Tampered

by Ross Pennie

  “He works so hard around the place,” Art countered, “fixing every little thing that’s on the fritz, making sure we’re safe and comfortable. But Gloria doesn’t give him a lick of credit.”

  “She is the boss, Art. And a marriage works best when the husband knows his place.”

  This wasn’t the first time Art reckoned it was just as well Phyllis had remained a spinster. Was that a smirk on her lips, or were they pressed together in anxious anticipation of the tricky left turn between the six-foot snowbanks? The combined workings of Mother Nature and the city’s snowplow crews made negotiating the Eaglescliffe loop devilish by car, and impossible by scooter, from December to April. But there was no way Phyllis would ever consider giving up her driver’s licence or the Lincoln, even for the winter season. And thank goodness for that. Her car — officially an antique at thirty-seven years of age — was a symbol of the continued independence of everyone who rode in it. Especially when the sidewalks were rutted with ice and snow.

  “Besides,” she continued, “you said yourself they may be up to something highly illegal.”

  “Have you thought about getting the muffler fixed?” Art asked, changing the subject. With Phyllis, that was always the best strategy.

  “I rather like the noise,” she huffed. “It’s full of conviction. And doesn’t affect the vehicle’s performance.”

  Her deafness must be getting worse. Either that or she’d turned off her hearing aid before starting the engine.

  Art tried a different tack. “I’m surprised Terryberry is open today,” he said.

  “They only just reversed their Sunday closures. They’re still closed on Fridays and Mondays. Disgraceful, really. If we’re going to foster a knowledge-based economy, libraries have to open their doors every day of the week.”

  “Are you sure no one will see what we’re doing on the Internet? Don’t the librarians —”

  “Stop fussing, Arthur. No one will bother looking at our screen. And we need no help from the library staff. I’ve been using Google and Wikipedia there since they first came out.”

  “And no one will know who is doing the searching?”

  “For heaven’s sake. We’re not proposing to do anything illegal.”

  Half an hour later they were seated at a terminal in Terryberry’s computer room. Phyllis had charmed, or perhaps browbeaten, the teenager restacking the shelves into leaving his post and lifting Art’s wheelchair from the trunk. If the lad had balked at first, he was all smiles the moment he spotted the Lincoln. He’d peppered Art for details about the car as he pushed him through the slush, up the ramp, and through the front door. Any answers Art didn’t know he made up on the fly, which kept the boy chatting all the way to the computer room. Phyllis finally dispatched him with her Latin-teacher look and repeated assurance that they needed no help connecting to the World Wide Web.

  “How do you suggest we start?” Art asked Phyllis after they’d removed their coats and she’d draped her mink over the back of a chair.

  “You tell me. You’re the man with the ideas. I’m just here to work the computer as your amanuensis.”

  He opened his scribbler and set it on the desk beside his pen.

  “You won’t need those,” Phyllis said. She pointed toward the end of the room. “We can print anything important on their machine. Only five cents a page.”

  All the same, he knew he would want to take a few notes. The charisma of electronic wizardry was no match for the comfort of pen and paper.

  Phyllis tapped the keyboard, and up came the Google logo, faster than turning a page in a book. Computer speeds and consistency never ceased to amaze him — as reliable as telephone land lines connected to the touch-tone service he’d perfected, but a hell of a lot more versatile, and in living colour.

  “So?” she said. Her Latin-teacher look hadn’t faded since she’d dismissed that helpful boy, and she looked all the more intimidating in her luxuriant fur hat.

  Art’s mind went blank. The empty search box taunted him like an exam question. “I . . . I’ve never done a search before. Earl has always —”

  “Don’t look so worried. It’s quite simple, really.” Phyllis moved her chair to give him a better view of the screen. “One just has to go step by step. Tell me again what makes you think Gloria’s nephew is not what he’s cracked up to be?”

  “First, it was his English. A man lives his entire life in Portugal, yet speaks with a perfect Canadian accent? Impossible. Then I saw the Argylls tattoo. That’s a Hamilton regiment. What’s he doing with that?”

