Cardinal was late. He stepped out of his car and took his parka off. Cold gnawed at his ribs, his belly, his nerves. He tossed the parka onto the back seat and opened a flat plastic package and took out a bunny suit. He walked over to the motel room and stepped into the suit just in front of the door.
Everything about the Broadview Motel was generic, even the pervasive smell of carpet, but the mirrors, the lamps, the TV screen were already speckled with fingerprints where the ident guys had dusted for latents. The desk was done, the phone, the television remote. Collingwood and Arsenault were now working silently at the bedside tables.
Loach was by the window, holding his phone out now and again at elbow level as if checking a compass reading.
“Reception sucks in this dump,” he said to no one. Then, into the phone, “I’m very glad to hear you say that. I agree. It’s crucial for law enforcement in this country.” He clicked off, put the phone in his pocket and contemplated the plate glass window.
“You’re late.” The room was studio bright with Ident’s lamps, and Loach had no trouble identifying Cardinal’s reflection in the window and speaking to it.
“I wouldn’t be here at all if Chouinard hadn’t called me.”
“Found it sooner than we expected. Narrowed it down to motels near Mark Trent’s house, and when that didn’t work, to places near Laura Lacroix. Manager says he stayed a little over a week. Paid cash. Description: Maybe sixty, slicked-back hair, in shape or at least not fat. No visible deformities, although manager did notice a limp.”
“A limp. Like from an accident? A birth defect? What kind of limp?”
“He’s a motel guy, not an osteopath. He says the guy has a limp. Left leg kinda stiff. Oh, and he wore gloves a lot.”
“You’d never know it.” Cardinal gestured at the storm of fingerprints.
“Yeah, well, who knows if any of them are his? You’d expect by this time the room woulda been cleaned up, except the grampa running the place saves money in the off-season by waiting till he’s got half a dozen dirty rooms. Here’s his sign-in.” He handed Cardinal a flimsy sheet of paper. “Plate number’s a phony. Manager confirms dirty white Econoline with some kind of painted-out logo, but the plate number doesn’t check out. We already ran it down.”
“Roger Arlington,” Cardinal read. “ ‘Arlington’ could be fake too.”
“Getting nothing from the records so far. Garbage cans are mostly McDonald’s and Subway wrappers. And I nearly tossed out the Tim Hortons receipt too, until I noticed the date and location. Highway 17, Pembroke, twelve days ago.”
“The day Marjorie Flint vanished.”
“Good solid policing combined with good leadership-you can’t beat it.” Loach took his phone out and put it to his ear and turned once more to the window. “Hi, honey. Hey, just heard from a contact at the academy-they may fly me down there to give a talk on the Montrose case.”
Roger Arlington. Cardinal made a note of the name and went over to Arsenault, who was photographing a print on the Gideon Bible. “How’d the Identi-Kit go?”
“Well, the one lady gave us good stuff on the van, but the other witness was a no-show.”
“This was the hooker, right?”
“Turns out hookers are not reliable people. But we got the manager here, who’s likely to do better, and a chambermaid also. Says she saw the guy a couple of times and he gave her twenty bucks to stay out of his hair.”
“That’s interesting.” Cardinal glanced in Loach’s direction. “Nobody told me that.”
“Unfortunately, not so good on prints. Bob, you want to tell him?”
It was charming the way Arsenault always included his silent colleague. It was like trying to bring a Corgi into the conversation. Collingwood gave no sign of hearing, so Arsenault led Cardinal over to the front window. The glass was frosted at the corners and speckled with red fingerprint powder.
“We’ve got tons of partials, but I got a feeling they’re not going to lead anywhere. Why? First, because they’re all different and that makes me suspect they’re old and not his. Second, because there are lots of smudges that don’t show a single loop or whirl. See? Look here. And here.” He pointed out a couple of blank smudges. “Even here.” He pointed to two marks, about three inches long, that were slightly curved toward each other like parentheses. “Karate prints, like when you shade your eyes to see out a window?”
“Or in,” Cardinal said. “How many thieves have we caught that way?”
“Exactly. But again, no skin lines at all. We’re striking out here. I think this guy is wearing gloves everywhere.”
