by Moss, John
“Your gun?”
“I forgot to bring it.”
“Cell?”
“Never carry one. Someone might call.”
Sakarov moved close and patted Harry down then shrugged.
“You will please join her.” He indicated with a wave of his pistol where he wanted Harry to go. “I did not think it would be so easy.”
“It’s not over yet,” said Harry.
“Just about, my friend.”
With Sakarov prodding him from behind, Harry stepped gingerly over an antique akstafa rug and moved down a corridor walled with expensive paintings and hangings until he came to the door at the end.
“Go in,” said Sakarov.
Harry hesitated.
“She is alive.”
Harry turned the knob and the door swung open into a room with the lights out and velvet drapes drawn tightly closed. From behind him, Sakarov spoke to the shadows.
“You see, Fräulein Strauss, your rescuer has arrived.” He pushed Harry forward into the room. “I will leave you to become acquainted once again.”
Sakarov locked the door from outside. Harry could hear breathing. He groped for a light switch, but failing to find one he felt for the draw-cord and opened the curtains. Sunlight flooded the room. Turning, he saw the bed was made up and empty. As his eyes adjusted, he discerned a figure cowering on the sofa with a blanket drawn around her.
“Lena,” he said. He approached cautiously. “Lena, it’s me.”
“Harry?” Her voice trembled as she stirred and looked up. “Go away,” she said.
“It isn’t an option at the moment. What happened?”
“Help me sit up. Oh God, I hurt.”
It must be bad, Harry. She’s not a complainer.
He was relieved to have Karen in the room.
“Did Sakarov do this?”
What difference does it make?
“Those two men. He watched.”
So their Tolstovian pacifism doesn’t extend to women.
“At least you’re alive,” he said, realizing immediately how foolish that sounded.
“Small consolation,” she whispered, as if she were sharing a secret.
Harry moved around the room turning on lamps. Damask wallpaper the colour of dried blood absorbed the illumination. The day was bright enough, but Harry wanted more light. There were no pictures, no mirrors, no objets d’art, little furniture, nothing that could be used as a weapon. It seemed to Harry he had stumbled into a medieval torture chamber, a room that was serenely elegant and yet reeked of brutality, where the Inquisition could foster the illusion of Godliness as it tormented the souls of the blessed and the damned.
“What can I do?” he asked, squatting down beside her.
“Nothing. I hurt.”
Harry gingerly pulled the blanket back. At first he could see no wounds apart from the ones already inflicted by Sakarov in Vienna. Then he realized contours of her naked body were glistening as if lit from beneath the skin. A luminescence of smashed blood vessels indicated bruising from an upholstered weapon, perhaps small sandbags wrapped in silk to inflict maximum pain with minimal mess.
He drew the blanket up again and tucked the upper edge around her shoulders so that she seemed inside a cocoon of the finest wool. She settled back for a few minutes, actually relaxing enough to extend her body out of its fetal clinch. Then, while Harry was walking around, doing a reconnaissance of their elegant cell, she suddenly sat up. A few involuntary groans issued from her pursed lips, but she rose to her feet.
“Hand me my clothes, Harry.”
Harry was dumbfounded. How much pain could this woman endure? He searched the room with his eyes. There was a small neat pile on the floor by the bed. Gregor or Oswaldo, true to their capacity for the unexpected, had folded her clothes after beating her. Or before.
For the second time, Harry helped Madalena Strauss ease her injured body into her clothing with a mixture of shyness and admiration. She said nothing as he helped her dress, but a few inarticulate sounds emerged as expressions of her extreme discomfort.
In underwear and a skirt but no blouse, she pulled away and went into the bathroom on her own. He could hear water splashing and then silence. After ten minutes she emerged. Her hair had somehow been teased into order by fingers run through its copper cascades. Or commanded into order. Her face, which had no bruises, looked radiant from being immersed in ice-cold tap water. Her lips without makeup glistened red and her green eyes flashed with wicked irony. She knew she looked ravishingly beautiful, like a painting by Klimt.
