by Medora Sale
“To you?” asked Higgs.
“No,” said Deschenes. “To my mother.”
“And what did she say?”
“She pretended she couldn’t understand him.”
Wednesday morning’s lecture was on interpretation of intelligence reports—not something, thought Sanders, that anyone in this room was likely to have to do. So Higgs had either run out of useful things to say or he was showing off. Or, most likely, both. But Sanders flipped through his scribbled-on notebook looking for a clean page and waited for the man to say something worth committing to paper. He had begun to feel sorry for Higgs. He knew he was not the only person in the room who failed to find the lectures riveting, and his sketches were a mild protest compared to some of the ways people had chosen to pass the time. So this morning he was going to take some notes—real notes—and try to look at least vaguely interested.
At the mid-morning break it was evident that the instructor had noticed Sanders’s newly awakened interest.
The enforced camaraderie of occasions like this brought out all of Sanders’s latent misanthropy, and he had found himself a corner table where he was unlikely to be disturbed. He had barely had time to pull a book out of his pocket as insulation against the world when he felt someone looming over him. “May I join you?” The voice was sharp, unpleasant, and familiar.
“Certainly, Inspector Higgs,” said Sanders, putting aside the paperback with a scarcely audible sigh.
“Sanders, isn’t it?” Higgs asked. “Toronto. We were surprised Toronto would send someone of your rank. We expected a retired sergeant when we heard Flanagan couldn’t come.”
No, thought Sanders, it took Maritimers to have the guts to do something like that. “We are always ready to improve our techniques,” he said. “And it’s an interesting subject.”
“You seem to find intelligence work more interesting than most of the people here. The response is rather disappointing,” Higgs said bitterly.
“I take it that intelligence is your specialty,” said Sanders, and then wished he hadn’t.
“I’ve been in intelligence for twenty-two years, one way or another,” Higgs said. “Here and in the army. Not that there’s much use for an intelligence officer here these days.” He stared bleakly into his coffee, as if he had reliable information that it contained cyanide but he was going to drink it anyway.
“I’m surprised you didn’t move over to Intelligence at CSIS, then. When it split off. So you could continue in the same area.”
“Surprised, eh?” Higgs gave Sanders a speculative look. “Can’t desert the old service,” he said. “Not after all these years. Let the younger men start off there. Good training for them, off on their own.” He pushed his half-full cup away. “No offense, but I was sorry not to see Flanagan come up from Toronto.”
“Oh, do you know Flanagan?” said Sanders, who was also pretty sorry Flanagan hadn’t come.
“Flanagan and I go way back,” said Higgs, staring at the concrete block walls of the cafeteria as though the lost years were floating behind them somewhere. “We were in the Mediterranean together. Then he went off to Toronto, and I ended up here. Why did they send you? Do you do intelligence work?”
Sanders shook his head. “Homicide. I once tried going under cover but, you know, no matter how you dress, if you’re my size people take one look at you and say ‘cop’ and that’s it. I walk into a poolroom and in five minutes there’s no one there but me and the cockroaches. Not even the owner. So I went into Homicide, where people expect cops to look like cops.”
Inspector Higgs appeared not to be listening. “Then why send you?”
Sanders shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “Maybe they were expecting a few bodies to float up.”
“You’re joking,” Higgs said. “Aren’t you? Nobody’s really expecting any trouble this week, are they?” His look of pop-eyed nervous anger had altered in some way in the last few minutes, and if Sanders hadn’t known that they were sitting in one of the most secure places in the civilized world, he would have said that it had been replaced by fear.
“I wouldn’t know,” Sanders said casually. “You’re the specialist.”
Sylvia looked up as Ian MacMillan walked into the office escorting a dark-brewed, fierce-looking man whose eyes were hollow with fatigue. In spite of his relative lack of height, he made MacMillan look pallid and effete. Sylvia smiled briskly, pushed a button on her telephone, and stood up. “He’s waiting for you,” she said. “Coffee?”
