The Drowned Man

by David Whellams

  “I’m in a bind and I’ll admit it, Peter. Now, I won’t put you in a bind by telling you things that you might have to report back to London.”

  Brayden was whining. Peter’s first thought was: Thinking what I’m thinking about you, I won’t turn you in to London. I’ll shoot you right here myself. But he was unprepared for the grim farce that followed.

  “Nicola came to me this morning, a couple of hours ago, and gave me an order. I swear that I don’t intend to obey it. She wants me to beat up Professor Olivier Seep.”

  “Why would that serve her purposes?”

  “She wants to know where the girl and the original letters are. She thinks he knows.”

  Peter then realized what had panicked Nicola. She had seen the Le Devoir report with its direct quote from the Williams letter, and she understood that there were only two ways Seep could have obtained the authentic original: by making a deal with Alida or by taking it from Carpenter himself.

  Brayden turned his palms up in wonderment and frustration. “It gets worse. This morning she ordered me to drive Malloway back to his hotel.”

  Peter marvelled at Nicola’s gall, shutting out Brayden and then forcing him to kowtow to Malloway, whom she had just slept with. There was only one explanation: Dunning requested that Neil drive him.

  “He wanted something from you, am I right?” Peter said.

  “He asked me to approach Georges Keratis and force him to tell me where Greenwell hid the letters, especially the letter from John Wilkes Booth to the general. That’s the one that implies there was a French plot to get the Americans into a war over Canada.”

  Brayden’s talents as an enforcer were in high demand. Peter decided to up the pressure. “Did Malloway know that Nicola wanted you to go after Seep?”

  “Yes, but he said the hell with what Nicola wants. I’m caught in the middle, Peter. Malloway thinks Georges knows, via Greenwell, where Alice Nahri went. But don’t you get the irony? Nicola wouldn’t care if I went after Georges. She’s tunnel-visioned where Seep is concerned. Meanwhile Malloway is slandering Nicola to me. Keeps saying she’s toast, saying that all that counts is finding the woman, your man’s killer.”

  Frank Counter had used the same words: Nicola was toast. This was getting to be like the fox, the duck, and the grain crossing the river, Peter thought, with no one to be trusted in the boat with another.

  In Peter’s reasoning, two deductions could be justified. First, Olivier Seep had one of the three letters in his possession. Otherwise, Nicola would be unlikely to press so hard. Second, Malloway told Neil to interrogate Georges about Alida’s whereabouts, not the letters. Why? A benign interpretation would be that he wanted Carpenter’s killer, a noble and simple goal. Peter didn’t believe that.

  He considered Brayden and his plea for sympathy. The man might have committed the earlier assault on Georges, and he might have been the one to torch Club Parallel, although Peter doubted that; both attacks smelled of the mafia. Peter could make no promises of immunity from prosecution, or even a sympathetic report back to London on his conduct. As John Case had advised, the witness often wants something the investigator can’t bestow.

  Unlike Sir Stephen Bartleben, Peter was never proud of his Machiavellian urges. But from time to time he indulged them.

  “Here’s what I think you should do. You can’t go near Georges Keratis for any reason. Inspector Deroche has offered him police protection. Stay away from him.”

  “The firebombing?” A look of gratitude came over Brayden’s face.

  “Yes. Deroche feels guilty about police treatment of Georges, and probably Greenwell, too. His people will be watching him. Inform Malloway you can’t get close to Georges. That is absolutely all you tell him. And don’t tell him I said hello.”

  “And what about Nicola?” Brayden said.

  Peter fixed him with a hard look.

  “Be sure of this. Nicola is officially in the bad books of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. The High Commissioner finally agrees that she’s gone too far in this pissing match with Seep. Her instruction to you shows how far she’ll go. You will have to tell her you refuse to approach Seep. The worst thing she can do is send you home. Nicola thinks everyone should hunger for those letters, so let her blather on.”

  The discussion came to an end. They both felt like gossips tattling on their colleagues.

