The Higher the Monkey Climbs

by Bruce Geddes

  In his chair, pointing and directing, Forzante wore summery colours, a white linen shirt, cream coloured trousers, a wide-brimmed straw hat with a light blue band. Surrounded by so many trees, by so much space, he seemed smaller than on the night of the party. I approached him slowly.

  “I know why you’re here,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of balls, thinking I had something to do with Langlois disappearing.”

  How? Maybe he had tapped my phone. Maybe someone in the restaurant overheard the conversation with Drew. Maybe Drew herself had given him a head’s up. Maybe it was a logical guess. Confused, I found my resolve beginning to stagger.

  “I just hoped you might have heard something.”

  “We’re not thugs here, Tricky. You think Tony Langlois matters to me?”

  “He might.”

  “Get your head out of your ass.”

  “I’m just trying to find out what happened to him.”

  “What do you care? Twenty-five years you don’t give a shit. Now, all of a sudden, you’re his guardian fucking angel.”

  “He asked for my help, Al.”

  “Some cousin you are. I know exactly who you care about.”

  “I’m here aren’t I?”

  “You’re like a fucking politician, Tricky. When a new building goes up, you’re there waving the golden shovel to make the first dig and then you’re there again when it’s done with a pair of golden scissors to cut the ribbon. Meanwhile, the ­construction guys are busting their backs and hands, sucking in concrete dust, freezing their asses off, making sure all the real work gets done.”

  “If you know anything, I’d like to hear it.”

  “Why? What good does it do you? You find out where Langlois is hiding, you bring him back, they toss him in the clink. Will that make you feel better? Then you can go back to Toronto and fill out government forms for Mexican engineers. Oh, no, wait. You lost that gig, didn’t you. You want something to drink?”

  With a shaky hand, Forzante summoned the maid, who was standing ready for the signal near the back door. He sighed to steady himself. “On a day like this, I like a little bourbon on ice. There’s beer, too. Whatever you feel like.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “You look like you could use one.”

  “I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.”

  “Right. You have to organize the search party. Don’t bother. When the UCF kills a mook, we fit him for cement shoes and toss him from the bridge. Hey, Tricky: Tony Langlois swims with the fishes.”

  Forzante started to laugh at his joke. The gardener raised his head from his work and smiled, timidly leaning on the handle of a spade, though I was certain he had not heard the joke. Then Forzante’s laughter shortened, dipping deeper into his throat until he was coughing, heaving loud and cracking. He struggled to keep his hand in front of his mouth, it swung wild with each convulsion. His face reddened, his eyes clenched shut, tears squeezed from the corners. The loose parts on the wheelchair rattled with his spasms. Bits of white and yellow phlegm flew from his mouth.

  “Are you okay?” I asked placing a hand on the old man’s back. “What can I do?” The gardener stopped his work. A man came running from the house, hauling a breathing mask connected by a tube to a clear bag. He shoved me aside and flung Forzante’s straw hat from his head to the lawn and then wrapped the mask around his face, snapping the elastic against Forzante’s thick head. Though apologetic, he did not pause in his work; it was a job he had performed before. He squeezed the bag, slowly, with fingers spread wide, releasing a spray into the mask. Forzante sucked in the aerosol two then three times and the coughing slowed and then stopped.

  “Just breathe, sir. Nice and easy.” I recognized Forzante’s nurse as the man with the Blackberry.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked when Forzante seemed to be breathing normally.

  “I don’t discuss Mr. Forzante’s health,” the man said.

  We were silent for a minute, waiting, half expecting things to get worse. Then the natural pale colour returned to his face and Forzante slapped the mask off his head. The man stooped to retrieve it, gathering the whole contraption in his arms.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Leonard,” he said. “The fluid builds up in the lungs, is all. A consequence of the chair. Leonard here thinks it’s a state secret. Jesus, but it takes a lot out of me.”

  “I’ll be in the house if you need anything else,” Leonard said. He scooted back up the stairs, two steps at a time.

