15

The Gates of the City

Flying east out of Salt Lake City, Mulheisen realized a simple truth: The modern city is similar to ancient cities. He had taken this route for no particular reason, except that it happened to be quicker in this time slot, and anyway, he thought it would be more interesting to take a different route home, instead of the Billings-Minneapolis route he had come out on (it had nothing to do with the gut-wrenching fighter-jet take-offs and landings on the Butte-Bozeman-Billings run, he told himself). Out of Salt Lake, a much bigger jet climbed out powerfully and majestically over the Wasatch Front, nonstop for Detroit. Mulheisen settled back with his insight about ancient cities and soon recollected a visit to Mexico City, many years before.

In those days he always took his vacation. He had long since quit doing that. He might take an occasional day or two, if he were out of town anyway, and sometimes he took a few days to visit an old friend who had moved to Reno. But he rarely took a formal vacation anymore. But someone had told him that Mexico, D.F., had purchased the old Detroit Street Railways trolley cars, and it occurred to him that he would like to see the Gratiot Avenue car that he used to ride with his father when they would go to a ballgame downtown. This was a very special memory, involving straw hats and men smoking cigars and the first sight of the green field within the tiered walls of Briggs Stadium. So he flew to Mexico City.

He liked it very much, although it was a mess, of course. There were already many too many people. But the city seemed quite livable in the regions that he explored. And he did get to see the old Gratiot Avenue car and ride on it. Unfortunately, it did not go very fast, as it used to do when the motorman got out toward Seven Mile Road and Eight Mile Road. In Mexico City it stopped on every block and it was loaded with people. But he rode it a couple of times anyway and enjoyed it. They hadn't bothered to paint it, apparently. It was still the same pale color with dark green trim. They had painted over the lettering, but “D.S.R.” had bled through, faintly.

One day he got off the trolley and was walking along a big street (he couldn't remember its name) when a voice called out, “Hey, Yank.” He turned and confronted an old Mexican man sitting on the steps of a very large building that housed the national health insurance agency. The old man was dark and wrinkled but dressed in a neat and clean suit of yellowed linen. He had evidently taken off his shoes, but now he slipped them back on. He had no socks. He stood up. He was about five feet four inches, including his panama hat. “I knew you were a Yank,” he said, in very good English.

“You must have spent some time in the States,” Mulheisen said. It was very bright here in the street and hot. He wondered how long this conversation would take and if it meant only handing over a few pesos (the peso was worth much more at this time).

“Yes, I have been in many cities of the United States,” the old man said. “Not just Texas cities or California cities, but also in Chicago, Illinois, and Dayton, Ohio, not to mention Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Have you been in those cities?”

“Yes,” Mulheisen said, “but it is hot. Would you like to go to a cervezeria?”

“No, I can't leave here, but I would appreciate something to drink, if you don't mind.” He gestured at a vendor of soft drinks, not far off. Mulheisen went to get the old man a bottle of warm citron drink.

“Why can't you leave here?” Mulheisen asked when he had brought the drink.

“My daughter works here. I need to see her.”

Hundreds of people were entering and leaving the building constantly. The old man watched them out of the corner of his eye while he talked to Mulheisen.

“How long have you been here?” Mulheisen asked.

This was the fourth day, the old man said. He said he had been a schoolteacher. He taught English. He was also a poet and a short-story writer. He had a collection of his short stories and poems with him, in an old and cracked leather briefcase. They were typed with a very faintly inked ribbon on blue-lined school exposition paper for a three-ring binder, with many “xxxx” markings on several words in each paragraph. They were written in English and had titles such as “The Aged Crone at El Pastor Fido Home.”

“That's where I live,” the old man pointed out. “It is a retirement home, as you would say. It is an infamous place.” The home was located outside the city. The old man had gotten a ride with a market farmer part of the way, then walked the rest. He walked home each evening, after the offices closed.

