Face-Off

by Michael Betcherman

  A few minutes later everybody filed out of the church and got back on the bus. He sat down and looked out the window at the church. He watched until it was out of sight. He felt as if he had just completed a long voyage.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Two days later, Alex and Lara wheeled their suitcases out of the hotel and handed them to the bus driver, who stowed them in the luggage compartment.

  “I’ll see you guys in a couple of days,” Boris said. He had to stay behind to take care of some business, but he’d be in Vancouver the following week, in time for Stefan’s first game in the provincial championships.

  Alex and Lara said goodbye and got on the bus. They stashed their knapsacks on the overhead shelf and sat down.

  “I wish we weren’t going home,” Lara said.

  “Me too.” The last two weeks had been the best two weeks of his life. It was like he and Lara had been on their honeymoon.

  The other tour members slowly filed onto the bus. Everybody was moving at half speed, still recovering from the farewell dinner the previous night. They had started off toasting Boris, and then each other, and then world peace, and they didn’t run out of steam until there was nothing left to toast except the cutlery.

  Bill Novak walked onto the bus, moving carefully as if he was afraid of falling.

  “What do you have to say about my man Lou now?” Alex asked. Lou had recorded two shutouts in a row, propelling the Canucks into first place in their division.

  Bill looked right past him and continued to the back of the bus. He looked like shit. He must have really tied one on, Alex thought. Adults were weird. They were always warning kids about the dangers of alcohol but they sure didn’t need much of an excuse to get drunk.

  When they got to the airport, they discovered that their flight had been delayed. The first thought to cross Alex’s mind was that there was another bomb threat like there had been after the first tour, but it turned out that their plane was an hour late arriving from Paris.

  “Let’s make a run for it,” Alex said to Lara when it was time to board. They joined the lineup in front of the gate.

  “I wish,” Lara said. She stepped back and pointed the camera at Alex. “Say ‘goodbye, Sarno.’”

  “Goodbye, Sarno,” Alex said as Lara snapped the picture. Bill Novak walked up behind Alex.

  “Let me take one of the two of you,” Lara said. Alex stood next to Bill. “Say ‘vo dinya, Sarno,’” Lara said.

  “Vo dinya, Sarno,” Alex and Bill said at the same time. Alex spotted Anna and Stefan as soon as he and Lara stepped through the doors at the arrivals level. Lara’s mother and father were standing beside them. He and Lara looked at each other.

  The honeymoon was over.

  FORTY

  “That was delicious,” Lara said as she, Alex, and Stefan cleared the plates off the table.

  “Thanks,” Alex said.

  “What time does the movie start?” Stefan asked after they’d cleaned up the kitchen and gone into the living room. The three of them were going to the opening of the new Johnny Chin movie at the Cineplex on West Pender.

  “Nine thirty,” Alex said. “Too bad Emma isn’t here,” he said to Stefan. “When’s she coming back?” Emma had spent March break with her grandmother in Victoria.

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “You want to see the pictures from the trip?” Lara asked Stefan.

  “Sure.”

  Lara opened her computer. She and Stefan sat down on the couch. Alex sat on Lara’s other side, opened his computer, and went to his Facebook page. He’d seen the photos on the flight home.

  “These are the ones we took at your house when Boris had us over for dinner,” Lara said.

  “Very funny,” Stefan said. He was looking at a picture of his bedroom. Alex and Lara had put a teddy bear on his pillow as a joke.

  “We thought so,” Lara said. “Boris said you slept with it until you were …”

  “Fifteen,” Alex interrupted.

  “Ha, ha.”

  Alex scrolled through the usual assortment of photos and messages and then checked his email. There was a Twitter alert from the War Crimes Tribunal from the day before, the day they’d flown home. The link led to a newspaper article.

  The headline read: IT WAS ZARKOV, WITNESS INSISTS.

  “Shortly after ten o’clock last night Milos Felden, a custodian at the Grand Hotel in the village of Barnok, called police and reported that he had just seen accused war criminal General Anton Zarkov and two other men in one of the hotel rooms. But when officers from Number Two Division in Sarno, the nearest police station, arrived an hour later, the room was empty.

