The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

Tell me more about the car,” Hazel said.

  “I don’t know if it’s the same car. It must not be,” Ingrid said, mesmerized by the Volga. “There are a million cars like this. Of course not. Of course not. But you understand.” She tapped her head, lost in some continuum. She took a drag on her cigarette again, then dropped it on the floor, stubbed it out with her toe. Opened the passenger door, sat down, stared out the window, didn’t move.

  “Ingrid,” Hazel said, “I need you to focus.”

  “We need to torch this place,” Ingrid said.

  “I’m not burning down this building.”

  Ingrid opened the glove compartment, pulled out a few papers. The car had been registered to Arthur Kennedy. Not hiding from anyone. Doing everything aboveboard. “Do you have a photo of this Arthur Kennedy?” Ingrid asked.

  Hazel took out her phone, pulled up the files she had there, and showed Ingrid the photo on Arthur’s driver’s license. It was a few years old, but the only other shot she had was of the man decomposing on the streets.

  “All this time,” Ingrid said quietly, “he was right here. I wish I had known.” She expanded the photo. “He never fixed his teeth.” She handed the phone back to Hazel. “Look up Dmitry Volkov. See if there is a photo. There is certainly a photo.”

  Hazel typed Dmitry Volkov into Google and thousands of results came up. One of the first was his appearance on Jack’s show, when he and Jack injected each other with sodium pentothal, right there on a YouTube video. They were in the Dominican Republic, wearing matching white linen shirts, a breeze working through their hair as they walked along a beach. And then Dmitry is strapped to a chair, just as Hazel had been a few days earlier, and injected.

  He answered questions from Jack—Are you a cosmonaut? Do you know the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa?—then his jaw tipped open, exposing gaps where teeth had been pulled. His eyes fluttered and went white. He was out cold, his body slumped like the dead man—like his son, whom he so closely resembled.

  Minus the sun.

  Minus the flies.

  Minus the bible in his chest.

  Dmitry Volkov died in 1986 after a short illness, according to Pravda. The caption under the photo of his open casket, translated into English: THE GREAT LION SLEEPS. No surviving children.

  “Arthur Kennedy was searching. And he found it,” Ingrid said, running her hand along the dash of the car. “His father had a car just like this.”

  “Is that why, as a boy, Kennedy never got sent back to Russia? The same with Nixon too? Their parents were dead?”

  Ingrid nodded. “Their fathers died right after they left, leaving them to grow up in the United States. In Kennedy’s case, they probably looked at him to work for the government. Maybe he did, or maybe he was too unstable. He was almost a teenager when we took him. There were a few pages we recruited to our side. In Nixon’s case, his mother made the trip with him, but clearly never told him his past. Best to let him forget that awfulness.”

  “So they didn’t even know who they were, didn’t know where they were from, did they?” Hazel asked, thinking about her own family tree. And the gaps in it.

  Hazel felt someone staring at her back, turned around, and thought she caught a glimpse of her dad standing there. But no. Of course not. There was no one there. Just the street.

  Ingrid said something else, but Hazel took off to the other end of the warehouse, where the shelves of boxes and crates were. She opened the first one she saw. Then the next. They were filled with papers.

  “Ingrid, these are files. There are files here!” Hazel began to tear open the boxes. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of files. She pulled out one. Inside were what looked to be medical records, except they were written in Italian, a language Hazel wasn’t exactly fluent in, but she found a few words she recognized: melanoma…infantile…

  There was a body drawing, indicating locations of tumors, two dozen circles across the abdomen of a child. A date: 1999.

  She climbed up the stair-ladder. There were boxes already opened on the top shelf, where the ladder rested.

  Files from the 1960s, the 1970s.

  German, Russian, Eastern European. Here were all the clues that Kennedy figured out. Then he tracked down Nixon, who brought it all to her brother.

  Hazel again thought of her family tree. Of her mother, who should’ve been listed as deceased.

  She tore through the box, looking for her mom’s maiden name: Black.

  Nothing.

  Looking for a Claire.

  Nothing.

  It wasn’t that easy, she recognized.

  “What was Kennedy’s real name?”

  “Anatoli,” Ingrid said.

