by Ingrid Betz
Six weeks ago, after a more than usually rancorous exchange with Elaine, Asher had thrown a few belongings in a duffel bag, and driven off in his beaten-up jeep to join a group on the prairies working to block a pipeline. Give the mess in his private life a chance to sort itself out, he’d asserted with his confident Irish grin. The mess, as far as Borrowman could make out, involved Verena. Verena Vitek was the third member of the Cell and constituted a whole other set of problems.
Some evenings she’d sit with them, cross-legged on the carpet in a graceful dancer’s pose, her eyes fixed on Asher as she listened with her unreadable cat’s expression. She never contributed much to their discussions. Backstory and logistics didn’t interest her. Eventually, she would rise and yawn, artless as a child, and on her way to the door say with just a trace of Serbian accent, “Let me know, what you decide.” She trusted Borrowman to tell her what needed doing, the way she’d trusted her father. Borrowman supposed he had taken the place of Volker Vitek, the man who’d died so abruptly and left his sixteen-year-old daughter rootless and vulnerable in a strange new country. But the worst things, the ones that had done the damage, had happened to Verena long before that, when she was growing up in Belgrade.
Safer, he decided, to wait until St. Denis supplied him with a few more facts before he put her in the picture about the poaching.
4.
VERENA LIES ON HER BACK in the sleeping bag that she uses as a bed, arms crossed under her head, and watches the moon make its slow journey westward behind the tops of the poplar trees. Sleep is a long time coming. She is thinking, as she does so often, of the day she might get to use the Henry on an assignment. Borrowman has said, “No, never, don’t even think it,” but she knows that since China, the plight of bears has been preying on his mind with increasing urgency, and sooner or later he will be driven to act on his concern. She replays in her mind the evening he got back from his trip.
She’d picked him up at the London airport. The sight of him crossing the arrivals hall with his familiar long, loose stride had made her throat ache. An aching throat is the nearest she ever comes to crying. “Welcome home, John.”
“Verena! I wasn’t sure you’d be here… ”
“I told Francine, my Canadian father is flying back from China and can I please switch classes.”
Taller and thinner even than she remembered him in his trademark Aran sweater, Borrowman’s cheeks were hollow under a two-day stubble of beard, his eyes red-rimmed with lack of sleep. Slung over one shoulder was his backpack with the Canadian flag prominently displayed. He’d sent her a message from Heathrow in the other London, to let her know what time his connecting flight from Toronto was due.
“Rough flight?” she asked.
“Missed a connection in Beijing. Took the Asian scenic route.” His voice was pitched low, as though he’d gotten out of the habit of using it.
“Nothing except your pack?” she said as they made their way through the press of people around the luggage carousel. He smiled his brief, melancholy smile—that hadn’t changed—and tapped his forehead. “Only what’s in here.”
A cold April rain was falling as they crossed the car park. She unlocked the door of her Volkswagen Beetle while he stood gazing at the rind of light edging the flat Ontario horizon. Drops of moisture gathered in the furrows of his cheeks. “As bad as you expected, was it?” she asked.
“Worse. They cry like children, the younger ones. It’s a sound you can’t forget.”
She waited for him to wedge his backpack in behind the passenger seat and fold himself into the car. “You’re back now. Give it time.” Bad choice of words. Time was a thing he didn’t have much of, the doctor had told him; a year if he was lucky. Stomach trouble of some kind; she didn’t ask. Everybody in her life died, why should Borrowman be any different?
His glance registered the wild violets in the dashboard flower holder. “You were at the farm?”
“Monday.” She pulled her seatbelt tight and smiled. “Exorcising my demons,” she said, using the phrase he’d taught her.
She was nearly as good a shot now as her father. Although his skill with a rifle hadn’t been able to save her mother the night the Serbian Secret Police burst through the door of their house in Belgrade. Hidden in a closet with her face pressed against her mother’s dresses, breathing in the scent of lilac, which she had previously loved and that now only induced nausea, she’d been forced to hear everything. Her mother’s stifled screams, the soldiers’ crude guffaws as they urged each other on, her father’s anguished pleading as he was forced to watch.
