Painting Judge

Painting Judge


In his youth M. Van Gogh had a fiery complexion and  bright copper hair. When he was a child, his mother, in an unprecedented moment of levity, described him to her husband as a cross between a summer sunset and a fire engine. Paterfamilias Van Gogh, who feared that his son’s colouring was a sign of bad things to come, was not amused. However, by the time M. Van Gogh reached sixty the fire had gone out. His hair and beard were snow white, his skin a muddy brown, although in some lights there was an undertint of orange. Age did not affect his eyes. They were the same ice blue as they had been when he was a baby.

If M. Van Gogh had lived the average life span he would have died obscure and penniless. Outside of his intimate circle no one would have known his name and none but a few artists, poor and penniless themselves, would have seen and appreciated his paintings. But by some happenstance he was ‘discovered’ in his fifties and his paintings now sold for amounts which would once have financed he and all the many friends of his youth for a decade. When he reached eighty no one was more surprised than he. He thought for sure that his drinking (he stopped at the age of seventy-five), his mental illness (diagnosed by many psychiatrists as chronic and untreatable) and the years of grinding poverty which accompanied the making of his great paintings, would kill him before he was out of his fifties but they didn’t. He lived on and on until by the age of eighty-five he dwelt in a large house with servants and had so much money in the bank the manager came by three times a year to give him a personal briefing on his account.

At the back of the house was a large yard, much of it filled with flowerbeds. The day after he bought the house he engaged a contractor to build a lean to studio off a blank spot on the back wall. The contractor had visions of a fine palace of a studio but M. Van Gogh stopped him in his tracks. He wanted no fine palaces. He didn’t mind them if they belonged to someone else and he was on a brief visit, but he did not want to own or build one himself. He wanted only the most humble of materials. He wanted a potbellied stove burning both wood and coal. He wanted modest windows with storms for the winter, of course, but he wanted them smallish so that a man could walk up to them and look out with satisfaction yet not so commanding they demanded he look out. When the contractor gave him the price he was astonished. He made a joke about Louis XIV and the extravagance of his royal court but the contractor was not amused. When M. Van Gogh asked around about the price he was told it was reasonable and he had the man go ahead.

As soon as the studio was built (quickly for the building market was depressed and the contractor had his pick of workmen), he spent most of his waking hours there. Summers he spent much of the days outside on a small patio. He joked with his bank manager - a surprisingly humorous man for one following such a profession - usually they were as dour as his dear old father -  that the house was for the servants and except for sleeping and eating he never went into it. He allowed the oldest maid, a second cousin who came to live with him some years before, being destitute and homeless, to clean the studio once a month. That was on the day he climbed into the motorcar for his trip to the sea some ten miles away.

If it was summer he sat on the beach all day, had supper at the hotel and came home. During the winter he walked, one hand on the chauffeur’s elbow, the other on his cane. The chauffeur carried with him a load of blankets and when they reached a certain bench he wrapped his employer in a wool cocoon and M. Van Gogh sat for some hours looking out to sea. It always occurred to him on these occasions that he could have saved himself all the trials and tribulations of being an artist by having become a sailor. He thought of sailors as artists who destained the vulgar claptrap of paint and canvas for the much purer art of simply seeing. Although he knew this to be untrue, in fact to be the worst kind of sentimental nonsense, still, every time he sat on his bench the thought went through his head and for a brief moment he enjoyed it as a child would enjoy the intense taste of his favourite candy.

Sometimes Denise, the second cousin, was still in the studio when he came back. This annoyed M. Van Gogh, for it meant he had to sit patiently listening to his relative’s complaints. Her complaints were complex, involved and legion. So as to kill two birds with one stone he ordered tea brought out on a tray and sat munching cookies while Denise walked the winding road of her illnesses and petty disputes with the other servants. Her monologues were much the same every month and M. Van Gogh sometimes wondered if she were not becoming senile. Other than an occasional hmmm and nodding his head, he made no comment. He had learned years before that interruptions were considered rude and comments were not appreciated. If Denise was still full steam ahead after an hour he unobtrusively removed a pre-measured packet of laudanum from an inside pocket and spilt the contents into his tea. He had learned exactly when to do this so that just as Denise’s voice became like a dentist drill cutting its way through a nerve, the effects of the drug cut in and saved him from excruciating misery. Denise was a good twenty years younger than himself and capable of talking well into the night but after two hours at the most, he pleaded his age and rang for the man servant who helped him to his bedroom.

To be aged and famous, unless one is an egoist, is a burden. Curators and sycophants in the employ of the men who will profit from an increase in the value of your work, spread about them a misty fog of hagiography. Supposedly at the centre of this misty fog is an electrical Prometheus, fire crackling the air around a nimbus of his creative tensions, waiting patiently for the chosen few who will be given the benefit of his steely gaze or even the sacrament of his god like touch. In truth, of course, there is an old man bundled against the chills of old age, in a chair in the corner. At ninety M. Van Gogh succeeded in putting an end to this nonsense by hiring two gardeners who came running at the sounding of a buzzer in their shed and garden. These two men, polite church goers but inexorable in the defence of M. Van Gogh’s privacy, showed all visitors who brushed past the butler to the door and out into the street. Sometimes, in the case of the truly zealous and pressing, they threw them down the front steps and shouted unchurch-like phrases after, for they had found from experience that physical fear was the best guard against repeat performances. Six months of this and the word got round so that now only the occasional unwelcome visitor showed up at the door. Most were given the gardener treatment but on the rare odd day M. Van Gogh would allow them to be ushered into his presence as a kind of tribute to the bad old days. They were mostly art students, feverish and consumed with ecstatic visions. M. Van Gogh spoke with them briefly about the prices of canvas, tubes of paint, brushes, etcetera, gave them a crisp one hundred dollar bill and sent them on their way.

Fame and reputation also brought many invitations, some social which he refused and some professional, which he mostly refused. In his seventies and eighties he had been foolishly moved by the arguments of Highly Responsible persons that a great painter in his dotage had debts to pay to what they called the ‘Great Tradition’. He sat on committees. He went to high profile openings of public expositions. He attended the Royal Family’s Arts Night where he was given a place beside the Prince who during the meal told him many off colour jokes, some mildly amusing but most plain silly. He also acted as the painting judge for this annual event, the successful painting being unveiled after the dinner by the Prince who took advantage of the occasion to tell a few more of his smutty jokes and make a few asides (referred to by his friends as the Royal Person’s zingers) in the same spirit of scatological snickering. All this reminded M. Van Gogh of a relative of the Prince from two centuries before who was famous for caressing the bottoms of duchesses in public and who often, during a reception, suddenly plunged his face into the cleavage of a well endowed young woman. One of the disadvantages of being Royal is that everyone knows your business and the business of your ancestors for even their most banal habits are written up in history books. If you are common, two generations succeeds in wiping the slate clean and the dead can go to their final rest in the fields of oblivion.

At ninety, along with hiring his two gardeners, M. Van Gogh dropped all these ‘Great Tradition’ duties excepting one, the Royal’s Arts Night. The Highly Responsible Persons were in high dudgeon for some months but he paid them no attention. They were, after all, the type of people whose artistic activity consists of eating stale sandwiches, gossiping and discussing fashionable topics under the delusion that their opinions, which they received from the newspapers and sifted with insect –like delicacy until they found a happy mix of the bland and the popular, were of great import. He did not cast all these people from his door for he liked some of them a great deal and set three nights a year to have them for dinner where everyone, including himself, for he was one of them, at least part time, if he was honest with himself, could have a jolly gabfest. But he turned aside all their blandishments about his withdrawal as the talk of the devil. He had a few paintings to finish before he died and the younger ones would have to take his place on the committees.

The Royal Arts Night coming up was special. The Prince was celebrating his thirtieth year hosting the event and, as well, M. Van Gogh celebrated his one hundredth birthday two days before. The media was agog with delight over such a momentous occasion filled with celebrity and significance. M. Van Gogh heard about the media frenzy from friends, most particularly from the young woman student who he paid to give him a weekly summary of arts and political news. He had never read newspapers for he found them hard going. After an hour he felt like a child who had just eaten three cones of cotton candy – regretful and nauseous. M. Legrand, the young woman, however, gave him brief summaries which he could ask her to expand if he so chose. Her summations were masterful and done up with a sly irony unusual in such a young person. They were also enjoyable to listen to for M. Legrand was beautiful and her voice a combination of morning birds singing and grave delicate rhythms of the sea. Although congress with a woman was a matter of memory for him now, he still loved to listen to their melodious voices and even to some of the non melodious voices of the middle aged women who had once been his lovers.

This connection with M. Legrand and the coming Royal Arts Night had recently become somewhat of a delicate matter to him. M. Legrand was a student, an impoverished one, but as well as being a student in the studio of X, an old enemy of M. Van Gogh (from X’s side for M. Van Gogh had never been able to see the use of cultivating enemies), she was an accomplished painter with her own individual style which M. Van Gogh thought showed considerable promise. She had entered a painting in the Royal competition where the winning entry would be unveiled by the potty mouthed Prince on that special night. Her painting was superb, the kind of painting done by the highly talented early in their career which art critics discount because of the painter's youth but in truth are fully mature works granted by a combination of the muse and the energies of youth. M. Van Gogh was the judge of the competition, of course. But if he chose M. Legrand’s entry there would be many who would accuse him of furthering a protégé’s career at the cost of true judgment, or even a mistress’s career, for there were many who claimed the meetings between he and M. Legrand, an hour every week in the library, were, as well as being media summaries, sexual in nature. Of course they were but not in the way these people meant.

M. Legrand herself was the soul of discretion. She never mentioned her entry and indeed, in all of their meetings, some one hundred or so, she had never mentioned the fact that she was a painter. M. Van Gogh disliked talking of painting. He thought it better to look at paintings rather than talk about them. But he paid her so handsomely that it was obvious that, as well as paying her for her services, he was subsidizing her studies. Not that they spoke of this. Every week in the envelope given her by the butler as she left the house there was a generous amount above the agreed upon payment.

