Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

“No, Martin. I don’t work that way.”

  Kingdon grunted. “When the police arrive, you can tell them where I am.”

  The door missed Leo’s face by an inch.

  The newsroom seemed suddenly claustrophobic. Leaving Stevie to her own thoughts, he wandered to the back and stared blankly for what had to be the hundredth time in his so-called career at an ancient wall display of miniature front pages gathered under the rubric, World’s Hundred Best Newspapers.

  Smart move, Fabian. Now you’ll be at the top of the shit list until pigs have wings. Your byline and the front page—or any page—shall be strangers one unto another. Yea, and forevermore.

  His eyes focussed on the mini-Osservatore Romano, then passed from the mini-Times of India to the mini-Citizen of 1950s vintage. Maybe it had been one of the hundred best earlier in the century. But then Michael Rossiter had sold it. Later, a flock of Bay Street buzzards bought it. After they’d finished eviscerating it, they sold it to a Calgary Christer, who would probably wring the last penny out of it by shrinking the news hole, downsizing the staff, and inflating the advertising. And pussies like Martin Kingdon would be there to aid and abet.

  A great crashing noise broke into his reverie. When Leo turned to look, he saw Frank Nickel beating his fist impatiently against the glass of the newsroom door.

  He scowled as Leo pushed the door open. “You again.”

  “It seems I have a nose for news, Frank.”

  “Who’s the unlucky stiff?”

  Leo permitted himself a facetious smile. Frank growled.

  “I hate to tell you this, Frank. But it’s someone probably in your top ten suspects list for a certain other murder.”

  “Who?”

  “Guy Clark.”

  “Shit!”

  Leo pointed Stevie to the doorway at the opposite end of the library that led to the unofficial staff lounge. “I’ll be with you in a sec,” he said.

  Frank had more or less ordered them out of the newsroom. Leo had helpfully alerted his brother-in-law to the aborted “bigstuff” story, presented Guy’s remarkably tidy desktop with a Vanna-style flourish, and was about to pull out one of the desk drawers for a look-see when Frank karate-chopped his forearm. A coincident distant banging on the lobby door was a signal the forensics had come to take holiday snaps and grub around, so all superfluous living characters—Leo and Stevie—got the boot. Leo neglected to tell Frank that Martin was in his private office, perhaps quaking.

  He disappeared into the forest of green filing cabinets in the library, pulled out a drawer marked “T,” which, thank god, was at eye level, and began fingering quickly through the envelopes of old clippings organized under subject.

  No “Trappist.” Damn.

  “Religious orders”? “Roman Catholic Church”? He looked down the tight tidy row of coffin-like drawers. No wonder they used to call newspaper libraries morgues.

  “Religious orders, Roman Catholic Church”?—too broad.

  “Our Lady of the Assumption”?

  “Our”?

  “Lady”?

  “Assumption, Our Lady of”?

  Where was Vera when you needed her?

  He rounded a corner to find the “A”files and nearly tripped over a floor-level file drawer that some idiot hadn’t bothered to close. Grabbing the handle of a higher file drawer to right himself, his eyes fell on the door that opened on one of the building’s interior stairwells. You could exit the library that way; the stairs would take you down four flights to the musty back room Stevie and he had passed through earlier. But you couldn’t enter the library (and therefore the newsroom) by coming up the stairs. He had tried it once. The door was always locked on the stairwell side. Leo glanced up at the library’s bank of fluorescent lights. He wondered again: Had they been left on since…yesterday? Or…? Is this the way the killer left? Through the door, down the stairs, out the back?

  He pulled out the “A” drawer and began to rummage. It would have to be someone familiar with the eccentricities of Zit HQ, he mused.

  About five hundred people.

  Well, that narrows it to a Pakistani village.

  Still, four hundred were home, probably watching television. Fewer than a hundred—from editorial—were grazing at Galleries Portáge.

  That narrows it to a Saskatchewan village.

