“What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” asked Charlie.
“Thought your girlfriend might enjoy it,” said Steve. “Worth a fortune at today’s prices.”
“I love fish,” said Charlie. “Brenda hates it.”
“Your problem,” said Steve. “Now let’s get going.”
The blue sky had lost its battle with the dark gray clouds and a cold northeasterly blow was coming up. Charlie pushed the throttle forward and pancaking from wave to wave, the boat headed back toward the Cape, leaving a wide, frothing wake behind in the darkening sea. Charlie pulled up to the private dock of a home south of Provincetown, made the boat fast with one quick loop around a cleat, and left the motor idling.
“You know your way around boats,” said Steve
“Told you I did. Hell, I used to go fishing all the time in Detroit.” He handed a key ring to Steve. “Car’s parked in front, blue Chevy from Hertz. The house belongs to a friend of mine. It’s empty, been on the market for a year. He undid the rope and backed away from the dock. “Bon voyage!” he yelled, as he pushed the throttle forward; the bow rose and he headed back up the Cape.
Later that afternoon, as Randy had warned, the Northeaster picked up, gusts reached thirty knots an hour, whipping up white caps on the dark jade rollers cascading in off the Atlantic.
At 5:00 p.m., when Steve was supposed to have returned his boat, there was still no sign of him at The Real Deal rental shop. At 6:30 p.m., he still hadn’t shown. Randy had planned to cook dinner for his girlfriend – he’d bought all the ingredients – but was unable to close up shop. He tried to reach Steve via VHF, but got nothing but static in reply. At 8:00 p.m., he called off his date and phoned the Coast Guard station at Falmouth.
Within fifteen minutes, their orange and white MH 60 chopper, with a two-man search and rescue crew, rose from the pad and headed for Truro. They ran more than two hundred and fifty such missions every year. The ocean was dark and storm-tossed, and visibility was poor. There was no sign of the missing boat: no flares, nor signal from the satellite locator beacon.
It was their radar that finally picked up the black speck, the boat, lying on its side in the surf twenty miles north of Truro. There was no trace of Steve. The life raft was still on board; it had never been inflated. They continued the search at sea and along the beaches for another three days but Steve’s body was never found. What they did find was a message inside a plastic folder taped to the boat’s windscreen.
It was a simple hand-written suicide message, with the day’s date noted on the upper right hand corner:
To whom it may concern,
I have decided to end a life that no longer has any purpose.
I know that the nice people who rented me this boat are covered with insurance. I apologize for any inconvenience this may otherwise cause.
I have used weights to ensure my body will come to rest on the bottom of the ocean. At least it will provide nourishment for the fish.
When word of the note got out, most of those who knew him were not surprised. Once he left the agency, he really had nothing to live for. No other vital interests, no family to support him, always something of a loner. He’d sold almost all his belongings, like a man coolly planning to do away with himself. Despite the note, the Coast Guard continued their search.
Though the media on the Cape played up the story, Steve’s disappearance was ignored by the rest of the nation with one exception: Martha Jenkins, a reporter with credentials from the Boston Globe, turned up the day after the search ended to write a human-interest story about the mysterious disappearance, she said. She was very thorough, spent two days retracing Steve’s short stay in the area, talked at length with the waiter who’d served him dinner and breakfast at the hotel. She also spent an hour over coffee with Randy and interviewed the rescue crew at Falmouth, and even examined the wreck of Steve’s boat, which had yet to be removed from the beach.
Randy and his girlfriend checked the Boston Globe each day for the next week, searching for the article on Steve’s tragic disappearance. Finally, Randy called the features editor to be told that no such report was in the works. And when he asked to speak with Martha Jenkins, he was told that the folks at the Globe had never heard of her.
“Have to admit there was something a little weird about her,” Randy told his girlfriend. “Fantastic green eyes but a red scar down the right cheek. Wonder what that was all about?”
Two weeks later, they held a memorial service for Steve. Ironically, it was at the same church in Arlington where the funeral was held a month earlier for Brian Hunt. The same small choir sang a medley of Steve’s favorite Leonard Cohen songs. There were several bouquets of flowers – the largest a display of fifty-three roses, once for each year of Steve’s life – that were sent by Steve’s real estate agent, Gail Larsen. Brian’s widow Joanne was there, along with Sarah Levin, Charlie Doyle, and a few of Steve’s other friends from the agency, as well as Bob Peterson, president of the local mountain bikers club.
Jim Page, Steve’s boss at the agency, delivered a moving, if brief, speech praising Steve’s patriotism and character, though he had to be short on specifics on what Steve actually did. Joanne spoke about what a wonderful friend Steve was to her and her husband and their family. Rather than speaking, Sarah Levin walked to the pulpit where her cello was leaning. “I want to express my sadness through music, not words,” she said, taking a chair and draping herself and around her cello. The church was filled by the slow, wistful third movement of Dvorjak’s Concerto in B minor. Afterwards, there was a pause. It was not clear that anyone else wanted to talk until Gail Larsen approached the pulpit. She had barely begun when she broke into sobs and was unable to finish. “It’s all so sad,” was all she could say.
No one noticed the woman sitting near the door in the last pew, with green eyes and the red scar on her cheek. She remained until the end of the service.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
Switzerland
Steve had had no trouble locating the car that Charlie left for him by the seafront home on the Cape. The drive to Boston’s Logan Airport took about two hours. Steve could have made it quicker, but he was feeling weary and stopped at a diner in Hyannis for two cups of watery coffee. At the airport, he returned the Hertz car, unloaded the two suitcases packed with his belongings that he’d earlier given to Steve, and headed for the international terminal. The ticket for the Swissair flight to Zurich was in the name of George C. Hardy, as was the Canadian passport, which Charlie had arranged for $10,000 from a talented forger in Toronto, who used to freelance for the Canadian equivalent of the CIA. Steve slept for most of the seven-hour flight, until he was gently awakened before landing by the stewardess who served him yogurt, muesli, a croissant, and coffee.
The Zurich airport was crowded with early-morning passengers and Swiss anti-terrorist police, who patrolled the terminals in groups of three wearing bulletproof vests and carrying Heckler & Koch MP5 service rifles. They were on high alert; a suitcase bomb claimed by al-Qaeda had killed two and wounded fourteen others at the Geneva Airport just the week before.
Steve showed his Canadian passport at customs and retrieved his luggage. He then picked up a Renault Megane from Europcar and took the E-25 west. It was a wonderfully clear day; the kind that enables Switzerland to live up to its travel poster image. Just a few puffs of white veiled the jagged peaks of the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, but the rest of the Alps rose breathtakingly stark and white against the cobalt blue sky.