The Garden of Betrayal

45

I nudged the screen door of the adobe farmhouse open with my knee, carrying Claire’s and Kate’s bags out into the dirt courtyard. It was a fine warm morning, air perfumed by the lavender rooted in the shade of the courtyard walls, and sun brilliant in a cloudless sky. Beyond the walls were endless rows of grapevines, tendrils heavy with purple fruit.

The house and the surrounding fifty acres were a slice of an old California rancho, half an hour north of Napa, that had been purchased by a thrifty migrant couple back before the area became wine country. The husband had restored the dilapidated house and outbuildings, while his wife revived the kitchen garden and planted lilacs, manzanitas, azaleas, and other flowering trees and shrubs wherever they’d take. They’d grown various cash crops in the early years-wheat, oats, and barley-but as time went by, and the wine boom gathered momentum, they’d leased most of the land to local vintners.

It had been a grandson who related the history to me, and who explained why the family was selling. His grandparents had died of old age, well after the succeeding generations had abandoned the land for the city. He was a UCLA-educated venture capitalist with a prominent Sand Hill Road firm, equal parts proud and ashamed of his humble heritage. The family didn’t want to spend cash on maintenance but couldn’t bear to see the place get run-down. I had the sense he was more interviewing than selling us, wanting to make sure the property was delivered into good hands. Despite our urban background, Claire, Kate, and I somehow passed muster. We found a housewarming gift in the kitchen after we closed the deal-a planting journal the elderly couple had kept over the fifty years of their residence, detailing what had flourished and what hadn’t, and packed with agricultural tips and advice. Claire had already become adept at translating it, leaning on one of our inherited farmhands for help with the colloquialisms that defied her Spanish dictionary.

I heard the screen door open again as I was loading the bags into our car, and turned to see Claire and Kate walking toward me. They were both wearing jeans and T-shirts and dusty boots. Kate had a silver locket around her neck, a farewell gift from Phil. He’d visited us in San Francisco before heading off to Vienna for a semester abroad. He and Kate had parted friends, and they still chatted online frequently. She’d put him in touch with Gabor, her hacker friend from nearby Budapest. Phil and Gabor had discovered a mutual interest in electronic music, and Kate had been amused to learn that they were planning to meet up at an outdoor festival in Prague. I was glad her first real relationship had worked out well for her but not entirely unhappy that they’d been separated before things went too far.

“I wish you could be there tonight,” Claire said, standing on tiptoe to give me a kiss. “The dancing is really magnificent.”

The San Francisco Ballet was kicking off its new season with a twilight performance of Balanchine pieces in Golden Gate Park, and Claire was making her debut as their new pianist.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized, hugging her tight. “I might catch the end. If not, I’ll definitely see you at the party afterward.”

Kate suddenly snapped her fingers and ran back toward the house.

“What now?” I said.

“Her sweater,” Claire guessed, shaking her head tolerantly. “I think she left it on a chair in the kitchen. She’s really nervous.”

The following day would be Kate’s first as a freshman at UC Berkeley. Our plan was to spend the night in a hotel in the city and then drive across the Bay Bridge to move Kate into her new residence hall. The previous week had been almost entirely consumed by speculation about her new roommate, with occasional heated digressions on the subject of what she should wear. My opinion hadn’t been sought.

Claire touched the corner of my mouth with a finger.

“You’re frowning,” she said. “You’re thinking about Kyle, aren’t you?”

“It’s hard not to,” I admitted. “I keep wondering where he would have gone to college, and what it would have been like to take him for his first day.”

She kissed me again.

“I know. I wonder the same thing.”

It had somehow become okay for us to be sad together, the shared sorrow paradoxically staving off our individual despair. I still grieved for my son and worried about the world I was leaving my daughter, but I felt optimistic at times, as well-about my marriage, and other things.

“Sorry,” Kate called, letting the screen door slam as she darted out of the house. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and then grabbed at Claire’s hand. “Come on. I want to make sure we have enough time.”

“She dialed around San Francisco and found a store that has the red sandals she’s been looking for,” Claire informed me, eyes rolling, as she let herself be dragged away. “In the Mission District.”

“Footwear’s important,” I said, my tone chiding. “I remember the shoes I wore on my first day of college.”

“Really?” Kate asked, curiosity bringing her to a halt. “What were they?”

I grinned at her, and she smacked her forehead with her hand.

“Okay,” she muttered. “I get it. You’re mean.”

“I remember my pants, too. They were these really nice boot-cut corduroys-”

“Mean,” she shouted, tugging at Claire’s hand again. “So mean. Come on. Let’s go, Mom.”

