Behind the houses of God stood the houses of Mammon, the industrial sector of the town. Beef prices must be through the floor, he reckoned. Why else would he be looking at Guy Poitier’s spanking-new Delectable Pork-meat factory? And grain was faring no better by the looks of things—or what was a Sunflower Seed Pressing Company doing in the middle of a wheatfield? And that cluster of timid folk standing around the old tenements down in the station square, they must be Sioux or Cree. The towpath turned a bend and led him north through a short tunnel. He emerged in a different country of boathouses and mansions with river frontage. This is where the rich Anglos mow their lawns and wash their cars and varnish their boats and fume about the Yids, the Ukies and those darned Indians on welfare, he decided. And up there on the hill, or as near to a hill as you get round here, stood his goal, the pride of the town, the jewel of Eastern Saskatchewan, its academic Camelot, the Dawes University, an organised medley of mediaeval sandstone, colonial red brick and glass domes. Reaching a fork in the towpath, Justin scaled the short rise and by way of a nineteen-twenties Ponte Vecchio arrived at a crenellated gatehouse surmounted with a gilded coat of arms. Through its archway he was able to admire the immaculate mediaeval campus and its bronze founder, George Eamon Dawes Junior himself, mine-owner, railroad baron, lecher, land-thief, Indian-shooter and local saint resplendent on a granite plinth.
He kept walking. He had studied the handbook. The road widened and became a parade ground. The wind threw up grainy dust from the tarmac. On the far side of it stood an ivyclad pavilion and, enfolding it, three purpose-built blocks of steel and concrete. Long neon-lit windows sliced them into layers. A signboard in green and gold—Mrs Dawes’ favourite colours, thus the handbook—proclaimed in French and English the University Hospital for Clinical Research. A lesser sign said Outpatients. Justin followed it and came to a row of swing doors overhung by a curly concrete canopy and watched over by two bulky women in green topcoats. He wished them good evening and received a jolly greeting in return. Face frozen, his beaten body throbbing from the walk, hot snakes running up his thighs and back, he stole a last surreptitious glance behind him and strode up the steps.
The lobby was high and marbled and funereal. A large, awful portrait of George Eamon Dawes Junior in hunting gear reminded him of the entrance hall of the Foreign Office. A reception desk, staffed by silver-haired men and women in green tunics, ran along one wall. In a moment they’re going to call me “Mr Quayle, sir” and tell me Tessa was a fine, fine lady. He sauntered down a miniature shopping mall. The Dawes Saskatchewan bank. A post office. A Dawes news stand. McDonald’s, Pizza Paradise, a Starbucks coffee shop, a Dawes boutique selling lingerie, maternity wear and bedjackets. He reached a convergence of corridors filled with the clank and squeak of trolleys, the growl of elevators, the tinny echo of quick heels and the peep of telephones. Apprehensive visitors stood and sat about. Staff in green gowns hurried out of one doorway and back through another. None wore golden bees on his pocket.
A large noticeboard hung beside a door marked Doctors Only. With his hands linked behind his back in a manner to denote authority, Justin examined the notices. Babysitters, boats and cars, wanted and on offer. Rooms to rent. The Dawes Glee Club, the Dawes Bible Study Class, the Dawes Ethics Society, the Dawes Scottish Reel & Eightsome Group. An anaesthetist is looking for a good brown dog of medium height not less than three years old, “must be an ace hiker.” Dawes Loan Schemes, Dawes Deferred Payment Study Schemes. A service in the Dawes Memorial Chapel to give thanks for the life of Doctor Maria Kowalski—does anyone know what sort of music she used to like, if any? Rosters for Doctors on Call, Doctors on Vacation, Doctors on Duty. And a jolly poster announcing that this week’s free pizzas for medical students arrive with compliments of Karel Vita Hudson of Vancouver—and why not come to our KVH Sunday Brunch and Film Show at the Haybarn Disco too? Just fill in the Please Invite Me form available with your pizza and get a free ticket to a lifetime’s experience!
