“Sorry,” he said. “I was taking a pee. So what’s the crisis?”
Morgan listened, envisioning his partner in bed. It made him feel lonely. He was sitting on the blue sofa in his living room in boxers and a T-shirt. The city through open blinds loomed under a canopy of dismal light that erased the stars.
“He doesn’t say who’s going to do it? He doesn’t say why?”
“No,” she said.
“He doesn’t say how he knows?”
“No.”
“The mistress, Eleanor Drummond, she said nothing?”
“No.”
“She witnessed a bizarre codicil to her lover’s will. He dies. She says nothing?”
“Yes.”
“He couldn’t anticipate you’d be on the case, Miranda.”
“I wonder if he knew how he would die?”
“Surrounded by koi?”
“He seems almost to welcome it.”
“He accepts — there’s a difference.”
“He doesn’t say why he’s picked me or how we connect.”
“You don’t remember him? Nothing?”
“Complete blank. When I heard his name today — I mean, WASP names are always familiar, you know what I mean? There are only so many to go around. But I never saw him before. His face in the class photo is indistinct. It was a grad course and I was an undergraduate. Everyone was older. He must have been in his forties if he’s the guy in the pond. Morgan, I was the only undergraduate in linguistics to receive a graduate award. I noticed everything, everything.”
“I got a philosophy scholarship in my last year. I didn’t use it, either.”
“But this is not about you.” She waited for a response, then decided to override his silence in case he was sulking. “Griffin wants the Institute to be Semiology not Semiotics — in deference to Sandhu’s Continental bent, I assume.”
“It’s extortion, you know.”
“If I’m not onside, the Benevolent Fund loses big and the Canadian future of signifiers and signs is in peril. Morgan, maybe he didn’t want to save himself.”
“Or maybe that’s what this is all about — saving himself.” They both considered the implications; the quiet of their shared breathing held them together. “Chateau Mouton Rothschild came out with a Balthus line drawing on the label of its 1993 vintage — a naked prepubescent vixen, and a threat to neo-puritan propriety. Outside of Europe the vintage was marketed with a blank label. And that’s the one collectors want. Not the Balthus. They covet the empty label.”
“Which only has meaning if you know the story.”
“Exactly. You have to know what isn’t there.”
“That doesn’t help,” said Miranda. “Everything about this guy escapes me. What if we were friends or lovers and it’s all gone away?”
“Unlikely!”
“But what if?”
“Then it will come back.”
“Do you think you could have a real relationship with someone you don’t know?”
“I saw a woman on the subway once when I was a kid, and she looked like I thought my mother could have looked if the world was different. I think of that woman sometimes, even now. She stayed the same age while I’ve grown old and cranky and my mother grew old and cranky and died. That woman I never knew has been a shaping influence in my life, and I just saw her once standing on the Rosedale platform, not even on the train. I was the one passing through.”
“You wanted to become a Rosedale matron?”
“Good night, Miranda. We’ll sort this out in the morning.”
He didn’t wait for her to respond but hung up gently. She wandered into the bedroom and turned out the lights.
The screen saver was still on. She sat in front of the computer, stared into the vacuity of a virtual undersea world, and let the computerized parrotfish transform in her mind to real fish swimming beside her in crystal-clear water, butting their beaks against coral to free up nutrients, sliding lazily between dimensions like colourful ideas drifting at random, hovering asleep against boulder outcroppings, darting toward her bubbles, and swinging away in disdain from their urgent ascent.
Breaking from the sensual languor that was closing around her, withdrawing her hands from between her thighs where they had settled palms out, afraid the soporific of sex with herself might bring on nightmares, she punched up her email account. She dragged the entire bundle of new messages into the delete folder. As they flicked from view, a return address caught her eye. Retrieving the message, she slotted it back to the in box. The vaguely obscene Anglo-Saxon resonance of kumonryu. ca was overridden by the hint of something mysterious, and the message opened on the screen, confirming her instincts. It was a note from Robert Griffin.
Enough for one night, she thought. After skimming Griffin’s detailed instructions on the care of his prize fish, which struck her as a not very odd directive, given their current relationship, she opened her Web browser and wandered from site to site, looking at koi, looking at fashion design websites, coming back to koi, looking at travel destinations, and more koi, until her personality was soothingly extinguished among worlds of pure information. Leaving the monitor on, she lay down and faded into a sleepless torpor that lasted until dawn broke open the day and she fell into herself once again.
3
Chagoi
The 911 call was from an elderly woman who had a clear view of the Griffin garden from her attic. She admitted it readily to the officers who came to her door early the next morning, and she ignored their query about why she hadn’t given her name. The woman made it clear it would be an impertinence to ask why she had been in the attic. She enjoyed being interviewed. She didn’t know Robert Griffin, she said, though her house had once belonged to his family.
As neighbours, they had exchanged occasional pleasantries, and when her husband died, Griffin delivered flowers in person. It was several years since they had last spoken. He employed cleaning and gardening services that came every week. And he had a friend.
His friend visited on a regular basis, usually midweek, late afternoon, and never stayed over.
Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros had observed nothing unusual on the day of Griffin’s murder. She referred to “he” and “him” when he was alive as if that were his name, finding in the pronouns an appropriate distance from the sordid events and their tantalizing details. She couldn’t imagine how the “remains” — said with the relish of an habitual Agatha Christie reader — how “it,” as she thereafter referred to the body, depriving Griffin in death even of gender, got into the pond. She just glanced out, and he was dead. She felt it was her civic duty to inform the police. The uniformed officers assured her she had been very neighbourly and that real detectives would call by if there were any more questions.
When Miranda arrived at the Griffin place with two black coffees and cinnamon-raisin bagels, toasted, with light cream cheese, Morgan was beside the upper pond, talking to the officers who had interviewed the woman next door.
She handed Morgan his coffee and bagel. Information at this point was sparse. She had checked on the way over with Ellen Ravenscroft. A preliminary examination confirmed no evidence of significant wounds or bruises. A superficial cut on the forehead, nothing more.
Miranda sat on the limestone parapet. After a while, Morgan joined her. They consumed their breakfast