I WOKE UP TO THE earthy smell of a wet morning and the evocative aroma of freshly perking coffee. It took me a minute to square myself with my surrounding. I’d fallen asleep on, a couch before the fireplace, where the coals had died, and I came to, groggy and stiff. Where the hell was the coffee smell coming from? I staggered up and rubbed my eyes, smoothed out some of the wrinkles.
“Good morning. Have I been making too much noise?”
It was Kim Roderick, standing in the front hallway, wiping her hands on a dish towel, smiling cheerily. Her teeth shone white in an uncharacteristic smile.
“Ah, no, I smelled coffee—look, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Don’t look so fierce. Are you angry? I hate people who drop in unexpectedly … But I guess I thought you wouldn’t mind, I thought you might be pleased …” Her smile had turned quizzical, almost hurt, surprisingly vulnerable. She waited expectantly. A cold breeze flapped through the open windows.
“No, give me a second and I’ll be pleased,” I said. “I feel it coming on already, a definite sensation of pleasure. No other name for it.” I yawned. “But you take me by surprise, madam. I did not expect to wake to find you in my kitchen …” I followed her to the kitchen, where she had a plate of sweet rolls and coffee cups at hand.
“I told you I came from a little town up north—Grande Rouge happens to be it. I came up to visit my father. I told you I was going out of town for the weekend …” She poured coffee and dripped cream into mine. “It just turns out we were going the same place.” She was smiling again, making very precise little moves around the big kitchen. She wore faded Levi’s, a checked blue-and-white shirt underneath a baggy old blue sweater. I excused myself and ducked into the bathroom. When I came back she was perched on a counter sipping coffee with a rim of confectioner’s sugar on her lip.
“But how did you know I was here?” I said.
“He told me—my father. You talked to him yesterday.”
“I did? The cop? The town cop. He’s your father?”
“No.”
“But that’s all … there wasn’t anyone else—”
“Ted Hook,” she said, peering at me over the old green cup.
“Ted Hook!” I couldn’t keep the shock out of my voice. “My God, he’s eighty or so …”
“Oh, please, don’t look so startled,” she said, her mouth making a tiny move, as if to say it would all be explained if I’d only give it time. “Look at it this way, you’ve been curious about my past, haven’t you? Now events—and my own inclinations, which I haven’t tried to explain to myself—are conspiring in your favor, you’re going to find out where this peculiar woman has come from, what her secrets are.”
I nodded a trifle dumbly.
“Maybe it’s my fate, that you should find out about me. In any case, it’s a small world, everyone knows that, and everyone has to come from somewhere. This place is where I come from, at least partly, this is one of the things I’ve spent my life trying to get away from—but here you are and I’m beginning to think there’s no escaping you.” She frowned at me. “Oh, you should have seen me when Ted told me you’d been here—my God, I was positively frothing. Not even up here could I get away from your poking and digging. But then I calmed down, he told me what you’d had to say, and my paranoia cooled somewhat—I decided you weren’t out to get me, that you had no idea I’d come from Grande Rouge. So, I decided a surprise visit might be fun.” She caught my eye for an instant, looked quickly away. “And I could prove to myself that I’m not afraid of you … that was a factor, too.”
“I don’t see myself as someone threatening you.” I took a bite of cherry Danish. “It’s all in your mind.”
“Granted.” She sighed, then straightened her shoulders, as if getting a grip on herself again. “So,” she resumed, “Grande Rouge is a place I’ve tried to forget.”
“Why? It’s not such a bad place—”
“Memories, some bad memories. It represents what I don’t want, lots of people feel that way about the place they come from. And it’s a country of the mind, too, isn’t it? Where we come from.” She gave a small nervous laugh, self-deprecating.
“Well, it’s one of those things, I guess. Subjective. But Ted said he had a son, not a daughter—”
“That’s right, actually—just a bit of shorthand on my part. I think of Ted as my father, simply because I didn’t have one. Ted’s my uncle, my aunt’s husband.” She nodded at my expression of curiosity. “Right, Rita Hook was my aunt. Whoever my father was, he was only a biological entity, not a human being—I suppose my mother knew who he was. But she couldn’t have told me anyway. She died when she gave birth to me.” She was getting it out quickly, precisely, making it absolutely clear so she wouldn’t have to go over it all again. “This was all in Chicago, of course, and my mother’s sister, Rita, took me back home, here, to Grande Rouge. It all sounds complex in the telling, but it’s not, not really.”
“So Rita brought you up … Funny, all the connections. Coincidence,” I mused, my mind slowing down to cope.
