by Ingrid Betz
He listened to her opening a cupboard door and clinking china, and got up and wandered around the room. The apartment was so damned bare. It contained almost nothing that represented a past or for that matter, a future. He picked up the leather-framed photograph and studied the middle-aged couple standing in the garden of an upper middle-class house in Belgrade. Markers on a trail of loss. Home gone, mother dead, father killed in what may or may not have been an accident. He replaced the picture on the plank and let his glance sweep the room. Belatedly he realized that something was missing.
“Verena? What happened to the TV I gave you last Christmas?” Knowing how her mind worked, he’d bought the smallest, most basic set he could find.
Her face appeared around the kitchen door. “I gave it away.”
“Why?” He couldn’t keep the hurt out of his tone. “I thought you liked it.”
“Oh, I did.” Too much, she implied. “Those two weeks I was away in the Maritimes?” He nodded; he’d signed her up with a group protesting the seal hunt. “When I got back Mrs. Ivanovich told me we’d had a break-in in the building. I started worrying the set would be stolen. So I donated it to the Women’s Shelter.”
Frowning, Borrowman crossed the room. A row of Lombardy poplars, ghostly in the light, loomed behind the balcony. Rolled up at the foot of the sliding glass door, was Verena’s sleeping bag.
“Couldn’t you at least allow yourself a bed?” he exclaimed angrily.
“What?”
“That white spool bed we have in the attic. I’ve offered it to you before. You could put a spread on it during the day…” His voice trailed off as Verena emerged from the kitchen carrying two mismatched pottery mugs.
She handed him one and lowered herself to the carpet. “Sorry. I’m out of biscuits.”
He leaned against the wall, too upset to sit. Serenely, her grey eyes met his. “You were saying?”
“About a bed. Why can’t you… ”
“I’ve told you. I don’t sleep well in beds. Besides, I like to be right next to the balcony. In case… ” She shrugged. But he knew how the sentence ended. In case in the night there was a pounding on the door. She had confided to him shortly after renting the apartment that she’d practised until she had the timing down to a minute: so many seconds to exit onto the balcony, so many more to hoist herself over the railing and into one of the trees, and finally to descend, hand over hand, to the ground. Did she seriously believe it might one day come to that? Borrowman couldn’t tell.
“You’ve told Asher about the mine?” she asked.
“I’ve emailed him twice.”
“Maybe he’s under cover and can’t answer.” She grinned. “Down a hole/with a burrowing owl,” she quoted in a sing-song voice. Borrowman didn’t smile.
“I told him the future of the Cell is at stake. I need him to go to Algonquin Park and investigate. Find out firsthand what’s going on. What we’re up against… ”
“I could do that. If you sent me.”
“Have you any idea of the difficulties involved? Apparently they have barricaded access by road. Hired security. It would mean travelling up river by canoe. Making portages. A year ago I’d have gone myself… ”
“I camped and canoed lots of times with my father.”
He looked at her, at her young girl’s face under the shining hair, and felt torn by his reluctance to put her in harm’s way. “This is different. These people have already proven they don’t mind killing people. ”
“Unarmed women,” she said scornfully. “I wouldn’t be, if I took the Henry.”
“Absolutely not. It can’t be allowed to come to that.” He lowered himself onto the chair. “Asher could take pictures. Bring them to the attention of the media. Let them expose what’s going on. The Canadian public will never stand for it.”
Verena raised her eyebrows. “The way they won’t stand for battery hens? Or experiments on lab animals? Please, John, get real.”
“I know, I know. The usual paragraph on a back page won’t do it,” he conceded. “It’s got to be something that makes an impact. Causes outrage.” He put down his cup and fidgeted. Damn chair, how was anyone supposed to get comfortable on a folding chair? “And it has to be soon. We can’t wait. Animals are suffering. Dying. While every day this company gets dug in more deeply…”
“A bomb or a bullet,” Verena said.
“Pardon?”
“That’ll get the attention of the company and the media both. Also the public absolutely loves that stuff. Gore and mayhem.”
She sounded like Asher. Bombs were his specialty. Before joining the Cell, he’d worked for a group on the Prairies dedicated to stopping gas pipelines, until their leader mistimed a blast and ended up in the hospital under police guard. Borrowman’s fingers brushed nervously over his moustache. He and Asher held this discussion regularly, how at some point and in some cases to do any good, a protest had to include violence. But he himself was not a violent man, he hated the thought of violence. Even more he hated himself for the tremor of unholy excitement it raised in him.
“What other way is there?” She drank her tea. After a minute she said, “You’re just worried, because I’m not Asher. You’re not sure I’d be up to the job. You’re not sure you should even be asking me.”
He flushed. “I feel responsible.”
“Don’t. I’m old enough to be responsible for myself.” Her smile was mocking. “Dad.”
He couldn’t help it—she brought out the paternal in him. She had ever since the time when she’d sat in the back row at one of his lectures looking lost and not a day over fifteen. It was in the auditorium of the public library, where he was giving a series of talks on endangered species. The subject that night had been loons, and she came up to him afterward with a question about the slides he’d shown. But the unfocused look in her eyes told him that loons were not the concern uppermost in her mind. He sensed the neediness in her, and on the spur of the moment he’d asked would she like to come home with him and meet Elaine and the boys?
