Blood Wine (31 page)

“Where's the gun, Frankie, do you see the guy's gun?” she demanded.

“It went down between the rocks. I can see it.” Frankie sprawled across the boulders and tried to reach into the crevasse.

“Not even close!”

“Then it's the water,” said Miranda. “Let's go!”

“Miranda.”

“Yeah.”

“We didn't have swimming pools in my part of Cabbagetown.”

Miranda stared at her incredulously.

“You got it,” said Francine. “I can't swim.”

Miranda looked across at the woman on the far shore. She was flapping her arms to signal flight. Or perhaps just telegraphing her own fear.

“Well, you're going to learn.”

“No.”

“Yes,” said Miranda and grasping her arms around the other woman, hauled her to the edge and heaved both of them into the turgid water.

Francine sputtered and thrashed. When they came to the surface the current thrust them apart. Miranda moved close as Frankie went under. When Frankie came up, Miranda swung out with her fist against the other woman's jaw as hard as she could. Frankie swirled away and sank back. Miranda grabbed her hair. If she lost her grip, she would never find her in the dark muddy water. Frankie came to the surface gagging and swinging at Miranda, trying to sock her in the face.
Damn
, thought Miranda,
she's a fighter. We're gonna make it.

The power in Frankie's muscles dissipated and Miranda rolled her onto her back, then, getting a grip under her chin, started kicking toward the far shore as the current swept them out of their assailant's range. Several times Frankie wrenched herself free and Miranda went under but she never released her grip and gradually Frankie relaxed, finding she was floating above Miranda's legs kicking vigorously beneath her.

When hands grabbed her by the shoulders, Miranda gasped in shock and went under. Half a dozen men and women had waded out downriver and extended themselves in a human chain into the current. They had to pry her hands free from Frankie. They hauled and then carried the two women up onto the shore. They were a long way from the golf course, almost within what used to be the city limits of Galt. The man on the far shore had disappeared.

Morgan caught the train south from Royston. Elke thought it would be better to stay away from the Cambridge train station, just in case. She borrowed Professor Sayyed's car and drove him over. Morgan was anxious to talk and fill in the details, but Elke was quiet. She assured him she would come back to Toronto to assist in drawing their various investigations to a satisfactory conclusion, but he knew she would not.

“Where are you going from here?” he asked as they pulled into Royston Station.

“After I leave Cambridge? Back to Israel, I expect. Maybe to Sweden. I'll let you know.”

“Will you?”

She smiled enigmatically. “I must reinvent myself, Morgan. I've reached the end of my usefulness to Mossad.”

“Maybe you'll retire to a kibbutz and grow old and grey, surrounded by grandchildren.”

“Perhaps.”

“Or build a cabin by a crystal lake in northern Sweden and live out your life in solitude, writing poems about pine trees and peace.”

“People like me do not live to be old.”

“That's ambiguous, Elke. You do not live in order to become old or you do not survive to old age?”

“Both, I think.”

She waited on the platform with him. Her blond hair gleamed in the sunlight. Her eyes were the blue of the afternoon sky. He felt empty, sure he would never see her again, and yet relieved. She was a dangerously complicated person to know.

“In Toronto,” he said tentatively, “are there many in your line of work?”

“Mossad? Other agencies? Yes, of course. On all sides, it is a very cosmopolitan city. Many are part- timers. They are the eyes and ears, and professionals, people like me, we are the legs.”

“And the brains. Mossad in Toronto?”

“Morgan, you didn't really think I begged money on the street to get back to New York?”

“When you skipped out? Yes, I did, it seemed possible you could do something like that.”

“Well, maybe I did. Here's your train. And here's the ten pounds I owe you. I owe you a lot.”

She reached up and kissed him passionately, then suddenly turned away and strode off to the car. By the time he looked out the window of the train, she was pulling out of the parking lot, up onto the road back to Cambridge.

In London, Morgan contemplated picking up his few things at the Vanity Fair, but he was travelling light. He had all his papers with him and there was nothing he was not prepared to abandon. It wasn't like leaving things in foreign territory. London was not like that; it was home and yet not quite familiar, like home in a dream.

