PART FIVE

Chapter One

1961

Lennie smelled perfume and looked up at her mother floating down the stairs, her feet in satin pumps placed sideways, bending her knees like she was waltzing. As her mother grew closer, the scent of her perfume got richer and so did the swishing sound of her evening gown. Suzanne said, “Watch out, darling,” and Lennie had to move aside while her mother swept past. Lennie’s hand darted out to feel the silk chiffon. “Don’t touch!” Suzanne said.

“My hands are clean.” Lennie held up her clean palms, ten clean fingers, then turned her hands to look at them. “Clean as starfish.”

Suzanne laughed. Emmett was helping her with her cream linen shawl, throwing it around her shoulders. She wore pearl-buttoned kid leather gloves that came up to her elbows.

Lennie repeated, “Clean as starfish.”

Suzanne bent down to kiss the side of her mouth, then wiped away the lipstick she’d left there. “Be good.”

The babysitter, Marcie, a dork, was watching from the living room. “You look like Jackie Kennedy, Mrs. Jones,” she said.

“Oh, I hope not,” Suzanne said. “She’ll think I’m just a copycat.”

Lenore sat on the stairs while her father escorted her mother out of the house. She was glad to have a beautiful mother, but she wondered if all mothers were so fake. She heard the Alfa Romeo back out of the driveway and went to kneel on the couch to watch them leave. The car was blue as a raincloud and the top was down and her mother’s head was wrapped up in the linen shawl, looking back at Lennie in the picture window.

Suzanne waved a gloved hand to her. “Do you think she’s all right?” she asked Emmett. She felt a thrill at going out into the lightening dusk of May, nestled in the leather seats as she once had done when her father drove this car. She loved the Alfa and was glad Emmett loved it too, kept it repaired; he’d even rebuilt the engine a couple of years ago and had it repainted the same gunmetal blue.

“Which?” Emmett asked. He was distracted, shifting gears. They didn’t have far to go but they were late.

Suzanne looked back again and saw the lonely half-shell of Lennie’s face in the window. They rounded the bend and there was only the night ahead. Dinner at the home of the American ambassador. The Kennedys were in town. How marvellous it was to hold sway like this, a woman and a man, good people. She glanced at Emmett, handsome in black tie, any match for Jack Kennedy. Emmett turned on the headlamps. They hurtled forward, rounding the curves of Sussex and following the river, lights from the little houses on the Gatineau shore rippling snakily.

“Who will be there?” she asked.

Without taking his eyes from the road, Emmett leaned sideways to hear her better, his voice smooth against the rumbling engine. “Who will be there? State Department, a fellow named Armstrong, a good man, actually. Merchant, the ambassador, he’s all right too. Mike Pearson is invited. It’s going to drive poor Dief mad with envy.”

“Poor Dief,” she said, excitement and pleasure rising in her throat. She loved to see Diefenbaker humiliated. Pearson was always gallant toward her. “Poor, poor Dief,” she repeated tenderly, loving them all.

At the reception before dinner, she got stuck with Olive Diefenbaker, who didn’t bother to make small talk but glared banefully at the guests and gave Suzanne such a bold look of disapproval when she accepted a daiquiri just like the president’s, Suzanne put it down and then lost it to a zealous waiter. Olive muttered to her, “I’m sorry, my dear, but I’ve forgotten your name.” Suzanne told her, using her maiden name too, “Suzanne McCallum Jones.” Olive pursed her Baptist lips and forgot her name again. It made Suzanne wish that Ethel Masters were here. Ethel was cut from the same cambric cloth as Olive, but for some reason she had decided to like Suzanne and treated her with a mother’s forbearance; or, at least she always remembered to ask about Lenore. But Ethel was with Bill at the hospital; Bill had had a heart attack.

The ladies were excused after the raspberry tart, and Olive quite suddenly disappeared. Word went round the salon where the women were politely ensconced that Prime Minister Diefenbaker and his wife had left early. Jackie Kennedy, speaking French with a beautiful young woman married to somebody Suzanne didn’t know, stopped and turned and, into the quiet room, said, “Quel dommage.” It was the first time that Suzanne had clearly heard Jackie’s voice. A kittenish, breathy voice, it shocked Suzanne a little, so utterly sexy, so pink, so creamed.

When the ambassador’s man reopened the doors to the salon and announced that the gentlemen had finished their cigars, Suzanne swept ahead of the others in search of Emmett. Entering the dining room in a flurry, she then had to drift and study the paintings when she realized that Emmett wasn’t here. A waiter came so close as to brush her arm, inquiring, “Would madame like something more?” The answer was most obviously no. Suzanne said, “I would like a cup of coffee,” and sent him off. She saw a coattail she knew instinctively was Emmett’s and pursued it, just as it disappeared around a corner.

It was Emmett, Emmett as he was when he wanted something more than he wanted her. She hurried to follow, and when he stopped before the doorway to another room, she stopped too and could see a wall of books, a masculine leather-bound library in the rosy, darting light from a fireplace.

Emmett didn’t go into the library but stood his distance. She saw he was like a hunting dog, perked, listening, and she stayed, fascinated to see her husband, where his glasses wrapped about his ears, and his long, muscular back that she knew with her bare hands, in a tuxedo, poised to absorb whatever went on in that room.

They stood like that for several minutes. But why doesn’t he go in? If it’s a private conversation, why is he eavesdropping on them? She didn’t like for Emmett to behave strangely as he was now, almost skulking, and she felt suddenly queasy. Then Emmett turned to retreat. When he saw Suzanne standing there, he approached her without greeting and took her arm to lead her quickly back to the company who were gradually dispersing, bidding the ambassador and his wife goodnight. Jackie was there, momentarily alone, and Suzanne saw her youthfulness, her brief show of disappointment, seeing Emmett and Suzanne emerge around the corner, then her smile returning and coming toward them and gliding past because the president was behind them now in the company of a man whom Suzanne knew to be the minister of defence, both of them smiling too.

They left then, and on the street, Suzanne waited while Emmett pulled up the convertible top on the car, for it had grown cool. When they were driving, in the leathery warmth lit by the low dash and streetlights showing new small leaves on the trees and hedges, she asked him, “What were they talking about?”

“What were who talking about when?”

“What were the president and Harkness talking about in the library?”

“You’re a curious one, aren’t you.”

“Why didn’t you let them know you were there?”

He didn’t answer. As they neared their home and she realized that he wasn’t going to tell her anything, she felt foolish and angry but didn’t wish to spoil the night. Remembering Jackie’s breathy purr, she softly asked again, “Tell me. I’m your wife. You know it doesn’t go any further than this car.”

He turned onto their street, the cambered road tilting her toward him, and she kissed his ear and whispered, “Tell.”

He pulled irritably away. They were at the driveway now, their headlamps sweeping the dark house. She said, “Why on earth wouldn’t Marcie leave a light on?”

Emmett was out of the car, running into the house. He rushed into the living room and turned on a lamp. When she arrived a second afterward, she found Emmett strangely frozen, and Lenore sitting on the couch with her bare feet tucked under her dressing gown. Suzanne thought Lennie had been left home all alone, but then a man stepped out of the shadows at the far end of the room.

 

Chapter Two

“I let the babysitter go,” said John Norfield.

Suzanne went to Lenore, “Are you all right?”

“We were sitting in the dark,” Lennie observed.

“She doesn’t mind the dark,” John said. “Do you.”

“No.” Lennie seemed unafraid but far too alert; it might have been noon. Suzanne thought, She should be afraid, why isn’t she afraid?

Emmett went back outside to the car on the driveway and closed its doors. When he returned to the house, he was carrying Suzanne’s evening bag. He gave it to her, then went to check the rest of the house. They heard him go out the back door.

“What’s going on?” Suzanne asked John. She heard herself sounding as if she were afraid of him, afraid of John, it surprised her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t wish to be dramatic. Ill judgment on my part. It’s become a habit, I guess, preferring the dark.”

He wore a jacket she thought she recognized from years ago and he did look seriously ill. Lennie was sitting very still, quivering. He said, “Lenore has been wonderful, keeping me company while we waited. Perhaps you’d better go up and put her to bed now.”

Suzanne was about to protest when she saw Lennie give her a look of relief, and she guessed that Lennie was tired of playacting, that she needed to let down her guard. When Suzanne went to her, Lennie even raised her arms as if her mother could carry her, then they both realized, she’s too big now, and they walked clumsily up the stairs, Lennie leaning on her step by step.

After several minutes, Emmett returned through the back door. He entered the living room. “What are you doing here?” he asked angrily.

“I’m losing my touch.” John stood as if he needed support, as if he’d lost reference to everything,

“Sorry,” Emmett said. “I guess we both panicked when we saw Lennie like that.” He went to get them both a drink.

“She’s going to be beautiful. Like her mother,” John said, accepting the drink. “And how was dinner?”

Emmett realized that it was obvious they’d been at a formal dinner, both of them wearing evening clothes. “It was fine.”

“Are they glamorous in person?” John sat down, putting his drink aside and lighting a cigarette. “Jack and Jackie.”

Emmett went to the window, pulled the drapes aside and carefully looked out. “John?”

“Yes, Emmett?”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“No one followed you here?” A small figure was walking away between the houses across the street.

“No. I was careful. And I believe that the dandy, our old friend Robert Morton, has kept his word and left you and your family in peace.”

John’s bargain with Robert Morton, his sacrifice, giving himself up on Morton’s promise that the RCMP would leave Emmett and his wife alone, returned to Emmett in all its humiliation. John continued, speaking gently, as if he understood Emmett’s embarrassment but had further news. “I think Morton was more interested in Suzanne. He sure thought she was one hot ticket.”

Emmett said, “I know about that.”

“Bob Morton’s infatuation? You know?”

“He’s probably still watching her.”

“Then you should protest.” John looked yet more abandoned. “He gave me his word,” he said softly. Emmett hesitated. Then John knew, “Oh. You’re bluffing. Well, let’s hope he’s not. She hasn’t turned into a ban-the-bomb lady, has she?”

“Look. You know that we can’t talk here.”

“I came to give you a message. Once I’ve given you the message, I’ll leave. I won’t be back. Not even to see Lenore.”

“Why would you want to see Lenore?”

“Shall I tell you?”

Emmett sat down.

“Good,” said John. Now that he had Emmett’s attention, he put his head back against his chair and rested.

“I’ve been travelling,” he began. “It’s rather difficult to find work. The RCMP track me, you see? Not as they used to, not the excitement of surveillance, though there’s that too, in a dreary, everyday sort of way, my mail and so on, not that there is any. They follow me to my jobs if I’m lucky enough to get one, and tell my new employers I’m a Red. And I’m let go. So I travel.”

“I’m sorry,” Emmett said again.

“Not your fault.”

Morton had botched John’s arrest years ago by using unauthorized police surveillance, but, Emmett saw, Morton didn’t need to arrest John; his imprisonment was general.

John saw Emmett’s face, his pity, and he repeated, “It isn’t your fault.” He rested again for a moment. “I saw Winnipeg,” he said then, falsely bright. “My home town.”

This surprised Emmett. He’d gotten the accent wrong.

John continued. “I haven’t had any word from Leonard Fischer. Or his letters don’t reach me. I don’t know if he’s alive.” They were quiet for a few moments. “I hope he’s all right. But I don’t know. His lungs . . . ” he trailed off, rested again, and smiled. “Pathetic, isn’t it.”

It was unlike him to talk so much, and Emmett realized how lonely he must be. Emmett wished he could hold John, he hurt with the yearning to hold him, in his shabby suit, with not much more than his adopted upper Ontario accent intact. John had even lost his old sense of irony. “They contacted me a little while ago,” John said.

“Who did?”

“Old friends. They’re looking for some information they say only you can supply.” John ignored Emmett’s tense face; he leaned back in his chair as if indulging in nostalgia, and mused, “Generous of them, really, to make me feel useful again. Don’t you think?” Emmett said nothing but listened carefully. After a moment John repeated, “I really do think it’s generous, decent, to let me serve in this way, after I’ve quit the game and all.”

Emmett took a drink. “Why would they choose you to be the messenger? They know how risky it is for you to be here. The RCMP would consider it a breach of the contract. You could go to jail.”

“They knew I couldn’t resist.” John shrugged. “I guess they know I love your wife.” He laughed with his cigarette between his lips. “There. I’ve said it.”

“What information could I possibly have that would interest them?” Emmett asked again.

“Actually,” John began and paused, staring at Emmett almost like a man with amnesia, as if trying to recall Emmett’s identity. Wonderingly, his tone, mystified, “They said I was to warn you.”

“Warn me? Warn me of what?”

“That you’re not moving fast enough.”

 

Chapter Three

Emmett stared at John. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s what I’m instructed to tell you. That you’re not moving fast enough.” John rested in his chair as if after some great effort. “I don’t know what it means.”

Emmett was silent, thinking. Then he said, “The missiles are filled with sand.”

John laughed. “Are you talking in code?”

“No. They’re actually loaded with sand. The Bomarcs and rockets for NATO are loaded only with sand. I don’t know which is crazier, nuclear bombs, possibly aimed at us, or sand in our defence missiles.”

“Sand in our defence missiles. Well. That should please them.”

Emmett, bitterly, “This country has zero defence. Not even Kennedy can make Diefenbaker load nuclear warheads into the missiles.”

John shook his head and said, “Do you ever feel old, Emmett?”

“Sure. Sure I do.”

“It occurs to me that we have been set up.”

Emmett didn’t answer. It was terrible to hear John express what Emmett had dreaded and resented ever since the investigation in ’53, ever since being sent to Cuba soon after being “cleared,” and later, to Japan, where he so conveniently fell into the sphere of Jim Smith and his special requests from the CIA. The set-up.

“All these years.” John smiled a little, and his handsomeness, his beauty was evident. He wearily sat forward. As if to a lost lover, he said, “Remember how it used to be, Emmett? Remember why we got involved so long ago? Think about it. Think back to what inspired us. What led Leonard to Russia. What led you and me to” — he hesitated — “live the way we do.”

A stubborn trace of hope in Emmett shifted, gave way. He wanted to let everything go; every remnant of what he wanted to call his private self was like a contraption he could no longer carry. Lowering his voice, intending John to understand that they must not be overheard by Suzanne, Emmett spoke barely above a whisper, “Nothing stays the same.”

John went on: “You called it ‘redemption.’ You claimed you could ‘redeem’ your life.” He shook his head. “Lovely dream. Turned nightmare.” John looked too ill to stand; he hadn’t touched his whisky. “We imagined we were saving the world. We didn’t even save ourselves. Now they’re putting pressure on you.”

Emmett bent down, picked up his drink, and drained it. “I’ll deal with it.”

“They’re coming after you, my friend. They want more information than you’re giving them.”

“I don’t have anything.”

“It’s not something you can just quit, Emmett.”

“I said, I’ll deal with it.”

“I suggest — ”

But Suzanne came downstairs. She’d changed her clothes, wore a woollen housedress. Cinderella. John stared. Emmett believed that he was trying to memorize her. The excitement between her and John was intolerable. John said, “I must be off.”

