Читать книгу Crazy Lady - James Hawkins - Страница 12

Superintendent Ted Donaldson is doing his best to support the world's beleaguered carb producers as he battles his way through the dinner buffet at the Mitre Hotel in Westchester. "To be honest, Daphne," he tells his old friend between the linguine and the shepherd's pie, "I'd retire tomorrow, but the little lady has been cooking up a to-do list since the day we were wed."

"That's why I always avoided marriage," lies Daphne. "No lists for me; no expectations, no disappointments, never having to say sorry."

"Never understood that myself," confesses Donaldson with a laugh. "I love Mrs. Donaldson, but I've spent my whole damn life apologizing for something or other. Anyway, what did you want?"

"What makes you think I want something…" she begins, and then stops as he raises his eyebrows.

"First clue: you're a woman."

"All right," she admits, then briefly outlines the supposedly shady past of Janet Thurgood.

"Way before my time," he says as he picks at his shepherd's pie.

"I asked David Bliss, but he's too wrapped up in that book he's writing."

"And his little French chambermaid," suggests Donaldson with a wink.

Bliss isn't wrapped up with Daisy at all. Moonbeams may be sparkling off the Mediterranean, but the light is cold as he wanders the deserted promenade of St-Juan-sur-Mer. The island fortress is just a shadowy smudge on the horizon, and he turns his back on it as he peers up at the promontory and tries to find the Château Roger through the eucalyptus and palms. The dilapidated building is there, he knows, but even in daylight he would struggle. But he doesn't need to see it. He feels it and questions himself, Do you honestly believe in past lives?

Lots of people do, sensible, sane people who may try to deny it even to themselves, but why this compunction to reveal the identity of the masked man unless he's there, inside you, saying, "You must tell my story to the world; the greatest love story ever told. It is time."

Maybe it's just my excuse. Maybe I'm just trying to escape from the police.

You want to escape? Get a job; be a plumber or an electrician. Do something creative.

Oh yeah. Have tools will travel. That's really exciting. Anyway, writing is creative.

Five hours slip by like a long night's drive as he wanders the darkened boulevards and quays, and when he eventually wakes up his mind he searches in vain for memories of the road. It's nearing two in the morning when he opens his apartment's door and breathes in relief at the empty bed. He checks the garden from the balcony — no lemons. But would he spot one in the moonlight?

What do you want? What are you looking for?

"I want answers," he says as he peers across the promontory for signs of the dark château that dragged him into the mystery in the first place.

Greg Grimes, a potter with piercing blue eyes and bushy blonde hair who threw little pots on a wheel every evening on the promenade, was the trigger. He was scruffy and unshaved, but he had a certain magnetism that drove women wild. Bliss would stand most summer evenings in the balmy air, watching in wonder as the English artisan moulded ceramic white elephants — midget ashtrays, egg cups, vases, and candle holders — for a google-eyed audience of women.

"It is free, gratuit," the charismatic potter would say as he offered each freshly minted gem to a different young woman, but his begging bowl always overflowed, until someone roughly amputated his hand one night and left him to the rats in the Château Roger's basement.

That was more than a year ago, and although the stores are filled with pots from Picasso's town of Vallauris, high on the hill above St-Juan-sur-Mer, none carry with them the love that Grimes infused into his tiny masterpieces. However, the lustre on a floppy wet clay pot quickly wears off, and most of the little treasures that warmed a heart one evening would be flushed down the hotel toilet by the next morning. And with much of the plumbing dating back almost to Napoleon, the entire system would be gummed up in no time.

Bliss's suggestion that the hoteliers should affix a notice to each toilet was dismissed with typical Gallic disdain as "autant pisser dans un violon," or as much use as pissing into a violin, and irate members of L'ssociation des hôteliers de St-Juan were the prime suspects in the potter's mutilation. However, as Bliss was to discover, a much more sinister organization took the man's hand.

I have to go back in there, Bliss tells himself with little enthusiasm as he stares in the direction of the building. He knows that it won't be easy; since his previous incursion more than a year ago in search of the wounded potter, the custodians have redoubled their efforts to keep trespassers out. But inwardly, he knows that it isn't the security guards bothering him. He knows he can walk the twisted hills surrounding the château and expect only polite nods from the muscled men in dark suits while they whisper, "Zhat is the famous Scotland Yard detective who is writing a book."

