The Truth Itself Read online

  But on those days she’d listened to old Leonard Cohen songs (all about him saying so long to Marianne, or Suzanne taking him down to the river and feeding him tea and oranges) that had transported her into another time and another place, not the breaking news on WDEV-FM out of Waterbury giving an update on the shooting at Suzie’s school.

  Details were sketchy. Two staff members had been killed along with the two gunmen who had not yet been identified. Minor injuries were reported among the kids.

  Nothing about her.

  Not yet.

  But she knew her prints and her DNA—hair tweezered from the rug by her bed, invisible skin flakes harvested from the inside of the jeans in her laundry basket and the sneakers that lay in the bottom of her closet—were being analyzed and very soon people somewhere would know who she was and the heavy machinery of the intelligence community would start to roll, a wide net would be cast ready to ensnare her and if she were trapped the sunniest outcome would be a show trial and life in prison with Suzie left to find her way through foster homes and institutions, branded for life as the “traitor bitch’s daughter.”

  That is, if Lucien Benway and his creature, Morse, didn’t get to them first and put bullets in the base of their skulls and dump their bodies in unmarked graves.

  Kate shut down these thoughts and concentrated on the road, staying just within the speed limit, watching the mirrors for the white Taurus Interceptors favored by the Quebec Highway Patrol.

  She’d stopped for a minute in the deep woods to remove the Vermont license plates, which she’d frisbeed into the trees, and replace them with Quebec plates, with their fleur-de-lys and Je me souviens motto.

  They allowed her to blend into the traffic but wouldn’t hold up to a computer check, and neither would the Canadian driver’s license in her wallet.

  But the license, in the name of Mary McCloud, had enabled her to rent a self-storage unit on the outskirts of the small city of Magog two years before. The owner was a Quebecois who’d reluctantly conversed in English. Kate, raising her diphthongs a little before the consonants in a near-flawless impersonation of an Ontario native, telling the guy that she’d moved from “Tronno” and needed some space for a while.

  He’d been incurious and even managed a smile when she’d paid two years rental in cash.

  She turned off at Magog, crossed the river, passed the dark brick textile plant that resembled a Dickensian poorhouse and headed for the self-storage, a couple of rows of low buildings squatting in the gray snow. The facility was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with rusted barbed wire.

  There were no workers on the premises. The owner ran the Shell gas station across the freeway and left the self-storage to pretty much take care of itself.

  Kate stopped the Jeep outside the gate and was pleased to see that a snow plow had recently done its work on the roads leading to the storage units. She stepped out into the cold and used the key she’d been given to unlock the gate, drove through and locked it after her and headed toward the second row of blocks.

  She stopped at the last unit, near the fence. A stretch of snow-covered ground lay between the fence and the freeway, the buzz of distant traffic reaching her.

  She parked the Jeep and, leaving Suzie asleep, rolled up the door.

  A five-year-old silver Hyundai with Quebec plates was parked inside. She’d bought the car from a dealer in Montreal, paid cash and driven it here and stored it for just this day.

  Before mothballing the car Kate’d had the oil, anti-freeze, power steering, transmission and brake fluid changed. She’d filled the gas tank and added Pri-G to stabilize it and slow down fuel deterioration, and disconnected the terminals of the brand new battery.

  The concrete of the unit was level enough for her to disengage the parking brake before storage so it wouldn’t stick to the brake drum over time. She’d left the manual transmission in neutral.

  Doing these things automatically.

  These skills, like so many others, hammered into her by her trainers a lifetime ago.

  She hadn’t been here since she rented the unit, and there was moment’s anxiety when—after she’d lifted the hood and connected the battery—she sat behind the wheel and turned the key. The car whined and coughed and then caught, the engine running smoothly.

  While the car idled, she opened the trunk and unzipped the bag inside, revealing Canadian passports in the names of Janet and Brett Brewster. A bespectacled version of herself stared out from Janet’s passport. Brett was a kid of four when the picture was taken, but if Kate cut Suzie’s hair and dressed her in the boys’ clothes she’d bought at H&M in Montreal, the girl would pass.

  Getting Suzie to agree to the makeover wasn’t something she relished.

  Kate drove the car out and parked it, still idling, beyond the Jeep. Suzie was awake now, staring at her.

  Kate opened the Jeep door and slid in beside the kid. “You okay?”

  The girl nodded.

  “You wait for me in the other car, baby.”

  The child obeyed and Kate drove the Jeep into the storage unit and removed their bags. She rolled down the door and locked it. Stowing the bags in the trunk of the Hyundai she headed toward the exit.

  “Where are we going, Mommy?”

  “To do a few things.”

  “What things?”

  “Oh, girlie things. Play dress up.”

  “Dress up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we’re going to fly.”

  “Fly to where?”

  “To find out about a man.”

  “What man?”

  “A man who I think can help us.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His name is Hook. Harry Hook.”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “Well, he’s a funny man.”

  FIVE

  The mother of all hangovers saved Harry Hook’s life.

