Transgression (16 page)

“How could you say you love me and not tell me?”

“Because I love you!” André dropped down on his knees. He was still almost as tall as she was. “I love you.” He wrapped his arms around her waist, pressed his face against her breasts. “I love you!”

Adele could feel his hot breath all the way through her coat. “Stop it! Don’t!” She wrenched herself out of his grip and backed against the wall. She looked toward the cupboard searching for something sharp or heavy.

André was watching her. “Look at me. What’s wrong with me? Can’t you see me?”

“André, please, don’t go on like this.”

“Do you see me, Adele? Or do you see Jesus? Is that who you’re seeing after all this time?”

“No. I’m seeing you!”

“Then love me!”

“I do love you! I love you. You’re my family, you’re the only person I have. But I don’t love you like you want me to love you!”

“But I don’t have a family.”

“You do now!”

André stood up. He started rubbing his head as if he were waking up all over again. “Everything’s fine,” he said. As if to prove it, he picked up a bottle of eau de vie from off the floor and took a long drink. He held the bottle out to her, but Adele shook her head.

André sat down on the chair and began to pull on his shoes. “I’m going to take Robber out.” He pulled on his overcoat.

“Aren’t you afraid to be seen outside?”

“I don’t think so.”

André walked out into the dimly lit hallway. Adele could hear him clumping down the stairs and the click of Robber’s paws as he followed him.

Adele closed the door and bolted it. She wondered if André could hear the bolt as it slipped into place. She didn’t care. She lay down on the mattress
and pulled the blanket over her coat. There was no source of heat in her room except for an electric heater André had found.

Manfred was alive. He’d been alive in Paris. He must still be alive wherever he was. She lay there feeling successive waves of happiness sweep over her and waves of dismay. How could André have done what he’d done to her?

She didn’t know what she’d do when he came back. She wasn’t at all sure she’d unbolt the door. She’d been a country bumpkin, all right, just like he’d said, perversely blind and stupid. She’d been getting undressed under her cover with him sitting not ten feet away, and cooking his suppers, and talking with him and listening to him far into the night. And holding him when he cried. And falling asleep so close to him that if they’d stretched out their hands they could have touched each other’s fingers.

They’d become each other’s best friend, she’d thought, and she’d spoken to him about Manfred almost every day and he’d stayed silent for months and months. And let her sit out in the cold. And let her continue to suffer.

Adele decided that when he returned she would open the door a crack and tell him to move down the hall to the kitchen. He could turn the stove on for heat. If he refused, then she’d move down the hall herself. The next day they’d have to discuss what to do. He’d have to find a job, despite Monsieur Talleyrand and his men, and he’d have to find a room of his own. And he would have to tell her everything he knew about Manfred. The officer who was hiding him had to be Lieutenant Oberg. And they were heading back to Germany. Was that where he was now? What had Manfred actually said to André? She had to know every word.

Adele waited a long time to hear approaching sounds in the stairwell. Finally she got up and turned off the light. She stared at the heater’s single working coil glowing in the dark. She waited to see shadows under the door, hear a faint knock. She waited all night.

Snow covered the skylight when she got up in the morning. She pulled off her coat despite the cold and changed for work. She avoided looking at André’s abandoned corner, his rumpled sheet and pile of clothes.

When she pushed open the building’s decrepit front door she half-expected to see André and Robber standing in the snow waiting for her. There was no one in sight.

Adele continued to work at the factory house and watch her hair grow out and save as much money as she could. She looked for André and Robber every day. She was sure he had fallen into the hands of Monsieur Talleyrand and she’d been the cause of it. Her anger melted away.

Why had she been so mean, so thoughtless? Why hadn’t she been more gentle? Why hadn’t she talked to him and allowed him to explain his feelings, and then she could have told him that it was impossible for him to act on what he felt, but that she still loved him, that she would love him forever.

Adele wandered down to the river to look for André and Robber among the smells and misery of the waterfront. She walked tirelessly far and wide. Had his eyes been put out, was he begging blind somewhere on the puddled streets? Was he dead?

By spring Adele had discarded her head bandage and was wearing a dark purple tam pulled down over her ears. The streets were warming and the stalls were full of crocuses and daffodils and discarded piles of old winter clothes. Something almost unimaginable was in the air. The end of the war was in the air.

