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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A smart, witty and subversive mystery about a dangerous stalker, featuring the wise-cracking, pansexual amateur sleuth from The Adventures of Isabel 'Think Patricia Highsmith on helium' Sunday Times Crime Club on The Adventures of Isabel When childhood friend Pris breezes back into her life begging for help with a dangerous stalker, our heroine is thrust suddenly into the world of the Canadian uber-rich. And when Pris's stalker is then murdered outside her book launch, the case is seemingly closed. But something still doesn't feel right, so our nameless heroine delves into her old friend's past, seeking the mastermind behind Pris's troubles before it's too late. Bunnywit does his level best to warn them, but no one else speaks Cat, so background peril soon becomes foreground betrayal and murder. Our detective walks a dangerous path in a world where money is no object and the stakes are higher, and more personal, than ever.
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PRAISE FOR
The Adventures of Isabel
“Think Patricia Highsmith on helium”
Sunday Times
“Quick fire plotting, snappy dialogue and a love of hardboiled crime make this really entertaining”
Crime Time
“A gloriously queer, camp crime caper… a breath of fresh air to both detective fiction, and queer fiction”
Waterstones Brighton, Indie Book of the Month
“The Adventures of Isabel is a winner!”
S. J. Rozan, author of Paper Son
“What would happen if Raymond Chandler and Frank N. Furter collaborated on cozies… You’ll scream with laughter”
Sarah Smith, author of The Vanished Child
“Fans of unconventional mysteries will be richly rewarded”
Publishers Weekly
CONTENTS
Fore ðæm nedfere nænig wiorðe
ðonc snottora ðon him ðearf siæ
to ymbhycgenne ær his hinionge
hwæt his gastæ godes oððe yfles
æfter deað dæge doemed wiorðe.1
“Bede’s Death Song” attributed to Bede the Venerable (Bǣda or Bēda; 672/673 – 26 May 735)
1. Loosely speaking: “Awaiting death, it’s smart to ask ourselves, before it’s too late, whether our life has been lived for good or evil, and how we will be judged on [or after] our death-day.”
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH MARY JANE? SHE’S CRYING WITH ALL HER MIGHT AND MAIN,
1. ONCE UPON A TIME WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG …
During our second year of university, Priscilla Jane Gill’s cat Micah died, and she had him taxidermied.
We all thought this was gross, but she said he was the truest being she’d met up to that point. She said that when she was with Micah she had been able to tune in to a special place, in touch with a purity to which she could only aspire, and that reaching for such purity gave her life a through-line of calm. She wanted to recall that clarity every day, and she thought she would do so when she looked at his effigy, posed in a lifelike facsimile of his favourite “meatloaf ” lounging position.
In those days, this sort of explanation made sense.
Besides, Priscilla was a folklore major, and they were all a bit like that anyway.
I think all of us saw Priscilla a little like she saw Micah — when he was alive, of course. To us, she was a symbol of a time out of time, a pure zone between childhood and real life where we could dream of a perfection for which we would not even 2remember to try once we’d put our college days behind us. But Pris didn’t distinguish between college life and reality, and that set her apart.
Maybe she was an early adopter of adulthood, or maybe she was a pure idealist. Either would have made her a wonder to us. We loved her evolved nature. She was an exotic, but she was our exotic, and long after we graduated, her image stayed with us, delicately posed in our history, perfect and without entropy, like a saint, or like Micah.
We got used to Micah’s Ghost, as we called him, after a while, and some of us also were able to take Pris for granted now and again — until she breezed out of our lives on graduation day, wearing not much of anything under her graduation gown, and became one of our memories of university life, preserved in the amber of time — which is to say, idealised and mostly forgotten.
None of us had seen her since, but any time any of us encountered each other, sometime in the conversation we were bound to mention Pris, and smile, and shake our heads at our inability to match her grace and aestheticism.
The woman at my door that cold October day was tall, ascetic, and stylish, with a grey brush-cut and the hollow perfect cheekbones of a clothing retailer’s anorexic display figure. When I opened my door, she was looking away down the corridor, and I saw her strong raptor profile with a mysterious thrill of buried familiarity.
“I thought I heard — someone — never mind,” the woman said, turned her gaze back to me, and smiled. Then I truly recognised her, that crooked supermodel smile with the trickster underlay.
