Until the Night (7 page)

It sent a chill through Cardinal to hear a man admit to loneliness. He never used the word about himself. But he knew what Ronnie meant. Friendships suddenly matter a lot more when you live alone. He didn’t know what he would have done if Delorme hadn’t somehow managed to become his buddy over the past two years.

“You’re ignoring the question,” Ronnie was saying now. “If I tell you I sometimes think Evelyn’s trying to contact me, you just think that’s nuts, right? You never wonder that way about …?”

“I miss Catherine. I miss her every day. I don’t suppose that’ll ever stop. But we had our life together and now it’s over and …”

“And what?”

A pretty young woman came into the dining room and asked if they would like more dessert.

“No thanks, Esmé. That was delicious. Just clear everything away and you can be off.”

Cardinal had been having dinner at Babstock’s place once a month for going on a year, and he still wasn’t sure if Esmé was a maid or a caterer or a niece. Babstock always treated her with respect but betrayed no interest beyond that. Caterer, Cardinal decided. The meals were always perfect, and he enjoyed their quiet conversations before the others—one the architect who had designed Babstock’s house, the other a major at the local radar installation—arrived after dinner and proceeded to beat both of them at stud poker.

“Fabulous meal,” Cardinal said. He tapped his wineglass with a fingernail. “Wine too.”

“You never thought Catherine might be trying to get in touch with you?”

“No, Ron. Why, has Evelyn been phoning you?”

“Phoning, no. But I hear her voice sometimes. I think I do. I mean, it’s bad enough I even saw a doctor about it.”

“What did he say?”

“Stress, of course. Overwork.”

“Well?”

“Okay, I’ll stop. I’m being silly. Let’s move.”

Cardinal followed him into the game room. Babstock’s house was a series of rectangles, mostly glass, overlooking Lake Nipissing. The lights of Algonquin Bay glittered across the frozen lake, making it look a much larger city than it was. Babstock had another house in town, but Cardinal had never visited him there.

They sat at the poker table and Babstock patted his pockets for his reading glasses. “Oh, listen—before I forget—I want you to come to my party.”

“It’s nice of you to ask, but I’m really not a party person.”

“I don’t want party people. I want real people. Feel free to bring someone, of course. Are you seeing anyone?”

“Not just at the moment.”

“What about that detective colleague you told me about? Why not bring her? You said you like her.”

“Lise is even less of a party person than I am.”

“All the better. Be good for both of you. Listen, what did you make of that case in California? That little girl missing for eight years.”

Babstock made a charming effort to be up on crimes Cardinal might be interested in—no matter how far afield they had occurred. This was a California case in which a child had been abducted at age two. Her mother recognized her eight years later, now age ten, at a playground in a different city. DNA tests confirmed her identity, and the couple who had stolen her were now in federal prison. Cardinal hadn’t paid much attention.

“Of course, what I really want to ask you about is this motel murder. But I know you can’t talk about it.”

“ ‘Fraid not. Ongoing investigation.”

“I know, I know. There’s the doorbell. Come to my party, John. Meanwhile, get ready to part with a serious amount of cash.”

From the Blue Notebook

Back in the winter, when the plane deposited Wyndham and me and the construction crew on T-6, we had somehow contrived in that polar darkness to assemble the prefabricated structure of the mess hall in such a way that it ended up with an extra stub of a room, a kind of alcove. I had dragged one of the more comfortable chairs into it and stacked some of my books around it. I liked to sit there at night and read.

Rebecca (this was weeks later) was doing a crossword in the mess. Of all of us, Rebecca was the one most able to keep to a regular schedule despite the unending twilight. When she was finished recording and sorting her data for the day, she devoted her evenings to crosswords, board games or reading. I was in my alcove, from where I could see Wyndham but not Rebecca. He was tinkering with his laptop, trying to improve the insulation pack around his jerry-rigged car battery. We weren’t supposed to do such things in the mess, but Wyndham always did.

