by Sam Wiebe
Itami had always seemed poised, dignified. A comfortable leader. To see him now with his white hair askew, a piss stain spreading across his sweats, was disconcerting.
“I’ll take you home,” I said. “You still live on Nanaimo, right?” I put a hand on his shoulder. He shivered but didn’t shake it off.
“David,” he said.
“That’s right. I used to hang out with your son, once upon a time. How’s Katz doing? He’s, what, a sergeant now?”
Itami looked back at the broken glass but I herded him through the apartment door, out onto the street where I’d parked my Cadillac. Joe shuffled as he walked. A crowd stood beneath the neon sign for the Rio Theatre, smoking and waiting for the midnight showing. They ignored us. At the car door, Joe blinked and peered around, then looked curiously at the flashlight in his hand. He snapped the light on, off, on, and off.
“David,” he repeated. “Matt’s son.”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t look much like him.”
I unlocked the passenger’s-side door and held it open for him. “Flattery gets you nowhere.”
After a moment spent staring at me in what felt like evaluation, Joe Itami said, “There isn’t one fucking shred of good in you, is there?”
* * *
Katz Itami finished putting his father to bed and joined me on the porch. He lit a cigarette, a Rooftop, and blew smoke toward Nanaimo Street. His father’s house had a view of the distant North Shore mountains. Katz stared forlornly at the V-shaped strip of ski lights blinking atop Grouse.
“I got a woman coming in next week,” he said, “make sure he takes his meds. Aricept, memantine. It’s Alzheimer’s, Dave. Dementia. Probably from all those years living alone.”
“There been other incidents?” I asked.
“I’ve been on his couch less than a month. We have oatmeal together, then I go to work. He’s usually asleep when I get back.”
“Doesn’t answer my question,” I said.
Katz shrugged. “I mean, he gets names mixed up. When Barbara dropped my stuff off, he called her by her mom’s name. But that’s nothing new.”
“Why me?”
“He was probably out walking, noticed your name on the buzzer.”
“My name’s not on the buzzer, Katz, but he knew it. Joe was looking for my father. Acting like he was still walking a beat.”
“Christ.” Katz flicked his smoke off the porch, into the trough of dead mulch that had once been a flower bed. Joe Itami’s house had been standing for eighty years, and looked every day of it. The property alone would probably fetch three million.
Katsuyori was eleven years my senior, a sergeant with the VPD. He was taller than his father, slightly heavier, and had a genial, compassionate air that had netted him more than a few confessions. Katz also had the exhausted look of the recently divorced. I didn’t judge him when he chained another smoke.
“Always thought my dad had it . . . not easier, but simpler,” Katz said. “He was born the year my gramps came out of the internment camp. Nisei, second-gen. Him being a cop, and then on top of that marrying Mom, putting up with her WASP-ass family looking down on him—not a lot of guys could carry all that.”
“No.”
“But he always knew what to do. Work the job, raise a family, come home each shift in one piece. Difficult things, but straightforward, y’know? I admired that. Part of me moving back here, aside from getting my shit sorted, was to learn from him. How he kept it all together. ’Cept it’s hard to ask him if he doesn’t know me. Doesn’t know himself.”
I left him my card. “Anything comes up.”
“’Preciate it, thanks.” He put it on the guardrail and continued staring at the lights in the dark sky. I wondered if the card would end up among the crushed filters in the barren garden. Something else forgotten.
* * *
Katz must have kept the card, because at seven the next morning he phoned my cell.
“Joe’s gone,” he said. “Took my car, I don’t know where, and Dave, fuck, he’s got my uniform. He’s got my gun.”
* * *
I picked up Katz in my Cadillac and we drove across First Avenune to Commercial Drive. Traditionally the city’s Italian and Portuguese enclave, the Drive was now also home to anarchists, activists, fashion casualties, and holdovers who viewed anyone under sixty with scorn. It was a spectacular mess—trattorias and mercados, German bakeries and African hair salons. And everywhere sushi and coffee, those two staples of East Vancouver life.
