The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “I’ve already told you. To find out why you keep dogging me. And to find out about Key. Val says you call yourself Key here.”

  “Are you sure that’s all?”

  “I’ve looked for you for a long time. A post office box in Rhinecliff, New York. You were on the Fox River a few weeks ago. You’ve been using the name M. J. Key.”

  “A few facts strung together don’t amount to much, do they? Perhaps Key isn’t your only reason for being here.”

  “What other reason could there be?”

  “You brought your rods,” she said. “Maybe you want to know something you think Key knew. Perhaps he wrote something about it.”

  The manuscript. “I won’t deny that,” I said cautiously. “I’ve been interested for a long time.” Raina had always operated on a different plane than the rest of us. I needed to go lightly. “Remember when you told me that white flies were Ephorons? You lied to me back then.”

  “It wasn’t a lie,” she said indignantly. “Ephorons are white flies.”

  “But not snowflies.”

  She shrugged. “Semantics.”

  “I had the manuscript in my hands,” I told her.

  Her smile disappeared and her skin seemed to turn pale. “What manuscript?”

  “The Legend of the Snowfly. I found it in Vietnam. It had once been in Oxley’s collection. Apparently he had two copies.”

  Her eyes turned hard. “Then you already know what’s in it.”

  I knew then that she had the surviving copy of the manuscript, but I realized that, until this moment, she had thought hers was the only one. I didn’t have the acuity to use my new edge. “I was talking literally. It was in my hands, but I never got a chance to read it. It got blown up.”

  She exhaled with relief.

  “Of course, you could always loan yours to me,” I said.

  She leaned back. “You want the secret of the snowfly?”

  “Is there a secret?”

  “The secret is that you have to do it on your own. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to find out what you should’ve known all along.”

  “How can I know what I don’t know?”

  Raina said, “Perhaps we’ll have the chance one day to discuss theories of ignorance as forms of knowledge.”

  This was vintage Raina Chickerman and I started to laugh but saw she was dead serious. “You’re expecting a snowfly hatch here.”

  “There was always a pathetic side to you,” she said, getting up and commencing to ignore me.

  After we had eaten, she fetched a jar with clear liquid inside and filled two chipped teacups.

  The liquid seared my throat and ignited a burgeoning fire in my belly.

  “ ’Shine,” she said.

  “They’ve been here long enough to set up a still?”

  “Does it matter?” she answered. “Why are you obsessed with facts? Is this a result of your career choice?”

  “What I see is a bunch of people who look like they’re on their last legs and they screw around making hooch? It looks to me like a doctor could help these people.”

  “It’s not their way.”

  “They just live like this until they drop?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s nutty.”

  She said solemnly, “If evolution is the law that governs all life, then doctors and medicine are unwittingly destroying the human species by allowing people to live who genetically should not. I mean, the whole point of natural selection is to select for strength. Medical intervention dilutes this. These men live naturally to the full extent of their natural allowance.”

  I shook my head. “The power of evolution requires reproduction. There are no women here. They can’t pass their genes along, so what’s the point?”

  She looked over at me again. “You might look more at effort than outcome.”

  I rubbed my eyes and finished the drink. “You’re the wizard behind the curtain in Oz,” I said.

  “You’re making progress,” Raina said with a sly smile. “But you still don’t get it.”

  •••

  It was the horse latitudes at sidereal passage, long past last light and a long way until the new one. We had separate beds, Raina and I. A statistician once told me that two data points would guarantee a straight-line plot; more, and there was a serious risk of disorder. Well, we were here, just the two of us, and I was enmeshed in more disorder than I could ­tolerate.

  “Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” Raina said, turning to face me. “Or act like a man and decide earlier?”

  Decide what? Her voice was distant, contemplative. “You were butting into my life.”

  “Don’t play stupid,” she said.

  In this instance I was not playing. I tried to check my frustration. “You sent Nick Adams.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You are an idiot. I didn’t send anyone anywhere. Hemingway sent him.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hemingway knows about Key. He doesn’t want others to follow him. And Gentry wanted his books back. Actually, Hemingway was pissed at the grandson for drugging the old man in Key West.”

  “What about what Gentry did to me?”

  She said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Gentry attacked me. I nearly ended up in the hospital.”

  “I was with him. He only bumped you a little bit.”

  “Not then. Before that. I was fishing on this river and he came into my camp at night and beat the hell out of me.”

  “An old geezer like that against a big virile man like you?” She smiled, disbelieving.

  The old man had struck me hard enough with his shoulder to feel like an all-world linebacker. And he had hoisted me out of the hole like I weighed nothing. “Gentry’s crazy,” I said. “And dangerous.”

  “He’s only protecting Hemingway. They both believe in loyalty and they’ve seen little enough of it in their lives. I can understand them.”

  I must’ve blinked. “I still don’t understand the Key West thing. The kid took all references to the manuscript and to Key’s books.”

