by Anne Emery
“We would all do the same.”
“But there was nothing in the message that would cause any alarm. It said, and I am translating from the original German, ‘Congratulations, Frau Keller!’ And I think I am remembering correctly, or I have the general idea anyway. It said, ‘I always wished I had your talents for sport and for science. Alas, I am talented only at reading and researching. But good for you! I must go; the scoundrel is here. Yours, L.’”
“Do you know who L is?”
He shook his head. “No, I do not. And the printing was in block letters, so I could not tell you whether it was a man or a woman.”
“I don’t suppose you know who the scoundrel is.”
“No. The word is Schlingel. Scoundrel or rascal, that sort of thing.”
Brennan didn’t want to put Habler on the spot by asking if he had reported the postcard to the police, but he could come at it from another direction. “Did the police speak to you, as somebody who knew Meika Keller?”
“They did. They came to question me. They knew I had recently become acquainted with her again. They wanted to see whether I had an alibi for the night she died!”
“And did you?”
“Yes, you may be confident that you are not sitting in the house of a killer! It was not much of an alibi. I was home in bed. If Commodore Rendell told the police I could not be reached that night, that is the reason.”
“Meika’s husband tried to reach you?”
“Yes, I found a message on my answering machine when I woke up. I had not even heard the phone bell ringing.”
Brennan looked around the room and did not see a phone.
Habler saw him looking and said, “The telephone is in my bedroom.” Brennan waited. “I was unconscious. I had passed out from drinking too much of the rum that is so popular here! I am not used to it. So, I was here, asleep. And did not hear the ringing.”
“You say Meika’s husband left a message?”
“Yes, a message from Commodore Rendell, looking for his wife and sounding quite angry. Not an operatic anger, but that cold kind of anger some people have. Asking where she was, and was she with me! He demanded that I pick up the phone, as if he thought I was in the house ignoring the call.”
“What time was that?”
“Oh, it was fairly late. Just before midnight, I believe it was.”
“Did you tell the police about his call?”
“I certainly will if they come back again and ask me.”
“Now, they’re not likely to ask you if they have no reason to think he might have called you. Maybe you should let them know.”
“Well . . .”
“Well?”
“Where I come from, Brennan, one does not go looking for trouble by contacting the police. They have not approached me after that quick first visit, so I am making the assumption that they have no concerns about me. If they come, of course I will tell them honestly that I had been drinking and had passed out.”
Brennan gave this some thought. He had been known to pass out on more than one occasion, but he was fairly sure that any time a telephone had rung on a table beside his bed, he had heard it. But then again, if he hadn’t heard it, and nobody later said they’d tried to ring him, he wouldn’t necessarily know the phone had rung and he hadn’t heard it.
“But, Brennan,” Habler said, “back to this postcard. If she kept it, the police must surely have found it. Would they not search through all her things at home and at her office?”
“I would expect so.”
“Yes, in my experience, police are very thorough! Even so, I do not see how they would be able to connect the mild words of that card to her death.”
“No.”
Brennan changed the subject then, back to music and the roles Habler had sung over the years, and what he hoped to do in the future. They lingered over a couple more glasses of the outstanding German beer, exchanged some witticisms in the German language, and then Brennan got up to leave.
“I know you have dinner plans, Fried. I won’t keep you any longer.”
“If I did not have the plans, I would be happy to stay in and talk music and drink beer with you, Brennan. You are a man very well versed in music. Have you ever thought of taking the stage yourself? I have heard you in your church, and it is easy for me to imagine you singing Puccini or Verdi.”
“Oh, I’m content to remain a humble parish priest, Herr Habler.”
The man let loose with a great Pagliacci laugh, which brought forth a bark of laughter from Brennan.
“When is your next performance?”
“Before Tristan begins in April, I have been invited to do a little afternoon concert in Lunenburg. A selection of pieces in German. Much of the population there is German, I understand, or of German ancestry.”
“That’s right. When are you singing there?”
“This Saturday at the Central United Church. Fine acoustics, I am told.”
“I’ll see you there.”
“That pleases me very much, Brennan.”
“And I intend to have a meal there after. If you’re free, I’ll treat you to a good, hearty Lunenburg supper.”
“Excellent.”
Brennan headed for the door and said, “Thank you for the hospitality today. And for the information on that postcard from Berlin. Not much there, I guess. The police have a local man in custody, so a little note of congratulations from the old country would not be of much interest to them.”
Chapter X
Monty
Monty completed his work week with two character witnesses for Alban MacNair. On Friday afternoon, he met with Colonel Bryce Simmons at RA Park across from Citadel Hill in the centre of the city. Royal Artillery Park was established in the early 1800s when Canada was still a British colony. The uniformed chief of staff stood waiting at the door of the long low white building that housed the Army mess of the 5th Canadian Division. He introduced himself and shook Monty’s hand and then gave him a little tour. There was the Air Force room; Monty looked in and saw the walls decorated with photographs of the great old war planes. Next Colonel Simmons pointed to the Army mess, with its elegantly papered walls, rounded arches, and formally set tables. Two of the tables ran lengthwise along the room, with a head table perpendicular to them. “You’d better be able to hold your liquor, quite literally, if you’re invited to dine in there. You’re not permitted to get up from the table until the head table gets up first. Woe to the fellow who enjoys a few too many glasses of wine and then feels the need to relieve himself. Sorry, soldier, not till the brass at the top of the room get up to take a leak.”
