Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  “I want you to come here and show me what you’ve done!”

  She looked at the sheet on which she had written over and over after the first few nonsense words: “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.” Its childish cadence played in her head. She almost smiled as she lifted the sheet and then, after a pause, crumpled it, dropping it at her feet.

  “No,” she said. “It won’t do.”

  “You little bitch,” he spat out. “Pick that up and bring it here.”

  Liz kicked the ball of paper instead. It landed neatly in front of him. He snatched it and quickly smoothed it out.

  “Fingerprints, Roger, fingerprints.” Her own boldness surprised her.

  He didn’t reply. He stood staring at the writing as if it were the worst pornography, vile and yet somehow compelling. Without lifting his head he said in a flat voice, “Give me your lighter.” She hesitated. He looked up. His eyes were glowing with anger. “Give me your lighter!” he repeated, the menacing tone unmistakable.

  She tugged it from her pocket and sent it flying through the air. He caught it in his one free hand, put the letter opener in his shirt pocket, and set the paper on fire. The flame, tentative at first, soon flared and greedily engulfed the paper. The smoke rose in a plume, broke along the ceiling of the vault and then slowly snaked toward her through the dead air.

  “Now,” he said, letting the curled and blackened ash fall to the floor, “Take another piece of paper from those microfiches and write the following: ‘I am responsible for the deaths of Guy Clark and Michael Rossiter.’ Short and sweet. And, of course, don’t forget to sign your name. Then bring it to me. I think it should be left outside the door.”

  She removed the elastic band from another set of microfiches and unfolded the protective paper. Her hands shook and she knew her earlier moment of calm had been just that—a moment, an interlude dictated by the body’s will to survive, a time for her to gather her resources. But there was still a chance. She was not prepared for darkness, for suffocation, for death. With her heart crashing against her chest, she followed Mellish’s dictation. Steadying her voice she said, “Would you tell me one last thing? Can you grant me a final wish before I give you this ‘confession’?”

  He responded to her quaint phrasing with the smile of a beneficent tyrant. He said, “You want to know, ‘why,’ the last of the five journalistic double-U’s, the most important and the least regarded. You want to know why I’m doing this. You’ve already asked and I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “But can’t you tell me now?”

  His eyes focused on her were jubilant. “Do you know,” he said, “I seem to have gotten over my little attack of claustrophobia. I feel quite fine now. I suppose it’s true that one can overcome one’s fears by confronting them. When I was first apprenticing at the Dorchester—in London—I used to dread having to eviscerate poultry or butcher the great sides of beef and pork. I would feel faint. All that blood and guts. But I got used to it. And when I was very young—did I tell you I spent some time after my mother’s death on a farm belonging to a cousin?—she made me wring a chicken’s neck. I think I was all of six years old. She was an awful woman. She used to lock me in a closet under the stairs when I was bad. I suppose that contributed to it…”

  Oh god, Liz thought, he’s slipping over the edge. With growing horror she regarded his flushed and sweating face and the two narrowed slits that were his eyes, the flecks of spittle which had appeared at the sides of his mouth. It was though he were somehow fuelling himself for the task ahead while at the same time starting to distance himself in his mind. She needed to stop the incipient frenzy before he whirled around like a fat dervish and slammed shut the vault door like a coffin lid.

  “Roger!” she cried. “Roger!”

  His eyes refocused on her slowly.

  “What?” he said absently, licking the sides of his mouth.

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  There was a silence and when he spoke again it was in a sly, teasing voice.

  “I won’t tell you because I’m not supposed to tell.”

  Her heart contracted with his words. All along she had willed herself to believe Mellish was acting on his own, for his own peculiar reasons. Now her mind had to confront the obvious: that he was the instrument of another, the only person who stood to lose if a curtain were thrown back on the past. With great weariness she said:

  “Did Paul ask you to do this? Or tell you? Or contract you?”

  The question seemed to offend him.

  “Of course not,” he snapped.

  “Then why are you trying to protect him?”

