The Delicate Storm (25 page)

“Oh my,” Hawthorne said quietly.

Cardinal and Delorme waited. Hawthorne shifted his weight, looking around.

“I’m glad it’s a child’s room,” he said, without explanation. Cardinal didn’t think he was talking to them, anyway. “It’s like revisiting a battlefield. Gettysburg or Poitiers. Ever been? A few quiet hills, flowers and grass waving in the wind. You’d never know what took place here.

“Of course, it seems so small now. Two kidnappings, one murder. A blip on the screen compared to September eleventh. But it’s a terrifying thing to be kidnapped.” He turned to Delorme. “Two months I spent in here. Two months.”

“It’s a long time.”

“It wasn’t so bad at first. After the initial shock, I mean. They were polite, made sure I was comfortable—or as comfortable as you can be with your ankles tied and a hood on your head. It was a pillowcase torn open along one seam. I could see straight ahead, but no peripheral vision. Had a marvellous view of that wall for two months. They kept reassuring me that they weren’t going to hurt me, that I was just a pawn, et cetera, something to trade. I suppose they were quite deferential, in their way.”

He turned to face the window. “That was boarded up. I fantasized about slowly loosening the board and one day jumping out, but there was always an armed guard watching me. They used to bring me books to read—political stuff at first, and later, paperback thrillers.” He sighed, and there was a shudder in his breath.

“How many were here?” Cardinal asked, but Hawthorne seemed not to hear. He continued with his muttered tour of the past, now pointing at a corner, now nodding toward a wall.

“The bed was a single cot. Comfortable enough, I suppose, but very narrow. Made it easier for them to tie me.”

A turn, a nod.

“Canvas chair by the door. Always someone in it, too. They were always armed but never flashed the weapon or anything. Having it was enough.”

A turn, a nod.

“Fold-out card table here. Two little fold-up chairs. Where I ate. Lot of takeout food, of course. But there was a woman who cooked occasionally. Madeleine, her name was. She made a good tourtière, other dishes. Even baked things sometimes. She seemed to feel guilty about the whole enterprise. ‘Don’t worry,’ she would whisper to me once in a while. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.’”

The memory seemed to pluck some string of emotion in him that had been hitherto silent. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

“And you know—I was all right. I really was all right. They had the television or radio on all the time, so I was right up to date with the news. And it sounded as if the provincial government was doing everything it could to negotiate an end to the thing. But then Ottawa called out the army. The minute they declared the War Measures Act, the air was sucked right out of this place. The kidnappers weren’t expecting that, you see. They thought there were real negotiations going on. But once Ottawa took over …”

With the tip of his Kodiak boot Hawthorne traced the outline of a tiger in the rug at his feet. “Once they thought the negotiations were hopeless, they became frightened. Well, you saw what happened with the other cell. The day after war measures were declared, they killed Raoul Duquette …”

The tip of his boot traced the tiger’s muzzle, around to the ears, back down to the chin. “That poor man has been in his grave for thirty years. And it’s entirely a matter of luck. He got with the more violent group. People have suggested he argued with his kidnappers, but I’m sure he was not so foolish as to antagonize them. No, he just had the bad luck to be taken by people who were willing to kill. My kidnappers were not, and I don’t for one minute put it down to my diplomatic skills. Although I did joke with them and so on, as much as possible.

“The important thing was to humanize myself in their eyes, without in any way kowtowing. Just to keep them thinking of me as a person, not an object. Disposable. I remember once, one of them let out an enormous fart, and I said, ’Ah.
Votre arme secrète
—your secret weapon. They got a laugh out of that.”

“How many people held you?” Delorme said.

“Four. Jacques Savard, Robert Villeneuve, the girl, Madeleine, and a man who came and went named Yves. He was the only one who threatened me. ‘Don’t think we won’t do it,’ he’d say. ‘I could snap your neck like this!’ and he’d snap his fingers. Bloody brute. World’s full of people like him, unfortunately.”

