Arthur took on Zandoo carefully, searching for openings, asking about his family (none, never married) and finally finding a shared interest in flower gardening. They talked tulips and begonias and asters, then dogs: Arthur’s own rambunctious Homer, Zandoo’s basset hound, Gaston.
“Twice a day he takes me to the municipal park, summer and winter. He knows every bush, every tree, and honours them all in the traditional way.” Smiling now, opening up.
And it was in the morning of the ill-famed November 26, as Zandoo and Gaston made their way through the leaf-strewn streets of Chambly toward the park, that he spied, about a hundred yards away, a black car pull up beside Abzal Erzhan.
“A big car, not a van, I couldn’t say the make. Quebec plates. To me, it looked like they were asking directions, one man leaning out the front passenger window, two others inside. A rear door opened, like they were inviting him in, and when he didn’t accept, two of them got out — not the driver, I never saw him.”
“Or her?”
“It could be a her. The other two seemed to be insisting. I didn’t see a gun but maybe they had one. They bundled him into the back seat. Abzal didn’t cry out, and he looked limp, and I’m thinking maybe they injected him with something.”
Arthur was astounded. “And did you not tell this to the police?”
“Me, I don’t have anything to do with police. Never have. They are always protecting the racists. Once I broke up a fight, a Somalian girl being pushed around by three white girls, and when the police came, they arrested me for assault. Three hours in jail before they let me go. With a warning. Pigs.”
“How well did you see these two men?”
“I couldn’t identify. One wearing a jacket, another a sweater, also a toque. But they were not Asian.”
“White?”
“Yes, and not too young, maybe in their forties, one tall and tough looking, one very thin.”
“How remarkable.” Also remarkable was that although Vana had relayed Zandoo’s account to the police, they had not worked him over harder. He’d made things awkward, however, by not being frank with the police. But who was Arthur to be righteous about being frank? An anxious glance at Margaret, an unnerving recall of the Episode.
“Vana, I would like to act for you and your husband.” Rarely did such invitations come from Arthur, whose clients often waited in line. But he was itching to take this on. Margaret smiled approvingly.
Vana hesitated. “You are a very important lawyer, I understand that.”
“It will cost you nothing.”
“I would get it in writing,” Zandoo mumbled, a little apologetically.
“Without question.”
“Oh, yes, thank you,” Vana said, “thank you, Mr. Beauchamp. We have been so alone, I didn’t know where to go.”
“All I ask is that you keep your silence, Vana. Speak to no one without my consent. Refer them to me if necessary. And you, my friend Iqbal, would you be interested in my representing you on similar terms?”
“I am an innocent man, sir. Lawyers are for the guilty.”
“It’s the innocent who most need their aid, Iqbal. You must tell your story to the Canadian public. And do so soon — delay breeds scepticism. I’ll be at your side when reporters ask questions. For your friend Vana, for Abzal, for justice, I am asking you to do this. If you’re willing, I’ll spend the hours needed to prepare you.”
“I am not afraid.” A brave thrust of chin. But then he mused, as if trying to quell his inbred lack of trust. “If I may ask, sir, what’s in it for you?”
“My thirst for justice, Iqbal. My thirst for justice.”
16
From his angle on his couch, Finnerty saw Sir John A.’s smile as sympathetic, sharing, but it hardly lessened an all-day hangover inflamed by heartburn — he’d hoovered a stack of flapjacks this morning, a double patty and fries at lunch. It was the tension that caused these excesses, the tension of waiting for three o’clock, Operation Eager Beaver.
He’d survived the weekend by hiding out — from friends, advisers, the press, for whom he’d run out of jests and bons mots. Hiding within the uncounted drafty rooms of 24 Sussex, taking cover from his sternly teetotal wife in search of bottles squirrelled away and forgotten.
E.K. was getting impatient, raising his eyes occasionally from his dispatches. “It’s almost time. They’re gathering in the war room. I suggest you get it together.”
It was a quarter to three. Finnerty had fled Question Period early, avoided the scrums in the foyer. Earlier, he’d briefed the full cabinet, a gruelling task, questions flying, alarmist comments from some, hurrahs from others that the nation was finally taking action. Afterwards, he’d drawn Clara Gracey aside. He’d seen her expression: resentment that the deputy leader had again been exiled from the insiders’ club, that she’d had to hear about the rescue plan at the eleventh hour.
“What am I, an untouchable? Am I to be sent to the girls’ room every time the men plot their war games?”
He’d insisted the circle had to be kept as tight as humanly possible.
“Fine. I don’t want back in. Let Lafayette be the goat if things screw up.”
He’d let it go at that. She’d already leaked her opposition to military intervention, obviously didn’t want to go down with all hands if things indeed screwed up. But they weren’t going to. He imagined himself smiling tonight from every TV screen in the country. Please share in my immense pride in our heroic men and women in uniform …
“It’s time, Huck. Up, up, and away.”
As Question Period petered out, Lafayette rose leisurely from his front-bench seat, pondering whether to indulge the clamouring gang in the foyer with the gentlest hint they were about to enjoy a watershed moment in history. But he stilled the urge, confusing them by walking off with a smile. The camera-toting press clung to him like pilot fish until he escaped into the no-go zone.
He paused at a window: opposing factions on the steps, the anti-poverty idealists and the hard-boiled patriots. “The Real War is at Home — Jobs Not Guns.” A banner with an alternative view: “Make War Not Peace.”
Happily, the truculent Saskatchewan doctor had been put on ice awhile, persuaded to wait until day’s end before yelping to the press. But the news from Tashkent had been less than helpful — the three women, if confusing accounts from Exotic Tours were true, had indeed boarded a flight to Igorgrad, where they’d disappeared into the gloom.
Here was Anthony Crumwell waiting in the Horseshoe, seeking a colloquy. “Charley Thiessen suggested I pass on an unusual tidbit about a suspect alliance among the wife of our slippery friend Abzal Erzhan, their landlord, Zandoo, and …” A moment of contrived suspense as they planted themselves on a couch. “The honourable member for Cowichan and the Islands.”
“Do tell, Anthony.” A smile to disguise his impatience.
Crumwell described a surreptitious tete-a-tete at a Montreal mosque two days previous, also involving Margaret Blake’s spouse, the noted barrister. They’d conferred for fifty-three minutes, apparently in the office of the local imam. Yesterday, Sunday, Zandoo had been fetched to the law offices of Tragger, Inglis in Ottawa, where he met again with them and with Julien Chambleau, M.P. for Iberville-Chambly.
“And what do you make of all that?”
“I pick up a whiff of conspiracy. An effort to protect the itinerant assassin, hide him, cover his tracks? A delicious development if that can be proved, do you not think?”
“No, I do not.” Lafayette decided he was dealing with a low-level neurotic, a conspiracy theorist. “Beauchamp et al. can’t be so naive as not to know Zandoo is under constant surveillance. They may be conspiring, but only to embarrass the government.” Crumwell looked chastened. “Have you or your minister spoken of this to anyone else?”
“Negative.”
“The prime minister?”
Crumwell hesitated. “If you think I should …”