Six Degrees of Freedom

by Nicolas Dickner

  On December 24, shortly before midnight, Lisa finds herself alone in her one-bedroom apartment. She turned down her mother’s invitation on the pretext of celebrating Christmas Eve at the Domaine Bordeur. The big lie went unnoticed; Josée Savoie is unaware that her ex-spouse is in the hospital, and Lisa has no intention of setting her straight. She prefers to keep the different zones of her life walled off. Each person in their own compartment.

  The people upstairs can be heard shouting as they tear into the presents. Sitting on her bed under several layers of quilts and blankets, Lisa checks the airfares to Copenhagen (point number seventy-four) for the twentieth time. They shot up for the holiday season and won’t drop again before late January. Her findings show that reasonably priced tickets are available if she agrees to lay over in Toronto, New York, Paris and Brussels, a total of forty-seven hours in airports and fifteen hours of chartered flights with four different airlines. But even under such insane conditions, she can’t afford to take off for Denmark. She converts the fares into euros, US dollars and yen in search of a currency that would make the amount seem smaller. Oh, for those bygone days when you could cross the Atlantic by toiling away in the galley of a liner.

  Anyway, there’s no point in dreaming about hasty departures. Lisa doesn’t even have a passport, and after thoroughly studying the steps involved in getting one (point number seventy-three), she has come to the conclusion that Passport Canada’s mandate is to prevent people from leaving the country.

  Lisa closes all the tabs and then the browser, and takes a peek at Skype, just in case. Éric is still perennially offline. He must be stuffing himself with œbleskiver, stirring a pot of gløgg or introducing Lærke to German board games, lying flat on his stomach in front of a cluster of wooden meeples.

  She folds down the screen of the laptop. It will soon be midnight, and the tribe upstairs can again be heard making a racket. Someone has just received an iPad or mitten warmers or a programmable slow cooker. Lisa is starting to wonder if it was a mistake to turn her nose up at her mother’s invitation.

  Through the window, where she has yet to hang curtains (point number thirty-one), Lisa can make out the pinkish light of the neighbours’ Christmas decorations across the street. She gets up from under the quilts and, shivering, goes to press her forehead against the frozen pane. A mist of delicate snowflakes is falling over the neighbourhood, turning the massive silhouette of Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense white. Down below, in front of the church, the old Dodge Ram is gradually disappearing under the snow.

  “IT’S A DODGE RAM,” Sergeant Gamache repeats. “My brother had the same model.”

  Mahesh has his doubts. According to Wikipedia, it could be a Plymouth Voyager or a G-Series Chevrolet. Laura reserves judgment. Jay shrinks into the background.

  For the last three days, the Enclave has been buzzing with excitement. Having traced Rokov Export through an (unpaid) electricity bill, and after placing the former premises of Autocars Mondiaux, located at 230 Gibson Street, under intensive surveillance for forty-eight hours, the RCMP launched operation Spur, which involved emptying out the garage with brushes and tweezers and packing everything into thousands of little zip-lock bags. The photographs are piling up on the RCMP server, and Laura observes the process with an air of disapproval. The operation was put under the command of a colleague she does not overly appreciate. She shakes her head as she scans the index of evidence.

  “They need to be more discriminating. It’s like they’re emptying out the Collyer brothers’ house.”

  Up to this point, the most interesting find has been the hard disk of the surveillance camera of the warehouse next door, from which 3,700 hours of nothing-very-much has been retrieved. Using an epic manoeuvre to which he alone is privy, Mahesh managed to assemble all of it in one interminable feature-length film that plays continuously on one of the screens, like an experimental film shot in black-and-white with a webcam and a cheap wide-angle lens. The infinitely slow scenes show the same four loading docks, where the occasional tractor-trailer arrives and leaves. In the upper left corner of the frame, almost outside the field of vision, a corner of the Autocars Mondiaux garage is visible, and parked in front is a black—black or very dark-coloured—van, whose licence plate, at this distance and resolution, is distinctly illegible.