“Please,” she said, as though this was precisely the question she’d been waiting for. It wasn’t until weeks later that he found out her father, the only remaining member of her family, had two days earlier stepped off a curb into the path of a cement truck.
“Surveillance,” he said firmly. “That’s the most I’d ask you to do.”
“And if I have to defend myself?”
He was getting too old for this, too tired and too ill, he thought, thrusting his hands between his knees to stop them from trembling. “There’s still a chance we’ll find out this company is doing exactly what they say they are: farming mushrooms. It’s ridiculous really, the idea of keeping wild animals in an underground mine. In the middle of nowhere. When you factor in the logistics of processing the bile and getting it to market.”
“Maybe that’s what they’re counting on everybody else to think.” Verena stretched her arms and yawned. “Long day.”
“Yes. For me, too.”
He stood up stiffly, knocking over the mug. A trickle of tea ran onto the carpet but the stain would never show on that execrable colour. Not even blood would do that. He had blood on the brain now, because of what Verena had said.
“A bomb or a bullet. What other way is there?”
10.
“SHE LEFT TWO DAYS AGO.” The nurse at the third floor station raised her head from the computer. The lenses of her glasses were tinted, making her eyes look pink. “Somebody came to pick her up.”
For a minute St. Denis was back with the Sûreté. “Somebody from London? Family? A friend?”
“Sorry.” The nurse reached for the phone, which was ringing. “That’s confidential information.”
St. Denis shrugged and turned away. Her boss, probably. Marigold Green had told him she had no family. It was crazy, but he felt disappointed. He�
�d like to have wished her well. People were standing around waiting for the elevators, both of which, according to the light panel, appeared to be stuck on the ground floor. With a grunt of impatience, he headed for the exit sign at the end of the corridor. He pulled open the heavy fire-door and descended the three flights of concrete stairs to the hospital lobby, where the reason for the holdup wasn’t hard to see. Afternoon visiting hours had coincided with the arrival in Emergency of a bunch of accident victims and the gurneys were currently being loaded into the elevators for transferal to the operating rooms on the first floor.
“Paul?”
He turned at the sound of his name. Mike Landesberg was detaching himself from a cluster of visitors.
“Mike. What happened, do you know?”
“An accident at the intersection south of town. SUV hit a logging truck.”
“Anybody local?”
“No. Tourists. Some of them kids.” His round boyish face expressed sympathy as they watched an orderly manoeuver an intravenous pole into the elevator beside a gurney. The figure under the sheet was pitifully small, the thatch of black hair on the pillow soaked with rain or maybe it was blood. “I came by to see my mother.”
“She still here? Must be what, three months since she broke her hip?”
“About that. It happened the day I sold the Keller mine. They won’t discharge her till I can get her into a nursing home.” Landesberg sounded despondent. “Over her dead body, she says.”
“C’est dur.”
St. Denis didn’t like many people, but he liked Mike Landesberg. Had liked him ever since he’d first arrived in Huntsville looking to set up as an outfitter on the lake, and Mike had taken him under his wing. Driven him around to view the various sites available and eventually found the ideal place for him, a former boys’ summer camp, at a reasonable price. Mike reminded him of a big friendly St. Bernard. Not the sharpest axe in the toolshed, but straight, and not full of himself like some. He glanced at his watch. He’d left Jim holding the fort; early afternoon was the quiet time of day.
“Got time for a coffee?”
“Sure thing.”
The two men headed for the Tim Horton’s counter located just off the lobby. Landesberg’s manner brightened visibly as they ordered.
“Doughnut?” he suggested, and when St. Denis shook his head he asked the girl for an apple fritter for himself. They paid and carried their cups to an empty table in the far corner. Landesberg hooked his dripping umbrella over the metal chair back and eased his bulk onto the seat.
“So what brings you here today?”
“You heard about the woman who got shot in Algonquin Park a while ago?”
“The one found stranded on a portage.” Landesberg nodded. “Didn’t she have a partner too, who disappeared?”
“Yeah. They rented their gear from me. I dropped by a couple of times to see how she was doing. Seems she’s checked out.”
“I heard she was from London. She couldn’t have gotten many visitors up here.”
St. Denis blew on his coffee. “A nice girl. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”
Landesberg looked at him; it wasn’t often he heard St. Denis say a friendly word about a woman. He leaned forward. “A rifle shot to the head, I heard. The Mounties have any idea yet who did it?”
“According to the victim, the perpetrators were Chinese. Some lunatics out after bears.”
“Really.” Landesberg had noticed before that when St. Denis talked about crime, his police training came to the fore in words like “victim” and “perpetrator.” “And the other woman?”
“Not a trace. Drowned, probably. If she wasn’t already shot dead.”
They were quiet a minute, watching a small knot of people form around a man sobbing in the lobby. Why was it, Landesberg wondered, when a man cried it made you feel so much worse than when a woman did?
“You were in the Sûreté du Québec,” he said. “You must’ve come across your share of crazies with a gun.”
