Her phone rang at eight the next Saturday morning. Someone was calling from a pay phone. Nobody used pay phones any more. Germs! And who didn’t have a cellphone? Usually, if her phone didn’t display the caller as someone she knew, she let it go to her answering machine. But this time, she answered, hoping.
“Hello, Miss Candace,” an accented male voice said. “We met at the 5K race.”
Miss Candace? Who spoke like that? “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Keita. The marathoner. We met at the 5K race.”
“Oh, now I’ve got it. Hey!”
“Thank you for the gift certificate. With it, I bought four pairs of shoes. And twelve socks. Pairs, I mean. And two pairs of running shorts and a watch.”
“That’s a good haul. But why four pairs of shoes?”
“All the same kind. Hard to find, and they had a special, twenty percent off, so I wanted to capitalize on the opportunity.”
She giggled. “Good thing. We all have to capitalize on opportunities.” She let that hang in the air.
He cleared his throat but said nothing.
“Well, were you calling for a reason?”
“To thank you . . . for the gift certificate.”
“Anything else?” Damn. Too pushy. Far too pushy. Could she just back off and give him some room?
“Would you like to go for a run, and then—how do you say it—a Tim’s?”
It was funny to hear this cute, slender-as-a-rake fellow with the Zantoroland accent and polite diction asking her if she wanted to accompany him to the cheapest coffee chain in the world. Tim Hortons had been popularized a continent away, in Canada, before spreading around the world and even across Freedom State. Everybody in Freedom State loved Tim’s now, and if you showed up at peak hours, you could wait fifteen minutes just for coffee. Well, Candace didn’t have time for that. Forget it. A job, her professional development courses, her training, a leering boss who had to be backed off every day . . . Candace had no time for lineups at Tim’s. Except, maybe, this one time.
“Sure, Keita, I would love that. When did you have in mind?”
“I have to do some housecleaning for a friend, so how about today at three, at the Freedom Gates entrance to Ruddings Park?”
What sort of guy would call up a woman and expect a date the same day? But then, this wasn’t really a date. It was a run and a coffee. Why not?
“I happen to have the day off, so sure, I can meet you then.”
“All right, Candace, I will see you at the aforementioned time and place.”
She giggled again. Aforementioned? “Okay, Keita, see you then.”
HE TURNED UP ON TIME, IN HIS RUNNING GEAR. HE WAS NOT tall—about five foot eight, she guessed, just three inches taller than she was. Three inches was a good height differential for . . . lovemaking. Stop it. Stop it right now. He was as slender as she remembered, but his calves and thighs looked as hard as rocks. Many guys wore formless shorts that dropped down to the knee. Ug-ly. But Keita’s shorts were the real thing, revealing much of the thigh and slit at the sides for comfort. Thin as he was, he also had a rounded, ample ass that Candace thought would hold up well under inspection. He kept a small pack strapped to the small of his waist.
“You rarely see elite athletes with a fanny pack,” she said.
He reached out to shake her hand and then kissed her lightly on each cheek. He was from another continent, that was for damn sure. But it was charming. No real pressure to the kiss, but at least it was a real kiss—not an air kiss, which was disgusting and fraudulent.
“It’s for my key plus some change for Tim’s, and sometimes I put an apple in there.”
She hoped that he wouldn’t run her into the ground. Some guys could be strange about running with a woman. They’d either kill themselves to keep up or try to run her ragged. But she had a strategy. If some dude was getting too competitive, she would just back off the pace. Slow down. Let him run ahead.
He noticed that she was holding her car key.
“I’ll put that in my fanny pack if you want,” he said.
Candace liked an observant guy. And she let him do it.
He had virtually no hair on his legs. She wondered if his ass was that smooth. She hadn’t been laid in . . . how long was it now? Stop it, Candace, stop it right now. We’re out for a run here. A pleasant, friendly run in Ruddings Park, with the promise of a coffee afterwards. A run and a coffee, and that’s all.
They broke into an easy jog, just right for warming up.
“I usually run alone,” he said. “So why don’t you set a pace that’s comfortable for you?”
She gave him an A-plus for that, and set out at a pace of 4:20 per kilometre—slow enough for easy conversation. Ruddings was one of the most beautiful parks in the world. Some local arts dealer had persuaded the park authorities to purchase a dozen large serpentine sculptures from Zimbabwe, so the striking, curved forms would come into view from time to time as they ran the ten-kilometre path circling the park.
“Would you like to run two loops?” he asked. Each loop had two big hills and passed at points through dense woods.
“Two loops sounds great.”
She asked him if he minded running slowly. No, he said, it was perfect like this.
“How could it be perfect,” she asked, “when you can run a sub-2:10 marathon?”
“For me,” he said, “this run is a perfect warm-down.”
“Warm-down,” she said. “What do you mean?”
He explained that he had just completed the core of his workout by running intervals on the track around the park reservoir. At first she felt a flash of anger—how dare he call her out for a run that was to be only his warm-down? But they kept running, and she liked his smile and that he asked her about her running history.
“Funny how my workout is your warm-down,” she said.
“Where I come from, I could not even make the national team.”
