Rex Under Glass, part 3
The front door was as red as a brothel
lampshade. A power tie for a suit of stone and brick. Rex Packard
walked up the curving flagstone path to the house on the large corner
lot and noticed something scurry on the lawn towards the well-trimmed
shrubbery which girdled the house like a sound-proof barrier. How a
salamander came to be on the lawn of a mansion on a quiet street in
Upper Westmount was beyond him. Nature wasn't one of his things.
Above the door, a stained glass entablature of green leaves and red
flower petals supported the numbers 31, the address Vernon Smythe had
given him. He hesitated before the choice of the bronze lion's head
doorknocker on the mullion which beckoned to him like a windup key
for a music box, and the simple self-effacing plastic doorbell button
on the fluted door jamb to his left. Push or pull. He rapped three
times. Loudly. The door was as solid as the knocker and the sound
waves reverberated inwards as if into a vast cathedral. Three knocks
were sufficient he thought. One knock could be interpreted as a
mistake, two knocks, reluctance, four knocks or more, impatience.
Three was just right. Firm. In control. Three knocks. He listened,
his left ear—his good ear—turned to the lion's head as if waiting
for a whisper of acknowledgement. A brief buzzing sound followed by a
click was his reward. He looked up and made a salute for a possible
hidden camera and then made his way in. A broad, long entrance
hallway lay before him, empty but for a framed painting with its
feet in the dust. A wide spiral staircase rose from the far end of
the hallway, while two large Gothic arched double doors stood guard
on either side of him a few feet away. He looked down to see he was
standing on a finely woven WELCOME mat which had been turned over,
the lettering visible through the back of the weave as EMOCLEW to his
eyes. Footsteps echoed down the staircase, slow, easy steps, leather
soles, heels as hard as hockey pucks. First the shoes, black patent
leather, then the pant legs began to appear. Rex stood firm with his
feet over the letters M and O while he watched Vernon Smythe make his
way down the stairs and towards him from the far end of the hallway.
The old oak floorboards provided the dry conversation as Vernon
approached, his right hand adjusting his watch strap as if signalling
Rex was late. He stopped beside the painting looking down at it while
pursing his lips.
“Do you like Georgio de Chirico?”
Rex thought it sounded like a drink.
Would you like a glass of Georgio de Chirico? Ice cubes? One or two?
He approached Vernon and looked down at the painting which stood
about four feet tall by two feet wide. A white tower, the base
surrounded by columns on two tiers, an orange roof with flags aloft,
an orange foreground with two figures and their shadows. Simple.
Childlike. Rex didn't respond knowing Vernon's tendency to ignore
answers.
“It's unfortunate it's a copy. Well
done but . . . a fake nonetheless.” He turned to Rex and put an
arm around his shoulders giving him a brief squeeze as if he were a
Father welcoming a son home. “Come along Rex, all shall be
revealed.”
He followed Vernon down the hallway to
the staircase.
“Do you hear anything Rex?”
Cocking his good ear to the spiral
above him Rex shook his head. “Nope, just you.”
“They say the house is haunted.
Voices in the stairwell. Silver shadows at night. They can't sell it
for love or money.” Vernon imitated Rex with his ear to the spiral.
“Such a load of rubbish. Come along, follow me.”
Up the stairs they climbed passing an
empty round-arched niche. “They say the niche held a fine porcelain
funerary urn for many years. Imagine passing that every time you went
to bed. 'Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass,' he
said, the stresses of his footsteps in time with his voice, a voice
having shifted to one of oracular intonement. Rex had known Vernon
long enough to sense he was quoting lines from literature, lines
learnt by heart as an avid student, the qualified memory of an
Oxonian. What led him from Oxford to intelligence work in Canada he'd
never discovered.
Reaching an expansive landing with many
closed doors, they continued up a further flight, a further niche.
Rex envisioned a voluptuous marble female nude in its place rather
than another funerary urn in need of dusting.
“Do you wander the house at night?”
Rex asked, looking at Vernon's right hand slide up the banister
before him, a few liver spots and wrinkles, rites of passage written
on the skin, its signet ring on his little finger, connections beyond
concealment.
“Hmm, yes, I've been known to wander
at night. 'Close the door, the shutter close, Or thro' the windows we
shall see, The nakedness and vacancy, Of the dark deserted house.'
Vernon scattered quotations like seeds upon a wasteland, his voice
echoing in the stairwell before sinking into the twisting aperture
beside them. “There is a sense of liberation in an empty house Rex,
especially if the walls are all eggshell in colour, clears the mind
of unborn thoughts. You can breathe deeply. Freedom from reference,
from the signified and signifier.” They were approaching the final
stairs, a bounty of light spreading out towards them. “And yet,
it's also egotistical, reducing and merging all to one, one to all.”
“I didn't know you were a
philosopher?” Rex said.