She turned the key in the ignition and Beethoven’s Pastoral came on. She’d put the tape on specially.
“Music,” said Borrowman, nodding. “I’ve missed that. Elaine and the boys okay?”
“Fine.” She gave the man in the car park booth a twenty and cupped her hand for the change. “Elaine wanted to be the one to pick you up. Donny’s been suspended again.”
“Oh, God.”
He’d struggled with parenting ever since the children’s mother had left them and moved to Toronto to make a life for herself working in a fashion boutique. Elaine, in Verena’s opinion, bullied him mercilessly. Much the way she’d bullied Asher before he bailed out.
“I told her you’d be too whacked to listen.”
He stared through the windshield as she turned onto Veterans Parkway, where a billboard proclaimed Welcome to London – Population 365,000. She knew he wasn’t seeing anything; nothing here in London, anyway. She had come back like this from trips of her own plenty of times. From the seal hunt in Newfoundland, and from sit-ins chained to old-growth trees or to downtown corporations’ office chairs. From demonstrations to protest the long-distance transportation of livestock, for which Canada had the laxest regulations in the western world: fifty-four-hour stretches without water or food, animals standing jammed together in their own excrement, the living propping up the dead and the injured. Then there were the protest rallies against labs that used animals for testing, which turned ugly as often as not. For days afterward her head would be filled with splintering glass and alarm sirens, and the terror of the creatures they were attempting to save.
Almost like war in Serbia, she’d described it once to Borrowman. Last summer she’d taken a week off from her job at the Dancefit Studio and spent them with Asher out west, dynamiting roads to save caribou habitat from being clear-cut. They’d come close to blowing up a truck carrying loggers and they joked about it afterward. How the protest might have been more effective if they had. You could do that kind of thing with Asher, joke about killing and death.
“Buckle up,” she reminded Borrowman. “The police have a blitz on this week.”
She never crowded people with questions; they told her what she wanted to know when they were ready. Borrowman was no exception. “Every night back at the hotel,” he was saying, “I couldn’t wait to get in the shower. To wash off the dirt of being human. The awful thing is, moon bears are so gentle.”
Their name matched the pictures Borrowman had downloaded from the internet to show her. Round, fur-lined faces, eyes with a vaguely oriental cast to them, and ears identical to the ones she recalled from the teddy bear of her childhood. Borrowman had tried to make her read up on them as well, but she found reading difficult in English. In Serbian, too, come to that—blame the years of interrupted schooling.
“If you stand close to a cage, they’ll reach out with a paw to touch you. Like children,” Borrowman said. On the radio, Beethoven danced to the steady beat of the wipers.
Boxed in by minivans and SUVs, they waited for the light to change on Dundas. It was after seven and windows were beginning to glow in the downtown office towers, lending their utilitarian rectangles an elegance they lacked by day. Traffic flowed again and two blocks further on a Tim Horton’s sign glimmered amid the neon scrawls. Verena switched on her turn signal a
nd Borrowman swung his head in her direction, spiky with nerves. “Where are we going?”
“For something to eat. Relax. I don’t suppose Elaine is keeping supper for you.”
“No.” He slumped back in the seat, yawning. His hair needed cutting. More grey than brown, it curled over the crew neck of his sweater. “Couldn’t sleep, doubled over in those awful airline seats. I felt like one of the bears.”
She found them a table next to the window where he could stretch out his legs, and made him sit down while she went to order. He leaned forward to pull his wallet from the back pocket of his corduroys. “I don’t know if I have any Canadian…”
She waved his hand away. “My treat,” she said, feeling shy because this was a reversal of their customary roles.
The restaurant was quiet and warm. The girl in the peaked cap behind the counter was replacing doughnut trays and a couple of seniors chatted in the corner over mugs of tea. What Verena liked about Tim Horton’s was the impersonal sameness of the place, no matter which outlet you went to or at what hour. She bought minestrone soup and a turkey, bacon, and tomato sandwich for Borrowman, along with coffee for each of them.
