Cipher

by John Jantunen

  “Especially Mr. Ling.”

  I said it with enough inflection to warrant another pinch but she refused to bite.

  “You stop her.”

  “Any idea how I’m supposed to do that?”

  “You detective, you figure out.”

  With that, Ruby Yee rang up my purchase, picked up her paper and vanished behind it.

  Once I got to headquarters, I called around to the local high schools in the order they appeared in the phone book. I knew most of the secretaries from my days working as the youth liaison and it didn’t take more than a mention of my job title to get a yay or a nay from the others. Amanda, the second to last one told me, went to Sheldon-Williams Collegiate, home of the Spartans (so she said when she answered the phone), but hadn’t been to school for a week. I asked if she knew where I could find her. She told me that they weren’t permitted to give out addresses over the phone and I asked to be transferred to Mike Roberts, the principal, a man who I’d once talked out of strangling a grade eleven student he’d caught using his own feces to write FREEDOM on the wall of the gymnasium.

  Mike remembered me right away and gave me Amanda’s address. I asked him to hold while I checked it against the one on Mr. Ling’s driver’s licence. They were the same. Back on the line, I gave Roberts a brief summary of what Ruby had told me and he gave me the names of three grade twelve students that she was known to associate with. All were males and white and from good families. Between them, my computer informed me, their parents owned three BMWs, two Volvos, one Mercedes, a couple of high-end SUVs and a Dodge Ram 3500. I asked if any had missed school recently. He called out to the front desk with the same and a few moments later told me that they hadn’t.

  I thanked him for his time and checked the police database for any addresses attached to the vehicles. There were four, the extra one being a downtown condo the Mercedes claimed as its primary residence.

  I took my lunch early, drove over to it and rang the superintendent. He met me in the lobby and asked to see my badge. He had an accent forged in the Eastern Bloc and was wearing a red terry cloth bathrobe and cowboy boots. The streaks of purple on his otherwise pale cheeks and the way he squinted against the light made me think of Romania and a certain count. His breath though, was definitely from the land of the living: three parts Johnnie Walker, one part scrambled eggs if I’d had to wager a guess. When I flashed him my credentials, I could tell he had an apartment number in mind and that he was relieved when I gave him a different one. He asked if I needed the keys and I told him that it wouldn’t be necessary but he rode up in the elevator with me anyway. He hit the five and nine buttons, telling me that there was a clogged drain on the latter floor. When the doors opened I paused long enough for him to tell me it was my stop.

  “Right,” I said and stepped into the fifth floor hallway. “Good luck with the, uh, drain.”

  He thanked me and hit the door close button too quick to hide the fear that I’d be sprinting for the stairs. I walked towards the number on the piece of paper in my pocket, chuckling to myself and thinking how there weren’t enough hours in the day. Amanda answered on the third knock. She was taller than I’d have thought, close to six foot, so I was looking into the middle of her black sports bra when she opened the door. By the time my eyes had righted themselves she was frowning and it would have made me blush if I didn’t recognize it as her natural expression. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and she was wearing red sparring gloves and matching tights and was covered in sweat. The TV was on in the living room. From it came a stream of foreign sounding yells and the steady clap of two pieces of wood coming together, which I took to mean that someone was fighting.

  “You from the school?”

  “No.”

  I showed her my badge.

  “Are you planning to kill a man by the name of Mr. Ling?” I asked.

  “If I say no, will you leave?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Then no.”

  She motioned to close the door but my foot got in the way.

  “I thought you said you would leave.”

  “I guess the plan’s changed.”

  Her frown deepened but she let the door go. I left it open and followed her in.

  Walking down the dark hallway, I wondered what sob story she’d told the white kid’s parents. When I saw what they’d let her do to the living room I figured it must have been something about refugees and being trapped in a cargo container for months, her only food being the rats feeding off the freshly dead. There were floor-to-ceiling tapestries and paintings with golden dragons on them and a half-dozen swords in a rack, with a punching bag in the corner, all of it wrapped together in the reddish glow cast by a half-dozen paper lanterns.

