Blacklist

CHAPTER 38

When I returned to her room, Renee had moved to the deep leather armchair behind her desk. I helped myself to water from a pitcher on the trolley and looked at the prints on the wall. Most were cover art from notable books published by Bayard Publishing. A Tale of Two Countries held pride of place above Renee’s desk, with an inscription “To the Boy Genius” from “the weary old man, Armand Pelletier” I guess it was supposed to be a joke-Pelletier was only a dozen years older than Calvin Bayard himself when Calvin took on the press’s first nonreligious novel.

“I’d rather speak to your face than your back,” Renee said.

I pulled up a chair to face her. “When we first met last Wednesday, I mentioned to you that I worked for the Bayard Foundation during law school because of my admiration for your husband’s work. When did your son start holding such very different views?”

“It was one of those things,” she said. “It started as an adolescent rebellion that hardened into adult intransigence.”

I made a sour face. “You are at least as agile as I at dancing away from questions you don’t want to answer.”

“I’m not subtle-I’d quell you when you asked intrusive questions, not dance around you, if I didn’t want your cooperation. You wouldn’t have betrayed a confidence with Edwards in the room, since it’s obvious that he supports the attorney general’s efforts to round up every Arab in the country for questioning. But now that we’re alone, you can tell me where this Arab boy is. I feel certain that you know.”

I was startled. “You’re wrong, Ms. Bayard: I don’t know where Benjamin Sadawi is. If he is in league with a terrorist group, I hope the law soon catches up with him, but if he’s just a scared runaway kid-I hope he finds another friend as good as your granddaughter.”

She looked at me through narrowed eyes. “I don’t know how to persuade you to tell me. Because I don’t believe you don’t know.”

“Why does it matter so much to you? I should think you’d be glad to have h~m out of Catherine’s life.”

She stopped for a moment to choose her words. “I am. And the surest way for her to continue to be infatuated with him, or the romance of his situation, as you put it, is for her to think of him as being on the run. If she could see him for what he is-an immigrant dishwasher caught up in events out of his control-she’d stop imagining herself as a romantic heroine in his novel.”

“She’s impulsive and passionate,” I said, “but I think she’s fundamentally levelheaded. Still, as I told you, I’m eager to question him myself, so if I find him I will let you know. You should realize, by the way, that my phones may be monitored by various law enforcement agencies.”

She didn’t want to be satisfied with my response, but she couldn’t think of a lever to pry the information out of me. If all this had happened twenty years ago, she’d probably have made Calvin hire me as a personal assistant just to get what she wanted, but she couldn’t come up with any good lever or bribe this afternoon. She was a smart woman-she didn’t keep pushing when she saw she had nothing to push with.

“If Darraugh Graham hadn’t hated Larchmont so much, it wouldn’t be standing empty,” I said idly. “Catherine might have brought young Sadawi to you in that case. I gather that Darraugh hates Larchmont because he was the person who found his father’s dead body. Did you ever know what drove Mr. Graham to take his life?”

Renee looked at me steadily. “It happened around the time that I married Calvin, and I had a great deal else on my mind. I do remember that Mr. Graham’s death was considered a scandal in the community, although old Mrs. Drummond made sure it didn’t get into the papers.

“It was that kind of event that made me determined not to live in New Solway: the women spent their lives in the most backbiting gossip, while the men did deals with each other, and had affairs with their neighbors. The women married their sons to their neighbors’ daughters and so the backbiting continued between mothers-and daughters-in-law. I insisted that we buy this apartment in town. I involved myself in the press. We spent weekends out on Coverdale Lane, riding and doing country things, but I didn’t keep track of our neighbors’ personal lives.”

It was my turn to look at her distrustfully: I was sure she knew more about the Grahams and the other Coverdale Lane residents than she pretended, but, like her, I didn’t have a crowbar for prying out more information. I changed the subject again.

“Kylie Ballantine’s papers are in the Vivian Harsh Collection at the Chicago Public Library. I went down to read them and there were several references in them to an unnamed committee-and to the committee’s patron. Would that have been your husband?”

She looked at me in hauteur. “Calvin’s support of art and artists is legendary. But I must say I’m surprised you have time to visit libraries. Are you planning to follow in this dead journalist’s steps in writing a book about Ballantine?”

“No, ma’am. Just trying to figure out why he went out to New Solway.” “Yes, well, I can’t see that that concerns me. My only interest in your activities is how they affect my granddaughter’s well-being.” She got up to press a buzzer on her desk phone. After a moment, Elsbetta appeared and was told to show me out.

“When you decide to tell me about the Sadawi boy, call my office and set up an appointment. I’ll make sure my secretary knows to fit you in immediately.” She was right: she didn’t dance, she slam-dunked.

I walked the four miles from Banks Street to my office. I’d heard a great deal today, and I was hoping I could remember enough of the nuances to let me sort lies from truth. I wished I had someone to talk it all over with. My old assistant, Mary Louise, with her astringent approach to the business side of detection, would have given me good feedback.

Or Morrell, whose thoughtful response to my own passionate ideasMorrell-I was getting so I couldn’t express his name without feeling

something in my center disintegrate. I had a moment of despair so overwhelming that I collapsed onto a bench, head on my knees. I flung out a hand, as if I could touch him.

Something cold landed in my outstretched fingers: a passerby had given me a quarter. I looked around, but I was at a crowded intersection on North Avenue. Any of the people leaving Walgreens or heading into Starbucks could have felt sorry for a woman so decrepit she couldn’t hold up her head.

