Toronto Noir Page 13

  After wandering for a little while, she eventually found a spot at a coffee shop in the nexus of Terminal 1. From the ceiling, five colored-glass silhouettes were suspended, their arms and legs fully outstretched, like they were dancing in space. A plaque titled the installation, I Dreamed I Could Fly. But to Christine the figures looked more like they were falling—as if they had tumbled downwards through the glass roof above them and, rather than shattering it, absorbed its material as their own.

  Sitting down with a coffee, she began to wait. There was a magazine in her purse, but she didn’t reach for it. Merely watching the crowds move back and forth before her was enough to pass the time. A few years prior, she might have hoped to spot a celebrity. But charter flights were too common these days, and airports had surrendered their status as the great equalizer. The rich and famous no longer had to wait alongside the masses as they endured the twin miseries of lost luggage and invasive security checks.

  His flight was due to arrive at 4 in the afternoon, from Boston. At quarter to, Christine returned to the baggage claim. From her purse she drew a scarf and sunglasses—more than enough to disguise someone not being looked for. As she sat down for one last wait, her hands quivering in anticipation, she reached inside her jacket and withdrew the thick sheaf of letters. She had found them a week ago while cleaning his study, tucked behind the Elmore Leonard section of his bookshelf. She’d sat down on the floor and read every last one, racing through their words as if someone had dared her. Index cards, napkins, hotel stationery—the history of his adultery. And at its center a boy, just barely old enough to drink.

  She’d read, in the skeletal block printing of a child’s hand, how they’d met at a performance in Los Angeles. Pierre had gotten drunk, and they’d consummated things soon after. Apparently, it was neither’s first time. The letters were so worshipful they were almost odes—the boy felt like he and Pierre shared something unnamable, and then he spent four pages trying to name it. He couldn’t remember the last time a man had made him feel sexy the way Pierre did.

  They had been meeting for nearly a year since that first tryst—often here, at Pearson, which was halfway between Vancouver and Atlanta, where the boy lived. Thus, when the letters involuntarily reared their head in her imagination, they were dictated in a candy-sweet Southern drawl. His name was Timothy.

  He didn’t want to keep it a secret anymore. He wanted them to move away, to Italy, although he’d never been there. He wanted a villa where they could make love in the sunshine, in the yard, where their lips and tongues and fingers could intertwine slowly, free of the haste of secrecy. He misspelled both definitely and necessary.

  But Pierre’s letters were far worse. The casual way he referred to the lovers he’d had in the past—some men she knew, men who’d stayed in their home, men whom she had made dinners for, taken holidays with. The explicit way he described his desires, using words she’d never even heard him speak. And, worst of all, through forty-seven letters, she wasn’t mentioned once.

  So Christine knew. When he had called on Wednesday and said he needed to stop in Toronto on the way home from Boston, that there was some consulting he’d been asked to do on a children’s production of the The Magic Flute, she knew where he was going. And she’d come to meet him.

  The clock read 4:15, and the flight from Boston read, Arrived. On the carousel before her, bags were beginning to slip down, one after another. Cardboard boxes, bright red Samsonites, huge black rolling trunks. She waited for his, a caramel-colored duffel. But it didn’t appear, and neither did he. At 4:30, the crowd around the conveyor began to thin, and she backed away, worried that she might be noticed. But by quarter to 5, she stood alone. Pierre was not coming—their plans must have changed. Perhaps he and Timothy had just met in Boston, his trip to Toronto entirely a ruse. Or he had gone to Atlanta, and even now they were locked in some squalid bachelor apartment, soaping each other in its phonebooth shower.

  The luggage for the next flight, from Minnesota, had begun to descend. Christine paced, unsure what to do next. The bags were identical to those that had come before—the same boxes, the same Samsonites, the same trunks. Each was a different life, she realized—each had a separate owner, with its own history, all moving independently of one another. And this made her feel very small, as if she was nothing more than a bag herself—inside an airport, inside a city, inside the civilization that must have cities. Exhaustion swept over her. Stumbling, she made her way back to the hotel.