Suzanne made a helpless gesture, grasping the air involuntarily, making a fist.

John said, “Pardon the cloak-and-dagger stuff, but would you mind closing the light?”

Emmett turned off the lamp, and John said, “Thank you.”

Emmett could see him make his way to the front door, Suzanne following. He heard John say goodbye, and when Suzanne returned to the living room, he asked her, “Do you want to go with him?”

She gave a low, nervous laugh. He could see her rubbing at her arm. In a small voice she said, “I hardly think I’m up to it.” It was more than she’d intended to say. She gasped a little, he heard her dry mouth, tsk, and she came to him and put her hand against his chest as she so often did, saying, “Emmett,” calling him.

 

Chapter Four

Suzanne took Emmett’s hand as he steadied her up the last few steps and out, till she was standing on the oily floor. “I never knew!” she kept saying as she emerged to the dank cold of the garage. A cold afternoon. “All this time and I never knew!”

“I only just found it by accident,” Emmett told her. “I got down on my knees here,” he indicated where the Alfa was normally parked, “to look under the car because I thought there was a leak in the oil pan, and then I thought, What the hell is that?” He’d already told her this story, but it was worth retelling; such an odd bit of luck. “I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

“Imagine!” She nervously stood clear while Emmett lifted the hatch to let it down into position and stamped it into place. “Just when we need such a thing.”

“Dual purpose,” he said, a joke he’d kept running in this discussion. “Liquor vault and bomb shelter.”

She laughed, her recent weeping surging up in her chest. “Just imagine. It’s incredible we’re even talking like this.”

“I’m sure we won’t need it.”

“Shall I start getting supplies?”

He said that she should and again, her weeping laughter, “This is completely mad!” They agreed on that, and Emmett guided her out the crooked door of the garage and back to the house. “How will we stay warm in there?” she asked. Then, more shrill laughter, “This is mad!”

Now it was late fall and so bitterly cold even the squirrels had retired. Emmett bought a Geiger counter. He lined the liquor vault with insulation that he stapled tight in sheets of plastic. He purchased a chemical toilet and a carbon air filter. He bought boxes of candles, along with five lanterns and kerosene, thinking that, with their body heat and these light sources, they might stay warm enough. He shopped for batteries and cots and sleeping bags. As he descended the steep stairs into the bomb shelter he had the old sensation of being under surveillance — though now the spy would be a Canadian bureaucrat stumbling out from behind the shrubbery to commend an obedient citizen on preparations for his own annihilation. Emmett was reminded of how the Japanese had behaved, stupefied by obedience, till the atom bombs fell. He was angry all the time, even his dreams were angry.

Suzanne was listing the things she’d pack; there were lists all over the house. One list she’d left in the bathroom included nail polish remover. Since she’d started to make lists it seemed she couldn’t remember anything. She got Lenore up early to go to school yesterday. It was Sunday. Lennie didn’t bat an eye.

“This is retarded,” Lennie had said. “You can try sticking me in school on Sundays now, but I’m not going to ‘bomb drill.’ I don’t feel like burning to death with that bunch of nerds.” She hated school. General assembly was sickening, the other children’s bodies pressing against her, crammed into the gymnasium to learn about where to hide when the Russians come to kill them with gas and fire.

 

Monday, Emmett drove Lennie the few blocks to school. A cold, sunless morning, heat blasting in the car. Lennie coltish, a stiff mass of resistance. He pulled up at the red brick building with its chain-link fence just as the bell sounded and the other children filed inside, Lennie not getting out but watching them, dry-eyed with a wan sort of grief. She seemed old, as if she had already lost everything, had accepted an enduring betrayal. He spoke gently, “You’re going to be late.”

Lennie wearily opened the car door, got out and shut it without saying goodbye, and walked away, struggling with the heavy wooden doors, disappearing inside. Not angry but resigned. Abandoned by the things that had made her a child. Nine years old.

He was late for a meeting with the prime minister. Diefenbaker had taken a shine to him, especially on the subjects of Cuba, China, and Vietnam, and used him as a sounding board, his silent confessor, for Emmett was never asked his opinion, was only invited to agree. Yes, Mr. Prime Minister, we shouldn’t isolate the Cuban people. Yes, Mr. Prime Minister, it’s a great day for prairie wheat farmers selling $400 million worth of grain to Mao Zedong. No, Mr. Prime Minister, the president of the United States can’t push you around. No, Mr. Prime Minister, that callow son of a bitch Kennedy can’t turn our ploughshares into swords. Perfectly right, Mr. Prime Minister, we won’t use our wheat exports to manipulate the Chinese on Hanoi.

At noon, Emmett crossed Wellington Street to walk down to Sparks Street, to the jewellery store that housed in its upper storey the National Press Club. He told the girl at the front desk the name of the journalist who was expecting him, then passed the men trading jokes at the bar and wove a path through the tables toward one of the booths at the rear of the club. Blue ribbons of smoke were illuminated by small yellow lamps on the tables and by brass fixtures with green shades on the walls. He recognized Wilson by the way he wore his hat, pushed back on his balding head.

Wilson stood up to greet him warmly, shaking his hand and gripping his shoulder, “Here you are, I’m glad to see you.”

Emmett sat across from him in the booth. “You look great.”

“Bullshit,” Wilson said.

“You don’t look any worse than you did ten or eleven years ago.”

Wilson tipped his glass of whisky. “Guess I’ve achieved saturation.”

When the waiter arrived, Emmett ordered a drink and a sandwich and a refill for his friend. Then he asked Wilson where he’d been since he left Japan. “Last time I knew your whereabouts, you were watching the retreat at Pusan.”

“My last and final foreign assignment.”

“Korea was?”

“Yup.” Wilson noted Emmett’s surprise. “Oh, come on. It happened to you too. Didn’t it?”

Emmett asked him to explain what he meant.

“You got yourself in hot water, didn’t you. Been anywhere since?”

“Jamaica.”

Wilson laughed.

“Worked on a deal to take bauxite alumina out of Jamaica. Went to Cuba. Havana. Where I met Ernest Hemingway at lunch at the embassy while arranging a delivery of salt cod from Labrador. I got back to Kobe once too. Aluminum. My career often intersects with aluminum.”

“How’s life in Ottawa?”

“Unremittingly dull. Is that why you’re here?”

“A fellow with the Canadian air force is creating a lot of heat over NORAD.” Wilson hesitated while someone walked close by, then resumed. “I met him in Colorado Springs. He’s drumming up opposition at NORAD headquarters. Here too. A lot of people are unhappy with your prime minister. Here in Ottawa, and in Washington too. Of course you know all this.”

“I know there’s some dissatisfaction over the Bomarc missiles. The Voodoo interceptors are sitting useless.”

“The Pentagon’s getting mad. If this was Central America, there’d be a nasty coup and it’d be all over for your Diefenbaker.”

Emmett took a bite of his clubhouse sandwich. “We call it an election up here.”

“Guess it doesn’t affect you. You’re one of those deep-sea fish lying on the bottom while the storms pass over. Insulated by all that bilge.”

“That’s a good thing, right? Public stability, bottom up.”

“Maybe. Your life’s dull, though. So’s mine.”

Emmett ordered another drink for each of them. “I don’t know why I’m buying lunch when you’re so insulting.”

“I like you. I know you’re more than you pretend to be.”

Emmett looked around the room, seeing familiar faces and some hardy types that suggested American military. The idea of a coup seemed almost plausible. Wilson’s green eyes observed him coldly, then quite abruptly, awash with affection, as if he’d turned on a tap. Emmett asked him to fill him in on where he’d been since Korea.

“McCarthy kept me home,” Wilson said. “When I finally got a clean passport again, I did some work for Colliers, till it went down. Freelanced myself almost sober. Then I did a long piece on the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Won a prize, and got myself a Midwest syndicated column.” He laughed. “Serendipity.”

Emmett thought that this sounded small compared with Wilson’s early career, but he said, “Congratulations.”

“I’m not touching Indo China. Not with a ten-foot pole and a nickel-plated condom.”

“I understand.”

“I’m a tough bird, but I can’t stand being considered an enemy of my own country. I can’t go through all that again.” The watery green eyes observing him. “And I’ll bet in that respect, we’re birds of a feather.”

Emmett finished his second drink and said, “I have a meeting at one o’clock.” He stood. “Would you like to come to my home for dinner? Meet my wife.”

“I hear there’s going to be some kind of rehearsal for Doomsday this evening.”

“Christ,” Emmett said. “We don’t have to pay attention to that.”

Wilson said he was tied up for dinner but would meet him later, here at the Press Club, at about nine. It was an odd suggestion. But Emmett agreed, he’d be here.

 

Chapter Five

At five minutes to one, Emmett walked back outside to a nearly deserted street. A patrol car slowed beside him and the cop looked at him carefully through the window. It was the kind of day that needs snow. Chilled, in his suit jacket, he ran across the street against the light. He took the stairs to his office, passing no one. His secretary was at her desk, and she jumped a little when he walked in. “Oh! Gosh, you startled me, Mr. Jones.”

He said, “It’s quiet around here.”

“Well, it’s the exercise day. You know, what’s it, the defence day against the Russians.”

“Right. How could I forget?” He was passing through to his office, but she was so intently drawn that he stopped and asked her if anything was wrong.

“Oh. No.” Her hand went instinctively to her phone. “It’s just my husband calling all morning. Honestly, he’s such a worrier.” Emmett asked what was worrying her husband now. “Oh, I don’t know. Just, he thinks it might be hard to come get me at five o’clock. If there’s a panic and people start leaving the city? We’re renting out in Westboro now, you know. And he’s afraid of the traffic if there’s a panic.”

“Why would there be a panic?”

“Oh. You know. If people start to think it’s real? My husband thinks some people might not get that it’s only playacting. They might think it’s real that the Russians are attacking and start to get into their cars and go who-knows-where. He thinks people are dumb.” She looked longingly at her telephone. “I told him not everybody’s stupid.”

“Would you like to go home?”

“Oh! That would be swell!” She dove under the desk and produced her purse. “You’re sure?”

He told her he was sure, and she was pulling on her coat when he asked her, didn’t she need to phone her husband to tell him she had the afternoon off?

“I bet he’s out back already, Mr. Jones. He left about an hour ago.” She tied a yellow scarf around her hair. “He says the Parliament’s going to be the first place the Russians bomb.”

“But it’s just playacting.”

She stopped and stood with her hand on the door handle, and in a low voice she said, “I know that. I really do. Anyways. If the Russians bomb us, we won’t have time to phone our husbands.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

“Really?” She looked him in the eye. “Well, of course I defer to your greater knowledge, Mr. Jones. But I also know we don’t have more than a candle in the wind if they ever do drop the Bomb. I don’t just sit here and type, you know. I read.”

She slung the purse over her arm and backed out of the room, pulling the door shut with both hands.

Alone, Emmett had a reflex of secret freedom, a physical rush of pleasure in being alone with state secrets, and now this made him squirm in shame. That love of secrets, a competitive quality, had made him easy to manipulate. His secretary’s fear leached into him like a bad dream. Restlessly he shuffled with the papers on his desk. He didn’t have a meeting, as he’d told Wilson; he needed some time alone. His phone rang.

“Emmett?” It was Suzanne.

“What’s wrong?”

She seemed to be speaking away from the receiver; he could hear her take a step in the kitchen, hear her pulling at the cord the way she always did, wrapping it around her hand. Then he heard the siren through the phone even while it sounded in the room where he stood. A high plaintive wail rising insistently, the authority of fear. “There it goes. I’ve got to go get Lennie.”

It was only one-thirty. He asked her why she was getting her so early and she answered angrily, “Oh for chrissake, Emmett, why do you think?” She slammed the receiver into its cradle.

He walked out into the hall. A dozen people were standing there. The siren shrilled. He said, “It’s just an exercise.” They stood and listened. It was hypothetical as one’s own death is hypothetical, and someone said, “Imagine.”

The secretary from across the hall shuddered visibly. “Thank god it’s not real.”

The siren slowly descended in pitch till it sounded hollow and off-key and then it sputtered out. Several of the people in the hallway chuckled, and someone said, “Fire drill’s over, children, back to your desks.”

Emmett walked to the stairs and down to the back exit, where he had parked his car. The Alfa embarrassed him today, struck him as frivolous. The police had stopped the car ahead of him to ask the driver for his papers, but they just took a quick look at the Alfa and waved him through.

Suzanne was pulling into the driveway when he arrived, and he parked behind her. She got out, had started to walk back toward him when she saw that Lenore was still sitting in the car so she turned and went around to open the passenger door, leaning down. When he approached, he heard her trying to coax Lennie out of the car. “It’s all right, darling, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

He joined her; together they stuck their heads in to croon their words of comfort and persuasion and then a mild threat, “If you don’t get out of the car, Lennie, you’re not going to see the television.”

Lenore wore a dazed, sullen look, but hearing this, her eyes moved to her parents’ faces and she viewed them closely and separately. Her skin was milky, shiny with sweat. More than frightened, she looked resentful. She put her legs out of the car as if following her own feet, Emmett and Suzanne backing away, then Suzanne running ahead to unlock the front door.

Lennie went straight to the TV and turned it on. A man was standing in front of a map of Canada. He spoke with a severe, scolding tone. Emmett came and tried to put Lennie on his lap, but her hard, thin body didn’t bend.

The man on the television said, “The most common answer is that they’ll die. And there’s no need for it. Improve your chances of survival. At the sound of the alert, keep calm. Do not use your telephone. Gather your family and check the gas in your car. If you choose to leave the target areas, take a blanket, two quarts of water, baby food, medicines, a battery radio, eating utensils, an axe and rope. Know your destination. Have identification for any lost children. For those who choose to stay, find protection from the blasts and heat effects. Protect yourself with bedsprings. Remove small objects that would fly around. There might be twenty or thirty minutes before fallout comes, perhaps longer. Use a fire extinguisher. Ladies, know how to get rid of radioactive dust. Turn off gas and water and electricity. And wait for further instructions.”

 

Chapter Six

Lennie’s parents had the sun behind them. The day that had been sere revealed a radiant November sun unobstructed by leaves, the sky stark blue against the grey branches of the trees. Lennie wasn’t used to seeing the sun at that angle, like a yo-yo broken off its string, because normally she was at school at this hour of this month. It made a rainbow through the high window in the dining room and hit her parents so she could see the wrinkles in their clothes and the frizz of her mother’s hair, their arms raised to tell her, Wait, wait, you have to make us feel better. She couldn’t see their faces, and she didn’t want to. Screw them. Screw Screw Screw.

She went up the stairs to her bedroom but hung around on the landing a few minutes to listen to them say, Her Her Her, She She She.

“I had to,” her mother said. “They phoned. They told me to come and get her. They said she was disturbing the other children.”

Her father said, “What about her? What about her feelings? Didn’t they think about that? What’s she going to do tomorrow when she has to go back? Now she’s a freak.”

“Don’t you call her that,” her mother hissed.

