Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  Kurt knew he was running out of time. If he was going to find out what had happened to Graciela Rojas, he had to do it now. He had to talk to the girl.

  He drove to the Nordic Club, a massive fitness facility that hosted a nationally televised tennis tournament every spring and served as the local celebrity set’s off-season playground. Kurt parked his Jeep a few spaces from where Chad Erickson had spit out his brains. Any other car bomb, there would have been a permanent scorch mark on the concrete. Whoever had rigged the Jaguar had shown an admirable appreciation for ecology.

  Kurt couldn’t afford a club pass, not on his salary, but he was on friendly terms with all the silky tan, blond young goddesses who worked the front desk and they looked the other way when he dropped in to use the weights or play a little racquetball. This morning, though, a Finnish girl named Marta seemed troubled by his arrival and he wondered if the newspaper article had anything to do with her hesitation to let him through. He decided to ignore her dark looks and press on. He was halfway down the corridor to the juice bar when he heard her call his name, but he kept walking.

  The long hike to the weight rooms was a passage through the oily, camphor-thick circles of athletic hell. Along the way Kurt liked to stop and observe the hard bodies undergoing their grim and torturous regimen and guess which ones would outlive their strokes. But today he was in a hurry.

  He found the young woman exactly where Jake had said she’d be, straining through a series of pectoral exercises at a Cybex machine. She looked sexy as hell in her gray sleeveless cotton T-shirt and metallic blue spandex tights. There was a small enticing crescent of perspiration on the T-shirt just below her lovely damp neck. Sweat beaded her face and the dark freckles on her shoulders.

  If she knew who he was, if someone had pointed him out as the sheriff or she recognized him from a newspaper photo, this was not going to work. He carried his gym bag into the men’s dressing room and slipped into his sweats. He asked the Hispanic attendant for shaving cream and a razor. He had wanted to do this for a long time, two or three years, but there had never been the right moment, or an adequate explanation to Lennon, to make such a drastic change in his appearance.

  “Many years?” asked the bemused attendant, making a stroking gesture at his chin. Kurt thought he recognized the young man from the pool hall last night.

  “Since before you were born.”

  The attendant watched him shave off twenty-two years of personal biology. When Kurt was finished he apologized for the mess in the sink.

  “S’okay,” shrugged the attendant. “I will bring the fire hose.”

  Kurt splashed on burning after-shave and stared at the face in the mirror. There was a strange man peering back at him, partly his father, partly the lad he’d been in the army. What surprised him most was how closely he resembled Bert, the strong jawline and diminished upper lip. He’d forgotten that when they were kids, people used to mistake them for twins.

  “All riiight,” he said aloud, turning his head from side to side. He looked ten years younger. Something that might count with a woman half his age.

  When he came out of the dressing room the young woman was lying on her back, knees locked down, struggling through bench presses in the free weight area. A half-dozen muscle-bound college boys with short retro hair had positioned themselves near her to watch and be noticed. Kurt walked over and looked down at her beautiful wet face.

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, miss, I think you’d get a lot more tone and probably do less harm to your muscle tissue if you’d drop down about ten pounds on those weights,” he said. “It’s not about how much, but how steady. Rhythm is everything.”

  He gave the kid at the next bench a get-lost nod, and the boy moved on without complaint. Kurt removed his shirt and began to add twenty-pound weights to the bar. He had to attract her attention somehow and suspected she wouldn’t be particularly interested in his brains.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw that she had stopped to watch him. A couple of the college boys were watching him too. Nobody had walked into the room this summer and stacked that much weight on a bar, but Kurt had been a weightlifter since the days of the Charles Atlas ads in comic books. There were years at a time when he’d let his body go, but when Meg took Lennon and walked out on him he had felt so angry and depressed he found his way back to the gym as a pressure release.

  After he’d performed enough bench presses to stun an Olympic coach, he took a break to wipe himself down. The young woman was sitting up now, daubing her neck with a towel, smiling at him, intrigued. Vanity attracted her. She was perfect for Jake Pfeil.

