A Door in the River

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “Well then, drive. Before I lose my composure. I was supposed to be there fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Fine, okay,” said Thurlow, and he pulled out of his spot. Wingate watched the door of the Eagle as Thurlow made his right-hand turn onto RR26. No one emerged from the building.

  “Good,” Hazel said to him on her end. “Just pretend to make a couple more phone calls. Talk to a few more people.” She and Forbes were listening to Wingate’s progress from a speakerphone in the community policing office in Dublin. They’d made it their headquarters. There were only two people here from nine in the morning to five at night, and only six days a week. Someone had to come down and open the door for her. They’d set up and tested the phone, tested the tracking signal, a signal that was being emitted by a device the size of a matchbook under the insole of one of Wingate’s shoes. There were eight hours of battery life in the phone, and the high-test trace was good to about seven metres underground. They were lucky, too: there was a tower in Dublin. The relay was only eight kilometres from the field. “Be nice to someone now,” she said.

  In her ear, Wingate said, “I’ll be back in the morning, sweetheart. You know Daddy sometimes has to travel for business. That’s right. Kiss Daddy goodnight now.”

  Obviously he was someone higher up, a VIP no one had ever told Thurlow about. The cabbie drove slightly faster than he needed to: he was frightened of his passenger now, and he had excuses to fall back on if he got into any trouble. No one wanted to talk to Ronnie if they didn’t have to, and this busy guy had come all this way for a reason. Best let someone else deal with him. Wingate was willing these thoughts into Thurlow’s skull. They made the turn onto Ninth Line and the sound of gravel pinging off the chassis filled Wingate’s head with images of tiny bullets flying around the car. There would be a black Mercedes waiting by the side of the road about six klicks in; Thurlow radioed ahead with the single word incoming, and then Wingate saw the Mercedes leave the shoulder about five hundred metres in front of them and lead the way to the little grove. Wingate saw that there was only one person in the car. His head rose about two inches above the headrest, suggesting the driver of the Mercedes was tall, over six foot. The car turned right and then Thurlow pulled up beside it. He said into his radio, Just a drop, and he turned around to Wingate. “This is it.”

  “I know this is it.” He dug into his pocket for the American twenty they’d decided would be the tip, something unexpected to keep Thurlow inside the illusion that Lupertans was some kind of fat cat or out-of-town boss. Wingate handed it over to him and the man thanked him.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  “I don’t rely on luck, Mr. Thurlow. Now keep your mouth shut. Only Ronnie knows I’m here.”

  “Okay, sir,” said the driver, and Wingate stepped out of the cab.

  ] 22 [

  James Wingate walked into the trees. He put the phone against his ear and whispered, “You there?” and heard her faint reply from the other end:

  “We’re here.”

  He slipped the open phone into his pocket so she could continue to listen to his progress. Immediately he stepped into the shade, and he saw that the copse had more trees in it than appeared from the road. Three metres in, it swallowed him whole. A scrap of old deciduous forest, untouched because once a river had flowed here and people had used it and they had not cleared the land. Instead, they brought the boulders they dug up in their fields and put them here, among the trees and in the riverbed. Eventually, the river had disappeared. You could see the history of the place in it.

  Apart from trees and boulders, there was nothing here, though. He walked in deeper. Behind him, he heard Thurlow’s car pulling away, and his skin horripilated. Sticks and last year’s leaves cracked and tore under his feet and he imagined that the sounds were booming out to the ears of whoever was going to find him here and, perhaps, put an end to his meddling.

  There was no one here. He saw no structures at all.

  Wingate stood in the midst of it and turned in a slow circle. He looked up and saw only the trunks of trees, pouring upwards into a dimming sky.

  He walked to where the grove thinned out a little and followed the old riverbed. There was a concentration of larger boulders in the river there, and he stopped and studied them. There was a space behind a particularly large stone, and he clambered across a couple rocks to look. Detritus was strewn beyond, including discarded wood and some chickenwire, and in the midst of it, he made out a large plate of rusted steel sitting on what appeared to be a concrete platform of some kind. As his brain adjusted to what was important in that welter of refuse, he also saw that there was a shiny black box about two centimetres wide and ten centimetres long, on the concrete, below the plate and protected by a Plexiglas shield. A card reader.

  He scrambled down and looked at it. This was what the IDs were for. You checked in at the Eagle, you showed your casino ID to Thurlow, you ran it through this reader. Then you went in. He ran the card.

  It didn’t work. He tried it again. Then a male voice came from an unseen speaker. “Not working?”

  “Nope.”

  “First time?”

  “First time,” Wingate said. “Am I supposed to run it through left to right or right to left?”

  “I don’t think it matters. Are you facing it the right way?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hold on.”

  The voice snapped off. Then there was a deep, metallic sound, chunk, and the metal plate popped up an inch. He got his fingers in under it and pulled it open. It was a heavy door on a pair of arcing metal hinges. It drew right up and revealed a set of concrete steps going down at a slant into the darkness. They’d been constructed against bedrock, these steps, and as he descended them, the space above his head got higher until he was standing in what seemed to be an underground cave of some kind. A light came on and Wingate looked up to see a series of lights in little steel baskets hanging from wires that had been tacked to the stone above. The light showed the cave narrowed again almost immediately, becoming a tunnel that led away from the chamber he stood in.

