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TimeLocke

Page 2

by Jack Barnao

He told me, and I repeated it and said I’d be there. And then I hit the feathers and slept like a baby.

  I was up early for my run, putting in a brisk six miles while the streets filled with commuters headed in to start the day’s nonsense with two hours of overtime. The sight cheered me. I wasn’t one of them. I can’t stand routine, and I’ve been in enough life-and-death situations that the pressures of business seem pathetically trivial. I hope to be able to avoid working steadily as long as I live. And with luck and an occasional assignment from the Melanie Keenes of the world, I’ll do it.

  I picked up the papers at the corner of Mount Pleasant and warmed down by walking the last block to my place, checking for coverage of the acid story. All three papers had it. The left-wing Star announced that the acid tosser had third-degree burns to his legs and speculated that he would sue me for assault. The business-minded Globe and Mail wondered whether the attack would have an adverse effect on the movie industry in Canada. But the dear old tabloid Sun had a picture of Melanie’s kiss at the airport with the cutline “Hero’s reward.” That and a story that compared me with Sir Galahad and the guys at the hotel with Satan.

  I showered while the coffee perked and then cooked myself a bacon-and-egg breakfast. Three mornings with a movie star in her room had left me OD’d on grapefruit.

  After I’d completed the cryptic crossword in the Globe, I started getting ready, deciding what to wear to the meeting. I didn’t want this guy to think I was some kind of military toy, never out of uniform. In the end I settled on a pair of buff pants and the leather jacket I’d picked up in Florence at a stall on the street behind the duomo. It usually lives in the trunk of my Volvo; it’s scuffed up, but it’s still the kind of jacket guys were getting swarmed for by our street gangs. It was probably more than I’d need for warmth. It was June 21, and we were getting the first of our summer weather.

  I left the car behind. Wainwright’s office was down in the high-rent district, where it costs more to park your car for an hour than it does to eat lunch. He was in one of the old buildings, no longer fashionable since the sixties, when our national banks started one-upping one another with the height of their head offices down here on King Street. The building Wainwright occupied was still bright and attractive, but it has a dated sadness to it, like a widow in a singles bar.

  I went up to the nineteenth floor. It was five to eleven, but I wasn’t going to skulk in the corridor like a jealous husband in a hotel, so I opened the door of 1931 and went in.

  The receptionist was a machine-turned blonde of forty or so. She stood up when I came in. “You’re Mr. Locke. I saw you on the news last night.”

  I gave a modest little snort and said, “I’m not usually so conspicuous. I’m here to see Mr. Wainwright, I’m a couple of minutes early.”

  She poured on the charm like maple syrup. “Mr. Wainwright said I was to show you in the moment you arrived. Come this way, please.”

  She made it sound like I’d get lost without her, but there was only one other door in the room. She went to it, inclining her head first to listen respectfully. Apparently she liked what she heard. She beamed at me, rapped on the door, then opened it and said, “Mr. Locke’s here, Mr. Wainright.”

  She stood back, but before I could go through the door, Wainwright came out. The mountain was honoring Muhammad. He was tall and rangy, the way elderly men get when they work at staying youthful. I judged him to be about seventy. And I was right about the bristly World War II mustache. He stuck his hand out, smiling. “Mr. Locke. Thank you for coming in.” His accent was more clearly English now but not regional. I know all the English tribal noises, and this wasn’t one of them. His voice showed breeding and/or money. We shook, and he kept hold of my hand long enough to draw me into the room and close the door behind me. Then he let go and waved me to the chair across the desk from his. “Sit down, please.”

  I sat, glancing around the room. It didn’t have the framed sheepskins that lawyers hang everywhere, and there were very few books on the shelves. He had a couple of photographs on his desk, but their backs were to me. On the walls he had a Lawren Harris landscape that looked as if it just might be the real thing and not a print. There was also a photograph of a French château.

  “You like my office?” he asked dryly.

  “I was thinking you’d make a good poker player, Mr. Wainwright. Nothing in here gives any hint of what you do. Unless you import wine from France.”

