It was true, he acknowledged this, that CSIS had never been set up to rival the American agencies in its work or its style, that it could never hope to anyway. And it was true that the official mandate for this civilian security agency, which had replaced the RCMP security service in 1984 when the Mounties had been caught doing un-Canadian things like breaking into offices and burning down separatists’ property and stealing dynamite and other spooklike things, was domestic only. He was embarrassed to say to the American agents he came into contact with that, no, CSIS had no mandate to undertake covert operations abroad, and no mandate for its agents to carry weapons, and, no, he didn’t think that was like running around without a dick. In secret, however, Hilferty yearned for the wide-open spaces of Yank or even British spookdom, for the overseas intrigue and the high-tech toys and the deadly weaponry and the life-anddeath nature of some of the assignments the Langley, Virginia, cowboys told him about in hotel bars over expensive CIA-issue bourbons. He wanted a piece of all that. He was tired of the endless, earnest debates in Canada about “security intelligence” as opposed to “foreign intelligence,” about when something posed a threat to the security interests of Canada and when it did not. He was tired of all this precious bullshit about Canada being a respected middle power and therefore, somehow, above the need for a bit of dirty old-fashioned overseas spying from time to time.
What other decent-sized country in the world would stick with such a ridiculous line besides dear old Canada? Not one. The world was changing fast, in Hilferty’s humble opinion, and Canada had to change along with it. For all he knew, the powersthat-be in Ottawa would never be able to come to a decision about whether to set up a real foreign intelligence service in Canada. They had been dithering about it since the last war and they were dithering about it still. But he didn’t give a damn about any of that bureaucratic bullshit. Never had. He knew what his real job was and he just got on with it.
Hilferty nursed the secret thought that he would have been a highly successful and valued CIA man, given the chance and the accident of birth in the U.S. of A. He had all the credentials, in his reckon ing. A conspiratorial mind — chess was his game from about the age of ten — a nice little degree in military history, an even nicer law degree from McGill. Then varied experience defending scumbags as a young criminal lawyer, then prosecutions in Montreal and the makings of a very nice little career in the Ministère de Justice. Another Montreal Anglo boy makes good.
But then, thankfully — there being no possibility of his ever playing in the American Spook League and his having no taste for becoming a Mountie spook — had come the McDonald Commission, the Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. With that came the decision to take spookery away from the Mounties, because they had been naughty boys, and give it to bright young non-policemen just like, Hilferty thought happily as he drove, his very self. His pleasure in having won the right to serve Canada as a CSIS agent had not been marred by the fact that, fair-minded Canadians all, the bureaucrats in Ottawa assigned to set up the new agency had sought applicants through large display ads in the careers sections of the major newspapers of the day. That didn’t make the job any less special, any less important, in Hilferty’s view.
So now, ten years in, he found himself driving down the almost empty highway toward his former hometown to continue his Important Mission to keep Canada a safe haven from nastiness of all sorts.
He had been doing his bit to push the envelope a bit, to do on the ground all he could to move CSIS along a little farther down the road to real agency status. He was sick of relying on those smug liaison officers from other services for the real dope on things that were important to Canada. Sick to death of it. So he pushed the envelope a bit whenever he could. He and some other like-minded CSIS men. Even if it meant keeping a few things to themselves, or occasionally breaking a few of the more vexatious rules and regulations that constrained them.
He had been doing his bit these ten years and, he liked to think in secret, the country was a little better for it. Those simple families in the little redbrick farmhouses he saw out the window of his car could have no idea just how fucked up a place the world was becoming, how very lucky they all were. They really had no idea.
And it was a very fucked-up place. This latest assignment showed that clearly. Hilferty guessed that when all was said and done he would probably just find that the Polish guys were here to watch Borowski, so they could report to Walesa what this loose cannon of a Polish-Canadian entrepreneur, socalled entrepreneur, was up to in Poland’s election year. Hilferty guessed that was what they were doing here, but, then again, you could just never be sure anymore, with the Soviet Union completely fucked, and amateurs like Walesa running the store in places like Warsaw. It seemed to his logical military-historian’s mind and his lawyerly training and his CSIS experience that it would be a natural thing for Walesa to want to watch Borowski, because the guy had scared the shit out of everybody in the last presidential election in Poland by suddenly going over and winning almost 25 percent of the vote.
Borowski, with his dubious, his really very dubious, biography, was worth watching. Even if you weren’t Walesa and scared shitless about this mysterious millionaire who claimed he had made his wad in Canada in refrigerators after exiting Poland via Sweden in 1969. Who then acquired Argentine citizenship while running a restaurant in Buenos Aires, for Christ’s sake, and then decided during the 1990 election that he’d go over from Toronto and stir the Polish pot with some statesmanlike rhetoric.
“Poles need a unifying goal and one such goal that can unite Poles is war.” That was one of his good ones. “The most effective weapon for Poland today is an intelligent medium-range missile with a nuclear warhead of about one megatonne.” Hilferty and the lads at CSIS had particularly liked that one as they sat in Ottawa and monitored coverage of Borowski’s progress in the campaign.
