The Kashmir Trap

by Mario Bolduc

  Oh, okay, New Age stuff. Now Juliette twigged to the long grey hair. Madeleine Morency was into pop spirituality, perfumed candles, et cetera, to free her kid from a life of crime, but it wasn’t working too well for them, no matter what Rodger promised. He was already too far gone by the looks of it. She wouldn’t see him again till the next disaster, probably a call from the police station.

  By her third cup of tea, Juliette figured she had enough information. Rodger’s path was twisted and tiring. There had been one incident after another, but nothing to connect him to David. He didn’t read the papers (“all lies”) or watch TV (“more lies”). Above all, Rodger never ever mentioned international politics. The only thing he cared about and his sole subject of conversation was one thing: money. He often got it from his mother.

  Just as Juliette was leaving without providing her phone number (“I’m always on the road, but I’ll call him”), she saw Rodger’s mother blocking her way. Juliette couldn’t get out. She had to see Madeleine’s photo album.

  “Another time, Mrs. Morency.”

  “I want you to see how much I love him. Please.”

  There was no refusing Madeleine Morency. Her sanctuary at the back of the house, her “elf garden,” as she called it. In the living room and kitchen, she must have been holding back, because here it was a festival for the senses: little angels, clouds, incense sticks, lace, and fine linens. The place was a medieval dump, and it was from here that she sent her positive vibrations to a son who at the same moment was probably emptying the cash drawer of a pizzeria or a car wash.

  The album itself seemed to come from the personal collection of some amateur wizard. An oversized, elongated scrapbook held letters his mother had lovingly glued in and news articles relating his criminal career, every petty arrest or incident connected with his shady world, all of it dated and pasted with loving care. It was a painstaking record that spanned from his very earliest days as a delinquent teen to the present.

  Juliette thumbed through it with interest, enthralled by this woman’s pain at the monument to failure that was her son’s life.

  “Every letter, every article is glued with my tears.”

  Once more, Juliette felt bad that she’d lied again. Rodger had done the same so many times in his life. Whatever nonsense her son had been up to, his mother didn’t deserve this. Juliette’s head was spinning. She should have stopped before her last cup of tea. All of a sudden, she felt like throwing up. Then she passed out.

  When she came to, Madeleine was holding out a damp towel: “You’re pregnant.”

  Back in the car, Juliette began to cry long and hard.

  19

  Temagami Penitentiary was on the edge of a forest, and beyond that, farther north, tundra, glaciers, and the North Pole. In winter, Max O’Brien’s cell window provided him with glimpses of deer, caribou, and moose as they ventured into the world of men in search of more food. He felt as though he were in a zoo, a prison invented by some wild-animal lover or by one of the animals, reincarnated as a prison architect. Yeah, why not? Did their ferocity and cruelty condemn them to live out their karma the same as humans … rebirth in that avatar of destruction, mankind, the worst of all animal species? Had wild animals really driven the gods to this level of desperation?

  Max was trying to survive here the best he could: walls around his cell, around the workshop where he made key chains no one would use … Santa’s workshop filled with shiftless young delinquents, a sort of North American gulag where porn films and disco music took the place of forced labour.

  Far removed from the city and life itself, Max, at twenty-six, felt like he was dying a slow death. He blamed himself for what had happened, for trusting that greenhorn, what’s-his-name. The idiot who worked on two contracts at the same time, a no-no under the agreement he’d sworn to, same as the others. Then it happened, the slow decline into the utterly ridiculous. The idiot got caught speeding while under the influence — another rule broken. The cops checked his identity and found he was out on parole, something Max hadn’t been told, naturally.

  Sitting in the Toronto patrol car on his way to booking, the cretin was scared stiff … of what? The speed the cops were driving, their nasty smiles, the leaden darkness that fell around the car? Anyway, instead of shutting his yap and taking the fall, he spilled it all.

  “Hey, if you let me off, I’ll tell you everything about a job, a really big one — names, details, everything.”

  The cops probably looked at him sideways with a grin. Deals were usually made further down the line, at least after you’d been charged and knew what kind of time you were looking at; and even then, it was your lawyer who did the dealing, not the joker in the deck. This one couldn’t wait.

  “You know Max O’Brien?”

  Of course they did, but they figured he was in Mexico.

  “No way,” said the ding-dong. “He’s in town, and he’s getting something set up on Bay Street.”

  The two cops were amazed and delighted to hear it, already seeing themselves honoured by the Kiwanis Club of Greater Toronto or cast in bronze facing the CIBC, their reward for saving an unscrupulous banker from the shame and humiliation of his board of governors.

  “You accept my offer, and I’ll tell you how you can pick him like a daisy.”

  More like a pimple.

