Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  “Bonjour, hello,” Maxime said, and set his bag down.

  “Bonjour et bienvenue,” Marshall said.

  The men shook hands.

  “You must be tired,” Marshall said. He walked Maxime over to a specific kiosk, where a Customs agent was waiting like a judge on his perch.

  “It won’t hit me until tomorrow,” Maxime said. “The airport is very busy. It seems I have come during your holidays?”

  Marshall had set his thin leather attaché case on the counter of the kiosk and was searching for paperwork, declarations and legal notes.

  “Labour Day,” Marshall said. “Last long weekend of the summer.”

  “Ah, yes,” Maxime said, “well, every day is Labour Day in France.”

  Papers were presented, stamped, and returned to the RCMP officer, who appeared to Maxime just a few years shy of retirement. There was a gentlemanly nature to this officer, a sort of distilled patience, and he reminded Maxime of someone’s grandfather. Once Maxime had been processed, they headed through Customs to the RCMP detachment located within the country’s busiest airport to file papers and retrieve Maxime’s handgun.

  “Welcome to Canada, officially,” Marshall said, and he handed Maxime a sheaf of papers for his safekeeping. “Keep these with you at all times. They’re your marching orders. You are now legally entitled to carry on your police work on Canadian soil.”

  “How long have you been in war crimes and crimes against humanity?” Maxime asked as they walked through a maze of hallways in the terminal.

  “The RCMP got into this game back in the late Eighties after amendments to the Criminal Code provided Canadian courts with the legal jurisdiction to try war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Marshall said. “Me, I transferred in from criminal intelligence and international training after a tour in Rwanda and then Bosnia.”

  “You must have seen your share over there,” Maxime said.

  “Mind-boggling, actually. Life-changing. I was in shock when I came back from Rwanda. The sheer scale of the death. And then I shipped off to Bosnia, thinking I could make a difference this time. I went through a depression and a divorce after I got back from that tour. All the things you see and are helpless to change. You have to focus on the few things you do that make a difference, they say. I transferred over to war crimes investigations as a means to hunt my own ghosts, I guess you could say. But it’s pretty much the same deal here as every other division, more paperwork than policing.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Maxime said.

  Marshall entered a pass code to unlock a door then held it open for Maxime. They entered a small reception area that opened onto a series of cubicles and offices. The place was empty. Marshall went over to a counter with a coffee pot on a burner, a jar of powdered coffee creamer and a bowl of sugar cubes. He took two styrofoam cups and poured coffee. Maxime could smell the burnt brew, and it turned his traveller’s fragile stomach.

  “And what about you?” Marshall said. “You career Interpol?”

  “City police, Marseille. Eighteen years. I was undercover the last seven, working the arms and drugs dealers mostly. The same men who committed war crimes in the Bosnian War, once the fighting stopped they found work in organized crime. Serb mob, Croats, Russians, they run all the ports, the longshore unions. I think of all the boxes of guns that made it to the Taliban, and now we find ourselves fighting over there. The loop just grows bigger.”

  Marshall stirred the creamer into the coffees and handed a cup to Maxime, who wondered how he would drink the stuff without offending his host. The notion of powdered coffee cream, of cheese slices not made from cheese, sugar donuts and hot dogs and drive-thru fast-food restaurants, it all confirmed his idea of North America, this vision of pot-bellied masses waiting in line to consume garbage dressed up with fancy logos. His chocolate shop was to be the antidote to all of this corner-cutting.

  “These two targets in Toronto. I’ve been reading the briefs your office provided. It’s hard to believe with all of our coordinated efforts that these assholes can still buy their way into a new life,” Marshall said, leaning back on the counter and blowing across the top of the coffee. “We work with Border Services, Custom and Immigration, the Justice Department. Like you said, the harder we work, it seems the loop just gets bigger. These killers are laughing while we’re filling out paperwork.”

  Maxime took a couple of quick sips of the acrid brew and nodded. “The loop is closing on these two, of that I am certain,” he said.

  “You’ll need to check in to your accommodations, get freshened up,” Marshall said. “What’s the plan from there? Did you want to get started right away, meet with my liaison on the Toronto Metro Police?”

  Maxime casually set his coffee cup on a desk at his side. He was beginning to feel the onset of the jetlag that would, within the next twelve hours, fully bloom into a foggy-headed, bleary-eyed stumble. He did not want to involve the local police, not yet. He wanted to do some poking around on his own first, the lone wolf in his character the only detraction from his career as an international police officer; in his world, partnerships and collaborations were not only expected, they were a requirement of law. But this was his case, his final case, and he would do it his way. He wanted forty-eight hours.

  “To be honest, Sergeant, I would very much like to rest for a day or so, catch up on my sleep. Perhaps it’s best if we meet our local police liaison after the holidays? These men, they are not going anywhere,” Maxime said.

  He saw the look of relief on Marshall’s face. A holiday was a holiday. “As you wish. You have my number,” he said. “Now let me get that sidearm of yours. Though I doubt you’ll need it. We’re a gentle folk, except when we play hockey.”

