Blood Wine

by John Moss

  “To you?”

  “No, I don’t know what the message was and I don’t know to whom it was being addressed.”

  “To whom? I’ve never heard anyone say ‘to whom’ before.”

  “You don’t suppose Elke is one of the good guys?”

  “Like, working for the CIA, the Mounties, INTERPOL? No, we checked her out. If she does, she’s undercover, so deep her own people don’t know she exists.”

  “That is an existential paradox,” said Miranda.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” said Miranda. For some reason she thought of Morgan. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I feel like I’m inside a connect-the-dots puzzle, where you draw lines and a picture appears. But because we’re inside on the two-dimensional page, we can’t see all the dots. If you can’t see the dots, how can you draw the picture?”

  “We need perspective.…”

  “Yeah, literally.…”

  “You want to watch Buffy?”

  “What?” said Miranda.

  “There’s a twenty-four-hour Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon. One of the New York channels is playing the whole of season four back-to-back. It’s for charity. You ever watch Buffy?”

  “Yeah, Clancy, I am a devoted fan, although I avoid trying to articulate why.”

  “Wit, some of the funniest lines, irony, irony about irony, and moral density, psychological complexity, profound silliness, silly profundities. No, it’s like trying to explain Monty Python and the Ministry of Silly Walks. Either you get it or you don’t.”

  “Clancy, I am genuinely relieved to know you watch Buffy. It makes you more human.”

  “You were doubting.”

  “Yes, no.”

  “So, why don’t we order in Chinese food and watch Buffy until dawn.”

  “I’m with you, Clancy. And what happens at dawn?”

  “I’m off for a few days.”

  “And you want to hang out?”

  “Actually, I was thinking of leaving you here for a bit, going home and picking up some clothes.”

  “You’re not moving in!”

  “No? No, I have no intentions of moving — in, or otherwise. I was thinking of driving you home.”

  “Home?”

  “Toronto. I’ve never been to Toronto.”

  “Ever been to Canada?”

  “No.”

  “Mexico?”

  “No.”

  “Not well-travelled, are we?”

  “The Gulf, Desert Storm, does that count?”

  “Marines?”

  “Marines.”

  “It figures. Yeah, thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “The ride. Thanks for the ride to Toronto.”

  By the time Miranda awakened, late Monday morning, Morgan was having tea with biscuits in Cambridge. She and Clancy had watched television in Elke’s apartment until they were saturated with vampires and tired of reiterating appreciative responses like two old hippies sharing a joint. Coming down made them edgy and they set out on the road before sunrise. Since there was no hurry and only Sunday traffic, they decided to have a late breakfast in Boston, which was significantly out of the way.

  When they got to Faneuil Hall in the Boston Market, they were famished and they grazed from one stall to the next, eating bagels and waffles and baked beans and whatever appealed in the moment, throwing away what they could not eat or did not like. Miranda confided she felt like an ecological terrorist, wanton with waste, and they donated twenty dollars each to a street musician busking in the morning sun.

  They forced themselves to walk for an hour, over to Boston Common and around through the narrow streets of Beacon Hill, until the vaguest pangs of hunger returned, then drove across the Charles River to pay homage to Harvard on their way through to Concord, where they had already determined they would have a picnic lunch beside Walden Pond, and a swim if it was possible, legal or otherwise. Miranda chattered to Clancy about Waterloo County, filling in details she had not mentioned at dinner with Elke. She had grown up in a village called Waldron, she had a friend called Celia, she still owned the family home, although it was empty, she had a few relatives, stragglers from generations older than her, living across the Grand River Flats in what used to be Preston, which along with Hespeler and Galt were now swallowed up in an amalgamation without any centre called Cambridge.

  They drove through Harvard Square and parked off Massachusetts Avenue near the gates of Harvard itself in the heart of Cambridge Mass, as she called it, and walked among the red-brick buildings and towering trees for an hour. She wondered about Morgan in London. It would be Sunday dinner by then. Was he washing down a meat pie with a pint of draft Guinness in The Bunch of Grapes? She had never been to London, but he had told her about his local, implying he had been a frequent visitor and not usually alone. She could not remember what his friend’s name was, but she knew she had copper-red hair.

  “Do you think this job is easy?” Alistair Ross demanded of Morgan and Elke. “It is not easy, I assure you. It is not easy at all.”

  Morgan glanced around the room, looking for a brollie and bowler. He was gratified to discover both on a stand by the door, just behind the chair where Elke was sitting like a truant schoolgirl, waiting out the headmaster’s rant.

  Ross got up and walked rapidly three paces toward Morgan, then veered so as not to collide. He wheeled upon Elke and strode by with such bluster he nearly tripped over her outstretched legs, which she withdrew just in time to avoid calamity.

  “They put me here, liaison, you know. It is a French word, as if we don’t have enough of our own. I am not the liaison officer, I am a liaison officer — do you see the distinction? Well, what is it you expect? Speak up, one of you, one at a time.”

  “Perhaps you should sit down,” said Elke in a soothing but sombre voice, abandoning her passive role for something more dominant as she rose to her feet and began slowly to back him into the far wall by the curtainless window, from which point he had only one safe retreat and that was behind his desk into a sitting position, which he assumed with relief as she closed in. She leaned over and smoothed the lick of hair draped across his forehead.

