by Mark Lisac
“Ginny, there’s a task coming up that I’d like you to be involved with. It may take a few weeks. Someone will be doing a review of a big collection that eventually needs to be sorted out. I want someone I can trust working side by side with that person.”
“Okay,” she said. This was more flattering than a big dinner out.
“You remember the Ostroski photo collection that was bought about a year ago.”
“Yes?”
“We’re going to start cataloguing it. There are tens of thousands of prints. There are thousands of negatives to go with them. And there may be some negatives that haven’t been printed. There’s no point in having the collection if we don’t know what’s in it. It’s time we had someone go through everything and make a preliminary arrangement of the work—sort it out by subject matter, by time period, by suitability for public display, that sort of thing. We also need to attach information to photos. I’m going to have someone do a preliminary review, then let Ostroski go through it. You’ll go through it with him.”
She kept up her co-operative expression despite the letdown. Hours and hours of looking at old pictures and chasing down meaningless information! He noted her ability to keep looking eager to please despite being promised weeks of tedium—another point in her favour—and went on to the main issue.
“That’s the job. I need someone from this office involved, someone trustworthy and with wits.”
She nodded. He saw strands of dyed-blond hair sift over her delicate ears.
“I’ll have someone else looking through the collection first but there may not be enough time for a full review like the one you will do with Ostroski. I will need daily reports on what’s turning up in the photos. I will also give you information before you start about particular types of photos to look for. You think you can do that for me?”
“Yes, Minister. I’d be happy to.”
“Good. It will take a little time to get this project started. I’ll let you know when we’re ready to begin.”
She looked him straight in the eyes and said, “I’ll be ready when you are.”
He said, “I’m happy to hear that.”
7.
THE FULL-LENGTH MIRROR CASED IN OAK WAS ONE OF Arlene Becker’s reliable enjoyments. It spoke of tradition and quality.
Arlene checked herself in it. Everything was in place. The middle was thicker than twenty years ago, but not unacceptably so. The legs were still good. The navy suit breathed respectability and suggested a certain experience with wielding authority. Ready for the world to view. If only the world made itself as presentable to me, she thought as she picked up her purse and headed down the stairs.
She locked the back door, walked across the concrete patio and the gravel pad to the garage and told the dogs to stay. The dachshunds were only half interested in an excursion. Ricky the Doberman was always ready to get into the car. She felt a twinge again, sorry to leave them behind. They were John’s dogs but she had long felt an attachment to them anyway. She would have bought one of her own if she had wanted to risk upsetting the social balance among them. She sometimes had idle thoughts of an Airedale or a Wheaten terrier. Whenever she did, she wondered if she really liked dogs that much or if she was just missing Scott and Linda, both off to college now at too young an age. Twins about to become separated by the world. So eager, so vulnerable.
One of her compensations for a real relationship was her sport model Nissan. She had picked it because she liked the idea of the Japanese rebelling against the primacy of the American, British, and German manufacturers who had dominated the sport market for decades. She drove it carefully out the driveway and hit the accelerator when she reached the main road. She was wary of police, but they never patrolled the five-minute stretch of local road that led to the highway.
It was a shopping day. She drove to the west end of downtown and found a meter in front of Ariadne’s. It was time to look for a dress that would be a standout at the Christmas parties that were part of the duties of a cabinet minister’s wife.
“Something for the Christmas parties, Ariadne.”
“Ah, we have a number of choices. Black or red, depending on how formal you’d would like to be, and two that are black with red accents.”
“The cut and finish are more important, I think. Eye-catching but not assertive.”
“Something to signify personality and respect for the occasion, but not to dominate? No claim of superiority?”
“That’s it.”
“I think you’ll find some suitable choices over here.”
She spent a little over half an hour going through the collection and talking with Ariadne. The selection process, the careful search for balance, was second nature to her now.
After the nicely timed visit to the dress shop, part business and part recreation, she drove to the golf club where the symphony foundation was holding its annual meeting. This was the dull group. The art gallery board matched her interests more and was made up of what she thought were brighter people. Most of the symphony board members had been produced by the same cookie cutter—grey hair, tired and wary faces, practised politeness, no interest in going for a drink after the meeting.
Frances Dahl was closest to her when she walked in. “Hello, Arlene. You’re looking well. Oh, what a lovely suit.”
“Hello, Frances. Thank you. Ready for the budget wrangle?”
“I’m hoping it will go simply this year.”
But it won’t, Arlene thought. Because Frances and too many of the other board members needed an hour and a half of useless talk about minor details to give their lives some meaning. If they needed someone to talk to, why didn’t they find minor physical issues to take to their doctors? They probably did, she had decided. But the doctors were probably too busy to spend a lot of time with them so they needed these meetings as well.
