by Ron Corbett
“We’re just waiting.”
“I’ll see you in a few minutes, then.”
“Where are you going?”
“To see that little girl’s mother.”
. . .
The Travellers let Yakabuski pass the way they had let him pass two days earlier. Not by clearing a path, but by leaning back when he approached, then leaning back in when he had gone. So he was always surrounded. So he had to feel the flannel shirts and the denim jeans as he brushed past, had to stare into their eyes, had to smell the dried sweat and sense their anger. Although no man swore at him. No man spoke under his breath. He was inconsequential. If Yakabuski burst into flames right then they would turn the other way. If he fell, they would stand atop his prone body. It was loathing in its purest form. What you reserve for a bug you find vexatious, but you still didn’t stand up and hunt it down. Because it was a bug.
The foyer of the building was empty and he rode the elevator alone to the eighth floor. When he knocked he heard Dumont say, “Come in.” He turned the handle, surprised to find the door unlocked. After the chaos of noise and light that was outside the building, walking into the apartment was like walking into a sanctuary. There was the scent of lemon and cinnamon — from candles burning in the living room or baked goods in the kitchen, Yakabuski wasn’t sure. The candles in the living room cast a weak yellow light that left most of the room in shadows. He moved noiselessly over the Mandala rugs, already knowing where he was going to find her.
Rachel Dumont sat at her kitchen table with the overhead light turned off. There was a fresh-baked cinnamon loaf cooling on a cutting board beside the stove. More candles burning on the windowsill above the sink. A teapot and cup were in front of her and another teacup was at a place setting across the table from where she sat.
“I made chamomile,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. I suspect chamomile wouldn’t be one of your favourites.”
“Not normally. Maybe it’s right for tonight.”
Yakabuski sat and poured himself a cup. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “You knew I was coming?”
“I suspected. I thought you might have been here already. It’s quite the crowd outside.”
“I’m just getting here. I was doing an interview on the French Line. A woman who used to be a neighbour of Augustus Morrissey’s.”
“Did she know something about Grace?”
“In a roundabout way, I believe she did.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Yakabuski took a sip of his tea. Smacked his lips slightly and gave her a smile. She was right. He didn’t care for it much. “I can’t explain this to you, Ms. Dumont. It’s just a feeling I have. And I hope I’m doing the right thing by telling you this, because I have no proof of what I’m about to say. But I’ve never been wrong about these sorts of things. I don’t mean to sound boastful, but that’s the truth. If something feels right and true to me, it is. If something feels the other way, then that’s what it is. And right now, I don’t think Grace is in any danger.”
Dumont didn’t react the way Yakabuski thought she would. Not much of a reaction at all. She raised the teacup to her lips, and when she put it back down she said, “Why do you think that?”
“Because I’m starting to think this war between the Travellers and the Shiners is fake. It’s never going to happen, and we’re all being played. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But it doesn’t seem real to me anymore. Which means your daughter’s kidnapping could not have been an act of vengeance by the Shiners.”
“What was it then?”
“I’m not sure. Part of whatever this is. But I don’t think she’s in danger.”
The candles seemed to dim slightly. Or the night darkened. A change that was hard to pinpoint. Yakabuski continued talking. “Do you know if your father is outside this building?”
“I have no idea.”
“No one has seen him. We know he was in Cork’s Town last night. No one has seen Sean Morrissey either. Makes you wonder who’s in charge out there.”
“I suspect no one is. It’s more of a mob, wouldn’t you say?”
Yakabuski tried another sip of his tea, then pushed the cup aside. “Ms. Dumont, you’re not reacting the way I thought you would. Why is that? The mother of a missing child should be relieved by what I just said. She should have questions.”
“Maybe because I have the same feeling, Mr. Yakabuski. None of this makes sense to me anymore. Why would the North Shore Travellers go to war for my daughter, a child they did not even know at the start of the week? Why would my father care? He’s never even met Grace.”
“Good questions. Have you come up with any answers?”
“They both want the same thing, the Travellers and the Shiners, and my daughter can help them get it. She is part of someone’s plan.”
“Any idea what they might be after?”
“I suspect what people are always after around here. The spoils of the land. It used to be trees, used to be fur, now it’s diamonds. That’s what people fight and kill for; I don’t think there has once been a face on the Northern Divide that launched a thousand ships.”
Despite the foreboding of the evening, Yakabuski could not help but smile. “You may be right about that. Have you been back up to Cape Diamond since you left?”
“No. I have no interest.”
“This has everything to do with that diamond mine. That feels right and true to me. I just can’t put the puzzle together.”
“Perhaps you are looking in the wrong place. Deception is probably my father’s greatest skill. More so than violence. He told me the Travellers had survived as long as they had because their enemies could never find them. The trick was to make sure they were always looking in the wrong place. Learn that, he told me, and you can disappear. It’s an old magician’s trick. The rabbit never vanishes. It’s just hiding where you’re not looking.”
“I’m not sure I’m following.”
