She eventually ends up at the website of Animations Herbert. In a jumble of animated GIFs, a generic clown flourishes a bouquet of balloons. Specialty children’s partys (sic), corpret events (sic), batchlor partys (sic). Disco, lighting, decoration, balloon bouquets. Valleyfield area and a little farther. Appelez Herbert the Clown Call Herbert the Clown.
This is perfect.
Lisa opens a chat window with Éric and announces she has found the Grail.
Éric: Where?
Lisa: Vallefyield.
She copy-pastes the site’s address. This one is truly a classic. On the home page, a brutally Photoshopped Herbert holds a bouquet of Herbert-balloons: three miserable, pixelated clown heads floating at the end of their strings. A hasty glance makes it look as if Herbert has three heads. Cerberus the three-headed clown, guardian of Hades.
Éric: wow. He does dachshund balloons too.
Lisa: I know.
Éric: How are things going at your mom’s place?
Lisa: Same as ever. Anything new on eBay?
Éric: Nothing yet.
They chat a while longer, but Lisa starts dozing off, so they cut it short. Better get some sleep. Tomorrow morning, mother and daughter are going on their traditional IKEA spree. No matter the state of the world, there will always be goods to buy. This is the dominant religion, and Josée Savoie does not joke about spiritual matters.
Lisa makes note of Herbert the Clown’s contact information, turns off the lamp. From next door comes the sucking noise of water returning to the sea.
IT’S ALREADY LATE WHEN JAY arrives at C Division armed with a large coffee. Laura’s office is frozen in the same futurist still life as yesterday afternoon: deserted chair, chewed-up pen, blinking voice mail. Jay is lost in conjecture about her colleague. She imagines her on a stretcher in the emergency ward of the Jewish General Hospital. Stuck in traffic. Summoned to the Cast Terminal for a top-level meeting about a container full of spectral apples.
Mahesh hasn’t come in either. Jay pulls out the filter from the coffee maker and stabs her finger into the grounds. Dry, crusty. The day-before-yesterday’s percolation. No sign of life on Sergeant Gamache’s desk. Alone as ever, Jay sips her jumbo family-sized coffee. Despite having slept for thirteen hours, she drags her feet. She has the unpleasant sensation of looking her age.
She can remember the pace she used to maintain, when she would follow a long day’s work with a night of overtime and get by on four hours of sleep at dawn. This went on six days out of seven. She kept it up for almost ten years, and not once did she falter. Her personal heyday.
Now Jay looks at her hand trembling over the keyboard as if it doesn’t belong to her. Big gulp of coffee. There are two (2) years, three (3) months and sixteen (16) days left to serve.
Someone on the floor can be heard pounding away on a stapler, a punching duel with a sheaf of paper.
—
Whenever she is asked to describe her work, Jay never uses the official nomenclature of her job description. She simply says “triangulating.”
She learned this verb from her seafaring grandfather. He was given to nostalgia and was forever going on about the good old days before the invention of loran and the GPS, when you put out to sea with maps made of real paper that ripped, with sextants and dividers. Drawing directly on the worn wood of the kitchen table, he had taught Jay how to locate one’s position in space by measuring the angle between two known objects. Triangulation amounted to far more than playing with optics and mathematics: it was crucial for reaching port alive. But Jay suspected her grandfather’s lesson had metaphorical implications.
Years later, the verb came to mind while she was spinning her wheels in the offices of the RCMP. Triangulation was a means of confronting figures and boredom, and getting home alive each night.
Officially, Jay is a financial fraud data analyst. She spends her days searching through Babylonian databases populated with hundreds of thousands of transactions made with cloned credit cards, an immense magma of legitimate purchases sprinkled here and there with cash advances in Bucharest, Lagos or Minsk. Her task involves detecting patterns, recurrences, coincidences. Over time, through cross-checking—triangulation—it is possible to determine which pizzerias, martini bars or Dollaramas show up a little too often on transaction statements in the months preceding a fraud. The work does require a degree of intellectual acuity but not exactly a degree in aeronautical engineering. It’s more a matter of statistical abrasion—rubbing a problem for as long as it takes to pulverize it—and Jay often wonders why she was assigned to this position, which could be filled by any newly graduated technician.
