Cipher

by John Jantunen

  for tanja

  cipher (noun)

  1 A cryptogram made by rearranging the individual characters of a plain text or by substituting others in their place. 2 An arithmetical symbol (0) of no value by itself, but which when placed after a figure or figures in whole numbers increases their value tenfold. 3 The continuous sounding of any note upon an organ, owing to the imperfect closing of a valve.

  ONE

  As far as I know, Ruby Yee was the first person to figure out who’d kidnapped Lester Mann’s granddaughter. She owned a store at the corner of Broad and 15th, the weathered sign over the front door simply reading ‘Groceries, Smokes & Confectionary.’ I’d been going there three times a week ever since she’d trapped a shoplifter in a garbage dumpster. When I’d pulled up in my cruiser — I was still driving a marked car back then and wearing a uniform, that’s how long ago it was — she was standing on top, stamping her feet on the lid and yelling in a shrill mix of English and Cantonese. My amusement quickly gave way to the sense of duty I felt in those days and I helped her down and let the kid out.

  He was taller than she was by a head, though he couldn’t have been older than ten. If I’d had the chance I would have asked her how she’d managed to get him in there, her being a good way to fifty and small and frail and otherwise looking like she was about to be blown away with the dust and litter that tosses around Regina whenever there’s no one using the streets (which seems a godawful lot of the time for a city the size of ours). But as soon as the kid was on the ground she started hitting him with a broom handle, and it was all I could do to get him in my car without earning a few lumps of my own. The prisoner secured, I turned back to Ruby intending to give her a full account of what the books had to say about forcible confinement. Before I could more than open my mouth, she gave me a sharp “Sank you,” thrust a brown paper bag into my hand then hurried into her store to attend to the half-dozen customers who’d taken up residence at the cash register.

  I ate through the contents of the bag on a park bench not far from the address the kid gave me when I asked him where he lived. He stank like a whole lot of dead things had been rolled up in a pile of leaves and set on fire. I’d felt sorry for him and for myself for having to spend the rest of the day in a car that had taken to smelling as bad as he did. I saw no harm in giving him a stern warning and letting him out a few blocks from home. In the bag there were two billiard-sized balls of dough rolled in sesame seeds as well as a sampling of pastries — poppyseed and coconut and one that smelled enough like ginger to send it to the bottom of the garbage can beside the bench after I was done with the rest. The others didn’t make much of an impression but the doughy pool balls sure did. Inside each one was a thick, purplish paste that was sweet and sour and spicy all at once, and I spent the rest of the morning wondering how long it would take my stomach to revolt if I took to eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with the odd snack in between to keep my spirits up.

  Two days after Trisha Mann disappeared, I came into the store like I always did: hurrying past Ruby reading a Chinese daily behind the till, letting the scent lead me to the rear where she kept the baked goods warm in a glass case. I helped myself, which I’d learned was the custom, and took my time getting to the front again. A loose floorboard at the end of the chip aisle squeaked underfoot so that Ruby’s hands had dispensed with the paper and were hovering over the cash register as I approached.

  Aside from a few lines at the corners of her mouth and a lightening of the three freckles at the crest of each of her cheeks, the years had left her as they’d found her. Standing there as I was — too much sag for a man with so few clothes in his closet, a lattice of broken veins making a map of my face and the curse of age in every step that I tried not to take lightly because it’d been six months since a hangnail had almost lost me my big toe and it shouldn’t still hurt so much but it did — time seemed to fold around us. The feeling that I was twenty years in the past, with nothing to look forward to beyond the hope that our hands would touch when Ruby passed me my change, produced a sudden longing in me. I’m certain that if she hadn’t said what she did next, I’d have done what the longing was telling me to do and this’d be a different story, and maybe even a happy one. But she said, “I know who the bad, bad man is,” and the moment slipped away.

  “Which bad, bad man is that?” I asked.

  “The one who did the bad, bad thing.”

  “I see.”