  “Maybe he spent his early childhood in Hamilton and has a friend in the Argylls.”

  “Did you see those two military types at Raimunda’s reception yesterday?”

  “I didn’t like the way they barged in. It was unseemly.”

  “They made a beeline for poor Zol,” Art reminded her, “and marched him out the door. He looked quite shaken.” Art’s tongue felt dry as he imagined what might have transpired.

  “Must be drugs,” Phyllis pronounced. “Perhaps they wanted his professional opinion on what they discovered in that raid up near Kilbride. Amphetamines, I believe they were making. In an old barn.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t drugs. They looked like a pair of MPs — buzzed haircuts, broad, stern, no nonsense.”

  “Members of Parliament are all fake smiles and glad hands. They don’t pair up and go marching into funerals.”

  “No, no. Not MPs as in politicians. Military police. The only current connection I know of between Camelot Lodge and the Canadian Forces is that Argylls tattoo on Joe’s bicep. It says something like Jason Argylls Forever. If the MPs were asking about Joe and his tattoo at his grandmother’s funeral, his buddy Jason must be in big trouble. A deserter. That’s what MPs are interested in when they’re making inquiries off the base. Deserters. Jason must be hiding out somewhere, like Ronnie Biggs.”

  Phyllis paused for a moment. A frown creased her forehead. “The train robber?”

  “The bugger hid in Australia and Brazil for decades. Even made trips back home to England, but only with the help of his friends and family. And always in plain sight, bold as brass.”

  “Caravaggio did the same.”

  “Who?”

  “Sixteenth-century painter. Killed one man, then another, and spent the rest of his life on the run in Italy and Malta. With the collusion of his family and high-placed patrons.”

  “They finally locked him up.”

  “No, no. He died free but poor. Some sort of fever.”

  Art couldn’t suppress a little smile. “I meant Ronnie Biggs. They nabbed him and sentenced him to thirty years. But they’re talking about releasing him, now that he’s a harmless old codger. And dying of cancer or something.”

  “What’s Joe’s name? If he’s Gloria’s nephew, it isn’t Oliveira.”

  “Medeiros. Joseph Medeiros. I’ve heard him spelling his name when ordering pizza from the telephone in our sitting room. It’s spelled —”

  “For goodness sake, Arthur, I know how to spell it.” She adjusted her fur hat then clicked rapidly at the keyboard. “We’ll put Jason, Joseph Medeiros, and Argylls into the search box. If Jason went AWOL from the Argylls as you surmise, and Joe is mixed up in it, there might be a newspaper story about both of them.”

  Up flashed a list of ten titles, with the words Jason, Joseph, Medeiros, and Argylls highlighted in random order. Art ran a finger down the screen and read the titles one by one. There was nothing remotely military in the list; just community newspaper stories about softball games (it seemed a fellow named Joseph Medeiros was a star player), details of a place called the Argyll Centre in Edmonton, Alberta, and a faculty listing from the University of Illinois Department of History.

  Phyllis cupped the mouse with her hand. “Let’s see what’s on the next page of listings.”

  “How many entries did Google find?”

  She pointed to the top of the page: 1,270.

  “We can’t
look at all of those. They’ll be turning out the lights and kicking us out before we’re half-finished.”

  “You’re quite right,” Phyllis said. “We need to refine our search strategy. Let’s try Argylls, AWOL, and Jason. Leave Medeiros out of it.”

  She clicked at the search box, typed in the new terms, and pressed the Enter key.

  A new list flashed up. Just fourteen websites in total, but all of them gibberish, mostly lists of words starting with the letter A. And an invitation to something called Facebook.

  Phyllis fingered her pearls and gazed past the computer for several moments. When she looked at Art, her eyes were probing. “Are you sure the name was Jason? You barely got a glance at that tattoo. Did you even have your glasses on? Maybe it was Jack or Jake you saw. Or even Adam.”

  Art felt foolish. Perhaps his eyes, or his memory, had deceived him. “I could have sworn it was Jason.”

  “Let’s delete the name. If it’s not correct it will act as a confounder.”

