by Peter Kirby
“Tell me about the Chajul mine disaster.”
“I’ve got nothing to say.” Susskind was still trying to figure out a way to get the door to open, pushing at it so it made a loud crashing noise. “Open the door, Vanier. Look, let’s forget any of this happened. I swear. Why don’t you just take a holiday, and get on with your life.”
Vanier didn’t answer right away. He let the suggestion hang there. Susskind was kicking at the door, getting frustrated.
“Who wrote ‘Don’t play with more lives’ on my son’s wall? Was that a message that I should take a holiday, or else?”
“How should I know?”
“Is that what you want me to do, Mr. Susskind? To back off? The people who raped Katya yesterday were threatening my family. Do you know anything about that?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. In your business, I’m sure there are lots of people threatening you. Now, please, open the damn door.”
“We need to sit down and talk, Mr. Susskind. You and me. Come over here. There are things I need to know.”
Susskind turned from the door and slowly approached. When he was about six feet from the table, he grabbed a large wrench from the workbench and spun towards Vanier, wielding the wrench like a baseball bat. His speed was surprising. Vanier ducked, but the wrench caught him a glancing blow on the side of his head, knocking him forward off the chair. Susskind stood over him and raised the wrench a second time, aiming again for Vanier’s head. As the blow came down, Vanier raised his arm to block it and rolled into Susskind’s legs, pushing him off balance. Susskind fell forward, pulled by the momentum of the wrench in his hand, and landed on top of Vanier. Still, he wouldn’t stop. He grabbed Vanier’s throat and squeezed. With Susskind’s weight holding him down, and the fat hands cutting off his air, Vanier was struggling. Susskind leaned into the task, closing off Vanier’s windpipe. They were face to face, and Vanier was losing strength. Susskind leaned in close. “Like I said, Vanier. You’re finished.”
Susskind kept his face close to Vanier’s, staring into his eyes as he squeezed.
Vanier was trapped beneath Susskind, his head on the concrete floor, like he was waiting to die. Susskind never saw the head-butt coming. Vanier whipped his head off the floor and his forehead connected with Susskind’s nose. They both heard the crunch of bone and cartilage. Susskind let out a scream of pain. He didn’t loosen his grip on Vanier’s throat, but he was forced to shift his weight to keep his face away from Vanier’s head. Vanier twisted around, managed to release an arm from underneath Susskind, and smashed his fist into Susskind’s bleeding nose. Susskind grunted. This time his grip loosened, and Vanier was able to twist himself out from under the fat man. Susskind seemed to know it was over, and Vanier had handcuffs on him in seconds.
Vanier pulled at Susskind’s collar until he got to his knees. Blood was pouring from his nose, staining his white shirt. His chest looked like he had been shot. Vanier kept pulling until Susskind stood up. He led him over to the chair, and Susskind sat down heavily. Vanier picked up the yellow coveralls from the table and got down on his knees. He took Susskind’s shoes off and guided his feet into the coveralls, pushing the ends of the pants into Susskind’s socks. He used duct tape to make sure the pants stayed enclosed in the socks. Then he made Susskind stand, and pulled the coveralls up above his waist.
He sat Susskind back down and duct-taped his legs to the chair. Then he undid the handcuffs and made Susskind stand again while he pulled the rest of the coveralls up over Susskind’s body, guiding his arms into the sleeves and zipping up the suit. Susskind sat back on the chair.
“I got 6X Large. I hope it fits.”
Susskind said nothing.
“You’re probably wondering what the tarp is for. I thought there might be blood. The tarp makes it easier to clean up. Sometime in the next twelve hours, you may want to shit, and I don’t want to have to clean that up. That’s why you’re wearing the coveralls.”
Vanier slowly wound the duct tape around Susskind’s upper body, fixing him to the chair. His left arm was taped along with his body, but Vanier left Susskind’s right arm swinging free. He grabbed a grease-stained towel and wiped it across Susskind’s face. The man looked a mess, blood, sweat, and grease mixing together.