The women in her quarter were laughing and joking among themselves, looking at old dresses and coats, fingering material and bartering in various languages. Moustached men in shirt sleeves stood in clusters smoking their pipes. Children raced around in giddy circles.

Adele climbed up the stairs. She stood in her room and looked at it for a long time so that she might remember André and Robber forever. She packed a cardboard suitcase with her few clothes. She pushed the corner cupboard away from the wall and took out the money she’d saved. She couldn’t make herself wait any longer.

She would follow Manfred. She would travel into Germany.

J
ack stared at the blue clay clinging to the heel of his boot. He looked across the cliff face. If the river had been at its normal depth, he would have waded downriver looking for any sign that someone had scrambled across the steep bank, but the water was too high and running fast.

Perhaps he was late, anyway. Perhaps the torrent of rain the previous day had washed the tracks away.

He’d been right, though. There was no question that the clay he was staring at was the same colour as the thin clay line caught between the sole and heel of the dead man’s shoes. Jack tried to control his breathing. His legs felt weak, braced against the sheer drop of the cliff. He had to figure everything out and he had no time to waste.

The man had been buried in a hurry, in fact, more hidden than buried, under no more than six inches of soil. It had been broiling hot for the last while. Part of the body had been dug up by feral dogs, and the air had got at it. Maggots were all over it. He could see the open gut again. Smell it. Jesus.

Jack slid back into the water. He waded knee-deep to the near bank and pulled himself out. His chest was heaving. How long had the man been dead? Two weeks, three, four? Bodies decayed at different rates of speed depending on all sorts of things. You didn’t have to be a hotshot wet-behind-the-ears OPP detective to know that.

Jack looked up the steep hill in front of him. He’d have to climb along the edge of the cliff and search every damn inch. He’d have to climb down the other side. He’d have to examine the path leading out to the railway tracks.

He looked downriver at the tumbling brown water as it raced around the Devil’s Elbow. He didn’t have a thousand men like young Harold Miles. He only had himself.

Jack limped along beside the railway tracks heading the opposite way from town, heading back toward the Broome farm.

He’d climbed the hill, he’d scrambled through brush and brambles, he’d half-killed himself and he hadn’t found the murder weapon or a suspicious piece of torn clothing or splatters of brain that were still somehow clinging to a trunk of a tree. But he had begun to wonder about something. Why would a person carry a body half a mile up the river to bury it? Why wouldn’t the murderer, or murderers, bury it close to where it fell?

The solution was simple enough but it gave Harold Miles the strong hand again. The man had crossed the cliff face, yes, maybe he’d even slid all the way down it if he were agile enough and desperate enough, but he hadn’t been killed there. He’d been caught and murdered close to where the grave was, exactly where Miles was searching.

Jack hurried along. His feet were still squishing inside his boots from wading in the river and he’d pulled a muscle somehow on the inside of his left thigh. It felt like he’d been shot.

He still had the big card to play, but it wouldn’t last long. Miles had been around the town for a night and a day. He’d be talking to everybody. He’d be on to the DPs soon enough.

Jack had parked his own car, a maroon 1937 Studebaker he kept in immaculate condition, near the wooden railway bridge. He could see it now, shining like a faraway dream.

Jack stood in his bedroom and looked in the mirror.

It had been almost more than he could manage to make himself pull on a checkered shirt and brown slacks and loafers. He hated wearing civilian
clothes, it felt like he was in the wrong skin.

It was better this way, though. The mayor had told him to stay out of the investigation. He would be, if he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He’d be on his own time, a private citizen who had the right to talk to anyone or look at anything. And anyway, uniforms made the men out at the DP camp nervous.

He didn’t have time to eat. For all he knew Miles and his posse were already out there. He didn’t have time to call down to Constable White or Constable Westland, either. He was supposed to be covering for one of them that afternoon but he couldn’t remember which one. He had the duty sheet somewhere in the house. It was usually up on the nail by the phone in the kitchen. In fact it was always up there but for some reason, lately, things had gotten a little out of order.

He decided to leave his revolver at home. He couldn’t imagine anyone out in that camp having the nerve to shoot him, but if they did the last thing they’d see would be his hands going around their neck. Just the thought of it gave Jack a familiar rush of pleasure.

