Nicholas Marten 01 - The Exile

by Folsom, Allan

  He looked back at the rolling countryside dappled by clouds and sun and knew all he could do was get on with the business at hand.

  And hold his breath.

  And wait.

  And watch.

  14

  STILL MANCHESTER. STILL SATURDAY, APRIL 6. 9:40 P.M.

  His jacket collar turned up against a fine rain, Nicholas Marten walked alone along the city streets, turning down one and then another without purpose. What he wanted was a sense and a feel of the city around him—and to keep moving and try to keep Moscow and tomorrow out of his mind. He remembered a war movie where a German U-boat captain told a subordinate, “Never think. You pay a penalty for thinking. You can never rest.” The captain had been right.

  Minutes earlier he had put Lady Clem into a cab, sending her home to her flat on Palatine Road. Manchester might be a good-sized city, she’d said, insisting she go home and not to his hotel room as he wanted, but she and her father were very well known and it would not do for rumors to start flying that she had been seen accompanying a man to his hotel, especially when that man might very well end up at the university and possibly at some point even under her tutelage. One thing the university did not tolerate was cohabitation between faculty and students, unless they were married, which, of course, she and Nicholas Marten were not. So a peck on the cheek good night and into the taxi she went and then, just like that, he was alone.

  Walking down Oxford Road, he passed the university buildings and kept on, through areas called Hulme, Knot Mill, and Castle-field, stopping finally to stand on a bridge over the River Irwell and look down it toward where it became the Manchester Ship Canal. A great waterway, which, he had been told, ran some thirty-six miles west to Liverpool and the Irish Sea.

  What he had seen so far was a large, modern city built around this center or that, driven strongly by commerce and at the same time filled to brimming with a sense of the arts, of opera, live theater, pop music, and pop culture. It was a city where electric trams and double-decker buses passed every few minutes. New construction popped up in some part of almost every street and alleyway, and lovingly restored stone buildings and brick-and-mortar textile mills from the city’s illustrious past when Manchester was a gemstone of the industrial revolution, were carefully preserved in between.

  What Marten saw and felt as he stood in the rain and looked from the bridge was a world centuries distant from the slick, ultra-fast, and ruthless sun-pounded streets of L.A.

  It was a distinction made all the more personal a short while earlier at dinner when he and Clem had entertained three university landscape design students Clem had arranged for him to meet. The three, two men and a woman, were Marten’s age or a little younger, and each had the same enthusiasm for the school, the courses they took, the professors they had, and the careers they were looking forward to. One in particular had been unwaveringly certain that a student who was smart and developed the proper connections could, within a few years of graduation, do very well indeed. Or, as it was put, become “almost rich.”

  It had been a valuable experience and made Marten feel that he shared something in common with these people and that he might actually succeed if he came there. But it had been a throwaway remark from one of the men as he sipped an after-dinner brandy that brought everything home.

  “The winters here are freezing,” he said, “there’s hardly any summer, and it’s almost always raining. Why in God’s name would anyone want to leave Southern California to come here?”

  Why?

  It was as if a bright light had suddenly shone down from the heavens. Nothing any of them said could have resonated stronger. The idea of following a lifelong dream and becoming an accomplished landscape designer aside, for all intents, Nicholas Marten was little more than a man on the run for his life, with a counterfeit identity and a violent past he didn’t want known, who had to get out of the mainstream and stay there. What better place than a large industrial city in the north of England? It was rainy, dreary, and cold. The man was right. Who in Southern California would be likely to come looking for him there? The answer was no one. And that more than anything else was what sold him.

  So the idea was right and the place was right. What made it doable was Rebecca’s progress. Not only did she like the Balmore and her bright, portly psychiatrist, Dr. Maxwell-Scot, she had adjusted to both with remarkable ease and enthusiasm. And yesterday, when he had taken Clem and gone to visit her to tell her where he was going and why, and to explain he would be away overnight, Rebecca had simply looked at him and then Clem and smiled, saying she thought what he was considering was wonderful and reminding him of what they had talked of before—that if she knew in her heart he was alright, it would make it that much easier for her to be alright.

