Page 13

Chapter Thirteen

Tucker waited for June Hudson in the Smith Library for the better part of an hour, watching the staff children in the garden below. Bundled up in coats, laps covered with paperwork, they were arrayed in an uneven pattern around the sundial at the heart of the garden. Every so often, they squinted up at the winter sun, expressions serious. Out at sea, the Civil Air Patrol scouted for increasingly deadly wolf packs of German U-boats. Here on land, the Office of Civilian Defense recruited private citizens—including children, it seemed—to identify aircraft silhouettes from the ground. A gray-uniformed woman knitted on a nearby bench, keeping an eye on them while their parents worked inside the Avallon. June Hudson had said that she was running a business, not a church, but only a church cared for each of its members so thoroughly.

He glanced at the door. No sign of June Hudson.

Earlier that day, he’d received a telegram from SOG. They were impressed, they said. His proposed solution for the translation delay was inventive, bold. Hoover had noticed, they said. Memos had been written, they said. The SOG telegram was not the same as a letter from Hoover himself, and it did not say Tucker’s efforts were enough to preserve his position, but it was positive enough that Tucker had had to take the letter out to the Bureau car and sit alone for a few minutes. Ever since he’d discovered that his position was in danger, he’d felt just like he did when he stepped into that humid stairwell in the Avallon. Drowning. For months, he’d been drowning.

But now he could finally get a breath. And now, with lungs full of air once more, he could see that he’d been draconian. He needed to make things right with June Hudson.

An hour and a half had passed; June Hudson had not appeared. Perhaps she had not gotten the note, perhaps she could not be summoned thusly, perhaps she could not be summoned thusly by him , who had dressed her down at their last two meetings. In the hall, chattering voices let him know that the book club party had ended. He gave it another five minutes, then another two, then another one, then he counted thirty seconds, and then he was out of excuses. Outside the window, the children had left.

Just as well , he thought. He was relieved and disappointed in equal measure.

In the bright, high-ceilinged seafoam tearoom with magnificent mountain views, Tucker sought out Sandy Gilfoyle and his sister, Stella, while the other patrons glanced up with curious discretion. Stella was having a loud, undirected conversation with one of the senior staff members, giggling like a little girl while the staffer smiled indulgently. Handsome Sandy sat in his wheelchair just as he had for weeks, no more animated than when he had first arrived.

“Good morning, Miss Gilfoyle,” Tucker said. “I need to take your brother’s wheelchair for examination. Protocol.”

“Which one are you? Is it Marty?” Stella asked. She smiled sloppily at him. This was what money had done to the Gilfoyle siblings; gave them the freedom to be soft, to be carefree, to be messy. They did not need to hustle or to charm. Or, in Stella’s case, to be penalized for being unable to learn how.

“Minnick. Agent Tucker Minnick, from the Bureau,” Tucker said. “I’ll just take the chair with your brother in it. Agent Calloway and I will inspect it and one of us will bring him back to you here.”

“Sandy-O, is that okay?” Stella asked the motionless young man. She stroked his hair. She did not question the logic in Tucker’s request. “I don’t think they mean anything by it, don’t feel bad.”

Sandy made no protest, so Tucker navigated him past Germans railing at the Swiss, room service waiters muttering in French, and Italians comparing their new books. Sandy Gilfoyle’s file noted that he spoke all these languages. With his pedigree and those skills, he could have gone into diplomacy himself, but every choice he’d made after university had taken him farther from the world hosted in his childhood home. But look at him now.

In the post office’s back room, Hugh Calloway was steaming open a letter while holding a black marker between his teeth. Because of the low ceiling, he looked like a lanky giant imprisoned by walls of boxes, crates, and bundles of letters.

“What’s cooking, Calloway?” Tucker asked.

Hugh selected a letter from the table and read: “?‘The yellow fellows caused a big fuss the first day. The most important one, I think he is an ambassador, complained there was no rug beneath his table while he ate and that only cheap hotels had no rugs. They all hurried to get him one so he could feel properly pampered. He didn’t need a rug, he needed a bullet.’?”

