19

Dark rumblings at work the next day. Before I could sit, Lydia was in my office, fretting.

“I told them you had the flu again,” she said. “In case they ask.”

“You’re terrific. Thanks, Lydia.”

I tugged at my ear lobe while Lydia peered critically. “You look too healthy,” she said. “Loosen your tie and put your coat back on. Try and get a sweat going. Think warm thoughts.”

“I’ll tell them I took a pill,” I said.

“Good thinking,” Lydia said and turned to leave. “Hello, Ms. Lu.”

Amanda shut the door, sat in one of my two client chairs, pulled on her wool jacket sleeves and began to complain about her kids.

“We finally got the youngest one sleeping through the night,” she said. “But now the middle one is up at strange hours and the oldest one insists on sleeping with us. If it wasn’t for the nanny, Julia wouldn’t get any rest at all. All the books say it’s normal, whatever that means, but I don’t know. They have to learn to be on their own. I guess those days are over for you.”

“Water under the bridge,” I said.

“How about Sagipa? He doing okay? Still on that thing about China?”

“China. Crooked union leaders. Who knows with that kid?”

Amanda drifted over to the wall and examined my law school composite. “What about the hazmat suits?” she asked. “You ever figure out what’s up with that?” She pointed to one of the oval photographs, the name too far for me to read.

“I know this guy,” she said. “He was on Drabinsky’s defence team. Good lawyer.” She sat down again. She fiddled with her wrist watch. “Listen, Richard,” she began, “I wanted to let you know. There’s been some talk.”

“What sort of talk?” I asked.

“It’s about the Newsys file. The senior guys are getting ­concerned.”

“And they asked you to speak with me?”

“Normally? No big deal. We’d ride it out. But what with the economy and all. We really want to hold on to this client.”

“It’s just that I’ve had this other case that’s taking more time than I thought it would,” I said.

“The Wanstead thing?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

I leaned back in my chair and used my index finger to pick at the dry cuticles of my thumbnail.

“Nothing’s going on with it. I’m going to drop it,” I said. “I’ll be able to concentrate on Newsys from now on.”

Hearing what she’d hoped to, Amanda rose to leave. Her leather shoes squeaked as she walked to the door.

“Oh hey, listen,” she said. “You remember the file you passed to me? The Manolo Palacios case? Turns out the guy used to be a top guy with the FFLC out of Colombia. But listen to this: Now he’s here and writing a book for small business based on Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare.”

“Is that right?”

“What a great idea,” Amanda said, leaving. “Wish I’d thought of it.”

I picked up the telephone, thinking I’d call Tony and tell him that I was sorry, but I could not do anything to help him find proof that my father’s death was anything but an accident. No matter what evidence he had, no matter how compelling it might be. Because I had other, more tangible things to focus on and he needed to understand. My job, for one. Of late, my routine performance had probably put me on a list of expendable associates and if I wasn’t careful, I would be expended.

Tony needed to understand.

And that’s without mentioning my marriage, which seemed to have become unsettled in recent weeks. Yes, I needed to concentrate on these things, on work and on home, and then, once the cheques from Newsys were in my account, once Inés and I were okay again, once the detachment had passed, then maybe I could return to Tony and be better able to listen more earnestly to his cloudy theories of murder.

I picked up the phone, held a rigid finger over the 1, and put it down again.

And maybe I would take what Sagipa had found about the investigation into the UCF and maybe I would confront my mother and find out what she knew about anything. And maybe even look into the details of the accident, but for now, for this moment what I had were priorities.

When I called, there was no answer at Tony’s house. Not yet ready to return to working, I phoned the townhouse. Inés answered, exacerbated.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get someone’s name changed in this country?” she said.

“I guess I never thought about it.”

“It takes years, for one. And a million forms, each one of them more complicated than the next. We’re just trying to correct a mistake of history. It should be a simple process.”

“Listen, Inés, I was thinking it might be nice to go away this weekend.”

“This weekend?”

“I’d like to make up for behaving so badly the other night.”

“I was going to do some grocery shopping. We’re out of everything, of course.”

“We could find a place up the peninsula.”

“So far away?”

“We could go closer. Prince Edward County. Or Niagara-on-the-Lake. Lydia told me about a special at the Little Inn in Bayfield.”

“When would you want to leave?”

“Tonight. We’ll leave at four, whenever Sagipa gets home from school.”

“Cuxi was supposed to work with Manolo this weekend,” she said.

I leaned back in my chair and chewed a bit of my inner lip, thinking: One battle at a time.

“Well, that’s okay. Just the two of us can go and the kid can stay on his own. He’s old enough.”