So, OK. It’s natural Walesa and his merry men would want to watch Borowski a bit this time around, especially since good King Lech had thrown the guy in jail for a few days after the 1990 campaign was over and had him charged with defamation before squeezing him for $100,000 bail money and kicking him out of the country.
But Hilferty had a sense there was perhaps more to it than that. He had never bought the rumours in 1990 that Borowski was KGB, or even CIA, for Christ’s sake; the rumours had gone that far. He never bought that stuff at all. But, and God knows he would never say this to Smithson and Rawson, maybe he was dead wrong about the Borowski connection in the first place. Why would the Polish agents be spending so much of their time in Montreal? As far as he had been able to gather, they hadn’t even gone up to Toronto or anywhere near Borowski’s turf. Why was that?
And why would they bother with an old guy like Janovski? Where did an old World War II–vintage émigré like that figure in this? Hilferty had been able to make no connection between Janovski and Borowski, no matter how many keywords and crossreferences he fed into the CSIS computer late at night when all the little secretary foxes had gone home. And why would these guys be bothering with Janovski’s niece now that the old man had bought it?
The questions troubled him, despite the soothing baroque music that filled the warm sanctuary of his large automobile. It also troubled him, though God knows he wasn’t about to tell Smithson and Rawson this either, not yet anyway, that maybe the Poles had snuffed old Janovski, that maybe the little coincidence of his drowning was too hard to fathom any other way. It troubled him that if it turned out they were the ones who had done the old guy in, maybe the Smithsons and Rawsons of this world would wonder why someone on Hilferty’s team had not been around the night it happened, seeing as they were costing the Canadian government such big bucks in surveillance overtime.
Hilferty sat up a little straighter now and began to concentrate on the heavy traffic that always built up on the western approaches to Montreal. He’d have to pon
der all of that a little later, after he’d finished talking to Delaney. Yes, Hilferty thought, Delaney might just be able to shed some light on this for them, after he’d heard the little proposition that the fine young undercover representative of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was driving to Montreal to deliver personally. Hilferty would ponder all of that later, and then he would take little Ronika — racy little Ronika of the tight jeans and the university textbooks clutched so fetchingly against Danskin ballet tops — out for a bit of dinner and a bang later at the hotel, to console himself, in secret, about what a complex and possibly dangerous place Canada had become.
*
The tires on Delaney’s Mercedes crunched wetly on the treacherous mixture of gravel and slush that passed for Brian O’Keefe’s driveway in wintertime. He hadn’t bothered to call first. In fact, he had had the most fleeting of intuitions that he had perhaps better start limiting what he said about all of this over the telephone. It was a Saturday morning, the day after his trip out to Lachine with Natalia, and he knew that O’Keefe would be home. Whenever he wasn’t at the Tribune these days, and even on some days when he was supposed to be at the newspaper, O’Keefe retreated to his few hectares of land at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and played out his strange role as part gentleman farmer, part survivalist.
It was a game that annoyed his wife, Karen, unspeakably. Delaney could only just remember the days when he and O’Keefe were young reporters together on the Tribune, and O’Keefe’s marriage had not yet deteriorated to a tense stand-off. The O’Keefes had still lived in the inner city in those days, and even with Brian racing around on his beloved police beat for the newspaper and Karen working hard at university courses, they still had time for some semblance of a life together. Karen even smiled a little in those days and consented from time to time to having a few people over from the paper for bad pasta and cheap wine.
Now, a few unsuccessful separations later, she and O’Keefe still shared the same space, far though it was from the inner-city media life they had once shared, but she did not share her smiles very much at all. Karen had grown tired, in a way that Delaney knew all too well, of the raucous reporter’s life O’Keefe loved so much. Tired of the boozing and the late nights and the shoptalk and the occasional indiscretions on the road, on assignment. Even the very late addition of a son, an enormous surprise to all O’Keefe’s colleagues at the paper as well as to himself, had not improved matters much. The boy, Seamus, was now five years old. O’Keefe and Karen were five years older and five more years into their disastrous marriage, but there was still no end in sight.
Karen was underemployed as a nurse in a local community centre. Treating the cuts and scrapes of farm boys after their brawls in local taverns was not quite what she had imagined for herself when she was somehow won over to O’Keefe’s mad scheme to escape the city. O’Keefe, for his part, contented himself in his time off with his gun collection, his two mongrel dogs, and tramping the overgrown fields around his house like some mad Irish lord, shooting at any bird or small animal that moved and dreaming of the day when an intruder might venture onto his precious sod.
Journalism had ruined O’Keefe in not quite the same way it had ruined Delaney. Delaney had moved around a lot in the business, worked here and there in a variety of media, thereby postponing the inevitable realization that 90 percent of journalism is repulsive, venal, mendacious, and cheap — a killer of souls and a graveyard of talent. O’Keefe hadn’t gone the parliamentary correspondent, foreign correspondent route. Airplane and chopper rides and good hotels and expense accounts and glamour assignments hadn’t spared him from the inevitable for as long as they had for Delaney. O’Keefe had stayed for almost his entire career at the Tribune and had taken on the persona of the loud, brash, terminally cynical city reporter so completely and so early that he could now hardly take the mask off, even with his oldest friends.
