East of Suez (26 page)

It
was
an unopened drawer, that’s all. When you search a room, it’s no good just opening some of the drawers. You have to go through
all
of them. It’s what tries to make what I do into something like a science. It will never make it all the way, but there’s only method between the ideal of order and complete chaos. I know that my methods have always been hit and miss, but I have always tried to be methodical when I could. More honored in the breach, maybe, as my neighbor Frank Bushmill is always saying.

“You think this might be the place?” Clay was looking at a small beat-up-looking place made out of new wood. It still had the yellow look of raw timber.

“I don’t think so. If I’m wrong, we can come back. Place in the photo I saw was more like a ski chalet: blond wood and an over-hanging top floor. The cuckoo-clock look. Didn’t I say that?”

“Like this one?” We were rounding a bend, mostly clear of trees, giving a spectacular look straight down into the blue Pacific, or whatever ocean it was.

“Yeah, this is the place. The fence is right.”

“You want I should drive right in or what?” He was already making for a flat bit of land, like an abandoned start of a curve, sheltered by deodars or whatever they call the trees at this altitude. We climbed out and stretched our legs. Below us, we couldn’t see land, and the water stretched out, blue for the most part, but striped with bars of lighter or darker shades which probably indicated the winds or currents out there.

There was no car to be seen near the house. No puff of smoke hinted at occupancy. Both of us circled round the front and then had a quick look at the back. For a moment, it reminded me of a cottage in Muskoka. Pieces of an old blue tricycle were stuffed into a box of firewood. Maybe it speaks to my local ignorance, but it seemed to supply a touch of North America to the Orient. This had to be Vicky and Jake’s place in the country. Even though it looked more like an Indian hill station in the movies, it gave me a sudden welcome blast of nostalgia.

I found the key to the back door in a pickle jar in a box of old magazines and yellowed newspapers under the back steps. The house didn’t seem to be protected with obvious security arrangements. Screens over the lower windows were in need of replacement; they had seen too much weather and were feathering away into red oxide, held together, occasionally, by spider webs.

Inside were more signs of a North American presence. A
Globe and Mail
, a
Toronto Star
, and a
New York Times
assured me that we were close. A clipping from the Grantham
Beacon
brought me home. On a white space, where an ad had left room for it, someone had scribbled the following:

G T W Y I H I S O T O R A O T E H T V R O H A E A A W T K D D N W R Y B U M W A E E Y U E R

—J

A message in code! Like the other one; it had the same look about it.
That’s
what this case was lacking. I rolled my eyes in spite of myself and stuffed the paper into my pocket. I knew that I could quickly unravel it just as soon as I had about eight weeks with nothing else on my mind. Maybe the earlier message would help decode the second. The first message was a child’s bit of fun; this looked less so.

A search of the place revealed little of value. It was the sort of place that provided slightly worn versions of whatever the family had back in Takot. They could take off for the hills without ever remembering to pack a toothbrush: the perfect get-away retreat.

Cupboards and drawers revealed more of what I’ve just said: a family of four had been happy here. On my second time round the place, I began looking for breaks in the pattern, things that clashed with this first assessment. The first of these I found in the bathroom. The sink was littered with rusting razor blades. Someone, a man, obviously, had hacked away at his face here, without bothering to turn on the water. (Outside, I had seen that water came from a cistern and hot water was heated in a tank in the kitchen. The tank and cistern were empty.)

Now I began to notice that the floor was scattered with date pits … they were everywhere, discarded on the floor, on tabletops, and in bowls and saucers. These signs did not belong to the picture of the happy family group with its crokinole board and abandoned craft projects. The cottage had seen recent use by a single person who did not know how to turn on the electric generator or did not wish to.

Clay came from outside. “There’s a Lambretta under a phony woodpile out back. It’s old but there’s a near-full tank of fuel in its belly. There’s drums of fuel out back too.”

“Our boy gets around!”

