London Bridges: A Novel (21 page)

I arrived home a little before three on a Thursday afternoon. The kids were back; Nana had never left Fifth Street. When I got there I insisted on cooking dinner, wouldn't take no for an answer. It was what I needed: cook a good meal, talk to Nana and the kids about anything we wanted to talk about, get lots of hugs. Not have a single thought about what had happened in Paris, or the Wolf, or any kind of police work.

So I made my interpretation of a French-style dinner and I even spoke French with Damon and Jannie while the meal was being prepared. Jannie set the dining table with Nana's silver, cloth napkins, a lace tablecloth that we used only for special occasions. The meal? Langoustines rôties brunoises de papaye poivrons et oignons doux —prawns with papaya, peppers, and onions. For a main course, chicken stew in a sweet red wine sauce. We drank small glasses of wine with the meal, a delightful Minervois, and ate with enthusiasm.

But for dessert—brownies and ice cream. I was back in America, after all.

I was home, thank God.

Home again , home again.

The next day I didn't go to work and the kids stayed out of school. It seemed to satisfy everybody's needs, even Nana Mama's, who encouraged us all to play hooky. I called Jamilla a couple of times, and talking to her helped, as it always did, but something seemed off between us.

For our day of hooky-playing I took the kids on a day trip to St. Michaels, Maryland, which is situated on Chesapeake Bay. The village turned out to be a lively snapshot of quaint, coastal charm: a thriving marina, a couple of small inns with rockers set out on the porches, even a lighthouse. And the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, where we got to watch real shipwrights working on a skipjack restoration. It felt as though we were back in the nineteenth century, which didn't seem like such a bad idea.

After lunch at the Crab Claw Restaurant we embarked on an actual skipjack charter. Nana Mama had taken her school classes there many times over the years, but she stayed home this trip, protesting that she had too much work to do around the house. I only hoped she was really feeling okay. I still remembered the way she used to teach her students on the field trips, so I took over as the guest lecturer.

“Jannie and Damon, this is the last fleet of working sailing vessels in North America. Can you imagine? These ships have no winches, just manpower and blocks and tackles. The fishermen are called watermen,” I told them, just as Nana had told her classes years before.

Then off we went on the Mary Merchant for a two-and-a-half-hour cruise into the past.

The captain and his mate showed us how to hoist a sail with a block and tackle, and soon we had caught a breeze with a loud whoosh and the rhythmic smack of waves against the hull. What an afternoon it was. Gazing up at a sixty-foot mast made from a single log shipped all the way from Oregon. The smells of salt air, linseed oil, residual oystershells. The closeness of my two eldest children, the look of trust and love in their eyes. Most of the time, anyway.

We passed stands of pine woods, open fields where tenant farmers raised corn and soybean, and great white-columned estates that had once been plantations. I almost felt as if I were back in another century and it was a good break, much needed R & R. Only a couple of times did I drift into thoughts of police work, but I quickly pulled myself back.

I half listened as the captain explained that “only boats under sail” can dredge for oysters—except twice a week, when engine-powered yawls were allowed on the bay. I suspected that it was a clever conservation ploy to make the watermen work hard for their oysters; otherwise, the supply might run out.

What a fine day—as the boat heeled to starboard, the boom swung out, the mainsail and jib filled the air with a loud smack, and Jannie, Damon, and I squinted into the setting sun. And we understood, for a little while anyway, that this had something to do with the way life was supposed to be lived, and maybe even why such moments needed to be cherished and remembered.

“Best day of my life,” Jannie told me. “I'm not even exaggerating too much.”

“Same here,” I said. “And I'm not exaggerating at all.”

When we got home early that evening I saw a scuffed-up white van parked in front of the house. I recognized the bright green logo on the door: HOMECARE HEALTH PROJECT. What was this? Why was Dr. Coles there?

Suddenly I was nervous that something had happened to Nana while I was out with the kids. The fragile state of her health had been on my mind more and more lately; the reality that she was in her mid-eighties now, though she wouldn't tell exactly how old she was, or rather, she lied about it. I hurried out of the car and up the front steps ahead of the kids by a couple of strides.

