The Mazovia Legacy (13 page)

But what, exactly, do you get? Somehow you get a dead Polish bomber pilot in Montreal and a dead Quebecois priest.

Delaney wondered what consulting psychologist Natalia Janovski would make of all these conspiracy theories, of all these conspirator figures.

What projections of inner psychic content would she blame this on?
Delaney thought wearily.
What would she find archetypal about all of this?

*

Delaney at the shooting range.
Club de Tir de Laval, Inc
. Weapon transported, as per instructions and regulations, in trunk of car. Said weapon, nine-millimetre semi-automatic pistol, Browning brand, now held tightly in right hand, at end of outstretched right arm. Left hand bracing right wrist. Orange safety goggles, provided by club management, to protect eyes. Ear covers, provided by club management, to protect hearing. Box of bullets on small table.

Target some distance away.The familiar semiotic target in concentric circles of red and white. No human silhouettes here. This is not America, this is Canada, where targets are in the abstract, not in the shape of human beings. Canada, where targets are concentric circles of red and white, not enemies in the shapes of men.

The sound of rapid gunfire close by, loud even through the ear covers. Other club members practising their aim. What brings them here? Are Polish agents killing uncles of their friends too? What secrets, what secret fear, brings them to
Club de Tir de Laval, Inc
. to aim and shoot at red-and-white circles some distance away?

Delaney, in jeans, sweatshirt, ball cap; fires, fires, fires. No stranger to weapons he. But, until now, an observer of weapons. Not always from afar. A taker of notes, a notetaker of weapon types, brands, calibres, numbers. Reporter, colour man, describer of conflict and carnage, of armed commitments he has not himself been forced to make. Now, however, he fires, fires, fires.

A clever system brings the targets whizzing on wires back down the range to shooters for perusal. The little holes Delaney's bullets have made form no particular pattern around the centre. Some are far from it, some closer. No shooting champion he. But he has not completely missed the target this session. There is improvement.

A few minutes of instruction from young JeanYves Pelletier, club coach, two-time Quebec and one-time Canadian rapid-fire pistol-shooting champion, explains again the theory and practice of shooting pistols. The champion shooter fires, fires, fires. The competition badges on his windbreaker quiver slightly with each shot. Target whizzes back to the two men. They peer at it together. Indoor warriors, in baseball caps.

The holes this time are soldier-close, crowded around the all-important centre. More words of instruction, encouragement. Then Delaney's turn again.

His right arm jumps up slightly with each shot, left hand steadying. This is the opposite of observation. Stand many metres away, pull a trigger, and a target is transformed. Something has actually happened; something is changed. A shell empties itself of its bullet, right arm jumps up, left hand steadies, a hole appears in a cardboard target. Ears ring, nostrils sniff explosive smells.

Delaney fires, fires, fires. This is the ultimate projection, the ultimate interaction of subject and object. This has it all: perception, implication, decision, action, consequence, change. Squint down the barrel, look for the clever little sight, fix target in said sight: fire, fire, fire. And target is changed. Holes appear in cardboard. Elsewhere, in other circumstances, something may fall over. Man-shaped cardboard silhouette. Man.

A target can be changed by this action. By action.

A target can be something sought, desired, or something hated, feared. A target can be sought, aimed at, because it is where one wants to be, what one wants to be, or it can be destroyed because it is a threat. In Canada, at
Club de Tir de Laval, Inc.,
targets are sought, not feared and destruction is, mostly, s ymbolic.

Delaney will not write about his target practice, will not report. There is no story here. Only targets, desired or feared. Changed through desire; destroyed through fear.

*

Before departure, Francis Delaney dreamed this:

He is moving through dense rainforest undergrowth in an unknown troubled country with some local guides and translators and soldiers. Their mission is to find a foreign hostage who is being held by rebel forces somewhere in the hills. They know that the task is a dangerous one. His companions are in battle fatigues and heavily armed, but he himself carries no weapon — only a notebook in his breast pocket. He is to cover the ambush for a newspaper in a far-off place. He feels absurdly vulnerable to sniper fire, to any attack. The birdsong is intense, as is the screech and click and flutter of insects.The sun and the salt from his own sweat burn his eyes and it becomes increasingly difficult to see.Then, for some absurd reason, he finds himself pushing a battered old baby carriage along the narrow, ill-defined mud track, as a refugee might. He realizes as he looks inside the carriage that the baby is missing, that it has been dropped somehow along the way and is now surely dead. He knows that his wife will be angry, but then remembers that he no longer has a wife. Then the scene shifts suddenly to Europe and he is both in the jungle and in a major city at the same time, in the impossible logic of dreams. His sense of disorientation and impending doom increases. Then snow begins to fall heavily on all that is before him.Then the realization presents itself to him as clearly as anything he has ever known that he will never be able to find the hostage, because the hostage is himself.

