Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

I do not turn to watch her now.

I feel certain she is not watching me, either.

I start up First Avenue, toward Twenty-third. I’ll catch a crosstown bus there, and then connect to an uptown subway on Broadway. It is a bright clear morning in New York. This is still only August, but there is the promise of September in the air. I am wearing gray slacks and a tropical weight blue blazer. I am wearing a white shirt open at the throat, and gray socks, and black loafers. Normally, in August, during school vacation, I wear jeans and a T-shirt all day long. But today, my sister is gone, and I do not know to which police detective or hospital official I may soon be speaking. I am not dressed formally, but I am dressed respectably, for whatever encounter with bureaucracy may lie ahead.

I do not want to go back to my mother’s apartment. I do not want to sit there with a family that has been lying to me for the past sixteen years. I do not want to revisit the human debris there. The clutter here in the streets is by contrast tumultuous and rich with life. I walk unseen among lovers and tourists, children and their grandparents, pets on leashes. I can remember mornings and afternoons in this city with my mother and Annie, the pair of us larking ahead of her on the sidewalk, my mother walking proudly behind us.

Where did we lose her?

Where has she gone this time?

I try to piece together the shattered fragments, the minuscule bits of mosaic that together form Annie’s past. Is there something there that will lead me to where she is now? But she has never left a trail before, my sister. She is as secretive and as skilled at deception as any of the imaginary FBI agents she believes are pursuing—

It suddenly occurs to me that perhaps Annie herself is a secret agent!

I burst out laughing.

A woman walking past looks at me as if I’m crazy.

“Sorry,” I say to her, and raise my eyebrows and pull a face and hunch my shoulders in apology.

But why not, actually?

Isn’t it possible that Sven Lindqvist in Stockholm was the recruiter who enlisted her? She came back to the U.S. as a sleeper, only to be summoned abroad by him several months later when she received an urgent message to sell all our band equipment and rush back to Stockholm, where for the first time she was to meet her European counterpart, the infamous UN translator named Sally Jean. Sven has been her control ever since. It is Sven who sends her all over the world on secret assignments. It is Sven who brought together the team of surgeons who spirited her off that Air France flight and installed a radio transmitter in her skull or her rectum or wherever. It is Sven who sent her down to Greenwich Village that New Year’s Eve to spy on the guys from Dartmouth and Harvard, two hotbeds of Communist activity. It is Sven who brought her back from India disguised as a Tantric adept in baggy pants and sandals with hennaed hair and a silver circlet over her right eye and lice that were probably radio transmitters in their own right. It is Sven, too, who arranged for the agent Wally Hennessy (ah-ha! A booking agent, or an FBI agent?) to send The Gutter Rats on a tour of the South, where Annie would contact her Georgian counterpart, Harley Welles, disguised as a redneck policeman, and henceforth exchange vital nuclear secrets hidden in her urine, which she generously sprayed all over Harley’s uniform leg and polished black shoes while the black secret agent Pearl Williams stood by taking discreet notes. It is Sven who arranged for her to rendezvous once again with Sally Jean in Amsterdam, where she scattered broken glass around her bed and searched her bags for secrets.

It is Sven who kissed her only twice in the moonlight, but captured her mind forever.

All entirely plausible.

I am smiling now.

I don’t care who thinks I’m crazy, I am smiling.

I walk in brilliant sunshine, smiling.

I do not want to go back to that apartment on Eighty-first Street, but I don’t know where else to go, or what else to do.

And suddenly, I feel so utterly alone.

I had to learn how to be alone.

I was twenty-six years old when Maggie and I got divorced. The singles scene was alien to me. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I stayed home a lot. I read a lot. I considered quitting teaching and going to Paris, after all, but I knew I’d never been any good at writing, knew I’d just be kidding myself all over again. I felt suddenly old. My wife was gone, and my sister was gone, and I felt like one of those old men you see on flaking green benches in the park, feeding the pigeons, tossing peanuts to the pigeons.

My sister claims she was in Tiananmen Square on June 3, 1989. I know she was in Asia at that time because I got married in September of that year, and she wasn’t there for the wedding. She wasn’t there for the divorce, either. She would have been almost twenty-three when Maggie and I got married, which is when she took her second trip to India, which expanded into her sojourn in Nepal and then China, and then Papua New Guinea. But whether or not she was in Tiananmen Square on the day the tanks opened fire is a matter of conjecture. In light of recent events, as they say, I doubt everything she has ever told me.

And yet, she was remarkably knowledgeable about the events of that day and the days preceding it, and the internal politics of Deng’s regime, which caused him to force the resignation of Hu Yaobang, his popular right hand man — well, she always was a good student.

She says she was at the Xidan intersection when the soldiers opened fire on a crowd of Chinese trying to block them. She says she ran with the others, trying to hide. She says the soldiers kept firing, even after no one was trying to bar their way.

“One minute, it was like a country fair in the heart of a huge city, the people cheering the students, the students cheering the people, and the next thing you knew there were machine guns firing. The agents spoke fluent Mandarin, you know, they were well-trained. I could see them running in and out of the demonstrators, egging them on.”

“What agents?” I asked.

Even then, I wanted to know what agents.

“The ones who incited the riots,” she told me.

She did not say they were FBI agents. I could easily have believed she was talking about Deng’s own people.

She told me all this while we were sitting on the roof of the building my mother still lives in on Eighty-first and West End. No pigeons on this rooftop. Only ramparts and parapets, the hum of traffic far below, Annie telling me that despite what the world was led to believe by those pictures of the lone student bravely holding off a column of four tanks, what actually happened was that the tanks ran over anyone who stood in their path.

“Even after the army reclaimed the square, the tanks kept roaming the streets, firing on people. Soldiers were firing their weapons in the air. There was blood everywhere. Everywhere.” The sun was low on the horizon now. We loved to watch the setting sun. “There were no pigeons in the square,” she told me. “The Chinese kill birds, you know. They won’t let them rest. They chase them whenever they land. They keep them flying in the air until they get exhausted from flapping their wings, and fall to the ground dead.” The rooftop towers were in silhouette now; Manhattan could very well have been Camelot, all ablaze with red as bold as blood. “Do you remember the funny names all the geese had?” she asked. “In the book?”

“Oh yes,” I said.

“Ank and Wink-Wink...”

“And Lyo-lyok...”

“I liked her best.”

“Remember Aahng-ung the glutton?”

“And Ky-yow...”