Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

A Meeting at the Cafe Visconti by Janice Law

When mystery aficionados talk about the revolution that occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of the strong female sleuth, they oughtn’t to forget the work of Janice Law, whose fictional investigator Anna Peters is about as tough as they come. Ms. Law’s first Anna Peters novel (1976) was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award and she has gone on to write a number of other novels and stories both in the Peters series and out. Her new story for us is somewhat off her usual track in that it is pure psychological suspense...

The sun still lit a high, cloudless sky, but the worst of the heat had sunk into the sienna- and ocher-toned buildings, making them glow as if by some subtle, internal fire. The big courtyard of the cafe was now mostly shadowed, and, freed of the heat and glare, the Bolognese were loitering over a Campari or a glass of mineral water or ordering pretty dishes of ices and biscuits. Michael smelled the smoke of their cigarettes, exhaust from the street, and a woman’s passing perfume, all touched with that more elusive smell, the faint exhalation of old stone and old buildings. Overhead, the swifts were beginning to swoop and twitter, while fat pigeons whirred between the tables and looked for crumbs underfoot.

Michael opened his notebook and glanced again at the column of figures. He had done all right. More than all right. The astronomy faculty had liked his presentation, admired the new software, understood the documentation; he had done the translations and now he had the orders sewed up. It was a good feeling, and he was thinking how much he liked Italians in general and the Bolognese in particular when a woman’s voice asked, “Do you speak English?”

Sometimes Michael ignored these appeals. His Italian was fluent, nearly perfect; his German was passable; his French, very good; and he could manage in both Portuguese and Dutch. Sometimes he would shrug, smile sympathetically, and shake his head.

“You must be American,” said the voice. “I’ve got one of the older models. A bit slow now.”

She must have noticed his company briefcase. Michael turned to see a nicely dressed woman with faded blond hair pulled back into an untidy knot. She was wearing oversized sunglasses with very dark lenses, and Michael was reflected as a tiny figure against a vast and somber sky.

“That must be the P-ninety-six?” he asked politely. You never know when you may find a customer.

“A generation before, actually. I’ve got one of the P-eighties.” She was somewhere in late middle age, a tall, sturdy woman with the confident smile of someone used to meeting people, used to making friends, or, perhaps, like Michael, used to making useful contacts.

“Really! Bane of our existence,” Michael joked. “How can we sell new software when those old dinosaurs are still going strong?”

“Slow but sound,” she said.

“A vintage model,” Michael admitted. “For personal use. For business applications now, our new line is the only thing to consider.” He could hear himself switching into his sales mode and smiled. “But you’re not here on business.”

Her expression adjusted subtly, and Michael wondered if he’d given offense. He nodded toward the guidebook and map that lay on her table.

“Travel and business,” she said after a moment, and there was a long pause. “You could say that travel has become my business.”

A waiter approached, very bright, neat, and important like all the cafe staff, and she ordered a San Pellegrino. Her Italian was quite passable, Michael noticed.

“I look at restaurants, hotels, tourist itineraries,” she remarked. “This is only my second time in Bologna. An underrated city.”

“One of the nicest in Italy.”

“That is what I think. I think it’s ready to be an important secondary destination if presented in the right way. Much more could be done with the university area as a package of entertainment, culture, and history. But not too touristy. That’s important for the publications I write for.”

Michael smiled at her enthusiasm.

“You’re wondering why I spoke to you,” she said.

“Americans abroad usually appeal for translations.”

“You are” — she hesitated, tipped her head to one side — “thirty-six, thirty-seven?”

“Thirty-six. Thirty-seven soon,” he added and instantly regretted it, for she said, “My son’s age exactly. He would have been thirty-seven next month. I saw you sitting there, and I said, he’s Mark’s age. That’s what Mark would have looked like. That’s what Mark would look like sitting in Bologna at the Cafe Visconti.”

“Your son... died?”

