The Drowned Man (34 page)

“Pascal, you've met Leander Greenwell, am I right?”

“Casually. As a book dealer, he courts the academic community.”

“Would you be willing to try again at his shop tomorrow? I don't think he'll talk to me.” Pascal had found the store shuttered the first time he had investigated. The professor raised his coffee cup in a form of salute. He was in a good mood now that he was being formally invited into the investigation.

Peter enlarged on his request. “I don't believe Greenwell murdered Carpenter. Whether he was involved in the scam, I don't know.”

“I agree. Leander is not a killer,” Pascal said.

“Keep it as light as possible. Slip in a question about the firebombing of Club Parallel.”

They looked at each other and sipped their coffee. Peter saw that the academic understood what he really wanted.

“The girl, Alida, tried to sell the letters to an American collector. You think maybe she'll try to sell them back to Greenwell?”

“Possibly. But I'm interested in
any
theories Greenwell may have. I think she got to Greenwell that night. If she's made contact with him since, I need to know. Only Greenwell can tell us what happened.”

The street lamps down at the end of the road blinked off in anticipation of the sunrise.

Renaud's meeting with Leander Greenwell never happened. Friday afternoon — it must have been about 2 p.m., Peter and Pascal agreed — the book dealer committed suicide by slashing his wrists in the bathtub in the lavatory above his shop. Pascal came into the living room, where Peter was grinding through the latest email of clippings from Maddy, and even before Pascal spoke Peter read the tragedy in his face.

“Greenwell?” he guessed.

“Cut his wrists.”

Pascal had tried to visit the book dealer that very morning. A morbid thought now occurred to Peter: Renaud might have been standing at the entrance to the store about the time Leander was preparing to slit his veins.

“I could have stopped it,” Pascal said.

He walked over to the front window, where the sun was streaming in. Peter recognized his need to enter a bright space; it was a common reaction to the claustrophobia of guilt. Later, grief would drive the guilty into the shadows.

“How did you hear the news, Pascal?”

The transcript of the three Booth letters, which they had planned to review again in light of Olivier Seep's recitations, sat at the end of the table, an unpleasant memento mori.

“Someone called me just now. Georges Keratis found Leander about an hour ago in the bathtub, bled to death. There was no saving him.”

Peter approached quietly. “You tried to see Greenwell. Let's talk about it. I want you to tell me exactly what happened this morning.”

Peter spoke as a friend, only peripherally as a policeman. He was thankful that Pascal hadn't been drinking; the professor now eyed the tray of liqueurs on the sideboard. Peter moved aside the papers on the table and sat his friend down on the chair across from him.

Pascal composed himself. “Step by step? I left here at ten o'clock. I walked over to his store, arriving at eleven or so. It's a long way but I like to walk. I found everything locked up, the blinds upstairs pulled down . . .”

“Did you try the doorknob?” Peter interjected.

“Yes, I did. Locked. There was also a sign in the window saying the store was closed. The feeling of the house was cold. I'm not saying that nobody was in there but the building felt as if it had been shut for a long time. The bookshop is on the main floor and the top half is one apartment.”

“You rang the bell. Did you knock?”

Peter remained patient, watching the horror of Pascal's timing sink in. “I rang the bell but you know, Peter, I didn't hear it ring inside. I should have knocked. I should have knocked
hard
.”

“Leander disabled the bell,” Peter said.

“I watched the store from across the street for about fifteen minutes.”

“Did you see anyone else approach the shop?”

Pascal focused but his concentration turned to puzzlement as shock skewed his memory. “I guess not . . . No, no one.”

“No. You couldn't have known.”

Pascal looked up, in tears. “But it's what I did next, Peter.” There was a pause. “Peter, you know that I'm gay?”

Peter seldom lied but he did so now, telling himself that lying was the tribute one paid to friendship. “Yes, I know.”

“I'd met Georges casually. I know, I should have told you earlier in the interests of full disclosure. It hadn't been my intention to make contact with him, but I guess I was excited. I went looking for him after I left the store.”

“More likely you were concerned about Leander,” Peter said sympathetically.

“I thought he might know where Leander had gone. He also might have a theory on the Club Parallel arson, I thought. I walked over to his apartment on St. Denis.”

“What did Georges say?”

