Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  McKelvey worked quick on his feet. He feigned severe disappointment, sighed and looked down the street, shook his head then looked back to the woman. “Shit, I knew this would happen. I told them at my office that you’d be closed with the long weekend and all. I’m a lawyer from Ottawa,” he said, “representing an immigrant in a deportation case. I only have until tomorrow, see, or…oh well, it’s not your problem.”

  The young woman stood there, the door ajar, and regarded him. She was dressed in plain khakis and a blue-grey wool sweater—or perhaps it was hemp—and she sported a nose ring, and her brown hair was curled together in tight rolls. McKelvey knew the word for it, it was on the tip of his tongue—dreadlocks, that was it. She looked, at least to McKelvey, exactly like someone who volunteered at a place like this should look. How unique we strive to be, he thought, and the harder we try, the more we fall into cliché.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re in here doing a mailing for our annual fall fundraiser. The executive director’s not in. We’re all volunteers.”

  She shrugged, and McKelvey caught a glimmer of possibility. He tensed and got his shoulder ready to push through the door of opportunity. “This woman I’m representing, Donia Kruzik, she’s going to be sent back to Bosnia if I don’t provide proof that she came through here, that she was provided assistance by your centre. It’s a long story, lots of legalese. I just think of her kids here.”

  He watched for it, but there was no immediate recognition of the name he’d thrown out there.

  “I don’t know what we could do to help,” the woman said, and she looked over her shoulder to her colleagues, who were interested now, absentmindedly stuffing envelopes. “I mean, with the privacy laws and everything, we can’t get access to any personal client files anyway.”

  “I understand,” he said. “It’s not your fault. It’s the government.”

  “Don’t get me started,” she said, smiling. When she smiled, her face changed, and she was prettier than he’d first thought.

  “Right,” he said, “they get to make their own rules as they go. They can follow immigrants around and tap their phones and kick them out of the country on a whim or a rumour, but we’ve got to play by the rules.”

  She looked back over to her colleagues then held the door open. “Come in,” she said. “I can at least give you some of our brochures.”

  “Anything would be a help,” he said.

  He stepped inside and smiled over at the other volunteers, a woman and a man. They were both in their mid-twenties as well, and McKelvey pictured them all sitting on the floor of a Queen Street West apartment, smoking pot and talking politics and civil rights. He hadn’t gone to university himself, or college for that matter, and so he’d always thought of the world as containing two sorts of people: those who thought about things, and those who rolled up their sleeves and got things done. It wasn’t accurate or fair, perhaps, but it was a philosophy which had served him well going on six decades.

  “I didn’t get your name,” she said.

  “Leyden,” he said. “Dick Leyden. I appreciate you opening the door. Listen, I should apologize for my face. I took a tumble off a ladder last weekend.”

  “I’m Pamela,” the woman from the door said. She turned to her colleagues and relayed the story McKelvey had provided. “I know we don’t have access to any personal files, but I figured we could at least give him some of our brochures, our annual report. It’s something at least. I feel bad that you came all the way from Ottawa.”

  The young man had been eyeing McKelvey. He said, “It is a long weekend. Why would you assume we would be open?”

  Smart kid, and confident, too, McKelvey thought. A good catch—why would an intelligent lawyer travel all that way without a confirmation?

  “Guess my clerk got her wires crossed,” McKelvey said with a shrug. “She called here the other day and spoke to somebody, I know that much. Maybe they forgot it was a long weekend. Anyway, I took the chance. I don’t really have many options left at this point.”

  The younger man nodded, satisfied, and returned to his work. Pamela went over to a shelving unit that displayed dozens of publications, brochures and leaflets and fact sheets. She picked a few, came back and handed them to McKelvey.

  “I’m really sorry I can’t be of more help,” she said.

  “This is a start,” he said.

  “The executive director is Peter Dawson. I know he checks his messages even when he’s on holidays. He’s pretty dedicated to his work. I can leave your name and number if you like.”

