Early Warning (2 page)

T
HE FUNERAL WAS
a riot of floral exuberance—not just lilies, but daffodils and tulips and sprays of apple and pear blossom. Frank Langdon sat with his daughter, Janny, about six pews back on the right; his wife, Andy, and their month-old twins, of course, couldn't come all the way to Iowa. Janny, two and a half, was behaving herself. Frank took his hand off her knee, and she stayed quiet. The broken sounds of tears being suppressed rose all around him. Frank's sister Lillian, her husband, Arthur, and their four kids were two pews ahead on the left. Mama was sitting in the front pew, staring straight ahead. Granny Elizabeth was sitting next to her, alone now—Grandpa Wilmer had died in the summer; in the intervening nine months, Granny had traveled to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. His mother liked to cluck knowingly and say, “She's blossomed, hasn't she?”

His brother Joe's baby, the same age as his twins, looked like she weighed what they did together. Joe's wife, Lois, and her sister, Minnie, passed the baby back and forth to keep her quiet. Frank stared at Minnie for a moment. He had known her his whole life, walked to school with her for years, known always that she was on his side. Maybe she loved him still. Frank cleared his throat. Annie, the child's name was. Janny couldn't get enough of her—she talked to her and stroked her head if she got a chance. Across the aisle from Minnie
were Frank's brother Henry, his communist aunt Eloise, and Eloise's daughter, Rosa. His sister Claire—fourteen, nineteen years to the day younger than Frank himself—kept turning her head and looking at Rosa, and why not? The girl was at her peak at twenty, severe and slender, with the look of a French actress. She made Henry, who was only months older, look like a girl, Claire look like a sheep, Andy, even glamorous Andy, look like a frump. Rosa was much more alluring than his aunt Eloise had ever been. Frank looked away. It was his father's funeral.

After the interment (where Janny wanted to walk from grave to grave, smelling the daffodils in full bloom; Frank didn't stop her), Frank calculated that he'd kept that sad smile on his face for eight solid hours. He held his drink, Scotch and soda—supplied by Minnie, who was now assistant principal at the high school and lived here, apparently comfortably, with Lois and Joe. Frank watched the neighbors come and go. This house, much grander than the house they'd grown up in, was industriously clean. The famous dining room with the sliding French doors that had been the envy of farmers around Denby, Iowa, all through Frank's childhood, still had flowered wallpaper and heavy moldings. While he was pondering the double-hung windows, Arthur Manning came up to him, as if they were merely brothers-in-law who just happened to see each other at a family funeral. Frank often wondered if his sister Lillian had any idea of what her husband talked to Frank about, or the uses he put him to.

Arthur held Tina against his shoulder. She was three months now, wiry and active, as if she planned to head out the door any moment. Arthur's tweed jacket was festooned with a folded diaper. Arthur jiggled and comforted a baby the way a great athlete hit a ball, as if his adept grace and evident reproductive success were the easiest thing in the world. Tina burbled and muttered, wide awake and not crying. Frank admired this.

Arthur said, “How are Richie and Michael doing?”

“Coming along,” said Frank.

“What are they now?”

“A month. But they were four and a half weeks early, so let's call them newborns.”

“Precocious, then,” said Arthur, with a straight face, and Frank
smiled a real smile. He said, “It's a good thing Mama hasn't seen them. She might suggest putting them down.”

Arthur's eyebrows lifted.

“Mama's strict about babies. If you aren't good-looking, you could be carrying something contagious.”

Arthur kissed Tina on the forehead.

“Don't worry, Arthur,” said Frank. “Tina would pass.”

Arthur laughed. But Frank could see it—even at his father's funeral, Mama doled out words and smiles like stock options. Annie and Lillian were the preferred stock; Timmy, Arthur's oldest at six, the class-A common stock; Debbie, five, Dean and Janny, both two and a half, the class-B common stock—not much of a risk, but not much of a dividend, either. Tina, who could still turn out to be blond, could rise in value or decline. As for Frank himself, well, he had taken his company private, and Mama didn't have much of an investment there at all—a peck on the cheek, a reassurance that everything was going to turn out fine. Frank lowered his voice: “Have you talked with Eloise?”

Arthur jiggled Tina again. His voice was low, too. “We clinked glasses, but we haven't exchanged actual words.”

“Were you congratulating each other on the death of old Joe?” Stalin had been dead about two weeks.

“I think we were.”

“Did your organization have anything to do with it?”

“Not that I know of,” said Arthur, seriously. “Just dumb luck, I suspect. But we will take the credit if it is offered to us.” He shifted Tina to the other shoulder. “Maybe he doesn't matter, though. There's no sign that things have changed or that their ambitions have waned.”

Frank nodded, then said, “You know what we said in the war? Two Russkies die, four more pop up. Why would Stalin be different?”

“You know that, when Hitler and Stalin were playing footsie, Hitler promised him Iran, right?”

“I didn't know that.”

“He did. Now Mossadegh hates the Brits so much that he's heading that way, too. However Iran goes, so go the rest of them.”

“Truman would have let them have it,” said Frank. “He let them have Eastern Europe. Maybe Ike has more balls.”

“Zorin is in Tehran now. He was in Prague in '48. Coups are what he does.”

Frank half expected Arthur to ask him to do something, but he couldn't imagine what that would be. Jim Upjohn, the savviest investor Frank knew, had recently put a lot of money into Getty, but Getty was based in Kuwait and Arabia—nothing in Iran. Arthur said, “I'm ready for bedtime. How about you?”

