by Ingrid Betz
The air crackled, and over the loudspeaker came the announcement that Flight 128 to Bracebridge was now open for boarding. Would families with small children and those requiring assistance please come forward.
“Does Elaine know?”
“Not yet. He wanted to warn me first. You know how she gets….” How she was liable to throw things, he meant, and threaten outrageous consequences, and generally behave like a bitch. Elaine was not the type to forgive a man for walking out on her. But John Borrowman didn’t use words like “bitch”; besides, Elaine was his daughter.
He sounded all at once forlorn. “Verena? You’ll be careful?”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Did I mention he’s short, Li Chen? Hard to pick out in a crowd.” Through the rifle sights, he meant.
“Goodbye, John,” she said as the call came for general boarding.
She disconnected to save him the awkwardness of having to wish her luck. He was asking her to kill someone, after all, and it had to be about the hardest thing he’d ever done.
The man was standing in front of the news kiosk where Borrowman had said he’d be. Emerging from the arrivals hall, Verena saw his glance travel from the red book in her hand to the plait of her hair and back again. St. Denis, thought Verena as she crossed the aisle to meet him. She was aware of an undercurrent of hostility as they shook hands.
“Paul St. Denis.”
“Verena Vitek.”
“I was expecting a man,” he said. “Somebody older.”
“Yes?” She had seen the text Borrowman sent him. ‘V. Vitek,’ he’d typed, along with the flight number and time of arrival. “Carrying a red book.” He’d made no mention of age or gender.
“Why not?” she’d asked him.
“No preconceived notions that way.”
“Are you saying St. Denis doesn’t know I’m a woman?”
“There’s no reason he has to.” He looked uncomfortable and she suspected there was something he wasn’t telling her. She tried to recall random remarks from the past, a tone of voice, a lift of the brow. “A good man, St. Denis. Tough, dependable.” If there was a “but” in there, she would find out for herself in due course, what it was.
She gave St. Denis her brief cat’s smile. “Maybe the Chinese will, too. Expect a man.”
He didn’t return the smile. Verena had the impression that what he really wanted to do was turn on his heel and leave her to fend for herself. He had quick green eyes and a nose like a potato pressed on anyhow in a square face. “Borrowman should have warned me,” was all he said.
She slipped Sleep Is for the Rich into the outside pocket of her backpack. “Warned you?” she said. “About what?”
“That he was sending a schoolgirl.”
“I’m older than I look.”
He scowled. “How much older?”
She swung the backpack over her shoulder. “Enough.”
St. Denis swore under his breath. Stocky, with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, in blue jeans and a scuffed leather bomber jacket, he himself looked every day of a well-worn forty-seven. He didn’t offer to carry her pack. “Come on. If you want to make the first portage before dark.” He strode toward the exit and she found herself trotting to keep up.
“You got the AR-7?” she asked. Borrowman had shipped the rifle with UPS overnight.
“This morning.” He pushed through the revolving door. “I should have guessed when I saw it. A girl’s weapon. Gimmicky.”
Verena laughed. “You think?” He hadn’t seen the holes in the bole of the elm tree.
The air outside was bracing, cooler in Bracebridge than it had been in London. She noted leaves already turning colour on some of the maples lining the street. The parking lot was relatively small so they didn’t have far to walk. He drove a nondescript SUV. His jacket swung open as he unlocked the door. Underneath it he wore a white T-shirt and she saw that what she assumed was excess poundage was in reality muscle.
“Get in,” he grunted, motioning. By the time she’d stowed her pack between her feet and buckled her seat belt, he had the engine running and was backing out of the parking slot. His fingers on the steering wheel were thick and square-tipped.
“You even know how to handle a canoe?”
“What do you think?”
“Read a topographical map? Make a portage?”
“I can do all of that. Everything. I used to go camping in Algonquin with my father.”
He swung left at the lights, just missing a bus. He drove like the bush pilot she and her father had gone up with a couple of times. Much too fast and with a reckless disregard for whatever else might be in the vicinity, but with a skill that outmaneuvered disaster.
“Things are different when you’re alone,” he reminded her. “It’s pitch dark in the bush at night. Can you make a smokeless fire?”
She shot him a look of contempt.
“And don’t count on calling for help. The mine’s out of range for mobile phones.”
“That’s supposed to scare me?”
“This isn’t a game, little girl. You get in trouble and the truth comes out, it puts all of us at risk.” He was still angry about having a female foisted on him.
“Listen,” she said. “I didn’t ask to work with you. If you want to know, I don’t care much for men. But if the information you passed on to John is correct, I’m willing to overlook the fact that you are one.”
He glared at her. If looks could kill was more than just a cliché for this man, she thought.
They stopped speaking after that. Verena concentrated on the scenery, which followed the usual pattern to be found on the outskirts of small Ontario towns. A procession of car dealerships and start-up businesses, a Tim Horton’s with a line-up at the drive-through window, a sprawling plant nursery, succeeded by farms and roadside stands laden with summer produce.
“You wouldn’t be the first girl to come up against this outfit and lose.” St. Denis tried again. “One of them’s at the bottom of the river somewhere. Another is slated for life in a wheelchair.”
