Chapter 17

Chapter 17: Mondieu

Sunday

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

~ John Steinbeck – East of Eden

               

A fitful sleep of half-remembered dreams afflicted the inspector with tortured, phantom images. A biting cold awakened him to a lightless morning. Where am I? The inspector glanced around at his surroundings, rubbing his eyes to dislodge the dust of dreams. Marie was over at her desk, the lights from her lamps and candles long since snuffed out, and she sat with her head on her crossed arms, breathing with the rhythms of sleep, still hunched over her work.

                The inspector checked his timepiece, still hunched under the blanket that Marie must have thrown over him at some point. What had he fallen asleep? How tired had he been? Mondieu sat up and put his feet on the ground –a good first step to waking up – and rubbed at his eyes, heaving a huge sigh. His breath hung in the air before him. What? How cold is it? Oh, no… why was it cold?

                Mondieu raced to the window, placing his hand on the icy pane, his breath condensing and fogging up the glass. Outside was white, sheer with ice and frost, a thin patina of snow blanketing the cobblestones. Could Turners not fix the problem?

                Or was Turners the problem?

                Marie was wearing his coat from the night before, and he didn’t have the heart to take it. He slipped out into the cold. Snowflakes descended from the sky, touching the inspector’s upturned face, soft as puppy kisses. Mondieu shivered violently in the frigid morning, and began briskly walking back to his room at the inn to fetch another coat. Was it another virus on the computer? Or had Turners not been qualified enough to remove the first?

                The worried glances in the inn were silent this morning, and even The Bear only quietly glanced at the inspector’s passing with wounded eyes. The inspector shivered again, not with the cold, and hurried up to his room, grabbing his cloak. Mondieu scurried through the barroom and out the inn, without even stopping to grab a coffee, and rushed off to the police station. Someone better have good news this morning.

                Only Seth was at the police station as Mondieu entered the building. Seth was sitting on his hands on top of the desk, rocking back and forth.

                “Morning, Seth. What news?”

                “Ah, inspector. It appears you failed, doesn’t it? The end is near,” Seth replied without looking up.

                “It is not too late for justice Seth, and we are not over yet,” replied the inspector, fumbling for a smoke in his cloak.

                “Right, of course, we have two more days left before the city is destroyed, do we not?”

                Mondieu said nothing.

                “Well, we caught someone last night. I considered them guilty, once, but now I cannot believe his guilt. Just another innocent trapped in this devastation, I suspect.”

                “Who is it?” the inspector asked. “Another capture at the tower?”

                Seth nodded and merely pointed at the back room.

                “Fetch Turners, will you, Seth? I’ll go speak with our captive.”

                “Yes, sir,” replied Seth, and he hopped to his feet, grabbed his coat, and ambled out of the police station, without haste. If the village is not destroyed in truth, it is already being destroyed in morale.

                A newly installed dead-bolt secured the door – Seth sure can be thorough when he tries – and the inspector retracted the bolt and pulled open the door.

                “Simon?” The inspector stopped abruptly as he entered, incredulous. “You?” Simon was lounging on the bed in the prison cell, completely at ease despite his predicament.

                “Ah, inspector,” replied Simon, sitting up with grace, and folding his hands in his lap. “I’ve clearly wandered into forbidden territory, it seems. So, what happens now?”

                For a captive, he seemed remarkably in control – artistic and psychotic? The inspector didn’t think so. So what was he doing here?

                The inspector pulled up a chair, sitting down with gravitas. “What were you doing in the tower, Simon?”

                Simon shrugged. “Inspecting, inspector. This criminal destroys a city we are all in – don’t we have a right to know what’s going on? I thought I might discover something from the tower itself regarding the shifting temperatures and weather patterns.”

                The inspector’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “But this isn’t even your city, Simon, not your problem. Why do you care?”  

                A smile played at the corners of Simon Temple’s lips. “Am I not permitted to care for people recently met, Inspector Mondieu? Do you not love them already, yourself?”

