The Hidden Keys

by André Alexis

  – I wonder, said Daniel, did you ever meet Simone Azarian?

  – Who hasn’t met her? answered Nira. You can’t go to a fundraiser anywhere within fifty miles of Toronto without …

  Fiona interrupted her friend.

  – Why? she asked. Have you met her?

  The question was clearly less significant than the tone in which it was asked, and the tone invited caution. So, Daniel said

  – I’ve never met her socially, but she’s the kind of wealthy person we were talking about, isn’t she?

  – Well, said Nira, she’s just as complicated as the others, but she has a reputation.

  – Yes, said Fiona. She’s kind of scarlet.

  That, for discretion’s sake, was as far as Daniel ventured.

  Whether Simone Azarian-Thomson was or was not ‘scarlet’ – whatever that meant – was none of his business. Nor did it make sense of her attitude. The thing that stayed with him was the idea of competition. Could it be that he’d stumbled onto a game Robert Azarian’s children were playing against each other? If so, what were the stakes? And what did Colby and Tancred have to do with it?

  It was difficult to imagine anyone less likely to be involved with the Azarians than Tancred. Tancred had always been wary of the rich. In that sense, he was more like Baruch’s son than Daniel and, not for the first time, Daniel wondered if Tancred might not have been a better son to Baruch than he had. Then again, it was impossible to predict how two beings who are obliged to get along would actually get along. Had Tancred and Baruch been father and son, it’s possible they would not have been so close.

  Whatever Tancred’s involvement with the Azarians, however, Daniel felt in his soul that Colby was a key to the whole mystifying business. Colby was crucial. That meant he’d have to keep an eye on the man. For anyone else, this would not be difficult. An albino who called himself Nigger and hung around Parkdale would be hard to miss. Unfortunately, Colby knew him well, knew him to be Tancred’s friend. It would be impossible for him to keep track of Colby by himself. Not to mention that, the Azarian thefts being among his first cases as a detective, he did not want to work outside official boundaries. He’d have to call in a favour.

  As it happened, Tom Paulsen-Puig – ‘Puli’ to his friends, though he did not resemble the dog – owed Daniel a number of favours. And he was good at his job: private investigator. Puli usually did skip tracing or spying for spouses. So, he could follow a man without being seen and, as it happened, Colby did not know him.

  – So is this a personal thing, Dan?

  Puli was looking out at the world. The trees in Cabbagetown were leafless and the street had taken on its late-autumn hardness, looking almost severe.

  – I’m not sure, Daniel answered. I don’t know what I’m looking for or what I expect to find.

  – But you’re sure there’s something to find? Look, Dan, of course I’ll do this for you. But if it’s not personal or urgent I’ll start in four or five days. Is that okay? I’m following a real pig around. His wife thinks he’s having an affair but it’s more like he’s doing the entire population of Rathnelly. It’s a good neighbourhood, but my god, it’d be easier to take pictures of the few people he isn’t fucking.

  Daniel, who up to that moment had been peering out at the street, turned to his friend. Puli was blond, his hairline receding: a man nearing forty. His nose, which had been broken sometime in childhood, was high bridged. He was in good shape but he drank too much and he was, as they say, unlucky in love. Puli himself admitted that, were he airlifted into a city of a million wonderful women among whom there were two who were ‘unhinged,’ he would have found and dated both and proposed to one inside of a week. Yet the man himself was sane, kind, even-tempered and generous. What was it in people that needed the sentimental confusion?

  – A few days shouldn’t make much difference, Daniel said. But the sooner the better.

  5 A Mausoleum in the Cemetery

  Tancred had made a promise to Willow and he would not consider his promise fulfilled until he’d done his utmost to discover any hidden significance to the mementos. His quest, as he understood it, was not about money or gain or status. It was about honouring his word and finding the truth.

  But Simone Azarian-Thomson had muddied the waters.

  There was a contradiction at the heart of the woman. She was at least somewhat convinced that the mementos were part of a treasure hunt whose reward was a kind of homily – ‘cleave to your family’ – meant for Willow. All the Azarians except Willow believed this. But either from faith in Willow or out of mistrust for her father, Simone also believed there might be more to it, that it would be just like her father to give the thing a final twist, to have a sting in the tail. So, she’d allowed Tancred to keep her painting and, by extension, her sister’s model of Fallingwater. She had, in effect, given him permission to complete his task.

  All of this left Tancred feeling as if he were in a fog of thought. Had Willow previously arrived at the same conclusion as her siblings and rejected it? Or was it, as Simone believed, that Willow had been too stoned to put the clues together? Did the ‘clues’ really point to a spot in Mount Pleasant? He hadn’t solved the puzzle for himself, so the so-called solution had no hold on him. Should he, then, reject the Azarians’ solution until (or if) he discovered it for himself? Or should he go to Mount Pleasant and look around?

  How uncertain things had become! Since his meetings with Willow and the death of his mother, the world had become unreadable. It now felt as if a question lurked behind any action he contemplated. He was living in a world of Ollie’s devising, it seemed, the value of everything open to doubt. But where Ollie could blithely live with uncertain value, he found it excruciating. How was it possible to know the important thing, under such circumstances?

