Bitter Paradise

by Ross Pennie

  Hamish completed his examination by taking hold of Bhavjeet’s hands and studying them carefully — the backs, the palms, the fingertips. “Look at this,” he said to Zol, pointing to the grit under the fingernails and the dark stains in the palmar creases.

  Still holding Bhavjeet’s hands, he turned to Uncle. “Tell me, is it the Petro-Valu gas bar on Upper James that you own, or is it the one on Longwood Road?”

  Uncle looked like he’d seen a phantom with psychic powers. His eyes grew huge and he took two steps backwards toward the door. “Um . . . um . . . Longwood Road!”

  “Longwood, eh? I thought so. You have the best gas prices in the city. And you do quick oil changes too.” Hamish made a point of studying Bhavjeet’s palms for another long moment then placed them on the young man’s belly. He smiled as he slowly pulled the sheets and blanket up to Bhavjeet’s chin. “I always like to support family-run businesses, don’t you, Dr. Szabo?”

  While Uncle, now tongue-tied, pondered Hamish’s pointed comments, Zol explained that he and Dr. Wakefield needed to go check on Bhavjeet’s lab test results.

  “Bhavjeet, I take it your parents are still in Pakistan?” Hamish said, reaching for the door handle.

  When the youth nodded a clear affirmative, Zol added, “If Auntie is out in the waiting room, perhaps she’d like to come and join us. In say, fifteen minutes?”

  Chapter 13

  The blonde caught Hosam taking in her perfume as he fastened his seatbelt. She frowned. “You can smell it, can’t you? It’s that strong, eh?” Her Arabic was fluent enough, but she wasn’t a native speaker. And she certainly was not Syrian.

  “It is a lovely scent,” he told her.

  Leila used to wear the pink scent by Chanel. Coco Mademoiselle. He used to buy it every year for her birthday. She had to leave the last bottle behind in Aleppo, unopened. More important things outcompeted it for space in the single suitcase they each were allowed on their late-night escape into Turkey. Some barbarian rebel fighter had probably found the handsome glass container on Leila’s side of their abandoned bathroom, sniffed it, and brought it home to his mother or sister. Most of those guys did not have steady girlfriends. They were too rough and too much on the move. When they wanted sex, they took it by force, then shot the girl before she could complain.

  “Shit,” said the blonde. “I was not supposed to stink up this car.”

  “It is not your vehicle?”

  “Of course not. It’s borrowed.” The look on her face suggested she was using the term loosely.

  It was best to play dumb. He had no idea who this woman was. She could be the Caliph’s girlfriend sent to test the loyalty of a new recruit. “Borrowed from a friend who is allergic to perfume?”

  “Shit, no! From the valet parking lot at YYZ. We have an associate who’s a car jockey there.”

  “Where?”

  She shook her head as if frustrated at dealing with an idiot. “Toronto Pearson Airport. Everyone who’s been in Canada for five minutes knows what YYZ is.

  “I guess I have a lot to learn.”

  “Just do not make a mess. And no vaping or smoking. I have to return it before morning in perfect condition.”

  “I am a surgeon, I do not smoke. I have had to cut cancer out of too many throats and lungs.”

  “They told me you were a barber.”

  “That, as well.” He could have told her the two professions had been one and the same for hundreds of years, and that he had started cutting his friends’ hair when he was a teenager. But the less he said the better.

  As they continued eastward along Barton Street, she was watching her speed. He waited for her to explain where they were headed and what he was expected to do, but she was saying nothing about any plans. It was clear the Caliph wanted him as unsettled and submissive as possible.

  “I heard you had a bad morning,” she said, her eyes still firmly on the road. “You know, at the shop.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Well, the boss is sorry. And . . . well, steps have been taken.”

  What sort of steps? Was Ghazwan now a lifeless corpse tied to a pile of bricks at the bottom of the lake? Merde!