I tried to see the neighborhood the way Joe Itami circa 1974 would, when it was the center of his beat. What still remained after gentrification, real estate crises, countless waves of new arrivals? What would he look for?
Katz had the passenger’s window all the way down, ignoring the light rain that soaked the sleeve of his shirt. He trailed smoke from his mouth. I’d asked him not to light up in the car, which he’d taken as an invitation to break out his vape pen. The car’s interior filled with the smell of apricot and mint.
“The Drive was your dad’s beat too,” Katz said. “He ever talk about what he did, back in the day?”
“He didn’t talk much period. Least not to me.” I added, “I don’t think he much wanted to be a parent.”
“That’s right, you were adopted or something.”
“Or something, yeah.”
We parked and knocked on the door of the Legion Hall. Built in the forties, the building had recently been painted bright blue and trimmed orange, the words LEST WE FORGET printed above the entrance. Katz put away his pen. The door was opened by a white-haired woman holding a spray bottle of bright green liquid. She looked warily between us, sizing us up.
“Looking for my dad,” Katz said. He held his hand flat at the height of his chin. “About yay tall, Japanese Canadian, seventy-two years old.”
“The officer,” she said.
Katz sent a nervous glance my way before nodding to the woman. “He say where he was going?”
“I told him we weren’t open and he said he was looking for someone. Said he’d been waiting at the park all morning.”
“Which park? Stanley?”
“I think he meant Clark Park.” She pointed up the street in its direction. “He said he got tired of waiting and was going to find where this kid was hiding. Michael Something-or-Other, think he said.”
Katz thanked her. Back in the car, we drove south, in the direction she’d pointed. It was a nothing park, a few hilly, grassy blocks, with a soccer field and softball diamond, playground and swing set. A deep diagonal rut across the western slope, hardened by bikes and the odd motorcycle. Joe Itami wasn’t there.
We drove slow along the Drive, looking for anything unusual. I asked Katz if his dad had told him about his days walking the beat. Something significant might have happened to him then.
“It was a rough neighborhood, that time. We grew up three blocks from the prostie stroll, before that was all pushed down to the ports. I was in Pampers when he and your dad were busting heads.”
“They do a lot of that, you think?”
“The seventies, Dave. East fucking Van. What do you think?”
* * *
Driving back up Venables, Katz pointed, “There,” and told me to stop. On the pavement beside a Vietnamese sandwich shop, beneath a mural of blackbirds and First Nations orcas, was Joe Itami’s MagLite. We noticed a commotion up the block, and headed in that direction.
A small group of elderly men sat and stood outside Abbruzzo Café. They were talking in English and French and Italian, and regarded us as intruders. I asked them what happened.
“Gook got Mikey,” one of them said.
“Shut up, Mauro, you don’t say that to someone’s face.” Mr. Voice-of-Reason smiled at Katz and said, by way of apology, “He’s just nervous, got the jitters. Mauro’s not s’posed to drink coffee no more.”
“What happened to Mikey, exactly?” Katz said.
“We’re ju
st sitting here. Guy drives up in his Nissan. He’s in uniform. Tells Mikey he wants to have a word. Mikey being Mikey, tells him what to do with that. Then the, uh, officer shows him his gun. Cuffs Mikey and drives off. Can hardly believe what I seen, y’know?”
“He looked Korean,” one of the seated men offered.
“Like you’d know,” Voice-of-Reason said. “You guys think he’s really with the cops?”
“I am,” Katz said. “And I appreciate your help. Anything else you can tell us?”
“Korean. I’m sure.”
“His car’s a piece of junk.”
“Smelled like he might’ve gotten sick on the ride over.”
“Or maybe Vietnamese.”
I stopped the flood of wisdom to ask how Mikey had acted at seeing Joe Itami.
“Same as all of us,” Mr. Voice-of-Reason said. “Came as a shock. We’re just killing time till the Juventus game, not expecting nothing like this.”
“Don’t you remember?” Mauro said to him. “Mikey recognized him. Said, Holy ess, it’s you.”
“Right, that’s right,” Voice said.