That year there were four hundred and fifty-five entries. The Prince’s agents placed them on easels and spread them around the grand hall for M. Van Gogh to look at. And look he did for he was the most conscientious of judges. He thought it his sacred duty to gaze at each one with the intense but kindly eye the painters themselves might turn upon it in an unguarded moment of self appreciation. This took him a month, visiting the grand hall every day, for at one hundred years of age M. Van Gogh, although surprisingly vigorous both physically and intellectually, no longer had the energy of early old age. He had two hours in the hall at his best, viewing and taking notes and then he went home. With four days left, after reviewing his notes, he chose twenty paintings which he then spent these last days looking at over and over again. M. Legrand’s was one of these paintings.

The day before the Gala, after listening to M. Legrand’s media summary without interrupting (he was tired and longed for his afternoon nap) he asked her,

“Are you going to the Art’s Night?”

“Well, I have received an invitation,” said M. Legrand, “but no.”

“And why not?”

“Clothes,” replied M. Legrand.

M. Van Gogh felt suddenly ashamed. How could he have missed such an obvious thing? He, a man who had spent forty years wearing rags and patches? He thought of apologizing but then thought better of it. Instead he rose, excused himself for a moment and left the room. He came back a few moments later and said,

“That will be all for today, M. Legrand. Thank you and I will see you tomorrow evening.”

M. Legrand left the room with her usual liquid grace and M. Van Gogh took the elevator upstairs to his bedroom to have his nap. When M. Legrand arrived at the room she rented near X’s studio she found the envelope contained far more than usual. She went out right away to a second hand shop and bought herself the necessities. The dress had to be altered but this for her was a pleasure – she loved working with needle and thread as much as she loved painting.

The Prince, of course, was delighted that the winner of that year’s prize was a beautiful young woman. Usually the winners were grizzled old veterans of the trenches of art, their eyes filled with a strange combination of obsequiousness and paranoid aggression. How much more pleasant to gaze upon this young woman in full bloom, her eyes filled with a smiling clarity, dressed in a stunning classical gown perhaps given her by an older lover, a man of wealth and influence not unlike the Prince himself. So impressed was he that he did not make his usual jokes, perhaps fearing that they would put him in a bad light before this young woman of refined sensibilities. His sycophants were disappointed that they were given no ‘zingers’ to pass around at the after event parties but they solved this problem by recycling some from years before.

A week later when M. Legrand finished her summary, M. Van Gogh asked,

“Has he sent you a message?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“I thought he would,” said M. Van Gogh. “He’s not a man to hesitate or delay. Have you decided?”

“No. I vacillate. I have a lover, a painter my own age. But he is as penniless as I.”

“I can look after this for you if you like. I don’t mean the Prince. You will deal with him as you like. I mean the money. Don’t answer in words. I know it is painful. If you are willing then simply nod.”

M. Legrand hesitated for a few seconds and then nodded.

“Fine, then,” said M. Van Gogh. “But there is one condition. The money will be deposited in your account. Leave the number with Jacob. The condition is that you are not to tell your lover you have capital. Tell him I give you a monthly income out of respect for your talent. Surely he will not look upon a hundred year old man as competition. I ask this because in a long life I have seen many women besotted by men who spent their money. You need it for something more long lasting than individual human beings – your painting. People change their feelings and they die but for as long as you can pick up a brush you have the painting. When I die you will be released from your promise, a release obviously not far in the future.”

M. Legrand looked at him for a long time but said nothing.

“You agree, then?” asked M. Van Gogh.

M.Legrand nodded. And so it was done.


One year later, at the Royal Arts Night, M. Van Gogh was approached by the Prince after  dinner. They stood in a small alcove off from the main hall, the Prince’s escort of dear ole pals attending at a distance, in respect, perhaps, for such an historic and august meeting between the embodied traditions of art and power.

“That young woman who won the prize last year,” said the Prince, “I forget her name…”

“M. Legrand, your Excellency,” said M. Van Gogh.

“Yes, M. Legrand. She seems quite a queer bird. I sent her a note and she didn’t reply.”

“Ahh,” said M. Van Gogh.

“I thought perhaps the first note had gone astray so I sent another. Three others in fact but still no reply.”

“Perhaps, your Excellency, you will allow my vast age to excuse my boldness, but what was in the notes you sent her?”

“Well….,” replied the Prince, “I asked her for a private meeting, a dinner tete a tete.”

“She’s very religious your Excellency and has a fiancé. So you can see why it would be impossible for her to reply. If you really want to see her I would suggest you invite her to a social occasion along with her fiancé. If you did that I’m sure you would get a reply.”

“Religious, eh? Well, we could all use a little more of that couldn’t we? Tempest Fugit and all.”

“No doubt your Excellency.”


But the Prince didn’t send another note. Other than the gala he never invited artists to social occasions. They were like glaciers, exuding chilly disapproval and looking down their noses at those not kissed by the holy god of art. Too bad that such a beauty was lost to him but there are plenty of others who were not, weren't there? Lots of other fish in the sea and all that.








 

Barry

Barry


No one thought Barry Erkin would ever become a policeman. He lacked the manichaean point of view, and, even as a child, had no interest in projecting his ideas on others. He was a ‘laissez faire’ sort of person, one who left others alone and in turn wanted to be left alone himself. “Barry will be a accountant,” everyone said, “or a fireman.” But when he reached the age of eighteen he applied for the Police Academy and was admitted.

Erkin papa was a plumber but he and his wife had so many children, after plumbing all day, he worked evenings at the pig works slaughtering pigs. As a result he smelt like a dead, slightly rotting pig and no amount of scrubbing in the big tub could made him smell otherwise. Even dousing himself with cheap deodorants merely made him smell like a dead pig sprinkled with perfume. As one can imagine from his work schedule, which in those days included Saturday, he hardly knew his children. When he rose in the morning they were asleep and when he came home at night they were asleep. When he came down into the kitchen on Sunday mornings and found it filled with children, all of whom became suddenly silent when their father walked into the room, he was surprised. For the last six days he had forgotten they existed. The children saw their father as an unpredictable and violent man, which was true. The kitchen emptied out and he sat down in glorious solitude at the table while his wife served him a huge, working man breakfast.

Barry was the second last of the boys. All told there were six boys and seven girls, the boys rough and ready with great, meaty paws like their father and the girls delicate faced but with strong, sturdy bodies able to defend themselves so fiercely even the bigger boys left them alone. Five of the girls became famous neighbourhood beauties. Two, scorning such a prize, dressed in a deliberately dowdy way all through childhood and early womanhood. One became a doctor and the other a political activist.

During his school years Barry was known as ‘the quiet Erkin’, which is understandable given that the rest were so noisy and boisterous. He liked sports but preferred games like swimming and track where individual skills were the center point and there was a minimum of group togetherness. Paradoxically, of all the Erkin boys, he grew to be the largest and most powerful and yet the one least interested in scrapping and bickering. He would defend himself, however. When he was in grade school he was expelled for a month for breaking a bully's nose. This made those who thrived on tormenting shy, seemingly incapable boys, leave him alone.

Erkin papa thought nothing of giving his boys a backhand slap when they were almost grown and when they were small he punished them by beating them with his belt, a monstrous thing three inches wide. But he treated Barry differently. There was something about the way the boy looked at him that made him hesitate. Since Barry was an obedient boy the question of correction seldom arose but once, when Barry was nine, his father gave him the strap treatment. During his beating the boy never uttered the slightest sound which so infuriated his father that he beat him all the more, so much so that his wife tackled her own husband in the boy’s defence. When his father unhanded him to fend off his wife, Barry ran out of the house and did not come back for three days. When he did come back Mrs. Erkin was beside herself with joy but while she was weeping and fondling and kissing him, Barry was staring at his father with undisguised hatred. After that, for the occasional punishment required, the old man gave Barry extra chores or made him stay in the yard for a day.

The Police Academy teachers thought highly of Barry. He was intelligent, quick, physically capable, polite and deferential. He graduated at the top of his class. As was usual he spent three years as a regular constable stationed in the city, learning the ropes. In his fourth year he was sent back to the Academy to do the Detective course and when this was finished appointed an assistant Detective under an older man, soon to retire. This was a great honour  because the older Detective was a legend and the scuttlebutt was that Barry had been hand picked to succeed him.

Barry and the old man, Frederich Delany, got along fine. Neither liked small talk. Neither drank. Neither went to church. Both loved to go on long walks and sit quietly in sidewalk cafes drinking coffee. Both liked to play chess and read complicated scientific books. One might be tempted to say they were like father and son but this would be inaccurate for Frederick, right from the beginning, accepted Barry as an equal. If he had anything to teach the younger man he did it in a bluff, factual way which seemed to assume it was a mere oversight of the cosmic order that Barry did not already know it. He put on no airs. His main method of teaching was giving Barry old dossiers to read and then discussing them with him while they went through the old section of the city for a long walk. In other words he walked him through past experience, the only way to teach anyone anything.

Detective work, unlike the way it is depicted in most fiction, is often boring. Writing endless reports and long interviews going nowhere compose the bulk of a Detective’s day. But it has its perks. Free meals at restaurants where the credentials of the kitchen staff are best left unexamined is one. During lull periods, wandering about the city enjoying oneself while claiming to be working is another.

