Face/Mask (19 page)

The van pulled away as quickly as it had arrived, leaving no trace of its presence on the empty street except wet tire tracks. She turned back inside and closed the door, leaning against it for a moment to gather her thoughts. She had to call her husband right away. She wasn’t sure what he could do, but there had to be some benefit to his official position.

She put a com to her ear and listened as it whistled on the other end. It seemed to go on forever, and she was about to cut off the link when Allen’s voice answered.

“Terry? What is it?” He sounded out of breath and irritated at her call, so she didn’t even pause to wonder why he had turned off the video feed.

“Allen, you have to do something. They arrested Uncle Joe.”

“What? Who arrested Uncle Joe?”

“
Cons
, who else? I can’t believe it. They came right into our house and took him. Three of them.”

“They came inside? Did they have a warrant?”

“What? I don't know.”

“Jesus, Terry. Didn’t you ask to see it?”

“No, I didn’t ask to see it,” she said trying to keep her emotions from spilling over. She couldn’t believe that with her uncle arrested her husband was going to criticize her for not taking the time to analyze the warrant. “Allen, there were three policemen banging on the door, and they had a van with flashing lights outside our house and I was scared out of my mind so please don’t you yell at me.”

“OK, OK. I’m sorry. But what did they arrest him for?”

“They said there were several charges. The only one they mentioned was conspiring with Tony the butcher against the administration.”

“Conspiring with the butcher? You must have misunderstood them.”

“I didn’t misunderstand, Allen. That’s what they said. I thought it was because he bought meat on the black market, but the
Cons
said no, Joe was conspiring with
agitators
!”

“This has to be some sort of mix-up. Maybe this Tony was up to something that we don’t know about. And they think Joe’s involved because he’s there all the time and…”

“Allen, can’t you do something? You have to get to the police station now.”

“Terry, I’m in the middle of…of my meeting.”

“The hell with your goddamn meeting! Uncle Joe is in jail!”

“Yeah, OK, OK. I’ll get out of here right away. I’ll make some calls to find out where he is and try to see him.”

“Please, Allen,” she tried to get herself under control again. “They didn’t even let him put his shoes on. You have to help him.”

“I will. I promise, I will. OK?”

“OK.”

“Terry, are you going to be all right?”

“Yes. I feel better now because...because I know I can trust you to help. Thank you, Allen.”

“You don’t have to thank me. What’d you expect? I’m not going to leave the guy hanging, so you just take care of yourself and the boys.”

“I will.”

“Maybe wake Richard up. He should stay up with you until I get home. I’ll call you as soon as I know what’s going on. You better let me get on it now. Bye.”

When Terry hung up she felt a little better. Allen, for all his faults, was reliable. She could hear his concern in his voice, even as he questioned her. Surely he’d find out why they’d sent three
Cons
to arrest an old man who’d done nothing more than buy unlicensed lamb.

Conspiracy? What could they have been thinking?

Allen would soon straighten them all out, of this she had no doubt.

Janus sat back on the sofa and held the com to his bare chest, as if letting it listen to his heavily beating heart. They’d finally arrested Joe. It was what he’d wanted, after-all, but now what? He hadn’t really given much thought to what he wanted to happen beyond that. And if Terry was right, the charges were much more serious than he thought they’d be. He wondered just what it was he had set in motion. From the bedroom he heard Sahar’s voice complain.

“Allen, if you are going to take calls from your wife maybe you should go home and let me sleep.”

He walked back to the bedroom, his bare feet shuffling across the thick carpet, and started to pick his clothes up off the floor.

“They arrested Joe,” he said softly.

“Your Joe?”

“Yes, my Joe. The RCMP showed up at my house and arrested him right in front of my wife.”

“Well, that is good news, isn’t it?”

Janus stopped buttoning his shirt and glared angrily at her, but she opened her eyes wide and tilted her head to one side.

“Allen, you are not going to be hypocrite with me now?”

He went back to buttoning his shirt, and turned his face away from her. She was right, of course. But even if this was what he had wanted, he felt no happiness. The sound of Terry’s voice begging him to help had guaranteed that.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s serious.”

She laughed and clapped her hands once, jumping out of the bed. Her small breasts bounced as she landed on her feet.

“You are very funny man, Allen. You dream and plan of this day, and now you look like you will cry.”

“Stop it.” He searched for the words to explain, but found none. “You don’t understand,” he repeated.

“I do understand. You come to fuck me while the
Cons
bust into your house and arrest your wife’s uncle. They do this because you want them to do it. And now you hate yourself for it. Do I understand right, Allen?”

Janus sat down on the armchair where earlier that evening she’d sat with her legs spread, wearing nothing but an inviting smile. He tried to look up at her but her expression, her smile that was somehow full of anger, was hard to face. How could he expect Sahar to understand what he was feeling when he himself didn’t understand it?

“I know I wanted this. It was something that had to be done. But now that it is done…Well, Terry and the children are going to be miserable, and I have to deal with that.”

“But you knew they would be miserable, Allen. Yet you did this so that
you
would be happy.”

“Happy? No, I never really expected to be happy. I just wanted to have my life back. My family...”

She sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette, her expression softening somewhat.

“So, what will you do now?”

“I have to try to help him.”

“After what you did?”

“I have to,” he whispered. “That’s what Terry expects me to do. Otherwise...”

“Otherwise she might think you wanted for this to happen. Yes, Allen. I always understand.”

