. But he told me that Eve was sober this last year.” Until the night she died. “Billie said the same thing.”

  “Good for your sister,” Garcia said quietly. “Getting sober is hard work.”

  “Yes, it’s a disease, I know that. But Eve saw her alcoholism as a weakness. A moral lapse. She moved around a lot – running away, maybe - and Jules spent way too much time alone in boarding schools.”

  “So you lost the connection not only with your sister, but your niece?”

  “Like a Tennessee Williams play, isn’t it? And now, I feel as if I’m just beginning to know them. But why, just when I start to think I’m getting close to them, do they slip through my fingers?” And why do I suddenly feel as if I’ve lost part of myself?

  She shook her head back and forth as she thought of her attempts to draw her sister’s face.

  “Billie said something to me at the shelter this morning. That if I thought Eve spent most of her final days in a fog of alcohol, I didn’t know my sister at all.” She gazed down into her glass. “But her drinking was so… unpredictable. Scary. She became a stranger to me. I’ve spent so many years being angry with her, judging her, blaming her for what she did and didn’t do. Hammering at her to change. Not even trying to know who she really was inside…”

  “There’s a fine line between who we are and who all the people in our lives want us to be. Sometimes we see only what we expect to see, Red.”

  “And hide our
disillusionment with anger? Good God, I missed what was right in front of me!” A fist tightened in her chest. “Eve was infuriating and selfish and a train wreck of a sister, but –”

  “But you loved her once. And you miss her.”

  A heartbeat of silence. “Yes,” she admitted slowly, blindsided by the realization. “After all this time, I’m finally getting to know my sister, Garcia. And - I like her. I understand more, there was so much more beneath the surface of her life.” She gazed at him. “Do you know what Pentimento is?”

  He gave her his crooked half-smile. “Is this a trick question?”

  “Pentimento is an underlying image in a painting. When the top layer of paint is removed, you can see an earlier painting beneath.” She shook her head. “I’m seeing an Eve who was finally trying to do something good with her life. She didn’t take her own life, I’m certain of it now. I just have to prove it. If only -”

  She stopped mid-sentence. She could tell that he saw the questions stirring in her eyes. “All the random choices we make over the years, Garcia. Leading us to this moment. What if we’d made another choice, so long ago? Do you ever think about that?”

  “You think too much, Red.” Mahogany eyes blazed at her in the darkness.

  You live too much in your head, Zan, she heard her sister say, so close that she turned. But there was no one there.

  “My curse. But clarity and rationality work for me. Nothing clouds judgment like emotion.” She looked away. “Our father stayed in his own world after our mother died. I was alone a lot, I read books, sketched, lived in my head. Eve called me the Snow Queen. But cerebral is safe, Garcia.”

  “Is that what you want, Red? Safety? Because if you do, you damn well shouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “I want to stop having one-way conversations with my sister!” she countered, squaring her shoulders, determined to move on from this emotional quicksand. “I want answers. I want justice. I want to know who I am without her.”

  His eyes blazed. “You’ll have your answers, Chica,” he said softly, touching his glass to hers. “But you need to trust me. You’ve been holding something back, Alexandra.”

  The note, hidden in her sister’s nesting doll. Alexandra took a sip of wine, to give herself time to think. Tell him. “I found a message hidden in Eve’s bedroom. Eve went to the river to meet someone that night. I think she went to meet Ivan.”

  Garcia leaned closer, liquid eyes gleaming in the darkness, until his face was just inches away from her own. “What did the message say?”

  “It said, ‘I know what happened to Charles Fraser. Meet me tonight, after eleven, near the river. You know the place.’ It wasn’t signed.”

  At that moment the lights on the tiny stage went out, and the saxophonist ended his set with a final riff.

  A rustle of silk, a spotlight, and a flash of silver. Then a tall dark woman stepped into the intimate circle of light. A bright fringed shawl fell from her shoulders to the floor. In a shadowy corner, the strings of a bass cello began to thrum. The woman closed her eyes. Very slowly, in a deep whiskey voice, she began to sing.

  The woman swayed on the stage, lost in the words of The Man that Got Away, her huge silver bracelets and rings glinting in the stage lights. Behind her, the three very old black men accompanied her on bass, drums, and a scarred upright piano. Alexandra leaned forward, not trusting her eyes, and suddenly stiffened with shock. “Good Christ, that’s Billie Jordan!”

  Moments later the waiter appeared at Alexandra’s elbow. “Y’awl listenin’ to ma favorite Laydee,” he drawled in his soft accent, lifting a hand toward the stage. “That’s our Satin.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “to tell my story...”

  Shakespeare, Hamlet

  Soft applause filled the nightclub as Alexandra and Garcia followed Billie Jordan from the stage to her dressing room. Alexandra rapped on the door.

  The door swung open. Surprise and suspicion registered in Billie’s eyes. “What are you doing here, Baby Sister?”

  “You’re Satin?” demanded Alexandra.

  “She never says hello,” muttered Garcia.

  Billie gestured them in and pulled off her huge metal earrings with a sigh of relief. “Yes, I’m Satin. Most people don’t know that. I like it that way.”