“Coincidence is another name for fate, isn’t it? But, no, Rita didn’t bring me up. I hardly knew her … I was four years old when she went off.” She went on evenly, controlled, retaining her good temper in the face of what had to be a painful subject. “It’s peculiar, the way everybody kept sort of leaving me—my mother dying, my aunt going away, no father at all … then there was poor old Ted, so sick, just an invalid, and he seemed so remote from me, like a great-grandfather of some kind, he didn’t know what to make of us children … my brother and me.” She shook her head, shaking off the inaccuracy. “No, not my brother. He was my cousin … my God, I get so confused when I talk about all this, on those very rare occasions when I do talk about it.” She smiled, transparently seeking understanding, and I was having my own problems relating this Kim to the Kim I’d seen previously.
“I can understand your problem,” I said. “It is confusing. But why didn’t you just tell me straight out when I wanted to know? It was inevitable that I’d finally discover your connection—God knows it’s slight enough—your connection to the hunting and fishing club. Hell, I’m determined about things like that and once I got on to Rita I’d have come to you—”
“Oh, come on, Paul! That’s not true at all … there was surely no certainty that you’d lead back to me, none at all …”
“But what do you have to hide?”
“Hide? Nothing to hide.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose, wiped crumbs from her mouth. Her dark eyebrows pulled together, almost meeting at the smallpox medallion. “But it’s not my favorite topic of conversation, as I’ve told you. Don’t be so dense! And, anyway, how could I possibly know that you’d turn out to be a maniac? That you’d just keep digging at it?”
I laughed, warming to her. She wasn’t remote. Her face knit together and she glared at me. “Bullshit!” she shouted at my laughter.
“Bullshit nothing … You’re right. How could you have known? I’d forgotten I’m a maniac. Out to get you.” I stood up without giving it a thought, compelled by the chauvinistic realization that she was awfully pretty when she was mad. One look from her, knowing what I had in mind, that I was going to touch her, stopped me short.
“I don’t know what it is,” she murmured, “but you do worm it out of me, don’t you?” She paused and put her hands flat on the width of her thighs, her feet drumming on the cabinet door beneath her. Her ankles flashed tan. “Nobody, not a soul I know now, except Ole, of course, knows all this old stuff about me, the archaeology, the prehistory of my life. And, really, why should they? It’s my life, my business … I’m a different person now.” She slid down off the counter and went to stand by the kitchen’s screen door. Rain pattered softly on leaves.
“But why isn’t your name Hook, Kim Hook? Where does Roderick come into it?”
“Foster home,” she said, back to me, voice monotonic, getting it over with; but she must have known this would happen when she made the choice to come to the lodge—she must have. “We went into an orphanage in Duluth after my mother—after Rita, I mean Rita, my aunt—went away and Ted didn’t know how he’d be able to take care of us. Then I went into a foster home. I took their name.” She hugged herself in the doorway, standing straight, legs apart as if to brace herself.
“And your cousin, the boy—Ted’s son—what happened to him?” I poured some fresh coffee and bit into another Danish.
“He was older. He went to a different home, I never saw him again … I wouldn’t have known him any way, would I? I don’t think Ted ever saw him again either. He was older, Ted’s told me the boy resented being taken away from his home … he lost his mother, his father, his home. He never came back to visit Ted, held it all against Ted …”
Later we went back into the front room and I threw fresh logs on the last night’s ashes, lit some newspapers beneath them. We sat down close to the fresh, snapping warmth, me on the couch, Kim on the floor, clasping her knees, staring into the flames. The cold dampness in the air penetrated to the bone. I wondered if she were sorry she’d come. I hoped not but that didn’t keep me from pursuing my own hares across the long fields of her past.
“But you didn’t hold it against Ted? You came back, you stayed in touch even though you were hell-bent on escaping from the past …”
“Sure, why not? I never felt Ted had been unfair to us. He was a sick man. I was too young to hold it against him and when I was older I realized it hadn’t been Ted’s fault … it wasn’t anybody’s fault. Then, when I was older, in my teens, I began to come back to visit Ted on my own, came back to live in the summer, work in the restaurant … He’s not a bad man. Life has played some nasty jokes on Ted, sometimes he’s confused, but he’s not bad.”
“When did you drive up?”
“Late last night. I wasn’t sure I was going to stop and see him so I didn’t tell him I was coming … I might have just driven on through and gone up to Thunder Bay, sometimes I don’t want to see anyone … I need to be alone at times.” She shifted her weight and glanced at me over her shoulder, smiled quickly, nervously. “As it turned out, I decided to see Ted—”
“Are you sorry you stopped?” She looked back again, more tentative than she’d been the other times I’d seen her. Maybe it was the effect of the place, the memories. She shook her head, no.
