“Unique,” Arthur said. That was too accurate. “Very tasty.” His stomach screamed for bacon and eggs, but it might cost his marriage to offend these over-obliging folk, stoutly Green — Sam Rosenstein had run for the party federally.
This had to be one of the curses of political life, being captives of the kindness of others, B & B operators like the Rosensteins. Why would they want this lovely nineteenth-century home to suffer the intrusions of strangers? What was the custom when the owners refused payment? Does one leave a handsome tip?
He could only assume that this genial couple suffered a disorder characterized by feelings of acute loneliness when not surrounded by others of their species. Last evening, they’d fluttered about, giving them nuts, sliced apples, asking questions, nattering, ensuring no conversational void would go unfilled. As a consequence of that, Arthur was too exhausted on retiring to mention the Episode. It would have been hugely inappropriate to do that, anyway, in bed.
“We keep butter for guests,” said Jo Rosenstein, seated now beside him. Arthur begged her not to get up, claimed to be savouring this healthy breakfast. Sam was at the table now too, carrying on about supermarkets selling New Zealand apples when you can get better quality in your back yard.
Margaret made motions to rise from the table, tugging discreetly at Arthur’s sleeve. “Arthur and I have an appointment, I’m afraid.”
“Before you head out, you should try the chicory coffee,” Jo said.
Gaia House was on Avenue des Pins, not far from the mosque on Sherbrooke, and since the sidewalks had been cleared of the night’s snow, Arthur and Margaret decided to enjoy a suddenly sunny day. Another chance to confess. But to what? Confession was for miscreants, and he’d done nothing blameworthy. But would she believe that?
The problem was not so much in the telling but in the manner of it. Should he make a joke of it? Ho, ho, ho, there she was half draped over him as Stoney barged in. Maybe he should come on affronted. How dare she! The brazen woman, thoughtless even in her sleepwalking state.
How to counter Margaret’s questions? Isn’t she staying in the bedroom below? Why on earth would she have sleepwalked upstairs? Stoney saw her snuggled up to you? What explanation did you give him? And he believed you?
Stoney hadn’t, and neither would Margaret. She’d go off like a moon rocket, forever distrust him for having betrayed her at a most critical juncture of her life and career. After she cooled, guilt would assail her — she’d been too immersed in politics to focus on his needs for companionship. His husbandly needs. But how had he demonstrated those last night? With flaccidity, fibbing excuses, alleged fatigue, complaints of feeling like an intruder in this strange house.
Yet if he didn’t tell her, what if she found out, what then? Why was I the last to know? Arthur would be in a hopeless situation, backed against the wall by his unworthy silence.
“Such a lovely day,” Margaret said, taking his arm.
The Mosque of the Holy Prophet was a converted greystone mansion, with little but its sign to designate it as a religious centre. By the door was a corkboard advertising a coming debate: “When Belief and Doctrine Collide,” two Christian clergy, a rabbi, and the mosque’s religious leader, Dr. Mossalen. Workers were washing a red swastika from the wall.
They slipped off their shoes, Margaret tied a silk scarf on her head, and a young woman led them past the sparsely attended prayer hall to the imam’s office. Dr. Mossalen rose to greet them, a furrowed, white-bearded face. His doctorate was in religious studies from Cairo University. Arthur had been told he was not one of the fire-and-brimstone mullahs the media preferred to focus on.
“Welcome, welcome to our little holy institution. Not one of the grand mosques of our Asian and African heartlands, but more peaceful than some. I content myself with the knowledge that God does not discriminate against homely houses of worship.” Efforts at introductions were waved aside. “Your names are well known in these precincts. Mr. Beauchamp, the eminent barrister, and his industrious political spouse. Mrs. Blake, yours is a sane voice amid the howls of consternation over this Bhashyistan business.”
He placed them on a settee, poured them coffee. “I hope it’s not too strong for your taste.”
“As long as it’s real coffee,” Arthur said, the bitterness of the chicory lingering.