Pascal leaned back in the chair. He exhaled loudly. Tears coursed down his face. “That's the thing, Peter. He said hardly anything. Wouldn't speculate on what happened at the club. Just said the owner is determined to reopen. He said he would drop by Leander's shop to check on him. You see, I'm the reason Georges went over there. If I had arrived at Georges's place earlier, if I hadn't waited across the street or if I'd taken a cab, he might have reached Leander in time.”

Peter wanted more details but there was a proper pace at which to debrief a witness, he well knew. He went to the sideboard.

“You need a drink.”

The front doorbell rang at seven thirty and instinct told Peter that it was Deroche. His arrival at the townhouse had been just a matter of time.

Renaud was upstairs taking a shower — Peter had allowed him only two shots of brandy — when Peter opened the front door. Deroche did not smile.

“When did you arrive in Montreal?” Deroche said, as Peter led him into the living room.

“Yesterday. I have no official status.”

“Oh, really? That's not what Mr. Counter tells me.”

Peter gave a strained laugh. He wondered if Sir Stephen had told Frank Counter to give Peter some slack — enough to hang himself? “What did he tell you, Sylvain?”

“Not a lot. You're here under orders from Monsieur Bartleben? I have the impression Counter doesn't like you much. I tried to tell him you are pretty good with a Taser . . .”

“Lord, I hope not.” Peter imagined Frank Counter recoiling as the Sûreté inspector related the saga of the shoot-'em-up at Caparza's. They had agreed to downplay the story.

Deroche looked around the room. He was restless, as usual. He kept his long raincoat on and paced the living room. A mischievous look came over his face.

“Counter said he would ‘be in touch by email' with you soon.”

Peter went over to the computer and found Frank Counter's fresh message: “Malloway left for Montreal this morning.”

When Peter turned back he found Deroche slumped in a leather chair. As usual, Peter couldn't tell whether he was beginning a shift, or just ending one.

“I came to interview Professor Renaud.”

“He's upstairs. He told me he saw Georges Keratis earlier today.”

“I know. Keratis told me. I want to hear Renaud's version. It was definitely suicide but why would Greenwell do that, Peter?”

“If you want, we can wait for the professor to come down. Avoid repeating ourselves.”

Deroche frowned. “We won't be repeating ourselves, Chief Inspector. I simply want to talk to you first.”

“Did he leave a note?” Peter said, hoping to control the discussion. He wondered if Deroche suspected Pascal Renaud of foul play.

“No note, Peter. It was an act of despair. I like the French word better,
désespoir
. He bled to death in his bath, alone.”

They were talking policeman-to-policeman. Both men had encountered suicides and there was nothing sadder. Deroche wouldn't be repeating the bathtub details to Renaud.

Peter saw that Deroche was waiting for something.

“Sylvain, it's the arson at Club Parallel that's bothering you, am I right?”

“Do you mean, did I get my wish?”

“All mafia, all the time,” reflected Peter. “Are you saying it's the same bunch that's been attacking the Rizzutos?”

“I don't know. Even the mafia needs a reason to torch a business. I see no connection between the mob and the death of Mr. Carpenter.”

“Or Greenwell?”

Deroche's demeanour turned secretive and grim. “Whoever torched the place, they were sending a threat Greenwell's way, and he knew what it meant. This was a mob attack, Peter. He obviously feared they would kill him. Do you see a connection to Carpenter's death? Something to do with those Civil War letters?”

“Doubtful.” He had reached a Rubicon with Deroche. Crossing it would mean that he wanted to be a player in Deroche's epic obsession with la Cosa Nostra. All mafia all the time. Peter hedged. “But there might be some link to gambling syndicates in Europe and Asia.”

Deroche wasn't stupid. “Asia? The Indian woman is the connection?”

“Too soon to tell.”

“Where is she?”

Peter gave a brief summary of Alida's travels to Washington and Buffalo, and the sting operation at the Gorman. He wondered if his account jibed with the story furnished by Malloway and Counter.

“I don't know where the girl is. I wish I knew,” Peter said.

Sylvain continued. “Leander wanted, above all, to protect Georges. He was removing himself from the picture. For some reason, the mafia is — was — after Leander.”

They heard Renaud moving about upstairs, so Deroche finished his private questions.

“Peter, I read the copies of the three letters you provided. Were they important enough to kill for?”

“I think that Carpenter was murdered for them. They could bring fifty to eighty thousand or more on the market.”