  A Dodge Ram, according to Sergeant Gamache, but Mahesh is not prepared to concede the point so easily. His screen is covered with pictures of vans that he is comparing to the security camera film.

  “It could also be a GMC Savana, or a Vandura. Or even a Beauville Sportvan.”

  Sergeant Gamache slaps his thigh. “A Beauville Sportvan! Why not a Westfalia, while you’re at it?”

  Laura stares at the van, squinting. “And it spent the whole summer there?”

  “Yup. It shows up every morning around 7 a.m. Disappears late at night.”

  With his finger on the mouse, Mahesh speeds up the film. The days and nights alternate in quick succession, along with the comings and goings of the trucks and tractor-trailers; meanwhile, the van appears and disappears from the parking lot at 230 Gibson, always driven by the same individual (five feet eight inches, Caucasian, short hair, indeterminate gender) lugging boxes, bags, two-by-fours, instruments and tools.

  This business continues until October 9, the date the van disappears for good. On the morning of October 11, a tractor-trailer arrives and backs into the garage. Ten minutes later, it re-emerges pulling a trailer loaded with a perfectly white refrigerated container, on whose side one can make out the code PZIU 127 002 7.

  “Do we know how long the container was inside the garage?”

  “The videos start in July, but we know Rokov Export rented the garage as of June. A six-month lease, paid in advance. Transferred in cash. Oh, hi, Micheline!”

  “Hello, port people!”

  Micheline Saint-Laurent enters the Enclave, distorting the magnetic field around her. This diminutive, grey-haired woman is the founder, the soul and the brain of the Mechanical Forensics Unit. She has the reputation of being a human computer, capable of analyzing, with no apparent effort, tire tracks, a shard from a tail light or a flake of paint from a vehicle.

  Her arrival lays bare the subtle hierarchies of the Enclave. She starts by greeting everyone with a single neutral nod, after which she directs a little wink at Laura and exchanges a robust handshake with Sergeant Gamache. Mahesh gives her a respectful two-finger salute, while Jay plays the invisible woman. Finally, Laura greets her with a vaguely Japanese bow. Micheline is her sensei, her mentor, her model. When Laura entered the RCMP as a naive intern, she started out in Mechanical Forensics. In her eyes, Micheline Saint-Laurent is the supreme über-librarian.

  Once the ritual salutations are over (duration: five highly concentrated seconds), Micheline’s steel-grey eyes scan the troops, while a teasing smile plays at the corners of her mouth.

  “I get the feeling there’s been some betting.”

  “Let’s say a slight disagreement between Maurice and

  Mahesh.”

  “Well?”

  “Dodge Ram.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “A hundred percent. The shape of the grille. The diagonal between the headlights and the bumper, the angle of the windshield. I factored in ten parameters, the margin of error is nil. Dodge Ram B Series, 1981 or 1982. As for the colour, the choices are black, burgundy or blue. Personally, I lean ten-to-one toward black.”

  Sergeant Gamache is jubilant. Mahesh immediately looks up an image on Google and compares it to the video. He has to admit it: he was wrong and will be buying the beer. Laura does a mental calculation.

  “A Dodge Ram ’81 or ’82—that narrows it down, doesn’t it?”

  “Sort of. I put in a query before coming up here. There are two hundred and twenty-three of them still on the road in Quebec. If you include all those registered east of Manitoba, the number is upwards of four hundred. They were indestructible machines.”

  “My brother-in
-law still had his last year.”

  “Okay, Maurice. We got it.”

  “As for the second van, it’s a Ford Econoline 2007.”

  Everyone turns toward Micheline in unison.

  “What other van?”

  “Could you go to November 25, Mahesh?”

  Mahesh moves the scroll bar to November. The dates flash by then slow down. Eventually, an ashen sun rises on Sunday the twenty-fifth. There is so little action on the screen that the image seems frozen. At 7:17, a white Econoline stops in front of Autocars Mondiaux and backs up in front of the garage.

  Standing behind Mahesh, Jay feels as if she is in free fall.