 A typical Detective murder case goes like this. A call comes to the station. The Detective and partner are sent to an address. The technicians are already there, gathering their harvest of evidence, so the partners sit on the step outside until they are finished. Then, in they go to look at the body, inert of course, and very dead. Dead bodies don’t bother them for they have already seen many dozens. They do not burden themselves with modern notions that they are somehow responsible, ‘if only they had’ or ‘if only society was somehow differently structured’ and all that. That’s for the hand wringers and they are not hand wringers. After looking about for a bit they instruct the uniforms to find the husband, the lover, the cuckold, the drinking partner or whatever. Often they don’t have to do this for they are already present, weeping and confessing. Sometimes the uniforms find them at the nearest bar or on a train leaving town or holed up in a hotel three blocks away. They may offer a little resistance but mostly, once they are in the interview room, they spill the beans. Just as they could not resist the impulse to kill, they cannot resist the impulse to unburden themselves. It’s all very sad and sometimes the Detectives empathize but mostly they remain very cool and simply observe. After this has been repeated many times they no longer judge. They may even begin to wonder if all this is not somehow preordained, if some vast chemical process over which individual human beings have no control, has not delivered them here, cop on one side of the desk writing, the murderer on the other side, emotionally distraught, confessing, pleading for understanding, for self justification.

In the first five years of being a Detective, Barry, accompanying Frederick, went to many of these cases. They comprised perhaps eighty or ninety percent of the murder roster. But there was another kind of murder comprising maybe five to ten percent. In these cases the partners would arrive at a taped off alley where a corpse, covered with a white sheet, lay on the bare ground. When the techs were finished they pulled back the sheet and saw the sign – one shot through the head. The victims were sometimes from the underworld, sometimes not. They were sometimes well dressed, with money in their pocket, sometimes not. But they were all shot through the head, usually from the back, by a small caliber pistol, most often a twenty-two. Most were male but there was the occasional female.

The usual procedures were followed. People who lived and worked round about, and intimates of the victim, were questioned but nothing came of these enquiries. Sometimes a person living nearby would say he heard a car backfire at a certain time the previous night. But, even if connected to the shooting, this information was useless. It merely confirmed that someone pulled the trigger and they already knew that. The timing supplied by the witness was usually vague. It could have been ten o’clock; it could have been twelve thirty. Very, very occasionally a witness heard something and then saw a figure walk off down the street. But the description of this figure could have fit perhaps one half of the city’s population, so it too was useless. He was wearing a baggy coat or perhaps it was a sailor’s jacket. He was young but then again he may have been middle aged. He was bulky and strong but perhaps it was the coat made him look that way. As useless as they were, all of these things were written down by uniforms and entered into the dossier.

Ballistic were done on the bullet but they all knew the pistol was now in the river. Tech evidence involving shoe prints, etc, was examined carefully but they all knew the shoes and clothing were also in the river or ashes in a wood stove somewhere outside of town. Of the several hundreds of these kind of murders Frederick had investigating in his career, only two were ‘solved’, each by the higher ups ordering it be pinned on a certain individual who, in reality, had nothing whatsoever to do with it, which means, of course, that none of them were solved.

“Who does them then?” Barry asked one day when they were waiting at a counter for a plate of Chinese food.

“Gangsters settling scores. The odd private citizen hiring a professional killer and somebody else. I suspect that more than half are done by the somebody else.”

“And who is that,” asked Barry.

Frederick looked at him for a long time and then smiled. He didn’t speak. Instead he nodded his head in a northeast direction, one quick nod with the eyes following it intensely. Three blocks away to the northeast was the headquarters of the Secret Police.  

Because of the nod and Frederick’s intensity, Barry asked no more questions. Everyone knew it was unwise to speak of ‘them’ anywhere in public. The restaurant was crowded with workers on their lunch hour. They ate their chop suey in silence and then left to go back to the station.

Three days later they were walking along the banks of the river headed for an interview with the wife of a  merchant. The merchant had disappeared and since he was very prominent, the Chief had sent Frederick out to interview his wife.

“So you think it’s the Secret Police who shoots all those people?” Barry asked.

“I don’t think,” said Frederick. “I know.”

“But I thought they took them to the station and shot them,” said Barry.

“Some,” said Frederich. “The ones they want people to know they shot. The ones they don’t they do it like the gangsters do so everyone thinks it’s the gangsters.”

                                   
After Barry had been with him six years Frederich was getting ready to retire. He had already served thirty years, five more than was required for full pension. Recently he and his wife bought a few acres just outside of town. They planned on keeping pigs and chickens and growing a big garden. Barry went out to see it with him one slow afternoon. Flat prairie land with a house just off the dirt road and a rough poplar fence around it. The house needed work and Frederich was going to auctions, looking for a tractor. It was late spring and they sat for an hour in the backyard drinking tea while Frederich told him his plans for the place – a chicken house, a pig barn, but first a screened gazebo because the summer bugs were outrageous.

Three weeks before he was to retire Frederich suddenly disappeared on a day Barry was at a course at the Academy. No one got in touch with him so he didn’t hear about it until he came in the next morning. Taking a younger detective with him he went off on a long walk through the old town asking everyone who knew Frederich - the shopkeepers, the waitresses, etc -  if they had seen him. No one had. The last anyone at the station saw him was the previous morning at ten o’clock. He said he was going for a walk to talk to someone and he left through the front door. When they searched his desk for an appointment note, a phone number, they came up with nothing. Frederick wasn’t good about writing things down. He kept a lot of things in his head.

They found him the next day on the riverbank shot through the head with a twenty-two. No sign of struggle, so the shooter was probably walking with him and suddenly pulled out the pistol and fired. It was a deserted part of the bank where people seldom walked. He was lying a little off the main path, face down. It was late in a very hot, rainless summer and the earth was as hard as concrete, so the Techs got nothing from the ground and nothing from Frederich’s clothing or body. Probably the shooter met him on the path and they went walking. The man never touched him.

“Who?” Barry asked his Chief Inspector.

The Chief Inspector shrugged his shoulders. “Frederich was a secretive man. Who knows what he had going on. You would know better than anyone. You spent the last six years with him.”

Barry was made the Investigating officer. There is a classic set up for such an operation and he set it up but he had little faith it would find anything. Once things were organized he let the cherub cheeked younger detective run it and report to him.  If he were to find an answer it would come from unorthodox methods.

First the gangsters. He made a few phone calls and met with a middle ranked man in a coffee shop where he often had lunch with Frederich. The man told him the organization had no problems with Frederich. He had never been on the payroll but at the same time he had stayed away from certain sensitive cases and the organization had no reason to kill him. “If he was a problem,” said the man, “we would have killed him long ago. Why wait until he was almost retired?” Barry felt the man was telling the truth. The uniforms, who went through Frederich’s papers both at the station and his apartment, found absolutely zilch connecting him to gangsters. This was like Frederich thought Barry. He would be circumspect and cautious but keep himself clean.

So who was he meeting on the riverbank by himself? A snitch? But why would a snitch kill him? There was no benefit to a snitch killing his connection. Did someone kill him for personal reasons? Unlikely Barry thought. Frederick was a smooth operator who genuinely got along with just about everyone. That someone would kill him out of personal pique was very, very unlikely.

So it came around to ‘them’, didn’t it? But that didn’t make sense either. Why would they want to kill Frederich, especially when he would soon retire? Approaching ‘them’, well that was a tricky matter. You didn’t phone them up and ask if they had killed your partner and if so why? The Secret Police were like a hard shelled turtle except the shell extended all the way round. They would talk to you all day, if you let them, squirreling for incidental details about cases and operations but they gave nothing in return. They were like a brick wall, a stainless steel door. They were like priests sworn to secrecy.

But Barry knew a few things. He had been taking computer night courses at the Academy for four years. Frederich called him a computer geek and he had to admit it was true. Last year an older man from the Secret Service had been in one of his courses. He was typical Secret Service type, hard and cautious, tight lipped, but Barry talked to him a few times in the break between sessions. The Service had gone big on computers. They took in the best graduates from the tech schools. The older man wasn’t looking to become a technical expert. There were lots of bright young recruits for that. What he wanted was a general knowledge detailed enough so that he could supervise intelligently. The man, like everyone else in the class, carried a laptop with him. One day while passing his desk Barry noticed the man was on a strange looking site, one tingeing the screen a faint blue colour. Barry memorized the ULR and the user name, George Simil, the name of his classmate. He thought it strange that the man used his real name, or at least the name he gave out in the class as his. He thought a Secret Service Officer would use a codename.

An old neighbourhood pal knew how to find passwords but Barry wouldn’t let him do it on their own computers. Far too dangerous. Like hiding on the riverbank beside a roaring fire. He bought a laptop on the black market. The user name and password belonged to an old man who died a month before in a pensioner’s home.

Barry wouldn’t let his friend try the site. Instead he had him walk him through the steps to find the password. Then he took the laptop to a café with wi fi. It took him two hours of trying but he finally got the password. Then he left the café because he was afraid being on the site might be tracked and there might be a finder truck.

The next night he went to another café. Blue screen. Enter password. Service Interface Files. Frederick P. Delany. The file popped up but to enter you needed Special Sections clearance.

He explained to his friend who told him, “No problem.”

But Barry thought there was. “Do you think finding the password left a track?” he asked his friend.

“Yes, but whether there is anyone looking for tracks is the real question,” answered his friend.

“But if there was then they would find a computer owned by a dead man, sold on the black market so no one knows where it is, right?

“Depends. Central could track its physical location when it’s online but someone would have to go there and catch whoever had it in their possession.”

“What’s the best way to do it then?” asked Barry.

“Get a black market stick and use it outside town. That makes it much much more difficult to track and if you do, to get there,” said his friend.

So that’s what they did. It took Barry’s friend only ten minutes to get Special Sections Clearance. “These guys are still in kindergarten,” he said.

But Barry wouldn’t let him go into the file. He did that himself three days later in a police car late in the afternoon twenty miles outside town, parked on the riverbank. Blue screen. Frederich P. Delany. Files of Operations Officer. Latest. August 12th, Tuesday, the day of Frederich’s death. The page came up slowly revealing a blank rectangle of blue excepting in the center of the page where there was a capital E, a bracket, the numbers 4930, unbracket. Barry stared at this for a full minute. If this meant what he thought it meant he found it hard to believe they would put it in a file but then again why not? They were basically untouchable and if, as Frederich had said, this was a normal every day thing for them, why not? Not wanting to stay on any longer, he exited and went back to the station and home.

