The Hidden Keys

by André Alexis

  and, distracted, took the leg with her to the back of the café.

  To Freud, Tancred said

  – Lie him down on two chairs. He’ll get hurt if he falls.

  Freud grudgingly allowed Morrissey’s body to sprawl over the chairs. Colby put the minder to lie forward with her head and upper body on the table. The three men then went out of Café el-Bugat without waiting for the waitress’s return.

  4 A Discovery That Comes with an Address

  Who were Errol Colby and Freud Luxemberg, or why were they who they were?

  It would have been difficult for Tancred to think of more difficult or more unappealing questions. Who is anyone? Why is anyone anyone? These were the kinds of questions it was better not to ask because they almost certainly had no answers, and thinking about them only added to the uncertainty.

  For all his frustration and unease at the questions, however, their answers were vital to him. Just how dangerous were Colby and Freud? They’d had a hand in Mrs. Mallay’s death. He was almost certain of it. But if he’d decided to keep them close to discover the kind of men they were, he’d have been disappointed. Colby and Freud were all manner of men. They were threatening and obsequious, ignorant and perceptive, concerned and callous. It was as if you could pick and choose among their characteristics and create your own Errol Colby, your own Freud. At times it wasn’t clear to Tancred that either man was any particular man – which only proved how useless thinking could be. For all his cogitation and consideration, it was a safe bet that Colby and Freud were dangerous and would be happy to have him out of their way.

  But what was he to do about it?

  They had returned from Castle Rose with Michael Azarian’s bottle of aquavit. None of them could find anything remarkable about the bottle itself. The numbers on the label had been changed from proper dates to the two numbers (1889, 4185) that made the bottle part of Azarian’s puzzle, one more clue that led to Mount Pleasant Cemetery. They spent a while, the three of them, trying to understand what Robert Azarian had meant by the bottle, if he’d meant anything at all.

  Colby and Freud scrutinized the clues. They walked around the Japanese screen. They picked up the bottle of aquavit. They approached the painting and listened to its ‘boring’ music. They contemplated the model of Fallingwater. Tancred, for his part, sat in one of the two chairs in the apartment thinking about Colby and Freud until, without warning, Freud’s face reddened and he began to shout in Colby’s direction, though what he said was meant for Tancred.

  – This is bullshit! He’s fucking with us! He knows something!

  – I told you everything I know, said Tancred.

  – You shut up! I’m not even talking to you!

  Tancred got up from his chair and stepped away from the mementos. Freud, furious, moved toward him.

  – You sit down or I’ll knock you down!

  Incongruously, this was the moment Tancred recalled his mother’s belief in the sacredness of human life. He remembered her words in part because it suddenly seemed to him that Freud was an animal, something like a large dog baring its teeth. And Freud sprang at him, helter-skelter, a cliché out of a class in jiu-jitsu, his fists up.

  As if the apartment were a dojo, Tancred calmly stepped forward, took Freud by the coat and threw him to the floor. The floor trembled, tipping the bottle of aquavit over. Tancred then punched Freud as hard as he could in the face, catching him on the cheek, the sound of it a moist thuck. Freud put up an arm, late. Tancred hit him again, this time catching him over the eye. Again, Freud tried to protect himself, late. Tancred caught him square on the nose, breaking it.

  It was over in moments, but the man was alarming. It had taken three painful knocks to the head – painful to Tancred – just to calm him down.

  – You didn’t have to do that, said Colby. Why’d you do that?

  Freud got up off the floor.

  – I’ll kill you, he said.

  But his words came out somewhere between a complaint and a question.

  Tancred said

  – It’s time for you two to go.

  – You really shouldn’t have hit him, said Colby.

  But Freud allowed his friend to coax him out of the apartment, leaving Tancred to clean up, to soak his hand in ice water, to wonder about who, among his friends, Colby and Freud knew. (Ollie, Daniel, Fiona?) Maybe he shouldn’t have attacked Freud. But it would have been worse, he thought, to let them think he was intimidated. Then there’d have been no stopping them. No, decidedly, they were not the kind of men one treated kindly.

