Gail Bowen - The Glass Coffin

Felix took the remote control from my hand and pressed pause. On screen, Caroline was frozen in the pool of deep gold light cast by the antique lamp behind her chair. Out of nowhere came a memory of a paperweight from my childhood: a chunk of amber that preserved a lifeless but still perfect wasp.

Suddenly, I was numb with fear. “What are you going to do?” I said.

When Felix pulled out his cellphone, I almost laughed with relief. The cell as a lifeline to the real world was a cliche of the film industry. But as Felix tapped in a number and waited for an answer, he was not a comic figure. He was as tightly wound as a man calling to hear medical test results that he knew would spell his doom.

As he listened to the voice on the other end of the line, it seemed the screws were tightening.

“It’s over,” he said. “People have seen the film. The network is committed to showing it. There’s nothing more I can do. Not about The Glass Coffin – not about anything. I have the sense that I’m being followed. That can mean only one thing. The police know it was me.” As he listened to the response to his words, Felix hung his head, a schoolboy being chastised. “You have nothing to fear,” he said finally. “There’s no way they can connect you to any of this. They could rip the tongue out of my mouth before I’d tell them anything.” He fell silent again, taking in every word. Then for the first time since he walked into the room, the weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders. “Yes,” he said. “I have it with me. You promise it will be that way? That’s more than I could have hoped. A double exit – with our souls leaving our bodies at the same moment.” He smiled to himself. “I’ll wait for your call.”

Felix placed the cell carefully on the table in front of him, then he took a small pistol and two bullets from his jacket pocket. His hands were trembling, but he had no trouble inserting the bullets in their chambers.

“There,” he said, looking down at the loaded gun in his hand. “I’m ready. Nothing to do now but wait.”

“She’s not worth it,” I said. Uncensored and unwise, the words tumbled out of my mouth. “Felix, she’s using you. Look at the movie. She uses everybody. She’s evil and manipulative. She’s destroyed so many lives already. Don’t let her destroy yours.” I moved towards him and reached out to touch his hand. “Listen to me,” I said. “You know I’m right.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” he said, and his voice was tinged with pity. “My life began the night I met Caroline MacLeish. All I’ve ever wanted was to share my life with her fully, deeply, completely. Her family kept us from sharing our lives. I cannot allow anyone to keep us from sharing our deaths.”

Felix’s face was wax-pale, drained, but his eyes had the zealot’s glow. The metamorphosis of ein prakiter Mensch into madman was mesmerizing. When he changed the position of the gun, it took me a moment to realize that, suddenly, the muzzle was pointing at me.

For a few moments, Felix and I sat in silence – both of us staring stupidly at the gun in his hand. I had no idea what he was thinking, but I was running through my options and there weren’t many. Given what I had to work with, even Ken Dryden would have had trouble stopping the action.

For the next twenty minutes, Dan Kasperski would be in his office, in a garage that had studio-quality soundproofing so that he could practise his drums without alienating his neighbours. When he’d advised me to choose an electronic kit for Angus, Dan had demonstrated his acoustic drums. Inside the garage, they were ear-splitting, but outside, even the wildest riff was just a muffled thump. No matter how loud I screamed, there would be no help from that quarter.

And I had no idea how to appeal to the man who was aiming the gun at me. During the time I’d been a political panellist on “Canada Tonight,” Felix and I had a good working relationship, but we had never fraternized outside the show. I had no reservoir of warm feelings to draw upon and no real understanding of what made him tick.

“I can’t let you go.” Felix’s voice was too loud, and he flushed with embarrassment. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to shout. This is difficult for me. I’m not a cruel man, but I can’t take the chance that you’ll send someone in here to stop me.”

Outside, a car alarm began its rhythmic bray. The sound was an irritating staple of the urban soundscape, but Felix started as if it were a threat. The hand holding the gun moved so that the muzzle was less than six inches away from my breastbone. Fear is a powerful stimulus. Suddenly, everything fell away except the problem at hand. “If you kill me, there’ll be no one left to tell your story,” I said. “All there will be is Evan’s film.”

“A distortion,” he said.

“Then you’ve seen it.”

Felix looked stricken. “I didn’t have to. I know that it’s a spiteful, twisted character assassination of a woman who deserves to be venerated. She saved my life, Joanne.”

“How?” I asked.

“By loving me,” he said.

“That’s reason enough for loyalty.”

“My feelings for Caroline go beyond loyalty. I worship her.”

“Then tell me about her. If I’m to be the keeper of your story, I should know everything.”

“The keeper of my story. I like that,” he said, but he didn’t lower the gun. “I was twenty-five when we met. A very young man from a very small town, who’d made a film about a boy who fell in love with a saint.”

“Autobiographical?” I asked.

Felix shrugged, “Aren’t all first films? The movie was crude and naive, but it seemed to lend itself to interpretation, so it enjoyed a certain success.”

“Is that how you came to Toronto?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “And in Toronto, I found Annie Lowell, who introduced me to the concept of life as an extreme sport.”

“I saw Black Spikes and Slow Waves,” I said.

“Then you know that I was self-destructing. I would have died the way Annie did, if Caroline hadn’t redeemed me.” He fell silent.

“Another saint in your life,” I said.

Felix smiled. “There are always patterns,” he said. “But Caroline wasn’t an ideal. She was a flesh-and-blood woman. The night I met her I was at my lowest point. Annie and I had been at a party and she told me she was tired of having me hang around like a whipped dog. So of course when she left the party, I followed her to the house on Walmer Road.”

“She and Evan were still living together when you had your affair?”

Felix’s laugh was bitter. “Our affair meant nothing to Annie, but it meant everything to me. That night I was wasted on booze and drugs – a wreck of a human being abasing himself in every possible way. Annie did what people do with whipped dogs. She gave me a couple of verbal kicks and threw me out. I pounded on the door, begging to be taken back. For once, Fate was kind. Caroline answered the door.” His eyes shone at the memory. “She invited me in. This exquisite woman had created a closed private world, where no one could follow her, but she chose me to be a part of it. I was the only one, and I stayed.”

“You were lovers.”

“Lovers, comrades, friends, confidantes – everything. She had no one.”

“She had a house full of people, Felix – her own children, her granddaughter, Annie, Tracy.”

“None of them measured up. Evan especially was a disappointment.”

“In what way?”

“He needed other women.”

“Women other than whom?”

“Other than Caroline. She didn’t understand it. She said that the only woman Evan ever truly loved was his first wife.”