  It was an attitude echoed by Dr. Maxwell-Scot when Marten first discussed the idea of his going to Manchester and leaving Rebecca in London.

  “The more independent Rebecca becomes,” Maxwell-Scot had said, “the faster and better chance for a full recovery. Besides, in an emergency you would only be a train or very short plane ride away. So yes, I think if the university situation works out, it would be more than alright, it would be very good for you both.”

  Soaked through from the rain, Marten turned from the bridge and started back toward his hotel. In his mind, if things worked out and he was accepted into the university program, it was a done deal. Very shortly, the city and streets where he walked now would become his home.

  15

  SUNDAY, APRIL 7. 6:02 A.M. IN MANCHESTER. 9:02 A.M. IN MOSCOW.

  Today was—April 7/Moscow.

  Marten stood in boxer shorts and a T-shirt in front of the television in his room, anxiously clicking back and forth between channels—BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Sky, CNN. What he saw was nothing more than typical Sunday morning fluff. Weather, a smattering of sports, human interest filler—a store selling car-sized bagels, a couple married at a horse race, a dog stuck in a toilet—intermixed with talking-head, political discussion shows about the state of the world and church services. If Moscow was under attack it was not being reported. In fact, neither Moscow nor Russia was mentioned at all. As far as the major television outlets were concerned, nothing immediately newsworthy seemed to be happening anywhere in the world.

  7:30 A.M.

  Marten was showered, shaved, and dressed and back in front of the TV. Still nothing had happened.

  9:30 A.M.

  Still nothing.

  10:30 A.M.

  Nothing. Nil. Zilch.

  LONDON. SAME DAY, SUNDAY APRIL 7. 6:15 P.M.

  Marten had toured the university with Clem once more, had a rather formal lunch with two of her professor-colleagues, and then taken the 1:30 train for London, which had arrived at Euston Station at a little past 5:30. From there he’d taken a cab back to the Hampstead Holiday Inn and, once in his room, immediately turned on the television. Ten minutes of switching channels and still there was no news from or about Moscow.

  A quick change of clothes and he went to the Balmore, where a cheery-eyed Rebecca eagerly pressed him for news of his trip to Manchester and what had happened there. When he told her of the city and the people he had met and the rather certain assurances Clem had made that he would be accepted into the graduate program, she was overjoyed. And when he told her about who Clem was and who her father was and their social position, she became all bubbly and giggly and very schoolgirlish. To learn that Clem was actually titled and could be called Lady Clementine made her seem like royalty. “It’s the kind of life,” she said wistfully, “people like us can only dream about.”

  Shortly afterward Rebecca was called to dinner and Marten left. Then, as he had in Manchester, he walked and walked and walked. This time he paid little attention to the city at all. His thoughts were on himself and Rebecca and Clem and what the future might be. With them came the logistics of it all and how long he could afford to pay for Rebecca’s care and his schooling before he had to find work.

&nb
sp; “The pieces.”

  Suddenly the sound of his own inner voice startled him and he stopped in the early twilight to look around, unsettled by the voice and unsure where he was. As quickly, he realized where his journey had brought him. To the house at 21 Uxbridge Street.

  “The pieces,” the voice said again.

  Instinctively he pulled back out of sight behind a large plane tree. Even though Gene VerMeer had gone back to L.A., he might have asked Scotland Yard detectives to keep the house and grounds under surveillance and, among other things, given his description as someone he would very much like to talk to.

  Yet, looking up and down the street, he saw no one, not even a parked car, and the house itself was dark. It, along with the safe deposit keys, the Russian Embassy, Penrith’s Bar, I. M., the charter jet, and April 7/Moscow, had turned out to be a dead end. Like a pricked balloon, nothing but spent air.