  “That would be great,” he said and gave his home number. “I’m staying at that number while I’m in town.”

  It wasn’t until he was on his way out the door that he remembered the name he’d given. He would have to keep that straight. He was Dick. Dick Leyden. He smiled as the door closed behind him.

  SIXTEEN

  Kadro drove the new junker Turner had acquired for him south towards the green-blue lakeshore. The vehicle was a 1996 white Toyota Corolla that smelled of wet dog hair and stale cigarette smoke, probably stolen, Kad surmised, from some social housing parking lot. Turner had left it in the parking lot of the Scarborough Town Centre with the keys under the lip of the wheel well. Kad stopped only once—to exchange a winning twenty dollar ticket for a new set of scratch and wins. He selected two five-dollar tickets for a game called “Keno” and two others for “Bingo”.

  He sat there in the parking lot of the mini-mart and used a nickel to scratch all the tickets, brushing the foil flakes from his jeans and his hands. He didn’t need to do this, he didn’t even really want to, it wasn’t something he could necessarily explain to someone who might see him sitting parked outside a convenience store—he just wanted to win, knew that unlike in war, the odds here were controlled by the printing of tickets. There had to be so many winners per box of tickets, of that he was sure. He had to look at the tickets very closely, to read the English very slowly and be sure he had not lost when he had in fact won. It was a fear, that because his English was rough, he might misread a ticket and throw it in a garbage can. He wondered how many times that had happened, someone reading a ticket too quickly, tossing it in the trash. How many people on the planet were still stuck in their humdrum life when in fact they were undeclared millionaires?

  Fate and the odds. It was like mortar shells falling from the sky, launched by unseen hands across the distance, the trigonometry of death. The luck of the draw, they said. Utterly random. You were standing there taking a piss or else you weren’t. Here it hits a bridge, or over here it hits a house with fourteen children huddled in the basement. The further you were from your target, the greater the odds of missing. How he had been standing not four feet from a fellow soldier when the man’s head suddenly exploded from a sniper’s shot—like a watermelon, the skull simply cracked and splintered, let loose the contents, this liquid so red and rich and putty grey, the taste of it on his face, combing it from his hair hours afterward. It left a man wondering, why me, why him, why here, why now. One second, half a second, not even the blink of an eye. What sort of strange algebra was at play? Born too soon, too late, or right on time.

  A man had to discover for himself, Kadro had learned, the difference between the things that he could control and those that he could not. In the middle between those two poles there rested a patch of open space called “semblance of peace”. Once he himself had learned this lesson, always the hard way, always through death and guilt and bloodied hands, once he had learned this lesson, he was set free. The war was no longer something to be feared, for bullets and mortars and bombs and mines were entirely beyond his control. The only things over which he had perfect domain were his own hands, his head, his heart. If it was his will to kill, then so be it. If he was told to take the point in entering a village controlled by the enemy, then so be it. Come what may, come what may, there was no sense in pretending he had any say in any of this. That moment of realization was, Kadro believed, like be
ing born again.

  “Try again,” he said aloud. “Fuck you,” and he tossed the tickets to the floor.

  He was careful not to speed or take sharp turns, lest he draw undue attention or scramble the precious cargo in his trunk. The school teacher, with hands and ankles tied expertly with military knots, would scarcely have noticed a bumpy ride, however, as he was still partially unconscious, breathing in shallow gasps in the dark, tight space. The teacher had been easy to subdue, as easy as Kad would have guessed, for the teacher, like most of his contemporaries in this soft and new country, had never known war, had probably never even as much as thrown or received a punch in anger. Knuckles soft, belly soft, jawline out there exposed—snap, and the man was out like a punch drunk boxer. He had placed his hands around the man’s chest and dragged him gently into the master bedroom, set him carefully on the floor, tied his hands and legs with a couple of neckties, then went back down and got Donia where he had left her in the car across the street.

  “He wants to see you,” he had told her, his head at her car window.

  “What did you tell him?”

