The Killing Circle (24 page)

There is a search. You can imagine. A father loses his son at the movies, the boy snatched away in the time it takes to buy hot dogs and onion rings—it’s a summer weekend news editor’s dream come true. In the early morning of that Sunday—before the dawn of the cancelled dusk-’til-dawn—one of the networks awakens a “missing person expert” and tapes an interview in which we are reminded that “The first twelve hours are crucial in cases of this kind.” Even the police supervisors behind the microphones at the first news conference of the day aren’t immune to the excitement of a race against time, especially where there’s a kid involved. It’s like something on TV. It is on TV.

Look: there’s the Chief of the OPP staring directly into the cameras and vowing to put all available resources into locating “little Sam”, and until they do, “I can tell you there won’t be sleep for any of us.” There’s the shots of local volunteers marching through the Mustang’s neighbouring
fields of corn, searching for clues, for body parts. And there’s the father, his skin speckled and spongy as oatmeal, robotically pleading for his boy’s safe return.
So,
thinks the readership of the Couch Potato,
that’s what a novelist looks like.

He looks suspicious. Even to me. An unconvincing performance of parental concern—not enough panic, the voice emptied, as though he’s already made the turn toward grief. I watch a repeated loop of myself on the all-news channel down in the Crypt in disbelief. That’s not how I
feel.
That’s not even me. Here: this fellow sobbing into his hands, throwing a rock glass against the panelled wall to avoid pouring anything into it, and a minute later cutting his feet on the shards when he gets up to check with the police for the fifth time this hour. I’m your man.

It appears the police might think so too. They’re coming around to “go over things” again, and though they once more offer the services of a “family crisis counsellor”, I can tell their initial sympathy is already starting to dry up. There are fewer questions about the figure I’d seen at the back of the drive-in’s lot, and more about my emotional condition over the last few years. First, there was the loss of my wife to cancer. Then the messy business of the William Feld murders, which, as one investigator puts it, “We had you on the longlist for the whole kaboodle.” Plus all the other layers: my son taken at the screening of a movie based on my
own book, a book in which a shadowy figure takes the lives of children. “I mean, you can’t
write
that kind of stuff,” another cop tells me, shaking his head. “But then again, you did.”

By Sunday evening, they’re suggesting I call a lawyer. When I tell them there’s no need, they look at me as though that’s just the sort of thing a guilty bastard would say. Out there in the night a search for my son is still under way, but in here, at the father’s house on Euclid Street, they’ve already found the guy they’re looking for, and all there’s left to do is wait for him to break. In time, the ones like me always do.

With my permission, they’re listening in on every phone call. They say it’s in case a ransom demand comes in, but I can tell it’s more likely evidence collection. A message from an accomplice. A midnight confession.

And I don’t blame them. In such cases, the parent is always the prime suspect. Statistically speaking, shadows are merely shadows. Harm tends to come from the ones you know best.

There are always exceptions, however. There’s always a Sandman. And when he strikes, don’t be surprised when you’re the only one who believes it was him.

For the first twenty-four hours, there isn’t time to suffer. There’s only the same answers to the same questions, showing complete strangers where everything’s kept around the house, letting a nice woman
straighten your collar and wipe toothpaste from the corner of your mouth before the press conference.

In the end, however, these distractions only make everything worse. In my case this comes on day two, upon awakening from a sleeping-pill nap and collapsing to the bedroom floor—one pant leg on, the other off—under the weight of facts.
Struck by the truth.
I’d never realized how literally this cliché could be taken. It’s the truth that leaves me splayed out over the hardwood, blinking at the dust bunnies under the bed, both hands reaching around to the back of my skull to check for blood.

Sam is gone.

They’re not going to find him.

I’m the only one who stands a chance of getting him back.

If it weren’t for this last thought I’m not at all sure if, an hour later, I would have been able to finish getting dressed. A good thing, seeing as there is the press to be dealt with. Take a peek out the curtains: a pair of TV news vans, their hairsprayed correspondents practicing their serious faces, along with a gaggle of beat writers from the papers, sharing dirty jokes and flicking cigarette butts into my neighbour’s garden. If life is to be carried on with—even whatever brittle simulation of a life that might be available to me—they will all have to be satisfied enough to leave me alone at least until their next deadline.

I decide the best way to proceed is to grant an exclusive. It’s a reflex that prompts me to choose the
National Star.
And who does the police’s media relations person bring in but the kid from Swift Current.

