Читать книгу The Snakeheads - Mary Moylum - Страница 9

It was a hazy morning, promising a bright, hot day. Grace took a cab to work. Her fourteen-year-old Volvo had broken down yet again, which meant two days in the shop and another six-hundred-dollar bill. What she needed was a new car. A Toyota Camry or the latest BMW would be nice, except for one small problem. In her family, the Wang-Weinsteins, Japanese and German-made cars were still referred to as “enemy” cars. Her parents had been mere infants when the atrocities in their former homelands occurred, but the history of it all still lingered in their minds. In any case, with her luck she’d drop forty thousand dollars on a BMW and within a week it would be on a container ship to the Middle East, Hong Kong, or Russia. That’s why a rusting Volvo, supplemented by taxi cabs whenever it was in the shop, was still much cheaper and less complicated.

“This block will do. Drop me off here.”

Three years had programmed her for the walk, which took her across O’Connor and up Bank Street. From there, she turned down Slater towards an uninspiring thirty-seven-storey concrete building. A silver and black sign proclaimed “Immigration and Refugee Commission”.

The IRC sat four blocks south of Parliament Hill, a mere ten-minute walk away from the political machinations it had been set up to bypass. Back in 1989, the commission had been created with noble intentions, as an arm’s-length agency, to determine who was or was not a refugee under the 1951 Geneva Convention. The year she had been appointed was the same year the commission had earned the distinction of being just about the most vilified government agency in the country. Knowing that, she had still accepted a political appointment to the bench. Why? Ambition — and naiveté. She had wanted to grant asylum to every deserving, downtrodden soul from every wretched country in the world. And besides, what else could you do with a law degree and a doctorate in anthropology?

It was easy to tell when an immigration or humansmuggling story had hit the front page. The lobby became a circus of newshounds. She did her best to look unimportant and anonymous as she threaded her way through them towards the bank of elevators. At the security desk, she discreetly flashed her ID badge to the men guarding the agency from subversives, and from the public it was supposed to serve.

On the nineteenth floor, she slipped past cubicles of overworked civil servants who laboured in silence, bent over desks covered in paper and case files. There were days when she still thought that the taxpayers were getting their money’s worth from all these young prosecutors, stern moralists bent on carving out careers, weeding out bogus asylum seekers from the genuine article.

“Grace!”

She turned around and came face to face with Mark Crosby, one of her least favourite colleagues. Crosby was a womanizer and plotter; when not on the bench, he spent his time scrounging around for cheap feels and political gossip.

“What?” she barked.

“I hear you’re assigned the Vladimir case?” he asked, leaning against the door outside her office.

“What’s it to you?”

“Need a second-chair? I could be of help to you. Given that last year, I was in Russia for three months with Immigration.” He glanced at the banker’s boxes of documents stacked outside her office waiting to be returned to records.

“Well, thanks, but no thanks.”

Not put off by the lack of friendliness, he continued, “I’m heading out to Vancouver this afternoon to try a boatload of Filipino sailors. My second-chair is down with the flu. Wanna run away with me?” he winked. “I checked. You got nothing on the docket.”

“No. I’m busy,” she snapped, giving him the onceover. Black horn rimmed glasses, double chin, and an evergrowing paunch. Why on earth should she be interested in him? She found his sexual interest in her almost insulting.

She pushed past him as she walked into her office, a nine-by-nine foot place of chaos, crammed with bulging files and more banker’s boxes of documents. It wasn’t luxurious by any stretch of the public’s imagination. However, this was the cubby-hole where she had produced her best work, the legal decisions that had held up at the Federal Court.

“Grace, you really could use my help on the Vladimir case and I can use yours on the Filipino sailors’ case. I don’t see why you’re not keen to work together.”

“The fact is, I’m not into office romance. I’ve said it once. I’ll say it again.”

“Come on, Grace. What’s a gorgeous girl like you doing all by yourself? You know how it could be between us.”

She glared at him. “I don’t want to hear how you feel about me. Let’s not go there. We’ve got a nice working relationship, so let’s keep it at that.”

“What about the hotel room I’ve already booked for you?”

“What? What?” She was royally pissed. “Cancel it! Cancel it right away! I don’t need that kind of cheap gossip hanging around me.” She wagged her finger menacingly at him. “Do something like that again and it’s grounds for a harassment charge. Send me an e-mail when you’ve cancelled the hotel room. Jesus!”

Without another word she buried her head in the file sitting in the middle of the desk, hoping he would go away. Mark Crosby had a sharp mind for spinning clever legal arguments, but she found him irritating. Unfortunately for her, he was somewhat infatuated with her. At the same time she could see the loneliness in his face. She wondered if he could see the loneliness in her as well. They were both workaholics, partly because they both had little going on in their private lives. He probably interpreted that as common ground. The fact of the matter was, he just didn’t appeal to her.

As she reached for the second package of exhibit items, the phone rang.

“Ms. Wang-Weinstein? This is Cindy Black from the law offices of Richard and Richard. We’re seeking a postponement of Thursday’s case.”

“May I ask why?”

“We need time to line up the witnesses. Immigration refuses to accept the authenticity of the passport and birth certificate. The lawyers want to explore identity through witness testimony.”

I don’t know how witness statements can vindicate your client when it’s clear from the documents that he’s a liar, Grace wanted to say. Instead she answered, “I suggest you call scheduling and ask for a hearing date next month. I’m not willing to postpone it further than that. And I want to see those witness statements at least a week prior to the hearing.”

“You’ll get them. I appreciate this, Ms. WangWeinstein.”

“You’re welcome.”

