Tongues of Fire (24 page)

They put out the candle and waited. Rehv had drunk very little, but it was enough to make him sleepy. He put his mouth close to Paul's ear. “Don't let me fall asleep.”

But he fell asleep anyway. He dreamed he was swimming on a cold black sea. “Wake up,” said a voice, very calm, very close. Paul. He sat up with a start.

“How long have I been asleep?” he whispered.

“Half an hour.”

He listened. The house was very quiet. The storm was dying down. They picked up the packs and walked slowly and quietly out of the room and down the hall. Rehv thought of his fingerprints in the black case on Derlago's bedside table, but without the noise of the storm he could not risk it. They went into the big room. Rehv closed the hall door very softly behind them.

Cinders glowed in the fireplace, casting a faint orange light on Derlago's uniform. Paul gathered it up—shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, underwear—as they crossed the room.

Outside, a light drizzle drifted down, wafted over the water by the last exhausted panting of the wind. A few stars showed in the north. Rehv carried the canoe from its place by the tree to the shore. He avoided the dock because of the chance it might creak. Gently he lowered the canoe into the water. They set the packs inside. Paul knelt in the bow. Rehv pushed off and knelt in the stern. They glided to the end of the dock. Paul untied the two lines from the cleat and passed them to Rehv. He retied them to the seat and looked back at the cabin. It was quiet and dark.

They paddled away, towing the seaplane behind them. In the middle of the lake Paul stopped paddling for a moment and fumbled for something in the pocket under the bow. Rehv heard a faint splash. Derlago's clothes sank to the bottom. Rehv looked back again and in the darkness saw the shadows of the spruce trees that protected the cabin. He tried to distinguish the outline of the cabin itself, but he couldn't. He didn't look back again.

They crossed the lake. The wind breathed its last few breaths and died. The water was as smooth as black jelly. The sky cleared and the moon appeared, a new moon like jaws wide open to devour the dark part that didn't show.

When they reached the far side they paddled along the shore until they came to a rocky point that rose steeply out of the water. They pulled the canoe onto the shore and then gripped the struts of the seaplane and began dragging it up the steepest part of the rocks, tail first. The seaplane was much heavier than Rehv had expected, and it took a long time. “One, two, pull,” he whispered. “One, two, pull.” When it would go no higher they each stood by a pontoon and rocked the plane forward toward its nose. Rehv held it like that while Paul found two large round boulders and rolled them under the raised parts of the pontoons. Then, with the round boulders as a pivot they began rocking the plane tail to nose, tail to nose, until at last it tipped up on its nose and stayed there. They leaned against the pontoons and pushed it over into the water. It landed on its back with a splash that threw silver drops high into the moonlight.

They put the canoe back in the water, retied the lines, and began towing the plane out into the lake. It was much harder with the plane upside down. When Rehv thought the water was deep enough he dropped the lines and guided the canoe around to one of the doors of the cabin. The water reached a third of the way up the door. Rehv pulled on the handle, but it would not open. Carefully he lifted himself out of the canoe and stood on the underside of the wing with water up to his knees. He pulled on the handle. And pulled again with all his strength. The door opened. The lake began to pour inside. Rehv climbed back into the canoe and pushed off.

They watched the seaplane settling lower in the water. First the cabin disappeared, then the tail, then the struts, leaving only the pontoons. There was plenty of room in the plane, room for four people and some baggage. When the water had taken all of it, the pontoons too sank out of sight. A big silver bubble rose up and broke on the surface of the black jelly.

Paul turned to his father and grinned, his teeth as hard and white as the moon. Rehv wanted to grin too, but he was too busy thinking about the other times his fingerprints had been taken: once for the army, the other time when he had arrived in America. And thinking about the black case on the bedside table.

They paddled south. The night was quiet and still and very long. They were quiet too, except once when Paul said, “Where are we citizens, Dad?” He hadn't called him that in a long time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The big helicopter droned on and on. A thousand feet below lakes and forest were gliding by. “Beautiful, isn't it?” said the young RCMP man looking down. “That's the real Canada.”

