The Burma Effect (2 page)

Montreal and Ottawa — April 2001

T
he spring, after an overlong Montreal winter, smells like thawing earth and gritty pavement newly exposed to the sun, with a whiff of months-old dog shit. Frank Delaney, journalist and spy, was enjoying the sharp smells and the faint warmth of early spring as he sanded and painted and otherwise pampered the sailboat Natalia.

He had been ignoring his mobile phone all morning when it rang periodically somewhere below deck. There was much to be done on his boat before the next April rain blew in across the Saint Lawrence River and before the next sailor had his day in the club's dry-dock berth. The boat was Delaney's first priority, as always, and the telephone could wait.

But eventually he could bear it no longer. He put down his paintbrush, wiped lacquer from his hands with an old rag and moved below to rummage for the phone as it rang again. He suspected it would be his editor, nervous because no column had yet appeared and angry that the weekly deadline had been once again ignored.

It was not the newspaper. It was Rawson, calling from Ottawa and pumped up.

“Francis, can you tell me why you have a mobile phone at all if you never bother to answer it?” Rawson said.

Rawson was one of very few people who still called him Francis. It was Frank now for almost everyone except those few who were close when he went off the rails and who knew the reason why. Rawson knew the reason better than most. “I'm on the boat,” Delaney said.

“I knew you would be on that damn boat,” Rawson said.

He, and some others, felt that Delaney's continuing obsession with the boat was somehow unhealthy, a sign that Delaney had still not quite left the past behind. For Delaney, who had lived almost full-time aboard in various Caribbean ports and backwaters for more than two hazy years in the aftermath of his first disastrous leap from investigative journalist to spy, the
Natalia
had been a refuge, had kept him almost sane.

Rawson at first was Delaney's enemy, and was now his friend. Rawson was the CSIS man assigned to unravel what had gone so overwhelmingly wrong after Delaney had first agreed, and then reneged on that agreement, to help the Canadian intelligence service sort out a little problem with Polish and Vatican agents apparently undertaking covert operations on Canadian soil.

When all of that exploded, trailing bodies on two continents, and when Delaney had crossed crucial lines both professional and personal, Rawson gradually moved from spymaster and de-briefer to friend. Still spymaster, yes; but still, five years later, friend.

Rawson had known who the real Natalia was, had seen her body and the gunshot wounds as she lay in the snow of a Quebec winter. He came to know that Natalia was the only woman, even counting his first wife, that Delaney had every really loved without holding back and that in killing her killers in Europe many months later Delaney had gone down a path from which there could be no return.

Delaney, after a sailing trip that lasted two years, had emerged far more spy than journalist. CSIS now used him periodically, in Canada and elsewhere, when Delaney's cover proved useful. At other times, Delaney polished his boat, wrote a vaguely focused column for the
Tribune
and worked, very occasionally, on a book aimed at exposing certain methods of rogue members of the Vatican security service, which he still insisted was the real force behind Natalia's murder.

The column usually made it into the newspaper with minutes to spare. The book might never see the light of day.

“Kellner's missing,” Rawson said.

“Not for the first time,” Delaney said.

“He'll turn up when the party's over.”

Delaney knew Kellner from the old days, when they were both much younger journalists, with much less personal and professional baggage. He knew that Kellner, living a very
louche
lifestyle for years in Bangkok, was also a handy occasional resource for CSIS. He knew almost nothing about what sort of assignments Kellner actually took on, but had never really bothered to ask. CSIS people were still coy about such foreign intelligence operations, many of them, pretending such operations never took place, were still not actually allowed to take place.

“Not sure about that, Francis. Not this time,” Rawson said.

“What's happened?” Delaney said.

“Not for the phone, OK? Can you come up?” Delaney did not consider a trip to Ottawa an inviting prospect at the best of times. He was behind on his boat maintenance and substantially behind on his column.

“Not a good time for me, Jon,” he said. “I'm up against it this week.”

“This is urgent, Francis. Really.” Rawson rarely used the word urgent.

“OK, Jon. But not tomorrow. I can't tomorrow. Friday maybe.”

“Tomorrow night?” Rawson must be really worried. Keeping Canada safe from the forces of evil usually did not extend to weeknights. Spymasters, Canadian spymasters in any case, had wives and children and handsome homes in the inner suburbs.

“OK, tomorrow night,” Delaney said. “Where? When?”

He would have been astonished if Rawson had invited Delaney to his home.

“Press club?” Rawson said. He had always clearly liked the faded surrounds of the bar in the National Press Building across from Parliament Hill. Some journalists of a certain vintage still met their contacts there.

“Fine. You'll owe me one. Ottawa on a Thursday night.”

“I'll add it to the list.”

Delaney climbed back on deck and carried on with his painting. He realized as he worked that the appointment in Ottawa would mean missing yet another Jung Society meeting.
Just as well
, he thought as he worked. The whole idea of his ever having joined such a group was ridiculous in the first place. More fallout from the Natalia days; a link, slowly fading, between him and the psychologist's life she had lived so intensely.

The Jungians found him an odd fish, and one who had never, so far, delivered the paper he had been promising them to write and to deliver before one of their meetings. They had found his contributions to their dream workshops stimulating, however, if sometimes alarming. His personal unconscious, his journalist's unconscious, was a maelstrom, a war zone that many of the well-to-do and well-grounded Society members entered with more than a little trepidation.

Natalia would have found all that very amusing. Delaney knew this. Whether she would find his other interests and other recent professional activities outside journalism amusing was another question altogether.