“Yes, the manager said he wore gloves a lot.”
“That’s interesting.” Arsenault glanced in Loach’s direction and back again. “Nobody told me that. But check this out.”
Cardinal followed him over to the desk. Cigarette burns and watermarks. Tattered Yellow Pages open to Chinese restaurants. Beside this, another crescent-shaped mark.
“The guy’s not all that careful about being seen,” Cardinal said, “and yet he’s wearing gloves indoors. Is there any chance our boy has a prosthetic hand?”
“You read my mind,” Arsenault said.
“This is good work, Paul.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m going to double your salary.”
“Too bad you’re not in a position to do that.”
“But you know I would if I could.”
“Will you throw in a Porsche as well?”
“Consider it done.”
Cardinal went back outside. He took off the bunny suit and got in the car and started it. He switched off the heater’ the sunlight was so strong it had warmed up the interior. He took out his cell and called Delorme on speed-dial. Then he remembered she was out sick and he hung up. He thought about maybe stopping by later to see how she was doing and then wondered if that might be a bad idea. He was pretty sure he’d handled things poorly.
The ARC hotel in downtown Ottawa. The kind of place where the staff all wear black and a visiting cop would never dream of staying. The room was small, the furniture minimalist to the point of severe. Delorme sat on the edge of the bed and gave it a testing bounce. Firm.
She took out her cell and checked the list of calls. Chouinard, Cardinal, Cardinal, Loach, Cardinal. You can damn well wait, John Cardinal. She dialed an old number she had for Leonard Priest. There was no ring, no response of any kind. She dialed Club Risque and asked to speak to him.
“I’m sorry, Len is not in tonight. Perhaps I could help you?”
“I was told he’d be there.”
“He was, but he took off for Toronto. Is there anything else?”
Delorme shut the phone book and opened the room service menu. The idea of eating in the room depressed her. A heaviness settled over her chest and stomach and she heard herself sigh. Really depressed.
A desk card caught her eye. It showed a woman wrapped in a towel with a dreamy smile on her face. Delorme picked up the desk phone and dialed. A recorded voice told her the spa was closed. She opened her overnight bag and hung a little black dress in the closet, placed her other items on the shelves.
She got undressed, put a shower cap over her hair and stepped into the shower. The pleasures of high water pressure and expensive soap. She resolved to change her shower head when she got home.
She dried off quickly and brushed her hair. She opened the closet again and put on her underwear. Her reflection in the full-length mirror nagged at her and she tried to ignore it. Then she couldn’t stand it and turned to look.
Ugh. You used to have a good body. Where did that go? The twenty-year-old she had been would have hated her as she was now. Then again, that twenty-year-old bundle of ego was hardly her present-day idea of good company.
She slipped into the black dress that was shorter than the one she had worn to the party. She hadn’t worn this one for, what, five years? She smoothed it over her thighs and submitted to a train of unhappy thoughts. It looked better with the shoes, but it would take at least two glasses of wine before it looked good. She had no credible reason to get dressed up in the first place. She would have dinner by herself and come back up to the room and watch some terrible movie on TV.
She went to a restaurant a couple of blocks away that she remembered as a lively place. Naturally, this particular night it was all but deserted. A trio of men stood at the bar, too busy jawing about sports to notice her or her vampy little dress. The waiter came and greeted her in French and English, and for reasons Delorme didn’t bother to ruminate on, she chose to answer in English. Normally she was happy to speak French-it was one of the pleasures of visiting the nation’s capital-but tonight apparently she was anglophone.
The waiter had asked only if he could bring her a drink to start, but she ordered the whole meal: steak frites without the frites, double the salad instead. No point in getting even more grotesquely misshapen.
The house red had no edges to it at all and went down too quickly. She was on her second glass before the steak arrived, just the right shade of pink.
The place had gone from subdued to tomb-like. Two of the men had left the bar, leaving the last one, who looked very French Canadian, to pick at his beer label. He had a good face and seemed about Delorme’s age. A left-hander. Wedding band gleaming on the hand that held the beer. He glanced at her and her stomach tightened at the thought that he might come over and speak to her.