  Darren Nixon was Darim Haql. Arthur Kennedy was Anatoli Volkov. In this world she was in, maybe her mother’s real name wasn’t actually Claire or Black.

  She’d need to go through every one of these boxes, examine each paper, attack this problem like the anthropologist she had been. I am, Hazel thought. I am an anthropologist. Observe. Dig. Collect data. State a hypothesis. Solve it. Determine significance.

  I am Hazel-Ann Nash and I am feeling alive.

  Hazel came back down the stair-ladder.

  Ingrid was still in the Volga, tears running down her face.

  “We need to get out of this place,” Hazel said. “I need to talk to Skip.” And then Hazel was through the roll-up door.

  Ingrid, suddenly agile, leapt out of the Volga in a blink, telling Hazel no, telling her come back, telling her she must listen, she must not leave, she must not go to Dubai. But that’s not where Hazel was headed just yet.

  No, first she wanted to stand in the past.

  Here was the sky Benedict Arnold saw: The same sun beat down upon her. There was the smell of the sea, buried beneath the exhaust of cars, but the sea is still the sea, the water is the same water. That was a blade of grass, pushing up through a crack in the pavement, growing where it shouldn’t, because it has grown there for hundreds of years.

  Hazel tried to cancel out the sound of traffic. Tried to unsee the retaining wall. Tried to unsee the commuter-train switching station maybe five hundred yards away, and the two men in orange vests doing something on the tracks, one of the men periodically clapping and hooting at the other.

  All around was the treason of today. The natural world replaced by screaming machines and men, everything a battle against land or for land. Benedict Arnold a traitor for a speck of dirt.

  She closed her eyes. Tried to fill her mind with white noise, so that she just heard her own pulse. The thump-thump of her heart.

  It was something she used to do in ancient burial grounds and places where trauma had occurred, back when she was still the kind of person who sought those places out.

  Her amygdala was ruined, which meant her emotional tuning fork didn’t work well anymore. But what persisted was her ability to see the world. The place it was. The place it had been. That’s what she was trying to find. A glimpse of what was left, of the residual energy, of what had drawn people to this place. Of what her father had seen. What he felt.

  What had brought Skip here, what had happened to him as a boy. It was all she could imagine.

  Hazel turned in a slow circle, her arms spread out, let the wind play around her.

  Imagined what kind of life Skip had had.

  Imagined the secrets he’d kept.

  Imagined the shame, the disbelief, the horror.

  It was impossible that he’d killed anyone.

  Which meant, she now knew, that it was entirely true.

  “Tell me something,” Hazel said to Ingrid, eyes still closed, though now she more fully understood the desires of those left one step behind, could see them exactly. “What did Benedict Arnold want?”

  “The same thing we all want,” Ingrid said. “For someone to say they give a damn about us.”

  “My mother,” Hazel said. “Was she part of this?”

  Hazel tried to keep herself centered.

  Hazel i
magined the concentric ripples.

  Hazel let time slow down around her.

  “Would it change anything?” Ingrid asked.

  And then another question hit her.

  Why wasn’t Ingrid dead?

  Why wasn’t I dead?

  So that we would both come here, Hazel thought, and opened her eyes, just in time to see Ingrid scream and for a giant bear of a man to grab the old woman, toss her like a bundle of newspapers onto the pavement, her body skidding across the asphalt back into the warehouse.

  A punished grunt escaped from Ingrid.

  It was a sound Hazel had heard once before, the last gasp of breath from a dying woman.

  Hazel’s gaze slid sideways. This bear was now coming for her. Hazel plowed toward him, straight at him, back into the warehouse, the past and the present finally the same thing, as the werewolf was released.

  87

  Washington, DC

  At Reagan National Airport, Rabbit picked up a Starbucks and headed straight for his gate, shoulders wide, letting people see his face. Because Trevor Rabkin wasn’t hiding from anyone.

  “American Airlines flight 3861 to Hartford is now boarding Zone 1. Zone 1 only,” the attendant announced.

