by Mario Bolduc
But tragedy lay behind the stillness of that day.
The bridge’s railing had been under repair. The roadside signs were unclear. Raymond was distracted at the wheel of his Pathfinder, as always. Max could easily imagine the scene. Sacha seated in the back, Raymond speaking to him, turning around to look at the boy from time to time. Glancing in the rearview mirror. Suddenly, he’d lost control of the 4x4. A lethal drop into the roiling river below. Raymond trapped behind the wheel. Sacha dragged out of the car by the Saqawigan’s rushing waters.
The news of the accident had struck Max hard. He’d found Caroline a few days later in Montreal, completely undone by grief. He was never able to find the right words. Tears welling in his eyes, his tongue silenced before the grief of a mother, his friend.
Sharon had been bent in two, almost unconscious. She was stuffed to the gills with sedatives, her eyes lost in the void, completely numb. Raymond’s wife would never get over her husband’s death. A year later she would die of a heart attack while she slept.
Josée had cancelled her flight back to Paris to take care of her mother, even though the young woman could barely take care of herself. Raymond, a man like no other, an exemplary and exceptional father, in her eyes. She just couldn’t come to terms with the death of a father she loved so.
Kevin was made dumb by grief, wandering all day in the family house on avenue Shorncliffe. Or collapsing on a chair behind his father’s desk, emptying his bottles of Scotch. Max had found him one morning, his eyes red, unable to believe what had happened, a succession of misery.
The young man pointed to a pile of documents on the desk. “Financial reports. The real ones. Raymond made us all into fools.”
Max didn’t understand.
“He made his entire board into fools. Fictional revenue, creative bookkeeping.” Kevin sighed. “Aspekt-Ziegler was never replaced. Raymond came back from his American tour with nothing at all. All the contracts, all of them! They’re not real.”
Raymond hadn’t been the golden child, after all. He’d hidden his failure by digging deep into the company’s reserves.
Kevin took another draw of Scotch. “Isn’t it ironic? While we were scamming him, Raymond was scamming his board. While we were passing him on the left, he was passing his board on the right.”
Kevin got up, walked around the desk. “When they saw what was happening, it was already too late. And in addition to that, he’d just lost twenty-five million for a lie.”
Max could now see the sheer extent of the disaster.
“Nordopak is bankrupt. Raymond had known it for a long, long time.” Kevin raised his eyes toward his friend. “My father killed himself. I’m sure of it.”
Max felt beaten, exhausted. Raymond’s death — whether it was a suicide or not — they were both responsible for it. Well, all four of them, really, with Ted Duvall and Claudia Ferrucci. If he’d indeed killed himself, they may not have pulled the trigger, but they’d bought him the gun. The thing that bothered him the most was Sacha; why would Raymond want to bring his own grandson into the waters of rivière Saqawigan? Because he’d discovered Kevin’s role in his downfall? To punish his son by taking away from him the thing he cared about the most? Max couldn’t imagine that level of cruelty in Raymond. But Kevin’s father could be twisted. He might have answered cruelty with cruelty.
Was Raymond Sacha’s killer?
“I hate myself for dragging you into this mess,” Kevin spat out.
Max should have known better than to go along. Oh, sure, he’d rebuffed Kevin’s advances, but not for very long. He’d joined the scam, and now Kevin’s guilt was rubbing off on him. Max couldn’t bury his head in the sand this time. He’d participated; he’d helped Kevin push his old man into the void.
As soon as the server moved to another table, Max leaned toward Josée. “I had no idea you and Kevin had reconciled.”
Josée shook her head. “It’s ancient history.”
After Raymond’s death, Josée and her brother had stopped seeing each other, hadn’t spoken a word to each other for years. Ancient history? She was referring to the rivière Saqawigan accident.
“The day he died I felt like Kevin blamed Raymond for the accident, blamed my father for taking Sacha away from him.”
“There never was conclusive proof that Raymond killed himself,” Max said.
“Kevin always believed it was suicide.”
Josée was right.
“At first it just made me so angry that he could blame my father, our father, like that.”
Max waited for her to continue.
“And then, well, I understand Kevin was completely distraught. He just hated Raymond so much …”
“Maybe he accused his father so he wouldn’t feel responsible for the accident. Sort of putting a wall between himself and his darkest thoughts.”
“I’ve been waiting to make peace with Kevin for months. I waited too long for the right moment. When I heard he was in trouble, I didn’t hesitate.” Josée smiled sadly. “I hope I’m not too late.”
Max encouraged her with a smile. “It’ll all work out, you’ll see. Kevin isn’t a killer.”
“I asked to go on unpaid leave. I mean from my job in Paris. I want to be here when they bring him in. I’m worried about the skeletons in the closet, though. And you were right about this Marilyn Burgess character. She’s ambitious. Very ambitious. And she wants to return to Canada with Max O’Brien in her trophy case.”
After the meeting with Adrian Pavlenco, Josée had spoken with a man by the name of Luc Roberge, a detective with the Quebec provincial police. He’d been humiliated by O’Brien in India not long ago. The man had been obsessed with the thief for years, seeing O’Brien as the challenge of his career. But now Roberge had been put aside. He was tending to his wounds in Cozumel, Mexico.