What would people say? Took a bullet in the gut and kept going, wrung the bastard’s neck like an unwanted chicken.

It was a childish emotion. A childish thought. He’d been having them forever.

Jack left the house, opened the door of his Studebaker and sat behind the wheel for awhile. His leg still hurt. He was still breathing too fast, panting like an old dog. He touched his forehead. His fingers came away shiny with sweat. Maybe he should have lain down first. The secret to taking naps had always eluded him, though. Whenever he tried, he’d just lie there wide awake and stiff as a board.

He would try again. He’d come home for a nap after he talked to the head man out at the camp. And he’d eat, too. And he’d go up to the hospital and visit Ruth. He had to get his life straightened around. It felt like it was unravelling somehow, like a ball had fallen out of his hands and he was trying to reel it in by a goddamn thread and it just kept spinning away, getting smaller and smaller.

Jack drove through the town. He eased the car over a railway level crossing and past two large coal bins and a water tower. He continued on by
a factory with lumber piled high behind it and pulled up. That was as far as the road went. He could have driven along a bumpy trail beside the railway tracks right out to the DP camp–he’d done it before with the town cruiser but he wasn’t driving the town cruiser. He was driving his Studebaker. He’d walk–it was only a few hundred yards.

The head man was waiting for him, standing on the path that led up the slope to the shantytown just as if Jack had called ahead to make an appointment. He was a sharp little bastard, Joe Puvalowski was. He had good English, he was prickly, and when one or more of the men ended up in jail it was never their fault, it was just a confusion. Joe liked that word, confusion. Usually the reasons weren’t very complicated anyway. They’d gotten themselves blind drunk and couldn’t walk as far as the camp or they’d gotten into a fight with some of the locals and needed the protection of a jail cell for the night.

Jack and the head man had always managed to work things out, and afterwards, particularly when he was sitting in Jack’s office and therefore in close proximity to the mayor, Joe Puvalowski would want to discuss jobs. There seemed to be a confusion: they were promised jobs by the prime minister of Canada and the King of England. Where were the jobs? They’d crossed half the country and no one would talk to them. They’d go up to the factory doors, caps in hand, and ask for anything. The worst jobs. Anything at all. And lately they’d even being threatened and chased away.

Jack had explained, more than once and with more patience than he usually exhibited, that any new jobs were going to the town’s returning soldiers, which was only right and fair, and that the men should be patient-their opportunity would come.

And over and over again, Joe’s dark face would flush, his wiry grey hair would tremble, he’d pull a worn piece of paper from the shabby hand-me-down suit he always wore when he came into town, and he’d point with a stubby finger. “Here, it says the bearer of this paper, he must be given a job.”

“Given priority, wherever possible and reasonable. That’s actually what it says, Joe.”

“We were promised,” Joe would thunder, clenching his fist and waving his paper in front of Jack’s face. And Jack would allow Joe Puvalowski to do
that, his hard grey eyes looking into Joe’s excitable black ones, and once again he’d wonder what kind of sights the man had seen, what godforsaken things had he seen?

“How’s it going, Joe?” the chief asked, limping up the path.

“Not good.” Joe’s face was dark as a thunderstorm, his mass of wild hair trembling.

Jack looked past him. The ramshackle camp seemed a little messier than usual, some clutter of wood and corrugated tin strewn around, a water barrel turned upside down.

“What’s not good?”

Joe was staring at the chief’s checkered shirt.

“I’m off duty, more or less,” Jack explained.

A cluster of men was standing beside the low door of the first shack. They were wearing the same kind of clothes as the dead man, shiny pants either too long or too short, an odd assortment of faded shirts, pants held up by suspenders or looping belts or rope, any kind of shoe.

“You’re too late, Mister Jack,” Joe said.

“Am I?” Jack could hear the sound of his own blood in his ears. A muffled beat. A whispering. He gritted his teeth and walked up the slope.

The men, wiry and small, pinched-faced and roughly shaven, gave way. Jack looked inside the first shack’s door.

The air smelled of unwashed bodies and drifting smoke. In the far corner two men sat on a rough bench. Coals beneath a makeshift stove smouldered in front of them. They stared back at Jack.

Harold Miles was nowhere to be seen.

“Your friends have been here already,” Joe said.