  Marten watched a moment longer, then abruptly turned and walked away. The voice had been the push-pull again, some part of him trying to keep the whole thing alive.

  “Raymond is dead,” he pushed back at the voice, “and whatever he had been about is dead with him. Three strikes and you’re out, Mr. Marten. Accept it and get on with your damn life. Clem is leading you in that direction. Go with her and forget the other. Because, like it or not, the truth of it is, whatever the ‘pieces’ might have been, there are none left to ponder. Zero. Zilch. None.”

  16

  The following day, Monday, April 8, Nicholas Marten formally applied for admission to the graduate program at the School of Planning and Landscape at the University of Manchester. With a letter of recommendation from—and, he was certain, the personal intervention of—Lady Clementine Simpson, on Thursday, April 25, he was accepted. On Saturday, April 27, he arrived in Manchester by train and, with Clem’s help, on Monday, April 29, found a small, furnished converted top-floor loft on Water Street overlooking the River Irwell. That same day he signed a rental agreement and moved in. On Tuesday, April 30, he began classes.

  It had all been done rapid-fire, with ease and without incident as if in some way Heaven had greased the boards and sent him sprawling headlong into a new life. As the weeks progressed and he settled in, he continued to make short entries into the journal he had begun when he first arrived in London. Most were exceptionally brief and variations of the same, “no pieces, no voices, no sense of Raymond at all.”

  On May 21, little more than seven weeks after they had come to England, Rebecca’s psychiatrist, Dr. Maxwell-Scot, was transferred to a new rehabilitation facility called Jura, which the Balmore Clinic had recently taken over in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

  A huge, sprawling manor on the shores of Lake Neuchâtel, Jura was an experimental program designed to take no more than twenty patients at a time and built on a concept of combining accelerated psychotherapy sessions with rigorous outdoor activities. It was a situation Dr. Maxwell-Scot thought would be excellent for Rebecca, and she recommended that Rebecca accompany her to Switzerland. At Rebecca’s enthusiastic urging, Marten had agreed.

  The second week of June, Marten made his first visit to Jura. Although Dr. Maxwell-Scot warned him of his sister’s still-substantial fragility and suggested that even the most casual reminder of the past could trigger her darkest memories and cause her to slip back into the awful state she had been in before, he found Rebecca, while somewhat unsure and still experiencing up-and-down mood swings, more enthusiastic, independent and stronger than he’d seen her since her breakthrough. Moreover, any reservations he might have had about the physical characteristics of Jura itself—he’d pictured an austere, almost asylumlike institution—were immediately put to rest. Jura was an extremely well managed magnificent estate surrounded by acres of vineyards with manicured grounds running a good half mile to the shores of Lake Neuchâtel. Rebecca had a large private room overlooking both the grounds and the lake, with a breathtaking view of the Alps across the water. It was as if Rebecca, come to be healed, had been plunked down in the middle of some hugely grand, impossibly expensive spa.

  Seeing Jura firsthand, Marten worried privately to Dr. Maxwell-Scot, as he had earlier, about the cost of it, and was told again what had been explained to him before: Jura was an experimental extension of the clinic, and Rebecca’s expenses, like those of all the patients there, were fully covered by the foundation.

  “It is part of the stipulation of the grant by the benefactor who provided the facility,” Maxwell-Scot had said, “that treatment here be at no cost to any of the patients or their families.”

  “Who is the benefactor?” he had asked directly, and Dr. Maxwell-Scot had said she didn’t know. The foundation was large, and grants often came from wealthy individuals who, for one reason or another—many quietly had family there—preferred to remain anonymous. It was something Marten understood and could accept, and he told Maxwell-Scot so, saying it was a gift that he and Rebecca fully and gratefully appreciated.

  At the end of June, Marten went to Paris to visit Dan and Nadine Ford to celebrate Ford’s promotion to the Los Angeles Times Paris bureau—a promotion heavily, yet good-naturedly, lobbied for by Nadine to the wife of the Times’s chief Washington correspondent, a woman to whom she had been giving French lessons almost from the first day of their arrival in Washington—and to camp out for a long weekend at their tiny new Left Bank apartment on the rue Dauphine.

