Authors: Gabriel Boutros
One more thing Sahar taught me to appreciate
.
He leaned back in his chair and tried to look casually around the room. All of the other customers were men. Most of them paid him little attention, the contents of their water-pipes and the low, hypnotic music turning their thoughts inward, away from any problems the real world may have presented.
As his gaze wandered around the room Janus came upon a man who was staring back at him from a table in the far corner. The man sat alone. He was dressed in a stylishly-cut suit, unlike the other customers. His expression was a combination of curiosity and amusement, as if he’d unexpectedly come across an exotic animal that had strayed far from home.
Janus made eye contact with him for a second, then he continued to look around the cafe. After a moment he glanced back in the direction of the well-dressed man and was perturbed to find he was still looking at him with the same expression on his face. This time Janus didn’t pull his eyes away, but held the stranger’s gaze, not certain what his own expression was.
He wondered if this was Walid. Sahar had said that Walid wasn’t very tall, but it was hard to judge his height when he was sitting. He certainly was dressed in the expensive-looking clothes she’d described, like he owned any place he walked into. And he looked like the one man in the café who’d be involved in any serious business. Most of the other customers were in a semi-hypnotic state.
Janus couldn’t decide how to approach him. He turned his attention back to the stage, feeling that he too was under a spotlight, unsure how to act. He was relieved when the waiter arrived with his coffee, as drinking it would at least give him something to do while making up his mind. Picking up the small saucer he blew across the steaming top of the cup, glancing in what he hoped was a nonchalant manner toward the man in the suit. The waiter was standing over the man now, whispering something into his ear.
The well-dressed man nodded and then stood up, while the waiter returned to his original seat, near the archway. As Janus had hoped, he wasn’t very tall, maybe 5’8”. He was trimly built, with jet-black hair gelled straight back. He walked over to Janus’s table and placed a small, somewhat effeminate hand on the back of a chair, clearly waiting to be invited to sit down. Janus tried to keep the nervousness he felt out of his eyes and smiled upward, as if this was something he did every day.
After a few awkward seconds of looking at each other, Janus spoke up.
“Would you like to sit down?”
“Only if I’m not bothering you,” the man replied, sitting down without waiting for Janus’s answer. His accent, like the waiter’s, was Parisian, not the
Québecois
accent which often sounded unintelligible to Janus’s untrained ear. “You like our coffee?”
“Yes. Well, I’ve been learning to appreciate it.”
“You never drank
that
in Ontario.”
Janus realized that the waiter had reported whatever he’d said to this man, confirming his importance. He decided that the direct approach was the one to take.
“I guess you’re Walid.”
The man smiled casually, although his eyes expressed his surprise. He nodded and asked, “Did Sahar tell you about me?”
Now it was Janus’s turn to be surprised. How in the world did this man know about his involvement with Sahar? The question must have been obvious from his expression, because Walid answered it without being asked.
“My friend, you have been seen many times going to her building. Your administration...
our
administration,” he corrected himself with a sarcastic smile, “is excellent at setting up surveillance over all of us. I have access to whatever their cameras show, which includes all the comings and goings on the streets of our town. You drive the same car each time you go to see her, and the licence plate tells me the car is for use by a
fonctionnaire municipale.
Forgive me if I do not have the English words.”
“It’s a big building. What makes you think I’ve been seeing this Sahar person?” Janus asked, suddenly worried that those cameras may have captured all his activities inside her apartment as well.
“Her clients come from outside our little…um, village
.
It is the only way the Muslim Council tolerates the presence of women like her. A Canadian, if I may call you that, who goes to this building with such assiduity, is clearly there for one reason. You are Thursdays, eight-thirty PM, are you not? I believe you have only missed once in the past 12 months.”
“I had a family…obligation.”
“It must have been very important for you to skip such a rendezvous,” Walid said with a knowing smile.
“But why would you think she sent me to see you?”
“Because she sends men to see me all the time. Her opinion of me is, how do you say,
exageré.
Exaggerated, yes? And Farid,” he pointed at the grey-haired waiter, “tells me that you were seen leaving her building tonight and driving directly to my cafe. It is now Thursday, nine-fifteen. Much earlier than you usually tear yourself away from her charms, so clearly you are looking for something important. The only thing important, here at our little
Café Liban
, is me, if I am not being too immodest.”
Janus stared wordlessly at this strangely self-assured man. He was having a hard time comprehending that his most intimate secrets were so easily discovered. While he’d always been aware of the cameras high up on lamp-posts, he’d never really thought about how pervasive surveillance in the city was. Did the RCMP spy on everyone it wanted to, including administration officials?
He thought of Leblanc’s warnings about someone higher up in the Ministry that was investigating his subordinates for moral turpitude. What would he think of Janus’s regular visits to a prostitute in Laval? Janus had convinced himself that he was flying under the administration’s radar, as long as he did his job well and kept his mouth shut. But he’d likely made himself a target of interest for the authorities. This meant that the RCMP could be studying his comings and goings each day. Or did those responsible for real security issues take little interest in middle-aged men acting out their adolescent fantasies? They could still decide to inform his superiors of his indiscretions, if they hadn’t already.
For the first time he wondered if his relationship with Sahar might be considered a security breach, and what the possible consequences could be for him. Joe’s arrest suddenly loomed as a giant warning sign to him.
“
Monsieur
Janus?
I am sorry if I have worried you.”
“Well you have. Not that you’ve been surveying me; that’s just an irritant. It’s the thought that the RCMP could be watching me.”
