Ice Lake

by John Farrow

  “Same old routine,” Mathers mentioned. “I mingle with the riffraff, you kow-tow to royalty. I choke on cigarette smoke, while you have coffee with the big shots.”

  Climbing out of the car, they were both dragging their bodies up, staggering a little on their feet. Cinq-Mars leaned against the vehicle to steady himself. “How am I supposed to do my job on next-to-no-hours’ sleep?” he brayed, then burped. “Whoa.” He stretched his spine to resume his upright posture. “There. That’s better.”

  “You’re ready to meet the Prez.”

  “Four eggs. Five slices of bacon. What got into me? Talk about a heart attack on a plate.”

  “Getting shot at, Émile. It made you feel young again.”

  Cinq-Mars chuckled. “Right. This morning I was pushing twenty-five. By the time we quit tonight I’ll be slurping Pablum for dinner.”

  Lucy Gabriel was driven to a low-slung, broad cabin deep in the woods on the Kanesetake Reserve. The smoke billowed from a chimney in a steady white plume until it cleared the trees, then grazed eastward. She knew where she was. She had been inside the cabin before, and had dated the guy who lived there. She had slept on the bed across from where she was now made to sit on the floor.

  Her captors kept her ankles bound but they untied her wrists and passed her a plate of pork and beans for breakfast. She ate. She was famished.

  Eventually, Constable Roland Harvey arrived home. He knelt in front of her and used a hunting knife to free her ankles, neatly slicing through the rope.

  “Usually you’re in it up to your hips, Lucy.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “This time, you’re in a pile up to your eyebrows.”

  She was interested. He seemed to know more than she’d expected of him. Then again, he was not merely a Mohawk Peacekeeper, but also a member in good standing of the Mohawk Warriors. Just about everybody knew that. Compromises were necessary in the rough-and-tumble world of domestic politics, and if the bad guys wanted a least one cop on the force to look after their interests, then things were bound to be that way.

  He helped her to stand.

  Other men were sitting around the cabin, and Roland suggested, “Let’s take a walk, Lucy.”

  She put on her coat and the two went outside. They followed a path around behind the hut, through the woods over the snow. For Lucy, it felt good to be fed, freed, and walking again. Her gunshot wound was not giving her much trouble, just a steady dull throb.

  “You got people upset with you, Lucy.”

  “What else is new, Roland?”

  “What’s new? You got every police force in a few provinces and states out looking for you. I don’t know what you been doing, so you’ll have to tell me yourself. Do you want them to find you or not?”

  She had to think about that. “Not particularly,” she replied.

  Roland Harvey nodded. “The bad boys know enough to ask our permission. We’re the ones who negotiated to keep you alive, Lucy. That’s what we all have in mind right now. Everybody wants you alive.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You can’t go home. You can’t be seen anywhere without being taken into custody. Maybe killed, that might be on the radar screen too. It’s a rock-and-a-hard-place kind of thing. You’d be safe in custody, but I think I’m hearing maybe you’d rather skip that experience. Yup?”

  “I don’t want to explain it, Roland, but I can’t go to jail right now. That’s what we’re talking about. Jail time. A good long stretch of it.”

  “All right then. I can offer you a compromise. You’ll go into hiding. We’ve got a place for you. Yup. You’ll be all right. Just don’t cause nobody no trouble.”

  “On the reserve?”

  Roland Harvey shook his head. “Too dangerous. You know that. Cops will look for you here. The Peacekeepers are out looking for you right now, and I can’t exactly tell them to stop.”

  “I understand. Where, then?”

  “The monastery. It’s all arranged.”

  “Oka?” She knew of no connection between the Mohawk Warriors and their quiet neighbours, the monks.

  Roland’s breath was vaporous in the air. He hadn’t put on a heavy enough coat and now he’d stopped walking, shivering, wanting to head back. “They got a whole wing that’s empty. Not so many young men become monks any more. One of the brothers looks after the building during the winter, takes care of the maintenance and stuff like that. He’ll take care of you too. But you got to agree.”

  Lucy didn’t have any mittens and hugged herself, her bare hands under her biceps. “So I just stay there.”

  “That’s right.”

  “For how long?”

