A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller) (7 page)

His eyes squinted and, at twenty feet, I could see his pulse throbbing on his neck. I gave him a three count, slow, and then gave him another option. “Or I can walk out. And think about your offer—which is now twenty grand, by the way, as a penalty for the violence of your employee—and then call you. And you can get Reynolds to a doctor and get him stitched up; I blew his eardrum and probably broke his ankle.”

Outside a cloud passed by and the room got dark and then light again and I went on, “To do that, Cornelius, you have to put your gun down on the ground. Not the table, the ground. And you have to do it slowly. And back up. Then I take both guns and walk out … I’ll leave them with your secretary outside. What’s her name, by the way?”

“Gwen. I think I’d rather call the cops.” He was getting aggressive again.

“Go ahead. Like I said, I’ve been arrested before and know what to expect but, trust me on this; it’ll cause you a hell of a lot more pain. The fingerprinting, the photographs, the media, it’ll be unpleasant for you. And if you call the cops I’ll never work with you. Right now I probably will. I just don’t negotiate under the threat of a gun. It’s a rule of mine.”

He thought about it and put the gun down and backed away.

I
n the foyer Gwen was reading off the computer screen and making notes on a pad of legal paper. She turned to face me when I came in and she tried very hard not to react when she saw the two guns in my hands.

“Do you have a sink or bathroom here?”

“Yes.” Her finger moved towards a small panel of buttons inset into her desk and I said, “No.” Loudly. Then I smiled brightly, “Don’t press anything. It makes me nervous.”

“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” She was trying to be as calm as possible and her voice carried it off. However, I was up close and could see the flush down her sweater and on her cheeks and I could smell a sharp whiff of sweat. I also couldn’t help noticing that her nipples were as hard as diamonds.

She swallowed noisily. “The top left button on my desk opens a panel in the wall. There’s a sink in that space along with a fridge and coffee maker.”

“Excellent. A little showy and strange but excellent. You may press it now.”

She did and the panel slid aside. While the sink was filling I kept an eye on her. “Your boss is fine but Reynolds is a little battered. He tried to shoot me. In any case neither of them wants you to call the cops. But check with them after I’ve left.”

Gwen nodded and I saw the sink was taking a ridiculously long time to fill. “So, have you worked here long?”

She was perplexed. “Three years … What are you doing?”

“Filling a sink and making small talk. Never mind, I’m lousy at small talk.” The sink was full and I tipped both guns in after putting their safeties on.

“Have a great day!”

And I left. I wasn’t an idiot though. I took the stairs. Just in case Devanter had the elevator under remote control, which is easy to do. And just in case he changed his mind about how to deal with me.

Two blocks from the building I made a series of random turns and found myself in a pawn shop owned and operated by a young, nervous man with glasses and bad skin. Everything was locked away in racks and on glassed-in shelves. I was examining a display of telescopes and binoculars when the clerk came down to me. “Find everything you’re looking for?”

There was a pretty nice-looking Simmons 1209 telescope, with tripod. Maybe nine inches long and about three pounds. I tapped the glass above it and asked its cost.

“$75.”

I looked at him, astonished. “Uh, no. It’s what, twenty years old? How much?”

“Really? That old? Look at its shape; it’s in great shape, isn’t it?”

“I’ll give you $30.”

He haggled me up to $40. and I paid it with one of Reynolds’s hundreds. The owner ran the bill under an ultraviolet light and pronounced it real. He gave me change made up of some of the dirtiest money I’ve ever seen. Then I left, carrying the scope in a plastic bag from Safeway.

I soon found myself at the strange triangular-shaped building I’d seen from Devanter’s office. It was called Artspace and was full of strange organizations and a few ad firms along with magazine and book publishers. No one said a word to me or tried to stop me and the elevator worked (badly) and took me to the sixth floor, where I got off and faced a hallway going left and right. I went right and passed by studios and organizations and ended up back at the elevator.

