Face/Mask (31 page)

“Allen, that is
haram
! Do not say such a word about yourself.”

He didn’t know if he had the strength to debate the point, but the need to talk, to empty his heart, was too strong.

“Do you trust me?”

“Trust you to do what?”

“No, I mean…do you think I’m a trustworthy guy? Generally speaking.”

She pulled her arms from his shoulders and stepped back, taking a deep puff on the cigarette while she eyed him carefully.

“You ask unusual questions, Allen. Even for you. But the answer is yes, of course. Generally and specifically, I think I can trust you.”

Janus jumped off the sill and grabbed her by her arms hard enough to hurt her, although she said nothing.

“How can you? I may have just betrayed my best friend!”

“You had no choice, Allen. It is to save your uncle Joe.”

“Whom I had already betrayed. Don’t you see? I specialize in screwing over the people who are close to me. People who depend on me. I never thought I’d do something like that, but when the time came I jumped right in.”

“Allen-”

“How do you know you won’t be next?”

“I won’t be. I know that.”

“How do you know? You only met me because I was willing to betray my wife in the first place!”

“Please calm yourself,” she said, pulling her red-marked arms away from him. “You are tired and very stressed. This is why you see things this way.”

“I see things the way they are. I know the things I’ve done, the people I hurt.”

“But it is not you. It is this fucking world, Allen, where everybody is screwing over everybody because there is no way to live otherwise.”

“You just don’t understand.”

“Of course I understand, Allen. Do you think I have never betrayed the things I believe in? Or the memory of the people I love? Do you think my life was so easy, that’s why I became a
sharmouta?
”

Her words hit Janus like a slap in the face. Even after all the months they’d spent together, time during which he often discussed his life in great detail, he hardly knew a thing about her. She could just as easily have not existed for the six days a week he wasn’t with her, coming to life upon his arrival.

He watched silently as she walked over to the chair and picked up a thin robe that lay across its back. She slipped the robe on and sat down, taking a deep breath and wiping a tear from her eye. He had never seen her cry before. She took a deep breath before speaking, and when she did, he noticed that her soft Middle Eastern accent was gone.

“Can I tell you something?”

Janus didn’t answer, because the only thing he would have said was “no.” A door was about to open for him, but he didn’t want to step through.. He feared that once she told him anything about herself he could never be with her again. The image he’d created in his mind would be shattered forever, replaced by a real person, with a past and a life outside their Thursday nights.

“Cat’s got your tongue, eh?”

He did a small double-take. He’d never heard her use any North American colloquialisms before. She smiled at him then, and it was still the smile he was used to, and that let him feel that all was not lost. Still, he said nothing, but shrugged slightly, waiting to see what she was going to say next.

  “Allen, what would you say if I told you I used to be Catholic? Not a very good Catholic, you know; but then who is anymore?”

September 27, 2018:

She was a refugee, as her parents had once been. They had left their homeland to start a new life in a different country, away from the war and the sectarian hatreds that had torn apart their beloved Lebanon. She, on the other hand, was displaced inside her own country. Her home and family in Quebec City were incinerated by what the news reports called a suitcase bomb, set off by a group of fanatics who distorted the merciful love of Allah, and the teachings of his one true prophet, Mohammed.

Sarah Shaheen had stopped existing several years earlier, disavowed by her own family. Now, Sahar Chamseddine sat in a small motel room, alone. She hardly felt the effects of the sedatives that pharmacies had been distributing like Halloween candy to allow the frantic populace some respite from the sheer terror that threatened to overwhelm the nation.

How does a person grieve for a personal loss when countless thousands of others were also dead, when mourners wailed in the streets or beat their chests behind closed doors? Who could give her comfort that did not need comfort just as much as she?

She hadn’t even had the time to mourn the loss of her mother when she was hit with the news of the attack on Quebec City. For days she held out hope that Rafik and the children were somehow among the survivors, but that hope had quickly given way to stark reality. Nearly a hundred thousand had died instantly, and thousands more would die in the following months, whether from their injuries or from the radiation that blanketed the provincial capital. Her young family was nothing but a memory now. A small creased picture in her purse, taken shortly after the birth of Almaz, all that remained to prove they once existed, had once filled up every waking moment of her life.

