City of Ice

by John Farrow

  The pair ascended the steps to the apartment building, kissed on the stoop. Way too passionately for Mathers’s liking. Their initial undercover job and they were having sex. Arm in arm, the two entered the building and Mathers ambled down to the rear door. He waited, and checked his watch. The junior cops opened the door from inside.

  “You kids having fun?”

  Both seemed flushed.

  “There’s no need to get carried away.”

  “We were told to make it look good,” the woman said.

  “You’re officers of the law,” Mathers reminded them. He didn’t know why he said that, or what it meant. After that he held his tongue.

  Minutes later the locksmith knocked—a mistake—and came in. Cinq-Mars entered last.

  “Wait.” Cinq-Mars held the door open a crack. Snowblowers and graders were active, their diesels roaring, and a long line of trucks waited in single file to be loaded with snow, the idling motors cacophonous. Small sidewalk plows scooted ahead of the graders, and pulsing amber lights flashed off the buildings. Tow trucks cruising the side streets emitted annoying wee-waw sirens to jolt residents from their slumber to move parked cars. In the corridor, the building quavered and windows rattled. Cinq-Mars seemed satisfied. “Let’s go.”

  They ascended to the fourth floor. The two rookies guarded the stairs at either end of the hall to warn of intruders. The locksmith kneeled down by a door and faced the lock. He’d already classified the job as a snap, but he required a patch of time.

  Cinq-Mars tapped him on the shoulder. Put a finger to his lips.

  The locksmith waited through a lull outside and started up again as the bedlam resumed. He was a small man, lithe, his fingers dexterous. He opened the door while the machines were especially vocal.

  Leaving their boots and shoes in the hall, Cinq-Mars and Mathers pulled on foam slippers over their socks. They entered the apartment and soundlessly shut the door behind them.

  This was illicit, everyone knew. This was illegal entry.

  Penlights shone the way. Cinq-Mars had brought along a DC fluorescent lantern to be used if conditions allowed—the swarm of revolving lights made it viable. The two men stood silently side by side in the lamp’s glow, feeling as though they’d been here before, alone in a barren apartment.

  The rooms were empty.

  Speech was prohibited. In response to his partner’s nod Mathers moved to investigate the closets. He feared the moment, feared he’d find another dead kid. Each vacant closet allowed him to breathe again, then the next clutched at his heart. No body was found on the premises. The apartment was truly empty.

  Swept clean.

  Cinq-Mars bent down to study the electrical outlets, and Mathers aimed the light. At first, the older man touched nothing. He appeared to be studying dust along the baseboards. He gestured for a screwdriver, which Mathers went out on tiptoe to fetch from the locksmith. Cinq-Mars removed the wall plate with extraordinary care, certain to make not the slightest sound. Mathers leaned in. His senior eased him back a bit. He didn’t want him breathing too close. Mathers saw it then—a wee silver transmitter wedged under the socket.

  Silently, Cinq-Mars restored the wall plate.

  He remained on his knees. The convoy of equipment outside was moving along, creating less racket, although the building continued to tremble. He had to act quickly. The detective moved down the wall to a small phone box, which jutted out from the baseboard bereft of active lines. Jacks were available in various spots around the apartment, but this box struck him as promising. Cinq-Mars removed the cover. Inside was the usual jumble of wires, and he deployed his penlight to show Mathers what was out of the ordinary.

  A small receiver, wired to the phone line.

  The first bug picked up conversations around the room, benefiting from the holes in the socket, transmitted the sound ten feet down the wall to an amplified receiver, which dispatched the news across the telephone network to an unknown destination.

  Cinq-Mars returned the cover to the box and signaled to evacuate the room.

  In the corridor he put his footwear back on and walked over to the cop watching the main stairs. He whispered that he wanted his topcoat. He returned and, after the locksmith had secured the door again, used the coat to mop up their winter melt. Cinq-Mars returned the coat to a grumpy-looking cop, and everybody headed down.

