Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  “Mr. D’Arcy will join us for dinner. I’ll have you shown to your cabin.”

  “For dinner?”

  “You will dine with me at the captain’s table. It is not often we have the pleasure of Mr. D’Arcy’s company. We must take advantage when we do.”

  “And where is Mr. D’Arcy now?”

  “I expect he is in the casino. That is where he usually goes.”

  “Usually?”

  “Mr. D’Arcy keeps a suite on board for his own private use and joins us from time to time as his schedule allows. A world-class sailor, you might say.”

  Miranda was more than a little bewildered. That did not sound like her sometime friend, Mr. Ross. To maintain a suite on a ship like this would be a major investment. Ross might be doing well in the world, but he did not seem inordinately wealthy. It did not sound like the reclusive Toronto lawyer, either. From what she knew of the real Mr. D’Arcy, he might be high-flying, but he wasn’t jet set. She was shown to her cabin, which proved to be accessed through the D’Arcy suite and had a balcony of its own. As she devoured two bananas, a large papaya, and a piece of garnet-coloured passion fruit from a bedside bowl, she wondered if there could possibly be a third Mr. D’Arcy?

  Only when she got up to dispose of the waste from her feast and wipe her hands clean did she notice a smaller manila envelope on the top of a dresser. She opened it carefully and withdrew another envelope, this one of clear plastic surrounding the brilliantly costumed figure of Wonder Woman from the April 1954 issue featuring the Stone Slayer of Easter Island. Ross! she thought. There was only one T.E. Ross, whatever his name really was.

  9

  Playing With the Dead

  Morgan and Miranda agreed to meet at Starbucks on College at Yonge. She wasn’t officially back from her leave, and he preferred to catch up away from the office. Both realized that much of what they had to say to each other was not police business, but personal. In the ten days since he had returned from the Arctic, Morgan felt at loose ends. He had wished his partner were around; he thought better when they were together. But when Miranda called from Tahiti to say she was on her way home, the first question that came to mind was not why, but why call? By the afternoon of the following day she’d be back. They talked for a few minutes about the stifling August weather in Toronto and the balmy weather in Papeete, and then she hung up and he realized how immensely relieved he had been to hear her voice.

  “You’re looking good,” said Morgan as he rose to greet her when she came in. “A little pale around the edges.” He wasn’t about to ask why she had cut her sabbatical short. That would come when she was ready.

  “Spent most of my time in a cave that was famous for bleaching skin white.”

  “No wonder I couldn’t reach you. I thought you’d dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “And you didn’t do anything about it?”

  “I worried.”

  “Thank you, Morgan, but I can take care of myself.”

  He slurped his coffee to skim off the crema. She was back. She actually had the soft warm glow of a carefully acquired tan that made her hazel eyes sparkle. “Well,” he said. “Well, well.” He didn’t know where to start.

  “Tell me about Harrington D’Arcy,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “He’s dead.”

  “The real Harrington D’Arcy?”

  “As far as I know. What about your guy, the sleazy Englishman who borrowed his name, did he turn up again?”

  “Actually, he did. Several times. I don’t remember telling you he was sleazy. He was quite debonair, although he did try to kill me. Or to place death in my way. Or he saved my life. It was an odd relationship. Actually, I knew your Mr. D’Arcy was dead. I heard the news at sea. But I want to know the details, to catch up on your case. I take it you’ve been waiting for me to help sort out the complexities.”

  “I have,” he said. “At sea?” His resolve to seem disinterested was fading. “Talk to me.”

  Miranda skimmed off her own crema with a spoon and savoured it with a lingering sigh, reached over and took the rest of his, then proceeded to tell him about her romantic cruise through the South Pacific, stopping off in the Marquesas Islands before travelling to fabled Bora Bora and then on to Papeete, Tahiti. She would tell him another time about the treacherous machinations of her Rapa Nui adventures. She would perhaps tell him about the suite kept on board the Island Queen in D’Arcy’s name, and perhaps about the note that was on her silver salver when she sat down at the captain’s table on her first evening aboard. But for the time being, she needed to find her way, to establish the right distance between herself and recent events in order to bring them into perspective.

