Snow Job

by William Deverell

  “Who has come home?” he thundered. “Who did our country free? Prostitutes! This failed adventure has become the fiasco of the ages! This House demands a credible explanation.”

  The Liberals rose in unison, a full-throated cheering, jeering tsunami. Margaret might have been the lone member to the Speaker’s left who didn’t join in. She’d been appalled by the official opposition’s warlike trumpeted efforts to prove they were tougher than the government.

  Arthur searched for her, found her among the Bloc benches, whispering to Chambleau. She looked up, wiggled a wave that he answered with a weak smile. He was desperate to believe in Stoney’s promise of discretion. Were they not the truest of friends? Almost family.

  Clara Gracey stood. “Mr. Speaker, there is less shame in trying and failing than in acting the snivelling coward. It is not this government that should apologize, but the honourable leader of the Opposition, who should be on bended knee to the proud men and women in uniform who bravely risked their lives. No fault lies with them. Their duties were brilliantly executed.”

  “Hear, hear,” called government members, rather weakly.

  “Those who designed this operation acted with the best intentions upon information at hand. Inquiries are being made as to why such information may have been incomplete. In the meantime, we shall continue efforts on every front to bring our citizens home with honour and in peace.”

  In an emergency caucus on late Monday, Conservative M.P.s had quickly acted to confirm Gracey as interim leader, lining up behind her as their one luminary untarnished by the debacle. Lafayette had supported her, but, insiders said, only because he couldn’t muster enough support for himself.

  Finnerty’s empty chair sat between Gracey and Lafayette, a gulf as wide and cold as the Labrador Sea. The foreign minister seemed sapped of former ambition, sombre, moody, awaiting her verdict, expected the next day, as to who would sit on the front row.

  The New Democrat leader, Marsh Jenkins, a Winnipeg labour lawyer, dug into his trove of sound bites, throwing out “scandalous costly boondoggle” and “boneheaded bumbling” in framing a question as to whether Monday’s raid was just a smokescreen to hide the government’s plans to declare war against its own citizenry by invoking emergency measures.

  Thiessen handled that one, denouncing Jenkins for relying on baseless rumours. The government had no such plans, was fully committed to freedom under the rule of law, in proud contrast to Bhashyistan’s oppressive Stalinist regime. Clara Gracey stood, led the applause.

  Jenkins stood again, eyeing the Press Gallery, which was on overflow, eager for blood. “Maybe the minister of foreign affairs, who I see is somehow still clinging to his job, can help us with this one. Unless it has escaped his notice, he will be aware that a family physician from Saskatchewan has expressed alarm to the national media that his wife, niece, and sister-in-law were detoured into Bhashyistan while on holiday, and are facing the gravest of perils. My question: why did the government proceed with Operation Eager Beaver knowing these women were at risk, and what, if anything, is the government doing about them?”

  Arthur still felt a trembling when those clips of Dr. Svetlikoff’s entreaties came back to him. A straight-talking but emotional man, grey templed and trim, who hadn’t been able to continue what he began, breaking down, choking and sobbing. Arthur had felt the whip of his pain, found himself daubing his eyes with a napkin.

  Lafayette heaved himself up. “Mr. Speaker, I can assure the honourable gentleman that this government is deeply aware of Dr. Svetlikoff’s concerns, and just as deeply committed to doing everything in its power to guarantee his family’s safe return.” Arthur wondered how anyone could be satisfied with that half answer.

  “Shame! Resign! Resign!”

  The Speaker squelched the shouts and catcalls with a demand for order. “The member for Iberville-Chambly.”

  Julien Chambleau rose. “Question for the minister of public security. Is the government aware that Mr. Abzal Erzhan was forcibly abducted into a car two hours prior to the bombing of November 26?”

  Thiessen took a moment as the words were translated from French, then removed his headset. “Au contraire,” he said before retreating to English, “we have reason to believe Mr. Erzhan voluntarily entered a vehicle occupied by his collaborators. If the honourable member has other information, we would be pleased if he would share it.”

  “With pleasure. I formally invite the minister to attend a press conference in the National Press Theatre at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. In fact, I dare him.” Thiessen appeared taken aback.

