Toronto Noir Page 12

  After several minutes, footsteps broke the silence of the street. Isabella pressed her face against the glass, but the man to whom the footsteps belonged didn’t require much effort to notice. He wore a tuxedo, and with each streetlamp he passed she gained a better view of both his solid build and the corkscrews of glossy black hair that fell toward his shoulders. His skin had an olive tone, and she guessed him to be of Middle Eastern descent, or perhaps Spanish. As he approached the two cars, their doors opened, and Isabella brought her hand to her mouth.

  Four more men emerged, also wearing tuxedos. The first man, without speaking, raised his palm, and they moved toward him. As all five came together they threw their arms around one another in a mass of silent embraces. The first man went to a lawn across the street and looked up at the second-floor window, then made a gesture to the four, who immediately returned to the cars and began pulling black boxes of varying shapes and sizes from their trunks. They too then moved to the lawn. They laid the boxes on the damp grass, then kneeled to open them. When they stood up, each raised a different instrument—one a clarinet, one a violin, one a French horn, and the last a bass. The first man looked at the four, glanced at the window, then looked at the four again and said something Isabella couldn’t hear. And then they began to play, and he began to sing.

  Isabella had never had music in her house during childhood, and she knew nothing of opera. So she did not recognize that it was Rossini’s music that quickly woke the entire block, or that it was the Count Almaviva whom the tenor hoped to emulate that evening. But she did know the music was perfect for the moment, a moment that the singer across the street was just then describing as divine. His voice soared to a climax as the window he sang to filled with light, and he dropped to one knee as a woman’s silhouette came to fill it. In this way, on May 25, 1986, Pierre Alvio became engaged to Christine Alpert. Unfortunately, every mountain has a valley.

  It was nearly twenty years later, to the very day, that Christine flew to Toronto. A cab arrived at 6 to take her to the airport. She had bought a new suit for the occasion, a jacket and pants set from Anne Taylor. She brought only two bags—a purse to accompany her on the plane and a larger, rolling case that she would check. Inside she had packed a change of clothes, two textbooks, nearly $50,000 in cash, and everything she would require for that evening. Her blond hair was up; an ivory chopstick pierced its bun. Nearly an hour in the bathroom had been required before she felt content with her appearance. The chopstick had finally made the difference.

  The driver smiled as she slid into the backseat. He was a black man, probably in his early thirties, with a shaved head and a strange web of scars across the back of his neck. Even at this early hour, sweat poured off him, and his blue cotton dress shirt clung damply around the outline of his body.

  “Good morning,” he said. “To the airport?”

  “That’s right,” Christine replied. She found herself fully alert.

  “Sounds good.” The cab sped through Richmond’s empty morning streets. “Domestic or international?”

  “Toronto,” she said. “The center of the universe.” He laughed—a deep, easy sound that caused his neck to bounce, like a toy, atop his shoulders.

  “I hate it there,” he said. “Too crazy. Too much noise, too many people. Too big. Reminds me of America, you know? You have some business there?”

  “No, not this time. I’m going to meet my husband.”

  “Romantic surprise?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m going to kill him.”

  He laughed again. “That’s very nice of you. My wife finds it easy enough to do that at home. Almost every night, I think she tries.”

  Christine exhaled a mock laugh in return, but didn’t say anything as the car turned briefly onto the highway before beginning a long, slow loop toward the airport plaza.

  “It was the first place I ever knew in Canada, Toronto,” the driver said.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Rwanda. In Africa.”

  “Oh,” she replied. Canadians, she thought, were so rarely from Canada. But she didn’t know anything about Rwanda, except that it was an unhappy place.

  “I came here a long time ago, almost ten years. And Toronto is where they took us. Me and my brother.”

  “Do you remember it?” Christine asked. She decided not to inquire about who “they” were—she imagined idealistic young college graduates, dressed in khaki and eager to ignore their parents’ concerns over money, relationships, real life.

  “Oh, yes. Maybe, I think, the best day of my life. Do you know, I had never been on an escalator before. So I remember that, my first escalator. Stairs that moved! My mind had never even thought this was possible. Now, I think it sounds ridiculous. But I remember being so scared. To time it right, that first step. My brother pushed me, I think.”

  Christine mock laughed again as the driver parked behind a police car, then helped her lift the rolling case from the trunk. It was heavier than it looked, and nearly toppled, but she grabbed the other end just before it crashed to the ground.

  “Would you prefer a window or an aisle?” The Air Canada attendant had slender, creamy fingers, and nails that shimmered like oysters. This made Christine ashamed of her own, red-rimmed and bitten down to jagged nubs, and she drew her hands into fists after providing her passport.

  “Window, if you have it, please,” she said.

  She spent the hour before her departure at the gate, sitting with her legs crossed and watching the wanderings of the suits and bickering families that populate an airport in the morning. A stroller designed for three children wobbled by, conducted by a weary-looking young woman. Taking a turn, it fell, and Christine stood up to help before noticing it was empty. When she sat back down, she realized that her legs were shaking. Not just that—everything below her hips was convulsing, possessed by some violent, unknown force. She pushed her heels into the carpet of the departure lounge, then counted the rapid beats of her heart until the flight began to board. Finally, at somewhere just past 3,000, it did.

