by Mario Bolduc
While still in Grande-Vallée, Max had tried his luck a third time. He called the notary on his vacation, trying to wheedle more information out of him. This time Michaud was more loquacious. The envelope sent to Kevin had come from Gérard Lefebvre’s safe-deposit box located at a National Bank branch in Victoriaville. It had been opened decades earlier. Max pushed a little, trying to determine what other objects had been in the box, but Michaud cut the conversation short. He had nothing more to say on the subject, and anyway, it was protected by attorney-client privilege, and even if he was forced to talk about it, he would say that the remaining contents of the box held nothing of any interest at all.
In short, Michaud had gotten around the law and confirmed that Kevin’s envelope had been the only item that was out of the ordinary.
And so the first stop had to be Granada.
In July, as Gabrielle was rafting on rivière Jacques-Cartier with her friend, Chloé, and Chloé’s brother, Kevin had gone to Andalusia and gotten in touch with Laura Costinar. It was still a mystery as to how the two of them could have possibly gotten to know each other. In any case, Kevin had likely obtained proof in Granada of the information the documents contained, whatever Gérard Lefebvre’s posthumous confession actually was. Sacha was alive, and in the hands of a stranger pretending to be his real father.
And so Kevin had made an irrevocable decision: Sacha would come back home.
What, again, had he written to Gabrielle in one of his emails? “Soon …everything will be as it was.”
When his family was together.
When Sacha was alive.
After Granada, Kevin returned to Montreal.
In August he hired Sylvain Drolet to work on the house and grounds. He’d travelled to Grande-Vallée to paint the house and to speak with Marie-France Couturier in preparation for Sacha’s return. Meanwhile, Caroline and Gabrielle had been left in the dark. Sacha would be Kevin’s surprise, a Christmas present.
Then the kidnapping in Bucharest.
“What about the man with his hand on Sacha’s shoulder at the reception in Granada,” Burgess asked Max. “Have you identified him?”
The adoptive father.
From Grande-Vallée, Max had sent Toma Boerescu the picture taken by Kevin in the Andalusian garden. The old man had paid a visit to Petru Tavala, the music-loving café owner. The man confirmed what Max had begun to suspect: yes, that was indeed the fellow Kevin Dandurand had met with that morning.
Without the child.
“Maybe Laura was grabbing the child at the same time,” Burgess suggested.
“So the breakfast was a diversion?”
“Perhaps.”
That still left the question of who the usurper father was.
No one had any idea.
One thing was clear enough: whoever this man was, he had ties to dangerous individuals, people who’d so far kidnapped Kevin and murdered twenty-five people: all to make sure the truth wouldn’t come out.
The following day Max called Marilyn Burgess right after hanging up from a very informative discussion with Boerescu. The man from Granada was Peter Kalanyos, a Hungarian Rom who’d fled that country after accusations of drug trafficking and attempted corruption of civil servants.
Burgess completed the tableau a few hours later after consulting with her own sources. “Violent, dangerous, he’s believed to be linked to Eastern European drug cartels. In Romania in particular.”
In Ferentari, the Bronx of Bucharest, where the mafia was located.
Burgess called Phil Garrison in Woodlands. Both Jennifer and he were clear: Kalanyos hadn’t been in Manitoba with Ioan Costinar. At least neither of them recalled the man’s presence.
In short, Kevin had angered a very dangerous person. Someone who’d stop at nothing to get the child back.
But again and always: why Sacha?
And how had his death been faked so effectively six years earlier?
“Do you intend to tell Caroline?” Burgess asked.
Max hadn’t said anything to Gabrielle, but he couldn’t very well keep the truth from Caroline. Part of why he’d gotten involved in this whole mess was to help patch things up between Kevin and Caroline. The media had depicted Kevin as the patron saint of hypocrites, the worst kind of ingrate son. Max knew Caroline had been troubled by these attacks on her ex-husband. By telling her the truth about the reasons behind Kevin’s presence in Romania, Max hoped to help begin to rebuild Kevin’s reputation.
“I’ll speak to her in Montreal,” he’d told Burgess. “But I still need to meet with someone before then.”
Louis Maranda, one of the policemen who’d taken part in the investigation at the time, was part of a model train club based in Delson, near Montreal. Next to the old mayor’s office, a warehouse had been converted into a tiny triage yard where a hundred or so miniature trains were stored, some of them remarkably realistic. Max saw Maranda, dressed up as a railway worker, standing behind railway signals. The policeman gestured for Max to approach. The latter stepped over an interchange, around a tunnel, then shook Maranda’s hand as he leaned against a small mountain. Max felt ridiculous among these scale models, an oversized doll in a dollhouse, a giant among the Lilliputians.
“A journalist interested in our little wonders! Let me tell you, that’s a rare sight indeed! You’re with La Presse, right?”
Max didn’t want to disappoint. “Television, actually.” He explained he wanted to meet Maranda not as a model train aficionado but as a former police officer with the Quebec Provincial Police who’d worked in Grande-Vallée for years.
