The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Page 4

  “Glasnost is a farce. Everyone knows that. This fair is just another propaganda tactic. None of the real feminist or dissident writers are being allowed to participate. There is still repression, censorship, no possibility of emigration for dissidents or Jews. I say that in my poems and that is why my poems cannot be published here in the Soviet Union. They must be translated and published in English!”

  “I can see your point,” Dee said. “I really can. Really. But I’m only supposed to be publishing Canadian authors. I have enough trouble just publishing women. Oh look, here’s Cassandra. She’s a translator. Maybe she has some ideas.”

  I glared at Dee, but actually I did have some ideas—and some contacts in London and New York. After I’d written out a few addresses for Olga, I mentioned that she might want to keep a slightly lower profile. Just in case there were…you know…

  “I am not afraid,” said Olga. “I must say now what I think. It is my opportunity.”

  “Maybe she should go talk to Lulu if she wants publicity,” said Dee. “She could write the first feminist letter trashing out the KGB.”

  “Who is this Lulu?” Olga demanded.

  “Over there, but I was just…joking,” she added, as Olga raced off. “Well, at least she’s a good self-promoter.”

  The fair was by now packed with Soviet visitors, but there weren’t many around Dee’s stand. “They don’t want to build log cabins?” I asked.

  “I don’t have enough lesbian books,” Dee said glumly. “Look over there—Naiad Press is doing landslide business. Beebo Brinker’s never been on sale in the Soviet Union before.”

  “Is that what’s causing the commotion?” I asked. “Is Ann Bannon making a personal appearance or what?”

  “There’s too many people to see,” said Dee, straining. “But it doesn’t seem to be coming from that direction.”

  The pushing grew stronger as people attempted to see what was happening, the muttering louder. Unfortunately, whatever message was being passed through the crowd was in Russian, so we were as much in the dark as ever. Suddenly we heard a siren outside, and then a phalanx of men and women in white rushed in with a stretcher. As the crowd parted, it was just possible, by standing on the chairs in Dee’s stand, to see where they were headed.

  Stand 103, the sign read. TRESH OOT. A few minutes later the stretcher went by again. And Olga was on it.

  That night in the Vladivostok People’s Hotel, Dee and I tried to make some sense of what had happened. According to Felicity Horsey-Smythe, who, with Lulu, was the nearest witness, Olga had been standing there talking to the editor of Trash Out. The next moment she had collapsed writhing to the floor and was dead within seconds. No one had seen anything untoward or threatening. There wasn’t a mark on her. She’d simply gasped as if she couldn’t breathe, clutched her throat, spasmed a few times, and gone down.

  “And we laughed about the KGB,” Dee moaned. “Did you see how fast those security men were on the scene? They got her out of there in no time. Oh yeah, they pretended to ask people what had happened, but that was just a ploy. They murdered her because she was a dissident!”

  “Rubbish!” I said. “They’d be far more likely to arrest her and throw her in prison than to murder her in the middle of an international book fair. That sort of thing doesn’t look very good.”

  But Dee refused to see that. “I think they should stop the book fair. I want to go home. It’s too scary.”

  I ignored her wails. “Don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence that Olga keeled over right in front of Lulu’s stand? It might make you think that…”

  “Think what?” Dee was looking for bugging devices under the night table, in the closet. Soon her paranoia would have her taking the telephone apart, and turning up the radio while we talked.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  Felicity Horsey-Smythe was in a room down the corridor. When we knocked and entered, she was on the phone trying to get through to her agent in London. “That’s Philip Fox-ton-ffoulkes,” she was shouting to the operator, “ffoulkes, not Vooks. What do you mean he won’t accept the charges?” She slammed down the receiver and said to us, “They’re hopeless down there in reception. This is the eighth time I’ve tried to reach him today.”

  “Felicity,” I said. “Do you remember what Olga was doing just before she died?”

  “Oh, please, let’s not go into that. I’ve spent the last two hours with a Russian detective, and my nerves are absolutely shattered. Olga wasn’t doing anything. She was just standing there writing down something for Lulu, some address or something.”

  “Maybe Olga was trying to pass her a message and they had to kill her,” suggested Dee.

