Toronto Noir Read online

  Magda finishes the dishes and lays the dishcloth over the tap to dry. She walks over and puts her arms around me from behind. I’m not expecting it, and I shiver a little. She holds me closer and rests her head on the back of my neck. I start to pull away, but then I wonder if she’s trying to hear the phone. I don’t move.

  “Look,” I say. “I’m tired. What do I need to do to make you go away so I can think this through?”

  “Pay for her. $400 for tonight, and $200 every night after that.”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re a smart dyke.”

  “Yeah. So how would you like the money? I don’t suppose you take PayPal?”

  “You’ll be passing through Union Station in the morning?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Go to the pay phones nearest the digital platform sign at 8:30 a.m., all right? Bring the cash in a plain envelope and leave it underneath the third phone, then just walk away. I’ll be watching you. If it’s not the right amount, I’ll drive straight to your place and wait for you to come home. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice doing business with you, Chris. Enjoy Magda tonight. Just pay extra in the envelope if you’re not through with her. If you misplace the merchandise and she goes AWOL, though, you’re responsible for the full price of the goods, got it?”

  “And how much is that?”

  “Ten thousand dollars, at least, and that’s if I give you a discount.”

  I hang up. Magda unwraps her arms and looks at me, a question in her eyes. I get the laptop and tell her that it’s okay, but just for tonight. She reads the translation, eyes bright. She pulls on my hands and giggles. I tell her that I’m tired and need to go to bed. She puts her hands on my waist and pulls me into a long hug. Then I go to my room with the laptop and shut the door. I plan on researching a place that will help Magda, but I’m too tired to think. I scrunch the duvet up around my ears and fall asleep.

  I pick up the cash and do the drop, just as comb-over said. Then I pretend to leave the station, but do a U-turn on Front Street and come back down. I watch the pay phone from behind one of the pillars. A redhead in a Hooters T-shirt and jeans is on the phone. One hand on the receiver, she reaches under the box and slips the envelope into her purse. Is that what Magda was up to yesterday? I shake the thought out of my head. If that were the case, why should she run away?

  I’d put $600 in the envelope, to buy us time. I had the savings, and it wouldn’t even pinch. She was still asleep when I left the house this morning. I poked my head into the guestroom. Her full lips were parted, eyelids soft, her hair arranged in spokes, like rays of the sun, over her pillow. I left a loaf of bread on the counter, an econo-sized jar of peanut butter and my phone number at work scribbled on a pad, just in case.

  After work, I unlock the door and find her sprawled on the sofa with a bag of nacho chips and the remote. More makeover shows. She’s wearing another oversized T-shirt of mine from the ’80s. Relax, it says, in bold caps. She stands up and gives me a kiss on the cheek.

  “Hi, Chris!” she says cheerily. “Laptop?”

  I take it out of my briefcase and open it up. She writes,

  —How was your day?

  After dinner, we curl up on the sofa again, Mag at one end, me on the other. We’ve hit on black gold—a marathon of home improvement shows. Mag giggles when they take a sledgehammer to the walls. During a commercial break, she says my name. I look over. She splits her legs apart, lifting her T-shirt. No panties. My face goes hot. I stand up and walk into the kitchen. She follows behind. The laptop is on the counter. I type,

  —I am very tired. I am going to bed.

  —I arrive to your bed too?

  I shake my head.

  The phone rings at midnight again. “I hope you enjoyed yourself,” comb-over sneers. “Now you know the drill. You want her for another night? Just leave the money there, same time, same place. If not, I expect Magda to be standing there instead. Got it?”

  “And what if I need to phone you?” I say. “If there’s some kind of problem?”

  “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

  “Hello?”

  I turn out the light and settle into my pillow. This whole charade could cost me a fair wad of cash. I’m drifting off again, when I hear the latch to my bedroom door click. I reach for the light. It’s Magda. She’s leaning up against the doorframe, her blond hair tussled.

  “You need something?” I say. “You okay?”

  She walks over to the bed and climbs in.

  “Fine,” I say, “But no funny stuff.”