I waved and blew kisses as they drove away and then headed over to the barn to do some work. I was installing a wire fence on the north side, digging the post holes by hand. One of the farmhands had taught me the proper technique so I wouldn’t destroy my back. Let the tools do the work, he’d cautioned, and slow down: lentamente. It wasn’t a race. It felt good to be working in the sun-loosening the soil with a pointed bar and then scooping it free with the hinged digger.

I took a break at around one, making myself a sandwich in the kitchen and sitting on the front porch to eat it. I hesitated when I was done and then stood on my chair to reach up overhead. There was a small trapdoor in the porch ceiling, to provide access to the dead space between the wood joists and the rafters. “Para fumigacion,” the farmhand had said and shrugged, when I asked about it. “Termitas.” I pushed the trapdoor open and felt around until I found the oversized Ziploc bag that I’d secreted a few weeks previously. Removing it, I sat down again. The bag contained two items: an eight-year-old Christmas card with a picture of my family on the front, and a color photograph of my son, Kyle, dead in the trunk of Mariano Gallegos’s car. Both items had been found by the police in a drawer in Anton Rastin’s home, along with Alex’s missing hard drive. Reggie had swiped the card and the photo from the police property room after they’d been processed.

I took the card from the bag first, touching the picture of my family before I opened it. The card was addressed to Alex and contained a chatty letter from Claire, updating our friends and family on our year. The letter opened with the news that she’d won a spot as an interim pianist with the City Ballet, and went on to say how excited she was to be performing again, despite the fact that she’d have to work evenings. Reggie had informed me that the card had Alex’s fingerprints on it, which was only to be expected.

I replaced the card and withdrew the photograph. Kyle was wrapped in my coat, lying on his side so that his face was only partially visible. He looked like he was sleeping. The M5 marque and the top edge of a diplomatic license plate were visible at the bottom of the picture; a light post and a bit of the George Washington Bridge showed at the top left. Alex’s fingerprints were on the photograph also, which was less expected.

Reggie and I had been sitting in the front seat of his car when he showed me the card and the photo. After I regained my composure, we worked out several versions of what might have happened. White’s men-Anton Rastin and his associates-had to have known where I lived, and what my family looked like, and when they could expect Claire to leave our building. One possibility was that the Christmas card had nothing to do with their knowledge-that they learned what they needed to know by observing us. Another was that White discovered that Alex and I were close and had Alex’s home or office searched for information about me. And yet another was that White had Rastin lean on Alex, and that Alex gave the card up voluntarily, because he was afraid Rastin would reveal his insider trading to the SEC or to his father.

Doris Carabello’s fingerprints were on the photo of Kyle also. The two sets of prints-hers and Alex’s-similarly lent themselves to several different explanations. Narimanov wanted Alex to sell me on the Saudi data. White would have instructed Doris to pressure Alex, but Alex’s trading indiscretions at Torino were years past, potentially difficult to prove in retrospect and certainly outside any statute of limitations. It’s possible that Doris gave him the photo as a threat, to underscore the viciousness of the people she represented. Or that Alex guessed at Doris’s involvement in Kyle’s death and demanded information about Kyle as the price of his cooperation. He knew how badly my family needed closure. Or maybe Doris shared the photo with him to remind him of his own complicity in my son’s murder, and to drive home the leverage she had over him. What seems certain is that Alex, consumed by guilt, wrote the anonymous e-mail to Reggie and then committed suicide two days later.

I rinsed and racked my lunch dishes in the kitchen and then built a small fire in the living room fireplace. I fed the card and the photograph into the flame individually, stirring the ash to make sure they burned completely. Clifford White was dead. Doris Carabello and Karl Mohler had vanished, presumably victims of Narimanov’s ruthless tidiness. Alex’s true role in Kyle’s death would likely never be known, unless he’d confessed more to his father in his letter than Walter had revealed. In retrospect, I couldn’t help wondering if a confession might not have been responsible for Walter’s abrupt change of heart toward me. Walter was ruthless to the core, but even he would have been shocked to learn that Alex had played a role in my son’s death.

Regardless, I didn’t plan to ask any more questions. It was time to move on: The Alex I wanted to remember was the friend I’d had before the pride and greed of his father’s milieu had destroyed him, not the shattered wreck who might have betrayed me. Amy had captured my feelings when I told her that Claire, Kate, and I were moving to California to start over: “That’s good,” she whispered, hugging me tight. “Let the dead bury the dead. Matthew eight: twenty-two.”

“Amen,” I’d murmured back. “Amen.”

