Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  Turner knelt and unlocked the foot locker. He pushed the lid back and moved some things around. He came back up with a black attaché case. He flicked the latches and revealed a handgun, ammunition clips, a couple of other accessories, stainless steel death. Turner took hold of the sidearm, heavy and black. Checked the safety, racked the action to check for live rounds.

  “SIG P225. Recoil action, 9 millimeter NATO cartridges in a nine-piece clip. Canadian Navy boarding parties use these beauties. Close security teams, you know—the cavalry. Cleaned and tested it myself,” Turner said.

  “I know guns,” Kad said, and he took the piece.

  He held it in his hand. Regarded it. Turned it over in the way that felt natural now, the way a guitar player held a new instrument— weighing it, getting to know its body and character. For weapons were a lot like humans: they could look alike, perhaps, but no two weapons were exactly the same in personality, in temperament. He had thrown aside expensive German hunting rifles with thousand-dollar scopes for a worn and beaten lever action 3-0-3 simply because of the feel and the response, the nature of the weapon. Simply because it felt right in his hands, an extension of his will. You for me, and me for you.

  “Good,” Kad said, sliding the action.

  “Accessories,” Turner said, and handed over a black silencer attachment about four inches long. “And your ammo. Thirty-six rounds. That’s it, so don’t waste it.”

  “The rest,” Kad said. A directive.

  “Hold your horses,” Turner said. Then he turned back to the foot locker. He looked over his shoulder—because he had handed over a weapon with ammunition—then turned back to his rooting. He stood up and held what looked like a men’s shaving bag. He unzipped the bag and held it open. Kad stepped closer and looked inside. Four syringes, four vials. Clear liquid.

  “Be careful,” Turner said. “You as much as prick the end of your little finger when one of those is loaded up, and you’re fucked six ways to Sunday. I mean gone.”

  “Do I look clumsy to you?” Kad said. His eyes were hard.

  Turner looked at Kad from across the storage room. Dust filtered through the LED light. Turner blinked his one eye. So easy to offend, these types. Nothing to lose, for they owned nothing but their family name, their pride. They were machines to a great extent, and like all machines they could only be programmed to a point. There were limitations.

  “Relax, sparky. I’m just saying, be careful,” Turner said. “This shit is straight from the play book of the Mossad. Get it? I’m talking covert black ops. One CC, and the poor son of a bitch exhibits signs of a heart attack—not even detectable in a routine autopsy. Boom, dead. The trick is to get the needle somewhere it won’t leave a bruise, signs of puncture. Under a toenail, back of the hairline, around the anus, that sort of thing. Use your imagination.”

  Kad put the pistol back in its case and zipped up the shaving bag. “The girl is ready?” he said.

  “Oh she’s ready, all right,” Turner said.

  “Take me there,” Kad said, “now.”

  Turner smiled, and said, “You know, that’s what I like about you people. You cut right to the chase. To the fucking bone.”

  Kad wondered how much the girl had changed in the three years since they had sat around that kitchen table drinking plum brandy, making plans through long-distance and third-party communication with The Colonel. Or whether she had really changed at all. Were any of them capable of further change? The transformation was complete, as far as he was concerned. From what he had started as, what he had become along the way, and what he was right now—it was a complete metamorphosis. Psychological, physiological, biological, spiritual. He had been a boy once, yes, the little boy who worked and played at his grandfather’s farm. The smell of animals in winter, hay wet with the stink of piss. He remembered the boy sometimes, though rarely, and always within the distorted context of fractured memory. For Kadro was dead, the death certificate filed in a municipal office. He was dead, and his brother was an orphan. It was the irony of this strange arrangement—they had to die in order to be re-born for this.

  “Let’s go,” Kad said.

  “I’ll give you the directions,” Turner said. “Drop me off at the subway.”

  Kad gave him a look.

  Turner said, “What, do you want me to hold your hand? This is it for me. I’m done. Over and out. You reach me in the event of catastrophe, period.”

  Turner opened the garage door, and they both squinted against the flood of light. He slammed the door shut behind them, wiped his hands across his pants, and they got in the car. Kad turned the ignition and put the car in gear and said, without looking at Turner, “Your eye. What happened?”

  Turner sort of smiled and said, “Left it in Bosnia.”

  Kadro dropped Turner off a small parking lot kitty corner to the York Mills subway station in the north of the city. There was a brick building about the size of a large garden shed, stairs leading underground and connecting to the station across the street. Turner opened the door and stepped out. It was a good late summer day, warm enough for the diehard cyclists to wear their shorts as they careened in and out of traffic.

  “Good luck,” Turner said, his hand on the door.

  Kad looked over and gave a small nod.

  “Get back on the highway up here,” Turner said, pointing north.

  “I know how,” Kad said. The grid map of Toronto was burned into his brain like a cattle brand. The hours they had sat pouring over maps, being quizzed as though his life depended on it. And it did.

