by Bruce Geddes
In a separate notebook he had points scribbled during interviews with people who knew Robbie. The bartender at the Dominion Tavern reported that he was a regular but never had more than two or three drinks before leaving. He was happy in his home life, as far as the bartender knew: a wife, two young children, the mother-in-law in the basement suite. There were other cards with other facts, their relevance less obvious. His Grade Seven French teacher alleged that she could not recall a student named Robbie Fitzgerald. In the margin of his own crumpled notes, Tony had written ‘SHE KNOWS SOMETHING!!!’ and underlined it several times, pressing so hard that the pen had torn through the paper. There was a program from a student production of Awake and Sing!, a page ripped from a drug store catalogue with a photo of specially priced air freshener circled several times in blue ball-point. There were lengthy receipts from grocery stores, others from repair shops.
Two days later, frustrated, exhausted, the floor covered with a chaotic mass of documents, my hands covered with dust and ink, I threw a pile of papers in the air and before the last one floated to the floor, I had decided to give up. For the first time since this whole thing began, I had really wanted to learn something.
There was no sense in showing what I’d found in the suitcase to anyone. None of it proved anything, none of it gave me any clues about Tony other than that he was obsessed finding injustice where none existed, with finding someone to blame, and that he was moved by a kind of filial spirit I had never before felt.
Legally, under the threat of disbarment, I was probably obliged to turn the papers over to the police investigating Tony’s disappearance or, at the very least, to the private investigator Bernard had hired. But instead, I spent the Sunday evening feeding page after photo after clipping into the fireplace, burning each one to nothing and generating intolerable heat in the townhouse.
And besides, though the stuff in the suitcase might yield some clues, I mostly didn’t want to help anyone find Tony. Not now, I didn’t. Instead, watching the last pages curl and blacken, the ashes lifting free and shooting up the chimney, I preferred to think of my cousin not as an unbalanced drifter, succumbing to the vagrant’s difficult life, but as a bright and vibrant fugitive, occupying the police with his cunning, always two and three steps ahead, avoiding drink to keep his wits sharp, his body trim from all-night hikes from one safe-house to the next, showing his face only to those he trusted. And from the others, running, running, always running.
EPILOGUE
For me, the recession came to an end on the day my real estate agent called me with fourteen offers on the townhouse.
“It’s the most vigorous bidding war I’ve seen on a single home since ’06,” she said.
And so when I went shopping for a new home, I let the agent talk me into a higher price and in the end paid for a lake view from a two-bedroom condo in a newer building in the Distillery District.
Leaving the townhouse was easy; even after eight years, my attachment to the neighbourhood was not strong. In fact, I barely knew the names of any of my immediate neighbours. I arranged to have my mail forwarded, changed the address on my magazine subscriptions, and got a new phone number that alerted the telemarketers, the first of them from a local radio station.
“I’m calling to inform you that you could win $25,000 just for listening to Kenny & The Bear in the morning,” he said.
And me: “All I have to do is listen?”
“When Kenny & Bear say the secret word, be the first to call and you qualify to win $25,000.”
“That’s not enough.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The twenty-five grand. It’s not enough. Make it fifty and I’ll consider it.”
“But the prize is $25,000. Wouldn’t you like to win $25,000?”
“Not if I have to listen to Kenny & The Bear. Make it worth my while. Make it fifty.”
“I can’t do that, sir.”
“Okay. What can you offer then?”
“$25,000.”
“Listen. I already told you. Twenty-five won’t cut it. How about forty? But I’d want something on top of that. For example. I never want to hear Phil Collins if I have to listen to your station. I hate Phil Collins. That’s my offer. Forty K and no Phil Collins.”
“I’d have to ask my manager.”
“Wait. Thirty-five K and no Phil Collins and no Bryan Adams. For that I could go down to thirty-five. What do you say? Hello?”
The Distillery is a fine place to live. There is live theatre and a restaurant that serves oysters from Washington State and Prince Edward Island and something interesting happens nearly every weekend. There are bars, too, nice ones with exposed bricks and beams, long wine lists, well-padded stools, and walls of good scotches. But they are crowded, bustling with young professionals and old tourists, noticeably more expensive, and less intimate than The Barrington, and after a few visits to each, I have yet to return to any.
Instead, I have grown unusually attached to work. I have set up my own practice and during days I do the regular immigration stuff, the forms, the interviews, the hearings, performing competently enough to garner referrals from satisfied clients.
At night, once a week, I deliver a talk to groups of refugees and would-be immigrants from St. Lucia, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone, among other desperate places. It is a standard bit, quite general and light on specifics and lasts half an hour. Questions follow, slowly at first, as though I might be a government spook and these free seminars part of some secret screening process. But after a few answers they are reassured and by the time we sit down for a pro bono consultation, they speak openly about their individual cases. I am often touched by their stories, the lengths they have gone to, the sacrifices they have made, their bravery. Some ask for my card and examine it carefully, running their fingers over the raised print of my name and the recently-added words Certified as a Specialist by the Law Society of Upper Canada. Each time it happens, I sense their intimidation at my dazzling powers.
Left on my own, I have taken a greater interest in cooking, experimenting with ingredients from the nearby market, researching recipes to try and duplicate my favourite take out dishes. In my food readings I discovered that pasta did not come to Italy with Marco Polo, but was already enjoyed on the Italian peninsula before the Venetian explorer even visited China, according to an article in the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Food.
Sagipa was shocked to learn it.
“I’m going to have some explaining to do,” he said.