  But I didn’t really, and I stared up at the Chinese soap opera playing on the TV behind her.

  “He took the little man.”

  “Huh?”

  “The girl.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The little Mann girl.”

  “You’re trying to tell me you know who kidnapped Trisha Mann?”

  “That’s what I say.”

  My eyes drifted back from the TV. She hadn’t made a move for either of the tens I’d set on the counter and I thought it best not to quibble.

  “He come in store every day. He, like you, eat Ruby Yee’s special black bean balls and rolls with sausage, not like you. He buy one bottle of milk. Every day, he do this, for one year. Then, three days ago, he come in. He buy all Ruby Yee’s special black bean balls and all rolls with sausage and nine breads and cheese and many bags of milk and peanut butter and chips and more. He spend three hundred dollar. Who spend three hundred dollar at Ruby Yee’s? No one, that’s who. Still, I don’t complain. Three hundred dollar. Good for Ruby Yee. After he pay, he get in car, a big car, grey I think, I not see driver. Next day that girl disappear.”

  “So you’re saying he took her. Trisha Mann?”

  “I not policeman. What you say matter.”

  No arguing with her there, though I thought it was likely the only thing she had gotten right since I’d come in.

  “You know his name?”

  “T-Ball.”

  “T-Ball?”

  “That’s what he say on cellphone. He answer, ‘T-Ball.’ No hello, no how are you? Just ‘T-Ball.’ Then he listen, sometime grunt, then he hang up.”

  “T-Ball. Perfect.”

  I jotted it down on the palm of my hand quick enough that she didn’t notice I was using my index finger instead of a pen.

  “You find?”

  “That’s my job.”

  I ate all six of my black bean balls in the parking lot of Mann Stadium, where the Roughriders played. It was only when I was crumpling the bag on the way to a garbage can chained to a light post that I remembered I was planning on saving two for later. No matter, I told myself, Ruby Yee’s is open ’til eight, and I did my best jumper, meaning my heels were off the ground when I released. I watched the wadded-up bag drift left and fall short of the can by two feet then glanced up at the billowing white dome rounding out ten stories of concrete and glass.

  It was mostly a coincidence that I’d come to the stadium for my morning snack. It was the first place that had sprung to mind when contemplating a little private time, which had more to do with the Roughriders being out of town than with the fact that it was owned by Lester Mann. He’d built it for the team right after he’d made his famous “Deal Of The Century” where he’d cleared $1.8 billion on a plot of scrub tundra so barren that even the Indians didn’t bother raising a stink. This was three years back, when he was already rich from flipping four or five subdivisions that had sat empty since the developer had split with enough government coin to make sure he’d never have to pay taxes again. Most people figured he’d gone somewhere warm and that was about the only lead we had on him, though the Mounties handled that case, as they did the abduction of Trisha Mann, so who was I to say?

  There wasn’t a vehi
cle in sight as I marvelled at what $430 million and change got you, all for a team that hadn’t won a Cup in fifteen years. Of course, this was coming from someone who’d never had much time for football; a serious character flaw as far as Regina was concerned and one that went a good way to explaining why I sought out empty parking lots on a morning when anyone in his right mind would have been looking for a crowded beach or a patio, winter being what it is in Saskatchewan and summer being so short.

  Returning to my car, I let the air con work its magic on the sweat making a swamp of my shirt. I hadn’t bothered turning off the motor while I ate. I wasn’t paying for the gas after all and it was already crazy hot, something I’ve failed to mention, along with the fact that I knew exactly who Ruby Yee was talking about when she said the name T-Ball.

  His real name was Terrence Bell; Terry-B when he was a kid selling pot to the high school football team, T-Bone by the time he was getting drunk and running over a twelve-year-old boy on his best friend’s motorcycle and finally T-Ball, a tag he’d picked up during the eighteen months he’d served afterwards. Not a bad kid: no history of violence, no pleading innocent to things everyone knew he did, no trouble at all as far as the law was concerned. After he hit the boy, he’d called an ambulance. He waited until he could see its lights before fleeing the scene. And he would have made it too if he hadn’t crashed his motorbike into a lamppost at the end of the block — which is maybe how he came to be called T-Ball in jail, the stitches in his head making him look more like a baseball than a steak. He’d have fallen plenty short of a list of possibles on something like an abduction, but the sudden longing I’d felt at Ruby Yee’s still had my guts in a knot and I couldn’t shake the hope that we might yet have a future together and that this was as good a day as any to start it.

  I spent the afternoon plugged into my computer. A few months previous my annual physical had landed me on administrative duties. I was supposed to be writing a report on the escalating Native gang crisis in the city but I saw no harm in a quick diversion, so long as it was in the name of The Public Good. By quitting time I’d pasted together a few choice excerpts from his criminal record and copied it to a brief sketch of what Ruby had said along with a half-dozen names of people Terrence was known to associate with. On my way out, I passed what I’d written to Mathers, my superintendent.

  “Where’s that report on the Indians?” he asked, not even looking up from his desk.

  That was as close to a hello and a goodbye as I got from him in those days. I flashed him a smile to show him there were no hard feelings.

  And that was the end, I thought, of that.

  Two nights later Terrence Bell proved me wrong by throwing Trisha Mann out of a speeding car and it’s a good bet that I was the last damn fool who ever called him not a bad kid.

  TWO

  In the days that followed, outrage over this heinous crime filled the columns of Regina’s daily, The Leader-Post. The Mann family’s grief became our own and Trisha’s picture rarely wandered far from the front page. Her death became a nightmare from which none of us could awake and I waited for Terrence to be tied to her murder but his name never once made the news.

  Then, one morning, I came into Ruby Yee’s and found her sitting bolt upright behind the counter, the TV quiet behind her and no sign of a newspaper to keep her from getting right to the point.

  “He’s back.”

  “T-Ball?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  I resisted the urge to ask if she’d heard of something called a telephone, eager as I was to get to the warming case where I found there was a decided lack of anything resembling a sesame seed–coated billiard ball.

  “He take all Ruby Yee’s special black bean balls,” she told me, “and rolls with sausage too. And two bottles of milk. Spend forty-three dollar. Not so bad for Ruby Yee.”

  I set three coconut-filled pastries and a slice of lemon poppyseed loaf on the counter, rounding it off with one of the pepperoni sticks she had propped in a cardboard box next to the till, then counted off enough money to keep her from saying anything else. I was at the door when she lobbed the parting shot I knew was coming but it still hit me like a brick thrown through a plate glass window.

  “Maybe you have better luck this time.”

  Honestly I can’t remember what I said in response. It was something along the lines of yeah, or it could have just been a grunt, but what I was really thinking was, “Ain’t enough luck left to make a damn bit of difference now.”

  Because I didn’t say this, Ruby Yee didn’t let out a sigh, and I didn’t walk back and lean over the counter and hold her in my arms, praying that the world would end right then so I’d never have to let her go. Instead I returned to my car and sat there alone, unable to drive for fear that the motion would jiggle something loose in me and tarnish a record that stretched back to the eighth grade when Teddy Crozier had pushed me to the ground during recess. Lying with my face in the mud had made Christy Wright laugh in a way that opened up all the grief I’d stored since I was a baby and crying came as easy as drinking milk from my mother’s tit.