  Max and Pascale had just taken shelter at Harbour Square on the 32nd floor of a brand-new building. It felt like a holiday. From the living-room window they could see the ferry shuttling to and from the Toronto Islands, sailboats going by, and the splendid sky of an unforgettable summer. They ate out on the terrace each evening, sometimes chatting about the con that Max and his team were about to pull off. Mostly they talked about what they would do afterward: Hawaii, Guadeloupe, Turkey, or Bermuda? There were long moments of silence. Chit-chat was for jobs, just a tool of the trade, nothing else. Silence was the most precious thing of all. When Max held Pascale in his arms, he couldn’t utter a word. Neither of them even tried. They just rolled together like down a precipice, so was this love or vertigo? An endless spiral Max let himself in for, embroiled in a passion he’d never known before.

  One last perfect moment to savour, almost as though they suspected what was to come. Max would remember every single detail for the rest of his life: the colour of the sky, the shapes of the clouds, the heat of the sun, but also Pascale’s smouldering look as they pulled themselves out of the tangled sheets, and the feel of her soft, trembling skin beneath his fingers. She smiled enigmatically when he asked what she was laughing at, and she said, “I’m not laughing. I’m just happy.”

  This was normally a word that scared Max, but coming from Pascale, it was the best in the world, the “truest.”

  “I’m simply happy because you’re here and I love you.”

  He took her face in his hands, and they gazed at each other. Her eyes were brighter than ever, and her face shone with a glow he’d remember always. “I love you, too.”

  It seemed funny to be saying these words and believing them, knowing that she also believed them. For once, words weren’t being used to manipulate someone. He kissed her in a way he never had before. And then they dived back into it.

  The next morning, Pascale got up early to go to the gym at the far end of the complex. From her stationary bike, she saw the police storming into the building. Without taking time to change, she ran across Queen’s Quay and got on a bus. She looked like an ecology-minded jogger, but also a lazy one who was taking transit to Cabbagetown. That was the location of Max’s hideaway and “base camp,” a place to ride out the storm. This one was a tornado. The entire gang was arrested, and they all had the fifteen minutes of fame they never wanted on page one of the papers.

  When she realized things were going south, Pascale contacted Antoine, who came in from Montreal with Bruce Clayton, a lawyer who was refreshingly down to earth. He advised her to turn herse
lf in. After all, what had she done beside take off when she saw the police coming? She had no record, and for once she wasn’t actually part of the plan, so no one could turn on her, and he was right. It was the only smart decision in this whole business that had collapsed with everyone inside, including the pigeon, whose wife left him when he was fingered. The bank put him on ice.

  Clayton explained that Max could be tried in Montreal for crimes committed elsewhere and eventually sent away. The Quebec Ministry of Justice only had to make the request to Ontario. Roberge, however, did not come to put his hooks into Max — on the contrary, he wanted him as far away from Montreal as possible, so the trial took place in Toronto, and he was locked up in Temagami. Max was off to the Arctic Circle.

  A whole pile of crap, that’s what the greenhorn had got Max into — and worse than that, three years at the other end of the world — gee, thanks, Roberge. Max kicked himself for hiring this disaster-prone nitwit. Still, no point in beating yourself up every day.

  No sense crying over spilled milk, he told Pascale when she visited him. At first she came by plane, which set her down in North Bay, where she rented a car to drive the rest of the way. After a few months, she settled for the bus: nine hours from Montreal, where she was living near Mimi and Antoine. One day, Max asked her if she had money problems, but she said no — she said she used the long ride to calm herself and do some thinking. He didn’t know why, but he felt she was slipping away.

  Looking at the forest with her in his arms, he knew he couldn’t reach her anymore. She was going through the motions of a ritual she no longer believed in. She had taken up her spiritual quest once more. What was it again? Being reincarnated a hundred times, seated in the lotus position with eyes closed, living in the present, the only time that really exists, and awaiting the bodhi, awakening, illumination like Siddhartha. So this cut-rate Buddhism she’d practised before had come back to haunt her, was that it? Antoine swore it hadn’t. He put her coolness down to the time and distance that separated them.

  Free at last after months that seemed like centuries, Max expected to find her waiting at the exit for him, as agreed. Instead, there was Antoine, with a sad smile and his habitual silence. He’d taken time off from his new job at Dorval Airport — having left Air France — to go get his friend in Temagami. They ate in a restaurant at the edge of the forest, surrounded by heavy machinery. The hamburger was awful. Antoine explained that Pascale had been in France for two months and was out of touch. Antoine hadn’t wanted to worry Max. He really thought she’d be home for his release, as she’d promised. “I’m so sorry.”

  They got back on the road, the taste of rotten meat still in their mouths.

  “Please tell me what really happened,” pleaded Max.

  Antoine recoiled: was it that obvious he was hiding things?

  One evening a few weeks before she left, he’d dropped in at her place. There was a man. “No, it isn’t what you think. There was nothing between them. I’m sure of it.”

  Max wasn’t.

  “But they were both embarrassed. I could tell the guy wanted to be anywhere but there.”

  Pascale hadn’t introduced them, and Antoine never saw him around there again.

  “Did you ask her about it? What did she say?”

  “To mind my own business.”

  Antoine was Max’s friend, and he persisted. He wanted to know if she was ditching Max, but Pascale paid no attention and just kept telling him to stay out of it. She was old enough to “look after herself.”

