The Only Café

by Linden MacIntyre

  Father Cyril didn’t know much about his roots but he knew his history, his politics. It has been the fate of Lebanon, these invasions. From the dawn of recorded time.

  He’d arrived in the country in February with some journalists. He’d travelled with them, north and south. South of Tyre the Israelis had offered hospitality. He would never forget the sophistication, the open-mindedness, the kindness they showed.

  Years later Pierre would respectfully suggest, “Perhaps you should have been in Beirut in 1982.” Then Father Cyril would remind Pierre of the public response in Israel to the September massacres, the public outcry, the demonstrations, a hundred thousand chanting for accountability. And they would get it—the Kahan Commission boldly naming names, calling for the dismissal of important people who shared responsibility for Sabra and Shatila, including Ariel Sharon.

  Imagine that in Syria? Egypt? Iran? Never in a thousand years.

  “Are you referring to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon?” he’d asked.

  Father Cyril had just smiled.

  A whale surfaced near the boat, and then another. But they were quickly gone. It was time to move. He had much to do now. It would take a long time to fill the empty pages of his journal, but he’d made a start. And he’d have time for the project, perhaps a real book. Who could tell what new avenues would open up now that he was about to be an idle rich man.

  The idea boosted his spirits. But then he thought of Ari and it was as if a cloud had moved in front of the sun. He studied the horizon. The sun was now a scarlet disc hovering, its reflection on the sea a fiery furrow streaking toward the land. The surface of the water was still, viscous, black as he approached the harbour mouth. Beneath the boat small crabs scurried in the sand.

  He slowed the boat to idle, retrieved his phone. He called Ethan but there was no answer. He left a message.

  “Ethan, call me. Couple of things. I want to give you a heads-up about something. The reporter, Rankin, tracked me down and I’m going to talk to her. Prudently. Just trust me. I can give you my rationale. Call me.”

  Okay, he thought. I’ve upped the ante. Your call, Brawley.

  Because he was preoccupied he didn’t notice that his arrival was being observed closely from a car parked on the nearby hillside road. He didn’t see a door swing open, a man emerge and stretch after what had obviously been a long wait.

  The tide was flat. There was no wind. Pierre secured the boat, then stepped back into the cabin, stowed the journal in his briefcase. He retrieved the whisky bottle, began to pour a drink. He felt the boat move, a rocking motion, from someone stepping down from wharf to washboard. Then a heavy thump as someone large descended from the washboard to the deck.

  He turned toward the doorway, the bottle in his hand.

  But it wasn’t Angus Beaton. It was Ari standing there, smiling, his hand raised slightly in what might have been a greeting, or a gesture of apology.

  31.

  “This is excellent!” Suzanne was glowing. She stood behind her desk for a moment, then walked around in front, held out her arms.

  Cyril stepped into them. She then stepped back but caught his hands. “Close the door.”

  He closed the door. She wrapped her arms around him again and this time kissed him warmly on the lips. He felt giddy, the warmth, the fullness of her—what was the word—her authenticity. His new contract.

  “You had nothing to do with this?” he said when she let go.

  “Well, I didn’t stand in the way of it. But it was all Hughes and Savage. And yourself, of course. You’re on your way, sweetheart.”

  “Well, it’s only for six months.”

  “Six months here? A lifetime. Cyril, I was a stringer for this outfit for two years before they offered me the time of day. And that was only because I was approached by CBS.”

  “And of course you let them know.”

  “Of course I did. Last place I wanted to be was in an American meat grinder but they didn’t have to know that.”

  “Well,” he said. “I guess I’d better be good.”

  “You can start by bringing in that Ari guy. You help us get this Ari fellow on TV and you’ll be golden for the rest of your career. Now, where’s Nader? Have you told him?”

  “No. Not yet. I just came downstairs from signing. But I had a text from him—he’s out front.”

  “Let’s go then. Can’t keep the spooks waiting, can we.”