Of course.
“Now, Harry, we must focus on how to get out of here.”
What about accounting for how we got here in the first place, sweetheart? Karen sounded like Lauren Bacall doing a Bogie impersonation.
Easy, Sailor, he cautioned. We’ll deal with last things first. There’s time for thinking later.
You’ve mastered the “thinking later” thing. You do know the guy in the other room, not to sound like a comic book narrator, is your mortal enemy, yes?
“Harry, are you okay?”
He peered into Lena’s deep emerald eyes. Karen was right. He wanted answers. Before he could start with the questions, she asked, “Why are you here?”
“I figured you were,” he said.
“And how did you know that?”
“My friend saw you last night.”
“The boy in the suit. And he followed me?”
“No, he had other things on his mind. But this morning he told me he’d seen you. And, once I adjusted to your resurrection, I figured the only reason you’d be in Toronto was Sakarov. So the best place to start looking was here.”
“But he seems to have caught you off-guard, Harry.”
“And you.”
“He was armed. I was not. I came quite prepared to kill him with my bare hands.”
Harry balked, then realized it might actually be something her police training had prepared her to do, and he shuddered.
“I was happy to accompany him home. I was prepared to disarm him. A fat man with a small gun. It didn’t seem daunting. However, I wasn’t expecting his Russian friends. They were watching TV when we got here. I was outmanned, so to speak. They argued with Sakarov. I understand a little Russian. They told him no killing. They would rough me up, nothing more. They did their job, locked me in here, and left. And here you are.”
Yes, Harry. Here you are. Now what?
Lena was obviously wondering the same thing.
Harry gazed at her with righteous anger. This woman, who had drawn him into her crusade to save children, had compromised the entire project for private revenge. She had turned her outrage into a blood feud, a vendetta, against one man. No matter how vicious Sakarov was, no matter what horrors he had personally inflicted on her, no matter how large his corpulent bulk loomed in the exploitation they were bent to expose, bringing him down on his own was not worth the compromise.
So now it’s your project, Harry. You’re annoyed it might have been compromised. But what about you? You’re here.
When he and Simon determined that Rachel Damboch was the gatekeeper, Harry realized he should have pursued the old woman, cutting out Lena from the process, and he should have forgotten about the fat Russian. Sakarov was an unpleasant distraction. Lena had made herself expendable.
By turning up dead?
But she’s not.
And you’re angry.
Yes. No. She’s my friend.
Harry, you’ve got a lot to learn about death.
“You’re not dead yet,” he said out loud, shifting his focus to Lena.
“But I did die, didn’t I?” Lena responded as if he’d been speaking to her. “It was very authentic.”
“It was,” Harry agreed. “And the living and the dead, we both pursued Sakarov. And here we are; he’s caught us.”
She smiled a tight, crooked smile.
“Listen!” he said. “Do you hear something?”
Scuffling sounds, followed by silence. Then a pistol shot cracked the air. Harry and Madalena Strauss exchanged looks of startled alarm.
“Maybe it wasn’t,” he said.
“It was,” she responded. “With no silencer.”
He took her word for it. She was more an authority on guns than Harry. But neither of them knew who had fired the shot or at what.
After an interminable wait where the air hung thick in their chamber there was a tentative knock on the door.
It had to be Simon Wales. Only Simon could have figured out where they were. Simon had borrowed Harry’s gun and bought ammunition. Simon had shot Sakarov.
The lock clicked and the door was pushed open deliberately, as if Simon was unsure of what macabre scene awaited on the other side.
“Simon, for God’s sake, come in,” said Harry.
It wasn’t Simon. Joan DeBrusk stepped into the room. Her clothing was dishevelled. She looked frightened. She held out Sakarov’s diminutive weapon, which appeared huge in her hands. Harry took it from her and handed it to Lena. He did not like guns, particularly ones still warm from being fired.
“Joan, where’s Simon? Is Morgan with you?”
She shook her head in bewilderment and sat down with Harry’s assistance on the edge of the bed. He left her with Lena and started into the corridor, then came back for the gun before walking out to the living room.
