There were three PCS. I wasn’t an expert, but it was obvious they were pretty new and, knowing Cutter, probably state-of-the-art. One seemed to be used only for Internet service. I took a quick look through the hard drive and found no applications other than internet software. Cutter had disabled the e-mail function on his browser and there was no stand-alone e-mail application. Why, I wondered. The bookmarks on the browser showed sites for news services in Toronto, New York, London, Manchester, and other cities around the world, along with a huge file of human rights sites, one folder labelled “Conspiracy Theories—Credible” and another, “Conspiracy Theories—Dumb.” I wondered how goofy a conspiracy theory would have to be before Cutter would reject it.

  The second computer had a few applications—word processing, an encyclopedia, spreadsheets and related stuff, and Cutter’s banking records. The money files were all encrypted. No surprise there.

  Games, lots of them, were the only function of the third computer. I knew nothing about games, so I didn’t recognize any of the titles. I opened one file on the desktop titled “Peace. Game?” and saw only page after page of code. According to the file’s date, Cutter hadn’t worked on it for more than a year.

  I sat back and thought. Why had Cutter divided his activities between different machines? Wasn’t it possible—easy, for him—to put everything on one computer? I remembered him saying something about being naked in a glass house when you used the Internet. Was that the reason? Did he think that separating his work would protect it somehow? I decided I would never know the answer, so I shut down the PCS and turned off the peripherals, the monitors, and VCRS connected to the CCTV cameras. I wondered what to do next.

  The stairway to the left of the vestibule door led to the upper floor. The darkness beyond the top step gave me the creeps. I took a deep breath, flicked the switch, gripped the banister, and forced myself to climb. As I went, every stair creaked.

  I found myself in a hallway. A window on the back wall of the house was covered. The hall led toward the front of the house, where black curtains hid another window. There were three doors. In the bathroom a toothbrush poked from a glass on the sink, a squashed tube of toothpaste beside it, the cap missing. An electric razor dangled from a socket at the end of its cord. A couple of rumpled towels lay on the floor.

  The door leading to Cutter’s bedroom was open. I stuck my head inside. A double bed, the blankets jumbled and skewed, a night table with a small lamp, a dresser, an easy chair beside a covered window. Good enough, I thought, closing the door.

  The one remaining door had been secured by three big padlocks. The key ring jangled as I released each one. I pushed the door open, flipped the switch, and lit up a nightmare.

  The ordinary furniture—a desk, a trestle table cluttered with files, and a few filing cabinets—seemed out of place in a room that screamed insanity. The ceiling, floor, and walls—even the glass in the single window—had been painted flat black, and seemed to press in on me. Opposite the door, the entire wall was plastered with glaring orange, yellow and red graffiti, the letters jagged and sharp. MOOTWA SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH dominated the space.

  I stepped around the desk and took a closer look. The window had been nailed shut. All the graffiti had been written in chalk. All the phrases were multi-coloured, some, like the banner, a foot high, some as small as four inches. Mistah Kurtz, he in Kijevo! The schoolyard is mined!! Operation HARMONY?!! Karlovac is the rabbit hole! Tell Alice! and, in vermilion, They killed them ALL!!

  I don’t know what it was—the claustrophobic atmosphere of the little room with the black wall, the glaring words that had erupted from an insane mind, the violence of each letter with its points and jagged edges, the certainty that Cutter had spent hour after hour, bent over or kneeling on the hardwood floor, maniacally working sharpened bits of chalk back and forth like a demented prisoner—but the room seemed to scream out “Run!”

  And run was exactly what I did. I stumbled down the stairs and out the door and into the clear, cold, normal autumn night.

  FOUR

  ALTHOUGH I HAD TOLD Reena about my inheritance, asking her to keep it to herself, she didn’t know that I had visited Cutter’s house a couple of times, so one day I filled her in. We were unpacking the early morning delivery from the food wholesaler’s. “I just don’t know where to start,” I said, “or what I should do.”