                “I’ll be asking the questions here, Simon,” the inspector growled. “You are in quite a bit of trouble, and you should not so blithely disregard your situation. You are now our prime suspect for murder, Simon.”

                The hint of a smile disappeared from Simon’s face. “Surely you cannot believe that this murder is mine, Inspector. I’ve been in here all night – how could I have tampered with the tower weather monitors?”

                “I’m not certain, Simon. But I intend to find out. What were you really doing at the tower?”

                “I already told you, inspector. I really was inspecting, nothing more.”

                “What are you doing in town?” Mondieu asked abruptly.

                Simon looked taken aback, then collected himself quickly. “Why, I thought you already knew. Well, that is a story. Have you ever heard of the villain DeMarc?”

                The inspector nodded slowly.

                “I’ve been on his trail for some time now, though I’ve never seen him myself. I received an anonymous tip that DeMarc was making a run for garden, to lie low for a while I suspect, as I don’t know what he might steal from this town. I’m an inspector, like yourself, though less well known, perhaps. When I arrived in town and discovered the murders and crimes, I began noticing the telltale signs of a deranged artist, one such as DeMarc himself. So in a sense, this is my investigation as much as yours, insomuch as DeMarc is involved.”

                “And why,” started the inspector, leaning forward with a dark glint in his eyes, “did you not inform me of this sooner? Don’t you think that if a dangerous criminal, a self-proclaimed Robin Hood, jewel thief, was walking the streets of garden simultaneous to these crimes – don’t you think I should know information like that?”

                Simon looked taken aback. “But, I did tell Seth, and he permit my investigation.”

                “I don’t believe you,” the inspector stated without inflection.

                “What?” Simon replied, eyes widening.

                “I said, I don’t believe you. I knew of the inspector for the DeMarc case, Simon. And I do not believe you are she.”

                The inspector let that sink in a moment, watching Simon’s face. Nothing. He’s certainly got his emotions under control. Is he our killer?

                “You’ve been at every crime, almost immediately,” continued the inspector, “and you know much for a man new in town. There is no reason for DeMarc to be here, and, last I heard, he was hundreds of miles to the east. No jewels to steal, no poor to help. No, Simon, DeMarc has no reason to be here, and no reason to lie low.  So, I ask again: Simon, what are you doing here? Who are you?”
                “I’m- “

                Before Simon could continue, the front door opened with a whine, a brush of chill air, and Seth marched in with Turners in tow. “Inspector!” Seth yelled, shaking the light dusting of snow from his shoes.

                “In here, Seth,” yelled the inspector, not removing his hard glance from Simon.

                Seth ambled over with Turners, and nodded at Simon before turning to the inspector.

                “What is it, Constable Seth?” the inspector asked, not even bothering to stand up.

                “Things are worse than we realized,” replied Seth in a huff, rubbing his hands together for warmth. “The weather controller is destroyed.”

                “What?” replied the inspector, his brow furrowed. “We already knew the weather controller had been tampered with. That’s why we guarded the tower – to prevent that from happening. Turners was supposed to be cleaning up the system.”

                Seth was shaking his head and Turners spoke up. “Not the weather systems, sir. I did clear those up. The weather device itself is underground. The tower just monitors the system. It looks like someone sabotaged the weather controller itself, sir.”

                The inspector stood up and began pacing the room in a frenzy. “So the entire system that drives this city is destroyed, and the winter has come, is that correct? What time was the weather controller destroyed?”

                “Around two in the morning last night,” replied Turners. “The monitors noticed a sudden spike in warmth, and then everything went out of control.”

                “That means I’m free from guilt,” Simon piped up. “I’ve been in this cell since early yesterday evening. But who did it, then?”

                The inspector kept pacing without hearing Simon, stroking his chin in deep thought. “Turners, will you take me to the weather controller?”

                “Yes, sir,” replied Turners, nodding.

                “Seth, stay here with our prisoner. I’ll be back before long.”

