Toronto Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  © 2008 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Toronto map by Sohrab Habibion

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-50-7

  eISBN-13: 978-1-617750-99-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007939597

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Brooklyn Noir 3, edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block

  Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin

  Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell

  Richmond Noir, edited by Andrew Blossom,

  Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert

  Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: EAST YORK ENDERS

  GAIL BOWEN Dundas Square

  The King of Charles Street West

  PETER ROBINSON The Beach

  Walking the Dog

  GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE East York

  Numbskulls

  PASHA MALLA Little India

  Filmsong

  PART II: THE MILD WEST

  HEATHER BIRRELL Bloor West Village

  Wanted Children

  SEAN DIXON Humber Loop

  Sic Transit Gloria at the Humber Loop

  IBI KASLIK Dufferin Mall

  Lab Rats

  NATHAN SELLYN Toronto Airport

  The Emancipation of Christine Alpert

  PART III: ROAD TO NOWHERE

  MICHAEL REDHILL Distillery District

  A Bout of Regret

  RM VAUGHAN Yorkville

  Brianna South

  RAYWAT DEONANDAN University of Toronto

  Midnight Shift

  CHRISTINE MURRAY Union Station

  Can’t Buy Me Love

  PART IV: FLATLAND FLATLINE

  ANDREW PYPER Queen West

  Tom

  KIM MORITSUGU St. Lawrence Market

  A Taste of Honey

  EMILY SCHULTZ Parkdale

  Stalling

  MARK SINNETT CN Tower

  Sick Day

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  TO NOIR A GOOD NIGHT

  In 1834, York, city of mud and canons, became Toronto, city of trauma and free refills. Depending on what side of the CN Tower you stand under, Toronto is histrionic or claustrophobic, gelling or uncool. It’s the 1967 Stanley Cup champion Maple Leafs; it’s a fading World Series Blue Jays souvenir cup. It’s gaggles of language-starved landfill stalkers who text and Facebook and spit wads of bubble gum onto the world’s cleanest tarmac.

  With its simple gestures, a stolen blue bike, a red balloon caught by a fraying string on Oakland Avenue, Toronto bids for more than the Olympics. Frustrated and frustrating, it teems with forensic experts and film-set extras trying to interpret our troubled conscience.

  Even though it’s North America’s most multicultural metropolis outside of Miami, it’s more commonly known for its cold winters, strong beer, and variety of transportation options. Perhaps that’s why it’s so disorienting. As Gail Bowen notes in “The King of Charles Street West,” Come in and get lost is strategically emblazoned on Toronto’s landmark five-and-dime Honest Ed’s. The Toronto Transit Commission has moved over twenty-five billion people since 1921, almost four times the world’s population. And while the transit monopoly searches for its next light rail train, others search for their next breath, meal, or kiss.

  Toronto Noir lets a bit of moonlight contour the ever-mobile city, allowing a glimpse, a brief catch and release. Sentimentality and deception bring these stories together. Dog-ear this book, use it as foreplay for further encounters on your coffee table. Sift through the stiff pages written by people who inform and present their city in a way no double-decker gimmick bus whizzing past the Rogers Centre and Casa Loma could ever hope to do. It is in our emergency rooms and carrying our groceries home that we are Torontonians.

  Some of our youth emulate high-octane luxury-car drag racing video games and kill taxi cab drivers one day shy of becoming a Canadian citizen. Others try and steal Michael Stipe’s microphone when he passes it down to the audience during a free concert at Dundas Square. Some nights we listen and judge, while others, the air has a pulse and bodies clog the carb-heaving arteries of concrete. Some nights, living isn’t enough and words are all we have; they blow them out without leaving a note or forwarding address.

  Some leave us, while others like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Ken Dryden carry the torch. The city is haunted by ghosts that sometimes get parks named after them: Gwendolyn MacEwan, Oscar Peterson, Jeff Buckley, Timothy Findley. Musically, Toronto spars with New York. The Barenaked Ladies, Broken Social Scene, Ron Sexsmith, Gordon Lightfoot, Glass Tiger, Platinum Blonde, and Triumph all got their starts here.

  Not that anybody knows. Toronto grounds itself in its unknowing.

  Working and living under the Great North, Toronto Noir’s authors share the weight of the unseen and the dying. Music binds Mark Sinnett to self-erasure and Peter Robinson inflects domestic problems with the twist of a foreign knife. Heather Birrell takes us to Ecuador and shows us how maternal longing can be an evil thing.

  “A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blowtorch,” says Ondaatje. Here, Peter Street’s clubland spawns nightly crime-scene sound bites. In the West End, bucolic mansions are usurped by halfway houses. Bollywood screenings warm up Littl
e India on murderously cold winter nights, while cadavers conceal their wares in cemetery-riddled East York.