  Turner closed the door, walked to the brick building and slipped inside. Kad waited a minute then pulled out of the parking lot. He made it a block before pulling into a Petro Canada station. He bought a newspaper and four scratch-and-win tickets. He sat in the car and used a penny to slowly scratch each ticket. He blew the crinkled bits of foil from his lap. He didn’t think about anything when he was scratching these cards. Nothing. The world around him closed down for a few minutes. He won ten dollars on the last ticket and went back inside. He showed the clerk the card, and the kid took it and hit a few buttons. The lottery computer made a whirling and ringing noise as though he had won a trip around the world. The teenage clerk didn’t seem too excited over the windfall. He handed out two fives, and Kad flashed his first smile in a year. It wasn’t a big smile, but it was something.

  He drove east across the top of the city then south down to the woman’s apartment building near the railway tracks. Unit 801. He parked on the street and looked at his watch. It was going on four o’clock. He got out of the car and went into the building. He pressed the buzzer for her unit and waited. He pressed it again, holding it this time for fifteen seconds.

  “Yes?” came a woman’s voice. “Who is it?”

  “Kadro,” he said. “From home.”

  A pause. A long pause. As though she were thinking. This is what he thought as he stood there. It would be naïve to assume every facet and angle of the operation would roll out exactly as planned. People changed their minds. Soldiers talked with bravado and offered up promises of infinite courage while drinking on the eve of battle. When the bullets and the mortars started to fly, it was another story. He knew about people and their limits. This is why one had to be adaptable, ready to transform within the moment. He waited, looking at some flyers scattered on the floor of the vestibule. Full-colour pictures of pizzas and buckets of chicken. Delivery to your door so you didn’t have to get off your ass and walk down to the pizzeria. The pizzas looked good and hot. His stomach growled. Then the door buzzed. He opened it and stepped inside.

  They had assembled in that kitchen those years ago, around that long wood table. Back home. Would she ever see home again? It seemed like a lifetime already lived in this new country. At first the plan was easy to follow, the directives and the drills running your body as though you were on automatic pilot. The paperwork was handled through The Colonel’s unseen contacts, and she’d entered the country with a suitca
se and a number to call. The one-eyed man she met through the immigration support centre, everything made to seem natural and quite by circumstance. The man got her the job as a seamstress in the little factory in the fashion district. She kept her head down and made dresses, or parts of them, and the women around her were all immigrants from some other place: Cambodia, Vietnam, and yes, Bosnians too, working for this Serb manager (though she had lied about her background and her hometown to get the job). She worked and she watched and she made notes. She saved some money and moved to that small apartment away from the guns and the gangs of Jane and Finch. She took the night course in English. Her only social time away from work, out of the apartment.

  The teacher. This was her mistake. The Canadian with the sad eyes. The good heart, the small smile. She never should have gone for coffee when he asked. And then asked again. But it felt good to talk to someone—even if she felt her English made her sound like a grade school student. This was her mistake. She had lost so much, it seemed like a small gift she could allow herself, a simple coffee with a good soul. First you lose your village, then you lose your family, and finally you lose yourself. You die or choose to be born again. There had been something in the eyes of the sad Canadian, this teacher who made bad jokes about words they looked up in the dictionary—something there, yes, within the sadness a tiny spark of life. A flash of hope. And this was her mistake…

  Donia Kruzik opened the door of her apartment. She stood there for a long moment. Kad stared at her, blinking. She opened the door all the way, and he stepped inside. An awkward moment as they stood there, each deciding on the proper greeting. Finally he moved to embrace her, but she shrank, and stepped back.

  “Friend,” he said, “it has been a long journey. From there to here.”

  He spoke in his native tongue, and it brought her back to who they were, where they had come from. She went to the tiny kitchen and put the kettle on to boil.

  “I will make tea,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

  He stood there. Watching her. He knew, and she knew that he knew. She took two cups down from the cupboard and got a box of Red Rose from the shelf. Something had changed. However small.

  “I met the man. I have the tools,” he said.

  He watched her. Then he moved to the kitchen and put a hand on her shoulder from behind. She froze. His hand was strong, and he held her there, rooted.

  “Are you ready?” he said.

  “Ready?”

  “To do what we have sworn to do,” he said. “Have you forgotten already, sister? Has your time in this country erased the past? Have you lost your appetite to avenge our people? Please tell me this is not so.”

  She bowed her head and nodded. “I am ready,” she said. “It’s a surprise, that’s all. You plan for the day for so many months and years, and then it is finally here. I apologize for not welcoming you. It was wrong of me. Please, come and sit.”

  He moved his hand from her shoulder to his side but sensed the change in the weather, within the hesitation. This was the inherent risk for those sent to conduct surveillance prior to operations—a settling in, an assimilation of sorts. He would kill her if it came to that. If she was unwilling to follow through. It was her choice. That was his directive. All of them shared the same directive. The only way this would work is if every link in the chain remained connected, solid—and every link in turn knew it was expendable in the name of the cause. Hesitation or gross misconduct was to be dealt with in the most extreme manner. There was no half measure. They had signed their oath in the blood of their forsaken kin. Those who had fallen in the fields, in the rows. He had not come this far to turn away. Their trust was sacred.