“I had breakfast with him this morning. He gets up at five thirty or six, says he doesn’t need sleep anymore. He told me you’d been there last night …” She turned to face me, dark-blue eyes shining, searching my face. “I’m not impulsive, you know, but coming out here was an impulse … I wanted to see the place.” She swallowed, sighed. “I thought you might be here. I was sure you’d be here, wasn’t I?”
The fire crackled. I looked down at her in the quiet. My heart fluttered nervously. I felt very young. Her thick dark hair was pulled tightly back in pigtails, the tanned skin stretched tight across her bone structure. Her head was small and delicate and the lines of age etched only faintly, the merest hint of what the distant future might hold.
“Did you know the club members then, when you were a kid? Did you know who they were when you went to Norway Creek … or was that a coincidence? Fate?”
“No, not a coincidence. I knew who they were, vaguely. I’d met them when they came to have a drink or dinner at Ted’s. They would come in once in a while, visit with Ted, because of Rita, the fact that she’d worked for them before she went away, and they were nice, well-behaved men … they’d say hello to me, ask me how school was coming, whatever middle-aged men say to young girls … So, when I finally made the break and went to Minneapolis, I went to the Norway Creek Club—after all, it was the only angle I had, the only connection I had. I called Mr. Dierker and he helped me out. With a word or two to the right people …”
“Did you meet Ole back then?”
“No,” she said, “he wasn’t in the group by then … I met him later, at Norway Creek.”
“I’d have thought by the time you were a teenager you’d have had plenty of financial backing from Ted. I mean, he was in pretty good shape once Rita disappeared, leaving all that money. You could have done anything you wanted, gone to school …”
She shook her head, lips pursed. “You don’t know me, or didn’t know me then. I never let Ted give me any money. It wasn’t mine and I think I always had the funny feeling that Rita might turn up one day and want her money … It was hers, Paul, however she got it. And since no one ever knew where she went, why mightn’t she come back? Seemed quite possible to me.”
“Do you still think she’s coming back?”
“I suppose not,” she sighed, “but then, you never know. She might. Stranger things have happened.”
“Yes,” I said, “they have, indeed. Coming back from the dead is nothing anymore.”
“And who says she’s dead? Nobody knows. It’s a mystery.” A smile twinkled up at me. She’d gotten through the interrogation. I could feel her relief. “It was a matter of pride, Paul. I didn’t want the money. Even then I was beginning to realize that it was important for me to make it on my own, do things my own way.” She stood up. “Th-th-that’s all, folks,” she said.
Together we explored the lodge, an unremarkable but intensely comfortable place, and went outside, where the rain had slackened to a fine mist. The trees dripped and the grass was fat, spongy underfoot. The water beaded up on the oily sweater I wore; she had on a beat-up old khaki windbreaker that was threadbare and bleached clean. We followed a path cut back through the beginning of forest, angling upward past slick rocks and mossy, damp tree trunks. Ahead, a hundred yards from the lodge, a cave yawned like a moist, toothless mouth. The path was almost overgrown, hadn’t been walked on in a long time. Standing at the opening, you could feel a stark chill, like the blast of winter from inside the earth’s hollow.
“It’s the ice cave,” I said. “I’ve heard my father mention it. Sometimes when the ice wasn’t delivered in the old days, they’d keep beer up here. It’s a natural ice cave, year round—look, you can see your breath. Even out here—”
“I don’t like it,” she said, a shiver jostling her voice. “I have claustrophobia, it’s terrible. And the cold … come on, let’s go back … I didn’t know it was up here, let’s go, Paul.” There was a fabric of panic in her voice, irrational, skirting terror. She was pulling at my arm.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s okay. We’ll go back.”
She looked away quickly but I saw her eyes, wide, frightened. I put my arm around her shoulders, instinctively pulled her toward me, a protective gesture, and felt her take a deep breath. Then she pulled away and shook her head with a faint smile. “I’m all right. Really. Just a phobia, everyone has one.” Her hand brushed my, arm, but her mouth was tense; her hand fluttered, moved away. “Don’t worry,” she said, brightly forcing it. “I’ve brought a picnic lunch … I know a good place. I bet you’ll like it.” She was fine again but something had happened back there; I was seeing all sorts of things she’d not shown me before. The view of her past with all its attendant vulnerability acted like a relaxant on me, made me drop my own mask a bit, something I hadn’t done in a very long time. I wondered which one of us had more to fear, more to hide, back there in the corners of our minds.