Perhaps they yielded to a sort of fad that consists in hiring repentant cybercriminals? Divisions B and D each had their own hackers, and C Division could not afford to fall behind. But once the hacker had been delivered, what then? After all, she had to be given a job.
At first, Jay was treated like a kind of consultant. She took part in meetings, analyzed cases, and her advice was sought for investigations. She possessed the empirical knowledge of someone with first-hand experience of the terrain. She easily unpacked behavioural and strategic issues. She thought like a criminal.
Undoubtedly, she could have made her way up the hierarchy, despite her somewhat unusual situation, but it soon became obvious that she worked best in Asperger mode, with her headset over her ears. She could not be fired—she would have had to be an employee first—so instead she was gradually sidelined. For the past not quite four years she has not been invited to any meeting whatsoever. Sometimes months go by without her leaving the Enclave. She has become just one more resistance in the vast printed circuits of the civil service.
Every morning, she downloads fresh data and tracks fraudsters. She watches the parade of humanity’s great passions and petty vices translated into perfectly neat rows and columns. She tries to picture, behind this cold numerical facade, the fates that are made and unmade, life advancing like a gummy flow of cross-country skis and scooters, souvlaki trios, MP3 files, airport novels, vibrators, regular gasoline, winter tires, California massages and roofing nails, IKEA cabinets, mint-flavoured chocolate pretzels, window cleaner and garbage bags.
She triangulates.
—
The morning goes by and the Enclave remains unusually deserted. Jay busies herself inside a closed circuit, headphones over her ears, until the hunger and fatigue become unbearable. A quick glance at the clock. One p.m. on the nose. That’s enough.
There are only a handful of stragglers left in the cafeteria. Most people have already gone back to work, but their presence lingers, scattered throughout the environment: bagel crumbs, ring-shaped coffee stains, molecules of Lise Watier and pâté chinois, heat signatures on the chairs. The sound system is playing an instrumental version of Madame Butterfly that blankets the acoustic space like a low-pile carpet and serves to mask conversations. Giacomo Puccini, white noise department.
Jay pulls out a random chair. She is still fried despite her three morning coffees. She takes out of her bag a snugly wrapped ham sandwich from the grocery store. Practical food in the shape of a torpedo. Load tube Number Two, prepare to launch. She bites into the bread without appetite, her eyes blank. Even eating a sandwich exhausts her, but she keeps at it and chews. The six inches between her and the end of this baguette stretch out like the road at the end of the world.
She finally swallows the last mouthful, short of breath, jaws aching. She rests her forearm on the table and her forehead on her arm.
When she awakes, Mahesh is sitting across from her. Since it’s Thursday, he has just finished running seven imaginary kilometres on a treadmill, and he is about to plunge his chopsticks into some shrimp chow mein.
Mahesh snags a stray shrimp and holds it in front of his eyes. “What were you dreaming about?”
Jay rubs her eyes. “I was dreaming?”
“You spoke, anyway.”
Mahesh pops the crustacean into his mouth and spi
ts out the tail. Jay massages her temples and looks around for a source of caffeine. Her surroundings swim in a fog.
“I slept for thirteen hours last night. Dunno why I’m still tired.”
“You’re coming down with something.”
He probes the noodles with the tips of his chopsticks, on the lookout for that mythic second shrimp. It’s said all legends are grounded in truth, but this remains to be substantiated. Jay grabs the plastic wrapping of her sandwich and squeezes it into a compact sphere the size of an eyeball.
“So, have you found Papa Zulu?”
Mahesh slurps down a few decimetres of noodles with an air of amusement. “Laura told you about it.”
“The bare bones. I didn’t get the complete course on the art of making a container disappear.”
“They doctored the database.”
“Hack or penetration?”
“Penetration. Several penetrations, actually. They altered four or five databases with different authorizations. They manipulated the data to have the container loaded onto another ship, and then they erased everything. A one-two punch—it’s as if the container had never transited the port. I retraced it in the database’s backup copy.”