When the light started to fade, Delaney cleaned up and went to let the club staff know he would try to get back the next day to finish. That was the last day possible, before the next sailor with an obsessive compulsive disorder hoisted a beloved vessel into the dry dock.

Stan, the old guy employed by the club to manage such things and to ferry people in a small outboard out to where their boats were anchored, was a no-nonsense sort. He lived in a small trailer on the Royal Saint Lawrence Yacht Club grounds. He usually smelled of Player's Mild smoke. He had a ruby red rum-soaked nose. No one had ever seen him sail.

“No way we can let you have that berth for more than another day, you know, Mr. Delaney,” Stan said. His faded T-shirt said: “Barbados Goombay Summer. Share the Experience.” Short grey chest hairs bristled at the frayed neck. “I'll be finished,” Delaney said.

“There's a crowd of them waiting, all this week and next,” Stan insisted. “You still got lots to do?”

“Yeah, I'll manage.” Stan would talk weather next. “Weather's been OK,” he said.

“Yeah,” Delaney said.

“Should be good sailing this weekend. But cold, probably. Blowy. The river'll be pretty choppy. You going out?”

“May do,” Delaney said.

“I can run you out,” Stan always ran him out; he ran everyone out to their boats. He did little else. “OK, Stan, thanks,” Delaney said, wondering how many times they had had precisely this conversation since he bought the boat. Stan shuffled out toward his trailer looking ever so slightly crestfallen, as he usually did. Delaney went to get his car.

He headed back slowly from the West Island to downtown, going against rush-hour traffic. On his way up to the highway, he saw older women and a few older men in the fading light, raking suburban lawns flattened and browned by a winter's weight of snow, only just gone. All of Montreal would soon come out of hibernation, pretending for a few precious months that summer actually existed and that grass and flowers could actually thrive in their city.

Delaney planned to work on the column that night and try to get a full day's work in on the boat on Thursday before the two-hour drive to the nation's dreary capital late in the afternoon. He hoped his aging Mercedes, in dire need of a tune-up, would make it.

The answering machine light was flashing, as it always was, when he got back to his Sherbrooke Street high-rise. Delaney had a theory that the answering machines of those who live alone always seem to be more heavily used than those in couples or families. He had no empirical proof, but it seemed to him that the many loose or fraying ends of a single person's life all seem to come together on an answering machine.

The opinion pages editor had called again. Patricia Robinson. Agitated. Never amused.
Frank, Patricia here. Not sure what's happening again this week but we really need that column in now, today. Got to figure out the illustration and one of the subs is off sick. Please give me a call as soon as you can. I'll try your mobile, thanks.

The column was called “Delaney at Large.” He'd always hated that name, had seen similar column names in a few newspapers around the country. Such columns were almost always the domain of journalists of a certain age who had had very successful careers, usually as political or economic or war correspondents, and then had either crashed and burned, or dropped out for a while, to resurface later and look for work. Delaney had done both, actually; crashed and dropped out, but the public version was that he had only dropped out.

Now he was to write eight hundred words each week on any aspect of Canadian, but particularly Quebec, life that interested him. Usually, the editors expected political comment. Sometimes they liked a bit of colour, a so-called people column. Always, they liked it on time.

This week, Delaney was trying to write something about whether Canada could still consider itself to be above the international fray, beyond the reach of terrorist attacks. He knew from both sorts of work he did now that it was only a matter of time before another major attack took place. There had been Nairobi and Dar es Salaam so far that year.The question was, where next? And who now could ever hope to be exempt?

But despite several Molson Export Ales and a very large Jameson's, Delaney had been unable the night before to make any headway on the column at all. He would try again tonight, maybe with less alcohol and more resolve.

O'Keefe had also left a message.

Yo Francis, it's O'Keefe. I need a drink badly and my friends and admirers say I should not drink alone. I think they are mistaken on this, but it would be on your head if they are correct. I will be at Grumpy's this evening, in the usual place. You are cordially invited to attend.

O'Keefe's marriage had foundered again, on the same shoals as always. His wife didn't like him. And she didn't like journalists. It was as simple as that. But they had so many years together, so many tumultuous years, and a son now almost ten years old, that the final break did not come. Just periodic breaks, more frequent than in the past but never, as yet, final.

O'Keefe was living in a spare room the sports editor kept ready for him. He was drinking more than usual, which was saying a lot. He did not like to drink alone, because when he drank alone he tended to beat people up. Karen, his wife, was still living on the dilapidated farm O'Keefe had bought for them once when he was somewhat more unstable than usual. She beat people up in a different way, even when sober.

Delaney avoided drinking sessions with O'Keefe if at all possible, but at such times felt a strong obligation because when Delaney's own marriage had foundered, O'Keefe had given him a bed and a glass. Then, when Natalia was killed, O'Keefe for once in his life dropped the facetious persona that had always put so many people off and allowed himself to actually feel Delaney's pain.

Delaney called O'Keefe's mobile. “Brian, it's Francis,” Delaney said.

“I know who it is,” O'Keefe said. Bad humour before a night out. A very bad sign. “Where are you now?”

“Just coming in from a day at the news boutique. Rewarding as always. Five hundred words on a drug bust in Point St. Charles. Going out again shortly to give the cops something else to do.”

“Bad day.”

“Yup. You coming?”

“Brian, I . . .”

“When you start out every second damn sentence with ‘Brian' or ‘Brian, I' you are not in the mood for drinking. OK, no problem.”

“I've got to finish up my column,” Delaney said.

“No problem. We all have our crosses to bear.”