Toronto Noir Page 7

  “Do you know this Meerza?” asked Prem. He laid a clammy hand on Aziz’s arm. The knuckles bristled with hair. There was a time when Aziz would have taken that wrist between his fingers and snapped it like a twig. Instead, all he did now was resist the urge to yank his own arm away.

  Aziz looked at the photograph again, then up at Prem. “No,” he said. “I don’t know anyone named Meerza.”

  Prem and Lal sat there for a moment before Lal took back the photograph. “Okay.”

  “What is playing at the cinema, Shahrukh?” said Prem, letting go of Aziz.

  “At the Beach or at the Gerrard?”

  “The one just there.” Prem motioned with his hand down the street. The gesture traced Aziz’s walk home, past the tikka houses and stores of religious paraphernalia, past the Ulster Arms with its coterie of drunks smoking in the parking lot, streetcars clattering by in both directions.

  “The one that shows Hindi films,” said Lal.

  “The Gerrard?” The cinema had reopened recently after years of dereliction. Durani worked there as an usher. Aziz often saw him leaving for work in the starchy uniform, bow tie and all. “I think that place is closed.”

  “No,” said Prem. “Definitely not closed, Shahrukh. Is it, Lal?”

  “No,” said Lal.

  “No, we are quite certain that it is open. In fact, we have come all the way from India especially to make a visit there.”

  “We have heard the films are very good,” said Lal. “Firstclass Hindi films.”

  “Perhaps you are starring, Shahrukh?” Prem grinned. A single gray tooth appeared like a tombstone amidst a row of white. Aziz stared at it. It was a dead thing.

  Lal slapped the table with both hands. The smack made Aziz jump. It was a sudden, swift act of violence from the quiet man. “We will go to the cinema then,” said Lal. “What is playing, it does not matter. We will go for the songs.”

  The two men stood. “Finish your meal, Shahrukh,” said Prem. “Enjoy your meat.”

  They headed out into the night. The snow whirled into the restaurant on a blast of cold air as they left, and then the door closed. Through the window Aziz watched the two men zip their coats and turn their collars up against the snow, then move off down the street.

  Aziz turned back to his meal. He stirred the rogan josh with his fingertips. The lamb had gone cold.

  The man in 8B whom he knew as Durani answered Aziz’s knock in his shirtsleeves. He looked at Aziz without speaking, hiding most of his body behind the door. Aziz dripped melting snow onto the landing, his eyelashes trapping beads of frost.

  “There are two men looking for you,” said Aziz. “From Bombay.”

  Durani stared at Aziz. He said nothing.

  “They’ve gone to the cinema where you work. I thought you’d want to know.”

  Durani nodded. “Thank you,” he said. He went as though to close the door, then paused. “Will you come in for a moment?”

  The inside of the apartment hadn’t changed since Aziz had been there last. The bed sat in the center of the room, neatly made. Perhaps there were more books, spilling in piles around the place: Hindi books, English books, Urdu books, books in Arabic, even a few in French. Outside, the wind howled and rattled the windows in their frames.

  Durani had been making tea. He brought Aziz a cup, once again in the Kashmiri style. It was warm and sweet and made Aziz think of home, a place he likely had in common with this Durani. They sat cross-legged across from one another on the floor, teacups in their laps. Durani peered at Aziz, then set his teacup down and began digging through a stack of books. He produced a sheaf of typewritten papers stapled together, and passed it to Aziz.

  The papers were galleys of an article written for a prominent Canadian newsmagazine, authored by a certain S.B. Meerza and annotated with a few edits in blue ink. Accompanying the text was a picture of the man sitting across from Aziz.

  “Read,” said this man.

  What Aziz read was a profile of a certain highly reputable Bollywood actress—an actress he knew well and whose films he had enjoyed before moving to Toronto. Now he didn’t go to the cinema. He woke up, went to his job at the bread factory, had a meal, and then headed to his job at the ice rink. He came home late and slept. Little by little, he was saving money to bring his brother to Canada.

