Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  Agnes had assumed there would be an inquest. Wasn’t someone going to find out who strung the wire there? Where were the police in all this? No officer had approached her. She had envisioned an incident room, and the police reconstructing the scene. She had thought that everyone who’d been at the demonstration would be interviewed, at least once. Had the police interrogated the security guards about the wire? What about the pharmaceutical company that ran the laboratory? Had the police contacted them? Didn’t Campbell’s death warrant some kind of answer? Give me someone to hate, she thought, and then Pinto will teach me how to purge myself of that hatred. Only tell me. Who is to be held to account?

  It was Zebra who set her straight: “It’s Mr. Semple’s doing. Campbell’s step-father is very good at making unpleasant things disappear. He’s a born fixer, as well as very, very rich. He’s got clout, political connections and what’s that word . . .? Nux? No, nous, I guess I mean.”

  They were standing outside the library. Zebra gestured that they should move away from the stream of students going in and out of the building. He led her to a bench tented by the branches of a huge blue spruce. Even given this cloistered spot, Zebra kept glancing nervously about.

  “Clement and Campbell never really got on,” he told her, his tone low and confiding.

  Clement Semple. The name conjured up a ruggedly handsome face, a mouth with strong white teeth and the cold blue supercilious gaze of a man accustomed to deference.

  “They argued a lot. Campbell thought Clement was basically a capitalist. His own father — Dr. Korsakov — was an eye surgeon, so I think Campbell always saw his real father’s profession as more altruistic. That’s why he kept his father’s surname after his mother remarried. And he made that decision really young. Dr. Korsakov died of a heart attack when Camel and I were still in grade school. It marked Camel out, you know, because none of the rest of us had actually lost a parent at that age. Lost one to death, I mean. But then, Camel always stood out. Even as a little kid, he was special. He really did want to make things better.” Zebra stared ahead unseeing and plucked repeatedly at the tufts of his spiky hair. He shivered, then huddled inside his woolen bomber jacket. “God, I miss him.”

  “Me too.”

  He gave no indication he had heard her; once again she wondered if he knew she and Campbell had been lovers. Not that it mattered, whether he did or didn’t. This was her knowledge, the holy irradiating secret she would hold forever tight.

  Zebra shook himself. “Anyway, back to Clement . . . he’s very . . . what’s the word when a man is really in love with his wife?”

  “Uxurious?”

  “That’s it. Clement is very uxurious. So he’ll do anything he needs to, absolutely anything, to make sure Leonore gets what she wants. And if she wants the violent macabre aspects of Campbell’s death magicked away, that’s what Clement will make sure happens.”

  “But what about the security guards,” she said. “What about the violence they did to you, to all of us?”

  Zebra swung around to face her with a look of alarm. The red welt on his brow had a hatching of white stitches. He had taken off the striped peak cap he’d started wearing to cover the wound. “Agnes! We can’t any of us talk about that. Don’t you understand who we are dealing with? Listen to me, Agnes. It’s Big Pharma money behind that lab. If they needed to, they’d manufacture the evidence to make it look like it was all our doing. We all have to keep quiet about what happened, don’t you see? For Leonore’s sake so that she can bury her son with dignity, and for all our sakes, so that we stay out of jail.”

  She felt both chastened and foolish. Yes, she reminded herself, it was a nightmare accident she must put away. Bury it, so that he could be whole again in her mind. Gloriously whole, as he deserved to be.

  “You do understand, don’t you, Agnes? I mean, Clement made it so clear for me. This really is the best course of action for everybody. I have to leave tomorrow,” Zebra said. “I don’t own a suit so I have to buy one and the funeral’s Saturday morning. Clement has asked me to be a pall bearer.”

  It was two more days before she saw Pinto, at their first Animal Ethics lecture since Campbell’s death. Agnes wondered if Fergus Jonquil might feel in any way complicit. It was Fergus, after all, who had told Campbell about the new laboratory and exactly when the animals were to be delivered.

