He had taken care of the Luger these long years, cleaning, swabbing, polishing his dark token of hope with only one thought: justice. Justice for his family. And for how many others? He had waited patiently for the right time to bring out the gun. This was the right time.
The immanence of a confrontation left him winded. It had been thirty-eight years since he’d been that little boy. Thirty-eight years since he’d last seen his mother, his little brother. He gripped the textured butt, his heart racing, flying with excitement. He looked up into the mirror, half expecting to find that ten-year-old boy. He hardly recognized the face he saw there. It was like watching himself from the outside. His eyes had grown round and stark. Together with the greying beard, the hair, he looked quite mad. For once this displeased him.
If he was going to succeed, he needed to become part of the scenery, to blend in with whatever background his prey had become accustomed to. He would have to think about that. Turning himself around in front of the mirror, he worked to position the barrel comfortably inside the waistband of his pants in the middle of his back. It was time.
He took the photocopy out of his suitcase. He needed his magnifying glass to read the name of the store in the smudgy backdrop behind the duck. The Toronto phone book, thicker than he had expected, lay in the hotel dresser. Leafing through the parchment-thin pages he found the name he was looking for. He located the address on the street map he had taken from the rental car. The place was not far, as distances went. He would scout it out first by subway, maybe by streetcar. He would find it, all the while warmed by the constant bulk of the metal pinned near the small of his back.
He was surprised at how cold it was in Toronto the first week of April. The sun gave off a milky thin halo of light, hardly what he would call spring. It had been warmer in San Francisco in the winter.
The subway he rode north to Queen’s Park was brisk and clean. Climbing the stairs to the surface he found, in the shelter of a glassed-in corner, a hot dog vendor with his portable stand and a middle-aged woman in an expensive ski jacket selling daffodils. The Cancer Campaign. An excellent cause. He, himself, was planning to eradicate a deadly cancer. He only had to find it, the rest would be easy. He shifted his back to reassure himself with the weight of his weapon, his own answer to medicine.
The wide intersection roared with the tumult of six lanes of cars flying north and south on either side of sculptured stone boulevards; the whine of trolley cars rolling east and west. A short distance north, the sixlane artery split to ring around a massive rose-coloured structure, gracefully Victorian and surrounded by lawns. The seat of the provincial government, according to his Toronto guidebook. He pulled out the street map and tried to orient himself. Keep going west.
He passed large ivy-covered houses that had been converted and taken over by the university; here and there some boxy, slightly newer buildings housed the departments of botany, engineering, and architecture. Students did not linger here. All the young men and women were in a hurry, carrying their books to the next appointment. If he remembered correctly, they were probably writing exams. Many were alone, but none as alone as he. Nobody on earth knew where he was. (Maybe Louis could have made a wild guess; Louis, who had been there when the whole thing started again, in the Wiesenthal Center.) Nobody else. All he had to worry about now was God. And he did worry about God, God the instigator, God the creator of species that ate each other, of people who killed others for treasure as arcane as a Yankees jacket. God the sadist. What else could describe a being that set up a system where the large were forced to hunt the small for every meal. It was better to think of God as dead than to think of Him as evil. In either case, life was meaningless. Those who didn’t see it were just fooling themselves.
Uncle Sol had been just such a fool. What did he used to say? When God closes one door, He opens another. That little lesson had been lost on Nesha. Doors had only closed for him. What about this door? This door would be the shadowy entrance that led him into the abyss. Louis had been the gatekeeper. When he heard Louis’ voice, Nesha had hoped it was a call for contributions. Nesha’s brain had arranged fortresses around itself, prepared for onslaught. He remembered standing before Louis in the Center, what — a week ago? The man’s mouth dropped open, framing a pink “O” beneath his trim moustache. Nesha saw himself mirrored in the other man’s eyes: overgrown beard and hair, jeans, sneakers. Every year he had come to the Center to search for news of the man, and every year he had grown more ragged, whereas Louis had been a constant: compact and well-groomed, hair clipped short. Louis had left him alone in the room but Nesha couldn’t keep the excitement to himself when he finally found a scrap, a hint of what he had been looking for; couldn’t help showing Louis with shy triumph what he had found. He could hardly fathom it had been only a week.
Nesha shook California off and turned down a street with desperate lawns and dingy porches. The two-storey near-shabby Victorian houses were painted like the ones at home, but the colours were different. The gingerbread trim was white, but here the brick was painted solid red or green, strong unyielding colours to keep out the cold of the Canadian winter. In San Francisco houses like these were coloured pastel blue or yellow or pink, sometimes all at once, reflecting the dreamy seascape of the Pacific.
As he got closer to his destination, students thinned out and were replaced by shoppers. Some ragged men shambled near the ethnic shops, trying to catch a sympathetic eye for a handout. Many in the crowd were Asian. He could easily have been back home in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
A small elderly Chinese woman in trousers and drab winter jacket stood near a stall arranging apples. She looked up as he passed by and held one out to him, a large red Delicious. He stopped, charmed by this gesture, shy and aggressive at the same time.