“So you’re in hard news now?” I ask him, and despite the wilfully clenched jaw, he allows a grin at my recognizing him.

“No future in arts.”

“You’re right there.”

“Guess they promoted me.”

“The Editor-in-Chief knows talent when she sees it.”

“This must be a very difficult time,” he starts. It’s how all of them start. The cops, the counsellors, the wellwishers, the hacks. Thank God for TV.

I follow with some televisual dialogue of my own. About remaining optimistic, asking whoever might know something about my son to come forward. Then the Swift Current kid asks the inevitable follow-up.

“What do you make of the overlap between all this and your novel?”

“I don’t make anything of it.”

“But isn’t it striking how—”

“We’re done.”

“Sorry?”

I reach over and click off his recorder. “Interview’s over. And remind the other vultures
outside that you’re the only one to get any roadkill today.”

It works. Within a couple of hours, the vans have cleared off along with the shivering journos who will be forced to quote from the
National Star
’s piece if they want any comment from Patrick Rush. Even the police have honoured my request for a little privacy. They send over a social worker to sit vigil just in case Sam walks in the door. It allows me to go out.

I head up to Dundas Street and turn east on to the ever-lengthening tentacle of Chinatown. Before I know it was where I was headed I end up outside The Fukhouse. Anarchists. Evelyn told me this is where they met on the night I first saw her. Now it makes me wonder:
Can anarchists hold meetings and still be anarchists?
Then again, if the lawless can’t be flexible with the rules, who can?

A light goes on in Conrad White’s old apartment. Behind the gauzy curtains a pair of shadows move about in what is likely some domestic chore but, from out here, appears as a ballroom dance. The two figures circling, holding hands for a moment before casting off to the opposite sides of the room.

The bulb flicks off. The room lit for so short a time I doubt the shadows were ever there at all. More ghosts. Evelyn and Conrad glimpsed in an afterlife waltz.

But I’m still alive. My son too. He has to be. There’s no point in seeing ghosts any more. They
have nothing to tell me other than what has come before. All that remains for the living is to pick up the mystery where the dead left off.

“So this really
is
your local,” a voice behind me declares. I turn to find Ramsay grinning at me through The Fukhouse’s gloom. “Would have pegged you for something a bit more tweedy.”

“The drinks are cheap.”

“They ought to be,” he says, surveying the room. “Let me buy you one?”

“Buy me two.”

Ramsay orders bourbon with beer chasers. We get the former inside us as soon as they arrive.

“Just dropped by your house,” he says.

“And I wasn’t there.”

“Went out for a stroll, did you?”

“You would know. You followed me here.”

“I’m a cop,” Ramsay shrugs. “Old habits.”

We sit looking straight ahead for a time. Our heads floating in the greasy mirror behind the gins, whiskies and rums.

“A terrible thing,” Ramsay says finally. “Your boy.”

I try to measure the sincerity in his voice, the regretful shake of his head. Seems real to me. Then again, I’ve gotten Ramsay wrong before. I may have never gotten him right.

“I’m told your best men are on the case,” I say.

“Then I’m sure they’ll find him.”

“I feel like I should be helping them look.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“They told me to stay at home.”

“That’s a hard order to follow if you think he’s out there.”

“I know he is.”

“You
know
?”

“Sam is alive. And I’m going to be the one who finds him.”

“Sounds like you’re on to something.”

“If I was, would I tell you?”

“You might. If you wanted to be clear.”

“Clear?”

“A show of goodwill. Without it, people can start down wrong paths.”

He had me. For a second, I thought now that Ramsay had William in his cell, there was a chance he would actually be sympathetic with a father who’d lost his boy. But suspicion is Ramsay’s default position. It’s where he lives.

“I would never hurt Sam.”

“Nobody says you have.”

“Nobody has
said
so, no. So if they’re not being honest with me, why should I be honest with them?”

“Like I said. You could make this clear.”

“It’s clear enough for me.”

I start toward the exit. A bit off balance from the bourbon, the rush that comes with the speaking of privately held revelations. But when Ramsay opens his mouth to say something as I go, I’m still able to beat him to it.

“You’ve found your Sandman,” I shout as both palms slap the door wide open. “Now it’s my turn.”

Ramsay may still be following me, but I don’t care. I’m not doing anything wrong. Only walking. And whispering questions out loud. Questions that, over a long night’s wander east, lead me out of the fog of shock.