“My share and then some.”
Landesberg waited, hoping St. Denis would elaborate. He took a bite of his fritter. “If it were me, in some of these cases, I’d be tempted to take justice into my own hands. You can’t always count on the courts to get it right.” God, he thought, he was starting to sound like his mother.
“It happens.”
“In the police force?”
“It’s not always black and white, even for the police. Not the way the media likes to portray it. Circumstances play a part. Provocation. Rage, one time in a hundred. We’re only human.”
Landesberg hesitated. “Is that why you’re not in the Sûreté anymore?” For a minute he thought he’d gone too far; St. Denis wasn’t the type who took kindly to people prying into his personal life.
But he only shrugged. “Basically.”
“Son of a gun.”
“Water under the bridge. MacCrae’s on the Park case. He’s a good cop.” St. Denis drank his coffee. “So, how’s the real estate business? I saw you at the car wash last week in a Cadillac Escalade. Nice car.”
“I’d never have managed it without the mushroom company sale.”
St. Denis nodded and thought of Borrowman. He’d called again just last night, asking for news. “Heard any more about their mushroom operation?”
Landesberg laughed his big easy-going laugh. “Makes for a good cover story, I’ll say that for it.”
“You don’t think it’s true?”
“Who knows? I told you, right, about the cargo Cody Willison’s been flying out to the mine? Dog food, plastic piping? Then just a couple of days ago I was in Gravenhurst, talking to the owner of the big Petrocan station. Apparently the company got the old road to the mine fixed and there’s been a ton of traffic heading that way ever since. Guy swears he saw a trailer-load of iron cages and welding equipment go by. Beats me what they have to do with mushrooms.”
Landesberg shook his head. He was sporting one of those pricey spiked haircuts, St. Denis noted. “All I care about is that their cheque was good.”
“Your mother?” guessed St. Denis.
“Right.” Landesberg spread his hands palms up to reveal their pale soft flesh. “You can’t believe the cost of those long-term care facilities.”
“So I’ve heard.” St. Denis drained his cup. “That’s family for you. Either costing you grief, or costing you money. As a rule, both.”
He needed to fork over another two thousand for the orthodontist, Yvonne had informed him. And she hoped he realized Danny was going to need new hockey equipment this year. Skates, pads, the lot. What did he mean, again? It wasn’t her fault the boy was growing like a weed after rain.
“Danny still coming to spend time with you this summer?” said Landesberg, picking up on his frown.
“Last week in August. So Yvonne says.” She had already changed the date twice. Maybe if she put it off till Labour Day, she wouldn’t need to let him come at all. St. Denis checked his watch. “Well. I’d better get a move on.”
Late afternoon, the day-trippers started returning. Jim was a good man, but he got flustered in a crowd. First he’d give Borrowman a call, pass on what he’d heard about cages heading for the mine. It would make his day. Turning to go, he gave Mike one of his rare grins. “See you around.”
“Sure thing,” said Landesberg. The elevators were free again, he noted.
He too, would have to get moving. Today was the day he was finally going to have it out with his mother. The hospital had given him an ultimatum: they needed her bed. He picked up the empty cups and dropped them in the trash on his way to the lobby. Passing the revolving doors, he caught a glimpse of St. Denis on the other side, ducking his head against the rain while he talked on his mobile. Imagine Paul St. Denis visiting a woman in the hospital! She must have been something special.
“You’re late.”
“Hello, Mom. How are you today?” Landesberg said in his heartiest voice, approaching the bed in which she sat propped up against the pillows, lancet-eyed.
“What do you care? I could be lying here dead while you gallivant around town.”
“The nurses would have noticed and called me,” he said. Pat Landesberg frowned, she was not in the mood for levity.
“I’ve been waiting forever for you to come through that door. Everybody else’s visitors are here.”
So they were, Landesberg noted, glancing around the ward. Each bed had a person sitting next to it and some had more than one. The woman prone in the corner had a couple with a sleeping baby. “I didn’t know the patients had a competition going.”
His mother made a gesture of impatience. “It’s not a joke. When you don’t show up, I worry.” Not about him; he wasn’t that naïve—those days were long gone. Now she worried about herself and what would happen to her if God forbid he failed to show up. Old people had a fear of being abandoned; it had to do with being helpless. One of the home-care agencies had explained it to him.
“Sorry about that.” He leaned down to drop a kiss on her papery cheek. “The elevators were tied up.”
“Your hair’s damp,” she said, shrinking back. “It needs combing. And the stairs? They were tied up, too?” She had him there. He sighed and looked around for a place to park his umbrella. Draped over the foot of the bed was the quilted robe he’d made her use; at least he’d managed that much.
“I’m here now. What can I do for you? Plump your pillows?”
“Keep your hands off them—they’re fine. Your tie has crumbs on it. You were down at Tim Horton’s, weren’t you?”
“I ran into somebody.”
“Who?”
“Nobody you know. Somebody I sold a property to.” He leaned his umbrella against the bed and scraped up a chair. “Listen, Mom… ”
“Never mind the idle chat. When are you taking me home? The doctor keeps saying I can go.”
