Cipher

by John Jantunen

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  He stood there until I was two steps past his secretary, maybe pondering what I’d meant before deciding he must have misheard me, then hurried back into his office to answer the phone.

  eleven

  After he left the Stiltons, Curtis took the long way to get to where he was going, which just happened to be the same place that I was. I’d come to Mann Stadium for the usual reasons and one more besides. I parked as close to the main doors as a person with a working set of legs was legally allowed and turned off the car. Normally I would have let it run, it being so hot and me being so prone to sweat, but the tank was on empty and I had the feeling I was going to be there for longer than it would take to reduce the grease-stained bag in the seat beside me to a crumpled wad that, given the lack of wind and my proximity to the nearest garbage can, I gave myself even odds for making a three-point shot with, heels on the ground or not. I slid out from behind the wheel and leaned against the side of the car wondering if it’d be enough to get somebody’s attention. Hedging my bets, I set the paper bag on the hood beside me and took out my gun. I pointed it at the nearest of the three surveillance cameras I could see attached to the side of the building. I’d never once fired it in the line of duty and I’d almost convinced myself that there’s got to be a first time for everything when I heard a door slam shut and the hard clap of footsteps that were most definitely not moving away.

  One advantage to being a police officer is that I don’t feel compelled to look up when someone’s doing their best to get my attention without having to go through the bother of saying, “Excuse me.” I’ve found I can learn a lot about the person’s place on the food chain by how long they’ll stand there, arms crossed, before saying something to get me to look up. A pause of a couple of seconds means they’re around about a weasel or a martin and every tick afterwards marks off the difference between, say, a fox and a cougar until you get to a grizzly who’d stand there all day if it meant he’d get to see the quiver in your eye before he showed you his teeth.

  The man glaring at me while I holstered my gun and played peek-a-boo with the contents of the paper bag was definitely of the ursine family, along the lines of a brown or black, although he was big enough to be a Kodiak. He was wearing a charcoal grey blazer over a black golf shirt and a nick over his left ear told me he used a straight razor to cut his hair. His arms hung loosely at his side, in deference to the tight fit of his XXL jacket. When I looked up from the bag, his eyes made a point of telling me that his first blow would land in my solar plexus and after that I wouldn’t care where he hit me.

  “I’m looking for a pair of bolt cutters,” I said, angrier than I’d intended. “You seen any?”

  The mention of bolt cutters set off a chain reaction in the bear’s mind that no doubt had him wondering how long it’d take to find the nearest tool shed with a shovel, a tarp and a length of rope long enough to tie me inside of it. His left hand touched the corresponding earpiece while his right inched a fraction closer to the bulge in his sports coat, and I got a flash of what some rock climbers call the dead-willies. It’s the feeling you get when your hands are slipping with nothing but air between you and the rest of your life. Changes your perspective, I’ve heard, even if you do manage to hang on.

  “Sorry, misunderstanding.”

  I reached for my car door, forgetting that my hand was busy squishing black bean filling out of the only bite I’d had the courage to take. I let the ball drop to the asphalt and whispered a silent prayer to Ruby Yee who, at that moment, seemed as likely to be in charge as any burning bush. I had the door open and managed to get one foot inside when two more charcoal grey blazers stepped out through the front doors. Neither of them was running but my keys were still in my pocket and by the time one of the keys was doing its job, the three of them could have had my car on their shoulders, thoughts of a front-end loader blotting out those of a shovel.

  I heard the rumble of an engine and a moment later saw a single headlight angling into the parking lot. The motorcycle pulled to a stop in front of the main entrance and Curtis lifted the helmet off his head. A sudden breeze cooled the drips rolling over the folds of skin on the back of my neck, the first sign I got that I was still on the short side of not being dead.

  Curtis didn’t seem to get that anything unusual was happening not more than twenty feet from where he dismounted. He hung his helmet on his handlebars and the timidity of the first few steps he took towards the stadium quickly gave way to a curious gait, every footfall probing the land ahead as if expecting it to give out from under him. This was not the Curtis Mays I had seen the day before — he of the pickled-dick swagger — but he was there at the periphery. He was biding his time, a few things to deal with and I’ll be right back: that was what his gait was saying to me. This, his little-out-of-the-way before heading to the address on the piece of paper in his wallet, was just a taste of things to come, to see if what he’d felt back at his sister’s was true and not just gas from too much army food.

  So he did his rooster walk, his head bobbing out in front of him, seeing if he could catch sight of his futurebright in the hundred metres plus two end zones of green that lay beyond the ticket booths. At the old stadium, the Mosaic, he’d have been able to walk right out onto the field but The Mann was a different beast entirely — a sealed dome of glass and concrete — and he had to make do with a glimpse of the lobby.

  He stood at the front doors with his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels, but I was too preoccupied to give the motion any undue significance. The first of the three bears was whispering something into his headset and the other two had assumed a stance that betrayed them for what they were: soldiers caught between two fronts.

  “Hey, aren’t you Curtis Mays?”

