Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

  “Manon,” he said, more loudly this time, but she still slept.

  Showers often liked to walk home from the State Department, but he had stayed too long this evening, mostly talking on the telephone and mostly to the White House, again. It was as though he were the only person in the United States foreign service who knew anything at all about Canada. Diehl even let slip the word “ambassador”—as though Showers were going to Ottawa as number one instead of number two. Showers was, quite frankly, pleased about that. He was less pleased by most of Diehl’s questions. They were concerned with terrorism, and Diehl explored Showers’ attitudes toward it as might a psychiatrist.

  Showers replied in every instance with a strict rendering of official U.S. policy on the matter. Diehl had ended their last conversation of the day sounding unsatisfied with that.

  There was not a single cab in the drive at the Twenty-third Street entrance to the building. Showers walked out to the street and stood. In the oncoming southbound traffic, there was no cab. But then, suddenly rounding the corner, one came. It already had a passenger, but a World War II-era system of cab sharing still existed in Washington. If the passenger was going anywhere near Georgetown, Showers would soon be home. The car braked to a halt. Showers said “Georgetown” through the open front window, got a nod from the black driver, snapped open the rear door, then got inside, at once wishing he hadn’t. The other passenger was Hugh Laidlaw.

  “Good evening, Mr. Showers.”

  “Why can’t you goons …”

  “Spooks.”

  “… spooks, leave me alone?”

  “It’s quite necessary that we talk.”

  “We’ve talked. There’s no point to any more conversation.”

  The driver turned into Virginia Avenue, heading toward the Watergate complex looming on the left.

  “We can help each other, Mr. Showers.”

  “Not interested in anything you can do for me.”

  “Considerable help.”

  “There is nothing you can do for me that I want done.”

  Laidlaw was looking at Showers impassively, his gray eyes steady, studying. “Hope Felicity Stuart,” he said quietly.

  “What the hell?”

  “Mr. Showers …”

  “Driver! Stop the cab! Stop here!”

  The driver slued the cab to a screeching halt. Cars behind swerved into the other lane and rudely honked. Throwing a dollar bill onto the driver’s seat, Showers grabbed up his briefcase and snapped open the door.

  “Please, Mr. Showers …”

  “Damn it, Laidlaw, are you ripping open my mail, too? Because, if you are, you are in big goddamn trouble. I’ll go to the White House. I will, Laidlaw, I will.”

  He got out clumsily, slamming the door behind him, striding away with looking back. Laidlaw closed his eyes, folded his hands, and sighed.

  “Take the Roosevelt Bridge, Sammy,” he said. “I want to go to the safe house.”

  A quiet beeping of the pager in his pocket told Sebastien his men were in position at the rear of the house. The neighborhood was on the outskirts of Montreal, a poor but quiet district. Sebastien wanted to do this without gunfire. He had two of his men dressed as provincial policemen just in case, to reassure the neighbors. But he hoped they’d stay watching television or whatever. He could hear Johnny Carson’s voice drifting through the trees from somewhere behind him.

  As far as they could determine, there were just two of the Papineau Fils inside. His surveillance team had waited more than a week in the hope that others might show up, but none had, and York was pressing for some action. They were young, these two, a boy and a girl. They would have to do.

  Sebastien paused to drink from his flask, licking his lips afterward. Then he grunted. His men were watching him. He slipped his hand-held radio from a pocket of his suitcoat and held it close to his mouth.

  “Bien,” he said. “Maintenant.”

  He nodded to the man next to him. Within seconds, the front door of the house was smashed in and they were rushing inside. There was a shot, from the rear of the house. Sebastien’s men were all using silencers. He heard the whoomph, whoomph of one, also at the rear of the house, as he himself hurried through the front door.

  They caught them in the kitchen, eating. The boy, a fat youth with long blond hair, was wounded in the side and bleeding badly. He had had a small-caliber revolver in his hand, which one of Sebastien’s men kicked aside. The boy lay on his back, breathing hard, whimpering with an unpleasant bleat. The girl, small, narrow-faced, with a beaky nose, stood above him, clenching and unclenching her hands.