“So you’re having a good day, is what you’re saying.”

Hugh jerked his chin toward Sandy. “Did you find that wandering the halls?”

“Forlorn without a collar.” Tucker ran his fingers lightly beneath the counter, looked at the closed door to the hallway, and glanced up at the light fixture, thinking of his own microphones. He was not the only one capable of surveillance. “Don’t forget that we’re not the only ones in this hotel with eyes and ears everywhere. Best behavior always, yes?”

The other agent looked at him over his letter, eyebrows raised meaningfully, before selecting another. Instead of answering, he read, “?‘Mother, I miss you but I will be sending money back soon. The Huns tip well.’?”

Kneeling by the wheelchair, Tucker removed one of the hubcaps in order to insert a tightly rolled note from his pocket into the axle. He would have loved to have a recording device that would fit in along with it, but one didn’t always get what they loved. “Anything of interest?”

“These staff interviews are like bailing water with a sieve. They keep getting drafted. Nothing like spending an hour questioning a fellow up and down and left and right to find out if he’s got Nazi sympathies only to have him shipped out to shoot at them before you can type his ID badge.” Hugh selected another letter. “?‘It makes me sick to give them sugar knowing you do not have any at home but Hoss says this is our way of helping.’?”

“Have you seen the GM go by?”

“She’s giving the Nazis books, isn’t she? ‘These folks are worse than those damn Yankees every summer’— damn isn’t spelled out, though; it’s got a dash in it already.”

Tucker replaced the hubcap, making sure it bore no obvious sign of tampering. “Someone else doing your work for you.”

Hugh selected another letter. “?‘Friend, I have never been so horny.’?”

He and Tucker burst into laughter.

Sandy Gilfoyle sat motionless, staring past the boxes.

Hugh broke off. He started to say one thing, glanced at the light fixture, the closed door, and instead said, “He’s really something, ain’t he?”

“I better get him back to Stella.”

They were a powerful family, the Gilfoyles. The FBI dealt with mob cases, so Tucker was not unfamiliar with dynastic might, but the Gilfoyles’ power was subtle. Indirect. They were a family of whisperers and listeners, adjacent to thrones rather than sitting in them. Kings and presidents could be ousted, after all, but the Gilfoyles could always simply fade into the background for a little while, collecting the properties dropped by fallen champions. It wasn’t difficult to see their influence at the Avallon. As a young man, Francis had fallen in love with the ruined hotel, brought his family, brought his friends. He had done such a good job, in fact, that the Avallon lived even now that he didn’t. No thanks to the heir, Tucker thought. All thanks to June Hudson.

He still wanted to find her. To explain to her—well, not explain about the telegram, obviously he would not explain about the telegram—but to explain that he wanted things to be different between the hotel and the Bureau, between her and him. Hopefulness made this generosity clear to him. He heard the word Hoss one hundred times a day. He had dreamt of her the night before. She was standing in the place of the sweetwater font outside his door, as if one was the same as the other. Hair slicked back and tucked behind her ears. Hands in her pockets, casual, confident, permanent. He asked, Who are you really? She smiled her little, powerful smile, and said, with the exact same inflection, Who are you really?

On the second floor, in Toad Blankenship’s cluttered office, he didn’t find June Hudson, but he found her dachshunds. Two slick-coated, one wire-coated, all beady-eyed in the handsomest housekeeping office one might ever hope to see, with oak cabinets and a leather desk chair generously sized for Toad’s posterior. Inside, Toad herself was in the process of chewing out a junior, a redheaded young thing who did not yet look sorry enough for Toad’s satisfaction.

“Mrs. Vance,” he interrupted. “Those Miss Hudson’s dogs?”

The dogs blinked up at him, panting in a way that normally signaled either anxiety or the need to vomit. The junior getting her ass handed to her blinked at him, too, panting only a little less.

“Agent Minnick,” Toad replied, “you here to be a menace?”

“I am looking for the general manager.”