  I put out the light. I’m too tired to argue anyway. I turn my back to her and fall asleep.

  I drop the money off and walk the same loop as before. It’s picked up by the same girl, same shtick with the telephone. I wonder what Magda is doing in my apartment. I should get another set of keys made if she’s going to be staying awhile. At least then she could go out. I explained to her yesterday how the auto-lock works. If she leaves, she won’t be able to get back in. She didn’t seem to mind. She’s probably sleeping the day away. I imagine she has a lot of zeds to catch up on.

  The phone rings at my desk at noon. “So, you want her until Friday, but what about the weekend?” says comb-over. “I’ll need a bigger wad tomorrow, in that case. It’s Thursday today, you dig?”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “You must think I’m a bloody nincompoop. So, what’s your deal?”

  “How much for the weekend?”

  “A grand.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “And how much for Magda, you know, outright?”

  “Fifteen grand.”

  “It was ten grand before.”

  “You don’t qualify for the discount.”

  “Call me back,” I say. “In an hour. I need to think.”

  I hang up the phone and put my head on my desk.

  It’s not the money. I have the money. I have over forty grand saved up for the condo I didn’t have to buy. And hell, I could probably get her for ten, if I haggle. Maybe that’s what I should do. I’ll just haggle for ten, and then comb-over will be out of my hair and I can think about this properly. I’m out a grand this week already, so it’s not like the price isn’t fair. What’s a few grand for a person’s freedom? If I buy Magda then I can do what I like. I can get her a key made, and we can just move on with our lives.

  I practice my lines until comb-over calls back. I deliver them quickly, in a tough-girl voice: “I’ll give you ten for her, not a penny more, and then you gotta leave us alone.”

  “Make it twelve and you’ve got a deal.”

  “Fine, twelve,” I say. “How and where do you want it?”

  “Same time, same place. Stand there with a briefcase full of cash and a phone in your ear. When my girl comes and picks up the receiver next to yours, you put the briefcase down by her feet. She’ll pick it up straight away, then you say goodbye into the phone and fuck off.”

  “Done.”

  “Nice doing business with you, Chris,” comb-over coos. “You’re a filthy dyke, but I like you.”

  I’m still shivering when I get home. She must see the look on my face, because she turns off the tube and comes right over. The bank asked some pretty awkward questions, but I explained that I owed my parents some cash. It was a convoluted story, but the young thing behind the till handed it over.

  “It’s gonna be all right now,” I say, putting a hand on her shoulder. She points to the laptop. I write that I’m buying her from the bad man. I click Translate. She shakes her head, types:

  —Again?

  I guess the translation isn’t going through right, so I try another wording. She seems to get me this time, because she puts her arms around me and buries her face in my neck. I start to shiver more violently and she grips me tightly. Then she pulls away and kisses me on the mouth, but I can hardly feel it. My lips are dry and there’s a fever of blood in my
ears. She takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom. I sit down on the edge of the bed. Magda kneels on the floor. She lifts my left foot, slipping off my shoe. I lie back on the bed. She pulls off my sock and runs a finger along the sole of my foot. I quiver. Then she starts massaging my ankle. Her hands run up and down my legs, under my trousers. She stops and I look up in time to see her pull off her T-shirt. Her body is thicker than I’d imagined, but perfect. By the time she unbuttons my fly, I have no will to resist her. All I can do is let go.

  I wake up happy, Magda breathing deeply beside me. I kiss her forehead and slip out of bed without waking her. My laptop under one arm, briefcase of cash in my hand, I’m actually whistling as I board the train. Whistling! The drop is easy. I start shivering when I get to the pay phone, but then I revisit last night, and that settles it. I set the briefcase down next to the redhead. She picks it up, and I say goodbye to the dial tone and hang up the phone. I don’t bother doing the U-turn today.

  Comb-over rings at noon. “This is just a courtesy call,” he says. “She’s yours. Enjoy the merchandise.”

  “Don’t call here ever again,” I say, relishing the hard shape of the words. I hang up first this time.

  After the call, I swing by Darrin’s desk. “You’ve been quiet since the presentation, Chris,” he says. “Thought you’d be asspompous with success. Everything all right?”