  He made an impressed face, the corners of his mouth turned down as he gave a brief nod. “Very good. What makes you think so?”

  “You have that photograph of Chambord. It’s on the Loire.”

  Now I had his full attention. “I see you know France,” he said.

  “One of my favorite countries, except for Paris, of course.” To my mind, Parisians are the New Yorkers of Europe.

  He chuckled. “Parlez-vous français?”

  “Un petit peu,” I said. “Enough to get moutarde avec le jambon.”

  He chuckled again, humoring me, then said. “As a matter of fact, the assignment I had in mind for you is in Provence.”

  “I like it already. Whose body am I going to be guarding?”

  He cleared his throat and hesitated for a moment. “I’m going to have some tea. Would you prefer Darjeeling or Lapsang souchong?”

  “Whatever you’re ordering, thank you. In ten years among the English, I never managed to develop a taste for the stuff.”

  He humphed and pressed the call button on his phone. The blonde appeared, smiling. “Jean, would it be possible to get some coffee, please?”

  “Of course. I’ll go downstairs,” she said breathily, turning the full thousand watts on to me. “How do you like your coffee, Mr. Locke?”

  “Black, please,” I told her, and she vanished, looking as if she were about to burst with the excitement.

  I sat and waited for Wainwright to break his news to me, wondering what the problem was. Most clients buy my services the way they buy steak. They know what they need. Their questions are about costs. I’m not used to people playing hard to get. He looked at me without speaking until it became a kind of showdown. Who was going to blink first? I broke the tie. “Can I infer, from your reluctance to speak, that this job you want me to do isn’t legal?”

  That cracked his coma. He shook his head. “No. It’s perfectly legal, just unconventional.” He picked up one of the photographs on his desk and handed it to me. It was a graduation photograph of a girl in her late teens, and she was beautiful, dark haired and intense looking, but with high cheekbones and a generous mouth that softened any hint of snootiness. She was smiling, and there was an air of mischief about her that for some reason made her seem Irish.

  “She’s lovely. And she also looks young to be getting a bachelor of arts from Cambridge.”

  “She was nineteen in that picture. That was six years ago. She’s picked up her doctorate since. She’s an historian.”

  “And she’s working on the Roman history of Provence?”

  He glanced up, impressed again. “You know about it?”

  “History’s kind of a hobby,” I minimized. “I know they were there a long time. The Rhone was a highway for exports from Gaul, salt and wine mostly. I also know that the town of Vaison-la-Romaine has the biggest Roman ruins outside of Italy.”

  His voice was trancelike. “She’s going to Vaison.”

  I handed him the photograph. “Well, unless somebody’s got a contract out on her, she won’t need my services,” I said. “She’ll be safer there than she would be in Toronto.”

  There was a tap on the door, and his secretary came back with the coffee. Wainwright made the most of the break, thanking her and praising her speed. I added an approving smile when she looked my way, and she left happily. Wainwright opened the coffees and then spoke as he handed me mine. “It’s not a contract,” he said. “It’s more in the nature of a grudge.”

  “Perhaps you can spell it out for me.” I sipped my coffee.r />
  He left his untasted, seeming to be plucking up nerve. Finally, he said, “It started last year. She was over there, working in Vaison, and a film crew came to town.” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t follow films at all, but they were working on some thriller or other, it seems, and they had a Corsican from Marseilles along with them as adviser.”

  “Some mob heavy?”

  “Yes. The French tend to lionize their criminals, the way the Americans once did with Al Capone and his ilk.”

  I could see the story shaping up before he told it. Some jaded hood with a string of hookers available to give him the greatest sex money could buy and he’d flipped out for a clean-limbed beauty who was more concerned about dead Romans than she was about what shade of lipstick to use.

  “And he put the moves on this young lady,” I prompted when Wainwright bogged down.

  “My niece,” he said. “Her name is Amy Roger.”

  The name fit the photograph. Amy, a no-nonsense name. I’ll bet that most girls her age are called Debbie. “He got fresh with Amy?”

