The Mysteries (3 page)

I was getting a bad feeling about this guy. “He was with her when she disappeared?”

“No.” She shook her head in emphasis. “He brought her home. And then he left. She was last seen in my flat.”

That seemed a strange way of putting it. Last seen by whom? Before I could quiz her, though, Laura had extracted an envelope file from her bag. “This should have everything you need. Hugh's phone numbers, some pictures of Peri, her notebook, the detective's report—”

“Detective? You've got a copy of the police report?”

“No, a private detective in Scotland. I hired him after she called, when I realized I couldn't get any farther on my own.”

I sat up straighter in my chair, competitive. “Did he find anything?”

“He found a few people who had seen her at the campsite, or on the road nearby, and took statements from them. But there were no sightings of her after that day. The trail went cold. He was honest with me. He said that without any leads he didn't know where to begin. He wouldn't give me false hope. He could have gone on taking my money for years without ever finding her.”

“I'll be honest with you, too. After two years, your daughter could be anywhere. She probably has a new identity, a whole new life. Even if I do manage to track her down, she may not want to come back. She's made certain choices. She's an adult, not your little girl anymore.” It had to be said, even if she would ignore it, and probably blame me in the end.

“I know that,” she said quickly. “I don't expect to get her back. I just want to know what happened. And I want her to know that I still love her, that I'll always love her, and that I'm always waiting for her call.”

She ran her fingers through her shining hair, pushing it away from her face. “The Scottish detective said something. He said there are only two kinds of disappearances. Either someone is a victim, or they
want
to disappear. He said if it was the latter, I had to respect Peri's choice. She hadn't called to ask for help, but to tell me she didn't need it.”

“Maybe.”

Her eyes flashed up to mine, and I saw the need in them clearly: the anxious, needy hope.

“What do you mean?”

I don't believe those “only two kinds of” formulations. People are more complicated than that, life more ambiguous. There was such a thing as a willing victim—but did that mean she should be left to her fate? What if her call
had
been a cry for help? I had no idea why Peri had made that phone call, and I didn't think the Scottish detective knew any better than I did.

“I just mean we don't know yet. Why Peri disappeared will be a mystery until we find her.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly, hoisting her bag onto her shoulder and starting to rise.

It would have been nice to end our first meeting on such an upbeat, positive note, but I got greedy.

“Wait—just a few more questions.”

She glanced at the watch on her slender wrist, then back at me, not very patiently, but still sitting.

“Peri's father.”

She stiffened. “She doesn't have a father.” Her tone was glacial.

I raised my eyebrows, all innocence, ignoring her clear signal. “Quite often, when a child goes missing—even an adult child—there's an estranged parent at the back of it.”

“Not this time.”

“You can't know that. If she decided to try to find him, or he made contact
with her . . .”

“Impossible.” She made it sound like her final word.

I waited.

She couldn't wait as long as I could. “Peri doesn't have a father.”

“Ms. Lensky, if I'm going to help you, I need to know everything, and that includes personal details. Just because you've decided certain things aren't relevant doesn't mean you're right. Even if Peri never knew her father, she would know she must have had one, and—”

“It's not just Peri who never knew him.” She looked me straight in the eye, but I was damned if I knew what she was telling me. Had she used a sperm bank for conception, or was Peri the child of rape? Either possibility said something very different about her, and about her relationship to her daughter, and I'm not sure which I found more unsettling. There was a time when I would have bulled ahead and insisted on having her spell it out for me. But I'd been in England for too long and had adopted the local manners and mores. Now they were no longer camouflage, but an integral part of me, and so I backed down before her distress and respected her privacy as she expected me to, like a proper English gentleman.

I told myself it didn't matter, because however it had happened, the man who'd provided half of Peri's genetic makeup wouldn't be aware of her existence and couldn't be involved in her disappearance.

And yet there was still a niggling little doubt at the back of my mind telling me I was missing something important here.

“Is there anything else you need to know?” Her tone was cool and impatient, and I felt bad that I'd forfeited her earlier warmth.

I told myself it was part of the job. “I'm curious about why you've come to me now, two years after another detective let you down.”

