City of Ice
Page 48
Émile Cinq-Mars put one foot up on a lower rail of the paddock fence, his eyes on their wives, the little girl, the horses. The summer had been warm, the grass beyond the fences tall in the breezes, although the land could use rain.
“It’s a gruesome business, Bill. Julia Murdick’s safe, we can hope. The Czar is dead, but another Russian will replace him, be sure of that. We’ve escalated the rules of engagement, contributed to the assassination of a criminal warlord. No charges. No trial. Merely summary death. Do you think the man’s replacement will show us any quarter for that?”
“He won’t think about us for the killing.”
“I suppose not. We’ll keep that hidden. We’ll add cowardice to our list of transgressions.”
“Émile, don’t.”
“What?”
“Beat yourself up.”
“Do you think I’d give my enemies the satisfaction? Bill, let me tell you what Holmes told Watson.”
“Please do.”
“ ‘Always,’ ” Cinq-Mars recited sternly, “ ‘carry a firearm east of Aldgate, Watson.’ That’s what he said. He’s right to say so. It’s a logic I try to follow.”
Bill Mathers was wearing his smirk again.
“All right,” Cinq-Mars said, disgusted. “Wipe that look off your face. Nobody said you weren’t a good detective. This doesn’t prove it either, you just got lucky.”
Mathers stayed smiling.
Ducking down, Cinq-Mars put a leg, then his head and shoulders, between rails of the paddock fence. The rest of his body went through. Mathers chose to go over the top, and they strolled slowly toward the child and horses. “Holmes was a man who relied upon his intellect, his cunning, his powers of deduction. We should all be so lucky. He recognized that sometimes he had to step east of Aldgate—the tough part of London by the docks—and carry a firearm. For us, it’s more than that. We have to step east of Aldgate and make deals with criminals. Sanction murder. Run civilians undercover. If the truth be told, I started this by going after my source—Selwyn Norris—and ended up striking a bargain with the devil, leaving him unscathed. Tell me that’s right, Bill. Sure, it’s the best I could do under the circumstances, it saves that silly, brave young woman—I know that—but tell me it’s right. When Holmes advised Watson to always carry a firearm east of Aldgate, I could accept his logic. There’s no excuse for stupidity. At times you need a weapon. But this isn’t fiction. Now we need more than firepower. Now we need to engage the enemy with more than our wits and our resources. There are times when we had better be ruthless, when we have to work around the law, or the enemy will win.”
“Do you believe that?” Mathers asked. He was no longer smiling.
“I’d like not to,” Cinq-Mars told him, “and I’m not going to work that way if I can help it. I know where that logic got André. For Holmes, east of Aldgate meant packing a weapon. For us, it means an escalation. Who knows where it’ll end? Our enemies instinctively will exploit our ethics as a weakness. Do we tolerate that? Do we let the bastards win? Do we say, we’re ethical, we’re within the law? The country, the society, the Western world may be destroyed but at least we will choose the honorable course, now the barbarians must answer to God. Is that our plan? Or do we do what Norris and André did? Do we become our enemy? Do we meet the bad guys on the streets, or on their country estates, and treat them for what they are—enemies, warriors to be fought and brought down with firepower? Do we behave as they do?”
Mathers cast his eyes to the land beyond. He sighed heavily. “I thought we won,” he argued.
Cinq-Mars raised an eyebrow to that. “Bill, you’ve got to get over your youthful naiveté. We caught Hagop Artinian’s killer, and the Angels delivered him to justice. Good for us. The perp turned out to be one of our own, a good cop once upon a time who went east of Aldgate and came back warped and dead. Maybe we’re all ruined once we cross that line. So far, we saved Julia’s life, and Norris took out our mutual adversary, the man who tried to trick me into blowing her up. Gitteridge got whacked. The Wolverines have been set loose with a huge budget because that child was killed, that poor little boy. Meanwhile, the Rock Machine is looking to strike a deal with the Bandidos out of Texas to bolster their ranks. I don’t know who they are, but do we need another international biker gang on the scene? Something tells me we’ll be making their acquaintance sooner rather than later. So what’s improved, Bill? Everything helps, we’ve had some success, but overall we haven’t made a dent.”
A mare snorted loudly and the child laughed at the sound. They played in the sun, horses and dog and young girl and women and off-duty detectives, and it seemed a fine day, an illustrious day, a beautiful, hot, lazy day of summer, the world carefree and calm. After a while, they retired to the back porch for drinks and a barbecue, and smoke drifted upward into the branches of the maple tree there, swirled around, and vanished into the bright blue of the high, wide sky. This was a day when it seemed that summer would never end, when winter was forgotten and appeared unlikely to return, when the world was wholly at peace with itself. This was a day like that, dreamlike and fleeting.
The End
Acknowledgements
The author thanks his agent, Anne McDermid, for making such a monumental difference, and all the editors who have contributed to the novel, especially Susanna Porter at Random House, New York. Particular thanks to Kate Parkin in England; Ed Carson and Iris Tupholme in Canada; and Ruth Coughlin in the U.S.
Copyright
CITY OF ICE
Copyright © 1999 by John Farrow.
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First published in hardcover by HarperCollins in 1999
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Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Farrow, John, 1947–
City of ice
I. Title.
PS8561.A785C57 2000 C813’.54
C98-932570-9
PR9199.3.F37C57 2000
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