Crazy Lady (8 page)

What do you want? What are you looking for?

“I want answers,” he says as he peers across the promontory for signs of the dark château that dragged him into the mystery in the first place.

Greg Grimes, a potter with piercing blue eyes and bushy blonde hair who threw little pots on a wheel every evening on the promenade, was the trigger. He was scruffy and unshaved, but he had a certain magnetism that drove women wild. Bliss would stand most summer evenings in the balmy air, watching in wonder as the English artisan moulded ceramic white elephants — midget ashtrays, egg cups, vases, and candle holders — for a google-eyed audience of women.

“It is free,
gratuit
,” the charismatic potter would say as he offered each freshly minted gem to a different young woman, but his begging bowl always overflowed, until someone roughly amputated his hand one night and left him to the rats in the Château Roger's basement.

That was more than a year ago, and although the stores are filled with pots from Picasso's town of Vallauris, high on the hill above St-Juan-sur-Mer, none carry with them the love that Grimes infused into his tiny masterpieces. However, the lustre on a floppy wet clay pot quickly wears off, and most of the little treasures that warmed a heart one evening would be flushed down the hotel toilet by the next morning. And with much of the plumbing dating back almost to Napoleon, the entire system would be gummed up in no time.

Bliss's suggestion that the hoteliers should affix a notice to each toilet was dismissed with typical Gallic disdain as “
autant pisser dans un violon
,” or as much use as pissing into a violin, and irate members of L'ssociation des hôteliers de St-Juan were the prime suspects in the potter's mutilation. However, as Bliss was to discover, a much more sinister organization took the man's hand.

I have to go back in there
, Bliss tells himself with little enthusiasm as he stares in the direction of the building. He knows that it won't be easy; since his previous incursion more than a year ago in search of the wounded potter, the custodians have redoubled their efforts to keep trespassers out. But inwardly, he knows that it isn't the security guards bothering him. He knows he can walk the twisted hills surrounding the château and expect only polite nods from the muscled men in dark suits while they whisper, “Zhat is the famous Scotland Yard detective who is writing a book.”

Bothering him are the thousands of tortured souls that he stumbled over in the dungeons beneath the derelict building: souls of resistance fighters, Jews, gypsies, and anyone else who stepped on Adolf Hitler's toes. Even inconvenient husbands, ex-lovers, or business rivals, denounced as “traitors to the fatherland” with poison pens, were whisked out of their beds at dawn with a one-way ticket to Auschwitz or Buchenwald — if they survived the first stop in the château's notorious torture chambers.

The château hides itself in the darkness as Bliss questions,
What am I trying to prove? The widows and orphans of the victims don't want me prying into their cellars; they don't want an invasion of neo-nazi relic hunters digging up their past.

“
Ce château et un panier des crabes
, a basket of crabs,” Daisy claimed, and none of his discoveries changed that. But now, as he flounders in search of an ending for his novel, he can't help thinking that the ruined château holds the key.

Vancouver, British Columbia, has its share of derelict buildings, though none whose age or black history comes close to the Château Roger. However, no more than a salmon's leap from the waterfront hotels and glitzy restaurants that line the Fraser River is an abandoned warehouse
that attracts the losers in life's lottery. Potheads, hookers, mainliners, pimps, and alcoholics all seek shelter from a harsh world under its leaking iron roof, while a shanty city of those still holding out hope grows outside its walls.

“Let's try down there,” suggests Trina, dragging her husband into a tight alleyway littered with boxes and bags, the homes of the homeless, behind the warehouse.

Rick hangs back, “I don't —”

“Come on. They're only people,” she calls as she surges ahead with a five-dollar bill in hand.

“I'm looking for a woman,” says Trina as she squats by the side of an aging Jesus look-alike.

“So am I,” he replies as the embers in his eyes briefly ignite, and he begins to reach out for her face.

Trina nudges him, laughing. “Cheeky.” Then she gives him a brief description of Janet.

“Maybe,” he says at the mention of Janet's head scarf, and Trina catches on.

