The Drowned Man (40 page)

Olivier Seep survived the assaults by Alida Nahvi and Dunning Malloway, but only by about two weeks. Chief Inspector Cammon pieced together the facts from the Sûreté and his own recollections, and added them to his report.

That night at the professor's house, Inspector Deroche, having confirmed the death of Neil Brayden in the yard behind the mansion, rushed to the dining room to investigate the blood-drenched scene. He left two men to minister to the professor while he secured the house. The officers struggled with kitchen towels to staunch Seep's bleeding; it was touch and go for the ten minutes they had to wait, but the medics quickly assured the police officers that Seep would live. The ambulance attendants bundled him off to the closest hospital, the Jewish General, where Seep was aware enough to take umbrage when the emergency room staff began talking to him in English; by the time they switched to French to accommodate him, he had passed out. His foot was put in a cast and his bruises and multiple abrasions were treated. Two cuts on his chest, one under each nipple, were minimized on the chart as non-life-threatening injuries. The resident gave him Demerol, which had the odd effect of both reviving him and sickening him. He threw up three teeth.

The professor's wounds stabilized rapidly, so that by the beginning of the second week he began to agitate to be sent home. By then he had also scheduled dental surgery.

Inspector Deroche visited the hospital every day for the first week. Peter advised him to lay charges immediately but Deroche hesitated. Finally, at the end of week one, the inspector concluded that Seep had no connection to organized crime, and turned his full focus on the Carpenter murder charge. Seep clammed up. Confession was not in the separatist's curriculum plan. Deroche proceeded with the paperwork based on charges of second-degree murder and criminal negligence by drowning.

As time diluted Deroche's momentum — the
procureur
général
referred to the body of evidence as Swiss cheese and was reluctant to proceed — Seep improved enough to be shuttled home to his house with a private nurse. He broke into tears as she wheeled him through his hollow dining room, the floor stained with his own blood, the table gone for cleaning, and his valuable paintings stacked in a restorer's studio. Seep ached to hold a press conference to somehow denounce the Anglos — and, he fantasized, the British, too.

The private nurse quit on the third day, and though in pain and alone in the house, Olivier Seep fell into a peaceful sleep that night — an extra Seconal did the trick — for the first time since the attack. In the early hours, two hooded thugs attempted to burn down the mansion with gasoline. Their intent wasn't to kill the professor, since they had no idea that he had checked himself out of the hospital, but rather to send a warning so that Seep would reveal the whereabouts of the elusive Alida Nahvi. The fire gutted the downstairs (and thus began the sub rosa legend — for anyone who still cared — of the lost Civil War documents) but the firefighters saved the frame of the house. The professor perished of smoke inhalation. The arsonists were arrested at the scene after a neighbour called in the disturbance and were at once identified by Deroche as mob underlings. He vowed to prosecute the mafia soldiers to the maximum.

The morning after Malloway's death, Peter, still in Montreal, gave a sworn statement covering everything he knew about the Carpenter case and the lead-up to the shootout, although again he held back the image of Alida Nahvi
au naturel
in his bedroom.

A fortnight after the fire at Seep's place, Peter was surprised to receive a call at the cottage from Inspector Deroche, who offered a few new insights.

“Peter, I now understand who set fire to Club Parallel. It was not the Rizzutos.”

“And it was not Seep, Malloway, or Brayden,” Peter said.

Peter had figured it out soon after Leander Greenwell's suicide. The club wasn't owned by a mafia affiliate, and management denied paying protection money. Even the Rizzutos needed a good reason to torch a business. The mob soldiers behind the two arson incidents had to be part of a different, rival clan. Strictly speaking, their motive was removed from the internecine wars for control of Montreal.

“But, my friend,” Deroche said, “I don't know why they would harass Seep or Greenwell.”

Peter responded to Deroche. “The same reason for both attacks. Intimidation. You remember I mentioned the Sword, the East Asian gambler who hired Malloway to kill Alida Nahvi? It appears that he didn't trust Malloway to track her down by himself. Malloway failed to catch her in Buffalo. The Sword then hired some goons in Montreal to visit Greenwell and Seep both, to get them to reveal her location. Neither man knew where she was but the gang was being paid to locate her at all costs. After the Club Parallel fire Leander feared a second visit and took his own life.”

“Yes,” Deroche said, “but the attacks were also a display of power.” Peter granted Deroche his moment.

“Which clan were they, then?” Peter said.

“We believe they're part of the 'Ndrangheta. Mob sects never make public shows of their strength unless they are sending a message to their rivals, and in this case the upstarts were issuing a warning to the established Rizzutos. The 'Ndrangheta took this hire job to show they can operate in Montreal under the noses of Nicolo and Vito. Things are just getting worse for the Rizzutos.”

