Chapter 10

ch1

I did my best to distract myself with routine and paperwork the rest of the night. Everyone was unhappy with me, starting with the building superintendent and ending with myself.

The former, who had slept through the firing of a .32 calibre pistol beneath his bedroom, wondered why I’d woken him up to tell him not to clean the basement corridor, something he’d had no intention of doing at that hour anyway. And having a resident policeman in the building was all very well, but why did I have to bring my work home? Parkdale Station grumbled at my request for a police photographer at that ungodly hour, and on a holiday Monday to boot. The ambulance men that came to transport Ewart’s remains to Grace Hospital grumbled at me for having interrupted their game of spit in the ocean. I knew the keeper of the petty cash box at HQ would grumble at me if I expected to be reimbursed for my taxi ride downtown, even though the Queen streetcar wasn’t running on Labour Day at four in the morning. I wasn’t the world’s fastest typist and was still pecking out my report on one of the department’s battered Underwoods at eight thirty when Inspector Sanderson sailed in freshly shaved and not yet enveloped in pipe smoke. Why he had no better place than HQ to spend the last day of the long weekend I didn’t know and didn’t ask. When he heard what the Sam Hill I was up to at this hour, he gathered me into his office and grumbled at me for letting Lucy out of my clutches. Then he told me I wasn’t fit to be seen in any self-respecting police office and sent me home to sleep for eight hours. I could report back to him that night at six. By then he’d have read my typescript.

How like the inspector not to go overboard and give me the whole day off! But I had to hand it to him — how like him also to stay late himself!

I’ll admit I was rattled by Ewart’s attack. Duty-bound to leave my trench knife in evidence storage at HQ, I unlocked a desk drawer I rarely go into. My service revolver and its shoulder rig, supposed to be worn only by detectives on duty, went home with me that morning. A box of ammunition too.

The streetcars were running now, and the ride out Queen West gave me time to mull over where I’d slipped up. Lucy’s disappearance was unfortunate, but not the worst of it. In the first place, I was sure she’d left under her own steam, not been snatched. Busy as I was with Ewart, I’m sure I’d have noticed the approach of any of his comrades behind me. This mattered to me because it had looked as if Ewart’s shot had been right on target. A miss would have left a bullet and some scarring of the corridor walls. I’d found no trace of either. Therefore, if Lucy had run away, it meant that Ewart’s bullet had hit the vest and — as at the demonstration — the vest had done its job. A search with a strong flashlight turned up no drop of blood on floor, walls, or ceiling. I took some comfort also from the fact that Lucy had come to me of her own volition. I just hoped that her reason for doing so had not expired with the latest assailant and that she’d be back. I couldn’t in any case have restrained Lucy and subdued Ewart at the same time.

Ewart had been a handful, and more. The man had fought like a tiger. My mind went back to the trench raids I’d gone out on during the war and to the ones our platoon had repelled. I’d done a good deal of hand-to-hand in Flanders, some of it against elite German regiments, but even these supermen would fall back in shock on getting a knife in the face. Maybe everyone, volunteers no less than conscripts, had been worn down by the rats and the mud, the stench and the sepsis, the poor rations and the sleepless nights. By 1917, in any case, nothing like the combat zeal of this Canadian Communist had animated even the most fanatical believers in Gott mit uns.

And then, once I had him, my sloppy policing had let Ewart escape questioning.

I just hadn’t been ready for his fervour. Maybe I’d let myself be lulled by the Socialism in one country slogan. The words expressed a vision utterly opposed to the nightmare of world revolution that made our businessmen squeal with fear. One country, only one — Russia. Not countries all over Europe or here in North America. No hint of gunplay and suicide in a Toronto basement. Perhaps this new Soviet policy turn was a ruse, a lullaby to soothe our fears while the bloodbath was being prepared. Whatever the plan — whether this one-country stuff was on the level or not — I now had to assume the Communist International considered little Miss Lucy a fly in their ointment. A fly that had now cost the party at least two flycatchers.