Maranda’s face fell. After being transferred from Montreal, he’d settled in Saint-Constant, birthplace of his wife. He agreed to answer questions, anyway. “As long as I can remember the answers!”
“I’m curious about the death of Raymond Dandurand and his grandson, Sacha.”
“Ah, the Saqawigan accident. Careful …”
A Union Pacific Railroad 600 series locomotive was steaming right for them. Max shuffled a few inches to the right, avoiding a terrible railway tragedy by little more than a hair.
“Come.” Maranda guided the visitor toward a small office where another man in railway overalls was reading a book on scale models. Maranda asked him to give them the office for ten minutes. Max and Maranda sat at the table. “What do you want to know exactly?”
Following procedure, Maranda had collaborated in the coroner’s inquest. The boy had disappeared, swallowed up by the river. Maranda was surprised to hear people were still interested in the story.
“In a world without violence, condemned to eternal joy, sometimes we media types have to look back in time to find anything at all to write about,” Max joked.
Maranda smiled. Quickly enough, he described the investigation’s conclusions: it had been a tragic accident. Raymond Dandurand had been drunk, a victim of a seat belt he hadn’t been able to undo once the 4x4 had tumbled into the river. Of course, the authorities hadn’t made that detail public. Raymond had drowned. The responsibility for the accident had fallen on Grande-Vallée’s roadwork planning board. The coroner’s report had pointed the finger at a lack or confusion of signage, that sort of thing.
“Even sober you couldn’t tell where you were going,” Maranda added.
“Is it possible the child might have survived?”
Maranda raised his head, surprised by the question. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, they never found his body, right?”
It was unthinkable that he might have survived. His body had never been found, sure, but the Saqawigan — most rivers, really — are full of drowning victims whose bodies are never recovered.
“Don’t forget. Here we’re not far from the Atlantic, and the tides are strong.”
What had the investigation found out about Raymond himself?
He’d been drin
king with his fishing friends. Caroline had left her son with his grandfather around eleven. Together they’d gone to the local brewery where the old boys got together to solve all of the world’s problems. Raymond was very popular, of course. He talked loudly and had two opinions for every topic. The men remembered the car seat perched on the bar. From time to time, between beers, Raymond checked on the child.
Max raised an eyebrow.
According to his friends, Raymond always did whatever he wanted.
Still, Max found it hard to believe that Caroline would trust her child to Raymond, considering their relationship. And doubly so because of the context of that weekend, right after the big score, just when Nordopak’s bankruptcy was about to be made public.
The accident took place around three in the afternoon, according to the report. Raymond had left the bar only a few minutes before, but had been gone to the village for more than four hours. Raymond had been drunk, and his friends had let him drive, with a child in the back seat to boot.
“The guys told us that Raymond didn’t seem drunk. And it wasn’t as if he would ever accept anyone giving him advice. He was stubborn, is what they said. Always ready to get into an argument.”
Max had no trouble believing that. “Any witnesses?”
A couple had been hiking near the river. They rushed down to the water to try to help, but it was too late. By the time they got there, the vehicle had already been lying at the bottom of the river for several minutes, with Raymond trapped behind the wheel.
“What about Sacha?”
As they were pulling Raymond’s body out of the car, the paramedics noticed the car seat in the back. It was empty. After speaking with Kevin and Caroline, and Raymond’s friends, the conclusion was that Sacha had been washed out of the car by the current.
Which meant, Max thought, that no one could confirm the child had actually been in the back seat at the moment of the crash. The last time anyone had seen Sacha had been at the bar.
What if Raymond had left the child somewhere between the bar and his tragic crossing of the river? By the time the six o’clock news flashed images of a terrible car crash on every TV screen, Sacha could have been in the hands of a kidnapper, who’d disappeared with no one being the wiser. The accident only a providential act, allowing him to escape public notice.
And yet something didn’t quite fit. Max tried to put himself in Kevin’s shoes, to understand how his friend had reacted when he learned his son hadn’t actually died that day.
How had he gotten the news? The notary’s documents sent after Lefebvre’s death? Had those led him to Granada and propelled him down the rabbit hole?
Max had no idea.
The day the accident actually took place Max hadn’t doubted the truth of it. Raymond and Sacha dead, an unbelievably cruel world, but no more. How could a child, some eighteen months old, have survived if an adult had died?
How could he have disappeared?
Raymond’s accident had been no accident. His car had been tampered with, his brake lines cut, or whatever they did in the movies to make quick work of a man. And yet the investigation concluded that the car had been in good working order.
So what had happened? Max had no idea, but Kevin knew.
Perhaps thanks to Laura Costinar.
31
The Albergue San Miguel was an old barracks for the Spanish cavalry, transformed some three years earlier by a Norwegian couple into a luxury hotel. This refuge from the modern world set you back four hundred euros a night. Max didn’t have a reservation, and didn’t think he’d find a room, but a last-minute cancellation meant that the mirador was available. A room that had been added to the original structure, over the top floor of the hotel. It had a spectacular view of the Alhambra, whose fortifications dominated the city.
