Omphalos Read online

  “Jake? Check the climate-control for my office, will you?… You’re sure? It’s getting hotter than hell up here!… Of course I know! I don’t like to complain, but… Well, make goddamn sure again it’s working such as it well should be… What was that?… Why, you little piece of shit! Consider your ass fired! I’ll —”

  He was suddenly sucking scarce air, so he pinched hard on the bridge of his nose for a hit from the aspirator implant…and settled some.

  Soon again the only motions were DeLint’s stained right fingers dipping blindly into the crock of pistachios, though he now knocked his knuckles against the curled fat lip with every dip, and felt nothing. Finished the letter, he signed it with a weak flourish. He blinked strenuously and shook his head, then read with the settling smile of a satiated child tipping towards sleep.

  FROM THE DESK OF EUGENE DELINT

  FOUNDER, PRESIDENT, AND CEO ETC. OF OMPHALOS

  “Charity Is Our Business”

  Dear Mr. Prendergast (Mark),

  Please allow me to introduce myself: I’m a man just like you who takes his pants off one leg at a time. The fact that I am Eugene DeLint (Gene to my intimates, among whom I hope I will be permitted soon to number yourself) should not be permitted to faze you one way or the other one iotum. I am a worker here at Omphalos, pure and simple, just as you are too simple and pure. I don’t mean that to sound supercilious, just because I am Founder, President, Chief Financial Officer, and Chair of the Board of Governors of Omphalos, etc. I would say you have the brightest of bright futures here, too, Mr. Prendergast! If you play your cards with abandon and follow all my rules. Now shut up, Mark, and listen up!

  You are new to our team, which I like to think of as a family. But I was new here once too, there at the Genesis. You will find as your time here evolves (and I trust it will be a lengthy evolution!) that, as in any family (or on any team), certain jealousies are directed at the most promising and gifted fresh members of the family/team, invariably those who have the most to offer and contribute on display on the table and when taking the initiative in the locker room!

  If I may take some little liberty: I insist upon your not allowing such jealousy, when it invariably sticks up its serpentine head, as it will for one as obviously brilliant and attractive as yourself (I’ve already taken one tiny liberty to personally peruse your file) to put you off your game, whatsoever it may evolve to eventually be. I don’t want to be seen to be prying into private matters though. NOW DON’T BE EMBARRASSED, Mark!!!

  My personal motto has always been: Screw the little guy. By which I only mean those who are small-minded, and intend no insult to boys or the vertically challenged man (joke). But not literally needless to say (seriously whatsoever vile rumour you may have heard).

  I wanted, though, in a sincere, slightly older-brotherly spirit, to take this opportunity to personally welcome you into our Omphalos family individually. Mottoes are disposable things, but ours — which I composed — is retainable: Charity Is Our Business. That’s Omphalos. That’s I. (Or should that be me?)

  Irregardless, I would like to invite you to a private, all-informal luncheon in my personal suite on Tuesday at 11:45, to which I will, or shall rather, assume you are coming unless beforehand you phone my current head secretary Don McNicol or my administrative assistant: Anna Kynder; to cancel well beforehand in advance. I wish you the very best for your future propensities, proclivities and propositions here at Omphalos, Mark. I remain,

  In Celebration of Ourselves,

  Eugene DeLint

  PS. One premature piece of advice occurs to me: until he’s officially terminated, be wary of Jake Shercock in the power plant. Ditto Dr. Ewan Randome.

  One down, one to go: the letter-cum-report to initiate Randome’s termination.

  But he was burning up! Perspiration was softening his scalp, drops of sweat were coursing his temples, and his forelock was sopping. Communicating with new finds always warmed him, but not to this degree! He was literally cooking!… It’s had to be the thermostat. He’d have that dwarf Jake Shercock’s balls on a shish kabob!

  His plump pink forefinger, like part of a steamed lobster, hovered at the desk pad, then dropped from even that effort. Besides, what more could he say to dwarf Shercock in his subterranean power plant? Ewan suspected him of secret surveillance. He knew too much for his own good…must go…

  DeLint was suddenly deeply flushed all over, and dizzy, and getting hotter by the second. His scalp was on fire!