  Reena pulled open the flaps of a large carton and began placing celery stalks, tomatoes, carrots and onions on the long bench opposite the dishwasher. She tossed the empty carton toward the back door, leaned on the counter and lit a cigarette.

  “After your grandma went into the home,” she began, “and your dad and I knew she’d never come back to her house on Harvie Street, I was in the same boat. Your dad was all tied up with your mom’s illness at the time, and taking care of you, so the job fell to me.”

  She flicked her cigarette ash into the sink. I began to dice carrots.

  “So,” she continued, her face suddenly softer, “I guess I can relate to what you’re saying. It’s a terrible job, having to go through someone else’s stuff—a lifetime of possessions and clothes and memories. Keepsakes and junk. You feel like you’re invading their home. And throwing someone else’s possessions away—someone you love—seems sacrilegious. Like you’re attacking them, stealing from them, and they’re not there to defend themselves. And at the same time you know that you’re doing it for them, that you’d never allow a stranger to go through the house and clean it out. It’s a duty, and you want to do it, but at the same time you feel like a creep.

  “I remember, I got most of the job done—it took four or five days—and then I found a box at the back of Mom’s closet, the kind Christmas cards come in. It was stuffed so full she had knotted a ribbon around it to hold the lid on. Inside were all the anniversary cards Dad had given her over the years, all the birthday greetings, and two congratulations cards from when your dad and me were born, each one signed ‘Love, Doug.’ A whole lifetime in a box held together with a bit of tattered ribbon.”

  Reena wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “What the hell do you do with a box of old cards?” she said.

  She picked up another carton, turned her back and began to stack packages of cheese and sliced meat on the counter. I chopped more vegetables. A while later I asked, “So, what did you do with it?”

  Reena’s tough manner was back. “Ah, it’s upstairs somewhere,” she said.

  “Every once in a while,” Abe said, “I come to the conclusion that, on the whole, life makes sense, then something like this comes along.”

  We were in his work room. Classical music played softly in the background. Abe sat in a leather chair, an empty glass balanced on the arm, his feet on a hassock. I sat in his desk chair.

  Although I had gotten nothing practical from her, Reena had made me feel better about things. She understood, and I don’t know why exactly, but knowing she understood lightened the weight I had carried on my shoulders since the day Lakshmi whacked me on the head with the news of Cutter’s will. So I decided to ask Abe for advice.

  I trusted him. I had liked him from the first day. He never talked down to me. And I had a lot of respect for him, especially after I found out that the bookkeeping and tax stuff I couriered back and forth to his “old folks” was all done for free. Mr. Chekowski, apartment 14B in the seniors’ retirement residence in Mimico, had let the secret out of the bag. It wasn’t Mr. Chekowski’s fault. He was in his eighties and starting to lose his memory.

  “See if you can put your problem into words for me,” Abe said.

  “All I have in my head are questions,” I began. “Cutter must have had a plan. That’s why he gave me his house and everything in it. But I can’t figure out what it might be.”

  “This problem cries out for a Cohiba,” Abe announced. “I got to smoke to think.”

  I got up and fetched a cigar from the rosewood humidor on Abe’s desk. He clipped the end, dropped the nub into the ashtray, and leaned forward to the lighter I held for him. When he had puffed enough of a cloud to close an airport, he sat back again and looked at the ceiling.

  “If you ever quit Reena, you could get a job as a butler. Anyway, maybe your friend was just nuts. Maybe there was no reason. Crazy people’s actions aren’t always, well, sane.”

  “You had to suck on a twenty-dollar cigar to come up with that brilliant conclusion?” I said.

  He laughed. “I like that you’re keeping a sense of humour about all this. No problem is ever so big that it can’t be laughed at.”

  “Yeah, well, when I’m in that house, the last thing I feel like doing is laughing.”