  “You look very familiar,” Kurt said to her, his throat parched from the workout. “Didn’t we meet the other night at Andre’s?”

  “I don’t recall,” she said with a slight accent.

  “Weren’t you there with Jake?”

  Her pretty face toyed with memory. “I’m afraid I don’t recall speaking to you,” she said. “Were you with someone?”

  Kurt stood up, the towel over his bare shoulder. “I was alone,” he said.

  The sweat stain on her T-shirt was larger now, dipping closer to her breasts. “Are you an instructor here?” she asked.

  “I do private consultation.”

  “Ahh,” she said, a tiny smile at the corner of her mouth. “I thought as much. What you said is no doubt true. Rhythm is everything. I’m looking for someone who can coach me.”

  Her eyes were all over him, a bicep, a thigh.

  “Do you live here?” he asked.

  The question seemed to surprise her. “My father has a home here,” she said. “I am here for the summer.”

  “That’s enough time.”

  She smiled and pushed a strand of dark hair from her eyes. “Are you expensive?” she asked.

  “Depends on what you want.”

  She looped the towel around her neck and rose, her eyes still dancing over his body. “I want the most advanced course,” she said.

  “That can be arranged.”

  He could see that she enjoyed this kind of play. “Come with me,” she said, patting perspiration from her cheek. “I am late to meet my father at the courts. On the way we can discuss the terms of”—she paused—“our arrangement.”

  “I don’t think I want to meet your father,” Kurt said.

  She smiled and bent over to get her things. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not a wedding I have in mind.”

  As they walked along the observation deck high above the tennis courts, she told him her name was Cecilia Rostagno and that she was a college student in Miami.

  “Rostagno,” he said. “Are you Italian?”

  “Yes,” she said. “My father is a diplomat. We have lived all over the world.”

  They stopped to watch her father’s match on the court below. He was a slender, silver-haired man around sixty, with a devastating tan. His legs were muscular and youthful, and he had an impressive serve. He was playing Bob Graeber, the club’s owner.

  “There is a party tonight at our home in Starwood,” she said, her forearms resting on the railing. Her face was still radiantly flushed from the workout, and Kurt saw why Jake found her so appealing. “Will you come?” she asked.

  “Parties make me nervous,” he said. “I usually work one on one.”

  She inclined her head to smile at him, dark hair falling across an eye. Something in that look reminded him of Graciela.

  “There’s an old storeroom I want to remodel into a weight room. I would like a professional to look at it—in private consultation. To advise me what is best for a body like mine.”

  Kurt watched the tennis players, his elbow touching hers. “As long as I don’t have to mix and mingle,” he said.

  She peered up at him through long black lashes. “We’ll find something more stimulating to do,” she said.

  Down on the court Cecilia’s father was pointing his racket at a mark two inches out of the service area and loudly arguing wit
h Bob Graeber. Her father seemed to be quite a competitor too.

  Kurt walked down to the juice bar, ordered an extra-protein Smoothie, and sat thinking about the crescent of sweat on Cecilia Rostagno’s shirt and the tawny glow of her skin. This girl was somehow connected to the events of the past two days—Graciela’s reaction at the bar, Gitter’s story about the bookstore. Not much, but what else did he have?

  In the lobby he made a phone call to Bert’s old girlfriend, Maya Dahl. He hadn’t seen Maya in a year and was unexpectedly nervous about hearing her voice.

  “Kurt!” she said. “My god, I can’t believe it.”

  He had known her since the early seventies, even longer than he’d known Meg. One spring break Maya left her dorm at Mills College and hitchhiked to Aspen, like a pilgrim to a shrine, vowing to ski until the snow was gone. She never went back. To pay her rent she took a scut job cleaning rooms in a lodge where Bert was working maintenance. They made love in the cozy quilted beds of wealthy tourists out on the slopes.

  “How about lunch?” Kurt said. In recent years Maya had been a successful caterer and always knew the gossip around town. Who was who, who was doing what. “My treat at Szechuan Garden.”

  “Why don’t you come out here? It’s such a nice morning.”

  “Is Don Juan at home these days?”

