A Victim Must Be Found (23 page)

“Yeah. You could be right. If I lost a brother to politics, I might not end up a choirboy. But what about Pambos? There wasn’t anything bent about him. He was a sweet guy …”

“Who was hung up on paintings, tin soldiers and Napoleon,” I concluded his thought for him.

“Aw, Benny, you can’t use that against him.”

“I’m not even trying to. What I mean is that we all react in our own way. One brother fell in with bad company, the other had a thing about improving himself, becoming a success, collecting things.”

“He had a great collection of old toys, Benny,” Barney added. “You ever see all those trick banks and stuff?” From here on the conversation got away from what was on my mind and closer to what was on Barney’s. For the fiftieth time we heard how Barney rowed across the Congo from Brazzaville to Léopoldville, now Kinshasa, with an exclusive interview. We both congratulated Barney and then we got up to leave the United. Bill let Barney walk ahead of him towards the cashier. He turned back to me.

“You know, Benny, I was over there and covered that Guenyeli business. I mean, I ploughed through all that British red tape trying to find out what really happened. In the end I got as clear a picture of what happened as anybody. Hell, I was a bloody expert on the incident. That’s what they called shootings in the street and bombs going off:
incidents
.” He took the cigarette I gave him when he discovered that his package was empty. We both lit our cigarettes from his butane lighter. “It was a major story. Nine Greeks were killed. All that. And the British were sitting on it even tighter than usual. But finally, I got to the boy whose brain-child the whole operation was. He was a major who’d been in Palestine and then went on half-pay until the emergency in Cyprus started to heat up. Of course, I was never able to use his name, but I was able to write a few good stories about it.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking he was about to get lost in his nostalgia.

“Well, when I first knew Pambos, he was very interested in all of the things I’d found out about the incident. He badgered me all the time about the details. In the end, I think he knew as much about it as Tim Bell or me. The point I’m making is,” he said, “you’re right about how that event got to both the surviving brothers in their own way. In a way, Pambos tried to collect it. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. Who’s Bell?”

“Oh, Bell was the galloping major. See you.”

I watched him join Barney at the cashier. He bought a package of cigarettes, while I wondered why all majors were galloping majors. I didn’t get anywhere with the thought, but I’m still working on it.

Half an hour later, I was standing on the doorstep of Dirk and Gertrude Bouts’s house on Queen Street again. When she came to the door, she peered through a crack. “Mrs. Bouts?” I said, with a false lift in my voice. “Remember me, I’m Benny Cooperman.” She opened the door an inch wider.

“Yes, Mr. Cooperman. I remember you very well.” She stopped there so that I’d have to pick up the momentum.

“I wanted to thank you for all your help.” She swallowed the bait and allowed the door to swing open the rest of the way. “Yes,” I went on, “you were a big help.”

“Then they know who killed him?” she said with a kind of hope or relief. “Come into the living-room.” I followed her to the big, bright room with the baby lying on the blanket in his playpen and minding his own business. I greeted Willum by name and got a smile from his mother for my memory. We both sat down, with a corner of the playpen between us.

“Not exactly,” I said, answering her earlier question. “The police are still looking for the killer.”

“Then, why …?” She was suspicious again.

“Please take it easy, Mrs. Bouts. They’ll get the murderer in time. The Niagara Regional Police are among the best in the country. Like the Mounties, they get their man or woman.”

Gertrude Bouts flinched slightly at my choice of a moment for equal recognition of the sexes “Do they think that a woman is involved, Mr. Cooperman?”

“Oh, yes. They know that Mattie Lent was involved with Pambos. They don’t know to what degree she was mixed up in his death, but they’ll sort that out. The fact that she’s gone missing is suggestive, don’t you think?”

“Not necessarily,” she said, drawing the words out slowly as she slipped on a sweater that was lying on the chair. ‘There are many reasons why a young girl moves on. They don’t all kill people.”

“Of course. In fact a few of them get killed themselves.” I got a smile for my pains.

“Exactly, exactly,” she said, playing with the hem of her skirt. “Oh, but that’s a terrible thought. I won’t be able to sleep tonight. Would you like some tea or coffee?” she asked smoothly, looking like she was going to get up. I smiled and followed her into the kitchen, which was yellow and cluttered.