“Is it always so cold in Toronto?” he asked, pulling some change from his pocket.
She began to chatter in some mysterious dialect, prodding the apple closer to his chest. As she opened her mouth into the strange shapes of her language, he could see she had almost no teeth. Biting into the apple, he nodded appreciation, and moved on.
All at once, he stopped, mesmerized by the shops across the narrow street. He drew the photocopy of the duck from his pocket and compared, though he knew as soon as he saw it. He had found what he was looking for. He had arrived at the location of the cancer and now it was just a matter of rooting out the centre. He had the instrument ready. Like a surgeon, he had the tool for the job. He threw the half-eaten apple into a carton of trash and looped his arm behind to stroke the comforting bulge beneath his jacket with tentative fingers.
chapter sixteen
Thursday, April 5, 1979
Bubie’s Bakery was on Eglinton, one and a half blocks from Mrs. Kochinsky’s duplex. Rebecca used to come here for bread when she still had an appetite, before David died. Before she had lost the insulating flesh on her bones. She was always surprised when she came across herself unexpectedly, like this morning in the paper. She had unfolded it and scanned the front page till she found the headline: “Senior Strangled in Own Home/Police Follow Lead.” At first she didn’t recognize herself in the photo, a grim, distracted shot. It was Mrs. Kochinsky’s duplex, the front yard skirted by police tape, that caught her eye. Then her own face, grey and blurry in the foreground. She couldn’t say it was a bad likeness of her, only one she would have preferred to keep shut away in a mirror in the privacy of her bedroom where she could still convince herself she was alive and well. She pictured the killer scrutinizing the photo. It would just make it that much easier for him. At least the reporter had gotten very little information from the police. Her name was not mentioned, nor any important details of the crime. She supposed she ought to be grateful.
In the bakery two elderly women in white uniforms stood behind the counter serving a few customers when Rebecca entered. The satisfying aroma of baking bread swelled from the back in a pervasive cloud.
“Can I help you?” one of the women add
ressed Rebecca in a Yiddish accent. Her stylishly short hair was dyed reddish brown; her eyes sparkled.
“I’m looking for Rosie,” said Rebecca across the glass shelves of rolls and pastries. Which of the two would it be?
“That’s me,” said the woman surprised. “I’m Rosie.”
“I’m Goldie Kochinsky’s doctor, Rebecca Temple.”
The sparkle went out of her eyes. “She’s sick, God forbid? I yesterday wondered where she is. I tried phone her ” She stopped, seeing something in Rebecca’s face.
“You haven’t read the paper?” said Rebecca.
The woman wavered on the spot, her round face turning pale. “Newspapers I don’t read. Too depressing.” She motioned Rebecca to move toward the back door where they could speak directly over a counter rather than across shelves of kaiser buns and danishes.
“If it’s in the papers, it must be bad.”
Rebecca told her as gently as she could, if one could relate a brutal act in any terms but violent. She hated being the bearer of bad news, though as a doctor she was thrust into that role too often.
Rosie held onto the counter for support.
“Rose,” the other server called out, “there are customers here!”
Suddenly in the doorway leading to the back, a large lumpy man in an undershirt smeared with flour appeared. Displeasure with Rosie turned into puzzlement as he watched her lead Rebecca past him into the back.
“Oy, this is no good, I gotta sit down.” Rosie held her stomach as if she suddenly had a bellyache, then collapsed into a floury chair. Her eyes clouded over; a tear drifted quietly down her cheek.
“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice cracking. “Goldie’s
dead? Murdered in her house? No, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.” She sat doubled over a moment, tears dropping on the tile floor mixing with the flour.
Finally she sat up with a deep sigh. “Why would someone do this?”
“You have any idea?”
Rosie wiped a tear then flapped her hand through the air. “She could drive you crazy, but to kill her...”
“Did she tell you about her past? Where she came from?”
“Ach! The background, very bad. Terrible things she went through. This drove her crazy. Sometimes I remember, a customer walk into store and she runs to the back. ‘He’s here for me,’ she says. ‘He’s gonna get me.’ The guy walk out. Nothing.” Rosie tapped her index finger against her temple. “I felt sorry, but what I could do?”
“Did you see her Tuesday?”
Rosie thought. “Only in the morning. She worked till maybe lunch. Then she went somewhere. Downtown, I think.”
“Wasn’t that unusual?” Rebecca asked.
“Sure. I was surprised. She had to go on the bus.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“To be honest I didn’t pay attention. She was telling me while I was serving a customer and ... well, I loved her but she could drive you crazy with her stories.”
Rosie got up abruptly and took a few steps to a corner where her purse leaned against the wall. She retrieved her wallet and from it she handed a photo to Rebecca. In the photo, Rosie and Goldie stood in the bakery, shoulder to shoulder, happily grinning at the camera. Rebecca felt a pang of loss.
“You know, must’ve been a store,” Rosie said, ruminating. “The place she went Tuesday. I remember something. I know sounds funny, but I think the name was after a river.”