  “This is Jon Garcia,” said Alexandra. “An old friend of Eve’s.”

  “Not that old,” said Garcia, with a nod of his head.

  “And what do you do, Jon Garcia, when you’re not banging on dressing room doors?”

  “I’m a lawyer by trade, Ms. Jordan. And now, Criminal Unit at the DOJ.”

  “Criminals…” She gave him an assessing look. “For or against?”

  “Against.”

  “Call me Billie.”

  “Your mama must have known her baby would sing like Billie Holiday.”

  “My Mama had a crush on Billy Dee Williams. Ever do Pro Bono, Counselor?”

  He raised a wry eyebrow. “Been a long time. Depends on what you need. A good lawyer knows the law, but a great lawyer knows the judge.”

  Billie chuckled as Alexandra stared at him, amused by the easy charm of the serious man she was coming to know.

  “Call me at the shelter tomorrow,” Billie said softly. Flashing a hundred watt smile at him, she disappeared behind a Chinese dressing screen in the corner of the room.

  “How the devil did you do that?” hissed Alexandra. “She stone-faced me for an hour this morning!”

  “It’s an ethnic thing,” he murmured. Billie Jordan emerged in jeans and a heavy sweater to face Alexandra and Garcia. “I want to talk to Alexandra,” she said. “Alone.”

  Garcia looked at the women for a long moment. “I’ll wait in the bar,” he told them.

  When they were alone, Alexandra turned to Billie. “I waited all day for you to call me.”

  Billie sank to a brightly patterned sofa and gestured Alexandra to sit beside her. “I have to protect my brother,” she said, gazing past Alexandra. “He was a very powerful man. Most of it was under the radar. And I made the choice to stay under the radar as well, for both our sakes.” Once more, distrust shimmered in the dark eyes. “You found me this morning. And now you’ve found me here. What am I supposed to think?”

  “I’m as surprised to see you as you are to see me,” said Alexandra honestly. “I learned that Eve was here, at this club, just before she died. Then you started to sing, and it all fell into place.”

  Billie leaned closer. “And just what place is that?”

  “I told you that Eve sent me a message. It was a warning. She mentioned needing satin. Turns out that’s you.”

  Billie Jordan caught her breath. “So Evie really did send you to me. You’ve got my attention, girl. What warning?”

  Alexandra held out her hands. “I wish I knew. She was scared, she thought your brother was in some kind of trouble.”

  Billie’s eyes flickered. “I knew nothing about Charlie’s work. His choice. If he was in trouble, the warning came too late. I can’t help you.”

  Can’t, or won’t? “Did your brother ever mention an Operation Firebird? Or a man named Ivan?”

  Billie’s eyes closed in concentration. “No. No Firebird, whatever that is. Something was troubling Charlie, I could tell - but he wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Did you meet Eve here a few nights before she died, Billie? Share a cosmopolitan together? Maybe she gave you something…” Alexandra snapped her fingers. “That’s it! What I’ve been trying to remember. You told me at the shelter that Eve trusted you with her treasures.”

  “She was here,” said Billie after a moment. “She’d just found out Charlie was dead and rushed home from Maine to be with me. The cosmos were for the band, she always took care of them. I told you this morning, Evie wasn’t drinking. But that night – we were both in shock.”

  “Did she give you anything to hide for her, Billie?”

  “What’s going on? You’re beginning to scare me.”
<
br />   “I think that your brother and my sister were caught up in something very dangerous. Something that may have caused their deaths.”

  “Caused their deaths?” The dark eyes glittered with pain. “You’d better tell me everything.”

  “Some of it may hurt you, Billie.”

  “My brother’s dead. I’ll be the judge of what hurts me and what doesn’t.”

  Alexandra took a breath. Speaking quickly, she told Billie Jordan about Frazer’s Russian connection, his mole hunt, and everything Eve had said in the recording she’d made in Maine.

  When she fell silent, Billie stood up in one swift motion, her hands fisted tight against her chest. “Oh, God!” she cried. “Charlie.” She stared into Alexandra’s eyes, struggling to understand. “No! He was in an accident…”

  “I don’t know the truth, Billie. Maybe it was a car accident. But maybe someone set him up to die. Help me find the answers!” Alexandra’s plea was as fierce as Billie’s pain as she grasped Billie’s arms. “Do you know if Eve had any enemies?”

  Billie shook her head back and forth, trying to absorb the shock of Alexandra’s words. “She was closer to men than women. I told you that this morning. But enemies? I thought they were all in love with her...”

  “This is important, Billie. Did Eve give you anything to keep for me?”

  The two women locked eyes.

  “Okay,” whispered Billie finally, disappearing behind her dressing screen and reappearing moments later with a thick cream envelope. “Charlie gave me this just before he died. He always left letters for Eve here, with me. Where and when they would meet, and so forth. They had a secret place.”

  You know the place… the words in the message sent to Eve. “Where?”

  “An inn, somewhere in the Maryland countryside.” She touched her forehead in thought. “She never told me the name of the inn. But she had a friend who drives a cab, he’d take her there to meet Charley.”

  The River Falls Inn, thought Alexandra. That’s where they would meet. Another matroyoska doll, twisted open.