She ate her steak and thought about Leonard Priest and the questions she wanted to ask him. She remembered their last conversation and how he had said cock so many times. Not something men did, in her experience, outside porno films. The word repeated itself in her mind without her wanting it to.
The waiter brought the check for her to sign. The man at the bar was gone. The bartender scooped up his tip and the beer bottle with its half-peeled label.
Back at the hotel, she had to wait for the elevator. When the door finally opened, a young couple released each other, none too quickly. The girl’s dress settled against her thighs as her lover withdrew his hand. Delorme got in and the three of them rode in silence to the third floor, where the couple got out. She heard them burst into laughter as the doors closed once more.
In her room, she took the bathrobe from its hanger and threw it on the bed. She took off her shoes and started to unzip the black dress. Then she folded her arms and stared at her reflection in the TV screen. A thinner, more ethereal Delorme stared back. According to her watch, she’d been wearing the dress for less than ninety minutes. She shook her head.
“Pointless,” she said. “Totally pointless.”
She sat on the end of the bed with her hands on her knees and thought about why she might be feeling this bad. John, of course. She thought about Loach and discounted him. She thought about Reicher and the depth of her fear in that locked room. It wasn’t that. She dealt with lots of creeps. A little shakiness for an hour or so afterward, but that was it. A little anger at the idiot guard.
It occurred to her that she might have entirely misunderstood the word loneliness. She had always thought it just meant wishing there was a friend around to talk to. Especially when you were feeling bad about yourself, your character and your life. She’d felt like that often enough, but this crushing, nameless weight was new. This awfulness that seemed to fill not just her heart but the entire room.
She leaned forward and opened the mini-bar. Pulled out a bar of dark Swiss chocolate and a half bottle of Pelee Island red and put them on the bed beside her. She picked up the remote and turned on the TV. Crackle of static as it came alive. The movie selection was long, but most of the titles meant nothing to her.
She scrolled through eight iterations of Barely Legal alone, Horny Housewives, Cum-Crazed Coeds, Gang Bangs, Ass Masters, Sweet Slavery, DP Debutantes. The Info button informed her that DP meant “double penetration” and watching seventy-five minutes of this would cost $13.99. Titles, the screen promised, would not appear on her bill.
She switched off the TV and got out of her dress and hung it up. She slipped into the envelope of cool sheets and opened the paperback novel she had brought with her, highly recommended by Oprah. Page one struck her as less than engaging, and page two was worse. The prospect of losing herself in a story dimmed and went out.
She reached for the light switch and caught another glimpse of the woman wrapped in the towel, the dreamy smile. The whiteness of the towel, the smiling lips remained as an afterimage as she closed her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had rubbed her back.
I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.
Two minutes, maybe three. She throws off the covers and switches on the light. The little black dress is still warm.
He was astonished by the simplicity of the place. A whitewashed attic, angular walls, slanted high ceiling, little more than one room, but whether through frugality or good taste she had managed to make it look large and inviting. She had painted the baseboards walnut brown and papered one wall with a spacious frond theme that maintained the brightness of the space but saved it from monotony.
The floor was covered with scraps of carpet in various shades of grey, fitted together in random squares and rhomboids. A single artwork dominated the place, a poster from the Musee de Cluny, bright red, showing a princess in medieval dress. Other than that, the most vivid object was a double bed draped in a spread of scarlet corduroy. Beside it, a wooden library table, with books packed into the shelves at either end. No television, no CD player, but she wouldn’t need one. In the past five days he hadn’t observed her more than twice without the white audio arteries of an iPod dangling from her ears.
An Apple laptop front and centre. He had followed her to Starbucks and watched her pull out a stack of papers to mark. It seemed early in the term for papers to be due, but perhaps she was earning extra money marking for someone else.
He had entered by the fire escape, the only way into what must be an illegal sublet. The door had a solid enough lock but he had managed to jimmy a window without much problem. It opened beside the galley kitchen, if that was not too grand a term for a built-in hot plate and sink. She had forgotten to switch off the overhead light.
The pay for a contract teacher, even at a major university, had apparently not improved much over the years. She didn’t even have bookshelves. Instead, forty or fifty volumes were lined up along the baseboard. Chaucer, Dante, Villon. Norton anthologies. Not following in Daddy’s footsteps, obviously. Not living on his money, either.