  The hotel was walking distance. Cyril had expressed surprise that the spies would want to meet them in a hotel suite and not at their offices. Suzanne had explained that the CSIS people don’t like outsiders wandering around their premises.

  “So what if they’ve wired the hotel room?”

  “Not a problem,” Suzanne replied. “We have nothing to hide.”

  The hotel lobby was intense with people checking in, checking out, dragging luggage on tiny wheels, bellhops hauling massive over-loaded carts behind them. Cyril was afloat on a sensation that was almost erotic, a journalist on his way to a clandestine meeting with secret agents. The dim, vast and vaguely intimidating lobby was like a movie set. He had become, on the strength of a couple of signatures on a brief document, a journalist. No, no. Too pretentious. A reporter. That’s how he’d describe himself, the way Suzanne and Hughes always referred to themselves. Reporters. “In our day,” Hughes told him once, “journalists were foreigners.”

  Waiting for the elevator he kept thinking: If people only knew!

  Suzanne knocked lightly on the hotel room door and there was instant movement on the inside. The door opened. A friendly face, smiling broadly—a hand extended. “Come in, come in. Right on time.”

  The man turned to Cyril. “We’ve never met but you must be Cyril. I’m Andy. These two I know only too well.”

  He grinned at Suzanne, gripped Nader’s elbow, led them in.

  “Nader, Suzanne, I think you know Bill, and of course you know McGuire. Guys—this is Cyril…what was the last name again?”

  “Cormier.”

  A woman who seemed slightly hesitant stood, nodded. “I’m Heather,” she said. Shook hands all around, though she paused before reaching out to Nader. He grasped her hand and shook it emphatically.

  A tall man in a rumpled linen jacket—Bill—remained seated. He smiled, but his manner was reserved. “We’ve laid on some lunch,” he said. “There’s drinks and coffee—why don’t we grab something before we start talking.”

  There was a table with a large silver platter of sandwiches, a second platter full of raw vegetables—cauliflower and broccoli, carrot sticks and peppers; a vast bowlful of ice and water and cans of non-alcoholic drinks. Introductory chit-chat mostly dealt with the current state of the media, the precariousness of the business model and the ongoing revolution in technology. Cyril gathered that McGuire had once been in the journalism business.

  The man in the rumpled jacket, Bill, finally interrupted. “We’re all busy people,” he said. “So maybe we should get on with why we’re here. Of course there’s the usual understanding, right? Off the record, okay? Understood that we realize certain bits and pieces will lodge in your fertile brains and become part of your general background knowledge. But nothing for attribution in any way, shape or form. Okay?”

  “Of course,” Suzanne said, her tone slightly starchy. “We wouldn’t be in this room if there wasn’t a certain element of trust all around.”

  Andy, his friendliness undiminished, said, “Absolutely. We’ve been through this before, most usefully in ’06, during the Toronto Eighteen thing. And of course nobody is recording. Right?”

  “Not unless you are,” said Nader with a laugh. “And I think you mean the Toronto Two thing.”

  “I think three is a better number,” said Bill. “One casts a wide net sometimes when the specific target is unknown.”

  “Which is always problematical,” said Nader.

  Suzanne said, “Okay guys, let’s get to the here and now. What can you tell us about your perception o
f the homegrown radical business six years after the Toronto Eighteen or Two or Three or whatever.”

  “It’s okay if I take notes?” Cyril asked.

  They all looked at him and he put his pen back in his pocket.

  There followed a lengthy dissertation by Andy on the inflammatory potential of events in Syria and Iraq, the unfocused nature of what had seemed, at the outset, to be a principled rebellion against the Assad dictatorship.

  “It’s chickens coming home to roost,” said Nader, who digressed back to the First World War and the post-war colonial configurations that took no account of the tribal or ethnic or religious realities on the ground.

  Suzanne reached out and patted Nader’s knee.