“What’s Mikey’s full name?” Katz asked.
“Michael.” Chortles from the seated men.
“Rosato,” Voice said. “Michael Rosato.”
The group closed ranks as soon as we asked about Rosato’s personal life. We went inside, bought espressos, and asked the barista, a thin woman with a hard smile and iron-colored hair. She hadn’t seen the abduction, but she knew Mikey. He’d been coming there for years.
“Take him awhile,” she said, “but he got himself back on track.”
“From what?” I said.
She shrugged and took the money and slapped my change on the counter. “From drinking, and I don’t know what else. He’s okay now, Mikey, but back in the day . . .” She looked at the ceiling as if his misdeeds were written there. “Back then he run with a pretty rough group.”
* * *
Another hour of searching produced nothing.
“You should call it in,” I told Katz. “It’s kidnapping.”
“My dad you’re talking about, Dave. He’s old. Confused. He’s no criminal.”
“Didn’t say he was.”
“I’ll call from the house, ’kay? Promise. By now he’s probably wandered back.”
But he wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t at Clark Park. Joe Itami had disappeared into East Vancouver, into 1974, into himself. Michael Rosato had been dragged along with him.
“Can you run Rosato through CPIC?” I asked. “Maybe Joe arrested him, back in the day.”
Katz nodded. I left him at his house to make arrangements, call in what favors he could. I told him I’d keep looking, and meet back with him in two hours.
I cruised up Woodland, down Clark, over Venables, and back up the Drive. It felt futile, like looking for someone else’s memories. Nick Cave played through the Cadillac’s speakers. “Wonderful Life.” For some of us, anyway.
* * *
My mother’s house is on Laurel Street. She and her husband had built it in the midsixties, anticipating they’d raise a family there. That hadn’t quite worked out. Instead, just as she reached the age and mind-set to give up on having kids, circumstances forced her to adopt her younger sister’s son.
I say circumstances, but it was my birth parents’ decision to leave me with the Wakelands. They’d been under the sway of a religious leader who preached that children (other than his own) were a spiritual drag. A tether to the flawed material world. Only much later did they recognize him as a fraud.
By then Beatrice and Matt Wakeland seemed to have the kid under control, so why complicate their own recently reclaimed lives? Easier to start over, to leave well enough alone.
I was luckier than most. And angrier than most. And tired of battling the past.
The woman I called my mother sat on the porch, smoking, looking slightly more frail than the last time I’d seen her, and just as defiant.
“What’s the occasion?” she said, standing to embrace me. She sat back in her rocking chair with a sigh, Oooof, which she covered for with an exaggerated yawn.
“Wanted to see how you’re doing,” I said.
“David.”
“And,” I said more truthfully, “I wanted to ask, do you remember Joe Itami?”
“Of course. Lovely man.”
“What exactly did he and Matt—”
“Your father.”
“Right, what did they do? How close were they?”
“Closer back in the day,” my mother said. “They were partnered up for a while. Joe was a nice man. Handsome as all get-out. He wanted off the streets, order to be home more. That’s why he got his promotion. Your father, well . . .” She shrugged. “He was who he was.”
“Constable for Life,” I said. I’d never quite escaped that mentality. “He or Joe ever mention a Michael Rosato?”
“I didn’t ask about his business. Like I don’t with you.”
“What about Clark Park, anything happen there?”
She turned her pipe upside down and banged out the ash into a Kirkland coffee tin. The muscles of her face tightened. “Why?”
“Because Joe ran off this morning in his son’s uniform, thinking it’s forty years ago. Katz and I have to find him before he hurts this Rosato. Something happened in that park, didn’t it?”
She tamped flakes of tobacco into the bowl and didn’t look at me.
“Beatrice,” I said. “Mom.”
“It was different then,” she said.
“Getting really fucking tired of hearing that.”
“Well it was,” she said. “You don’t understand ’cause you grew up in a safe place. Back then, the kids that hung out in that park were rotten to the core. A decent person couldn’t even walk through there.”