In my head I had a map of the building, so I figured the office I was interested in was in front of me and to the left, as close to the corner of the building as possible. There was a door there in roughly the proper position. I knocked on it and heard a woman’s voice say, “Come in!”

Inside I found a large office space broken up with bookshelves and partitions. In the centre of the room near the far wall and the windows was a pretty young woman with short black hair and piercing green eyes. I recognized her from looking out of Devanter’s window.

“May I help you?”

There was a trace of both an accent and attitude. I gave her my best smile. “Yes. Actually I just want to look out your window with a telescope. Do you mind?”

“Why?”

I had lots of options. I could lie or I could lie even harder. I chose that one. “I’m a spy.”

“Oh. Then go right ahead.”

To get to the window I had to pass behind her desk. On it was a picture of a young boy and piles of invoices.

The woman pushed her chair back from the desk as I knelt down and took the scope out of the bag.

“What’s that?”

“A telescope. Twenty-five power. So it makes things look twenty-five times closer than they actually are. Which is handy if you’re a spy.”

I set it up on the windowsill and focussed it at Devanter’s building and then started counting floors. At six I stopped and found I had a pretty good view of the whole glassed-in monstrosity that was the office. The view wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but I could certainly identify Devanter and Gwen, both standing, and Reynolds, sitting in a chair with a towel pressed to his ear with one hand. With the other one he clutched his ankle.

Someone came into the office behind me and gave a large package to the green-eyed woman. She signed for it and started to make happy noises. I turned to find her admiring brightly printed catalogues.

Back through the telescope I could see Devanter on the phone and I looked down and checked the ground floor for ambulances or police cars but could see neither.

The phone beside me rang and the woman took complicated notes about percentages and dates.

I did math in the back of my head and decided that I’d left Devanter’s office forty minutes before. Forty minutes. So if he’d called the cops they’d have arrived already. Cops may be slow if you report a residential break-in or a loud party at 3:00 a.m. on Friday night/Saturday morning but they’re pretty fucking quick if you’re a millionaire reporting an armed gunman and assault and battery on a lawyer at noon on a Monday.

This meant that Cornelius Devanter and Alastair Reynolds and Gwen, no last name, hadn’t called the cops. I leaned back on my heels and bit my lip while thinking.

“Find what you wanted?” The woman was sitting back down at her desk.

“You bet!” I packed the scope back into its bag. “Thank you so much.”

She had a nice smile. “You’re welcome.”

“I love the fact you’re not asking me all sorts of questions.”

“Would you like me too?” She seemed genuinely interested in my response.

I still couldn’t place the accent so I just shook my head and told her, “No. I’d just have to make up a lie.”

“That’s what I thought. Have a good day.”

“I will. You too.” And I left.

I
took my trusty telescope for a walk south, heading towards the Millennium Library, which sits in roughly the centre of the city. As I walked I saw posters on lampposts and walls for the Red River Exhibition and more for something called the Fringe Festival, which apparently involved plays. There were other posters for the Folk Fest, which involved music, and Folklorama, which involved many, many cultures.

None of them seemed familiar and I wondered if they were unique to Winnipeg or if every city had them. Maybe I’d just never noticed stuff like that in my earlier life, being so involved in theft, drugs and general anarchy. I couldn’t really come up with an answer so I just kept moving and thought about other things.

I love it in the movies when the hero needs to know something and he, or she, of course has immediate access to a newspaper reporter, a friendly snitch or a whore with a heart of gold—some kind of expert on any subject needed.

In the real world reporters almost never tell you things because their jobs are to gather news, not to spread it around all indiscriminate like. And snitches require payment and are very, very, very unreliable. They also have the lifespan of some elements on the south side of the periodic table. That’s because bad guys don’t like snitches and snitches need to be around bad guys in order to make any kind of money at all. So snitches
HAVE
to be attached to bad guys and bad guys
HAVE
to crush them down whenever they can.

