Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories

by John Robert Colombo

  Twenty-three square kilometers, and Sandhurst in the middle of it—specifically, at the municipal address of #12 Sandhurst Circle.

  Seven hundred and fifty square meters on the main floor and second. Granite counter-top in the kitchen, and in the three baths, except the master bedroom’s ensuite which was a deep pink marble. Dark hardwood floors throughout, matching the beveled trim around doors and other openings. It was, as the brochure stated, ducal.

  The yard, now, that was incomplete. A swimming pool, defined by stakes and string in tamped-down topsoil, waiting for the builder to come and finish the job with landscaping and excavation.

  The basement, although considerable, was not mentioned in the real estate listing for the home when the subdivision was, briefly, on the market. Before the developer went bankrupt, and his assets were spread among an ad-hoc group of companies and funds that together formed something more useful.

  Before we moved in.

  “That’s where we keep the cells,” said Stephan as he sipped the espresso he’d made in the identical granite-countered kitchen in #42 Cathedral Crescent. There we sat, waiting for the driver to take me to Sandhurst. Stephan took the time to bring me up to date. I ran my finger along the lip of the counter-top.

  “There are seven altogether,” Stephan said as he set down the tiny cup. “Seven cells. An interrogation room. Laundry room. Three piece bath. ”Stephan allowed himself a smile. “Italian tile. Etruscan fixtures.”

  Mr. Nu’s basement on Larchmount was no comparison. That one was small, barely six feet of clearance, the floor made of uneven concrete sloping to a drain in the middle. Light from bare bulbs, two of them, either end of the long space. Under one bulb, the canvas lawn chair, where the team found Mr. Nu. One pale thigh crossed over the other, hands folded over brown-shirted belly as Marisse and team finally — finally! —crept down the stairs, their laser sights tracing jittering nonsense script across his wide chest.

  “Some of us were thinking slate,” Stephan’s smile faltered and his eyes strayed to the French doors, beyond which subterranean sprinkler systems flicked water across the newly laid sod of #42. “But really, for a three-piece it was overkill. And the tile we chose — two kinds — big octagonal pieces, the color of cream, and the palest blue in square … you know, to fill the spaces.”

  I didn’t interrupt him as he continued, outlining the pattern on the counter-top with his fingertip. I had not known Stephan for as long as Marisse; he was relatively new to the firm. I had, indeed, only met Stephan once before, at a conference in Las Vegas wherein he and I shared a panel discussing covert logistics opportunities. I think we had impressed one another but that was as far as it went. I was even more at a loss here than I was with Marisse. So I waited for Stephan to exhaust his renovation stories, refill his espresso cup, and fall silent, staring into the foaming murk, before saying it, as gently as I could:

  “There is no driver, is there?”

  He looked at me, naked apology in his eye, “I’m sorry, sir. You’re on your own.”

  It should not have been a long walk, but it took more than an hour to cross the distance between Cathedral and Sandhurst. The subdivision was constructed at the crest of a gentle hill, foundations sunk in land that had until very recently anchored nothing more than rows of corn. It was the highest farm in the area, between a low marsh to the north of it — and the city and the river it sat on, to the south. Standing amid those corn-stalks, how intoxicating it must have been, to turn and everywhere, see the world beneath you.

  The walk was quiet. Most of the houses we kept in the compound were vacant, but not perpetually. When we acquired the real estate, we determined that maintaining a population equivalent to one-tenth of the subdivision’s population capacity was adequate both to our cover, and to staffing needs. And so our sub-contracted staff moved about — from one structure to another, clearing driveways and cutting grass, paying taxes. Keeping up appearances.

  It was a hollow facade, and could not be anything else, given the limitations of our contractors … hard men … hard women.

