Snow Job

by William Deverell

  She realized she’d been thinking like a politician, not a leader. It would be wrong to gamble against harsh odds just to win an election. Obscenely wrong.

  “Thank you, Percival.”

  A full bladder aroused Charley Thiessen from his hotel bed on Sunday morning, and he padded off to the bathroom in the grip of a mighty hangover. His watch said half past ten, and he was pretty sure he was still in Yellowknife.

  Sitting on the can, ignoring a ringing phone, clutching a head that felt as big as a basketball, he trawled for recent memory. There’d been an aboriginal ceremony in the afternoon, which went off okay, but then the Château tape was aired nationally, and everything fell apart. At the campaign rally, they’d sat on their hands, embarrassed for him. His lawyer jokes fell flat.

  He’d fled into the night, into the bitter cold, by a back door, avoiding a small hunting pack of reporters. Hiding his face in the fur cowl of his parka, he’d found his way into Old Town, into a tavern full of boisterous hardrock miners, nobody giving him a hoot, nobody caring about the city dude slouched in a corner, ordering doubles.

  And as he stumbled out at closing … yes, that’s when he saw the aurora borealis dancing like God’s fingers in the sky. That’s when he’d made a major life-changing resolution … but what was it? Not simply to escape the political life, though that was now a given. Something more all-encompassing. Starting over. Never going back home. Never having to look them in the eye. His mom.

  He could open a practice here in Yellowknife, do good things, defend the poor on legal aid. Start a new life in the coldest city in Canada, median winter temperature thirty below. There was a masochistic feel of penance to that, somehow satisfying.

  He surrendered to the persistent phone. “I think you’ve missed your flight, sir.”

  Thiessen almost said, “Call me Charley,” but realized that’s not who he was any more. Not the same old Charley. Different.

  Dear Dr. Hank,

  Colonel Letvinov says we’ll have access to a telephone and fax when we get to Omsk, so I will have talked to you by now and sent this off. (Am I making sense?) I know I’m going to sound garbled on the phone, and it will take hours to explain everything, so that’s why I need to fax, it’ll fill in some of the details.

  So what you are reading is a short letter with an appendix (it’s inflamed but don’t remove it!). The appendix consists of copies of entries from a journal I was half-heartedly keeping. You should read them first, so the rest of this makes sense. (Did you get any of my letters?)

  Driving to Omsk may take a few days, because traffic is going only one way, trucks pulling in full of soldiers, they’re setting up for God knows what, maybe an invasion, a war, and we can’t contact the Canadian embassy because there’s a communications blackout, except for military radio.

  Colonel Letvinov doesn’t seem to know what to do with us, Maxine, Ivy, and yours truly. I don’t think we were in his plans, whatever they are. So he’s keeping us “sequestered” until he gets permission to pack us off to Omsk and civilization.

  But we’re safe, and unless I sounded incoherently hysterical with relief on the phone call we haven’t yet had, you know how that came about. I’m still pinching myself. Delirious at the thought I’ll soon be with you and Katie and Cassie and Jessie. I feel conflicted, though, as I fret about the safety of my many friends here, my comrades and saviours. More on that coming up …

  The weird thing was how easy it was to get to the Russian side. We just dashed across the border (no fence, no guard posts, just rolling steppes), Ruslan and Atun in the lead, our company of resisters behind them — they’ve grown to about four hundred men and fifty women — plus Maxine, Ivy, and me (hearts in throat). Right into the arms of the Russian army. They’d been waiting for us, watching our progress, I guess, from one of those aircraft that had been dipping their wings at us and dropping supplies, food, gear.

  Colonel Letvinov, their commander, greeted Ruslan with a bear hug, like an old friend. (Turns out he is an old friend. That big old red-bearded pirate has been keeping secrets from us — now we have serious doubts about who he was really working for all this time.)

  Anyway, we’ve been transported to a Siberian border town whose main feature is a restored wooden fort, once a fur-trading post, and that’s where we’re barracked, the three of us, a heavy-timbered suite with a stinky bear rug. Atun is here too, so protective, he sleeps just outside the door. I’ll tell you about him and Ivy on the phone, it’s unbelievable. He proposed! They’re engaged! (She didn’t mull long over it.) After overthrowing the Ultimate Cockroach he’s going to fetch Ivy to be his Canadian princess and they will live happily ever after.