  She clicked on the search box, deleted Jason, and put in Hamilton, Argylls, AWOL, and deserter.

  The first two listings were Government of Canada non-military websites. The third riveted with possibilities: Hamilton native AWOL from military base in Sarajevo. Corporal Jayson Dasilva missing after accident.

  “My word,” Art said. “Can we have a look at that . . . link, is it?”

  “I knew you had the name wrong. See — it’s Jayson with a Y.”

  Phyllis did something with the mouse, and a page from the Hamilton Spectator filled the screen.

  Beneath a September 18, 2003, headline, the item was short and lacked detail. It did say that Corporal Jayson Dasilva, of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada, known affectionately as the Argylls and based in Hamilton, Ontario, had been charged with impaired driving and dangerous driving causing death after a motor vehicle accident in Sarajevo in August 2003. An unnamed woman and two children died at the scene. While confined to barracks awaiting a preliminary hearing and potential court martial, Corporal Dasilva disappeared. Military sources among Canada’s peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina remained confident it was only a matter of days before he was located and detained.

  “Goodness,” Art said.

  “But that news is almost six years old. Anything could have happened by now. He could have been tried and acquitted, or found guilty and already served his sentence.”

  “Or he’s still on the run,” Art said. “Can we keep searching? There must be updates to the story.”

  Phyllis erased the contents of the search box and inserted Jayson Dasilva, Argylls, and Sarajevo.

  Up came a short list: four entries from the Hamilton Spectator and three from Canada’s national dailies.

  “Pick that one,” Art said, pointing to the third entry. “It has the most recent date.”

  Another page from The Spec flashed onto the screen. January 4, 2004. Sources from the Argylls confirmed that Corporal Jayson Dasilva, age twenty, remained at large. His whereabouts was unknown. It seemed to Art that the brevity of the report indicated the Canadian Forces’ embarrassment that one of their number was AWOL five months after being implicated in the deaths of three civilians.

  “And that’s the most recent update the Web has to offer?” Art said.

  Phyllis took them back to the list of newspaper articles. They read each item in detail, but found no news more recent than January 2004, five years ago.

  “Any bright ideas are most welcome at this point,” Phyllis said.

  “Too bad there weren’t pictures with those stories. I’d at least like to see what this Corporal Dasilva looks like. Do you suppose he’s the guy in the toque and sunglasses? Did he and Joe fall out and now Joe is threatening to expose him?”

  Phyllis grabbed the mouse and zipped the arrow to the top of the screen. “Of course. I should have thought of that. One needs to search separately for images. I do it regularly for my art history class. My pension doesn’t stretch to the purchase of the recommended textbooks.”

  The screen filled with four rows of assorted images — photographs and cartoons the size of postage stamps. The photos were too small for Art to identify any of the subjects, and the captions beneath them too brief to make any sense.

  “You can analyze Renaissance paintings from photographs this small?” he asked. “Phyllis dear, are you sure you’re studying art history, not philately?”

  “For someone who was once on the ground floor of high tech, you’ve turned into a veritable Luddite. Those aren’t postage stamps, they’re called thumbnails.” She waved the mouse’s pointer over the photo of a young man wearing a military cap.

  A second later, a familiar face filled the entire screen.

  “Mother of God,” said Art.

  “No need to invoke the deity, Art. But this is quite the machine.” Her face beamed with pride, as though the Internet and all its bits and bytes were her invention.

  The caption read: “Corporal Jayson Dasilva, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada, Hamilton, Ontario.”

  Art couldn’t take his eyes off the face. The young man had extremely short hair, and there were no stitches above his right eye.

  But there was no mistaking his identity.

  Corporal Jayson Dasilva, formerly of the Argylls, was pulling a Ronnie Biggs and currently loafing at Camelot, ordering takeaway pizzas.

  CHAPTER 33

  Shortly before noon, Zol steadied the glass bowl as Max cracked a seventh egg against the rim, his tongue clamped between his teeth. The poor kid was trying his damnedest to separate the yolks from the whites, and he wasn’t going to give up. The recipe called for four yolks in one bowl and five whites in other. So far, Max had managed to separate only one egg. Zol had tossed the five others into a plastic container; they’d be having omelettes for supper well into next week.