“Please,” said the stranger. The voice arising from that broad chest was unexpectedly muted.
Deschenes appeared in the doorway to his office. “I would like to thank you for coming all the way out here on such short notice.” He held out his hand. “It is Mr. Hoffel, is it not?”
“Mister will do, Superintendent,” he said. “And Inspector MacMillan was a most efficient chauffeur. It was no trouble.” As they were speaking, MacMillan herded them unobtrusively into the office, sat down behind them, and took his notebook from his pocket. Hoffel glanced rapidly back and frowned.
“What we’re interested in, Mr. Hoffel—” Sylvia’s entrance with the coffee interrupted Deschenes. He sat back and waited for her to pass cups around.
MacMillan’s voice cut through the rattle of china. “What we’re interested in, Mr. Hoffel, is finding out what in hell you’re doing here—why your government decided to send you instead of the usual bodyguard types. I mean, why the whole bloody Austrian secret service, or whatever you call it, here in Ottawa?” MacMillan waved Sylvia out of his way with an angry gesture.
Hoffel pivoted slowly around in his chair and looked at MacMillan before turning to speak to Deschenes. “We had hoped to make my arrival appear unobtrusive,” he said. “I had not really expected to be recognized.”
“Our Mr. Metcalfe from External Affairs was posted in Vienna last year,” said Deschenes.
“Ah. I see. Well, why am I here? Just as a precaution, of course. Our prime minister has become—what can I call it?—a target recently of some unpleasant attacks, most of them merely verbal. But there have been threats of violence. You know what these things are. One must pay attention to them even though it is very rare that anything happens as a result of them.” He smiled and spooned sugar into his coffee.
“Why would your prime minister be subject to threats?” asked Deschenes.
“Why? All politicians, all famous people, receive threats,” said Hoffel. His face had arranged itself into an expression of great sweetness.
“Indeed,” said Deschenes. “But people like you are not sent out to hold their hands, are they?”
“Perhaps not.” Hoffel paused, his head to one side, appearing to weigh Deschenes’s usefulness and reliability. “We have a particular group of rightist fanatics who are convinced that our government is swinging dangerously to the left once more.” His dark eyes danced with amusement. “I am sure that you Canadians think that we are all disturbingly right-wing, but on the whole we are really quite centrist, although we have our share of people on both sides of the political sea. This particular group seems to feel that a little destabilization would help to bring them to power. They are probably wrong, but we do not care to have them try.”
“Especially if their destabilization techniques consist of killing off the members of your government?”
“If they tried that, it would be most unfortunate, yes,” said Hoffel. “It is, of course, a remote threat, but one that must be taken into account.”
“Why over here?” said MacMillan suddenly.
“Why not?” said Hoffel. “But we are investigating every area that the prime minister and other members of the government must visit. We are not more suspicious of your peaceful and well-guarded country than of any other place.” He smiled again and put down his coffee cup. “I must return to the embassy, I’m afraid. I have a meeting there in a few mi
nutes. If I could prevail upon you to—”
“Of course,” said Deschenes. “Inspector MacMillan will arrange for you to be taken back downtown.”
MacMillan followed Hoffel in the direction of Sylvia’s office, stopped at the door, and then walked back to Deschenes’s desk. “A helluva lot of good that did us,” he hissed. “I’ve had more information out of the Mafia on a bad day. ‘Ve are not bloody vell suspicious of your country,’” he mimicked in a harsh, badly rendered German accent. “The hell they aren’t. They know something—and I’m going to find out what it is.”
“Thank you, Ian,” said Deschenes coldly, and picked up his telephone receiver.
“What I don’t understand,” said Harriet Jeffries, “is why you’re here. Aren’t you supposed to be communing with your fellows all day? What’s happened to your meeting?”
