Hard Rain (46 page)

Jessie reached the second floor, ran down a long hall, into a room. She felt Kate's small hands clinging to her. “Oh Mom. You took so long.”

“I know, sweetheart. But everything's going to be all right.”

Heavy feet bounded up the stairs. Jessie glanced wildly around. There was no other door, no way out. She went to the window, put Kate down, manipulated the locking mechanism. It was a double window; she couldn't figure out how it worked. The footsteps came quickly down the hall. Jessie picked up a wooden chair and hurled it through the glass. The storm howled into the room. Jessie took Kate in her arms. Mr. Mickey came through the doorway, the pistol in his hand. He pointed it at her head and said, “Too late.”

Perhaps because of the storm, he didn't hear Alice Frame coming up behind him. Blood trickled from her mouth. She stumbled against his arm and tried to grab the gun. Mr. Mickey jerked it away, but Alice held on to his arm. For a moment her eyes met Jessie's.

“Jump,” she said.

The gun went off. Alice slumped to the floor. Mr. Mickey pulled the gun free and turned toward Jessie. She jumped out into the night.

It wasn't a long fall, not nearly as long as the fall in Malibu. But there was no water waiting below, and she had Kate in her arms. They began a slow spin in the air. Jessie stuck out one hand to break the fall; with the other she held on to Kate as hard as she could. Then she was lying on her back, breathless in the snow.

“Kate. Kate.”

“I'm okay, Mom,” said a voice against her breasts. “Are you?”

“Yes.” Jessie sat up. She put a hand in the snow to push herself to her feet and felt pain in her forearm. She tried again.

It was worse. She got her legs beneath her, heaved herself up. Then, with Kate in her good arm she took a step away from the house. She sank to her waist in the snow, fell forward on her bad arm. She bit her lip to keep from crying out. A cracking sound came from above, almost inaudible in the wind. She worked one leg free, plunged forward on her bad arm, sank; worked a leg free, plunged forward, sank; worked a leg free.

She was at the back of the house. Mount Blackstone rose before her, an immense shadow in the driving snow. She reached the trees.

“Hold onto my neck, darling.”

Jessie felt freezing hands on her neck. That freed her good arm. She used it to pull them through the trees, a foot at a time, plunging, sinking, plunging, sinking. But Kate's hands kept slipping away; her lips chattered from the cold. She wasn't wearing a coat. Jessie tried to remove her suede jacket and wrap it around her, but couldn't get it off her bad arm. It dragged uselessly behind them.

Plunge. Sink. Plunge. Sink. Jessie climbed the mountain, Kate in one arm, the other arm dangling behind.

“I'm getting cold, Mom.”

“I know, darling. It's going to be all right.”

Plunge. Sink. Plunge. Sink. The next time Kate said she was cold, her voice was so thick Jessie could barely distinguish the words. And she herself didn't have the strength to answer. She just kept going. Her clothes hardened with frozen sweat.

Kate's teeth stopped chattering. Her body went limp and she didn't speak. There were no sounds but the angry ones of the wind and the desperate ones of plunging and sinking. Once she thought she heard the whine of an engine. The sound died. She plunged and sank, plunged and sank.

After a while, Jessie grew aware of a new sound, a soft clicking sound from behind, as though someone were knocking pencils together. She turned, saw nothing but the lights of the cabin, far below. She plunged on.

But the clicking continued. It grew louder. Jessie turned again. Now she saw something. First it was a shadow behind a screen of slanting snow. Then it was a figure. And then a man. He didn't plunge and sink, plunge and sink, but strode along the top of the snow. The clicking came from the frames of his snowshoes.

Jessie turned and kept going. Plunge. Sink.
Click click
. Plunge. Sink.
Click click
. Closer and closer. Then she heard him breathing, the deep, even breathing of a distance runner.

She plunged. Sank. Plunged. Sank. Then a hand pressed against her back. It bent her down, pushed her in the snow, face down, Kate beneath her. Kate squirmed frantically. Jessie squirmed too, with all the strength she had left. She rolled over, onto her side, and looked up into Mr. Mickey's eyes. They were without expression. He was a man with a job to do—Bao Dai's opposite: for him, murder carried no moral baggage, nothing damning, nothing redemptive.