But of Dr Lara Emrich, until recently the leading light of the Dawes academic staff, expert on multi- and non-resistant strains of tuberculosis, sometime KVH-sponsored Dawes research professor and co-discoverer of the wonder-drug Dypraxa, there was not a word. She wasn’t going on vacation, she wasn’t on call. Her name wasn’t included in the glossy internal telephone directory hanging by a tasselled green cord at the noticeboard’s side. She was not in search of a male brown dog of middle height. The one reference to her, perhaps, was a handwritten postcard, relegated to the bottom of the noticeboard and almost out of sight, regretting that “on the Dean’s orders” the scheduled meeting of Saskatchewan Doctors for Integrity would not be taking place on Dawes University premises. A new venue would be announced a.s.a.p.
His body screaming blue murder from cold and exertion, Justin relents sufficiently to take a cab back to his characterless motel. He has been clever this time. Borrowing a leaf from Lesley’s book he has sent his letter by way of a florist, together with a generous bunch of lover’s roses.
I am an English journalist and a friend of Birgit at Hippo. I am investigating the death of Tessa Quayle. Please could you telephone me at the Saskatchewan Man Motel, room eighteen, after seven this evening. I suggest you use a public callbox a good distance from your home.
Peter Atkinson
Tell her who I am later, he had reasoned. Don’t scare her. Pick the time and place. Wiser. His cover was wearing thin but it was the only cover he had. He had been Atkinson at his German hotel and Atkinson when they beat him up. But they had addressed him as Mr Quayle. As Atkinson nonetheless he had flown from Zurich to Toronto, gone to earth in a brick boarding house close to the railway station and, with a surreal sense of detachment, learned from his little radio of the worldwide manhunt for Dr Arnold Bluhm, wanted in connection with the murder of Tessa Quayle. I’m an Oswald man, Justin . . . Arnold Bluhm lost his rag and killed Tessa . . . And it was as nobody at all that he had boarded the train to Winnipeg, waited a day, then boarded another to this little town. All the same he wasn’t fooling himself. At best, he had a few days’ march on them. But in a civilised country you could never tell.
“Peter?”
Justin woke abruptly and glanced at his watch. Nine at night. He had set a pen and notebook beside the telephone.
“This is Peter.”
“I am Lara.” It was a complaint.
“Hullo, Lara. Where can we meet?”
A sigh. A forlorn, terminally tired sigh to match the forlorn Slav voice. “It is not possible.”
“Why not?”
“There is a car outside my house. Sometimes they put a van. They watch and listen all the time. To meet discreetly is not possible.”
“Where are you now?”
“In a telephone kiosk.” She made it sound as if she would never get out of it alive.
“Is anybody watching you now?”
“Nobody is visible. But it is night. Thank you for the roses.”
“I can meet you wherever suits you. At a friend’s house. Out in the country somewhere, if you prefer.”
“You have a car?”
“No.”
“Why not?” It was a rebuke and a challenge.
“I don’t have the right documents with me.”
“Who are you?”
“I told you. A friend of Birgit’s. A British journalist. We can talk more about that when we meet.”
She had rung off. His stomach was turning and he needed the lavatory, but the bathroom contained no telephone extension. He waited till he could wait no longer and scurried to the bathroom. With his trousers round his ankles he heard the phone ringing. It rang three times but by the time he had hobbled to it, it was dead. Head in hands he sat on the edge of the bed. I’m no bloody good at this. What would the spies do? What would crafty old Donohue do? With an Ibsen heroine on the line, the same as I’m doing now and probably worse. He checked his watch again, fearing he had lost his sense of time. He took it off and set it beside his pen and notepad. Fifteen minu
tes. Twenty. Thirty. What the hell’s happened to her? He put his watch back on, losing his temper while he tried to get the damned strap home.
“Peter?”
“Where can we meet? Anywhere you say.”
“Birgit says you are her husband.”
Oh God. Oh earth stand still. Oh Jesus.
“Birgit said that on the telephone?”
“She did not mention names. ‘He is her husband.’ That is all. She was discreet. Why did you not tell me you are her husband? Then I would not think you were a provocation.”
“I was going to tell you when we met.”
“I will telephone to my friend. You should not send me roses. It is exaggerated.”