  But the plane itself was even worse. A mild anxiety had shadowed her for the past week, ever since she first made her discovery. Now, trapped inside the small space, it began to balloon, swelling up and contaminating the captive air. Christine tried to measure her breathing, but it seemed that—even when she opened her mouth so wide that her lips felt stretched against her teeth—her lungs would not fill. She glanced around the business class cabin, worried that someone might notice her silent terror, but no one was even looking in her direction. An attendant came by with glasses of water, and she took one, then closed her eyes and, disgustedly, allowed her mind to wander to the only memory that eased its trembling. Pierre.

  She had seen him perform many times, of course. Even before they met, before the dinners of homemade pasta and weekend trips to the island and lazy Saturday mornings spent watching Italian soccer matches in bed. Before she even knew his name, she had seen him on the stage, in his debut. Her twenty-fifth birthday. She had been eager to get out and party—her boyfriend at the time, a rugby player named Eli, a grizzly bear of a man, had arranged a boat cruise in celebration. But attending the opera alongside her father was her birthday tradition, one that extended back to childhood. She loved all music, but preferred opera to concerts, which offered too much time where you were just alone with your thoughts. Without a story to follow, she often found her mind wandering to its darkest corners, spaces filled with thoughts and impulses best left buried.

  Pierre was a phenomenon, even from the beginning of his career. However, that first performance was not Christine’s favorite. Pierre was not yet familiar enough with the limits of his own talent. He sought to replace experience with furor, and chased opportunities before the music presented them, trampling the subtlety that would eventually form the hallmark of his style.

  Nor did she imagine him as he performed now, reduced to supporting roles and celebrity appearances, obviously well into th
e twilight of his career. There were exceptions, of course— the odd, understated aria could still illuminate him, causing the entire audience to almost imperceptibly lean forward in their seats, straining to ensure they caught every note. But these moments only sharpened the contrast with his former self, underscoring how the ellipses of his moment in operatic history would not rival its prime.

  It was nearly a decade ago, in Bologna, that he had given the performance that her memory anointed as his finest. His hometown, although he had never really lived there, having moved to Canada before beginning school. But when the Teatra Comunale invited him to lead their production of Falstaff, there had been no deliberation necessary. Christine was doing graduate philosophy work at the time, so her summers were open to adventure. A week later they were in Italy, at the beginning of three glorious months.

  Of course, the locals hated her—they saw only a shy, mousey Canadian woman who kept a fine Italian boy locked up far away from home. But she spent most of her time in the library anyway, continuing her studies. And for Pierre, it was heaven. He slipped perfectly into the role of the foolish knight, and took the stage each evening with a sense of self-confidence that eluded him in his North American appearances. In character, he became far less troubled than in reality, when an uncontrollable European moodiness would sometimes sweep him without warning.

  The performance Christine chose to remember was his penultimate one in Bologna. The opera concludes in a solo. Falstaff, who has just suffered the embarrassment of a beating at the hands of fairies, surrenders in a fugue that the whole world must surely be a farce. With each show, Christine found herself more and more desperate to hear Pierre bring the evening to its climax. She knew, even then, that he would never again be so transcendent. But that night, just as he began, there was an accident. A young oboist, well-known for his fondness for a preperformance drink, had passed out in the pit. A sound like a duck being stepped on brought the music to a halt, and the orchestra mobbed the fallen boy, swiftly bearing him up and over to an exit. The performers on stage looked at each other, suspended in the instant, unsure of how to proceed.

  And then Pierre began, without accompaniment, to sing. For the rest of her life, Christine would insist that no single superlative could sufficiently describe the joy that credenza released inside her. She felt suddenly conscious of all the layers of reality around her—that of the audience, the theater, the opera, and the music itself, which seemed like it had been evolving for thousands of years toward each of those perfect notes.

  Thinking of that moment—her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin buried between her knees, her feet pulled up onto the tiny seat beneath her—Christine felt herself relax. As the plane lifted above the clouds and began its journey, she closed her eyes and, for the first time in seven days, finally found her way to sleep.

  Pearson was a gargantuan airport, far larger than Vancouver’s, and Christine strode through it with her head down. The crowds terrified her. So many people, yet so little talking— airports were one of those places, like subway cars, where the density of solitary travelers created great moving, silent hordes. The thicker the swarm, the more isolating the experience. The baggage concourse seemed to have been built with this in mind—pillars like redwoods were spaced throughout a room the size of several gymnasiums. Christine imagined that the entire population of Toronto could likely fit inside the space. But it would somehow still feel empty. Its walls and roof were all glass and white steel, so that it felt like she had moved not only east, but also forward, through time itself, and arrived at some point in the future, inside the hangar for some monolithic spacecraft that had not yet been invented.

  Christine’s bag was one of the first, and she snatched it off the ramp so suddenly that it slipped to the ground with a crack. No one paused their own searches to notice.

