The Divide (23 page)

She was embarrassed to realize she had said this out loud.

“But you want more than that,” John said. “Something finer and better.”

She nodded.

He said, “You would have slept with him—if he’d asked.”

“Yes. I guess I would have. I almost did. Isn’t that strange? There was one time… he took me to dinner… but he said he’s not interested in women. In men, once, but even that was a long time ago.” She rolled over and felt John’s hand slide up her shoulder. “He’s not a good man, is he? But still… at least he’s been able to help you.”

“No,” John said. “I’m sorry, Susan. No, he hasn’t.”

“Not cure you. But he said he gave you a prescription—”

“He gave me dopamine. It’s what they give Alzheimer’s patients. In my case, it’s not much more than a placebo.” Susan turned to face him. He smiled in the dark. “Max can’t do anything to help me. He never could. That’s not why he came looking for me.”

“Why, then?”

“Guilt,” John said. “Remorse. And to finish the experiment.”

Later, he said he was thirsty. Susan brought him a glass of water from the bathroom tap. He sipped it in the dark.

She said, “Do you know everything about me?”

“Yes,” he said solemnly. “And you know everything about me.”

But not really. Not everything.

Curled against him, she whispered: “Will you die?”

She strained to hear his answer against the hissing of the wind.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’ve thought about it. What’s happening to me is very powerful, a powerful process. I feel it. It’s like an engine running inside me. Very strong. It’s not something you can simply resist. You have to bend—this way or that. But that’s the hard part. Even if I can bargain with it, I’m not sure… I don’t know if it’s a deal I want to make.”

He held her against him; but Susan was wordless in the dark, and this time the silence lingered.

Amelie knew where her brother had taken her: it was the place they called “the warehouse.”

At least, she and Roch had called it that. It wasn’t really a warehouse. It was a big abandoned building beside the railway tracks, where the CPR line ran along the lakeshore west of the city. Many years ago, Roch once told her, the building had contained a fur-storage business. Now it was a cold, dark warren of cavernous rooms and windowless chambers. And she was confined in it.

She remembered how she had come here—but dimly, dimly.

She had gone into the city to meet her mother, but it turned out that there was no bus from Montreal scheduled at that hour. So she had milled around through the crowded, oppressively hot terminal for almost an hour… and then Roch put his hand on her shoulder, and she
knew
it was Roch, knew it instinctively and immediately. He took her arm. She wanted to break free but couldn’t. He led her out to his van and then he locked her in the back.

They drove to a vacant lot by the CPR line and Roch parked and climbed in back with her. He had something in his hand: a syringe—

Memory clouded. But she remembered him carrying her through the snow at dusk, his strong arms enfolding her. She had recognized the way to the warehouse, where they used to go when there was nowhere else to sleep. But only in summer. It was winter now, and cold, and the snow was deep and getting deeper. Someone will see us, she thought. The railroad police will see us for sure. But the railroad police, who sometimes parked along these tracks, weren’t here now. The snow was too deep and recent. Everybody had gone home. Everybody had found a warm place to stay.

The warehouse…

The property had been in litigation for years. It was worthless. Someday the building would be torn down. For now, it was abandoned and dangerous. Even when they came here during their time on the street, Amelie would never venture very far inside. There were bats living in the old cold-storage chambers; there were drippy, ancient pipes and wild raccoons and bad smells. Since then, apparently, Roch had explored the building. He had a big Eveready flashlight in one hand, and he pulled Amelie stumbling after him with the other. There were rooms and corridors so deep inside this building that no light penetrated from the outside; cracked linoleum or bare concrete floors drifted with sawdust and animal droppings. Roch put her over his shoulder, took the handle of the flashlight in his teeth, and climbed a narrow wooden ladder to a higher, darker level. In a small room here at the heart of the building, he dumped her against the chipped plaster wall and started a small Sterno fire. The smoke wafted up to the ceiling and dissipated through a hole there, up and up in lazy curls. The room did not warm appreciably.

