The Glass House

by David Rotenberg

  “Eddie, I need to find Decker.”

  “He’s beneath the radar, off the grid, on his own, dross in the wind.”

  “Eddie!”

  “I don’t know where he is. And that’s the way he wanted it. So unless you have something else on your mind—”

  “Seth’s in trouble.”

  Eddie spat the bomber from his lips into the can beside his chair.

  “I know you care about the boy.”

  “Because you’ve bugged—”

  “Yeah. But I know you care about that boy, and I think he cares about you, and I know that he’s in great danger.”

  “What does that have to do with finding Decker?”

  “I think Seth’s been leaving clues about where he’s going, but only Decker can decipher them.”

  “Tell me.”

  And she did. The tree drawing in the San Francisco Wellness Dream Clinic, the same image in pencil in the Coronado Hotel, the doctor’s claim that Seth kept saying “At the tree, at the lamp post.” Finally, she read him the poem.

  Eddie was on his feet, pacing quickly with his awkward stride, his foot lifter clacking with every step.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Eddie turned and saw Marina in the door of his study, clearly frightened.

  “Nothing, honey. Everything’s okay.”

  “It’s not!”

  “Who’s that?” Yslan demanded.

  “My daughter. Where did you track Decker last?”

  She told him Namibia.

  “Okay. He’s no genius when it comes to hiding. I’ll find him.”

  “And tell us where he is?”

  “I don’t know about that.” He snapped off the connection and turned the ringer off. She could call as much as she liked, but he wouldn’t pick up until he knew what was what with Seth.

  He sat heavily back in his desk chair. Much to his surprise, Marina came over, climbed up on his lap and said, without speaking, You’ll find Mr. Decker. You will.

  Fifty-five minutes later he got his first hit. Decker had traded Visa cards, using his old one to get a new one under a false name—one that Eddie had seen before, long ago, when they were kids in school.

  He quickly found out that Decker had loaded the card with a seven-thousand-dollar advanced payment. The first charge was a rental car fee from Windhoek’s Avis office. He hacked into their site and found the exact vehicle, then he got the vehicle’s GPS code and hacked into that. He got its current coordinates, then went to Google Maps and punched those in: Solitaire, Namibia.

  His friend—or at least his rental car—was in Solitaire, Namibia, right at the junction of Highways 1 and 6.

  He picked up his phone, thought for a moment, then dialed.

  “Eddie?”

  “Yeah, he’s in Namibia.”

  “I know that, but the country’s bigger than France.”

  “He’s at the junction of Highways Six and One.”

  “Does the place have a name, Eddie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “Solitaire—Solitaire, Namibia.”

  53

  YSLAN TO AFRICA

  ON THE AIR FORCE JET, Emerson had been oddly quiet for some time. Finally, as the jet banked for its descent to Windhoek’s military airport, he said, “I thought we were after Harrison’s poisoner.”

  “We are,” Yslan replied. “We find Seth, we find WJ.”

  Emerson nodded.

  Yslan stared at him. “You knew that. Why did—”

  Before she could finish her question, he turned to her. He didn’t look good, which was so pronounced because of his usual beauty. “Yeah, I knew that,” he said.

  “You okay?” Yslan asked.

  But he turned his head away from her and stared out the window at the quickly approaching Namibian desert.

  A man lost in thought, Yslan assumed, then she corrected herself: A lost man.

  He turned to her and said, “You realize you spoke those thoughts out loud?”

  She hadn’t. She quickly changed the subject. “Are you reporting to Mallory?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “I am. Who do you think arranged for our current transportation?”

  “So he’s okay with what we’re doing?” Emerson nodded and she continued. “So tell him I’m following a hunch, and before you jump all over me for—”

  “I wouldn’t. And neither would Mallory. A hunch is just an idea in the pupal form.”

  She looked at him hard. Was he mocking her? No. The man seemed to be slowly uncoiling, somehow falling apart. As if he was approaching an ending of some sort, she thought, then wondered where that thought came from and if she’d spoken it aloud.

  “What more do we have in this world than hunches that there are other worlds out there waiting for us?” He turned from her, and his image in the plane’s window was somehow buried there—locked in the glass.

  The plane banked sharply a second time, and Yslan saw the chopper on the runway, its rotors turning—ready to bring them to Solitaire.

  54

  CHOPPER

  THE DAYS MELDED ONE INTO the next as worlds slowly aligned, his reality shifting from a memory of Seth as a baby to the burial of his wife to Seth’s small hand sliding from his. Decker lost in thought and baking pies—and hearing the music in everything he touched, in every clatter of pan into sink, of every can opener turn, of every whisper of the wind.

  He felt light, almost transparent.

  Then he heard a sound he couldn’t identify and whose music he couldn’t find.

  The whop, whop, whop of a helicopter.

  55

  TRISH AND COPS

  THE KNOCK ON TRISH’S CONDO door left no doubt that she was required to open it despite the late hour—which, as she knotted the bathrobe around her thin waist, she noted was 3:17 a.m.

  More knocking—this time someone shouting her name. Definitely not cool in her high-end building. Intentionally not cool, she thought as she opened the door.