  He let the big head loll and roll, and for a brief spell the relief of moving air about the wattles was like Mother blowing gently on the damp crevices of his neck and chins, as she’d done during the torpid nights of the First Drought. He tried to fix his smile on her phasing holo. Idiot tech. He blinked hard. She was the one had really run Omphalos, admi…tit…puppet love…the sick…cun…c-u-n-t…sorry!…Mom.

  When he looked up again, the room appeared darker. There: somebody had moved past him on the left… Good…he’s come…at last…for his…

  “Mo-om, pa-lease…I’m your…don’t make me…pa-lea…”

  A noise — a nightmare’s raving whispering — pulled his burning chin off his enflamed breast, and with all his will he held still and squinted into the dim distance. Wanted to rise now. Couldn’t. There was someone darkening the doorway, an arm raised, pointing.

  “Who?” he managed. “I’m on fire…Hel…p…me.”

  A voice, soft and low, and distantly familiar: “Look what you’ve brought me to, Gene.”

  “Mom?…”

  A scream filled the room — “Machetazo!” — and the air was a whoosh of avenging steel wings.

  DeLint blinked his harrowing eyelashes once. A premonition of parting was the last impulse to fix his mind for an infinitesimal moment. Then a searing tickle of fire — itself perhaps the briefest intimation — ended all consciousness, and a big buzz consumed creation instantly, a snapping off of the Big Bang’s light switch. Then separation.

  Eugene DeLint’s head tilted forward to the right, bounced off the edge of the desk and landed face-up in the shell-littered wok with a sound of shifting beach shingle. Blood spurted from above and the eyes blinked once before standing open in the red rain.

  Chapter 2

  “Very well, thank you, Doctor…Ewan. Was that a steel guitar playing ‘Julia’? Strange, as you said it would sound at first, then lovely. It’s as moving as hearing Lennon singing it to his mother.

  “Sorry, Ewan, I don’t have CATVID. Anyway, I’m standing here starkers, no matter you’d see only my mug. ‘Julia’ alone will have to do for now. But I look forward to hearing the whole album at my next appointment. Tomorrow morning, right?

  “Well, yes, I am on the shitty public bud… Ewan. Ewan?”

  Near-naked Detective Inspector Kevin Beldon set down the earbud and was arrested by his ghostly reflection in the balcony door. He half-turned and over his left shoulder appraised the state of his sagging grey jockeys: like an old man’s scrotum. He couldn’t remember when he’d put them on clean.

  Change then, old man!… Shower and change. You’ve got a date with an angel.

  He looked down at the maple dining table and picked up a hardcover copy book, black and pimply. The blank volume was a gift from his therapist, Dr. Ewan Randome, the renowned head of Psychiatric Wellness at Omphalos. Dr. Randome had fixed a white label to the front cover, on which he’d written in fancy Gothic script: The Near Future. Kevin slipped out the silver pen clipped to the spine, flipped open the book, and wrote:

  In the near future, old-white-man loneliness will be the only acceptable joke.

  This supposedly was helping, part of the good doctor’s so-called bibliotherapy. In the near future Kevin Beldon would achieve psychological wellness through writing such nonsense. That was the plan, anyway. Dr. Randome read Kevin’s entries at the start of each weekly session, often chucklin
g, or squinting at Kevin from sparkling pale-blue eyes and asking for elaboration, or laughing heartily in a way few risked anymore (because so many were made uncomfortable by laughter). Sometimes Dr. Randome would gloss the cryptic entries with a line from the Beatles: We can work it out, or All you need is love, or something equally banal. He was an ardent Beatlemaniac. One of that week’s entries in The Near Future would launch their talk. Kevin was charged with making at least one entry per day. If he could he’d have a session with Dr. Randome every day. But their next session was not till the next day, Monday morning, at Randome’s private practice in Sandy Hill.

  What he really needed was to get out more, not just to the life-saving therapy sessions. Detective Kevin Beldon was a man who needed action in the real world, not these old tails he kept chasing around in his head, his regrets about the near past. Where were all the murderers when you needed them? Didn’t crime waves go with heat waves in those bad old movies? Bring the criminals!

