The Burma Effect (6 page)

He sweated for about 20 minutes on the rowing machine, working far too hard on something he used to find easy. He tried the weight machine and the Stairmaster and essentially just punished himself as much as he could. Sometimes a workout was a sort of meditation for him. Today it was penance. But he wasn't sure what for. He had to assume it was something to do with Kate.

The trainer, a young McGill University health sciences student named Vernon, came over as he was slowing down.

“You ought to do some stretches now, Frank,” he said. “Your muscles are going to seize up. I was watching you go.”

“Geriatric aerobics,” Delaney said.

“You're still in pretty good shape,” Vernon said.

“For a guy my age.”

“Yeah. You got to keep active. Keep those legs moving.”

“Fuck off, Vernon.”

“Will do, Frank,” Vernon said with a grin.

Another reason for the workout was that Delaney fully expected to get drunk that night with O'Keefe. Not because he wanted to but because it would be almost impossible not to. So the workout would somehow compensate for a night of excess, before the fact. Or something like that.

O'Keefe suggested they start out at Darwin's, once a trendy Bishop Street bar and now well past its prime. O'Keefe preferred them like that. He claimed to detest yuppies, claimed he could not be responsible for his actions in a yuppie bar. The yuppies had long since moved on from this establishment and the drinks were now reasonably cheap.

He was standing at the bar when Delaney arrived, all six feet four inches of him. Hunched over the bar, drinking San Miguel from a bottle into which the waiter had forced a wedge of lemon.

“That's a girl's drink, isn't it Brian?” Delaney said.

“No, it is permitted at this time of the night. It is for hydration purposes, before the festivities begin. It is cold and cheap and it goes very nicely with my rum.”

A short glass with melting ice cubes sat near him at the bar.

Delaney surprised himself by ordering a double whiskey. Early in the night for him. The bespectacled boy behind the bar looked impressed.

“Now what have we here? Young Delaney drinking a large Jameson's and it's just gone eight o'clock,” O'Keefe said. “Is everything all right at home?”

“Is this where we're settling in for the night?” Delaney asked. He felt his Air Canada tickets in his jacket pocket and wished he had left them at home. It was going to be a night to lose things, he thought.

“I have many fond memories of this place, my lad,” O'Keefe said. “I grew up here.”

Delaney remembered that O'Keefe used to enjoy picking on university drinkers here years ago, flashing his Quebec Provincial Police press card so fast that it looked like a police pass, confiscating small stashes of hashish from terrified youngsters and smoking it in the men's room. They drank in silence for a moment.

“You have been avoiding me, Francis. You have decided I am a bad influence,” O'Keefe said.

“Correct,” Delaney said.

“The rule, established and etched in stone over the years, is that we get drunk together before you head off on a big bird somewhere. Is this not our unshakable rule? Am I not your next of kin, God knows, maybe even your only kin, possibly the executor of your will, trusted confidante, former colleague, et cetera, et cetera and so on and so forth? Have we not been somewhat remiss? Would this meeting have taken place without my insisting it be thus?”

“We have been remiss,” Delaney said.

“We will make amends,” O'Keefe said.“My heart is heavy with grief, this night, and there shall therefore be festive times. Or something.”

“Shall we exchange tales of woe?” Delaney said.

“Me first,” O'Keefe said.

They drank for hours, moving from bar to bar, slowly but surely moving eastward. They ended up on Saint Lawrence Street, south of Saint Catherine, where the Anglo yuppies rarely went. The language now was almost entirely French, the entertainment tacky, tending toward end-of-the-world striptease and pole-dancing bars. They had not been in such bars for years.

They talked much less than one would have thought. There was very little to say that had not already been said over the years, through various shared disasters personal and professional. The city spoke for them, said enough, said what needed to be said.

Late, very late, they made their pilgrimage to Schwartz's for smoked meat sandwiches. In the crush and noise of the place, under neon, elbow to elbow with strangers, intoxicated, O'Keefe said: “We've patched things up, Karen and I. I have rented a van for the transportation of my necessaries. Tomorrow.”

“Ah,” said Delaney. The room swam slowly around him.

“Too too much water under the bridge. This particular bridge.”

“Yes. Possibly. I would say.”

“Yes.”

They drunkenly munched sandwiches. “Your love life, of course, is, as always, in splendid condition, correct?” O'Keefe said. “Soon to be a feature story on the
Tribune
lifestyles page?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“RCMP. They always get their man.”

“Not quite.”

“She's OK, you know. Kate is,” O'Keefe said, suddenly made serious by drink.

“Ah. Advice.”

“She is OK. You are not. We know this. She is the only one who will have you. All other women everywhere, in every nation, have seen you for what you are. Especially your first wife.They will not have you. Et cetera. Then of course there was Natalia, a possible exception. But Natalia is dead, still dead. She will not wake up. Et cetera.”

Even seriously intoxicated, Delaney and O'Keefe knew there were lines dangerous to cross. O'Keefe crossed this one anyway.

“I am allowed to say that,” O'Keefe said. “This is the rule. We have rules for this sort of thing. We get drunk, I advise you to let all of that go. You refuse, your life goes nowhere, we do it again some months down the track. We have rules governing this sort of thing.” “Yes.”