Deroche grunted, dissatisfied with everything.

Pascal came downstairs and the inspector's interrogation moved briskly. Neither man seemed to mind that Peter remained for the interview. The few new facts that Peter learned were significant, although he did not yet know how they fit in the puzzle. Coincidentally, minutes after Pascal gave up his vigil at the bookshop, Georges Keratis called Leander but got no answer. When Pascal arrived at the flat and explained his efforts to find Leander, Georges rushed over to the shop. Both Pascal and Georges had reason to feel guilty, for persistence by either of them that morning might have interrupted Leander at a fatal decision point.

Deroche disclosed that Club Parallel had never been bothered before by the mafia, and the owners were not paying out protection money. Pascal remained contrite but could add little more.

The inspector delivered one more surprise at the end of the half-hour interview. “As you probably know, someone beat up Georges Keratis a few days ago. His boss went to the police on Georges's behalf. In effect, we didn't offer much help at the time. I owe something to Georges and Leander.”

The next morning, Peter rose to find that Renaud had already gone out. His scrawled note on the kitchen counter said that he had been invited to brunch by a university colleague, but to Peter it sounded like an excuse. Pascal had become as restless as Peter. He had drunk a third of a bottle of Johnny Walker the night before, which would have poleaxed Peter. He just hoped that his friend wasn't out there playing detective.

Peter had his own difficulties, although a hangover wasn't one of them. Greenwell's suicide had clarified nothing. He began to pace from the kitchen to the living room and back. No brainwave arrived. He had finally mastered Pascal's coffeemaker and he prepared a large pot in anticipation of a long wait for something to break. He booted up the desktop
PC
. Although Maddy had sent no new clippings on the cricket scandal, he still had plenty from Friday to read. It was Saturday and he imagined Michael ordering Maddy (if that were possible) to cease and desist for at least one day.

When he finished scrolling through the morning's news, he minimized his browser and saw that a new email had arrived. He shut down the web page he was reading and saw that Special Commissioner Souma had sent him a message. The subject line read, “Info Request: Regional Profile.” Peter knew that the heading was intentionally meaningless. Souma had understood that he was sending intelligence to an unsecured mail server and had reframed the information to make it seem innocuous.

The chap known as the Sword was a Pakistani national of Vietnamese heritage and was familiar to police in the Far East and India. He ran an international gambling operation, which indiscriminately exploited football, cricket, field hockey, and horse racing. No nation had managed to convict him but he had a police record in several jurisdictions. The problem was that he was everywhere and nowhere, flitting around a dozen countries. Souma's in-house conclusion was that the best hope for trapping the Sword was probably a corruption charge, based on a mix of regulatory and criminal violations. The email made no explicit connections to the Mayfair Hotel caper. The Sword was still small time but coming up faster than the police liked to see. The most disturbing thing, Souma appended, was the Sword's proactive efforts to hook up with European syndicates, including the Sicilian mafia.

Peter shut down the computer and contemplated another stroll along the canal. He ruminated on the chances that Malloway had arrived in Montreal, and a fresh idea came to him. Before leaving the condo, he Googled the website of
Le Devoir
and found Olivier Seep's speech. Peter had failed to spy a reporter in the audience. He'd thought Seep's lecture lacked fire and was hardly worth highlighting, but Pascal had commented presciently that, with mounting political tensions leading up to the Parti Québécois convention in the spring, the press would attend. Apparently they had been trawling the rhetoric of the ambitious Professor Seep for escalations of his favourite theme, the perfidy of the Anglos. The news report provided a verbatim quote from the Williams letter. Peter wrote it down, intending to compare this version later with Nicola's.

He wandered down to the Atwater Market for a
pain au chocolat
and another coffee, and ended up finishing his snack on a bench by the canal. He realized that he was becoming obsessed with Dunning Malloway; he told himself that there was no professional rivalry involved. Peter had earlier surmised that Malloway was after Alida Nahvi because he was convinced that she had the letters with her. But was the flipside true? Did Malloway believe that Hilfgott and her precious letters were useful because they offered a path to Alida? Was Alida the only target here?

At the edge of the canal, Peter looked down and imagined Renaud jumping into the dark pool. Water was everywhere, Peter mused: the Lachine Canal, the Anacostia, the Niagara, and now the self-inflicted death of an old book dealer in his bath.