  She had stumbled, sprawling headlong into a culture in crisis. For Matteo and his cohort caught up in the heart of the maelstrom, their struggle was deadly serious. She did not want to diminish its significance nor overplay her role by turning it into an amusing adventure.

  She had been right about the debit card and the PIN number that had given her access to enough money to get her home in comfort. She was curious about the source, but not anxious. It had seemed almost inevitable that someone else should be looking out for her interests. Before dinner she had bought a few clothes and toiletries and when she approached the captain’s table she was quite confident that Ross would be waiting for her. Since she had again eluded death, he would be gracious. She was unable to decide whether her false papers and the money were from him in recompense for service rendered or, as she felt with a vague sense of foreboding, she was being maintained for purposes yet undeclared. If the latter, Ross would at least provide a touchstone so that she could anticipate what might be expected. Fate, she had thought, sometimes comes in the guise of an English gentleman of no moral suasion at all.

  Instead of her false Mr. D’Arcy or another of the same name, there was only the note and a shrug from the ship’s master by way of an explanation. It was he who had informed her before they reached the Marquesas Islands that Harrington D’Arcy had been reported dead in the Canadian Arctic, and he who had been only mildly nonplussed that the dead man apparently travelled from a semi-tropical island south of the equator into high latitudes above the Arctic Circle and managed to die of exposure, all in a matter of days, while his ship had steamed peacefully through the South Seas in its own separate world.

  The note had been written in a familiar voice that she seemed to hear as she read. “My dear Miranda,” it began. “Unfortunately, I am unable to join you. Please give my regards to Bora Bora. It is the most delightful island of any I know and I shall miss showing you its splendid charms to their best advantage. The suite is of course yours and you may sign for anything you wish. Do spend a few days in Tahiti before you return to Toronto. Papeete itself is a bustling port and you might want to pick up a strand of Tahitian pearls. You may charge to my account at the Pearl Market, a delightful shop on rue Colette, just up from the waterfront.” The tone seemed casual and yet formal, like a sugar daddy not wholly convinced of his superior status. As an afterthought, he wrote. “I am very pleased you are alive. My friend, Te Ave Teao, distracted the federales —”

  “Distracted!”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Morgan.

  “Sorry, I didn’t say anything.”

  “I think you said distracted.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “Think away.” Morgan liked watching her think. He had missed that.

  Aware that her narrative had dwindled into silence and Morgan was sitting across from her in Starbucks, in Toronto, watching her think, Miranda felt a warm surge of camaraderie as she continued her mental reprise of the note from Ross. After dismissing the importance of the death of Matteo’s brother, or perhaps diminishing his partisan sacrifice as a meaningless heroic gesture, he had continued: “I went ahead into the cave to assure you were hidden and was quite relieved to find you nowhere in sight. Enjoy your voyage. Yours T.E.” And then at the bottom: “Don’t pull
the rug out from under yourself.”

  “Morgan,” she said, leaning forward with a conspiratorial tilt to her head, “have you ever heard the expression, don’t pull the rug out from under yourself?”

  “Sounds Presbyterian. Or something done by the Cirque du Soleil.”

  “I don’t think he meant it as theology. Nor as a bodily contortion.”

  “Who?” Morgan asked.

  “Tell me about the investigation.”

  “Have you talked to Jill yet?”

  Her ward, Jill Bray, was a student at Branksome Hall and presently on a fifty-two-day canoe trip across the Arctic with Camp Wanapitei.

  “She won’t be back for another week. Tell me about your investigation.”

  He wanted more of her story, but decided to forge ahead and let her fill in the gaps when she was ready. “Last time I talked to you I had one corpse to deal with, and now I’ve got two or possibly three, or four. D’Arcy virtually died in my arms.”

  “Really.”

  “No, not really. I was off hunting fish with a weir and a spear when he died. Of exposure. That’s what the police report said. As for the wife, I’m still not sure.”