Once the greetings were finished and the meeting was underway she spent the first five minutes thinking about Frances Dahl’s hope that things would “go simply this year.” She wondered if she should find an excuse to throw in a coarse phrase along the lines of “just like shit through a goose.” That would get them commenting about the girl from the country. She backed off mentally, as she had done last year. She needed to be solid and respectable to get her way during the search for the new music director.
They ran the meeting fifteen minutes longer than planned. She had to drive back out of the city in bunched-up traffic. Just as well, she thought. Avoid the temptation to make full use of the car. She let the engine out an extra twenty kilometres an hour on the side road to the acreage. She pulled into the garage, took the garment bag with the dress, closed the garage door, and stopped. A dirty white compact pickup was coming up the drive. It came to a halt a respectable distance from the garage. A young man climbed out and looked at her.
He seemed to be in his early twenties, probably Latin American. A slim body, nearly thin. A wispy pencil moustache and serious eyes. She decided not to act intimidated.
“Can I help you?”
“Good afternoon. I hope so. You are the lady of the house?”
“Yes.”
The dogs ran up and circled the young man, the dachshunds growling. She said, “Quiet.” They stopped the growling but kept up the circling and kept their distance from the stranger. She saw he was being careful but not showing any fear.
“My name is Roberto. I have been employed in construction but there are not many jobs underway this year. Now I am going through the acreages here to ask if anyone needs any work done. I can do small construction or repair. I can also arrange machinery for snow clearing, do yard cleanup, or book gardening services for next spring.”
He looked around the property. He noted the orientation of the house and the garage and the location of the kennel. He saw the wide line of trees and thick hedges. There were big houses on each side of the property but neither was visible. Across the road he had seen a mix of pasture and woods. The colour and design of the house—a
two-storey with cedar siding and accents of flat metallic blue paint—was not essential; half an hour later he would have trouble describing it, except for the location of its windows and doors.
“We have all the regular maintenance taken care of,” she said.
“Is there any job to be done here? I am willing to work cheap. There is not much construction work now and I don’t want to depend on my sister to support me.”
She knew she should not be affected by the reference to a sister but she was. She also liked the way he carried himself—self-sufficient, but not arrogant. And he was someone to talk to.
“Have you been in this country long?”
“A few years. I like it here. It was a little better when work was easier to find.”
“My great-grandfathers might have said the same thing. They eventually got settled. One found a job that lasted a long time. The others started businesses.”
“Maybe things will improve once oil prices go back up. They cannot stay down forever. I should probably take training in a trade, or maybe look into something like accounting. But that would take money. Now I need to earn money.”
He thought she looked interesting. She was older, of course. But she had a finished look about her, like wood that had been polished. Her medium-brown hair looked well tended. Her clothes beneath her open coat were good quality without being showy. She looked like she was used to running things, but was still able to see the person she was talking to. He had a feeling that if he stood closer to her he might smell a perfume. She created an effect of something both solid and unnecessary, familiar yet exotic.
“Maybe the work shed could use some repair. There’s a bad window for one thing. And there are spots where the ditch along the driveway could probably stand to be cleared out.”
“I could do that sort of work.”
“What’s your name?”
“Roberto Morales.”
“May I have your telephone number.”
“Yes. Do you wish to write it down?”
She did not want to open her purse with him there and said, “I’ll remember it. I’ve never been afraid that I’ll forget numbers.”
He told her the number and she said, “I’ll call you in a few days once I decide what might need to be done around here. Will that be all right?”
“Yes, I would be glad to do anything for you.”
“There wouldn’t be more than a couple of days work.”
“That is better than nothing. A little work here and there—better than nothing. Thank you. I will wait for your call.”
He got back into his truck, turned it around, and headed slowly down the driveway to the road. She watched him until he reached the road and drove off before she walked to the door and unlocked it.
Something wasn’t right about that, she decided. She decided not to care, and not to worry about the fact that she did not care.
Roberto got back to the main highway. He would come back to the acreage if Mrs. Becker asked him to, although that hadn’t been the idea. The trip was meant to be reconnaissance. He knew Jack had run into a problem with the Mr. Becker, the one in the government. He would have been happy to see the property without anyone there, although in that case he would not have set foot outside the truck with the aggressive and unpredictable dogs roaming about.
He had no plan in mind. Seeing the acreage was simply a matter of being prepared. The more you knew about a situation, the easier to develop a plan fast if necessary. When he got back to the city he went to visit those who passed for his friends. He knew they acted like friends and that he acted like their friend. He could almost make himself believe at times that the comradeship was genuine. He more than half trusted them but did not trust them fully, which he knew was the same as saying he did not trust them. But they let him do small jobs for money. The small jobs were the kind that exposed him to only a little bit of risk from the police. And the friends could be useful in other ways.
