Cipher Page 2

  I followed them out and down three steps and traced their smudge along the dappled sheen of a marble walkway. Around the corner the path opened up into a sunken courtyard, likewise marbled and as big as an Olympic-sized swimming pool. There was a fountain in the middle of it. A craggy knoll formed its centrepiece, and perched atop it there were three sirens carved in stone, all of them naked from the waist up and their hair bent to a fierce wind. The empty pool below was ringed with a fleet of galleons hoisted on metal poles. Each of them had a floodlight beneath it and was bent at a drastic angle as if trapped in the throes of a terrible storm. It struck me as a might garish for a chartered accountant, though I couldn’t deny that it set a certain mood.

  On the wall of the ranch house opposite, two sheets of tinted glass formed a sliding door almost as big as a movie screen. I hurried past it, startled as much by the larger-than-life figure I cast within its reflection as by how the sirens behind me seemed so eager to beckon me towards my doom. I picked up the smudges on the other side. Whoever had made them must have been moving at a fair clip because it was all I could do to match their stride. They passed by three doors, all of them locked and their panelled windows curtained, and then the footprints were gone, the last of them angled towards a flower garden. The garden was overcome by weeds and timothy grass but there was still plenty of dirt between to pick up the trail. It ran diagonal to the corner of the ranch house’s southernmost wing. Halfway through it, I caught sight of a shard of green-tinted glass stamped into the soil. It was from a beer bottle, near as I could tell, and curved into the shape of a tear. The dried blood staining the slivered edge of it eased my mind as to what I could expect to find at the end of the trail but, moments later, my back pressed against the ranch house’s stuccoed wall, it got me to thinking about what could have happened there to startle someone into a flight untroubled by a foot sliced into ribbons.

  I reached for my sidearm and found enough courage in its heft to take a peek around the corner. The marble gave way to paving stones and I could see the frame of a door raised against the spackled plaster. I slunk along the wall in the guise of a much slimmer man and came to the door. It was ajar, I could see, so I reached over and gave it a push. It swung open with a dull thud and I froze, listening for the ripple of other sounds — footsteps maybe, another door slamming, the definitive click of a weapon made ready — but there was nothing.

  “Once more,” I said and turned into the breach.

  The door opened into a small kitchen. Overhead, two naked fluorescent tubes laid bare the chair toppled on the floor and the hard night’s worth of cigarette butts scattered around an upended ashtray. I’d call that evidence of a struggle and it told me that my business with Terrence was done before I’d even got there. I scanned what I took to be the servant’s quarters for any sign of how the fight might have progressed but all I could see was a fridge and stove wedged on either side of a sink and two doors facing off against each another. The one on the right looked flimsy and cheap, like a closet door, but the one across from it was made out of a dark-hued hardwood, mahogany maybe or teak. Between them there was a greyish-green Formica table and my eyes settled on a familiar-looking brown paper bag sitting on top. The bottom of it was grease stained and I swear I could detect the faint smell of sesame seeds.

  Thinking that maybe I hadn’t been wasting my time after all, I holstered my gun and crossed the room. I righted the chair and sat down in front of the bag. The top of it was rolled over and it was while I was unfurling it that I noticed the nine millimetre, semi-automatic Beretta secreted behind. It was the Cheetah model, I’d wager, though I’m far from an expert; black with matching grips and a cloudy patch where the serial number should have been. I was just reaching for it when I heard a creak that could only have come from bedsprings. I looked to the closet door, thinking I should have paid it more attention. After a breath, it swung open and a man appeared.

  He was naked, buck-strapping as they say. A good-looking fellow in his mid-twenties, carrying 220 pounds cut onto a six-four frame; tall enough that his crew cut bristled against the door frame on its way through. He didn’t seem in the least concerned that there was a nine millimetre, semi-automatic Beretta within arm’s reach on the table in front of me. I watched him walk past, the mild admiration I felt for the kind of hang he could manage that early in the morning hidden behind a professional frown meant to convey that I was all business.

  He slipped through the dark-hued door without a care and a few seconds later I heard a steady stream at the toilet. He took his time in the bathroom then returned through the door, ignoring me completely on his way back through the kitchen. Though he didn’t speak a word on either trip, and I was too busy keeping my frown from wavering to say anything either, I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest we weren’t talking. What spoke to me the loudest was how he was trying to muster a genuine swagger. Why he was putting so much effort into the way one foot dropped in front of the other, him looking like he was about to throw up — his breath telling me that if he did, it wouldn’t have been the first time that morning — and there being only me to see it anyway, I guessed had something to do with the tattoos he wore on both arms. There was a Canadian flag on his right and his left had been stencilled to look like what you’d wear under a suit of armour: chainmail with a gauntlet at the wrist. I wagered that if I looked close enough I’d see some letters between the links that told me what branch of the military he’d been in, and maybe a few other marks that’d say how many men were wishing they’d stayed in bed the day they’d crossed his sight.

