Six Degrees of Freedom

by Nicolas Dickner

  Lisa leaves Éric to his labours. When he is possessed like this, nothing can draw him out of it. She leaves the cameras behind so that he can post them on eBay tomorrow.

  In the living room, Mrs. Le Blanc has stretched out on the couch and is drowsing in front of a gangster movie shot in a Germanic language that the protagonists must chew on at length. There are gunshots, and English subtitles.

  Lisa slips out, taking care not to let the screen door slam, and goes back home.

  JAY COMES INTO TOWN FROM the airport and goes directly to work without even making a detour to her apartment. Three-fifteen on the clock, not much of the day left to salvage, but Jay couldn’t care less. The radio in the taxi is playing for no one in particular. A news report announces the start of another cannabis season in Montreal’s outlying northern suburbs. Some guy in Mascouche was shot to death at dawn in a cornfield.

  Jay shuts her eyes.

  When she opens them again, the taxi has pulled up in front of the headquarters of the RCMP’s C Division.

  She takes the elevator wearing her solemn expression and dirty clothes. In the seventh-floor vestibule, she waves her access card and pushes open the bulletproof glass door. She immediately finds herself enveloped in the muted rustle of ventilation, crumpled paper, photocopiers and conversation.

  Jay veers off toward the washrooms.

  Swaying in front of the sink, she splashes water on her face. As she brushes her teeth, she thinks of Horacio, buried in the Guzmans’ lot in the municipal cemetery, inside one of those little concrete pods reminiscent of Japanese capsule hotels.

  Jay’s office is in the Enclave, a workspace that, despite being in the middle of the seventh floor, is completely isolated from the surrounding cubicles by a wall of filing cabinets and movable partitions, a forest of artificial ferns and the cluster of photocopiers. This is a satellite of the Port Investigation Unit, whose main office is situated at the Cast Terminal, at the other end of the city. Jay ended up in the Enclave due to a bit of organizational happenstance: there was no room in Fraud but there was here.

  So it was, through the workings of chance and circumstance, with the coffee maker supplying the lubricant, that Jay was integrated into the local population.

  The first desk on the right, unoccupied 99 percent of the time, belongs to Sergeant M.F. Gamache, the dean of the Enclave. He devoted the better part of his career to the main national imports sector, narcotics, and now spends most of his time at the Cast Terminal. He is what is known as a field person, meaning he prefers to be “on site,” even when it serves no purpose.

  He drops by C Division once a week, with a dozen sesame bagels and first-hand information about ongoing investigations.

  The occupant of the first desk on the left is Laura Wissenberg, criminal intelligence agent. Officially, she’s assigned to the Sub-divisional Section of Border Analyses, which straddles the Divisional Section of Criminal Analyses, the National Security Intelligence Section as well as the Sub-sub-divisional Section of Unclassifiable Cases, but Laura usually works for the Port Investigation Unit.

  She wears glasses, and has a librarian’s brusque sense of humour and a keen awareness of political issues. Each day at lunch hour, she memorizes long-dead cases from the eighties while eating her pre-wrapped sandwiches. Even though she essentially deals with port-related matters, she never goes on site; contrary to Sergeant Gamache, she believes that geography is an abstract construction that can just as well be managed remotely.

  Laura, what’s more, is a major source of anxiety for Jay, who, after working alongside her for seven years, still has not been able to figure out what her omniscient colleague knows about her.

  Mahesh Chandratreya Gariépy’s desk is at the far end on the right and is the only one equipped with its own coffee maker. A computer analyst, he arrived seven years ago, a few months before Jay. He was barely eighteen years old and he had to beaver away for several years before he was taken seriously. He functions on code, caffeine and minimalist Scandinavian music.

  At the far end on the left is the desk of Jay-full-stop, the asocial-Internet-fraud-girl who, glued to her keyboard all day long, an expensive pair of German noise-reducing headphones clamped over her ears, performs a task that could be listed in the DSM-IV.

