A Death on The Horizon

by Mark Ellis

  Rad negotiated the big SUV into a spot right near the front door. He’d skipped breakfast, as he usually did when Nancy was traveling, and looked forward to the bagel and cream cheese he’d order with coffee at the ground-floor Starbucks as soon as he concluded his business. In the center lobby, he waved to Cissy McGovern, who kept her vigil at Cascadia Travel even though business was lousy. A glossy poster featuring a Carnival cruise to Tahiti evoked the Northstar’s imminent departure. Rad thought of the airy captain’s suite he would soon inhabit, its teak appointments shining like lustrous satin and the upholstery, carpeting, and mattress new each season. The command berth always used to engender a renewed sexual energy between Nancy and him. This time it would be about political retrenchment, preparations for official dinners, and a few good books.

  He grabbed a copy of the local Glen Herald, feeding coins into the rack outside the tomb-quiet gift shop, and then skipped the elevator to walk up the three floors. It was surprising when he found Ward out of the office, and Rad was unnerved that the BlackBerry Twittering tech head had opted to leave a hastily scrawled note taped to the inside of the glass door: Back in 30 minutes.

  Where the hell was his receptionist? During Clinton’s go-go era and the Bush Boom, Ward would have never locked the doors during business hours. Thirty minutes could represent lifetimes to the obsessive-compulsive, time-sense-disordered planner—enough time to secure or lose a fortune. A lot of people, his customers, had recently done the latter. His note screamed: I have time for this now, whatever the hell this is, so chill. The inescapable subtext was that since only the expansion of bureaucratic government power was moving quickly and everything else had slowed to a crawl, What’s the rush?

  Rad went back downstairs and ordered his bagel and coffee. At a Starbucks table, his thoughts drifted to the idea of his local Republican precinct chairs asking him to run for office.

  Trans Oceanic captains were ostensibly apolitical, but there was a reason he was requested by the Rainier Policy Institute every year. Everybody knew the political score on Rad. Everybody knew about his affiliation with Seattle’s conservative PAC, the Evergreen Alliance. The autographed portrait of Ronald Reagan hanging on the captain’s suite wall had been whispered about by every immigrant maid in Trans Oceanic’s employ. He’d been given it soon after receiving an army commendation for his actions during a confrontation with a Viet Cong shore emplacement.

  Rad is one of us, the saying went.

  If he were so inclined, the 2009 cruise would be the time and place to signal his intentions to run for office. Something about the Northstar’s untamed destinations conjured dangerous political waters and bestowed upon the voyage a context of togetherness. Many on board would form alliances and hatch strategery that did not bode well for the Obama agenda. Rad might never have so many influential ears to hear him again.

  With two disastrous election cycles under the bus, the GOP needed fresh faces—and miracles. There’d been a round of whining, allegations of voter fraud, and more than a few cable news circular firing squads, but it was time to move on. Democratic strategists ate such floundering like the Cups ‘O Noodles and organic nutrition bars they brought in for lunch.

  On the final munch of his bagel, Rad saw his financial adviser hurrying up the Timberland Center’s flights of stairs. He paid his bill with the comforted sense that there was apparently enough capital left in play to keep a guy like Ward running. The stocky, salt-and-pepper-coifed money manager had just sat down in the desk behind the interior plate glass when Rad walked in. He looked up from his monitor and then stood. “Rad,” he said, extending his hand.

  “How goes the battle?”

  The slightly dazed look Ward gave as he sat again was immediately recognizable these days. It was an expression that those who’d done well over the Clinton/Bush years used to convey, “Look, we’re hunkering down. It’s brutal out there, but we’re going to make it.”

  “Nothing much has changed since our last meeting, so my recommendations are the same: wait and see, wait and see.”

  “What exactly are we waiting to see about again?”

  Ward leaned back in his seat. A framed photo of his wife and three daughters was on the bookcase behind him. They looked to be in the full flush of prosperity, smiling from plush patio lounges near a pool in a lush backyard that Rad knew from an old Herald advertorial to be the planner’s own.