  No one says a word. Three minutes forty seconds elapse without the slightest movement. Then, at 7:20, someone wearing overalls gets out of the van, their face hidden under the visor of their cap, and disappears behind the corner of the garage. The image becomes perfectly static again; Mahesh fast-forwards it. The person comes back out of the garage at 7:39, dragging a garbage bag, and loads it into the Econoline. Sixty seconds later, the van moves off and vanishes from the screen.

  Mahesh rewinds and stops at the exact moment the driver is shown dragging the garbage bag. “Weird, isn’t it?”

  “Weird.”

  “A black truck, then a white truck. It’s like a game of chess. Black always plays first.”

  “White always plays first in chess.”

  “You sure?”

  “Maybe it’s the same person in a different van.”

  Mahesh is puzzled and replays the sequence in slow motion. “What could he be hauling in the bag?”

  “No idea. Maybe he was cleaning up.”

  “Cleaning up? Did you see the state the garage is in?”

  “He stayed for twenty minutes.”

  “It looks heavy, anyway.”

  They watch the person heaving the bag into the van as slowly as a tectonic plate. The scene goes on forever and is on the verge of becoming farcical. Mahesh freezes the frame, and Micheline shrugs.

  “Ford Econoline 2007. Possibly 2008—it doesn’t really matter. Hardly any white ones like that belong to private owners; there’s an 85 percent chance it’s a rental.”

  She adds nothing more and, after the customary goodbyes, slips out.

  Mahesh replays the film backwards in slow motion and watches the suspect very slowly getting out of the van, followed by the enormous garbage bag. Knitting his brow, he leans his whole body toward the screen and analyzes the sequence frame by frame, as though trying to recognize someone. Jay feels an urgent need to find a diversion.

  “And, uh…any progress with the search at the garage?”

  Laura brings up a photo gallery on the screen. The crime scene has been recorded from every angle: workshop, washroom, reception, roof, and the surrounding lot within a radius of twenty metres. All that’s missing are satellite pictures. There’s even a panoramic shot of the workshop, which appears oddly familiar to Jay, even though she spent no more than twenty minutes there. Some minutes are more intense than others.

  “Have they found anything so far?”

  “Trash. Scraps of wood and steel, paint-stained tarps. And some empty Empire apple crates. Footprints. Lots of fingerprints, none of which match anything in the databases. They also sent some biological material to the lab.”

  Jay stiffens. “Biological material?”

  “Hair and some blood, I think. We should have the lab report by this weekend.”

  Jay takes a few steps back in the direction of the corridor. “I’m going down to the cafeteria. Anybody want anything?”

  “Negative.”

  “A sticky bun, if there are any left.”

  Jay’s legs are shaking as she backs out of the Enclave. Above all, don’t succumb to panic. She’ll go down to the cafeteria and bring back a large coffee and two buns and act perfectly normal. She automatically checks if her pass is hanging from her belt and heads toward the elevators. Down to the cafeteria is where she’s going. A coffee and two buns.

  Though, on second thought, maybe she’ll go down to the main floor and very calmly walk out the front door, whistling, hail a taxi, and ask the cabbie to drive to Vancouver.

  LISA AND ROBERT WALK THE length of the only corridor in the Westmacott Building and back, three slow kilometres on beige carpet punctuated by sporadic dialogues. They exhausted all the conversation topics some time ago. Robert lives in a closed circuit; he can no longer ask questions about current events, his daughter’s daily life or even the weather. Occasionally, bits of conversation surface from the past, anachronistic and intact, like a core of prehistoric ice.

  When Lisa goes back out into the open air in the late afternoon, she’s in pretty bad shape. The sun has just set on the St. Lawrence Seaway. The parking lot is empty. She sits down behind the wheel of the Dodge, breathes deeply for a long while, eyes closed, and gradually regains her composure. Then she starts off toward Huntingdon.