Before departure, Natalia Janovski dreamed this:

She is in the company of familiar, welcoming women. The meeting is in Emma Jung's house. They have been invited to help Mrs. Jung complete her famous researches into the legend of the Holy Grail. Natalia is guest of honour at this gathering. They are on the shores of Lake Zurich. Jung himself is not there. He defers to his wife on Grail research; he always has. Natalia gives a brilliant paper about her latest work on the Grail legend. Emma Jung is delighted. There is polite, though enthusiastic, applause. Natalia is given an important new research assignment. The party then lunches on the most delicious foods imaginable, gathered from the far reaches of the globe. They move outside into the brilliant Swiss winter sunshine. The lake is frozen solid but the ice is black, not white. It looks like a chill expanse of black marble. Everyone skates elegantly, their skate blades describing mysterious arcs and symbols on the ice. Then Natalia is skating alone, ever alert for the Grail. It is somewhere close; she knows this in her dreaming heart. Then she begins to skate figure eights, over and over and over again. The inscriptions on the marble ice are exquisitely chiselled.Then the figures of eight become symbols of eternity, the numerals turned on their sides. Natalia skates and skates eternity signs, chiselling them deeper and deeper into the lake's hard surface. The ice is finally pierced by her sharp blades and she sinks elegantly in. Below the surface, though, is not water but ash, the blackest ash. She disappears without a trace.

*

Delaney stood alone in his quiet apartment, looking appreciatively around, as he always did before leaving on a long trip or a new assignment. It was his personal style of meditation. He noted with small private pleasure the order, the neatness, the cleanliness of it all. Books and papers stacked properly in their places, pens and pencils ranged in rows. Paintings and photographs straightened. On the kitchen counter a polished drinking glass upturned on a fresh, folded dishcloth, so as to leave no ring on the shiny surface. No chaos here.

Delaney stood in the quiet of his own space, knowing too well its stark contrast with the world outside, the world he knew almost against his will of teeming cities, mazes of streets, taxis jostling for position, airports, customs officers, baggage, hotels, strangers. The world, sometimes, of risk, violence, sudden change. This space he called his home, however, his own and only space, with its austere order, was one of the few things that never changed, never posed a threat, never betrayed him. And to which, therefore, his commitment never wavered.

Europe — Late Winter 1995

I
t seemed perfectly natural for them to be in Paris together. Delaney had been there many times before, of course: on assignment, or en route to various ex-colonies of France in Africa, or with exlovers, ex-wives. One ex-wife. Long ago, there had been holidays here, and in Provence, but that was another lifetime. Paris was still a city Delaney liked very much, however. He was comfortable there and it was just seven hours from Montreal so it never seemed like a major journey.

Natalia had been there often as well, or so she told him on the way over in the droning stillness of the night flight. As a student, as a backpacker, on holidays, as a pilgrim en route to her Zurich mecca. He did not ask her if she, too, had been to Paris with a lover. He knew that she would simply smile her wry psychologist's smile and be thinking of the subtext of a question like that. So he did not ask it and she did not volunteer any information on the subject.

It was becoming perfectly natural for them to be doing any number of things together, Delaney thought as they made their way in a taxi through the snarled traffic on the
périphérique
to the hotel. Natalia had not seemed terribly surprised when he said he thought they should go to Paris to visit this Polish comrade-in-arms of her uncle's and see what he might know, or not know, or not wish to know. Especially since she had already phoned old Zbigniew Tomaszewski and given him more information than perhaps she should have. Delaney had become convinced that the way to the answer to the question of Stanislaw's death would be through those who knew him best. The old man's priestly friend was dead. That left the comrade in Paris.

Natalia had simply thought quietly about the idea for a few moments, and then agreed to go without much further discussion. She could see the logic, she said, and anything that might shed some light on the death of her uncle was attractive to her at this stage.

So they had set about tying up the few, the surprisingly few, loose ends in each of their lives before leaving. Natalia had prevailed on colleagues at work to indulge her grieving process a little longer and take over her cases. She had seen to some of her most distressed clients for a day or two, cancelled some evenings with her victims of torture and some other evenings of good psychological works, and then she was free to go. Gustavo, apparently, was not a factor in any of this. If there were other lovers in her life, she didn't appear broken-hearted to leave them for a while, at least as far as Delaney could see.