  “Did she go to Europe with the guy?”

  Antoine didn’t know, but apparently not. She’d left the country alone. “But that doesn’t mean anything. She could’ve met him over there.”

  As the car emerged from the woods, Max ignored the landscape, brooding, trying to understand. So the son of a bitch had waited till he was locked away to move in and take her thousands of kilometres away. Max had no doubt the guy had handled this elopement, this kidnapping. Even though she had agreed to it, it was still kidnapping. Max blamed himself for not being able to do anything about it. How could he, though? Still, any reaction at all would have been better than not realizing.

  Eleven years later, Antoine was on a wild-goose chase through the ghats of Varanasi. The silhouette of this stranger, this elusive phantom, had once again undermined his existence. Max felt a shadowy world creeping all around him. He was a pawn in a game with rules unknown, especially to the players. All his life, people had deserted him with no warning: first his mother, then his father. Philippe’s death was an abandonment too; Pascale, of course, and now David. All of them had disappeared into a shadow world he couldn’t shed light on.

  The sound of his cellphone snapped Max out of his reverie.

  “The Pakistanis have successfully tested a missile,” yelled Jayesh, overexcited. “Of course the Indians couldn’t care less!” They should care, he thought. “You know what Musharraf said? ‘We don’t want war, but we’re ready for it.”’

  The crisis was worsening every day, and government ministries were scrambling. Prime Minister Vajpayee had his top three strong men in an emergency meeting: Lal Krishna Advani, Jaswant Singh, and Arun Jaitley.

  “They’re even thinking of covering the Taj Mahal with a gigantic camouflage net!”

  “The Taj Mahal? Seriously? It’s a Muslim monument. Why would Pakistan fool with that?”

  “The continent’s gone topsy-turvy,” Jayesh said with a sigh.

  President Musharraf seemed to confirm this by saying his troops would be moved from the Afghan to the Indian border. “In other words, they figure that the Indians are more dangerous than the Taliban!”

  “That’s got to piss off the Americans,” Max replied.

  “Sure.”

  According to the media, Washington was preparing an evacuation plan for its sixty-four thousand citizens in both India and Pakistan.

  There would be escalation of paperwork at desks and victims at the front. Twenty dead in Kashmir overnight. Poonch, a town on the Indian side, had been bombarded by Pakistani artillery, leaving seven dead and thirty wounded, and of course the Indians had to counterattack. All along the border, losses were piling up, not to mention the jihadists, who had taken over three Indian police stations, including Doda, north of Jammu. Intervention by Indian forces followed a hostage-taking. Blood and more blood. In Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, schools were closed early for vacation due to the bombardments, or was it so the kids could die in the mountains instead?

  Violence reigned through the rest of India, too. Perhaps in tribute to the Nazi SS they admired, Sri Bhargava and a hundred Durgas — heads shaved and tattooed with snakes — had set fire to a store full of Muslims, including some children. The doors were locked, so most could not get out. Later, the Durgas danced in the streets.

  But what did all this have to do with David? Well, Max had to go back to the beginning and outline everything he knew or thought he knew. First certainty: David had gone off to a place unknown a few days before he was due to leave for Montreal; like James Bond and Genghis Khan, he had disappeared into thin air. His destination was so secret that no one close to him knew where it was — not Juliette, not his colleagues, least of all his boss. Why such secrecy? Second certainty: the day before the attack, David showed up at Imam Khankashi’s place. There was a friendship, or at least a connection going back to his prison days. Khankashi had disappeared, too, or rather, as Jayesh put it, was being hunted by his nemesis Bhargava …

  Why all this sneaking around? Not to mention the safe, which was his third certainty. Someone had opened it without forcing it. Who and why? What about the name Tourigny on the airline ticket? What was the connection there, exactly? This was no former employee of the High Commission — Max had verified that. Nor did it have anything to do with the Canadian Co-operation Office in Kathmandu. No mention of a Tourigny on the list of participants at the Mon
treal conference either. A brick wall. Every clue led to a dead end. Max had spent the night backtracking to pick up the trail afresh. No dice. Each certainty cancelled out the others. It was a set of interlocking traps that yielded nothing. He had to find out where David had gone instead of Kathmandu.

  “Any news from Indian Airlines?”

  “Nothing,” said Jayesh. “No mention of a passenger named David O’Brien for Kathmandu or anywhere else.”

  “What about the competition … any quick visits to Pakistan, for instance?”

  “No. There have been no India–Pakistan flights since the attack on Parliament.”

  “Natch.”

  “I could check Air India.”

  “No point.”

  “Trains? Buses?”

  “Maybe, but we’d never know unless he travelled first class, which he wouldn’t if he didn’t want to be traced. He didn’t mention the trip to anyone. The only thing left is the Volvo.”

  “The car was in Delhi the whole time. Juliette and Béatrice used it.”

  “He could’ve asked Luiz to drive him somewhere for a few days then bring him back.”

  “He’d have to take Luiz into his confidence, but not Juliette or Vandana.” Jayesh seemed doubtful.

  “Depends what he was hiding.”

  20