by Howard Engel
“Maybe the time for Savas will come later,” I suggested, and he bought that for the time being. Pambos began looking lost again, so I reminded him. “The list,” I prompted from where I was sitting on the corner of the bed.
“Yes. The names on the list aren’t pulled out of the phonebook, Benny. Most of them, as a matter of fact, are unlisted. I’m talking about names that are well known from Grantham all the way to Toronto. I don’t want to embarrass anybody. You know what I mean?” I nodded as I sipped tea.
“You can’t get a new list?”
“No.” He gave me a look that said I hadn’t been listening. But I had. I put it down to Pambos knowing his story too well. He couldn’t imagine that I didn’t have all the tidy details tucked away already. I tried to look even more concentrated. I felt cross-eyed, but he didn’t get up and walk out.
“You said back at the United that this list of yours would be valuable to some people but not to everybody. Can you explain?”
“Look, Benny, before we go on with this, I want to put things on a businesslike basis. You know what I mean?” This was my cue to make a grand gesture. But I held my hands on my teacup. Somewhere inside me a voice was saying “Remember your rent!” It was right, moving from the hotel had moved me into a whole new debt bracket.
“Is this going to be worth a hundred a day plus expenses, Pambos? You have to decide that.”
“Well, Benny, I guess money is only money. You know I own a piece of the Stephenson House, don’t you? I’m no millionaire, but I’m comfortable enough, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure.”
Pambos Kiriakis owned a piece of the Stephenson House! That surprised me. I thought he was just the manager. The hotel, one of the oldest and most traditional institutions in Grantham, had been established when the old canal town was at the height of its career. It had started as a health spa when the smelly open sewer that now ran behind St. Andrew Street was a forest of tall masts making their way up to Lake Erie or downstream towards Lake Ontario. That heyday lasted until the third Welland Canal was opened just over the hundred years ago. This canal bypassed Grantham’s centre of gravity and the town began to look elsewhere for a reason for being. Somehow, some called it a miracle, the Stephenson House was spared in the general rethinking that slowly went on following the close of the Hitler war. No longer a spa noted for its healing waters, the hotel put out feelers to social clubs and Grantham’s most exclusive circles. When the private boys’ school named after the martyred Bishop Cranmer held a public dance off its Western Hill campus, the location was invariably the Stephenson House. In fact, when a fire put part of Cranmer’s lower school out of service, classes were held at the hotel until the damage had been repaired. When the mayor held a function that required a hotel’s amenities, the Stephenson was booked and the proprietors of other local hostelries didn’t even begin to question the choice. The Stephenson House was a hotel that was out of its category, a find in a small city like Grantham.
From the fifties to the seventies the hotel had been owned by the Lawder family, one of the oldest families in the district. I went to school with one of the Lawder girls, who impressed all of us when she passed around a photograph of her horse, Pegleas. I remember it with jealousy unabated over these many years. During the last decade, the hotel had changed hands at least twice that I heard about. But, then I’m not the first to hear about the wheeling and dealing among the powerbrokers of the city, even when the power is losing its steam and the broking is largely trying to pay off an incrustation of mortgages deposited along the classical lines of the ancient brick main building.
So, Pambos Kiriakis had a piece of it. Good for him. Some of the old blood around these parts is getting thin. It was time for some transfusion to come along and take a fresh look at the old place. Kiriakis had caused some local eyebrows to be raised when he began managing the hotel. I remember the gossip from St. Andrew Street about this Greek coming along and pushing old Phin Lawder off to pensionland. A day earlier the same people had been trading stories about Phin’s wasteful and intemperate ways. Phin was a drunk and a spendthrift, but he came from a good family. At least it was a good one back in 1813. Pambos’s family didn’t arrive on the scene until at least a century and a half later. His father, so he told me, became a shoeshine man in a narrow store near Queen and St. Andrew in the early 1960s. Pambos’s older brother fell in with some unpleasant characters in Malham, south of Grantham, and ended up as a sacrifice to appease some god of the wars between the mobs. While he was still alive, Pambos said, it was hard not to get a ticket for going through a green light. The cops took their responsibilities more broadly back then. But Pambos never showed any sign of letting his brother’s failure to make a success of crime build up a resentment in him for law, order and the establishment. Quite the opposite in fact. The first time I talked to Pambos, he told me about the beginnings of his coin collection, which he figured at the time was worth several thousand dollars. He didn’t get this by brother Costas’s methods, but by simply culling his change at the end of the day and checking catalogues.
Now that I think about it, Pambos was always dipping into a catalogue of one kind or another. I remember him telling me about a couple of auctions that I might have taken advantage of, if I hadn’t been living in a hotel room where all the furnishings were marked by matching cigarette burns. He once invited Wally Skeat from the TV station and me to look at his art collection. When we got to his apartment, we saw the usual Van Gogh prints on the walls. The art collection was in an old cardboard portfolio left over from public school. Three pencil drawings! Now what kind of art collection is that? One was a picture of old Joe Higgins, on his crutches selling balsa birds at the corner of St. Andrew and James, like he always was every Saturday when he was sober. The next was a group of houses in Toronto. They were heavily outlined and simplified so that what you saw was more pattern than a lot of details. The name in the lower right read “L. Harris.” It didn’t mean anything to me, but it lit up Wally’s face. “L. Harris” was, I gathered, somebody every civilized person should know about. The other drawing was a sketch of a Venetian street scene judging from the gondola and the flooded streets. The signature down at the bottom read “Perdix.” This didn’t excite Wally, so I guessed that he wasn’t a household word in as many households as “L. Harris.”
