Nicholas Marten 01 - The Exile

by Folsom, Allan

  For John Barron to disappear in the way he needed to, he had to wholly become someone else. Simple enough in a simpler time. In days past he could have picked a half-dozen streets in L.A. alone where for a few hundred dollars he could have a new identity in a matter of minutes—complete with birth certificate, Social Security card, and California driver’s license. But these were not simple times and authorities everywhere, from national security agencies to local police to financial institutions, were building huge databases to crack down on false identities. So his change had to be as real as was currently possible. He had to find someone about the same age with a legitimate birth certificate and Social Security number—but more, someone who had recently died and whose death certificate had not yet been filed. He knew finding such a thing and quickly was not just a near impossibility, it was crazy. But Dan Ford didn’t think so. Such large obstacles only raised the level of his game. Immediately Ford sent out a massive e-mailing—a curious appeal, as he put it. He was looking to do a story with a political twist. It concerned people who were recently deceased but for one reason or another remained alive legally with their names on a current voting register. In other words, he was looking to do a story on voter fraud.

  Enter directly Hiram Ott with a midnight reply to Ford’s e-mail. Had Dan Ford ever heard of a Nicholas Marten? No. Of course not. Few people had. And those who might would remember a Ned Marten, because that was what he had called himself.

  The illegitimate son of a Canadian trucker and a Vermont widow, Nicholas Marten had run off to join a traveling rock group as a drummer when he was fourteen, and that was the last he’d been heard of. It was only a dozen years later when he learned he had pancreatic cancer and only weeks to live that he came home to Coles Corner to see his mother. There he learned that both parents were dead, his mother buried in the family plot on her hundred-acre farm. Alone and broke, he’d turned for help to the only person he knew, family friend and lifelong bachelor Hiram Ott. Ott brought Nicholas into his home and set about trying to find some kind of hospice where he could live out his final days under medical care. It wasn’t necessary. Nicholas died in Ott’s guest room two days later. As official keeper of county records, among other things, Ott made out a death certificate and had Marten buried next to his mother in the family plot.

  But for some reason he’d never gotten around to filing the certificate. It had been in a box in his office for more than a month when fellow Northwestern alumnus Dan Ford’s e-mail arrived. When Ford called to reply, Hiram Ott had been told the truth—Ford had a very close friend whose life depended on a new identity. Ford followed up by asking if this was a situation that Ott could feel comfortable with. For anyone else it would have been a definite no. But there were other things at play here. First, Hiram Ott had a rambunctious, mischievous personality. Second, few people in Coles Corner remembered that Edna Mayfield had had a child out of wedlock twenty-six years earlier, fewer still that a young man named Ned Marten had come to town and died, and only Hy Ott himself knew that the death certificate had never been formally filed. Third was that on the afternoon of his death Nicholas Marten had told Ott that he was ashamed he’d done nothing with his life and wished somehow he could still make some kind of contribution that might help someone else. The final thing was the kicker. While at Northwestern, Ford had gotten Hy Ott out of an extremely sticky and potentially bone-shattering situation involving Ott and the girlfriend of a particularly large and mean-spirited varsity football player. It was one of those things where a favor done was a favor owed until it was repaid, and now Hy Ott was repaying it—walking John Barron across a meadow in Coles Corner on an early spring day to view Nicholas Marten’s final unmarked resting place among the new-fallen leaves in the tiny family graveyard.

  For Barron’s part, he’d come in gratitude, wanting to thank Hiram Ott personally for what he had done and because he’d wanted to know who he was becoming, where his namesake had lived as a boy, and what the land and town and people were like. There were other reasons, too. Guilt and reverence, and, perhaps more pointedly, self-protection, in the event he was ever questioned about his past. He tried not to show it, but he knew Hiram Ott could see the conflict and emotion and uncertainty in him; this was not something one did every day. And he knew it was why the burly newspaperman had suddenly put his arms around him and given him a great hug, and then stepped back and said, “It’s between you and me and Dan Ford and God. No one else will ever know. Besides, Nicholas would have liked it. So don’t think. Just accept it as his gift.”

  John Barron had hesitated, moved and still unsure, then finally he smiled. “Okay,” he said, “okay.”

  “In that case”—Hiram Ott’s grin suddenly became wide as a river and he put out his hand—“Let me be the first to call you—Nicholas Marten.”

  1:15 A.M.

  Nicholas Marten rolled over and looked across the darkened room to the main door. It was closed, the chain lock in place. As it had been all along. Maybe the bartender had done nothing at all. Maybe Gene VerMeer had never asked about him.

  1:30 A.M.

  Outside, finally, London was quiet.

  9

  YORK HOUSE, THE BALMORE CLINIC. NEXT DAY, TUESDAY, APRIL 2.

  11:30 A.M.

  Marten made his way across a lobby crowded with people he assumed were therapists, patients, staff, and patients’ family members like he was. A dozen steps and he turned down a less busy hallway and started toward the exit doors at the far end. He’d spent the last two hours with Rebecca and afterward chatted briefly with Dr. Maxwell-Scot, who had told him how well and how quickly his sister was acclimating, so much so that she was starting her in group therapy that afternoon. Once again Rebecca had told him that if he was okay, she would be okay. It was an ongoing thing with her, designed, he knew, as much to help him as to reassure her. And he had done his part by saying he was fine and was enjoying his time catching up on sleep and seeing London. Laughingly he told her how he’d gone out to explore London the night before and had run into Clementine Simpson in a pub. She liked Clementine Simpson and thought it was wonderful that he had met her, and he agreed it was. It kept it all fun and airy and light. He had said nothing of the rest, especially of his near-encounter with Gene VerMeer, nor why he had gone to the pub in the first place. Nor had he told her of calling Dan Ford in Washington as soon as he’d come back to the hotel and telling him he had seen VerMeer in London and asking if Ford could get a rundown on how deeply the LAPD was still involved with the Raymond investigation.

  Nor had he said anything about Ford’s return call earlier that morning telling him VerMeer had requested to come to London on his own and was due back in L.A. later that day. Nor had he mentioned Ford’s warning that VerMeer’s request to come on his own probably meant his real reason for going to London, maybe with LAPD approval, had been to look for John Barron, on the hunch he might still be working the Raymond trail as well. Nor had he told her of what else Ford had said, that he thought it would be in Nicholas Marten’s best interest to lie low and to stay completely away from whatever he thought Raymond might have been involved with.

  It was a thought that still lingered as Marten reached the exit doors and pushed through them and turned up the sidewalk, heading for his hotel, his focus on the future and what he would do to secure it once Rebecca was able to leave the clinic. Then he saw a poster announcing a special ballet to be performed at the Balmore auditorium this coming Sunday, April 7.

  April 7!

  There it was again!

  Immediately he heard his own inner voice. This time it was not about the “pieces” but rather a single exclamation—“April 7/Moscow!”

  With it came the stark realization that with everything he had been doing he had lost track of time and April 7 was this coming Sunday! Suddenly it didn’t matter what the Russian investigators in L.A. or the Russian students at Penrith’s Bar had said. To Marten it was not just a date or a day like any other, it was something very real becau
se Raymond had written it down. If it was nothing, why had he written it? What had he, or whoever he had been affiliated with, planned to have happen on that day in Moscow?

  And what if the official posture taken by all the security agencies dismissing Raymond’s actions as being part of a larger conspiracy had not been a smoke screen for further top-level investigation at all but, in truth, a final dismissal of everything he had been about? That April 7/Moscow was simply another of the brief jottings of a deceased madman and meaningless to anyone but him?

  What then?

  Would they just hand it over to some fifth-level bureaucrat and forget it? The answer was most probably yes, because they had nothing else to go on. The trouble was none of them had known Raymond the way he had. None of them had ever looked in his eyes, or watched how he moved, or seen the supreme arrogance in him. In Raymond’s own words, there were still the “pieces.” And what if those “pieces” were set to detonate in Moscow this coming Sunday?