  Impulsively, she wrote the question in her the notebook and passed it to Pinto: “Do you think Fergus feels any responsibility?”

  Pinto scored out her question roughly with his pen. Then he put his finger to his lip. That made twice now she had been cautioned by a male member of the Ark to keep silent. Under her defaced question, Pinto wrote in a neat round script: “We made the decision.” The double underscore impressed on her their culpability far more cogently than anything Zebra had said.

  Her thoughts slid to the vertiginous proposition that she was therefore also complicit in Campbell’s death. We made the decision. A grotesque picture assaulted her: she was sitting here in the lecture hall with his bleeding head in her lap. Stop it, Agnes. Stop!

  A solidly built middle-aged woman walked stiffly on to the stage. She wore an unflattering boxy suit of purplish tweed that made her look upholstered. Her hair, which was thin and scraped back from brow and temples, had a glaring burgundy tint.

  She faced her audience squarely for several seconds without a word; then boomed: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am Dr. Clarissa Montridge, and I will be taking over Dr. Jonquil’s lectures until at least the end of term.”

  “What’s wrong with Fergus?” someone called out.

  Dr. Montridge frowned to indicate she found the manner of the question impertinent. They were made to pay for this discourtesy with another silence lasting some seconds.

  “My understanding,” she said, “is that he has taken a leave of absence. For further details I would suggest you address yourself to the administration office or to the head of the department.”

  A buzz of disaffection spread through the hall. Dr. Montridge meanwhile busily arranged her papers at the lectern and took some time positioning her reading glasses on her nose.

  “You will doubtless find my approach very different from Dr. Jonquil’s,” she began, “at least based on my admittedly cursory perusal of his themes and recommended readings. What I intend to present to you, ladies and gentlemen, is a less biased, or shall we say, one-sided approach.” To the word “one-sided” she gave a particular emphasis before stopping to stare out at the hall with a look both challenging and smug.

  Pinto wrote a single word in his notepad, which he then passed to Agnes: “Ouch!”

  As the lecture progressed, Agnes grew increasingly irritated by the professor’s sneering tone whenever she referred to the philosophers Fergus favoured, like Sprigge, Sheldrake and Singer. She was also beginning to feel queasy as Dr. Montridge persisted in extolling the biological and cultural benefits of meat eating. They heard a great deal about Vitamin B12 and Jehovah’s rejection of Abel’s vegetable sacrifice. This ancient story, according to the professor, demonstrated the unassailable truth that the human species requires meat for its physical, mental and emotional well-being.

  “Without meat, ladies and gentlemen, we would have no human civilizations.”

  At least she had said “civilizations” plural. Nonetheless, what a total nightmare this woman’s lecture was. Agnes looked at Pinto, who rolled his eyes.

  Dr. Montridge then segued into the various ritual proscriptions surrounding the preparation and consumption of various meats observed by religions around the world. What about Buddhists? Agnes wanted to cry out. Why did they have to sit passively and politely listening to this stuff? It was like being verbally whipped for their beliefs. It was like living with her parents again.

  The professor had moved on to Indigenous people’s traditions of respect and gratitude toward the animals they killed and ate. The ludicrous picture sprang to Agnes’s mind of urban meat eaters paying monthly
visits to their local abattoir to thank the cows and pigs whose pristinely wrapped remains they would later purchase in the supermarket. Why couldn’t this foolish woman see that vegetarianism was an ethical imperative toward which all peoples must evolve?

  At last, the lecture was over, which Clarissa Montridge signalled by taking off her glasses and blowing her nose. She then announced that for next week’s class, they were to write a 1,000-word essay presenting a balanced appraisal of Temple Grandin’s contribution to the more humane handling of stockyard animals on their way to abattoirs. Agnes bristled at the word “humane” in this context.

  “That was ghastly,” she said to Pinto, while glancing up to make sure Clarissa Montridge was well out of earshot. The sorry fact was she could not afford to alienate this stolid, bigoted woman with her objectionable theories. She had to get an A in the course if she was to keep her scholarship.