  And 9:06. Where was everyone at 9:06? Everyone was everywhere at 9:06. Who could account for individual movements at a mall? All he could remember was Paul Richter murdering a clock with his eyes at precisely 8:00. And the Krystle Carrington/Alexis Colby memorial slugfest about half an hour later.

  Leo found “Assumption, Our Lady of.” It was like Guy Clark’s byline file: thin as Melba toast. He opened it quickly. Looked like a couple of lifestyle features (monks have lifestyles?) plus a couple of newsy-looking pieces. He slipped the file into his inside pocket and walked toward the back. Removing files from the building was forbidden, but what the hell, worse crimes had been committed at the Zit. One of them recently.

  Still, whoever it was had taken a fair chance. There were other people out on streets, in parking lots. Or looking out of windows, as Axel was doing now in the back room, his hand clasped behind his back, staring out at the black sky.

  “Were the lights on in the library when you two came in?”

  Neither Axel or Merritt answered. Axel’s only movement extended to the pushing of a wedding ring around and around his third finger with his thumb, an unconscious stroking that seemed to mesmerize Merritt, who monopolized the centre of the battered couch, her legs tucked under her, worrying a bright lacquered nail.

  “Axel?” He addressed the ponytail.

  “What?” Axel’s voice snapped.

  “Lights. Library. On or not on when you came in?”

  There was a hesitation. “On,” he said finally.

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes, I’m sure. There was the bank of lights on over the front of the newsroom, and the library lights. Also on.”

  Leo looked around the room, at the couch where he had had his monumentally stupid tryst with Julie Olsen, where he’d lain with a sore back three days before. Once, too, there had been a talented writer who after lunch every day turned the battered couch to the window and fell into untroubled sleep. Finally, his snores reached the wrong ears and he was sacked, although afternoon naps were the least of his sins.

  Leo glanced at Stevie, lost in thought, plucking at some loose stuffing poking from the arm of her chair. He returned his eyes to Axel’s back, to the expanse of Manitoba tartan. Ironic, my ass. The jacket was probably his father’s. The fucker was so maxed out on his credit cards he couldn’t buy something new.

  He sighed. He’d known Axel forever. It was Axel who’d got him to the hospital when he’d hit a tree on the monkey trails in Assiniboine Park on his three-speed after drinking a quart of Southern Comfort. It was Leo who calmed a raving Axel lost in the middle of the frozen prairie at three o’clock of a January morning after doing ’shrooms by pointing out that all they had to do was follow their own ski trails back through the freshly fallen snow. It was Axel who kept him from climbing the water tower on Kenaston Boulevard when he was tripping. And Axel who convinced him to buy a motorcycle (so he could borrow it; then watch it slide into the Red). And Axel who made him play drums in his (very) short-lived punk band, Axel and the Rods. Leo still had the T-shirt.

  “So tell me,” he said. “Where were you at 9:06 this evening?”

  Book 6

  Sunday, October 2

  32

  Bees

  Manitoba: Horizontality Beckons You. Leo flashed by the sign on the Trans Canada—the handiwork of the advertising firm that had produced the paper’s failed Pop A Zit campaign. Only political connections could be keeping them in business, he thought, turning his eyes to the (admittedly horizontal) landscape. The weather had recast itself once again. As far as his city eyes could tell, the periodic rain of the past several days had left little trace on the co
untryside other than to remove the pall of dust from harvesting or clear the haze of burning stubble. Late-morning sun beat the shorn grain fields into gold, flamed the willows canary yellow, and reddened his face and the arm he rested on the open window of the Land Rover. Breathing in the sweet air, he imagined he was in Australia where summer was just arriving. But when he looked up, winter’s approach was all too evident. The incandescent blue of summer was gone. The sky was pearly, whitening. Clouds raked northwards with frail fingers. A black chevron of geese crossed high and—this was the discouraging bit—south. And, to lend journalistic authority, the car radio reported the first frost.

  Traffic was light. Everyone had to be at church. Or sleeping in. Or milking cows. Or whatever the hell it was people did in rural Manitoba on Sunday mornings. Sleeping in with Stevie would have been his Sunday-morning choice. He would have postponed this trip to Our Lady of the Assumption before you could say two Hail Marys and an Our Father, but Stevie, understandably (he supposed), had found Saturday evening more vivid than just a trip to the mall.

