Honour Among Men

by Barbara Fradkin

Sept. 14, 1993. On the road, Sector South, Croatia.

  I’m trying to write in the APC and it’s noisy and hot as hell. We’re on the move again and this time it’s big. The whole company is together and we’re going to a place called Medak, where the Croats grabbed a whole lot of land inside the UN pink zone and nearly got a bunch of our guys in Charlie Company killed. It was the same offensive we experienced the other day but even worse up at Medak because they rolled their tanks in and took over a bunch of Serb villages. Now the politicians are at the table again, making up another new ceasefire deal.

  Danny got the word to pack us up and in less than two hours we were rumbling down the road. The OC dropped by for a pep talk to tell us this was the real thing. This was going to be war and we should be prepared for anything. Some of the guys are really pumped, but I don’t know. I’m wondering how long all of us can dodge the bullet.

  Blakeley didn’t want a lawyer, he didn’t want all the protections the Charter of Rights and his political handlers thrust at him. He wanted to tell his story. When they finally began, seated opposite each other at a small interview table in the windowless recording room, Green realized why.

  “I’ve lived with this for ten years,” Blakeley said. He was seated at attention, his back rigid and his gaze fixed on the wall behind Green. Sullivan sat in the corner, quietly taking notes. “It was a moment I could never take back, a moment of shame and weakness that I could never live down. All that I accomplished afterwards and all the good I did, could never make amends for that second when I lost control and killed a man. I don’t deny it. I don’t excuse it. And I always knew that somehow, someday, I’d be called to account.”

  Green waited.

  “When I told you this morning about the danger and brutality of the Yugoslavian mission and about how one momentary lapse in behaviour shouldn’t be allowed to destroy all the good that a soldier accomplishes, I wasn’t only talking about Ian MacDonald. I was talking about me, and trying to justify me. As I’ve done for the past decade.”

  He flicked his gaze at Green as if gauging his response, then returned to his spot on the wall. Green kept his face neutral.

  “I’ve worked hard for peace, doubly hard since that incident. I believe in peacekeeping and in providing support to the weak and victimized of the world, and I know more than most when and how that support should be deployed. I would have had something important to contribute at the cabinet table, an expertise that could save countless lives not only of those victims, but of our own soldiers as well. I believed that might balance the scales.”

  Still Green waited, but his impatience with the rhetoric must have shown, because Blakeley glanced at him again, this time with a ghost of a smile.

  “That’s what I told myself, and most times in the bustle of the day, I believed it. But in the dead of night, the truth comes calling. I had heard about critical incident stress, of course. It had been drummed into us at staff briefings and by the army padres all the time. I knew I was supposed to watch for signs of it in my men, and I knew what I was supposed to do to help them. Encourage them to talk about it, give them a few days of light duties, and refer them to the padres. But you know, we have hundreds of years of military conditioning working against that. There’s a tradition of soldiering on, of hiding the pain behind bluster and stoic good cheer, of sharing a cathartic belt of whiskey—or two or half a dozen—at the end of the day. The military still measures success by how well a soldier can do that, not by how well he asks for help or confesses to panic and sleepless nights.”

  He paused and took a sip from the water glass on the table, licking his lips as he considered his next move. “I was ambitious. Croatia was my first real field command, and I was determined to prove myself. I accepted every mission and earned myself a reputation as a can-do guy. If you have a really tough assignment, and you want it done, give it to Johnnie Blakeley. I thrived on the challenge and came back from my first tour there raring to go back and prove myself again. And the military were only too happy. They were spread really thin, and they needed experienced field commanders, so they promoted me and sent me back, this time to Bosnia. More brutality, more danger.”

  As he spoke, his eyes began to shine, and his hands swept in broad gestures, but Green sensed a manic edge to his excitement. “Again I sailed through it. I had endless energy and confidence. I volunteered my unit for every dangerous, gut-wrenching mission there. We worked against impossible odds, and we were stretched so thin on the ground that sometimes all we had were a couple of Iltis Jeeps and a lot of bluff against militias fifty men strong. A few of my men cracked, but by God, not rock-solid Johnnie Blakeley. I slept like a baby, drank only my two beers a day, and got so used to the sound of shelling that I didn’t even hear it any more.”

