The Secret Agent (7 page)

Knetsch groaned despairingly. “They murdered Princess Di, too. Drugged Dodi’s driver and paid off the paparazzi. I read it in the
Star.”

But Stefani was still looking at him. “Even if I thought
for an instant you might be right, I don’t see how your father’s execution fits the theory.”

“The CIA always plays both sides. Maybe they promised something to the North Vietnamese. Maybe Gramps refused to deliver, and was eliminated as a result. When the deal fell through, the Viet Cong retaliated. They beheaded my dad.”

“You sound like a raving conspiracy theorist.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Can you separate what you remember from what you’ve been told?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were a kid—eight years old—when your father and grandfather died. Whatever you believe about your family’s past springs in part from memory, and in part from half-truths—things your mother may have believed and passed on, for example.”

“And we know Mom was always high as a kite,” he retorted, “and thus unreliable. But she didn’t talk about Jack’s disappearance—she’d never even met him. My father was reported dead two weeks after Gramps disappeared, and that news overshadowed everything else. Mom preferred to remember the good times—when my dad was alive. That’s what she talked about.”

“The good times?”

He studied the crackling flames, and chose his words well. It was important that she understand he had been raised in more than a shooting gallery.

“My mother was the only child of a wealthy Chicago banker. A leading debutante of 1956. She grew up with my dad, and they were cut from the same mold. Naïve, well-intentioned upper-middle-class Americans with bright smiles, whose lives were blown apart by a conflict they never chose. My father was barely thirty when he died. I’ve outlived him by a decade. I have no idea what
he was really like. When I was little, he was the god in the helmet who flew the big jets—every boy’s hero. But it’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen him as anything but a victim.”

“Of fate? Of U.S. policy?”

“Of his childhood. That, more than anything.”

“Explain.”

Max glanced at her. “We all want to be our fathers, Stef. Boys do, at least. My dad had a war hero for a role model. Jack was James Bond in a Panama hat. Dad spent his life living up to Jack’s legend.”

“And you?”

The question brought him up short. “I learned to ski at the age of six because it was the closest I could come to flying.”

She reached for the warmth of the fire; light dappled the bones of her face. “Did you ever meet Jack?”

“Once. My father took me to Bangkok when I was four. In the fall of ’63.”

“He never came to the States?”

“Not in my lifetime.” The bitterness crept in, despite his care. “Jack abandoned his family. Dad was about five when World War II began, and Gramps never really came back. Bangkok—the silk business, or the life of a NOC— always attracted Jack more than being a parent. Dad resented Gramps—his house, his art, his legend in the expat community. Resented it as much as he wanted to be a part of it. Could you blame him? I’m not really sure why he even took me to Thailand.”

“What do you remember about the trip?”

He sighed and shoved his fingers through his hair, as though he might clutch at the past lodged somewhere in his skull. “Flood water in the streets. It was the end of the rainy season and we went everywhere by boat. Gramps liked the old khlongs better than the new roads
they’d built for cars, anyway. He loathed progress. He still called Thailand ‘Siam.’”

“You see?” Stefani countered. “Those are things you’ve been told. ‘Progress’ and ‘Siam’ aren’t a four-year-old’s words.”

“Oh, fuck
the words. You asked.”

“Tell me about Jack.”

He summoned the face—indistinct at best, retouched by later glimpses of photographs—that lurked always on the edge of his mind. “He was a big guy, but then I was quite small. He had silver hair that was always slicked back, and a white bird on his shoulder. The bird’s beak looked exactly like his nose.”

“Did you like him?”

Max shrugged again. “Do four-year-olds like anything?”

“What about the house?”

“God—the
house.”
He smiled involuntarily. “A tree house made of teak. Leafy and cool. Rooms with dark floors I could slide across in my socks. Silk pillows. Lizards skittering along the walls. My bedroom was like a ship’s cabin, small and wood-paneled. The smells of jungle and garlic and rotting fruit came through the open windows at night.”

“For an all-American kid, that must have been a little weird.”