  Arthur worried how the obdurate Iqbal Zandoo would handle a siege by the press. But the telling of his account could not be put off. Arthur had spent hours with him in Tragger, Inglis’s Ottawa office, and again the previous evening in a nearby hotel where Zandoo was sequestered. He’d even rehearsed him in front of a video camera, one of Pierètte Litvak’s many toys.

  Proceedings grew tiresome as government members rose with planted questions aimed at bandaging their leaders’ wounds. Reporters scurried out to file their bulletins. Arthur casually scanned the Public Gallery behind them, blinked, rubbed his eyes, focused. The ubiquitous Ray DiPalma. Looking solemnly back at him through his wire-rims. A nod. A hand held tightly at his chest, fingers splayed. The gesture repeated. Ten fingers, ten minutes? Both hands meeting as if in prayer, then forming a steeple. St. Patrick’s Basilica.

  Me and my shadow … Yesterday, Arthur had conferred at the Tragger, Inglis office with Antoine Salzarro, who’d retained a private investigator to profile DiPalma through friends and acquaintances, from his college days to the present. The detective, a woman, was hoping to get close to his former wife. Janice. Or Janet.

  DiPalma rose, shrugged into a parka as he shuffled past the security officer and out the Public Gallery door. Arthur waited a minute, musing, half listening to the tedious refrains from below excoriating the Opposition for, of all things, playing politics.

  From the entrance to the basilica’s ersatz grotto, DiPalma watched Arthur descend the ramp, then butted a cigarette and walked in. Arthur waited until an elderly woman exited in a motorized scooter, then entered a spacious hall with a bookstore-cum-souvenir shop and a chapel, where a scattered few sat in prayer. Few others were about. DiPalma was on a bench by a wall, reading the morning paper.

  “Crumwell’s got constipation,” he said. “He hasn’t gone to the toilet for forty-eight hours. He’s so icy, when it comes out it’ll be frozen. He claims he didn’t really buy that dodge from the third son, insists he relied on info from Russian sources. Ogilvie Road is in turmoil.”

  Impressed by these confidences, Arthur again quelled his doubts about DiPalma. “Let’s hope that at least the campaign to save Lower Mount Norbert Road remains afloat.”

  “Turns out the Starkers crowd are nudists.”

  No liquor breath on him today, so maybe he was in recovery from the trauma of his marriage breakdown. Arthur wanted to probe him about his student days as a Carleton jock, but didn’t want him to sense any distrust.

  “Savannah sends her love.” A meaningful look at Arthur.

  “What?”

  “I think you know what I mean.” A severe, almost condemnatory expression. “I have to warn you that most of the island is on Margaret’s side. Maybe not the loafers who hang about the store — they’re either jealous or in awe. Emily LeMay — who’s finally given up on me, by the way — insists it’s been going on since last year, but you know how she exaggerates.”

  Arthur sat there with his mouth open, too numb to stanch the torrent of bad news. He grasped at a fleeting hope: DiPalma was kidding him cruelly. But that would suggest he had a sense of humour, however macabre.

  “I wasn’t sure if Margaret had chucked you out of the apartment with your clothes and toothbrush, so I asked some of the intel officers at Ogilvie Road this morning and they hadn’t heard anything. I hope this entanglement doesn’t complicate things for us, and that you two can m
ake up, because I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.”

  “Forgive me for interrupting, Ray, but I have been convicted without trial.” There was nothing for it but to divulge the entire innocent version, and that he did. DiPalma appeared to be struggling against scepticism.

  “How come no one seems to know Savannah had this sleepwalking problem?”

  “I know! Margaret knows!”

  “Down, down, people are staring.”

  Arthur fought for control. “Tell me, Ray, does the entire island also believe you succumbed to Emily LeMay?”

  “Not any more, because I finally told her I was gay, and she put the word out. Now I’m the centre of gossip.” He thought about it. “Okay, point taken. What did Margaret say when you told her?”

  “I haven’t,” Arthur croaked.

  “Well, she’s going to hear.”

  Arthur eyed the chapel, where a young priest was lighting candles. No, there was but one person to confess to. He must sit down with his life partner post-haste, take his bitter medicine, plead with more might than he’d ever summoned for the most sceptical jury. He was so engulfed in grief that he was slow to realize DiPalma was going on about something else.

