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.
26
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.