“Priscilla Jane,” I said with that tone of satisfied arrival with which we greet the inevitable return of unfinished business. 3
2. SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE
“Yes,” she said. We stood for a moment, waiting.
“You look so different; it took me a moment,” I said.
“You look just the same. I knew you right away when you went by —”
“?” I made that all-purpose noise-with-moue I’ve perfected in years of living with my cat Bunnywit.
“I followed you from that store down the —” She showed me where with a sharp gesture with her head. Snow particles silvered the air around her head. She often failed to finish her sentences in those days too.
“Great!” I said. “I’m glad you took the trouble. Come in!”
She looked again toward the stairway and said to it, as she dreamily edged into my hallway, “I was coming anyway but it helped to see you before you saw me. Since … well, I haven’t been too … I’ve been … hmm, convalescing.”
“Tea?” I held out a hand to take her snowy scarf, and she carefully folded her gloves into the pocket of her pea jacket before shaking the snowflakes from its shoulders and handing it to me. She ruffled her hair for more haloing droplets.
“You’re supposed to wear that hat, not keep it in your pocket,” I said. I led the way to the kitchen, Bunnywit following us with his usual disdainful curiosity, ready to make her his as soon as she slowed down enough that he didn’t have to exert himself.
“Herbal,” she said. “I’m trying to cut down on caffeine and sugar. Not sure it helps, but it can’t hurt.”
“Cancer?”
“No. And it isn’t anorexia either. Make the tea.”
“Fuck the tea. What’s wrong? Anything I can —?” Talk about seventy-five seconds’ worth of cut-to-the-chase. I bit my tongue, but it was too late. 4
“Of course. Why do you think I looked you up after almost two decades? Make the tea.” She sat down at the kitchen table in one of the sturdy oak chairs and leaned over to stroke Bun.
“Don’t remind me how old I am, Pris.”
“I’m older,” she said. She was. It had been one contributor to her charisma.
“I’m feeling a goose walking over my grave. What are you doing here, and why do you look like death warmed over?”
“Because I very nearly was dead,” she said. “I’ve spent the last year recovering from an attack.”
“A physical attack?”
“Oh, yes, it was very physical.”
“Who did it?”
“A guy.”
“Is that why you were looking over your shoulder? They didn’t catch him?”
“He’s in jail. No-one follows me now — I don’t think. I’m just paranoid. They say he followed me for months, learned my routine. Then when he jumped me, it was somewhere no-one could interrupt. I was stabbed seventeen times and my throat was slashed. And he broke my jaw and cheekbone. Did an after-knife kickfest.”
A seriously committed attack, in both senses of the words. I busied myself readying the teapot and left the silence there. She filled it.
“Nobody knows why. I didn’t recognise him. They say he’s a nutbar, but he was found fit to stand trial. I have nightmares and I wear too many clothes. That part doesn’t matter, the clothes, but I thought I’d get it over with.”
Coming back to sit and wait for the kettle to boil, I looked her up and down. If possible, she was even more beautiful than she had been, though her beauty was a whole lot spookier for having added a shadowy echo of those too-thin mass-media clichés who throng the red carpets at award ceremonies. 5
3. THAT WAS THEN, AND THIS IS NOW
“I had such a crush on you twenty years ago,” I said. “Well, we all did, but most of the women wouldn’t admit it.”
I didn’t say that today she almost terrified me. Or that I wasn’t necessarily delighted that she’d reached back into a place I kept in Dreamtime and brought that place into the present as if we’d never parted. Outside science fiction novels, I don’t like time travel.
So: “Hmph,” I said. “It’s like Then is Now. Weird. I don’t like time travel.”
“So eloquent!” she mocked. “I’ll tell you what it really is. In your head, you’ve kept talking to me all these years. So I show up, we have twenty-some years of friendship instead of a few years of old history.”
“And you? Have you been talking to me for twenty years too?”
“I didn’t have to,” she said. “I knew we’d meet again. I always knew. I just … didn’t know when.”
“Why didn’t you look me up, then?” The kettle whined and I got up. Bunnywit was still twining around her legs, which meant he wasn’t trying to trip me as usual.
