Way the Crow Flies (13 page)

“Eggs,” groans the wheelchair girl, her head lurching forward with the effort of speech.

“What?”

“She told you,” says the girl.

Madeleine rises cautiously to her feet and looks at the huge black and tan dog. Can his name possibly be Eggs? He turns and goes to the wheelchair girl, flops down and rests his chin on her twisty feet. He blinks but doesn’t move when her hand drops down to pet him and her zigzagging fingers poke him in the eye.

“What are you doing here?” says the girl with the knife.

“She called me.” It feels rude to call someone “she” when she’s sitting right there, but Madeleine doesn’t know the girl’s name. Probably the girl doesn’t know her own name.

The knife girl turns to the wheelchair one and says, “Was she bothering you?” Madeleine inches toward her bike. Me go home now.

“Noohhh,” sighs the wheelchair girl, followed by the slight sobbing that is her chuckle. “I ju wah teweh my nay.”

The girl turns to Madeleine and says, “She wants to tell you her name.”

Madeleine stops and waits.

The wheelchair girl says, “Ahm Ewivabeh.”

Madeleine doesn’t know what to do. The tough girl shears a curl of bark from her stick. Around her neck is tied a leather shoelace that disappears beneath her grimy white T-shirt. At the corner of her mouth, Madeleine can see a paper-thin scar—it traces a line down toward her jaw, pale pink in the tanned face. She senses that this girl would fight like a dog. Sudden, savage.

Madeleine turns to the retarded girl and says, “Um. Hi.”

“Well say her name, can’t you?” says the knife girl.

Madeleine hesitates, then says, “Ewivabeh.”

The wheelchair girl’s head jerks back at an angle and her laughter shreds the air: “Ahhhhaaahaaaa!”

The knife girl stops whittling. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No,” says Madeleine, honestly.

“’Cause if it is, you’re dead.”

“I know.”

“Her name is Elizabeth.”

“Oh,” says Madeleine. “Hi, Elizabeth.”

“Ayyy.”

Madeleine looks at the tough girl. “What’s your name?” she asks, surprised by her own nerve.

“Who wants to know?”

“Um”—she can feel a grin tiptoeing across her face, and tries to suppress it, along with Bugs Bunny, who threatens to take over—“Madeleine.”
Charmed, I’m sure, doc
.

The girl spits again and says, “Colleen.” Then she folds her knife, sticks it in the back pocket of her denim cut-offs and leaves, walking away barefoot up the street with her stick over her shoulder.

Madeleine picks up her bike. “’Bye Elizabeth.”

“Wayyy!”

Madeleine waits with her hand outstretched while Elizabeth’s closed fist wavers over it, then opens and drops something into her palm. Not a candy. Madeleine looks down at her hand. “Wow.” A beautiful green boulder, swirled sea smoke. A glassie. The most valuable marble you could own. “Thanks Elizabeth.”

Jack waits in the stifle of the phone booth beside the PX. He has fed the phone enough dimes to cover the call to Washington but he’s concerned his time will run out before he gets to talk to—“Crawford here.”

“Simon.”

“Jack, how are you, mate?”

“Not so bad, yourself?”

“Can’t complain. What’s your number there, call you straight back.” Jack reads the number into the phone, then hangs up.

It was an obstacle course getting through to Simon—First Secretary Crawford. A series of English accents, from Eton to London’s East End, told him he had reached the British Embassy in Washington. Bureaucracy, vast and self-perpetuating. Jack knows; he is part of it. Thank goodness there are people like Simon, who know how to cut through. The phone rings, Jack picks it up.

“Back in Centralia, eh? How’s the old place look?”

Jack glances out—an airman carries groceries to his station wagon, where three kids bounce in the back seat and a beagle
haroos
in the back-back. “New,” he says.

“Not a great deal to report, Jack. Our friend is still on hold. I’ll let you know when he arrives.”

“Do you have a ballpark?”

“Not really. I should think we’ll move when the time is right.”

Jack wonders how they’ll get the man out. Through Berlin, perhaps. Will “our friend” be concealed in a car? Jack has heard about defectors being brought in that way—folded into the false trunk of a Trabant. “What about when he gets here? Do you want me to track down an apartment for him in London?”

“It’s all taken care of.”

“Good, that’s good.” Jack doesn’t want to sound too eager. “Where do I pick him up when the time comes?”