  She moaned. “God, you are thick. He wants to spare others what he has gone through. He knows what it is to go all the way for something and he knows that it crushes most people.”

  “If he knows this, why does he stay?”

  “Because he’s committed. I swear, Bowie.”

  “All right, let’s assume you’re telling me the truth about Hemingway and what happened in Key West. Explain to me why the U.S. government is methodically removing all references to Key’s works.”

  She leaned forward. “What are you talking about?”

  I told her about my experience at Michigan Tech and the New York City Public Library.

  “The materials are not listed in the Library of Congress?”

  I knew I had her interest. “It looks that way.”

  She said, “Give me a smoke.”

  I tossed her the pack. She struck a wooden match on the table, lit the cigarette, and stared at the flame until it was nearly burned down to her fingertip.

  Raina was quiet for a long time. “Eubanks said you were trouble,” she finally said.

  I elected to remain silent.

  “There’s nothing in the manuscript,” she said. “Don Quixote. If the government is doing what you say, it’s misguided and acting foolishly.”

  “You should know,” I said.

  She smiled. “You haven’t figured it out yet.”

  Why did she keep saying this? “I know that Gus was Key.”

  “Gus wrote the manuscript,” she said. “The government has never been able to break his ciphers. They’re afraid that the manuscript contains some sort of key and they want it.”

  “They haven’t approached you?” If I knew she had the manuscript
, the government would surely know.

  “Oh, they’ve tried,” she said. “Through Eubanks, but the manuscript is mine, not theirs, and Gus swore to me there’s no key to any code in it.”

  “But they think there is.”

  “And you think it contains the secret to the snowfly. People believe what they want to believe.”

  Or they’re led to believe in a certain way, I thought. Before I could say anything, she began to talk. “My father was a scientist, a biologist and a physicist. He and my mother were Russian Jews who fled the Reds in the early nineteen-twenties. The Russians hated the Germans and my father figured Germany would be a safe place. But he had not counted on a Hitler. Who had?” she asked. “When it began to look like National Socialism would grab the reins of power, he took my mother and left Germany.” She paused and inhaled, her cigarette glowing. “They were Jews by birth, but their records were buried somewhere in the chaos of Russia and they were not practicing Jews. Gus doubted the Nazis would ever find out, but he couldn’t take the chance. My father was a prominent scientist for the Germans and might have stuck it out safely, but he had my mother to think about. They came to the U.S. and my father got a job teaching in East Lansing.”

  “As M. J. Key.”

  Raina smiled. “Do you know who Donovan was?”

  “Wild Bill, leader of the OSS, father of the CIA.”

  “Gus loved puzzles and codes and he had some revolutionary ideas.”

  “He and Vijver.”

  She whistled in mock appreciation. “You’ve done some homework.”

  “I read their article.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “It suggested there was a code buried in it and dared anyone to break it.”

  “There was,” she said. “Gus knew about some of the German cryptography and he and Vijver wrote the article to spike Washington’s interest. Nobody there could break it.”

  “And Donovan got the message.”

  “Somebody he knew recognized that Gus was on to something.”

  It was strange how she called her father by his given name. She flicked the cigarette butt aside and lit another. “It was 1938. Donovan had already decided in his gut that there was going to be a war and he recognized that Gus could be a tremendous help to the country. He arranged for my father and mother to leave East Lansing in such a way that people would not much want to follow them.”

  “As publicly accused Nazi sympathizers.”

  “Gus spoke English with a German accent, so it was easy enough to believe. At that point Donovan was without portfolio, but he was gathering assets for the country. You won’t remember this, but when Roosevelt got elected to his third term, he promised that Americans were not going to fight other peoples’ wars.”

  “Which didn’t rule out our wars, if we got pulled in.”

  “You’ve got it. Donovan was convinced that the U.S. needed a new, centralized intelligence agency run by civilians, not soldier boys. Roosevelt picked him to run the show. My mother and father were then living under assumed names in New York.”

  “Rhinecliff,” I said, guessing.

  “Close enough. Remember, Roosevelt was from Hyde Park, which is just down the Hudson. My father was one of Donovan’s first recruits. Gus wanted to play the cryptoanalysis game, but Donovan had other plans for him and when Donovan wanted something, he usually got it. He asked Gus to return to Germany.”

  I had lived beside these people and never known anything about them.

  “My mother remained in New York and also worked for Donovan. Gus went back to Germany and took a position at a technical institute in Berlin. By then he and Vijver had refined their plain language codes. Gus wrote letters to people all over the world, all of them Donovan’s agents.”

  “About trout,” I said. “And all of it was code.”

