“It’s someone in the NSC. He’s been called there for consultations several times a week.”
“Does it have anything to do with someone named Porique?”
“Porique?”
“He was a minister in the Canadian government. We knew him in Europe when he was a diplomat. He and Dennis were very close friends.”
“I’ve not heard his name.”
“Can you find out?”
Jordine shrugged.
“Please find out. I’m very worried about Dennis.”
“Don’t worry.” He reached for her shoulders but she pulled away, taking a gulp of brandy at the edge of the bed, then getting to her feet.
“It’s almost two A.M. I must get home.”
“I’ll drive you home.”
“No, I have the car.”
“You always have the car.”
She shrugged again.
“He wanted that car more than anything, but he almost never drives it. Peut-être, he resents that all the money for it came from my father.”
“Why don’t you have your father buy him another one just for him?”
“Don’t sneer, Arthur. When he is an ambassador, he will have both his own car and a driver.”
She put on her brassiere and then pulled on her panties, wiggling her bottom as she did so.
“Bien, mon cher,” she said, when she was fully dressed. “I will call you tomorrow.”
“I want you to think about life without Dennis, Marie-Claire. Even if it means being without your father’s money. I’m not exactly poor, you know.”
“No, you’re not, Arthur. But you are not as rich as my father.”
12
A block north of the Showers’ house was a steep-sided hill, dark and thickly wooded. There were three large homes situated on the slope, but they were set far apart, and their windows were darkened at this late hour. Trench had picked his hiding place among the trees with care, and felt safe. He was not visible from any of the houses around him, but he had a perfect view of the front of the Showers’.
Not as perfect as Trench would have liked. The steep angle denied him much of a look at the interior, but he could keep track of comings and goings. Dennis Showers had entered at his customary time. His wife had left a short while later, alone. Showers had remained inside. Trench had seen him at a window. Later in the evening, lights on the upper floor had been turned on. Twenty-six minutes later, they went out. Showers had gone to bed without his wife.
Were this action entirely up to Trench, he would have spent more time in observation, calculating dangers and possible surprises. But this was not his own operation anymore. He was now just following instructions. After the aborted hit-and-run attempt with the old Cadillac, he had used that emergency telephone number and used up his one call. The interested party wanted another try, and wanted it in a hurry. It would be easy for him, though. He’d now only have to do as he was told.
He’d learned in Vietnam that the easy way was always the most dangerous way. It was the easy paths that had the tiger traps and punji sticks, the dry dikes between the shit-filled rice paddies that had the land mines. He’d do as he was told, but he would be wary.
A car pulled out of the below-ground garage of the house next to Showers’, roaring up the steep grade of the driveway, and pausing at the top until the automatic garage door closed. Then it turned and sped off down the street, a small foreign roadster with the top up, a girl with long hair driving. The lights in her house had been turned off.
The lights in the house on the other side of Showers’ stayed on for nearly two hours, then went out all at once. By then, all the houses on Showers’ street were darkened.
With the infinite, almost Oriental patience he had learned was his most valuable tool, his most effective weapon, Trench sat his ground, his arms around his knees, and waited. He occupied his mind rethinking his escape route, deciding to alter it slightly to make better use of the cover of Rock Creek Park. He pondered the best arrangements to make for the pickup of the remaining $50,000. He indulged himself a little, and let his mind savor the memory of the tall redheaded girl in Florida. She was the last woman He had slept with. She was the last person he had killed. He was getting itchy.
At 2:17 A.M., Showers’ Mercedes pulled up and parked against the curb a short distance up from his house. His wife, alone, got out and walked along the brick walk to the door, the distant click of her heels in the empty night audible to Trench’s sensitive hearing. When she shut the door behind her, he looked at the luminous dial of his watch again. Thirty minutes later, he reached into his olive drab canvas satchel and pulled out a long-barreled C02 pellet target pistol. Gripping it firmly with both hands, using his knees for a brace, he sighted it at the street light, aiming high to allow for the weapon’s peculiar trajectory, and carefully fired.
The pellet missed, possibly striking the roof of the house next to Showers’. Trench took a deep breath, aimed slightly lower, exhaled, and inhaled deeply again. If he missed this time, he would have to abort this night’s effort. Three shots would be too many. He fired. There was a crackle and a puff of dust, a flare, and the light went out. He put the pellet pistol back in the bag and waited a half-hour more. Nothing moved.
He stood up, picking up the satchel by its strap. It was heavy with more than the pistol.
Porique awoke, startled by the sound of his own coughing. She didn’t stir. She was lying on her stomach, her face turned away from him, her blond hair eerily white in the dim light from the window. He thought of waking her, at least of touching her, but let her sleep. The stress was beginning to tell on her. She had been through so much in her life. He had thought the emotional scar tissue tough enough to inure her to almost anything, but this experience was revealing a deep, lingering vulnerability. He could not determine how much of it had to do with him. He had not been able to answer the question of whether she actually loved him or had merely become attached to him in the manner of some wet and hungry stray cat. Either way, he must see this through. If she wished to stay with him, he would be grateful, but not even her love would stay his resolve. He wasn’t sure that he was capable of love anymore.