“I’m not. Jesus, Suzanne, of course I’m not calling her a freak.”

But Lennie knew, he said it because he thought it. It came out of his head. Communist spies are the real freaks.

Lennie went into her bedroom. To celebrate her ninth birthday because she was “nearly a decade old,” her mother “redecorated” her room last June and got floral skirts for her bed. Lennie found them beautiful — skirts for a bed, big blue flowers with yellow tongues. Lennie crawled under her bed. She was protecting herself with bedsprings. From downstairs she heard the distant vibrations of their voices.

Emmett told Suzanne that he had to go back to work. She followed him out to the car, kept him talking in the driveway. He only wanted to be in his office, to close his door.

He hadn’t been contacted in some time, not at all since John Norfield was sent as messenger. Emmett had made the decision; he’ll make contact with them, he’ll tell the Russians that he’s finished, he’ll tell them to leave him alone.

No one ever did catch him in his work for the Russians, no one at External Affairs, no one in the FBI, no one in the CIA.

The Americans think he’s one useful patsy, giving them stuff on his government’s plans in Cuba. Information, photographed documents that made the Americans feel in control. He was a success, a great success as a spy. Now the continent might be destroyed by an atom bomb.

Celebrate the end of your brilliant career, he told himself, have a party all by yourself. He’d always had to work alone. There were no Spymasters Clubs, no conventions in Moscow. No professional conversation had ever been possible — that was the nature of the game, and he’d accepted it, even welcomed it, perceiving himself as exclusive, private. But he was merely desolate.

His hand was on the car door. Suzanne was standing before him with her arms wrapped around her shoulders, shivering in the cold while she talked. Emmett felt a tremor of panic. His mind went up — he was in his airplane, his Lancaster, high above a city on fire. He was also, of course, in his driveway. It was daytime. His body was swept into a whirlwind, the wild wind of a firestorm. He shuddered, she didn’t notice. She never seemed to notice.

She was talking. She must never know. He’d contact his Russian handler, he’d tell him that he was through, he would retrieve himself. He would be a husband and father, an ordinary civil servant, and if there were another war — if there was another war, it wouldn’t matter anymore, they’d all be dead. He needed to gather his son to him; maybe they should all go to Japan, it had already come through fire; it was hard to think clearly, and Suzanne was telling him, “I’m so worried.”

“I know.”

“I can’t protect her. She’s strong, but it makes her vulnerable. Do you know what I mean? Am I making any sense?”

“Yes.” He’d tell the Americans too, he was through. No more duplicates. His stuff on Cuba had seemed harmless. Even Kennedy had liked Castro in the days after the revolution. The Americans would cut off Aoi, his son would suffer. He had to go to his son; they should all go to Japan.

She was talking about Lennie. “If she wasn’t so bright. If she was less, less of everything, and more, more silly, I wish she was silly.”

“I have to get back to work.”

Suzanne said, “Of course.” She stepped back from the car to let him go. “That goddamn siren.”

He got into the car and rolled down the window.

She leaned down and said, “Do you think they’d actually drop the Bomb on us?”

“They might. I don’t know. We did.”

“No we didn’t.”

“Oh,” he said. She believed in countries; didn’t she know that there are no countries? There’s only power. Mad generals and a sad, crazy prime minister.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’ll see you tonight.”

“What should I do with Lennie? She’s so scared.”

“Read to her. Keep her away from the TV and the radio. Tell her she’s good. Tell her it’s going to be okay.”

“I love you,” Suzanne said.

Emmett drove back downtown. He thought about how Suzanne loved him.

How? In the light of day with her conscious mind in all its sundry calculations.

One day, when he’s clear, when they’re all clear, he’ll go away alone for a while, till he feels strong enough to ask himself if, in the world as it must be, without that ideal that had once loaned him a secret radiance, without his talent and that private light he’d thought he lived by, her sundry love will be enough.

 

Chapter Seven

Close to nine o’clock that night in cold, hard rain he parked in his spot near the East Block and walked down to Sparks Street. Wilson was standing under the store’s awning, smoking a cigarette. “Thanks for showing up,” Wilson said, taking his arm to guide him back out into the rain to where an Edsel Corsair four-door hardtop was parked at the curb. Wilson dropped his cigarette onto the sidewalk and said, “Rental. Shitty car. Jump in.”

They were driving. It was raining very hard. Emmett asked where they were going.

“We’re off to see the Wizard.” Wilson grinned. He was having a good time. Emmett felt his spirits lift. It had been too long since he’d spent time with a happy person. Maybe men are more naturally happy than women are. More foolishly optimistic.

They actually went back to Jones’s neck of the woods, about half a mile from his home in Rockcliffe, and pulled into a circular driveway of the kind favoured by Ottawa socialites, replete with a green canvas umbrella funnelling from double front doors to the edge of the boulevard, fortification for hairdos. A large Stars and Stripes drooped in the rain. Wilson parked and tossed the keys cheerfully — “Back entrance” — leading him around to the back of the house, where somebody had built an addition, a modern contraption of sheet metal with steel beams that extruded from a brick facade. Emmett realized he was somewhere official, something subsidized by state money, American state money.

They were greeted by a tall, lanky man with an open, Nordic face, wearing the casual dress uniform of the American air force. “Hello, friends,” he said, “Chuck’s in here,” his voice warmly relaxed, his accent mid-west. “We’re winding down, but I know there’s still a cold beer with your name on it.” They followed him through a chilly, stylish room decorated with a lot of tiger-striped furniture, then down a set of stairs, the smell of wood smoke and cigars reaching up to greet them, and into a rec room with a pool table, football trophies, photographs of college football teams, a padded leather bar at one end, a stone fireplace at the other, where sofas and upholstered chairs were set up around a black bearskin rug. A stocky black maid was stacking dirty dishes with the remains of a late meal of spaghetti while another went around with clean ashtrays. Twenty men or so were sitting in bright contentment, drinking coffee or finishing a beer. Emmett recognized several journalists. Besides the lanky officer, there were others in military uniform, both RCAF and US air force. The American ambassador was here, speaking quietly and earnestly. An athletic forty-something fellow broke away and came to greet them. This was their host, Chuck, the ambassador’s assistant.

Emmett was struck by a general atmosphere of gratitude and relief, and he knew that the reporters were getting an unofficial “backgrounder.” Chuck spoke in the hushed tone of a church steward. “Glad you could make it. Wilson, good of you go out in the rain to collect him. Emmett, right? Glad to meet you at last. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Emmett doubted this was true; it would be the kind of blanket statement Chuck would use often in every posting. Ambassadorial. Chuck murmured, “Come in,” and showed them where to sit. To the stocky maid he said, “Leave those a minute and get the gentlemen whatever they’d like.”

The ambassador smoothly acknowledged them without pausing in his speech. “The cold and bitter truth is this,” he was saying, “if they decide to use the ICBMs, and you fellas don’t have the weaponry to meet that challenge, the whole continent will be destroyed.”

Chuck took his seat beside the ambassador, leaned his elbows on his knees, and said, “Conventional weapons have gone the way of the dodo bird.”

“I’d never tell your prime minister what to do — ” the ambassador said, and Chuck interrupted, “Just try it,” and everybody laughed.

The ambassador paused, generously acknowledging Chuck’s wit before continuing. “Like I said, it’s not our goal to interfere in your national affairs. But this, my friends, is international. It calls for a statesmanlike decisiveness —” Again Chuck interrupted and finished for him, “Somewhat lacking in your chief —” The ambassador smiled indulgently at Chuck’s un-diplomatic candour and resumed, “A decisiveness and, if I might add, a forthrightness in delivering on a promise.”

The Ottawa journalists squirmed at this suggestion that their country wasn’t playing straight. Somebody grumbled, “It’s a damned disgrace.”

Chuck scratched his head. “I admit I’m at a loss. The uranium comes from you. Makes more than a billion dollars in Canada, creates a lot of jobs for Mr. Diefenbaker’s voters. But when it comes to loading it into the Bomarcs, Diefenbaker is suddenly a virgin.” He smiled at them all. “Kind of retroactive.”

The officer who’d greeted Wilson and Jones at the door now spoke. “We can’t protect you without your full cooperation. That means nuclear, that means we go prepared for maximum war. That’s what it means to live in the twentieth century. It’s absolute madness to have all these empty cannons sitting up here with the Russians aiming nuclear missiles at you right now as we speak. Don’t kid yourselves. Your prime minister is a hypocrite of the first order.”

There was a brief shocked pause, and then another of the US air force officers said, “Yeah! Where the hell did you guys get a nerd like that?” He spoke so lightly, the insults bounced off the company, and they all laughed. “He’s a big nerd!” the officer repeated indignantly, and everyone laughed harder.

This broke up the party. It was getting late. They began to stand and collect their coats, thanking Chuck for his fine hospitality. “We’re not all bad, are we?” Chuck asked. “I often get the impression you Canadians think we’re some kind of monstrous, mammoth obliteration of your precious identity. All we want is some help in protecting your north from a nuclear holocaust.”

Emmett was wondering exactly why Wilson had brought him here when he saw a familiar face on the other side of the room, obscured by the other men as they were leaving. Then he saw him clearly. Wearing a bomber jacket, and the same, winking smile. A visitor from a bigger place. He caught Emmett looking. Jim Smith, Aoi’s employer in Kobe and the man who’d so effectively presented him with his job as “consultant” for the Americans. Mr. Smith was making his way toward him.

Emmett began to speak closely into Wilson’s ear, “Nice of you to bring me along. I’d appreciate a lift back to my car in a few minutes.” Wilson saw Mr. Smith approach; he stiffened eagerly, but Emmett nudged him to leave. “Wait for me. I’ll be along shortly.”

“Okey-dokey, I’ll be right outside,” Wilson said and went.

Jim Smith was reaching for Emmett’s hand, introducing himself vigorously, “Emmett, right? We met in Japan, remember? Commerce, right?”

Emmett politely corrected him. “External Affairs.”

Smith snapped his fingers. “That’s right! Nice to see you again.” He took his arm. “Something I’ve been wanting to ask —” leading him aside.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you too,” Emmett said. “I didn’t expect to see you here tonight. Just seems too lucky.”

“Anything to make you happy, Mr. Jones.”

“Look. I want you to know. I’m not in the game anymore.”

“And I want you to know, the stuff on Cuba is pretty unremarkable.”

“I don’t care.”

“Change of heart, have you?”

“That’s right.”

“You’d be taking a pretty big risk, trying to wriggle out of this one. Lot of people riding on you.”

Emmett could feel the sweat between his shoulder blades. But he said, “Nobody’s going to like it when they learn that the CIA is pushing around a Canadian civil servant.”

“You won’t get a chance to say much, if it comes to that. Besides, we’ve got a long memory. Some time in the future, when you think it’s all blown over, maybe you’re even retired with your gold watch for good service to the Canadian government. Maybe you and your wife are on your way to your daughter’s wedding, something like that, your lovely daughter in her wedding dress in the backseat. Then, boom, a freak accident.”

“You’re crazy.”

“It’s a crazy world.”

“I’m through. And if you hurt my family, I’ll kill you.”

“I do what has to be done.”

“If anything happens to me or to my family, they’re going to know all about you.”

Smith smiled. “Maybe your government will protect you, just like they did the last time.”

Emmett backed away, saying more loudly, “Thanks! Glad everything worked out.” Smith watched him go, his face set in a small smile.

He took the stairs two at a time, his heart pounding. He would protect his family, he would protect his son. He went outside to find Wilson sitting in the car. Rain was flooding the streets. He got into the car. Wilson took a look at him and asked, “You okay?” Emmett said he was. Wilson said, “They were pretty insistent I get you here tonight. I thought it was because they wanted somebody at External to hear their take on your prime minister.”

Emmett looked away. “That’s probably it.”

Wilson went on, “Somebody sure needed to speak with you.” When Emmett didn’t respond, Wilson drove awhile, then asked over the drumming rain, “What do you think?”

“About?”

“The coup.”

“Kind of an exaggeration to call it that.”

“I’ve seen some nasty situations that started small, like tonight.”

“Yeah. But this is Canada.”

“Friendly.”

“That’s right.”

“How’d you come to know Jim?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

Wilson gave him a quick look and smiled. “Worth a try. Always a newspaper man.”

“That’s all right.”

They were close to the Sparks Street club. Wilson asked, “Still taking pictures?” Emmett didn’t answer. Wilson said, “Okey-dokey.” There was a sharp crack of thunder. Emmett told him, “Just drop me off here and I’ll walk to my car.”

Wilson refused, the streets went stark with sheet lightning. Emmett gave him directions. When he pulled up beside the Alfa, Wilson whistled. “Beautiful. They paying you pretty good?”

“It belonged to my wife’s father.” He got out of the Edsel and leaned down to thank Wilson for an interesting evening.

Wilson nodded thoughtfully, studying him. “Yup,” he said. “You’re more than you pretend to be.” He gazed around at the empty parking lot. He looked old and rumpled now. “There’s something here I can’t quite figure out.”

 

Chapter Eight

Emmett made a call. After he’d made the call, he did the usual things: taking a bus to the suburbs then doubling back by a different route, he bought a newspaper, folded it backward, and tucked it under his left arm, he went through the motions spurred by the belief that this was the last time. It was now April 1962. He hadn’t had any pushback since telling Jim Smith he was finished working for the Americans. He’d sent a letter to Aoi, asking, Is James well? and received no letter in return, other than a spring term report card from James’s private school. He wondered if maybe he was clear of the CIA. Now it was time to rid himself of any expectations from the Soviets.

The meeting didn’t go as he’d planned. Sure, it was pleasant enough; his Russian contacts were always pleasant. It came to him over the subsequent days, as the impression of his cheerful contact wore off and his position came more clearly into focus: there were those who believed that the decision to leave the service of the Soviet Union was not his to make.

It was a new contact, yet another replacement. He calculated that this was his fifth since he started, twelve years ago, at the same time he’d joined External Affairs. Each man was as pleasant as his predecessor, sympathetic, admiring of Mr. Jones’s commitment to the cause.

“You must understand,” Emmett interrupted, “I have absolutely no faith in your government. I have no faith in any government on the planet.” He was tempted to go further, to explain to the Russian that it was his lack of faith in government that had started him on the path of being a spy. He’d been inspired, lured by the promise, the ideal of a stateless society. He suspected that the Russian would laugh heartily.

The man, whose given name was Oscar, smiled, real amusement in his eyes. He had thick black eyebrows and a generous moustache, like a shorter, chubbier version of Groucho Marx. Emmett reiterated that surely it must be obvious, no man could support a government that planned to obliterate millions of people.

“But there are no such plans, Mr. Jones! This is wild talk!”

Emmett said he could no longer be sure of that.

“Well, if we are pushed — ” Oscar shrugged philosophically. “But you will talk sense to your prime minister.”

“Yes, but not for you. I don’t work for you anymore.”

