A Murder of Crows

by David Rotenberg

  “Any word from Seth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What, Eddie?”

  “He’s been in touch.”

  “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Another silence followed.

  “You in Dundas, New York?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They come and get you from Namibia?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then this attack is for real?” Eddie was no conspiracy nut, but he had a profound distrust of power and those who wielded it. He was always sceptical about what they chose to tell the populace and what they chose not to tell the populace.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah what? Try to be specific.”

  “There are still body parts . . .” He didn’t add “stuck in the mud,” although he wanted to.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh.”

  “So outside of seeking an update on my efforts with our lawyer friend to what do I owe this missive?”

  “How much have you found out about the PROMPTOR program?”

  “You have computer access?” Eddie stood. His brace clacked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Go online. You know where.” Eddie hung up.

  Decker opened his browser and called up the synaesthetes’ website. The front page had a new video of the Human Camera. Decker admired people like Stephen Wiltshire and Daniel Tammet but he knew they only provided cover for him. So when people inevitably had to label him they called him a synaesthete, although he was in actuality only a distant—very distant—cousin of synaesthetes.

  A pop-up of the young monk in the Duomo came up, but before Decker could watch it the second prompt appeared. He hit shift F7. It immediately gave him what Eddie called a side door to the Pro Actors Lab website. He carefully moved his cursor back and forth over the Pro Actors Lab title page—an etching of two French commedia performers having a late-night drink. Back and forth—back and forth. Finally the cursor hopped and the carafe of wine on the table between the two actors changed colour for just an instant. If Decker hadn’t been concentrating he would have missed it. But he was concentrating and moved the cursor to the carafe and typed in his access code: Sethcomehome.

  The carafe tipped forward and the wine spilled across the table until it covered it like a large tarp. Then the table tilted forward filling his screen with darkness. Instantly Eddie’s unique script bibbled across the top.

  Why do you want to know about PROMPTOR?

  Because I want to trade it for information about where Seth is, he wanted to write but instead he typed, They think one of the terrorists used it to contact his coconspirator.

  And they can’t break PROMPTOR?

  If they could I wouldn’t be—

  Yeah. I get that.

  So, Eddie, can you help them break PROMPTOR?

  Maybe. Eddie relit his bomber and inhaled deeply. He’d been making slow progress on breaking into the guts of PROMPTOR. But of late things were changing out there in cyberland. The Israeli STUXNET virus opened up all sorts of new possibilities for someone with Eddie’s computer prowess. As well, as the Arab Spring took hold, tens of thousands of young Middle Easterners had downloaded PROMPTOR to keep their communications safe from the local secret police. So many that the system crashed several times. Eddie monitored every crash because each time the system started back up it gave him more and more access to its inner workings.

  What does your maybe mean? Decker wrote.

  What if I could get them to the guy who wrote the program?

  They already know who wrote the thing, but they can’t touch him.

  What if we tell them they have the wrong guy.

  What?

  Eddie took another long drag and let the sweet smoke bounce off his computer monitor. Don’t you think something like PROMPTOR has a lawyer’s fingerprints on it? A New York lawyer’s fingerprints? Perhaps someone who lives on Patchin Place—and likes to fuck with other people’s lives?

  Decker smiled, then wrote, Get them the PROMPTOR e-mail contacts for one Professor Neil Frost and I’ll try and trade it for them caging Charendoff.

  Sounds like a plan to me.

  Good. Now tell me about Seth.

  Decker, you know I can’t.

  Yeah, yeah. My son swore you to secrecy.

  He did.

  Well, tell me this at least. Did he cash the $20,000 check I gave you to get to him?

  For a moment the screen was blank, then Eddie replied, Last Friday.

  Not going to tell me where?

  Come on, Decker, you know that I promised Seth not to pass on information about his whereabouts to you. You know that. And you know why he insisted on that.

  For an instant he was back at his wife’s graveside. Seth’s tiny hand in his. Then the boy’s eyes turned to him—shock on his face. “You’re happy Mommy’s dead.”

  “No, Seth. No.”

  “You’re lying to me. Lying to me.” The boy had taken his hand back—and he never held Decker’s hand again, or let him into his life.

  Decker didn’t know what to say so he asked, Any news from the ol’ neighbourhood?

  El Junctioni?

  Yeah, the Junction.

  Trish Spence and Theo keep leaving messages for you.

  Forward them to me.

  Something about CBC not liking the hung man in that documentary you’re working on. CBC have an objection to male size, do they?

  Who knows what CBC objects to. Just forward their messages to me. Others?

  Leena left a message.

  What did it say?

  Are you okay.

  That’s it?

  That’s it.

  Okay.

  Then there’s that guy.

  What guy?

  Preppy looking—hanging out on our street. Finally knocked on the door.

  And?

  Said his name was Emerson Remi and that you knew him. Do you?

  Decker remembered his feeling of nausea every time he’d met Emerson Remi. Was Mr. Remi in the woods looking for the path to the clearing like Viola Tripping had suggested? If so, was that why he was knocking at their door?

  You still there?

  Yeah. No, I don’t know any Emerson Remi. Any other news?