  In the elevator up to the room, Christine slumped against the mirror. She could go anywhere in the world from here— the cash was in her bag at her feet. All futures were only a ticket away. But she felt sapped of direction—the Christine before her in the mirror looked old. Unwanted. Impotent. On the fourteenth floor, the doors opened. Dragging a hand along the wall and her tiny case behind her, her eyes half closed, she stumbled to the room.

  A hanger dangled around the knob, something she didn’t remember having put there herself. She picked it up—Ne Pas Deranger, it read. French. She took a step back. Men’s voices came from inside the room. Laughter. Deep inside her, a rage awoke. This was not enough—it was too passive. She wanted him to know. She wanted the boy to die, to leave him stranded and alone. She wanted to fly him to the middle of the desert and then abandon him, with nothing but the knowledge of his own infidelity to wait with him for death. Socrates’s death was far more than he deserved. Fist clenched, she raised her hand, ready to knock. But something stayed her hand, forced it down, to the hanger. She flipped it to its English side. Do Not Disturb. And then she left.

  On her way back through the lobby, she stopped at the front desk. A new, more handsome boy had replaced the one from that afternoon. Smiling, she asked him to send a bottle of champagne to her husband’s room. And then she flew away.

  PART III

  ROAD TO NOWHERE

  A BOUT OF REGRET

  BY MICHAEL REDHILL

  Distillery District

  It’s bad news whenever a policeman walks into your bar, but it’s worse when you’ve been having an affair with his wife. Katherine and I had been seeing each other for so long that I didn’t really ever think about her husband anymore. He was in the background, like a great-uncle, and for the last couple of years we’d stopped being careful, he was that regular in his work and in his habits. To listen to Katherine, all they had left in common was the marital home. He probably had affairs too, was how she saw it, and she believed a series of unspoken arrangements kept the balance in all of our lives. But if that was true, then what was Leonard Albrecht doing at the back of my bar, squinting at one of the old photographs behind glass, like he was thinking of sitting down for a plate of calamari and a beer?

  The Canteen was the name of my bar, a name I borrowed from the original saloon that stood on this spot, more than 150 years ago. I’m down a side street in the Distillery District, one of Toronto’s oldest unwrecked neighborhoods. For a lot of years in this city, all the most interesting neighborhoods— at least the ones with a story to tell—have been taken over to build condos, but this corner of the city was so unpopular, so out of the way, that they left it alone. It stands at an angle to the shore of Lake Ontario, close enough to drink its waters, but far enough away from the city’s old wharfs that the only business done from its docks was its own. Until fifteen years ago, the distillery was a miniature city unto itself (complete with its Victorian cobblestones and cramped walkways) that churned out whiskey, rum, and during WWII, acetone. I’d never met anyone who’d been behind its locked gates, and tucked in behind the monstrosity of the Gardiner Expressway, it was all but inaccessible. But it was industrious for an invisible, unloved corner of the city: It was still putting out rum when it closed in 1990.

  Some smart business types thought it might make a decent tourist destination and started cleaning it up a few years after it shut its doors. I got in on the ground floor for what was a lot of money five years ago, though now I couldn’t buy a chunk of c
obblestone to paint my name on for that kind of cash. I’ve since made back what this place cost me and I’ve parlayed its status as the original distillery bar into a couple of lucrative sidelines. In general, I’ve been lucky in business. And up until now, it seemed, in love too.

  Albrecht was meandering toward the bar where I was polishing glasses, getting ready for the lunch rush. It was 10 in the morning on an overcast September day. Bartenders are supposed to be good people-readers, but the truth is, you don’t need any skills to read a person who’s come into a bar to drink alone, and those are the people who like to talk. The movie cliché is wrong, though: Most of the people— men, usually—who sidle up to a bar to unburden themselves aren’t suffering from heartache. Half the conversational openers I hear are some variation on, “Fucking Leafs, eh?” and I can tell you that, after a while, all those suckers pining over the Stanley Cup or the World Series trophy make you hungry for a story about love. Just once I’d like some stubbled broken heart to sit down at my bar and say, “The day she walked into my life was the day my life ended.” Or something like that.