“It was the most fabulous place I’d ever seen. Like waking up in Never-Never Land, surrounded by the Lost Boys. I didn’t want to leave. When I toured the place again last year, I knew that I’d been trying to get back to that house all my life. Back to the garden, as Crosby, Stills and Nash would say, where fathers live forever and war never comes.”

A swift glance from the dark eyes; something he’d said had hit home. “Do you remember anything else?”

“Waking in the night and being afraid.”

“Bad dreams?”

“Noise. The kind you can’t ignore. I got up from bed and walked out into the hall. Gramps was standing there, shouting at some guy who was running down the stairs. There was blood on Gramps’s face and my dad was restraining him. They’d been fighting.”

“Jack and your father? Or Jack and the guy on the stairs?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you recognize him? The stranger?”

“All I remember is that I was afraid. They were angry and the talk was serious, something I shouldn’t hear. I went back to bed and pulled the covers over my head.”

“Could it have been a thief?” Knetsch suggested.

“He was a Westerner,” Max replied, as though that made a difference. “He was tall and had a crew cut and wore some kind of uniform.”

It was a memory he couldn’t shake: broken sleep, shouting and blood, the tall, angry figures flickering grotesquely in torchlight. A nightmare that recurred over thirty years until it became the pivot for obsession:
I must know the truth.
Jack’s will, the Bangkok house, the priceless collections, the stock in the silk company: were they all merely proxies? Did he just need to lay a ghost three decades old?

“Have you asked the CIA what they know about Jack Roderick?” she asked.

“I filed a FOIA request—that’s the Freedom of Information Act. They sent back three sheets of paper blotted out with black ink. Told me squat. But they know more than that—I’m sure of it.”

“Max, why did you hire me?”

His eyes slid over to Knetsch’s. The lawyer stared implacably back. “I didn’t. I thought I was hiring Oliver Krane.”

“To do what? Storm CIA headquarters? Rifle old files in Langley?”

“You’re a forensic accountant,” he said, feeling his temper slip. “Find my grandfather’s lost cash. Nose out the people responsible for stealing his house and everything in it. Help me and Jeff prove my claim.”

“You haven’t a shred of proof for a single thing you’ve said.”

“Exactly. And that’s why I’ve got to go back to Bangkok.
To find the truth.”

Knetsch’s wineglass tipped over and shattered on the stone-flagged floor.

“Bangkok?” she repeated dubiously. “That could be dangerous.”

“I know.”

The devil-may-care look resurged in her eyes; she grinned, and held up her glass in salute.

Not even death threats could faze this woman. Oliver Krane had known exactly what he was doing when he sent Stefani Fogg to France.

Around midnight, Max
told her it was too late to ski to Le Praz, and offered her his guest room instead. She didn’t protest—didn’t fight her way past him to click into her skis, though the wine and the hours of talk had closed the distance between them and she had more than once caught herself wondering how the line of his jaw would feel under her fingers. While he went in search of sheets, she walked Jeff Knetsch to the door.

He was still uncomfortable in her presence; all the facts and the effort at professionalism had failed to make him her friend.

“What do you really think of Max’s story?” she asked him. “Max’s assassination theory?”

“All that crap about the CIA? I think he’s got too much time on his hands.”

Or the strong need for a hero. But which man does he want to redeem? Jack Roderick? Or Rory?

“And as for flying to Bangkok—”

“You’re worried?”

The lawyer hesitated, one hand on the massive oak jamb of Max’s door. “He’s pissed off somebody with a lot of firepower. And it hasn’t occurred to him that the strangled whore was just an opening shot. Next time, he could lose something he really values.”

“Does he listen to you?”

Knetsch smiled wryly. “Max listens to nobody. Especially when he has paid for the advice. Are you skiing tomorrow?”

“Off-piste.
Max wants to show me the backcountry. Join us, if you like.”

It was her attempt at a truce. But wariness lingered in the eyes of Max’s oldest friend.

“I know Max’s backcountry. My leg can’t take that kind of terrain anymore,” he said curtly. “I’ll meet you for a drink afterward.”

“The Bateau Ivre,” she suggested. “Four o’clock.”

