The Blue Helmet (10 page)

The place was so quiet I could hear the kitchen clock ticking. I found the light switch and suddenly I was back in the familiar, messy world of Cutter’s office. Little red and green lights along the desk top told me the computers and peripherals had never been switched off, and the
TV
monitors showed the four outside locations covered by the cameras. I had never noticed before, but Cutter had rigged them to rotate the images through the four monitors, probably to prevent the images from burning the screens.

The house was warm and stuffy, with an underlying odour in the air. The smell grew stronger as I entered the kitchen. I looked under the sink and pulled out a sack of stinking potatoes in an obscene tangle of white shoots.

I took a plastic garbage bag and dumped the potatoes inside. In the fridge I discovered a container of yogurt giving off a powerful stench,
some limp celery, a few wilted carrots, and half a cheese sandwich. All of it went into the garbage with the potatoes.

I tied up the bag and unlocked the back door. In the garage I found a garbage pail and tossed the bag inside. I saw a lawn mower, a trimmer, a rake, a few shovels, a couple of fuel cans. Cutter didn’t own a car.

I went back inside and began to clean up the kitchen. The sense that I didn’t belong in the house was like a voice nagging in my ear, but I kept going, forcing myself to finish what I had come for. I washed the countertop, the table, and the floor. I wiped down the shelves and walls inside the fridge. I emptied the dishwasher and stacked the dishes in the cupboards.

As I was hanging a towel over one of the chairs to dry, my cell chirped. It was Andrea.

“Are you free for a delivery, Lee?” I thought about my plan to force myself upstairs to take a look around. Cutter’s room—the place where he’d killed himself—was up there.

“Perfect timing,” I said into the phone. “Be right there.”

I
WAS ON THE MOVE
all the next day and didn’t get to Cutter’s until after supper. This time I was determined not to let the place beat me, even though I was going in after dark. Once inside, I kept telling myself, you can’t tell if it’s day or night, anyway.

I went first to the basement. It was well lit, dry and uncluttered. The furnace rumbled away in one corner next to an old table and a half-dozen broken chairs. There was a shower stall beside the water heater, its taps and showerhead crusted with lime deposit. The door on the washing machine was flipped up, and a sock drooped over the lip of the open dryer door like a hound’s tongue. All the windows were covered with black
cloth tacked to the frames.

Back on the main floor, I thought I’d start a kind of inventory of all the stuff in the office. In a way I was interested to see some of Cutter’s research. But I soon saw that it would take me ages to go through all the files piled on the tables. Hours to toss out the magazines. Days to examine all his printouts. Defeated, I sat down at the desk and flipped through the address book beside the phone. The handwritten entries were neat, listing a yard service, grocery delivery, contact numbers for telephone, natural gas, electricity accounts, my cell number, the pharmacy, the café. Beside the telephone company information was a pencilled note, “They’re in on it!”

There were three
PCS.
I wasn’t an expert, but it was obvious they were pretty new and, knowing Cutter, probably state-of-the-art. One seemed to be used only for Internet service. I took a quick look through the hard drive and found no applications other than internet software. Cutter had disabled the e-mail function on his browser and there was no stand-alone e-mail application. Why, I wondered. The bookmarks on the browser showed sites for news services in Toronto, New York, London, Manchester, and other cities around the world, along with a huge
file of human rights sites, one folder labelled “Conspiracy Theories—Credible” and another, “Conspiracy Theories—Dumb.” I wondered how goofy a conspiracy theory would have to be before Cutter would reject it.

The second computer had a few applications—word processing, an encyclopedia, spreadsheets and related stuff, and Cutter’s banking records. The money files were all encrypted. No surprise there.

Games, lots of them, were the only function of the third computer. I knew nothing about games, so I didn’t recognize any of the titles. I opened one file on the desktop titled “Peace. Game?” and saw only page after page of code. According to the file’s date, Cutter hadn’t worked on it for more than a year.