  As I’d suspected, there was a kung fu movie playing on a TV that claimed a wall all to itself. As she approached it she cued the remote I hadn’t seen in her hand until then and the figures on screen did their dance, triple time, in reverse. The fighting bits over, or yet to begin I suppose, she assumed a stance in the middle of the bamboo mat that took up most of the living room floor. On the TV a man was running, from whom I didn’t see. He was scared though, that much I could tell. Turning a corner, he came upon a large square filled with soldiers. By the expression of shock on his face it was clear he’d made a wrong turn but when he turned back the street behind was likewise filled. Everyone charged at once, their faces painted with insane rage. My eyes, even then, were too old to keep up with the mess of flying bodies and limbs, and I looked to Amanda who was doing a fair imitation of the on-screen hero. A few times, watching the ballet she was putting on, her little dance brought one of her feet or a hand within inches of striking my nose. While I didn’t doubt the grace and fluidity of her movements, it occurred to me that if I’d reached out and grabbed her by the wrist it wouldn’t have taken much of an effort to snap her arm, or her leg for that matter; both being no thicker than the tail of hair slapping against her back with every kick and punch.

  I got her point, though. If she’d wanted to kill Mr. Ling she’d have done it when he hit her. I made haste back to the elevator, certain that I’d found out enough to placate Ruby Yee and maybe even open up a little place in her heart for me (a sentiment dashed the moment I brought her the news and she didn’t lower the paper from in front of her face nor speak beyond a monosyllabic grunt, which may have expressed satisfaction or the opposite, it was impossible to tell).

  Six months later, when Derek Smalls mentioned her name, I wasn’t surprised. It made sense, Derek and Ruby being connected so early on that they’d also be connected so late in the telling (the same way it did when I stopped by Ruby’s store on the eve of my retirement to find a Punjabi woman manning the till and a solitary sesame seed wedged in a crack in the floor the only evidence that Ruby had ever existed).

  I left Derek in front of the statue and drove as fast as a car that didn’t have to stop at red lights could drive on a weekday morning just after seven. I parked in a spot clearly signed Fire Lane but didn’t get out. The blue of the condo’s spire was stacked against the sky — Ling-Ling’s China on one floor and something far worse on the ninth. In the windows I could see reflections of birds flitting from one current to the next and the outline of clouds.

  She wouldn’t be there and neither would he. Curtis was right: Terrence’d be in a basement somewhere. Maybe I could find him if I went to Mathers and he put the full weight of his authority behind me, sending dozens of officers to pound on doors, ask questions, all the things cops are supposed to do. Thinking of what happened last time I went to Mathers, expecting results and maybe a pat on the back and getting only a dead girl in return, I sat in my car and ate the two black bean balls I hadn’t given to Derek. When that did nothing to ease the morning crowding me through the windshield, I drove back to the station and spent most of the day staying out of Mathers’s way.

  In t
ime, Curtis came looking for me then left and came back and left again. All the while I stood at the window, watching the street grow thick with traffic and empty until the only thing left were patches of light on the asphalt and the feeling that it was as good a night to walk home as any.

  thirty-four

  He was in the dark, lying under a car. How Curtis got there, he didn’t know; the past lost to the present like it is in all wars, of conscience or otherwise.

  (Later, it would all come back in a dream, preserving the memory. He’d parked his bike along the train tracks then climbed the fence. The parking lot surrounding the stadium was bright, exposed, and there was no way to get across without being seen if someone was looking for him. He crept along the fence until the stadium was as close as it was going to get then made his way quickly, taking a straight line though there were blocks of concrete at the base of all the lampposts big enough for him to hide behind if he thought it would help. At the stadium’s wall, flat against its seamless sheen and breathing hard, he tried to think of what would happen if he’d been seen. Where would they come from, and how many would there be, and what would he have to do to them? He followed his thoughts to the garage door, only a few feet away. It was closed, no sign of movement, no sounds from within. On the far side, there was a dumpster. He crept to it and found it locked. Then, because it was a dream and things happened as they were expected to, he heard the low rumble of an engine and he hid, crouching low behind the metal container. A white van pulled to a stop in front of the garage door and a moment later it opened. Curtis slipped the gun from his pants, following the van into the darkness, then stole out from behind it and rolled under the first car he saw).