  He chose to go and look around the cemetery. There was no reason for Simone to invent such a specific solution to the clues her father had left. So, the place no doubt held something of importance.

  It had snowed, but not heavily. A wind troubled the flakes on the ground as if they were sand, creating white whorls on the roads and walkways through the cemetery.

  Tancred thought of Mount Pleasant as a kind of hospital, an extreme hospital, if you like. Its occupants were obviously beyond medicine, but the cemetery was so quiet, its atmosphere so serious, it was as if the dead depended on silence the way patients do: for sleep, for rest.

  Simone had not given him the coordinates of the Weidens’ graves. So, Tancred went to the cemetery’s office and asked if there were a plot where a number of Weidens were buried. There was: plot 22, very near the office itself, though, because the grounds were so strangely laid out – plot 35 beside plot 39, 17 beside 22 and so on – it took Tancred a good fifteen minutes before he found plot 22 and a few minutes more to find the graves of the Weidens.

  When he did find the graves, he was disappointed. He hadn’t expected to find anything obvious. In fact, he wasn’t sure what he’d expected. But the Weidens – generations of them – were buried beneath dull, grey stones. Here and there, carved into the gravestones, were putti, ivy leaves, praying hands or, simply, the name WEIDEN, beneath which the barest particulars were engraved.

  Harvey Weiden

  1924 – 1926

  Winfried Weiden

  1926 – 2011

  There were, in total, nine gravestones – three rows of three – bearing the names of somewhere around a hundred Weidens. On either side of the Weidens, as well as before and behind, there were stones bearing other names: Homer, Lobden, Sylvester, Attal, Modeste, Borde. These surrounding gravestones were even more bland: polished rectangles on which the various surnames were engraved.

  After allowing the other surnames to resonate with Weiden – wondering what, if anything, connected ‘Lobden’ or ‘Sylvester’ with ‘Weiden’ – Tancred finally noticed what he should have seen at once: the mausoleum just beyond the nine Weiden gravestones. The mausoleum was wide as a two-car garage – twe
nty feet by twenty, say – but built of thick and solid stone, its sides almost entirely covered by leafless vines. It was some fourteen or fifteen feet tall and in the lintel above its wrought-iron door the name WEIDEN was carved.

  He stood before the mausoleum a while before he noticed that, from a certain angle, a glimmer of light came from beneath the door. Tancred pushed, and though it was heavy, the door opened without a sound, as if it had been recently oiled. Inside, the enclosure was empty, faintly lit by a gas flame. That is, in the centre of the mausoleum, on the ground, there was a copper circle, two feet in diameter, with a darker metal lip or border around it. The copper circle rose slightly at its centre, like a volcano with very little elevation. From the mouth of the volcano – a hole two inches in diameter – a seemingly endless supply of natural gas flowed, sustaining a reddish flame that lit the mausoleum’s interior.

  It was a few moments before Tancred’s eyes adjusted to the light, but when they did he saw that what he’d taken for blank walls were not quite so. To begin with, the walls were of white marble and, from floor to ceiling, it was as if there were squares cut into the marble itself: each square about five inches by four, as if the inner walls of the mausoleum were the dullest mosaic imaginable. But that wasn’t quite true either. At the centre of each square, more feelable than visible, the name WEIDEN was engraved. That is, there were thousands and thousands of squares engraved in the white marble walls, each square apparently containing the name WEIDEN.

  Nor was the mausoleum floor a blank. Aside from the fountain with its flame, there were words engraved in the floor’s granite. These words were more easily legible than the names on the walls but they were done so that they encircled the fountain, one leading into the other. As it happened, Tancred recognized the words at once. There were two quotes from the King James version of Proverbs. The first was from chapter fifteen:

  He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house …

  The second was from chapter eleven:

  He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind …

  It was odd, being in that place. The mausoleum seemed to bear a message. The place itself meant something, but it felt, to Tancred, as if its meaning were just out of reach. Clearly, the mausoleum pointed to the idea of home or family. But, all the same, Tancred did not feel he had taken in the place’s full significance. He was not convinced he ever could. The mind behind this room was so foreign to his own.

  As was perhaps natural, given the quiet, the marble and the small light from a restless flame, Tancred’s thoughts turned briefly to church and to God. How much he would resent any god that had the presumption to exist! But the Christian number, with its grey-beard symbols and signs, was particularly galling. Why fill a world with clues if the only thing of significance was death, if all sacred signs pointed to nothingness? Then again, perhaps the world was, in terms of meaning, various, and it was this that he resented, forced as he was to choose what mattered and what did not. None of these thoughts helped him here, of course. This place had been designed by a man, Robert Azarian. It pointed to something in the world. The question, for Tancred, was if any but the one who’d designed the place could know what its meaning actually was.

  Tancred had left the mausoleum and was walking away from the Weidens when he was stopped by an older man.

  – She’s a cold one, eh? the man said. You could use three or four long johns and it’d still freeze your tackle off. But you got t’ visit the dead or the dead visit you, my mom’d say.