  “I’m waiting to see how far government control of certain markets advances.” Ward counted his fingers dramatically. “Banking, automotive, insurance, healthcare, energy. I’d be wary of putting a nickel in anything they get anywhere near.”

  Rad glanced out the window on the sunny side of Ward’s office, noticing that Mr. Timberland’s paint was peeling from the siding of an alcove wall. He and Nancy would be OK with his military pension and Trans Oceanic retirement, but the dream of living large on his investment portfolio was falling away like the taupe paint chips falling into the bark dust.

  “There are some opportunities out there, identity protection for example. Another segment has seen an uptick. Maybe you buy a hundred shares, see how it goes.”

  “What’s that?”

  Ward’s dazed look turned to an expression of resigned bemusement.

  “The business in post foreclosure cleanup operations has turned land-office. Mostly these are mom-and-pops, but one outfit, Jiffy Foreclosure Services, has gone national and is offering franchises. I could get you in on the ground floor.”

  “You mean people who go in and clean up after a foreclosed family or business moves out?”

  “Exactly. It’s so bad, the banks have begun offering transition allotments in the thousands to avoid the losses. You wouldn’t believe the kind of messes these people leave behind. Not to mention purposeful damages. Not to mention truckloads of possessions they simply abandon.”

  “I’d feel like a war profiteer.”

  “You’d be putting people to work.”

  “OK, let’s try a hundred shares.”

  “So,” Ward asked, “any chance we’ll be seeing your name on the 2010 primary ballot? 7th District is wide open.”

  Rad smiled. “Wait and see, wait and see.”

  “You’re sounding like a politician already.”

  Rad left Ward hunched over his computer screen, dialing up six thousand dollars’ worth of backing for the real estate grave robbers.

  The Escalade, though arctic white, was a veritable furnace inside. Rad drove through the sleepy Arbor Glen afternoon, all windows open while the air conditioning fired up, and then back out along the parkway that led to the gated homes and fairways. Instead of swiping his card to open the gate, however, he kept going. With the Northstar’s sail day on the horizon like a solstice event, a last look around the countryside wouldn’t hurt. Soon enough, his negotiations around the deadheads and shoals of the Inside Passage would begin.

  Through a concentrated mental effort, he was able to turn his thoughts to the nuts and

  bolts of what would be required on the Rainier cruise, aside from his expert helming of the ship. He’d have to have a ready take on the political scene, possible midterm candidates, and his opinion about who might make the best presidential candidate for 2012. He would also have to field questions about his own plans post-retirement. Would Rad run for District 7?

  The waters he would be navigating would be challenging both literally and politically. His good friend Alvin Alderson had pissed and moaned when Barack Obama was elected, saying, “If only we could have gotten the House, tipped the Senate, anything to stop these people.”

  But Nancy—a Goldwater girl as much as Alderson was a Goldwater guy-- had seen things differently. “No, let them have it all for now,’ she’d said. “Let their full agenda be known.”

  Rad carded himself through the gate, waited for the new clubhouse celebrity mother duck and her six ducklings to cross Arbor Glen Drive, and then pulled into his own driveway. The garage door came up, and the sight of Nancy’s Cayen
ne reminded him how much he missed her, and how long the upcoming cruise would seem without her. He formed a mental picture of her in Palm Springs, shopping with their only daughter, Rebecca, and then having dinner with her, husband Sam, and the grandsons. Afterward, they’d all go to the Raging Rio Water Park for an evening of torrent-channeling chutes. Rad paused to remember the last time they’d all been together, a summer ago now, before the election that changed everything. He recalled kicking back on a chaise lounge at Raging Rio, reading Pat Buchanan’s State of Emergency while Sean and Ricky inexhaustibly mounted the slides and slid over smooth vinyl on slicks of chlorinated water, their boyish yells adding to the cacophony of voices. Rebecca, displaying a flawless grace even in the most chaotic public environments. Sam capturing moments on his digital camera with the easily arrogant air of a litigator who would someday make a big haul, leave law, and never look back.

