by Mario Bolduc
Emil put his hand out again. He grabbed the edge of the sheet and lifted it gently. Suddenly, Samuel woke up and turned his head toward Emil. His eyes were full of fear, his face bloodless. Emil yelped: on each side of the boy’s face, two red stains.
The young patient had no ears.
2
Bucharest, November 26, 2006
Max O’Brien had headed straight to the Intercontinental Hotel to drop his bags off after coming in from New York City. An hour later he was off to wander through — and lose himself in — the streets of the Lipscani District, a maze of lanes filled with Bucharest’s citizens out for a bit of Christmas shopping. At some point he burst out of the maze of small commercial streets and onto Unirii Boulevard in front of the Palace of the Parliament. The sheer monstrosity of the monument startled him. Like a wedding cake with its top layer missing, crushing the capital around it, it was one of the largest buildings in the world. The dream of a megalomaniac tyrant, Nicolae Ceauşescu. The People’s House — though the people themselves had renamed it the People’s Madhouse. Around it, the Civic Centre, built over the ruins of a nineteenth-century neighbourhood. Twelve churches, two synagogues, and three monasteries, not to mention hundred of homes and shops, had been razed to build it. The destruction of a district twice as large as Le Marais in Paris. The Civic Centre was a city within the city, the place the dictator had ruled from to the end of his life. After the revolution in 1989, Romanians took over construction of the palace, which now housed the Parliament and various ministries. And yet it felt unfinished, as if it couldn’t ever be completed.
Max kept on walking.
He had a meeting on the other side of the fountain, near the pond that ran along the boulevard.
The past forty-eight hours had been dizzying. Max had learned from a newspaper in New York that the Romanian police were looking for his friend Kevin Dandurand in relation to the murder of twenty-three Roma. Max had tried in vain to get in touch with Kevin’s wife, Caroline, in Montreal. So he’d called Gabrielle, their daughter, who’d been living with her father since the couple had split. Kevin taught physical education at Collège Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur, but, according to the teenager, who’d been shocked by the news, Kevin had been on sabbatical since September. He’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail by himself. The trail ran from Maine to Georgia, the hike of a lifetime for an experienced outdoorsman. He could only be reached through email. And what about Caroline, what was happening with her? Gabrielle had explained that she’d locked herself in her house, refusing to answer the phone after being hounded by journalists following the accusations levied by the Romanian police.
Max had written a long email to Kevin, demanding an explanation, and left his cellphone number. Gabrielle had done the same thing — several times — earlier that very same day. As one might expect, Kevin hadn’t answered a single one of her messages. Gabrielle told Max that Josée, Kevin’s half-sister who worked as a lawyer in Paris, was already packing her bags for Bucharest. She was off to sort out the whole mess. She’d be there the next day.
In other words, total chaos. Kevin a killer? A murderer of twenty-three innocent Roma? Surely it had to be an error. Max would clear things up and get his friend out of whatever mess he was in.
On his way to Kennedy Airport, Max had left a message with Josée at her office on avenue des Champs-Élysées, setting up a meeting with her at the Intercontinental in Bucharest. He then reached out to one of his contacts in Prague, who put him in touch with a fixer. Max needed a guide and an interpreter. Someone for whom Romania and the internal dynamics of its judicial system held no secrets. Someone who might guide Max through the maze of Romanian society.
Toma Boerescu.
And so Max, feet frozen in his boots, now waited next to the fountain for the man. What about Romanian punctuality? Clearly, the fall of the Ceauşescu regime had wreaked havoc on good manners!
A crowd milled around Max: German tourists, their cameras strapped over their shoulders; older women negotiating with their tiny dogs at the end of taut leashes; teenagers on their skateboards, sporting esoteric tattoos, pants low on the hips, and enormous, untied running shoes. Those pimply teenagers were all amnesiacs, likely enough, completely unaware that the construction of the road they were risking their necks screwing around on had required the displacement of seventy thousand people.