He took an indirect route to Heathrow, stopping in at The Bunch of Grapes for a farewell pint of Guinness. He dawdled until the last minute then left in a hurry, with a couple of inches still in his glass. On his way out he strode by a bulletin board and had he not delayed so long in tearing himself away, he might have noticed a folded slip of paper with his name on it pinned to the cork. The bar woman remembered a lady with copper-red hair posting it earlier in the day, but she did not connect that woman with the rumpled American who gazed morosely into his Guinness for an hour and then bolted.

The Cambridge Police were very accommodating when Miranda explained who she was. Since the events along the river road from Waldron to Galt and at the Devil's Cave fell under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Provincial Police, they arranged for her to meet with the OPP after her hands were treated at the Waterloo Memorial Hospital adjacent to the golf course.

The only anomaly in the story Frankie and Miranda told the investigating officers was their inability to account for the bullet through the skull of the man at the base of the cliff who, when last they had seen him, was moaning but alive. The third man had obviously executed him at such close range the victim's brains had muffled the shot, then fled in the car, which he had probably dumped back in Toronto by the time the two women and a small squad of OPP forensics people got to the scene.

Miranda did not attempt to make a connection for the OPP between what had happened here and the mayhem at Bonnydoon Winery, which was being investigated by another detachment. Nor did she explain that Tony Di Michele was a gangster from New Jersey or that Frankie was the widow of Vittorio Ciccone. All that would come out, but for the time being it was easier to gloss over complexities. She wanted to get back to Toronto. She still had business to take care of, especially now. Mr. Savage was going down.

Standing at the top of the cliff, where she had directed the crime scene investigators to the Devil's Cave, Miranda looked over to the golf fairway, where play had resumed, even though the more curious slowed in their game to observe the police activity across the river and to gossip. She glanced at Frankie's bruised jaw and moved close enough to feel the other woman's warmth. They had been through a lot together, but Frankie's thoughts were entirely her own, probably circling around her grief and the loss of Tony as well as Vittorio. For Miranda, time briefly collapsed and she thought she could hear her father's voice. She glanced sideways at her friend, expecting for a moment to see Celia, smoking, with a conspiratorial grin. Instead, it was Frankie Ciccone, wearing a borrowed windbreaker from the Cambridge Police Department and looking thoroughly bedraggled but somehow poised.
She's a survivor
, thought Miranda.
We're survivors
.

When Morgan's flight arrived in the late evening, he felt disoriented. It was different than jet lag on the way over.
When you fly opposite the earth's rotation, you're thrust into the future
, he thought.
A little faster and you could land before you left
.

When he reached home he called Miranda.

“Hey,” she said. “What's up?”

“You know,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“It's good to be home.”

“How was England? Did you bring Elke back?”

“No, I saw her. She sent her love.”

“I'll bet she did. Did you give her mine?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know. She's not what she appears.”

“None of us are.”

“No, I mean, really.”

“So do I.”

“What have you been doing?”

“I spent some time with your old friend Frankie Ciccone.”

“Frankie? You did?”

“Yeah.”

“Doing what?”

“You know, this and that.”

“With Frankie?”

“Yes.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I'm on my way into a nice hot tub.”

“What time is it?”

“Ten, maybe.”

“My body is totally confused. I don't know whether it's much later or much earlier than ...”

“Than what?”

“Than it is. My head, too.”

“That doesn't leave much.”

“What?”

“That isn't confused. Your body, your head, what's left? I don't want to know.”

“You don't?”

“No.”

“Do you remember the Rubik's cube?”

“Which one? Yes, of course. I was good at it.”

“Getting the colours lined up?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever think about what holds it all together?”

“Hooks and elastics? Swivels and tracks?”

“I suppose. I'll call you in the morning.”

“Toronto time.”

“Yeah.”

“Morgan.”

“Yeah?”

“It's good to have you back.”

