City of Ice

by John Farrow

  The man had not asked for her consent this time and he raised the gun above her head and she had to look up to stare into the black hole of the barrel and she stared at it and told herself that she would not go berserk here, she had expected intimidation, and she understood that she was supposed to imagine her death here and the bullet approach and the spatter of her brains against the wall but saw instead the cold metal and Julia was speculating on the color, not silver, not gray, not gunmetal, and she felt a calmness then, a peacefulness, and she believed that she would be all right, that she would neither wail nor rant.

  “You will walk with us. You won’t run off, you won’t scream, you won’t talk. You’ll do what you are told. Behave like everything’s normal here because that’s how it is. Everything’s like normal.”

  He took the gun out of her face then and hooked it in his belt again and wrapped himself in the beaver coat and she could breathe properly once more, almost.

  “Let’s go,” the other man commanded in French. He also spoke quietly but in a snarly tone. They walked on through the tunnel, Julia between her escorts, the sounds of their heels echoing in the narrow enclosure. She looked at their boots making all that noise. She couldn’t feel her own feet or sense her steps, her knees failed to work, something was wrong with her, it wasn’t peacefulness that had overtaken her, something else, she was in a state unknown to her. Both men, she noticed—and that was all that she knew for certain, all that occupied her consciousness—wore motorcycle boots.

  Out of the tunnel Julia stood on the sidewalk between the two men, the sun in her eyes. They were waiting for someone to arrive. “Stay cool,” the one who spoke English warned her. Duluth Avenue cut through the lower section of the park. Suddenly a van turned off Park Avenue and braked and the side door slid open and she was bundled into the vehicle. She fell upon the brown shag carpet on the floor. No seats, no windows in the back, and she rolled as the vehicle sped on and gripped fistfuls of shag to support herself. A man clutched her ankles, moving them out of his way. She lay partially on her side and the man with the pistol in his belt crouched over her and she feared being beat up or raped or killed, and he said, “Take that pack off.”

  Julia managed to get to her knees to slip the backpack from her shoulders. The movement, the activity, helped restore her. She’d been in shock and she was coming back to herself now and she was trembling and vaguely nauseous. The van stank of randy cat. The man with the pistol searched through her sack and she was glad that Norris had taken infinite precautions.

  Each of her books carried the name of Heather Bantry. A couple had been purchased brand-new in order to inscribe her name. In one he’d crossed out the identities of previous owners, including that of Julia Murdick, and added Heather Bantry’s. For two others he had merely ripped out the page inscribed with her real name and had her sign again as Heather. The biker went through her wallet. How Norris had been able to do so she did not know, but he had provided her with a social insurance number, a health insurance card, a student ID with photo, an Ontario driver’s license, a credit card, the works, all in the name of Heather Bantry. She was glad now that he had not trusted her to go through her apartment alone. He’d explained that the Angels wouldn’t explore her place with careful attention, that they’d restrict themselves to a primitive ransack. That was their style. They were probably inside right now. Norris had found several bits of evidence linking her to the name of Julia Murdick, including a postcard magnetized to the refrigerator door. If the name of Julia Murdick came up, she was to refer to her as a previous roommate who had moved out. If the fact that she had a one-bedroom apartment, with one bed, was ever raised, she’d reluctantly confess that Julia Murdick had been her lover. “They’ll like that. It’ll make sense if they think you’re an outsider. It’ll explain why you’re not down at the latest dance. It’ll explain anybody who might phone for you, the real you. It’ll explain a lot.” Having riffled through her possessions, her abductor did her the courtesy of replacing everything.

  “College girl,” he mumbled.

  “I hope you are who I think you are,” Julia responded, pleased to finally find a voice. She quavered, the sound was faint, which was okay. Norris had forewarned that she might become frightened. He had instructed her to use fear to her advantage. Better to be frightened than not. You’re less suspicious if you’re scared. The Angels like to be scary. You’ll offend them if you don’t show fear. Allow your natural fear to shine through along with your natural feistiness.