  Though he wasn’t fastidious, Tancred hated blood. It always got to unexpected places. Now, for instance, he found two drops on the Japanese screen, though Freud had been a few feet away from it. But as he was wiping Freud’s blood from the screen and the floor, his thoughts turned to Alexander von Würfel, the one who, curiously, hadn’t painted the screen, though he’d made all the other mementos.

  How careful Robert Azarian had been, not wishing anyone to know all five clues. Then again, why did he allow von Würfel to make four of the five pieces? A previously vague idea came back to Tancred with unexpected clarity. Willow had assumed that the hints they needed were in the five objects her father had bequeathed to his children, in the congruity of the pieces.

  But what about von Würfel? Was he – that is, the man himself – a clue?

  Von Würfel’s initials had been on the one piece he hadn’t actually made: the Japanese screen. The man’s name must have been a hint. Willow had come to think otherwise, largely because the ‘signature’ had read a(ա), not a(vա) or av(ա). But also because, having discovered nothing significant about von Würfel, she had lost interest in the man, had begun to search for some other meanings to the a(ա).

  Indeed, Willow had found another meaning. The signature was not an a and w, as she’d imagined, but an a and ա, the ա being the first letter of the Armenian alphabet. It stood for

  աոաջրև

  or the Armenian word for ‘first.’

  – You see? Willow had said. The ‘a’ stands for Alton and the ‘ա’ stands for ‘first.’ My father was saying ‘Alton (first)’ but I don’t understand why.

  When Tancred related Willow’s words to him, von Würfel understood perfectly.

  – That makes sense, he’d said. It means Alton’s clue comes first.

  Tancred had nodded in agreement at the time, but now he was not sure. There was something about von Würfel – had to be. The maker was tangled in the things made.

  So, what was it about von Würfel? First and most obviously, the name was German. So was the name Weiden, which was, as Willow had told him, the German word for willow. Less obvious, but maybe as significant: Alexander von Würfel was English. He did not himself speak German. So, there was, in von Würfel himself, a conjunction of German and English. When Tancred thought about that and held Psalm 137 in mind, one phrase stuck with him, the same phrase Ollie had pointed to:

  We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof ...

  Which is to say:

  We hanged our [something] upon the [Weidens] in the midst thereof …

  He found the ‘something’ easily enough online:

  An den Wassern zu Babel saßen wir und weinten, wenn wir en Zion gedachten.

  Unsere Harfen hingen wir an die Weiden, die daselbst sind …

  So …

  We hanged our Harfen upon the Weiden in the midst thereof …

  Somewhere among the Weidens there was a Harfe or Harfen. Maybe. If Robert Azarian had been thinking as Tancred now imagined he had been, if Alexander von Würfel was in fact a clue to a puzzle whose solution, strangely enough, von Würfel himself was seeking. Tancred felt ridiculous breaking into the cemetery. It was two in the morning. He was walking with a stepladder that hung awkwardly from his shoulder. The night was cold – minus something or other – so he’d dressed warmly: gloves, boots, a toque, a pullover, a black overcoat. His getup felt lumpish, as if parts of himself didn�
��t quite fit.

  No doubt, there were security guards around, somewhere. But he neither saw nor heard anyone else. He was among the dead and it felt that way.

  Over the weeks, he’d examined all the gravestones around the Weiden mausoleum and knew them well and was almost certain there were no HARFEN among them. So, Tancred began his search inside the mausoleum. The light from the flame was inadequate. It illuminated the words that surrounded it but not much more. In fact, the dancing shadows it cast made reading the names on the walls difficult. Even more disheartening: each of the four walls of the mausoleum was fifteen feet wide and ten feet high, and each of the rectangles bearing the name WEIDEN was four inches by five inches. That meant that each of the walls – save the one with the door in it – had, in theory, 1,080 engraved rectangles to be examined.

  There being no sure way to proceed, Tancred chose to begin with the wall that had the fewest WEIDENs in it; that is, the wall with the door. Here, there were a mere thousand or so rectangles. But each and every one of them contained the name WEIDEN. This it took him some forty minutes of mind-haltingly dull work to ascertain: flashlight in hand, himself atop the stepladder or bent from the waist or down on his knees. After half an hour, Tancred was far from sure that what he was doing was sane, let alone sensible.