“Marilyn Burgess has taken up the torch,” Josée added. “She’s got carte blanche from her superiors to get her hands on O’Brien.”
“I’m sure they’ve made a mistake about Kevin. Why would he have been involved with some con man?”
Max felt defenceless. Faced with Josée’s curiosity and intelligence, with Marilyn Burgess’s determination, all he had was a fixer who couldn’t go two steps without his walker, surviving on handfuls of pills, incapable of speaking a whole sentence without stopping for a breath.
And then there was this story Cosmin Micula had told him. Max hadn’t known that Kevin kept connections with family overseas.
“Almost cousins,” Micula had said. What did that mean, anyway?
Max couldn’t wait to ask Kevin his questions and figure out what had really happened.
According to the photographer, Kevin would soon get in touch with him. Plane tickets had been purchased, and they would meet at the airport.
But it had been radio silence from Kevin since Max had met with the photographer.
After Josée left for her room to write a few emails, Max skimmed through Ioan Costinar’s biography, which he’d gotten off the Internet. Thirty-six years old in his last picture. With glasses and a well-trimmed beard, he looked like a professor of Latin. Didn’t have the appearance of a Rom, that caricature in Paris Match or National Geographic: poorly shaven faces, overcoats in tatters, caps screwed permanently on their heads, holding the reins of a dozen horses while walking toward a market. Or chasing chickens in a coop, with beaming, toothless smiles.
In another document, Victor Marineci praised the Romani leader. According to Marineci, by his actions, Costinar had helped the Romani community take giant strides forward. Before him, the Roma had been seen at best, as circus animals, and at worst, as vermin that needed to be exterminated. But where could they be sent back to? India, which they’d fled a thousand years before? Get serious. The Indians did care about the fate of their long-lost cousins. Indira Gandhi had helped fund the first World Romani Congress in
London in 1971. But the Indian government could never go beyond symbolic measures. The fate of the Roma was in the hands of and depended on the goodwill of European authorities, who had to solve the claims of these people forgotten by history. His whole life, Costinar had striven to make the lives of the Roma better, and that was why he’d been killed, according to Marineci.
Another martyr.
Max left the hotel. The university was on his right, the National Theatre on his left. Bucharest had worked hard to forget its painful past. All of the street names were changed, parks and squares beautified and renamed. Since the revolution, the collective memory of postwar socialist heroes had been erased. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a Stalinist, mentor of Nicolae Ceauşescu, was but a faraway memory now. Ceauşescu himself was harder to erase because of his House of the People, which had become the Palace of the Parliament.
Max could still remember the news items he’d seen on television showing the tyrant’s decline. In Târgovişte, the small man gesturing toward the revolutionaries, accusing them of betrayal. A few hours earlier Ceauşescu had fled by helicopter off the roof of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party’s building in the middle of Bucharest. Elena had stood by his side, unable to help him this time. The dangerous Elena, whose fancies were legendary. A sort of Marie Antoinette who’d never quite gotten the dirt off her smock, despite the jewellery and other extravagances. The austere Joséphine to this stammering Napoleon who made himself emperor, he, too, with a sceptre and serious glare. The couple had met in 1939 during a strike. Ceauşescu had fallen in love with the textile worker seeking to better her lot in life. Older than Nicolae, she cheated about her age later in life, subtracting one year, then two, to make sure her husband was her elder. In 1965, after the death of Gheorghiu-Dej, when Nicolae succeeded him, Elena became his number two. She took advantage of this new power to invent a scientific career for herself. She was the recipient of several honours for a thesis on polymers — which she’d never actually read — that was written by Ioan Ursu, a professor at Timişoara University. He’d even left a few mistakes in to make it more credible.
The destruction of residential neighbourhoods, the construction of the House of the People, and even the destruction of Romanian villages were all projects she’d supported and perhaps even suggested. She was the one who’d whispered to Ceauşescu as he laid his head on his pillow: they are right to fear you, for you are fearsome.
They were a coarse, ridiculous, and bloodthirsty pair, welcoming the great men and women of this world in one of their twenty-one palaces, forty-one villas, and twenty-two hunting lodges. Charles de Gaulle, Queen Elizabeth II, Richard Nixon, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. After swimming with Fidel in Cuba, Trudeau had visited Bucharest with Nicolae, all to promote CANDU, the Canadian nuclear reactor.
Max also remembered the summary trial of the dictator. And his execution. Shot at point-blank range, facing the soldier who killed him. Elena was shot in the back. Both with machine guns. Their bodies, sprawled in the dirt, seemed so small and insignificant. A death befitting the couple who’d made all of Romania tremble for twenty-five years.
Max’s cellphone rang, startling him out of his thoughts.
“Max O’Brien?”
A man’s voice. Max waited.
“Not so many people know your real name, Robert Cheskin.”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“I am calling to offer a simple trade. You have the passport, do you not?”
Max could guess what was coming.
“And I have Kevin Dandurand. It would not be a problem at all for me to give him to the police. But your friend is, for now, more useful to me if I can obtain something in return, would you not say?”