  “Can’t say I blame you. Okay, we look at this like it’s a mystery that we need to solve.”

  “A conundrum.” It was my word for the day.

  “Exactly. If Cutter’s actions are simply the product of a deranged mind, there’s no answer. So, we set that possibility aside. What are we left with?”

  Abe clamped the cigar in the corner of his mouth and ticked his index finger. “One, Cutter wanted you to do something.” He ticked his middle finger. “Or, two, he wanted you to know something.”

  “Or,” I said, “both.”

  The next time I unlocked Cutter’s front door, a full pannier banged against my legs as I hauled it inside. I kicked off my snowy boots, went straight through to the kitchen and unpacked, laying everything out on the table. I had brought a dozen 100-watt lightbulbs, a screwdriver set with pliers, a flashlight, a new notepad, a small radio, and some sandwiches and coffee Reena had insisted on making for me. It was Sunday and I had all day.

  My first move was a sacrilege, to use Reena’s word. I dragged a chair to the kitchen window, climbed up, and yanked the curtains aside, producing a cloud of dust that swirled in the sunlight that suddenly poured into the room. I tugged the aluminum disks out of the window and dropped them on the counter.

  Carrying the chair, I marched from room to room, pulling the drapes open and jerking down the disks. Then I climbed the stairs and freed the windows up there. With light coming in, Cutter’s bedroom seemed less creepy. I stripped the linen from his bed, collected the towels from the bathroom, and hauled the whole lot downstairs to the garbage.

  I propped open the door of the “crazy room,” as I had come to call it, set my radio on one of the filing cabinets, and tuned it to a local rock station, turning the volume low. I cleared the desk, piling Cutter’s books and files on the table, and climbed on top. One of the bulbs in the ceiling fixture was dead, the other only a 6o-watt, so I replaced both of them with the stronger bulbs I had brought with me.

  The bright light chased the shadows from the corners, but the wall with the manic graffiti seemed to shout even louder. The strange words, MOOTWA, Kijevo, Kurtz, Karlovac, blazed against the black background. Grunting with the effort, I turned the desk around so I wouldn’t have to face the madness.

  I opened my notepad, placed it on the desk, and began with the filing cabinets. In the first, all three drawers were packed with neatly labelled files. I flipped through a few. “International Monetary Fund” took up four inches, “Land Mines” another three, “Political Donations: Corporate” and “Privatization of Military” a whole drawer. Cutter’s research. I wondered how many hours he had spent compiling all the information.

  I pulled open the top drawer of the second cabinet. It seemed to be devoted to Cutter himself. There were records dating back to his days in elementary school, and more recent legal papers like insurance policies, a copy of the deed to the house, warranties for appliances, and a thick folder of documents relating to his video game. The first file in the middle drawer contained one sheet of paper with Department of National Defense on the letterhead. It was dated a month or so before Cutter killed himself. It was addressed to him, and said, “On December 1 at 08:00 hours, a ceremony will be held….” I skipped down the page. It named a place, a stadium in Winnipeg. Why, I wondered, was the Department of Defense writing to Cutter? Somehow I couldn’t imagine him, with his strange ways, part of an army, standing to attention or saluting or polishing his buttons. Or following orders.

  But then I heard myself say, “Hey, wait a minute.” The last time I had seen Cutter he had said something I let slip by because it meant nothing to me at the time. Fifty wars, he had told me, were raging right now, somewhere in the world. And then, “I was a peacekeeper, once.”

  There were more files concerning military stuff. And magazine and downloaded newspaper articles about investigations and commissions of inquiry into army matters. The dates stretched back over ten years.

  In the bottom drawer I found three hardback notebooks. They were cloth-covered, scuffed and stained, the pages curled and dirty. I flipped one open. Neat handwriting filled the pages. Cutter’s handwriting. The margins were covered with doodles, little drawings of houses, mountains, farm wagons. I opened another. The writing was more spidery, as if hurried. The black and red ink sketches showed tanks and rifles and bullets. In the third, scrawls punctuated by exclamation marks filled the pages, sometimes corner to corner rather than between the lines. And the drawings depicted skeletal faces, mouths stretched wide in horror, eyes missing, teeth broken.