“And where are you from?” she said.
“It’s a long story,” he said. “Tell me about yourself.”
She didn’t want to tell him that she was a police officer, particularly not if he was going to hold back himself. Nothing turned some guys off faster than hearing she was a cop. A lot of guys were intimidated by a black woman with a decent job. And she wasn’t interested in that kind of guy.
“Do you have family here?”
“Yes, I grew up in AfricTown. My father was a black man from Brazil,” she said, “and my mother is mixed, Portuguese and black.”
Candace told him that she grew up with her brother and grandmother in AfricTown and that people assumed her mother was part black because what the hell else would she be doing raising kids in that part of the city. But the truth was that AfricTown was all she could afford, and at least in that part of Clarkson, her kids would not stand out or be teased about being mixed. Candace’s mother became the secretary at her high school, which Candace hated, because she knew everything about every boy that Candace even looked at. Candace told Keita that she’d had a little scrape with the law when she was a young teenager.
“Folks said I had quick hands, and I became a little too adept at the art of pickpocketing. Social worker got me off. Tough as nails, but heart of gold. She read me the riot act and scared me. So I joined the cross-country team and started studying in earnest.”
“And what do you do now?” he said.
“I’ll tell you about it,” she said, “when you tell me more about you.”
After the run, Keita took her to Tim Hortons and bought her a coffee. She offered to cook him dinner. He said he would be delighted to join her—but what about clothes? Well, she said, she could drive him home, wait for him to change and then drive them back to her place. But he said it would be better if she gave him directions and he came back in two hours. And this he did, exactly as promised.
SHE SERVED HIM SPAGHETTI, WITH HOMEMADE SAUCE MADE from tomatoes that she had grown in her own garden. And salad. And b
read with cheese. And fruit. She figured that a serious marathon runner wouldn’t go in for crappy desserts. He ate it all. When they finished, she sat beside him on the couch and put her hand on his forearm. It was all the encouragement he required. He stood to take her into his arms, and Candace took him into her bed.
When Candace woke up in the morning, she discovered that he was gone. She had no idea where he lived, or how to reach him.
GETTING TOGETHER WITH CANDACE HAD BECOME A PROBLEM he couldn’t ignore.
Yes, she had made him feel that taking her out on a run and then for the coffee and then coming home to her meal and her arms was the most natural thing in the world.
As they ran, he had found it difficult to think of anything but her body. Her sounds, too, had intoxicated him. Her breathing quickened in the final kilometres of the run. She kicked up the pace to 4:00 per kilometre, and as she pushed close to her limits, working on hills, she panted and gasped, and he could not stop imagining the sounds she might make if she were spending herself on him.
When they tumbled into her bed, all he knew was that he had never felt so hungry in his life. And her hunger had met his.
While she slept, he had washed up for her while fantasizing about the next time that he might touch her again. Occasionally he poked his head into the bedroom to hear her gentle snores. But people in this country had so many things. He had no idea where to put away her knives and forks. Frying pans. Pots. As he was looking for a place to put the glasses, he opened a bottom drawer and noticed a thick telephone book and, behind it, a police badge. He turned over the badge. Sergeant Candace Freixa / Clarkson Police Department.
He left quickly, quietly opening her front door. He jogged the ten long kilometres back to Ivernia’s home, looking over his shoulder the whole way.
AS CANDACE ENTERED THE KITCHEN THE NEXT MORNING, she noticed that Keita had washed her dishes before leaving. What other guy would take her for an easy run, listen to her gab about her youth and mother and father, invite her out for coffee, love her utterly and then do the dishes? He had put them away in ridiculous places in her cupboards—forks, knives and spoons in the middle of a frying pan in a cupboard meant for plates. She’d tease him about that, next time. She took a step toward the coffee maker and saw that a drawer had been left open. The one with her badge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
IF DARLENE COULD JUST EARN A FEW THOUSAND MORE dollars, she would disappear and never be found by anybody who might like to do to her what they had done to Yvette.
Darlene wasn’t stupid. She had eyes and ears. She knew the score. She’d seen Yvette after the prime minister left. While they had tea in the staff room, Yvette told her the whole story. Yvette was rattled and said she wouldn’t mind spiking her tea with rum. But neither of them had any. There was a no-smoking rule in the Bombay Booty, so Darlene had slipped out the back door of the brothel and was standing in the dark in a grove of trees, about to light a cigarette, when a vehicle marked Reliable Security Services pulled up and stopped just a few feet away.
Darlene closed her cigarette lighter and watched Lula walk over to the driver. They were so close that if Darlene had emerged from the trees, she could have touched them. But she stayed right where she was. Still, she saw that Lula leaned over and spoke through the window. And that a man got out of the car, dressed in a security officer uniform and wearing handcuffs on his belt. Lula pointed him to the stairs at the back of the building. Darlene held perfectly still as they walked right by the place where she was hidden.
“Yvette Peters,” Lula said, “you hear? Don’t let her out of your sight until she’s on the plane. Yes, the usual authorization.”