  Comparing it to Larchmount, now: a straight street, and short, with tight-packed houses with front porches, but no driveways, cars jam the curb, even at eleven in the morning. From dawn, elderly men sit on porches in their plaid shirts and baseball hats, having seen it all, still watching; pleased young mothers with baby carriages make their way down to the coffee shop at the bottom of the street. On such a street, in such a house as his, Mr. Nu might hide forever, ensconced in his basement beneath his light bulb, wearing his brown T-shirt and greenish shorts, his socks…

  …of a fabric, to carry perspiration, from flesh.

  The subdivision surrounding #12 Sandhurst was intended for wealthy families with good credit. So even the smallest home is overly-large, more dramatic than practical, and the houses grow as they reach the center. Number 12 Sandhurst, near that center, is of course, one of the largest. Sheathed in limestone or something like it, the building presses against the lot’s edge. It has a square tower at one end that resembles a clock tower. Although no higher than its neighbors, the elevation of the ground on which it was built grants it a subtle dominance. It might be approached from two directions — but from either, doing so is an ascent.

  It must have been a warm day, because I was perspiring heavily. Itching, too; Sandhurst Circle was the last portion of the subdivision scheduled to be finished, and the collapsing banking industry — the sudden extinction of wealthy families with good credit — did not wait for the developer to complete the landscaping.

  So the hot breeze blew clay dust up in miniature sandstorms, eddies that swept across the front walk and driveway, frosting the tall, dark windows gray. The dust coated my throat and stung at my eyes. I approached the front door. It ought to have opened — #12 Sandhurst is equipped with well-hidden cameras and security with access to face- and gait-recognition software, and I was in the database. But it was left to me, to shift the door-knocker aside and enter the access key. The double oak doors swung inward, and I stepped inside, into the front hall.

  The room climbed two storeys, with the sweep of a staircase following a curved wall upstairs. The only light came from the tall windows behind me, and somewhere within, I heard the pulsating whine of a vacuum cleaner.

  How near was it? I couldn’t tell at first. While I had some idea of the layout of #12 Sandhurst, I had not studied the floor plans in great detail. Whatever the trouble with Stephan and the driver, I was expecting that I would arrive here and be greeted by the duty officer, then ushered through the appropriate hallways and staircases. Not standing alone, attempting to triangulate the location of a housekeeper, while work waited to be done.

  There were five exits from this space, counting the stairs and the door that I had come in: two on either side of me, and another in an archway beneath the stairs itself. Pale, dust-colored light hinted from all of them. As the vacuum cleaner shifted from pile to board, some of that light flickered — as though the cleaner passed before a window — then seemed to pulse brighter — as if perhaps that cleaner drew back a curtain. The banister from the staircase cast a sharp shadow at one point, the wall behind it glowing a dusky orange. The light of the setting sun? Perhaps. The shadow moved as I watched, growing and climbing to touch the ceiling before fading again. It was as though time were accelerating, and I was left behind, here in this dark vestibule, watching it Doppler ahead.

  I blinked, and my eyes stung ferociously, so I blinked again.

  In front of me stood a tall man, hair close-cropped in the Marine style. He wore an olive-green T-shirt that showcased a powerful physique — black trousers that tucked into high military boots. His fists were clenched at his side; jaw clenched too, with tendons swelling and subsiding up and down his neck. His eyes were wide. Brimming with tears.

  And again, I blinked.

  Behind him, on the stairc
ase, was an upright vacuum cleaner, a dozen steps up, abandoned — the power cord descending taut from the dark of the second floor, like a single, black marionette string. At the very end of its reach.

  Once more: the blink. With a grandiose leisure now, as though the passage of time had slowed and was readying itself to stop here, in the infinite silence of the instant between heartbeats.

  I didn’t let it. I took a shuddering breath and shouted, and so did he, and then we both screamed, yowled like animals, into the dark chambers of #12 Sandhurst Circle.

  And it was only then I turned from him and fled out the front door, into the deepening night.

