Up in Smoke (18 page)

CHAPTER
27

“I'm afraid that's the law, Mr. Cheeseman,” Zol told the indignant farmer on the other end of the phone, first thing Monday morning. “You and your family can drink as much unpasteurized milk as you like, but you're not allowed to sell it.”

“Our family's been dairy farmin' in Norfolk County back four generations. Hell, that's how we got 'r name.” As Percy Cheeseman's voice rose to a shout, Zol pictured the man's face getting redder and redder. “I'm not lettin' none of your stupid, new-fangled laws interfere with seventy-five years of tradition. For God's sake, man, our product is completely natural. And hund'erd percent pure.”

Natural, yes. Pure, too. Pure salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, and listeria, the lively quartet of unpasteurized milk.

“When's the other doctor coming back?” Cheeseman continued. “You know, the guy who took sick. He was the right man for the job down here in Norfolk County. Left us alone.”

“I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree . . . sir,” Zol said. “And —”

“Those city ways o' yours got no business down here in God's country. You'll be hearin' from my member o' parliament.”

That cosy little promise ended the call, and Zol made a note to send one of the health inspectors to the Cheeseman farm. The job needed someone tall, broad, and blessed with a good-old-boy manner. He hadn't met all the inspectors yet, so no one came to mind. He'd have to ask Nancy.

Cheeseman's call had come through before Zol had a chance to look at his overnight emails. He was turning to read them when Nancy knocked twice and entered.

The light had disappeared from her shiny brown eyes.

“You better have a look at this, Dr. Szabo. Out here. I'm not touching it.”

“What is it?”

“Please, come see for yourself.” She led him out of the office toward her desk in the reception area. She stopped two paces from the desk and pointed to a packet sitting beside her in-basket. “See? Bad news pasted right across it.”

It was a large, brown envelope addressed to Dr. Zol Szabo, Health Unit, Simcoe. The address was neither handwritten nor typed. It had been crudely cut and pasted from the pages of a newspaper, probably the
Simcoe Reformer
. That wouldn't have been difficult; his name had been all over it lately. Without a stamp or a return address, the thing did look menacing. And oddly melodramatic.

“Any idea how it got here?” he asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “There's an outside mailbox. Sylvia checks it at nine-thirty every morning before she starts sorting the mail, in case there's been an overnight external delivery. The mailman comes right to her office, so the outside box rarely has anything in it.”

“Sylvia put this here?”

Nancy nodded without taking her eyes off the package. It was as if she was trying to control the villain inside it with her gaze.

Zol leaned over the desk and sniffed. Nothing. He sniffed again. Suddenly, Ringo was jamming those too-familiar bars of “Yellow Submarine.” The odour was faint and Ringo's session correspondingly brief. But there was no denying the stench of rez tobacco.

He lifted the manila packet from the desk. It was lightweight but stiff, as if it contained a piece of cardboard cut to its exact dimensions. “Got a letter opener?”

Nancy pulled in her arms. “Our policy is not to open anything that doesn't have a return address. One time we had a stink bomb.”

“Really?”

“From a disgruntled parent. Unhappy that her child got dismissed from school for not being properly immunized. During a German measles epidemic, for heaven's sake.”

Zol returned the envelope to the desk. Very slowly. And with two hands. “So, what do we do with it? What is the policy?”

She looked puzzled for a moment, as if trying to remember. Then her lips tightened into a shy smile that seemed to catch her by surprise. “Notify the medical officer of health.”

“I guess that means I get to use my judgment.”

She maintained her stare at the envelope and said nothing. It was clear she wasn't going to sit at her desk until the manila menace had been dealt with.

He picked it up, again with both hands, and took it into his office.

He closed the door.

He held the envelope to his ear. It wasn't ticking. He turned it over. The simple flap had been secured with a length of wide, transparent tape. Nothing on either side indicated where it had come from or who had sent it. The odour of rez tobacco brought the Badger to mind. Was it another warning from him? In the form of a written message or something more drastic? Dennis wasn't a prankster. It wouldn't be a stink bomb.