  “We know all that, love. We’ve all seen Lawrence of Arabia. Let’s use our time here to see how these guys can help us advance the story we’ve been working on. Why don’t you go ahead?”

  “Sure,” Nader said. “Sorry. I get a bit wound up sometimes. But if I’m getting wound up then what’s going on in the mosques and madras-sas everywhere, including here, isn’t so hard to figure out. And so, basically…”

  Cyril listened, struggling to imprint in memory everything that Nader had to say.

  “Just to go back briefly to where I was interrupted, the problems in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon and Jordan—let’s not get into Palestine—have deep, deep political roots. To the politics add sectarian differences within Islam itself. We understand the challenge of dealing with that from the point of view of national security and the danger of making a security risk worse by using the wrong kind of tactics—surveillance, infiltration—to confront it.”

  Bill cleared his throat. “Well, hopefully we have the kind of oversight to keep us on our toes…”

  “And hopefully you accept that we’re a legitimate part of that oversight,” Suzanne said.

  “Absolutely,” said Andy. “We’re meeting with you because we see no conflict between the interests of security and accountability. The line that’s always difficult to establish is where accountability compromises operational effectiveness.”

  Bill spoke specifically to Nader. “So let’s be clear and candid here. We know that you have great contacts in the various Muslim communities and I’m pretty sure you know and probably talk to a number of the people that we have concerns about. So why don’t you tell us what, in an ideal situation, you want us to help you with?”

  Nader exchanged a brief glance with Suzanne. “You want me to keep on with this?”

  “You’re doing great,” she said.

  “People in the local mosques are very aware of the attempts to infiltrate them by the Salafists and other extremists. But there’s another concern that’s just as large—that there has been an effective infiltration of various mosques by people working for you guys and that certain of your people are stirring things up for purposes of—and this is not my word, but theirs—entrapment.”

  “Understood,” said Andy. “Always a hard call. Going back to the Toronto Eighteen-or-However-Many, was your friend, Mubin Sheikh, a concerned citizen or a provocateur when he worked with us while he was gaining the confidence of the ringleaders? Were the original eighteen all potential terrorists or mostly just a silly BOG…”

  “A what?” Suzanne asked.

  “A BOG…a bunch of guys. Are we dealing with cultural and sectarian tensions or serious recruitment of young people who will turn into problems for Canadians and Americans and Brits or…?”

  “Fair enough,” said Nader. After another glance in Suzanne’s direction, he carried on. “We could talk all day without a serious disagreement about the problems and the possible solutions. But we’re working on a story and, with the understanding that the ground rules here work both ways, background and all that—part of our story, and part of the reason for being here, is getting to the bottom of rumours we’ve heard from credible sources that CSIS has retained, on contract, a security consultant with deep experience and continuing connections to a foreign intelligence agency. And that this individual is running agents that work for you in the community.”

  The room fell silent.

  “You mention Mubin Sheikh,” Nader said. “He did great work. For you, for the community and for us. But I know you had concerns that he turned into a bit of a loose cannon. The word is that the next Mubin would be on a shorter leash. So if you really do have a shorter leash, you know or should know what he or they are really up to.”

  Cyril could hear the hum of a vacuum cleaner in the hallway just outside the door. Everybody looked toward the door, as if waiting for the noise to go away.

  “So what’s your question, Nader?” said Andy.

  “Okay. The question in the community is who is this guy and what is he up to. And who’s holding his leash—if there is a leash.”

  There was a long silence as the vacuum cleaner faded.

  “You want to answer that, Bill?” said Andy.

  “Well, right off the top. Normally, whether this were true or false you know we’d never comment. Right? But I’m going to be up front in this case—this is news to us. Just the existence of that kind of rumour is as disturbing to me as it is to you folks. Do you want to elaborate a little bit?”

  “Not really,” Nader said. “If it’s just talk, end of story.”

  “Can I ask, which foreign intelligence service?”

  Nader and Suzanne exchanged a long glance. Suzanne nodded.