Bothering him are the thousands of tortured souls that he stumbled over in the dungeons beneath the derelict building: souls of resistance fighters, Jews, gypsies, and anyone else who stepped on Adolf Hitler's toes. Even inconvenient husbands, ex-lovers, or business rivals, denounced as "traitors to the fatherland" with poison pens, were whisked out of their beds at dawn with a one-way ticket to Auschwitz or Buchenwald — if they survived the first stop in the château's notorious torture chambers.

The château hides itself in the darkness as Bliss questions, What am I trying to prove? The widows and orphans of the victims don't want me prying into their cellars; they don't want an invasion of neo-nazi relic hunters digging up their past.

"Ce château et un panier des crabes, a basket of crabs," Daisy claimed, and none of his discoveries changed that. But now, as he flounders in search of an ending for his novel, he can't help thinking that the ruined château holds the key.

Vancouver, British Columbia, has its share of derelict buildings, though none whose age or black history comes close to the Château Roger. However, no more than a salmon's leap from the waterfront hotels and glitzy restaurants that line the Fraser River is an abandoned warehouse that attracts the losers in life's lottery. Potheads, hookers, mainliners, pimps, and alcoholics all seek shelter from a harsh world under its leaking iron roof, while a shanty city of those still holding out hope grows outside its walls.

"Let's try down there," suggests Trina, dragging her husband into a tight alleyway littered with boxes and bags, the homes of the homeless, behind the warehouse.

Rick hangs back, "I don't —"

"Come on. They're only people," she calls as she surges ahead with a five-dollar bill in hand.

"I'm looking for a woman," says Trina as she squats by the side of an aging Jesus look-alike.

"So am I," he replies as the embers in his eyes briefly ignite, and he begins to reach out for her face.

Trina nudges him, laughing. "Cheeky." Then she gives him a brief description of Janet.

"Maybe," he says at the mention of Janet's head scarf, and Trina catches on.

"How much?" she begins, exchanging her five for a twenty, but Rick is quickly on her shoulder.

"Don't," he hisses. "Not until he tells you."

"OK," she says. She rips the bill in half, thrusts the Queen's head into the dropout's face, and puts on a mobster's tone. "The rest when I find her, awl'right?"

"Brilliant," complains Rick five minutes later when all the leads have fizzled and the bum has taken off.

"So? He hasn't got the dough."

"Neither have we," Rick is moaning when Trina spots a pile of cardboard boxes against a brick outhouse and senses a presence.

"Shh…" she whispers, pulls Janet's crucifix from her bag, and gingerly advances like a vampire hunter. "Janet?" she coos. "Janet?" A brown head scarf appears.

The chase is short. Janet is too weak to struggle, and as Trina escorts her towards the car she says soothingly, "Don't worry. We won't tell the police where you are."

Behind her, playing backstop, Rick mutters under his breath, "You could get us five years for this."

Rick Button's warning seems likely to come to fruition the moment they take Janet into their house and Kylie sings out, "Mum, Dad, police on the phone."

"Let me," says Trina, grabbing it from her husband, but she instantly relaxes. "It's only Mike Phillips," she says with her hand over the mouthpiece as the inspector explains that he's been in touch with an officer who specializes in cults and sects.

"You know the sort of thing," he elucidates. "Twenty-year-old heiress runs off and gives everything to God, who turns out to be some freaky-haired junkie with a Bible."

"I don't think Janet has anything —" Trina begins, but he cuts her off.

"Not now she doesn't. That's my point. But she may have done. Anyway, Officer Zelke wants to talk to you."

"Hey," shouts Rob from the basement as he turns up the volume on the television. "It sounds like the stick insect."

"The RCMP and Vancouver police are searching for a woman wanted in the death of one of their own…"

"Turn it off," shouts Rick, but Janet seems oblivious as she caresses her crucifix and rocks herself comfortingly on a kitchen chair.

"What makes you think she's from a cult?" Trina questions Paul Zelke from the quiet of her bedroom a few minutes later.

"Daena," he asks succinctly. "Is that what she calls herself?"

"Yeah. Daena XV."

"Thought so. There's a whole bunch of women in a joint they call Beautiful and they all reckon they're Daena. It's a religious freak show, usual stuff: polygamy, incest, child abuse. All ordained from on high, all in the Bible. But so is stoning gays and adulteresses to death, though we kinda frown on that today."

"Why do you think Janet is from there?"

"We got a call a couple of days ago from the jerk who runs the place. His name's Wayne Browning, though he calls himself The Saviour. Anyway, he gave a false ID, but we know it was him, and he seemed pretty keen to find her."

Wayne Browning isn't keen on finding Janet, he's desperate, and so is Janet's husband, the man who originally sent her there.

