The Piano Maker (18 page)

“In that case, take it off the market,” she said. She asked about the prospects for a new piano manufacturing business there now, and he paused a moment and then he said that in his opinion prospects for that sort of enterprise would be poor indeed.

Money meant nothing now, he said. The inflation; beggars everywhere. Had she not heard? Was it much different in Canada? In France a loaf of bread cost more than a skilled worker had earned in an entire day before the war.

One morning when she arrived at the concert hall, the front-office girl handed her an envelope. “A man dropped it off yesterday,” the girl said. “Nicely dressed. He said he was looking for you but you’d moved.”

It was from Nathan.

In the practice room she took off her coat and read the note twice. She sat down on the piano stool, with the electric fire glowing, and she read it again.

Nathan was in Montreal, looking for her. He had come across a wonderful opportunity. A rare and unusual deal for a very large fee. He needed her.

Deals are becoming fewer
, he wrote.
Governments are waking up to the value of their artifacts, but this is a good one. Wait till I tell you. Leave your address with the girl
.

The next evening, he came to her flat for dinner. He brought a good bottle of Bourgogne and two slices of cake from Lennard’s. He said he’d just spent a week in New York, and since Montreal was so close he’d taken the train north again and come looking for her. He appeared confident and relaxed, and he was well dressed as usual, in a good suit and shined shoes. There was more grey in his hair now, not at his temples but on top, and somehow that only made him look more interesting. He was aging well, without losing his energy and edge.

“It’s good to have a bit of money, Helen. Isn’t it? I hope you are putting yours to work. Investing it. With the inflation running so high.”

“Investing, now? In these times?”

“Not in the stock market. Something much more clever.”

He’d been reading up on paleontology, he said. This new deal was a bit like the Persian horse and rider but more complicated. It would also be ten times more lucrative. He asked if she knew anything about dinosaurs.

“Just what I remember from science in school,” she said. “Which isn’t much. We read Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
. About dinosaurs, I remember that he used them for time-span comparisons. I think he said that they were the dominant species for a hundred million years or more. Then one day they were wiped out. Gone. There was something in the paper not long ago. Someplace out west.”

“Probably in Alberta. That’s the place for it in the world right now. It’s something to do with the last vegetation of a certain kind, and with the soil and the ice shield and then the retreating glaciers that shaved the land down to where it was millions of years ago. We’ll let him be the specialist, but we should know the basics. Maybe read up on it a bit.”

“What specialist?”

And Nathan told her that one evening in the hotel bar in New York he’d met a man who said he was a claims buyer working for a big oil company. When he found out what Nathan did for a living, he said he wanted to talk to
him, not in the bar, where they might be overheard, but out in the lobby.

“And that’s what we did, Helen. We sat out there in the leather chairs and there was no one around and this man, Brent was his name, he wouldn’t give me his last name or the name of his oil company, but he told me that a geologist friend of his in Canada had just found the entire skull of a dinosaur with a number of vertebrae still attached, and not only that, but with some connective tissue and even scales and skin still covering some of the dome down to the cheeks.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Organic tissue eighty million years old? Apparently it’s very unusual, but I guess depending on the minerals in the soil, it could happen. Remember the skin of the horse and rider? Tough like saddle leather. He said this find was unheard of and hugely valuable, but the geologist was prepared to disclose the location for money and sell the rights to the find. I asked how much, and Brent said five thousand dollars. Now, wait—” Nathan raised a hand. “I know. It sounds like a lot, and I thought so too. I telephoned my friend at the British Museum, and at first he said that such a find was unheard of. Biologically highly improbable, he called it. But somehow I could tell he was intrigued, and eventually he said that if it did exist it would be an absolute
sensation
in paleontology. His word. I asked how much such a skull with skin on it might be worth, and he said he didn’t know.”

Nathan paused and grinned at her. “Helen, later that same day he called me and said many thousands of pounds. How many? I said. Twenty, thirty? And he said at least that much. He said that because of the prestige and the international interest, there would be a bidding frenzy among major museums. He called it a once-in-a-lifetime exhibit, and from tissue samples scientists might be able to learn more about dinosaurs and the earth then.”

“Amazing,” she said.

“Isn’t it?”

“Did you talk to that geologist who was selling it?”

“Yes. On the telephone. I had to turn my back while Brent dialled the number.”

“And?”

“He’s French.
Very
French, and very cautious. Suspicious. That’s why I need you.”

“Is he here in Canada?”

“I don’t know. He clearly knows the value of what he has to offer. He would only say that the site was in northern Alberta. I said I was interested, and he told me to give Brent five hundred dollars’ goodwill money just for the contact and to send another five hundred to an address in Alberta. He said he would meet us there, and if he trusts us and we all decide to go ahead he’ll want another one thousand up front. Then a guide will take us north and we have to pay him the rest of the money once we’ve arrived at the site.”

“Do you trust the situation?”

“I do. It feels right. That’s why I paid the first thousand dollars already. I’ve almost never been wrong about that sort of thing. But you can see why I need you.”

“Because he’s French?”

“Yes. And you’re good at this by now. This man sounds every bit like the civil servant with the Indian mask, and you’ll do much better with his kind than I could. But this time I want you to put up one-half, and then we’ll split the profits again down the middle.”

“You want me to put up two thousand five hundred dollars?”

“Yes. And cover your own expenses. Full partners this time. It’s not as if you’re still poor.”

There was a long silence while he waited her out. He pulled his cake plate closer and ran the fork over the crumbs and squashed them into the tines and put them in his mouth. He grinned at her.

