Snow Job (32 page)

The firm’s senior Ottawa solicitor, Sidney P. Biggles, was an unctuous former parliamentarian who’d gone down with the Liberal ship in the last election. He pounced as Arthur returned to the waiting room, rubbing his hands with glee over the poll results while regretting he wouldn’t be on the hustings this time.

“No, my duty lies with Tragger, Inglis, Bullingham — and even more proudly with their illustrious senior counsel. In the humble expectation you might squeeze out a few moments to sign them for staff, two dozen copies of
A Thirst for Justice
are already on order.”

“They might prefer to wait for the movie.”

“Marvellous. Have they engaged a leading actor? Someone with sufficient panache, I hope.”

Arthur considered spinning the joke out, but instead apologized for his feeble sense of humour. “Could you spare me an office, Sidney? I have matters to discuss with a colleague … and here he is now.”

Ray DiPalma, freshly groomed and in the requisite uniform of Ottawa grandees, a dark pin-stripe, shiny shoes, black valise, horn rims today. “Honoured to meet you, sir,” Biggles said, escorting them down a windowed hallway to a spacious, plushly furnished office.

“This is my own humble workplace.” Biggles raised a hand to deflect protests not made. “No, no, I shall insist, you must have it. Just shove those papers aside. Phone, fax, two computers, tape recorder should you care to dictate memos to our senior secretary. She will bring you coffee and something tasty to go with it. She’s yours for as long as you wish, do with her what you will and she’ll merely ask for more.” Rattling on like that, proving himself DiPalma’s match in logorrhoea, he sidled out the door.

“We should’ve insisted on champagne and exotic dancers,” DiPalma said. “I couldn’t get first class on the plane, though — heavy Christmas bookings. How much cash are you bringing?”

“Twenty thousand, mostly in traveller’s cheques.”

“May not be enough to buy the favours we’ll need.”

From the way DiPalma rubbed his fingers together, Arthur gathered payouts would be exorbitant. “I have credit cards.”

“You’ll be lucky to find a functioning ATM in Albania.”

“I can wire for more.” But he dreaded having to face the ire of the skinflint Bullingham.

DiPalma closed the room’s venetian blinds, brandished a cellphone. “Global roaming privileges.” He opened the valise and spread its papers out. “Overnight to Athens, a feeder to Corfu, hydrofoil to Albania. No maps needed — I know that country backwards. Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, I did them all when I was tracking Krajzinski. I have files on who’s who, who pulls the strings, whose palms to grease.”

DiPalma seemed phenomenally alert today, efficient. His tour of duty in the Balkans had been his time of glory, and he was excited to be returning. A last hurrah, Arthur assumed, for one coping with the gradual debilitating effect of Parkinson’s. Only lately had Arthur picked up on DiPalma’s tremors, a slight shaking of the hand. He was young for the disease’s onset, but famous other sufferers had achieved renown: Eugene O’Neill, John Paul II, Pierre Trudeau.

“I’m Ray DiPalma the developer. I specialize in vacation resorts. That’s why the new threads. Apex International Getaways Corp., properties in the Caribbean, South Pacific, Florida, Mexico. Albania is developing a tourism infrastructure, they’ll be drooling to get their hands on my money. I was up all night cobbling window dressing — letterheads, financial statements, brochures. I’m looking for beach property, you’re my mouthpiece.”

“I presumed I was going in as Abzal Erzhan’s lawyer.”

“Right, and you’ll be on the next plane back. Trust me.”

Arthur had brought documents too: a letter to Abzal from his wife, also signed by their children, along with photos of them. Those would introduce him, as would a recent front-page story,
complete with smiling pictures of Arthur standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Zandoo at their press conference.

“You’re absolutely sure CSIS knows nothing of this?”

“I told Crumwell I’ll be incommunicado for a week or so while I’m worming my way into the Environmental Revolutionary Front. Which doesn’t exist, except on paper — Zack and I phonied up some cryptic emails and some maps and diagrams of tar sands facilities in Fort McMurray. We’re scheming to plant some bombs — that’s what they’re supposed to think, but it’s just a form of paper monkeywrenching.”

This sounded more serious than the “diversion” Savannah mentioned.
Ray’s idea. He’s pretty imaginative
. “I would suggest you put that on ice.”

“Too late. Come on, Arthur, every cop in Alberta and half the CSIS staff will be freezing their butts off in the northern boreal forest while we enjoy our Adriatic holiday. It was Zack’s idea, the guy is brilliant.”

“It sounds of criminal mischief.”

“The stuff I handed over is too vague. No mention of explosives. I let them draw that conclusion. I’ve got a get-out-of-jail card with the greymail I’ve got on CSIS — that’s trade talk, means soft blackmail. Trust me.”

Hopefully, DiPalma would find safety behind the shield of Canada’s whistleblower laws, which Arthur had taken pains to review. But he’d gone beyond his role as double agent. Whether or not this was DiPalma’s idea — and he seemed unwilling to take credit for it — he’d become an agent provocateur, practically a subversive.

“I assume that when you fellows came up with this novelty you were on some potent Amazonian hallucinogen.”

“I’m off intoxicants. Cigarettes too, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m on the patch. Cleaning out the system.”

Maybe that accounted for his being so alert and organized. Arthur suspected he’d never seen DiPalma entirely sober before.

“Now I want you to sit down, Arthur, I want you to relax.”

Arthur subsided onto the couch, fearing the worst.