He asked his friend the next morning, “When would be the best time to go on and stay on for a while?”

”In the morning,” said his friend with no hesitation.

“Why?” asked Barry.

“Because it’s so busy. The busier it is the less noticeable an aberration. Although I wonder if it would come up as an aberration on their system. It didn’t seem to have any pick ups for this sort of thing when I was on there.”

Barry arranged his schedule so he had a car in the mornings and drove out of town on a different road each day. He spent two hours reading files and then went back to town.

Frederich was an informant. The files were filled with his reports on anything from office politics to the drinking habits of his supervisors. There was even a report on Barry, his political opinions (none), affiliations (none), personality, daily habits. There were pages and pages of this kind of stuff, penny ante, mundane and boring. That Frederich was spying for the Secret Service shocked him but the fact that Frederich had spent many hours, thousands perhaps, writing up these inane, banal reports shocked him even more. The files went back thirty years so he was a snitch right from the beginning. Why? Barry wondered. Maybe he was blackmailed. Or maybe in those days it was expected as a normal, every day part of the job. Maybe everyone did it.

On the fourth day of reading Barry opened a file having to do with the arrest of a prostitute. The older files were handwritten, a paper original scanned into the file but the newer were typewritten. This one was typed. Barry recognized the name of the prostitute. She was the Great Leader’s present mistress and had been so for three years, the longest reign for any of his women. The date on the file was four years ago, so one year before she became the big boss’s mistress. Frederich had arrested her for assaulting a man in a bar. The woman, who must have had considerable strength, had hit the man over the head with a heavy barstool and fractured his skull. He died on the spot. She was jailed and brought to trial. Frederich was the officer supplying evidence and he did an excellent job, as usual. The woman was given ten years hard labor, remitted a short time later to six months minimum security detention. The file was essentially the police report on the incident with comments by Frederick. The comments were scathing. He called the woman a dangerous psychotic, a sociopath. It was his opinion that the state should lock her up and throw away the key.

“So,” Barry said aloud to the empty car, “So.”


“If you let me go up on the file I can probably find you the shooter.” Barry’s friend said when he explained what he found.

They were walking through the old district towards a café to have lunch. Barry was paying which was usual practice. Today he owed his friend a debt but on many other days his friend was simply broke. He spent all his money on computers and programs.

“Why?” asked Barry. “The actual person who pulled the trigger was a professional. ‘Kill this person on Tuesday,’ they said and he did it. He was the means but the real killer was much higher up, right? The real killer was HIM at the instigation of his mistress. What surprises me is that the file is still there on the site. When I checked in police files it was gone. In that year’s arrest lists, nothing, no such name. No Prosecutor’s files under that name. No witness reports. No Supervising Officer reports, nothing, as if, as far as the police are concerned, the woman did not exist; there was no crime, no killing. The whole thing has evaporated. Even the autopsy report on the victim has disappeared.”

“I suppose they don’t have to worry too much,” his friend said. “I mean, who in their right mind would try hacking their site and even if they did what would they do with the information? What use is it to anyone?”

“Well, to me it answered a question which would have bothered me all my life. Not that the answer is a satisfying one, mind you, but at least it’s an answer. As for anyone else, you are right. What would one do, shout it from a street corner until they came to blow your brains out? Write it on bathroom walls until they catch you and beat you to death? Although it is the truth, it is a truth totally useless to anyone, excepting to the big boss and his mistress who gain something from its eradication. To them its value is in its negation.”

The route to the café led over a bridge across the river. When they were in the center of the bridge Barry lifted the laptop strap from  his shoulder and, without checking his stride in the least, tossed it over the rail. A few seconds later they heard the splash. His friend said nothing. It was the natural conclusion to the whole affair, wasn’t it? A dead man’s laptop, a dead cop, a dead man in a bar. It was like putting a period at the end of a very long sentence. You do it and then it’s over and time to start another.  

Miss Grey

Miss Grey


If you turn right at Scotia off Allison you will see the house at the end of the street, a dead end with a turn around large enough for cars but the bane of garbage truck drivers and movers driving long vans. Miss Grey lived in that house for many years. She was born there in the days when people were born in houses, not hospitals and died there, full of years as they say, not long after the beginning of the supposedly last of the wars, at least according to the Committee. Of course an error had been made and later it became clear there were a few more wars necessary to clear the way for ‘peace and constantly joyous living.’ Not that Miss Grey ever paid much attention to wars. To her they were rumours from a far away land and she paid as much attention to them as she paid to baseball scores or young men who race bicycles up and down mountainsides.

Miss Grey’s father was a gangster but a gentlemanly one. During the later part of his career he never shot anyone personally although several of his associates did. He wore tailored suits, sported a cane when he took his morning constitutional and had a church pew three rows behind the most socially prominent family in the neighbourhood. This family was more respectable than Miss Grey’s for it was their great grandfather who had been the gangster and by the time the present family representatives appeared on the scene the money had been washed of the blood he had spilt to accumulate it. Not that Miss Grey’s father went to church much. He showed up once a month and on feast days. Otherwise he spent Sunday mornings playing gin rummy with cronies from the old neighbourhood.

When she was a child Miss Grey was not bothered by the way her father made his money. Those who said nasty things about him she ignored. They were jealous, envious souls, the kind who made a grab for self respect by pulling their superiors down into the muck with them. Miss Grey’s mother, Ophelia was her name for God’s sake, took the ambiguity of their social position (money but gangster money) much more to heart than did Miss Grey. To be frank her mother was paranoid. Her talk, after arriving home from a social occasion, was almost exclusively of ‘certain looks’ she received or ‘whisperings’ or ‘hasty avoidances’ covered up by the swirl of the crowded room. She always came home with a terrible headache which she treated by complaining of the slights she had received while drinking two ounces of scotch from one glass alternating with the two ounces of brandy from another. Usually it was Miss Grey who listened to her. Her father dropped his wife at the door and continued on to the club where he drank rainwater and strawberry syrup. Miss Grey was the only child, so who else would listen?

When Miss Grey became a young woman Ophelia began including her husband in her complaints. She had been fooled into marrying him she told Miss Grey by his imitating what she called a fashionable boulevardier, that is a handsome, dashing, moneyed man about town when in truth he was ‘one of them’, that is a gangster. He picked her up for dates in a brand new sports coupe, took her to the most expensive places, sent her dozens of roses delivered by a striking young man who sang the latest love song playing on the radio right there on the front porch as he handed her the roses and so on. When he proposed he presented her with a diamond she later found out to be corundum and pulled out a bottle of champagne she later found out to be from the vats of one of his bootlegger buddies. She was far too young (eighteen) to be discriminating about such things and when she did become so later on it was too late. She was a gangster’s wife and people were whispering about her in the corners. Her sisters, both of whom married prominent doctors, would not come to her house and limited invitations to their houses to once a year at Christmas time. Her mother, apparently, was mortified and went to her grave so deeply embarrassed Ophelia’s sisters claimed she would be uncomfortable and restless there forever more.

Men in general, confided her mother to Miss Grey, were beastly characters, somewhat like the gods in the Greek fables, whose permanently engorged members were always seeking a place of rest and relief. If it had not been for dear Doctor Blanchard declaring her too delicate for ‘the crude aspects of the relation between husband and wife’ shortly after Miss Grey’s birth, her father, that is Miss Grey’s father, would still ‘be up to it’ demanding this or that and every day she (Ophelia) thanked the dear Lord for Doctor Blanchard declaration that her delicate health would not allow her participation. Of course Johnny (father and husband) had found an outlet for his lusts elsewhere. There was no shortage of young floozies willing to throw themselves at a moneyed gangster, although in Johnny’s case they would not have had to throw themselves too vigorously for him to catch them she was sure. These activities of his were hidden behind a screen of smoky clubrooms and sleazy hotels, one it was impossible for her, a proper woman, a member of society, to penetrate not that she would want to anyway. But she did hear things, second and third hand so to speak. When Johnny had given up drinking liquor for rainwater and strawberry juice his sex drive seemed to increase tenfold in accordance with some kind of mathematics of bodily compensation and Ophelia had heard that he had three mistresses on the go, one of them barely nineteen years of age. Of course he was older now, middle aged, but if rumour was to be trusted he still had two with an occasional singer or dancer on the side.

These revelations were not really revelations to Miss Grey although she pretended they were for her mother’s sake. Ophelia would have been scandalized to no end that her daughter, her well brought up daughter shaped on the lathe of an expensive finishing school run by nuns, knew about such things. But she did. Although not attracted to men sexually Miss Grey was very sharp in picking up the various indicators of her father’s erotic connections and had known for many years of his attachments to certain ladies of the underground. He did not actually tell her for that was not his style, but when he took her to an elaborately decorated suite in a certain hotel and left her to read in the parlour while he disappeared with his host, a beautiful younger woman who hung on his words as if they were the most delicious of intoxicating liquors, into the inner rooms for an hour returning with all the cells in his body relaxed and smiling, even without the scientific words and detailed anatomical drawings, it was obvious to her what was going on. She didn’t mind. For some reason, even at a young age, she did not have any of her mother’s Puritanism, and saw no reason to think of her father’s pleasures as wrong or evil. Indeed afterward, in the mood of expansive benevolence created by his post coital glow, he often took her to expensive shops and bought her whatever she wanted – toys when she was a child, jewelry, clothes, books and perfume when she got older.