  In the end, physical acts and written acts share a parasitic need to enjoy and to tolerate. So clash away, city by the lake, it all comes down to communal passions: crimping your hair, making deviled eggs, varnishing the deck, not calling someone back, ever.

  These stories capture encounters that happen every day. They resurrect the brutish moments displaced by high school graduations and taxi strikes, preserve them in metaphor, wrap them in gauze. Except here we let the carnivorous parchment swell heavy: a panting mascot, tied outside a bank, awaiting the return of its owner.

  Come in, and get lost.

  Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Toronto, Ontario

  February 2008

  PART I

  EAST YORK ENDERS

  THE KING OF CHARLES

  STREET WEST

  BY GAIL BOWEN

  Dundas Square

  Toronto was in the tenth day of a garbage strike when Billy Merchant came back into my life. The city was sweltering, and the stench that rose from overflowing cans, fetid dumpsters, and cardboard boxes swollen with rotting produce hung above the hot pavement like a poisoned cloud. We were a city ripe for a plague, so it was no surprise when I picked up the Toronto Star that morning and saw Billy’s photo staring up at me. I hadn’t seen him in forty years. If he’d let Mother Nature take her course, I wouldn’t have recognized him, and he could have kept his empire for himself. But Billy never met a mirror he didn’t like, and he was rich enough to believe he could defeat time. Judging by the picture in the Toronto Star, he had either discovered the fountain of youth or invested in a perpetual makeover: His hair was still thick and black as the proverbial raven’s wing; his body was toned; his jawline smooth and his smile dazzling.

  He didn’t look young—he looked carved, like one of those figures at the Movieland Wax Museum in Niagara Falls. Except, unlike the wax Jack Nicholson or the wax Harry Potter, Billy Merchant hadn’t been captured in his most memorable scene ever—at least, not the one I remembered. Billy with his cool, slender fingers around my throat whispering, “If you ever tell anybody what you saw, I’ll kill you.”

  I hadn’t doubted him for a moment. Billy had his weaknesses, but he wasn’t given to idle threats. Besides, twenty feet away from me, at the bottom of the basement stairs of the rooming house where we lived, there was a dead man and I had watched as Billy killed him.

  “It’s hard to make predictions—especially about the future.”

  —Allan A. Lamport, Mayor of Toronto

  For four decades, I’d kept our secret. I had my reasons, but when I saw the cutline under Billy’s photo calling him The King of Charles Street West, something stirred inside me. A preacher or a poet might have called that stirring a thirst for justice, but I wasn’t a preacher or a poet. I was an ordinary woman who lived in a nice house off the Danforth with too many pictures of my son and too many memories, so I did what an ordinary woman does when she contemplates blackmailing a murderer: I made myself a cappuccino, peeled an orange, and sat down to read the paper.

  The article about Billy was nice—inspiring even. Much of it was in Billy’s own words—about how forty years ago, as a twenty-year-old with a high school education and two years working construction under his belt, he moved to Toronto, found a place to live in a rooming house on Charles Street West, got a job waiting tables, worked hard, and saved every penny. According to Billy, his landlord, a Russian immigrant without living kin, admired his work ethic, and the men developed what Billy characterized as a father-son relationship. Then came the happy ending. When the older man died, it turned out that he’d left Billy his house. Starting with the property he’d inherited on Charles Street West, Billy began to sell, mortgage, lease, invest, and purchase until he owned an impressive chunk, not just of Charles Street West, but of Metropolitan Toronto.

  City Success Story was the heading above the continuation of the story on page three. There was a photo there too: It was of Billy standing in front of the Charles Street West property in 1967 with “an unidentified woman.” The unidentified woman was me.

  Except for a strip of joke pictures of Billy and me mugging in the instant photo booth at Union Station, this was the only photo of the two of us together. I realized with a pang that it had been taken by our landlord, Vladimir Maksimovich Chapayev, known to us as Vova, and murdered by Billy on a soft September evening in 1967. It wasn’t hard to figure out how the picture had made its way into the paper. When it came to his triumphs, Billy was as sentimental as a schoolgirl. He would have cherished this photo of himself on the cusp of his brilliant career. The fact that he had killed the man who took the photo and threatened to kill the woman who stood beaming beside him would have been of no more consequence to Billy than the clippings his manicurist snipped from his fingernails.

  “Nuts to you.”