“What meeting?” asked Sanders lazily. He drained off his beer and looked over at Harriet. “Our leader, the inestimable Higgs himself, declared that he had other duties and ordered us to go sightseeing. That’s what I’m doing, obeying orders. An excellent quality in a police officer, the ability to obey orders.” He pushed aside his glass. “But what is more important now,” he said, “is lunch. Do we take risks and eat here—I think I smell something that might be food—or do we go elsewhere?”
“Elsewhere,” said Harriet. “Where’s your car?”
“At the motel. Why?”
“Excellent.” She leaned back and raised her hands expansively in the air. “We will go in mine, which has a cooler in the backseat filled with things to eat and drink. When you called, I decided that I was in the mood for a picnic. I can find you a place both quiet and pleasantly sheltered from the wind. How does that sound?”
“Terrific,” said Sanders. As they stood up to go, the person at the back table slipped his book into his pocket and set out after them.
“This is terrific,” said Sanders. He was lying on his back on the grass, staring up at a small tree that had grown green and luxuriant in the protected environment of the city, and trying to figure out what kind of bird was darting around in it, singing furiously. “I do believe that some of my fellow officers have joined a tour of the city, poor suckers. They don’t know the half of it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Harriet from her perch on a large granite boulder. She had attached another lens to her camera and was focusing on a seaplane moored downstream from them in the river. “Do you like seaplanes?”
“The essence of pure enjoyment,” he said. “That’s in answer to your first question. And I’ve never thought much about them. That’s in answer to the second.”
“Well, I’ve taken a picture of it anyway,” said Harriet. “Whether you like them or not. Can you reach the beer?”
“Certainly,” said Sanders. He rolled over and extracted a bottle of beer from a small orange cooler. “How did you find out about this place?” he asked, propping himself up on his elbow to open the bottle and look around him. He was lying on the grass inside a circle of rocks that looked as if it had been built by Stone Age men of modest aspirations. He had placed himself strategically within reaching distance of Harriet and the cooler, which contained the remains of a picnic lunch, several rolls of film, and beer. To the east the river flowed away from them, swirling around the point; to the west thick shrubbery and trees hid them from the noise and smell of heavy traffic on the bridge to Hull. The worn grass and flattened beer cans testified that many others knew about this retreat, but on this sunny Wednesday they had it to themselves.
“Isn’t it nice?” she said. “I found it when I was a kid. We used to have a house near the canal, and I’d set off every day in summer with a lunch and just go and look at things. Deserted corners were my specialty. I know lots more of them, too.” Sanders rolled over on his side to look at her, but by now she had twisted herself around and was contemplating the shoreline across the river through the viewfinder of her camera. “Hey, I didn’t realize it was that late,” she said, pointing at a distant clock face.
“What about it?”
“If we leave now, we’ll just make it out to the lab to pick up the Ektachrome and get back to my place before rush hour starts. Don’t you want to see those pictures you helped take?” She glanced sideways at him and started picking up the empty bottles.
“Of course,” said Sanders, propping himself up on his elbow and watching the sun glint on her dark hair as she moved.
Andrew Cassidy was back in his own office at CSIS, with piles of material stealthily transferred from Steve Collins’s filing cabinet stuffed into his hitherto empty bottom drawer. As he finished reading one document, he would drop it into a cardboard box beside his chair and pick up another. He reckoned he had enough here to occupy him until the end of the day, with plenty left in Steve’s office to keep him busy until noon tomorrow. And then he was going to have to start thinking, because the pages of careful notes he had compiled so far wouldn’t lead a cat to a mouse hole. The squeak of the door opening made him close the folder in front of him and look up.
“Oh. Hi, Betty. What’s up?”
“It’s Charlie Higgs. He’s in my office and he wants to see you.”
“Damn,” said Cassidy. “What for?”
“About Steve, I expect,” she answered. “What will I tell him?”