  Despite the arctic air-conditioning in the lobby of the plush Bangkok Phuket Hospital he was sweating profusely, a miasma of stale booze following him as he jogged into the elevator, studiously ignoring a short, red-faced man in an expensive suit standing beside four bruisers who encircled a striking bronze-skinned woman in some kind of traditional garb and a skinny boy of maybe eight in a knitted skull cap.

  The woman’s fine nose twitched and she whispered something to one of the big men who kept the door open with a thick hand and said to Hook in an unplaceable accent, “Would you please take the next elevator, sir?”

  It wasn’t a question and the stinking Hook retreated as the doors closed, left standing beside a plump Thai man in a tuxedo perched on a little dais playing “I Will Always Love You” on an electric violin. The song, a reminder of the event that had ended Hook’s career and very nearly his life, brought with it a terrible foreboding that almost sent him bolting for the exit, but the lure of money had his finger repeatedly stabbing at the elevator call button.

  When the next car arrived Hook, fighting dizziness, rode up to the sixth floor alone, pleased the elevators didn’t run to mirrors although the jolly posters advertising discounted colorectal examinations in Thai and English made him queasy and he swiped toxic sweat from his forehead with his forearm.

  Until the night before Hook had been on the wagon for six years, choosing a different path from that of the many aging expatriates who, like remittance men of old, washed up on the beneficent shores of Thailand and went magnificently to ruin, pickling their organs in booze and party drugs, their aging skins becoming lizardy and their sagging tackle shored up by jolts of Viagra that wreaked havoc with their blood pressure and sent many, still semi-tumescent, to the ER of hospitals such as this as their exhausted hearts gave out.

  The disgraced Hook had spent his first few years in Thailand behaving like them, snorting cocaine off the bud-like breasts of teenage bargirls, washing down handfuls of little blue bombs with tequila to combat the coke dick and enable him to continue on his
toboggan course of FFM threesomes.

  Somewhere in the midst of his booze-fueled orgy he’d decided he wanted, surprisingly, to live, even though that meant that each sober day he had to face the reality that twenty-two people had died on his watch.

  Died when he’d made the wrong decision.

  The fall-out from that decision had prompted his resignation from the CIA (accepting a handshake that was far from golden) and caused him to flee to Bangkok, intending to end it all in a glorious blur of chemicals and cunt.

  Then he’d gone clean and sober and withdrawn to the jungles of southern Thailand, living in isolation with only his ghosts for company.

  But, despite his almost monastic lifestyle, his cash reserves—which had taken a hit during his years of excess—were dwindling, and it was with an uneasy mind that he’d sat on the steps of his wooden shack hidden in the jungle high above a small beach town just after dawn the day before, listening to the haunting calls of the gibbon monkeys, attempting, with little success, to forget his financial woes as he tried to capture in watercolor the pink light washing the fissured limestone cliffs with their beard of deep green foliage shrouded in a soft mist that he’d feared was beyond his skills.

  Maybe because he wasn’t concentrating so hard the picture wasn’t half bad. A keeper, even.

  When his cell phone chirped he wanted to ignore it but old habits had him setting his brush in a glass of water and going inside, tempted to retreat when he saw Johnny Martin’s name on caller ID.

  Martin was a mouthy Brit who flitted around Thailand getting up to no good. Against his better instincts Hook took the call.

  “What’s up, old sport?” he said in the vaguely patrician accent that was as fake as the last name he was currently living under: Henderson, from Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. Not really an alias. Just a way to distance himself from what and who he had been.

  “Harry, I’ve got a little thing going. Over on Phuket,” Martin said.

  It was always a “little thing” with Johnny Martin.

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah, a little bodyguard gig.”

  “I’m not a bodyguard, Johnny.”

  “Well, of course you’re not, Harry, but it’s money for jam. I just need you as a floater.”

  “Isn’t a floater an unflushable turd?”

  Martin brayed a laugh. “Funny, Harry. Good one.” He coughed and Hook could hear him lighting a cigarette and sucking on it. “You’ll just be some guy in casual clothes, looking like a holiday maker, you know, keeping an eye on things from the fringes.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “One of my crew got himself arrested last night. Some trouble in a bar. A girl. The usual. You know?”

  “Yeah.” He’d had a few of those skirmishes in his time.

  “So I’m a chap short and I thought of you.”

  Hook knew he should end the call but he said, “What are you paying?”

  “A thousand.”

  “U.S.?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it involve?”

  “You get the ferry across to Phuket today. I put you up in a hotel for the night and tomorrow at 09:00 you wait in the lobby of the Bangkok Phuket Hospital. You know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me and my chaps will collect the clients from the airport and drive them to the hospital.”

  “Who are they?”

  “My clients?”

  “Yes.”

  “A woman and a kid. She’s bringing him to the hospital for tests.”

  “Where are they from?”

  “Burma.”

  “Why do they need bodyguards?”

  “They’re rich.”

  “Then why don’t they bring their own?”

  “A problem with travel documents. You know?”

  Hook heard himself say, “Okay. I’ll do it for two thousand.”

  “A grand and a half.”

  “Done.”

  Martin said, “You don’t know me tomorrow when you see me, okay? You hang out in the lobby then when we arrive you drift along with us like an innocent party.”

  “I am an innocent party.”