  “Usually these days it’s Romania. Poland’s going out of the business. Malta’s a possibility, but mostly a switching station. Egypt? Too unreliable. Albania is a growth industry, it’s the only country in the world that has loved America through thick and thin. My guess is the Yanks provided one of their facilities, as well as expertise in rendition.”

  “Rendition? Whom are we talking about? Erzhan?”

  “I see you have your mind elsewhere. Yes — the scuttlebutt is he was rendered out of the country. One of my workmates heard that, she was troubled by it, needed someone to talk to. Enter Ray DiPalma. Aretha-May is her handle, a knockout, by the way — she’s on the idiot fringe desk, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and she’d been seeing a married guy in the next cubicle, a communications traffic analyst. The affair bottomed out, she felt used, and the two of us have started seeing each other. Nothing intimate, we’re just sharing our wounds — I told her all about Janice, of course. We had a little cry together. Anyway, where was I?”

  “Erzhan. Rendition.” Arthur’s own marital woes had been put on hold. “From whom did Aretha-May hear this? The traffic analyst?”

  “Right. And he heard it from an intel officer I usually avoid, name of Sully Clugg, a thoroughgoing jerk but I’ll buy him a whiskey and get his version. Just a minute.” He answered his cell. “I’m on him now. Downstairs, St. Patrick’s Basilica. He’s spotted me, he’s waving me over. Got to go, sir.” He disconnected. “Crumwell himself is handling me. He wants me to weed out what I can on this Zandoo guy. Can you feed me anything?”

  Arthur felt a tremor. Not fear but outrage at his loss of privacy. “You obviously know where he is.”

  “Suffolk Hotel, room 18.”

  “Fine. Tell them you coaxed that out of me. And that he’s going to say Abzal was abducted.”

  “Touché, tell them the obvious. Don’t worry, no one’s going to grab Zandoo. They thought about it, but it’s politically dicey. I told them you’ve probably got him on videotape.”

  “As indeed we have. Let’s get back to Abzal. Who kidnapped him? CSIS agents?”

  “Unless they’re renegades it doesn’t add up. What would be their motive?”

  “What would be anyone’s motive?”

  “Somebody who didn’t want the Alta International deal to go ahead.”

  Arthur had got too distressed in that grotto, so he headed home to shower and change. As he stepped from the taxi, his stomach was roiling with the ugly sense of being watched. They were outside his building now, probably in that cream sedan looking for a parking space. Or was it that minivan just pulling into the lot? Darkened windows, that would be their style.

  So it was now confirmed Crumwell was targeting both Margaret and him, to the point of phoning DiPalma for updates. The voluble spy had shown such candour that Arthur now regretted sicking a private eye on him.

  Before going up, he called from a lobby payphone, not trusting his cell, though he was only making dining reservations. His next call, to Margaret’s private line, was answered by Pierètte.

  Over-jocular: “Is her ladyship anywhere about the palace grounds?”

  “I suspect she’s still in the House, Arthur.”

  “Well, uh, if you speak to her, tell her I … I love her.”

  “She doesn’t know that?”

  He cleared his throat. “And that I’ve made reservations for the Cézanne at seven-thirty.”

  “Some kind of anniversary?”

  “No, I don’t have any particular excuse. Reason, I mean.”

  “Just that you love her. That’s sweet.”

  “One thing more, Pierètte. Alta International was vying with several other players to develop Bhashyistan’s oil and gas. Who were they? After Alta, who had the best inside chance?”

  “On it already.”

  In the elevator, he mused: Erzhan had seen his captors — the two that had exited the car were Caucasian, according to Zandoo — so why would they not have silenced him permanently to avoid being exposed? Why render him to a secret foreign facility? To torture a false confession from him?

  He wondered if even a multinational oil company, despite its vast riches, could engineer what was known in the trade as an extraordinary rendition, torture by proxy. Surely some government agency had to be involved. Only one superpower had proven expertise, though others might easily have learned by example.

  From 10C, “Water Music”: a composition he disliked for its easy familiarity, Handel’s fawning curtsey to the first King George. Through the vents, a cry: “Damn it, Sally, you tied the knots too tight!”

