Slow Recoil (20 page)

As with the murder of his son, and the eventual implication of a fellow detective in the death, there were things for which a human being simply could not prepare. Any parent worried about their child crossing the street or talking to strangers, but this, this was beyond the scope of comprehension. The late night phone call notification was the first of many sucker punches thrown in the dark. McKelvey had caught the jab square on the jawline, and his knees had buckled—but he'd stayed on his feet. As the president down south kept telling everyone, it always seemed darkest just before the dawn. And it was a cliché, but it was true, at least in McKelvey's case. There was the identification of his boy at the morgue, the wax grey face of his child with the little hole in his forehead the colour of black cherry. There was the push to keep the stalled investigation active; pushing hard, for he sensed his boy's lifestyle on the streets had relegated his case to the background. There was the chase for Duguay, the shooting in that darkened hallway, the ensuing investigation by the dumbasses in Professional Standards…

Right now McKelvey was listening to a young man tell his girlfriend how the subway was actually the best place to be if there was a terrorist attack.

“How do you figure that?” the girl said.

She looked to McKelvey like she was maybe seventeen. A high-school student with hair bleached to a blinding white, pierced nostrils. The boyfriend, too, had facial piercings, two long studs on an eyebrow that resembled bones. The sight of this hardware always gave McKelvey a desire to reach out and twist them, just to show the wearer what sort of opportunity he was providing to a potential foe. Darwin and all that business.

“We're underground, dude,” the boy said. “They probably have like reinforced concrete and everything, like a bomb shelter, oxygen they can pump in or something. Like in that movie, right, how the people down in the subway were the last people on earth after the nuclear war.”

The train sounded its stop at Rosedale, a neighbourhood of money and old families. The doors chimed and opened, and the two kids got up and shuffled out. McKelvey watched them slip away as the train moved on, and he was glad they were gone, because he had an overpowering urge to lean over and tell them the truth about their collective predicament. He imagined the look on their stapled faces when he said,
“It doesn't matter if
you're upstairs or downstairs when the whole fucking outhouse
blows up. Have a nice day.”
He wondered what they were teaching kids at school these days.

The thing he liked about the subway was its steady thrum, this comforting sense of being in motion, moving beneath the city blocks when traffic was gridlocked. On more than one occasion in those days of his recuperation following the shootout, if truth be told, McKelvey had put tokens in the turnstile just to ride the thing back and forth to kill a few hours, to watch people in their habits, to get lost in the anonymity of public transportation. He would sit there listening to the train cars shooking on the tracks, or screeching through the tunnels with that sound that made you shiver and cringe. Sit there and try to think of nothing at all, least of all the future trajectory of his life, the great burn of his prime now fizzled and ebbing. It was something he would never tell Hattie, or anyone else, this aimless subway riding. Now he set the paper down and read the advertisements along the top of the subway car, ads for condoms, one for a college program in graphic design, a poster advertising free testing for STDs at a health clinic near the Ryerson University campus.

McKelvey got off the subway at St. Clair and went above ground, hit Yonge Street and walked the two blocks to the address. It was wedged between a European deli and a flower shop, the sort of leased space that appeared to have been a storefront at some point in its history, with a floor to ceiling front display window that now featured posters in various languages promising access to career counselling, assistance finding accommodations, basic transit maps and schedules. To his surprise, the lights were on, and there were two or three people in the back standing around a long table. It looked as though they were stuffing envelopes, collating sheaves of paper. He stepped up and pulled the door handle, but it was locked. The sound of his rattling caused the heads inside to turn towards the door. A woman in her mid to late twenties turned, looked at McKelvey for a minute, said something to her colleagues, then came towards the door. She unlocked it and opened it.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “We're closed.”