“How much?” she begins, exchanging her five for a twenty, but Rick is quickly on her shoulder.

“Don't,” he hisses. “Not until he tells you.”

“OK,” she says. She rips the bill in half, thrusts the Queen's head into the dropout's face, and puts on a mobster's tone. “The rest when I find her, awl'right?”

“Brilliant,” complains Rick five minutes later when all the leads have fizzled and the bum has taken off.

“So? He hasn't got the dough.”

“Neither have we,” Rick is moaning when Trina spots a pile of cardboard boxes against a brick outhouse and senses a presence.

“Shh…” she whispers, pulls Janet's crucifix from her bag, and gingerly advances like a vampire hunter. “Janet?” she coos. “Janet?” A brown head scarf appears.

The chase is short. Janet is too weak to struggle, and as Trina escorts her towards the car she says soothingly, “Don't worry. We won't tell the police where you are.”

Behind her, playing backstop, Rick mutters under his breath, “You could get us five years for this.”

Rick Button's warning seems likely to come to fruition the moment they take Janet into their house and Kylie sings out, “Mum, Dad, police on the phone.”

“Let me,” says Trina, grabbing it from her husband, but she instantly relaxes. “It's only Mike Phillips,” she says with her hand over the mouthpiece as the inspector explains that he's been in touch with an officer who specializes in cults and sects.

“You know the sort of thing,” he elucidates. “Twenty-year-old heiress runs off and gives everything to God, who turns out to be some freaky-haired junkie with a Bible.”

“I don't think Janet has anything —” Trina begins, but he cuts her off.

“Not now she doesn't. That's my point. But she may have done. Anyway, Officer Zelke wants to talk to you.”

“Hey,” shouts Rob from the basement as he turns up the volume on the television. “It sounds like the stick insect.”

“The RCMP and Vancouver police are searching for a woman wanted in the death of one of their own…”

“Turn it off,” shouts Rick, but Janet seems oblivious as she caresses her crucifix and rocks herself comfortingly on a kitchen chair.

“What makes you think she's from a cult?” Trina questions Paul Zelke from the quiet of her bedroom a few minutes later.

“Daena,” he asks succinctly. “Is that what she calls herself?”

“Yeah. Daena XV.”

“Thought so. There's a whole bunch of women in a joint they call Beautiful and they all reckon they're Daena. It's a religious freak show, usual stuff: polygamy, incest, child abuse. All ordained from on high, all in the Bible. But so is stoning gays and adulteresses to death, though we kinda frown on that today.”

“Why do you think Janet is from there?”

“We got a call a couple of days ago from the jerk who runs the place. His name's Wayne Browning, though he calls himself The Saviour. Anyway, he gave a false ID, but we know it was him, and he seemed pretty keen to find her.”

Wayne Browning isn't keen on finding Janet, he's desperate, and so is Janet's husband, the man who originally sent her there.

“I pay you,” shouts Joseph Creston into the phone. “Keep her there, keep her quiet. Is that such a problem?”

“Forty years,” Browning shoots back. “Yes. And what I've paid you would keep her for another forty. I've funded that place.”

“Yeah, but you've not done so badly out of it.”

“That's not the point. Find her. Get her back.”

“It may not be that easy,” Browning admits before revealing that Creston is not the only one who wants his wife. “She's supposed to have killed a cop.”

The international line goes dead as Creston analyzes the new data and crunches the numbers.

“All right. This may not be bad,” he is saying as he thinks of the very last time that he saw her: a snivelling wretch on the edge of life following the death of her third child. “I love you. I'll always do the best for you,” he said before she was whisked away to be put aboard the company jet. “You'll get help where you are going.”

“Maybe she needs more than you can give her,” he tells Browning. “Maybe they'll help her.”

“She was OK when she wuz here,” complains Browning, seeing Creston's funding slipping away.

“And so she ran away?”

“She's confused, she doesn't know what she's doing or saying, she's kinda lost her mind.”

“Perhaps she needs a psychiatrist?” suggests Creston, then questions himself,
What if she recalls too much?
“What does she remember?” he asks guardedly.