The easiest thing would be to call the police. Let them handle it. Did the Simcoe detachment have a bomb squad? Probably not. They'd send it to Hamilton or Toronto, and he'd never see it again. The police blew up anything they remotely considered might be a bomb. But if they destroyed this envelope, he'd never know what was in it.

And that could be a problem.

Maybe the Badger hadn't sent it. Maybe it was someone wanting to be helpful. Matt Holt, for instance. He had every reason to want to see the liver epidemic cracked, and every reason to stay in the shadows. He'd stuck his neck out before and the chop-shoppers had torched his garage.

Zol brought the packet to his ear again. He planted his feet and shook it. Nothing. He tried it again with a bit more force. Something rustled, and not with the tinkle of metal or the clunk of plastic. What did it sound like? Styrofoam? Paper?

This was silly. He had to know what was inside, but also be assured it wasn't a bomb. He had to get it X-rayed. Not at the hospital. He couldn't bring a potential bomb into Simcoe General and casually ask the radiologists to put it under their machine. He'd be out of a job by the afternoon.

Who else had an X-ray machine?

Eddy Pakozdi. At his veterinary clinic. He also had a lively curiosity about everything that crossed his path. Zol pictured Eddy as he'd seen him last, on his snowmobile flying across the snow-covered fields of Norfolk County, dashing from farm to farm and tending to cows with infected teats, horses with colic, and nannies with whatever troubled milking-goats.

Veterinary medicine. Curiosity. Milking-goats. It was slowly coming back to him. A couple of years ago, maybe longer, Eddy had told Zol about this weird thing called orf virus infecting milking-goat herds under his care. Lots of goats, but only a couple of farmers, had developed the characteristic blistering lesions that took weeks and weeks to heal. Acting on advice from the Veterinary College in Guelph, Eddy controlled the outbreak by culling the affected herds. Zol forgot about the incident because he hadn't been responsible for Norfolk County at the time, and orf virus was a relatively harmless human pathogen that health units never concerned themselves with.

When Hamish had described a possible orf hybrid in Mongolia, Zol knew the strangely named virus sounded familiar. But at the time, he was so rattled from seeing that woman hit the deer on Highway
24
that he wasn't thinking straight.

He looked at the envelope in his hands, made a mental note to ask Natasha to contact Guelph and see what details she could dig up regarding orf activity in Norfolk County, then banished the virus to the back of his mind. The big question for today: would either a vet or a public-health doc recognize the X-ray image of a letter bomb staring back at them?

CHAPTER
28

An hour or so later, Zol followed his perennially industrious father out of the kitchen door and into the yard. They hadn't told Mum what they were up to. She'd fuss and tell Dad to
put that stupid thing away, Gazsi. All it does is cause trouble.

It was good to see Mum up and dressed today. Her cheeks lacked colour and that turban never let you forget she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but her smile was genuine when she told Zol how much she'd loved Max's visit yesterday. She'd made Zol promise to stay for lunch today, and yes, she was more than strong enough to heat up a can of tomato soup and make him a nice sandwich to go with it. They had yet to discuss her role in connecting Francine with Max. Bringing up the postcard correspondence didn't seem necessary at this point, and no matter how Zol might broach the subject, no matter how careful he was with his tone of voice, his mum would think he was being petty and bitter about Francine. Yesterday, over their rounds of Clue and Scrabble, Max had undoubtedly told his grandmother all about his mother's impending visit. Poor kid, he was getting set for an epic fall; Francine had yet to answer Zol's invitation, so it was anyone's guess whether she was actually coming.

With his dad now four paces ahead, Zol strode past the six tobacco kilns that had consumed his teenage summers. He rubbed his right clavicle, suddenly aching where he'd fractured it falling from the rafters of kiln number one. Age fourteen and exhausted, he'd been upended by a heavy bundle of freshly tied leaves. Now the buildings were abandoned and barely standing, but evocatively weathered and more photogenic every year. Like so many other tobacco farmers, Dad couldn't bring himself to pull down the old kilns, though it was difficult to imagine Gaspar Szabo having even one nostalgic bone in his flinty body.

