Cipher

by John Jantunen

  “His name was Lawrence Madding,” I told him.

  “Who?”

  “The guy they found in that chair this morning.”

  Curtis nodded, putting out of his mind the image he had of Terrence tied there, his screams growing weaker with every heartbeat.

  “Never heard of him,” he said.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “There a reason you brought me here?”

  I was asking myself that very question but hadn’t come to any conclusions.

  “Sidewalks.”

  “Huh?”

  “Something a soldier once said to me. He’d just returned from a peacekeeping mission, somewhere dark and hot, I can’t recall exactly. Told me the hardest part of coming home was learning to stay on the sidewalks again. Six months later, I ran into him, asked him how he was doing with the sidewalks. He laughed. ‘They’re easier every day,’ he said. He’s got three kids now. A good life, as far as I can tell.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  He had me there so I shrugged.

  “This have something to do with Terrence?”

  “You still got that gun?”

  He went stiff and I knew that he did.

  I knocked on the side of the van to hear the clunk it made then turned and walked back to the front gate. The uniform was still watching the movie and didn’t look up. 12 Gauge was continuing to do his name proud and I wondered what my chances were of finding the door unlocked so I could see if he was all that and the bite too.

  “I don’t understand.”

  It was as close to Curtis pleading as I’d ever hear. I thought about laying it all out for him and whether I’d be doing him a favour if I did. I tried to think of the words that would conjure some sense out of who Lawrence Madding was and why Curtis needed to know his name. They weren’t there and Curtis had to settle for a closed car door and the twist of a key to answer the questions augering the space between us.

  thirteen

  He didn’t hang around at Halton’s longer than it took for him to slip on his helmet and kick-start his bike. He passed me going a fair clip over the posted speed limit before I’d got to the end of the dirt access road leading away from the front gate, and he didn’t bother with the stop sign where the dirt changed to asphalt. I expect he was feeling like that fly trapped behind the curtain again. Regardless of how fast he pushed the bike, it couldn’t change the fact that the world seemed to be conspiring to make him, in the very least, speak to the man on the slip of paper in his wallet.

  Whether this was true, I’m sceptical. Clive and Lawrence and Barry and I (and Emily and Ron and Violet, and little Tish Tish too) were all playing our parts for reasons that were clear from the outside but maybe took on a bit of blur through his eyes. From where I sat, all roads led to Curtis Mays and that’s what I said into the quiet of my car as I watched him pull over to the curb in front of the first phone booth he saw, certain by then that he had done what I had suspected he had when he’d sat at the table with me and the gun in Horace Milne’s ranch house.

  In the booth at the side of the road, the phone pressed to his ear, the paper held up to the light even though he’d already dialled, Curtis didn’t, of course, hear me. Instead he heard: “You have reached The Regina General Hospital. If this is an emergency please hang up and dial 911. If you know the extension of the person you are trying to reach please enter it now, otherwise please dial 0 or stay on the line.”

  Hanging up, he drove straight to the hospital and asked the lady at the front desk if there was a Walter Hering there. After he was done with her, I would see she was a large woman, middle-aged, wearing a plain white shawl over a plain white blouse and knitting what I took to be one of the former whenever no one was standing in line. A shy woman, except when she was at work. At work she was a lion, quick to growl and show her fangs, which were stationed in the office behind her, watching the hospital, in shifts, through surveillance cameras.

  “Are you family?” she asked.

  “I’m his cousin.”

  “He’s in room 237. You have until nine.”