  “Nonsense,” I said. A sudden memory of Lulu standing in the courtyard listening to Simone and sucking on her pen came back to me. I said casually, “So, whose pen was it anyway?”

  “What do you mean? Well, Lulu’s, I suppose. Yes, she picked up a pen lying on the stand table.”

  I tossed Felicity a pen from my pocket. “Could you just show me how Olga was standing, what she was doing?”

  “Oh really,” Felicity said. But she stood up and, holding the pen, she touched it thoughtfully to her mouth. “I told you, she was just standing there, thinking.”

  “Oh well,” I said. “Thanks anyway.” I nodded to Dee and we left.

  Out in the corridor I could hardly contain my excitement. “That’s it, don’t you see?”

  “What? Felicity said Olga wasn’t doing anything.”

  “She was doing something. She touched the pen to her mouth, and the pen had poison on its tip.”

  “Oh my God.” Dee leaned against the corridor wall. “Then Lulu poisoned Olga. But why? Is Lulu a KGB agent?”

  I shook my head impatiently. “It’s more likely that Lulu was the target. Someone knew about Lulu’s habit of sucking her pens and substituted one with poison for an ordinary one. Olga was killed by mistake. The poison was really meant for Lulu!”

  Dee stared at me. “Do you think we should tell her?”

  “I think she may know. Did you see her face when they were taking Olga’s body away?”

  “But who could have wanted to kill Lulu?”

  “That’s the trouble. There are probably dozens.”

  “But only some of them are here at the fair.”

  Half an hour later we’d come up with a list of five names. Four of them had been featured on Trash Out covers in the past year. They were:

  1. Jean Winthrup, a veterinarian who had written a popular book on lesbian sexuality and who had become a sort of sexual pundit/entertainer. An article in Trash Out had revealed that Jean’s personal sexual habits weren’t all that normal (she could only do it in a large kitty litter box) and had quoted a number of ex-lovers.

  2. Monica Samson, a feminist poet who had won all sorts of major awards and who taught at Yale. Trash Out had exposed her work as unoriginal and accused her of plagiarism. The anonymous piece, possibly written by her rival Lois MacGuire, claimed that one of Monica’s most famous books had whole lines lifted from an obscure Swedish woman poet of the nineteenth century.

  3. Davis McKee, an influential feminist linguist/philosopher who had given lesbianism a whole new vocabulary of invented words. Detractors said she was like a kid who’d gone crazy with Pig Latin; admirers carried her dictionary around like the Bible. Trash Out had unleashed a scathing account of her financial holdings in South African companies.

  4. Casey Walters, a prolific anthologist. For the past ten years, Casey had put together anthologies of poetry and prose on every conceivable subject that had to do with women. The Trash Out feature had parodied her by including “excerpts” from a supposed new anthology, Feminist Chimpanzee Stories, and its companion volume Women and Parakeets: An Anthology.

  The fifth suspect, as yet unprofiled in Trash Out, was Simone Jefferson.

  “I’d say she’s the most likely,” I said, “because she hasn’t been trashed yet.” />
  “But we don’t know for sure that Lulu was planning to trash her,” Dee said.

  I looked at my watch. “It’s only half past ten. Why don’t we pay a visit to Lulu?”

  There were voices in Lulu’s room, but they stopped when we knocked. “Come in,” said Lulu, a little unsteadily.

  She and Felicity Horsey-Smythe were sitting rather close together on the single bed with glasses in their hands. A half-empty bottle of vodka stood on the night table beside them.

  Dee and I perched on the armchair and declined to share the vodka.

  Felicity said, “Lulu and I were just talking about what happened today.”

  “It was a real shock,” Lulu said. She sounded pretty drunk. Her topknot was slightly askew, and her scarves twisted and jumbled around her neck. “Olga was a nice kid. She was going to write an article on Raisa Gorbachev for the next issue of Trash Out.”

  “I told Lulu it would be more understandable if somebody had maybe been trying to kill her.” Felicity laughed shrilly and took another gulp of vodka.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked innocently. “To me it would seem just the opposite. If someone killed Lulu, it would mean they were probably on the cover of Trash Out. Then it would be purely a question of narrowing the suspects down. Why would anyone famous take a chance like that?”