“So we know where it is.”
“Yes and no. We know it was shipped to Caucedo.”
“Dominican Republic?”
“Correct. But according to official records, the carrier never had the container on board, and the Caucedo authority never received it. It may have been off-loaded on the sly at the Newark–Elizabeth port of call—that still needs to be verified.”
Silence settles in at the table. Mahesh sucks up his noodles, Jay is thinking. Her brain switches on, one circuit at a time.
“And the carrier? Don’t they have the exporter’s contact information?”
Mahesh, looking jubilant, abruptly stops his sucking. “Laura didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“Oooh, you’re going to love this. The killer detail. The container was delivered by a trucking company in Lachine, Transport Tor.”
“Tor? Thor?”
“Tor. A family business, not registered at the port. Around twenty employees, a dozen tractors, a few trailers. Early June they get a phone call from a strange company…Korov Export.”
“Rokov.”
“Rokov? Okay. Whatever. They want to rent a trailer for a forty-foot container. Normally, Tor doesn’t do rentals, but business is slow and they happen to have a trailer rusting away at the back of the lot. You know what they say: take the money and run.”
Noodles, bok choy, noodles. Jay is getting antsy. Mahesh looks for something under the paper napkins (probably just a way to draw out the story). He locates the little packet of soy sauce and starts to tear it open.
“So one of the drivers delivers the trailer to a transfer point in Longueuil. The parking lot of a KFC that’s gone out of business. The trailer didn’t stay there, obviously, but since it wasn’t equipped with a GPS tracker, there’s no way of knowing where it was taken afterwards.”
The soy sauce packet stretches but doesn’t tear. Mahesh gives up.
“Long story short, early October the exporter calls Tor: they can come pick up the trailer, same place as in June, the KFC parking lot. A slight change: there’s a reefer on the trailer, and it needs to be delivered to the Cast Terminal.”
“They didn’t find that suspicious?”
“Sure, but hey, it’s a little late for scruples. The exporter faxes the information: reservation number, temperature setting. Everything seems to be by the book. So they make the delivery and wash their hands of it. The upshot: no one has any idea where the container spent the summer.”
“Distributed trucking.”
“Correct. They segmented the transportation. Another trucking outfit took over, but which one? Where did they move the container? Straight to Rovok?”
“Rokov.”
“Rokov, Korov. Who cares?!”
“I sometimes wonder how you’ve managed to hide your dyslexia from everyone for the past seven years.”
“Next time, I’ll come better prepared. I’ll have a Power-Point.”
Jay smiles dreamily as she fidgets with her ball of Cellophane. “Anyway, they’re clever.”
Mahesh lifts a flaccid piece of bok choy with his chopsticks and subjects it to a stern examination. “Clever, yes, which is also our main reason for presuming criminal activity. Why would a bona fide exporter of Empire apples want to make their containers invisible and untraceable?”
The question hovers momentarily over the table. Jay takes the opportunity to pitch the Cellophane ball, which lands directly in the trash can. Mahesh abandons the bok choy on the heap of noodles and closes the container. He pretends to sweep the crumbs off the table but finds none.
“My grandfather used to say that a meal that leaves no crumbs is a suspicious meal.”
“Your grandfather was a wise man.”
“No doubt about that.”
Packing the food container back into the plastic bag, Mahesh discovers a fortune cookie and hands it to Jay. On their way back to the Enclave, Jay toys with the cookie as if it were a subversive idea.
The two co-workers return to their ergonomic chairs. Mahesh starts up his coffee machine and brings up the file of container PZIU 127 002 7 on his monitor. Jay puts on her headset and cracks her knuckles. Just as she is about to turn on the music, her eyes fall on the fortune cookie. She unwraps it, breaks it in half and extracts the slip of paper.
You are one of the people who go places in life.
She wonders if the statement should be taken literally. She crunches a piece. Edible but not really meant to be eaten. A fortune cookie isn’t a food—it’s an information storage unit.
While she chews, she watches an endless column of credit card numbers shimmering on her computer screen. Sometimes this feels like a life sentence.
