Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  “And not the Vanderhoef twins,” Natasha said. “For them, lighting up in that vacant lot so close to their school was pushing the rebellion envelope as far as they dared.”

  “Don’t forget Tammy Holt’s project,” Hamish said. “You know, the wonder drug that went sour?”

  “And got cleaned up without a trace,” Natasha added.

  “Expunged is more like it,” Hamish.

  “You think that’s our poison, Tammy’s wonder drug?” Zol said. Had it made its way into Grand Basin’s tobacco fields?

  “But it was more than a year ago that they closed down her project,” Colleen said. “Why would we be seeing the effects all these months later?”

  “Last year’s tobacco crop is this year’s cigarettes,” Zol said. “The kiln-dried leaves sit and age for a few months. The longer the better, actually. Like wine. I’d say the timing is perfect.”

  “The matchstick particles could be merely a marker,” Natasha said, “telling us that tobacco from the smoke shops is contaminated with something. Why don’t we test rez tobacco for a liver toxin?”

  “Because technically,” Hamish said, “the stuff is toxic already. Full of hundreds, if not thousands, of chemicals. Look at the warnings on a pack of cigarettes. We’re looking for a brand new chemical and we have no idea what it is. Where would we start?”

  “Yeah, we need targeted testing,” Zol said. “That’s how the guys at airport security examine your laptop for traces of explosives. Those people know what they’re looking for, and their machine tells them when it finds it.” The team, on the other hand, hadn’t the faintest clue what they were looking for. It seemed hopeless.

  “Not everything was expunged from Tammy’s lab,” Hamish said.

  “No?” Zol said.

  “We still have Jovan Ligorov. Well, sort of.”

  “Who’s he when he’s at home?” Colleen asked.

  “Tammy’s research assistant,” Hamish said. “Her number-one guy. He was a surgeon in one of those Yugoslavian states or provinces or whatever they call them. Kind of a strange guy. Used to wear a huge, ornate cross around his neck. Over his lab coat. It gave Tammy the creeps.”

  “He still around?” Zol said. Ligorov could be anywhere; when research projects folded, the assistants dispersed to find work wherever they could.

  “Directly below my lab, as it turns out,” Hamish said. “In the morgue.”

  Natasha’s hand flew to her mouth. “Murdered? Like Tammy?”

  “Alive and kicking.” Hamish paused, then added, “He’s a diener.”

  Zol answered Colleen’s puzzled frown. “A morgue attendant. Helps with autopsies.” He turned to Hamish. “You talked to him?”

  “It wasn’t a conversation. He clammed up as soon as I mentioned Tammy’s name.”

  “But at least we’ve still got him,” Zol said.

  “Good luck,” Hamish said. “This morning, he looked like I’d invoked the devil. Clutched his cross and told me to leave the past in the past.”

  When they’d finished the meeting, and the others headed toward the door, Colleen held Zol back.

  He’d been expecting this.

  “My contact in Toronto called me at noon,” she whispered. “The three guys they found executed under the rubble at the ROM were from Misty Shores First Nation.”

  “Where’s that?

  “A couple of hours northeast of Toronto. The Trent River watershed.”

  “They’re not Mohawk up there,” he said.

  “So I’ve learned. Anishinaabeg.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Related to the Ojibwa and Algonquins. Never have been on exactly friendly terms with the Iroquois down our way.” Actually, it was worse than that. The Iroquois were at war with the Ojibwa and Algonquins when the Europeans first arrived. Did hundreds of years of enmity ever get resolved?

  “I did a little research,” Colleen said. “Misty Shores sits on a rare and historically rich burial mound built two thousand years ago by the Middle Woodland People. Most of the site’s sacred treasures have disappeared. Appropriated by scholarly collectors or stolen by thieves, depending on your point of view. ”

  He chewed on that for a moment: these days, special interest groups saw museums not as palaces of shared history, but as plunderers of cultural icons.

  “Whatever we might think about museums,” Colleen continued, “the people of Misty Shores have become militant about reclaiming their artifacts. Some inflammatory statements on their website.”