She glanced up at me sideways with that same Farmer-Pang mischievousness that had glinted out at us sometimes. Now it was sharp and clear and wicked. “Why didn’t you, me?”
I laughed. “You were always in Kathmandu or Timbuktu or Mogadishu — my budget didn’t run to exotic destinations.” Until recently, and even then, not much, due to other decisions I will talk about in due time.
“You followed my career, though.”
“Hard to avoid it. I have all your books, by the way. By the time you were back in the country, I wouldn’t have dreamt of imposing on you.”
She guffawed. Really. “Don’t be a bloody fool!” 6
“Life moves,” I said, grinning to try to lessen the sting. “I figured it’d moved too far. Like continental drift.”
“Platypuses.” She nodded. “Platypussies?” She leaned down and picked up Bunnywit. “Come here, platypussy.”
4. MICAH’S GHOST
“Be careful, he bi—” I started, then watched Bun reach his front paws out and literally hug her, snuggling his head into the crook of her neck under her elegant right ear. (Her left ear was just as elegant, but he picked the right one.)
“I’ll be damned. He never does that!” Even to me, most of the time.
“He smells Micah.”
“You still have Micah?” Maybe I raised my voice a little. There was a catch in Bun’s purr, and Pris shook her head.
“I forgot how transparent you are. I recall how Micah’s continuing presence —”
“Gave me the creeps,” I said flatly.
“Actually, I meant a different incarnation of Micah — a living one. I use the name over and over. This one is Five. I do keep a scrap of the original Micah’s fur in my spirit bag.”
“You still wear that thing?”
“Different incarnation of that too.” She reached under her sweater’s cowl neck and pulled at a leather thong until she had fished out a small red kid-leather bag. “Its great-great-great-grandchild by now. I make a new one every few years.”
Bun purred even louder and reached out for the bag. She easily deterred him and poured him onto the floor, where he adopted the undignified gopher pose he usually uses only for salmon and craned his neck to keep the bag in sight.
“Shoo,” she murmured confidentially, just to him. He dropped to a sit, washed half his face once, then quietly walked off to the 7living room, still purring, the little duck-tail that Manxes have twitching back and forth on his sashaying butt.
Pris dropped the bag back inside her sweater neckline and shook her head slightly. The motion was just like a preening cat.
“You are still one spooky soul, Priscilla Jane Gill.”
She smiled again, looking at me comfortably and directly. I began to think I’d been craving the sight of that smile for twenty years.
I didn’t want to sleep with her, exactly. It’s actually pretty easy to find people to sleep with. No, I wanted her back in my life in the same way that in dreams I see my brother, who died when I was young, and want him to stay when he shows up.
As if my life might have been different all this time, in some special way, if she had stayed in it, and if she stayed in it now, her staying would retroactively make that difference real.
Schrödinger’s roommate.
5. SCHRÖDINGER’S COLLEGE REUNION
I’m not a starfucker. It wasn’t because she’d become famous. I’m a fan of Leonard Cohen songs, but I didn’t want her to bring me tea and oranges all the way from China — or even, as in Mick Berzensky’s song, “fish in a dish / from the old corner store” from which she’d followed me. But I’d always liked her a lot, and she fit into my kitchen easily. She reminded me that I’d been a better person once and that she’d liked me too.
“I didn’t miss many of them, but I missed you,” she said. “Not a craving, but you know, I’d be in a street somewhere, someplace I’d never been, and I’d see something I wanted to share with someone, or I’d want to talk with someone right that minute — and sometimes it was you. Those were nice moments.”
I leaned back against the counter with the empty teacups in my hands. 8
“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure my tone was on the right side of sarcasm. “I liked ’em too.”
“I know,” she said. “I can hear myself. What a wanker, eh? All that nostalgia wasn’t enough to bring me to you. It took fear, and seventeen knife scars — eighteen, really, but one was just a nick — and an article in the newspaper.”
“Oh, that.” A few months earlier, I’d been momentarily notorious for helping enquire into the murder of a street sex worker who was the granddaughter of a friend of mine. The situation had become worse before it was solved, and I had some scars myself to prove it.
“Yes, that,” she said. “I want you to do the same for me. I want to — hire you? I have money.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed aloud. Partly in disappointment, I must say, and partly from annoyance, but humour still came out on top.
