The Mazovia Legacy (7 page)

“I'm going to talk to that nun,” Natalia announced suddenly. She hitched her purse up higher on her shoulder and moved toward the sidewalk to cross the street back to the gate. Delaney was startled, looked up to where she had pointed, and then moved to go with her.

“What do you mean?” he said. “What would she have had to do with anything? Hold on.”

But Natalia was determined to go on and to do so quickly. Something about the situation suddenly made her want to act, to move beyond the precipice where the old priest's news had left them. She had been moving, she realized, as if in a dream since the night she discovered Stanislaw's body. She was tired of introspection. She yearned quite uncharacteristically for movement, action, definite answers, some promise of resolution.

“No,” said Natalia. “I want to ask someone else about all this. Anyone else. You stay here. They won't like men going in there anyway. I might be able to get her to tell me something.”

“Tell you what? What could an old nun possibly know about any of this?” Delaney asked impatiently. “Wait.”

“No. I'm going in.”

Natalia dashed across the road. There was no traffic. As she went back through the gate, she turned and saw Delaney standing on the sidewalk, looking perturbed.

Perhaps he will be angry with me now
.
But surely he of all people can understand this need for answers,
she thought.

For the first time in many weeks she was clear in her mind about what she was doing and why. She carried on up the driveway and into the main convent building. The worn wooden stairs inside were broad, gleaming with wax and the effort of many Ursuline arms. No one was around. She ran lightly up, and on the first dark landing saw the pale light from outside coming in a long row of windows that gave onto the shaded verandah. Through the spotless but very old glass she could see the back of a nun's veil — rocking, slowly rocking.

Natalia went through the door and apologized immediately to the old woman for the intrusion.

“Please, I'm so sorry to startle you,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”

The nun, easily past her seventieth birthday, stopped her rocking and sat up very straight in the high-backed chair. She had small, dark eyes that stared. She did not, however, seem afraid. Perhaps that was because she had seen Natalia coming across the road. Or perhaps it was because she had expected someone, eventually, to come.

*

Delaney watched from across the street as Natalia disappeared into the convent building. He felt the unpleasant sense of entanglement grow.

I'll have to wait for her now,
he thought, surprised at how annoyed this small inconvenience made him. He was used to being the one to make the moves, to seek the information, to plan a strategy. He expected that Natalia would be discovered by someone, reported to the priest, and that there would be a scene in which he would have to intervene.

He saw Natalia appear on the high, wide balcony, saw the old nun stop her rocking and sit bolt upright in her chair. Natalia pulled another rocker close to the old nun and sat facing her directly, leaning forward, and talking intently. The two women sat like this and talked for a long time.
Psychologist with client,
Delaney thought.

It was impossible for him to guess from their movements whether Natalia was having any success. He did not like being kept in the dark like this. He did not like depending on someone else to gather information for him. Then it occurred to him that not since they had driven in the gate that morning had he thought to check whether they were being followed. He did not like that very much either.

As he looked carefully around him now he could see no one watching, no car waiting, nothing untoward. He felt nonetheless that he was somehow losing control of the situation. He turned, crossed a small footbridge over the canal, and began trudging through deep snow down an embankment and out across the frozen lake toward the fishing shacks.

*

Sister Marie Alpha Gilberte Huberdeau, everdevoted, ever-obedient member of the Blessed Order of the Ursulines, watched quietly as the pretty young woman who had spoken such excellent French moved slowly back down the driveway to the street. At the gate, the young woman turned briefly back and gave a furtive wave up to the balcony. Sister Gilberte did not wave back. Nor did she yet rock, for the moment, in her favourite old oak chair. She watched as the tall young man, older than the woman, crossed the street to join her. He stamped snow from his boots and his trouser legs. They spoke for a few moments, and then the young man looked briefly up in the direction of the balcony before they walked together to get into a fine old car that was parked near the priests' residence. She waited until the car had sped off in a plume of steam in the direction of the city before she resumed her rocking once again.