  He checked his phone messages. Wentworth Chance again. He’d been interviewing Arthur’s old cronies, digging up discreditable episodes from a past that would have made even Bacchus blush. Now he wanted to spend a few days prying around Garibaldi, that cesspool of gossip. That had Arthur quaking, wondering how to dissuade him.

  He stepped into the shower, turned the water on hot and full, looked down to see his feet in his now-soggy slippers.

  Candlelight and soft harmonics from a jazz trio. Cézanne and Pissarro prints on the walls. An attentive waiter who had the courtesy not to announce his name. For Margaret, a vintage Bordeaux; for Arthur, Perrier and cranberry juice. The buttered clams were probably delicious, but he couldn’t taste them.

  “How romantic, darling,” she’d said as he escorted her in. “I love surprises.”

  He shuddered, buried her untimely utterance beneath inquiries about her take on fast-moving events. Half an hour later, she was still holding forth, fretting that the government’s climate change measures, skimpy as they were, had been forgotten in the midst of crisis.

  “They’re planning an early Christmas break so they can run and hide from everyone. That’s if they’re still in power after Thursday. I need to get back to the riding — I’ve been neglecting it, I have an endless list of people to see. I’ll be running around like a hyperactive squirrel.”

  And maybe never set foot on Garibaldi? No, Beauchamp, don’t even think it, screw up your courage, man. But still he stalled, playing a game with Margaret: who among the diners was the spy from CSIS? The bald gentleman eating alone. The sad-looking woman at the bar. The impatient boor claiming he had a reservation.

  A deep breath. “Margaret, I have a small event to relate. A ridiculous event. I’ve been having trouble putting it in words. For that, only that, I haven’t been fair to you.”

  “Do tell.” Her smile, poorly suppressed, confused him.

  He took a long swallow to force open his gullet. “Matters were not what they seemed, and may God smite me on the spot if I’m not entirely frank about that.” The unswerving gaze of her electric silver eyes. “While we’ve been in Ottawa, Savannah has, uh, often retreated to the bed upstairs when matters between her and
Zack … you know how they squabble. And, of course, she has sleepwalking difficulties.”

  In an attempt to spread his hands in a helpless, shrugging motion, he knocked his glass over, spilling its residue. An ice cube skittered off the tablecloth. The waiter was on the spot with a cloth. “May I replenish that, sir?”

  “Ah, no, not right now. Thank you, no.”

  Margaret reached out to press his shaking hand, and he was so jittery that he almost pulled it away. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t let you go on like this, Arthur, it’s cruel. Savannah phoned me on Friday to tell me.” A chiding expression, as from a tutor to a truant child.

  Arthur was nonplussed, speechless. Friday? Five days ago?

  “You woke her up. As you got out of bed and left with Stoney.”

  It took a while to digest this. He sagged finally, weakened by the tension. “He’s … well, Stoney …”

  “Yes, he’s probably outdone himself, he must be hoarse by now. Come on, Arthur, people may want to believe the worst, but surely no one does. I mean, be serious. Virtuous Arthur, a faithless lecher? Making a move on a woman half his age? You, Arthur?”

  She smiled, but Arthur felt the bite of sarcasm, of mockery, her way of punishing him for his tardy guilty plea. Sneaking its way into his mix of emotions was a smidgen of resentment. Virtuous? Stuffily incapable of dishonour, was that her implication? But he managed a weak smile, and in truth felt much relieved — even as Margaret stifled laughter.

  18

  At eight o’clock, bright and early, Charley Thiessen strolled through the parliamentary corridors to the dining room. He was in pretty good spirits despite everything, despite the Bhashyistan shambles, despite the sudden death of his leader and mentor, despite the pall that had settled over everyone.

  That was because Clara Gracey had phoned him the night before. She’d congratulated him for the smooth way he’d handled himself in Question Period, especially in putting the Emergencies Act to rest. Then she apologized for “needing” him, practically begging him to stay in cabinet and keep his two portfolios, Justice and Security. He’d told her she could always count on Charley Thiessen. Loyalty breeds loyalty, that’s his first principle.