Suzanne sat down beside Kimura on the couch, and with puffy eyes and sisterly persistence she tucked herself under his arm, Kimura looking relieved but baffled. Emmett thought about the leather briefcase with its photographs and transcripts. He had removed it from the vault beneath the garage; he’d taken it out to a quiet place in the country, wrapped it in a tarpaulin, and buried it in wet, mulchy soil. The tarp would loosen and rain would get in. Surely the rain will get in.
Chapter Nine
Gophers are solitary and they like dry ground, so the prime minister’s remote summer retreat in the Gatineau Hills was idyllic for one particular gopher who seized the occasion of a summer’s day to burrow the hole into which the prime minister put his foot as he descended from his flagstone terrace, thus breaking his ankle. His wife, Olive, got a doctor from a nearby village who might have set the cast too tight. At any rate, it swelled. Olive had him moved to Ottawa, to his bedroom on the second floor of Sussex Drive, where he was stranded but where she had access to better doctors. Still, blood vessels behind his knee burst, and blood filled his leg, and there was talk of amputation.
Since he’d been laid up, Cabinet meetings were taking place in his bedroom, so it was strange but not entirely abnormal for Emmett to receive a request for a consultation with the prime minister at his home, at bedside.
He was shown to the bedroom by Olive herself. He followed her up the broad carpeted stairs to a closed door, where she turned to give him an unfocused look and say, “Don’t keep him too long. I’ve got his supper waiting.” She ushered him in, “The young man you wanted has come, dear,” and left him, closing the door behind her.
It was late afternoon and sunny, but the drapes were drawn here. In the gloom Emmett made out a four-poster bed and a figure propped up against a stack of pillows. From under the bedclothes a foot protruded encased in plaster. There were newspapers and several files strewn on the bed. Diefenbaker’s freckled hands were knitted on his lap. Emmett saw that the prime minister was wearing yellow flannel pyjamas under a plaid bathrobe. The room smelled of Absorbine Jr.
Diefenbaker’s eyes, like plums, set deep in his loose, wan face, followed Emmett as he crossed the room and came to stand uncertainly nearby. Dief nodded in recognition: this was the fellow he wanted, though Emmett had the impression that the prime minister didn’t really know what exactly he did in the East Block, only that he was a comparatively friendly man who would agree with him. With no words of greeting, Diefenbaker told him, “Harold Gembey was here this morning.”
Emmett went on alert. Gembey, chair of the Security Panel during the early days of Emmett’s ordeal, was now head of Intelligence with External. He mumbled something congenial. The prime minister shivered irritably. “Pull up a — ”, waving with both hands. Emmett saw a row of chairs at the side of the room and pulled one toward the bed, aiming to place it at Dief’s waist, avoiding the purple toes where they emerged huge and hairy from the end of the cast.
“He said he’d been down in Washington,” Diefenbaker resumed. “At a conference for so-called Intelligence. A meeting of the spooks. He was invited to the British Embassy.”
He drifted off, as if his message had been fully imparted. Emmett cleared his throat. The freckled hands plucked at the bedclothes. It appeared the prime minister was having difficulty swallowing. Yet for all his dishevelment, he acted as one who believed himself the only sane man in a madhouse. His oversized head of curly yellowing hair trembled, his tongue darted out to moisten his lips, his eyes were bruised by exhaustion, but he evinced a prideful fury.
He gave a chuckle. And made a noise to indicate, I’ve got their number, the jig’s up. A glass of water stood at his bedside and Emmett wanted to offer it to him, this man like a felled bird, a battered old falcon.
“Something’s going on,” Diefenbaker said. “And I’ll bet my boots that hothead pup is at the bottom of it.” The air whistling in his nose, Diefenbaker went on, “That arrogant son of a bitch is going to get us all blown to smithereens!”
“President Kennedy, sir?”
“President Kennedy, sir! That callow young bastard. That vain cock of the walk! That tinsel, that glamour boy, that prick! Well this is one prime minister he can’t push around.”
The door opened, a shaft of evening sunlight streaked across the carpet, and Olive came in with a glass of milk and a vial of pills. She told Emmett that it was six o’clock, just as a clock out on the landing struck the hour, tolling. Maybe it was the sunlight or the presence of his wife, but Diefenbaker seemed to shrink into his bed. “A baby boy, eh?” Diefenbaker said. “Dimples!”