She stared down her patrician nose at me as well as she could, given that she was sitting down and I was still bringing tea paraphernalia to the table. To help her with that, I sat down and assembled the cups and saucers.
“I have some money now,” I said. “Money, I don’t need.” She kept glaring, so I went on, “You’re cute when you’re acting on privilege.”
6. THE PEACE OF UTRECHT
I poured the tea. She breathed through her nose a couple of times, then relaxed slightly.
“I need help. Specialised help. Am I paranoid or am I really being followed? Why did someone who presented as a crazed fan but who isn’t crazy and hadn’t read my books attack me? I see his fucking face in my dreams. I’m fucking sick of expecting to see him for real. I came to ask you to help me. Whatever it takes.” 9
“Time for my speech, which won’t be eloquent,” I said acerbically. “I got into that shit by accident, and I’m not getting any younger. Friends come and go. My most recent lover just ran away with the circus and maybe I won’t see her again. That’s okay, I’m happy for her, but between that and recovering from a few broken bones and a lot of soft tissue injuries, I’m feeling a little vulnerable. Mortal. I’m sure you can understand that.”
“You sound like we’re negotiating a fucking treaty. This isn’t the UN. What will it take?”
“That’s not the point. It’s also not the point that today I was sitting here thinking about old friendships and old ties and how to renew them. Today is just because I was hungry and depressed for a long time, and I’ve lost the knack of having a life.”
“Then it’s an opportunity.”
“Ha. Fuck that Newspeak. For one thing, you weren’t on the renew-ties list. For another thing, I just got over being beaten to within an inch of my life — the matter is still before the courts, as they say — and you turn up out of the blue and suggest I investigate your mortal danger. You think you have any favours to call in? After all this time?”
“I don’t have favours to … that’s not what … Listen. I just think that if anyone in the world will get it, it’s —”
“Bullshit. An opportunity. Sure.”
She sighed. “Yeah. Okay. Fine. Forget it.” But she showed no interest in moving. She reached out and picked up her Japanware teacup, sipped the hot jasmine tea, and then she did a small, curious thing. She licked her lips afterward as if the tea were the best thing she’d tasted in a long time. It was that little unconscious moment that got me. I’m pretty sure it was unconscious.
“That’s not the point either,” I said. “I just need some breathing space. It would be easier if …”
“If —?” 10
7. JUST SAY “NIAOW”
Just then a ping-pong ball caromed into the kitchen, Bunnywit galloping after it. On his way past me, he stuck out a paw with full claw deployment and sliced at my leg, getting me right through the blue jeans. It felt as if he drew blood, and this I later confirmed.
Four cautionary little slices an inch long. Surface, really, just enough to remind me that I am not ten feet tall and bullet-proof. If he could talk, I’m sure he’d have said, “Girlfriend, what are you thinking …? No!! She’s lovely and she smells deliciously of long-dead cat, but send her away. Now!”
He did say a sharp “No!”, though with his accent it came out “Niaow!”
I should have taken his advice.
AND SHE WON’T EAT HER DINNER — RICE PUDDING AGAIN —
8. “… WHO TURNED PARADISE INTO HELL? MARBLE WALLS INTO PAPER-MÂCHÉ …”
The best Chinese noodle house in town, Double Greeting, is across the street from a homeless shelter run by the Sally Ann and used to nestle up next to a dilapidated rooming house whose hundred-year history had transformed it from a railroad hotel (not the fancy kind, but the kind that was home to railway workers at the turn of the twentieth century) to the scummy end of the line for sad drunks and addicts, in cheap rooms above what I call “a bar of last resort”.
The city had bought the hotel, though, and around New Year had solved the problem of its historical importance by bulldozing it. Dumptrucks had carted away the resulting jumbled mass of cracked heritage brick, hundred-year-old hand-crafted twelve-by-twelve beams now splintered to matchstick, filthy mattresses and rusty cot frames, and the cheap-deal doors that over the years had replaced the original Good Wood. Now to get to the Double G 12we cut across a series of vacant lots, the wind getting a good run at us and slicing through our overcoats, mitts, and other wraps.