She took a deep breath and held herself very still. “I want you to help me because this could be my last chance. I'm leaving, you see. The London job was for three years. Now my company is sending me back to America. I don't even know where I'll be a year from now—probably New York. If Peri wanted to get in touch with me again, she wouldn't know where to find me.”

Her words were carefully chosen, but I could hear the anguish vibrating low in her voice, and I felt a sympathetic pain in my own chest.

“I'll do my best to find her for you, Ms. Lensky.”

“Thank you.” She rose in one fluid motion. “Call me after you've talked with Hugh.”

Ancient lessons in now-outdated etiquette pushed me onto my feet, and I hurried around the desk. My mother had done a good job on me: I opened doors for women
and
called them “Ms.”

She gave me a brief, social sort of smile and slipped out of my office, leaving behind only a faint trace of her summery, green-smelling perfume.

It was only then, my hand still on the door handle, that I realized I hadn't taken a credit card impress, or a check, hadn't even remembered to get her signature on a standard boilerplate for my services. But none of that mattered. I was back in business, with a new mystery to solve.

3. Benjamin

Austria, 1809

The country was full of French spies after Napoleon's recent victory over Austria. Britain was at war with France, and life was not safe for Benjamin Bathurst, the British envoy to Vienna. Before leaving the city, he took the precaution of obtaining false passports for himself and his Swiss manservant. Travel from the Continent to England, especially for someone known to the authorities, a man bearing important papers, was necessarily a slow, dangerous, circuitous progress. Bathurst was determined to reach Hamburg, a still-independent city, where he thought he would be safe.

On the twenty-sixth of November, Bathurst's coach stopped in the small town of Perleberg for a change of horses. In the coach with Bathurst and his servant were two other travelers. All four dined at the inn while they rested. At nine o'clock, the travelers returned to the courtyard, where the coach was being readied. They waited as their luggage was loaded. Then, for no reason anyone could later explain, Bathurst moved away from the others, walking briskly around the horses as if to check something, or speak to someone on the other side of the coach.

He was never seen again.

The two other travelers boarded the coach. Bathurst's servant called for his master, then went to look for him. But he was gone.

The other travelers were annoyed at the delay, thinking that Bathurst had gone off to relieve himself and perhaps missed his way in the dark. Maybe he'd had too much to drink, or had made an assignation with that pretty barmaid . . .

Only his servant knew that Bathurst had feared for his life and how desperate he had been to move on. He roused the others to search for his master, while he raced off to see Captain Klitzing, the Prussian governor of Perleberg. Unknown to the other travelers, Bathurst had earlier requested protection from Klitzing during his stay, which had been granted in the form of two soldiers, who had spent the evening hanging about the inn, eyeing everyone suspiciously.

When questioned, the soldiers had noticed nothing amiss. No one waiting in the dark and chilly courtyard had seen or heard anything unusual. Although some ruffian might have crept unseen into the yard under cover of darkness, surely the sounds of a scuffle would have alerted the others.

Klitzing arranged for the three remaining travelers to lodge at the nearby Gold Crown Hotel and started an investigation immediately. Every inn and tavern in the town was checked, fishermen were instructed to explore the local river, while gamekeepers and huntsmen with dogs were sent out to search the surrounding countryside. Bathurst's servant unpacked the luggage and discovered his master's sable cloak was missing. It was eventually found hidden beneath a pile of logs in the inn's woodshed. An employee was questioned about this and held briefly, but his questioners were convinced he knew nothing of Bathurst's fate.

A pair of Benjamin Bathurst's trousers was found by huntsmen on a forest path. The trousers had been turned inside-out and shot at with a pistol—but not while Bathurst was wearing them. In one pocket was a scrap of paper, a scribbled letter from Benjamin to his beloved wife in which he mentioned the name of one Comte d'Entraigues as implicated in his trouble.

When the British government learned of Bathurst's disappearance, they offered a thousand-pound reward for his return or certain news of his fate. Despite this substantial reward—which Bathurst's family agreed to match—there were no takers.

Benjamin's wife appealed directly to Napoleon and, despite being at war with Britain, the French ruler granted her special permission to travel throughout France and Germany in search of her husband.