Just before ten a.m., the car reached my stop. When I let myself into my apartment, she was lying on the bed, snoring lightly, her raincoat thrown on the armchair, the vest still strapped on over my jersey, and my baggy old trousers pulled primly back up around her waist. I could have gone to the police call box on the corner and arranged for a paddy wagon to come and pick her up. Against this course of action was my reluctance to entrust her to anyone but myself. What’s more, I reckoned I’d earned the right to be the first to question her. I’d nursed her. I’d beaten the bushes for her. And after playing hard to get, the rare bird had chosen my nest to land in. Naturally, I was possessive. Most of all, though, I was too dog tired to do much of anything.

I slipped off my shoes, padded into the kitchen, and buried the key to Rutherford’s handcuffs in a box of cornflakes. I examined the cuffs to make sure I understood how they functioned. They could be carried closed without being locked, as indeed they had been carried in the constable’s pouch before Lucy lifted them — and in my pocket since their removal from Benny’s wrists. A lock release button on the outside of each bracelet had to be depressed before closing the cuffs would lock them.

I returned to the bedroom and locked one cuff around the sleeping woman’s right wrist, the other around my left.

Lucy groaned and blinked at me. “What is this?” She tugged and pulled my hand up with hers in front of her face.

“Nothing,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

She did, and for once I was able to follow her.

Some hours later I felt my wrist being tugged — gently, as if by accident. She was trying not to wake me. Night had come again, and it was too dark for me to see what she was doing. My right hand found the switch for the bedside lamp. Lucy’s right wrist was bleeding, especially over the bump.

“Bones too big,” she explained with a sigh.

“You want to run away again?” I asked.

“Only to WC.”

My bathroom hugged the corridor wall of the apartment, with no window and a vent shaft too narrow for her to crawl out through.

“Come into the kitchen first.”

She looked at me as if I were cracked, but went along. The kitchenette took up the space between the bathroom and the outside wall. Like the rest of the apartment, it had many years ago been painted a dull ochre shade that was darkening with time. Two of the three low-wattage bulbs in the ceiling fixture were burned out, and the kitchen window — which faced another dark apartment block — was too far back from Queen to catch any of the street lighting. After nightfall, I navigated the alcove raccoon-style, mostly by touch. I got my paw into the cereal box and eventually brought it out with the key. Once we were detached, I let Lucy help herself to a fresh towel from the icebox, which held all my linens. She was surprised to find it warm. I explained that I’d discontinued ice deliveries, thinking I’d buy an electric refrigerator, but hadn’t yet managed to save enough. Cold storage would have been nice in this heat. Not being much of a beer drinker, though, I found I could get by without.

“Do you have here some dinner?” she asked when she came out of the bathroom. “For trousers I must be fatter.”

I found a safety pin in my bachelor sewing kit and nipped the waist in for her. She wasn’t ticklish; we both took the business in course. All the clothes (and lack of clothes) rigmarole we’d been through had reminded me some time earlier that Lucy was not just a fugitive but a woman. I have to say, though, the new line made her look more feminine.

“Not afraid of explosions if we stay?” I said, keeping my voice flat.

“This time I was not followed.”

I let my hand rest on her shoulder and looked into those distant grey eyes of hers. “Why are they trying to kill you, Lucy?”

“This is why I am coming to you. You must help me send a message to the United States President or, even better, King of England. They, the others, will do anything to stop me.”

Now I looked at her as if she were off her head.

“You don’t believe me,” she sighed. “I will make you, but it will take time. We eat first.”

“First,” I corrected, “I’m putting a dressing on that wrist. Then, if you’re good, I’ll let you cook.”

I’d just got a Band-Aid on when heavy boots clopped down the corridor and the door started rattling with thick-knuckled knocks. I put my finger to my lips. Lucy nodded. We both stood where we were.

“It’s Constable Rutherford, Sergeant.”

I didn’t doubt it: the gravelly bass-baritone rang true, even more so the spirit — parade-ground correctness seasoned with put-upon impatience.

Rutherford knocked again, less resolutely. “Inspector Sanderson phoned Parkdale station and asked someone to come out here. He wants to see you at City Hall.” Shuffling of feet. “Your light’s on, so I presume you’re home. Can you hear me, Sergeant?”

Lucy and I stayed quiet. Presently we heard a sound like paper ripping. A page from a police notebook with Sanderson’s message pencilled in block capitals slid in under my door. I could almost hear Rutherford sigh as he turned to leave.

“Are you going?” Lucy asked once the clop of the constable’s boots had faded off down the hall.