My inner-city neighbourhood was undergoing “urban renewal”. What that seemed to mean was “urban clear-cutting” — through the winter, old buildings kept vanishing, replaced by parking lots. I’d seen neither hide nor hair of the “renewal” part near my apartment yet, though for the first time in two decades there was new construction in the area, a few blocks north.
With my legacy from my parents last year, I’d secretly — a secret from my neighbours anyway, as I didn’t want to disrupt our fragile camaraderie — bought the Epitome Apartments, the heritage brick building where I live2.
My lawyer (for fuck’s sake, “my lawyer” indeed! But my life had weirded up to the extent that I actually had a pet lawyer) had already had two developers offer to take it off my hands for a pittance, to help “renew” the neighbourhood — again, that word — by flattening one of the last heritage buildings and putting up some monstrosity of curtain-wall glass and moulded concrete. “Just say no,” I told him.
I didn’t have much in the way of capital left afterward, but in setting in motion the restoration of one of the hundred-year-old buildings in the inner city, I was doing my bit on the renewal front the way I wanted it done.
I’d suggested to Pris that we go have some food. To put off the inevitable conversation about what she wanted, I was explaining all this neighbourhood stuff to her as we picked our way across the snow and rubble of the vacant lots.
“You should get involved,” she said.
“In what?”
13“Oh, you know. Community organisation. Heritage preservation.”
I laughed. “You think I need a hobby?”
“Well, it makes you mad. So do something. Join the neighbourhood association.”
Yeah. That’s what my downstairs neighbour was trying to convince me to do, but back in my not-so-secret past as a social worker, I’d done a lot of unpaid time in voluntary organisations, and in the immortal words of R. A. Lafferty, that way lies rump of skunk and madness. Have you ever noticed how many paths lead to rump of skunk and madness, and how few to happily-ever-after? I would prefer HEA, and I had recently resolved to avoid the rump-of-skunk type of decision if I possibly could.
Besides, I was waiting on any precipitous decisions until the broken bones and deep tissue injuries had fully healed from the last time I said, “Oh sure!” to a call for help.
I tried not to let on how much pain came with my effort to get the sticking outer door of the noodle house open over the ice ridge on the concrete stoop. I still was far from rehabilitated. I held one of the mismatched inner doors for Priscilla, and she blew in on a gust of wind and laughter.
9. BLACK EGG
We shook snow off our coats and scarves. I had managed to make her wear the hat for all of half a block before she snatched it off and crammed it in her pocket, so while I was shaking snow off yards of woolly scarf and snood, Pris leaned over and shook her head like a dog. But when she straightened, she took a step sideways and grabbed my arm.
“Phew. I keep forgetting! Dizzy,” she said. “Never mind, okay now.” 14
The most efficient waitress in the world works at the Double Greeting. Mei welcomed us, gave us menus and order forms and a pen, brought me the glass of ice over which I like to pour my Chinese tea, asked after my health, replaced a dirty bowl, and added extra napkins to the table after refilling the napkin dispenser, all in the time it took Pris to slide into the seat in our assigned booth. (Pris nudged in front of me to snag the seat against the wall — facing the door, I realised after an annoyed moment, but I shook my head and let it go.)
Mei tut-tutted over our snowy coats. “I hang by hot air,” she said, and swept off, greeting two other groups and directing them to tables on the way to put our wet clothing on the staff coat-hooks near the kitchen. I noticed with karma-compromising pride that the new customers’ coats were referred to the customer coat-rack, over in the draught by the door.
Pris watched Mei, awed, as she supplied the newbies with menus, answered the phone and took a phone order, all whilst making a tray of red bean coolers, and delivered the coolers while telling the other waitress where to take the full tray that had just come out of the kitchen. “Gawd, look at her! Why isn’t she in charge of the world?”
“My feelings exactly. If I spoke Cantonese, I’d hire her to run my real estate empire.”
“No kidding! Wait, you have a real estate empire?”
“Kidding. I have the Epitome, my apartment building. ‘EP-eetome’. That’s how most of its residents pronounce it. And I ran out of money buying it, and I don’t have much of an income, so I’m applying for a Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program grant to restore it.”
Pris unfolded the voluminous laminated menu. “What’s good here?”