Frank said, “Always.”

But dinner was served. Once they were seated, Janny between himself and Minnie, who kept putting bits of food on her plate, Janny seemed to cheer up. She ate everything Minnie gave her, and asked for more of the canned corn. There was plenty, as always—beef stew, beans, rolls, the newest possible potatoes, an angel-food cake. When everyone had eaten their fill, Joe told a story—the kind people tell at family dinners after a funeral, about the person who died. “One time, Papa sat me on our horse Jake, and then led me to the apple tree and had me pick apples. I would hand them to him, and he would put them in an old feed sack.”

“Oh, that was the Arkansas Black,” said Rosanna. “So good. Only cropped every two years, though.”

“When Walter showed up to propose to you, Rosanna,” said Eloise, “I remember he wore the strangest hat.”

“It was a derby!” exclaimed Rosanna. “Very stylish.”

“I was looking out the window. I thought he was wearing a turban.”

“How did that look like a turban?” said Rosanna.

“I didn't know! I'd never seen a turban, either.”

Everyone laughed.

Minnie said, “What about the rattlesnake?”

“What rattlesnake?” said Joe.

Frank suddenly remembered this.

Minnie said, “Frankie and I were picking pole beans. We were maybe seven. There was a snake under the bottom of the fence, a step from where we were. Walter must have been watching us, because, as soon as I screamed, this long, forked stick came down and pinned the snake's head right to the ground. We ran away. I don't know what Walter did with the snake.”

Frank said, “He cut off the head with a hoe. I remember him saying that the cut-off head could still bite.”

Debbie said, “What do you remember, Mommy?”

“Well,” said Lillian, “one time when I was working at the drugstore, I was at the counter late at night, adding up what I had sold for the day, and someone sat next to me, and kind of leaned into me, so I moved over without looking up from my figures, and he leaned into me a little more, so I moved over a little more, and he elbowed me in the side, so I whipped around to tell that guy to get away from me, and it was my papa, grinning like mad that he had played a trick on me. We laughed all the way home.”

Debbie nodded. Frank had never thought of Walter as playful.

Henry said, “When I was about nine, we came out the back door in the morning, and Papa said, ‘Look at that.' He was pointing at something. Then he moved his finger in a curve and said, ‘See that sheen?' and it was a huge spiderweb covered with dew. It must have been ten feet across, and perfect.”

Claire started crying. Rosanna said, “We could have lost him long ago.” She dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her apron.

Everyone sat up.

She nodded. “Papa fell into the well. He was standing on the cover of it—the old well—and it broke away. He flung out his arms to the sides and caught himself. That well out by the barn—that's a deep one. He climbed out and never said a word about it until a couple of years ago. He told me he hung there, trying to decide. I asked him, ‘Walter, what were you trying to decide?' He said he was trying to decide how to get out, but I'm sure he was trying to decide whether to get out, because I'm telling you, back in the Depression, it seemed like either a slow death or a quick one were the only choices.” She shook her head. “So—I tell myself we had twenty extra years. That's what I tell myself.”

The memory of his father that came to Frank was of having his pants pulled down and being beaten with the belt—no memory of pain, only of Walter looming over him, the muscles of his forearm twitching and bulging, the words matching the rhythm of the blows, Frank's close-up view of the hairs on the back of Walter's hand.

—

LOUIS MACINTOSH LOOKED LIKE
about ten people that Frank knew—that was, he was not tall, not fat, not thin, not handsome, not
ugly, not dark, not light. He was not surprised to see Frank and Arthur when they showed up at dusk at Stewart Air Force Base, so Frank wondered what MacIntosh's handler had told him. They boarded the plane, a De Havilland Comet, a sleek-looking airplane (Frank considered himself somewhat of an amateur expert—he worked for Grumman, and he had been taking flying lessons for a year). A simple blue stripe was painted along the fuselage, but no other identification mark. There were ten seats to each side of the aisle, and an unmarked canvas bag sat on each seat, belted in. Frank's and Louis's seats were behind the bags; the toilet was behind their seats. Frank did not have a suitcase, nor did Louis. After Arthur left, someone closed up the plane and someone flew it, but Frank didn't meet or even glimpse the crew. When they took off, Frank saw only the edge of a dreary sunset over the dark lumps of the Catskill Mountains to the west.

Unusually for him, Frank got no feel for MacIntosh, but maybe that was because Frank was better at picking up details at a distance. They both sat quietly, the narrow aisle between them. The canvas sacks of money were uniform—clasps turned and locked, tops folded over, the outline of the square corners within just barely visible. Whoever had packed up what Arthur had said was ten million dollars, Frank thought, was an orderly person. Louis dozed off.

They flew east. The Comet was a quiet plane. Frank was interested to note how they'd installed the engines—not under the wings, which was what he was used to, but within them. And the wings themselves reminded him of some sort of swooping bird—a barn swallow, maybe.

When Louis woke up, he shook his head and looked around, then shifted in his seat with a groan. After a moment, he stood and went into the toilet. As soon as Frank heard the door lock, he was on his feet. He felt all the pockets of Louis's jacket, which was draped over the back of his seat, and all the pockets of his coat, which was folded into the open compartment above their heads. No wallet—that would be in Louis's pants. No briefcase. He looked in the pocket of the seat in front of Louis, and he felt under Louis's seat. Nothing. He sat down again as the lock turned in the door of the toilet, and stared out the window. Below them, the vast Atlantic, black under the moonless cascades of stars.