Snow Job

by William Deverell

  “Not in so many words. But when one carefully parses the phrases used by their imam one can detect a certain unpatriotic subtext.”

  Gerard Lafayette scanned the screens on the wall. No developments, just endless analyses. He wondered if the Ultimate Leader enjoyed keeping them in suspense. He was likely calculating what he could demand in compensation. Hundreds of millions, maybe, which he would personally pocket. “What’s the latest on Erzhan, Anthony? Where do you think he is?”

  “I’d wager he’s in Montreal. One assumes his terrorist cell keeps a safe house there. We’re working on this, but we don’t have a lot of manpower, gentlemen. And lady. There is one man he may seek to connect to. A Vancouver barrister, Brian Pomeroy. Defended him on the assassination charge. A framed photograph of him, in his robes, is hanging on a wall of Erzhan’s living room.”

  “You have eyes on this Pomeroy?”

  “He too has disappeared. An agent sought an appointment with him today, on the pretense of seeking advice on a hit-and-run accident, and learned that Mr. Pomeroy is on some kind of ramble in the Barrens of the Arctic. We have people trying to locate him, but … as I say, we’re likely to go over budget on this one.”

  “That will be looked after,” Finnerty said impatiently.

  “In fact,” said Lafayette, “this may be a time to consider loosening not just the purse but the legal restraints. Forgive me if I remind everyone this is the very kind of crisis that my amendments to the security bill were intended for.”

  “They got shot down, Gerry,” Clara said. “Mr. Crumwell, I want to make sure we’re not turning a blind eye to suspects other than Abzal Erzhan and his confederates. You constantly hear of authorities getting so hooked on a theory they get tunnel vision …”

  Crumwell interrupted, not kindly. “Minister, we are not putting all our eggs in Mr. Erzhan’s basket. There are other distinct possibilities, and I was about to get to them.” A raised hand commanded attention. “Anarchists. Eco-terrorists. Seeking to spoil the deal with Alta International.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking.” Defence Minister McPhee. “Where you’ve got fossil fuel issues, you’ve got the environmentalists. The violent ones, the fringe elements, it doesn’t take much to stir them up. I’m not talking about the Sierra Club or the Green Party.” Murmurs of assent. “But you get people who dynamite dams and bridges, attack refineries. That lot.”

  “In that regard,” Crumwell said, “you may be interested to know that two such individuals — members of the Quatsino Five, who infamously caused millions in losses to one of our major logging firms — are currently employed by the member for Cowichan and the Islands.”

  A nervous shuffling. Clara recalled there’d been some noise around that last year, especially on the call-in shows. Two young people on parole, hired to caretake Margaret Blake’s farm on the Gulf Islands. Unwise of her, but she’d stoutly defended the hiring.

  “In fact, we have someone who’s been, ah, monitoring that situation,” Crumwell said. “One of our most resourceful men.”

  E.K. Boyes turned up the sound on a monitor, a live satellite relay from Igorgrad.

  A desk, the Bhashyistan flag in background, a symbolized hand holding three jagged lightning bolts. A technician was setting up a microphone on the desk, laying out some pages. Music, the national anthem. The technician scurried away. A few moments later, the Ultimate Leader himself entered and sat, picked up the text, frowned over it, then spoke in a deep rasping voice, muted as a translator spoke over it:

  “Weep, oh my comrades. Yes, all Bhashyistan weeps on this, the blackest day in our proud history since the traitorous and bloody assassination of our country’s beloved Great Father. Today I announce the barbarous murder in Canada … by the henchmen of imperialist dogs clinging to power of sixteen … no, seventeen great patriots of our nation.”

  The interpreter was having trouble keeping up, getting it right. Someone gasped: “Seventeen?”

  “Shut up.”

  “… loyal and dedicated advisers in an unarmed vehicle ambushed by the terrorist Abzal Erzhan, who has been welcomed in Canada despite … murdering the Great Father of our country … and also eight crew members of our glorious nation’s presidential plane, which was brought down, though unarmed, by Canadian fighter planes …”

  “What?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Our proud people … my countrymen, do not cower like slaves. We resist! We fight to the last drop of patriotic blood! To that end, as leader of glorious Republic of Bhashyistan, I declare against Canada we are in state of war! God save Bhashyistan!”