Olive put the glass of milk into her husband’s shaky hand.
When Emmett stood up to get out of the way, Diefenbaker cried out to Olive, “Don’t let him go yet! I’m not finished! Don’t let him out!”
Olive didn’t appear to be surprised, merely petulant to match her husband’s petulance, as if this was a typical bicker, but she turned the argument Emmett’s way and said to him, “Oh please just say your piece, it’s suppertime!”
He asked what the prime minister would like him to do.
“Get it clear!” Diefenbaker told him. “Find out what’s going on!”
“With?”
“With Harold Gembey, with that arrogant bastard Kennedy, with the American security machine right outside my window!”
“You want me to speak to Gembey. And find out what happened in Washington.”
“Find out everything! Before it’s too late! Kennedy will destroy me, he’ll destroy the Conservative Party of Canada! Don’t kid yourself for a minute, he’ll destroy you too! You! You’re chickenfeed compared to the big stuff that little upstart is going after.”
The prime minister’s fear of personal slights outweighed his fear of nuclear devastation. In the silence following Diefenbaker’s outburst, the tinkling of pills in the vial in Olive’s hand was a reminder of time’s passing. She held it pressed beneath her bosom and sighed and stared at Emmett, who thought how it was kind of funny that neither she nor her husband wore glasses, and how they had similar skin, soft as old peaches.
He left them there and soon found himself walking up Sussex without remembering that he’d left his Alfa parked back near Rideau Hall. The mild evening air was pleasant on his face. Walking, he imagined a nightmarish conversation with Harold Gembey.
— Dief has asked me to speak with you, Harold.
— Has he now?
— Yeah. He wants you to tell me, what went on down there in Washington, at the conference for spooks.
— You spying for him now, Jones? First you spy for the Russians, then you spy for the Americans, now you spy for the prime minister?
— He didn’t think you’d tell him what’s going on, so he asked me to ask you.
— Of course I’ll tell him what’s going on. He’s the prime minister of Canada. Even if he’s nuttier than a fruitcake, I have to tell him. Even if he’s barking mad, I have to tell him anything he wants to know.
Then Emmett imagined himself with his little Minox camera suddenly visible in his hand, and Gembey sitting up, alert. — Say, Jones, what’s the game?
What’s the game? A Chevrolet Bel Air lurched to a stop, squealing its tires to avoid hitting him as he blindly crossed the street. He stood in front of the car, feeling the heat from its engine, then leaned over to peer through the glare on the windshield. There was Oscar, his fifth Russian contact, his last, grinning back at him, wiggling his Groucho Marx eyebrows. Oscar stuck his head out the driver’s window and said, “Get in the car, Mr. Jones! In a hurry! Before somebody bangs me in the rear.”
He got into Oscar’s Chevrolet.
Chapter Ten
Suzanne was working in her darkroom in the basement. She didn’t notice that the sun had set since Lennie had got home from school so the house was in darkness but for a sliver of electric light illuminating the upstairs hall from beneath a closed bedroom door. From outside, Lennie’s was the only light shining in the
dark house.
Lennie was in her bedroom, standing on her bed. She was in debate with a throng of vile inferiors beneath the precipice where she stood, sword in hand. It was her sacred task to lead them from their weak and evil ways, on the difficult path toward the Good. She felt the fury of righteousness swelling in her heart.
She had almost made it through another week at school — one more day until the weekend. The pain of contact with all those people in the hallways, in the classroom or at bomb drill, inescapable in the washrooms and the change room before gym class, the exposure of her face, the feeling that her body had been cut out with scissors and pasted onto the scene, the long hour when she had to find somewhere to sit in the lunchroom and then outside to huddle in the grass with her back against the brick, making her face hard and blank.
She gave her foes one final thrust with her sword, then leapt off the bed into a freezing river that tumbled her over rocks into a waterfall, swimming even as she fell and so propelling herself into a glassy pool surrounded by ferns where a heron broke from the reeds and she lay on her thick wall-to-wall carpet and heard the shushshush of the heron’s wings as he flew away.