  The landscape is ink black under a new moon, but Lisa knows the slightest curve of this road by heart. She passes Hinchinbrooke, crosses the little steel bridge, drives past the yellow light blinking at a deserted intersection. She can just make out the alternating fields and thickets, discerns the distant light of a farm, its silos standing like rockets ready for takeoff. She slows down imperceptibly in front of the dark and boarded-up Baskine house, where, if it were light, a RE/MAX sign that has been yellowing for months could be seen nailed to the door. Lisa gives the big barn of a place a discreet nod.

  It’s Friday, and the residents of the Domaine Bordeur have already shut themselves indoors for the evening. As she parks the Dodge, Lisa notices a peculiar Christmas decoration in front of the Mirons’: the Datsun has been adorned with strings of lights, and Santa Claus is sitting behind the steering wheel wearing imitation Ray-Bans. Lisa bursts out laughing; the Datsun is ready for Burning Man.

  Inside the house, it smells of death and stale air. There’s the sound of water dripping in the kitchen sink. Any property left on its own naturally tends to fall into ruin. Lisa has to sell this place fast. As soon as she receives the certificate attesting to her father’s incapacity. As soon as she can find the time. As soon as.

  She shuts off the valves under the kitchen sink and turns up the thermostat a few degrees. While the place warms up, she sets up some boxes. On the first, she writes, For Papa. On the second, For the Mirons. On the third, Salvation Army. Placing the felt marker on the fourth box, she hesitates. From this point on, it’s the trash can.

  She switches on the radio and scans the dial from end to end. All the receiver can pick up is a folk music station. Well, at least it’s better than silence.

  As she makes her way to the bedroom with the For Papa box, Lisa stops in front of a framed picture. Under the glass stand daughter and father, aged eight and fifty-eight, wielding handsaw and drill, looking like a pair of outlaws. The photo was taken in Huntingdon at Robert’s first building site. Who was holding the camera? Josée perhaps. The frame drops into the box. Maybe the photo will jog his memory, wring a smile from him. Lisa no longer knows how to clear a passage in her father’s brain.

  The evening goes by in this way, interspersed with insignificant discoveries. While emptying out the bathroom, between two bottles of shampoo, she stumbles on a pair of dice. What are they doing there? Lisa pictures her father rolling dice while sitting on the toilet. Maybe he used them to make difficult decisions during his moments of relaxation.

  When the boxes are full, the time showing on the kitchen clock is 10 p.m. It’s already Saturday in Denmark. The sun will be rising, and Éric too. Lisa loads the boxes into the Dodge. She turns down the heating in the house, shuts off the lights and locks the door without looking back.

  Once she’s home, Lisa jumps into her pyjamas and, taking her computer, slips under the mountain of blankets. Éric is online for the first time in a week. Without even thinking about it, she clicks on his picture. The connection is successful and the young man appears on the scr
een, sitting at his desk in a room flooded with morning light. Lisa points an accusatory finger at the camera.

  “Where were you, sir, for the past week?”

  “I haven’t left my house for three years.”

  “You were doing the incommunicado thing.”

  “We had family visiting with us. I did some reading. Everyone needs to unplug from time to time. You wanted to talk?”

  “Yes. No. Nothing special.”

  “You’re up late.”

  “I just came back from Saint-Anicet, with a stopover at the Domaine Bordeur.”

  “How’s your father doing?”

  Lisa’s gesture says, “topic off limits.” And anyway, what could she say? The room is small. The staff seem competent. Her father’s brain is atrophying. It’s been weeks since he uttered Lisa’s name, and she now suspects he has forgotten her.

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  “No. Quiet Saturday morning. Lærke is spending the day here.”

  The little girl’s head, with ruffled hair and a freckled nose, pops into a corner of the screen. She scrutinizes Lisa closely and, having satisfied her curiosity, goes back to her occupations.

  “What are those drawings behind you?”

  Éric swings halfway around toward a big whiteboard covered with sketches and a tangle of sentences.

  “Nothing. Just some work-related notes.”

  “I thought your companies operate all on their own.”

  “Um, yeah, but this is something else. Research and development.”

  Lærke moves through the background waving a Lego vehicle that’s halfway between a flying cigar and a Soviet shoebox.