Fog, a Novel Page 11

  Chapter Fifteen

  Letter from Hell

  Mrs. Meeropol opened the soundless door. There was no creak, no shudder as the door pivoted smoothly around on its hinges. The silence of the opening door was noticeably and ominously predictive. As in “this is just the beginning, my friend, the storm lies ahead.” Above, ash was descending from the sky. The two stories were merging. The plane that was atomised and a friend that had soared away into an unknown sky.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked timidly.

  “Come in.” Having said that, she turned and went into the kitchen to make tea, as usual. I sat down on the nearest oval couch, where I always sat down, not knowing where that three-legged device was best supported.

  “I know you and Nat put some distance between you, so I guess you don’t know. He left last week.”

  “Where has he gone?” I asked with a raised voice.

  “Kandahar, maybe.” She said this from the kitchen, her voice distant. Kandahar. Or, Alexander. Where the Greek conqueror had panted to a stop, exhausted—and then was shrugged-off, dismissed and transformed into a hapless has-been by fierce Pashtun pride. A mountainous impenetrable fortress. The word Kandahar, as she stated it, bounced off half-destroyed buildings, snow-capped mountains, colonial archways, and hidden caves; it travelled through long corridors where reapers hid, scythe-ready, behind each column. It was a word formed within the toothless hollows of ancient nomadic mouths. “Kandahar? Kandahar?” I repeated. “He didn’t tell me anything.”

  Afghanistan! Now I knew why he had visited my grandfather. He had been preparing for his new role, doing his research. His body had become that of a panther, sinewy and tight. When he was working out so hard I had thought he was doing it for a specific role, maybe for a movie contract. I had never asked why.

  I followed Ava Gardner into the kitchen. She was leaning against the kitchen counter, a teacup and saucer shaking in her hands. I crossed over and gently took them. Two large tears emerged and dribbled down her dry parched cheeks.

  “What is he going to do there? Has he joined the Army?” I would have been totally disillusioned if he had done that.

  “No. He has a job with a security agency. He’s been training with them for a while. I never thought he’d be posted to Afghanistan, but I think he knew. He left this letter for you.”

  She handed me an envelope. I tucked it into my pocket. “Mrs. Meeropol, is there anything I can do to help you with the business? Do you want me to take care of the accounts?”

  “Thank you, Chuck. Drop by when you can.”

  It was the wrong time to stay for tea. I started towards home, but my impatience to read the letter got the better of me. I detoured and sat down at the Copa and was again greeted by Rudy, the barman.

  “Yow! Wazzup, dude? You okay?”

  “Cool! Everything’s cool. Wazzup with you? A Boreal lite, puullees!” I said it like Obama used to—hanging out with the guys, playing hoop, being cool; the type of thing the media laps up. I was not necessarily in a bad mood. Just developing a swag.

  Rudy poured the beer lightning fast and slid it to a stop right in front of me. No foam. “Get you some nuts?”

  “Nope, I’m good. Thanks!”

  I studied the beer before I took a sip. A waitress passed by and kissed me on the cheeks. “Hey, Chuck!” she chirped. “Been a long time.” She spoke like nothing had changed; so the word hadn’t spread, no one else knew Nat had left. I had changed. Significantly.

  Rudy had a client watching a European Liga game at the other end of the bar. He served him a pint and then came back to me, smiling. “Why’d you give me the shaft the other day, man? You walked by and said zip. Wazzup with that, bro?” He wasn’t going to let it slide.

  “I was outa sorts. Got some bad news at work.” I satisfied him with a lie. He didn’t probe any further. I pulled out the letter. He immediately understood I wanted to be left alone. He said, leaving, “As long as Chuck the man is Chuck the man, everything’s okay!”

  I ripped open the envelope and took a large gulp of the beer.

  Hey!