               

                Turners and Mondieu left the police station quietly, walking east from the police station, out to the far corners of the city. More storage facilities were located in this section of town, and a few farms and inner-city fields for harvest. The plants were dying, dead, frozen in place. Many of them looked already sunken and destroyed by the sudden, inexplicable weather.

                Snow shrouded the field in a rag of death, strangling the plant-life. Day three of creation, the day on which plants were created, and every growing thing. This snow has destroyed everything floral. Whoever was behind this devastation was a master of timing, a man who had plotted this out. Was it Simon?

                It was like pictures the inspector had seen, though with a sense of wrongness. The inspector had only been here a week, and already he caught himself thinking, you just don’t see snow here. Was this monstrosity stoppable? It already felt as though a certain inevitability was pervading the once edenic city.

                Turners led the inspector towards the outer edges of town on the eastern edge. It was all fields until they reached a stone wall, which surrounded a tall, lighthouse-shaped tower. The northern side of the weather controller station had an opening in the rock wall, and Turners led them through and stone wall and into the interior of the tower through a low threshold.

                “Here we are,” said Turners, motioning to the interior of the tower. Everything was dark, and the inspector could not see anything, but Turners pulled a switch on the side of the tower, and a host of fluorescent lights illuminated the guts of the weather controller.

                It was a mess. The weather controller was a tall structure with several orbiting metallic sections revolving around the base of the tower. Monitors lined the impressive base, and the inspector hadn’t appreciated fully the size of the outer building structure to contain such a magnificent technology. The machine was monstrous, fully fifty paces tall, and twenty paces wide, it was a bulky mess of wires, blinking lights, monitors, juddering machinery. It also appeared to continue underground – possibly for quite some distance, the inspector noticed.

                And the entire structure was a wreck. A large hole had been ripped from the sides of the device, and a layer of frost covered large sections where condensation allowed the device to freeze. A horrible screeching sound, like metal pieces scraping continuously, echoed around the chamber from below where Turners and Mondieu stood, near the entrance to the building.

                “What happened? How could this happen?” the inspector asked, his mouth dropping open at the sight. It was the rawest, most destructive mess he’d seen in some time. “How could someone do this?”

                Turners gripped the rail the catwalk on which they stood, encircling the device. “A bomb, it looks like, or something like one. A messy one, too, from the looks of it,” Turners replied.

                “I can see that, Turners, but where did someone even get a bomb?”

                Turners simply shrugged, at a loss. Where could one get such a device, in town? Or did they make it? That implied a sufficient understanding of intricate chemistry, or electronics which the villain had already displayed an aptitude for, previously, with the information tower. This didn’t look like intricate work in the slightest, just raw, ugly devastation.

                The inspector slid under the rails and hopped into the central section, immediately surrounding the weather controller. He touched the pieces, glancing at the burnt, broken pieces that the explosion had thrown violently outward.  It looked almost like two, maybe even three, separate placements, which implied some sort of time-initiated explosion. Could this have been set up earlier? And just allowed to detonate at a specific time?

                “How often do people come in here, Turners?” the inspector yelled over the whining metal.

                “Never, inspector. Maybe a couple times a year someone comes in to dust and clean and make sure everything is working, but probably no one has been here for months.”

                Easy. This criminal faced no significant opposition at any stage. I’m not even giving him a fight. The inspector tapped at his coat pockets for a cigarette, but realized they were all in his coat with Marie. He’d left his books at her house, also. Scatterbrained, and the cost is high for my inattention. No more. This has to stop, and soon. It would stop soon, whether or not he had any say in it.

                “Turners, head back and tell Seth that he can let Simon go, for now. We’ll need to keep an eye on him. And let Seth know that we no longer need to watch the tower.”

                “Yes, sir,” replied Turners, heading back out the way he came.

                The inspector walked in circles around the weather control tower, admiring its beauty. It was a raw power, here, and it seemed almost… old.  

                The stakes were rising every minute, and the inspector must follow the only good lead he had, given by the criminal himself, or herself: the tree.  Is it knowledge, or life? Time to get some answers.