  “Now then,” he said, his confidence apparently restored by her ministrations. He looked past Elke to address Morgan as if she were no longer there. “What is it I can do for you, sir?”

  “Nothing,” said Morgan. If this man was meant to arrange his meeting with Elke Sturmberg, his purpose had already been accomplished. It seemed unlikely he would lend further clarity to the situation.

  “Good,” said Alistair Ross. “Then, if you will excuse me, I have a lot to do.”

  “Have you?” said Elke, moving into his line of vision. “Are you expecting visitors?”

  “Actually, I am. How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “No, it was deduction, you must be a detective.”

  “Wine expert.”

  “Whine? What, what?”

  Elke glanced over at the umbrella and bowler and smiled at Morgan. “Mr. Ross,” she said, “were you expecting a detective from Toronto?”

  “Apparently I was.”

  “That would be him over there, Detective Morgan.”

  “But you arrived first, you take priority. Detective Morgan will have to wait.”

  “No, I’m here to meet Detective Morgan. Morgan, help me.”

  “We’re here to meet each other,” Morgan explained.

  “Then why bother me?” said Alistair Ross. “I am a busy man. It is not easy being l’officier liaison.”

  “I thought there were several,” said Morgan.

  “What?”

  “Liaison officers.”

  “We are a special cohort — how many of us, I am not prepared to say.”

  “More than two, less than twenty,” said Elke.

  “How did you know?”

  “Elke,” said Morgan. “I think we could take our leave now,
without causing offence.”

  “Elke, is it? I’m waiting for someone called Elke,” Ross observed. “It is not a common name, what?”

  “Thank you,” said Morgan, motioning to Elke with a nod in the direction of the door. “If we see her, we’ll send her right on.”

  “How very kind.”

  “Not at all,” said Morgan as they slipped out the door and left Alistair Ross to his own devices.

  A clerk looked up from her desk and winked. They walked on, not daring to say a word. Emerging onto a side street, they cut through several laneways and came out on Whitehall not far from Downing Street. There was no sign of anyone following them.

  “Well, what do you think that was all about?” said Elke, finally allowing herself to laugh as they walked toward Westminster Abbey.

  Morgan shrugged, indicating he was pondering the question with great gravity.

  Inside the Abbey, in the Poet’s Corner, surrounded by the mortal remains of so many cultural luminaries, he at last found the words.

  “The guy was a clinical fruit bar.”

  “I think the English are charming and strange.”

  “I think my people and your people, whoever they are, used the office of Alistair Ross as a rendezvous. He wasn’t supposed to understand what was happening. And I think he’s whatever the police equivalent is of shell-shocked. I’ll bet there are others throughout New Scotland Yard; they’re harmless enough, waiting for their pensions to kick in. It’s bountiful eccentricity, much better than consigning the poor sods to an institution or early retirement watching re-runs of Coronation Street.”

  “Does that happen often with police?”

  “Possibly it does in all jobs, I don’t know. Do accountants burn out? I expect they do.”

  “But you deal with death.”

  “So do morticians. Do you suppose undertakers look after their own walking wounded, or maybe send them off to dig graves?”

  “Morgan, what are we doing in Westminster Abbey?”

  “Where would you rather be?”

  “Cambridge.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I need to go there. I’d like you to come.”

  “To Cambridge? Why not? Providing you answer a question.”

  “Sure.”

  “Who are you … and all that that implies?”

  “A big question. I can tell you some things, not everything. Let’s take a pew, I’ll try to explain.”

  Morgan breathed a deep sigh. From where he was sitting, he could see the sarcophagi of numerous kings and queens of the realm. What fascinated him more were the spidery lines of architectural stonework, solid and beautiful, mysterious and ephemeral. He looked at the woman beside him. She was not necessarily going to tell him the truth, but at least she was about to talk and maybe he’d see through the lies.

  “Carlo Sebastiani contacted me.”

  He was surprised she chose to start there, but pleased she was making a start.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. I got to know Tony.”

  “One-armed Tony? What do you mean, got to know him?”

  “I got to know him. Tony Di Michele. He’s not a bad guy.”

  “Yes he is.”

  “Well, not in the sense I mean. He’s intelligent, ambitious —”

  “And a drug-dealing gangster.”

  “He doesn’t sell.”

  “Yes, he does. He sells to the sellers. That doesn’t make him less responsible for the misery and degradation.”

  “Morgan, don’t lecture. Carlo heard about me from Tony. Carlo called and we had a meeting.”

  “A meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “The blond, the gunman, and the godfather. Go on.”

  “It was Ivan Muritori who introduced me to Tony. When Ivan tried to unload the wine through me, Tony got upset. So did Carlo.”

  “Why?”

  “Okay, Morgan. Follow this. I used Ivan to get to Tony to get to Carlo. Capiche?”

  “This was not a chain of coincidence.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what? Why was my connection with the Sebastiani family not a coincidence? Or why am I telling you this?”

  “Both.”

