The Mazovia Legacy

by Michael E. Rose

  Inside the cloth wrapping was a neat stack of Canadian hundred dollar bills, with a paper band around them on which was marked “$5,000.” And a black, very new semi-automatic pistol. On the side was inscribed “Browning-FN9mmHP. Inglis Canada.” There was an extra clip of nine-millimetre bullets, and a small booklet explaining how to load and care for the gun. A Quebec government firearms acquisition certificate in Delaney’s name. A membership card, also in his name, for a gun club and target range on the North Shore: “Club de Tir de Laval, Inc.” Another little booklet, a government publication this time, explained who and in what circumstances citizens, including bona fide members of registered shooting clubs, were allowed to own and transport handguns in Canada. There was also a brief unsigned note:

  “Thought this stuff might be of some use to you. Cash for expenses and the like. No receipts required. Weapon for show, mainly. Not sure if you’ve ever used one of these. Doubt you’ll need to, but people can calm down nicely if you wave one of these around under certain circumstances. Watch where you point it, and mind the safety catch. The certificate and the membership card are not bogus. I’ve still got a few pals in useful places. Like-minded men — you know the drill. Have a go on the target range if you like. Practice makes perfect. And remember, even with the permit we’ve given you it’s a serious offence if the cops stop you in your car and the gun isn’t in the trunk.”

  How very Canadian, Delaney thought.

  Chapter 6

  On Sunday, February 19, 1995, some time just before midnight, consulting psychologist Natalia Janovski sat at a desk in a silent apartment before a school notebook that she used to record her most private thoughts. She wrote:

  “Inability to sleep continues, classic symptoms of anxiety continue — restlessness, fantasies, mildly obsessional behaviour. Dream images vivid, disturbing. Various patterns can be seen to be emerging. Grieving process apparently unresolved. How I wish I could get this monkey off my back. How I wish for a clear psychic space, so I can just sleep for a while, forget about all of this for a while. Surely there is nothing in what I am experiencing that many, many people do not experience all the time when they lose someone they love. I have seen elements of it in many of my own clients. But how many of them become convinced that their missing Other has been murdered? It is natural that such a loss would provoke a psychic disturbance. But where does this perception of murder come from? Is there any basis in reality or is it just an unresolved neurosis?”

  Natalia paused for a moment and looked around her intensely silent apartment.The air was pleasantly warm, the radiators ticked reassuringly, and the small desk light made a cozy circle in the otherwise winter-dark room. She wrote:

  “There is no fear in here tonight, nothing to fear. So where does this anxiety come from? Perhaps it is simply, and this is what I would likely say to a client, that this death has taken from me a target for the projection of my animus complex, and this release of psychic energy is disturbing my equilibrium. Is this maybe why I have sought out Francis now? Another male figure on which to project my animus? Surely not.”

  Surely not, she thought as she looked at the entry in her lined schoolgirl’s notebook. Surely I am more self-aware than that. There is surely more to this than a rather mundane unconscious projection. I asked him to help because he is experienced in these things.

  “Why can’t I accept what I see before me? Why can I never just accept that some things are real, that events are real events, that perceptions are to be trusted and not always just projections from the unconscious. My uncle has died. He left me a disturbing message. He seemed troubled before he died. I don’t see how he could have drowned the way they say he drowned. His close friend has also drowned, at about the same time. I don’t accept the explanation for that death either. I think that the old nun in Lachine did see something, just as I suspected she might. I could sense it in her eyes, her body language, her speech pattern. I have considered a situation, acted on it, sought information, found new information. So why do I always feel that I must apologize for my perceptions? Why would I always feel that the actions I have undertaken in the world are just symptoms, rather than reasonable responses to the facts? Why am I always so uncomfortable with action in the world?”

  She became impatient with the tone of her journal entries now. How many years, she wondered, had she spent time like this, alone, recording her thoughts in journals exactly like this one? How many times had the entries sounded quite like this one? Enough scanning of the contents of her psyche for clues to her behaviour. Enough self-castigation. Tomorrow she would simply continue what she had started, no matter where it might lead. Any good Jungian analyst would agree, she thought, that intuitions, any elements scooped from the unconscious, are to effect change in a personality or to help accomplish some other useful work, in addition to merely being interesting in themselves.

  She decided that she would try once again to sleep. But she could not resist the impulse to write one more line in her precious journal, her introvert’s journal. She wrote:

  “What is archetypal about all of this?”

  *

  The call from O’Keefe didn’t come until very late on Monday, but Delaney had had no doubt that it would come. O’Keefe was many things, but he was surely a reporter who never missed a deadline. Delaney had asked for the information by Monday and O’Keefe delivered it.

  “I got a bit for you on the old dead guys,” O’Keefe said on the telephone. He was calling from the Tribune newsroom, and Delaney had to marvel, as he regularly did, at how quiet such places had become. No more than ten years ago, O’Keefe would have had to shout down the line over the din of typewriters and braying editors and ringing phones. Nowadays, there was an eerie stillness to the computerized, carpeted places where the news was processed. Phones no longer rang: they warbled politely. Editors no longer shouted: they hissed threats and whispered plots.