“The woman who broke in to rescue the bears, you’re talking about?”
He nodded. “Just making sure you know. These guys play rough.”
“Those women didn’t have a gun. I do.”
Outside, hilly fields of scrub pasture were being overtaken by bush. Verena shrugged off her windbreaker, folded it, and pushed it up against the window. She leaned her head on the resulting cushion and closed her eyes. “You can stop making conversation now. I’m going to catch some sleep. I plan to paddle through the night.”
She could sense him staring at her, itching to say something, but biting his tongue. She dozed off and the next thing she knew, somebody was leaning over her, shaking her by the shoulder.
“Get off me!” she yelled. Her fists flew up, hitting solid flesh before her eyes had properly opened.
“Pardon!” St. Denis, startled into French, backed away. “Take it easy, Verena,” he said, putting the emphasis on the last syllable the way Francine did. He stood by the jeep’s open door, rubbing his jaw. “That’s quite a punch you pack.”
“For a schoolgirl, you mean?” She sat up, fully awake now, and unbuckled her seatbelt.
“Women usually wait till they’re awake to hit me.”
She ignored that; she wasn’t interested in making things easier for him. They were parked in a lot overlooking a large body of water. “We’re here? This is it? Your outfitter’s camp?” She jumped to the ground, pulled her backpack after her and looked around.
A group of men in baseball caps were laughing and roughhousing as they loaded fishing gear and coolers into a couple of pickup trucks parked at the far end of the lot. On the slope to the lake stood a number of brown log buildings connected by gravel paths. Ferns grew under stands of birch and cedar. Canoes rocked bes
ide a wooden dock. The lake shimmered and stirred under the late-afternoon sun, casting up reflections of green and silver. On the far shore, trees rose in waves until they lost themselves in a blue-black horizon. Verena was suddenly overcome by an intense craving to be out there among them.
St. Denis led the way to the nearest building. Under a sign marked Office, he pushed open the screen door for her to enter. Oakum, she noted, remembering the pungent smell of the long tobacco-coloured strips wedged between the pine logs that formed the walls of the cabin.
“Sit if you want.” He gestured at a chair. “Back in a minute.”
He let the door slam shut behind him and made his way down to the dock, where a tall man in a ponytail was helping a family load camping gear into two canoes. A member of the Cree nation, she decided. Her father, raised like many Europeans on Karl Mai westerns, had learned to admire and respect the Aboriginal inhabitants of the new world. He’d taken great pains to teach her the names of the various tribes. She watched St. Denis direct the transfer of a tent from one canoe to the other. He was a man who ran a tight ship. Or maybe he was just killing time, making sure Verena knew where she rated on his list of priorities. Turning away, she inspected her surroundings.
A desk, bulletin board, chairs, a filing cabinet, and a safe, with shelves along two walls.
Odd, to see objects as modern as a computer sharing the rough-hewn pine surfaces with coal-oil lamps and a battery-powered radio. The papers littering the desk didn’t interest her, but a framed photograph caught her eye and she picked it up. “Love, Daniel,” was written in a child’s hand across the bottom. A nice-looking boy, with his arm around the neck of a German shepherd.
Behind her, the screen door opened and closed and she heard the scuff of St. Denis’s boots on the board floor.
“Your son?” she said, replacing the photograph.
“Yes. Coffee before you go?” he said, indicating a carafe keeping warm on a hotplate at the back of the room. “Might be your last for a while.”
“Sure.” She watched him take mugs from a shelf and pour. He was forcing himself to be hospitable, and that was to his credit. “He lives in Huntsville with you?”
“In Montréal with his mother. Milk? Sugar?”
“Just milk.” A spoon clinked against china as he stirred. “I suppose he comes to visit? This is a good place for a boy to spend time.”
“That’s not the way his mother sees it.” He handed her a mug and picked up his own. “Biscuits?”
“I’m fine. And the dog? Who does he live with?”
“He’s dead. The picture was taken four years ago.”
Which would make the boy what? Twelve now, or thirteen? He had his father’s eyes, Verena noticed. Vaguely, she recalled Borrowman telling her that St. Denis had been a dog handler for the Sûreté de Québec, canine division.
“Did he die on assignment?”
St. Denis looked at her.
“How’d you get mixed up with the Cell, anyway? A girl like you. Smart. Attractive. Your whole life ahead of you. There must be a dozen better things you could be doing. Hell, a hundred.”
“Borrowman is good to me. He’s my Canadian family.”
“You’ve got no one else? Mother? Father?”
“Dead.”
He appeared to consider. “None of my business. But why the gun? Why shoot people? Why go that far?”
She shrugged. The question was straightforward and deserved a straightforward answer. “It lets me know I’m alive,” she said and he frowned.
“There are other ways. At your age…”
“None that give me pleasure.”
“Sacre bleu.” St. Denis shook his head. He glanced out the window and the light showed a bruise forming on the skin where her fist had connected with his jaw. “The dog didn’t die. He was killed. Slowly and deliberately. There’s a difference. You’re an animal activist—you’d know all about that.”
“Who?”
“A man used him for rifle practice. It took twenty-six minutes for Khan to die. I timed it.”