On her travels in the spring of 1810, Mrs. Bathurst managed to pick up a number of conflicting reports and rumors about her husband's fate: He had escaped to the north coast of Germany, but drowned there; he had drowned while trying to cross the Elbe after escaping his abductors; he had been killed by a servant. The governor of Magdeburg Prison had been heard to boast, “They are looking for the English ambassador, but I have him.”

When Mrs. Bathurst confronted the prison governor, he did not deny his words, but said that he had been mistaken about the identity of one of his prisoners. He would not explain further, nor would he allow her to meet this man. In the end, she was forced to return to England sadly, none the wiser as to her husband's fate.

At home, she was visited by the Comte d'Entraigues, the double agent who had been named in her husband's last letter to her. The comte told her that Benjamin Bathurst had indeed been imprisoned in Magdeburg, and, when she asked for some proof, he promised to try to obtain it. However, a few days later, both the comte and his wife were assassinated at their house in Twickenham.

The general assumption at the time and also later was that French agents were responsible for abducting and disposing of Benjamin Bathurst; yet how they managed to accomplish this with such utter secrecy, in front of so many potential witnesses, has never been satisfactorily explained. As an early commentator on this famous case wrote, “The disappearance of the English ambassador seems like magic.”

4. Joe

Being a private investigator is not a normal sort of job, nor is it a career that many people choose. In fact, I'm not sure it's a choice at all. I've often felt I was chosen for this role, rather than the other way around; and my dedication to it makes it seem more of a vocation, or an obsession, than ordinary work.

My calling is to look for missing persons, and you don't have to look very deep to figure out the reason why. My first case was my father.

He disappeared when I was nine years old. In my childhood imagination, the disappearance of Joe Pauluk was on a par with the great unsolved mysteries of all time, like whatever happened to Benjamin Bathurst, Owen Parfitt, or the crew of the
Mary Celeste;
but in reality he was just another guy who didn't come home from work one day.

When my mother called the service station where he worked as a mechanic, to find out why he was so late, they said he'd called in sick the day before. She discovered shortly that he'd cleared out their joint checking account, and emptied the joint savings account that was supposed to be our college fund. Luckily, she had her own private savings account, earmarked for emergencies, as that was exactly what our daily life had suddenly become.

A few weeks later, Dad's car was traced to a dealer in Chicago, who had bought it from a man matching my father's description. At that point, the police said there was nothing they could do. If my father had decided to sell his car and move to another state without telling anyone, that was his right. My mother couldn't even sue him for desertion or child support because they weren't married.

He could have left her anytime, as my mother's mother liked to point out.

“Yes, Ma, I know. Of course he could have left me—we both knew that. He didn't need the state's permission to move out. That's just it: Why sneak away like that when he didn't have to? Why steal money from his own kids?” Dropping her voice still lower (my ear was already pressed hard against the door; now, I held my breath in order to hear) Mom confided into the phone, “Ma, I think he must be in some kind of trouble. I think maybe he
had
to go on the run. I just wish he would have told me . . .”

My father didn't gamble, take drugs, or drink to excess. He had few debts, which were budgeted for. He had no obvious enemies, and his friends (such as they were) had no idea where he'd gone, or why. My mother always claimed that they had been getting along just fine, and, as far as I knew, that was true. They argued sometimes, but who didn't? There was none of that constant, strained tension in our house, that invisible poison in the atmosphere that reveals an unbearable unhappiness. So why did he leave? And why leave like that?

He must have had to leave. It was the only thing that made sense. Some great outside force compelled him.

Sometimes I thought he'd been carried off to oblivion by a mysterious, incomprehensible power, like the Tennessee farmer, vanished into nothingness, that I'd read about in
Great Unsolved Mysteries of the World
. But although the weirdness attracted me in a story about someone else, closer to home it was just too scary. Mysteries should always have a solution. Despite the fantasy that haunted my childhood, in which I saw my dad wink out of existence before my own eyes, I needed to believe there was a rational explanation for what had happened to him. I'd been raised by my parents to be a skeptical humanist, and I already knew from television how easily people could be misled.