“I don’t know. I think now that he is dead, but I don’t know for a certainty.” Her expression momentarily turned vague and distracted, and Michael began to fear eccentricity, mental disturbance, all the anguish of emotional illness.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. He would wait a minute, he thought, then call the waiter and ask for his check. He was glad now that he had his briefcase and could use the excuse of a meeting.

“I didn’t believe it for a long time,” she said in a reflective tone. “There are days when I don’t believe it yet. I can understand those MIA families, I really can. Until you have something to bury, you don’t believe. It doesn’t seem real, does it? Someone is young and alive without a problem in the world and then — he’s gone.”

“An auto accident?” Michael asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and something about the gesture made him think that she must once have been attractive, desirable. “I don’t think it could have been an auto accident. Those are reported. No, he disappeared years ago on a cross-country trip. He’d been camping out, hitching from one town to the next. It was the thing to do then, backpack, hitchhike, ‘see the world.’ Perhaps you did the same yourself.”

Michael nodded before he could stop himself. “I traveled around a bit after my senior year.”

“You’d have been seventeen,” she said very definitely. “You might have been at the same campsites. It’s a small world. When I travel, I meet so many people...” The waiter appeared with a coaster, a napkin, a little bottle beaded with condensation, and a glass garnished with a slice of lime; he laid them out smartly and was gone with a flourish. “...who might have known Mark,” she resumed without a break, “who might have seen him, who were the right age or in the right place. Over the long run, that has become comforting.”

“There was an investigation, of course...”

“No ‘of course’ about it,” she said sharply. “It was strictly after a fashion. You know that was also the time for running away, dropping out. It was hard to convince the authorities that Mark would never just have disappeared.”

“You did not accept that.”

“Never.”

“I suppose you searched, yourself...”

“Searched, hired detectives, put up posters, leafleted the entire area. It was in northern Arizona — not a very populous place. I don’t think I left anything undone. That’s a bad thought, the thought of having left something undone. I still wake up sometimes at night, sit up in bed with my heart pounding, thinking, ‘I’ve forgotten something. What was it I was supposed to do? Where was it I was supposed to go?’ But I haven’t forgotten anything.” She took a sip of her mineral water and looked around the cafe and then back at Michael. It was impossible to see her eyes behind the sunglasses. “I can assure you I’ve followed every lead, every clue.”

“I’m sure you have,” Michael said. He put his hand on his briefcase, ready to get up, ready to leave.

“Twenty years,” she said. “A lifetime. It’s been a very curious life. But you’d have a different perspective. Twenty years ago, you’d have been seventeen, and twenty years later my son would have looked like you.”

“It’s a very sad story,” Michael said and shifted forward in his seat. He looked around with his hand half raised, but the alert and efficient waiters were all inside.

“There was a grove of aspens,” she said, and as soon as she spoke, Michael felt the shift of some inner tide. “There was a small lake, too. When I first went there, the aspens were turning; I remember little pale gold leaves shivering in the wind and, behind them, mountains the color of lead.”

“But you said he ‘disappeared,’ ” Michael said. “No one was to blame, was there? There was no suspicion, no evidence? You’ve said as much...”

She studied her glass for a moment. “There was evidence,” she said, “if you looked hard enough. What was hard was to convince the authorities to do something. To convince them that Mark would never have...”

“It’s hard to be sure sometimes,” Michael said abruptly. “It’s hard to know what anyone will do in a given situation.”

“But some people you just know,” she said. “In extraordinary circumstances, yes, that’s true. In extraordinary circumstances, who knows what we would do. I look at those poor Bosnians and Romanians sitting in the arcades...”

“Some of them are professionals,” Michael said. He prided himself on knowing a scam when he saw one. “They’re refugees today, Gypsies tomorrow, pickpockets the day after.”

“They look miserable enough,” she said, “wherever they come from. That is a drawback to Bologna.”

“As an ‘important secondary destination’?”

Like so many determined and energetic people, she was immune to satire. “What would we do in their place?” she asked in turn. “In their place, with poverty and disaster? That is one thing. But on a camping trip in the West?”