  “The hotel receptionist and a guest told police that they had seen a very tall, thin man leave the hotel in the company of two other men, but they were positive that it was not the general, whose face is well known throughout the country.

  “‘Both witnesses said that the man they saw had short grey hair and a receding hairline, and that he was at least ten years younger than the general,’ a police spokesman said. ‘They stated that they had an unobstructed view of the man and that his face was unscarred. As you know, General Zarkov is not.’” Alex didn’t have to look at Zarkov’s picture to remember the jagged scar that ran from just below his ear to his jaw.

  “Mr. Felden insisted the two witnesses were lying. ‘I know who I saw. It was Zarkov.’ He accused the police of collaborating in a cover-up to prevent him from claiming the $500,000 reward offered for information leading to the general’s arrest.”

  Another nutcase, Alex thought. He moved on to the hockey scores. The Canucks had defeated Montreal 3–0, their third win in a row.

  “The Wall shut out the Canadiens last night,” Alex said, using Stefan’s nickname for Lou Roberts. “That’s three in a row.”

  “How many does that give him for the season?”

  “Eight.” Alex wondered if the custodian actually thought he’d seen the Stork, or if he had flat out lied. If that was the case, he really was nuts.

  “That’s the palace in Grabel,” Lara said, “where the king made people walk off the tower if their families wouldn’t pay the ransom. You must have been there.”

  “Many times. Who’s that guy with Alex?” Stefan asked.

  Alex leaned over and took a look at the picture. “Bill Novak.”

  “You look like a little boy beside him,” Stefan said. “How tall is he?”

  “About six eight,” Alex said. “He played ball at Washington State.”

  Lara clicked on the next picture. “This is our hotel in Grabel.” She leaned against Alex. “They ran out of hot water the day we got there.”

  “The swimming pool smelled like rotten eggs,” Alex said.

  “And the doorman was nasty.”

  “Best hotel ever,” Alex said.

  “I’d go back there in a flash,” Lara added.

  “You guys are cute,” Stefan said.

  Alex turned back to the article on the Canucks game but thoughts of the Zarkov sighting intruded. It didn’t make sense that the custodian would lie. If the man he saw wasn’t Zarkov, he wouldn’t get the reward. Alex reread the story.

  “Go back to the picture of me and Bill,” he said to Lara.

  “What for?”

  “Humour me.” Lara shrugged and went back to the photo.

  “Listen to this,” he said. He read the article aloud, stopping after he read the key sentence: “‘Both witnesses said that the man they saw had short grey hair and a receding hairline, and that he was at least ten years younger than the general.’” He pointed at Bill Novak’s picture. “Remind you of anybody?”

  “What are you saying?” Lara said. “That the man he saw was Bill?”

  “I don’t know. But how many men in Berovia match that description?”

  “This happened at ten o’clock the night before last, right?” Lara said. Alex nodded. “That was our last night in Sarno. We all had dinner at the hotel. Bill was there, too. Getting shit-
faced.”

  “I know,” Alex said.

  “Maybe he has an identical twin,” Stefan said.

  “Didn’t you think Bill was acting weird yesterday?” Alex asked Lara.

  “I thought he was hungover.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  Lara gave it a few seconds’ thought, casting her mind back. “No. Not that I can remember.”

  “Me neither,” Alex said. “Whenever I said anything, he just nodded … Where’s the picture you took of us at the airport?” Lara scrolled through the photos until she found it. “Put it beside the one from the palace,” Alex said.

  “Looks like the same man to me,” Lara said.

  Alex stared at the photos, looking at every detail, as if it were one of those puzzles where you have to find ten differences between two apparently identical pictures. “Holy shit,” he said after a while.

  “What?” Lara asked.

  “Look at his watch.”

  “It’s not the same watch,” Stefan said.

  “He’s not the only person in the world to have two watches,” Lara said.

  “Yeah,” said Alex, “but he’s wearing it on his left wrist in the photo at the palace and on his right in the one at the airport.”

