IT WAS ONCE SAID ON CBC RADIO BY A PROFESSOR FROM OTTAWA that she had met the poor, but she had never really known them. But that was not true about her—John believed it was what was said about her by the middle class, who pretended to know everything—in fact she had met the poor everywhere and was more knowledgeable about them than were a host of devoted middle-class activists that he himself had met over the years.
But once she had met activists and doers, she was encouraged to think of the poor as “something else.” That is, not as poor but as underprivileged. Oh, there was a vast difference in those words. One said what was: the poor were poor. One said they were not like you and me.
Before, when she was spoiled, she had been far too clever to have causes. “I shouldn’t have come on this trip,” she told him. “But I had to prove something to myself—finally.”
“Well, that is for another day,” John said. “My main concern is to keep you safe, and to get you the hell home.”
“No one wants me home,” she said.
“That is not true at all—Garnet and Perley both do—very much.”
“Back to a snowstorm,” she said, “blizzard-like conditions—whiteouts on the bay—eating a plate of smelts—that would be fine!”
John had been her unofficial protector since her father had died when she was twelve, and he slept in a trailer on their back lot for weeks during the summer when she was home. Always taking his vacation to coincide with her arrival. In that way he watched as she grew up. He loved her—but he knew she had opportunity with a hundred other far more important men. (One was almost a goddamn prince.) She knew movie stars and premiers, prime ministers and famous hockey players, could make them fall for her with a glance of those beautiful brown eyes, and he had succumbed too—and he was no different. Well, after she was herself twenty-five.
“Yes, I am old enough to be her father—so what?” he would say to himself as he drove the highways at night. But to him it would have been a betrayal of the family to act upon it.
The pill made him tired. He went back to his room. He felt the night coming on, and his room little by little darkened so the cheap frescoes and cheaper furniture could not be seen anymore.
The next morning he woke, sweating and dizzy, and rose without remembering exactly where he was. His face was thin and pale. He was not well now. He knew it—but he kept it, like so much else, to himself. Or in most ways, from himself. That is, he had had a heart attack the year before and was on various medications. He was trying to get off booze but as yet hadn’t. He had not informed the Cyr family about any of this.
He remembered the sunlight and how it hurt his eyes. He fumbled for his sunglasses, and searched for the pill to help him breathe. He had to do something. He had to go out again, and follow the street past the jail. It was now after two in the afternoon and it got dark early. He supposed Mary wanted to see him too. And he wondered about bail for her—though he was sure her lawyer had already tried.
John had already solved some of it.
Victor must have known something or seen something about the mine—he must have come to her with a tape of someone saying something, perhaps—and was worried. Why? Because he hid Florin. Why was it older people or an older person he worried about? Because he did not go to the police, so it had to be someone with some power. And why did he want to tell Mary Cyr?
Because his father worked at the mine? Because she was an American (he would think) who could help him?
And why did he not tell her sooner? Simple. Because he had something to give her and was continually being watched, and he did not want to put her in danger. His little life was heroic.
At first John had speculated that the reason the boy was killed was that he sold lotto tickets and there was a fight over this—that is what the old porter told him Victor did. But now he felt the boy had been beaten and left near the villa, not to have the death blamed on Ms. Cyr but to have it blamed on the boys he was in competition with. (That is, a fight among boys, which John had first suspected himself.)
But Victor had managed to make it back to her place, and what followed was the result.
This is what John already knew.
He went to the restaurant and had cereal and café con leche. He went to the reception desk and asked for a map.
Mary said that Victor lived somewhere near the Calle de Republic. So that is where he would go. But she got the name wrong—slightly; it was called the Calle Republica.
Mary had told him that Victor’s mother died and his father was killed in the mine explosion. She said she asked him three times about the tape he wanted to give her, and he said one night, “No más me molestes,” and looked about as if frightened, so she nodded and did not ask him again.
“Ah,” John said.
“Ah what?” Mary said. “Ah yes or ah no—I think it is an ah yes.”
John shrugged and for the moment said nothing else. That is, John did not think he was waiting for Mary Cyr specifically—but she was one of a dozen tourists he might have approached. John was also sure he would have given the tape to her if he had not been worried about his four-year-old brother, Florin.
So in a way it was accidental that this had happened.
But John knew already that this would only be if you discounted the input of Mary Cyr herself—the idea that she met the boy accidentally, and did not have some other plan. In his entire life John had never seen her without another plan—a secondary road on which she travelled parallel to the road bystanders believed she was on. So she might very well have sought Victor out by the dropping of an earring onto the cobblestones. She might have badgered him to give her information about the mine disaster, told him who she was (or he found out from others that she was the coal lady), and he just might have worried that he could not trust her. When he realized he could, it was too late.
The more John thought of this, the more he came to this conclusion.
So he tried to decide if any other scenario worked. No, not really.