First up is how whoever took Sam knew we were planning to be at the Mustang on that particular night. As far as I can recall, I hadn’t spoken of it to anyone. Had Sam? Perhaps. An overheard playground boast (“My dad’s taking me to see
his
movie tonight!”), or something let slip to his friend Joseph. Still, these are unlikely scenarios, as Sam doesn’t usually gossip with his gang of kids at the park, none of them do, all of them boys of an age where their primary communication is the role play of machine-gunning soldiers or robots with laser beams firing out from their eye sockets.

The far greater probability is that we were followed. A black van. Changing lanes to keep me in view as we headed out of the city.

So why not take this to the police? I’ve come close to telling them about Angela a couple of times, but held back for reasons both rational and intuitive. On the rational side, I have no proof that it was her. More than this, “Angela” is dead. I’ve got Petra’s disposal to keep hidden. And I’m currently the prime suspect in Sam’s disappearance.
Now that I think of it, Angela likely had something on everyone in the circle that they didn’t want out in the open. It’s how she’s kept under the radar all along.

But what really prevents me from mentioning her name is the gut certainty that I’m not
meant
to. If Angela—or whoever it is who has my son—gets the idea that I’m telling the police everything I know, it’s over. The only way to Sam is through following the story to the end.

Before I know it the sun is plucking stars from the sky. I’ve made it all the way out to the Beaches, turned down one of its side streets to the boardwalk. No one out but the few pre-dawn joggers and picnic-table snoozers, the lonely and haunted like me. With shoes off, the sand is cool under my feet. Yet when I step into the first timid waves the water is body temperature, having been simmered over the course of a heatwaved summer. It may never freeze again.

Something touches my hand—a fly, a candy wrapper lifted from the beach on a gust of wind—and I look down expecting Sam to be there. The fact that he is missing is always at the front of my mind, and yet the illusion of his presence comes to me several times every waking hour. He’s not here. But he
should
be. Taking my hand and stepping out into the water. Asking if he can go all the way in. Telling me not to be afraid.

The morning brings an ugly specificity to the flatscreen billboards and construction cranes to
the west. It turns my eyes back out over the water. But the lake is just as likely an industrial product, its surface wrinkly and thin as aluminum foil.

Here’s what I’m thinking as I start back: there is nowhere to go any more that has not been modified, re-invented, enhanced. Places don’t
exist
as they once did, simply and convincingly. Virtual reality is the only reality left.

And so what? If I can just have Sam back, the rest of the world can keep its recycled myths, its well-crafted fakery. I don’t need anything to be real any more. I just need him.

To find Sam, I have to find Angela. But to search for someone who doesn’t exist: not the best task for an out-of-work TV critic. So what would Tim Earheart or Ramsay do in my shoes? Start with what’s on the table. Not much. There’s Angela’s name (false), her age (within a decade range), her published work (lifted from others’ autobiographical accounts). There’s also what I know of her appearance (especially susceptible to the whimsies of shadow and light, so that she was one thing reading from her journal on the opposite side of Conrad White’s rug, and another the night she cupped her hands over my ears to muffle the sounds she made in her bed, as though it was me and not her neighbours she needed to save from distraction). For someone who has come to play such a cruelly important role in my life, Angela has done all the taking and in return left next to nothing of herself behind.

One thread I still have of hers takes me to the condo where, eighteen floors above, I had seen
and touched parts of her that now, in recollection, fall in favour of the argument that Angela has never been anything but a creation of fantasy. My effort to return my hands to her skin renders only the most generic impression, a softcore going through the motions. The naked Angela comes to me now from too great a distance, implausibly flawless and blue-lit.

If this is the case—if I never was with Angela on what I thought was our only night together—then perhaps Angela isn’t to blame. Perhaps
I’m
the psychotic. There
is
no Angela because there never
was
an Angela. Which would mean she isn’t the one who has done something terrible to Sam. I am.

Only the building’s superintendent throwing me against the wall puts these dark considerations aside.

“You,” the man says. The same one who’d given me the heave-ho the last time. Now, however, he’s giving me the clinical stare of a physician checking for signs of jaundice. “Tell me. Just between us. Whisper it in my ear if you’d like.”

“Yes?”

“What is your
problem
?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“You’ve found him.”

“Not you. A tenant.”

“They’re not tenants when they own the unit.”

“What are they then?”

“They’re
unit owners
.”

“I’m looking for a unit owner.”

“Buzz them.”

