Fear was what you felt interviewing a Cuban dissident at his rundown Havana home and suddenly hearing military boots kicking down the front door and the howls of the Neighbourhood Brigades urging soldiers on.
No, the feeling Delaney felt just then was not fear. It was a deep sense of dread. Dread of entanglement, of ensnarement. It was not at all the same as fear. He remembered clearly the first time he had this feeling. He was sixteen, and intensely, hormonally, involved with a buxom young high school sweetheart. They had been kissing and fondling each other with teenage ferocity for weeks and in her ardour the girl had one night whispered: “Oh Francis, I love you.” His reaction had been unmistakable and it had not been joy. He had thought, instead: How will I ever get out of this now?
Delaney felt that dread of entanglement once again as he stood with Natalia on the old wooden porch. He knew that what they had learned that morning was important, that the facts they had uncovered meant there was much more to the death of Stanislaw Janovski than he had suspected. The coincidence in the timing and nature of the second death was simply too great. So far, he had been simply taking a journalist’s interest in what Natalia had told him of her uncle’s story. But he knew that he was now also personally implicated in this increasingly complex affair, that he was connected to this other human being because he had said that he would help her. He was becoming involved in a way in which he, the professional passive observer, had spent a lifetime trying to avoid.
*
They walked the short distance out the gates and across St. Joseph Boulevard to the canal. They strolled for a short while along the bicycle path that ran beside it and then stood looking out over the frozen lake to the group of three ice-fishing huts sitting brown-black against the brilliant white expanse. Delaney had left the car where it was parked, apparently not caring that it would trouble and annoy the priest if he saw it still there. They did not talk much immediately after the encounter on the porch. Natalia walked with her hands in her pockets, and felt the fear that Delaney had not felt. The priest has been murdered too, she thought. She looked over at Delaney, but he also was deep in thought. Francis thinks so too.
“He was murdered too,” she said.
“We can’t be sure of that, Natalia,” Delaney said slowly. “We don’t even know if your uncle was murdered.”
But she knew he was not stupid, that he had been around the world. She knew that he, too, found it a most disturbing coincidence.
“I would like to know if my uncle came out here to visit Father Bernard around the time they died,” she said.
“I wouldn’t count on our friend across the street to help us out on that,” Delaney said. “I could possibly make some inquiries about this so-called drowning through the ice, though. I know some reporters who find that sort of thing interesting. It might have hit the French police tabloids.”
They had stopped, and were leaning against the old iron railing that separated the path from the frozen water in the canal. The municipal authorities had spent a lot of money fixing up the area. There were benches and picnic tables, now heaped with a season’s fall of snow, beside the bike path. Small bronze plaques here and there described the history of the place. A squat building of ancient stones to their right was the main trading post of the early fur trade, one such plaque said. It was now a museum, and brightly dressed schoolchildren were filing inside behind an impossibly young teacher.
Natalia looked across the street and saw on the second story of the main convent building a solitary nun rocking slowly on the balcony, bundled up against the cold air. Perhaps, Natalia thought, she had been there the whole time they had been with the priest. Perhaps she was often there, watching the street below.
“I’m going to talk to that nun,” Natalia announced suddenly. She hitched her purse up higher on her shoulder and moved toward the sidewalk to cross the street back to the gate. Delaney was startled, looked up to where she had pointed, and then moved to go with her.
“What do you mean?” he said. “What would she have had to do with anything? Hold on.”
But Natalia was determined to go on and to do so quickly. Something about the situation suddenly made her want to act, to move beyond the precipice where the old priest’s news had left them. She had been moving, she realized, as if in a dream since the night she discovered Stanislaw’s body. She was tired of introspection. She yearned quite uncharacteristically for movement, action, definite answers, some promise of resolution.
“No,” said Natalia. “I want to ask someone else about all this. Anyone else. You stay here. They won’t like men going in there anyway. I might be able to get her to tell me something.”
“Tell you what? What could an old nun possibly know about any of this?” Delaney asked impatiently. “Wait.”
“No. I’m going in.”
Natalia dashed across the road. There was no traffic. As she went back through the gate, she turned and saw Delaney standing on the sidewalk, looking perturbed.
Perhaps he will be angry with me now. But surely he of all people can understand this need for answers, she thought.
For the first time in many weeks she was clear in her mind about what she was doing and why. She carried on up the driveway and into the main convent building. The worn wooden stairs inside were broad, gleaming with wax and the effort of many Ursuline arms. No one was around. She ran lightly up, and on the first dark landing saw the pale light from outside coming in a long row of windows that gave onto the shaded verandah. Through the spotless but very old glass she could see the back of a nun’s veil — rocking, slowly rocking.
Natalia went through the door and apologized immediately to the old woman for the intrusion.
“Please, I’m so sorry to startle you,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”
The nun, easily past her seventieth birthday, stopped her rocking and sat up very straight in the high-backed chair. She had small, dark eyes that stared. She did not, however, seem afraid. Perhaps that was because she had seen Natalia coming across the road. Or perhaps it was because she had expected someone, eventually, to come.