  “Zarkov’s left-handed,” Stefan said, his eyes widening as the realization hit him. “Left-handed people wear their watch on their right wrist.”

  It didn’t take Alex long to find the picture of Zarkov he’d stared at so often, the one where he was standing beside the Snowman, laughing into the camera, holding a gun in his left hand. The watch on his right wrist had a silver band and a black face—just like the one in the picture taken at the airport. “That’s not Bill Novak,” he said, pointing at the picture from the airport. “That’s the Stork.”

  “Peter,” Lara said softly.

  “Peter,” echoed Alex.

  “Who’s Peter? What are you talking about?” Stefan asked.

  “You know Peter Jurak, Roman and Tomas’s friend, the guy who does makeup for the movies?” Stefan nodded. “He was in Berovia,” Alex said.

  “But he wasn’t there to introduce Greta to his parents,” Lara said. “He made up the Stork to look like Bill so they could smuggle him out of the country as part of the tour group.”

  “Airport security didn’t give him a second look. They waved us all through,” Alex said.

  It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

  “Holy shit,” Alex said again. “They got the Snowman out the same way.” He turned to Stefan. “Remember when we had dinner at Lombardo’s just before Christmas, the day your dad arrived?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Remember the fat guy who came to the table? He was on the first tour.”

  “Yeah,” Stefan said. “He was really drunk. Mom got Dad to put him in a cab so he wouldn’t drive home.”

  “When Boris mentioned the bomb threat at the airport he reacted as if he didn’t know what he was talking about. He tried to cover it up by saying he was drunk. But he didn’t forget about the bomb threat. He didn’t know about it because he wasn’t at the airport when the tour left. The Snowman took his place.”

  “Peter was in Sarno then, too,” Lara said, her excitement rising. “Remember how everybody thought he was cheating on Greta until we found out he was visiting his cousin Iris?”

  “You thought he was cheating.”

  “That was his excuse for being there,” Lara continued, ignoring the interruption. “He was really there to disguise the Snowman.”

  It all came together in a rush. Alex remembered how eager Tomas had been to do a second tour, and how pissed off he was when Boris said he couldn’t do another one until after Christmas. It wasn’t because he needed the money for Lina’s private school. He wanted to get the Stork out of Berovia as quickly as possible.

  “Bill was supposed to go on the second tour,” he said. “They planned to do the switch then, but the Stork broke his leg when the government raided his hideout so he wasn’t able to go on the trip.”

  “And when he couldn’t go, Bill cancelled. He didn’t really break his arm,” Lara said.

  “Peter was planning to be there, too, so he could disguise the Stork,” Alex said. “But when Zarkov got injured, Peter said the shoot in Hungary was cancelled. He ended up taking Greta to Paris. What was the name of the movie he said he was working on?”

  “Vampire Killers 3. Or maybe four. I can’t remember.”

  Alex did a quick search. “There’s not even a Vampire Killers 1,” he said. “He made it all up. He just needed a reason to explain why he was going away.”

  The three of them looked at one another, their faces flushed with excitement.

  “How are we going to prove this?” Stefan asked. The question brought them back down to earth.

  “Wait a minute,” Lara said. “The doctor who filled in Bill’s medical claim form must have been in on it, too.”

  “You’re right,” Alex said.

  “You’ve lost me again,” Stefan said.

  “Bill said he couldn’t go on the tour because he broke his arm,” Alex explained. “He didn’t really break it, but a doctor had to fill out a medical claim form saying he did so that the insurance company would reimburse him for the cost of the tour.”

  “Do we know who the doctor was?” Lara asked.

  “I can find out.” Alex accessed his travel agency email account on his computer. He scrolled back until he found the email from the insurance company approving Bill Novak’s claim. “Dr. Marcus Ratliff,” Alex said. He Googled him. “He’s a plastic surgeon … And he specializes in facial reconstruction.”

  “Oh my God,” Lara and Stefan said at the same time.

