Snow Job (29 page)

If it was indeed a mind game, DiPalma had just scored another winning point. The awkwardness he’d displayed on earlier encounters had to be related either to drink or the nervousness of one assigned to probe a prominent couple.

“Well, Ray, there’s always old-timers’ sports.”

“Not for me. My medical examiner found some early symptoms of PD.”

Parkinson’s disease. Thus the impaired balance, the occasional slight tremor. Arthur found himself empathizing with DiPalma. Suddenly it was all making sense, the shuffling walk, the ill-advised comforts of cigarettes and booze, the reaching out to religion. Arthur’s talent at judging character was not flawed after all; his first instincts had been right.

DiPalma had both a beer and a cigarette going now, the smoke rising up the flue. “Anyway, I’ve finished my stint on Garibaldi. I’m on the road, I’m Zack Flett’s
consigliore
now. My boss is
delighted. He put me in charge of the eco-terrorist section, with my own office.”

From the kitchen: “Wash your hands before you even fucking
touch
that cinnamon roll.”

“Wash your fucking mouth.”

“Don’t those guys ever stop?” DiPalma sat stiffly, words tumbling out between sips and puffs. “Okay, I talked to the agent I mentioned, Sullivan Clugg, Sully — he liaises with the limeys. He has good intel that an international security firm working out of London — mercenaries, basically, ex-MI5, KGB, Stasi — set up a ghost flight from Montreal last month. On contract for unknown employers. Destination, Albania.”

DiPalma’s information resonated with such credibility that Arthur wondered why he’d ever doubted him. He showed him Hanife Bejko’s letter. DiPalma lit a fresh cigarette off the one he hadn’t finished, fixed his glasses over his nose, and his mouth fell open as he read the note.

Finally he looked up. “Oh, baby. Gjirokaster — I’ve been in that town.” He yelped, sucked a knuckle burned by the cigarette in his left hand. “I have to cut down.” He read the note one more time, then looked up with a gleeful smile.

“Albania. Let’s go.”

C
lara Gracey had moved into 24 Sussex and felt cowed, even bullied, by the thirty-four-room, energy-guzzling limestone mansion, the uncomfortable home of prime ministers since the 1940s. With its creaks and groans and hissing radiators, it was like living in the belly of a wheezy old whale.

She’d debated whether to move in — tenancy could be brief — but had felt guilty smoking in her chic apartment; here she could make the rules. And hold private council without intrusions.

Four acres and the Ottawa River and the cover of darkness would shelter Margaret Blake’s arrival. A couple of the gals talking over a glass of wine — it was worth a try. The last hope, really. An expanded, loophole-free Species at Risk Act, half a billion for renewable energy, two more national parks — the cabinet wouldn’t balk at those in exchange for a tie vote, with a compliant Speaker to break it.

Good riddance to that narcissistic traitor Lafayette — she wouldn’t have to look over her shoulder any more. If an election were forced, he would get his reward, a deserved burial of the Progressive Reform Party.

So it was opposition 154, government 152, and to scramble for that, Clara had had to promise the seven-toed member for Twillingate that if he hobbled in on crutches he’d be in line for secretary of state for sport and tourism. The vote was set for the day after tomorrow.

Percival Galbraith-Smythe rang. “Ms. Blake is in the foyer. Shall I send her in?”

“Of course not. I’ll come out to greet her.”

She put on her most winning smile, butted her smoke, and headed out, turning the wrong way, finally getting directions from one of her staff.

Margaret was in the foyer by the grand staircase, looking aghast at its leopard spot carpet, a garish memento from the Mulroney years.

“Don’t blame me,” Clara said. “Every P.M. since St. Laurent has left his spoor.” Finnerty’s contribution: several hidden bottles of rye.

They settled in a parlour overlooking the river and the distant twinkling lights of Hull. Margaret chose a settee, crossed her legs, wary, a little tense. She had a good inkling of what this was about. “Stick to your guns,” Pierètte had said. “Buyer beware.”

She had respect for Clara: it took grit and intelligence to manoeuvre through the old boys’ club to 24 Sussex. But she was an economist wedded to the old thinking, a pedigreed Tory playing the old games, out of touch with the realities facing this besieged planet.

“White or red?”

“The white, thank you.”

“Mandarins, nuts, granola chews — sorry, I’m trying to lose weight. Look at you, you’ve never had that problem.”

Margaret picked out a nut from the offered tray. Clara poured from a boutique B.C. Chardonnay, not hiding the label.

“Certified organic,” Margaret said, acknowledging the gesture.

“They’re always a little more expensive, aren’t they?”

“Surprising, given the cost of herbicides, fungicides, and the other poisons most of them use.”

Clara was having trouble with the concept of growing grapes with poison. She didn’t care to mention that winemakers were big contributors.

Trying not to sound effusive, she dished out compliments on Margaret’s performance on and off the floor, for representing so
persuasively Canada’s growing green electorate. “I’m so proud of you. Especially as a woman.”

“One of those unfortunate accidents of birth, I guess.”

Clara laughed. This is what she wanted, a little feminist bipartisanship. “Congratulations, by the way. The last Gallup had you at thirteen per cent.”

“Thank you, but it’s spread too thinly, isn’t it?”

“That’s our electoral system, sadly.”

“If I recall right, Clara, a few years ago you were calling it a skewed system.”

Clara kicked herself for opening the topic, but Margaret wasn’t through. “It’s a great curiosity, isn’t it, that when in opposition the traditional parties forever talk about a reformed Senate and proportional representation, but it vanishes from the agenda when they’re in power. Here you are at thirty-three per cent with almost half the seats; while our thirteen points translates to one, and I squeaked in.”