Dad undid the workshop padlock, pulled open the door, and flipped on the light. He pointed to his spotless workbench. “Put it there,” he said, meaning the mysterious envelope that had barely left Zol's grasp since he'd first touched it two hours ago.

With the care of a surgeon handling an endoscope, Gaspar lifted his metal detector from its place on a shelf. He'd created the instrument from an old hockey stick, a round metal disk that once had been a pie plate, and a bunch of electrical stuff Zol didn't pretend to understand. Gaspar took a fresh packet of batteries from a cupboard he'd rescued from a neighbour's kitchen renovations and inserted them into the device.

He fiddled with the detector, tuning it like a radio. It screeched like an indignant seagull when he passed it over a pipe wrench he'd set on the worktop. But it didn't so much as peep over a stack of newspapers piled on the concrete floor. When it squeaked over a bundle of rags in a cardboard box, Gaspar looked perplexed until he found a length of electrical cord buried underneath. Finally, he took a dime from his pocket, covered it with about twenty pages of the Simcoe Reformer, and passed the detector over it. When the thing whistled softly but clearly, he beamed.

“Looks like it's working,” Zol said.

“Of course.” The wink said it all.

He told Zol to move his envelope to the middle of the workbench. Then he raised his eyebrows, drew in a deep breath, and passed his instrument over it. Nothing. Not a hiss, not even a whisper. He lowered the device so that it was practically touching the envelope, then passed the detector over it again, systematically. Up and down, side to side.

The thing made no sound at all.

“No metal, eh?” Zol said.

Dad's face was serious. With his tongue clamped between his teeth, he looked like Max concentrating on a tricky video-game sequence. “One more test.”

He switched off the detector and handed it to Zol, then turned to a box of electrical stuff. He rifled through switches, fuses, connectors, and bits of wire. From somewhere in there he pulled out a piece of copper wire a handbreadth in length and the thickness of a few human hairs. He tucked the tiny wire under the right-hand end of Zol's rectangular envelope, then threw the switch on the detector and started a pass from the left.

The gadget made no sound. Not even a chirp. No matter how slowly or how quickly Gaspar passed his detector over the envelope and the copper wire he'd hidden beneath it, the thing stayed silent. Beads of sweat collected on his forehead, and he began to look like an anxious inventor trying not to lose his cool in front of an important patron. He tapped the detector's metal disk, checked the position of the batteries, and readjusted the tuning knob. He tried another pass over the envelope. When he got to the spot where he'd hidden the wire, the gadget woke up and screeched enthusiastically.

Still not satisfied, Gaspar moved the wire to another spot, this time beneath the other end of the packet. When he tried the detector again, the thing stayed quiet until it got to the wire, then chirped like an angry robin.

Zol had to shout over the racket. “What's the verdict, Dad?”

Gaspar killed the switch. “You have to ask?”

Two tests were telling Zol the same thing, but uncertainty was making his heart beat overtime. Eddy Pakozdi's X-ray machine had revealed no interpretable shapes or shadows inside the envelope. No wires, no bits and pieces made out of metal. And now, Dad's homemade device seemed to be saying the same. Could he trust it? Trouble was, neither Eddy nor Dad could promise there wasn't a wad of plastic explosive waiting to blow them from here to Lake Erie. Or a fine, dispersible powder teeming with enough anthrax or bubonic plague to infect the entire county.

Dad laid the detector against the wall and picked up the envelope. He shook it next to his ear, held it up to the light, sniffed it.

“Pirate smoke inside here,” he said, finally. “From the rez. And not properly cured.” He took a penknife from the shelf above the workbench and waved it toward the door. “Outside, son. This, I do alone.”

“No, Dad. It's my problem, my responsibility.”

“And this my workshop. You — you have Max and Colleen to thinking about. And your important work that — that makes me so — proud. Yes, I never say, but I am very proud.” He put his left hand on Zol's right shoulder and gave it a long, hard squeeze. Was he aware that his thumb was pushing against Zol's old collar-bone fracture? No, but there were tears glistening in his eyes. “Soon, I will not have . . . well, you know what we facing . . .”