She drove the Mark IV, a brown bag of groceries in the backseat. We wound all the way back to town, then swept north along the lakeshore for a few miles, past Ted’s, past a scattering of isolated cabins, then down a rutted gravel road toward the lake. Light rain, almost like surf spray, glazed the windshield, and I could smell the water and the wet sand. She pulled off between clumps of gorse rooted in the sand and rock and I followed her down a narrow, natural stairway of rock slab. Driftwood, worm-eaten and smooth as marble, lay everywhere and I was winded when she stopped, gestured at a point of rock and land ahead of us.
“My favorite place on the whole shore,” she panted, excited by the sight of it. “You can just see it, past the brush at the very edge. It’s a miniature castle, a one-room castle … God only knows who built it but I found it years ago and I’ve never seen anyone else here. I’ve never heard anyone even mention it.” She moved on, over the flat edges, across the treacherous loose stones, and I followed her with the brown bag. It wasn’t my element but she seemed at home, an altogether different person from the one at Riverfront Towers; she knew what she was doing; it was as if she’d truly come home.
She’d gotten several yards ahead of me and when she called something back over her shoulder the rumble of the surf washed it away. I smiled and followed, watching her stretch and flex as she climbed up from the stones to the ledge of earth with the slippery grass. I handed up the brown bag and took her hand, pulling myself against her weight. She had color in her cheeks and a big smile across her face; she was the picture of health and security and independence, reminded me of a bitchy, too-blessed girl I’d known in college, a girl who’d seemed unapproachable to all of us who were not ourselves exactly godlike. Instead of making me feel an antique, beset by entropy and creeping damp, Kim pushed me to feel young, to make me want to lose weight and take to regular exercise and recycle myself into the time of my life when I could still fall in love.
“Come on,” she said, tugging my sleeve. “There it is.”
She pushed through some head-high shrubbery, led me into a sandy clearing, circular with a carefully built tower erected in its center. The stones were native, from the large chips of boulder studding the shoreline, and the largest ones at the base could easily have weighed a thousand pounds or more. They had been meticulously placed, mortared, and fit against adjacent stones; a fireplace had necessitated a chimney up one side. There was a single entrance opposite the hearth. At eye level above a wide stone bench was an opening which provided a view of the lake.
We stood inside, out of the lashing rain, which had intensified in the past minutes, and she hugged herself gleefully, happy to be there. I set the bag on the bench and looked at her, at the glittering eyes, the controlled energy as she surveyed the simple interior of her castle.
“It’s always just the way I left it, whenever I come back. See, my logs stacked beside the fireplace, a pile of newspapers, box of matches in an oilskin.” She widened her eyes at the wonder of it all. “Never any evidence of anyone else …” Her pigtails hung forward over her shoulders.
“Whose land is this?”
“No idea. Somebody went to the trouble of building it and just went away. I come here every time I come north … sleep on the bench in the summer. It gets cold at night but the fire is enough to keep you warm.” She started unpacking the groceries. “Lake air makes me hungry.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“You get the fire going,” she said.
The heat radiated from the stones, filling the castle with aromatic, woodsy warmth. When I was done she was uncorking a bottle of wine, pouring it into an old-fashioned blue metal coffeepot she took from under the bench. She dropped in pieces of apple, raisins, orange sections, and cinnamon sticks and put it on the grill above the snapping logs.
While the wind blew an occasional spray of rain through the window, we sat on the earth floor before the fire and ate slabs of crumbling cheddar on fresh bread we tore from the loaf with our fingers. She sliced thick chunks of summer sausage and we washed the garlic away with the spiced hot wine.
“Cozy, isn’t it?” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. “It’s like a nest … when I was a child I always tried to make a nest out of my pillows and blankets, I pretended I was a squirrel. I always thought a squirrel must have it pretty good in his tree. Walt Disney effect, I suppose.” She sighed, munched on cheese. “My analyst never pursued it, much to my surprise. He kept nudging me toward my sex life and I kept telling him that what I most liked to do in bed was build nests and pretend I was a squirrel. Poor man.”
“I like it,” I said. “It’s a long way from real life.”
“Well, maybe this is what’s real. All the rest of it is pretend.”
“Maybe,” I said.
We bundled up again and went for an hour’s walk along the beach, our faces tingling in the rain and wind, leaving a long trail of double tracks. The wind dug at us and we didn’t talk much; it was hard even to think. The enjoyment came from the physical effort and it was the first quiet time I’d had in a long time. Up the curve of shoreline, well beyond any last sight of the castle, she nodded to go back and we turned, went back climbing along the flat ledges of rock that lay wet and black like gigantic shingles.
Anxiously we sucked the hot wine, battling the bone chill. She sat opposite me, the fire between us, our backs propped against heavy stones. She smiled softly, her hands locked round the hot metal cup.
“I’ve never brought anyone else here,” she said solemnly.
“Why me?”
