Death Spiral (14 page)

When he heard the clock strike eight Wilf said he thought he’d go upstairs and stretch out in his room.

Clarence looked up. “All right,” he said.

Wilf climbed the stairs and took his pain pill, but resisted the sleeping pills. He was waiting for a call.

He lay down in the dark. Whenever a car passed on the road behind the house, a light would travel up his wall, cross the ceiling and disappear. It didn’t seem to take long until he heard the phones ring out in the hall and down in the kitchen. He remained motionless. The ringing stopped. A moment later his father was calling from downstairs.

“It’s long distance! For you, Wilf!”

Wilf sat up and reached for his cane. “I’ll take it up here then.” He walked into the hall, lifted the receiver and waited to hear his father hang up.

“Hello?” Wilf said.

A familiar voice came crackling down the line. “Well, Jesus Christ, if it isn’t that crazy plane jockey from the frozen north.”

“Hello, Mick.”

“God, it’s great to hear your voice! I couldn’t believe my ears when Peggy said you’d called. Jump on a train. Jump in a plane. Get down here as fast as you can.”

“Hey, whoa up.” Wilf tried to put a laugh in his voice and send it all the way down the line. “I can’t come see you just yet. Soon, though.”

“Soon isn’t good enough. How are you? Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine.” Wilf slid down the wall and sat on the floor.

“Peggy said you got your sight back.”

“That’s right. It just came back.”

“That’s a miracle. You know that, don’t you?”

“Peggy said the same thing.”

“You have no excuse now, Pal. You’ve got to come see us. You’ve got to meet Peggy. And little Mick.”

“And the baby.”

“That’s right. You’ve got to come down to Jersey, Wilf.”

“I will. Maybe this summer.”

“July. I get holidays in July. And the baby will be a couple of months old by then.”

“July, it is. That’s a promise. I promise. Jesus, Mick, it’s great to hear your voice. Peggy says you’ve been working out of town.”

“I’m sitting in my gorgeous hotel room right this minute. It’s the lap of luxury. About ten feet by ten. I’ve been in bigger foxholes.”

Now Wilf did laugh. “What kind of work are you doing?”

“Prefab houses. You know the kind, they come more or less ready-made? We just knock them together. As long as the foundations are in we can work in any kind of weather. And the thing is we’re busy as hell.”

“That’s great, Mick.”

“How about you? What are you doing? Are you back to school yet?”

“I will be soon.”

“Bloody lawyer.”

“Listen, if you ever need one I’ll be there. Pro bono.”

“I hope that means for free.”

“Of course it means for free. Of course it does. Listen, I’ve got a question for you. I know it’ll sound kind of dumb after all this time.”

“No it won’t.”

“Well, it’s just that I’ve been wondering a lot lately about what happened way back then. I don’t even know exactly where you and your buddies found me. I know you said I was still in my plane and it looked like I’d tried to make a landing on some road.”

“You were in the ditch, Pal. One wing broken off. Canopy ripped off, tail gone and sleeping like a baby. Another Jesus miracle. Someone’s been looking after you, I hope you’re grateful.”

“I’m grateful to you.”

“Stop that shit. Just a few dog faces, dead tired and walking along hoping we wouldn’t run into any suicidal Germans. That’s all.”

“Where exactly, though? I must have asked you this before but I can’t remember.”

“I can’t remember you asking. You weren’t too chatty about all that. You were in some dogfight and got the worst of it, that’s all you ever said. Still mad about having your ass kicked, I figured, so we talked about lots of other things.”

“There was a wall of smoke.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s all I remember. The last thing. I flew into all this smoke. But I don’t know where.”

“Near Weimar, Wilf. Out in the country some bloody place. We were about five miles in front of the main advance, scouting around, radioing back anything we saw that might be trouble. And there you were.”

“There must have been an artillery bombardment going on. Somebody must have hit something.”

“No. We didn’t have to call in anything. The Wehrmacht had pulled out a week or so before we got there. It was a walk in the park. If you don’t count the camp.”

“The camp?”

