The Mazovia Legacy (8 page)

It was a game that annoyed his wife, Karen, unspeakably. Delaney could only just remember the days when he and O'Keefe were young reporters together on the
Tribune,
and O'Keefe's marriage had not yet deteriorated to a tense stand-off. The O'Keefes had still lived in the inner city in those days, and even with Brian racing around on his beloved police beat for the newspaper and Karen working hard at university courses, they still had time for some semblance of a life together. Karen even smiled a little in those days and consented from time to time to having a few people over from the paper for bad pasta and cheap wine.

Now, a few unsuccessful separations later, she and O'Keefe still shared the same space, far though it was from the inner-city media life they had once shared, but she did not share her smiles very much at all. Karen had grown tired, in a way that Delaney knew all too well, of the raucous reporter's life O'Keefe loved so much. Tired of the boozing and the late nights and the shoptalk and the occasional indiscretions on the road, on assignment. Even the very late addition of a son, an enormous surprise to all O'Keefe's colleagues at the paper as well as to himself, had not improved matters much. The boy, Seamus, was now five years old. O'Keefe and Karen were five years older and five more years into their disastrous marriage, but there was still no end in sight.

Karen was underemployed as a nurse in a local community centre. Treating the cuts and scrapes of farm boys after their brawls in local taverns was not quite what she had imagined for herself when she was somehow won over to O'Keefe's mad scheme to escape the city. O'Keefe, for his part, contented himself in his time off with his gun collection, his two mongrel dogs, and tramping the overgrown fields around his house like some mad Irish lord, shooting at any bird or small animal that moved and dreaming of the day when an intruder might venture onto his precious sod.

Journalism had ruined O'Keefe in not quite the same way it had ruined Delaney. Delaney had moved around a lot in the business, worked here and there in a variety of media, thereby postponing the inevitable realization that 90 percent of journalism is repulsive, venal, mendacious, and cheap — a killer of souls and a graveyard of talent. O'Keefe hadn't gone the parliamentary correspondent, foreign correspondent route. Airplane and chopper rides and good hotels and expense accounts and glamour assignments hadn't spared him from the inevitable for as long as they had for Delaney. O'Keefe had stayed for almost his entire career at the
Tribune
and had taken on the persona of the loud, brash, terminally cynical city reporter so completely and so early that he could now hardly take the mask off, even with his oldest friends.

His inability to see any redeeming feature in any human endeavour, any public figure, in just about anything at all, had made him a very hard man, at forty-six or forty-seven years of age, to be with for very long. That, and his not terribly well disguised alcoholism were exhausting for those who dared spend time with him. Even Delaney did not come out to the farm very much anymore, though there was a period after his wife left him that he had spent more than a few nights with the O'Keefes, drinking the house whisky and fighting hounds for space on the couch. Karen had endured this for a while and then it became clear that Delaney had best begin passing his time some other way, inflicting his grief on someone else for a while.

O'Keefe, though, would have let his old friend, a fellow Irish Quebecer scribe of the bilingual kind, stay on forever. He would do anything for those he considered his friends and Delaney was counting on this for some help in the Janovski killing. For he had now decided that it, like the priest's death, was murder. O'Keefe's contacts in the police and the coroner's office and the more disreputable of the crime tabloids were up-to-date and first rate. And O'Keefe spoke the sort of raw French
joual
of the streets to which Montreal cops and coroners responded well. Delaney's French was simply wrong for this sort of work. It made him suspect, an
Anglais
.

Karen appeared more sullen than usual as she opened the door to the O'Keefe kitchen. She had gained a lot of weight and her hair was dry and not well combed. She was busy heating soup on the stove for young Seamus, even though it was midmorning. The heir to the O'Keefe land holdings sat at the plastic-covered table with a foolish grin on his face.

“Hi, Uncle Francis,” Seamus said. “I'm having soup.”

“Brian's out in the barn,” Karen said. “Hunting pigeons.” She was not one for small talk anymore. But she paused, and then asked: “You doing OK, Francis?”