  Despite their undeniable cordiality, her colleagues know nothing about Jay. They don’t know where she grew up and went to school. They don’t know if she has travelled, if she has brothers or sisters. If she is self-taught or holds a degree. If she has a boyfriend, a lover, a child, a hamster, a collection of succulents. They don’t know if she knits, trains for triathlons or saw the last season of Breaking Bad. They don’t even know where she worked before the RCMP—this last point being especially irksome for Laura. She has often tried to question Jay, but the answers she got were vague and variable. Independent consultant. Electronic media. Self-employed. A start-up. Transactional Web freelancer. Telecoms. There wasn’t the slightest trace of her anywhere on LinkedIn, Facebook or Google.

  In fact, her colleagues are unaware that Jay is not Jay’s real name.

  —

  Jay enters the Enclave dragging a bag of dirty laundry behind her. All’s quiet in the shadow of the ferns. Sergeant Gamache is on site, Mahesh is represented by the coffee machine, and Laura is so deeply absorbed in her monitor that she doesn’t notice Jay’s arrival.

  Jay sits down in front of her computer. She has two (2) years, three (3) months and seventeen (17) days left to serve in this chair. One thing, at least, can be said about the conditions of her confinement: they are ergonomic. She boots up the computer—unofficially known as the slowest machine on the seventh floor—and cracks her knuckles. She sometimes wonders if her job isn’t just a sophisticated way of convincing her this is all she is worth. The new flavour of rehabilitation: belittlement.

  Whatever. They want her to triangulate, she’ll triangulate.

  Suddenly, Laura turns toward her, glasses poised on the tip of her nose.

  “Absent yesterday. Late today.”

  Jay flashes back to her round-trip flight, the night spent in the airport security office. She feels paragraph 3(a) of Annex 1 pulsating around her like a force field.

  “A funeral in Sainte-Foy.”

  “My condolences. Any inheritance on the horizon?”

  “I doubt it. Mahesh call in sick?”

  “Nah. He’s at Cast.”

  Laura has already gone back to work, and Jay is fighting an urge to give the computer a whack to hurry the boot along.

  “What’s Mahesh doing over at Cast?”

  “Gone to look for a phantom container.”

  “A phantom container?”

  “A forty-foot refrigerated container. Called Papa Zulu.”

  “The reefer already has a name?”

  “You know Mahesh…”

  The connection window finally comes up. Jay keys in her password (5+e’@>»0~#8vcP) and hits the Enter key with calculated brutality.

  “And what exactly does little Papa Zulu contain?”

  “Fifteen tons of Empire apples.”

  Jay lifts her eyes from the screen, all at once intrigued. “Since when does Quebec import apples in October?”

  “I didn’t say it was import.”

  “Export?”

  “Mmm, yes.”

  “That cuts down the possibilities. Stolen cars?”

  “We have no idea what’s in the box. It could be anything at all, including fifteen tons of Empire apples.”

  Laura chews on her Bic pen with a blank stare, looking as if she finds the idea genuinely amusing. What if, for once, reality actually coincided with appearances? That would be a refreshing change.

  Jay folds her arms, perplexed. Nothing is more commonplace than a phantom container; there’s one on every ship. No one knows who owns them, where they are from, where they are going. They travel in the cracks of the system, and so long as they stay on board, no one pays attention to them. Even once they’re unloaded, they remai
n in administrative limbo until cleared through customs. If no one comes to claim them, they can sit idle for months among the abandoned containers—and since the 2007 financial crisis there are many, many abandoned containers.

  Laura, who can tell from Jay’s face what she is thinking, gestures vaguely.

  “Actually, we’re mainly interested in the way it disappeared. It was delivered to Cast five weeks ago. It was scheduled to stay on the wharf for two days and then leave for Hamburg. But in the meantime, it evaporated. Poof.”

  “Poof.”

  “That’s the long and the short of it. It wasn’t loaded onto the ship, it’s not in the terminal yard anymore, and it was even deleted from the database. As if it had never been there—a real phantom. It was found accidentally, because of the invoices for dockage and electricity. We started from there and followed the trail.”

  “What about the exporter?”

  “Can’t be found. Not registered anywhere. An outfit with an odd name.”

