by Bill Granger
The words were too fast for him. He merely blinked again.
She smiled. It was a smile she knew that made men like her. She had learned that much from watching the other girls at school practice their pouts and their dreamy looks and their little coquetries. She knew all about herself, the way a pretty woman knows about herself. At least, that is what she thought.
Still he looked miserable.
She called from the motel room. Wagner answered.
“I’m staying down.”
There was a silence on the line.
“Is there a reason?”
“Something’s wrong. I talked to him and he doesn’t want to talk. He gave me a glib description, not like someone describing someone he’s afraid of, but like someone describing the elevator operator. I get the feeling he wants me to go away. Something happened between the time Redbird called and I got here. Something that’s clammed him up. He looks terrible.”
Another silence on the line.
“Mr. Wagner?”
“I was just thinking, Karen.”
“Thinking along my lines?”
“No, not really.” Another pause. “Thinking maybe you should come back to Powell Street, maybe we should buck this up higher, talk to someone else about it, get feedback and input.”
She closed her eyes to hear the conversation better. She could even see Wagner in the office. She knew the patterns in his speech when he got nervous. The trouble with her was she was too goddamn bright. Her father had said that once and it was true. She did terribly in school, barely passed her first civil service exam. And yet she was too goddamn bright. She saw that something was wrong now, wrong at both ends. The Russian was afraid; Wagner sounded afraid.
“I think I should stay here. For a day or two. Just look into this a little, try to loosen our client up.”
“How you gonna loosen him up, Karen?” But said with absolutely no leer to the voice. Not at all like Wagner, who spent all their time together staring at her breasts. He was nervous and afraid and obviously thinking about something else. She kept her eyes shut tight to concentrate on seeing the voice.
“I’m going to talk to him some more. There’s something wrong here and I can’t put it down on paper yet. Let me have a day or two.”
Wagner paused. Four hundred miles north of Karen, Wagner was thinking about the tapes that recorded all the conversations on all the telephones in the office on Powell Street.
“Well, I just don’t know,” Wagner began. “You wouldn’t just be exercising Uncle’s expense account?”
It was a stupid thing for him to say. “That isn’t even worth an answer, Mr. Wagner,” Karen O’Hare said. They both knew it.
“I didn’t mean it that way, I was kidding. You don’t kid easy, Karen, you got to learn to take a joke.”
She said nothing but she opened her eyes. She had seen enough of his voice in her mind.
“A day or two,” he said.
“That’s all. Just to make sure. To get something I can put down on paper.”
“A day or two,” he said.
“There’s no point in sending someone down and then pulling them right back with nothing to show for it but a vague feeling that something is wrong.”
“No.” Pause. “I suppose you’re right, Karen. I guess you’re calling it.”
They broke the conversation without pleasantries. Karen put the receiver back on the phone and sat on the edge of her bed for a long time, listening to her voices. There was Raspoff’s voice and Wagner’s voice and another voice. She listened to the third voice for a long time and she understood it was her own.
The third voice was very clear about one thing: Something was wrong, worse than she had imagined a moment before.
10
TO END THE TRAIL
Norton Sound was gray. The low silhouette of the Nome Peninsula lay below the northern sky. The sun was quite bright but there was no cheer in the day. The lighter carried lumber, machine parts, two new Chevrolet trucks, and a gray man, the sort of anonymous visitor who sits in airport lobbies or train stations or at sidewalk cafés and is never seen. The sea was too shallow to take the heavy cargo ship all the way into port. The sea route to Nome had always been too shallow and the Army Corps of Engineers was spending a fortune to reverse a million years of nature. The dredgers were at work in the sound, some to scoop the sand and rocks containing gold bits, some to shove the sand somewhere else so the ships could dock easily at the port. Captain Holmes, still not a captain, was aboard the cargo ship, glad to be rid of the G-man and his insistence on learning the stories of Henry McGee.
It had been important to stay with Holmes because Holmes had to be scraped clean of memory. He had been closer to Henry McGee for a time than any man. It had been a good time from the point of view of those on the trail. That is what Devereaux told himself to keep the idea of a trail fresh in his mind. He had never felt so far away from Henry McGee, the ghost he had seen fifteen years ago, the man of too many stories.
What had he accomplished in three weeks? Stories, the kind of stories they invented in the If game in Alexandria.
The trail was now cold. He had sent the wire from the cargo ship to the safe house in San Francisco and it had been passed along from there to Hanley in Washington. The message was not in plainspeak but the words were clear.
Devereaux had dreamed in his bunk on the ship the night before. In the dream, he had gone home to Rita and the house was gone. Not sold but gone. A vacant lot remained. He found Philippe sitting on the curb. He asked where she had gone. Philippe said, “Just gone.” In the dream, he had gone to Hanley to find her and Hanley had winked at him and said, “She is just gone. She took the house with her.”
He could not find her in the dream. When he woke, he was sweating and it was four in the morning. The worst time in life was four in the morning with a bad dream behind you.
He had to end this thing. He had all the tape transcripts of his interviews to turn into stories and he would work on Nels Nelsen in Nome for one more day and that would be it: End of the trail. There is no Henry McGee, there is no trick, the thing is over.
