Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

“Hello, Andera,” I said, not turning. “I expected you.”

Felicia said, “Who is he? What does he-?”

“My client,” I said. “John Andera.”

John Andera spoke from behind me. “You two leave now.”

“Leave?” Felicia Crawford said, and there was alarm in her young face. I saw something else in her face too-a vague, sudden wonder. A tendril of what-recognition? Confused groping on her face. She said, “I’m Felicia Crawford.”

“I know who you are,” Andera said. “Pack your things. Go on. Don’t come back. Both of you.”

Paul Two Bears began to pack their few things, throwing the clothes into the two small suitcases. Felicia just stood.

“I want to stay,” she said. “I want to talk.”

“No,” Andera said. “Just get out, now.”

I said, “Can I turn around, Andera?”

“Turn around,” he said.

He was a few feet inside the closed door. A different man. Instead of his quiet sales-rep’s suit, he wore a black jump suit, soft black canvas shoes wet with rain, a black raincoat, and a black soft hat. In the dark he would be invisible. His blue eyes were hard and clear, his face without expression except for a faint, constant twitch at the corner of his left eye-a tension tic, automatic when he was tense, alert. He was looking at Felicia, not at me, and behind his blank expression he was still bleeding inside.

He said, “Go away, Miss Crawford. Don’t call the cops if you want Fortune found alive. Go a long way.”

“Will he be found alive anyway?” Felicia said, still with that hesitant wisp of recognition, maybe with hope.

“Maybe, and maybe not,” Andera said. “I don’t know. But if you send the cops, he will be dead. No other way.”

I said, “Go on, Felicia. It’s too late. Go back to Pine River, or go home, or go anywhere else you can live. Go on.”

Paul Two Bears stood with the suitcases. Felicia took his arm, and they walked to the door. As they passed John Andera, she started to speak, but Andera shook his head, jerked his pistol toward the door. He reached out, touched her shoulder with his empty hand. Paul Two Bears took her out.

The door closed, and John Andera sat down. He nodded me to a chair. I sat, and he rested his pistol in his lap. He rubbed at his eyes with both hands as if they hurt. I made no move. The pistol seemed forgotten, but I didn’t think it was, and I would have no chance against him. Not him.

“You knew I’d follow,” he said. “All that about another man who’d fingered Francesca, about Felicia being in danger, and the act of accusing her here. It was all planned.”

“If I’d guessed right, you had to be somewhere near,” I said. “You followed me before to Abram Zaremba.”

“You’re a good detective. That’s one reason I hired you. People told me you were good, stubborn.”

His voice and manner had changed. Charisma is a word overused in recent years-that personal magic in a man that arouses special loyalty in his followers. Andera had a kind of charisma now. Not leadership, but confidence. He would do his job, all the way. No arrogance or pride, just a fact. If he took a job, it was as good as done. He was a man who lived a double life by reflex. He didn’t think about it. In my office he had been John Andera, sales representative. Now he was someone else.

“She’s a nice girl,” he said, “Felicia. What will she do?”

“She’ll be okay. Maybe back to Pine River. Would you like that? It’s what you really wanted, wasn’t it? Your people, your home. Before Korea, before Katje Van Hoek.”

I kept my eyes toward the pistol on his lap, but that was just habit. If he was going to shoot me, I couldn’t stop him.

He said, “It’s what I’ve missed most, I guess. The land, the space. It’s a rough land, you’ve seen it. Not fat and soft like here.”

“He Who Walked A Black Wind,” I said. “A good name. Your father is proud of that name. He’s not so proud of Ralph Blackwind as a name, and he wouldn’t like John Andera at all.”

His smile was thin. “A crazy trick, going out into a tornado like that. I was young. The army made me change the name to Blackwind. Names are magic to us, you know that? When I changed the name, I lost the magic. The old men would say what happened then had to happen because I lost my name.”

“Maybe they’re right,” I said.

“Why not? It explains as well as anything,” he said, and was silent for a moment. “How’d you figure me out? You knew when you came back from Pine River, didn’t you? Or maybe you never believed my story from the start.”

“No, I believed your story, more or less. It could have been true, and you paid me enough for it to have been all a lie, too. I couldn’t decide then.”

“When did you decide?”

There was a sense of strangeness, almost eerie, in the way we sat there talking like two casual travelers on some comfortable train rolling through the night toward a distant destination. Both pretending we were oblivious to the pistol in his lap, the murders like a weight on the quiet room.

I said, “I began to notice something-no one had ever seen you with Francesca, no one had ever heard of you. There was no trace of you in her life before the day you walked into my office. You’d made your relation to her as brief and recent as possible, no visits to her place, but someone should have seen you sometime, at least have heard your name. She had a roommate, people were hanging around, watching her. She’d talked, written a few letters. But you didn’t show up anywhere, not a whisper. It was strange if your story was true.”

“Yeh,” he said, as if he’d known the risk.

“Then,” I said, “for everyone else there was some outside corroboration of what they told me. Everyone interconnected with past and present and each other-except you. Nothing put you into the picture except your own story. The trail of her father that Francesca followed led to the Emerald Room-but not beyond on any evidence. She was still working there when she died. Only your word said she’d ever talked to you about Raul Negra or Blackwind.

“Your story of meeting her at a party didn’t exactly fit. She wasn’t after romance or fun, she was hard on her purpose like a hound on a hot scent. There was no hint she’d traced her father beyond the Emerald Room. On the other hand, the story of Raul Negra’s big shoot-out made it pretty sure that Blackwind had gone at least one more step after the Emerald Room, but maybe not a step past Abram Zaremba. My hunch was that Blackwind had gone to work for Zaremba in another job back there fifteen years ago-and still had that job. You told me that Zaremba was a part owner of your company.

“I remembered that Katje Crawford had said that Ralph Blackwind had a great love of children. Working for Zaremba, you could hover around Dresden, but keep out of sight. It came to me that Marvel Office Equipment, and you, were that next, last step on the trail. But Francesca hadn’t taken the step. She hadn’t found you-you had somehow found her. I thought about my being shot outside my office. Why had I been shot at? It looked to me like Sasser, or anyone else, only wanted to know who had hired me. So why shoot me? The answer was that no one had shot at me, the shots had been for you. Why? Because you were Ralph Blackwind, the real father.”

He sat and nodded as if admiring my work, my reasoning. I believed that he was doing just that. He was a professional, a man who appreciated solid work and reasoning.

“Your face is dark enough,” I said. “Not too dark, your mother was half Caucasian. Dye takes care of graying, darkens hair. You’re taller-probably you wear two-inch lifts in your shoes. The blue eyes are tinted contact lenses. I sensed from the start that your voice had been heavily trained, your speech worked on. Not a recent disguise to fool me, no. You’re a fugitive, have been for fifteen years, the disguise is your normal appearance now, part of you, and you had a complete plastic surgery job on your face a long time ago.”