Blood Wine (24 page)

He lay back on the bed with his head propped on both pillows. They had had a restless night, touching at arm's length, the nerve ends in fingertips burning, and then careening into each other, soaring and humping and roaring their pleasure in each other's bodies and minds. They dozed, wrapped in one another's arms, desperate to avoid falling away. Each brought out in the other something of the loneliness and longing that no one else had discovered. And then they fell deeply asleep, and then she was gone.

Coming into the room they had made straight for the bathroom and helped each other out of wet, clinging clothes and into the shower as casually as if they had been lovers for years. They washed and rubbed with soap and hot splashing water until their skin, sallow from their swim in the Thames, glowed pink and flush, and they dried off in a flurry of towels and suddenly, stepping into the bedroom, they became shy and climbed into bed quietly and touched each other with tentative and gentle deliberation — not with the innocence of virgins, he thought, which is another name for not knowing what you are doing, but that different kind of innocence that comes only from experience, making love with the full knowledge of how much they could do for each other.

She was gone and it was Sunday. He had nowhere to go. He would spend the day walking through London the way he had when Susan would go home for the weekend. She used to invite him but he always resisted. Meeting her family might somehow bring an end to his adventure, and he still had too much to do. He was in the process of losing and finding himself, and she, with her copper-red hair and her full lips and her eyes filled with hope and forgiveness, was perfect, as long as she wasn't too real. Parents and bedrooms and kitchens and siblings were more reality than he could deal with, back then.

Now he missed her. He wondered if the woman he had bumped against in Beaufort Gardens could possibly be her? He wondered where Elke Sturmberg had got to, and how Francine Ciccone was getting on in her splendid and solitary widowhood.

Morgan never envisioned himself a lady's man. In fact, he was rather contemptuous of the notion. He was certainly not a man about town nor casual in his occasional affairs. Since Lucy, he had had no lasting relationships with women, apart from Miranda. Now, in a few days, he had made love with a beautiful friend of his childhood and with a stunningly dangerous blond who had exploded into his life only the week before, with whom he shared no other past and virtually no chance of a future.

He wondered about Miranda, whether she was recuperating or back in Toronto.

From the end of Thackeray Street, Morgan could see a large dark car parked in front of the Vanity Fair. He had no choice about returning to his room and caught the tube from Victoria Station up to the British Museum. His clothes, his passport, and his notes on the Humber Bridge shooting and the Ciccone execution were there. He was not about to leave them behind because some maniacs were trying to kill Elke.

It's all about why
, he thought as he walked slowly up the street toward the parked car.
We know who killed the kid under the bridge and who killed Vittorio Ciccone and who killed Philip Carter. We even know who killed the old lady, Mrs. Peter Oughtred at Bonnydoon Winery. But we don't know why. When we do, maybe we'll know who killed the ex-boyfriend in New York, and who killed Carlo Sebastiani, and who tried to kill Elke and me.

Morgan had Elke's little pistol tucked into the front of his pants, with his shirt out to hide it. He rapped on the closed window of the parked car. It rolled down. A man sporting a neat mustache gazed up at him with an annoyed look on his face.

“May I help you?” he said to Morgan in a tone suggesting they could not possibly have anything in common.

“You tell me,” said Morgan.

“I am sorry,” said the man. “There seems to be some mistake.”

The car window started to roll up. Morgan lifted his shirt so the gun showed. The window stopped halfway.

“See here,” said the man, “I really am awfully sorry, I don't think I can be of much help. I've never even talked to an American before, not on the street.”

Morgan could not make sense of the man's statement.

“Roll it down,” he demanded.

The window descended. The man's face glowed a deep red. His mustache twitched. “Perhaps I could pay you,” said the man.

“What for?” Morgan asked.

“In lieu of whatever it is you want,” said the man.

“What I want? What I want is to know what you want.”

“My dear fellow, I want nothing more than to leave. Providing you don't shoot me.”

“You're waiting for me, right?”

“I'm waiting for Flo.”

“What flow, what the hell are you talking about?” Morgan nudged his hand against the gun through his shirt.

“Flo, my dear fellow. Florence. She is my friend, she is up for the weekend.”

“Your friend?”

“Yes, my ‘friend.' You know, in quotation marks. Are you here from my wife? Is she behind this? Good God, she hired an American.”

“Canadian.”

“Canadian? I didn't know you people carried guns.”

“We don't.”

“You are.”

“It's not mine.”

“Here's Flo. Perhaps you wouldn't mind. Thank you. Flo, this gentleman and I have been chatting.”

“Hello,” said Flo.

“Hello, Flo,” said Morgan as Flo walked around and slipped into the passenger side.

“It's been nice meeting you,” said Morgan to the man with the mustache. “I'm not from your wife. I've never met her.”