In Montreal, her mother’s death had done nothing to soften her father’s attitude toward her. The death of her husband and children were, in her bitter father’s eyes, a judgment cast by a vengeful God because she had rejected her family and their faith. Her brothers, saddened by their mother’s death, and devastated by the loss of friends and relatives in the nuclear attack, were unable to break their father’s will. They’d seen her at their mother’s funeral, weeping louder than most at the back of the church which she had entered surreptitiously after the service began, but had not spoken another word to her since the hospital.

Since that day the government was overwhelmed by the influx of refugees, of which Sahar was one of the first. They’d put her up in an inexpensive motel, along with many of the early arrivals, but soon the army was putting up tents in public parks while temporary housing was hastily built.

They would provide her with some food and medication for a little while, and this cheap room until she got back on her feet. Yet how was she ever to get back on her feet after everything in her life had been taken away? She had never held a job in her life and now, alone and heartbroken, she was going to have to look for work.

Already, there were stories about local Muslims being attacked in the streets by vengeful crowds, or losing their jobs for no reason. She couldn’t even begin to think about how she was going to make money to support herself.

October 7, 2039:

Things never turn out the way one expects, Janus knew, as recent events had proven. He sat on a bench in the courthouse lobby, waiting for someone named
Caporal
Chaloux in order to commit the first serious criminal act of his life, yet his thoughts were on Sahar and the previous night’s revelations.

She’d shown him a faded paper picture of herself and her young family, making the story she recounted seem all too real. He could no longer look at her as some exotic sexual plaything, nor as a woman who lived only for him. Once upon a time, she’d had a husband and two beautiful daughters, as well as parents that had turned their backs on her.

And she’d had no other way to survive except to join the one profession that was always in demand, whatever the political situation of the country. To do this she’d taken on a persona that her clients would think was foreign and exotic, although she’d grown up a middle-class, suburban Montrealer, like most people he knew.

He looked around the courthouse lobby and wondered how many people found themselves here because of circumstances beyond their control. He was ashamed for ever feeling superior to these people, whose problems he couldn’t imagine. He asked himself what kind of person took advantage of someone else’s desperate situation, the way he surely had been doing with Sahar for all these months. She hadn’t told him about her past to make him feel uncomfortable, but he saw himself as one of the countless men who exploited her for their own pleasure.

Some loud yelling from the direction of the information desk brought him back to the present. He looked over and saw a woman in tears being consoled by Pascal, the information agent he’d spoken to his first time here. He was the one who’d directed them to Silver, and now the lawyer had him involved in this half-assed scheme which could end up with Janus in jail alongside Uncle Joe. 

Janus rubbed his face hard, trying not to get himself worked up. Silver had told him that Chaloux was an RCMP liaison officer who worked out of the courthouse. Silver hadn’t explained why the man was willing to take a bribe, nor what he was going to do for the money; only that he would be taking the payment for himself as well as a number of other courthouse officers.

Janus was to sit on a bench in the lobby at 9 AM and wait for Chaloux to approach him. He had to have $100,000 with him, preferably carried in something non-descript, like a grocery bag. So, at the appointed hour, Janus sat there watching while Pascal listened to people’s problems and directed them to their various appointments. He wondered at the man’s patience, and his willingness to help strangers.

Janus squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds, trying to keep calm. When he opened them he was no longer alone on the bench. Beside him sat a uniformed man in his early fifties, extremely overweight and sweating profusely. If it hadn’t been for Janus’s own preoccupations the other man’s stertorous breathing would have announced his presence even before Janus opened his eyes.

He fit the description that Silver had given him. Janus wasn’t sure whether he should say something or wait until the man spoke first. He turned to him, but the other man gazed straight ahead.

