Secret Father (7 page)

He led me out into the newly glistening sunshine. His sky-blue limousine, a Lincoln, was at the curb now, nose to tail with my black Mercedes. My driver was at his passenger door, waiting. Healy's, a blue-uniformed airman, was coming around his car, having just closed the far door for someone else, a passenger already in the rear seat. As Healy and I approached the curb, the airman saluted.

I sensed the tension in Gerhard, the positive energy it took not to raise his arm at the infamous angle, like the positive energy it had taken me, moments before, not to say "sir."

Healy called his farewell to me: "The kids will be fine." Then, with a wave of the folder, he ducked into his car. He said something to the passenger who was already there, another man in uniform whose profile I glimpsed. He was blond.

Stooping to my own car, I knew that the general was right, provided all that he said was true—knowing equally that all that he said was not.

A mile or two from Lindsay Air Station was the center of Wiesbaden, as defined by the barrel-vaulted
Hauptbahnhof
Above the red-brick railroad station was a sentry-like clock tower, its spiked dome evoking the helmet of a kaiser's cavalier. Before the station stood a three-tiered Roman fountain around which the light automobile traffic of a Saturday morning flowed. Opposite the station a broad park was spread, acres of grass, trim as a bowling green. Clusters of spring flowers in every color wore the beads of the recent rain like a dust of glass.

Wiesbaden, a hospital town in the war, had not been badly bombed, and so it alone of Rhineland cities retained its prewar beauty. Running along one side of the park were the Baroque nineteenth-century buildings of the municipality, and along the other, the colonnades of the
Kurhaus,
site of the ancient hot-spring baths. Next to the
Kurhaus
was the elegant casino, the
Spielbank.
One client of mine, bringing me here in the winter, had joked, at Chase's expense, that
Spielbank
means "play bank," while another client had let drop that Dostoyevsky's
The Gambler
had been set there.

As my car approached the three-tiered fountain, sliding into the traffic rotary immediately in front of the station, I impulsively instructed Gerhard to pull over. I told him to keep the motor running, then left the car for the station, thinking of that gambler. In the ticket hall, I found a pair of telephone booths, chose one, and put a ten-pfennig piece into its slot, my slot machine. I dialed the number I had memorized in the general's foyer.

"General Healy's quarters." I assumed it was the orderly who answered, although I had not heard his voice during my visit. He spoke so flatly it was as if those three were the only words in his vocabulary.

"I would like to speak with Mrs. Healy, please. Kindly tell her this is Michael Montgomery's father."

A long time passed.

Then the one sharply articulated word, "Hello?"

"Mrs. Healy, forgive this interruption. I had the feeling that with General Healy having to rush off, you and I hadn't quite completed our conversation."

Again a long silence.

Then, so quietly I wasn't sure I'd heard, "Had we begun it?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Our conversation. Had we begun it?"

"I am only trying to understand what's going on with my son."

"I really ... have ... nothing to add to what my husband told you."

"You said you know Michael. You said you like him."

"I do. Yes."

"Can you imagine how I feel? How unlike him it is to have done this?"

"Done what?"

"Not come home. Not tell me."

"Oh."

"What do you think he has done?" I waited a long time for her answer. Finally I said, "I know you are worried, as I am. Why are you worried, Mrs. Healy? Your husband says there is nothing to worry about, but he is worried, too. I can tell. We're all worried parents. That's why I called you."

"Not worried about the same things."

"What?"

"I cannot talk to you, Mr. Montgomery."

"Mrs. Healy, Michael is—" I checked myself—stopped myself from blurting, "Michael is all I have." That I shamefully depended on my child for emotional equilibrium had not been true when Edie had made the charge, but it was true now. I had almost just said so. Such was the forbidden line I was already being dragged across, as if I knew what lay ahead.

I veered, saying, "Michael has had his problems, Mrs. Healy. And I would just be far more at ease knowing what is going on."

"I wish to be able to help you. I do not know myself, as you say, what is going on. I do not know where Ulrich is—your son, or Katharine."

"Ulrich? Katharine?"