“I want proof of life.”
A few moments of silence. Then Kevin’s voice. “Max? Is that you?”
“What did they do to you?”
“I’ll tell you on Wednesday.”
Wednesday? What the hell was he talking about?
“Are you okay, are you —”
“Wednesday …” Kevin groaned on the other end of the line.
Max understood he’d just been punched.
The man’s voice came back. “I am a serious man, O’Brien. I want the passport. You bring the passport to me and you leave with your friend.”
Max sighed. He didn’t have a choice. “Where are you?”
“Near the bus terminal — 208 Alexandriei Boulevard, third floor.”
15
The vicar’s rumbling tone had rung against the cavernous roof of the nave in Chapelle Notre-Dame- de-Bon-Secours. He’d been a friend of Raymond, the vicar, though that day he was delivering his eulogy. He spoke of a citizen, first among many, a job creator who’d remained, through his whole life, humble, serene, detached from the material world. The tearful audience clung to his words. Max O’Brien glanced toward the front row filled with higher-ups from Nordopak. Naive men and women who’d been swindled by their CEO, their friend. For months, they would all be involuntarily involved in a tragedy. They had chosen to hide their dear leader’s activities. His honour would remain safe beyond the grave.
The following day a succinct though eloquent communiqué: Nordopak remained open, but the trustee was amenable to takeover bids. Cambiano was first in line. The Italian company, the real one this time, was glad to scoop up a competitor at a bargain price.
In short, bankruptcy ruined Nordopak. Kevin had helped create the whole mess. And what was more, amid the uncertainty, one thing was clear: the employees were straight out of luck. Their pension fund was an empty husk; Raymond had funded the company out of it for years. Even those who’d retired ages ago felt it: suddenly, the cheques stopped coming.
Within a few hours, the coverage of Raymond’s death, which had so far been mostly about his accomplishments and his successful career, now took stock of these new developments. Stories came out about the fate of the unfortunate employees. People began wondering how such a respected man could have stooped so low, how Raymond Dandurand could have ripped off his employees. One article asked for stricter controls over companies’ private retirement funds. An editorial blamed businesspeople’s lack of ethics. And then a few days in, another scandal, a new tragedy, something else to distract the cynics.
A week later Claudia Ferrucci came in from Toronto and Ted Duvall flew in from Chicago. The four accomplices were parked on a calm street in Dorval in Max’s rental car.
Kevin spoke through the silence. “I have no intention of keeping the money. It feels tainted to me. I don’t want any part of it.”
Tainted was the right word for it, Max thought. Blood money.
“The trustee in bankruptcy has agreed to do what he can to help out the employees before resolving the rest of the debt. He’s going to try to fund the pension plan.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” Ted Duvall asked. “Drop a duffle bag full of cash at his front door, ring the bell, and run away?”
“Why not? Look, maybe Raymond kept cash on him, in his office, you know? He kept other secrets. Why not that?”
That was Kevin’s plan? Max didn’t like it; it amounted to sullying Raymond’s reputation even further. “That’ll lead them to think your father was the one responsible for the scam.”
Kevin shrugged. Raymond’s reputation wasn’t worth much anymore, anyway. What mattered most was to replenish the pension fund. Repair what Raymond had done using the profits of the fraud he’d fallen victim to. The fraud that had driven him off the bridge. The gold medal for convoluted redemption went to Kevin.
“The man killed your son,” Claudia said.
In other words, why do you feel so guilty? Why are you forcing your guilt on us?
Kevin remained silent. His mind had wandered back to his father again. They were quits now. Kevin had led Raymond to his death, and Raymond had taken Sacha with h
im.
Game over.
Faced with his silence, Claudia got out of the car and slammed the door behind her. She raised her hand and waved down a passing taxi. Her answer was clear.
Duvall turned toward Max, as if to ask permission. “I need the money, Max.”
Max nodded. Duvall got out of the car.
Max sighed. It was an unusual proposition, but the scam had been rather unusual itself. A son robbing his father. Raymond bankrupting his company. The son wanting to make amends for the father’s mistakes. If it took a weight off Kevin’s shoulders … why not?
“Okay,” Max said.
The building had been erected in the mid-1940s, right at the apex of triumphalist Stalinist architecture. Max had gotten out of the cab one block earlier to walk the rest of the way. In his pocket, Laura Costinar’s counterfeit passport. He turned into an alley, hoping his entrance wouldn’t be noticed. This area was somewhere between a garbage dump and a vacant lot. A container had been knocked over a little farther away, garbage scattered across the yard. Someone had gone through it, it seemed, taking what could be recycled or sold.
Max looked up at the dwellings. Five storeys that included a mix of apartments and offices. There were chairs on the roof, placed along the parapet. A summertime terrace, probably. Max didn’t want to go in through the front door, where he’d likely be expected. On the right, in the neighbouring building, the back door was ripped off at the hinges.
He crossed the lot and walked into the second building, stepping over discarded boxes and soiled clothes and climbing the stairs to the roof. From his new position, he could see below him now the chairs of the rooftop terrace. He could reach it by jumping. Two metres at most, but he wouldn’t be able to come back the same way.