  “Of course you are, Harry. Just a figure of speech.” He laughed and Hook could see his ruddy face and yellow teeth. “You spot anything dodgy you call me on my mobile, yeah?

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Johnny?”

  “No, no. Not a thing, Harry. Scout’s honor.”

  Hook hung up and wandered back outside and looked at the painting he’d never finish and left it on the deck to dry and went in and started packing a small bag, uneasy in the certainty that there was more to this than Johnny Martin was revealing, that he was wandering into something dangerous and messy that was way outside his wheelhouse.

  Hook had never been one for the dirty work, more of a schemer, a plotter, a gambit man, attracted to intelligence work not for the blood and the guts but for the platform it afforded him to outsmart the opposition—for the intelligence, goddamit.

  But the money would keep him going for a while.

  Filled with misgivings he took the boat from the mainland to the island of Phuket and at sunset checked into a cheap hotel near the hospital. The room was claustrophobic and the rattling air conditioner coughed warm, fetid air. Hook forced open the window and allowed in the snarl of the traffic and the cooking smells from the stalls in the street below. When the blare of a muezzin—Martin had contrived to find a hotel in the shadow of one of overwhelmingly Buddhist Phuket’s few mosques—filled the room (and filled the jumpy Hook’s head with old memories) he found himself walking the narrow, clotted streets, his nostrils thick with the scent of perfumed flowers, spiced food, exhaust emissions and sewer gas.

  This wasn’t tourist Phuket, far from the girly bars and massage parlors of Patong, and he saw no other farang. Thirsty, he sat down at a sidewalk eatery and ordered a Coke. At the table beside him six men were gambling on pok deng, a card game in which players win by beating the banker's hand.

  They were drinking Laotian whiskey with a dead cobra coiled inside the bottle. One of them saw him watching and, smiling a gap-toothed grin, the man filled a shot glass and pushed it over to Hook who thought of refusing but didn’t and joined in the game and remembered buying another bottle of snake whiskey for his new best friends and then remembered little else until the bleat of his cell phone alarm that morning had dragged him retching and stinking from his sleep.

  He’d puked, showered and puked again. Dressed in khaki shorts and a patterned shirt, looking like just another aging tourist, he’d headed for the hospital, arriving late, and had almost missed Martin and his crew who were already ushering the woman and the boy into the elevator.

  Following them up in the next car, keen to get this done and get his hands on the cash, Hook watched the display hit six and as the doors slid open he heard the unmistakable cough of suppressed weapons and looked into the hospital corridor as Martin and his men were ambushed by some stocky, swarthy types, who left them lying dead on the polished floor and grabbed the kid and the woman and dragged them toward the stairs.

  Hook gave no thought to intervention, and as weapons swung his way he put up his hands and stepped back into the elevator and hit the lobby and “door close” buttons simultaneously, the doors taking forever to shut, and just as they were about to kiss a brown hand holding an automatic surged forward, but to no avail and Hook was moving down, bile in his throat.

  He had a bad moment when the car stopped on the third floor, but it was only to admit a bluff Australian couple who bid him “g’day”, the woman as bruised as a prize fighter, her face bearing the signs of the cosmetic surgery the hospital was famous for.

  Hook rode down with them and scuttled past the violinist and the little nurses in their lilac outfits and out the side exit by the mini-mart, down the ramp into the heavy heat to where taxi drivers lounged smoking in the shade of a jackfruit tree.

  Then he was in a taxi and away, setting co
urse for Phuket Old Town with its clogged streets and Chinese buildings, to the jetty where he found a ferry about to depart and was sitting in the bow watching the land recede when the shakes hit him and he sat shivering and grinding his teeth for the next hour until the boat docked and he hurried to where he’d parked the old Yamaha dirt bike he’d bought off an indigent Ukrainian, kicked it to life and there was only one thing to do: buy a bottle and go home and drink it until he was unconscious.

  SIX

  A motel rose from the soiled-looking snow along the A10 to Montreal, the neon gamely jerking and jittering against a low sky the color of a bruise. It was only early afternoon but car headlights were on and darkness was ready to pounce beyond the low gray hills.

  Kate clicked on the blinker and drove into the motel, parking close to the office.

  “Stay here, Suze,” she said and left the car, the windows of the Hyundai sufficiently misted to disguise the gender of her daughter.

  The office was so overheated that she could taste the sweat of the fat man in yellow T-shirt who sat behind the counter watching sports on CNN. He glanced at Kate and then his eyes were back on the tube.

  “Can I have room please?” she asked in her Tronno voice.

  He grunted and slid a broken-backed register across to her. “Fifty dollars.”

  Kate paid with Canadian banknotes and used her Mary McCloud license to register. The man barely glanced at her ID and slid a key to her with a smudged and crumpled paper tag tied to it with brown string.

  “Room Ten,” he said, his eyes already back on the screen by the time she walked out.

  Kate parked the Hyundai outside number ten, took a pair of their bags from the trunk, and hurried Suzie into a room that smelled of mold and mothballs.

  She clicked on the TV and surfed past a couple of Canadian channels until she found CNN, which was still doing its sport round up.