by Jim Stark
"I feel the thrill of the kill,” he said quietly. “My instinct wants to kill ... no, wait, that's not right,” he corrected himself. “My instinct wants me to survive, and killing is the key to survival. There, that's got it. I knew that. How did I forget a simple equation like that?
"I'm quivering from scalp to toe to find myself heading out onto a dock with these instruments of death. How odd! This is your basic no-lose combat situation here. I don't get hurt, no matter what. My enemy is big enough to eat, but too small to bite back.
"And even if I fail to catch a fish, I'm so rich I could feed India for a month ... okay, so I exaggerated on that one. That's not the same thing as lying ... well, okay, so it is the same."
He sat on the end of the dock and looked over the rod and reel. He hadn't fished for a quarter of a century, but the technology of murdering fish hadn't changed. Importantly, he had changed. Still, life was too short to get bogged down in conundrums. He opened the tackle box.
"Now, what would a dumb-ass fish like to chomp on?” he asked aloud. “This little yellow spinner looks delicious. Onto the little clip, aaaand..."
Victor stood, keeping the end of the rod out over the water so the lure wouldn't catch on the dock. He let out about a foot of line, eased the rod back behind himself, cocked his arm, flung the rod forward, and released the thumb button. “Whoosh,” he said, “we fly through the air with the greatest of ease, aaand ... sploosh, we make a noise."
The casting part was easy, a one-handed operation, but reeling in was a two-handed task, and the plaster cast on his left hand and forearm made it a tad awkward. After a bit of experimentation, he got the hang of it, and his mind turned back to the nature of this activity, the meaning of it.
He wasn't sure that killing fish was such a great way to have fun. “If I didn't kill fish, somebody else would,” he muttered as he cast again. “It's merely a matter of which particular fish I end up eating, the big fucker that gets hauled in by a mile-long drift net off the Grand Banks or the little fucker I yank out of the lake by the mouth. I'd rather eat the little fucker. That way I get to enjoy the contest, unfair though it may be."
He watched the lure break the surface and whiplash up to the end of the rod as he reeled in. Then he glanced towards the lodge and wondered again whether his long-standing habit of speaking his thoughts out loud could be dangerous in this circumstance.
"Should I feel guilty about having the advantage of a rational mind?” he asked quietly. “No, I shouldn't! I've got the superior brain, so I use it, and the fish wouldn't do any different if he was me and I was him. If he had tools and I was the micro-brain, he'd swim to shore with a Twinkie on a hook and go human-ing. Too bad. Maybe a zillion years into the future the tables will be turned, and people will get hauled into lakes by schools of pike and munched to the bone because they can't tell the difference between junk food and a steel hook. But for now, I get to win and you get to lose. The natural order of things. You don't like it? Talk to the engineers, whoever they are. I didn't make the rules."
And once again it occurred to him that he should be more circumspect about talking aloud. “I'm afraid that Noel the cook may be checking me out with a pair of binoculars,” he said without moving his lips. “I'm afraid that Bill the groundskeeper is actually a CIA operative trying to steal my secret. No, that's silly. I don't believe it, so why did I say it? But I am afraid that—what's her name?—Winnifred Jopps, is after my body and ... okay, so I flat-out lied. I ... wish!"
He decided he simply had to stop talking out loud, no matter how he might minimize the movement of his jaw. The business risks were too great, and there was always the possibility that he had been put under surveillance by Patriot Security. Besides, he might be scaring off the fish.
What am I really afraid of? he wondered silently as he sailed the lure towards the opposite shore once more. Come to think of it, Patriot Security wouldn't spy on me, he realized, because they know I could just ask Helen and find out, even if she lied about it. But I do feel fear. I guess it's healthy to feel some fear. Okay, not necessarily healthy, but it's real, according to my design. I fear death. I fear death so I kill, to eat, to avoid death.