*
Delaney watched from across the street as Natalia disappeared into the convent building. He felt the unpleasant sense of entanglement grow.
I’ll have to wait for her now, he thought, surprised at how annoyed this small inconvenience made him. He was used to being the one to make the moves, to seek the information, to plan a strategy. He expected that Natalia would be discovered by someone, reported to the priest, and that there would be a scene in which he would have to intervene.
He saw Natalia appear on the high, wide balcony, saw the old nun stop her rocking and sit bolt upright in her chair. Natalia pulled another rocker close to the old nun and sat facing her directly, leaning forward, and talking intently. The two women sat like this and talked for a long time. Psychologist with client, Delaney thought.
It was impossible for him to guess from their movements whether Natalia was having any success. He did not like being kept in the dark like this. He did not like depending on someone else to gather information for him. Then it occurred to him that not since they had driven in the gate that morning had he thought to check whether they were being followed. He did not like that very much either.
As he looked carefully around him now he could see no one watching, no car waiting, nothing untoward. He felt nonetheless that he was somehow losing control of the situation. He turned, crossed a small footbridge over the canal, and began trudging through deep snow down an embankment and out across the frozen lake toward the fishing shacks.
*
Sister Marie Alpha Gilberte Huberdeau, everdevoted, ever-obedient member of the Blessed Order of the Ursulines, watched quietly as the pretty young woman who had spoken such excellent French moved slowly back down the driveway to the street. At the gate, the young woman turned briefly back and gave a furtive wave up to the balcony. Sister
Gilberte did not wave back. Nor did she yet rock, for the moment, in her favourite old oak chair. She watched as the tall young man, older than the woman, crossed the street to join her. He stamped snow from his boots and his trouser legs. They spoke for a few moments, and then the young man looked briefly up in the direction of the balcony before they walked together to get into a fine old car that was parked near the priests’ residence. She waited until the car had sped off in a plume of steam in the direction of the city before she resumed her rocking once again.
Ah, the nun thought, ah, mon bon Dieu seigneur. The things one sees, the things one must endure in this life. She rocked, and felt the chill of the coming afternoon in her nostrils. She smelled the vaguest hint of a Quebec spring, too, however, and that gave her spirit some repose. After the winter comes spring, she thought.
She thought, calmer now, of all of the winters and springs she had seen unfold from this very balcony and this very chair. She thought of other winters and springs she had seen in other convents and churches in other parts of this snowbound province. Quelques arpents de neige, she thought. A few acres of snow. That is what the French kings called this place.
She was calmer now, after the surprise visit, and after the questions about things she might have seen. The girl’s questions had been from the heart, Sister Gilberte had thought. Some things about Père Bernard, God save him, some things about the girl’s uncle who had also recently been taken. Sister Gilberte had listened quietly and said very little, as was her custom, the way she and thousands of young Quebec farm girls had been trained to do as their duty to God and the Catholic Church. She felt that she had not sinned by telling the girl that, oui, sometimes she saw visitors come in the courtyard, and that, oui, she remembered seeing Père Bernard walking in the grounds and along the canal with another old man, not a priest, who would come by bus to visit from time to time. Even not so long ago, mademoiselle, yes that is true.
And, oui, she had seen other visitors. Of course, people came from time to time for the priests and for deliveries and to make repairs and remove the snow. Oui, people came in from time to time. It would be impossible, however, to remember all such visitors and so she really could not say who else might have come to see Père Bernard. That would be impossible to say. Sister Gilberte had preferred to listen to the girl’s story of how her uncle had suddenly been taken, that he had been a good Catholic man who had fought bravely in Europe’s War — the one which les Canadiens français had not wanted very much to fight — and that she missed him very much.
Sister Gilberte had listened and had not told the young woman about those she herself missed, about her own family she had left so long ago, about all that she had seen these past fifty or more years wearing the habit of the Ursulines.
She did not tell her about the day very much like this one, so many years ago, when she thought God had called her for her sinful thoughts and her dis obedience, when the trickle of blood ran down inside her thigh and she ran and ran and ran to a rushing icy stream between the hard frozen farms and sat with her skirts billowing up in the freezing water to wash that sinner’s blood from her body. She did not tell the girl how the pains each month had been intense, excruciating punishment after that first time in the cold, cold water, how no matter how much she tried to wash away the sinful, sinful blood it still came, and how there was no one she could ever tell. There were things that must be kept strictly between a Catholic girl and her Dieu seigneur.
Sister Gilberte did not describe to the girl how proud her family was when she had been the first child to enter the convent, how they had waved and waved at the train the day she left for Saint-Jérôme. They had waved that way when her older sisters had left the village to work in the textile mills of New England and the shoe factories in the east end of Montreal. She did not describe all the convents and schoolrooms and hospitals and presbytères where she had done her duty to God and the Catholic Church. All of the things she had seen, and heard, and some she wished she had not seen and heard, things she was not supposed to see and hear.
Sister Gilberte shuddered. The wind from the river was getting colder as the sun moved. She did not wish to think this afternoon about some of the things she had seen and heard as an Ursuline.