“I honestly don’t know. The fatalist in me surfaces when it comes to you, I don’t know why. I can’t quite seem to get rid of you—I don’t mean that unkindly, Paul. We just keep coming together. It wouldn’t be unusual for most people. But it is very unusual for me.” Her mouth tightened characteristically.
“Without meaning to sound rhetorical, pretentious, or overly windy,” I said, “I don’t know you, who you are, Kim. The more I’m with you, the more I learn about you, the less I know … the less it seems to me I know, the more of a mystery you are.” I heard myself laughing nervously; she watched me levelly.
“You learned a good deal about me this morning,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone who wanted to find out so badly … maybe now you know enough.” It had become a game between us: I seek, I find a bit here, a trinket there, fragments of who and what she was. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to know. It had begun with a suicide and moved on to a murder. Now it had become something within me, something I didn’t want to name.
“Well, there’s something funny going on with us, isn’t there?”
“No point in asking me,” she said. “You’re the one—”
“But there is. You know there is. You can feel it.” I wanted her to admit it.
“Look, I only hope you’re satisfied now. You can’t say I’ve avoided you, that I’ve closed myself to you. I came to you this morning. I wouldn’t have had to, would I?” She shifted against the stone, bent her knees up, looked at me from between them. “Be satisfied with the present, the way I am now … the way you know me now.”
We listened to all the muttering sounds. I threw another piece of driftwood onto the fire. Through the window the sky was darkening.
“Has it occurred to you how much alike we are?” I asked.
“How could it? You’re the one who’s been finding out about me. I know nothing about you.”
“Well, you and I are insulated from life, I think, we’re afraid to let ourselves get caught up in it. We’ve been betrayed, hurt … this morning you told me the story of a child who was batted around like a handball.” I sipped my wine and she sniffed, her chin resting in a bridge of her hands. “If you’re frigid, if, it all fits, in my mind …” I watched her; she remained expressionless, eyes impersonal, listening. “And I’m the same, too far from people to make contact easily. Sometimes I feel like an icy disk skimming through the dark, never touching anything.”
“You’re very poetic,” she said tonelessly.
“You’ve told me some secrets,” I said. “You’ve brought me here, where you’ve always come alone …” I took a deep breath. “Now I’ll take you somewhere … where I’ve never taken anyone else. I’ll tell you a true story.”
I’d been thinking for several days about what happened to me in Finland, when I’d killed a man. I’d never told anyone. General Goode knew the story, its bare facts, but I’d never told him what actually happened. How it felt and what it did to me. He may have known that I hated him, more than hated him, but he didn’t really know why. No one knew but me. I’d never wanted to tell anyone before, not even Anne.
I followed the old man onto the train, up wooden steps into a machine that was very old and drafty and threadbare. My first plan had been to kill him by “accident,” by shoving him onto the track in the path of the locomotive. It was the way they did it in the movies but two men alone on a platform in the middle of Finland, with a stationmaster watching from about twenty paces away and a locomotive that was rolling very slowly to a stop—that was real life and it did not lend itself to murder.
I sat across from him in the uncomfortable, rocking compartment, watched him doze intermittently between spells of staring out into the utter darkness. It was something over an hour to Helsinki and it was a peculiar necessity I faced: If the old man reached Helsinki with his tattered briefcase, both he and I would be killed. He by the Finnish Communist apparat, I almost surely by the CIA. If I, on the other hand, managed to terminate the old man and deliver his briefcase to a Mr. Appleton at the arrival dock in Helsinki, then Mr. Appleton would not kill me and I’d be in London by noon of the next day.
As the train bumped along, the old man’s noggin bouncing in his half sleep, I considered my situation with unalloyed dismay. Terror is a relative thing—relative to what you are in danger of losing, in this case my life—and what I felt had surely oozed into a netherland on the far side of terror. I had become, through my own innocence and the calculations of General Jon Goode, a man with a mission, without the slightest hint of what I was actually doing, only that it had to be done. Once in, never out, Goode told me a safe time later in the course of apologizing for having landed me in such a “pickle”—his word, not mine.
I did not know then, nor do I know now, what it was I delivered to Mr. Appleton’s office in Helsinki (he dealt in bicycles, his office cluttered with instruction manuals, spare chains, bicycles in various states of assembly as if they’d been abandoned in haste). He accepted it, a thick manila envelope, and asked me to return the next day. He hoped I would enjoy myself and urged me to take in the world’s largest bookstore and wasn’t I surprised to find it in Helsinki? Mr. Appleton had thinning hair, a Ben Turpin mustache, and when he stood up he looked quite miraculously like a human bridge piling.