  He looked at her earnestly, shrugged, and said, “I told him that we have to go back home for a death in the family. He understands. He was worried is all. Please, he wants to see you. And then we are finished and he is free to go.”

  He jumped in the car, moved it across the street to the visitor parking, then he waited just long enough for her to disappear inside the building. He came up right behind her. She was standing at the door to Fielding’s apartment, hesitating because it was slightly ajar. He had hoped, of course, that she would slip inside, but he was prepared to adapt. He came up behind her. She turned. The look on her face seemed to tell him that she knew what was to come. In her eyes he saw confusion and sadness, anger and regret and sorrow—the eyes of his mother when he’d left for war in the hills…

  Of course, the operation was not ad-hoc, as Krupps used to say, his old squad leader with the university education in literature, throwing these expensive words and Rimbaud and Kipling quotes out during the heat of a firefight. Nothing Kadro did was ad-hoc, not if time and circumstance permitted. Earlier he had cased this building sufficiently to understand the landscape, the possibilities. He hugged the side of the building, bricks to his cheek. At the laundry room door he pulled a sample-size of black spray paint from his coat pocket, reached up and coated the video camera that provided roughly, in his estimates, a forty-degree scan from its position.

  From there it had been tactical, the collateral damage of battle. His hands moved and his legs moved, and he was bent at the waist, the trees and the fields and the mud at his feet and the stink of death and gun powder, and he heard Krupps screaming at him to hurry up, hurry up, and he pressed and squeezed, then she was limp and he was done, Donia was done. She was gone.

  He set her gently on the carpet. His breath came fast and short.

  Her eyes staring, lifeless grey.

  How the eyes of the dead saw everything and nothing all at once.

  There was a long moment wherein he could hear nothing but the rush of blood in his ears as it was during a firefight, and he stood there in the school teacher’s room with his mind playing tricks—like where was Krupps, where were the others?

  Then he blinked. He looked down at Donia’s body, and everything was here and now. He untied the school teacher and shoved the neckties in the man’s back pockets, not wanting to leave anything behind, and he put the man’s head and neck in the vice of his arms and applied a sleeper, ensuring continued compliance. At the doorway, Kad borrowed the man’s British driving cap and fall jacket from the hall tree, even put his eyeglasses on, then he left the building by the stairs with the dead weight of his drunken friend wilting at his side. He was sweating profusely by the time he kicked open the exit door on the main level, shuffling with Fielding’s hundred and sixty pounds at his side, huffing it across the ridge, to the next hedgerow and the safety of his squad, Boom-Boom set up with his big machine gun.

  “Pardon me,” an elderly lady said when he bumped into her. She was coming around the hallway towards the elevators, a bag of groceries in her hand.

  “My friend is sick,” he said and pushed on, down the hall to the laundry room.

  Baskets sat atop the working washers and dryers and the room smelled thickly of heat and the false spring scents of Bounce sheets, but he got lucky and there was nobody in the room. Out the door and along the wall, he came out to the parking lot from the far side so that any video that did catch them would be difficult to decipher. He set Fielding in the passenger seat long enough to get them out onto the street then in behind a strip mall by a clump of overgrown weeds and saplings near a dumpster. The man was coming around, woozy, and he got sick on himself a little bit, the result of being knocked out. Kad worked fast, with precision, and Fielding was in the trunk and Kad was back on the road in less than three minutes.

  Kad had called Turner on his cell and told him they had to meet at once—plans had once again been altered out of necessity—and Turner, swearing a blue streak, had given him directions to Exhibition Place. Edging the lake and bordered by a tall stone wall and triumphant archway, this was the space where, since 1879, the city had annually staged the country’s largest fair, the Canadian National Exhibition. In late fall, the grounds hosted the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, where, as the ads declared, “once a year the country comes to the city”.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? I’m spending time with my family, asshole. Do you remember when I told you to contact me only in the case of emergency?”

  “This is emergency,” Kad said.

  Now the two men were standing in the parking lot of Exhibition Place.