  The ride up in the elevator and the walk down the hall were as uneventful as any other ride in an elevator and walk down a hallway. Following an orange line on the wall that promised to lead him to rooms 201–259, he glanced discreetly at the numbers on either side to give the impression that he knew where he was going. A nurse might have sideswiped him with a wink and a smile. A person may have rasped their last breath in one of the rooms on the way to Walter’s. A mother might have fidgeted with a bouquet of flowers to keep her mind off the dying boy in the bed behind her. A child may have pulled the plug on the machine hooked up to her grandpa and a father may have scolded her then given her a slap. On a different floor, a baby may have been born, an artery clamped, a brain weighed in the morgue then set beside a liver and a heart, a security guard may have slipped outside for a toke, someone in the laundry may have cursed when a lump of human feces rolled out of a sheet as she was putting it in the washing machine, a woman on the housekeeping staff might have overheard a funny story involving a hot dog, an overweight woman experiencing stomach pains might have been told that she was giving birth. These are all things that happened at Regina General the night Curtis came to visit. If they weren’t happening when Curtis made his way to the room where Walter Hering lay — his spine severed in four places, his right eardrum burst, his lung punctured, half of his ribs crushed — then they had already happened or were about to happen, but the quiet in the elevator and the emptiness of the hall told him none of this.

  He paused at the door to room 237, certain, all of a sudden, that whatever he’d find inside would only deepen the mystery surrounding his best friend, worried at the same time that it wasn’t really a mystery at all, the same way that a tornado wasn’t — the funnel of wind sucking up, we’ve all heard the stories, livestock and cars and dropping them unscathed miles away while at the same time shredding houses and splintering telephone poles and rending families. It was a natural phenomenon: its secrets and terror recorded and documented until it didn’t have any secrets left but was terrible regardless, and mysterious too, although only the most ignorant amongst us would call it that.

  Walter Hering, known as Scorch to his friends or to anyone who read his file where it was listed under Known Aliases, lay in bed about as far removed from the awesome power of a tornado as a man could be. Once though, before he was reduced to the lump of hardly breathing matter that confronted Curtis as he entered the room, he was at the centre of a veritable whirlwind of criminal activity: the eye of a storm that swept people up like dust in a funnel of larceny, theft, intimidation, and yes, murder and rape and even torture, but that had never touched kidnapping, Scorch being of the mind that such a thing was below him.

  He’d said as much to an informant while he was doing time after punching a police officer in the face for asking him what he was drinking out of a paper bag while standing in the middle of the intersection at Lorne and 12th and screaming, “Come and get me, you fucking pigs. You pig fuckers. Come and get me!” In court, he stated that his reason for doing so was that he needed a little break from the day to day but speculation was ripe around the station that he was looking to open a chapter of The Hells Angels in Regina and hadn’t served enough time to qualify for the presidency. A few weeks after his incarceration fifteen bodies turned up in a field outside of Brandon, Manitoba. All were members of The Bandidos biker gang and had been shot in the backs of the heads, their legs and arms bound. The federals stuck an informant in the same cell with Scorch hoping he’d know why.

  If he did, he never said but this is what the informant recorded while they were eating lunch one day:

  WH: Fuck kidnapping. That’s for sand niggers and wetbacks. Stealing babies and little girls. Only a pussy’d fuck with kids.

  (Yet he did, I’m certain, fuck with a
certain little girl, though he was never charged, never even under official investigation. And why am I so certain? Because of what he said to the informant following a few faint, yet distinct, slurps out of a bowl of soup.)

  WH: But I’ll fucking tell you, if I was going to fucking kidnap someone I’d know how to fucking do it.

  I: And how’s that?

  (A brief moment of quiet during which the informant stated the subject glared at him menacingly.)

  WH: You know, you sure ask a lot of fucking questions.

  (Another moment of quiet punctuated by a few slurps of soup and several more menacing glares.)

  I: You’re the fucking one who fucking brought it up.

  (Slurp slurp)

  I: You going to fucking tell me or what?

  WH: All right, fuck. But only because you look like you’re about to start boo-fucking-hooing into your fucking soup.

  I: Fuck you.

  WH: Hey, never fucking mind, then. Fuck.

  (Slurp slurp slurp)

  I: I don’t even want to fucking know.

  WH: Good, cause I ain’t going to fucking tell you.

  I: Good. Fuck.