“Done.” He turned away.

But as she shut the door behind him, she wondered what had inspired Knetsch’s mistrust. Krane & Associates? Her credentials? Or the fact that she was a woman in Max Roderick’s house?

M
ax
lay awake well past one, feeling the turbulent night air shudder against the frame of his house. Faces swam in and out of his consciousness: Jack Roderick’s eyes and sharp nose; his father’s, a softer version; and Stefani Fogg’s profile, half-averted. When he thought of her, it was always in profile—the slope and pitch of her facial structure like
a piste
he had yet to map. He had told her what he could of his family’s past, not because he had paid Oliver Krane to send her here to Courchevel, but because he’d tested and liked her nerve. Max had learned much about the human spirit by watching the human body ski: three days’ observation had shown him how little she feared.

Except, he suspected, deep emotion. Feeling that might cause pain, or chain her to another human being. Feeling that could wreck the perfect autonomy she’d crafted for herself.

He avoided the same traps. He’d been terrified of them most of his life.

Wind buffeted the house’s peaked roof; the door to the balcony rattled faintly in protest. The fog that had blanketed the slopes at dusk had blown into Switzerland; the moon was setting. He rolled over, thrust his feet out of bed, and without turning on the light placed his hand on his viola where it sat in the corner of the room.

It is possible for one man to ski at world-class level or to play an instrument with orchestral precision—but not in the same lifetime. Max loved his viola with the passion he had long since lost for skis, in part because the viola had always denied him mastery. It submitted to nothing in his repertoire.

He took up the bow with humility, clutched the instrument by its throat and walked out into the freezing air. The wind was like a knife on his naked back; it pierced the folds of his pajama legs. He might be incapable of subjugating the music under his hands, but he could still subdue his flesh to the elements. He laid his bow across the strings.

A viola contracts in extreme cold, and the sound it makes is warped and distorted. A chord sang out from the shrinking wood, and then another—melancholy, haunting, a paean to the dying moon. It was as though the mountains themselves were bewitched to speech. And the stories they told were of a sort to terrify children.

Take good care
of your mother, pal.
The strong right hand felt like a heavy weight on his shoulder and there was a burning in his nose as though he might sneeze or cry, so
he leaned into his dad’s trousers and buried his face in the dress poplin. The whole Navy was watching from the pier, women holding babies and little kids dropping pebbles into the flat black water, the aircraft carrier’s reflection wavering and dissolving with each
plunk! plunk!
as though it were insubstantial as air. Coronado, a breathless July morning, 1965.

You’re the man of the house now, Maxie Max. I’m depending on you to keep Mom safe. You’ll be in first grade soon, so once you know how to write I’ll expect a letter every week, telling me how things are. Your house log for the S.S.
Roderick.
Got that?

He nodded up into his father’s face, arms still clutching his trouser leg, but the sun behind Rory’s head blotted out his features. The hand lifted from his shoulder, cupped his mother’s chin—

Take good care of y our mother, pal.

He had tried his best, using sheet after sheet of grade-school paper, his eraser tearing dimples in the flimsy stuff. He’d written about trips to Evanston and the big old house by the lake his grandparents still owned and the pounding rain on his bedroom eaves. He’d written about the dead snake he’d discovered in the cellar and the road trip he and his mom took to Lake Tahoe and how he’d seen a deer beneath Half Dome in his first Yosemite hike.

It was not the first time his father had been away on carrier duty. Max was used to living alone with his mother for months, used to the circle of closeness they pulled in like a tent flap against the lurking beasts beyond the doors, but this was the most dangerous tour his dad had pulled. At times his mother’s expression grew distant, she took to ironing clothes relentlessly during the long winter afternoons. After one of these bouts when he was six, she drove Max into the hills and rented him skis.

There were hurried patches of leave during the two long years his father was gone, unexpected as Christmas. Phone calls knifed with static. Trinkets that arrived in crushed cardboard boxes covered with strange ink seals. TV footage of downed planes that Anne hurriedly switched off whenever Max entered the room.

Take good care of your mother.