  9

  Settled on a sofa by the faux fireplace, Ray DiPalma took another sip of brandy before continuing his rambling discourse. “I had the best ears in Belgrade back then, played a major role in busting Krajzinski, the Balkan wolf — you remember him?”

  Arthur nodded. “One of those Serbian ethnic cleansers.”

  “He earned forty years from the War Crimes Tribunal, and I earned a promotion to run the entire South Danube bureau. Then they suddenly pulled me out, God knows why, and one rotten stolen computer and I’m shelved, stuck in a corner cubicle.”

  Arthur nodded sympathetically. Margaret had excused herself a while ago, was in her office, on the phone or her laptop. An hour earlier, after ushering DiPalma into their flat, she’d asked if he cared for tea, coffee, juice, or something stronger. His disarming politeness in choosing the latter was, to Arthur, a typical mannerism of one who regularly sought escape in drink. As an AA veteran of nearly twenty years, Arthur recognized him as a brother of the bottle, a perception reinforced as DiPalma worked his way through half a litre of wine plus a substantial share of the five-star brandy kept for guests.

  It was as if he needed drink to keep his vocal cords from drying out. He seemed unable to stop talking, mostly about his own sad life, and Arthur wondered if he had crumbled under the pressure of work, the pressure of keeping secrets for a living. An alternative theory was open, that he was performing — “conniving,” as Margaret put it — but if so, DiPalma had missed a distinguished career on stage, one finer than would ever be enjoyed by the theatre major in apartment 10C. But if this was all a clever act, what purpose would it serve?

  “When CSIS got the laptop back they found I’d logged onto a wife-swapping site. It was just an idle thing, I was surfing, but they made an issue of it, showed it to Janice, my wife. That’s when the marriage headed south. And, yes, there were some photos of Janice and me at a nudist camp on Lake Massawippi. She went ballistic when Crumwell asked her about them. It was stupid of me to leave them on the computer. Now they’re monitoring my Internet use, at least at the office — I heard them laughing over a couple of lonely-hearts sites I’d accessed during lunch.”

  So far, DiPalma had not divulged any state secrets, or offered an inside scoop about anything, including this morning’s multiple assassination. Occasionally, he stepped out to the balcony for a smoke, taking his glass with him. But otherwise he sat by the roaring phony fire blathering away about his fall from grace, as unlike a trained spy as one could imagine. Arthur had known many who’d suffered breakdowns; this man matched the type. The heartbreak type. Brian Pomeroy was the worst case he’d known: alcohol, cocaine, he’d gone delusional, spent time in a care facility.

  “This is her picture.” Janice, in a wallet photo folder, blond, winsomely appealing. “She went off with a lobbyist for the mine industry, a rattlesnake, no human values, he’s all about money and power. I phoned her a few times, maybe I got too loud. All I wanted was to talk with her, so I went to her house one afternoon, and of course she complained I was stalking her.”

  DiPalma jumped at the angry shout from next door. “I am not seeing another woman! I am fucking her!” Arthur explained to DiPalma that the aspiring young actor was rehearsing for a comedy about the travails of matrimony.

  DiPalma took a moment to recover. “That sent shivers, a little too close to home.” He fumbled for his
pack of Rothmans, then had to retrieve a couple of cigarettes that spilled to the carpet. When he slid open the balcony door, Arthur could hear the anxious noises of the city, plaintive howls of sirens, giving way to his neighbour crying, “Come on, it’s just a game! Just don’t tie me too tight …”

  He got up to a ringing phone. Wentworth Chance, said the caller ID, the nagging biographer. Arthur let it ring. Wentworth had been his junior counsel on a notorious case, the murder of a judge. In a weak moment, Arthur had agreed to a series of interviews, and this lanky young apostle, who regarded him with an awe befitting the gods, was constantly on the phone, assailing him with questions.

  “I’m a mess, but they don’t know it in the service,” DiPalma said as he came back indoors. “I’m a fairly good actor, I play it cool, straight. I don’t have anyone to talk to any more since Janice took off, that’s the problem. I used to tell her all my woes until she became one of them. I lost my mother when I was six, to cancer. My father, forget it, I didn’t exist for him.” DiPalma drained his glass, looked woefully at the brandy bottle, now empty.