  He was walking in a dead riverbed. There was a small channel carved in the stone at his feet in which a rill of water carried along: the remainder and reminder of the old river. This was the continuation of the passage it had carved into the fields and the bedrock over millennia before it was diverted and claimed.

  As he went down, the door above him closed on its own, making a soft clicking noise followed by a mechanical sound when it was fully shut. The lights stayed on. The wires stringing them made shallow, drooping arcs between the bulbs. He hadn’t seen a camera on the way down, and couldn’t see any here, so he got the phone out.

  “I’m in a riverbed,” he whispered. “Fifteen feet underground. An empty riverbed, like a cave.”

  “We’ve got you on the screen here, James,” Hazel answered. “We see you. Leave the phone on, but put it away and focus.” He slipped it into his pants pocket.

  The riverbed stretched out for about sixty metres in a meandering southerly direction before turning sharply to the west. Apart from the narrow cut of water in the ground, the walls and floors of the bed were dry. It smelled of the cold and the damp, though, and he was beginning to wonder what kind of casino, no matter how secret, would go to this trouble to hide itself. He needed to keep his mental compass points straight under here so he’d know, approximately, where the empty river was leading in context of the upper world. He came to the turn, made it, walked another thirty metres west, and then the bed began to curve again. It was impossible to know how many degrees off of due west he was turning, as the slow curve delivered him eventually to another door. But now he wasn’t sure if the door opened to the east or the north. It was an elaborate entrance.

  Why had they made this operation so vulnerable to detection? A taxi driving into a field to disgorge a passenger under the watchful eye of someone in a Mercedes wasn’t exactly black ops. But he�
�d slipped in under whatever radar they had, and judging from the interlocking hoops a person had to jump through to get here, they knew if you were a legit customer. If you weren’t, there was probably a hole for people just like you. A chill went through him. He was already adapting Hazel’s methods: jump in the water – or the river – and look for a life preserver afterwards, if you needed one. And now it was too late to shake off her influence: he was in. He’d walked about two hundred metres. In deep. As he reached the door, he turned and looked over his shoulder, and saw the riverbed rising behind him. He’d also gone down. How far though, he wasn’t sure.

  The door had no handle. He stood in front of it, and after a wait that felt slightly too long to be safe, another metallic unlocking sound came from within, and the door opened. He went through it. Now he was in a manmade construction, a vestibule with a second door and a thick, Plexiglas window covered on the other side by a grey vinyl blind set in the wall to his right, with a tray like a teller’s underneath. He felt heat at last, and a male voice asked him to put any weapons he was carrying in the tray. He’d get a tag for them, and he could reclaim them when he was leaving.

  “Do I buy my chips here?” Wingate asked. They had decided back at the station house that the casino chip spoke authoritatively to what the activity was in here, and it was best, they thought, for him to go in appearing to know what he was doing. The voice behind the Plexiglas told him he could buy at the tables. Good, thought Wingate, one surmise established. “I don’t have anything you need to take,” he said, and the window slid shut. The second door buzzed open, and he went through.

  And then he was in another world, a huge stone room with an imperfectly installed wooden floor and the river, now having found a second wind, meandering through the middle of it in a channel almost a metre wide. There were heating elements, like the kinds you found in the stands at amateur hockey games, hanging down and heating the frowsy space. The stream vanished beneath a particleboard wall that was at the back of the “room.” So it was a casino. He was amazed. He’d never seen anything like it.

  No one looked up when he walked in to the bright, high-ceilinged room in front of him except for a woman occupying a concierge’s desk just in front of the door, on the other side of a very small, curving tile surface someone had cemented down onto the stonebed. “Hello,” she said, holding her hand out. He shook it. Odd. “So this is your first visit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Welcome, then. Food and drink is on the house. You can sit down and buy in at any of the tables.”

  “Thanks very much,” he said. He handed her a Canadian twenty. She gave him a little, surprised bow.

  “Welcome,” said a man, coming toward him and extending his hand. “I’m Ronald Plaskett. I’m the manager.”

  “Pete Lupertans,” Wingate said.

  “Wonderful. Nice to meet you, Pete. Now, you got your card?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who tuned you in?”

  “I know Feldman from way back.”

  “Feldman should be getting a bigger cut, I tell you. So just show that card for chips, for food, for drink. Enjoy yourself. Roulette is tonight at midnight.”

  He patted Wingate on the arm and then continued on to talk with the woman at the desk. Mr. Lupertans was going to save some of his more specific queries for the dealers and croupiers.

  He walked forward into the cavelike room and he worked against the tide of fear that was beginning to rise in him. He was here now, and anything could happen. He’d not been patted down, as he’d expected to be, but even if he had brought a weapon, there was no saying he wouldn’t be patted down later. Being armed in this position was an open invitation to Murphy’s Law. He had only his wits.