  Of course, it hadn’t helped that he and Axel had come to blows, of a sort. Axel had responded to Leo’s 9:06 question by flying off the handle and punctuating his critique of Leo’s “unfounded suspicions” by socking Leo in the stomach, which Leo unthinkingly returned. Further punches might have been exchanged, but Merritt apparently decided shrieking would once again have an effect. Which it did.

  Where had Axel been at 9:06? The answer, so far, was none of your fucking business, Leo.

  He sucked in his stomach. It hurt. What with his back still a bit tender from Wednesday’s injury, it had not been a good week for his midsection. Axel, he presumed, was in less discomfort. Leo’s fist had felt like it was hitting a wall. All those ab crunches Axel had been doing had had their effect. What hurt more was being hit by your oldest friend. He almost wished Stevie hadn’t filled him in on the gloomy details of Merritt’s pregnancy on the ride home. He would have preferred to think of Axel as just wildly pissed off with him for hefty teasing than actually feeling trapped by an awful truth and lashing out.

  Oh, to hell with it.

  Leo stepped on the accelerator. Maybe getting out of the corrupt old city into the pristine countryside was the tonic. All those earnest hard-working folk growing healthful canola and going to the Protestant church of their choice on Sundays.

  He flashed by a Rural Crime Watch Area sign.

  Or maybe not.

  He was almost disappointed when his journey ended. After he’d driven an hour straight over flat terrain, the road had veered beckoningly toward a line of smoky hills and began to meander, rising lazily on ancient glacial mounds, dropping softly into sheltered valleys. He eased up on the accelerator and savoured the peaceful seclusion, the relaxed human scale of the unhorizontal landscape. A few fat cows dotted patchwork fields; the sun glinted off the metal roofs of distant silos; gravel byways wound past groves of trees toward comfortable-looking farm houses. He almost missed the sign. He made one wrong turn, fooled by an old telephone post high on a hill that stood against the sky for all the world like a crucifix. Then, further along the main road, he saw the rough brown plaque with the word monastère burnt into the wood and then, in the middle distance, the monastery itself, a large two-storey box of sandy-coloured brick, as utilitarian looking as a modern high school.

  He parked near a cluster of fir trees and hauled himself out of the car, stretching after the long ride, taking the kink out of his back. Though the monastery was also a working farm, there was no evidence of habitation. He travelled up the gravel road connecting the monastery grounds to the main highway and admired the neat fields, the carefully tended flower beds with their borders of whitewashed stones, and the sturdy white barns, but he wondered if some mysterious race had created this tiny perfect civilization and then abandoned it. The breeze carried the only evidence of animal life—the tweedle-dum of a jay.

  Across the gravel lot, he noted a sign designating part of one of the low white buildings as the information booth. Were they recruiting? But the commercial element of the monastic enterprise hit Leo with force when he stepped over the threshold into a dark, cramped room and inhaled the peculiar suffocating odour of church annexes, a mixture of wax and cleaning fluids and old books, remembered from his childhood. There was a glass display booth and a cash register and shelf upon cluttered shelf of plaster statuary, candles, rosaries, and other keepsakes, most of it cheap and garish, and of course, rows of jars of Trappist honey and Trappist cheese. Leo found himself so depressed by the tackiness of it all that he didn’t hear footsteps coming down the hall. He flinched when he turned and saw through the shadows an apparition, a pale young man, short and thin, with a knobby skull visible through the bristles of black short-cropped hair. The eyes behind the hornrims glittered with curiosity. Leo stared at him for a moment longer than was comfortable, then said, “I have an appointment with the novice master, with Father James Hart.”

  “Of course. Yes. We have been waiting for you. Follow me, please.”

  Halting syntax and the trace of an accent suggested that English was not his first language. But before Leo could add anything, he found himself hurrying through the door and down a path behind the young man at a speed unseemly for a monk. He slowed down enough to hold the door open for Leo and then led him at a more reverential pace through the main building.