  This actress, the article explained, had recently achieved international prominence. She was a fixture now on TV entertainment programs otherwise specializing in Hollywood news, although she had yet to appear in an American movie. But she was on billboards and in magazine ads for perfumes and cosmetics in New York, London, Toronto, all heavy-lidded eyes and glistening lips. There was regular talk of her, even outside India, as “the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  The first few paragraphs detailed this increasing global fascination with the girl from Malabar Hill. Aziz was familiar with her story. Everyone was. But he could feel the article moving toward something else. There was a subtle irony to how her career was being explained. And the urgency on the face of the man opposite, the author—his tea untouched and going cold—only added to these suspicions.

  Sure enough, the article began to pose questions. How had it all happened so quickly? Why were international markets suddenly taking interest? India had been producing screen beauties for generations. There were countless other Bollywood starlets just as stunning, as talented, as charismatic. Why this one?

  And then things turned. The actress, claimed the article, had enlisted Mob help: Producers had been threatened, politicians bribed, corporations extorted. A murder led to another, which led to another, which resulted in all-out gang warfare on the streets of Bombay. The article linked the previous year’s communal riots to the actress’s growing success. A bomb had derailed a commuter train while she presented an award at a film festival in Italy, killing dozens.

  None of what the article discussed, Aziz knew, was anomalous in the Indian film industry. But glancing up occasionally at the man across from him—Durani, Meerza, whoever he was, huddled there on the floor in his empty apartment with his tea—he could see the consequences of trying to publish it in a North American publication, of smearing Bollywood’s great international hope. That it had never seen the newsstand spoke to the power of the Mob. All its author had left were a bed on the floor, a pile of books, and a galley copy of a piece that never was.

  The article ended with a description of the actress making an appearance at the Toronto Film Festival on the arm of a celebrity music producer. The reader was left in a blinding array of flashbulbs and glamour. Aziz flipped the pages back into order and handed the article to Meerza.

  “No,” the neighbor said, waving his hand. “You keep it.”

  Aziz paused. He didn’t want this thing, and the responsibility it represented. He was doing fine. “Are there other copies?”

  “No,” said Meerza. “They destroyed my computer and the magazine’s files were deleted. This is all that is left.”

  “I can’t take it,” said Aziz.

  “Please. They’ve found me.”

  “You can’t run? Or tell the police?”

  “These are goondas only. If I say anything about these, and even if police action is taken, more will come. Now that they have found me outside India I will be easy to track. Every move I make will be known.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “I will wait.”

  “Here?”

  “Where else? Perhaps they just want to talk to me, see how I am doing.” Meerza swept a hand around the apartment, sketching its emptiness with his fingers.

  Outside on the street the snow had stopped. The sky was still and purple. Aziz walked west along Gerrard, snow crunching and squeaking under his boots. In one pocket was Meerza’s article, folded into thirds. In the other was the knife. As a streetcar rattled past, Aziz wrapped his gloved fingers tightly around the handle, careful not to pop the blade.

  At the Gerrard Cinema he stopped. The marquee twinkled. It
cast a dome of yellow light onto the street. Aziz bought a ticket to the early show, which had started nearly an hour ago. The woman working told him this but he waved his hand: no matter. He wanted to see this picture. There was an actress in it who was important to Aziz.

  The cinema was dark save the band of light twirling out from the projector, silent save a sad violin and the rattle of the film threading from reel to reel. On screen, the famous Indian actress was praying silently before some sort of altar. It was night. The moonlight in the film was blue. Aziz stared at the screen for a moment, at the woman up there. Then he sat down at the end of an empty row near the door, looking around.

  Less than half the seats were occupied. People were scattered around the theater, mostly in groups of two. Aziz glanced from one pair of heads to the next: a woman and her son, two elderly Sikhs, a young couple with their arms around one another. But then, there they were. Prem and Lal were only four rows up, against the wall on the left side of the theater. There was a seat separating the two men, but it was definitely them—the shorn heads gave them away. Aziz fingered the article in his pocket with one hand and the knife with the other.

  The action in the film had moved to a battlefield. A handsome soldier was loading his gun while bombs exploded all around. Aziz watched as either Prem or Lal stood in the dark and shuffled his way up the aisle. He lowered his face as the hired thug walked by. The man had a mustache; it was Prem. Aziz waited until Prem had exited the theater, then slipped out of his seat.