“They’re not here. Or not answering.”

“If I’d known it was you down here, I wouldn’t have answered either.”

His hands have loosened their grip on his belt. It’s his calmness that makes it certain he’s going to hit me. In my experience, there’s always a moment before taking a shot to the face when you see it coming, but don’t quite believe it.
Here it comes
, you think. Then
No, he wouldn’t
. And then he does.

“She has my son.”

The super looks down at me over pockmarked cheeks. “Divorce?”

“Something like that.”

“Call your lawyer like everyone else.”

“It’s not a lawyer kind of thing. If you know what I mean.”

Apparently he does. One fist returns to his side, and the other fishes in his pockets for his keys.

“I’ll tell you what the building’s records show,” he says, ushering me through the lobby and into a small office where the Christmas tree is stored. “But I see you in here again and I’ll stuff you down the garbage chute.”

I tell the super to look up the account under the name Pam Turgenov.

“Thought you said her name was Angela.”

“She lies.”

“Most of them do.”

He pulls up the file on Angela/Pam’s financial status with the condominium corporation. The mortgage and purchase agreement solely under Pam Turgenov’s name, though the account has recently come under arrears. Unit 1808 hasn’t paid its maintenance fee for three months, and the bank has frozen the accounts.

“We’re looking for this one,” the super says. “But from what I can tell, she hasn’t been here for a while. Not since the break-in.”

“There was a burglary?”

“Took some crap jewelry, personal stuff. But left the TV.”

Personal stuff
. Like Petra’s Yankees cap. So it could find its way to my house.

“I’m changing the locks this week,” the super says.

“It won’t matter. She’s not coming back.”

“All her junk is still up there.”

“Trust me.”

“But she’s got your kid.”

“I’ll find her.”

I must sound convincing. The super gives me a soldierly nod. “When you speak to her,” he says as he walks me to the door, “tell her I’m keeping the TV.”

From the condo I walk straight up Bay Street toward the gold and silver office towers on the far side of the rail tracks. It takes a while. I’m occupied with working through what shouldn’t come as a
surprise, but has nevertheless: Angela not only failed to report to the authorities that it was Evelyn behind the wheel of the car she drove into a cliffside with Conrad White, but she likely had a hand in bringing about the crash in the first place. It was Angela who lured them north with breadcrumb clues. More than this, she must have been there. To make sure the job was done. And to replace Evelyn’s purse with her own.

This is how Angela managed to live so completely off the grid: she made herself disappear
and
become someone else. And when the debts started to come due under Pam Turgenov’s increasingly bad name she was gone again.

There’s more support for this suspicion at the offices of the law firm where Angela claimed to work as a legal secretary. This time, I assume a cover—her jilted lover, which I suppose I am, among other things. It buys me enough sympathy with the girl at reception to find out that there was a Pam Turgenov working there for a time, not as a legal secretary but as a temp.

“Never got to really know her,” the receptionist says sadly, as though this was her life’s main regret. “Always had her nose in a book. Like,
Stay away, I’m
into
this
.”

“Do you remember what she was reading?”

The receptionist looks at her nails for an answer. “Actually, now that I think of it, she wasn’t reading. She was
writing
.”

“How long ago did she leave?”

“A while. Like,
months
. She was probably only here for a couple weeks.”

“Do you know where she went after she left? Another firm maybe?”

“It’s why they’re called temps.” The receptionist shrugs. “They come and go.”

When I give her the flowers I’d brought with me (”Is Pam here today? I have something for her birthday”) I’m rewarded with a blushing thank you.

“If I happen to bump into her, who can I say came calling?” she asks as I start toward the elevators.

“Try Conrad. Or Len. Or Ivan.”

It’s only as the elevator doors are almost closed that the receptionist raises her narrowing eyes from writing each of these names down.

Dusk. That pinkish light over the city that is the occasionally beautiful by-product of pollution. The chill that comes within seconds of the sun dropping behind the rooftops. I’m headed east for no good reason. Or no better reason than to avoid what I know awaits me at home: messages from the police reporting how they haven’t come up with anything yet. Maybe even the kid from the
National Star
camped out in my yard, a copy of
The Sandman
in his knapsack, the pages furry with Post-It notes. Better to keep drifting through the darkening streets than face that.

Yet it’s at this time of day, in this kind of light, that you see things. Twilight illusions.

