Face/Mask (43 page)

A few weeks earlier Richard had announced that he was dropping out of school and looking for a job. He needed to see another side of life, he said, and his parents had reluctantly agreed, as long as it was for only one school year. Now he worked 30 hours a week as a stock boy at the administration grocery store, and hardly ever went out anymore in the evenings. Terry had wanted to drive him to work each day, but Richard insisted on taking the metro-bus. She was concerned that he’d be spending too much time outdoors, lining up for the metro-bus each day, but Janus pointed out that he’d been doing it for years. As long as Richard kept his air-mask filter clean he would be fine.

Janus never spoke to him about the bombing again, although he kept a close eye on his son. If there was one thing he knew about it was the burden of keeping guilty secrets. He gave little thought to his own role in hiding what Richard had done. He’d acted to protect his son and would do so again, if necessary.

And both of them would keep the secret they shared hidden from Terry. Janus was determined to not subject her to any more heartache if that could be avoided. He’d even begun making love to her more often, although Sahar’s face occasionally floated between them in the dark. That didn’t matter: Terry had never suspected, and she would never know. He didn’t think he’d ever get over the pain of losing Sahar, but he was surprised at how much pain a man could keep inside, especially when all he had left was his family.

He would continue to make the best of his life with Terry and the boys. It was up to him to get them all through these troubled times. If, on occasion, his thoughts drifted back to the soft touch of someone who no longer existed in any official records, he told himself that this was nothing more than his own little daydream From now on, all he had left would be sweet memories of Sahar, and these would not be enough to break up his family.

At home, they hardly spoke about Uncle Joe’s case, except on those occasions when Silver called them to discuss a plea bargain he was a trying to arrange. The preliminary inquiry had been, according to Silver, cut and dried. There had been little to contest, considering that much of the evidence was not even presented in open court for reasons of national security.

A trial date had been set for early in the new year, but the lawyer still had hopes of a deal that would see Joe deported back to Italy, perhaps after five or six years in jail, rather than being imprisoned for the remainder of his life. Silver refused to speculate about the chances that such a deal would be agreed to, and Janus wasn’t sure if such an outcome was worth hoping for.

At work, Janus had gotten used to not having Leblanc around. One day, a week after the bombing, Janus had come to work and found a memo link on his P-screen, advising him that Leblanc’s position had been filled by an up-and-coming newcomer who was distantly related to the Public Works Minister.

A few days later Leblanc sent Janus a terse e-message, telling him that Prescott had claimed that he’d sold sensitive information to unnamed foreign interests, but had no proof of anything. Leblanc had not sat around waiting for that evidence to be discovered, and Janus never heard from his friend again. Officially he’d moved to Fort George to work on a shale gas project, although Janus could never find any record of him being employed there.

Office gossip suggested that his friend may have killed himself in shame at what the investigation had uncovered. Janus clung to the hope that Leblanc had successfully skipped town one step ahead of the law, perhaps using his underground connections to get a new identity.      

He told himself that there was no point feeling guilty. If Leblanc got hurt it was because of his own irresponsible actions. So Janus got on with his life, and did his best to take care of his family.

December 23, 2039:

Robert Sévigny looked down into the trash basket in his office, filled with wadded up tissue paper that was soaked with the blood he’d coughed up. The burning in his chest was constant now. He’d finally gone to see a doctor, but had no intention of going back. He’d barely understood what Stage 4 Bronchiectasis meant, only that it was four times worse than Stage 1. What had been made clear to him was that nobody had ever survived anything more than Stage 2. He had no intention of spending his final few weeks wasting away in a chest hospital.

I get to decide when and how this all ends.

There was a knock on his door and he reached down and pulled out the plastic bag that lined the basket, shoving it into his briefcase. He would dump it into an incinerator later, on his way to the river.

“Come in,” he called out, and his door opened. A young corporal entered, standing stiffly at attention like he was on an army parade ground. Sévigny looked at him for a moment, wondering how long the man would stand there if he didn’t tell him to relax.

“At ease,” he said, not in the mood to tease the young officer. He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out an info-disc which he handed to the corporal. It contained his final reports on the investigations of the past few months, as well as his recommendations on how certain loose ends should be tied up. The Justice and Security Minister had always let him have a free hand in how he handled his Division, but he wanted Sévigny to remember who was in charge, and insisted on being kept informed about everything he did.

Almost everything,
he told himself, aware that the truth about the bombed-out apartment in Laval was a secret that he and his handpicked crew would take with them to their graves. In his case that would be soon enough.

Too bad. I had such great plans for the money I got from Chaloux.

He looked at the young policeman who was still standing in front of his desk, waiting for any final orders before Sévigny left. A thin growth of peach-fuzz above his lip made him look even younger, which was surely not his intention.

That’s a face of benign ignorance if I ever saw one. What would he think if he ever found out what was on that info-chip? What would he think if he knew what I did to those four boys in Laval?

Sévigny’s wandering thoughts turned to someone else who’d remained ignorant of many of his recent activities. He leaned back in his chair and decided that Yves Prescott was a tiresome, even obsessive, fanatic in his own right.

While Sévigny understood all too well how things worked at Homeland Security, his former superior suffered from a naïve belief that catching the enemies of his country really mattered in the long run, a defect common to true believers of all stripes. Sévigny was a more practical man, as was Hans Schultz. They knew that their countries would always have enemies, and they could not all be defeated, whether by eradicating them or by co-opting them.