“Did Matt and Joe arrest Rosato there?”
My mother struck a kitchen match off the railing and bent low. I loomed over her, cupping my hands to provide a windscreen. She coughed and broke the match in two and tossed both pieces toward the can.
“Some things a cop’s wife knows not to ask,” she said. “Whatever your father did, I’m sure he felt he had to.”
* * *
It was late afternoon, the sun screened by slate-colored clouds. I walked around Clark Park, trying to imagine a time when it felt ominous to do so. Instead I saw a troop of Catholic students occupying the fields, a pair of middle-aged women kissing on a park bench, a kid on a bike following his father in a circuit of the basketball court, legs pumping with more assurance as the motion became familiar to him. Joe Itami wasn’t among us.
Katz phoned to say he’d looked up Michael Rosato, and found a record of drug offenses and property crimes going back to his twenties, probably further. Nothing in the last few years. Evidently he’d gotten clean.
“More a shit-disturber than a hard-ass,” Katz said. “He would’ve been seventeen, eighteen back in the day. Part of the Clark Park Gang. I asked one of the old-timers about them. She said the park gangs used to be, quote, unquote, pretty rough customers.”
“What I heard too.”
“Rosato’s known associates are mostly dead or moved away. The name that comes up the most is Holditch, Gordon, no middle initial. He did a stint for larceny back in the early eighties, but cleaned up and started a business. ’Member Gord the Stereo Guy, had the store on Alma and 10th?”
“Sure, with the commercials.” A jovial fat man jumping over a whiskey keg to prove his customers had him over a barrel, but only for a limited time.
“Gord’s dead, but his wife still lives at 30th and Main. She says a car went by her house this morning, a couple times, slow. Could’ve been a Nissan. Want to pick me up?”
I said I would.
* * *
The Holditch living room was a shrine to the late store as much as its late owner. Framed photos of Gord on opening day, full-page ads, an article in the Georgia Straight, all decorated the walls. On the floor behi
nd a pair of recliners was the store’s neon sign, unplugged, furry with dust, its cord wound loosely around the top of the G.
Nelly Holditch was a large pretty woman in a paisley blouse and dun-colored slacks. Her frizzy brown hair was loosely ponytailed, a few white roots showing. She had coffee ready, and while she poured, she told us about her husband’s nightmares.
“Gord got sober the year we married. Never left the wagon after that. I know he’d had some bad times before me. Once, twice a year, he’d wake up with his side of the sheets soaked through. It’d take him hours to unwind. When I’d ask, he’d say he was thinking of old friends.”
“Michael Rosato?” Katz asked.
“He mentioned a Mikey but I never met him. I guess Mikey’s life hadn’t turned out so well. He couldn’t kick his problems the way Gord did. Poor guy.”
“Something happened to them in Clark Park,” I said.
“Lots. It’s where they used to congregate. They were kids—punks, I guess you’d call them. Lot of broken homes, abuse, parents who drank or did whatever. The park was where they’d get away from all that.”
“The police bothered them?”
“Harassed them,” she said. “Any time there was a fight or a break-in in the neighborhood, it was those evil kids in Clark Park. Some of the cops thought Gord was the ringleader, and really had it out for him.”
“He ever mention a cop named Joe Itami?”
“No. There was one name . . .” She sighed. Her irises traveled in orbit as she tried to recall.
“Wakeland,” Katz said.
Nelly’s head made deep, emphatic nods. “Him, yeah. I remember ’cause we saw the name on a business ad somewhere, a couple years ago. Security company, I think. Gord tensed right up. That night he had one of his sweat spells.”
I tried not to show any emotion. It was easy. Anger and shame and disbelief all roiled through me at once, canceling each other out. I didn’t know what to feel. Joe Itami’s words came back to me.
“People saw Gord as this happy, funny guy,” Nelly said. “A real character. And for the most part he was. God, no one could make me laugh like him. But something happened back in the day, and once in a blue moon it would creep to the surface. I’d tell him to forget it, it was ages ago. Gord would say, Easy for you, they didn’t put you in the drink.”