  —Motto of Toronto’s Uptown Nuthouse

  (now defunct)

  If you’re going to travel fast, you have to travel light. That’s what Billy always said. But it was possible Billy had underestimated the power of things he left behind. I had resources. The $64,000 question was whether I still had the nerve to use them. For forty years, I had wrapped myself in respectability, believing that each act of quiet duty separated me from the girl who believed the sun rose and set on Billy Merchant and who stood at the top of the cellar steps, heart pounding with fear and love as Billy knelt over Vladimir Maksimovich Chapayev and pinched the nostrils of his thick, maddeningly persistent snorting peasant nose until the old Russian stopped breathing forever.

  As I propped Billy’s photo against my cappuccino cup, my hands were shaking. Maybe, after all, the last laugh would be Billy’s. Maybe in that instant when he silenced Vova, he had silenced me. It was possible that all the years of cautious living in my pleasant house off the Danforth had smothered the raw nerve I would need to bring Billy to his knees. I looked at Billy’s picture again. And against logic and good sense, I drew strength from it.

  In my quiet, sunny kitchen, I could almost hear Billy’s voice, silky as one of the ties he was fond of fingering at Holt Renfrew: “Bring it on, babe. You’re tough, but I’m tougher. I can take you.”

  “You take a chance the day you’re born. Why stop now?”

  —Billy Merchant’s motto,

  appropriated from the movie Golden Boy

  I moved into the Charles Street West house on June 21, 1967: the first day of what the world would remember as the summer of love. There were no flowers in my hair, but there should have been. I was a virgin ripe for experience, ready for plucking. When I saw Billy, shirtless, his thin chest glistening with sweat as he mowed the postage-stamp lawn in front of the house, my loins twitched. He gave me one of his bullet-stopping grins, asked if he could carry in my luggage, and I was a goner.

  That night Billy took me to see Golden Boy at a cheap theater that showed old movies. When Barbara Stanwyck told William Holden to follow his dream, Billy’s hand squeezed mine as if someone had shot 300 kilovolts of electricity through his body. Afterwards, Billy stood under a streetlight, arms extended like an actor. “Sooner or later, everybody works for the man,” he said. “And babe, you are looking at the man that, sooner or later, everybody is going to work for.” That was my 300 kilovolt moment.

  From the day we met, Billy and I seized every possible second together. Vova lived on the first floor of the rooming house. A gentle accountant who spent his evenings and weekends making scrapbooks of the Royal Family lived on the third floor. Billy and I shared the kitchen and bathroom on the second floor. His bedroom was at the front and mine was at the back, but even the long summer evenings weren’t long enough for us, and by Canada Day, Billy and I knew the squeaks and hollows of one another’s mattresses as intimately as we knew the contours of one another’s bodies.

  We might have been short on money, but we were long on dreams. I earned nine dollars a day s
elling costume jewelry at the Robert Simpson Company on the corner of Queen and Yonge. My dream was to go to Shaw’s Business College and become a private secretary. Billy earned nine dollars a day (and tips) at Winston’s on Adelaide Street West. Winston’s was the restaurant where the Bay Street elite ate prime rib and talked money. Billy, who dreamed of becoming a millionaire before he was twenty-five, said that every day at Winston’s was worth a year of college education.

  That summer, he and I explored the city, not just our neighborhood—all the neighborhoods. On payday, we bought ten dollars’ worth of subway tokens, and after work, we’d hop on the subway and take turns choosing which stop we’d get off at and which bus or streetcar we’d board. Every night was an adventure. As we traveled through the muggy evenings, Billy would sit with his forehead pressed against the window looking out at the unfamiliar streets with the hunger he had in his eyes when he looked at my body.

  “Toronto is the engine that drives Canada.”

  —Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto

  When he talked about Toronto, Billy was like a lover: His voice grew soft; his hands trembled; his eyes glittered with lust. He needed, physically, to touch every part of the city, so he could penetrate her secrets. He had a shoebox filled with the spiral notebooks in which he recorded what the men who lunched at Winston’s were saying about his city, and the information he had was pure gold. The men who drank icy martinis at Winston’s had insider information about which crumbling town houses and firetrap warehouses were going to be torn down and where new freeways might be built; they knew where the subway might be expanded, and which cheap rural land would be developed as suburbs for the people flocking to live the dream. The men with icy martinis knew what nobody else knew: They knew where Toronto was going.

  “Nobody knows where the hell downtown Toronto is. But

  everybody’s going to know where downtown North York is.”

  —Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto

  Even though Billy didn’t understand what they were talking about, he wrote it down. Later, when we rode the public transit out to the edges of the city, Billy put the pieces together, and he floated his extravagant dreams. He was a man obsessed. Many years after that, I was reminded of Billy when I read my child the story of Icarus who dreamed of touching the sun and stuck feathers to his shoulders with wax so he could fly. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell into the sea, but Billy was smart enough to calculate the odds. Nothing could bring him down.