Free Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

how hard could it be? Well, she worried about him, that was all. He just seemed a bit lost to her when she called sometimes. Lacking focus, perhaps. She just didn’t want him to end up like Zed, wandering rootlessly through dangerous places far away. She still didn’t understand why he didn’t just finish his thesis and take his master’s degree. She wondered sometimes if he knew what he wanted. She was afraid sometimes that perhaps he didn’t.
    He was reading the eleventh verse of the psalm: Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.
    His mother was explaining about responsibility and adulthood. She had ideas about staying engaged with the world, as expressed in one’s willingness to make something of one’s life, particularly after having enjoyed the benefits of a lengthy and maternally funded university education. Which, naturally, was not an inexpensive proposition. Not that she minded, of course she didn’t, not at all, and she certainly wasn’t saying this to make him feel guilty; she just didn’t want him to end up like his brother, she was just a bit concerned, and she wondered if he was fully aware of the—
    “I know what I want,” he said quietly. And suddenly, miraculously, the haze lifted. The decision was made. He let the phone drop a little, holding it loosely and barely listening to her, and with his other hand he picked up the map. Montreal was less than two inches to the north.
    She wanted to know what he meant by that, but he’d already hung up the phone. He reached for his wallet from the side table, folded the Bible page into it, grabbed his coat from the closet, and put his toothbrush and the map in opposite coat pockets. The telephone began ringing again within minutes, but he was already out the door.

Part Two

10.
    In a low-lit jazz club in Montreal, some years before Eli arrived in the city, a detective was sitting alone at the bar. He was meeting an old friend, who was running late, and while he waited he examined his fedora in the warm dim light. His wife had given it to him for his birthday a month earlier, and it had an appealing newness about it. It was a perfect shade of chocolate brown. He rotated it slowly, admiring every angle, set it down on the gleaming dark wood of the bar, and ordered a pint of Guinness which took some time to arrive.
    He was trained in the reading of malevolent patterns. His work was essentially the study of intersections: the crosshairs where childhood trauma meets a longing for violence, where specific temperaments come up against messages written on mirrors in red lipstick, torn pairs of stockings in the empty industrial streets out by Métro Pie-IX, the backseats of secondhand automobiles and angles of moonlight over stains on concrete. He possessed a brilliant and sometimes eerie sense of intuition, which he wielded like a scalpel, and in the Montreal police department he was unsurpassed. His work usually involved rapists or murderers, and he had never worked with missing children until this particular afternoon at an almost deserted downtown jazz club, when his friend showed up forty-five minutes late, bought him a second beer to make up for it, and pulled a Bible out of his briefcase.
    “Christopher,” his friend said, “I need your help on something.”
    Christopher glanced at the Bible and then at Peter. “Don’t tell me you’ve found religion,” he said.
    “No, this is evidence. Listen,” Peter said, leaning toward him a little, “have you ever thought about coming to work for me?”
    “Thought never crossed my mind.”
    “You’d like working for me. You get a little more leeway to do your job. It’s less . . . procedural, for lack of a better word. I don’t believe in paperwork. But anyway, look, you don’t have to decide right away about coming to work for me, I just want you to take a look at this. You know that parental abduction case I’ve been working on, the one I was telling you about?”
    Peter