City of Ice

by John Farrow

  She reached for him, and touched him, gave him an earnest, medical, squeeze. She felt awkward and silly and not so experienced after all as he moved to love her in ways her body would allow. Julia heard herself sigh again, utter involuntary sounds as though to keep contact with herself, quick jabs of pleasure, and she spoke to him, her words wanton, making him laugh with her language, but her whole attention was desirous of him now, she was needy in ways she hadn’t realized, desperate in ways she hadn’t anticipated, and Julia was grateful just for the flash of emotions and pleasure.

  He knew not to enter her but placed himself over her, his body upon hers.

  Finding his rhythm, Julia moved with Norris in the still night and simultaneously felt so extraordinarily safe amid the heightened danger of her life that that confluence of sensations bolted her ahead of herself, she gasped and felt torn apart. With cries and a great shudder of her limbs she was fierce now in his arms and joyful, and everything—she knew—the whole business was worth it, especially the danger, especially the anxiety, she gave herself up to this tempest and this calm and if she stayed so close to Norris that she could not determine whose skin was hers or his she’d know then that everything would be all right, everything would be just fine.

  He soothed her, and brought her down gently, and she moved above him to pleasure him. “Okay, old man,” she whispered. “You’re in for it now. You have no idea how much I needed this. I was getting nervous out there, Sel. I was getting doubtful about myself, you. I’ve been worrying. Did you know that? Is that why I’m here? Some nights I want to scream in my sleep.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “I feel their bugs in my house as if they’re nattering at me. Some nights I want to talk. Babble. I want them to come over and get me. I have dreams about being tortured by Hell’s Angels and they really are devils, they really are hideous. Don’t give me that look. I’m okay. I’m okay. But for the stress that you have put me through you will now suffer the consequences.”

  “Then I win,” she heard him mention under his breath.

  “What’d you say?” she whispered back.

  “I win. We had a bet. I’d get more information out of you tonight than you would extract from me even though you were the one asking the questions. You have confided in me down to your heels, girl. I win.”

  He was good, she had to admit that. But that was all right. Her life depended on him being good at what he did.

  She nuzzled his chest, moved her hands over him. “Enjoy your victory, Champ,” she conceded. “Because now you’re going to pay. Big time.”

  11

  Saturday, January 15

  In order to be themselves, the Banker and Julia needed to overcome their own fastidious training. A walk through Mount Royal Park and up the mountain on a cold, sunny, breezeless afternoon was proving to be fraught with difficulty. For a few hours they wanted to forget about being the bikers’ banker and his caregiver, but it wasn’t easy.

  They had set aside the afternoon to play hooky from their covert lives. Julia had been having qualms about their mutual dependency. While she’d enjoyed a portion of time to get to know Selwyn Norris, growing familiar with him, learning to trust him, she’d been paired with Arthur Davidson—alias Carl Bantry—alias the Banker—knowing little of the man. That lack of knowledge irritated her. For Arthur had become a symbol of her folly, the person who most perfectly represented her willingness to endanger her life without logical rationale. What did he have to offer in a time of crisis? Right in her presence, as if she was invisible, the Banker had speculated on how she might hold up under pressure—but what about him? Why did he and Norris worry about the woman while clearly displaying confidence in the man? Why doubt the young one and not the old? During their initial tests he’d performed well, as had she, but could she trust her life to him if things went wrong? She decided to take him for a walk on the mountain where Norris had first introduced himself to her, where they could view the treacherous city and discover whatever there was to be revealed.

  Strolling into the sun they tried to strip away the veneer of their fake personas to speak as friends, as cohorts. Anyone watching would not mistake them for lovers, for they’d promptly separate if accidentally they touched. When listening to him, Julia would stretch her neck high and back, analyzing his remarks rather than taking them into her care and nurture as a lover might do. Arthur walked most of the time with his hands in his pockets, an insular man uncomfortable with company, protective of himself and his secrets. His smile was winsome, though, and anyone could tell that he cared about his companion, a care that was friendly, possibly fatherly in nature.

