Peter Heller - Celine

In the shocked silence that often follows mortal combat, Celine and Pete looked at each other.

“Goose two, Smiths zero,” Pete said quietly.

“I had no idea their wings creak like rusty hinges. Didn’t it sound just like that, Pete? The boys look all right,” she added, very dry, meaning the kid and his father who were taking their humiliation out on each other.

“A valuable lesson in Don’t Feed the Animals. Could prove a lifesaver in bear country.”

“We’re going to bear country, aren’t we, Pete?”

“Yes we are. I’m looking forward to it. I’m a little tired of being at the top of the food chain.”

“You sound like that Neruda poem I love so: It so happens I am tired of being a man… Somewhere in there he knocks out a nun with a lily. Sorry, you were saying?”

Pete squeezed her hand. “Her phone is tapped.”

“Mmm. Probably for a while, God knows why. And nothing happens, no trigger, until she hires us to find her father.”

“Right. He disappeared twenty-three years ago. I think there’s a good possibility that someone has been eavesdropping ever since.”

“Wow.”

“Wow,” Pete repeated dramatically.

“Waiting for him to call. Because they don’t believe he’s dead either.”

“Right. And there are scores to settle.”

“Accounts to balance at the least.”

“Hmm.”

They listened to the vanquished little boy’s older sister scold him for getting whipped by a bird and dropping a perfectly good chocolate cone on the grass, and they watched the Family Smith tromp off to their car and new adventures in engaging the world.

Celine said, “Instead we triggered the action. So then why…” Celine wore large glasses in dark tortoiseshell. They were a bit like Jackie O’s sunglasses but bigger, even more of a statement. She didn’t mean them to be, she shied from anything show-offy, but she had an innate and inarguable sense of style. She took off the glasses, eyed them critically as if they were smudged, which they weren’t, and put them back on, settling them on her not at all diminutive, aquiline nose. “Why wouldn’t they want us to have the file?”

“You mean if they wanted to find Paul Lamont?” The two were beginning to pronounce the “they” with vague distaste.

“Yes,” she said. “They could simply follow us to him. After all, we have a better find rate than the FBI.” Which was true.

“But do we have a better success rate than the CIA?”

They looked at each other. “Probably,” Celine said. “That’s just it. They can’t find him. Whoever they are. And they’ve seen the file. You can bet they’ve broken in before and copied it. She didn’t know but she does now because they wanted her to know. They wanted us to know. The fallen picture, etc.—that was a warning.” Celine took a pocket mirror from her purse and checked her lipstick. “No, they’ve wrung the leads dry. The file is no more to them than an artifact. And we come along with our impeccable track record. They don’t want us to find him or they’d let us have the file. The risk, whatever the risk is, is just too great.”

“What’s the risk?” Pete said.

“I’m not sure.” She snapped the mirror closed and smiled at her husband. “I thought the silverware tray being moved was an interesting detail, didn’t you? Spy craft is spy craft I suppose.”

They had worked together for so long, had conducted so many of these inquiring conversations, that they knew the pacing down to the last long notes. Like musicians who nod at each other before the final measures, they shared a long look that meant: That’s all for now. This too shall be revealed. And then Celine raised the cell phone and called Gabriela back.

Jackson Hole was pleasant. Nothing more. Celine pointed out that an entire town bent on leisure and fun was very tiring.

“I take that back,” she said as they strolled across to the Cowboy Bar for lunch. “ Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, don’t you think? I mean if you enjoy it.”

“Well,” Pete said. He held her hand and guided her across the street. He looked a little out of place in town, but only because he always dressed as if he were going to build a boat. In Maine. The attire did not change for formal affairs except that he might, just might, throw on an old tweed jacket. What he wore summer and winter, for woodwork in his shop, for dinner with one of Celine’s fancy childhood friends, was loose khakis, often stained with a little varnish or a spatter of paint; worn leather deck shoes, often without socks; a canvas shirt, blue or green or cranberry, from L.L.Bean. That’s it. A little like Fidel Castro always wearing army fatigues. Pete refrained from quoting Thoreau, but he told Hank once that his sartorial habits saved a lot of time and energy and expense.

Now he said, “It’s why I always felt coming back to the States after traveling was a bit stressful. I mean our job as citizens, apparently, is the pursuit of happiness. Something I always have to gird myself for. I’d much rather just be happy, or not.”

To prove her point about the pursuit of fun, they had to wait for a table behind a group of road bikers who wore bike shoes that clumped and tight bike shorts that didn’t clump nearly enough. According to Celine. “You will never ever be truly happy if you wear those shorts,” she said. “You are telling your manhood that you wish he were an internal organ.” One of the men overheard her and began to laugh, and insisted that the two of them slide in front of the group in line.

At the scarred wood booth where they ordered burgers, the young waiter told them that Celine looked like an old-time movie star. Was she? No, she was not.

“Dude, you could be,” he said. “And I mean that as a compliment. We have a bunch in town.”

“So I hear.”

“Harrison Ford was in the other day.”

“You don’t say.”

“He’s a regular guy. He was even on the ski patrol.”

Celine really could have used an ice tea. But the kid was warming to his subject. He told them that a skier from Texas or somewhere ran into a tree and was knocked out pretty bad, and when he woke up he saw Harrison Ford leaning over him, strapping him into a sled. The man began to cry because he knew he was dead. The kid thought it was so funny.

The burgers were excellent. The bar in the center of the restaurant was packed with locals drinking beer like it was a job, and Randy Travis sang about how his love was deeper than the holler. The din was so loud that Pete might as well have been legally deaf. Perfect.

Celine leaned forward and nearly shouted in his amplified ear: “Pete, we’re being followed. I’m sure of it. FYI.” She tipped her head toward a young man in a baseball cap and week-old dark beard at the bar. Pete nodded. Only she would have known that the bare twitch of his lip was a smile: He had come to the same conclusion.

Celine wanted to see Lamont’s portraits. Pete had brought in his laptop, and after he’d eaten half his burger he scooted around to her side of the booth and opened it up, and using just the bar’s open Wi-Fi network he found the first archive of Lamont’s photos of Amana.

The first black-and-white portrait filled the screen. What struck Celine right away was the calm. A distilled calm radiated from the woman and formed a pool of quiet in the boisterous clamor all around them. It was a profile shot, slender neck and naked shoulders, head inclined, black hair tied back.