“Yeah, this godforsaken camp. No resistance there either, though they’d waited until the very last moment to leave.”

“Where was this?”

“Right near Weimar. Buchenwald. You must have heard of it. It’s famous now. What we saw in there, you wouldn’t believe. It stays with you, you know?”

“Yeah. Mick…from the road where you found me, how far away was the camp would you say?”

“A couple of miles maybe. Not far. Jesus. You know that smoke? They’d been running crematoriums twenty-four hours a day in there, but even at that rate they couldn’t get through them all before they had to abandon the place. Bodies were still stacked up like cordwood when we got there. Some of the poor bastards who’d survived told us that the air got so black they couldn’t tell whether it was day or night. They had to feel their way around; they had to lie on the ground to breathe.”

“How many days between the time you found me and you found that camp?”

“The next day, I think.”

“When did they stop the furnaces?”

“I don’t know.”

“I flew through human ashes,” Wilf said.

Mick fell silent for what seemed like a long time. “Why the hell are we talking about this?”

“We don’t have to. Not anymore.”

They went on to talk about Wilf’s imminent return to college and how Mick was planning to open up his own prefab construction company. Wilf promised once again to get down to Jersey that coming summer, said goodbye and hung up the phone.

He got back up on his feet and walked into the bedroom. He stretched out on the bed and fell asleep. When he woke up he could hear his father snoring gently down the hall. Wilf crept down the stairs to the study, switched on the light and turned to look at the stacks of transcripts. Buchenwald. It was almost a relief. At least it was something real he could concentrate on. Buchenwald was anything but a mirage.

He began to leaf through his father’s papers looking for a reference to the camp. He couldn’t find one. He opened up the new filing cabinet and looked through the files. Near the back of the top drawer his eyes fell on a tab Clarence had neatly labelled
“Final Statements: the doctors’ trials.”

Wilf pulled it out.

“It is immaterial for the experiment whether it is done with or against the will of the person concerned. The meaning is the motive, devotion to the community. Ethics of every form are decided by an order or obedience.”

His father had made a neat handwritten note in the margin:
“Dr. Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, chief architect of the inmate experimental programs.”

Orders and obedience, Wilf thought to himself. It sounded all too familiar. But why obey such heinous orders at all? Out of fear of one’s own death. That was the usual claim reported in the newspapers, coming from everyone throughout the German hierarchy. Heard everywhere.

And that had been Adrienne’s claim, too. Hadn’t it? She’d been afraid of her boyfriend. He was threatening her life; she had to do it.

Wilf read the passage over again. Dr. Brandt was actually articulating an interesting variation, carving up some poor soul not from fear of losing one’s own life but for the common good. A person’s ethics defined by an order from someone else.

It would certainly simplify one’s inner conflicts, Wilf thought to himself, if one had any inner conflicts.

“In my life I have never followed egotistical aims and I was never motivated by base instincts. For that reason I feel free of any guilt inside me. I have acted as a soldier, and as a soldier I am ready to bear the consequences.”

So said one Dr. Fritz Fisher.

“Never motivated by base instincts.”

Wilf couldn’t take his eyes off that phrase. No base instincts flickering under the mind that designed the freezing experiment, no quickening of the blood in the one contemplating the feel of the scalpel on healthy arms and legs, no growing anticipation walking through antiseptic halls, no arousal at the first sight of the helpless experimental subject, no pounding of heart, intake of breath.

Just doing one’s duty, as determined by someone else.

And Adrienne was so small and her beauty was so frail and her voice that night in the car was so persuasive. “Christian love,” she had said.

“Researching something?” Clarence was standing in the doorway in his pajamas and slippers.

“Just trying to put myself back to sleep actually.” Wilf returned the file to its place and shut the drawer. “Nothing like legal documents to induce somnolence. Works every time.”

“That could be a problem when you go back to school.” Clarence came in and sat down on one of the leather chairs. “It’s quarter after four.”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t. I went for a leak and saw your door was open. Looking for anything in particular?”

“Not really. Just browsing. I was reading about the doctors’ trials.”