She knew that refugee claimants were often quite prepared to violate the Immigration Act by producing forged or stolen identity and immigration documents. It was predictable, yet dispiriting. Four years on the bench had made her weary of photocopies presented as “original documents,” or identity papers that were torn or had incomplete stamps and seals or faded lettering. That was the problem with the job. After a while, compassion fatigue set in, closely followed by cynicism. Nothing surprised her. She had seen it all before. Prosecutors and judges who spent too many years in the business became masters of the same worn-out, exasperated expression.

After she hung up, she reached into her briefcase for the morning’s Globe and Mail. Immigration and refugee stories were now a sign of the times. Populations were on the move, displaced by war, natural disasters, famine — who could have guessed that her Ph.D. dissertation on mass movements and resettlement of displaced peoples would position her in a growth industry? Wanting to make a difference in the world, she had accepted a contract with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to study mass migration in Europe. That was the year when Europe had to deal with an influx of millions of people leaving the former Soviet Union. In the course of her two years with UNHCR, which spanned seventy thousand interviews with asylum seekers, she had learned two facts. One, people migrated. For whatever reason, they wanted a chance to live in another country that offered them better economic opportunities. Two, when too many people migrated, prosperous countries responded by shutting their gates through tougher immigration laws. But people were desperate, and willing to do anything. They would use fraudulent documents, pose as other people, become indentured slaves as nannies or sweatshop workers or prostitutes, run drugs, run guns — anything to earn hard currency to pay for passports and air tickets.

In Geneva, one of her tasks had been to deal with the press, who tended to be unsympathetic to the plight of refugees. Often, she would link them up with various field officers: people who worked on certain cases or remembered a story that stayed with them. Grace thought about the case that still resonated through her life after all those years, like the incoming tide that washed driftwood onto a beach. She would never be able to forget the face of that young woman. The case had played itself out at customs in Sweden. A young Iranian woman and her baby had been smuggled out of Iran by agent smugglers. They had stuffed her and her baby into a cargo trunk. When customs officials pried open the top, they found the woman buried underneath a bundle of rags. During the trip, the baby had suffocated. Mouth to mouth resuscitation could not save her infant. The young mother had seized her one chance to escape from Khomeini’s henchmen, who had executed every member of her family, only to find herself being charged with criminally negligent homicide by the Swedish authorities, and sent to jail.

Grace despised agent smugglers. To her they were no more than criminals living off the desperation of others. But she knew that those desperate people in Third World countries often saw them as saviours. And sometimes, she grudgingly had to admit, they were.

She grabbed a second cup of coffee from the lunchroom and scanned the papers. This was the third immigration story splashed all over the front page this month. More often than not, she read the feature stories not for the news, but to see if the reporters got the details right. The lead story this week was about a people-smuggling ring that was jointly smashed by U.S. and Canadian immigration officers. A migrant vessel had been intercepted around Akwasasne. Nick Slovak’s colleague, Walter Martin, had been killed in the shootout between INS agents and the snakeheads. Even the papers were calling them snakeheads now. She preferred the term alien smugglers. The dead smuggler, Shaupan Chau, had been granted refugee status by the IRC in Montreal, back in the mid-1990s. Thank goodness she hadn’t been the judge who heard his case. Blank passports and Canadian visas were found on the boat. It must have been an inside job in some embassy somewhere. How else would they have gotten their hands on blank passports and visas?

There was an adjoining article about Nick. It described how he had spent the last couple of years running undercover operations against agent smugglers. There was a picture of him at the bottom of the page. She soaked up his image; looking for subtle changes since they had last seen each other. The photo didn’t do him justice. In the flesh, he exuded energy and intelligence. She remembered the first time she had laid eyes on him. He was her idea of handsome: deep-set, piercing greygreen eyes, a serious, sensitive face, mop of brown hair falling over a high forehead, the way his clothes hung on his five-foot-eleven frame. He moved with an easy grace; she knew that he either played or had once played a lot of sports. He turned her on. Taking him to bed was easy, but a real extramarital romance wasn’t something she had planned. A brief encounter had morphed into something deeper. In the beginning, on impulse, she had lied to Nick about not being married, and then she had to go on lying. What a fool she had been. At first it was easy to do, living in two different cities. He always called her on her pager. But then one day he had called her office and her secretary had inadvertently provided him with her home number. David, her husband, had answered the phone. Nick had ended their romance. He told her he wasn’t interested in a three-way relationship. Not long after that, David, too, left her and filed for divorce.

After the break-up with Nick, she rationalized that there was no way their relationship could ever have worked. In the world of immigration, there were two opposing sides. Those like Nick who stopped the barbarians at the gate. And adjudicators like her who granted them asylum and let them in. In their nine months of sleeping together they had both been crossing into enemy territory.

A few months later she had presided on a case in which Nick had represented the minister’s office. He had spent months building a deportation case against a female member of the Iranian mujahedin. However, in Grace’s opinion the middle-aged woman didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist. In her legal decision, she had written that living in a mujahedin neighbourhood wasn’t the same thing as actually being a bomb-throwing member of an underground army. Forced to choose between love and the exercise of her own judgement, she really had no choice at all. She could not convict a woman she believed was innocent because she was in love with the prosecutor. Nick was outraged, and his office treated her as persona non grata. He hadn’t returned any of her calls. To make matters worse, the left-wing ideologues had been triumphant, using her legal decision as a moral victory in their propaganda war with the right-wing ideologues over the issue of refugees.

Staring at the photo of Nick, she was filled with regret and desire. It was too late now to pick up the phone. Too much time had passed and events had driven them too far apart. The connection between them was broken.