The Winter Beach Read online

  What was happening to her? She forced herself to go over the previous day step by step. Carmen's hands on her shoulders, her realization that Saul was crazy, paranoid, and her own panicky decision to leave today. She nodded. Leave, now, immediately. But she had to wait for Carmen to come, she thought plaintively. Her hands tightened on the table, made fists. She saw herself walking toward Saul's open arms. Felt warmth of them about her, the comfort of resting her cheek on his shoulder ... Unsteadily she stood up and got another drink of water. Leave!

  She sat down with the water, torn between two imperatives: she had to leave, and she had to wait for Carmen. If she stayed, she thought, sounding the words in her head, Lasater would use her somehow to get to Saul. Still she sat unmoving, wishing Carmen would come now, take the decision away from her. She pulled an open notebook close and with block letters drawn shakily she wrote Leave. She nodded and pushed herself away from the table.

  Packing was too hard; she decided not to take some of her things—the typewriter, some of the books, one of her suitcases. Dully she thought of the refrigerator, of food turning bad. She shoved things into a bag and carried it to the car and blinked at the trunk already full. She put the food on the floor of the back seat and decided she had enough. It was eight o'clock when she left the house and started down the driveway. At the bottom, a large blond man waved to her. She made the stop, prepared to turn, and rolled her window open a crack.

  “Yes?”

  “Lasater wants to see you. He's in a camper in the park.” He went around the car, keeping his hand on the hood; at the passenger side, he opened the door and got in.

  She looked at him, feeling stupid. Her door was locked, she had thought of it, but not that side. Slowly she pulled out onto the highway, climbed the hill, went down the other side thinking of nothing at all.

  “There's the turnoff,” the blond man said.

  She turned and drove carefully down the steep gravel road to the campsite. She stopped when he told her to. They both got out and he motioned toward the motor home at the end of the campgrounds. She walked to it.

  “Lyle, what an early bird! I thought it would be later than this. Come on in. I'm making breakfast, Mexican eggs. You want some?”

  The interior was exactly like the ads she had seen in magazines. There was a tiny living room area with a narrow sofa and two swivel chairs. There was a counter separating that part from the even smaller kitchen, and beyond that another curtained-off part. All very neat.

  “Why did you send that man after me?”

  “Afraid you'd be up and out early, and I wanted to talk to you.” He was dicing a red pepper. “Look, I can add another egg, no trouble at all. Pretty good dish.”

  She shook her head.

  He reached below the counter and brought out a coffee cup. “At least coffee,” he said, pouring. He brought her the cup and put it on a swing-out table by the side of the sofa. “Sit down, I'll be with you in a minute. You hung over?” His scrutiny was quick, but thorough. He grinned sympathetically. “Have you told them anything about me?”

  “No. I'm sick, I'm going to buy juice and aspirin and go to bed.”

  He backed away. “Christ! What a break! You okay? If you don't feel like driving to the village, I can send for stuff for you.”

  She shook her head again. “I'll go.”

  “Okay, but then in the sack, and stay until you're tiptop again, right? It's the rain. Jesus, I never saw so much rain. Has it ever stopped since you got here?”

  He went on cheerfully as he added onions to the chili pepper, then a tomato. He tossed them all into a small pan and put it on one of the two burners of the stove. He poured himself more coffee as he stirred the sauce, and through it he kept talking.

  “You know, it might be a good ploy, your getting sick now. You pile up in bed and he comes to visit, right? I mean, he digs you or would he have spent all day and most of the night with you? So he comes to visit and you ask him for a drink, a glass of water or juice, and later we come collect the glass, finis. Not bad actually.”

  Wearily she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “You've been so smart,” she said. “If I did what you asked and no more, I was safe enough. Hand over the prints, get my story on the eagles, forget the whole thing. If I poked around and learned anything more than that, you could always point to my medical record and say I'm just a nut.”