“Tendons, tripe, and spleen in broth with rice noodle?” It was my round-eye test. 15
“Sounds great,” said Pris, “but get them to leave out the tripe. It’s too chewy. Oh! They have black egg! I should get one for my soup.”
“Okay, you win.” Black egg is preserved duck egg, also known as “thousand-year-old egg”, a delicacy that even some Chinese people eschew. I love black egg. I should have known not to bother with the test, given Pris’s character — and peripateticism.
“What?”
“Never mind.” I wrote down the soup order (#5 no tripe), with two black eggs (#61) on the side, added Hoi Nam chicken (#110) and Green Beans with XO Sauce (#236), and waved the order slip at Mei. She was on her way past with a loaded tray and the means to reset two tables, but somehow the slip vanished from my hand and a full pot of tea landed beside my glass of ice. I poured pu’er into a cup for Pris and into the glass for me. The ice crackled and dissolved, steaming. The full glass was cold, and in the humid restaurant began to gather a coat of condensation.
“How can you drink that? It’s freezing out!”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You always drank ice water — I remember that,” she said.
“I did?” But I had. People made fun of me for it. My brother had once, when he was twelve and I was younger, drawn a cartoon of me as an ice demon surrounded by ice and empty glasses.
Lots of ice under the bridge since then.
It wasn’t the most relaxing dinner. Every time the door opened, Priscilla jumped slightly. She tried to disguise the fact that she checked out every single person who came through the door. When a big group and several individuals came in at the same time, she couldn’t disguise her agitation. I leaned forward and murmured, “Kwan Ying Athletic Society Board. And I recognise all the singletons — they’re from the neighbourhood. Chill! Eat your tendon and spleen in noodle soup.” 16
“No problem about chilling, with the draught from the door!” she joked, but as Mei had seated us right beside the heater we both took her remark for the smokescreen it was. She sat back slightly, however, and got slightly more serious about her dinner.
The whole evening, though, she ate like a fashion model. Which is to say, hardly at all.
10. AND IF IT WAS TRUE AS IT WAS TOLD TO ME, THEN IT IS TRUE AS I AM TELLING IT TO YOU
Here’s the thing. In books, plots are often complicated — unnecessarily in many cases — by people neglecting or refusing to talk with one another. In books, so rarely in fact do people say what they mean that it’s almost a shock to find a character who does, and when it happens the narrative almost seems naïve. (This is why people either underestimate or esteem the books of Alexander McCall Smith, for example, according to their natures and narrative preferences.)
There is a technical reason for this which I discovered last time I sat down to chronicle a sequence of my life’s events: even if one is inclined to super-realism in literature, there is just not enough space in a book for all of the conversations of real life. One evening of the committed discussions of good friends, especially friends re-united after long absences and many stories, as Priscilla Jane and I found ourselves, would strain a chapter or even a whole book, if transcribed exactly.
And when one is dealing with the nature of memory, another layer is added to the difficulty of selecting from all the many exchanges and events during a certain span of time. Readers of books like this one you hold are looking for an understanding of a particular series of events represented by choices and con sequences. I understand that you don’t want an endless re-enactment of My Dinner with Andre. 17
Technical challenges aside, out here in the real world it is actually more common for people to try to tell each other what we mean, rather than choosing our words for dramatic effect or suspense-serving obfuscation. And yet, oddly, real life sometimes sounds like a bald and unconvincing narrative compared with literature’s staged and theatrical simulations of verisimilitude.
Go figure.
So rather than the desultory-chat-analogue I have no space to record here, I will say simply that Pris and I talked intensely for hours. I told her about my adventures of the autumn3, which had left me in a long period of healing but had brought a great Chinese-opera acrobat into my life. I learned a lot about Pris’s previous and current Micahs, her recent travels, and the attack that had put her in hospital for months with knife wounds, fractures, and deep-tissue damage that still made her weak, and dizzy when she bent over.
We also compared our current levels of cynicism with our youthful ideals, discussed current and former lovers, sidelined into several examples of Internet humour during which detour she showed me how to better use the browser function of my few-months’-new mobile telephone, and I had a conversation with a couple of the board members from Kwan Ying on their way by as they left after their meal.
There were many words.
