Julian (22 page)

I also found it hard to believe the suits were part of the amateur-hour watchers group. Still, nothing fit. There was only one person who could connect the dots for me.

His car pulled into the driveway thirty minutes later.

A
S IT TURNED OUT
, two cars rolled up to the garage—identical models, each driven by a chauffeur in a peaked cap.

When Chang came into the apartment he found his ward at my kitchen table holding a mug of tea in a trembling hand. Chang shook hands with him, firing off a few questions in Chinese as he pulled up a chair for himself. He sounded respectful, not as smooth as he had been with Mr. Bai on my visit to Bai’s office above the restaurant, but close. Charr, his chin quivering, replied at length, nodding in my direction a few times.

Chang turned to me. “It is imperative that we move our guest immediately. I arranged the cars as quickly as I could. He will be in one of them, out of sight. The other is a decoy.”

“Which gives the bad guys a fifty-fifty chance of picking the right one and following it,” I countered. “That’s if they
have only one vehicle. If they have two, your plan collapses.”

Chang nodded. “I have thought of that but I was only able to—”

“There’s another way.”

I must admit I enjoyed seeing his eyebrows rise, silently asking me what I had in mind.

So I told him.

Then I turned off the light.

It took only a few minutes to go downstairs and help Charr gather his possessions—a few articles of clothing, which he jammed into a small suitcase together with his remaining cigarettes and two of the novels he had borrowed but hadn’t read yet. As we left his room I switched his light off.

“No, this way,” I said when he turned toward the door to the garage. “Back upstairs.”

He and I sat together in my darkened kitchen, Charr clutching the handle of the suitcase resting on his knees. Below, I heard car doors open and close. I went to the window, keeping out of sight as I peered around the frame. The sedans, one after the other, reversed into the road and sped away in opposite directions. In one of them, Chang would be crouching out of sight behind the front seats. The other car would have no passenger.

The plan was for Charr and me to wait half an hour. I felt sorry for him, not knowing where he was bound, forced to trust a stranger less than half his age. Then he did something that showed me he was a survivor no matter how scared he was. He opened the suitcase and took out a pack of smokes and a well-worn deck of cards secured with an elastic band. He held the cigarettes up.

“
Ke yi ma?
I may?”

“Just this once.”

He smiled and lit up. “I teach you Chinese game.”

“Okay.”

I hate card games, but anything was better than sitting anxiously in the dark watching a scared fugitive chain-smoke. The game was like blackjack, or twenty-one, but the object was to take turns slapping down cards, counting up the accumulating value in your head and blurting out the total before the other guy did. In the unlit room we read the cards as best we could and whispered the points totals.

When the time came I picked up my cell, keyed in the number I had looked up earlier, gave some instructions and ended the call.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Charr snapped the elastic around his cards and stowed them, checked the suitcase latches, got up and ran his cigarette under the faucet. I led the way downstairs and through the garage and out the pedestrian door, first checking for movement on the misty street. The humidity muffled city night noises, even a siren wailing in the distance. The plan was to make use of the unlit lane that ran behind the yards on my street. The lane had been put in years before, when the neighbourhood was built, to provide access to the detached garages behind the houses. Charr and I would head south, crossing four or five yards, then cut out into the lane.

We set out, and soon ran into our first problem—a fence that I knew about but hadn’t realized would be such a challenge for a not very tall, middle-aged fugitive.

“Wait till I’m across, then give me the suitcase and follow me,” I whispered.

I vaulted the wooden barrier. Charr handed the case over and attempted to haul himself up and over, got high enough to balance on his chest. He grunted and puffed as his shoes scrabbled on the boards.

“Wait,” I said, hopping back across.

I made a footrest by interlacing my fingers. Charr got the idea and made it to the top, teetered awkwardly, then dropped like a sack of bricks to the other side.

“Oof!” he said.

“Shhh!”

I found him crouching on all fours in a flower bed. A dog barked. Then another. We froze. Charr, wide-eyed, looked about.

“I afraid dogs,” he whispered.

“Don’t worry, they’re not close,” I assured him. “Let’s go.”