  “For as long as it takes, I guess. We’ll wait for the cops to get less interested in you. The bad guys, they have to forget you exist. You tell me how long that takes.”

  Lucy turned with him and they walked back toward the house. Before they’d gone halfway, she told him, “All right. I’ll stay there. Thanks, Roland.”

  He put an arm around her shoulders and they walked in that manner. “You’re welcome, Lucy. Hell, we owe you. You know that.”

  Cinq-Mars ascended to the top floor of the BioLogika Corporation in a quiet elevator distinguished by soft mood lighting and black surfaces trimmed with reflective stainless steel. Subliminal New Age music provoked violent fantasies in him. The exhausted detective imagined himself emerging with a speaker in each hand trailing strands of spaghetti wire, the music shorted out in mid-chord and squawking.

  At the top floor the doors swished open, and Cinq-Mars stepped out onto plush mauve carpet. The brushed softness underfoot caused him to feel sleepy again, as if inviting him to nap. His joints felt rubbery. Immediately ahead, a marble wall that travelled three-quarters of the way to the ceiling appeared suspended off the floor, adorned in its centre by a small scrap-metal sculpture vaguely suggestive of a Swiss Army knife gone berserk. Giving the artwork a quick study, he decided that, in a pinch, it might be useful at an office party as a communal bottle-opener.

  He did a tour around the marble slab and on the opposite side found the receptionist’s desk, unoccupied. He’d arrived before business hours. Cinq-Mars patrolled the corridor, made use of the men’s room, then sorted out his bearings. As the president of such a company, would he not choose an office with a view of the lake? The detective strolled down to the north side of the tower, located the most imposing door there, and knocked.

  “Come!”

  Opening up, he stepped into an opulent office, large enough for nine holes of mini-putt. Behind the president’s desk, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the Lake of Two Mountains, with a bird’s-eye view of the fishing shacks where Andrew Stettler had been found dead. The carpet was deep, a dark grey with meandering lines of purple, and on it the company crest, a shooting star, was detailed in gold. Four chairs followed the sweeping curve of the broad cherry desk, and the wood cabinets and panelling that were prominent along three walls picked up the concave theme. Above the cabinets, an impressive array of sailing, golf, squash and equestrian trophies indicated an athlete on the premises, although Cinq-Mars had yet to locate the recipient of these accolades in the flesh.

  To his left, a door opened wider. Bathed in light, a man in the executive bathroom was drying his hands on a towel that he hadn’t bothered to remove from its rack. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing hairy and muscular forearms. Poking his head out, he called through, “Yes? You are?”

  “Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars, sir. Police.”

  “Cinq-Mars! Of course. At long last we meet. Have a seat. I’ll be with you in two sees.”

  The man returned to the depths of his cubicle without bothering to shut the door behind him, and Cinq-Mars sauntered farther into the office. He waited with his hands behind his back, trying to articulate what impression this opulence made upon him. What did it signify? He had expected an office dusty with scientific studies, perhaps Bunsen burners flaring on cabinet tops, w
alls of bottled pills and assistants frantic in white lab coats. He had expected—illogically, he realized now—a wild-haired biologist with rat feces on his sleeves, strange plants from the Amazon gobbling insects on the window-sills. He had not prepared himself for this display of corporate excess.

  His host reappeared, doing up the cufflinks on a light-blue pin-striped shirt as he approached. The detective noted that the panes of mirror in the bathroom behind him were fogged with condensation.

  “Detective? Werner Honigwachs. Sorry about the circumstances. I caught you on the evening news last night. What a shock. We haven’t adjusted to the tragedy yet, not at all.”

  Cinq-Mars shook the proffered hand. Honigwachs looked dapper, regal. Cinq-Mars ticked off a mental list of the man’s fashion accessories, noting the rings, an expensive watch, and a gold bracelet. The suit was blue.

  “Please,” the man offered again. “Have a seat.”

  Cinq-Mars was glad to accept. Conditioning himself to a lack of sleep was part of his job, but this morning his breakfast seemed rowdy, bent on payback, tormenting a body that had not taken proper care of itself.