Her flesh chilled. “Timed it?”
“It was an ambush,” he said. “I was investigating a grow-op in the bush. Somebody tipped off the guys running it and they were waiting for me. Three of them. They had rifles, and one of them shot the dog in the jaw. They roped him to a tree and me to another.”
“And made you watch what they did next?” The scene formed itself inside her head. It was always the same scene in the end. Her mother screaming while the soldiers whooped and taunted and did what they wanted. Her father weeping as he begged. “They let you go?”
“Eventually. After they had finished with us.”
The dog had been killed in his stead. Verena had the stifling feeling that she was back in the Balkans with all their intentional cruelty, their escalating mean-spirited destruction of anything the other side might value or hold dear. “And the man who did it?”
“Dead now, too.”
Verena nodded. Even though St. Denis must have realized that going after him would mean the end of his career in the Sûreté. But revenge had a way of taking over your life.
“My only regret is that I couldn’t make it happen slowly enough.” St. Denis frowned at her. “The reason I’m telling you all this is so maybe you’ll think twice about what you’re doing.”
“It’s too late.”
“In that case, finish your coffee,” he said harshly. “We’ll go and pick up your supplies.”
She fished her navy blazer and pleated skirt out of her pack and looked around. “Can I leave these somewhere?”
“What the hell are they for?” he said.
“Camouflage for the trip home.”
He rolled his eyes and made a derisive sound in his throat. But he opened the door to a closet containing rain gear and boots, and tossed her a coat hanger.
She was enjoying this, Verena thought. It was like shopping in a supermarket that specialized in foods to be eaten only in the wilderness. Or on a trip to the moon. The storeroom was clean and orderly, with metal shelving and bins lining the walls. Each product was clearly labeled. “Freeze-dried Lasagna,” she read. “Lentils with Chorizo.” But she wouldn’t have time for anything beyond the basics.
“I’ll take the scrambled eggs.” Protein, fast and easy to heat. “Tea. Oat cakes. Raisins.” She dropped the packets into her backpack as they moved along the aisle. “Do you take Daniel camping?”
“We were supposed to go this week, as a matter of fact.”
“What happened?”
“No seats left. She didn’t book the flight early enough. That all you want?”
Verena nodded.
“She.” The dismissive way he’d said the word revealed how he felt about the woman who was the boy’s mother. Felt about women in general as a consequence—was that what Borrowman had hesitated to tell her about St. Denis?
She accompanied him into an adjoining building where she picked out a light-weight sleeping bag. He indicated the folded tents stacked according to size. “Foolproof to erect,” he said. “Even for a girl.”
She shook her head. “All I want is a tarpaulin. It’s only two nights.”
He pulled one off a shelf. “There’s no such thing as ‘only’ in the bush. You’re gambling.”
“So are you,” she said. She kicked him on the shin with the toe of her hiking boot. “That’s for ‘even for a girl.’”
He made a grab for her, but she stepped smartly out of reach. He hopped about clutching his leg, but apart from swearing under his breath, he knew enough to say nothing. Their last stop was at a shed next to the beach, where canoes of various sizes were stacked upside down on wooden racks under a high raftered ceiling. Each had the name, St. Denis Outfitters, along with a number painted on the bow of its brown hull.
“Suit yourself. But this
is the one I would recommend.” Stopping near the end of the row, he measured the canoe against her small stature with an experienced eye. “Light for the portages. And fast enough for a getaway. Should you make it that far.”
“Oh, I will. As long as the plane arrives and Li Chen is on it.”
St. Denis grunted, not bothering to conceal his skepticism. He added paddles, one and a spare, and stood by while she hoisted the canoe onto her shoulders and carried it down to the water’s edge. If he was waiting for her to ask for help, she was happy to disappoint him.
She swung the canoe down cleanly, taking care not to scrape the hull on the pebbles washed up in the sand. Strapping the rolled-up sleeping bag to her pack, she stowed it under a seat and dropped the tarp on top. Small curling waves lapped at the soles of her boots. The lake beckoned. Verena could hardly wait to be carving through the water and becoming part of its sparkling surface as it flowed toward the distant shore.
“And the Henry?” she asked, straightening up.
“It’s in the office. In the safe.”
“I’ll come up with you.”
She could sense him debating, whether there wasn’t some way to keep from handing the rifle over to her. But as a member of the Cell fighting for the cause, he was committed to supporting her and they both knew it. As they strode up the path, he talked about the river route to the mine. Did she have the map? He’d marked alternate routes, and what to look out for. She saw the man with the ponytail watching them from the dock, his expression was unreadable.
St. Denis motioned her ahead of him into the office. “He must be crazy, Borrowman! Him and me both.” The words left his mouth in a burst of controlled anger. “Sending a girl on a mission like this. It’s a disaster in the making. Do you honestly think you can get the better of an organization like this one?”
“We won’t know till I try,” she said coldly. “You have a washroom?”
“Through there.”
While he dialed the safe, muttering to himself in French, she slipped into the little washroom at the rear of the office. When she emerged she’d pinned up her braid and pulled a khaki-coloured watch cap low over her ears and forehead.