“Quite a group, aren’t they?”

“Not exactly Doc Robinson.”

“No. That’s for sure. They were infected.”

“You think so?”

“Indoctrinated with all the rest. Fell into line. They thought they were doing advanced science, that’s the strangeness of it, and in circumstances that allowed the acceleration of knowledge without the usual restraint on human experimentation and so on.”

“And do you think they were?” Wilf moved to the doorway. He had to lean up against it.

“Doing advanced science? I could care less. The international community should destroy everything they did, breakthroughs be damned, they should burn all their notes.”

“It stinks. Doesn’t it?”

“I guess so. Are you all right?”

“I just have trouble sleeping. You know that. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“You’re not going to wander around the streets of Toronto if you can’t sleep, are you?”

“I’ll go into the stacks at the library, fall asleep in there. I think I’ll go back to bed. How about you?”

“Do me a favour? Stay away from Andy and that business in the woods? You don’t need it.”

Wilf smiled at his father as he moved into the hall. “I’m a war vet, Dad.”

Clarence pulled himself out of the chair and crossed the study. “You’re more than that. You’re a genuine hero. And that means you don’t have to prove anything to anybody!”

Clarence stood in the dark hallway and watched Wilf limp toward the stairs.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Duncan looked at the photograph taped up in the window. A few other people were doing the same thing. He pushed in closer. Now he could see crystals of frost clinging to the man’s dark eyebrows.

Do You Know This Man? Contact Sergeant A. Creighton at the police station or phone 221.

Though his nose was clearly broken and his lips were swollen and split, it was the frost that seemed to Duncan to be the most pitiful thing. It was the frost that proved that the man was dead. Otherwise he could just be sleeping.

“He looks like he’s asleep,” a woman to Duncan’s right said.

“He’s dead,” Duncan replied.

A man snorted into the cold morning air.

“I know that, Duncan,” the woman said.

Dead. Never to come back into that body. Disappeared somewhere. In the wind. Blowing across the countryside. He’d seen the souls of dead people lots of times. Flying through the moonlight, tangled in branches, dark shadows in the swirling snow. They were everywhere.

Bodies were left behind though. The little man’s body had been left behind like a dead mouse turned out of his burrow in the middle of winter. Duncan smiled at that. There was a poem. His mother used to recite it to him all the time. “Wee timorous beastie.” Which was curious because his mother hated mice and went on a regular rampage every fall when they started to come into the house. She said they carried all kinds of disease. Nothing would drive her crazier than uncovering a writhing pink nest of newborn mice under her bed or in her sock drawer. All the walls in the house would have to be washed. All the bedding bleached. Utensils in the drawers dipped in boiling water.

You could never tell. That was the thing. Even the most gentle, smallest creature could be the most dangerous. That man could be dangerous. With his closed eyes.

Duncan wondered if maybe they’d put that picture in the newspaper. He hoped they would. He wanted to cut it out and tape it up on his wall. He surveyed the town. It was early Saturday morning and there weren’t many people in sight. He thought he’d treat himself to breakfast at the restaurant at the other end of Main Street. It was the only one open in the mornings. It was the dingiest one, the one where the people who didn’t have any family went to eat. The man and woman who owned the place, whether he was drunk or sober, whether day or night, always made Duncan feel welcome there.

He strode along feeling light of spirit. He thought of his mother again. He knew she was somewhere close by. Perhaps she was sitting up high in the hydro wires or flitting like a shadow along the icicles shining in a long row over his head. She’d always called him her good boy and she’d always told anyone who came to their place that he tried hard to do his best.

Duncan’s heart overflowed with a mix of feelings. She could see how he was running the lumberyard and the shop, she could see how hard he was trying to live his life. To be a good man. To do his best.

She knew everything.

* * *

Andy stood in the McLauchlin garage and hoped no one would walk past the open garage doors and see him standing there. He turned to watch Wilf crouching beside an old orange crate, rummaging through some rags.

“The Chief is all over me for going out to the DP camp,” Andy said.

“I know. You told me.”