  “Get them back to headquarters,” Sebastien said. “Call Dr. Mouflet for the boy. Send her to interrogation. And I want a thorough search of this house, now.”

  The most immediate yield was wads of Papineau Fils propaganda—leaflets, posters, proclamations, and even cartoons. They all urged secession and some urged armed uprisings, and they were all in French. Sebastien only glanced at them and hurried on, moving ahead of his men, grimacing at the filth and grime, ignoring the food stains on his own shirt and tie. He climbed the narrow stairs, wheezing, to the small floor above, where he found a bathroom and two dark, cramped bedrooms. Drawing his small pocket automatic, he stepped into the first, sidestepped away from the doorway, and flicked on the lights. No one was there. He went through it quickly, sweating. By the time his men came up the stairs, he had a thick, dirty envelope in his hand.

  “Incroyable,” he said. “They have no subtlety, no prudence. Ils sont fous.”

  He handed the envelope to one of the men, who opened it to reveal a thick wad of currency.

  “British pound notes,” said Sebastien. “Mon Dieu.”

  When they returned to his Montreal headquarters, occupying an old warehouse down by the river, Sebastien went to his dusty office, eased himself back into his old wooden swivel chair, turned off the light, and slept—without dreams. He was awakened by Depêche, his chief assistant, nearly two hours later. Sebastien frowned as he turned the light on again, then looked up blinking.

  “Monsieur,” said Depêche, “the interrogation is complete. The boy is dead.”

  “Et la jeune fille?”

  “Now, in the hospital.”

  “What have we learned?”

  “From the boy, rien. He died too soon. From the girl …”

  He stepped forward and lay the interrogation report on Sebastien’s desk. It comprised four pages, typed single-spaced.

  “She was very talkative,” Sebastien said.

  “Vraiement. The electrodes to her genitals produced nothing, but her breasts …”

  Sebastien waved his hand in displeasure.

  “En tous cas, there are many Papineau Fils in Montreal now,” Depêche said. “They are acquiring a large supply of explosive. Porique is definitely in Montreal. She does not know where, but he meets with this Macoutes.”

  Sebastien snorted, studying the report closely, his heavy-lidded eyes widening from time to time as he read it.

  “The girl is to stay in hospital indefinitely,” he said, finally.

  “It would be a long stay in any event.”

  “And I want all copies of this report brought to me at once.”

  He locked the one copy in his safe. When the other three were brought to him, he waited for Depêche to leave, then ran them through his shredder, one of the few pieces of American equipment he allowed himself. He reached for his flask, and drank good cognac.

  Showers, in a foul mood, was drinking. The White House and Hugh Laidlaw had made him irritable enough, but upon arriving home he had found that Marie-Claire, whom he had no wish to see, had decided to spend this evening at home. Ignoring her attempts at conversation, declining dinner, he had made a gin and tonic and gone to his study, emerging only to replenish his drink. Marie-Claire eventually abandoned all attempts at friendliness and contented herself in the living room with her needlepoint, and with innumerable telephone calls, mostly in French. In an
interlude, while she was in the bathroom, Showers made a call of his own, to a number in Westchester County he had tracked down only that afternoon.

  He had located Sandra Pope, the blond Braddock High head cheerleader and campus queen, finding her husband listed in the Westchester phone book. At first, she sounded delighted to be talking to him. How absolutely super after all these years. But no, God no, she hadn’t heard anything of Felicity Stuart. The poor little thing. Whatever could have happened to her. A school teacher in some hick upstate town, no doubt. Drank a lot, too, didn’t she? But then, Showers used to drink a lot as well, hadn’t he? And what had become of him? Still working in the bookstore in New York City, ha ha ha?

  Showers wanted to strangle Sandra. More than anything, he wanted breezy, chirpy, snippy Sandra Pope to know all about how very successful he had become as a diplomat, but he couldn’t tell her without sounding like the idiot adolescent he had once been. It was as though she presumed he was a clerk in the passport office or something as menial. And who the hell was Sandra? Her father had been a railroad dispatcher. He would find some way to rub Sandra Pope’s nose in his success, but later, not now. He mumbled something about getting together sometime, and hung up.