Max circled the Christmas tree proudly displayed at the intersection. A gigantic tree that brought back memories of Kevin. Over the past two days, as he’d prepared for his trip to Bucharest, Max had relived the painful stages of their long friendship, all overshadowed by a horrible tragedy: the death of Kevin’s father, Raymond, and of his infant son, Sacha. Max could remember every fresco painted on the walls of Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours in Montreal, a few days after Easter. Raymond’s family, his friends, and employees of Nordopak, the company Kevin’s father had founded in the 1960s. It had been an emotional ceremony punctuated by sobbing from Kevin, Caroline, Gabrielle, and Josée, each more bereft than the last. Caroline was in a complete state of shock, blaming herself for having left her child with her father-in-law that day. How could she have known that he would stop on his way to have a drink with his friends? The autopsy had confirmed it: traces of alcohol in Raymond’s blood. The businessman had been in no state to drive his Pathfinder.
Standing behind the crowd, Max had chosen to remain discreet. He’d surveyed the neighbourhood before coming, inspected the area surrounding the small church. Once inside, he’d quickly made mental note of lateral exits and his most likely escape route, if need be. Max had come to Montreal under a cloud: he knew the Quebec provincial police, the Sûreté du Québec, was after him, and had been for years. His crime? Fraud. His victims? Hustlers, the nouveau riche, takers who exploited those without the means to defend themselves. Max was constantly changing his identity, and his appearance, too. A perpetual lie that was becoming progressively harder to bear.
That day he’d run a risk by being there. But he couldn’t have stayed away; he just had to be present for his friend, to support him in this tragedy. In a way, Kevin and Max were responsible for these two deaths, the result of their mistakes.
After the funeral, once the rubberneckers had dispersed, Max made his way to Kevin’s place, finding Gabrielle in a state of shock. Caroline was exhausted, having cried every tear in her body. Sacha had been the blood in her veins. Sacha-the-Red, Raymond had called him, because of the large birthmark on the back of his neck. Caroline felt as if she had killed her son with her own hands. She was entirely blameless, of course, but how could you convince a grieving mother that she was an innocent bystander? Josée, meanwhile, seemed incapable of getting hold of herself. She had cried throughout the ceremony, and she was still crying, huddled in a corner. She’d adored her father. She’d moved to Paris recently, and they’d spoken several times a week, Josée telling her father about her heartaches and her challenges and her joys.
Max couldn’t stand it. He’d taken Gabrielle by the hand — she was seven years old back then — and they walked together to the Dairy Queen down the street for ice cream. Max would have given anything that day to be able to find the right words. But he had nothing to offer her. How was he supposed to explain to Gabrielle that she would never see her brother, her grandfather again? There was a crowd of children all bumping and pushing against one another at the counter for the first ice cream of the season, but neither he nor Gabrielle noticed; they were entirely absorbed by their pain.
“I’m not hungry,” she finally said in a monotone.
Her ice cream had melted all over her hand. Max threw the cone into the garbage and took the girl’s hand again. They walked to a park, its grass still covered in patches of grey snow despite the early spring. They were both incapable of saying a word, immured in their pain. The day was beautiful, the sunlight pouring through the branches of centenary maples. A magnificent day, intolerable, death wallowing in
its power.
A few hours later Max found Kevin in a bar on rue Stanley. The two men drank into the early hours of the morning, along with the owner, a friend of Raymond’s. By dawn their humanity had deserted them. Montreal’s streets were empty, grieving. Kevin crossed the parking lot, toward a handful of idling cabs. All of a sudden the young man threw himself on his knees and howled. Max had never heard anything so violent. So unbearable.
Losing your father and your son in the same accident. What kind of cruel and vengeful God would permit such horror?
Max first met Kevin in the fall of 1993 on the corner of Madison and Seventy-Second Street. Kevin was wearing a lumberjack’s checkered windbreaker, but no hat on his head. He was shivering. Around him were a hundred or so Christmas trees, which that day didn’t seem to attract the attention of a single New Yorker. Max hated Christmas. Like all single people, really. A holiday made doubly cruel by its seemingly interminable preparations. At forty-two, while most men his age were living lives within the bounds and lines of owning property, raising children, and getting ready to celebrate Christmas with them, Max wandered through the streets of New York looking for a bar to call home for the night.