Especially books for from her mid teens on Miss Grey was a great reader. The kind of books she was allowed to read by her mother and the nuns did not satisfy her curiosity for, as one can imagine, they leaned heavily toward the pious and the devotional, leaving out all that she was the most interested in. Her father bought her whatever she wanted. Upon entering the bookstore he walked to the sitting area in the back, grabbing a fishing magazine from the rack on the way, and left her to take all the time she wanted wheeling about her cart, piling it high with thick volunms. He didn’t even glance at the titles although it would have done him little good to do so for other than reading newspapers, racing forms, accountant reports and the church bulliten over and over again when the Minister’s sermon was unusually tedious, he read nothing and would not have even heard the names of the books or the authors she herself read. He was a purely disinterested buyer of books and left all matters of taste, content and possible moral danger for her to solve for herself. Her mother would never in a million years understand why Miss Grey loved him for this, loved him for leaving her alone and letting her chose for herself and how whatever sins he had in other areas of his life, if they were sins, were as nothing to her beside this great disinterested generosity. Her father, being a gangster and all she supposed, was a strategic man and the books were delivered wrapped tightly so the servants could not see the titles, on an afternoon when her mother was off to her bridge club. She kept them in a locked trunk behind her dresses in her walk in closet where he mother’s lack of curiosity guaranteed she would never go or even if she did, bother about hounding her daughter for the key, a process Ophelia would find unpleasant and stressful.

By the time she was in her early twenties Miss Grey read her way through the canon of western literature. She then embarked on a journey through the east, reading the classical Chinese, Japanese, Indian and others in translation. She then came back to the west and read through much not normally considered part of the canon – Conan Doyle, the great ghost stories, science fiction, the Norse Sagas, North American Indian legends. As well as fiction she read some Philosophy – Bertrand Russell, Spinoza (whom she loved dearly), Hegel, Wittgenstein, Weill, and religious philosophy, including Emerson, Dogen, the Buddhist Sutras, the Hindu classics and so many others the back of her closet had six trunks in it by the time she was twenty-five, all jammed with books. There was space left for perhaps one more trunk when fate intervened to solve forever the problem of where to hide her books.

On the twenty-third of December, in the year xxxx, Miss Grey’s father and mother, in the back of the chauffeur driven car and on their way to her mother’s oldest sister for a Christmas party, stopped at a red light. While her parents were seating in the back, ignoring one another with a frosty hauteur, three men stepped out of the bushes and shot them and the driver so many times they were all dead within minutes, her father immediately for the autopsy report said one of the bullets hitting him blew out his brains. After the period of shock and disbelief Miss Grey thought it ironic that her mother and father, who for the twenty years preceding hardly said a word to one another other than pass the salt or the front door will have to be repaired, died together in a hail of bullets. Her mother who took some five minutes to die from blood loss, if she was conscious, must have thought this is where linking oneself to a gangster gets you – breathing your last in a limo splattered with blood and guts, stinking like a cesspool and a slaughterhouse combined while the engine idles and coloured lights of the approaching police cars strobe into the cold darkness.

Well there she was, twenty-five, in possession of the legitimized part of her father’s fortune (the gangsters fought over the non legitimate), living alone in a large house staffed with six servants with the major accomplishment of her life being to have spent much of it with her nose stuck in a book. When the estate was probated she had enough money left her that, assuming she didn’t become a wastrel or a drug addict or both, she would never have to worry about money. Five of the servants, four women and a man, were older, all in their early sixties. Miss Grey had no desire to live in her parent’s style, (dinner parties, her mother’s ‘at home’ afternoons, bridge club Wednesdays, club memberships, etc.) so she set up a Trust which paid them a pension annuity and sent them on their way. The other, a young girl who had just come up from the country two years before to become Miss Grey’s maid, stayed behind in the house once lively and populated if not particularly happy, now so strangely quiet and empty. At the time Miss Grey and this girl, Aya by name, were already lovers, although by Aya’s preference, she continued performing the duties of Miss Grey’s maid.

Aya was a thin slip of a thing, a good foot shorter than Miss Grey who, granted, was tall, so tall she always wore flat heels and avoided dress designs which elongated the figure. Aya, now that the other servants were gone, became cook and cleaner as well as lady’s maid but this was not particularly onerous for Miss Steel lived simply. She rose in the morning early, dressed herself in a housedress and sweater and descended to the kitchen where she made breakfast for the both of them. She served Aya breakfast in bed in a reversal of the maid/mistress roles, for Aya, in a naked moment early in their relationship, told her the one thing she hated about being a maid was the very early morning. After this Miss Steel, who loved the early morning, insisted Aya stay in bed until she was served breakfast. After breakfast, Aya got up and went about her chores.  

To have a life ahead of you and the resources to do with it what you wish is truly a glorious thing. Yet Miss Steel would not have said so at the time for she was unsure of herself and had not yet found her way. She read and read deeply and voluminously but reading is on the passive side of the co-creation between author and reader which brings forth an imaginary world. We are, after all, enjoying an imaginative world created by another. In its receiving, its ingesting there are elements of activity but not activity of the highest order. Miss Grey understood this at twenty-five but it was a nascent understanding. By the time she was thirty her understanding was fully conscious and she became dissatisfied with merely reading. This was a problem for she read twelve hours a day. Without her reading she would have been at a loss with what to do with herself.

“Write, then,” Aya said to her when Miss Grey told her of her problem.

“Easy to say,” replied Miss Grey.

“Don’t write then,” said Aya.

“Oh, stop it,” replied Miss Grey. According to Aya, who was a very practical, down to earth person, one either did something or one did not. Dithering was not a part of her nature.

“You are too cut and dried, Aya,” said Miss Grey. “Things are not as simple as you make them out to be.”

Aya did not reply to this. That she did not irritated Miss Grey to no end for she knew silence with Aya was an expression of smugness. Why should I bother, her silence was in effect saying, to point out the obvious to this poor deluded wretch? She’ll come around to it on her own without my wasting further energy by repeating what I have already said. Miss Grey had an urge to give her a good poke but controlled herself. Aya, although smaller, was much stronger and more physically active than Miss Grey. Earlier in their relationship they had indulged themselves in several wrestling matches and Aya had won them all. Not that Miss Grey minded for in sexual relations she preferred the bottom but, although she would not admit this to herself, she expected to be on top in the world of words and social relations. Aya usually accommodated her in this but that day, she had kicked against the traces. Steaming inside but pretending to coolly resume reading her book she waited until Aya left the room and went down the stairs before she said to herself aloud but not so loud that Aya could hear her, “You little bitch.”

Two weeks later, after a great struggle not to write so as to prove Aya wrong in her smugness, she decided to set aside two hours a day, after breakfast in the morning, to write. What she would write she did not know. She would simply sit down before a blank sheet of paper and write something on it even if it was merely gibberish. Aya went out of the house in the mid morning to do the shopping. She would do it then and thus hide it from her. Otherwise Aya, silent and knowing, her big brown eyes bemused but so slightly bemused that one could not accuse their owner of definitely being so, would ascend into the seventh heaven of smugness and Miss Grey, weaker or not, would have to leap from her chair and strangle her.

But writing when she left for her shopping trip did not prevent Aya from discovering what she was doing for Aya, although largely successful in pretending to be self contained and disinterested was really very interested, sneaky and snoopy. She noticed that several days in a row as she was leaving the house, Miss Grey took on what might be called the energy of expectation. She was waiting for Aya to go and her efforts to conceal this waiting were unsuccessful. Her hands, for example, as she stood in the hall to say good bye and bestow a chaste kiss on her beloved’s sweet smelling and lovely cheek, her hands were already involuntarily giving away the game by reaching out as if to arrange paper before her on a desk. Her body, leaned over to bestow its kiss, was filled with impatient exurberance. “Go!” it seemed to say. “Get thee gone; I have important things to do.”

So one day, the fifth day of Miss Grey’s new regime, Aya went out the front door and down the step but when she reached the fence at the end of the walk leading to the street she turned right instead of left. This led her to the alley running along the side of the property and eventually to another alley which went across the back of the house. When she reached midway along the back, as lithe as a cat she slipped through the bushes growing there and came up to the back of the house. The day before she had put the orchard ladder against the sill of Miss Grey’s second floor study. When she reached the window she slowly raised her head until she could see Miss Steel seated at her desk and writing in such a furious and concentrated fashion that Aya suspected that even if she fell off the ladder and loudly crashed upon the ground below, Miss Grey would hardly notice. This seemed to Aya simultaneously a cause for celebration and a source of sadness. But now that she was on the ladder, spying through the window on her friend and lover, she felt somewhat ashamed of herself. She climbed down as quietly as she could and went off to do her shopping.

What was Miss Grey writing? Well, gibberish mostly but not entirely for her reading had given her an excellent vocabulary and sense of structure and rhythm so that the descriptive passages she was writing, although lacking context, narrative superstructure and directional drive, were, nonetheless, in their own way, competent and skillful and each hour she put into sitting at the desk and writing was making them more so. They were essentially autobiographical, not in the sense they were direct transcriptions of passages from her own life, but in that they were descriptions of social scenes her mother might have experienced or ones that Miss Grey either imagined or experienced herself, or indeed, imagined she had experienced. When you read as much as Miss Grey had read it is sometimes hard to tell the difference.

Six weeks after she began sitting at her desk two hours each morning, writing, Miss Grey came out of the closet and gave one of the passages to Aya to read. She wondered for some time whether she should do so for Aya, although far from illiterate, was not well read. She read romance novels running from the racy dime store variety to the at least somewhat elegant and refined. With romance novels if they consist of long descriptions of emotional and moral states, they are elegant and refined. If they lean to descriptions of sexual acts performed naked or semi naked then they are vulgar, perhaps even pornographic. Miss Grey thought the distinction silly. The only distinction she herself respected was whether the writing was good or not, although she had to admit that the later were excellent preludes to love making while the former more conducive to a discussion of morality and social order. Whether an ethical discussion was more significant in the larger order of things than an orgasm was a question which made no sense to her. But then again, since ethical discussions can only be had by sentient beings and sentient beings can only be created by a sexual act, then perhaps the orgasm was superior or at least came first as a necessary premise to questions of morality.

The passage she gave Aya was a description of a dinner party. It was in the style of Proust, although  simplified, stripped of much of its arabesques and elaborate metaphors, understandably, as a nod toward the magazine style of the day, for although a great wanderer through the fields of the literary imagination, Miss Steel was a grounded woman and had in her sights certain women’s magazines she planned on sending her work to once she had achieved a satisfactory level of competency. Miss Steel knew the foundation of the piece was Proust but Aya did not, for she had never read Proust, indeed had never even heard of him.