  “Of what?”

  “What killed her. She seems to have died of exposure, as well.”

  “In Toronto … in August?”

  “It’s possible, apparently you can murder by weather.”

  “What in God’s name were you doing in the Arctic? She must have been very alluring.”

  Morgan looked startled. Miranda flashed her teeth.

  “Just a good guess, Morgan. But I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “How’s your novel going?”

  “Finished, polished, edited, in the bookstores tomorrow. If I’d known how easy it was, I’d have been writing mysteries for years.”

  “Devastating reviews,” he said, projecting into the future. “Ignored by the public. Remaindered at a dollar a copy. End of writing career. Aren’t you glad you didn’t resign from the force?”

  She leaned low across the table and looked up into his eyes. He really is quite beautiful, she thought. Too many beautiful men in my life. She slouched back against her chair and smiled dreamily.

  Morgan had no idea what was going through her mind. “Did you ever read that book I gave you, Beverley Haun, Inventing Easter Island?”

  “No, Morgan, I didn’t. It went up in a fiery inferno that was meant to consume me.”

  He assumed she was speaking metaphorically.

  She added, as an improbable addendum: “I watched from the grave, Morgan, cheek by jowl with a desiccated skull. Well, the cheeks and jowls were mine. He was on the gaunt side.”

  “It’s a good book, I’m reading it now.”

  “Nice title.” She tilted her head and a veil of auburn hair descended slowly across her field of vision. Exhaustion as an aphrodesiac was beginning to fade. She sat up abruptly. “Who was the woman, Morgan?”

  “There have been several,” he responded, and, much to his surprise, an image of Ellen Ravenscroft veered through his mind. Feeling self-conscious, he pushed back from the table and walked over to order two more coffees from the barista. When he returned, Miranda seemed to be lost in thought, barely smiling when he slid the coffee under her nose. He slurped at the crema and stared at the sun gleaming on the College Street windows. He looked back at her and then away, envisioning those final hours on the desolate, beautiful, haunting, disorderly shore of Baffin Island.

  Gloria Simmons had been holding D’Arcy across her lap when Morgan returned with the fish. She had been holding his head against her body, almost as if she intended to nurse him before he expired. The other man, Miguel Escobar, was lying against her outstretched legs, curled up with his back pressed to her for the radiant warmth from her body. When she had looked up through the smoke and announced D’Arcy’s death she hardly moved.

  At the time he was dumbfounded and simply went about preparing the fish. He rolled them in layers of saturated moss and settled them into the embers. He had nothing to clean them with but expected the flesh would fall off in their fingers when they were cooked.

  In retrospect Morgan realized how deeply he had been moved by the strange picture of the three bodies intertwined. There was something so primal about the scene that he had no words to describe it. In all his years in homicide he had never seen death and life so intimately connected; he had never seen a woman, a person, poised between them, so inextricably bound to both. The angel of life and the angel of merciful death.

  When the fish was cooked he had helped to dismantle the tableaux, laying Harrington D’Arcy on a bed of moss close to the boulder face and propping the other man up so that he could eat morsels of char held to his mouth. After a little food and a few sips of water that Gloria Simmons carried to him in her own mouth and fed to him from her lips while Morgan tended the fire, the man seemed to relax into a deep sleep and she gently rolled him onto his side so the smoke wouldn’t choke him.

  The evening sky had cleared again to a deep blue; rescue would be on its way. Warm and satiated from succulent chunks of char, Morgan and Gloria Simmons moved to the edge of the smoke and were immediately inundated by clouds of tiny blackflies dive-bombing at what little exposed flesh offered itself up. The weather had been too cold during the night, then too bright and then too wet; now conditions were perfect and the scourge of the North attacked mercilessly until their prey moved back under the cover of smoke.

  Without being prodded, Gloria Simmons had decided it was time for clarity. “You are patient, Detective Morgan, or very focused.”

  “Neither,” he had responded

  “Curious, then?”