  The hotel was connected to Terminal 3. The lobby was nearly empty when she arrived. One geriatric traveler sat sleeping at a coffee table before a bowl of green apples, that morning’s paper scattered across his lap. Two young men, barely more than teenagers, stood at the front desk. Christine was only steps away before they noticed her, and thus she had to endure one describing to the other how he had been “whipping his dick like it owed him money.” Red-faced, he turned to her. Ripe, moist acne covered his cheeks, and his blond hair hung in a limp swoop across his forehead.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Welcome to the Gateway Hotel.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m checking in, but I have a strange request.” His mouth hung open in reply. “My husband is staying here tonight, and I’d like to surprise him. Would it maybe be possible for me to get into his room without you letting him know I’ve checked in? It’s our wedding anniversary.”

  The boy nodded dumbly for a moment, still embarrassed. “Let me see,” he said. “Can I have your name, ma’am?”

  “Of course. Alvio. My husband won’t be arriving until this evening.” He busied himself for a moment with a computer monitor that stood below the counter, making rapid jabs at its touch screen. Christine held her breath.

  “And your husband’s first name?”

  “Pierre.”

  The boy’s face scrunched up for a moment, and Christine noticed that the acne extended down to his neck, its pustules thickening within the nourishment of a razor burn. He nodded.

  “Looks like it won’t be a problem,” he said, and grabbed a print out from somewhere by his knees. “I’ll give you one key, if you can sign this for me?”

  “Thank you so much,” she said. “I really do appreciate it. And, it won’t … He won’t know that I’m here?”

  “That’s right. We will, but he’ll have no clue.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

  “Uh huh.” The boy slipped her a plastic keycard. “Enjoy your anniversary, ma’am.”

  “I will,” she said. “Thank you again. I know this is unusual.”

  He smiled. He had a very small head, like the ball atop a needle.

  Given that it was only an airport hotel, the room was well furnished. A full desk and two brown leather club chairs surrounded an inviting queen-sized bed. Christine left her purse by the door, rolled her case to the bed, and threw it onto the duvet. She went to the window. Toronto was a distant gray bar graph upon the horizon. It shimmered in the smoggy heat. The airfield spread out below her—a sea of tarmac gradually giving way to endless, ugly squares of yellow grass. From the corner of her eye, she thought she saw something move among its tall, dying blades. Something animal, like a large rat. She imagined what kind of beasts must lurk out there, stranded in the fields between no places, surviving off nothing but insects and each other. But she couldn’t find whatever she had seen again, and so turned to the case on the bed.

  Inside, things were just as she’d packed them. Her clothes were wrapped around the cash, and atop them sat a hair gel container. She unscrewed its cap and sniffed—the moist mixture inside smelled like dead fish left out in the sun. Once hemlock dries, its toxicity is severely reduced. But kept damp and ground to a paste, it is lethal, choking off the nervous system like salt in a gas tank. She had discovered it in her studies—it had been used to execute Socrates after his condemnation for impiety. Plato, watching his former teacher’s last moments, carefully took note of how death’s grasp took hold:

  The man … laid his hands on him and after a while examined his feet and legs, then pinched his foot hard and asked if he felt it. He said “No”; then after that, his thighs; and passing upwards in this way he showed us that he was growing cold and rigid. And then again he touched him and said that when it reached his heart, he would be gone. The chill had now reached the region about the groin, and uncovering his face, which had been covered, he said—and these were his last words—“Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.” “That,” said Crito, “shall be done; but see if you have anything else to say.” To this question he made no reply, but after
a little while he moved; the attendant uncovered him; his eyes were fixed. And Crito, when he saw it, closed his mouth and eyes.

  Afterwards, the victim and his assassin were forever bound—the red spots that cover the stem of a wild hemlock plant are referred to as the “blood of Socrates.” A misnomer, of course, because there would be no blood. Only the chill, spreading through Pierre’s body like syrup across a pancake.

  This was the method upon which Christine had decided, but she had initially wanted something far more vulgar. In those first few days afterwards, her only solace had been the lurid scenarios she concocted in her mind. In her favorite, she has him naked, bound and gagged, with a rope tied fast around his neck. By this she leads him out into the street, where all the audiences he has ever performed for are arranged, jostling with each other for the finest views. The street is covered with the glass of a thousand bottles, and she drags him down it, the shards shredding his skin into pale, wraithlike ribbons. She had once cut her hand open dicing onions, and been amazed at the way the flesh lost all its elasticity, instantly becoming pale, almost alien. She wanted every inch of Pierre to look that way, red and white like a candy cane.

  But the hemlock had seemed easier, and would allow her to be somewhere far away by the time it did its work. She opened a water bottle—there were two by the door, above the minibar—and rapped the container against its rim. Pierre would drink one before bed—he did this like a ritual, even at home—and then sleep for the last time. The paste broke off in chunks and spiraled down inside the bottle. Christine shook it until her arm hurt. Within an hour, it would dissolve completely.

  She repacked her bag, left the hotel room, and returned to the lobby. The loudspeakers were playing Rush’s “YYZ,” and Christine wondered for a moment both how to spend the rest of her day and whether anyone else listening to the song realized it was a tribute to the building in which they stood. She decided to simply return to the terminal and wait.