“Sometimes extraordinary things find us in ordinary places.”

“That was what I said! I said something terrible must have happened. That’s why I believe he must be dead.”

“Other things can happen,” Michael began. “People have been known to—”

“No, no, you don’t understand. Let me tell you...”

“I’m sorry. It’s been good talking to you, but I really must be going.” Even to himself, Michael found his voice unconvincing. “I’ve got this meeting.”

“Not now, surely,” she said, imperturbably, relentlessly. “This is the hour for cafes, for aperitifs, for reflection. Especially for reflection. I see you are the sort of man who reflects, who remembers. As soon as I mentioned the lake and the aspens, I saw that you were a man who remembers.”

Michael laughed and gathered his forces. “You made me think about camping in the mid-seventies. Evenings in a sleeping bag, listening to Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and the Stones.”

“Yes,” she said eagerly, “all that wonderful music. All that loud, wonderful music. Generation-breaking music, but not for us. Mark and I grew up together. Was that an advantage or a disadvantage, do you think?”

Michael shrugged. “My parents were older than average. Quite a bit older.”

“I had Mark when I was eighteen. So, you see, I understood him. I understood his generation. The wanting to get away, to experience life, to see the world. Our town was small. The button factory and the cloth mill were still running then. ‘Make something of yourself or you’ll end up in the mill,’ that was what I was told as a girl. And then the sixties came and the new electronics plaint and the real-estate businesses and it wasn’t as hard for a woman to earn a living anymore.”

“And Mark’s father? What did he do?” Michael asked abruptly, although it was rude, although it would surely delay his departure.

“That’s what Mark always wanted to know.”

“He didn’t know?”

“It was irrelevant, completely irrelevant.”

“Perhaps not to him,” Michael protested.

“Mark’s father was like me, young and foolish. But he didn’t have any staying power, and so he became irrelevant.”

“Boys need a man in their lives.”

“Of course, you had a father. A conventional life. But Mark had his grandfather. My parents were very kind. I had a wonderful life when Mark was small. I had a part-time job with the local travel agent. Twenty-five hours a week. The rest of the time I took care of Mark. We went fishing and on picnics along the river; we went to the swings in the little town park. We never missed the children’s matinee at the movie theater or the special programs at the library. That was the happiest time of my life.”

“Then he grew up,” Michael said. “He got too old for the park and picnics and being perfect.”

She took a sip of her mineral water and ignored the implications. “It was an adjustment when he went to school. Though I had to work, so I was away part of the time anyway. And then he did so well, no one could say I hadn’t done a good job with him. No one. He started the trumpet in elementary school, then played with the high-school band. Do you play an instrument?”

“As a child.” He remembered the shiny, flaring brass mouth, the padded valves, the amazing amount of slimy fluid distilled from puffing out the notes of the “Triumphal March.”

She smiled. “And sports. Baseball, of course. That was the big sport in our town. We had an adult team as well. And he insisted on playing football, although he was too light. That was the only thing we ever argued about. I went to all his games, and I suffered through every one of them until his junior’ year. Junior year, he broke his right leg in a game. I remember that awful sound, that terrible, unmistakable crack. I was in the stands and the sound went right through my heart.”

She put her hand to the base of her throat. Her hands were strong and capable, Michael noticed, but spotted with age and beginning to wrinkle.

“After that, I said ‘no more,’ though I think he played sometimes with the boys after school. I think he did.”

“But he was off the team?” Michael asked.

“The leg didn’t heal quite right. It was shattered. A bad, bad break. And the local hospital wasn’t the greatest — I still regret I didn’t insist he be taken to Providence or Hartford. But he was in such pain, and I was scared to death. Do you have children?”

Michael shook his head. “I haven’t been married long. We’re hoping.”

“You will know when you have children. The fear, the regrets. It left him with a slight limp. Most of the time it was undetectable, but when he was tired, you noticed.”