  He shook his head in wonder and reached for his glass again. The glow had died from his eyes, and this time his hand shook slightly. Ah, thought Green, we’re finally getting to it.

  “But when I returned home to Edmonton, I couldn’t come down. I was bored and out of sorts. I felt useless running drills and playing fake war games. I couldn’t relate to any of the concerns of my family; they felt trivial and extraordinarily petty. My wife—” he corrected himself, “my first wife said I’d changed. I had. I had bonded to a world outside my family. To my men, to the villagers of Yugoslavia, and to the harsh mountainous beauty of their land. My wife and I fought. She complained, and I told her most of the world had it far worse. When I was posted to Ottawa, she refused to move. I didn’t consciously leave her, I just ignored her ultimatum. In Ottawa, away from my unit and my family, I began to unravel, but I still didn’t see it. I met Leanne, who was working in communications in DND at the time. She was ambitious, adventurous and fearless—all the things my wife wasn’t. And more importantly, she admired my accomplishments. We kept it low-key, because our relationship could have jeopardized both our careers, until my wife got wind of it and filed for divorce. I didn’t think I cared.”

  He stopped and looked directly into the camera. “Is that thing going to run out of tape?”

  Green shook his head. He didn’t tell Blakeley that there were half a dozen people watching the digital image from the room down the hall, including Kate McGrath, who had been nearly apoplectic when she found out she was excluded. “I have a history with the guy,” Green had told her. “It’s me he’s expecting to talk to, me he feels a connection to.” “Oh, I see,” she’d retorted. “Man to man?” He’d said nothing, reluctant to be drawn into a dispute, whether over jurisdiction or the old boys’ club. In response, she had pointedly turned her back.

  Blakeley pulled his gaze away from the camera with an effort and began to massage his forehead near his scar. He wet his lips. “But the next thing I knew, I’d booked myself a week off, ostensibly to return to Edmonton to work out the separation with my wife. But instead I flew to Halifax at the other end of the country, where no one knew me and no one would judge me if I drank myself into a stupor for a week. I hit the Lighthouse Tavern on my fourth night, hung over and plagued by nightmares and flashbacks. There in the Lighthouse was another officer from Yugoslavia, also quietly getting drunk, and on the TV in the background that damn witch hunt called the Somalia Inquiry. We commiserated about the lack of understanding and respect we’d encountered back in Canada, especially among the military’s senior admin and JAG staff, who’d never set foot in a foreign battle field in their entire careers.”

  “You’re talking about Dick Hamm.”

  Blakeley looked beyond surprise. He nodded with resignation. “You know that? Of course you do. Dick and I hadn’t been in the same company, but we’d still shared a lot of briefings together. Meeting him at the Lighthouse was like walking into the arms of an old friend. I started to let all my frustrations out, and at the height of it, I felt this dam inside of me begin to break open. I got up to relieve myself, and to get a grip too. Hamm was a tough soldier, and I had a feeling he’d never come apart the way I was close to doing.
/>   “Anyway, that’s when Daniel Oliver accosted me and accused me of killing his friend.”

  “How?”

  “Not literally, obviously. By not giving him the support he needed when he was over the edge.”

  “Was that true?”

  Blakeley nodded reluctantly. “We had a difficult mission to do, and as it was, I had young, green kids puking their guts out as they dragged these bodies down for the medics. Men unable to sleep because of the stink and afraid they were bunking down on top of a mass grave. I told them all we had a job to do.”

  “Where did Constable Jeff Weiss fit into this?”

  Blakeley looked momentarily dismayed but seemed to resign himself to the fact Green had tracked the police officer down. He shook his head wearily. “He was a kid too, only five years on the job before they sent him over to help monitor and train the local police in Sarajevo. He was bright enough, and he spoke some Serbo-Croatian, so when our CO asked for police and forensic support during the Croatian withdrawal, they included him. He asked to go, if I recall, a request I’m sure he regrets to this day. He didn’t expect to be piecing together body parts.”