  “Little under the weather,” I say. “Keep shivering. Think I’ve caught a fever-flu. Mind if I duck out early?”

  “Knock yourself out. We can live without you today.”

  “Thanks, man,” I say, pulling a listless face. “Appreciate it.”

  “No sweat. Just be in shape by Monday, all right?”

  “You bet.”

  I get to the station in time for the 1:43. The pay phone kiosk is empty. A kid walks by and checks all the change slots with his finger.

  On the train, I think about Magda. Maybe I should take her shopping for some new clothes. We could go to the grocery store too. I’ve never asked her what she likes to eat, just cooked her what I had in the fridge. What if she hates fish?

  I reach the condo by 2:30. I call the elevator, but I can’t wait, so I take the stairs. I think of what to type into the laptop.

  You’re free, I’ll type. I’ve set you free! What do you want to do now?

  I unlock the door, already picturing her on the sofa, an oversized T-shirt cinched high on her thighs. What will we do tonight?

  But she’s not there. I look for a note, but there’s no sign of one.

  I should have known better.

  PART IV

  FLATLAND FLATLINE

  TOM

  BY ANDREW PYPER

  Queen West

  She moved to Toronto from one of the smaller cities a couple hours west along the 401, a place with a borrowed, European name that embarrassed her, so that now when people ask where she’s from she shrinks it in her mind until it’s only a country crossroads, a pair of stop signs with white crosses in the ditch to tally the fatal car accidents, and answers, “It’s so tiny. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

  The only thing she’s ever done for money is serve men drinks in bars. Just men, because the bars have always been strip bars. “It’s easier,” she explains whenever it is suggested she wait tables in a proper restaurant instead. By easier she means there are rules in strip bars she has come to depend on. The men keep their eyes on the dancers, their hands to themselves, and tip foolishly well. No description of the chef’s special features, no flirty walk through the wine list recommendations. No female, diamond-necklaced customers giving her looks meant to remind her that what she is doing now is all she is. Will ever be.

  She is twenty-six years old.

  In moving to the city, she’d planned on doing something else. She wasn’t sure what. They shot a lot of movies in Toronto. Could there be a job for her on set? Wardrobe? Makeup? Fetching the director’s cappuccino? Whenever she walked by a movie shoot on her way to work, most of the people seemed to be standing around drinking coffee, or mumbling into walkie-talkies, or stifling yawns against the backs of their hands. That was moviemaking? She could do that.

  But what was she doing? What employment was she walking to as she passed these boring yet still somehow glamorous location shoots? She was on her way to serve men drinks in a strip bar.

  Her five nights a week at For Your Eyes Only is temporary. A cash grab to pay for the time required to settle in, make some connections. Soon she’ll quit. Soon, her real Toronto life will begin. This is what she told herself, and what she mostly believed.

  In those moments when doubt crept in—when she felt she might as well be back in that smaller city with the name she was too embarrassed to say aloud—she had one consolation to return to. She may be a strip bar waitress, but she wasn’t a stripper. She’d been asked many times and always refused. This was her sustaining source of pride, of identity. She wasn’t a woman who showed her body for money. Not looked at. Not an object.

  When she delivered trays of beer and rye-and-gingers to men in the places she worked in, they rarely made eye contact. Sometimes this was because they were absorbed in the entertainments on offer, but mostly because, for them, she wasn’t there. It was skin they wanted, the uninterrupted study of hidden parts, and in that room—windowless, overpriced, smelling of baby oil—they were freely allowed to watch. It made her feel invisible.

  But what if you started feeling invisible all the time? Not just in strip bars, but on the street, standing before the bathroom mirror? Her answer was to move to Toronto, rent a studio apartment on Queen West with a back alley entrance, join the millions of others pursuing fame, breakthroughs, love, matters of real importance.

  So far it hadn’t helped. If anything, the city had only perfected her invisibility. There were so many more people not to notice her. So many more shared looks or Good mornings or acknowledging smiles that didn’t occur.

