Omphalos

by Gerald Lynch

  He fought for control. “You’re not listening, Kelly. It was a MYCROFT supposition based on evidence, as you also well know, medical records that had been tampered with, wiped clean. Why are you doing this?”

  “And Judge Mender wasn’t protecting just Omphalos. I’ve heard that the Dome contains files on some of the most powerful people anywhere. Omphalos not only has security as tight as Beijing’s, it does have a form of diplomatic immunity. I know. Remember: I worked there for a whole miserable year.”

  “It’s just —”

  “Da-ad, this obsession with the Widower is what drove Mom crazy! Like Bill said that time, it’s what made you a widower.”

  He reached for the rail of green cedar, twisted it until the screws protested, his molars grinding bones.

  “Let’s drop it then, it’s ruining our lunch.”

  She brightened. “With pleasure.”

  She plucked at the avocado silk blouse whose neckline was decorated with a white braid something like the Celtic design on Kevin’s rug. She said cutely, “Five hundred dollars at Mom’s favourite place in the Rideau Centre, Clio’s. But what am I thinking? Why would Kevin Beldon care about that?”

  His stomach hurt again. She just couldn’t help punishing him. When he turned from the drying lake to look at the blouse, the action caused his own sweaty shirt to peel from his back like sunburnt skin. She had no breasts, unlike her mother. He shouldn’t notice.

  “It looks lovely, dear. How’s the prosecution of the Lobos going?”

  “That’s one biker gang that won’t be expanding into the capital region any time soon.”

  “Another feather for you.”

  “Do you really know that Snake thug? He is easily the nastiest of a nasty breed, if still a highly effective witness for the prosecution. When I first interviewed him in the Regional Detention Centre, he made the connection and asked about you with a sort of neutral steeliness that I expect passes with him for affection. Talk of embarrassed!”

  “Snake,” Kevin snorted. “Hey, I’ve heard rumours that a certain someone is being talked about for the Supreme Court. That’d have to be the youngest appointment ever!” He smiled as fatherly-proud as he could.

  She dropped her head to the menu, spoke clippingly: “Would you like something to drink, Kevin? Or would you like to order right away?”

  “I’m starving. You’re drinking again?”

  “You’re getting paunchy, Father.”

  He placed his left hand on his stomach, fingertips self-consciously circling his growing navel. “Like I said, I’ve been uneasy all morning. I know you think it’s all bullshit, sweetheart, but I really do have a gut-feeling that something big’s about to break.”

  “As Judge Mender said, Kevin: everyone now knows about your gut-feelings, thanks to the silly factioning article by your little professor friend. Another embarrassment, I might add. But they’re not infallible, are they, Kevin, your…premonitions?”

  “What do you imply, Madame Prosecutor?” But it was like a knife in the gut.

  “Nothing. Where is that monkey when we need him?” She searched for the waiter, who had dashed inside when they’d kept talking. She stopped fanning herself with the menu and instead waved it at the reflecting windows of the dining room.

  He squinted at her. “Heard from your brother lately?”

  She swung back. “Your son? Haven’t you?”

  She was something else. “Touché. Bill then.”

  The waiter came running. The sides of his swashbuckling shirt were darkly glistening.

  “A drink for the lady? And for you, Detective Beldon?”

  “More water will be fine, thank you, with ice and a twist this time. Then the garden salad, please.”

  “Mademoiselle?”

  “Tom Collins, the onion soup.”

  The waiter ran.

  “Have you heard from Bill?”

  “No. Though last we did talk, he mentioned a possible visit around this time. So don’t be alarmed if someone, someone like Frank Thu, tells you Billy boy’s back in town.”

  She was the only person he knew with a perfect poker face. “Good. Why would I be alarmed? It’ll be great seeing Bill again.”

  “How long has it been?”

  Why was she doing this? Face-on, he again recognized his grey eyes in hers, his long face like a big drop of disappointment; and only a moment ago she’d been beautiful. But when she turned to gaze at some movement on the lake, in profile he recognized her mother, the full lips, the pointy chin. A blend of us both, then, as all kids are. And he was swarmed by emotion.