  Maya’s husband was Cuban. When Castro came to power, Juan Romo was studying business at Wharton and decided to stay in America. Now he was a millionaire stockbroker named John Romer.

  “He’s in New York. Come on out and we’ll ride the ponies.”

  When he hung up, the receptionist was waiting to speak with him. “Sheriff Muller?” she smiled shyly. “I wasn’t certain it was you.”

  “What do you think?” he asked, patting the tender skin of his face.

  “Sheriff Muller,” Marta said, her fair cheeks glowing red, “I have been instructed to ask all of our patrons to show their cards before using the facilities.”

  Kurt looked down into her ice-blue Finnish eyes and grinned dumbly. “Marta,” he said, “you know I don’t have a card.”

  She averted her eyes. “I’m sorry, Sheriff Muller,” she said. “I have been instructed.”

  Kurt smiled at her quaint European formality. “Who’s doing all this instructing?” he asked.

  She was a sweet girl, and he could see this wasn’t easy for her.

  “Graeber?” he helped her.

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  “I bet Graeber read the paper this morning,” Kurt said.

  Marta remained in front of him, embarrassed but polite, observing some unwritten law of Scandinavian decorum and waiting to be dismissed.

  “It’s okay, kid,” he said, touching her shoulder. “It was only a matter of time.”

  He first noticed the truck idling about in the parking lot of the health club. It caught his attention because there weren’t many old Ford pickups in town these days, not since the Range Rovers had taken over. But his mind was preoccupied with a dozen puzzling details and he didn’t think about the truck again until he’d passed through town and crossed Castle Creek Bridge and happened to glance in his rearview mirror. It was the kind of truck that made perfect sense downvalley, and because the driver kept his distance along the dusty summer haze of Highway 82, in no special hurry, Kurt figured he was on his way home. Five miles later, when Kurt turned off for Woody Creek and trailed down through the cottonwoods toward the old iron river-bridge, the truck followed, its worn gears grinding. In the mirror Kurt could see a driver with black hair, his T-shirt bright as a sheet below a dark neck and face. Maybe one of the Mexicans from the pool hall, he thought. Maybe the gunman. He felt under the seat to make sure his father’s old Luger was within reach, the replacement he’d hidden there this morning. Now that he wasn’t going in to the department anymore, he had to resort to what was in his attic.

  Maya’s husband owned fifty acres of ranchland along the east ridge, overlooking the deep, tree-choked trench of the river. She had met him at the dessert table at John Denver’s Christmas party a couple of years ago. ‘I’m getting married,’ she called to tell Kurt not many weeks afterward. ‘I’m tired of being noble and hardworking and poor.’

  He saw the archway for the ranch up ahead and glanced in the mirror again. The pickup was slowly closing the distance between them. Kurt maintained his speed, patient, calculating the moment, and then swerved off abruptly toward the Romer gate, his tires screeching, the back end of the Jeep juking away from him. He fought the wheel and gunned the vehicle out of a bar ditch and onto the white pea gravel of the driveway, his front tires skidding to rest atop a cattle guard. The pickup honked angrily but kept going. When Kurt turned, all he could see was a rattling tailgate receding in the distance. It had all happened too fast to get a good look at the driver.

  In the back of his head he could feel the creeping, irreversible onset of paranoia. Maybe the guy really lived around here, he told himself. Maybe he was heading home. Kurt wondered if he was going to start suspecting every Hispanic kid in the Valley of coming after him.

  He reached under his seat to make sure the Luger hadn’t come loose in the skid and something on the floorboard caught his eye. A blue fabric strap protruding from under the passenger seat. He took hold of the strap and pulled, and a lady’s handbag slid out. Graciela’s handwoven bag. He realized instantly that she must have stashed it there when they went walking into the Grottos.

  Kurt sat rigidly for several moments, staring at the handbag in his lap. He thought about their meeting in his office, the bag resting like this on her knees, how the colors had suited her. He remembered everything about her—the graying shock of hair, her intelligent eyes, the way her hands had caressed the battered face of her old friend.