  Lying there he tried not to think about the van, how he hadn’t heard anything from it beyond the creaking of its engine as it cooled, meaning whoever was driving was still inside. His eyes on the red dot beside the elevator, he waited for the doors to open and for Mr. Mann to come out.

  How long he was there, there was no way to tell, not for a man pinned under a car, wedged as tight as in a coffin. He had to fight to stay alert when his mind strove to wander, calling up thoughts of Terrence as he had been, on the day they’d first met, then settling on the cat, as dead as Trisha Mann, both in the ground because of him. Unable to reconcile himself to the latter, he thought of the former, and the image that came was of Terrence with his hands around the cat’s throat, throttling it, its paws scratching at his hands and arms until they fell still; of Terrence dropping it in the shopping cart, then leading him (time now moving in fits and jumps, gaining a life of its own beyond the steady tick) to where it lay, curled up and stiff to the touch. And even if that wasn’t how it had happened — if Curtis had been the one leading, and the cat showed no signs of violence, its eyes visible and popping but not grotesque — he imagined it was (the dark so intrusive that later he couldn’t recall why he’d remembered it this way, when that day was so clear in his mind: the beginning of his futurebright, his life with Terrence).

  Struggling to regain control of the memory, or rather to abolish it, to rid himself of it once and for all (it did him no good, now, when Mr. Mann was so close, nearer even than the end, no farther itself than the edge of a leaf, which I have heard is how some Natives, in their day, spoke of death, always no farther away than this thinnest of all things, even less than a hair), Curtis thought once again of his training.

  “A fly on the wall. We’ve all imagined it, what it would be like.”

  (So said his sergeant, in a classroom not unlike the ones at Campbell Collegiate except there were no windows to distract him with the field beyond and the uprights; there was only the here and now and the sound of his voice; the sound, he said before he’d even given the class his name, of life itself.)

  “And because it is so familiar, we can use it, this fly. Now close your eyes.”

  (No need to close his eyes now in his coffin but he did anyway, out of habit, and respect, and fear too.)

  “You are a fly on the wall.”

  (The sergeant’s voice so certain and steady that it left no doubt, and the class was indeed filled with flies, littering the walls, awaiting their orders.)

  “Now launch yourself, you are weightless, do you feel it?”

  “Sir, yes sir!”

  “Good. You are circling, now leaving the classroom, now flying down the hall. And what do you see?”

  “Someone’s coming, sir!”

  (This from a classmate, and when he said it Curtis knew it was so; from the clap of footfalls and the rustle of something else, he couldn’t tell what.)

  “Yes. And what is this someone wearing?”

  “A uniform, sir!”

  (Another classmate, who spoke a fraction before Curtis himself, who could now see the man, no it was a woman, he could smell her and hear it in the space between her steps, and in her hands —)

  “Is this person carrying anything?”

  “She’s carrying a stack of papers, sir!”

  (From Curtis who knew it to be true, for the fly he was had seen it.)

  “Corporal Miller, would you come in here, please?”

  Curtis opened his eyes and, standing at the door, she was exactly as he’d seen her, flitting past as a fly, a sheaf of papers in one hand, expressionless, her hair tied in a bun tight enough to make her face look like it had been carved in a tree.

  Under the car, so still it might as well have been a tomb, he once again became a fly. He took flight and felt the weightlessness in his belly and in his head and clawed up through the dark. He found the van tucked in the corner and looked through the passenger window. It was open and the driver was smoking (he could smell the smoke from where he lay, but the fly could see the ember burning a hole in the pitch). Through the window, past the man at the wheel, his features lost in shadow but his mouth moving, saying something into a radio, a low murmur: “Copy that.” Then out again, circling away from the van, towards the ceiling where he heard a noise, familiar: a rifle cocking, then another. He saw them wrapped in the darkness, hanging from the ceiling like spiders. There were two of them: men with rifles. The fly he was landed on the closest one’s forehead, tasted his sweat, sour and salty, knowing one thing: I’m trapped.