"Seems fair to me,” he said out loud, now without any fear. “Okay, so ‘fair’ isn't the point. It's the way things are. In any event, it's time to retreat back under my skin, like a normal person.” He remembered a tune he'd once written, and began singing quietly:
Inside of my body is the place I must hide
I peek out through my eyes and let the pictures inside
"Speak no more, oh great but somewhat short and chubby hunter,” he commanded himself. “Speaking outside the established norms is punishable by social death. It's a sin, of sorts. But fishing ... fishing is a sport, like war, punishable only by applause. Sis boom bah. I was designed to kill. Rah rah rah. Shut up the face ... and kill."
Chapter 4
THE GAL-DANGED CHURCH IS A DAD-GUMMED JOKE
"Through those doors, second room on your left down the main hall, courtroom three,” said a uniformed guard to the well-dressed man doing the asking. “There's a sign on the door: Caughy Commission."
The federal inquiry had been established to deal once and for all with the question of sexual abuse in Canadian boarding schools, and the media was in its feeding-frenzy mode. Bishop Sutherland followed the directions he'd been given, and was immediately pounced upon by microphones, cameras, and cawing open mouths. It wasn't expected that observers from the Catholic Church would attend this session. Today's witness was the “widow of the old coot from Quyon who decked Bishop Malini last November,” as one TV commentator had described her. And this entire inquiry concerned a matter that the Catholic Church had already reviewed internally, away from the glare of publicity, a matter it considered “closed” after the scandal of the first years of the new millennium.
"No comment,” said the Bishop repeatedly in response to their entreaties. That will be on the TV news tonight, he thought, the fact that I was here, and had nothing to say.
Steve Sutherland was a tall, robust man, known for his charm and sense of humor on most occasions ... not including this one. He was the current chairman of the Canadian Association of Catholic Bishops, and he had come to Ottawa from his Alberta diocese for an emergency meeting of the CACB, tomorrow, a meeting that he himself had called. He entered the courtroom and found a seat at the back, on the side, just as the witness was beginning her testimony.
"There was just no containing that cranky old man on that particular morning,” sputtered Barbara Farley, widow of the late Joseph W. “The Bishop's secretary—he's a priest, you know—can you imagine that, a priest being a secretary? Anyways, this here secretary, he's beside hisself when Joe come barreling in there cocky as an Injun on hooch. The secretary-priest wasn't too sure whether to laugh or cry at the sight of my Joe raging about everything under the sun, the way I heard it, the way Joe told it to me anyways."
Sutherland—the bishop who reportedly always asked to be called just plain “Steve"—bowed his head and pinched the top of his nose. I bet this woman has never heard the word “aboriginal," he thought.
As royal commissions went, this one was bound to yield plenty of fireworks, and some fearsome nightmares. The newspaper reporters were scribbling frantically, trying to pen the perfect metaphor for the female throwback that had allegedly counseled her dear husband to punch out Bishop Malini. The five distinguished members of the judicial panel—three women and two men—winced and squirmed. Several men from the town of Quyon, retired farmers, had driven all the way to Ottawa to support the widow of their departed friend Joseph W. Farley—not that she needed it. They didn't wince or squirm, but in fact, they were cracking up inside, the way Steve read their faces.
"The Bishop hisself,” continued Mrs. Farley, “he hears this ruckus outside his office, so he comes out to see what the devil's going on, eh? Well, my Joe gives him one of his mean look-sees with them bushy eyebrows of his, like he's about to
whup his grandson with his belt in about two shakes, and the Bishop, he starts getting scared that he's about to get whupped. Lord love us, I'd ‘a give a side of beef to see that sight with my own eyes.” She descended involuntarily into an imperfectly subdued cackle.
"Counsel, if could you instruct your client to get to the point and spare us the colorful language?” implored Justice William Caughy. “This is not a sitcom. This is a judicial inquiry, and I've just about—"
"Of course, Your Honor,” interrupted the lawyer, with a sustained glare at his irascible client.