  “They probably would if they thought they could get away with it,” Lulu muttered, pouring herself another drink. “I’ve had death threats, you know.”

  “Who here would you think most likely?” Dee asked. “I mean, if we pretended it was you, not Olga, who was the target.”

  A strange look passed over Lulu’s face. “I’ve been wondering that myself. I have lots of enemies here.”

  “You should have thought about this when you started your journal,” Felicity giggled. She’d taken off her hat, and her streaked blonde hair stood up wildly.

  “I did think about it.” Lulu’s moroseness seemed to be growing in direct proportion to Felicity’s vodka-induced gaiety. “But I wanted to go ahead. It was something I’d thought for a long time: investigating the fault lines in certain women’s strength, exposing the pretensions and predilections behind the famous masks. A lot of people have said that wasn’t fair, that these women didn’t become famous on purpose, that it was their work that was important, not their personalities. I say that’s garbage. No one becomes famous without wanting on some level to be famous. None of the women who’ve been on the cover is famous for her ideas alone. She’s partly famous because she’s got charisma or a beautiful face or because she’s got ins with the right people or she’s outrageous. She’s famous precisely because she’s a hypocrite, espousing one thing publicly, another privately, writing books or making speeches about feminism and sisterhood and screwing over any individual woman who stands in her way. To me that’s not feminism, and women deserve to know what their heroines are really like.”

  “But what about Simone Jefferson?” Dee broke in, perhaps unwisely. “I’ve met her, and she’s really nice.”

  “What about Simone?” Lulu said. “She’s never been on the cover.”

  Felicity leapt in. “Well then, according to your theory, Cassandra, she’d be a good suspect, just because she wouldn’t be suspected.”

  “She’d only be a good suspect if Lulu was planning to put her on the cover. But you’re not, are you, Lulu?”

  Lulu said nothing. She emptied her glass and stared very hard at the opposite wall. Finally she muttered, “I’ve got to get some sleep.”

  Dee and I stood up obediently. Felicity stayed right where she was.

  “Well,” said Dee, when we were back out in the corridor. “I thought Mrs. Horsey-Smythe was married.”

  “I’m sure she’s just researching her next lesbian novel,” I said comfortingly.

  The next morning at breakfast we happened to stand behind Darcy Joanne again. She was asking for scrambled tofu and herb tea. “Well then, what about yogurt? What about all those Ukrainians who live to be 105 and only eat yogurt?”

  Sighing, she took her plate of fried eggs and said, “Really incredible what happened yesterday, don’t you think? I’m thinking of bringing out Olga’s poems. They’d probably sell really well now.”

  “That’s morbid,” said Dee.

  “That’s publishing,” Darcy replied. “You don’t have to think about that stuff up in Canada. We do.”

  “Doesn’t it seem odd that it happened in front of Lulu’s stand?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Darcy. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say Lulu had engineered it for publicity. She’s in real financial trouble—that’s the rumor. I don’t know how she could afford to come here.”

  “But I thought Trash Out was a huge success.”

  “It had novelty value,” Darcy said. “But that’s worn off. People are saying that it sounds the same every month. And nobody but feminists are interested in the dirt on other feminists. But Lulu put a lot of money into it. I guess her loans are probably coming due. Cash-flow problems—that’s the polite term for imminent bankruptcy.” And Darcy drifted off to join her Californian friends.

  “Yeah, I know she has me in mind for her cover,” said Simone, almost in resignation. We’d caught up with her in the courtyard outside the exhibit hall. “But what can you do? Better Lulu trashing me out than Ishmael Reed. At least Lulu doesn’t pretend to be the voice of injured black manhood.”

  “But what can she dig up on you?” Dee asked. I wanted to warn her that this was a potential murderer we were dealing with, but Dee rushed on, “I love your work. And your life has seemed so straightforward. I mean, at least in that article I read in Time magazine. You went to college, graduate school, and then published a novel.”