“Yeah. It's good to be here. Enjoy your bath, sleep well.”

“Call me in the morning.”

“G'night.”

Toronto the Good

“A
mazing
!” Morgan exclaimed over morning coffee. “If even half your story is true, you're an Amazon. And Frankie, you and Frankie fighting the bad guys together? That is a truly formidable team. They didn't have a chance. My role was more passive, it was Elke in charge. She's a trained agent, she kills for a living. Or knows how to kill. My goodness, Miranda, we're supposed to find dead people and solve murders, not be there for the killing or get ourselves killed.”

“That about sums it up, Morgan.”

They had been talking for two hours in Tim Hortons near the Summerhill subway station. She accepted his sympathy for her hands encased in surgical gloves full of ointment. She smiled broadly at his account of Alistair Ross, the liaison officer at New Scotland Yard, and shared his admiration for the venerable mullah of Cambridge. She thrilled to his description of dodging shotgun pellets in the turgid waters of the Thames, and was pleased to match his escapade with her own, fleeing bullets in the roiling waters of the Grand. She was perplexed by Elke's cool dispatch, executing the man in the train, until she connected it to the shooting of Gianni under the Humber Bridge. But what really threw her was discovering that the night Elke had presented herself at her apartment, she had been faking dementia from shock and intentionally peed on her floor. Miranda was disturbed but fascinated by the inevitability of their friendship.

Morgan laughed at her recital of the phone messages from Clancy and Ellen Ravenscroft. The fact that Miranda had not herself realized Clancy was gay he found strangely satisfying. He did not mention his brief trysts with either Frankie or Elke. He and Miranda seldom talked about sexual intimacy, although not from shyness, for they were both very open about other details of their lives. Once, Morgan had had a lurid encounter with two young women from the secretarial staff at Headquarters, and he had not even told her about that — but it was because he suspected they had used him as a fantasy toy rather than because he felt incredibly shallow and enjoyed it.

“We're at an impasse,” said Morgan.

“The focus has tightened tremendously,” said Miranda.

“Yeah, Mr. Savage, we get him and it's over.”

“We bring him in, Morgan. Alive.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It's what's going to happen. Agreed?”

“We'll see.” He had not told her about his commission to eliminate Savage with a minimum of legal theatrics; he had not decided whether it was, in fact, his mission.

“Your people want him dead even more than I do,” she said, reading his mind.

“They're not my people. And I'm certainly not theirs.”

“A secret agent.”

“Two secret agents. I don't work for them.”

“But they were pretty convincing.”

“They each have their causes. Both find radical fundamentalism offensive. She thinks the terrorists will strike at her homeland, he thinks they will prevent his homeland from being established. Me, I'm a homicide detective like you. I'm not an agent for anybody.”

“Well, for all the terrorist implications of what we're into, Morgan,
and a visceral need on my part to see his balls on a platter — I think we'd better concentrate on finding him and let the system look after the rest.”

“So let's go.”

“Let's.”

Since they had absolutely no leads, they took the subway down to College and Yonge and walked over to Police Headquarters. Inside, manning the desk in their division, Morgan recognized Don Smith, the brother of the Bobby at the Arms and Armaments Show in Earls Court. He saluted the older man and got a cheery wave in return. Morgan walked over to him. All he could think of to say was, Ronnie sends his regards. It wasn't much on which to start a relationship.

“You'll never guess who I was talking to,” said Morgan.

“My brother Ronnie, I imagine.”

Morgan grinned. “How on earth did you know that?”

“Simple deduction, my dear Watson.”

“Well, Mr. Holmes, perhaps you would edify.”

“I heard you were in England, Detective. On the desk, I generally know where people are when they're away. And your eagerness, ‘you'll never guess?' It had to be someone special, and the incredulity suggested uncanny coincidence. That pretty much narrowed it down to my brother or the Queen Mother.”

“Well, he's a good man,” said Morgan. “He broke the rules and let me go where I shouldn't.”

“Good men question the rules, Detective Morgan. Great men break them. We'll have to have a pint sometime.”