"Your Honor, my foot,” snapped Mrs. Farley. “I am getting to the damned point. What I been telling you is what Joe woulda said if he was here now, God rest his soul. This whole mess woulda got itself sorted out years ago if the big shot bishop had of listened to what folks were telling him. So you settle yourself down and perk up your ears and do some serious listening, young fella, or I'm gonna refuse to testify any more at your blinking hearing and go out in the hall and say all what I gots to say to them fellas from the TeeVee. I believe they're plenty interested in what I gots to say."
The cheering section from Quyon was in stitches, and the reporters were loving this backwoods mayhem. “Sock it to him,” whispered the cameraman just behind Steve as he zoomed in for a close-up of the distinguished punchee.
"Mrs. Farley,” begged Judge Caughy, “I'm trying very hard to make allowances, but if you could just—"
"Now as I was saying,” she went on, “the gal-danged Church is a dad-gummed joke. I figure me and Joe and our young ones probably put a hunnert thousand dollars into the collection plate over the last fifty years. You get my point, Your Honor? We were ... like you might say we were major shareholders in the Catholic Church, so to speak.
"And yet here's our grandson Geoff coming to us with this story about his chum Bobby Thompson that got put into that boys’ school, St. Dominique's, and got hisself bred up the ass by some filthy old priest. This was all a few years back, eh? Bobby never went back to that school up in Peterville after he was fourteen, and he's nineteen now. Anyways, Bobby Thompson, he told Geoff there was a lot of them doing it ... lots of them priests and them—whatcha call ‘em—them Catholic Brothers. And they was doing it to lots of the boys there, which is why Bobby was running away all the time and why some o’ them other boys was running away too."
"We're sadly aware of these facts, Mrs. Farley,” said the chairman. “Our society has been trying to deal with this situation for many, many years. Please get to the point, the part about when your husband—"
"So my Joe, he has a real long talk with young Bobby Thompson, and he believes him. And then he finds out that Bobby's parents and relatives had been complaining direct to Bishop Malini, some of them for years, back when Bobby was in there at the school. But nothing ever changed! Nobody ever did nothing! Nobody wanted to believe them boys, even after all that big publicity ten years ago in the papers and on the TeeVee and all that. Nobody wanted to believe that priests could do such terrible things, specially after the past times this stuff was caught happening. And Bobby says it's still going on, at least that's what he heard, and we believed him.
"So my Joe, he drives hisself down to the Bishop's place in Ottawa and tears a strip off the guy—you know, like a good old-fashioned tongue-lashing, with nothing held back. Well, I'm afraid when my Joe got hisself fired up, he pretty well covered all the cuss words we generally use down on the farm, plus a few more he musta picked up somewheres else. If you ask me, he shoulda done it a long time ago, and so shoulda you and the damned pope and anybody else that knew about what was going on in there at the school."
"This all happened in the outside lobby?” asked Justice Caughy, trying to get her back on track. “In front of Bishop Malini's secretary?"
"Hell no,” fired Barbara Farley. “First, Joe backs the Bishop up into his office and closes the door behind, then he gets to telling him off. The Bishop, he gets all flustered and he tries to get around Joe and get hisself out the door, and that's when he slips an cracks his face on the corner of his desk, just like it was ordained from above."
"So ... your husband didn't actually strike the Bishop, then?” asked the chairman.
"Is that what I just said, Your Honor?” scowled a furious Barbara Farley.
"Yes, but I was—"
"Then that's the way it was, Your Honor. Maybe if you woulda listened up the first time, we coulda—"
"That's it for this session,” announced Judge Caughy with a loud slap of his gavel. “We'll convene again next Wednesday. Counselor, if you could have a heart-to-heart with your client, I'd be most—"
"Of course, Your Honor,” managed the lawyer.
Chapter 5
CAST OFF
At 2:00 p.m., the corporate helicopter thumped skyward from the roof of Whiteside Technologies, on its way to Wilson Lake. Randall Whiteside felt it had been worth it to stay up half the night with the lawyers. Now he had Victor's contract in hand, and was feeling very pleased with himself.
