Mrs. de Sauvenard went on. "Blaise apologized, but you know it's water under the bridge. Furthermore, he told me that since that deal he's kept as far from this Platonov character as he can, because he heard he's gotten in with the Russian mafia pretty heavily."
"Oh?" Rowe found this fact of quiet interest.
"Violent company to keep! Guys who come and go internationally, enforcing the rules they like. I guess the government wasn't crooked enough for him! Ha!"
"Does Platonov speak English?" Rowe asked suddenly.
"I believe he does. Blaise said he distrusted translators."
"Must be fun when he does business in China."
"Ha!"
"Harris got a little drunk on that big bonus, I guess," said Rowe, "and now he's struggling pretty bad. His personal finances are what's driving him, I believe, his situation with his wife, trying to please her. She's quite the little—uh." He found himself unable to utter the phrase.
"Cock tease." Mrs. de Sauvenard said it. "Yeah, Kitty. That's obvious, that's her whole focus in life. Well, her family can't be of any help to them anymore. You know, they're really a pathetic couple. I've had them out on my boat. They both get seasick."
Smiling, Rowe said, "Yet she wants him to buy her a yacht." Bertrice de Sauvenard hooted. "A status symbol that makes you vomit! That's her all over! But now listen, you were trying to tell me that just because Leland and Ivan Platonov misbehaved together in the past, that doesn't necessarily mean they're in cahoots now with this hotel deal."
"Yes."
"Except that as soon as I hung up with Blaise, I sat there and I thought: can I get access to our headquarters' phone statements on the computer?"
"And?"
"It was something Big Kenner used to keep an eye on, but as I told you, I started leaving minor things like that to Leland and the other directors. Well, Big Kenner's password was still good. I scanned down the calls from Leland's number, and in the past two months he's phoned both Moscow and..." She paused for effect. "Zurich."
"Oh, really?"
"Zurich several times, same number."
"Is he supposed to be doing any company business there currently?"
"No! We've scaled all that back!"
"So you suspect him of doing a little bit of alpine banking?"
"I certainly do."
"OK, well, we need something more solid on this guy. Can your source in Prague, this Blaise, get me Platonov's phone number? A cell number?"
"Leland's calls to Moscow were made on a landline, that's how I knew it was Moscow."
"That's irrelevant. Were there a lot of calls, or only a few?"
"Just a couple, and they were short. I'd think he'd want to minimize his contact with Platonov, you know, for deniability."
"OK. Please try to get me that number, landline or cell, whatever. And Mrs. de Sauvenard?"
"Yes?"
"If it's all right with you, I'll be entering your building downtown again tonight."
——
Alger Whitecloud and Dendra prepared a gigantic skillet of bacon and fried potatoes, which they held for a little while as they all waited for Lance. Then they went ahead and ate, Bonechopper muttering through his beard into his steaming cup of coffee, "Son of a bitch thinks he's playing a little game with me."
"He said he'd be back soon," Gina insisted, again.
But she was terribly worried. The minutes passed with Dendra chattering about an anticipated trip to town, where she intended to get a pedicure and some new tops and maybe hang out at her mom's for a while. "She's getting up there, so when I come over"—self-righteous inflection—"I make sure to do whatever laundry she's got, along with mine."
"You're such a great daughter," said Bonechopper.
She glared at him.
"When was the last time you helped the old girl out, anyway?" prompted Bonechopper.
She didn't answer.
"It was three months ago you went over there."
"Well," Dendra said defensively, "I'd get to do a lot more for her if you'd come and live there with me, rent free!"
Bonechopper spat into the campfire. "Dendra, it's a twelve-by-sixteen-foot shed she lives in. And she hates my guts." He got up, spanked his thighs, and said to Gina, "He's really not coming back. How do you feel about that, little girl? Your badass boyfriend running out on you? Come on, Alger, let's go find our friend Lance."
Gina rose and spanked her thighs too. "I'm going with you."
"No." Bonechopper and Alger simply turned and hustled into the woods, with no preparation. Gina trotted after them, but they moved like wolves and lost her within minutes. She walked back to the clearing.
