Safe Houses

by Dan Fesperman

  “Your dad?”

  “Yes.”

  Anna had her mother’s eyes, but her father’s cheekbones and oval face. His hair color, too. In the photos that had run on TV he’d looked a little haggard, and most of his hair was gone. In this one, with a full head of reddish brown locks tossed by the breeze, he looked downright dashing.

  “What was he like?”

  “Strong and silent type. Self-made man.”

  “This wasn’t his family’s farm?”

  “Oh, no. He saved his money, bought small, and kept adding. He even made the chicken houses work. So many people get into that and get in over their heads, because Washam pays you depending on how your birds stack up against everybody else’s. But his flocks always rated near the top. He started with almost nothing. His dad was an electrician who kind of bounced from one job to the next. I think his wiring burned down somebody’s house.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Dad used to tell a pretty funny story about it. He didn’t say much, but whenever he told a story he hit all the right notes.”

  “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

  “He never wasted a word. He was sneaky smart, and solid. I think that’s what must’ve caught Mom’s eye when they met. He was older, by four years. Maybe it’s what she needed at the time.”

  “A CIA gal who ended up in the middle of nowhere, clerking for a real estate lawyer. What was her family like?”

  “Holy rollers, from rural North Carolina. Her father was a preacher, Assembly of God. Supposedly he wanted to baptize me, but Mom refused. Dad said that later she changed her mind, but by then he was in the hospital after a massive coronary and he never recovered. I think Dad told me that so I wouldn’t make the same mistake, waiting too late to tell them something important.”

  She looked away. Henry waited for a moment before speaking again.

  “Do you remember your mom’s parents?”

  “Not the preacher. I vaguely remember my maw-maw, but she was kind of a nervous wreck. Not at all the doting type. She kept her distance, especially from Willard. She died a few years after my grandfather, and by then I think she was drinking pretty heavily.”

  There were a few more photos of Anna and her brother, and she sorted through them quietly. Toward the bottom of the pile was a fading color shot from an old Instamatic, curling at the edges, of a man in his fifties, handsome in a way not unlike Anna’s father. He was seated in a café, smiling rakishly but with a hand thrust forward, as if he didn’t want his picture taken.

  “Who’s he?” Henry asked.

  “No idea.”

  Henry looked closer. On the rear wall of the café you could just make out the word HERREN on a sign with an arrow.

  “From Germany, I’m guessing. That sign is pointing to the men’s room. Interesting.”

  “A lot of character in that face.”

  He flipped it over, but there was no writing.

  “Look at this one,” she said, pulling out the last photo in the pile.

  “Is that you on the left?”

  “When I was a little girl.”

  The young Anna stood on the Mall in Washington next to her mom and another woman maybe twenty years older, in a business suit, with the dome of the U.S. Capitol in the background.

  “Is that one of your grandmothers?”

  “No. No idea who it is. I vaguely remember that trip, mostly as a lot of standing in long lines and too much walking. Although now I’m thinking that maybe this woman took us to lunch.”

  “So they were friends?”

  “Maybe. Those smiles don’t exactly give you the warm and fuzzies, though, do they?”

  “Anything on the back?”

  She flipped it. Blank.

  The final item in the file was a six-by-nine cream-colored envelope, closed with a metal clasp. Inside were three passports, two blue and one black.

  “Whose are these?” Henry said.

  “I didn’t know Mom and Dad had one, much less Willard, although I guess Mom would have had to have had one, if, well…”

  “For working in Berlin. Right.”

  He opened the first blue one, which looked brand-new. It belonged to Anna’s mother, and was still valid. She had obtained it only three years earlier.

  “Did they take trips overseas?”

  “Never, as far as I know. Dad had no desire whatsoever. And Willard would have been such a handful.”

  They flipped through the back section for visas and entry stamps, but the pages were blank.

  “Looks like it’s never been used.”

  “How sad. I wonder why she even got it.”

  Anna picked up the next one, which was black and said “Diplomatic Passport” on the cover. There was a hole punched in it, meaning it was expired. Helen Marie Abell had obtained it in 1977, the year she joined the CIA. The photo was a revelation, a young woman full of energy and life, a hint of mischief. Henry was thinking how much she looked like Anna, especially in the eyes, when Anna said, “Look at her. She was beautiful.”

  “She’s got your eyes for sure.”

  “You think?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Anna shrugged. “I never used to like it when people said I took after Mom. Too afraid I’d end up like her, I guess, giving up on herself the way she did.”

  “You think she gave up?”

  “Well, look at the life she’d made. Farm wife with soybeans and chicken houses. Three meals a day to cook, a grown son to take care of. She’d kind of painted herself into a corner.”

  “And this little room out here was her corner.”

  The passport’s back pages had entry stamps for Germany, plus a few more indicating she had passed through East Germany, probably on her way to and from Berlin. The only other entry stamps were for the United Kingdom.

