"I want answers," he says as he peers across the promontory for signs of the dark château that dragged him into the mystery in the first place.
Greg Grimes, a potter with piercing blue eyes and bushy blonde hair who threw little pots on a wheel every evening on the promenade, was the trigger. He was scruffy and unshaved, but he had a certain magnetism that drove women wild. Bliss would stand most summer evenings in the balmy air, watching in wonder as the English artisan moulded ceramic white elephants — midget ashtrays, egg cups, vases, and candle holders — for a google-eyed audience of women.
"It is free, gratuit," the charismatic potter would say as he offered each freshly minted gem to a different young woman, but his begging bowl always overflowed, until someone roughly amputated his hand one night and left him to the rats in the Château Roger's basement.
That was more than a year ago, and although the stores are filled with pots from Picasso's town of Vallauris, high on the hill above St-Juan-sur-Mer, none carry with them the love that Grimes infused into his tiny masterpieces. However, the lustre on a floppy wet clay pot quickly wears off, and most of the little treasures that warmed a heart one evening would be flushed down the hotel toilet by the next morning. And with much of the plumbing dating back almost to Napoleon, the entire system would be gummed up in no time.
Bliss's suggestion that the hoteliers should affix a notice to each toilet was dismissed with typical Gallic disdain as "autant pisser dans un violon," or as much use as pissing into a violin, and irate members of L'ssociation des hôteliers de St-Juan were the prime suspects in the potter's mutilation. However, as Bliss was to discover, a much more sinister organization took the man's hand.
I have to go back in there, Bliss tells himself with little enthusiasm as he stares in the direction of the building. He knows that it won't be easy; since his previous incursion more than a year ago in search of the wounded potter, the custodians have redoubled their efforts to keep trespassers out. But inwardly, he knows that it isn't the security guards bothering him. He knows he can walk the twisted hills surrounding the château and expect only polite nods from the muscled men in dark suits while they whisper, "Zhat is the famous Scotland Yard detective who is writing a book."
Bothering him are the thousands of tortured souls that he stumbled over in the dungeons beneath the derelict building: souls of resistance fighters, Jews, gypsies, and anyone else who stepped on Adolf Hitler's toes. Even inconvenient husbands, ex-lovers, or business rivals, denounced as "traitors to the fatherland" with poison pens, were whisked out of their beds at dawn with a one-way ticket to Auschwitz or Buchenwald — if they survived the first stop in the château's notorious torture chambers.
The château hides itself in the darkness as Bliss questions, What am I trying to prove? The widows and orphans of the victims don't want me prying into their cellars; they don't want an invasion of neo-nazi relic hunters digging up their past.
"Ce château et un panier des crabes, a basket of crabs," Daisy claimed, and none of his discoveries changed that. But now, as he flounders in search of an ending for his novel, he can't help thinking that the ruined château holds the key.
Vancouver, British Columbia, has its share of derelict buildings, though none whose age or black history comes close to the Château Roger. However, no more than a salmon's leap from the waterfront hotels and glitzy restaurants that line the Fraser River is an abandoned warehouse that attracts the losers in life's lottery. Potheads, hookers, mainliners, pimps, and alcoholics all seek shelter from a harsh world under its leaking iron roof, while a shanty city of those still holding out hope grows outside its walls.
"Let's try down there," suggests Trina, dragging her husband into a tight alleyway littered with boxes and bags, the homes of the homeless, behind the warehouse.
Rick hangs back, "I don't —"
"Come on. They're only people," she calls as she surges ahead with a five-dollar bill in hand.
"I'm looking for a woman," says Trina as she squats by the side of an aging Jesus look-alike.
"So am I," he replies as the embers in his eyes briefly ignite, and he begins to reach out for her face.
Trina nudges him, laughing. "Cheeky." Then she gives him a brief description of Janet.
"Maybe," he says at the mention of Janet's head scarf, and Trina catches on.
"How much?" she begins, exchanging her five for a twenty, but Rick is quickly on her shoulder.
"Don't," he hisses. "Not until he tells you."
"OK," she says. She rips the bill in half, thrusts the Queen's head into the dropout's face, and puts on a mobster's tone. "The rest when I find her, awl'right?"
"Brilliant," complains Rick five minutes later when all the leads have fizzled and the bum has taken off.
"So? He hasn't got the dough."
"Neither have we," Rick is moaning when Trina spots a pile of cardboard boxes against a brick outhouse and senses a presence.
"Shh…" she whispers, pulls Janet's crucifix from her bag, and gingerly advances like a vampire hunter. "Janet?" she coos. "Janet?" A brown head scarf appears.
The chase is short. Janet is too weak to struggle, and as Trina escorts her towards the car she says soothingly, "Don't worry. We won't tell the police where you are."
Behind her, playing backstop, Rick mutters under his breath, "You could get us five years for this."
Rick Button's warning seems likely to come to fruition the moment they take Janet into their house and Kylie sings out, "Mum, Dad, police on the phone."
"Let me," says Trina, grabbing it from her husband, but she instantly relaxes. "It's only Mike Phillips," she says with her hand over the mouthpiece as the inspector explains that he's been in touch with an officer who specializes in cults and sects.
"You know the sort of thing," he elucidates. "Twenty-year-old heiress runs off and gives everything to God, who turns out to be some freaky-haired junkie with a Bible."
"I don't think Janet has anything —" Trina begins, but he cuts her off.
"Not now she doesn't. That's my point. But she may have done. Anyway, Officer Zelke wants to talk to you."
"Hey," shouts Rob from the basement as he turns up the volume on the television. "It sounds like the stick insect."
"The RCMP and Vancouver police are searching for a woman wanted in the death of one of their own…"
"Turn it off," shouts Rick, but Janet seems oblivious as she caresses her crucifix and rocks herself comfortingly on a kitchen chair.
"What makes you think she's from a cult?" Trina questions Paul Zelke from the quiet of her bedroom a few minutes later.
"Daena," he asks succinctly. "Is that what she calls herself?"
"Yeah. Daena XV."
"Thought so. There's a whole bunch of women in a joint they call Beautiful and they all reckon they're Daena. It's a religious freak show, usual stuff: polygamy, incest, child abuse. All ordained from on high, all in the Bible. But so is stoning gays and adulteresses to death, though we kinda frown on that today."
"Why do you think Janet is from there?"
"We got a call a couple of days ago from the jerk who runs the place. His name's Wayne Browning, though he calls himself The Saviour. Anyway, he gave a false ID, but we know it was him, and he seemed pretty keen to find her."
Wayne Browning isn't keen on finding Janet, he's desperate, and so is Janet's husband, the man who originally sent her there.
"I pay you," shouts Joseph Creston into the phone. "Keep her there, keep her quiet. Is that such a problem?"
"Forty years," Browning shoots back. "Yes. And what I've paid you would keep her for another forty. I've funded that place."
"Yeah, but you've not done so badly out of it."
"That's