  What’s a letter like this worth? Zero. No one writes letters these days. Not me for sure. But this one is special. I will write like I have always spoken to you and right away, I gotta apologize man, ‘cos I stayed away from you for the past few months. It had nothing to do with Myra. Read on and you will know. I was in intense training. I know you’re not going to like what I have to say. Yes, dismiss me! I respect you, man, and nothing will change that. Letters are not my thing. Words are yours. Mine are feelings. I can express some of them when I’m with you on the Main, walking, chatting, feeling the buzz at night on our little strip, there. I personally thought it was always crap. A forever reinventing itself, continuously bankrupt neighbourhood, full of small-time boring dreamers and poor artists who continue to imagine that they are hip business folks! And I bet you will rip this letter open sitting in a pub or a café, over a pint, right there . . . bitch about me in your head, somewhere between Duluth and Prince Arthur. Am I right?

  I was not getting anywhere with the acting. My agent is a piece of shit! She always got me these stereotype tough guy roles. Enforcers. I’m sick of it. I wasn’t asking for a lead role. But maybe something a wee bit more intelligent, man, than a muscleman or a dead-beat cop. Know what I mean? It struck me that it was my physical features that were misleading everyone. I decided to turn the tables. I ran into someone who was looking to hire long-term positions in the security industry for people in good health. Well, there was nothing they could complain about as far as I was concerned. You know how I had been working out. So, I took the bait. I went through training in all sorts of equipment. What really appealed to me was the electronic stuff. I like that. So, after a three-month training period, I am being sent off to Afghanistan to work in the Canadian Trade office in Kandahar. It’s right next to the consular offices. They need to have a perimeter defence set up and are subbing all these jobs to private agencies. Yeah, it’s not your bag. I have been talking to your grandpa. He was emphatic it was a failed mission. Boy! What a wealth of information he has inside that shiny head of his! Will not, as a nation, get us anywhere. He said that. He is very deep, man. I know where you get it from. I had to consult him. Hope you don’t mind.

  Anyway, I am leaving. We all need to leave things behind. You need to walk away too. Walk away and start fresh. That way there are surprises. Otherwise you get too familiar with living in the fog. It’s a job. I will come out of it with a CV I can show around. Just watch! And by the way, just to finish our half-assed conversation late that night, I didn’t have anything physical with her. Now you can believe me, or you can talk to her. I have no reason to jive you, man! Fuck me over in your mind and I know you enough to know it isn’t gonna make you feel good. So, love me as you always have, because I will always.

  Take care, man! You don’t owe me anything. My mother would love to see ya from time to time. She dotes on you. Be back soon, I hope—and will write to you on your home email.

  Respect for the brother! N

  I must have read the letter seven times before I folded it up and put it back in the envelope and into my pocket. My body shuddered gently and my mind raced around in circles: from idea to emotion, from anger to gratitude, from disbelief to relief, from melancholy to madness. I felt bitter but better, angry and lost, loving and remorseful. I had believed in him but he hadn’t believed in me. That was the hard part. He was so totally fucked up! “How could he do this?” I must have hissed under my breath because Rudy looked at me from the other end and nodded his head, politely—like he knew. Why didn’t he talk? He had gone secretive and done me wrong; pissing me off, messing with my life, and now he was trying to straighten things out from long distance. That wasn’t going to work. No way! Why was he choosing to turn himself into dust?

  The sliding doors of the bar were slightly open, allowi
ng in a dry, cool air. I looked out into the streets. The lamplights cast a pall. I looked instinctively down the street. He was not careening away on his bike. I looked again. There was no one hanging around with a coffee cup or a cap held out. They always tipped their hats to him. He was gone. They had withdrawn.

  Rudy slid me another pint and wiped the counter. I stared into it. Yellow, piss-coloured liquid, shaped by the alluring curve of the glass, a mocking profile of a modish night—lights bouncing off the rim, reflecting the short black dresses and skin tones of a trendy night outside; the dark stillness of a disinfected street in a city with no caves, no long beards, no turbans, no long tunics, no gunfire, no ambushes, no cares. The fizz from the beer rose anxiously and popped into the barely hygienic air above it. Had he signed off, or had he signed on to something I’d never realized was in him?

