The Borrowman Cell Read online

  THE

  BORROWMAN

  CELL

  Copyright © 2020 Ingrid Betz

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  The Borrowman Cell is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The borrowman cell : a novel / Ingrid Betz.

  Names: Betz, Ingrid, author.

  Series: Inanna poetry & fiction series.

  Description: Series statement: Inanna poetry & fiction series

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200203665 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200203681 | ISBN 9781771337298 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771337304 (epub) | ISBN 9781771337311 (Kindle) | ISBN 9781771337328 (pdf)

  Classification: LCC PS8553.E86 B67 2020 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  THE

  BORROWMAN

  CELL

  INGRID BETZ

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  In memory of my father,

  the painter Rudolf von Elsterman.

  1.

  SHE KILLED A MAN IN BELGRADE once. Even though six years and a continent separate her from the event, Verena Vitek still occasionally catches sight of her victim’s face. Hook-nosed and with a high, balding forehead, his features surface on a crowded street, or at a table on the other side of a restaurant. Or she’ll sometimes see his profile ahead of her in an airport line-up as she is doing now. Briefly, she closes her eyes. When she opens them again, the man is turning away from the desk, boarding pass in hand, and she can see that he is somebody else entirely.

  It is Monday morning and the Air Canada Jazz counter in Terminal One of Pearson International Airport is busy. People are heading home or back to work after spending the weekend in Toronto. A woman with two children in tow and a baby in a collapsible stroller hung about with plastic shopping bags, is causing a hold-up as she searches for her ticket. Businessmen mutter into their cellphones. Directly ahead of Verena, university students in purple and white Western hoodies trade subdued banter. Hungover, she judges. A couple of seniors, whey-faced in the early-morning hour and clutching oversized Tim Hortons coffee cups, join the queue. Some sixth sense alerts her and she glances past them. Strolling down the broad central concourse, parting a stream of turbaned Sikhs bound for the West coast, are two RCMP constables in bulletproof vests.

  Verena Vitek’s stomach muscles tighten and she schools her face into an expression of unconcern.

  They’ll be trolling the aisles for trouble-makers returning home from the sit-in at the Animal Research Lab; comparing images to the ones caught on surveillance cameras and looking for a match, which is hardly surprising given the way the protest ended. Verena’s bruised hip still aches from being dragged bumping down the steps of the building. Catching sight of the students, the constables slow their pace. Their glances consider and reject each one before they come to rest on her.

  Female, five-foot-three, one hundred and eight pounds, is what they see. Hair wheat-blonde, eyes grey, facial features unremarkable, unless they count the straight Roman bridge of her nose. Age—they’ll have trouble with her age, men always do. She’s heard it guessed as low as seventeen, although she has just celebrated her twenty-first birthday. It’s a discrepancy she has abetted this morning by wearing her old boarding school uniform of blazer and pleated skirt, and braiding her hair to hang in a girlish plait down her back. The line shuffles forward and Verena moves with it.

  On yesterday’s tapes, she’ll appear as an androgynous figure in black jeans and a grey turtleneck, with a watch cap pulled low to conceal her hair. There isn’t much to reconcile the two images. As an activist in an animal-rights group, she has been to plenty of protest rallies and the police haven’t managed it yet. But as Borrowman likes to remind her when he schedules her assignments, that doesn’t mean they never will.

  “Where to?” says the ticket agent.

  Verena slides her ticket and passport across the desk. “Londonontario.” She runs the two names together to differentiate the city from its more famous namesake. It is one of the first things she learned to do upon arriving from Serbia.

  Out of the corner of her eye she sees the gaze of the younger constable travel down her muscular dancer’s calves. When it reaches her feet in their flat schoolgirl oxfords, he loses interest and the two men move away.

  “Luggage?” The agent sports plum-coloured fingernails and an air of resentment.

  “Only carry-on.” Verena holds up her bag. SALEM: the name of the international boarding school is fading but still legible on the side.

  “Gate 12. Boarding in forty-five minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  Politeness is key; studies have shown that people are more likely to remember rudeness. She makes her way without incident through security and chooses a seat in the departure lounge, well away from the man whose face she has mistaken for her victim’s. Away from the eyes of the patrolling RCMP as well, the knot in her stomach starts to loosen. The wariness that is just this side of fear stays with her, but she is used to that. Ever since childhood, variations of fear have been her companion. Fear of her mother’s bouts of silent weeping and of the whispering men who come to see her father in the night. Fear of her father. Fear later, mixed with loathing, of the Serbian Secret Police in their grey uniforms. She reaches into the outside pocket of her bag for the book she always carries with her, an old Donald Mackenzie thriller with its paper jacket worn away to expose a bleached red cover. Sleep Is for the Rich is the first book she read for pleasure after learning English. She sits with the book unopened. She likes the smooth, hard feel of it in her hands. It reminds her of the stock of the AR-7.22 calibre hunting rifle she keeps dismantled at the back of the clothes closet in her apartment.