“She’s taking a private hour,” Toad said.

The junior maid found her voice to reply, with some satisfaction, “She’s probably crying over Sandy Gilfoyle.”

Toad let out a righteous, reptilian snort. “Does that gossip taste delicious to you, Martha? How would a slap taste? How about—”

Tucker cut this off. “What is her meaning?”

“Hoss took Sandy Gilfoyle’s return hard, as you can imagine.” Toad must have had a taste for gossip herself, because when she saw his blank face, she added immediately, “Oh, you don’t know everything, do you, G-man? She raised Sandy, and not just out of that hole in Avallon IV. She and Edgar played house with that boy.”

He didn’t care for the feeling inside himself. “Do the Gilfoyles generally entertain such close relationships with staff?”

“She wasn’t just staff. She was one of them. She went everywhere with them.”

“How did that make the rest of the staff feel?”

Toad produced a second chin and a frown to go with. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Were they jealous?”

She produced a third chin. “I can’t speak for anybody else, but I was glad to see Mr. Francis take notice of someone else who could handle the water. Only a fool’d be jealous of someone being trained up to go down into Avallon IV. And in any case, you’ve met her, haven’t you?”

He had.

“No one works harder than Hoss, and that was always true,” Toad said. “So what if they spent every day with her? Let them play house with her, too, for a while.”

“What changed?”

“Why, they grew up, Agent Minnick,” Toad said, clearly surprised he had to ask. “They grew up and moved away. She’s only one of them when she’s here at the Avallon. Not out there. You’ve heard her. But this brat here’s wrong. That ain’t what got Hoss cooking right now, though; it’s Jerry. Martha Hughes, come out into the hall with me, we’re gonna go polish the doorknobs with your smirk.”

“Mrs. Vance, wait,” Tucker said. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say to her; he just felt the need to command her to stop, to listen, to prove that he had some sort of authority. She had once again managed to make him feel like a boy.

Toad, paused in the doorway, gave him a knowing look. “I don’t have time to solve your problems, Agent. You and I both got dogs we need to be kicking.”

Then she hauled Martha out by her upper arm.

After she had gone, Tucker went through all her drawers, mostly out of habit, slightly out of indignation. He found nothing out of the ordinary but an unsmoked cigar, a love letter with no names on it ( I don’t think of Indiana at all when I’m with you ), and, in the back of one of the drawers, a live snail with an odd, horizontally oriented shell. This final find, so unexpected that it raised goose bumps on his arms, made him shut the drawer quietly and leave the room at once.

···

That snail, that snail. Tucker had seen its kind before. They had some funny name. The threetooth. Was that it? The Cheat threetooth? He might have been misremembering, but he remembered that flat, horizontal shell. It was a mountain dweller, a West Virginia native, and it liked the rivers, and it especially liked the sweetwater. It especially liked the sweetwater when the water turned. He had forgotten about that. They’d been everywhere, hadn’t they? After the water turned in his youth, they’d covered the ground so thickly you couldn’t walk for crushing them. The snails must have been already lurking underground or under leaves, but it was hard not to think they were made of the sweetwater itself, so quickly and thoroughly did they arrive. So many shells, the sort of thing children would delight to collect, except that there were no children after the water turned.

“Agent Minnick,” June Hudson said. “Toad said you were looking for me.”

She stood in front of the font by his room, eclipsing it from sight, both her posture and the hall lighting uncannily similar to his dream. All the things he’d thought to say to her now felt bald and foolish.

Instead, he heard himself saying, “Is there any water in this place that isn’t sweetwater?”

She considered him. “That’s right. The staff says you avoid it. Tucker Rye Minnick. Bottled drinks only. Do not serve water. Sleeps on right side of bed. Likes onions and garlic. Strawberry desserts. Light or no dinner. Displays tin can wrappers on mirror. No wedding ring.”