11. NO MEANT NO
I also made it clear to Pris that I wasn’t the answer to her need for understanding. At least, I thought I made it clear. I even suggested she use some of her substantial earnings from famous-explorerdom to hire a professional.
18She had been deeply attentive to the rest of the conversation. That part, she seemed to ignore, in part because of the interruption of the opening outer door of the restaurant.
That initial knot of people had been an anomalous rush in a usual steady-state of clientèle, and regularly, as we ate and talked for over two hours, we would hear the clunk of the door opening again, and I’d feel the icy breeze on the back of my neck. At first Pris would come up on point each time like a high-strung service dog, but she seemed to relax as time went on, and hardly glanced at some of the later arrivals.
I had just made the traditional two-handed finger-writes-character-on-paper signal to Mei for our cheque when yet another customer came in. I’d turned to look for Mei, who was serving a table near the door, but my eye was held by the furtive flinch that the bundled figure, vaguely coded male by bulk and attire, made when he saw that I had noticed him.
He could have been anyone. He could have been one of the street people, whose lives tended to be one continuous furtive flinch. But he could have been caught staring at us. I couldn’t tell.
Pris noticed I was watching something. But the guy had deked left, into the restrooms, and all we had caught was the olive-green, bright-green, and brown-and-grey of his back view, normal swatch-pattern for anyone bundled in winter attire of parka, scarf, cap, mitts.
“What?”
Mei zoomed past our table, with hardly a pause as she slid our cheque in front of us.
“Nothing. You’ve got me all paranoid.”
The guy came out of the bathroom when we were halfway through paying. Later I was able to give his description to the police, but that’s just because I had thought his behaviour odd. When I tilted my head to indicate him as Mei seated him across 19the room, and said, “Anyone you know?”, she barely gave him a glance.
“Quit being weird,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “on the weird thing, that ship has sailed, but hey, you started it.”
Pris gave no sign she was perturbed. She laughed. I could have sworn it was a real, genuine, amused laugh.
“I’m staying at the Union Bank Inn,” she said. Was the weird guy close enough to hear her? Later, I was asked that.
“Want me to walk back there with you?”
“Nah, I’m fine. As you pointed out, I get weird from time to time.”
“‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean —’” I began, but her laugh cut me off.
“If you are going to help me, you have to learn when to help me and when to tell me to quit wanking,” she said.
“I’m not going to help you — that way. I told you.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”
“But now that we’re back in each other’s lives, let’s keep it that way.”
“I agree. Kindred spirits are rare enough, but kindred spirits who knew me when? Priceless.” She thus proved that sometime in the past decade, she had watched some TV, somewhere. Kathmandu, probably, on some kind of solar-powered tablet device sponsored by some big Japanese conglomerate, if I properly understood how she financed all her trips to the top and bottom of the world. And by getting her joke I proved that I had also enjoyed too many commercial moments back in the day when my TV had worked.
We hugged goodbye at the door of the restaurant.
“Call me tomorrow. Let me know what you decide.”
“It’s still no.”
“No, it isn’t. Call me tomorrow.” 20
12. ASK A POLICEMAN
Those who know me would be surprised at what I did next. Roger certainly was, when I called him.
Roger is an old buddy of mine from the bad old days. Partly as a result of covering himself in honour during that little dustup in the fall which left me with bruises and broken bones, he’d recently been promoted to head of the Major Crimes Investigation Unit.
That is to say, he is a cop.
Despite that, he is a fine fella, and I have come to be able to overlook the occasional broomstick-up-his-ass moment. Cops are like that — good cops, anyway — they come over all strict and implacable and law-and-order from time to time. Understandable I guess, given that their job is, well, law and order. Over the past little while, while keeping my disdain for the other kind, I’ve come to appreciate good cops.
Not that I would ever admit to Roger the depths of my conversion. Having been naked with him once or twice, many many many years ago, was as much disadvantage, professionally speaking, as I was prepared to accept in our collegial relationship. Well, that, and what he knew about some of my youthful indiscretions and the law enforcement attention these had received in their day.
I asked him about Pris’s concerns and told him of her proposal.
“I turned her down,” I said.
“You must be growing a brain,” he replied in his usual friendly fashion.
“You and the horse you rode in on,” I replied, equally fondly. “But I was wondering if you could kinda check it out for me. Kinda keep an eye on the situation.”