  After the very chastened Brayden left the townhouse, Peter killed time by reading and sorting the stack of clippings that sat by the computer, hoping the effort of mindless classification might produce some gestalt.

  The busywork was also his way of delaying an update to Bartleben. Peter was Sherman, on his own in hostile Georgia. But it wasn’t a bad feeling.

  Deciding on yet another walk to the canal, he brought along one of Pascal’s cigarettes. As he smoked, he paused at the spot where Carpenter had tumbled in, noting that the crime scene had reverted to former uses, with cigarette butts clumped at the edge of the waterway and candy wrappers flattened on the grass. Oil from the twice-daily passage of the short-haul factory train continued to leech up from the rail bed. Peter looked around and tried to conjure up the murder scenario. He walked around the empty fringe of lawn and along the asphalt path; the farther he got from the canal, the more ominous the watery trench loomed behind him. The wrappers, the discarded plastic bottles, and the crumpled smokes formed a pattern, he did not doubt, but one that only a physicist would dare to compile. He had read in a magazine about how the Lego company had set up a website that allowed a child to submit a design for, say, a castle or a dinosaur or a petrol station. The Lego people would convert the mock-up to a Lego structure and send back a package of blocks so that the kid could build his fantasy. Peter liked the idea that the final structure — dreamed up by a child — presaged the gathering of its elements. He wanted to submit the design of this killing and have someone send back all the pieces. He waited for the wrappers, the cigarettes, the plastic bottles, and even the shine on the rails to draw themselves together spontaneously, predestined into a natural, if warped, whole; a Frank Gehry castle or a trash dinosaur — or a murder. He turned around to the water and nodded a respectful acknowledgement to John Carpenter’s spirit.

  Pascal stamped into the house that evening and announced that his previous night’s consumption of scotch had caught up to him and he was taking a nap.

  “Wake me at six,” he instructed.

  Peter, with no desire for alcohol, went back to downloading and sorting. He was closing in, he felt, but he remained tentative, guarded about next steps. It was not like him to delay in this manner: he could simply have Malloway, Hilfgott, and Brayden airlifted out of Montreal in the morning. Bartleben would respond, if he pressed hard enough. They would be sweating in an interrogation room within twenty-four hours. One or perhaps all three knew who had killed Carpenter. Forget the documents, the letters had become a mirage, slipping out of view the closer he got.

  The townhouse was silent; with the weather having turned, even the air conditioner refused to fill the emptiness. He needed a stimulus, but not booze; he could use a spur to break through the last mental obstacle. Actus reus and mens rea, both remained out of focus.

  He began to understand his own irresolution. He would have to wait for the girl. She was his spark. She had travelled half the world, fumbling towards some dream that Peter had little hope of understanding. She had killed wantonly along the path to . . . where? Where would Alice Nahri, born Indian and British, tied into corruption in Pakistan and Nepal, on the run in Canada and the U.S., find any peace? The world of blue people, Pandora, was a fiction. He knew she would keep moving, perhaps in a circle back to Montreal, the City of Saints. She had a restless twitch.

  He yearned to call Maddy but it was the middle of the night in Leeds. She and Michael had found the Avatar connection and Maddy had an instinct for the young woman’s movements and motives. He wanted
their advice. And he needed Joan, too. She had ordered him to finish the case — he owed it to the Carpenter family. But he owed her, too. Her brother wouldn’t last much longer and he ought to be home when it happened.

  CHAPTER 40

  Peter stood by the window for at least fifteen minutes as the sky above the street outside lapsed into blackness. He was alone again. Renaud had woken up to say that he lusted for a drink, and he knew a tavern up on Greene Avenue. From an angle by the window, Peter could almost see where young Carpenter had been struck by the Ford sedan. The sodium bulbs on the light standards buzzed and flickered into life, creating round stamps on the streets and the medians, like flashlights pointed from heaven on arbitrary spots. If Seep had the original of one of the three letters, then he had either killed Carpenter to get it or was implicated through Greenwell and the woman. It was a sign of Peter’s frustration with the Carpenter case that he considered phoning Deroche and having Professor Seep arrested. Deroche would do it if Peter insisted; he despised the separatist.