THE MIRONS ARE NOT PART of the landscape; they built the landscape.
Most people move to the Domaine Bordeur simply as a result of circumstance: a divorce, a death, a reversal of fortune. The Mirons, however, live in this bleak place of their own free will. They laid claim to this plot of land long before the streets were paved, long before they had names, when all you could see were some trailers scattered among the spruce trees. The bears would attack the garbage and the bird feeders on a daily basis. It was the Far South.
Back then, Sheila Miron taught an intro to technology course at the Huntingdon high school and Gus was a foreman on various construction sites in the area. They had known each other since childhood. They both hailed from a hamlet somewhere in Ontario called Milles Roches, which no one had ever heard of. This is not a subject Gus Miron likes to talk about. When questioned about his little hometown, he just mumbles, “Don’t waste your time. It’s not down on any map.”
When Lisa is not with either Éric or Robert Routier, chances are she can be found at the Mirons’. Not so long ago, the legs of Mr. Miron and those of his young assistant could often be seen sticking out side by side under the Datsun. She would hold the flashlight, hand him tools, ask questions. At 4 p.m., Mrs. Miron brought them tea and scones. Lisa would come home stained with motor oil and plum jam.
The Mirons never had children, and Lisa is the closest thing they have to a granddaughter. The Mirons are there for her whenever she needs a hand. Even in touchy situations. They help her deal with algebra homework, bake a birthday cake for Robert, repair a window broken by a catapult prototype, improve the catapult prototype. So, naturally, it was to them that Lisa turned to fashion a parachute.
The Mirons didn’t know why their young neighbour needed a parachute, but they didn’t ask any questions.
She spent several days drawing plans and cobbling together small-scale models with grocery bags and glue sticks. Her parachute was not going to look like a sack of potatoes. It would be worthy of Leonardo da Vinci, with an elegant canopy and a vent to reduce oscillation. A first-rate piece of work
. Three times she calculated the surface area in relation to weight, air density, altitude, drag coefficient and terminal velocity. Éric reviewed the calculations—two heads are better than one—but found nothing wrong.
Lisa pushes open the Mirons’ screen door and goes in without knocking. Inside, the house smells of boeuf bourguignon and vanilla. Sitting at the kitchen counter, Sheila Miron looks up from her crossword puzzle and fixes her piercing gaze on Lisa.
“I was waiting for you.”
“Am I too late?”
“No. I even have a surprise for you.”
She gets up, and Lisa follows her to the sewing room. Madame Miron turns on the light and rubs her hands together. The workshop is the only untidy room in the house. Whereas the rest of the place is impeccably neat, this room is overflowing with rolls of cloth, tailor’s dummies, patterns, bobbins, vintage and modern machines. Not everyone is allowed in here. You must earn the right to enter, show the proper attitude. For Sheila Miron, sewing is a serious matter, to be ranked alongside marble sculpture or aluminum welding. Beyond this door, she is Chief Textile Engineer.
Near the overlock machine, on a large work table, lies a carefully folded parachute: prototype number three.
The past week has been a veritable obstacle course for Lisa. She has simultaneously learned the basics of sewing and how to operate an overlock, plus the art of drawing a pattern and choosing a fabric. The first two parachutes were sewn, analyzed and unstitched several times before being rejected. The Chief Engineer was adamant: these were merely test models that did not deserve to cross the threshold of her workshop. Lisa continued to unstitch, measure, draw and sew together again. The nylon resisted, slipped, puckered. Peering over Lisa’s shoulder, the Engineer supervised the stitching without saying a word, while an old cassette tape deck played operatic arias.
Despite Lisa’s efforts, prototype number three did not receive the stamp of approval. Lisa inspects every seam—she doesn’t understand. It all seems quite acceptable. But Mrs. Miron insisted: this parachute does not leave the workshop. Try, try, try again, etc. Lisa sighs. There’s not enough nylon left for the fourth parachute and she has no time to return to Valleyfield to buy more. While Lisa is stewing over it, Mrs. Miron hunts through her closet and pulls out an old Eaton’s garment bag.
Six Degrees of Freedom Page 5