Seventh Enemy (7 page)

Skeletons. Like the fact that Willy was shacking up with a woman who was still technically married. “How do you know these things?” I said to Alexandria Shaw.

She smiled. “It’s my job.”

“And if they find some of these—skeletons?”

She shrugged. “It’s the job of the newspaper to print it. And,” she added, glancing sharply up at me, “I assume it will be your job to protect him.”

“So you want…”

“Balance,” she said.

“Well, I just don’t see how I can help you. I don’t know about any skeletons in Walt Kinnick’s closets, and if I did, I’d hardly tell you about them. As his friend, and especially as his lawyer, I am not the one to help you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have seen you.”

“I’m just trying to get the whole story, Mr. Coyne. SAFE has been very forthcoming with the media.”

“Organizations can do that. It’s trickier for individuals.”

“When the individuals are public figures,” she said, “like Walt Kinnick, they’re fair game.” She tilted her head and grinned at me. “Hunting metaphor, huh? Fair game?” She shrugged. “Now you’re on their list. Walt Kinnick and you. If you’re not for them, you’re against them. A turncoat is the worst kind of enemy. Right? Those people are told how to think by their leadership, and that’s how they’ve been instructed to think, so—”

“What do you mean, their list?”

“SAFE publishes a list of their so-called enemies in their newsletter. Prominent people who oppose their party line. The word is that you and Walt Kinnick will be high on their next list. How do you feel about that?”

“Flattered. Humble. Unworthy.”

She smiled quickly. “Come on, Mr. Coyne. Any comment?”

I shrugged. “I appreciate the warning, Ms. Shaw.”

“It wasn’t a warning. Just some information that’ll be in my story tomorrow. I wish you’d give me a hand with the rest of it.”

“Sorry. I can’t.”

She stared at me for a moment, then nodded. She reached into her bag and came out with a business card. She put it onto my desk. “If you change your mind, hear anything else…”

“Right,” I said. “Sure.”

“Oh, one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“How can I reach Walt Kinnick?”

I shook my head. “Sorry. Can’t tell you. Privileged information.”

She smiled. “Didn’t think so.” She snapped off the tape recorder and stuffed it into her bag. Her notebook followed it. She stood up and held out her hand to me. “Thanks,” she said.

Her grip was firm. She actually shook my hand. “I’m afraid I wasn’t much help,” I said.

“Everything helps,” she said. “You’d he surprised.”

I spent Wednesday doggedly trying to clear enough odds and ends on my desk to appease my conscience so that I wouldn’t feel compelled to lug my briefcase to Fenwick. Julie, of course, would pack it up for me, as she did every day, and I’d dutifully take it home with me when I left the office. I’d prop it against the inside of the door to my apartment, the way I always did, so I wouldn’t forget to take it back to the office with me.

But I wasn’t going to bring the damn thing on my fishing trip. Briefcases and fly rods don’t belong in the same car together.

So I skipped lunch and stayed at the office until nearly eight and felt wonderfully masochistic and virtuous. I was a man who had earned a few days of trout fishing.

That evening I assembled my gear, not an easy task since I found it scattered all around my apartment. My fly rods were in their aluminum tubes in the back of my bedroom closet. My waders lay rumpled in the corner of the living room. I found my reels on the bottom shelf of the linen closet. I discovered fly boxes on my desk, in the kitchen cabinet with the canned soup, in the drawer of my bedside table.

I nearly abandoned the search for my favorite fishing hat, the stained and faded Red Sox cap that my friend Eddie Donagan, the one-time Sox pitcher, had given me. It was studded with bedraggled flies, each of which had caught me a memorable fish, and I needed it for luck. I finally found it in the last place I expected—hanging on a hook in the front closet.

When I got all the stuff assembled, it looked as if I had enough equipment for a two-month African safari. When I got it packed in my car there certainly wouldn’t be any room for a clunky old briefcase.

I showered, brushed my teeth, and climbed into bed. I started to turn off the light, then changed my mind. I picked up the phone on the bedside table and pecked out the familiar Wellesley number.

It rang five times before Gloria mumbled, “Hello?”

“Sorry. You sleeping?”

“Oh. Brady. No.”

“Busy?”

“Not really.”

“I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt anything.

“I said I wasn’t busy.”