  “Your wife mentioned a dispute between him and MacDonald over a cause of death?”

  Blakeley looked impatient. “Two Croatian soldiers had been shot. Our unit was documenting and mopping up dozens of Serb deaths—combatants and civilians alike who’d been shot by the Croats—so frankly if a Serb got in some retaliation, I wasn’t going to lose sleep over it. Weiss was going around questioning Serb villagers, and naturally they lied. Why wouldn’t they?”

  “They said it was MacDonald?”

  “They said it was a blue helmet—that’s a UN peacekeeper. They didn’t say who, but Weiss narrowed it down to MacDonald.”

  “And he came to you with this information?”

  Blakeley nodded.

  “What did you do?”

  “I told him in no uncertain terms that this did not happen.”

  “You told him to bury the report?”

  Blakeley stiffened. “I told Weiss that before he impugned the reputation of the UN peacekeeping force, the Canadian army and a brave young man who was about to get a medal for rescuing civilian lives, he’d better be damn sure of his facts. That was the end of it.”

  Green sat back, frowning at the blustering man sitting opposite him. “But if that’s what happened, why did Daniel Oliver accuse you of not supporting MacDonald?”

  “I requested MacDonald in the first place. Oliver was his section commander and tried to veto the request. He didn’t say why, and I thought it was just because they were friends, so I went over his head to Hamm. I realize now that he vetoed it because he knew how close to the edge MacDonald really was.”

  The explanation seemed credible enough, and yet the story felt incomplete. MacDonald had come home from Croatia haunted by something he had experienced there and unable to get beyond it, until he took the only way out he could think of. And Weiss, more than twelve years later, was implicated in some as yet unknown manner in the cover-up of Patricia Ross’s death.

  Blakeley must have seen the skepticism on Green’s face, for he leaned forward intently to bolster his case. “I didn’t even see the warning signs in my own behaviour, let alone MacDonald’s. I believed in our capabilities and in getting on with things. That was the pride of the Canadians there. But in Halifax, it all caught up with me. I was waking up in a sweat, buried in body parts and gagging on the stink of corpses, fighting the haze of smoke and gunpowder from the burning villages. The Lighthouse bar stank, the smoke hung like a pall . . . Next thing I knew, I reached across the table, grabbed Oliver by the throat, and gave him a jab to the head. Just one. Before Hamm and Oliver’s buddies pulled me off.”

  He broke off, dropping his gaze. In the quiet of the interview room, his breath grew ragged as he stared into the abyss of his memory.

  Green shifted gently forward. “But one was enough.”

  Blakeley managed a brusque nod. His jaw clamped and tears brimmed in his eyes. He jerked a desperate hand toward the camera. “Jesus, can we turn that thing off?”

  Green didn’t reply, but watched in silence as the man struggled against the long buried past. After a moment, he resumed.

  “I haven’t had a really restful sleep since it happened. I caught the first flight back to Ottawa, swore off booze, and tried to bury the fact that I’d ever been to Halifax. Nobody knew I’d been there, nobody connected me to Daniel Oliver whatsoever. Leanne helped me through it.”

  “You told her?”

  “I had to tell someone. I came back to Ottawa a basket case. I couldn’t eat or sleep. Everyone else thought it was the divorce, but Leanne knew something terrible had happened. She sat with me those endless nights, she never judged or pried. Without her, I would never have pulled myself out of the tailspin.”

  Green thought about Leanne’s behaviour during the interview earlier in the day. This explained her protective interference and his acceptance of it. It also provided a plausible explanation for her mentioning Weiss, even over Blakeley’s objections. She had been anxious to divert suspicion away from her husband because she knew the explosive secret that lay in his past.

  As Green had noted before, not a woman to underestimate.

  Blakeley squared his shoulders and took a deep, weary breath. “What happens to me now?”

  Green looked across the table at him expectantly. “That depends on what else you can tell me.”

  “About what?”

  Does the man think I’m an idiot, Green thought, but he kept his voice dispassionate. “About Patricia Ross and Detective Peters.”