“She hasn’t gone to the police. We have privacy limits, you know.” 21
“Okay, fine. But I have gone to the police. And I am making a formal expression of concern. You could at least file an incident report or something.”
“Saying what? A weird guy came into Double Greeting Noodle House? A celebrity who was viciously attacked and probably has PTSD is paranoid?”
“Rog …”
“I’m noting it. But just sayin’ …”
“Fine. But please note it.”
And he did. As it happens, it did little good.
2. My neighbours, by the way, all pronounce it “EP-ee-tome”, which is part of why I love the place.
3. See The Adventures of Isabel.
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH MARY JANE?
13. AMBROSE BIERCE, MEXICO, 1913
Pris disappeared that night.
No, I don’t mean she went back to her life and I never saw her again. I mean the other thing.
Despite my intention to stay out of it, I had called her at the hotel in the evening, and then the next morning, but I hadn’t gotten an answer.
Roger called late the next evening, from outside my building. I buzzed him in, proud that the new security system still worked (this being the inner city), and he gave me the news.
“Pris went missing as of yesterday,” he said.
“‘Went missing’,” I said. “That’s the weirdest idiom. It manages to assign blame to the victim without clarifying agency. Like ‘got attacked’.”
“Yeah, sure,” said my big tall handsome annoyed cop buddy. “Bottom line, she isn’t there. Her visit. Give it all to me again.”
So I told him about Pris, and Micah, and Bun. 23
“She left from the restaurant after we ate. That weird guy — I’m sure he was staring at us. She pretended it didn’t bother her, but it must have. She told me to call her, and then we hugged. She headed off across the Arctic wastes to her hotel, and I waited to see if the guy followed her. He didn’t, at least not right away, so I mushed home in the blizzard. As far as I know, he didn’t follow me either. I must have been picking up on her jitters.”
“Did you call her?”
“Not as such. Well … a couple of times. I left a couple of messages. After that I figured she must have changed her mind. But I didn’t feel easy about it.”
I couldn’t stop obsessing about my last few minutes with Pris. “At least I knew enough to call you. And may I say something like ‘I told you so’?”
“You didn’t tell me so. You passed the burden of your worries to me, but last I heard from you, you weren’t fussing about Ms. Gill.”
He let me stew for a moment, then relented. “But if it makes you feel better, it was because of your thirteen ‘couple of ’ unanswered phone calls, plus three or four by assorted other parties and an unsuccessful visit by ‘a sharp-looking guy in a fancy suit’ where they got no answer from the room, that the desk clerk began to wonder if something was wrong. Fancy Suit insisted there was, and insisted that the manager go up to bypass the Do Not Disturb sign on the door.”
“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen couple of. Like dogs in the hunt. Counted by twos, like a brace. Twenty-seven, actually, according to the call display.”
“And the manager found …?”
“Indications of a hurried departure or —”
“Roger! This is me, your pal, here.”
“And this is me, cop, here. Indications of a hurried departure or, at a stretch, foul play. End of answer.” 24
“Not end of questions.”
“Obviously. But my advice? Go with your original instinct. Stay out of it. Not that you ever really listen to me.”
“I listen to you a lot. Especially when you are telling me something I want to hear. But now I feel — guilty. If I had said I would … Look, what was this ‘guy in a fancy suit’ thing?”
“Some dude who used to date her. He didn’t have any more luck than you. Assuming he didn’t make off with her himself.”
“What?”
“Kidding. He has an alibi. And forget that guilt crap. If you had said, ‘Sure, girlfriend,’ you guys would have still said goodnight, she would have gone back to the Inn, and in the morning you wouldn’t have had an answer to your calls. And you would have called me. I would have said, ‘She’s probably out shopping, for God’s sake, so take a Valium®.’ Then concern would have increased, and the manager would have been unlocking the door at exactly the same time as he did anyway.”
“But …”
“Apart from if you had decided to stick to her like a burr, which wouldn’t have guaranteed a different outcome and would have put you at the same risk — assuming there was any risk and she hasn’t just gone shopping or base jumping off a skyscraper or some damn thing, nothing you did or didn’t do would have made a damned bit of difference. So get over it.”
“Thanks for your kind words.”