Mr. Mickey had his gun, but he wasn't bothering to use it. Perhaps he hated waste. He just took her neck in his huge hand and began forcing her head down into the snow.

Jessie tried to move. She tried to bite. She tried to scream. She could do nothing.

Then a white bear rose up behind Mr. Mickey. It raised its white paws high in the air and brought them crashing down on Mr. Mickey's head. Mr. Mickey slumped forward, on top of her.

Sirens sounded down below. They could have been the screams of very small things, like butterflies. Then Mr. Mickey was no longer on top of her, and the bear was bending down, peering into her eyes. The bear's own eyes were very worried and a little wet.

Click. Click
. More clicks. The bear looked up. Mr. Mickey was on all fours, his head hanging down. He raised it very slowly, just in time to see a much smaller man come clicking out from behind a tree. He had a ski mask on his face and a gun in his hand.

Mr. Mickey's lips twisted up in a little smile.

The sirens screamed their little screams.

The gun cracked.

Mr. Mickey dropped dead in the snow.

“Got him, Zyz,” said the man in the ski mask.

“Keith?” said the bear.

“To the rescue,” said the man in the ski mask.

The sirens sounded.

The bear picked her up. He picked Kate up. He carried them down the mountain.

“I can walk,” Jessie said.

“You don't have to prove it,” the bear replied. He didn't let her go.

They were almost at the bottom when Jessie put her lips to the bear's ear and told him a secret. It was just two words: “George Will.”

42

“Imagine,” Keith said, “a desk man like me saving the ass of an old hand like you, Zyz!”

Thanksgiving morning. The wind had died, the snow had stopped falling. The sky was bright blue; snow covered everything, thick and white. The whole world was blue and white, dazzling blue and glaring white. Just being in it—there outside the cabin on Mount Blackstone, watching the ambulance attendants carry out the bodies of the senator, his wife, Major Tsarenko and Pat Rodney—made Zyzmchuk's eyes hurt.

“You've got a good imagination, Keith,” he said.

Keith laughed. His cheeks glowed in the cold air like polished apples.

“Better than mine,” Zyzmchuk said. “Sometimes I have trouble imagining things.”

“It's your Central European background, Zyz, if you don't mind my saying so.”

Zyzmchuk smiled. Keith smiled. “That must be it,” Zyzmchuk said. “Some sort of sociogenetic block. There are certain things I just can't imagine.”

“Like what, Zyz?”

“Like your father's wine cellar.”

Keith's smile froze on his face. “My father's wine cellar, Zyz? What about it?”

Three state troopers came out of the cabin, the rolled-up red rug on their shoulders. “What sort of collection did he have?” Zyzmchuk asked.

Keith's smile relaxed. “A modest one, really, I guess. Mostly Burgundies, if I remember. It's been a long time.”

“Did your mother like wine too?”

“My mother?”

Zyzmchuk nodded. “Did she enjoy going down there and rooting out a nice bottle?”

“Sometimes, I suppose.”

“Like after she'd come home from scrubbing Erica McTaggart's floors?”

Keith looked up into Zyzmchuk's face. The glare made him squint, reducing his eyes to slits. “What are you saying exactly, Zyz?”

Zyzmchuk gazed past him, at the white mountain. “Got your watch on?” he asked. “The gold Rolex?”

Keith frowned. “Yes.”

“What time is it?”

Keith pulled back the sleeve of his coat. “Eight-twenty.”

“That's a nice watch,” said Zyzmchuk, looking at it. “Did your mother ever see it?”

Keith tugged down his sleeve. “She passed away years ago.”

“I know. I saw a picture of her the other day. I think she would have been impressed by a watch like that.”

Keith squinted up at him. “Why do you think that, Zyz?”

“Because she was poor.”

“I wouldn't say that. More like middle-class.”

“Middle-class people don't scrub floors for a living. You were poor, Keith. No father, and a mother who cleaned up for the McTaggarts. Now you've got a gold watch, a red Jaguar, a house in Malibu. You've come a long way.”

Keith's brow wrinkled. “There's no house in Malibu, Zyz.”

“Sure there is. A nice little investment. Just not in your name, that's all. Do you know Fairweather? He's flying down to Panama this afternoon to get all the details. He's very excited about it.” A police helicopter came around the mountain and dipped over the cabin. “You made it big, all right,” Zyzmchuk said, “but it must have been hard being a poor scholarship student, and a local boy too, at Morgan. What with all those rich kids. Like Hartley Frame.”