  Before the younger of the two cops whose badge announced him as Laurence Garreth Jr. (or was it Garreth Laurence Jr.? It was something Junior) could open his mouth she said, “It’s late, and unless you have a warrant you’re not setting foot in my home.”

  The other cop, a shorty, had a smirk on his silly little face. A puny thing with a gun and a strut. Trish assumed if this pipsqueak got shot, the police alert would be “Little Asshole down, take your time.” He reached into the pocket of his long coat—who wore long coats like that anymore? More cops copying cops in TV shows, she thought. He produced a warrant. Trish grabbed it. “I need my reading glasses.” She turned her back on them. Over her shoulder she announced, “One step into my home and I’ll scream rape.”

  She found her glasses behind a mound of used wrapping paper, each sheet of which was neatly folded, then stacked on an end table.

  She pushed aside the six plastic cutlery trays and eight saucepans so she could sit on the couch. When she reached for the switch of the table lamp she knocked over twenty light bulb packages.

  The warrant had her name spelled correctly, the date was right, and her address was accurate. So much for an easy way out, she thought. On the top of the second page she saw the purpose of the warrant: “To Investigate a Report of Rodent Infestation.”

  “At three o’clock in the fucking morning?” she shouted at the cops, who were still standing in the door. She checked the signing judge—the Right Honourable Stephanie Preston. All those details were in order, too. She sighed as she got to her feet, crossed to the door and handed back the warrant.

  “Can we come in, Ms. Spence?” Junior.

  “Sure. But this is some kind of joke. Who looks for mice at three in the morning?”

  “May we come in?” Junior again.

  “Yeah. But don’t touch anything. My home is a work of modern art—an installation, if you know that term. Every piece has been carefully chosen and p
laced.” As she spoke she allowed her eyes to scan the room—how had it gotten to be this full of junk?

  The two cops began their search.

  Trish removed a four-foot stack of newspapers from an Eames chair and sat. “Maybe if you tell me what you’re really looking for, I’ll tell you where to find it,” she said.

  Junior grunted and went into her bedroom.

  Minicop strode into her kitchen like he was Anthony Bourdain or maybe just Guy Fieri.

  “Make me some coffee while you’re in there,” she said. He grunted in reply. What was it with cops and grunting?

  Then from her bedroom she heard, “Here.” The vertically challenged cop came out of the kitchen and with a grin went into her bedroom. A moment later Junior came out of her bedroom with a mouse dangling by its tail.

  Trish howled with laughter.

  “What’s so funny, Ms. Spence?” Mini cop asked.

  “It’s frozen, you moron. Look at it, stiff as a board! You brought it in here with you, then claimed you found it.”

  “That’s a serious accusation.” Pint-Sized—she’d mentally added a d to his name.

  “This is a serious farce.”

  “And this,” Junior said, pulling out another official-looking piece of paper, “is a serious citation.”

  “No doubt already signed by Stephanie whatchamacallit too.”

  “How do you—”

  “You’re not talking to the paperboy, whatever the fuck your name is.”

  “Garreth Laurence.”

  “Junior. Let’s not leave out the best part. I just love it when grown men are juniors, don’t you?”

  “Well, no doubt you’ll love this too, Ms. Spence. Your condo is now officially quarantined. You cannot live here even a minute longer. Get your purse and a change of clothes and you’re out of here. A city crew will be in here tomorrow and will remove every item. The cost of which will be appended to your city tax bill. If I were you I’d take this as a warning.”

  Trish’s mouth opened—then shut.

  “You’re not talking to the paperboy either, Ms. Spence.”

  • • •

  She checked into a Lake Shore motel just before dawn. It was the kind of place that didn’t ask questions of its patrons and didn’t supply toilet paper in the bathroom or sound insulation between the cavalierly named “suites.”

  She contacted Eddie.

  “Trish, it’s early—”

  “Yeah, I get that. Can you do genealogy searches?”

  “Genealogy, astrology, hydroponic gardening—”

  “Find me what hive the Right Honourable Stephanie Preston comes from.”

  She hung up. The couple in the next room finally stopped trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records—and she closed her eyes.

  When she woke, about two hours later, she noticed that she’d missed a call. She retrieved the message. “It’s me. You’re not going to like this but the Right Honourable Stephanie Preston is from Clan Parees. She’s the wife of that Public Broadcaster guy.”

  56

  TRISH AND ANDREW PAREES

  IT WASN’T EASY TO GET a second meeting with Andrew Parees, CPBC big shot, but Trish had often found her six-foot-plus frame intimidating enough to get her past any secretary—female or male, gay or straight.

  And that’s how she burst into Andrew Parees’ office that morning.

  “Stephanie Preston is your wife, and the dead boy’s name was Seamus Parees, so what the fuck’s going on here?”

  To her surprise, Andrew Parees didn’t squirm in his chair or betray in any way that he was perturbed by Trish’s unscheduled entrance or her opening statement.

  “Aren’t you the persistent one,” he finally said.

  “Yeah, I guess. Was this some kind of perverse hundred-year-old homophobic shame?”