  “They suspect Mossad. Or IDF intelligence.”

  There was a round of laughter, Nader laughing with them.

  “See,” said Nader, when he stopped chuckling, “I don’t think these people ever heard of Sayeret Matkal.”

  “Say what?” said Bill with a broad smile.

  Nader stared at him for, perhaps, fifteen seconds. “I think you heard me.”

  Bill seemed fascinated by some aspect of the ceiling and when he spoke he continued to study it. “When I was a boy, my old dad had an expression he’d use when he thought my imagination was running away with my better judgment.”

  He stood. “He’d say, ‘Billy my boy, you bin’ readin’ too damn many comic books.’ ”

  Andy laughed. “Stay in touch guys, you know how to reach us if you come across anything interesting.”

  “It was not a denial,” said Nader.

  They were walking quickly along the busy sidewalk. Cyril struggled to keep up with Suzanne and Nader, but was also troubled by two competing instincts—to believe the friendly public servants or his now infuriated friends.

  “Suzanne, I can’t believe how easily they sucked us into mentioning the Israelis.”

  “Oh fuck off, Nader. I’m thinking and I’d suggest you follow suit.”

  “Okay. Okay. It’s the fact that you haven’t said anything since we left that place that’s making me nervous.”

  “Well, Nader, you should be nervous. There’s nothing wrong with being nervous. And as far as mentioning the Israelis goes, it was my call, and it was the right call.”

  “It’s a short trip from being nervous to being scared.”

  She stopped walking so suddenly that Cyril almost stepped on her heel. “Is that what you’re thinking? That I’m scared? Jesus, Nader. Really?”

  He raised his arms. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I never meant to imply…”

  “I know that,” she said. “But there are certain denials that are unnerving. Either they’re dead certain we could never get to the truth if we had a hundred years and all the resources in the world to work on this, or they know with certainty that we’re dead wrong. We have to think long and hard about which one we’re facing here.”

  She walked on.

  “Or,” said Nader, “they have their heads in the sand and this guy is rogue or a foreign plant.”

  “Why would the Israelis take the political risk of planting a spy in Canada?”

  “Because Canada is super sympathetic toward Israel right now, so the political risk would be zero. Even when Canada wasn’t so frien
dly they risked forging or stealing Canadian passports for past operations. You know they’ve done that.”

  Suzanne stopped again, then turned to smile at Cyril. “How are you enjoying journalism so far?”

  “Great.”

  “By the way, what did Andy have to say when he took you aside as we were leaving? You can tell me it’s none of my business.”

  “He asked about my name, the Cormier and the Bashir. And then he asked if I was related to Pierre Cormier.”

  Nader laughed. “As if they don’t know!”

  “Anyway, he told me that shortly before my father disappeared, they’d met with him. He had something he wanted to tell them, something that was bothering him. But Andy said he never got the opportunity.”

  “Well, that’s interesting,” said Nader. “Did he mention who met with your father?”

  “No, just said ‘we.’ I guess I should have followed up a bit. Right?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe not,” Suzanne said. “We have to regroup and figure out where we stand.”

  “Where we stand,” Nader said, “is in the middle of a major story.”

  “But do we have the goods to tell it?”

  Suzanne draped an arm over Nader’s shoulder and Nader looped an arm around her waist and they walked on like that.

  “We’re gonna have to bring Savage into the picture,” she said.

  “I’m aware of that,” Nader said.

  Cyril examined his new contract, a single page, the pittance he’d be paid. Luckily money wasn’t a major factor at the moment. Pierre’s will had taken care of that. It was the job description that excited him. Associate Producer. Reality needs witnesses, he thought. Who can I share this with? His mother, but her overreaction would be embarrassing. Gloria? It wouldn’t matter to her, not really. She’d be friendly, warm perhaps. But she’d resent the distraction of his call. He could fall through a crack in the earth and she’d consider it a distraction from her all-important files.