The morning mist solidified into drizzle. Gina hugged her crappy plastic poncho.
Dendra tried to make more conversation, but Gina was busy tumbling into a horrific depression. Dendra shrugged and went to the pile of angular-looking equipment beneath the pegged-down tarp, extracted a chainsaw, and trudged away with it in the direction of the murdered tree. The chainsaw was longer than Gina's arm and looked heavy as Dendra listed under its weight. She returned, got a five-gallon bucket and about a six-foot length of garden hose, and stood with her hands on her hips. She was fairly well built, with meaty thighs and a deckhand's wide walk. She had donned a pair of heavy brush chaps, thick-soled boots, and an orange helmet with a black mesh face shield. "Hey, c'mon, sunshine. Wanna help me buck some bolts offa them logs?"
Gina just stared at her.
"C'mon, the people need shakes, you know? Gotta put something on their houses to keep the rain out, don't they?"
She lumbered off, and Gina soon heard the vzzz-VZZZ of the chainsaw starting, then the steady, camouflaged glugga-glugga.
Gina sat on the ground beneath the kitchen tarp and began singing, softly, "The Man That Got Away." The singing calmed her a little. She didn't know what else to do.
She sent ESP waves to Lance. Have you hurt yourself again, darling? She gathered all her energy, imagining it like a glowing ball of daffodil-yellow electrons surrounding her. Here is my beacon. Feel my beacon. Come back to me.
Bonechopper and Alger had taken off in the direction of the ridge, so perhaps one of them had seen Lance go that way after not finding a vehicle. She supposed that because they knew the terrain, they could overtake him.
This thing was degenerating.
She smelled the exhaust fumes wafting from Dendra's saw, and marveled at how sharp her sense of smell had become in the woods. She remembered that when she and Lance had met up with the three timber thieves, she'd caught a whiff of Dendra's shampoo. The gas fumes smelled extra-unnatural. She lived in Los Angeles where everybody breathed engine exhaust all day long, yet there she was never aware of it, unless she was standing right next to an idling bus or something.
Suddenly she remembered the road that Dendra had said was just yonder. Christ! She leaped up, not wanting to discuss leaving with Dendra, who as she worked on the tree was between Gina and the supposed road. Go, said her inner voice.
One good thing about not having luggage: you don't have to screw around gathering your stuff.
Gina crept through the shrubs, skirting the area where Dendra was working, trying to make as little noise as possible. Peeping through the branches, she could see the logger chick working cumbersomely in her chainsawing gear, smoke drifting from beneath her mesh face shield. She can fit a cigarette in there? Gina marveled. Under other circumstances Gina might have really hit it off with Dendra. She smelled the cigarette smoke.
Dendra stopped the saw to kick a massive cedar round free from its last splinter. Gina froze, then moved slowly. Still the leaves and branches made slithering sounds as she moved through them, and twigs crickled beneath her feet.
The hell with it. Seeing an opening in the vegetation ahead, she broke from the thicket and ran. Behind her she heard Dendra yell, "Hey! Gina! Stop! Shit!"
Seconds later an unimaginable thing happened: an explosive noise, trailed by a sickening bizzz! as a bu
llet tore through the vegetation right next to her ear.
She kept running, her feet magically nimble over the forest duff and debris. The road! Yes! Rutted to hell, but it was gravel and a clear way to run. The light-gray sky was above her head now instead of the ominous forest canopy. Instinctively she followed the road downhill, her body surging with adrenaline, her legs pumping hard and free. She and Rita had always been fast runners. She heard another shot, but it seemed far behind and sounded, somehow, halfhearted.
Gina ran until she was out of breath, then she walked as fast as she could. The road began to climb, however. Was she going deeper into the mountains? She knew already that these dirt wilderness roads formed a web, linking to each other around mountains and ridges, not for the purpose of going anywhere but simply to access the terrain. What cop would possibly want to come up here to look for tree thieves? You'd belly out your car in two minutes. She listened for Lance's voice. Every time a bird called in the distance she paused briefly to listen, thinking it might be a garbled syllable from the love of her life. There was no way to know how to get to the paved highway. Well, as long as she stayed on the road she was less lost than she had been.