“You never heard his last name?”

“Never. He insisted everyone just call him comrade or soldier, but the girl slipped once or twice, calling him Yves. He never stayed more than half an hour, thank God. I think he was mostly relaying messages.” Hawthorne suddenly swung round and strode toward the bedroom door. “I really can’t be in here anymore, it’s just too much.”

In the living room, he leaned against the back of an armchair, breathing heavily.

“Everything all right?” the owner called from the kitchen.

“Fine,” Cardinal said. “We’ll be gone in a minute.”

“Why don’t you sit down,” Delorme said. “Take a breather.”

“No, it’s all right. I’m fine. Sorry about the little display.” Hawthorne managed a smile, but sweat had beaded on his forehead.

Cardinal pulled out the photograph of Miles Shackley. “Do you recognize this man?”

“No. Should I?”

“Not necessarily. And these people?” Cardinal showed him the photo, four smiling terrorists with the window behind them.

“Well, Lemoyne and Theroux I recognize from the newspaper accounts. They were never here, as far as I know. They were busy killing Mr. Duquette. That’s Madeleine, the one who would occasionally cook.”

“And the man on the end?” Cardinal pointed to the man with the black curls, the striped T-shirt.

“I’m not likely to forget that man. He’s the one they called Yves. The bully of the group.”

“We believe his name is Yves Grenelle,” Cardinal said.

“May have been. Understand, I didn’t want to know anything. I wanted to be as little threat to them as possible. Didn’t want to give them any reason to kill me—other than the political one. You tell me that’s Yves Grenelle, I’ll believe you. I never heard the full name. I just knew him as a right bastard, if you’ll forgive the technical term.”

“How did you see his face?” Delorme said. “You were blindfolded, no?”

“That man didn’t care whether I saw his face. And that terrified me. One time he pulled my hood off, when Madeleine was in the room.”

“Did he come round throughout your time here? Were his visits regular?”

“Not at all. He came three or four times toward the beginning. After that, I never saw him again. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t come. I was locked away in the bedroom.”

“But you never saw him after the second week?”

“I don’t believe so. The news was on all the time, and I know he didn’t come round after they killed Duquette. I’d have remembered that, because he scared me bad before that. After Duquette was dead, they all scared me. I was terrified he would come round again and stir them up, but if he did come, I didn’t see him.” Hawthorne suddenly got to his feet. “Look, I think I’ve been all the help I can, Detective. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d very much like to go home.”

Cardinal went to the kitchen to thank the owner of the house.

“You’re welcome,” Lamotte said. “Hell of a thing that happened here. Hell of a thing. I’m glad it’s not, you know, the other house. The one where they …”

“Right,” said Cardinal. “Thanks again.”

“Was that the fellow they kidnapped? The diplomat?”

“I can’t tell you anything, I’m afraid. It’s an investigation in progress.”

“After thirty years? Doesn’t sound like much progress.”

“Well, you know,” Cardinal said, “slow but steady wins the race.”

“Yeah, right. And if you believe that … What’s wrong?”

“That window,” Cardinal said, speaking to himself, really. “That steeple in the distance.”

“Ste-Agathe. Still the tallest thing in the neighbourhood.”

The neo-Gothic lines of the steeple looked stagey against the heavy cloud. Cardinal pulled the photograph out of his pocket, the four grinning young terrorists. The view outside the window looked different. It had been summer, then; the trees were green and full. But the view across the street was otherwise the same: a brown wooden ranch house with a fat cedar outside, and off to the right, above distant rooftops, the steeple of Ste-Agathe. “It was taken here,” Cardinal said. “The picture was taken in this room.”

“For sure,” said Mr. Lamotte, who was peering over his shoulder. “That’s the house across the street. And there’s the church.”

Cardinal couldn’t wait to tell Delorme, but when he got into the car, he found Hawthorne sobbing in the front seat like a child, and Delorme looking for once at a loss.

