“Help!” the teenager shouted, looking straight at Linder. “Somebody help us, please! Mister, over here!”
Linder ran to the girl.
“It’s the landlord!” she cried. “He’s hurting my mom!”
A moment later, Patricia Kendall burst out the door with the man in overalls in hot pursuit. His face was livid with rage.
Linder let her pass but stepped forward to block the path of her pursuer. The man, who was at least an inch taller than Linder and more than fifty pounds heavier, grabbed Linder by the shoulders and attempted to push him aside. But Linder, having had basic martial arts training early in his CIA career and having used it more than once to defend himself, put the man off-balance, threw him to the ground and held him there.
“Get off me!” the man spat in frustration, his face pinned to the dirt. “Let me up!”
“Settle down,” Linder replied from astride his broad back. “First you’re going to tell me why you’re all riled up chasing a woman who’s half your size.”
“That woman is a thief!” the big man protested. “She owes me two hundred dollars!”
“Is that so?” Linder questioned. “How did she steal it? Did she take your wallet?”
“Don’t be an asshole. She’s a month behind in her rent, and the next month’s rent is due today.”
“Do you have a lease to back that up?” Linder demanded, unsure what to do next.
“I’m not answering any more questions,” the landlord sputtered. “Get off of me or I’ll call the sheriff on the both of you!”
“Now you listen to me, fathead,” Linder spoke in a low growl directly into the man’s upturned ear. “You’ll get your rent money if it’s due. But if you so much as touch that woman, I’ll come back here and personally take your head off.”
He released the man’s twisted arm and removed his knee from the small of the man’s back, then rose and stood aside.
By now a cluster of bystanders had appeared as if out of nowhere, and a doughy-faced woman dressed in a loose-fitting lavender fleece pantsuit waved a finger in Patricia Kendall’s face, haranguing her over the unpaid rent. To Linder’s surprise, Patricia looked slow-witted and flustered in response to the woman’s demands that she pay in full or be evicted. Could something have happened to impair Patricia’s brain while in captivity? It hadn’t looked that way during her brief conversation with the women outside the reassignment center or her chat on the way home from school with Caroline. Could she have knocked back a drink or taken a hit of weed or something stronger during her few minutes alone before the landlord arrived? It hardly seemed possible.
Caroline went to her mother’s aid at once, interposing herself between Patricia and the doughy-faced woman and attempting to draw her mother back to the shelter of their apartment.
Meanwhile, Linder noticed the beefy landlord retreat toward the curb, where Deputy Eldon’s squad car had pulled up as if it had been lurking around the corner all the while. Eldon left the car without a word and approached the quarreling women at a brisk walk with the jabbering landlord in tow.
“What seems to be the problem?” he demanded sternly of the landlord’s wife.
“The problem is that our tenant owes us two weeks’ back rent and won’t pay,” the woman complained.
“Is that correct, ma’am?” the sheriff asked Patricia with more sympathy than Linder might have expected.
“It’s not that we refuse to pay, officer,” Patricia responded slowly. “You see, I just started a new job and they pay every two weeks. I have some of the money now but I won’t have the rest till next Friday.”
“Pay us by tomorrow or you can find someplace else to live,” the landlady warned.
“We know our rights,” the husband echoed. “The padlocks go on tomorrow if we haven’t been paid.”
“And what about the 911 call for assault and battery?” the deputy countered. “Would someone like to tell me about that?”
Caroline stepped forward and pointed her finger at the landlord. “He hit my mother!” she accused.
“The dispatcher didn’t say anything about a woman being hit, only that there was a fight between two males. Did the dispatcher get it wrong?” Eldon asked with arched eyebrows, as if accustomed to such cross-charges.
The landlord cast an anxious look at Linder.
“I think I might be able to clear up that part,” Linder interjected. “If you’ll give the big guy and me a moment alone, I think we might be willing to work something out.” Linder gestured for the landlord to step aside with him.
“Okay, but make it fast and keep your hands off each other,” the deputy answered, looking directly at the landlord. “I’m getting awfully tired of coming out here every few months to break up your fights with tenants. This crap has got to stop.”
Without waiting for a reply, Eldon took Patricia and Caroline aside for a private conference of his own.
“Okay, here’s my offer,” Linder said to the landlord when they were alone. He spoke with an aura of barely restrained violence that he had learned to project when addressing terrorists and insurgents. “Whatever she’s already offered to pay, I promise you’ll get by tomorrow. Anything else you’re owed, you’ll get next Friday. Meanwhile, she stays put till sunset Friday, unless she finds a new place before then. And in return for your leaving her alone, she won’t press assault charges against you. How about it? Do we have a deal?”
“Okay by me,” the landlord answered with a sullen look. “But if they’re not out by next Friday, I’ll call the sheriff and have them both evicted. I’m through with this.”
“Fair enough,” Linder answered, and the two men shook hands.
He approached the deputy sheriff next. “I think we may have a solution that will work all around. Would you mind if I had a word with the tenant?”
“If she doesn’t mind, I won’t,” the deputy replied. “But be quick about it.”
Linder took a few steps toward the apartment door and Caroline followed with Patricia close behind.
