Читать книгу Last of the Independents - Sam Wiebe - Страница 11

The Ethereal Conduit of Madame Thibodeau

“He’s been sleeping for the last two hours,” I heard my grandmother say as she led someone down into the basement. I imagined them in single file, proceeding cautiously down the stairs, the only light my grandmother’s torch. And me, lurking in that basement like some cut-rate Cthulhu, waiting for the seals on my sarcophagus to be broken.

The expedition reached the lower depths of the household. I emerged from my room stumbling and rubbing my eyes. I saw Katherine and Ben, noted their reactions, and debated whether they’d think less of me if I turned around and retreated back into my room.

“Did you forgot Monday’s a work day?” Katherine asked.

“I didn’t forget.” I took the mail from my grandmother. “Just felt like taking a personal day.”

“Usually you phone in and tell the office.”

I tore up the flyers and subscription renewal warnings. “Usually Mondays the office is empty.”

“Would you like some lunch?” my grandmother asked me.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Well, would you mind putting on some pants?”

I stepped into a pair of jeans, turned on the light and ushered them inside. My grandmother retreated to the sanctity of the upstairs. I sat on the bed, motioned Katherine into the threadbare love seat. Ben stood against the wall. Usually he needed to be at the centre of any discussion. Today he held back.

“So what’s going on?” I said, groping behind the headboard to find my moccasins.

“You tell us,” Katherine said. “Mr. Szabo dropped off some money. About sixty bucks in change. I put it with the rest.”

“Good,” I said. “Any other developments?”

“Like what?”

“No messages?”

“None,” she said. “Oh, except for that skinny record producer chick. What was her name?”

“Amelia Yeats,” I said. “What did she say?”

“Just that she really enjoyed meeting a famous detective and wanted to have dinner with you tonight. I told her you were busy.”

“Really?”

“And afterward you might want to come back to her place and share a nice bubble bath. Come on, Mike.”

I collapsed back onto the bed. “So sorry for having a dick.”

Ben had begun inspecting the room. “You have a Sega,” he said.

“If you listen closely you can hear his fanboy-itis wearing off,” Katherine said to me.

“No, it’s a nice room,” Ben said. “It’s fine. It’s just —”

“Not very glamorous, is it?”

“Well,” he said, “you live with your grandmother.”

“She lives with me,” I said. “And it beats living above a djembe store.”

“Smells kind of funny,” Ben said.

“It does smell awful,” Katherine agreed.

“It’s the dog,” I told them. That prompted an explanation and medical history. By the time I’d finished, the dog had clambered down the stairs and buried her face in Katherine’s crotch. She pushed the dog away firmly and crossed her legs.

“What’s her name?” Ben asked.

“When she was a baby we called her Babe — real creative, I know. Years later we decided she needed a real name, so I named her Odetta, after the blues singer. Only she doesn’t look like an Odetta and she doesn’t answer to Odetta, so I went back to calling her Babe. But she’s not a baby anymore and that doesn’t fit, and because it’s been so long, she doesn’t come to that name either. So I just call her ‘dog’, or the dog if I have to differentiate her from other dogs.”

The dog in question walked to her corner and with a laboured wheeze collapsed on her mat.

“Poor girl,” Ben said, stooping over to rub two knuckles against the dog’s skull.

“Anyway,” I said, “there anything else going on?”

“I just drove here because he asked me to,” Katherine said, pointing at Ben. “If it was up to me I’d’ve let you sleep.”

“Are you pissed at me?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she said, in what she probably thought was a convincing tone.

I turned my attention to Ben. “Out with it.”

“Not a big deal, really. It’s just my mother wants to hire someone else.”

“I see,” I said, leaning back against the head-board. I hoped at least it wasn’t McEachern. “She’s entitled to do that, of course. Tell her I understand.”

“No, she doesn’t want to replace you.” Ben held up a card, pink with blue script. “It’s just that someone told her about this and now she can’t get it out of her head. I was actually hoping you could talk her out of it.”

I looked at the card. MADAME THIBODEAU, ETHEREAL CONSULTATIONS followed by an address near the foothills of Burnaby Mountain.

“She’s serious?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Who told your mom about her?”

“No idea.” His expression turned strangely credulous. “It’s all bullshit, right?”

“What do you think?”

I got up and walked to the washroom and splashed cold water on my face.

“I know your mother,” I said. “The more we try to talk her out of this the more she’ll want it. So let her book the session.”

“She already did. Sundown tonight.”

I sat back down on the bed and started buttoning my shirt. “If it’s one session and your mom is willing to waste the dough, there’s no real harm. But some of these people are lampreys. They’ll string her along, week after week, with nothing to show for it.”

“And that’s our job,” Katherine said. Immediately she added, “I’m kidding, of course.”

“We’ll go and see,” I said, ignoring her. “And if Madame Thibodeau starts with that ‘To find your daughter you must purify your bank account’ shit, we’ll call her on it.” Looking at Katherine I added, “After all, we can’t have her honing in on our turf.”

