“Hello, Patricia,”
he greeted her as he stepped forward and pulled aside the curtains to
let in the sunlight.
As he sat beside her on
the bed and reached for her hand, she recoiled. The new Roger,
twisted and broken by his time in the Yukon, evoked both pity and
fear. While she pitied him for his suffering and loss, she feared
even more what he might be capable of doing, now that he had returned
from the outer limits of survival. Was he here of his own accord or
had he been directed to find her?
Still confused and
disoriented at his appearance in her house, having counted Roger dead
for a second time, suddenly Patricia remembered the letter she had
written to him two nights before, still tucked in the borrowed book
on the kitchen counter. In that moment, she felt a mounting tension
between her spousal loyalty toward Roger, tinged with compassion for
him, and her natural instinct to protect herself and her daughter.
While it seemed clear that she must break free from Roger once and
for all, she hesitated without quite knowing why.
“Sorry to barge in on
you like this. It must come as quite a shock,” Roger spoke on as he
stepped away from the window.
“Your postcard said
you were at Kamas,” she replied in a low monotone. “I heard very
few survived there.”
Roger gave a dismissive
laugh that showed stained and broken teeth.
“There was a prisoner
exchange. They let a handful of us leave before the attack. So, it
seems State Security hasn’t given up on you and me quite yet. How
about that?” he added with a smirk. “But first things first.
Let’s make some coffee, shall we? Do you have any in the house?”
Patricia pulled herself
up in bed and sat with her back to the bedstead, putting some
distance between her and her husband.
“I’ll make some for
you,” she replied. She slid out of bed on the side opposite Roger
as he cast a knowing glance at the empty gin bottle on the floor.
“I’ll be back in a jiffy,” she added, and slipped into the
bathroom. She emerged a minute or two later wearing a wrapper and
looking as fresh as she could manage.
Once in the kitchen,
she dropped the borrowed book into her handbag while her husband’s
head was turned and measured out a teaspoon of instant coffee into
each of two mugs while water heated on the stove. Though Roger took a
seat at the kitchen table, Patricia remained standing by the stove.
“The men who brought
me here told me a little of what you and Caroline have been through
while I was away,” he remarked. “I can’t blame you for being
less than thrilled at seeing me. Tell me, did any of my letters get
through?”
“Not a one,” she
answered.
“Nor yours. And has
anyone told you where I was sent before Kamas?”
“Not a word.”
“All right, then,
I’ll get to the point,” Roger continued. “In January, I was
dying a slow death in a camp hospital in the northern Yukon, when
suddenly one morning someone stuck an IV in my arm and a feeding tube
up my nose. The next thing I knew, I was on a medevac flight to the
regional hospital in Yellowknife.
“A few weeks later,
when I recovered enough to hold a conversation, I received a visit
from my old interrogator, a fair-haired snake-in-the-grass who went
by the name of Dennis. According to Dennis, State Security had
located a trust account that your father opened at a Swiss bank and
wanted you and Caroline, as the trust’s sole beneficiaries, to
appear in Basel to claim the funds. It seems they had already filed
suit in the Swiss courts on your behalf but couldn’t take it any
further without a personal appearance. And because you had already
refused, they offered to release me if I could persuade you to
reconsider.”
Patricia Kendall
recognized the tension behind her husband’s glib smile and felt her
blood run cold at seeing how completely Roger had fallen into step
with the DSS’s objectives. Mercifully, the whistle of the teakettle
interrupted her thoughts.
“What else did they
offer you, Roger?” she asked without emotion as she poured hot
water into Roger’s mug. When it was filled, her husband reached out
to take it from her hand. Instead, she set it before him on the
table.
“If you and Caroline
agree to appear in Basel and make whatever claims the government
tells you to make, they’ll pay you a ten percent finder’s fee of
whatever they recover from your father’s accounts under the tax
fraud provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. On top of that,
they’ll let the three of us stay overseas with no further pursuit
by the DSS.”
Now Patricia filled her
own mug, leaving it on the counter to cool.