Peter's first mentor at New Scotland Yard, so many years ago, was an old hand named John Case. Case had recruited Peter. He was acerbic and never became flustered, but his self-control wasn't icy or dismissive. He was elegant and his instruction moulded gentlemen policemen, investigators who were polite and kept the exact distance from witnesses required both to win their confidence and slightly intimidate them. At first, Peter found this posture unfeeling, but as Case himself was a consistently upbeat, warm companion, Peter adopted the model and came to learn that empathy with witnesses was tactically useful.

On this subject, John Case had once told him, “There will come a time when witnesses may start coming to
you
. Count yourself lucky when this happens. Some will be pleading, some will claim to have solved the case and still others will be on your doorstep demanding that you arrest one of the other witnesses. Nobody knows why this happens. It doesn't always. Don't let it inflate your ego. And don't be too frigid with your supplicants: they want something from you and they may arrive despising you for not solving the puzzle faster. To them, you are a bureaucrat and when has a bureaucrat ever moved fast enough?”

Case had paused at this point. By now, he would have hung up his suit coat on the rack, shot his cuffs, and snapped his braces, all preliminary to lighting up his thin, burled walnut pipe and delivering the punch line: “And don't forget this, Peter. They may have dropped by with the intention of killing you.”

Returning to the condo, Peter caught sight of Neil Brayden standing on Pascal Renaud's front steps. A visit from Deroche, or even Malloway, was one thing, but Brayden was truly the Unexpected Guest. He wore a narrow-lapelled suit, a thin black tie, and a white shirt that made him appear more than ever the chauffeur. Peter couldn't imagine why he had come. The roles had been cast. Brayden had thrown in his lot with Nicola Hilfgott, and whether or not Nicola was doomed, it was too late for shows of disloyalty.

Peter recalled John Case's lecture: be cool, not cold.

Brayden offered a plangent smile, something Peter hadn't seen before. “Nicola and Malloway were up all night,” he said.

“And you were, too?” Peter said.

“Yeah, well . . . Can I come in?”

Peter led the way into the living room. He shut down the computer while Brayden waited. In the kitchen he poured the last of the coffee into a mug for Brayden; he was pretty sure he took it black.

Peter didn't trust him. There was a type of witness who always told the truth but not enough of it. This was Brayden. He had yet to lie to Peter but the problem with him was his notion of loyalty. Neil Brayden was chauffeur, point man, and adviser to a woman who would run over her husband's grandmother with a golf cart if it helped her career. Brayden was also Nicola's enforcer and her lover.

“Nicola has gone too far,” he said, after taking a chair.

“When did Malloway arrive?” Peter said.

“Yesterday afternoon. She insisted on picking him up herself at the airport. Came back straight to the house in Westmount, closeted themselves in her study until 2 a.m.”

Peter did not ask how Brayden knew all this. If Hilfgott had shut him out and presumably dismissed him, how did he end up at her mansion that late in the evening? The answer was clear enough: Brayden, feeling betrayed by his superior, had found an excuse to watch from the shadows of the residence, monitoring his boss and Dunning Malloway. Jealousy was in play.

“I'm in a bind and I'll admit it, Peter. Now, I won't put
you
in a bind by telling you things that you might have to report back to London.”

Brayden was whining. Peter's first thought was:
Thinking what I'm thinking about you, I won't turn you in to London. I'll shoot you right here myself.
But he was unprepared for the grim farce that followed.

“Nicola came to me this morning, a couple of hours ago, and gave me an order. I swear that I don't intend to obey it. She wants me to beat up Professor Olivier Seep.”

“Why would that serve her purposes?”

“She wants to know where the girl and the original letters are. She thinks he knows.”

Peter then realized what had panicked Nicola. She had seen the
Le Devoir
report with its direct quote from the Williams letter, and she understood that there were only two ways Seep could have obtained the authentic original: by making a deal with Alida or by taking it from Carpenter himself.

Brayden turned his palms up in wonderment and frustration. “It gets worse. This morning she ordered me to drive Malloway back to his hotel.”

Peter marvelled at Nicola's gall, shutting out Brayden and then forcing him to kowtow to Malloway, whom she had just slept with. There was only one explanation: Dunning requested that Neil drive him.

“He wanted something from you, am I right?” Peter said.

