Chapter 12 Plainsong
Plainsong
Mitch had never wanted to take revenge before, yet now that strange thrill of exacting vengeance flowed through him, mixed with some anxiety over how to do it.
He paced along the platform distractedly, waiting for his train, Salinas’s face looming in his mind.
Salinas in the courtroom, pointing a finger at him, demanding an exemplary sentence.
Salinas and his unyielding righteousness.
Salinas whose arguments were more like sermons.
Salinas, formidable in his black robe, swaggering around with all the arrogance of the powerful.
When the train pulled into the station, Mitch got into the last carriage instead of his usual third. The train started again with a jerk just as he was sitting down.
The last glimmers of daylight were fading. For once, Mitch didn’t read. Instead he ruminated, picturing all the ways he might kill his enemy.
All in good time. First, he had to figure out how to do it without getting caught.
Mitch’s first breathless thought was to use a revolver.
Pulling a trigger was probably the method that required the least skill, but a gunshot would be too loud, and the death too fast. And, unless he fired at point-blank range, too easy to miss.
No, whatever the method, it shouldn’t be over too quickly.
Mitch’s own imprisonment had been a long, slow torture.
Salinas should be forced to rot just as slowly, too.
A knife would give the bastard time to see death coming for him, to feel it as he bled out.
But Mitch didn’t think he was physically capable of stabbing someone; even cutting raw chicken or gutting fish made his stomach turn.
Beating Salinas to death, on the other hand, now, that he could do.
He had learned to fight in prison, though only to defend himself, never to attack.
He raked a hand through his hair and rubbed his face hard, taking a deep breath.
He was so worked up that he was actually trembling.
Maybe he could tamper with the brakes in Salinas’s car.
That would be clean. Discreet. Sabotaging the brakes would be terrifying for the prosecutor, that moment when he realized he had lost control of his car.
And yet, too unpredictable – he couldn’t risk others getting hurt as Salinas hurtled through the streets.
That monster had condemned enough innocent people to unspeakable punishments already.
Mitch found he wasn’t bothered by the unaccustomed profanity his mind supplied whenever he thought about the prosecutor; in fact, he revelled in it.
Suddenly the train screeched, then slowed to a stop. Mitch looked out the window. His ghostly reflection was superimposed on the rear facade of a small house over-looking the tracks, no more than a dozen metres away.
A woman sat on the ledge of an upstairs window, legs dangling in the air, crossing and uncrossing them absently while she read.
Her nightgown billowed gently in the breeze.
Mitch recognized the book in her hands: Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, the story of a woman who gives her life to her family and reclaims her freedom at last. The book, deemed too graphic, was on the banned list.
Sensing that she was being watched, the woman looked up and met the startled eyes of the stranger on the train, whose shy, awkward smile didn’t seem to indicate much joy.
Mitch felt as if time had slowed to an impossible stillness, as if the woman’s gaze was crossing a vast ocean to reach him. As if that gaze had the power to erase everything that had come before it.
The train started up again, and the little house disappeared.
Lying in bed that night with his hands clasped behind his head, Mitch stared up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. How do you fall asleep on a day when you’ve felt both an irresistible urge for revenge and a wild desire to love?
* * *
Anna walked down the street with a ring of keys nestled in her hand, still hardly daring to believe that what she’d been chasing for so long was right there, at the end of the block.
She was feeling so many things at once that it was impossible to define them.
Happiness, excitement, fear – though in what proportions, she couldn’t have said.
“What have I got myself into?” she murmured to herself, pushing open the door to her new restaurant.
Daylight filtered dimly through the frosted front window, casting a ghostly haze about the room.
There was barely a trace of the old place left.
The dining room floor was littered with chunks of ceiling plaster; shreds of tattered wallpaper clung to the walls.
A few wobbly tables stood coated in dust, and stacks of yellowing newspapers hid beneath a tarnished mirror.