Zol squeezed his dad's arm, held his watery gaze for a long, quiet moment.

“It's addressed to me, Dad. I should be the one to open it.”

Gaspar closed his eyes and turned away. Zol had seen that manoeuvre a thousand times before and knew there was no breaking through it.

Now he was blinking back the tears as his dad closed the door behind him with a resolute clunk. Zol plodded across the yard, stood beside kiln number one, and focussed on the work-shed door.

The moments crept by, and nothing happened. What was Dad doing? How long did it take to slice open an envelope?

An explosion tore from the back of the workshop. Zol dove behind the kiln and shielded his eyes as he hit the ground. He crouched motionless on the grass, his heartbeat hammering at his throat.

What . . . ?

He looked around. Nothing had changed.

Oh, for God's sake.

What a skittish idiot he'd been. It was only a Harley, misfiring as the driver gunned down Jenkins Road.

He jumped up, swiped at the telltale mud and grass on his slacks, and squinted at the shed.

Dad was standing at the open door, still in possession of the penknife and four intact limbs. And beaming a satisfied smile.

“You come see this, Zollie.”

“What is it?”

“You will see.”

“Nothing dangerous?”

“Not for us. Not anymore.”

Gaspar had opened the envelope and removed its contents. Displayed on the workbench were an unmarked piece of corrugated cardboard roughly the dimensions of the envelope and a zippered food storage bag of about the same size. Sealed within the transparent plastic was something that at quick glance was thin, brown, and crinkled.

Gaspar swung a gooseneck lamp over the bag. “In old days, that blight in there bring tobacco farmers big trouble.”

Zol looked through the bag without touching it. It contained a single tobacco leaf. At least, the major part of one. It looked aged to some extent, cracked in several places as if fairly brittle, and discoloured in a strange way.

“Looks like it's got a rash, Dad. Our crop didn't looked like that, did it?”

“Never.
TMV
spoils yield and selling price.” Gaspar Szabo's tobacco had enjoyed the best of reputations. If he'd wanted, he could have bought himself a new car every year on the bonuses his crop earned from the brand-name tobacco companies.

Zol picked up the bag and examined the leaf on both sides. A healthy plant at this stage of curing would be an even, caramel brown. This one looked diseased. The top side was mottled with irregular swirls of yellow, grey, and brown. The underside was covered in red spots.

Zol pointed to the spots that looked like dried blood on sun-weathered skin. “What are those?”

Gaspar fished a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. “Never seen those red marks before. Not with
TMV
.” He turned the bag over. “The top side, that's
TMV
, tobacco mosaic virus. Stunts plant growth and gives bitter taste. Dark spots underneath? I do not know. Maybe it's from — What you call it? — a mutant?”

He pulled a sheet of letter-size paper from the envelope and handed it to Zol. “I didn't put my glasses. Maybe there is message?”

There certainly was, laser printed in capital letters at the top of the page:

OKAY, OKAY.

A LOT OF REZ TOBACCO LOOKS LIKE THIS.

BEST I CAN DO. BALL'S IN YOUR COURT.

Zol's cellphone chirped on his belt. It was Colleen.

“Hi,” he said. “I'm here with Dad. What's up?”

“Oh Zol. I feel terrible.”

“What's wrong? You sick?”

“It's all my fault.”

“For pity's sake, tell me — what's wrong?” He could barely formulate the next words, but he had to get them out. “Is it Max?”

“Olivia. They got her in the parking lot. At the
LCBO
.”

Anyone who drank as much Southern Comfort as Olivia Colborne was bound to get dinged for drunk driving sooner or later. “On a
DUI
?” Getting nabbed by the cops in the parking lot of the government liquor store sounded like karma.

“A drive-by. Asian faces with a high-powered rifle.”

“Is she going to be okay?”

Colleen's voice dissolved into a flood of sobs. “She's on her way — to the morgue. And — and I put her there.”