The sounds in the night in the wide dark wooden convent halls.The sounds of weeping, the sounds of punishments, and the sounds of secret footsteps. The sounds, in those years when she was housekeeper to a priest far from here, of protesting, whimpering, groaning altar boys who had been summoned to consult with him behind closed doors. What did they do in that room those afternoons? What on earth could make the small boys whimper so?
There were things even here in Lachine that she wished she had not seen, wished she had not heard. And so she could not tell the young woman of that darkening late afternoon not so very long ago, when as she sat and rocked she saw two men in suits and fancy coats come and knock at the door of the priests’ house much as the young woman herself and her friend had done this very day.
She thought it would not be right to tell how Père Bernard had answered, how the men had gone inside, how they had stayed for a very long time, only the three of them there that day. She did not tell how in the early evening dark the two men had come out to carry a long, dark bundle to their car, how they had driven it across the small canal bridge and past the boatsheds and down onto the thick hard ice and out to the fishing shacks.
She did not say how she saw them unload their bundle into one of the shacks and then drive away in their fine new car. She had not even told Père Carpentier when he returned that night from his duties in Montreal. It was not for her to tell all that she had seen and heard.
Chapter 5
Hilferty loved being a spy. He loved it even though he was the Canadian version of a spy, a sanitized and civilized version of what he secretly called “world class spies” like the CIA guys or the Brits or the Israelis. Still, he was as much a spy as you could get in this great northern outpost and he loved it. He really did.
He was particularly content on days like this. A classic late-winter or springlike morning — the choice of descriptions said a lot about your personality, the Service psychologists would no doubt claim — filled with February sunlight, the snow brilliant, the air not too cold. Alone in a shiny, oversized, and very comfortable government car, driving down the highway from Ottawa to Montreal. His snug little house in the charming New Edinburgh district, his charming assistant deputy minister bureaucrat wife, his charming perfect daughters behind him for a day or so.
He was fresh from a secret Saturday briefing with his supervisors — he just as secretly called them his masters — confirmed in the assignment he had been on for many weeks now, knowing exactly what his next moves would be, the issues of back-up and resources and manpower all sorted out, the way clear, for once, to carry on with what he was trained to do, what he suspected he had been born to do, for Canada.
Days like this, assignments like this, clear-cut situations like this, he knew, as he adjusted the balance control on the car radio so as not to miss a nuance of the baroque concert playing on the CBC, were becoming harder to arrange. His masters were lately far too worried about parliamentary committee submissions and staffing cuts and the cost of surveillance overtime and their own pensions, too frightened by the budget cuts to all federal government departments and services to keep clearly in their minds what the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had been set up to do and why minor issues of money and bureaucracy and mandate and accountability had to be pushed into the second tier of things to consider.
The meeting had gone exceptionally well. Hilferty had picked his most unspooklike suit for the occasion, since he knew Smithson did not like people flaunting their spy status on the arch-conservative streets of Ottawa, and Rawson was jealous of those who dressed better than he did. Hilferty’s briefing was a classic. The adrenalin flowed directly to the speech centres of his brain and the words
flowed out just as they had to in order to reassure his masters that all was well with this operation, that it was worth every penny and every operative who had been assigned to it, that no minister or journalist would get wind of it, that if they did there could be no hint of scandal or waste or violation of procedures or of the Canadian Criminal Code or, God forbid, of the constitutionally enshrined Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
And, of course, as was always the case when Quebec turf was involved, they had wanted endless reassurances that the operation would not flare up into another in the decades-long series of federalprovincial jurisdictional battles, that CSIS agents, and in particular Smithson and Rawson themselves, would not find their pictures on the front of the Globe and Mail or, God forbid, Le Devoir, in a year when the separatist government in Quebec City was planning to hold yet another referendum about whether people in the province had finally decided that, yes, this time they really had had enough of Canadian federalism. Everything was fine, just fine, Hilferty had assured them. Everything was going exactly according to plan, no chance of a fuck-up — Smithson liked briefings to have a few bits of profanity in them, as this made him feel more like the hard-bitten spymaster he would never prove to be — all going exactly according to plan.
Quite routine, really. Just carrying on, gentlemen, with our tracking of two Polish agents who have been in the country for some time. Monitoring their activities before kicking up a fuss at the Polish Embassy or approaching anyone in the band of reprobates and paranoiacs and malcontents and thugs who now made up Walesa’s sorry excuse for a presidential team and the chaotic remains of a security apparatus in Warsaw. And most definitely, gentlemen, this high-priced journalist in Montreal could turn out be a help to them in their investigations. Yes.
It was a shame, Hilferty thought as he drove, how the whole CSIS thing had turned out, how cautious and apologetic Smithson and Rawson and those like them had had to become in carrying out what Hilferty, in secret, liked to call Their Important Mission. He hated having to make such earnest pitches for support for operations, having to go cap in hand to the Smithsons and the Rawsons of this world for permission to do what he knew was best.
The Mazovia Legacy Page 7