In Washington, Henry Pastern struggled to decide whether to add the three Booth letters that Greenwell had worked so hard to assemble to the FBI’s Stolen Art list, but he eventually decided to hold off; he had never viewed the originals and was unsure which version of the letters, if any, was authentic. Once a month he checked all the databases relevant to the Alice Nahri / Alida Nahvi hunt. There was never anything new.
Back in Montreal Georges Keratis didn’t care where the letters might be. He inherited Leander’s shop, which he renovated and turned into a successful hair salon. He tore down half the bookshelves, sold some of the volumes, and gave away a lot of the rest; the rule was that any customer celebrating a birthday could select a book from the remaining pile and take it home. After a while, Georges felt guilty and he stopped trashing his benefactor’s collection. He began to read some of the fine Quebec collection on the shelves. He eventually enrolled full time in the history program at McGill University.
Peter Cammon and Pascal Renaud worked at sustaining a long-distance friendship. From the moment of Peter’s return to England, they bombarded each other with emails, all connected to the Carpenter case and its aftermath. Peter remained grateful for Pascal’s openly offered hospitality and the even-tempered welcome into his home, a place that had served as a kind of headquarters for Peter’s investigative kibitzing. Nor did he forget that Pascal was the one who had risked his life to attempt to aid John Carpenter the night he died.
Once in a while the professor would call the cottage from Montreal, just to chat. The Cammons planned a vacation to Quebec once the cricket inquiry subsided. The two men always seemed to work their way back to the “case”; it was as though both had yet to find their way to the end of the saga. One such call entailed a comprehensive report by Pascal on the highly politicized funeral of Olivier Seep.
“Madame Hilfgott will be outraged if she hears of the tributes paid to him,” Pascal said. “You’d have thought Jean-Paul Sartre had mated with Che Guevara.”
“No mention of the Booth correspondence?” Peter said. “Or is it all legend now?”
Renaud laughed. “The stuff that dreams are made of?”
“The Tempest?”
“Last line of The Maltese Falcon,” Pascal riposted.
Their transatlantic alliance went into decline as the weeks passed. The deaths and funerals of both of Joan’s siblings occupied the Cammons through much of November, and Christmas brought with it Maddy’s advancing pregnancy, which began to preoccupy the whole family. By then, Peter was busy with Tommy Verden in the hunt for the Sword, a matter which Peter wasn’t free to discuss with Pascal.
Other worries ate at Peter. He had led Renaud into the danger zone of Olivier Seep’s house, where Pascal had been forced to confront the humiliation of his rival, trussed and bloodied on the floor. Peter should have considered Pascal’s ambivalent feelings towards his separatist colleague and separatism generally — feelings entwined with his sister’s death. Peter didn’t dare ask him if he resented Peter’s drafting him to drive to the mansion that night.
One question nagged at Peter more than any other. It seemed odd that Pascal and Alida had missed each other when she fled from Pascal’s condo. Peter supposed it was possible. He conceded that she could have guessed the location of the door key under the flowerpot. But wild scenarios spun through his reinventions of that night. Did Pascal spy Alida while he was monitoring the façade of Leander’s shop? Did they perhaps talk in the cobbled alley around the corner, voyeurs agreeing that Seep had murdered Carpenter — Pascal must have figured it out by then. Did Pascal make a suggestion . . . ?
Peter, ever the rational detective, came to understand that his suspicions were unfair. Renaud had consistently been an amiable host. He had gone easy on the politics, had confided the painful story of his sister’s death; his empathy with Peter’s own loss had helped pull Peter out of his depression over Lionel’s passing. Distrust was no way to treat a friend. Peter owed him more than that.
Peter wasn’t a devotee of New Year’s resolutions but the first of January provided the perfect opportunity to exorcise his unfair speculations. He made the call, enjoying the intrusion into Pascal’s hangover. As usual, the professor recovered within minutes and they launched into a cheerful post mortem on 2010. They inevitably wandered into a review of the night of Alida’s ghostly arrival. Peter was careful when he finally said, “You know, Pascal, I can hardly believe it. One minute she was there, naked, the next . . .”
