Snow Job (50 page)

O
n Sunday, Arthur sought to entertain his melancholy client at the Ohrid festival’s closing events, but they were hounded everywhere by a tagalong team of reporters. The Russian, Vlad Mishin, was not one of them — he’d last been seen smiling and waving at them as he lined up for a rock concert.

“Maybe he has given up trying to get his Russian-language exclusive,” Abzal said. “We owe the Russians nothing. We were their colony, and instead of granting us freedom they turned us over to their trained goons.”

It was always “we” when he talked of his home — he was losing his Canadianness. He hadn’t stopped lamenting about Bhashyistan, about his years of felt inadequacy, but at least he’d quit making veiled threats to disappear. Mostly, he was morose, tense, and silent.

Tired of insisting to the press, however pleasantly, on their right to remain silent, they finally retreated to the refuge of the RCMP’s villa and its guarded gate. The press corps followed, but by afternoon’s end had dwindled to a hard core shivering by the road in the cold, crisp evening air. Abzal carried on down to the basement fitness room, to try burning off his surplus of nervous energy.

McIlhargey and Djon were again at the chessboard — they’d been at it for three hours, off and on. It would be their last game; Djon planned to leave for Albania that evening. He’d already cleared out
his room — accommodation was tight, and the two inspectors were soon due back from Tirana.

With them, hopefully, would be Ray DiPalma, sole medical casualty of Operation Erzhan. Arthur had talked to him the night before — he felt well enough to leave his care facility, but hadn’t sounded enthusiastic. In fact, the news of Abzal’s emergence in Macedonia seemed almost to have added to his melancholia. “Congratulations, Arthur,” he’d said in a dry and weary monotone. “You pulled it off in spite of me.” He was either off his boutique mood elevator or it was working in reverse. Like cocaine, Arthur suspected, it rewarded with extreme highs and punished with brutal lows.

“Offering draw,” said Djon. He’d been defeated only once, a courtesy loss.

“Not yet, comrade.”

McIlhargey rose to the summons of Sergeant Chow in the sunroom, now dimly lit by a desk lamp and a pair of glowing computer screens. The printer was humming, pages rolling from it. Chow said, “It’s a wrap,” and announced that Ottawa was sending an executive jet tomorrow to fetch everyone home.

McIlhargey sat, read through the printouts, handed Arthur a report from the Montreal RCMP.

The stilted, over-precise law enforcement jargon, when reduced to common English, disclosed that after twenty-four hours of surveillance and intercepted phone calls, Sully Clugg and Rod Klein had been arrested at the Montreal airport, carrying false passports and last-minute tickets to Mexico. The FBI had been asked to trace a call Clugg had made to an unlisted number in Dallas in which he’d warned, in poorly coded language, of a “blowback,” spy jargon for alarming news.

Arthur assumed Clugg and Klein hadn’t opened their mouths except to demand counsel. Law enforcers, traditionally contemptuous of criminal lawyers, tended to run to them with more haste than the average evildoer. So it would be difficult to identify other conspirators — the driver of the kidnap car, Anglo-Atlantic’s
operatives — or to trace secret bank accounts. Harder to nail these mercenaries for the ten murders on Colonel By Drive. But the kidnapping case seemed solid, especially with the panicky attempt to flee to refuge in Mexico.

Arthur expressed these thoughts to McIlhargey, who seemed torn between continuing this conversation or resuming his chess game.

“Let me ask you, Counsellor, how would you defend them?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Don’t play high and mighty, you’ve acted for the worst scum on the West Coast. Let’s say these turkeys had retained you — what would you advise them?”

The answer seemed easy. “Any competent lawyer would pleabargain for a minimum sentence, tendering their clients as Crown witnesses on their agreement to implicate Anglo-Atlantic. Clugg seems enough of a sociopath to roll over on friends and allies, especially if tens of millions are sitting in a numbered account in Freeport or the Caymans.”

McIlhargey’s grunt seemed to express admiration, but it might have been scepticism. A wrap, Chow had said. Yet much seemed unresolved, the entire backwash from the assassinations of November 26: the farcical mini-war with Bhashyistan, the perils facing the Canadians trapped there, the tumult in that country, Anglo-Atlantic’s oil grab, the Russian bear at the border.

Arthur would let the politicians sort that out. He couldn’t do everything.

“Again I offer draw,” said Djon.

McIlhargey mulled over the end game, frowning, but then rose and took his hand. “Accepted. Next time we meet, I’ll want revenge. Get out of here.” His punch on the arm was intended as jocular, but must have smarted — Djon was rubbing it as he went upstairs for his bag. McIlhargey muttered, “I had a winner going.”

Chow called again from the sunroom: “Mr. Bullingham, returning your call.”

A few perfunctory words of congratulation, then: “I talked to McRory last night. Told him we’re starting at twelve million for Erzhan. I expect he’ll appoint a commission with subpoena powers and a wide-ranging mandate. I persuaded him that a good old-fashioned fault-finding inquisition will bury the Tories in opposition for the next twenty years.”

“All very well, Bully, but the Liberals aren’t in power.”

“Only if the Almighty himself intervenes will they not be. With the justice minister gone crackers and this CSIS scandal, the Tories are hovering above single digits. You’ll be the star of the show as counsel for Erzhan. The state will pay your fees, of course — I’ll run some numbers by them tomorrow — and I’ll try to get them to throw in an able young researcher.”