Keith squinted up at him for what seemed like a long time. Then moisture squeezed out from between his eyelids. And his voice cracked a little when he said, “It was hard, Ivan. Sounds silly, now, maybe, but it was hard. I wanted so much to … belong. I suppose I embellished things a little. Some things. From time to time.”

“Perfectly understandable. In fact, there's only one thing I don't understand.”

“What's that?”

“Why Frame fired you, that summer you interned in Washington.”

The moisture stopped leaking through Keith's eyelids. “I don't get you, Zyz. I worked there every summer, for one thing, and he never fired me. I left on my own, but that was just two years ago, when I came over to your outfit.”

Zyzmchuk shook his head. “You worked there one summer, Keith. And you were fired. What happened? It couldn't have been too serious, or he wouldn't have taken you back, would he? Was it your long hair?”

Keith said nothing for a few moments. A plow came slowly up the lane, folding blankets of snow before it. Keith sighed. “I had a brief, very brief, affair with Alice. At her instigation.” Keith's eyes flickered toward him, then looked away. “It amounted to nothing, but Frame found out.”

“That's going to be hard to verify,” Zyzmchuk said. “In the circumstances.”

Keith shrugged.

“Still, he fired you.”

“Yes.”

“But later he hired you back.”

“Yes.”

“So he forgot and forgave.”

“I suppose you could say that.”

“When did he take you back?”

“A year or so after I graduated.”

“Around the time the Red Cross visited Hartley Frame's prison camp and declared him dead?”

Keith glanced around. Zyzmchuk didn't. He already knew what there was to see: the mountain on one side, state troopers on the other. “I don't remember the exact date,” Keith said.

“No? How about Woodstock? Do you remember that?”

“Woodstock?”

“The festival. That's when Hartley and Pat made their little deal in the woods.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Zyz.”

“You were there. It was just the kind of rich man-poor man stuff you understand so well. Pat went to the army physical as Hartley, in return for the blue Corvette. The one you dumped in Little Pond.” Right on top of the BMW Pat Rodney dumped there; it wasn't surprising, Zyzmchuk thought—local boys always knew the best spots for dumping things, and they were both local boys. Their mothers had worked together at the plant. The sons had started together at the bottom; one had used the other to rise to the top.

“Maybe they both thought Pat would flunk the physical,” Zyzmchuk continued. “Maybe just Pat did. Maybe he didn't care much one way or the other. Maybe he thought going to Viet Nam was worth the car. Maybe there would be more payments when he came back. Maybe he was just a dumb kid. He passed the physical. His fingerprints went into the records as Hartley's. He went, as Hartley, to Viet Nam. He got captured. Meanwhile Hartley went, as Pat, to California.

“Then the Red Cross visited the prison camp, and enough evidence was produced to declare Hartley dead. That made the switch a fait accompli. Of course, it was smart to keep Pat Rodney alive. There might have been a propaganda use for him further down the line, if the senator ever ran for President, say. Meanwhile, everyone who knew about the switch tried to profit: Doreen Rodney blackmailed Hartley; Disco made a clumsy attempt to get to the senator. He came up here, didn't he?”

“You must be very tired, Zyz. You're not making sense.”

“No? Don't you remember intercepting Disco and taking him on a little trip?”

Keith looked around again. The mountain and the troopers hadn't moved.

“But they were small-timers compared to you,” Zyzmchuk went on. “You're the one who made it all happen. I've been checking the army records. They're badly organized—it took some time to find them.” Keith bit his lip. “The funny thing is that Hartley's whole unit could have been wiped out easily, but all they did—North Vietnamese regulars, by the way—was take one prisoner. Isn't that odd?”

“Odd?” Keith's voice was low.

“Yes. Almost as if it were a setup. Almost as if they knew who their prisoner really was from the beginning.”

“This is a lot of wild talk, Zyz. I can't follow you at all.”

“Sure you can. When Pat Rodney went to Viet Nam, someone—someone with a good imagination—walked into the Russian embassy and told them about the Woodstock deal. Oh—I meant to ask you something. You mentioned you spent your junior year abroad.”