  Nothing except yet another church on Annette is being converted to condos.

  Decker lifted his fingers from his keyboard, careful not to write what was in his mind: That’s not good. The churches keep the evil in check.

  You still there? Eddie bibbled.

  Yeah. What’s featured in Theo’s shop?

  The used-book shop?

  Yeah.

  Why?

  Just tell me what’s on display in his window.

  Calling it a display is generous, Decker.

  Okay—what’s there?

  It’s Camus this week—dozens of different editions of L’Étranger.

  Decker nodded, thinking, L’Étranger, the stranger . . . no, the outsider. Like the girl who just wanted to watch, but what he wrote was, How long on the PROMPTOR thing?

  Two days at least—but I’ll have to get lucky to manage it in two days. Anything else, my friend?

  No.

  Then adios, comrade.

  Then Eddie’s distinctive icon—a cross-legged yogi with a large erect phallus smoking a huge bomber—popped up, waved and disappeared into the nothingness of land digital, Eddie’s kingdom.

  51

  A COLLISION OF LIBRARY BOOKS AND RED MUD—T MINUS 3 DAYS

  DECKER OPENED HIS DORM ROOM DOOR AND SHOUTED TO HIS marine in the corridor, “Hey, boss. One going out, boss!” He was rather pleased with the way the line sounded coming from his mouth, not Paul Newman, but not bad.

  Decker left the dorm and noticed that the large library building across the way had its lights on despite the late hour. He watched students coming and going. It amazed him. It was the middle of the night and the place was clearly in full use. Decker couldn’t remember if he�
�d even bothered to get his library card validated when he was an undergraduate at University of Toronto.

  He crossed the quad and entered the building. As he did he recalled sitting in on a student-actor evaluation at a university theatre program where he was appalled to hear a senior teacher turn to a young actor and say, “Just go to a library and wander the aisles—something will catch your eye. Read that.”

  Stupid advice to a student who, like so many of them, had so little knowledge of literature. But for someone like Decker who knew books, it was a good idea.

  He called Yslan. “Can you get me a library card?”

  “If you’ve got too much time on your hands—”

  “Can you get me a library card?”

  The phone went silent for a moment then Yslan came back on the line. “It’s waiting for you at the front desk. Present your ID and they’ll give you a two-week card. And Mr. Roberts . . .”

  “What?”

  “Your real ID, not the fake one you used at Gatwick.”

  He hung up and got his two-week library card from the indifferent student who was manning the night desk.

  He quickly found a copy of Camus’ L’Étranger, then, allowing himself to meander, he found himself slowly walking the aisles of the fiction section. He’d done this many times in the past.

  When he told Crazy Eddie about this kind of thing his friend had asked, “You’re looking for truths. Right?”

  “I wouldn’t use those exact words, but yeah, truths.”

  “So why look at fiction?”

  “Because fiction is just fact filtered through a specific mind. If the mind is good, the truths are distilled, refined.”

  Decker stopped halfway down one of the many rows of books and turned to his right. At eye level was a copy of a John Fowles’ collection, The Ebony Tower.

  He checked out the two books and left the library. As he did he stepped into a puddle and swore. Then, in the bright light from the library windows, he saw the dull red mud on his shoe. He reached down and scraped some off with his finger. He looked at it—red mud. He put it to his nose and was instantly surrounded by the earthy smell of Inshakha. Here in upper New York State the red mud of Mowani brought back his final image of her—on the edge of the bathtub, stripped to the waist, applying the very same red mud he had on his fingers to the beauty of her face.

  He looked around him, but all was as it should be. A campus on a hill in upper New York State. The cold of the night solidifying its grip before the sunrise drove it back to the other world.

  * * *

  Three hours later, back in his dorm room, he finished making notes in the margin of both the John Fowles book and the John le Carré novel he’d picked up in the Johannesburg airport and was pretty sure he had something valuable at his fingertips. Then he started on L’Étranger.

  The door opened and Harrison and Yslan entered his room.

  “You could knock . . .”

  “We don’t need to knock, Mr. Roberts,” Harrison said as he tossed a stack of papers onto Decker’s desk. Decker glanced at them—they were his reports on the first interrogations.

  “What am I supposed to do with these?” Harrison demanded.

  “If the U.S. government is short of toilet paper, I assume—”

  “Enough,” Yslan said.

  “I thought you were the truth expert, Roberts.”

  “It’s not as simple as that.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “Look,” Decker said pointing at the stack of paper, “these folks knew they were being interrogated. Knew that they were suspected of doing something that they probably had nothing to do with.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Simple math. I’ve gone through almost two hundred and fifty interrogations. It’s not possible that all of them had something to do with the attack. Not possible.”

  “Yet more than two hundred of them you’ve marked as suspicious.”

  “No. As potentially untruthful.”

  “Same thing.”

  “No, it’s not. These people may be hiding something. Sure, but fuck, it could be anything. Maybe they’re illegal in the country, maybe they cheated on their taxes, maybe that they hate America, maybe they oppose democracy, maybe they despise Chicken McNuggets—could be anything.”

  “And why would that make them lie?”