  “Guess she didn’t go to Paris, then,” Anna said. “Not exactly the globe-trotting mystery woman if she spent the whole two years in Germany.”

  “Don’t sell it short. Plenty of intrigue to go around in Berlin in those days.”

  “Secretarial job, that’s my guess.”

  “I doubt they give severance packages to secretaries.”

  “Unless some boss tried to knock her up.”

  “In those days that’s probably how the boss got promoted.”

  Anna smiled.

  “Hand me the last one.”

  It, too, was dark blue, but the writing on the cover was a shock.

  “Canadian?” Anna said. “What the hell?”

  They opened it. The younger version of Anna’s mom again stared back at them—the same photo as the one from her diplomatic passport, but with one important difference.

  “She’s blond! Do you think it’s the wig?”

  Henry took the wig back out of the box.

  “Can’t be. This one’s almost new. But look at the name in the passport.”

  The Canadian passport had been issued in the name of Elizabeth Waring Hart.

  “Holy shit. An alias?”

  “I think they’re also called cryptonyms.”

  “So she was undercover?”

  “Let’s see if she used it.”

  He flipped through the pages and found entry stamps for France and Germany.

  “So here’s the Paris connection,” she said. “Look at the dates. October of seventy-nine.”

  “Wasn’t that about the time of her severance?”

  Anna checked the materials the government had sent her.

  “This doesn’t add up. The date of her severance is before all of those entry stamps.”

  “Maybe they kept her on unofficially a while longer. For a last hurrah.”

  “For something sneaky, you mean?”

  “Isn’t everything they do sneaky?” />
  He flipped through the passport again. A scrap of yellowed newsprint fluttered out like a moth. Anna caught it in midair. It was a news story, only four paragraphs. Handwritten across the top was Tagesspiegel, with a date from October 1979.

  “This is also dated before her severance,” Anna said. “Can you translate it?”

  She handed it to Henry, who read it quickly but carefully.

  “It’s about a murder. A young woman, beaten and strangled. A suspected lovers’ quarrel in an apartment in Kreuzberg, meaning it was probably a dump. She was only nineteen.”

  “American?”

  “German. Anneliese Kurz.”

  Anna gasped, a sudden intake of breath that caused Henry to look up.

  “You’ve heard of her?”

  “No. But her name, it’s…”

  “It’s what?”

  “The same as mine. Anneliese. Look, it’s even spelled the same, with an ‘e’ in the middle. It’s my first name. I’ve always hated it.”

  “Did you ever ask where it came from?”

  “She just said it was a name she’d always liked. I hated all my names, but that one especially.”

  “All your names?”

  “Anneliese Audra Claire Shoat. Two middle names, for God’s sake. Try fitting that on your driver’s license. I wanted to go by Claire, but she wouldn’t let me. She said Anneliese was noble and honorable.”

  “Noble and honorable enough for your mom to quit her job?”

  “And then go traveling around Europe under a false identity, doing God knows what?”

  Anna was quiet, thinking it over. Then her eyes widened.

  “What? What is it?”

  “I just remembered something. A moment with Mom, from the summer before I went off to college. August, it would’ve been. In 2002.”

  She stared into space, eyes blazing.

  “We were shopping, buying a bunch of clothes for me at Hecht’s. We’d driven all the way across the Bay Bridge so I could go to a mall. I’d just come out of the dressing room in some god-awful thing she made me try on, and she must have seen something over my shoulder that made her stop, because she dropped her shopping bag and just stared. So I turned to look, too, and there was some man in a suit on the other side of the store, standing there with his arms crossed and staring at us. Then he nodded, like he was about to come over to say hello.

  “I asked her who it was, but I don’t think she even heard me, ’cause then she said, real quiet, ‘You see that man over there, honey?’

  “I said, ‘Yes,’ also real quiet, because by then I could tell it was something serious. And when I turned back around to look again he was smirking, and she said, ‘I want you to remember his face. If you ever see him again—at school, at home, or anywhere—then I want you to let me know right away. Do you understand?’ ”

  “Did you ask who he was?”

  Anna nodded.

  “Her answer was really vague. ‘Somebody Mommy used to know.’ That’s all she’d say. I remember the words exactly because for a second or two she sounded like she was talking to a ten-year-old. Then she said, ‘He’s the reason you have your name.’ ”

  “Meaning ‘Anneliese’?”

  “That’s what I assumed, because it was the name I’d always bugged her about the most. I was in second grade before she let me shorten it to Anna.”

  “And this guy, what did he do next?”

  “Nothing. Next time I turned around he was gone. I never saw him again, and Mom never mentioned it again.”

  “That’s quite a story. Would you remember him if you saw him again?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been, what, twelve years? He was older than Mom, so he might even be dead by now.”

  “It wasn’t this guy, was it?” Henry slid out the photo of the man in the German café.

  “No. Or I don’t think so. Although maybe I’m saying that ’cause the guy in the picture looks friendly. This other guy had a pretty nasty smile.”