  “A plum,” he said, connecting her. “You're a plum. I reached in and pulled out a real plum. You know there aren't any plums in plum pudding? Boy, was I ever disillusioned when I found that out.” He had broken his eggs into a frying pan; he watched them closely, turned them, and then flipped them onto a plate. He poured his sauce over them. “No tortillas,” he said regretfully. “Toast just isn't the same, but them's the breaks.” Toast popped up in the toaster and he buttered it quickly, then brought everything to the living area. He pulled out another table and put his breakfast down. “Look, are you sure you don't want something, toast, a plain egg?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” He reached under the table and flipped something and extended another section. “Presto chango,” he said. Then he pulled a briefcase toward him, rummaged in it, and brought out an envelope, put it on the table. “While I eat, take a look at the stuff in there.”

  There were photographs. Lyle glanced through them and stopped when she came to one that had Saul Werther along with several other men, all looking ahead, as if they were part of an audience.

  “Start with the top one,” Hugh Lasater said, with his mouth full.

  She looked at it more closely. It was an audience, mostly men, all with an attentive look. She studied it, searching for Saul, and finally found him, one tiny face among the others. Two other photographs were similar, different audiences, but with Saul among the others. There was a photograph of four men walking; one of them was Saul. And there were two blown-up pictures of the larger audiences.

  Lasater had finished eating by the time she pushed the photographs aside. “You recognize him without any trouble?”

  “Of course.”

  “But in one his hair's almost white, and in another one it's dark brown. He had a mustache in one, didn't you notice it?”

  “I assumed they're over a period of time. People change.”

  “Two years,” Lasater said. He removed his plate and leaned back in his chair once more, holding coffee now. “One of those conferences was in Cold Spring Harbor, one's Vanderbilt, the last one's Cal Tech. He gets around to the scientific meetings. And at each of those conferences there was an incident. A young scientist either vanished or died mysteriously.”

  Lyle closed her eyes. Don't tell me, she wanted to plead, but no words came; she realized her head was pounding in time with the booming of the surf. The booms meant another storm was coming. When the waves changed from wind waves to the long swells that formed a thousand miles offshore, or at the distant Asian shores, and when the waves did not dash frantically at random intervals, but marched with a thunderous tread upon the land, there would be a gale or worse. Saul had told her about the difference, and her experience here had confirmed it, although she had not been aware of the difference before his mini-lecture.

  “I'm leveling with you,” Lasater said now. “I want to wrap this up and be done with it. You must want to be done with it too. Lyle, are you listening to me?”

  “Yes. My eyes hurt, my head aches. I told you, I'm sick.”

  “Okay, okay. I'll make it short. Picture Berlin back in the thirties. You see Cabaret?” She shook her head slightly. “Oh. Well, Berlin's recovering from the worst economic slump in history, expanding in all directions under Hitler. At the university they're developing the first electron microscope. And at the university is Herr Professor Hermann Franck, who is one of the pioneers in biochemistry. He's using the prototypes of the electron microscope fifteen years before anyone else has it. Right? Franck has a Jewish graduate student working under him and the work is frenzied because Franck is tired,
he wants to quit, go back to his family estate and write his memoirs. Only he can't because the work they're doing is too important. He's on the verge of something as big in his field as Einstein's work was in his, maybe bigger.”

  “How do you know any of this?” Lyle asked.