“Listen, this is obviously not the right apartment for you any more,” Linder began. “The landlord will give you till next Friday to pay what you owe or go somewhere else. Now, I believe my landlady might have something that would suit you. I’m on my way back there now. Would you like me to check with her?”
“We can only afford $150 a week,” Patricia offered dully without making eye contact.
“No problem. That’s more than I pay now,” he answered.
Caroline cast a hopeful glance at her mother and responded for both of them.
“Then please do,” she said. “And thank you ever so much for helping us. And, by the way, I’m Caroline and this is my mother….”
But before Caroline could complete the sentence, Patricia turned on her heel and rushed back into the apartment as if she had left something burning on the stove.
“I’m Tom Horvath,” Linder replied. “Never mind your mother. I can understand her being upset. I’ll come back this evening and introduce myself to her then.”
* * *
Sharon Unger was not as receptive to Linder’s proposal as he had hoped.
“Tom, you’ve been a very good tenant here,” she objected. “But what do either of us know about these two women? How can I be certain they’ll pay the rent if they take your room?”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” Linder answered. “Since I’m recommending them, I’ll guarantee their rent until they establish their credit. In fact, here’s a down payment for their first week’s rent.” And with that, he pulled out his wallet and counted out a hundred dollars in cash.
“That’s a mighty generous thing to do for someone you’ve just met,” Mrs. Unger observed drily. “Have you always been so charitable? Or might this mother and daughter have some, well, special qualities?”
“Let’s just say that they remind me of someone I used to know,” Linder replied.
Mrs. Unger, apparently moved by Linder’s kindness tow
ard strangers and his consideration for her own financial interest, seemed to soften.
“All right, bring them over and let me take a look at them,” she replied.
Linder thanked her and set off promptly to the apartment on 50th North. When he arrived, Caroline came out alone to meet him.
“Mother is not feeling well,” she offered before he had a chance to speak. “She apologizes for not seeing you and asked if you could come back in the morning.”
Caroline’s answer seemed so pat that Linder wondered how often the girl delivered it.
“Certainly,” he responded. “The rooms are available but you’ll have to come meet my landlady before she’ll agree to rent to you. Do you think I might take you and your mother to see her tomorrow after breakfast? It’s only a few blocks away.”
“Yes, Mother usually feels better in the morning. I’ll talk to her. Could you come back around ten?”
* * *
Linder returned at the appointed hour the next day and knocked on the apartment door. A few moments later, Patricia Kendall opened it, looking fresh in pressed jeans and a plaid cowgirl shirt, her mahogany hair, as sleek as he remembered it but now streaked with gray, tied behind her head with a blue ribbon. But in the nine months since her arrest, she had aged markedly. While her figure had always been slim as a dancer’s, in Beirut it had seemed the more alluring for having filled out somewhat. Now she was thin to the point of angularity, and her olive complexion, which before had seemed ageless, showed fine lines and wrinkles around the eyes, forehead, and lips, and a blotchy sallowness that her suntan could not hide.
Yet for all that, Patricia Kendall still held an appeal for him independent of time and physical appearance. Though it was born of a pre-romantic bond that some might dismiss as puppy love, Linder wondered whether puppy love didn’t sometimes produce a permanent imprinting like that between mother hens and their hatchlings. For that reason, Linder was deeply disappointed when Patricia Kendall’s dark eyes met his and he saw not the faintest glimmer of recognition. If imprinting had occurred back when they were teens, it was entirely on his side.
“Hi, I’m Tom Horvath,” he introduced himself, doing his best to conceal his chagrin. “I hope I haven’t come too early.”
“No, not at all,” she said in a husky voice. “Caroline said you’d be coming at ten. I’m Patricia Kendall.”
He noted that, despite her polite smile, she offered no explanation for her odd behavior on the previous day. And rather than invite him inside, she stepped out and called for Caroline to join them.
“I gather you two are new in town, like me,” he continued. “I arrived from Montana last month. You know, I was very lucky finding rooms with Mrs. Unger when I came here. It seems to me that you two might do a lot worse than rent from her, considering the kind of landlord you’ve got now. Would you like to meet her and see what she might have?”
Caroline came out the door and locked the deadbolt behind her as he spoke.
“Good morning, Mr. Horvath,” she greeted him with a cheerful smile. Like her mother, she was dressed in jeans and a plaid cowgirl blouse.
“My, you two are going to fit in here just fine,” he remarked on seeing them side-by-side. “Shall we go? It’s not far.”
They covered the short distance to Mrs. Unger’s bungalow in a few minutes and spent the time in innocuous small talk about Coalville and the erratic spring weather. Linder detected the smell of mint on Patricia’s breath and a faint odor of alcohol from her body as she perspired from walking in the sun. Linder grew concerned as he recalled Mrs. Unger’s house rules but was unsure how to raise the subject without calling undue attention to it.
The interview with Mrs. Unger started off well, with Patricia and Caroline graciously accepting their hostess’s offer of tea and answering each of her questions in a way that built confidence. But when Mrs. Unger asked how they came to be in Kamas, Patricia surprised him.
