Face/Mask (16 page)

“Just wanted to make sure you were OK,” he said after a few seconds of awkward silence. “We can talk later. You should rest.”

“OK, Dad,” Richard replied, laying his head back down on the pillow. But as Janus headed for the door his son spoke again. “Dad. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have driven the car on the highway.”

“Uncle Joe shouldn’t have taken you out in the first place.”

“No, Dad. It wasn’t his fault. He really didn’t want to take me. I begged him. And I begged Mom until she said it was all right.”

“You couldn’t have waited until I got home?”

“You always get home late. And then you lock yourself away in your office.”

The reproach in Richard’s voice was unmistakable. Janus closed the door softly behind him, then leaned back against it for a moment. So was it his fault now that he had a job to go to? Did this give Joe license to step in as a surrogate father-figure, albeit one who never had to impose discipline, or worry about spoiling his children?

Janus walked to his bedroom, not sure what he would say if he had to face his wife’s uncle just then. From the top of the stairs he could hear hushed whispers below, and he could just make out Terry’s words, which had a sense of urgency to them.

“Don’t be silly, Uncle Joe. He knows it’s not your fault. It was a drunk driver. In the middle of the afternoon; can you believe it?”

Janus slipped into the bedroom and closed the door behind him, giving it a hard push at the end so they would hear it close and know where he was. They would be able to relax and wouldn’t have to whisper when they spoke about him. He kicked off his shoes and lay down on his bed fully dressed.

He knew that eventually Terry would come to him, if only to call him for supper. He would have to face them then, and maybe even discuss what had happened. He was certain that Joe would be sufficiently apologetic, although Terry was already providing him with an excuse. They would sit there looking at him, waiting to see what Janus would say, if he would be forgiving or accusatory. And Terry would be giving him that look that warned him not to disturb the harmony she had established in her household.

Janus knew he could get through tonight’s supper without saying anything to hurt anyone’s feelings. He had become quite adept at dissembling; allowing everyone to see only the mask he put on. Terry, Joe and even Richard would be relieved to see how reasonable he was, and their evening would not be the horror-show they feared.

But Janus didn’t feel the least bit reasonable. He’d had about all of Joe he was willing to take for today, and maybe for some time to come.

Joe was the kind of man who took it for granted that everyone who met him thought he was a great guy. It would never occur to him that as kind and thoughtful as he was he constantly overstepped the boundaries that Janus had tried to establish for his family. And the consequences this time were horrible, and could have been worse.

In many ways Joe was like a spoiled child who did whatever he wanted yet was somehow always above criticism. But unlike a misbehaving child Janus couldn’t send him to his room, worn-out welcome or not.

“No, Joe, you don’t get sent to your room,” Janus whispered to himself. “Not for this. Not for this.”

September 13, 2039:

Robert Sévigny came to the end of his com-call with Hans Schultz, who’d been asking if there was anything new to report on the search for his mysterious, missing information. All Sévigny could tell him, as he had so often that summer, was that his sources were doing their best to keep an eye out for it, but had come up with nothing so far. Schultz, surprisingly patient and good-humoured despite the constant lack of news, thanked him and promised to call back in a week or two for another update.

“Looking forward to it,”
Sévigny said, wearing a subservient smile on his face until Schultz turned off his com; then he leaned his head back and rolled his eyes.

A moment later a light ping from his P-screen got his attention. A report with the subject heading “Janus” had just been sent to him. He reached out and touched the screen, wondering what it could be about, and found himself quite surprised by the report’s contents.

An “anonymous complaint,” one of hundreds received each week at the RCMP tip-line, had come in concerning an old man of Italian origins who was suspected of buying food on the black market. Such a complaint would normally be forwarded to the Economic Crime Division, but Sévigny had asked that the P-screen be programmed to flag anything concerning Allen Janus.

Although these kinds of complaints were advertised as being anonymous they were, of course, automatically traced, disclosing that the call in question had been made by the Department Head. The man he was informing on was, of all things, his wife’s uncle, Giuseppe Pizzi, who had been living with Janus and his family for over two years.

Sévigny read the complaint again: Pizzi was buying unstamped groceries from a
Boucherie St. Laurent
, and for some reason Janus had decided to make a complaint about him. He rubbed his forehead, wondering what the man’s reasons might be.

As curious as Janus’s actions were, what caught Sévigny’s attention was that the butcher shop’s name was highlighted in red, meaning that it was of high interest to somebody in Security Prosecutions. He touched the name on his screen and was prompted to enter his ID number.

A classified report on a butcher shop
.
This day’s getting stranger by the minute
.

He punched in his code and a report appeared, with the first entry being May 15, 2019. Scrolling down quickly to the end of the report Sévigny saw that the final entry was dated in 2022, although electronic surveillance was listed as ongoing but dormant. Sévigny knew that this contradictory phrase meant that bugs in and around the store were still actively recording, but the recordings were stored on the massive RCMP hard drive without any detailed analysis being done. That meant 17 years’ worth of conversations was readily available, for anyone who needed to listen to it.

Jumping back to the report’s opening paragraphs, Sévigny learned that Antonio Cirillo, owner of
Boucherie St. Laurent,
was a butcher like his father and two uncles were before him. His family had moved to Montreal in 1983, when he was twelve, and opened up the butcher shop which would become his second home for the next fifty years.