  Julia made herself as comfortable as she could in the rear of the van. No one stopped her from doing otherwise, but they indicated that she had to face the back, not the front windows. They drove on, and she rehearsed her position and prepared herself for the interrogation ahead.

  Be who you are. There is one safe course—be Heather Bantry, and know what you want.

  Okay, Selwyn. Gotcha.

  Along the way the van stopped and both men in the rear jumped out. They were replaced by a man and a woman and the door slid shut violently and they drove on again. She had not anticipated the gender mix. The woman wore a black leather jacket and jeans and boots, her hair shorn around the ears. She seemed malnourished, pale, weak. Slender and sullen, the moll did not look at her and did not move toward her until the man who had boarded the van signaled that it was time to do so.

  When she spoke her accent was heavy, the words tentative and slurred. “Me, I search you.”

  Julia switched immediately to French. “Go ahead.”

  The protocol lifted her spirits. They had not allowed any of the men to rub her down or touch her breasts or squeeze her buttocks in a hunt for weapons or a wire. They had obliged her by getting a woman for the job. The biker’s moll was thorough, looking and probing and running her hands over Julia’s body so that she did not know whether to giggle or kick her off. She yelped once, and even the driver looked at her. Julia apologized. After that the search went quickly.

  The van pulled over again and the woman got out and the man with the pistol and his companion got back inside. They drove on, four of them in the rear now, and Julia could not help but believe that she had passed an important initiation. Her body tingled all over as if she’d been sleeping on grass.

  The driver lit up a cigarette and the others moved forward and helped themselves from his pack and Julia was offered one but she declined. The van filled with their smoke and her eyes watered and she promised herself to have a word with Norris. This was one hazard he had neglected to mention.

  “I don’t suppose we could declare this a smoke-free zone for as long as I’m in here,” she said. Her captors scowled at her. “Just checking.”

  Saying something had felt good, her courage and natural lippiness returned. If these men were going to buy her incarnation as Heather Bantry, she’d have to sell them on a persona, a wit, a gaminess as though she was wild and irreverent and sassy while also being smart and controlled, cultivated and middle-class. She told herself these things and realized that she already lived the part—Selwyn Norris had chosen wisely. That thought prompted her first cynical doubt. She was sitting in the back of a smoky, cat-stink van with gang members, suffering the notion that Norris had solicited her not because he thought that she could play a role but because she suited his requirements for a certain type. She felt lonely then, duped. Had his attentions been not personal but calculating? Wasn’t he concerned for her, didn’t he marvel, wasn’t he enchanted? He could be so infuriating! He had forewarned that she’d come to doubt him, that she had to hold fast, she had to stick to who she was, Heather Bantry, and what she wanted, rehabilitation for her father, that any other course was treacherous. All right! she shouted within her head to alleviate her own anxieties, I’m Heather Bantry. I’m Heather Bantry. I’m on my own now. No one’s around to help me. Are you satisfied, Selwyn? I’m Heather Bantry!

  She slumped lower in the van to elude the thicker tiers of smoke and in doing so saw, on occasion, the tops of duplexes and apartment
buildings and patches of sky through the front windshield. The sky seemed promising, lustrous, as though of another world and her view from inside a prison. Julia concentrated on the sky and tried to catch bits of shadow and from those calculate the angle of the sun and the direction in which they were traveling.

  The driver only stopped in a hurry, never gradually, and repeatedly Julia was thrown forward and the vehicle wiggled on loose snow. The man with the gun, who was probably along, she guessed, for his command of English, told her to face the back. “Look out the window once more I’ll shoot your butt.”

  They stopped. One rider stepped out, two others climbed in. One was Max Gitteridge.

  He made himself reasonably comfortable against the back of the passenger seat. “We meet again.”

  Julia asked, “Can I face the front now?”

  “Face forward,” Gitteridge allowed. “I was reading about your father like you said. I’ve done my research. He had a breakdown.”

  “That’s right,” she told him.