  “Interesting design,” he mentioned, indicating a freestanding sculpture of the solar system to one side of the presidential desk. Planets circled the sun. The earth’s moon revolved in its traces. Orbs were connected to the centre by stiff silvery wires as thin as gossamer. In the stone base, a digital readout told the time.

  “It’s a clock,” Honigwachs noted. He quickly waved his hand as though to dismiss the obvious. “You can see for yourself that it tells the time, but it’s also a cosmic clock. Remarkably, it simulates the location of the planets at any one moment. Over the course of one year, the earth orbits the sun. Uranus takes seven years. The moon goes around the earth every twenty-eight days, that sort of thing. I had it commissioned myself.”

  “You’re an astronomer?”

  The question caused Honigwachs to smile, perhaps with more than an ounce of conceit. He had been speaking with the passionate intensity of a hobbyist. “Not my science, Cinq-Mars. My little toy reminds me of the great quests of our time. It’s a reminder to nurture the broadest possible view. Here, at BioLogika, our preoccupations have to do with understanding and manipulating the body’s immune system. Elsewhere, physicists are hunting for the origins and composition of the universe. One journey is connected to the other, I suspect.”

  “How so?” The conversation was drawing Cinq-Mars to a heightened level of wakefulness, which was useful to him, as potent as coffee. In the department he rarely had the opportunity to philosophize about the nature of the species or time’s arrow. In Honigwachs, he sensed a peer, although for no particular reason he was not warming to the man.

  The president leaned back and swivelled a trifle in his chair. “I wouldn’t want to bore a man like you.”

  Cinq-Mars smiled. “Am I to take that as an insult?”

  Honigwachs hesitated, then released a burst of laughter. “It’s not intended that way, Detective. I mean only that I don’t want to take up your valuable time.”

  A rumbling in his stomach provoked Cinq-Mars to stand, and he moved over to the window, drawn by the view. Fresh snow made the panorama exquisite, the settlements below him mere outposts in a vast wilderness. He focussed his eye on the bright orange hut where Andrew Stettler had been found beneath the floorboards in the icy water. “Cosmology is a pursuit of mine, sir. Yesterday I was out on the lake with a fishing line going down through the ice. By raising and lowering the line, I moved moisture from the frigid water of the lake, to the cold air under the floorboards, and to the warmth of the cabin. Fascinating, really, to watch the ice crystals form and expand. Simple minds are easily entertained, perhaps. You’ll pardon me if I’m rambling, sir, I’m suffering from fatigue this morning. Yesterday—it was fascinating—as if watching a galaxy form in miniature. Something you said interests me, Mr. Hogginworks—”

  “Honigwachs,” the president corrected him. “It can be tricky, I know.”

  “My apologies again. No excuses. I’m hopeless with names. Though it seems that I’ve heard yours before.”

  The executive smiled. “I’m curious now. What did I say of interest?”

  “You said, as I came in the door, ‘At long last we meet.’ I find that curious. As if you believe that we should have met previously.”

  “We move in the same circles, you and I.”

  Cinq-Mars tilted his head slightly, looking down the slope of his nose at the man in his leather seat, in the saddle of his success. “I don’t think so.”

  “Ah, but we do. You are the great Cinq-Mars, horse trader par excellence, known to produce the finest polo ponies in this part of the country. I, on the other hand, play. It’s a wonder we haven’t met, actually, from my point of view. I’ve seen you around. I already know you by reputation.”

  Cinq-Mars shot a glance at the trophies on top of the bookshelves and cabinets. He was so weary, it had not struck him that the equestrian silverware might be for polo. He kicked himself for being so obtuse. He looked back at the man and studied him with keen scrutiny.

  “Imagine me with a helmet, Cinq-Mars, in my gear, on horseback.”

  “I’ve seen you. The name comes back to me now. I just never knew how to pronounce it. You’re a two-goal player.”

  “Ah! I’m flattered,” the man said, and he did seem pleased. “You’ve placed me. This spring we must talk horses. I’ll need a fresh colt to start developing.”

  “We’ll talk.” Cinq-Mars returned to the chairs in front of the desk, settling into a different one this time. “Tell me, I’m curious—how do you connect cosmology to the biological sciences?”