Two years earlier Max had learned of Pascale’s death. The woman he loved. He’d gone to India to witness her cremation on the banks of the Ganges. Since then, Max had had a few brief, meaningless relationships. Once trivialities had been exchanged, after the first few encounters, the same issue would arise. When it came time to show his true self, Max was trapped — all he could offer were lies. And so he would walk away, not unkindly, without making any waves, and return to the solitude he was forced into by his work. By his being a con man. The same solitude guided him toward an unknown bar that night as he scanned the storefronts on the corner of Seventy-Second Street.
Kevin was jumping up and down, shadowboxing against the wall. The dance of frozen feet. Seeing the guy jittering on the street corner, Max couldn’t help but smile. Normally, he would have walked on, said nothing at all, but for some reason he engaged with the man.
“Merry Christmas!” shouted Kevin, waving his arms about. He added, “Want to go for a drink?”
So it would be coffee, first, in a nearby deli — a double espresso sweetened with a few drops of the cognac secreted in Kevin’s inside pocket. Cab drivers jostled one another to reach the counter. The large outside window was all fogged up. New York in winter.… After coffee the two men found refuge at the Donohue, Max’s local. They agreed on Irish whiskey, the universal remedy for the blues. Kevin told Max he was from Montreal and wasn’t actually a lumberjack. The trees he was selling weren’t even from Canada, but from a nursery in New Jersey, only a few kilometres away from Manhattan. The whole setup was just for show. Misleading representation? Kevin answered with a smile. Who cares about truth? Max wasn’t about to contradict him.
The whole Christmas tree thing was only to make ends meet. It gave Kevin enough time to concentrate on his true passion: running. A former member of the Canadian Olympic team, he’d been to the Games in Seoul, as well as in Barcelona the previous year. He’d made a strong impression. No medals, but lots of hope for Atlanta — those were the next games. He trained with American athlete Richard Voight in New York.
At dawn Max stumbled home with a dishevelled Christmas tree in tow, which he couldn’t remember why he’d accepted. He didn’t think he’d ever hear from the fake lumberjack again. But after Christmas, Kevin called to invite Max to one of his training sessions at the Tribeca Sports Center. It was a dilapidated old gym next to a bus terminal — you could hear the buses changing gears as you ran around the track. Max sat in the stands and watched Kevin breathing hard, listening to the advice of a grey-haired man in a track suit — Richard Voight, a gold medallist at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
A few moments later Kevin threw himself down the track again. Despite his stature — he was tall, strong, something rather unusual for a marathon runner — there was something vulnerable in his movements, a semblance of fragility. He looked like a big kid who’d grown up too fast, running laps in a park.
“Ah! So you’re the Robert Cheskin who’s been carousing with my Kevin!” a young woman called out to Max from a few seats behind him. He’d been working with the Cheskin alias for a few months now. Max had noticed the woman when she’d first walked into the gym. Black tousled hair, a magnificent smile. Her name was Caroline. She and Kevin had just gotten married. Her belly was as round as a balloon. She was expecting a child soon: Gabrielle.
“Caroline is a journalist,” Kevin explained later after he’d changed back into civilian clothes.
The young woman freelanced for small newspapers and magazines, usually those with a left-wing bent. The sort of papers whose mission was to fight against the cruelties and injustices of the world. The sort that sought to redress all wrongs, be they past, present, or future. Caroline dreamed of a job with the New York Times or the Washington Post; she was always looking for the next topic, the next story that would give her an opening, a foot in the door of those great papers. For now, however, she satisfied herself with what she had: contributing to sincere pamphlets with anemic print runs.
Back at the Donohue, Caroline asked Max what he did for a living. Where he worked, exactly.
“In a bank. Recovery and collections. I take care of outstanding loans and credit margins, that sort of thing …”
“So you pester people who can’t pay?”