When his father’s A-4 fell out of the sky that January morning half a world away, he knew nothing about it until he found her lying in a stuttering coma, drunk as a lord, on the kitchen floor of the San Francisco apartment. By April, when they knew Dad was dead and no body was coming home, Anne began walking the streets at all hours, an old raincoat of his father’s wrapped around her emaciated body. She burned incense and hung beads from the door frames and sang phrases of half-remembered songs under her breath, and when she looked at Max he was convinced she saw through him.

Take good care of your mother.

One night at three
A.M.
, on his way to the bathroom, he tripped over her body in the dark. What he could not say to Stefani Fogg—what he could not find the words to tell anyone—was that thirty years later, as he’d stared at the expression of horror in the eyes of a dead Thai hooker, it was his mother’s face he’d seen.

He awoke at
dawn and drank his coffee in front of the living room’s wall of glass. Snow had fallen sometime after he propped the viola back in its place and returned to bed. There would be a foot of powder in the glades, but most of the tourists would grab the tram to Saulire. The backcountry would be empty and quiet on this Friday, tracked only by local guides and the kids who cared nothing for avalanche danger. He felt his heart surge at
the thought of it: silence amid the blanketed conifers, the mass of snow trembling above the trees like a wave poised to curl.

He set off alone with a backpack and his usual gear to the rented villa in Le Praz. Stefani had given him her key the previous night, and told him where to find a change of clothing. They both knew she was not the sort to rise early, even for the best new fall of powder in the world.

And so Jacques Renaudie saw Max that morning as he swept his doorstep, riding the platter lift out of town in defiance of all rumor.

“The concept of
skiing within-bounds is pretty much an American one,” Max told her somewhere around mid-morning, as they paused for breath in their hike up a crevasse. Their skis were slung over their shoulders and in their packs they carried water, protein bars, ropes and picks and beacons. Stefani’s back was aching.

“Boundaries exist for the National Forest Service— which owns the land most American ski areas are built on—and because too many skiers have died in backcountry avalanches.” He wore his helmet again today, and had forced her to wear one as well. “If you map out your terrain, and fire avalanche cannon every morning in peak snowslide season, you can control the snow pack and fend off the worst disasters.”

“Simple risk management.” Stefani briefly considered the idea of Oliver Krane standing in the path of an avalanche. “Whereas in Europe, nobody worries about skiers dying?”

“In Europe, the
pistes
were carved by villagers first and by ski corporations only after World War II. Look at the concentration of houses. It seems random, but it’s uncannily scientific. If you watch a tidal wave of snow
churn down the mountain for centuries on end, you build where the wave never passes.”

She gazed out from their perch—a small plateau perhaps twelve feet square in the granite face. From this distance, the map of the Trois Vallées was a storybook illustration—hamlets of stone and sloping roofs tucked into the clefts between the hills; deep forests of fir with heavy mantles of white; and the power cables of ski lifts soaring from ground to air.

“The closest you could come to flying,” she mused. “A kid airborne on a pair of skis. Did your father ever see you race?”

“No,” he said curtly, his eyes fixed on the landscape.

She spared little breath for conversation after that. She was too intent upon following Max’s footsteps. It was important to pay attention to every toehold and outcrop that could be grasped with gloved fingers. She did not ask him where they were going; he had pointed upward to a rocky cornice three hundred feet above a glade. Higher still, there soared an open granite head-wall flush with old hard-pack and new powder.

“Switzerland,” he explained, “if you climb far enough.”

She supposed that when they had skied down through the thick growth of trees that marched toward the valley below, they would turn around and repeat the exhausting climb. It hardly mattered. For now it was enough to track the man in front of her.

“Do you do this often?” she asked when at last they stood on the cornice edge.

“I’ve been up here three times this winter.” He pulled his skis from the harness on his back. “Let me go first, and pick your own line later.”

She was just clicking her boot into the bindings of her new T3s when the crack of a gun ricocheted off the head-wall. The sound echoed, gathering force.

“What’s that?”

Max’s head was craned backward, his eyes fixed on the snow above them.

