Читать книгу Max O'Brien Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Mario Bolduc - Страница 9

There was the nasal call for Delta flight 148 to Rome, and the passengers shuffled to the counter. Max O’Brien was one of them, ticket in one hand and Italian passport in the other. The crowd ground him to a halt directly beneath one of the three TV monitors. He looked up as someone turned up the volume. CNN showed the usual pictures of desolation: this time the carbonized carcass of a car blown up by terrorists in New Delhi, with one dead, Luiz Rodrigues, and one seriously injured, David O’Brien, both employees of the Canadian High Commission of India. Max stood immobile, paralyzed for a long time, his eyes fixed on the screen, his world pulverized yet again, and left so fragile that soon nothing of it would remain.

“Your ticket, please, sir?”

Max roused himself as the nasal voice reached him from behind the outstretched hand. Passengers around him were complaining. He left the lineup.

Juliette was sorry she’d made fun of Béatrice when she got off at Maharani Bagh, her suitcases filled with gifts. “Oh, I know the feeling. I’ve been there before.” And for once she was right: “Déjà vu all over again.” As soon as the Gulfstream landed at Dorval, David’s mother had taken charge. She’d managed to get security to keep the journalists, those blood-sucking, carnivorous parasites, as she called them, away from the hangar where the ambulance awaited. She barked in the face of the muscle men from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: “This just isn’t the time, got it?”

Shrugs all around, sunglasses removed and replaced, wristwatches requiring nonstop attention, fingers pointed and threatening, hands outstretched, but Béatrice wasn’t giving an inch. “I don’t give a good goddamn about your investigation.”

Juliette was still caught up in the whirlwind of the day before, when she’d headed for the Apollo Hospital after Bernatchez’s phone call. The bombing had happened in the northern part of Delhi along the banks of the Yamuna, he told her. Their car had been booby-trapped. Pity that was all they knew for the time being. “David’s dead, David’s dead,” she kept repeating as she ran through the hospital corridors, as though the mantra could somehow bring him back. Then she saw a familiar face, Dr. Rangarajan. She knew his smell, the timbre of his voice, gravelly as though he were always on the verge of coughing or clearing his throat. He held her tight for comfort with the words one always says at times like that, but she heard none of it. Then a thanedar in a uniform and moustache with an officer — also moustached — showed up and Rangarajan cleared off. The officer was in charge of the preliminary investigation and had Juliette tell them absolutely everything, even if, at first glance, it seemed utterly banal.

She felt like answering, “It doesn’t matter. Nothing does anymore. He’s dead.”

“Madame, he is still alive.”

Juliette could have kissed them, both of the moustachioed cops. She wanted to see David, yes, absolutely, but she couldn’t. Just as she started screaming, Bernatchez ran toward her with Vandana and Mukherjee and took her hand, vowing to catch the cowards and to make sure the Canadian government would never let these monsters get away with it. She couldn’t have cared less about them or any other government, of course. All she wanted was to be with David, alone.

“You’re both heading straight back to Canada,” Bernatchez told her.

There were a doctor and a nurse aboard the Gulfstream supplied by Worldwide Air Ambulance Service and Dr. Mitchell from the High Commission, whom Juliette had never met. Neither one was very chatty, which suited her, since she was in no mood for conversation. She was numb from the sedatives and sealed inside a flying clinic. Through the porthole, she watched India drift away, perhaps forever: first little pinpoints of light, then nothing … total blackness.

What was it the Mahabharata said: “All the creatures of the night crowded round me, deformed and terrifying …”?

For the first time on board the plane, a longing for cocoa, an irresistible urge to bite into a piece of chocolate — maybe because I’m pregnant, she thought. Maybe it was just the sedatives she’d taken. Why now, all of a sudden? It was as though her brain had decided to come to her defence and keep her from thinking about what had happened to David. This yearning had nagged at her all night.

Now at the end of the corridor of the intensive care unit at the Montreal General, she was sitting in a little room rigged up on the ninth floor, munching a Toblerone as though her life depended on it.