Monty laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“It’s not so formal downstairs in the bar.”
The bar was named after a Halifax tradition that is over two hundred years old: every day but Christmas, a cannon on Citadel Hill fires a one-pound charge of black powder at exactly noontime. The Noon Gun Room was panelled in dark wood, and photographs and guns from various eras were mounted on the walls.
“Beer?”
“Please.”
Simmons walked over to the bar. “Two brew for us here, Shirley.”
“Keith’s, sir?”
“Yes, please. You know me well, Shirley.”
The colonel brought the glasses to a table, and he and Monty sat down. The Deputy Commander of Land Force Atlantic Area was a film-version image of a military commander. He had an angular face, cropped greying hair, and dark eyes. He was tall, fit, and tanned, as if he had just come back from directing operations in a theatre of war close to the equator. He would be a godsend on the witness stand. Another man rose from a nearby table and came over to join Monty and Colonel Simmons. Simmons introduced the newcomer as Everett Cunningham, from the Assistant Judge Advocate General’s office. Monty found it slightly amusing that a lawyer from the AJAG o
ffice would be sitting in on the interview, but he merely welcomed the lawyer and directed his attention to Simmons and his friendship with Monty’s client.
“Thanks for seeing me, Colonel. I’m pleased to be meeting with you, and I’ll be seeing Lieutenant-General Patriquin as well, to gather evidence of Alban MacNair’s good character.”
“Put me on the stand first! Patriquin will be a hard act to follow. I can’t claim anything like that rescue he pulled off in the Sinai Desert!”
“I look forward to hearing all about that, but I know you’ll make a good impression yourself, Colonel.”
Simmons had nothing but praise for Alban MacNair.
“He was under my command in Croatia. An excellent soldier, a great man for logistics. Disciplined, forward-thinking, loyal. And a good fellow to have around. But I’d known him for years before we served together.”
“All good then?”
“All good. Sure, Alban is a bit of a partier. Or he was. We have to keep an eye on that sort of thing.”
“Drinker?”
“MacNair liked his liquor, but it was never a major problem. It certainly never affected his work. And in fact, he gave up the booze a few years ago.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, Christmas party at my place — 1987 or ’88, I think it was. I’d been joking with my wife about stocking an extra bottle of rye for Alban, but when he showed up at the party, he said he was off the stuff.”
“How about women? Any trouble there?”
“I never knew MacNair as a skirt-chaser, not any more than the rest of us. He had girlfriends, of course, but then he got married and settled down. Nothing ever came to my attention about misbehaviour on that score. Not that I would necessarily have heard about anything private.”
“He mentioned an incident where he was disciplined by his superiors. He was a little outspoken about unification of the forces, as I understand it.”
Simmons gave a hoot of laughter. “We all had something to say about that! But, yeah, he went out of bounds by mouthing off about it in the presence of civilians, and that went into his pers file. But nobody here in Halifax held it against him. The flak came from up the line in Ottawa.”
“So, it was just words with MacNair? He didn’t act out his frustrations in other ways?”
“What kind of ways? He didn’t set fire to the Department of National Defence or anything. Just ranted about it and was disciplined for that. He never said or did anything, to my knowledge, that would suggest the kind of crime he’s charged with, and you can sign me up as a witness to say so.”
The AJAG lawyer obviously had no objections, and the three men parted company on a friendly note.
* * *
An hour later, Monty was sitting across from Lieutenant-General John Joseph Patriquin, D.F.C., in the living room of Patriquin’s home on the Bedford Highway. The view out his front window was of the Bedford Basin, where enormous convoys of ships had assembled before heading out across the Atlantic during both World Wars. Patriquin served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his wartime service, and was decorated again for his actions during a peacekeeping mission. Now in his mid-seventies, he was of medium height, stocky, and white-haired. He and Monty asked after each other’s families, then Patriquin said, “And now you’re representing Lieutenant-Colonel MacNair. A dreadful situation. Dreadful that the woman died, of course, but also that Alban MacNair has been charged. Unbelievable.”
“Exactly. So, tell me, sir —”
“John. If you start ‘sirring’ me, I might start giving you orders!”
“Very well then, John. I wouldn’t be competent to carry them out. So, tell me how you know Alban MacNair. He had various postings overseas, but I don’t imagine you served with him in any of those places, given the age difference.”
Patriquin laughed. “I was of a different era, true. But our postings in West Germany overlapped for part of a year. As you would know, I’m sure, he was with the Army at Lahr in the 1970s. I was at the Air Force base, Baden-Soellingen, in 1974.”
“Would you have seen him then, even though you were on different bases?”