Aya loved the piece. She praised it to high heaven, especially what she considered to be a subtext of smouldering eroticism involving the young heroine (as Aya called her) and the headwaiter which while granted it did not actually break out and declare itself, was still there lurking in the background so to speak, eyeballs rolling and tongue hanging out. Aya was sure the success of the piece lay in a great red sea of eroticism lying beneath the elegant restraint of the prose and the gentlewomanly tinkle of conversation and crockery. She claimed such a combination would sell like hotcakes and urged Miss Grey to send it off to the magazines immediately. Miss Grey was a little taken aback at this analysis but on reflection thought Aya to be essentially correct. She spent three days combing the draft for errors and then sent it off.

Nobody could have been more surprised than Miss Grey when a letter came back two weeks later accepting the story. Three weeks later another letter arrived with a cheque enclosed. Aya was ecstatic. Miss Grey was now a writer. To be the partner and companion of a writer, to Aya, was much more prestigious than being the partner of a rich woman. Riches were, after all, inherited, whereas being a writer came from one’s own talent and hard work. She insisted Miss Grey move her work area to the room at the back on the ground floor, twice the size of the study on the second floor. Miss Grey, after first resisting (she was very conservative – her first impulse was to leave things just the way they were) allowed herself to be swept away by Aya’s enthusiasm. Aya cleaned and painted the room herself, ordered in bookshelves, brought carpet samples from the store for Miss Grey to choose an area rug, and arranged for movers to come and move the chairs and big desk down from the old study. It was truly a magnificent room. It had a bank of windows out onto the garden in the back, high windows from floor to ceiling. At first Miss Grey felt dwarfed by the room’s size, by the great sweep of the window view. She soon learned to pull the drapes when she was writing. (something which Aya thought strange – surely the view out the window should inspire Miss Grey) She positioned two of the bookcases so they enclosed the space to the right of her desk. Thus ‘entombed’, as she called it, she wrote mornings everyday from eight until noon. When the old mantle clock (with new, accurate works installed) struck twelve she capped her pen (she used an old fountain pen of her father’s fitted with a new nib) rose from the desk and walked into the kitchen where she had lunch with Aya.

Within two years Miss Grey was published regularly by the a dozen high circulation magazines. Every week she received letters from other magazines requesting story submissions. A publisher was getting ready a book of her short stories for publication. The magazines she wrote for were asking for a photograph and biographical details ( she had given them a brief fictional bio and published the stories under a pen name – Olivia Monmoth) but she was unsure what she wanted to do about all this. She didn’t really want to give interviews and the thought of her photograph being studied by thousands of people made her slightly nauseous.

“Well,” said Aya, “You are a famous writer now and you will just have to put up with it. You owe it to your readers and to the magazines which send you all those fat cheques.”

“Nonsense,” replied Miss Grey. “I owe them absolutely nothing. They don’t have to read my stories if they don’t want to and neither do the magazines have to publish them. I would have to be a complete fool to talk myself into thinking that I owe my life to anyone just because I write stories.”

Aya thought this attitude very ungrateful. This, unfortunately she thought, was typical of Miss Grey. She supposed it to be a matter of upbringing. To be brought up a princess leads to exaggerated ideas about one’s independence. But then again, thought Aya, Miss Grey was independent, wasn’t she? She could stop writing stories tomorrow, never get another cheque and it would make no real difference. She would go on living in the big house just as before. Nothing would change.

“Nonetheless,” said Aya, “publicity must be taken care of somehow. People like to know something about their favourite author. They like to feel as if they know them and share in some way in what they imagine to be their exciting life.”

Miss Grey broke out laughing. Although she always looked the lady and for the most part acted as if she were one, thought Aya, Miss Grey could often be very vulgar. When something made her incredulous she laughed in the braying style of a donkey while flinging her arms about as if she were drowning and searching for a grip on a dock or a lifesaver. When this subsided she snorted loudly three of four times and then wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. When this performance was over Aya said,

“Dear Ali, (Miss Grey’s Christian name) surely you are not so insane to think you can be a popular author and remain anonymous.”

“Yes, I am exactly so insane dear Aya,” replied Miss Grey. “They get text and that’s all they get.” This ended the conversation for it was eight AM and Miss Steel led Aya to the door by the elbow and pushed her gently into the corridor. For Miss Steel the writing hours between eight and twelve were an absolute.

Miss Grey’s stories were so popular in the magazines that the publisher decided to forgo their usual requirement of an extensive book tour. Miss Grey refused to do the tour but the publisher thought she was already so well known the lack of a tour would not hurt sales. They were right. Top of the best seller list and so on. This, of course, brought even more pressure on the publisher to trot out their best selling author but unfortunately for them Miss Grey was not the trotting type. They sent her letter after letter laying out various possible schedules (concentrating on the sunny south for it was winter and the north where Miss Grey lived was frozen solid and they thought they might lure her with all expenses paid trip through the balmy south) but Miss Grey refused them all, eventually, after ascertaining the envelope did not contain a cheque, tearing them up without reading them.

Aya could hardly believe all this. An expenses paid trip through the south from coast to coast, staying at the finest hotels, eating chef cooked meals seemed to her to be the summit of desirability. But Miss Grey was adamant. She was not the slightest bit interested in going and would not go. Miss Grey liked it exactly where she was with her daily schedule, her cats, her aviary at the back of the house, her two walks a day, her comfortable, cozy bed with the iron fireplace at the foot where Aya built up the fire and put on the screen just before they went to bed. Twice a week they went to the movie house by taxi, twice a month they had dinner at a downtown restaurant. They went to the city’s two offerings of opera a year, to the three or four ballet performances and to the Chamber Orchestra. Relatives were entertained once in the spring and again at Christmas time. Since the gangster was dead even Miss Grey’s two doctor married aunts attended. They had the immediate neighbours over for a barbecue midsummer. One year after first publishing Miss Grey had run into an old school friend who was also lesbian and her and Aya now had a gathering once a month where the ‘girls’ came and had dinner. Three of these were great readers and they met six or seven times a year to discuss books and read poetry aloud. Two gay males also attended, friends of Miss Grey’s original contact and one straight male who everyone referred to as HIM, even when he was present for he was a good humoured man and enjoyed his status as the only heterosexual man in the crowd. With all this Miss Grey was mightily satisfied and could see no reason to go gallivanting about subjecting herself to rude questions from strangers. All of her friends knew she was Olivia Monmoth but they were not overly impressed. To them she was Ali and that she wrote ‘racy’ stories for the magazines which sold like hotcakes was interesting but not that interesting. They were far more impressed by the ballroom where she and Aya entertained and even more impressed by the catered dinners and tortes cooked jointly by Aya and Miss Grey for dessert. And finally they were just friends for as time went on, perhaps because Miss Grey was doing something she loved and was thus satisfied and relaxed, they simply enjoyed the couple’s company for they were warm, funny and enjoyable to be with. The icing on the cake was Miss Grey’s mind. She was witty, highly intelligent and erudite. There was no anti intellectualism at Ali and Aya’s, very different from other spots in the city where money and knuckle dragging were de rigeur.

Two years after Miss Grey’s first collection of stories, the publishers came out with another. The head of the firm decided to send, unannounced, for she was sure Miss Grey would give a resounding no if asked, a representative to try coaxing her into an appearance at two or three events in the Big City. So one day in June, a fine sunny day so warm Aya and Ali were eating lunch in the side yard where the sun was pouring through the elm foliage and dappling the white table cloth, a young woman knocked at the door. The two women could hear the knock clearly. Ali got up and peeked around the corner of the house. Aya watched her gazing at whatever was there for some time, wrinkling her brow in study and then came back and sit down at the table.

“Who is it?” asked Aya.

“A young woman from the publisher,” Ali replied.

“Are you sure?” asked Aya.

“Not absolutely but ninety-nine percent,”

“What are you going to do?” asked Aya.

“Nothing,” said Ali.

“That would be rude,” said Aya.

“They started the rudeness by not taking no for an answer.”

“Still, that doesn’t give you an excuse for continuing it,” said Aya.

“Yes it does,” Ali replied.

Aya decided to say nothing. When Ali got into a mood the best thing was to leave or remain silent. She never stayed in her moods for long but when she was in one it was impossible to deal with her. Trying to make her see sense only made it worse.

The knocking from around the corner continued with short intervals of rest. Aya supposed publisher’s agents would have to be persistent. If they weren’t they would never last.

When, after ten minutes, the knocking had not stopped, Ali rose from her seat and walked around the corner, coming back a few minutes later with a young woman who looked like she ought to be in high school rather than knocking on the doors of famous authors. She was flustered and embarrassed. Ali sat her in her own chair and went and fetched herself another. Aya placed the plate of sandwiches in front of her and poured her a cup of tea. After an ineffective protest that she was not really hungry the young woman dug into the sandwiches, eating steadily until they were all gone. She drank three cups of tea. Aya and Ali watched her in astonishment. Perhaps, between assignments, the publisher kept her imprisoned on half rations. When she was done Ali invited her to come along for the after lunch walk.

The young woman stayed for three days. After the first day she gave up trying to persuade Ali to tour. The contest was unequal. Ali was a very determined person who knew exactly what she wanted and the young woman was, well, more or less just an ordinary young woman. But Ali, feeling sorry for her, did throw her a bone.

“Why don’t you make out as if you were Olivia Monmoth and do the touring yourself?

“Oh Goodness!” exclaimed the young woman and broke into a horsy laugh.

“Why not?” asked Ali.

“It wouldn’t be right,” was the reply.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Ali. “There is no right and wrong in such matters. It’s business. If the lady’s clubs are convinced you are Olivia then you are Olivia.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Of course you could. With a little coaching you could be Olivia to a ‘T’.”