Ah
, the nun thought,
ah, mon bon Dieu seigneur. The things one sees, the things one must endure in this life
. She rocked, and felt the chill of the coming afternoon in her nostrils. She smelled the vaguest hint of a Quebec spring, too, however, and that gave her spirit some repose.
After the winter comes spring,
she thought.

She thought, calmer now, of all of the winters and springs she had seen unfold from this very balcony and this very chair. She thought of other winters and springs she had seen in other convents and churches in other parts of this snowbound province.
Quelques arpents de neige,
she thought.
A few acres of snow. That is what the French kings called this place.

She was calmer now, after the surprise visit, and after the questions about things she might have seen. The girl's questions had been from the heart, Sister Gilberte had thought. Some things about Père Bernard, God save him, some things about the girl's uncle who had also recently been taken. Sister Gilberte had listened quietly and said very little, as was her custom, the way she and thousands of young Quebec farm girls had been trained to do as their duty to God and the Catholic Church. She felt that she had not sinned by telling the girl that,
oui,
sometimes she saw visitors come in the courtyard, and that,
oui,
she remembered seeing Père Bernard walking in the grounds and along the canal with another old man, not a priest, who would come by bus to visit from time to time. Even not so long ago,
mademoiselle,
yes that is true.

And,
oui,
she had seen other visitors. Of course, people came from time to time for the priests and for deliveries and to make repairs and remove the snow.
Oui,
people came in from time to time. It would be impossible, however, to remember all such visitors and so she really could not say who else might have come to see Père Bernard. That would be impossible to say. Sister Gilberte had preferred to listen to the girl's story of how her uncle had suddenly been taken, that he had been a good Catholic man who had fought bravely in Europe's War — the one which
les Canadiens français
had not wanted very much to fight — and that she missed him very much.

Sister Gilberte had listened and had not told the young woman about those she herself missed, about her own family she had left so long ago, about all that she had seen these past fifty or more years wearing the habit of the Ursulines.

She did not tell her about the day very much like this one, so many years ago, when she thought God had called her for her sinful thoughts and her dis obedience, when the trickle of blood ran down inside her thigh and she ran and ran and ran to a rushing icy stream between the hard frozen farms and sat with her skirts billowing up in the freezing water to wash that sinner's blood from her body. She did not tell the girl how the pains each month had been intense, excruciating punishment after that first time in the cold, cold water, how no matter how much she tried to wash away the sinful, sinful blood it still came, and how there was no one she could ever tell. There were things that must be kept strictly between a Catholic girl and her
Dieu seigneur
.

Sister Gilberte did not describe to the girl how proud her family was when she had been the first child to enter the convent, how they had waved and waved at the train the day she left for Saint-Jérôme. They had waved that way when her older sisters had left the village to work in the textile mills of New England and the shoe factories in the east end of Montreal. She did not describe all the convents and schoolrooms and hospitals and
presbytères
where she had done her duty to God and the Catholic Church. All of the things she had seen, and heard, and some she wished she had not seen and heard, things she was not supposed to see and hear.

Sister Gilberte shuddered. The wind from the river was getting colder as the sun moved. She did not wish to think this afternoon about some of the things she had seen and heard as an Ursuline.

The sounds in the night in the wide dark wooden convent halls.The sounds of weeping, the sounds of punishments, and the sounds of secret footsteps. The sounds, in those years when she was housekeeper to a priest far from here, of protesting, whimpering, groaning altar boys who had been summoned to consult with him behind closed doors. What did they do in that room those afternoons? What on earth could make the small boys whimper so?

There were things even here in Lachine that she wished she had not seen, wished she had not heard. And so she could not tell the young woman of that darkening late afternoon not so very long ago, when as she sat and rocked she saw two men in suits and fancy coats come and knock at the door of the priests' house much as the young woman herself and her friend had done this very day.

She thought it would not be right to tell how Père Bernard had answered, how the men had gone inside, how they had stayed for a very long time, only the three of them there that day. She did not tell how in the early evening dark the two men had come out to carry a long, dark bundle to their car, how they had driven it across the small canal bridge and past the boatsheds and down onto the thick hard ice and out to the fishing shacks.

