“Hey, I came from the Toronto force, remember?”
“When you were, what, thirty? Loach is forty-five.”
“I believe his wife is from up here originally.”
“She lived here for like a week when she was ten. Did you know he’s coaching Chouinard’s son’s hockey team?”
“Chouinard is not gonna let something like that sway him. He’s just seeing the Montrose thing. Don’t take it personally.”
“You know my record, John.”
“I do, and I agree it’s not fair.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
“But you agree with the D.S. that Loach is some kind of super-cop? Pick of the litter?”
“Too early to say.”
“So to get taken seriously, I just have to crack a high-profile case.”
“Apparently.”
“And be male.”
Laura Lacroix did not show up for work. The entire staff of CID spent the rest of the day interviewing people who knew her. No one had any idea where she might be.
Cardinal ate dinner alone at his kitchen table. Afterward, he went over to Delorme’s place and they watched a movie together. They had been doing this for well over a year now, and sometimes Cardinal worried it might be a bad idea. On the other hand, there was no law against being friends with your colleague.
Delorme had rented The Mission, Jeremy Irons playing a Jesuit priest who tries to save the souls-and the lives-of the natives he has come to seventeenth-century South America to convert. When the movie ended, they sat in silence for a while watching the final credits roll.
Cardinal turned to Delorme and was halfway through saying he thought it was a pretty good movie before he realized she was crying.
He didn’t know what to do. Or if he should do anything at all. Finally he came out with “Really got to you, huh?”
Delorme shrugged. She sat forward on the couch and hid her eyes with one hand and cried harder.
“Lise…”
Cardinal went to the kitchen and found a Kleenex box and came back and tapped her knee with it. She clutched at it blindly and pulled out a handful of tissues. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose and said “God” a couple of times, shaking her head.
Cardinal said nothing.
Eventually Delorme said, “I don’t think it’s the movie.”
“No?”
“This Loach thing. Must have hit me harder than I thought. Guess I didn’t realize what kind of ego I had-until it got wounded.” She took another Kleenex from the box and blew her nose again. “And now I’m going to feel even worse for having cried in front of you.”
“Forget it, Lise. We’re friends first, colleagues second.”
“On the other hand, it could just be hormones.”
“Yeah,” Cardinal said. “I get those too.”
From the Blue Notebook
Before relating exactly what happened to the Arcosaur project, I should say a little about the terrain.
Drift Station Arcosaur (Arctic Ocean Synoptic Automatic Resource) was located on an ice island designated T-6, the T being short for “target”-a taxonomic legacy of the Cold War. We were living on what used to be part of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf until it snapped off from Ellesmere Island in the mid-fifties and itself became an island. For more than three thousand years it had been attached to Canada, but by 1986 it had circled the polar cap many times, drifting aimlessly-but always clockwise-with the Arctic gyre. It was well to the east of its starting point when we first pitched camp on it, but the grooves and furrows of the surface left no doubt as to its origin: they all ran in the same direction, what used to be east-west when the island was stationary.
Twenty kilometres long and riding ten to fifteen metres higher than the surrounding ice pack, our ice island was selected by the Polar Research Institute because it was big enough to land planes on. Every now and again we would get lodged in the ice pack, only to become mobile with the first change in wind or current, or the first hard knock from another floe. But our radio beacon made us easy to find.
(Point of history: It was thought that Robert Peary mistook an ice island like ours for actual land, which he named Crocker’s Land and put on the map. Some have hypothesized that Peary was misled by an Arctic mirage, but such mirages are commonplace and he was far too seasoned an explorer to make that mistake. Just as paleontologists like to discover species, explorers need to discover land. Crocker was Peary’s patron. In any case, some years later an exploration party perished as a result of finding nothing at his coordinates but open water.)
Three of us-Wyndham, Vanderbyl and I-had been here since April, along with a few support staff. The others joined us in July. Elongated freshwater lakes-called leads-had formed in the island’s grooves, some as long as ten kilometres, and these were a subject of intense biological research. Their blue colour is of a specific tone and brilliance I have seen nowhere else. The eyes of certain Nordic movie stars come to mind.
People who hear about Arctic research-that is, winter research-for the first time express wonder that anyone can stand the isolation, let alone the extreme temperatures. And the prospect of spending months on end in twenty-four-hour darkness they find terribly depressing. But it’s actually the Arctic summers that test one’s inner resources, at least on an ice island. Even though the temperature may never rise much above freezing, the twenty- four-hour sun turns the surface to slush, sometimes as deep as two feet, making all outdoor activity much harder. Supply planes can no longer land, dramatically increasing the isolation factor, and then there is the sun itself. If an Arctic researcher is going to snap, it will most likely occur on a summer day of blinding light, when he is exhausted from struggling to move equipment even a short distance, when he is wet (and as a result far colder than he ever was in winter) and when restful sleep is a receding memory.
But summer was still months away when Rebecca arrived. The surface was still firm’ one could still believe in solidity. I had no reason to be thrown by her simply entering the same room.
Sitting around with Wyndham after dinner one evening, I said, Before I die, I would like to taste Shackleton’s whisky. (A crate of it had been discovered beneath the floorboards of his shack.)
They won’t allow it, Wyndham said. It’ll be preserved for posterity.
He would have wanted us to have a drink.
Wrong pole. Anyway, doesn’t enter into it, what Shackleton might have wanted. Didn’t realize you were such a lush, he added with a smile.
No human being could dislike Wyndham. Even in the academic/scientific community, so rife with competition-for jobs, for grants, for recognition-so awash with rivers of bad blood, you never heard a bad word about Gord Wyndham, nor did he ever speak harshly of another human being. For that alone he was remarkable, but he was also a first-rate scientist, open-minded yet skeptical, precise, conscientious, generous.
About his family life I knew nothing first-hand, but he was always telling us about his wife, whom he found humorously, delightfully unscientific, and his two young boys, about whom he related stories as if they were anecdotes from the field. I told him he should write a monograph in the style of the old Geographical Society: Some Observations on the Curious Behaviour of Prepubescent Males in the Ottawa Valley. He spoke of them with such a charming combination of love and awe that even I, a person bored to petrifaction by people’s families, remember his stories of Phil and Milo-even those names! — with pleasure and affection.
Eleven bottles wrapped in straw and paper dating back to 1907, I said. The Nimrod expedition. A brand no longer in existence. Mackinlay’s, if I remember right.
Shame the poor guy never got to drink them himself.