I was setting one of the corner posts when I glanced up and noticed a distant dust trail moving toward me. It was late afternoon; the wind had risen, but it was still hot. I put away my tools, wiped sweat from my brow, and squatted down in the shade of the barn to wait. A white Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up a few minutes later. Ari was driving, Shimon in the front passenger seat. They both got out and looked around, their eyes masked by sunglasses. My muscles protested as I stood up.

“What do you do for water?” Shimon asked.

“You’re a farmer?”

“More than you.” He snorted. “I grew up on a kibbutz.”

“There’s a big lake a mile east that feeds an aquifer directly under our property. I had a study done before I bought the place. Water’s never been a problem here, even in drought years.”

“It’s lovely,” Ari said approvingly. “Mazel tov.”

“Thanks. You want something to drink?”

Shimon shook his head, arms folded.

“What we’d like is to know why we’re here.”

“Unfinished business,” I said easily, not having expected any pleasantries. “You disappeared without telling me how you fixed Senator Simpson.”

The senator had held a press conference the week after White died, to announce his withdrawal from the presidential race for personal reasons. One of his reasons had been distress at the untimely passing of his closest aide. He’d closed with an impassioned appeal for donations to the American Heart Association.

“A quiet word here and there about the senator’s libido,” Shimon said. “The Republicans don’t want a Bill Clinton.”

“And relations between America and the Persian Gulf States?”

“Fluid,” Ari suggested.

I smiled, but Shimon looked annoyed.

“Unchanged. The French withdrew their security proposal to the Saudis. They seem quite put out with the Russians these days.” He took his sunglasses off and rubbed his eyes. “There is some reason other than your curiosity for me to have traveled seven thousand miles to see you, isn’t there?”

I nodded, gesturing toward an old windmill a few hundred yards away. The blades were spinning slowly, the iron shaft creaking on ancient bearings.

“The windmill drives the pump that lifts water from the aquifer. I had an engineer out here the other day, to talk about replacing it with a more modern windmill so I could do a little cogeneration at the same time. I mentioned that I planned to install a solar array as well, so I could get myself off the grid. He laughed. Oil’s cheap, he explained, because of the financial crisis. It would take forever to get any kind of payback on my investment. His advice was to do nothing.”

Shimon shrugged.

“We made another round of the Western governments, identifying Rashid as the source of our Saudi estimates. No one wants to talk about an energy problem twenty years from now. They’re all preoccupied with unemployment and stimulus plans and budget deficits.”

“They’d focus if they really understood the consequences. We’re running out of time.”

“So, what do you want us to do?” Ari asked.

“Send me Rashid’s information. The real information. I still have an audience.”

“Possible,” Shimon said, frowning, “but this is a political problem-”

“I read the news accounts of Narimanov’s plane crash,” I said, deliberately interrupting him. “And I made a few phone calls. It’s interesting. The plane dropped off radar almost a hundred miles away from the crash site, and the search-and-rescue team never found Narimanov’s body. There’s a German air base nearby. I’m not usually a big conspiracy theorist, but it made me wonder: What if the crash was staged, so the Germans-or their friends-could secretly grab Narimanov?”

Shimon stared at me, his eyes hooded.

“Mohler was feeding money to dozens of bank accounts,” I continued. “White told us that Narimanov controlled business and political leaders all over the world. If Narimanov was secretly in custody, whoever held him would have leverage over everyone he’d been bribing.”

“Tread lightly here,” Ari advised softly. “Very, very lightly.”

“Let me be very clear,” I said. “I’m not threatening anybody with anything. Nothing I know or suspect goes any further, ever. But I want you to know that I’ve established a nonprofit organization to promote awareness of impending energy shortages and to lobby for more action on alternative energy strategies. Walter Coleman gifted us an endowment. It would be nice if the business and political leaders who were on Narimanov’s payroll were encouraged to be supportive as well.”

“That’s it?” Ari asked.

“That’s it.”

He glanced at Shimon and then back at me.

“You have information on this organization?”

I fished one of my new business cards from my hip pocket.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s a little damp.”

Shimon put his sunglasses on again and nodded curtly.

“I’ll tell my superiors about your organization,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll approve. I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a number of calls in the near future, offering donations or help. And I’ll have a word with Rashid’s executor in Jerusalem. My recollection is that he left some papers for you. I’ll see that they’re sent along.”

“Thanks.”

Shimon turned and began walking back toward his car, Ari trailing behind. He glanced at the fence posts I’d set and came to a halt.

“You’re planning to keep livestock?” he asked.

“Goats,” I replied. “A mutual friend suggested they might be a good idea.”