"I pay you," shouts Joseph Creston into the phone. "Keep her there, keep her quiet. Is that such a problem?"

"Forty years," Browning shoots back. "Yes. And what I've paid you would keep her for another forty. I've funded that place."

"Yeah, but you've not done so badly out of it."

"That's not the point. Find her. Get her back."

"It may not be that easy," Browning admits before revealing that Creston is not the only one who wants his wife. "She's supposed to have killed a cop."

The international line goes dead as Creston analyzes the new data and crunches the numbers.

"All right. This may not be bad," he is saying as he thinks of the very last time that he saw her: a snivelling wretch on the edge of life following the death of her third child. "I love you. I'll always do the best for you," he said before she was whisked away to be put aboard the company jet. "You'll get help where you are going."

"Maybe she needs more than you can give her," he tells Browning. "Maybe they'll help her."

"She was OK when she wuz here," complains Browning, seeing Creston's funding slipping away.

"And so she ran away?"

"She's confused, she doesn't know what she's doing or saying, she's kinda lost her mind."

"Perhaps she needs a psychiatrist?" suggests Creston, then questions himself, What if she recalls too much?"What does she remember?" he asks guardedly.

"Hard to tell; all she does is pray."

"So, the chances are they would think that she is a little unstable?"

"Sir, your wife's a nut. You know that."

"She's still my wife," Creston insists sharply, then comes to a decision. "Hire someone… a private detective, a pro, money's no object. I want her kept out of jail. Do you understand?"

"Yep."

"And I want her found."

Bliss is still searching, still seeking direction as he prowls the quays and streets of St-Juan-sur-Mer. His manuscript is shrinking daily as he pares off one implausible scene after another while trying to find a point of historical solidity from which to build his ending. His sticking point is that the fortress on the island of Ste. Marguerite, the Fort Royal, wasn't the first prison to house Louis XIV's famous masked prisoner, and neither was it the last.

The sight of the majestic cliff-top building rising out of the Mediterranean stops Bliss as dawn arrives with a crimson slash across the horizon and the sea shifts from cobalt to azure. "That's what I call impressive," he muses as if the show has been orchestrated just for him.

The smell of hot bread and croissants draws him from the scene to his favourite boulangerie just off the promenade, and as he sidles through the narrow doorway of the ancient bakery, he's salivating. A blonde-haired woman with her mind on her breakfast nearly butts him as she meets him headfirst in the doorway.

"Pardonnez-moi," he mumbles, stepping back.

She glances up momentarily to reply, "Merci."

If their eyes meet for a nanosecond neither notices, and Bliss is already at the counter silently practising his order, Deux croissants, s'il vous plait, before he feels a tingle of unease.

"Bonjour, monsieur," calls Marie, the baker's little wife, her beaming grin barely making it over the mounds of warm bread and pastries.

"Bonjour…" he begins, though stops abruptly when he finds his gaze locked onto the spiralling coils of a pain aux raisins, his mind spinning as he thinks of the woman.

"Monsieur?" queries the rotund woman with a smile, but he's stuck in the swirling coils of the sticky pastry, trying to fathom who she was.

"And how is zhe writing, monsieur?"

Around and around goes his mind — she must be a local, just a familiar face. Then he stops and catches up to Marie. Disastrous; terrible; feel like giving up. The words are there but they won't take shape amid his confusion, then a prod from behind jump-starts him.

"Sorry. Very good, thanks, coming along nicely."

Marie smiles in relief as she takes his order and adds a complementary shortbread in celebration of his apparent success. "It must be very nice to be famous, is it not?" she continues chattily, happy to practise her English.

"I am not famous," he protests, but she stops him with a floury hand.

"Here, everyone, they say to me, ‘How is zhe famous number one English writer today?' And I say, ‘He is very good.'" The she leans in closely to add. "But I know zhat you are also zhe detective who finds zhe secret of l'homme au masque de fer."

"The Man in the Iron Mask," murmurs Bliss as he sits on the quay wall eating breakfast, but his mind is still on the woman in the baker's doorway as he looks ahead at the infamous island through a forest of yacht masts.

The flotilla of million-dollar boats, neglected since September, bobs idly in the lazy water of the harbour. It is a nautical ghost town. Most of the crews have switched uniforms and now serve the same well-heeled masters, this time as lift operators and chalet girls in the alpine ski resorts, although many of the flashier yachts and their owners have followed the sun to the Caribbean or Seychelles.