“Secundo piano nobile,” he said,
stamping his shoes on the oak floorboards. The third floor was an
open space with six foot windows hooded in rounded alcoves, quiet
sentinels of light. An antique desk, compact, leggy, with leather
inlay, was positioned near one of the windows; a lamp, a tea cup and
saucer, books, and an open laptop computer were positioned upon it
like a still life. In a corner, an upholstered high back chair of
indeterminate age and an upright lamp completed the decor. “Avail
yourself of that chair and join me over here,” Vernon directed. “At
my age Rex, if one hasn't become philosophical, then one's likely
philosophically . . . dead.”
Rex looked at the lamp and chair and
thought of Bert and Ernie, tall and thin, short and stout. He managed
to manhandle the chair over, and as he passed one of the windows, he
watched a pigeon on the window ledge walk back and forth as if
impatiently waiting for an appointment. Vernon settled himself in his
elegant leather chair before the desk with a sigh. “Sometimes Rex,
I think we're all in the dark, all in the dark.”
“So, what's it all about Vernon?”
“How long have we known each other
Rex?”
Rex looked at Vernon noticing the
loosening of the skin around the jowl and neck. “I met you when I
was nineteen.”
“Twenty years, yes. Fleet of foot the
hours have passed. Well, Rex, we have a rogue on our hands.”
“Did someone jump ship with a whistle
around his neck?”
“Do you know what a whistle blower is
Rex? . . Someone tooting their own horn. They see the sharp wedge of
light from a crack in the door and are seduced. They have Jason
Bourne in their minds, travelling the world looking over their
shoulder, visions of romantic romps, renown, money, their name in the
media, picture in all the papers, in the history books. Then there's
the other whistle blower, the one with a grievance, their career
crumbling, nothing to lose.” Vernon crossed his legs and looked at
Rex like a sheep dog staring down a lone wolf. “The relationship
between a whistle blower and Joe Public is symbiotic. Good old JP knows deep
down their freedoms and benefits are resting on certain foundational
necessities. Whistle blowers pull the curtain away and good old JP
starts pointing their finger of self-guilt at the Father in charge. No,
not a whistle blower telling the public what they already know deep down. It's someone with a . . . with an audacious reticence.”
Rex raised his eyebrows. “Audacious
reticence?”
“Have you ever heard of someone
called Evan Dashmore?” Vernon asked, pressing a key on the laptop
computer.
Rex thought in earnest, but had never
come across such a name. He shook his head.
“That's what I always liked about you
Rex. Information about staff and their personal lives never
interested you. Too much liability involved. Anyway, Dashmore was a
field man, used the name of Harris occasionally. No recollection?”
“No, our paths never crossed. I
remember hearing about a certain Harris though. Reputation of being a
bit of a Casanova.”
Vernon, with his reading glasses on the
end of his nose, was typing, two index fingers pecking away like
starlings in the lawn. “He's just a few years older than you.
Currently he's in . . . Prague.”
“Ah, that's what you meant by
nostalgic.”
“Yes, 1994, a successful operation.
Promotion for the both of us I seem to remember. Since you know
Prague, I thought you'd do nicely.”
“Well, what did he do?” Rex
looked around him, “Steal the furniture?”
Vernon ignored the sarcasm, reached
within his finely tailored pinstripe suit jacket and withdrew a long
envelope. “The flight leaves tonight. Gives you the afternoon to
arrange yourself. I do hope you have your passport?” Rex didn't
move so Vernon laid it upon the desktop. He opened a drawer and
withdrew a thick envelope. “Cash. Hotel is all arranged.”
“Why aren't you availing
yourself of internal leather gloves? Why an outsider like me?”
Vernon looked over his glasses at him.
“It's a case that has . . let us say . . . considerable outside
interests.”
“What do you need from me then?”
“Evan Dashmore has damaging
information and photographs on a USB flash drive. We need it. Simple,
clean document retrieval operation. One man job Rex. In and out.”
“Sounds like a dangerous job. Perhaps
he knows of me. Knows my face.”
“Highly unlikely Rex. He spent most
of his career abroad.”
“What steps have been take against
the man so far.”
“We've used the three step CA system.
We began with THAW, then moved on to SIFT, and applied RAMP at the
same time. He was breaking.”
Rex was sick of the three step program.
The Russians praised him for teaching them these methods, but he
sensed they would never adopt such time consuming techniques. Their
methods were more abrupt. Rex felt he'd changed, his morals and
ethics had begun to be exposed due to the erosion of his
indifference. Such psychological character assassination techniques were now more
unsettling to him. The slander, the fabrication, the isolating, thwarting traducements. He'd heard of the abuse of them by organisations
outside of intelligence.
“Is Evan Dashmore a threat?”