  His daughter, Kelly, now a Crown prosecutor, once said that his moral code was primitive. That’s not true, he’d countered. He valued the rule of law above all else.

  She’d shot back, “That’s what I mean, Kevin.”

  But what did that mean? And why had she taken to calling him Kevin?… God bless her. It was Kelly who had arranged things with Dr. Randome and dragged him out of the apartment and driven him to the first session, which really had been life-saving. Kelly knew Dr. Randome from her own brief stint in the legal temp pool at Omphalos years ago. But did everybody in this backwater capital have a connection to Omphalos?… Yes. And Kelly must have called in a big favour to get such high-level help for her dad.

  The day’s entry in The Near Future done, he snapped the book shut and dropped it onto the table. At the balcony door he paused to look through his ghostly reflection, then slid the glass and dipped to avoid hitting his head again. Out on the small balcony and looking down at himself, he smirked at his legs: thin poles of legs, hardly bigger at the thighs than the calves, pale streaks of misery, and still hairy red like some orangutan’s. Though only his legs.

  Red. No one called him Red anymore. Whitey would be more appropriate now, and for going on years, truth be told. But he was no Whitey. Only Cynthia, his late wife, had continued calling him Red, and in recent years she’d had to explain to new acquaintances: Kevin had flaming red hair — and not so long ago either. She’d make her scowling face: It was his secret weapon, that head of fire, way up there, scared the shit out of criminals, or at least their confessions. Now Kevin has experience.

  Now, Cyn, I have nothing. Because of the Widower, I have nothing. Because the Widower made me his last widower, I have nothing. I should just go to my Nothing reward. Who knows, maybe I’d find you again in Nothing, my Love.

  It had started like nothing, the Widower case. Kevin’s oldest and only remaining friend on the force, Chief Frank Thu, mentioned in passing what seemed the routine suicide of a middle-aged woman. Obviously, something about it had to have been nagging Frank, but Kevin hadn’t twigged, so the chief had handed off to Detective Otto Parizeau.

  Then a second suicide, same profile as the first. MYCROFT, their near-intelligent computer (and getting nearer with every new version), determined that both couples had stashed their considerable fortunes in an offshore account traceable only to the wives. The accounts had been emptied, but not by the new widowers.

  Then a third middle-aged woman turned up dead, same M-O: left neatly on her bed like a body in a coffin, apparent suicide by self-poisoning. There were a couple of things similarly unconventional about all three deaths: no suicide notes, and the poisons weren’t pills or anything handily available. The killing mixture had been constituted of chemicals even MYCROFT had trouble identifying. As in the first two deaths, the secret bank account of the third had been hacked using hundreds of proxy servers. The light-speed transferral of funds could not be traced, though MYCROFT suspected (with fifty-two-percent accuracy) that Pyongyang National was the ultimate, if likely penultimate, destination. MYCROFT was coaxed into going out on a cyber-limb and speculating (if refusing an accuracy rating) two locales for the money’s final destination: Beijing or Port-au-Prince. The Haitian capital was only a mild surprise.

  The fourth victim followed in a month, same method, exotic poison. Alert for the funds transferral, MYCROFT was able to determine that the action twice accessed anonymous proxy servers in rogue state Haiti. Again: no surprise. But MYCROFT was able to surprise in suggesting with eighty-one-percent accuracy that the first proxy was located right there in Ottawa. Only two organizations had enough security and juice to execute such instantaneous cyber-crime: the federal government and the global charity conglomerate headquartered in Ottawa: Omphalos.

  Chief Thu took the case from a fuming Otto Parizeau and assigned Kevin Beldon. Parizeau complained loudly to the local Macro Media stringers who always came first to him for insider information. Parizeau had been hoping for media derision directed at Thu and Beldon. But Planet Macro picked up the story for its local-colour crime slot, needing a replacement serial killer after the seemingly impossible suicide of the cannibalistic Seattle Marinater. Macro’s first headline dubbed the new serialist:

  THE WIDOWER GETS CANADA’S BEST COP!

  The Widower responded next day, providing material for a new headline:

  BELDON NO HELP.