“The bases were fairly close to each other, near the border with France, and I recall seeing him a couple of times. Once I think was a NATO exercise. Not much time for socializing on that occasion, but there was a golf tournament and I’m pretty sure we had a drink at the nineteenth hole. More than likely!” Patriquin laughed, then said, “MacNair served in Egypt and so did I, though our times there didn’t overlap. He was later. But I’m well aware of his career and his advancement since then.”
What was it Monty had heard about Patriquin’s role in Egypt? The Suez Crisis? “John, I should know this, so please excuse my ignorance. My father once told me about some daring deeds of yours during our peacekeeping mission in the Suez. What’s the story on that?”
“Not much more of a story than hundreds of others in uniform could tell you. You know what the crisis was all about: the president of Egypt, Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956. The canal had been built and run by the Suez Canal Company, a company owned primarily by French and British investors. Well, I shouldn’t say they built it; Egyptian labourers did the heavy lifting. It should have come as no surprise that Nasser nationalized it; it’s in Egypt, for God’s sake. But it linked the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, provided a shortcut between Asia and Europe, and was the lifeline for Arab oil going to Great Britain. The Brits were wild. The prime minister at the time, Eden, apparently said England could not allow Nasser to ‘have his thumb on our windpipe.’ They, along with the French, wanted to take it back by force. The French were even more militant about it. They were having their own troubles in North Africa, with Nasser supporting rebel forces in Algeria. So, England and France, along with Israel, wanted to mount a military action to get the canal back in, well, Western hands.”
“War again, only eleven years after the end of World War II. And smack in the middle of the Cold War.”
“Right. And the funny part, if you can call it that, was the attitude of the Yanks. For all their adventures on the soil of foreign countries, they were dead set against the use of force in this instance.”
“They were the cooler heads this time around.”
“Yeah, except they didn’t prevail. Israel sent paratroopers in on October twenty-ninth and, two days later, the Brits and the French started dropping bombs on Egypt. They sent an ultimatum to Nasser and launched an armada. The Americans were furious. So were we. Apparently Prime Minister St. Laurent sent a blistering telegram to the British PM. Party politics came into it here: the opposition portrayed the Liberal government as being disloyal to Britain. But in fact, the government was trying to keep our allies, the U.K. and the U.S., from falling out over the whole thing. And the Soviets were playing a double game, offering to cooperate with the United States while at the same time threatening nuclear — yes, nuclear! — bomb attacks on Britain and France! Well, anyway, good old Mike Pearson stepped in and got UNEF off the ground. This was the first UN peacekeeping force; earlier forces had just carried out monitoring operations. A Canadian general, Burns, got the command. And Pearson got the prize.”
That was Lester B. Pearson, nicknamed Mike, secretary of state for external affairs at the time and later prime minister. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts.
“Great story about Pearson,” Patriquin said. “President Johnson was up visiting from Washington, and of course the Secret Service was on hand to protect Johnson. One night up at Pearson’s cottage retreat, one of the Secret Service men sees Pearson and says to him, ‘Who are you?’ And Pearson says, ‘I’m the prime minister of Canada, I live here, and I’m about to go and have a leak.’”
“Love it. He was quite a wit.”
“As was his wife, Maryon, I seem to remember. But, anyway, yeah, Mike P
earson, Nobel Prize winner for promoting the peacekeeping force in the Middle East.”
“You won some accolades yourself, John.”
“Oh, well, I was over there. It was us, Norwegians, Danes, Brazilians, Yugoslavs, a contingent from India, some others as well. There was a big flap early on; the Egyptians didn’t want us there, because they figured the locals wouldn’t be able to tell us apart from the Brits. They really put their foot down about the Queen’s Own Rifles! But anyway, I arrived in the spring of ’59. I would be flying reconnaissance missions over the Sinai desert in one of the Otters. Otter aircraft. Jesus, the heat over there! You hear about the desert, but you really have to be there to experience it. It’s well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I didn’t know how I’d be able to function in it. And it’s hell for flying, too. Sometimes the engines can barely get enough power to lift off. And landing: you’d have these shimmering heat waves that would throw you off. And the runways were miniscule; God help you if you overshot them, because they were surrounded by minefields.”
“That’s it — the story I heard about you had to do with minefields.”
“Right. I injured myself in a rough landing on the less-than-ideal terrain there. Hit my head and got a cut on my face near my right eye; it swelled up and the doctor was worried about my vision. I didn’t think it was affected, but they wouldn’t let me near the controls of a plane. But I couldn’t bear sitting around doing nothing. Well, one of the Royal Dragoons came down with ‘Gyppo gut.’ That’s what we called the horrendous form of dysentery you’d get from drinking the local water or eating food that wasn’t prepared by our people. But you could get it even if you were careful. Anyway, one of our soldiers was sick, so I talked my way into a ground mission, reconnaissance mission, and got into the Jeep, and we headed out on patrol.
“Now this was the springtime and that means you have a desert wind bringing in the intense heat from the south and whipping up the sand to the point where it’s a freakin’ blizzard. Sand gets into everything, every part of your equipment, your planes, your vehicles, yourself! You can’t see. And that’s what blew up while we were out.”