“Keeps one awake. Otherwise I tend to sleepwalk through my mornings.” Arthur almost choked on his coffee. “Vana and Iqbal Zandoo are without; she’s showing him through the mosque. I know her well and can attest to her probity. I haven’t met Iqbal, who I suspect is not much of a believer.”
Margaret asked him how he felt about the Bhashyistan mess.
“Much as you do, I imagine. Distress. Confusion. Some fear of the consequences of overreaction. Of interest, we play host periodically to a group of that nation’s emigrants. Maybe they’ll talk to you, I don’t know — they’re a close-mouthed lot who harbour much hostility against their despotic home government. In their language, Erzhan means soul of a hero, and these people believe him to be one, whether he be guilty or innocent.”
“Have the police questioned any of them?” Arthur asked.
“Not to much effect. A journalist has been working them over too, rather insistently, in fact.”
“A police agent?”
“That’s what they suspect. Allegedly works for an online journal. I saw its website, and it looked hurriedly cobbled together. At any rate, our Bhashyistanis are right to be cautious in expressing their feelings toward Erzhan, though I suspect none can truthfully say where he is. There are suspicions. But I am stealing your valuable time. Vana and Iqbal are at the door.”
Vana entered shyly, followed by Zandoo, late sixties, bearded and balding, with a scowl that could curdle milk. His handshake was restrained, perfunctory. Mossalen attempted to put them at ease, offering greetings in Pashto and Urdu, then seemed embarrassed at his show of linguistic prowess. “One picks up various tongues along the way in the racket of giving spiritual guidance. This is very much a polyglot mosque.”
“I grew up speaking English,” Zandoo said, surly. “Maybe not as fancy as you.”
“And you speak it very well, as does Vana. I told her, Mr. Beauchamp, that she can fully trust you. A brave woman, these are trying times for her.”
Zandoo sat back, arms folded, declining an offering of tea or coffee. But Vana took the former, offered a tentative smile. “I don’t know what to think about all this.” She looked prettier than on TV, but sadder. Dark, solemn eyes.
Arthur began his questioning by asking after her children. They hadn’t been sleeping well but were back in school, where there had been taunting; it was difficult for them. Further gentle probing revealed nothing unusual or amiss about this unexceptional Canadian family — Erzhan may have had a rebellious past, but had apparently integrated into the new world with remarkable ease, a respected teacher.
He loathed the Ultimate Leader and his loyal, clinging minions. No sensate being would reprove him for that — after his acquittal in the Canadian courts, his parents had been beheaded, his two brothers arrested, beaten, tortured, his teenaged sister serially raped by her jailers. But Vana insisted he wasn’t involved in an anti-Bhashyistan cabal. Any political involvement was local — Neighbourhood Watch, park and playground cleanup campaigns — or athletic — high school hockey and soccer. He was a hockey player himself, in an amateur senior league.
He had rarely discussed his youthful years — which had included a stint in the army and his desertion from it — or the fate of his family or his alleged role in the assassination of Great Father Boris Ivanovich. He’d told his son and daughter of his arrest and trial, however, and proudly spoken of his great protector, Brian Pomeroy, a photograph of whom hung in a place of honour.
Vana’s account of the morning of November 26 had not been made public, though repeated many times to investigators. It had begun as a very ordinary day. Abzal had read the newspaper over breakfast, as he regularly did, com
menting on items, reading passages aloud, often bewailing the state of the world. An observant and dutiful citizen, Arthur assumed, rightly cynical about the murky realm of politics.
“I packed his lunch, and he left for work, and that’s all I can say. The police asked me if he was nervous or worried, and I told them, no, he was normal, like every day.”
“And did they seem satisfied with that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The cops kept bugging her,” Zandoo said. “Me too, like we were criminals. To me, these guys were racists.”
“No, Iqbal, they were doing their work.” Vana said this reprovingly. “Everybody is a racist but you.” To Dr. Mossalen: “Iqbal has a good heart, but … he finds his own path.”
Mossalen smiled. “And it does not often lead to the mosque.”
“In this place, I will not say what I think.” Zandoo refused to meet the imam’s eye. “But I respect.”