She did not say how she saw them unload their bundle into one of the shacks and then drive away in their fine new car. She had not even told Père Carpentier when he returned that night from his duties in Montreal. It was not for her to tell all that she had seen and heard.

H
ilferty loved being a spy. He loved it even though he was the Canadian version of a spy, a sanitized and civilized version of what he secretly called “world class spies” like the CIA guys or the Brits or the Israelis. Still, he was as much a spy as you could get in this great northern outpost and he loved it. He really did.

He was particularly content on days like this. A classic late-winter or springlike morning — the choice of descriptions said a lot about your personality, the Service psychologists would no doubt claim — filled with February sunlight, the snow brilliant, the air not too cold. Alone in a shiny, oversized, and very comfortable government car, driving down the highway from Ottawa to Montreal. His snug little house in the charming New Edinburgh district, his charming assistant deputy minister bureaucrat wife, his charming perfect daughters behind him for a day or so.

He was fresh from a secret Saturday briefing with his supervisors — he just as secretly called them his masters — confirmed in the assignment he had been on for many weeks now, knowing exactly what his next moves would be, the issues of back-up and resources and manpower all sorted out, the way clear, for once, to carry on with what he was trained to do, what he suspected he had been born to do, for Canada.

Days like this, assignments like this, clear-cut situations like this, he knew, as he adjusted the balance control on the car radio so as not to miss a nuance of the baroque concert playing on the CBC, were becoming harder to arrange. His masters were lately far too worried about parliamentary committee submissions and staffing cuts and the cost of surveillance overtime and their own pensions, too frightened by the budget cuts to all federal government departments and services to keep clearly in their minds what the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had been set up to do and why minor issues of money and bureaucracy and mandate and accountability had to be pushed into the second tier of things to consider.

The meeting had gone exceptionally well. Hilferty had picked his most unspooklike suit for the occasion, since he knew Smithson did not like people flaunting their spy status on the arch-conservative streets of Ottawa, and Rawson was jealous of those who dressed better than he did. Hilferty's briefing was a classic. The adrenalin flowed directly to the speech centres of his brain and the words flowed out just as they had to in order to reassure his masters that all was well with this operation, that it was worth every penny and every operative who had been assigned to it, that no minister or journalist would get wind of it, that if they did there could be no hint of scandal or waste or violation of procedures or of the Canadian Criminal Code or, God forbid, of the constitutionally enshrined Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

And, of course, as was always the case when Quebec turf was involved, they had wanted endless reassurances that the operation would not flare up into another in the decades-long series of federalprovincial jurisdictional battles, that CSIS agents, and in particular Smithson and Rawson themselves, would not find their pictures on the front of the
Globe and Mail
or, God forbid,
Le Devoir,
in a year when the separatist government in Quebec City was planning to hold yet another referendum about whether people in the province had finally decided that, yes, this time they really had had enough of Canadian federalism. Everything was fine, just fine, Hilferty had assured them. Everything was going exactly according to plan, no chance of a fuck-up — Smithson liked briefings to have a few bits of profanity in them, as this made him feel more like the hard-bitten spymaster he would never prove to be — all going exactly according to plan.

Quite routine, really. Just carrying on, gentlemen, with our tracking of two Polish agents who have been in the country for some time. Monitoring their activities before kicking up a fuss at the Polish Embassy or approaching anyone in the band of reprobates and paranoiacs and malcontents and thugs who now made up Walesa's sorry excuse for a presidential team and the chaotic remains of a security apparatus in Warsaw. And most definitely, gentlemen, this high-priced journalist in Montreal could turn out be a help to them in their investigations. Yes.

It was a shame, Hilferty thought as he drove, how the whole CSIS thing had turned out, how cautious and apologetic Smithson and Rawson and those like them had had to become in carrying out what Hilferty, in secret, liked to call Their Important Mission. He hated having to make such earnest pitches for support for operations, having to go cap in hand to the Smithsons and the Rawsons of this world for permission to do what he knew was best.