“I understand. When you’re alone like you are, it’s hard to resist the propaganda. But you must be assured —”

So it went, and then they shook hands, this man Oscar with great warmth and a happy sense of silliness that Emmett had never before seen in a Russian contact. “You’re a brave, heroic man,” Oscar said, his smile indicating that no such thing exists.

“I quit. Get it?”

Oscar laughed indulgently, wiggling his Groucho Marx eyebrows. “Let the world go to hell in a handbasket!” He’d adopted a New York accent.

Emmett walked across the street, caught a bus, and rode it till it looped and came the other way. The bus driver, watching him in his rear-view mirror, thought it must be a bankrupt, or a man who’d just confirmed his wife’s infidelity — the blank face, the shock.

His friend Wilson started to travel up from Duluth to Ottawa often during the federal election campaign that spring, and they’d have a few drinks. Wilson refrained from asking Emmett more questions about his relationship with Jim Smith, though he teased him about how tough it was for a reporter to endure unsatisfied curiosity. Wilson did ask Emmett a lot of questions about Prime Minister Diefenbaker. “I hear he hates Kennedy’s guts,” Wilson said.

“I hear it’s mutual.”

“I also hear he’s crazy. Actually mad.”

Emmett told Wilson unofficially, “The prime minister’s just a bit frantic for affection. I think he’s secretly, deep down in love with Kennedy. Envious. Jealous. Kennedy’s handsomeness and charm suck the joy out of Dief.” He trusted Wilson to steal his words and refashion them into his own. Wilson had to keep things pitched sharp for his editors.

The election went badly for Diefenbaker, but he survived with a minority. June 18, Emmett and Suzanne watched the results on television, and invited Dr. Kimura to watch it with them. “Poor Dief,” said Suzanne in delight every time his party lost a seat. “Oh! Poor Dief.”

When he’d lost fifty seats from his once majority, she brought dinner on a tray into the living room so they could watch TV while they ate. Lennie lay on the carpet and observed her mother’s pleasure with narrowed eyes. When the last results were in and the government had held on but Diefenbaker had lost ninety-two seats, Suzanne brought forth champagne. “What a terrible night for Dief!” she said and she even poured Lennie a half-glass.

Kimura was offended that the election had resulted in a minority government; it would be a weak government; his instincts were to respect power, despite his solitary, peaceful nature. “You are a strange woman,” he observed, “who cheers for the bad fortunes of her country.”

Lennie stiffened.

Suzanne quickly drained her champagne, poured another, and said, “We’ll all be fine. It’s always fine.” These days, with the bomb shelter stocked and ready, with a generalized sensation that the sky is falling, that the end of their lives would be quick and violent, all this had inspired giddiness in Suzanne — she felt that she was sliding helplessly, a toboggan run, a plummet. She was having dizzy spells, and the liquor would quite likely make her sick to her stomach later, when Kimura had gone home. “You’re fine, aren’t you, Kim,” she declared. “You’re becoming a business man! What could be more fine than that?”

“What’s this?” Emmett asked.

“Oh, you know, darling, Kim’s gone into business.”

Emmett asked what this meant.

“I’m still a doctor.” Kimura crouched to put his hand on Lenore’s forehead. “You’re getting drunk!”

“Am I?” Lennie asked. So this is what they’re always doing. It felt good.

“I’ll always be a doctor. But can’t a doctor also be an entrepreneur? I’m investing in a company. We’re going to import medical equipment from Ohio. Very good machines for anaesthetics.” His voice had quickened with excitement.

Emmett and Suzanne agreed; that’s a good business for a doctor to be in.

“I’m always a doctor. But I have a partner who’s not. Still, I think he’s a very decent man.” Kimura slowed, his attention strayed to the window and the green dusk. It was nearly solstice and still light outside. “A smart man,” he said quietly. “Someone you know.”

Suzanne so wanted to be gay. “How nice! We’ll have him over!”

“You might not think it’s nice. Someone from your past, Emmett. A man you knew very well. But he’s retired now.”

Emmett asked who he was. “A tired-out External drone?”

“Not tired. Perhaps disillusioned. Not External. The RCMP.” He made himself look Emmett in the eye. “Very high up in Intelligence.”

“Morton,” Emmett said, “is not retired.”

Kimura’s face revealed his uneasiness. “Yes, he’s retired from the Mounties now. Did you know he has five children? He can’t afford such a family on what they pay him. And they frown on any man who tries to do business on the side. So he quit.”

“Who’s Morton?” Suzanne asked.

Lennie sat up. The Rabbit. “The man with the pink eyes.”

Emmett realized that Lennie was thinking of her birthday a few years ago when the little man who hated the sun had arrived to collect him, the day when Morton had pretended to give him all his files. “Another man,” he told her.

Kimura said, “His eyes aren’t pink, they’re brown. Are you mad at me, Emmett? For colluding with your enemy?”

“You mean Robert Morton. The spy from the RCMP?” Suzanne paled. “How dare you?”

Kimura had felt Suzanne’s anger before. “But he’s retired. He’s started a new life. And a business venture that will make a lot of money. Me. A rich man without children. I’ll have to give it away!”

Suzanne was not to be deterred. “Don’t you realize what he did?”

Kimura said to Lennie, “Shall I give my money to you?”

“No, thank you,” said Lennie. She held her empty glass like an egg and went to take it to the kitchen.

“How did this happen?” Suzanne wanted to know. “I can’t believe you’d work with that awful, awful man.”

“I think it was his job you didn’t like,” Kimura said. “Not the man.”

“He spied on us!” But a tremor ran over her. She had spoken of John, “us,” her instincts went first to John. Robert Morton was listening on the phone, it made a clicking sound when he tuned in.

Emmett saw fear in her eyes, and then she crossed her arms and she was uncontrollably angry because she’d cornered herself and it made her righteous. She said, “How can you even think of colluding with that snake!”

“That’s enough!” said Emmett.

His scolding, masculine correctness did what it always did to Suzanne: it triggered tears.

Kimura helplessly offered, “I’ll cancel the deal.” It was apparent by his limp voice that the deal was not to be cancelled.

Emmett asked, “When did he quit the force?”

“I don’t know for certain, but it was more than a year ago.” Kimura looked miserable. “Two years ago, I think.”

Then it was soon after Morton had pretended to return all the Jones files.

Lennie had come from the kitchen. She stood at the doorway to the living room in her stork pose, one socked foot tucked up against her knee. She was ten years old. Once she’d been skinny, but now she’d grown slender; gawky had become graceful; her bony face was striking. She had a beautiful mouth.

Lenore caught her father looking. Emmett had come to expect a childish reprimand, a rolling of the eyes, but what he saw was forgiveness. Austere and impersonal forgiveness. She turned away and climbed the stairs toward her own room.

Suzanne began to apologize, “I don’t know why it hit me like that. It was the shock. I’m sorry, Kim. God, I fight with you, don’t I?”

Kimura, bewildered, reassured her, it was all right, it was just passion, “the passion of an artist,” he called it, putting it beyond reason. “I wouldn’t like you any other way.”

“He was such a bogeyman in my mind,” she said, adding ruefully, “I’m falling apart.”

“Oh, I hope not!”

Emmett listened. Had Robert Morton gotten frustrated with the bureaucracy and decided he’d make some easy money? Five children would be expensive. He was a smart guy, a loner. What better way to fight communism than to make a fortune selling anaesthetic equipment?

One more thing troubled him. “How did you come to know Morton?” he asked Kimura.

Kimura’s eyes went to the TV. He hesitated. “A mutual acquaintance. Happenstance.” He stared at the television, feeling Emmett study him.

In the silty darkness, the election results were final: Diefenbaker’s government had squeezed by with a minority. The summer of 1962. The bomb shelter was stocked with tomato soup, nail polish remover, and a broom for sweeping radioactive dust.

Suzanne sat down beside Kimura on the couch, and with puffy eyes and sisterly persistence she tucked herself under his arm, Kimura looking relieved but baffled. Emmett thought about the leather briefcase with its photographs and transcripts. He had removed it from the vault beneath the garage; he’d taken it out to a quiet place in the country, wrapped it in a tarpaulin, and buried it in wet, mulchy soil. The tarp would loosen and rain would get in. Surely the rain will get in.

 

Chapter Nine

Gophers are solitary and they like dry ground, so the prime minister’s remote summer retreat in the Gatineau Hills was idyllic for one particular gopher who seized the occasion of a summer’s day to burrow the hole into which the prime minister put his foot as he descended from his flagstone terrace, thus breaking his ankle. His wife, Olive, got a doctor from a nearby village who might have set the cast too tight. At any rate, it swelled. Olive had him moved to Ottawa, to his bedroom on the second floor of Sussex Drive, where he was stranded but where she had access to better doctors. Still, blood vessels behind his knee burst, and blood filled his leg, and there was talk of amputation.

Since he’d been laid up, Cabinet meetings were taking place in his bedroom, so it was strange but not entirely abnormal for Emmett to receive a request for a consultation with the prime minister at his home, at bedside.

He was shown to the bedroom by Olive herself. He followed her up the broad carpeted stairs to a closed door, where she turned to give him an unfocused look and say, “Don’t keep him too long. I’ve got his supper waiting.” She ushered him in, “The young man you wanted has come, dear,” and left him, closing the door behind her.

It was late afternoon and sunny, but the drapes were drawn here. In the gloom Emmett made out a four-poster bed and a figure propped up against a stack of pillows. From under the bedclothes a foot protruded encased in plaster. There were newspapers and several files strewn on the bed. Diefenbaker’s freckled hands were knitted on his lap. Emmett saw that the prime minister was wearing yellow flannel pyjamas under a plaid bathrobe. The room smelled of Absorbine Jr.

Diefenbaker’s eyes, like plums, set deep in his loose, wan face, followed Emmett as he crossed the room and came to stand uncertainly nearby. Dief nodded in recognition: this was the fellow he wanted, though Emmett had the impression that the prime minister didn’t really know what exactly he did in the East Block, only that he was a comparatively friendly man who would agree with him. With no words of greeting, Diefenbaker told him, “Harold Gembey was here this morning.”

Emmett went on alert. Gembey, chair of the Security Panel during the early days of Emmett’s ordeal, was now head of Intelligence with External. He mumbled something congenial. The prime minister shivered irritably. “Pull up a — ”, waving with both hands. Emmett saw a row of chairs at the side of the room and pulled one toward the bed, aiming to place it at Dief’s waist, avoiding the purple toes where they emerged huge and hairy from the end of the cast.

“He said he’d been down in Washington,” Diefenbaker resumed. “At a conference for so-called Intelligence. A meeting of the spooks. He was invited to the British Embassy.”

He drifted off, as if his message had been fully imparted. Emmett cleared his throat. The freckled hands plucked at the bedclothes. It appeared the prime minister was having difficulty swallowing. Yet for all his dishevelment, he acted as one who believed himself the only sane man in a madhouse. His oversized head of curly yellowing hair trembled, his tongue darted out to moisten his lips, his eyes were bruised by exhaustion, but he evinced a prideful fury.

He gave a chuckle. And made a noise to indicate, I’ve got their number, the jig’s up. A glass of water stood at his bedside and Emmett wanted to offer it to him, this man like a felled bird, a battered old falcon.

“Something’s going on,” Diefenbaker said. “And I’ll bet my boots that hothead pup is at the bottom of it.” The air whistling in his nose, Diefenbaker went on, “That arrogant son of a bitch is going to get us all blown to smithereens!”

“President Kennedy, sir?”

“President Kennedy, sir! That callow young bastard. That vain cock of the walk! That tinsel, that glamour boy, that prick! Well this is one prime minister he can’t push around.”

The door opened, a shaft of evening sunlight streaked across the carpet, and Olive came in with a glass of milk and a vial of pills. She told Emmett that it was six o’clock, just as a clock out on the landing struck the hour, tolling. Maybe it was the sunlight or the presence of his wife, but Diefenbaker seemed to shrink into his bed. “A baby boy, eh?” Diefenbaker said. “Dimples!”

Olive put the glass of milk into her husband’s shaky hand.

When Emmett stood up to get out of the way, Diefenbaker cried out to Olive, “Don’t let him go yet! I’m not finished! Don’t let him out!”

Olive didn’t appear to be surprised, merely petulant to match her husband’s petulance, as if this was a typical bicker, but she turned the argument Emmett’s way and said to him, “Oh please just say your piece, it’s suppertime!”

He asked what the prime minister would like him to do.

“Get it clear!” Diefenbaker told him. “Find out what’s going on!”

“With?”

“With Harold Gembey, with that arrogant bastard Kennedy, with the American security machine right outside my window!”

“You want me to speak to Gembey. And find out what happened in Washington.”

“Find out everything! Before it’s too late! Kennedy will destroy me, he’ll destroy the Conservative Party of Canada! Don’t kid yourself for a minute, he’ll destroy you too! You! You’re chickenfeed compared to the big stuff that little upstart is going after.”

The prime minister’s fear of personal slights outweighed his fear of nuclear devastation. In the silence following Diefenbaker’s outburst, the tinkling of pills in the vial in Olive’s hand was a reminder of time’s passing. She held it pressed beneath her bosom and sighed and stared at Emmett, who thought how it was kind of funny that neither she nor her husband wore glasses, and how they had similar skin, soft as old peaches.

He left them there and soon found himself walking up Sussex without remembering that he’d left his Alfa parked back near Rideau Hall. The mild evening air was pleasant on his face. Walking, he imagined a nightmarish conversation with Harold Gembey.

— Dief has asked me to speak with you, Harold.

— Has he now?

— Yeah. He wants you to tell me, what went on down there in Washington, at the conference for spooks.

— You spying for him now, Jones? First you spy for the Russians, then you spy for the Americans, now you spy for the prime minister?

— He didn’t think you’d tell him what’s going on, so he asked me to ask you.

— Of course I’ll tell him what’s going on. He’s the prime minister of Canada. Even if he’s nuttier than a fruitcake, I have to tell him. Even if he’s barking mad, I have to tell him anything he wants to know.

Then Emmett imagined himself with his little Minox camera suddenly visible in his hand, and Gembey sitting up, alert. — Say, Jones, what’s the game?

What’s the game? A Chevrolet Bel Air lurched to a stop, squealing its tires to avoid hitting him as he blindly crossed the street. He stood in front of the car, feeling the heat from its engine, then leaned over to peer through the glare on the windshield. There was Oscar, his fifth Russian contact, his last, grinning back at him, wiggling his Groucho Marx eyebrows. Oscar stuck his head out the driver’s window and said, “Get in the car, Mr. Jones! In a hurry! Before somebody bangs me in the rear.”

He got into Oscar’s Chevrolet.

 

Chapter Ten

Suzanne was working in her darkroom in the basement. She didn’t notice that the sun had set since Lennie had got home from school so the house was in darkness but for a sliver of electric light illuminating the upstairs hall from beneath a closed bedroom door. From outside, Lennie’s was the only light shining in the dark house.

Lennie was in her bedroom, standing on her bed. She was in debate with a throng of vile inferiors beneath the precipice where she stood, sword in hand. It was her sacred task to lead them from their weak and evil ways, on the difficult path toward the Good. She felt the fury of righteousness swelling in her heart.