  Peter put aside thoughts of Alida. The young woman was driven by devils he could never understand. He retreated to the kitchen and opened a beer, resolving that it would be his only drink of the evening. Olivier Seep remained a wild card. Peter couldn’t see him firebombing the club, nor physically attacking Georges Keratis. If he latched onto an original of one of the letters it was most likely through direct collusion with Greenwell himself.

  Blithely insulting the entire province in a few keystrokes, he revived the PC and Googled “corruption” and “history of Quebec.” The Google algorithm spewed out page after page of references to government commissions of inquiry into graft, as well as sites featuring scabrous incidents of corruption over the years. He read for an hour, trying to understand how the nationalist movement regarded the mafia presence in the province.

  Of course, the history of corruption in Quebec, and Canada more broadly, was hardly unique and it reflected the growing pains of an expanding society. Perhaps it was inevitable that the country’s first great public works project, the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, spawned contracting scandals during the rule of the first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, or that in the twenties rattling cases of harsh whisky were smuggled across the border to the Prohibition-constricted American market.

  At about ten thirty Peter shut down the computer. He circled the main floor, cranking shut two casement windows and checking the front door; he smelled frost in the night air. His ritual mimicked the cottage, where he performed the same circuit each evening. As he made his rounds, it occurred to him that perhaps he had settled too far into Renaud’s domain.

  His mood turned him obsessive-compulsive. He squared the ream of blank paper next to the monitor and did the same again with the stack of printouts on the other side. Leaving his research exposed was a vote of faith in Renaud. He trusted his new friend. Pascal might come home slightly debauched from the Atwater bars and if he woke Peter up, that was fine. He turned off every inside light but the kitchen overhead and the night light in the upstairs bathroom.

  He went upstairs to the guest bedroom, which felt close and airless. He kept on only a singlet and shorts, lay on the bed, and tried to doze. Several rows of town homes separated Renaud’s place from the Atwater Market; babble from the outdoor cafés bounced intermittently off thermal layers into the room. The sound reminded him of an old tube radio unevenly tuned in.

  He failed to sleep. He had had fewer dreams since his brother died. All those waking hours spent thinking about Lionel had supplanted his dream life. If only he could work out the meaning of his passing. He had had no opportunity to say goodbye. About a month after Lionel’s death, Peter had a very bad night. Waking up in the glow of the spring sunrise he felt guilt wash over him. He had climbed out of bed and come down the stairs to the kitchen, where he stood for a while staring at the floor. He hated the taxonomy of the Stages of Grief but there was no doubt that he had entered the Bargaining phase. He would have traded his own life to have Lionel survive. He sat on the front steps and wept for ten minutes or more; he let forth uncontrollably. If Joan heard him she chose to leave him alone. He went for a long, solitary walk up the nearby country lanes. The next day he went out and brought Jasper home.

  In his will, Lionel had asked Peter to retain his personal papers. Peter had stored them in the air-raid shelter at the cottage. He now recalled an odd phrase in the will that contrasted with the dreary legalese: “There may be material therein, brother, that will help you fill in the lacunae regarding Father.” Staring at the ceiling in Pascal’s condo, Peter smiled to himself. He had a new mystery to solve, a family one. He would open up the air-raid cache when he got home and find what his brother wanted him to find.

  Peter fell into a dreamless sleep.

  She’s sleek in the zipped black pantsuit that makes her look the elegant party girl but not cheap. Montreal girls know how to dress, she thinks. The only problem is no pockets, and she has brought a clutch bag for the gun. She walks along the canal but then shies back from the water. She slows her pace as she gets to the section where John crawled into the death pool. She has given up hope of proving anything and now she keeps on, without contemplation or a look back. She heads towards the railroad tracks and the edge of the spill of light from the annoying flood lamp by the factory fence. She marks the plastic bits and wrappers and cigarette papers strewn about at random, and recalls the scene in Terminator 2 where the shattered drops of silver alloy flow back together and reconstitute the unstoppable robot villain. Keeping to shadowed zones, she reluctantly makes her way to the road, where there is no choice but to enter the unforgiving light.

