Slow Recoil (24 page)

He'd thought in his naïveté that she meant as a prisoner, that he had been executed as a criminal. And it was true in a sense, for she had told him—the closest she had come to shining a light on her past—she had told him how he had been murdered during the war. But then, seeming to sense she had betrayed her secret memories, she had closed up again. He told her about his wife and the drunk driver who ran her down on the street as she was leaving work. How everything left you in that single moment when the telephone call startled you. Your whole life draining from you in one rush.

Who was this woman?

There was no clue to her past beyond the meagre facts she had set out: she had lost her husband, she had come to Canada to both escape the memories of her brutalized homeland and to start again. And she wanted to learn to speak and write English better than she could.

“Here I can be anybody I want,” she had said. He remembered it now.

He called out, and his voice echoed. A large room then, empty. Factory or warehouse? Sounds of the harbour, gulls and boats—if he listened closely, with intent and focus. He was near the lake, of that he was certain, as certain as a blindfolded man can be.

What were the motives at play here? A kidnapping for ransom? What the hell did he have to offer anyone, besides a teacher's pension? It didn't make sense. It was Donia, something about her.
Who was she
? Charlie had been right, of course. He had no idea who she really was, who he was fooling around with.

He squeezed his eyes shut, wiggled his hands to no avail, and willed with all of his remaining energy to send McKelvey a sign, a signal.

Come for me, Charlie…

NINETEEN

B
ojan Kordic brought the razor to the neckline and, with the fore and middle fingers of his free left hand, pulled the skin taut. The razor made its familiar scraping sound as it slid upwards following the grain of the hair, mostly grey now. He paused there in mid-motion, face pasted with rich sandalwood lather, the straight razor which had belonged to his father spread open in its sterling silver “V”—the only piece of home, of his past, that he had carried with him to this new country. Now he owned a new name, a new history.

He paused. He thought he saw something move in the mirror. The slightest ripple of the shower curtain behind him. He slowed his breathing. The tap dripped. He shifted his weight, gripped the razor, then pivoted on his hip, thrashing open the plastic curtain. Empty, of course. A shampoo bottle on the edge of the tub teetered over from the momentum and fell with a hollow clunk. It was getting to him again, the war. Those days, so far removed, and yet burned into his memory for repeat play without advance notice. The images came back while sitting in a meeting at work, or reading to his daughter at night, these flashes, sounds, smells. He had been waking from terrible dreams lately, too, dreams of faces, arms, hands reaching out to him…

After shaving, he went quietly down stairs and ate a bowl of hot oatmeal while scanning the international box scores for soccer in the
Toronto Star
. He did not like hockey, although in order to talk business in this country he kept up on the progress of the Maple Leafs, the player names and trades, even bought tickets to take clients to games, feigning passion when the Leafs scored. He did not like hockey or baseball or basketball, but he missed the old rivalries in soccer, the open air stadiums in his old country. He ate alone in the silence of the kitchen until his wife came down in her robe and put coffee on. And then his daughter, the jewel of his eye, came down the stairs. She came over and asked to sit on his lap while she dribbled Cocoa Puffs down the front of his dress shirt. She was dressed in her new
Lilo
& Stitch
nightgown, her new favourite movie character.

“Do you really have to go to work on the long weekend?” his wife said.

“I have paperwork to catch up on,” he said, “my sales and inventory reports. I won't stay more than three or four hours. How about we take a hike in the bluffs when I get back this afternoon?”

Then Bojan Kordic grabbed his overcoat and his briefcase, kissed his wife and daughter goodbye, and, with a heart full of gratitude, pulled out of his suburban driveway in his silver Subaru Forester. He did not notice the white Toyota Corolla pull away from the curb a little ways down the street and follow him through his neighborhood maze, out to join the line of traffic on the Don Valley Parkway moving south towards the downtown.

Maxime Auteuil was quite certain the driver of the white Toyota Corolla was unaware that he was being followed. How interesting—the follower being followed. And it was quite conceivable, he mused, that he himself was being followed as well—this strange chain to infinity. Though not likely. He glanced in his rearview and side mirrors. It wasn't the first time he had done this; he had become something of an expert in the tracking and tailing of people during his days working undercover, tracing the drugs and arms shipments through the ancient port of Marseille, that cavernous underworld of dangerous characters. He had followed suspects for weeks, sometimes even months. He'd watched people shave, shit, shower, shuffle along in the mundane ruts of their life, he'd seen it all and written it down in a notebook for later recall and testimony. The only difference here was the lack of familiarity with the landscape, the lay of the land. He had waited a moment before pulling from the curb, and now he was three cars back on the parkway. It was a beautiful country indeed, and this city, what he had seen in his first twelve hours, was not bad at all. It was no Paris, no Lyon, to be certain, but it had its charms. It was new and clean, for starters, even though the food was horrible and the wine even worse.