“Ten percent?” she
replied coldly. “How generous they are with my father’s money.”
“I understand,
Patricia, but there’s more to their offer than just money,” Roger
urged. “Our passports would be reinstated and we would each have a
multiple entry and exit visa to come and go from the States if we
wanted. Depending on our level of cooperation, they might even vacate
our convictions and restore our civil rights so that I could qualify
for a license to do business in America again.”
“And if we refuse?”
Roger’s eyes turned
hard. “Then, if you’re lucky, you and Caroline will spend the
rest of your lives in this flyspeck of a town, or in another labor
camp. And I’ll be on the next transport back to the Yukon with
what’s left of the Kamas rebels. You see, unless we help the DSS
help themselves to your father’s money, they have absolutely no use
for us.”
For a brief moment,
still dazed by Roger’s appearance and the terms of his offer,
Patricia wavered and reached for her mug to take a sip. But when she
gazed into Roger’s hollow yellow eyes she knew that, in a land
where the government had the power to separate husband from wife in
more ways than by divorce, the man before her was no longer her
husband. He had come to Coalville not to liberate her, but to save
himself and curry favor with his tormentors at her expense. Though
tempted by the promise of release, her intuition told her not to
trust Roger, just as it had once warned her not to accompany him to
Beirut.
“All right, if what
you say is true, then time would be on our side, wouldn’t it?”
she challenged. “Until I show up in court, their case goes nowhere
and the government gets nothing, am I right? So why not bide our time
and see if they sweeten their offer?”
“Because these people
are utterly ruthless, Patricia,” Roger answered, his eyes wide with
fear. “If you don’t do exactly what they want, they’ll send you
back behind the wire and put their offer to Caroline next. If she
refuses, you’ll both be put through bloody hell until you give in
or die.”
“Already been there,”
she replied doggedly.
“That’s exactly my
point,” he argued. “Why risk subjecting yourselves to all that
again? Why not let them have the damned money while we seize the
chance to go free? After all, it was never your money and most of it
wasn’t your father’s, either. Hell, the lion’s share of it was
looted from the downtown banks.”
“That is simply not
true,” Patricia bristled. “Father always kept the family’s
trusts segregated from the Movement’s funds. The Eaton trusts have
been handed down to benefit future generations. The government has no
right to them, nor do I have a right to give them away. If Caroline
or I don’t come forward to claim our portion, the trustees will
seek out beneficiaries from other branches of the family.”
“Don’t be
pigheaded, Patricia,” Roger persisted. “How could any sum of
money be worth condemning Caroline to captivity?”
Ever the litigator,
Roger came up with one new argument after another, playing artfully
on his wife’s conflicted feelings. At last, she agreed to accompany
him to the courthouse in Heber for a brief meeting, solely to verify
the terms of the government’s offer, and more for Caroline’s sake
than for her own.
“We can stop for
breakfast on the way, if you like, or have a nice lunch in Heber
afterward,” he offered cheerily once she had agreed. “The DSS
even lent me one of their cars to use, now that I’m out on parole
like you and Caroline.”
Despite her misgivings
about Roger’s motives and her deep distrust of the DSS, Patricia
changed clothes for the trip to Heber, intending to return long
before the time came to pick up Caroline from school. When she called
in sick at work, her boss seemed unusually nervous and acted as if he
had been expecting her call. The DSS must have already spoken to him,
she thought.
Roger and Patricia had
nearly reached Silver Creek Junction in his government sedan before
either of them spoke.
“So tell me, how have
you and Caroline been getting along in Coalville since your release?”
he asked to break the silence.
“We’re adjusting,”
she answered guardedly. “Caroline is doing well in school. And I
have a job that pays enough to keep a roof over our heads.”
“Glad to hear that.
And how do you find the natives here?”
“Nice enough,” she
answered. “They’ve been decent to us.”
“By any chance, have
you come across anyone you knew from before?” he asked next.
She shook her head and
murmured a no.
“Any visitors come
through town looking for you?” he persisted.