"Rick. He is also called Rick.
I
call him Rick. They call Katharine Kit. With Americans always the
Spitzname.
"

"Not always. My son is—" But I stopped. If he had a nickname, would I know it? This woman would.

She finished my sentence. "Your son is Michael. It is true. A good full name for him. Michael the archangel."

"You don't know where they are, Mrs. Healy? I gathered from what your husband said that you did know. Nürburgring. The Grand Prix race. The sports car club."

"There is a club," she said. "And the race was what Rick told his father and me. But it is not true. Rick lied to us. They are not at races. They are not at Nürburg. My husband concluded that yesterday afternoon."

"And so called Mr. Jones at the dormitory."

"Yes."

"So your son, my son, this girl—they simply disappeared?"

"For them it
is
an adventure, the
Lerche,
lark. I am satisfied that my husband is right about that. The young people have no sense of danger."

"What danger?" I heard the involuntary escalation in the pitch of my voice. "Your husband is tracking them now? And he is doing it surreptitiously?"

There was a loud noise behind her, in the background, a door banging, a carton falling, something. The sudden hollowness in my ear told me that she had cupped the mouthpiece of her phone. She spoke to someone, a crisp order in German I could not make out. Then to me, with an edge, she declared, "I have nothing to say to you more. It is impossible that you and I should talk together in this way."

"Not impossible at all, Mrs. Healy, since we are doing it. We have something important in common, you and I."

"What is that?"

"I don't know. You tell me."

When she did not answer, I thought, crazily enough, Spook! The wife of a spook. The exotic, mysterious German wife of a man whose wife should have been anything but.

She had just admitted that her son had lied, that her husband had lied, too. Lied to me. She had allowed it.

I expected her to hang up, but I waited. A full minute passed and she still had not disconnected, and I thought, She is considering the question—what we have in common. And now I knew. "You are serious about your son," I said.

"Absolutely."

"So am I about mine."

"Where are you?" she asked abruptly. The change in her tone, I understood, meant a new decision.

"The
Hauptbahnhof,
" I answered. "A pay phone."

"Where is your car?"

"Outside. My driver's waiting."

"Do not return to your car," she said. Authority came easily to her, and for the first time since the evening before, I found it possible to suspend what had made me suspicious. "You must do exactly as I tell you. Your car is being followed. Leave the station by a side door. Take an auto-taxi to Hainerberg. Browse in the base exchange. Become lost in it. Then walk up the hill to the clinic, where there will be more taxis. Be sure you are not followed. Take a second taxi to the Russian Chapel. The driver will know. Wait there."

The disconnecting click came so quickly I knew she did it with her finger.

 

The Russian Chapel was visible from everywhere in the Rhine River valley. A sepulchral shrine with three golden onion domes, it sat on top of a small mountain on the eastern edge of the city. A local duke had it built a hundred years before, in memory of his wife, a niece of the czar, after she died giving birth to her first child. I had seen the chapel only from a distance, but I needed no taxi driver to tell me where it was. I'd had it pointed out on practically every visit to Wiesbaden. None of my hosts ever seemed to know if the child, whether boy or girl, had lived or died.

The surprise in actually visiting the chapel was to find that it stood with its back to the view. In the valley I had been admiring it from behind. A small Orthodox church, the entrance faced a gravel circle that was ringed, in turn, by an oval grove of birch trees, the tops of which fell short of the troika domes. The life-size veiled head of a woman, carved in stone, stared blankly out from the meter-wide medallion above the portal. More than inert, she seemed vividly dead.

I pulled the heavy door open and stepped inside. While my sense of sight failed at once, my sense of smell came alive. The pungent odors of stale incense, candle wax, dust, and perhaps the leavings of small animals all combined to evoke the airless musk of religion. What I took to be a sanctuary lamp burned above me, but then I realized the red glow was from the glass of a rose window strategically placed to illuminate the otherwise dark reaches of a very high ceiling.

As my eyes adjusted, I saw what a cramped space it was: an altar, a grilled screen before it, a half-dozen pews, and on the wall to the right, below the rose window, a gilt-framed icon whose face I could not make out.