“Some of these stories have been rejected by The New Yorker and Esquire, even by Playboy magazine.” He showed Mulheisen the printed rejection slips. “The stories are too risqué for Mexican magazines. They are about prostitution, one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. This is a terrible country for censorship. Sometimes the American editors send me five dollars, which I have told them to hide within the sheets of the story, for there are thieves in the post office.”

“Does your daughter know you are waiting?” Mulheisen asked. “Did you call her to tell her that you were coming?”

The old man smiled forbearingly. “You Americans.” He chuckled. “Not everyone has a telephone. The home would never allow me to use their telephone, even if I could pay and if Daisy had a telephone.”

“You could have written to her,” Mulheisen pointed out.

“I don't know which office she works in, or where she lives. She won't tell me. But I will see her today. This is the last door where she could go in.”

Mulheisen didn't know if the old man had ever intercepted his daughter, but he had seen Helen Sedlacek this morning at the Salt Lake City airport. As a policeman he was used to the drill whereby you monitor airports, bus stations, and train stations to intercept wanted criminals, but he also knew that the tactic didn't often succeed, since most people drove cars. Modern cities were too porous when the police were dealing with auto traffic. But he realized now that when it came to air travel, a great hub such as Salt Lake City was like the walled cities of yore. They had just a few gates, and one could watch for travelers there, in just the way that the old man waited patiently for his daughter to go in or come out of one of the four great doorways of the national health building in Mexico City.

At Salt Lake he had just caught a glimpse of Helen on the conveyor system. She was going in the opposite direction. By the time he hopped off the conveyor bearing him toward a different wing of the huge complex, the wing where the gateway to the east was located, and doubled back, he could not find her. But what he soon learned, however, was that she must have gotten on a plane to the north. That was where that gateway lead, the same one he had come in on. She was flying to Butte, perhaps, or Spokane, even Seattle.

Mulheisen found the gate where the next Butte-bound flight boarded and showed his identification. A helpful young woman from Delta Airlines checked the passenger list and found no “Helen Sedlacek” or any similar name. The plane hadn't boarded yet. Mulheisen cruised the other gates without success. He didn't see her in any of the little shops or snack bars, either. So, he had missed her, this time.

For several minutes he wandered about, wondering if he should interrupt his flight to make a more protracted search, perhaps with airport authorities. But he realized that it would take too much time, and anyway, he didn't have a warrant. Indeed, he had no grounds whatsoever for detaining her if she were unwilling to be interviewed. She was a suspect, that was all.

On the plane east, he pondered the situation and decided that she was probably not just passing through Salt Lake. That would be a mere coincidence. If a person were starting out from any place in the United States, the chances that they would pass through Salt Lake City and have to change planes there were not high. Not remote by any means, but not high. On the other hand, if she were staying in the area, she would be bound to travel in and out of a handful of gates that served an enormous region. It seemed to him that the odds were quite good that she was in the area. The question was, how long would she remain?

Jimmy Marshall was at Detroit Metropolitan to pick him up. When they got past the preliminary foolishness—"Where'd you leave your horse?"—Mulheisen explained his notion about watching for Helen at Salt Lake City. Marshall thought it was a total waste of time. The region served by that airport was larger than Europe. If Helen Sedlacek were using a different name, it would be a matter of physically monitoring the gateways. Jimmy Marshall couldn't imagine that the Salt Lake City police, or any other agency, had the personnel to spare on this scale to aid the Detroit police, particularly since they had no arrest warrant.

“Not yet, anyway,” Mulheisen said. He explained about the shotguns Jacky had retrieved from the cabin on Garland Butte. Mulheisen had brought the guns back with him, along with ample latent fingerprints from the house, which could be compared with known prints of Helen Sedlacek and the prints found in Iowa City. As for Joe Service, he had no prints on record, as far as they knew. But if Joe Humann was Joe Service, he would now.