“He’s still fighting, fighting hard.”

Juliette turned her head toward a shadow engulfed in the blinding light from the downtown buildings that shone through the open windows.

Dennis Patterson.

Without a thought, she threw herself into his arms. She wanted to seem brave and stop crying, but it was too much for her. With every new visitor, the pain rose in her face, a torrent she couldn’t control. Patterson waited it out, then took her aside. He was bigger than she or David, and he held her by the shoulders like a fragile, delicate rose. As old as Bernatchez, but having aged better than the former pro football player, he was visibly proud of his white hair, and his bushy eyebrows made him look like a retired Santa.

“I know he’ll get through this. Dr. Dohmann’s an exceptional neurosurgeon.” He sounded like a get-well card: sweet, sonorous, pious wishes, when what she really wanted was the truth and some explanation, here and now.

“Why? Why him?”

Patterson just shrugged. “A ton of reasons, I suppose, and nothing to do with who he is or what he represents.”

“What are these RCMP types saying?”

“Not much for now, but they have a man there.”

Juliette knew who it was: a heavyset guy with very short hair whom David had introduced at one of their soirées. He seemed nice enough, certainly discreet, but she couldn’t recall his name. Patterson said he’d be helping the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India’s FBI.

“Helping? Wait a minute, I don’t understand!” Juliette yelled. “Two employees of the High Commission in a bombed car, and the RCMP is just looking on?”

“Imagine if it was the other way round and an Indian diplomat in Ottawa got bombed on Elgin Street. What would people say if the Indian police took charge?”

Juliette couldn’t care less what people thought. She remembered incidents with American or British diplomats and the squads of FBI or Scotland Yard that showed up. The Mounties, however, were just leaving one officer on site to get eaten alive by the CBI.

“That’s the way things are done, Juliette,” said Patterson.

“The way things are done?”

Bernatchez had promised: “The Canadian government would not let these monsters get away with it.” Words, words, words. “You know people in the department. You could do something. I’m sure a call to the right person in Ottawa would get them more involved.”

“Look, Juliette. It’s frustrating, I know, and I agree, but there are bilateral agreements …”

“Do something.”

“I’ve talked to the minister, and he’s not against the idea of offering, say, additional logistical help to the Indian police.”

“Additional logistical help? How about a pen-and- pencil set with John A. Macdonald on it?”

Patterson sighed and made Juliette look at him. “Look, the important thing is for David to get better, stay alive. He’s going to need both of us for that. You especially.”

Hallmark, Hallmark, Hallmark.

She felt abandoned, coddled and silenced, cut off from reality.

It was night again, and Juliette had hardly slept since her arrival in Montreal: just short periods of agitated sleep, awaking in sweat, stunned and disoriented. She wanted to be set up next to David, in the same room, at all times, but for both medical and security reasons, Patterson had explained, they couldn’t let her. She no longer felt like fighting and obediently followed Béatrice home.

On her way out of the hospital, she chatted briefly with two Mounties from the airport who asked her the same questions as the Indian police before they left. What were they doing here anyway? Shouldn’t they be in New Delhi helping out their fellow officers?

“Look at them pretending to be useful,” she yelled as she climbed into the taxi. “Good for what … raking in their pay?”

“Do you remember those old films?” Béatrice replied, “The Indians. Not your kind, the others with feathers: Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne, who knows? When they attacked the pioneer wagon trains headed west, rows of them appeared on the mountaintops, menacing in their war paint, and fell on the poor settlers for no reason. We were never told why. No need. It just happened, like rain. No one justifies rain, do they?”

What was she getting at? Juliette thought.

“Well, terrorism is just the same, like Indians in the movies or rain in summertime. No need for a motive or a rationale. The goal of terrorists is to terrorize. That’s all there is. In other words, why even bother to investigate? What is there to find out? In any event, tomorrow or any moment now, three or four groups will claim responsibility for the attack, most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba. David was just one more statistic, and mere statistics don’t get investigated, they just pile up, nothing to get upset about. Then they get shuffled to the bottom of the pile. Vague, impersonal statistics. Open it,” said Béatrice, pointing to the glovebox.