  Not that anyone looking carefully would judge them to be a father and daughter out for a walk. Their body types were notably opposite. Julia was tall, square at the shoulders, and inclined to put on weight if she didn’t watch herself. She had an hourglass figure. Arthur was a full head shorter. His posture was sloped, his shoulders rounded, and he was moderately thin for his age. His form was pear-shaped, rather womanly. He had to take quicker short strides to match her long ones. His baldness accentuated a rake to his forehead severely different from her flat brow, which actually broadened near the top. Her nose lifted and her nostrils flared where his nose dipped, the nostrils hardly visible. Her skin was a fine feature, drawing the utmost benefit from her age and sex. His showed thirty-year-old acne scars along the jawline, and in bright light capillaries were visible. Unlike Julia’s fine lines, Arthur’s large eyebrows over his smallish eyes were his only startling natural feature, except for his decidedly unnatural, precise, square scar.

  “What happened to your cheek?” Julia blurted out. She’d been rehearsing a roster of questions, and one slipped loose, spoken before she could censor herself. From the time they had first met, the patch below his right eye had intrigued her as a badge of experience or, possibly, of error.

  “I got shot,” he stated bluntly. The words settled in the clear air to crystallize upon the snow. Below them tobogganers hooted and slid, and the two selected a downward path bleeding away from the broad clearing into the trees.

  “In the face?” Julia asked. She implied her dismay, her disquiet.

  The Banker declined to mock her for stating the obvious. “Point-blank range. Small-caliber weapon, fortunately, or I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Fortunately,” Julia said, the irony of the word apparent.

  “It could have been worse.”

  “Could it have been better? I mean, what happened?”

  A path through the trees to the summit remained open in winter, packed down by snowshoers and hikers. A measure of agility would be required on the steeper, icier sections. They forged on and after a dip commenced the incline, and Arthur offered Julia a hand up.

  “Julia—” the Banker began, then stopped. “It’s hard for me to call you that. Do you mind if I stick to Heather? I get nervous. I’d rather not slide into bad habits.”

  “I know what you mean. I feel dumb when I say Arthur. You’ll always be Carl to me. Dad. Let’s stick to those names.”

  They walked on. “I’ve come to my post as the Banker legitimately, Heather. Once when I was a branch manager my bank was robbed. Over my career as a teller, loans officer, and manager, my branches were robbed four times.”

  “That’s when you were shot?”

  “I wasn’t working for Sel, if that’s worrying you. The contrary—he rescued me. Selwyn gave me back my life. After being robbed three times, I was a trifle blasé about the whole rigmarole—a mistake I won’t make again. On the day in question a robber barged into my office to keep me from touching off alarms. His buddies riffled the tills, waved guns around, shouted threats. You can’t help but be scared when someone’s waving a pistol in your face, but I was reasonably calm. I checked the guy in front of me, made mental notes on the details that help with identification later. With each robbery I’d improved my recall. That time, a scuffle broke out with a teller. She was attractive, and one of the punks
touched her in a lewd way. She screamed, she was instantly hysterical—who could blame her? She began flailing at him. The robber panicked and shot her. Whether it was deliberate or whether the gun went off accidentally I don’t know. I do know that he never gave her a warning. He never gave her a chance.”

  “My God.”

  Arthur took a deep breath. She could see that he still had to deal with the emotions from that day. “By that time the bank was full of people screaming and robbers were shouting crazily. I jumped up. I didn’t do anything, it was involuntary, I just jumped up from my chair. The guy in my office knew he had more on his head now than armed robbery. The moment was heightened. We were both petrified. He knew I’d checked him out. He raised his pistol from his side, slowly. I tried to argue, make him see sense. He swore at me, quietly, I’ll never forget that, like this was all my fault, then the son of a bitch shot me in the face.”