“Well, good for you, old chap. It's not something one easily forgets. If I may, we have an engagement.…”

“Yes, of course, tally-ho,” said Morgan. He waved them off and stood in front of the Vanity Fair, gazing up and down the street, trying to see if there were any other people sitting in parked cars. Then he decided he did not care and went in.

Morgan decided to have a pub dinner in The Bunch of Grapes and then, although he had walked all the way over from his hotel, he decided on a postprandial stroll up and down the length of Beaufort Gardens. Several times. But of course a woman his own age with copper-red hair was nowhere to be seen. He left, trying to put Susan Croydon out of his mind.

Morgan slept soundly through the night. When he woke up and had breakfast in the small dining room of the Vanity Fair, he was feeling himself for the first time since arriving in England. He looked forward to his meeting with Alistair Ross at New Scotland Yard.

As he walked over past the British Museum and down Charing Cross Road, he passed one of the pubs where he had worked some twenty years earlier, but he did not glance in. He was done with nostalgia, and he had a job to do. It amused him that he was not certain what his job was.

It was still early when he reached Trafalgar Square and sat down on a bench to watch the fluttering of pigeons. Horatio Nelson looked dapper on the top of his column, staring off into the distance at the oncoming French and ignoring the gathering of tourists below.

Morgan was having what he thought of as an existential moment. Everything around him was defined by his own position in the scene. On a corner to his right was Canada House. Behind him, the steps leading up to the National Portrait Gallery, behind to the left, St Martin-in-the-Fields, then down on the left, The Strand, leading to Fleet Street, and straight ahead, past the lions, Whitehall, with Big Ben barely visible, and hidden to the right, past Pall Mall and Canada House, just a narrow garrison of buildings away, were St. James Park and Green Park and Buckingham Palace.

So familiar was the panorama, he knew every aspect without looking. He felt very much alive, surrounded by the substantiality of things. Paradoxically, he also felt ephemeral, knowing if he were not here, everything would be exactly the same. Being and non-being, he thought — you can only deal so much with things like this, then you go mad or get bored.

At New Scotland Yard he was given complicated instructions on how to find his way through labyrinthine corridors to a door marked
ALISTAIR ROSS
.
At last
, he thought, as he knocked with the assurance of a man who had achieved his goal,
it is all going to make sense
.

Ross rose to meet him as he entered a surprisingly nondescript room. Morgan strode forward and thrust his hand out in greeting, aware as he did so that there was someone else in the room, revealed behind him as the door swung shut in his wake.

“Ross,” said Alistair Ross, “liaison.”

Morgan wheeled around without shaking hands and stared into the eyes of Elke Sturmberg. She had changed into a light cotton dress and looked almost demure.

“Detective Morgan,” she said.

“Ms. Sturmberg.”

“You two know each other? Good,” said Alistair Ross. “That should make things easier. Perhaps between the two of you, you can explain what's going on, what you want me to do. New Scotland Yard is at your service — within reason, of course.”

Cambridge

O
n
Saturday, Seymour Clancy came to visit Miranda. It was after lunch and she was sitting outside, wrapped in a hospital gown that in both fabric and cut was generically cheery. He brought her a small bouquet of spring flowers, although it was the beginning of summer. When she saw him approach, she settled low in her chair and gazed up through lowered eyes.

“Help me, help me,” she said plaintively.

“What? Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course,” she responded, sitting upright. “Help me break out of this joint. They're all so bloody nice, it's making me sick. It's time to go back to Kansas.”

“Kansas?”

There's no place like home, but she didn't want to go home, just somewhere else.

“It's time to move on,” she explained.

“Yeah, lets see if we can't get you out of here.”

New Jersey seemed happy to release her into the care of a New Yorker, and she was out within an hour. Only after they were on the road did Miranda remember she'd left the flowers behind.

On their way through the Henry Hudson Tunnel, she closed her eyes and did not open them until they emerged in Lower Manhattan.

“We're right near the Best Western I was staying at,” she said. “I can stay there.”

“You want to get your clothes from Elke's?”

“Sure, let's go there first.”

The building superintendent let them in when Clancy identified himself as a cop. Opening the door into Elke's capacious loft, Clancy whistled.

“She was doing all right in the wine racket, wasn't she?”

“You think she was part of the scam?”

“No, I don't think she was part of the scam. I think she got in over her head precisely because she was not part of it. She was an expert, and that made her dangerous.”

“To whom?”

They sat down on an improbably long sofa, then Miranda got up and went into the kitchen area and returned with a couple of imported beers.

“From the bottle okay?” she asked.

“Sure.”

They settled in side by side on the sofa. Both put their feet up on the coffee table, sliding a couple of heavy wine books and a stack of
Vogue
magazines to the side.

“Why don't you stay here for the night,” Clancy suggested.