“Yeah, good. You?”

“Terrific.” She ladled steaming soup into Seamus's bowl. “Had lunch?”

“Bit early for me,” Delaney said.

Karen looked relieved. There was a burst of gunfire from the direction of the outbuildings and she looked sharply at Delaney, as if this was somehow his fault.

“That'll be Rambo in the barn,” she said. Delaney heard several more blasts from inside the dilapidated grey barn as he crunched through old snow toward it. He was careful to call out loudly before going in, lest O'Keefe think he had at last found some human target for his rage.

The firing stopped and Brian appeared, wearing what looked like a Crimean War greatcoat, a tweed cap, and a pair of grotesquely soiled rubber boots.

He stood well over six feet tall. In one hand he carried a short-barrel pump-action shotgun, of the sort used by riot squads the world over. In the other, a quart bottle of Molson's Export Ale.The murderous gun had come from a friend in the Quebec Police Force; the beer was from the battered Kelvinator fridge O'Keefe kept in the barn.

“Oh fuck me, it's Delaney,” O'Keefe said. “What do you want now? Don't come whimpering to me about your girl troubles again, whatever you do.”

O'Keefe somehow managed to grasp Delaney in a bear hug without spilling any of his beer or killing either of them with the shotgun. Delaney always felt like a frail boy in one of O'Keefe's extravagantly rough embraces.

“Have a beer, young man, and we shall eliminate this pigeon problem together,” O'Keefe said.

They went into the dim stinking barn. A couple of frightened cattle, the sum total of O'Keefe's herd, looked without hope at the new arrival, aware that nothing would save them from this madman with a riot gun. High in the rafters sat a line of pigeons, equally terrified, at whom O'Keefe had been launching fusillades.

“These fucking pigeons are driving me crazy, Francis. They shit everywhere.” O'Keefe managed to open the fridge door, retrieve a bottle from inside, open it, and hand it to Delaney, again without putting down his own burdens. “I'll get my doublebarrel from the house for you.”

“Never mind, Brian. I'll just watch.”

This was O'Keefe's cue. He put down his beer, loaded three shells into the chamber, and fired them in quick succession in the general direction of the rafters. He pulled expertly at the wooden stock between shots to reload.

“Bastards, bastards,” he shouted with each explosion. “Sons of bitches.”

Birds fell. The hunt and the beer and the toowarm coat had reddened O'Keefe's face. He grinned wildly at Delaney.

“Want to have a go?” he asked.

“No thanks,” Delaney said.

“Faggot.”

“Look, Brian, I'm not going to keep you long. I need a favour.” Delaney found himself unable to be charmed by O'Keefe today, or anytime lately. “What's up?” Brian asked as he reloaded. Delaney explained as little as he could about his interest in the death of Stanislaw Janovski and Father Bernard Dérôme. Could O'Keefe possibly help him out by making some inquiries about actual times and causes of death, coroner's reports, autopsies, police investigations, if any?

“Your police contacts have always been better than mine,” Delaney said. “And I've been out of the front lines for a long while now.”

“Yeah, I know,” O'Keefe said. “Too cerebral for the police beat now. Let your old pals deal with the pigs now. I know that little game.”

“So what do you think?”

“I'll check it out for you. When do you need it?”

“I don't know. Soon. Monday?”

“I'll try,” O'Keefe said. “What are you working on exactly?”

“Oh, just a little sniffing around for a longer piece.”

“And you don't want to tell your old pal Brian O'Keefe too much about it just yet.”

“Not for the moment, Brian, that's true. You know the scene.”

“Yeah,” O'Keefe said. “Investigative bullshit. So what have we got here? Old Polish guy, drowned. Old French priest, drowned. Don't tell me, let me guess. A couple of old faggots, and young Delaney figures he's got the Catholic Church in his sights at last. Any choir boys involved?”

“Not so far.”