  Arthur directed him away from what he feared would be a maudlin history of childhood trauma. “There’s something you wanted to tell me, Ray. If you want legal advice, I’m prepared to give it. We’re now solicitor and client. I may not, without your permission, divulge what you say.”

  The moment was punctuated by screaming guitars from the flat below. That was met by a banging on the floor next door, which persuaded the rock fan to turn the volume down.

  Suddenly, Margaret raced from her office. “Oh my God, Bhashyistan has declared war on Canada.” She turned on the console TV. “The Calgary Five have been arrested on some trumped-up charge.”

  On the screen, a reporter in the lobby of the Foreign Affairs Building: “They are accused of insulting the Revered Mother, apparently a crime in Bhashyistan. The state police are seeking, quote, the usual fifteen years’ imprisonment. Back to you, Mark.”

  “We’ll continue to stay on top of this dramatic story.” Mark, looking wan and weary, was sharing the camera with a bearded political analyst. “Dr. Jethrop, what’s your reaction to that?”

  “Well, I’m sure it will take them all of five minutes to convict these innocent Canadians, who are obviously intended as pawns in a scheme of criminal extortion. Insulting the president’s mother, that is utterly farcical. Bhashyistan’s institutions of justice are an insult. The entire country is an insult.”

  “The cabinet has remained behind closed doors ever since Bhashyistan’s declaration of war,” Mark said. “What do you think their reaction should be?”

  The expert hesitated, stumped. “I shall leave that up to wiser heads than me.”

  Cut to the Alberta premier, urging swift and decisive action. Cut to the Liberal Opposition leader, describing Bhashyistan as a terrorist nation. The U.S. secretary of state: her government will always stand beside its allies and neighbours. The British prime minister. The French president.

  Reaction from people on a Toronto street. “I guess we have to put our trust in the government.” Others were less typically Canadian: “Let’s show them who they’re dealing with.” “Go in there and take them out.” DiPalma watched all this with a quizzical frown, then jumped as the phone sounded, Pierètte’s ring. Margaret took it in her office.

  “Okay, Ray, what did you want to tell me?”

  He played with another cigarette, then looked up. “Abzal Erzhan didn’t just disappear. He was disappeared.” He slurred that slightly: dish-appeared.

  “How do you know?”

  “You ought to talk to Vana Erzhan. She wanted to see a lawyer, but the cops encouraged her not to. You should also talk to their landlord, Mr. Zandoo.”

  “How could this be arranged?”

  “Julien Chambleau.” Margaret’s friend, the Bloc Québécois member for Iberville-Chambly. “They live in his riding.”

  Arthur nodded. “So it would be appropriate if he visited.” He was tantalized by this intrigue. His planned getaway to the West Coast might have to be made brief.

  “Who do you think might have disappeared him, Ray?”

  “I’m trying to get something on that.”

  Margaret breezed back, woke up Arthur’s desktop computer. “Pierètte says to check out YouTube.”

  All Arthur knew about YouTube was that people posted all sorts of twaddle there, video clips of kids playing dress-up and puppies being bathed. Margaret typed in the link she’d written down, and in a moment the Bhashyistan flag appeared, words superimposed: A Production of Third Son of Ultimate Leader Films.

  DiPalma put on a pair of wire-rim spectacles. “Third son of six. Mukhamet Khan Ivanovich. Computer sciences degree from the University of Dusseldorf.” The CSIS agent might be a wreck, but he was a well-informed one.

  The Ultimate Leader’s webwise progeny was narrator of this film, a fat young fellow with thick glasses and a multicoloured skullcap. “Here we have rooftop terrace of Igorgrad Grand Hotel, and here you seeing tables and umbrellas for tourists for gazing on beautiful city below and mountains. Over there, in Park of the Revered Mother, is her famous statue.” A fifty-foot pyramid topped with a gold-plated Amazonian figure wielding an axe and carrying a swaddled baby, a load of firewood strapped to her back.