“I'm in here with Kayla,” Nana called as I opened the front door and Damon and Jannie slid by me on either side. “We're just kicking back, Alex. No need for alarm. Take your time.”

“So who's alarmed?” I asked as I slowed and walked into the living room, saw the two of them “kicking back” on the sofa.

“You were, Mr. Worrywart. You saw the Health truck outside, and what did you think? Sickness,” said Nana.

She and Kayla both laughed merrily, and I had to smile, too—at myself. I made a very weak protest. “Never happened.”

“Then why did you rush up the front steps like your trousers were on fire? Oh, forget it, Alex,” Nana said, and laughed some more.

Then she waved her hand as if to chase away any unwanted negativity in the room. “Come. Sit down with us for a minute or two. Can you spare it? Tell me everything. How was St. Michaels? Has it changed very much?”

“Oh, I suspect that St. Michaels is pretty much the same as it was a hundred years ago.”

“Which is a good thing,” Nana said. “Thank God for small favors.”

I went over and gave Kayla a kiss on the cheek. She had helped Nana when she was sick a while back, and now she stopped in regularly. Actually, I'd known Kayla since we were both growing up in the neighborhood. She was one of us who got out, received an education, and then came back, to give back. The Homecare Health Project brought doctors to the homes of the sick in Southeast. Kayla had started it, and she kept it going with incredibly hard work, including fund-raising, which she mostly did herself.

“You look good,” I told her. The words just came out.

“Yes, I lost some weight, Alex,” she said, and cocked an eyebrow at me. “It's all this running around that I do. I try my best to keep the weight on, but it just comes off, damn it.”

I had noticed. Kayla is close to six feet, but I had never seen her looking so trim and fit, not even when she was a kid. She's always had a sweet, pretty face and a disposition to match.

“It also sets a better example for folks,” she said. “Too many people in the neighborhood are overweight. Too many are obese, even a lot of the kids. They think it's in their genes.”

Then Kayla laughed. “Plus, I must admit, it has helped my social life, my outlook on things, whatever. Whatever.”

“Well, you always look good to me,” I said, putting my foot in it again.

Kayla rolled her eyes at Nana. “He lies so easily. He's really good at it.” They both laughed again.

“Anyway, thank you for the compliment, Alex,” said Kayla. “I'll take it for what it's worth. I don't even consider it too condescending. Oh, you know what I mean.”

I decided I'd better change the topic. “So Nana is fine, and going to live to a hundred?”

“I would expect so,” Kayla said.

But Nana frowned. “Why do you want to get rid of me so soon?” she asked. “What did I do to deserve that?”

I laughed. “Maybe it's because you're a constant pain in my butt. You know that, don't you?”

“Of course I know it,” Nana said. “That's my job in life. My reason for being is to torment you. Don't you know that yet?”

And as she said those words, I finally felt that I was home again, really home, back from the wars. I took Kayla and Nana out to the sunporch and played “An American in Paris” for them. That's what I had been not too long ago, but no more.

About eleven, I walked Kayla outside to her Health van. We stopped and talked for a moment on the front porch.

“Thanks for coming by to see her,” I said.

“You don't have to thank me,” Kayla said. “I do it because I want to. It just so happens that I love your grandmother. I love her tremendously. She's one of my guiding lights, my mentor. Has been for years.”

Then Kayla leaned in very quickly, and she kissed me. She held the kiss for a few seconds. When she pulled away she was laughing. “I've wanted to do that for the longest time.”

“And?” I asked, more than slightly surprised at what had just happened.

“Now I've done it, Alex. Interesting.”

“Interesting?”

“I have to go. I have to run.”

Laughing to herself, Kayla ran out to her van.

Interesting.

After some much-needed R & R I went back to work and found that I was still assigned to the extortion/terrorism case, which apparently now involved chasing down whoever was responsible, whoever had the money. I was told that I was picked because I'm relentless.

In a way, I was glad it wasn't over. I was still in touch with several of my contacts on the case: Martin Lodge in England, Sandy Greenberg with Interpol, Etienne Marteau in Paris, but also police and intelligence in Tel Aviv and Frankfurt. Everybody I talked to had possible leads, but no one had anything hot, or even what I would consider lukewarm.