Lennie floated in the glassy pool. Fish swam beneath her, gently nudging her body or even swimming over and around her with their cool slithery touch, and she turned and twisted with them. Larry, the boy who sits behind her in Homeroom, told her that she’s prettier than Monica, the prettiest girl in the class. Lennie saw that he wasn’t being mean. This moment is a rare reprieve, too small, too fragile, too dissimilar; on such fractional lapses in a day, week, month, school-year of pain, Lennie thought, yes, it’s actually pain flowing out of the A where her ribs meet, like her soul is leaking from the punctures they make with their eyes, on Larry’s surprising minute of kindness you can’t build a person who can survive Grade Five.
She went down the dark stairs to the back door, opened it, and looked out across the lawn. There was that figure again, a ghost slinking away. She retreated, closed the back door, locked it. Then she went to the kitchen and turned on a light. She got a bowl and the flour from the cupboard, took the newspaper from the kitchen table and went back upstairs to the bathroom, and ran the tap till the water was warm. She stirred flour into the warm water with the end of her toothbrush. Then she took the bowl of glue to her bedroom.
She cut the newspaper into narrow strips, slipped the strips of newspaper through the glue, and lay them across her forehead, shocked by the first slimy chill, then liking it, and liking the smell of wet newspaper, she laid more strips across her nose and along her cheekbones, all over the face except of course the eyes and nostrils. She moulded the strips around her lips, smoothing it all around her face until she felt the mask conform to her features. Then she lay down to wait for it to dry.
Suzanne couldn’t stop working. She was listening for the Alfa pulling into the driveway, for Emmett clattering in the front door, and she was counting her lucky stars he was late tonight. Lennie was in her bedroom; this yanked her attention, but it was guilt on a hard-mouthed mare; I’m getting good, she thought, too good at ignoring guilt, living with it, letting it get raw and scab over, a wound that’s been with me for years. For how long? How long ago did she meet John?
She slid the paper into the developing solution and waited while the image rippled into existence. There he was again. And again. In the actor she once hired, she saw something of his poise, definitive and lonely, diffident, skeptical; in strangers whom she photographed without their permission — their backs turned away, even women sometimes, exciting when it happened, attractive solitaries with that muscle around the mouth. She saw something of him in gestures even if not in the people themselves, as if they participated in the event that was John Norfield. She took a slug of brandy from the bottle on the shelf where she stored her chemicals. One of these days her hand will choose the wrong bottle and she’ll poison herself with developing fluid, a possibility that didn’t trouble her, her analgesic being so close to her poison.
Gestures that belonged to John, that had been initiated by him in a wave of gestures undulating under the surface for the remainder of her life: his way of turning his back at the very moment of disclosure when something might have been said and felt and made true; his deflection, his solid purpose against the incursions of love, hard and shining as mica in stone, heat-possessing and older than God, yes, she thought of him as ancient, so ancient he’d outlive himself and her. And Lennie.
Out of the chemical bath Suzanne withdrew an image that no one, not Emmett, no gallery owner or journalist, no one would ever recognize as a continuum of her lode, her muse. John would have found it sentimental, he’d turn over in his grave, she thought, for she believed John finally dead; dead and enduring.
The photograph was a landscape, rock and pine trees, an image she’d caught at Blue Sea Lake from her canoe one morning very early when the lake was a mirror misted by the breath of dawn; a long low shore dividing a southeast sky from still water, reflecting dogwood in flower (it being the occasion of dogwood bloom) and the tidy shelf of cedar that cantilevered over the water and above, shrouded in mist, the pine trees. John’s spirit was here. No one would know.
Chapter Eleven
Oscar turned his Chevy Bel Air around and drove back down Sussex toward the prime minister’s house, passing it without comment, following the river east to the countryside, leaning over the steering wheel, his right hand loosely drumming the dash. The Chevy was a ’61, but its shocks were shot and its back end struck pavement when the car hit a bump. It was dark now, and Emmett thought he saw sparks when he looked behind. Oscar must know how much he resembles Groucho Marx, Emmett thought, the nose, the moustache, the voice, the affected accent. The casual irony and a fondness for non sequitur. Emmett’s Russian contact, his fifth, his last.