  “There were Gestapo stooges throughout the university. One of them tried to keep up with Franck and his work, made weekly reports that are mostly garbage because he wasn't being cut in on any of the real secret stuff. But enough's there to know. And, of course, Franck was publishing regularly. Then, something happened, and, I admit, this part gets shady. His grad student was beaten and left for dead by a youth gang. The professor applied for permission to take the body home for burial, and that's the last anyone knows of either of them. Obviously the kid didn't die. He survived, maybe killed the professor, maybe just hung around long enough and the old guy died of natural causes. He had a bum heart. Anyway, the student ended up with the papers, the notes on the work, everything. We know that because it all vanished. Eventually when Franck didn't show up at work, the Gestapo got interested enough to make a search, and found nothing. The war thickened, things settled, and Franck was forgotten, another casualty. Then twenty years ago the Gestapo reports came to light and a mild flurry of activity was started, to see if there was anything worth going after. Nothing. About twelve years ago a bright young scientist working on his thesis dragged out Franck's articles, and there was an explosion that hasn't stopped sending out ripples yet. Bigger than Einstein, they're saying now.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don't know. Maybe three people do know. But for twelve years we've been looking for that student, now an elderly gentleman, who makes it to various scientific conferences and kills young researchers. We want him, Lyle, in the worst way.”

  Lyle stood up. “It's the best story yet. They keep getting better.”

  “I know. I can't top this one, though. He's crazy, Lyle. Really crazy. His family was wiped out without a trace, it must have done something to him. Or the beating scrambled his brains. Whatever. But now he's crazy, he's systematically killing off anyone who comes near Franck's research. He's able to keep up with what's going on. He can pass at those conferences. Maybe some of the time he actually works in a university somewhere. But if we can get a set of prints, we'll know. The Gestapo had them on file, they fingered every Jew in the country. All we want to do is see if they match. Maybe they won't. We'll step out, go chase our tails somewhere else.”

  “And if they do match?”

  “Honey, we'll be as gentle as a May shower. Somewhere there are a lot of notebooks, working notes, models, God knows what all. He can't keep all that junk in his head, and besides, he was just a student. Franck had been on it for years. It's on paper somewhere. We want him to lead us to it, and then he'll be picked up ever so carefully. There's a real fear that he'll suicide if he suspects we're anywhere near him, and he's too important to let that happen. He'll be better treated than the Pea Princess, believe me.”

  She went to the door. Her eyes were burning so much it hurt to keep them open; she was having trouble focusing. She still did not believe him, but she no longer knew which part of the story she could not accept. It was all too complicated and difficult. She wanted desperately to sleep.

  Lasater moved to her side, his hand on the door knob. “Honey, we're not the only ones looking for him. And we are probably the nicest ones. Science is pretty damned public, you know.”

  “Now you wave the Russian threat.”

  “And others,” he said vaguely. “But also, there are pharmaceutical corporations that know no nationality. It's a real race and everyone in it is playing to win. Even if by default.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The ultimate sour grapes, Lyle. A really poor loser might decide if he can't have the prize neither can anyone else.”

  He opened the door. “Look, no rain. I must be in California. Go on, get your juice and aspirin, and then pile in the sack for a day or two. I'll be around, see you later.”

  He knew he had frightened her at last. It had taken the big guns, but there was a trick to knowing when to show strength and when to play it cozy. She was shaken. She had to have time now to let it sink in that her own position was not the safest possible. But she was a smart cookie, he thought with satisfaction, and it would sink in. She would get the point soon enough that this was too big for her to obstruct. The next time he saw her, she would ask what assurance she had that once done, she would be truly out of it, and he would have to reassure her, pour a little oil on her conscience.

  Hugh Lasater was fifty, and, he admitted once in a while to himself, he was tired. Watching Lyle walk to her car, he thought of what it would be like to have a woman like her, to sit by a fire when the wind blew, play gin, read, listen to music, cuddle in bed. There had been three women along the years that he had tried that scenario with, and each time what he got was not exactly what he had been after. The women he liked to cuddle in bed were not the sort who played gin by the fire, and, he said to himself, vicy vercy. Lyle drove up the gravel trail to the highway and he motioned to Milt Follett to come back inside.

  Not Lyle, or anyone like her, he decided emphatically. Too old, too dumpy. He hoped she had not spread flu germs around.

  “Get up there,” he told Follett, “keep an eye on her place. Werther's sure to pay a sick call, and when he leaves, the house is yours. She won't get in the way.” He did not believe Follett would find the prints, either. In his mind was a scene where Taney handed them to him; he believed in that scene.

