The Puzzled Heart

by Amanda Cross

  “It does seem to be the kind of letter they might write though. It’s like kid stuff.”

  “Leslie, the right wing in this country, Christians though they may call themselves, are besotted with their message. They are like fundamentalists everywhere, certain of their correctness and of being ordered by God to destroy those who disagree with that certainty. I think perhaps we should stop fooling ourselves about them.”

  “I’m not fooling myself about them. I’m just saying that it’s not that easy to distinguish that letter from a joke letter, the kind of anonymous note sent by nuts.”

  “I might agree with you if Reed were here. If I had heard from him, or had the slightest idea where he was. Now that I think of it, it was my certainty that I wouldn’t hear from him that allowed me to go to you. I’m so frightened. And I feel so helpless.”

  “Which,” Leslie said, “is why we have to get help. The question is who and how. Let’s come up with several possible plans while we’re waiting for seven o’clock—and their next message.”

  By the time they had reached this point, Kate was somewhat calmer, a bit more collected, though still capable, Leslie was certain, of collapsing into despair at the slightest provocation. Most ominously of all, she refused a drink, as though, Leslie surmised, Reed was doomed if Kate had a drink without him. By the time seven o’clock came around, and the doorbell rang announcing the delivery of the next message, Leslie had decided that coping with this kind of suspense required a wholly new, and for her unpracticed, support. Thinking of her grandchildren—by now, she hoped, claimed by their parents—she decided that life was never empty of new challenges, but with age one might have the fortitude to resist or meet them. Having, when push came to shove, resisted the grandchildren, she now sat with Kate hoping for the necessary fortitude.

  The seven o’clock message demanded that Kate announce, through paid advertisements or articles or op-ed pieces in specific newspapers and journals by the time of their next publication, why she was abandoning feminism and joining the right wing in its efforts to restore true family values. A list of the publications and a concise but terrifying definition of “family values” was appended. If Kate failed to comply with these demands, Reed would be killed. The message concluded: Neither the police nor any government agency must be contacted.

  “I hate people who use contact as a verb,” Kate said. It was, Leslie considered, the first sign that her mind had clicked back into place.

  “I thought these people believed in the police,” Leslie said, hoping to encourage this rational bent. “Or is that only for inner cities and against black men and boys?”

  “We have to do something,” Kate said.

  “You don’t think they’ll kill Reed, not really?” Leslie asked. It struck her that this conversation horribly resembled one of those prime-time programs she occasionally watched when overcome with exhaustion.

  “They’ve killed doctors who do abortions; they’re fanatics. But it’s not a very sensible demand. What’s to stop me from denying the whole thing once Reed is back?”

  “That’s easy. In the first place, you’ll be tarred with what you said, no matter what explanation you offer. That’s how the media work. You can’t ever correct reporters’ misstatements, they just go on making them anyway. In the second place, fear for Reed will restrain you. And if it doesn’t restrain you, it will be because Reed insists it shouldn’t, and that will lead to further complications of a marital sort. No, they’re clever all right. It’s always easy to be clever if compassion is not part of your aim. Just think about the way Pat Buchanan’s mind works, or Rush Limbaugh’s, and you’ll have a good sense of what you’re dealing with, even though neither of them has anything to do with this particular caper. Kate, are you listening?”

  “Listening and thinking, along the same lines. Thank you for coming home with me, Les. I’ve just had a thought.”

  “Thank God for that. Do you plan to share it?”

  “I think I know where to go for help, or at least for an initial conference. There’s a woman I met last year named Harriet. I’ll phone her.”

  “Don’t phone. Give me a message and I’ll deliver it. In these days of cyberspace, I don’t trust any phone. If I’m being paranoid, better safe than sorry, as my mother used to say.”

  Kate wrote out the note.