  Simone smiled. “Nobody’s life is that straightforward. Everybody does little deals, makes little trade-offs, has skeletons in the closet. Mine are no worse than anybody else’s, but I have them. For instance, I’m a lesbian, but I’m not out to a lot of people, and I don’t write about lesbian characters. That’s how I want it at the moment; that’s how I can do my best work at the moment. But Lulu’s bound to make that the focus. I’m angry, but I’m prepared.”

  Simone’s face was a calm mask. I couldn’t really tell what she was feeling and thinking.

  “It’s terrible about Olga, isn’t it?” I said.

  But Simone just nodded.

  “Either Simone’s a liar or we’ve got the wrong suspect. And she didn’t look upset about Olga at all.”

  Dee and I were back at her stand, surrounded by hordes of Russians. If anything, Olga’s death had increased the attendance at the book fair, and there was an especially large crowd around TRESH OOT.

  “Maybe we should give up,” said Dee. “The Soviets probably killed Olga. And if they didn’t they’ll have to figure out who did.”

  “Rubbish,” I said. “What does the KGB know about feminism? They have no idea it’s a greater threat to world stability than capitalism. No, there must be a connection somewhere—to the idea that Simone is somehow involved and the rumor that Lulu’s losing money on Trash Out.”

  Fifteen minutes later I had broken into Lulu’s room at the Vladivostok People’s Hotel. I realized how little I knew about her as I leafed through a box of back issues of Trash Out and rooted in a suitcase full of scarves and black underwear. There must be a clue here somewhere, but I was damned if I knew what it was or where to find it.

  I heard footsteps in the corridor and hastily crawled under the bed. While I held my breath, the footsteps continued down the hall and disappeared. I scrambled out again. But my eye had been caught by a crumpled piece of paper in between the bed and the night stand. It looked as if it had been thrown there in a fit of anger. I smoothed it out and read:

  POISON PEN

  Some authors are sensitive about their secrets. I found that out the hard way during the most recent international feminist book fair in Vladivostok when Simone Jefferson tried to poison me with a quantity of stry
chnine placed on the tip of my pen. Like many people, Simone had noticed that I’m in the habit of sucking my pen when I’m thinking. So she substituted one that had poison in order to shut me up. The only reason I’m here today is that there was only enough of the substance to make me really ill, not enough to kill me. Otherwise I would have been murdered in cold blood in the very midst of the book fair, while selling this journal.

  Lulu went on to detail the means by which Simone was caught. The bottle of rat poison in her hotel room. Her fingerprints on the pen. “All because,” Lulu wrote, “Simone was afraid I was going to finally expose the secret she’d hidden for so long. Her lesbianism.”

  Again I heard footsteps in the corridor, but this time I wasn’t fast enough. I was on my hands and knees by the bed when Lulu came in. She immediately spotted the paper in my hand.

  “I didn’t mean to kill Olga,” she said, edging toward me while she kept the door well blocked. “Nobody can accuse me of premeditated murder. That editorial is proof. The poison was meant for me. That’s not a crime, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “Not if you really meant to commit suicide. But you miscalculated the dose; you only thought you’d get ill and that Simone would be blamed. It was a big risk to take, Lulu. And Olga took the consequences.”

  I couldn’t see any way around her body to the door.

  “No one’s going to know,” she said, coming closer to me. “I’ve still got some strychnine here and, as we both know, it doesn’t take much.”

  “I’ve always thought,” I said calmly, “that all those scarves were a big fashion mistake.” I grabbed the ends of one of them and started twisting.

  The door behind her burst open.

  “KGB!” said Felicity Horsey-Smythe playfully, and then gasped. “Oh my, Cassandra dear, whatever are you doing to poor Lulu? She looks as if she can’t breathe very well like that.”

  “Be a good girl, Felicity,” I said, still keeping a firm grip on Lulu, “and call the police, dear.”

  A half hour later Simone had retrieved the bottle of rat poison Lulu had planted in her room, and we’d presented it together with Lulu’s editorial to the Soviet police. I had no idea what would happen to Lulu now; whether she’d be tried and punished, sent to Siberia, or locked up in the Lubyanka. Whatever her punishment, I suspected it would be milder than what some of Lulu’s victims would have meted out if they’d had the chance.