  I was striding forward when I said it, having got the necessary thrust by pushing off from my car, and it caught the three bears off guard. I was past them by the time they reacted, two of them closing the gap between me and my vehicle and the other raising his voice a notch so that I heard him repeat the name to whoever was on the other end of the wire.

  “My niece is your biggest fan. Cutest little thing, nine years old and she’s already got your wedding planned, down to the Chinese dumplings and cherry cheesecake. You mind?”

  I held out the pen and pad that my hands had suddenly produced from my jacket. Curtis took them, not in the least bit stunned by the request.

  “Her name’s Jenni. With an i. If you could … Perfect.”

  I held it up to the light so I could read where he’d written, Looking forward to the honeymoon, with two little hearts in place of O’s on the last word, and not a squiggle to betray that he’d written it using his left hand as a table.

  “Thanks, gosh she’s going to be so happy. I can’t say how much …”

  The three bears lumbered past us, back into their forest of Astroturf and stadium seating, and I felt no need to finish my sentence. I patted Curtis on the shoulder and walked back to my car. I picked the brown paper bag off the ground and gave the contents a brief but meaningful glance. If I’d had my doubts before, I had none now: there was something magical about Ruby Yee’s special black bean balls.

  “You’re the guy,” Curtis called after me.

  “Huh?”

  It came out garbled between chews but I think my meaning was clear.

  “From yesterday morning. You a cop?”

  I nodded so I could swallow in anticipation of another bite.

  “You still looking for Terrence?”

  “Never was.”

  “Why you following me, then?”

  It was a bit of a leap; I was, after all, there first, but I let it slide.

  “I have something to show you.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Something you need to see.”

  He was still standing by his
bike when I turned my car towards the exit but I felt no need to show him my brake lights to tell him I was serious. Either he’d follow me or he wouldn’t. The questions he was asking himself would bring us back together sooner or later and right then, later was fine by me.

  A few hours previous I’d seen the uncensored version of what I was meaning to show him and even in its redacted form I wasn’t keen on a second viewing. As I pulled into the street the lone headlight was almost on top of me and it was telling me that I was making a mistake almost as Grimm as the one that had me playing Goldilocks.

  twelve

  My parents were German. They fled Berlin when it became clear that having their lives controlled by one madman wasn’t the end of their troubles; a second even madder man also had some use for a dyspeptic civil servant and sometime gardener. While my mother always did her best to prepare me for life in a new country, the one concession she gave to the old was the stories she told me to get me to go to sleep (but which usually had the opposite effect). They all came out of a solitary volume and she always read them in her native tongue. I still have the same copy and, though I’ve forgotten most of the language it’s printed in, I’m certain that there is no story in it called, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” It’s a shame, not only because it makes me think that the play on words I just used was born out of ignorance and kept out of laziness, and for the way it rolls off the tongue when spoken aloud, but also because I would surely like to find out what really happened to that yellow-haired maiden when Papa Bear came upon her sleeping in his wife’s bed. She’d still get her fairy-tale ending, for sure, but anyone who’s grown up with the stories I did has a different idea than Disney of what that means. I’m not saying there weren’t plenty of happily-ever-afters, it’s just that it was generally the wolves and the witches and the giants and, yes, the bears who got them. The rest of us weren’t so lucky. Maybe it’s a hard lesson to learn at such a tender age but it does give one pause to consider whether, later, I’d have learned a better lesson by wandering into some wild animal’s den, eating its food, busting up its furniture then falling asleep knowing that it’d be hungry when it returned, and what words of comfort the police would offer my parents when they came to give them the few scraps of clothes that were all that was left of me.

  I, myself, have had occasion to make a similar kind of house call. What I’ve always wanted to say, though never did (my mother not having raised that kind of boy), was the same thing I said to Curtis when I led him to an office chair in the northernmost corner of Halton Brothers Auto Wreck Yard.

  “Take a good look,” I told him.

  We hadn’t spoken from the time he’d parked behind me just inside the gate. There was a uniform sitting in a cruiser next to the office, a building fashioned out of scrap metal and hubcaps. As I stepped out of my car he raised his coffee cup to me then went back to watching the movie playing on the screen propped on the dash. The office itself was dark. Inside, a dog loosed barks like shotgun blasts in deference to the name he’d been given, which was 12 Gauge. The yard lights were on and I had no problem finding the office chair, its cushions made into rippling seas of seared fabric and melted foam, amongst the ten acres worth of crumpled cars and trucks.

  The first time I’d come upon the scene there were a couple of things I’d noticed right off besides the bloody mess that was hardly enough of a body to keep it tied to the chair. Foremost was the hole cut in the wire mesh fence. It didn’t take a twenty-four-year veteran to see that this was how the perpetrators gained access to the yard, but then maybe a rookie wouldn’t think to ask why 12 Gauge was locked in a crate underneath a shelf piled with carburetors when it was Mike Halton’s habit to release him into the yard every night just before locking up.

