Oasis of Night

by J. S. Cook

  “Thank you, Mr. Stoyles. You are most kind.”

  Just then a group of lady Christmas shoppers blew in through the door, and I went to see to them. When I turned back, the little man had gone, leaving most of his lemonade untouched. I didn’t have too much time to think about him, however: the parade of Saturday shoppers kept us on the hop till well past five and it was five thirty before we started dressing the tables for the supper crowd. I’d taken a handful of reservations for dinner, but knew the following week would probably be busier. Besides, the popular local band known as Uncle Tim’s Barn Dance was playing at the K of C hostel tonight, and they were supposed to be a real big deal. Around nine, Tex asked me if he could use the phone in my office; he was in there a good half hour, and when he came out, he seemed more preoccupied than usual. I didn’t have time to question him about it: we had a sudden, last-minute flurry of customers and from then until closing, the only things I thought about were seating arrangements, drink orders, and the customary gratuities. It was eleven on the dot when I closed and locked the front door, and turned the sign in the window. “God, I feel like I’ve been run over by a train.”

  Chris lifted a fresh pot of coffee off the burner and poured us all a cup. “Here you go, boys. A good night’s work in anybody’s books, I’d say.” The radio behind the bar was tuned to a local station; tonight they were broadcasting live from the K of C hostel and just then some guy was giving his all to “Moonlight Trail.”

  “Goddammit, I hate that song,” Tex moaned. “And he’s murdering it. Why the Sam Hill do they try and sing country songs around here anyway? It’s not like—”

  Chris shushed him. “Jack, turn it up.”

  I got up and twirled the radio knob, but there was nothing on except static—a faint crackling sound, very dim and faraway. It was almost like the signal had gotten interrupted between there and here. Then we heard a series of thumps, a girl screamed, and far away in the background, I heard a man yelling there was a fire, the building was on fire, and then the signal died.

  We stared at each other, wondering if what we’d just heard was real, wondering if we ought to go and do something. Rick, I thought, Rick Callan was there, and he would know what to do. Rick was good at taking care of things. He would have matters under control immediately, and the band would come back on and everything would proceed as normal. This wasn’t Brooklyn or the slums of Philadelphia; this was Newfoundland, and it was safe and there was nothing here that could hurt anyone….

  The man with the face.

  “Huh?” Chris was looking at me strangely. “You say something, Jack?”

  “The man… lemonade. The man with the face, he had no eyelashes.” No lashes, and no eyebrows, either. They’d been painted on, drawn on, something. The skin of his face was too tight, and shiny, as if…. “He was here. This afternoon. He sat in here. He asked me for cold lemonade.”

  Tex nodded. “Yeah, I remember him. Lemonade. You think…?”

  I didn’t have time to answer him because somebody was pounding on the door. Dan O’Hagan, my old pal from the Telegram, was there, his cameras slung around his neck like bandoliers. “The K of C hostel’s on fire! I’m going up there now. Come on! They might need help.”

  We threw our coats on and followed him out into the freezing cold. There were hardly any people about, and the only cars we saw crept along at a snail’s pace, their headlights showing just a thin beam through the slits in the blackout covers. The cold was already biting my nose and the tips of my ears. I’d shoved my feet into winter galoshes but my toes were numb, and my fingers tingled painfully; it hurt to breathe. “Dan, slow down.”

  “Come on.” Tex caught hold of my sleeve and towed me forward. “You stand around too long, you’ll freeze in place.”

  We had just reached the top of Long’s Hill when we saw the blaze: red, enormous, leaping up into the blackness of the winter night. My heart lurched. Rick Callan was there. Rick Callan was in there. I waded through ankle-deep snow, crossing as close to the hostel as I dared. At this proximity, the heat was intense, searing my naked face, burning my lips and eyelids. A line of fire hoses had been linked to the hydrants and ran across Harvey Road and up Parade Street, and a group of firemen were doing their valiant best, but it was already too late. The building had by then been reduced to a pile of flaming rubble, burning with the intensity of hellfire. It was no use. There was nothing I could do. There was nothing anyone could do—not now, not ever again.

  “I’M SORRY to have to do this, Jack. We tried to locate someone else who could positively identify him, but most of his friends all died in the fire.” Picco’s hairline was singed, and his eyebrows were completely gone, but he was otherwise unscathed. Fort Townsend’s proximity to the hostel meant a great many Constabulary officers turned out to assist during the fire; Picco had been one of them. “You can take a minute if you want. There’s no rush.”