  Leaving the Escalade ticking in the garage, Rad entered his quiet house through the kitchen door, pondering the nights he would sleep alone in the captain’s suite. After reading for an hour, he went to bed, counting the one blessing that made life worthwhile.

  After thirty-six years, he was still very much in love with his wife.

  Chapter Ten

  Early morning Saturday found Melissa in her home office, hunched over her computer. While researching the life and times of the late Ms. Svenko, she’d skimmed over the contours of recent political history, seeking all she would have known had she been paying attention, and all she needed to know now. But the Northstar’s departure from Seattle was fast approaching, and the time to delve deeper into the particulars of the Svenko case had arrived.

  Dounia Svenko had not lived to see Lady Liberty’s crown and torch in New York Harbor. Lara’s mother had succumbed at the age of forty-two to a strange malady whose victims lost hair and bled from the gums in the days before almost certain death. After the local branch of the Ministry of Health had done all it could, she withered and died in the family’s dreary flat in Stavack. Dounia was one of several victims carried out of the minimalist high-rise, which served as housing for the legion of spigot jockeys and pressure-release drones who labored under the institutional-pink banner of the huge wastewater management facility there. Dounia’s husband and daughter had somehow survived the deathtrap complex, which subsequent tests confirmed had used water mistakenly assumed to have been cleansed of PCBs to air-condition the hive of over seven hundred cramped apartments. After Lara’s death, Viktor told Imbroglio, “I watch Lara closely after my wife, because we all breathe the same bad air, but she was always healthy.” In fact, Stavack’s politburo pointed to such healthy kids when going about the business of their own exoneration, successfully subsuming clear evidence, just as they had in Chernobyl. But scores of less-resistant folks died from the atomized water, and it wasn’t over. Many of those who survived had auras like the Vietnam munitions grunts who had handled Agent Orange.

  Viktor and Lara’s immigration approvals were signed by officials happy to expatriate any possible future Stavack victims. They crossed under the French-gifted symbol of American promise just as Margaret Thatcher and Ronnie Baby began circling the Soviet Union like raptors spying faltering prey.

  Melissa mused over her notes as she waited for Shauna and Randy to show up for their trip to the antiques bazaar. She’d laid a good slather of balm over her split lip before going to bed the night before, and the wound felt better after a solid, dream-riddled slumber. Her mind was starting to twine around the Russian journalist’s sad story, starting to get hunches, and one hunch whispered that Viktor Svenko had more to tell.

  According to some of the human-interest stuff published at the time of Lara’s death, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Viktor found four blocks down and three blocks over from his building was the center of his life now. Clicking on the church website, Melissa found that the same Ivan Kharvost from the news reports was still the parish spokesperson. She dialed the number and soon had Kharvost on the line.

  Kharvost had gotten to know the family soon after they’d moved to America and explained how Viktor had finished raising Lara in the badland of cubist obelisks across the channel from downtown Manhattan.

  By all accounts, Lara was a smart kid, a rapacious reader with an aptitude for the language arts, and soon eclipsed the Svenko family’s limited grasp of English. She’d tried to adapt to what they both ironically called the Big Apple, but after high school the affordable Dinkins Community College seemed a dead end. She entered early adulthood seemingly destined for a life of curtailed opportunity, but when Senator Barack Obama announced his run in 2007, it was like a spiritual awakening for her. She transplanted herself to the West Coast.

  Kharvost recalled, “Viktor and Lara went to the airport together in a taxi. He told me that he wept as he watched her plane take off.”

  The family had been responsibly irreligious, which made Viktor a good fit for the Marxist Revolution, but in America, especially after Lara moved a continent away, the nearby house of worship was probably the only place Viktor could find people who resembled his past. “As to how deeply our faith became his,” Kharvost said before ringing off, “you’ll have to ask him.”