  My point here is that I had no idea what Albrecht was thinking, although I’m pretty sure he knew what I was thinking, since he was giving me time to notice him. I don’t know the first thing about cops, but I gather from watching movies that they can figure out a lot from your body language. I just stood there trying to polish glasses in as unguilty a way as possible, but for all I knew, the angle of my arm was telling him I’d been sleeping with his wife for nine years.

  He gave me a smile and a little wave when he saw me looking at him. “Nice place,” he said.

  “It’ll do.”

  “Mainly tourists?”

  I stared at him for a second. The small talk was supposed to show me he was in complete control. “It used to be,” I said finally, “but the locals have found it.” The sweat from my palm smeared the glass I was cleaning and I had to start over. “It’s about fifty-fifty now.”

  He nodded appreciatively, looking around a little more. “I live over by Queen and Bathurst,” he said. “I go into the Wheat Sheaf sometimes. But I work out of 51 Division, five hundred meters from here. You’d think I’d have had cause to come in before now.”

  “I guess we keep our noses clean,” I said.

  “I usually work nights, so you must. Or we would have met by now.” He pulled out a stool and sat, ran his fingertips over the old, burnished wood on the bar. He had massive, thick hands. I knew what he looked like from the pictures in his house, and I knew he was a big man, but in person he was considerably more imposing. There were a couple other surprising things about him too: His face was warm and his eyes soulful. He had a huge gourmand’s nose. If I hadn’t been on guard, I might have taken an instant liking to him. “This bar and the Wheat Sheaf,” he said, “they must be about the same vintage, eh?”

  “About that. 1830s or thereabout.”

  “I just love these old places,” he said. “Nobody really cares about them, though. If they’re in the way, down they come. Lucky this spot wasn’t of interest to anyone.”

  I had to smile. He was playing me perfectly. I put the glass into the overhead rack and took another one out of the rotary washer. I decided it was time for him to make his point. If I had any say in the matter, I wanted this over before there were customers to deal with. “Listen, officer,” I said, “the lunch rush is coming in soon. Is there anything I can help you with?”

  He seemed to shake the cobwebs out, like he just remembered he was on business, and drew a wallet out of his inside jacket pocket. He flipped his ID open to me. “Sorry, I slip into reveries I guess. Detective Inspector Leonard Albrecht,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’m not here on licensing business.”

  “I figured as much,” I replied, keeping my eye on him.

  “You’re Terry McEwan?” I nodded. “You got any unhappy ex-employees?” I thought about that for a minute. What the hell could one of my ex-employees have told Leonard Albrecht about where I went in my off hours? I said that there were none I was aware of. He opened his notebook. “Do you remember a Deborah Cooper?”

  “Yeah. She served tables here this summer. She was seasonal, you know? I hire them in June and cut them loose after Labor Day.” A glimmer of something began to surface in the back of my mind. “What did she say?”

  “Well, she came in last week to complain you were running an illegal after-hours club here.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is it true?”

  I tried not to show my pleasure at his line of questioning. How do you like that? I thought. Leonard Albrecht shows up in my bar not to blacken my eye for having an affair with his wife, but because he’s pulled duty to look into my underground activities. Someone up there had a very black sense of humor. “It depends what part you’re asking me about. The ‘illegal’ or the ‘after-hours.’”

  He tilted his head at me minutely, like a huge parrot. “From that I take it’s a yes to the after-hours part, but you’re of the opinion that you’re not doing anything wrong.”

  “It’s a private club, detective.”

  “You charge money?”

  “It pays the servers for their time.”

  “I see. And there’s nothing leftover for you. So you’re basically volunteering your time, right?”