  “Can’t you see? Can’t you tell? Look at me, Liz. Look at me! Isn’t there something in my face that gives the answer? My god, I’m surprised no one has ever seen it!”

  Liz looked at him with consternation. Her eyes searched his features. What was she to look for? Or at? She saw nothing but the same square fleshy face with the slight lantern jaw, the same white forelock, tenacious before the receding hairline—features with which she had been acquainted for two years, now burned into her memory. She shook her head and opened her mouth to signal, “no,” but Mellish interrupted.

  “Try this then,” he said impatiently and then in a voice lowered by half an octave and laced with familiar cultivated tones narrated: “Roll over Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky the news.”

  Liz could feel the fine hairs on the back of her neck rise. The imitation was uncanny. And now, too, she saw, or thought she could see, a physical resemblance. It wasn’t much but, yes, there was something about the eyes—their wide separation caused by an uncommonly broad nasal root—and something about the small mouth, too, although Mellish’s lips were fuller than Paul’s, the lower lip protuberant, the upper a Cupid’s bow, a faintly effeminate, Brian Mulroneyesque focus in the expanse of jaw glistening now with perspiration.

  “So,” he continued, evidently pleased with his performance, “Have you figured out why? Remember, I didn’t tell you. You figured it out all by yourself. Not that it really matters now.”

  His mocking voice seemed to reverberate in her head and she had the sensation of sinking under water, into a wavering prism of shattered light, a smothering confine where there was only the sound of her own pounding body rhythms. Everything seemed unbearably heavy, her arms, her mouth, her eyelids. Slowly she opened her mouth to give voice to what her conscious mind could not now deny.

  “Brotherly…love,” she intoned.

  He smiled at her. “Well, half-brotherly anyway.”

  “Half-brotherly,” she echoed hollowly.

  “Yes, we share the same mother. Paul is half-English. His father was German.”

  She realized she was staring at him, seeking confirmation in his features, trying to find in the one sibling the traces of the other.

  “I never knew he had a brother,” she heard herself say. “I thought his whole family died in the war.”

  “I was told Paul had died in the war,” Mellish said, suddenly confiding in tone. “But one day a few years ago when I was working at the paper in Ottawa, I saw a wire-service photo of him that someone had tossed in a basket on the entertainment editor’s desk. It was an old one of his appointment to the orchestra here. Even after all these years, I could see that he was really Karl Staudt. My mother gave me a picture of him that I’ve had with me since I was a child, a picture of him as a young man before the war started. I knew I wasn’t mistaken. My mother told me he was studying to be a musician. She predicted he would be a great artist and that we would meet one day, when the war was over.”

  The jubilant expression returned to his face.

  “And you know,” he said, “we did, finally. Didn’t we?”

  His gaze seemed to turn inward like that of a child reviewing some secret memory. Liz had already written the absurd suicide note, but Mellish seemed to have forgotten it. He was agitated now in a different way, rhapsodic, and she sensed that as long as she could
keep open the portals of his memory she had a reprieve. In as casual a manner as she could muster she said, “Your mother must have become separated from Paul before the war. That would have been painful for a woman.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It was. Oh, it was. I was very young, remember. But my strongest memories are of her grieving for him, worrying about him. You see, it was very confusing for her, to have a son fighting for the enemy. And we were very isolated. My mother’s family would have nothing to do with us. She had been married to a German hadn’t she? A Hun. They wouldn’t forgive that! And then she had left him and returned to London and, worse, had a child out of wedlock. Me! I was a bastard, and when I was six, I became an orphan.” His sad smile seemed to ask for her sympathy.

  But Liz was repelled. She prayed her repulsion didn’t show on her face. Quickly she said, “Children usually go with their mothers in a separation. Especially in those days. Why didn’t Paul return to England with your mother?”

  “He wanted to. He was in his teens. But his father wouldn’t let him, would he? Not then. Not in the Fatherland. Of course, his father forced him to join Hitler Youth and all that. He didn’t want to, you know. He didn’t want to, but his father made him. And then there was no way of getting out of that system.”