  Melissa thanked the churchman and got on the trail of Viktor Svenko. Public assistance had been a way of life for the naturalized Svenkos. According to press reports contemporary with Lara’s death, Viktor qualified for an assisted-living one-bedroom apartment downshore from, coincidentally, a wastewater treatment facility. The family had gotten food stamps and had regularly availed themselves of medical care provided by the State of New York. Once in Seattle, Lara’s activist freelancing didn’t earn her enough to disqualify her for more food stamps and other entitlements. As Obama barnstormed across the county, she took her résumé and socialist credentials to Imbroglio and soon after wrote to her father gushing that they’d hired her to write progressive filler at fifteen cents a word.

  Next came a surprising letter informing Viktor that Lara had been accepted by the alternative-elite University of Washington’s Journalism Program. Interestingly, he had not informed her father about the 2008 Rainier Policy Institute assignment. According to reports, he only learned about her assignment on the cruise from a Imbroglio editor’s phone call in the dazed day or so after his daughter’s death.

  The old Chekhovian had been interviewed by a spectrum of investigative entities, but if he had suspected anything particularly dangerous about his daughter’s new life on the West Coast, it never made it to the public record. He and Lara had parted over a year ago, early summer of 2007, he told the authorities and clutches of reporters who hounded him over two weeks. Aside from a Thanksgiving visit, a monthly phone call, and a smattering of her press clippings sent from time to time, her life was elsewhere.

  Melissa wrote in her notes, Ask Scrimshaw for father’s contact info, but as soon as she set her notepad down, her synapses flared. Even in the Naked City, the name Viktor Svenko would be unusual. His home telephone number came up almost instantly in the online White Pages. She decided to wait until after the bazaar to dial the number. A call that sounded rushed and on the verge of something might spook the old Communist.

  Better idea: a webcam conference. Such visuals often meant the difference between trust and evasion, especially with elders. But then there was the complication that Viktor likely didn’t have a webcam, perhaps not even a computer. But if there was a cash incentive, say a $250 check, Stavack’s retired plumber might be willing to visit the office of a Charon partner on the East Coast.

  The doorbell rang—Randy and Shauna—and when Melissa opened the door, she realized just how much her air-conditioning would be required that night.

  “Jeez,” said Shauna, who had, as did Randy, a slick of sweat on upper lip and brow. “It’s a scorcher out there.”

  Iced coffee, a bit of Charon shoptalk that Randy endured, and they were out the door and into Randy’s Prius. It was noon, eighty-two degrees, when they hit the Queen Anne pavement.
After months of depressed alertness to wind chill factors and pelting rains, the walk from the Prius baked them into a trance. The heat worked its desiccating magic on the street-side marketplace as well. A kiosk selling croissants and designer teas was an island unto itself. Purveyors of artifacts waited with the look of shunned authors, and some of the merchants were packing up early.

  “Oh, look!” exclaimed Shauna.

  Melissa and Randy followed as she scooted to a nearby table. There, a vintage metal lunchbox featuring the sixties TV spy drama The Man from U.N.C.L.E. gleamed dully in overbearing sunlight. Robert Vaughn and David McCallum stood poised with snub noses and resolved expressions calculated to put KGB-reminiscent THRUSH agents on notice.

  “I have to have that,” said Shauna.

  The antiques man leaned forward with a smile and opened the clasp, releasing the sandwich-softened air of the box and revealing that the U.N.C.L.E. motif continued on the thermos bottle. There were a few dings and worn areas, but the box and its artwork were in good condition. “One hundred fifty,” said the curio’s seller.

  “Ouch,” said Shauna.

  As Illya Kuryakin handsomely faced the glare of punishing sun, Randy stepped up. “You’ve got a birthday coming up, right?” he asked Shauna. Both women paused. He sold cell phone service to millennials, one of the few indefatigable markets.

  “In about a month.”

  “Can I get this for you as an early gift?”

  It almost seemed as if the street vendor was reluctant to let his relic go. He allowed himself a last caress over the forty-year-old American-made latch while taking a credit card payment from Randy on a handheld machine. “It’s only a matter of time now,” Shauna joked as a klatch of passersby admired her new lunchbox, “until I get my badge.”