My father had never spent a lot of time with me—dads didn't, as a rule, back then—and as far as the outside world was concerned he was just an ordinary guy, but to me he was a hero. As a regular viewer of TV shows like
Get Smart!
and
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
(and too young to realize they weren't meant to be taken seriously), I found it entirely reasonable that my dad could be a secret agent, his job at the service station a cover like the dry cleaners that hid the entrance to U.N.C.L.E. HQ. He wasn't allowed to tell us, of course, but he had a mission to save the world. The thought of it made me glow with pride.

A secret government agency had the money, the equipment, the skills, and the reasons to make one of their operatives disappear in the most spectacular way. I'd never seen any of the James Bond movies at that age; but the stories were well-known on the school playground, and I'd been particularly impressed by Bond's resurrection after his totally convincing murder followed by a burial at sea in
You Only Live Twice.
I felt grateful that nothing so apparently final had been done to my dad. He'd just “gone away,” as my mother put it, and I expected, no matter what else she said, that one day, his mission accomplished, he would come back to us with no more warning.

My mother told us we'd just have to get on with our lives without him. She expressed no anger at my father's desertion. Even now I don't know what her innermost feelings were, but if not dictated, they must have been complicated by her feminist beliefs. She was, and still is, a strong-willed, quixotic individual, one born outside her natural time. Ever since I was old enough to read about them, I've realized that she was more like Emma Goldman, or the “New Women” of the 1890s, than she was sister to Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem or any of the new-wave feminists who came along later. She believed in free love and equated marriage with prostitution at a time when the average American girl went to college to get her “MRS” degree and thought pregnancy out of wedlock the most horrifying fate imaginable. My mother wouldn't even pretend to be married, not even—as her own mother would plead—for the sake of the children. Before the term “Ms.” was coined, she was always, emphatically,
Miss
Kennedy, and gave her surname to her two children so everyone always knew that our father was not married to our mother.

She was a staunch individualist, and she believed strongly in love. Love was too important to be denied and could not be compelled. If love died within a relationship, people had the right—even the obligation—to leave their partners and seek it elsewhere.

My father knew the rules. If he no longer loved my mother, he had only to tell her so, and she would have let him go. He could have abandoned us honestly.

His disappearance was the great mystery of my childhood, one which I was eager to grow up and solve.

The chance came sooner than I'd expected.

When I was sixteen I wrote an essay for my civics class (“Dissent Makes Good Citizens”) that won me a trip to a student conference in Minneapolis. I got to stay in a motel, and even though my civics teacher was right across the hall, and I had to share a room with a strange kid from Oshkosh, this was a thrilling novelty that seemed the height of grown-up sophistication. I examined the miniature toiletries and paper-wrapped tumblers in the bathroom, and bounced on my bed while my roomie hunched over the end of his, flicking through the TV channels. There was a telephone on the stand between the beds, and the local phone books were in a drawer underneath.

I picked up the white pages and automatically turned to the
P
s to look for my father's name. I wasn't expecting to find it, but there it was:
Pauluk, J,
just above
Pauluk, M.

My heart turned over. I felt dizzy. I took a deep breath and mentally talked myself down. OK, it wasn't a common name, but that still didn't mean it was
him
.
J
could stand for Jane instead of Joe.

I reached for the phone and got the front desk.

“I'd like an outside line, please.”

“You'll have to come down to the front desk and give us a credit card imprint.”

“Credit card! It's just a local call.”

“I'm sorry, sir, but company policy requires that we take credit card details in advance from any guest wishing to make calls from their room.”

“But I don't have a credit card.”

She paused. I heard someone else speaking to her. Then she said, “There's a pay phone in the lobby.”

I hung up without thanking her. My heart pounding, I tore out the page with
Pauluk, J
's address and phone number and grabbed my jacket.

“Hey, man, where you going?”

I turned and saw the kid from Oshkosh staring at me, his mouth hanging open slightly.

I gave him the same, mysterious reply my father used to give me: “Have to see a man about a dog.”

Scarcely a minute later I was dialing the number on the lobby pay phone.

A woman picked up on the third ring.

I took a deep breath. “May I please speak to Joe Pauluk?”

“He's not back from work yet. Who's calling?”

My mind went blank. I had not planned for this; I hadn't planned or expected anything. “Uh, that's OK, I can call back.”