  In the bathroom there was one stall, a sink, and a single urinal. The door to the stall was closed. Between it and the floor were jeans hiked to reveal mismatched socks: one blue, one black. Aziz leaned against the sink and unfolded the article from his pocket.

  “Last year’s communal violence that erupted on the streets of Bombay,” he read aloud, “can be directly attributed to the involvement of gangs in the film industry. The startling rise to the top of one actress, in particular, is irrevocably linked to an ongoing war between certain rival production studios and their respective Mob affiliations.”

  From the stall there was no sound. The feet didn’t move.

  Aziz continued: “North American audiences might be interested to know that the Indian actress whose ‘exotic’ look sells them cosmetics, soft drinks, and high fashion—the international face of Bollywood—has achieved prominence in her home country not by talent, or even looks, but by a methodically implemented strategy of extortion, blackmail, and even murder.”

  More silence from behind the stall door. Aziz flipped the pages until he found the passage he was looking for.

  “The efforts of Bombay’s police to curtail the rising violence have been compromised not only by organized crime syndicates, but also by the financial backers of the film industry, who pay off the city’s lawmakers to turn a blind eye to their activities. One officer who refused to be bribed was executed, as an example to his colleagues, in broad daylight on Jehu Beach, where he was walking with his wife and daughter.”

  Aziz lowered the article.

  “This was my brother,” he told the feet beneath the stall. “Our father was an officer in Kashmir, and when the troubles became too much, we moved south to Jammu, and my brother and I both enrolled in the academy. When we graduated, I stayed in Jammu. He went to Bombay.”

  The toilet flushed. Aziz tensed.

  But then nothing happened. The stall door didn’t open. The feet remained where they were. Aziz thought back to Prem’s hand on his arm, the hair on his knuckles and the touch of his skin, cold and wet. That dead gray tooth.

  A minute passed. Another. Still the feet remained motionless. Laying the article on the counter by the sink, Aziz pulled the knife from his pocket. He flicked the blade. The noise it made was crisp and clean. He breathed, he blinked, he stared at those mismatched socks underneath the stall door, and he waited.

  PART II

  THE MILD WEST

  WANTED CHILDREN

  BY HEATHER BIRRELL

  Bloor West Village

  Beth knew Paul would not leave her. It would be up to her.

  “Did you see this?” He cocked his head to the side, then skewed it aggressively toward his laptop, which he had perched on a pile of old newspapers on the kitchen table.

  “See what?” Beth refused to turn from her careful work at the counter. The naturopath had said six drops of the kava root tincture and three of the impatiens, star of Bethlehem, cherry plum, rock rose, and clematis. In spring water. She squeezed the top of the dropper delicately. Two drops fell, followed by a narrow quicksilver dribble. The precision of it all, the crucial measurements and ratios, the equilibrium and relative concentration and dilution—it was doing her in a bit. But the naturopath had said it would help her regain a sense of her place in the world, settle her nervous system, her overactive mind, and her frequently aroused nether regions. She would feel better, centered, the healer had promised.

  Beth smiled. The water clouded then cleared. She lifted the glass to her mouth, and let the mixture slide home. It tasted like moss, mold, cheap perfume sunk deep into cheaper upholstery. She gagged and grabbed the edge of the sink, then closed her eyes without thinking—as if shutting off one sense might dull another—and listened to Paul like he was bearing a message from a fleeting and inconsequential dream.

  “Beth, I’m serious.”

  She opened her eyes and looked out the window. It was summertime in Bloor West Village, and the purple finches, with their wine-speckled plumage, were regular visitors to the feeder. As if they’ve been dipped in raspberry juice, she remembered reading in a guidebook. The birds flitted and pecked, then retreated from a domineering grackle.

  Paul whistled through his teeth and Beth watched him sit back hard in his chair. “Check this out,” he said. Something had scared him a little, and it was this that finally drew Beth to the screen.

  It was an abstract, staged photo, something someone with too much studio time and grant money had cooked up. A black river with creatures rising sluggishly from its depths. Swamp monsters—perhaps it was a movie trailer? Beth shook her head. “So?”