The important thing was to keep society functioning, to let the people feel secure enough to get through their daily lives, yet not so secure that they felt free to complain about the loss of a way of life they’d once loved. When a library or a police station was blown up the public wanted to see someone punished. Sévigny had given the public what they needed. He at least had that knowledge to comfort him in his final hours.

With Prescott rendered toothless, Sévigny had stopped investigating the vices of Allen Janus, which he thought of as a total waste of time. And nobody knew of Janus’s failed attempt at bribery, so there would be no grounds to prosecute him for his ill-thought out plan. Janus would get away with what he’d tried to do, but this hardly ranked as the worst of the injustices that Sévigny saw every day.

He’d never believed there was any real justice in the world, anyway. Despite his own hopeless condition, he didn’t consider his disease to be any kind of karmic punishment. The truth was that the best masks in the world could only protect you for so long. There was just too much poison in the world.

He looked out the window at the swirling mist of grey against the blue-green backdrop of the sky. The air outside had turned out to be the one rival he hadn’t been able to defeat. He faced his situation with the same equanimity that he felt when he had to take the life of an enemy of the administration. The world would keep on spinning. People would be born and others would die. It was simply his turn, even if it had come earlier than he’d expected.

He wished he could believe that he’d be rejoining Catherine in some sort of afterlife. But he knew that, even if God did exist, he would never have been sent to the same place as her. Just as well, then, that the only place he expected to spend eternity was at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River.

Good thing I never learned how to swim.

The corporal was still standing in front of him like a loyal puppy, so Sévigny dismissed him with a wave of his hand. The relieved-looking younger man saluted and left the office with the info-disc. Sévigny got up and put on his heavy overcoat. There was nothing left to do; it was time to go.

He opened his office door and heard a radio, somewhere in the police station, playing a Christmas carol. A soprano voice sang about stars brightly shining, and Sévigny wondered how many people could swear to ever having seen such a thing. As far as he was concerned the murky air that enveloped their world rendered notions of right and wrong equally unclear, often lost in the daily smog.

He paused at the door to slide his mask over his face, allowing himself a small sense of pride that Schultz himself had commended him twice in recent weeks: first, in secret for the recovery of the chip from Sahar Chamseddine’s apartment, and then publicly, after the explosion in Laval that had ended the investigation of the RCMP bombing. Sévigny had made sure that the resolution of the bombing investigation, and Schultz’s commendation, were prominently mentioned in his report.

My legacy? Sure. As long as the truth never comes out
.

The report also detailed the investigation and arrests of a group of dissidents working out of a butcher shop in Little Italy. There was the late Antonio Cirillo, an idealistic trouble-maker who’d gotten in over his head with that damn electronic chip, although that last part had been omitted from Sévigny’s report. And, of course, there was Giuseppe Pizzi, a harmless old man who’d suffered a great deal at the hands of the Directorate’s interrogators, all because he’d done something to piss off this Allen Janus character.

The chief prosecutor wasn’t motivated to prosecute Pizzi, especially with Cirillo dead, and was willing to let Sévigny decide on the old man’s fate. Even Hans Schultz had intimated that Pizzi held little interest for the administration. It was totally arbitrary, Sévigny knew, but that’s just the way the world worked.

As a general rule someone in Pizzi’s position rarely saw his family again, even if he was never convicted of anything. Sévigny decided that Giuseppe Pizzi would be an exception to that rule, and would somehow manage to survive his ordeal. It would be Sévigny’s final, if unofficial, act.

That would be quite the Christmas present
, he thought, humming along to the song that was now stuck in his head.
For the old man…and for that little prick, Janus.

December 24, 2039

It was the afternoon before Christmas, and Richard finished wrapping the present he’d gotten Rollie. It was a box-set of 2D movies, like the ones Uncle Joe had introduced them too. Richard had found the set at a thrift shop he’d started to volunteer at a few weeks earlier, and thought his brother would appreciate the souvenir of happier days.

Since the bombing in October Richard had lived in a permanent state of watchfulness, certain that his arrest was always imminent. Somehow, though, no suspicion was ever cast his way. He and his father had hardly spoken about it again. The last time was when the news announced that a group of suspects had accidentally blown themselves up in Laval. Richard hadn’t been sure whether he should be happy or upset with the development, but his father had leaned over to him and said, “Now that it’s over we can all get on with our lives.”

But it wasn’t really over for Richard, and, despite the passage of time, his days and nights were far from restful. He dreamt of the bombing often, especially the bloody arm, and sometimes he found himself crying when he was by himself. But he never felt the urge to turn himself in, or to reveal the truth to anyone else. He simply accepted that he was going to carry the burden of guilt all his life.

Of the students who’d been killed in the RCMP bombing the one he’d known best was Julie Prégent, the girl he’d always felt was both pretty and smart, even if most days he couldn’t stand her smarminess. It was hard for Richard to imagine his old classroom without her in it, giving her opinion on every topic. He wondered, from time to time, whether she’d be alive today if he’d paid more attention to her arguments, instead of accepting everything Mr. Robinson said so unquestioningly.

As for Mr. Robinson, Richard heard that he’d taken a medical leave of absence due to the emotional trauma caused by the violent deaths of so many of his students. He’d be travelling outside the country for the foreseeable future. Upon hearing the news, Richard had only one word for his former teacher:
Fucker
.

In early December Richard saw Julie Prégent’s mother at the grocery store where he worked. He hadn’t gone to Julie’s funeral but remembered the mother from her regular attendance at school concerts where Julie had been first flute. He was surprised that the mother recognized him, and was thankful that she didn’t question him about his absence at the funeral. So many students had gone, and Julie’s parents were in such a state of shock that day, he doubted if she remembered who had attended and who hadn’t.