  They reached a cut in the rock formation of the mountain that required careful handholds and patient steps, and Julia climbed across and offered a hand to her partner. Arthur chose a slightly different route to span the gap which momentarily left him spread-eagled, his balance dependent on her hand, before he was able to transfer weight from one foot to the other and spring across. After that they climbed side by side along a widening portion of the trail, their boots digging into crusted snow. Below, cars whizzed up and down Park Avenue, oblivious to their adventure.

  “Did the teller die?”

  Arthur wet his lips in the dry cold. “She’s a para-plegic. ”

  “That’s terrible.” She did not know what to say and felt oddly contrite. “What about the robbers?”

  He shook his head. “The man who shot me was killed in a holdup four months later. I ID’d his mug shot down at the morgue. Which was a pleasure. The other shooter will get his someday. I’ll never have the satisfaction of knowing it, because I don’t have a clue what he looked like. But losers like him don’t make it through without getting hurt.”

  “That poor girl.”

  Arthur strode on with his head downcast. “All she was doing was working at a bank to earn a modest living. All she did was get scared when molested by a man with a gun. For that she’ll never walk again.”

  The anger in his voice impressed Julia. She had not recorded this passion in her partner before. He’d been so easygoing—forceful, at times, and committed, but his demeanor had come across as even and uncomplicated. “So, Dad, is that when you chose to become a crime fighter?”

  He smiled quickly, slightly, as they took alternate routes around a boulder. The divergent trails came together again, and the man took the young woman by the elbow and walked alongside her that way.

  “I might as well tell you, I was a mess for a time. Seeing a young teller gunned down, seeing a pistol pointing in my face, believing at that moment I was a dead man, getting shot myself, learning later that my teller was crippled for life—I never wholly recovered. I was a nervous wreck. I was fiercely, illogically angry.” He was staring straight ahead now, as though revisiting that wrath. “To make a long story short, I had a nervous breakdown, went through a lifestyle change, divorced, became a drunk, the whole shebang.”

  “Different, but not totally dissimilar from the real Carl Bantry,” Julia noted.

  “No coincidence, of course,” the Banker determined. “Selwyn chooses us wisely.” Every bone in her body yearned to pursue that one question. How had she been chosen? What did Arthur know about it? “I remember when Hagop was scrutinizing you.”

  “Hagop?”

  “Santa Claus. The boy murdered on Christmas Eve.”

  “He found me?”

  “Sel gave him the coordinates. That’s the word he uses when he wants someone in his sights. You had to be smart. Attractive, but Hagop was not to get carried away. That’s not a slight, by the way, but you know what I mean.”

  “Do I?” Julia responded. “Just what were the physical requirements?”

  “He didn’t want someone who’d distract a room. You had to be noticed, to be appreciated, but you shouldn’t be the center of attention.”

  Julia decided that she could accept the restricted attributes as being complimentary. “What else?” she pushed him.

  “You had to be bright. A reader. Bilingual, French and English.”

  “What else?”

  “Bit of a loner. Superior to your peers in both intellect and self-absorption.”

  “What!”

  “You had to be foreign to the city, not living at home, ideally on your own. Romantically unattached.”

  “Holy. Anything else? Height? Hair color? Ethnic origin? SAT results?”

  “I didn’t get all the details.” Arthur chuckled. “It was Hagop’s gig.”

  “So—like me—you were conscripted. Selwyn Norris wined and dined you, brought you along slowly?”

  “The day I met him I was drinking in a bar along the Main. Selwyn came in the door and walked directly over to my table. Guess what he said.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “‘Drink up, Arthur Davidson. It’ll be your last shot for a while. You’ve been through the dark, had your butt reamed. The time has come to stand in the light.’”

  “You knee him in the testicles?” Julia wondered. “I would’ve.”

  “Too pissed. But he had my attention. I was drunk as a skunk, and he was dramatic enough that I took him to be my guardian angel. That was my first thought. But what I said was, ‘Who’re you, Dickhead?’”

  “Funny. I said something similar the first time we met. How’d he respond?”