He had done the things expected of the careful agent. He had followed the false trails again to see if the chasers had missed anything. He had gone to the Polar Bar in Anchorage to talk to the regulars about their remembrances of “Henry McGee,” the man named Otis Dobbins who had met Nels Nelsen there. He had awakened nearly every morning in a strange room in a strange town and wondered where he was. He dreamed of Rita Macklin every night, and each time, the dream became worse. One night, Rita was pregnant and said she was going to marry the father of the child in her belly. It was not Devereaux. Another night, Rita said she did not love him anymore. The dreams became real as the search for Henry McGee stopped becoming real.
The lighter was very close to the rocky shoreline now and hands for and aft readied the lines. The lighter bumped gently against the dock and nudged it with its iron hull. The lines snapped out in the cold air and fell heavily on the dock. Devereaux picked up his bag and went down the steep inside ladder to the deck below. Devereaux stepped uncertainly down the ramp. It felt very strange to be on firm land after eight days in a choppy sea. He imagined he was walking with a rolling gait as he moved along the dock to the land.
The trail would be buried here in a day or two and then he would fly back to Anchorage and take the nonstop to Washington. He would call at Anchorage to say he was coming home.
Would the telephone ring in an empty house?
He shook his head to get rid of the thought and then he saw her. The woman was at the end of the dock, standing next to an ancient Thunderbird with a battered side door. She was wearing a fur coat and looked absurdly young to be in furs. She was pretty and her eyes glittered, even in the ugly light of the sullen morning.
He memorized her face because it was a trick he knew how to do. He thought her eyes were too bright for the middle of an ordinary morning.
He started to cros
s her path and she raised her hand. She smiled at him. Her teeth were bright in a wide, pretty mouth. “Nels,” she said. “You must be the man, you’re the only man coming off the lighter. I mean, Nels was drinking in town at the Nugget and he kept talking about how he had to meet the lighter because there was a passenger coming off it. So I said I had a car and I was tired of drinking. I said I wanted to meet someone different anyway. So I’m meeting you to take you into Nome. You wouldn’t mind me giving you a ride?”
He understood the last words and the smile and shook his head. He didn’t mind. She had a hushed voice and spoke English in the odd way Indians and Eskimos did. Her fur coat was open and she wore very tight jeans. Her black hair was long and tied back from her oval, almond face.
Devereaux moved to the other side of the car and opened the door. He threw his canvas bag on the backseat, next to a pile of beer cans. He slid onto the leatherette seat of the old T-Bird. The motor was running and the car was warm.
“You want a beer?”
“Sure,” he said.
She fished two cans off the backseat. They were barely cold. They opened the cans and took a swallow and she put the car in gear and started down the road.
“My name is Narvak,” she said. “My native name. I am also called Catherine, you can call me anything you like.”
Said this, smiled, turned to him, opened her mouth to him.
Devereaux thought she might be sixteen or seventeen years old. He tried to keep that in mind while feelings stirred his belly. She had brown breasts and they strained against her bright shirt. She had the shirt partially opened and she knew it; she knew everything she was doing.
When the dark-faced man had sent her to Nome again, this time to find out about the government man, she said she would do anything for him. Ulu had said she should fuck him. She had said he might be ugly or fat. Ulu had said to fuck him anyway.
But he wasn’t ugly or fat and maybe it would be a pleasure.
“Are you looking at me?” she said.
“Obviously,” he said.
“Do I look good?”
He tried to remember something. “Are you eighteen?”
“I’m as old as hell,” she said.
“I suppose.”
“Would you like me to stop the car?”
“How long did you know Nels?”
“Not long. I meet him in town. I seen him around. Him and his partner, but his partner got killed a couple of weeks ago. Something like that.”
“Who was his partner?”
“Guy named Henry McGee. You come to find out about it?”
“Why would I want to find out about it?”
She didn’t like this. She stopped the car on a gravel road that ran away from the town. She turned to look at him. “Nobody can see us,” she said. She opened her mouth again. She licked her lips in an exaggerated way, perhaps in the way she had seen women in movies do.
“Did Nels tell you about me?”
She put her hand on his crotch.
“He said you were from some government agency about the traplines or something like that, about endangered species or crap like that.” She made him hard and she reached for the zipper on his trousers and felt his hand on her hand.
“What do you know about Henry McGee?”
He felt the little bird hand flutter beneath his grip. Until that moment, he was not certain. But the little bird was trying to escape.
“You just want to talk, you don’t want to fuck.”
“Did you fuck Henry McGee?”
“That man? Hell, no. He smelled bad.”
“What do you know about Henry McGee?”
“Leggo my hand, you want to hurt me?”
“Maybe,” Devereaux said.
“I don’t let nobody hurt me. You want to hurt someone, I know this one in town but she’s fat, you have to like a fat one, but you can hurt her, you never see her without a black eye or something. But I don’t let no one hurt me.”
He released her hand. She pulled it back to the wheel. She was coiled now beneath the furs and there was no good feeling between them.
“You got wolf eyes. You got eyes like wolves but you can see deeper into your eyes. Wolf has flat eyes. You still look good to me. But you don’t hurt me.”
