3
There was the nasal call for Delta flight 148 to Rome, and the passengers shuffled to the counter. Max O’Brien was one of them, ticket in one hand and Italian passport in the other. The crowd ground him to a halt directly beneath one of the three TV monitors. He looked up as someone turned up the volume. CNN showed the usual pictures of desolation: this time the carbonized carcass of a car blown up by terrorists in New Delhi, with one dead, Luiz Rodrigues, and one seriously injured, David O’Brien, both employees of the Canadian High Commission of India. Max stood immobile, paralyzed for a long time, his eyes fixed on the screen, his world pulverized yet again, and left so fragile that soon nothing of it would remain.
“Your ticket, please, sir?”
Max roused himself as the nasal voice reached him from behind the outstretched hand. Passengers around him were complaining. He left the lineup.
Juliette was sorry she’d made fun of Béatrice when she got off at Maharani Bagh, her suitcases filled with gifts. “Oh, I know the feeling. I’ve been there before.” And for once she was right: “Déjà vu all over again.” As soon as the Gulfstream landed at Dorval, David’s mother had taken charge. She’d managed to get security to keep the journalists, those blood-sucking, carnivorous parasites, as she called them, away from the hangar where the ambulance awaited. She barked in the face of the muscle men from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: “This just isn’t the time, got it?”
Shrugs all around, sunglasses removed and replaced, wristwatches requiring nonstop attention, fingers pointed and threatening, hands outstretched, but Béatrice wasn’t giving an inch. “I don’t give a good goddamn about your investigation.”
Juliette was still caught up in the whirlwind of the day before, when she’d headed for the Apollo Hospital after Bernatchez’s phone call. The bombing had happened in the northern part of Delhi along the banks of the Yamuna, he told her. Their car had been booby-trapped. Pity that was all they knew for the time being. “David’s dead, David’s dead,” she kept repeating as she ran through the hospital corridors, as though the mantra could somehow bring him back. Then she saw a familiar face, Dr. Rangarajan. She knew his smell, the timbre of his voice, gravelly as though he were always on the verge of coughing or clearing his throat. He held her tight for comfort with the words one always says at times like that, but she heard none of it. Then a thanedar in a uniform and moustache with an officer — also moustached — showed up and Rangarajan cleared off. The officer was in charge of the preliminary investigation and had Juliette tell them absolutely everything, even if, at first glance, it seemed utterly banal.
She felt like answering, “It doesn’t matter. Nothing does anymore. He’s dead.”
“Madame, he is still alive.”
Juliette could have kissed them, both of the moustachioed cops. She wanted to see David, yes, absolutely, but she couldn’t. Just as she started screaming, Bernatchez ran toward her with Vandana and Mukherjee and took her hand, vowing to catch the cowards and to make sure the Canadian government would never let these monsters get away with it. She couldn’t have cared less about them or any other government, of course. All she wanted was to be with David, alone.
“You’re both heading straight back to Canada,” Bernatchez told her.
There were a doctor and a nurse aboard the Gulfstream supplied by Worldwide Air Ambulance Service and Dr. Mitchell from the High Commission, whom Juliette had never met. Neither one was very chatty, which suited her, since she was in no mood for conversation. She was numb from the sedatives and sealed inside a flying clinic. Through the porthole, she watched India drift away, perhaps forever: first little pinpoints of light, then nothing … total blackness.
What was it the Mahabharata said: “All the creatures of the night crowded round me, deformed and terrifying …”?
For the first time on board the plane, a longing for cocoa, an irresistible urge to bite into a piece of chocolate — maybe because I’m pregnant, she thought. Maybe it was just the sedatives she’d taken. Why now, all of a sudden? It was as though her brain had decided to come to her defence and keep her from thinking about what had happened to David. This yearning had nagged at her all night.
Now at the end of the corridor of the intensive care unit at the Montreal General, she was sitting in a little room rigged up on the ninth floor, munching a Toblerone as though her life depended on it.
“He’s still fighting, fighting hard.”
Juliette turned her head toward a shadow engulfed in the blinding light from the downtown buildings that shone through the open windows.
Dennis Patterson.
Without a thought, she threw herself into his arms. She wanted to seem brave and stop crying, but it was too much for her. With every new visitor, the pain rose in her face, a torrent she couldn’t control. Patterson waited it out, then took her aside. He was bigger than she or David, and he held her by the shoulders like a fragile, delicate rose. As old as Bernatchez, but having aged better than the former pro football player, he was visibly proud of his white hair, and his bushy eyebrows made him look like a retired Santa.
“I know he’ll get through this. Dr. Dohmann’s an exceptional neurosurgeon.” He sounded like a get-well card: sweet, sonorous, pious wishes, when what she really wanted was the truth and some explanation, here and now.
“Why? Why him?”
Patterson just shrugged. “A ton of reasons, I suppose, and nothing to do with who he is or what he represents.”
“What are these RCMP types saying?”
“Not much for now, but they have a man there.”
Juliette knew who it was: a heavyset guy with very short hair whom David had introduced at one of their soirées. He seemed nice enough, certainly discreet, but she couldn’t recall his name. Patterson said he’d be helping the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India’s FBI.
“Helping? Wait a minute, I don’t understand!” Juliette yelled. “Two employees of the High Commission in a bombed car, and the RCMP is just looking on?”
“Imagine if it was the other way round and an Indian diplomat in Ottawa got bombed on Elgin Street. What would people say if the Indian police took charge?”
Juliette couldn’t care less what people thought. She remembered incidents with American or British diplomats and the squads of FBI or Scotland Yard that showed up. The Mounties, however, were just leaving one officer on site to get eaten alive by the CBI.
“That’s the way things are done, Juliette,” said Patterson.
“The way things are done?”
Bernatchez had promised: “The Canadian government would not let these monsters get away with it.” Words, words, words. “You know people in the department. You could do something. I’m sure a call to the right person in Ottawa would get them more involved.”
“Look, Juliette. It’s frustrating, I know, and I agree, but there are bilateral agreements …”
“Do something.”
“I’ve talked to the minister, and he’s not against the idea of offering, say, additional logistical help to the Indian police.”
“Additional logistical help? How about a pen-and- pencil set with John A. Macdonald on it?”
Patterson sighed and made Juliette look at him. “Look, the important thing is for David to get better, stay alive. He’s going to need both of us for that. You especially.”
Hallmark, Hallmark, Hallmark.
She felt abandoned, coddled and silenced, cut off from reality.
It was night again, and Juliette had hardly slept since her arrival in Montreal: just short periods of agitated sleep, awaking in sweat, stunned and disoriented. She wanted to be set up next to David, in the same room, at all