  He had me there, but I couldn’t come up with something to counter him with. I was thinking of how I was going to tell Katherine all of this. You’re not going to fucking believe who walked into my bar this morning, was what I was already saying to her in my mind. I could see the dread and curiosity in her eyes, the way she’d say, NO! when I told her, like there wasn’t a chance I could be telling the truth. We’d be sitting on the couch, two glasses of wine on the coffee table in front of us, and I’d tell her and she’d slap me on the arm, her eyes wide— Get out!—and then she’d be laughing hysterically with her hand over her mouth. I heard her in my mind as if she were standing right there at the bar in front of me. Oh, how awful! Her mouth pursed in delighted horror. You poor, poor thing! I was almost of a mind to draw this out as long as I could.

  Except I had a problem now. Leonard Albrecht was real.

  “You still with me?” he said.

  “Sorry,” I replied. “Am I going to need a lawyer?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you’re straight with me or not.”

  I processed that for a moment and it dawned on me that if the man was as much a student of history as he’d said he was, he might be interested in what was below my bar for more than just procedural reasons. “This was a worker’s bar,” I said. “Mainly Irish. They opened it and ran it, but management told them what hours they could keep, what activities were allowed. I guess running a bar on the grounds of a distillery has its challenges.” Albrecht smiled. “Anyway, I guess some of them didn’t like being told their business. They secretly dug themselves a basement and they did what they liked down there.”

  “Which was what?” asked Albrecht.

  “Music, dancing. The occasional cockfight. And there was a boxing ring.”

  “That’s what she said.” He looked down at his notes. “Cooper. She said there was fighting.”

  “Is that the illegal part?”

  “Oh no, it’s all illegal. Selling liquor in an unlicensed room, holding a sports contest. Both are pretty bad, but the two of them together are really bad. You sell tickets to the bouts?”

  I saw Gillian and Henry, my lunch staff, come in through the side door. They shot me looks and disappeared into the kitchen. “We only have three or four fights a year.”

  “You sell tickets?”

  “Yeah,” I said, starting to think maybe I shouldn’t have felt so smug about Albrecht’s reason for visiting me. Maybe an accusation and a fat lip wouldn’t have been as bad as this was starting to look. “Listen, I didn’t really know—”

  “You knew,” he said. “Let’s not go down that road.” He stood up. “Sh
ow me.”

  “Is there any way we could do this when the bar’s a little quieter?”

  “Your people can handle the first rush. You’ve got other business. Let’s go.”

  When Alan Kravitz handed me the keys to the place, he held one of them up, a rusty, old-fashioned one. “There’s a little storage space under the bar, might be useful to you. Be careful, though, the floors are rotting and I don’t know how strong the beams are.”

  The first time I went down there, I brought my cook with me to see if he thought it would be a good place for a fridge. “Christ,” he’d said. “You could dry salami down here.”

  We’d walked through the small, dark, dusty room with two flashlights and a pair of long sticks, pushing crates aside with them. There was a disgusting stained cloth lining one of the walls, and I guess Kravitz hadn’t brought a stick with him when he first investigated because I used mine to pull the cloth away and found a door behind it. It lead in to an enormous room with a broken-down piano in it, a bar, a stage, and a tattered old boxing ring. There were some forty chairs arranged around the room. We’d shone our beams into the cold, lightless place and looked on it with genuine wonder. Under the bar was a log with a record of bar sales and admission fees and the like, and we saw that there hadn’t been a soul in that place for eighty years. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked the cook.

  “You’ll need another license,” he’d said.

  “Or not.”

  It took two years of secretly refurbishing the place to get it up to scratch. I tried to keep as much of the old grandeur as I could, but the piano had to be replaced and the boxing ring recovered, although the ropes had survived and so had two of the turnbuckles. If I could find anyone to fight in the place, they’d have the chance to get knocked silly against a turnbuckle that had dimmed the lights on some Irishman a hundred years earlier. Katherine had been the first person outside of the bar I’d shown the finished room to. “Wow,” she’d said. “I’m not the only thing you’re doing on the side.”