She had almost made it through another week at school — one more day until the weekend. The pain of contact with all those people in the hallways, in the classroom or at bomb drill, inescapable in the washrooms and the change room before gym class, the exposure of her face, the feeling that her body had been cut out with scissors and pasted onto the scene, the long hour when she had to find somewhere to sit in the lunchroom and then outside to huddle in the grass with her back against the brick, making her face hard and blank.

She gave her foes one final thrust with her sword, then leapt off the bed into a freezing river that tumbled her over rocks into a waterfall, swimming even as she fell and so propelling herself into a glassy pool surrounded by ferns where a heron broke from the reeds and she lay on her thick wall-to-wall carpet and heard the shushshush of the heron’s wings as he flew away.

Lennie floated in the glassy pool. Fish swam beneath her, gently nudging her body or even swimming over and around her with their cool slithery touch, and she turned and twisted with them. Larry, the boy who sits behind her in Homeroom, told her that she’s prettier than Monica, the prettiest girl in the class. Lennie saw that he wasn’t being mean. This moment is a rare reprieve, too small, too fragile, too dissimilar; on such fractional lapses in a day, week, month, school-year of pain, Lennie thought, yes, it’s actually pain flowing out of the A where her ribs meet, like her soul is leaking from the punctures they make with their eyes, on Larry’s surprising minute of kindness you can’t build a person who can survive Grade Five.

She went down the dark stairs to the back door, opened it, and looked out across the lawn. There was that figure again, a ghost slinking away. She retreated, closed the back door, locked it. Then she went to the kitchen and turned on a light. She got a bowl and the flour from the cupboard, took the newspaper from the kitchen table and went back upstairs to the bathroom, and ran the tap till the water was warm. She stirred flour into the warm water with the end of her toothbrush. Then she took the bowl of glue to her bedroom.

She cut the newspaper into narrow strips, slipped the strips of newspaper through the glue, and lay them across her forehead, shocked by the first slimy chill, then liking it, and liking the smell of wet newspaper, she laid more strips across her nose and along her cheekbones, all over the face except of course the eyes and nostrils. She moulded the strips around her lips, smoothing it all around her face until she felt the mask conform to her features. Then she lay down to wait for it to dry.

 

Suzanne couldn’t stop working. She was listening for the Alfa pulling into the driveway, for Emmett clattering in the front door, and she was counting her lucky stars he was late tonight. Lennie was in her bedroom; this yanked her attention, but it was guilt on a hard-mouthed mare; I’m getting good, she thought, too good at ignoring guilt, living with it, letting it get raw and scab over, a wound that’s been with me for years. For how long? How long ago did she meet John?

She slid the paper into the developing solution and waited while the image rippled into existence. There he was again. And again. In the actor she once hired, she saw something of his poise, definitive and lonely, diffident, skeptical; in strangers whom she photographed without their permission — their backs turned away, even women sometimes, exciting when it happened, attractive solitaries with that muscle around the mouth. She saw something of him in gestures even if not in the people themselves, as if they participated in the event that was John Norfield. She took a slug of brandy from the bottle on the shelf where she stored her chemicals. One of these days her hand will choose the wrong bottle and she’ll poison herself with developing fluid, a possibility that didn’t trouble her, her analgesic being so close to her poison.

Gestures that belonged to John, that had been initiated by him in a wave of gestures undulating under the surface for the remainder of her life: his way of turning his back at the very moment of disclosure when something might have been said and felt and made true; his deflection, his solid purpose against the incursions of love, hard and shining as mica in stone, heat-possessing and older than God, yes, she thought of him as ancient, so ancient he’d outlive himself and her. And Lennie.

Out of the chemical bath Suzanne withdrew an image that no one, not Emmett, no gallery owner or journalist, no one would ever recognize as a continuum of her lode, her muse. John would have found it sentimental, he’d turn over in his grave, she thought, for she believed John finally dead; dead and enduring.

The photograph was a landscape, rock and pine trees, an image she’d caught at Blue Sea Lake from her canoe one morning very early when the lake was a mirror misted by the breath of dawn; a long low shore dividing a southeast sky from still water, reflecting dogwood in flower (it being the occasion of dogwood bloom) and the tidy shelf of cedar that cantilevered over the water and above, shrouded in mist, the pine trees. John’s spirit was here. No one would know.

 

Chapter Eleven

Oscar turned his Chevy Bel Air around and drove back down Sussex toward the prime minister’s house, passing it without comment, following the river east to the countryside, leaning over the steering wheel, his right hand loosely drumming the dash. The Chevy was a ’61, but its shocks were shot and its back end struck pavement when the car hit a bump. It was dark now, and Emmett thought he saw sparks when he looked behind. Oscar must know how much he resembles Groucho Marx, Emmett thought, the nose, the moustache, the voice, the affected accent. The casual irony and a fondness for non sequitur. Emmett’s Russian contact, his fifth, his last.

He let Oscar talk. The headlights strafed trees and brush. What Oscar was saying was interesting and he listened carefully, but he was also playing a little game with himself: he was pretending for a few moments that he was unburdened of connection to anyone on earth.

He pretended to himself that he was a person he’d long forgotten, before Suzanne, before Lennie and James, before the war, when he was young and solitary, and his decisions mattered not a damn to anyone but himself. Then it had been easy to be courageous, reckless. Pain, the possibility of death, all had been heroic fantasy. When he was young, without a family, in that lee of memory when his parents were out of the picture and the war was still something you trained for, he wasn’t anyone at all, as if he didn’t reflect any light. Now he took a moment to pretend to be him, that young man who’d never killed anyone. A line he’d heard from John came to mind, from that night when he first met him, first met Suzanne and fell in love. “There is no Mr. Tragedy.”

But Oscar had finished laying the rationale for the broader plan the Party had laid for him — the information that Emmett would pry out of Diefenbaker during their bedroom confabulations at Sussex Drive, the photographs of documents from Diefenbaker’s office — and Emmett was forced to return to his present, compromised state.

“Funny, ain’t it,” Oscar was saying, his fingers tapping the dash. “But not so funny as a man who never figures out that he’s got to serve something greater than himself. That man doesn’t even know he’s a joke.”

Emmett saw his own face reflected in the passenger window, illuminated by the green glow from the dash. He’d been wearing this face in its slow permutation for forty-two years.

“A selfish man is nothing but a scrap of irony,” Oscar went on, “a thumb-sucking baby!” He gleefully slapped the wheel. “Deluded, silly, self-important! A man who does not serve the state is nothing! Not even a cipher. Unless — ah — unless he belongs to a system that will give him — on loan — a meaning. A function. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Jones. You’re not content to feel the sun on your head, you’re not self-indulgent, you don’t need to think you’re some big-time mystery. That’s why I like you! That’s why I drive you around.”

“What do you want, Oscar?”

“You can get access to your prime minister’s desk.”

“Even if I could, you don’t really need it on paper.”

“Sure we do! You know that.”

Emmett didn’t respond, so Oscar pressed, “Whas’a matter? Your camera got broken?”

“I told you. I told you, and I meant it. I no longer work for you.”

“Ah, come on. The cause was worth risking your life and now it’s not?”

“That’s right.” The cause, Emmett thought, is exactly the point: it was individual freedom; it was his hatred of being manipulated by whatever power was reigning over him. It was his love of secrets, the ultimate privacy. Funny. It had led him to a lifetime of surveillance.

Oscar leaned toward him without taking his eyes from the road, his smile wryly generous. “Hey. You know what makes the world go round?”

“I don’t know, Oscar. Is it love?”

“Foibles.”

It was a great word in a New York accent. Emmett repeated it, “Foibles.”

“Human foibles. Quirks of character.”

“That doesn’t sound very communist,” Emmett observed.

“Why not? You know, you ought to take a broader view. Don’t be so doctrinaire.”

Emmett laughed.

“That’s right. Laugh and the world laughs with you. What could be more communist?”

“So I should take photographs of the prime minister’s papers as a contribution to an international conspiracy of fuck-ups.”

Oscar raised his thick eyebrows. “Nasty.”

Emmett wondered if the eyebrows and moustache were real. He said, “Take me back to my car, Oscar. I’m going home for dinner.”

Oscar drove on for another mile or so without further conversation. Emmett looked past his reflection to the stars. If a man were to jump out of a spacecraft in outer space, he would have no purchase on his movement; if he began to fall with greater weight on his left foot, he’d “fall” in a perpetual spin to the left and would be helpless to change it. He was now helplessly rotating through Oscar’s zero gravity just as he’d once felt he was falling through the zero gravity of his own country. Oscar handled the steering wheel with a light touch, his funny face set to an unreadable expression. As the miles passed, Emmett took a quick look at the dash, wondering how fast they were going, and if it would be possible to jump out of the car and try to run. He didn’t know where they were, only that they were east of the city. At some point, Oscar had taken a route south of the river. The Chevy almost leapt off the last edge of concrete. Tall yellow weeds scraped at the passenger window as they tore down a gravel road.

“You don’t want to get lost, Oscar.”

“I’ll find my way back. You don’t have to worry about me.” Oscar wiggled his eyebrows.

He saw that Oscar’s levity was self-conscious, wilful. The gravel got sparse and soon they were driving over dried, rutted mud, the car bouncing so hard, Emmett banged his head on the roof.

The car struggled up a hill. When they reached the summit, Oscar braked and turned off the ignition. The sound of crickets. Oscar got out, Emmett quickly following suit. He stood with the car between them, trying to see in the dark whether Oscar had a gun. Oscar said, “I could shoot you. Or I could be humane, and leave you here and make you walk home.”

The pulse of crickets, and wind, warm for October.

“Nice night for a walk,” Oscar said.

Emmett didn’t wait around. He ran into the field and down the hill, tumbling down the incline to a hedge and a barbed wire fence, someone’s field. Oscar fired the gun. Just once. The sound went crackling through the air.

He pressed his body down in the grasses that grew up around the fence. He watched the headlights of the car dip and swerve over the landscape as Oscar manoeuvred the car around to drive back from where he’d come.

 

Chapter Twelve

Emmett arrived at his home at about six a.m. His last ride had dropped him off at Rockcliffe Park, so he’d walked the last few blocks from there. It was still mild weather. When he limped up his driveway he made out, in a milky pre-dawn, his wife sitting on the front steps. Suzanne was wearing a silk bathrobe, wrapped in a mohair blanket. She watched him approach with dull eyes that gradually began to fill with life. Relief, he was pouring relief into her. She watched him wordlessly, closely; even when he’d sat down beside her, she didn’t speak but looked at him intently.

“Why are you out here?” he asked.

“Someone phoned last night,” she answered hoarsely. “He said he was a friend of yours. He said I should watch for you.”

Emmett put his hands on her face and pulled her close. “Where’s Lennie?”

“She’s all right,” Suzanne said. “She doesn’t know.” She clutched at him. “Where were you?”

Emmett held her but didn’t answer. He could sense that she was thinking quickly, contrary to the drag he felt in her body. As the moment lengthened, she became more solid in his arms, more separate from him. He was too exhausted to do more than marvel, feeling a sort of mild horror, thinking about how separate they really were. She had never asked him for anything more intimate than a reassurance that he was all right; it was his role always to be all right, to perform his function. And now, when perhaps it had occurred to her that she might have, that she should have, asked him something more deeply, that she might have asked him, What drives you? What do you believe in? it was too late. Her position seemed so terrible to him then, he didn’t want her to be aware of it; even now he wanted to protect her.

She was weeping; he realized she’d been weeping for a long time, her hair was wet at the temples, her face was salty. “I waited at the window all night. Then I came out here.” He recognized that type of weeping, deep and low in the throat. She was mourning him. “I didn’t know what to do.”

She began to cry so hard her back convulsed. He held her and felt her euphoria. He’d died for her that night, and returned, a second chance. The complexities, the guilt, the discrepancies would resume, but for now she was taking refuge in the room that his imagined death had emptied, a zero, indivisible, and absolutely full. Innocent.

He helped her to stand, and they went into the house. In the hallway, she looked up. Lennie was sitting at the top of the stairs.

Lenore saw her father in yesterday’s clothes. She saw that he’d torn his pants. Even from here she could smell the sour dirt on him. She wearily pushed herself upright and went into her room, closing the door behind her.

Emmett said, “She gets more like my mother every day.”

Suzanne had one slippered foot on the first stair, but she froze when he said this and turned back to look at him. He saw, he understood, that if she said another word, everything in his life would explode. But what she might say, he couldn’t guess. In silence, he followed her past Lenore’s closed door, to their bedroom.

He watched her kick the slippers from her narrow feet and sit on the bed and let the robe slip from her shoulders. She was wearing a fine white sleeveless nightdress he’d never seen before. He was so tired. He saw three small basins, two made by her clavicle and one formed at her throat, and he imagined them filled with dew.

 

Chapter Thirteen

Harold Gembey was standing in Emmett’s office, looking out the window, when Emmett arrived there two hours later. Gembey was one of the chosen ones, whose smooth steady progress gave the department its shape, like a shoetree, a hat block.

Even after all these years, Harold wouldn’t look him in the eye. Emmett did his best to capitalize on that. He’d had only thirty seconds to prepare himself for this encounter, since arriving, sleepless, and his secretary standing nervously to tell him that Mr. Gembey was waiting to see him. “He asked me to let him in,” she said. She looked scared and apologetic.

“Hello, Harold,” Emmett said. Gembey turned away from the window to say, “Emmett.”

Emmett took a moment to hang his coat on a hanger behind his door. Then he went to his desk to look at the messages his secretary had left beside his telephone. Nothing to indicate that Gembey was due to drop in. He asked Gembey what he could do for him. Then he remembered the prime minister’s demand that he question the head of Intelligence about “what’s going on.”

Gembey stood where he was. “We found your car,” he began.

“On MacKay Street.”

Gembey looked surprised. “Yes.”

“Thank god it didn’t get towed away.” Then mild chagrin. “Suzanne is displeased.”

Gembey waited for further explanation, but when he received none, other than Jones rubbing his temples in a semaphore that indicated “hangover,” he said, “I see.”

“Always sneaks up on you,” Emmett said ruefully. With a trace of piety, “As long as it’s only myself I’m harming. Anyway, Harold, it’s funny to see you here.”

Harold was about to explain, the abandoned Alfa Romeo had raised an alarm, but Emmett interrupted. “Just yesterday, Mr. Diefenbaker was asking about you. You’ve saved me a trip.”

Gembey was attentive but not wholly convinced; mention of Diefenbaker’s name didn’t necessarily command a salute. Gembey, warily, “Oh?”

Emmett smiled. “You know how he is. Circuitous. And his leg’s troubling him. Anyway, he’s asked me to speak with you about the Intelligence summit in Washington, at the British Embassy, ‘the conference for spooks,’ he called it.” He laughed generously, watching Gembey stiffen. “Listen, Harold, I know better than most men how little you can say about these things, even to your prime minister. But can you give me something? Anything to put his mind at rest?”