DARLENE DIDN’T HAVE A BOYFRIEND, BUT SHE DIDN’T HAVE a pimp either. That was one of the perks of working at the Bombay Booty. Lula took care of everything. All Darlene had to do was satisfy the men who came into her bed, act like she enjoyed it and keep her mouth shut. Outside work, Darlene had her routines. After her Tuesday and Thursday morning workouts, she would stop in at the Bleeding Heart grocery store in south Clarkson—the neighbourhood was falling apart because it was by the railway tracks bordering the city, and thus close to the route taken by people walking to and from AfricTown—and buy herself a package of Smarties.
Darlene was shaking the Smarties out of the package into her hand and turning right on Liberation Street when she sensed that she was being followed. She sped up, turned the next corner and ran. A car shot ahead of her, blocking the intersection ahead, and a black man with a gun on his hip jumped out.
“Easy way or hard way, honey. You decide,” he said.
“Who are you?”
The man pulled a purple pistol from his belt. The neighbourhood had gone so far to seed that he didn’t seem to care that they were in broad daylight.
“The fuck you doing?” Darlene said.
“Pointing a Ruger .22 calibre semiautomatic pistol in your general direction,” he said.
“Put that thing away,” she said.
“The easy way is that you stand real nice and answer my questions, and the hard way is that I shoot you now. Stand over there,” he said, motioning to an office building with a brick exterior.
“No need to get excited,” she said.
“Do it,” he said, pointing the gun at her.
Darlene stood with her back to the building. He aimed above her head and shot off a bullet at the wall. A spray of crumbling brick fell over her.
Darlene flinched. “No need for that,” she said.
Now he opened the trunk of his car and pointed his pistol at her.
“Hard or easy, Darlene Wood. You decide.”
He knew her name. “Easy,” she said. “Let’s go easy.”
“What happened to Yvette Peters?” the man asked.
“First, just tell me who you are.”
“Saunders. Now talk. What do you know about Yvette?”
“She was my friend. I’m sure you know where we work. Here one day, gone the next.”
“Who did her in? How did she disappear?”
“How do I know how my best friend ended up dead in a country she’d never fucking seen before?”
“What did you last talk about?”
“How much we loved sex.”
“I’m running out of time.” He stepped in close, grabbed her forearm and squeezed. It hurt like hell.
“We talked about who she was going to see that night.”
“And who was that?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes we imagined the guys we would be doing. Would they have big dicks or small? You, for example, surely have a tiny dick, to leave room for such a big asshole.”
He punched her in the mouth. Darlene bled from the lips and tongue, and one of her teeth fell out.
“One more wisecrack and you die.”
“All right,” Darlene said. This time, she believed him.
“Did you hear anything about what happened when she was with her last customer?”
“No.”
“The last customer—a man I happen to be representing right now—thinks he saw a recording device in the room.”
Darlene shook her head.
He twisted her arm again. “I can kill you here, fast. I can do it nice and slow in your living room. On your red couch. 201A Stewart Street, right? You’ll find your place a bit messed up. If you ever make it back there. Nice hiding place, for the money. Under the mattress. Very original.”
“Okay, okay. Let go and I’ll talk.”
He let go.
She was feeling cold, suddenly, and her entire body was trembling, but she was trying hard not to show it.
“I heard the conversation was taped,” she said.
“Who has it?”
“I don’t know. Some guy took it.”
“What guy?”
“Don’t know his name.”
“What did he look like?”
“Don’t remember.”
Saunders pressed the pistol against her temple. The cold
metal dug into her skin.
“I heard it ended up with that marathon guy. The black dude who won the Buttersby Marathon.”
“Name?”
“Keita Ali.”
“From where?”
“Zantoroland.”
“Illegal?”
“How would I know? I didn’t ask for his passport.”
Saunders pointed his pistol at her again. “If this doesn’t add up, I’ll come back for you, put this in your mouth and pull the trigger.” He closed the trunk of his car, got in and drove off.
Darlene did not go home. She was no fool. She waited for the car carrying Saunders, his gun and his fist to go out of sight. Then she took a taxi to a women’s shelter in a far end of town. She didn’t plan to stay there long enough for anyone to find her. Darlene was sorry to have given up Keita Ali. She had no way to get word to him. Maybe they wouldn’t catch him.
She hadn’t had the chance to go beyond Grade 9, and she’d wasted her teenage years working for Lula, but all that was about to change. Darlene Wood could take a hint. She would leave town as fast as she could.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AS HE DROVE TO WORK, ROCCO DRUMMED HIS fingers on the steering wheel. Diminishing returns. A simple economic concept. You had it good, once, but things got less and less pleasurable with every passing day. That pretty well summed up what Rocco felt about his job. Minister of immigration! He had had more control over his life running a used car business. And given the way the Prime Minister’s Office ran the show, micromanaging every hiccup, Rocco had had more influence on the country selling cars too.
What kind of prime minister would try to frame one of his own cabinet ministers? The visit to AfricTown had been a set-up, for sure. The PM had intended to see Rocco stung in that police raid. Had Rocco been caught with his pants down in AfricTown, his name and face would have been splashed all over the media, he would have been criminally charged with “being party to an act of prostitution,” and he would have been fired from cabinet and bounced from government.