“What friend? Lara, be careful what you say to her. My name’s Peter Atkinson. I’m a journalist. Are you still in the phone box?”
“Yes.”
“The same one?”
“I am not observed. In winter they observe only from cars. They are lazy. No car is visible.”
“Have you got enough coins?”
“I have a card.”
“Use coins. Don’t use a card. Did you use a card when you called Birgit?”
“It is not important.”
It was half past ten before she called again. “My friend is assisting at an operation,” she explained without apology. “The operation is complicated. I have another friend. She is willing. If you are afraid, take a taxi to Eaton’s and walk the remaining distance.”
“I’m not afraid. I’m prudent.”
For God’s sake, he thought, writing down the address. We haven’t met, I’ve sent her two dozen exaggerated roses and we’re having a lover’s tiff.
There were two ways to leave his motel: by the front door and one step down to the car park, or by the back door to the corridor that led, by a warren of other corridors, to reception. Switching out the lights in his room, Justin peered through the window at the car park. Under a full moon each parked car wore a silver halo of frost. Of the twenty-odd in the car park, only one was occupied. A woman sat in the driving seat. Her front passenger was a man. They were arguing. About roses? Or about the god Profit? The woman gesticulated, the man shook his head. The man got out and barked a final word at her, a curse, slammed the door, got into another car and drove away. The woman remained where she was. She lifted her hands in despair and drove them onto the top of the steering wheel, knuckles upward. She bowed her head into her hands and wept, shoulders heaving. Overcoming an absurd desire to comfort her, Justin hastened to the reception desk and ordered a cab.
The house was one of a terrace of new white townhouses built in a Victorian street. Each house was set at an angle, like a line of ships’ prows nosing their way into an old harbour. Each had a basement with its own stairway, and a front door set above street level, and stone steps leading up to it, and iron railings, and brass horseshoes for door knockers that didn’t knock. Watched by a fat grey cat that had made itself at home between the curtains and the window of number seven, Justin climbed the steps of number six and pressed the bell. He was carrying everything he possessed: one travel bag, money and, despite Lesley’s injunction not to do so, both his passports. He had paid the motel in advance. If he returned to it, he would do so of his own free will and not because he needed to. It was ten o’clock of a frosted, freezing, ice-clear night. Cars were parked nose to tail along the kerb, pavements empty. The door was opened by a tall woman in silhouette.
“You are Peter,” she told him accusingly.
“Are you Lara?”
“Naturally.”
She closed the door after him.
“Were you followed here?” he asked her.
“It is possible. Were you?”
They faced each other under the light. Birgit was right: Lara Emrich was beautiful. Beautiful in the haughty intelligence of her stare. In its chill, scientific detachment that, already at first scenting, caused him inwardly to recoil. In the way she shoved her greying hair aside with the back of her wrist; then, with her elbow still raised and her wrist at her brow, continued critically to survey him with an arrogant yet inconsolable stare. She wore black. Black slacks, a long black smock, no make-up. The voice, heard close, even gloomier than on the telephone.
“I am very sorry for you,” she said. “It is terrible. You are sad.”
“Thank you.”
“She was murdered by Dypraxa.”
“So I believe. Indirectly, but yes.”
“Many people have been murdered by Dypraxa.”
“But not all of them were betrayed by Markus Lorbeer.”
From upstairs came a roar of televised applause.
“Amy is my friend,” she said, as if friendship were an affliction. “Today she is a registrar at Dawes Hospital. But unfortunately she signed a petition favouring my reinstatement and is a founding member of Saskatchewan Doctors for Integrity. Therefore they will be looking for an excuse to fire her.”
He was going to ask her whether Amy knew him as Quayle or Atkinson when a strong-voiced woman bawled down at them and a pair of furry slippers appeared on the top stair.
“Bring him on up here, Lara. Man needs a drink.”
Amy was middle-aged and fat, one of those serious women who have decided to play themselves as comedy. She wore a crimson silk kimono and pirate’s earrings. Her slippers had glass eyes. But her own eyes were ringed with shadow, and there were pain-lines at the corners of her mouth.
