by John Farrow
“You can’t believe that.”
“Why not? Somebody did. I see you had cops here this morning. Maybe they’re thinking the same thing.”
Honigwachs was stunned that this man knew about the other visit. What else did he know? “No, no, they’re not thinking anything like that.”
“Maybe they should,” Jacques said.
“No, I, I didn’t shoot Andy. I’d never do that. Even if I wanted to, which I didn’t I’d never have the guts for something like that. I’m not some kind of Rambo.” He tried to laugh, and to get Jacques laughing along with him. “Besides, I mean, I had no reason.” Honigwachs wished that he could just shut up. That would be the preferred strategy. Take charge of this conversation through reticence and disdain. He’d be more convincing that way. Sit back in his swivel chair and scoff at this man, as he had scoffed at Cinq-Mars, let him know how preposterous he was being. He also knew that he could not pull off that pose right now. He was too nervous. He had to hang in there, he had to keep talking, he had to keep denying and denying until the message got through. “I’d never shoot Andy. He was like a son to me.”
“A son!” Jacques boomed. For the first time, he looked back at his men waiting at the door. They smiled, encouraged by his glance. “A son. Well, you wouldn’t be the first father to bump off his kid, now, would you?”
Honigwachs declined to answer.
“Would you?” Jacques slapped the back of the larger man’s head.
His head bent, Honigwachs gasped from the shock of the blow. “No,” he admitted, panting. “I guess not.”
“You shoot him?” He whapped the back of his head again.
Honigwachs was unaccustomed to humiliation. The burning feeling that was building in his head was partly his rage and partly his fear. “No, sir. I did not.”
“Were you in that shack at the time?”
Honigwachs flinched even before the hand came up to hit him again. After he had flinched, Jacques smacked the back of his head. “No, sir!” Honigwachs said.
“You weren’t there?” He hit him, the back of his fist thumping his temple, hard.
“No, sir.”
“Where were you?” He hit him with a closed fist behind the right ear, three quick, solid punches that caused Honigwachs to lift his shoulders to defend himself and try to hold his head away.
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember?” Jacques smacked the back of the man’s head again. “You don’t remember where you were when the man who was like a son to you got whacked?” He gave him a karate chop across the back of his neck.
Honigwachs was reeling, blood throbbing in his brain. “At home, I guess.”
“You guess?” He gave him a harder chop across the neck again.
“I was home. Stop hitting me.” He heard a ringing in his ears. His vision had become obscured, as if tears had sprung to his eyes. He hoped they hadn’t.
“You’re telling me what to do?” Jacques rammed the heel of his palm into the man’s ear and Honigwachs grunted with the shock of it. “You don’t get to do that,” Jacques warned him, then smacked his temple again. “All you get to do is take it.” He slapped the top of his head again. “All you get to do is hope maybe I get tired.” He punched him behind the ear again. “Not so tired that I don’t just whack you, because I’m inclined to do that. Maybe you did it, maybe you didn’t, maybe I’ll whack you in case you did. You ever think about that? You ever think I might whack you just in case you were the one?” He did not hit him again, but Honigwachs stood curled against the window, waiting for the smack.
Jacques backed away and put on his leather gloves, as if this was a ritual that carried meaning, as if it indicated a change in procedure.
“I can have you whacked just by thinking about it, Mr. Honigwachs. Don’t forget that. Right now, I’ll keep you alive because you might help me find out who did Andy, and because I need you to take real good care of the funds that’ve been turned over to you for your safekeeping. I hope you take better care of that money than you did Andy, who, as I recall, was also turned over to you for you to look after. At all times, remember, all I have to do is think about it. I don’t even have to change my mind. All I ever have to do is just get a look in my eye, then Jesus Christ, you’re gone, you’re done. All you can do then is pray the job gets done by somebody who does it properly, who keeps it neat. Some guys, you know, are sloppy about the work they do. When they do a whack it can be a mess. Keep that in mind.”
Honigwachs nodded, as though consenting to the terms.
Once again, Jacques lifted his arms away from his body and one of his associates came over and helped him on with his coat. “Any suggestions? Give me a name. Tell me maybe who might have done it, who maybe was thinking about it in some kind of delirious moment.”
Honigwachs shrugged. He was so thrilled to see him putting on his coat.
Jacques chuckled. “I’m not leaving here without a name.”
“I don’t know. He was friends with Lucy Gabriel. She’s an Indian girl.”
“Naw, it wasn’t her.”
“How do you know that?”
“That’s my business. Why are you giving me the name of somebody who didn’t do it? That’s what guilty men do. You’re looking and sounding to me like a guilty man, Mr. Honigwachs. I might do some careless thinking about you if you don’t watch out.”
He put up his hands as though to defend against a physical barrage. “I’m sorry. You asked for a name. She popped to mind. I wasn’t saying it was her.”
“It wasn’t.”
“So I don’t have any other names.”
“Just give me the name of somebody I can talk to. Because let me tell you something. Andy Stettler, he was a friend of mine. So give me the name of somebody I can talk to, and we’ll see where that leads. Give me that name.”
