Snow Job (37 page)

“Excellent,” Arthur said. “And in business again so quickly. You put to shame my most valued clients.”

Bejko beamed, threw an arm out expansively. “This? It is nothing. You should see in warehouse the cars, Lexus, Mercedes, Porsche, new, right off ship. But too many middlemen, too much overhead. Bribes alone eat half of profit. Is why I get arrest, not pay enough to police chief.”

A bottle was produced, unlabelled, but when uncorked it smelled of a powerful brandy. Arthur said simply, unapologetically: “I don’t drink.”

“Bad luck. You, my friend, Mr. Ray, must make up for second-best lawyer.” Bejko filled a glass and passed it to DiPalma, who choked on the first sip.

“Warms stomach, yes?” Bejko found a ginger ale for Arthur, and clicked glasses with them. “To freedom for Abzal.” A second toast: “To great country you belonging, Canada.” Bejko expanded on this tribute, extolling the Canadian military for emptying the Bhashyistan jail. “Smart move.”

Bejko topped up DiPalma’s brandy, then accepted a cigarette from him. DiPalma’s hand trembled as he held his lighter, a typical Parkinson’s effect. Increasingly often, Arthur had observed, DiPalma would keep his hands in his pockets or otherwise out of view.

Bejko blew out a gust of smoke, then described how he’d spent two months of a three-year term in an institution known simply as Prison 303. Half a day’s drive from here, into the mountains between Korça and the Macedonian border.

Three days before Bejko’s release, Erzhan had been thrown into an adjoining cell. “He looked like drugged. He demand, why am I here, I am simple teacher, Canadian citizen, and they beat him, but only use rubber cables.”

He’d seen no Western agents, nor had Erzhan been taken away for questioning. The police laid into Abzal for two days, though to what purpose Bejko couldn’t explain, other than, “Is standard procedure.” By the third day, they’d tired of the sport. “No one is knowing this Erzhan, or why he in jail. No criminal charge, no lawyer, no nothing. Everyone confuse, even police, guards. No one have much English for talking him.”

Black and blue but finally left in peace, Erzhan was able to tell his neighbour what he remembered of his abduction. A grey sedan pulled up and a front-seat passenger leaned out to ask directions to the nearest liquor store. Without waiting for an answer, that passenger got out of the car and another from the back. A sudden blow to the back of his neck, as if from the edge of a hand, paralyzed him. He fought for consciousness but all went blank as he was bundled into the vehicle.

This was in finer detail than Iqbal Zandoo’s account, but despite losses in translation and Zandoo’s distant perspective, the two versions meshed well. Arthur asked if Erzhan had described any of the three men.

The one who asked about the liquor store was tall, thin-faced. The one from the back seat, Erzhan’s attacker, “looked like heavyweight boxer.”

“And the driver?” Arthur asked.

“He not ever see.”

He came to fifteen hours later, naked, groggy, in a police van, just as it was rolling into Prison 303 under a raised steel gate.

“What day was this?” Arthur asked.

Bejko rummaged in a drawer for an old desk calendar. “I am release November thirty. So three days before, on twenty-seven.”

Arthur and DiPalma exchanged looks. That was the same day, Ottawa time, that an IED demolished the Bhashie limousine.

“When come home from Prison 303, I learn more from BBC news. Abzal, he is, how you say, inconvenient person because of bombing in Ottawa City. But is also famous former assassin. All confusing to me. But he not do bombing, not possible.”

“Tell us about this warden,” said DiPalma, who was chain-smoking. He’d warmed to the brandy by now, was on another refill.

“Hard bargainer. Hundred thousand leks to commuting my sentence, not take less. Hasran Chocoli, good communist in past life, but repent, kept job.” Bejko studied Arthur’s tailored dark suit, as if appraising its value. “Chocoli and me, we have mutual respect. Maybe I make contact for you. For token introducer fee.”

“That would be very kind.”

“Five thousand dollar is usual fee. For you, three thousand.”

Arthur swallowed, but decided not to quibble, drew out his traveller’s cheques.

“Chocoli is not so cheap, I must warn. He prefer leks, but maybe also take euros, dollars. Not traveller’s cheques, too easy to trace.”

Though a taxi had been hired for the morning, for the journey to Korça and the date with warden Hasran Chocoli, Arthur couldn’t locate DiPalma. No one from the Gjirokaster Hotel had seen him leave. Everything was in order in his room, clothes hung, the washroom giving evidence he’d showered and shaved. His cellphone was still there.

After cancelling the taxi, Arthur scoured the neighbourhood in the hope, proven vain, that he might find him in a restaurant or bar or maybe a drugstore, seeking a remedy for his hangover.

I’m planning to meet Ledjina’s parents tomorrow
. But where were they to be found? The manager at her restaurant was unfriendly, claiming not to know her address or phone number, let alone those of her parents. She wasn’t expected on duty until the dinner hour.

Arthur spent the afternoon seething — while either pacing or studying his phrasebook, trying to focus on the perplexing Albanian consonants. In a restless fury, he snapped the book shut and turned on his set to CNN. He was besieged by rolling shots of Christmas celebrations around the world. Bizarrely, depressingly, he was suddenly aware he was alone for Christmas in a strange land.

The newscast went to the day’s headline story, a startling event: a Canadian raid last night on Igorgrad. CF-18s had taken out Bhashyistan’s ground-to-air defences and blown up hangars holding several MiG interceptors. The Information Ministry had been razed flat. A missile had made shards of a yellow Hummer whose occupant was believed to be the infamous third son, the late Mukhamet Khan Ivanovich.

On screen now, trying not to smile, was a colonel from Canadian Forces Air Command, describing a “perfectly executed, surgical procedure with limited targets.” All aircraft and personnel had returned safely to the U.S. base in Kyrgyzstan.