Thoughts of the woman burn like a slow fuse as Bliss wanders the deserted quays once he's finished eating. "For Sale" signs occasionally pull him up and he muses on the possibility of buying something modest and escaping completely, but he knows that even modesty comes at a premium here. And he's well aware that most of the owners are simply trying to rid themselves of an expensive toy before they are drawn back by the arrival of spring.

"Just one more year, get our money's worth," they'll convince themselves as they begrudgingly pay for a refit and paint job before hiring a crew.

Bliss scans the boats hoping to glimpse the woman, thinking she could be a crew member, but there are no blondes today. Blondes are the creatures of summer: northern European crew members and ditzy starlets on the make.

It is winter and the olive-skinned locals have taken back their town, though Bliss sees few of them working. Most of the dark-haired, dark-eyed men and women sit around in the few bars that still bother to open and wait for spring. Their euphoria following the departure of the summer vacationers has waned since the realization that the visitors took off with the money. And with most of the restaurants and clubs closed for the season, and stores cut back to a minimum, there won't be a lot of joy until the conferences and festivals begin. Then, by the end of May, when the International Film Festival in Cannes lights up the whole coast, everyone will paint on smiles, ready for the sun. Christmas comes in August on the Côte d'Azur, when the stores will be laden with glitz and trash and filled with wallet-happy holidaymakers determined to wear the lustre off their credit cards. Sleep finally catches up with Bliss on a quayside bench. Daisy finds him two hours later.

"Where you been?" she demands, angrily poking him awake. "I look everywhere."

"Sorry, Daisy."

"Why you no love me?"

How many times has she asked? How many times has he wanted to say, I do, in a way, but there is someone burnt so indelibly in my heart that I can't escape.

"Because she's dead…" he begins angrily, then stops himself and softens as he explains. "There's someone else, Daisy, but she died. I tried to save her, but I couldn't, and she took my heart with her to her grave."

The news hits Daisy harshly and she stands with a deeply furrowed brow as she tries to process the information.

"Someone else?" she questions vaguely after a few moments.

"But she's dead," he reminds her, though knows that won't be enough, that it isn't enough for him either.

"Oh, Daavid. Zhat is terrible," says Daisy, sitting beside him. "But why you not tell me?"

Bliss shrugs. He knows how unfair it would be to say to a woman, As much as I want to be with you, it is only because my one true love is not here.

"I've tried counselling, therapy, self-talk…" Welling tears stop him as he replays memories neither coloured nor faded by time, perfect memories of a perfect relationship — just a few weeks of sheer ecstasy, a wonderful, magical time when two foreigners in a foreign land found pure love in each other's minds and bodies.

"She was everything a man could ever ask for," he says quietly, willing himself not to look at Daisy, knowing she has a right to be offended by the insinuation that she is less.

But Daisy is not blind to his words or his sudden coolness. "What happened?" she asks, though she would rather not.

"Long story," he says, finally relieved that he no longer has to pretend, either to her or himself. "Maybe I'll tell you one day."

But where does zhat leave me? questions Daisy silently, with a look of pleading, and Bliss sees what is going through her mind and tries to soften the blow. "Daisy," he says, gently taking her right hand. "I look into your eyes and I see a beautiful, warm woman and, in a way, I love you."

"But —"

"There is no magic, Daisy. There never was. We became friends before we were lovers and I… well, I thought I would get over her."

"But you didn't."

"No. I could lie. I could marry you and tell you that you are the one I truly love, but that wouldn't be fair. I know, deep down, that I would always wish that you were her."

Tears are streaming down Daisy's face — tears for herself. "But she is dead," she reminds him, as if he needs reminding.

"I know. That's the worst thing. I have no way of ever getting my heart back. She took it with her."

"What about her grave — you could visit," begins Daisy hopefully. "You could kneel at her grave and say —"

"Cremated, I think," says Bliss, lightly putting a hand on her arm to stop her. "No grave. I never even saw her body. I was wounded… we crashed… I crashed."

"A car?"

"A plane."

"You were flying?"

"Yes… no… not really… I don't know," he says, and then he stares out over the sea and relives the terrifying moments in a rusty Illushyn cargo plane when he grappled with the controls at the side of a dying woman — the woman who ran off to heaven with his heart and left him in hell.

"I did not hear," says Daisy once he has given her a sanitized version of the incident when he and Yolanda rescued a group of Western computer experts from Saddam Hussein's clutches before the Americans slung the dictator in jail.

