Blood Wine

by John Moss

  “Getting the colours lined up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever think about what holds it all together?”

  “Hooks and elastics? Swivels and tracks?”

  “I suppose. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “Toronto time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Morgan.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s good to have you back.”

  “Yeah. It’s good to be here. Enjoy your bath, sleep well.”

  “Call me in the morning.”

  “G’night.”

  21

  Toronto the Good

  “Amazing!” Morgan exclaimed over morning coffee. “If even half your story is true, you’re an Amazon. And Frankie, you and Frankie fighting the bad guys together? That is a truly formidable team. They didn’t have a chance. My role was more passive, it was Elke in charge. She’s a trained agent, she kills for a living. Or knows how to kill. My goodness, Miranda, we’re supposed to find dead people and solve murders, not be there for the killing or get ourselves killed.”

  “That about sums it up, Morgan.”

  They had been talking for two hours in Tim Hortons near the Summerhill subway station. She accepted his sympathy for her hands encased in surgical gloves full of ointment. She smiled broadly at his account of Alistair Ross, the liaison officer at New Scotland Yard, and shared his admiration for the venerable mullah of Cambridge. She thrilled to his description of dodging shotgun pellets in the turgid waters of the Thames, and was pleased to match his escapade with her own, fleeing bullets in the roiling waters of the Grand. She was perplexed by Elke’s cool dispatch, executing the man in the train, until she connected it to the shooting of Gianni under the Humber Bridge. But what really threw her was discovering that the night Elke had presented herself at her apartment, she had been faking dementia from shock and intentionally peed on her floor. Miranda was disturbed but fascinated by the inevitability of their friendship.

  Morgan laughed at her recital of the phone messages from Clancy and Ellen Ravenscroft. The fact that Miranda had not herself realized Clancy was gay he found strangely satisfying. He did not mention his brief trysts with either Frankie or Elke. He and Miranda seldom talked about sexual intimacy, although not from shyness, for they were both very open about other details of their lives. Once, Morgan had had a lurid encounter with two young women from the secretarial staff at Headquarters, and he had not even told her about that — but it was because he suspected they had used him as a fantasy toy rather than because he felt incredibly shallow and enjoyed it.

  “We’re at an impasse,” said Morgan.

  “The focus has tightened tremendously,” said Miranda.

  “Yeah, Mr. Savage, we get him and it’s over.”

  “We bring him in, Morgan. Alive.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “It’s what’s going to happen. Agreed?”

  “We’ll see.” He had not told her about his commission to eliminate Savage with a minimum of legal theatrics; he had not decided whether it was, in fact, his mission.

  “Your people want him dead even more than I do,” she said, reading his mind.

  “They’re not my people. And I’m certainly not theirs.”

  “A secret agent.”

  “Two secret agents. I don’t work for them.”

  “But they were pretty convincing.”

  “They each have their causes. Both find radical fundamentalism offensive. She thinks the terrorists will strike at her homeland, he thinks they will prevent his homeland from being established. Me, I’m a homicide detective like you. I’m not an agent for anybody.”

  “Well, for all the terrorist implications of what we’re into, Morgan, and a visceral need on my part to see his balls on a platter — I think we’d better concentrate on finding him and let the system look after the rest.”

  “So let’s go.”

  “Let’s.”

  Since they had absolutely no leads, they took the subway down to College and Yonge and walked over to Police Headquarters. Inside, manning the desk in their division, Morgan recognized Don Smith, the brother of the Bobby at the Arms and Armaments Show in Earls Court. He saluted the older man and got a cheery wave in return. Morgan walked over to him. All he could think of to say was, Ronnie sends his regards. It wasn’t much on which to start a relationship.

  “You’ll never guess who I was talking to,” said Morgan.

  “My brother Ronnie, I imagine.”

  Morgan grinned. “How on earth did you know that?”

  “Simple deduction, my dear Watson.”

  “Well, Mr. Holmes, perhaps you would edify.”

