The Bohemian Murders (34 page)

Michael’s father had not been the hard-driving risk-taker the grandfather was. When California became a state in 1850, all Michael’s father wanted to do was settle down and be an American; but Michael’s mother, a minor Russian princess, wouldn’t hear of renouncing their place at the tsar’s court. So Michael had grown up in two worlds. In temperament and appearance he was more like his grandfather than his father, and recognizing this, his father had thrust the information-carrying (that is, the spying) role on Michael when he was only nineteen.

At first, with the enthusiastic hotheadedness of youth, Michael had enjoyed the intriguing side of being a Kossoff. But then he’d met and fallen in love with his Katya—and Katya had been killed by the Russians, on the
assumption that Michael had shared certain secret information with her. Tragically, he had not; but there was no convincing her murderers of that. Feeling vengeful and betrayed, he had then volunteered his services to the United States government as a double agent, and he had been leading a perilous life ever since. Yet, he said, he had been perfectly happy with it until I came along two years ago and turned him upside down.

Now Michael wrapped his hand in my hair and pulled my face close to his. “Aren’t you going to try to change my mind?”

I licked the tip of his noble nose, because it was irresistibly close. “About what?”

“Marriage, of course.” His hand strayed down the valley between my breasts, and below. “I’ve just robbed you of your virtue, after all.”

“If you didn’t realize that I was not a virgin, and therefore had lost my virtue a while back, then you are less experienced than I supposed.” I drew back a bit and scrutinized him: sensually curving lips, rosy cheeks, and the bright eyes of an imp. “You don’t seem displeased with my lack of virginity.”

“If I were, you would probably have something to say about pots calling kettles black.”

“No doubt.” I laughed; into my open mouth he plunged his tongue, which got us involved in something else for quite a while. When we had disentangled ourselves again, Michael stroked the hair back from my forehead, raised himself up on one arm, and said seriously, “You do understand about Artemisia, don’t you? She was just a part of the ruse.”

I frowned a little, and did not reply immediately. The ruse to which he referred was that whole Misha persona. Michael had sought to appear as if he’d become dissolute and unreliable, because he wanted out of the spy game and neither government would agree to let him go.

“The problem is, Michael, that Artemisia didn’t know it was an act. She thought Misha was the real you, and she could have been hurt. Deceiving people is so, so—” Thinking of the people I myself had deceived, albeit for
(supposedly) good cause, I could not complete the sentence.

“I didn’t deceive her,” Michael said patiently. “I told her from the beginning that I was in love with someone else. Of course I meant you, Fremont.”

“It might have been nice if you’d told
me.
”

“I’d intended to. Back at the end of the summer I thought all I had to do was announce my resignation to both sides, and I’d get some sort of letter of dismissal and that would be that. But that was not what happened. During the fall when you had to stay in San Francisco for Mickey Morelock’s trial, I found out that neither the Russians nor the Americans would let me go. Their refusal panicked me. I became obsessed with the morbid idea that what had happened to Katya would also happen to you the minute I said the words ‘I love you.’ ”

“So you became Misha.”

“Yes. By the time you arrived in Carmel I’d perfected the act. Believe me, I didn’t always enjoy it.”

“But you did sometimes?” I teased. “Like the time Artemisia spent the night with you?”

“I told you,” he grumbled, “I was drunk. I’m human. And I’m sorry.”

“I forgive you,” I said, reaching up perversely to tweak his ear; but somehow the tweak became a kiss of delicious tenderness.

Outside our little cabin the wind picked up and went moaning like a ghost at the cracks around the door and windows. But we were safe and warm. We had built a fire in a hideous potbelly stove, the room was gilded by the glow of many candles, and we had the comfort of each other lying side by side, full length, skin against skin.

“It has all been worth it,” Michael murmured.

“What do you mean?”

“You demonstrated something to me that makes all the difference.”

“I was not aware of giving demonstrations.”

“No, you were just being yourself. Fremont Jones. That is what I learned: You are not Katya.”

I turned my head on the pillow and tried to find my
way through Michael’s eyes into his soul. My throat felt dry. To speak of Katya was like treading on holy ground; one must go respectfully. I cleared my throat and admitted: “I still don’t understand.”

“For years I felt the guilt of her death. How could I love you, and want to have you with me, when for Katya loving me had been the same as dying? But you, Fremont, are different. In fact, you’re completely impossible! You have a talent for getting into risky situations that equals, if not exceeds, my own. You may listen to advice, but then you inevitably draw your own judgments from it and go your own way. You’re so strong, or maybe just so stubborn, that if an avenue doesn’t open up in the way you want to go, you will just hack your way through the obstacles regardless. It has become perfectly clear to me that you are going to continue to get into these situations no matter what I or anyone else does.”

A remarkably accurate assessment, but I was not entirely sure I liked it. I sat up, tossed my hair back, and put my fists on my hips. “So?”

Grinning, Michael pushed himself up against the head of the bed and folded his arms over his hairy chest. “So I may love you and I may be concerned about you, but I’m not enough of an idiot to think I can control you—which also means I don’t have to feel responsible for you.”