I sat back and thought. Why had Cutter divided his activities between different machines? Wasn’t it possible—easy, for him—to put everything on one computer? I remembered him saying something about being naked in a glass house when you used the Internet. Was that the reason? Did he think that separating his work would protect it somehow? I decided I would never know the answer, so I shut down the
PCS
and turned off the peripherals, the
monitors, and
VCRS
connected to the
CCTV
cameras. I wondered what to do next.

The stairway to the left of the vestibule door led to the upper floor. The darkness beyond the top step gave me the creeps. I took a deep breath, flicked the switch, gripped the banister, and forced myself to climb. As I went, every stair creaked.

I found myself in a hallway. A window on the back wall of the house was covered. The hall led toward the front of the house, where black curtains hid another window. There were three doors. In the bathroom a toothbrush poked from a glass on the sink, a squashed tube of toothpaste beside it, the cap missing. An electric razor dangled from a socket at the end of its cord. A couple of rumpled towels lay on the floor.

The door leading to Cutter’s bedroom was open. I stuck my head inside. A double bed, the blankets jumbled and skewed, a night table with a small lamp, a dresser, an easy chair beside a covered window. Good enough, I thought, closing the door.

The one remaining door had been secured by three big padlocks. The key ring jangled as I released each one. I pushed the door open, flipped the switch, and lit up a nightmare.

The ordinary furniture—a desk, a trestle table cluttered with files, and a few filing cabinets—seemed out of place in a room that screamed insanity. The ceiling, floor, and walls—even the glass in the single window—had been painted flat black, and seemed to press in on me. Opposite the door, the entire wall was plastered with glaring orange, yellow and red graffiti, the letters jagged and sharp. MOOTWA SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH dominated the space.

I stepped around the desk and took a closer look. The window had been nailed shut. All the graffiti had been written in chalk. All the phrases were multi-coloured, some, like the banner, a foot high, some as small as four inches. Mistah Kurtz, he in Kijevo! The schoolyard is mined!! Operation HARMONY?!! Karlovac is the rabbit hole! Tell Alice! and, in vermilion, They killed them ALL!!

I don’t know what it was—the claustrophobic atmosphere of the little room with the black wall, the glaring words that had erupted from an insane mind, the violence of each letter with its points and jagged edges, the certainty that Cutter had spent hour after hour, bent over or kneeling on the hardwood floor, maniacally working sharpened bits of chalk back and forth like a
demented prisoner—but the room seemed to scream out “Run!”

And run was exactly what I did. I stumbled down the stairs and out the door and into the clear, cold, normal autumn night.

A
LTHOUGH
I
HAD TOLD
Reena about my inheritance, asking her to keep it to herself, she didn’t know that I had visited Cutter’s house a couple of times, so one day I filled her in. We were unpacking the early morning delivery from the food wholesaler’s. “I just don’t know where to start,” I said, “or what I should do.”

Reena pulled open the flaps of a large carton and began placing celery stalks, tomatoes, carrots and onions on the long bench opposite the dishwasher. She tossed the empty carton toward the back door, leaned on the counter and lit a cigarette.

“After your grandma went into the home,” she began, “and your dad and I knew she’d never
come back to her house on Harvie Street, I was in the same boat. Your dad was all tied up with your mom’s illness at the time, and taking care of you, so the job fell to me.”

She flicked her cigarette ash into the sink. I began to dice carrots.

“So,” she continued, her face suddenly softer, “I guess I can relate to what you’re saying. It’s a terrible job, having to go through someone else’s stuff—a lifetime of possessions and clothes and memories. Keepsakes and junk. You feel like you’re invading their home. And throwing someone else’s possessions away—someone you love—seems sacrilegious. Like you’re attacking them, stealing from them, and they’re not there to defend themselves. And at the same time you know that you’re doing it for them, that you’d never allow a stranger to go through the house and clean it out. It’s a duty, and you want to do it, but at the same time you feel like a creep.