  “I heard you were in England, Detective. On the desk, I generally know where people are when they’re away. And your eagerness, ‘you’ll never guess?’ It had to be someone special, and the incredulity suggested uncanny coincidence. That pretty much narrowed it down to my brother or the Queen Mother.”

  “Well, he’s a good man,” said Morgan. “He broke the rules and let me go where I shouldn’t.”

  “Good men question the rules, Detective Morgan. Great men break them. We’ll have to have a pint sometime.”

  “I look forward to it,” said Morgan.

  Alex Rufalo was in his office and motioned them in. Spivak and Stritch were busy with paperwork as they walked by but glanced up. Detective Bourassa nearly bumped into Miranda and smiled shyly. His huge face was still swollen from where Morgan had popped him.

  “Shut the door behind you,” said the superintendent.

  Miranda and Morgan settled into chairs facing him and all three of them waited expectantly.

  “Well?” the superintendent finally said.

  “Well, what?” said Morgan.

  “You two are back on track?”

  “Yeah,” said Morgan. “How about you?” As soon as he spoke, Morgan realized the indiscretion. If occasionally he and Alex Rufalo shared a few drinks and exchanged confidences, it was outside the office. Nothing secret, but outside the office.

  “Yeah, sure, we’re on track,” said Morgan before Rufalo had a chance to respond.

  “You want to fill me in?”

  “There’s nothing much to tell,” said Morgan. “I think Elke Sturmberg has disappeared. She wasn’t much help, anyway. I’d say she was an innocent victim caught up in a series of unpleasantries. She handled herself well, and she’s gone. We don’t need her.”

  Miranda was stunned. Morgan was leaving the superintendent out of the loop. Was this strategy? Did he think they needed to work outside the law — or was he buying in to his reluctant role as a counterterrorist? Either way, he had clearly, and so far as she knew, spontaneously, chosen to exclude the Toronto Police from his plans. Not that he had any plans.

  “What about you, Detective?” said the superintendent, turning to Miranda. “You and Frankie Ciccone, what was that all about? Racing around Rosedale! Who is or was Tony Di Michele? Mafia, for God’s sake, from New Jersey. How did you get yourself caught between sides in a gangster bloodfest? This isn’t good for business, this kind of publicity.”

  Miranda looked to Morgan. He stared back expressionless. She took her cue from that and simply shrugged.

  “Okay, then,” said Rufalo, “go out there and do something.”

  “For sure,” said Morgan as he and Miranda rose to their feet.

  “I want the whole story,” said Rufalo. “I want the pieces to fit.”

  “We’ll do our best,” said Miranda.

  “It’s us and the OPP and the Mounties and God knows who else. I want a nice neat package we can all take home.”

  Morgan winked as they walked out Rufalo’s door. She knew he was thinking about the impossibility of taking one package to multiple homes, about the proliferation of stories without closure, about the mechanism inside a Rubik’s cube.

  They sat down at their desks, which opposed each other, back to back. They flipped on their computers and started r
iffling through accumulated paperwork. Miranda would have to complete her account of her Waterloo Country adventure with sufficient detail to satisfy the Cambridge Police and the OPP, as well as her superintendent. Morgan had to justify an expensive trip to England that was apparently a waste of resources. They worked quietly for the rest of the morning without looking up or comparing notes.

  Lunch in the food court under the old Eaton’s College Street department store with Spivak and Stritch and a few others from the office, including a sheepish Bourassa and his partner, was a raucous affair. It was rare that they ate out together, but this was an occasion. Bourassa had picked up a lead from a contact in New York and closed down some bikers who had knocked off a runner for the mob. No arrests, but the bike club had picked up and gone back to Quebec. This was as close to a celebration as Homicide cops generally allowed themselves, at least during the daylight hours.

  “I met a guy in New Jersey who knows you,” Miranda said to Bourassa while trying to negotiate a collapsing taco shell stuffed with chili. “He used to. He’s dead.”