At least once a week, we get together. Sagipa is now firmly Sagipa, the ‘Cuxinimpaba’ business dropped and forgotten immediately after Manolo left. That happened on Hallowe’en night. Before the trick or treaters arrived, with Inés dressed as a mouse, Manolo explained that he had taken up with the marketing assistant at his publisher and was moving to New York City as soon as they could be married, since it would be better for his career to live in the world’s media capital. But Inés hadn’t been married to Tricky McKitrick for eight years for nothing and with her mousey whiskers flaring, she called U.S. Immigration’s snitch line, her stories of Manolo’s terrorist exploits fortified with specific details—the dates, the targets, the names of the bankers in the Caymans. Before Manolo had a chance to even see the Empire State building, he was ruled permanently unable to enter U.S. territory and now the RCMP wanted to talk to him, too.
Sagipa did not seem bothered by the flight of his father.
“It just never seemed to me like he was going to stay,” he told me before a play one night. “Like he would never be able to settle into the kind of life he would have had here.”
“It wears on you, the changes, once you realize how deeply they run,” I said.
“But it’s inevitable. The world changes. It’s like evolution. You don’t adapt, you don’t survive. I was willing. Why not him?” Sagipa paused, surveyed the crowd of theatre-goers and returned to m
e. “I wonder what’s going to happen to him. I mean, you have to wonder.”
In the year since Inés moved out, I have been on two dates. The first was with a former member of the Polish national handball team, a formidable woman. We spent the evening in a pub watching highlights from the Vancouver Games and between luge runs and free skates she told me about the glorious 1994 season when she led her squad to the European championships, losing a squeaker to the hated Russians in the semi-finals.
The other was a woman named Kate who went to bed with me on our only date and set me off guard for a second time when, after my orgasm, she turned to me, gave me a solid, chummy punch on the shoulder, and said: ‘Nice job, champ.’
I still speak with Drew, though the calls have become less frequent since they found Tony. Six weeks after his disappearance, a group of teenagers, looking for a good place to smoke hash and toss around stoner ideas, hopped the fencing of an abandoned steel factory not far from the river and discovered Tony’s half-charred body slumped against a crumbling wall amid broken glass and chunks of rebar.
The Wanstead police didn’t know what to make of the scene. There was no sign of struggle and footprints in the dust on the floor around him suggested that Tony had walked soberly to the spot and simply sat down. His body had been burned severely down one side, his skin crisp and blackened, the flesh eaten away to the bone, maggots already feasting on what remained. But, strangely, the other side had been untouched by the flame and was not even much decomposed, given the estimated time of death. The flames had been selective. Even half his clothes remained intact, one plastic button melted, the other still fastening the two sides of his shirt.
At the funeral, Bernard spoke eloquently, though in the absence of personal anecdotes about his father, he related something allegorical from his experiences in the Congo instead. Mrs. Langlois, sitting next to Corazon, wept periodically and then, midway through the priest’s homily unfolded her book of WordSearch puzzles and in a too loud voice asked Corazon for a pencil. I sat in the third row, behind Drew and Gus and their two children, both home for the summer. Drew’s parents were there, too.
“Thank you for coming,” I said before the service.
“Believe me, it wasn’t our idea,” Mr. Herringer said.
I sent flowers and, worried that I might be the only one, also sent an arrangement in the name of my mother. But when I arrived at the funeral home, the coffin was surrounded by a modest number of bouquets and wreaths. I read the notes. The bar staff at TCs. Management at Fabrivida. Drew and Gus, of course. Louise asked if she got to take them home. During the service, I did not turn around, but sensed the emptiness behind me.
Bernard demanded an autopsy, which showed that Tony’s blood contained a dizzying concentration of lorazepam, oxicocet, and metoprolol, enough to kill him three times over, the coroner reported. When the details of the overdose emerged, questions over the strange burns to his body became more intense. Rumours circulated about a sicko loose in town, setting fire to corpses and extinguishing them before they spread to the whole body. The Echo interviewed leading experts on the occult and the police opened an investigation to look for the body’s defiler.
But when the coroner concluded that the accelerant used had been rifle powder, I understood.
A year later and the Echo’s online edition still talks about it. The WAW, now embracing Tony like a martyr, is offering a reward for anyone with information leading to an arrest. It’s not what Tony wanted, all that attention. Of this I am positive. Tony had wanted to disappear, to leave no trace of himself on earth, to leave neither debts nor receivables. To never again be subjected to the power of another.
The fire, set with something slow burning—a cigar maybe, was meant to ensure his liberation. But as a last stab at dignity, it could not have gone worse. Instead of using his final act of self-determination to slip unseen from the world, his name is now the starting point for the kind of horror story generations of Wanstead kids—sitting around oil drum fires in vacant lots or under the abandoned stands at playing fields or in the ditch beside rusty railroad tracks or on the steps of a church hall—will use to scare the shit out of each other.
I shake my head at the thought, dismayed that the details come to me so clearly.
Toronto, 2010
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their subject matter expertise, I wish to thank: John Khajadourian, MBA (small business and its relation to guerrilla warfare), Michael Kopke, B. Eng. (automobiles), Jonathon Leebosh, LL.B. (immigration law), Jim Pegg, B.A. (factories), and Eugenia Piliotis, M.D. (imperforate anus, fistula, etc.). Sometimes, I don’t listen as well as I should; any errors in these areas of expertise are mine.
For their critical readings and feedback, I am grateful to Hali Ahlfeld, Mark Anderson, Charles Austin, Tanaz Bhathena, Dennis Bock, Natalie Jano, Roy MacLaren, Alex Mangiola, Dave Medd, David O’Connor, Anne Perdue, Morgan Wade, Drew Yamada. Special thanks in this regard to Robert Plowman and Geoff Rector. Many thanks also to Sam Hiyate and Chris Needham and everyone at NON.
Some of the events described in this novel are based on historical events, but in all cases, they have been shifted, mashed, and otherwise altered to fit more neatly into the story.