“All right.” I sighed. “That’s good. In fact, that’s really fine.” I let down my guard and leaned back against him, snuggling into the soft hollow beneath his arm.

For a while we were quiet, and then Michael said, “Oh, by the way. You might want to know that the Cypress Coast Company has charged Braxton Furnival with fraud and theft, and the district attorney has also charged him with murder. It seems that when the new man from Cypress went to his house in Del Monte Forest—which incidentally didn’t belong to Furnival, it’s a lodge for the developer’s guests—he found a dead body, subsequently identified as Ramon Reyes, a speculator from Paso Robles. They’re looking into the possibility that Reyes was shot with the same gun that killed the
fellow they found in the woods—Pete Carlson. There’s a warrant out for Furnival’s arrest.”

I had wondered what happened to Ramon; there were any number of questions I wanted to ask, but I dared not. All I said was “They’ll have to find Braxton before they can arrest him.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No. Of course not!”

“Hmm. At any rate, he was selling memberships in a nonexistent golf club,” Michael went on, “and taking cash for options on property to which he didn’t have the title, and pocketing the money. Some of it, of course, went into bribes to cover up Sabrina Howard’s death. Fremont, I have an idea you know a great deal more about all these things than you put in your letter to Wish Stephenson.”

When I made no reply, Michael said softly, “Look at me, love.”

I looked at him mutely. I suppose there may have been a plea in my eyes but if so, it was unformed, for in truth I wanted to tell him everything but felt bound to hold my tongue.

He said, “I do have a proposal for you, but not a proposal of marriage. I propose that we be partners, you and I. Fremont Jones and Michael Kossoff. Partners in life and in work, all burdens, all secrets, all joys to be shared. What do you say, Fremont; will you be my partner?”

A smile spread slowly over my face while in my head I repeated the words and let their meaning bloom full in my mind. Then I said, “That makes eminently good sense.”

I sat up in the bed, folding my legs Indian-style, and Michael did the same. We faced each other. I held up both my hands, palms out, and Michael fitted his palms to mine—a spontaneous, solemn salute.

“Yes,” I said, “Michael Kossoff; I, Fremont Jones, will be your partner in life and in work, all burdens, all secrets, all joys to be shared.”

SPIRIT SHOCK

As recently as a week ago I would not have thought that I, Fremont Jones, should ever find myself in a place such as this. I peered surreptitiously through the dim light in an effort to see if the others present were handling the eerie atmosphere with more equanimity than I. I was, in point of fact, decidedly uncomfortable. Even apprehensive. Only loyalty to my new friend—whose risk was, after all, far greater than mine—kept me in my seat; otherwise I should have bolted. Facing resolutely forward, I sneaked a look at her from the corner of my eye.

My friend, Frances McFadden, waited alertly, eagerly, for the séance to begin. Her eyes glinted, picking up light from the candles that burned in sconces on the wall; her lips were parted and her breath came light and fast. In truth I could not comprehend her attraction to Spiritualism—so great an attraction that she would deceive her husband and come on the sly. I was helping her, of course,
out of my own curiosity, as well as a profound belief that one owes it to one’s gender to thwart the sort of husbands who are forever telling their wives where they may go and what they may do.

We were eight around the table; when the medium entered, she would make nine. Whether there was significance to that number or not, I did not know. The medium’s empty chair was to the right of Frances, and Frances at my own right. On my left sat a man who smelled unpleasantly of cheap cigars, a bulky fellow whose scratchy tweed sleeve kept rudely impinging upon my more lightly clad arm. The woman beside him I could not readily see, though with the curve of the round table one would have thought she should fall in my line of vision. I mentally pictured a wife shrinking in her husband’s shadow—though in truth I knew neither of them from Adam or Eve.

Continuing on clockwise around the table, in the place of honor as it were, directly across from the medium’s throne-like chair, sat a handsome man with a hawkish profile. He was clean-shaven but had a good deal of dark, wavy hair on his head—in color either black or brown or dark red, it was impossible to tell in the dim conditions. I did not want to be so rude as to stare, and a glance hardly sufficed to make the distinction. Diagonally across from me, next to Mr. Hawk, sat a blob of a woman, pasty-faced, whose several chins
spilled over the high neck of her fancy black dress and thus obscured most of a very large cameo. She breathed with a wheeze. Two more women made up the balance of the table, both middle-aged and unremarkable in bearing or dress, but I thought a great deal of sadness seemed to emanate from them.

Emanate, indeed! I gave an inward snort. This seance and its oppressive atmosphere must be poisoning my mind—ordinarily I’d have no truck with anything such as emanations, not even in my vocabulary! I should have to watch myself, or I’d become as enamoured of the spirit world as Frances.

The room was stifling, all the windows closed and hung with heavy velvet drapes. I squinted and judged the drapes to be dark green, matching the embossed, brocaded wallpaper whose color was just discernible in the candleglow. The silence was thick, marred by the wheezing of Madame Blob. I heard Frances catch a breath in her throat, a little gasp, and at the same time the candles began to waver and cast weird shadows as if in a draft, although I had neither seen nor heard a door open. From my friend’s palpable sense of anticipation, as well as by these slight signs of movement, I guessed the marvelous medium’s advent was at hand.