  “Let’s hang on to this,” he said, setting aside the clipping with the passports and a few of the photos. They poked around for another half hour, but found nothing of interest. Anna was more subdued, and they said little as she collected the items she needed for the severance check.

  “You said the lock was already loose?” she asked, just before closing the file drawer.

  “Yeah.”

  “Makes me wonder what might be missing.”

  “Maybe nothing.”

  “We can hope.”

  As she prepared to lock up, Henry gave the room a final once-over. Then he looked up at the ceiling, and his gaze stayed there.

  “What is it?” Anna asked.

  “That.”

  He pointed to an air duct, one foot square, with a louvered metal vent. “If you’ve got a space heater, and an air-conditioning unit in the wall, what’s that for?”

  “Fresh air from outside?”

  “Maybe. But wouldn’t that be mounted on an outer wall?”

  Henry pulled over the office chair.

  “Hold this steady for me,” he said, stepping onto it. He reached into his pocket for his tool kit, thought better of it, and instead retrieved a dime, which he used to unscrew the bolts on the vent cover. He dropped the screws into his shirt pocket and handed the cover to Anna.

  “What’s up there?”

  “Nothing I can see.”

  He reached inside and felt around. The recess in the ceiling was of the same dimensions as the opening except on one side, where it extended at least a foot farther onto a small shelf above the ceiling. He groped back, reaching as far as he could until he felt the edge of a small envelope.

  “Got something.”

  He grabbed it and slid it free. Then he stepped down from the chair. The envelope was tiny, only two by three and a half inches, with a clasp closure. On the outside, in cursive lettering in black ink, was the word Sisterhood.

  “A hideaway within a hideaway,” Anna said.

  “What do you think?” He handed it to Anna.

  “Definitely Mom’s handwriting. But ‘Sisterhood’? Not her style.”

  Anna undid the clasp and turned the envelope endwise. Out dropped a small key. There was nothing else. Anna tried it on the file drawers, but it didn’t fit.

  “It’s numbered,” she said, taking a closer look. “Like for a post office box.”

  “Or a safe deposit box.”

  “Also not her style. And wouldn’t there be some kind of bill for it?”

  They rechecked the banking records, just in case, but it was all pretty standard, and there were no mysterious service charges.

  “It could be for some other bank, so she could hide it from your dad.”

  “Or in Switzerland,” Anna said, which made her giggle. “I’m thinking the post office is more likely.”

  “What’s the Sisterhood, then?”

  “Nothing from around here, as far as I know.”

  “But you’ve been gone awhile. This could’ve been something recent. Whatever it is, she went to a lot of trouble to hide it.”

  Anna turned the key over in her hand.

  “We might as well try the post office first. See if the slipper fits.”

  “After you, Cinderella.”

  They locked the office and set out for the middle of town.

  20

  That night, after a fruitless visit to the nearest post office and further scrounging among photo albums and boxes of old junk, Henry was back at his house and had just opened a bottle of beer when his cell phone rang.

  It was Mitch.

  “Thought you would have checked in by now, Mattick.”

  “Not much to tell you yet.”

  “You never know. Run it down for me.”

  He summ
arized the visit to Willard and the trip to the labor pool without fielding a single question, but Mitch perked up when Henry got to the part about the items in the barn.

  “And she called it a hideaway?”

  “It’s an office. Farm and financial records, mostly. And there was nothing on her laptop, far as I could tell.”

  “But she kept the place locked?”

  “Well, it’s out in the barn, so that makes sense.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  He went over their findings. He figured Mitch would get excited when he mentioned the old news clipping about the dead girl in Berlin, dated so close to the time of Helen Shoat’s departure from the CIA, plus the Canadian passport issued in another name. But Mitch just grunted and said “Yeah” a few times, so he kept going.

  The news of the researcher’s card for the National Archives seemed to intrigue him.

  “And that was recent?”

  “A couple months ago.”

  “What was she looking for?”

  “No idea. Family history maybe?”

  “Find out.”

  “I’ll put it on the list. Anna didn’t seem all that interested.”

  “Who’s at the wheel here, you or her?”

  “If I steer too sharply, Mitch, she’ll get suspicious.”

  “I get that. But steer it all the same. Find a way.”

  Mitch also wanted to know more about the photos.

  “Who was in them?”

  “Family, mostly. Holiday shots and vacations. There was one of an older guy in Germany who looked like he was in a café, probably from her CIA days.”

  “Got a name?”

  “No idea. But he’d be ancient by now, if he’s even alive.”

  “Who else?”

  “A shot from a day trip to Washington, Anna and her mom with some friend of hers.”

  “Friend of Anna’s?”

  “Of her mom’s.”

  “Describe her.”

  He did so, quite generically, further piquing Mitch’s interest.

  “What year would that have been?”

  Henry did the math. Anna said she’d been five or six at the time.

  “Maybe ’89 or ’90.”

  “Send me a copy. Take one with your phone, and shoot it to me on an email.”

  “Sure. First time I get a chance.”