William Deverell - Snow Job

Arthur had nodded off in the La-Z-Boy and hadn’t heard the Land Cruiser enter the compound, but he was startled to wakefulness as Inspector Fyfe charged inside. Fuzzy with sleep, Arthur watched him speed to the bar, pour himself a half tumbler of whisky, and down it in two gulps.

Arthur looked at his watch: ten o’clock. He’d expected to be back in his hotel by now, in bed. He started to struggle up, confused by Fyfe’s inexplicable distress.

“Don’t get up yet,” Fyfe said. “Take a breath.”

Longstreet came in now, alone. Arthur subsided back on the chair, his heart racing with the adrenalin of dread.

“He’s dead, Arthur,” Longstreet said. “When we showed up at his hospice, they had just cut him down.”

Three a.m., and still Arthur had not slept, though he’d slid under the covers almost three hours earlier, upon his return to the apartment. The meagre details known of Ray DiPalma’s suicide — if that’s what it was — played an endless loop in his mind.

Fyfe and Longstreet had been told only this: at DiPalma’s request, the hospice staff brought dinner to his room at six. When an attendant returned an hour later for the tray, she found him hanging from a beam, a chair tipped over. If the lead detective was to be believed, there’d been no sign of a struggle, no despairing note left behind. DiPalma’s dinner had been untouched.

The state police were sour with the inspectors, almost openly hostile, questioning their role, their presence in the country. A reputed Albanian connection to Abzal’s rendition was already big news in Tirana, and the death of a Canadian intelligence officer threatened a deluge of unwanted attention, so the inspectors contacted Canadian consular officials to attend to further arrangements, and proceeded on their way.

Arthur’s door was open a crack and he could hear Abzal snoring on the sofa bed, a restorative sleep at last for one whose hungering for justice and vengeance had denied him rest the last two nights. Arthur supposed he was inured to tragedy — the death of one ill-fated agent was merely a sad digression from the bloody events of Bhashyistan.

But for Arthur, the impact was barely endurable. Ray DiPalma, the shape-shifting spy who never came in from the cold. Despite himself, Arthur had made an emotional investment in the fellow, had learned not merely to abide him but to tolerate his quirkiness and feel empathy over his many plights. He’d not admired his impetuosity, but it had fascinated him, as had his boozy, convoluted logic. Crumwell thinks you think I’m on your side. Which is true. The last part, I mean .

However much Arthur prided himself on his ability to read the psyche of others, it had taken him an inordinate time to be satisfied of this double agent’s sincerity. Soon, proof of his good intent — an accusation against Crumwell but also a confession — would be removed from a safe in the Tragger, Inglis office and released to the media.

Arthur doubted he would ever be satisfied that DiPalma hanged himself. The indicators of suicide had been there: the overwhelming sense of failure and unworthiness, the shame of achieving celebrity not as a rogue but a dolt, his incurable nervous-system affliction, his alcoholism. Yet possible malefactors abounded.

Assassins hired by the renderers of Abzal Erzhan. Serbians seeking vengeance for the downfall of Krajzinski. Ledjina’s brothers.

He rolled over, tried counting sheep. When they balked at the fence, he tried goats …

“I fool you,” says a disembodied voice. Arthur sees only folk dancers on the cobbled streets, then looks up, and there’s Ray DiPalma, hovering in the air. “I did it for you,” he calls, drifting away. “I love you.” Arthur pulls hard at a tether rope but the gondola rises higher and higher, until he can no longer see DiPalma waving.

That image propelled Arthur to consciousness, and he lay there awhile, orienting himself. He was in the bedroom of his Ohrid apartment, and morning mist was rising from the lake. He scanned the sky through a tall window, as if expecting to see Ray still floating toward the heavens. All he saw were dark clouds, and they were shedding snow, and the beach and the streets were turning white.

It was Monday, an important day, the end of something … Yes, he was to return to Canada that afternoon. He was going home. That prospect helped lessen his gloom, and he allowed himself a spate of longing for his funky, fuddled island. Margaret had been no devotee of DiPalma, but she would understand his need to mourn and rebound before joining her on the road.

He hoped the simple routines of farm life would assuage tragedy’s pain, the health-giving chores, the communion of his boisterous farmhands and his many other friends. He will stoically endure the joshing repartee over his nationally advertised role as the bon vivant of Garibaldi. He must not miss the official launch of Hot Air Holidays — that seemed an important message from his dream.

He slipped into the main room — quietly so as not to arouse Abzal — and filled the coffee maker with water. “Damn,” he said, too loud, as his packet of ground coffee broke open and spilled. Oddly, that didn’t cause Abzal to stir — not the slightest motion or sound came from the sofa bed.

“Abzal?”

Closer inspection revealed that the bulge beneath the blankets was fashioned by cushions and pillows.

“Road to Victory!” proclaimed the banner on Clara’s Winnebago. “Join the Conservative Bandwagon.” Out side, five old-timers — boaters, braces, and brass instruments — were playing Dixieland, a genre Clara thought had died in the last century.

Advance scouts had done a methodically inept job of hiring local talent for each stop on this West Coast tour — yesterday’s jug band had been bad enough, but the Dixiecrats betrayed her party as seeming old and out of touch.

Clara had awakened to their sounds with a bang, bringing her alive to the innumerable crises from which sleep had given fitful release. She was now hurriedly dressing in the confined space that was her bedroom in this heartland-friendly Winnebago — the strategy was to portray Clara Gracey, Ph.D., as down to earth, just one of the folks.

She peered out a window. The Dixiecrats were outside an old movie house — the Palace, according to a marquee blazing bright in the dim morning light. “Remind me, Percival, where are we?”

“Oyster Flats.”

“And what are we doing here?”

“You are about to flip pancakes.”

She saw grills being set up near the press bus. Eight o’clock, locals streaming in, enough to make it a respectable show. She was in Margaret Blake’s constituency, a pit stop to show the flag in the Viking’s home town.

A jolt of black coffee swept clear the last cobwebs of sleep. No headache today, that was a mercy.

“Where will I take the Moscow call?” Arkady Bulov, the Russian president, was due on the line in about forty-five minutes. She’d met him once, at an economics summit in Lucerne. An unstuffy Harvard-trained M.B.A.

“A secure line is being set up in that theatre over there — it’s now the town’s recreation centre. After that, four quick stops before lunch, at which time we will connect you with General Buchanan.”

Operation Wolverine. As of two o’clock, she must tell Air Command to proceed or back out. Her divided cabinet, after wrangling through a long conference call, had thrown the whole load on her. She had never felt more alone, or more overwhelmed.

“Did Buster express any second thoughts?”

“He remains gung-ho.”

Clara opened the curtain of another window. A frost on the ground, but snowless. She’d had it with snow; somebody had lied about global warming. Her view was of framed country houses on large, well-kept lots — a neighbourhood that ought to be Tory blue, but the only lawn signs were Green, three of them. No matter. Clara had practically gifted the riding to Blake, whose brand of direct talk and unyielding idealism was playing surprisingly well across the country.