He was holding his hand up, warding her off comically, as if she’d overwhelmed him. “You really need a chocolate sardine, Hazel!” He held the box to her, and now she gratefully took one and unwrapped it. It was excellent, toothsome chocolate. He watched her eat it. After a moment, he said, “Do you ever think about the dinosaurs?”
“The dinosaurs?”
“Yeah,” he said, and he leaned forward, that position that made it look like he might sail over the desk. “I mean, they were so successful. They had flying dinosaurs and dinosaurs that could eat the little leaves at the tops of ancient redwoods and dinosaurs the size of your pinkie. I just think about them sometimes, wonder who they were. Because they were everywhere and they, like, ruled the earth. But success has its costs, right? Too many dinosaur mouths, not enough trees or meat. Now, if only they’d had some smart dinosaur to tell them they had to change their ways before they screwed up all the good stuff, maybe this would still be a dinosaur planet instead of a people planet. But they didn’t have that smart dinosaur so instead the universe sent a meteorite to blow all their scaly behinds to kingdom come so the planet could start over.” Hazel chewed more slowly. He was smiling at her. “Dinosaur days are over. All the dinosaurs are gone. But we’re not going to wait for a meteor to sort us out, are we? Hell, no. We’re going to sort ourselves out. And – this is the thing, this is the hard thing even – though we want it to be about people, it isn’t. It’s about money. It’s always about money. You know that and I know that. So first we show the dinosaurs in charge that we can handle the money side of things. We take the meteor hit, you know? And after that, we make it work.”
She felt about as heavy as a brontosaurus. “Jesus,” she said. “You had me for a minute back there. I thought everything might be okay.”
“It’s all good,” he said.
“You’ll still be paid your salary, is what you mean.”
His eyes sparkled, as if he’d just fallen in love. “We need people like you, Hazel, people with a strong connection to the way we do things, so there’s continuity, you know?” He put both his palms down on his desk. His body language said they’d just solved all the world’s problems. “Change goes badly when systems fail to negotiate the transitions sensitively. We’re not going to make that mistake here. No meteorites, you know what I mean? It’s going to be more like a fine sandpaper, moving slowly over the rough patches.” He was practically beaming. “I have to say, I’m so glad we had a chance to meet, Hazel. I want you to know my door is open to you, any time, for any reason.”
She stood. “When’s it going to happen? Can you tell me that?”
“When’s what going to happen?”
“Amalgamation. Redeployments. Clawbacks.” She gripped the back of the seat she’d been sitting in, where she presumed she’d looked like a complete fool. “When are you going to start fucking us?”
“That’s salty,” he said. He stood up behind his desk, and his ergonomic little chair rolled back silently. “The needs and views of all our partners in policing will be solicited before anything happens.”
She went to the door and turned around. “I wonder how soon after policing standards go to hell up here you’ll be telling your bosses in Toronto that we’re not ‘managing our resources’ well. Because the blame for a fucked-up system always lands on the ones who have to live in it, not the ones who invent it.”
“Don’t fall for that kind of thinking,” said Willan. “You invent your own reality, Detective Inspector Micallef. And if you want it to be one in which your higher-ups are trying to suffocate you, you will wither away.”
“God, you sound like someone I know. She doesn’t live in the real world, either.”
“Happy birthday, by the way.”
“Yeah, thanks,” she said.
16
They’d put together a nice evening for her, something to mark her birthday and the beginning of a new chapter in her life, but none of it went the way they were planning. When Emily heard the door to the downstairs apartment slam shut, she knew Hazel wasn’t going to be the most receptive guest at the evening’s celebrations, and she put her hand on her granddaughter’s wrist and prevented her from opening the door to the basement. “Judging from the sound of your mother’s boots on the parquet, Martha, I’d give her a couple more minutes.”
“I can handle my own mother.”
“Just handle her in a few minutes. She’s going to be feeling a little under the weather tonight.”
Martha released the doorknob and stood back a couple of feet, as if expecting the door to dissolve and admit her on its own terms. She and her grandmother listened to the sounds emanating from below, a combination of heavy footfalls and hoarse mutterings that seemed liberally sprinkled with language one didn’t usually use in front of a child, even a thirty-three-year-old one.
“Son of a fucking bitch,” they heard, and then the sound of a drawer being thrown.
“She does sound a little under the weather,” said Martha, grinning nervously at Emily. “Was she sick when she left for work this morning?”
“Something like that,” said Emily.
“MOTHER!!” came Hazel’s voice from below, volcanic.
“You want to go down there?”
“Maybe I’ll wait another few minutes,” said Martha.
“Hand me that bottle.”
Martha passed her a full two-sixer of J &B.
The basement apartment was littered with thrown things: two full drawers, towels, shoes, sections from various newspapers. She was puffing in a corner of the room like a bull. The door to the upstairs had opened, and she heard her mother descending. “Are you armed?” said Emily from behind the basement door.
“You better not be coming down here without something for my back.”
Her mother opened the door six inches and held out the bottle of J &B. “This is the best I can do.”
Hazel strode to the door and snatched the bottle out of her mother’s hand. She was beginning to feel the heebie-jeebies: it had been almost twenty-four hours since her last pill. Waves of nausea accompanied the anxiety. There was a tumbler in the bathroom meant for drinking water out of; she filled it to the rim. When she came out, Emily was standing in the middle of the room, looking around at the mess, her arms behind her back. “You want a straw?”
“You had no right.”
“I had no right.”
“I had surgery seventeen days ago. I have pain and I have a prescription for pain killers. What the hell were you thinking?”
Her mother was dressed nicely, in a grey wool dress with a thin, shiny black belt around her waist. Elegant. She hadn’t put her shoes on and she was tilting back and forth on her heels in her black hose. “First off,” she said, “keep your voice down. There are people upstairs planning a nice evening for you and they don’t need to hear you swearing like a fusilier.”
“Fuck ’em,” said Hazel. “Where are my pills?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
Emily pushed past her in the bathroom doorway, grabbing Hazel’s arm on the way in. Whiskey sloshed onto the cold tiles. She tugged her toward the toilet bowl. “There they are,” Emily said, lifting the lid. “They’re down there somewhere. If you can’t find one, maybe you should just lap the water. You might as well, with the mess you’re making of yourself.”
Hazel saw something on the floor behind the toilet, and shook herself loose of her mother’s grip and leaned forward to close the toilet lid. She sat down on it, straddling the toilet tank, and put the glass of whiskey down on the floor as she felt around behind. She was sure she’d seen an escapee, a pill that had bounced off the toilet rim and rolled onto the floor. Her finger grazed it, pushing it farther along the floor, but then she had it. She closed her hand around it and stood. Her mother was shaking her head ruefully.