  Once again, the young lovers made a spectacle of themselves on the front stoop, this time to attract attention while the officers slipped out the rear. The pair headed off, the locksmith crossed to his unmarked van, and Cinq-Mars and Mathers, choosing alternate routes, reconnected at their squad car, where Cinq-Mars drummed his fingers across the wheel.

  His partner waited.

  “At issue,” the older man began, “is whether the bug was dropped before the apartment was emptied out—or after. I’d say after. It’s a recent implant. The dust on the wall plate doesn’t coincide with the dust on the quarter round or the baseboards, or with the dust on the other plates. The plate was disturbed. The same thing happened in Hagop Artinian’s apartment.”

  “What does that give us?” Mathers pondered.

  “Whoever removed her stuff wants to know if she’s been missed.” Cinq-Mars spoke slowly, quietly, as though directed by the late hour to be discreet. “If they’ve pulled her from view, they’ll want to know who gets nervous. They think about her being connected. But they don’t know. So they run a test. Or, if they happen to figure she’s connected, they might want to know to whom. That’s scary. In that scenario, they suspect somebody besides us.”

  “Your source.”

  “Whoever he is.”

  They waited in the stillness of the car. In his rearview mirror, Cinq-Mars saw the young police officers coming the long way around to pick up their vehicle. They remained in character.

  “At Hagop’s place, I’d bet money they took their bug out. Here, they put it in.”

  Mathers broached the one question he’d rather not have mentioned. “Do you think she’s alive, Émile?”

  Cinq-Mars shook his head with an instinctive determination. “Bill, until we find her hanging in a closet with a meat hook in her hide, we proceed on the basis that she is. I don’t want to lose this one. No way. No more dead kids.”

  Mathers struggled with the implications. “If we treat her as alive, that means she’s being tested.”

  “Which means we never indicate that we know about her existence. As of now, pull all surveillance off the apartment. As far as we’re concerned, she does not exist. We mention her to nobody.”

  Mathers took a deep breath and released an arduous sigh. “Now what?”

  “Take the morning off, Bill. Catch up on your sleep. Pay your caseload a little attention tomorrow afternoon. Or is that today already? Whatever. If I can swing it, I’m not coming in until tomorrow night.”

  “To do what?”

  Cinq-Mars bobbed his head from side to side, as though that remained to be decided. “The device was sophisticated. The installation professional, top-notch. We’ve heard mention of KGB, FSB, there’s talk about CIA. I bet those groups can recognize one another’s handiwork. The best chance that woman has is if the Angels never think CIA, and if they have an ex-KGB officer among them, they might. If they’re testing her, we want her to pass. If she’s being initiated, we want her to get through. Otherwise, the SQ will find her in a ditch somewhere, chain-sawed into cordwood.”

  “Tomorrow night?” Mathers reminded him after a pause.

  “I’m curious. How far does LaPierre go with his gadgets? Maybe I’ll pay him a visit.”

  Cinq-Mars started up the car. He figured the officers in his mirror were kissing just to get Mathers’s goat, but he was too tired to play along.

  “I learned stuff tonight,” Mathers let on. “Émile, at your place—in the barn. Why did you tell me that your friend betrayed you?”

  “Ray knows too much. His caution was too deliberate. When he warned me about a rogue, he had som
ebody specific in mind. I could feel it. Hell, the damn horses could feel it. You know what? You put me on to him.”

  “Me? How?”

  “You said my source probably knew me, if not directly then through someone close to me. For a while I was even careful what I said around Sandra, just because she’s American. But then I figured, if I was CIA, coming across the border, how would I find out who to contact in the department? Chances are, I’d check with Canadian Intelligence, call in a favor, see what that did for me. Ray pointed Steeplechase Arch to my door.”

  Mathers considered the news a moment. He was falling asleep. “Is that selling you out? Your career prospered, Émile.”

  “Aiding an organization to manipulate a friend is betrayal. Keep that in mind in case you’re tempted. Do you want a lift home, or back to HQ?”

  “HQ,” Mathers stipulated. His car was there. He had no intention of taking the morning off as Cinq-Mars had suggested. He’d need his car, if not at the crack then fairly early in the day.