  The fifth victim was laid out typically but with her folded hands holding a small book; not a prayer book but an antique paperback novel titled Beautiful Losers. Downloads of the e-text soared, and overnight hundreds of chat rooms devoted to the Widower opened. Planet Macro instantly had round-the-clock crews on the ground in Ottawa.

  Everyone viewed the touch with the book, its title, as a murdering psychopath’s sick joke. Only Detective Kevin Beldon suspected that the joke was on him, because Beautiful Losers was by Leonard Cohen, and Cohen’s writings and music were his family’s favourites.

  Over the ensuing months, subsequent Widower victims — six, seven, eight, nine, and ten — were found with printed messages in their knitted fingers. So the deaths appeared more conventional suicides, though the messages made for weird suicide notes:

  “Magic is afoot”

  “You stepped into an avalanche”

  “Fuck a saint”

  “Lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, come back to me.”

  And last: “I won’t be long.”

  It was soon discovered that “Magic is afoot” was not a reference to Sherlock Holmes but a line from the novel Beautiful Losers, then as instantly that all the notes were taken from Cohen’s writings. Chat rooms and blogs of amateur and professional detectives, criminologists, psychiatrists, theologists, musicologists, and literature professors were occupied with the gnomic notes. They could be made to mean anything, so nothing useful. Macro called them “the suicide quotes.”

  The Widower still left no traceable clues for forensics or MYCROFT. Kevin had nothing but his secret knowledge that the riddling suicide quotes involved him personally. He’d begun drinking heavily again, daily to late-afternoon distraction, nightly to unconsciousness, waiting for the next middle-aged wife to show up dead with a Cohen line entwined in her fingers like worry beads praying for his personal involvement.

  Finally, after a week’s poring over medical records with MYCROFT’s help, Kevin made a solid connection between two of the Widower victims and Haiti just before the latest Duvalier coup there (that of dictator Grand-Enfant Doc). Residual medical records on their personal tablets confirmed that victims seven and eight had visited Haiti’s puppet state, the Dominican Republic, some twelve years before on an Omphalos therapy vacation headed by Eugene DeLint and his mother. But the records had been scrubbed of the usual fuller profiles. MYCROFT speculated (with ninety-six-percent accuracy) that such medical information, because heavily encrypted, would leave unique traces on the main frame of its primary serve
r, unscrubbable residual bits that MYCROFT’s REIMAGINE program could reconstruct. That was the second lead to Omphalos, this one promising hard evidence, but cyber-tracking ran up against Omphalos’s impenetrable firewall.

  Kevin sought a very limited search warrant for only the one relevant medical section of Omphalos’s labyrinthine mainframe. Daughter Kelly Beldon prosecuted the Crown’s case — despite Kevin’s pleas that she delegate. Judge Johnson Mender scolded Kelly publicly for wasting the court’s time: “Detective Beldon suspects now, does he? Based on twelve-year-old partial medical records on personal tablets? My dear girl, we’ve all heard of your father’s criminal intuitions, but such voodoo does not constitute evidence, not in this judge’s courtroom, and it is far, far from sufficient to justify violating the security of this city’s — nay, this country’s and one of the world’s — most admired institutions. Petition denied.” Crack.

  The Widower slayings stopped suddenly at ten authentic and two readily apprehended copycats. But didn’t that, the immediate cessation following his refused search warrant, validate Kevin’s suspicion of Omphalos’s — and DeLint’s — involvement? No one, not even Frank Thu, would listen, not after Judge Mender’s widely reported dressing-down of Kelly Beldon. So only Kevin was left more convinced than ever that Omphalos harboured evidence pointing to a serialist nonpareil, the Widower. And this psychopath wanted him, Kevin Beldon, involved.

  Kevin had continued driving up and down both sides of the Rideau Canal through all hours, a pint of Powers in his crotch, stopping frequently to stare up at the permanently lighted seventeenth-floor windows of Omphalos’s northwest corner. He’d been standing below the Laurier Street Bridge well past midnight in late January, watching a few wobbly skaters on the canal brave the nostril-pinching cold, when it came home to him like an icicle up the back of his head: