by Mark Lisac
“But first you have to see Mr. Karamanlis.”
“I agreed to do a job for him. I can’t break my word on that. You know that’s not why I want to talk to you.”
“You should put your commitments first, Harry. I’d only distract you and get you into trouble. The premier’s your old friend, anyway. You and I met days ago. It won’t matter so much if we can’t stay friends.”
“Angela … “
“And what about that wife, Harry? You call her your ex-wife but I think that’s only a legality for you.”
“The divorce is real. I didn’t want it, but it happened and that’s never going to change. Whatever I feel about Sandra... This isn’t a rebound, Angela. It isn’t a desperate search for company. If I were still married, maybe I’d have been able to keep you at a distance and then forget about you. I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.”
“Harry... I have to go.”
“Call me if you need me.”
“I will. I hope I don’t. Not that way. Not if I feel threatened. I need you to be with me. That’s bad enough.”
14
MORLEY JACKSON KEPT BOOKS, IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN. HE kept a few simple tools that allowed him to do minor work on his twenty-two-year-old pickup truck. He still felt nostalgic for the days when he had cleaned and gapped his own spark plugs.
He also kept his friends. He liked to see them happy and safe. He did not suffer the delusion that he could be responsible for their lives. They had to live their own. Still, he was sad to see George Manchester declining into a caricature of himself. He was worried when he saw Harry Asher taking chances instead of sticking to his normal pattern of safety and calculated risk.
Jackson thought of Harry as someone you could count on if trouble broke out, but not necessarily someone you could count on to stay out of trouble. That was one reason he was always ready to listen when Harry said he had something to discuss. The other was the prospect of entertainment. Today sounded different, however.
It looked different, too. Asher walked into Jackson’s office without his usual grin. He closed the door despite the fact it was Saturday and the hallways and other offices were empty, and spoke just above a whisper. Jackson rarely heard Asher’s voice at low volume.
“Morley, do you think the Parson has always led a blameless life? I mean personally, not politically.”
“I don’t know, Harry. I think I once heard him swear when some tea dripped on a shirt he was wearing. The rest of us in glass houses should be reluctant to start throwing stones.”
“If he had a major embarrassment in his past — I mean a really big one, something way beyond what people might call an indiscretion — do you think he’d be willing to talk about it if he were confronted? And if getting the story straight were important?”
“Oh, I’d say that would be extremely unlikely. You’d probably have more luck catching him swearing than you would getting him to admit he’d ever made a mistake.”
Asher had not expected a much different answer, but thought he would have to confront the Parson again soon. The key might be to avoid suggesting that the Parson had ever made a mistake: let him suggest fallibility on his own.
“I may have the lid coming off the Apson case,” he said. “Angela Apson decided to talk yesterday. It had to do with Orion Devereaux’s death. She said her husband had been digging into the past and was sure that Devereaux was the Parson’s son.”
Jackson let out the start of a laugh but stopped and thought. “And he had evidence?”
“Nothing on paper, that she knows of. She doesn’t know who he might have talked to, either. She says he didn’t claim to have it absolutely nailed down but he was sure beyond reasonable doubt.”
“Well, his idea of reasonable doubt may not rest on the same standards as a judge would use.”
“I’m leaving all that aside for now. The point is it makes sense as an explanation for the murder. Turlock killed Apson in a cold rage. If Apson had found something that would destroy the Parson’s reputation, that might have pushed Turlock over the edge. There’s no other explanation in sight.”
“And who is or was supposed to be the mother?”
“She didn’t have anything to say about that. Apson wasn’t talking much about what he was doing. Something apparently pushed him to give her the main points of the story. If Apson didn’t dream it up himself, he had to have gotten it from someone else or found a written record of some kind.”
Jackson stood up and stared out his window at the half-empty street ten floors down. Eventually he turned and said, “I don’t like it. Hearsay from a dead man. A missing mother.”
“There would be an easy way of proving or disproving it. But Devereaux has been cremated. It’s generally considered impossible to extract DNA from cremated remains. I checked. There’s bound to be some blood and possibly hair on the car seat, but it will be going to the crusher soon, if it hasn’t already. I’m not eager to try for a sample from there, and the only way to do it would involve asking a lot of questions that would leave a trail with the police. But unless I can find another way, I may have to take extreme measures.”
Jackson knew better than to come right out and tell Asher to let the case go. He looked out the window again at people wrapped in coats and scarves, tramping down the sidewalks through wind-whipped swirls of snow grains.
“Do you know why I like reading Clausewitz, Harry? It isn’t to learn about military tactics or bits of history from old wars. I appreciate the way he wrote and thought. He’s an unusually modern mind for someone who was writing in the 1820s and ’30s. He wrote in a very clear style that mostly consisted of assembling facts, but when he wanted to make a point, he often chose a metaphor. It added colour and meaning. He also insisted repeatedly on ignoring widely held opinion and taking a hard, close look at the facts to see where they led. There’s one passage in which he talks about people repeating accepted wisdom. He complains that at most they look at the tops of mountains of evidence, just long enough to confirm what they are already thinking, and they never get to the bottom of things. He had an innate skepticism and self-confidence. That’s why he stands out. He looked at things carefully and he accepted realities and worked with them.”
Jackson turned to face Asher. “There’s another passage in which he talked about the risks of flanking operations that take soldiers too far into the enemy’s rear. He said it’s like a man walking into a dark room full of enemies: they will get him in the end. That’s how he puts it. They will get him in the end. Tell me why this is worth pursuing.”
“I agreed to do a job for a friend, Morley. I can’t leave this information hanging. And I can’t take it to him and then tell him to have someone else check whether it’s true. If the story is that Devereaux was the Parson’s son — even if there’s no more to the story than that Apson believed it — Karamanlis has a right to know. He asked me to find out what was going on. This should let him rest easy. If the story got out, it would be embarrassing to the party as well as to Manchester. But it wouldn’t cause fatal damage. The only problem is not knowing if someone else is sitting on the story. That would be bad. But with preparation in advance, handling the story if it gets out would be manageable.”
“I take it you would like to confront George Manchester — ask him outright if he had a son out of wedlock, days after that man died in a horrible accident.”
“Maybe that’s the best time. If there’s anything to it, talking to him while he’s shaken up would give the best chance of getting a straight story out of him, or as straight as we’re likely to get.”
“The ‘we’ in this case being not the royal we, but you and I.”
As
her grinned for the first time since he’d walked into the office. “You like history, don’t you, Morley?”
“Yes,” Jackson said. “History is full of hidden relatives. Who knows how many people in Europe today are descended from children born secretly to tomcatting aristocrats and princes? Then there are the children who were hidden away for other reasons like mental disability. George the Sixth’s disabled brother virtually disappeared. Jane Austen had a brother who was put away with a caretaker willing to look after him. He was never mentioned, certainly not by Jane, even though she was ready to dissect village social life minutely.”
“How about the relatives who were known but were highly inconvenient? They had a habit of dying young. Like Sextus Pompey. Remember hearing about him?”
“All right. I’ll make allowance for that. He did talk about Sextus Pompey. The son of a great man — one who had a chance to follow in his father’s footsteps. It’s not a name that many people would throw around. Not even someone with sporadic delusions of belonging in the ancient Roman senate. I’ll see if he’s willing to agree to another meeting.”
15
ASHER THOUGHT ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FINDING SOMETHING in Devereaux’s office or apartment that could yield DNA. He quickly decided he was even less eager to pursue that route than to try the long shot with the car.
A sample would open the possibility of using the threat of a DNA analysis on Manchester. Asher did not dismiss that option. He was no more eager to try it than to find a way of getting fluid or body samples from Barnsdale. The old man was at least halfway to senility, but he had spent his life clashing with people who wanted something from him. Trying what amounted to a threat was too dangerous.
He walked along the height of the riverbank until he reached Tom Farber’s monument. A few cross-country skiers were out on the park areas. A handful of other people were walking on the path down in the valley beside the river.
Asher looked at the tractor that served as the symbol of Farber and his era and wondered why he had never been to Farber’s grave. He had visited so many others.
He had started with his parents. Leonard and Hannah Asher. His father had been a liquor salesman and had died in a car crash on an icy highway. His mother had been a substitute teacher. She took on full-time work after becoming a widow. Something in her failed at the moment the police arrived to tell her that her husband was dead. She recovered enough to keep working for her son’s sake, but it didn’t last. Two years later, she was dead herself, of pneumonia. Harry watched her casket being lowered into the ground beside the place where he had seen his father buried. All certainty in life seemed buried with them.
His scattering of uncles and aunts could not take him in. After several months, he went into the home of foster parents who ended up adopting him. They fed him well and indulged his talent for sports. His real parents had already instilled the value of education, so school never became a point of friction in his new home.
He felt a natural affection for his adoptive parents but ended up drifting regularly back to his real parents’ graves. Their small stone markers resonated with Asher’s sense of the world as an arena of loss.
He began to see burial sites as places of tragedy and peace. And truth. They were the one place where the comings and goings of ordinary life, the hopeful excursions, the wild and harried escapes, the evasions, the searches for new and more, were distilled into immobility and final choice.
He began taking notice of who was buried where when he travelled. A trip to England when he was in university confirmed his interest. When he travelled after that, he would usually go out of his way to find a cemetery. He had seen graves across much of North America and Europe, and a few in other places. But he drew the line at taking photographs. Something seemed disrespectful about trying to capture an image of a last resting place. The pictures in his mind were enough.