  Two

  WHEN Harriet Furst arrived in response to Kate’s note, Kate realized that it was far too long—months—since she had seen her. They had met while both were engaged in a more or less temporary capacity at the Schuyler Law School,* Kate in an unfamiliar role in unfamiliar surroundings, Harriet having taken on a new life and a new identity, which seemed to have propelled her wonderfully into the later decades of life. The friendship the two had formed was a lasting one, but they were both busy and neither, Kate realized sadly, had recently called the other. She mentioned this to Harriet.

  “Well, here I am, in answer to a billet-doux. Better than a phone call, really. What’s the matter, my dear, and what can I do?”

  “I thought perhaps you and your fellow private eye might help me. Harriet, I really don’t know what to do.”

  “Start at the beginning—which was when?” Harriet said.

  “Last night. And it seems like each hour has been a week long.” Forcing herself into an appearance and voice of greater calm than she felt, Kate told Harriet the whole story thus far, which hardly took six sentences. Harriet listened with close attention.

  “Now tell me about how you came to join a detective agency,” Kate added. She did not analyze if her motive was to stall (action being dangerous) or to decide whether or not to trust Harriet in her new profession.

  “Don’t you think we’d better call Toni, my partner, and get her over here?”

  “Yes. Meanwhile, tell me how all this happened. Of course, you are the perfect private eye.”

  “That’s what Toni said about me. ‘You’re able to move about the world unseen, with the invisibility that age bestows in our society,’ she said. I thought that rather clever of her.”

  “How did you meet her? Answering an ad?”

  “Hardly.” Harriet, after a long look at Kate, decided that talking was the most helpful activity she could undertake while they waited. “Toni (her full name is Antonia, I had hoped after the Willa Cather novel, but Toni said not),” Harriet began, “had worked in the computer and Xerox copier room that, as you will vividly remember, I ran in that dreary law school. I hadn’t seen her since I left there, but suddenly she turned up, offering me a job in a detective agency. The agency was to consist of Toni and me, and if it worked out, in a year or so I would be a partner. Of course I looked at Toni with some bemusement as she laid out this proposition. We were meeting in the office Toni had hired for her new undertaking. It was small and looked exactly like a private detective’s office, my idea of which, perhaps like Toni’s, had come from movies and TV shows about male detectives. There were two desks, two chairs besides the desk chairs, a rather grubby window, and a filing cabinet. One of the desks boasted a notebook computer, a telephone, and a fax machine. The other seemed to be waiting, hopefully I thought, for its occupant to arrive.” Harriet paused to smile sympathetically at Kate before continuing.

  “What really astonished me most about the whole business was Toni’s looks—well, not so much her looks as her clothes and makeup. When I had known her at the law school, she had been thin and rather gawky, dressed always in jeans and, depending on the weather, either a T-shirt or a sweatshirt, both oversize. She now looked like something they might feature in one of those magazines devoted to fashion and the way to get yourself up if you want everyone to look at you with either admiration or horror. I was certainly looking at Toni. Her thinness had become elegance. Her clothes, even to my ignorant eye, were smashing in their expensive simplicity; they, together with her makeup and hairstyle, managed to convey simultaneously a come-on and a don’t-mess-with-me message. The whole getup was staggering.


  “ ‘Like it?’ Toni said. ‘I’ve done myself over. This is a power suit, in case you didn’t know.’ ‘I didn’t,’ I said.

  “ ‘Of course you mustn’t feel guilty,’ Toni said, seeing me dismayed at the fact that I hadn’t changed an iota. ‘I want you to look just like you look. That’s part of the point of my offer—the way you look, your age, your cleverness, the way you handled all those frightful law school professor bullies, the fact, as you so often pointed out, that nobody even sees old women, let alone is able to describe them. All that’s what I want. How about it?’

  “Well, what did I have to lose? An adventure is an adventure. I even quoted her a poem I’d recently come upon by Sharon Barba called ‘The Cycle of Women’:

  Until she rises as though from the sea

  not on the half-shell this time

  nothing to laugh at

  and not as delicate as he imagined her

  a woman big-hipped, beautiful, and fierce.