  “Did Paul tell you that?” She hoped the disbelief did not tell in her voice.

  “My mother told me. She said he would have made a much more proper English boy. Like me. Like I would have become, if there hadn’t been a war, if my mother hadn’t died, if…” His voice trailed off.

  “I tried to find him. I didn’t believe he had died. In the early 60s, I went to Germany. I knew the name, you see. I thought there might be a cousin or someone who would know. I did find some distant relatives, but they insisted Paul had been killed, that his body had never been found. Maybe they didn’t believe I was related to him. Maybe they thought I was some official snoop. But I knew we would find each other eventually.”

  As he talked he methodically wiped the blade of the knife with his fingers. Even in the pale light of the vault the silver finish flashed and scintillated and she shivered at the memory of its sharp point against her back, at the notion of it piercing her skin. She looked at Mellish’s face. It was still flushed and damp—the heat and closeness of the sub-basement seemed worse with each passing minute—but his features had relaxed somewhat and the manic quality had, at least for a time, absented itself from his eyes. She felt safe to probe deeper.

  “But you’ve kept your relationship a secret,” she continued. “Why? Was this Paul’s idea?”

  Mellish started. For the first time he looked uncertain. “Well, yes,” he said slowly. And then he glared at her as if she were stupid. “But surely you see why, Liz. He had created a new life for himself, one that did not include a brother in it, particularly a brother who knew something of his past, something different than what he had been telling everyone else. My sudden appearance might have started people asking questions. It had to be kept secret.”

  “But the two of you could have arranged some other story, surely.”

  “He didn’t want it that way. He thought…he thought inconsistencies would arise. Naturally, I agreed with him.”

  And yet, to her ears, his voice lacked conviction. Liz imagined that Paul must have been unpleasantly surprised to find a near-forgotten half-sibling suddenly materialize, and she wondered what compromises he had made, what manoeuvres he had used to contain this eccentric, orphaned man and satisfy his need for acceptance and inclusion without drawing public attention to their connection. To Paul he must have been like a ticking time bomb. She asked, “Did you know everything about his past? Did you know what’s contained in that file?”

  Mellish shifted his eyes downward to the file balanced atop the leather jacket. When he looked up again, his eyes were hard, the uncertainty vanished.

  “Yes,” he said.

  And in that simple affirmative, that merciless stare, was everything she needed to know. She didn’t have to ask if he had been shocked or disgusted, angered or frightened, if Paul had denied everything and Mellish believed it, or if he had rationalized his crime to his half-brother the way he had rationalized it to her. It didn’t matter now. A few feet from her was a man blinded by a fierce and distorted loyalty to a paragon conceived in his mother’s myth-weaving, to a long-lost sibling, to a remnant of precious family. He was like a tortured shadow who, in searching for, and finding, itself, repeats the action of its beloved. This shadow, this larger, coarser mutation of her once sweet lover, was repeating Paul’s murderous activity in another form. She knew now that any hope of reasoning with him was gone and her blood ran cold.

  Wordlessly, he slipped the knife into his breast pocket and removed the lighter. With his eyes trained on her, he bent down to the file folder, tugged at the top and removed a sheet of paper, waving it before her triumphantly. Then, suddenly, he disappeared from view and her heart leapt with a foolish certainty that he had vanished. Instinctively, she started forward, but he was back in an instant, dragging with him an empty drum, its metal base scraping the concrete floor with a hideous rasp. Robbed in that moment of her last chance for flight, her wits began to crash around her. She stepped back, aware only of her own laboured breathing, her dry mouth as she watched Mellish take the sheet of paper, set it aflame, drop it into the drum, and witness with scornful gaze its annihilation. He followed with another sheet and then another, finally lifting the entire file and tossing the contents in ferociously crumpled sheets of four and five into the blaze. The interior of the drum glowed like a furnace, orange and throbbing, as each new piece of paper fell to the flames. Smoke rose in a column as the fire intensified. Some of it drifted toward her, filling her nostrils with its acrid perfume, stinging her eyes, obscuring as it arched and billowed around Mellish’s face, hellishly shadowed in the flickering light. She knew she could no longer bear it.