  “They figured the loon pipe was theirs? Stolen from their mound and not from a similar one in Ohio?”

  “I’d say so. Enough to break into the ROM and attack the First Peoples Gallery with the sledgehammers and crowbar the police found near their bodies.”

  He pulled on his raincoat. “And then the Badger gets them popped off, snatches the goods before their corpses are even cold, and tries to cover his tracks by blowing up the White Man’s folly.”

  And having seized one of the legendary pipes, he’d be looking for the second. It seemed the Badger had no more liking for the Anishinaabeg than he did for the Whites. All his wealth was not satisfying his greed. The Badger was on the march for political power, and not just at the local level.

  Colleen tugged her hat down over her forehead. “The bugger has eyes and ears everywhere.”

  He pictured Max stashed at the farm, playing Clue with Gaspar and Kitti. “Don’t remind me.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “I’m afraid that’s the law, Mr. Cheeseman,” Zol told the indignant farmer on the other end of the phone, first thing Monday morning. “You and your family can drink as much unpasteurized milk as you like, but you’re not allowed to sell it.”

  “Our family’s been dairy farmin’ in Norfolk County back four generations. Hell, that’s how we got ’r name.” As Percy Cheeseman’s voice rose to a shout, Zol pictured the man’s face getting redder and redder. “I’m not lettin’ none of your stupid, new-fangled laws interfere with seventy-five years of tradition. For God’s sake, man, our product is completely natural. And hund’erd percent pure.”

  Natural, yes. Pure, too. Pure salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, and listeria, the lively quartet of unpasteurized milk.

  “When’s the other doctor coming back?” Cheeseman continued. “You know, the guy who took sick. He was the right man for the job down here in Norfolk County. Left us alone.”

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree . . . sir,” Zol said. “And —”

  “Those city ways o’ yours got no business down here in God’s country. You’ll be hearin’ from my member o’ parliament.”

  That cosy little promise ended the call, and Zol made a note to send one of the health inspectors to the Cheeseman farm. The job needed someone tall, broad, and blessed with a good-old-boy manner. He hadn’t met all the inspectors yet, so no one came to mind. He’d have to ask Nancy.

  Cheeseman’s call had come through before Zol had a chance to look at his overnight emails. He was turning to read them when Nancy knocked twice and entered.

  The light had disappeared from her shiny brown eyes.

  “You better have a look at this, Dr. Szabo. Out here. I’m not touching it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Please, come see for yourself.” She led him out of the office toward her desk in the reception area. She stopped two paces from the desk and pointed to a packet sitting beside her in-basket. “See? Bad news pasted right across it.”

  It was a large, brown envelope addressed to Dr. Zol Szabo, Health Unit, Simcoe. The address was neither handwritten nor typed. It had been crudely cut and pasted from the pages of a newspaper, probably the Simcoe Reformer. That wouldn’t have been difficult; his name had been all over it lately. Without a stamp or a return address, the thing did look menacing. And oddly melodramatic.

 
“Any idea how it got here?” he asked.

  She wrinkled her nose. “There’s an outside mailbox. Sylvia checks it at nine-thirty every morning before she starts sorting the mail, in case there’s been an overnight external delivery. The mailman comes right to her office, so the outside box rarely has anything in it.”

  “Sylvia put this here?”

  Nancy nodded without taking her eyes off the package. It was as if she was trying to control the villain inside it with her gaze.

  Zol leaned over the desk and sniffed. Nothing. He sniffed again. Suddenly, Ringo was jamming those too-familiar bars of “Yellow Submarine.” The odour was faint and Ringo’s session correspondingly brief. But there was no denying the stench of rez tobacco.

  He lifted the manila packet from the desk. It was lightweight but stiff, as if it contained a piece of cardboard cut to its exact dimensions. “Got a letter opener?”

  Nancy pulled in her arms. “Our policy is not to open anything that doesn’t have a return address. One time we had a stink bomb.”

  “Really?”