  “Very.”

  “There will be ripe blueberries close by. There always are when the blackflies come out.”

  He had expected something a little more illuminating, but as if she had just been warming to her own voice, she shifted perspectives and continued, “You know about Nanisivik on the north end of the island, Nanisivik is closing down.” She adjusted her posture on their bed of moss and lichen. “A far bigger find has been made, running like a band across central Baffin. We are at the east end of it where we sit. Zinc, copper, lead, nickel, and, of course, immeasurable quantities of gold as a bonus. All of this is worth billions.”

  “In potential,” he had said.

  “Access will be relatively easy with global warming to help us along.”

  “Us?”

  “There is us and there is them. You, I presume, are with us. Our side consists of the Inuit people who own the rights and a foreign investor.”

  “A foreign investor?”

  “The government of Chile.”

  “And them?”

  “A fascist cabal, also from Chile. People we do not like.”

  “Then why deal with them, if you have the rights?”

  “They have much money, they are ruthless, they have a political agenda. All of that makes them a formidable foe, not easily dismissed. Some of our own people support them.”

  She had moved restlessly in their nest, her eyes were red from the smoke and tears were smeared on her cheeks. He reached up and touched his own face to confirm that he too had been tearing up. Escobar lay very still while Harrington D’Arcy seemed to dominate in death as much as in life. Morgan leaned toward Gloria Simmons in expectation. She complied. “You might call them Pinochet loyalists,” she said. “They are a fascist junta who want to bring down the present government.”

  “Of Chile. Is Pinochet still alive?”

  “Just barely. But they don’t need him, they need his name. They already have a good part of the national treasury from the Pinochet years in offshore accounts. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer. With Baffin Island under their control, the Pinochet cabal could undermine Chile’s control of the market, and destabilize the government. If the government falls, their investment here would assure their return to power — this time without help from the CIA, so far as we know. Two birds with o
ne stone: destabilize this government; bankroll the next. Then watch the terrors begin all over again.”

  Despite spending time on Easter Island, Morgan was hazy on Chilean politics. It seemed obvious, though, that he would endorse the Inuit claim; he could not imagine being on the Pinochet side

  “Their victory would be a very bad thing,” she continued. “Pinochet was ruthless, thousands died. Thousands more simply disappeared.”

  “The desaparecidos.”

  “The disparu, yes. So, Morgan, our job, yours and mine, is to ensure that control of the Baffin copper belt does not fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Our job.”

  “You help get me out of here, we remain undead. We take Harrington D’Arcy back home for burial with his wife. We take our friend here, back for whatever awaits him. Then you get back to solving murders, and life returns to normal.”

  Life returns to normal. Pulling out of his reverie, Morgan looked across the table at Miranda and smiled shyly as if he were somehow embarrassed to have been so far away in his mind.

  “Welcome back,” she said.

  “You, too,” he said.

  “It’s good to be here,” she said. “Morgan, once again, what the hell were you doing up there? You need me around to keep you grounded.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I was sailing the South Seas on the Island Queen when I heard about D’Arcy. I checked him out on the Globe and Mail website and up popped a picture of you. Stock photo, not flattering. So I knew you’d been up there, and there were no survivors, apart from you and your lady friend. All three of the businessmen died, including Harrington D’Arcy. Tell me?”

  “You knew about Gloria Simmons? And here I thought you were psychic. Yeah, we survived. The other three didn’t. One of them was already dead when we got there. Then D’Arcy died. And the other one died after D’Arcy, it was like the breath had been sucked right out of him.” Morgan remembered being shocked by the cruelty of the man dying at the point of rescue, but he also remembered feeling somehow his death was inevitable. “I went out into the clearing to meet the chopper that had zeroed in our smoke. It was the D’Arcy Associates chopper from Pond Inlet. When I got back with the rescue team, the woman, Gloria Simmons, I’ll tell you about her later, she was fine, but the man, Señor Miguel Escobar, he was dead. He’d seemed okay, he even ate a bit of the fish I cooked up.”