Janus looked around nervously, thinking that maybe the man knew they were being watched. The courthouse lobby was its usual hive of activity, but try as he might he couldn’t tell if there was anyone paying particular attention to them.

God, I’m not made for this cloak and dagger stuff
.
Anybody could be recording us for all I know.

He had to do something to get the man’s attention, because he was far too nervous to sit there much longer. He took the plastic bag from under his heavy trench coat and placed it on the bench between them. After a short pause he let go of the bag and placed his hands in his lap, all the while keeping his gaze fixed on the information counter, as if his attention was drawn to something there.

He felt sweat running down the back of his neck and had to resist an urge to say something. After about a minute there was a heavy exhalation from beside him and a shifting of weight on the bench. From his peripheral vision he could see that the stranger had stood up and was walking away. The bag was in his left hand.

Is that it? Was this even Chaloux?

He was suddenly certain that he was being set up, that things were not supposed to happen this way. He jumped to his feet and in a harsh whisper called out, “Chaloux!”

The heavy-set man stopped instantly and turned his head to look at Janus, an expression of terror in his eyes.

“
Merde
, don’t yell out my name like that,” he shot back angrily. Then he turned and walked away, faster than before, his own nervousness clearly getting the better of him.

Janus sat down, hopeful that this was the right man after-all, and that he’d done the right thing by giving him the money. He remembered how Sahar had said they lived in a world where everybody was screwing over everybody, and he hoped this didn’t apply to
Caporal
Chaloux.

Chapter thirteen

Criminal Code of Canada, R.S.C. 2028, ch 357, section 120(a)(i) and (ii):
Everyone is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding twenty years who, being a security officer, public officer or officer of a reconstituted court, directly or indirectly accepts, obtains or agrees to accept any money or valuable consideration with intent to  interfere with the administration of justice, or to protect from detection or punishment a person who has committed or who intends to commit an offence.

October 10, 2039:

In the best of circumstances Janus hated waiting. Knowing that he’d begun on a path of criminality that he could never have foreseen made waiting that much more agonizing. The reports flashed on his P-screen at work, messages were left on his com mail, but his mind had stopped functioning. Since he’d passed a bag with a small fortune to an RCMP agent, all he could do was wait for the other shoe to drop.

He still had half of Walid’s money, to be placed in the right hands at the Security Prosecutions office. But that step came only after Silver’s RCMP connection confirmed that he’d received his share. Janus waited out the weekend in agony. The confirmation should have come in by now.

When the com whistled in his ear on Monday morning he ignored it, as he had all the others, until he saw on the desk viewer that it was Silver who was calling.

“Jesus,” he whispered harshly as he answered the call. “Where’ve you been?”

“I’ve been talking to my guy, and the news isn’t good.”

“What do you mean the news isn’t good? Which guy did you speak to?”

“The guy who doesn’t want you to know his name. It looks like the guy you met with never went to see the other guy.”

Janus took a second to figure out which guy was which. He remembered that one of the RCMP agents who’d been involved in Joe’s arrest was a contact of Silver’s, and the lawyer was keeping his identity a secret from him. This man was supposed to get half the money that Janus had handed over to Chaloux the previous Friday. Obviously Chaloux hadn’t come through.

“Maybe something happened,” Janus said, trying to sound hopeful. “Was it supposed to be today?”

“It was supposed to be the same day
.
Chaloux was supposed to meet him an hour after he got the…um, the papers from you. He never showed.”

“Jesus.”

“Damn right. Me and the other guy have been trying to reach Chaloux since then with no luck. I even called his house com, and his wife hung up in my face. No answer since then.”

“If he didn’t give your guy his share, you think he kept it all for himself?”

“That’s the best case scenario.”

“What do you mean, best case? What could be worse than that?”

“Think, you
schmuck
! Maybe he gave everything to somebody higher up. Maybe he’s turned on us all.”

“What are you talking about? You said you knew this guy. You said you’d worked with him before.”

“What can I tell you,” Silver said with a sigh. “None of these guys are exactly trustworthy.”