“Last Fall, our family was abducted by Unionist security forces overseas and brought back to stand trial on false sedition charges. After a security court wrongly convicted us, the judge sentenced Caroline and me to five years in a corrective labor camp. Why they let us out of Kamas on probation after only six months remains a mystery to me. But, unless something totally foreseeable happens, I expect Caroline and I will be in Coalville for quite a while to come.”
“I see. And are you employed in the area now?” Mrs. Unger asked without missing a beat.
“I work part-time in the accounting department at the Wanship truck depot,” Patricia replied, meeting her gaze head-on. “And Caroline attends North Summit Middle School. Your house would be quite convenient for both of us.”
“Well, let me make it perfectly clear that I don’t approve at all of what they do to prisoners at places like Kamas,” Mrs. Unger told her. “Believe me, I’ve seen enough at my age to know that not everybody who lands there is guilty of a crime. And this town is home to plenty of former camp prisoners, most of them fine upstanding people.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Unger,” Patricia responded quietly. “That means a great deal to us.”
“Fine, then. Let me show you the rooms. There’s no lease here, but rent is payable in advance, either by the week or by the month, and I ask that you abide by the house rules.”
Linder followed them to the vacant rear bedroom, which would likely be Caroline’s, and to Linder’s room, which Patricia would take over.
“But this is your room,” Patricia exclaimed in surprise, pointing to Linder’s packed duffel and some of his papers stacked on the writing desk.
“Oh, I’ve been planning to move, anyway,” Linder lied. “I’ll be rooming with a buddy from work who has more space than he knows what to do with.”
Patricia cast a questioning look at the landlady, who said nothing. But on seeing Caroline’s look of delighted expectation, the mother withheld further objections except for the most important one: money.
“I would so like to say yes, Mrs. Unger, but I’m afraid I won’t have the full rent until I’m paid on Friday. Could I pay you fifty dollars now and the rest next Friday?”
“I’m sure we can work something out,” Linder broke in. “My rent is paid up through next week and my buddy’s place is rent-free. Why doesn’t Mrs. Unger hold my deposit on your account till you can pay her? I don’t mind waiting a while to see my money back.”
“That would be fine with me,” Mrs. Unger replied.
“Really? You would do that for us, Mrs. Unger?” Patricia asked, clearly touched by the offer.
“Don’t thank me. It’s Tom’s deposit,” the landlady replied as she led them back to the kitchen.
A few minutes later, Patricia and Caroline returned to their old apartment to pack their belongings, while Linder carried his bags to the front porch and returned to the kitchen alone to make a phone call.
“Hi, Jay, did I wake you up?” he asked when the connection went though. “Remember your offer to let me spend a night or two on your living room sofa? Does the offer still stand? If it does, I have a bottle of good Canadian whiskey that I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Tonight could be it.”
He smiled at Jay’s response.
”No, don’t bother picking me up,” Linder added. “I’ll be right over.”
S19
Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment. Napoleon Bonaparte
LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE, THREE YEARS EARLIER
Warren Linder sat at his desk in the U.S. Embassy chancery building in Nine Elms and looked out the window across the Thames River toward central London. The diplomatic staff’s relocation to America’s new London embassy complex had been completed during the darkest days of the Events, when the Unionist regime was withdrawing from military bases, closing consulates and cultural centers around the globe, and downsizing its diplomatic staff in every major and minor overseas capital.
The gleaming steel-and-glass cube in London remained half-empty, with entire floors left un
furnished and unoccupied. The DSS’s London Base occupied a choice location on a high floor facing the Thames, where Linder idled away many an hour gazing out his window at the Queen City of the Free World. As a senior operations officer in the base’s Emigré Branch, Linder qualified for a private office rather than an open cubicle, and savored his second coffee of the morning with The Times spread across his desktop.
He put aside the front section, which he had read in the Tube en route to work, and opened the paper to the Life section, where births, deaths, weddings, engagements, and celebrations were announced. A photograph of a handsome young couple, the man in his mid to late forties and the woman perhaps a decade younger, caught his eye immediately. The brief single-column article announced the marriage of Roger Kendall, an American banker, to Patricia Eaton, daughter of the exiled American industrialist, Philip Eaton. Both were recently widowed.
The headline jolted Linder out of his lethargy and cleared his brain of the haze that lingered from his overindulgence in single malt whisky the night before. While he knew that Patricia’s first husband had been killed during the Battle of Cleveland and that she had fled America, fearing arrest because of her father’s suspected role in the rebel attacks there, Linder had not known of her arrival in London. Her father had left the city for Switzerland some months earlier, after a notoriously botched DSS rendition attempt by Linder’s predecessor while Eaton drove his car on a country lane near Cambridge.
News of Patricia’s engagement to her first husband more than a decade earlier had left Linder depressed for days. Word of her husband’s death years later, while Linder worked under cover for the DSS in Cleveland, had left him irrationally hopeful about his prospects to win Patricia’s heart. Locating her, however, had posed a thorny problem. In the months following the Battle of Cleveland, her trail had gone cold and Linder had feared that she and her daughter might have been captured or killed.
Exile Hunter Page 40