He let Oscar talk. The headlights strafed trees and brush. What Oscar was saying was interesting and he listened carefully, but he was also playing a little game with himself: he was pretending for a few moments that he was unburdened of connection to anyone on earth.
He pretended to himself that he was a person he’d long forgotten, before Suzanne, before Lennie and James, before the war, when he was young and solitary, and his decisions mattered not a damn to anyone but himself. Then it had been easy to be courageous, reckless. Pain, the possibility of death, all had been heroic fantasy. When he was young, without a family, in that lee of memory when his parents were out of the picture and the war was still something you trained for, he wasn’t anyone at all, as if he didn’t reflect any light. Now he took a moment to pretend to be him, that young man who’d never killed anyone. A line he’d heard from John came to mind, from that night when he first met him, first met Suzanne and fell in love. “There is no Mr. Tragedy.”
But Oscar had finished laying the rationale for the broader plan the Party had laid for him — the information that Emmett would pry out of Diefenbaker during their bedroom confabulations at Sussex Drive, the photographs of documents from Diefenbaker’s office — and Emmett was forced to return to his present, compromised state.
“Funny, ain’t it,” Oscar was saying, his fingers tapping the dash. “But not so funny as a man who never figures out that he’s got to serve something greater than himself. That man doesn’t even know he’s a joke.”
Emmett saw his own face reflected in the passenger window, illuminated by the green glow from the dash. He’d been wearing this face in its slow permutation for forty-two years.
“A selfish man is nothing but a scrap of irony,” Oscar went on, “a thumb-sucking baby!” He gleefully slapped the wheel. “Deluded, silly, self-important! A man who does not serve the state is nothing! Not even a cipher. Unless — ah — unless he belongs to a system that will give him — on loan — a meaning. A function. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Jones. You’re not content to feel the sun on your head, you’re not self-indulgent, you don’t need to think you’re some big-time mystery. That’s why I like you! That’s why I drive you ar
ound.”
“What do you want, Oscar?”
“You can get access to your prime minister’s desk.”
“Even if I could, you don’t really need it on paper.”
“Sure we do! You know that.”
Emmett didn’t respond, so Oscar pressed, “Whas’a matter? Your camera got broken?”
“I told you. I told you, and I meant it. I no longer work for you.”
“Ah, come on. The cause was worth risking your life and now it’s not?”
“That’s right.” The cause, Emmett thought, is exactly the point: it was individual freedom; it was his hatred of being manipulated by whatever power was reigning over him. It was his love of secrets, the ultimate privacy. Funny. It had led him to a lifetime of surveillance.
Oscar leaned toward him without taking his eyes from the road, his smile wryly generous. “Hey. You know what makes the world go round?”
“I don’t know, Oscar. Is it love?”
“Foibles.”
It was a great word in a New York accent. Emmett repeated it, “Foibles.”
“Human foibles. Quirks of character.”
“That doesn’t sound very communist,” Emmett observed.
“Why not? You know, you ought to take a broader view. Don’t be so doctrinaire.”
Emmett laughed.
“That’s right. Laugh and the world laughs with you. What could be more communist?”
“So I should take photographs of the prime minister’s papers as a contribution to an international conspiracy of fuck-ups.”
Oscar raised his thick eyebrows. “Nasty.”
Emmett wondered if the eyebrows and moustache were real. He said, “Take me back to my car, Oscar. I’m going home for dinner.”
Oscar drove on for another mile or so without further conversation. Emmett looked past his reflection to the stars. If a man were to jump out of a spacecraft in outer space, he would have no purchase on his movement; if he began to fall with greater weight on his left foot, he’d “fall” in a perpetual spin to the left and would be helpless to change it. He was now helplessly rotating through Oscar’s zero gravity just as he’d once felt he was falling through the zero gravity of his own country. Oscar handled the steering wheel with a light touch, his funny face set to an unreadable expression. As the miles passed, Emmett took a quick look at the dash, wondering how fast they were going, and if it would be possible to jump out of the car and try to run. He didn’t know where they were, only that they were east of the city. At some point, Oscar had taken a route south of the river. The Chevy almost leapt off the last edge of concrete. Tall yellow weeds scraped at the passenger window as they tore down a gravel road.
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