  “Good man,” Delaney said. “I’ll come over. You on deadline?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t give a fuck. But why don’t you just take it over the phone? You want me to type it up nice and neat for you or what?”

  “Ah, the phones. You know.”

  “No, I fucking don’t know,” O’Keefe said. His swearing increased as deadlines approached. “Someone tapping your phone? Your story that big? Hello, hello, RCMP? This is Brian O’Keefe. Get off the line this instant. You leave my friend Delaney alone now, you hear?”

  Delaney recognized this manic behaviour in O’Keefe. He knew it would be a mistake to say anything more. Not just because he did wonder if his phone was indeed being tapped, now that CSIS had made an approach, but also because he didn’t want to wind his friend up any further. He must have had a fight with Karen or a long lunch, Delaney thought. Probably both.

  It was the lunch, and a few other things. When Delaney arrived at the Tribune newsroom a short time later, O’Keefe was as pumped up as he could get and still function before a computer screen. It wasn’t just the alcohol, although O’Keefe’s red face told part of the tale. It was the rage. The newsroom was full of people half his age who dressed in smart clothes and whose careers were ahead of them, and this enraged him. The paper had less and less space for the kind of cop-and-robber material O’Keefe had made his reputation on, and this enraged him. He was finishing a bitter conversation with the assistant city editor when Delaney walked up to his workstation and this, clearly, had enraged him too.

  The assistant city editor’s name was Fiona Williams. She had an Honours degree in Mass Communications from Concordia University. She hadn’t had her thirtieth birthday yet, but she wore an expensive female-editorial-executive outfit in the requisite creams and white. Word at the Press Club, according to O’Keefe, was that her meteoric rise at the paper had more to do with the managing editor’s extramarital appetites than young Ms. Fiona’s news judgment. Delaney had heard many such rumours, most of them unfounded, from enraged male journalis
ts of a certain age.

  “If you’d give me a few more fucking minutes without interrupting me, I would give you the motherfucking story,” O’Keefe was hissing to her.

  “OK, Brian. You file by five p.m. or we fill that hole with Canadian Press copy,” Ms. Fiona said.

  “Fuck that. Those CP idiots wouldn’t know a lead if it bit them on the ass.”

  “Five p.m.,” Ms. Fiona said. She looked at Delaney, who knew her slightly. “Don’t distract him, Francis.”

  “Fuck you, Fiona,” O’Keefe said.

  She walked back to her office, her many strands of amber beads swinging rhythmically against an ever-so-slightly transparent blouse. “Yuppie scum,” O’Keefe said as she disappeared.

  “Another rewarding day in the news boutique, Brian?”

  “Yuppie scum. This paper’s completely fucked.”

  “I better not keep you away from it too long, then. You got a second to give me what you got?”

  “I got all goddamn night. I’ll file when I fucking want.” O’Keefe reached into his very battered shoulder bag and retrieved a notebook that had served many times as a coaster for sweating mugs of draft beer. He flipped it open to the back page. “This looks more interesting than you said it was, dearie.”

  “What have you got?”

  “My extensive contacts in the police and court system, which as you know have made me what I am today in the Canadian media, tell me that your man Janovski the Wonder Pole slipped and killed himself while taking a bath.”

  “That’s yesterday’s news, I’m afraid, Brian.”

  “Some tiny questions in the autopsy report about the amount of bruising around the head but nothing really inconsistent with an old guy falling around in a slippery bath and buying it. They were a little bit troubled by the hair, however. Some little question marks, I’m told, about what seemed to be a few bits of hair missing on the back of his head and neck, but nothing the rocket scientist down at the coroner’s office could figure out or gives a fuck about. Figures it’s one less vote against independence in the referendum.”

  “Hair missing,” Delaney said.

  “Yeah. A few bits. Maybe the guy was a bit rough with the old comb. Maybe he missed you so much he was pulling his hair out. You know this guy?”

  “No. What do the cops say?”

  “Ah, you know. Nothing, as usual. They couldn’t give a shit about this one.”

  “What do you figure?”

  “If they gave a shit, my guy tells me, they might have wondered a little more energetically about whether someone pulled out his hair for him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  O’Keefe sprang up and grabbed a large handful of hair on the back of Delaney’s neck, and began to force his head down onto the computer keyboard and then pull it up sharply. He did this a few times. No one in the newsroom appeared to find this unusual, and the reporters in the area around O’Keefe just continued their work. A neatly dressed young man at the next desk polished a pair of steel spectacles as he held the phone receiver with his shoulder and said: “Gee, Stewart, I’ll have to get that lawyered and it’s almost deadline. My editor won’t want another darn defamation suit.”

  O’Keefe finished his little demonstration and let Delaney up for air.

  “You know, a bit rough while they were helping the guy into the water. Ducking his face in to make sure the temperature was right. Just how he liked it.”

  “Ducking his head in?”