“Athletic injuries are so common now,” Michael said. “My right knee isn’t all it might be.” He was aware of a strange, tactile memory, not in his mind so much as in his shoulders: the weight of pads, the last of the old-fashioned leather pads, and the shock of impact, the springy force of bone and muscle and leather.

“Oh yes,” she agreed. He could feel how much she wanted to agree with him. “And contemporary lives have certain parallels, certain points in common. Like you and Mark. The same age, the same desire to ‘see the world.’ Music as a child, too, and sports? Did you play sports, too?”

“Soccer,” Michael said too quickly. “And a little tennis.”

“Tennis, too,” she said with a smile. Her smiles were beginning to make him uneasy. She seemed to be finding some sort of confirmation from him, and Michael told himself that he was crazy to be trapped in a cafe by this stranger.

“It’s getting late,” he said, looking at his watch. “I really do have a meeting.”

The old buildings were turning from sienna to a deep, shadowy umber, and the waiters were putting down the umbrellas. The sky had shifted imperceptibly from blue to pink, and her sunglasses reflected an amber and purple void.

“Of course,” she said, “of course you must keep your appointment.”

There was a hint of condescension in her voice, and Michael said, “It might not have been the way you remember. It might not have been that way at all.”

“But you know nothing about it,” she said.

“He never knew his father,” Michael said. “You told me that. What boy wouldn’t be unhappy? And in a small town...”

“Where everyone knows everything? Is that what you think?”

“Children are cruel.”

“And adults, too. We are not an attractive species, are we? You think he was miserable, that he ran away, that for twenty years, twenty years! he left his mother wondering what had happened to him. Is that what you think?”

“I don’t...”

“He wrote me every week,” she said triumphantly. “Or called. Called more than wrote. Collect. My phone bills were huge. Hi, Mom, he’d say. I’m in Cleveland or Denver or Mesa. Wherever. I was going to fly to San Francisco and meet him there in two weeks. To celebrate his cross-country trip. Does that sound like alienated youth? I got the records from the phone company and showed them to the police. Week after week, he called. Then new friends, the campsite up in the aspens with the lake and the lead-colored mountains, and he was never heard from again. What do you think?”

“His story might be different,” Michael said. “He might have wanted to know—”

“Secrets?” she asked. Her well-shaped hands had rather long nails. Rather long; he had not noticed that. And though the light was almost gone, she still had not removed her glasses. Michael turned slightly. Three of the waiters were back by their station. One was smoking, the other two were starting to wipe up the tables and put away the chairs.

“What do we owe children?” she asked. “Love, care, a decent life. Do we owe them our history? Yes? Even if it is a terrible one?”

“It isn’t for me to say. It was for your son.”

“But he’s been dead for twenty years. You must answer for him.”

Michael felt his chest tighten. He’d developed a touch of asthma after he turned thirty; it acted up under stress or in smoky places. “I would want to know,” he said. “He would be a grown man and he’d want to know.”

“But now Mark would have a secret, too,” she said. “As you must. By thirty-six, one has had time to accumulate follies and secrets. Isn’t that right?”

“But you believe your son is dead.”

“Mark has one of two secrets: the secret of his death or the secret of his disappearance.” She leaned forward in her chair, and for the first time, Michael caught a glimpse of her eyes, light, lighter than his own, intent, pained, and cruel. He understood that she was not pathetic but dangerous. “I propose a swap,” she said.

“I can see you were always manipulative,” he said before he could stop himself. “Trading off one thing for another. Trading silence for a ‘nice’ life, for money, for protection.”

“For my son’s happiness,” she replied quickly. “For a way to live. I was eighteen years old. No, I lied, I was barely seventeen when he was born, and scared to death. At seventeen, he was on a cross-country trip to ‘find himself,’ but at that age I was faced with supporting an infant and myself with all my hopes and dreams ended.”

“You should have thought of that before you got into bed.”