  The city and streetlamps were petering out. Barton Street was leading them into the darkness of the countryside, and it had been a while since they had seen another vehicle travelling in either direction.

  “They, um . . . told you my name.” His mouth was so dry he could hardly speak. “What is . . . what is yours?”

  She hesitated then said, “They said you should call me Farah.”

  His eyes quickly flooded with tears, and there was no point in trying to hide them. She might as well have stabbed him through the heart.

  “What?” she said.

  “The bastards! They knew that name would upset me.”

  “I just do what I’m told.” She flipped a bottle-blonde strand into place behind her ear then glanced nervously at both side mirrors. “What do you mean?”

  “That was my daughter’s name.” He forced himself to say it out loud. “Farah.”

  “Was?” The woman’s eyes darkened. “What happened?”

  “A mortar bomb. Our second-last night in Aleppo. If only . . .”

  She looked ashamed. “I’m sorry. I never would have . . . Was she little?”

  “She had just turned eight.”

  The woman gave his arm a squeeze then returned both hands to the steering wheel. “Call me . . . call me Saramin.”

  If this woman was working for the Caliph, there was a softer side to the gangster’s operation. It would not hurt to exploit it by learning more about her. If he was going to keep his head, he had to get his mind off his family. “Your accent,” he said. “I have been trying to pinpoint it.”

  “And you don’t have a clue.”

  “May I guess?”

  “A hundred guesses and you’ll never get it.”

  “Northern Iraq? From the mountains?”

  She made a face. “God, no. You think I’m Kurdish or Yazidi? Their Arabic is horrendous. And their manners!”

  “Sorry, I did not mean it as an insult.”

  “Enough with your foolish guesses. My family is from Damascus.”

  She could not expect him to believe such a story. Not with that accent.

  Seeing the doubt on his face, she tilted her head and smiled. “My grandfather immigrated from Syria to Saint Lucia after World War Two.”

  “Saint Lucia?” He had to think for a moment. “You mean, the West Indies? The Caribbean Sea?”

  Using her arms and upper body, she pretended to dance. “Yo’ got dat right, mon.” She stopped abruptly and became serious again. “Syria was a bad place for Christians after the French left in 1945.”

  “You are Christian?”

  “Who knows anymore?”

  “My late grandfather was French. A baker from Brittany.”

  “That explains the blue eyes.”

  In this light, she would not be able to tell what colour his eyes were. Someone must have told her about the blue-eyed Arab who worked in the barbershop. It was disconcerting to be talked about even when you did everything you could to keep your head down.

  “You speak French?” she asked.

  He had lost most of the language after his grandfather died and left no one in the family Hosam could speak it with. He did remember some of the swear words the lively old man had seasoned his speech with. Hosam told himself he used them in honour of Grandpapa André.

  “Un p’tit peu,” he told her.

  “Just a little, eh? We had the French in Saint Lucia on and off for two hundred years. We got taught some of their language in school. A friggin’ waste of time.”

  “Have you been back home recently?”

  Her eyes narrowed and her lips tightened in a frosty red line. He
had touched a nerve. “Enough,” she said. “We’re getting to the tricky part. Shut up and let me do my job.”

  When they reached the termination of Barton Street, she turned right at the stop sign onto Fifty Road. Soon, the roadway narrowed and they started a steep ascent of a forested ridge looming ahead of them. Saramin hunched over the steering wheel, her right foot alternating between the accelerator and the brake. The Lincoln’s massive engine revved and purred beneath its hood. After several alarmingly tight switchback turns that could hardly contain the massive vehicle, he realized where they were. They were climbing the Niagara Escarpment, the famous formation that gave its name to the region.

  The forest, black and menacing on both sides, crowded the barely adequate roadway. Was she going to cast him into this lonely wilderness of trees and gullies? He told himself to calm down. He had given the Caliph no reason to harm him. And as a corpse, he would be of no value to anyone. Still, his heart raced and his palms sweated inside the gloves.