That fucking Dendra.
Chapter 14 – War Paint
I had long known that Petey's favorite place was "outside," but even I was surprised at how he was glorying in this strange trip through the woods. The rain simply pounded down on us, and he raced through it laughing as if we were at Sea World getting endlessly drenched by Shamu.
Best of all, there was no one to tattle on here.
Petey didn't yet miss his stuff at home, and he took my lighthearted explanation of our trip—going camping with the idea of surprising Aunt Gina and Lance on their camping trip—at face value. For the hell of it is a perfectly good reason to children. I love children for that.
We'd left the boys' camp in the direction Daniel reckoned was likeliest for Gina and Lance to have gone, toward the Harkett River. We found it, crossing the gorge on a log bridge that had been thrown down in the middle of nowhere. My breath caught when we came to the bridge, a beautiful, solid trunk spanning the gorge at a narrow point, perhaps seventy feet across, the river foaming far below, the craggy rock walls dark with continual spray. Petey loved it; he loved the drama of it, hanging on the railing as Daniel and I stood in the middle of the bridge and scanned up and down the watercourse, looking. Daniel told us the rock walls were basalt, a hard, fine-grained rock that had poured from volcanoes as the dinosaurs watched.
The railing wobbled under Petey's weight and I grabbed him. I took a deep breath. He stood still.
"Watch how fast this water is," said Daniel, as he dropped a chunk of wood. It made a hearty splash in the center of the river where the water was smooth and powerful—that is, all its power intact, none spent smashing into rocks—then bobbed up, moving swiftly downstream. It drifted to the side we'd come from, slid down a smooth rock, and disappeared.
"It couldn't have sunk," I wondered.
"Watch," said Daniel.
The chunk, which was about the size of my head, reappeared a few feet downstream, like a cork in a tub, then seemed to move backward—that is, upstream—then disappeared again.
A couple of seconds later it reappeared in the same place it had the last time, and began the cycle again.
Petey was appalled and fascinated.
Daniel said, "It's caught in a hydraulic."
"What's that?" I said.
"It's a standing wave in a river. See how the water slopes down from that flat rock, then almost bulges up in that eddy? You'd think the water there ought to be calm, but it's not. That chunk's being carried in an up-and-down circle."
"Wow!" Petey thought that was cool. "It's science!"
"It certainly is. That's a small hydraulic. There are much bigger ones in this river, man-eaters, count on that. I suspect there's one further downstream, see where I'm pointing?"
"Yeah!" said Petey. "I wouldn't want to fall into something like that!"
"People do, sometimes," Daniel said. "Kayakers really don't like them."
"What happens?" I asked. "How do you ever get out of it?"
"Eventually the river decides to spit you out. Your orbit degrades. Sometimes"—he shrugged—"you die before you get free."
We left the river and took a snack break on the other side, sheltering next to a huge boulder. Petey kept noticing all the things kids notice—things adults consider little or unimportant but which are really things adults just tend to stop seeing. Why is this? Do we lose some of our curiosity about the world?
I guess it makes sense: long ago you learned that if you jump off the top of a fence without bending your knees, it hurts. You now know how to jump off the top of a fence. You learned how to tell a starling from a grackle, so you don't have to look closely at those birds anymore. You learned the basic properties of mud. Mud is mud.
So you more or less stop seeing things in an exploratory way, and although this saves time, you miss stuff.
"Look, Mom, you can paint with this rock! It's a paint rock!"
"Oh, cool, honey." He'd pounded a fist-sized brown cobble against a storm-gray basalt boulder, pulverizing some of the softer brown rock against the harder rock, the powder of which immediately mixed with the rain, forming quite a lovely reddish-brown liquid, which he finger-painted on the gray rock.
Daniel came over. "Hey, do like this." He showed him that if you paint beneath an overhang, the rain won't wash it away. Daniel drew a crude skull, which Petey immediately copied. "Outline your hand," encouraged Daniel. "It looks very petroglyphic."
Petey became absorbed in the orange cast the pigment gave his skin.
"Hey, war paint!" cried Daniel.
"What's that?"
Daniel stroked two bold diagonals across his own cheeks. "Wow!" Petey immediately smeared his own face. "How do I look, Mom? Where's your mirror?"
"In my toilet kit. You guys both look extremely tough and manly. Not ridiculous at all. In fact, looking at you, the word ridiculous would never enter my mind."
Daniel smiled. "We look fearsome, then, right?"
"Since that's the point of war paint, yes. Extremely fearsome. Fearsome to the nth. You know that stuff is never gonna come out of your clothes."
"I feel," remarked my friend, "that I'm never gonna come out of these clothes. Let me see that stone, Petey."
Petey handed it over. "It's special."
Daniel inspected it. "Gosh, these stones on the surface are all glacial till; who knows where this particular rock got carried from. I don't know if this is a ferrous clay or what. Haven't noticed others like it."
"It's not clay, it's a rock," Petey said.
"I know, but it might've been clay before the earth's guts made it into rock."
"Oh." Petey dropped the stone into one of his secret-agent pockets. I didn't want to know what other forest elements he'd stored in there.
Opening my senses, I gazed into the woods. How many different shades of green were there? A hundred? A thousand?
The fresh smell of earth came up to my nostrils. It occurred to me that although plants and animals were living, expelling waste, dying, and decaying all around us, there was never a smell of rot, only a heavy, wet freshness. I guess if we'd come upon a four-day-old elk carcass, it'd be high. But nothing consumable by the bugs and moss and ravens lasted long. The forest is a terribly efficient place.
We got going again, following a creek that was supposed to get bigger, then join the Quilmash River on the other side of a high ridge. "I don't know what the hell they were doing," murmured Daniel, "but given the way the weather's been, they might have wanted to gain elevation, to try to see better where they were. If they have a map and compass, I don't know how they could've gotten lost."
"I fear that's the point," I said.
Daniel and I were keeping track of our whereabouts quite well with map and compass, taking bearings, dealing with declination, and navigating around obstacles. I'd
had a general idea of how to do it, left over from Girl Scouts when Mrs. Vorhazy, Becky Vorhazy's mom and leader of our troop in Wisconsin, took the dozen of us out to Sammond's Pond, told us to get out of the van, then drove away after saying, "There's a shortcut to town over that hill. Go, go!"
We obediently trudged off, realizing that somehow Becky had managed to remain in the van.
Mind you, Mrs. Vorhazy had given us no training whatsoever in the use of map and compass; she must have felt that direct experience would be the best teacher. We stared at the coffee-stained AAA map she'd tossed to us, then followed the red ends of our compass needles, believing that they must point the way home. I guess we were all ten or eleven.
We wandered the gently rolling woods for a couple of hours until we heard an automobile horn honking at signal-type intervals. We followed the sound to Mrs. Vorhazy's two-toned Dodge van where she'd parked on the other side of the pond after having run to town to shop for ballerina shoes for Becky.
In those days, adults did things like that without getting sued or even questioned. You never even thought to mention it to your parents. My brothers died laughing when I told them about it; then they showed me how to really find your way cross-country with a compass, map or no map.
My reverie was shattered by a harsh sound from above. It sounded like a death rattle, not that I'd ever heard one. Some hermit dying in his tree house? We looked up. We heard it again.
Petey pointed to a spaniel-sized black bird that had just settled on the tip of a huge hemlock.
The bird gazed down at us, flapped its wings—whump, whump—and uttered its harsh, tragic cry again.
"I'd say that's a raven," said Daniel.
"No wonder Poe wrote that poem," I commented.
"I don't think he likes us," said the war-painted Petey, before resuming his front-running course.
"Well, I don't like him. Or her," though I couldn't readily imagine such a bird tenderly laying an egg, let alone feeding young. That black, curving beak looked like it could carry off a spring lamb.
"Reminds me," said Daniel, "of a carny I used to work for." Once again Petey yelled, "Hey!" in a certain voice, and I hustled up to him.
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