The Burma Effect Read online

  “OK, tomorrow night,” Delaney said. “Where? When?”

  He would have been astonished if Rawson had invited Delaney to his home.

  “Press club?” Rawson said. He had always clearly liked the faded surrounds of the bar in the National Press Building across from Parliament Hill. Some journalists of a certain vintage still met their contacts there.

  “Fine. You’ll owe me one. Ottawa on a Thursday night.”

  “I’ll add it to the list.”

  Delaney climbed back on deck and carried on with his painting. He realized as he worked that the appointment in Ottawa would mean missing yet another Jung Society meeting. Just as well, he thought as he worked. The whole idea of his ever having joined such a group was ridiculous in the first place. More fallout from the Natalia days; a link, slowly fading, between him and the psychologist’s life she had lived so intensely.

  The Jungians found him an odd fish, and one who had never, so far, delivered the paper he had been promising them to write and to deliver before one of their meetings. They had found his contributions to their dream workshops stimulating, however, if sometimes alarming. His personal unconscious, his journalist’s unconscious, was a maelstrom, a war zone that many of the well-to-do and well-grounded Society members entered with more than a little trepidation.

  Natalia would have found all that very amusing. Delaney knew this. Whether she would find his other interests and other recent professional activities outside journalism amusing was another question altogether.

  When the light started to fade, Delaney cleaned up and went to let the club staff know he would try to get back the next day to finish. That was the last day possible, before the next sailor with an obsessive compulsive disorder hoisted a beloved vessel into the dry dock.

  Stan, the old guy employed by the club to manage such things and to ferry people in a small outboard out to where their boats were anchored, was a no-nonsense sort. He lived in a small trailer on the Royal Saint Lawrence Yacht Club grounds. He usually smelled of Player’s Mild smoke. He had a ruby red rum-soaked nose. No one had ever seen him sail.

  “No way we can let you have that berth for more than another day, you know, Mr. Delaney,” Stan said. His faded T-shirt said: “Barbados Goombay Summer. Share the Experience.” Short grey chest hairs bristled at the frayed neck. “I’ll be finished,” Delaney said.

  “There’s a crowd of them waiting, all this week and next,” Stan insisted. “You still got lots to do?”

  “Yeah, I’ll manage.” Stan would talk weather next. “Weather’s been OK,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Delaney said.

  “Should be good sailing this weekend. But cold, probably. Blowy. The river’ll be pretty choppy. You going out?”

  “May do,” Delaney said.

  “I can run you out,” Stan always ran him out; he ran everyone out to their boats. He did little else. “OK, Stan, thanks,” Delaney said, wondering how many times they had had precisely this conversation since he bought the boat. Stan shuffled out toward his trailer looking ever so slightly crestfallen, as he usually did. Delaney went to get his car.

  He headed back slowly from the West Island to downtown, going against rush-hour traffic. On his way up to the highway, he saw older women and a few older men in the fading light, raking suburban lawns flattened and browned by a winter’s weight of snow, only just gone. All of Montreal would soon come out of hibernation, pretending for a few precious months that summer actually existed and that grass and flowers could actually thrive in their city.

  Delaney planned to work on the column that night and try to get a full day’s work in on the boat on Thursday before the two-hour drive to the nation’s dreary capital late in the afternoon. He hoped his aging Mercedes, in dire need of a tune-up, would make it.

  The answering machine light was flashing, as it always was, when he got back to his Sherbrooke Street high-rise. Delaney had a theory that the answering machines of those who live alone always seem to be more heavily used than those in couples or families. He had no empirical proof, but it seemed to him that the many loose or fraying ends of a single person’s life all seem to come together on an answering machine.

  The opinion pages editor had called again. Patricia Robinson. Agitated. Never amused. Frank, Patricia here. Not sure what’s happening again this week but we really need that column in now, today. Got to figure out the illustration and one of the subs is off sick. Please give me a call as soon as you can. I’ll try your mobile, thanks.