The next day he told me that “my friend in London”—that would be Goode, who had prevailed on me to do this dirty work over a dinner he was buying me at Claridge’s because I was the son of an old friend—had another small errand for me to undertake. I asked too many questions, because Mr. Appleton became cross with me and concluded a most persuasive oration by smashing one of those snowfall paperweights against his office wall. He told me that I had to do what he asked, that there was no reason for me to know what the errand involved—only that my life depended on it. The discussion took several hours but that was the thrust of it; it was unfortunate but I would have to make contact with an elderly doctor in a village not too far from Helsinki and pick up a package. The village was not safe for Mr. Appleton and his friends; I would be perfect, in Mr. Appleton’s view, and he told me that the doctor had been alerted to have ready for me what I was to take out.
Nothing went quite the way it was supposed to, of course, and when I got to the village the doctor had decided not to cooperate. We left notes for each other in the best tradition of pulp fiction; under no circumstances were we to be seen together. For three days, while I nervously pretended to be a tourist (not the easiest thing to do in a village of only a few hundred souls in Finland, during the restrictive, windblown, snowy winter), we argued in our pathetic written notes. I spied on him, saw who he was, kept to myself. Finally, confused, I saw him steal out that night and, like an animal scurrying for its life, make for the railway station.
Mr. Appleton had given me instructions for several possible eventualities. In case the doctor took flight, in whatever direction, I had only one task: kill him. He told me several ways to do it. If he had the briefcase, take it. Give it to him, Appleton, in Helsinki. He explained with great care the crucial advantage I had in this unlikely, obscene situation; the other side (I have no idea who they were) had no way of knowing me or what I was up to. By the time they discovered it, it would be much too late to do anything about it. Thus, I was the man my country needed. It was insane.
But Mr. Appleton was, I was absolutely certain, capable of killing me. And all I could think of was how best to save my own skin. Watching the night whisk by in spotty bits of moonlight, listening to the heavy breathing of the doctor across the way, I fought it out of my mind.
Who was less likely to kill me—Appleton or the lads who were going gunning for the doctor? If I killed the old man, Appleton had told me I was safe, out of it, on my way. If I failed to kill the old man, Appleton had assured me that he himself would kill me. But would he? Would he really kill me? Would I die without ever knowing what I’d stumbled into?
I killed the old man with the .38-caliber pistol Mr. Appleton had given me. I did it in the compartment while he slept, pressing the barrel where I thought his heart would be. I couldn’t risk a head shot; I didn’t want anyone to know he was dead until, at least, the train reached Helsinki. I got off the train in a suburb, took a taxi to the railroad terminal, and surprised Mr. Appleton, who was waiting to greet me and take my briefcase or kill me.
I felt as if I’d turned into a dark hallway where I would walk forever. I heard Appleton chuckling underneath the absurd brushlike mustache, felt his huge hand on my back. He told me he was sorry I’d gotten involved and had to do what I did, but I should remember that it was a war and we all had to be ever vigilant.
I didn’t see Goode in London; I was afraid I’d try to kill him with my bare hands. For months, then years, I dreamed about the old man, the white stubble on his chin, the deep lines scooped out of the pink white cheeks, the smell of cologne and age. I would wake up in the night, nauseated, hearing the rush of breath, the rustling of dry lips, the soft grunt from the unconscious sleeping man as he took the impact of the bullet …
My life was never the same. I became a different, less human being and I mourned the loss of myself. I split apart, as if cleaved by an ax, and half died. Half a man remained and that half knew a terrible thing: It had killed a whole man to save only half of itself. There was a built-in error. How could the thing that remained ever prove that the price paid for continued existence was worth it? And how could it ever reach out to another human, a fellow, and make the connection? There was something missing. Something necessary.
It was dark when I finished the story. I felt as if I’d undergone some extremely punishing physical activity. I was out of breath and my memory had been beaten to jelly. Self-consciously I tried to laugh and produced a groan, tried to muffle it by clearing my throat. Confession was good for the soul, and I’d never quite located mine.
The shape that was Kim, a shadow in the faint glow from the embers, leaned toward me, her face pink in the memory of the flames and her cheeks wet. I heard her sniffle, saw her hand swipe across her face. She rested her hand on my arm, consoling.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve cried, too. I’ve cried for that poor old man … but he’s still there, there’s no getting free of him. He’s there, he’ll always be there. He’ll die when I die, only then.” I took her hand in mine, felt the wetness of her tears.
“No,” she whispered, “no, for you, I’m crying for you, not the old man.” She swallowed hard. “Killing someone to save yourself … We’re programmed to survive. It’s not unnatural to kill, particularly not for survival. Jesus …” She pulled her hand away and threw a pebble into the embers, sparks showering upward, a bright fountain. “He was right, your Mr. Appleton. It’s a war, it was a war, and war rules are different. You got caught in it, you had to kill someone. It was the only way out. Sometimes you have to do things …”
“It’s the living with it,” I said. “The killing was easy. Knowing what you did, the choice you made … that’s hard.”
