A Victim Must Be Found (7 page)

Although they didn’t look like Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, I got a picture of the two of them looking at me. It stayed with me and I can see it now. Favell and Paddy Miles, Ollie waving the short end of his tie at me and Stan on the edge of tears.

FIVE

On my way back to the car, I started wondering whether the time had not come for another word with my client. His list was looking less substantial than it had when I first heard about it while unpacking my goods above Tacos Heaven. I intended to drive back to the new apartment, but found myself parked in the old parking place behind the City House, my home of many years. It wasn’t the drink, and the headache had mostly gone. I was woolgathering, trying to find a solid place to put my feet in this business of Pambos’s list. I backed out and headed for Court Street. In time the car would learn the new way home. There was a corner parking space with my name on it against the schoolyard fence. You could still read the names of departed tenants on the wooden panel with the word “reserved” in block capitals.

In the cupboard above the sink, I found some cans of soup left behind by A. Morris or P. Parretta or one of the other vanished former tenants. I read the instructions and looked for a can opener. I’d seen my mother doing this since I was just a youngster. She was very good at making soup. We often had green pea soup one day and mushroom the next. Of course, her chicken soup was her own. She would never serve canned soup with meat in it, although we did grow up on vegetable soup from Campbell’s quite innocently for many years. It was only brought into question when Campbell’s began to market something called “Vegetarian Vegetable.” I missed Ma’s cooking and was looking forward to recreating some of her dishes now that I was on my own for the first time in an apartment of my own with a stove. I poured the soup into a saucepan and added a can of tap-water. I turned the heat under the saucepan to high and gave the mixture a stir, not enough to break up the tiny cubes of carrots and potatoes, but just enough to combine the water with the contents of the can. I was doing this when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Who’s that? Is Phil there?” The woman had an English accent, from the north somewhere, but I couldn’t be sure.

“This is a new line,” I said. “It was only put in today. This is the first call I’ve had, actually.” Her north of England accent prompted my “actually.” Just like in the movies. She said she was sorry for bothering me and hung up. I put down my end and went back to the stove, where a cloudy bunch of small bubbles was beginning to turn the soup from orangish-brown to beige. I let it boil for five minutes, then served myself on my new coffee-table, which, when you pulled at it, lifted up to dining-room table height. I don’t claim that the soup was as good as my mother makes, but it was familiar and on the right track.

It was nearly seven when I came out on the street again. The sun had set about half an hour ago and fingers of frost were in the air. Nowhere could I see any sign of the relatively balmy afternoon. Did I see golfers this afternoon or had I imagined them? This was always a tricky part of the year. The car started and I backed out of my space, the headlights illuminated the wire of the fence and cut off any view into the empty schoolyard.

I drove down King Street to Ontario and turned left. Ahead of me a battery of highway signs prompted me m several directions. I knew them all, but I was always bothered for newcomers whenever I faced this choice. I could feel the pressure of cars behind me, urging me to make up my mind already. I wondered whether within a city there might not be some calmer system of signalling choices to drivers than these screaming capital letters. I made my choice before the car behind me began honking me to action. I turned right, went past the park with its huge cenotaph commemorating the dead of two world wars and turned right again at the television station. Wally Skeat would be finishing up his half-hour with the evening news, weather and sports. I was tempted to stop, but I headed down Yates Street and turned into Stephenson Road, which wound down the bank of the muchdredged canal and came towards the bright—but bright within reason and with taste—lights of the Stephenson House.

When I started out, when I put the key in the ignition of the car, I don’t think all of me knew where the hell I was going. There were questions that I wanted Pambos to answer, things that came out of my meetings with Mac-Culloch, Favell and Paddy Miles. It’s funny how a case begins to lose its abstract appearance after you’ve met a few of the characters involved. In their eyes you can see how real it is, and the abstraction disappears like the exhaust of a Mack truck into the night air.

I parked the car not in the lot in front of the colonial façade of the main building but around the back where the headlights interrupted an alley-cats’ crap game. A couple of pairs of green eyes stared at me in defiance, but most of the dark shapes scattered in all directions. Other eyes looked out at me from the shelter of a row of garbage cans. There was a moon, a few days past the first quarter. It glinted on the metal bars on the windows and the frame around the back door. There was no light coming from this side of the hotel, although I could hear a rumble of exhaust from the kitchen stoves and even a little dinner music from the front of the house. I tried the door; it was open. I invited myself in.