  (Slurp crunch crunch slurp)

  WH: Obfuscation, that’s the key.

  I: What?

  WH: Try to keep up, for fuck’s sake.

  I: Obfucktion, right, that’s the key.

  WH: Like say you steal some rich kid. I mean their dad’s fucking loaded, right? A billionaire, at least. So you ask for ten million.

  I: That’s a lot.

  WH: Fucking right it is. And you’re never going to fucking get it. No fucking way. But say the kid’s gone for a week, right? No fucking sign of her, no fucking leads, nothing. Just the ransom note then nothing. No drop location, no fucking pick-up date.

  I: Nothing.

  WH: So what does the guy do?

  I: The rich dude?

  WH: Yeah.

  I: I don’t know.

  WH: He posts a fucking reward. A couple hundred grand to start. By the end of the second week it’s up to a million.

  I: Not bad.

  WH: No shit. So, say you’re in jail. Say you’ve been there for six months, a year, whatever. You talk to the warden, say you think you might have heard something, you don’t know if it’s important but you think you ought to talk to someone. He hooks you up and you give them a few facts. All recorded, plenty of witnesses. And there you go, a cool million, just waiting for you when you get out.

  I: What about the kidnappers?

  WH: What about ’em?

  I: Someone has to take the kid.

  WH: Of course. And maybe they get killed during the rescue or maybe they end up facing life or, fuck, who cares?

  I: They call that conspiracy.

  WH: Fuck you, conspiracy. It’s the perfect plan. And it’s a fucking gift. From me to you.

  And there it was, Scorch’s gift to the world. Now stuck in a box in a basement not so far from Clive Winkle’s surveillance tapes and a thousand other boxes never bothered with by anyone except a retired police officer with a good opening line and the person who put them there. (Most likely Sergeant Drummond, a thin twig of a man as unlike a police officer as a speck of sand is to a mountain. A man who has come to call me, “You again,” and who I know best as a sapling planted at the end of the aisle where I crouch, am always crouching, as I sift though tapes and files and sometimes photos.)

  A perfect plan in every way, except that there was no reward and the girl died and when Scorch got out of jail he was run over by a truck twenty-four hours outside of the prison gates and now lay in a hospital bed, a barely breathing mess of body parts and fluid draining through tubes who hardly had the strength to open his eyes so he could see Curtis standing at the foot of his bed. He said something but it was too faint to hear and Curtis stepped closer. Scorch said something else and when Curtis still couldn’t understand him, he bent low and placed his head whisper distance from Scorch’s ear, which he thought of as belonging to Walter Hering, and waited for Scorch to suck back enough air to let him speak again.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Curtis told him his name.

  “You here to finish me off?”

  “I’m looking for Terrence Bell.”

  “T-Ball?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a friend.”

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Curtis Mays.”

  “He wasn’t fucking lying then.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “He came back, didn’t he?”

  “Where is he?”

  “I knew he would.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Sure, why not? But first you got to promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “Kill me.”

  “I can’t —”

  “You’ll fucking promise. Or your fuck-buddy’s going to fucking die and he’ll be screaming while he does and it’ll take fucking weeks and it’ll be your fucking fault. Now you fucking promise me —”

  And then his air ran out. He gasped, trying to get another breath but it was like concrete in his throat. A high-pitched whistle went off and a red light over the bed flashed and the line on the cardiograph fluttered like a moth battering a streetlight. Curtis, all senses on high alert, looked to the door, his feet knowing to step out of the way of the woman in white now hurrying through, his body suddenly as thin as a razor so as to be invisible to the three other women and the man who followed her in. Folding himself into the space between the door and the bathroom until they were bent over the man the doctor knew as Walter and the nurses as Mr. Hering, Curtis slipped out without having to endure a scowl from any of them or a question that he couldn’t answer, without having to express the pretence of alarm or concern. All the while Scorch/Walter/Mr. Hering yelled, his rage shaking cracks in the concrete so that what he said came out dusty, the voice of an old hermit, too many years spent in a cave with only the drips for company, shrivelling then under the pale glow cast from the fluorescents in the hall’s ceiling.