So she hadn’t just gone shopping. Rebecca recalled the confusion with Goldie’s English the day the poor woman had run into the office. Rebecca had heard a verb where Goldie had meant a noun. The cousin had asked her for a shop, a particular shop, not to go shopping, as Rebecca had understood.
“A river?”
“You know, in the name. A famous river.”
“You mean like the ‘Mississippi’ Shoe Store?”
Rosie stared at her bleakly. “I’m sorry, I only trying to help.”
“I’m not making fun of you,” said Rebecca. “I’m just thinking out loud. Would it make any difference if I told you the place was within walking distance of Beverley and Dundas?”
She shook her head. “You know more than me.”
“She came to me very frightened Tuesday afternoon,” Rebecca said. “All I know is she walked to my office from wherever she was. She was killed that night.”
“She came to you before she was killed?” Rosie watched her horrified and perplexed. The unstated question: Why didn’t you do something?
A lump formed in Rebecca’s throat. “Could I borrow this photo?” she asked. “I’ll get it back to you.”
Rebecca felt the woman’s uncomprehending eyes follow her as she left the store.
chapter seventeen
Rebecca drove home along Eglinton Avenue with Rosie’s voice ringing in her ears: She came to you before she was killed? She came to you...? It was barely 9:15 a.m. and Rebecca was already tired.
She had a few hours before her first patient, scheduled at one. She thought of flipping through the Yellow Pages to look for the store Rosie had mentioned — if it was a store — but she didn’t know where to begin. She couldn’t look up restaurants or furniture or garden supplies. All she knew (and that was probably too strong a word for it) was that there might be a river in the name of it, whatever it was. A river. How many rivers did she know the names of? The Mackenzie, the Missouri, the Thames....
From habit Rebecca’s eyes searched out the watercolour on the wall of the den. The only painting of David’s she hadn’t taken down to store in the basement. It had been hard to come across them at every corner of the house. Now it was just hard in the den. David had painted her in profile sitting with her ankles tucked beneath her on a green verge of grass by the lake. The picture was bathed in the kind of golden light the sun might deliver on a late afternoon in summer. He had told her she was like the sea when he made love to her because she was all around him, she was everywhere, and he had to submerge himself in her even if he drowned. She hadn’t the heart to take this one down.
Okay, the river. She stepped over to the bookcase in the den and retrieved an atlas. Happily, there was a page on world statistics: the largest countries, the highest mountains, the most populated cities, and among this fascinating lot, the one she needed — the longest, ergo best-known, rivers. Only she couldn’t imagine how anyone would work them into the name of something in downtown Toronto. The Nile What. The Amazon Something. The Yangtze Such and Such. And there were columns of them, rivers she had never heard of, rivers she had forgotten about. There was no easy way to find what she was looking for. She would just have to get on with it.
She was putting on her jacket when the phone rang.
“Rebecca? Are you all right, dear?” said the Polishaccented voice. “I saw your picture in the paper and I got worried.”
That awful picture of her coming out of Goldie’s place. “I’m fine, Sarah; thank you.” Rebecca didn’t want her mother-in-law to worry; she was still getting over the death of her son.
“Was it someone you knew?”
“A patient of mine.”
“I’m so sorry. What a terrible thing. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I’m fine, really.” Sarah was an elegant, cultured woman who loved art and had imparted that love to her son. She had been responsible for David being the man he was and Rebecca would always be grateful to her for that. But his death, instead of bringing them closer together, had formed a wedge between them, each reminding the other of their loss.
By 10:15, Rebecca was driving along College Street at a snail’s pace in the right hand lane. While she read the names of each shop on both sides of the street, drivers who found themselves behind her honked and veered to the left to pass. Gino’s Hardware, College Gifts, Margo’s Donuts and Coffee Shop. Drier than dry. No hint of river, lake, or stream.
A few blocks east of Bathurst, she made an illegal U-turn and drove back along College Stree
t, reasoning that Mrs. Kochinsky wouldn’t have been able to run to the office from further afield. Rebecca turned down Spadina and suddenly came to a full stop. While traffic whizzed around her, she sat just north of a street that intersected Spadina and led into Kensington Market.
She felt as if she were poised on the edge of a time warp. The market, its chaotic goods stacked and sprawled on the sidewalks under sun-faded awnings, looked like it could toss her back fifty years. The genteel veneer of Beverley Street, barely two blocks away, may as well have been on the moon. She blinked at the crisply painted sign several stores down the side street: Atlantic Seafood. What if Rosie didn’t know an ocean from a river? What if her translation from the Jewish was slightly off? Rebecca parked and set out on foot.
She stood at the corner facing the noisy clutter of the narrow street jammed with small shops and cars. Pungent smells of butchers and fishmongers and God knows what else trailed into hints on the air. She approached Atlantic Seafood. Iridescent layers of whitefish, red snapper, and perch glimmered on beds of crushed ice outside the store. The effect was esthetic, spoiled only by their blank eyes, empty as glass.
Inside the store, two dark Mediterranean-looking men stood wiping down the cutting boards behind a counter piled with shrimp and snails.
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