The High Road (25 page)

“You know, you taught me something about campaigning that I’ll be considering carefully before I unsheathe my sword again,” Fox confessed. “I’ll leave you to your celebration, as I have another stop to make yet.”

I thought it was a rather magnanimous performance from someone for whom magnanimity did not come naturally. I wondered if he were heading over to shake hands with Alden Stonehouse or propose pistols at dawn.

At 12:36 a.m., the CBC election desk declared a Liberal minority government.

Lindsay and I left Angus on his doorstep and finally fell into bed at 2:30 a.m., happy, contented, and utterly spent. We said
little. Lindsay fell asleep almost right away with her head on my chest and my arms around her. I wasn’t far behind.

At 2:40, after the final British Columbia ballots had been tallied, a Liberal minority government was confirmed.

Then, at 2:41, while we slept, the old Alexandra Bridge linking Ottawa and Hull groaned, shook, then gave up, and fell into the river.

In my nightmare, a stocky, blunt instrument of a man stands over my bed in the dark. Calm and deliberate, he stretches his hand towards me, obviously headed for my throat. I knew it was a dream, so I wasn’t really that worried. The boathouse strangler then stopped short of my neck and gave my shoulder a shake. Hmmm. Vivid dream. I actually felt that. I then realized I was, in fact, not asleep. In a blink, my heart rate went from resting to “better grease the defibrillator.”

“Daniel,” he hissed in a whisper about as soft as a space shuttle launch. “Are you among the livin’?”

“Angus?” I gasped in the darkness. “What the hell! I was halfway to a coronary!”

I slid out of bed, mercifully in pyjamas, and led him to the living room, easing the bedroom door closed behind me. Man, could Lindsay sleep. She never even stirred.

“Why didn’t you just phone me, or at least knock?” I asked when I’d turned on the lamp.

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” he replied, apparently seriously.

Angus, dressed to traverse the polar ice cap, wore his snowmobile suit and heavy boots. His thermal beard rendered the scarf redundant.

“But how did you get in? I locked up,” I asked, still in a bit of a lather.

“Laddie, I’ve told you several times. There’s a spare key hangin’ under the porch railin’,” he explained. “Have you not found it yet?”

I was about to ask him why he needed to wake me up at 5:05 in the morning, less than three hours after we’d all finally hit the horizontal, when my BlackBerry rang. I was surprised to find it clutched in my left hand. Apparently in life and death situations I instinctively reach not only, for the newspaper, but for my BlackBerry too. I held up my index finger to Angus, despite my instinct to hold up a different digit, and sent him a hold-that-thought kind of vibe while I hit the green button on my BB.

“Bradley, it’s five in the morning! What gives! Somebody better have been assassinated.”

“Addison, pop a Quaalude and shut the fuck up, this is important,” Bradley Stanton replied.

I’d never had a call from Stanton this early so something out of the ordinary was going on. I looked up at Angus, who was pacing and starting to sweat off the pounds in his arctic garb.

“Okay, okay. I’m listening. What’s going on?” I said into my BB.

“You know that bridge that connects Ottawa and Hull that nearly everybody who works in government uses every goddamned day?” he asked.

“Yeah, of course I know it. I nearly T-boned a bus on it last year. Not my fault, by the way. The Alexandra Bridge.”

“Yeah, well, it’s gone,” Bradley said with some drama and a pause. “It collapsed into the river a few hours ago. No deaths, no injuries. It started vibrating and made some funny noises an hour or so before it fell, so the lonely people up at that hour got the hell off it in time.”

“Holy shit. It just fell?” I asked. Angus nodded like a four-cappuccino bobble-head doll and cut in.

“Aye. That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to tell you. We’re goin’ there right now for a wee peek, so hang up and let’s be off!”

I wasn’t quite ready to get off the phone and held up my stop-sign hand. I was still missing something.

“Wait a second, Bradley. Why call me?” I asked. “It’s not in our riding.”