  She put a cup of tea in front of him, and he sat at the two-seat kitchen table. She sat with her cup and blew across the steaming water. Their eyes met and held for a long moment. They saw each other as they had been, younger and wounded, not as they had become. Changed.

  “Can you share your work with me?” he said.

  She went to the bedroom and returned with a single file folder. It was letter-sized, blue, and bore no writing or identifying features. She placed it on the table in front of him. He opened and began to read. The first page contained the photos of the two targets, their names typed beneath:

  BOJAN KORDIC

  GORAN MITOVIC

  Then followed several pages of tiny notations—dates and times and tracked movements of the targets. Their home address, their work address, phone numbers, the names of their spouses and children and the schools they attended, their lives reduced to a series of comings and goings. She had done good work. The information was concise, invaluable in ensuring the two main criteria were met: that these were in fact the bona fide targets; and that it would be possible within the scheduling and routine of their lives to make contact and retreat with limited collateral damage or liability to the cause.

  “Well done,” he said, and set folder aside.

  “I have worked hard,” she said, “getting to know the people at work. The woman who works outside the manager’s office, this Bojan Kordic. His executive assistant. She keeps his schedule. We share a cigarette outside during break.”

  “There will be time to talk of our plans,” he said. “It has been what, three years?”

  “Almost,” she said.

  “You look good. Healthy. This country agrees with you,” he said.

  She caught his eyes, and he held her there, and she knew what he was looking for. Some sign that she had forsaken their plans. The first thing The Colonel had instructed in bringing them together for this: the greatest threat is not death, for we all died a long time ago. No, the greatest threat is that those of you who are sent abroad will succumb to the liberties and luxuries of your new country. Shopping malls and fast food drive-through restaurants, and women and men who lay down with anyone at all after a single dance in a night club. There will be those of you who forget in time why you are there in the first place…

  “What do you think of this country so far?” she asked.

  “It is new,” he said. “Like it just opened.”

  And they shared their experiences. The first landing. Pearson International Airport. The language. The faces from around the world moving freely on the streets. Everything open and free. And new, so new, as he had said. Some things were better, yes, but many things were not. He thought of telling her about the money he had won, but he kept it to himself.

  He excused himself and went to the bathroom. When he came back, he said, “Will you miss this place?”

  He watched her.

  “Some things,” she said. “I suppose, yes.”

  And then it happened, just like that, just as he was sitting there. Like a narcoleptic zoning in mid-sentence, Kad forgot where he was. Blinked. Somewhere else, the damp and moldy basement of a house in the hills, the shells walking in yard by yard, the artillerymen of the enemy forces well-trained in this after the first days of war in Croatia. They walked them in, they drew lines, and they created walls of exploding shells.

  “Getting closer,” he said. “Listen.”

  “What is getting closer?” Donia asked. She looked at him.

  Kadro flinched, as though he had heard a noise that was inaudible to her. It frightened her. He stared at nothing at all for the longest moment, then, as though a hypnotist had snapped his fingers, turned and looked at her. And he blinked.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Good. Yes.”

  He finished his tea and thought something stronger would ease the strangeness that had fallen between them. She had cried in his arms all those years ago. In that kitchen where The Colonel’s man had brought them together, the sun coming through the window and catching the dust in the air, the little kitchen warm from their bodies, warm from their collective hatred and grief. He had not had a drink in more than two years. He knew men back home, men he had fought with in the fields and the hills, good men who were drunks now, drug addicts. Needles and pills. They
did not work, they could not work. Men in their late twenties and early thirties who drank vodka and brandy and cheap strong beer, hoping the next drink would be the drink to numb them just enough, to ward off the memory of the things they had done. It was not an easy thing to live with nightmares when you knew they were real.

  “What is his name,” Kad said.

  She looked up. Caught in the headlights. The accusation.

  “This man. This man you have become friends with. Please. Don’t lie to me.”

  “There is no one. I have…I have a friend, that is all he is. He is…”

  He closed his eyes. He was not unprepared for this. And so he thought: rather than her, I can erase the trace of this man. A small grace, it would be his little secret. That there could be no compromise of their work, this was the inarguable fact. That he could perhaps spare her for this indiscretion, he would try.

  “Who is he? Where does he live?”

  “There is nobody, please. I am alone. Look around. You can see the life I have lived here. Alone. I’ve worked in the places where I was told to work, I have watched the men I was told to watch. When they drink their coffee, where they buy their lunch, when they go pee… ”

  She stared at him, unblinking. He considered this and finished his tea and rubbed his hands together. He leaned forward, his eyes shining with that electric intensity she remembered now from their early days, the days of the kitchen table, and it was a look that both comforted and terrified her. She understood that with this man, there was no comprehension of the notion of defeat.

  “Do you remember what it was like back then? Do you remember? I remember. I remember what it was like to be gone from my village, to be gone for months that seemed like years, to have been gone so long that I became an animal. Yes, capable of things that only an animal could be capable of. But righteous. In our cause, in the blood we shed. And I remember what it was like that July to come home to find the bastards had rounded up the men—our brothers and fathers and husbands and cousins and grandfathers and uncles—and they had lined them up and shot them…”