The clothing in her closet consisted mostly of neatly stacked T-shirts. A few pieces suitable for lectures, two small dresses, nothing expensive. He made a mental note of sizes.
The bathroom had no door. It was separated from the rest of the space by a curved wall. In the medicine cabinet, birth control pills, a prescription cream for eczema, allergy pills. Nothing she would die without.
He went back to the desk and opened the laptop. E-mail from students angling for higher marks or to retake tests. A couple from her father. Her calendar was more useful. It gave course numbers and times’ the locations would be easy to find. She had a conference coming up in Chicago in a couple of weeks. A doctor’s appointment tomorrow. Spin class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
A dark stairwell. Using his flashlight, he went down it and examined the door to the second floor of the house. Bolted from the inside. Dust on the doorknob and on the stairs themselves confirmed that the fire escape was the only entrance in use.
He was starting upstairs again when he heard a key in the lock. He drew back into the shadows. Sound of the door closing, keys hitting the counter, backpack hitting the floor. He lowered himself to sit on a step and waited.
Her boots hit the boot tray, her footsteps crossed the room. Rattle of hangers. He listened in his darkness as she undressed. And he listened for a long while after that, during which there was no sound. Above the stairwell, the lights remained on.
She was crying. Not loud, but unmistakable, the sound of sobbing, the rattle of mucus. Then her bare feet, the light, light step of a ninety-pounder, a hundred at most. Splash of the shower.
He moved soundlessly up the stairs. He opened the door and stepped out onto the snowy fire escape. Dull clang of metal steps as he descended. Rusted hinges squealed as he opened the rear gate. Snow swirling in the alley lights as he pulled his hood up and headed toward the street.
The sound of the young woman’s tears stayed with him as he walked several blocks. It was with him still as he got into the van, and as he started it, and as he stopped at the first intersection, and as he crossed it.
Giles Blunt
Until the Night
From the Blue Notebook
Did you hear Ray last night? Rebecca said, twiddling a knob on her lidar unit. He scared me half to death. I thought some little animal was being tortured.
He suffers from nightmares, I said. Minute he touched down, I told Jens he wasn’t suitable. Jens, of course, wouldn’t discuss it. I think Kurt pressured him to accept his acolyte.
Kurt isn’t like that.
No one is immune to worship. Except possibly you.
She ignored that. Kurt was looking for Ray earlier, she said. It’s a good thing you weren’t in here when he came by.
No doubt.
Ray does seem a little lost. Do you think he even wants to stay?
Wants? Maybe-if you can be said to want something that is killing you. He’s staring into the jaws of failure if he quits-and God-knows-what if he stays. Annihilation, I suppose.
God, you’re grim. Suddenly your ash-black globe makes sense. You’re not one of those people who mistake being depressed for being intelligent, are you?
This is the dark side of the earth up here, in case you hadn’t noticed. And anybody who loves it-in winter, at least-is not likely to be the life of any party one would care to attend.
Rebecca had removed the towel from her porthole window. She turned from her lidar readout and stared at the circle of fog pinned to her wall. The camp had been fogged in for days and nerves were raw.
Unlike you, I don’t feel any urge to come up here in the dark of winter. I’m not even slightly attracted-emotionally, I mean-aside from my research interests. And yet I’m drawn to those who are. Kurt. You.
Opposites attract? That’s your analysis? Eight years of postgraduate education and this is what we get?
I was leaning against her door, arms folded across my chest. There was nowhere to sit. I was smiling, but she wasn’t looking at me and took me seriously.
She shook her head. Not opposites.
I took a half-step forward and placed my hands on her shoulders. She rolled her chair aside to escape.
There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it, she said. I’m drawn to you the way you are drawn to the dark.
Then why do you pull away?
Don’t be obtuse, Kit.
Tell you what, I’ll put together a repertoire of jokes. I’ll become the sort of person people call “a great storyteller.” Remember in your high school yearbooks they would always say so-and-so “livens up any gathering”? So-and-so “really knows how to tell a story”? That’s who I’ll become.
