“Canadians?” Pierre said, and smiled.
The four men at the table went silent, looking up at him. One nodded.
“Cape Breton?” Pierre said. All four laughed.
“Pierre Cormier,” he said. “I’m with Draycor. Can I join you?”
“Cormier,” said one, gesturing toward a chair. “That’s a pretty common name where I come from. What Cormier might you be?”
“New Waterford,” Pierre said, offering his hand. “But my ex-wife’s people are from near Mabou. I spent a lot of time there. You know the place?”
“Well fuck me,” the miner said. “Know the place?”
“You fuckin’ people,” said one, laughing. “You’re all related.”
“I’d heard there was someone here from Mabou,” Pierre said. “A MacIsaac?”
“You got it. Sandy MacIsaac from Mabou Harbour.” He held out his hand.
“I’m sure I’ve seen you at the West Mabou dance,” Pierre said.
“Quite possible.”
The story of the strike that had turned into a riot and a massacre came out slowly, and that it came out at all was because they’d trusted him. He was a company man, a lawyer, but he was a Canadian and he had a coincidental tribal link with one of them.
Over coffee Pierre explained that he and his ex-wife had spent many happy summers back where Sandy came from and, in their better days, they’d schemed about retiring there. That the marriage had ended (amicably) only added to his credibility. These miners understood such things, the demands of work, the absences.
Sandy agreed to walk him through the battle scene, an open space just outside the chain-link fence that separated the mine property from the cluster of shacks where local workers lived with their families. He and the other ex-pat miners had watched the confrontation from a second-storey window inside the compound. They had been able to see some of the action outside the fence and they’d definitely heard the helicopters and the gunfire.
Sandy said he’d never witnessed anything like that before, the brutality. And he’d worked all over, Indonesia, the Congo. “They usually keep the lid on pretty tight in places like this.”
“So what went wrong?”
Sandy shrugged. “It was ridiculous from the get-go. If we had known…”
“Known what?”
Sandy was uncomfortable but told the story anyway, as well as he could remember it. One of the local miners was getting married. The Canadians on his crew passed the hat and collected maybe two hundred dollars—hard currency. Some shit disturber heard about it and started agitating about the differential in wages paid to the white guys and the earnings of the locals. It went from there.
“It was nuts,” Sandy said.
“Yes,” Pierre agreed. “Quite so. Eight killed.”
“Even women,” said Sandy bitterly.
Pierre nodded.
“Life means fuck all around here,” Sandy said.
“How many people know about this, Sandy?”
“Most people here. We don’t talk about it, though.”
“That’s wise.” He grasped Sandy’s arm. “Nobody would believe it anyway.”
“There’s also a rumour here that the order for the military crackdown came from Canada. From the company. Is that true?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“It’s the talk.”
“Talk where?”
“Among the guys, mostly. Makes sense. What we did, passing the hat, didn’t have to end like that.”
“But where’s the so-called information coming from, about Toronto?”
Sandy stepped away, stared off into the distance for a moment. He shrugged, laughed. But when he turned to face Pierre, he wasn’t smiling. “I feel like I’m in a witness box.”
“Sorry,” Pierre said. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. Forget I asked. Okay?”
“I’d better mosey,” Sandy said. “I’m on graveyard all this week. Need to get a bit of shut-eye.”
Pierre called after him as he walked away. “I’d like to keep this conversation between the two of us. Okay?”
Sandy just kept walking.
He left the geologist’s video to near the end of his investigation. Pierre was not naïve about the objectivity of cameras. The camera was another point of view—the perspective of the man behind it. But the information on the recording would be raw, unedited and uncorrupted by human memory and the distorted retrospective of self-preservation.
Footage from the incident was mostly silent. He wasn’t sure what had happened to the sound and the camera operator was unable to explain. In any case, the audio would have disturbed the information because sound disturbs emotion in the listener. What Pierre wanted was the simple physical detail of what was happening in the moment.
He paid particular attention to the women. The death of women in a war or any kind of conflict always complicated explanation. Who shoots women? Savages.
Fucking savages, you people. Oh, how well he knew the phrase.
The woman with the laundry basket caught his eye on his first time through the video and he’d stopped the tape. He’d stared in disbelief. A laundry basket?
He’d leaned back in the chair, staring at the screen. A chill rippled through his shoulders. He rewound, pressed play.
There were other women, but she was so incongruous, hurrying around the perimeter, trying to get by, carrying the wicker laundry basket. She was wearing a baggy blouse and an ankle-length loose skirt. Her feet were bare. There were women wearing jeans and baseball caps but some were dressed like the woman with the basket, obviously local. But unlike her they were engaged and angry, faces furious. Some of them were throwing stones. The woman with the basket was clearly not involved. She was on the edge of the action but she dominated Pierre’s attention, activating memories of another woman with a laundry basket. On her toes. Arms extended as if in supplication or about to fly.
The images converged and became one picture. A woman lurching forward, arms extended, laundry basket tumbling.