“It’s a feeling I have, Mr. Yakabuski. I have never been wrong about mine, either. When I feel like I’ve been cheated, or deceived in the sort of way my father used to deceive me, then that is the truth. That’s how this feels to me right now. As though we’ve all been summoned here, but we’re standing in the wrong place.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
As Yakabuski was walking back to the mobile command centre, he was surprised to see John Evans huddled behind one of the tactical team’s armoured personnel carriers. He was wearing a flak jacket, although he had taken off the combat helmet that had been given him and was sitting on it.
When Yakabuski reached him, Evans smiled and said, “So is this a typical week up here? You don’t really need television, do you?”
“Why are you here?”
“I actually thought I might be able to help out. It’s pretty quiet, though, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“That’s odd,” he said, taking a quick glance at the line of Travellers in front of Dumont’s apartment building, then the line of Shiners on the other side of the APC. “I also wanted to let you know we found Harry Sloan, the driver of that campervan, and get this — he’s alive.”
“He hadn’t been harmed?”
“Might take a few doctors to get you the answer to that one. He hadn’t been physically touched. But he’s in shock.”
“Can he give us a description of the man who kidnapped him?”
“I’m told he couldn’t spell his name right now,” Evans said sourly.
“Where was he found?”
“Cree Falls. Parking lot of an Irving station. People working the eight-to-four shift say he was sitting on the curb when they got to work. People on the midnight shift don’t remember him. No sign of the camper. I Google-mapped Cree Falls.”
“It’s a seven-hour drive from here,” said Yakabuski.
&n
bsp; “Yes it is. Our boy may be joining the party tonight.”
“He may already be here. How would we know?”
“That’s right. How would we know?”
. . .
It seemed to Yakabuski that in a northern country you spent half your life waiting. For seasons to change, rain storms to end, road trips to finish; you wait for fishing season, hunting season, freeze up, the next portage sign, the plane ride home, the snow plow to come down your street, the leaves to fall. The North is country borne of anticipation, the people who live here always gazing down a long road or a coursing river, wondering what might be coming their way.
Yakabuski wondered if it was the same for other countries, other places. His experience was limited. He had travelled abroad, but only to war zones. Which skewed everything. Maybe anticipation, the white-knuckle days of waiting, was a common thing. Although he didn’t think it was. You needed seasons. You needed forests and lakes and open space. In a city with no seasons, what would you be waiting for? The bus?
So when he returned to the mobile command centre, he joined the cops inside that were waiting and didn’t think that much about it. Situation normal. He stared at the video screens and waited for someone’s first move. Waited for the lines to move. Or six hours to pass, the sun to appear over the Springfield River, and Bernard O’Toole to say, “We’re calling it a night, let’s pack up and go home.”
At 12:15 a.m. there was a rustling on the Travellers line, some men moving from the back of the crowd to the front, and the tactical squad cops tensed and took the safeties off their tear-gas rifles, but several men switched places for no apparent reason and nothing more happened.
Everyone went back to waiting.
At 12:45 a.m. a cop on the front line reported seeing a Molotov cocktail in the hand of Peter O’Reilly, and four members of the tactical team surrounded him and led him away, to the jeers and curses of the Shiners standing near him, who did nothing more than jeer and curse. O’Reilly was searched, but the cops found nothing, so they had to let him go. O’Reilly walked back to the Shiner line, slouching and pursing his meaty lips and giving the cops the finger.
The Shiners applauded. Everyone went back to waiting.
. . .
Yakabuski rubbed his eyes, trying to remember when exactly he had slept last. Yesterday morning. Three hours on his couch. And the day before? That answer didn’t come to him as quickly.
“It feels as though we’ve all been summoned here, but we’re standing in the wrong place.”
Rachel Dumont’s words kept rolling through his mind. She knew her father better than anyone, certainly better than most, and she thought he was playing everyone. His greatest skill was deception, she had said, misdirecting people’s attention, being able to disappear by standing where no one was looking, the stock trick — maybe the only trick — in the magician’s handbag.
Even if she were not the daughter of Gabriel Dumont, if it had been nothing more than a casual observation by someone on the periphery of this case, the words would have resonated with Yakabuski. Because it felt that way to him as well. And he knew, by looking at O’Toole’s increasingly angry face, that it was beginning to feel that way to the chief of the Springfield Regional Police Force as well.
It was beginning to feel to Yakabuski as though everything that had happened in Springfield that week — the killings of Augustus Morrissey and Tete Fontaine, the kidnapping of Grace Dumont, the riot on the North Shore, the riot in Cork’s Town — had led to this moment, to this scene he was looking at on the video screens inside the trailer. It did not seem like happenstance or bad breaks coming one after another. It seemed like something that had been built. Had been envisioned. A plan of some kind.
He tried again to figure it out, ran the known facts through his mind, careful not to include speculation or assumptions, things that seemed logical yet were unproven, just the known facts:
Augustus Morrissey had been murdered, and his body had been trussed to a fence on the North Shore. His eyes had been cut out, something the North Shore Travellers used to do. Two days later, the Shiners came to the North Shore, started a riot, and killed Tete Fontaine, a cousin of Gabriel Dumont, leader of the North Shore Travellers.