  “Fucking kill me! Kill me! You f—”

  fourteen

  On the elevator ride down, he was not alone. I watched from the room behind reception while sitting next to a man who introduced himself as Ricky Dee, although the name tag pinned to his imitation cop shirt said it was Richard Dursley. My first look at him had been when he stood in the doorway after I’d asked the lion at the front desk to see whoever was in charge of security. A quick glance told me a couple of things: The first was that Ricky Dee spent more money on his hair than I spend on groceries, and the second was that the guy who did his transplant had a side business selling hats.

  Ricky Dee led me to the bank of screens that let him watch all the hallways and doors at once. Thinking I didn’t see, he clicked his radio three times; a gesture that didn’t mean anything until, on a corner screen, I caught his partner take a final puff from between a pinched thumb and forefinger then, flicking I couldn’t see what, light a smoke to make it look like he was legit. I watched Curtis on the screen below hold the elevator doors for a young woman with a child sleeping on her shoulder. The kid was limp like a Golem sprawled over a village and big, though his face was that of an infant. She thanked him but I could see that she didn’t really mean it, her gratitude worn thin with grief and worry. He followed her inside and I looked to a screen three over: Main Lobby — Elevator.

  A few moments later the doors opened. Watching Curtis walk out, I thought of a man I’d once heard tell of, one of our greatest thinkers I was told. He’d enlisted to fight my father and, maybe, save him from one evil so that another evil, even worse, could have a go at him. This great thinker passed the medical exam on our side but when he got to Mother England he was told he was t
oo sick to go out and play with the other boys. So he sat at a window and watched them march past. When they marched to the east he was bitter with envy and when they marched to the west, or hobbled or were pushed or didn’t show up at all, he wasn’t sure what he felt. After a time, Mother told him he was well enough to go outside, but still too sick to play. He was sent into the countryside to see how the farmers were doing with only daughters to tend the animals and to plough the fields.

  It wasn’t much of a life for a young man, adventure in his heart and a father back home hoping for a hero. Still, he went about his duties with a determination born out of stubborn pride and was surprised to discover that the quiet walks measuring the distance between filling out surveys and filing reports were more to his taste than laying in a field of mud so cold that it felt like death, with only the screams of other men and the buzz of flies to tell him it wasn’t.

  It was on one of these walks that he came across The Gate. Really, it was just a gate, like hundreds of others he’d passed through already. It was made of wood, saplings bent into a rough approximation of the metal and wire that Mother had deemed too important to be standing in the way of cows and sheep. It had a wheel on one corner so that when the great thinker opened it, it rattled and squeaked exactly as it would have had Mother not seen a tank or a rifle or a canteen in the one it had replaced. He walked through this gate — The Gate — thinking … he couldn’t say what. He was a young man so I’m inclined to believe he was thinking about what those daughters did when they weren’t tending the animals and ploughing the fields: thinking about their hair frizzled from sun and sweat, and the way the water ran down their arms in muddy creeks when they washed their faces. His shoes dragging on the dirt, the cow path packed as hard as tarmac, thinking of how sweet they must have smelled even though they worked with shit all day and bathed in a bowl outside the kitchen window. That is, thinking the thoughts of a young man unaware that his life was about to change in the most delicious and tantalizing way. In the moment between opening The Gate and latching it shut with a piece of twine strung in a loop, an instant as dramatic as one spent chewing on a stem of grass gone to seed, he found God. God, he would write with awe even though he was an old man by then and should have used up his store of awe long ago, spoke to him, filling the moment with so much that in fifty years of writing and thinking he’d barely crested the surface of all that He had said. Everything he’d ever need to know, and maybe us too, given to him in a flash, and a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to get it all down on paper.