A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  ‘Let me tell you about your father,’ Landau said.

  ‘I’d prefer another story if that’s okay with you, Mr Landau.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘You don’t want to know about the man who sired you?’

  Sired. She had thought that only horses were sired. He had neglected to trim the wick of his lamp and in the fug of lamp smoke and the bleary paraffin fumes, the corners of the hut were blurred and diminished and the burr on his rifle stock seemed to glimmer and pattern with life. She very much wanted the opportunity to put her plan into effect. But in that moment, in her unhappy refuge from the blizzard with Landau, she very much doubted that she would now be given the chance.

  She coughed blood out of her throat. ‘My mother was raped. My father could have been anyone.’

  He chuckled. Whether through fatigue or diminishing light, or the concussive effect of his blows to her face, she could barely make him out at all, now.

  ‘You are not the progeny of rape, Natasha Smollen. On the contrary. It was romance and treason that made you. So let me tell you.’

  ‘Tell me?’

  ‘About the Polish whore, your mother. And about your father, who I was proud and delighted eventually to kill.’

  It was more than an hour before he finished his story and his voice had become, with unaccustomed use, a harsh rasp in the thick air of the hut.

  ‘Can I make you coffee, Mr Landau?’

  He nodded and tossed the keys across to her and she caught them nimbly and unlocked the cuffs.

  ‘You have your father’s reflexes.’

  She lit the stove under the pan of melt-water and watched the flame, bluish, as it steadily burnt. She did not honestly know how she had managed to grip and strike the match. She did not know how she had caught the keys he had flung to free her unfeeling hands. She needed to make the coffee. She needed to perform this most mundane of tasks in order to compose herself in the aftermath of what she had been told. She glanced up at the strips of flesh torn from the carcasses of what he’d slaughtered and hung in his hovel to cure and stink until he considered them edible meat. She heard the wind shudder and wrack against wooden walls. She inhaled the paraffin stink that provided his fuel and the flame for his lamp and under it caught the sweetish odour of Old Spice cologne splashed on unwashed skin. She closed her eyes. She had to remember to breathe, to count and measure the individual breaths, or she would suffocate and faint. She prised off the lid of the coffee tin. She extended her fingers until the tips touched the blue flame under the melt-water pan and pain bristled through her and she recoiled, having regained herself.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Making your coffee, sir.’ Her back shielded her hands from him, the self-infliction of her burns. She could feel her fingertips blistering. She felt sobered, restored a little by pain.

  She had listened with incredulity at first, sure that he was in the grip of some dismal fantasy inspired by his obsession with her mother. But as the detail accrued, she realized that he was not a man capable of inventing such stuff. There was a hateful conviction to Landau’s testimony. He told his tale with such evident loathing for its subjects it was obviously an ordeal for him to recall it all so vividly. He recounted its dogged chronology in what was still for him an awkward, alien tongue. And as he did so, the story started to tingle through her with the hot compulsion of truth. She was seeing her mother’s stubborn secrecy revealed. She was hearing her own history. And so she listened, dismayed that she should find herself so ardent an audience, so desperate to learn her truth from so grotesque a witness to it. A witness, at least, until the moment he became such a willing participant in the events he described. Disbelief and scepticism gave way in her to shock and a sweep of revulsion that had her shivering and sweating at once as she listened to Landau’s story, handcuffed, on the cot. Her skin pricked and blotched and a furious itch spread under her scalp. Her skin sang with tension and her lips trembled and her mind would not be still as her heart hammered under her ribcage as he spoke.

  She stared into the flame and waited for the water above it to boil. She knelt feeling angry and indignant until an overwhelming disappointment engulfed those lesser emotions, drowning them, leaving her feeling drenched in sudden futility, more lost suddenly than she had ever known it was possible to be. Oh, God. God help me. She wanted to put her arms about herself, to cradle her body and rock in her abandonment and desolation. It would deliver her some comfort just to hold herself, in the absence of anyone else to comfort her with their sheltering arms, with the warmth of an honest embrace. But she couldn’t. Such extravagant movement would be rewarded by her captor with a bullet. She was in Landau’s prison. Landau was her vigilant, merciless guard.