Green and blue. Green and blue. Krebs was bored with it right away. He had never flown in such a slow helicopter. For something to do, he opened his briefcase and looked at two photostats he had already looked at a lot. One showed a set of fingerprints, incomplete and of a quality so poor he found it difficult to believe they had been taken by a professional; but there was the provincial police seal at the bottom. The other was a copy of a special immigration permit, almost sixteen years old. It was the kind of permit issued for a short time by the U.S. government, after the fall of Israel. This one had a thumb print in the lower right-hand corner and the name Isaac Rehv written on the top line. The Interpol computer said that the print in box B-1 of the provincial police form and the print on the immigration permit had been made by the same thumb. The Interpol computer had said this without being asked, the way it did nowadays. Information on a man named Reeve had been fed into it; it had thought for a second or two and then told Krebs's computer the whole story. The system had worked perfectly. But for some reason no one had given the Interpol computer a look at the prints until two weeks after the disappearance of Mr. Reeve.

Krebs felt the body of the RCMP man suddenly go tense. “Bring her down, bring her down,” the RCMP man said to the pilot. He had binoculars in his hand, and he was training them on the narrow end of a pear-shaped lake below. “Look, sir,” he said. “A moose.” He gave the binoculars to Krebs. The helicopter went down to about a hundred feet. Krebs saw something brown and stupid standing in the water.

They saw two more moose on the way, and one tree stump that looked like a moose. “That's the real Canada, sir,” the RCMP man told him a few more times. A tree stump that looks like a moose? Krebs wanted to say; and once, even a few years ago, he would have. But not now.

Now he kept all that inside. Now he was a man who knew how to get along with other men. He had to be, after five years at headquarters. Two thousand four hundred and sixty-three meetings. He numbered them in his desk diaries. It proved how busy he was. But no one doubted that: They kept adding people to his staff.

Krebs was the number-two man in the Middle Eastern section. When the computer in Virginia had dredged Isaac Rehv up from the past he decided to assign himself to the case. “You don't have time for that stuff,” everyone had said. And besides, it wasn't important anymore. Most of the Israeli refugees were quiet now. They were working, raising families, in jail, or dead. Sometimes there was trouble—a bombing or a hijacking or someone shot on the streets—but it was nothing like the trouble they had with the Filipinos. There were some people who thought that a mistake had been made. Oil prices had fallen, but they soon started rising again; and the Palestinians had never stopped shooting: Now they shot at each other. But Americans were importing so little oil that it hardly mattered anymore what the price was; and they had much more leverage in the Middle East than before. They had lost nothing. And gained a little.

Krebs knew that Isaac Rehv was no longer important. But at the same time he knew that he was doing the right thing. It was right for his reputation as a man who never quit. Isaac Rehv had beaten them long ago. Krebs wanted to see the look on his face when he finally caught up with him.

He looked out the window and saw green and blue. He focused on the faint reflection of his face in the glass. Then he slipped one hand under his jacket and pinched himself around the middle. He didn't like what he felt. A few more pinches didn't make it any better.

“This is it,” the RCMP man said. They flew in low toward a lake that at first was blue like others but grew grayer as they approached. Krebs saw a Zodiac rubber boat at the southern end of the lake. There were three men in it. They looked up. Ahead he saw a long narrow point that almost divided the lake in two. Near its tip a wooden dock stuck out into the water. There was a cabin almost hidden in some spruce trees. The helicopter hovered for a few moments over the cabin and then settled slowly down on the narrow pebble beach. The pilot shut off the motor and the electrical systems. It was very quiet.

“This is it,” the RCMP man said again. “Lac du Loup. That's Wolf Lake in French.” He opened the cabin door and held it for Krebs. Krebs took his briefcase and stepped onto the ground. Something bit him hard on the top of his head, where there hadn't been any hair for a few years.

“Jesus Christ.” He smacked it. It bit him on the hand.

“Blackfly,” the RCMP man said. “They're hungry this year.” He gave Krebs a piece of tissue to wipe away the blood.

They walked up a dirt path that led to the cabin. A big man in a blue uniform was standing in front of the door, picking his teeth. “This is Corporal Derlago,” the RCMP man said, trying to maintain a pleasant tone of voice, and failing.