  “She was at dinner at the best restaurant in town with a friend, another historian. It’s not a big place apparently, not grand.” He waved his hand vaguely. “The film people were there, together with this man and his girl of the day. It seems he came over and tried to sit at Amy’s table. He was drunk, and Amy brushed him off, politely but firmly. It didn’t work. He pulled a chair up beside her and made a grab at her. She slapped him, and when he tried to slap her in return, she hit him with the wine bottle.”

  I laughed. “Doesn’t sound as if she needs a bodyguard, much as I’d like the job.”

  “It didn’t end there,” Wainwright said soberly. “One of the film people, a cameraman or something, he laughed at the man’s discomfiture. That night he was hauled out of his hotel bed by two men, tied and gagged, driven into the countryside, where they broke both his arms.”

  “And what about Amy? What did she do?”

  “She was staying with a very tough old Frenchwoman. She used to be with the Maquis, the Resistance. Amy told her what had happened, and she called out some old friends to guard the house with shotguns that night, and they drove Amy to the airport at Lyons the next day.”

  “How did she take that? I’d guess she was very annoyed at having her work interrupted.”

  “Indeed.” Wainwright nodded and paused to take a sip of his coffee. “Fortunately, this all took place toward the end of her time there, so she didn’t lose much in the way of fieldwork, but now she has to return for a few weeks on a new project.”

  “And the guy she hit is still mad,” I finished for him.

  “Yes.” Wainwright set down his cup very carefully, as if he were afraid he would slam it down and splash it everywhere in sudden, uncontrollable anger. “I have a lot of contacts with the wine-growing establishment there, as everywhere in France, and the word is out that he intends to punish her, most severely.”

  “I can imagine what he has in mind,” I said. “The Corsicans run most of the prostitution in southern Europe.”

  Wainwright couldn’t let it rest there. “I’m afraid that if she goes back there he will abduct her and abuse her and consign her to some North African brothel.” His hands were shaking as he spoke.

  “And you’ve tried to warn her but she’s too committed to her subject to refuse to go on this trip.”

  He paused to mop his face with his handkerchief. “I can see I don’t have to explain anything to you twice,” he said.

  I nodded, weighing the financial opportunity I had here. Damsels in distress are more fun to guard than rock stars or oil sheikhs, especially when they’re as toothsome as Amy Roger. I would have taken the job for expenses alone, but my family did succeed in raising a businessman, even though they don’t approve of my business. “Have you told her you’d thought of sending someone like me?”

  He nodded grimly. “She was very angry. She said she would not allow this hoodlum to spoil her work. That was the first thing. And secondly, she did not want to have some muscle-bound oaf tagging along chewing gum and breathing beer on her.”

  “I hate being typecast,” I said, and he smiled at last.

  “You have no idea how relieved I was last evening to see you on the news,” he said. “You’re a man of culture; I think we can overcome her objections.”

  “At the risk of sounding mercenary, if we can persuade her that I’m housebroken, there is still the subject of compensation.”

  “I can’t pay you as much as Miss Keene did,” he said.

  “Who told you what she paid?”

  “I deal with some influential people in Canada as well as France,” he said with a slight smirk. “From the owner of the Edinburgh Towers I got the name of Miss Keene’s agent and hence, your fee structure.”

  “Your niece is a most interesting woman,” I said softly, “And the story you told me appeals to the knight-errant in my soul. But on the other hand, you don’t have a whole lot of options open to you.” There, I thought, ball in your court.

  He held up his hand. “How does two thousand dollars a week for five weeks sound? Plus all expenses, of course.”

  “Fine.” I nodded crisply, the way I’d learned to do when the officer in charge of the briefing told me what impossibilities he was expecting. No arguments. You do it. Period.

  Wainwright extended his hand, smiling in relief, and we shook. Then he pressed the buzzer again. The sun shone from the doorway as the blond helmet came around the jamb. “Ah, Jean, would you be so kind as to make out a check to—” He paused and turned to me.

