Omphalos

by Gerald Lynch

  On his way back from the shower, naked as a senile stork, he stopped at their antique record player and flipped through the small collection of old-style albums, more Cynthia’s than his. He selected a Leonard Cohen album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony. He tenderly held the disk’s edge between both palms like a basketball for an old-school set shot. He blew lightly at the dust. It had been a while since he’d wanted music. Something was definitely up.

  He watched and listened for a while as the relict vinyl spun its Columbia label and hummed soothingly. He placed the needle, cracked a lesser smile at the spit and hiss of emptiness. The fast strumming, the gravelly Cohen voice not so worn for once, but young and plaintive:

  I asked my father,

  I said, “Father change my name”

  The one I’m using now it’s covered up

  with fear and filth and cowardice and shame

  Good old Cohen, never faked lightness, never lied about the truth, never meant only one simple thing. Except in this straight line:

  Yes and lover, lover, lover,

  Lover, lover, lover, lover,

  Come back to me

  During the last weeks of the Widower case, in the early morning hours, they would all sit in the living room of their old home and listen to Cohen, drinking and too drunk to offer more than appreciative noises. Those were the only good family times of the year-long Widower period, and the only time their living room looked lived in. People want to deny it, but problem drinkers have good spells too.

  Alongside his pimply black The Near Future book on the dining-alcove table was a yellow tin of small Dutch cigars, Panters, and an antique steel-cased lighter, the kind whose cotton had to be soaked with contraband fluid. He inserted a cigar all the way into his mouth and slid it out moistened, savoured its mouldy aroma, fired it with a flick-click-scratch of the lighter. Snap shut. He inhaled deeply, then blew a grey funnel towards the open balcony door. Smoking was such a pleasure again, such a relief, now that he couldn’t care less about its consequences.

  He sat and pulled the black book to him, flipped to the last entry, took the pen and wrote on the clean facing page in fine black hand:

  In the near future, fathers will sue their disappointing sons.

  There, two entries in one day! His book of half-assed aphorisms, Kelly called it. Dr. Randome would have a field day!

  Smiling felt funny. Another big change. Crime was good for him, he was sure of it again.

  He turned off the record player and got dressed: short-sleeved white cotton shirt, black slacks, faux oxfords. At the door he frisked himself: wallet, keys, Panters…pager! He snatched it from the chair by the door and held it in his palm. It was warm, warmer than it should be even on this baking day. It’s been vibrating like hell. He’d accepted the pager in a spirit of compromise, but would carry only the antique vibrator rather than the new one that said his name at increasing volume, unto screaming till answered. He wouldn’t even look at the display window, dropped the pager into the crowded breast pocket of his shirt.

  The door closed behind him.

  Such a bare room. Nothing on the eggshell walls. For furnishings only the antique record player on the floor, the cheap maple table and two chairs in the dining alcove, with a third chair by the door. The only colour was a mostly green throw rug with braided black border of Celtic design. Everything else remained in the old home, in Kelly’s keeping.

  The door opened a few inches and a large claw of a hand reached towards the bowl on the chair, grabbed a fistful of change. For the squeegee kids. But, yes, that had been Cynthia’s too, the green-tinted Galway crystal bowl. Kevin’s mother, Mammy, had been from Galway, with his father an Irish Jew from Dublin; Cynthia was first-generation Ottawa Irish, the local Irish and French-Canadian mix, those more Irish than the Irish.

  She’d said she’d had all of the Widower and booze she could take for two lifetimes, and gone to visit her favourite niece in Santa Barbara, California. That far away, the first time ever they’d truly been apart in some thirty-five years together, he’d felt her absence, especially at night, like a phantom limb. A phantom lung. Half his heart. She’d not said when she’d be back and never once called. There, she’d checked herself into some Buddhist detox clinic for two weeks. Come home, a Sunday morning. Found the house empty. Taken his old service revolver from the desk in his study. Gone into their bedroom. Sat on the edge of their bed. Put the barrel to her heart and pulled the trigger. Bled all over the place. Stupid Cyn. Nobody shoots herself in the heart.