“You think so?”

“Why not. You were here as a legitimate guest. You're not breaking any laws just because she's taken off. If she's a felon, it's on your turf, not ours.”

“How's Tony doing?”

“He lost his arm.”

“I remember.”

“He's lucky to be alive. What about Elke Sturmberg?”

“What about her?”

“She might have done it. I understand it wouldn't be her first.”

“Her first hand! Tony's forearm was shattered and hacked, the hand in the bag was severed with a single blow at the wrist.”

“A definitive distinction.”

“Probably by the nefarious Mr. Savage. We told you about him, and I think he was sending a message.”

“To you?”

“No, I don't know what the message was and I don't know to whom it was being addressed.”

“To whom? I've never heard anyone say ‘to whom' before.”

“You don't suppose Elke is one of the good guys?”

“Like, working for the CIA, the Mounties, INTERPOL? No, we checked her out. If she does, she's undercover, so deep her own people don't know she exists.”

“That is an existential paradox,” said Miranda.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Miranda. For some reason she thought of Morgan. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I feel like I'm inside a connect-the-dots puzzle, where you draw lines and a picture appears. But because we're inside on the two-dimensional page, we can't see all the dots. If you can't see the dots, how can you draw the picture?”

“We need perspective.…”

“Yeah, literally.…”

“You want to watch
Buffy
?”

“What?” said Miranda.

“There's a twenty-four-hour
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
marathon. One of the New York channels is playing the whole of season four back-to-back. It's for charity. You ever watch
Buffy
?”

“Yeah, Clancy, I am a devoted fan, although I avoid trying to articulate why.”

“Wit, some of the funniest lines, irony, irony about irony, and moral density, psychological complexity, profound silliness, silly profundities. No, it's like trying to explain Monty Python and the Ministry of Silly Walks. Either you get it or you don't.”

“Clancy, I am genuinely relieved to know you watch
Buffy
. It makes you more human.”

“You were doubting.”

“Yes, no.”

“So, why don't we order in Chinese food and watch
Buffy
until dawn.”

“I'm with you, Clancy. And what happens at dawn?”

“I'm off for a few days.”

“And you want to hang out?”

“Actually, I was thinking of leaving you here for a bit, going home and picking up some clothes.”

“You're not moving in!”

“No? No, I have no intentions of moving — in, or otherwise. I was thinking of driving you home.”

“Home?”

“Toronto. I've never been to Toronto.”

“Ever been to Canada?”

“No.”

“Mexico?”

“No.”

“Not well-travelled, are we?”

“The Gulf, Desert Storm, does that count?”

“Marines?”

“Marines.”

“It figures. Yeah, thanks.”

“For what?”

“The ride. Thanks for the ride to Toronto.”

By the time Miranda awakened, late Monday morning, Morgan was having tea with biscuits in Cambridge. She and Clancy had watched television in Elke's apartment until they were saturated with vampires and tired of reiterating appreciative responses like two old hippies sharing a joint. Coming down made them edgy and they set out on the road before sunrise. Since there was no hurry and only Sunday traffic, they decided to have a late breakfast in Boston, which was significantly out of the way.

When they got to Faneuil Hall in the Boston Market, they were famished and they grazed from one stall to the next, eating bagels and waffles and baked beans and whatever appealed in the moment, throwing away what they could not eat or did not like. Miranda confided she felt like an ecological terrorist, wanton with waste, and they donated twenty dollars each to a street musician busking in the morning sun.

They forced themselves to walk for an hour, over to Boston Common and around through the narrow streets of Beacon Hill, until the vaguest pangs of hunger returned, then drove across the Charles River to pay homage to Harvard on their way through to Concord, where they had already determined they would have a picnic lunch beside Walden Pond, and a swim if it was possible, legal or otherwise. Miranda chattered to Clancy about Waterloo County, filling in details she had not mentioned at dinner with Elke. She had grown up in a village called Waldron, she had a friend called Celia, she still owned the family home, although it was empty, she had a few relatives, stragglers from generations older than her, living across the Grand River Flats in what used to be Preston, which along with Hespeler and Galt were now swallowed up in an amalgamation without any centre called Cambridge.

They drove through Harvard Square and parked off Massachusetts Avenue near the gates of Harvard itself in the heart of Cambridge Mass, as she called it, and walked among the red-brick buildings and towering trees for an hour. She wondered about Morgan in London. It would be Sunday dinner by then. Was he washing down a meat pie with a pint of draft Guinness in The Bunch of Grapes? She had never been to London, but he had told her about his local, implying he had been a frequent visitor and not usually alone. She could not remember what his friend's name was, but she knew she had copper-red hair.

“Do you think this job is easy?” Alistair Ross demanded of Morgan and Elke. “It is not easy, I assure you. It is not easy at all.”