“All you’ve got to do is look in on our friend once he arrives. See that he’s comfortable, not too bored. Take him out for an airing once in a while. Usual care and feeding of your common garden variety defector.”

“Does our friend have a name?”

“I’m sorry, of course. His name is Fried. Oskar Fried.”

Jack pictures a thin man—spectacles and bow tie. “East German?”

“That’s right. Though he’s been stuck in the boonies for a few years.”

“Where? Kazakhstan?”

“One of the ‘stans,’ no doubt. Come to think, you may as well take his London address….”

Jack fishes in his pocket, finds a scrap of paper and writes down the address on the back of Mimi’s grocery list. “So there’s not a whole lot for me to do but sit tight.”

“Welcome to ‘the great game.’” It’s the first reference Simon has made to the fact that he is an intelligence officer.

“First Secretary, eh? Isn’t that Donald Maclean’s old job?”

Simon laughs. “Technically yes, although I don’t plan on a midnight flit to Russia any time soon.”

They hang up with a promise to get together when Simon passes through with the defector.

Oskar Fried
. Jack assumed the “Soviet scientist” would be Russian. The fact that he’s German adds a congenial dimension to the already
fascinating prospect of meeting the man—it’ll be that much easier for Jack and Mimi to make him feel at home. Not to mention Henry Froelich right across the street—Jack meant to ask Simon whether he could invite Fried home for a meal. He looks at the address on the scrap of paper. A street near the university. If asked, Oskar Fried is here doing research at the University of Western Ontario. No one will ask. An academic with a German accent—hardly a rarity. And this part of the world is rich with German immigrant culture, pre-war and post. Simon has chosen a good place for Oskar Fried to recover quietly from whatever the ordeal of defection entails. It’s simple, Jack reflects as he pockets the list: select a context in which people will answer their own questions. He opens the folding glass door of the booth and sets out for home across the parade square.

Oskar Fried is presumably a scientist of some importance. Why is Canada getting him? There’s the National Research Council in Ottawa. There’s the heavy water plant at Chalk River, which was cleansed of espionage back in ’45—after the infestation by the Atomic Spy Ring that helped the Russians get the bomb. Fun ’n’ games, thinks Jack, shaking his head at the memory of Igor Gouzenko talking to the press with a hood over his head after his defection. A real black eye for Canada. Chief among the names the Russian cipher clerk gave up was that of a Brit, Dr. Alan Nunn May—like Maclean, another Cambridge type—who had passed weapons-grade uranium to the Russians in the name of “world peace.” Jack touches two fingers to his forehead in response to the smart salute of a cadet and steps from the black parade square to the cooler sidewalk, enjoying the stroll home. He sticks his hands in his pockets, absently rolling a bit of paper. He can almost hear Simon: “Take off those American gloves!”

Perhaps they were just overly privileged. Nunn May, and Guy Burgess and Maclean and their lot, wouldn’t last a day on a Soviet collective farm. But that’s history; Russia has the bomb and, God knows, so will China soon enough. What count now are nuclear missiles, ICBMs, and developing some sort of defence against them. Is that what Fried will be working on? Canada has a small number of nuclear weapons, but no warheads—at least, not that Prime Minister Diefenbaker will admit to. Jack stops in his tracks. The groceries! He makes an about-face and retraces his steps to the
PX, digging in his pocket for the grocery list—it’ll be great seeing Simon again, and finally introducing him to Mimi. She’ll fix them a real Acadian feast. Then over to the mess, where the two of them will close the bar the way they used to—“Here’s to being above it all.” He regards the scrap of paper:
shredded wheat, milk, can peas…
. He peers at his wife’s pencil scrawl.
Real jello
—no, that must be
red
Jell-O—
bag potatoes, hot dogs, doz. buns
—and here he’s defeated—
mushmelbas?
What’s a mushmelba? A type of mushroom? A cracker? Mimi ought to have been a doctor instead of a nurse, with her writing. He would phone home to ask, but he finds he’s out of nickels and dimes. Oskar Fried.
Friede
means “peace.”

He walks into the PX, takes a cart and, still staring at the encrypted list, wheels slowly up the aisle and straight into someone else’s cart. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” the woman says. “You’re new.”

“That’s right. I’m Jack McCarthy.”

“I think we’re neighbours.” She is perhaps three or four years older than he, pretty in a way. “I’m Karen Froelich.” They shake hands.

“I just met your husband.”