  If a Cheddar-and-basil soufflé was going to rise like a cloud, the whites had to be separated perfectly. Cooking-school dogma said that yolk-contaminated whites wouldn’t whip into the requisite soft dry peaks. Much as Zol hated arbitrary doctrines, today was not the day to put the perfect-separation theory to the test.

  Producing a soufflé was like uncovering the culprit in an outbreak investigation. You amassed the ingredients like facts, checked them for freshness or accuracy, assembled them with some measure of skill, then served the results for everyone to see. If your work was built out of dubious components, it fell flat. As did your reputation. Zol craved the simple triumph of a feathery soufflé, a golden dome rising above plain white porcelain. Natasha had called with the news that the links between Viktor Horvat and Camelot Lodge appeared more complicated than ever.

  “That’s great,” Zol told Max, who’d finally got the hang of the eggs, managing three in a row without a speck of yellow in the white.

  Zol fished the hand-operated beater from a drawer and held it out to his assistant.

  Max pulled a face. “Aw . . . Gimme the electric one.”

  “This is better.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Hey, real chefs don’t even get to use this. They use a whisk. And a lot of elbow grease.”

  Max checked his elbows for greasy stains, then realized he’d been outsmarted. “Da-ad.”

  Zol pressed the beater’s handle into Max’s right palm.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Of course. You separated all those eggs, now you get to beat them into submission. It’s good practice.”

  “For what?”

  “For your game stick.”

  “No it’s not.”

  Zol chuckled. The boy was right. The slick manipulation of a video joystick bore no relation to any useful occupation.

  Max dipped the beater into the bowl and scowled, first at the instrument, then at Zol. Then, certain that his reluctance had been duly noted, he started cranking. Barely. Those soft dry peaks were a long way off.

  “Something smells extraordinary,” Colleen called from the front ha
ll, the door banging closed behind her, the heels of her boots clicking against the tiles. “Do I detect basil and garlic? And Cheddar?” Moments later, she burst into the kitchen like a barefoot sunflower, her coat in one hand, a shopping bag in the other. She set the bag on the counter and paused, cocking her head as she tugged off her scarf. She covered her eyes with her hand. “And . . . another cheese? Don’t tell me . . . it’s . . . um . . . Parmesan.”

  Zol folded her gorgeous, compact body into his arms. He breathed in deeply, devouring the jasmine, green apple, and hint of musk that enveloped her. He kissed her lips, but only lightly. More would come later. At the moment, Max was all eyes, his beater silent.

  “Sorry,” Zol told her, “wrong about the Parmesan.”

  “Give me another chance.” She lifted her nose and made a playful show of sniffing like a connoisseur. She shook her head. “It’s not Gouda or Stilton.”

  She slid from Zol’s embrace and gave Max a hug, whispering, “Can you give me a hint?”

  Max paused, uncertain what to say. “Is it Italian, Dad?”

  “That’s my boy.”

  Max seized his beater, puffed his chest, and began churning like a fiend. Zol wondered if he was as transparent as Max when it came to impressing a beautiful woman. Yes, he decided. It was in the hard wiring.

  Colleen shot Max her smile of approval, then closed her eyes, sniffed again, and turned to Zol. “I know what it is,” she said, smirking. She stuffed her scarf into her coat sleeve and retreated to the front hall.

  “So?” Zol asked when she returned, slippers in hand.

  “You masked it with sesame oil, which isn’t exactly cricket.” She slid her toes into her moccasins and crossed her arms. “You’re serving Thai salad with the soufflé?”

  “And the cheese?” Zol said.

  “It’s that sneaky relative of Parmesan. Asiago.”

  He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her toward the refrigerator, then lifted his prepared ingredients from the shelves. “Right on all —”

  The phone blared from the desk beside him. The call display said Caledonian Med Cent. Must be the coroner calling from the morgue. Something unusual, with public health implications. No one else ever called him from the hospital.