“Bright boy. Here’s the thing. Your guy won tonight. Congratulations, by the way.”

I then remembered that we’d beaten Fox, taken C-P, and won in the big national show, too. Funny how the mind works when it’s trying to wake up.

“You too, Bradley. You’ll soon be Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister. It has a nice ring to it.”

“Whatever. So here’s the thing. Angus is still big news across the country, though I wish it weren’t the case. We got to find something for him to do because there’s no goddamned way he’s going into Cabinet or even getting a Parliamentary Secretary spot. There’s no telling what might happen if someone with his overcooked moral compass made it into the Cabinet room. I shudder to think. Besides, we’ve got too many favours to return to even consider it.”

“Wow, thanks for making us feel so welcome,” I said in my eye-rolling voice. “Look Bradley, we had no expectations of getting anything this time around, so don’t sweat it,” I said.

“I’m not sweating it, Addison, but Angus is not just another backbencher. We need to be seen to be doing something with him. And as the big bridge went down, the perfect role came up. Angus is an engineer, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

Then it hit me, just as Bradley started to talk again. I nodded as I listened.

“Okay, here it is. I’m seeing a one-man commission to investigate the collapse of the bridge and to –”

I interrupted him, knowing exactly where he was going.

“Yep, and determine how and why it fell, then recommend measures to ensure it never happens again. Blah, blah, blah. Angus gets something contained, with a limited lifespan, but high profile in the short term. Everybody’s happy and nobody gets hurt,” I observed, as my brain processed the idea.

“And more importantly, the new Prime Minister is seen to be in charge and taking decisive action within hours of the
collapse,” Bradley reminded me. “Great optics from every angle.”

“The McLintock Commission. Might work,” I replied. “Let me kick it around with Angus and I’ll get back to you.”

“Danny boy, I’m not asking you to do this,” he said with an edge. “I’m telling you. Have Angus in the Leader’s office at 8:00 sharp. This one-man commission train is leaving the station so your guy better be on it. Trust me, this is the perfect solution. It’s sheer genius.”

Only Bradley Stanton could find a political silver lining in the collapse of a major bridge. He hung up. So I did too.

“Come on. Get yourself clothed, man, we’ve got a hovercraft to catch and time’s a burnin’,” pleaded Angus as he headed out and down the stairs to the main doors of the boathouse.

I pulled on long underwear and got dressed as fast as I could. By the time I’d left Lindsay a note and put on my fourth shirt and third pair of socks, Angus had opened the big doors. Though it was still dark, the thinnest gauze of light taunted the eastern horizon. It wouldn’t be long.

“So just how did you find out about the bridge?” I asked as we worked together to position the two dollies under the hovercraft.

“The
Ottawa Citizen
website,” he answered. “I’m over sixty now so I cannae sleep much past half-four.”

“And why don’t we just drive into Ottawa?” I inquired. “You know, in a car that has a heater and windows that roll up?”

“When we get to the scene, I’ve a yen to be on the more interesting side of the yellow police tape.”

It took us fifteen minutes to get
Baddeck 1
down onto the ice and the dollies back into the boathouse. It should only have taken ten minutes, but I was there to help. I explained Bradley’s one-man commission idea to Angus, as I squeezed the rubber bulb on the gas tank to feed the engine. It was the only remotely mechanical task Angus ever let me handle. And I’m pleased to report that I nailed it every time. Well, that’s not exactly accurate. The first time, I was so eager to please that I pushed my finger
right through the bulb, showering us both with gasoline. But since then, I’d been batting a thousand.

“So what do you think?” I probed.

“’Tis a sound plan, it seems, as long as we write and release our own report without any political interference from the Snake Oil Man.”

That’s what Angus often called Bradley Stanton. We took our places in the hovercraft cockpit and I rubbed my gloved hands together to warm my fingers.