“You said, ‘Not really.’”

“That means no.”

“Well, but you said, ‘Not really.’ What did you mean, ‘Not really,’ if you didn’t mean you really were busy?”

“Brady, dammit, do you always have to cross-examine me? You don’t have to play lawyer with me. If I was busy, I would’ve said I was busy. Okay?”

I sighed. “Okay.”

I heard Gloria sigh, too. “Shit, anyway,” she said.

“I’m sorry.

“Yeah. Fine.

“Everything okay?”

“Except for Perry Mason phone calls, fine.”

“Well, good.”

“That why you called? To find out if I was busy?”

“Well, no.” I cleared my throat. “I’m going to be away for a few days. Thought you should know.”

“Why?”

“Well, I’ve got a chance to go fishing with—”

“No. I mean, why did you think I should know?”

“Oh.” I hesitated. “The truth is, I guess it feels better, thinking that there’s someone who should know when I go somewhere. I mean, everybody should have somebody who knows when they’re going away. Does that make any sense?”

“No,” said Gloria. But I heard her chuckle. She knew me. She understood.

“Somebody who—cares,” I said.

“I’m not stupid, you know,” she said softly. “You’re looking for someone to play wife for you.”

“No, I just—”

“I’m not your wife, Brady. I was your wife. When I was your wife, it was appropriate, your telling me when you were going somewhere. Which you used to do a great deal, if you remember. I don’t recall that you ever actually asked. You told me. Then you went.”

“I asked,” I said. “I always asked.”

“Yeah. You’d say, ‘I’m off to Canada with Charlie Saturday, remember?’ Some question.”

“I didn’t—”

“Or you’d say, ‘You don’t mind if Doc Adams and I spend the weekend out on the Beaver River, do you?’ Like that. Asking.”

“It’s the Beaverkill. Lovely trout river.”

“Whatever.” Gloria laughed softly. “Brady, if you want to tell me when you’re going somewhere, that’s fine. If you want me to be a telephone wife now and then, I can handle it. Go fishing. I don’t care. Have fun. Don’t fall in. Whatever you want out of it. Okay?”

I lit a cigarette. I took a deep drag, let it dribble out. “I don’t know why I called,” I said.

“Me neither,” she said. “When Terri was on the scene you didn’t call that much.”

“I guess not.”

“I’m not your girlfriend, you know.”

“I know.”

“So why are you calling me?”

“I don’t know. I mean, family…”

“You made your choices, Brady.”

“Billy’s at school, Joey’s in his own world. You…”

“I’m divorced. So are you. We’re divorced from each other, as a matter of fact.”

“I don’t like the idea of being out of touch.”

“That’s the choice you made.”

“Yeah.”

“You can’t have it both ways.”

“I guess not.”

“That was always your problem,” she said. “Wanting it both ways.”

“It was more complicated than that.”

“Not really.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Maybe you’re right.

“Look,” she said. “If it’ll make you feel better, leave a number with me.”

“Just in case something…”

“Right,” she said.

I read Walt’s phone number to her.

She repealed it. “This is Walt Kinnick?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve been reading about him in the paper. You, too, actually.”

“Yeah, well we’re just going to do some fishing.”

She hesitated a minute. “Are you okay?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It sounds…”

“Nothing to worry about.”

“I didn’t say I was worried.” She paused. “Maybe a little concerned.”

“Yeah?”

“Um.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Sure,” said Gloria. “It’s what we ex-wives are for.”

“And that,” I said, “is why every man needs one.”

I
WAS ON THE
road a little before seven. I beat the westbound commuters onto Storrow Drive, angled onto Route 2 by the Alewife T station, and had clear sailing. Morning fog hovered over the swampy places alongside the highway. It would burn off by mid-morning. It promised to be a perfect May day in New England.

Sixty miles or so west of Boston Route 2 narrows from a divided superhighway to a twisting two-laner. Here it is called the Mohawk Trail. It dips and wiggles through towns like Erving, which prospers on its paper mill and its waste treatment plant, and Farley and Wendell Depot and Miller’s Falls, which don’t appear to prosper at all.

On an October Saturday, the Mohawk Trail is crammed with leaf peepers, most of them out-of-staters. Caravans of automobiles pull onto the narrow shoulder so that gaudy vistas of crimson maples and bronze oaks and bright yellow aspens can be recorded on Kodacolor.

