Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

“Eli,” she said, “sweetheart, tell me what’s wrong.”

“I just don’t think we’re in any position to judge his life.”

The pause lengthened and grew black around the edges. No, she told him, she was serious. She wanted to know what was wrong, with no diversions this time.

“My girlfriend disappeared.” Eli listened for a moment and then interrupted her. “Yes, Lilia, the one I was living with, you think I’d have more than one? She didn’t just leave me. I mean she disappeared.”

His mother offered her opinion that girls don’t just disappear, unless they’ve gone and gotten themselves—

“This one does.”

Then she did go and get herself—

“No,” he said, “she wasn’t preg nant. For God’s sake.”

Her son, she felt, deserved better than that. And what did he mean by disappeared, exactly?

“She just got on a train and—”

“So she left. ”

“Yes, but it wasn’t—”

“Then how do you know it was a train?”

“Because she said she was sick of traveling on buses,” he said.

She was worried about him. How long had he been working on his thesis, out there in the boroughs? (She had a way of saying the word boroughs that conjured up images of far-off places of questionable repute: Uzbekistan, North Korea, Côte d’Ivoire.) How long was his thesis? It must be the length of War and Peace by this point. Was it even done yet? Wasn’t it due a year ago, at least? Heaven knew she wasn’t one to judge, of course, or to criticize, but he had to at least consider her point of view in this matter. It seemed a bit odd to her that he’d want to spend time chasing after noncommittal girls who leave on trains when here it had been years and he’d missed at least one thesis deadline already. What exactly was it that was so impossible to write about? He’d always been so good at writing, he’d always been so passionate about those dead languages of his, and she understood about writer’s block, well, she thought she did, but how hard could it be? Well, she worried about him, that was all. He just seemed a bit lost to her when she called sometimes. Lacking focus, perhaps. She just didn’t want him to end up like Zed, wandering rootlessly through dangerous places far away. She still didn’t understand why he didn’t just finish his thesis and take his master’s degree. She wondered sometimes if he knew what he wanted. She was afraid sometimes that perhaps he didn’t.

He was reading the eleventh verse of the psalm: Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.

His mother was explaining about responsibility and adulthood. She had ideas about staying engaged with the world, as expressed in one’s willingness to make something of one’s life, particularly after having enjoyed the benefits of a lengthy and maternally funded university education. Which, naturally, was not an inexpensive proposition. Not that she minded, of course she didn’t, not at all, and she certainly wasn’t saying this to make him feel guilty; she just didn’t want him to end up like his brother, she was just a bit concerned, and she wondered if he was fully aware of the—

“I know what I want,” he said quietly. And suddenly, miraculously, the haze lifted. The decision was made. He let the phone drop a little, holding it loosely and barely listening to her, and with his other hand he picked up the map. Montreal was less than two inches to the north.

She wanted to know what he meant by that, but he’d already hung up the phone. He reached for his wallet from the side table, folded the Bible page into it, grabbed his coat from the closet, and put his toothbrush and the map in opposite coat pockets. The telephone began ringing again within minutes, but he was already out the door.

In a low-lit jazz club in Montreal, some years before Eli arrived in the city, a detective was sitting alone at the bar. He was meeting an old friend, who was running late, and while he waited he examined his fedora in the warm dim light. His wife had given it to him for his birthday a month earlier, and it had an appealing newness about it. It was a perfect shade of chocolate brown. He rotated it slowly, admiring every angle, set it down on the gleaming dark wood of the bar, and ordered a pint of Guinness which took some time to arrive.

He was trained in the reading of malevolent patterns. His work was essentially the study of intersections: the crosshairs where childhood trauma meets a longing for violence, where specific temperaments come up against messages written on mirrors in red lipstick, torn pairs of stockings in the empty industrial streets out by Métro Pie-IX, the backseats of secondhand automobiles and angles of moonlight over stains on concrete. He possessed a brilliant and sometimes eerie sense of intuition, which he wielded like a scalpel, and in the Montreal police department he was unsurpassed. His work usually involved rapists or murderers, and he had never worked with missing children until this particular afternoon at an almost deserted downtown jazz club, when his friend showed up forty-five minutes late, bought him a second beer to make up for it, and pulled a Bible out of his briefcase.

“Christopher,” his friend said, “I need your help on something.”

Christopher glanced at the Bible and then at Peter. “Don’t tell me you’ve found religion,” he said.

“No, this is evidence. Listen,” Peter said, leaning toward him a little, “have you ever thought about coming to work for me?”

“Thought never crossed my mind.”

“You’d like working for me. You get a little more leeway to do your job. It’s less. . procedural, for lack of a better word. I don’t believe in paperwork. But anyway, look, you don’t have to decide right away about coming to work for me, I just want you to take a look at this. You know that parental abduction case I’ve been working on, the one I was telling you about?”

Peter opened the Bible on the bar. A certain page had been marked with a yellow sticky note.

A child’s uneven handwriting sloped downward across the page in blue ink, overlapping the beginning of the Twenty-second Psalm: Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home. — Lilia.

“Good Lord,” said the detective. He took the Bible from Peter’s hands. “I could find her in ten minutes with something like this. How old did you say she was?”

“She’s eleven and a half. Been missing a little over four years.”

“Same age as my daughter. Missing from where?”

“Middle of nowhere, south of here. Her mother has a house near St.-Jean, not far from the American border. Her father’s an American, so the kid has dual citizenship, and they’d probably crossed the border before the mother even reported her missing. Anyway, the girl’s been missing for years, and the police’ve been useless. Someone recognized them from a poster and they almost caught her in Cincinnati a year ago, but nothing after that. There’s just no trail. She could be anywhere this evening.”

“This note is recent?”

“Not particularly. Some religiously inclined traveling salesman found it in his motel room in Toledo three years ago.”

“Three years ago. So she was eight when she wrote this.” He was still looking at the note, shaking his head. An image flashed through him — a small girl with short blond hair sitting cross-legged on a bed in a motel room, writing carefully in a Bible — and he blinked.

“At most. She might’ve still been seven. Three years ago was just when the salesman happened to find it. Listen,” Peter said, “I could use your help on this. It’s a solvable case, but she could be anywhere, literally anywhere tonight, I am out of leads, and I’m having a bad month. You know Anya left me. Take a leave of absence from the police force, come work with me on this. The money’s better.”