  I thought about Trisha Mann and told myself that it didn’t matter what I’d turned over to Mathers, that even if I hadn’t tuned him into Terrence Bell, Clayton Farber, the head of Mann Industry’s security, still would have found out that one of the people who’d kidnapped his employer’s granddaughter went by the name T-Ball. And even without my list of his known associates, I’m almost certain that Clayton would have followed standard investigative procedure and compiled a list of his own, one that couldn’t have failed to include Walter “Scorch” Hering, a petty thug who just happened to have spent the last six months of a three-year stretch in the same cell as Horace Milne, a chartered accountant serving time for embezzling a nickel short of one million dollars from the Shady Hills Retirement Village. Tracking all possible leads, Farber would still have followed the trail to the ranch house Milne used when entertaining the friends his wife knew nothing about, the keys to which Horace entrusted to Scorch in exchange for a little hand on the inside. The very place T-Ball and two others had held Trisha Mann until Clayton Farber and his team, acting, so the official record states, without the knowledge of the RCMP, stormed the front door and shot Daryl Madding, whose last act was to radio his older brother, guarding the girl with T-Ball in a bunker at the back of the property where, I’ve heard said, Horace Milne took the women he’d saved for himself so as not to offend his guests with the acts of wilful savagery he thought his newfound wealth entitled him to. Not finding the girl in any of the rooms, even without my involvement Clayton and his men would have searched the grounds and stumbled on the bunker ten minutes too late to save Trisha, who was already speeding away in the back seat of a stolen car with two of her abductors, the coroner’s report indicating that it must have been driving in excess of 160 kilometres per hour; a fact they were able to determine from how far her body rolled after it was ejected from the vehicle, and by how much skin they’d had to scrape off the asphalt.

  Thinking of this, and telling myself I wasn’t to blame, and that I ought to stop wasting the taxpayer’s dime and get to work, I drove north out of town. Ten minutes past the city limits I took a right on a dirt road that my GPS insisted didn’t exist. I’d been down there once before — there wasn’t a badge in Regina who hadn’t — and I knew that just around the corner a regimented cluster of jack pines gave way to an eight-foot-tall span of sharpened spikes bound into a fence. Some would have called it wrought iron and coming upon it again I could see why: the sight of it had my stomach doing backflips. I chewed on the pepperoni stick to calm it down. While I drove the half kilometre to the gate I assured myself that I’d have plenty of time to savour the rest of my snack when I got there, knowing as I did that the Mounties had secured it with a chain and padlock the week before. But the gate was standing wi
de open and as I eased the car through it I subdued the growl rumbling from beneath my belt with a promise that I’d throw it a bone when I got to the house. Halfway up the drive, I could see it through the cracks in a grove of cherry trees, their limbs heavy with fruit and enlivened by the forage of several hundred crows. On the far side of the orchard, the ranch house was as long as a ten-story building set on its side, its six-peaked roof steepled with terracotta. Of the two dozen windows I could see, all were dark.

  I parked behind a grey Mercedes housed under a carport big enough to hold a small fleet of the same. It had dealer’s plates, which I took to mean that it had gone missing from a used car lot. I was about to call it in — I’d gone so far as to pick up my radio and was holding it to my lips — when I spotted the motorcycle tucked into the corner behind a riding lawn mower. It was a racing bike, blue with silver highlights, that much I could see. I made a down payment on the debt I owed to my stomach with a pinch from the lemon loaf and got out to take a closer look. As I’d suspected, it was a Suzuki GSX-R1000, a machine that a Google search had told me was known in some circles as Jack the Ripper, on account of the noise it made and how hard it was to catch: the same bike that Terrence, then T-Bone, had driven into a light post three years earlier.

  If I were a better cop, there wouldn’t have been any question as to what I should do. But then if I were a better cop, I wouldn’t have been thinking about what’d happened the last time I’d followed protocol. The thought of Trisha Mann hitting the highway at 160 kilometres per hour and the sound she must have made — like a flat tire flapping on asphalt — gave me plenty of reasons to turn my back on Jack the Ripper and walk to the door on the far side of the carport, thinking it was as good a place to start as any. I tried the knob but it was locked. Pondering my next move, I spied a trail of footprints etched in dust and dabbed with blood on the cement floor. Someone versed in the intricacies of forensic science might have been able to glean a whole lot about who’d made them from their size — petite — and the delicate arch the toes made away from the heel, and maybe even something about the person’s frame of mind — whether they were running scared or taking a midnight stroll. All I could tell was that they were coming from the other side of the carport’s open back door and that they were too small to be made by a man.