It was true, he acknowledged this, that CSIS had never been set up to rival the American agencies in its work or its style, that it could never hope to anyway. And it was true that the official mandate for this civilian security agency, which had replaced the RCMP security service in 1984 when the Mounties had been caught doing un-Canadian things like breaking into offices and burning down separatists' property and stealing dynamite and other spooklike things, was domestic only. He was embarrassed to say to the American agents he came into contact with that, no, CSIS had no mandate to undertake covert operations abroad, and no mandate for its agents to carry weapons, and, no, he didn't think that was like running around without a dick. In secret, however, Hilferty yearned for the wide-open spaces of Yank or even British spookdom, for the overseas intrigue and the high-tech toys and the deadly weaponry and the life-anddeath nature of some of the assignments the Langley, Virginia, cowboys told him about in hotel bars over expensive CIA-issue bourbons. He wanted a piece of all that. He was tired of the endless, earnest debates in Canada about “security intelligence” as opposed to “foreign intelligence,” about when something posed a threat to the security interests of Canada and when it did not. He was tired of all this precious bullshit about Canada being a respected middle power and therefore, somehow, above the need for a bit of dirty old-fashioned overseas spying from time to time.

What other decent-sized country in the world would stick with such a ridiculous line besides dear old Canada? Not one. The world was changing fast, in Hilferty's humble opinion, and Canada had to change along with it. For all he knew, the powersthat-be in Ottawa would never be able to come to a decision about whether to set up a real foreign intelligence service in Canada. They had been dithering about it since the last war and they were dithering about it still. But he didn't give a damn about any of that bureaucratic bullshit. Never had. He knew what his real job was and he just got on with it.

Hilferty nursed the secret thought that he would have been a highly successful and valued CIA man, given the chance and the accident of birth in the U.S. of A. He had all the credentials, in his reckon ing. A conspiratorial mind — chess was his game from about the age of ten — a nice little degree in military history, an even nicer law degree from McGill. Then varied experience defending scumbags as a young criminal lawyer, then prosecutions in Montreal and the makings of a very nice little career in the Ministère de Justice
.
Another Montreal Anglo boy makes good.

But then, thankfully — there being no possibility of his ever playing in the American Spook League and his having no taste for becoming a Mountie spook — had come the McDonald Commission, the Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. With that came the decision to take spookery away from the Mounties, because they had been naughty boys, and give it to bright young non-policemen just like, Hilferty thought happily as he drove, his very self. His pleasure in having won the right to serve Canada as a CSIS agent had not been marred by the fact that, fair-minded Canadians all, the bureaucrats in Ottawa assigned to set up the new agency had sought applicants through large display ads in the careers sections of the major newspapers of the day. That didn't make the job any less special, any less important, in Hilferty's view.

So now, ten years in, he found himself driving down the almost empty highway toward his former hometown to continue his Important Mission to keep Canada a safe haven from nastiness of all sorts.

He had been doing his bit to push the envelope a bit, to do on the ground all he could to move CSIS along a little farther down the road to real agency status. He was sick of relying on those smug liaison officers from other services for the real dope on things that were important to Canada. Sick to death of it. So he pushed the envelope a bit whenever he could. He and some other like-minded CSIS men. Even if it meant keeping a few things to themselves, or occasionally breaking a few of the more vexatious rules and regulations that constrained them.

He had been doing his bit these ten years and, he liked to think in secret, the country was a little better for it. Those simple families in the little redbrick farmhouses he saw out the window of his car could have no idea just how fucked up a place the world was becoming, how very lucky they all were. They really had no idea.

And it was a very fucked-up place. This latest assignment showed that clearly. Hilferty guessed that when all was said and done he would probably just find that the Polish guys were here to watch Borowski, so they could report to Walesa what this loose cannon of a Polish-Canadian entrepreneur, socalled entrepreneur, was up to in Poland's election year. Hilferty guessed that was what they were doing here, but, then again, you could just never be sure anymore, with the Soviet Union completely fucked, and amateurs like Walesa running the store in places like Warsaw. It seemed to his logical military-historian's mind and his lawyerly training and his CSIS experience that it would be a natural thing for Walesa to want to watch Borowski, because the guy had scared the shit out of everybody in the last presidential election in Poland by suddenly going over and winning almost 25 percent of the vote.

