going out to find a newspaper: majestic mountains supporting an endlesssky where the morning sun was carving mists away from the day’s clean promise, everything any visitor to Canada and particularly the beautiful province of British Columbia could want, but also (eyes dropping to take in a sweeping palette of industrial greys) back-alley-cum-parking-lot, chicken-wire fence, and dirt-dusted, supersized, aluminium Quonset. My guess: a curling rink. These ruddy northerners do love to sport on ice.
I eased the morning stiffness from my knees, descending the stairs of iron and air that climbed the back of the building. Walking around to the front and through the garden in the moist morning, toward the rising sun and the newspaper box across the street, I was entangled by a plague of green worms descending on sticky filaments. I should have backed off and found a way to bypass them, but instead I swore and flailed until all the strings were broken, the caterpillars all over me, then I swore some more and crushed and brushed them off.
Back in my room, I set the coffee to decoct, and opened the paper to search for a mention of the trial.
Last spring, the prosecution had opened dramatically, broad hints of intrigue and newly unearthed information setting the gathered families alight with speculation and hope. Then came weeks of hysterically banal minutiae: ticket purchase, baggage checking, details nearly universally known. Some heartbreaking, if irrelevant, moments, such as testimony from the stalwart Irish sailors who had fished bodies from their seas; as well as misleading ones, such as a suggestion that the Canadian spy agency had had a mole inside the terrorist cell until shortly before the bombing occurred, a mystery never solved. Then came a long summer break, occasioned by the prosecution’s attempts to shorten the process by presenting witness reports instead of witnesses. They could have pressed on. Instead, they pissed off.
The fall brought more testimony, more research, more witnesses, a growing weight of information. And so the trial sank down through the newspapers, off the front pages, out of the public eye. I could go days now and find not a mention in the press.
But look: this morning, Canada’s National Newspaper
had
published an article on the trial, a moment that might prove crucial—though whoknew? A bookseller testified that he had given a book about the bombing to a star witness for the prosecution, bolstering accusations that the witness, “Ms. D,” had repeated what she had read, not what she had witnessed. As with all the trial news, I felt a detachment both familiar and disturbing.
Ms. D’s identity was masked by witness protection. She had been whisked away from her life years earlier. Death threats against those with inside information about the bombing were not uncommon. The publisher of a community newspaper, a man who had been part of the same Sikh-nationalist circles as the bombers but then began speaking out against them, had been killed.
In the courtroom, Ms. D’s identity was no secret. Plenty of those present knew her as the former employee of one of the accused. She said they were in love, although the affair had remained nobly platonic, with both of them married. When she testified, on October 31, 2003, she started with a description, under duress, of the hold he had on her. She loved him still, she said, though he had fully confessed to her his role in the bombing.
Her challengers, in cross-examination, said she was making this up. Wanting revenge for losing her job. How could she love someone as evil as he sounded? She stuck to her guns, but now, ten months later, the defence brought a witness who claimed Ms. D owned a book about the bomb plot,
Soft Target
, which contained all the details she was now regurgitating, including errors of a sort she couldn’t have made up on her own.
The sun was nearly above the horizon, and coffee was gargling up into the top of the
I eased the morning stiffness from my knees, descending the stairs of iron and air that climbed the back of the building. Walking around to the front and through the garden in the moist morning, toward the rising sun and the newspaper box across the street, I was entangled by a plague of green worms descending on sticky filaments. I should have backed off and found a way to bypass them, but instead I swore and flailed until all the strings were broken, the caterpillars all over me, then I swore some more and crushed and brushed them off.
Back in my room, I set the coffee to decoct, and opened the paper to search for a mention of the trial.
Last spring, the prosecution had opened dramatically, broad hints of intrigue and newly unearthed information setting the gathered families alight with speculation and hope. Then came weeks of hysterically banal minutiae: ticket purchase, baggage checking, details nearly universally known. Some heartbreaking, if irrelevant, moments, such as testimony from the stalwart Irish sailors who had fished bodies from their seas; as well as misleading ones, such as a suggestion that the Canadian spy agency had had a mole inside the terrorist cell until shortly before the bombing occurred, a mystery never solved. Then came a long summer break, occasioned by the prosecution’s attempts to shorten the process by presenting witness reports instead of witnesses. They could have pressed on. Instead, they pissed off.
The fall brought more testimony, more research, more witnesses, a growing weight of information. And so the trial sank down through the newspapers, off the front pages, out of the public eye. I could go days now and find not a mention in the press.
But look: this morning, Canada’s National Newspaper
had
published an article on the trial, a moment that might prove crucial—though whoknew? A bookseller testified that he had given a book about the bombing to a star witness for the prosecution, bolstering accusations that the witness, “Ms. D,” had repeated what she had read, not what she had witnessed. As with all the trial news, I felt a detachment both familiar and disturbing.
Ms. D’s identity was masked by witness protection. She had been whisked away from her life years earlier. Death threats against those with inside information about the bombing were not uncommon. The publisher of a community newspaper, a man who had been part of the same Sikh-nationalist circles as the bombers but then began speaking out against them, had been killed.
In the courtroom, Ms. D’s identity was no secret. Plenty of those present knew her as the former employee of one of the accused. She said they were in love, although the affair had remained nobly platonic, with both of them married. When she testified, on October 31, 2003, she started with a description, under duress, of the hold he had on her. She loved him still, she said, though he had fully confessed to her his role in the bombing.
Her challengers, in cross-examination, said she was making this up. Wanting revenge for losing her job. How could she love someone as evil as he sounded? She stuck to her guns, but now, ten months later, the defence brought a witness who claimed Ms. D owned a book about the bomb plot,
Soft Target
, which contained all the details she was now regurgitating, including errors of a sort she couldn’t have made up on her own.
The sun was nearly above the horizon, and coffee was gargling up into the top of the
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