I sighed and stood up. Back to your loom, Penelope.

I continued west on North Avenue, doggedly thinking about the Bayards. Neither Renee nor Edwards would have said as much to me on their own as they had together. Edwards’s anger with his mother over Catherine, and his mother’s anger about his rightwing views, had let me learn that there was something fishy about Bayard Publishing’s finances-either today, or sometime in the past. Edwards had also implied that his father had slept around-he’d called Kylie Ballantine one of his “special projects.”

And Geraldine Graham? I had reached the bridge over the Chicago River, where I came to a halt, staring at a crane moving scrap metal in a plant at the river’s edge. Had she also been one of Calvin Bayard’s special projects? A lover, supplanted by the new young wife from Vassar? If that was the case, it was funny that MacKenzie Graham killed himself after Calvin arrived back in New Solway with Renee, instead of while Geraldine and Calvin were still lovers.

All those New Solway lives, they were like the twisted ribbons of steel dangling from the crane’s magnet. You could turn them and see them in different combinations. I could see a version in which Geraldine Graham threw a mask into the pool so she wouldn’t remember the lover who made her buy it. Or because she had found out that she shared the lover with the mask’s provider. I could see, less clearly, her formidable mother throwing the mask away: No primitive art allowed? No primitive passions allowed? Or Darraugh throwing it in because he resented anything to do with Calvin Bayard-if Calvin had been Geraldine’s lover.

Calvin had also forced Olin Taverner to buy a mask. And Edwards Bayard had grown up to give Olin any revenge against his neighbor and nemesis the old lawyer might crave. But why should Taverner want

revenge-surely it was Calvin Bayard who was the wronged party here. And what did that have to do with Marcus Whitby-aside from his interest in Kylie Ballantine?

The crane dropped its load. The sound didn’t reach me over the traffic noise along the bridge, but the end of the show galvanized me back into motion. At the corner of Damen, a drunk was panhandling. I gave him the quarter I’d gotten on Wells Street. He wasn’t grateful-these days a quarter is a pathetic handout.

Tessa’s truck was in the parking lot. When I passed the door to her studio, I stopped for a moment to watch. She was working weekends to finish a commissioned piece for a Cincinnati park, highly polished chunks of chrome that made you want to touch and slide on them. Despite the cool day, she had the heat turned off and was working in a tank top and shorts under her protective apron, her beaded hair pulled back under a hard hat.

I’ve learned not to interrupt her when she’s got her blowtorch going full blast, but when she saw me in the doorway she turned off the flame and came over to me, removing her hard hat and flipping her protective eye shield up over her head. “Are you still full of germs? How far away do I have to stand from you?”

“Keep burning your blowtorch under your nose; it’ll kill any viruses.” She laughed and came over to the door. “How many people have you given your office keys to lately, Warshawski?”

“Just one-a young economics Ph.D. who’s doing a little work for me.” “Some men were here yesterday and again this morning who didn’t seem to have any trouble with your front door. What’s going on?”

So much for trying to operate without the fear that leads detectives to unacceptable levels of nerviness. “They think I’m hiding an Arab terrorist.” “If you are, keep him buried until these guys lay off they’re a thoroughly mean-spirited bunch. If I didn’t have to finish `Children at Play’ this week, I’d take a hike, too-they make me nervous. These are what-federal agents? You know, my mother’s family was from Cameron, Mississippi. My grandparents had to run away in the middle of the night when the local sheriff led a group in burning down their house because it was in a spot where some local white muckety-muck wanted to build. I am not crazy about citizens having to stand helplessly by while the law takes over their homes.”

“Me, neither, but I don’t know what to do about it at this point. They keep waving that damned Patriot bill in my face.”

“Bastards!” She took me to a glassed-in cubicle at the back of her studio. She sat at a drawing board and began sketching rapidly with charcoal. In a minute, she had drawn four faces, two each on two separate sheets of newsprint. They were the same two men, dressed in service overalls in the first picture, in suits in the second. One of them was the man who’d insisted on searching my apartment last night.

“The one guy is a federal marshal, so I suppose his sidekick is, too.” I took the sketches from her.

“Try not to do anything to get these boys in blue so mad they burn down our space here: I’ve got two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment that I don’t want to try to replace. Insurance company never paid my granddaddy one thin dime for his house, you know.” She stomped back to her blowtorch.

I moved slowly across the hall and undid the locks to my office. Why did I bother, when the FBI or whoever could come in with sophisticated lock busters and help themselves to my space?

At least they hadn’t trashed my office, not like the horrible time I’d had a year or so back when I’d gotten on the wrong side of a malevolent city cop. I booted up and checked my messages. I wrote Morrell a long e-letter, telling him everything I’d been doing since Friday morning, even about getting a quarter when I was reaching out a hand for him. I wanted to be able to discuss Benjamin with someone, or rehash how we’d run away from Larchmont, leaving Catherine Bayard bleeding in the fields behind us, and I poured it all into the letter. But when I read it through, I deleted that part. If they were tapping my phone line, they could pick up my e-mail as readily as my conversations.

Oh, darling, I wish I knew where you were. Surely you wouldn’t have gone off with some set of extremists and not left word with someone from your team. Surely you’re not with Susan Horseley or some other fascinating jet-setting journalist?

In the end, I deleted the whole letter and turned to my own phone logs.