McKelvey worked quick on his feet. He feigned severe disappointment, sighed and looked down the street, shook his head then looked back to the woman. “Shit, I knew this would happen. I told them at my office that you'd be closed with the long weekend and all. I'm a lawyer from Ottawa,” he said, “representing an immigrant in a deportation case. I only have until tomorrow, see, or…oh well, it's not your problem.”

The young woman stood there, the door ajar, and regarded him. She was dressed in plain khakis and a blue-grey wool sweater—or perhaps it was hemp—and she sported a nose ring, and her brown hair was curled together in tight rolls. McKelvey knew the word for it, it was on the tip of his tongue—dreadlocks, that was it. She looked, at least to McKelvey, exactly like someone who volunteered at a place like this should look.
How unique we
strive to be,
he thought,
and the harder we try, the more we fall
into cliché.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “We're in here doing a mailing for our annual fall fundraiser. The executive director's not in. We're all volunteers.”

She shrugged, and McKelvey caught a glimmer of possibility. He tensed and got his shoulder ready to push through the door of opportunity. “This woman I'm representing, Donia Kruzik, she's going to be sent back to Bosnia if I don't provide proof that she came through here, that she was provided assistance by your centre. It's a long story, lots of legalese. I just think of her kids here.”

He watched for it, but there was no immediate recognition of the name he'd thrown out there.

“I don't know what we could do to help,” the woman said, and she looked over her shoulder to her colleagues, who were interested now, absentmindedly stuffing envelopes. “I mean, with the privacy laws and everything, we can't get access to any personal client files anyway.”

“I understand,” he said. “It's not your fault. It's the government.”

“Don't get me started,” she said, smiling. When she smiled, her face changed, and she was prettier than he'd first thought.

“Right,” he said, “they get to make their own rules as they go. They can follow immigrants around and tap their phones and kick them out of the country on a whim or a rumour, but we've got to play by the rules.”

She looked back over to her colleagues then held the door open. “Come in,” she said. “I can at least give you some of our brochures.”

“Anything would be a help,” he said.

He stepped inside and smiled over at the other volunteers, a woman and a man. They were both in their mid-twenties as well, and McKelvey pictured them all sitting on the floor of a Queen Street West apartment, smoking pot and talking politics and civil rights. He hadn't gone to university himself, or college for that matter, and so he'd always thought of the world as containing two sorts of people: those who thought about things, and those who rolled up their sleeves and got things done. It wasn't accurate or fair, perhaps, but it was a philosophy which had served him well going on six decades.

“I didn't get your name,” she said.

“Leyden,” he said. “Dick Leyden. I appreciate you opening the door. Listen, I should apologize for my face. I took a tumble off a ladder last weekend.”

“I'm Pamela,” the woman from the door said. She turned to her colleagues and relayed the story McKelvey had provided. “I know we don't have access to any personal files, but I figured we could at least give him some of our brochures, our annual report. It's something at least. I feel bad that you came all the way from Ottawa.”

The young man had been eyeing McKelvey. He said, “It is a long weekend. Why would you assume we would be open?”

Smart kid, and confident, too, McKelvey thought. A good catch—why would an intelligent lawyer travel all that way without a confirmation?

“Guess my clerk got her wires crossed,” McKelvey said with a shrug. “She called here the other day and spoke to somebody, I know that much. Maybe they forgot it was a long weekend. Anyway, I took the chance. I don't really have many options left at this point.”

The younger man nodded, satisfied, and returned to his work. Pamela went over to a shelving unit that displayed dozens of publications, brochures and leaflets and fact sheets. She picked a few, came back and handed them to McKelvey.

“I'm really sorry I can't be of more help,” she said.

“This is a start,” he said.

“The executive director is Peter Dawson. I know he checks his messages even when he's on holidays. He's pretty dedicated to his work. I can leave your name and number if you like.”

“That would be great,” he said and gave his home number. “I'm staying at that number while I'm in town.”

It wasn't until he was on his way out the door that he remembered the name he'd given. He would have to keep that straight. He was Dick. Dick Leyden. He smiled as the door closed behind him.