  His desk was covered with old pictures and letters, the old high school yearbook there as well, opened to his senior home-room picture. He snapped it shut, wanting suddenly, desperately, to escape from this. He left his study and, walking past the living room without saying a word to Marie-Claire, went outside into the summer night, as moistly thick with heat as it had yet been that season.

  He turned left at the sidewalk, walking past invisible clouds of summer insects noisy in the bushes and trees. Despite the din, he could hear the click of his leather heels against the brick pavement, and, somewhere in a nearby house, the sounds of a party.

  Showers wanted to be gone from this place, from this time. Unlike any other period of his life save when he had fled his family’s Westchester for his own New York, he felt caught dangling between his past and future. He was now having very serious doubts about whether his marriage would last, whether it could last. If it was to survive, it would have to be in Ottawa, yet Ottawa was still so many days away, and Showers was not at all certain he could psychologically tolerate many more of these days. Lately he had been fighting an impulse to ask Alixe Reston to go off somewhere with him.

  He stepped off the curb, picturing the two of them checking into the Henlopen Hotel on the Delaware shore, walking the boardwalk with the evening crowds, lying on the beach together just after sunrise. A fantasy. She seemed a fantasy when she was with him.

  He sensed more than heard the approaching car, just as he was midway across the street. There were no headlights, just this tingling sense of nearing danger, and all at once the increasing roar of a violently accelerating engine. It had been a car in the Congo, a rusting old dark blue Ford with dirty windows, coming at them from behind as they approached the market square, flashing by and then swerving away down the crowded, dusty street—just as the grenade went off. No one drove that fast in Georgetown, not even the teenagers.

  Shrieking fear demanded that he move, that he do what he should have done in the Congo. He leaped and dove and rolled, smashing up against the opposite curb as the car, its engine at full blare, careened around the corner with squealing tires, a wheel hitting the curb with a wrenching thwack, and ground past him, scattered dirt stinging his face. It was another rusty old car, a Cadillac with tail fins, either pink or white. Showers had only the flash of a glimpse of the driver, a black man wearing a cap.

  As the Cadillac raced down the street, its headlights coming on at the next intersection, Showers slowly sat up, feeling frightened, embarrassed, and angry all at the same time. And bruised. His shirt sleeve was torn, his right elbow scraped and bleeding, his knee throbbing. He forced himself to slow his frantic breathing, and drove away the hateful, racist thoughts that filled his mind. Not all black people tried to run down white people just because they lived in Georgetown, and that might not even have been the case. Showers slowly got to his feet, the pain in his knee increasing. Nervous glances found no new threat. He had a right to be rattled, but there was no reason for such paranoia. It was just the Congo coming back to him again.

  He tried to avoid Marie-Claire when he returned to his house but she saw him as he entered the hall and was alarmed at his appearance. “Dennis, qu’est-ce que c’est?” she said, rising from the couch. “Sang? You are bleeding!”

  “I had an accident,” he said, continuing on up the stairs. “I fell in the street.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “No. Let me be. If you want to help me, bring me a drink.”

  Frank Trench steered the old Cadillac out of Georgetown along back streets, crossing the dark, wooded canyon that was Rock Creek Park over the P Street bridge and then heading northeast toward the black ghetto. He had been swearing, furiously and continuously. He could not understand how it was possible that he had missed. It was like firing pointblank with no sign of a hit. Showers could not have seen or heard the car in time, yet he was rolling out of the way the instant the fender should have struck him, as though he had expected everything. But that couldn’t be. Forewarned, he wouldn’t have been out on that street.

  It had been Trench’s third try at Showers. He had almost taken him out with a rifle up in the country north of New York, but the son of a bitch had never stayed still long enough for a clear shot and ended up getting away by outdriving him. Trench’s next chance had been in a downtown Washington parking garage, a perfect place for a robbery-murder, but there proved to be too many people around. And now he had blown the perfect setup. Blackface makeup or not, Showers would remember. The smartest thing Trench could do now would be to take the fifty thousand and disappear.