  A handbag was so intimate, he thought, like a diary or a bundle of love letters. But ten years as a cop got the best of him and he drew open the pull-strings. There was a fair amount of clutter. Lipstick and hairbrush, a key to her room at Star Meadow. Postcards of Aspen and that damn unwieldy trail map. Travel pack of Kleenex with Spanish wording, bottle of aspirin, small Minolta camera still set for the first picture, ballpoint pen. A coin purse with weighty Argentine coins and quarters and pennies and folded bills from both countries.

  He flipped through her passport. The photograph showed a slightly younger woman, her face leaner, the jaw more handsomely defined. She had a beautiful smile. He pulled dark strands of hair from her brush and rolled them between his fingers. He remembered the coconut fragrance, her face close enough to whisper in the dark.

  At the bottom of the bag there were two small square boxes wrapped in tissue paper. One contained a tiny gold stickpin, a skier in motion, the other a silver-plated aspen leaf attached to a necklace chain. Gifts for her two daughters.

  He found a well-worn red notebook in the jumble and thumbed through the ruled pages, trying to decipher the Spanish, the lists and dates and scribbles. Impatient with his ignorance of the language, he skipped to the end to see what she had recorded last. In the middle of a clean page she had printed her final entry, a single word followed by a question mark:

  PANZECA?

  Kurt had no idea what the word meant. Was it someone’s name? A place?

  He returned the items to the bag, slid it back under the passenger seat, then drove onto the Romer property.

  The gravel road leveled out through an open pasture where polo ponies grazed. At the end of the long drive, beyond the prim white stables, Maya Dahl stood at a corral fence with one fist cocked on her hip, watching her trainer lead a beautiful new colt around in circles. The sight of Kurt’s Jeep brought a smile to her face and she turned to wave at him, a hand shading her eyes from the sun.

  “Is that really you, Kurt?” she said, striding toward the Jeep in riding boots. “For a minute there I almost thought you were—”

  She stopped and folded her arms and looked at him. The smile slipped away and then returned as something dreamier, more melancholy.
“Well,” she said quietly, “I guess you probably know what I thought.”

  “Hello, Maya,” Kurt said, stepping out of the Jeep. “How have you been?”

  “Well kept,” she said. Her cool blue-green eyes studied his face. “What happened there?” she asked, staring at the stitches.

  “Ran into a door.”

  She squinted at him. “Why do I even ask?”

  Taking his arm she escorted him toward the main house, an imposing flagstone fortress she now called home.

  “I heard about Chip on the news,” she said. “I should’ve called you. I don’t know what’s happening to me out here. I’m getting awful about keeping in touch with my old friends. I guess I was too embarrassed to pick up the phone. I was afraid you’d say, ‘Maya who?’”

  She had put on a little weight and the dry climate had finally begun to mistreat her face, giving her wrinkles where she’d never had them before. Her golden hair was shorter now, darker, though still satiny and fine. But her eyes were showing her age, Kurt thought. Their eyes were giving them all away.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve seen today’s paper,” he said.

  “One of the nice things about living out this far.”

  “I’ve been taking some vicious slams,” he said. “It’s not worth it anymore. I handed in my resignation to the county commissioners.”

  She didn’t slow her stride. “Good for you,” she said. “I don’t know why you ever wanted that job in the first place. Whose idea was it, anyway?”

  Kurt grinned. “As I recall, you were a charter member of the Rabid Skunk party. Maybe I should hold you personally responsible.”

  Maya smiled sadly. “I miss it,” she sighed. “I miss the madness.”

  “What do you expect?” he said, nodding toward the house. “You’re living like Barbara Stanwyck in the Big Valley.”

  She laughed that sexy, throaty laugh he remembered so well. “Luxury is a bitch,” she said.

  They entered the house and passed the stone fountain trickling in the foyer, then descended steps into the sunken living room, plush couches arranged in seating squares. The only time Kurt had been here was for Maya’s wedding reception, which had been quite a feast. But today, without the many guests burbling about the rooms, there was a cathedral air of space and quiet.