Clara sipped her wine, wondering how to get back on track. “Christ knows you’ll have little trouble holding on to it, Margaret.” A gamble: “Just between friends, and if you repeat this, I’ll deny, but I doubt we’ll try very hard to win Cowichan back. We may just throw a nobody in there for laughs.”

“Oh? I had understood you were targeting it.”

“Strategies change.” A deep breath. “Margaret, you’re nobody’s fool. You know why I wanted this little gab with you.”

Little gab
. Girl talk. The P.M. had slipped a rung in Margaret’s esteem. “I’m open to hear you, Clara. I have to warn you — I’ve never learned how to play political prostitute.”

If the insinuation was meant to draw blood, it worked. Clara sought to control herself, covered by tilting her glass and emptying it.

Margaret told herself to stop this sniping, it wasn’t very mature. She searched for the source of it — maybe resentment of Clara, that she was to the manner born, thanks to a powerful, connected
family, all the breaks and all the perks. “I’m sorry if that seemed sexist or personal. Political compromise is what I have a problem with. Some people think I suffer a stubbornness disability.”

Clara laughed it off with “Save your shots for the floor of the House,” but it took effort not to lecture this idealist. Compromise — her prostitution — was the lifeblood of the art of politics.

Down to business. “Okay, Margaret, I don’t have to tell you these are difficult economic times, but here’s what’s on the table.” Clara went down the list, renewable energy, species at risk, five hundred thousand hectares of national park. No reaction, just that impenetrable steel-grey gaze.

Clara wanted a refill but noticed Margaret’s wine was nearly untouched. She splashed a little in her own glass anyway. She was starting to understand why Finnerty became a drunk on this job.

“Here’s my counter-offer,” Margaret said. “We’re committed to a carbon tax, one that is neither token nor symbolic. Fifty dollars per metric ton of non-renewables, doubling in ten years. Plus an end to all subsidies to oil and coal producers. Full compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Those are fundamental.”

Clara had intended Kyoto as a sweetener anyway if things got desperate, so she topped up her bid with a ten-year plan to comply. But a carbon tax — fifty a ton or ten, it didn’t matter — sent a chill down her spine. She’d crusaded against the concept as grossly unaffordable for a country struggling from recession. “Believe me, Margaret, a carbon tax won’t get past the cabinet. You don’t know what I’m dealing with.”

“I know what you’re dealing with. A bunch of non-renewables.” It’s not the economy, stupid, she wanted to say. It’s planetary survival.

“Take it to your people.” Clara couldn’t believe they were all as bullheaded as their parliamentary leader.

Margaret was finding this ticklish. She didn’t want to be tarred as the rotten apple in the Opposition barrel, the M.P. who saved an unpopular government, but a hamper of rations had been offered,
and she could be spanked for not snatching it. This was not her call to make alone.

“Is anyone off limits? The press, I assume.”

“I suppose they’ll find out eventually. Later the better. For now, can we keep this among friends?”

“You’ll take my counter-offer to your people?”

“Absolutely.” Clara had zero hope.

Before escorting her guest to the front door, she showed her around a bit, talking about this and that: how Lafayette took a jump off the cliff, the Bhashyistan standoff, the alleged kidnapping of Abzal Erzhan, the clever job by Margaret’s husband in using a press conference to set up an alibi defence. They even shared a laugh over Charley Thiessen’s ham-handed performance at that event.

Margaret took one last look about as an attendant bowed and scraped at the open door. All the hoary old paintings and urns and vases and bric-a-brac. She’d heard it cost sixty thousand a year to heat the joint.

“Watch out,” said Clara. “The day may come when you’ll be sleeping in the main bedroom, having nightmares.”

“Stranger things have happened,” said Margaret, setting off for the waiting limo.

Clara felt a headache, the kind that came from banging your head against a wall.

Nine o’clock Wednesday morning. In half an hour Thiessen would be joining the rest of the cabinet to debate a dying effort to stave off defeat the next day and an election that could send the Tories tumbling to a grab bag of seats. His was safe, maybe the safest in the country outside the Bible belt. Clara Gracey’s wasn’t, the Toronto burbs.

He could live with the likely scenario, Clara slip-sliding back into academia, good old boy Charley Thiessen elected to succeed her, maybe by acclamation. A spell as Opposition leader, winning applause with his jabs and quips, galloping to an easy win in the next election. Prime Minister Thiessen. Call me Charley.

He sat back, his sock feet up on his desk with its old framed photo of his younger mom, smiling down at little Charley in his Cub uniform. Who’d have known?

He’d run that scenario past her last night. “That’s my Charley,” she’d told him. “You are the
man
.” She hadn’t said one mean word about how he’d wrong-footed himself in the National Press Theatre — though it had featured on the nightly newscasts, Charley in his juice-stained shirt, his mouth opening and closing like a fish freshly landed. Rick Mercer had done a prime-time skit on the CBC, in a dripping red shirt.

He picked up the phone. “Send him in.” Crumwell, who’d called en route from Ogilvie Road with a promise of good news “that I’m sure you’ll enjoy.” Abzal Erzhan found hiding in the back room of a Montreal tenement? Arthur Beauchamp arrested smoking crack in a bordello? The consensus at CSIS was that Beauchamp’s kidnap scenario stank. Cooked up for a murder defence. That gasbag and his smirking put-down.

Crumwell slipped in like a thief, quietly closed the door.

“How’s that problem with your, uh, works, Anthony?”