  FIFTEEN

  McKelvey turned down Detective Kennedy’s offer of a ride back to his place and instead walked out the front of the station, turned left and ducked into Fran’s famous diner at College and Yonge for a grilled cheese and a Coke. He was starving, guts growling. The place was busy with brunchers enjoying oval platters of huge pancakes, fried eggs, sausages and home fries. The restaurant was a throwback to the 1940s, red leather booths and mile high pies, milkshakes served in frosted stainless steel mixing containers, lunch specials of meat loaf, mac and cheese, liver and onion. It was Hattie’s favourite place for a cheeseburger and fries, her every-payday treat. McKelvey thought of her as he sat alone and ate to fill his gnawing stomach, wondered how much or how little to tell her. He knew that despite her comments about the Homicide crew being elitist assholes, she had taken her courses, she had written her papers, she was on the precipice. It was what every cop wanted, after all, to reach the pinnacle of police work and to be a dick, a shamus. If he leaned on her too heavily, if he continued to press her to dig up intel, help him connect the dots, well, he’d be responsible for the consequences. He decided that he would ease up on her. Sure. Once he got her to reach out just a little more, he would really let up on her.

  He finished the last of the Coke and left cash on the table. He crossed Yonge Street, intending to grab the subway the two stops down to King Street Station. From there it was a short walk south and east to his place. It had turned into a perfect day, and the streets were busy with people on their way to brunch or to shop, to buy flowers or veal or lamb for Sunday dinner. In a few hours the patios and pubs would be filled with long weekend cheer, pitchers of draft beer. McKelvey had a sudden urge to swallow a tablet, feel himself lifted from his boots, lifted from his skin for a little bit— that glow he got at the top of his scalp. Maybe have a cold beer and talk hockey with Huff at Garrity’s, then crawl into bed and pull the covers over his head, wake up in the spring with a big beard. Then he realized how irresponsible he had been with the prescription, popping them out of boredom perhaps, or pain that was more spiritual than physical. The ages-old story of every loser who ever got stuck under the thumb of that shit. Too smart for it, that’s what everybody thought. It won’t happen to me, I won’t get stuck. St
ill, he saw himself flushing the pills after Jessie had confessed to him her struggle with the demons of addiction, and now he both congratulated and cursed himself. Not that any of it would matter in the grand scheme of things. Look around, Charlie, at all of these millions of people, life swirling on with or without you…

  He stopped at the stairs leading to the underground labyrinth of tunnels which had been carved beneath the city in the early 1950s. He looked up to the sky, and he wanted to scream. Fucking McKelvey. He’d done this, he’d brought them here, Fielding and himself. Tim Fielding. School teacher. Widower. Jesus Christ, where was the kid? He had no right to be sitting on a stool at Garrity’s. He needed to follow up on the magnet left on Donia’s fridge, the immigrant resource centre—Bridges. This was perhaps the only line to Donia Kruzik or her people or her past—whoever and whatever the hell this woman was.

  He went down the stairs to the subway, crossed the threshold of the underground, and was immediately embraced by a blanketing wave of stale, fetid air. Sometimes that initial waft was so strong, the taste of sulphur on your tongue, it turned your stomach a little. Especially if you had been drinking the night before, your belly already in a precarious state. He pulled a ten from his wallet and went to the dispenser against the wall, bought two tokens and took the rest in change. He pushed his hips through the turnstile and went left towards the northern line. He had the address memorized from the magnet. It was an easy haul up the Yonge line to St. Clair.

  He waited behind the yellow caution line, looking up to the video feed of weather, traffic, and the latest news ticker of headlines. There it was, the update on the murdered woman and the missing tenant of the apartment, as yet unnamed. But McKelvey knew it wouldn’t be long before Fielding’s face was on the front page of every newspaper. A train whooshed in, and he got in and took a seat. It was just one of about seven hundred subway cars running daily on the Toronto Transit Commission’s three subway lines, moving hundreds of thousands of passengers beneath the city. Unlike many of the large urban subway systems in the U.S., Toronto boasted a good safety record on its trains. The transit cops were both uniformed and plainclothed and had basic police authority within the jurisdiction of TTC property. It was one of the jobs McKelvey had contemplated as he wrestled with the early days of retirement. He knew himself too well, and figured he would eventually shoot some gum-smacking teenager. It was another idea best left untested.

  He picked up a copy of the Globe and Mail folded on the empty seat beside him and scanned the headlines. The newspapers were filling with personal testimonials, commemorative pullout sections more than a week in advance of the anniversary of the attack on the twin towers. Everybody was trying to find a way into this thing, to have the light shine on them for just a few moments, like the day John F. Kennedy had been shot—where you were and what you were doing suddenly seemed to matter. Gatherings were planned in every major city across the country. Canadians would stand shoulder to shoulder in a reflective moment of silence. Journalists now referred to the fateful day simply as “9/11”, as though it were a branded trademark. Conspiracy theorists filled the airwaves and newspapers with their strange deductions, drawing lines to JFK and Martin Luther King and the Skull and Crossbones, Osama bin Laden and the Russians, and how the man on the moon had been filmed in a production set in California. McKelvey had watched with a sense of mild trepidation as his ally to the south gathered its army to invade Afghanistan. He was hopeful for a decisive and righteous victory, and yet somehow too cynical too really believe it. It seemed that nothing would be easy to figure out ever again.

