the Montreal conference. Endless meetings with Bernatchez, Caldwell, and company. There were a thousand details to attend to and time was running short. The investors had to be reassured, fussed over, and given tender loving care; a huge job. Still, David had to go to Kathmandu in the shadow of the mountains … with Vandana along, too. Two fewer pairs of hands to do Bernatchez’s bidding.
That didn’t take into account Béatrice’s impromptu visit. David hadn’t seen his mother for months, and yet he chose that very moment to leave town.
Odd.
“Kathmandu — what exactly happened there? What did you do?”
“Meetings and get-togethers.”
“What about?”
“A literacy project we’ve been on for months with CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency.”
“Even during a civil war?”
“The situation’s calmed down a bit,” she replied unconvincingly.
Max sensed she was hiding something, but what was it? He’d felt it from the beginning. A professional liar himself, he knew how to spot an amateur who’d never make it to his level of the game. The ones with no talent for it, like Vandana, didn’t have the skills for his kind of work.
“You’re right,” she said, changing the subject, “I left the flowers.”
13
David lay hidden beneath layers of therapeutic materials, and Béatrice hovered over him with a facecloth, which she used very tenderly to bathe his face, afraid of hurting him further. I feel like Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross in a half-tone Renaissance painting, thought Juliette. Outside the door, security agents kept watch. She was a member of their group now. She knew their habits, their tics, and their first names. They shared the same routine. The fountain at the end of the corridor, for example, was their turf. When they came into the room, however, it was always on tiptoe, but it was more for her and Béatrice than for David. He’d become part of the furniture, a thing, a pall.
At first, the two women had taken turns at his bedside, but now they left together in the evenings. Once in the apartment at the Rockhill, Juliette found Béatrice crying alone in the dark. Then they hugged each other tight. Juliette had just decided to tell Béatrice about her pregnancy, but she was no longer brave enough.
There was a long, plaintive ring of the phone in the night, and Juliette ran to pick it up before Béatrice had time to ask “Who could that be at such an hour?” Juliette knew somehow it was Max on the line.
“How’s David?”
His voice was surprisingly clear, though it came from the other side of the world.
There was so much to tell him, but she couldn’t get a thing out. Like a bashful young girl, she got all tangled up in polite phrases. I must sound like an idiot.
Max, genuinely polite, pretended not to notice.
Since yesterday, David had become feverish and developed pneumonia. She told him about her last discussion with Dr. Dohmann, the EEGs he’d shown her. Barring a miracle, there was no hope, he had said. She spared him the details of her fainting, her legs folding just like that in front of everyone, then the crying in Béatrice’s arms, both of them in tears.
“What will you do?” Max inquired.
She closed her eyes: “I don’t know. I believe in miracles.”
Max did, as well, but what was that worth compared to the belief of Dr. Migneault? Dohmann’s replacement was a thorough young doctor with a shaved head, a bit tough-looking. Béatrice suspected this was to pre-empt the appearance of baldness. Juliette and Dr. Migneault shared a love of chocolate. She pretended to hope, but knew she could not. She found herself in an office with Béatrice and a corpulent social worker. Patterson stood in the hall, discreetly out of the way.
“The decision is yours and yours alone,” Migneault said with the appropriate flutter in his voice. “We can wait for weeks, if you wish, but his condition will not alter.” He glanced from the social worker to the pair of them. Juliette knew what was next.
“David is clinically dead,” Migneault said.
Whatever he said afterward didn’t register with Juliette. All her thoughts were for David. She pictured the timid young man who’d approached her in the cafeteria at McGill University, relived those evenings discussing international politics, those long walks in Westmount parks when he passionately but patiently explained the inevitable nature of things in general and the world order in particular. There was the coffee spilled in that Sherbrooke Street Restaurant and the young waitress’s irritability. What about that absurd shirt he absolutely had to hang on to, the stolen bike he never got back, his hopeless attempt at wearing contacts, or his illegible signature, and that mix-up at the post office — “Just why, tell me, do you have to write as though you’re retarded?” His last birthday was at Montebello. Never another. Never growing old. Dying young. Dying, period.
Moments later, out in the corridor, Patterson was all solicitude. Words of encouragement were the very last thing she wanted to hear, neither his nor Béatrice’s. They’d abandoned David, and now it was her turn to do so. Dohmann and Migneault, too. What cowards we all are.
Chocolate, once more, chocolate.
David was not allowed to die, not until she decided. The terrorists had done their worst by leaving his fate in her hands.
“Mukherjee remembered saying goodbye to David late in the afternoon,” Max continued, “about four-thirty. Luiz was with him on his way back, then nothing, the car just disappeared. No witnesses, just an explosion by the Yamuna in the evening. Near a Muslim slum … on top of it.”
“I don’t suppose anyone’s talking.”
“Majid Khankashi — Genghis Khan, they call him,” Max said. “Vandana told me he and David met often. Did he ever tell you what about?”
“No.”
Juliette regretted not having been more curious. David returned home from the High Commission worn out. Why bother him with questions?
“He never came to see him in Maharani Bagh?”
“Just evening phone calls … David never brought his work home with him.”
“Except for the conference.”
“That’s right.”
“They met the day before the explosion.”
Juliette hadn’t known that. Anyway, she never asked him about his movements. Why not ask Khankashi himself?
Disappeared …
She remembered once having met him by accident with David in Old Delhi near the Kasgari Mosque. The impeccably trimmed beard allowed a glimpse of what Juliette considered an enigmatic smile, one given to showing joy as well as sadness. He offered them tea in a nearby café. She’d felt no apprehension at the time. In the crowded streets, passersby eyed them with respect, and yet the papers portrayed Genghis Khan as a bloodthirsty Islamist, despite his being a Sufi mystic.