  Her Bic clamped between her incisors, Laura swivels back to her computer and opens a PDF, which she zooms 200 percent. Jay can see it is a bill of lading for container number PZIU 127 002 7. Laura points her pen at the exporter’s name.

  “Rokov Export.”

  “It’s Russian?”

  “It looks Russian.”

  “False address, apparently.”

  “Apparently. The e-mails bounce, the street doesn’t exist. The fax number rings at Pizzeria Stratos in Saint-Hyacinthe.”

  “Pizzeria Stratos.”

  “Probably just a random number.”

  Laura’s telephone emits a double ring: outside call. She decides to ignore it.

  “What was I about to say? Ah, yes. Papa Zulu wasn’t on anyone’s radar until we discovered the dockage bill. The exporter couldn’t be located, the container was erased from the database…It attracted attention. They dug up the bill of lading, the delivery voucher, and Mahesh went down to analyze the databases.”

  “So you know where the container was shipped.”

  A red light starts to blink on the telephone. You have one new message. Laura gives the device a peeved look. “Not yet. I assume Mahesh will come back from Cast with an answer.”

  Pause. Jay scratches the nape of her neck. “So there’s no complaint, no complainant, no victim and no evidence.”

  “There’s a presumption of illegal activity. I’m trying to link this to the West End Gang, but there’s not much to go on.”

  Laura’s cellphone is vibrating on the desk. A picture of her girlfriend appears on the screen: blond, braids, and mean as a miniature Valkyrie.

  “Sorry, I have to take this.”

  Jay beats a retreat to her desk, where her computer has finally finished booting up. She yawns and suddenly realizes she hasn’t really slept in forty-eight hours. She decides to go have a coffee.

  When she walks past Laura’s desk, Laura is still on the telephone. The discussion has to do with the finer points of work-life balance.

  As she watches the coffee machine dispensing the light brown liquid, Jay recalls the coffee she drank back then: endlessly boiled at high heat, flavoured with cinnamon, served with too much sugar. Horacio would down a dozen thimblefuls every morning, with cigarettes bridging the gaps and the radio blaring, before he deigned to utter his first word of the day.

  When Jay returns to the Enclave, Laura has disappeared; all that’s left of her is a zealously chewed Bic pen. The red light is still blinking on her telephone and the office chair is spinning, as if an intelligence officer was ejected from it an instant ago. Instinctively, Jay turns her eyes toward the ceiling, and then watches the chair rotating more and more slowly. Laura Wissenberg has gone to meet new challenges.

  LISA IS STRIPPING THE VERANDA, and she’s thinking about money again.

  More specifically, she is thinking about the wealth of the house’s erstwhile inhabitants. Yesterday morning, Robert discovered a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape 1939 in the cellar, lying on the earthen floor behind a pile of boards. The wine was undrinkable and unsellable, full of suspended particles.

  Lisa’s imagination went into overdrive. How did the bottle get there? Come to think of it, how did a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape get into Quebec before the Second World War? No doubt through a private importer. A bottle like this suggests a wine cellar, a luxurious wine cabinet, roasted game, a well-laden candle-lit table, and a 78 of a Mozart concerto playing on the phonograph.

  Lisa is of the opinion that money buys happiness—and the people living in this house were obviously very happy.

  For three days Lisa has been stripping the endless veranda girdling the house. At first it seemed preferable to emptying the attic full of bat shit, but now she isn’t so sure anymore. Scraping guano or scraping paint—what’s the difference? As she rasps away the eight layers of oil-based enamel covering the boards—mint green and jujube yellow and salmon pink—it occurs to her that each species stratifies a different variety of excrement.

  Headphones covering her ears, she scrapes to the 4/4 beat of an obscure Byelorussian group that Éric introduced her to. She abruptly raises her head. She puts down her scraper and shuts off the music.

  Robert is calling her.

  She follows his voice to the vestibule, down the corridor, past the living room with its hall of mirrors, through the dining room and kitchen. She finds Robert kneeling at the far end of the pantry, half hidden behind a heap of wallpaper that has been torn to shreds, busy examining a triangular aperture.

