Crazy Lady (7 page)

“Where the hell could she be?” demands Dave Brougham as he sits down with Mike Phillips and Constable Paul Zelke, and all eyes turn northwards to the mountains and the distant community of Beautiful.

“It's a bit of a hangover from the sixties,” explains Zelke, the force's expert on religious cults and sects. “It was originally set up by a bunch of American anti-war existentialists more interested in staying high than avoiding the
draft. They really worshipped Dylan, Che Guevara, and Castro, but they somehow wrapped it up in a sort of revolutionary religiosity; let's face it, almost anyone can see God through a haze of blue smoke.”

“Yeah,” laughs Brougham. “The only real difference between Mother Theresa and Marilyn Monroe is a bottle of rye and a couple of joints.”

“Franz Kafka was their hero really,” continues Zelke more seriously as he flicks through his notes. “David and Goliath; small men taking on the world. But there's no overall logic as far as I can see. Shit, Nietzsche was an atheist and they even twisted his ideas into it somehow.”

“How do they get away with it?” asks Inspector Phillips as he tries to understand.

“Charismatic leader; usually the long-haired one with a guitar and a line on a regular supply of coke or other shit. Wayne Browning, a low-life from the southern United States, quickly took over, and most of the other men either grew up or blew out their brains, leaving him with all the women.”

“And they never caught on?”

“You'll believe anything if you want to, Mike. It's like sending money to those nuts on television 'cuz God wants you to.”

“So, what happens there now?”

“We've kinda given up, to be honest. Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer wouldn't be too happy about us spending a bunch of money infiltrating a place like that. We've got a tap on his phones; we hear the odd rumours about kiddie abuse. It's odds-on that Browning has his pick of the young virgins as they leave the nest —”

“That's gotta be illegal,” breaks in Brougham, but Zelke has heard it before.

“No different from any of the other communes, Dave. We'd take them on, but the world doesn't need another Waco or Jonestown.”

Janet Thurgood knows nothing of the apocalyptic disasters in Guyana and Texas nor anything else that happened in the world beyond Beautiful for the forty years she was there — Wayne Browning made sure of that. And now, as she scavenges in the shadowy lanes of Vancouver's Chinatown, she is more than ever convinced that she has somehow slipped through a galactic wormhole. It should be 1953; in Janet's mind it is 1953. She is an eleven-year-old crying for her mother and crying over the loss of her precious Jesus.

“Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” she mumbles as she squirrels into a garbage bin behind a restaurant, and then she mentally runs a list of childhood facts as she seeks security.

“Once two is two; two twos are… Twelve pennies in a shilling; twenty shillings in a pound… Ring a ring o' roses… The Queen is Elizabeth the second. Her official birthday is… Her real birthday is…

“Why can't I have two birthdays, Mummy?”

“That would be greedy, Janet.”

“Is the Queen greedy, Mummy?”

“Get to your knees and pray that God didn't hear you.”

“Our father…”

The vivid memories and rambling mutterings continue as she searches for her past, for food, and for her crucifix. The loss of her precious icon worries her most. It's the crutch she has carried with her from childhood. Without it, she knows that she is forever lost.

T
he West African rainy season is the subject of jubilation around the boardroom table at Creston headquarters in London.

“Looks like the crop from Ivory will be above expectations,” croons Dawes, surveying the latest data from the man on the ground.

Joseph Creston is less optimistic. “Assuming the Muslims don't invade and destroy it.”

“Why worry,” retorts Dawes, ever the accountant. “It'll just push up the price of our Ghanaian and Nigerian output.”

November in the coastal rainforests of southern Côte d'Ivoire may mean constant downpours, but along the southerly coast of mainland Europe, where the French Alps stumble heavily into the Mediterranean, brilliant sunshine still turns the beaches to gold and the clear cobalt sea mirrors the sky.

Detective Chief Inspector David Bliss is walking — hour after hour, mile after mile — seeking inspiration to complete his novel.

“Well, just how hard can it be?” he chastised Samantha, his lawyer daughter, when she questioned both his ability and his sanity. But now, as he wanders home along the deserted promenade in St-Juan-sur-Mer, he peers across the bay to the island of Ste. Marguerite and wonders whether or not he will ever be able to convince skeptical readers that he really has discovered the secret of the island's most notorious prisoner — the Man in the Iron Mask.

Despite the touch of warmth in the limpid afternoon air, the quays and beaches are silent, apart from the occasional screech of a hungry gull; the restaurants and beach-side bars are padlocked and boarded up. The transient workers of summer have been drawn north into the alpine ski resorts by the scent of money, and only a few arthritic and bronchitic Brits, desperate to escape the lugubrious English winter, wander in search of a fish and chip shop and a recent copy of the
Daily Mirror
.