  It’s because of this that, when his face appeared at her window, she thinks he is someone she knows. After only three weeks in Toronto she’s learned that strangers keep their eyes to themselves.

  Her apartment—just a room, really, with a fridge-sized toilet and kitchenette peppered with mouse turds—has only one window. She kids herself that she chose the place for the view. A brick wall, ten feet away on the other side of the alley, plastered with graffiti tags and a pleading, unheeded homeowner’s message: Hobos! Please don’t poo here! This is the small square of world she can see from her mattress on the floor. It is ugly. But she’s always thought the truly big cities, the real ones, are meant to be ugly. It is the sort of apartment and the sort of view that, down the line, she will look back on as Where She Started From. She reminds herself not to replace “shit” for “poo” in the retelling.

  It is lying on this mattress, staring through this window after a slow Tuesday at For Your Eyes Only, that she sees him. The top of his head at first. And then, as he rises higher, the whole of his face. Because she is almost asleep, she spends some moments trying to fix him in her mind as an introduction to a dream. The pause allows her to get a good look at him. And for him to see her too. Only later will she realize that he would have noticed that her eyes were open, her hand inches from her phone, and that this hadn’t stopped him from looking.

  Of the different kinds of men who visit strip clubs, she would guess the man at the window belonged to the Ones Who Don’t Want to Be Here. Men forced to entertain visiting business associates, a shy friend dragged along to a stag party. These men watch the dancers too, but in the way the visitors to the AGO studied the Rothkos and Moores and Carrs. They are art appreciators, not perverts. This was what they intend to convey with their thoughtful squints, their chins held in their palms.

  Yet here this man is, staring at her in her bed. And she isn’t art. She is a woman wearing nothing but bikini underwear (it is hot, the room is always hot). And he is invading her privacy. He is breaking the law. He is a creep.

  Even as
she sits straight and pulls the sheet up to cover her breasts, she takes note of his features for the composite sketch the police will ask her to help make of him when she calls this in. White. Thirties. Prematurely gray hair cut preppily short. A face belonging to someone who, if he were to open the door for her or lend a hand lugging her groceries onto the streetcar, she’d think, There goes the last of the good guys. Good with kids, dependable, few vices, if any. A little sexy, but not dangerously so, not someone who’d have to hurt you to excite you. A man to marry if you were lucky.

  And money. His face says money. Born with it, educated to make more of it, would always have it. She’d never gone out with anyone for whom these things weren’t an issue. She’d never gone out with anyone like him.

  She picks up the phone. Starts dialing 911. The face falls away.

  Leaning out the window, she hears him round the corner of her building, but doesn’t catch sight of him. Just the pebbly scrape of his leather-soled steps. And below her window the three-legged chair he’d pulled out of the garbage to stand on.

  She doesn’t press the last digit that would bring this moment to official attention. Instead she turns the phone off, puts on a T-shirt, and returns to lie on her mattress. She’s scared. But there is a prickling sweat on her forehead and neck that has nothing to do with fear. The man at the window reminded her that she is not actually invisible. And with visibility has come a rush of blood to her extremities, a lead weight in her limbs. She’s so heavily, uncomfortably alive-feeling that, for a time, she’s not sure she can move.

  She doesn’t call the police that night, or the next morning, or at any other of the hundred points over the twenty-four hours that follow the Peeping Tom’s visit when she’s told herself, I have to do something. Because it runs against what she regards as her plucky, take-no-shit nature, she wonders why she doesn’t. The theory she tries to situate at the top of possibilities is that she has deemed the guy as nonthreatening, a corporate frat boy she can easily handle if he ever returns. He hadn’t looked like a rapist (though she knows better than to judge these things on looks alone). But this isn’t the reason she doesn’t call the police. Nor is it because she is curious about him, or suspects her physical description wouldn’t be enough to go on, or that his watching her turned her on. It’s because she thought this was the sort of incident one experienced in the city. Complaint wasn’t part of the bargain. A cheap apartment off a crack-pipe-and-needle alley, a neighborhood known for its human stew of drugs and punks and artists and out-patients off their meds: A face at her window is the least she should expect living here.