Joe had come up behind him. Jack stepped back out the door. “No friends of mine. How many?”

“Two bosses, dressed like you. Four in uniforms. Pushed things over. Pulled things apart.” Joe’s voice began to rise. “Put us in a line. Here. Right here.” He was pointing toward the top of the path. “Lined us up. Searched us.”

“For what?”

All the men’s eyes turned to Jack. They were frightened, Jack could see that now. No doubt Miles had wanted them to be frightened. No doubt the
young bastard had known exactly what he was doing.

“Brought back memories, did it, Joe?”

The blood in Joe’s face darkened another shade but he didn’t answer.

“They were looking for a gun. A murder weapon. Didn’t they tell you what they were looking for?”

“I know what they were looking for,” Joe said.

“Without them telling you, you mean? You knew before?”

Joe glanced at the other men. “We know nothing, Mister Jack. It has nothing to do with us.”

Jack grinned. “One of the fellows out here got himself murdered and you don’t know anything about it? Is that what you’re saying?”

Joe thought this over for a moment. “The young boss, he took our papers. He said no man leaves until he says. We have nothing to do with this trouble. People jump off trains. They jump back on. Do I keep a record, do I write down in a book? This man in the ground, these men who do such a thing, how would I know? And the boss, the big boss, he says this happened many weeks ago.”

“How many weeks ago?”

Joe shook his head.

“Did he say?”

Joe shook his head again.

No goddamn forensics for me, Jack thought. He put his big arm around Joe’s shoulder and led him off a little distance from the rest of the men. “This little prick you’re calling the boss, do you know what I think he’s thinking? I think he’s thinking you’d have a hard time throwing away a gun, given all the things you’ve been through. A gun would be too important to someone like you. He thinks you’ve hidden it.”

“They didn’t find a gun because we don’t have a gun!” Joe’s hair quivered.

Jack picked up the lapel on Joe’s suit coat. He ran his huge thumb up and down its frayed edge. “You and I, we’re friends. Do you know what that means? It means you’d be a lot better off telling me what happened than talking to that young cop.”

“The boss said, if we want our papers back don’t speak to nobody but him.”

“Did he?”

“Who is the big boss here? Who is the commandant?”

“I am.”

“It’s all a confusion.”

“There is no confusion,” Jack said.

Joe tried to look away but the chief of police was twice as large as he was and standing right in front of him. “We want jobs and no trouble. No more trouble. We have done nothing. None of us. This I swear.”

“Tell me what you know, and I’ll get your papers back.”

Joe shook his head again, but slower this time.

“What are you afraid of?”

“This is not our country.”

“And?”

“We don’t know what will happen.”

“Nothing will happen. We have laws here.”

Joe shook his head a third time. Jack could see that he was settling down into a stony silence. He let go of his lapel.

“Think about it. I’ll give you a minute,” Jack said.

The chief walked slowly through the camp pondering his options. There wasn’t much point in searching for the murder weapon, not now. And if Joe continued to refuse to talk there wasn’t much he could do about that, either. Confiscating their landing papers had been a smart move. That’s all they owned in the world, they wouldn’t be going anywhere. Miles could take his time, talk to each one of them separately, wave their papers in front of their noses and threaten to light a fire to them if they didn’t tell him everything they knew. Of course most of the men couldn’t speak English-that might be a problem. But then Miles would have a translator. Miles would have everything.

Jack limped up the grassy hill behind the camp. He looked back over the dingy collection of makeshift shacks, past the railroad tracks and the scrub bush angling down toward the river. Clouds were scuttling along the far horizon. The storm the day before was becoming a memory. A shaft of smoky sunlight lit up a distant hill.

How far was Miles ahead? He had the forensic reports, if not in his hands, then soon–it had only been two days. And maybe he’d found something out there by the gravesite, but not the murder weapon. If he had, he wouldn’t have been searching for it in the camp. The truth was, probably, Miles didn’t know anything more than he did.

Joe Puvalowski was standing at the bottom of the hill watching him. Jack could see the other men moving about, picking up debris around the camp, trying to put things back together. About thirty yards across the face of the hill from where Jack was standing, he noticed a tarpaulin lying on the grass, a few boards strewn around, and what looked like a man-sized hole dug into the slanting ground.