“I’ll speak with him myself.”

“Good.” Emmett gave him a doubtful look. “And good luck.” He touched the pile of messages on his desk: work to do.

Gembey sat down. “I’ve got some questions for you, Emmett.”

“Go ahead.” Emmett leafed casually through his messages. He saw among them one from his journalist friend, Wilson, and the phone number from the local hotel Wilson used when he was in Ottawa. He said wryly, “Though it’s not exactly music to my ears, Harold.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged.

Gembey said, “You didn’t make it home last night.”

“Well, yes. Technically, it was dawn.”

“One of our guys picked you up on the parkway. He dropped you off at Rockcliffe Park this morning at 5:25.”

“He was one of yours, was he?”

“When we saw your car parked near Sussex Drive at about four this morning, we got worried. We put some officers out to look for you. Perhaps you should tell me what happened.”

“A friend of mine is in town. I’m afraid we’re quite bad for each other.” He added, “An American journalist whom I met in Korea during the war.”

“Ah.”

“He has a fondness for Canadian whisky. We got talking and a bottle flew by.”

“Where did this take place?”

“I wish I knew. It was quite a bar crawl. Then we got it into our fool heads to cab it east. He knows someone out there. A woman. He decided to stay, and I hitchhiked home.”

“Who is your journalist friend?”

“Harold, am I under suspicion now? Or have you just got a habit of prying into my private life?”

Gembey pursed his lips and apologized, saying that of course Emmett wasn’t “under suspicion,” he hadn’t intended to pry, adding brusquely, “I’ll let the department know that you’re fine.” He stood to leave. “I’m glad you’re all right. But if you could give me the name of your American friend, it might make everybody feel better.”

“Let me speak to him first, if you don’t mind, Harold. It’s not just his reputation at stake, you see? There’s his friend. The woman.” He got up to walk Gembey to the door. “You’ll speak with poor Dief?”

Gembey studied the brim of his hat. “As a matter of fact, I’m on my way to Sussex now.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s fine, then.” He thought that Gembey looked tired, strained, on the verge of being overwhelmed. He’d always looked that way. It was partly what made Ottawa trust Harold: he wasn’t a tall poppy; he was one among others trying to do an honest day’s work in Canadian Intelligence. Funny, Emmett thought, all the funny ways to be a spook.

 

Chapter Fourteen

Robert Morton parked several houses down and across the street and used the rear-view mirror to watch Suzanne carry narrow boxes from the front door of their house and out to the trunk of her car. The girl was helping her.

He didn’t doubt that the boxes contained Suzanne’s photographs. He even surmised they were framed in slim black wood, the way she liked: he’d seen her shows before: tasteful, chic.

Morton knew something about kids. He saw that Suzanne and the girl weren’t talking while they moved the boxes into the trunk. They worked unconsciously together, without conversation.

The girl had grown tall. The wistful earnestness he’d seen in her childhood had come into its own; she wasn’t the kind of girl who’d ask for any favours nor grant any wishes. The independent type. Doesn’t yet know she’s intimidating. Sure, he knows something about kids, though he has only one daughter among the brood and that one is more regular than this one, and happier. When Morton was sure that there was no one else around, he didn’t linger but pulled out and slowly drove ahead. He drove back downtown to the Chateau Laurier to meet Dr. Kimura for lunch.

The doctor was already seated in the dining room when Morton arrived, and he rose to shake Morton’s hand, greeting him with his cheerful smile and warmly saying his name, “Robert, Bob, you’re not late, I’m early. Overeager to forsake my patients.” Kimura took his seat again, smiling. “I cannot express how much fun it is to be a man of the world!” He stared as a clutch of suits walked past to take a nearby table. “So many celebrities!”

Robert Morton looked. Mike Pearson was ordering lunch in the company of three other men. Morton knew them all. One of them was an American pollster, Lou Harris, granted leave by Kennedy to help Pearson’s floundering campaign last June.

Dr. Kimura sipped his ice water, searching the other tables with undisguised delight. “You know what, Bob? Most ordinary humans are ugly when they’re naked.” He picked up the menu. “If we make a lot of money, my friend, I might just hang up my stethoscope forever.”

Morton said, “You’ve given most of your life to other people. It’s time you had something for yourself.”

“You too! We’re having our mid-life crisis together.” Kimura studied the menu. “You know, as a doctor, I use the word crisis specifically to indicate the turn, the critical stage of an illness. At its crisis, a disease will go one way or the other. But my life is not a disease, it’s a gift I cherish. Ever since I agreed to go into business with you, I’ve felt rejuvenated. I’m a doctor. It’s what I am. I awoke to my fate of being a doctor when I was six years old, when I learned that my life was mine to make, like a waking dream, a dream I can guide this way and that. I remember the moment clearly. I was walking home from school. The teacher had told us about a famous physician in ancient Egypt. I felt a jolt of lightning rip though me. Eureka! I’m a doctor. I walked home from school knowing, I am Takuya Kimura, doctor of medicine, even though I am only six.”

The waitress came, and after she’d taken their order, Kimura said, “Is it this way with you? I am a policeman? Maintiens le droit! Right out of the starting gate?”

Robert Morton said yes, that this was true of his own life, in a way, though he hadn’t had quite such a clear idea of how it might pan out. “I thought I was going to be a cowboy.”

They ate their lunch and spoke about the small difficulties to overcome in importing the anaesthetic equipment from Ohio. Neither of them ordered a drink. They were having dessert when Kimura, in his most gentle, physician’s manner, mentioned that he was attending a “small gala” that evening at “a beatnik club.” “The wife of our mutual acquaintance,” he said with mild chagrin, “Emmett Jones’s lovely wife, Suzanne, is a photographer of some repute. But you know this.”

“Of course I do. It’s how you and me met, remember?” Morton said.

“At the gallery! When I was so angry. Really, I’m ashamed at how angry I was then. I went back alone to see her photographs of poverty. I was trying to make amends.”

“You only got mad because you were worried.”

“Yes. But it’s always shameful to be angry.”

“You’ve more than made up for it, doc.”

Kimura grew thoughtful. “Well, it’s natural for you to say so. I don’t think I’ll ever be sure.”

“Emmett Jones needed you. I’m telling you, you’re a real friend.”

“Is it a friend? One who spies, one who tells?”

“Listen.” Morton lowered his voice. “That’s in the past. What information you gave me only helped to clear his name. You let us see what kind of man he is. Naive. Loyal. Ambitious. Am I right? He’ll never know how lucky he was that we found you. You’ve been the only real friend the man’s ever had.”

Kimura said, “This isn’t true.”

“No? Let me tell you something. Emmett was used by everybody who ever pretended to be on his side. They did nothing but take advantage of him.” He hesitated before adding, “Even his wife.”

Kimura quickly protested, “That’s not true.”

“Sure, okay.” Morton smiled and lightly shrugged. “Women do.” He tucked his tie in at his waist and smoothly continued, “You, on the other hand, understood him. Without your insights into this case, things might’ve gone very bad for him. You saved his life.”

“I wish I could be sure. I’m fond of Emmett. I’ve known his daughter ever since she was a little baby. And I love his fearsome wife.”

Morton said with a sincerity that surprised Kimura, “She’s a beauty all right.” He caught Kimura studying him. “They’re safe now. All of them.”

“Have they been unsafe, Bob? From persecution, yes. But is there more?”

“Not everybody is as reasonable as I am. There are some real nuts out there.” He took a look around. Kimura had gotten used to Robert Morton’s survey of a room, of a street, his quick inspection of cars at the curb with their windows down. “They don’t know when to stop. They don’t know any boundaries or borders.”

“You refer to the fanatics. The enthusiasts.”

Morton felt a warm wash of affection for his newfound friend. Briefly, he wished he could touch Kimura, just his shoulder, a small signal of appreciation for his insight. “The enthusiasts. That’s right.”

“Yes. They are everywhere.”

“Sure. But here? In this country?” Morton took a drink of water as if to clear his palate. “I don’t know. Maybe in Japan.”

“Canada is my country of birth.”

“Didn’t mean to offend.”

“I’m merely clarifying. There are enthusiasts in Japan, we all know this, especially those of us who lived through the war. Canada has them too. Every country does.”

Morton scratched his jaw. He looked at the ring on his left hand, made the diamond dance in the light from the chandeliers above their table.

“A different shade of enthusiasm,” Kimura added. But he was searching, thinking, this country is not very enthusiastic.

“Red?” Morton offered. Then, embarrassed at having made a poor joke, he pushed it, “Pinko?” He shifted himself uncomfortably in his chair.

“This is a country of ‘dear-hearts and gentle people,’ like the song by Perry Como. Every person in Canada is at the centre of his own universe.”

“Sometimes they’re not such dear-hearts. Sometimes they’re just fanatics. I hate communists. But hatred is putting us at the brink of nuclear war. Now’s the time to drain the acid from our blood. But there are men who like the feel of hate, and they can make a lot of righteous trouble for an odd fellow like your friend Emmett and his beautiful wife.” He pushed his heavy chair away from the table. He didn’t normally talk so much.

They patted their lips with the linen napkins and stood to leave, Robert Morton in his crisply pleated pants, shaking his knees a little so the cuffs rode over his penny-loafers. Casually, “So — a beatnik gala tonight.”

“That’s right. Her new photographs will be hanging in a popular café. I hear there’ll be music.”

“I wish I could come.”

Kimura stopped, embarrassed, “I don’t think it’d be a good idea, Bob.”

“Oh, I know, I know.”

As they were leaving the restaurant, Dr. Kimura said, “I find it hard to be middle-aged.”

“Why? You’re fit. You’re in pretty good shape in every way.”

“I’m in good shape. Yet I feel heavy with myself.”

They said goodbye on the sidewalk outside the Chateau. Morton remarked that it was a mild fall. There was soft sunlight. But Kimura seemed to have snagged a cloud, for he muttered fretfully, “Such a long season with no change in the weather!”

“Don’t worry, doc. It’ll snow.”

Kimura nodded curtly. He’d gotten cranky, unhappy. He turned and stumbled from the curb. Morton caught his arm to pull him back to the sidewalk, but Kimura’s knee gave out and he went down at a funny angle. He heard a pop and felt the meniscus cartilage squeezed, pinched and released, bruised, damaged again. An old, recurring injury. “I’m okay,” he told Morton and bid him adieu.

As he limped back to his office, Kimura’s irritation yielded to anxiety. His injured leg brought back a bad memory. Yes, Bob Morton had found him. It had frightened Kimura very much when the RCMP nosed him out as the travelling companion named in Emmett’s report to the Liaison Mission after the brawl in the bar. Robert Morton had “invited” Kimura in for questioning about his friendship with Emmett Jones. It had taken all of Kimura’s skills to conceal his fear during this questioning, his terror that Morton would connect him and Emmett with the death of a Japanese policeman. But it never came up. Morton didn’t know about the homicide in the Tokyo bar. And Kimura had helped Emmett, he’d helped his friend by drawing a portrait of him for Robert Morton, a portrait of a man innocently snared by the Red hunt.

Kimura thought, I like Bob Morton. It was true, he was excited now to be in business. Did he like being in business with Morton? Or did he want to keep Morton in full view? Yes, it’s this way for him. He has always feared the police and always loved them too.

He’d lost his fervour for practising medicine. The flesh presents untransmutable evidence of disease and decay. In these recent months, he’d felt aversion for his patients. A sort of stage fright. His compassion has been exhausted. Yet he must contrive to play against each sickness, play by play till checkmate. When did he get to be disgusted with human beings? They almost always die meanly. Even surrounded by family, they’re alone, even the very old, crying out for their mother. If only illness and death were beautiful. His knee hurt so much it made him nauseous. I should have hailed a taxi, he thought. I’ve really screwed it this time. I’ll be on crutches. I’m an imbecile.

He’s lived without great achievement. His most original act has been to serve the RCMP. An agent! Helping the police in the name of helping his friend, betraying Emmett’s privacy and in this way betraying his own privacy, inevitably, permanently, a light where there should be darkness and peace. I’ve become unnatural. He pulled at the door to his clinic. How will I live out my life? He greeted the receptionist and limped to his examination room. I should have married.

 

Chapter Fifteen

Emmett had noticed a sort of slipstream, when time moved more quickly and when he knew, he almost heard, what was going to happen next. For example, he knew that Harold Gembey would leave his office and go directly to see the prime minister because Gembey had told him so. But he also knew that after Gembey had left Sussex Drive, the prime minister would call him.

Emmett hadn’t had any sleep. He had a blister on his heel from his long trek home after Oscar had abandoned him on the starlit hill. Even his secretary warily noticed his high spirits, his quickened mind in dictation, felicity that seemed out of keeping in the doleful East Block. He snapped off three memos on matters that yesterday had seemed too complex for individual solution.

Oscar, you old comedian, he said to himself, we’re through, kaput, go fuck yourself.

He didn’t know if Oscar would leave him alone now. Oscar’s true motives would be unknown even to Oscar himself, maybe even to Oscar’s Soviet handler, to the handler of the handler of the handler of the air marshal of the general of the foreign minister of the Kremlin. Maybe, if Emmett Jones were wiped out by a rogue Bel Air with bad shocks, it would be because of President Kennedy. The original Marx, Herr Karl Marx, wrote that one brilliant passage on the “perversion of human needs,” and it had become a sort of mantra for Emmett. My means of life belong to someone else, my desires are the unattainable possession of someone else, everything is something different from itself, an inhuman power rules over everything. An inhuman, relentless power — power for its own sake — an inhuman power rules even over Jack Kennedy.

Two hours later, when Emmett entered the boudoir of the prime minister of Canada, he found Diefenbaker dressed in a white shirt with a loosened tie, but with the same plaid flannel bathrobe thrown over his clothes, seated in a cushioned chair with his foot resting on an ottoman. Emmett greeted Dief a little too fondly and then he sobered, expressing the tired willingness of a mediocre civil servant; a necessary focus for the prime minister in tribulation. He blandly informed the prime minister that he’d had a word with Harold Gembey.

Diefenbaker cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Nothing new,” he grumbled, “same old vague poppycock.”

A vacuum cleaner powered on somewhere in the house. Diefenbaker’s bedroom resembled the one he might have had back in Saskatchewan where he’d practised law, where even his favourite painting of John A. Macdonald would represent not a statesman’s forefather but simply a common man’s ideal. The droning vacuum now made Emmett aware that Dief was not much more than a hotel guest at Sussex Drive, that the man’s chronic fury was inspired by his own sensation of being an impostor, a country cousin, a temporary embarrassment to the Establishment.

“I had visitors,” Diefenbaker began. “On the hill. Oh yes, I’ve been out today. I might just as well have been to the moon.”

The snoozy drone of the vacuum was now accompanied by the scent of floor wax. There were other odours too, of an apple pie in the oven, fragrances of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, wafting on the dust motes through the curtained bedroom. Emmett stood still but perhaps because sleeplessness recalled nights with Lennie in infancy, he swayed a little, or it was the sensation of the earth turning round. He sighed.