  The second wall he chose was even more tedious to do. He was now tired and warm. The flame, though modest, was enough, when coupled with his going up and down the stepladder, to heat the mausoleum. So, after examining another thousand (plus) white-marble rectangles, he was uncertain if he’d missed something or not. His mind was now so used to seeing (and his fingers feeling) WEIDEN, he wasn’t sure it would register anything else. He regretted not asking Ollie – who had returned home to care for his father – to help him. This was just the kind of thing Ollie would have been happy to do. And Ollie would not have cared if they found a rectangle with the name HARFEN carved in it or not. The more futile an endeavour, the more it suited Ollie’s view of the world.

  But Tancred was fortunate. He did not have to examine all four walls. The third one he came to, the wall facing the door, was the one on which he found – seven rows down from the top of the wall and five columns from the right-hand edge – not the name HARFEN but the word HARFE: HARP, a single harp among the willows.

  Though he had spent an hour and a half systematically looking for it, Tancred was dumbfounded to discover this HARFE on the wall. It seemed improbable – and somehow sinister – that he should be the one to find it. Or had Willow’s siblings come to it before him? And then, the discovery felt unreal: too simple, too obvious, though it hadn’t been simple or obvious until the moment he saw and touched the engraved marble for himself.

  But he’d been right! His and Robert Azarian’s minds had taken the same path and had come to the same place. Yes, it was marvellous, but his moment of wonder was brief. Having found a rectangle with HARFE engraved on it, Tancred wasn’t sure what to do. The rectangle was indistinguishable from those around it, save for the different engraving, and even that was visible only if you shone the light directly at it.

  He blew on the rectangle. He wiped it with his elbow. Then Tancred pushed on the stone. It gave way, slightly. A curious feeling: like he was falling into the wall. He pushed again, harder. This time the stone went in easily and kept going until there was a click and it sprang back, some four or five inches out from the wall. The name HARFE had been engraved on the face of a secret drawer. In the drawer, there was a black-leather Hermès envelope in which Tancred found two things: a small gold key and a thick piece of yellow paper – like a canary’s breast – on which the words

  Crédit Suisse

  Fairmont Le Montreux Palace

  Avenue Claude Nobs 2

  Montreux, Suisse

  Box #742015

  were printed in black ink.

  Just like that, after stubbornly following an intuition, Tancred had proven Willow right. Her father had meant her to find something, and that something was (apparently) in a box at a Crédit Suisse in Montreux. Whatever the thing was, however, its existence inaugurated another task. He would have to go to Switzerland.

  First, of course, he’d have to deal with Colby and Freud.

  As he walked from the cemetery, the half moon seemed to be sticking out of a black pocket. It was still cold but Tancred was now too distracted to care. Another thought had come to him: wasn’t it strange that if Willow had connected ‘Weiden’ – her own name in German and the name of her father’s friend – with Psalm 137 she could, on her own, have discovered the drawer in the mausoleum? The four other clues were redundant – perhaps only a spur to Willow’s mind – and each was useless on its own. It seemed her father had wanted Willow – Willow alone – to find the key and the address. You couldn’t help wondering why or feeling sad now that she never would.

  5 Daniel Has a Word with Delmer McDougal

  – I don’t really have an impression, said Puli. I guess the least you could say is that your Colby guy isn’t exactly predictable. One minute he’s at the cemetery, hanging around looking for something. Yeah, that’s him in the picture. Sorry. I couldn’t get a clear shot of him. Anyway, then he’s in Parkdale. Then he’s at the harbourfront having a drink with buddy there who’s dressed like he’s going golfing. They were in the Lebanese place on Queen’s Quay. It’s got great aish el-saraya. You should try it, Dan.

  Daniel thanked him.

  – You did good, he said. I’ve got what I wanted.

  – Thank god for that, said Puli. I can’t stand surveillance when it’s cold out.