  Pinto rolled his eyes again. “We’ll have to endure, I suppose, and hope like hell Fergus isn’t away for very long.”

  “Do you think he’s off because . . .?”

  He stopped her with the same gesture as before, finger to lip. She chastised herself. When would she learn to be more circumspect?

  “Can you imagine,” she said once they were safely outside, “how Campbell would have reacted to that silly woman’s meat-eating propaganda?”

  Pinto grinned. “He would probably have leapt up, told her she was talking nonsense and stormed out in protest.”

  “I wish . . .” she began.

  “Campbell could afford to do that if he’d wanted, Agnes. He wasn’t on a scholarship. If he dropped out of a course or failed one, it would have made no difference. His mother paid his fees.”

  Campbell the rich kid: the characterization seemed to her to verge on betrayal.

  Pinto said: “I hope Zeke gets through the funeral tomorrow all right, and Campbell’s mother and Kit.”

  “Yes.” Again, she had to fend off thoughts of his lithe lovely body sealed in a wooden box, the worm-riddled earth pressing against its sides. She strove instead to conjure up a lovely vision of him bounding suddenly into view, the light at play on his black hair, making a natural aureole around his head, the whole world shining on and adoring him.

  That night she dreamt he was in her bed, making love to her so lavishly she could feel the warm tracery of his caresses on her skin when she woke. She began to nurture the willfully ecstatic notion that her body retained precise memories of Campbell’s touch; a force field of recollection that would stay with her onto death; and perhaps beyond.

  And why not, especially since Campbell’s love making was one of the most exalted experiences she had ever had? For hours after she had been with him, she lived inside a warm erotic glow that was as actual as any geographic place. Why should her body’s memory of all that wondrous sensation dwindle away to nothing?

  Even though it was late November, the morning of the funeral dawned fine and clear. She hoped the weather was the same in Boston. It would surely be easier for his mother and Kit and Zebra and all the other mourners if rain was not pelting down on the coffin and into the grave.

  When Zebra returned, he insisted she see a photo he’d snapped with his miniature camera. It showed the coffin suspended on its guy ropes, ready for lowering. “I think Pinto feels it was wrong of me to take it,” he admitted, opening his laptop. “But it seemed like that final moment, you know, when he was still among us and you could say goodbye.”

  She was not altogether convinced by this rationale, although she did not doubt his good intentions. Rather than look at the coffin hung upon the air, she focused on the little clutch of people who stared out of white faces.

  “That’s Campbell’s mother,” Zeke said, pointing to a slender woman in a black dress with stand-up collar and a little hat with a half-veil. Agnes could make out only that she had a heart-shaped face and her hands near her mouth. To stop herself screaming, she thought, I can understand that. Her eye then picked out a woman with radically razored hair, standing beside Campbell’s mother. The near-naked skull reminded her of photos in history books of women who had their heads shaved as punishment for consorting with the enemy.

  “Who is that?”

  Zebra swallowed audibly, “It’s Kit.”

  Agnes looked at him unbelieving.

  “She cut off all her hair,” Zebra said. “She’s not eating. She’s been in hospital. She’s in a very, very bad way, Agnes.”

  “I’m so sorry.” And truly, she was.

  “Horace is with her,” Zeke added. “He is absolutely loyal to her. Like a dog that loves its mistress above everything. I know he can be a pain but he’ll see her through this, if anyone can.”

  Agnes fixed on the photo again. She spied, beside and just a little behind the haunted figure she now knew to be Kit, a familiar small, wiry figure. It was the first time she had ever seen Horace without his hood up. Had Kit’s situation prompted some new openness in him?

  “Zeke shouldn’t have taken it,” Pinto declared when Agnes mentioned the photo. “That was a private moment.”