If there was any kind of forensic evidence linking Helen to any felony, Mulheisen felt that the airlines—there were only a handful—could be pressured into at least a computer monitor of their reservations system, a kind of flag on the name “Helen Sedlacek,” maybe even any “Helen S——” flying into or out of Salt Lake City. When people used a false name, they didn't usually falsify it much, especially amateurs. “Let's find out what Helen's mother's maiden name was,” he suggested. “Also, wasn't she married once? I seem to remember something about that. What was her married name? It doesn't seem likely—I suppose divorced women don't like to use the name of a man they rejected, or who rejected them—but a running woman may be desperate enough.”

Back at the precinct—more greetings of “Where's your boots, podner?"—the file revealed that Helen had been married before, but the name wasn't indicated. A check at the Wayne County records produced a birth certificate and Oakland County found a marriage license. She was born to Mary Kaparich and Sidami Sedlacjich. She had been licensed to marry Ara Koldanian.

Mulheisen was intrigued. A Serb marries an Armenian? It seemed unusual. There were a lot of Armenians in the Detroit area, mostly on the west side, he thought—Dearborn, the downriver communities. They were hardworking, enterprising people, in his experience. Like the Serbs, they were Eastern Orthodox, but he assumed there were significant differences in the two churches. Marshall agreed to run the two names past the airlines and also to set up an interview with Koldanian: He might have something useful to tell them about Helen.

There was also about two weeks of phone calls to return and reports to be updated, developments on old cases to review, and . . . About five o'clock, he looked up to see Jimmy leaning against the doorjamb, smiling wryly.

“So, Mul,” Jimmy said, “you ready to move to Montana?”

Mulheisen shook his head. He was tired and ready to go home. “It's all right,” he said. “It's fine. I liked Butte. It's kind of a cranky, interesting old industrial town. But to live there or work there? Nah. Everything's so open, you're so exposed to the elements. I don't think so. It'd be colder than a brass jockstrap in the winter, I bet. Also, the newspaper is a pretty decent rag, but it doesn't cover the Tigers much, and it's hard to get good cigars. Nice country, though.”

“What about the women?” Marshall wanted to know. “What'd you think of those cowgirls?”

“Cowgirls?” Mulheisen laughed. “I'll tell you one thing, though, it seems like those women are a lot freer than around here. They're ready to jump out of their clothes at the drop of a hat.” He recounted the incident at Antoni's sauna and Sally McIntyre's cheerful shucking of her jeans at the hot springs. Marshall was deeply impressed.

Sometimes when Mulheisen looked at his mother, he just about didn't recognize her. It seemed to him that she had once been older, fatter, bulkier. She wore flowery dresses once upon a time. She had a bosom once. The name Cora didn't seem odd, in those times; it seemed normal among her friends, Hazel and Grace and Mabel.

He had been only a little boy, of course. His father was still alive, still going off to work every day in his brown or blue or gray suit, wearing a fedora and an overcoat. A pleasant man, he wore wire-rimmed glasses and smelled faintly of Old Spice aftershave lotion. He was the half of the salt-and-pepper shaker set that had disappeared. A grandma-and-grandpa set. He would be salt, maybe. His mother would be pepper, though evidently not a very hot pepper, just darker than salt.

She was thicker then, and not only did she wear a flowered housedress but even, and always, an apron. Her hair was longer then, but already gray, in a bun on the back of her head, and she wore wire-rimmed glasses, too. She smelled of talc and a perfume that he believed was called White Shoulders, though perhaps it was just lilac water.

In the intervening years, his mother had become younger while undeniably getting older. Her face was more lined, but she had become leaner, tanned, her bosom had disappeared, and her hair was quite short and a more steely gray. She wore contact lenses most of the time, but when she wore glasses, they were one of several pairs in Italian frames and never, never wire-rimmed. It appeared that she spent quite a nice sum on sunglasses. She wore slacks, bulky sweaters, boots (usually colorful rubber ones, or sturdy hiking ones), running shoes, a startling variety of stylish but clearly sturdy and protective jackets, anoraks, and parkas. She seemed to have a lot of gear: bicycles, binoculars, helmets, special gloves, backpacks, cameras. And she talked knowledgeably and interestedly about all of it.