I don’t know which of them started it—probably Wyndham, who was always good for a philosophical ramble—but they were talking about different kinds of cold. For some reason their easy conversation put me in a sneering mood and I couldn’t focus on my book. Rebecca told a story about a young monk who travelled thousands of miles to study under a great Zen master.

Rebecca’s voice in the twilight:

The master told the student to sit still and meditate. Told him to
meditate every day. Told him to meditate his every waking hour, to ignore everything else in the world except for the demands of nourishment and sleep.

I couldn’t see her, but I pictured her face, her mouth. Full lips forming the words.

So the student meditated for months on end—until he was exhausted, wasting away. Time and again he would go to the master and say, Why have I not attained enlightenment? I have done everything you say. The master grew angry and told him not to come bothering him with any more complaints. Not to come to him at all until he attained enlightenment.

I know how this ends, I thought. I was half tempted to heckle.

The student went away and managed to stick with it for another month. Then he climbed up the hill to the master once more, and all he wanted to ask was, Am I nearly there? Am I making any progress at all? Is there the slightest hope? But the moment he began to speak, the master pulled out his sword. With a single motion—it flashed just once in the sunlight—he cut off the student’s finger.

Stunned, howling, the student staggered back from the master, turned and stumbled down the hill. He hadn’t gone far when the master shouted his name. The student stopped, clutching his bleeding knuckle, and looked back up the hill. The master slowly raised his hand and, with a smile of utter bliss on his face, wagged his own index finger.

Rebecca paused, and I knew she was demonstrating to Wyndham. Wyndham looking up from his task to see her imperturbable face. Beautiful slender finger wagging at him.

And at that moment, she said, the student attained enlightenment.

Ah, yes, said Wyndham, a very different kind of cold.

My regard for religion, any religion, has always been low, but Zen Buddhism—perhaps because it is fashionable in those urban enclaves where fashion is everything—seemed to me particularly bogus, precious, its masters the spiritual equivalent of mimes. As for sub-zero pedagogy, the High Arctic is the coldest teacher of them all—I have lost far more than a finger under its
instruction—but I have yet to attain even a modicum of wisdom, let alone enlightenment, for all its fabulous array of blades.

Not like Vostok, Wyndham added.

Rebecca’s laugh, brief, throaty. Not like Vostok at all.

Oh, smug! Oh, Annex! I thought, my sneering still at full roar when it was blown from me as if by a sudden blast, a shock wave that rolled outward from their easy concord. It had been stupid of me to imagine Rebecca and I sharing the warmth of that unspoken
contra mundum
attitude that seems to envelop certain couples.

A few days later, I changed my mind yet again. We had a globe at Arcosaur, quite a big one. Close to the poles, there’s nothing like a globe to give a proper sense of geographical relationships. But I had another globe of my own that I kept on display in my area of the lab. It was a scruffy, disreputable-looking thing I had picked up at a flea market. (I am a frequenter of such places when in a big city, not because I have any expertise or love for antiques, but because I have a certain affection for things that survive, especially if they survive for no apparent reason.) The market stall had two globes on display, high school models of the same vintage. One of them was the familiar blue and white sphere interrupted by nations of less natural shape and colour, many with vanished names. Siam. Yugoslavia. The GDR.

Someone had painted the other globe, an identical high school model, matte black.

How much is that? I said to the vendor. It looks like something they’d use in a TV version of
Hamlet
.

He looked at the black sphere and back at me. Three bucks.

My black Earth went with me on all my travels after that. Whenever people would ask me about it, and they invariably did, I would give them different answers.

What is that? Rebecca was standing behind me in the lab. I could smell the faint cucumbery scent of her hand lotion.

My mother, I said.

It’s like something from
Hamlet
, she said. If it had been written for television.

4

D
ELORME PARKED IN THE LOT
of the Algonquin Bay Public Library and got out of the car with her hood up. She took her briefcase from the back seat and shut the door. She walked as far as the sidewalk and looked across the street. A half-dozen cars were parked behind the Quiet Pint, none that she recognized. The night was cold, snowless. From somewhere, the repeated grinding of a car engine refusing to start.