  But what, exactly, had Daniel got? Photos of Nigger Colby, Freud and Tancred. Photos that were upsetting because, now, he knew something was up. Despite telling Tancred that Freud and Colby might have had something to do with Mrs. Mallay’s death, there Tancred was hanging out with them like they were friends – an idea Daniel found impossible to accept. There was nothing honourable about Colby, and Freud was a sociopath. Perhaps they had something on him. It was impossible to tell from photos what exactly was going on.

  (How surreal to see Tancred with a golf bag. Tancred hated golf.)

  There was no doubt about it: he’d have to speak to Tancred. Friend to friend, first. There was still no reason for official involvement, but Tancred’s life now impinged on Daniel’s professional imagination. Meaning that, until now, the detective in him had never had to think about Tancred Palmieri. Before he got in touch with Tancred, though, he would visit the places where Puli had taken pictures of Freud, Tancred and Nigger: Café el-Bugat, Mount Pleasant cemetery, an apartment building on Winnett.

  The first place he went – to get it out of the way – was Mount Pleasant. He disliked the cemetery and hated the thought of spending time there on a day off. To think that there were people who loved to walk about among the gravestones, cenotaphs and mausoleums. Some, it seemed, came to pay their respects to the famous dead, like Glenn Gould. But of what good is the place where a man’s bones lie rotting? In Gould’s case, why not leave it at the recordings? There was more of Glenn Gould in one measure of the Goldberg Variations than there was in all this well-kept necropolis.

  Then again, Daniel’s father was buried in Winnipeg and Daniel resented the distance. It felt as if Baruch had disowned him in choosing to be buried so far away. So, perhaps there was some significance to a resting place? No, none. As far as he could tell, the earth did not mind where petals fell. Why should he care what ground his body nourished? And yet, he missed his father, his ashes even.

  Mount Pleasant was its late-autumn self: trees mostly leafless, with here and there a burst of yellow or orange from persistent fronds, a thin layer of snow on the ground, the sun bright, the feeling in the cemetery one of almost circumspect calm, as if Toronto’s dead were, even for corpses, well-behaved.

  Daniel found the Weiden mausoleum easily. It was close to the cemetery’s main office and pale smoke rose from its narrow chimney. He looked into the mausoleum and saw nothing obvio
us – that is, nothing to explain Nigger’s interest in the place, nor anything to explain Tancred’s. It was white marble. There was a perpetual flame and biblical engravings on the floor and the name Weiden was carved thousands of times into the walls.

  It was impressive, in its way, but not the kind of thing to attract drug dealers, you’d have thought: too elegant, too subtle. Then again, Colby had been at Simone Azarian-Thomson’s home, with its paintings and expensive rugs. So, maybe there was a connection between this place and that one.

  As he stepped out of the mausoleum, he was met by an older man in a long, grey coat.

  – G’day, g’day, said the man. There a bar in that place there?

  – A bar? asked Daniel. Why would there be a bar in a mausoleum?

  – Oh, jeez, don’t ask me, eh? Your average person’ll drink Jaysus knows where. But I seen so many people go in there, that iron grille’s like a screen door in a windstorm.

  – Really? said Daniel. How many people are we talking about?

  – I’m not sure just how many …

  – I wonder if you could describe some of them for me, said Daniel.

  He showed Delmer McDougal his id, which Delmer examined closely.

  – Police, eh? Well, I guess it’s to be expected. Somethin’ must be goin’ on.

  And because he was, when faced with the police, honest and forthcoming, Delmer told Daniel everything he knew about Alexander von Würfel, about a ‘dark fella’ whom he described well enough for Daniel to recognize, about an albino and a blond man with a limp.

  – What do you think they were after? asked Daniel.

  Delmer was suddenly thoughtful.

  – Well, I’ll tell you, son. In my experience, it’s usually about Liz. The Liz on a twenty, I mean. If it’s not about Lizzie, it’s about love. I been runnin’ ’round for pret’ near seventy years an’ I can count on one hand that’s missin’ three fingers when it’s been about anythin’ else.

  – Can you tell me what the men were like?