The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (2 page)

–A
MANDA
C
ROSS

M
y name is Leighton Fansler. I have long wanted to publish some of the cases of my aunt, Kate Fansler, who, while never a private investigator in any professional sense–she certainly never had a license nor was she paid–took on, like Sherlock Holmes and Peter Wimsey, many interesting cases. She has been adamant until now about her refusal to let me tell the stories of any of her cases, and no one can be more adamant than Kate Fansler. I finally got her to admit, however, that this case was an exception. All those intimately concerned with it are now dead, and no harm could be done to anyone in the telling of it. Indeed, she mused, it might be of help to some.

WHAT WAS CLEAR
to Kate at the very beginning of the case was that, by the time Tania Finship was sixty-two and almost the oldest member of the faculty in her department,
or anywhere else, she had become beloved. After her disappearance, it became clear that, in the opinion of her colleagues and students, she had not known this. She had done her job efficiently, curtly, honorably, and without notable tact, and had undoubtedly considered, if she reflected on the matter at all, that the outrage and anger she heard from students who had not done well in her courses represented the general opinion. As is, alas, so often the case among human beings–who tend, whatever their profession, to substitute tardy regret for timely expressions of appreciation–Tania Finship was gone before anyone had told her that they loved her.

If she was dead, there was no evidence to say so. Had her husband wished to claim her savings and remarry, he would have been hard put to do so before the statutory seven years. As it was, he mourned her, having always loved her and made his affection clear, if unspoken. She may have kept her professorship through tenure, as many disgruntled younger professors had been heard to mutter, but she kept her marriage because it suited them both: in the United States in those years one did not stay married unless one chose. Her children, grown and moved away, had come east when she disappeared, and finally returned to the West Coast, keeping in close touch with their father. As to her savings, all she and Tom, her husband, owned they had owned jointly. It was already his, but, as he often made clear after the disappearance, sharing it once again with her was his only, his fervent wish.

No one could imagine what had become of her. The police were as puzzled as the FBI and the CIA, who had entered the case on the thinnest of suspicions that she had been part of a spy ring. Her parents had been Marxists and Trotskyites in the Twenties and Thirties, and one never
knew for sure that they had not become Stalinists and planted Tania for future spying at birth. Unlikely, but the CIA is nothing if not expert at the unlikely. She might have waited all those years, until her children were grown, and then taken off with her ill-gotten information. What information a professor of Russian literature could have acquired in a blameless life was at best unclear, at worst nonsense. Still, she did read and speak Russian, and what is more, had been clearly heard to say critical things about the United States Government. Anything might be suspected of someone as profoundly antinuclear and antiwar as Tania.

“Which,” as Fred Monson said to Kate Fansler, “is just the problem. The CIA has got this ridiculous bee in their bonnet, but the result is everyone has just decided she’s in Russia and stopped looking–everyone who had the ghost of a chance of finding her, that is. And the students are getting restless. They’ve heard her hold forth, and they’re perfectly sure leaving this country or even her penthouse for more than a few hours was the last thing she wanted. If Tania had ever had any wanderlust, she had long since lost it, or so the students and her husband reported. The point is, can you help us? I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“What do you think happened?” Kate Fansler asked.

Fred Monson heaved a great sigh. “I try not to think,” he said. “The fact is, Tania was a bit of a burden in the department. Conscientious, heavens yes, and hardworking, and highly intelligent. But she had taken to cultivating a crusty manner that was as hard on her colleagues as it was on her students. You want an example? All right: at a meeting of the curriculum committee some weeks ago, when we were discussing next year’s catalog, I had to report that some man who had promised to teach the survey course was
now refusing to do so. Tania was in charge of survey courses, and was considerably annoyed, as anyone would be at that news that late. What she said was: ‘Couldn’t we just tell him to go pee up a rope?’ ”

“I see what you mean,” Kate said. “You’re not suggesting that the man in question heard about it and abducted her?”

“I’m not suggesting anything–certainly not that. But it’s hard enough to run a language department. They’re the worst kind: for some reason those who teach languages become ornery from the moment they learn about inflected nouns, without having them talk nothing but mayhem, kidnapping, and worse. Find out what happened to her, please, for the sake of the academic world and my sanity. The department has discretionary funds, and the university will help, all on the q.t., of course. The university position is that she needed an emergency operation, and doesn’t want anyone to know. They may have to admit a scandal, but not before it’s absolutely necessary.”

“I should think,” Kate Fansler said, “that the feelings of the university were not anyone’s prime concern. They certainly wouldn’t be mine. You’ve checked the hospitals?”

“Everything has been checked,” Fred Monson said. “Everything. When my mother used to lose things, she always said they had disappeared into thin air. Of course, they always turned up fifteen minutes later. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s clichés enacting themselves. Tania’s nowhere, Goddamn it. Nowhere.”

“I’ll think about it,” Kate Fansler said. “I’ll let you know my decision in a few days. Meanwhile, may I talk to Tania’s husband? Will he see me?”

“I’ll damn well make sure he’ll see you,” Fred Monson said. Kate could not but reflect that, chancy as the Chair’s
disposition clearly was, this disappearance had done nothing to improve it. Could Tania have simply decided to vanish for the sheer joy of ruining Fred Monson’s life and temper? Or could the husband, however devoted he was reported to be, also have inspired such retribution?