  “Maybe,” O’Keefe said. “If they gave a shit, the cops could have asked a little more about that. But they don’t, and they didn’t. They just figure the old bastard slipped and drowned. Or that’s what they want to figure. Pathologist just probably put in a little note about that in case it blows up some day and somebody asks why he missed it. If it was anything at all in the first place, which is not at all sure anyway. They’ve got a lot of other worse cases than this these days and the guy was, what, eighty or so. So they don’t give a shit. Nothing stolen, no motive, no suggestions from his daughter or his niece, or whoever she is, about why anyone would want to bump the guy off, so case fermé.”

  “What about the old priest?”

  “Ah, now that one is much more interesting.”

  “I’m ready.” Delaney was taking notes in his ersatz shorthand.

  “Well, for one thing, it’s fucking hard to drown in an ice-fishing shack as you know from bitter experience. But he managed it. That’s fine. Took a fair bit of water in his lungs, apparently, after falling down inside and slipping partway into the fishing hole. You know. The usual household accident.”

  “What was he doing out there?”

  “Don’t ask me. Cops figure he was humping some local kid up the ass. Bit of a cold place to get your rocks off but who am I to say? Maybe the boy was big enough to get pissed off and he snuffed the old faggot. Maybe the kid’s father got wind of it and did him in himself.”

  “Is that what the police are saying?”

  “Not really. Not explicitly. I think that’s what my pals are thinking as they proceed methodically to get to the bottom of this murder most horrid.”

  “There’s a murder investigation?”

  “Ah, now there is where it gets interesting. There should be one. How’s this for a little human interest item? The autopsy shows the water in his lungs was chlorinated, fluoridated, all ready for drinking, and even had some small traces, very small, of soap and cleanser and a few other things.”

  “Bath water?”

  “Nope. The Province of Quebec has gone to such lengths to clean up the St. Lawrence River that it flows down now from Ontario all ready to drink, and with a little soap mixed in for bathing.”

  The two journalists looked at each other in the way that only journalists look when they know they have a story, or the beginnings of one.

  “Guy drowns in his bath, and then brings himself out to the ice-fishing shack so as not to upset the housekeepers,” O’Keefe said. “You know the drill, Francis. A man of the cloth.”

  “So it’s a murder investigation.”

  “Well, not exactly. The cops tell me there’s a goslow order on this one. Check it out, but don’t solve it too fast. Not that these dumb fucks have a hope in hell anyway of solving it, but never mind.”

  “A go-slow order? Who from?”

  “My guess is the Pope. He doesn’t like it when his guys fuck little boys, or big boys for that matter. Bad for business.”

  “Seriously.”

  “The guys I spoke to say they don’t know. Not from their level. They’re guessing someone in the Montreal Church hierarchy has got to one of the senior officers. A good Catholic probably.”

  “They going to go along with something like that?”

  “For a while, probably. They’re busy, and they figure it’s just another faggot priest anyway. They’ll get around to it eventually.They weren’t told to drop it, just to go slow for a while.”

  “I see.” Delaney felt a small spurt of adrenalin go through him. He wasn’t sure if it was the journalist in him who was excited by this, or someone else.

  “What’s the connection between the priest and this Janovski guy?” O’Keefe asked. “Was he gay?”

  “No. Don’t think so.”

  “Can you use this stuff?”

  “Absolutely,” Delaney said. “Eventually. I owe you one.”

  “If you don’t use it, I can use it. Let me know. Christ knows I need a front-page hit about now.

  Throw the editors a bone.”

  *

  Delaney called Natalia that night. There were two messages from her on his answering machine, along with the usual string of requests and queries from editors, colleagues, producers, and publishers’ representatives. He should, he knew, check in more often with his magazine and with his publisher but he knew also that he would not. He
realized as he dialled Natalia’s number, however, that he had checked in with her, or she with him, every night since that first afternoon when she came to his apartment. My hot new assignment, he thought as the telephone rang.

  She was agitated, but also guarded.

  “Oh Francis, I’ve been trying to get you,” she said. “Someone has been in my apartment.”

  “When?”

  “Sometime today. While I was at the clinic. I know someone’s been in here.”

  “What did they take?”

  “Nothing I can see. But things are moved around a bit. Papers, books. I can sense someone was in here.”

  “Want me to come over?”

  “Well, actually, someone is here with me now. A neighbour.”

  “We should talk over a few things. I’ve got some information.”

  “Would tomorrow be OK?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Maybe you could come here.”

  “OK. What time?”

  “In the morning?” she said. “ Midmorning? Late morning? I’m still only back at work part-time.”

  “OK,” he said. “Midmorning. Lock your door. When your neighbour goes.”

  “I will.”

  A neighbour, Delaney thought.

  *

  Delaney took a cab to Natalia’s place the next day. The snow had returned so he decided to leave the Mercedes where it was. It was also harder to follow someone in Montreal in a cab, if indeed someone was going to try to follow him today.

  The cabbies all seemed to drive the same sort of Volkswagen Jettas. Fleets of them swarmed up and down the main streets these days. By the time the particular Jetta he had chosen pulled onto Esplanade Street, Delaney had looked out the back window a number of times and seen nothing unusual. The gaunt black driver in a Montreal Canadiens hockey sweater had asked him in Creole if he had left something back at his apartment; did the genti’hom want to go back?