"No one heard, Daisy. In fact, officially, I think I'm supposed to kill you now that I've told you." The Frenchwoman shrinks back in concern, but Bliss cracks a wan smile. "Just joking. Although you probably shouldn't tell anyone. We shouldn't have been there."

"What is her name?"

He wants to correct the tense but doesn't, and he knows why; he knows that she is still alive in his mind, that she will always be alive, that she will outlive him. "Her name is Yolanda… Yolanda Pieters," he says, and finds himself going off into the distance again searching for an image. It's an easy search. Her face, sheer unadorned beauty — the most beautiful face he ever set eyes on, with just a single imperfection that he found intriguing — is dreamlike today, though it isn't always that way. Sometimes, when he's feeling the loss most, it's nightmarishly marred by the agony of her death throes.

"Daavid. You must move on," Daisy tells him as she sits beside him and tries to comfort him.

"I've tried. God, how I've tried."

She reaches out to stroke his cheek. "Now I understand," she says, as tears stream down her face.

"I wish I understood," mutters Bliss. "It's been more than three years. How long will it last?"

"Forever, Daavid," she says, knowing that her tears are not only for him and his lost love, they are for those who took a piece of her heart when they departed. And she turns to the Château Roger, where, along with memories of her grandfather and several other relatives who were swept up by the Nazis during the war, she too can find an image.

Roland was his name, and Daisy closes her eyes as she reruns the painful image of the young Parisian boy — a city sophisticate with a Beatles haircut and Daddy's souped-up British Mini — who was the first to sample her tender young flesh. She was a pretty fifteen-year-old schoolgirl at the time, in the mid-sixties, and was diving after a shoal of sardines in the bay one sunny summer's day. Roland was diving nearby with an entirely different kind of fish on his mind. He struck, and landed his virginal catch in a little hidden cove where the tunnel from the château's basement comes out onto a golden beach. Forty-five seconds later Roland hit his stride, and with a triumphant yelp and a premature ejaculation he left Daisy in the sand while he shot off up the château's tunnel in search of another adventure.

"It is très dangereux. You cannot go zhere," Daisy yelled after him, but his motor was running so fast he didn't care if he was coming or going.

Daisy shudders at the memory of Roland's dead body being washed ashore a couple of days later — minus his zizi — but at that time she was still scared of the château's legendary ghosts and kept silent about their tryst, worried that a vengeful resistance fighter in the basement mistook him for a Nazi storm trooper.

She shakes off the unhappy memories of her loss, realizing that she is facing another, and asks, "But why you in Iraq?"

"They did have weapons of mass destruction," replies Bliss. "Cyber-weapons. That's why the inspectors never found them."

"Cyber-weapons."

"A computer virus to attack our systems."

"What will happen?"

"Maybe nothing," he says, not wishing to alarm her with the prospect of a super-virus kicking in and screwing up the world. "Although I think we've seen the signs: major power outages in America; bank computers on the blink for a week; the internet crashing." He pauses, knowing that the big one is still out there, that everything to date has been small fry. But he knows that it is like waiting for the earthquake that will one day kill Los Angeles. "It's coming… it's coming," everyone warns, then bang, the bottom falls out of the Indian Ocean and swallows a quarter of a million people in Asia. And all you have to do is constantly worry about one dead woman, he chastises himself, but then admits that it's not constant, only when it's triggered — similar hair, voice, colour, eyes, shape.

Stop it… stop it… she's been dead for years, he tries telling himself, but the more that time has gone on, the worse it has become. You need closure, says the voice in his mind, but he disagrees. I need Yolanda. Need to know that I didn't kill her.

You didn't kill her. You would have died for her — you wanted to die for her.

And still she left me.

She didn't want to. It wasn't her choice.

"Daavid," breaks in Daisy from outside.

"I thought I'd got over her," he says, but he can't help comparing her to the château's victims as he sits looking towards the old building. Sixty years on and many of the town's widows still dream that their lovers were sent to a remote concentration camp and will one day march home, strapping young men.

Daisy's grandmother was amongst those who stayed awake night after night when the war ended, but the pain was always still there the following morning: the gnawing, insidious pain of hope, watching the door for hour upon hour, begging, praying, screaming, pleading. "Come back. Please come back. I love you — I love you more than you can possibly know."

"Daavid. You have to move on," Daisy tells him, and he wants to say he'll try, but he finally gives up.

"So do you, Daisy," he says as her tears continue to stream. "I'm sorry, but I can never take a chance with you or anyone else. I can never look into your eyes and say with honesty, ‘You are the only one for me.'"