  With his elbows on the arms of his chair, Honigwachs touched the fingertips of both hands together, a meditative posture. “I thought you were here to discuss poor Andrew. The sciences! Yes, they seem to move in tandem, have you noticed? Throughout the ages, if one area of science advances, then progress also occurs in other disciplines. At least, that’s my shorthand version.”

  Cinq-Mars nodded as though he expected, and wanted to encourage, more.

  “We live in a time warp, Cinq-Mars. That’s my theory. That’s the meat of the matter. Do you know how a star—our sun, for instance—sinks into the time-space continuum?”

  “Yes,” Cinq-Mars said. Which was true, he did.

  “I believe that we haven’t come to terms with what this really means, with how it confines us to a condition in which we live out of time. That warp, that gravitational bend in time—that’s the realm we inhabit. It pulls us into the past, keeps us there. What will be will be, I suspect, because it has already been. We don’t have a future, only the perception of future. The secrets of the cosmos are being revealed, Detective, the secrets of the biological sciences are rapidly being discovered, more or less in tandem, because the time has come—we are passing through the appropriate space—for such revelations. It’s inevitable. All these things are already known, and have been known ahead of time. It’s just a matter of stumbling across the appropriate information. Of catching up to time.”

  Crossing a foot over the opposite knee, the man gave his ankle a scratch through his sock.

  “A simple theory, really,” Honigwachs continued. “Sufficiently outrageous that I tend to keep it to myself. Essentially, the space traveller who does not age relative to those left behind on earth is living in real time. It’s the aging and dying on earth who are caught in the time warp, out of sync, muddled in the ignorance that comes with being strapped to the past. That will not change, but it seems to me that on rare occasions humanity passes through a grid where we do manage a paltry catch-up, a smidgen of progress, so that we live closer to the speed of light. Now appears to be one of those epochs, or spaces. More accurately, space-times. Best understood if we can agree that there is no now, only a then which carries the appearance, the artifice, the conceit, of being now. Sometimes we stumble onto then. We find ourselves on the threshold of an extraordinary a
ge of discovery. Everything on earth—customs, cultures, politics, everything—is on the brink of change during such times. I know that you’re here on serious business, Cinq-Mars, so I’ll leave you with that.”

  Cinq-Mars liked the theory. While it was flaky, and could easily be reasoned into submission, he admired the mind willing to deploy the rational in service of the outlandish, to see what might float free. The theory was also, Cinq-Mars intuitively recognized, married to the ego of its progenitor. “Mr. Horningwachs—” he began, then paused.

  The man allowed his smile to fade slowly, uncertain if he had been sideswiped or not. “Honigwachs,” he corrected him again. “It’s not that hard.”

  “Sorry. Honigwachs. I’ll remember that now. Mr. Honigwachs, forgive my memory. Last night I got shot at. Getting shot at makes me lose sleep and losing sleep makes me irritable. When I’m irritable I eat too much. It’s an old habit, a bad one. Eating too much puts me out of sorts. When my stomach goes out of whack, my brain follows suit. I hope you’ll forgive my rudeness.”

  Honigwachs touched his fingertips to his chest. “There’s nothing to forgive, I assure you.”

  Cinq-Mars jumped to his feet at that, suddenly a jack-in-the-box of energy and motion. “There is! If I were on the ball I’d discuss your theories of the universe. See how you melded those together with polo and horses. I’d question your use of the grey colt as your second horse when clearly he gets winded early—though, like you, I admire his initial speed—and I should be asking about the security concerns at BioLogika now that your Head of Security is dead. Instead, I can’t even keep your name straight.”

  The president rose as though to see him to the door. “Everybody can have an off day.”

  “On the other hand, since I’m here, let’s get to the bottom of this. Are you not alarmed that your Head of Security has died a violent death? Alarmed, I mean, for the welfare of your company.”

  Cinq-Mars was glad that the president did not know what to make of the interloper in his office, what to take seriously or how much he should dismiss. Honigwachs was a man given to command, and to control, and yanking that scaffolding out from under him amused the detective. His tired state didn’t help, an upset stomach was certainly a nuisance, but Cinq-Mars was a great believer in turning liabilities to work in one’s favour, which he was doing now.