  “Oh, come on. You’re the bad guys as far as they’re concerned. They don’t think you’re questioning them to help them—or keep them safe. They think you’re there to accuse them of complicity. So they hedge their bets.”

  “They lie,” Harrison said.

  “No. I didn’t say that. They could be prevaricating or equivocating or paltering.”

  “Or fucking lying.”

  “Yeah, or that. All I can tell you is that I think they weren’t telling the truth on the sections I underlined. But I have to tell you I’m not confident in even that. First, I wasn’t there to see them talk.”

  “And that’s important?”

  “It’s sometimes crucial to me.”

  “And this time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Harrison turned to Yslan. “I want them all questioned again. This time about their contacts with Professor Frost.” Then he turned to Decker. “You have just short of two hundred interviews left to review.”

  “Maybe you folks are barking up the wrong tree by interviewing Muslims.”

  “Really, Mr. Roberts.” He paused, evidently in some sort of argument with himself. He just as evidently came to some sort of resolution and said, “Do you know who Gerald Bull was?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Dr. Bull was a crazy-assed weapons inventor who was dealing directly with Saddam Hussein, and our dear Professor Frost had business dealings with that creep. So it’s logical that his accomplice or accomplices were from the Muslim community, wouldn’t you say?”

  Decker ignored the rhetorical question but asked one of his own. “That’s why the minimal security clearance on his file?”

  “Yeah,” Harrison said. He pointed at the computer on Decker’s desk and said, “The interviews are there for you to download and analyse. I want your opinion by nightfall.”

  Decker had never heard the word “opinion” used as an obscenity before. But before he could say anything else, Harrison turned and left his room.

  Yslan went to follow, then stopped herself and closed the door.

  “You don’t buy it, do you.”

  “Buy what?”

  “The jihadi connection to Professor Frost.”

  “It’s not for me to say. It’s not why you brought me here.”

  “But you don’t buy it,” she pressed.

  Decker reached into his backpack and took out two paperback books. The first was le Carré’s A Murder of Quality. The second was Ancaster College’s library copy of John Fowles’ Ebony Tower. He handed them to her. “Read the underlined passages.”

  Yslan accepted the books, put them on the desk and pulled up a chair.

  “Explain,” she demanded.

  “Just read the damned books.”

  “Why?”

  “I find books helpful,” he said.

  “Okay. But that’s just because you know literature, right?” Yslan said. “At least modern literature.”

  Decker didn’t answer. He hoped she was right but had a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with his other gift.

  “Well, isn’t it? You’ve done adaptations of a bunch of novels for the stage, haven’t you? Lady in the Lake, The Great Gatsby, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Brazzaville Beach and Rapture of Canaan.”

  “I only started work on those last three, I—”

  “—never produced them. Right. But you did get to adapt and direct The Dwarf, didn’t you? In Cincinnati as I recall.”

  “You know very well I did.”

  “Yes. I do recall that.”

  “That’s how you found me, wasn’t it? Through the Cincinnati Playhouse. That
led you to Steven Bradshaw, who led you to me?”

  Yslan didn’t answer.

  She didn’t have to.

  A look Decker hadn’t seen before crossed her face. “Wanna know what’s up with your supposed friend and accomplice in that little Cincinnati episode, one Mr. Steven Bradshaw?”

  “Is this some kind of bribe or trick?”

  “Neither. But I’m tired of you thinking of yourself like some kind of saint.” Before Decker could protest she continued, “After you used him—yes, that’s the right term Mr. Roberts—used him, he had a seizure, then about two hundred more over the next month.”

  “And is he—”

  “All right now? No, I wouldn’t say that unless you think that living in a vegetative state is ‘all right.’ Perhaps you should be more careful, Mr. Roberts.”

  More than you could possibly imagine, he thought as he remembered finding Seth’s diary in the hostel on Vancouver Island—with its eight by ten photograph of the dead boy from Stanstead, Quebec, whom Ira Charendoff had had killed. But more than the photo he remembered Seth’s cutline on the bottom: “This is what happens when you get close to people, Dad. Stay away from me.”

  Decker had used Steven Bradshaw’s good services to contain Henry-Clay Yolles of Yolles Pharmaceuticals, but the last time he saw Steven the young man’s eyes were glazed and he was seemingly unable to control the movement of his limbs.

  Decker turned away. He couldn’t allow Yslan to see his eyes.

  “So, tell me about you and these books. This isn’t about you and truth-telling. What’s this—another parlour game of yours?”

  Decker assumed his ability to walk down aisles and aisles of books and somehow find something of relevance to him was another subset of his gift. Like his ability to tell people’s ages and backgrounds and his ability to find order in events—what he called “semblant order.” But he wasn’t sure he wanted to share any of this with Special Agent Yslan Hicks.

  “It’s not a parlour trick.”

  “Fine, what is it?”

  “Before you met me, could you have worked out the riddle of the two sisters in the house at the fork in the road?”

  Yslan opened her mouth, then shut it.

  “Don’t do that. Just answer my question and remember I know if you’re telling the truth.”

  After a moment she said, “No. I don’t think I could have figured out the riddle.”