Caught (16 page)

Carter drank steadily and became more prudent with each drink. His eyes became gleaming slits and he hardly moved except to nudge his glass forward with a finger when it was empty.

The girl was quick to fill it for him. She poured to the rim.

They’d brought out the instruments after midnight. They played Dylan and Cohen and Pentangle and Hearn’s girl took the guitar from him and sang about times getting rough and hard and she looked up at her boyfriend and spoke the line: Why don’t you lay me down in the long grass and let me do my stuff. Patterson had to look away.

Hearn took the guitar back and sang an Irish folk song about a love lost at sea.

They got maudlin and bellowed out the chorus, nasal and off-key, like their lives depended on being honest when they sang. Hearn sitting on the straight-backed wooden chair: Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s.

His foot going. He finished with tears in his eyes, though Patterson was pretty sure the kid hadn’t fished off Cape St. Mary’s or anywhere else except maybe off the side of a luxury yacht.

At dawn, when the sun was rising, the young girl, Ada, wandered over to the piano in the corner and lifted the lid.

She slid across the bench and touched the keys without making any sound at all. Then she began to tinkle out a little melody and her backbone became straighter and she was frozen and alert. A tangerine light was creeping across the varnished hardwood floor and up her back. It lit up her blond hair and burned across the white shoulders of her peasant blouse.

Patterson had never heard a piano played that way. She was violent with it, as if there was something inside the wood and strings that she had to rescue or exorcise.

It was not what Patterson thought of as music. He didn’t know what it was. Her body jerked like she completed a circuit of high-voltage power; she was welded to it, couldn’t lift her fingers away from the keys, the way a person being electrocuted can’t let go of a live wire.

And when she stopped she was flushed and tigerish-looking.

Or maybe she was just stoned. Or he was just stoned. They had been smoking and drinking for hours. Maybe they had put something in his drink. He thought acid, maybe. He felt ravaged and elated. Whatever he experienced while she was playing, he doubted it as soon as it stopped.

Patterson thought she was going to expose him. That she knew everything. He half expected her to take off her clothes or set something on fire.

What the hell was that, Hearn said. His girlfriend got up from the table with a load of plates and let them clatter into the kitchen sink.

That was the piano, Hearn’s girlfriend said.

Ada swung her legs over the piano stool and sauntered across the room with the filmy scarf she’d worn around her neck in her hand, trailing it on the backs of the furniture. She dropped the scarf over Carter’s drunken face, a face set like marble, inert and puffy and desolate, and put her fingers on top of his bald pate.

Whatever had poured out of her fingers into the piano might pulse through the man’s skull and fry him on the spot, Patterson thought.

She flexed her fingers in a kind of gentle massage, the chiffon scarf wrinkling up, swishing over Carter’s nose and ears.

The girl told Carter it was time for bed. The sun had lost all of the orange flare by the time Patterson left the dinner party.

The next day he’d gone back with a terrific hangover and a briefcase. He handed Hearn twenty thousand dollars and Hearn gave him a tour of the boat, sixty feet, a big fishing rig in the back, mahogany and polish, a false floor under which they were going to store the cargo. The boat must have cost a fortune, even purchased, as it had been, in a foreclosure sale.

The satellite tracking system was installed that night by a couple of scuba divers, attached to the hull under Patterson’s instruction.

But Patterson hadn’t known the nature of the device they’d planted on the sailboat until now.

He knew, of course; it had been carefully explained. He’d read the dossier with its space-age jargon, the self-congratulatory bolstering. A military-led innovation, a dish in outer space that bounced signals, gave them a bead on anything that moved. But he hadn’t understood the nature of it.

They could trace the boat as it travelled down the coast. They would know exactly where the boys were at least three times a day. They would know when they’d collected the cargo, when they were heading back, when they entered Canadian waters.

It was imperative they make it back to Canadian waters.

The boys would be arrested in Canada.