They waited a couple of minutes. Hawthorne pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes, blew his nose thoroughly and then sat back, exhausted. “God,” he said, and shook his head slowly back and forth. “You want to know the truly stupid thing?”

“Sure,” Cardinal said.

“I told them this on the first day. They’d sat me down and got the hood on me and had my wrist manacled to the bed frame. They’d finished cheering each other for their wonderful victory, et cetera. And when it was quiet and there were just two of them in the room, I said to them,
‘Mes pauvres amis,’
I said. ‘I have some bad news for you, I’m afraid. The truth is, I’m not even English, you see. So if you think Her Majesty’s Government is going to lift a finger to save me, you’re sadly mistaken.’”

Delorme looked at him. “You’re not English?”

“No, madam. That’s the ridiculous thing.” Hawthorne shook his head in amazement at the scope of human folly, and his next statement came out in a tone of wonder. “I’m Irish.”

24

T
HE REST OF THE DAY
was given over to the dreariness that is contemporary travel. First there was the rainy drive out to Dorval airport. Then there was a long wait made worse by Air Canada’s refusal to impart any information beyond “icy conditions in Ontario.” They both pulled out their cellphones. Cardinal called Musgrave.

“Here’s something for you to file under certifiable facts,” Musgrave said. “Leon Petrucci did not order your man to be killed, and Leon Petrucci didn’t order Paul Bressard to feed him to the bears, and Leon Petrucci didn’t write that note.”

“Why not?”

“Because Leon Petrucci is dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yes. Leon Petrucci is thoroughly, completely, totally dead. He had another operation down at Toronto General two months ago, and he fell into a coma and never woke up. He died a week ago last Tuesday—long before your victim showed up in Algonquin Bay.”

“How come it wasn’t in the papers?”

“It will be. He wasn’t registered under his real name.”

“You’re sure about all this?”

“Cardinal, I work for the
RCMP
. Organized crime is what we do. Whoever killed Miles Shackley, believe me, it wasn’t Leon Petrucci. And while we’re on the subject of inter-agency co-operation, I’d like to thank you for letting me know Squier quit,” Musgrave said. “Nothing like keeping me up to the minute.”

“Sorry. Really, there hasn’t been a chance. You know, Squier actually turned out to be helpful in the end.”

“By accident, no doubt. I have to tell you, though, my man at
CSIS
tells me the pressure came from very high up. Yesterday morning they get a visit—not a call, a personal visit—from Jim Coulter. Do you know who Jim Coulter is?”

“Name’s familiar.”

“Deputy chief of
CSIS
operations in Ottawa, and a real bastard—former Mountie, too, so I know whereof I speak. Anyway, Jim Coulter has a confab with
CSIS
Toronto and two hours later Calvin Squier is out the door. You do the math. Squier may have quit, but I think he was frozen out.”

“Well, we’ve figured out why
CSIS
trailed Shackley. They don’t want it coming to light that Raoul Duquette was murdered by a CIA informer—an informer run by an agent working on our
CAT
Squad.”

“Ouch. Yeah, that wouldn’t exactly enhance their image.”

“Listen, do you guys have someone who can age a photograph?”

“Yeah, sure. Tony Catrell will do it for you.”

“You got a number for him?”

There was a pause.

“You still there?” Cardinal said.

“Still here. Just rethinking this age progression business. You know what? Don’t use Tony. Tony’s a nuts-and-bolts guy. Knows everything there is to know about the software, but, I don’t know, he’s a bit of a cold fish. No, I think you wanna take this to Miriam Stead at Toronto Police.”

“I figured it’d be faster using one of your guys.”

“Miriam Stead is like the guru of age progression. Been doing this stuff for thirty years. There’s nobody better. Nobody faster, either. The difference is, Tony’ll give you a likeness, but Miriam—Miriam’s an artist. I don’t know how she does it, but you give Miriam Stead a photograph, she’ll give you back a human being. She’s also a workaholic who likes to spend her weekends in the office. By the way, do you have any idea what the weather’s doing up here?”