  The column was called “Delaney at Large.” He’d always hated that name, had seen similar column names in a few newspapers around the country. Such columns were almost always the domain of journalists of a certain age who had had very successful careers, usually as political or economic or war correspondents, and then had either crashed and burned, or dropped out for a while, to resurface later and look for work. Delaney had done both, actually; crashed and dropped out, but the public version was that he had only dropped out.

  Now he was to write eight hundred words each week on any aspect of Canadian, but particularly Quebec, life that interested him. Usually, the editors expected political comment. Sometimes they liked a bit of colour, a so-called people column. Always, they liked it on time.

  This week, Delaney was trying to write something about whether Canada could still consider itself to be above the international fray, beyond the reach of terrorist attacks. He knew from both sorts of work he did now that it was only a matter of time before another major attack took place. There had been Nairobi and Dar es Salaam so far that year.The question was, where next? And who now could ever hope to be exempt?

  But despite several Molson Export Ales and a very large Jameson’s, Delaney had been unable the night before to make any headway on the column at all. He would try again tonight, maybe with less alcohol and more resolve.

  O’Keefe had also left a message.

  Yo Francis, it’s O’Keefe. I need a drink badly and my friends and admirers say I should not drink alone. I think they are mistaken on this, but it would be on your head if they are correct. I will be at Grumpy’s this evening, in the usual place. You are cordially invited to attend.

  O’Keefe’s marriage had foundered again, on the same shoals as always. His wife didn’t like him. And she didn’t like journalists. It was as simple as that. But they had so many years together, so many tumultuous years, and a son now almost ten years old, that the final break did not come. Just periodic breaks, more frequent than in the past but never, as yet, final.

  O’Keefe was living in a spare room the sports editor kept ready for him. He was drinking more than usual, which was saying a lot. He did not like to drink alone, because when he drank alone he tended to beat people up. Karen, his wife, was still living on the dilapidated farm O’Keefe had bought for them once when he was somewhat more unstable than usual. She beat people up in a different way, even when sober.

  Delaney avoided drinking sessions with O’Keefe if at all possible, but at such times felt a strong obligation because when Delaney’s own marriage had foundered, O’Keefe had given him a bed and a glass. Then, when Natalia was killed, O’Keefe for once in his life dropped the facetious persona that had always put so many people off and allowed himself to actually feel Delaney’s pain.

  Delaney called O’Keefe’s mobile. “Brian, it’s Francis,” Delaney said.

  “I know who it is,” O’Keefe said. Bad humour before a night out. A very bad sign. “Where are you now?”

  “Just coming in from a day at the news boutique. Rewarding as always. Five hundred words on a drug bust in Point St. Charles. Going out again shortly to give the cops something else to do.”

  “Bad day.”

  “Yup. You coming?”

  “Brian, I . . .”

  “When you start out every second damn sentence with ‘Brian’ or ‘Brian, I’ you are not in the mood for drinki
ng. OK, no problem.”

  “I’ve got to finish up my column,” Delaney said.

  “No problem. We all have our crosses to bear.”

  “On the weekend, OK? I’ve got to go up to Ottawa tomorrow.” “State secrets.”

  “Right.”

  “You are a devilishly handsome and interesting young man, you know that, Francis? What a life of intrigue we lead.”

  “On the weekend, OK?”

  “Yup.”

  There was also a message from Kate, the woman who thought she was Delaney’s girlfriend. She was a Mountie, RCMP, doing criminal analysis now in Montreal—a specialist in credit card fraud. She had even spent a couple of years on and off travelling the world on RCMP time researching a book on card fraud—now seemed to know everything there was to know about the subject.

  About men, she seemed to know, or understand, far less. She could not fathom, for example, why Delaney was still refusing to fall in love with her, why he still seemed under the spell of Natalia, dead now almost five years.