Like the black van that slowly drives past me. A shadow behind the wheel. The outlined head and gloved hands that belong to whatever I chased into the corn rows at the Mustang.

As I start after it—noting again how the model name has been removed from the rear doors, a caking of dried mud obscuring the licence plate—the van picks up speed and chugs around the next corner.

I cross blind against the traffic. A station wagon screeches to a stop. Kisses its grille to my hip. The contact sends me spinning against a panel truck, but my feet continue to slap the pavement, righting my course on the sidewalk. There is honking and
Hey! Hey!
s behind me but I take the same corner the van took and all sound is gulped away. A man my age and in my shape can’t run like this more than a hundred yards without his breathing becoming the only thing he can hear. And his heart. His untested heart.

The van is gone. I keep running.

And then he’s there.

Up ahead, the shadow slides along the walls. Takes another turn into the grounds of the old Gooderham & Worts distillery. A few clustered blocks of Dickens’s London shoehorned between the expressway and condo construction sites. Long, Victorian brick barracks with smokestacks at their ends like exclamation points.

The past slows me down. It’s the cobblestone streets that turn anything faster than a walk into a
tiptoed dance. During daylight hours, the doors on either side open into galleries and cafés, but they are locked now. No one else in the pedestrian-only lanes but me and the one who’s led me here.

And there he is. Slipping into a narrow alley. But slowly. As though waiting for me to catch up.

There are no lights between two of the vacant buildings, so that all I can see of the figure ahead is the rise and fall of its head against the dim brick. And then he stops altogether.

A bit further
, the body language of his cocked head says.
You’re almost there
.

I come at him in what I intend as a rush, but there is little rush left in me. When I reach the point where he’d been standing I nearly trip over something on the ground. Heavy but with a liquid give. A bag of sand.

It gives him more than enough time. The black van is waiting for him in the parking lot. The extinguished brake lights turning my raised hands from red to pink as it shifts into drive and slides away.

Starting back, I nearly fall over the bag of sand a second time. Except now I have the time to see that it isn’t a bag of sand at all.

A body, more or less. No: less.

Propped against the wall like a sleeping drunk.
Legless
. Also armless, noseless, eyeless. A man dissembled into disparate parts laid out over the cobblestones. A human anthology.

It makes me grateful for the dark. Still, I can see enough. And what I can’t see my mind fills in with
what it remembers from the night in the shed with Petra.

Time to go. Someone else will discover this by morning. There is nothing to be gained by lingering here aside from being seen.

And yet I stay where I am a minute longer. Partly because all the air has been sucked out of the world. Partly because the man scattered at my feet was once a friend.

We were the last ones. This is how I know it’s Len even before I use the toe of my shoe to open the wallet next to the body’s cupped hand and squint to read his name on the driver’s licence inside. If you didn’t know what I know, there would be no way of connecting the grinning face in the wallet’s ID to his corpse—there is no identity left in him, all of the features that mark someone for who they are cut away. This has likely been Angela’s lesson all along: you take a person’s story and what remains is nothing more than skin and blood. The body is worthless. What counts is what it does. The lies and truths it tells.

I’m on the news in the morning. Once again they’ve used my taped statement from the first day of Sam’s disappearance. Since then, I have continued to refuse the cameras, as it isn’t doing me any favours on the suspicion front. Not to mention that pleading for Sam’s safe return isn’t going to make any impact on the person I know has him now.

A couple of the investigators come by to give me an update on the search efforts, but their eyes now openly betray their doubts. In the name of thoroughness they ask again if I’ve told them everything. Even after I repeat the same details, they wait for me to go on.
It’s alright
, their seen-it-all faces urge me.
Just tell us what you did. We won’t judge you
.

I start packing the moment the door closes behind them.

Before I go, I put in a call to Tim Earheart at a payphone around the corner. It strikes me that he’s the only person in the world I have to say goodbye to. But I’m denied even this. He’s not home, so I’m left to stutter some nonsense into his answering machine. All I remember is attempting a joke (“You know you don’t get out enough when you’ve only got one name on your speed-dial”) and asking him to “Look out for Sam if I—if it turns out Sam needs looking out for.” The kind of tight-throated message you wish you could erase as soon as you put the receiver down.

I stop off at home one last time after that, trying to think of anything else that needs to be accounted for. I look at the rows of children’s books Sam is too old to read any more and think
A father and son used to live here
. But that past tense takes all the life out of it. People used to live in every empty house you’ve ever stood in, and this makes them no less empty.