  Right now I’m at the window looking down at some of our Revolutionary Front irregulars behind the palisade walls. They’re getting basic training from a Russian drill major who spends most of his time shouting and stamping his feet with exasperation. It would be comical if we weren’t afraid Russia has plans to use them somehow. As sacrificial lambs, maybe, to foment a terrible, full-scale civil war.

  When we warned Atun he should not trust the Russians, he shrugged. “They are generous. Every fighter will have a Kalashnikov.” That’s what’s making us nervous, talk like that.

  Our fort is on a rise five hundred metres from a village on the Bhashyistan side that’s even smaller than Canora, but a lot scarier. There are a couple of customs buildings at the border, which has a swing gate but no fence unless you count a few useless strands of barbed wire. But you can’t say it’s undefended. Brown-uniformed soldiers have been pulling in since dawn, in trucks or on foot, looking bedraggled when you see them through Atun’s binocs. There have to be a thousand of them over there. I don’t know much about military strategy, but it doesn’t make much sense for them to be digging trenches in the desert.

  Beyond the border, in the distance, are some deserted oil derricks, and farther away, clinging to the horizon, is a commercial centre called Özbeg. Atun says it’s a strategic target, they’re going to liberate it first.

  Above, I see three unbroken contrails in the still afternoon sky. Russian MiGs.

  My nightmares have stopped, Hank. Now I only dream of you and the girls. Love to all, and Mom, and all our friends.

  XOXO, Jill

  33

  On Sunday, Arthur sought to entertain his melancholy client at the Ohrid festival’s closing events, but they were hounded everywhere by a tagalong team of reporters. The Russian, Vlad Mishin, was not one of them — he’d last been seen smiling and waving at them as he lined up for a rock concert.

  “Maybe he has given up trying to get his Russian-language exclusive,” Abzal said. “We owe the Russians nothing. We were their colony, and instead of granting us freedom they turned us over to their trained goons.”

  It was always “we” when he talked of his home — he was losing his Canadianness. He hadn’t stopped lamenting about Bhashyistan, about his years of felt inadequacy, but at least he’d quit making veiled threats to disappear. Mostly, he was morose, tense, and silent.

  Tired of insisting to the press, however pleasantly, on their right to remain silent, they finally retreated to the refuge of the RCMP’s villa and its guarded gate. The press corps followed, but by afternoon’s end had dwindled to a hard core shivering by the road in the cold, crisp evening air. Abzal carried on down to the basement fitness room, to try burning off his surplus of nervous energy.

  McIlhargey and Djon were again at the chessboard — they’d been at it for three hours, off and on. It would be their last game; Djon planned to leave for Albania that evening. He’d already cleared out his room — accommodation was tight, and the two inspectors were soon due back from Tirana.

  With them, hopefully, would be Ray DiPalma, sole medical casualty of Operation Erzhan. Arthur had talked to him the night before — he felt well enough to leave his care facility, but hadn’t sounded enthusiastic. In fact, the news of Abzal’s emergence in Macedonia seemed almost to have added to his melanchol
ia. “Congratulations, Arthur,” he’d said in a dry and weary monotone. “You pulled it off in spite of me.” He was either off his boutique mood elevator or it was working in reverse. Like cocaine, Arthur suspected, it rewarded with extreme highs and punished with brutal lows.

  “Offering draw,” said Djon. He’d been defeated only once, a courtesy loss.

  “Not yet, comrade.”

  McIlhargey rose to the summons of Sergeant Chow in the sunroom, now dimly lit by a desk lamp and a pair of glowing computer screens. The printer was humming, pages rolling from it. Chow said, “It’s a wrap,” and announced that Ottawa was sending an executive jet tomorrow to fetch everyone home.

  McIlhargey sat, read through the printouts, handed Arthur a report from the Montreal RCMP.

  The stilted, over-precise law enforcement jargon, when reduced to common English, disclosed that after twenty-four hours of surveillance and intercepted phone calls, Sully Clugg and Rod Klein had been arrested at the Montreal airport, carrying false passports and last-minute tickets to Mexico. The FBI had been asked to trace a call Clugg had made to an unlisted number in Dallas in which he’d warned, in poorly coded language, of a “blowback,” spy jargon for alarming news.