The Travellers did not retaliate right away. They only did that after Dumont’s granddaughter had been kidnapped. Yakabuski included the kidnapping of the girl as a known fact, which wasn’t technically true — she simply wasn’t where she should have been — but he knew it to be true and included it on his list.
What else was known with certainty? A diamond worth more than a million dollars had been found in the mouth of Augustus Morrissey. The stone was from Cape Diamond, where Gabriel Dumont had lived for many years. Sean Morrissey’s mother once owned a ring that was made from an uncut diamond. She disappeared when Morrissey was twelve years old. A killer was making his way north, a business partner of Sean Morrissey’s, his last known whereabouts a seven-hour drive from Springfield.
The known facts. In the false light and anticipation of that night, Yakabuski kept running them through his mind. The link, when he found it, would be as tangible as a known fact. Would be a known fact, because that’s the way it always went.
When nothing came to him, Yakabuski tried to expand his list of known facts. Gabriel Dumont was violent and probably delusional. Tete Fontaine had been hung on the same fence panel as Augustus Morrissey. Sean Morrissey was a thief. No one throws away a million-dollar diamond unless he can get more. Tyler Lawson couldn’t keep a secret to save his soul. His sister needed a divorce.
Yakabuski stopped. He had lost the path and stumbled off into the woods. He didn’t have the fact he needed to solve the puzzle. There was still something missing. Or something he had not picked up on, a known fact whose significance he had missed.
“It feels as though we’ve all been summoned here, but we’re standing in the wrong place.”
Chapter Fifty
Yakabuski left the trailer and went back to the police line. The moon and the stars could not be seen that night because of all the false light on the bluff. He looked around at the two lines of potential combatants assembled in front of Building H; the Coyote APCs and steel-plated patrol cars in-between; a half-dozen ambulances lined up in the alley beside Building G; the small knot of men in grey uniforms and old-fashioned cowboy hats, smoking beside one of the ambulances.
He found Evans, who was telling the tactical team sergeant a story about raiding a crack house at Jane and Finch once: he’d thought it wouldn’t be a problem, but there was a steel door to the upper floor that would have made the Bank of Canada proud. A hundred feet of steel chain and a Coyote solved the problem.
Yakabuski stared at Peter O’Reilly, who gave him the finger. Then at a Traveller standing on the front line of potential combatants who was bigger than he was and hadn’t moved all night, not so much as a finger, according to the cop who had been watching him on video since 10 p.m.
When he returned to the trailer he asked O’Toole, “Those guys outside with the cowboy hats, where are they from?”
“Special constables. They’re normally stationed at the airport. The feds called them in around 9 p.m. Any cop within a hundred miles of Springfield is up on this bluff tonight.”
Yakabuski slammed open the door of the trailer and started running toward his Jeep.
. . .
The Springfield Regional Airport was to the south of the city, a forty-five-minute drive from the North Shore, but Yakabuski made it there in under twenty. He brought the Jeep to a screeching halt in front of the security kiosk by the arrivals gate, where a startled security guard with a face covered in pimples told him nothing unusual was happening.
“All quiet,” he said. Then thinking that more needed to be said, added, “Even more than normal.”
Yakabuski was told the same thing at the security office inside the terminal. A quiet night. A pl
ane from Toronto had landed four hours ago. Passengers were long gone. A plane from Buffalo was arriving at six in the morning. The terminal was about as quiet right then as it was possible for an airport terminal to be. None of the ticket windows were manned. The carousels were not moving. A janitor with a floor polisher was swinging it around at the far end of the terminal, so far away Yakabuski couldn’t hear the swoosh of the brushes.
Yakabuski asked to be brought to the control tower and was told the same story one more time. A quiet night, said the duty controller. There were probably not more than a dozen people working in the terminal right then. Good luck getting a coffee.
“Nothing out of the ordinary has happened tonight?”
“Nothing,” said the controller, who hesitated a second after he said it, and then added, “A commercial flight landed about an hour ago. Called in a change to its flight plan while en route.”
“That’s unusual?”
“Not really. Although it’s not the sort of thing the bigger companies tend to do.”
“Whose plane is it?”
“That De Kirk plane over by hangar five.” When he said it the controller stood up, looked out his window, and added, “That’s strange. The back cargo door is open but there’s no one around.”
Chapter Fifty-One
The light in the room was dim and shadows had settled, lying unmoving between the furniture. The two men in the room were seated and still, only occasionally raising crystal rock glasses to their mouths to take sips of Scotch. Cambino looked at the man seated on the other side of the metal desk. The man had been his business partner for many years, but this was the first time they had met.
“I was not expecting you until tomorrow,” the man said, and he gave Cambino a curious look. “Did anything go wrong during your journey?”
“No.”
“I still don’t understand why you drove. You could have taken a plane.”