  As he had been her mother’s, once. As he had been when her mother’s only offence had been the crime Nazism decreed was committed by her mother’s Slavic blood, by the geographic proximity of her mother’s homeland to its predatory neighbour. Natasha was reminded of something her mother had said, years earlier, on a weekend trip with Bill here in Colorado, as the two of them argued over politics, Bill over on the other side of their tent, building a fire to keep away the wolves.

  When you live without freedom, hope becomes difficult to sustain, her mother had said, who had discovered much during the war about living without freedom.

  You kept the wolves away, Bill, she thought. But one of my mother’s wolves came back for me.

  Landau approached her then and knelt behind her and held the flat blade of his bowie knife in front of her face. And she saw herself, saw her face in its bright reflection in the cabin gloom. And she thought, as she always thought, how little she resembled her mother in looks. And she saw, as she had never before seen, her father’s pale eyes carefully watching her under his shorn, flaxen hair. And she felt some of his strength returning to her. She felt it in his blood, beating through her. She felt it in his kindness, in the courage and resolution that had saved her mother’s life and allowed her to be born. It was a fundamental feeling, this, an obdurate determination in the marrow of her bones. It coursed and crackled in her, her father’s life and will for her to live.

  ‘What do you think of your mother, now?’

  ‘The Polish whore,’ Natasha said.

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘A man without honour. A traitor, as you rightly said.’

  ‘Good,’ Landau said.

  And she could have sworn she saw her father smiling back at her as she stared at her reflection in the polished blade of Landau’s bowie knife.

  He rose and kicked her. ‘The water is boiling,’ he said.

  Later, after the coffee and secured again, Natasha wished with all her heart that she had dried her mother’s tears when the Robert Frost poem made her mother cry in the cold at the inauguration. She wished she had lifted the veil away from her mother’s face and kissed away her mother’s tears. But she had not. And it would always be too late to do so now. She would never forgive her mother for the harbouring of her shameful secret. She was to be denied that opportunity. She would never get the chance to tell her mother that her secret bore no shame. That was her fear, at least. That was her fear.

  Hope becomes difficult to sustain.

  But not impossible, her father’s voice insisted. Not impossible, Natasha.

  She closed her eyes and heard Peter Landau loading and reloading the rifle across his lap with practised hands.

  Nine

  Bill was asked to wait in the bar for the manager of the lodge. It was one of the lesser ironies in a life that had inflicted on him many much greater ones. They had told him to help himself to anything he might want to drink. Days earlier he might have wanted to drink everything. He looked at the bottles ranked on the wooden shelves behind the waxed and burnished bar. There were rare single malts from Scotland and bottles of Kentucky bourbon and Irish whiskey in tall, high shouldered bottles from Dublin and Limerick and Cork. Their labels were arcane with detail against glass
that was amber and tobacco coloured and caressed by dabs of yellow light. He saw a bottle of Oban and seeing it made him smile. Martin Hamer had drunk Oban whisky, developed a taste for its peaty subtlety on a trip to Scotland a few years before the war. He’d been very rude, subsequently, about the relative merits of whisky and schnapps.

  ‘Maybe you’re a Scotsman in your soul,’ Bill had said.

  ‘I like almost everything about the place and its people, Bill,’ he said, forlornly. ‘But in the end, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What’s the catch?’

  He hesitated. ‘It’s the kilt, Bill. When all is said and done, it’s the kilt.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right, kid. You’d be more than wise to stick to lederhosen.’

  Bill smiled further. Martin had detested lederhosen.

  A few days ago he would have seen this recollection as the poignant justification for a drink. He’d have poured a glass of Oban and told himself he was drinking it in fitting tribute to his dead friend. It was what drunks did. It was how drunks lived their lives, how they functioned. They came up all the time with compelling reasons for raising the glass in their hand. He should know. He’d seen and done enough of it to be a real authority.