He yawned wide and saw the back of his throat in the rearview mirror. Hard to believe he was here, really here, closing the loop on this final case. After leaving the RCMP officer, he had gone to the avenue of car rental agencies. He'd selected a black Hyundai Accent, joined the Gardiner Expressway, and wound his way downtown to the Royal York Hotel. He passed on a free upgrade to a full-size car, much preferring the familiarity of a smaller vehicle, which was the norm back home. Even the police vehicles were tiny Renaults. The flats, too, and the hotel rooms, the pant sizes. Here, everything was larger, starting with the sky. The attitude seemed to be “more space, so why not take it up?” But it was his accommodations that he refused to downgrade, choosing wherever he travelled to stay in four-star properties, which was of course covered within the expense claim guidelines as set out in a sixty-page booklet that every agent was expected to memorize—despite the fact the bureaucrats in Financial Control were constantly updating the thing with sub-clauses and fine print to guard against complacency and fraud. Yet another reason he couldn't wait to retire, to leave behind the universe of reports and receipts and statements and testimonials, dotted ‘I's and crossed ‘Ts'. There would be no bureaucracy at his chocolate shop,
mais non
; as long as he listened to his wife, he expected they would be just fine.

The red wine he'd ordered in the dark and small Library Bar on the main floor of the Royal York Hotel had been half decent, he had to admit, but it still did not compare to the wines of home. He could not be certain if this was a question of quality, which he doubted, or more a question of setting—
les environs.
This was the
je ne sais quoi
of French cuisine, the small miracles of fresh and warm baguettes brought home under your arm at the end of a long day, strong cheeses and red wines partaken of in the middle of the afternoon. He was sure this was the case, as the wine he had ordered had actually been French, so go figure. It just didn't taste the same over here. Not to mention the fact that the waiters didn't know wines from their assholes, even though they pretended to know the difference between a
syrah
—or Shiraz, as the Americans called it in their sensitivity to corporate branding—grown in the scrublands of middle California or the Rhône Valley of France.

Maxime followed the white Corolla. And the white Corolla followed the Subaru driven by Bojan Kordic. There were two targets that he was aware of: Bojan Kordic and Goran Mitovik. There was no police science to his choosing to begin with a stakeout of Bojan Kordic, it was simply flipping a coin. But Maxime had been a cop long enough to appreciate that strange mix of luck and hunch and a little nudge from the cosmos. He had been sitting slumped down in the seat of the car for just under two hours when his choice to begin with Bojan Kordic had so quickly brought about a promising lead. While there was no way he could be certain at this point that the man in the Corolla was in fact one of the Colonel's operatives—perhaps it was a creditor or a jealous husband or a disgruntled former employee—the odds were heavily in his favour.

That Bojan Kordic had perhaps only hours left to live worried Maxime not at all. It was not his concern, not his place to intervene in the fate of this man. These events had been set in motion years before. His interest was solely in tracking the man in the white Corolla, who would eventually—hopefully—lead him to the man he had travelled across the ocean to find. It was all about working your way up the chain one link at a time.

Kadro followed the Subaru down the DVP, across midtown, then southward to Spadina at Queen. The so-called Fashion District was home to the city's largest selection of garment and fashion accessory producers, custom bridal shops, fabric and leather and fur outlets. Many of the producers and boutiques were housed in renovated former warehouses.

Bojan Kordic pulled into the lot behind his factory, a fourstorey brick warehouse with the words “Garbo Garments” painted neatly in black lettering on the bricks above the front entrance. The parking lot was big enough for forty cars, four rows of ten. Today there were only half a dozen cars, and it made the place look all the emptier. Bojan got out and started for the back doors, and after a few steps he sounded his car alarm with a click of his key fob. Kad pulled in and stopped so that his car was still concealed by the side of the building, not yet visible in the parking lot. As Bojan unlocked and slipped inside the rear double doors, Kad eased back out of the lane onto Spadina. There would be fully functioning video surveillance cameras to catch a one-eighty field of view, of that he was certain.

Maxime slowed down along Spadina just in time to catch the white Corolla backing up the laneway between two warehouses. Maxime was in the flow of traffic and unable to stop, but he glanced over his shoulder and watched as the Corolla pulled out and found a parking spot along the street. He went two blocks farther and did the same. He sat in the car for a moment with his notepad, marking the times and locations, the license plate of the Corolla. He opened his attaché case, which contained his Walther P38 sidearm locked within a smaller case, his files on the two known targets—Kordic and Mitovik—as well as a much thicker file on the operations and known associates of The Colonel. He moved these aside and found the slim black case that contained his GPS tracking device and the handheld receiver that looked like a cellular phone.