  I slammed the book closed, my heart racing, and went to push the drawer closed with my foot. Then I saw something. I set the books on the desk, got down on my hands and knees, and reached to the back of the drawer. My fingers scraped on metal. It was a helmet, light blue in colour. I set it on the floor and it wobbled a couple of times. I reached in again and brought out a wood-handled knife in a leather sheath. The knife was razor sharp. The last item was an old shoe. A child’s leather shoe, scuffed, the heel worn down. One side and the toe were covered by a stain, dark, reddish-brown, blackening at the edges.

  Blood.

  By late that afternoon I had moved my centre of operations downstairs to the office. I cleared the trestle tables, piling the contents on the floor under the front window, and tidied the computer desk. I dug out Cutter’s software disks and, while I held the cell phone to my ear, followed Abe’s instructions, installing the encyclopedia and word-processor on the computer Cutter had devoted to Internet access so I’d have everything in one place. It would be my research headquarters. “Might as well add the mail program,” Abe advised. “Then you can contact me that way, too, if you want. What’s going on up there, anyway?”

  “I’ll let you know,” I replied, “when I know.”

  I was fumbling in the dark. I had a powerful feeling that I was starting out on some kind of journey, not at all sure where I was going or how I would get there, but I knew the direction I’d take. There would be a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, a million pieces to put together. Probably false trails and dead ends. I had a ghost leading me.

  I called Reena, told her I’d be home late. “You sound excited,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “I think I’m onto something. Talk to you later.”

  I jotted down a list of words already burned in my brain. Kijevo, Kurtz, Karlovac, MOOTWA. I launched the computer’s encyclopedia. Today was as good a day as any to begin.

  “Hang on, Cutter,” I said to the empty house. “I’m on my way.”

  PART THREE

  MOOTWA

  Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame on us gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather, who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given.

  —Homer, The Odyssey

  ONE

  CUTTER WAS AN “ONLY,” like me. He was born in a little town called Pictou on the Northumberland Strait that separates Nova Scotia from Prince Edward Island. His parents ran the snack bar on the ferry that worked the crossing between nearby Caribou and Woods Island, PEI.

  Cutter’s school records showed a monotonous string of A’s, from grade one through high school, with neat handwritten comments that praised his high marks and pointed out that he was a loner and seemed to be withdrawn at times. Except for the grades, I could have been reading about myself.

  He got into the University of Toronto on a full scholarship and proceeded to knock off top marks and prizes in electrical engineering. Somewhere along the line he became a pacifist. He didn’t believe war was noble or heroic. He thought it was insane.

  From Cutter’s diary, volume one

  At the Somme in the First World War, a five month battle costing 415 thousand lives on the British side alone gained 45 square miles of empty ground. 45! That’s 9 thousand dead for each square mile. How bad does it have to get before someone says, “Hey, wait a minute! This isn’t worth it!” During the last two years of the Second World War, over a million people were being killed each month. Who could say with a straight face that the generals who directed such lunacy were in their right minds? If individual human beings acted the way nations or tribes at war behave, they’d be locked away as dangerous offenders.

  In his first year of university he caught the computer game bug and by the middle of second year he was already designing his own games and thinking about signing up for the armed forces reserves, which seemed like a strange interest for a pacifist electronics genius with a bright future promising great jobs and lots of money. His mom and dad were against it. “Too dangerous,” they said, in the letters that Cutter had kept. “You could get killed, Bruce, and then what would we do?”

  His parents were driving home from the Caribou ferry wharf one night when a drunk driver wandered across the solid line, turning their pickup truck into scrap metal and making Cutter an orphan.