O’Neill stood at a podium waiting for the room to fall quiet. He was going to give a speech with the snow of the screen playing over him, an electrified tweed of hiss, a knit of static and spark, glitch and random flicker.

The technicians in the booth were connecting cables, hitting switches. A feed of light and dark spewed over O’Neill’s face and hands.

He was thanking the scientist they had in from Ottawa to explain the technology, he was thanking the minister of defence, who wasn’t present, of course, and he was thanking Patterson for his hard work and dedication.

He told how Patterson was the guiding force behind the operation. How it was Patterson’s baby. There was applause and the guy next to Patterson clapped him on the shoulder.

O’Neill said that the RCMP in every province had been advised of the sting operation and they were behaving in accordance with the wishes of the Vancouver detachment. Mexico was on alert. Colombia was on alert. San Diego knew to keep an eye.

He made a joke about Patterson having to imbibe substances, both legal and illegal, while working undercover and how it must have been a hardship.

He said, Sometimes the job requires going the extra mile. Everyone chuckled.

We’re lucky to have him, O’Neill said. He glanced up from his papers then and took off his glasses and tucked them inside his suit jacket. He looked out at the audience for a moment.

We’re going to throw the book at these kids, he said. They won’t know what hit them.

O’Neill sat down and they all watched the screen. The new technology gave them the exact co-ordinates. It gave them a picture.

It took the sport out of it, Patterson thought. There was a pornographic element, the way they could watch without a break in the flow of time.

They looked on in silence, now, and they felt the hair on their arms stand up, the way you’re meant to feel in the presence of the supernatural.

Watching made them feel watched.

They knew they were next.

Everybody on earth was next. Perhaps they had always been watched. But now someone owned the eye.

They owned it.

This was the kind of eye: there was nothing to hide behind.

Patterson could not look away. He was glued. In the snow on the screen the yacht was a hard blur, a pulsing light on a grid. The yacht the boys would be taking to Colombia.

He had to admit a fondness. Hearn was well spoken and he had good manners. The kid thought the world of David Slaney; that much was clear.

Hearn believed one of them had to be on land waiting for the shipment. And it had to be Hearn because Slaney was too visible after the escape. Getting him out of the country would take off some of the heat. Hearn had worked hard, over the last four years, to establish his cover. He was serious about his studies; he seemed to be in love with his girl. Maybe he felt he owed Slaney the trip. The money would give David Slaney a fighting chance on the outside.

Hearn seemed to believe that working together, but from opposite ends of the trip, he and Slaney were invincible.

Is this unfolding? somebody said, pointing at the screen. The yacht was moving.

This is instantaneous, the scientist said. This is there’s no delay. It’s coming straight at you.

Somebody asked, It drops out of the heavens?

It’s bounced, the scientist said. The pictures are coming from outer space.

But there’s a delay, someone said. A woman. They had one woman on the team and she was at the back of the room. She was the one who said a delay. Because how could there be a picture without a delay, a picture bounced more than a thousand miles?

No delay, the scientist said.

It’s moving, all right, somebody said. Patterson looked at his watch.

They’re heading to Mexico, he said. Slaney’s going to fly down and meet them six weeks from now, then it’s on to Colombia.

Patterson didn’t say about losing Slaney in Montreal. He didn’t say the whole thing might blow up in their faces if Slaney didn’t show. There had been no sign of him once he’d checked out of the room they’d bugged. Hearn wouldn’t go on without him. Patterson was sure of that. Where was he this time?

We’ve got them, O’Neill said. He raised his fist in victory.

Bon voyage, somebody said.

You’re the One That I Want

Slaney gave the
porter his ticket, found his seat, and set the doll up in the empty one next to him. He nudged the pink box a little until the doll’s eyelids dropped shut. Then he felt Montreal tug at itself, the
clack
of the rail ties, the slow, wrenching slide of smokestacks and concrete and sun-struck facades, a smooth emulsion streaming behind. He thought of her. Or she was just there. He was full of her. She was ultra-present, right there with him. Near him, or inside him.