He stopped the tape again. The image was blurry, the woman ghostlike, and that was worse. He pressed play again and she disappeared. The wandering eye of the camera had moved on to action that was more relevant. Later in the video he was sure that he had spotted her, a crumpled figure among others. But he wasn’t sure. And it shouldn’t have mattered. She wasn’t part of the event that he was attempting to reconstruct or deconstruct. She was an element in the statistical account but she wasn’t relevant. But he was unable to stop thinking about her.
That evening he had a drink with Harrison. Cancer diet be damned.
“I watched the video. There was another woman…”
“Yes,” said Harrison. “There were several women. At least two of them from town—I’ve seen them at the public meetings. Politicals, without a doubt.”
“There was one with a laundry basket.” Pierre tried to smile, to convey a sense of weary disbelief.
Harrison seemed puzzled. “Laundry basket? I didn’t notice that.”
“Maybe I was seeing things,” Pierre said. And for an hour or so he savoured the possibility that the woman was imaginary. But even if she was, she came from somewhere, a memory he’d managed to suppress for decades. Now revived, threatening to unlock other memories.
Before he’d gone to bed he went back to his temporary office and rewound the tape, played it again in slow motion until he found her. He played it again. And again. And when he returned to Toronto he took the tape home with him. And watched it again and again and again.
He could easily have ducked. He could have delegated this to Kennedy. He could have played the health card. I’ve got cancer. Lois would have put her foot down, insisted. We don’t fuck around with cancer. Even Brawley would have understood. He was obsessive about what he called “plumbing.” But Pierre really had no choice. Early in his life he’d learned the importance of control. Had he taken charge decisively when he should have, this might not have happened, this fi
asco. Had he been in control in September 1982, would that catastrophe have happened?
This is the last time you’re going to ask me a question like that. You know exactly what to do. Was that what Brawley said? Or were the words from another time, another place? Or do time and place make any difference to destiny?
He tried to imagine the violence at Puncak but the imaginary scene was eclipsed by memories. Beirut. He is again staring into darkness broken by starbursts of light above the flat punctured roofs, the rutted, littered streets. He can even hear the pop and rattle of the gunfire, the shrieking, the grinding clanking Merkava changing its position, gun turret swivelling toward the wretchedness. You know exactly what to do. They’d all laughed manically, everyone in the observation post. Including the Israelis who were staring at the carnage through binoculars. Exactly. What to do. They’d laughed and he’d laughed with them.
Too much. Too much to think about. He could not afford indulging in self-doubt. There were facts to find, a libretto to prepare for what would be a stern process of accountability. Draycor had his back, he knew it. He had the confidence of everyone who mattered. They told him it was his call. And it was his job to get the facts, report back. And, if necessary, let Communications work with Legal to refine a Strategy for Going Forward.
Your call, Pierre.
Three words. The lawyer, never mind the warrior, should have recognized the potential peril in those words. But he hadn’t anticipated that a distant Draycor manager would transmit panic to a minister of government who would in turn relay it to a roomful of paramilitary commanders anxious to unleash their over-armed, overstimulated thugs who were overly impatient for any kind of action, especially against a rabble of undisciplined protesters backed up by wives and kids.
Your call, Pierre.
And he made it. So suck it up, he told himself.
There had been a three-hour wait at the airport in Jakarta and he’d spent the time in a bar reflecting on the consequences of a careless act of generosity by some sentimental miners from Canada. A story to be reserved for the special moment when a human interest angle might leaven the predictable investigative thrust. A story that was human in its warmth, though tragic in its outcome. It didn’t take him long to finish his report, the last part of which was forensic in the detail of how eight people died in a violent rampage by a unit of the Indonesian special forces, the notorious Kopassus.
For the company, the story would be exculpatory. The media would move on. It was unlikely that in these days of tight budgets an editor would undertake to send reporters to a place so far away, especially when the incident had hardly caused a ripple in the market. Gold was hot and getting hotter. Eight shit-disturbers gunned down by a squad of psychopaths could easily be written off as another minor example of the inhumanity of distant places ruled by cops and soldiers and dictators. But for Pierre a single image would continue to roil the darkest places in his memory.
The woman’s body flung forward, the shocked expression on her face. A pretty face. A young face. And whatever she’d been carrying, suddenly suspended in mid-air in front of her. A basket. Clothing. Clothespins. The spinning body, the expression of astonishment. Perhaps the videographer, amateur and frightened, judging by the shakiness, didn’t even notice her. What was she doing there? Returning from the river maybe? Rushing to the shelter of a nearby hovel over ground that had always been a part of her safe, unchanging place.
She was on the edge of the frame, the important action was happening about fifty feet away—men with clubs and stones confronting armed commandos. But Pierre couldn’t stop staring at her, and the flung basket, what looked like children’s clothing. The flurry of clothespins suspended in the nothingness around her.
6.