The wife of Emiliano Zapata. She had known what would happen to her husband, and she had grieved. But he had gone. The fusillade of bullets struck hours later.
Porique groped on the night table for his cigarettes, then struck a match. He looked to the window and the dark line of rooftops against the gray Montreal night sky. Was there someone there watching? Was that someone armed, watching and waiting as in the cliché Foreign Legion movies, watching and waiting for the lighted match?
He quickly lighted his cigarette and lay back against the pillow.
He had nothing to fear but the Papineau Fils. They were all around him, but he had them under control. They would protect him from everyone else. They would keep him from everyone else.
Porique shuddered again. Moving his cigarette to his left hand, he put his hand on her bare back, and gently shook her.
“Manon.”
She still slept.
“Manon. Ma chère Lescaut.”
He shook her more resolutely. She groaned and sputtered, then raised her head. She had only been drinking wine that night. No drugs.
“Ric? What is it?”
“Manon, ma chère. I think we shall leave this place soon.”
“Is it time? I thought …”
“No. Not yet. But I cannot think with these Papineau Fils all about me. I need to think. I cannot think as a prisoner, and that is what they are making me. This grubby goddamn flat is as good as a jail. I need to think on my own terms. I need to talk to myself. I need to put these people at arm’s length.”
She rolled over and pushed herself up to sit beside him. The window light marked the curves of her small breasts. The sheet fell to the dark triangle at the joining of her thighs.
“A cigarette, Ric.”
“Tobacco? Not …”
“A cigarette.
Just one. I’ve got a bloody headache.”
He lighted one and handed it to her. It was a Gauloise, very strong. She didn’t mind. She could drink cognac by the water glass, and not even grimace. She was very tough, this one.
“I’ve told you what you should do, Ric.”
“‘Telephone Dennis Showers.’”
She exhaled, and quickly inhaled again. “Yes. Soon. Tomorrow.”
“Ring him up and say, ‘Hello, old pal. I’m going to destroy Canada, and I’d like your advice.’”
“What you say is for you to decide. But whatever we do, whatever happens, he can help us, Ric. We’ve nobody else. We don’t have anybody else in the whole bloody world.”
“Do you still have some feeling for him?”
“Of a sort.”
“Explain the sort.”
“I have. I was in love with him when we were hardly more than children. It’s something special to me, but it has nothing to do with now. That isn’t why I want you to call him. Don’t even bring me into it. Just call.”
“We’ve talked about this before.”
“We had three goddamn fights over it, Ric. You want to sit and contemplate your place in the universe. I’m trying to figure out some future for us, to find a way out.”
“You don’t want me to do this.”
“Don’t say that. I haven’t lost any of that; we haven’t. But I want a future for us. Somehow. Something. Do what you decide you must do. I’ll be with you. But I don’t want suicide. I don’t want to close out with some grand goddamn existentialist gesture. Not yet. This man can help us, Ric. Dennis Showers is your friend.”
“He was.”
“You saved his life.”
“He’s the sort of man to repay that debt on his own terms.”
“Try him.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Call him tomorrow. I have his telephone number in Washington. Just make contact. Give us somewhere to turn.”
“I’ll think about it, but n’importe comment, we must leave here soon.”
“To go where?”
“I know a place.”
“Where?”
“In the hills north of Ottawa. In the Shield. They don’t know about it. No one knows about it. It’s near Lac des Sables. We can be alone there.”
He put out his cigarette, then took hers and did the same with it. She looked away, suddenly demure, as he pulled her back down upon the bed.
“I want to be alone with you, Manon Lescaut. In the forest. Just you and I. If only for a few days. If only for a few hours. Ma chère, chère Manon.”
She kept her eyes averted until he was upon her and his face was pressed into her hair. If he looked into her eyes just then, she felt, he might see unhappiness there. But it was not unhappiness, not with him. It was fear.
“I love you, Ric. I love you, love you, love you, love.”
Behind the building that housed Porique’s hideaway flat was a litter-strewn alley. There was a car parked in it, and a shabby van in need of paint. In the back of the van, hunched near the recording equipment, were three men: a technician; an older, sour-faced type who kept playing his fingers over his pistol; and Claude Sebastien.
“They fuck all the time,” said the technician.
“It’s all they have to do,” said the older man with the gun.
Sebastien grunted.
“Well?”
“Well, what?” said Sebastien.
“He’s going to fly the nest.”
“Yes.”
“We should take him.”
“Yes.”
“Tonight?”
“No. Not yet,” said Sebastien, and he took out his flask.
Inspector Beckett, still out of uniform, got off his eastbound train at Tornoto’s Union Station, mingling with the crowd on the platform as it made its procession through the gate, ignoring a conductor and another man in serious conversation, content that they seemed to ignore him. Once within the station, he turned aside to go to a men’s room, and, upon leaving that nearly empty chamber, made his way out a side exit of the terminal. If there were anyone there waiting for him to hail a taxi, be met by a car, or rent a car, they were out of position. His way was on foot, down the two blocks of Bay Street to Queens Quay and the Ferry Terminal and then to the islands park beyond the Inner Harbour. Pausing beneath the Gardiner Expressway overpass, he could see up the street to beyond the Post Office. No one had followed.