That afternoon, Janus spent three hours in his office trying to decide what to do. He was certain that Chaloux hadn’t turned the money in to his superiors. The weekend had passed and nobody had been arrested. That meant that the corrupt
Con
had kept the money for himself.

He wanted to go to the courthouse, but didn’t know what that would get him. He remembered how he’d rushed to the police station the night of Joe’s arrest, without the slightest idea of what he could do once he got there. He’d ended up getting slapped in the face with his own impotence against the RCMP.

He wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to find Chaloux: Silver had told him that the courthouse security offices weren’t accessible to the public. Janus knew only one person who worked at the
Palais de Justice,
but it was someone who was always ready to help those in need. Of course, Pascal the information agent might not want to do any favours for him. He and Chaloux might be friends, for all Janus knew. He would just have to risk it.

He decided to swing by his home before going to the courthouse. He had something hidden in a closet that he hoped would get Pascal on his side.

Striding into the large lobby of the
Palais de Justice
, Janus headed straight to the information desk. Pascal was giving directions to an anxious-looking couple in their forties. For a moment Janus saw himself and Terry standing there in a state of near-panic, and wondered how often that scene repeated itself at the courthouse.

Once the couple went off Janus stepped forward, returning the clerk’s smile of recognition.

“Hi. Pascal, right? I’m looking for a policeman that works here. A
Caporal
Chaloux; I think he works security.”

“OK. I can call down to their offices and see if he’s there.”

“Is there any way I can get in there without being announced? It’s a personal matter between me and him, and he’s been avoiding me.”

Pascal looked around surreptitiously, then leaned forward to whisper to Janus.

“I know this guy, Chaloux,” he said. “He’s a bit of a joke around here. Just putting in the time until he can retire, you know what I mean? What’d he do to you?”

Janus had an urge to answer truthfully to this man whose daily existence consisted of helping others, but he resisted. What he’d attempted with Chaloux was not something he could announce freely.

“Listen, I appreciate your help. It’s really personal, though. I have to see him.”

“He screwed you over, didn’t he?”

Janus nodded. “Pretty obvious, eh? And now he’s not answering my calls.”

Pascal looked around again, biting his lip, before turning back to Janus.

“Freakin’ piece of crap. That’s just like him to do that.”

“I have to speak to him,” Janus said. “But I don’t want him to know I’m here. So he doesn’t take off on me.”

“Their offices are in the second sub-basement, and the public isn’t allowed to go wandering around there. Sorry.”

“I don’t have a gun or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“If you had a gun on you, my friend, the alarms would’ve gone off like crazy when you walked in here. That’s the least of my concerns.”

“Oh, of course,” Janus said, understanding what the man really wanted. “I have something with me.” He put his hand inside his coat pocket and kept it there. “Maybe it would help to convince you.”

The clerk’s face reddened, and he looked quickly around the lobby.

“Hey, buddy. You can’t go around offering people money. You can really offend someone like that.”

Janus knew he was on the right track
.
He hadn’t even mentioned money but Pascal had understood right away. And he hadn’t rejected the idea out of hand, nor did he say that the offer would offend
him.
It wasn’t surprising. Pascal couldn’t be getting rich, sitting at this desk all day, helping others. Meanwhile he must have had a good view of all the corruption and double-dealing that went on around him, so why should he be left out?

He’s just like everyone else. Not that I’m any better
.

“Look, I know you’re an honourable man,” Janus said. “But I’m desperate here, and I just want to thank you for helping me. After-all, that’s what you do here, right? Help people.”

Pascal’s eyes darted around the lobby again, but he said nothing this time. Janus took that as another good sign. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and placed it palm down on the desk in front of him. A small envelope was sticking out from underneath. Hidden in a closet at home he still had half the money that Walid had given him for bribes, and he would continue using it for exactly that.

“What is that?”

“There’s two thousand dollars here. That’s a lot of money to let me sneak off with your passkey while you’re not looking. Like I said, I’m just going to speak to this guy. That’s all that’s going to happen.”

“I, I don’t usually…” Pascal said, unable to finish his sentence.