  There were no guns at the sit-in, of course. Borrowman doesn’t approve of events that resort to violence to further their cause, although like many, this one skirted inadvertently close to it by the end.

  The sit-in was a large one and lasted for three days. A number of animal-rights groups, including PETA and Animal Alliance, took part. They bore signs reading “End Animal Experiments,” and, “Say No to Animal Abuse,” in red paint streaked to look like blood. On Sunday, when the police arrived to evict the protesters, a crowd gathered on the street to watch. Scuffles broke out as some yelled encouragement and others taunted. All swagger and beating their batons on their shields, the Tactical Unit swarmed the building. One of the PETA group members lost control and swung a sign at them. It was all the provocation the police needed. In the surge that followed, a
dozen activists were arrested and hauled away in black and white vans, but Verena made sure she wasn’t one of them.

  After the fracas, she’d gone home with a girl she knew from previous demonstrations and spent the night wrapped in a blanket on the floor of her downtown apartment. Lily was apologetic; she’d offer to share her bed, but she already had her boyfriend from Hamilton staying with her. “No problem,” Verena told her. “This is the way I sleep at home.” Lily thought she was joking, and she didn’t bother to set her straight.

  While she waits in the departure lounge, Verena shifts in her seat to ease the ache in her hip. She won’t complain, even to herself. She feels she’s been lucky and gotten off lightly, like that time in Belgrade.

  She’d been barely fifteen and when the sirens began to wail she came close to panic, much like the girl from PETA. She was still two blocks away from the safety of her parents’ flat, and she had just enough time to slip the Armelite out of her schoolbag and thrust it under a fruit stand before she was caught up in the police net—one of a hundred or more fish swept up at random. They were held overnight in cells meant to accommodate twenty. No water and no food, no toilets either. The pressure and stink of human bodies, most of them fearful, some defiant, stayed with her for weeks. The complaining stopped when the first screams were heard down the corridor, and then the whimpering started.

  In the morning, she was taken out. For interrogation, she thought, wondering how soon before she too would scream. Instead, she was led to the reception area where her father, white-faced and supporting his plaster-encased right hand, waited to claim her.

  “Kids, eh?” said the duty officer. “Better keep her home from now on.” From his jocular manner, she knew he had been paid a handsome bribe.

  “I’m sorry,” she told her father on the bus ride home. “I wasn’t quick enough…”

  “No, no. I could not have done better myself. Sheer accident, that the body was discovered so quickly.”

  She remembers the respect in her father’s tone. Their insurgents’ group was small and composed mostly of the middle class: teachers, doctors, a few tradespeople. Only the Viteks knew how to use a gun. Volker Vitek, a former colonel in the Army reserves, had a reputation as a crack shot. Three days earlier, the Secret Police had picked him up for questioning. When he emerged from prison, he had a broken hand. It was his gun hand and consternation followed: the insurgents’ intended target would be in town for five days only, serving as prosecutor for a special session of court set up to deal with enemies of the regime. He was somebody high up in the Serbian judiciary, nicknamed the Electrician for the methods of interrogation he favoured. With no other options and not without misgivings, Verena was designated to take her father’s place in the planned assassination. The only thing she still sometimes regrets is the loss of the Armelite. It was her first rifle, the one her father gave her the year she turned thirteen and he taught her how to shoot.

  “Flight to London now boarding,” crackles an announcement from the ceiling. “Families with children first.”

  Some of the older passengers exchange glances of relief. The baby in the stroller has been fretting non-stop while the two children chase each other shrieking around the aisles. Verena is lucky once again; she has gotten the last window seat and no one sits beside her.

  “Space! Canada has so much space,” her father exclaimed, the first time they flew from Toronto to London.

  It was one of the things he loved about their new country. Nobody felt compelled to raise a militia and steal his neighbour’s land; there was more than enough to go around. She recalls him sitting, as Verena is doing now, with his forehead pressed against the Perspex pane, watching the farming townships of southwestern Ontario unreel tirelessly along the network of concession roads three thousand feet below. Only, then it had been a morning in early November, two weeks after her mother’s funeral, and the landscape had that peculiarly Canadian look of drawing in for winter. Foreshortened yellow clay brick houses sheltered behind pine windbreaks. Silos bulged fat with corn and cows gathered about the barns. In the fields, the browns and yellows of ploughed furrows and winter wheat formed geometric patterns around the leafless woodlots, stitched together by the dark thread of creeks. “Backbone of the nation,” her father said. Volker Vitek was a man who appreciated farmland. He himself had been forced to leave behind some five hundred hectares of productive ancestral land when they fled Serbia.