  Andrew moved slightly in his chair and put his hand on the thick desktop blotter. For a moment Trish wondered what he could be blotting that required such a large blotter.

  “No,” he said softly.

  “Then what is it?”

  After a long pause, he turned in his large desk chair and stared out the window at the dozens of new condominiums that were sprouting like glass mushrooms after a storm on the expensive downtown streets of Toronto. “It’s finally coming to fruition,” he said.

  “What is?” she demanded.

  He indicated all the construction. “It’s the result of hundreds of hard decisions, maybe thousands of sacrifices—that’s what’s building this place into one of the world’s great cities.”

  More of that world-class crap, she thought.

  Then without segue he asked, “Have you ever wondered why there are so many churches along Annette Street in the Junction?” Before Trish could say anything, he rose and began to speak. “Ms. Spence, do you recall the mania at the turn of the century, all that Y2K nonsense?” Trish didn’t respond. “Do you?” he demanded. She nodded. “Well, that was nothing compared to the fear and anxiety that ran wild when the calendar flipped from the eighteen hundreds to the nineteen hundreds.”

  “So?”

  “Toronto was a very different place back then.”

  “No doubt.”

  “But not the way you think. There were no Asians here or very many non-Christians for that matter.”

  “The good ol’ days.” Trish tried to be as sarcastic as she could manage—which was pretty damned sarcastic.

  “Your cynicism blinds you to the real way of the world, Ms. Spence.”

  “So . . .”

  “So the church—the very foundation upon which this entire city rests—was under attack. Radical ideas from south of the border were taking hold. And darker things, too. Riots in the night, law and order itself was breaking down, and many churches, some along Annette, were burned to the ground as mobs cheered.”

  “No doubt witches and warlocks were behind all this.”

  He threw her a hard look. “You are not far from the truth, which once again your cynicism prevents you from seeing. The millennial change had unleashed untold forces. The very fabric of this society, the foundation of all future growth, was coming apart. Rent and torn, it was literally flapping in the wind.” Then again without segue he asked, “Have you ever been to China?”

  This change of subject completely unsettled her, but she managed to say, “Japan, but not China.”

  “Completely different idea. Do you never wonder how a small Communist Party can control one point three billion of its citizens?”

  “Through threats and extortion—”

  Andrew Parees laughed, a big belly laugh, the kind of laugh a father gives to his little girl who has said something infinitely childish. “You read the wrong papers. Sure, there are or were threats and extortion. There are those things here too, by the by. But no, that’s not what allows the small Communist Party to control such a huge population.”

  “Then what is?”

  “The fear of chaos. The fear that the deep roots of their society will come up from the ground and all will be thrust skyward into the whirlwind. It has happened in their society several times. And everyone—and I mean everyone—knows that order, no matter how cruelly or arbitrarily applied, is better for the general good than chaos. And chaos, that’s what was happening here at the millennial change from 1899 to 1900. The Catholics and Protestants who gave this country solidity—or at least ballast—were being thrown at each other. We were on the brink of giving the anarchist uprising, the fires of chaos, exactly what they wanted—all-out war between the two pillars upon which this city sits, the Catholic and Protestant religions. We were about to cast aside all of the values of this country. All of them. Have you ever lived through a police strike, Ms. Spence?”

  Trish knew that during the brief police strike in Montreal in the late sixties more murders took place than in an entire year. But she chose to say nothing.

  “I can see from your face that you know of it even if you didn’t live through it. Well, a police strike i
s a minor breakdown in order compared to what was going to happen at the millennial change. So even someone like you can see that it had to be stopped.”

  Although she felt herself being drawn into a trap, she asked, “And how did they do that?”

  Andrew Parees bridged his hands and said simply, “There are only two ways of bringing peace to warring families.”

  “Marriage and—” The realization struck Trish like a twenty-wheel truck and she collapsed into a chair. When she looked up, Andrew Parees was looking down at her. “No,” she said.

  “But, yes, Ms. Spence. For the good of us all.”

  “They sacrificed that boy!”

  “Since marriage was out of the question, it was the only way. Surely you see that.”

  Trish struggled to her feet. “Who else besides you knows?”

  “Every sane person—everyone committed to the safety and sanity of this place, to the growth of this city into greatness.”

  “Every churchman?”

  Andrew Parees smiled—a father pleased that his daughter had figured out a simple mathematical equation. “Of course, things didn’t go as simply as they should. It seems that my great-grandfather objected. It seems he had feelings for the boy. After his wife, my great-grandmother died, he never remarried—lived alone for over forty years and died at one hundred and two. On his deathbed I heard him say the name Seamus. It was the last thing he ever said, and his will . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “It insisted that Seamus’s grave be attended to—that the whole of his considerable fortune be put to telling Seamus’s story.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “The law against perpetuities.”

  “You mean like in that old film Body Heat?”

  “Yes. You can’t control the actions of the living from the grave. The law against perpetuities ensures that.”

  “So where did his money go?”

  Andrew Parees smiled then said, simply, “To the first step towards this city’s greatness, to get the Junction to join the big bad city.”

  “And erase the death of Seamus.”