“Anything. Tell him I’ve gone to Kenora for my sister’s wedding and I won’t be back for a week; tell him I got hit on the head and I’m still in a coma. Look, Betty, I haven’t got anything to say to Charlie Higgs. He’ll ask me what we’re doing and I’ll say everything we can and he’ll know that means nothing at all and he’ll get mad as hell. And I don’t blame him.”
“I’ll tell him you’re out, shall I? Even though he knows you haven’t checked out with downstairs?”
“Sure. He’d expect nothing less from me. He always thought I was an insubordinate son of a bitch. Thanks, love. I’ll do the same for you someday.” And he blew her a kiss. “Oh—and Betty?” She turned back. “Is this all Steve had around? Because most of it isn’t worth a pinch of shit. What about at home?”
She looked thoughtfully at him. “Well, as far as I know, that’s it. But why would he tell me where his stuff was kept? You know.”
Her tone was dismissive, almost contemptuous, but she remained standing in the doorway with her head tilted slightly to one side and her hair falling carelessly across one half of her face, hiding her expression. Cassidy waited, afraid to move and break the mood, for her to say something else. But after a moment more, she flicked the hair off her face, nodded abruptly, and left. Maybe that meant he had kept things at home. It wouldn’t hurt to check, even if it meant putting off the lovely Samantha one more time.
“Where are you staying in Ottawa?” Sanders asked as Harriet jumped into the car, dumped the envelope from the lab on his lap, and headed into the steadily thickening traffic.
“In the Glebe,” she said. “Near the canal. One of those miraculously lucky six-month sublets. Actually, I’m only a few blocks from Dow’s Lake, practically in the country. It’s nice.” As she was speaking, she made a right turn through a red light without bothering to stop, screeched into the oncoming traffic, and bucketed along the potholed road. “Bronson,” she said. “It’s a little faster than Bank, I think. You know, this is where I learned to drive when I was seventeen. Around here.”
“They should have tried teaching you a little harder. Don’t traffic laws impress you at all?” asked Sanders as she ran her second red light.
“Not at all,” she said. “Does my driving bother you? I’ve never had an accident. I’m probably much more careful than you are, friend.”
“No doubt,” he said, yawning and lapsing into semi-comatose silence until the car stopped on a shaded street in front of a big, dark red house.
“Hey,” she said, touching him lightly on the arm. “We’re here. These are my temporary quarte
rs, or at least the top half of it is. Or are. Like it?”
Sanders yawned again. “Not bad. It’s not quite what I expected, though,” he said as he got out of the car. “Not nearly arty enough.”
“Come around to the back. We use the tradesman’s entrance.” She pushed open a wooden gate that led into a large garden, and pointed with a flourish at a set of wooden stairs going up to the second floor. “Private entrance.”
The stairs led directly into the kitchen, and it was clear from one look at that room that no one had done anything to the house since it was built sixty or seventy years before. It had a huge old porcelain sink; an ancient, yellowed stove; and an antique refrigerator. The floor was wooden, dark, and stained with years of cooking spills. Sanders looked at it and laughed. “This reminds me of home,” he said. “Except that it’s bigger and seems to have a better class of neighbors. And my ma isn’t standing in front of the stove yelling at me.”
“Isn’t it great?” she said. “Come in here.” She led him impatiently into a room off the kitchen that was being used as a study, walked over to an enormous wooden desk, and took the envelope from him. She ripped it open, extracted a small box, and began laying the slides that she took out of it onto a large rectangular structure with a milky glass top.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A light box,” she said. “Don’t cops ever take pictures?”
“Of course we do. But we have these people called photographers, and that’s what they’re paid to do. Then the rest of us don’t have to know anything.”
“Philistines,” she said cheerfully, and flipped on the switch. There was a long silence as she bent over the slides and examined each one. Just as Sanders had begun to think that there was something seriously wrong with them, she looked up and said, “Perfect. I am bloody good, you know. Look at that one—the one we did with all those people charging by me—it’s awe-inspiring, that’s what it is.” She pointed at the slide of the Supreme Court building.