SS Glasgow Castle 46 Chapter Forty Six

The trip back to Paris went fine. The flight from France went fine. The woman who was my immigration officer said she hoped that I had a great holiday. But as I stood on the pavement outside the Toronto airport, I found the notion of returning to my room next to the toilet too horrible to bear. I ended up paying a small fortune for a cab to Peterborough.

I arrived at three in the morning, let myself in with the spare back key hidden under the rock in the garden, and spent the rest of the night on the front room sofa. I was woken up by the smell of coffee and the first thing I saw was my childhood mug standing on the table a foot from my nose, issuing clouds of aromatic steam.

I heard my old man move around in the kitchen and I sat up on the sofa and reached for the steaming mug. I drank coffee and ma.s.saged my temples and reviewed the story I'd prepared. When I felt it contained enough truth to throw him off I went to join him:

SON: (enters kitchen)

FATHER: (looks up from plate with remains of scrambled eggs, grunts)

SON: (grunts submissively)

FATHER: There are fresh eggs in the fridge.

SON: I'm all right for now. I'll join you with another coffee if I may.

(pause while SON pours a coffee and joins as advertised)

FATHER: How was the holiday?
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SON (rubs peeling nose): Actually it was a kind of a working holiday. Got a gig to do a complete ad and promo package for a luxury hotel in Africa. Manager of the hotel is a friend of a friend. They flew me down there for a week to take things in. But I meant to apologize for crashing in like that.

FATHER (somewhat doubtfully): It's all right.

SON: I spent a week living in the so-called lap of luxury and couldn't face the s.h.i.tty room I'm renting presently. But now I'll be able to afford something better.

FATHER (still somewhat doubtfully): That's good.

SON: And I'll be able to give you your money back.

FATHER: (dismissively) The money... It's good you showed up. I need to talk to you.

SON: You need to talk to me?

FATHER: Frieda's worse. So I'm going to join your mother. We'll stay there as long as necessary. (looks out of the window at the weather while computing Frieda's life expectancy) Maybe till the end of summer.

SON: You want me to look in here once in a while?

FATHER: Maybe once a month. I know it's a long trip.

(pause)

SON: Dad... Why do you always refer to her as 'your mother', not 'Ingrid' or 'my wife'?

FATHER: Because she's your mother and I'm talking to you.

SON: I see. Listen, would it be okay if I moved in for a couple of months? This way I could look after the place without bother. I don't have to be in the city for this overseas gig.

FATHER (deeply puzzled, issues the official press release): You're always welcome.

And so, two days later I drove my old man to the airport in his Oldsmobile. As we were saying goodbye he asked if I could grant him a favour.

"Sure," I said. "Sure."

"When it gets warmer, can you paint the fence?"

"Oh sure," I said. "Sure."

After his flight had left, I drove down to collect the few odds and ends that I'd left in the room next to the toilet. Mr Natarajan almost exploded with joy when he saw me, grew suspicious, then joyful again when I paid him the outstanding rent, and told him I was vacating the room. That was when he told me that someone had been around to see me in the meantime. He didn't deal with the visitor, one of the tenants did, so he couldn't even give me a description.

When I entered my former cell the first thing I focused on was the blinking light on my answering machine. I replayed two cryptic messages from my father and one long silence, fifteen seconds of dead air ending with a click and the dial tone. I didn't hang around. I gathered everything up and was out. I refused to give the insistent Natarajan my new address on grounds of an impending move, and announced I'd be back for mail before slipping him a conciliatory twenty. He was standing on the front path and waving when I drove away.

I didn't like the fact that there had been people asking about me. When I got back to Peterborough I drank brandy and coffee in the kitchen until three am. Then I called Sanis. He was very pleased to hear from me. He'd already taken care of the hotel bill business and was about to transfer my first monthly retainer from AG Design into my bank account, but didn't know where to send the statement of expenses. I told him to FedEx me a banker's draft instead, together with the statement, and gave him the address in Peterborough.

I got it three days later. It amounted to just under forty six hundred American dollars, and was accompanied by the itemized expenses statement. I suspected my monthly retainer would somehow always amount to less than five thousand, and that it would be always accompanied by an expenses statement. Sanis was smart. He knew that cheating someone rudely means you only get to cheat once. But I was rea.s.sured to see that the Sanis money fund turned out to be a perfectly respectable operation run by a Belgian merchant bank, with Sanis taking a standard broker's cut. At least that's what it looked like on paper.

I immediately went and sold the draft at my parents' branch and acquired a Macintosh IIci and a 56k modem. I spent a couple of days learning how to use it, then signed on with a provider. I needed unlimited access to the Internet for one specific purpose: to check on Kross.

When I typed his name into the search engine and tapped return, I was rewarded with over 1000 hits. It was a popular name in cybers.p.a.ce, mostly through the efforts of one Kross, Bentley who specialized in churning out books about computer games.

I needed to narrow down my search. I decided to start with the n.a.z.i father, the sub commander, and looked for Kross within World War II context. There were over three hundred hits, well over half pointing to illiterate n.a.z.i-lovers who fawningly mentioned the Iron Kross.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw that one of the pages referred to a Kross in the Kriegsmarine: wartime German navy. But this particular Kross was a Leutnant-zur-Zee who drowned with his destroyer in a Norwegian fjord in 1940, curiously enough right next to Narvik and just a few miles away from my parents' current residence. I persisted and unearthed another Kriegsmarine Kross who in turn drowned with the Bismarck. Neither of them had been a submariner. The only thing left was to run a check on the submarine: U-117.

I found that it didn't exist. There was a U-116. There was a U-118. There was no U-117. Given German fondness for order it was very odd. But there it was.

I ran a search on SS Glasgow Castle next. There were lots of entries featuring the three words scattered singly in a text. The day turned into night as I clicked through page after page. It took me until dawn to find out that there had been no ship named SS Glasgow Castle during World War II. There was one now - a pleasure boat that took tourists on day-long cruises around Loch Lomond, reservations in advance encouraged but not necessary. No submariner named Kross; no U-117; no SS Glasgow Castle.

But if Kross had lied to me, why did the police superintendent tell me to ask Kross about his n.a.z.i father? I finally thought of running a search for Kross and U-117 as partials. I found a kapitanleutnant Krossman who commanded the U-71. He didn't sail anywhere near Africa, at least according to official war record. And his career ran till 1943, when he surrendered himself and his damaged boat to a Canadian destroyer off the coast of Newfoundland.

That was when I fully realized the futility of any further search efforts. Who said Kross's father's name was Kross? Maybe it had been Krossman. Maybe it had been Kreuz. And anyway U-117 and SS Glasgow Castle were pure fiction. They just didn't exist.

I ate breakfast first, then faced the hard truth: I owed my new fortune not to a quaint historical incident, but to a modern armed heist with murder thrown in along the way.

I had been up for over twenty four hours, but there was no way I could go to sleep after that. I spent the rest of the day in front of the computer, fueled by coffee, then coffee and brandy, eventually coffee and scotch. I checked out every possible avenue, including the home page of a hair salon in Fiji (called Kross Kuts). I was halfway through the scotch and nearly out of coffee when I found Kross.

My Kross.