  I followed, Nat led. Nat brawled, I tried my best to control him. Sometimes I got mad at him for going out of control. I read like a nerd. He avoided reading and instead asked questions and stored his answers, mentally. One time, he beat up a bunch of rogues in a nightclub line for harassing Luc, the panhandler. He stepped in and cleared the whole line-up before the bouncers even knew what had happened. He walked away as soon as the cops arrived, and even stared down at them. I was nervous as hell, ready to throw up. Nat rolled up his sleeves, nodded his head, and said to me, “Don’t stand around, you’ll get busted. When the pigs have no clue what they are doing, they will arrest you for resisting arrest.” At a school concert, the teacher asked him to play Perfidia on guitar, because he was good at the twangy style, on an old Les Paul with reverb on a small amplifier. He insisted on playing Apache, like it was played by Link Wray. The teacher said, No! Perfidia! And that was it. He was adamant about playing Apache. And he did it. I played rhythm guitar with him. The school kids were up on their feet when he ended by playing a nasty, mean D chord that made the speakers crack and warble and when we finished, he pointed to me. I basked in his style. No other friends mattered. I had to get on with this cold case. He had sent me a clear signal.

  I walked home thinking about Nat. Was he doing security detail somewhere in Kandahar? I mean, what exactly was he doing? Was he walking on a dusty trail protecting a Canadian business investor seeking road and hospital contracts? However I approached the subject of him in Afghanistan, I could never find an answer to the question I most wanted to ask: why had he left so quietly?

  Chapter Sixteen

  African Diamonds

  Myra called the next evening to ask that I meet her dad, Gerry. There was a bird in her voice. She had shown him the picture and he had immediately recognized a character sitting at the back. It was Derek Boswell. The name meant nothing to me, but Myra’s dad was about to set me straight. Nothing could replace Nat as far as ground intel was concerned on the hood, but I felt a sense of ease that this Gerry had come into our midst. I was not always sure that I could handle this project without Nat. It was reassuring, now.

  Gerry had moved onto the Main and was working in an office on the second floor of a building near the corner of Duluth. It had recently been renovated by the city and now housed a number of small NGOs: architectural firms, design studios, and film companies, none of which seemed to need more than a room or two. He worked for a non-profit company that provided computers to schools in Africa.

  I was greeted with a firm handshake and a gaze looking straight at me. I liked him immediately. He had stylish grey hair along the sides and a thick dark crop on top. He wore a dark blazer and a collarless shirt. He was both the administrator and the spokesperson. He took my jacket and hung it up next to his. Mine looked limp in comparison to his.

  “Myra was telling me about your project. I’ve looked into their company. It’s big-time operations. Their foreign ops make the domestic one look like a store front. Alice in Cinderella’s garden.” He smiled confidently.

  I had some clue what he meant by that. He spoke like a Soviet-era cold war sleuth. He spoke in riddles but with conviction and had a gravelly voice that added serious enigma.

  He continued, “However, that the daughter of a Montreal scion could be involved personally is bewildering at first, but not impossible. She had reached a point where money and resources made her oblivious to the limits of her actions. And the family’s enthusiasm about ‘clean diamonds’ makes things curious. They never are. Take it from me. Any outfit working in the mines in Africa is operating, at best, in a grey area. They hire local mercenaries as enforcers, engage in deals with rebel groups, pay off government officials, and rely on the services of political gangsters. This is unavoidable. No African diamonds are bloodless.”

  He said all this with the characteristic sanguinity that he had already established. He invited us to sit around a table in the middle of one of his two rooms, as if at a strategy meeting. “But look, no one is going to blow up a plane merely out of a personal vendetta or jealousy. That’s psychotic, like a bad-ass daytime soap opera.”

  I listened to him, quite enthralled.

  “There has to be a greater purpose to such an event. Did Myra tell you I recognized Derek Boswell?”

  “She did, but it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “He’s a former insurance broker, probably still in jail at present. I would call him the essence of sleaze in this city.”