Cirillo had come to the attention of the RCMP in 2019, when one of his customers had complained that he was selling imported
Halal
meats. The fact that he was in any way catering to a Muslim clientele, when so many of that community’s own butcher shops were being forced to close, was cause for suspicion at the highest levels of the Security Directorate. Someone was concerned that Cirillo was sympathetic to the Muslim population that was gradually being pushed toward the internment camp in Laval.

Electronic surveillance was authorized and undercover agents were assigned to frequent the shop from time to time. Most of them were Christians from Middle-Eastern backgrounds who could pass for Muslim. They bought the
Halal
meat and cultivated friendly relations with Tony, trying to sound him out about his allegiances and his acquaintances. They could never learn of any disloyal activity, or even opinion, on his part. He claimed to be nothing more than a businessman catering to a regular clientele. By early 2021 residence in Laval was obligatory for Muslim families, and Cirillo had no more clients for his
Halal
meats. At that point the double-agents stopped frequenting his butcher shop.

Other agents, all legal residents on the Island of Montreal took up the investigation and the electronic surveillance continued, but after another year, with nothing to report, even these agents were reassigned. The electronic surveillance on the shop remained a part of the country’s ever-growing network, as spying on one’s fellow citizens had become second nature at the Security Directorate. Recordings of all conversations at the shop were made as a matter of course, then filed away and forgotten.

Now the
Boucherie St. Laurent
had once more come to the attention of the authorities. Sévigny cared little about people who bought food on the black market, even if the administration depended on the income from its heavily-controlled supermarkets. He was, however, curious about all the seemingly unconnected suspicious activity.

Janus, an administration director with some clearly unsavoury habits, had been seeing an Arab prostitute for several months. His wife’s uncle, a non-citizen, was shopping at a black market butcher shop for months, a butcher shop with a history of anti-administration sympathies. The wife and her uncle were part-Muslim, although this had been hidden on Pizzi’s request for an entry visa. And now Janus informs on the old man. Why would he do that? Was there something more than undeclared groceries involved here?

Sévigny knew that Prescott would want to be informed of this latest news about Janus. At the same time he’d see if the former prosecutor’s connections would authorize an analysis of the old surveillance recordings. This was something that would require a lot of man hours, but Prescott would surely agree it was worth it. If Prescott wanted to know what Janus was up to Sévigny was sure the answers would be found in the recorded conversations.

The Akwasasne Mohawk Reservation straddled the borders of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, as well as western New York State. The natives who lived there had patrolled these borders for decades, until 2020, when a combined force of American and Canadian soldiers invaded and took control of the border-crossing between the two countries. This led to an armed struggle that borrowed heavily from the tactics of insurgents in the renascent Afghan War.

The result was four hundred dead, evenly distributed on both sides of the conflict, in just a few months. At that point the general public, not yet having sunk to its eventual level of apathy, raised an outcry against the conflict. The administration discreetly decided that its military resources were required in the larger theatre of war, declared its objectives achieved and pulled its troops out of this potential quagmire.

In reality a compromise was found whereby the natives controlled who and what went through the border crossings, while the administration’s drones patrolled the skies. Despite the occasional anonymous pot-shot at these drones, the truce held and a peaceful coexistence continued to exist twenty years later.

With the largest urban center in the area being the small town of Cornwall, and no major industry for hundreds of miles around, the air here was cleaner than in the cities. Fearing that any growth of the local population might bring with it the deadly pollution that was common to all larger towns, the Band Council passed a regulation forbidding expatriate natives from moving back to their ancestral homes.

This brief history of the Akwasasne Reservation, which was the preferred location of smugglers on both sides of the border, was recounted by Tony Cirillo to his friend Joe as they rode there from Montreal in the back of a small van. The trip took over two hours because of three road blocks that had to be cleared, but Joe hardly felt the time pass.

As they drove through the countryside Joe could see the haze above him thinning out, allowing occasional peeks of the sun, glowing a toxic orange in Earth’s ailing skies. It was probably only his imagination, but even inside the van he thought the air smelled better here than in the city. The miles of untillable farmland on both sides of the road reminded him of the rolling countryside outside his village of Miramare.

Tony had told him that the antibiotics they were going to buy came from an American pharmaceutical company that regularly manufactured more than its legal sales quota. Canadian regulations limited the amount of drugs that were allowed on the market each year. This kept prices artificially high for local distributors while ensuring a healthy annual profit for the administration, which was the company’s main shareholder.

While these antibiotics were extremely expensive to buy in Canadian cities, they were impossible to obtain in the internment camps. Sahar had given them a list of what was most needed to control the spread of lung infections in Laval. This would be Joe’s first trip with Tony to the reservation, a trip to buy something that was much more important than a tender piece of lamb.

His heart pounded with the excitement that came from knowing that for a little while at least his world wasn’t going to be controlled by a faceless bureaucracy or a heartless paramilitary. He’d never considered himself to be a rabble-rouser or a scofflaw, yet he’d always fought against what he thought were unjust rules and regulations. Maybe it was the sense of fairness he’d inherited from his mother. Or maybe it was the fear of an unchecked military power that his Uncle Silvio had taught him.

Whatever it was that stirred his feelings, when the van finally pulled up outside a clapboard building covered by neon signs advertising discount cigarettes and alcohol, it was all Joe could do to not jump out and start hugging everyone in sight. Tony reached across and squeezed his hand, and his expression was one of concern for his older friend.

“You’re feeling ok, Joe?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“No, no. That’s good. I just thought maybe you were a little nervous about doing this.”