  For the fourth time in the last ten minutes, he tried Hazel’s number. No answer. He tried Moten too. The same. Rabbit had the proof now. Thanks to the files he uncovered at Yale, combined with what Butchie sent, he had all the layers of how Kennedy and Nixon fit together, down to when their blackmail scheme started. He tried Hazel again. Nothing. Better to get to Connecticut and deal with this himself. He was about to shut his phone. Instead, he made a new call. Mallory, his ex-wife, answered.

  “What is it, Trev?” she said without a hello.

  “Can’t I just check in? I wanted to see if everything was okay. If you got the box of toys I sent.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “I didn’t know if Candace even liked toys anymore,” he said, referring to his daughter. “I just figured, well, better to get it to her and let her decide.”

  “She’s four,” Mallory said.

  “I know, I know,” Rabbit said.

  “You sound funny. What’s wrong?”

  An older businessman stepped past him, wearing a suit and a woven straw trilby hat from the 1950s, back when hats had nothing to do with baseball. It looked like something Jack Nash would wear. Or even Moten. Men of a particular taste, men of a particular style.

  “I just— Did you ever watch Jack Nash when you were a kid?”

  “What, the Bermuda Triangle show? All that?” his ex-wife asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I remember the one about the Curse of King Tut. That one freaked me out, especially when the exhibit rolled through town. Why?”

  “Did you think it was real?”

  “Real? No. Of course not.”

  “Yeah,” Rabbit said, “me either.” He knew what’d be waiting for him in Connecticut. He had no choice. This was the only way to save Hazel. He started heading for the plane. “Just do me a favor: Tell Candace I love her.”

  88

  New Haven, Connecticut

  The first punch Hazel delivered broke The Bear’s nose open. It was a right cross, which caught him by surprise. The Bear was expecting a foot stomp followed by an elbow to the gut, the move all humans tend to know.

  Instead, she went right for the face, and his nose popped, blood gushing immediately, which is what happens when you’ve had your nose broken a dozen times over the course of your life. Hit it right, and all of a sudden, you’re a bloody mess. The benefit of not having any cartilage there anymore was that The Bear would be fine once the bleeding stopped.

  It was an extremely effective tool in a fight, he knew. Maximum show, minimum damage. In The Bear’s experience, reasonable people lost the will to fight once they saw blood, provided they weren’t intent on killing you or thought you weren’t planning on killing them.

  As a rule, The Bear tried not to get into fights, because he had a hard time modulating that balance, whether he was being attacked or if he was the attacker. So he had to be methodical, stick to a plan, understand ahead of time what he was and wasn’t willing to take, physically.

  But still, that punch? It was a fighter’s punch.

  Muscle memory, The Bear thinks. Nice. He had worried that that part of Hazel was gone.

  He turns his head and leans into Hazel’s second punch, this one connecting with the left side of his head, under his temple, above his ear, which gives The Bear a nice ringing sensation in his head.

  A pretty good shot, The Bear thinks. Hazel is stronger than she looks, though already she’s wheezing from the exertion, and Ingrid is rushing toward him, screaming, yelling, so The Bear takes one more punch, this one to his kidney.

  This makes him actually gasp—it doesn’t matter, if someone hits you in the kidney, it hurts—and then he grabs Hazel and tosses her over his shoulder, like a sack of vegetables, and pins her against his body, squeezing her tightly enough that what wind she has left grunts from her.

  He does not wish to hurt her. Again.

  He will take her to the ground.

  He will let her down lightly.

  He will protect her head, her precious head, the place with all of the secrets locked away, let her live, give her the chance to leave, but Ingrid? The Bear knows what Ingrid did so recently. She needs to be dispensed with in short order.

  To break Ingrid’s neck will take half of a second. And then he’ll tell Hazel what to make of her, that she is a killer, that what she is made of is lies.

  Of course, he also will need to explain to Hazel that she herself is made of lies and contradictions too. That her past and his past have been a tapestry. That what she holds as anger must be released.

  It’s an effective plan, well thought out, right up until the moment Hazel bites into the soft part of The Bear’s neck, under his ear, and rips open his external jugular, and The Bear collapses on top of her, his entire life running from him, beat…beat…beat.

  89

  Hazel Nash tastes copper. The werewolf is pleased.