“You go off on another little assignment. Not for the newspaper this time, right? You leave all of the hard stuff behind. Yes?”

“My business, Brian,” Delaney said, the alcohol suddenly lighting his aggression fuse. “Wrong, brother. My business too.” Delaney stood up unsteadily. O'Keefe stood up too, put a large hand on Delaney's shoulder and sat him firmly down again. The other diners carried on with their sandwiches. This was Saint Lawrence Street, after 2 a.m.

“Wrong, my brother,” O'Keefe said. “My business too.”

The taxi let Delaney off in front of his place just before three. O'Keefe had walked back to the sports editor's house, for the last time until Karen threw him out again. Delaney barely managed to get his door open without an instruction manual.

He sat in Natalia's chair, with her reading light on. He drank a litre and a half of bottled water. He took three aspirins before sleeping. He did not call Kate until the morning. He dreamed this:

He is sitting in a barber's chair in a comfortable, safe old-fashioned barber shop. An avuncular, apronclad barber is slowly and expertly cutting his hair, occasionally massaging his scalp and shoulders. It is a wonderfully soothing and pleasant experience. The barber then somehow tilts the chair so Delaney is completely upside down, suspended completely upside down so that his hair hangs away from his head, straight away from his head. The barber cuts the tips of his hair like that, somehow standing below him and reaching up. Delaney watches the world from this position, as the avuncular barber snips and combs and shapes his hair from below. There is a sudden dizzying return to upright, some final snipping and combing and then the proud barber's moment with mirrors front and back. Delaney has been transformed. He has the thick, wavy, perfectly combed hair of a very young man, the fresh beardless face of a much younger, a much more hopeful man.

It was late morning, in fact, before Delaney was able to call Kate. He woke at 10 a.m. fantastically hung over, suffering for his sins. The scalding shower was penance. He could not look at food. His head was still spinning ever so slightly as he dialled Kate at home.

There was no answer. There was no way to avoid the mobile number any longer. She answered after two rings. She was clearly outside. He heard the sound of something like a chain saw far off in the background.

“Frank,” she said. The mobile screen had told her.

“I've been trying to call you,” he said.

“Not on this phone.”

“I left a message for you at work.”

“I took a couple of extra days off. I'm up at Sue's cottage.” “How is it?”

“You and I refuse to indulge in small talk at such times, remember Frank?” “At which times?”

“Times crucial to the future of our relationship.”

“Ah.” His head was aching horribly. “Are hangovers an excuse?” he asked.

“Now we are sharing details from our private lives. How interesting,” she said. “The man is actually telling me what he does in his private times.”

“I'm going to London tomorrow. Then Bangkok.”

There was a moment's silence.
Good
, he thought.

“Oh,” she said. “What's come up?”

“Assignment.” She knew nothing of his CSIS work.

“I see. How long?”

“A week or so, probably.”

“I see.”

“I called to say good-bye.”

“I'm glad.”

“Are you?” he asked.

A pause.

“Of course, Frank.”

A pause.

“We'll sort something out when I get back,” he said.

“Will we?”

“Yes.”

“Like what?”

“We'll come up with something. OK?”

“Are you my lover boy again, Frank?” He could sense the wry smile all the way down the phone line. “Something like that,” he said.

RCMP Officer Kate Hunter did not consider herself a sentimental woman. She did not normally fall under the spell of just any man she met along life's way. She did not consider herself, in fact, to be under the spell of one Francis Delaney, journalist at large. Or, more accurately, she did not allow herself to believe that to be the case. However, as she put down the telephone after her last conversation with Delaney before he left for Europe and Asia, she felt the unmistakable tug, what she would in another mood have called the adolescent tug, of longing.

Delaney, to be sure, was a most infuriating man. Kate knew this, had known this from the first minute they had been introduced at an overcrowded, overheated party almost a year earlier. There had been the requisite drunken heart-to-heart on a rainy balcony, the escape for a late-night meal, the return to a downtown apartment, the fumbling for belts and buttons in the early hours, the drawing together and the moving apart.

Then, this infuriating, months-long stasis. This now so Delaney-like reluctance to fall in love, his reluctance to give up ghosts of the past, to give up on one female ghost in particular. Kate Hunter did not normally allow herself to waste time like this on conflicted males of the species. Certainly never with police males of the species nor, until now, media males.

So why, she asked herself as she pretended to read magazines in a friend's sunny cottage backyard, was she compelled to think again and again about this infuriating journalist at large, to wonder if he by now was packing a bag for his latest assignment, what he might usually bring along on such a journey, what he was actually going to do while away.

Instead of simply reading and drinking summer lemonades, instead of relaxing as planned from the rigours of her police work, she found herself imagining what sort of person Delaney would be while abroad, what he would be like as he did his journalist's work, how he might look at a desk somewhere in some hotel, writing up the day's events somewhere in the world.

She very much looked forward to his return. Kate Hunter did not usually allow herself to indulge in such adolescent musings. It was unsettling and, she told herself sternly, unbecoming to a usually sensible, usually two-feet-on-the-ground member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police financial and high-tech crime squad. Not a job for hopelessly sentimental daydreamers.

Better, she thought, far better, to stop all this nonsense at once.

London and Bangkok