She let herself lean against me as we walked back across the ledges to the car. I had my arm around her shoulder. We drove in silence, sat quietly in the turnaround before the lodge. Rain came and went, mist clinging and ground fog building up in pockets.
“Thank you for the picnic,” I said. “The whole day. It’s been a nice surprise. Better than nice.”
She smiled and nodded. I leaned across the car, touched her face, turning her toward me. I kissed her tentatively and she kissed me back, without passion, but comfortably, without resistance. It didn’t last long.
“I’m going back to spend the evening with Ted. Go to bed early. Days outside in weather like this can wear you out.”
I nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I enjoyed the day, too.”
I got out and looked back through the window. I could taste her faintly on my mouth. She pulled the huge car in a slow, deliberate arc and moved serenely off into the night, snatched from my sight by an abrupt turning in the narrow roadway.
I stood on the porch for a while watching the clouds of fog gather around the lodge like the mists of Brigadoon. My father and all the rest of them, the good and the bad, had stood where I stood, watching identical nighttimes softly closing around them. I was aware of them, the fact that they had been there once, frail and human and foolish, but the woman was pushing them into the perspective they deserved. She was in the here and now, and I had told her my most awesome secret. And I had kissed her, which may not have been much of a seventies accomplishment but then I wasn’t much of a seventies man.
I sat on a living-room couch, half reading a beat-up paperback copy of C. P. Snow’s The Masters which had been left in a pocket of my suitcase from a trip long ago. But the image in my mind was Dana Andrews in Laura, sitting in the empty apartment with rain streaming down the windowpanes, falling in love with a painting. He was a forties man and I knew how his mind worked. And I wondered what the day had meant to Kim, the day and the kiss. It seemed so large to me. Could it possibly have meant anything comparable to her?
Unfortunately just enough of my mind was still functioning to make me realize that though she’d now revealed with a flourish the mystery of her parentage, she was still mostly a puzzlement. She had said nothing about Billy Whitefoot, where he’d come to play his part in her life. She’d ignored the story of Larry Blankenship. Yet they were there, gentlemen of indistinct proportions, mute in the past. I could see them, I kept signaling to them, but I couldn’t make them hear.
I was back to the facts of what I knew. Rita had been employed by the club members and Rita had been Kim’s surrogate mother. And Rita had gone to the lodge one winter night and never been heard from again. And the members of the hunting and fishing club had taken care of the little girl when she’d come to the city. She owed something to those men who had reached out to a frightened, north country girl with no place to go … But did she really? Did she ever owe anybody anything? It didn’t seem to be in her makeup. She kept even, she never fell behind when it came to her debts.
Later, in bed with The Baseball Encyclopedia and the career of Hank Sauer, who had become the Cubs’ big home-run hitter after Bill Nicholson had been shipped to Philly, I got to thinking about the disconnected, random selection of people and events which make up the grid of one’s life. All those Cubs I’d watched as a kid, they’d come from all over the country, from dozens of Depression backgrounds, and entertained me at Wrigley Field, where you could smell the greenery of the vines on the walls in the outfield.
What had happened that day in the lobby was much the same thing. A man I’d never known commits suicide and the event develops a hungry life of its own, reaching out ravenously to consume whomever it touched. Harriet, Tim, the club members … Rita and Carver and old Ted. And Kim. If Larry Blankenship hadn’t pulled the trigger, I’d never have met Kim. It was a bond, like a muscle, flexing, pulling us together. I felt close to her and, through her, to all the points at which she was bound to the pattern …
To Larry by marriage; to Harriet by hate; to Tim through his sense of responsibility; to Rita by her mother’s blood; to Ted by chance; to Billy by marriage; to Darwin by lust; to Anne by friendship; to Ole by love and caring; to the members of the club by fate.
To me … by what?
It made a hell of a list. Great for an old-timers’ game. Maybe I could throw out the first ball. Finally I went to sleep.
I woke up lonely and cold, badly in need of some human companionship. I resisted the faint desire to call Kim. She needed plenty of room. I hoped that she had some thinking to do about her own life, about Ole; but in the morning light I was unsure of her. There was the nagging fear that she didn’t take me so seriously, that we were on different wave-lengths like Chekhovian characters rattling on to each other in our own private worlds, neither hearing the other.
I packed my suitcase and went outside to find a brisk, clear morning with heavy dew lingering in the grass. The Chat and Chew Cafe was steaming with eggs and bacon, several locals fueling up for the day, glad to see the sun hanging in a pale-blue sky above the lake. Dolly smiled at me when I came through the door and I sat down next to my friend Jack, the cop.