  “Close up, here are busts of great heroes of Bhashyistan.” An array of them on the low wall surrounding the terrace. “And here is rooftop swimming pool for use only in summer, and here is bar.” A wooden structure with stools. “Here is hidden video camera in case of spies or enemies of the state.” Its lens was one of a pair of glass eyes in a bust of the Great Father. “And here is pickup for sound.” Mukhamet bent, pointed to a small microphone under a table. “Surprise, we are not so backward here in Bhashyistan.”

  DiPalma seemed impressed, a little puckered whistle. Then Mukhamed’s cherubic smile filled the screen. “And day before yesterday, here is rock-solid proof how our ungrateful guests insulted Revered Mother.”

  A dimmer, dusky light, the Calgarians relaxing with drinks, five men enjoying a sunset.

  “Eight point five.”

  “Nah, doesn’t beat a Prairie sunset.”

  “What’s that weird shit on the pyramid over there? Mad Igor in a dress?”

  “Looks like an ape carrying an axe.”

  “That’s the Great Mother. It’s in one of their brochures, some bullshit fairy tale about how she went out to the forest to gather kindling and lay down in a field of flowers and gave birth to the Ultimate Leader.” Laughter.

  “He wants another half a billion on closing.”

  “Has to be untraceable, that’s going to be a bitch.”

  “Hey, keep your voices down.”

  “Paranoid, Clyde?”

  “You bet I’m paranoid.” A glance toward the bar. “Five days in this shithole. Don’t dare talk in the rooms.”

  Clyde and two others rose, moved off, out of sight, presumably to confer about Igor’s extortion fee.

  Back to Mukhamed. “So you seeing why are being tried Canadian running dogs for unbearable insult to great lady of People’s Republic of Bhashyistan. Also notice scheme for bribing our glorious president. Stay tuned for more breaking news, this is Mukhamet Khan Ivanovich, reporting from Igorgrad.”

  Arthur was spinning when he finally got to bed, after midnight, after DiPalma practically had to be carted out to a taxi. Sleep was slow in coming, stalled by excitement and by a long bedtime colloquy — mostly about DiPalma, of whom Margaret was highly distrustful.

  “He’s just too damn eager to betray CSIS and the oath he swore on joining it. It could be a diabolical scheme. That stolen computer could have been set up to make it seem plausible that’s he’s embittered against his employer. His stage director probably thought up the klutziness, the heavy drinking, the nervous breakdown. It’s all too clever.”

  A fan of spy thrillers, she’d read John LeCarré’s entire oeuvre. DiPalma was a spy who would someday come in from the cold, she
insisted, like his fictional counterpart, who’d played the turncoat.

  Arthur was entranced by the intrigue, didn’t want to buy into her doubts, preferred to buy what DiPalma was selling. He was encouraged to believe the fellow could unveil dark, thrilling secrets, high-level scandals. He begged Margaret to believe he was an excellent judge of character, a faculty that had rarely failed him. Like a mantra, he repeated, “What have we got to lose?”

  10

  It was nine-thirty, the weary back end of a day of unrelenting hell. For the first time in his political career Huck Finnerty regretted the ambition and circumstances that had propelled him to his country’s highest office. He felt stymied, freighted with self-doubt, by a sense he wasn’t the man for this job. He badly needed a drink, a steadier, but if he slipped out to the john one more time they’d be wondering if he needed a bladder operation.

  The martyr DuWallup, accepting he was out of it, had wished them well and gone to bed. But a few more advisers were here, E.K. Boyes’s crew. Others kept popping in, dispatches, questions, consultations. Breaks were becoming more frequent, people pacing, conferring in corners, weary laments, an occasional desperate laugh.

  Finnerty had got angry on the phone to A.J. Quilter. “You’re goddamned right I’m concerned! You don’t have a monopoly on concern! We’re busting our ass working on this!” Finnerty had turned him over to Crumwell of CSIS, who was calmer, got Quilter to book overnight flights to Ottawa for a couple of his people who’d done stints in Bhashyistan.

  The P.M. had brusquely vetoed a proposal to bring in the official opposition to make common front. He couldn’t believe Cloudy McRory wanted to be anywhere near this stinkpile, nor did he want McRory sitting around telling him what to do; Lafayette was bad enough. Mr. Cool, unflustered, no sweat patches on his shirt, and with a smile no less mocking than that of the sculpted Great Father on the terrace of the Igorgrad Grand. Even Hitler in his bunker showed more despair.