  “Don’t cross-examine me, Madame Prosecutor, I’m just not up to it today.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad.” She faced him, her eyes misty. “I was just thinking, it’s a year soon.”

  They both turned to the coin of lake, that near perfect circle of steely brilliance. At a distance a hunter’s-green canoe glided towards them, only one paddler, a blond girl in an orange life vest, sitting in the prow, her dripping blade poised like something about to stab again.

  But that’s odd, Kevin thought, squinting, the paddler’s location. And sitting in the prow like that, shouldn’t the canoe be tilted ass-end-up? He felt another aftershock starting again, in his feet, then along the insides of his thighs, his groin, stabbing upwards through his gut this time; he placed a hand to his murmuring heart.

  “Dad?”

  Directly opposite them now, not twenty feet from their table, the lone paddler twisted and shouted, “Will you please stop fucking around, Tim — we’re gonna crash into the patio — or the whole thing is off!”

  Her partner sat up, a stupid grin on his big face: “Patience, Kitty. Fun’s just beginning!”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  Ah, the old hidden-accomplice again. But the feeling was so powerful now that he did fear for his heart. His chest was actually buzzing! His right hand clutched the breast pocket, and he recognized the vibrating pager there.

  Kelly was half across the table: “Daddy, what’s wrong!”

  He fished out the pager and checked the display.

  “It’s our friend Frank Thu — hey, you must be the factioning one! I’d better take it. Maybe it’s about Bill, I’d not be surprised now. Sorry if I alarmed you, dear. But it alarmed me, damned thing.”

  “I wasn’t alarmed.”

  Her face was tense and focused elsewhere. He stood, letting his napkin fall to the cedar boards, and headed into the restaurant. That alarmed daddy would have been worth a mild heart attack. She loved him, true, but he needed to find a better way for them. It was his fault, this inability to show love between them. Mistakes were made, sure, but they did love each other — and Bill — and that was all that was needed to rebuild the family. We can do it, Cyn.

  The waiter handed Kevin the restaurant’s communicator. Turning his back on the nosy host, he said, “Frank?” He hunched his shoulders and listened intently.

  “Right away.”

  His face showing nothing, he handed back the communicator and returned to the patio.

  “There’s a scene, I have to go, Frank needs my help, my leave just ended. You won’t believe it.”

  Her drink hovered at her mouth and she raised her eyebrows.

  He leaned on the table, bracing himself on fingertips, and whispered, though there was no one else on the patio: “I need your word on confidentiality.”

  “You have it.” She drained the sweating glass.

  “Strictly entre nous then: Eugene DeLint has been found murdered in his Omphalos office. It sounds gruesome.”

  She showed nothing, turned to look out at the lake. “Don’t look so smug, Kevin. What you’re still obsessing over is over. The Widower is over. Who found DeLint?”

  “The perfect question, Madame Prosecutor. But as of now, nothing’s over till I
say it’s over…dear. Even if it’s only to prove that Omphalos was connected to the Widower. Then I will move on, dear,” he lied.

  She gritted a smile. “Don’t overdo it, Dad.”

  “Wha — overdo what — I don’t —”

  “The dear business, Kevin.”

  He had to resist touching her, just lightly cupping that troubled head. How she must suffer for her cool. But touching had never been their way. They related intellectually only, with words, teasing, parrying, and sometimes cutting wit. All his fault, of course. She’d been too young for that Irish way of showing affection, his own father’s infrequent way. He’d invested so much of himself in Bill, his firstborn. Then busily been building his career when Kelly came along. All his fault, this way they were together. Mea maxima culpa.

  Finally she said with real feeling: “Kevin Beldon’s hunches! Factioning! Wow. How’s a murderer to plan for that?” She snorted and shook her head.

  He watched her with a momentarily quizzical face, but hadtime now only for the case. “You knew Eugene DeLint pretty well.”

  “Fellow officer of the court, Detective Beldon, you and I are not supposed to talk about pending cases.”