“Do you suppose that’s what he thought?” she asked. “I would be happy if he had, but I think he had other fears. You would understand that. I can see you have imagination. I can see you have an appreciation of what is not ordinary.”

“Things happen,” Michael said. A little breeze sprang up out of the arcades and chilled his damp chest.

“Things happened up in the aspen grove,” she said. “I am an intelligent woman. I didn’t know that at seventeen — or even at thirty-four. I’ve discovered that since. As I’ve discovered what happened. Twenty years is a long time. The works of Shakespeare, the theory of relativity, a treatment for cancer. What can’t be done in twenty years if one puts one’s whole mind to work?”

“Not everyone can write like Shakespeare,” Michael said.

“But maybe there is a task for everyone,” she said. “A unique task. My task was always Mark, protecting him, searching for him. You might be interested in how I proceeded.”

“It is getting late,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, “very late. Brian, David, Judy, and one other. Up in the aspen grove. I spoke to the camp manager. He is a rather sour, indifferent man. He remembered drinking, marijuana, loud music. The night Mark disappeared, he heard shouts in the dark, but he was not one ‘to borrow trouble.’ That was his phrase, ‘to borrow trouble.’ He just sat in his office and collected the camp rentals, but he was decent enough to store Mark’s gear.” She reached into her bag and produced a snapshot. “Judy. It took five years to find her. A fortuitous meeting. You know, it was rather sad about her. She died on her honeymoon in Hawaii — one of the very first cases of attacks on tourists. She left the campsite the same night Mark disappeared. I got these from her.”

Michael looked at the photos spread on the table: young men with scruffy beards, shorts, hiking boots, and big rucksacks on frames. He remembered the smell of dust and unwashed socks and hemp. “That was David,” she remarked.

“Was?”

“It only took me three years to find David. An unattractive person,” she added reflectively, “Not the sort of friend Mark had been used to having. He had a motorcycle accident. I read later that they believed he’d been forced off the road by another vehicle.”

“How did you find him?” Michael asked.

“Judy’s snapshots. She knew his name. I found his address by contacting every motor vehicle department in the country. It took a lot of time. David told me about the party. There had been a fight, he thought, but he had been too drunk to remember. In the morning, he said, Mark was gone. I did not believe him.”

“Perhaps you should have believed him,” Michael said.

“But that would have raised other questions. Brian, now, took nearly eight years. He’d gone into camping equipment, working at a mail-order company for serious backpackers and hikers. There are a surprising number of mail-order companies. I paid to have a computer age the image from Judy’s snapshot. And, of course, travel is my business. I found him in San Diego.”

“How did he die?” Michael asked. His voice, sounded hollow, unfamiliar.

She looked at him quizzically. “He died in a fall,” she said. “Ironic for a climber, but he fell down his office stair.”

“Four years ago?” Michael asked.

“Just about. I’d figured maybe another six or seven for you, but there is always serendipity. I saw you sitting here when I least expected to, but of course you’d always been in my mind.”

“Of course,” Michael said.

“And now we must swap,” she said. She laid her handbag on the table. It was the size of a small duffel bag and looked heavy.

“Perhaps you do not really want to,” he said.

“Perhaps you are afraid,” she said. “Afraid to know.”

“None of this has anything to do with me,” Michael said. “Now Mark...”

“Yes?”

“Mark was afraid.”

She waited.

“When it happened — and before — he was afraid...”

“Ah,” she said, “when what happened?”

“The fight, the accident. It really was an accident; it was no one’s fault.”

“Up in the aspens,” she said. “The night of the party.”

“That’s right.”

“He was afraid...” She stopped and, for the first time, hesitated.

“He was afraid of violence, of unforeseen craziness and confusion.”

“Why?” she asked and bit her lip.

“I think that is what you have to swap,” Michael said. The lights were coming on. Their golden pinpoints swam in her dark lenses.

“There was no way he could have known,” she said softly.

“There are always rumors, hints.”

“In a small town, yes, rumors, hints, whispers.”