“Well, don't call during dinner, all right? We eat at six. And if you're trying to sell something, don't bother. We don't have any money, and we never buy anything over the phone.”

“No, ma'am, I'm not selling anything. I just . . . I'll call back later.”

She hung up.

Looking at my watch, I saw it was just past five o'clock. She'd said they ate at six. He might be back any minute. I tapped my foot, nervous and impatient, wondering how long I ought to wait before trying again.

And what would I say if
he
answered this time? Would I recognize his voice after so many years? How could I be sure this was
my
Joe Pauluk?

I realized I would have to go and see for myself.

I went to the front desk. “Could I get a taxi, please?”

“Ian? You're not going out?”

Caught. My shoulders stiffened, and I turned at the familiar voice to see my teacher, Mrs. Charles, looking at me with furrowed brow. “Is anything wrong?”

“No, no, nothing's wrong.” I tried to smile. My mind was racing. “I've got relatives in town. I promised my mom I'd see them while I was here.”

“But not now.”

“Yeah, they've invited me for dinner.”

“Oh, Ian!” She shook her head in dismay. “You can't! The opening ceremony starts at six. It's the first chance for all you students to meet and talk together. You can't miss that!”

“The banquet is tomorrow night. I thought that was the important thing.”

“They're both important! Look, you'll have some free time tomorrow afternoon, couldn't you visit them then? Surely you don't have to have dinner with them. If you explain, they'll understand. Would you like me to talk with them?”

She smiled with such kindly concern that I felt my soul shrivel. I shook my head. “No, no thank you. I'll explain. You're right, they're bound to understand. I'll try to get back here by six, six-thirty latest.” I had no idea how big Minneapolis was, or how long it would take to get from there to the address I clutched in my hand and back again, but one minute would be more than enough to show me if this Joe Pauluk was my father.

“Why do you have to go? Why not just call?”

“It's too late for that—they've already left, to meet me—I have to go and meet them, I said I would.” I gabbled and grimaced, desperate to convince her. “It's OK, really, I'll rush straight back. But I have to go. My mom gave me money for taxis and all that,” I went on, as easily as if I'd been lying all my life. My mother had given me fifty dollars for emergencies, but I knew she expected me to bring most of it back home. We lived to a very strict budget, every spare dollar going into the college fund for me and Heather.

From Mrs. Charles's expression I saw she'd accepted my story, even though she didn't look happy about it. Unfortunately, she stayed with me until the taxi arrived, chatting about the weekend's schedule. I had meant to ask the desk clerk for a map of the city and some idea of what the taxi fare might be, but I didn't dare do that in front of Mrs. Charles, fearful of rousing her suspicions. I wasn't used to lying. Beneath my down jacket, my armpits ran with sweat while I concentrated on looking relaxed.

Luckily, the taxi driver had no problem with the address. Mrs. Charles waved, beginning to look a little anxious again, as he pulled away. “I'll be back as quick as I can,” I said, and sat back and tried to think of nothing.

It was completely dark, and very cold, when the taxi stopped in a quiet residential street. It looked like a fairly recent development at the lower end of the price scale. Except that the houses were newer, it reminded me of my own neighborhood back in Milwaukee. I paid the driver what he asked, barely registering the cost, then got out.

“You want me to wait?”

“No, no.” As the cab drove away I realized that I didn't know how I was going to get back to the motel, but I couldn't worry about that just then.

I took a deep breath, feeling the cold air bite my lungs, and stared at the ordinary ranch-style house in front of me. It looked snug and sealed against outsiders, the curtains drawn against the dark and prying eyes. A yellow light shone above the front door, but it looked less like a welcoming beacon, more like a warning: yellow for caution.

Parked on the driveway, in front of the garage to the left of the house, was a light-colored, late-model American car. I could hear the ticking of the engine as it cooled and knew it hadn't been parked there very long. On an impulse, I walked over to it and opened the door on the driver's side. The warmth of the interior was like a caress. I felt a powerful urge to slip inside, behind the wheel, to start 'er up and back away from this house and whatever life went on behind its walls, to drive away from this neighborhood and this city, to hit the highway and go. I could drive, even though I wasn't yet licensed. I could drive and drive . . . I think, if the keys had been left in the ignition, I would have done just that.