It was a wide hallway leading to the kitchen of the hotel. I could hear voices raised in banter behind the closed double doors. The passage was lit by what came through the panels of wire-reinforced glass in the doors. A cart with empty garbage cans stood outside the kitchen. The hall smelt of the constant traffic of garbage-out and fresh produce-in. It was a heavy-duty location. On the floor I couldn’t even find a cigarette butt to hold up to Pambos as a sign that his boys were letting him down.

I continued down the hall, turning left at the kitchen, and noticed that from here on the floor was covered in industrial carpet and the walls with wooden panelling. The hall ended at a single closed door with a window in it, like in a speakeasy in the movies. The window was closed. On the door, under the window, I read a discreet sign: C. Kiriakis, Private. “C”? What does the “C” stand for? I knocked and waited for the window to slide open. I expected to get the once over lightly from some beefy bodyguard, followed inside by a fast thorough search that made me feel like I was being measured for a pair of pants. Then I remembered that this was Pambos’s office, not some movie casino run by some Raymond Chandler kingpin of gambling and related vices. This was Grantham, Ontario, and I was looking for the guy I’d had coffee with a few hours earlier. It made me feel better. Thinking of Pambos added a few watts of light to this blind-alley corridor. I tried the door. It was open like the other one.

In my head I could hear my mother yelling at me, as though I was telling her all about my adventures behind the Stephenson House. “Benny! What are you trying to do to me! Scare me to death? Just tell the story, leave out the scary parts.” I could see her looking at me in her tangerine living-room. “Benny, Ellery Queen you’re not. Just tell me the facts, like the fellow said on … What was it? With Sergeant Friday? You know the one. Bum-bahbum-bump!” Why was I dragging my mother into this place? It was scary enough without her, what with the noise the hinges made as the door opened inward. I stepped in and closed the door behind me, not quite cutting off my mother’s voice inside me. In my perspiring imagination she was saying, “You think I don’t know what an open door means! I wasn’t born yesterday.” For a second I wondered if I’d see her familiar face appear at the window, if I slid the panel open. I ignored the temptation.

“Pambos!” I called in a subdued yell that stepped on its own intentions. “It’s me, Benny!” The sound of my voice vanished into the curtains, which hung down to the floor. I could feel that old horror creeping up my back as I heard the inner voice say, back away, get out while there’s still time.

A noise on my right. A section of the bookcases, filled not with books but with antique toys and lead soldiers, pivoted. Pambos came into the room, followed by an older man whose name I didn’t know, although I’d seen him around town for years.

“Benny! What a surprise! Glad to see you, sit down. I’ll get Renos to send in some coffee. Hey, do you two know each other?” I looked at the man behind Pambos, and he looked at me. We stood in mutual embarrassment, waiting to be introduced. “Benny’s a private detective around town, Bill.” Bill nodded.

“Investigator,” I corrected. Pambos shrugged. “There are a couple of things, Pambos …”

“Bill here’s working for the
Beacon
. He’s a reporter. Sit down,” he repeated. We both did, while Pambos went around to the business side of his desk and demanded coffee through the telephone.

This wasn’t the first time I’d spent an evening with Pambos, as I’ve said, but the evening had been relocated to its most glamorous setting to date. His collections were no longer kept in a box and brought out to be admired, but they were all around us. He pointed out the paintings and identified them: a Lawren Harris, an A.Y. Jackson, a small Pollock and a Wallace Lamb. The toys were mostly Victorian and early twentieth century. There were cars and buggies, trains, fire-engines, banks, jugglers, trick dogs and other animals and masses and masses of lead soldiers. “This fellow here,” Pambos was saying, “is a member of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. They were his élite force and under his personal command. There weren’t many of them left when he got back from Moscow after the winter of 1812–13.” The figure, which stood less than three inches high, had been hand painted from his leather boots to his ginger-coloured whiskers. He carried one of those backpacks that French soldiers carried through the Napoleonic wars.

