by Andrew Pyper
Pittle raises a hand and waves at me from his table, his figure especially dwarfed under the giant screen TV that is now showing two gleaming black men pummeling each other in a ring at Caesar’s Palace.
“I hope this isn’t taking up too much of your time,” Pittle says as I take the seat across from him.
“Not at all. Besides, everybody’s got to eat sometimes.”
“That’s true.” Pittle looks at me, twists the hair on his chin between busy fingers. “It’s just that I wanted to share some things that may be of interest to you.”
“To my case, you mean.”
“No. To you.”
I could fight this distinction but shrug instead, sit back in invitation for him to continue.
“There’s good news and there’s bad news.”
“Oh yeah? Give me the bad news.”
“There’s only one document in the entire county archives that makes any reference to Mrs. Arthurs’s Lady in the Lake.”
“The good news?”
“It’s a handwritten manuscript written by none other than Alistair Dundurn.”
“So it’s the same thing as the book I already have, right? A History of Northern Ontario Towns. I don’t see how that’s helpful.”
“No, it’s different. And I never said it would be helpful.”
“So what is it then?”
“This.”
He disappears beneath the table and for a not-quite-awake moment I expect a hand puppet to appear in his place, a red-nosed ceramic face that tells dirty jokes in a squeaky voice. But then Pittle returns and brings with him a bundle of wrinkled papers bound in a leather satchel. Places the package down in front of him on the table and lays his hands on top.
“This,” I say, “is paper.”
“A manuscript. Dundurn’s. Except more like Dundurn’s own memoirs. Very interesting stuff. A later work than his history, probably written at the same time as he was going a bit wonky. Which either makes it more honest or completely unreliable.”
Pittle wriggles back in his chair and grips the ends of the armrests, his head tottering on his neck. At that point the waitress arrives (“Have youse decided what youse want?”) and Pittle orders a pint of Ex and twenty Suicide Wings. Then she turns doubtfully to me and I ask for the same.
“You sure you like it hot?” she almost sneers, and I wonder why she didn’t ask Pittle the same thing.
“Hot as you can make them,” I tell her with forced relish, and she curls her upper lip towards her nose in a troubling expression I take to mean Oh yeah, pal? We’ll see about that.
“So,” I say after the waitress has left. “What’s so interesting about our friend Mr. Dundurn’s life?”
“Not much, I expect,” Pittle raises his eyebrows. “Aside from the fact that he was there on the night Mrs. Arthurs described to you. The night The Lady went through the ice.”
Above our heads a commentator’s voice on the giant screen interrupts to announce “We’ve just learned that he’s suffered a severe concussion, ladies and gentlemen. Johnson will be scratched for at least the first two games with Chicago.” The voice is excited, even cheerful, slowing only to emphasize concussion and then instantly picking up again.
“How do you know he was there?” I ask.
“Well, he doesn’t actually come out and say it of course. But he slips in enough hints to make it clear.”
Pittle clicks open the satchel and pulls a single sheet out from the manuscript pile before him, holds it close to his face and reads through its trembling creases.
“‘The men watched her fall through, and not a soul among us said a word. For they knew what they had done. And while there was a darkness settling upon their hearts, there was also the relief that the town was once more safe from physical or moral threat.’ Did you notice the slipup in there? ‘Not a soul among us said a word’? Dundurn’s manuscript is entirely handwritten, but the ‘us’ stands on the page uncorrected. I think this shows that the entire work is nothing less than a personal recounting of the event. A confession, really.”
The waitress returns with our beers and slides them before us, watery suds spilling over the sides and rushing into a moat around the base of the glass. Without a word both of us pick them up and glug down the first third in sudden thirst. Then, a moment later, first Pittle and then I fill the air with belches passed through clenched lips, a sound like the release of radiator steam. Neither of us excuse ourselves before speaking again.
“So he knew her,” I say.
“Everybody knew her. But he might’ve been the only one who found out what her story was. Or some of the pieces, anyway.”
“And?”
“She was Polish. And Catholic. Not great things to be in Europe during the early ’40s. Dundurn doesn’t say how he found even this out because she had no passport or documentation of any kind. But I suspect he went out and visited her where she was camping in the woods near the lake. To interview her.”
“Maybe for other reasons too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mrs. Arthurs told me that some of the men in town would go out there to spend a little time with her. Before the wives found out.”
“I see.”
Everywhere I turn to look at something other than Pittle’s face my eyes meet only televisions. Hanging on chains in the corners, pull-down screens taking up entire walls, three smaller units nesting in the boxes above the bar originally designed as wine racks. Each one showing a different athletic spectacle: a body sculpting show hosted by a man whose skin is so oiled and packed with sinew he looks like a sausage fried to the point of bursting; a stock car race where cameras set on the dashboards showed just how tedious driving around an oval track two hundred times must be; a highlights tape of downhill skiing accidents featuring one neck-snapping accident after another.
“O.K., so one way or another, Dundurn was researching The Lady,” I say, taking another gulp of beer. “What did he get?”
Pittle lifts his hands and they hover over the papers like two metal detectors searching the sand for buried change. Inside his beard, something quivers.