  “And what’s his link with Corinthe?”

  “I don’t know, but there was a time when unduly ambitious insurance brokers were raking in millions selling insurance to lonely elderly folks while promising to look after their portfolios, all the while arranging to be on the payout list at their death. He was one of them. Nothing so illegal, just offering a professional financial service. Until he became impatient enough to hasten the deaths of a few of the senior citizens.”

  “Oh! God!” Myra’s eyes widened.

  “It gets even more complicated,” Gerry continued. “He had been a close buddy of one of the full patch members of the Bandoleers, a rival group to the Shawinigan chapter of the Angels. They helped him in his enterprise. But while he was being prosecuted for the deaths of six senior citizens he decided to turn informer on his previous associates and received a reduced sentence for cooperating.”

  First big breakthrough. The sun shades, the rushed attitude, the Benz idling outside and now she is thick with the hoods. Did Linda find out? All fitted in. My grandfather was right.

  But I was a bit confused, too. “Nobody keeps the company of biker gangs if you want to be clean. Absolutely no one. And once you’ve become associated, you’re cooked. Forever on a watch list. How could the police have missed such connections to Corinthe?”

  My question hung there, unanswered.

  Myra had brought the picture and I began to look at it again, carefully this time. I saw there were two characters visible just outside the restaurant, each of them with arms crossed.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “I imagine they’re lookouts,” Gerry answered. I would find out soon.

  Myra said softly as she looked at Corinthe’s image, “We’re coming after you! Bitch! Soon! And Dr. Jekyll, we’ll ream yer arse too!” She could be sweet and funny.

  We began to methodically discuss all the evidence we had, and all the evidence we didn’t have, trying to devise a workable plan and evenly distributing the work yet to be done. This thrilled Myra. She was happy with our ‘team approach,’ as she enthusiastically called it. I’m sure Nat would have said that there is some naivety to all this. But with Gerry on board, it felt better.

  She volunteered to trace Dr. Roberge’s contacts, collecting all the information she could about his friends and acquaintances and, wherever possible, visiting them. She was looking to pick up information about his habits and behaviour both before and after the murder. She was going to find out how much Linda knew. She even suggested that maybe her paintings had some clues about what she knew. “Behavioural patterns ma
tter,” she offered, smiling. “Sometimes the paintings are metaphors.” Charming statements.

  Her father was to deepen his investigations into the corporate web, especially related to its African activities. The key was to figure out how she got the explosives. He was also to prepare his contacts in the media for the revelations to come. His responsibility wasn’t only to help resolve the cold case, but to time and co-ordinate its eventual exposure. He thought ahead.

  I had the riskiest path forward, everyone agreed. I’d attempt to get hired at the Enterprise and meet Corinthe. I knew that despite the fact the couple had announced their move to the Caribbean, Corinthe was still a director in charge of Human Resources and lived in town. At the end of each month she’d fly away to the islands for a week. It was my job to confirm she was the woman who had delivered the package, and then to get current pictures and a handwriting sample. For that, I needed to get close. Because blowing up a plane, just because of a slap on the face, was not going to go down too well with the jury.

  The Gabriel-Jacops head office is located at the corner of Berri and Rene-Levesque. The granite-faced obelisk has a large diamond crystal logo adorning the gaunt, two-storey portal. The facade of the building has a shine, unlike the concrete buildings surrounding it. There are no windows on the first two floors. On the third floor are large windows. One can only imagine the administrators moving around behind the darkly tinted glass.

  A CTV Business Hour program available online had given me more information about the eighty-five-year-old founder. Robert Jacops, still on the Board although no longer the CEO, had patiently insisted how the diamonds they handled were bloodless. “We never deal in conflict diamonds.” The program ended with Kelly Patrick, the business reporter, doing his best to define the global abrasives and grinding tools market while explaining the stunning rise within it of a small enterprise originally founded in a remote corner of Quebec. Everything about the company’s unexpected northwards performance trajectory was presented as miraculous, legitimate, and hard earned.