  For the first time since the Vietnam War, newspapers featured daily photographs of combat set against the red rock and dust of that ancient place. The Gulf War at the turning of the last decade now seemed little more than a toe in the water, with its nearly harmless Scud missiles, oil fires blackening the sky, its made-for-TV ending. The television news these days began each broadcast with a body count. Eleven U.S. soldiers were killed when their transport helicopter went down on a spiny mountain ridge on the other side of the world, some obscure place named Spin Boldak. There was an ambush waiting for the rescue party, and those soldiers were lost as well. The president said the nation ought to steel itself for many more days of bad news to come. Years, even. This was to be a fight of biblical proportions—good versus evil.

  If the world had seemed an unpredictable place a year earlier, it was now entirely incomprehensible. McKelvey sensed a shift at the axis, an internal adjustment to their collective cognition. People now spoke openly of their anxiety in riding the subway, that great potential tunnel of death. Movie theatres and shopping malls, patio bars and outdoor concerts; any place of human congregation now seemed suspect. Business travellers of nonwhite descent drew the weary and suspicious gaze of their fellow passengers. At the bottom of McKelvey’s stomach sat a coiled knot that told him this had been waiting for them all along. It was their number.

  As with the murder of his son, and the eventual implication of a fellow detective in the death, there were things for which a human being simply could not prepare. Any parent worried about their child crossing the street or talking to strangers, but this, this was beyond the scope of comprehension. The late night phone call notification was the first of many sucker punches thrown in the dark. McKelvey had caught the jab square on the jawline, and his knees had buckled—but he’d stayed on his feet. As the president down south kept telling everyone, it always seemed darkest just before the dawn. And it was a cliché, but it was true, at least in McKelvey’s case. There was the identification of his boy at the morgue, the wax grey face of his child with the little hole in his forehead the colour of black cherry. There was the push to keep the stalled investigation active; pushing hard, for he sensed his boy’s lifestyle on the streets had relegated his case to the background. There was the chase for Duguay, the shooting in that darkened hallway, the ensuing investigation by the dumbasses in Professional Standards…

  Right now McKelvey was listening to a young man tell his girlfriend how the subway was actually the best place to be if there was a terrorist attack.

  “How do you figure that?” the girl said.

  She looked to McKelvey like she was maybe seventeen. A high-school student with hair bleached to a blinding white, pierced nostrils. The boyfriend, too, had facial piercings, two long studs on an eyebrow that resembled bones. The sight of this hardware always gave McKelvey a desire to reach out and twist them, just to show the wearer what sort of opportunity he was providing to a potential foe. Darwin and all that business.

  “We’re underground, dude,” the boy said. “They probably have like reinforced concrete and everything, like a bomb shelter, oxygen they can pump in or something. Like in that movie, right, how the people down in the subway were the last people on earth after the nuclear war.”

  The train sounded its stop at Rosedale, a neighbourhood of money and old families. The doors chimed and opened, and the two kids got up and shuffled out. McKelvey watched them slip away as the train moved on, and he was glad they were gone, because he had an overpowering urge to lean over and tell them the truth about their collective predicament. He imagined the look on their stapled faces when he said, “It doesn’t matter if you’re upstairs or downstairs when the whole fucking outhouse blows up. Have a nice day.” He wondered what they were teaching kids at school these days.

  The thing he liked about the subway was its steady thrum, this comforting sense of being in motion, moving beneath the city blocks when traffic was gridlocked. On more than one occasion in those days of his recuperation following the shootout, if truth be told, McKelvey had put tokens in the turnstile just to ride the thing back and forth to kill a few hours, to watch people in their habits, to get lost in the anonymity of public transportation. He would sit there listening to the train cars shooking on the tracks, or screeching through the tunnels with that sound that made you shiver and cringe. Sit there and try to think of nothing at all, least of all the futu
re trajectory of his life, the great burn of his prime now fizzled and ebbing. It was something he would never tell Hattie, or anyone else, this aimless subway riding. Now he set the paper down and read the advertisements along the top of the subway car, ads for condoms, one for a college program in graphic design, a poster advertising free testing for STDs at a health clinic near the Ryerson University campus.

  McKelvey got off the subway at St. Clair and went above ground, hit Yonge Street and walked the two blocks to the address. It was wedged between a European deli and a flower shop, the sort of leased space that appeared to have been a storefront at some point in its history, with a floor to ceiling front display window that now featured posters in various languages promising access to career counselling, assistance finding accommodations, basic transit maps and schedules. To his surprise, the lights were on, and there were two or three people in the back standing around a long table. It looked as though they were stuffing envelopes, collating sheaves of paper. He stepped up and pulled the door handle, but it was locked. The sound of his rattling caused the heads inside to turn towards the door. A woman in her mid to late twenties turned, looked at McKelvey for a minute, said something to her colleagues, then came towards the door. She unlocked it and opened it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re closed.”