“Bully, I pray you have not somehow committed me to an interminable commission hearing in Ottawa. I have a farm to run.”

The voice sweetened. “Arthur, my dear, dear friend, have I mentioned I was thinking of modernizing the firm’s name? Never did like the concept of dead people on a letterhead. Bullingham, Beauchamp — sounds more compelling, don’t you think?”

Arthur told himself not to falter. “Bully, I am fully and finally retired.”

He could hear Bully’s wheezing laughter as they disconnected.

Djon came down, shouldering his bag. “Now I return to Albania to shake foundations of crumbling government.” He took both of Arthur’s hands, held them tight. “First item of business, we proclaiming you official hero of Albanian Socialist Party. Comes with framed certificate which I bring you when coming to Canada to collect on bet. So don’t worry, not getting rid of old Djon yet.”

Arthur invited him to visit him on Garibaldi Island, Dordana too. He felt a little damp of eye as they hugged — no one more deserved the title of hero than this wily, short-sighted, recently demoustached gentleman of many talents.

He stood aside as Abzal, freshly showered, came forward and
clenched with Djon as a wrestler might, pinning his arms, kissing both cheeks. “May God always be at your side, Djon Bajramovic. You’re my friend for life, for the life I will owe you forever.”

They went out together to Djon’s taxi, Abzal’s arm around his skinny shoulders. Easily embarrassed by emotion — especially his own — Arthur made his way to the washroom for a Kleenex and privacy.

Arthur had nodded off in the La-Z-Boy and hadn’t heard the Land Cruiser enter the compound, but he was startled to wakefulness as Inspector Fyfe charged inside. Fuzzy with sleep, Arthur watched him speed to the bar, pour himself a half tumbler of whisky, and down it in two gulps.

Arthur looked at his watch: ten o’clock. He’d expected to be back in his hotel by now, in bed. He started to struggle up, confused by Fyfe’s inexplicable distress.

“Don’t get up yet,” Fyfe said. “Take a breath.”

Longstreet came in now, alone. Arthur subsided back on the chair, his heart racing with the adrenalin of dread.

“He’s dead, Arthur,” Longstreet said. “When we showed up at his hospice, they had just cut him down.”

Three a.m., and still Arthur had not slept, though he’d slid under the covers almost three hours earlier, upon his return to the apartment. The meagre details known of Ray DiPalma’s suicide — if that’s what it was — played an endless loop in his mind.

Fyfe and Longstreet had been told only this: at DiPalma’s request, the hospice staff brought dinner to his room at six. When an attendant returned an hour later for the tray, she found him hanging from a beam, a chair tipped over. If the lead detective was
to be believed, there’d been no sign of a struggle, no despairing note left behind. DiPalma’s dinner had been untouched.

The state police were sour with the inspectors, almost openly hostile, questioning their role, their presence in the country. A reputed Albanian connection to Abzal’s rendition was already big news in Tirana, and the death of a Canadian intelligence officer threatened a deluge of unwanted attention, so the inspectors contacted Canadian consular officials to attend to further arrangements, and proceeded on their way.

Arthur’s door was open a crack and he could hear Abzal snoring on the sofa bed, a restorative sleep at last for one whose hungering for justice and vengeance had denied him rest the last two nights. Arthur supposed he was inured to tragedy — the death of one ill-fated agent was merely a sad digression from the bloody events of Bhashyistan.

But for Arthur, the impact was barely endurable. Ray DiPalma, the shape-shifting spy who never came in from the cold. Despite himself, Arthur had made an emotional investment in the fellow, had learned not merely to abide him but to tolerate his quirkiness and feel empathy over his many plights. He’d not admired his impetuosity, but it had fascinated him, as had his boozy, convoluted logic.
Crumwell thinks you think I’m on your side. Which is true. The last part, I mean
.

However much Arthur prided himself on his ability to read the psyche of others, it had taken him an inordinate time to be satisfied of this double agent’s sincerity. Soon, proof of his good intent — an accusation against Crumwell but also a confession — would be removed from a safe in the Tragger, Inglis office and released to the media.

Arthur doubted he would ever be satisfied that DiPalma hanged himself. The indicators of suicide had been there: the overwhelming sense of failure and unworthiness, the shame of achieving celebrity not as a rogue but a dolt, his incurable nervous-system affliction, his alcoholism. Yet possible malefactors abounded.

Assassins hired by the renderers of Abzal Erzhan. Serbians seeking vengeance for the downfall of Krajzinski. Ledjina’s brothers.

He rolled over, tried counting sheep. When they balked at the fence, he tried goats …

“I fool you,” says a disembodied voice. Arthur sees only folk dancers on the cobbled streets, then looks up, and there’s Ray DiPalma, hovering in the air. “I did it for you,” he calls, drifting away. “I love you.” Arthur pulls hard at a tether rope but the gondola rises higher and higher, until he can no longer see DiPalma waving.

That image propelled Arthur to consciousness, and he lay there awhile, orienting himself. He was in the bedroom of his Ohrid apartment, and morning mist was rising from the lake. He scanned the sky through a tall window, as if expecting to see Ray still floating toward the heavens. All he saw were dark clouds, and they were shedding snow, and the beach and the streets were turning white.