She did, and inside was a firearm, very small, a .25 calibre of the kind you might slip into a handbag. Juliette was surprised to see Béatrice had one.

“In El Salvador I was constantly afraid, so I took shooting lessons without saying anything to Philippe. Go ahead. Pick it up.”

“I’ve never used a gun.”

“Easier than a tube of lipstick. You’ll see.”

Juliette closed the glovebox. Enough violence. Why make more?

Along Route 87, Max, now travelling as Peter Flanagan in a rented Ford Taurus from Kennedy Airport, heard on the radio that his nephew hadn’t regained consciousness after the attack but the surgeons were hopeful they could bring him back: “His heart is solid, and he’s strong, so he’ll pull through.” Max also learned that David hadn’t travelled alone from Delhi; Juliette was with him, bent over the stretcher, in tears, naturally. Max knew his nephew was married but hadn’t met the young bride yet. After the death of Philippe, his son David had cut Max off, or rather he had fallen into oblivion.

He crossed the border at Rouses Point using one of his American passports. The customs officer, already blasé about the security measures introduced after 9/11, barely glanced at it, cellphone in hand, more interested in lecturing his eldest daughter about letting everything lie about the house than hunting potential terrorists. Max then went directly on to Montreal. He thought about stopping at Mimi’s first, but the pain, like the curiosity, was unbearable. He just had to know, to understand.

David’s mother lived in a building, the Rockhill, in Côte-des-Neiges, where she’d moved after Philippe died. Béatrice could have gone back to Ottawa to be near her son when he was recruited by Foreign Affairs, but Montreal was more her style.

“Do you know how many years I’ve spent in boring capitals, practically going to bed at curfew? Ottawa’s pretty and calm, but no thanks!”

Juliette fell asleep fully dressed, and it was the doorbell that cut into her dreamless sleep. It was daylight, and she heard voices. This is it. They’ve come to tell me it’s all over, she thought. In the kitchen she came face to face with a bulky, grey-haired, uniformed policeman who respectfully stood aside, surprised to see this little thing appear from behind him. A second man sat at the table, a smaller, younger plainclothes officer. He got up when he saw her and offered a cold, hairy hand, very official.

“Detective Sergeant Luc Roberge, Quebec Police Force. I’m very sorry to bother you. This is Officer Morel.” The officer nodded. Juliette turned to Béatrice, who was leaning on the counter and paying no attention to her.

Why did she let these two in?

“What’s happened is absolutely horrible,” Roberge continued. “Since 9/11, it’s as though everything’s upside down. Totally.”

Juliette said nothing, so he went on.

“I hope he makes it through. Sincerely.”

Hallmark Plus.

He coughed. “I realize this is a delicate moment, but you may be getting a visitor …”

“Visitor?”

Roberge turned to Béatrice, looking for encouragement and getting none. “We have good reason to believe that Max O’Brien will soon be back in Montreal,” he went on. “He’s sure to know his nephew’s in a coma from the media. We think he’s bound to show up.”

Roberge was stickhandling, so Béatrice came to his rescue: “Sergeant Roberge is from the Economic Crimes Squad.”

“I thought I’d already mentioned that.”

“They want to arrest Max. End of story.”

“We’ve been after him for fourteen years.” He seemed strangely proud of this sorry record, adding, “My team is convinced he’ll get in touch with one of you.”

“Why me?” asked Juliette. “I’ve never even met him.” This was true. David had only mentioned the name a few times in passing. She knew David’s uncle had been wanted by the police for several years: a crook who was not involved in her life, or David’s, for that matter.

“All I’m asking is for your cooperation. He is brilliant, but sneaky and manipulative. You mustn’t believe a thing he says, ever.”

Béatrice waved his business card. “Message received, Sergeant. If he ever does show up, one of us will call you, right, Juliette?”

She nodded.