Wilf had called Andy earlier that morning to tell him that he had some crucial information concerning the murder in the woods but that he couldn’t say what it was over the telephone, for fear of Nancy Dearborn. He knew that what he had hidden in the orange crate was an unlikely piece of evidence. His conjecture about the boot prints seemed stronger. But the phone call to Andy wasn’t so much a call to action, anyway. He just needed him to confirm that they were possibilities that anyone would have to consider, that they existed in the real world, that he wasn’t too far gone.

“Do you know why he’s all over me? Because the OPP are all over him,” Andy was saying.

“You told me that part, too.”

“It was a gross breach of protocol, that’s what it was. Messing with that arm. And the body. Getting our tracks all over everything. Once you’ve established a homicide has occurred you’re supposed to desist from any further investigation and call those bastards. And then we went out to the DP camp.”

“I was just keeping you company.” Wilf reached deep inside the crate and wrestled out the circle of ice.

Andy looked a little startled. “What the fuck is that?”

“What’s it look like?” Wilf balanced the ice on the crate’s edge.

“Like a piece of ice with a ring grooved in it.”

“There’s two letters in the middle.”

Andy came closer.

“Foundry marks, I think. If you reverse them, they read
JF
. And there’s a spidery ridge of ice running here. Another one running from there to there. It’s a cast of something and those ridges are cracks in the thing itself. It’s like a fingerprint.” Wilf looked up and smiled.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. I know what it’s used for, but I’m not sure what it’s called. Take it.”

Andy flinched back a little. “I don’t want it.”

“Just for a minute. I need to stand up.”

Andy lifted the ice up, bracing it against his chest and looked back toward the open doors again.

“I think it’s one of those things people tie their horses to when there’s nothing else around,” Wilf said. “A piece of iron with a ring on the top. They put it on the ground and loop one of the reins through. You’ve seen them.”

“They’re called tethers. Weight tethers.” Andy was sounding more irritated than enthralled. He lowered the ice back into the crate and covered it up with the rags. “I can’t fool around any more, Wilf. If I make one more wrong move I’m going to get my ass fried.”

“I found it on the side of the road close to where those three men came out of the woods. And runner marks, too. A cutter had been standing there.”

“But that doesn’t mean anything. Anybody could have stopped beside that woods. They could have been doing anything.”

Andy strode over to the open doors and closed them. The only light left inside the garage was struggling in through a small side window.

“There was just one man,” Wilf said.

“What do you mean?”

“Out there. Three men didn’t murder that man. There was only one.”

Andy leaned up against the doors. “Oh yeah?”

Wilf told him his theory about the similarity in the tracks and then he said, “The sun was warmer and the ice on the road was melting a little when he came back.”

“Why the hell would he come back?” Andy had his arms wrapped stolidly across his chest by this time.

“Because he didn’t get the idea to lay down two more tracks until afterwards. He had to go home to get his extra boots.”

Andy had to smile. “Some mastermind.”

“It must have been Thursday. It was milder on Thursday. It had snowed a little Wednesday night because Carole and I drove through some snow. It turned windy and cold by Friday.”

“Everyone knows he was probably killed on Thursday.” Andy could feel himself getting drawn in again. He began looking for his allusive cigarettes.

“Have the OPP talked about the tracks?”

With the doors closed Wilf was only a dark presence at the other end of the garage. Andy could hardly make him out.

“Yeah. A lot. Our tracks. Yours and mine. Particularly yours. They said your tracks were all over the place. How did you manage to get that thing anyway?”

“I drove back out there later. I chipped it out of the road.”

“What the hell were you thinking? You know you can’t do that. Even if it doesn’t mean anything, and the chances are it doesn’t, you can’t remove possible evidence from a crime scene!” Andy found his cigarettes and lit one up. “You know why I came over here? Not because you said you’d found something interesting. It wasn’t that. It was because of the way you sounded.”

“How did I sound?”

“Well, different. Sort of, like you were kind of afraid of something.”

“Nancy Dearborn?”