  “No, it’s fine.” I swallowed hard. The room—an empty parade hall in the CLB Armoury building—had been pressed into service as a temporary morgue, the city morgue having been overrun with corpses of the recently dead. The bodies here were laid out in neat rows, each one covered with the requisite white sheet. “I’m all right.” Picco peeled back the part of the sheet that covered the head, and I looked, then nodded, and stepped away. Callan’s face was as unblemished as it had been the last time I’d seen him alive. “How did he…?”

  Picco replaced the sheet. “I don’t know, Jack.” He sighed. “The body isn’t burned as badly as some of the others. He may have been hit by falling debris. He was found outside the structure, lying face-down on the ground; two soldiers took him to a medic, but he couldn’t be revived.” His pale eyes searched my features—for what, I didn’t know. I felt nothing even remotely like grief, or sorrow, or regret, or any of the things you usually felt at a time like this. I felt nothing, nothing at all, as if some invisible force had come along and stolen my capacity to react to something like this. “I’m sorry,” Picco added. “I know he was your friend.”

  “Yeah.” The room was of necessity cold, and I shivered. “Yeah, he was. Come on. Let’s get out of here.” We went out to where Picco’s car was parked. I’d walked up from the Heartache, despite the cold, and he had offered to drive me home. The first of the funerals for the fire victims would take place today, and local churches had pushed aside whatever holiday season business they might otherwise have had to make room for the dead. It seemed to me that I spent an inordinate amount of time doing that myself. First with Judy, then with Frankie, then with Sam’s wife Tareenah and now there was Rick. Maybe I was a bad luck charm, a jinx or something: brush up against me and you die.

  Picco stopped for the traffic cop at the intersection of Duckworth and Prescott. “You all right?” He reached across and touched my arm. “I’m sorry, Jack. I really am.” He sighed. “Listen, I’m not supposed to tell you this, so if you say anything to anybody I swear to God I’ll gut ye.” The cop waved us through and Picco’s car tipped down over the hill, turning right onto Water Street. “There’s significant evidence to suggest the fire wasn’t an accident.”

  I might have said something, but I’ll be damned if I remember what it was.

  “A Bulgarian agent was put ashore in Conception Bay back in October. You remember that night I found you and Callan out in Topsail?”

  “Yeah, I remember. I felt like you were my mother, and I had to hide my dirty magazines under the mattress.”

  “We received a tip that lights had been spotted offshore in Conception Bay, so we went out to check. We didn’t find anything.”

  “So how’d you know… Bulgarian?” I wonder if you could direct me to… ah, Parade Street? “There was a man in my cafe that same day, the day of the fire. He was little, not much over five feet tall, and he had an accent. There was something strange about his face, too. I remember he had no eyelashes.”

  Picco gazed at me while we waited for the traffic ahead of us to move. I thought I saw anxie
ty flit across his features, but it was gone almost immediately. “You didn’t tell me? Jesus, Jack.”

  This was new; Picco never, ever swore. “What was I supposed to do? Call you up and report it? ‘There’s a man here with no eyelashes. I think you ought to arrest him.’”

  He dragged his gaze away from me. “Either way, if this… eyelashless man in your cafe is who we suspect he is, he may well have started the fire. His name is Yosif Tzvetanov—”

  “I’m impressed. Say it again.”

  “Yosif Tzvetanov, and he is a Nazi collaborator. He was probably working with Jonah Octavian.”

  A Greek working with a Bulgarian? “Uh-huh.”

  “The fire was deliberately planned as an act of sabotage.” Picco pulled up in front of the Heartache. “Stoyles, be careful. Octavian’s buddies know all about you. You better watch yourself. Carry a gun if you got one.”

  I opened the door and put my foot on the sidewalk. “Thanks for the ride. Come in for a coffee?”

  Picco raised his nonexistent eyebrows dismissively. “I’m on duty.”

  I got out, but leaned back in and grinned at him. “Seeing Chris tonight?”

  He kept his gaze fixed on the front windshield. “None of your business.”

  “Where do you guys do it, anyway? You live with your sister—”

  Picco put the car into gear and pulled away from the sidewalk so fast I nearly went down, but his reaction made me laugh, and I was grateful. If Picco was still a jerk, then some things were definitely right with the world. I went inside, stopped long enough to say hello to Tex and Chris, and went through to my office. Normally, I wouldn’t abuse the telephone lines, this being wartime and all, but I’d decided upon a course of action, and I needed to carry it out before I lost my nerve. The hostel fire had set some things in motion, things I was powerless to stop. The only thing I could do now was strap in and hope I survived the ride.

  I got Kevin MacBride’s line on the first try, but there was a wait since Cairo was four and a half hours later than Newfoundland and the young woman who took my call said she believed the captain was at supper. It took about fifteen minutes for them to locate MacBride and get him to the telephone; the first thing he did was apologize for the wait. “So you’ve decided, then?”