  Tancred nodded and kept moving. He did not want to speak to anyone. The man put a hand on his arm and said

  – You’re here for those Weidens, aren’t you?

  The man was five feet seven or so, ruddy-faced, his grey hair sticking out from beneath a black toque, most of him hidden by a large blue overcoat that was so shiny it seemed to be made of plastic. It was difficult to tell how old the man was: sixty-five, at a minimum, it seemed to Tancred, but then he was a poor judge of people’s ages.

  – What do you want? Tancred asked.

  – Nothing, said the man. The name’s Delmer.

  Delmer McDougal held out a hand, which Tancred did not shake.

  – I guess you’re thinkin’, ‘Jeez, who’s the old fart?,’ eh? I got t’ tell ya, son, I don’t even know how I got so old. It’s not like it happened all of a sudden, eh? Not like one day you’re young and the next your teeth are gone and you’re pissin’ yourself if ya don’t get to the john on time. It’s a terrible thing and it comes slow, but we can’t none of us help it. Anyways, I’m sorry if I came at you out of nowhere. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. I just thought it was interesting you comin’ here for the Weidens. It’s like a bunch of people just found out these Weidens here are their best friends.

  – And you like to keep track of people? said Tancred.

  – You put it that way, son, it’s like you think I shit in someone’s milk. That’s not how my parents brought me up. I was only thinkin’ you might be interested in other people who’re visiting your friends here.

  – I’m not interested in other people’s business, said Tancred.

  – Well, if you ever wanted someone to keep an eye on things, like, I could do it for you, eh? And it wouldn’t even be that much. I’m sure not lookin’ to gouge anyone. That’s for sure.

  – I’m not interested, said Tancred.

  And he walked away.

  In fact, Tancred had been interested in Delmer’s proposition. It might have been helpful to know who had recently visited the Weidens’ graves. What had soured the encounter was Delmer himself. Tancred would not, as they say, have trusted the man any further than he could have thrown him. It troubled him that Delmer had seen him near the Weidens’ mausoleum.

  Delmer, for his part, could not believe his good luck. He’d been hired by – and still worked for – Alton Azarian. His sole responsibility was to tend to the Weiden mausoleum and keep watch. What, exactly, he was looking for was not clear. Azarian had mentioned his sister, Willow. But even after Willow’s death, he’d encouraged Delmer to stay on for a while ‘just to see what you might see.’ And Delmer had stayed on for a number of reasons. First: because at sixty-eight he did not expect to find better – that is, easier, more leisurely – employment. Second: although the work was dull it paid well. And third: the work encouraged his tendency to woolgather.

  (Encouraged it? His time in Mount Pleasant was a positive inducement to think about trivial but comforting things. What, for instance, had happened to the old clothes pegs, the ones from his childhood that looked like round-headed men with troublingly long legs? You couldn’t convince him that the new ones, with their rat-trap coils, were in any way better, and they were certainly less elegant.)

  When von Würfel had come snooping around, Delmer had felt something like delight. What a relief! Something to report to Mr. Azarian, at last – and he had, of course, reported it. On top of that, there was the practical matter: von Würfel had paid him to go on doing what he was already paid to do! The man was a godsend and his money was pure gravy.

  Yes, but what was he to make of the young black fellow who’d entered the mausoleum? Tall, guarded, soft-spoken, not the kind to give money without reason. (Also blue-eyed! First dark person he’d seen like that!) Was it a good sign or a bad one that a young black man and an older white one were both interested in dead Weidens? It had to be good, didn’t it, that there was what you’d call ‘diverse interest’?

  Because he hadn’t done so in a while, Delmer entered the mausoleum and looked around.

  The crypt was nothing but plain white marble, an unimpressive flame, much engraving but not a picture of the dead anywhere around. His favourite graves were those with cameos of the deceased on them. It was really something to see that this corpse had once been pretty or that one thin, that this one had had bad teeth, that one a full head of hair. Pictures made the dead seem like your next-door neighbours, a feeling that brought Delmer a surprising peace.

>   If there was anything precious in the mausoleum, he was happy to leave it for others. He could not imagine that people with such banal taste in crypts would leave anything interesting. A certificate of some sort, maybe: stocks, bonds, the deed to a ranch or an oil well. Nothing a normal person could use.

  After calling Alton Azarian, he dialled the number Alexander von Würfel had left him.

  – Is this Mr. von Warmfull? he asked.

  – Who is this, please?

  – Oh, it’s Delmer from down the cemetery. I’ve been doin’ some lookin’ out and I caught a body nosin’ around your Weidenses’ graves.

  – Ah, Delmer, said von Würfel. I hope you didn’t scare this person off.

  – I wouldn’t do anythin’ like that. I’m not sayin’ he’s still around but I didn’t have anythin’ to do with him leavin’.

  – Did he see you looking at him?

  – No, sir. I was what you’d call discreet.

  – And this is the first time you’ve seen him?

  – Yes, sir, and I been out there every day payin’ attention. So, I woulda seen him already if he’d been here before. And I woulda called you. It’s a lot a work keeping an eye out, eh? I’m not sayin’ you haven’t been generous, but this keepin’ your eyes peeled is a real business for an oldster like me.