  “Look at what was under the wallpaper.”

  In front of him, the flowered paper has brought down a section of lath and plaster, exposing the entrance to a space between the partition and the exterior wall. Lisa instantly notices that the hole’s dimensions are ideal for a somewhat skinny fifteen-year-old girl to slip through.

  Robert moves aside to let Lisa poke her head through the opening. The inexplicable void extends several metres to the left, where she can discern in the half-light, leaning against the side of the chimney, a crude ladder leading to the floor above. Lisa licks her index finger with the assurance of a veteran speleologist. No hint of a draft.

  “There’s a ladder.”

  Robert nods.

  “Going where?”

  “No idea. Want to go see?”

  Her father hands her the work light, which is plugged into a twenty-metre extension. Coiling the cord in her hand, like a deep-sea diver with her air line, Lisa squeezes through the hole and makes her way to the ladder. She imagines the treasure tucked away at the other end of the shadowy passage—for what would be the point of building one other than to stash Aztec mummies and halberds? The ladder goes up to a trap door cut into the floor of the second storey.

  She puts her foot on the first rung. The wood creaks but holds fast. Robert seems all at once to regret sending his daughter into this recess.

  “Is it sturdy?”

  Lisa nods. The little planks were nailed to the uprights decades ago, but they still appear to be sound. She starts to climb. Running along the walls are some ancient electric wires secured with porcelain insulators. Century-old forged nails protrude through the plaster lathing. Lisa brushes her finger against the tip of a nail. She thinks about the rich man who built the house, the mysterious Mr. Baskine. Was he thin or fat? She has trouble picturing him inching his way through this darkness bristling with metal.

  When she reaches the top of the ladder, she sticks her head through the trap door. The passage continues for another five or six metres before disappearing behind the western corner. It probably runs all the way around the house. Does it possibly worm its way into the partitions between the rooms? Lisa remembers her father’s observation a few days earlier that the second-storey walls were abnormally thick.

  A drop of sweat slides down Lisa’s temple. She starts to feel a throb in her stomach. She knows that the claustrophobia gene runs in her family and could manifest at any time. The Routiers expect elevators to break d
own the way other people expect asthma attacks or psoriasis.

  She hoists herself onto the landing and pulls up a length of extension cord. One floor down, in the half-circle of light, she glimpses her father’s backlit head. She gives him a thumbs-up—although the truth is she still feels that alarming throb in her stomach. She advances along the secret passageway clutching the extension cord. To cheer herself on, she imagines forgotten Monets and busts of Anubis.

  Once she gets past the corner, Lisa ends up in a room—not much more than an enlargement of the passage, really—fitted out as a sort of hideaway. On the floor lie an almost brimming ashtray, a bottle of Barbancourt, a stack of Life magazines, a military flashlight and a purple cushion with golden pompoms devoured by generations of stubborn moths. The ground is littered with fossilized mouse droppings that crunch underfoot. Lisa grabs the flashlight, wipes it on her sleeve and flips the switch. The jinni in the batteries is long gone. The ashtray is heaped with Craven “A” butts and there are two fingers of syrupy rum left in the bottle. On the rim of a drinking glass Lisa can still make out a brownish trace of lipstick. A woman hid here, once, to escape from something, or someone. Or perhaps simply from boredom. Maybe the people in this house were not so happy after all.

  Lisa shines the light on the walls, looking for clues to the identity of the woman who used this closet. Nothing, no graffiti, not even a tiny Gertrude was here.

  She crouches to take a closer look at the February 1962 issue of Life lying open on the floor, face down, as though it has just been put there. John Glenn poses on the cover with his calm eyes, his freckles and his astronaut’s helmet. Lisa picks up the magazine. Whoever came here left off reading right in the middle of an article titled “Six Degrees of Freedom.”

  After a last look around, Lisa turns and makes her way back to the ladder, coiling the work light’s cord as she goes. Stationed at the aperture, waiting for his daughter, Robert fidgets as though he were expecting Jacques Cousteau. He relieves her of the lamp and helps her stand up.