  Bill poured coffee into a mug from a percolator behind the bar and took it over to the large window that made up one wall of the room. He imagined the view through it was usually magnificent. He also imagined the glass to be inches thick. It was blind now, this glass wall, with snow that billowed and pushed against the great pane in dense and ceaseless patterns of white. The storm was uncannily silent, in the calm of the bar, robbed of its violence once deprived of its withering screech. He looked around. There were hunting trophies on the walls, of course. He saw moose heads and spreads of antelope horns that looked almost prehistoric in their runic grain and span. There was a snarling timber wolf. There were stuffed cougars and bobcats and a bald eagle spread its wings, haughty forever in death, above the big double door. All they lacked was a grizzly bear, Bill thought, sipping coffee. There was probably one in the basement, hauled up for sorority parties and corporate get-togethers. The floor under his feet was an intricate parquet and there was much rosewood and oak in the room. It smelled of teak oil and money and tradition. Bill wondered how a man like Landau could have survived here for so long.

  The double door opened and a man came in and Bill introduced himself. The manager of the hunting lodge wore a well-cut plaid suit and a cravat and his leather shoes clacked on the parquet. They sat on upholstered leather stools at the bar. His name was Charles Dupre and he invited Bill to call him Chuck. With his slicked-back hair and his English suit, Bill thought he had never met any Charles less Chuck-like in his entire life. The lodge manager looked more like John Cheever than he did any sort of hunter after game. It was all wrong, out of kilter, the atmosphere of the place, its charged off-season emptiness. Bill looked at the Oban bottle and suddenly knew that the liquor inside it was something cheap and fraudulent, distilled unlicensed somewhere like Boston maybe, or Chicago.

  ‘It’s good of you to talk to me, Chuck.’

  Dupre nodded towards the window. ‘I’d talk to anyone who took the trouble to come up here and see me in this. Frankly, I don’t know how you did it. And I think you have wasted your time, because I’ve told the police in Denver everything.’

  ‘I have a personal involvement.’

  He nodded. ‘The police told me that when I called them back and mentioned you were coming. They said to assure you they’ll get a helicopter and dogs up as soon as this storm clears.’

  And Landau will see the helicopter or hear the dogs and he will kill her, Bill thought. He was trying not to dislike Dupre. But his instinct wasn’t letting him. There was something bogus about Chuck, something counterfeit in the clothing and the way he forced his vowels. And his hunting lodge had the dead opulence about it of mob money. It was a mob investment and the mob weren’t too fussy about employing the likes of Landau because they didn’t possess an instinct for what was wrong and what was right. They were too dumb and amoral to differentiate.

  ‘Who owns this place?’

  ‘Is that relevant?’

  ‘It’s a harmless question.’

  ‘A conglomerate of business people from New Orleans.’

  Ah, Bill thought. Chuck, who didn’t look so much like John Cheever anymore, examined his nails.

  ‘How long did Landau work here?’

  ‘We inherited him. I guess eight or nine years.’

  ‘Enough time to get to know the terrain.’

  ‘Plenty,’ Dupre said. ‘But he always had too much sense to go out there in weather like this.’

  ‘He was fortunate to have the choice.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That was a joke in bad taste. How did you, by the way? Get up here?’ The road had been obliterated by drifting snow. He had done it with bloody-mindedness and a compass, feeling for crevasses with a ski pole, virtually blind behind his ski glasses and all the while thanking Christ he was still in some sort of shape. For once, weighing a solid two hundred and forty pounds hadn’t hurt. His weight anchored him in his boots on the screaming slopes in the wind. The compass was German, military issue, taken by Julia Smollen from Martin’s corpse as he lay in a Swiss meadow eighteen years earlier. Julia had also insisted he strap on his friend’s old waterproof watch. It was as though she believed these items had some talismanic quality, as though they would protect him or bring him luck in his search for the daughter of the man to whom they had belonged.