“I don’t know—”
“Give me a name!”
“I …”
Honigwachs stopped talked because Jacques had reached under his coat and taken out a gun. He held it down by his side in his gloved hand, and he told him to take off a shoe.
“What?”
“Take off your right shoe, Mr. Honigwachs. Quickly, please.”
Standing on one leg, the president undid his shoelace, then kicked off the shoe.
Jacques moved close to him. “Pull off that sock.”
Honigwachs obeyed.
“Put your right foot forward.”
“Please.” Honigwachs pointed his right foot forward. The big toe sunk into the plush, dark-grey carpet. It trembled.
“Now I’m going to shoot off your toe or you’re going to give me a name.”
Honigwachs started hyperventilating as Jacques aimed the pistol at his toe.
“Camille Choquette,” Honigwachs said.
“Who’s that?” Jacques continued to aim along the barrel of the gun toward the other man’s foot.
“She works at another drug company. I think they went out. They knew each other, I know that.”
“So? He knew lots of people.” Jacques pulled back the trigger.
“It was her hut!”
“What?”
“It was her hut! Where Andy was found. That was her hut.”
Jacques looked up at him then. He nodded, and put away his gun. “Put your shoe back on,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to stink out the joint.”
Honigwachs fumbled with his sock, but his hands were shaking too much to get it back on his quivering foot.
“God, what’s that stink? Did you shit your pants, Mr. Honigwachs?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did. It can’t be a nice thing to contemplate, your toe blown off, all that blood, not being able to walk again except with a limp. You got a fear-stink all over you.”
He just couldn’t get his sock back on, he was trembling too much.
“I’ll look up this Choquette. See where that leads. Meanwhile, you don’t have to worry about contact
ing me. That’s never going to happen. But I’ll be in touch. I want you to know that, Mr. Honigwachs, that you can count on me being in touch.”
Jacques and his well-dressed toughs opened the door and went out.
Werner Honigwachs was finally able to put his sock back on, and he stood there holding his shoe. Time had stopped for him. He could not keep track of his thoughts. He turned and faced the Lake of Two Mountains again, looking out on the ice-village where the fishing huts stood as multicoloured sentinels in the sun. He remained still like that for a while, and he did not move until some time later when his secretary came in to ask him if everything was all right. She wondered why he was standing there, not moving, not saying anything, just holding his shoe and staring out the window like an imbecile.
Throughout the spasms and volcanic indignities inflicted by his body, Emile Cinq-Mars sat with a bemused resignation, too weary to indulge his misery much. Upon emerging from the cubicle into the large employees’ restroom he noticed that he was pale, and washing his hands, he sank into a stupor of indifference, the swirl of water consuming his full attention. Honigwachs had talked about the planets in their traces, this spinning, this spiralling downward, a distortion of time. Straightening, he felt his feet glued to the floor, his energy sapped.
Mathers pushed open the door and, seeing him at the sink, came inside to commiserate. “Head home, Emile. We can cover this ground another time.” The young cop leaned against a sink while Cinq-Mars dried his hands slowly. “You look like hell, and if you’re a time bomb I don’t want you going off in the cruiser.”
“I’ve got another question to ask those two.” His voice had a gravelly, weary timbre. “But I’ll keep it to myself for now. This is a story, Bill.”
“What is?”
“How an unemployed, destitute guinea pig, a lab rat, became Head of Security in no time at all while still in his twenties, and all that got him was a premature and violent death. I want to know why. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Bill Mathers took the elevated Metropolitan east-bound from near the industrial park where Hillier-Largent Global was housed. As they drove, they could easily see the mountain, ten miles away. On the other side was downtown. They passed the edge of an affluent suburb and turned onto the l’Acadie circle where a congested immigrant quarter began, and they got bogged down in the usual snarl of traffic there. Pedestrians and cars moved to and from a busy shopping centre. Cinq-Mars was tempted to join the hordes himself and hunt down a hit of Kaopectate, but the congestion deterred him.
“Scary,” he mentioned, without any particular reference.
“What is?” Mathers was thinking about his wife, wondering what she was feeling now, trundled off to his sister’s house. Perhaps she was at the shopping centre at that moment, walking through in order to change cabs, so that no single cabby could connect her point of origin to her destination. Following the line of his partner’s gaze, he took in the pedestrians, an immigrant crowd, the colours and hues and languages of the world mingling and shuffling along. They were neighbours, as his apartment was located nearby, a few blocks up.
“It’s scary that people sniff nose-sprays and swallow pills and allow serums to be injected into their arms to see whether or not they’ll have a bad reaction. It’s a game of Russian roulette.”
“I’ve heard of worse.”
“I’m not making comparisons, Bill, I’m just saying. It’s amazing that this is routine. If you advertise in the paper for guinea pigs, they’ll line up and actually hope to be selected.”
Traffic moved a hundred feet before stalling again. “In the States,” Mathers went on, “I think in Chicago, men volunteered to get AIDS.”
“Excuse me?”
“I kid you not.”
“For what purpose?”
“So they could be experimented on later.”