Jennifer brayed like a donkey when something was funny. An honest to God donkey. She’d cross her legs to stop from peeing in her pants and beg him to shut up, holding one hand out. The laugh rocked her whole body and it was animal and mannish.

She’d felt ashamed about being on welfare. Her family had money. She had grown up with a charwoman but there was no trace of snobbery in her, except for the shame she felt cashing the welfare cheque.

She had a tab at the convenience store and she would go in and get smokes and bags of chips and wait, holding up the line, while the woman behind the counter wrote it all down. They conferred in quiet tones. They were like people in church when this transaction occurred, solemn and reverent about the vertiginous debt.

She smoked on the fire escape, sometimes, to watch the sun go down. If he had to pick a moment, it was her shoulders bent over a sewing machine with the smoke going in the ashtray.

Everything dropped away after she had cooked a meal and was having her evening smoke. She was five-foot-seven and bony and boyish. There was hardly anything to her. Her hair was long and thick and she coloured it a honey blond and her eyes were big and arresting. They narrowed and looked to the side when she had a problem to solve. When she was hurt or afraid she broke into a slow smile.

She made him butter her toast. Do things for me. That was the way she felt about him. Do things for me. She burnt everything she cooked. She had tried university and flunked out.

But she was full of patience for the child. The kid made her dopey with love. She had a way of being undiluted and present with Crystal; everything she was, she handed over to the kid.

Men fell in love with her and he watched her let them down easy. He watched as she gently, firmly destroyed several different men, and he was to remain unsuspecting about his own fate until she said: How do I put this.

She was funny. She did that thing of wrapping her arms around herself and turning her back on you, making kissing noises, and you could watch her hands groping at her own shoulder blades and waist with faux-passion. It was a raunchy parody and she’d glance back over her shoulder and ask if he were jealous.

She mimed a glass box, and the look on her face. She faked a fear of being trapped in the walls of glass that was pretty convincing.

Once he’d come home and she was in the oversized corduroy armchair with lumps of stuffing and exposed springs and she was crying over a book. The whole room was dark except for this light they had. A pole with five different lamps, each bubbled glass shade a different colour. Orange, blue, red, pink. He couldn’t remember what book.

But he remembered her blinking him into existence. Looking up from the book and blinking her wet eyelashes, touching the corners of her eyes with the side of her hand and the blue light on her cheek, blinking until she was out of the sad book and present with him in the hole of an apartment they shared. And it occurred to him that he only really felt like someone, like a whole being, when she was calling him to account.

She was please and thank you and outrageously selfish, except for the child.

Could you put butter on that? Not even looking up from the book. Ordering him around.

She was the only person he knew who ate real butter.

Slaney got off the train in Ottawa. He went into the airy station, all glass and girders and pigeons, and he looked up Fred Decker in the phone book, the guy she’d married, and he found the address. He was going to ask her to wait for him until he got back from the trip.

Slaney caught her hand just before it struck his face. That was in the hall when she opened the front door.

Crystal said, Who is it, Mommy? She was all changed, Jennifer’s little girl, she was so tall. The serious eyes and the pout. He squatted and held out the box with the doll. She hid her face, digging her forehead into her mother’s thigh.

I’m a friend of your mother’s, Slaney said.

Go ahead, honey, Jennifer said. Crystal had stepped out and taken the box in her hands and yelled suddenly, Guess what I got. Another one.

Jennifer let him in the apartment because of the neighbours.

I don’t need them mentioning this up and down the whole building, she said. There were two children having a tea party in the living room with Crystal. They were trying to get the new doll out of the cardboard box.

Slaney and Jennifer stood in the middle of the room because sitting down didn’t seem the right thing to do. She had her hand pressed to the side of her face. She was looking at the floor and she was rigid as a stone.

He told her he’d wanted to give her things, to build a life.

Don’t pin this on me, she said. Don’t you dare. He told her he was sorry.

Did you get my letters? he said.