“Tomorrow.” I figured by then I’d have something to report.

“What will they do to you?”

She looked so serious I had to laugh. Perhaps she was thinking of Soviet-style punishments — or maybe she was just afraid I’d be taken off the case and she’d have to start from scratch with some other detective.

“Try to starve me into submission,” I said. “Let’s have dinner.”

She boiled some potatoes. I opened a tin of salmon and a tin of peas to go with them. While they were heating, I pulled the scarred drop-leaf table out from the window and opened it up, placing my dining room chair and kitchen chair to either side. Whatever I did, I never let Lucy get between me and the door to the corridor. Although she wouldn’t start her long story, I tried to clear up a couple of details while we ate. It impressed me that she’d located the Reference Library and looked up my address in a city directory. As for the lock picks —

“Won in a card game with some Polish guys,” she explained around a mouthful of potatoes. “I should have won money for clothes, but it was dishonest game.”

“What about the rain gear — coat and hat?”

“Them I got before, on Friday afternoon. I buy on time, with first payment of fifty cents. The young man in the shop believed a nurse from Western Hospital would be honest to pay what more. And it maybe helped that my dress was very tight.”

You hear a lot of accents in Toronto without thinking much about them, but that throaty Slavic voice of hers was growing on me. She spoke in all simplicity of gambling and burglary tools, and now of deploying a little sex appeal to work a con, while at the other end of her range she could carry off the straitlaced Edna Salisbury rôle. Any chump sweet on her would be in for a hell of a ride. I was happy enough just listening.

“You are thinking I stole from the skinny sister, but I left more money in the hospital.”

“I suppose you charmed Constable Rutherford out of his handcuffs as well,” I said.

“I demonstrate: you are policeman sitting beside my bed.” She pointed to me, then drew her hands together in the air. “So he understands what I want; he closes curtains around my bed. Then to thank him ...” She beckoned me closer. I moved my chair next to hers and her arms went around me. She pressed her cheek to mine. It was a hug made to measure for a constable of Rutherford’s age and prospects, and I enjoyed every second of it, even while my right hand was intercepting her left in the side pocket of my jacket. “Yes,” she said, “but you are a sergeant and clever. You know, what is more, that Lucy is not only poor woman that got hit on the head, but a strangler and a thief.”

“Don’t forget picklock and vamp.”

“And then before he can see them,” she said, resuming her charade, “handcuffs go under the bedclothes. I push him away. I yawn. I am sleepy now.” Her hands shooed me back. “Your constable says if I would sleep, maybe he would go out to eat something. I don’t let him see I understand, because sometimes it is more useful not to understand English and to speak with body. And now my body says how tired it is and tells policeman it’s safe for leaving his post.”

“Still,” I said, squashing the last peas on my plate and licking them off my fork, “English is not your first language; I assume Lucy is not your real name.”

“Svetlana is my Russian name, but I am not Russian. Lucja, which means same as Svetlana, is my Polish name. Lucja Grudzinska. Close enough to Lucy, don’t you think?”

“So you speak Polish, Russian, German —”

“All better than English. I had aunts and uncles in Prussian part of Poland. I think you were in war fighting against Germans, taking some prisoner. I heard you say Hände hoch. Is it your belief that German soldiers surrender easily?”

After the Ewart business, I’d expected her to be talking about the long arm of Russian communism. “Germans? You have to surprise them — no walk in the park.”

“Nice expression. But next time, they may be surprising you: this is my message for the West. Do you have vodka?”

“There’s whisky behind the encyclopedias, glasses in the kitchen.”

“Behind?” She walked over to the shelf.

“Not the Gs, further left.”

“I want to see first what your encyclopedia says about Germany. Versailles Treaty forbids them to have warplanes, correct?” She pulled a volume off the shelf and leafed through till she found the article. “Listen: ‘A new inter-Allied aeronautical committee of guarantee ...’”

“Take a deep breath,” I advised.

“This committee ‘receives lists of all German workshops in which flying material is manufactured, of machines, and of pilots and sees that the provisions of the agreement are not infringed.’ Do you believe this?”

I said that I did. That sure, sometimes there were slip-ups, but that these days the world was jogging along no worse than usual. For my pains, Lucy told me I was a baby.