Sakarov wasn’t dead as Harry expected. He was slumped on a large Victorian sofa, bleeding from a flesh wound in his side. Being a fat man, he was a difficult target to miss. Being a fat man, his vitals were difficult for a bullet to find.
“Hand me a cigarette, Harry.”
Harry glanced down at a silver cigarette case on the burled walnut coffee table. Why not, he thought. He pocketed his keys and wallet, then removed a well-rolled cigarette from the case and handed it to Sakarov. He flicked on a butane tabletop lighter and the big Russian took a few deep drags. Despite his wound, he seemed to relax.
“Good,” he said. “Thank you, Harry. A little marijuana, it helps. Given the circumstances, you are free to go. Take Fräulein Strauss with you. And my assassin, Miss DeBrusk. On your way out, would you ask the concierge to arrange for medical assistance. I’ll need a doctor who makes discreet house calls. I think we all want this to play out as quietly as possible. Please, Harry, I seem to be bleeding on my sofa.”
“Lucky for you it’s only a slip cover,” said Harry. “If you get up, avoid the antique carpets. Bleed on the hardwood.”
“The akstafa, yes. It is tribal from Caucasian Mountains, like me.”
“You’re not really Russian,” said Harry.
“Not that it matters at the moment, but I’m from Saskatchewan. Russian parents, intellectual bourgeois turned hardscrabble farmers.”
“And you reinvented yourself after the USSR collapsed.”
“In 1991, yes. Harry, please go now.”
Harry went back to the room where he had been prisoner before Joan liberated them. The two women were sitting close, as if proximity offered mutual consolation—to Madalena for the brutality she had endured, to Joan for having shot a benefactor of the Zylberman Children’s Centre.
Benefactor?
She’s here; she would have known where to find him. But why? That’s another question entirely.
Ask her, Harry. The fat bugger won’t bleed to death. And if he does, it’s poetic justice.
Nothing poetic about it if Joan DeBrusk gets charged with murder.
Keep an eye on Lena. She might take the opportunity to finish him off and let Joan take the blame.
It’s not Lena’s kill. And it won’t be Joan’s. She’s in shock. I don’t think she’s ever shot anyone before.
Just Bambi’s mother and the occasional moose.
Hunting and shooting are different.
Tell that to Bambi.
Joan helped Lena get into her blouse and buttoned it up for her. They went out through the living room and passed Sakarov smoking uncomfortably on the sofa without acknowledging his presence. It obviously wasn’t the appropriate time for Lena to kill him; Joan didn’t want to see what damage she’d done; Harry was determinedly indifferent to the man’s level of discomfort.
Steadying Lena between them, Harry and Joan made their way down the elevator and into the airy opulence of the lobby. Suddenly, they were confronted by the immovable mass of Gregor and Oswaldo standing in front of them.
“Gentlemen,” said Harry. “Mr. Sakarov needs your assistance upstairs.”
Harry urged his small cohort to move directly ahead. The two Russian thugs looked puzzled but stepped aside and Harry, arm-in-arm with two striking redheads, moved with conspicuous grace across to the entry and, after awkward realignment, out the revolving door.
They flagged a taxi for the short distance to Harry’s condo, to the annoyance of the driver who lost his place in the rank. Harry tipped him well to make up for it. They didn’t talk until they reached the twenty-third floor and were inside his apartment. Only then did it occur to Harry that introductions were in order.
“You are the woman in the pictures,” said Joan.
“No,” Lena responded. She seemed alarmed that the connection had been made, then smiled as if flattered that it had.
“Why don’t you two get yourselves cleaned up in there?” Harry pointed to his bedroom. “There are a few women’s clothes in the cupboard.”
Harry, you should never have brought them here. The clothes, not the women. They’re morbid souvenirs. What they don’t put on, throw out.
The bedroom curtains were drawn. Joan walked in, without turning on the lights. Lena followed her into the darkness, closing the door behind her.
