Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

41.

San Francisco, 1991

Marianne, Countess Didier rented a car and drove north into Marin County. She was well-rested for a change, and she had eaten a light breakfast in a fast food restaurant. She’d carried out a cup of cola with ice on it, which sat sweat-beaded in the drinks container beside her. It was midmorning on a flawless morning, sunny, blue-skied, warming to a balmy temperature. In the blue of the bay far below the Golden Gate Bridge, pleasure sailing boats were riding hard in the wind with their masts leaning forward and their bright sails stiffly full of wind.

Marianne drove an hour north in to Marin County, through the increasingly lush green countryside that distinguishes north coastal California, and into the low verdant wine fields and orchards of Napa and Sonoma. She drove into the wooded back areas of Santa Rosa, and found a small country lane buried under great redwood trees. She cruised slowly along the country road, sipping the last of her soda, until she found the driveway of the house she was looking for. She pulled in behind a parked boat on a trailer, and a large off-roader SUV with grills over its lights and overhead fog lights.

The door opened as she walked up the driveway. She felt a pang in her stomach, sensing each step took her closer to that mysterious man who had fathered her during he last days of World War 2.

The man standing in the doorway was not that man. He was old, at least 80, and he braced himself in the doorway. He must have been a strong man in his youth, and he still had a fierce glint in his blue eyes and a determined jut to his white-stubbled jaw. He wore rumpled denims and a white shirt that might once have gone with a business suit but now looked rumpled and had several tiny yellowish stains from spattered cooking oil. He called out:

“You the lady who called?”

“Yes I am. Can I visit with you for a few minutes?”

“I don’t see why not.” He stepped back to let her pull the screen door open and join him in a living room that smelled faintly musty, of someone whose housekeeper must not be good about always showing up to wash clothes and clean up. Dirty dishes were stacked on a coffee table, and a television set flickered with the latest news. He pressed a button somewhere, and the TV went black. “Have a seat.”

“Thanks.” She found a palatable spot on a doggy-smelling couch under the front window, thinking the light and the brightness would separate her somewhat from the gloom in which the old man was spending his last years.

“What was it you was after?” He helped himself about awkwardly, leaning on things, and favoring a stiff left hip. “Doggone it, Randy! Randy!” he bellowed to someone in back. “Roger!”

He returned to the living room and sat down hard. “My dog and my grandson. Can’t rely on either one of them. Dog’s probably out chasing a rabbit and the boy’s probably gone to school or out in back smoking a joint, can’t never know for sure which.”

Marianne introduced herself as briefly as she could. “Do you remember a man named Tim Nordhall?”

“Aw sure I do,” Bannerby said. “How could I forget? He was in the Navy, as I recall. Some secret defense work, is that right? Two beautiful women in his life—one a spy, the other one of those dashing women pilots—how could he choose? So he took them both. And they went along.”

“All three of them did survive the war, didn’t they?”

“What makes you think so?”

She hoped she was right. It was a long journey, full of anguish for her, and all for nothing, if she were wrong. “I was led to believe that they each perished in 1945.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Naomi Meged was abducted by the Soviets. Nordhall died on the Indianapolis when a torpedo from the Japanese submarine I-58 hit her. And the little blonde WAF was lost at sea searching for him.”

“But none of it is true, is it?”

“Is it? How would I know?”

“It’s been half a century, Mr. Bannerby. The Soviet Union is finished, the war’s been over a good half century, and the secrets are starting to look silly. Why don’t you help me out?”

“What makes you think it was a lie?”

“Because of the way the news clippings and the police reports and the War Department memos tell the story. Supposedly the same man was in three different places at the same time. I’ve been to Moscow and talked with the man himself, Viktor Mutsev, Jaguar, Malone, who knows what other names and disguises. He told me for sure those were all a patchwork of confusing cover stories. Once I noticed that, a bunch of other little details began to seem out of place. Then I started digging, and finally I came up with your name.”

“Okay,” he said. “You understand that we all protected Tim and his women for years and years.”

“Then it’s true?”

“Oh sure, you’re right. But what do you care? News story?”

“No, Mr. Bannerby, I am not a snooping reporter. I have reason to believe Tim Nordhall was my dad, and I’m hoping he is still alive somewhere so I can see him before he dies.”

