Montaro Caine A Novel - By Sidney Poitier Page 0,80
said something to put Fritzbrauner off? Or was his decision a foregone conclusion? Had Fritzbrauner had a different scenario in mind from the beginning, one in which they were not meant to play a part? Was it all a game to Fritzbrauner? Was he more interested in winning than in doing what was right? Or had someone gotten to him first?
Caine called Roland Gabler in New York and was disappointed but not surprised to receive a response that was just as shattering as Fritzbrauner’s. Gabler would not accept the terms they had offered.
Caine was nearly ready to call Cecilia to tell her that he would be returning home earlier than expected when he received a call from Gina Lao.
“I have Michen Borceau on the line for you,” she said. “Do you have time to speak with him?”
“Put him on,” Caine said, hoping that Borceau would have something encouraging to say, but upon hearing Borceau’s frantic voice, he understood that what his lab director was calling to tell him was even worse than anything he had heard from Fritzbrauner and Gabler. The normally jovial Frenchman sounded more deflated than Montaro had ever heard him.
“Montaro,” Borceau said, his voice soft and shaky. “Do you remember the tiny particles of those strange coins you asked me to examine?” he asked.
“Yes,” Caine said, fearing what Borceau would tell him next.
“The particles have disappeared. They’ve been stolen.”
“Stolen? How?”
“I don’t know.” Borceau explained to Caine that ever since Colette Beekman and Herman Freich had left the Fitzer Lab, he had kept the slivers of the coins in a tiny plastic container in his safe at the lab. They had still been there that morning. But before he had left the lab, he had checked the safe once more, just to make sure the slivers were still there. He had found the plastic container exactly where he had left it; the particles inside, however, had vanished.
“I have no idea how this happened,” said Borceau. “No one else knows the safe’s combination. I haven’t even told it to Gina. I didn’t leave my desk all day. I didn’t even leave for lunch.”
“Objects can’t just disappear,” Caine said.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out how someone could have gotten in here without my knowing.”
After he hung up the phone, Caine slumped on a couch in the suite, dejected. For the first time in his adult life, he felt the self-pity his grandfather P. L. Caine always warned him against succumbing to, the helplessness that Montaro always counseled his own daughter against. He tried to slam the door on those feelings, and yet he could feel them trying to shove their way inside him. He tried to drink, but his heart wasn’t in it; he tried to eat, but he had no appetite. His phone rang frequently. Cecilia called; so did Gordon Whitcombe and Nancy MacDonald. He avoided all of them; he didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even to Howard.
Mozelle left Caine to take a walk through Geneva, and when he returned near sundown, Caine was still in the same nearly catatonic state, seated by a window, staring out at the gorgeous lake. Caine kept replaying in his mind the words that his grandfather had told him when he was just a boy—“The difficulties of life can lick a man or they can strengthen him; it’s the man’s choice”; “A man has to face hard times, no matter what”—but all those words sounded empty to him now. Everything seemed to be falling apart—his company, his family, all his quixotic hopes. Flawed judgment and wrong turns had brought him aground to flounder on the rocks of his mistakes. He thought of the conversations he had had at Kritzman Fritzbrauner’s estate—purposeless coincidence versus purposeful design. The answer to that riddle seemed to be beside the point—life itself felt purposeless to him now.
Montaro’s mind went back to the grim news he had received from Michen Borceau. “Objects don’t just disappear,” he had told Borceau. And yet now, as he considered the statement he had made, he recalled the first time he encountered the coin at M.I.T. He had thought that objects weren’t supposed to behave the way this one did. And as Caine continued to ponder, an idea occurred to him, one that at first seemed absurd. But anything the human mind could conceive of was possible, he had often told himself, and so perhaps what he was beginning to think might not be so absurd after all.