by John Farrow
Included in the report was information Cinq-Mars did not know. The victim had been identified as Andrew Stettler, an employee of a pharmaceutical company known as BioLogika. When the company’s name was mentioned, the camera panned the tall building at the head of the bay that overlooked the ice-village.
Following her husband’s thirty seconds of continued fame Sandra switched back to the American channel, while Cinq-Mars mulled the news that the dead man had worked near the spot where his body had been recovered.
Sandra punched off the tube with her remote control, stretched and yawned. She fluffed her brown hair back, then leaned way over and kissed her husband. She was a handsome woman with lively eyes and a quick smile. She had a soft, full mouth and gentle lines across her forehead created by perpetually arching her eyebrows. She jumped up, grasped his hand and pulled her man to his feet.
“You are not going to think about this all night, Emile.”
“That might not be possible.”
“Wanna bet?”
Movie romance had her in the mood, and the detective was not about to pit himself against the bright twinkle in her eye. They departed the den in their country home clasped in one another’s arms, and Cinq-Mars stretched out his free hand to turn out the lights.
2
ROLL CALL
Approximately two months earlier,
Wednesday, December 8, 1998
Depending on the nature of the experiment, lab rats at Hillier-Largent Global Pharmaceuticals, Inc., were paid up to a thousand dollars for a weekend of their time and the indiscriminate use of their bodies. Applicants agreed to be inoculated, or scratched with a vaccine, or given drugs orally, or sprayed with decongestants, or plied with laxatives, and consented also to spending a weekend, Friday night to Monday morning, in the lab under observation. In a few experiments they were deprived of sleep, in others they were prohibited from leaving their beds except to urinate or defecate in pots, their urine and feces retained for study.
In any economy, stagnant or prosperous, a shortage of candidates rarely occurred. If the company advertised for healthy twenty-year-olds, non-smokers, with no record of prolonged alcohol abuse, the line of university students needing cash for spring break circled the block. If the company required octogenarians with a known history of heart disease, applicants were dropped off by relatives. They shuffled into line behind their walkers, checking pacemakers and pulse, sneaking a smoke to calm their nerves prior to the interview. If the company requested men with a previous history of heroin addiction, ex-convicts released from prison a few days earlier responded, as polite as choirboys, happy for three more days of detention, and they were joined by skid-row vets hoping to earn a dollar.
Inside the laboratory, where visitors’ blood tests were conducted, a poster, out of the lab rats’ sight, repeated a variation on an old adage: “Life is Shit, Then You Croak.” The sign was meant to cheer up the technicians.
Lucy Gabriel, generally, did not require cheering up, although she had been responsible for erecting the sign. Affable and fun-loving, she was bright, eager and talkative, and took considerable pride in her work. She’d been chosen to interview the applicants who lined up for the Wednesday morning roll calls because of her natural affinity for the destitute. She treated them in a cordial and sympathetic manner. Being native didn’t hurt. The poor suspected that she had known hard times herself, which eased their embarrassment at being there. Those who recognized her as an activist for Indian rights, someone who had spent time on the barricades during an explosive period in the history of her reserve, believed that they had placed themselves in good hands.
Men, of course, were delighted to discover themselves in the care of a beauty.
An aspect to conducting the interviews was keeping an eye peeled for special people. That Andrew Stettler caught her attention was no surprise. He had come on strong. She knew the type. Men of his ilk treated the program as a joke, a bump on the road, a story for the boys back at the bar.
As was the case with most lab rats, Andrew Stettler was down on his luck the day that he showed up. Lucy had no problem with that. She didn’t judge people by their troubles. She still lived on the Kanesetake Reserve, where being down on your luck was common-place, where hard times never ended. On occasion, she might grow impatient with men who chose to be boisterous about being broke, or who dismissed bad decisions as rotten luck, but she understood that people had a right to deal with misery in their own way.
Andrew Stettler’s way was to be the life of any party going.
