The Kingfisher Secret Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Anonymous

  First edition published 2018

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Century Publishing, an imprint of Cornerstone, a division of Penguin Random House UK, a Penguin Random House Company

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request

  9780771001697 (hardcover)

  9780771076626 (paperback)

  9780771076633 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number is available upon request

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  1. Montreal, 2016

  2. New York, 2014

  3. Prague, 2016

  4. Mladá Boleslav, Czechoslovakia, 1968

  5. Prague, 2016

  6. Prague, 1970

  7. Prague, 2016

  8. Prague, 1970

  9. Prague, 2016

  10. Strasbourg, 1971

  11. Prague, 2016

  12. Paris, 1971

  13. Prague, 2016

  14. Strasbourg, 1972

  15. Strasbourg, 2016

  16. Montreal, 1975

  17. Strasbourg, 2016

  18. New York, 1976

  19. Strasbourg, 2016

  20. Prague, 2016

  21. New York, 1977

  22. Prague, 2016

  23. Horky Nad Jizerou, Czechoslovakia, 1978

  24. Miami, 2016

  25. New York, 1984

  26. Miami, 2016

  27. Montreal, 2016

  28. Horky Nad Jizerou, 1986

  29. Montreal, 2016

  30. Montreal, 2016

  31. Moscow, 1987

  32. Montreal, 2016

  33. Mladá Boleslav, 1990

  34. Montreal, 2016

  35. London, 1992

  36. Montreal, 2016

  37. New York, 1994

  38. New York, 2016

  39. New York, 2016

  40. Sochi, Russia, 2014

  41. New York, 2016

  42. Novyy Rim, Russia, 2016

  43. Miami, 2018

  A commonly known type of sexpionage is a honey trap operation, which is designed to compromise an opponent sexually to elicit information from that person. A man who is the seducer in a honey trap operation is known as a raven. A female seductress is known as a swallow.

  —Wikipedia entry on “Sexpionage”

  1

  MONTREAL, 2016

  Grace Elliott sat on a stained purple sofa in the cheapest hotel in downtown Montreal. The junior suite had not been updated since the 1980s, when washed-out photographs of surfers standing on beaches counted as art. There were holes in the wall and in the carpet, blobs of mold on the ceiling, and neon pink stripes on the hazy mirror. The ninth was a smoking floor. Room 927 smelled the way a generation of cigarette-and-beer breath, body odor, and failure ought to smell.

  To Grace, it was beautiful. She noted every detail so she could return to it again and again, this afternoon that was sure to relaunch her career.

  Her digital recorder was running and so was an app on her phone, as a backup. The devices captured the raspy voice of the tall woman on the corner of the bed, whose screen name was Violet Rain. Part of the agreement to secure the interview was to supply Violet with thin Davidoff cigarettes, Juicy Fruit gum, and a forty-eight-dollar bottle of Rioja. Now Violet was smoking, chewing, and drinking at the same time. Despite this onslaught, her teeth were bleached white. Her soft yellow flip-flops were faintly discolored but her hair and toenails were as impeccable as her teeth. To Grace, Violet’s artificial breasts seemed a miraculous but painful burden to carry.

  “So he never gave you money?”

  “What kinda question is that? Why would he?” Violet looked around, like there were other people in the room who might be insulted along with her. “I’m not a whore. I’m an actor. Was Julia Roberts a whore when she banged that old fart in Pretty Woman? No. She was just playing a whore in the movie.”

  This directly contradicted Grace’s source. “Sorry.”

  “Whatever. You’re not the only one. My parents and my good Christian brother who stopped speaking to me when I was nineteen, they couldn’t figure it out either. You’ve had real sex. All that moaning and calling out? That’s acting. I’m an actor like any other actor. When I’m with a man off-set in my regular life, a gentleman friend, I’m just me and he’s just him.”

  “Did you always want to be an actor, Violet?”

  “I did drama in junior high and high school. I played Juliet once! It’s like: Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow. Living here in this filthy, Frenchy capital of porn for twenty years wasn’t my choice. It just happened. But I’m finally gonna make the transition to TV and, Grace, you’re gonna help me.”

  As an American, Grace had trouble thinking that Montreal could be the capital of anything, least of all pornography. She was not even aware of this instinct until she’d been forced to move here. Back home, it was a key component of the emotional education system: everything modern and powerful and neat and naughty had been born in the U.S.A.

  Grace leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, close enough that the smoke from Violet’s cigarette twirled into her hair. She would need a shower, but not here. “If he didn’t give you money, what did he give you? I mean, he’s a lot older than you. You’re stunning and he’s…well, he’s him.”