“Men who killed your wife should be hanged,” she said. “Scotch, Bourbon or wine? This is Ralph.”
It was a large attic room, lined in pine and roof-high. At the far end stood a bar. A huge television set was playing ice hockey. Ralph was a wispy-haired old man in a dressing gown. He sat in an imitation leather armchair with a matching stool to put his slippered feet on. Hearing his name, he flapped a liver-spotted hand in the air but kept his eyes on the game.
“Welcome to Saskatchewan. Grab yourself a drink,” he called, in a mid-European accent.
“Who’s winning?” Justin asked, to be friendly.
“Canucks.”
“Ralph’s a lawyer,” Amy said. “Aren’t you, honey?”
“Not much of anything now. Damned Parkinson’s dragging me into the grave. That academic body behaved like a bunch of horses’ arses. That what you came about?”
“Pretty much.”
“Stifle free speech, interpose yourself between doctor and patient, it’s time educated men and women had some balls to speak out for truth instead of cringing in the shithouse like a bunch of craven cowards.”
“It is indeed,” said Justin politely, accepting a glass of white wine from Amy.
“Karel Vita’s the piper, Dawes dances to their tune. Twenty-five million dollars start-up money they give for a new biotech building, fifty more promised. That’s not peanuts, even for a shower of rich no-brains like Karel Vita. And if everybody keeps their nose clean, plenty more to come. How the hell d’you resist pressure like that?”
“You try,” Amy said. “If you don’t try, you’re fucked.”
“Fucked if you try, fucked if you don’t. Speak out, they take away your salary, fire you and run you out of town. Free speech comes mighty costly in this town, Mr Quayle—more than most of us can afford. What’s your other name?”
“Justin.”
“This is a one-crop city, Justin, when it comes to free speech. Everything’s fine and dandy, long as some crazy Russian bitch doesn’t take it into her head to publish harebrained articles in the medical press badmouthing a clever little pill she’s invented that happens to be worth a couple of billion a year to the House of Karel Vita, whom Allah preserve. Where you planning to put them, Amy?”
“In the den.”
“Mind you switch the phones over so’s they don’t get disturbed. Amy’s the technical one round here, Justin. I’m the old fart. Anything you want, have Lara fix it for you. Knows the house better than we do, which is a waste, seeing as we’re gonna be thrown out of it in a
couple of months.”
He went back to his victorious Canucks.
She no longer sees him, though she has put on heavy spectacles that should have been a man’s. The Russian in her has brought a “perhaps” bag and it lies mouth-open at her feet, stuffed with papers that she knows by heart: lawyers’ letters threatening her, faculty letters dismissing her, a copy of her unpublishable article, and finally her own lawyer’s letters, but not too many of them because, as she explains, she has no money and besides, her lawyer is more comfortable defending the rights of the Sioux than doing battle with the limitless legal resources of Messrs Karel Vita Hudson of Vancouver. They sit like chess players without a board, square to each other, knees almost touching. A memory of oriental postings tells Justin not to point his feet at her, so he sits askew, at some discomfort to his battered body. For a while now she has talked into the shadows past his shoulder and he has barely interrupted her. Her self-absorption is absolute, her voice by turn despondent and didactic. She lives only with the monstrosity of her case and its hopeless insolubility. Everything is a reference to it. Sometimes—quite often, he suspects—she forgets him entirely. Or he is something else for her—a hesitant faculty meeting, a timid convocation of university colleagues, a vacillating professor, an inadequate lawyer. It is only when he speaks Lorbeer’s name that she wakes to him and frowns— then offers some mystical generality that is a palpable evasion: Markus is too romantic, he is so weak, all men do bad things, women also. And no, she does not know where to find him:
“He is hiding somewhere. He is erratic, each morning a different direction,” she explains with unrelenting melancholy.
“If he says the desert, is it a real desert?”
“It will be a place of great inconvenience. That also is typical.” To plead her cause she has absorbed phrases that he would not have credited her with: “I will fast-forward here . . . KVH are taking no prisoners.” She even speaks of “my patients on death row.” And when she presses a lawyer’s letter on him, she quotes from it while he reads it, lest he miss the most offensive parts: