Julian (12 page)

“How does the code work?” I asked.

Ninon flipped to the last page of the notebook, fished a pencil out of her bag and printed the alphabet down the page, grouping the letters in columns.

“It’s a really old code system,” she explained, “called the Polybius square. You print the alphabet in a grid like this, five across and five down. I and J are treated as one letter. The code works when you add numbers—in this case, 1 to 5—along the top and down the side.”

“Got it,” I said. I didn’t get it.

Ninon smiled her half-smile. “I haven’t finished. The numbers can be written in any order you want, as long as the sender
and
receiver know what that order is. Watch.”

She jotted the numbers down, but they weren’t in sequence.

“Aha, now I
do
get it!”

“So what’s the code for the letter A?”

“Um … fifty-two. Or twenty-five?”

“You use the top number first. What’s V?”

“Fifty-four.”

“And how do I write THE?”

“Thirteen, thirty-one, forty-two.”

“Congratulations, you’re officially a spy.”

Ninon turned to another page, saying, “I keep a record of words I like.”

I followed the movement of her finger as she read, “Andalusia. Conundrum. Toggery. Misericordia. Carpetbagger.”

“Even if you decode the numbers, I still don’t know what any of them mean.”

“It’s not about the meaning; it’s about the sound.”

“The code seems like a lot of trouble to me.”

She put her things in the bag. “When you’ve done a few sentences, the code begins to be automatic and it goes pretty quickly after that,” she explained.

“Do my last name.”

“You never told me what it is.”

“Paladin.”

Ninon smiled. “It means ‘knight.’ ”

“Really?”

“King Charlemagne had twelve knights.”

“Oh.” As if I knew who he was.

I had picked my surname from an old black-and-white TV series I used to watch with Linda McCallum.
Have Gun, Will Travel
was a Western. The hero was a man dressed in black who packed a long-barrelled pistol in a leather holster with a horse’s head shaped like a chess knight embossed on it. The man, whose business card said, “Wire Paladin, San Francisco,” was a sort of detective and fixer who rode around helping his clients. Thanks to Ninon, I now understood the connection between the horse’s head and the name.

“There are lots of ways to do the Polybius,” she went on. “It’s simple code. A cypher expert could crack it in no time. But the average person has never heard of it. I like codes.”

And secrecy, I thought.

We turned and looked out over the water. Small boats, their sails drooping, struggled unsuccessfully to find enough breeze to move them along. The clamouring gulls escorted the ferry to the slip at Centre Island, the crew secured thick ropes around the bollards on the pier, the ramp was lowered and we followed the crowd onshore. It seemed like half the city had been struck by the idea of spending Sunday on the islands.

Ninon looked around. “I’ve never been here before,” she told me.

“Me either.” I reached into my pocket. “But I’ve got a map. What would you like to do first?”

“Walk,” she replied. “Away from this crowd and this noise.”

And so began the best day of my life.

——

We ambled along paths leading toward the eastern tip of the islands, then turned down a different trail heading back west, the air around us heavy with humidity and the odours of water and vegetation. Occasionally a whiff of candy floss or caramel corn or barbecue smoke drifted by. We weren’t alone, but in a way we felt like we were, and our conversation was quiet and private.

The hot sun seemed to melt our shyness and coax uneasiness away, and gradually each of us opened the door into our lives and let the other in—a new experience for both of us. I told Ninon a lot of things about my past that I had never shared with anyone, but I held back everything about Mr. Bai and my new identity. I was Julian Paladin now.

For her part, Ninon unfolded much of her past, too. She had been born in a village called L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in Provence, in the south of France.

“Where the sky is bluer than anywhere in the world,” I said.

She nodded, then continued her story.

The village was an ancient community of stone buildings, cobbled streets, and a central square shaded by plane trees and anchored by a church. A village where everybody knew everybody else. What Ninon loved most about her birthplace, she said, was the river, the Sorgue, which was dammed at the eastern edge of the town and split into shallow streams that ran clear and pure around and through the village, turning the gigantic water wheels that used to power small factories. Ninon’s father, Gilbert, was cook and bartender at the little Café France on the square. His food was
famous in the area. The three Bissets lived in the apartment above Ninon’s mother, Nathalie’s, seamstress shop on the quay. Ninon did needlework for her mother to help out.

Ninon related all this as if it had been a dream. “And then everything went to hell,” she said, almost whispering.

We had stopped for lunch, spreading the blanket in the shade of a beach umbrella. The sand was dotted with bathers. Kids dug in the sand and splashed at the edge of the water. Shrieks and laughter floated from the children’s park behind us. We sat shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the undulating water stretching all the way to the horizon under the hammering sun.

Ninon continued her story. The event that began her nightmare was the move from Provence to Quebec City, where Gilbert’s brother-in-law had invited him to come and take the chef’s position in his upscale restaurant in the old town. Ninon was thirteen. She didn’t like the city, hated the weather, made few friends, disliked the high school. She couldn’t seem to adapt. They spoke a kind of French there, she said, but it wasn’t like France at all. Nothing was.

One afternoon, when she was fifteen, her mother and father took her to her aunt and uncle’s house, kissed her goodbye, and drove off to Montreal for the night to celebrate their wedding anniversary. It was the last time Ninon saw them alive.

“There was a shooting,” she told me, hard-voiced and dry-eyed. “Some biker war. Retaliation for something.
Papa
and
Maman
were strolling down the street on the way back to their hotel after the celebration dinner. They got caught in the crossfire.”