  “Yeah, I’ve known a few down there.”

  “You get around, don’t you?” said Spivak.

  “Yeah,” said Bourassa. “Some.”

  “You too,” said Spivak to Morgan. “Gawd, everyone gets around but me and Stritch.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Stritch in his most funereal voice. No one knew quite what he meant, but it seemed funny and everyone laughed.

  “Did you really go to law school?” Miranda asked Bourassa.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Columbia.”

  “The country or the university?”

  “New York,” he said.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Did you graduate?” As soon as Miranda asked, she was annoyed with herself.

  “Actually, I did. Third in my class. So what?”

  “Oh,” she said with relief. “Did you practice?” It seemed unlikely, but it seemed politically correct to inquire.

  “I came home. I would have had to do the Ontario bar exams. Wasn’t interested. Saw enough in law school, I wanted to be a cop.”

  “Did you ever tell anyone you failed out?”

  “Yeah, sure. There’ve been times when it’s better being a dumb lawyer than a cop.”

  “Even a smart cop?” said Miranda.

  “He fakes it,” said Spivak, uncertain what his point was.

  “There’s too much moral ambiguity being a lawyer,” said Bourassa in the most coherent statement he had ever made about police work. “I prefer enforcing the laws, not seeing how far I can bend them.”

  “The law’s loss, our gain,” said Morgan.

  The subject shifted from Bourassa, to everyone’s relief. Morgan sat back in the molded plastic seat and surveyed the scene. He was homesick for The Bunch of Grapes and at the same time pleased to be back. These were people he admired. They worked hard and they were good at what they did. Each would go off to a different life at the end of the day, some solitary and some to families. Some of them were solidly working class and some were professionals. They all earned pretty much the same, they spent money and time in different ways. That’s what he liked about being here, rather than England where class still prevailed, or the States, where the job defined who you were.

  “Hey, Morgan, wake up,” said Spivak. He likes opera, thought Morgan. His partner plays hockey, always the only black kid on the team.

  “Morgan,” said Bourassa, then turned to the woman beside him, “you know, Morgan should have been a lawyer.”

  “Yeah,” said Morgan, blowing on his knuckles, “the defense never rests.” He laughed. Bourassa collects, indiscriminately, for every charity going, walking desk to desk, door to door. His partner, Audrey, is a chess master.

  Miranda rubbed her gloved hands gently together, trying to spread ointment into the sore parts. She and her partner didn’t hang out much, but it was just what she needed, to get her mind off the case. There is no case, she thought. There’s Savage. Once he goes down, the details look after themselves.

  Suddenly she was restless but she didn’t know which way to turn. Morgan sensed her agitation. He stood up.

  “We’ve got to go,” he said. “We’ve got an interview downtown.”

  After they were out of earshot, she whispered her thanks.

  “Let’s walk for a while,” he said. “Try to relax. Say anything that comes into your mind.”

  “Anything?” She glanced sideways and caught him in profile. “You think we already know where he is, don’t you?”

  “He’s here.”

  “Where?”

  “In Toronto.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “His cuticles.”

  “His cuticles?”

  “Did you notice the hand with the ring?”

  “Notice it! Yes.”

  “It was like Savage’s hand. The cuticles were inordinately neat.”

  “Inordinately?”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t expect a man wearing a macho ring like that to have manicured nails.”

  “That was a vanity ring, Morgan. I would say he was exactly the type who would go to a professional.”

  “Whatever. Savage’s nails, they gleamed like talons. Same manicurist. And I’m betting that means they both hung out in the city.”

  “There are manicurists everywhere, Morgan, even small towns.”

  “Not ones these guys would go to. Culturally, they would find it offensive to hang around with women in a beauty salon. They’d go to, maybe a barbershop, big and fancy, where the clients get their nails done as a bonus, with a shave, and a Cuban cigar is thrown in at the end. Toronto. Big hotel, downtown.”