  “Leonard wants to keep me alive forever,” Forzante said. “He says we have important work to do.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “What makes you say so?”

  “Your speech at the party.”

  “Well, that,” he said. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “That was a bit of a show. But I’m satisfied with the way things have turned out. I could die happily right now. Leonard doesn’t see it my way, though. He’s always rushing around saving my life.”

  “You’re lucky to have him around,” I said.

  “Lucky? Do you know what we pay him? He’s like a mother the way he overreacts,” Forzante said. “But at least he’s loyal.”

  He paused and used his index finger to wipe a stray drop of spittle from the side of his mouth and then contemplated the smear on his finger, as though it would tell him something.

  “I always appreciated loyalty,” he said. “I didn’t always get it.”

  I tried to slow my heart by returning to the deck to retrieve a chair from a set of eight encircling a large table. I sat down near Forzante, my head slightly below his and swept my hands across my lap, trying to straighten the material. A pair of squirrels, one chasing the other, raced across the lawn in front of us, disappearing into the foliage.

  “Are you talking about my father and his plans for a takeover?”

  “I was hoping you’d have never heard about that.” He said so like he was about to tell me the truth about Santa Claus.

  “I’d like to hear your side,” I said.

  “You’ve got some sense of fairness.”

  I waited. Forzante sighed. Somewhere in his chest, liquid gurgled.

  “Well, it seems that your father had some different ideas about the union’s future,” he said. “About the direction we needed to go to remain relevant. I don’t know. Maybe he was right. But this I do know: he should have come to me first.”

  “You think you would have listened?”

  “I was always ready to listen to new ideas,” he said.

  “Usually,” he said. “As long as our people came out better.”

  “Often, I would listen,” he said.

  And then, “I suppose I could have done better at that, too.”

  “You think that’s why my father wanted to take over?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “You think there was any other reason?”

  “Well, there’s power, too. There’s always that. I loved your father like a brother. But he was a slippery bastard, I could tell that from the start. We had a good thing going. We had influence. We were both making good dough. So were the guys at the WAW. Sure, I made more than him, and got to meet all the hotshots, some other perks, but I was the President. I founded the thing. He wanted more. He got greedy. Forgive me for saying so, but you asked.”

  I brought my hands together. My head felt full and unbalanced.

  Forzante continued. “It damn near broke my heart when I learned what he was up to. One morning, I get a call from Jimmy Numbnuts over there at the WAW, I don’t remember his name, and he wants to know when we’re sitting down to finalize things. ‘Finalize?’ I say. ‘Blow me!’ I say. ‘Why in Jesus’ name would I have anything to finalize with you?’ So I hang up and I ask around and nobody’s heard anything. Frances Saunders thinks I’m cracked. Wally Bonk tells me
to calm down. I slug him one, that little shit. Not hard, but you know. I told him I was sorry later but he still sued me, the fuck. I call Jimmy Numbnuts back and he explains that good, old Gordie McKitrick has been conducting secret negotiations behind my back, looking to divide the country with the WAW, put an end to competing with them, and sell out everything we’ve been working for thirty something years.”

  “You must have been angry,” I said.

  “I still don’t believe what Numbnuts is telling me so I head right for Gord’s office and I start ripping through his drawers and his files, the guy kept records of everything. Nothing there. So I go over to Aberdeen and they start going through his office at home. I told your mother it was some tax forms we were looking for, the poor suffering woman. I’m in there for an hour before I think to look under the desk blotter and there it is, a thin file. His whole plan for life after your Uncle Al. His new executive. Who’s in. Who’s out. Peace with the WAW. The kind of clout they’d have with management, the deals he’d secure. Drafts of agreements with lines crossed out and written over three and four times. It was all there. There was no denying it. Jesus, Tricky, can you imagine? After everything!”

  “I have trouble believing it myself.”

  “Believe it. It’s true.”