Once the mafia connection was made, Deroche cooperated more in wrapping up the killings of Carpenter and Malloway, and the demise of Leander Greenwell. Tommy Verden pledged Scotland Yard's fullest collaboration by providing the Sûreté with a complete briefing on the continuing investigation of the cricket scandal. Deroche was flattered. In London, Peter and Tommy spent several long days focusing on the career and perfidies of the man known as the Sword. Deroche joined in on two conference calls, thrilled to be included.

In the second week of November, Deroche was proven right in his prediction that the Rizzuto clan was doomed and would be eaten up, month by month. Sitting down to dinner one night, the patriarch, Nick, was assassinated by a rifleman waiting in the yard behind his mansion; the gunman's first shot penetrated the plate glass window and terminated the ancient mafia leader. Deroche sent an email to Peter: “Nicolo should have hired the guy who installed Seep's back window.”

In Washington, Henry Pastern struggled to decide whether to add the three Booth letters that Greenwell had worked so hard to assemble to the
FBI
's Stolen Art list, but he eventually decided to hold off; he had never viewed the originals and was unsure which version of the letters, if any, was authentic. Once a month he checked all the databases relevant to the Alice Nahri / Alida Nahvi hunt. There was never anything new.

Back in Montreal Georges Keratis didn't care where the letters might be. He inherited Leander's shop, which he renovated and turned into a successful hair salon. He tore down half the bookshelves, sold some of the volumes, and gave away a lot of the rest; the rule was that any customer celebrating a birthday could select a book from the remaining pile and take it home. After a while, Georges felt guilty and he stopped trashing his benefactor's collection. He began to read some of the fine Quebec collection on the shelves. He eventually enrolled full time in the history program at McGill University.

Peter Cammon and Pascal Renaud worked at sustaining a long-distance friendship. From the moment of Peter's return to England, they bombarded each other with emails, all connected to the Carpenter case and its aftermath. Peter remained grateful for Pascal's openly offered hospitality and the even-tempered welcome into his home, a place that had served as a kind of headquarters for Peter's investigative kibitzing. Nor did he forget that Pascal was the one who had risked his life to attempt to aid John Carpenter the night he died.

Once in a while the professor would call the cottage from Montreal, just to chat. The Cammons planned a vacation to Quebec once the cricket inquiry subsided. The two men always seemed to work their way back to the “case”; it was as though both had yet to find their way to the end of the saga. One such call entailed a comprehensive report by Pascal on the highly politicized funeral of Olivier Seep.

“Madame Hilfgott will be outraged if she hears of the tributes paid to him,” Pascal said. “You'd have thought Jean-Paul Sartre had mated with Che Guevara.”

“No mention of the Booth correspondence?” Peter said. “Or is it all legend now?”

Renaud laughed. “The stuff that dreams are made of?”

“
The Tempest
?”

“Last line of
The Maltese Falcon
,” Pascal riposted.

Their transatlantic alliance went into decline as the weeks passed. The deaths and funerals of both of Joan's siblings occupied the Cammons through much of November, and Christmas brought with it Maddy's advancing pregnancy, which began to preoccupy the whole family. By then, Peter was busy with Tommy Verden in the hunt for the Sword, a matter which Peter wasn't free to discuss with Pascal.

Other worries ate at Peter. He had led Renaud into the danger zone of Olivier Seep's house, where Pascal had been forced to confront the humiliation of his rival, trussed and bloodied on the floor. Peter should have considered Pascal's ambivalent feelings towards his separatist colleague and separatism generally — feelings entwined with his sister's death. Peter didn't dare ask him if he resented Peter's drafting him to drive to the mansion that night.

One question nagged at Peter more than any other. It seemed odd that Pascal and Alida had missed each other when she fled from Pascal's condo. Peter supposed it was possible. He conceded that she could have guessed the location of the door key under the flowerpot. But wild scenarios spun through his reinventions of that night.
Did Pascal spy Alida while he was monitoring the façade of Leander's shop? Did they perhaps talk in the cobbled alley around the corner, voyeurs agreeing that Seep had murdered Carpenter — Pascal must have figured it out by then. Did Pascal make a suggestion . . . ?

Peter, ever the rational detective, came to understand that his suspicions were unfair. Renaud had consistently been an amiable host. He had gone easy on the politics, had confided the painful story of his sister's death; his empathy with Peter's own loss had helped pull Peter out of his depression over Lionel's passing. Distrust was no way to treat a friend. Peter owed him more than that.