“The guy that tried to kill you this morning,” I pointed out, “was a Nova Scotia born Scots-Canadian Communist, not a German warmonger.”

“He talked to you?” Lucy’s eyebrows went up.

“No, he choked on a shirt button before he could be questioned.”

“You have not to worry about that with me. I am the girl without buttons.”

“Say, I thought you were getting us a drink.”

Lucy shuffled my library around until she found the rye, then banged around the kitchen until she found something to put it in. She emptied the old mickey into one glass and poured the same amount from the new mickey into another.

“I know all about shirt-button suicide pills,” she informed me. “Until one month ago, I belonged to the Soviet Russian secret police.”

“Sure you did.”

“Yes, just like my countryman Felix Dzerzhinsky, except that he was the tsar of OGPU and I foot soldier. Na zdrowie! Cheers!”

“What happened to him?” The only Felix I knew was a cartoon cat with black fur.

“Felix escaped by fatal heart attack — no tears for him, please; he still believed. Me, I felt fooled and betrayed. I got out by crawling on my stomach through the Pripet Marshes. That’s one of two big reasons why they must kill me. No one is permitted to leave OGPU. In fact, no one is permitted to leave Russia, but for that they would not chase me so far.”

“You want me to ask you the other big reason,” I said.

“The other big reason is that I have evidence that USSR is secretly helping Germany prepare the next war.”

If the conversation had been spooling out in an interrogation room at HQ, I’d have been doing my damnedest to drag the professed secret policewoman back to earth. Or maybe have been ringing for a psychologist. I’d heard from one such that a person’s talent for day-to-day survival was no guarantee she was free of paranoid delusions. But in my own bed-sitter with a drink in my hand and no one looking over my shoulder, I felt I had time to see if Lucy and reason truly had parted company. Besides, this next war delusion was familiar to me; I’d come close to sharing it.

Except that I couldn’t see how the Russians fit in.

“Communists helping capitalists?” I said. “Isn’t that like oil mixing with water? Cats helping dogs?”

“Today’s Politburo cares nothing for international Communism. These two countries both hate Versailles Treaty. It’s enough.”

“The last war put a check on German militarism,” I said. “Now before you say I’m all wet, let me tell you I didn’t think so at first.”

I hadn’t thought so on the morning of November 11, 1918, when our battalion stood holding our breaths in the Grande Place in Somain, the main square of a small French town only twenty-five miles east of Vimy. On the stroke of eleven a.m., the mad rejoicing began. French families broke out the wine they’d hidden from the enemy. Hasty MacDermid sang Gilbert and Sullivan songs from the church bell tower. I was among the minority that couldn’t join in. It was as if, for the few of us, our minds were locked into a stance of attention. Perhaps I was still anticipating a postscript.

For the rest of November we marched east across a scarred and mutilated Belgium to occupy the German city of Cologne. The Armistice was still holding when in a driving rain I marched across the Rhine at the head of my platoon, and the Armistice held over the following weeks as impatience replaced elation among the men. You heard less of The war is over; we made it through! and more of The war is over; when do we go home? But armistice is not peace. I had no trouble remembering that the war was not over. In part because I kept remembering the faces of men in my platoon that had been killed — particularly the last one, a young private caught in the German wire and machine gunned at Canal du Nord. But mostly because, although I saw hungry and grieving families in Germany, their homes, schools, churches, and barns remained standing and intact, their fields uncratered by mines and shells. The devastation of the last four years was all behind us, in France and Belgium. I’d had a feeling the people we now lived among would never see the full cost of war or learn of it in other than the driest bookkeeping terms. Never, that is, until war broke out again.

“It’s a funny thing, Lucy,” I said. “Even in June 1919, when they made peace official in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, I had no confidence that we were done. Nothing changed for me until after the first Remembrance Day that November. People were summing up the year, and how trade was being re-established with Germany. Only then did I think we had a real likelihood of putting armed combat behind us. I think it more all the time. The League of Nations is working. Germany will soon be a member. And the Boche signed something at Locarno last year that makes war with France impossible.”

Lucy had heard me out, her chin resting on one hand. Now she pushed a wavy lock of dark brown hair behind her ear and went on the attack.