  Then there was the pair of bolt cutters discarded on the ground. They’d been dropped by the person who’d put them to use on the bloody mess tied to the chair. I agreed with Bob Hammond, the investigator assigned to the case, that whoever had put them there did so to send a message.

  Bob and I had talked about the possible nature of the message for a few minutes, drawing our own conclusions, then I’d asked him why he thought the bolt cutters were sitting where they were.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, here, not there.”

  I pointed from where we were standing, the bolt cutters still very real between us, to the hole in the fence.

  “They wanted us to find them, like I already said.”

  I nodded and smiled.

  “You’re probably right.”

  And I have no doubt that he was. Whoever’d left them there had walked fifteen steps out of his way so he could drop this instrument of torture and death in a place where the first person on the scene was very likely to step on them when he rounded an Econoline van rather than, say, tossing them into the bushes on the other side of the fence as they hurried out the hole, knowing they’d be found during a thorough search of the area. Because they knew this, they’d also know that finding them in the bushes would have made it look like the people who’d used them were amateurs who didn’t have the sense to get rid of the evidence, rather than the professionals they most certainly were. Both Bob and I agreed that was a fair approximation of what had happened. It was on the matter of why they did this that Bob’s and my opinions differed. Bob thought it related to the nature of the message. He was convinced it was a warning, probably from one gang to another. I thought it was carelessness and told him so.

  “You’re telling me that these here people, the same ones who went to all the trouble of sweeping every single one of their footprints from not only the crime scene but from the two hundred metres they walked along the fence to where they most likely parked their car — and I say most likely because they swept the tire treads away too, leaving no evidence, in fact, that they were here at all except the bloody mess over there, the hole in the fence and these here bolt cutters — those are the people that you are calling careless?”

  I admitted they were.

  “Well, what’s that say about the message they’re leaving, then?”

  I thought it was pretty obvious but answered him anyway.

  “That they couldn’t care less.”

  Bob, not one to vary the routine we’d hashed out over our years together on the Regina Police Service, shook his head as he strode off to yell at some junior officer doing nothing but standing where he’d been told to stand, a blatant move to prove who was in charge.

  And it’s true, he was in charge. I was just a bystander. The only reason I was there was because Mathers, ever the optimist, had sent me over to take a peek at the latest bloody mess the mounting gang war had deposited in his city, hoping it might spurn me to at least start on my report before the next deadline he’d set (which was the following day).

  The bloody mess’s name, I learned, was Madding, first name Lawrence. It was plain from my first look that he’d got his fairy-tale ending, the same one six of his closest relations would get to look forward to in the coming days. He hadn’t been at Halton’s long enough to start smelling and walking over to get a little private time with him, I didn’t have a hard time imagining he was just what he looked like: a half-melted wax figure replete with a horrified expression. His nose was a gored hole in the middle of his charred face, as were his ears on either side, his hands were cut off at the wrists and his feet at the ankles and both were missing all their digits, the fingers and toes scattered around the chair where they’d fallen, except for the ones 12 Gauge had taken upon discovering the body during his morning rounds.

  “Police work deals with the facts and if you ain’t got the facts then you ain’t got jack.”

  This is one of Bob’s favourite lines and he’s said it enough times to make me almost believe it’s true. But facts are funny things. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you that facts have a habit of changing as soon as you look at them. And looking at
Lawrence and the bolt cutters and the hole in the fence and thinking about 12 Gauge taking his cut in fingers and toes, the facts were realigning as surely as electrons under a microscope.

  “Imagine that,” I said to no one in particular. “He was here.”

  Knowing what I did about him, I knew he wouldn’t have come through a gap in a fence too small to walk through upright, which meant the bolt cutters were looking more like an arrow than a message.

  Forsaking goodbyes for a flutter of my hand, I followed the arrow to the front gate, trying to think of something else he might have left that’d prove my point. I poked around for a few minutes, then spent a few more kicking at the dirt to make up for the lack of anything solid. While I was getting back in my car, I thought of a new opening line for my report and wondered if it was too early to celebrate. I decided it was but that didn’t stop me from dropping by Ruby Yee’s for a quick pick-me-upper.

  I spent the rest of the day looking at people’s shoes in front of the tallest building in Regina, named after the Mann who’d built it. Sometime between that and parking at the stadium, I forgot the opening line for my report and congratulated myself for not having celebrated too soon.

  I didn’t mention any of this to Curtis when I led him to within sight of the chair. I just said my bit and lifted the police tape surrounding the crime scene. He ducked under it and made his way to the patch of dirt blackened by what looked like a pool of chocolate syrup. He took his time getting there, his movements as slow as if he were underwater, and, to his credit, followed my directions to a T. I gave him plenty of time for his good look. I had nothing but an empty Word file waiting for me back home and didn’t feel the need to rush him. After staring down at the chair long enough to draw a few conclusions of his own, he stepped to the police tape making a spider’s web out of the hole in the fence. He peered through it, then walked back to where I was leaning against the Econoline’s faux wood panelling.