And whores rarely, if ever, have hearts of gold. They are individuals who rent out their equipment for the pleasure of others so they see the worst of people at the worst of times. It makes them bitter, and rightly so. In other words, they may know but they will never, or almost never, tell.

So I had to make myself an expert as needed. In stir I had read Ian Fleming’s original James Bond series and found a common thread where Bond’s boss would send him off to learn about various subjects as needed. If he needed to learn about gold, he would go to the Bank of England. If he needed to learn about diamonds, DeBeers would lend samples and a loupe. And if Bond needed to learn about guns, then Q, the quartermaster, would come and give an expert opinion.

Unfortunately I did not have the Bank of England on my side, nor did I have good relations with DeBeers and I had no Quartermaster named
Q
. So I used libraries, lawyers and bartenders to learn about whatever was necessary. Libraries would fill in many answers through back issues of newspapers and magazines. Lawyers could tell you a lot more, if you asked them nicely, especially if you were their client. And bartenders, the right bartenders, could generally fill in everything else, and they liked to talk. Most of their life involved listening, so talking was a nice change.

None of that was really an option, so I decided to head to the library, and five minutes’ walking got me there. On the fourth floor I went through the white pages looking for Devanter, Cornelius, Reynolds, Alastair and Goodson, Aubrey. I struck out on the last two but found that Devanter’s address matched the building downtown. Then I signed up for an Internet-enabled computer and used it to run searches on those names, plus variations. That got me a listing for Reynolds as a lawyer in a city law firm, apparently a partner in Reynolds and Lake. It also mentioned that he had written a piece for the University of Manitoba school newspaper back in the early nineties. The same search gave me eleven articles about Devanter in the
Free Press
, the Toronto-based conservative
National Post
news rag and something online called
Canadian Business
. Goodson showed up only once as a major donor for a museum that dedicated itself to aircraft and the history of flight in Canada.

I marked down the dates and pages of the articles and checked out the business site to find that the article was basically a puff piece about how much Devanter was worth, over $100 million, and how much he donated to good causes. I logged off and went up to where the periodicals were kept and filled out the request forms, three at a time, as the librarian instructed me. When they came they were in microfiche and I went over to the nearest machine and started reading.

Basically Devanter was a business man. A successful one. He had started with a small company building airplane components, mostly engine controls. That had been very successful. With that money he had diversified into other businesses, buying up a series of cheap hotels across the country and linking them together under one name. Then he’d staffed them with students just out of hotel management schools he ran in British Columbia. Later he had gotten a gigantic contract with the American government to build bits and pieces of unmanned drones used to blow up people in Afghanistan and Iraq early in the wars.

But there were some controversies. According to a union press release, the components his company claimed to have made had in fact been made by another factory and shipped over to augment the stock—just before a buyout was attempted by a conglomerate from Luxembourg. The value of the company had thus been augmented considerably and Devanter had avoided the buyout offer (which had been “anaemic,” according to officials) and then borrowed against the factory and stock. Then he’d gone to work with that money buying this and that.

And the drones he’d built hadn’t been terribly successful ones. However, they’d been backed by a fierce and senile United States senator from a state that started with a vowel. So the drones had kept flying even when they’d become famous for catastrophic engine and equipment failure.

And the hotels he’d bought hadn’t been a chain, as the article had implied. Instead they had been seized by banks, mom and pop places that had failed in dribs and drabs over the years. The banks couldn’t dispose of them any other way so they’d been a cheap, fire-sale buy for Devanter. As for his hotel management school, it had gotten into some serious trouble with the Chinese government for overcharging students, but that problem had vanished when a certain official had been demoted for incompetence in Beijing. Over the next year most of the students had been hired by Devanter, not at terribly high wages, but they’d been happy enough to get the work.

These days Devanter was mostly into real estate in and around the city. And he pumped a lot of money and attention into civic causes, enough to keep his name in prominent view. He built hotels, mini-malls and condos, and spent a lot of time organizing the demolition of older buildings. His interest in the police commission was well known, although no one seemed to know why.