  His name was Scott Neeson, and the haircut did not lie. He was a former U.S. Marine Sergeant, recruited after three tours in Iraq. He was living at CnMqmNc84 Twilling Row, and there he would stay until he could finish building a vast wooden deck with an installed hot tub and a covered grill-house.

  He came over with a twelve-pack of beer and a pair of sirloins, the day after I settled into #37 Ridgeway. So named because the houses scattered along the northern edge, their yards edging on a drop that looked down on woodlots and farmlands in the old marsh. A ridge-way. In moving in to #37, I had inherited an immense barbecue grill, five burners on the grill itself, with a small gas range attached. Neeson, sporting a pale blue Hawaiian shirt and long brown cargo shorts, came around the back of the house in the late afternoon, set down the clinking case of beer and fired the beast up.

  “You’re joining us?” he said, bending to pull bottles from the case. He handed me one.

  “Something like that,” I twisted the bottleneck and set the cap down on the deck railing.

  “Good. We can use good people here. And it’s a nice place.”

  “Is it?”

  “It is. Nice big houses, and the money’s good when you don’t have to pay for them. Nobody bothers you.” Neeson turned to the grill, examined the dial. “Pretty light lifting, is what. You come from the Service?”

  “You think I’m a Marine?”

  “I thought you were a Marine, I’d have said the corps. But service isn’t the word I was looking for, either.” He snapped his fingers as he spoke.

  “You’re thinking about Company?”

  He nodded. I shook my head.

  “Does that even mean anything?” he asked. “You saying no?”

  I smiled. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” And although that is what I always said, and that is what most of us always said when we could not think of a proper joke, Neeson laughed as though he’d just heard it.

  “But you’re from up the chain,” he said, turning serious, “aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “You came here to check out what was happening with…”

  “Nu.”

  “With him.” Neeson lifted the grill and peered into the dark, hot space. “We met in Sandhurst, you and I.”

  “We did.”

  He let the grill cover down.

  “And now, you’re moving in.”

  I took a long pull of my beer. It was a dark-colored ale from a local brewery. I thought I might remember the brand, for later.

  “Word gets around,” I said. “I’m moving in.”

  “That’s some inquisition you must be planning. How long do you think?”

  I sipped my beer. Stephan had told me I could have Ridgeway as long as I needed it, so long as I kept up the lawn and did the same for four other houses near mine. By the book, I would rotate out of it after a month. But that could be extended, he explained, if I were engaged in some special project, one that only I could properly finish — like Neeson’s deck.

  Neeson leaned back against the railing, crossed his arms. “So you have any questions? Figured I’d come here, save you another trip out.”

  “In.”

  “Yeah. It is ‘in’ from here, isn’t it?”

  We looked at each other for a moment. In the sunlight, Neeson’s face took on a harder quality than it had in the shadowy foyer of Sandhurst. No tears, that was one thing. But the late afternoon tempered him in other ways. Lines at the corners of his eyes, a droop in the corner of his mouth, flesh beneath his eyes folded like lava-flow. It made him a hard statue that the years had eroded as much as they ever would. He was a man who knew about car batteries and pliers.

  “What have you learned?” I asked.

  Neeson opened the top again, and the heat hit us like the wind. He nodded, lifted the sirloins from their wrapping, and draped them over the grill, causing a ferocious sizzling and a cloud of smoke.

  “Better get a spray-bottle,” said Neeson. “There’ll be flare-ups, and we don’t want to turn this fine meat to shoe-leather.”

  I found a tall plastic spray bottle beside the sink, filled it with tap water, and hurried back. Sure enough, he was right — fat from the steaks had dripped down to the steel plates that stood in for the rocks you’d find in older models, and it was burning furiously. We sprayed and sprayed, but the flames never quite went out.

  The subdivision is fairly remote from major shopping districts. The nearest is a 40-minute drive through farm country, past corn-fields and finally across a great, near-empty parking lot, to the massive building supply store that had once been a continent spanning chain.