The young woman continued to protest but her resistance eventually broke down under Ali’s browbeating. Aya and Ali had a loud argument that night when the young woman went out for a walk. When she came back the three of them had a long talk.

Aya traveled with the young woman back to her Big City and (with phone calls to Ali and her lawyer) negotiated the young woman’s contract.

“It’s an acting job,” Ali said to Aya when she arrived home. “That poor thing doesn’t have what it takes to be an agent for dog trainer. Now she has a nice job lunching at lady’s clubs three months a year with a generous salary far in excess of what she would make doing anything else.”

“I’m just worried she might loose her balance pretending she is someone else,” said Aya.

“But the someone else she is pretending to be doesn't exist. Besides stage and screen actors do it all the time. Whether it unbalances them depends on what they started out with in the first place. She’s a very grounded girl at heart. She’ll be just fine.”

Enquiry Manager

Enquiry Manager






Enquiry Manager



Being a Enquiry Manager administrator was an isolating job. Firstly one worked in a compound sitting on a neck of land jutting out into the estuary of the river, a compound surrounded even along the river by high, guarded walls with coils of razor wire and electronic sensors atop it. There were sentry boxes every three hundred feet, manned 24 – 7. Secondly the compound itself was isolated. The jut narrowed as it came onto the mainland presenting a three hundred yard interface at the neck which was double walled with the land on the city side of the walls completely flat and empty for six hundred feet. The section of city which began at the end of this was a wasteland of ruined warehouses, at night their blind, empty, lightless windows staring out at the darkness so sadly that regardless of the fact they were wood and bricks, metal and mortar, they seemed, in their lifeless abandonment, their desolation, to give off an atmosphere of organic despair. Thirdly one left the compound infrequently. Other than his vacations (two months a year) during the years he worked there Alan left the compound only six times.

Alan had a fourth source for his sense of isolation – he felt at odds with most of his fellow administrators whom he considered to be blinkered in the extreme and whose opinions he considered, for the most part, to be borderline psychotic. Alan’s reputation was that of a silent man, a lone wolf. This was not really true of his essential self but certainly was of the self he had created to get along with his fellows in the compound. By saying little he was excused from repeating the shibboleths they mouthed every day which if he himself had said them would have made him physically ill.

He stayed because he needed the money. He was the sole support of a family of ten who lived in modest circumstances in a house across the river. He and his estranged wife had six children, all of them grown and none capable of making a living. Five had a rare genetic disease common among the city’s inhabitants. A small minority of scientists wondered if it were not caused by the city’s drinking water which they claimed to be chockfull of contaminants but the majority of informed opinion sided with the Council of Considered and Thoughtful Resolutions, which claimed the disease a result of karmic obstructions imbedded in the DNA of a long line of ancestors. The disease wasted muscle, made walking and balance tricky and thus rendered them incapable of sustained work of any kind. The sixth child was blind and, according to the decrees of the Council, to be tolerated in the interior of a private space but not allowed out in public. The children along with his wife made seven. The others making up the household were his two aged parents and his wife’s bedridden mother. As has already been said the house they lived in was modest but fortunately it was large, a necessity for a house sheltering such a number.

Every month when he received his pay Alan sent seventy-five percent of it in cash, by messenger, across the river. His wife sent a note back by the same messenger thanking him. The note was written in a fine backward leaning script perfectly centred on a piece of brownish notepaper and sealed in an envelope of the same colour. The bottom drawer of his desk, a large drawer twelve inches deep, was full of these notes all replaced neatly in their envelopes with the flaps tucked in. That his wife had sent them every month and that he read them and saved them in the drawer seemed to him to be a symbolic comment upon their marriage and the cool, exact and formal thing it had been. When he signed the contract to work for Enquiry Manager which involved him living in the compound ten months a year, he was mightily relieved for by that time the tension in the household between he and his wife was close to unbearable. He spent two weeks of his yearly vacation in a hotel room visiting the house every day. The other six weeks he spent upriver in a cabin he built some years ago with his own hands.

Fortunately for Allan his job at Enquiry Manager was technical. He was the administrator for the unit which wrote code for robots. He had his own small building containing five private offices with a large common area. He had twenty-one staff ranging from the janitor to an assistant manager. When he first came to the compound he wrote code but over the years he moved more and more away from writing to administrating and supervising. Now he did no writing at all. His days were filled with assigning tasks, dealing with personnel issues, balancing budgets and writing reports. He didn’t hate his job but found no real satisfaction in it. Yet he considered himself lucky to have a good paying job that he did not loath and which enabled him to support his family in a more than adequate style.

But at the same time all this was true, Alan had a great longing. His work was journeyman and technical and he longed for something more absorbing, more compelling. In three months he would be fifty and time was passing by. During his ten months a year in the compound he had little time for anything but work. In the six weeks he spent at the cabin he brought with him at least one, sometimes two of his grown children and although they were mostly independent, there were still much that he had to do as a result of them being there. He had a longing to be free of his responsibilities. He would have loved to wander about the country for a year or so seeing how other people lived, what they did with themselves, if there were any who managed to live a life free of the slavery his own life had become. But this was impossible. His family would starve. To follow his own desires at the expense of others would bring down upon him not only self-condemnation but the anger of heaven as well. He had created two poles in his mind and he was torn between them. He felt he would never be free of the conflict and despair he felt growing within him everyday.

Then, one day in his eleventh year in the compound, on a fine day in late spring, on one of the short trips outside his job occasionally required, he met an unusual man. The meeting he left the compound for was in an office building in the old downtown not far from the river. When it was over the two men with him decided to go on a tour of the building. Alan declined. He had taken it some years before. He and the other two agreed to meet in the lobby of the monstrous high rise when the tour was over, two hours or so. He took the elevator to the ground floor and walked outside onto the vast boulevard  running along the front of the building. The pavement was jammed with automated vehicles. The noise was incredible. The stink of gasoline, exhaust fumes, burnt oil, hot rubber made him slightly nauseous. He didn’t know but he suspected that if he went down the side alley one hundred yards from the entrance, he might run into some area worth walking through and perhaps a place to grab a bite to eat. The security robot followed him, of course. It was strictly against regulations to disable it but he was on the team that wrote its code, so as soon as they turned into the alley and was out of sight, he ordered it to stop, flipped up its control cover and, punching in a series of complicated instructions, ordered it to wait where it was until he came back. Over its shoulders he draped the bright red suit coat denoting him as a member of the bureaucrat classes. Underneath he wore only a generic white shirt cut much like the one worn by most people you see on the street. He wore a pair of scruffy jeans, something his superiors objected to but stopped short of insisting on, for it was the tradition in the compound that the code writers dressed more freely than other bureaucrats. Thus decked out he would appear to people not close enough to notice the expensive watch, the impeccable haircut, the expensive handmade shoes, to be an ordinary person, perhaps a store owner or a small trader of some kind.

The alley was a long one for the building was deep. When he came to the end of it there was another alley traveling at right angles to it. After a moment’s hesitation he turned right for the river was somewhere to the right and he might come upon a park, or docks or something different from the usual maze of urban alleys. He was surprised to find that after ten minutes of walking along this new alley he was at the river. He had thought the river was much farther away.

In river cities it is usual for the well to do to live along the river banks – spreads of lawns with docks and sailboats on the riverbank, and above this the house sprawling its wings across a hill built up to prevent flooding and create a view. But this was not so in the City for the better off chose to live outside the city, in places similar to the compound, circled round with walls and guards. They felt being spread out along the river made them too vulnerable. So, much of the riverbanks were occupied by the poor. There was the occasional ‘gracious’ home chopped up into rooms and small apartments but much of the banks were occupied by homemade shacks constructed of salvaged or stolen materials. Into the sluggish current of the river jutted wharves made of tree trunks cut from the copses of trees along the banks. From these the local people swam, fished and launched their primitive homemade boats. Some worked weirs along the banks. Other used nets of various kinds and description. These people were called the river people and perhaps three quarters of their food came from fishing, shooting birds and trapping small animals along the banks.

The river people were not gardeners. Some of the women tended small salad gardens but that was about it. So Alan was very surprised when, upon coming to the end of his alley to find a long, wide vegetable garden leading down to the river. As it swept down to the bank the garden flowed, so to speak, around the dilapidated sides of a small shack distinguished from most of the river shacks by having a stone chimney sticking up through its metal roof. Midway down the garden, on the left hand side, was a man working between the rows with a hoe. Most uncharacteristically Alan decided to walk along the cut grass beside the garden and speak with this man. Ordinarily he would not have been here in the first place but, given that, it was truly extraordinary that he decided to walk up to the man and engage him in conversation.

The man was a fisherman who came from far up the river where the people, besides fishing and hunting, grew large gardens.

“Everyone here,” he said, “thinks I am crazy to slave away in the garden. They think it unmanly, women’s work. But I don’t care what they think. My family and I have vegetables all year from the garden. The people around are hungry by the end of the winter and sick of eating fish and only fish while we eat root vegetables with our fish all winter long.”

It was early in the season and they had an hour’s conversation about growing plants, with the man doing most of the talking for what did Alan know about growing plants? Before he left the man gave him a bag containing a variety of seeds and told him how to plant them. Carrying the seeds Alan walked back to meet his two companions.

Alan lived in a small house behind his workplace. It was thought necessary that Managers live in separate quarters to keep a certain distance between them and those they supervised. At the side of the house was an open area which got lots of sun. When Alan dug in it with a shovel the earth was loamy and black, the kind of earth the man told him to plant in. Over two days, after work, Alan turned up a twelve by twenty section, screened some soil for the tops of the rows and planted. He had rows of beans, beets, carrots, tomatoes, green pepper, onions, squash, garlic and spinach.