  Arthur assumed Clugg and Klein hadn’t opened their mouths except to demand counsel. Law enforcers, traditionally contemptuous of criminal lawyers, tended to run to them with more haste than the average evildoer. So it would be difficult to identify other conspirators — the driver of the kidnap car, Anglo-Atlantic’s operatives — or to trace secret bank accounts. Harder to nail these mercenaries for the ten murders on Colonel By Drive. But the kidnapping case seemed solid, especially with the panicky attempt to flee to refuge in Mexico.

  Arthur expressed these thoughts to McIlhargey, who seemed torn between continuing this conversation or resuming his chess game.

  “Let me ask you, Counsellor, how would you defend them?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Don’t play high and mighty, you’ve acted for the worst scum on the West Coast. Let’s say these turkeys had retained you — what would you advise them?”

  The answer seemed easy. “Any competent lawyer would pleabargain for a minimum sentence, tendering their clients as Crown witnesses on their agreement to implicate Anglo-Atlantic. Clugg seems enough of a sociopath to roll over on friends and allies, especially if tens of millions are sitting in a numbered account in Freeport or the Caymans.”

  McIlhargey’s grunt seemed to express admiration, but it might have been scepticism. A wrap, Chow had said. Yet much seemed unresolved, the entire backwash from the assassinations of November 26: the farcical mini-war with Bhashyistan, the perils facing the Canadians trapped there, the tumult in that country, Anglo-Atlantic’s oil grab, the Russian bear at the border.

  Arthur would let the politicians sort that out. He couldn’t do everything.

  “Again I offer draw,” said Djon.

  McIlhargey mulled over the end game, frowning, but then rose and took his hand. “Accepted. Next time we meet, I’ll want revenge. Get out of here.” His punch on the arm was intended as jocular, but must have smarted — Djon was rubbing it as he went upstairs for his bag. McIlhargey muttered, “I had a winner going.”

  Chow called again from the sunroom: “Mr. Bullingham, returning your call.”

  A few perfunctory words of congratulation, then: “I talked to McRory last night. Told him we’re starting at twelve million for Erzhan. I expect he’ll appoint a commission with subpoena powers and a wide-ranging mandate. I persuaded him that a good old-fashioned fault-finding inquisition will bury the Tories in opposition for the next twenty years.”

  “All very well, Bully, but the Liberals aren’t in power.”

  “Only if the Almighty himself intervenes will they not be. With the justice minister gone crackers and this CSIS scandal, the Tories are hovering above single digits. You’ll be the star of the show as counsel for Erzhan. The state will pay your fees, of course — I’ll run some numbers by them tomorrow — and I’ll try to get them to throw in an able young researcher.”

  “Bully, I pray you have not somehow committed me to an interminable commission hearing in Ottawa. I have a farm to run.”

  The voice sweetened. “Arthur, my dear, dear friend, have I mentioned I was thinking of modernizing the firm’s name? Never did like the concept of dead people on a letterhead. Bullingham, Beauchamp — sounds more compelling, don’t you think?”

  Arthur told himself not to falter. “Bully, I am fully and finally retired.”

  He could hear Bully’s wheezing laughter as they disconnected.

  Djon came down, shouldering his bag. “Now I return to Albania to shake foundations of crumbling government.” He took both of Arthur’s hands, held them tight. “First item of business, we proclaiming you official hero of Albanian Socialist Party. Comes with framed certificate which I bring you when coming to Canada to collect on bet. So don’t worry, not getting rid of old Djon yet.”

  Arthur invited him to visit him on Garibaldi Island, Dordana too. He felt a little damp of eye as they hugged — no one more deserved the title of hero than this wily, short-sighted, recently demoustached gentleman of many talents.

  He stood aside as Abzal, freshly showered, came forward and clenched with Djon as a wrestler might, pinning his arms, kissing both cheeks. “May God always be at your side, Djon Bajramovic. You’re my friend for life, for the life I will owe you forever.”

  They went out together to Djon’s taxi, Abzal’s arm around his skinny shoulders. Easily embarrassed by emotion — especially his own — Arthur made his way to the washroom for a Kleenex and privacy.