  “I have trouble accepting it, then.”

  “That’s something different altogether, isn’t it.”

  I was waiting for more, I wanted Forzante to continue, but he seemed finished.

  “And then?” I said, moving to the edge of chair. “What did you do then?”

  “I don’t know. I was just sick. Back in my office, I told my girl to cancel my appointments and hold the calls. Then I called for a quart of Special Old and poured it down my throat. Then I cried like a Frenchman.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Maybe I swore some too. No, I definitely did. You can count on it. I had all of his conspirators fired. No questions asked.”

  “But, Al,” I said, leaning closer, my lips not far from his ear. “How’d you get even?”

  Forzante, tears pooling at the rim of his eyes, blinked several times and turned his face to me, the look of surprise genuine. “Even? How could I get even? Your father was two weeks in the ground. You don’t get even with a corpse.”

  It didn’t seem possible.

  With what Forzante knew about me, Inés, my mother, everything that he knew, the ways he had of knowing. It didn’t at all seem possible.

  “He was already dead when you found out about the takeover?”

  “Two weeks gone. I’m telling you, it still kills me to think about it. Plus I had to pay that pussy Bonk twenty grand. It was union money, but still.”

  He didn’t know. He really didn’t know.

  All I would need to do is check court records for a civil suit, Wally Bonk, Plaintiff, v. Allistair Forzante, Defendant. The details of the punch, the date, a sworn affidavit from the doctor who treated Bonk, it would be there, notarized, dated more than two weeks after Gord’s death. Even for a man with Forzante’s resources, it seemed entirely unlikely that a punch to an employee’s face was designed in the moment to serve as an alibi for ­murder.

  Still, whether covering the bases or still simply trying to understand, I asked: “So you didn’t know about Gord’s plans until after he was killed?”

  “I just said so. That’s why the WAW guy called me. He ­figured I was a part of it all along. He didn’t realize Gord was working behind my back. I don’t like saying this, Tricky, it does me no good, but I can’t stand to think what would have happened if your father hadn’t died. What would have happened if he’d lived to fight the battle he knew would come. Maybe it was better that he went when he did. Not that it was fortunate. I don’t mean to reduce your loss to a business transaction. But I think of what it would have done and sometimes I don’t know what to think. I don’t fight clean, Tricky. You probably know that.”

  We watched the gardener shovel mounds of peat around a freshly planted shrub, patting black soil with the flat of the blade, then more finely with the sole of his boot. He was working efficiently, showing his experience. I’ve always admired the skilled specialist. How couldn’t you? Their worlds seem so neatly contained, everything in them so knowable.

  “Where’s that girl with my bourbon?” Forzante said, twisting to look towards the house.

  “I’ll go find out.”

  I walked heavily across the lawn and dragged my feet on the stone patio. In the kitchen, the maid was already dropping ice into a heavy glass, one cube at a time, as though Forzante had given her specific instructions about the ideal shape and size. I leaned against the counter, the marble cold against my back. The complicated details were beginning to unravel, truth decoupled from history. I thought about my father and the lies that had sustained me. Maybe Tony understood the lie. That the only reason we acknowledged each other was this common notion that my father was a hero, and now that the illusion was shattered for me, my loyalty not so blind to the truth, we would no longer have any of that in common. What should have ended that night on the steps of St. Andrew’s Church Hall would finally be extinguished. Maybe that was the crow’s omen. But as long as Forzante got hurt, as long as he continued to fight Gord’s fight, that was okay with Tony. And maybe that was why he was gone now, thinking that through his mysterious disappearance he was granting a favour to Gord.

  I never really gave Tony much credit for his intelligence. I think I was wrong there.

  I thought I was figuring things out. I was suddenly aware that I no longer depended on anyone for protection—neither Tony nor Gord. That was good. But it also meant that I was alone. There are consequences, strings of them, to what we choose to believe or not believe and I don’t know if Tony realized this, if only because he had never allowed himself to make the choice.