Four more fences and a sprained ankle later, we sneaked down a driveway between two houses and came out onto the lane, Charr limping and clutching my arm. I toted his suitcase, flashing back to my escape with Wesley. We made it to the intersection of a side street and the lane, where a taxi was waiting, lights out, engine off.

I pulled open the rear door.

“You’re late,” the cabbie grumbled. “I was gettin’ ready to pull out.”

I helped Charr into the cab and laid the little suitcase on his lap. He gripped it as if it was a lifebelt.

“You have the destination, right?” I asked the driver, handing some bills across the seat to him.

“Yep.”

I patted Charr on the shoulder, and he grabbed my hand and squeezed it before letting go.

I checked with the cabbie. “The directions are clear?”

“As a bell. What is this guy, a spy or somethin’?”

Watching the cab start up and pull away I muttered, “I wish I knew.”

I killed an hour and a half watching a late-night movie, drumming my fingers on my thigh, before I phoned the cut-out. I’d never seen Chang show any kind of mood, emotion or fatigue—but when he replied, he sounded weary.

“Yes, Julian.”

“I just wanted to be sure that Charr—that the guest made it safely.”

“He did.”

I waited for more, but it didn’t come.

“You weren’t going to let me know, were you?
I
had to call
you
.”

“Everything has been taken care of.”

“I was worried about him.”

“You needn’t concern yourself, Julian. But thank you for your help,” he said stiffly.

A hot flush bloomed in my neck and face. Not concern myself? I had no idea what was happening right where I lived. I could be in danger—from cops or spies or crooks, I didn’t know. The so-called guests—especially Charr—could be under threat. And the guy with the answers apparently didn’t think I deserved any kind of explanation.

Chang’s offhand, phony politeness stuck like a bone in my throat.

Be the painter, I told myself.

“Was there something else, Julian?”

“I want a meeting with Mr. Bai,” I blurted.

Pause.

“Mr. Bai is quite busy these days. Perhaps—”

“No, Mr. Chang,” I cut in. “No ‘perhaps.’ Definitely. You are my contact with Mr. Bai and I’m telling you I want a meeting with him.”

I heard a great sigh at the other end. Or did Chang’s second-long pause cause me to imagine it?

“All right, Julian, I’ll do my best.”

Another brush-off.

“If I don’t hear back from you in, let’s say, two days, I’ll come over to Mr. Bai’s office myself. And I won’t leave until I see him.”

This time
I
cut the connection.

As soon as I put down my cell I began to second-guess what I’d done. If I pushed Mr. Bai he might get angry. This might not be my home anymore. I might have to leave my job. I’d lose the only security I had.

On the other hand, I felt relief, a thawing of the tension that had been gathering for a long time. I had allowed myself to slide backward after vowing that I would change my life for good and refuse to stand on the sidelines. Now I was back on track. I would go to Mr. Bai and demand some answers. And if his solemn promise to me had meant anything, I’d get them.

I
WORKED LATER THAN USUAL
the next day, arriving home mid-afternoon with an empty stomach and a case of the jitters. Thoughts of Ninon and my status with Mr. Bai endlessly bounced off one another. I took a longer run than usual, pushing hard so I’d be tired and able to sleep. Afterwards I showered and ate an early supper, then found a not-too-stupid movie on TV, forcing myself to stay awake until it was over. Before I turned in I checked the street for watchers but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

I hardly ever remember my dreams, but in a nightmare that night I found myself at the rink, flying down the ice, the rasp of my skate blades in my ears, my stickhandling a blur as I sidestepped bodychecks, hurtling toward the net. All of my teammates, a row of blank faces, watched silently from the bench. I swept to the left wing, the goalie slipping across the crease, tracking me. Then I pivoted, zipped back
to centre, and when the goalie reacted I drilled a slapshot aimed high to the corner of the net.

But my stick broke and the puck dribbled straight to the netminder.

The dream recycled. I missed again and again, in exactly the same way. I read my failure in the faces in the crowd.

The dream cut to another scene—a penalty shot. I circled to build up speed, then came straight in on goal and flicked a wrist shot. Dead on target. Goal! A bell rang. But the red light didn’t come on. The puck bounced off the mesh and ricocheted right back out to my stick. Impossible! A bell rang every time I shot and scored, but the net always spat back the puck.

