Free Miss Montreal by Howard Shrier Page B

earthy, but still had a comic lilt.
    “I pick Sophie up at school at three-thirty and if it’s nice we go to Parc Laurier. You know where that is?”
    “Give me an intersection.”
    “St-Gregoire and Brebeuf. Near the climbing structure. But don’t come right away. Give Sophie time to settle in, find some friends, otherwise it’ll be
Maman
this,
Maman
that, the entire time. I also don’t want you talking to her.”
    I hadn’t planned to involve Sophie. Upsetting grown-ups was one thing, the victim’s child another.
    We traded cell numbers and agreed to meet around four.
    Next, I called Marie-Josée Boily’s office and left a brief voice mail explaining why I needed to talk to her. Left my cell number there too.
    Arthur Moscoe would be at home, so I dialled his number. It went to voice mail. I asked him to call my cell at his first opportunity.
    The only contact Holly had for the Afghan family was at their rug business, which would be closed now. They’d have to wait until tomorrow.
    So would the Lorties. Since they were politicians in pre-election mode, I knew I might have to go through a personal assistant or press secretary. I sent an email to the address Sammy had for Laurent Lortie, requesting a meeting. I copied his daughter Lucienne, in case she was more plugged in than her father.
    Getting nowhere fast. Actually, not even that fast. Just nowhere. I thought of taking a walk but a look at the rain through the hotel window put that to rest.
    I propped up some pillows on the bed and stretched out with my laptop, intending to read the work files Holly Napier had copied onto a memory stick.
    As soon as I thought of her, I veered off course, wondering what she was doing right now. Probably still at the office, angled over a monitor. An attractive woman. A bit like Jenn, in that she was tall—no six-footer but five-eight or -nine—and strong looking. I liked her high cheekbones and fair skin and her great red tangle of curls. Very bright eyes. Smart enough to know she was smart, relaxed enough not to have to prove it. Nice smile.
    When it started to shape up like a duel between research and a cold shower, I plugged in the USB stick that contained Sammy’s notes on the stories he was working on. The folders came up alphabetically:
Aziz, Lorties, Miss Montreal
.
    I started with the Aziz file. The father, Abdul, had been born in 1947 in Kabul to a Tajik family—a minority in a Pashtun-majority country. He excelled in school and was accepted to the school of medicine at University of Kabul in 1968. When the Soviets invaded in 1979, he became known as an anti-Russian speaker and pamphleteer, likening the president, Babrak Karmal, to Joseph Stalin. Accurate or not, it landed him in prison. He was married by then to a nurse, a woman who had attended university when maybe one percent of Afghan women did so. They had a son, Mehrdad, and an infant daughter named Mehri. He was beaten and tortured in custody until a sizable bribe secured his release. He emerged determined to flee at the earliest opportunity via Pakistan and India. A cousin in Canada would help him get started.
    Papers, however, were expensive and scarce and the bribe had depleted the family’s resources. They stayed in Kabul as resistance to the Soviets grew, as religious fervour began to grip the city in ways it hadn’t before. People shouting
“Allahu akhbar”
in the night, all night, in defiance of the ten-o’clock curfew and army patrols. Men growing out their beards and criticizing those who drank liquor or dressed in Western style. Veils, once scarce, became more common. Taliban rocket attacks became a daily event, targeting the bus station, markets and other crowded places. Everyone had a story about a friend, neighbour, classmate or kinsman killed.
    Caught between the oppression of the Soviet occupation and the Islamism that had taken over the rural areas and was encircling Kabul, Abdul kept at it, pleading with contacts, scraping together