  Follet scowled. “It's going to rain again.”

  “Take an umbrella. Rain's good cover. They'll be in a hurry to get inside, you won't have to stay so far back.”

  Follett cursed and almost absently Hugh Lasater slapped him. “Get your gear together. You'd better take some sandwiches, coffee. He might not show until after dark.”

  Follett's fists were as large as sacks of potatoes, and as knobby. “Relax,” Hugh Lasater said. “Someone has to teach you manners.” He began to gather the photographs, dismissing Milton Follett, who was, after all, no more than a two-legged dog, trained in obedience and certain indispensable tricks, but who was inclined to yap too much.

  Two days, he thought cheerfully. After all those years, two more days was not much. He had been in the Company when Cushman made the connection between Werther (or David Rechetnik) and Loren Oley's cancer research after Oley had vanished. Hugh Lasater had winkled out the details over a fourteen-month period, the Berlin connection, the old professor, everything he had told Lyle. Cushman had not then or ever grasped the implications and had shelved the investigation, but Lasater had stayed with it, working on it when he had time, keeping his own file. And four years ago Lasater had had enough to take his walk. He retired, pleading battle fatigue, nerves. He knew he had covered his traces so well that no one would ever be able to backtrack him. You're not going to write a book? they had asked, and he had laughed at the idea. A year later he had a new job, and was still on it. And in two days, he would know. But he already knew. He had known for over a year.

  He sat with his long legs stretched across the motor home and made his plans while Follett grumbled as he began to put together sandwiches. Outside, the surf was booming like a cannon.

  * * * *

  Inside Lyle's head the surf was booming also. She flinched from time to time, and she was squinting against the light even though the sky was solidly overcast now. Her legs ached and her arms felt leaden. A gust of wind shook her car and she knew the rising wind would make the coast road hazardous to drive. It was not too bad where the hills were high on the east side of the road, but every gap, every low spot, every bridge opened a wind channel, and it howled through, threatening to sweep anything on the road through with it. She came to the village and stopped at the supermarket. She had not had time to become very friendly with anyone in town, but they all accepted her by now with amiable good will. Most of the tow
nspeople she dealt with seemed to know her name although she knew none of theirs. The woman at the checkout stand in the grocery nodded when Lyle entered.

  “Morning. How're you, Mrs. Taney? That's a real storm blowing in this time. Got gale warnings up at Brookings already. We'll get it.”

  “Worse than last week's?”

  “Last week?” The woman had to stop to think. “Oh, that wasn't much at all. This one's a Pacific gale. Better make sure you have kerosene for your lamp, and plenty of wood inside. Could lose the lights.”

  Lyle thanked her and moved down the aisle and began selecting her groceries. Juice, ginger ale. She remembered being sick as a little girl and her mother bringing her iced ginger ale with a bent straw. For a moment she was overcome with yearning for her mother's comforting presence. She saw straws and picked them up. Her pump was electric, she remembered, and picked up more juice. If the electric lines went down she would have no water until they were restored. She knew she had to drink a lot; she was parched right now in fact. When she got to the checkout she was surprised by the amount and variety of potables she had picked up. Irritably she regarded them; she should put some of the stuff back, but it was too much effort and she paid for them and wheeled the cart outside to put her bag in the back seat. The wind was stronger, the gusts took her breath away. And the pounding of the surf was like a physical blow to her head again and again and again.

  Before she started her engine, she found the aspirin bottle and slipped it inside her pocket where she could get it easily. She put a can of Coke on the seat next to her and then turned on her key.

  Salmon Key was on a bluff a hundred feet above sea level. On the streets running parallel to the coastline the wind blew fitfully, not too strong, but at each intersection and on the cross streets it was a steady forty miles an hour with gusts much stronger. Lyle went through an intersection, fought the steering wheel to keep her car in her lane, and then in the middle of the next block parked at the curb. She knew she could not drive up the coast against that wind.