How all this had happened, Mulheisen didn't know. It had been gradual. Her round face had leaned into this finely wrinkled but leathery one so slowly that he hadn't noticed how. For one thing he didn't see a lot of her, generally speaking. For days, even weeks, their only communication was via notices attached to the refrigerator with magnets. Even these magnets had changed; where once they were bunnies and ducks, now they were embossed with old railway emblems, or the logos of environmentalist organizations.

They did have a memorable conversation on the evening that Mulheisen came home from Montana. He got home about six. He was surprised to find her there. He had gotten used to not seeing her, to communicating on the refrigerator. She had just come back herself a few hours earlier, from the Gulf Coast. She had been following the migration of cranes. She was delighted to hear that he'd been to Montana. Butte, she said, wasn't far from Red Rocks Lake, where the trumpeter swans were. If he went back, he ought to take a run down there and also check out the possibility of wolves on the Idaho-Utah border.

She observed that he looked tired, but also refreshed. He did feel refreshed, he said. It had been nice to get away. She watched him with interest and then said that he ought to get away more often, maybe permanently.

He'd been thinking about that, he told her. He had been wondering if he ought not to make a change. But . . . it was hard.

Usually for the good, though, was his mother's observation. Then, apparently lapsing into a reflective mood, she said that she had experienced three or four major changes in her life, and every time she had been afraid, fearful that the change was not going to be for the best. Marriage was one of those times. Giving birth was another. In a conventional way, of course, one was supposed to think of these changes as positive, but when it was happening to you it didn't always seem that way.

The biggest change, she supposed, came when his father died. But that too had turned out to be liberating. And then discovering the birds—that was a real liberation.

She was thrilled to discover birds . . . and also shocked. Having lived for a good long time, she had not been prepared to find that she knew nothing about the hundreds of beautiful, colorful, even spectacular birds that just ordinarily surrounded her. She didn't know how this could have happened. One day she had been aware, if she had been asked, that there were sparrows, robins, chickens, ducks, and maybe eagles. Within another day or two she had discovered a rose-breasted grosbeak (an incredibly gorgeous bird, not imported, but sitting in the plum tree in her own yard), then a yellow chat, several warblers, and a golden-crowned kinglet, a green heron. Most important, she realized that her life had always been surrounded by creatures of surpassing beauty, elegance, and mystery. It still shocked her to think that these fabulous beings had been invisible to her, simply because of ignorance and an inability to see.

All it had taken was a single walk around her own yard and down to the St. Clair River with a woman she had known for many years, a fellow past matron of the Eastern Star, who happened to be a birdwatcher. From that had come an incredible sequence of discovery, enchantment, and finally devotion to the causes of the environment and ecology.

She was silent for a good long time, evidently reflecting on this remarkable transformation. Suddenly, she said, “Not all changes are liberating, of course. I never told you—we thought it was better not to—that I had a child long before you. She didn't live very long, just a few days. Her name was Mary, after my mother. After that, things were"—she hesitated—"difficult between your father and me. But, we got over it and ten years later you were born.” She smiled.

Mulheisen was thunderstruck. A sister he had never known about? Years of his parents looking at one another in a special way, of saying things in a special tone, and he was not privy to it! He would be unable now to recollect some of these moments, to reconstruct the situation. His father was gone, his mother would be gone before too much longer, and only now he was learning that there was a whole aspect of life in the house where he had grown up to which he had no access. He wanted to ask a million questions, but as he looked at his mother she just shook her head. “Don't spend even a minute thinking about it,” she said. “Your father and I were stupid enough to let it bother us for years, until you came along. It was a waste of time. We never figured it out.”

There was, of course, yet another change awaiting her, she said. This would be the big one. She had every reason to hope that it would be as liberating and exciting as the changes that had gone before.