The Mazovia Legacy (11 page)

“Seriously.”

“The guys I spoke to say they don't know. Not from their level. They're guessing someone in the Montreal Church hierarchy has got to one of the senior officers. A good Catholic probably.”

“They going to go along with something like that?”

“For a while, probably. They're busy, and they figure it's just another faggot priest anyway. They'll get around to it eventually.They weren't told to drop it, just to go slow for a while.”

“I see.” Delaney felt a small spurt of adrenalin go through him. He wasn't sure if it was the journalist in him who was excited by this, or someone else.

“What's the connection between the priest and this Janovski guy?” O'Keefe asked. “Was he gay?”

“No. Don't think so.”

“Can you use this stuff?”

“Absolutely,” Delaney said. “Eventually. I owe you one.”

“If you don't use it, I can use it. Let me know. Christ knows I need a front-page hit about now.

Throw the editors a bone.”

*

Delaney called Natalia that night. There were two messages from her on his answering machine, along with the usual string of requests and queries from editors, colleagues, producers, and publishers' representatives. He should, he knew, check in more often with his magazine and with his publisher but he knew also that he would not. He realized as he dialled Natalia's number, however, that he had checked in with her, or she with him, every night since that first afternoon when she came to his apartment.
My hot new assignment,
he thought as the telephone rang.

She was agitated, but also guarded.

“Oh Francis, I've been trying to get you,” she said. “Someone has been in my apartment.”

“When?”

“Sometime today. While I was at the clinic. I know someone's been in here.”

“What did they take?”

“Nothing I can see. But things are moved around a bit. Papers, books. I can sense someone was in here.”

“Want me to come over?”

“Well, actually, someone is here with me now. A neighbour.”

“We should talk over a few things. I've got some information.”

“Would tomorrow be OK?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Maybe you could come here.”

“OK. What time?”

“In the morning?” she said. “ Midmorning? Late morning? I'm still only back at work part-time.”

“OK,” he said. “Midmorning. Lock your door. When your neighbour goes.”

“I will.”

A neighbour,
Delaney thought.

*

Delaney took a cab to Natalia's place the next day. The snow had returned so he decided to leave the Mercedes where it was. It was also harder to follow someone in Montreal in a cab, if indeed someone was going to try to follow him today.

The cabbies all seemed to drive the same sort of Volkswagen Jettas. Fleets of them swarmed up and down the main streets these days. By the time the particular Jetta he had chosen pulled onto Esplanade Street, Delaney had looked out the back window a number of times and seen nothing unusual. The gaunt black driver in a Montreal
Canadiens
hockey sweater had asked him in Creole if he had left something back at his apartment; did the
genti'hom
want to go back?

No, he did not want to go back. No, he thought, what he really wanted to do was see if some Polish agents were following him. He wanted to see if some CSIS agents were following him, he wanted to see if his editors or his readers or his accountant or his ex-wife's lawyers were following him. In fact, he now thought he saw a large car with two men in the front pull over on Mount Royal Street as his taxi turned down Esplanade, but he couldn't be sure. How could you be sure? But Delaney had to stop his thoughts from wandering. The cab driver wanted his money.

Gustavo, the Chilean refugee social-worker soccer-player ladies' man, was with Natalia when Delaney arrived. Very tall, very thin, very balding, but with what hair he had left fashionably gathered in a long grey ponytail. Despite the weather, Gustavo wore only a light denim jacket, replete with pins declaring his various social and political allegiances. He worked with Natalia, apparently, doing Good Works with refugees, torture victims, coup victims. Art therapy, or some such thing.

Gustavo was just leaving, he said. No, no, he told Natalia, he wouldn't stay for coffee with them. No,
gracias,
no. Delaney and Gustavo eyed each other as male primates do.
Been here all night, amigo?
Delaney asked wordlessly.
Going to be staying the night, gringo?
Gustavo was likely asking wordlessly back. He was gone after a brief hug and a light kiss on both cheeks from Natalia. He showed no desire to be embraced by Delaney.

“Don't tell me, let me guess. He's in love with you,” Delaney for some reason thought it necessary to say.

“He thinks he is,” Natalia said.

“Therefore he is. That's how it worked when I was a boy.”

“He's projecting. He's in love with the idea of being in love with me.”

“Oh, please,” Delaney said. “No wonder I stopped paying you for therapy.”

“Learning to withdraw your projections, Francis, that's the hardest thing. All the psychic figures you need for completeness are with-in. Any good Jungian will tell you that.”

Was that a wicked smile he saw on her face, or just a smile?

“Makes it a bit hard to connect with real people then, doesn't it?” Delaney said.
Not that I'm any authority,
he thought.

Natalia seemed taken aback by this remark. “I've had my small successes making connections, Francis,” she said quietly. “Not as many as most, of course. Perhaps not as many as you. But I have always preferred to live alone in any case.”

“It's none of my business anyway,” Delaney said quickly. He didn't bother correcting her version of his prowess at making connections, especially recently. “It's none of my business.”

She spared him her explicit agreement. They let the proddings about love lives go at that.

Natalia's explanation of the supposed break-in was vague at best, in Delaney's view. She
thought
she noticed things slightly rearranged. She had a
strong intuition
someone had been inside. There was even a
different smell
about the place when she got back the day before. The whole thing had made her
very anxious
. Still, he had a good look around for himself.