Delaney had likewise prevailed upon his editors at the magazine, but with much less difficulty for anyone concerned. Technically he was on leave anyway, technically hard at work on another book and chasing a few wisps of investigative possibilities. But he did check in with the desk, as a courtesy in an increasingly discourteous media business. And then he, too, was free. For all of his smart talk to Natalia a few days earlier about connections with people, he recognized that he had very few.

Delaney made a point of buying his airline ticket with CSIS money, for reasons, Natalia would probably say if she had known about it, deep in his unconscious. To Delaney it seemed somehow appropriate and amusing to be counting out his spy cash at the Air Canada office. Natalia, however, would not hear of his paying for her ticket, even when he explained that the money would not be from his pocket, that it was “expense account money,” that his magazine was accustomed to him spending money to go off here and there on short notice. She insisted that Stanislaw had left her some money and his house in his will. She said she did not want to be a burden on this journey for tickets, hotels, or anything else.

Or, Delaney suspected, to be under any obligation to anyone. She would have been looking after herself for too long to want that.

Late February and early March in Paris are often grey and damp, the price paid for the April that follows. The streets in front of the Hotel Méridien were slick with late-winter rain as the cab pulled up. It was still very early, 7:30 a.m., and the traffic had thinned after they passed the Porte Maillot.

Delaney reached over the taxi driver's small sleeping dog on the passenger side to pay and to have the usual debate about the impossibility of being issued a proper receipt. The driver made no move to help with their bags, although they had both brought only small ones, and the hotel doorman was hurrying to help the arriving occupants of a gleaming Jaguar with Swiss licence plates, so they went into the lobby unassisted and unheralded.

It was busy, as always, but with the subdued sound of all large first-class hotels. Delaney knew many other smaller hotels in Paris far more charming than this highrise establishment on the edge of the city and far closer to the parts of Paris he liked better than this. But he knew from experience that hotels of this size and quality were places where you could be anonymous to a certain extent, where people could be met in lobbies, where staff asked few questions, and where taxis congregated outside.

The desk clerk was supercilious, naturally — a caricature. He pretended, as all Parisian desk clerks are apparently trained to do, to have trouble with Delaney's Anglo-Quebecois accent. In years past this had angered Delaney, but now he simply continued such conversations in his own brand of French without apology or any change in accent. Clerks, drivers, and waiters all eventually abandoned their little post-colonial charade.

As a punishment, however, this particular clerk then attempted to make it seem an impossibility that there would be any adjoining rooms. He argued that they would have to stay on separate floors, that it was all too impossibly complicated a matter to arrange for this bearded Canadian in a disreputable hooded parka. Natalia stood quietly as this transpired, neither amused nor embarrassed — in the sort of dreamlike state Delaney had by now observed as her usual response to any number of situations. She looked tired from the flight and tired from the events of the past few weeks.

“
Il va falloir que vous prenez ou un chambre double, avec deux lits, ou deux chambres sur deux étages,
” the clerk said, daring Delaney to declare publicly the nature of his relationship with Natalia and the importance of the request for separate but adjoining rooms.

Delaney had been to hundreds of hotels, with hundreds of unhelpful desk clerks, and had learned that in such situations the best strategy was to simply stand his ground. A small line of impatient people began to form behind them and, suddenly, a solution was found. The clerk produced two keys for rooms on the fifteenth floor. Near the elevator,
malheureusement,
and rather small, but nothing else could possibly,
monsieur,
be arranged.The desk clerk, too, failed to ask them if they needed help with their bags.

“The City of Paris bids you welcome,” Delaney said to Natalia as they moved across the lobby. “Not a very happy young man,” she said. Delaney had stopped to peer again at the number on the keys when Hilferty came up to them with a very natty young man at his side. Quite clearly French secret service, Delaney thought, or at the very least Quai d'Orsay.

“Welcome to Paris, Monsieur Delaney,” Hilferty said, pleased to have startled Delaney in this way. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Delaney could not say that he was terribly surprised that Hilferty would now be in Paris. The surprise was only that he had found their hotel so quickly and had been there, apparently, even before they arrived.

“Hilferty,” Delaney said. “
Quel grand plaisir
.” They eyed each other for a moment, each waiting for the other to provide a clue about how to play this scene. Hilferty was in one of his mischievous moods and offered no help. Delaney was tired and in the somewhat nihilistic state of those who have just gotten off a long overnight plane flight, so he let the silence build until Hilferty's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant embarrassment forced him to fill it.