  When they reached the summit, the road flattened and the encroaching forest gave way to the expansive darkness of wide, featureless terrain. Saramin relaxed her iron-fisted grip on the wheel and sat straighter in her seat. She pressed the accelerator to the floor. After a kilometre of dead-straight blacktop, he could see the road was about to end at a T-junction beyond which there was nothing but a light-consuming void. They could be anywhere: Syria’s Badia Desert, Arabia’s Empty Quarter, a dark-matter star. Saramin reined the heavy vehicle to a stop and removed a phone from her inside jacket pocket. She flashed him a warning to keep his hands off the mobile then studied the navigation app on the screen. She must have been told not to risk making an incriminating record of their journey by activating the vehicle’s built-in navigation system. Together, they peered through the windscreen at the rickety sign that identified the crossroad. He could just make it out in the indirect glow of the headlamps: Mountain Road East.

  “Okay,” she said, “this is us.” She hit the gas pedal and turned left.

  Less than a minute later, they came to what appeared to be a large, unpaved parking lot with a substantial building on its far side. There were no lights illuminating anything anywhere. Not even a sliver of moon. As Saramin applied the brakes and turned right into the lot, Hosam could see a large cross towering above a steeply pitched roof. A sign at the front of the property partially revealed itself in a flash of the headlamps. He could not catch every word, but the last two said Baptist Church.

  It seemed a remote location for a Christian church. On his daily bus rides to and from work along Route 34, he saw dozens of churches in various shapes, sizes, and degrees of ostentation. It seemed strange for the faithful to drive far into the country when there were many churches convenient to the heart and suburbs of the city. Perhaps it had something to do with cheap land. Or maybe these people had strange worship practices they preferred to conduct well away from prying eyes. By the size of the parking lot, this church had a substantial membership. A congregation, he reminded himself, was what his sponsors at First New Canaan called themselves.

  But merde, what was he doing here in a stolen, mint-condition, extra-long Lincoln Navigator that smelled strongly of expensive perfume?

  Saramin parked behind the church in a spot well hidden from the road. Hosam heard a car door open and close. A second door opened and a vehicle’s interior light came on. He could see it was a truck, a pickup with an extended box. A medical colleague used to have a Toyota Tundra much like it for hauling gear around his hobby farm near the Mediterranean, southwest of Aleppo. Hosam could not let himself imagine the sorry condition of the farm and the handsome truck these days. He had heard that the colleague had been kidnapped for ransom, his left thumb delivered to his wife on ice as proof of life.

  The pickup’s front passenger door closed, the light went off, and footsteps crunched against the gravel.

  Saramin lowered her window and hailed the two approaching figures, both of them with stubbled faces blackened by paint or charcoal. In the glow of the Navigator’s vast instrument panel, Hosam could see only four eyes and a lot of crooked teeth.

  “I brought you a helper,” she told them in Arabic. “I hear he’s good with tools.” She checked her watch. “You have three hours until moonrise.”

  The shorter man, who had been standing by the truck on the driver’s side, told her, “Enough time for two trips, then.” It was obvious his mother tongue was Syrian Arabic. His accent was straight from the city of Homs.

  “The boss wants at least three trips to the yard tonight,” she told them. “So don’t mess around.”

  The man shrugged and produced a small flashlight. “How strong and fast is your boy?” He blinded Hosam with his torch while he took a good look at him. “Hey, you’d better have a strong back.”

  Hosam nodded. Two years in the refugee camp shifting cases of bottled water and burlap sacs of Thai rice had given him strong arms and, yes, a strong back.

  The man dipped his beam away from Hosam’s eyes and pulled a small object from his pocket. “Here,” he said, tossing it. “Put this on.”

  “Careful,” Saramin hissed. “That stuff stains.”

  The man shrugged off the warning as Hosam caught the projectile. It was a tube of face paint. Jet black.