Most of the apartments in Bliss's building in St-Juan-sur-Mer are as vacant as the beaches, and since his arrival at the beginning of September he has only twice spied another occupant. The whirring of the elevator usually signals the arrival of Daisy, the bubbly Provençale real estate agent whose company and bed he has been sharing for a while.
Isn't this what you wanted?
he has asked himself a dozen times.
Somewhere where you won't be disturbed.

“I 'ave just zhe place for you,” Daisy enthused with a glint in her eye. “No one will know you are here — except for me,” she added, and at first the arrangement seemed perfect.

The sound of the elevator signals Daisy's approach — the third time today — and Bliss can't help thinking that he would have had more privacy had he stayed in London. But this is where it happened; this is where Louis XIV's legendary prisoner spent eleven years of his life locked in
solitary confinement with his guards forbidden to see him or speak to him on pain of death.

“Maybe he was trying to write a book,” muses Bliss wryly while he waits for Daisy's cheerful greeting as she lets herself in, although he knows that was not the case; he knows that the wretched man was consumed day and night by one thing alone: the love of the woman who owned his heart. He was waiting, day after day, month after month — waiting and praying that she would come to set him free.

“Hello, Daavid,” Daisy calls in her heavily accented English. “I 'ave brought you zhe dinner.”

“In here,” he calls from the airy room that leads onto the balcony, the room where he has set up his writing station and where he can keep in view the masked prisoner's island fortress across the bay.

“
Terrine de volaille
,” Daisy announces triumphantly as she places the dish of chicken on the table. Then she drapes herself around his neck, asking, “How iz zhe book today? Good, no?”

“No… yes… I don't know,” answers Bliss despondently. “I'm beginning to think this was a huge mistake.”

“Never mind,” Daisy trills with a suggestive kiss. “Maybe we can do somezhing else.”

Distractions, distractions, distractions
, he muses to himself as he picks at the food, but at least he's grateful that he has escaped the television. “You must have satellite,” Daisy insisted when he complained that more than ten minutes of translating the quickly spoken French on the local stations gave him a headache. “You can have maybe two hundred American channels.”

“Terrific,” he replied, but came to his senses within the hour.

“What is zhe matter, Daavid?” queries Daisy, sensing tension, and Bliss wishes he had a sensible answer; he wishes he knew why his enthusiasm is draining, why he has lost his drive.

“I don't know…” starts the English detective, then he scuttles to the balcony and peers at the distant verdant islands. The fortress — the Fort Royal on the island of Ste. Marguerite — stands out sharply and appears strikingly forbidding as the wintry sun slips behind the island and heads for the depths of the Mediterranean. The wind is shifting to the north, kicking up whitecaps and darkening the sea from warm azure to bleak indigo, and goosebumps suddenly pepper his thighs as the chill hits.

The sound of Daisy's breath spins him. “What is wrong, Daavid?”

“It's getting cold,” he says, though knows that is not the real reason for the goosebumps. “He is still there,” he adds after a moment's thought as pulses of energy make a
whooshing
sound in his brain and raise his hackles.

“Who?”

“The Man in the Iron Mask —
l'homme au masque de fer
.”

“Daavid, zhat was three hundred years ago.”

“This is really weird,” he carries on as he focuses on the fortress. “If I told anyone in the force about this they'd have me in front of a shrink and out on mental disability in a week.”

“Daavid, zhere is nothing zhere,” says Daisy, pointing across the bay to the island. “It is just a museum now.”

Bliss knows different, though he still can't explain the powerful feeling that washed over him the first time he entered the cell that housed the famous prisoner. “It was like he was talking to me… guiding me… begging me to write his story,” he explains, as he has explained many times before. “But now I've lost it. I don't what I'm doing anymore… don't know how it ends.”

“It will be all right —” she starts, but he cuts her off, shaking his head.

“No… no… no,” he says, and then he spots the lemon tree in the garden below. “Watch,” he commands,
dragging Daisy to the edge of the balcony and pointing to the loaded tree.

“What?”

“Nothing happened, did it?”

She peers intently, thinking,
I missed somezhing
. “What is it, Daavid?”

“The first time I looked a lemon dropped off.”

“They drop all the time.”

“No, they don't. That's my point. I've been watching it for weeks now and I've never seen another, not while I was actually watching. But the first time, at the instant I looked, a lemon fell.”

“But what does zhat mean?”

“It was like a signal, the start: a green flag, a cannon shot, a whistle.”

“Start what?”

“The race — my race — to discover the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask. Everything here has been guiding me…” he pauses as he loses direction and searches across the bay for his bearings.

“Are you all right, Daavid?”

“See, even you think I'm going mad now.”

“No,” she says, but her concerned mien tells him something else as he turns away from the island to look into her eyes.

“I have to go,” he says quietly. “I have to go now.”

“But, zhe dinner…”

“I'm sorry… ” he says as the apartment's door closes behind him, and Daisy wipes a tear from her cheek before turning back to the island with a sinking feeling.

S
uperintendent 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?