Ninon had no living relatives other than the aunt and uncle in Quebec City. They adopted her. Not long after, she took off and never went back.

I wanted to ask her why, but from personal experience I knew the question probably wouldn’t be welcome. It could have been any of a dozen reasons. I kept silent. Then, after a few minutes I asked, “Were they nice?”

“My aunt was okay.”

“But not your uncle.”

She gave me a look that said more than her words. “He was too nice.”

“Oh.”

“And my aunt knew. And did nothing.”

I shook my head. Sometimes there’s nothing you can say.

“Anyway,” she murmured, “now there’s just me.”

“Not anymore,” I said.

We packed up our picnic and made our way slowly to the western beach. Ninon wanted to watch the sunset. Clouds were gathering, and the lowering sun set them on fire. We spread the blanket at the edge of the water. The still air remained hot and clammy. Around us adults collected kids, umbrellas, buckets and shovels and all their picnic jumble, then trickled away toward the ferry dock. By dusk we had the beach to ourselves.

We didn’t talk much, as if the unfamiliar sharing of our past experience had used up all our words. Ninon yawned.

“Aren’t you tired?” she said, curling up on the blanket and pillowing her head on her hands.

“Not really.”

She didn’t notice my reply. Her deep breathing and the sigh of the water brushing the sand were all I heard. I sat beside her, my hand on her shoulder. I didn’t think she’d mind.

For a couple of seconds earlier in the afternoon, while Ninon was telling me about her life, I had envied her. She had relatives. She knew where they lived. She had memories of the place where she had been born and spent her childhood. Good memories.

But her aunt and uncle, especially her uncle, had betrayed her. I had no relatives that I knew, but I held no bitterness about my family either. How could I, when I knew nothing about them? Did they all die? Did they stick me in a basket and deposit me on some doorstep? Was I some sixteen-year-old’s nightmare, given away? Maybe it was better not to know. Were fond memories of home just a mockery when you couldn’t go back? I had suggested to Ninon, maybe you’ll go back to Provence someday.

“I hope God heard that,” was all she said.

After all the light had faded from the sky I lay down next to Ninon, her back against my chest, her head under my chin, and covered us as well as I could with the blanket. Her slender body was warm and moved rhythmically as she breathed. Her hair smelled of sunlight. I held her that way for a long time. In the sky above the water heat lightning flickered behind the massed clouds like fireflies in the dark.

I
WAS LATE FOR WORK
Monday morning, skulking through the door under Mrs. Altan’s steely eyes and Gulun’s black scowl. He grumbled a promise to dock my pay. I didn’t care; I was riding high after my day with Ninon even though there had been a small glitch when we parted at the ferry dock earlier that morning. The sky had cleared overnight and the morning breeze was cool and clean. I asked if we could meet in the afternoon and she gave me one of her slippery replies.

“I don’t want to smother you,” I reassured her. “I had a good time yesterday.”

“Me too,” she replied, her eyes shifting to the side.

“So. Meet you at the park? Maybe?”

“Okay. But not today.”

“Can I give you my address?” I asked her.

“Um, not right now. But I’ll see you soon.”

I figured Ninon was reluctant to be pinned down because she didn’t want me to know she was living—at least most of the time—at the mission. I forced myself to be patient, not to push her. If I put pressure on, she might disappear for good.

But it was frustrating. There was no method to contact her. I had a phone now but was only allowed to use it for Chang business. Besides, if I called the mission she’d know I was aware that she stayed there.

I was stacking canned vegetables on the shelves near the street door when Gulun’s stony words interrupted my thoughts. “You gonna daydream or you gonna work?” he shouted from the cash register.

“I am working. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you not be late!” he yelled, louder.

I stood up and walked to the counter, where he was jamming lottery tickets into the pockets of a display.

“How about not screaming across the store at me, okay? I said I was sorry for being late. I’ll stay a couple of extra hours today.”

“Words don’t mean nothing,” he snapped.

I turned back to work, holding in my anger, slashing open a carton with my box cutter. I whacked the cans onto the shelf, label to the front. Neat rows. When I had emptied the last carton I hauled it and the other empties to the back room.

Wearing a dark cardigan, Mrs. Altan was sitting at a small table she sometimes used as a desk, jotting numbers into a ledger with a stub of pencil. When I tossed the cartons to the floor she looked up from her accounts.

“Don’t be angry at him,” she said.

Her face, on most days creased by anxiety, seemed softened, even sad. I didn’t reply to her.

“You remind him of our son,” she said.

Does he yell at him, too? I wondered.

“I didn’t know you had a son.”

The Altan family was a closed book to me. They could have had a dozen relatives stashed in the upstairs apartment for all I was aware, although even one extra person would have stretched the place to its limits. The apartment was the same size as the store.

“When we leave Turkey,” Mrs. Altan replied, “our son stay behind with my sister’s family until we can get a start here. Gulun don’t want to leave him but I say it will be alright. We come first, save our money. But when the time come and we send for him it’s too late. The rules all different. His papers expired and now he might have to go in army. He’s big young man, strong, your size, also your age. Eighteen.”

I nodded. I wasn’t eighteen but Julian’s birth certificate said I was.

“And he is our only child,” she added. She sighed, straightened her back. “You are good boy, Julian. We know.”

I went back to work, sweeping out the store and, for good measure, the sidewalk in front. When I stepped back inside Gulun was ringing up a sale. The customer brushed past me as Gulun recited his customary “Thanks. Come again.”

I stood in front of the counter. When Gulun turned my way I said, “I apologize for being late. And I’m sorry about your son.”