  “ ‘Those bastards who shot you down like a dog and put your teller in a chair for life were working for someone. I’m after the men responsible, but I need your help, Arthur Davidson. Sober up now so you’ll be man enough later.’ ”

  The two walked up to the ridge of the mountain where the stone lookout stood guard from a precipice. A calèche moved off with winter tourists kissing in the cold on that high trail above the city, the sled skidding on the snow, the breath of the horse vaporizing in great billows. The driver gently clucked his tongue and slapped the reins to keep his beast going. In the frigid air the breath of the two hikers proved they were panting from their ascent.

  “Why do you do this, Dad?”

  “Why? Everything I do now is revenge for my teller. The work makes sense. Shuffling papers no longer makes sense. Signing loan applications no longer makes sense. I do it because this simple, sad little banker is a fighter at heart. I do it because, like you, I’m hooked.”

  They surveyed the city below them, chimneys smoking in their winter slumber like so many drowsy old men puffing away, huddled in a private club. The city seemed a peaceful, contented place, the altitude and sunlight on the winter snows contributing admirably to the illusion. Perhaps it was the easy white breath of the chimneys across the winterscape that reminded Julia she stood upon a dead volcano, that the elevation of her view had been created by molten rock spewed from the bowels of the earth. She stomped her feet to keep them warm, as though striking a compact with the frozen ground.

  “Heather?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  With that simple question she understood that his intentions for this day mirrored her own. She had come to figure him out, to get down to his core, to discover if she could trust him with her life. He wanted to know if she’d seize up when times got bad, or come through for him. Would she, like the teller who panicked and got shot, freak out at the wrong moment? Or, when the chips were down, would she be brilliant, would she shine?

  Julia had no corresponding tale to tell. She had no anecdotes to pinpoint the moment when she had turned toward this work. Nor could she move to any pat answer, for had she really thought this through? Was she not merely a puppet on Selwyn’s strings, happy to be manipulated, to go along for the ride? How could she convince him of her commitment? Now that she was asking the pertinent questions, how could she convince herself
?

  Sensing her dilemma, Arthur coaxed her along. “To do this, you’re risking your year at university, your career, your future, your—”

  “Life?” she asked back. “Yeah, well, my life I care about, those other things—” She let it drop.

  “What about those other things?”

  Julia thought awhile. The city was so huge below her. When Selwyn had driven her up here to skate, he’d stopped at this lookout to explain the ways of the world to her. She’d responded to that, she’d reveled in that, although she’d tried to keep Selwyn from knowing that much about her. But he had known. He had had her pegged.

  There was the matter of the steeplechase arch. She used to think that the pain she experienced during sex would go away, or be corrected. Then she’d found out that she’d have to live with it. Selwyn had shown her that she could still take a lover, as long as they adapted to certain compromises, so it didn’t seem as important now as it had a week ago, or even a night ago. To be unable to have children the way other women did was part of it, too, that verdict still slumped inside her as chronic bad news, but that wasn’t the whole deal either.

  “My parents were children of the sixties,” she began. “They’re divorced, of course. My mom raised me. I’ve had between four and six stepfathers. How many depends on which ones I’m supposed to count and which ones were, in my mom’s words, ‘merely itinerant.’”

  After a moment of silence, Arthur suggested, “So Selwyn is a father figure to you, something like that?”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  She had a way of uttering profanities that made men smile. Selwyn did, and now Arthur was beaming as well.

  “My parents bought a farm, back when they were still together. They’d had some hippie-commune idea about living off the land that never got off the ground. No pun intended. Good thing for them it didn’t, they would’ve starved. Anyway, we still own the farm but we use it as a retreat. What was supposed to have been a veggie patch is a parking space for German cars. You can swim laps in the stables. You get the picture. Buildings were added and others expanded, we had to keep growing to keep pace with the divorce rate, to accommodate the new kids from this marriage and the old ones from that one. I have no brothers and no sisters, but half brothers, half sisters? Who can count?”