  ‘He was a good man in the mountains,’ Bill said, fiddling with the lugs to put his own watchstrap on the watch, thinking of a truth he’d teased her with once: you can take the peasant out of Poland.

  Julia put a hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry, Bill. I’m so sorry for the unkind things I said about you going.’

  ‘Forget it, kid. I never take any notice anyway.’ And she reached up and kissed him and he held her hard in his arms for a moment before turning away to go.

  He’d called her from Englewood before first light and setting out for the lodge.

  ‘Any word?’

  ‘Nothing. Frank sent a bouquet and a basket of fruit and a card.’

  ‘How did he find out?’

  ‘Someone in the police department, I suppose. There was a blank cheque with the card. He’d signed it.’

  ‘That’s thoughtful, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t want show-business gestures, Bill,’ her voice broke. ‘I want my baby home.’

  Bill looked at Chuck Dupre in the mob lodge in Colorado and wondered, even after the battle to get there, how he could have missed the Cajun flamboyance of the cravat and the hint of the Delta in the accent the man struggled to conceal.

  ‘I’m not going to waste your time, po’ boy, and I’m sure as hell not going to let you waste another minute of mine.’

  ‘I’ve told the police as much as I know. As soon as we knew he was breaking the law we informed the authorities and Landau was fired.’

  ‘Except that’s not true. An indignant guest with an interest in wildlife conservation was birdwatching through his binoculars when he saw Landau raid a nest. That’s what actually happened. The guest reported what he saw and you were left with no choice but to fire Landau.’

  Dupre lit a cigarette and blew out smoke. His eyes were on the white wall of blizzard and his face took on a stubborn cast.

  ‘You had me checked out immediately after I called you,’ Bill said. ‘You’d be an amateur if you hadn’t. So you know that I know people. And those people will be happy, po’ boy, to take a trip to New Orleans.’ He hated speaking like this. But he needed to make himself understood. ‘I don’t give a fuck either way about Landau using his gun skills to help with the hardware for your activities outside Colorado. I just want to find him. And you are going to do all you can to help me, Bubba.’

  He slapped Dupre on the back. The slap was heavy and avuncular and very hard. Dupre’s face became pale and then he n
odded and rose and Bill followed him, thinking that Frank’s thoughtful cheque could no longer be described as entirely blank.

  He was about to leave the lodge a full hour later when he was approached by one of the skeleton crew who ran the place in the dead winter months. He was checking his equipment in the wood-and-marble lobby, securing the harness straps on the pack that carried his supplies and bivouac before lacing on his waterproof nylon boots.

  ‘There’s a telephone call for you, sir.’

  He walked to the desk and the waiting phone with a sinking heart. It would be the police. They had found a body. They would very much appreciate his help with its identification. Would he mind? But it wasn’t the police. It was Julia.

  ‘He sent me her hair, Bill. He cut off her lovely hair.’ Julia was wailing, undone.

  ‘Where was it sent from?’ He gripped the receiver so hard in his fist he heard the plastic crack. ‘Julia? Was there a note?’

  ‘No note. Denver,’ she said.

  Then he was in the right place. ‘I’ll find her, honey. I swear to God I will.’

  He laced his boots and shouldered his pack and walked out into the storm.

  He walked west, the incline varying but almost always upward, the avalanche risk appalling if he gave the prospect serious consideration. He tried not to, but it was hard when every laboured footstep reminded him of how much snow the storm had brought. It started to abate an hour out of the lodge, full night fallen by then and the landscape blue and still, under a bright moon. It was very cold. Wind chill always made the cold variable and confusing. When the wind ceased you knew what you were up against with the cold, could judge its bitter seriousness and the strength of its intent. The wind still blew powder off the surface of the freshly fallen snow in small, swirling eddies. But they were only the storm’s playful afterthought.

  Its legacy was avalanches.