  Blakeley stiffened. “Good God, man. You don’t think I had anything to do with those, do you?”

  “Don’t pretend ignorance, John. That’s where the evidence points.”

  “But Daniel Oliver was a drunken flash of anger. It wasn’t premeditated. I could never intentionally go out and kill someone!”

  So what were the years of military training all about, Green was tempted to ask, but he stuck to the facts. “We have an eyewitness who places you in the Delta Hotel having drinks with Patricia only hours before her death.”

  Blakeley sat back with a thud. “Lord help me,” he muttered.

  “Perhaps the truth will,” Green said drily. “What happened.”

  “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Did Patricia Ross contact you?”

  Blakeley glanced around the small room as if hoping for answers or rescue from its shadowy corners. His gaze flicked to the camera. Eventually, seeing no other escape, he gave a faint nod. “She phoned me.”

  “Where? At your campaign office?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “At my Laurier Street condo.”

  “How did she get the number?”

  “She didn’t say.” His expression cleared as if he’d come to a decision. “She said she had something to discuss with me about Halifax, and she wanted to meet for a drink. I suggested the bar at the Delta because it was nearby and discreet.”

  “What was the date and time of this call?”

  Blakeley paused. “Friday night, April 21st. Two days before the meeting. I was going home to Petawawa for the weekend, and I wanted time to think.”

  “Why?”

  Blakeley shot him a scowl, his first display of spirit in some time. “The woman was obviously planning to blackmail me, Inspector. I needed time to arrange my assets and figure out what my response should be.”

  “Maybe she just wanted to confront you and get an apology. And maybe some gesture of compensation.”

  “I was on the brink of a high-profile career. She was a drink-ravaged, hard luck girl looking for the brass ring. My instincts told me blackmail.”

  “Did you tell anyone about the phone call or your meeting?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Not your wife or your campaign manager Roger Atkinson?”

  Bake shook his head vigorousl
y. He thrust his chin out and looked at Green in open challenge. “I deal with a lot of classified material, as I’m sure you do, and I’ve learned to be a good poker player.”

  Not good enough to fool Leanne ten years ago when you returned from Halifax, Green thought, and not good enough now either. “So what happened at the meeting?”

  “As I thought, she wanted money. Not a reasonable amount as compensation for Oliver’s death—which I would have given her without hesitation, by the way—but ten thousand a month for the rest of her life. A sum I couldn’t possibly raise.”

  Green thought of the man’s two luxurious homes and exquisite white leather couches. Patricia Ross had lived her final years in a dingy room furnished in Sally Ann rejects. “Couldn’t or wouldn’t? You have some significant assets.”

  “I didn’t kill her! I left her waiting for a cab.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Ten-thirty.”

  “And what did you do afterwards?”

  Blakeley cast about, looking uncomfortable. “I walked around for a few minutes to clear my head, then walked back to my condo.”

  Green calculated rapidly. Ten-thirty was just outside the limits of MacPhail’s estimated time of death. The pathologist wasn’t foolproof, but he’d seen a lot of dead bodies in his time. “Can anyone verify that?”

  “My wife.”

  Blakeley must have seen Green’s disbelief, for he flushed. “It’s true!”

  “But you said you told no one about this meeting with Patricia, so you see my dilemma. Patricia is dead. If no one but you knew about the blackmail, who else could have killed her?”

  “I don’t know! That’s your job, not mine.”

  Green raised his hands innocently. “And my job points to you.”

  “That won’t get far in a court of law.”

  Green stared him down for a moment, wondering what leverage he could use. The old warrior was back in form. “I’m quite prepared to proceed with the evidence we have, sir. But that’s not what concerns me now. There is a woman who witnessed Patricia Ross’s murder and who has now disappeared. She’s probably already dead. That’s a lot of bodies piling up as a result of your ill-advised punch to Oliver’s head. A lot more bodies to hide from your conscience. But we haven’t found hers yet, and as long as that’s the case, there’s a chance you can save her. What can you tell me about her disappearance?”