  The thought barely had time to register before the garage door rattled upwards and a car drove through. Curtis opened his eyes. He saw the headlights, heard the pulse of bass-heavy hip hop and watched a Mazda drive past, its skin painted bright green, glistening like a frog. It drove to the middle of the garage and stopped. The engine died and with it the music but not the lights.

  “Turn off your lights.”

  The voice, amplified, came from everywhere at once: monotone and metallic. Lester Mann upstairs, watching the garage through a surveillance camera, speaking with the voice of God (but why? Curtis asked, the truth still clouded, hidden from him). Good little shepherds that they were in the car, the headlights went out, leaving only the dark again and the voice.

  “Step out of the car.”

  Doors opening, the squeak of sneakers on cement and then there was light. Well Curtis remembered the feeling: a shock like birth, nothing beyond the glare except what he’d brought to it. He shrank back deeper under the car, worried that some of their shine would find him.

  “Where is he?”

  “In the trunk.” The voice shouting the answer came out thin, weak.

  “Show me.”

  Feet moving past, the lights following, and the click of the trunk opening. Curtis shimmied to the edge of the car. He saw a person grappling with something. His back was to him but he could tell he was a boy, not yet a man, his black hoodie pulled tight around his face. Dragging the something out of the trunk, as limp as a rolled-up carpet, holding it up until it stiffened. Then turning to the garage, like a magician to his audience.

  Ta-da.

  And there he was, blinking against the bright, hi
s mouth gagged and his hands bound behind his back: Terrence.

  Curtis didn’t even get a moment to savour the sight before a whisper, like a wheat stalk’d make slapping against your leg, felled the man by the trunk.

  Phfft. Phfft.

  Two more silenced shots and two other almost-men, whom Curtis hadn’t seen on the far side of the car, likewise dropped. Terrence stood fast, eyes roving until they found two columns of light, men dropping out of them like the spiders Curtis’d imagined them to be, then jerking towards the van, its engine revving as it backed up, stopping inches from the frog-skinned car.

  Two men dressed in white jumpsuits leapt from the van and grabbed the body at Terrence’s feet. They slung him into the back of the van and moved to another. The two spiders, wearing black with masks concealing all but their eyes, stood as steady as their rifles, one on Terrence, the other on the front passenger-side door of the Mazda.

  Curtis didn’t see the second spider moving to the door of the green car, such was the hold that Terrence had on him, this the real Terrence before him, what he’d become, bound and gagged, wincing when the spider grabbed him hard by his hands, making his knees buckle. (The two suddenly now inseparable so that Curtis felt the pain in his own wrists and wanted to cry out, his voice stifled by the tape over Terrence’s mouth and the wadded-up rag inside it, tasting of dirty dishes and soap.) He didn’t hear the door open and was as surprised as anyone when a new spot of light appeared. In it stood Amanda, known as Ling-Ling to her friends (all of them now dead and in the back of the van, driving in a circle, tires not squealing in anticipation of the road beyond the garage door now opening).

  Ling-Ling in the light, suddenly seeing who she was, as bound to the person she’d made herself into as Terrence, only a few feet away. She made no noise, playing perfectly the role of a fly, as the spider raised his gun, pointing it at her, his finger on the trigger.

  Curtis watched, trying to make sense out of this strange twist, to find meaning in the things these people were doing. Trying above all to find a way out for himself and for Terrence in even the smallest action, in, say, the way the spider paused, his finger on the trigger when the easiest thing would have been to shoot (except it is never easy to shoot a woman, and especially not one such as Amanda, as tall as the man-spider and dressed in black, the spandex or Lycra, or whatever space-age fabric it was, as sleek as she herself, her body that of a girl who grew too fast, a body longing to be filled, if not by the woman she would become, then by a man who could make her what he wanted, all that he desired). Standing there, she did something improbable, so unlike a fly: she assumed a fighting stance. One foot forward, one arm raised, bent in front of her, the other at her side, rigid, her eyes on the spider, her body calm yet rippling, about to explode.