“Hold it.”
“That’s what I heard.”
Cinq-Mars had to mull that one over. “You mean that people have volunteered to be injected with HIV so they could be useful guinea pigs for a cure? How much does that pay?”
“Nothing. It’s a public service. You know, men who had lost lovers but didn’t get the disease, they agreed to get the disease to help with the cure. Other kinds of idealists. It’s an epidemic, Emile. Some people have lost dozens of friends. Some people are willing to lay down their lives.”
“Meanwhile,” Cinq-Mars observed, “some scientists are willing to postpone their research until they’ve been assured a better cut of the profits. They say it’s the nature of the beast. What do you make of that?”
“Medicine is money,” Mathers postulated. “Health is big business. Medical research is a growth industry. You know how things go when money’s involved.”
“I’ve seen a few things.”
“I heard that if the big international drug companies sold heroin and crack on the streets, they’d have to take a cut in their profit margins. Imagine that.”
Cinq-Mars whistled at the comment, then paused to stretch in the limited confines of the car. “So far we’ve worked this case top-down, Bill. Sooner or later we’ll try bottom-up. Trace the life and times of Andrew Stettler. How’d he win friends and influence people? How does a lab rat get to be the job-boss? What’s up with Lucy Gabriel? Where does she fit in? Honigwachs and Hillier and Largent can enlighten us with their view from on high, but what’s life like down in the lab, where most visiting rats get injected except for one, one special rodent, who gets promoted? I’d like to know what the technicians think.”
“About what?” Mathers asked. With any luck he’d make the next light and be free to scoot up Boulevard l’Acadie. The route separated the rich from the poor, and immigrants from established residents. To further divide the classes, the boulevard was guarded with a chain-link fence down one entire side, the contemporary mansions behind it having perfectly manicured, treed lawns, while on the opposite side were row houses, scruffy apartment buildings, and scarcely a blade of grass.
“About their bosses. About life in the biological sciences. Are they idealists or skimmers? Are they devoted to antihistamines or the cure for AIDS? What do they think about the nature of the beast?”
He didn’t make the light, but his would be the first car out of the chute on the next green. “You’re right. We don’t know the environment. Bottom-up it is.”
“There’s a blood trail and it’s still fresh. I got a feeling we need to know what’s on the ground. I bet some people are stepping on monkey poop and rat feces, and we’ve got to find out what’s in it for them.”
“Then there’s Lucy,” Mathers reminded him.
“That’s true, there’s Lucy. Did you notice? We told Hillier and Largent that she’d been kidnapped, and both of them neglected to ask the big question.”
“Which is?”
“You should know.”
Mathers thought for a moment. He was about to complain about his weariness when the obvious struck. “They didn’t ask if there was a ransom demand.”
“The first question on anybody’s lips after they hear about a kidnapping, what do the bad guys want? What’s the ransom? How many bucks. File that one away. Hillier and Largent didn’t ask. Maybe it’s because they know why somebody would want her.”
“Are we going to ask?”
“Bottom-up, Bill. I want knowledge first. Then I’ll ask.”
Mathers shot forward on the green light as if giving chase. Pushed back in his seat, Cinq-Mars braced his abdominal muscles against an impending turmoil.
“What’s next?” Mathers wondered.
“Drive us to the station. I want to pick up my car. I’m going home. Visit your family at your sister’s. Just make sure you’re not followed.”
“We’re knocking off?” Mathers doubted the apparent good fortune.
“Not quite.”
“Ah, here we go. What do I have to do while you’re home napping?”
Cinq-Mars tilted his head back, as if to bring his
partner into clearer focus, and stared down his impressive beak at him. “Youth is not an achievement,” he preached, “it’s a responsibility. While I am napping, pup, you will be finding Camille Choquette’s address for me. You’ll also find Andrew Stettler’s. Then tonight, while you’re enjoying Valentine’s Day with your wife, I will be talking to Ms. Choquette. Tonight, while you are making your wife feel better, I will be taking a stroll through Andrew Stettler’s residence. Tomorrow morning, there will be no excuse for you to be late for our rendezvous.”
“What rendezvous?”
“The ice-village, for breakfast, let’s say, eight? We’ll have a thorough look at the crime scene after you’ve had a good night’s sleep. I, on the other hand, will be feeling no less ornery than I do right now.”
Mathers thought about fighting back. He knew that his partner had problems. Today they were partly physical, but also he had a father who was dying, and his own home had been attacked the night before. Now was not a time to get crotchety himself and tell him to stuff his crankiness.
“I’ll do my part.”
“One more thing. Let’s drop by your place. Surely you have some Kao in your medicine cabinet? Or, like everybody else, will you send me down the block?”
Mathers had reached his limit for one day. “We’ll pass a pharmacy along the way, Emile. You can buy your own damn Kaopectate.”
Cinq-Mars glared at him, astounded. “I should have known. You’re like all the rest. You’re a thoroughly unworthy sort of man, Bill.”
Mathers chuckled. “You know where you can shove that, Emile. But before you do, let’s find you that Kao.”