  She knew a little about that story, but far from all of it. She knew that Natalia had been murdered, but she did not know by whom. She knew that Delaney at the time had been working on something very secret and very dangerous, but she did not know that it was his first assignment as a CSIS spy. The phrase investigative journalist covers a multitude of sins.

  She had strong views as to how much time a man needed to get over a loss, to move on, to get on with the next phase of his life. Sometimes Delaney seemed about ready to do that. Sometimes he moved in Kate’s direction. Some-times they had good times together, or good sex, or both. But Kate still felt threatened by and jealous of a dead woman and this, more frequently now, made her angry. Her anger made Delaney want to go live on his boat.

  Hi Frank, it’s Kate. Not sure where you are. I’m thinking of going up to Sue’s cottage this weekend the weather’s so nice and I think you should come. Let’s go up there and relax and see if the weather turns really warm, OK? Call me when you get this, all right? It’s, um, threethirty on Wednesday. I’m at work. Bye.

  Delaney listened to that message a second time, listening closely for tone, subtext, delivery. Nothing obviously amiss. A straightforward proposal, or so it seemed. Still, as always lately, Delaney was wary, particularly about excursions that required overnight stays. Things were at a delicate stage between Kate and himself and, as with everything else in his life, he preferred to avoid complications.

  It was almost 7 p.m. He dialled Kate’s mobile. She answered right away. Someplace noisy. “Hi Kate. It’s Frank. Where are you?”

  “Crescent Street. The Winston Churchill. Just moved in from the tables outside.They put them out this afternoon for the first time this year. It’s getting a bit cold now. You want a drink?”

  “I’m just back in. I was at the boat.”

  “What else is new.”

  Kate seemed as jealous of the boat as she was of a woman with the same name. “Spring spruce-up.”

  “Come over,” Kate said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “I better not,” Delaney said. “I’m behind on the column.”

  “Too much time on the boat.”

  “Yeah, maybe. I better finish it, though.”

  “Your deadline’s Wednesday afternoon, no?” Police. Observing everything, remembering every detail.

  “I’m late again this week.” There was a silence. Delaney let her fill it; his strategy in such matters.

  “You get that message about the weekend?” she said. “Yes.”

  “What do you think? Could be nice. It’s nice up there in the spring.”

  “I’d better pass. I’ve got a lot to do.”

  “The column’s for Saturday’s paper, Frank.”

  Delaney let that go. Kate didn’t.

  “The column’s for Saturday, no?” she said.

  “The column is not all I do, Kate,” he said.

  “Oh really? So what’s to detain you this week? Sandpapering the boat or failing to write the book?”

  Delaney did not want to let this go any further. It was all too familiar.

  “Let’s drop this, OK?” he said. “I can’t make it this weekend. You go. Have a nice time and we’ll get together next week sometime.”

  “I’m tired of this, Frank,” Kate said. “I’m really tired.”

  “You putting too much stock in this sort of thing, Kate. Don’t worry about the small stuff. I’ve always told you that.”

  The line went dead. Fuck, Delaney said out loud. Kate was still at the bar when Delaney got to Crescent Street about half an hour later. There was the usual Montreal hubbub of French and English, spoken interchangeably. She was handing a credit card to the waiter.Two glasses with beaten-up lemon slices sat on the smudged table along with Wednesday’s Tribune.

  “Don’t let that card out of your sight,” Delaney said. “They have a way now of recording all the data on the magnetic strip.”

  She looked over, surprised but obviously pleased. Her face was lovely when she was pleased—soft skin, not ruined by the sun, and green eyes that shone. Laugh lines around the mouth. Disappointment and resentment did not come naturally to her. It was something she was having to learn from him.

  Her hair was expensively streaked in golds and bronze, but tied back tightly, so she would look more like a cop. It wasn’t working tonight. “We’re closing,” she said.

  “They know me here,” Delaney said.

  “It’s a young crowd. No fortysomethings here, usually,” she said.

  “Nasty.”

  “You too.”

  “Not always.”