Diefenbaker heard the sigh and again he said, “Oh, yes. You can be damn sure I’ve had visitors. Two hours before he tells the entire world that he’s taking us to the brink of thermonuclear destruction, he sends his link boy to bring the prime minister of Canada up to speed.”

“President Kennedy, sir?”

“President Kennedy, Captain America, that arrogant son of a bootlegger. I look into a mind like that and I see a little boy, desperate to meet the measure of his own farfetched ambition. Playing politics like it’s polo. He’d sooner destroy the world than take advice from other world leaders.”

“You’ve heard from President Kennedy today, Mr. Diefenbaker?”

Diefenbaker went on, grumbling, “Of course that majordomo de Gaulle will do whatever Kennedy tells him to do. Macmillan too. I’m the only man strong enough to stand up to him. Which is why he shirks me, dodges me like a guilty schoolboy. Two hours! The very day!”

“The very day of what, sir? Two hours till what?” Emmett knew it didn’t matter how nonsensical his prompt might be; Dief would unravel his complaint as he wished. Emmett was only a figure swaying in the shadowy room.

“He showed me pictures!”

“Of?”

“Aerial photographs. Which, he claims, show a bunch of Soviet missiles. Blow ups. Squiggles and dots. Why should I believe that wild little gangster? His fool ambassador tells me that I’m looking at Soviet missiles thirty times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Shadows and polka dots! It only exists in Kennedy’s mind. He fears Cuba, so he has a nightmare, the missile sites are in Cuba. It’s the work of a psychosis. It’s a terrible joke. The world is threatened by a playboy in Washington.”

“Aerial photographs, sir? Of Soviet missile sites in Cuba?”

Diefenbaker chortled. “With enough power to blow up Hudson Bay. Enough nuclear weapons to wipe out Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury, and Lima Peru. Kennedy’s trying to hold a gun to our heads.”

“Soviet missiles, Mr. Prime Minister?”

“Pictures of what he says are nuclear warheads. He’s got nuclear on the brain. We need better proof! We need consultation! If it’s real, it should go to the UN! What we need is an independent, on-site inspection by the unaligned members of the disarmament committee. But what we get is the American president showing faked-up pictures taken from an airplane and telling us it’s war.”

Emmett said, “Soviet nuclear warheads stationed in Cuba and aimed at North America.”

“Quite a story, eh? He’ll have everybody’s attention now! Champion of democracy!”

“What if it’s true?”

“Don’t be so easily fooled. It’s a phoney set-up by the CIA. It’s a manufactured crisis. It’s horse opera.”

“May I ask, what are you planning to do?”

“Nothing!”

“Forgive me, sir, but that might not be possible. Under the circumstances.”

“I say do nothing. Call his bluff. If I let my government go along with the Americans now, we’ll be their vassals forever.” Diefenbaker’s hands clutched the arms of his chair. He stared so hard at the wardrobe situated behind Emmett, Emmett turned around to look, as if an attack might spring from it. Diefenbaker asked, “Do you have children?”

“Yes. Yes, I have.”

“Go home then.”

 

Chapter Sixteen

He went home. They watched television while they had dinner, Emmett, Suzanne, and Lenore. Emmett and Suzanne would certainly have preferred to shelter their daughter from President Kennedy’s dry, raspy presence at the dinner table but couldn’t refrain from moving the TV set around so they could watch while they ate. They had meatloaf with creamed corn, a meal that none of them liked but which Suzanne seemed to feel compelled to offer.

While Suzanne was taking away their plates, Lennie asked her father, “Is there really an imprisoned island?”

“Cuba? No,” he said. “It’s what President Kennedy thinks.”

“He’s our president?”

“No.”

“Are the Russians going to take us prisoner?”

“No, baby. That will never happen.”

“Will they blow us up?”

“No. Never.”

“How do you know?”

“It would be crazy, wouldn’t it.”

“It’s what people do.”

Suzanne returned from the kitchen with ice cream and chocolate sauce.

Lennie spooned ice cream, kicking the legs of her chair. Suzanne told her to stop, but Lennie went right on kicking. They’d turned off the TV. The only sounds were the scraping of their spoons and Lennie’s shoes striking the legs of her chair.

Finally, Suzanne said, “You have homework.”

“I already did it.”

“Then go upstairs and take a bath.”

Lennie got down from her chair. “Dad? Come to my room please.”

“Sure. Why?”

“I have to talk to you.”

He followed Lennie upstairs to her bedroom. She told him to sit, there, on the bed, and then closed the bedroom door. She still had the ballerina lamp she’d had since she was in a crib. He turned it on and touched his finger to the dust on the dancer’s pink shoe.

Lennie stood on the chair in front of her white desk to reach into the cupboard above, where once she’d stored her china horses. Now she carefully lifted down what looked at first like a stack of egg cartons but which proved to be a series of masks, one of them still powdery and unpainted, but the others lacquered in white, like egg shell, with black rims around the eyes. The painting was skilful and remotely Asian. One mask was painted in more ordinary watercolours, Emmett marvelling over the brush strokes, the blending of a sage green to make a skin tone, fawn shading at the temples. Lenore held this mask to her face.

She held the mask in place, an inch or two from her face, and in the quirky lamplight the mask threw a shadow on her own features, making a triplicate of Lennies.

He told her, these are very good; he said, he hadn’t realized she had such talent.

Lennie removed the mask and laid it down. She gently stacked them again then stood on her chair to replace them in the cupboard above her desk. “Would you like me to make one of you?” she asked.

He said he’d like that. But he hoped she didn’t want to do it right now. “I have to go back to the office.”

“Late at night?”

“The House of Commons is sitting tonight. I should go and see if there’s anything I can do.”

She looked at him without saying anything. She was wearing a navy jumper with a white shirt and navy leotards. She had long legs and arms, long hands with long fingers, and she wavered or it appeared that she did; a concentrated searching of her father’s face rippled through her body. As had happened so recently in speaking with his wife, Emmett had the sensation that if his daughter were to say what was on her mind at this moment, his world would blow up. He waited in dread. She was trembling, like water trembling at the lip of a glass before it overflows.

“What is it?” His question was barely audible. He heard her swallow. She looked into his eyes, and when she looked away, down at the baby blue carpet, he felt abandoned, irretrievable. More loudly, in a normal voice, he asked, “What’s up, Lennie?”

She said, “I’ll never tell.”

“But why?”

“I’ll never tell on you.”

“Well,” he said, laughing nervously, “thanks.” He stood up to leave.

She didn’t move but observed him closely. He might have been a well-constructed robot; she seemed mildly impressed by his ability to operate his limbs. Her lovely face, her suddenly beautiful mouth, and her direct gaze softened. Her kindness completely unnerved him. He laughed again and began to hurry out. He was in the hallway, wondering if she wished him to close the door behind him, when she added, “Don’t worry.”

“Okay,” he said. He made himself smile and lightly respond, “I’ll try not to, Lennie Penny. And don’t you worry either.”

“People always laugh when they know they’ve done something really terrible,” she said.

Emmett turned, re-entered her room, and sat down again on her bed. “Have I done something terrible?” he asked.

She gnawed at her lip. He saw her uncertainty. He asked her to tell him, “Do you believe I’ve done something bad?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “When you’re not here.”

“Maybe I have. But I’ve tried to be a good man.”

A look of revulsion, as if at a foul odour, passed over her face. She patiently waited for him to leave and go back to the office. He was embarrassing her. “It’s hard,” he said. “In the grown-up world. In the adult world,” he corrected himself; he must no longer speak to her as to a child, “we have to make decisions based on what we know at the time. Sometimes we make mistakes.”

“Do you make mistakes?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Of course I do. I’ve made many mistakes, I know.” He added, disliking himself, “My intentions were good.”

“What have you done?”

“Well. Many things. A lifetime of things.” He looked to the ballerina lamp for an answer. He thought, Everything is something different from itself. “I hope you have a life, my darling, my love, that lets you be good. Really good. For your entire life. You deserve that. How I wish it for you, baby.”

 

Chapter Seventeen

The prime minister was planting tulips. Olive was helping him because he was still using crutches. Emmett walked up the drive and passed a scowling, furious minister of defence on his way out. Harkness would assume that Diefenbaker was being counselled by civil servants just like Jones, in his decision to stall on putting the military on high alert to match the Americans. NORAD and the regular forces were waiting in vain for the prime minister’s okay.

Olive was on her knees digging with a trowel while the prime minister sat on a lawn chair, holding a burlap sack filled with bulbs. She didn’t stop working when Emmett approached. Diefenbaker gave him a quick, nervous smile. “I told him off,” he confessed without preamble. He shook his jowls. “Those photographs are phoney baloney. It’s a set-up by the CIA.”

Olive said, “Don’t talk. Plant.”

“It’s going to rain,” the prime minister explained. “We’ve got to get these in before the weather goes sour.” He dug into the sack and produced a bulb, handing it to his wife and saying, “Harkness would have us go off like sheep to war. He may be a fine fellow, but he’s weak, a follower, he’s too eager to please the Americans.”

Emmett said, “It might not hurt to let the forces go on high alert, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Hurt! Hurt! Of course it’ll hurt! Why, we stand to lose — not just a chance to make peace — we lose our credibility with the Cubans! We lose our credibility for nuclear disarmament. Kennedy wants a war? Let him have his war. He’s been itching for it since he messed up the Bay of Pigs.” He shook his sack of bulbs.

“Actually, Mr. Prime Minister, there’s word that the military has already moved on this.”

“Eh?”

“I said there are rumours, generally around the Hill, that the navy and RCAF have already moved onto bases in the south, into Florida. I hear the navy’s out looking for Soviet fishing boats off the coast of Labrador. And in the North Atlantic. Working with the US navy.”

“I know that. You’re not telling me anything new.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have my finger on the pulse.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t need you to tell me what’s going on in my government.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“I understand.”

“How did you come by this omnipotence?”

“Sir?”

“You heard me. Loud and clear.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Ha! Could have fooled me!”

Olive was struggling to stand up. Emmett took her arm to help her. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’ve been gardening all my life.”

“Yes,” said Emmett. “It shows.”

A siren raced down Sussex. Diefenbaker’s crutches were on the grass beside his chair. He picked them up and stood, dropping the sack of bulbs.

Emmett said, “Your garden is beautiful.”

“No, it’s not,” Olive said. “Not now.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” said Diefenbaker.

“The tulips are his craze.” Olive retrieved the bulbs from the grass.

“Pardon?”

Diefenbaker pointed a crutch at him. “I said, how do you know what the RCAF has done? And who told you this gobbledygook about the navy?”

“Of course I don’t know for certain, sir. I’m merely quoting rumours going around.”

“Then you know he telephoned me.”

“Sir?”

Diefenbaker chortled unhappily. “I gave him the what-for.”

“Are you speaking of President Kennedy?”

“Himself. The warmonger. He wants the Russians on the defensive. And then they’ll go and bomb us.”

“I hope that’s not the case,” Emmett said with a dry mouth.

“Oh, you just don’t know the trouble we’re in.”

Olive had set off for the house, saying, “Come on, Daddy.” Diefenbaker began to move across the lawn on his crutches, Emmett following, wondering if he’d been dismissed. Diefenbaker stopped to let him catch up and said, “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

Emmett thanked him, vaguely.

“I hear you were a communist.”

“No. No sir.”

“A real college Marxist.”

They were standing close enough for Emmett to see each wiry curl on Diefenbaker’s head. He felt an odd surge of love for this crazy old man. He could almost tell him the truth. “I once admired the Soviet Union.”

Diefenbaker gave another of his miserable chortles.

“But I was naive, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Be that as it may, you’re a nice fellow. I’m not a man to shy from controversy. If you admire the Soviets, say so. Forthright. Loud and clear.”

“I think we have to take the threat of nuclear attack from Russian missiles in Cuba very seriously, Mr. Diefenbaker.”

“Very seriously,” said Diefenbaker, mimicking. “Well, anyway, I like you because you think for yourself. If we’re blown to bits in the next twenty-four hours, at least you can say you always spoke your true mind.”

 

Chapter Eighteen

Bill Masters tapped and came in. Emmett caught a quick glimpse of his ashen-faced secretary with her hand on the phone before Bill closed the door.

Bill had gone grey since his second heart attack, and he’d lost about fifty pounds, had become a shrunken little man; he was like a bad impersonator, hardly recognizable. Emmett was always shocked to see him, though he ran into him often enough. Bill crossed the room and went to the window without speaking. From behind, Emmett thought, you wouldn’t even know it was Bill; he hadn’t seemed to be so short when he was fat.

Bill seemed to like his new svelte self; had taken to wearing herringbone jackets with coloured shirts. The weight loss hadn’t done anything for his nerves. He looked down at the centre yard, then stood on his toes to peer out toward Wellington Street. “You know they’re talking about an evacuation,” he said.

“Yes. I heard.”

“More than five hundred people will fit into Diefenbaker’s concrete bunker.” He turned to face Emmett. “But not you and me.”

“No.”

“Head of the CBC, for chrissake. He goes.” Bill winced, trying to smile. “Bryce went out and bought a whole bunch of booze. On his own dime.” Bryce was the clerk of the Privy Council, a very practical man. “He personally told me, he’d cleaned out his own private bank account to buy it all.” Bill returned to the window; he was like a dog left behind from a family outing. “Rye. Scotch. Gin.”

Emmett told Bill, Diefenbaker’s bomb shelter still wouldn’t be very much fun, even with Bryce’s booze.

“Better’n being fried on the outside!” Bill’s voice had changed too, from a frog to a cricket. “Jesus!” He came and plunked himself down in the chair opposite Emmett’s desk. “Something I want to ask.”

“Okay.”

Bill — this strange new Bill — squinted at him. “You ashamed, you feel justified, you feel what?”

Emmett asked him what he meant.

“The Russkies. What do you make of them? Now they’re on our doorstep going to blow us all up.”

“There have been madmen for as long as there have been men.”

“Sure. But destroy the whole world? I want to know. What do you feel?”

“Unreal. I feel unreal.”

“Well, it’s real, pal,” Bill said angrily. “Answer my question for once. Don’t give me none of this real-unreal stuff. You were a communist. Now how do you feel?”

“You’re bringing this up now? Now you’re frightened, you’re accusing me?”

“Be straight, Jones. It’s the end of the world.”

Emmett paused. He and Suzanne and Lenore might be dead tomorrow. Or, worse, they might survive for a few days before succumbing to radiation sickness. He hated Bill’s show, this death’s door inquisition. If he and his family were going to be extinguished along with another hundred million people, it didn’t mean he had to speak to Bill about his real feelings. He said, “I was wrongly accused. You know that.”

Bill sniffed. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

“Yeah. Sure. I gave the Russians information about the layout in Cuba, possible access from the sea. I took photographs so they could formulate better plans, land surveys from British railways. I kept them abreast of Castro’s revolution. I was the Who’s Who of Cuban unionists. I arranged liaisons between Russian apparatchiki and Che Guevara. I was instrumental in arranging Castro’s oil and sugar imports from the Soviet Union.” He paused then added, “And tonight, my family and I are escaping by helicopter to safety in the Crimea.”