  “I’m bringing you in because it’s not safe for you on the outside.”

  “On the outside of your own very hazardous world?”

  “Exactly. Trust me. Morgan, I knew about the wine scam long before Ivan exposed it to Beverley Auctions and, theretofore, the world.”

  “Thereafter. You don’t mean theretofore. I’ve never heard a living person utter the word, except maybe a lawyer.”

  “Miranda was right.”

  “About what?”

  “You really are pedantic. Mind you, she meant it in the nicest possible way.”

  “So, what was Ivan’s crime that he died for?”

  “Not for knowing me. And not for blowing the scam. He knew other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for starters, he crunched numbers and came up with discrepancies.”

  “When?”

  “When I told him the wine was bogus, he started snooping into weights and measures and the importation of Lebanese wine into Canada. He got into the Bonnydoon Winery accounts. Not the secret ones. The public records. Trust Ivan, he found minute discrepancies that could only be accounted for if something else had been shipped in the casks along with the wine, before they were dumped into the blending tanks.”

  “And for this he was killed.”

  “Morgan, the mob was pissed off but the mob did not kill him.”

  “What was in the barrels?”

  “The casks, they were from Lebanon.”

  “Yes?”

  “Drugs. A lot of drugs on a regular basis from Afghanistan, via the white powder road through Iran, Iraq, Syria.”

  “The dangerous complexities expand exponentially. So who do you work for? If you knew all that, why wouldn’t the Sebastianis, the Ciccones, and every other gangster, biker, and street corner pusher want to kill you?”

  “Carlo Sebastiani was attempting to save my life.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What? You’re going to keep me in the dark? Is this some kind of a game?”

  “You might say so. Trust me, Morgan. Sebastiani had the best of intentions — in regard to my well-being and Miranda’s.”

  “Let’s take another direction. Why did you go north?”

  “To Canada? To Rochester. Carlo arranged for a contact but I was intercepted and taken to Buffalo. From there it was pretty much like I told you. Except I wasn’t blindfolded. No one saw the need — I was a dead woman from the moment they nabbed me. They stuffed me into the back of the plane, but I got to see Niagara Falls from the air, and a memorable view of Niagara-on-the-Lake. It looked like an architect’s model.”

  “So, you’ve seen our Mr. Savage face to face. That’s why they want you dead.”

  “That’s part of it, yes.”

  “But I’ve seen him too, and they haven’t killed me.”

  “They needed you, Morgan, to get to me. On London Bridge, they had us together. They missed a grand opportunity.”

  “They’re still after me and you let me go back to the Vanity Fair? Thanks.”

  “I didn’t think they’d do it. They were counting on you leading them to me a second time. They needed you alive.”

  “You were speculating with my bloody life.”

  “But you survived. We’re here now, together.”

  “Exactly. I wonder if they respect the sanctuary of the Church.”

  “I would be certain they do not.”

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” said Morgan, suddenly seeing every shadow moving inside Westminster Abbey as a possible assassin.

  Boarding the train from King’s Cross Station for Cambridge, Morgan and Elke found an empt
y compartment. They sat opposite each other as the train lurched into motion. Morgan covertly gazed at her bare legs, which were considerably revealed by the way she sat, and he surreptitiously glanced at the maddening way she wore the strap of her large handbag over her far shoulder, even though she was sitting, so it crossed between her breasts, accentuating their individuality. Damn, he thought, do women know when they’re doing that? What? he asked himself. Doing what? That. Making their breasts stand out.

  As the train rolled out into the countryside north of London, he became aware that he was slouching so his slacks bound up against him. Damn, he thought, as he adjusted himself, do women notice things like this? Her eyes were half closed, but he swore she was watching when he raised himself upright and tried without drawing attention to make himself comfortable.

  The door slid open and a man carrying a trench coat stepped in, nodded to them both when they looked up, and sat down beside Morgan. He had the unhealthy skin of someone who avoided the sun and a full mustache. Middle Eastern, perhaps. Not Arab, perhaps Persian, and class-conscious, preferring unhealthy pallor to the working-class ravages of desert sunlight. The man stared at Elke’s legs, at one point bending his head to the side to afford himself a better view.

  When he caught Morgan observing him, he smiled as if they were conspirators. Morgan resented his presumption and scowled.

  The man sat back, appearing to doze. All three of them seemed lulled almost to sleep by the clackety rocking of the train. Morgan started suddenly, shaking his head to wake up. He glanced at Elke. Her eyes were on his. When she caught his gaze, she lowered her eyes to one side. Morgan glanced casually in the direction she indicated and saw that the man was holding a semi-automatic in his lap, covered by his coat. Only the snout was visible, but the bend of his arm made it clear he had his finger on the trigger.

  When he saw they both knew he was holding a gun, the man spoke. “Do not move, please, Mr. Morgan, Miss Sturmberg —”

  “I prefer Ms.”

  “Miss Sturmberg, you will kindly shut up.”

  “No,” said Elke. “What do you think, Morgan?”

  She seemed entirely nonplussed. Morgan was impressed.

  “He doesn’t have a silencer,” said Morgan. “So he’s not intending to shoot until we pull into Cambridge.”