  “I don’t want to offend you, but I’m interested—is he whacked out or what?” Gitteridge was speaking English.

  She tried to sit up as he did, with her back against the rear door. “He’s not whacked out. He’s good. But it’s important how he gets treated. Dad’s delicate. Put him in the back of a van, make him stare down the barrel of a gun—I’m not saying anybody here would do that—if something like that happened to him, yeah, he’d go funny again.”

  “What happens when he goes funny?” the other new arrival asked her. He was wearing a cashmere overcoat, which he unbuttoned in the cramped quarters, revealing a sharp beige suit. She decided he was one of those snappily dressed bikers Norris had told her about. In all, he wore four rings on his fingers. His black hair was combed straight back and greased down. She figured him to be around thirty, not much older than that, and he had scaly skin. His eyes were penetrating, steady, dark.

  “Sometimes he takes a ride on the Metro.”

  “So?”

  “Trouble is, he won’t get off. He’ll stay on the Metro, going around and around until somebody kicks him off. Sometimes when he’s sick he’ll sit in his chair and if you ask him to do something he’ll get all excited and prepare himself. Then he’ll stand up, cross the room, and go sit in another chair. If you coax him again he’ll get all excited again, like the first time never happened, and go sit in another chair. If you left him alone, he’d just sit in the first chair and never move. My dad gets into a loop where he can’t turn off the switch. He cycles. It’s like he goes around in circles in outer space.”

  “So he’s wacko, that’s what you’re saying,” Gitteridge surmised.

  “We’re supposed to take care of this guy?” the other man wanted to know. He was studying her with a hard gaze. His clothes were the finest she’d ever seen on a man, but he looked alien to her, whackedout or something.

  The operation might depend on the issue he had raised. Selwyn Norris had drummed the matter into her head. She had to portray Carl Bantry as a flipped-out banker, one too loony to be accepted back into his profession, yet he had to be manageable, a man whose knowledge and talents remained sufficiently intact to benefit the financial prowess of any organization.

  She had to be strong here, defiant. “My father is not a charity case,” she told him, and she matched his glare. She matched it and she reveled in her tone and the sinew of her conviction. “I am not a charity case. My father is talented. He’s capable. He can work as well as anybody, and when it comes to banking, when it comes to international finance and currencies, he’s one of the best. I know because in the old days some of the world’s biggest companies came to him for advice. Countries came to him. He knows his stuff and his illness hasn’t diminished that one bit. Okay, so he’s fragile. I have to take care of him. You can’t pressure him or bully him. He loses his marbles then. But the goddamn banks screwed him and they won’t hire him back, they won’t admit to making a mistake. But if somebody needs a financial expert, if somebody needs to move money around, or if somebody needs to know how to work money on an international level, they couldn’t do better than to hire my old man.”

  “But he’s a nutcase, Heather,” Gitteridge reminded her. “So who’s going to hire him?”

  She could not pretend to be a tough girl here, not in this company. She was a banker’s daughter negotiating for better terms from the world in which she found herself. “Someday my father will be hired by people who don’t care that he’s lived in a tunnel. They’ll see he’s a financial expert who rose through the ranks way quicker than most. My father will be hired by someone who appreciates that he doesn’t have options in life, so he’ll be loyal to anybody who gives him a chance.”

  “No matter who?” the man in the high-gloss beige suit asked her. He had acne scars around the rim of his jaw. Although the hands in his lap looked like they’d been given a manicure recently, he had hood features, a generic hardness, a menace.

  “No matter who.”

  The two men up front shared a glance. They responded favorably to the way she talked. She didn’t lead them into conversations they had no desire to indulge, didn’t ask them to compromise a thing. A good start, Julia thought, to any relationship.

  “Let’s say somebody hires him,” Gitteridge put forward. “What happens if he goes nutso?”

  “I’ll be around. I’ll see to my father’s needs. Keep him on top of things. I’ll protect him from anything he can’t handle. In the first place, he’s not nearly as sick as he used to be. He’s almost cured. What’s past is past. It’ll be my job to keep him content in his environment. I can pull him out of his cycles. I have that effect. If he does flip, a little delay and I’ll have him back on track. No big deal.”