  When he finally got around to sitting at the table — a pair of jeans and a plain black T-shirt doing their job well enough without any help from a comb or a razor — there was something close to amusement in his eyes, like he was staring at me and the gun and thinking that I should have shot him the moment he walked in if that was my game, and if I so much as twitched he’d have the muzzle in my face and the count of three to decide whether I was worth the time he’d have to spend mopping the floor.

  I let him carry on the act longer than I intended because, sitting there and trying to keep up my end of the routine, it came to me that, goddamn, it was Curtis Mays. There’d been a time when if he hadn’t appeared on the front page of The Leader-Post’s sports section you’d have thought you’d woken up in the wrong city. And he had crossover appeal too, alternately gracing the pages of the Entertainment section (“CM’s Top Ten Film Fave’s of the Year”), Fashion (“Cowboy Boots and Black Leather: CM’s Outlaw Image Knows No Bounds”), Life (“Christmas with the Mayses”) and Wheels (“Tow the Line: CM’s Dream Truck Is a Chevy”). He even managed to attract some scorn on the editorial page for his involvement in a party that got out of control after he led his team to the national championship. The latter resulted in a torrent of angry letters and threats of cancelled subscriptions, the general gist being that if Curtis wanted to blow up half the downtown then the least the city could do was buy him the dynamite.

  What they said, and by “they” I mean almost everyone who was drawing breath in Regina during the four years he played high school football, was that he was the best thing our city had ever produced. And when I say “thing,” that’s exactly what they meant: not so much a man as a living, breathing piece of the world, like the ground you walked upon or the line where the field met the sky. He was that thing and no amount of hyperbole in The Leader-Post’s sports section, or the coffee shop, was able to contain expectations of what he would become.

  Nobody even raised an eyebrow when, upon graduating high school in the spring of ’02, he announced he was going to serve his country by enlisting in the Armed Forces instead of riding a free ticket all the way to the big leagues. When he was deployed to Afghanistan a short while later, his letters home became as constant a fixture in the paper as his photos used to be, and there wasn’t a store in town that didn’t offer freebies and discounts to his parents (who’d moved to White City s
hortly after he left for the desert and, truth be told, didn’t get to town all that often). Three years passed. Regina’s hopes swelled along with the accounts of his travels through Kandahar Province and every time reports came back of casualties, the churches filled to overflowing.

  “God, let it not be Curtis Mays,” the preachers would plead, and the Amens would respond loud enough to compete with the roar from the stadium when the Riders were within reach of a playoff spot.

  Such was the place he held in the hearts of our prairie city and the sight of him sitting across from me, the scent of his pickled manhood prickling at the hairs in my nose, had my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. The Pride of Regina, who’d promised he’d hang around long enough to claim the Grey Cup for the Riders before heading south to show the Yanks how the game was really played, staring at me like I’d have as much chance of hurting him as I’d have of catching a shark with a butterfly net, and waiting — Curtis Mays waiting for me to make the first move.

  Not wanting to disappoint, I loosened my tongue and croaked out, “I’m looking for Terrence Bell.” When that didn’t produce more than a frown I added, “You know where he is?”

  Curtis grit his teeth and glared at me and I knew the conversation was as good as done.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said and reached for the brown paper bag. I stood and turned to the dark-hued door, and Curtis did the same. His intention, I think, was to follow me out, maybe even to stand at the rail around the front porch, watching me drive away, his gaze ripe with all the possible meanings of my visit. Instead, I’d be making my way through the vast emptiness of the ranch house’s chain-linked rooms in pursuit of the front door by myself. Not seeing him as I pulled out of the driveway, I wouldn’t be able to tell whether his gaze was ripe or not but it didn’t take much of a stretch to figure out what was on his mind. It was the piece I’d left behind. He’d mentioned it in place of a goodbye.

  “You forgot your gun,” he said.

  I was already halfway into the hall, the dark of its windowless interior adding the appropriate drama to my exit.

  “It’s not mine,” I said, parting my jacket to show him the Glock I had holstered there, then slipped into shadow.

  After I left, Curtis picked up the gun from the table and examined it. He’d tell me so the first time I visited him after he’d been released from the hospital, still some six months away. He’d tell me that the magazine was empty but there was a bullet in the chamber and also that he had had an inkling of what that lone bullet meant but not enough of one to make him fire the damn thing into the ceiling, which is what he’d have done if he had the chance to play it over.

  It struck me, when he’d told me this, that if I’d taken the gun, pretending it was mine, then none of what happened after would have happened either, at least not in the way it did, and also that I knew even then that no good would come of leaving it. I left it anyway, certain that if I took the gun it’d be the last time I saw Curtis Mays unless it was on the TV. Knowing that, the choice was out of my hands, for choosing never to see Curtis Mays again would have been like choosing not to breathe.

  three

  When Curtis told me about how he’d picked up the gun after I’d left him at the ranch house, we were sitting in his parents’ living room. I’d visited him a couple of times after he’d awoken in ICU, some months previous, and once after he’d been moved to a private bed. We’d more or less got the lay of each other’s land and coming to White City was my first attempt to find out what the dirt held beneath it.