  “From a disgruntled parent. Unhappy that her child got dismissed from school for not being properly immunized. During a German measles epidemic, for heaven’s sake.”

  Zol returned the envelope to the desk. Very slowly. And with two hands. “So, what do we do with it? What is the policy?”

  She looked puzzled for a moment, as if trying to remember. Then her lips tightened into a shy smile that seemed to catch her by surprise. “Notify the medical officer of health.”

  “I guess that means I get to use my judgment.”

  She maintained her stare at the envelope and said nothing. It was clear she wasn’t going to sit at her desk until the manila menace had been dealt with.

  He picked it up, again with both hands, and took it into his office.

  He closed the door.

  He held the envelope to his ear. It wasn’t ticking. He turned it over. The simple flap had been secured with a length of wide, transparent tape. Nothing on either side indicated where it had come from or who had sent it. The odour of rez tobacco brought the Badger to mind. Was it another warning from him? In the form of a written message or something more drastic? Dennis wasn’t a prankster. It wouldn’t be a stink bomb.

  The easiest thing would be to call the police. Let them handle it. Did the Simcoe detachment have a bomb squad? Probably not. They’d send it to Hamilton or Toronto, and he’d never see it again. The police blew up anything they remotely considered might be a bomb. But if they destroyed this envelope, he’d never know what was in it.

  And that could be a problem.

  Maybe the Badger hadn’t sent it. Maybe it was someone wanting to be helpful. Matt Holt, for instance. He had every reason to want to see the liver epidemic cracked, and every reason to stay in the shadows. He’d stuck his neck out before and the chop-shoppers had torched his garage.

  Zol brought the packet to his ear again. He planted his feet and shook it. Nothing. He tried it again with a bit more force. Something rustled, and not with the tinkle of metal or the clunk of plastic. What did it sound like? Styrofoam? Paper?

  This was silly. He had to know what was inside, but also be assured it wasn’t a bomb. He had to get it X-rayed. Not at the hospital. He couldn’t bring a potential bomb into Simcoe General and casually ask the radiologists to put it under their machine. He’d be out of a job by the afternoon.

  Who else had an X-ray machine?

  Eddy Pakozdi. At his veterinary clinic. He also had a lively curiosity about everything that crossed his path. Zol pictured Eddy as he’d seen him last, on his snowmobile flying across the snow-covered fields of Norfolk County, dashing from farm to farm and tending to cows with infected teats, horses with colic, and nannies with whatever troubled milking-goats.

  Veterinary medicine. Curiosity. Milking-goats. It was slowly coming back to him. A couple of years ago, maybe longer, Eddy had told Zol about this weird thing called orf virus infecting milking-goat herds under his care. Lots of goats, but only a couple of farmers, had developed the characteristic blistering lesions that took weeks and weeks to heal. Acting on advice from the Veterinary College in Guelph, Eddy controlled the outbreak by culling the affected herds. Zol forgot about the incident because he hadn’t been responsible for Norfolk County at the time, and orf virus was a relatively harmless human pathogen that health units never concerned themselves with.

  When Hamish had described a possible orf hybrid in Mongolia, Zol knew the strangely named virus sounded familiar. But at the time, he was so rattled from seeing that woman hit the deer on Highway 24 that he wasn’t thinking straight.

  He looked at the envelope in his hands, made a mental note to ask Natasha to contact Guelph and see what details she could dig up regarding orf activity in Norfolk County, then banished the virus to the back of his mind. The big question for today: would either a vet or a public-health doc recognize the X-ray image of a letter bomb staring back at them?

  CHAPTER 28

  An hour or so later, Zol followed his perennially industrious father out of the kitchen door and into the yard. They hadn’t told Mum what they were up to. She’d fuss and tell Dad to put that stupid thing away, Gazsi. All it does is cause trouble.