The big man took his hand out of his mouth and offered it to Krebs. “You're the one who took those prints,” Krebs said, shaking it.

“What there were of them,” the RCMP man said.

Derlago looked down at his big black shoes. “It's a good thing you got them,” Krebs said. “They were all we needed.” Derlago showed a mouth full of ugly teeth and gave the RCMP man a defiant look. Krebs realized he had gone too far. “Of course it would have been nice to have the man too,” he added. It didn't make the big man look at his shoes again, but at least he stopped smiling.

“You can say that again,” the RCMP man said.

They went inside. “It's just the way it was,” Derlago said. “No one's touched a thing.” They looked around. “Course there's not much to see,” Derlago went on. “It's just like any of the other lumber cabins in these parts. Except for the books maybe, and those pictures of Arizona.”

Krebs glanced at the black-and-white photographs that hung on the walls. “What makes you think it's Arizona?”

“He told me.”

“Who?” the RCMP man asked.

“Reeve. Or whatever his name was.”

The RCMP man snorted. He walked across the room and peered closely at one of the photographs. “I've been to Arizona, and that's not Arizona. It's Texas.”

“So what?”

Krebs knew it wasn't Texas either. Israel, maybe. He looked at the books in the crude wooden bookcases that lined the wall opposite the fireplace. Most of the titles were in Arabic, which he had learned to speak a little, but could not read. “Is there any way these books could be packed and sent down to me?”

“Certainly,” the RCMP man said. “I can radio for supplies right now.” He went out.

Derlago led him through the bedrooms, one by one. In the first bedroom there was nothing but a bunk bed and a wobbly bedside table. “They didn't use this one,” Derlago said.

“Is this where you slept that night?”

Derlago glanced at him warily. “Yes.”

“You didn't hear anything?”

“Nope. There was one hell of a storm. Blew the whole night. Besides, the nearest road is two hundred miles from here.”

That hadn't stopped them. “I wouldn't have done anything different in your place,” Krebs said. Derlago rewarded him with another display of his rotting teeth.

They went into the middle bedroom. “The boy slept here,” Derlago said. The bed was neatly made: An inspecting sergeant could have bounced a quarter on it. In one corner of the room stood a paddle and a pair of worn snowshoes.

“They must have frozen in the winter.”

Derlago shrugged. “People get tough up here,” he said. “Or they don't last.”

Against one wall was an old pine chest of drawers. Krebs opened every one. He found socks, long underwear, plaid shirts, jeans, woollen gloves, leather mitts. As he turned to leave the room he saw another photograph taped to the inside of the door. It looked like the others. “Why would he say it was Arizona if it wasn't Arizona?” Derlago said.

Krebs didn't answer. It was always better than saying, “I don't know.” Carefully he pulled off the tape and put the photograph in his briefcase. “What was the boy like?”

Derlago thought. “A boy,” he said finally. “Quiet, kind of.” He thought some more. “Except,” he added, pausing to choose the right word, “he was colored.” Derlago took him into the last bedroom. “Reeve wasn't colored. He was dark, but not colored, if you know what I mean.”

It was a simple room like the boy's. A single bed, unmade. A chest of drawers full of clothes. Snowshoes. Boots. And on the floor under the bed, two books. One in Arabic, the other in English. Krebs picked up the one in English. The cover was falling off; the glue was cracking along the spine; the pages were loose. Either it had been read many times, or it had been thrown around a lot.
Geology and Geography of the Western Sudan,
by F. McG. Stilton, professor of geology, Middlebury College. He put it in his briefcase.

They went outside. The Zodiac was tied to the dock, and a man in a full wet suit was coming up the path. “We got it,” he called to Derlago. “Some of it, anyway.”

“Le's see,” Derlago said. They walked down to the dock. Krebs glanced over at the helicopter on the beach and saw the RCMP man sitting beside the pilot, talking on the radio. They got into the Zodiac. The man in the wet suit pulled the starter cord of the little outboard. Two trails of mucus had hardened on his upper lip. Derlago made a face. “Do something about your nose,” he said over the noise of the motor.