As head of a major municipal department it took Janus one phone call to learn that Joe had been taken to the main RCMP detention center in the east end of Montreal. It was located in an industrial area which had long ago been cleared of any residential buildings.

The drive there took over an hour, the heavy traffic moving slowly on the slippery highway. The car’s wipers worked hard to keep his windshield clear of the sticky snow. Janus tried to concentrate on the road, but was having a hard time controlling his racing thoughts.

Sahar hadn’t understood everything. He wasn’t doing this merely to avoid Terry’s suspicion. She’d always relied on him in the past and it mattered very much for him to be able to come through for her again.

He’d wanted to punish Joe and he had. Now his family needed him to help, and he was going to try. It didn’t matter that he was the one who’d set the police on Terry’s uncle in the first place. He had no idea what he was going to say when he got to the police station, but he would think of something.

He took the bridge back from Laval, before heading east along Highway 40. As he approached the east end of Montreal he was faced with the sight of a dozen oil refineries belching clouds of black smoke twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He couldn’t remember these refineries spewing so much smoke into the air when he was a young man, and wondered if anything ran as it was supposed to nowadays. He checked his air-mask reflexively as he got off at the exit, and drove along the service road past the giant, rust-covered fuel tanks.

In a few minutes he was in front of the new offices of the Security Directorate, with its quasi-military enforcement arm, the RCMP. Unlike the buildings that surrounded it, as well as most other buildings in Montreal, this one was well maintained. It was one of the symbols of power in the city and the administration hadn’t hesitated in pouring uncounted millions of dollars into the state-of-the-art facility.

Pulling up at the gate Janus lowered his car window and held his cit-card out to the electronic eye. A blue laser scanned the card and then did the same thing to his left eye through the air-mask’s glass shield. Around him Janus saw heavily-armed guards in sealed huts behind ten-foot high electric fences. One would have thought the building held the nation’s greatest treasure, or the world’s most notorious terrorists. In the end, it was simply a high-end police station.

This is where they bring dangerous subversives like Joe Pizzi
.

He wondered who’d managed to confuse Joe’s petty offence with an act of treason. Somebody could have decided to add the conspiracy charge to make Joe seem like a bigger catch. Maybe there weren’t any dangerous terrorists left, and they needed to charge small-fry like Joe to justify the huge security apparatus they’d created.

Good thing they haven’t started accusing people of thought-crimes
.
Yet.

There was a loud clang, snapping Janus out of his semi-seditious reverie, and the gate opened with a harsh metallic rattle, trundling slowly back on itself like the door to an ancient dungeon.

Once he was through the gate Janus parked his car, and walked toward the building’s wide stairs. The snow had stopped coming down and he stepped carefully around foul-looking puddles. He felt the need to hurry, but the sight of the guns being carried by the guards made it clear that this wasn’t the place to break into a run.

Soon he was standing in front of a desk sergeant sitting behind a glass wall with a small speaker on the front of it. The policeman seemed entranced by something on his P-screen and didn’t look up as Janus approached him. Janus wasn’t sure if he should knock on the glass separation to announce himself, or if he should simply wait to be spoken to. Despite years as a director in the administration bureaucracy Janus felt ill at ease in the police station. He’d bent the rules too often in his personal life to feel comfortable surrounded by law enforcement officers.

He stood there for over a minute, clearing his throat in anticipation of getting noticed by the desk sergeant, before being surprised by a gentle tap on the shoulder. Turning he saw
Caporal
Therrien, the policeman who’d come to his house after Richard’s car accident a few days earlier.

“
Monsieur le Directeur
. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

Janus was aware that he had never contacted Therrien to “thank” him since that visit. Did the officer think he’d come here to give him a gratuity in person?

“
Caporal
Therrien, hello. It’s so nice to see a familiar face. I feel quite out of my element here.”

“Did you wish to see anyone in particular?”

“Well, yes. I need to speak to someone who’s in charge. It’s about a prisoner I’d like to see... if possible.”

“A prisoner?”

“Or a suspect. I’m not sure what you would call him. It’s my wife’s uncle, Joe Pizzi. You remember him, surely. He was arrested tonight.”

“My goodness. That is a surprise.”

Janus wasn’t certain how sincere Therrien’s surprise was, but there was no time to worry about that. He needed help to get past the desk sergeant and inside where he could speak to someone in authority.

“Be that as it may,
Caporal
, I do need to speak to someone about this matter, and the gentleman here,” he pointed at the desk sergeant who was clearly following the discussion while keeping his eyes on the P-screen, “has been ignoring my presence. I don’t know if I could impose upon you to help me.”

“Do you mean do you another favour, sir?”

“Yes. Yes, that is what I mean. And clearly I will be even in greater debt to you. I would certainly not forget your assistance.”

“Well, as long as you don’t lose your memory, sir, I’m sure we can do something to help you.”

Therrien walked over to the desk sergeant and whispered into the speaker-phone. The other man didn’t seem either interested or impressed with whatever Therrien had told him, and kept his eyes locked on the P-screen. Therrien leaned closer and whispered with a greater sense of urgency. After a few seconds the desk sergeant looked up and Therrien nodded to him. The desk sergeant reached his hand under his desk and pressed a hidden buzzer to unlock the door on his left.

Therrien walked over to the door and held it open, motioning Janus to follow him. As Janus advanced he waved to the desk sergeant and thanked him. In the doorway Therrien leaned over to whisper into Janus’s ear.