“A deadly ghost.”
“Tell me, did you see her outside the condo that night? Even a glimpse?”
Pascal thought for a minute, and said firmly, “No, Peter.”
CHAPTER 47
She keeps the letters in a strongbox under a false floor in the closet. Banks ask for personal data on every application for a safety deposit box, and so she keeps her money in cash and her valuables at hand. From time to time, she takes a key, removes the letters, and reads them through. It becomes almost a monthly ritual and eventually she starts reading books on American history, the Lincoln assassination, and so on. She reads Renaud’s book on the Civil War. She figures that this is good, honest preparation for the day she becomes an American citizen, however that plan might work out. One day she picks up an old People magazine and sees that Gloria Stuart, the actress who played the elder Rose in Titanic, has died at the age of one hundred. She likes to stand on the edge of the lake; from there, with her 20/10 perception, she can see every detail of the far shore. She remains vigilant. She regrets not being able to return to Rochester but this will do. Walking out to the pines each morning, she looks around carefully and repeats to herself that this will do.
It was Maddy who made the educated guess. Or guesses. She did not tell Michael about the shrink-wrapped package, for she wanted its secrets to be hers, at least at first. It was all she could do to hold back from opening the Avatar box set but she resolved to go about this task one careful step at a time. On the weekends after the Henley confrontation, she enlisted Michael to drive around to garage sales and junk shops, where she rooted out used copies of VHS tapes of the Terminator series and The Abyss. She ended up buying a fresh copy of Titanic on DVD. She trusted that they were identical to the ones Alida had viewed. Maddy reminded herself to take it slowly — she would not be travelling to North America before the baby came. Do things in the right order, she told herself. On a late November weekend when Michael was working double shifts she got out all the films and lined them up by the television. Mimicking a forensic detective, she rotated the new DVD box set of Avatar, held it up to the light and compared the plastic wrapping of her new Titanic. They looked about the same, hermetically sealed by machine. With a paring knife she slit the plastic on the Avatar box and opened the flap. She took out the DVDs and the other materials, and stared at them for a long time. She placed the disc in the player and watched the film from the beginning; the clue was in there somewhere, she was confident.
In Avatar, the tall blue creatures never refer to any geographical coordinates for Earth, nor, according to internet searches, is there a town in the United States called Pandora. Avatar takes place on a mythical moon in the year 2154. Is there a future world out there that gives you hope, Alida? Or does your sanctuary derive from the past, from the world almost exactly one hundred years ago, when hopeful men and women attempted the ocean crossing from Southampton to New York?
She watched The Terminator, which ends with the heroine fleeing to the mountains of the American southwest, but Maddy couldn’t imagine Alida doing that. It occurred to Maddy that Alida Nahvi was connected to water; it was her theme, her motif. The Lachine Canal, the Niagara River, the Anacostia, and the wide St. Lawrence. Look for a place near water, Maddy reasoned. It did not matter that the girl came from Bihar, one of the driest places in India. Maddy cued up Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the ultimate water movie. She watched it twice. None of the scenes was set in Buffalo o
r in Rochester, and none of the characters hailed from an American, British, Indian, Canadian, or Pakistani city that rang any bells. She fell asleep on the sofa as Céline Dion sang over the closing credits the second time around. She dreamt of water, and of her baby boy. The next day, she skimmed through Titanic four more times, fast-forwarding through many scenes. Nothing struck her until the sixth viewing: the scene where Jack Dawson — Leo — lucks into an invitation to dine with the upper crust in a borrowed tuxedo. When questioned by the nobs, he reveals that he was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Maddy retrieved an American atlas from the shelf and opened it to the second-last state map in the book. She circled Chippewa Falls in red marker. Then she turned to the Avatar materials arrayed on the table.
There was a brass key that didn’t belong with the movie materials. Alida must have placed it inside the DVD box — Pandora’s box — and somehow resealed the container. Maddy had no doubt that it opened another box, in which the secrets of the Sword and his crimes would be found. But where? Maddy placed the key in the centre of the red circle and contemplated it for a long time.