“Well, you are in the driver’s seat, and not just literally, so I figure we can negotiate our own terms.”

“But I’ll hear no jokes from you about Ottawa needin’ to build bridges to Quebec,” Angus decreed. “There’s nothin’ funny about a piece of our history lyin’ twisted in the river.”

I hadn’t thought of that yet, but Angus was right. It was good to see his political instincts developing.

He hit the button and the engine screamed to life, putting an end to any further conversation. I’m sure more than a few of our neighbours were blasted out of their beds as Angus throttled up. We lifted off the ice and flew down the river in the early morning darkness.

It actually wasn’t too cold in the cockpit. As Angus described it, the wind angling off the windscreen fed the thrust fan behind us and missed the driver and passenger sitting in our aerodynamic cocoon. It was a clear day and I regretted not being able to watch the sunrise behind us as we pushed west. It was ice most of the way, with just a few patches of open water that
Baddeck 1
negotiated easily, with only a bit of spray escaping from beneath the hovercraft’s skirt. Other than the engine noise right behind us, it was a very pleasant ride and oh so smooth. It took about an hour, but we got there in one piece.

It made for a very strange sight. You forget how ingrained an image becomes through repetition. In the previous five years, I’d driven and walked over the Alexandra Bridge hundreds of times, from both sides of the river. The bridge had just faded into the
background for me. It had become such a part of my memory’s vision of the landscape that the bridge no longer stood out in my mind’s eye. It simply blended in. I think my brain would have registered minor alterations in the scene, even if I might not have been able to put my finger on what precisely had changed. A new streetlight. Fresh paint on the bridge railings. A flock of birds on the ironwork. But nothing prepared me for the jarring image that emerged from the gathering morning light as we reached the scene.

Angus slowed
Baddeck 1
as we approached. I stole a glance at him and watched his mouth drop open and his eyes widen behind his goggles. Fire engines, red lights pulsing, blocked access to the bridge from either side. Police cordons kept back reporters and their cameras. From the south bank, the Ottawa side, the bridge looked completely normal for the first 150 metres or so until it reached the first of four foundation pilings, spaced unevenly across the river. The centre span then slanted sharply down into the ice and water, looking like a drawbridge that had plunged past its mark into the moat below. From the Hull side of the river, the roadway simply ended in mid-span, sprouting gnarled iron fingers.

Below, the ice was shattered, leaving chunks and floes competing for space in the black water.
Baddeck 1
was not exactly a stealthy craft. You generally knew we were coming ten minutes before we arrived and five minutes before you could even see us. We weren’t about to sneak up on anyone. So we’d already aroused considerable interest by the time Angus guided us up close to the crippled span.

“It’s definitely not a good idea to drive right underneath it, Angus,” I shouted above the engine.

“I cannae hear you, lad,” he screamed back. “I’m just going to drive underneath it to have a look.”

Oh great. Good idea. I looked over at the Hull side of the river and saw about a dozen police and emergency officials scrambling down onto the shore. They were aiming a large megaphone our
way and waving their arms like a rock concert audience that couldn’t keep the beat. Of course I couldn’t hear them, so I tried to convey in hand gestures and my own special pidgin sign language that we were there on official business and that they shouldn’t worry. Judging by their reaction, it probably translated as “We’re in a hovercraft and we’ll go wherever the hell we damn well please. So back off.”

I was still trying to read their flapping arms when they all of a sudden started pointing behind me as we inched under the bridge. I lost sight of them. I was a little nervous, okay petrified, that the bridge was still unstable and might yet break free completely, crushing us in the process. I honestly didn’t think that was an unreasonable fear. So I turned back to Angus to give voice to this deeply held belief. But he wasn’t there. I’m serious. He was no longer piloting
Baddeck 1
. You do strange things in such situations. I immediately looked under the dashboard where there was just barely room for our legs and confirmed that he’d not somehow squished himself underneath. There remained only one other option. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Angus had left the hovercraft.