  A communications records-check had shown that only one call had been made that morning to 1814 Lundy’s Lane: from Omphalos. Claiming diplomatic immunity, Omphalos would not reveal the caller’s inside code, and Chief Thu’s freshest illegal Duner worm got splattered against its firewall. But one did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to know what every child knew: Omphalos equals Eugene DeLint.

  Chapter 4

  The maroon Crown Victoria swept southward along the Rideau Canal, its windows down and vents wide open to the rush of hot air, stately in its procession for those who remembered such cars sentimentally. But guzzling gas all the way, his gluttonous Maroon Queen. Kevin replaced it every five years from a criminal dealer in Syracuse, at incrementally criminal cost. Frank Thu had not given up threatening him over requisitioning police fuel. And while on leave?

  On the other side of the canal was Echo Park, where his family home of thirty years still sat, occupied now by Kelly alone. He’d have picked her up, only Kelly preferred to control her entrances and exits. She was a toddler when they’d bought the house at 1814 Lundy’s Lane. After her mother’s death, she’d discovered it was worth twenty times the purchase price. Kevin had insisted on giving it to her and Bill outright. He suspected that sentimental Kelly (in this respect only) had been ready to pay any price to buy them out, but because of Bill’s stubbornness she’d been forced to register the deed in both children’s names.

  The big car swooped smoothly round the curves of the Parkway, where an expanse of sere grounds and a few dusty beds of deadheaded tulips separated the road from the trickling Rideau Canal. How long had it been since Ottawa’s last “Tulip Festival”? Ten years? Twenty? A few über-dedicated joggers trudged the canal path, trailing their toes as if at the end of a desert marathon.

  In five minutes he found himself standing in a mostly empty expanse of black parking lot whose heat was already baking the soles of his feet. He didn’t mind the oily odour of cooking tarmac; it smelled like eight cylinders, and the past, which was always mostly better. A sudden aftershock of intimation ran up his thighs and died in his groin. It was a barometer for bad news, this gut of his.

  In the Pavilion foyer the temperature dropped severely. The diminutive male host, Asian, likely a Korean refugee, demurred when Kevin insisted that the young lady could not already be sitting out on the patio.

  “She knows full well that I never eat outdoors. And in this heat?”

  The host continued smiling tightly with the red menus against his black silk-vested chest.

  Kevin gazed about the empty room, then out through the wall of windows. And there she sat, alone on the patio at a corner table, still settling herself and replacing her sunglasses. That could only be his Kelly: the ramrod posture, the fall of red hair to shoulders, not flaming like his once had, but auburn. That would be her mother’s genes. Though definitely red still. That loose hairstyle is deceptive, he thought — and immediately chastised his fatherly unkindness.

  The waiter said with a smirk, “This way, if you will please, Detective Beldon.”

  Tripping after him, Kevin asked, “Did my daughter tell you who I was?”

  The waiter wouldn’t alleviate Kevin’s unease over being recognized but slipped sideways through the tight double doors like leaving an airlock. Kevin followed clumsily.

  The outside air immediately steeped him again, with the sun a ball o
f god-awful radiance directly overhead. What was she doing to him?

  “Kelly. Sorry I’m late.”

  “Kevin.”

  She angled her cheek for a kiss, and he obliged, mistakenly hitting the knob of cheekbone.

  Kevin. Bill always called him Dad, even when he was mad. And again Kevin wished for her sake that Kelly could smile more naturally; as it was, even her best daughterly smile contained too much of the baiting prosecutor to the accused. It wanted so to be winning, that smile. And she was, she was! Kelly was always winning. Or all but that one time.

  She was beautiful, too, his daughter. As anyone’s daughter she’d be beautiful: that striking hair, those big grey eyes hidden behind the champagne shades, a fine female nose with character, a longish face lightly freckled. Tall like him, lithe in a way the failing joggers along the canal would die for. Emanating cool in an avocado blouse and white pleated shorts, wafting welcome waves of cool. Even out here in this canvas stink, where the awning’s blue paint smelled ready to drip onto his head — cool Kelly, cool as autumn rain. He was ever mindful of his fortune in such a beautiful and brilliant daughter. She alone was enough to live for, not to die for. He must see her more often. He must start showing her how much he loved her. Doctor’s orders.