EPILOGUE
Peter bought Jasper without papers but no one could doubt her pure breeding, and that she was his dog, loyal and true. He liked the distance she kept from other people, Maddy excepted; it was not an aloofness but rather an even-temperedness that suited him. Joan, when Peter and Jasper started up their dog-and-master walks, silently falling into rhythm, said to Sarah on the porch one day, “Those two are too much alike. They’ll never have to talk, they’re already telepathic.”
“You’d understand about that,” Sarah replied, and Joan swatted her.
He could only guess the dog’s age but when he threw a stick she gambolled after it, and she never seemed to tire. Every morning and early evening they traipsed along varied routes through the downs and farmers’ lanes until it seemed a logical time to return. It was seldom necessary to keep her on the leash. He would only hook her up when there was a prospect of traffic, or when they headed onto unfamiliar paths. Someone had trained her to heel; even then, her obedience appeared to be natural, a sign of intelligence. The dog would occasionally meet another and her response was always the same: she sat down and waited for the new friend to come to her.
On a weekday afternoon in May, Peter took Jasper for a long hike into new territory more than two miles from the cottage. These days Peter brought with them a mobile phone, dog treats, and a leash; he didn’t bother with a walking stick, though he might need one soon. The spring weather had ushered in a rare phenomenon: more sunny days than rainy ones. The pair had become explorers with a shared taste for new vistas and chance encounters with farmers, hikers, and birdwatchers. And so it was that day.
Their morning walk had been postponed by two phone calls from Bartleben seeking advice. The Carpenter and Malloway deaths had largely been cleaned up thanks to Tommy Verden, and public scandal averted. The cricket sting and the interminable voicemail-tapping incidents hung on in nasty ways. The press criticized the Yard daily for its dilatory approach to laying charges against the Murdoch tabloid in the face of clear invasions of privacy. What seemed straightforward became complex, with the parliamentary inquiry chronicling every alleged voicemail invasion, their hearings peaking with revelations that the notw had abused the privacy of one grieving family of a murder victim. As for the cricket transgressions, the sport’s regulatory bodies stumbled along in the face of Scotland Yard’s criminal inquiries. The potential for British prosecution of the Pakistani bowlers receded. Peter helped out by running liaison with Indian and Far Eastern police authorities but the infamous Sword went to ground.
Their sojourn took them to rolling countryside that Peter had forgotten. Joan had hiked with him to this part of the county ten years ago, he recalled. The sudden memory of his relative youth lured him farther than he might have gone on a normal day. Jasper never faded; Peter gave her water from a plastic bottle and she was fine. After two hours, they found themselves on a straightaway section of a wide country road that he didn’t recognize. A rank of linden trees, dark-leafed and freshly in bloom, formed a windbreak that obscured the fields ahead, while dense hawthorn bushes hemmed in the immediate edges of the road on both sides. The thick growth darkened the path, a bit of Constable overlaid with Brontë gloom. The lane curved out of sight to the left about two hundred yards along.
The air was still. Peter heard a plaintive voice calling “Brute!” Or perhaps he heard “Brit!” or something else entirely. From around the turn a purebred Doberman galloped into view. He was young and unrestrained, as well as collarless, and he stopped in the middle of the dusty road when he saw Peter and Jasper. Peter had hooked the retriever to her leash in case a farmer’s lorry suddenly appeared. Now, she did something he did not expect; instead of sitting and waiting, Jasper pulled away from him towards the young dog. Peter unsnapped the clasp. Jasper walked to the exact centre of the dusty path but did not sit down. She showed no panic; her positioning was strategic. He watched her go into a crouch, no deference given to the Doberman. Her posture left no doubt about what was going to happen. The young dog, in feral mode, trotted to within seventy-five yards and began to range back and forth, always returning to the centre of the road.