“Hard to tell; all she does is pray.”

“So, the chances are they would think that she is a little unstable?”

“Sir, your wife's a nut. You know that.”

“She's still my wife,” Creston insists sharply, then comes to a decision. “Hire someone… a private detective, a pro, money's no object. I want her kept out of jail. Do you understand?”

“Yep.”

“And I want her found.”

Bliss is still searching, still seeking direction as he prowls the quays and streets of St-Juan-sur-Mer. His manuscript is shrinking daily as he pares off one implausible scene after another while trying to find a point of historical solidity from which to build his ending. His sticking point is that the fortress on the island of Ste. Marguerite, the Fort Royal, wasn't the first prison to house Louis XIV's famous masked prisoner, and neither was it the last.

The sight of the majestic cliff-top building rising out of the Mediterranean stops Bliss as dawn arrives with a crimson slash across the horizon and the sea shifts from cobalt to azure. “That's what I call impressive,” he muses as if the show has been orchestrated just for him.

The smell of hot bread and croissants draws him from the scene to his favourite boulangerie just off the promenade, and as he sidles through the narrow doorway of the ancient bakery, he's salivating. A blonde-haired woman with her mind on her breakfast nearly butts him as she meets him headfirst in the doorway.

“
Pardonnez-moi,
” he mumbles, stepping back.

She glances up momentarily to reply,
“Merci.”

If their eyes meet for a nanosecond neither notices, and Bliss is already at the counter silently practising his order,
Deux croissants, s'il vous plait
, before he feels a tingle of unease.

“Bonjour, monsieur,”
calls Marie, the baker's little wife, her beaming grin barely making it over the mounds of warm bread and pastries.

“Bonjour…”
he begins, though stops abruptly when he finds his gaze locked onto the spiralling coils of a
pain aux raisins
, his mind spinning as he thinks of the woman.

“Monsieur?”
queries the rotund woman with a smile, but he's stuck in the swirling coils of the sticky pastry, trying to fathom who she was.

“And how is zhe writing,
monsieur?
”

Around and around goes his mind — she must be a local, just a familiar face. Then he stops and catches up to Marie. Disastrous; terrible; feel like giving up. The words are there but they won't take shape amid his confusion, then a prod from behind jump-starts him.

“Sorry. Very good, thanks, coming along nicely.”

Marie smiles in relief as she takes his order and adds a complementary shortbread in celebration of his apparent success. “It must be very nice to be famous, is it not?” she continues chattily, happy to practise her English.

“I am not famous,” he protests, but she stops him with a floury hand.

“Here, everyone, they say to me, ‘How is zhe famous number one English writer today?' And I say, ‘He is very good.'” The she leans in closely to add. “But I know zhat you are also zhe detective who finds zhe secret of
l'homme au masque de fer.”

“The Man in the Iron Mask,” murmurs Bliss as he sits on the quay wall eating breakfast, but his mind is still on the woman in the baker's doorway as he looks ahead at the infamous island through a forest of yacht masts.

The flotilla of million-dollar boats, neglected since September, bobs idly in the lazy water of the harbour. It is
a nautical ghost town. Most of the crews have switched uniforms and now serve the same well-heeled masters, this time as lift operators and chalet girls in the alpine ski resorts, although many of the flashier yachts and their owners have followed the sun to the Caribbean or Seychelles.

Thoughts of the woman burn like a slow fuse as Bliss wanders the deserted quays once he's finished eating. “For Sale” signs occasionally pull him up and he muses on the possibility of buying something modest and escaping completely, but he knows that even modesty comes at a premium here. And he's well aware that most of the owners are simply trying to rid themselves of an expensive toy before they are drawn back by the arrival of spring.

“Just one more year, get our money's worth,” they'll convince themselves as they begrudgingly pay for a refit and paint job before hiring a crew.

Bliss scans the boats hoping to glimpse the woman, thinking she could be a crew member, but there are no blondes today. Blondes are the creatures of summer: northern European crew members and ditzy starlets on the make.