  Stop it! He suddenly told himself. Stop thinking about it. Get Raymond out of your mind! Remember Dan Ford’s warning you to stay away from it all and lie low. Think about Rebecca and your own life, the same as you did last night. There’s nothing you can do, so just stay away from it.

  Marten took a deep breath and kept walking. He reached the street corner and waited for the light to change. Suddenly the memory of I.M. came roaring back and with it April 7/Moscow all over again.

  Maybe April 7 was just an ordinary date and too vague to have any particular meaning. I.M. was equally vague, but it was something more than a date, or safe deposit keys, or a house, or an embassy, or a charter aircraft no one could find anything more about, because I. M. almost certainly was a person. And obviously VerMeer, whatever his true reason for being in London, had thought enough of it, too, to ask Penrith’s bartender about it.

  Today was Tuesday. It meant there was still time. If somehow he could find out who this I. M. was and get to him or her he might also find out what was to happen in Moscow on Sunday and, in turn, stop it. Promise to himself or not, it was something he had to do because he was afraid no one else would.

  Abruptly he turned from the street corner and went back to the Balmore. He might have had no luck with the Penrith’s bartender or with the Russian students, but there was someone else who just might be able to help.

  The Balmore Foundation office where Clementine Simpson worked was small and, at the moment, silent, as the half-dozen people who crowded the workspace sat staring impatiently at their darkened computer screens. Obviously the computers were down and they were waiting for them to come back up.

  “Mr. Marten.” Clementine Simpson stood up when she saw him. “How nice of you to drop by.”

  “I was with my sister and just leaving when I realized what time it was. I thought maybe you might be free for lunch.”

  “Well”—she smiled and glanced at the still-dark computer screens, then back to Marten—“why not?”

  10

  SPANIARDS INN, SPANIARDS ROAD, HAMPSTEAD. 12:20 P.M.

  “This was a favorite watering hole of Lord Byron and Shelley, as well as the infamous 1700s highwayman Dick Turpin, who stopped by for a drink between coach robberies, or so the story goes,” Clementine Simpson said as they sat down at a corner table in the sixteenth-century tavern to look out at a garden dappled with sunlight. “And that is the first and last of my historical commentary.”

  “Thanks.” Marten smiled.

  Clem Simpson was dressed as she had been the day before, in the same kind of dowdy, dark navy, oversized business suit. This time she had added a crisp white blouse buttoned up to the throat and small, gold hoop earrings that hung just inside the curl of her auburn hair. In her own way, and even though she seemed to work hard to hide it, she was quite attractive.

  A waiter who looked as if he’d been there since Dick Turpin’s time brought menus, and when he asked if they’d like drinks, without a second thought she ordered a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

  “It’s a very nice Rhône, Mr. Marten,” she said.

  “Nicholas.”

  “Nicholas.” She smiled.

  Nicholas Marten never drank at lunch, but for some reason he looked to the waiter and heard himself say, “That would be fine.”

  The waiter nodded. Marten watched him walk off and then quietly, and in an offhand way, as if he were just curious, got to the reason he had invited her to lunch.

  “Last night, when I was leaving Penrith’s Bar, I passed a small side room near the door. A group of Russian students were sitting near a sign that read ‘Russian Society Group.’ I asked them about it and they said it was a get-together of young Russians to talk about what was going on at home. Before, you said you went to Penrith’s rather often when you were in the city. I wondered if you knew anything about it?”

  “The Russian Society Group?”

  “Yes.”

  The waiter brought the Châteauneuf-du-Pape and two glasses. Pouring a taste, he set the glass before Clementine Simpson. She picked it up, tasted it, and nodded her approval. The waiter then amply filled both glasses, set the bottle on the table, and left.

  Clementine fingered her glass and looked at Marten. “I am sorry to disappoint you, Nicholas, but I don’t know anything about a Russian Society Group. I’ve seen their sign up on the wall, but I have no idea who they are or what they do. But that doesn’t mean anything. There are any number of Russians living in London, and the area around Penrith’s is a very popular Russian neighborhood. I would imagine there are all kinds of committees and societies there.” She lifted her glass and took a long sip of the wine. “Is that the reason you invited me to lunch?”