Please don’t.
Just for you. That’s how much I love you. Karson Durie, raconteur.
I know this is your version of being light-hearted, but why is it every time I talk to you about anything serious it’s like I’m feeling my way around the knife drawer?
My mother used to say something similar: You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself.
It’s not you I’m worried about. I don’t think you should visit me here anymore.
Don’t think-or don’t want?
Just go, would you? I can’t take this. I’ll see you in the mess.
I opened the door and went out and the fog closed around me like a fist. The lights of the mess, not more than twenty metres distant, were a barely perceptible glow. I moved with one hand outstretched before me. The temperature was dropping. I could feel the difference in the texture of the slush beneath my boots.
I was startled by a loud crack. A slash of fire tore upward through the fog and vanished. I called out, What’s going on?
Wyndham’s voice came back, oddly close in the fog, though I could not yet make him out.
Ray’s missing. We don’t know what to do about it.
Thwock of the flare as it burst into a dandelion bloom, a dim throb beyond the fog.
Do you think he’ll see that?
It’s getting colder. The fog must be thinning in places.
My hand touched parka, but it was Vanderbyl. He stumbled a little to avoid me. I’ve been trying to radio Base, he said, but I don’t think they’re receiving me.
Wyndham said, Nobody’s seen him since this morning, when he went back to his cabin to rewrite some material Kurt critiqued. That was when, Kurt? About nine-thirty?
Nine-thirty, yes.
I asked them if he was armed and if he had his radio.
As far as we know, Kurt said. Not that he’s answering.
Hmm. How sharp was your critique?
The briefest of pauses before Kurt answered. It was a candid review. Not what you’d call harsh.
The two of them had searched everywhere: the radio shack, the power shack, the shop, kitchen, labs, and all the other huts. They had even radioed the seismic and core huts. Nobody had seen Ray Deville.
And so we hovered there, three disembodied voices in the fog, wondering where he might have gone. We didn’t even bother asking why, at least not aloud. Ray and his radio silence. Sometimes a man can be so lost there’s nowhere to look, nothing to be done.
We had a gloomy meal, a gloomy evening. People spoke but little. Wyndham attempted to lighten the mood by telling us a couple of unintentionally funny things Ray had said, these rendered in a note-perfect imitation of his franglais. He didn’t get much of a laugh. The truth was, Ray and his manifest neuroses were hard to endure. One sensed that there ran beneath them a slick black river of contempt.
God, I hope he’s all right, Kurt said later as he rinsed his dishes in the sink.
Wyndham listed the reasons for optimism. The temperature, at minus five Celsius, was crisp but far from severe. Ray’s parka and scarf and boots were not in his cabin, so it was likely he would be warm enough. Our ice island was not vast, and in half-decent visibility he should have no difficulty finding his way back. He was armed, he had his radio…
Kurt opened the door, and his irritated response hung there in the mess with the cold air that rolled in: Then why the hell hasn’t he used it?
In my narrow bed, I dreamed I had to climb a glass mountain that glittered in the glare of a savage sun. I was in the company of a man and woman who claimed to know the way but did not. Nor were they of any help when the mountain metamorphosed into a pure, unclimbable pyramid. It rose to a blinding point, and when I woke in the darkness, my eyes were wet as if I had been crying.
The fog had lifted and the hut was lit by a toppled pillar of light that angled through my porthole: they had left the floods burning on the Decca mast as a beacon. I lay there thinking about Ray Deville and imagining his encounter not with a bear or a walrus or a crippling fall, but merely with the Arctic in all its purity-an indifference that was boundless and exquisite, immeasurable to man.
After a time, I heard cries and answering shouts. Slamming doors and frantic voices-manly Vanderbyl and oboe-toned Wyndham. I hunched at my porthole, sleeping bag clutched around my shoulders. Wyndham was helping Ray across the last few metres of slush. Kurt waited, his back to my hut, erect and motionless, his shadow in the floodlight an endless black tangent. He said Ray’s name.
The staggering, limping boy looked up, and I saw in the silvery light the blank, staring eyes of one who has blundered into God’s private palace, who has looked his maker in the face and felt his marrow freeze.