Throughout this, Margaret sat smiling, taking the safe route of silence. Her implicit message: you take on this curmudgeon, Arthur. Dr. Mossalen excused himself — he had other visitors, duties to attend to.
Arthur took on Zandoo carefully, searching for openings, asking about his family (none, never married) and finally finding a shared interest in flower gardening. They talked tulips and begonias and asters, then dogs: Arthur’s own rambunctious Homer, Zandoo’s basset hound, Gaston.
“Twice a day he takes me to the municipal park, summer and winter. He knows every bush, every tree, and honours them all in the traditional way.” Smiling now, opening up.
And it was in the morning of the ill-famed November 26, as Zandoo and Gaston made their way through the leaf-strewn streets of Chambly toward the park, that he spied, about a hundred yards away, a black car pull up beside Abzal Erzhan.
“A big car, not a van, I couldn’t say the make. Quebec plates. To me, it looked like they were asking directions, one man leaning out the front passenger window, two others inside. A rear door opened, like they were inviting him in, and when he didn’t accept, two of them got out — not the driver, I never saw him.”
“Or her?”
“It could be a her. The other two seemed to be insisting. I didn’t see a gun but maybe they had one. They bundled him into the back seat. Abzal didn’t cry out, and he looked limp, and I’m thinking maybe they injected him with something.”
Arthur was astounded. “And did you not tell this to the police?”
“Me, I don’t have anything to do with police. Never have. They are always protecting the racists. Once I broke up a fight, a Somalian girl being pushed around by three white girls, and when the police came, they arrested me for assault. Three hours in jail before they let me go. With a warning. Pigs.”
“How well did you see these two men?”
“I couldn’t identify. One wearing a jacket, another a sweater, also a toque. But they were not Asian.”
“White?”
“Yes, and not too young, maybe in their forties, one tall and tough looking, one very thin.”
“How remarkable.” Also remarkable was that although Vana had relayed Zandoo’s account to the police, they had not worked him over harder. He’d made things awkward, however, by not being frank with the police. But who was Arthur to be righteous about being frank? An anxious glance at Margaret, an unnerving recall of the Episode.
“Vana, I would like to act for you and your husband.” Rarely did such invitations come from Arthur, whose clients often waited in line. But he was itching to take this on. Margaret smiled approvingly.
Vana hesitated. “You are a very important lawyer, I understand that.”
“It will cost you nothing.”
“I would get it in writing,” Zandoo mumbled, a little apologetically.
“Without question.”
“Oh, yes, thank you,” Vana said, “thank you, Mr. Beauchamp. We have been so alone, I didn’t know where to go.”
“All I ask is that you keep your silence, Vana. Speak to no one without my consent. Refer them to me if necessary. And you, my friend Iqbal, would you be interested in my representing you on similar terms?”
“I am an innocent man, sir. Lawyers are for the guilty.”
“It’s the innocent who most need their aid, Iqbal. You must tell your story to the Canadian public. And do so soon — delay breeds scepticism. I’ll be at your side when reporters ask questions. For your friend Vana, for Abzal, for justice, I am asking you to do this. If you’re willing, I’ll spend the hours needed to prepare you.”
“I am not afraid.” A brave thrust of chin. But then he mused, as if trying to quell his inbred lack of trust. “If I may ask, sir, what’s in it for you?”
“My thirst for justice, Iqbal. My thirst for justice.”
16
From his angle on his couch, Finnerty saw Sir John A.’s smile as sympathetic, sharing, but it hardly lessened an all-day hangover inflamed by heartburn — he’d hoovered a stack of flapjacks this morning, a double patty and fries at lunch. It was the tension that caused these excesses, the tension of waiting for three o’clock, Operation Eager Beaver.
He’d survived the weekend by hiding out — from friends, advisers, the press, for whom he’d run out of jests and bons mots. Hiding within the uncounted drafty rooms of 24 Sussex, taking cover from his sternly teetotal wife in search of bottles squirrelled away and forgotten.
E.K. was getting impatient, raising his eyes occasionally from his dispatches. “It’s almost time. They’re gathering in the war room. I suggest you get it together.”
