LITMIR.BIZ

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left Air France — to go get his friend in Temagami. They ate in a restaurant at the edge of the forest, surrounded by heavy machinery. The hamburger was awful. Antoine explained that Pascale had been in France for two months and was out of touch. Antoine hadn’t wanted to worry Max. He really thought she’d be home for his release, as she’d promised. “I’m so sorry.”

      They got back on the road, the taste of rotten meat still in their mouths.

      “Please tell me what really happened,” pleaded Max.

      Antoine recoiled: was it that obvious he was hiding things?

      One evening a few weeks before she left, he’d dropped in at her place. There was a man. “No, it isn’t what you think. There was nothing between them. I’m sure of it.”

      Max wasn’t.

      “But they were both embarrassed. I could tell the guy wanted to be anywhere but there.”

      Pascale hadn’t introduced them, and Antoine never saw him around there again.

      “Did you ask her about it? What did she say?”

      “To mind my own business.”

      Antoine was Max’s friend, and he persisted. He wanted to know if she was ditching Max, but Pascale paid no attention and just kept telling him to stay out of it. She was old enough to “look after herself.”

      “Did she go to Europe with the guy?”

      Antoine didn’t know, but apparently not. She’d left the country alone. “But that doesn’t mean anything. She could’ve met him over there.”

      As the car emerged from the woods, Max ignored the landscape, brooding, trying to understand. So the son of a bitch had waited till he was locked away to move in and take her thousands of kilometres away. Max had no doubt the guy had handled this elopement, this kidnapping. Even though she had agreed to it, it was still kidnapping. Max blamed himself for not being able to do anything about it. How could he, though? Still, any reaction at all would have been better than not realizing.

      Eleven years later, Antoine was on a wild-goose chase through the ghats of Varanasi. The silhouette of this stranger, this elusive phantom, had once again undermined his existence. Max felt a shadowy world creeping all around him. He was a pawn in a game with rules unknown, especially to the players. All his life, people had deserted him with no warning: first his mother, then his father. Philippe’s death was an abandonment too; Pascale, of course, and now David. All of them had disappeared into a shadow world he couldn’t shed light on.

      The sound of his cellphone snapped Max out of his reverie.

      “The Pakistanis have successfully tested a missile,” yelled Jayesh, overexcited. “Of course the Indians couldn’t care less!” They should care, he thought. “You know what Musharraf said? ‘We don’t want war, but we’re ready for it.”’

      The crisis was worsening every day, and government ministries were scrambling. Prime Minister Vajpayee had his top three strong men in an emergency meeting: Lal Krishna Advani, Jaswant Singh, and Arun Jaitley.

      “They’re even thinking of covering the Taj Mahal with a gigantic camouflage net!”

      “The Taj Mahal? Seriously? It’s a Muslim monument. Why would Pakistan fool with that?”

      “The continent’s gone topsy-turvy,” Jayesh said with a sigh.

      President Musharraf seemed to confirm this by saying his troops would be moved from the Afghan to the Indian border. “In other words, they figure that the Indians are more dangerous than the Taliban!”

      “That’s got to piss off the Americans,” Max replied.

      “Sure.”

      According to the media, Washington was preparing an evacuation plan for its sixty-four thousand citizens in both India and Pakistan.

      There would be escalation of paperwork at desks and victims at the front. Twenty dead in Kashmir overnight. Poonch, a town on the Indian side, had been bombarded by Pakistani artillery, leaving seven dead and thirty wounded, and of course the Indians had to counterattack. All along the border, losses were piling up, not to mention the jihadists, who had taken over three Indian police stations, including Doda, north of Jammu. Intervention by Indian forces followed a hostage-taking. Blood and more blood. In Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, schools were closed early for vacation due to the bombardments, or was it so the kids could die in the mountains instead?

      Violence reigned through the rest of India, too. Perhaps in tribute to the Nazi SS they admired, Sri Bhargava and a hundred Durgas — heads shaved and tattooed with snakes — had set fire to a store full of Muslims, including some children. The doors were locked, so most could not get out. Later, the Durgas danced in the streets.

      But what did all this have to do with David? Well, Max had to go back to the beginning and outline everything he knew or thought he knew. First certainty: David had gone off to a place unknown a few days before he was due to leave for Montreal; like James Bond and Genghis Khan, he had disappeared into thin air. His destination was so secret that no one close to him knew where it was — not Juliette, not his colleagues, least of all his boss. Why such secrecy? Second certainty: the day before the attack, David showed up at Imam Khankashi’s place. There was a friendship, or at least a connection going back to his prison days. Khankashi had disappeared, too, or rather, as Jayesh put it, was being hunted by his nemesis Bhargava …

      Why all this sneaking around? Not to mention the safe, which was his third certainty. Someone had opened it without forcing it. Who and why? What about the name Tourigny on the airline ticket? What was the connection there, exactly? This was no former employee of the High Commission — Max had verified that. Nor did it have anything to do with the Canadian Co-operation Office in Kathmandu. No mention of a Tourigny on the list of participants at the Montreal conference either. A brick wall. Every clue led to a dead end. Max had spent the night backtracking to pick up the trail afresh. No dice. Each certainty cancelled out the others. It was a set of interlocking traps that yielded nothing. He had to find out where David had gone instead of Kathmandu.

      “Any news from Indian Airlines?”

      “Nothing,” said Jayesh. “No mention of a passenger named David O’Brien for Kathmandu or anywhere else.”

      “What about the competition … any quick visits to Pakistan, for instance?”

      “No. There have been no India–Pakistan flights since the attack on Parliament.”

      “Natch.”

      “I could check Air India.”

      “No point.”

      “Trains? Buses?”

      “Maybe, but we’d never know unless he travelled first class, which he wouldn’t if he didn’t want to be traced. He didn’t mention the trip to anyone. The only thing left is the Volvo.”

      “The car was in Delhi the whole time. Juliette and Béatrice used it.”

      “He could’ve asked Luiz to drive him somewhere for a few days then bring him back.”

      “He’d have to take Luiz into his confidence, but not Juliette or Vandana.” Jayesh seemed doubtful.

      “Depends what he was hiding.”

      20

      Flags and flowers, heavy, downcast faces and dark suits — Juliette didn’t know how long she could keep this up: hand extended to receive condolences from people she didn’t know and whose sincerity she couldn’t gauge. The ritual was just one more “must” for the ants on the diplomatic sandhill, all of them anxious to show the public how big-hearted they were. The funeral home on Laurier was the place for one to “be seen” this week, if one was to convince one’s superiors of one’s superior character and attachment to one’s country’s values.

      Other majorettes and cheerleaders inhabited this senseless

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