“No, not at all. No worry. He thinks
he's Scot-free. You'll figure out a way without physical contact I'm
sure. I've included Dashmore's info and photographs in the
envelope with the airline tickets.”
“I don't know Vernon, this doesn't
have a good feel to it.”
Vernon held the thick envelope open so
Rex could see the thickness of hundred dollar bills like rings on a
freshly cut tree trunk. “Think of your kid's tuition Rex.”
“I don't have kids.”
“I would never have hired you if you
did.”
Rex made his way out of the empty
house, each door tempting him with its apparent emptiness, but he
contained his curiosity. He could consult a reference book at the library to find the address and discover whose house it was. As he approached his SUV parked on the street, he
turned around and looked up to the third floor of the Renaissance
Revival home and saw Vernon standing before one of the windows like a
representation of a 20st century man captured behind glass
at a wax museum. He waved but Vernon wasn't looking at him, his sight
was further off, over the trees towards the city below and the
horizon to the south. The big picture.
*
The sharp-edged cornice of
the Palazzo-inspired architecture cut the blue sky like a prow of a
ship. Rex climbed the old stone stairs of the library and quietly
entered the foyer and made his way across the pink marble floor
towards the reference desk. The librarian, a young woman with brown
hair and dark glasses, was on the phone. She nodded to Rex and raised
the one minute finger, a common gesture in librarianship. “That's
right ” she said looking down at a large book open before her, “the
equivalent I Ching hexagram for the Zodiac sign of Scorpio, is
one long line upon two stacks of five short lines. . . . Yes, that's
right. . . Not at all. Anytime Mrs. Whipple. Glad to hear you're
feeling better. Goodbye.” She hung up the phone. “Can I help
you,” she asked Rex, closing the book on her desk as if embarrassed
by its contents.
“Yes, I hope so. I think
you have something called Criss-Cross, a book listing
addresses to names.”
The young woman looked from
Rex towards the corner of the reading room, resting her gaze upon a
little man hunched over a table, his books and papers surrounding him
like a protective fort.
“The book's presently in
use I'm afraid.”
Rex followed her gaze to the
man in the corner of the reading room, and as they gazed together at
the scene of a mind gone astray, the little man looked up from his
books and papers like a prairie dog scenting the approach of humans.
“I'm sorry, I don't have
much time. I'm off to Europe tonight. It will only take a moment to
look up one address.”
She smiled up at him.
Europe. Escape. Freedom. “I'm sure we can convince Mr. Musil to
lend us the book for a moment.”
She wore a patterned dress
which reminded Rex of honeycombs. She was not tall, coming only to
Rex's shoulder, and as he followed her through the maze of chairs
and tables, he felt like a Knight accompanying a Queen to meet a mad
archivist.
“I'm sorry Mr. Musil, this
patron needs to consult the Criss-Cross for one address only. We
won't take it from you.”
“But, but the connections
can't be broken you see. It's all connected. We are immersed in truth
like a vast ocean. All the names. All the addresses. All the phone
numbers, yes, all connected.”
The librarian nodded
wearily, her shoulders sagging with the weight of such dusty
thoughts. “It will only be a moment, we'll use the book over there
on the corner of the desk, and bring it back to you here. It won't
leave your table.”
Rex had wandered off to the
periodicals not wanting to upset the man by hovering nearby like a
menace. He noticed an advertisement for a music venue featuring The
Sylphs, Ariel and the Psychic Overtones, The Paranoids and
Zizek and the Detectives. Damn, he thought. Some good
old retro rock for the weekend and he'd be in Prague skulking around
corners.
“Excuse me sir,” the
librarian said, coming up to him. “The window of opportunity is
open.” She pointed to the large thin papered tomb on the corner of
the table. The little man was standing up holding his hands before him
imploringly, anxiety at the corner of his eyes.
“Thank you so much, Miss .
.”
“Mary, not at all. Glad to
help.”
Rex nodded to the man as he
approached. “Thank you very much. I'll just be a sec.” He bent
down to search for the address, the sound of thin pages being turned was like the sound of waves breaking upon a shore. The little man was pacing
back and forth nervously as if worried Rex might abscond with the
volume. Rex put his finger on the address and ran it across to the
name . . .V. Smythe. A number in parentheses beside the name
indicated how many years at that address: (30).
* * *
Pavor Loveridge let the
papers slip from his hand as he closed his eyes and rested his head
deeply upon the pillow. Thirty years. He was seventeen thirty years
ago, the age when he first met Victoria at a party held at the Baie d'Urfé Yacht club. Victoria Ondine. From Pointe-Claire. Victoria would be his age if she
had lived. He reached over to the lamp and turned it off. He conjured
images in the dark of the next stage of Rex's adventure. Feet on the ground, running, fragments of
scenes, buildings, the river, the bridge, rooftops. Pavor's chest
rose and fell with the sweet ease of sleep.
© ralph patrick mackay
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