“You see Weimar Republic admitted to the League of Nations and you think they want peace. Absurd! Peace in West, for now, maybe. Not in the East — not till they’ve had a bite of Poland. And even if some parts of the German government would want peace, the German military wants war. And illegally they are acquiring means to wage war. Listen.”

Her story took the rest of the night. That’s when I heard, for the first time and all at once, what I’ve already laid out in instalments. I haven’t tried to set it down in her screwball English. Her inconsistencies made me think she’d forgotten how to speak rather than never known; for instance, she was capable when she thought about it of sticking the and a in where necessary, but was at excitable moments as stingy with them as if she were sending a telegram at a dollar a word.

How much of it did I believe? Her claims about this Lipetsk place were far-fetched and damn hard to swallow. There was little I could corroborate, naturally, but by going over what a witness says forwards and backwards, and testing whether it comes out the same every time, an experienced cop gets a sense of how things must have been. As regards facts as opposed to the language in which she retailed them, Lucy wasn’t scattered or confused. She didn’t contradict herself, and I never had the feeling she was improvising. If anything, her story came out too consistent, but then again she’d had hours on the road and on the seas to rehearse it. Pat didn’t mean false.

I took it as evidence of trustworthiness that, while she didn’t brag about her crimes, she didn’t hide them either. She did claim she’d never killed or crippled anyone, and I had to call her on that. Partial strangulation — which she’d used last Friday on a young nurse here in town and, she said, on a milkmaid in Poland — was riskier than Lucy made it sound. Miscalculate the angle: you break a neck. Miscalculate the duration: your victim sinks into a coma or dies. Luckily for all concerned, Daisy Bennett was back on her feet, but how the deuce could we know that that Polish girl had fared as well? I bet Lucy hadn’t hung around to see her victim recover.

At that, a shadow passed across Lucy’s face, and vanished.

“You lead a soft life, Sergeant,” she retorted. “You can afford such thoughts.”

By four a.m., my place was cool enough that you could lift your glass without breaking out in a sweat. Lucy had stopped after three drinks. I’d lost count but was spinning this one out so as to leave a last ounce in the second mickey, just in case she changed her mind. She was sitting up on the bed with a pillow stuck between her and the headboard. I had the armchair pulled close to the window. A breeze had come up, enough to ruffle my curtains — stiff as they were with city dust and soot. Through the open window we heard from the direction of Queen Street a truck with a busted muffler rolling by, likely bringing produce from the Niagara fruit farms in to the Dominion store. When the engine noise faded, the peace of the night settled in again, a peace underlined rather than broken by the sighs and creaks of the settling apartment block.

I still had questions, of course, and after that last mouthful of rye I started in on them. “So did you get to Bruce Bielaski and get him stirred up?”

“Bielaski? No, not Mazur either. I had to leave town — I would say rather quickly — after I pushed Soviet agent off the world’s tallest building.”

“What was in that letter anyway?” I said, ignoring the cheesy teaser. “And did you still have the thirty-five millimetre negatives at this point?”

“I have them right here.” She showed me her perfect smile.

She was not what you’d call a beautiful woman, except for certain features — her mouthful of even teeth among them. She knew the effect she was having on me. Though I couldn’t help thinking she enjoyed flirting too much for someone that believed her country was on the chopping block. Then again, maybe it was just her European style, not in the least a sign of shallow feelings: I did have first-hand evidence that someone was trying to kill her. Most likely she thought I was the shallow one, in need of charming to keep me interested in German warplanes. Not too flattering. Any way I sliced it, I felt I had to suspect that smile.

“You mean right here in this room?” I asked, trying to look everywhere but at her. Failing.

“Right here in this mouth.” She took out an upper dental plate attached to a number of teeth.

I started from my chair, grimacing involuntarily. Her face without the denture was old and witchlike.

“’Ight ’ere.” Hollow-sounding, mutilated words.

The pink Vulcanite panel moulded to rest against the roof of her mouth separated into two layers. From between them she removed what looked like a waterproof envelope. The rye rose in my throat. Seeing my distress, she hastened to reassemble the plate and restore it to her mouth. Only then did she unseal the envelope. From it she took a short piece of photographic film.

“Have a look, Sergeant,” she said gravely, her voice blessedly normal.

I could see nothing on the small negative except that the photographs appeared to be of documents.