He no longer knew if this pursuit was hobby or passion or mere habit. He didn’t like to consider whether it was an obsession. It had outlasted his discovery that not even cemeteries could offer absolute certainty.
After embracing the law, he had wanted to see where Clarence Darrow was buried. He’d been disappointed to find that Darrow had been cremated and his ashes scattered. He wanted to see a real grave. A visit to the cemetery where Sir John A. Macdonald was buried in Kingston had met his purpose. Like Asher, Macdonald had been a lawyer; like Asher, he had really wanted something different. Asher had dreamt of hockey, Macdonald had dreamt of a literary career.
All such sites opened a portal to reality for him. Graves were a sure connection to people. Only graves.
While he did not like photographs, he did like old portraits. He remembered again how in Florence he had stood transfixed in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. He knew the stories about it were disputed and that artists regularly took liberties with line and colour. For all that, he had still found something as firm as the earth in the painting. If it was not an accurate remembering of a particular young woman, it was an accurate imagining of one who could draw a man’s eyes and inner hopes.
Asher saw the shadow of the tractor had lengthened. He took another look at the icebound river and walked into the archives building. He wanted to study the photograph of Farber and Manchester, the one with an unnamed woman standing between them.
16
LATER IN THE DAY, ASHER WALKED UP TO MANCHESTER’S front door, again with Jackson. They had to wait for him to appear from the upper floor. The nurse-housekeeper said Manchester had been agitated. Asher took that to mean there was an opportunity to pry a lever into the old man’s layers of self-regard and pretence, but that the situation was brittle.
The Parson wore blue, a darker blue than on the first visit. His face seemed greyer. He took a second or two to focus when he looked at whoever was speaking to him.
He said hello to Jackson and, unlike the first time, acknowledged Asher’s presence immediately.
“Well, young man. More questions, eh? Still nosing around to see if scraps of gossip have been dropped on the ground.”
“Gossip is what brings me here, Mr. Manchester. It’s not about John Apson and Victor Turlock. It’s about you. I’ve reason to believe that Apson stumbled across some old rumours about you. Damaging rumours. Some might say salacious. Turlock didn’t want the story coming out and killed him. I don’t know if he did it to shut him up or if he was simply acting out of blind hatred.”
The Parson took a moment to process that.
“Gossip and rumour are the lot given to anyone who leads,” he said at last. “They are part of the price paid for elevation and integrity. Envy is also part of the price. So are stone throwing and backstabbing. One brings the most hateful to account and ignores the rest. They will end up in the trashbins of history.”
“I’ll tell you this straight out, Mr. Manchester. I think John Apson believed he had found evidence that you were Orion Devereaux’s father.”
“And why would the ramblings of a small-town accountant be of interest to me?” Manchester retorted. But he was shrinking into his dark blue suit and drawing back into his chair.
“If not a small-town accountant, how about a city lawyer? John Apson may not have amounted to much but from everything I know about him he was a literal thinker. Numbers had to add up and every entry in the books had to be accounted for. A led straight to B and B to C. A man like that doesn’t make up stories. He spent months trying to dig up information. He died because he found it.”
“He may have died only because Victor Turlock thought he had found something. You were careful in your choice of words, Mr. Asher. You said you thought that Apson believed something. Two straws grasped in one sentence.”
“Your son is dea
d, Mr. Manchester. That’s a cold, hard fact.”
Asher had never before seen someone staring at him with a look that combined pity and disgust. This must be what it’s like to be an ugly dog that hasn’t been housebroken, he thought.
“Morley, what are the qualifications for young men seeking partnership in your firm? Rudeness and brutality?”
Jackson started to say that certain questions could not be avoided, but Manchester didn’t let him finish and turned back to Asher.
“Who have you told about this? Is the devious Mr. Karamanlis going to be slobbering over this chewy piece of gossip before long? Has he been already?”
“He wants to know why Turlock killed Apson. I have to tell him. I don’t have to tell him everything you tell me unless you say it’s all right.”
“It is not all right. It is wrong. How will you know whether he intends to entertain his friends with this tale?”
“He doesn’t want a story like this coming out. That’s why he hired me — to find out what he was dealing with. He wants to be prepared. But he doesn’t want the stink spreading past Turlock.”
Manchester stopped again. Asher decided not to push him harder and waited. The words began flowing.
“Sin is a powerful thing. It has destroyed many people in this country. I think sometimes it may permeate the very ground. Perhaps it is in the oil, which so many think is the province’s hope and salvation.
“I have seen the weight of sin bear down on people even when they could not say what they had done wrong. My government made some mistakes, I admit. Not many, but some. When it did and people suffered, they did not hold it against us. A badly designed program that failed to protect people as intended. A hospital or school that developed cracks in a wall. People usually accepted such things. And especially those things that were beyond our control — low grain prices, low oil prices. They felt they had done something to deserve their punishment.