  “I wanted to add old in that last line, but it’s not my poem. Still, that was me: big-hipped, old, and fierce.

  “So we settled down to be a detective agency. It was clear from the beginning that we were the perfect pair of operators. Toni got their attention and I worked where their attention wasn’t. We followed errant wives, husbands and lovers, and missing children. That part was pretty grim; they were mostly teenagers who didn’t want to go home when found, but at least the parents and the child were forced to talk to one another, which often hadn’t happened much before.” Here Harriet paused for another look at Kate, who smiled weakly, attempting reassurance.

  Harriet continued. “Toni insisted we each have a licensed handgun. I refused, hating guns, but in the end I agreed, figuring I could always stash the thing in my capacious purse and never use it. I was wrong about that. We were hired by a boyfriend to tag along, unseen of course, with a young woman jogger who insisted on running just at dawn. I said I didn’t think we undertook bodyguard work, but Toni said she ran anyway, and if the guy paid our rates, why not? So Toni ran when the girlfriend ran, and it’s very likely that her being in sight and looking as though she could be carrying a gun discouraged a few rapists. All I know is that one day Toni couldn’t make it, because of another case, and told me to go with her.

  “ ‘Are you out of your mind?’ I asked with my usual tact and gracious circumlocution.

  “ ‘Get a bicycle,’ Toni said. ‘You can ride a bicycle, can’t you?’ I admitted that I could.

  “ ‘Well,’ she said, as though that ended the conversation.

  “ ‘Well, okay,’ I said, preserving my dignity. To give Toni her due, she provided the bicycle, one of those things with ten or twenty or so speeds, which I have never understood. But I can pedal, and I did. Round and round the park we went. The jogger stuck to the road, thank God, and if she wondered why this old bag was bicycling more or less along with her, she probably decided I was clinging to her for safety. People who run at dawn don’t wonder too much about people who bicycle at dawn, or so I figured. And then he struck. He must have thought I wasn’t any danger to him, since I was clearly aged and breathing heavily—I admit it, there were a lot of hills—and he pounced on her and dragged her beyond some bushes. I left the bicycle to its fate and followed, slowly and carefully. I was able to creep up behind him and put my gun to his head, just the way Louise did when Thelma was about to be raped in Thelma and Louise. ‘Leave her alone,’ I said. He looked so unconvinced that I shot the damn thing just past him, to make my point. He got the message, and tried to run off, but she tackled him, and I held him there while she went to call the police. One rapist off the park roads, or so we hoped. I rather enjoyed just holding the gun on him while he contemplated rushing me. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got an itchy trigger finger.’ Well, I had to get my dialogue from somewhere. I may have been a bit of a spy at the law school, but I’d never been a detective.

  “The boyfriend gave us a bonus, but the woman was mad as hell, which I thought unreasonable. Still, that wasn’t our problem. And it was just about then that I became a partner, though we still called the agency by Toni’s name, Giomatti. I didn’t see any point in putting my name on the door.”

  “Anonymity has always attracted you,” Kate said kindly, but glancing at her watch. Just then the phone rang. Kate answered, clearly frightened, but it was Toni. Kate handed over the phone.

  “She wants you to go to school tomorrow in the usual way,” Harriet said after a moment. “Either Toni or I will come to see you in your office hour; we’ll have thought of a reason for doing so. Toni doesn’t believe in being seen too often, in her undisguised self, with a client, not at first anyway. Sometimes I wonder, but she does seem to know what she’s doing—as with the gun. I pointed out that an unloaded gun would have done as well. ‘No it wouldn’t,’ Toni said, ‘because you would have known it was unloaded and that would have made a difference.’ She was right there.

  “Now, Kate,” Harriet continued, “let’s have a drink. I know it’s early, but you need one, and I need one. Reed wouldn’t mind; I’m sure he’s hoping you can get all the courage you need, even if the littlest bit of it comes from a bottle.”