“And when it happened — we were all drunk, you know — when it happened—”

“It? It?” she demanded.

“You’ve been there,” Michael said. “The loneliness of it, the mountains, the sheet of water with the trees quivering and dancing.”

“The campsite was sordid.”

“In the mountains, you feel small,” Michael said. “The wind comes down and blows your soul away.”

“But if he was afraid,” she said, “he was afraid of himself.”

“He had a temper,” Michael agreed.

“But nothing like...”

“You were going to say?”

“I was going to say, ‘Nothing like his father.’ Nothing like.”

“Yet he worried,” Michael said and gripped the edge of the cafe table.

“There was no sign,” she said carefully. “There was no sign whatsoever. Schizophrenia develops typically in adolescence. His father — his father was ill from the time he was eleven or twelve.”

“A fine father you picked for your son,” Michael said.

“ ‘Picked’ is not the right word. But that’s another story. We were talking about Mark. He was seventeen when he disappeared. True, the danger years, but there was no sign ever.”

“But you must understand,” Michael said. “The night awash in beer, rivalry, anger, a sudden violence—”

“And my son was killed,” she said in a cold voice.

“There was blood,” Michael admitted; he sounded surprised. Yes, there had been blood. “Even in midsummer, it is very cold there in the morning. The light is bluish and the mountains are the color of lead. You can wake up there and see the very shape of your fears lying in a pool of blood.”

“You had killed...”

“Let me give you the situation, all right? This guy was in the camp. A stranger passing through. He joined the party that night. He made a pass at Judy, picked a fight. In the morning, he was lying dead in the tent, and the others were gone.”

“They would have had ordinary fears,” she observed, not unsympathetically.

“They bugged out. Mark had no head for alcohol. By the time he came to, everyone else was gone. He was left to... clean up.”

“The lake,” she suggested.

“The lake is very deep,” Michael agreed.

“But not as deep as deception.”

“Nor as madness. There was the proof, wasn’t there? Proof of what he’d always wanted not to know. Proof of the rumors about crazy Uncle Ben, who’d done something terrible, who was locked up far away, who could never, ever be released.”

“You knew all this and yet you left him,” she said, her voice dangerous again.

“I’m trying to give you the situation.” ‘

“The situation in which he died or in which he ‘disappeared’?” She began fumbling in her purse and Michael stood up.

“It was Uncle Ben, wasn’t it?” he demanded. “Mark’s father was loony Uncle Ben?”

“You see,” she said softly, “why it was better not to tell him. You see how much I had to protect him from. You do see that, don’t you?”

“Maybe you can see why he had to protect you, too.” Michael’s whole body pounded with his heart like a great resonating chamber, and a gray morning light suffused the Cafe Visconti, bringing with it the inescapable awkwardness of death. “Why life was impossible for him. How could he have told you, for God’s sake!”

“He would have told me in the end,” she said calmly. “We were very close. I can’t expect you to understand that, but he would never have left me wondering and grieving for twenty years. Never. You had an ordinary life, a conventional home. You have no idea.” A little black snub-nosed pistol peeked out over the top of her purse. “You are the very last,” she said. “After twenty years.” She raised the pistol, and, full of anger and regret and fear, Michael leaped back from the table and broke for the street. His bad leg slowed him, and she saw that the instant before she saw the car. She jumped up and shouted his name, and he glanced back — she would remember that he did glance back — but he had hidden too well, the past was too terrible, and all alternative futures too full of regrets and recriminations. He was still running when he hit the street.

The squeal of brakes and the thump transfixed her heart and turned her nerves to thorns. After a few seconds, she sat back down and laid the child’s pistol on the table. When the caribinière arrived, the pistol would be lying there, a harmless toy, and she would be staring toward the dark street behind her tinted glasses. She knew what she would say, something about a present for a friend’s child, a misunderstanding, a curiously unstable stranger. She knew she would say those things, though she was not sure why she should bother, for now she was not convinced that she had not, after all, made a terrible mistake.