  “Orange juice or water?”

  Verena turns from the window as the stewardess bends forward with her tray. She helps herself to water. She would prefer the juice, but she has learned the value of self-denial and practices it whenever the occasion presents itself. Across the aisle, a row ahead of her, the man who has the profile of her victim looks around from his newspaper. Briefly, their glances collide and a tremor runs down her spine. She leans back in her seat, out of his line of vision, and closes her eyes.

  The first she’d seen of her victim that day in Belgrade was his acid-blue jogging suit appearing and disappearing between the trees on the mountain path below her. She can still feel the rough scrape of bark on her back as she pushes herself erect from her position at the base of a chestnut tree. Down in the valley, the towers of the city are sinking into a rose-coloured evening haze. She hears the heavy slap of his feet on the hard-packed earth and the sibilant wheeze of his breath as he rounds the final bend. He is a big man and runs awkwardly, flapping his hands at the wrist and ducking his bald-crowned head. At a distance of fifty paces, she steps forward smiling, and he flings back his head, startled.

  She holds the Armelite with the silencer pointed downward, close to her side so it won’t be the first thing that registers in his vision.

  “Nice day,” he offers in Serbian between breaths. She is a pretty young girl and he won’t see fifty again. At fifteen, she is already aware of the effect of her looks on men. Even when she swings the rifle to her shoulder, he doesn’t immediately realize what she is about to do. Not until the fiberglass stock lies smooth and cool along her cheek and she is sighting down the barrel with her finger curling around the trigger, do his eyes widen. By then she’s focused on the blue vein jumping in his forehead.

  Death is clean and quick. One instant he’s there behind the sights, the next he’s slumped like a sack on the ground. Blood seeps from a hole in his forehead, hardly enough to pool under his head. Men have been shot next to her in street riots, this is the first time she has killed anyone herself. Her father had tried to prepare her for the emotions she would feel. He’d described the sense of empowerment, what he hadn’t told her about was the exultation. Doing things well is a form of revenge on life; the only one available, he’d said.

  Within seconds she has removed the silencer, unscrewed the two halves of the rifle, slid the barrel into the hollow of the stock and slipped it down among the schoolbooks in her bag. At her feet, the Electrician’s pale face stares upward into the canopy of chestnut leaves. She has purposely not been told his real name or anything about his personal life. She recalls stepping over his outflung hand and noticing with mild interest that he wore a wedding ring.

  Her father’s approval turned to anger some days later when she admitted that she’d shot their target from the path. Why in God’s name hadn’t she picked him off from a place of concealment in the trees?

  She shrugged. She liked the feeling of power facing him had given her. “I thought he should be made to see death,” she said.

  “What if he’d had bodyguards?”

  “He didn’t. I watched the slope below.”

  “All the same. It was reckless. Stupid. He could have been armed.”

  “An old man. I was faster.”

  “You were taking a chance. You put all our lives at risk.”

  “Sorry, Papa. Next time…”

  “There won’t be a next time!” he shouted, his famous temper sending his plastered fist sla
mming down on the table. “Not while I’m your father.”

  But Volker Vitek had died before the opportunity to put his threat to the test arose. There’s an irony to that, Verena thinks, as the pitch of the engine changes.

  The Dash 8 is beginning its descent into London. The stewardess, whose navy slacks are too tight across the buttocks, has barely time to retrieve the empty cups before the announcement comes over the intercom to fasten seatbelts and stow trays. Through the window, Verena watches the city’s jigsaw skyline tilt with the horizon and return to an upright position, anchored by high-rise towers gleaming in a shaft of sunlight.

  Borrowman will be at the airport to meet her. To debrief her, as he likes to call it. She phoned him late last night, wrapped in Lily’s spare blanket, to give him the time of her arrival. He’d been watching the end of the sit-in on the CBC National News and was audibly relieved to hear from her.

  They’ll discuss what was accomplished. What went right and what went wrong and most importantly, has their cause been advanced or has it suffered a setback?

  Verena doesn’t care much either way. She cannot pretend to share Borrowman’s zeal when it comes to animal rights. She is a contributing member of his Cell and that has to be enough for him, as it is for her.

  Wind buffets the treetops. The plane dips and levels, dips and levels, like a big bird swinging down for a landing, until at last the wheels touch the tarmac, scrape, bounce, touch again and the entire cabin rushes headlong to a stop. Verena stands up and pulls her bag out of the overhead compartment. She teaches aerobics at a fitness studio in East London; her first class is at three o’clock. Even allowing for the debriefing and a quick stop to buy bread and milk, this means she has time to spare. Enough time to pick up her AR-7 and do what she loves best: drive out to an abandoned farm she knows and get in some target practise.

  As she waits in line to disembark, she realizes with astonishment that she is happy.