Max smiled. “Something like that.”
Failure to pay, deadbeat creditors. They’d heard those words often enough, the both of them, Max would come to learn. Addicted to their credit cards, chronically in debt, they were acrobats of poverty. They lived in a pathetic little rental in Sunset Park in Brooklyn’s Chinatown. And things weren’t easy, that much was clear. Max didn’t yet know that Kevin came from a family of entrepreneurs, that he’d had a golden childhood that had left its mark. Elegance, distinction, good manners. A beautiful garden to play in behind a manor on avenue Shorncliffe in Westmount. A summer home on rivière Saqawigan in Gaspésie — the biggest house in the entire region. Private tennis and horse-riding lessons. Extensive studies in management. Kevin was destined one day to take over the family business. What was he doing in New York pretending to be a marathon runner, selling Christmas trees to make ends meet? After having worked a few years for Nordopak, Kevin had cut all ties with his father. Caroline had told him this one night, not wanting to say any more than that. Max hadn’t pressed. Secrets, like fruit, must be ripe to be picked without effort.
At one point that very night they had stood in front of a giant billboard in Times Square: an ad for the Boston Marathon with the year’s previous winner, trophy in hand.
“Next year, Robert, it’ll be my picture up there.”
It was a dream that wouldn’t come true, not the following year, nor any other. Disappointing performances, an injury that wouldn’t heal. Voight fired, replaced with a guru from California. Yoga, relaxation, transcendental meditation. No results there, either. But Kevin wouldn’t give up. After the Boston Marathon, after New York, he was offered a teaching position in British Columbia — he refused outright. He couldn’t leave Caroline by herself; she’d just given birth. They were madly in love, the two of them, that much was clear. They couldn’t bear the thought of living apart. Max had never seen such osmosis between two people, such compatibility. Even Max’s relationship with Pascale those long years ago, the tormented, troubled, passionate moments spent together, seemed dull compared to the love between Kevin and Caroline. An intense love, destined for tragedy.
Max adopted their family, in a sense. They went out together all the time. Restaurants, museums, theatre, cinema: Caroline’s world. Meanwhile, Kevin took Max out to baseball and hockey games. Max pushed Gabrielle’s stroller through Central Park while the girl’s father trained and trained. On Gabrielle’s birthdays, Max would come over, his arms loaded with gifts. Gabri
elle would throw herself at him, emitting shrill, joyful cries.
In other words, they saw one another as much as Kevin’s schedule and Max’s particular hours allowed. Max was often away, always on business. Sleazy business, which the couple knew nothing about, of course.
That always made Caroline laugh. “Your bosses are ready to send you to the ends of the earth for a few bucks out of some deadbeat’s pocket! Now that would make a good story!”
The last thing Max needed was publicity. Caroline burst out laughing when he pulled a confused face. A loud, confident laugh that made you want to follow her anywhere. Kevin tried to make her happy, to do everything for her, and sometimes fell just short. As did she. But they always ended up back together after a fight or an argument, falling on their feet like champion gymnasts. Sometimes, right in the middle of a conversation, Max would notice a shared smile, a look between them. He’d glance away then, feeling as if he was intruding, not wanting to insert himself too deeply in their intimacy, especially because he wasn’t revealing his true identity to his friends. Max made sure to keep them as far away as possible from his own scheming. To always play the role of protective older brother. It was a lie, another one, but it comforted him; it was the most beautiful lie in the world.
And so Max tried to help them out, giving secret gifts they knew nothing about. Like that training seminar in Colorado with a motivational speaker of some kind.
“He’s just amazing! You should read his book, Robert.” That was Kevin telling Max he couldn’t go to the seminar because he was flat broke. So Max made a cheque out to the motivational speaker without telling Kevin.
Another time Caroline’s computer suddenly died on her. Max knew they were tight on cash, so he came up with a prize she’d never heard of for her to win. One morning a representative from a technology company knocked on her door with a brand-new machine.