16 SIMON SAYS
After the lives of Karen and Matt and Lucy were extinguished in the thundering waters of the Anishnabe River, after being distraught with grief and setting ablaze their lovingly restored stone farmhouse on the Sanctuary Line outside London, Harry collected the few things left in the world that reminded him of his family and gave them to the Salvation Army. There were Matt and Lucy’s outgrown clothes in plastic boxes stored away in the old drive shed, there were bicycles and toys, Christmas ornaments and ice skates, odd and ends. He found nothing but grief in souvenirs of the dead.
And yet he kept a few things of Karen’s. Her body was never recovered; her death wasn’t absolute in the same way as Matt and Lucy’s. There were two silk blouses, a professional suit and a cashmere sweater that had been at the dry cleaners following a conference where she gave the keynote address, along with a small leather zip bag of makeup she kept in her office. As Harry’s anguish assimilated, they became dark reminders of her physical absence. She urged him to throw them out as demeaning talismans and he promised her he would, eventually.
He rustled around in the kitchen and put together a favourite recipe of udon soup made with fresh noodles, miso, tamari, porcini mushrooms, and baby bok choi. When the women came out of the bedroom he had the table by the window set with a steaming tureen and a plate of Ontario cheddar and biscuits. He poured a crisp cool sauvignon blanc for each of them.
Both women looked like they’d just returned from a spa. Their copper hair—Lena’s shimmering in luxurious rebellion as she moved; Joan’s casually controlled—was exactly the same colour and texture, yet made them look utterly different and each breathtakingly attractive.
He could almost forget the ordeal they had just been through.
Neither of them had used Karen’s clothes or makeup.
They wouldn’t, Harry. Not the makeup. And their clothes just needed brushing out. Joan shot Sakarov, she didn’t wash her hands in his blood. And Lena was considerately relieved of her clothing before she was beaten.
They looked terrible, now they look great.
Such is the way of the world, Harry.
“Aren’t you worried his men will come here?” Joan asked. “This soup is terrific.”
“Thank you,” said Harry. He was teaching
himself to cook smart and appreciated the compliment. “It’s not like they don’t know the way. But no, I’d say they’ll go back to Conrad Fearman and cast Sakarov to the wolves. They’re thugs, not killers. They’ll steer clear of him for now. They don’t want to blow their permanent resident status. You realize Zakarov was intending to kill us until you showed up? It was a missed opportunity.”
“Sorry,” she said. “No, of course I’m not sorry. Who’s Fearman?”
“Just a guy, a pervert with money.”
“He is a bad man,” said Lena. “Mr. Sakarov associates with very bad men. Conrad Fearman is one of them, one of the worst because he is rich and well respected. He keeps a series of so-called granddaughters on hand, before turning them out on the street when they reach puberty.”
Joan turned ghastly pale, which highlighted her freckles, making her eerily like a gamine in a pre-Raphaelite painting.
That’s what you thought your Viennese friend looked like, Harry. A painting by Rossetti. You’re either a very casual connoisseur or exceptionally fickle.
Harry wanted to remind her that paintings were tropes for the viewer’s own sensibility—they weren’t real in themselves—but he let it go.
“Joan,” said Lena, turning to the other woman, “exactly where do you fit in, in all of this?”
Lena took Joan’s hesitancy for confusion and proceeded to clarify. “Who are you? How do you know Harry? How do you know the repulsive Mr. Sakarov? How did you end up coming to save us? And shooting him?”
Harry knew Joan was trying to assimilate what had happened to her, to process the weird and terrifying turn of events in her life. She seemed a genuinely open person, ingenuous to a fault, and he imagined she was uncertain how to respond to the woman who looked like paintings by Klimt, who seemed unfazed by violence, and whom she seemed to have rescued from imminent death. Joan lived as an innocent in a fallen world, but this must have been more than she could grasp. Only an hour ago, they had been in a chamber of horrors. Now they were eating a light and elegant lunch, overlooking Toronto harbour filled with sailboats crisscrossing like insects prepared to take flight.