  “Age doesn’t matter. Most men are gross, when you get right down to it.” Violet sighed, put out her cigarette and lit another. “I guess I might as well tell you. When you wanted to talk to me I blew you off for the first week because I don’t want to be some narc. It just isn’t me, to get someone in trouble. He didn’t do anything illegal or even weird, unless cheating on your wife is weird. You know the reason I finally texted you back? Because the man is a liar. He said, I swear he said, that he was going to bring me down to New York and L.A. and introduce me to some producers. He was going to make my transition to TV.”

  “He didn’t follow through?”

  “Ghosted my ass. We were together five times and it was all about to happen, maybe reality TV, maybe the soaps, and then…nothing. You can’t do that to me.”

  Half an hour earlier, Violet had talked about her strict parents. She had dropped out of high school and moved to Montreal from Northern Ontario when she was seventeen. The plan was to begin as a model, leap to New York or London or Paris, make some money, meet the right people, and break into the movies. Now, at the end of a career in pornography, she was thirty-six. She had been dating a married actuary but the relationship had recently collapsed in a financial dispute.

  It occurred to Grace, listening to Violet, that a porn star and a supermarket tabloid journalist could have a lot in common. Both of them had come to Montreal for professional reasons, think
ing it would be temporary. Both of them hoped these ninety minutes in Hotel Clementine would put them back on the path of their dreams, that this story would change everything.

  When she was in seventh grade, Grace had won a writing competition in her hometown of Bloomington, Minnesota. Part of the prize was lunch in Minneapolis with a city hall reporter from the Star Tribune. She still remembered every moment. The idea that she could order anything from the menu, an appetizer and a main course, was wizardry. A new world had opened.

  But 1998, the year she graduated in the middle of her class with a master’s in journalism, had been a lean one for newspapers. Or at least for Grace Elliott in newspapers. She sent her resume to every large daily paper in the country including the Star Tribune. Then, when she heard nothing back, to medium-sized dailies and magazines. It broke her heart a little, and then a lot. She had not cultivated a mentor in school, and the city hall reporter who had taken her to lunch in Minneapolis had died. The only response she received to her job applications was for an unpaid internship at Esquire. She was not in the financial position to accept an unpaid internship in one of the most expensive cities in the world, so one dark weekend she responded to an oblique ad on the college bulletin board that did not specify the National Flash or its location. The tabloid’s parent company had just moved from New York to Canada because the chair of the board had secured a thirty-year lease on a stone warehouse in Old Montreal for one dollar a year. The free space had something to do with economic development, after a dalliance with Quebec separation, but Grace never understood what value the locals received for their money. The Flash employed a total of three Canadians.

  “When are we doing the photo shoot?” said Violet, when they were finished. “If you don’t know anyone, I know a guy. He used to shoot ads for Guess jeans.”

  “I had a pair of those.” Grace was on the verge of giddy. Violet had gone into grim, humiliating detail about her affair with the man some hoped and many feared would become the next president of the United States. They would both be in New York soon enough, doing interviews on CNN. When she turned off the recorders, Violet had emptied the bottle of Rioja into two plastic glasses and now they were celebrating what would come next. “I’ll text you with dates right away. But we’ll make sure the photos are sexy and strong.”

  “To girl power.” Violet lifted her wine.

  “Girl power.” Grace tapped the rim of her plastic glass to the rim of Violet’s and they drank. At almost six feet, Violet was a few inches taller than Grace and far more voluptuous. The last man Grace had dated had called her “sinewy in a good way,” which made her feel as seductive as a male marathon runner. It was quiet enough, as they drank their wine, to hear a couple having sex in the adjacent room.

  “She’s definitely faking,” Violet whispered. “So what comes next?”

  “I go back to the office and get working on your contract. You can’t tell anyone else about this, not until the issue comes out.”

  “When do I get paid?”

  “As soon as it gets through legal. I’ll make sure they rush it. When my editor hears your story…”

  “Do you think he’d pay two hundred thousand? Instead of one-fifty? I need a new car.”

  “I’ll say you insist on two-fifty. He’ll want to negotiate, so maybe we can land at two hundred.”

  This did not bother Grace, the notion of advocating for Violet. The man who owned the National Flash funded most of the worst things that happened in America. It would horrify her professors, back in Austin, to know she paid sources for stories. But nothing about journalism was as she had imagined it back in the 1990s.