Bill’s face, at first almost gratified, soured. “I stood by you.”

“Yes. You did. And I’m grateful. So why are you turning against me now?” He spread his fingers on his desk and leaned forward.

Bill, staring at him, blinked and gazed around the room. “I don’t know. I guess I wanted somebody to blame.”

“You should go home, Bill. Ethel will be worried.” Emmett came around the desk to usher Bill out. He touched the skinny shoulder. He felt canny. Alert. He asked Bill, would he be able to get some rest if he just went home to Ethel and trusted that nobody was going to pull the trigger tonight?

“How about you?” Bill asked. He gripped Emmett’s arm; he seemed to have swung from anger to love. “How’s Suzanne? Is she scared?”

“She’s fine. I made her a bomb shelter.” He laughed, forcing Bill into a nervous chuckle. With the door open, Bill turned and hugged him. Emmett heard his secretary give a gasp of despair. He would send her home. No doubt, her husband was already waiting in the parking lot.

 

Chapter Nineteen

Emmett didn’t tell his secretary anything just then but again retired behind the closed door. Raw inside, in the pit of his stomach, raw with a suspicion that he’d been emptied forever, that pretending, feigning, living by proxy, this was all that was left to him; he was dry in his soul. What he knew was no secret: Canada’s Bomarc missiles were actually filled with sand; there was no nuclear deterrence there or in the Voodoo interceptors — this was what Oscar wanted confirmed, but it was bankrupt information, pretty well public knowledge. The prime minister wanted the missiles in Cuba to vanish into fantasy, wished them to be phoney photographs, fake evidence manufactured by the CIA. Diefenbaker, the prairie lawyer, needed to have faith in objective information, a loving God, unaligned multiples, disinterested confirmation from the UN, and at the same time, he needed to believe that his nemesis, the handsome Jack Kennedy, was working in subterfuge, from a hidden agenda.

The missiles were real, and there were already enough of them in Cuba to blow up North and South America: this is what Emmett believed. He also believed that the Russians would do it; they’d use nuclear missiles if they were forced to prove themselves, to avoid humiliation, forced to prove the success of their revolution. This was how it worked — every system carrying within itself the seed of its own death.

When External first began to send him to Cuba, in the first blush of the revolution there, he’d taken some good pictures for the Russians, he’d done some very handy sleuthing right under the noses of the embassy staff. Even Kennedy in those early days of the Cuban revolution had admired the socialist freedom offered by Castro. Time magazine had called Castro “a humanist.” Prior to all that, in Emmett’s posting to the Liaison Mission in Tokyo, he’d done good work too, he believed even now; the massive UN force against the North Koreans was unjust; he had believed that it was the occasion for communism, imperfect yet inevitable. The photographs he’d taken of the Yalu River had gone to his Russian contact and he’d felt good about that, it had been an honourable risk in the name of freedom, of justice.

Later, when Jim Smith had forced him to work for the CIA, he’d given up; he’d fed the CIA only the most obvious information, stuff they already knew; he’d never tried to achieve any useful espionage for the Americans. Just when it might have been useful. He could almost laugh at himself. But then he thought, I’m not very funny.

He opened his door to tell his secretary that she could go home, but she had already gone. His phone rang. He let it ring. The only person he’d answer to was Suzanne, and he was on his way home now. But something made him change his mind, and he picked up.

“Emmett?” A man’s voice.

“Who am I speaking to?”

“It’s Harold.”

“Pardon me?”

“Harold Gembey,” said the voice.

Emmett warily answered, “Hello, Harold. Anything wrong?”

“I just want to talk to you. How about you meet me outside. I’ll be parked right on Wellington.”

“Okay,” slowly.

“It’s your wife. It concerns her.”

“My wife.”

“Your wife and daughter.”

“I see.”

“Five minutes.”

“No,” Emmett said. “I’ve got some things to do first. Twenty minutes.”

The person on the other end hesitated, then agreed.

Emmett couldn’t go home. Whoever was on the phone would follow him there. He wanted, at this hour, he yearned to be with Suzanne and Lenore. But he would use what little talent he had left to make them feel, if not safe, then completely loved. He thought, if this passes, if this crisis is resolved, if the world survives, I’ll get Kimura to help me bring my son here. And Aoi, if she wants to come. He’ll look after them. Lennie will be happy.

Twenty minutes. The duration struck him as a gift, a bit of bliss, a reprieve from this headlong rush toward disaster. He thought he would take the time to practise something. In the future, if there were one, he would live a single life, no secrets. The drapes moved, he saw them move, though there was no one in the room with him. The sordidness of the nuclear standoff struck him clear and hard with a wave of sickness.

He considered leaving his office right now, going outside, walking down toward the riverbank, past the public path, farther, down into the bush where the leaves had fallen, in the burnt orange dogwood and crisp, dun oak, to sit and be alone, to avoid meeting whoever was waiting for him in a car on Wellington Street. A stack of papers lay on his desk, the pen he liked to write with, a blue cup he used for paper clips, a pretty thing he’d taken from Suzanne. By the window (where the drapes moved), a softly worn leather chair, black leather softened grey. The carpet too was worn, its dark pattern. Dark oak furniture, forest green walls, the oil painting in its gilt frame above the door, The Capture of the Halifax.

The mantel clock on the credenza chimed. He must not go near his house. Whoever was waiting outside would follow him there. He would protect his family by staying away.

Emmett was enthralled by the oak wood, by the worn wool of the carpet, by creased leather, and a shadow that moved in the wake of sunlight through the drapes (that moved, with light, with time’s passing). Everything is something different from itself. Life is beyond us all.

He remembered Lennie’s totem, her mortal exchange, her childhood apprehension that we become what we kill. Maybe he was so afraid right now, he had fallen in love with fear.

He remembered Lennie’s totem and he could see her, standing on one leg, stork, to meet his eye, and he saw that she had become beautiful and that she would forgive him not easily but through an act of will. Her slender body, her impersonal grey eyes, her mouth. Now he let his own world change shape. Now he let in the knowledge he’d forestalled until he was ready. That Lenore was John Norfield’s. Norfield fathered her. Norfield’s hovering over their lives; Suzanne’s obsession, all those posing actors and strangers and gestures, and the haunting, the grief she inscribed in a landscape.

Among the files so generously donated back to him by Robert Morton, there was, he first thought, none of Suzanne with John. Emmett had found this too unlikely to be reassuring, and when he finally had a chance to peruse them in private, he had discovered that this was not the case; there was a photograph of them together: one. Dated 1951. Precise location unknown but not far from home. John had come back without Emmett’s knowing.

Was it only a perverse sort of ecstasy at the eleventh hour that made it so easy to see that it didn’t matter? A sublime indifference he might have learned from his daughter. Lenore was his daughter too. He loved her out of dutiful fatherhood instilled in a man of ordinary talent. But the love he felt was also instinctive, adoring, pleasurable; he would give his life for the pleasure of saving hers.

Emmett sat down at his desk. He took the pen he liked and wrote three letters: one for Suzanne, one for Lenore, and one for Dr. Kimura, asking Kimura to find his son, asking him to help Aoi and James to safety.

Are the letters to Suzanne and Lenore truthful? he asked himself when he had finished and was sitting back to reread them. They were more than that. It was something to build life on, the everlasting changefulness at the heart of things, the intricate and ever-changing expressions of love. He found he was good at it, love.

 

Less than an hour later, Emmett Jones stood on the roof of Kimura’s apartment building. Below, the smallest branches of the treetops shivered when their last leaves fell. The common garden, seven storeys down, was going to seed, pale yellow pods pinned to dry stalks, and the darkest red ivy twining the spikes of the iron fence. Beyond the iron fence, the broad river turned on its sullen currents.

Emmett took out his cufflinks and slid his watch over his hand, then placed these objects on the ledge that ran the circumference of the roof. In the pocket of his suit jacket he felt the weight of the three handwritten letters. He took off his suit jacket and folded it so that his letters were hidden, and placed the jacket several feet away from his watch and cufflinks. He stepped up onto the ledge.

He loved the trees, their nearly infinitesimal movement when their leaves let go. Deliberately, he removed his glasses and set them down.

Out on the river, a white boat drifted lazily, a white blur. There were nuthatches somewhere, their low whistle, whi whi whi. Emmett envied the boat on the river, the nuthatches in the trees, the garden as it collapsed into late autumn. He envied and loved it all.

He realized that not so very many minutes had passed, and quickly he turned to look behind his back, and then again faced the river. He leaned into the air, slowly gave himself until his weight began to lift from his feet, until he learned what it was like to be airborne and then how it was to fall.

<>

Dr. Kimura had stayed home from the medical clinic that day; his meniscus cartilage was torn again. He was sitting in his penthouse, reading the Ottawa Citizen while listening to the radio for news of the missile crisis when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something dropping past. Kimura limped painfully to his large picture window with its beautiful view. The pane of glass radiated heat. He saw a pleasure craft, a wooden cabin cruiser, drifting on the river. The boat suddenly veered toward shore. He saw a woman sitting on the top deck of the boat; she was clutching two children to her side, and she was screaming. With his crutches, Dr. Kimura took the elevator down seven storeys to the doors at the back of his building, yielding to the patio and garden.

The cabin cruiser had already moored to shore, and a man was running from the boat toward the iron fence encircling the garden. Dr. Kimura stood on the other side, and for several moments, the two men stared at the tall spikes of the fence. Suddenly the man fell to his knees, and the doctor could hear him being sick into the grass. On the boat, moored at the shore, the woman was still screaming. Kimura said, “For god’s sake, get your family away from here.

“Take the boat to the marina,” Kimura said firmly. “Get your wife to take the children into the cafeteria there, give them hot chocolate or something.” Kimura manoeuvred his crutches on the soft ground. “I’ll phone the police.”

Kimura looked up at the roof of his apartment building, yellow brick obelisk, blue sky, cirrus clouds catching the sun.

As he was making his way back to the patio and inside to the elevator, he heard the throaty roar of the boat’s engine gunning in reverse. Kimura pressed the button to the elevator, briefly tempted to take the stairs but knowing he’d never make it up seven flights. He felt he was a clearheaded doctor acting in an emergency. The sight of his friend, a friend whom he’d loved and whom perhaps he’d betrayed, this would wait to be understood later. Suicide is a mystery never to be fully unfolded. But why did Emmett come here to die?

The elevator doors opened. There, coming out, was one of the oddest-looking men Dr. Kimura had ever seen.

The sun was low in the sky. Bright light struck off the river and shattered on the tile and chrome of the foyer where Kimura stood while the man scurried out of the elevator. How like a rabbit, Kimura thought. I should follow.

A small man with anaemic skin and pink teary eyes, he almost knocked Kimura off his crutches on his way out. The Rabbit must have thought that the elevator had stopped at the lobby and was confused to find himself at the lower level accessing the underground garage on one side and the patio doors on the other, leading out to the garden built there for the shared enjoyment of the residents. The Rabbit made a fussy movement toward the patio, pivoted, and scuttled toward the doors to the garage.

“Those are locked,” Kimura told him, getting into the elevator. He held the door open. “You’ll have to exit at L.”

So the little man returned and said nothing of thanks or greeting while the elevator rose again, and at the lobby he hustled off blindly into the glaring sun reflecting from the tall glass windows of Dr. Kimura’s apartment building.

<>

Dr. Kimura didn’t move out of his penthouse, as people expected him to do. He found the view exquisite, eloquent, and secretive. The private Dr. Kimura didn’t give up his penthouse. But he seemed to age quickly, and he retired from practising medicine to focus on importing anaesthetic equipment from Ohio with his friend, Robert Morton, who returned to his position with the RCMP, leaving the daily business in Kimura’s capable hands.

Kimura found solace in his efforts to help the boy, James, and his elegant mother settle in Ottawa. He felt himself their guardian, their protector, and this was a source of great comfort to him.

The placid, duplicitous scenery intrigued Kimura more than ever before. He loved his winter view of the icy river and the frozen garden, the snowy hyphens of its iron railing. It kept his lost friend Emmett in mind, ever present.

<>

Years later, at Robert Morton’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, Kimura rose unsteadily (due to drink; his knee had been replaced) to make a toast. “To Robert and his wonderful wife, Maxine, lovelier than ever,” he said. “May we never forget all that we can never really understand. May we always honour the Maxine,” and here he laughed at himself, “the maxim — that the only thing we know is love. And sometimes, my good friends, we must struggle with ourselves to know even that.

“Love is the light by which we discover our way. Love,” Dr. Kimura said, “is information.” And then, seeing the indulgence in the smiles on Robert Morton’s adult children’s faces as they stared into the bubbles of their champagne, Dr. Kimura sat down.

<>

Blue Sea Lake, 1964

Lenore slid the canoe down the sloping granite shore, put one long leg in the bow, and shoved off. She sat in the bow because it’s easier to steer from there when you’re alone. The morning was calm, the water glassy, doubling the shoreline in perfect reflection, the aspen and poplar in full leaf. Late summer, when the season was nearly turning. She paddled out toward the reef. A seagull was sunning itself there while a cormorant drifted nearby. The seagull lifted off when she approached. But the cormorant stayed, undulating its snaky black neck.

Lennie let the canoe drift, the current turning her toward the cottage. She saw her mother come outside, cross the lawn to the shore, and sit on the rocks there. Over the water, they were aware, one of the other. Nearly two years since her father’s death.

Her mother laughed the other day. Then covered her mouth with her hand. She didn’t want to be happy, but happiness wanted her.

Her father could only tell her about hope. How all his mistakes had been made out of a wish to be good. He was hungry for something, always hungry. People must be crazy, dreaming themselves up. It made them dangerous, even when they didn’t think they were. Then they were sorry.

In his letter, given to her by Mr. Morton that day, her father wrote, “To protect you from myself, I have pretended to be an aspect of you.”

Lenore has decided that she’s going to be an actress. She thinks that this is the kindest way to live, to give people something to believe in for a little while. She would be an actress and an artist and go to Japan with her brother, James, and they would look after each other.

Her mother was leaving the shore now and walking away. Lennie saw that she was carrying her camera. This was the first time she’d touched it since Dad died. It meant that Lennie was freer than she’d been yesterday. Some people have to work so hard even to pretend to be someone.

Everyone already lives inside her. It makes her ache with sorrow, but Lennie will accommodate the whole world. She can do this without even trying very hard. Because she has talent. She knows she does.

You just have to breathe, breathe in the ocean of air. Because higher than air, we’re infinite. And to be infinite is to be all the people, those who were here and are now gone, those who are not you, and all the people you are, from the moment you’re born till the day you die, all those hungry creations combined into one great white noise. But infinity hurts in the human heart. Her father is nearly two years gone. Lennie knows that, all along, even since the very beginning when light was first invented, time’s passing has been our blessing. Time was created to ease our pain. The cormorant suddenly opens and spreads its slate black wings, and lake water sprays like shattered crystals in the sun. Here is perfection.