He caught the very next ferry, and only just, happily noting that only a tourist couple and their three children boarded behind him before they closed the gate and the boat got underway. He would have at least twenty minutes. Taking an empty place at the rail, he spent the crossing looking back at the receding shoreline, which flattened as they drew further away, until the buildings seemed to rise directly from the glittering blue-green water. At length the perspective widened enough to include the sweeping shaft of the CN Tower, half-again as tall as the Sears Tower in Chicago and the world’s highest free-standing structure, which the Canadians had erected for no real purpose other than to make the Toronto skyline more interesting and add substantially to their national pride.
The youth was at the ferry dock, loitering, a long-haired boy wearing a T-shirt, cut-off blue jeans, and running shoes, one like dozens of other youths hanging about on the island that summer morning except for the design on his T-shirt. It was a caricature of the American President James K. Polk. Beckett had chosen it himself, in part because of its obscurity, symbolically because Polk was the president who had campaigned on “54°40’ or fight,” but had wisely compromised with the English to leave British Columbia in Canada, and thus made Canada possible.
Disembarking, he stopped to ask the youth the hour. When told it, he said he guessed he had time enough for a stroll around the island, and asked if the park’s maze were still there. The youth said it was.
Beckett made it a leisurely stroll, pausing to admire the tulip beds, smiling at mothers and children, gazing at sailboats out in the lake. When he came to the maze, he paused to ponder it bemusedly, entering it with some hesitation, as though feeling foolish. At the third turning of the second dead end, certain he was completely alone, he took the folded manila envelope from his breast pocket and stuck it deep within the hedge. He found his way out, and then ambled along in a wide arc that brought him back within view of the entrance to the maze. The youth came jogging up a moment or two later, darting into the maze as though he had need for a comfort station, which may well have been the case.
There was a cafe near the ferry dock that served beer and wine and had a splendid view of the Tornoto skyline. Beckett started toward it, moving more quickly, distracted only by an official sign saying: PLEASE WALK ON THE GRASS. He smiled. He was fond of Americans, but he pitied them for their uncivilized cities.
Staff Sergeant Major O’Neill, dressed in a sports coat and sports shirt, was drinking a beer at a small table. Beckett bought a glass of wine and joined him.
“You made your train, then, Superintendent.”
“It’s ‘Inspector,’ Rory, but this is no occasion for that formality.”
“Sorry. You picked a pleasant day to come to Toronto.”
“I’m off on the next train to Ottawa,” he said, pausing to pat his now empty breast pocket, “I’ve already concluded my major business.” He sipped. “Have you news, Rory?”
“Harry York is going to open parliamentary debate in a week.”
“I heard that, from a number of sources,” Beckett said.
“He’s going to try to ram it all through before parliament adjourns for the summer. It’s in the morning Globe and Mail.”
“A deadly serious man. What other news? What of our gambit?”
“One bite. The British Major Hotchkiss.”
“Military attaché and MI Six. All very obvious.”
“All very eager. He wants you to contact him in Ottawa at once.”
“Just ring him up?”
&nb
sp; “Yes.”
Beckett smiled.
“Any others? Any Americans?”
“None of them seemed to understand what I was about. The French and Russians made no response at all. The Japanese thought I was soliciting a routine bribe for their doing business. They gave me five thousand dollars Canadian.”
“You must keep that. Any others?”
“No. Not the Germans, not the Swedes, not the Chinese. There was a Libyan, but he wanted me to get him a girl, one he saw on Yonge Street.”
“Get him one. From Yonge Street. And make sure you’re watched.”
“These guys following us, they’re very clumsy, inspector. Are they anything to do with the new federal security service?”
“No, I’m sure they’re from one of York’s private posses. I don’t think the prime minister trusts me any more than the Albertans do.”
“These irregular guys might get rough, eh?”
“Clumsy but nasty. Fortunately, there aren’t too many of them. Old Harry’s discretionary funds are a bit strained.”
Another ferry was approaching the dock. Beckett finished his wine and set down the glass.
“I’m going to go back on this boat, Rory. If there are interested parties aboard, they’ll go right back with me. Take your time here. You know where to find me in Ottawa.”
“Right. Looking forward to it. Like the old days.”
“Right you are, Rory.”
Two men in business suits hurried off the ferry, saw Beckett standing with the passengers about to board, and quickly moved around the barrier to join the boarding line. Beckett remained where he was, gazing at the CN Tower, keeping his eyes away from the boy in the Polk T-shirt who was also among the passengers. When the gate opened, his package in hand, the boy went up to the bow. Beckett took a seat in the interior cabin. The two in business suits sat opposite him, one glum, one grim, neither looking particularly bright, not the sort of secret police you’d expect for a politician of Harry York’s intellectual attainments. But a prime minister awash in sedition and confronted daily by threats of civil war wasn’t going to place much trust in regulars.
Northern Exposure Page 15
