“You forgot to eat. I never thought I’d be saying this, but no.”
“Okay.”
“No, really, it’s a lovely idea, but I’m still at the ‘office,’ and tomorrow’s a heavy day. They’ve been bringing in the dead all evening, accidents and executions. Toronto’s getting to be a lethal place. I’m going to sleep here.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, so there were minute traces of poison absorbed through the skin on her neck. The details will be on your desk in the morning.”
Morgan went to bed on an empty stomach and lay awake for a long time. He listened to the darkness, excited, then calm, until a rush filled his mind and he drifted to sleep.
* * *
Miranda and her companion talked deep into the night, huddled over a light supper of sliced Spam with crackers, cheese, green grapes, and a Chilean cabernet to wash it all down. At ease with each other and yet wary in the ambient gloom of the bedside lamp, they might have been lovers in a dangerous time.
She changed the dressing on his wound, sluicing the ragged flesh with alcohol until he proclaimed he’d rather die from blood poisoning than painful benevolence. There was an urgency to their playfulness that heightened the intensity of being together. But even had the Englishman been up to it, Miranda thought herself unlikely to have sex with such a man. There were too many unknowns, too many evasions. Being in the midst of a conspiracy, when she was not even sure who the players were, was not supposed to be erotic.
But of course it was. It crossed her mind that intrigue was an aphrodisiac, better than oils and roses. It was infuriating because he looked so astonishingly handsome, his body taut and hard, suppressing pain like a great muscle ready to spring, the strain enhancing his face by making each feature more sculptural. His dishevelled hair and stubbled beard, the bared chest and bloodied bandage, the quiet but resonant voice and elusive accent, made him almost irresistible.
Bad news, naturally. She gazed at him and realized that the danger and confusion surrounding him were a natural state of affairs. The rational side of her mind found this intolerable, while, strangely, a small part of her wanted no resolution, but for things to go on as they were, one mystery rolling into another, each adding layers of complexity, like a snowball caught in an avalanche.
Looking at herself in the mirror, Miranda had never been so aware of herself as a woman. She decided to turn this to her advantage. She suspected Thomas Edward Ross could out-manoeuvre her in the manipulation of truths, but in the oppressive intimacy of their situation, perhaps she had the upper hand.
She led him on, playing on his urge to define himself. He talked. He had abandoned her book on the plane to São Paulo, he told her. That’s where the smoking man must have found it. Ross had spotted the Chilean travelling in the tourist section, that’s when he exchanged books and asked for Miranda’s help. But when he realized his pursuer knew he had been seen, he changed plans. Instead of leaving with Miranda, he slipped out through the baggage hold, leaving a few dollars in his wake.
What is odd, she thought, is that this seems improbable, but not impossible. She asked questions.
Why were they after him, whoever they were?
Why was he concerned about the Heyerdahl book?
How did she fit in?
Had she been part of his plans from the beginning?
What was special about Maria D’Arcy’s copy of the book?
Did it have something to do with the handwritten notations?
Was there a connection between the book and Maria D’Arcy’s death?
Who attacked him here in the Hotel Victoria? Was it the smoking man?
Why did they follow him to Easter Island?
Or did they follow her?
He repeatedly responded without answering, leaving her enthralled by his artful evasions when she should have been infuriated or frightened.
They both flinched at the sound of a gentle knock on the door. She recognized the voice of the concierge — perhaps he was also the owner — but could not make out his words.
She looked to Ross, and he shrugged, indicating that the inevitable could not be avoided. She slipped the lock on the door and opened it a crack.
The door slapped against her, pushing her backward into the room. A man came in, and the concierge stood behind him. The man walked directly to Ross and wrenched him to his feet. Another man entered the room. He imposed himself between Miranda and the door. When she moved, he slapped her hard and she fell to the floor. The first man hauled Ross out of the room. The second man snapped off the bedside lamp, then followed, drawing the door closed sharply behind him. Both men had worn kerchiefs pulled up over their faces; only the concierge was recognizable.
No words had been spoken. Miranda’s head throbbed. The scene had played out like a black-and-white movie, with the sound muted. Film noir, she thought, aware she was lying alone in the dark, with the taste of blood in her mouth. She had slipped into a screenplay written by Dashiell Hammett in league with John le Carré.
* * *
3
Murder Becomes Us
Miranda telephoned Morgan again, in the early morning after she got back from her interview with the Isla de Pasqua Police, but he was already out. She did not leave a message. Despite being half a world away in the southern hemisphere, she was only an hour west of him, so he would be working. She tried the office, but he was not there, either. The bland inflection in the Canadian voice at Toronto headquarters struck a chord of empathy, and she longed to be home. She wanted to solve mysteries, she realized, not invent them. And not inhabit them from the inside looking out. She sat down on the edge of the bed and saw that one of the two Heyerdahl books was missing. Her mind was muddled, searching for a metaphor to describe the panic swelling inside her; the feeling that Kafka was in charge of the world.
***
When Morgan arrived at Harrington D’Arcy’s office, high in a bank tower near the intersection of King and Bay Streets, he was surprised to find that D’Arcy had vanished.
“I had an appointment with him at nine,” Morgan explained to the receptionist, then to a secretary, then to an administrative assistant, and finally to an associate executive, each of them dressed in expensive clothes, surrounded by the lavish accoutrements of their relative positions, all in a warren of offices so tastefully appointed that the excess seemed somehow an aspect of corporate efficiency. There was nothing to indicate what kind of work was done there, but the place reeked of success.
Each person he talked to declared that they had no idea of their employer’s whereabouts. He was assured Harrington D’Arcy was unlikely to take off for a sail, to work out at his club, or to attend a secret meeting, without his entire office staff being made fully aware. There were apparently no clandestine moments or covert affairs in the life of Harrington D’Arcy. His very private business activities and reclusive social life were apparently tracked and controlled by his staff.
And yet he had disappeared the day after his wife was found dead, when he was wanted to assist in a police investigation into the possibility of her murder.
There was nothing in the office to indicate tragedy; no sign of grief, no particular interest in being interviewed by a homicide detective. No one professed to knowing Maria D’Arcy on a personal basis. She was apparently no more than a rumour in their glass-walled garrison high above the city streets.
As Morgan stood facing the polished marble of the elevator wall, waiting for one of two ornate metallic doors to slide open, and distracted by the emptiness of his experience in D’Arcy’s office, the reflection of a woman moving down the length of the opposite corridor caught his eye. The apparition came into focus beside him as if the woman herself were caught in the cool surface of the marble walls.