  He was usually so open and forgiving she was surprised by the vehemence of his disapproval. She sometimes fancied she could see his conscience at work, ejecting rash judgements and preconceptions, making room for empathy wherever it could be brought to bear. So she was certain he would add some remark to soften this dogmatic reaction to Zebra’s picture of the graveside group. But nothing came.

  Because she saw Pinto’s grasp on right action as so far superior to hers, questions begin to tug at her. Was it unseemly to look at a photograph of Campbell’s mourners? She consoled herself that she was also one of them, even though she was not physically present for the funeral and interment.

  With this rare exception, Pinto continued to be her sterling example as she struggled to accept the fact of Campbell’s death. She tried not to lean on him too heavily, and above all, not to babble or to cry in his presence.

  “Death sends us to the old labours,” he counselled her. Pinto never revealed the source of this gnomic quotation but she took the meaning well enough. Although initially she had to force herself to sit at her desk and get on with it, the habitual compulsions soon reasserted themselves. For twenty-minute spans she could become agreeably lost in a line of thought crowned by an insight and forget that he had gone.

  But at day’s end, alone in her bed, she would be overwhelmed again by the sudden violence of his going. She had been inducted into the basic lesson of life’s fragility and brevity, and she wished with all her heart she might have learned this lesson another way. Not through his death, but another’s, even or perhaps most especially, her own. She clung to the certainty her memories of him lived, and of these she had a great store, all of them golden. In this way she learned to placate the demands of her grief, even when it was at its most mordant.

  Nonetheless, when the next death came, not one of them — not even Pinto — was prepared. It was the saturnine Clarissa Montridge who was the messenger. When she took her place behind the lectern, it was obvious she was out of breath. Something had happened to dismantle the stolid monumentality she had projected so effortlessly the week previous. While Agnes detested the woman’s views, she did not like to see her so distressed.

  “I regret to inform you . . .” She stopped and coughed discreetly into a handkerchief. For a deluded instant, Agnes happily assumed Dr. Montridge was about to announce this was her last class before Fergus returned. “. . . that Professor Jonquil has died.”

  Inside Agnes’s brain there was nothing but white noise. Several students in the hall leapt to their feet. Someone’s tablet clattered to the floor.

  “It can’t be,” Agnes said three times. She looked around for Pinto but could not see him anywhere in the room.

  “Was he ill? What happened to him?” A woman in the front row pressed for the details to which they all felt entitled.

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty . . .”

  “What cr
ap!” someone shouted.

  “I will not countenance such vulgar language and discourtesy,” said Clarissa Montridge. She then promptly left the stage.

  Agnes sat on, benumbed. There was an unpleasant trickle of sweat in her armpits. Some of the others were texting their friends, trying to find out if anyone knew more about Fergus. They all wanted to hear the same thing: a refutation; the confirmation that Clarissa Montridge had it all wrong. The stupid woman had been misled, or she was ill and had fantasized the whole thing. The college would quietly terminate her contract. Dr. Montridge would go away to a rest home where she would recover her health and then go to teach elsewhere.

  She decided to go to the Ark, to seek out Pinto or Zebra. It can’t be, she kept saying to herself, as if this would work some magic charm. It simply can’t be. But perhaps Fergus had had a heart defect or a brain aneurism. These things happened, even to people as apparently vital and robust as Fergus Jonquil.

  If it was true, the fact of his death would surpass the mere uncanny, coming as it did so soon after Campbell’s. Either the fates were creating a diabolical garment, stitching one death to the other, or something truly sinister was afoot.

  “Agnes . . . you’ve heard about Fergus, then?” Pinto came to the door looking as if he had not slept. He preceded her into the kitchen, moving very slowly, like a man recovering from a major operation.

  “Minnie’s here,” he told her. “She’s on the phone upstairs, talking to a friend of hers who’s a policewoman.”

  “Police? Was it a car accident?”

  “They think he was murdered, Agnes. Minnie’s friend told her Fergus was garrotted, strangled with a piece of wire.”

  “My God!” She shook her head stupidly back and forth, a child’s gesture that sought to undo what she had just heard.