“I remember, I got most of the job done—it took four or five days—and then I found a box at the back of Mom’s closet, the kind Christmas cards come in. It was stuffed so full she had knotted a ribbon around it to hold the lid on. Inside were all the anniversary cards Dad had given her over the years, all the birthday greetings, and two
congratulations cards from when your dad and me were born, each one signed ‘Love, Doug.’ A whole lifetime in a box held together with a bit of tattered ribbon.”

Reena wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “What the hell do you do with a box of old cards?” she said.

She picked up another carton, turned her back and began to stack packages of cheese and sliced meat on the counter. I chopped more vegetables. A while later I asked, “So, what did you do with it?”

Reena’s tough manner was back. “Ah, it’s upstairs somewhere,” she said.

“Every once in a while,” Abe said, “I come to the conclusion that, on the whole, life makes sense, then something like this comes along.”

We were in his work room. Classical music played softly in the background. Abe sat in a leather chair, an empty glass balanced on the arm, his feet on a hassock. I sat in his desk chair.

Although I had gotten nothing practical from her, Reena had made me feel better about things. She understood, and I don’t know why exactly, but knowing she understood lightened the weight
I had carried on my shoulders since the day Lakshmi whacked me on the head with the news of Cutter’s will. So I decided to ask Abe for advice.

I trusted him. I had liked him from the first day. He never talked down to me. And I had a lot of respect for him, especially after I found out that the bookkeeping and tax stuff I couriered back and forth to his “old folks” was all done for free. Mr. Chekowski, apartment 14B in the seniors’ retirement residence in Mimico, had let the secret out of the bag. It wasn’t Mr. Chekowski’s fault. He was in his eighties and starting to lose his memory.

“See if you can put your problem into words for me,” Abe said.

“All I have in my head are questions,” I began. “Cutter must have had a plan. That’s why he gave me his house and everything in it. But I can’t figure out what it might be.”

“This problem cries out for a Cohiba,” Abe announced. “I got to smoke to think.”

I got up and fetched a cigar from the rosewood humidor on Abe’s desk. He clipped the end, dropped the nub into the ashtray, and leaned forward to the lighter I held for him. When he had puffed enough of a cloud to close
an airport, he sat back again and looked at the ceiling.

“If you ever quit Reena, you could get a job as a butler. Anyway, maybe your friend was just nuts. Maybe there was no reason. Crazy people’s actions aren’t always, well, sane.”

“You had to suck on a twenty-dollar cigar to come up with that brilliant conclusion?” I said.

He laughed. “I like that you’re keeping a sense of humour about all this. No problem is ever so big that it can’t be laughed at.”

“Yeah, well, when I’m in that house, the last thing I feel like doing is laughing.”

“Can’t say I blame you. Okay, we look at this like it’s a mystery that we need to solve.”

“A conundrum.” It was my word for the day.

“Exactly. If Cutter’s actions are simply the product of a deranged mind, there’s no answer. So, we set that possibility aside. What are we left with?”

Abe clamped the cigar in the corner of his mouth and ticked his index finger. “One, Cutter wanted you to do something.” He ticked his middle finger. “Or, two, he wanted you to know something.”

“Or,” I said, “both.”

The next time I unlocked Cutter’s front door, a full pannier banged against my legs as I hauled it inside. I kicked off my snowy boots, went straight through to the kitchen and unpacked, laying everything out on the table. I had brought a dozen 100-watt lightbulbs, a screwdriver set with pliers, a flashlight, a new notepad, a small radio, and some sandwiches and coffee Reena had insisted on making for me. It was Sunday and I had all day.

My first move was a sacrilege, to use Reena’s word. I dragged a chair to the kitchen window, climbed up, and yanked the curtains aside, producing a cloud of dust that swirled in the sunlight that suddenly poured into the room. I tugged the aluminum disks out of the window and dropped them on the counter.