Alan was already considered eccentric by his fellows in the compound. He seldom went to social events organized by the block social convenor. In conversation he was succinct, laconic. Even though he was the Manager of his section, at celebratory social events he attended for a bare minimum of time and then suddenly disappeared, leaving the hierarchical representation to his much more convivial assistant manager. His opinions on social issues were not known. When people began a conversation on such questions he listened politely for a few minutes without saying anything himself and then left, often so abruptly his departure was considered by many to be rude. He did not gossip although he would listen to it sometimes with a bemused expression on his face. When he did talk in an animated manner, it was about an idea or a book he was reading or a development in computer code writing. Occasionally he would say very cynical things about the Environmental Committee’s new plans to clean up the river, such as, “Well, I suppose they will simply calibrate the sensors differently. That should help a lot.” or “If they take readings after ordering a two day cessation of effluent dumping, that should do the trick.” Very few caught the sharp drift of these comments so he was never reported. Most thought them a manifestation of a weird sense of humour as if he were a man addicted to puns or Latin jokes and so narcissistic he failed to realize others didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

So when Alan began digging up the soil beside his house and some weeks later plants began to grow, strange, queer looking things no one had ever seen before, to most people this was simply Alan expanding his realm of eccentric behaviour. That he spent his spare time watering, weeding, and hauling wheelbarrows full of leaves to build a compost heap, was strange but not so strange if one considered it was Alan doing it. When the garden began to produce he set up a portable gas stove in his porch to make stir fry, soups and stews. He invited people over for a bowl of stew but most considered his concoctions to be far too earthy and were afraid they might contain harmful bacteria. It was as if they were made to eat grass and rough, chunky, strangely pungent things lacking the wonderfully even consistency of the cafeteria food with its smooth tastes chemically formulated, sugared and oil injected. His visitors dwindled until there was only two, one a genuine adherent, the other a sycophant looking for a leg up the promotion ladder. The genuine adherent, a strange bird like Alan, a much younger code writer whose own anti social behaviour was tolerated because of his brilliance, began going to Allan’s every evening and helping hoe and haul leaves for the compost pile. This man’s name was Uri and although he was the long, skinny type who reminded one of a reed or a tall stalk of grass, he was amazingly strong despite his spindly, stretched out muscles. On Saturday he and Alan worked in the plot all day, stopping occasionally for a bowl of stew or a green salad or a delicious roasted beet or two. During work breaks, drinking coffee while sitting on the grass beside the garden they talked away at a great pace. Everyone who saw them assumed they were talking about plants and the garden and this was true but they had another topic of conversation as well.

Uri came from a small community in the hinterland. In school he was obviously brilliant and at the age of fifteen was given a full scholarship in the City. Otherwise he would not have been able to attend for his parents were small farmers with nowhere near the resources necessary to pay for a son at the university. The intellectual ferment at the University was just the thing Uri needed. He blossomed like a wild rose and graduated with a Doctorate in computer science before he was twenty. He came to the compound a few months later and had been there for five years. His specialty was robotics. Within the first year he was the source of more innovations than the whole robot research unit had been in the previous ten. Alan recognized his worth the first time he met him and was ruthless in clearing away the deadwood in the department which would have hampered him. He employed the very simple method of transferring jealous and reactionary researchers to other areas of research. In this Alan had not the slightest scruple. For him those who had become stupid and calcified should get out of the way and if they didn’t he removed them.

From the age of twelve to nineteen Uri lived mainly in the world of ideas. He lived, breathed and ate ideas. Three weeks after his nineteenth birthday he fell in love with a young woman whom he met at a student party on the riverbank. These parties were informal annual spring events in student life in the City, one which the university tried its best to discourage but they may as well have tried to prevent spring itself, for the exuberance of the young people and bonfires lighting the dark while the students danced to the weird anarchistic music they loved, went together like matter and energy. The young woman, beautiful and as spirited as a tigress, by some strange principle of attraction, straight armed all the good looking frat boys and zeroed in on Uri, gangly, solitary, self absorbed, whose male beauty was of the highly individual kind but whose intelligence, character and personality shone like gold nugget beneath the surface of an obscuring pool. Uri, granted somewhat otherworldly, but certainly not blind to the beauty of women, did not object to being seduced and the two young people spent the summer together living in a shack on the river belonging to her father, a fisherman. After this they were inseparable. Uri’s contract at the compound included that his ‘wife’ (they were unmarried, neither believed in it) live with him there in separate quarters. This was unusual for the compound contained few women, the men were expected to live away from their wives, but when the contract negotiator tried to refuse him, Uri said he would be leaving then and going back to his home village to work on his father’s farm. This was not an idle threat either. The young couple had determined to do exactly that if she were not allowed to live in the compound. The negotiator quickly changed his mind and made the arrangements.

The bond with his woman changed things for Uri. He began to notice the solid real world about him and the humans who inhabited it. His introduction to her family, physical workers much like the farmers he came from, made him examine the prejudices against their class interwoven into much of what he was taught at the University, the notion that intelligence flowed upward, for example. It was clear from his memories of his own community and his relationships with his girl’s family, that this simply was not true. Fortunately for Uri this did not lead, as it does for many, to exchanging an old set of prejudices for a new. But it did lead to him wanting to leave his research job at the compound. It did lead to him looking into the practical uses of his discoveries and becoming horrified at the ramifications. One of his early electronic discoveries, for instance, seemed to be leading towards a robot which could hover above a crowd, identify a single individual in it and kill him or her with a laser beam or an explosive rocket. He and Ella, his partner, spent hours in the evenings talking about leaving and starting up a farm north on the river. This is why he was so taken with the notion of gardening and when Alan invited him to help he snapped up the invitation. Gardening, farming, could be a way out, a way he and Ella could create a life for themselves outside what he had come to call (only in his own mind and to Ella and a few very trusted friends) the structure of horror.

What he and Alan spoke of then, was leaving. But the situation of the two men was radically different. Uri and his partner could leave at any time. They could either go through the official channels which might take a year or two, or slip away at night up the river into the hinterland where even the authorities could not find them. Alan, on the other hand, had responsibilities. He could not leave his family to starve. Uri, after becoming aware of the problem for the older man, did some thinking and a little tinkering and came up with the suggestion of a solution. But Alan was leery. Not only did this solution seem dangerous but dishonest as well.

“Of course it is dishonest,” Uri said. “But they themselves have been dishonest and it is only a matching dishonesty. Fire must be fought with fire.”

Still Alan was doubtful. “What if they catch us?” he asked.

“They will kill us of course,” replied Uri. “But at least they will kill us straight off. What we have right now will kill us very slowly over a number of years.”

For two years Alan and Uri talked about Uri’s solution, Alan leaning toward it one month and away the next. Finally, when they were harvesting the beets from the third of Alan’s gardens, Uri said to him, “She wants to go. She hates it here and so do I. We can no longer live like this. We are becoming moral monsters, predators. She feels she is living in some kind of terrible limbo world where there is no connection to the earth, no connection to basic sanity. I have some money saved. We plan to buy a sailboat and leave without permission. She says we cannot go through official channels. She says they will never let me go. You are the goose which lays the golden eggs she says. She says once they find there will be no more golden eggs they will kill the goose, bake it in the oven.”

Alan begged Uri to give him another two days to think. Uri agreed. “But only two days,” he told him. “Time is running out. No more wasting time.”

The next day Alan and Uri went for a walk along the river and Alan agreed to his plan.

The plan involved Uri computer hacking and Alan using his administrative authority to cover it up. There was to be a transfer of funds from a number of research accounts into a complex maze of external accounts and then into a combination of gold and cash. When these transfers were complete all three of them, Uri, Ella and Alan, would, during their next vacation, (happily synchronized with the end of the gardening season) first leave town ostensibly for a tour along the river, and then, when they thought the opportunity right, up the river into the hinterland. No one but the three of them and an uncle of Ella’s were in on this plan. In the compound you could trust no one. There were spies and sycophants everywhere.

The transfer of funds went without a hitch. It was not necessary for Alan to cover anything up. No one made enquiries. It was as if nothing had happened. The gold and cash were in the hands of Ella’s uncle, a fisherman and part time smuggler.

Uri went on his vacation three days before Alan, staying with Ella in the same shack on the river they spent the summer they first met.

On the night before he was to leave the compound for his vacation, Alan received a message from an old friend. Alan was taking his nightly walk before turning in when the man came up behind him and fell into step with him.

“I will tell you something,” the man said, “and then leave right away. It is too dangerous for me to speak at length with you but what I tell you now is all I know anyway. They know. A man will be on the bus into the city tomorrow – one of them. He will be the only one on the bus you don’t know. He will try to befriend you and invite himself down to the river to meet your friends. That’s all. Good luck.”

Alan’s friend slipped off the path and disappeared into the darkness.

Later that night Alan texted this information to Uri on the secure device Uri had given him.

“Bring the man along with you, of course,” Uri texted back. “There is more than enough room for another in our little expedition.”

Alan did as Uri told him. The man seemed delighted with how easy it was to make his connection. As they walked along the alley beyond the tall office building, the alley leading to the old man’s garden and in turn to the dwellings of Ella’s relatives, the man smiled broadly at the grass fields and the tall, towering trees as if he indeed were out on a pleasure excursion after a long period of hard work which had been stressful and tiring. But his excursion did not last long. When they were halfway down the alley, in the midst of shade and shadow under the canopies of the great elms lining the road, someone shot the man through the head with some kind of silenced weapon for there was no sound but for a soft pizzzzzt. He dropped like a bag of sand onto the road and almost immediately two men come out from the trees with a wheelbarrow. They stripped the dead man completely naked, one of them cutting from his neck a device embedded under the skin. His clothes and the device they rolled into a ball and dropped into a large metal drum filled with water by the side of the road. They weighted it down with a cinder block and it sunk to the bottom out of sight. They then picked up the body and lay it in the wheelbarrow and covered it with a blue tarp. This was all done so efficiently, so quickly that when it was over, Alan could hardly believe it had happened. But it had happened and the two men were gesturing to him to walk with them as one of them pushed the barrow down the road to the river, while the other, walking beside him, hummed a popular tune Alan often heard on the radio. He followed. What else could he to do?

Uri, Alan, and Ella left that night, as soon as it was dark, to sail up river.