“What, is it snowing?”

Musgrave just chuckled and hung up.

Their plane took off at four o’clock. Cardinal slept most of the way to Toronto.

“Boy, you sure conked out,” Delorme said when he woke up, rubbing his eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Little out of it. Had trouble sleeping last night.”

“Yeah, that room was overheated.”

“Frankly, it was because you were in the room. It was distracting.”

“Come on, Cardinal. That’s ridiculous.”

“Don’t give me that, like it’s some big shock. You think because I’m married, I’m not attracted to women? Do I look like a choirboy to you?”

“No.”

“So what’s the big mystery?”

“Nothing. I’m just surprised, okay? That’s legal, right, for me to be surprised?”

“Jesus. Forget I said anything, all right?”

“Fine. It’s forgotten.”

They landed in Toronto only to find that their connecting flight to Algonquin Bay had been cancelled. Once more, the laconic explanation: icy conditions.

“Oh, man,” Delorme said. “I don’t want to spend another night in a big city.”

“I’ll call Jerry Commanda—maybe we can catch a ride on an OPP chopper. Anyway, there’s one good thing about this.”

“Really?” Delorme said. “I wish you’d tell me what it is.”

“Toronto’s ident headquarters is at Jane and Wilson. That’s actually not too far from here. We can take a cab.”

“Fabulous,” Delorme said. “Just fabulous.”

They were met at the front desk of ident headquarters by Miriam Stead. Whatever Cardinal had been expecting, Miriam Stead was not it. She had white hair, short and spiky, and silver hoop earrings. She wore a grey turtleneck over black jeans and a pair of scarlet Keds. There wasn’t a trace of fat on her, and if it weren’t for the grey hair, she could’ve been mid-forties. A marathoner, Cardinal thought, got to be.

She brought them back to her workstation, which was a cubicle furnished mostly with machines Cardinal didn’t recognize and two Mac computers with gigantic screens, one of which showed the image of a desiccated skull.

“He’s cute,” Delorme said.

“Sorry,” Ms. Stead said, and clicked the image into oblivion. “Reconstruction project, obviously. That’s mostly what I do—reconstruction and missing kids. But I understand you have something a little different for me.”

Cardinal handed her the group photograph and told her what they needed. While he was talking, Ms. Stead slipped the picture into a flatbed scanner, and it appeared bit by bit on the Mac screen behind her. Still listening, she swivelled around and went to work with her mouse—now cropping, now enlarging—until the head and shoulders of Yves Grenelle all but filled the screen.

“If you don’t know his real name, then I don’t imagine you’ll be giving me any photos of Ma and Pa and Gramps, right?”

“Sorry.”

“That’s mostly what we use, of course. With a missing kid, if you want to know what they look like seven years later, you age them toward Mom and Dad. Without that kind of input, we don’t know whether your man is likely to be skinny or fat, hairy or bald.”

“Maybe this isn’t such a great idea, then,” Delorme said.

“Oh, no, I can help you. What we’re talking about is the human being’s battle with gravity. Basically, everything sinks—flesh heads earthward, cartilage lengthens, the nose starts to sag. It’s a terrible flaw in the design. But what we do in a situation like this, where there’s no genetic input, is we’ll give you several possibilities—using the variables I just mentioned and also updating hairstyles and so on. What can you tell me about your fella’s lifestyle? Is he a drinker? A smoker? Weightlifter? Health nut? All of that affects how people age.”

“Well, now you’re making me feel dumb,” Cardinal said. “I didn’t even ask anyone about those things. Coming here was pretty spur-of-the-moment.”

“That’s all right. I may be a civilian, but I do realize you people aren’t trying to make my job more difficult, even if that is invariably what you do.”

“What are the chances of any of your variations being close to reality?” Delorme asked.