It was a quarter to three. Finnerty had fled Question Period early, avoided the scrums in the foyer. Earlier, he’d briefed the full cabinet, a gruelling task, questions flying, alarmist comments from some, hurrahs from others that the nation was finally taking action. Afterwards, he’d drawn Clara Gracey aside. He’d seen her expression: resentment that the deputy leader had again been exiled from the insiders’ club, that she’d had to hear about the rescue plan at the eleventh hour.
“What am I, an untouchable? Am I to be sent to the girls’ room every time the men plot their war games?”
He’d insisted the circle had to be kept as tight as humanly possible.
“Fine. I don’t want back in. Let Lafayette be the goat if things screw up.”
He’d let it go at that. She’d already leaked her opposition to military intervention, obviously didn’t want to go down with all hands if things indeed screwed up. But they weren’t going to. He imagined himself smiling tonight from every TV screen in the country. Please share in my immense pride in our heroic men and women in uniform …
“It’s time, Huck. Up, up, and away.”
As Question Period petered out, Lafayette rose leisurely from his front-bench seat, pondering whether to indulge the clamouring gang in the foyer with the gentlest hint they were about to enjoy a watershed moment in history. But he stilled the urge, confusing them by walking off with a smile. The camera-toting press clung to him like pilot fish until he escaped into the no-go zone.
He paused at a window: opposing factions on the steps, the anti-poverty idealists and the hard-boiled patriots. “The Real War is at Home — Jobs Not Guns.” A banner with an alternative view: “Make War Not Peace.”
Happily, the truculent Saskatchewan doctor had been put on ice awhile, persuaded to wait until day’s end before yelping to the press. But the news from Tashkent had been less than helpful — the three women, if confusing accounts from Exotic Tours were true, had indeed boarded a flight to Igorgrad, where they’d disappeared into the gloom.
Here was Anthony Crumwell waiting in the Horseshoe, seeking a colloquy. “Charley Thiessen suggested I pass on an unusual tidbit about a suspect alliance among the wife of our slippery friend Abzal Erzhan, their landlord, Zandoo, and …” A moment of contrived suspense as they planted themselves on a couch. “The honourable member for Cowichan and the Islands.”
“Do tell, Anthony.” A smile to disguise his impatience.
Crumwell described a surreptitious tête-à-tête at a Montreal mosque two days previous, also involving Margaret Blake’s spouse, the noted barrister. They’d conferred for fifty-three minutes, apparently in the office of the local imam. Yesterday, Sunday, Zandoo had been fetched to the law offices of Tragger, Inglis in Ottawa, where he met again with them and with Julien Chambleau, M.P. for Iberville-Chambly.
“And what do you make of all that?”
“I pick up a whiff of conspiracy. An effort to protect the itinerant assassin, hide him, cover his tracks? A delicious development if that can be proved, do you not think?”
“No, I do not.” Lafayette decided he was dealing with a low-level neurotic, a conspiracy theorist. “Beauchamp et al. can’t be so naive as not to know Zandoo is under constant surveillance. They may be conspiring, but only to embarrass the government.” Crumwell looked chastened. “Have you or your minister spoken of this to anyone else?”
“Negative.”
“The prime minister?”
Crumwell hesitated. “If you think I should …”
“Maybe not for the time being.”
It was just after three when Lafayette led Crumwell into the war room. He’d half expected the group of seven to have become eight, but Finnerty had wisely abided by his counsel to keep Clara Gracey out of the mix.
The P.M. looked notably more blotched and pasty than usual, like an uncured fatty ham with a pink protrusion representing a nose. Lafayette sat well away from him so as not to endure his boozy scent.
“Nail-biting time,” said Thiessen beside him. A distasteful image. Lafayette’s own nails were tastefully manicured.
“T minus six minutes,” said Dexter McPhee, looking at the clock. All were seated on one side of the room’s massive circular table, watching the screens.
General Buchanan removed his headphones. “Gentlemen, CF-18 Hornets are descending on Igorgrad. From now to zero hour, we have radio blackout.”
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