  And then she tastes something that reminds her of veal. And then she realizes she is tasting something at all, that there is flesh in her mouth, and blood, and the pressing weight of a human on top of her.

  She can feel the blunt corner of a shoulder crushing her throat, bristled hair cutting into her cheek. She can’t see anything, can’t hear anything, can only feel pain, and the warm soak of blood.

  His breath on her neck, rasping.

  “Help me,” he says, his voice in her ear, barely audible, a whisper, a plea, nothing near a threat. What has she done? “Hazel-Ann. Help me.”

  And then the body is tipped off her.

  “Move,” Ingrid says, and Hazel sees that Ingrid has lifted one side of the man up a few inches, giving Hazel enough room to slide out from under his weight.

  Hazel rolls away, and Ingrid dumps The Bear back down. He crawls onto all fours, all threes in this case, since he’s clutching his pulsing neck with one of his giant fists. He’s smart not to stand, because if he stands, he’ll be dead in seconds. He’ll be dead in minutes if they don’t help him, apply pressure to the neck, call 911, get an ambulance here, which will get the cops here, which will get the press here, which will be the end of everyone.

  Hazel knows this man.

  His face is older now, getting older by the second, as if he’s decomposing right before Hazel’s eyes.

  She tries to remember the two of them. Tries to recall what pushed them together. Tries to recall the feeling of his hand low on her hip—he’s the man in the photo, the one in her apartment, the one from the affair—but all she sees in her mind is a young man, an ornate sapphire bracelet, standing in an alley in Tripoli, in the shadow of the Al-Tell Clock Tower, Karl saying that the bracelet was hers and that he’ll tell her all about her father, if she could do a favor for him, though this already felt like a favor that would end with bloo
d.

  Tripoli. When was that?

  “Help me,” Karl-with-a-K rasps, dying on the floor of this warehouse.

  With his backpack and running clothes, he looks like a German tourist, which she supposes maybe he is.

  Ingrid is beside her again now. She’s pulled a hammer from the wall and spins it in her hand. Seven decades on the planet, and she’s ready to kill, easily.

  Hazel takes Ingrid’s hand, removes the hammer from it. “No,” she says. “We’re not doing that anymore.”

  “Do you know this man?” Ingrid asks.

  He meets Hazel’s gaze for just a moment, blinks once, doesn’t say a word.

  “I do,” Hazel says.

  “He followed us today,” Ingrid says. “I assumed he was sent.”

  “I don’t work for anyone,” he says. “I pay a debt.”

  “A debt is a job,” Ingrid said.

  “Good God,” he says, each word an effort, but then, as he sees Hazel, a thin smile creases his face. Hazel hears his words. The words of a man who loved her. “You look beautiful, my werewolf.”

  90

  Hazel grabs a roll of duct tape from the shelves and steps back over to Karl, stares down at him. He’s so weak now he couldn’t do anything to her but beg. She rips off a length of tape and wraps it around the gaping wound she’s left him with.

  “If you have something to confess, do it now,” she says quietly.

  He falls onto his side, then his back, staring up into the lights. He has maybe a minute before he loses consciousness.

  “I have been protecting you,” Karl says. “I have always been protecting you.”

  “By killing Darren Nixon and Arthur Kennedy?”

  “By killing everyone.” He turns his head, faces her. “And keeping you alive.”

  And then she is in Beirut and Karl is beside her. And then she is in Tehran. And then, as the memories flood, she is in Johannesburg. Belfast. Moscow. Tracking her father’s sins, and those he sinned with: tracking the children, the so-called “pages” of the bible who Jack Nash worked with.

  The entire world spills out in her mind, and Karl is beside her, behind her, she is flying through the air strapped to his chest, mountains and sky and water, the world tipping, tipping, spinning, spinning, Karl screaming her name, Hazel-Ann, Hazel-Ann, Hazel-Ann. No seat belts anywhere. A tangled parachute line. A jump from 6,000 feet into the Russian wilderness, trying to keep from being detected, finding this man who knew her father—finding The Bear! Now she had a concrete lead on what her father had done—on the children who were snuck out of their homes, leaving their families behind. Orphans. When they left with her father, some of them became orphans. And then the rigging is all wrong, and they’re spinning, spinning, spinning.