  “Yeah.” I pushed away the crossword puzzle I’d been working on. “Yeah, I’ll do it. What we talked about—” I wasn’t dumb enough to say it over an open wire. “I’ll do it.”

  MacBride let out his breath into the transcontinental silence. “Right. Good on you.” He laughed. “Great to have you aboard. Someone will be by to see you in a day or two and give you some instructions. That all right?”

  “Sure. After the year I’ve had, I’m game for anything.”

  I’M NOT sure exactly when it was, except I know it was noon and the sun was shining, even through the December cold. The Heartache was empty of customers, and I was working behind the bar, sorting through the previous night’s receipts, when I became aware of someone standing in front of me, waiting patiently for me to look up. I guess I’d expected a lot of things: maybe MacBride himself would come, or maybe Tex would turn out to be my contact, or Chris or Picco. I took my time before I gave him my attention and in retrospect, I’m glad I did.

  “I wonder if you might help me. I am looking for a particular building.”

  Maybe he said something else; I don’t know. It seemed like the cafe, the street, the sun through the windowpanes, the world—all of it vanished into meaningless chaos, and there was only him. “Sam.”

  “Salam alekum, Jack.”

  I was trembling so much, I had to hold on to the bar to keep from falling. “Sam, you… why… I mean—MacBride said—did you come all the way from Cairo?”

  He laughed, the laugh I loved so much, and reached out a hand to steady me. “No, Jack. I regret even I am not capable of spanning the globe in a mere eye blink.” His gentle gaze took me in. “After Tareenah….” There was a long silence, while he composed himself. “No, I have been here for some time now, helping out your Sergeant Picco and lending a hand wherever I might. It was me you saw that day, outside your cafe, watching you from across the street. I hope you didn’t mind too much. Are you glad to see me?”

  “You have to ask?” I wanted to rush to him, to leap over the bar and grab him, tell him how much I loved him, how much I had missed him, but I was afraid. “H-how are… I mean, your children, how are they?”

  “My children are well, thank you. My sister came from Alexandria to care for them. They are… managing, as am I.” His elegant mouth curled up at one corner. “Is that all you have to say to me, Jack?”

  “Well, I think—”

  I came out from behind the bar and there he was, standing in front of me, so close it would have been impossible to insert a hand between us, and he was gazing up at me and smiling. “Do you know what your problem is, Jack?”

  It was suddenly very hard to speak. “No.”

  “You think too much.”

  And I took him in my arms and kissed him.

  About the Author

  J.S. COOK was born and raised on the island of Newfoundland. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English Language and Literature and a B.Ed in post-secondary education. She makes her home in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with her husband Paul and Lola, her spoiled rotten dogter.

  J.S. Cook also writes as JoAnne Soper-Cook.

  By J.S. COOK

  But Not For Me

  Come to Dust

  Famous Last Words

  A Little Night Murder

  The Lovely Beast

  Oasis of Night

  The Quality of Mercy

  Sixteen Songs About Regret

  The Stranger at My Door

  The Winter Dark

  Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Stranger at the Door

  By J.S. Cook

  South Carolina lawyer Calvin Amos is confident he can gain Thomas Basinger his freedom on appeal. Thom was convicted of a murder during an armed robbery gone bad. But Basinger’s case proves more difficult than Cal anticipated, and the battle he assumed he’d win turns into a devastating failure. Remorseful over the personal defeat, after Basinger is executed, Cal throws himself out of his office window.

  Bizarrely, the fall doesn’t kill him. Even stranger, Thom Basinger rings Cal’s doorbell looking for a job. Both men are drawn to each other. Before long, the two forge a unique, heartfelt connection that transcends the boundaries of life and death.

  Calvin Amos always imagined himself in possession of some great love or other. He didn’t know he had to die to find it.

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Famous Last Words

  By J.S. Cook

  When former Indiana farm boy William Henry Rider goes on a bank robbing spree in Benedict Fouts's corner of Depression Era Illinois, it's up to Ben to bring him in. But Rider is no ordinary criminal. Famed for robberies that happen in the blink of an eye, Rider becomes a folk hero who steals from the rich and burns the mortgage papers of poor farmers teetering on the edge of financial ruin.

  Intrigued to learn that Fouts has been assigned to his case, Rider approaches him in a darkened movie house with a unique proposition: “We’ll have ourselves a game of Cops and Robbers. I’ll run, and you catch me. The clock starts right now, Ben.”

  Ben knows he’s the only one who can stop the Bureau from murdering Rider, but he’s soon struggling with another reason to chase the enigmatic fugitive.

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

 

 

 
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