Borowski, with his dubious, his really very dubious, biography, was worth watching. Even if you weren't Walesa and scared shitless about this mysterious millionaire who claimed he had made his wad in Canada in refrigerators after exiting Poland via Sweden in 1969. Who then acquired Argentine citizenship while running a restaurant in Buenos Aires, for Christ's sake, and then decided during the 1990 election that he'd go over from Toronto and stir the Polish pot with some statesmanlike rhetoric.

“Poles need a unifying goal and one such goal that can unite Poles is war.” That was one of his good ones. “The most effective weapon for Poland today is an intelligent medium-range missile with a nuclear warhead of about one megatonne.” Hilferty and the lads at CSIS had particularly liked that one as they sat in Ottawa and monitored coverage of Borowski's progress in the campaign.

So, OK. It's natural Walesa and his merry men would want to watch Borowski a bit this time around, especially since good King Lech had thrown the guy in jail for a few days after the 1990 campaign was over and had him charged with defamation before squeezing him for $100,000 bail money and kicking him out of the country.

But Hilferty had a sense there was perhaps more to it than that. He had never bought the rumours in 1990 that Borowski was KGB, or even CIA, for Christ's sake; the rumours had gone that far. He never bought that stuff at all. But, and God knows he would never say this to Smithson and Rawson, maybe he was dead wrong about the Borowski connection in the first place. Why would the Polish agents be spending so much of their time in Montreal? As far as he had been able to gather, they hadn't even gone up to Toronto or anywhere near Borowski's turf. Why was that?

And why would they bother with an old guy like Janovski? Where did an old World War II–vintage émigré like that figure in this? Hilferty had been able to make no connection between Janovski and Borowski, no matter how many keywords and crossreferences he fed into the CSIS computer late at night when all the little secretary foxes had gone home. And why would these guys be bothering with Janovski's niece now that the old man had bought it?

The questions troubled him, despite the soothing baroque music that filled the warm sanctuary of his large automobile. It also troubled him, though God knows he wasn't about to tell Smithson and Rawson this either, not yet anyway, that maybe the Poles had snuffed old Janovski, that maybe the little coincidence of his drowning was too hard to fathom any other way. It troubled him that if it turned out they were the ones who had done the old guy in, maybe the Smithsons and Rawsons of this world would wonder why someone on Hilferty's team had not been around the night it happened, seeing as they were costing the Canadian government such big bucks in surveillance overtime.

Hilferty sat up a little straighter now and began to concentrate on the heavy traffic that always built up on the western approaches to Montreal. He'd have to ponder all of that a little later, after he'd finished talking to Delaney. Yes, Hilferty thought, Delaney might just be able to shed some light on this for them, after he'd heard the little proposition that the fine young undercover representative of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was driving to Montreal to deliver personally. Hilferty would ponder all of that later, and then he would take little Ronika — racy little Ronika of the tight jeans and the university textbooks clutched so fetchingly against Danskin ballet tops — out for a bit of dinner and a bang later at the hotel, to console himself, in secret, about what a complex and possibly dangerous place Canada had become.

*

The tires on Delaney's Mercedes crunched wetly on the treacherous mixture of gravel and slush that passed for Brian O'Keefe's driveway in wintertime. He hadn't bothered to call first. In fact, he had had the most fleeting of intuitions that he had perhaps better start limiting what he said about all of this over the telephone. It was a Saturday morning, the day after his trip out to Lachine with Natalia, and he knew that O'Keefe would be home. Whenever he wasn't at the
Tribune
these days, and even on some days when he was supposed to be at the newspaper, O'Keefe retreated to his few hectares of land at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and played out his strange role as part gentleman farmer, part survivalist.