  Like the exterior, the interior was utilitarian. The halls, with their off-white walls and grey terrazzo flooring, were clean and smart but they weren’t dissimilar to those of contemporary office buildings in any urban centre. Boring, Leo thought. But what did he expect? Medieval French masonry in the middle of the prairies? He reflected as he was shown into a small dark room with a very ornate table that the Zit feature stories on the Trappists were poor preparation for reality. Such phrases as “strict and austere observance of the Benedictine rule,” “a communal life of prayer and retreat,” “exclusively contemplative life” seemed psychologically deceptive. They suggested something idealized and rhapsodic in the best romantic tradition. Instead, what he had seen so far seemed much more ordinary—a factory farm with a gift shop. Had Michael himself actually been attracted to this?

  After a moment he was joined by his host, who came quietly into the room on slippered feet and carefully closed the door. Father James looked to be in his mid-forties. He was tall, over six feet, and heavy-set in his white robe and black scapular, with big hands that enveloped Leo’s in a powerful handshake. In proportion to his body, however, his head was small, and its shape was like that of a perfect tonsured egg, cheeks and chin all silkily plump. His eyes, which seemed to wander as if they couldn’t focus, were disconcerting. Though the room was in shadow, his grey-blue irises captured a ray of light from the room’s only window, and reflected it glassily.

  They sat at the far end of the table nearest the window. It framed a view of hills and trees of such picture-postcard intensity that Leo couldn’t help remarking that its beauty seemed almost contrived. He regretted saying so as soon as it slipped from his mouth and then, with shock added to embarrassment, he realized suddenly that Father James was blind. The wandering eyes were sightless eyes; the hills and trees existed only to the ear and the hand and the intake of breath. He apologized, but Father James was not offended. He laughed openly and agreed that it was likely true; as memory served, there was something almost artificial about the view from the window. The autumn weather engaged them in small talk for a few moments and then, after an awkward pause, Father James said, “Father Abbot gave me news of the tragedy yesterday, only a few moments before you telephoned, as it happened. I’m afraid we’re slow to get the newspapers here. And then only Father Abbot is privy to them. I take it you were a friend of Michael’s?”

  “Well, more of an acquaintance.” Barely. “Were you told that I write for the Citizen?”

  “Yes.” A small frown creased his forehead. “But I’m not sure—”

  “I’m looking mostly fo
r background.” A classic journalistic line if ever there was one.

  “Well—”

  “I won’t quote you by name.” Classic line number two. “I just want to understand the person that Michael was. And this—” He gestured vaguely around the room. “—was obviously going to be an important step in his life.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Then—?”

  “I hope I can trust you to be careful of our privacy.”

  “Of course.” Number three.

  Leo tugged at the coil of notebook in his shirt pocket. The man was blind. But his hearing was probably acute.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll jot down a few notes.”

  “Well—”

  “Just for my own reference.” Number four. “As I said, you won’t be quoted.”

  Father James’s frown straightened. He nodded in assent.

  “I think,” Leo continued after a moment to collect his thoughts, “it will come as a complete surprise to people who knew Michael that he was going to do…this.” He lifted his arms to indicate the universe of the monastery, forgetting for the moment that such a gesture would go unnoted. “Hardly anyone seems to have been aware that he was planning to make such a—” He groped for the word. “—drastic change in his life.”

  Father James clasped his hands on the tabletop and looked across at Leo, his eyes in motion as though seeking something on which to alight. It had an odd assessing effect. Leo felt exposed in a way he wouldn’t have thought possible with a sightless person.

  “You use the word ‘drastic,’” Father James replied. “Perhaps it does seem drastic. But Michael’s been on his way here for some time.”

  “You mean he had been thinking about taking this step for some time.”

  The monk nodded. “So it’s not as abrupt as it might appear. Although I wonder a little at Michael not talking with friends and family about it. He was looking forward to joining us and I would have expected him to share his feelings, his joy.”