  “Yes, of course, it’s just —”

  “Oh shut up, Kevin, there’s no case yet…though we should be careful. I wasn’t long out of law school, and I assisted in winning one of the periodic sexual-harassment suits brought against Omphalos, this one by a young man whom DeLint had fucked over but good. Sor-ree, I know how you hate profanity in a lady, Father.” She’d done a southern belle accent, palm to chest again, batting her lashes away from him.

  “Of course I remember your first big case. Wasn’t Dr. Randome named in the suit too?”

  “Ewan Randome did whatever Eugene DeLint told him to do. Remember that, Dad. DeLint brought Ewan in to start up Psychiatric Wellness, and Mother DeLint soon had him running Omphalos Orientation, which periodically involved arranging private meetings between DeLint and his quote-unquote special finds, such as this boy.”

  “You too?”

  “What?”

  “You had to kowtow to DeLint too?”

  She squinted at him, ignored the question. “My contribution to the case was clerking and searching stuff mostly, except for one key move I won’t bother detailing. It had to do with digging up an old date-rape exclusion where the complainant was male. The harassment discharge made my rookie name. DeLint noticed, hired me himself out of the legal temp pool. Of course you don’t really remember any of this, Kevin. But yes, I, your only daughter, was once owned by Eu-genius DeLint, as we Omphalos insiders called him, sarcastically, of course. Owned like an indentured servant, like many another in this artificial city he’s made the centre of the great globe’s charity business. But DeLint owned me for little more than a year. He was unbelievable at first, a flatterer from the flatterers.”

  She waited, Kevin said nothing.

  “Bottom line: Eugene DeLint helped my early career. I thought at long last I’d found the daddy I never had.” Again with the southern belle on day-aa-dee. She laughed poorly.

  “Ouch. But you’re right: I don’t remember all the details. And right again, Madame Prosecutor: we really shouldn’t be talking about this publicly. Though I think I’ll break the law and call you later, if that’s okay with you?”

  “I’m telling you all this mainly because you will come across your daughter’s name today. I expect Frank Thu and MYCROFT will already have compiled a priority list of DeLint’s contacts dating back to his hatching. We parted ways acrimoniously, but that’s the only way anyone leaves Omphalos-DeLint. Believe me, Dad: there are a lot of people won’t mind hearing Eugene DeLint is dead. Don McNicol, his long-time head secretary I mentioned, hates his guts but could never break from him. And that executive assistant, Anna Kynder, that was another sick relationship, especially after Mother DeLint died. Be forewarned: you’re wading into a real cesspool of the family romance at Omphalos.”

  “You don’t say? Well…dear, I will need to hear more of this insider dirt.”

  She was all efficiency. “Don’t call from within Omphalos, no matter what you’re told by security. Is your police communicator still disconnected?”

  “I’ll reactivate today, Frank’ll be thrilled.” He lightly cupped her head, and felt the neck tendons tighten like piano wires vibrating. “Sorry about having to run, Kelly.”

  “Liar.”

  He snapped back his hand. “What?”

  She snorted away from him: “Never lie to a lawyer, Dad. You’re dying to get on the case. You always hated weekend downtime. And because she worshipped you, Mom pretended to hate it too, and so did Bill and I. Goodbye. I’m having another Collins.”

  “If you talk to Bill —”

  “Away with yeh, Kevin!”

  They both laughed at the bad imitation of her grandmother, Mammy.

  He looked out: on the lake the canoe was a tacky Canadian souvenir, a receding silhouette of a working paddler’s torso, a man’s now. But in the prow, Kevin knew, lay a hidden accomplice. He shivered in the heat, swung about and exited.

  Chapter 5

  Away from the crimes of his life sped Kevin Beldon in his maroon Crown Vic. Away from Kelly and talk of Cyn and Bill and mistaken family relations. Away from irritated canoeists and the blinding man-made lake. Away, too, from deceiving squeegee kids, spiders and spooky skies making a riddle of the warp and weft of his life. His life? Kelly was right, per usual. This was his life: crime. He had no eyes now for the scorched earth and deadheaded tulips — kept his gaze trained on the swooping Parkway. No time now for half-assed reflections on the near future. The future is now, a case: numerous possibilities leading to one solution. Away with yeh, Kevin! as his sainted Irish Mammy indeed used to shoo him. Towards the case, and the life of crime.