  Outside, it was a cool but sunny dusk. The last of the October leaves in a churchyard whirled off the trees and landed in her hair. Walking east and south from downtown to Old Montreal, lightly buzzed from the wine, Grace loved everything she usually hated: pawnshops and fast food chains, cigarette butts in the gutter, graffiti, multiply pierced young punks in black leather who sat on cardboard with filthy dogs and begged for money. It was, she thought, all so human. Nothing could ruin this feeling because she was about to break the biggest—well, actually the first—story of her career. She was forty-three, divorced and childless by choice, the owner of a one-bedroom condominium and a cat, with three unfilled prescriptions for antidepressants in her purse. She spent an average of five evenings a week alone, with romantic comedies on Netflix and wine that did not come close to the bottle of Rioja she had bought for Violet. Violet Rain! For two months she had pursued Violet. Even the esteemed professors of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin would agree it’s not easy to contact a porn star, to win her trust, to convince her over several coffee meetings to tell her story publicly.

  The National Flash would always be a joke to her classmates who ended up at legacy publications before they hit thirty, but they would all agree that what Grace had achieved here was dogged, patient, ethical investigative journalism. After this story popped, if she found an editor with a bit of imagination and an appetite for risk, she too would make the transition. She would do what she had wanted to do since she was a twelve-year-old girl: be a real journalist.

  Grace smiled at strangers. She stopped to give a bit of love to a golden retriever. In a boutique that smelled of vanilla a block from her office, she tried on a three-hundred-dollar cashmere scarf she had admired for months. Until today, she had been afraid to touch it. When you’re writing cutlines for photos of out-of-shape celebrities on Mediterranean beaches, you don’t deserve to touch cashmere. In the mirror she stood with her shoulders back, messed her brown hair so it fell properly over the scarf and jacket, took off her glasses, put them back on again, took them off.

  “Very sophisticated,” said the shopkeeper.

  She bought the scarf because the old Grace, the pre-Violet Grace, would not buy the scarf. This was the pivot, the moment of her reinvention.

  At the warehouse she said hello to the main floor concierge and took the stairs instead of the elevator. Her boss, the editor in chief and publisher of the National Flash, Steadman Coe, was on the telephone in his glassed-off office. He sat back in his chair with his loafers on his desk, his big voice and booming courtesy laugh leaking through the windows. Despite the chilly temperatures, Coe was sockless. His suit was baby blue and his tie was black. He shaved his head in the mornings and by this time of day he already had a ring of stubble above his ears. It was the day after production day, so the office was otherwise empty apart from the video game designers who sub-leased the northwest corner. Grace turned away from Coe and practiced what she would say. She could see herself as she said the words, with the new scarf, reflected in the window. She was slouching. Why was she always slouching? She stood up straight and pulled her shoulders back again. This is going to be the biggest story of my career—and yours.

  Sunset came early this time of year. The clouds over the St. Lawrence River were pink and purple. She kept touching her new scarf, which still carried the vanilla smell of the boutique. The last three times she had visited her doctor, with the usual fears of a middle-aged woman—something funny about her left breast, a lumpy mass behind her right knee, headaches unrelated to wine—the tests had resulted in nothing, nothing, and nothing again. But the subsequent question-and-answer session, about her mental health, had not gone terribly well. Grace would not call herself depressed, though the doctor had determined she was. It was not until she arrived on the third floor of the nearly empty warehouse, with Steadman Coe barking and bellowing behind his glass, that she arrived at a self-diagnosis: she was simply unfulfilled. She had not reached her potential. She had felt sorry for herself, as though journalism, her ex-husband, and the global economic order had chosen this life for her. How had she missed this, this deep truth? It was her choice.

  “It’s my choice.”

  “You’re talking to yourself, Gracie.” Coe stood in his office with the door open, an unlit cigar in his mouth.

  Stand up straight, shoulders
back.

  Coe sat down again, put his shoes back up on the desk, and before Grace had a chance to tell her story he related the insignificant advertising-related victory of his just-finished phone call. Other newspapers were losing ad revenue. They were only gaining, thanks to the upcoming presidential campaign.

  “Well, that’ll be over soon.”

  “Not if he wins,” said Coe. “These polling firms, they undervalue and misunderstand our people, your people, Gracie…”

  The slouch was creeping into her shoulders. “Steadman.”

  “It’s almost six o’clock. Why are you still here?”

  “For the last two months, I’ve been working on—”

  “You need to get out more, take a holiday. Do yoga or some shit, join a board.”

  “I do do yoga. Now listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I just finished a long interview with a porn star named Violet Rain.”

  “Nice. Did you get me an autograph?”

  “Who had an affair, four years ago, with Anthony Craig.” Coe removed his feet from the desk and put his cigar in an empty coffee cup. The smile departed from his face, along with what remained of his tan.

  Grace told the story, right up to her celebratory glass of Rioja in the Hotel Clementine. Yes, $250,000 was a lot of money, but the election was in less than a month. This would be, ever so briefly and gorgeously, the biggest story in the world.

  His voice was unusually small when he spoke. “Everyone knows he has affairs. His divorces—”