Morgan glanced around the room, looking for a brollie and bowler. He was gratified to discover both on a stand by the door, just behind the chair where Elke was sitting like a truant schoolgirl, waiting out the headmaster's rant.

Ross got up and walked rapidly three paces toward Morgan, then veered so as not to collide. He wheeled upon Elke and strode by with such bluster he nearly tripped over her outstretched legs, which she withdrew just in time to avoid calamity.

“They put me here, liaison, you know. It is a French word, as if we don't have enough of our own. I am not
the
liaison officer, I am
a
liaison officer — do you see the distinction? Well, what is it you expect? Speak up, one of you, one at a time.”

“Perhaps you should sit down,” said Elke in a soothing but sombre voice, abandoning her passive role for something more dominant as she rose to her feet and began slowly to back him into the far wall by the curtainless window, from which point he had only one safe retreat and that was behind his desk into a sitting position, which he assumed with relief as she closed in. She leaned over and smoothed the lick of hair draped across his forehead.

“Now then,” he said, his confidence apparently restored by her ministrations. He looked past Elke to address Morgan as if she were no longer there. “What is it I can do for you, sir?”

“Nothing,” said Morgan. If this man was meant to arrange his meeting with Elke Sturmberg, his purpose had already been accomplished. It seemed unlikely he would lend further clarity to the situation.

“Good,” said Alistair Ross. “Then, if you will excuse me, I have a lot to do.”

“Have you?” said Elke, moving into his line of vision. “Are you expecting visitors?”

“Actually, I am. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“No, it was deduction, you must be a detective.”

“Wine expert.”

“Whine? What, what?”

Elke glanced over at the umbrella and bowler and smiled at Morgan. “Mr. Ross,” she said, “were you expecting a detective from Toronto?”

“Apparently I was.”

“That would be him over there, Detective Morgan.”

“But you arrived first, you take priority. Detective Morgan will have to wait.”

“No, I'm here to meet Detective Morgan. Morgan, help me.”

“We're here to meet each other,” Morgan explained.

“Then why bother me?” said Alistair Ross. “I am a busy man. It is not easy being
l'officier liaison
.”

“I thought there were several,” said Morgan.

“What?”

“Liaison officers.”

“We are a special cohort — how many of us, I am not prepared to say.”

“More than two, less than twenty,” said Elke.

“How did you know?”

“Elke,” said Morgan. “I think we could take our leave now, without causing offence.”

“Elke, is it? I'm waiting for someone called Elke,” Ross observed. “It is not a common name, what?”

“Thank you,” said Morgan, motioning to Elke with a nod in the direction of the door. “If we see her, we'll send her right on.”

“How very kind.”

“Not at all,” said Morgan as they slipped out the door and left Alistair Ross to his own devices.

A clerk looked up from her desk and winked. They walked on, not daring to say a word. Emerging onto a side street, they cut through several laneways and came out on Whitehall not far from Downing Street. There was no sign of anyone following them.

“Well, what do you think that was all about?” said Elke, finally allowing herself to laugh as they walked toward Westminster Abbey.

Morgan shrugged, indicating he was pondering the question with great gravity.

Inside the Abbey, in the Poet's Corner, surrounded by the mortal remains of so many cultural luminaries, he at last found the words.

“The guy was a clinical fruit bar.”

“I think the English are charming and strange.”

“I think my people and your people, whoever they are, used the office of Alistair Ross as a rendezvous. He wasn't supposed to understand what was happening. And I think he's whatever the police equivalent is of shell-shocked. I'll bet there are others throughout New Scotland Yard; they're harmless enough, waiting for their pensions to kick in. It's bountiful eccentricity, much better than consigning the poor sods to an institution or early retirement watching re-runs of
Coronation Street
.”

“Does that happen often with police?”

“Possibly it does in all jobs, I don't know. Do accountants burn out? I expect they do.”

“But you deal with death.”

“So do morticians. Do you suppose undertakers look after their own walking wounded, or maybe send them off to dig graves?”

“Morgan, what are we doing in Westminster Abbey?”

“Where would you rather be?”

“Cambridge.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I need to go there. I'd like you to come.”

“To Cambridge? Why not? Providing you answer a question.”

“Sure.”

“Who are you … and all that that implies?”

“A big question. I can tell you some things, not everything. Let's take a pew, I'll try to explain.”

Morgan breathed a deep sigh. From where he was sitting, he could see the sarcophagi of numerous kings and queens of the realm. What fascinated him more were the spidery lines of architectural stonework, solid and beautiful, mysterious and ephemeral. He looked at the woman beside him. She was not necessarily going to tell him the truth, but at least she was about to talk and maybe he'd see through the lies.

“Carlo Sebastiani contacted me.”

He was surprised she chose to start there, but pleased she was making a start.