“Not much, in the end,” he says. “Her English was almost non-existent, and I don’t think she was much of a talker anyway. What we do know is that she arrived here in the summer of 1945 as a DP But without official papers, as I’ve said, which suggests she’d managed to—”
“DP?”
“‘Displaced person.’ The government’s term for all people left homeless by the war. A refugee. Somebody that made it out.”
“But how’d she get here?”
“Who knows? She’d probably been on the road in Canada for a while, camping out, staying away from the larger cities and towns where they’d be more likely to ask questions. As for how she got out of Europe? We have to be talking about a very resourceful woman here. Keep in mind that Poland was the first place to undergo Nazi ‘Germanizing.’ The Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws served as the model for similar regulations aimed against the Polish people generally. Basically this meant complete loss of rights, nationhood, name. Children between six and sixteen were forcibly taken away from their families to be brought up as Germans, a policy which entailed their being sent to institutions to be ‘re-educated’ in order to erase their language, culture, history along with everything else. And they were the lucky ones. The others, the ‘undesirable elements,’ were sent to the camps.”
“All this is in Dundurn’s papers?”
“Mostly the transcripts to Nuremberg Trial No. 8, actually. I did some research of my own.”
Pittle’s face exhibits no pride in this, his voice offering only the evenness of professional clarification. Above me, the same commentator states the word “concussion” for a second time.
“What made her ‘undesirable’ then?”
“She was a single mother, which suggests in itself that her husband either fought in the Polish military or was one of the first ones sent to the camps. Maybe he worked in the gov
ernment, was an academic or a writer—one of the ones they took care of right away. There could have been secondary concerns as well: after the Jews and the Gypsies came Communists, the mentally ill, pregnant women, homosexuals. She may have been one or all of them. But my bet is she wasn’t thinking of herself at the time. She had to get out of there in order to save her daughters no matter who she was—they would have been just the right age to be taken away. Not an easy thing, but she pulled it off. It would’ve made a great story, but she certainly didn’t tell it to Dundurn. As far as we know she didn’t tell it to anyone.”
“And so she ended up here.”
“One of the camp barracks at Auschwitz was called Kanada. It was where all their food, clothes, gold, jewelry and other confiscated goods was kept. It was real, but in another sense it was totally imaginary. Somehow the name had meaning for all of them. A safe, protected place. I didn’t know that. Did you?”
“No, I didn’t,” I say, throwing a finger up to rub at the bridge of my nose as though bitten by some invisible flying thing.
Then the waitress arrives with two baskets of slippery-looking wings, each liberally glazed with a fluorescent red ointment. “Suicides,” she announces as she sets them down and drops two roll-ups of cutlery into the puddles around our now empty beers. Pittle orders two more.
“They look good,” I lie, staring into the piled limbs in front of me. Pittle says nothing in return, his small hands already clenched before his mouth, grappling with his food.
“Well now,” I push on, pulling a wing of my own out of the carnage. “She got out, made it over. What I’m wondering is why she wasn’t given official refugee status when she got here.”
“Maybe she didn’t ask for it. Maybe she was too used to running. And even if she had asked, her acceptance wouldn’t have been a foregone conclusion. Canada’s immigration and refugee policies in 1945 were not what you’d call liberal, particularly given that a world war had just come to an end. We were way behind the other Allied nations in accepting DPs, and in the end it took a couple of years for the government to really open the doors. So she must have figured she’d be better off going up north and trying to melt into some backwater on her own.”
“And you think that’s why they took the girls away from her? Because she didn’t have the right papers?”
“Could’ve been. But more likely because she was different. Non-communicative, husbandless. And from what you’ve told me there were also rumors that she had been providing certain—that she was ‘morally questionable,’ according to the language of the day. Based on this, they probably also assumed she was nuts, or called her that in order to do what they wanted with her. Either way they locked her up, shipped off the kids and forgot all about it. That is, until she broke out from the hospital and started inviting the local kids for a walk in the woods. The rest is history, as they say.”
Pittle places his hand on the cover page of Dundurn’s journal then quickly pulls it back, leaving an oily stain of chicken fat and tabasco in its place.
“Dammit,” he mumbles, mouth full.
“She escaped the war and made it to freedom only to be hunted down right here in happy old Murdoch.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it, in a terrible sort of way.”
“Funny,” I say, feeling the broken ice lapping up to the knees, the chest. Arms held out to the puffing faces on the shore. “Terrible.”
For a time neither of us says anything while Pittle eats and I pretend to eat. These things really are hot, yet utterly tasteless except for the painful burning they leave on the end of my tongue. I glance over towards the bar and find the waitress standing there looking back at us, and although it’s too dark to make out her face I imagine a cruel, satisfied smile playing over her lips.