  When he’d bent to kiss her, something had briefly overwhelmed the canvas smell. “Are you wearing scent?”

  “Katia, Kevin.”

  He playfully held up surrendering hands: “What’d I do, Your Honour?”

  “Kat-ee-a, Kevin, pronounced catch-ya. Mom gave it to me the Christmas before she died.”

  What was this?

  She smiled. “She was moved by some old story of a Russian figure skater who lost her life’s love. Advertising bullshit, most likely. But of course you remember nothing of that, do you, Kevin? I’m wearing it for the first time today in honour of our luncheon. Actually, it’s supposed to be one of those compounds that enhances your own natural scent. If the water restrictions continue, soon we’ll all be shaving our heads for lice and donning periwigs and merkins, like living in the filthy past again.”

  “Ah, yes, the filthy past. But periwigs and what?” The plastic chair legs on the wooden deck were noisy as he arranged to sit opposite her, with the glassed-in dining room on his left, shrunken Dow’s Lake to the right. As she ignored the question, he continued: “I like the scent. It’s just that it’s different for you. It, uh, works for you.”

  She snorted lightly. “My father, the doyen of aroma therapy.”

  “The what?” He laughed lightly. “You’ve always had a talent for wrong-footing me, Kelly.”

  She placed her left hand lightly on her upper chest: “I have a talent?”

  The waiter was hovering in a miasma of perspiration, smiling and leaning and gesturing with his drinks menu, elbows tight to his ribs to conceal the dark stains that grew down his sides. Kevin grinned up at him absently, then trained his smile on his daughter. She nonchalantly removed her wide-brimmed blue hat with the white ribbon and set it on the table against the green-stained pine railing; then, first checking the extent of the awning overhead, she removed her shades.

  But hadn’t she just donned the shades? Nervous? Kelly? He must put her at ease.

  “You look lovely as ever, Kelly. Very smart, my exceptionally talented daughter.”

  “You look overdressed, Father. I think shorts are permissible on a middle-aged man in this heat.”

  “With my legs?” He laughed. Father? Worse, way worse.

  “I know how you hate eating outside, Kevin, but,” and she whispered away from the waiter, “Judge Johnson Mender is lunching in there.” She checked his reaction. “He barely acknowledged my nod. I thought we’d both be more comfortable out here.”

  “Johnson Mender?” Squinting at the reflecting glass, he continued: “I didn’t see him. I haven’t seen Johnson since…well, since the denial of the Omphalos search warrant. We were good friends once, you know.”

  “I do know. I expect he left, having heard me tell the waiter to show Detective Beldon out here. Besides, it’s not that hot. There’s a breeze off the lake.”

  “There is?” He looked for it, squinting the other way now. The small Dow’s Lake had been man-made from swampland some two centuries before when Colonel John By built the Rideau Canal on the backs of Irish navvies. The shrinking silver disk of water, like a shining coin dropped on drying mud, was blinding in midday brightness.

  “We could go inside now, Kevin. But if you’d rather not do this at all, just say so.”

  Those affixing eyes, his eyes. “No-no, dear, I’ve been looking forward to this for days.” But of course he couldn’t stop himself: “I should never have agreed to your petitioning for the Omphalos search warrant.”

  She smiled inscrutable satisfaction: “As if you had a choice.”

  They needed so few preliminaries — straight to the main event.

  He said, “When you saw I was the chief investigator, you should have handed it off. I should have called in all favours and had Frank get Judge Mender to suspend his decision. Diplomatic immunity for Omphalos! For an NGO? Who ever heard such bullshit?”

  She was unmoved. “It wouldn’t have mattered, Kevin, take my word. But don’t conveniently forget Judge Mender’s dismissal of your voodoo evidence, as he called it, his allusion to your notorious fac —”

  “That was not part of the search petition. I had circumstantial evidence and MYCROFT supposition pointing to Omphalos medical records…uh, dear.”