  “Usually. Lately.”

  “Sorry.”

  They looked at each other over the tabletop. The waiter looked over.

  “Gin and tonic?” Delaney asked Kate.

  “Depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “Are you my lover boy?”

  They both laughed out loud. The hard thing about Kate was that no matter how much Delaney tried not to like her, he failed. “Drink?” he asked again.

  “And afterward we go back to your place and fall hungrily into each other’s arms? Have passionate sex. I drag myself to work at the last possible moment tomorrow, looking worn out, eliciting knowing glances from colleagues. I am distracted from my important police work. A whispering campaign starts. My reputation is ruined. Yours is ruined. It doesn’t matter. We have each other. Like that?”

  Delaney ordered a gin for Kate and a Molson for himself.

  “Do you need a heart-to-heart talk or something?” he asked her. “We’ve had those.”

  “Then you know what’s what. A little.”

  “I know what’s what,” she said. “I’ve seen this all before. The man needs space, the man needs more time to get over her, the man is not sure what he wants. But the man is pushing fifty and he is shorter than I am, by almost two inches.”

  She was trying hard not to smile or laugh. It was hard for her to be tough.

  “I enjoy your company, Kate.”

  “When you want company.”

  “I’m here tonight.”

  “I want to go back to your place tonight, Frank. I want to wake up in your bed. I want to drink the last of the skim milk in your fridge. I want to see what else is on the shelves. I want a normal, standard, passionate love affair with you. I will refrain from saying I love you. But I need you to fall for me, Frank. I can get company if I need it.”

  Delaney rarely invited Kate, or anyone else, male or female, to his apartment. Before the events of five years ago, it had been an austere, ordered, almost antiseptic place. Now there was disorder, dissonance, which he did not like to share. Items brought from Natalia’s apartment were now in his space. Her favourite reading chair and lamp were in his space. Most of her books. Some
of the paintings that had been on her walls. Her diaries, full of Jungian thoughts and sketches. Not for sharing.

  Delaney had no satisfactory reply to make to Kate tonight, or any other night. He sat in silence.

  “Invite me back to your place, Frank,” she said. “Would you please do that? Let someone else in besides a woman’s ghost?” “Don’t do this tonight, Kate. OK?” She stood up and put her phone in her bag. Delaney could sense the eyes of other men in the bar locking onto her, as always.

  “Call me when you’ve figured out what you want to be when you grow up, OK Frank?” she said. She did not even seem particularly angry. “Maybe get yourself some therapy. That’s what Natalia would have suggested, isn’t it? For an obsessional difficulty?”

  Then she was gone.

  Someone died because of me, he wanted to say. He wanted to run after her and say: Someone died because of me.

  Of course, working on a newspaper column that night was no longer in the cards. But going over a couple of blocks to meet O’Keefe was a very dangerous idea. So Delaney went home with some takeaway Vietnamese and six bottles of beer. George, the omniscient doorman, was not at his post for some reason. No knowing looks to endure.

  Delaney dreamed that night. It had been a while since he last had the classic Natalia dream. But the dream came again that night:

  She is lying in the snow in the Laurentian woods, with the horrific bullet wounds to her head and to the fingers of her hands that she had used to cover her head before the gunshots came. It was snowing, as it was then, and always would be in that dream, and after a while the snow covered her up and all went peaceful, in a way. The dream then hovered like that, like it always did, for a very long time. Still. Quiet.The body in the woods, the snow falling steadily, silently down. Delaney watching, watching.

  Chapter 2

  Delaney detested Ottawa with unusual ferocity.This was not entirely to do with the fact that his ex-wife lived there now with an ambulance driver. He had hated it even when he first worked in Canada’s capital as a journalist in the parliamentary press gallery. He had hated the incestuous, parasitical nature of the work he had to do then, cultivating contacts among politicians and politicians’ aides and their various consultants, hangers-on and flunkies in order to have anything to write about at all.