Read Online Secret Father by James Carroll - Free Book Online

worried, too. I can tell. We're all worried parents. That's why I called you."
    "Not worried about the same things."
    "What?"
    "I cannot talk to you, Mr. Montgomery."
    "Mrs. Healy, Michael is—" I checked myself—stopped myself from blurting, "Michael is all I have." That I shamefully depended on my child for emotional equilibrium had not been true when Edie had made the charge, but it was true now. I had almost just said so. Such was the forbidden line I was already being dragged across, as if I knew what lay ahead.
    I veered, saying, "Michael has had his problems, Mrs. Healy. And I would just be far more at ease knowing what is going on."
    "I wish to be able to help you. I do not know myself, as you say, what is going on. I do not know where Ulrich is—your son, or Katharine."
    "Ulrich? Katharine?"
    "Rick. He is also called Rick.
I
call him Rick. They call Katharine Kit. With Americans always the
Spitzname.
"
    "Not always. My son is—" But I stopped. If he had a nickname, would I know it? This woman would.
    She finished my sentence. "Your son is Michael. It is true. A good full name for him. Michael the archangel."
    "You don't know where they are, Mrs. Healy? I gathered from what your husband said that you did know. Nürburgring. The Grand Prix race. The sports car club."
    "There is a club," she said. "And the race was what Rick told his father and me. But it is not true. Rick lied to us. They are not at races. They are not at Nürburg. My husband concluded that yesterday afternoon."
    "And so called Mr. Jones at the dormitory."
    "Yes."
    "So your son, my son, this girl—they simply disappeared?"
    "For them it
is
an adventure, the
Lerche,
lark. I am satisfied that my husband is right about that. The young people have no sense of danger."
    "What danger?" I heard the involuntary escalation in the pitch of my voice. "Your husband is tracking them now? And he is doing it surreptitiously?"
    There was a loud noise behind her, in the background, a door banging, a carton falling, something. The sudden hollowness in my ear told me that she had cupped the mouthpiece of her phone. She spoke to someone, a crisp order in German I could not make out. Then to me, with an edge, she declared, "I have nothing to say to you more. It is impossible that you and I should talk together in this way."
    "Not impossible at all, Mrs. Healy, since we are doing it. We have something important in common, you and I."
    "What is that?"
    "I don't know. You tell me."
    When she did not answer, I thought, crazily enough, Spook! The wife of a spook. The exotic, mysterious German wife of a man whose wife should have been anything but.
    She had just admitted that her son had lied, that her husband had lied, too. Lied to me. She had allowed it.
    I expected her to hang up, but I waited. A full minute passed and she still had not disconnected, and I thought, She is considering the question—what we have in common. And now I knew. "You are serious about your son," I said.
    "Absolutely."
    "So am I about mine."
    "Where are you?" she asked abruptly. The change in her tone, I understood, meant a new decision.
    "The
Hauptbahnhof,
" I answered. "A pay phone."
    "Where is your car?"
    "Outside. My driver's waiting."
    "Do not return to your car," she said. Authority came easily to her, and for the first time since the evening before, I found it possible to suspend what had made me suspicious. "You must do exactly as I tell you. Your car is being followed. Leave the station by a side door. Take an auto-taxi to Hainerberg. Browse in the base exchange. Become lost in it. Then walk up the hill to the clinic, where there will be more taxis. Be sure you are not followed. Take a second taxi to the Russian Chapel. The driver will know. Wait there."
    The disconnecting click came so quickly I knew she did it with her finger.
    Â 
    The Russian Chapel was visible from everywhere in the Rhine River valley. A sepulchral shrine with three golden onion domes, it sat