A rack of squat, mostly burned-out candle stubs stood before the icon. Altogether, the shrine might not have been entered in the century since its princess died, and suddenly it seemed more mausoleum than church. I backed out, feeling like a profaning interloper.

Aware of the crunch of my shoes on gravel, I circled around the building to the small fenced plaza behind. I took in the vista of the city spread below, the needle spires of Wiesbaden's Lutheran churches, the brick tower of the
Rathaus,
the town hall. A line of haze hung over the Rhine, an otherwise invisible river perhaps five miles distant. From that direction—ultimately, from the North Atlantic—storm clouds marched steadily overhead, having overrun the sun again. I took the driving wind squarely in my face, the way a deck officer does.

I studied the view as a way to avoid looking at my watch. The taxi had dropped me at the bottom of a curving gravel road that marked the limit of the secluded site. Odd that the chapel should be so visible across the province yet so isolated. A Saturday morning, but there were no other visitors. Then it hit me that Mrs. Healy would have known that.

Not for the first time, I wondered what Gerhard would be making of my having vanished. A decade or two later, expatriate American executives holding positions like mine would be at risk for kidnapping, even in Europe, but not then, when we Yanks were still unvanquished. I knew that before calling the police at my disappearance, Gerhard would call Butterfield, my assistant, back in Frankfurt. So from Hainerberg, I had called Butterfield first, and told him to have Gerhard wait for me at the station.

And I, precisely what was I making of the melodrama into which I had been conscripted? I had never been a man for mystery novels or spy thrillers, and if you had told me that I would take seriously a warning of being followed, whispered by a woman with an accent, I would have laughed at you. But that was before mystery had come to define my life, the mystery of what Michael was becoming, the mystery of what Edie's absence had done to both of us.

Soon I was no longer seeing Wiesbaden; my mind's eye drifted back to that other grove of birch trees, in the far corner of the Holy Trinity churchyard in Oyster Bay. Those trees marked the Elgin burial plot, where Edie's family members had been laid to rest since the middle of the nineteenth century. We mourners were not actually to witness the interment, so custom dictated. But as the others were ushered by undertakers away from the casket and its mound of flowers, I stonily refused to move. The minister approached to touch my elbow. Edie's father looked at me with disapproval.

I had not seen her die. It had never occurred to me I would not see her remains entrusted to the earth. How many times could I be missing from this woman's side when she needed me? Near the mahogany box that held her crushed body, I stood with no comprehension of anything but her absence. Edie's absence was what required my presence.

Her parents' concentration had already been transported from the churchyard to the country club, where the caterers would have spread the collation. When Edie's mother took my arm, I was aware of it, but I must have shaken her off, because then she was gone, and so were the others. For some moments there, because Edie had ceased to exist, so had everything else—including Michael, which, when I realized it later, seemed a betrayal ofhim. I do not know with whom my bereft son drifted from the graveside back to the cars, or if he walked off alone. That my state was one of pure anguish does not change what else it was, a feeling in grief, which later seemed another betrayal, of being more intensely alive than ever.

"Hello, Mr. Montgomery."

She was standing behind me.

I turned. "Hello," I said awkwardly, unclear for the instant what I was doing here, or who she was.

She looked different, for one thing. Her hair was up from her neck, showing the long line that curved up from her shoulders to her face. She had changed from riding clothes and now wore a dress of some kind beneath a trench coat, with the coat's belt tightly cinched. She wore tan linen gloves, an item of style, not warmth, and she wore heeled sandals, which drew my attention to her shapely ankles.

The odd thing to strike me was that she shaved her legs, which of course every American woman did. I had grown up assuming hair grew no more on female legs than faces, and though by then I knew better, nothing had cracked my self-presumed sophistication like the discovery that year that most German women did not shave their legs, not even some of the most fashionably coifed of those I'd met in Frankfurt. But Mrs. Healy did. Shaven legs, and the relatively compulsive hygiene they represented, would have been just one self-reinvention following her marriage to a well-placed American. Then the exotic aroma of her perfume hit me again. I deflected the sensation. She was the mother of Michael's friend, that's all.