“We need time to line up the witnesses. Immigration refuses to accept the authenticity of the passport and birth certificate. The lawyers want to explore identity through witness testimony.”
I don’t know how witness statements can vindicate your client when it’s clear from the documents that he’s a liar, Grace wanted to say. Instead she answered, “I suggest you call scheduling and ask for a hearing date next month. I’m not willing to postpone it further than that. And I want to see those witness statements at least a week prior to the hearing.”
“You’ll get them. I appreciate this, Ms. WangWeinstein.”
“You’re welcome.”
She knew that refugee claimants were often quite prepared to violate the Immigration Act by producing forged or stolen identity and immigration documents. It was predictable, yet dispiriting. Four years on the bench had made her weary of photocopies presented as “original documents,” or identity papers that were torn or had incomplete stamps and seals or faded lettering. That was the problem with the job. After a while, compassion fatigue set in, closely followed by cynicism. Nothing surprised her. She had seen it all before. Prosecutors and judges who spent too many years in the business became masters of the same worn-out, exasperated expression.
After she hung up, she reached into her briefcase for the morning’s Globe and Mail. Immigration and refugee stories were now a sign of the times. Populations were on the move, displaced by war, natural disasters, famine — who could have guessed that her Ph.D. dissertation on mass movements and resettlement of displaced peoples would position her in a growth industry? Wanting to make a difference in the world, she had accepted a contract with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to study mass migration in Europe. That was the year when Europe had to deal with an influx of millions of people leaving the former Soviet Union. In the course of her two years with UNHCR, which spanned seventy thousand interviews with asylum seekers, she had learned two facts. One, people migrated. For whatever reason, they wanted a chance to live in another country that offered them better economic opportunities. Two, when too many people migrated, prosperous countries responded by shutting their gates through tougher immigration laws. But people were desperate, and willing to do anything. They would use fraudulent documents, pose as other people, become indentured slaves as nannies or sweatshop workers or prostitutes, run drugs, run guns — anything to earn hard currency to pay for passports and air tickets.
In Geneva, one of her tasks had been to deal with the press, who tended to be unsympathetic to the plight of refugees. Often, she would link them up with various field officers: people who worked on certain cases or remembered a story that stayed with them. Grace thought about the case that still resonated through her life after all those years, like the incoming tide that washed driftwood onto a beach. She would never be able to forget the face of that young woman. The case had played itself out at customs in Sweden. A young Iranian woman and her baby had been smuggled out of Iran by agent smugglers. They had stuffed her and her baby into a cargo trunk. When customs officials pried open the top, they found the woman buried underneath a bundle of rags. During the trip, the baby had suffocated. Mouth to mouth resuscitation could not save her infant. The young mother had seized her one chance to escape from Khomeini’s henchmen, who had executed every member of her family, only to find herself being charged with criminally negligent homicide by the Swedish authorities, and sent to jail.
Grace despised agent smugglers. To her they were no more than criminals living off the desperation of others. But she knew that those desperate people in Third World countries often saw them as saviours. And sometimes, she grudgingly had to admit, they were.
She grabbed a second cup of coffee from the lunchroom and scanned the papers. This was the third immigration story splashed all over the front page this month. More often than not, she read the feature stories not for the news, but to see if the reporters got the details right. The lead story this week was about a people-smuggling ring that was jointly smashed by U.S. and Canadian immigration officers. A migrant vessel had been intercepted around Akwasasne. Nick Slovak’s colleague, Walter Martin, had been killed in the shootout between INS agents and the snakeheads. Even the papers were calling them snakeheads now. She preferred the term alien smugglers. The dead smuggler, Shaupan Chau, had been granted refugee status by the IRC in Montreal, back in the mid-1990s. Thank goodness she hadn’t been the judge who heard his case. Blank passports and Canadian visas were found on the boat. It must have been an inside job in some embassy somewhere. How else would they have gotten their hands on blank passports and visas?
There was an adjoining article about Nick. It described how he had spent the last couple of years running undercover operations against agent smugglers. There was a picture of him at the bottom of the page. She soaked up his image; looking for subtle changes since they had last seen each other. The photo didn’t do him justice. In the flesh, he exuded energy and intelligence. She remembered the first time she had laid eyes on him. He was her idea of handsome: deep-set, piercing greygreen eyes, a serious, sensitive face, mop of brown hair falling over a high forehead, the way his clothes hung on his five-foot-eleven frame. He moved with an easy grace; she knew that he either played or had once played a lot of sports. He turned her on. Taking him to bed was easy, but a real extramarital romance wasn’t something she had planned. A brief encounter had morphed into something deeper. In the beginning, on impulse, she had lied to Nick about not being married, and then she had to go on lying. What a fool she had been. At first it was easy to do, living in two different cities. He always called her on her pager. But then one day he had called her office and her secretary had inadvertently provided him with her home number. David, her husband, had answered the phone. Nick had ended their romance. He told her he wasn’t interested in a three-way relationship. Not long after that, David, too, left her and filed for divorce.
After the break-up with Nick, she rationalized that there was no way their relationship could ever have worked. In the world of immigration, there were two opposing sides. Those like Nick who stopped the barbarians at the gate. And adjudicators like her who granted them asylum and let them in. In their nine months of sleeping together they had both been crossing into enemy territory.
A few months later she had presided on a case in which Nick had represented the minister’s office. He had spent months building a deportation case against a female member of the Iranian mujahedin. However, in Grace’s opinion the middle-aged woman didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist. In her legal decision, she had written that living in a mujahedin neighbourhood wasn’t the same thing as actually being a bomb-throwing member of an underground army. Forced to choose between love and the exercise of her own judgement, she really had no choice at all. She could not convict a woman she believed was innocent because she was in love with the prosecutor. Nick was outraged, and his office treated her as persona non grata. He hadn’t returned any of her calls. To make matters worse, the left-wing ideologues had been triumphant, using her legal decision as a moral victory in their propaganda war with the right-wing ideologues over the issue of refugees.
Staring at the photo of Nick, she was filled with regret and desire. It was too late now to pick up the phone. Too much time had passed and events had driven them too far apart. The connection between them was broken.
chapter five
Nick was on a first-name basis with agents of the FBI, CIA, Interpol, MI5, MI6, Mossad and half a dozen other police forces around the world, but one of his most frequent working partners was his old friend, Detective Steve Kappolis of the OPP. Kappolis commanded the fugitive squad, which investigated and tracked down criminals from other countries who had chosen Canada as a hiding place. The last case they’d worked together had involved a phony document ring that was doing brisk business in the reproduction of passports, propiskas, health insurance cards and other documents for illegals who were living under false identities. Nick knew he could count on Kappolis. The detective was not one to play the information-sharing, power-playing jurisdictional games that provincial and federal enforcement agencies often indulged in.
Nick figured if the killer of Walter Martin had not been a criminal before he entered the country, he was a criminal now. And within twenty-four