The Doberman barked twice and fell into a deep growl. Judging the coming fight, Peter sensed that the opponent, lithe and muscled as he was, was not trained to the pit. Peter had encountered pit fighting — a surprisingly widespread criminal activity — where the dogs are driven by bait and prods to attack ceaselessly until one combatant is dead or maimed. On the other hand, he had never heard of a brawling golden retriever.
Peter could have deterred the battle by re-chaining Jasper but for the moment, feeling the anger of the dogs building across the seventy-five yards, he simply walked over to the retriever and paused. In the silence Peter sought clarity of purpose. On other days, he had chosen reason in the face of violence, the law as his response to savagery. But his beloved dog was decided, had been from the first sight of the Doberman.
Peter leaned down to Jasper’s ear and said in an inflection that was almost American, “Go get ’im.”
Peter knew that dogs let into the pit run straight at each other like jousters in the lists. To the touts observing, they often appear to start spinning in a vortex of chaotic biting. The animals are seeking the hold, the body part that can be seized to effect in their powerful jaws. The trained attacker will latch on and shake the victim, seldom changing grip until the opponent becomes exhausted or bleeds away. The defender does the same. The best targets are the vulnerable throat, leg arteries, and underbelly; these are taken out by choking, hamstringing, and evisceration, respectively. A dog will sometimes be taught to go for the snout, a carryover from the unmourned days of bull baiting.
The body of a dog contains most of the same functional organs and skeletal features as a human and it is not too much of a stretch to compare a dog fight to a knife fight, with sharp teeth and claws serving as the blades. Jasper should have been at a disadvantage. She was smaller than the Doberman and no one ever bred a long-haired retriever for the pit. Her one defensive virtue, her thick fur, was diminished by the season; her coat was not as thick as it would be in the autumn.
She held her ground as the Doberman launched himself.
The attacker made the mistake of first seizing Jasper at the shoulder, where the fur was thickest. Canines differ from people in an important respect: their shoulders consist of flexible joints held in place by an articular capsule anchored by ligaments that allow them to stretch and torque their bodies in ways impossible for human physiology. At the same time, they remain vulnerable to tearing and separation of the joint. A clamping grip at the shoulder keeps the victim out of position, while potentially ending the fight on the spot if the teeth bury themselves too deep. Jasper’s crouching stance prevented the Doberman from getting at her stomach or throat. The shoulder attack was the only lethal course open
to the young dog. Jasper was ready. Though his teeth did puncture her shoulder fibre, the Doberman had made a tactical error. She moved under the adolescent dog and planted her teeth in his femoral artery. The pain caused the Doberman to give up his purchase.
The dogs rolled and fought for a disabling bite. Jasper did not let the Doberman retreat. The young dog seemed surprised that she kept coming. Jasper’s strategy was to avoid being pinned by the Doberman’s superior bulk and Peter could see that she had fought before, although he had never found scars on her body. As they spun, the other dog’s left haunch seemed to drag by a millisecond, although Peter saw that its power to slash and in-fight remained impressive. Jasper took bites to her right forepaw, which was the same leg the attacker had gripped at the shoulder, and to the skin on her forehead.
She broke off the fight, not in concession but to see if the younger dog was limping or bleeding out. And then they were back at it. Jasper’s new approach was to snip at the extremities of the younger animal, inflicting painful punctures on toes, ears, and chest until the dog yelped and retreated. They regrouped. Blood flowed into Jasper’s eyes, like a cut boxer. The Doberman surprised Jasper with a third attack on her front leg, holding on and trying to shake her to the ground. But this was a frontal attack and Jasper, with her right leg askew, dipped under her opponent and put her teeth into his throat. She pulled, ripping out the jugular so swiftly that the Doberman’s rictus grip held fast to her leg and only released when Peter intervened and pried open the jaws.
The owner of the dog, a young man with sandy hair, came around the corner and stopped ten feet from his dead pet, while Peter cradled the retriever and held her apart from the canine corpse. All three of them were coated in red. The young man, confusion on his face rather than anger, meekly approached; he seemed stunned. Peter, glancing at him, saw that he could hardly tell which dog was which. The blood kept him back from the tableau.
The Drowned Man Page 42