“Choose me,” he demanded, wearing a wry smile upon entering her office. He had long black hair, curling where it rested on his shoulders, an engaging grin and a discernible brightness to his eyes. Sitting down in the chair in front of Lucy’s desk, he splayed his big hands across the pale oak veneer. “Rich veins. You won’t have to drill for my blood. I admit, the last time I bled, the colour was black. Alien ancestors, I’m guessing. Maybe the bullet poisoned me, who can explain it?” His chin was pointy, his neck longer than most, and his Adam’s apple was particularly prominent. “For you, sugar, I’ll bleed red. Looking at you makes me feel like a red-blooded American boy, which I’m not. I’m local talent. Canadian. A Montrealer, born and bred. Chances are decent I’ll die here, too. I don’t get around much anymore, but who can blame me? So many lovely beauties, how can I leave even one behind? Speaking about dating—”
“We weren’t,” Lucy interjected.
“Details,” he said, waving a hand as though to dismiss her point. “We’ll use the grand your company’s paying me to take an enema—or whatever you got in mind—and we’ll have ourselves a night on the town. Good food. Catch a movie. Drinks someplace. What do you say?”
“Name, please,” Lucy asked. His smile had already snared her. The slight turn at the corners of his mouth expressed mischief, fun, buffoonery and an inclination, she supposed, for the erotic. She liked the darkness in his eyes.
“Call me Andy.”
“What does your bank call you, Andy, in case we write a check?”
“Ah! That’ll be Andrew Stettler. Since I don’t see my name on a check too often, make it out to Andrew R. Stettler. A nice honky ring, don’t you think?”
“If you say so.”
“You’re not white,” he said.
“You’re not blind,” she murmured, and pretended to mark his form.
“Might’ve been. Half-blind anyway, until I saw you. Women in uniform never looked good to me before, but you’ve turned me right around on that one.”
Her white lab coat did not constitute a uniform, but she wasn’t going to argue the point. “Are you clean, Andy?”
He sniffed both armpits. “Lord God Almighty, I think I did take a shower this morning. Shaved, too. I smell like a cross between Irish Spring and Right Guard. So no, I don’t stink, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I think you know what I’m asking.” She typed his name into her computer.
He flashed that dark-eyed smile again. “What’s your name, sugar?”
“Lucy Gabriel.”
“Please to meet you, Lucy. I believe in a drug-free America, so I do my part by living in Canada. Seriously, though, I stay away from that shit. Bought me too much trouble in life. Lost me too many friends. Sample my blood, if you want.”
“I’ll do that, Andy. I positively will do that. But you can save us both time and trouble by answering honestly.”
He brushed his big hands over the surface of the desk, smiled. “Clean for how long?” he asked.
“Six months would be nice.”
“Next question. Clean of what, exactly?”
“Heroin. Crack. Cocaine. Amphetamines,” she stipulated.
“Marijuana? Hash? Angel dust?”
“It’d be nice if you could give me six months from my list and six days from yours.”
He stuck out his hand. “Agreed. Can I come back next week?”
“Ah …”
“Kidding!”
He laughed. “I’m clean! I’m not saying it’s been entirely voluntary, but I haven’t toked up up since my last job. Your list never interested me. I’m one of the few guys alive who went to prison and actually came back a rehabilitated soul. I’m a walking, talking miracle, Lucy.”
She had a backlog of applicants waiting in the corridor outside, but was in no hurry to finish with him. “Under occupation, what do I write? Miracle man? Religious nut? Jailbird?”
He laughed. “Funny you should ask. Let me talk to you about it. Any jobs with this company, Lucy? Real, permanent-type jobs, not this guinea pig stuff?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “You’d have to apply at Personnel.”
“Drug company, right?” he went on. “I come here, I see video cameras in the lobby. I see employees showing photo I.D., punching in passwords. I’m thinking, they got security problems here. I can help with that.”
“Try Pinkerton’s.”
He laughed again, as if she’d cracked a joke. “I can’t be bonded, Lucy. But someone like me, I know things that would pin back the ears of a Pinkerton guard. If you have problems, I’m your man, the guy with solutions.”