“I don’t hurt you.”
“You want me to suck you?”
“No,” Devereaux said.
“You got it hard down there.”
“No,” Devereaux said.
“Well, you look good to me. I just want you to know that.”
And Devereaux knew, staring at the wild young creature behind the wheel, that the trail had not ended. One more day and it would have been buried. But she had scratched into the rock and opened up a new way. A new and dangerous path to Henry McGee.
11
COMING FROM TUESDAY TO MONDAY
The Soviet 21-class submarine had two names. The first name appeared in all the naval records. The second name was a joke among the officers of the sub and a few of the crew. The second name for the submarine was Spirit of Glasnost.
The old submarine had been outfitted in the yards at Archangel with the new turbine blades. She slid under the pack ice without a sound, silent as a whale or a shark. The new turbines were based on the principles of the super-quiet turbine blades sold to the Russian government two years earlier by a major Japanese manufacturer. United States intelligence—in a report filed with the National Security Agency from R Section—did not discover the sale until construction of the new turbines was already under way at the Soviet shipyards. Washington was very angry with the Japanese. The turbines, it was said, could nullify U.S. sonar because sonar was based on sound in water and the new turbines made almost no sound. Congress was upset and threats were made against Japanese imports.
Given the political atmosphere at the time, the Japanese company bowed low and fired its director. This seemed to confuse and mollify Congress. Quietly, the Japanese conglomerate continued to ship its small, light cars to the United States market. It had sold 106,514 the year before. It also made and sold videocassette recorders, personal word processors, and motor scooters, not to mention cordless electric toothbrushes.
The submarine was one hundred ten feet beneath the restless surface of the sea. The pack ice was broken into floes in the cold spring, groaning and cracking here and there, waking the way a sleeper awakes from a deep, disturbing dream. The floes were so many swift-moving islands in an invisible stream against the gray of the water and sky.
The passengers had boarded the submarine at Akaki in Siberia, seventy-five miles directly west of Wales, the village on the tip of the Seward Peninsula in Alaska. There was a military airfield at Akaki and a small harbor. The submarine was still undergoing tests. Now it was spring and the pack ice was all broken and the sub was testing the American sonar in the open, chill waters of the Bering. The tests were going well. The submarine had slipped up the Bering Sea to the straits, which was the narrowest water between the Soviet Union and the extreme western edge of the Seward Peninsula. Now it quietly treaded the four-mile gap of water between Big Diomede and Little Diomede. It was exactly on the international dateline with half the ship in Tuesday and the other half in Monday.
The ship was silent; the crew spoke in whispers; the sonar men adjusted the amber screens back and forth, trying to detect the Americans trying to detect them. The Americans sat on the rock of Little Diomede, which bristled with radar and sonar, and stared like blind dogs across the ice to the Soviets on the other rock. The submarine crawled slowly north and west, into the American sea, and still it was thought that no one saw the vessel beneath the water. The submarine crossed to the narrow waters of Kotzebue Sound, above the Arctic Circle.
Just like jail, Kools thought as the seaman led him along the narrow, clammy passageway toward the galley. The seaman had said nothing. Probably didn’t even understand English, Kools thought. The seaman had a flat, Asiatic face, he and Kools might have been related. Ten thousand
years ago.
The seaman had nodded at Kools. Noah had been staring at the pages of a Russian reader—he was trying to learn Russian, for Christ’s sake—and looked up and saw the seaman signal and almost started to get up from his bunk. But the seaman had taken Kools’ arm and led him into the passage and closed the hatchway with a curtain.
Like being in jail, Kools thought. Maybe worse. Ain’t gonna drown in jail. Ain’t gonna have all the water in the world crush you down, get in your mouth, ears, nose.… It wasn’t worth thinking about but it was hard for Kools to put it out of his mind.
Kools and Noah had undergone the training at the tight Soviet compound. They had apple juice at night at first, until the spirit of glasnost unthawed enough for a few smuggled bottles of vodka. They were kept apart from the native village a half kilometer east of the frozen concrete compound, but Kools had made it out on the second night. He had visited with the people and it had been all right. They knew what he was, but he was a cousin to them, related over ten millennia. He nearly didn’t make it back to the compound that first night.
The Soviets trained hard, without subtlety. Kools understood it from the days in prison at Palmer, understood it from all his life. He worked quietly, not like Noah. Noah liked to talk. Noah liked to be in charge, which was just like a white man.
Kools didn’t see the point of it, but sometimes that was just the point: It was pointless, like the guards in Palmer waking you up sometimes at three A.M., just to fuck you around, just because they felt like it.
The seaman opened another curtain and there was the old man in a small cubicle, just as bare and sweaty cold as the one he had just left.
They hadn’t known the old man was on the sub.
Kools had an instinct. You had it or you didn’t. He had sharpened it in Anchorage, sharpened it in prison at Palmer.
He sat down on the single chair and watched the old man on the bunk. The old man sat cross-legged. He had very dark skin, as though he had been in desert sun all his life, and his eyes were bright, quick, steady. The old man nodded when Kools took out his cigarette pack.