  His brain buzzed like a freshened hive. Kelly had been right again: Frank would already have updated MYCROFT on DeLint’s file. Everything anyone could ever want to know about Eugene DeLint would be instantaneously available from MYCROFT at a whisper, or a gesture, or even at a thought (for those stupid enough, or ambitious enough, to volunteer for the latest implant, which was rumoured to be the beginning of a new weapons program code-named “Lucifer”). MYCROFT would endlessly link in emulation of a neural net, spinning scenarios in such a way as could convince Kevin he’d committed the crime himself. That was brilliant MYCROFT. And that was fine, that degree of probability and even of invasive intimacy.

  But Kevin needed to work his own way to the imagined condition of complete knowledge, not be plunked into it like some VIRTLIFE vid game. MYCROFT would throw up its overload of information that would occupy an I-T forensics team of twenty for weeks just to begin evaluating and indicating possible paths to follow. But no machine was going to solve this crime. Because no soulless thing, whatever its super-learner algorithms, could ever do what Kevin’s mind was already doing: sensing, anticipating, hunching, thinking, imagining, guessing — leaping… Okay-okay, he thought, joyfully head-butting the steering wheel — factioning!

  Factioning: the term a University of Ottawa professor had coined to explain Detective Kevin Beldon’s gift for detection. During study towards his master’s degree in criminology, Kevin had volunteered to be the subject of research that had produced an academic article in a fat French periodical called Criminel. The word factioning had stuck. It made equal sense (little) in either language in stubbornly bilingual Ottawa. He’d come to detest the word, because its simplification wanted to leave him out of the process altogether, his mind, his soul. At only a bit of a stretch, the article could as well have been talking about MYCROFT. Kevin had taken to insisting to the curious that his method was just the old mixture of close observation, exhaustive research, repetition, memory-work, logic, more repetition, and the play of reason and imagination. But an ambitious academic’s slick lie had become truth, and in the general publi
c’s mind (thank you yet again, Macro Media) the odd word factioning had become synonymous with the odd Beldon.

  Cynthia had soothed him. “Okay then, at most it’s really just a kind of faith,” she explained to their few close friends (Frank Thu had needed no explanation). “Kevin has faith in his intuitions, but not just them, for heaven’s sake! That’s why Red, and not some computer, is the next stage in the evolution of law enforcement.” She was mocking the phrasing of the sensationalizing Macro stories.

  Above all, though, Kevin secretly believed it was his willingness to become that which only a few good cops — and no machine — could ever become: criminal-minded. Willingly criminal for the sake of the rule of law. Corrupt enough for a spell, and no more. No more!

  At Hawthorne Avenue he crossed the canal on the wrought-iron drawbridge (he always hated the way the wheels shimmied on the metal grid, the felt loss of control). He could see Omphalos now, the green Dome, DeLint’s Button. The great Eugene DeLint murdered!

  Omphalos could have been harbouring the Widower all along, as he’d suspected. And then withdrawn its protection, and so the Widower had exacted his revenge on DeLint.

  The Widower had been funnelling money somewhere. Maybe to Port-au-Prince. Omphalos had a Haiti connection through DeLint. Omphalos was ideally positioned to have been helping the Widower launder funds through Pyongyang or Beijing National to Grand-Enfant Doc Duvalier’s outlaw regime, and DeLint had decided to end that arrangement. DeLint himself could well have been the Widower. And somebody had beaten Kevin to the kill. Maybe.

  Of two things only was Detective Beldon dead certain, though MYCROFT would never give either even a probable maybe. One: the Widower had returned, dead or alive. Two: it was as personal as ever.

  And a third high possibility struck him: DeLint’s murderer (maybe the Widower) wanted him to suspect that Dr. Ewan Randome was involved, perhaps as the Omphalos insider, maybe as the murderer himself, maybe even as the Widower. And likely because the murderer knew of Kevin’s new therapeutic relationship with the psychiatrist. Personal? Personal (as his old man would have put it…and as Kelly had somehow picked up? Yes, from his own imitations of that Irish-Jewish lingo).