She decided on the spot to take him seriously. “All right, Andy. I’ll give you a problem. Provide me with a solution.”
For the first time, he sat back in his chair, cocky and cool. “Shoot.”
“Let’s say I wanted you to steal a truck. How would you go about it?”
Andy whistled. “Whoo-ee, aren’t you the action figure! Are you serious?”
She smiled. “No, I’m not. It’s a test. Are you all talk, or do you know things?”
He nodded vigorously, as if to indicate that the ground rules seemed fair enough and that he was only too eager to rise to the challenge. “All right. Let’s see. The gangs, there’s your problem. You don’t hijack a truck anywhere close to the city without the approval of organized crime, not unless you want your clutch foot lopped off. Either you make a deal with a gang, or …” He seemed to suddenly lose himself in thought.
“Or what, Andy?”
“You’re Indian, right?”
“So?”
“Heist a truck in the States. Then use your Indian friends—I’m just saying, maybe you have a connection—to let you drive the truck back across the border. Everybody knows Indians control the border. If what you want is the truck, pay your Indian friends with the contents. Cigarettes or booze.”
His eyes had wandered to one side during his dissertation. Done, he looked back at Lucy Gabriel, and discovered that she was staring at him with a grave expression.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She shook herself, as if emerging from a trance, and jumped up from her chair. “Would you mind waiting here a minute?”
“I got no pressing engagements.”
Lucy quickly left the office.
She made her way down labyrinthine corridors, halting at a number of doorways to punch in a code, and entered an expansive laboratory. Lucy started work early, and the lab had yet to fill with its usual complement of technicians. Spotless, the walls and ceiling white, the tables a shiny stainless steel, the room was made eerie by silence. Lucy was pleased to find the man she was looking for there, which saved her an elevator ride three floors up to his office.
“Dr. Largent!” she called.
“Good morning, Miss Gabriel.” A slight, mousy-looking man with distinctive blue eyes, Dr. Randall Largent brushed his tufts of hair into rampant bursts of white flame, as if performing an impression of Einstein. Under his laboratory smock he was dressed in his familiar pinstriped blue suit and tie. Sixty-two years old and a principal of the company, he was a creature of the executive suite, not the lab.
She strode up to him to whisper her information, and her employer placed a conspiratorial hand on her elbow, drawing her close as he lowered an ear.
“I’ve found the one for us! He’s perfect! Perfection on a platter!”
“Calm down, Lucy.”
“He’s exactly what we’re looking for. He’s here as a lab rat. What should I do?”
Dr. Randall Largent sucked in his breath before announcing his decision. “Hire him,” he suggested. He exhaled.
“Really? For the job?”
“No,” he stipulated. “Hire him as a lab rat. Observe him over the weekend. See how he handles himself”
“Yes, but what if he doesn’t show up for the weekend?” Lucy objected.
“Then he’s not the man for us, is he?”
“I suppose not,” she conceded. “But it’s not a typical weekend, remember. It won’t be easy.”
“All the better. We’ll see how he fares.”
Hillier-Largent Global Pharmaceuticals, Inc., did contract research, and Montreal was a major research centre. Whenever the exclusive license to a successful drug patent was expiring, competing companies developed their own versions for the marketplace. New variations required testing, if for no other reason than to adhere to government regulations. Drug companies had found it cost-effective and less messy to farm out this kind of work, and Hillier-Largent Global, a relatively small outfit, happily took on the contracts as a means to finance its own development of new drug therapies for serious illnesses. This weekend they were experimenting with a bowel cleanser, to be used when patients needed to prepare their intestines for examination. When Andrew Stettler had mentioned taking an enema, he’d been close to the truth.
Lucy nodded. “Okay, I’ll do that.”