One of the receipts he’d found at the rivière Saqawigan house had pointed him here. Kevin had stayed at the Albergue for three nights in July before returning to Canada. He’d come to take pictures, Max guessed, either as proof that Sacha was still alive or to identify his kidnappers. He’d probably begun preparing the counter-kidnapping in his room, with Laura Costinar as his accomplice. Since he didn’t have any forged documents to take his son back to Canada, he’d gotten in touch with Cosmin Micula, a talented forger.
At least that was how Max thought events had unfolded.
The Norwegian woman at the front desk couldn’t remember seeing Kevin, even after Max showed her a picture of him. With all the guests coming and going …
Max dropped off his bags and left the room immediately to explore a city whose sights he could barely glimpse through the fog of his worry. He was insensitive to the beauty surrounding him, lost in thought, trying to put himself in his friend’s shoes, to understand his motivations. He saw Kevin meeting Laura, telling her all about his family’s odyssey, their hardship. Perhaps Laura, seeing his limited means, had agreed to help. He only needed to bring his child back to Canada, to start a new life — or more accurately, to return to his old one. But first Kevin needed to see his son for himself, to prove Sacha’s existence to himself.
Or perhaps it was the other way around. Laura had contacted him, intrigued by this man taking pictures at a private party. She’d spoken to him again, or they’d met, and he’d told her everything. Touched by his story, maybe she’d suggested the kidnapping and agreed to help since she knew the family well.
Perhaps. Maybe. Too many unknown answers, questions he didn’t know yet to ask.
Max recalled that sin, that dark trait often attributed to the Roma to rouse hate and anger toward them: they stole children.
Had a Romani man, this Peter Kalanyos, stolen Sacha?
Max found a chair on a street-side table at a small café and ordered an espresso. He contemplated the view of Iglesia de San Nicolás. The cold streets were deserted, but Max had no trouble imagining how busy this plaza would be come high season. As he drank his coffee, he forced himself to make sense of the Spanish-language newspapers scattered on the tables. Listened to the barking voice of a lottery ticket vendor. Distractedly watched a broadcast of a Christmas parade on Telemadrid through the café window.
Max paid and returned to his walk. Melancholy overcame him, despite the new knowledge that Sacha was alive. All that still connected him to his dear friend, Kevin, was the thinnest of threads, one that could be severed at any moment. Had Kevin wandered through these streets, as well? Had he met someone? Had he struck up a conversation with a stranger? Max almost wanted to wander the streets and show Kevin’s photo to every stranger he passed. But instinct told him that attracting attention here wouldn’t be a good idea, despite what the Roma in Montreal had told him about hiding in plain sight.
The information he’d gleaned from Maranda, the retired policeman-cum-train conductor, made him think back on that tragic spring. It seemed to him that the circumstances surrounding Raymond’s death had been left purposely nebulous. When the accident had occurred, Max had tried to shut out the truth as much as possible. As if not facing facts would make the pain less difficult to bear, the guilt less crushing. Now, this picture of Sacha alive and well, his discussion with Maranda, it had all revealed to Max how little he’d actually taken the time to analyze what had happened.
“You’re calling me from jail?” Caroline sounded more intrigued than scandalized.
They spoke over the phone as Max was driving back from Delson. “I’ll explain. But we need to see each other, you and me.”
“Have you heard from Kevin?”
“Not yet. But …”
“Yes?”
Max turned his hazard lights on and brought his car to a halt on the shoulder. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”
His words came out fretfully, slowly, almost a stutter. Why was he telling her what he’d learned over the phone? Caroline remained silent the whole time on the other end of the line.
Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I’m not yet a hundred percent sure, okay? It’s a hypothesis and …”
Silence from Caroline.
“Sacha might still be alive.”
What reaction was he expecting? Tears? Shouts? Laughter and thanks? Anything.
Anything except that deafening silence.
“Why are you trying to hurt me?” she finally asked.
“Caroline, please, listen to me —”
“Sacha is dead,” she said, her voice like broken glass. “How many months — years! — did it take me to … and now …”
Max thought she might hang up on him. “Kevin went to Romania to try to find him. That’s why he left.”
“Spoken like a true liar, like a thief!”
“I’ve got proof, Caroline.”
More silence.
“A picture taken by Kevin in Spain.”
“You’re insane!”
“Do you remember the Second Cup, Caroline, the one we went to together last year?”
Caroline held the picture in her hand. Sacha-the-Red in an Andalusian garden. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, the veins in her eyelids like stains on skin so white it was almost green. She seemed to be trying to get hold of herself. She pushed the picture back across the table. Around them, strangers came and went.
“What happened on the Saqawigan might not have been an accident,” Max finally said.
Caroline looked up at him, confused.
“A setup. To fool anyone investigating the car crash.”
Max talked of Laura Costinar, seen in Kevin’s pictures. Of her husband’s role in the Romanian Romani community. How he’d died in Manitoba, and his wife’s murder in Bucharest. How Max was playing the role of messenger for Kevin. Raymond’s presence in Woodlands.
“Sacha is alive, and he’s at the centre of the storm, Caroline.”