  “It’s Cuyabeno,” Paul replied. “It’s your river, Beth.”

  The trip had been Paul’s idea. They’d been trying for two years to conceive, then stopped, then succeeded, then miscarried. Then there were too many options dangled before them, too many well-meaning, putty-faced friends at the door. Paul began to clear out corners in the basement; Beth took long walks in Etienne Brûlé Park. The park was a long strip of winding land on either side of the Humber River, one-time superhighway for the coureur de bois of the park’s name. Brûlé was only twenty-three when he became the first European to see Lake Ontario from the mouth of the Humber. What must he have been thinking as he stared out into that inland ocean, surrounded by his Huron Indian brothers? The fall of 1615: Toronto was nothing more than a carrying place, a spot to heave burdens onto strong backs and into hardy canoes. Yonge Street, longest street in the world, that broad boulevard of strip clubs, fast food, head shops, and hairdressing salons had nothing on the Humber in its heyday—explorers, missionaries, and traders vying for bewildered souls, the softest of fur pelts, the prospect of getting there first. Oh, it was romantic and incorrect, she knew, but when Beth visited the park she often thought of Brûlé, and would forego the two landscaped paths for the less manicured trail that ran right smack up against the river’s edge.

  The alternative was the commercial strip on Bloor where for weeks they attempted to distract themselves, buying crumbly, extravagantly priced cheeses from the new high-end deli, top of the line BC and Australian wines from the LCBO, and organic beef from the butcher. Their neighborhood was a town unto itself, the welcome signs and the real estate pages proclaimed, and it did seem its own little satellite village, not quite suburb, but not entirely of the city either. Quaint, functional, and quietly fantastical, it had an air of the hobbit—hobbit with Eastern European roots, with lingering Ukrainian bakeries and speci
alty shops. Even the homeless folk tipped their hats with one hand while they held out the other for change. The buskers strummed mournful Ukrainian folk tunes on battered guitars, and on Sundays the loudspeaker at Saint Pius X played stately choral music, designed, it seemed, to chide and cajole the wayward. God was already smiling on Bloor West Village; there was no pressing need for prayer.

  And on every street corner and tidy parkette, Beth spotted the strollers. For her they were little buggies of anguish—their sturdy wheels and bright utilitarian fabric, their multitude of clipped-on accessories and soft, cushioned interiors. She wanted to puncture their tires, spray paint their protective sides, slash their UV-blocking visors. Paul knew this, he saw this, and he said, “Let’s go away. Somewhere where people don’t think this way, the way we think.”

  Beth had nodded, semi-entranced by Paul’s ability to imagine quick fixes and to act on them with a kind of jittery intensity. When he suggested Ecuador, the emerald light and mercurial moisture of the rain forest, she had shrugged then wondered sheepishly, “Isn’t it a bit, I dunno, cliché?”

  “It won’t be cliché for long,” he said grimly. “It will be gone.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. “It’s like we’re peering in at a dying, caged animal, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” said Paul in a way that suggested he hated himself, “there is a way of helping.”

  He looked like he wanted to stick forks in his eyes, so Beth agreed to go. Paul had a friend who had been through the region with an NGO. The friend gave them tips and details: what to bring, whether to tip or haggle, which immunizations to endure and delicacies to sample. They were to spend two weeks in the Amazon basin, in Cuyabeno National Park.

  The trip had been literally breathtaking, fourteen days and nights where Beth spent whole minutes trying to teach herself to breathe again. Was it the humidity or simply the intensity? They called it the world’s pharmacy, an Eden: sweet balm and scourge, the innocence and viscera of new beginnings. But it was also something more sinister, something cloying and stealthy. To say it was unlike anything Beth had ever experienced might have been inaccurate—there were woods in northern Ontario whose fog of blackflies and sneering impenetrability came close, maybe. But where the native people of her northern province had been decimated by white man’s guilt, these jungle lands were still inhabited by their original denizens—men and women with wide implacable faces and smooth, rubbery skin who clambered up the banks of the river with ease, clutching plastic jugs of gasoline, babies strapped to their backs with long strips of cloth.