Before the illness, when I took the dog to Douglas Park, she’d take off across the field, ruining ball games, harassing little children and stalking the wildlife. Now when I loosed her collar and tossed her ratty tennis ball, she loped after it as if the activity held no pleasure for her, like it was a huge favor to me. The next time she ignored the ball and squatted behind the home team dugout. I watched a crumbling deuce fall from between her legs.

“Lovely,” I said.

I was sitting on the bleachers on the Laurel Street side, watching the convoy of SUVs and minivans pick up kids from Day Care. I watched the vehicles recede down the block. An assembly line of similar kids and similar cars.

I thought about Cynthia Loeb. I do that often. I know more about her than anyone except her mother, more even than Ben. I’d read her journal eight times. I knew the seating plan of her second-grade art class. I could draw her dental charts from memory. I felt like the host of some sort of virus.

My last girlfriend, Mira Das, walked out after seven months of listening to me babble about time tables and partial license plates. She told me she’d slept with Gavin Fisk just to feel like she mattered in some way to someone. What kind of a non-entity do you have to become to make a woman feel like that?

But at least with the Loebs I’d exhausted everything. With Django there were the pawn shop owners. They weren’t speaking, though that could be due to healthy distrust rather than conspiracy. That left me at an impasse. The Ford Taurus wasn’t recovered. Ditto the bike. I’d exhausted a comprehensive list of people who knew Django or saw him that day. Everyone else thought Django had run off or Cliff had been complicit in his disappearance. I didn’t believe either scenario.

Eventually the dog brought the ball to me. I stood up and pocketed it. We started home to get ready for the psychic.

I expected the parlor of Madame Thibodeau to be dusty and low-lit, the shelves crowded with occult knicknacks. I was half-hoping for a crystal ball. She ushered Ben and Mrs. Loeb and I into a sparse eggshell-coloured room, drew the teal drapes and sat us on a pair of L-shaped couches that formed a U facing the Madame’s rattan throne. The Madame herself eschewed kerchiefs and beads in favor of a teal pants suit with silver hoop earrings and a half-dozen silver bracelets on her left wrist. Her hands were soft and she had honey-coloured press-on nails. Her hair was blonde and swept back from a puffy pink face with a hefty amount of concealer. Her expression was earnest.

“I’m not a fortune teller or a prognosticator,” she said. “I think of myself as part of a conduit. What comes through the conduit depends on what is put in.”

Mrs. Loeb, perched on the edge of the sofa cushion, nodded. She held clutched in her hands a folded photo of her missing daughter. Ben sat on her other side, stealing glances at me over his mother’s head. I fiddled with my wallet.

It was a slick pitch, delivered directly to Mrs. Loeb’s heartstrings, ignoring the scoffs of her son and the disinterest of their family friend. The Madame cautioned her on what not to expect, in a way that would produce in Mrs. Loeb’s mind a strong hope for the miraculous without making any claims to it. At the end of the spiel Mrs. Loeb handed over her daughter’s picture and an envelope containing five hundred dollars. Madame Thibodeau did not accept checks.

Before she could stow the money in her pocket, my wallet slipped out of my hands, spilling business cards across the floor. The Madame used the toe of her slipper to scoot a pair of cards towards me. Each card said MORRISS CARGILL, INVESTMENT STRATEGIST. They’d come with the calendar.

“We’d like to speak to Cynthia,” the Madame said. “We’d like to talk to someone who knows her. This woman is her mother. She must be allowed an audience.”

Ben looked at his mother, who had closed her eyes, and at me, who shot him a look that said: patience. Madame Thibodeau did not close her eyes, but kept them trained on a corner of the room, at the juncture of walls and ceiling. I could almost imagine a disembodied torso floating there.

“Someone is telling me that your uncertainty is almost at an end,” the Madame said. “They want me to tell you to be strong. That hope is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.”

“How powerful?” Ben said.

His mother shushed him.

“They are sending me an image of water.”

“It was raining the morning Cynthia disappeared,” Mrs. Loeb said. The Madame nodded knowingly.

“The image is of two silhouettes in the rain, a larger silhouette and a smaller one. I can’t make out their faces.”

“Can you tell where they’re heading?” Mrs. Loeb said.

“They are two shadows in the darkness and the rain. They are moving through the darkness and the rain towards a green light.”

Her eyes settled on Mrs. Loeb’s.

“I’ve been given a glimpse,” she said. “It takes time and patience to interpret what comes through the conduit.” She patted Mrs. Loeb’s hand. “I know you’re eager. This will take some time. But I’m willing to make your daughter my highest priority.”

Mrs. Loeb nodded gravely, thankfully.

“I believe two sessions a week would be the most productive. I will consult the literature and try to find out exactly who is trying to contact us.”

“What will that work out to a week?” I asked. “A thousand dollars? Is there a punch card for a free session with ten of equal or greater value?”

Madame Thibodeau never looked at me. “Some people,” she said to Mrs. Loeb, “simply can’t understand or won’t accept the science of what I do.”

“What science?” I asked her. “Cold reading and five minutes on the web searching the kid’s name would’ve given you every detail you just fed us.”

Mild annoyance stoked to anger. “My gift is to ask questions of the spirit world.”