  “Don’t do this, Roger,” she heard herself beg, forcing back the sob that rose in her throat. “Don’t do this. I was Paul’s lover.”

  “You’re lying!” he cried above the crackle of flames. But he was lost to sensibility.

  “Bring me the note you’ve written. Now!”

  With shaking hands, Liz lifted the sheet from the shelf and willed herself forward. Her feet were leaden. The distance seemed to yawn before her.

  He moved around the drum, snatched it from her with his free hand, careless now of fingerprints, and glanced at it quickly. With a grim satisfaction, he moved slightly to set it on his coat. Liz looked helplessly at the knife balanced in his shirt pocket and then, as he bent in his task, she looked past his head and saw through the nimbus of smoke a sight that finally sent the tears coursing silently down her cheeks. But they were tears of relief, for, not six feet away, Leo was staring hard at her, his dark eyes a warning.

  42

  Abyss

  Leo tensed. When Mellish moved, as he did now, with exaggerated care placing Liz’s note into his coat, he anticipated with dread the final act: that Mellish would suddenly slam the door to the vault, leaving it locked and impenetrable. Time was running out. The smoke from the fire had already reached Leo, insinuating its way into his nose and throat, forcing him to suppress with fierce concentration the urge to cough, allowing him only shallow breaths when he needed every ounce of nourishing oxygen for his straining muscles. It was impossible to conceal his presence much longer, yet surprise remained his single ally.

  He was standing a few feet behind Mellish, between two rows of dusty, half-empty wooden shelves, submerged in shadow. He couldn’t make any mistake now. Arriving at his position undetected had already taken him down a treacherous stretch. The passage, narrow though it was, had been left with discarded wooden flats leaning upright against the wall, each of which looked perilously close to tipping. Worse, the floor had been scattered with bits of wood and packing straw and though he had prudently removed his shoes at the stairwell, he had feared a warning snap with every step. Desp
ite the stone walls and their temporary wooden bolsters, the passageway had seemed like a membrane, fashioned to amplify sound. He had realized almost immediately that Liz was not only in the large storeroom to the right of the corridor, but in the ancient vault, the curiosity that had captured his attention on an early visit. Her words, soon distinguishable as he edged his way along, echoed hollowly as though travelling from some remote region while the male voice—Mellish’s, he realized with alarm no less diluted by confirmation of his expectations—rumbled and reverberated. The content of their exchange had filled him with amazement and misgiving.

  The storeroom had two entrances. The closer one opened onto a short corridor that led directly to the vault. The farther entrance, some twenty feet beyond, marked the back of the storeroom. Leo had had to stop and strain his memory for a recollection of the vault’s design. The door, thick and impenetrable, didn’t lie flush against the wall when opened. He had known that. He had pushed against it and felt its weight recoil on his earlier visit. But did it open to the left or to the right? He couldn’t remember. If the latter, then Mellish would be screened and Leo’s chances of crossing the entrance undetected multiplied. If not, then the element of surprise vanished. He would be seen. But there had been no choice. With an adrenaline surge, he had stepped quickly into the pool of pale light carpeting the doorway and then out and beyond. The vault door opened to the right.

  With relief he had clutched at a bare bit of wall, grateful for its unexpected and delicious coolness. He hadn’t been caught. But in the beat of time it took to cross the doorway he had turned his head and the scene had been emblazoned on his mind. Mellish was in front of the vault, half-hidden by the door, his back to the storeroom and its rows of shelves. As Leo inched his way to the second door past a series of metal drums along the wall, he had felt a surge of confidence. Circumstances favoured him. Mellish was too entirely absorbed in his manic activity to expect an attack from behind.