  It was good to see Mum up and dressed today. Her cheeks lacked colour and that turban never let you forget she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but her smile was genuine when she told Zol how much she’d loved Max’s visit yesterday. She’d made Zol promise to stay for lunch today, and yes, she was more than strong enough to heat up a can of tomato soup and make him a nice sandwich to go with it. They had yet to discuss her role in connecting Francine with Max. Bringing up the postcard correspondence didn’t seem necessary at this point, and no matter how Zol might broach the subject, no matter how careful he was with his tone of voice, his mum would think he was being petty and bitter about Francine. Yesterday, over their rounds of Clue and Scrabble, Max had undoubtedly told his grandmother all about his mother’s impending visit. Poor kid, he was getting set for an epic fall; Francine had yet to answer Zol’s invitation, so it was anyone’s guess whether she was actually coming.

  With his dad now four paces ahead, Zol strode past the six tobacco kilns that had consumed his teenage summers. He rubbed his right clavicle, suddenly aching where he’d fractured it falling from the rafters of kiln number one. Age fourteen and exhausted, he’d been upended by a heavy bundle of freshly tied leaves. Now the buildings were abandoned and barely standing, but evocatively weathered and more photogenic every year. Like so many other tobacco farmers, Dad couldn’t bring himself to pull down the old kilns, though it was difficult to imagine Gaspar Szabo having even one nostalgic bone in his flinty body.

  Dad undid the workshop padlock, pulled open the door, and flipped on the light. He pointed to his spotless workbench. “Put it there,” he said, meaning the mysterious envelope that had barely left Zol’s grasp since he’d first touched it two hours ago.

  With the care of a surgeon handling an endoscope, Gaspar lifted his metal detector from its place on a shelf. He’d created the instrument from an old hockey stick, a round metal disk that once had been a pie plate, and a bunch of electrical stuff Zol didn’t pretend to understand. Gaspar took a fresh packet of batteries from a cupboard he’d rescued from a neighbour’s kitchen renovations and inserted them into the device.

  He fiddled with the detector, tuning it like a radio. It screeched like an indignant seagull when he passed it over a pipe wrench he’d set on the worktop. But it didn’t so much as peep over a stack of newspapers piled on the concrete floor. When it squeaked over a bundle of rags in a cardboard box, Gaspar looked perplexed until he found a length of electrical cord buried underneath. Finally, he took a dime from his pocket, covered it with about twenty pages of the Simcoe Reformer, and passed the detector over it. When the thing whistled softly but clearly, he beamed.

 
“Looks like it’s working,” Zol said.

  “Of course.” The wink said it all.

  He told Zol to move his envelope to the middle of the workbench. Then he raised his eyebrows, drew in a deep breath, and passed his instrument over it. Nothing. Not a hiss, not even a whisper. He lowered the device so that it was practically touching the envelope, then passed the detector over it again, systematically. Up and down, side to side.

  The thing made no sound at all.

  “No metal, eh?” Zol said.

  Dad’s face was serious. With his tongue clamped between his teeth, he looked like Max concentrating on a tricky video-game sequence. “One more test.”

  He switched off the detector and handed it to Zol, then turned to a box of electrical stuff. He rifled through switches, fuses, connectors, and bits of wire. From somewhere in there he pulled out a piece of copper wire a handbreadth in length and the thickness of a few human hairs. He tucked the tiny wire under the right-hand end of Zol’s rectangular envelope, then threw the switch on the detector and started a pass from the left.

  The gadget made no sound. Not even a chirp. No matter how slowly or how quickly Gaspar passed his detector over the envelope and the copper wire he’d hidden beneath it, the thing stayed silent. Beads of sweat collected on his forehead, and he began to look like an anxious inventor trying not to lose his cool in front of an important patron. He tapped the detector’s metal disk, checked the position of the batteries, and readjusted the tuning knob. He tried another pass over the envelope. When he got to the spot where he’d hidden the wire, the gadget woke up and screeched enthusiastically.

  Still not satisfied, Gaspar moved the wire to another spot, this time beneath the other end of the packet. When he tried the detector again, the thing stayed quiet until it got to the wire, then chirped like an angry robin.

  Zol had to shout over the racket. “What’s the verdict, Dad?”

  Gaspar killed the switch. “You have to ask?”