She smiles. Yes, she’s pretty in spite of the lines around her eyes, her mouth—no lipstick. “I hope he offered you a cup of coffee.”

“He offered me a beer,” says Jack, “but we made do with coffee.”

“Good.” She brushes a strand of hair from her cheek, tucking it behind her ear. Her hair is not done but you wouldn’t call her unkempt. She is simply not, as Mimi would say,
“bien tournée.”
Her gaze falls briefly as she says, “Drop by any time.”

Shy, or perhaps vague. In any case, it isn’t the usual air force wife invitation:
You and your wife must come over for dinner once you’ve settled in
. But he recalls that she isn’t an air force wife.

“I’m afraid you’ll be seeing us sooner than you think, Mrs. Froelich.” And he repeats the invitation he extended to her husband earlier this morning. He is ready for a feminine objection echoing Mimi’s and Betty Boucher’s, but Karen Froelich just says, “Thanks,” and begins a polite getaway down the aisle.

There is something girlish about her, although she must be forty. Worn white sneakers, stretch pants. And, it looks like, one of her husband’s old dress shirts.

“What’s, uh—” He feels suddenly awkward as she stops and turns; he is making too much conversation. “I saw you’re reading
Silent Spring.”

She nods.

“What’s it like?”

“It’s um. Disturbing.” She nods again, as though to herself.

He nods too, waiting for more, but she just says, “Nice meeting you,” and moves off.

Jack turns to stare at the shelves of cans in front of him, the way men do in grocery stores—
I could find Dresden at night from twelve thousand feet, but where are the canned peas?
He heads back up the aisle. “Mrs. Froelich,” he calls, a little embarrassed. “Can you help me out here?”

“Call me Karen.”

“Karen,” he says, reddening for no reason, and handing her the grocery list, “I can’t read my wife’s writing.”

She looks at it and reads aloud, “Four-seventy-two Morrow Street—”

Jack takes the list back and turns it over—
Simon, are you watching this? Christ
.

Karen looks at the scrap of paper, where he’s pointing. “Marshmallows.”

“Thank you!” says Jack.
I sound too relieved
. As they move off in separate directions, his heart is beating a little too quickly, out of proportion to the gaffe—the address was meaningless to her. No harm done. It’s a healthy reminder to be careful, that’s all. Not that it matters. Even the name Oskar Fried would be meaningless to her. It’s largely meaningless to Jack. Some Soviet egghead in a bow tie.

He finds the fruits and vegetables mounded amid plastic grass, turns his gaze to the bananas, apples and pears, and shreds the address inside his trouser pocket. Potatoes … ah, there they are. Mimi didn’t say how many. He puts two bags of them into his cart. Now, what else did she want? He reaches into his pocket for the grocery list and finds the shreds—that’s it, shredded wheat. And what else? Hot dogs. And buns. For the kids. And marshmallows, of course….

Madeleine is up in her room before lunch, surrounded by her worldly goods: books, toys and games, and her—she refuses to call them dolls—what’s the word for dolls that aren’t sissy? Bugs Bunny is in pride of place on the bed, his ears currently arranged in two chignons on either side of his head. At his right, she places a sock monkey named Joseph—she can’t remember why he is called that, she only knows that when he was a sock he was pinned round her neck the time she had strep throat in Germany and she miraculously recovered.
“Guten Tag, Joseph,”
Madeleine says, and he smiles back with his button eyes.

Standing on a chair to reach her closet shelf, she stows the tattered game of Snakes and Ladders, then Monopoly—the British version, with pound notes and London street names—and the mystical game of Chinese checkers, with its precious store of coloured marbles,
Do not play with them outside
. She lines up her Narnia books on the shelf in the correct order. Given to her by a second cousin of her father’s who is a Jesuit priest in Toronto. “Thank you Father What’s-His-Name, these are the best books I’ve ever read.”

She is perfectly happy thus employed, whiling away the time until Auriel and Lisa return from their baseball tournament, so she is surprised when her mother calls from downstairs, “Madeleine, there’s a friend here to see you.”

Surprise gives way to alarm as she tries to imagine who might be calling on her. Colleen? Elizabeth? Both? She slowly descends the stairs.

“Hi, I’m Marjorie Nolan,” says the girl at the bottom of the three kitchen steps. “Welcome to Centralia, Madeleine.”

“Marjorie’s
maman
told her there was a little girl her age just up the street.”