“Of course you don’t. And I wouldn’t even have dared to ask you if I wasn’t in such a tight spot. I’m not asking you to do this for yourself. I’m the one who needs
your
help.”

Janus slid the envelope forward, then reached over the desk and took the passkey from Pascal’s belt. Pascal stared at the envelope as if he thought it was going to bite him, but he made no move to push it away or to stop Janus.

Janus took the elevator down to the second sub-basement. Once off the elevator he hid in a corner near some unused lockers, out of sight of the prisoner loading area. He waited while a line of prisoners trudged onto the buses that would take them back to the detention centers. He noted that none of the prisoners wore air-masks, and wondered how well-sealed the transports were.

He resisted the urge to pace around in his nervousness and impatience. Any movement out of his corner meant risking being caught. After half an hour Janus saw the last bus move up the narrow ramp to the street. Two guards headed down a corridor on the opposite side of the garage, but there was still no sign of Chaloux.

Once the area was clear he stepped out of his hiding spot, walking quickly but trying not to draw attention to himself by breaking into an outright run. It was about fifty feet to the doors that led to the security offices. When he got to the doors and was out of view of the rest of the garage he let out the breath he was holding. He pushed to see if the doors were locked.

They weren’t; the door swung open slowly and Janus found himself looking at a man in a blue RCMP uniform, but it wasn't Chaloux.

“
Monsieur
Janus,” Robert Sévigny said as he opened the door wider. “What brings you here?”

Despite his utter surprise Janus’s voice remained calm as he turned to the only back-up strategy he could think of: deny everything.

“Oh hello, Sévigny. I wasn’t actually looking for you.”

“Ah, no?”

“No, of course not. I was in court checking on my wife’s uncle’s case. I believe I mentioned it to you a few days ago. I got on the elevator with some court personnel and simply got off at the wrong floor.”

“Well, I must congratulate you on how calmly you’ve replied, despite the total falsity of your statements.”

“Total falsity?!”

“And your feigned indignation is excellent,
Monsieur
. Well done. But it so happens that I’m aware of your plan with
Caporal
Chaloux
.
I also note that you’re holding a limited issue passkey in your tightly-clenched right hand.”

Sévigny reached out and tapped lightly on the fist that Janus had made. Janus hesitated, searching helplessly for something to get him out of the situation, but there was little point in trying. He lifted his hand and opened it, revealing the passkey that Sévigny knew was there. The officer lifted it from Janus’s palm and slid it into his own pocket.

“I’m quite surprised that you brought so much money into the courthouse last week,” Sévigny said with a concerned expression, as he patted Janus’s pockets to see if there was anything else worth seizing. “Don’t you know this place is full of criminals…and lawyers?”

Janus just stared at the man. What was there to say? He was caught and the consequences were going to be severe. Whether Chaloux had given him up voluntarily or under duress made no difference. Not only would Joe not be bribed out of jail, but Janus fully expected to join him in a cell that night.

“I could write up a report exposing the little plot between you and
Caporal
Chaloux, which is a shame because he is an excellent agent. But, then again, maybe I won’t write up any reports at all. I have no idea what the future holds,
Monsieur
Janus, other than that our business is not over yet. Far from it.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“It’s simple. Go home and inform your family that you’ll have to think of another way to obtain the release of this Giuseppe Pizzi. Don’t try to spend the remainder of the money you have on anybody else. You might need it yourself soon enough. Who knows? I may be calling on you in the near future.”

Janus stood transfixed, unable to pull his eyes away from the policeman’s face. It made no sense that Sévigny wasn’t arresting him on the spot. In fact Janus felt quite put out by the idea, especially as the policeman was wearing an infuriatingly self-satisfied smile.

“What’s going on, Sévigny? You’ve caught me bribing a policeman in order to get an accused criminal out of jail.”

“Accused terrorist,
Monsieur
Janus,” Sévigny said, always with that same smile flickering across his lips. “Let’s not mince words.”

“All right, terrorist then. And you’re not arresting me? Why the hell not?”