One hour with Tom Finship proved that speculation as unsubstantial as all the others had been. He greeted Kate in the penthouse on Riverside Drive he had long shared with his vanished wife. They had bought it many years ago, for a now (given the state of New York City real estate) ridiculously low sum. As their penthouse had risen in value they had always talked of selling it and buying a house in the country where their gardening joys might really have scope. But the moment had never arrived. The terraces on the penthouse were large, and while Kate Fansler could scarcely tell a lilac from a rhododendron, there was no question even to her ignorant eye that this was an extraordinary rooftop garden. “The house in the country never quite worked out,” Tom said when they were once again seated on the terrace after the tour. Kate, looking over the Hudson River to New Jersey, and sipping the iced tea that Tania’s husband had served them, did not try to hide her scrutiny of him. Tom was in that state of calm which follows upon terrible news, but also in the state where talk is necessary and all but ceaseless. Kate, glad to serve as an audience to one who would be helped simply by talking, also needed to learn all he could tell her, which was the story of his and Tania’s life.

“We would have had to trade this”–his arm swept to indicate the whole terrace with its rich plant life–“for a small apartment and a house, and somehow the whole thing never fell into place. God knows we had great offers for this place, but when we looked at the small apartments
we could by then afford, we began to feel cabined, cribbed, and confined, as Hamlet said, before we had even tried it out. And with a house in the country, Tania would have been there only weekends and in the summer. So we just kept talking about it. Now, without her …” He did not complete the sentence.

“It was Macbeth,” Kate said. “Hamlet talked about being bounded in a nutshell. When did you retire?”

“Five years ago,” Tom said. “I was a professor at City College, and I just couldn’t take it anymore, teaching remedial English and being mugged in the parking lot. A lot of us took early retirement when the system, in order to get rid of us, made it especially attractive. And it wasn’t really the remedial English and the parking lot, it was just that I’d been at the same game too long. As you can see, I’ve even forgotten my Shakespeare–not that I’ve taught him since open admissions.”

“Have you enjoyed the retirement, until this came along?”

“Moderately. The days pass. I like working around the house. I have a few investments, and they need looking after. I’ve always wanted to write a novel, but having all day isn’t particularly conducive to creation, or so I’ve found. Funny thing, though, I discovered I really liked cooking. Tania always said she was the oldest kitchen boy in town. We had people in a lot, for dinner, drinks out here. It was a good life. Regular. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you mean by ‘regular’?”

“Every day was just like every other. Well, not exactly, of course. The days Tania taught were different from the days when she didn’t teach. We joked: if Tania’s teaching Chekhov, it must be Tuesday. And then, every afternoon,
when she’d come back from the university–she taught in the morning, and advised from one to three–or just when the hour came round, on the days she didn’t teach, she’d take her walk. Down Riverside Drive, across Seventy-second Street to Broadway, down Broadway to Fifty-ninth, and across to Fifth Avenue. Then she’d turn and come back, without the carrots.”

“Carrots?”

“For the horses, the ones that pull the carriages through the park. For tourists, I suppose. Tania loved to offer them a carrot each, brightening their lives. It’s funny how it began, really; she told me.” Tom seemed lost in thought.

“How?” Kate urged him.

“She was crossing Fifty-ninth one day, going somewhere–I mean, not on her exercise walk–and a little girl got out of the carriage she was riding in with her family, to have her picture taken with the horse, and she tried to feed the horse a carrot, holding it upright, by its end. Of course the horse took hold of her hand too, and the girl, screaming, dropped the carrot. To the rescue, Tania. She showed the girl how to hold her hand flat with the carrot on it, and calmed her down, although, Tania said, she couldn’t convince the child to try again. That’s what put the idea of carrots for the horses in Tania’s mind. Also, it gave her a destination for her walk, and made it possible for her to say: ‘I walk almost three miles every day–warding off osteoporosis and other dangers of aging.’ ”

Tom fell into a sort of trance, staring out over the Hudson River. “I’ve been thinking,” he finally said, “how we work so hard to avoid the dangers of old age, now that we all live so long, and then, suddenly, we’re gone.”

“There’s no real evidence she’s ‘gone,’ ” Kate said.

“I can’t believe she wouldn’t have let me know, if she was able to. Something terrible must have happened.”

“You’ve been married a long time then,” Kate said, not making it a question.

“We were married in the war. We both finished graduate school, and then the children were born. Tania taught all through those years; we needed the money. It was a busy life, but a good one. The children keep calling,” he added, reminded of them. “I’ve gotten to dread the phone calls: ‘No news, Pop?’ And I always have to say, ‘No news.’ She can’t just have disappeared into thin air,” he concluded, in an unconscious echo of Fred Monson.

“What have the police done?” Kate asked, more to have something to ask him than because she needed to be told. The police had put Tania on their missing persons computer, and had made inquiries–perfunctory, Kate felt sure. There had been no ransom notes, no signs at all. Either she was dead–though in that case where was the body?–or she had chosen to vanish. The police admitted that, in the case of aging wives, the latter was unlikely. Amnesia? Possibly. But the hospitals had received no one of that sort, nor had the shelters for the homeless. Weren’t there a lot of homeless women on the streets? God knows, there were, and one could hardly question all of them, though most of them were well-enough known in their neighborhoods. Still, no one was likely to report a new bag lady. The police shrugged, officially and metaphorically. Call them when there was a body.

After a while, Kate ran out of questions and Tom fell into silence. She left him finally with sympathetic reassurances, but without much hope on either side.

Later that week, Kate called the chair of the department, Fred Monson, and told him that frankly she didn’t think there was much she could do. Just for the hell of it, Kate had walked Tania’s exercise route, but no inspiration followed. It was a rainy day, and there were not many
horse carriages lined up, just a few across from the Plaza, the horses, under their blankets, looking sad, and the drivers, under their raincoats, looking sullen. Kate liked walking; otherwise she felt a fool.