“O.K., Doug. Let’s go back a second,” I say once I’ve given up on lunch for good. “Even if I go along with your interpretation that Dundurn was there at the lake when it happened, how does that help me with Mrs. Arthurs’s theory that The Lady has come back to claim Flynn and McConnell. Not that that’s possible. But as a matter of argument—”
“As a matter of argument, of course.” He lowers his wing and clears his throat. “Well, Dundurn goes on to detail certain instances where The Lady was said to have reappeared in the years following her death. Sightings up near the lake. Walking through the trees at night in her hospital clothes. Rising up out of the lake at dusk, or a scream echoing out over the water in the middle of the night. What’s most interesting perhaps are the reports made by children. Cottagers’ kids running in crying to their mothers saying that a mean, green old lady had approached them, asking them to take her hand and go for a little swim. Crazy stuff like that. Dundurn figures that these stories even played a part in the region’s failure to make it as a viable tourist destination. People got the creeps bad enough that they decided to spend the extra money to buy places fifty miles to the south. You can take that argument or leave it. But what’s important is that Mrs. Arthurs isn’t alone in her opinion. It’s just that she may be the last person alive to express it.”
I nod once and finish my beer. Lay my napkin over the food in front of me like a white sheet.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Tripp, Doug?”
“Sorry?”
“The last name on the sign-out card of that Dundurn book I took from the library was his.”
He pushes his face forward and lowers his deep voice even lower.
“That’s interesting.”
“Yes, it is. And given that the circulation desk of the Murdoch Library is not exactly a busy place, you would have known about it. And then you recommend the same book to me.”
Pittle smiles once, a carnivorous flash, then pulls it back into the bush.
“I didn’t know what he was looking into specifically at the time,” he says. “I mean, it’s just a book of local history, right? The guy can read. But after he was arrested and the rest—I had some ideas of my own.”
“So then you handed it over to me.”
“You were interested. So was Tripp. And I thought if you saw his name in there it might mean something to you.”
Now Pittle slurps at his beer, lifts a muscular drumstick to his mouth. “So?” he asks, takes a bite.
“So what?”
“What do you think he was doing with Dundurn’s book?”
“Listen, Doug, I’m not sure I can—”
“Off the record.”
“Legally speaking, ‘off the record’ doesn’t mean a thing.”
“I give you my word then.”
It’s moments like this they drill into you at law school. How never to betray your client’s confidence even with your closest friends, colleagues or loved ones, and Pittle not even qualifying as any of the above. And yet I want to tell him something. Part of me thinks I might make the unclear clear through putting it into words. Part of me just wants to say it to someone else.
“Tripp ran an after-school club with Ashley and Krystal where they would read books and talk about them, do creative writing exercises and other stuff like that,” I start, and Pittle stops eating for the first time.
“I’d heard something about that.”
“Well, that’s how it all began, anyway. But I have reason to believe it went further. That they started to dramatize events. Put on plays of their own making. That was one of the rules, as a matter of fact. Nothing could be real.”
“And you think this is of importance to the defense?”
“Probably not. But it might be important, nevertheless.”
For a while we keep our eyes lowered to the table, let the static of sports statistics fill our ears. Then Pittle shakes his head as though he’d just stepped through cobwebs.
“The imagination can be a very dangerous thing,” he says.
“How’s that?”
“When you stop seeing it only as the hypothetical and take the step into making it real. Think about it. This is really what we mean when we talk about som
eone having an evil mind. Charlie Manson, Oppenheimer, Hitler, Dahmer, whoever. People who let themselves go too far into their heads.”
“C’mon, Doug. There’s an entire body of science—the hangover of traumatic childhoods, chemical imbalances, whatever. There’re many other ways of explaining—”
“I’m a librarian,” he interrupts. “A part-time reporter. I prefer my world to be the world of facts. At the same time I know the control it takes to keep it that way. Sometimes I wish I could be something different. But I have to resist those kind of thoughts. Remind myself that so long as I stay with the facts, I’m safe.”
“Safe from what?”
“What I might be if I let myself.”
At the bottom of our baskets the waitress has thrown in a wet nap that each of us now struggles to rip open. Inside, the sharp lemon of jet travel hygiene. I smear it over the bottom half of my face as Pittle, so aggressive with his food a moment ago, now makes delicate stabs at his lips and pushes his basket to the side of the table. A male voice from the TV above us panting, “I just went out there to kick some butt and that’s exactly what I did.”
Then Pittle starts again, this time jumping forward in his chair, hands diving and poking up through his papers. “I can’t believe I didn’t even show you.”
“Show what?”
“Dundurn’s picture.”
“What difference does it make what he looks like?”
“Not him.” He pulls a square of paper away from a paperclip, holds it a foot away from my eyes. “Her.”
I hold out my hand and he drops it into my palm. Too small to convey an entire person really, a white-fringed square the size of a commemorative stamp. Black-and-white, but more yellowy brass than anything else. And coated with a fog that at first obscures the subject: a woman in a buttoned cardigan (a little too tight at the shoulders) framed from the waist up. Hair tied and pinned into a disordered nest the color of carbon dust. A long, weary neck, riddled with vertical bulges that could be muscle or tendon or vein. And a face of the kind of beauty that somehow resists the simplicity of such a term, a beauty against the beautiful. A face like a historical map, rough marks indicating shifting boundaries, the outside bordered by hypothetical coastlines. Not aged but suggestive of vast expanses of endured time. The face of Europe pushing through an out-of-focus lens.