“He asked me to approach Georges Keratis and force him to tell me where Greenwell hid the letters, especially the letter from John Wilkes Booth to the general. That's the one that implies there was a French plot to get the Americans into a war over Canada.”

Brayden's talents as an enforcer were in high demand. Peter decided to up the pressure. “Did Malloway know that Nicola wanted you to go after Seep?”

“Yes, but he said the hell with what Nicola wants. I'm caught in the middle, Peter. Malloway thinks Georges knows, via Greenwell, where Alice Nahri went. But don't you get the irony? Nicola wouldn't care if I went after Georges. She's tunnel-visioned where Seep is concerned. Meanwhile Malloway is slandering Nicola to me. Keeps saying she's toast, saying that all that counts is finding the woman, your man's killer.”

Frank Counter had used the same words: Nicola was toast. This was getting to be like the fox, the duck, and the grain crossing the river, Peter thought, with no one to be trusted in the boat with another.

In Peter's reasoning, two deductions could be justified. First, Olivier Seep had one of the three letters in his possession. Otherwise, Nicola would be unlikely to press so hard. Second, Malloway told Neil to interrogate Georges about
Alida's
whereabouts, not the letters. Why? A benign interpretation would be that he wanted Carpenter's killer, a noble and simple goal. Peter didn't believe that.

He considered Brayden and his plea for sympathy. The man might have committed the earlier assault on Georges, and he might have been the one to torch Club Parallel, although Peter doubted that; both attacks smelled of the mafia. Peter could make no promises of immunity from prosecution, or even a sympathetic report back to London on his conduct. As John Case had advised, the witness often wants something the investigator can't bestow.

Unlike Sir Stephen Bartleben, Peter was never proud of his Machiavellian urges. But from time to time he indulged them.

“Here's what I think you should do. You can't go near Georges Keratis for any reason. Inspector Deroche has offered him police protection. Stay away from him.”

“The firebombing?” A look of gratitude came over Brayden's face.

“Yes. Deroche feels guilty about police treatment of Georges, and probably Greenwell, too. His people will be watching him. Inform Malloway you can't get close to Georges. That is absolutely all you tell him. And don't tell him I said hello.”

“And what about Nicola?” Brayden said.

Peter fixed him with a hard look.

“Be sure of this. Nicola is officially in the bad books of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. The High Commissioner finally agrees that she's gone too far in this pissing match with Seep. Her instruction to you shows how far she'll go. You will have to tell her you refuse to approach Seep. The worst thing she can do is send you home. Nicola thinks everyone should hunger for those letters, so let her blather on.”

The discussion came to an end. They both felt like gossips tattling on their colleagues.

After the very chastened Brayden left the townhouse, Peter killed time by reading and sorting the stack of clippings that sat by the computer, hoping the effort of mindless classification might produce some gestalt.

The busywork was also his way of delaying an update to Bartleben. Peter was Sherman, on his own in hostile Georgia. But it wasn't a bad feeling.

Deciding on yet another walk to the canal, he brought along one of Pascal's cigarettes. As he smoked, he paused at the spot where Carpenter had tumbled in, noting that the crime scene had reverted to former uses, with cigarette butts clumped at the edge of the waterway and candy wrappers flattened on the grass. Oil from the twice-daily passage of the short-haul factory train continued to leech up from the rail bed. Peter looked around and tried to conjure up the murder scenario. He walked around the empty fringe of lawn and along the asphalt path; the farther he got from the canal, the more ominous the watery trench loomed behind him. The wrappers, the discarded plastic bottles, and the crumpled smokes formed a pattern, he did not doubt, but one that only a physicist would dare to compile. He had read in a magazine about how the Lego company had set up a website that allowed a child to submit a design for, say, a castle or a dinosaur or a petrol station. The Lego people would convert the mock-up to a Lego structure and send back a package of blocks so that the kid could build his fantasy. Peter liked the idea that the final structure — dreamed up by a child — presaged the gathering of its elements. He wanted to submit the design of this killing and have someone send back all the pieces. He waited for the wrappers, the cigarettes, the plastic bottles, and even the shine on the rails to draw themselves together spontaneously, predestined into a natural, if warped, whole; a Frank Gehry castle or a trash dinosaur — or a murder. He turned around to the water and nodded a respectful acknowledgement to John Carpenter's spirit.

Pascal stamped into the house that evening and announced that his previous night's consumption of scotch had caught up to him and he was taking a nap.