Dinner with the Dissidents by John Tesarsch

Author:John Tesarsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Affirm Press

The police arrived early that afternoon: two men and a woman (a surprisingly large team to investigate a leak). The younger man even had a gun in his holster, as if he were responding to a bank robbery.

The woman approached me. ‘Are you Leo Borsky?’

Despite my predicament, I found her attractive: tall, shapely, with blonde hair tied back in a bun.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know why we’re here?’

‘I suppose it’s about that leaked report,’ I replied, as casually as I could manage.

On the other side of the partition, one of her colleagues was questioning Gary. This gave me hope. There could be dozens of staff in various agencies and departments who had access to that document. Surely the police would have trouble catching me.

‘We are conducting an investigation. Please give me your copy.’

‘Just a minute.’ I bent over my safe to enter my pin. It took all my effort to stop my fingers jittering, but still I entered the wrong number. Hopefully she was looking away and didn’t notice. Second time lucky. I shuffled through my papers and took out the report.

She gave it a quizzical glance and ticked my name off her list. ‘You haven’t given this to anyone?’

I felt curiously beholden to her, a schoolboy answering to the principal. That, after all, is the effect of the social contract. ‘No, I would never do that.’

It must have been my hesitation, or else my accent, which caught her attention. Now she subjected me to the full force of her scrutiny. No doubt she took in all my glorious imperfections: the yellowing teeth, the sunken chin, the ruined capillaries on the bridge of my nose. Not to mention the rounded shoulders and the burgeoning paunch; the white shirt splashed with soy sauce, three wash cycles ago; the pants with the shiny knees. And to a police officer, a man who doesn’t take care in his appearance is a man who cannot be trusted.

She raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow. (What is it, these days, with all the brow bars and beauty parlours in every shopping strip?) ‘And you haven’t divulged its contents?’

Once, I had to research how a lie detector works. It compares the degree to which your vital signs – pulse, blood pressure, breathing – differ from the baseline in response to particular questions. With enough practice, you can beat the machine. But it is another thing altogether to bluff an experienced police officer.

‘Never,’ I said.

Again there was something about my accent, or my intonation, which bothered her: it was obvious from the way she narrowed her eyes.

‘Mr Borsky, we are asking everyone to make this statutory declaration, that they didn’t leak the report.’ She handed me a document. ‘Take some time to look it over.’

I had been required to make declarations before and had never given them any more thought than if I were ticking off the items on a shopping list. Although the words on that sheet of paper were familiar, now they were printed in poison ink.

‘As you know,’ she added, ‘the penalty for making a false declaration is up to four years in jail.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.