Peter wasn't a devotee of New Year's resolutions but the first of January provided the perfect opportunity to exorcise his unfair speculations. He made the call, enjoying the intrusion into Pascal's hangover. As usual, the professor recovered within minutes and they launched into a cheerful post mortem on 2010. They inevitably wandered into a review of the night of Alida's ghostly arrival. Peter was careful when he finally said, “You know, Pascal, I can hardly believe it. One minute she was there, naked, the next . . .”

“A deadly ghost.”

“Tell me, did you see her outside the condo that night? Even a glimpse?”

Pascal thought for a minute, and said firmly, “No, Peter.”

She keeps the letters in a strongbox under a false floor in the closet. Banks ask for personal data on every application for a safety deposit box, and so she keeps her money in cash and her valuables at hand. From time to time, she takes a key, removes the letters, and reads them through. It becomes almost a monthly ritual and eventually she starts reading books on American history, the Lincoln assassination, and so on. She reads Renaud's book on the Civil War. She figures that this is good, honest preparation for the day she becomes an American citizen, however that plan might work out. One day she picks up an old
People
magazine and sees that Gloria Stuart, the actress who played the elder Rose in
Titanic
, has died at the age of one hundred. She likes to stand on the edge of the lake; from there, with her 20/10 perception, she can see every detail of the far shore. She remains vigilant. She regrets not being able to return to Rochester but this will do. Walking out to the pines each morning, she looks around carefully and repeats to herself that this will do.

It was Maddy who made the educated guess. Or guesses. She did not tell Michael about the shrink-wrapped package, for she wanted its secrets to be hers, at least at first. It was all she could do to hold back from opening the
Avatar
box set but she resolved to go about this task one careful step at a time. On the weekends after the Henley confrontation, she enlisted Michael to drive around to garage sales and junk shops, where she rooted out used copies of
VHS
tapes of the
Terminator
series and
The Abyss
. She ended up buying a fresh copy of
Titanic
on
DVD
. She trusted that they were identical to the ones Alida had viewed. Maddy reminded herself to take it slowly — she would not be travelling to North America before the baby came.
Do things in the right order,
she told herself. On a late November weekend when Michael was working double shifts she got out all the films and lined them up by the television. Mimicking a forensic detective, she rotated the new
DVD
box set of
Avatar
, held it up to the light and compared the plastic wrapping of her new
Titanic
. They looked about the same, hermetically sealed by machine. With a paring knife she slit the plastic on the
Avatar
box and opened the flap. She took out the
DVD
s and the other materials, and stared at them for a long time. She placed the disc in the player and watched the film from the beginning; the clue was in there somewhere, she was confident.

In
Avatar
, the tall blue creatures never refer to any geographical coordinates for Earth, nor, according to internet searches, is there a town in the United States called Pandora.
Avatar
takes place on a mythical moon in the year 2154.
Is there a future world out there that gives you hope, Alida? Or does your sanctuary derive from the past, from the world almost exactly one hundred years ago, when hopeful men and women attempted the ocean crossing from Southampton to New York?

She watched
The Terminator
, which ends with the heroine fleeing to the mountains of the American southwest, but Maddy couldn't imagine Alida doing that. It occurred to Maddy that Alida Nahvi was connected to water; it was her theme, her motif. The Lachine Canal, the Niagara River, the Anacostia, and the wide St. Lawrence.
Look for a place near water,
Maddy reasoned. It did not matter that the girl came from Bihar, one of the driest places in India. Maddy cued up Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the ultimate water movie. She watched it twice. None of the scenes was set in Buffalo or in Rochester, and none of the characters hailed from an American, British, Indian, Canadian, or Pakistani city that rang any bells. She fell asleep on the sofa as Céline Dion sang over the closing credits the second time around. She dreamt of water, and of her baby boy. The next day, she skimmed through
Titanic
four more times, fast-forwarding through many scenes. Nothing struck her until the sixth viewing: the scene where Jack Dawson — Leo — lucks into an invitation to dine with the upper crust in a borrowed tuxedo. When questioned by the nobs, he reveals that he was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Maddy retrieved an American atlas from the shelf and opened it to the second-last state map in the book. She circled Chippewa Falls in red marker. Then she turned to the
Avatar
materials arrayed on the table.

There was a brass key that didn't belong with the movie materials. Alida must have placed it inside the
DVD
box — Pandora's box — and somehow resealed the container. Maddy had no doubt that it opened another box, in which the secrets of the Sword and his crimes would be found.
But where?
Maddy placed the key in the centre of the red circle and contemplated it for a long time.