  Over the next couple of hours, Hosam and the man from Homs filled the truck and the Lincoln with several loads of what must have been thousands of dollars of copper sheeting. The church was in the process of having its asphalt roof replaced with a brand new copper one. The supplies could only have been delivered recently. The shiny metal shingles were still stacked on their wooden pallets where they showed no signs of weathering.

  The other guy — tall, super muscular, and reeking of the same chewing-tobacco stench that had accompanied Marwan’s assailants into the shop this morning — spent his time at the top of a ladder. He was so monosyllabic that Hosam could not tell what part of the Middle East he was from. His job was to remove the church’s copper flashing, eavestroughs, and downspouts with a crowbar and hacksaw. He worked with an LED headlamp strapped to his forehead, his practised hands proof he had stripped buildings numerous times before. Neither man said more than a dozen words, although the taller guy did a lot of spitting onto the ground. When he wiped his mouth with what looked like the same dark WWE bandana Marwan’s silent attacker had worn this morning, Hosam nearly swooned and took care not to come even close to looking the guy in the face.

  The short man from Homs barked occasional instructions and aimed his flashlight at whatever bundle of shingles he wanted Hosam to lift. Hosam learned nothing of either men’s stories and could not figure out whether they were willing partners in the Caliph’s operation or, like himself, were working under some private threat.

  Almost three hours later, Hosam was too exhausted to ruminate any further over the crime they had been committing. He closed the Lincoln’s rear door while the other two secured the cover on the pickup’s cargo box for a final time. They had already made two trips in both vehicles from the church to a scrapyard on the lower side of the Escarpment. The place was conveniently obscured by a high wall topped with shiny razor wire.

  Saramin, who had spent hours sitting in the Lincoln reading magazines and fiddling with her phone, now called to him through her open window, “Here! Don’t forget. You know the drill.” She handed him four baby wipes and added, “Remember, I’ve got a plastic bag for you to put the dirty ones in so you don’t —”

  “I understand.”

  He did understand Saramin’s fussing about the face paint. Traces of it on the upholstery might arouse suspicion among the owners when they reclaimed their cars from Toronto Airport’s valet parking service. If anyone spotted new stains or smudges inside their vehicles, the Caliph’s nice little jig would be up. He would no longer have unlimited access to a fleet of wheels invisible to the police. The cars and trucks the Caliph quietly “borrowed”
had not been reported stolen, so no one was on the lookout for them. Furthermore, CCTV surveillance cameras would not have recorded them making previous deliveries to the Caliph’s scrapyard, which sooner or later would be under suspicion of receiving stolen property.

  The scheme was ingenious, but distastefully crooked. He was not sure what had his heart pounding fastest: his fear of getting jailed and deported for thievery; his dread of the Caliph’s reprisals if he did not cooperate; his revulsion at working alongside a sadistic murderer; or his guilt at stealing from the decent citizens of the fair-minded country that was providing sanctuary to his family.

  As they turned away from the ravaged building for the last time, he received a shock that filled him with more shame than he could remember. The Lincoln’s headlamps lit the complete inscription at the front of the church: Welcome to First New Canaan Baptist Church, A Caring Community.

  The heist he had committed was particularly cruel. Not only had he stolen expensive copper shingles and trim from his benefactors, but he had violated the dignity of their house of worship. Leila would insist on knowing the details of his experience tonight. He could describe the tough-as-nails woman with hair down to her waist, but he could never tell Leila about the crime he had committed against their Church People.

  Chapter 14

  After leaving Bhavjeet’s room, Zol pulled up a chair beside Hamish at one of several workstations in the Emergency Department’s central hub. Hamish brought the boy’s electronic record onto the computer screen in front of them.

  Zol pointed to the house address on the top line. “Violet Drive? Where’s that?”

  Hamish opened Google Maps on his phone and typed in the name of the street. “Stoney Creek. Look, it’s few minutes’ walk from those starfish in the Petz Haven on Queenston Road. But nowhere near our school in Beasley.”