  I could see Raina’s teeth flash. “You were always smart, Bowie. Smarter than you knew or gave yourself credit for. The Nazis never broke the codes and Gus was never suspected. With his academic contacts he kept the Allies tuned in to a lot of things the Nazis were up to. Donovan said that my father was the most important spy in the war. Gus came home in 1945 and they gave him medals and he said he had had enough. He felt he had earned his place in America and we went to Detroit to live.”

  Now I had something to ask. Raina was born the same year I was. “If your father was in Germany, where did you come from?”

  “Dirty mind, Rhodes. My father was a scientist. Scientists traveled, even during the war, mostly to neutral countries. Donovan arranged for my father and mother to meet. He was sensitive to such things. I’m the result of a reunion.”

  “M. J. Key,” I said.

  “Hold your horses, I’ll get to that. In 1947 the government came calling again. This time the war was against the Russians. It was cold, but just as serious. They sent my father to Leningrad. His job was to gather information, but more important to stop certain things from happening.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Spies don’t talk in details.”

  “How did they get him into Russia?”

  “Easy. He went in as the Nazi scientist he was. Remember, at the end of the war the Russians, Americans, French, and Brits were all grabbing Nazi scientists. Many of them went to ground. It was arranged in 1947 for my father to be found and sent over to the Russians.”

  Part of me wanted to believe her and part did not.

  “My father got out in 1951 and told the feds he was finished. His nerves were shot and he wanted his own life.”

  “From Russia to Pinkville.”

  She laughed the old Punky laugh. “I never caught the irony before.”

  “Your name isn’t Chickerman,” I said.

  “Well deduced, Einstein. That was Gus’s invention.”

  “There were other transplants in upper Michigan and Eubanks was their guardian.”

  She nodded. “My mother and father were the last.”

  “Which is why Eubanks pulled up stakes.”

  “He what?” I detected a stitch in her voice.

  “He left Traverse City.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course, that’s logical.”

  Didn’t she know? This upset her. I decided she didn’t and I sensed it hit her hard. Now she was alone, without her protector. “You went to a lot of trouble to get the Key manuscript and make sure I didn’t.”

  “Don’t be an imbecile. I had no idea you were after it.”

  “But you wanted it bad,” I said.

  “Not for the reason you did.”

  “Not for the snowfly?”

  “God,” she said.

  “But Key was real, a Brit,” I said.

  “No, some people think that, but he was American born, with an English mother, and he was raised over there. Gus took his name to write the 1943 work. It was published as part of the British scheme to make the Axis think he was alive.”

  “But it was Gus who wrote the snowfly manuscript,” I interrupted.

  “Yes, Key no longer needed his identity. He was in the ground. And had been since before the war.”

  Which confirmed what Lady Hoe had told me. “Your father was using his name before that.”

  “Yes, Gus admired him. They were very close friends for a long time.”

  “So he took his identity.”

  “At times,” she said defiantly. “Key traveled throughout Europe for conferences all through the nineteen-twenties and into the early thirties. Gus was in Germany then and he and Key became close friends, took vacations, fished together, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, everywhere. When Dad settled in East Lansing, he used Key’s name to conceal his identity and to honor a great man.”

  “Key was at Bletchley Park.”

  Raina laughed hear
tily. “You get an A for effort.” I didn’t let on that I was guessing. “Key was in England in name only. Alan Turing was the driving force at Bletchley and Key had been his mentor. Key’s death before the war was kept secret so that he could be kept alive. The Germans knew Key and feared his ruthless intellect. Bletchley sent out communications for the Germans to intercept so that they would think Key was alive and playing a crucial role in Allied intelligence. Nazi agents chased his name all over England and the Brits used this to trap them. Key was just bait,” she said. “Gus said that Key would have appreciated this. When Gus wrote his code article he used Key’s name as a way to assure government attention.”

  Most of it fit together, even the government’s paranoia. There had been two Keys and Gus was one of them. “I never knew your father fished.”

  She chuckled quietly. “Gus was pathologically private. The Germans used him, the Russians used him, and the Brits and the Americans used him. When he had enough, we disappeared. He wanted to dedicate his life to something that could never be corrupted. Even though he worked against the Nazis and Soviets, he also had to work for them in order to preserve his cover, and this always weighed on him. He could never forgive himself, but he tried all his life to make amends.”

  “With fish?”

  “Why not fish? Gus and Key loved fish and it was a symbol powerful enough for Christ. Fish are about hope.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You, of all people, should understand.”

  I wasn’t sure what I knew anymore. “What about the snowfly?”

  “Good night,” she said wearily.

  •••

  The next day I watched Ernest Hemingway make clumsy roll casts into a slow pool in an oxbow of the river near camp. Two men were with him. Most of his casts fell short and others got hung in the tag alders, low brush, and dead timber along the bank and had to be freed. He stood silently and motionless while others came to his assistance. When the line was free, he began casting again, deliberately, mechanically.

  During one of his frequent hangs, I approached him and waved.

  “Hiya, kid.”