“The bleeding will stop in a while.”
Vanier pulled a chair up and sat down opposite Susskind, leaned in and said, “Here’s my problem. I need answers, and I have no time to waste. So I want you to tell me everything. Now. Start to finish.”
“You want to beat a confession out of me? You’re crazy. You’ll never be able to use it in court.”
“Not for court. For me, that’s all. I want to know.”
“I’ve nothing to say.”
Vanier picked up the wrench in his right hand and walked behind Susskind. Then he reached down and took Susskind’s hand in his left hand. He placed Susskind’s hand on the table. “Last chance, Mr. Susskind. I want to know everything.”
Susskind tried to pull back but Vanier had his arm stretched behind him. He couldn’t move it.
“Goddamn you, Vanier.”
Vanier held Susskind’s hand tightly on the table, raised the wrench and brought it down hard on Susskind’s thumb, smashing the bone. Susskind screamed and shifted violently in the chair before settling into low sobs that seemed to come from deep within him. Vanier put the wrench down on the table, out of Susskind’s reach, and sat back down.
“I’m not stupid, Mr. Susskind. I know I won’t be able to go to court with any confession. But you threatened my family, and I need to protect them. So here’s the deal. You tell me everything, I get it on tape, and then I take a leave of absence. The case goes nowhere and I know you won’t hurt anyone close to me. If you move against me, I release the tape to the press and you’re finished.”
Susskind was lost in pain, sobbing to himself. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hand. Every few seconds he would change its position, moving it off the table to let it hang, resting it back on the table. Vanier figured it hurt like hell either way.
He pulled his chair forward and took Susskind’s hand in his own. He had Susskind’s attention.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I told you. Go to hell.” He spat in Vanier’s face.
Vanier took Susskind’s broken thumb between his own thumbs and squeezed, rolling the broken pieces of bone. Susskind’s chair seemed to lift off the ground as he screamed. “Please. Stop. Whatever you want. Just no more. Please.”
“I want the whole story. Start to finish. No holding back. You understand? I’m going to record it and it will be my protection. You can go back to doing what you do, but you stay away from me and my family. Clear?” Vanier squeezed, and Susskind screamed again.
“You’re getting off easy compared to Sophia Luna and Sékou Camara. Compared to Katya. Oh, and let’s not forget Maître Bélair. You’re getting off easy, Mr. Susskind.”
Susskind was sobbing again. Vanier checked his pulse. “Your heart rate’s up, but that’s to be expected.”
Vanier pulled a digital recorder from his pocket and put it on the table. “When I turn this on, you’re going to start talking, and the sooner you get through it, the sooner you can go home.”
Susskind nodded.
“You start with your name, title and who you work for. Then go on from there. Your story, start to finish. I want everything to be on the tape. You start lying and we go back to the beginning. Leave anything out and we go back and start over. And every time we have to go back to the beginning it will hurt. Like this.” Vanier reached for Susskind’s hand and pushed on the thumb. Susskind screamed.
Vanier switched on the recorder and looked at Susskind. He was slow to start, with coughs and deep breaths. When he spoke, it was almost in a whisper. “My name is Richard Susskind. I am the Vice President of Latin America
for Essence Incorporated.” Vanier picked up the recorder and played it back. The sound was good, crystal clear.
“Okay. Start again, a little louder.”
“My name is Richard Susskind. I’m the Vice President of Latin America for Essence Incorporated.”
He started slowly, hesitating about naming the deeds, but once he got over the first murder, there didn’t seem to be any point in holding back. Vanier had him go back to the beginning.
“Where do I start? I suppose the logical place is the landslide, that’s where it all started. The landslide was our fault. No doubt about it. It destroyed half of Chajul. Our engineers had built the tailings pond on the cheap. The assholes built it on a hill just outside the village. In the best of circumstances, it was dangerous. It was a dumb-assed place to build it, but anywhere else would have cost more. So the mine goes operational and we’re making money. But over time, the tailings pond was filled to three times its designed capacity. Our own experts had been telling us it was a catastrophe in the making. Six months before the thing collapsed, I got a memo from the mine manager begging that something be done. You know what I did? I fired him. It was too expensive to fix.”