  The road is never very busy, but it is a particularly pleasant drive on a Sunday, in the dark green mini-van from Ridgeway’s garage. It is a drive that I have done more than once — gathering paint and lumber and exotic power tools that were not already in the well-equipped workshop in Ridgeway’s basement.

  Some days, I recognized my neighbors in the aisles: Scott Neeson on more than one occasion, hauling sheets of plywood as big as flags and bags of concrete on orange-painted dollies; Stephan and Lynette, a slender South-Asian woman some years older than he, looking speculatively at kitchen cabinetry; Luis, a small and swarthy man with black hair to his shoulders, a thin and patchy beard and an unstoppably cheerful grin, who one Sunday afternoon admitted to me that he was flirting with the idea of building a sauna, but mostly shopped for floor lamps and fine art prints. “There are so many rooms,” he explained.

  One day, I met Benoit there.

  “It has been months,” he said. We were loitering in the aisle for drop ceilings.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry,” Benoit snorted. “I hear that you have taken a house there. You are doing — what?”

  “It’s a complex enterprise. I cannot complete it in a day.”

  “Months,” he repeated and glared up at me. Benoit was a head shorter than I, and heavy in the gut. If he was higher on the chain than I, it was not by much — and although I don’t think he was much lower, either, I have taken it as a matter of pride that he has never had the capacity to intimidate me. But when our gazes broke, it was I, not he, who looked away.

  “I haven’t reported much, I know,” I said.

  “You haven’t reported at all. We received word of your arrival from the superintendent. But from you? Nothing.”

  Benoit led us to the end of the aisle as a couple pushing a big orange cart appeared at the other.

  “What is your impression of Mr. Nu?” he asked. “From the meetings you have no doubt had by now?”

  I didn’t answer, and Benoit nodded.

  “No meeting, hmm?”

  We rounded the end of the tandem, and stepped into an aisle filled with exterior siding materials, and window frames. Benoit smiled gently.

  “You think that I will be shocked now, and angry, don’t you?”

  “You would have the right.”

  He shrugged. “I, the right. Do you know that there was a time that I actually feared you? Now — you tell me I have the right to be angry with you. I wonder: is it because I have become so much more impressive?”

/>   “I’m not afraid of you,” I said, and he nodded knowingly.

  “Marisse,” he said. “What was your impression of her, after our interview at the Marriot?”

  “You have my report—”

  “I do,” he said. “Now tell me. Do you still think that she suffers from a ‘simple dissociative disorder resulting from mission-related trauma?’”

  “That’s what I wrote?”

  “It is,” Benoit looked down. “Two weeks ago, she killed herself. Shot herself through the eye with a semi-automatic pistol. Her customary sidearm. You’ll forgive me if I cannot summon the precise make—”

  “A Glock,” I said. “Lately. She also had a Desert Eagle.”

  “Not the Desert Eagle. Absurd. No. The Glock. Yes. She was the fourth member of the team that assailed Larchmount to attempt suicide; the second to succeed.”

  I put my hand on the shelving and leaned hard. It had been built for siding and window frames and, on the other side, ceiling tiles, and it didn’t so much as quaver.

  “Her family?”

  “Grieving, I imagine. I have not had opportunity to inquire in detail. We are concerned now with the examination of other links in the chain.”

  We hurried from window frames and siding, and moved into gardening supplies. There, Benoit expounded on the fate of the transfer team, whose leader had simply vanished three weeks before; on the firm’s government contact, a small former FBI woman named Lester, who had spent ten minutes with Mr. Nu, the two of them on either side of a glass barrier. Suddenly and inexplicably replaced by an older man, because, the firm’s intelligence indicated, she had gouged her eyes out and attempted to disembowel herself with an X-acto knife during a debriefing.

  And then, the matter of Sandhurst, and the changes that had wrought themselves there.

  “You have noticed,” said Benoit, “or perhaps you have not, that we have suspended prisoner intake at Sandhurst these past few months. We are making other arrangements.”