Amelie was a spectator to all this. She felt abstracted from her body. What had Roch put into her? A drug, she thought. Something lazy, distancing, and slightly nauseating. She lifted her hand and looked at it: it seemed to be floating in midair.

She watched Roch pace the room, checking the entrance and fiddling with the Sterno. There was a question she wanted to ask. It was on the tip of her tongue. She worked hard to recall it.

“Roch… what is it you want? What do you want from me?”

He turned his face toward her, but only briefly. His eyes were blank with indifference. He stood up briskly.

“This isn’t about you,” he said. “You don’t matter anymore.”

The snow had paralyzed the city. Overnight, a winter blizzard had accumulated drifts and depths that the snowplows could not shunt aside, at least not quickly or efficiently. The main arteries were reduced to a single lane; the subways were running but the buses were not. Susan awoke to an absolute silence: the traffic outside the hotel had been utterly stilled.

John was in the bathroom—she could hear the shower running.

She went to the window. Outside, the streets were transformed The city was white, unsullied, and motionless. The snow had stopped falling but the sky was a uniform grey.

Good, she thought. We can’t go anywhere today. It wasn’t a blizzard; it was a reprieve.

She turned when she heard the water stop. John appeared a: the bathroom door in his Levis: skinny, pale, a little shaky…but his eyes were bright and lucid.

“Get dressed,” he said. “We don’t have time to waste.”

I should have expected this, Susan thought. There
was
no reprieve. It wasn’t possible.

He couldn’t afford one. He didn’t have the time.

“It’s an old building down by the lakeshore,” John said over breakfast. “Amelie showed me one time when we were out walking.”

Susan hesitated over her eggs. “Showed
you?”

He was momentarily puzzled. “Showed Benjamin, I mean.”

“An abandoned building,” Susan repeated. “You think Amelie’s there—Roch took her there?”

“I’m almost certain of it.”

“Is it safe to go there?”

“No. It’s not safe at all.”

“We could call the police,” Susan said. “We don’t even have to tell them about Roch. Say we spotted some vagrants on the premises.”

John shook his head. “Maybe that would flush him out. But I think, if he were cornered, he might just kill her. It’s pointless, but it’s the kind of gesture Roch might make.”

“How can you know that? You never met him.”

“I met him once,” John corrected her.

“And you know that about him?”

“I know that about him.”

“You’re just going to walk in and take her away from him?”

“If I can.”

“Maybe he
wants
you to come. Maybe he’s jealous, he’s out there waiting for you… that’s why he told Tony Morriseau where he was going.”

“Maybe,” John admitted.

“How can you just walk into that?”

“Because I have to. It’s a debt. I want to pay it off. Not just a debt to Amelie.” He regarded Susan solemnly across the table. “I’ll tell you another secret. There are lives I could have saved. Thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. But I didn’t. So I have to save
this
life, Amelie’s life. It’s not just one more experiment, Susan. It’s the only experiment that matters.”

She didn’t know what he meant, but it was impossible to ask— there was a ferocity under the words that she was afraid to provoke.

He stood up suddenly, put down money for the bill. “The roads should be clear by now,” he said.

They stopped at a Home Hardware outlet off Yonge Street, miraculously open for business although there was only one clerk inside. John bought a heavy-duty flashlight and fresh batteries and assembled them as Susan drove south and west through the snowbound streets.

She followed his directions toward the lakeshore west of the city, over the railroad tracks and into a labyrinth of warehouses and crumbling brick factories where the snow lay in pristine mountains and the little Honda labored like a crippled pack-mule She parked when he told her to park. The silence was sudden and absolute. “We walk from here,” he said.

Susan was dressed in high boots, a ski jacket, jeans. She tore the jacket sleeve while climbing through a hole in the fence that defined the railroad right-of-way. Now we’re trespassing, she thought. Now the police will come and arrest us. But there were no police; there was only the snow clinging to the tree branches and the soft sound it made when it fell; the glitter of the track where an early morning train had polished the rails.