“I look forward to it,” said Morgan.

Alex Rufalo was in his office and motioned them in. Spivak and Stritch were busy with paperwork as they walked by but glanced up. Detective Bourassa nearly bumped into Miranda and smiled shyly. His huge face was still swollen from where Morgan had popped him.

“Shut the door behind you,” said the superintendent.

Miranda and Morgan settled into chairs facing him and all three of them waited expectantly.

“Well?” the superintendent finally said.

“Well, what?” said Morgan.

“You two are back on track?”

“Yeah,” said Morgan. “How about you?” As soon as he spoke, Morgan realized the indiscretion. If occasionally he and Alex Rufalo shared a few drinks and exchanged confidences, it was outside the office. Nothing secret, but outside the office.

“Yeah, sure, we're on track,” said Morgan before Rufalo had a chance to respond.

“You want to fill me in?”

“There's nothing much to tell,” said Morgan. “I think Elke Sturmberg has disappeared. She wasn't much help, anyway. I'd say she was an innocent victim caught up in a series of unpleasantries. She handled herself well, and she's gone. We don't need her.”

Miranda was stunned. Morgan was leaving the superintendent out of the loop. Was this strategy? Did he think they needed to work outside the law — or was he buying in to his reluctant role as a counterterrorist? Either way, he had clearly, and so far as she knew, spontaneously, chosen to exclude the Toronto Police from his plans. Not that he had any plans.

“What about you, Detective?” said the superintendent, turning to Miranda. “You and Frankie Ciccone, what was that all about? Racing around Rosedale! Who is or was Tony Di Michele? Mafia, for God's sake, from New Jersey. How did you get yourself caught between sides in a gangster bloodfest? This isn't good for business, this kind of publicity.”

Miranda looked to Morgan. He stared back expressionless. She took her cue from that and simply shrugged.

“Okay, then,” said Rufalo, “go out there and do something.”

“For sure,” said Morgan as he and Miranda rose to their feet.

“I want the whole story,” said Rufalo. “I want the pieces to fit.”

“We'll do our best,” said Miranda.

“It's us and the OPP and the Mounties and God knows who else. I want a nice neat package we can all take home.”

Morgan winked as they walked out Rufalo's door. She knew he was thinking about the impossibility of taking one package to multiple homes, about the proliferation of stories without closure, about the mechanism inside a Rubik's cube.

They sat down at their desks, which opposed each other, back to back. They flipped on their computers and started riffling through accumulated paperwork. Miranda would have to complete her account of her Waterloo Country adventure with sufficient detail to satisfy the Cambridge Police and the OPP, as well as her superintendent. Morgan had to justify an expensive trip to England that was apparently a waste of resources. They worked quietly for the rest of the morning without looking up or comparing notes.

Lunch in the food court under the old Eaton's College Street department store with Spivak and Stritch and a few others from the office, including a sheepish Bourassa and his partner, was a raucous affair. It was rare that they ate out together, but this was an occasion. Bourassa had picked up a lead from a contact in New York and closed down some bikers who had knocked off a runner for the mob. No arrests, but the bike club had picked up and gone back to Quebec. This was as close to a celebration as Homicide cops generally allowed themselves, at least during the daylight hours.

“I met a guy in New Jersey who knows you,” Miranda said to Bourassa while trying to negotiate a collapsing taco shell stuffed with chili. “He used to. He's dead.”

“Yeah, I've known a few down there.”

“You get around, don't you?” said Spivak.

“Yeah,” said Bourassa. “Some.”

“You too,” said Spivak to Morgan. “Gawd, everyone gets around but me and Stritch.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Stritch in his most funereal voice. No one knew quite what he meant, but it seemed funny and everyone laughed.

“Did you really go to law school?” Miranda asked Bourassa.

“Where'd you hear that?”

“Where did you go?”

“Columbia.”

“The country or the university?”

“New York,” he said.

“And?”

“And what?”

“Did you graduate?” As soon as Miranda asked, she was annoyed with herself.