  The first evening, Marten and Dan Ford took a walk along the Seine, where Marten asked Ford if there was anything new in the LAPD’s take on Raymond and if they were still engaged in a follow-up investigation. Ford’s reply was that as far as his friends at the Los Angeles Times knew the whole Raymond thing had been put to bed. “By the LAPD, the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, even the Russians. Not even a glow in the ashes,” he said. VerMeer was back on his regular shift at Robbery-Homicide, and Alfred Neuss was doing business as usual in Beverly Hills and sticking to his story that he had no idea whatsoever what Raymond Thorne had wanted with him.

  Finally Marten had asked if he knew how Halliday was doing, and all Ford could tell him was that Halliday was still working out of Valley Traffic Division, which meant he was still employed but his job now was little more than handing out traffic tickets. In essence he’d been demoted and put out to pasture. A big fall for an elite 5-2 detective, and to a place from which there was no recovery, at least not for him. And Halliday was still in his early thirties.

  Afterward they stopped in a brasserie for a glass of wine, and at a quiet table Ford told Marten there was something he needed to know.

  “Gene VerMeer’s got his own Web site. It’s cute. It’s called ‘Knuckles and Knuckles dot com.’”

  “So?”

  “I bet he’s asked for information on John Barron a half-dozen times in the last couple of months.”

  “You mean he did come to London looking for me?”

  “I can’t put myself in his head, Nick.” Ford had long ago programmed the name Nick Marten into his mind and Nadine’s. To them Nick Marten was Nick Marten and always had been. “But he’s a brutal, malicious bastard who’s taken it upon himself to avenge the squad. He wants to find you, Nick, and if he does he’ll kill you as fast as he said hello.”

  “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Because he’s got the Web site and because he’s got a lot of cronies in sympathy with him. And because I don’t want you to forget it.”

  “I won’t forget it.”

  “Good.”

  Ford fixed Marten with a stare. He had been warned and that was enough. Abruptly he grinned and shifted gears, boyishly ragging Marten on his bohemian lifestyle as a university student and especially gibing him about his ongoing clandestine affair with one of his professors, the not-so-demure Lady Clem.

  Early the following day Marten, Ford, and Nadine had boarded a train at the Gare de Lyon and taken a long day trip to Geneva and then Neuchâtel to visit Rebecca at Jura. It was a short but joyous and loving reunion that reestablished Rebecca�
��s relationship with Dan and Nadine Ford, and one that allowed them all to marvel at how enormously their lives had changed in so little time.

  In mid-July Nicholas Marten went to visit Rebecca again, this time taking Clem, as a member of the foundation, with him. What he found was a Rebecca even more remarkable than before. For the first time she looked like the beautiful twenty-four-year-old she was. Gone were the hesitancies and up-and-down moods of before. She seemed bright and healthy and athletic, and, as Dr. Maxwell-Scot had first discovered in London and encouraged here, was developing a skill, one she had great aptitude for and wholly enjoyed, learning to read and speak other languages.

  Playfully she teased her brother with a smattering of French and Italian and even a little Spanish. Marten was not only thrilled with her sharpness and mental agility, he was tickled. And like his visit to her with Dan and Nadine Ford, it was warm and happy and fun all at the same time.

  In mid-August Clem returned to Jura on foundation business and was surprised to find Rebecca down by the lake and on her own visiting with a Swiss family.

  Gerard Rothfels was general manager of European operations for an international pipeline design and maintenance firm based at the corporation’s Swiss headquarters in Lausanne. He had recently moved his family—wife Nicole and their young children, Patrick, Christine, and Colette—from Lausanne to Neuchâtel, less than a half hour’s drive away, because he wanted to distance himself and his family from the surroundings of his work.