“What do you say, Helen? I think we can make as much as fifteen or even twenty thousand dollars
each
on this one. And have an adventure straight out of Jack London.”

She borrowed Darwin’s
Origin
and the work of a modern American paleontologist from the library and read them in a few sittings. She had a last weekend with Claire and told her what she was planning. Claire heard her out and then said, “Keep in mind that this time trust really is an issue. You are risking a lot of money.”

“I know. But he kept his word with all the deals we did together, and we now have money because of him.”

“But he’s cheated you before. Sister Brejon, who teaches psychology, says that people do not change. As they get older they may learn not to repeat mistakes, or they learn to do things more cleverly in order to avoid problems, but their basic nature does not change.”

“I’ll be watching out for that, Claire. I’ve learned a few things too.”

The Killing

THE CIRCUIT COURT
arrived in a large Ford motorcar. There was the Honourable Sir James F. Whitmore, the judge, and for his support there were the court clerk and the court scribe and the chauffeur. Soon after he’d settled in at the hotel, the judge called an in-camera briefing of prosecution and defence. The briefing took place in the judge’s quarters on the ground floor, in room 101. It was the Royal Suite, the best room at the hotel.

Mildred prepared an elaborate tea, and then she and a maid took the trays there and knocked on the door.

“The three of them were sitting around the table,” she said later to Hélène. “There was lots of cigarette smoke in the room, and Sir James is sitting there in shirtsleeves and no collar but with a big wig on his head and white locks down to his shoulders. And Agatha Tancock, that’s the assistant Crown attorney, she was smoking and just staring at me with those coal-black eyes.”

Mildred said the judge sat waving away the smoke and
she heard him say, “First degree, Mrs. Tancock? You will be able to prove planning and intent?”

And the assistant Crown frowned at the judge and said, “Yes, of course, Your Honour.”

Mr. Quormby stood up and opened the patio door to air the room for a moment, and then he helped clear a space for the tea things among the papers and the long gun on the table.

After the briefing Mr. Quormby came to see her, the second-last time before the trial, he said, because he had to drive into the city to look after a few things.

“As I expected, there are notes from the first trial. The judge let us take a look at them, just ten minutes each to keep it fair and even. And by the way, I saw the gun. He had it there as tagged evidence. You didn’t say much about it.”

“Didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t. We’ll need to deal with it, and in a minute you’ll see why. At the briefing the judge informed us that he’s set aside three days for this trial. At first he’ll allow time for himself and the jury to learn the circumstances; that’s when you’ll be describing what led up to the situation, and then the prosecution will introduce the new evidence.”

“Have they told you yet what that is?”

“Yes. In general terms. It will have to do with the
testimony of a firearms expert and with the medical report from the hospital. Now tell me about the gun.”

“Nathan bought it at the outfitter where we got all our equipment. It was in a small settlement more than a day and a half north of Edmonton by train. Just a few log cabins and dog kennels and that outfitter. I think it was once a trading station of the Hudson’s Bay Company. We rented the dogs and the sled there, and we bought supplies. And the gun. Deer Run, the train stop was called. I think I’ve told you all that.”

“Actually, no. This is the first time you mentioned the name of the place. Mrs. Giroux, be prepared to go over it again and again with the judge and the assistant Crown. I have faced Agatha Tancock before. Try as hard as you can not to contradict yourself. Any contradiction and she will not let go of it. That is her trick and it’s very effective. Please continue.”

“We got there late on the third day after we spent the first two nights at the railroad hotel in Edmonton because we couldn’t reach him—”

“Him? Who is that? Try not to use pronouns. Use names and concretia. Be precise. Nothing vague.”

“The geologist. We’d left messages at the number he’d given us, and eventually someone called back. But it wasn’t him. It was a man called Prosper who said he’d been hired to take us to the site.”

“Prosper?”

“Yes. It’s an old French name. In French you stress the ending, like Pros-
per
. He was a very good guide.”

“But he was not the one who’d found the skull and was now selling it?”

“No. He was acting for that man. We never learned his name. Prosper’s job was to guide us there and to take our money. Then he went on his way and we turned around.”

“Where was the geologist all this time?”

“We never saw him and never heard from him again. Prosper was the one who called back and told us where to meet him, and early the next morning we took the train north. We stayed in Deer Run for five days, because I had to learn to handle the dogs and the sled. There were two dog teams. Our six dogs and Prosper’s three. The cross-country trip to the site took five-and-a-half days. We slept in the tent we’d bought. Prosper had his own. There was snow on the ground but in places the wind had blown it away, and that was where we put up our tents. Native people had camped there before. Prosper could tell from where the rocks lay in circles. Teepee rings, he called them, to hold down the tent skirts.”

“Good,” said Mr. Quormby. “Do it like that, with as much detail as you can. Was the site marked on any map? Did it have a name?”

“No. There was no map. Prosper simply knew where it was. I heard him use a word one night when we were sitting around a fire making dinner. It sounded like
Atanaskewan
. I asked him about it, and he said it was an old Cree word, something about a river, but not literally since there was no river anywhere near.”

“I see. There’s something else. I need you to think about how you’ll be describing the nature of your relationship with Nathan Homewood. She’ll belabour that, and … forgive me, but you need to be very clear on that. You both slept in the same tent, and then all those nights in train compartments. She’ll be insinuating situations and motives, if only to embarrass you. Think about it and tell me on Monday. I need you to stick to one clear version of the story. The truth is best, because it’s most easily remembered. All right?”