“I don’t dispute that, just that the spirit world answers you.”

“I can sense your frustration,” she said.

“Not exactly a divine revelation, is it?”

Madame Thibodeau said, “When you dropped those cards a moment ago, I knew your heart wasn’t open to this experience. No doubt you expected me to use the information and pretend it came to me supernaturally. I don’t know what your name is and I don’t claim to be clairvoyant. As I explained, I am just a woman who is open to what pours forth from the conduit. People who are deaf to it can’t help but be jealous, but I sense frustration from you, also. You have exhausted your abilities and the poor girl is still missing. I can’t guarantee a result, but isn’t it only fair of you to let Mrs. Loeb decide whether or not she wants to employ someone with a different set of skills? Aren’t you letting your jealousy and prejudice stand in the way of what’s best for Cynthia?”

The Loebs looked at me, anxious for a response. Madame Thibodeau drew herself up in her chair and rotated some of her bracelets. Feline satisfaction seemed to radiate from her, but her face remained meek, her eyes imploring me to relent, to forgive, to apologize. Her words were not without effect. She’d used the same word I’d thought of back at the park. Exhausted. It was true. I felt a trickle of shame in my blood.

I said, “You’ve got some inarguable points there. You’re perceptive. I appreciate that quality. I like to think of myself as the same. And I am frustrated.”

She smiled sympathetically.

“I don’t claim to be a great detective. Most detective work is drudgery. It’s reading through a transcript for the umpteenth time in the hope that something jumps out, some overlooked clue. I’m also prejudiced against anything that takes a leap of faith. I hear you say to a woman who’s lost her kid, ‘I see two figures in water, give me five hundred dollars,’ well, the hackles go up.”

Madame Thibodeau began to protest but I held up my hand. My turn.

“Ten minutes before we walked in here I told them how this would go down. I explained to them what a cold reading was. How you’d single out the mother ’cause she’s emotionally vulnerable, easy to manipulate. I told them you’d say something cryptic, wait for our response, then build on it. Fact is, the morning Cynthia Loeb disappeared there wasn’t a raindrop in sight. But you built your story on that, keeping it just vague enough so you’d have an out.”

“I never said her daughter disappeared during a rainstorm.”

“You never said anything substantive. You’re a fraud, how could you?”

I stood up. The Loebs followed suit.

I’d like to think my speechifying left the Madame torn up inside and repentant, but all I’d succeeded in doing was tearing off the last scrap of pretense. Our eyes met. I also like to think that beneath the mutual disdain and scorn, we shared an admiration, or at least an honest appraisal of the other’s nature. But all of that might be romanticized, two worn-out hookers trying to claim emotions they had no right to.

“You’re a bastard,” she said.

“Pretty much. Mrs. Loeb would like her money back.”

Looking up at us, Madame Thibodeau took the envelope and passed it to Mrs. Loeb, but not before withdrawing two of the bills. “Cost of doing business,” she said, smiling.

I looked at Mrs. Loeb, who nodded, her stoic good cheer already returning. She knew she was getting off cheap.

“That should at least buy one fortune,” I said as the Loebs headed out of the parlor. “Any sooth for me before I leave?”

The Madame remained in her seat staring at the portraits of Robert Borden on the currency, an absent glaze to her eyes. Without looking up she said, “How ’bout, ‘beware the ides of March?’”

“Ah, it was worth a try,” said Mrs. Loeb. She dropped me on the corner of Beckett Street. As I climbed out of the car, she killed the engine to rummage through her purse, coming up with the envelope which she offered to me. I waved it away.

“Your money’s no good.”

Ben had climbed into the front seat. Leaning with his elbow out the window of the Town Car he said, “That was a bravura performance, Mike. Really restored my faith in you.”

“Shucks,” I said. “Pissing off the clairvoyant is easy. They never see it coming.”

He shook his head at the cornball joke. “It’s always the ides of March you have to beware of, never the nones or the calends. The calends are my favorite.”

“The calends are under-utilized,” I agreed.

Alone in my office I made tea and answered an email query about my fee structure. I made the calls that needed to be made and fired off emails to people who deserved them. During our Staples spree I’d picked up a scanner, and I spent time making digital copies of the Szabo documents, including Django James’s birth certificate and baby footprint.

It was dark out and the usual Hastings Street crowd was gathering under the awnings at the end of the block. Sex trade workers, homeless persons, a whole lot of substance abusers, some of whom encompassed both the other categories. We are all of us whores of one kind or another.

I worked until nine. When the mundane chores had been knocked off, I stood out on the balcony with the dregs of my tea and thought hard about the Szabos and the owners of Imperial Pawn. Ramsey and his daughter knew something. Theirs wasn’t a silence built around staying away from the police at all costs. If you run a pawn shop in Vancouver it’s inevitable you deal with the law. It could be gang-related: it’s hard to make a store owner talk when the person they might finger has friends who enjoy playing with matches.

I wondered if Gavin Fisk sweated Ramsey or his daughter. I wondered if he gave a shit. About the Szabo case, about anything. I hoped he made Mira happy.