  His parents lived in a gated community on the outskirts of town, the kind with two cars in every driveway and a third parked on the road. The houses were all four bedrooms/five baths with backyards big enough for a barbeque, a hot tub and not much else. His father answered the door on my second ring. He was a small man, a good six inches shorter than his son, but fit. Corded veins forked out from the rolled-up sleeves of his navy dress shirt, the top button undone in deference to the weekend, and there were traces of blonde left at the fringes of his salt-and-pepper crew cut. I showed him my badge and introduced myself as Detective James Steadman.

  “Kelly Mays,” he said as he shook my hand with wary resolve.

  “Maybe your son’s mentioned me,” I offered after a moment had passed and he hadn’t invited me in.

  “Can’t say he has.”

  “He around?”

  “He’s resting.”

  “It’s okay, Dad.”

  Kelly turned to Curtis, sitting at the end of the hall. I could see from the way Kelly crimped his neck that it still pained him, seeing his son like that: his legs hanging useless from the seat of a wheelchair, his sweatshirt loose against the flat of his chest, his face pale and drawn. He stepped aside and held the door for me. When I was through I saw Curtis staring at him, his eyes wide and his jaw tight. I couldn’t make sense of the expression until I heard the screen door seesawing shut behind me and Kelly’s slippers whispering down the porch steps. Curtis’d been trying to urge his father to stay and as he wheeled himself over to offer me his hand I knew that being stuck in a chair was the least of his burden.

  After we shook hands, Curtis directed me to the couch and Mrs. Mays came in with coffee and fresh-baked apple squares. While I sampled both, she stood behind Curtis, one hand resting on his shoulder, her smile strained though sincere.

  “Mom,” Curtis said and her hand startled from its perch.

  “I’ll let you two have some peace,” she said and turned for the hall. I watched her pause at the threshold as if she couldn’t imagine what she was supposed to do next before habit took over and led her into the kitchen. When I turned back to Curtis, he was looking at me the same way he had when he’d sat at the table in the servant’s quarters of Horace Milne’s ranch house.

  “So what brings you by?” he said.

  On the drive up, I’d thought of nothing else until the question had become muddled beyond all comprehension. I knew there had to be a reason in there somewhere but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was so I started at the beginning, hoping that somehow it would lead me towards an answer.

  I spoke of Ruby Yee and a city in mourning and from there it was a short trip to Terrence Bell and the ranch house. I told him I’d driven out there on a hunch and I did my best to lend some suspense to my search through its deserted grounds. When I spoke of turning into the breach and finding the evidence of a struggle, he was leaning forward in his chair, rapt. His eyes smiled when I told him my first impressions of that cocky young soldier, smelling of sex and sweat with too much drink souring both. He laughed when I got to the part about the gun, swearing he knew what it was for and that he should have fired the damn thing into the ceiling for all the trouble it’d caused. After I’d departed the tale, I treated myself to another apple square and mumbled through crumbs that I guess I just wanted to hear how it’d played from his end.

  My explanation seemed to satisfy him and he launched into his side of the story with the weariness of a soldier returning from combat, certain that the only thing he’d ever do of consequence was firmly behind him.

  He’d taken a train from Ottawa, he said, because he’d always wanted to take a train across the country. When he got to Regina, there was no one at the station to meet him with Welcome Home placards and confetti and ticker tape as there most surely would have been if he’d wanted it. There was someone waiting for him though and, of course, that was Terrence Bell, the only person who knew when and how Curtis would be returning. He was reading a book on one of the benches that face the tracks. He didn’t look up when the train pulled to a stop nor when its passengers started filing onto the platform. Curtis walked over and gave him all the standard greetings, the hellos and how-long-you-been-waitings and whatnot, but Terrence didn’t so much as flinch the whole time Curtis was standing there, just sat reading like he was soaking in the tub. Finally Curtis gave
his foot a kick, hard enough to keep the devil from walking straight for a week is how he put it. Terrence looked up and smiled at his friend, and it was that smile, more than anything, that told Curtis he was home and happy for it.

  Then Terrence went right back to the book. He was reading The Third Man by a fellow named Graham Greene. He’d nicked a copy from the prison library and from the way he was poring over it at the train station, it was obvious to Curtis that he’d found something in there he couldn’t shake.

  Seeking inspiration, I, myself, read it a few years later and I have to admit that there were certain similarities between what this Greene fellow wrote over a half century ago and what went on between Curtis and Terrence. It was a tragic tale of intrigue and betrayal narrated by a cop who wasn’t privy to all the facts but who’d been around enough to know that filling in the blanks was half the job and, regardless of the line some lawyers might try to sell you, knew that the truth most often lay outside of what could be proved to within a shadow of a doubt. Set in Vienna shortly after the Nazis had starved themselves into submission, there was a sense in the air, too fresh to have crystallized in the rest of the world yet, that the bar for human depravity had been raised a few notches so that anyone hoping to make a name for themselves had better learn how to fly. And that’s what the book was about: a guy named Harry Lime learning to fly, only to end up being dragged back to earth by his best friend, a hack writer whose head and heart were rooted in a morality that no longer applied except in the most hopeless of romantic pulp novels.