“But, my friend, they watch everybody. Surely
you
are aware of that. And that you are one of many hundreds of men who like to sample the exotic delights in what you call our Forbidden Zone is not important to them. As long as your actions are limited to satisfying your desires I can assure you, from personal experience, that they will not bother you.”
“But coming here today? Meeting you may be something that catches their attention.”
“You have an exaggerated idea about my importance,
monsieur
. I am just a cafe owner who is known to be very cooperative with the authorities when they need to know what is happening in Laval.”
“Cooperative? You mean you’re an informer?”
Walid smiled broadly. “A very well-paid one, I may add. I say this to you in confidence, as it is not something I advertise to my customers,” he said, with a disdainful look around the place. “Happily for my countrymen, I am not a very good informer. I rarely come up with information that the RCMP doesn’t already have, and none of my friends are ever troubled by your famous police force.”
Janus tried to let all this new information sink in, but he couldn’t keep his thoughts from careening around inside his brain. He’d come here looking for money to help Terry’s uncle, money that came without any official strings, and that was to be used in a way that bordered on the seditious. But spending so much time in the Muslim enclave and speaking to this man who may or may not be the head of a local underground: surely these actions wouldn’t be brushed off as innocent. If they were threatening to deport Joe just because he bought fresh lamb, what might they do to him?
He got up abruptly, knocking his wooden chair over behind him.
“I have to go. I’m sorry, but I can’t be here. This was all a mistake.”
He headed for the entrance, struggling to put on his coat and air mask at the same time. Walid trotted beside him and held the coat up so that Janus could get his arm through his sleeve.
“I understand your concern,” he said. “Drive home carefully, and if you do decide there is something you need, please come see me. You are my friend now.”
Janus pulled the mask over his face and waited for the door to unseal. He wasn’t sure that being this man’s friend was something to be happy about. He stepped onto the sidewalk, and looked around at the street lights which contained the many hidden cameras that covered every major city.
His department was called upon regularly to do maintenance on those cameras. How could he have chosen to ignore what they were there for? Had his desire for Sahar blinded him to such a degree?
“Stupid idiot,” he said. He truly had been living out a fantasy, ignoring the real world where everything a person said or did could be brought to the administration’s attention. He knew he was responsible for what happened to Joe, but helping him now was out of the question. He had to make sure he didn’t end up as Joe’s cell-mate.
He rushed to his car, got in and started the engine, peeling out into the streets without checking for oncoming traffic. In his haste to get away from that place it didn’t occur to him to wonder how it was that Walid knew his name.
September 23, 2039:
Robert Sévigny sat slumped in his favourite low-slung armchair, his body aching all over. Lately he didn’t have the energy that he once did. He leaned back his head and closed his eyes while he listened to the music that wafted through the air around him. The 3-D sound that enveloped him like a warm blanket was one of the few luxuries he permitted himself in an otherwise ascetic life. The colours and the scents that lingered after each song were so different from the image he projected at work that few of his colleagues would ever have suspected his tastes.
Janus Joplin
played in the background: Sévigny loved the suffering in her voice. It reminded him that pain was a common human trait. He’d certainly seen his share.
His throat had been bothering him for several days, and he tried clearing it, coughing a few times. The burning sensation was still there, so he soothed it with a sip of wine:
Pouilly-Fumé
, from an ancient family-run vineyard in the Loire Valley. Not the plonk they tried to pass off at the S.A.Q. Its smoky aroma filled his senses as he breathed in deeply before each sip. There were several advantages to being a high-ranking RCMP officer, not the least of which was knowing where the best of anything could be obtained on the black-market. Yet he rarely abused this knowledge, limiting himself to those few things he felt a civilized man should not be forced to live without.
Since his wife Catherine had died in Québec City he had shed much excess baggage from his world. In those first few months he’d been certain that he would end his own life, unable to go on without her. Surprisingly, with the passage of time, keeping fanatically busy with his work, simply living from one day to the next, the thought of killing himself eventually lost its hold on him.
On occasion he wondered if it wasn’t cowardice that kept him from ending it all. But as a police officer he’d faced life-threatening danger and never turned away from the challenges. There was no reason to believe he’d chosen life because he was afraid to die.
The fact was, and he hoped that Catherine would forgive him wherever she was, he simply wanted to live, even if his life was emptier for her absence. As he felt the music float over and through him he breathed in deeply. Most days he pushed thoughts of his wife and her death to the back of his mind in order to continue to do his job. But there were times, alone like this, when he gloried in his suffering and loneliness, the pain an integral part of being alive.
He knew it would all end eventually, probably at the hands of some political radical. It was an ugly and violent world, and he had little expectation of dying peacefully in bed.
Until the end came, however it came, he could still find satisfaction in his work, even after all these years. In the early days he spent much of his time blowing up tunnels that the camp’s disenchanted youths built under the fences, or making sure nobody bypassed the electronic monitors off Laval’s waterfront. In recent years, things had gotten quieter, with just occasional flare-ups of violence in the camp. It was as if the anger of the detainees had dissipated, leaving behind a sense of hopeless resignation. His network of spies and informers allowed him to nip any anti-administration activities in the bud.
But life still had a few surprises left, such as that silly, horny Department Head, Allen Janus. None of Sévigny’s contacts had been able to provide reasons for Janus informing on Giuseppe Pizzi, who seemed to be more than a low level black-market shopper, as Janus had claimed. With Antonio Cirillo involved up to his eyeballs in a scheme to funnel money to a number of illegal activist groups, Pizzi was surely in it with him.