The Drowned Man by David Whellams Page B

young Booth would have had no difficulty with the authorities when he crossed the St. Lawrence River. His ambitions while in Montreal — apparently to provoke England into a military clash, and to forge alliances with sympathetic Canadians — still rang hollow to Peter, even when he took out Hilfgott’s report and reread it. Her passion for the letters, whatever they might say, eluded him. The additional notion, referenced by the consul general, that Booth tried to stimulate an uprising of French-Canadian nationalists in conjunction with the enfeebled Confederate States of America, seemed even more tenuous.
    He took a break from the Civil War histories. Every first class passenger had been provided with a copy of that day’s Montreal
Gazette
, and Peter had retrieved a copy of yesterday’s
Telegraph
from the magazine rack. He scanned the British headlines. The world was churning away and there was hardly enough room on the front page to clock the quirkiness of the week’s news. British Petroleum hoped to choke off the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico using something called a “static kill” device. Reports offered little hope for a rescue of thirty-three trapped miners in Chile. Floods had hit Pakistan, drowning hundreds, while Maoist rebels had launched attacks in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. Peter, who had fond memories of Washington, D.C., and had briefly considered a side trip to see old colleagues, noted that he would be missing a monster rally of American Tea Party supporters that afternoon on the Washington Mall. It was to be convened in front of Abe Lincoln’s statue. The last article he read, and wished he had not, chronicled the bitter debate over the building of an Islamic cultural and prayer centre near Ground Zero in New York.
    He turned to the Montreal paper with no pretence of gleaning profound insights into life in Quebec, but one article did catch his eye. Reportedly, Montreal prosecutors had announced that they hoped to lay charges in the gangland murder of a member of a local mafia clan known as the Rizzuto Family. The
Gazette
furnished a helpful chart of the organization, which had ruled the city’s criminal element over three generations and was now under attack by forces unknown. One patriarch was in jail, while assassins had eliminated two scions of the family and several bodyguards in the previous eighteen months. According to the article, gangsters were being pulled from the streets on a regular basis and “disappeared” by their abductors. From his experience with U.K. gangs, he calculated that the attacks were about to reach a crescendo with a really big — and public — hit. He was sure of it. At least, he mused, he would have a tidbit of conversational material for his meeting with Inspector Deroche at the Sûreté du Québec.
    For the dozenth time, Peter reminded himself that he was only here to retrieve a body.

CHAPTER 8
    The plane landed at two thirty in the afternoon, on time, at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. Peter wound his way across the customs area, scanning for a fast-track lane, or better yet, his pick-up. That was Neil Brayden, whose elevated title was chief of protocol, but whose functions, no doubt, encompassed every kind of errand and enforcement duty in the consul general’s office. Peter had asked that he not be greeted by a sign with his name on it.
    This left the question of how Chief Inspector Cammon would be identified, which the consulate solved neatly by sending a policeman to recognize a policeman. A lean, six-foot-tall man in a black suit stood to one side of the customs processing hall and at once caught Peter’s eye with a quick nod. He wore a white shirt and a narrow black tie, and had cut his hair short with an electric trimmer. He wasn’t a mere chauffeur; the suit was unmistakably Savile Row and the attitude was don’t-mess-with-me.
    â€œNeil Brayden, chief of protocol with