  Arthur had nodded off in the La-Z-Boy and hadn’t heard the Land Cruiser enter the compound, but he was startled to wakefulness as Inspector Fyfe charged inside. Fuzzy with sleep, Arthur watched him speed to the bar, pour himself a half tumbler of whisky, and down it in two gulps.

  Arthur looked at his watch: ten o’clock. He’d expected to be back in his hotel by now, in bed. He started to struggle up, confused by Fyfe’s inexplicable distress.

  “Don’t get up yet,” Fyfe said. “Take a breath.”

  Longstreet came in now, alone. Arthur subsided back on the chair, his heart racing with the adrenalin of dread.

  “He’s dead, Arthur,” Longstreet said. “When we showed up at his hospice, they had just cut him down.”

  Three a.m., and still Arthur had not slept, though he’d slid under the covers almost three hours earlier, upon his return to the apartment. The meagre details known of Ray DiPalma’s suicide — if that’s what it was — played an endless loop in his mind.

  Fyfe and Longstreet had been told only this: at DiPalma’s request, the hospice staff brought dinner to his room at six. When an attendant returned an hour later for the tray, she found him hanging from a beam, a chair tipped over. If the lead detective was to be believed, there’d been no sign of a struggle, no despairing note left behind. DiPalma’s dinner had been untouched.

  The state police were sour with the inspectors, almost openly hostile, questioning their role, their presence in the country. A reputed Albanian connection to Abzal’s rendition was already big news in Tirana, and the death of a Canadian intelligence officer threatened a deluge of unwanted attention, so the inspectors contacted Canadian consular officials to attend to further arrangements, and proceeded on their way.

  Arthur’s door was open a crack and he could hear Abzal snoring on the sofa bed, a restorative sleep at last for one whose hungering for justice and vengeance had denied him rest the last two nights. Arthur supposed he was inured to tragedy — the death of one ill-fated agent was merely a sad digression from the bloody events of Bhashyistan.

  But for Arthur, the impact was barely endurable. Ray DiPalma, the shape-shifting spy who never came in from the cold. Despite himself, Arthur had made an emotional investment in the fellow, had learned not merely to abide him but to tolerate his quirkiness and feel empathy over his many plights. He’d
not admired his impetuosity, but it had fascinated him, as had his boozy, convoluted logic. Crumwell thinks you think I’m on your side. Which is true. The last part, I mean.

  However much Arthur prided himself on his ability to read the psyche of others, it had taken him an inordinate time to be satisfied of this double agent’s sincerity. Soon, proof of his good intent — an accusation against Crumwell but also a confession — would be removed from a safe in the Tragger, Inglis office and released to the media.

  Arthur doubted he would ever be satisfied that DiPalma hanged himself. The indicators of suicide had been there: the overwhelming sense of failure and unworthiness, the shame of achieving celebrity not as a rogue but a dolt, his incurable nervous-system affliction, his alcoholism. Yet possible malefactors abounded.

  Assassins hired by the renderers of Abzal Erzhan. Serbians seeking vengeance for the downfall of Krajzinski. Ledjina’s brothers.

  He rolled over, tried counting sheep. When they balked at the fence, he tried goats …

  “I fool you,” says a disembodied voice. Arthur sees only folk dancers on the cobbled streets, then looks up, and there’s Ray DiPalma, hovering in the air. “I did it for you,” he calls, drifting away. “I love you.” Arthur pulls hard at a tether rope but the gondola rises higher and higher, until he can no longer see DiPalma waving.

  That image propelled Arthur to consciousness, and he lay there awhile, orienting himself. He was in the bedroom of his Ohrid apartment, and morning mist was rising from the lake. He scanned the sky through a tall window, as if expecting to see Ray still floating toward the heavens. All he saw were dark clouds, and they were shedding snow, and the beach and the streets were turning white.

  It was Monday, an important day, the end of something … Yes, he was to return to Canada that afternoon. He was going home. That prospect helped lessen his gloom, and he allowed himself a spate of longing for his funky, fuddled island. Margaret had been no devotee of DiPalma, but she would understand his need to mourn and rebound before joining her on the road.