She crossed the street and entered. Two young men with long hair and nose rings were chatting in one of the booths, a paperback copy of
The Corrections
between their pints. The fireside table where she had sat with Priest last time was occupied by a couple. The woman stared at the tabletop while the man traced her hand with a fingertip. Illicit lovers, Delorme thought, or perhaps just a couple recovering from a quarrel.

Priest himself was hunched over a newspaper at the bar. Delorme sat a few stools over and ordered a glass of red wine. “I’ll pay now,” she said when Tommy brought it.

Priest glanced over, then turned his face right back to his newspaper. His cellphone was on the bar beside a half-empty pint of Guinness.

Delorme took out several papers from a conference she had attended months ago and opened the top one. “Developments in Case Management—A Success Story.”

“You intent on making this your home office?” Priest said without looking up. “That your plan?”

Delorme turned to him and raised her glass. “I’m fine, thank you. And how are you this evening?”

“Sod off.”

“Here’s to British hospitality.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Even the jukebox was silent. Murmurs of conversation from the two occupied tables. Priest folded his paper.
The Guardian
. He picked up his phone and swivelled on his stool, facing Delorme. He keyed in a number and put the phone to his ear. “Yes, I want to report an incident of police misconduct, please.” He kept the phone to his ear, looking at Delorme the whole time. “Yes, Sergeant, I wish to report a case of police harassment … At a pub. The Quiet Pint. Yes, that’s right …”

Delorme kept her eyes on the case management study.
The institution of new protocols over the course of several months resulted in significant upward deviations in clearance averages
. She read the sentence several times. If Priest was really calling the station, it could be embarrassing.

“Delorme …” Priest said into the phone. “I don’t know her first name. She says she’s off-duty, but she keeps coming round here asking questions. I’ve asked her to stop, but she refuses …”

Delorme turned a page.
Precincts where protocols remained unchanged reported lower clearance averages or similar averages with less desirable outcomes
.

“No, I think what it is, Sergeant, is she’s one of those cunts who thinks she’s so bloody hot she can do whatever the hell she wants and the blokes’ll just fall all over begging for more … Certainly …”

Priest got off his stool and came over to Delorme, holding the phone out. “He wants to speak to you.”

Delorme took the phone and glanced at the little screen, but it was blank. She could hear a man’s voice, and put the phone to her ear. “You work hard all day,” the voice said, “and now it’s time for some serious relaxation. Call 970-COCK and we’ll lick your pussy for as long as you want. Talk to real live studs, with massive erections ready to serve you—anywhere
you want it. Any way you want it. Just open your legs and dial 970 …”

Delorme handed the phone back. “I think it’s your dad.”

Priest placed the phone on the bar and slid it down toward his newspaper.

“So tell me. What do I have to do to get rid of you?”

“I’m a paying customer—trying to be. Why do you want to get rid of me?”

“You know why.”

Delorme shrugged. “And you know how.”

Priest turned his back on her, went to the end of the bar, collected his phone and his Guinness, and went to an unoccupied booth and sat down. When Delorme didn’t move, he held out both his palms and raised his eyebrows. Well?

Delorme put her papers into the briefcase, picked up her wine and brought them over to the table. Her knees brushed his as she slid into the booth, and she wished they hadn’t.

Priest half stood and reached across the table for her briefcase and placed it between their glasses. He leaned forward and spoke in a low voice into the handle. “Thirtieth January, two thousand eleven, interview with Leonard Priest in the matter of Laura Lacroix, disappearance of. Present, D.C. What’s-Her-Name and God knows who else.”

Delorme stood awkwardly and opened the briefcase, tilting it toward him. “No microphone.”

“Could you open your shirt as well, please?”

Delorme sat down and placed the briefcase on the seat beside her.

“It’s open to the third button already, I notice. Freckles, I see—very nice.”

“How did you meet Laura Lacroix?”

“Come on, then. Just one more button.”

“How did you meet Laura Lacroix?”

He closed his eyes and leaned forward, and the wide nostrils flared. Then the vivid blue eyes opened, taking her in once more. “Incredible,” he said softly. “You actually use Ivory soap.”