Arthur felt no joy in anyone’s death, even Mukhamet’s, but the man had authored his own downfall, courting disaster with his taunts.

Here, in clips from a press conference in Ottawa, was Clara Gracey, confident and commanding, praising the military, proclaiming that Canada would not be mocked by a tinpot dictator, instructing the Ultimate Leader to release the hostages to avoid further strikes, castigating UN members for their empty phrases of support, and announcing that Canada would single-handedly do what international justice demanded.

A reporter asked if she feared fallout because the raid was on Christmas Eve. “Certainly not. We’re dealing with a country that denies Christians the right of free worship and perverts the true
meaning of the great religion of Islam. The entire free world applauds what we have done.”

A political tour de force. The prime minister could yet raise her party from the grave. She had embarked on a clever campaign, not against the official opposition but against a country far, far away.

Meanwhile, with exemplary bravado, Bhashyistan national radio was telling a different story: patriotic defenders had beaten off yet another invasion by the Western warmongers. A lie so pitiful that even in Muslim Albania it was likely to provoke only laughter.

It was three o’clock. His anger at DiPalma was being succeeded by concern for him.

F
or Charley Thiessen, this didn’t seem a lot like Christmas. Yet everything was in place for it: the house festooned with decorations, the glowing angel reigning over a spruce dressed with sparkly icicles, carols pumping from the stereo, the rich greasy smell of a twenty-pound bird in the oven, Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Earl hunkered over the thousand-piece jigsaw that was a holiday tradition. Mom and wife in the kitchen, jabbering nonstop. The two boys trying out their new toboggan by the riverbank. The entire town of Flesherton prettily coated with five inches of newly fallen snow.

His mother had been constantly at him: “You going to sit there all day like a lump? What’s eating you, anyway, Snarly Charley? It’s a time of joy, for Christ’s sake.” His wife would chime in: “You with us or against us, Charley? Get off that stupid computer.”

He’d been all day on his laptop, hiding behind the massive, blinking tree, surfing the news outlets for headlines he didn’t want to see. Like, for instance: “Justice Minister’s Smear Backfires.” His head was aching and his insides were boiling from the stress accumulated over the last few days, ever since that gut-clenching horror show when he’d raced back to the Château to try to rescue the mini-recorder.

Scenes from that foiled mission kept replaying. Calling Stonewell’s suite from a house phone, leaving an inane message:
“Guess you guys must’ve split, I’ll keep trying.” Then, taking no chances, racing up there. A moment of hope when he saw the “Do Not Disturb” — surely it meant they were sleeping it off. Rapping on the door, calling, “Yo, Robert, it’s me.” Shouting, hammering in vain as a housekeeper stared at him from down the hall. Returning to the elevator, feeling defeated.

Also bugging Charley was that his oldest, Joy, just turned eighteen, had come back from college for the holidays like the green avenger, carrying on about vanishing bears, whales, fish, forests, and coral reefs. She was doing a paper on greenhouse gas emissions. She’d forced him to watch a Suzuki documentary predicting scenarios he didn’t need to hear about, coastal flooding, drowning cities. He had his own problems.

Uncle Earl passed by to refuel before attacking the jigsaw again. “Get you another toddy, Charley boy?”

Thiessen smiled wanly, nodded — another toddy would not hurt.

“Why so glum? We blasted the bejesus out of those Bhashies, best Christmas present the country’s ever had.”

“I’ll bet it was your idea, Charley.” His mom, joining in, wiping her hands on her apron. “Don’t tell me. Cabinet secrecy. I may be just your dumb mother, but I know how things work.” Then going after him again: “Such a perfect Christmas Day. Get in the spirit, Mr. Prime Minister.”

Mr. Prime Minister. The concept was strange to him now, illusory. Maybe he’d been fooling himself thinking he was P.M. material, maybe DuWallup and the gnome had been having a private joke, encouraging the cabinet buffoon to think he was the party’s prince-in-waiting. Maybe they thought he could be used, the way George W. Bush was.

He scanned the Canadian Press site: no bulletins from Garibaldi Island, no interviews with smirking staff at the Château, or its pompous desk clerk, Fortesque. He’d sidled up to him calmly, explained he’d dropped a gold cufflink in Mr. Stonewell’s suite. The matter went all the way up to the hotel manager, who told Thiessen,
with great aplomb, he was immeasurably pleased to help the honourable minister any way he could.

A surly security officer had accompanied Thiessen to the suite, breathing down his neck as he fumbled under the bugged table, pretending to look for the alleged cufflink. The mini-recorder hadn’t dropped to the floor, nor was it still stuck to the underside of the table.

Frantic, he crawled about on his elbows and knees, checking under every piece of furniture. Gone. It was gone. Not found by housekeeping obviously, because the room hadn’t been done yet. The security guy watched with narrowed eyes, saying nothing, unwilling to restrain the country’s highest law officer from going through drawers, closet, wardrobe. Unable to suppress a grin as Thiessen got his prints all over the hookah pipe, then wiped them with his shirttail. He’d recoiled at the sight of a used, leaking condom beside the bed.

His quest failed, he’d fled the Château, entertaining images of Stonewell striding into the
Ottawa Citizen
newsroom, the political editor listening raptly to Thiessen’s taped voice.
Boy, I’ll bet you must know some stories about the old shyster
. Or worse, far, far worse:
Normally I don’t toke up until after dinner
.

Thiessen had spent that afternoon in near paralysis, weighing options: should he hang around the hotel waiting for Stonewell? Then what — confront him? Or should he call Crumwell? Have one of their goons take Stonewell down in a back alley? In the end, he couldn’t bear to see their incredulous faces, to hear their icy tones of contempt. In the end, he did nothing, because anything he tried would only make things worse.