It was a thorough demonstration of authority. Some part of him felt this was a game that had been happening forever between the two of them, each party taking turns demonstrating to the other how they had gotten to this place in their life. No, although this hallway felt timeless and dream-ridden, the game had not been going on forever, because he could remember the first move. It had been hers, before she even knew her opponent. The first move was this: Tucker being directed endlessly around the main building by her gray-and-gold proxies, being forced to tunnel his way in through the staff entrance to get to her. He was still tunneling; she ran circles around him on this board.

June was pleased with herself. Pleased with his reaction. She said, “You’re not the only one with ears in these walls, Agent Minnick.”

“I don’t sleep on the right side of the bed,” he said.

“You sure of that?”

“I don’t sleep. The smell of the water keeps me awake.”

Her eyes found his coal tattoo. She did not say, But you’re from here. Instead, she said, “One of the staff cabins has a rainwater cistern, no sweetwater. They might let you drag a cot in there, if you asked them.” A pause. “Or you could just order them to let you stay there.”

Ah. Yes. Here. This was what he had meant to say; she’d brought him back to it. He said, “I want to apologize. My priorities as an agent are not always the same as my priorities as an individual.”

“Do you recognize my words coming out of your mouth?” she asked. “What was I trying to tell you about Ulcie Crites?”

He put his hand on his doorknob. He did not intend to retreat, but he wanted the implication that he might, if things got unproductive. Unprofessional. “I was apologizing. I’m still apologizing. I want things to be different between us…between the Bureau and the hotel.”

June considered this. She was wearing a button-down the texture of a forest mushroom, velvety and touchable, and it was open three buttons’ worth of skin. Her neck held a drippy gold necklace that disappeared inside her blouse. She was unthinkingly (or perhaps thinkingly; he was not certain she did anything by accident) lightly tapping one of her fingers against her breastbone. Finally, she said, “What does the Bureau know about Sabine Wolfe?”

Tucker was tempted to recite back exactly what the Bureau knew, just as she had recited facts about him. Sabine Wolfe: watercolor painter; mother of Hannelore; friends with Lothar Liebe, the Gestapo man, and Dr. Otto Kirsch, the physician who had written several opinion pieces in favor of the Nazi Party; wife of the cultural attaché who the FBI thought had taken far too many sightseeing trips during his time in Washington. But he just said, “She has unpleasant friends.”

“I just watched that doctor friend of hers drug her screaming child in the middle of my book club party,” June said. “Needle this long. Put the girl down like an elephant.”

“Is there a question in that statement?”

“I don’t know. I just know I didn’t like it.”

He said, “Would you like the Bureau to add the needle and the drug to the confiscated list?”

Her mouth tightened.

“It’s done,” he said. It felt good to grant her something so easily. He would make a new rule. Of course the diplomats could not have sedatives. They couldn’t even have two newspapers. “How is Agent Harris doing in your switchboard?”

“Toad says all her housekeeping girls will be fighting to be promoted into all the empty positions I’ll have there in nine months,” June said. “I say, if those girls want to have babies with his face, that’s their business.”

“Do you like shocking people, Miss Hudson?”

Her eyes glittered with amusement.

He wanted to give her something else then, something more valuable, something that proved that, although his priorities as an agent were not always the same as his priorities as an individual, they were not entirely divorced, and that she could expect to address either at will. He felt expansive and breathless; he realized he was shielding his eyes a little, as if from that Texas sunset.

He asked, “Can I ask the hotel a question? Someone has placed three calls from that sixth-floor cloakroom. The switchboard says each time they’ve called and then hung up without saying anything. Is this something your staff might do?”

“No. But I can find out who it was.”

All at once, he regretted asking. It all felt too real, too reckless; this was why he’d been a little relieved when she hadn’t appeared at the library. He could not trust himself to make good decisions. Not with this sweetwater running up and down every wall around him, slowly displacing the blood in his veins. He was wild on the sweetwater; Federal Agent Tucker Rye Minnick could not be wild.

He could not take it back, so he just said, “Don’t tip my hand, Miss Hudson. This is delicate business.”

She gave him a very knowing smile. “Welcome to hotel work.”