“Or no, I've got it. Old Polish guy wishes to leave his vast riches to the Church, but a jealous relative, no, his wife, finds out and kills the fucker first.Then does the same to the priest who had the idea in the first place.”

“It's good, Brian. Very good.”

“‘Two Dead in Catholic Sex Romp. Pope Implicated.'”

“That's it exactly.”

“Sounds exciting. I can't wait to see it. Joint byline if I help you out, of course.”

“Of course.”

They both took manly pulls at their beer. Delaney realized, somewhat sadly, that there was not much more to say.

“Here. Take a shot,” O'Keefe said. “You'll need some practice if you're taking on the Quebec Catholic Church hierarchy, my lad.”

For some reason, Delaney took the offered shotgun. He loaded it with one shell. He'd been around guns often in his reportorial travels over the years, but had not fired many. He sighted up to the rafters and then out at the bright rectangle of snow that shone through the doorway. He felt a growing urge to fire, to unleash what was contained, to see the effects of this powerful tool he now held close to his face. He smelled the polish on the stock and the light oil on the barrel.

“Go ahead,” O'Keefe said as he drank from his bottle and watched Delaney's hesitation. “Shoot.”

Delaney turned and sighted along to a cluster of empty brown beer bottles that O'Keefe had placed on a wooden crate near a support beam. Delaney suddenly wanted to effect change in this target, to transform it, if not necessarily to destroy it. All other stimuli momentarily fell away.

He sighted down the barrel for what seemed to him a long time. Then he slowly squeezed the trigger, remembering how a Sandinista soldier had once shown him to keep a gunstock tight against his shoulder. The explosion of sound was deafening, so close to his ear. The target burst into a brief cascade of brown glass and droplets of beer and bits of shattered wood. Pigeons poured from the rafters and the cattle lowed in terror. O'Keefe's maniacal laughter frightened them even further.

“You're a natural, Delaney,” O'Keefe roared as he danced briefly in the muck and straw of the barn floor. “You're a fucking natural.”

As Delaney drove away down O'Keefe's driveway, he heard more gunfire coming from the barn. His right ear was still ringing from the single shot he had fired. He felt a dangerous exhilaration.

*

Delaney knew Hilferty slightly. They'd had a couple of extremely off-the-record conversations when Delaney was researching his book on the CIA and Quebec separatist groups. Hilferty, Delaney had decided then, should be placed in the category of not-terribly-reliable source. Close enough to information of interest but either unwilling or unable to share the truly interesting bits with anyone, least of all an investigative reporter.

Still, some of the things Hilferty had passed along proved useful, if only in leading Delaney to people who really knew what was going on in those days and were willing to say. Hilferty was also to be placed in the category of those police officers and not-so-secret agents who get a thrill out of journalistic interest in their work and their lifestyles, those who have to restrain themselves from telling more than they know should be told, or from telling more than they realize they are telling.

After all his years as a reporter, Delaney was not surprised when Hilferty called unexpectedly from his car phone and said he wanted to meet. He'd had dozens of unexpected calls from people over the years, and dozens of unexpected meetings. The only surprise was that Hilferty was already parked downstairs on University Street and wanted to come up right away. As usual lately, Delaney had not much work he wanted to do and the call he wanted to make to Natalia after his morning session with O'Keefe could wait. He told Hilferty to come up.

He didn't try to guess whether this could have anything to do with the Janovski thing. Hilferty was the type who would tell him soon enough.

Of course Hilferty took Delaney up on his offer of a drink, even though it was early afternoon.
He reads too many thrillers,
Delaney thought as he poured a Jameson's for his guest and a mineral water and lemon for himself. Hilferty had taken off his black cashmere overcoat and placed it carefully down on the sofa, label out, so it would be clear it was from Holt Renfrew. The silk scarf, he left on. It actually looked quite good with his Holt's houndstooth jacket and his bright yellow V-neck sweater, which was also in cashmere. He took the clinking glass from Delaney and wandered around the living room a little, talking as he went.