  “Let’s go see your old man,” Gitteridge proposed.

  “Hang on,” Julia declared. “Not so fast.”

  “You’ve got a problem with that?”

  “Sure do. We haven’t worked anything out. I’m not going to introduce you to my father until we understand each other.”

  Gitteridge smiled. She didn’t like his smile. He was a handsome man otherwise, but the lowlife in him showed when he smiled, as though the gesture was unnatural. “That’s not exactly how it’s going to work, Miss Bantry. You are going to introduce us to your father—now—and that’s that.”

  “No way.”

  “I’m not going to argue the point.”

  “Neither am I. I know where he lives, you don’t. My father is stable, he’s okay, but he might flip if a bunch of rowdies barge in on him. Tell me if you want to hire him first. Make an offer. If the terms are acceptable to my dad, I’ll make the introductions.”

  Gitteridge issued that bony, pinched sneer again. “You know, Miss Bantry, if I was a lawyer for the Hell’s Angels or the Mafia—which is a fantasy, but if I was—I’d be pretty much dumb to get involved in my clients’ dirty work. If I was such a person and I found myself in a situation where dirty work seemed the only answer, I’d ask the driver to stop the van at the next intersection. I’d get out. You wouldn’t. Now, do I get out at the next corner, or what?” He raised his hand as though to signal.

  “Yeah, yeah, you win. I’ll take you to see my dad. But don’t hurt him. He can’t suffer duress.”

  “What’s that?” the man in beige asked.

  “Don’t upset him,” Julia explained.

  Gitteridge said, “Miss Bantry, I’m a lawyer. I’m not a goon. I have been asked to visit a potential client, and I will do so. After the visit, we’ll talk.”

  “I have your word my father won’t be harmed?”

  “I don’t give my word to you on anything. But we are going to meet your father and that’s that. Now, tell me where he lives.”

  Julia realized then that they weren’t moving, nor were they stopped at a light or stuck in traffic. She gave up the address. Gitteridge slid the side door open, bent low, and stepped out. “See you there,” he told her. The biker in the dandy clothes fo
llowed him out. The van spun away from the curb and Julia Murdick hung on.

  Julia stepped inside the shabby apartment block, heading for the buzzers, when the man in the cashmere coat and fancy suit restrained her, demanding, “Which one?”

  Coded signals would not be permitted.

  He rang the buzzer at length, and inwardly she smiled. She couldn’t have signaled their arrival in a more deliberate fashion.

  The bell rang back and they entered through a second set of doors.

  “Which way?” Gitteridge asked.

  “Top floor.”

  “After you.”

  Four of them followed her up. Gitteridge and the other guy in a suit maintained her pace with ease. The two big bikers who had abducted her were back, and they found the ascent difficult.

  She was rattled by nerves as she gained the top floor. Please, please be in character. Please please please. Lordy, I’ll be wearing concrete pumps.

  “Which door?” Gitteridge demanded.

  She led the men there. The sleazeball in the suit rapped his knuckles against the wood. She wanted to touch his lapels, feel the material.

  They waited, and heard a shuffling motion before a peep of a voice inquired, “Who is it?”

  “Daddy, it’s me,” Julia chirped. Her temples throbbed, she was parched, but she had found her voice and it had sounded true and confident.

  The chain lock was detached before the dead bolt was unfastened. The hood in the fine threads stepped to the door with the demeanor of a man about to charge through, and one of the panting fat boys joined him.

  “Remember,” Julia warned, “be gentle. He’s fragile.”

  The door opened and Heather Bantry’s daffy, brilliant, frail father stood before them in a ratty housecoat and pajamas three sizes too long. Unshaven, his hair disheveled, the Banker appeared passive, almost comatose. He smiled at Julia and at the men with the same insipid grin. “Been up since the crack, waiting for the morning trains,” he said dully. “Would you like a cup of tea?”