SIXTEEN

K
adro drove the new junker Turner had acquired for him south towards the green-blue lakeshore. The vehicle was a 1996 white Toyota Corolla that smelled of wet dog hair and stale cigarette smoke, probably stolen, Kad surmised, from some social housing parking lot. Turner had left it in the parking lot of the Scarborough Town Centre with the keys under the lip of the wheel well. Kad stopped only once—to exchange a winning twenty dollar ticket for a new set of scratch and wins. He selected two five-dollar tickets for a game called “Keno” and two others for “Bingo”.

He sat there in the parking lot of the mini-mart and used a nickel to scratch all the tickets, brushing the foil flakes from his jeans and his hands. He didn't need to do this, he didn't even really want to, it wasn't something he could necessarily explain to someone who might see him sitting parked outside a convenience store—he just wanted to win, knew that unlike in war, the odds here were controlled by the printing of tickets. There had to be so many winners per box of tickets, of that he was sure. He had to look at the tickets very closely, to read the English very slowly and be sure he had not lost when he had in fact won. It was a fear, that because his English was rough, he might misread a ticket and throw it in a garbage can. He wondered how many times that had happened, someone reading a ticket too quickly, tossing it in the trash. How many people on the planet were still stuck in their humdrum life when in fact they were undeclared millionaires?

Fate and the odds. It was like mortar shells falling from the sky, launched by unseen hands across the distance, the trigonometry of death. The luck of the draw, they said. Utterly random. You were standing there taking a piss or else you weren't. Here it hits a bridge, or over here it hits a house with fourteen children huddled in the basement. The further you were from your target, the greater the odds of missing. How he had been standing not four feet from a fellow soldier when the man's head suddenly exploded from a sniper's shot—like a watermelon, the skull simply cracked and splintered, let loose the contents, this liquid so red and rich and putty grey, the taste of it on his face, combing it from his hair hours afterward. It left a man wondering, why me, why him, why here, why now. One second, half a second, not even the blink of an eye. What sort of strange algebra was at play? Born too soon, too late, or right on time.

A man had to discover for himself, Kadro had learned, the difference between the things that he could control and those that he could not. In the middle between those two poles there rested a patch of open space called
“semblance of peace”
. Once he himself had learned this lesson, always the hard way, always through death and guilt and bloodied hands, once he had learned this lesson, he was set free. The war was no longer something to be feared, for bullets and mortars and bombs and mines were entirely beyond his control. The only things over which he had perfect domain were his own hands, his head, his heart. If it was his will to kill, then so be it. If he was told to take the point in entering a village controlled by the enemy, then so be it. Come what may, come what may, there was no sense in pretending he had any say in any of this. That moment of realization was, Kadro believed, like being born again.

“Try again,” he said aloud. “Fuck you,” and he tossed the tickets to the floor.

He was careful not to speed or take sharp turns, lest he draw undue attention or scramble the precious cargo in his trunk. The school teacher, with hands and ankles tied expertly with military knots, would scarcely have noticed a bumpy ride, however, as he was still partially unconscious, breathing in shallow gasps in the dark, tight space. The teacher had been easy to subdue, as easy as Kad would have guessed, for the teacher, like most of his contemporaries in this soft and new country, had never known war, had probably never even as much as thrown or received a punch in anger. Knuckles soft, belly soft, jawline out there exposed—snap, and the man was out like a punch drunk boxer. He had placed his hands around the man's chest and dragged him gently into the master bedroom, set him carefully on the floor, tied his hands and legs with a couple of neckties, then went back down and got Donia where he had left her in the car across the street.

“He wants to see you,” he had told her, his head at her car window.

“What did you tell him?”

He looked at her earnestly, shrugged, and said, “I told him that we have to go back home for a death in the family. He understands. He was worried is all. Please, he wants to see you. And then we are finished and he is free to go.”