  “You’ve had a goddamned emergency every day. Two targets, that’s all you had to look after. Christ almighty,” Turner said, hands on his hips. He looked around, taking in the enormity of the exhibition grounds, the sky windswept and cloudless. “Do you appreciate the planning and training, the costs, the sheer lengths that people besides yourself have gone to here in order to make this happen? And you’re running around like some sociopath. Didn’t I say not to draw attention to yourself?”

  Turner’s older model Volkswagen station wagon was pulled in beside the Corolla at the far end of the lonely parking lot. The Honda, there was the first mistake. Jarko’s Garage. Poor Jarko.

  “Jesus, this is like a nightmare or something,” Turner said. “I thought you’d be the least of our problems. I thought of all people, this is the guy we don’t even need to worry about. You’re one of the few who actually served in the Colonel’s unit.”

  There were people out jogging and riding bikes along the lakeshore, and the long blades of the country’s first large-scale urban windmill were turning soundlessly in the slight breeze, gulls fluttering around the lot to pick at the last of the squashed fries left from the end-of-summer exhibition.

  “So let me get this straight. You’ve eliminated two people; the superintendent of your partner’s building, and now your partner,” Turner now said in a low voice, calm and measured. He leaned back against his car, arms folded across his chest, the sun on his face. They could have been old buddies meeting up to throw the Frisbee or smoke a joint and talk about girls from high school. “Two bodies, and not one of them is an official target. All you’ve done is draw heat and add to the trail that leads back to you and me and everybody else involved in this gaggle-fuck. I mean, you just wacked your partner in this whole thing. The one who just spent months working a dead-end job so she could track and detail and ensure the targets are bona fide. You don’t think the cops will track her back to her job then straight to Bridges? What the hell am I supposed to think here? Are you shell-shocked?”

  Kad leaned back against his car now, too, and folded his arms. He stared at the Canadian. In this light the man’s one good eye appeared grey, like smoke.

  “It had to be done,” Kad said. “I did not plan this. I am not stupid, I am not a soc
iopath. I am doing what I came here to do. You talk like the fat generals who ran our war from the back rooms, from the safety of their fancy hotels with their whores and their wine and caviar, while we slept like dogs in the rain and the snow, scrounging for food like goddamned animals, not even enough bullets for our guns. Don’t talk to me about my partner, you know nothing of the sacrifice she has made for her people. This will never be forgotten. We all have our roles to play in war. She made a mistake, and I controlled the damage.”

  “Listen,” Turner said, and stepped closer now. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you about the places I’ve been and the things I’ve done. I’m no backroom general. My job is to get this back on track before the Colonel finds out and sends another squad over here to clean up your mess and clean you and me up at the same time. You’ve got twenty-four hours. Find your targets, eliminate them, then call me. I don’t want to hear from you until this is done.”

  Kad exhaled. He turned and walked to the back of the car, and he said, “There is still this.” He unlocked and opened the trunk. The school teacher was awake inside, bound and gagged, laying on his side. The light flooded in, and the school teacher squinted, turning his head away. He made noises and tried to lift himself.

  “What the hell is this?” Turner said.

  “The school teacher.”

  “You’re just zipping around town like some goddamned Sunday driver? What if you get pulled over?”

  “He is my insurance,” Kad said, then slammed the trunk. “This man’s friend, he is a policeman. This is the man I met in Donia’s apartment when I returned to make sure we had not left anything behind. I should have killed him, but I did not. Now I am cleaning up my own mess. This man’s friend is the one who tracked us to the garage then also went back to talk to the superintendent to get answers to his questions. He left his card… ”

  Kad pulled the business card from his shirt pocket and held it up. “He is the final link to all of this, to all of us,” Kad said. “I will tell him he can find his friend safe and sound if he follows my instructions. In the meantime, I am free to finish my work. The police and the newspapers are looking for the man in my trunk. He is the one who killed Donia. It is called, in the military jargon, a diversionary tactic.”