  Whatever concern Marten might have had earlier about how much information Dr. Flannery had passed on to Dr. Maxwell-Scot about Rebecca and himself, and who at the Balmore might know about it, was put to rest, at least in Clementine Simpson’s case. From her manner and the way she reacted to his question, he was certain she had no idea who he was or why he would be asking that kind of question. Still, he had known that once he asked it she might very well ask why, and in her own way she had. He had an answer ready. It was a lie, of course, but he knew it would work.

  “I told you last night I was at Penrith’s because someone I met on the plane suggested it might be a good place to sample London atmosphere. The someone,” he lifted his own glass and took a sip, “was a very attractive young Russian woman. I went there hoping to bump into her. She wasn’t there, but I saw the Russian sign and—”

  “Bumped into it instead of her.”

  “Yes.”

  “You had been on a long flight. Add to that the emotion of taking care of your sister and to that pile on jet lag, and still you had the fortitude to venture out halfway across London.” Drink in hand, Clementine sat back and smiled wryly. “She must have been very attractive.”

  “She was.” Marten hadn’t expected the wit or the deliberateness of her response. It made him wonder what else to expect. She might dress like someone’s dowdy aunt, but she hardly acted like one. “I never even got her name. She just called herself I.M.”

  “Her initials?”

  “I guess, or a nickname. You said your friends had been gathering at Penrith’s for years.” Marten pressed her carefully. “I wonder if any of them might have connections in the Russian community.”

  “Who might help you track down this young lady.”

  “Yes.”

  Clementine studied him for a heartbeat, then again came the wry smile. “You really were smitten.”

  “I would just like to find her.” Marten knew getting Clementine Simpson involved was a long shot at best, but she was his last concrete connection to Penrith’s and the steady group of people who frequented it. His hope was that through her or them, someone just might know, or have heard of, I.M., assuming the initials referred to a person. If so, that person would be defined immediately, as in, “Well, we know an I. M., but it hardly fits your picture of a lovely you
ng lady. The I. M. we know is not a she but a he, is fifty years old, and weighs two hundred and thirty pounds.”

  If that happened, he would have a description and a beginning, and take it from there, somehow press her to find out who this person was and where he or she could be found.

  “Blonde?” Clementine asked with a raised eyebrow.

  Suddenly Marten needed to describe her. He needed a description, any description. “No, auburn brown and neck length, kind of like”—he paused—“yours.”

  Clementine Simpson stared at him, then took another sip of her wine and reached into her purse for her cell phone. A moment later she was talking to a woman named Sofia and asking her help in locating a “hot, young Russian bimbo” (her words exactly) with neck-length reddish brown hair and the initials or nickname I.M. Then she thanked Sofia, hung up, and looked at Marten.

  “I told you last night we were at Penrith’s celebrating a friend’s birthday. It was Sofia’s. She just turned eighty. She came here from Moscow forty-five years ago and has been a godmother to almost every Russian immigrant to London ever since. If anyone can track down your little cutie, she can.” Abruptly she took another sip of wine, then picked up her menu and very deliberately studied it.

  Despite the urgency of the clock ticking toward Sunday, Marten had to let himself grin at Clem’s near-schoolgirl attitude toward a woman who didn’t exist. He took a sip of wine and watched her for a moment longer, then picked up his own menu.

  Short of going house to house through the neighborhood around Penrith’s banging on doors asking for someone named I.M., he had done what he could. Never mind it was a huge neighborhood and there were thousands of doors, there was also the very real probability Gene VerMeer, through the Metropolitan Police, had done or would be doing the same, and all he needed was to stumble across their path and find himself suddenly singled out and being questioned. So all he could do now was hold his breath and pray that the ubiquitous Sofia would come up with something. That left only lunch and making small talk with Clementine Simpson.