The Wolf, or maybe al Qaeda, or some other clever, homicidal bastards were out there with close to two billion dollars in their coffers. Among other things, three city blocks in Paris had been destroyed. Political prisoners had been released. There had to be some slipup, some way to find them, or at least some way to discover who they were.

My second day back, the analyst Monnie Donnelley and I made a paper connection that interested me enough to drive all the way out to Lexington, Virginia. I arrived at a two-story contemporary on a back road called Red Hawk Lane. A Dodge Durango was parked in the driveway. A couple of horses grazed in a nearby paddock.

Joe Cahill met me at the door of the house. The former CIA agent was all smiles, just as I remembered him from past meetings about the Wolf. Joe had told me over the phone that he was eager to help the investigation in any way he could. He invited me inside and had coffee and a store-bought crumb cake waiting in his den. The room had views of an outlying pasture, a pond, and the Blue Ridge Mountains off in the distance.

“I guess you can tell I miss the job,” Joe said. “Some days, anyway. You can do only so much hunting and fishing. You fish, Alex? You hunt?”

“I've taken the kids fishing a couple of times,” I said. “I hunt some, yeah. Right now, I'm hoping to bag the Wolf. I need your help, though, Joe. I want to go over some old ground. Something has come up.”

“All right, you want to talk about him again. How we got the Wolf out of Russia? What happened once he arrived in America? How he disappeared after that? It's a sad but well-known and documented story, Alex. You've seen the files. I know you have. Almost ended my career.”

“Joe, I don't understand why nobody seems to know who he is. What he looks like. His real name. That's the story I've been getting for over a year now, but how can it be? How could we work with England to extricate an important KGB guy, and not know who he is. Something bad happened in Paris—but nobody knows what. How is it possible? What am I missing? What has everybody missed so far?”

Joe Cahill spread his large workingman hands, palms up. “Look, I obviously don't have all the pieces, either. It's my understanding that he was undercover when he was inside Russia. Supposedly, he was a young, very cagey agent, which would mean he's still only in his early forties. But I've also read reports that he's in his late fifties or sixties now. That he was actually pretty high up in the KGB when he defected. I've also heard that the Wolf is female. I think he spreads the rumors himself. I'm almost certain that's what he does.”

“Joe, you and your old partner were his controls once he got here.”

“Our boss was Tom Weir, who wasn't the director yet. Actually, the team included three other guys—Maddock, Boykin, and Graebner. Maybe you should talk to them.”

Cahill rose from his easy chair. He went and opened French doors leading out to a stone patio. A cooling breeze swept into the room.

“I never met him, Alex. Neither did my partner, Corky Hancock. Or the rest of the team—Jay, Sam, Clark. That's the way it was set up from the beginning. It was the deal he brokered when he came out of Russia. He'd help us bring down the old KGB, name names there, and here in the U.S. But nobody got to see him. Believe me, he delivered names and information that helped bring down the evil empire.”

I nodded. “Right, he keeps his promises. But now he's on the loose, and he's established his own crime network—and a whole lot more.”

Cahill took a bite of his coffee cake, then talked with his mouth full. “Apparently, that's exactly what he did. Of course, we had no idea that he would go bad. Neither did the Brits. Maybe Tom Weir did. I don't know.”

I needed some air. I got up and walked to the open doors. A couple of horses were hugging a white wooden fence under the shade of oak trees. I turned to face Joe Cahill.

“Okay, so you can't help me with the Wolf. What can you help me with, Joe?”

Cahill frowned and looked confused. “I'm sorry, Alex, not much. I'm an old plow horse, not good for much of anything anymore. Coffee cake's good, right?”

I shook my head. “Not really, Joe. Trust me, store-bought's never the same.”

Cahill's face sagged, then he grinned but his eyes weren't smiling. “So now we're gonna be honest, I guess. Why the hell are you here? What's this about? Talk to Uncle Joe. What's going on? I'm kind of lost. You're playing way over my head.”