“And that’s another thing. Why would you say Nancy Dearborn might be listening?”

“She might have.”

“She wouldn’t listen. She couldn’t. She’d be fired.”

Wilf walked over to the window and looked out into the yard.

“You sounded a bit strange, that’s all.”

“You thought I was out of my head when I showed up that night with those beer glasses and a pill bottle.”

“True enough.” Andy could see Wilf’s face more clearly now. He looked calm enough.

“Once these things get started they’re hard to stop. Adrienne O’Dell could have told us that.”

“What things?”

“These kind of things.”

“Listen Wilf, I’ll forget I saw that piece of ice and you’ll forget you ever told me about it. All right?”

“All right.”

“And later tonight you could get rid of it somewhere.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I would. Anyway, I’ve got to get downtown. I’ll keep your one-man theory in mind, though. You’d think the OPP would have come up with the same thing by now, with all their men.”

“Maybe they have.”

Andy swung open the garage doors, looking too eager to leave.

* * *

Carole looked through the clothes in her closet. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to wear to the dance that night. She wasn’t even sure they were still going. She hadn’t heard a thing from Wilf since the day before. When Mr. McLauchlin had arrived back from his business meeting he’d already been told that Andy and Wilf had found that poor man in the woods. He seemed alarmed about it. His face was flushed. And then that detective had come in looking for Wilf.

Carole took out her three best dresses and laid them out on her bed. She didn’t like any of them. Why was Wilf always in the middle of these terrible things?

She looked at herself in her dresser mirror. She was only wearing a slip and she didn’t particularly like what she saw. Her hair was still announcing the mad blunder of that dye job to anyone with eyes, for one thing. Her neck was too long for another, her collarbone stood out like she was half-starved, her breasts only hinted at a possible cleavage and she was sure they were asymmetrical, though Donny had never noticed, or at least he’d never complained.

The only thing she liked about herself was her legs. When her seams were straight they could look quite smashing. She didn’t even want to think about her sallow complexion, her colourless eyes, her thin nose.

She made a decision. The emerald dress would have to do because it was the only one with matching shoes that might be comfortable enough to dance in all night, not that she could imagine dancing with Wilf. What would they do? Sit out the fast numbers and just sway in the same spot to the slow ones?

Probably.

As Carole thought about that, she could see everyone watching them, the tall thin girl and the wounded soldier. Everyone would know he was a soldier even though he’d be wearing a suit and tie.

She could feel her face touching his face, his arm about her waist, drawing her close. She wondered where his arm in the sling would go. Against her breasts, such as they were, that’s where. Pressing against her breasts.

She hung the three dresses back up in her closet. It was hours before she needed to get ready. She didn’t even know if they were going to go out to dinner first. She didn’t know whether to eat at home or not. He hadn’t even called.

Wilf McLauchlin.

The more she’d gotten to know him, the more it seemed that she didn’t know him at all. It was as if he were standing in shadows half the time, as if he were keeping a secret, but of course that wasn’t true. If anything he talked too much and told her too much and he wanted too much from her. Those two murders. Wanting her to be involved, or needing her to be involved, she wasn’t quite sure which it was, but it didn’t matter anyway because she didn’t want to get involved. Why would she? Since yesterday all she could think about was how strange it was for one man to take another man into a woods and chop off his arm. Somehow it seemed less crazy if there’d been three of them.

And why his arm? Surely if he’d wanted to kill the man, he would have taken the axe and aimed for his head. It just didn’t make any sense.

She turned to look at herself in the mirror again. Her face looked a little flushed. Wilf was obviously obsessed with such things. Such terrible things.

You see what he’s doing to you, Carole thought to herself.

* * *

The phone rang.

Wilf wasn’t sure he wanted to answer it. His father had left earlier that morning for another Brantford meeting and since Andy had retreated from the garage Wilf had been thinking once again about what Mick Pascani had said.

And once again he could see the dark billowing clouds. What had come next? The American field hospital.

“Are my eyes bandaged?” he asked. His body felt like it was still buckled into his plane, he felt like he was still flying.