“Oh my Lord,” Bannerby said. “Lordy. You don’t say.” He sat back, tapping his fingertips together as if trying to figure out how to weave the truth properly together. “Well, I’m sure you are right, and nobody is after them now. Lord Almighty.”

“Please help me, Mr. Bannerby.”

He stared at her.

“Maybe,” she said, “Catherine Francese might want to know what happened to her brother.”

He grinned. “Catherine called me to tell me you visited her.”

“No.”

“Yes. A number of us have been covering for Nordhall for a long time. Maybe it’s time to let go now.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was on Stalin’s most wanted list. He stopped the Russians from stealing the radioactive material that came with U-234. We couldn’t stop the Reds developing the A-bomb—had plenty of traitors here who made sure of that. But Tim slowed them down a few years. He and his...wives.” He turned his gaze up. “I never said a thing, didn't ask questions.”

“Then you knew all along what happened to him,” she said in amazement, not holding it against him, just grateful he had opened the door to let her in on his secrets.

“We knew Stalin would have had him killed. We knew—“ (his eyes seemed to grow cloudy) “—that your mother was in danger, but there was nothing we could do to help her. The NKVD took her away, but in the end, Siberia took her, and millions of souls like her.”

Marianne struggled with her own tears. Bannerby handed her a box of tissues, and she thanked him, dragging out one after another and mopping the big round tears that fell liberally down her cheeks.

“My mother,” Marianne said wistfully. "Anna Stokowska.”

“Yes. She named you after herself. Anna Maria. The French people who adopted you changed it to a more French version to suit their tastes.”

She was not surprised at any of it, but numb. “My stepmother’s sister was an old spinster named Marianne. They thought it would make her happy, since she never had children.” The old lady had lived to the age of 90 in a little house near Rue Cortot, a Montmartre back street in the 18th Arondissement of Paris, near the tiny home of composer Erik Satie. Marianne had often gone walking with her, to church at St. Jean, along the artists’ stalls, and around the white dome of the Sacre Coeur.

He brought her back from that memory and said gently: “I can tell you something nobody else knows. Your mother is the one who saved that uranium from going to Russia. Anna Stokowska loved Tim, and she is the one who tipped off Meg and her handlers with the FBI. Our intelligence people are often not very good at being bad, so it took Tim and Corie to put a wrench in the works right on that plane headed for Montana. The Reds were after Meg, who had really betrayed them. They got someone else instead.”

Marianne wiped the last tears away with a deep, shuddering sigh. She crushed her balled-up wet tissue. “Does my father know all this?”

He gave her a long funny look. “He knew, yes. He caught her impersonating a Marine Corps Reserve officer, spying on our atomic secrets. He had no choice but to turn her in. I believe it’s one of his life’s great regrets, but you’ll help him make up for it. He’s had a good life, but he’s a just man, and her never forgot your mother.”

“Oh my God.” She pressed: “I need to know everything that happened, from his own mouth. Can he tell me?”

“Sure. Straight from the heart, where it counts.” He softened some more. “My God, I had no idea how much you were suffering all these years. You poor child. Of course.”

“I want to call him. Do you have his phone number?” Her voice quavered, and she almost expected to be told no, as she had in one way or another all her life, but he nodded.

“Oh yes, of course. I don’t have his address, but I know he settled in Great Falls, Montana.”

She was surprised, in a numb way. How easy it would all now be. She almost felt like crying again. “Then I can find them,” she said definitively, sensing that her globe-girdling search was just about over. “So what really happened in the end?”

Bannerby kept tapping his fingers, until he forgot about them and dropped his hands in his lap. “He and the little pilot, they recovered part of the atom bomb that went to Hiroshima. Government swore me to secrecy, of course, but I was a law officer, hunting Nazis and Communists for years, and that was just second nature to most of us good decent law enforcement personnel. Did my part in New Guinea before that, you know, came home with a piece of shrapnel in my hip, and still I got into police game to try and help my country. Most of us felt that way. I was at the airport when they came back from Montana. They were national heroes, and we wanted to save them no matter what.”

“They didn’t split up—she flying the plane to Tinian, he taking the ship?”

“No, no, the spy boys planted all that baloney in the files knowing the Soviets would get in there to look. It was all a put-on. But I’ll tell you what happened in real life.” He grew animated, and his eyes lit up, as he leaned forward to tell the story, and Marianne leaned closer eagerly to listen. "It was the war, you know," he began. "The crazy war..."