“Mrs. Bouts, may I take you into my confidence?”

“But of course, if you want to.”

“Well, I am not a great believer in the story of Mattie’s disappearance.”

“No!” She forgot that the water was overflowing the kettle as she stood at the sink. “Why would you say that?”

“Because I think you know where she is.”

“No! Don’t say that even as a joke. I know nothing about her.”

“I think you know everything about her.” She looked at me with steady eyes. She no longer was going to make tea or coffee. And we’d never determined which it was she’d intended to make. She stood there and I knew I had to make my next words count. “When I came here yesterday, you told me a lot about Mattie.”

“That’s right. We were friends.”

“But you told me things that only Mattie would have known. You told me about the town in Austria where she came from, what valley it’s in …”

“That’s right. It’s a well-known valley for skiing.”

“For someone who hasn’t been there, you seem to know a great deal about it. I thought something was wrong when I talked to you last. You appeared to be worried, but you hadn’t really done anything about Mattie.”

“What could I do? I didn’t know anything about Mr. Kiriakis. You told me he was dead. And that was only yesterday.”

“You could have gone to the police after I left. But you didn’t. Why wouldn’t you report Mattie missing if you were friends?”

“But she’s hardly missing yet! It’s only a few days.”

“If Willum went missing, you wouldn’t wait days or minutes before reporting it. You’d be on the phone in seconds. No, there’s only one reason why you didn’t report Mattie missing.”

“I don’t want to listen to this.”

“You didn’t report her missing because she isn’t missing, Mrs. Bouts. You know where she is.”

“Me?”

“And there’s something else. Mrs. Bouts, you told me all about Mattie’s home in Schruns. Have you ever been there?”

“Why, no, I just heard Mattie talk about it. And I saw her pictures.”

“Black-and-white pictures, Mrs. Bouts, but you described the village houses and church to me in colour.”

“Mattie must have …”

“You told me about the white and green houses, the green dome of the church. The pictures upstairs, even the postcards, are in black and white.” Gertrude Bouts put her fingers m her mouth and didn’t seem to notice she was doing it. She made a throaty noise but I couldn’t make out any words. “No, no, I think there’s a simple explanation here, Mrs. Bouts, something that explains everything. And you know what it is as well as I do.” She shook her head from side to side. “The reason you know so much about Mattie, Mrs. Bouts, is because
you
are Mattie Lent. It’s the only way it makes sense.”

“Me? You’re being ridiculous! What are you saying? I have my feelings, Mr. Cooperman.”

“You and Mattie Lent are the same person. That’s why you didn’t want the police looking for Mattie.”

“I have finished talking to you. I have nothing further to say.”

“I know, I know. I’m just going. But I want you to know that I understand. I’m not blaming you. You invented Gertrude Bouts because you were living with Dirk as his wife. You want to protect your parents at home in Austria, so you pretend that you, Mattie, are the tenant of the Bouts. To anyone on Queen Street, you’re the wife of Dirk and the mother of Willum, and to the folks at home, you’re still Mattie, up on the second floor. It seemed an innocent enough deception at first. Who could be hurt by it? You only did it out of the most generous motives, to prevent your parents, who, I understand, are both elderly and ailing, from being hurt in their old-fashioned ways. Where’s the harm? And then when your sister, Greta, came for a visit, you got away with it neatly. I haven’t called Greta at the UN, but I could if I have to. Did you tell her that Gertrude Bouts was in hospital? How did you explain her absence downstairs to your sister?”

“I am not opening my mouth.”

“That’s right, Mattie. Don’t say anything. You see, I’m not here to give you away. I only want to know what Mattie knows about Pambos Kiriakis’s death and anything else about him that might shed some light in that direction.”

“I see.”

“I’m not in the pay of the police. I have no direct line to the Kirchplatz in Schruns. I only want some information that might help find your friend Pambos’s murderer. You owe that to him, Mattie.”

“But if you come, others will come. I’ll never have any peace.”

“They may come, but they won’t come through me. Others may catch on to your Austrian accent under your excellent imitation of Dirk’s Dutch. But Dutch and Austrian aren’t the same and your voice helped give you away. You’ll have to watch that.”

“Will you go if I tell you?”

“Cross my heart.” She sat down on a sturdy kitchen chair and I found its mate.

“All right. I won’t tell you about myself, only Pambos.” I nodded my agreement to her rules and she went on. “I met him first when I came to Canada, when my English was very bad. I was taken to his restaurant. He was kind to me and gave me the name of someone who helped me with my English. I didn’t see him again until after three years. By then I was living with Dirk, but it was all fighting from morning to night. Pambos was at the hotel and he gave me advice, but I could see he was lonely, so I became his little
Schätzchen
. Dirk was away then, even more than now. We had a lot of fun, Pambos and me. He
knows
so much. I mean, he knew so much. But, I began to get worried.”

“In what way?”

“Well, in the first place, Dirk wanted to get serious. In the second, I got tired of Pambos’s stories. He had a mind like a ski slope. There were many trails, but always the same trails. It was either his paintings or Napoleon. Or Cyprus! He could go on with his newspaper friend about Cyprus until after three in the morning. I might as well be in bed with Dirk. You know? In the end, I didn’t come back any more. Dirk and I had Willum and now Dirk spends all his time in Hamilton again. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Are you saying that you haven’t seen Pambos for a long time?”

“Not since before I was pregnant. We didn’t have a fight, we just wanted different things. He was always kind to me. He was a good man, Pambos Kiriakis.” She paused here, thought a moment about what she was going to add and then said: “But he was for
me
, you understand,” and she pointed to herself, “a very boring man, Mr. Cooperman. With one friend he would talk about how Napoleon could have invaded England near Dover because of the way the cliffs gave way to beaches a few miles away. Or he would go on for hours about one painter and another. He was very partial to a painter named Lamb, I remember. He tried to buy pictures from the painter, but he wasn’t painting any more. Pambos lent him some money to have his television set fixed. He was a dear man, Mr. Cooperman, but for me he was not fun. I respected him, I was grateful to him for
sooo
much he did, but in the end, not even the love-making was enough.”

“How much of this does Dirk know?’

“Oh, he knows nothing about Pambos.
Nothing!”

“Okay, well try to keep it like that. What about the other little deception?”

“Well, he agreed that for the sake of my parents …”

“I see. How long were you going to keep this game going?”

“My mother has only a few more months to live.”

“I’m sorry.” That seemed to stop things for a while.

“Have you heard from the police?”

“A Sergeant Savas called yesterday. I said Mattie was out. He said he’d call back.” I wondered how long she would have been able to keep up the fiction of being Gertrude Bouts once the police came looking in earnest for Mattie Lent. If they began by asking for passports and other papers, she might have cracked after thirty seconds.

“Do you know anything about his wife?” I asked.

“I think that it was over and done with a long time ago. When he spoke about her, he was always kind. I didn’t get the feeling that he avoided talking about her. It wasn’t a big issue.”

“I wonder if she felt the same,” I said, thinking out loud.

“Well, you can ask her.”

“I can, I guess. All I know is that she’s living in Montreal. I suppose I could ask the police if …”

Mattie nodded impatiently, so I stopped nattering. “She is here in Grantham.”

“What?”

“I called her when I heard that Pambos was dead. I didn’t want her to read about it in the paper. I thought it was something I could do. She said she would try to come for the funeral. I just got off the telephone with her. She phoned me from the police station. She was being questioned by them, and then she is going to the hotel.”

“Which hotel?”

“Why, the Stephenson, naturally. She is probably the new part-owner. It’s only natural that she should stay there.”

“So natural that I couldn’t think of it.” I got up and showed signs that I was about to make tracks. Mattie sat, a bit stunned by the fact that she had survived an ordeal that had given her more bad nights than the deception was worth. In the end, she got up and showed me to the door.

“You know, Mr. Cooperman,” she said, holding the door wide, “I’m glad you came here today. I feel a lot better.”

“Thanks for the information,” I said and started down the sidewalk. She watched me go for a few seconds. I was almost down to the
Beacon
when she went in and closed the door.