“You must figure I do nothin’ but eat,” he growled. “And you wouldn’t be too damn far wrong. Har, har, siddown, siddown, you find your daddy’s place all right?”
I nodded, ordered the ranch breakfast, which included a steak and hashbrowns as well as eggs, the works. Hot coffee perked me up.
“Y’know, ever since I was talking to you the other day, I been thinking about what I said, about Ted and Rita, the two kids—”
“What about the kids?”
“Well, there was the boy, he was older, course, and he was their natural child, or so everybody said.” He mopped up some egg with a corner of toast, leaving a yellow stain on his lower lip. “Well, I shouldn’t say that because a lot of people figured that maybe it was someone else who put that particular bun in Rita’s oven, not old Ted … but, what the hell, Rita and old Ted said it was their own, and what harm was there in that? Officially the boy was theirs. Robert, Robert Hook, that was the boy’s name. Real fat kid, eyes just like raisins in a rice pudding, always looked like he was peeking outa that fat face. Real quiet kid, always had his head down, looking at the sidewalk. Funny, the dumb stuff you remember, ain’t it?
“And then there was the girl. I reckon Rita was real close to that sister of hers, down there in the Windy City, Chicago. She musta been gone, aw hell, six months taking care of her down there … you know how sisters are sometimes. I had a pair of sisters, kinda unhealthy, they was so close. Anyway, she came home with the little baby girl, Shirley … just a tiny baby. Then once Rita took off and Ted was in bad shape, he sent ’em out to the orphanage …
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What is this Shirley thing? I thought the girl’s name was Kim?”
He looked at me, surprised. “Oh, you know the family, then?”
“No, I just happen to know the girl … Kim.”
“Well, you’re right about that, but they didn’t name girls Kim back in those days, see. Little Shirley decided she’d become Kim once she was gone. When she came back to town, years later, hell, she was all growed up, one of them damned teenagers, and she was Kim by then … made sure we all got it right, too. So we called her Kim Hook, but she’d taken another last name—I forget.” He looked at my plate. “Eat up, for God’s sake, your steak’s gettin’ cold. She still visits Ted, I hear, little Shirley.” He watched me go to work on the steak and eggs. “Look, though, here’s my point. I got to thinking about our little chat with Dolly the other day and I was reminiscing with a couple of the boys havin’ a beer the way you do, y’now, and somebody remembered something about the Indian guide I told you about … Running Buck?”
Dolly stopped to listen, sweat beaded on her brow, still smelling of powder. Two girls were bearing the brunt of the serving and she rested a fat arm on the pie cabinet, blew on a hot cup of coffee. She listened attentively, eyes flickering away at her clientele.
I said, “The man who took Rita out to the lodge that last night.”
“Well, this guide had a kid with him most of the time, kid was ’bout the only person he ever hung around with or said more ’n two words to. Me and my memory, I can’t recollect the kid’s name—”
“I remember the boy,” Dolly interrupted, eyebrows knit as if on the verge of a discovery. “But I can’t get his name either. Anyway, he must of been Running Buck’s son, wouldn’t you expect?”
“Funny thing is,” Jack said, pausing for emphasis, chins quivering over his open-necked blue policeman’s shirt, “the kid’s still in these parts, that’s what I remembered whilst we was having a beer! Hell, he come back after going down to the Cities for a spell but he didn’t stay long, went off to college somewhere, Mankato or St. Cloud, anyway now he’s running the Indian Affairs Center up in Jasper, up on the Range …”
“Running Buck’s boy,” Dolly said. “Sure is funny the way people turn out, ain’t it? Who’d a thought it?”
“I figured I oughta tell you, seein’ as how you turned up here for breakfast.” Jack scowled in thought. “If you’re interested in the club, the boy might be able to fill you in on some details, your father and his friends. He used to help Running Buck, I’m sure he worked out there at the lodge from time to time … doing errands, odd jobs.” He drained his coffee cup and covered it with his hand.
“Where’s Jasper?” I asked.
“North and west of here, not too far from the border. Ely, Coleraine, Hibbing, Virginia, Jasper, they’re all up there together.” He gave me directions and I finished my breakfast, listening to him ramble on. “Once you get there, go to the center and just ask for the director, name just on the tip of my tongue—anyway, he must be So-and-So Running Buck, don’t you see? I don’t know.”
The highway branched off to the left north of town and I had to pass Ted’s on the way. The bronze Mark IV was sitting in the sun. The morning felt like fall, clean and fresh and pure, as I headed inland toward the Canadian border, toward Jasper.