“Let me introduce my colleague, Jean Stoufflet, from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” Hilferty said eventually. “Jean, this is Francis Joseph Delaney, one of Canada's foremost scribes. A righter of wrongs, defender of the weak, teller of tall media tales.”

Hilferty had adopted his CSIS-operative-onforeign-soil look: dark suit, no yellow cashmere sweater this time, Gucci loafers, olive-green Aquascutum trench coat.

Stoufflet was wearing a quite splendid dark green suit, very European in cut, and he had a magnificent camel-hair topcoat slung over his thin shoulders. He carried one of the regulation, tiny, purse-cum-briefcases that an upwardly mobile young Quai d'Orsay–type must always have on his person.

Delaney figured him to be about thirty-five, from one of the old, monied Parisian families.
Ecole Nationale d'Administration,
a couple of years volunteer service in Chad or Côte d'Ivoire or some former French colony as a
coopérant
to avoid his compulsory military service, and then into the Quai and moving up through French Intelligence. Delaney had seen his type many times. Sometimes, perhaps those a little less advanced on the career path than this one or with slightly less promising family connections, to be seen paying their dues in one of the many Irish pubs of Paris, trying to look relaxed as they forced down pints of Guinness and listened for evidence of IRA plottings.

“
Enchanté,
” Stoufflet said. He seemed reluctant to offer Delaney his hand. “I'm afraid I do not know your work.”

Stoufflet looked immediately to Natalia. For her, a hand was extended.

“
Et vous, madame?
You are a journalist, as well?”

“No, I'm not,” Natalia said.

Delaney was pleased to see she did not bother offering Stoufflet any other information, at least for the moment.

“You should introduce us to your lovely lady friend,” Hilferty said.

“This is Natalia Janovski, from Montreal,” Delaney said. “Natalia, this is John Hilferty, someone I know from my Ottawa days.” Delaney could see Hilferty waiting to hear how much Delaney would not say in front of Natalia. “He's with External Affairs.”

“A bureaucrat,” Hilferty said modestly. “A humble civil servant.”

Natalia had already made it clear with her body language that she did not wish to make small talk in hotel lobbies today and said she would go upstairs. The three of them watched as she got into the brass-doored elevator. Delaney saw Hilferty looking at the number lights go on and off over the door, out of habit only, as he would almost certainly soon know what rooms they were in without any of this rather old-fashioned detective work being required.

“Our lovely young Polish friend is not aware, I take it, that you keep the company of spies,” Hilferty said, with an elaborate sideways glance at Stoufflet to see how this stylish gambit would be received by the French. “And you, old buddy, you don't seem at all surprised to see us.”

“I don't know what you could be talking about, John,” Delaney said. He had no wish to talk over with Hilferty how much or how little he had told Natalia about anything at this stage.

“Ah, a natural. Just as we suspected,” Hilferty said.

“A natural.”

“Yeah. Our newest little Maple Leaf spook. Keep up the good work.”

“I'm a freelance journalist.”

“Exactly.”

“I wouldn't presume too much, if I were you Hilferty,” Delaney said, suddenly impatient with the game.

“Well, I've presumed five thousand dollars of Canadian government funds on you Delaney. A first instalment only, of course. But handy for those little extra expenses. Business class is always such a treat, isn't it.”

“What five thousand dollars are you talking about?”

“Very good.”

“I hope you haven't mislaid any of our government's precious money,” Delaney said. “That would be a very bad career move these days. They'll take it out of your pension.”

Stoufflet gave a little snort, and opened up a pack of
Disque Bleu
. He threw the cellophane wrapper on the floor and stared malevolently at the bellboy who had noticed.

“Well, do let us know if you need anything further, Francis,” Hilferty said. “We'll be around and about.”

“
Le gouvernement de la République Française
is at your service, Monsieur Delaney,” Stoufflet said as he lit his cigarette. The match, too, went onto the marble floor.

“
Je vous en prie,
” Delaney said.

“Why don't we meet tonight for a quiet drink somewhere?” Hilferty asked. “Do some plotting and scheming. Cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

Natalia took a long while to answer when Delaney knocked later on the panelled door that separated their rooms. Her room was the mirror image of his. It was dim with the drapes half closed. She had been resting on the bed.
Le Monde
was in sections on the bedspread and a bottle of Badoit water was open on the night table. She was still in her travelling clothes, waiting, probably, for Delaney to appear before she showered and changed or went to bed or whatever was her pattern after a long flight. She looked even more tired than before, but also somehow troubled now. It was a look he had seen before, a faraway look that came over her when she was worried or suspicious or, more likely these days, grieving.