“Good morning! What’s up?” The question was posed by the other half of the company’s letterhead, Dr. Harry Hillier, as he entered the lab. Harry was easily Lucy’s favourite of the two, but he was not involved in all the company’s enterprises. She knew things her boss did not. Bald across the top, with jet-black hair worn straight down on the sides, Harry had a horse-shaped face with large lips. He was no taller than Lucy. Everyone knew that Harry Hillier was the scientific brains behind the company, whereas Randall Largent managed the enterprise. Hillier was known as a bland stickler for the rules, while Largent had a reputation for fudging data, and nobody would put it past him to cook the books.
“Just working my way through roll call,” Lucy cheerfully intoned. “It’s under control now. Got to be going. Bye!”
She set off on the fly, sliding a little on the polished floors.
Andrew Stettler had left his seat and was examining a photograph perched on a filing cabinet as Lucy returned to her office. In the picture, Lucy was dressed in what she referred to as battle fatigues—an embroidered elk hide vest, denim shirt and tight-fitting, patched jeans. She was standing on an upside-down police cruiser, a fist clenched at her side, her other hand raised straight up clutching a rifle. Her face was painted with colourful streaks—war paint—and her mouth was wide open, apparently expelling a bloodcurdling holler.
“Lucy, is this you?” Stettler asked, incredulous, as she took her seat.
“Yep.”
‘Jesus. I better not mess with you. That was during the Oka Crisis?”
At the beginning of the 1990s, an altercation between the police and her people had led to a conflict. A town near the reserve, called Oka, had blithely decided to expand the limits of its municipal golf course. The expansion absorbed land Mohawks considered to be their own, and they further believed that the land in dispute included sacred burial grounds. A classic confrontation. Whites pooh-poohed the notion of ancient burial grounds and faded treaties while deifying golf and every man’s right to swing a club. Mohawks invoked centuries of grievances to marshal their defence of the piney woods and put up roadblocks. The SQ, attacked. A cop was shot and killed, and the police contingent fled the woods like scared rabbits. The army was brought in next, and the stand-off between Indians armed to the teeth and soldiers with fixed bayonets absorbed the interest of the western world for weeks. Eventually, peace was restored. The Mohawks kept their burial grounds, while a few of their number did jail time.
“Oka Crisis … last weekend,
” Lucy deadpanned, “I can’t remember now. I’m always turning over cop cars, it’s hard to keep track.”
“And I thought I was a bad boy.”
She smiled. She liked him. “Listen. There’s a chance of a regular job.”
“You’re kidding me. Here?”
“Not here. But that’s another story. Next week, maybe, I’ll set up a meeting with the president of another company, a partner company of ours. He’s looking for someone like you.”
“Why only maybe?” Stettler asked.
Lucy cocked her chin. “First, you have to get through the weekend. I’m hiring you for the guinea pig job. If you’re not a troublemaker, if you behave, that sort of thing, you’ll get the interview.”
“Lucy, that’s great. Thanks.”
“You won’t be thanking me this weekend. You’ll be puking your guts out between attacks of diarrhea.”
“Yeah?’
“Afraid so.”
Andy gently nodded, accepting the conditions, and flashed his seductive smile again. “How’s that any different from my usual weekend?”
Andrew Stettler walked away from Hillier-Largent Global that morning, which was not unusual in itself, for most lab rats arrived and departed by public transport or on foot. Only a few drove, usually in old, rust-spotted cars that dragged their mufflers. What made Stettler’s departure exceptional was that after he had walked a few blocks and turned three corners he stopped and looked around, then unlocked the door to a late-model Oldsmobile, tucking himself in behind the wheel.
Equally surprising, he drove to a house he owned. Andrew Stettler lived on the upper floor of a duplex in a congested, nondescript north-end neighbourhood, and leased the lower portion of the house, connected by an inside staircase, to his mother. He did not charge her more than the monthly allowance he provided for her, but for tax purposes they honoured the ritual of writing and cashing rent checks.
At home, Andy stripped out of the faded, rough clothes he had worn to the interview. He unlaced the worker’s boots and tossed his old jeans into a heap. Then he dressed again, in a pressed shirt and creased trousers. A knock on the front door interrupted him.