“No, why?” she
answered.
“I had the most
extraordinary experience in the camp hospital,” he replied. “I
met another prisoner from Cleveland who claimed to know you.”
Patricia sensed that
Roger was watching her closely for a reaction but she offered none.
“When I met him,”
he continued, “I thought I was going to die within days and asked
him to find you and help you and Caroline if he ever got out. A few
months later, the man escaped. I always wondered if he kept his
promise.”
“What was his name?”
Patricia asked.
“Linder. Warren
Linder,” he answered.
Patricia swallowed
hard.
“I knew a Warren
Linder when I was a girl but I’m sure I haven’t seen him here,”
she declared under Roger’s watchful gaze.
“Have you come across
someone by the name of Horvath?
“Well, as a matter of
fact, yes,” she replied after a pause. “A man by that name helped
us find a new place to stay when we had trouble with our landlord.
Why do you ask?”
“Nice try, Patricia,
but it’s written all over our face. Linder and Horvath are the same
man and you know it,” he accused.
Patricia did her best
to remain expressionless.
“Well, I’ll be
damned,” Roger said excitedly. “Of all the places!”
“Whatever you might
think about Tom Horvath, I want you to promise you won’t say a word
about him to your friends in the government,” Patricia shot back.
“I will not repay a kindness by letting any harm come to that man.”
“Oh, I don’t need
to say anything to them. Either he’s Linder or he’s not. Of
course, I’d know right away if I saw him. But so will the
Department. And I’d hate to be in his shoes when they catch up with
him, though the bastard deserves every bit of it for what he did to
us.”
“What nonsense are
you talking now?” Patricia scolded. “What could Tom Horvath ever
have done to us?
“If Horvath didn’t
tell you his real name was Warren Linder, then I don’t suppose he
would have told you Linder was the undercover operative who came to
your father’s apartment in Beirut disguised as the Mormon rebel Joe
Tanner.”
Patricia’s eyes
widened involuntarily as she realized that this must have been what
Linder had tried to tell her the night before.
“Listen, Patricia,”
Roger went on, “I got all this straight from Linder’s mouth. It
seems he was roped into going to Beirut at the last minute to meet
with your father and me. But the operation failed to go down as
planned. And while he and your father were out on the veranda alone,
your father offered to turn himself in if the DSS would leave the
rest of us alone. Against orders, Linder agreed to pass his offer
along but, when his superiors learned of it, they were furious and
accused him of conspiring to aid the insurgency.”
Patricia looked away.
“Poor bastard,”
Roger reflected, “now I see why Linder went so soft-headed when we
were in the hospital together. He already knew you from before.”
In that moment,
Patricia Kendall realized that, despite Linder’s having come to
meet her father in disguise as Joe Tanner, it had never been his
intention to capture them. On the contrary, if he had been allowed to
deliver her father’s message, she and Caroline and Roger might
still be living peacefully in London. Instead, Linder, too, had been
arrested and subjected to the very same treatment as Roger. But
unlike her husband, whom captivity had corrupted, Linder had never
caved in under pressure and, having escaped the camps, had even
risked his life to come to her aid.
Now, she realized, her
best hope for the future lay not in Roger’s self-serving proposal
to meet with DSS lawyers, but in returning to Coalville, warning
Linder, and perhaps even fleeing with him if it were not already too
late.
“Stop the car,” she
ordered. “We’re going back.”
“What on earth are
you talking about?” Roger objected.
“I said turn around,”
she repeated.
“We can’t turn
around,” he answered, holding fast to the wheel. “They’re
expecting us.”
“I don’t care. Take
me back. Now!”
“You don’t
understand, Patricia,” Roger answered, his voice taking on a
pleading tone. “When I said they would go after Caroline if you
refused, that was no figure of speech. Dennis drove over to the
Middle School to pick her up before you and I left the house. You’ve
got to do what they want or they’ll send her back to Kamas. Alone.
Without you or anyone else to protect her.”
All at once Patricia
felt as if her head would split.