“I had to tell Crumwell about you and Savannah Buckett, because it’s all over your island. I also had to mention Stoney as the source, because the old man gave me the third degree and I didn’t want him to think I was hiding something.” Arthur went numb as DiPalma prattled on. “Crumwell wanted me to get some kind of statement from Stoney, but I explained that would compromise me. So he just let it drop, and I don’t know if they’re going to pursue it.”

He took Arthur’s hand, clutched it hard. “No way, I mean absolutely no way, am I going to let them smear you. It would be like … like standing by while they go after my own family. I’ll go public, I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles about how CSIS’s top spy tried to engineer a vicious slander campaign. He won’t get a job picking up dog droppings in the park. So let’s put it out of mind while we’re hot on the trail of the biggest screw-up since Maher Arar.”

Arthur remained silent as he once again reassessed his presumptive fellow traveller. Unreliable and unstable, according to Margaret. DiPalma fidgeted, patted his pockets out of habit, looking distressed — the patch may have lost some potency.

“We are solicitor and client, Ray, a relationship we entered into some time ago at your request. So I may not repeat what you have just divulged unless you release me from my obligation of silence. Otherwise, our communications remain privileged to the end of time, even should you suddenly, right now, drop dead in front of me.”

As if recognizing this as black humour, DiPalma attempted a stiff smile, then had to still a tremor of his hand.

“So this is what we’re going to do, Ray. You are going to free me from my legal restraint — conditionally. You are going to recite on tape your role, as mandated by Crumwell, to spy on Margaret and me, and you will detail this last conversation with him. I’m going to seal the tape in an envelope, which will be signed and dated by
Biggles and at least two other lawyers. It will be placed in the safe here with instructions it not be opened unless you and I somehow fail to return from Albania.”

“Bet your life we’re coming back.”

“Do it, or forget Albania.”

DiPalma hesitated only a moment. “No problem.” He sat at Biggles’s desk, and began talking to the tape machine.

Within the first ninety minutes of their crowded Olympic Airways flight, DiPalma had already broken his pledge not to drink, and was two vodkas to the bad — “Just enough to take the edge off” — but he was antsy, scattered in his conversation, an endless flow. Arthur’s concentration on his Albanian phrasebook was regularly spoiled by pokes and nudges.

He learned things he didn’t care to know: Sully Clugg, the ex-Blackwater bruiser, was suspended for three days after grabbing a secretary’s crotch at the office Christmas party. DiPalma had become so soused that he’d blown his chance with Aretha-May, passing out on her sofa. He was feeling sexually frustrated. He wished he’d been a better husband to Janice.

Arthur closed his eyes, tried to sleep, but DiPalma, keyed up, wired on the want of nicotine, lurched into a ramble about Albania. “Money will have to be the big mediating factor. Everything and everyone is for sale over there, politicians, government officials, but you have to break through the layers of the old Commie bureaucracy.”

Then came a primer on rendition practices: the Lear 35 the vehicle of choice, the victim encased head-to-toe in a black jumpsuit, diapers, sleeping drugs. Torture by proxy. Electrodes to the genitals, mutilations, mouths without teeth, fingers without nails.

Not for the first time, Arthur reconsidered the wisdom of this mission, this leap into the unknown. But he would heed the Bard:
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt
.

Many hours later Arthur awoke to DiPalma’s snores and the sun streaming through his portside window, land below, Germany maybe, or Poland. It took a while for him to shake off a chilling dream of lying shackled on a cold concrete floor, Anthony Crumwell snipping off his fingers, leaving bloody stubs.

Crumwell had earned this role as the black hat of Arthur’s nightmares through the fear and revulsion he’d provoked by prying into Arthur’s every intimate doing. If the gods are just, revenge will be delicious.

S
limed with mucky oil, slipperier than the greased porker he’d outclassed at last year’s Garibaldi Summer Games, Stoney crawled from under the Fargo and washed up at his outdoor sink. Job done, he was free at last, free of Arthur Beauchamp’s constant, heartless grousing. It took a while, but so did the Sistine Chapel.

He’d tie a ribbon around this baby, park it in Arthur’s driveway for when he returned for the holidays, a reminder it was Christmas bonus time. Heartbreaking to lose the old girl, she’d been in the yard so long she was like family. No sense letting her sit idle. A master mechanic must always break in any rebuilt trannie, and there was excess herbage to be ferried to friends at undisclosed border crossings.

Now he could go back to getting his latest business venture off the ground. Hot Air Holidays. His main task: sticking a broom up Dog’s puckered ass — his test driver insisted on tethering the balloon to the ground. Made it only six feet up last time.

The phone was complaining again from the house. Probably that grasping witch from the collection agency — she’d been hanging on his heinie like a Rottweiler for the last three weeks. Herman Schloss, the world’s worst poker player, had committed the highly unethical lapse of not disclosing the lien on his cabin cruiser.

An energy transfusion was needed. He fumbled through his eight-pack for a Lucky. The tab released with a comforting
phsst
, and he cranked it back, wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

The phone again. He went inside, waited as his machine reeled off his powerful new greeting: “Garibaldi Taxi, Loco-Motion Rent-a-Car, and Hot Air Holidays, offering twenty-four-hour-a-day prompt and efficient service. All our lines are tied up, so please leave a message.”

A male voice, whiney and pleading. “Mr. Stonewell, please pick up, this is my third call this afternoon.”

Which didn’t make sense, it wasn’t even noon. “Customer service,” he said, disguising his voice in case it was some other leech from the collection agency. “I’m sorry, our establishment has been experiencing heavy traffic today. Whom may I inquire is calling?”