It was his first time in her apartment. He had always very much enjoyed looking around an attractive woman's apartment.The little things — the pictures and the books and the mementoes — told you a lot about a woman, and there was a pleasant element of voyeurism about it. In Delaney's experience, being allowed to look at a woman's things, or doing it surreptitiously, was a prelude to further intimacy. Maybe.

He examined the heavy inner-city door lock and could see nothing amiss. He suddenly felt very foolish doing so.
I'm no detective, for Christ's sake,
he thought as he straightened up. Perhaps the tiny scratches he thought he saw on the brass key cylinder were normal. He wasn't able to say. Natalia showed him how books appeared to have been moved and replaced on her many bookcases.

There were scores, hundreds, of books. Jung, of course.
The Collected Works
and just about everything else written about Jung's work
.
Jungians by the bushel. Emma Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Hillman, Progov, Campbell, O'Connor. The titles on these shelves were intriguing.
The Death and Rebirth of Psychology. Synchronicity and Human Destiny. The Discovery of the Unconscious. The Psychology of Romantic Love. Care of the Soul. The Soul's Code.
Others on other shelves equally intriguing.
The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Idea of the Holy. Tristan and Iseult: A Study of the Sources of the Romance.
Delaney very much enjoyed looking at a woman's books and wished he could linger over these for a long while.

“Why did you get into this sort of work?” he asked, pulling a volume from a shelf.

“Oh, some broken part of my own personality that needed fixing, I suppose,” she said, smiling.

“Seriously,” he said.

“I'm serious,” she said. “Almost serious.”

“Why Jung?”

“Because he links everything together for me. Behaviour, and the unconscious reasons for it. Human experience and symbolic representation. Rational, irrational. Inside, outside. Light and shadow.”

“All right, all right,” Delaney said, laughing as he put the book away.

“You asked for it,” she said, laughing too. She showed him her neat consulting-psychologist's desk and he wondered how anyone would dare meddle with the ordered stacks of papers and journal articles and notebooks. Here and there, however, a scrap of paper or a brightly coloured note was slightly out of place, or tucked roughly in amongst other pages. Her pens were fantastic shades of purple, green, and pink. Many crumpled balls of paper, too many, sat discarded in a wastebasket. A very small flash of exuberance, of disorder, hereby betrayed.
Of course she would deny this is a hint of some kind of inner chaos,
Delaney thought.

She brought him to the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom, as if to complete the tour, as if he were thinking about renting the apartment. The kitchen was somewhat New Age for his taste, but it was a true cook's kitchen. Meals were actually prepared here. Stainless steel, and open shelving, and serious knives, and eggs in wire baskets. Tall glass jars of pasta and politically correct Third World lentils and peas and beans.
I bet Gustavo enjoys that,
Delaney thought.

The bathroom was woman-fragrant; stirringly so. Oils, powders, creams. One toothbrush only.The bedroom was dim, secret, the bed surprisingly large, its cover a deep maroon. A comfortable reading chair with a serious spotlight beside it told of many bookish nights. He sensed that this was where she hid herself from things she had heard in sessions with clients, from things that had happened to her, from deaths of parents, deaths of uncles, war stories, torture victims; the usual household accidents. He stood at the threshold of the bedroom, looking in.

“So nothing has been taken?”

“No. I don't think so,” she said.

“Well, I'm not sure what we can do. Unless you want to call your friends in the Montreal Police.”

“No, thank-you.”

They were standing by her desk. Delaney wanted to tell her about what O'Keefe had discovered, but his paranoia was increasing daily so he suggested a walk. She looked surprised, but something in his look made her simply put on coat and boots and go with him. They walked across Esplanade and past the hockey rink using a path that had recently been plowed. A few kids had wisely stayed home from school to scrape around on the hard Quebec ice instead. Their shouts echoed off the apartment buildings that lined the street.

There was a dangerous race against the traffic on l'avenue Parc and then they were in Mount Royal Park, just below the giant electric cross on the hill whose light had for years dominated the Montreal skyline. Delaney suddenly hailed a cab. Again, Natalia looked surprised, but she said nothing. In a couple of minutes, after a risky U-turn in the cascade of traffic, they were up what passed for Montreal's mountain and under the snow-laden trees around Beaver Lake. If they were being followed, their pursuers would surely now be dead in traffic behind them. They watched more kids skating on the man-made lake for a while, and then walked and talked.

Delaney told Natalia what O'Keefe had told him, or almost all of it. He spared her, however, the image of intruders possibly forcing her old uncle's head into a bathful of water, of a possible interrogation. Her eyes told him she was frightened enough with this near-confirmation that someone had killed him, no matter what means they may have chosen. Her eyes also told him, if he had not already known, that he was now irretrievably implicated in this affair with her and that she very much wanted him to be.

He told her he had been able to ascertain there was at least the possibility of Polish agents being in the city. He told her that he thought it best if they limited their conversations on the phone from now on, and kept a sharp eye out for people who might be watching their movements.

He did not, however, tell her about Hilferty, or about the CSIS proposition, and he did not tell her about the gun that he had put carefully away in his filing cabinet for safekeeping. He did not tell her about the $5,000 being offered, in advance, for “expenses.” He decided that he didn't want to know why he did or did not do things today. He just wanted to trust his intuitions, as Natalia might, under other circumstances, have advised.

She stopped suddenly in the path and brushed snowflakes from her eyelashes. He thought she was going to ask about why Polish agents might want anything from her uncle and he was ready with precisely the same question for her. But she had something else on her mind.