Susskind’s gaze drifted off Vanier’s face. He seemed to withdraw into himself as he spoke, confirming what had happened in the hope of making sense of it. Vanier had seen it before, when confession becomes therapy, a search for meaning.
“We went into crisis management. We knew we’d have to pay damages, but the goal was to limit the cost. I was the point man for all the negotiations. We made a deal with the Guatemalans so that all claims would be dealt with by a compensation fund that we would set up. We promised fifty million. I was able to convince Minister Hastings to have the Canadian government pitch in another fifty. It doesn’t sound like much but it was a fortune for the people who lost their homes and their relatives. A fortune. You know how much these people earn a year?”
He looked at Vanier. Vanier waved for him to continue.
“In return for the compensation, the Guatemalans were going to pass a law prohibiting anyone from suing us. It was a beautiful deal. We’d be off the hook without paying a cent. Our fifty-million contribution was being paid by our insurance. The only problem was, you don’t get deals like that without spreading the wealth.
“The Guatemalans wanted kickbacks for agreeing to the deal, so we agreed. Four of them were supposed to get ten million each. When Minister Hastings got wind of what the Guatemalans were doing, he got greedy. He wanted his share before he’d sign off on the Canadian government’s contribution.”
Susskind started coughing, wincing with each cough.
“Up to now, this was all pretty normal stuff. Nothing we couldn’t handle. It’s the way business is done. But someone fucked up and sent a draft of the contract outside the organization, to a translator. Worse, some idiot put real names into the schedule. Those names weren’t supposed to be in the contract. They were still setting up the companies that would be getting paid, all offshore, untraceable companies. You would never know who was behind them. So, instead of waiting for the names, or just putting fake names, someone wrote the real names in the draft. But we got the draft back, and everything looked good. The deal went through and everyone got paid.”
Vanier pushed stop on the recorder and picked up a towel from the workbench. He wiped some of the blood from Susskind’s face. Susskind coughed again, deeply, and spat a ball of red mucus onto the floor.
“Where was I?”
Vanier sat back down. “The deal went through. The payments were made.”
“Oh, yeah. At that point, we think everything has worked out perfectly. Except one morning, Hastings gets an email from Sophia Luna. She says she knows everything, and she wants a Minister’s permit in exchange for keeping quiet. She must have known what was going on when she saw the draft. Then she waited until the deal was done and probably used her contacts in Guatemala to follow the money when it was paid out. So she had proof that Hastings was on the take.
“Hastings blew a fuse. He refuses to make a deal. Tells me to deal with it, to get the documents back and there’s no question of giving her anything.
“I figured it was just a question of picking her up and scaring her a bit and we’d have the documents. But it was a total screw-up from day one. Those guys in GSC are great at security in some Third-World hellhole, but absolutely shit here. All they had to do was to pick her up, scare the shit out of her, and get the documents. Then the plan was to send her back to Guatemala on the corporate jet and let the Guatemalans deal with her. But things started to go off the rails from the start, and they kept getting worse.”
Susskind nodded towards the recorder, and Vanier turned it off.
“Water. I need water.”
Vanier looked around. The only tap was in a tiny toilet at the back. He found a coffee mug and filled it, brought it back to Susskind.
Vanier sat down. “You were saying how things started to go off the rails.”
“Yeah. Okay. Switch it back on.”
Vanier turned the recorder on and sat back to listen.
“First, there was the lawyer. The guys from GSC had been watching her, waiting to pick her up. The assholes should have grabbed her earlier, but no. They let her go meet the lawyer. So when she doesn’t have anything on her, they figure she’d given him the documents, or access to them, who the hell knows. So we sent that lunatic Santos to check out his office. He finds nothing there and he goes off to the hospital. Brilliant piece of work: Santos is going through the lawyer’s bag in the hospital and the lawyer wakes up. Santos puts his hand over his mouth to stop him screaming. Couldn’t think of anything better than to kill him. He said he was afraid the cop was coming back.