“If he’s got fat and bald, then the version that’s fat and bald will look a lot like him. Not just a little—a lot. Obviously, you can’t use it for courtroom ID without fingerprints or DNA or
something
, but the truth is, the proportions of your face don’t change. That’s why—say you haven’t seen someone for thirty, forty years—the moment you get up close and they start to speak, you’re looking in their eyes, you know it’s them.”

“To give us all these variations,” Cardinal said, “that’s going to take a few days, I suppose.”

“You should have them by tomorrow.”

“Really? Musgrave said you were good.”

“Sergeant Musgrave of the Mounties! I love that man! I swear, he must’ve been born wearing a tunic and a Smokey hat.”

“She’s right about people aging differently,” Delorme said when they had gone back to the front desk. “I hope I look that good when I’m her age.”

“Keep eating that poutine,” Cardinal said.

“Did you see that plaque in her cubicle?”

“I did. Miriam Stead finished among the first twenty seniors in the New York marathon last year.”

After what seemed like a thousand phone calls back and forth to Jerry Commanda at OPP (“Jesus, stay in Toronto, Cardinal. This town is frozen solid, I kid you not.”), Cardinal managed to arrange a helicopter ride courtesy of the Ontario Provincial Police.

It was one thing to hear about icy conditions and quite another to see them first-hand. The pilot told them that things were supposed to be “pretty hairy” up in Algonquin Bay, but people were always saying that about the weather up there. “We got a two-or three-hour break in the rain for now, so we’ll be fine. Runway’s useless for planes, though,” he told them. Rotor noise made conversation difficult after that, and it was too dark to see much from the air.

As they were passing over Bracebridge, Delorme jabbed a gloved finger toward the ground. She shouted to Cardinal: “No cars!”

It was true. The highway unfurled like a pale grey ribbon among the hills, completely empty. A ghost highway.

Even so, the helicopter ride went so smoothly that it was hard to understand why the regular flight had been cancelled—until they landed. The pilot stepped down first, and fell flat on his face; the tarmac was a sheet of solid ice. Except for two security guards and a lonely-looking maintenance man, the airport itself was deserted.

“This is weird,” Delorme said. “It’s like a dream I used to have all the time.”

The pilot’s wife was waiting for him in the parking lot, motor running. Cardinal and Delorme turned down the offer of a ride—foolishly, as it turned out. The car Delorme had left at the airport was now an ice sculpture. It took them half an hour to open the doors, using a pair of hammers they managed to borrow from the maintenance man.

It was frustrating work. Cardinal fell to his knees more than once, and his desire to be home and warm became more intense by the minute. Delorme, somehow immune to gravity, managed to work efficiently without falling once, though she did let fly with several curses, the first French Cardinal had ever learned—in the playground, not in class.

The highway into town was treacherous, even though it had been heavily salted. Abandoned cars were strewn at crazy angles on the shoulders and in the culverts. There were no pedestrians anywhere. There was exactly one other car on the road, a red minivan just ahead of them that several times threatened to go off the road.

It was nine-thirty by the time Delorme turned onto Madonna Road. Less than a hundred yards after the turnoff she had to stop for a gigantic branch that had snapped from a frozen poplar. Cardinal knew the tree well. In summer, after a heavy rain, it was the branch that hung lowest, and by August it would sometimes brush the roof of the car as he drove by. It was no wonder the thing had broken; it was encased in a good half-inch of ice. As Cardinal dragged it to the side of the road, it sounded like the snapping of a thousand small bones.

“Listen,” he said, back in the car. “About what I said—about last night.”

Delorme frowned at the road ahead, her face pale in a stripe of passing moonlight. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry I said it. I’d just woken up from a serious nap and I wasn’t thinking clearly. It was unprofessional, and I don’t want it to get in the way.”

“It won’t. Not on my side, anyway.” Delorme slowed very gradually to a stop. “I don’t think I’ll try your driveway with this ice.”

“So, we’re okay on that?”

“We’re fine,” Delorme said.

Cardinal waited for her to say something more, but she just stared straight ahead, waiting for him to get out.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he said.

“Yeah. See you tomorrow.”