“April.”
“Party?”
“Tea.”
“Okay, you’re cleared. Clothes are in a sealed box in the closet. Put them on. Pack everything else except your shaving kit, take the back fire-escape, and drop the suitcase beside the dumpster. Toss the cellphone in the dumpster there, then go to Disraeli, cross Main, and walk up Alexander. Wander a bit. Check for tails. We’ll be watching for ’em too. Take your time, then head to the Presbyterian Church on Laura at Alexander and sit in the pews. We’ll make contact if you’re clean.” Beep. Click. Dial tone.
Alex tore up the card and flushed it down the toilet. He opened the box and found worn jeans, white socks, old Nikes, green plaid shirt, a thin red jacket, and a beat-up Blue Bomber tractor hat. At least they were clean. He changed quickly, packed, threw the keys on the bed, opened the door, and checked the hallway. Clear. He made his way down the fire-escape and out into the alley. As he passed the hotel dumpster, Alex chucked his cellphone into it and dropped his suitcase on the ground. That, he said to himself, will be gone within the hour.
Alex followed his instructions, moving along Disraeli, dodging across Main Street’s several lanes, and up Alexander. Despite the clothes, he felt conspicuous, too upright in these beaten-down surroundings. He forced himself to discard his habitual upright, parade-ground posture, pace, and presence. Loser, he told himself. Think loser. Act loser. Look loser. Shuffle. Head down. Drift. He checked himself in the store windows as he walked along, trying to look as if he was stopping to ponder a smash-and-grab.
As he ambled along, he stopped at a bench in the churchyard park at Fountain Street. Maybe I should have brought a bottle, he thought. Nah, don’t want cop trouble. Just look thirsty. He hung his head but quickly checked the street behind him, looking, he supposed, for a shady character even scruffier than himself, or maybe someone in a trench coat, who would suddenly stop walking, turn away, pull up his jacket collar, and light a cigarette. I watch too many detective movies, he told himself.
After another half hour of wandering up and down the streets of this depressing neighbourhood, Alex found it was unpleasantly easy to shuffle along looking discouraged. Time to get going, he thought. He headed for the rendezvous point. The church on Laura was just one of the many churches and fine buildings in this once-prosperous part of Winnipeg. The grand red-brick Canadian Pacific railway station on Higgins Avenue, built in 1904, had once been the centre of a lively local economy that supported numerous small manufacturers, warehouse businesses, banks, and one-product shops; a number of rival churches and synagogues had been built for the mostly east-European immigrants who had come to build a better life in the early twentieth century. But that was ancient history.
In the sixties, businesses had started faltering or had moved to newer parts of town. The closing of the CP station was a big blow. And then the demographics began to change. As the middle class moved out and welfare clients moved in, trade fell off, and other stores, banks, and services moved out. Residents moved to the suburbs and businesses left Main Street for the new malls on west Portage Avenue and Pembina Highway to the south. Then the native population swelled, displacing the white working poor, if not the derelicts.
Ill-prepared young natives moved from the reserves to the city in search of the life they’d watched on TV. They didn’t find it. Instead, kids living on welfare, drugs, booze, and prostitution wandered the streets. Gangs began to multiply. More businesses left. More banks closed. Seedy hotels, pay-day “banks,” and little else remained. Winnipeggers grew resigned to the native slum around north Main, Selkirk, Slater, and MacGregor: what can you do? Just don’t go there, especially at night. Every election, the white politicians talked about doing something, and between elections they did nothing.
We will make something better for our people, Alex thought. We’ve got to. He reached the church on Laura and noticed the paint peeling off the door.
He went in and stood at the back, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. He walked partway down the aisle and sat in a pew, not too far back, but not in front either. The place was empty except for a couple of old women several rows away, drinking from a bottle hidden carelessly in a paper bag. He watched them for several minutes and then an attractive little native woman came swiftly down the aisle, dropped onto the pew beside him, and immediately knelt as if to say a prayer.
Good grief, he thought. They don’t watch enough detective movies. You are way out of place, lady. After a few moments of inaudible prayer she raised her voice and whispered, “Come with me and keep quiet.” She rose as quickly and quietly as she had arrived and continued forward towards the altar. Alex got up immediately, wondering whether it was more obvious if he went with her or followed six feet behind her, and decided he couldn’t afford to lose her.
Alex hurried after her, through a doorway beside the altar, along a hallway, down a flight of stairs to the basement, across an empty, cement room with faded yellow paint, out a creaking metal door, up four concrete steps, across a rubble-scattered backyard, through a break in a collapsing wooden fence, across another small yard, and down another set of steps into the basement of an old house on Ellen Street.
“Very complicated. Does the priest know about this setup?” Alex teased.
“The priests here are liberation priests, just like those fighting for justice in other oppressed countries,” the woman replied tersely. “Now, no more questions. When we go outside, hold my hand like we like each other and walk with me.”
“If I’m going to hold your hand, shouldn’t I at least know your name – just in case we get stopped, of course?” Alex smiled as he took her hand, but the flush that crept into her cheeks was angry, not embarrassed. “I’m Deanna. But we won’t get stopped. Let’s go and stop talking.” Alex stopped smiling.
They walked up a set of uneven wooden steps to a dismal kitchen, went out the back door, and followed the narrow stone walkway along the side of the house to Ellen Street. Deanna, if that was her name, led Alex to Henry Avenue, then east to King Street and turned towards the great Logan CPR train yard. They worked their way east along the tracks and climbed up to the Main Street overpass, crossed the bridge, and finally slid down into a muddle of ragged bushes to a basement doorway at the back of the rundown “Aboriginal Centre of Winnipeg Inc.” on Higgins Avenue – the once-majestic CPR station, a gilded lady turned to new pursuits.
Deanna took Alex’s arm, directing him to a small basement doorway, half hidden by scrawny vines. Inside, she pointed down the hallway to another door. “Go there!” With that she turned and walked away, cold, hard, tense, and bitter. Alex shuddered. God only knew what her life had been like before she had joined the Movement and what it would be like after Molly Grace was done with it.
Alex examined the door. It had a coded lock, and a surveillance camera covered it from a corner. To knock or not to knock? As he raised his hand to knock, the door swung open and a native half a head shorter than Alex, but about a foot wider, motioned him in then frisked him roughly.
“Come with me,” he said, speaking and moving at the same time.
The burly man walked down the hallway to another closed door, grunted at the kid guarding it, and knocked once. A lock turned and the door opened. Alex stepped in. A small group, five young natives and an older man standing around a large table, stopped talking and looked up, interrupted in mid-conversation. The leader stepped back from the table, folding a large map over on itself as he did so.
Wednesday, September 1, 1235 hours
Winnipeg: Colonel Stevenson’s Headquarters
Even a stranger would have seen that the older