  Some of the men here had a day’s worth of stubble. There were tired-looking servers bringing coffee and sandwiches. One of the men – he had a tattoo on his neck of a pair of dice – drank a beer from the bottle. There was only one woman here and she was playing blackjack. She had a large pile of chips in front of her. Her eyes were unnaturally bright.

  Now that he’d confirmed what was going on here, the next step was to do what a person like the one he was playing would do. And he guessed Pete Lupertans was here to have a good time and play.

  He began to stroll through. There were two blackjack tables, one baccarat table, and one poker table. He now counted eleven men and one woman. There were five men at the poker table. He elected to be around as few people as possible at first, and he joined the woman and another man at a blackjack table. He got his money out. “What’s the buy-in?”

  “Whatever you say it is.”

  He stole a glance at the chips on the table. People didn’t have too much in front of them, he saw with some relief. Five hundred would look about right. He peeled off bills.

  The dealer counted them out smartly. “Five hundred in.”

  Plaskett looked over at the baize. “Go, Harry.”

  “Green?” said Harry.

  Twenty-fives. “Yeah, green.”

  Harry pushed over a stack of twenty. “Five hundred out,” he called.

  Wingate followed the lead of the other two players, putting out a single chip, and receiving his cards.

  He knew enough not to ask for a card if he didn’t need one. He stuck against all threes, fours, fives, and sixes. He won a hand, and then he won another, and the other player won a bunch of hands and then he had seven hundred or so dollars in chips. A waitress came around with a tray. “Drinks or food?”

  “I’ll have you,” said the man beside him.

  “I’m not for sale, Ed. You want a bourbon, though?”

  “Sure,” he said. He nudged Wingate. “She’s not on the menu.”

  “I heard that. Can I have a beer?”

  “Yep,” said the waitress. “You?” she asked the woman.

  “Nothing,” said the woman.

  The waitress retreated and Wingate used the opportunity to bond with a fellow drinker. “Pete,” he said, offering his hand in tight quarters.

  “Ed,” said the man, shaking. “You gonna play the roulette tonight?”

  “Should I?”

  “I can’t tell you that, pal. It’s a matter of taste.”

  The cards were going around. The roulette was a matter of taste. He let some time pass. Then he asked the man, “They got anything stronger than bourbon here?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “You know. Maybe something that’ll keep me going all night.”

  “Play the roulette. You won’t be sorry.”

  It was just after nine in the evening. If Hazel could still hear him, she’d know that he was down for the roulette. The casino was a front for something else. Plaskett and his associates weren’t against making some scratch with it, but there was another game.

  He went up and down for the next two hours, shooting the shit with Ed and drinking a couple of beers. The woman was a good player. She knew how to leverage her bets. But when midnight came, she cashed out with less than she’d had when he sat down.

  “Where’s she going?” Wingate asked Ed.

  “Not everyone likes the roulette,” he said. People all over the space were standing up. The games were ending. Some people were cashing in their chips, others were colouring them up to larger denominations and putting the chips away in their pockets. Maybe you could pay with the chips.

  When the people who were going to play roulette were the only ones left, the back wall of the casino began to shudder as the partitions separated and turned perpendicular to the room. Behind it was a smaller section of the space they had been in. The roof of the riverbed encroached here, making the space more intimate. There was a single roulette table standing in it.

  “Gentlemen,” said the hostess, “Midnight roulette. Please step forward and place your bids.”

  Back in the Dublin Community Policing Office, Hazel said, “Bids?”

  ] 23 [

  Midnight

  His mind was turning over at
top speed. Five people had left, including the woman. The remaining seven men were to place their bets, but he saw, as he approached the roulette table, that there were nine spots around the table and four chips in front of each spot. Each pile was a different colour. He had been playing blackjack for quarters, but how much were these chips worth?

  The men gathered around the baize, and the croupier – a man Wingate had not seen before – started the wheel spinning. The space was closed, but there was another particleboard wall to his left, and there was a door in it. Space was tight in here, and the river in its gulley twisted at their feet before vanishing behind the second wall. As he approached the baize, he saw this was not a normal roulette layout. There were not thirty-nine squares and a couple for zero and double-zero, there were three identical strips, each numbered one to ten, in vertical columns parallel to each other. The wheel was on the right end of the table, surmounted by two walls of Plexiglas to keep people from touching it. Each man went to a monochromatic stack and waited. Wingate did the same. He was light-headed and worried a vein in his neck was visibly pounding.

  “We’ve only got two lots tonight, sorry, gents. Shortage this week. Good luck to you.”

  He dropped the ball into the wheel, where it hit with a worried clack and jumped up onto the polished wooden rim above the numbers. The wheel was normal, but the numbers on the baize didn’t match. How was the winner determined? Men were already putting chips out. They were only using the two numbered strips closest to the wheel. For whatever reason, they didn’t think the third strip was a good bet. Wingate mirrored them. They were moving the chips around, too, changing their minds. Wingate picked up one chip and moved it. A man across the table from him looked at him strangely. Finally, one man put a chip down in the third rank, and after he’d broken the ice, a couple of other men did as well.