“Wouldn’t mind havin’ a place like this outside St Joseph or Biloxi.” Clay was admiring the children’s clippings on a bulletin board: drawings and cut-outs.

“Have you ever been to St Joseph or Biloxi?”

“Of
course
I’ve— What’s up your nose, Ben?”

“I don’t mind your playing any character you like, Clay. A friend’s a friend. But I’d put your home south of Biloxi, south of Tampa, south of Puerto Rico. Around Trinidad.”

“You put me there?” His laugh was a high descending scale. “Would you believe Tobago? Charlotteville, Tobago.”

“Your American’s the best I’ve heard. It took me a while.”

“It’s hard to get clear of the toffee-nosed voice of my schoolmasters, my teachers, in my ear, man. I’m burying a lot of history, Ben. Let’s leave it alone for a while. One long winter’s night I’ll tell you all you want to know. Okay?”

“Okay. But at least give me a number where I can get hold of you.” We exchanged numbers like Wall Street brokers, and nodded as we put our books away in our pockets. Given the setting, it was bizarre.

“What you make of this?” Clay asked me. “Does it look like they expected to come back here?”

“Clean underwear in the drawers, toothpaste in the bathroom. What do you think?”

“What about all the date pits?”

“I think that Jake was hiding out here after Victoria left.”

“He’s the dude you don’t know whether he’s dead or alive?”

“Yeah. I know Vicky’s alive, because I’ve seen her. But, as far as Jake goes, he could be alive or dead. Anyway, the more drawers I go through, the better I’m getting to know him. And he’s beginning to interest me.”

“Why?”

“He’s the reason I came to this bog,” I said.

“You got moss for brains.”

“Hell, I suppose he could be tucked away inside the Central Prison.”

“That’s as good as being dead from what I hear.”

Clay and I shared half of a
shawarma
-like sandwich we’d picked up on the way. After a third look around, we locked the door behind us and replaced the key in its hiding place. I thought of the kids as I caught a last glimpse of the bike. They’d be needing newer, bigger bikes when they came up here again. If they ever did.

The ride back was passed mostly in silence as the heat of the coast began to overwhelm us by increments. We bumped along the downhill leg of the journey. Whenever the Morgan hit a particularly big bump, Clay shot me a look to see whether I was blaming him. Or maybe the look was on behalf of the damage this trip was inflicting on his ancient heap. I grew drowsy as I watched the way the little car responded to the smallest touch of the wheel. The car was fragile, but it hugged the road like a truss. In fact the topography was transferred to my backside through the medium of the bucket seat. I reviewed the whole of the last few days as we came down to tidewater. Clay let me off at my hotel and went on to wherever he was living. I think I knew, but, for the moment at least, I had forgotten. Before I closed the door to the lobby, he called over to me from the car: “Ben! You might try to find some clothes that don’t attract so much attention in daylight.” I looked down at my rumpled, creased dinner jacket.

TWENTY-TWO

I CALLED FIONA
first thing, but again she’d heard nothing. “You’ve got the wrong girl if you think anybody tells me anything. I have no radio or TV and live with my head under water most of the time.” She wanted to know what I had been up to all day, but I put her off with a tale of exotic meals and tourism. She didn’t close-question me, but let me escape with my unconvincing lie.

When the phone rang as soon as I’d hung up, I had a sudden fright. It came too quickly after the preceding call. And no one was on the line. I know my reaction was irrational, just a feeling behind my knees that experience had taught me to trust. A look out my window showed me a small cluster of people staring at the front of the building. What could be of interest? That it might be me scared the hell out of me. I turned my white shirt back-to-front, put on my light jacket, checked the mirror to see if I could pass for a vacationing clergyman, and took the stairs to the lobby. That’s when I saw the first of the policemen. Were they Tom-toms, or cops of another flavor? I dived into the library, or whatever they called it, off the lobby. Three elderly women, one with blue hair, were writing letters as though time would never end. I sat down in a big chair and pretended to be reading a newspaper written in German. The pages of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
were big enough to mask my face from the two cops who came to check out the library. Meanwhile other policemen came and went up and down the elevator. I tried to think what was in my room that might interest them. Thank God I’d left the diamonds where they were. The key, along with my spare change, might not attract too much attention.