A second crack. Stefani heard, quite clearly, the bullet singing over their heads.

“Go.
Go, go, go!”
Max shouted, and pushed off the cornice as though a starting gate had sprung.

She dove after him, unable to look at the mass of white shuddering behind, the grip of fear suddenly at her throat. The silence before the roar of the snowslide was like an instant suspended, as she soared out into the air twenty feet before landing on the slope below, the sound of her own breath hideous in her ears. Max never looked backward, never spared so much as a glance for the massive sheet of snow peeling off the headwall; every nerve in his body seemed trained on the tree line below, on the heavy glade that might shelter them and impede for a few precious seconds the onslaught of the avalanche. She was incapable of thought or decision; she merely thrust herself forward, the technique instinctual, willing herself not to catch an edge and tumble headlong to her death. Willing herself to survive.

The snow’s roar was deafening, now, and she could not help casting a hasty glance behind—the cornice, the chute down which they had raced, the headwall above: all blotted out in a screaming mass of white three stories high. She almost stopped dead from sheer terror but a faint shout from Max pulled her head around. He had halted near the edge of the glade some sixty feet away.
Waiting for her.

She hurled herself forward through air dense with sound, her body wired for the moment when the avalanche would gather her up in its jaws and crush her. Max had moved farther into the trees and she reached
them a mere instant before the wave of snow. She had once seen the path an avalanche could slice through a forest: trunks lying like spilled matchsticks on either side of the brutal swathe. But those had been aspen trees, frail wispy things with no roots to speak of—now she cut sharply around the massive bole of a fir and felt the earth shudder beneath her feet. The snow slide gobbled up the glade.

With a sound that might have been a whimper she forced herself deeper down into the trees, her eyes locked on Max’s back. The firs behind her were groaning now like martyrs on the rack, bent unnaturally under the snow’s weight, trunks snapping like twigs. There was no trail in front of her, nothing to follow down the mountainside but Max’s flitting form, his turns powerful and unquestioning.
I’ve been up here three times this winter—

A branch whipped across her shoulder and her skis slid out from under her. She fell, screaming.

Max careened around, poles stabbing for purchase. “Get up! Get up, God damn you!”

She forced her poles into the loose snow and heaved upward. His face was gray beneath the tan, his eyes fixed on something behind her. She hurled herself downward and saw that he was still rigid in the same spot. The roar made words impossible. In an instant she would be seized and bent double, spine snapping like the trees-Max dropped his poles and caught her as she tore past. Her feet nearly slid out from beneath her again, but for the vise of his arm. His mouth was pressed to her ear. “That’s the worst of it.”

Only then did she allow herself to look behind. Twenty-five feet up the mountainside, the snow had come to a shuddering halt against the bulwark of the firs. A broad door had been punched through the glade,
and a road half a football field wide spilled from it. Firs that had seen two hundred winters had been felled in a matter of seconds.

Max was still holding her. She began to tremble, so violently that she slipped through his arms and sat down on her skis. The massive weight of snow suspended against the sky, caught in the net of branches, was creaking eerily, like sails in high wind.

“We should get down while we can,” he said urgently. “Can you make it?”

She looked up at him, her eyes wide, her face pale. “Hell,
yes.
That was the best goddamn run I’ve ever had in my life.” A wild elation flooded her heart.

They emerged from
the trees at the base of a valley, on the cusp of high alpine pasture. They shouldered their skis and began to walk down the hard-packed road that led to a small village, and forty-five minutes later stopped at the first tavern they could find. There was a fire and a few free tables amid the crowd of local patrons. In a heavy Savoyard accent a young woman offered them fresh bread and cheese and sausages; they drank Swiss beer and toasted the bread and cheese over the fire with long-handled tongs. Stefani was in tearing high spirits, she was giddy from cheating death; she flirted and charmed and had never looked more glorious. Max knew how a near-death experience could take some people and he waited for the after-effects of adrenaline to wane. He restrained the impulse to grasp her shoulders and pull her close. It was only after the pastry was offered and refused, and she had tossed back a brandy, that she voiced the obvious question.