And that was it: three pencil drawings in a kid’s portfolio. The Van Gogh sunflowers by the bathroom door were looking better and better every minute. As Pambos brought his little brass Turkish coffee-maker to a boil three times, no doubt to shake off the evil eye, he explained that Harris was a member of the Group of Seven, not one of whom I’d ever run into before, and Perdix was a fellow at Cranmer College, who was, according to Pambos, gong somewhere. The sketch of Joe Higgins was by a local artist who may or may not have heard of the other two. Anyway, it wasn’t my idea of a picture collection. After we sipped the thick, sweet coffee, Pambos had got going on his hobby-horse about supporting Canadian arts, which made me feel like it was twelve-thirty instead of only a quarter after nine. Wally and I got out as soon as we could after that. I was glad Pambos had a hobby, I wished I had one.
So now Pambos was comfortable, not a millionaire, but with a tidy piece of Grantham history in the form of an interest in the Stephenson House tucked into his pocket. I guess he could afford to part with whatever it took to locate the missing list.
“Pambos,” I asked, “tell me more about this list. A list that has the kind of value you’re putting on it isn’t your average laundry list. What kind of list are we talking about? Why is it so valuable? Tell me why somebody’d want to take it from you.”
“I’ll get to that, Benny. Give me a chance to organize my thoughts, eh?” I didn’t know he was feeling pressured. I was only trying to help, after all. Pambos took a deep breath and appeared to notice his rolled sleeves for the first time. As he spoke, he unrolled them and refastened his cuffs. “You see, Benny, I can be sure it wasn’t anybody working f
or me that took it. Sten and Andy have been with me for five years. If they wanted to steal from me, which they do, they would take directly from the bar receipts or from the restaurant cash. The list I’m talking about wouldn’t mean anything to them.”
“So, who does that leave?”
“If you ask me, somebody on the list swiped it.”
“Pambos, have you taken up blackmailing or some other kind of extortion?”
“Me? Hell, Benny, this is Pambos Kiriakis you’re talking to! I never pinched so much as an apple off a fruit stand in my entire life! I’m clean, Benny, and so is this list.”
“Pambos, you’re driving me insane!” He looked at me like the shoe was on the other foot.
“What’ve I done? I’m bringing you some business. I’ve helped you unpack. What more can I do?”
“You can give me a lead that isn’t missing for a start. From what you say, all we have to do to find our suspect is to find the damned list. What kind of trick is that?”
Pambos nodded. But he didn’t look too worried. I was not getting a handle on this investigation. I was asking the wrong questions. Here I was at the very beginning of what might become a case, and already I was as mixed up as if it had been dragging in and out of courtrooms for three years. I knew that everything depended on getting a grip on the nature of Kitiakis’s list, in order to find out why it was so valuable, but Pambos was not prepared to tell me until he was good and ready. I felt like I was trapped in a computer that had to learn the entire English language before it could tell me “yes” or “no.” I tried to master my irregular breathing.
“Pambos, can you remember any part of the list that might be important? Can you remember any of the names on it?”
“I been thinking of that. That’s why I came to see you back at the United. I know you keep half your office hours there.”
“And?”
“And, what?”
“And do you remember names from your list”
“Yeah. Sure I do. But, like I said, it’s a delicate business. Most of the people on the list wouldn’t want to be brought into this.”
“Right, Pambos. Maybe I’m the undercover editor of the Grantham Beacon instead of a private investigator. Maybe the word private means I’m a stringer for The Toronto Star. Is that what you think? Either you came here to trust me—I mean apart from helping with the boxes—or you came to shoot the breeze. Which is it?”
“Benny, don’t get hot at me! I’m just feeling my way through this. If it was somebody on this list that took it, I want to wipe the floor with him!”
“Good! I recognize the emotion. Tell me, Pambos, do you remember the names on the list?”
“I remember some of them. There are about twentyfive names in all. All big shots in the Niagara district. I can remember maybe half a dozen of the names. That’s all.”
“Okay. Have you seen any of the people who appear on the list lately?”
“I was coming to that.”
“I’m glad you were coming to something!” Pambos ignored the anxiety he was building in me brick by brick.
“Three of them were in the hotel shortly before I noticed the list missing.” I rooted through one of the halfemptied boxes and found a scrap of paper and a ballpoint pen.
“Now we’re getting someplace,” I said. “Who were they?”
“Jonah Abraham …” The whistle that came out of me was unpremeditated. It represented genuine surprise.
“I can’t imagine the head of Windermere Distilleries rifling your desk, Pambos.” Pambos looked wounded, like I’d interrupted a vast torrent of information.