When I had convinced myself that mere exposure to the German language did not automatically turn me into a German scholar, I dug in my pocket for the two code messages I’d collected in my travels, examining the longer one again behind my newspaper. At first, the message was as impenetrable as the newspaper. “Bum” was a good old English word, but none of the other groups of letters made sense. The signature “J” was almost certainly Jake’s. One of the children could have written the shorter note. Jake was using a code he and Vicky had picked up from their kids.

The message must have been intended for Vicky. I sat and stewed about the code for about twenty minutes, working out which letters occurred most often. There were five “e”s, “a”s, and “t”s. Only two “i”s. This wasn’t a code where “a” stands for “c” and “b” stands for “d.” Otherwise there would be more “x”s and “z”s than normally occur in English. So it wasn’t a substitution code. By the time I’d finished this preliminary study, I was sure that the language used was English and that the words consisted of the scrambled letters of undisguised English words. I could call Vicky at her mother’s house to ask her what the message said. It was an end run, a bit of a cheat. Of course, I was guessing that the message was important. Wasn’t there an old novel in which something that was taken for a message in code turned out to be a laundry list? I’d have to put that to one of the literary types when I got home.

When I next looked up, the cops in the lobby were thinning out. They had done all the searching they intended to do and were waiting for the word to clear out. One was giving the manager a hard time. He shrugged his shoulders and mimed ignorance of the languages they tried out on him. My whereabouts were a mystery. He slipped me a wink as soon as they began quizzing the cleaning staff. Meanwhile, a couple of bored policemen were looking through guidebooks and excursion pamphlets near the desk. They wouldn’t have minded looking for me near the Blue Mosque or the golden domed temple.

All of this going through the motions suddenly stopped when a long black car, with smoked windows and flying a little flag from a front fender, drew up outside. Out of it stepped a plump little fellow in uniform wearing more gold braid than you see in a Brazilian officers’ mess. The jacket and trousers had “Made in England” written all over them. Judging by the straight backs holding doors for him, crisp salutes, and bloodless faces, this was major trouble for me, if not general disaster. He came right into the library. Even the little old English woman with glasses on her nose was holding her breath while her pen leaked on the letter she was writing. We were told to clear out by an aide-de-camp. I did this, taking refuge in a haberdasher’s across the wide intersection. To pass the time, I bought some T-shirts for my brother’s kids. I was startled for a moment when the salesclerk, whom I asked to hold on to the parcel, referred to me as “Father.”

In the neighboring liquor store, I bought my hotel keeper a large bottle of ouzo. I hoped that such a token might pass as a sign of my appreciation. I played at being a customer until I saw the big black car sail away again.

As quietly as I could, I left my package for the proprietor on the front desk of the hotel. He never mentioned it or thanked me. I guess he judged that the payment was not much more than the cost of the service rendered.

I remembered the line of old taxis drawn up in a row just off the road leading to the hotel. If I could get that far, I could escape my particular fire without getting burned. What were the cops up to? Three cars had vanished from the lot in front of the hotel. One car was still parked behind the room I was sitting in. A man had recently walked back to that car and had warmed his back on the hot metal of the hood for some reason best known to himself. His partner was still prowling the lobby. At length, he rejoined his companion and they drove away. I made it to the outside without attracting the attention of the manager, who would, no doubt, want to tell me about the annoyance he had saved me from. People like doing good turns and they also like to be thanked for them. It’s human nature. But I thought it best to move while I could move quick. I’d bought the hotel keeper a bottle of ouzo, what else did he want?