  Nobody had to state the obvious. The Snowman had already been operated on. The Stork was next in line. Once Ratliff gave him a new face, the two of them would disappear forever.

  Lara asked the question they were all thinking.

  “What are we going to do now?”

  FORTY-ONE

  Alex turned his head from side to side, trying to get the stiffness out of his neck. He’d been sitting in the car for six hours, watching Marcus Ratliff’s house on Marine Drive in Southlands. The plan they had come up with the night before was simple. Follow Ratliff. He would lead them to the Stork.

  It had crossed Alex’s mind that this was his chance to live out his fantasy movie ending, the one where he blew the Stork’s head off, but now that it was within the realm of possibility, the prospect of confronting Zarkov face-to-face scared the shit out of him. He, Lara, and Stefan were all agreed. They wouldn’t try to be heroes. As soon as they found out where the Stork was, they would call the police and let them take it from there.

  Two minutes before noon, Stefan got off the bus at the stop up the road. He was taking the twelve-to-six shift. Then Lara would take over. Alex got out of the car.

  “Bond. James Bond,” he said, as he tossed the car keys to Stefan.

  “Which house is it?” Stefan asked.

  “The one with the two black Mercs,” Alex said, pointing to a huge mansion on the other side of the road.

  “I think I’m going to be a plastic surgeon when I grow up,” Stefan said.

  “Call me if he leaves the house, and don’t follow him too closely,” Alex said.

  “Yes, James.” Stefan said. The two brothers jabbed fists, then Alex walked to the bus stop.

  He took the number forty-nine bus to Main Street and then got off to wait for the number three to take him to the travel agency. He was standing at the bus stop when Tomas drove up in his silver Audi.

  “Get in,” he said.

  “I’m good,” Alex said.

  “Don’t be stupid. Get in.”

  The last thing Alex wanted to do was get in the car with Tomas, knowing what he did, but as far as Tomas knew the truce had held and it would have looked fishy if Alex had refused. He got in the car. Tomas had just driven off when his cellphone rang.

  “Hello,” he said.<
br />
  A voice on the speakerphone answered in Berovian. “Je Marco. Je slago. Node Roman?” It’s Marco. I’m leaving. Where’s Roman?

  “I’ll call you back,” Tomas said in Berovian.

  A moment later Stefan texted Alex. He’s on the move.

  K, Alex texted back. Then it hit him. The timing of the call Tomas received and Stefan’s text was no coincidence. Marco was a nickname for Marcus. The doctor had left his house, and Alex’s guess was that he was on his way to operate on the Stork.

  But what did Roman have do with it? Was it possible his uncle was involved after all? Roman told him that he believed the Stork and the Snowman were criminals, but he could have been lying. After all, he supported the Freedom Party, the party that had protected them all these years. Did he agree to go into business with Boris because it was a good opportunity? Or did he do it because it was the perfect way to get the two men out of Berovia?

  Alex sat in shocked silence as they drove to the agency. Fortunately, Tomas had as little interest in conversation as he did. As soon as they got to the agency, Tomas disappeared into Roman’s office and closed the door.

  “Do you really think Uncle Roman is part of this?” Lara asked dubiously after Alex brought her up to date. “Remember what happened the last time we thought that?”

  “I know,” Alex said. Then he remembered seeing Roman with Bill Novak at the Canucks game. They’d known each other for years. Roman would have known that he could double for the Stork. He was probably the one who recruited him.

  He and Lara tossed that into the mix when Roman and Tomas came out of his office. “I’ll be gone all day,” Roman said. “If you need me, you can get me on my cell.”

  Fifteen minutes later Stefan sent a text. Heading west on hwy 1. Alex guessed that Ratliff was going to the terminal at Horseshoe Bay. From there a ferry would take him to the Sunshine Coast. The Stork could be hiding in any one of dozens of remote communities up the coast, where people had never heard of Berovia or Maldania.

  Fifteen minutes later Stefan sent another text. Just passed Horseshoe Bay. Ratliff wasn’t taking a ferry to the Sunshine Coast. He was heading in the direction of Whistler.