William Deverell - Snow Job

Okay, a couple of men have got out of the car, and one of them is going toward the men and women pouring out of the tents. A huge commotion! A shout, repeated. “Abzal! Abzal!”

It has become a chorus. They are thronging him. “Abzal! Abzal! Abzal!”

Dear Hank (continued) ,

Eight a.m., a cold winter sun is rising over the snowbound eastern plains. In the tent village of the Revolutionary Front, the partisans are dipping bowls into a huge pot of, I guess, porridge. Abzal Erzhan is still moving among them, hugging, shaking the hands that are not pummelling him on the back. “Abzal! Abzal!” Where had he come from? No one is saying .

We have just returned from breakfast downstairs in the officers’ mess, where we met a very engaging journalist, Vlad Mishin. The card he gave us says he’s with Izvestia . He arrived with Abzal Erzhan, I guess, though he didn’t say so. No one will talk about Mr. Erzhan, we just get shrugs. I find his presence here a little unnerving. A hero of the resistance, and a Canadian citizen to boot, but isn’t he also an assassin?

Anyway, Mr. Mishin wants to interview Maxine, Ivy, and me, and we’re game for that, anything that will get word out that we’re alive and well. He’s the only journalist here, and seems to have privileges, talking and joking with the colonel and his staff — they’ve probably ordered him to put the right slant on this story. Cynical me …

Abzal Erzhan has just entered the palisade gate, a Kalashnikov over his shoulder, and has joined red-bearded Ruslan and Atun and Colonel Letvinov, and they’re poring over maps down there. I’ve read history. Sometimes the big powers don’t directly invade the little ones. They use surrogates. At the Bay of Pigs the surrogates got trounced .

Through the binoculars Atun left with us, I see cook fires burning in the Bhashyistan army encampment. Their efforts at trenching have been abandoned — I think they struck hardpan over there. You don’t see any civilians on the village’s streets, it’s like a ghost town. Sometimes you hear a shot, accidental or caused by nerves. If you believe Atun, it’s deserters being executed .

The air seems prickly with anticipation. I know I should get away from the window, but I can’t. It’s nerve-racking, though, what if one of those rifles sends a bullet my way? Or a missile. I have an eerie sense the Russians might not mind, they’d have their excuse to go to war, which it looks like they’re itching to do .

Hello again, darling. It’s a couple of hours later. I’ll try to relate this as plainly as possible, though I’m absolutely shaking .

First of all, there was a plane, a small one, Russian, I guess, and it flew right above us, low, over the border, and you could see the Bhashyistan soldiers scampering off, like they were under attack, but the plane only dropped leaflets, it was like a snowfall of paper .

As this was going on, Ruslan was leading about a hundred partisans south, and Atun was taking another hundred to the west, a pincer manoeuvre, said Mishin. I’d better explain. Vlad Mishin has come up to our suite to do his interviews, and we all got distracted when the plane passed over. Vlad had his own binocs (and a satellite phone, by the way), and Maxine and Ivy and I were fighting over the other pair .

So Bhashyistan officers were running about, ordering their soldiers back to their positions, and you could see them, officers and infantry, mulling over the leaflets. They’re from the Bhashyistan Revolutionary Front, Vlad said, with a picture of Abzal Erzhan and a message urging the army to put down their guns and join the resistance .

While that was going on, Abzal Erzhan led the main body of partisans straight toward the little customs houses, and as they approached, there was wild activity on the Bhashyistan side, with most of the officers piling into army trucks and speeding off .

Some of the foot soldiers followed, bounding off like jackrabbits, but most began throwing rifles into a pile, raising their arms in surrender. By this time, Abzal Erzhan’s contingent had crossed the border. Not a shot fired! They simply took over the village, and the townspeople finally emerged from their homes. You could hear their chanting from the half a mile that separates us. “Abzal! Abzal! Abzal!” Even the soldiers who’d surrendered were calling his name .

Meanwhile, Vlad Mishin has been on his satellite phone, to his editor in Moscow, relating his scoop. Somehow, the communications blackout doesn’t apply to him. He looks really pleased with himself as he concludes his call … Oh, boy, he wants to know if I’d like to call home .

The girls had finally gone to bed, and Dr. Hank Svetlikoff was contemplating the risks of doing the same, of suffering through another tormented night.

He was slow to answer the phone, fearful of what he might hear — eleven o’clock on a Monday night seemed a good time for bad news. By the time he got to it, Katie had already picked up the extension, and was screaming wildly, nonsensically.

“Who is this?” he demanded.

“Just me, dear.”

“How like a winter hath my absence been. What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen.’” Apt lines from a favourite sonnet, recited with rumbling brio as Arthur warmed his buttocks by the blazing phony fireplace — a break from the gratifying task of vacating his unloved tenth-floor Ottawa flat.

No longer would he have to endure this thin-walled sound box, whose lessor was soon to resume his Ottawa professorship. No more Handel, no more theatrics, no more weekend revels detonating through walls and floors. Almost all his belongings were now bagged and boxed, and what wasn’t ready for storage would travel with him. Westward ho!

The four days since his return from Europe had been hectic: wearying sessions with police, politicians, and press, the constant nagging of the phone. Among the worst perpetrators: the deadline-bedevilled chronicler, Wentworth Chance — whose title for the final chapter, “A Balkan Odyssey,” hinted of ponderous prose throughout.

Newspapers had devoted vast columns of ink to Abzal’s rescue and his secret journey to his homeland, ultimately dwarfing the sadder story of DiPalma’s travails and death. Arthur had largely abided by RCMP pleas to withhold details so as not to compromise the case against the renegade CSIS agents, but he’d balked at keeping back the DiPalma tape. I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles about how CSIS’s top spy tried to engineer a vicious slander campaign .

The media trumpeted the tape as confirmation that Crumwell and Thiessen were co-sponsors of l’affaire Chateau Laurier — a journalist had already traced the hotel’s billing charges to an unspecified government account. CSIS issued its standard vague disclaimer: “The Service does not comment on investigations it may or may not be pursuing.”

Nor had it commented on DiPalma’s death, though it was the subject of massive speculation. His demise was still heavy on Arthur’s mind, his shrouded figure shuffling energetically through his dreams.

“The play’s the thing!” A bellow from the hallway, as the theatre major unlocked his door. He sounded in fine fettle, well recovered from the critical flop of “Marital Bonds.” Inhuman screeches sounded from the rock fan’s flat below, a skirl of amplified guitar, the thump-thump of bass. A woman’s shout: “Turn that damn thing down!” How pleasant it was to be facing imminent eviction.

It was Thursday, and tonight he would lay over in his Vancouver club before taking a weekend of recuperation on Garibaldi Island, a respite too brief. Then he would join Margaret on her crosscountry campaign train. Manitoba maybe, Northern Ontario.