  Kate rose to get the drinks. Harriet sat waiting, believing in the recuperative agency of even the most moderate exertion.

  * * *

  And so the next day Kate sat in her office dealing with students. It was an effort to force herself to concentrate on their concerns, but her success in doing so relieved the tension about Reed for a few minutes at a time. The sixth student, looking so natural in that persona that even Kate was fooled for a few minutes, was Toni, whom Kate vaguely remembered from the law school. Obviously Harriet’s partner was talented at disguises, capable of assuming any costume and behavior consistent with her age and sex, and perhaps beyond. She looked exactly like a graduate student.

  “I’m the last on line, I think,” she said, taking the seat by the desk and staying in her role until the door was closed. “Thank God you don’t teach in one of those small colleges where everyone in the place knows all the students personally. New York, I love you.”

  Kate looked questioning.

  “Okay,” Toni said. “Down to plans. I was going to mention, however, that we thought of Harriet as a cleaning woman come to dust, but were informed that a cleaning woman dusting during the day or for that matter at any other time would almost certainly arouse suspicions. So it’s me, but Harriet sends love. We’ve been thinking about your case all night. Here’s where we are for the present.

  “First, rules of operation. Never telephone. If you absolutely must reach us, call from a phone booth on the street, give us the number, and we’ll go out to a street phone and call you back. Wait there for us. If someone else wants to use the phone, just stand there holding the receiver, keeping the lever down in an unnoticeable way. If someone bullies you out of the booth, just stay till you get in again. We’ll keep trying. Is that clear?”

  Kate nodded, trying to think where the phone booths were near her house or office. She realized how seldom she had used one, and planned to scout them out on her way home. Unobtrusively, of course. She still felt sick to her stomach, but less so now that some action was promised.

  Toni continued: “We have lots of other plans, but I don’t see any point in going into them all now. I’ll be back during your office hours. I’ve signed up, with a late fee, for one of your courses so that I’ll have a right to be here, particularly since I have to consult you often in order to catch up.”

  “Which course?” Kate asked.

  “The big lecture. I don’t want a grade, so I don’t have to write papers or take a section with a student aide. I don’t want them—the people behind this caper—to spot me as a student, but if they do, we can use that for our own purposes. Phony name, of course, but I paid money and I’m not matriculated, so they won’t go into my records until later. Believe me, money is all, here as elsewhere.” She continued before Kate could
question any of this. “Our immediate problem is this ad or article they want you to place. You may have to do it, but right now we want to stall them—partly because by stalling we force them to make some moves, and moves always tell you something, and partly because we don’t want you to have to place the damn thing at all.”

  “But won’t Reed be in danger?”

  “I doubt it. Remember, Kate, he’s only of use to them alive and well. They’re planning one of two maneuvers, or so Harriet and I guess. Either they’ll try to brainwash him and make him see the point of view of his captors, which often works very well indeed, or they’ll try to seduce him—both mentally and physically, so prepare yourself for that. If Reed is half as smart as I hear he is, none of this is going to work, exactly, but he’s going to pretend it does.”

  “You’re remembering the abortion doctors they’ve shot, and the clinics they’ve bombed, and all that?”

  “Look, Kate, forget abortion doctors and clinics. They feel morally right about that. They tell themselves they’re saving human beings; they can use fanatics to do their dirty work for them. But these people aren’t terrorists like the Islamic terrorists—they can’t really claim that their god has told them to blow up the enemy even at the cost of lives. It still says ‘Thou shalt not kill’ in their Bible, and while the morality of killing abortion doctors—who also kill, in their view—or killing in time of war can be argued, kidnapping and killing is another kettle of fish. Are you with me?”

  “I’m trying to be. I’m also remembering Yitzhak Rabin.”

  “Who was, like the abortion doctors, killed in a public place. Try to pull yourself together, Kate. You’re no use to us or Reed if you’re always in a panic, believe me.”