It’s pretty as hell. Photographs rarely do it justice.

Personally, I’d rather meditate upon a single scarlet maple leaf, preferably one that is floating on a trout stream past my waders, than on several billion of them all washed together over hillsides that stretch on for a hundred miles. I agree with Thoreau: All of Nature’s mysteries are revealed on a single leaf.

Actually, I’m a leaf peeper myself in May, and when the trail began its acute northwest ascent into the Berkshire foothills west of Greenfield, I found myself marveling at the thousands of pale shades of green and yellow and pink in the new May leaves that walled the roadside and formed a canopy overhead. Even the bark on the new saplings rioted with color—the gold of the willows, the black of the alders, white birch, gray aspen. The maples exploded with their crimson springtime blossoms. The wild cherry blooms were white.

Nature’s colors are more understated and subtle in May than they are in October. In May they’re fresh, young, natural, full of vigor and confidence. October foliage is the desperate makeup of old age, trying too hard to recapture the beauty that has irreversibly passed.

May’s my favorite month.

The fact that the best trout fishing New England offers comes in May could have something to do with it.

I pulled to the side of the road where it picked up the Deerfield River just west of Shelburne Falls. I consulted the map Wally had drawn for me on the back of the Dunkin’ Donuts napkin. Nine miles past the old inn in Fenwick, according to Wally’s sketch, an unmarked gravel road angled off the paved road to the right. The gravel road forked exactly two-point-two miles past a wooden bridge. The left fork followed the river. I was to go right. A lightning-struck oak tree stood at the point of the fork.

The right fork began as gravel but, after two hundred yards. turned to dirt. It twisted up into the hills. Wally had indicated several other roads branching off it. At exactly one-point-nine miles from the dead tree I was to follow the ruts to the left. A brook paralleled the wrong road. A stone wall and an old cellar hole marked the correct one. From there, a one-mile ascent would take me to Wally’s cabin. That’s where the road ended. Wally had drawn a picture of his place. Smoke twisted from its chimney.

I suspected Wally liked his cabin because no one could find it without one of his maps.

I found the unmarked gravel road. I recognized the fork by the dead oak. From there it got confusing. The road was narrow and rocky. The previous night’s rain puddled in the ruts. What on Wally’s map appeared to be small tributaries off a central roadway were, in fact, branches of equally untraveled dirt roads. It would’ve driven Robert Frost crazy. I drove slowly, glancing frequently at the Dunkin’ Donuts napkin. Finally the ruts narrowed and brush began to scrape against both sides of my ear.

I stopped. This felt wrong. I looked again at the map. It didn’t help.

I stepped out and leaned against the side of my car. I didn’t know where the hell I was. But, I decided, wherever it was, it was a perfectly fine place to be on a May morning. I was in the woods. All around me birds were whistling and cooing and flirting with each other. From somewhere above the canopy of new leaves came the squeal of a circling hawk. He was hunting, not flirting. A gray squirrel cussed me from the trunk of a beech tree. Off to my right I heard a brook burbling its way downhill over its boulder-strewn watercourse.

Maybe in one sense I was lost. But I knew exactly where I was.

The road was too narrow for turning the car around, so I had to back down to where it branched. I got out and walked up the left tine of the fork, where I found the stone wall and the cellar hole. According to Wally’s map, I was no longer lost.

So I stood there and told myself what a cunning woodsman I was, and after a minute or two I noticed the smell of woodsmoke. I climbed into my car and chugged in second gear to Wally’s cabin. It was made from weathered logs. A roofed porch spanned the entire front. Rocking chairs were strategically placed to encourage the loafer to prop his heels up on the railing and sip bourbon at sunset and watch the bats fly and the deer creep into the clearing. Big picture windows bracketed the front door. Smoke did indeed wisp from the chimney.

It was more than a cabin and less than a house. From the outside, it looked spacious and inviting.

I parked beside a mud-splattered black Cherokee, shut off the ignition, and stepped out. My BMW was mud-splattered, too.

Before I had taken two steps toward the cabin, a liver-and-white Springer spaniel came bounding to me. I scootched down to scratch his ears, and he rolled onto his side and squirmed and whined.