But his real friend—as far he had had any real friend in this cold country—was Jack. Jack not only gave Adela work, he took an interest in Roberto and was always ready to help without acting like a domineering father. Looking after your friends was the main thing Roberto had learned in the jungle. That and the usefulness of force.
8.
BECKER LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW OF HIS OFFICE. IT WAS a low-rank office, figuratively and literally. His demotion to the Culture ministry had taken him to the ground floor, which was actually sunk well into the ground. He had a good view of the paved area in front of the legislature building. The flower bed between the window and the broad walkway was depleted now. The trees on the other side were all evergreens; no bright yellow aspens in sight.
The approaching winter made him think again about the two years he had spent getting his master’s in agricultural economics in North Carolina. For a kid who had grown up in Wisconsin, living in a place where the first signs of spring could be felt in late February was a revelation. He remembered the magnolia tree underneath his window and the mockingbirds that sang in it. He remembered the bend in the highway where a local farmer had a stand to sell apples and apple cider. That memory stood out because of the Winesap apples, a variety he had not seen back in Wisconsin. Then there were the stranger things like the “Impeach Earl Warren” signs still dotting the countryside years after Warren had left the Supreme Court. The aging signs were forcibly present, just like the university choir singing “Dixie” during the local television station’s nightly sign-off, and like the prisoners in striped shirts and pants he had once seen clearing brush alongside a highway. It was a land of tobacco factories and old wooden houses and barbecue shacks. The factories were built of dull brick and the wooden structures were painted in flat colours. It had all seemed simple yet arcane. Strangely, the dreamlike appearance was somehow linked to the reality of antiCommunism and Vietnam, a war immensely far away yet brutally present. Simple beliefs had somehow inflicted a bloody physical and moral tearing apart. The capacity of the irrational to endure and even prevail was a lesson he had drawn too late from that time. He had thought he could go into politics and set things on a better course. If he had understood what he had seen back then—fleeting glimpses of stubborn, earthbound traditions standing up against a flood of passing words and television reports, all as imperturbable as the scent of hay and manure in Wisconsin dairies—he would have realized that some change took a day and some took longer than a lifetime. Some things required not merely changing what people did or thought, but changing who they and even their ancestors were.
He blinked and turned back to the briefing note on his desk. Daydreaming was a bad habit. Yet he thought it helped him apply perspective. Time was never as long as it seemed or distance as far, once you began thinking about how far you had travelled in both. He had learned patience. He was starting to hope he had not learned too much patience.
He suspected that Jeffries was stalling. That didn’t bother him particularly. When things had to be moved along he would order action. Jeffries was stubborn and resisted change, seemed at times to fear change. But he was too attached to his career to risk open defiance. The implied threat from Ostroski was another matter entirely. Becker did not want to take that to the premier but he couldn’t risk not giving a warning.
The essential problem was how to keep Ostroski’s hands off the photo collection while not pushing him into doing something stupid that would embarrass the government. Paying him off would help. But he had to be kept waiting while the collection was surveyed. How long was he willing to wait? How fast could the preliminary survey be done? Becker guessed the answers were: not long and not fast enough.
The phone rang. He picked up the receiver and heard Ginny say, “Mr. Rabani is here.” He thanked her and heard the click as the door opened and Ostroski’s lawyer was shown in. Neither of them said anything until the door closed again.
“George, how are you today?”
“Fine and hoping to be better after we talk, Minister.”
“Please, it’s John. I’d be happy if we could keep this business on a relatively friendly basis. Have a seat.”
Rabani felt the signals tumbling into place. First name, but no standing up to shake hands.
“I don’t know that my client is interested in friendship. He would certainly settle for mutual respect.”
“I would too. Though the offer was made to you, not directly to him. It’s hard to think with either friendship or respect of someone who would threaten to throw one of my dogs off a bridge—any dog. I knew a fella once who shot his dog because it wouldn’t listen to him. Never trusted him after that.”
“I realize a strain has been created. Therefore let’s try to conclude an arrangement efficiently. My client has certain items to offer you in exchange for satisfactory handling of his photo collection. I will tell you frankly I don’t know exactly what he’s offering, but he seems to think that you do. I also don’t know exactly what his objections are to leaving his entire photo collection indiscriminately in the hands of the government for eventual public display, but I take it some of the images are personal.”
“You’re referring to the government’s photo collection, which happens to consist of pictures that he took and later sold?”
“We’re ready to concede ownership, although Mr. Ostroski still feels the government acted in a high-handed and unfair manner when it bought the collection. He thinks coercion would be an apt description.”