  “John Locke, Personal Assurance,” I said.

  He nodded and turned back to her. “You have that?” She beamed, and he went on, “In the amount of five thousand dollars. Mark it on account of services to be rendered, fifty percent advance.”

  “Of course.” She looked at me with a respect that showed me my attractiveness had entered a whole new dimension.

  When she had gone, I said, “How do you propose to break the news to your niece?”

  He sat, rocking slightly, his forehead pursed, an old man’s gesture that made him look almost fragile. “I thought we might do it over dinner.” He uncrinkled his brow and looked into my face. “What do you think?”

  “Excellent. Would you like me to bring someone?”

  “You have a wife?” He sounded surprised.

  “No, but I do have a good friend who might be persuaded to make me look less threatening.”

  He nodded. “Good idea. Seven-thirty for eight, tomorrow evening at my apartment.” He told me where it was located, and after his secretary had brought my check in for him to sign, we got the business out of the way, shook hands, and I left.

  The day seemed a lot warmer with five grand in my pocket, and I ambled around the financial district, ducking into the underground shopping complex on King Street, where I spent a pleasurable half hour in the bookstore. After that, because I was in the district, I called the lady lawyer my mother had told me about. What the hell? I could buy her a bun down here on neutral turf.

  Not surprisingly, she wasn’t in, but I left a phone message and went on my way, feeling righteous. I had done my duty.

  I banked my advance, keeping a modest couple of hundred out for walking-around money, then went to the central reference library and brushed up on the history of Vaison-la-Romaine before heading home. I got there just as Janet Frobisher drove up in her ancient Volkswagen beetle. She’s tall and good to look at, with soft auburn hair. She’s in her late twenties, and you’d figure she’d be a shoo-in to be out in the suburbs by now with a baby on each hip, but for some reason she’s unlucky in her choice of men. I’m very fond of her and have been tempted a number of times, but the old superstition about doorsteps has always kept Janet and me on a brother-and-sister basis.

  She works for our national radio network, the CBC, and when she saw me, she beamed and hoisted her purse aloft like a trophy. “Big day at the factory,” she said. “
I got the new digital tape of the Brandenburg Concerti. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Love to.” I said. “I’ll head upstairs first and build us a couple of drinks.”

  “G and T, please,” she said. “Give me ten minutes.”

  She lives on the second floor, and I live on the third, so I held the door for her and went up the back stairs behind her. Then I headed up to my own door, where I checked my security marker. It’s not conspicuous, a hair just below the bottom hinge on the doorjamb. It’s located at a distance of thirteen comb teeth from the bottom of the hinge, not a measurement anybody would be able to duplicate without the same pocket comb as mine. I hadn’t been broken into. One of these days I will be. I’ve racked up enough black marks in the books of the PLO and the Provisional IRA that someone will get wind of me someday and I’ll have to move, but for now, all was well.

  After a quarter hour I ambled down to Janet’s apartment with the gin bottle, tonics, and a couple of beers for me. She had changed out of her working skirt into blue jeans and racked up the tape. She let me in, then pressed the start button while I mixed her drink and opened a beer.

  “The first concerto is my least favorite,” she told me. “I was going to fix a spaghetti sauce while it’s running, then listen to the rest. Would you like to eat with me?”

  “Great,” I said. “On one condition. Can I get you to come with me to a spiffy business dinner tomorrow?”

  “Spiffy?” She raised both eyebrows. “Have you been dating cheerleaders again?”

  “You know my principles. No girl with an IQ of lower than room temperature.”

  “Anything capable of reading and writing is in jeopardy,” she said, laughing. “But what makes you think the occasion will be spiffy?”

  “It’s a prospective client. He imports French wine. I’d imagine he knows an escargot from a handsaw.”

  “Probably.” She sliced onions, dashing at her eyes with her left wrist. “What’s the occasion?”

  “His niece is gun-shy. She’s a historian, and she’s tangled up with a bad-news Corsican. She’s afraid I’ll shoot somebody in the head and break her concentration when she’s working.”

 

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