“Meanwhile, the bitch, Luna, is scaring Merchant and his crew. She never stops talking. First she’s trying to make deals, and then she starts threatening them. I heard her myself. She was crazy. Anyway, we arrange with the African guy to swap her for the documents. Another screw-up. The African is lying on the floor in the bank like he’s sick and refuses to move. He probably figured we weren’t going to let Luna go. And while all this is going on, Hastings, the Minister, is calling me, like, six times a day, screaming at me to fix the problem. This is someone who could ruin my career in a heartbeat.
“Anyway, the African puts together this insane scenario where we have to deliver Luna before he gives us the document. But guess what? After we’ve held Luna for a few days, she knows more than ever. I mean, she had even seen me and Merchant. So there was no way we could let her go. And sure as hell the African was finished too. So the plan was to park Luna in Place Ville-Marie and wait until the African got the call to say she was safe. Then they were going to whack her. She was half dead already with the amount of drugs she’d been given. Crazy as the plan was, it almost worked. We got the documents, Luna was dead. The only problem was the African. He took off. Escaped on a bike, for Chrissake! That was where everything was supposed to end. Luna and the African would be dead, and we would have the documents. But Merchant screwed up again. He let the African get away.
“So the African was still out there, and, guess what. Two days later he calls to say—surprise, surprise—he’s made a copy, he knows everything and he’s going to talk to you if we don’t give him a permit. So we’re back to square one.”
Vanier reached forward and stopped the recorder. “You? You said ‘He’s going to talk to you,’ There is no you. You’re talking into a recorder and you’re by yourself. Do you understand? I’m not here. Nobody’s here. So we’re going back.to where you said, ‘So the African’s still out there’, and start again.”
Vanier rewound the recorder, pushed record and nodded at Susskind. Susskind looked resigned, took a deep breath and started again.
“The African was still out there. So we’re back to square fucking one. I’m reporting everything to Hastings. When he hear
s that the African’s after a Minister’s permit he does an about-face. Maybe he can get the Minister of Immigration, the Showers guy. He says maybe he can convince Showers to issue one. Hastings must have been getting scared. Two days later, he told me he gave Showers fifty thousand dollars in cash to issue a permit for the African. The bastard said that’s how much I owed him. Like ten million wasn’t enough. But he got the permit signed. I saw it. I couldn’t believe it. Are they all crooks in Ottawa?
“The African gave us everything, photocopies of bank transfers, the works. But Merchant decides on his own that the African has to die. This is after the fact. Everything is finished. But Merchant doesn’t want any witnesses. Again, they screw up. The police find the body. But I figured they still have no proof. So we tried to shut the investigation down. We tried to scare Vanier off the case.”
Susskind looked to his captor as if for approval. Vanier nodded, and Susskind continued.
“So, yes, I admit I told Merchant to make sure Vanier went off the case. He was supposed to scare Vanier. I know nothing about any rape.”
Vanier clicked stop on the recorder. He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and held it up in front of Susskind’s face. “Now read this.”
Susskind was breathing heavily through his mouth. His nose had stopped bleeding, but it was swollen and blocked with dried blood. He bowed his head to read the note. He was almost crying. “No. Please. Don’t do this, Vanier. I’m begging you.”
“Read it.”
Susskind opened his legs and the paper fell to the floor. Vanier reached out and grabbed Susskind’s free hand. The thumb was now double its normal size. Vanier put his own thumb on the top of Susskind’s and moved it back and forth. Susskind screamed, and started crying again.
Vanier picked up the paper and put it back in Susskind’s lap. “Read it.”
He leaned back in the chair and clicked play.
“I can’t go on,” Susskind read. “It has to end. For once in my life I’m going to do the right thing. Goodbye.”