  Maybe not. Maybe he could still get lucky.

  He stopped impatiently at a traffic light at Sixteenth Street, the demarcation line between white and black Washington. It turned green and he hastened into the dark streets beyond, just another black man driving another old car. Tomorrow, he’d be a white man again. Tomorrow, before he did anything else, he would make that one phone call to the first of those Washington numbers.

  10

  Harry York awoke to a cold bedroom. Ottawa was known for terrible heat in summer and terrible cold the rest of the year, but sometimes the terrible cold intruded upon summer nights as well. He had almost asked a servant to set a fire. Shivering and yawning, for it was only 6:00 A.M., he put on his robe and shuffled to one of the windows. It was said that 24 Sussex Drive had the finest view in Ottawa, a sweeping panorama of the river and the opposite shore. But the opposite shore remained Quebec.

  Never in all the long history of British colonial botchery had the English crown and Parliament made such a mistake as when some bewigged fool established the policy of leaving French Canada French. Queen Victoria’s grand conciliation gesture had been to place the Canadian capital here on the Ottawa River, a bridge between the two provinces. The capital should have been in Montreal—an English-speaking Montreal. Victoria’s armies beat the Dutch farmers at Blomfontein and won the Boer War. But she left it at that, and the Dutch republic of South Africa was the result. Now, because of the same naiveté, English-speaking North America was faced with the prospect of a Castro-style socialist regime on the St. Lawrence.

  York settled into a chair by the window, leaning his head back, but still gazing across the river. The sun was rising directly downstream, one brilliant shaft of light a painted streak of glitter on the water.

  York’s fence-mending trip to Alberta had been as unproductive as he had expected. He and the provincial premier had dutifully exchanged their rhetoric for the benefit of the local news media. They had “useful talks.” They changed absolutely nothing. Alberta was demanding a relationship with Ottawa not much closer than that which Alberta had with Washington.

  Trudeau’s maneuvering during the 1981 constitutional debates was an ingenious e
xercise that still fascinated York and had him frequently returning to the newspaper clippings of the time. The constitution that Trudeau had produced to replace the 1867 British North America Act as Canada’s charter was a fair compromise that nearly all the provinces rejected, principally because of the bill of rights Trudeau had incorporated, with Levesque and the Quebeckers leading the opposition.

  Knowing that Levesque would never compromise, for it would mean abandoning the separatism that was his party’s raison d’être, Trudeau had wooed the other premiers, dropping items from the proposed bill of rights in exchange for agreements of support until only Quebec stood against him. Then, Trudeau began another successful round of negotiations to have the deleted rights restored. It was called a brilliant coup, but it was successful only as a temporary expedient, not as a move to change history. The new constitution severed all formal ties to Britain except for the symbolic allegiance to Elizabeth as queen of Canada; but it did not change Canada. The success of a constitution is not in its adoption but in its survival. The United States’ constitution could not be considered a success until the conclusion of the American Civil War.

  York was going to play Trudeau’s game: treatying with the west, telling Quebec to go screw; but unlike Trudeau, he was, this time, going to play it to its ultimate logical conclusion. It would be no mere temporary political expedient. The flaw of most politicians was that they tried to mold the future simply as an extension of the present. York knew what the greatest of the statesmen had known: the future derives not from the present but from history. And the future would soon be upon them.

  He rose wearily. He had to meet Sebastien again, in the French city of Hull again. He was not sure how well that gross Frenchman understood his job.

  A motorboat was coming upriver. A slight shiver ran over the cold flesh of York’s back as the sound of its engine came to ear. According to some reports he had read, that boat or any boat could be carrying a most unpleasant cargo.

  Kodakov, dressed in a green plaid sports coat, yellow slacks, and white loafers, was in the secure room in the Soviet embassy basement, having just returned from Florida. Miami was no Las Vegas, but he had enjoyed himself, as the frowning Yerofeyev had noted. The ambassador was with them in the secure room as well, and he too was frowning. He set Kodakov’s expense account on the table with a sharp snap.