Anna pushed through the debris and clutter to the kitchen.
The remaining appliances were rusted and dead, an extractor fan dangling from a wire like a skeleton from the gallows. Even the rats had abandoned the place.
Everything will be fine because there’s nothing to say it won’t be, she thought. It had been a favourite saying of her former neighbour in the Great White North, a generous and eternally optimistic old farmer who used to drive her to the bus stop in his pickup whenever her car refused to start.
Anna had loved her life in the vast expanses of Quebec.
Dirt tracks leading to isolated farms; wood-and-barbed-wire fences enclosing meadows where wild blueberries poked through the grass in spring.
The winters had been brutal and the nights long, but she had learned to be comfortable with solitude.
She’d come to appreciate its quiet stability, and she’d made the modest rental house her own.
When she’d first arrived in that remote village some forty kilometres north of the nearest city, no one had asked questions.
They’d simply observed her, taking their time, as small-towners do, before forming an opinion.
Eventually, they learned that she had come from far away, that she was polite and always paid her bills, and that, on the few occasions when she went to the local bar, she could match them drink for drink and would sing along with them – and that, after a little while, she’d headed home as quietly as she’d arrived.
“Everything will be fine because there’s nothing to say it won’t be,” she murmured again, as the scale of the task she’d taken on truly dawned on her.
All it would take was careful budgeting, smart equipment purchases, and the right group of people for the job.
Anna already knew how she wanted the place to be laid out.
The kitchen was small, but, if it was well organized, the staff wouldn’t be tripping over each other’s feet around a hot kitchen range.
She’d knock down the wall separating it from the dining room and install a glass panel instead so she could always keep an eye on the diners; the room would accommodate thirty, no more, no less.
The décor would match the menu: cheerful, light and refined.
Anna had earned her stripes. She knew her craft, and she was more than ready.
Once the renovation was underway, she’d start scouring for deals at liquidation auctions.
Most restaurant owners threw in the towel after a year or two, and many others who were in the process of opening a new place refused to buy from auctions out of superstition.
But Anna was stubborn and she didn’t believe in bad luck.
She found a chair that looked sturdy enough and sat down, and let her gaze wander. She imagined the clatter and rush in the kitchen, the clinking of silverware against plates, the hum of conversation in the dining room. It was a world that, though it didn’t exist yet, already filled her with joy.
* * *
On his way to open the bookshop, Mitch stopped at the courthouse.
His sleepless night had given him the opportunity to thumb through the pages of several detective novels, and the masters of the genre all seemed to agree on one thing: contrary to the old saying, there was such a thing as the perfect crime – but it didn’t happen by accident. It required meticulous planning.
Having wound his way through the crowds in the lobby, Mitch walked up and down the courtroom corridor, pausing at every door.
A small notice pinned to a corkboard listed the trial being held, along with the names of the judge and prosecutor.
Hearing voices, he turned. Three men were coming his way.
Salinas, who seemed delighted with the effect he was having on his two colleagues.
Though Mitch’s eyes never left him, Salinas spared him not even a passing glance. His indifference only fuelled Mitch’s hunger for revenge.
As he stepped out of the courthouse, a sharp pain shot through his leg.
Yet the sky was a clear blue, and there was no rain in the forecast. He was suddenly dizzy, his heart pounding much too fast, and he had to lean against a wall so he wouldn’t collapse.
Pins and needles crept up his arms, his neck, his cheeks.
The feeling lasted several minutes. Once it finally passed, Mitch made his way to a nearby café, to gather his strength and collect his thoughts.
From his seat on the café terrace he spotted Monsieur Verner, climbing out of a taxi and heading into a store.
Mitch was about to call out to him – but he quickly stopped himself.
Verner, Madame Ateltow, Mathilde… They’d all turned their backs on him.
Not one of them had attended his trial or paid him a visit during his five long years in prison.
They’d left him to his fate, completely alone.