“Actually, I did. Third in my class. So what?”

“Oh,” she said with relief. “Did you practice?” It seemed unlikely, but it seemed politically correct to inquire.

“I came home. I would have had to do the Ontario bar exams. Wasn't interested. Saw enough in law school, I wanted to be a cop.”

“Did you ever tell anyone you failed out?”

“Yeah, sure. There've been times when it's better being a dumb lawyer than a cop.”

“Even a smart cop?” said Miranda.

“He fakes it,” said Spivak, uncertain what his point was.

“There's too much moral ambiguity being a lawyer,” said Bourassa in the most coherent statement he had ever made about police work. “I prefer enforcing the laws, not seeing how far I can bend them.”

“The law's loss, our gain,” said Morgan.

The subject shifted from Bourassa, to everyone's relief. Morgan sat back in the molded plastic seat and surveyed the scene. He was homesick for The Bunch of Grapes and at the same time pleased to be back. These were people he admired. They worked hard and they were good at what they did. Each would go off to a different life at the end of the day, some solitary and some to families. Some of them were solidly working class and some were professionals. They all earned pretty much the same, they spent money and time in different ways. That's what he liked about being here, rather than England where class still prevailed, or the States, where the job defined who you were.

“Hey, Morgan, wake up,” said Spivak.
He likes opera
, thought Morgan.
His partner plays hockey, always the only black kid on the team
.

“Morgan,” said Bourassa, then turned to the woman beside him, “you know, Morgan should have been a lawyer.”

“Yeah,” said Morgan, blowing on his knuckles, “the defense never rests.” He laughed.
Bourassa collects, indiscriminately, for every charity going, walking desk to desk, door to door. His partner, Audrey, is a chess master.

Miranda rubbed her gloved hands gently together, trying to spread ointment into the sore parts. She and her partner didn't hang out much, but it was just what she needed, to get her mind off the case.
There is no case
, she thought.
There's Savage. Once he goes down, the details look after themselves
.

Suddenly she was restless but she didn't know which way to turn. Morgan sensed her agitation. He stood up.

“We've got to go,” he said. “We've got an interview downtown.”

After they were out of earshot, she whispered her thanks.

“Let's walk for a while,” he said. “Try to relax. Say anything that comes into your mind.”

“Anything?” She glanced sideways and caught him in profile. “You think we already know where he is, don't you?”

“He's here.”

“Where?”

“In Toronto.”

“What makes you think so?”

“His cuticles.”

“His cuticles?”

“Did you notice the hand with the ring?”

“Notice it! Yes.”

“It was like Savage's hand. The cuticles were inordinately neat.”

“Inordinately?”

“Yeah, you wouldn't expect a man wearing a macho ring like that to have manicured nails.”

“That was a vanity ring, Morgan. I would say he was exactly the type who would go to a professional.”

“Whatever. Savage's nails, they gleamed like talons. Same manicurist. And I'm betting that means they both hung out in the city.”

“There are manicurists everywhere, Morgan, even small towns.”

“Not ones these guys would go to. Culturally, they would find it offensive to hang around with women in a beauty salon. They'd go to, maybe a barbershop, big and fancy, where the clients get their nails done as a bonus, with a shave, and a Cuban cigar is thrown in at the end. Toronto. Big hotel, downtown.”

They wandered south on Yonge Street then cut west on Dundas and back up University Avenue.

“Okay,” said Morgan. “Try this for logic. The old lady, Mrs. Oughtred, she told us Mr. Savage sometimes drove to Bonnydoon and sometimes flew in by ‘aeroplane.' I'm betting when he flew, it was from Buffalo — that's how they brought Elke up — and when he drove, he wasn't crossing any borders.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, and he had an extravagant house at the winery, very west coast postmodern. He and his cohort like to live well, much better I'm sure than their minions working the trenches.”

“The trenches?”

“Toilers in the vineyard — bad analogy. The guys working at newsstands, taxi-cabs, variety stores — murderous hours, low pay, keeping watch — how do you think they track us so easily? They're everywhere.”