“I told you Trigorin knocked out one tooth. I removed enough more to hold a denture in place.
I knew a London dentist from my time there, someone I trusted, and he managed to make with hiding place. I never told British agents about my plate, so I was able to keep the photos even when my clothes were searched at the Ponds and my other things at my hostel room.”

“You knocked out your own teeth?”

“Obviously. If Germany and Russia invade Poland, hundreds of thousands of my countrymen will lose their arms, legs, lives — things not so easy to replace. I disgust you, too bad.”

“Okay.”

“By okay you mean what? ‘Calm down, you crazy woman’?”

“I mean okay,” I said gently, intending not so much to calm her down as to tell her that — whatever reservations I’d had about her before — I now recognized how much those pictures meant to her. “What’s in the letter?”

“Actually — now, I mean — I have no copy, but I memorized it every word. Do you want to write? While you find pen and paper, I’ll put the negatives back. In bathroom, I think, would be more polite.”

I wrote down what she recited when she came back, then went over it with her and cleaned it up, so it sounded more like English. Here’s what I ended up with:

MOST SECRET
Kommandir A. S. Trigorin
Inspectorate of Aircraft, District G.
Voronezh, Russian SSR.
Instructions pertaining to the German installation at Lipetsk

Comrade Commander,

You have already been briefed as to your regular duties regarding the inspection of Red Air Force facilities in District G. The presence in your district of a secret German flying school and test flight facility at Lipetsk necessitates these additional instructions.

Your comportment towards the German personnel at Lipetsk is to be cordial and discreet. Obtain the maximum information about German military strategy and equipment while revealing nothing of our own. In particular, find out as much as possible about German plans for the coming war against Poland. Reichswehr chief General Hans von Seeckt has assured the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet Union that obliteration of our common enemy Poland is the object of German rearmament. He has denied there can be any peaceful settlement of Polish-German issues (Danzig, Upper Silesia, etc.). But the General has so far revealed no timetable for the invasion.

Lucy said the senior officer that signed the letter, a V.I. Kozlov, had apparently served with Trigorin in the squadron of heavy bombers based in Jablonna in 1915, for there was a handwritten postscript: “Needless to say, Arkadi, we must be prepared to take our share of the spoils. Who can forget the girls of Warsaw?”

I was impressed — at the same time as the cop in me was looking forward to getting enlarged photographic prints of the original Russian documents and to having them independently translated.

“When that door to your room in the Beaconsfield Hotel hit you on the head,” I said, “you weren’t really knocked out. You just fainted.”

“On back of my head, underneath my hair, I still have a bump. Do you want to feel?”

“On the back of your head,” I corrected. “If you had been knocked out, chances are you wouldn’t remember anything about it — but you knew the man on the other side of the door was trying to kill you. That’s why you ran away from the hospital. Who was he?”

“He followed me from New York — probably just a party member. Not a trained assassin, that’s for sure.”

“Still, I wonder why he didn’t throw that hand grenade before it went off?”

“He did. I threw it back.”

That shut me up for a good half minute. I tried to visualize Room 29 from the inside, a summer morning just heating up. The transom window open. A knock on the door, to bring Lucy closer to the blast. She goes to the door, not maybe to open it, but to listen. A grenade arcs in over the transom. She’s been through the Russian Revolution and the Civil War; she knows what this is. Maybe she catches it before it hits the floor. Hot potato. Back she heaves it the way it came in, and before she can step back from the door, bam!

“You’re a gutsy lady,” I said at last. “You couldn’t have known how long the fuse was or when he’d pulled the pin.”

“All the chasing around was making me nervous — crazy, you might even say.”

“I might. But for him to try a second throw was just plain stupid.” I guessed it must have been one of those early Mills bombs with the seven second fuse — so long you lose track. They shortened the time to four seconds for the ones made later in the war. “Okay,” I said, “better tell me the rest of the story, from the moment you arrived in New York and Robak got arrested.”

“You said something about a walk in the park.”

“It was just a turn of phrase.”

“It would be nice, though. I could talk while we walk. Do you have a park?”

“Sure, High Park — the city’s best, they say. But a park sounds like a swell place to get shot.”

“Too bad. I wanted to see the sunrise.”

“There’ll be other sunrises, Lucy. Spill it.”