“Too much,” he protested, frowning, as she set the bowl in front of him, but she knew he hardly ever ate on planes. He laced long skinny fingers around the china bowl to warm them, or maybe it was to stop them from trembling. Tugging her braid free of her collar, she slid into the seat opposite him.
She remembered how the words had started pouring out of him in a kind of relief.
“They keep them in the semi-dark. Underground. In cages so small they can’t stand up properly or turn around. Words can’t describe the stench.” He picked up his spoon and put it down again. “That’s the first thing you notice. The second is the moaning, the head-banging. It never stops. Twice a day they ram a catheter through the hole in their abdomens to milk the bile from their gall bladders. Sometimes they leave it in permanently. Many of the bears chew their paws from the pain. A third of them die of infections in the first month.”
Verena was silent while he ate. “Did you get to Chengdu?” she said at last. She had helped him pinpoint all the known sites on the map before he left.
“Chengdu. Zhuhai. Huizou. I lost track. Over nine thousand bears in captivity at last count. They’ve emptied most of the forests in Asia, so now they breed them on farms. A Korean idea, originally, it spread to Vietnam as well. The authorities choose which sites westerners are allowed to visit, but you can always bribe somebody.”
He’d pulled a napkin from the metal holder and patted his moustache. Like his hair, it was growing grey but it suited him. It lent authority to his spare face and the finely-boned features that could still be considered handsome. “Not bad, this soup,” he said, a comment banal enough to stem the distress that engulfed him over the subject of moon bears.
“Of course they feed you a line about how they’re improving conditions. Making the extraction more humane. Even sometimes dabbing on anaesthetic before they punch a hole to the bladder. What a laugh!” He bit into his turkey club, not really noticing. “It’s gotten to be big business. Very lucrative. Now that they’re using bile in commercial applications, not even the breeding programs can keep up.”
He’d fixed her with his moss-coloured gaze, which always reminded her of a hurt dog, and was telling her about a veterinarian in Chengdu when headlights flared in the window, illuminating the raindrops sliding down the glass. At that point he stopped speaking. A couple of men in work boots pushed through the door. One of them gave her the eye and she turned her head away with a twitch of contempt. She wondered if Borrowman had been under surveillance in China.
“You were saying?” she prompted. “About a vet?”
“Yes. He took me aside. Trained in the U.S. and uncomfortable with the way things were being done. Did I know that a Chinese company was considering setting up harvesting operations in Canada, he said? We have the largest remaining population of black bears in the world. Seems some Chinese consumers will pay extra for bile from wild sources—the real thing, they call it. Plus, the market in North America is expanding, and it would eliminate the hassle of trying to import the stuff illegally.”
Laughter sounded from the counter where the men were joking with the girl in the cap and Verena stirred. “People in the west can’t possibly believe…”
“People believe what they want to,” Borrowman said harshly. “Look at us—gulping down ginseng and Echinacea to the tune of millions, in spite of what medical science tells us. God, I’m bushed.” He put down his cup and glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a class at Western in the morning.”
“I’ll take you home,” she said.
He swayed and had to catch hold of the metal chair back as he got to his feet. Still, he’d eaten all the soup and most of the sandwich and some of the haunted, edgy look had gone out of his eyes. “Time to face the music.” It was a joke he sometimes made, going home.
Outside, the rain had diminished to a fine drizzle. She was turning the key in the ignition when she felt a touch on her arm. Like a paw reaching through the bars. The comparison came to her unbidden, and she flinched.
“Verena? Sorry. Talking the whole time about myself and the damn bears and not asking how things are with you.”
“Fine. I’m fine.” She backed the Volkswagen out of the parking spot and waited for an opening in traffic. “Francine let me take extra classes. Now I’m rich.”
“Rich enough to take time off?”