  As a premonition of spring, a tickler, a boost to civic morale, the winter thaw arrived in the early morning hours, taking the form of a torrential downpour. Sometime after dawn, blue skies became prevalent.

  An immaculate day.

  Émile Cinq-Mars and Sandra Lowndes released their horses to the three paddocks abutting their stables, and the animals kicked up their hooves in the melting snow. Heavy with foals, mares slouched and rubbed themselves along the fences, content enough. Given to a spell of enchantment, the couple observed the animals, assured that winter would end, that the rituals of spring and summer would again pertain. The countryside would bloom. While they were immersed in the frigid dark of winter, for either of them to have imagined the prospect had seemed attributable to fuzzy-headedness.

  The couple stood in their boots leaning on the corral fence. Both grinned as though a jubilant breeze had passed through them.

  “I guess I’ve been a problem boy,” Cinq-Mars lamented.

  Sandra stood with her chin on her hands, elbows and forearms resting along a fence rail. “You’ve been distant,” she acknowledged, deliberately being gentle with him.

  He moved closer to her and brushed her cheek with a finger, shifting a strand of straw-colored hair away from her eyes. Sandra turned and lowered her head, meditatively touching her lips with both thumbs. Her husband crossed his arms and hung them on the top rail, a foot up on the lowest rung.

  “We are why we are,” he stated.

  Sandra observed him intently. She knew when he desired his words to settle, when he expected their import to be esteemed, their weight affirmed. At times his riddles were too arcane for her sensibility. “Which means what exactly?”

  Cinq-Mars did not become agitated by this direct rebuttal to his mood, in itself promising. “The phrase meant a lot to me when I was younger. Back then it carried the weight of revelation. Now it means nearly as much, but in a different light. We are why we are. Think about it.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  The movement of his chin, she noticed, even the rhythm of his words, closely matched the gait of a dressage horse crossing the paddock, its neck nicely rounded as though responding to the aids of a phantom rider.

  “The world puts up its pet phrases—‘You are what you eat,’ ‘Be all that you can be,’ ‘I think therefore I am,’ ‘Things go better with Coke.’ One morning, I woke up with a line in my head, ‘We are why we are.’ It stuck.”

  “What does it mean to you?”

  He shrugged, as though that was less important now. “That we’re here for a purpose. That that purpose dictates who we are, what becomes of us. We’re on the earth for a reason, and when we know the reason, we get a glimpse of who we are. I got it into my head that my purpose in life was to care for animals. I wanted to be a vet. That wasn’t possible, so I became a cop, an altogether different sort of zookeeper. I rationalized that I’d gotten my destiny mixed up at first.”

  Two polo ponies ran off at a gallop until they hit the deeper snow, which flew up alongside them and caused them to disappear momentarily behind a blizzard of their own creation.

  “I took the phrase personally—we are why we are—and grafted my own ambition onto it. ‘I’m a cop because that’s why I’m here, to be a cop,’ that sort of thing. Either I’m older and wiser or simply less concerned about how my career affects the universe, but I now apply the phrase generally. We are who we are because of why we are.”

  He was allowing his words to settle again. Sandra asked, “Then why are we, Émile?”

  He repeated his shrug and allowed the cathedral vault of his eyebrows to rise, indicating that the answer did not reside with him, that the best he could offer was speculation. “Perhaps we’ve been put here to care for animals. In a sense, our communal purpose is to be vets.”

  “You’re losing me, Émile,” she warned him.

  He smiled, and she was glad to see that brightness illuminate his face for a change. Just as spring lurked behind the cover of winter, she believed that the man she’d married remained underneath the worry and burden of his occupation. Perhaps it was the sunlight on his face again, the unbuttoned jacket, or being outof-doors, finally, without a hat. He was looking years younger. Strange, because she knew that he hadn’t slept much, that he had tossed all night.

  “Cats and dogs live in our homes because they know how to control their bowels. If horses and pigs and goats and lizards and elephants and hippos could handle their personal hygiene, we’d have domesticated them aeons ago. Giraffes in the living room, rhinos in the kitchen. Gazelles in our backyards if we could afford the real estate.”