“Napoleon was a general by the time he was twentyseven,” Bill said. Pambos answered with a date. Seventeen-ninety-something. I had interrupted a meeting of the Tin-soldier League. I didn’t have much to contribute. I was going to volunteer Napoleon’s famous dying words, “Kiss me, Hardy!” but I thought that they both knew them as well as they knew the year of the Offensive of 1812.

“Do you think he was poisoned?” Bill asked me. I didn’t know what to say. I thought he’d been beheaded like all the others. Pambos came to my rescue just as coffee arrived on a big tray. I sometimes thought that Pambos lived on coffee; wherever he was, a cup was growing cold at his elbow.

“You’ve been reading that stuff by that Norwegian dentist, Bill. Come on!” Bill’s smile lit up his craggy face as he leaned forward.

“Sten Forshufvud was Swedish and a respected biologist. Why are you underrating him? You can still argue fairly, can’t you?” Pambos turned to me and tried to explain the history.

“The traditional story is that Napoleon died of cancer of the stomach on St. Helena in 1821. But there are those,” he said, pinning Bill down with a look that would have been withering if Pambos had been any taller, “who believe that he was poisoned by one of the Frenchmen attached to the Emperor’s household.”

“Montholon, the nasty Count of Montholon!” Bill added.

“So you say!” said Pambos. “You can’t prove a thing!” Pambos said it so passionately, I thought he was taking the question of the count’s guilt or innocence personally.

“Hey! Slow down. Let me be the jury. What I don’t know about Napoleon could fill volumes. I’m as impartial a witness as you’re likely to get.” I picked up my coffee and began to sip. In a moment Pambos began to make a case for the fact that the Emperor had died of natural causes. He invoked books from his shelves as he went and soon the air was thick with names I’d never heard before: Montholon, Bertrand, Marchand, Hudson Lowe, Dr. O’Meara, Dr. Arnott, Dr. Antommarchi and dozens of others. Every once in a while Bill would interrupt.

“I object!” he’d say. “There’s no proof that there was a cancer found in the post-mortem.” Or, “Hudson Lowe was only interested in his liver, he didn’t care a damn about his stomach!” When I say that most of this went over my head, I exaggerate. It
all
went over my head. When Pambos finally began to wind down he brought out a letter from the top drawer of his desk.

“I showed this post-mortem report to Agatha Christie,” Pambos said. I began to wake up. I’d heard of her. In fact there were only half a dozen of her books I haven’t read.

“When did you hob-nob with Dame Agatha,” said Bill, not disguising his disbelief.

“A cat can look at a crime queen,” Pambos answered. “It was back in the 1970s. I was wondering about the same thing you are, so I sent her a copy of the postmortem report, holding back the Emperor’s name. I didn’t fool her.” He looked down at the letter and read:

Yes, I rather guessed it was Napoleon. It certainly argues a cautionary tale in the use of emetics, doesn’t it?

Pambos waited for the effect of the letter to sink in.

“No word about poison. Not a word about arsenic intoxication. Not a murmur about foul play.”

“Well, she may have said that in the 1970s, but if she’d heard from you twenty years earlier, she would have had more to say. That’s my bet,” Bill said. Pambos put the letter, which was handwritten, back into the neatly addressed envelope. I thought that they’d let the matter drop there, but they didn’t. There wasn’t a moment for me to catch Pambos’s attention for a few questions.

Bill took out a pocket flask and added a nip to his coffee. Then he went on to describe the evidence for the other side. I heard the same names tossed around again, but now there were others: Ben Weider, Hamilton Smith and David Chandler. Like the earlier batch, I wasn’t able to place any of them, but I will say this for Bill, he laid down the evidence like a good crown attorney. We heard about antimony as well as arsenic, about the contacts between Montholon and the Comte d’Artois, who became Charles X. It was a tempting theory, but the chemistry about making a poisonous almond drink from peach pits left me behind again.

I was about to ask Pambos if I could borrow his ear for a private moment, when the telephone rang. I looked at my watch. It was getting late. Nowhere in town did time disappear as fast as at Pambos Kiriakis’s. I was surprised at the hour, but reassured that he continued to be the good host I remembered.