  She smiled down at the pirate-themed menu alongside her hand, then met his gaze warmly. “Besides, Dad, it was the biggest case ever to hit this backwater. And I knew how important it was to you — no way I’m delegating!” She briefly exaggerated a pout, her bottom lip turned out. “Sorry I blew it, Dad. Though you never did tell me exactly what or who it was you expected to find at Omphalos.”

  “I don’t blame you, Kelly.”

  “You shouldn’t. Very few get above Omphalos’s sixteenth floor, only Eugene DeLint’s nearest-and-dearest: the head secretary — McNicol, Don McNicol — and an old biddy executive assistant, Anna Kynder. And your new friend, Dr. Ewan Randome, of course. Rumour has it that Dr. Randome’s sessions with DeLint take place not at the comfy Sandy Hill residence you go to, and not in Ewan’s Psychiatric Wellness suite at Omphalos, not even in DeLint’s office, but up in the very Dome itself, DeLint’s Button! God, I’d give anything to be a fly on that wall.”

  “Is that so? Why?”

  She checked her enthusiasm. “Are you finding your sessions with Ewan helpful, Kevin? Does he still have you writing those half-assed aphorisms in your silly Here Comes the Future book? Whatever, do as Dr. Randome tells you. They say Ewan works miracles with the traumatized, as he first did back in Haiti and the D-R with victims of the new Tonton Macoutes, then here after the First Drought, and, well, with all manner of victims.”

  Ewan. He smirked and looked out on the stressed lake. “Yeah-yeah, thanks for the referral. I like Dr. Randome just fine, if not so much the idea of myself in therapy.” He managed a laugh: “But I cannot get anything out of him about Omphalos.”

  “When’s your next session?”

  “Tomorrow morning, and I’ll confess, Madame Prosecutor: I need it.” He closed his eyes. “For some reason all morning I’m thinking Omphalos, the… Someone got to Judge Mender a year ago, I’m more sure than ever. But who, and how? And why? I could have had the…”

  “Oh, why don’t you just come out and say it, Kevin: the Widower. But get real. Omphalos would not have led you to the Widower. That wasn’t just wishful thinking, it was delusional desperation. And look how it ended.”

  He clapped a hand to the crown of his head as if installing himself safely in the back seat of a squad car, then rubbed down the nape. “Of course.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Kevin. There was nothing I could do,
or you or Frank Thu. Do you have any idea how big Omphalos really is? The CIA could have got to Judge Mender. EuroPol could have got to him! UNSecure!… What does it matter now, anyway? There’s been no Widower activity for over a year. You scared him off, Kevin, but not with that threat of an Omphalos investigation. You must settle for that lesser victory, Dad.” She smirked. “But that really was the flimsiest of Beldon hunches ever, totally wonky factioning. The truth is —”

  “What does it matter?” He let that sink in before grinning horribly. “Factioning. If I could go back in time, I’d take that criminology professor, put his beardy head against the jamb and slam the door repeatedly.”

  “Kevin! Such violence!… Besides, the much-quoted article about your factioning made you famous!”

  “Please,” he managed to laugh, “stop saying that word. It’s like a slap!”

  She grinned and waved her raised left hand back-and-forth like slapping: “Factioning factioning factioning factioning. Take that, bitch.”

  He congratulated himself on lightening the mood at his own expense. But he couldn’t keep it light.

  “It was no hunch, no factioning. Like I said, we had MYCROFT evidence, only some of it conjecture, and that with high probability. Eugene DeLint and Omphalos had helped two of the first Widower victims years before, arranged two therapy vacations at a secured resort clinic down there just before Haiti went totally rogue and annexed the Dominican Republic. Then both die in Widower suicides? Coincidence? I do not think so. And don’t forget the instantaneous bank transferrals originating in Ottawa and passing through Port-au-Prince proxy servers.”

  “But we already knew all that! Eugene DeLint had taken those women as part of a group that included his own mother. That’s how they first met Dr. Randome, at his trauma clinic in Santo Domingo, not Haiti. Coincidence, Kevin, it happens, that’s why the word exists. Anyway, nobody needed to get to Judge Mender. Any judge would have refused us based on your factioning.”