“Will you let me finish? Another name is Peter Mac-Culloch. The other is Alex Favell. They were all at the hotel. Any of them could have taken it.”
If Pambos had handed me a Who’s Who of the Grantham élite, I couldn’t have found more prestigious names. Abraham, MacCulloch and Favell, while they might never sit at the same table, have graced the best tables in town and beyond. MacCulloch was vice-president of Secord University. He’d come to academia through business. A local boy, he’d made a name for himself in the west, in oil, I think. After more than five years in the job, his face in the paper had become a second logo for Secord. As a fund-raiser, he had no match. He brought into the ivory tower some of the bottom-line philosophy he’d learned in the blitzkrieg of modern business.
Alex Favell, whose name I’d heard around town over the last few years, wasn’t as well known to me. I remembered at once that he had something to do with the paper mill in Papertown, south of Grantham. I’d read or skipped through pieces about him on the business pages of the Beacon. I couldn’t conjure up a face to fit the name. The best I could do was remember seeing the name connected to some social note about the opening of a paper-mill- endowed floral clock somewhere along the road between Niagara Falls and Queenston. The floral clock must be among the wonders of the world least included on the endangered lists
Lists. I kept coming back to lists. I tried to imagine what kind of list would include Jonah Abraham, Alex Favell and Peter MacCulloch. Favell and MacCulloch were old Grantham, old Ontario, even old Upper Canadian names. There is no equivalent to the Mayflower in Upper Canada. If you came too early, you were French and not in the pecking-order. If you came too late, you couldn’t qualify as a United Empire Loyalist, which meant that you belonged to them foreigners who came after 1800. The UEL list was an important list for some people, but it wasn’t the one I was looking for because it excluded Jonah Abraham, the well-known and well-fixed distiller of just about everything but attar of roses.
“Pambos, none of these guys are picking up butts from the gutter. And you say the others on the list are just as rich? Why do you think they would stoop to petty larceny? Now grand larceny is another matter.” Pambos looked uncomfortable. He got up and paced the room, finally stopping to fix a few slats in a shutter that had fallen half out of the frame. Very tidily, he picked up the falling pieces and slipped them into their grooves. But he didn’t answer my question. It gave me a moment to wonder why I had used those old-fashioned terms for theft. I took a deep breath and tried again. “Isn’t Jonah Abraham sniffing around trying to get a Senate appointment?”
“The only Senate appointment he’ll get is an appointment to see a senator,” Pambos said, with uncharacteristic cynicism. “And since your memory is so good, you’ll recall that MacCulloch is a leading candidate for a future lieutenant-governor here in Ontario.”
“Noted,” I said with a scowl. And when that had sunk in I added, “Which all adds up to the fact that you have more talking to do, Pambos, before I can tell you whether or not I can help you find this thing.” Pambos sat down on the edge of my bed. He looked like he had avoided all of the hard questions he was capable of avoiding. From now on he would have to play with the facts or not play at all. “Tell me about the list,” I said.
He sucked at something caught in his teeth for a few moments, trying to turn the thing over in his mind sufficiently to find the best starting point. When he had it, he said, “Have you ever heard of the painter Wallace Lamb?” I thought about that and shook my head.
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. I only heard about Picasso a year ago. How does he figure?”
“His dealer gave me the list. The people on it all have pictures on loan from Tallon’s collection.”
“Tallon?”
“Arthur Tallon. He ran the Contemporary Gallery on Church Street.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve walked by it.” The Contemporary Gallery, which I had actually been in, although Pambos didn’t have to know how I spend my spare time, was an honest-to-goodness art gallery just like the ones in Toronto or Buffalo. To indicate sales, they used the little red dot system like all the big-league galleries. It was the only gallery in town where picture-framing wasn’t the big deal. The only other large gallery was for exhibitions only. It was located in the mansion built by the man who built the Welland Canal. They didn’t sell pictures at Rodman Hall, you jus
t got to look at travelling exhibitions. The only things for sale were dainty little hasty notes which were just the thing for sending “regrets only” on.
“Why did Tallon give you the list, Pambos? Was he worried about it getting lost?”
“I was buying a Lamb from him. He gave me the list of local people he had lent a few Lambs to.” I was beginning to feel more shepherd than investigator, but at least I thought, now, we are beginning to get somewhere.
“Now, we are beginning to get somewhere. All you have to do is ask Tallon to give you a duplicate list.” Pambos didn’t like my idea. His smile faded on his face and he began shaking his head.
“I can see you don’t read the Beacon as thoroughly as you should. Arthur Tallon died in Grantham General four weeks ago.” Light was beginning to sift through the slats in Pambos’s story. If Tallon was dead, that could complicate things.
“We’re still getting somewhere,” I said. “Has Tallon’s death got anything to do with the value of the list?”
Pambos Kiriakis looked at me like he’d been patiently teaching me the two-times-table for the last three hours and I still was stumbling over two times six. “Of course,” he said, making me feel about seven-and-a-half and not too swift into the bargain. “Tallon was a terrible businessman. Disorganized. Depended on his memory or slips of paper. If I didn’t force him to take my money, he would never take payment. The only receipts I ever got from him are written on torn-up pieces of cigarette packages.”