  The townhouse stands a street back from the water. She takes one glance behind her and sees how truly opaque the verge beyond the lit-up asphalt is. The whore stood in a pool of light like that, on the edge of blackness. There is no one about. She walks up the steps and takes a key from under the flowerpot, and hesitates only to verify the silence.

  An unfamiliar motor and a change of air pressure raised Peter from his slumber. At first he assigned the whirring sound to the air-conditioning unit but he quickly perceived that the gas furnace had kicked in. He rolled over to the edge of the mattress. If he had failed to dream, was the after-image of a dream possible? For that’s what had imprinted itself on his mind, an old-fashioned photogravure. Alice Nahri and John Carpenter in a cheesy wedding-cake portrait, into-the-sunset figurines holding hands. But those joined hands were transmogrified into an electrified fibre, and the after-dream symbolism became clear to him. He understood then that the strongest link on his chart of suspects and victims was the fibre that carried Alida’s sins and her remorse towards Carpenter, in a quest for forgiveness.

  Peter had slept solidly for four hours, and now he was alert to any threat the darkness might bring. He did not jump out of bed; what was the point if you didn’t have a gun? Rather, he lay back on the coverlet, half-cool, half-warm; he heard nothing but the rush of tepid air from the ducts into the chilly room. Silently, he slipped out of bed and stood on the carpet, backlit by the window in the bathroom. He felt ridiculous. He wouldn’t impress anybody in his creased undershirt and plaid shorts. He prepared himself for the presence in the hallway.

  The girl slid into the bedroom — it seemed just the right spot to strike a pose — with her hands displayed to show that she lacked a weapon. Peter wondered if she owned one; the FBI found no gun in the Focus or on the body of the hooker pulled from the Anacostia, and Alida had left nothing in the Gorman Hotel. He noted that her pantsuit left no place for a concealed gun, or even a blade. She was beautiful.

  He wasn’t afraid of her, armed or not.

  They stood six feet apart. He tried to think like a constable facing down a suspect. He could rush her or try to intimidate her. His mind raced. Maybe she did have a pistol in reach; it would be in the hallway, if anywhere. Chief Inspector Peter Cammon had no illusions left about
any human being’s capacity for violence, and he was brave, but he was content to see what Alida wanted from him.

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said. He understood that she had waited a long time to make her case to him. Her voice was smooth liquid. Her words were genuine, unaffected, meant only for him.

  With that one statement, Peter’s perspective on the investigation shifted again. He at once understood what he cared about in this case and what he wanted from it. Facing him was the one person who knew what had happened. Peter Cammon, retired chief inspector, had parked himself in that stuffy London office in the Mother House while Bartleben patronized him, and he had flared back at the boss’s attitude. But Bartleben might have been accurate in his flattery; Montreal had been what Peter needed and it was a shame that he’d slipped away from the Grand Game. Peter was good at crime. He had also been right: from the beginning he’d seen that the woman was key. There was evil in her betrayal of Carpenter, but he believed her when she said she hadn’t killed him.

  “Are you here to tell me what happened?” he said.

  “Olivier Seep killed him.”

  Peter needed more from her. “Why did you come to Montreal with John Carpenter?”

  “I had to leave. There is a man. The Sword. He’s a heavy player in organized crime in Pakistan.”

  “The cricket bribes? The photos in News of the World?” Peter said.

  “You know about that?”

  “I still don’t know why you came to Montreal.”

  She adopted a confessional tone. “The Sword forced me to get close to Johnny. I had no choice. He ordered me to infiltrate the task force.”

  Peter’s surprise was evident. “You know about the task force?”

  “Yes, the cartels know all about Scotland Yard.”