His inability to see any redeeming feature in any human endeavour, any public figure, in just about anything at all, had made him a very hard man, at forty-six or forty-seven years of age, to be with for very long. That, and his not terribly well disguised alcoholism were exhausting for those who dared spend time with him. Even Delaney did not come out to the farm very much anymore, though there was a period after his wife left him that he had spent more than a few nights with the O’Keefes, drinking the house whisky and fighting hounds for space on the couch. Karen had endured this for a while and then it became clear that Delaney had best begin passing his time some other way, inflicting his grief on someone else for a while.
O’Keefe, though, would have let his old friend, a fellow Irish Quebecer scribe of the bilingual kind, stay on forever. He would do anything for those he considered his friends and Delaney was counting on this for some help in the Janovski killing. For he had now decided that it, like the priest’s death, was murder. O’Keefe’s contacts in the police and the coroner’s office and the more disreputable of the crime tabloids were up-to-date and first rate. And O’Keefe spoke the sort of raw French joual of the streets to which Montreal cops and coroners responded well. Delaney’s French was simply wrong for this sort of work. It made him suspect, an Anglais.
Karen appeared more sullen than usual as she opened the door to the O’Keefe kitchen. She had gained a lot of weight and her hair was dry and not well combed. She was busy heating soup on the stove for young Seamus, even though it was midmorning. The heir to the O’Keefe land holdings sat at the plastic-covered table with a foolish grin on his face.
“Hi, Uncle Francis,” Seamus said. “I’m having soup.”
“Brian’s out in the barn,” Karen said. “Hunting pigeons.” She was not one for small talk anymore. But she paused, and then asked: “You doing OK, Francis?”
“Yeah, good. You?”
“Terrific.” She ladled steaming soup into Seamus’s bowl. “Had lunch?”
“Bit early for me,” Delaney said.
Karen looked relieved. There was a burst of gunfire from the direction of the outbuildings and she looked sharply at Delaney, as if this was somehow his fault.
“That’ll be Rambo in the barn,” she said. Delaney heard several more blasts from inside the dilapidated grey barn as he crunched through old snow toward it. He was careful to call out loudly before going in, lest O’Keefe think he had at last found some human target for his rage.
The firing stopped and Brian appeared, wearing what looked like a Crimean War greatcoat, a tweed cap, and a pair of grotesquely soiled rubber boots.
He stood well over six feet tall. In one hand he carried a short-barrel pump-action shotgun, of the sort used by riot squads the world over. In the other, a quart bottle of Molson’s Export Ale.The murderous gun had come from a friend in the Quebec Police Force; the beer was from the battered Kelvinator fridge O’Keefe kept in the barn.
“Oh fuck me, it’s Delaney,” O’Keefe said. “What do you want now? Don’t come whimpering to me about your girl troubles again, whatever you do.”
O’Keefe somehow managed to grasp Delaney in a bear hug without spilling any of his beer or killing either of them with the shotgun. Delaney always felt like a frail boy in one of O’Keefe’s extravagantly rough embraces.
“Have a beer, young man, and we shall eliminate this pigeon problem together,” O’Keefe said.
They went into the dim stinking barn. A couple of frightened cattle, the sum total of O’Keefe’s herd, looked without hope at the new arrival, aware that nothing would save them from this madman with a riot gun. High in the rafters sat a line of pigeons, equally terrified, at whom O’Keefe had been launching fusillades.
“These fucking pigeons are driving me crazy, Francis. They shit everywhere.” O’Keefe managed to open the fridge door, retrieve a bottle from inside, open it, and hand it to Delaney, again without putting down his own burdens. “I’ll get my doublebarrel from the house for you.”
“Never mind, Brian. I’ll just watch.
”
This was O’Keefe’s cue. He put down his beer, loaded three shells into the chamber, and fired them in quick succession in the general direction of the rafters. He pulled expertly at the wooden stock between shots to reload.
“Bastards, bastards,” he shouted with each explosion. “Sons of bitches.”
Birds fell. The hunt and the beer and the toowarm coat had reddened O’Keefe’s face. He grinned wildly at Delaney.
“Want to have a go?” he asked.
“No thanks,” Delaney said.
“Faggot.”
“Look, Brian, I’m not going to keep you long. I need a favour.” Delaney found himself unable to be charmed by O’Keefe today, or anytime lately. “What’s up?” Brian asked as he reloaded. Delaney explained as little as he could about his interest in the death of Stanislaw Janovski and Father Bernard Dérôme. Could O’Keefe possibly help him out by making some inquiries about actual times and causes of death, coroner’s reports, autopsies, police investigations, if any?
“Your police contacts have always been better than mine,” Delaney said. “And I’ve been out of the front lines for a long while now.”
“Yeah, I know,” O’Keefe said. “Too cerebral for the police beat now. Let your old pals deal with the pigs now. I know that little game.”
“So what do you think?”
“I’ll check it out for you. When do you need it?”
“I don’t know. Soon. Monday?”
“I’ll try,” O’Keefe said. “What are you working on exactly?”
“Oh, just a little sniffing around for a longer piece.”
The Mazovia Legacy Page 8