“So you can send me up north?” In case what the vet had told him turned out to be true. “You know I’m always packed.” Her thumb stroked the wheel; the sensation was the same as when she stroked the curve of the rifle stock. “I could take the Henry,” she said, testing.
Borrowman patted the front of his sweater for the cigarettes he was supposed to be giving up, before he let his hand drop. “Don’t even think it.”
They turned off Dundas and drove north on Richmond Street. Cars were letting out passengers in front of the Grand Theatre and the sidewalk bloomed with umbrellas. “Einstein’s Gift” read the title on the marquee. A play about good intentions with evil consequences was how the poster below described it.
Verena thought Borrowman might have dozed off, he was quiet for so long. He lived on one of the older residential streets near the university, in a big yellow brick house decorated with chimney pots and Victorian gables and a deep-bosomed porch. Light shone from every window, gilding the wet foliage of the maples as the Beetle swung into the driveway.
Borrowman came to life, muttering. “Talk myself blue in the face about energy conservation. And the minute I’m not home… ” He thrust open the passenger door and lurched to his feet, yanking his backpack out from behind the seat. The dashboard light carved trenches in his face.
“John?” Verena leaned toward him. “About the Henry. It’s not as though I’d ever actually kill anybody. Not again. Not if you didn’t want me to.”
“I know,” he said, turning away. She could tell he was embarrassed by her willingness to put into words what he had trouble even thinking. The trees were dripping rain.
She can still see him starting up the walk, head ducked and shoulders hunched in his sweater. She wonders if he ever lies awake at night as she is doing now, and if he wishes that they had never met. That he had never taken pity on her and never grown to love her like a daughter.
5.
THE FRONT DOOR BANGED SHUT and Borrowman realized that the piano had been silent for some minutes. He swung around for a quick visual check of the room. Elaine had announced at lunch that she’d be in to see him after the lesson; they needed to talk. She’d used the word urgent, by which he understood the subject was going to be Donny. A stack of new zoology textbooks lay on the coffee table, and the computer screen displayed the teaching schedule he’d begun cobbling together for the fall term. Nothing that n
eeded to be kept secret from her. As a precaution, he switched off the light illuminating Algonquin Park.
“Dad’s little hobby,” Elaine called the map, in a tone not meant to be complimentary. Asher had mounted the whole thing one rainy Saturday afternoon while drinking craft beer and playing Definitely Not the Opera on the radio. Donny and Raymond, hanging around to watch, had been endlessly impressed. Most things Asher did impressed them, and to them there was nothing he couldn’t do; much unlike their father who, as he’d proved to their amusement on numerous occasions, hardly knew which end of a screwdriver was which.
Borrowman lowered himself into the chair behind the desk while a spasm of pain bored through his lower abdomen. He couldn’t let Elaine see him like this. Opening a drawer, he rummaged through the contents for his cigarettes. He was trying to cut down and found it helpful to hide them from sight. Elaine came through the door just as his fingers closed around the carton.
“Looking for something, Dad?”
He withdrew his hand. “I thought I asked you to knock before you came in,” he said mildly.
“Why? You’re not doing anything secret in here, are you?”
“Someday I may think of something.”
“If it’s because you’re still smoking, I already know that.”
Borrowman’s smile was shamefaced. Dedicated to saving animal life on the planet, he seemed powerless to stop poisoning himself and his family. “Nothing gets by you, does it?”
Elaine sniffed. She had pointed, nervously pretty features and thick dark hair worn short in a stylish wedge cut. “It doesn’t take a detective. The room smells like an ashtray.” His daughter was not above employing exaggeration to make her point, especially if she could make him feel guilty in the process. Her sharp brown eyes, accentuated by rimless spectacles in the shape of crescents, flashed around the study with distaste. She had inherited his tall, spare frame and her mother’s flair for dressing, which she liked to indulge in with good-quality clothes. Money had been a constant sore point between Asher and herself. “What’s wrong with getting a decent job?” she’d harangue him. “Instead of dreaming up ways to get yourself arrested?”