Annette Blais, a Patriot agent who had agreed to stay with Victor at the lodge, sat up front beside the pilot. She was a solid thirty-five-year-old with round shoulders, dark hair, a ruddy complexion, and a dozen pounds she'd been trying to shed for a decade. As with all the female agents working for Patriot, she wore no make-up, but she was one of the few who liked the policy. She wasn't the type to wear it—never had been, never would be. “I don't need it,” she used to tell her mother back when she lived at home, back when her parents were alive. “Why would I want to hide my natural beauty?” she'd asked every man she'd ever loved and dumped.
She was joking with the pilot about Canada's new Prime Minister, Louis St. Aubin, allegedly an intellectual lightweight with an ego the size of Lake Superior. She did so quietly, under the drone of the engine, since St. Aubin and Whiteside were friends.
Randall, never far from his briefcase, was making a string of thirty-second calls on the helicopter's phone. Among other things, he made arrangements to land briefly at the Ferguson's farm near Carp, on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River, where Victor's two Samoyed dogs were being boarded.
Whiteside-produced global positioning technology made finding the place easy. They landed, expecting to be met by Nancy Ferguson, the kennel owner. As the chopper idled in a hay field a hundred yards south of the barn (as per instructions), Nancy's husband Tom approached, and he shouted Nancy's whereabouts to Annette over the engine's whine—she was apparently in Vancouver on some kind of government business. Contrary to everyone's expectations, Tom showed no trace of rural friendliness. He just explained his wife's absence, delivered the frightened dogs, on leashes, and retreated.
Annette had to hoist the wiggling, yipping dogs up to the pilot—no easy trick. She looped one leash around her left ankle while she lifted the larger dog, the male, and as she did this, the female almost pulled her leg out from under her. The pilot was laughing—Annette was not.
When the loading operation was complete and the door closed, Annette tied one of the dogs at the very back of the cabin and settled the other at her feet. Whitebird III took off again, and as it crossed the river, Randall hung up the phone with a sense of finality. “Annette,” he said loudly, “what did you and Helen find out about our taxi driver?"
"Not much,” she said, turning sideways in her seat and stroking a panting Samoyed. “He's a committed loner. From nineteen ninety-seven until today, he sort of ... well, vanished. He never married. He's been driving for Blue Line for twelve years and living on a rented farm about twenty miles south of Ottawa. He'd go to work and go right home again. No close friends, no girlfriend, no problems at work, no military record, and no criminal record. We called the hospitals to see what we could learn about his arm, and they had no record of any treatment. The cops knew about him getting robbed six weeks ago, but they didn't know anything about him getting a broken wrist. That's about it. Maybe Cam has more."
Grant Eamer, the pilot, had been instructed to lan
d briefly at the Patriot compound at the estate before going out to the lodge. Randall wanted to zip over to the manor, kiss his wife and kids, and then take care of a daily duty that was starting to make him crazy—the pacification of Cam O'Connor, who was increasingly resentful of Helen Kozinski's authority and seemingly unaware that he'd been booted upstairs in the Patriot pecking order. He was right there, waiting, at the helipad, and none too happily, as the engine was cut and the blades fluttered down.
"I'll be ten minutes or so,” Randall said as he unbuckled, “then we'll head out to the lodge.” Once he was standing on the ground and away from the chopper, he explained to Cam that he'd be at the manor for only ten minutes, then he walked directly to a Patriot van to be driven the few hundred yards to the manor house.
Annette wanted to take the antsy dogs out for a walk, or at least a pee, but under the circumstances, she decided to wait in the now-silent helicopter. Cam's moods had a way of affecting other people's plans.
* * *
Cam waited, checking his watch every thirty seconds, with not a word for the pilot, who stood nearby. The boss was compulsively punctual, and for that, at least, the nattily dressed securocrat was grateful. Ten minutes later, noted Cam, the Patriot van returned Randall from the manor. The door opened ... and real life restarted.
Randall didn't know how his good-natured former pal from University of Toronto days had turned into a stale old crust of bread, but there he was, sulking by the chopper, fifty-seven going on ninety. “Let's walk while we talk,” he said, and he started down the dirt road before Cam could object. “What's the poop on Helliwell?"