He’d been home two days, much of the time holed up in his den. He was thinking about deception, truths untold, and lies. Is there a difference? Yes, he answered. There is a difference that requires perspective that only time provides. But what about deception that becomes a lie because of the chemistry of self-preservation? Is it a lie if a listener is hearing what he needs or wants to hear? Who is morally responsible, the liar or the listener?
He was near the bottom of another Scotch. The bottle was down by about a third. True. No denying that. He picked it up to pour another but put it down again, capsized by untold truths from the dark side of the memory wall, 1982. And the recent truths from Western New Guinea. Truths untold from a cancer treatment centre.
Once again he fished the prescription from the pile of paper on his desk. He squinted. It was still illegible. But he knew what the doctor had written there because he had asked for it. Demanded it, in fact. Androgen suppression. Chemical castration.
He sighed and put the prescription back on the pile, stood and walked toward the bedroom, sat on the side of the bed. Lois woke, rubbed his back. “Come to bed.”
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “We should see a gynaecologist.”
She chuckled. “Could we talk about it later?”
“I might have a medical issue in that department.”
She sat up. “What?”
“Nothing major, but we should be thinking about clinical options. Go back to sleep.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like I said, nothing major. Man stuff. Testosterone, libido. Nothing that concerns you.”
“Excuse me?” She got up, walked around the bed, stood looking down at him.
So he explained late into the night, merciful deceptions concealed in half-truths. Because, after all, nobody, including Pierre, could know the whole truth.
The Only Café was quiet. He stood at the bar, ordered a beer, watched the door. He wasn’t sure what brought him back. Perhaps the wall of memory, 1982, perhaps the suspicion that the fat stranger, Ari, might know something from behind that—so far—impenetrable wall. There was no sign of him.
The young bartender seemed friendly so Pierre asked him how well he knew Ari.
“As well as anybody knows him.”
“Has he been around?”
“Not lately. How do you know Ari?”
Pierre was startled. That accent. It couldn’t be, but it clearly was.
“I met him here, a few weeks back. I’ve been away, on business.”
“What kind of business?”
There could be no mistaking either the accent, or the wary manner.
“Mining. I’m guessing you’re Israeli too?”
The young man frowned. “I’m a Canadian.”
“Ah.”
“Do you know Israel?”
“I know Israel. Where did you meet Ari?”
“Like you, here. And yes, I was born in Israel. But I wanted to see the world. I needed a job for a while. Ari knows the owner. We talk now and then. You’re from?”
“Nova Scotia.”
“And how do you know Israel?”
“I have roots in Lebanon.”
“Ah, Lebanon.” The bartender smiled. “I’ve been to Lebanon.”
“What were you doing in Lebanon?”
The bartender shrugged. “What do Israelis usually do in Lebanon?”
Pierre drained the beer glass and stood. “Tell Ari if you see him that Pierre was here. The Lebanese guy.” He smiled.
“Pierre. I’ll tell him.”
“And your name?”
“Tal.”
They shook hands.
The chiming telephone caused him to rise quickly from where he’d been sitting at the cabin table, staring at his journal. He staggered, light-headed, perhaps from the rocking motion of the boat. The missed call was from Lois so he called her back.
“How are you?” she asked. He could hear the tension in her voice.
“I’m fine. Drifting offshore. I just saw the most amazing pod of whales.”
“Ah,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’re getting the papers out there.”
“No.”
“Just as well,” she said. “The company has been in th
e news a couple of times. Your name came up.”
He sat. “What about me.”
“Nothing to worry about,” she said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. I miss you.”
“How did my name come up?”
“Oh, that thing in Indonesia. Something about shareholders.”
“What paper,” he said.
“The Globe. Business section. Now don’t go getting anxious. You’re supposed to be resting.”
“Okay,” he said. “We’ve been in the papers before. How are you feeling?”
“Never better,” she said. “A little queasy in the mornings but when I remember what’s causing it I get all blissy.”
“That’s great,” he said, now anxious to get off the phone. “I miss you too.”
“Love you,” she said. “Come home soon.”
He opened up his browser, found the story: Draycor Shareholders Demanding Answers. All predictable but for the anonymous source quoted four paragraphs down: A management committee, alarmed by a potential hit in share prices…an internal investigation to determine the sequence of events that led to the massacre at Puncak Mine in Western New Guinea…sources…anonymity…not authorized…
He called Ethan.
“I just saw the story in the Globe. What the hell…I did the investigation. I wrote the complete report and I briefed everybody on everything there is to know. Everyone signed off on it. What’s this?”
“A story from out there somewhere. Where you are, I think. Somebody talked about Puncak. Some eyewitness. Stirred things up a bit. It’ll blow over.”
“But an internal investigation? What’s that about?”
Ethan sounded calm. “They have to say something to cover their ass. When the time is right they’ll release your full report and it’ll be the investigation they’re talking about. Okay? Otherwise everything is cool.”
“If everything is cool, I might as well come home.”
“Look. We’ve been down this road before many times. This too will pass, as my grandma used to say. You’re okay?”
“I’m not especially okay.”
The Only Café Page 6