  They wandered south on Yonge Street then cut west on Dundas and back up University Avenue.

  “Okay,” said Morgan. “Try this for logic. The old lady, Mrs. Oughtred, she told us Mr. Savage sometimes drove to Bonnydoon and sometimes flew in by ‘aeroplane.’ I’m betting when he flew, it was from Buffalo — that’s how they brought Elke up — and when he drove, he wasn’t crossing any borders.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, and he had an extravagant house at the winery, very west coast postmodern. He and his cohort like to live well, much better I’m sure than their minions working the trenches.”

  “The trenches?”

  “Toilers in the vineyard — bad analogy. The guys working at newsstands, taxi-cabs, variety stores — murderous hours, low pay, keeping watch — how do you think they track us so easily? They’re everywhere.”

  “Morgan, that’s xenophobic.”

  “No. They’re not all foreigners.”

  “Or immigrants.”

  “No, okay, I take it back. But Savage, he likes to live well. He has a fabulous house in the country, only it’s ashes and dust now. He commuted. From where? From a great place in the city … it stands to reason. He fancies himself cosmopolitan. He’ll have a suite in a hotel in the heart of Toronto, yes!”

  “You are not being monitored by every kiosk selling lottery tickets.”

  “The lottery outlets, I hadn’t thought of them.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Do you know Mrs. Oughtred’s husband and I, we might have been distantly related?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have a family hope chest that belonged to a Haun from the Niagara area, at least two hundred years old. The old lady said her husband was a Haun on his mother’s side.”

  “It’s sad. She didn’t tell us about her own ancestry, only his. She was a woman of her era, I guess. Ninety-six years old. What an absurd way to die, blown to ashes and dust.”

  Walking north past the Ontario Legislature at Queen’s Park, they each experienced brief encounters with nostalgia evoked by university buildings visible through the trees on either side of them. Avenue Road stretched out ahead, a canyon between condos running all
the way to the tower at Upper Canada College, where it diverted around the playing fields of the privileged.

  “That’s it,” said Miranda, suddenly. “Not a hotel, a condo. We’re looking for a condo. Philip’s nails were immaculate, too — did I tell you his name was Mohammet Jousef? He was Albanian.”

  “You told me he was an Albanian. I don’t think you told me his name.”

  “Mohammet Jousef. He was educated in the States. Morgan, his nails were manicured.”

  “No big gold rings?”

  “No, he was a corporate lawyer.”

  “Miranda —”

  “I know, Philip Carter was the corporate lawyer, not Mohammet Jousef. He told me once it was an occupational thing.”

  “Getting his nails done?”

  “Washing his hands, you know, Pontius Pilate, Lady MacBeth.”

  “Ah, don’t we love lawyers. So, do you think Mr. Savage is Albanian as well?”

  “Morgan, we’re not looking for a barbershop. We’re looking for room service manicurists.”

  “At a hotel. You think these guys lived at The Four Seasons.”

  “Not necessarily. But I’m betting if we check out the manicurists in a few of the better hotels around here, we’ll find one who provides off-premises room service.”

  “Let’s give it a try.” They were within easy reach of several expensive hotels, but it seemed an arbitrary undertaking.

  “I’m betting Savage lives in one of these condos,” said Miranda, gazing up Avenue Road. “He wants to be at the centre of things. This is it. There aren’t many condos by the big hotels closer to the lake. Except down at the harbour. We’ll try there next.”

  “You think you know this guy.”

  “You’re chasing down a killer, Morgan. I’m after a nightmare. I know him, yes.”

  “And you think he’s somewhere near the corner of Bloor and Avenue Road.”

  “Toronto has any number of centres, right? But this is the centre of refined decadence. This is where he needs to be — to observe all that is dissolute about the world he wants to destroy, to revel in the richness of its inevitable demise. He’ll fuck it, the world he fears and can’t have. That’s how this guy thinks. He’ll lift its skirts for a peek, feel it up publicly, fuck it by stealth.”