  Fastidious Leonard appeared beside me, poking the screen of his Blackberry as though testing a steak for doneness.

  “It’s nearly time for Mr. Forzante’s nap.”

  “He hasn’t had his drink yet.”

  I looked through the kitchen window. Forzante had taken off the straw hat and fanned at his face. His silver hair was shorn at the back, a squared military cut. One hand fell to the side, his fingers steadied themselves by weaving into the spokes of the wheel. The gardener approached with a flat of small flowers. Forzante selected from the tray and pointed to the places he wanted them planted.

  “He doesn’t need the drink. He needs the nap.”

  “Still, he asked me to bring the drink. Those were my orders.”

  Sniffing, Leonard shoved his Blackberry into a holster clipped to his belt. “Please don’t stay long,” he said. “Mr. Forzante has a meeting with the mayor later this afternoon. We need to get him dressed.”

  I brought the bourbon to the garden, the ice rattling in the glass.

  I shook Forzante’s hand—what else could I do?—and told him that I had to be going.

  “If I hear anything about Tony, I’ll let you know,” Forzante said.

  “I appreciate it.”

  “You do what you think is right in this world. It gets sorted out in the end,” Forzante said. “But you know what, Tricky? About Tony. One way or the other, it probably won’t be good news.”

  I pushed my teeth into my lower lip. “I know,” I said. “I’ll make sure Leonard has my numbers.”

  Forzante laughed weakly. “Don’t worry. He knows how to get in touch with you.”

  “Of course he does.”

  Not yet ready to leave, I remained planted there while Forzante sipped his bourbon. “And about Gord,” I said. “Jesus, Al. I don’t know what to say. Should I apologize? I feel like I should apologize.”

  “Apologize?

  “For not trusting you,” I said. “Also, I guess, for my father.”

  Forzante swallowed and shrugged. “Aft
er a few years you’ll get to be philosophical about the whole thing. We’re all human. I can’t stand to think about it, but in the end, it was just politics. He wasn’t an evil man. You did okay. Your mother is good. He was no angel either, but none of us is.”

  Out of Forzante’s drive, I glided a block north, then half a block west, and then parked the car on the street beside Clarence Krull’s old mansion. After Krull’s widow was unable to sell, she donated the place to the Wanstead Historical Society, who rented its ballrooms for wedding receptions, charity bingos, and high school proms, the marble bathtubs stripped away to make room for rows of urinals. A dozen elderly women, dressed in summer dresses and floppy hats, clutching hand bags or leaning on canes, waited on the lawn as a photographer arranged them for a group shot. Some of them smoked, satisfying cravings after a long event inside the house. The photographer waited for the cigarettes to vanish before demanding their attention. I turned the ignition off and watched as the women wound smiles around their faces, standing a little taller against the bends of age. In the heating car, I thought of Tony’s suitcase in the trunk and with the lack of sleep and everything that was happening, I began to feel a little sick.

  36

  The following weekend, using Sagipa’s emptied bedroom, I passed the two days with the contents of Tony’s blue canvas suitcase. Arranging the bits of paper in small piles from wall to wall, cataloguing according to subject and then document type, cross referencing by date and place, I tried to make sense of the information it contained.

  Some pages were marked with lucid thoughts, a well-constructed case against Forzante built on the weight of details. Tony had safety reports on Gord’s Krull Monte Cristo that showed its softer points. He had the specs on the GMC bus that hit the car and a set of index cards, each with facts about the bus driver, the man who had killed Gord. His name was Robbie Fitzgerald. Born on May 20, 1955, Robert Harold Fitzgerald would have been 28 at the time, making him the second youngest bus driver on the Wanstead Transit payroll. He measured 5’9, weighed 166 pounds, wore a size 8½ shoe, and required eyeglasses to drive, especially at night. He obtained his licence in 1977 and was hired that year part-time. Within six months, he was full-time, ‘early by WT standards’, Tony noted.