  “Think so?”

  “Absolutely!” He raised a hand to emphasize his point. “One of the earliest myths of our culture is of Noah saving animals from mass extinction. I consider the myth to be embedded in our genetic code, because that’s why we are.”

  “Exactly what vitamins are you taking these days, Émile? I want a complete breakdown of your prescription list.” Feeling happy again herself, she was delighted that it was so easy to arouse a smile from his usually dour, priestly visage.

  “I’ve been thinking, Sandra, about the history of life. On earth it’s been marked by catastrophe. The mind of nature has a long memory. Nature has never forgotten the Permian period, for instance—a mass extinction that came on fast. We nearly lost the planet. Ninety percent of ocean species, gone. Seventy percent of reptile and amphibian families, thirty percent of insect species, vanished. I think nature said, ‘Holy cow, that was a close one!’ ”

  “Nature didn’t have cows back then.”

  Cinq-Mars had to check himself before he took her meaning, and there it was again, an unmistakable upturning around the edges of his mouth.

  “All right, so nature said, ‘Jumping leaping lizards!’ Do you want me to go on?”

  “Don’t stop.”

  He nodded, thinking, finding his place in the scheme of things, working his way back through the musings that had interfered with last night’s rest. “Okay, so nature sees itself come close to being annihilated, and it thinks, ‘What we need are robust creatures for land. Let’s create dinosaurs. To support complete domination by the dinosaurs, we’ll create plant life and animal life for their consumption. Let’s hope they’re tough enough to endure whatever comes next.’ They weren’t, as things turned out. So after the dinosaurs journeyed off into that good night, nature made another choice. This time it banked on brain-power. But brains had to be placed within a tough species, a competitive, aggressive, strong-willed species, because the earth is no place for wimps. So humankind evolved, developed with the express purpose of endlessly enhancing its mental capacity so that the species could care for the planet, so that we could anticipate natural and interstellar catastrophes. We are who we are because of why we are. We have lived with dogs in our dwellings since the Stone Age. We ride horses. We have deified the cat. Meanwhile, Hell’s Angels exist because down through the ages we required and acquired th
eir traits—the barbarian interest in expansion, the aggression. Ultimately, they may still be with us because they’re an archaic remnant of ourselves we haven’t wholly solved. That’s why we create so many troubles for ourselves, why we war, to develop our sense of survival, to enhance our ability to solve problems, to heighten our belief in what is right and what is wrong, to propel our technology forward, to make us capable of crisis management for what must surely lie ahead.”

  Sandra stared at him awhile before she coughed with apparent significance. “Excuse me, sir. But it sounds as though you’re making excuses for the excesses and horrors of the species. Humankind has delivered the world to the brink of destruction—men, especially, I might add—not cats and dogs.”

  “To the brink but not over the brink, that’s my point. We are who we are because of why we are. It’s our role to learn to manage annihilations and extinctions. We’re here so that nature can have a mind with which to keep itself company—an organism with which it communicates. We’re here as crisis managers to preserve not merely our own species—which was the problem with dinosaurs, their inability to manage the environment—but our companion species also. Everything we do trains us for that calling. Whether it’s engineering or theology, war making or economics, literature or crop dusting, everything we do and have done ultimately revolves around learning to lovingly manage the world and avoid catastrophe. We’re babes in the woods, in terms of our time on earth, we’re in kindergarten. We’ve got a long way to go. Together we’re just one complex Noah building an ark.”

  “Which means what, Émile? Will you honor the Hell’s Angels for being ruthless? Will you refuse to arrest them?”

  Cinq-Mars moved over slightly and dropped an arm around her shoulders, tugged her closer to him. “No,” he conceded, again with a smile, acknowledging that she had not been as serious as he might have preferred. “But they started me thinking. I was wondering why people bother to romanticize them. It’s been a long time since they were postwar rebels, a bunch of bomber pilots looking to revive past glories. Now they’re drug runners and murderers on wheels who wear sports shirts and pressed pants, unless they’re putting on a show specifically calculated to induce fear. Even people who fear them also tend to think they’re cool.”