She followed John along the arc of the railway for a hundred yards or more, then scrambled after him up an embankment.

“There,” he said. “That’s the building.”

Susan stood panting and looked up.

The building was huge. It was an old black brick building on an abandoned railway siding, sooty and Victorian. There were no windows, but the open loading bay gaped like a toothless mouth. The snow had not softened or warmed this building, Susan thought, it was big and indifferent and it frightened her.

John’s gaze was fixed on it. “I want you to stay here.” he said. “If I bring Amelie oat, help me get her to the car. Give me twenty minutes inside. If I’m not out by then, find a phone and call the police. Understand?”

“Yes.” She looked at him critically. “John? Are you sure—I mean, are you all right?”

He shrugged.

“For now,” he said.

She watched him walk away from her, toward the building; and she understood with a sudden, aching finality that she had been afraid of this place all along, even before she knew it existed—this dark chamber where he was determined to go—and that she could not stop him
or
bring him back.

Roch was pretty comfortable in the warehouse.

Sure, it was cold. Of course. But the Sterno fire helped. More important, he was alone here… except for Amelie, and he was able to keep Amelie sufficiently blissed out that she was not a real presence.

He was alone in this vast, empty building and it occurred to him that this was his natural state; that he had discovered his ideal habitat. His problems had always been with other people—their prudishness and their nasty glances. He was a stranger out there in the world. What he needed was what he had found: his own kingdom,
this
place. He moved down these dark and windowless corridors with the flashlight in his hand, king of the lightbeams, his pockets stuffed with a treasury of D batteries, and when he laughed his breath smoked out in front of him.

Of course, he had a purpose here. None of this was random motion. He was waiting for the man Amelie used to live with. No, more than that. He was waiting for justice.

He had left a trail and he believed the man would follow it. If not, maybe Roch would wheedle an address or a phone number from Amelie—she was cooperative, in her present condition—and the challenge could be issued more formally. But it would be better simply to lure the man here. “Benjamin,” Amelie had said his name was. (She whispered it to the air from time to time.) But the name didn’t matter. What mattered was the humiliation Roch had suffered in Amelie’s apartment, months ago, and its sequel, his humiliation at Cherry Beach, both events now blurring into a long history of similar humiliations for which they had become emblematic. Roch understood that his life was an arrow, with moment following moment like the points of a trajectory toward some target not wholly of his own choosing. But he was happy in that service and he was happy to have found a home here.

He explored the snowbound building in great detail. He avoided the ground level, where there had been extensive vandalism and where the walls were emblazoned with vulgar graffiti. He preferred the lightless upper regions, closed to the world, a wooden ladder and the Eveready flashlight his admittance into a pure and angular wilderness. He also liked the cold-storage chambers at the rear, where the furs used to hang behind the loading bays, though these were less hospitable: bleak caverns where snowmelt dripped from corroded freon pipes and animal dung lay thick on the floor.

Time was nearly meaningless here… or would have been, save for the periodic demands of his body and the ticking clock of Amelie. Now he ambled past a shuttered window where rags of winter light penetrated from the west. Afternoon, therefore. He circled back to the room where Amelie, bound at the ankles, had crawled closer to the Sterno fire, some instinct for warmth operating through the narcotic haze. She seemed to be asleep; her breathing was shallow and periodic. Roch considered giving her another injection, then decided not to. It would be too easy to kill her. This was a ticklish business. Still… even if he
did
kill her… hadn’t she served her purpose already? Assuming “Benjamin” showed up. She was disposable, really, except as a potential hostage against some emergency Roch could not entirely frame or predict. Dead, she would only have to be disposed of.

Still—

But he hesitated in his deliberation, startled to a new level of alertness by the distant but distinct sound of footsteps in the cavernous space of the warehouse.