“Why is there a bell?” I asked myself, circling to renew the attack. “There’s no bell in hockey!”

My eyes popped open. Heart thudding, I propped myself up on one elbow. In the living room, my Curtis cell was ringing. I scrambled from the bed and ran to the phone, pushed the green button.

“Is this Julian?”

A male voice. Familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to it. I shook the last images of the dream from my head. “Who is this?” I demanded.

“Are you Julian?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m calling for Ninon. She needs you. Better hurry.”

The taxi picked its way along dark empty streets toward the lake. It passed through shadowy pools under wide bridges
and tangles of roads and ramps. It crossed desolate stretches of flat land where the bulk of an occasional building loomed above dimly lit streets. The driver drew to a halt in the middle of a block. Ahead, the road dead-ended at a stretch of hurricane fence with dark horizontal space behind it. A canal of some sort, I guessed. On one side of the road cranes reared into the moonless sky beside some sort of half-completed warehouse or factory; on the other was an open space of unlit and unused land with a few trees where a tiny light prickled in the distance.

From my shirt pocket I pulled the scrap of paper with the scribbled directions I had been given over the phone.

“This is it?” I asked.

“Yeah. We just crossed the intersection you mentioned. The south side, you said.”

“Can you wait?”

The cabbie scanned the surrounding area. “Not for long.”

I got out and looked around, heard a thump as the taxi’s door locks engaged. Not a human form to be seen, not a vehicle on the poorly illuminated roads. A sustained hiss of light traffic on the elevated expressway behind me. Unsure of where to search, I began to walk toward the flickering light, passing through long, dry grass strewn with litter, into the spindly, ragged-looking trees. Closer, the light turned out to be a small campfire. Four silent figures sat on logs, hunched around the crackling blaze, its light glimmering on their lowered faces. Along with woodsmoke I smelled cigarettes, weed, wine.

Someone hissed, “Over here.”

I followed the sound, finding a crude shelter made from a tarp stretched between trees. The shape standing beside it was one of the chess players from Grange Park. His clothing smelled of liquor and cigarettes.

“Where is she?” I asked.

He nodded to the dark space under the lean-to. “There.”

Dropping to my knees, I crawled under the tarp. I made out the forms of two figures stretched out next to a bundle of clothes, giving out soft snores. I peered at them, barely able to make out their faces. One was the second chess player; the other, a woman I didn’t recognize.

“She’s not here,” I said. “Is this some kind of—”

“That’s her, right there,” the guy insisted, pointing at the heap of clothes.

I crawled a few feet farther. I heard a cough. Ninon was wrapped in her camo jacket, knees to chest, head tucked down, shivering despite the warm evening. Bits of dried leaves speckled her tangled hair. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her chapped lips slightly parted, and she was breathing raggedly. The odour of dried vomit and sweat seeped from her clothes.

I turned on the chess player, but he held up his hand, cutting me off.

“Cool it, man. She wouldn’t let us do nothing for her, or take her anywheres. You know what she’s like. She’s been here—what, a few days? Wouldn’t go to the mission. Or couldn’t. Then tonight she digs a phone number out of that bag of hers and asks me to call. I’m sorry, man. We done all we could. She’s bad sick.”

I slipped my arms under Ninon’s body and got to my
feet. She was as light as a little girl. Her head lolled against my chest as I set off.

“Hold up!” said the chess player. He laid Ninon’s satchel on her stomach.

The taxi was waiting just where I’d left it. When the driver saw me coming he hopped out and opened the back door. I put Ninon on the seat and ran around to the other side, got in and put my arm around her.

“Julian,” she said, her whisper raspy and weak. “I knew you’d come.”

And she drifted away again.

I took her home, thinking the hospital Emergency ward was probably crowded and the wait for help would be long. They might think Ninon was just another addict. At my house there was a nurse right upstairs.

I paid off the cab and carried Ninon to my apartment and laid her on the sofa, a pillow under her head. I brought her a tumbler of water but she managed only a few sips. Then I ran upstairs and tapped on Fiona’s door.