by Howard Engel
In my head I could hear my mother yelling at me, as though I was telling her all about my adventures behind the Stephenson House. “Benny! What are you trying to do to me! Scare me to death? Just tell the story, leave out the scary parts.” I could see her looking at me in her tangerine living-room. “Benny, Ellery Queen you’re not. Just tell me the facts, like the fellow said on … What was it? With Sergeant Friday? You know the one. Bum-bahbum-bump!” Why was I dragging my mother into this place? It was scary enough without her, what with the noise the hinges made as the door opened inward. I stepped in and closed the door behind me, not quite cutting off my mother’s voice inside me. In my perspiring imagination she was saying, “You think I don’t know what an open door means! I wasn’t born yesterday.” For a second I wondered if I’d see her familiar face appear at the window, if I slid the panel open. I ignored the temptation.
“Pambos!” I called in a subdued yell that stepped on its own intentions. “It’s me, Benny!” The sound of my voice vanished into the curtains, which hung down to the floor. I could feel that old horror creeping up my back as I heard the inner voice say, back away, get out while there’s still time.
A noise on my right. A section of the bookcases, filled not with books but with antique toys and lead soldiers, pivoted. Pambos came into the room, followed by an older man whose name I didn’t know, although I’d seen him around town for years.
“Benny! What a surprise! Glad to see you, sit down. I’ll get Renos to send in some coffee. Hey, do you two know each other?” I looked at the man behind Pambos, and he looked at me. We stood in mutual embarrassment, waiting to be introduced. “Benny’s a private detective around town, Bill.” Bill nodded.
“Investigator,” I corrected. Pambos shrugged. “There are a couple of things, Pambos …”
“Bill here’s working for the Beacon. He’s a reporter. Sit down,” he repeated. We both did, while Pambos went around to the business side of his desk and demanded coffee through the telephone.
This wasn’t the first time I’d spent an evening with Pambos, as I’ve said, but the evening had been relocated to its most glamorous setting to date. His collections were no longer kept in a box and brought out to be admired, but they were all around us. He pointed out the paintings and identified them: a Lawren Harris, an A.Y. Jackson, a small Pollock and a Wallace Lamb. The toys were mostly Victorian and early twentieth century. There were cars and buggies, trains, fire-engines, banks, jugglers, trick dogs and other animals and masses and masses of lead soldiers. “This fellow here,” Pambos was saying, “is a member of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. They were his élite force and under his personal command. There weren’t many of them left when he got back from Moscow after the winter of 1812–13.” The figure, which stood less than three inches high, had been hand painted from his leather boots to his ginger-coloured whiskers. He carried one of those backpacks that French soldiers carried through the Napoleonic wars.
“Napoleon was a general by the time he was twentyseven,” Bill said. Pambos answered with a date. Seventeen-ninety-something. I had interrupted a meeting of the Tin-soldier League. I didn’t have much to contribute. I was going to volunteer Napoleon’s famous dying words, “Kiss me, Hardy!” but I thought that they both knew them as well as they knew the year of the Offensive of 1812.
“Do you think he was poisoned?” Bill asked me. I didn’t know what to say. I thought he’d been beheaded like all the others. Pambos came to my rescue just as coffee arrived on a big tray. I sometimes thought that Pambos lived on coffee; wherever he was, a cup was growing cold at his elbow.
“You’ve been reading that stuff by that Norwegian dentist, Bill. Come on!” Bill’s smile lit up his craggy face as he leaned forward.
“Sten Forshufvud was Swedish and a respected biologist. Why are you underrating him? You can still argue fairly, can’t you?” Pambos turned to me and tried to explain the history.
“The traditional story is that Napoleon died of cancer of the stomach on St. Helena in 1821. But there are those,” he said, pinning Bill down with a look that would have been withering if Pambos had been any taller, “who believe that he was poisoned by one of the Frenchmen attached to the Emperor’s household.”
“Montholon, the nasty Count of Montholon!” Bill added.
“So you say!” said Pambos. “You can’t prove a thing!” Pambos said it so passionately, I thought he was taking the question of the count’s guilt or innocence personally.
“Hey! Slow down. Let me be the jury. What I don’t know about Napoleon could fill volumes. I’m as impartial a witness as you’re likely to get.” I picked up my coffee and began to sip. In a moment Pambos began to make a case for the fact that the Emperor had died of natural causes. He invoked books from his shelves as he went and soon the air was thick with names I’d never heard before: Montholon, Bertrand, Marchand, Hudson Lowe, Dr. O’Meara, Dr. Arnott, Dr. Antommarchi and dozens of others. Every once in a while Bill would interrupt.
“I object!” he’d say. “There’s no proof that there was a cancer found in the post-mortem.” Or, “Hudson Lowe was only interested in his liver, he didn’t care a damn about his stomach!” When I say that most of this went over my head, I exaggerate. It all went over my head. When Pambos finally began to wind down he brought out a letter from the top drawer of his desk.
“I showed this post-mortem report to Agatha Christie,” Pambos said. I began to wake up. I’d heard of her. In fact there were only half a dozen of her books I haven’t read.
“When did you hob-nob with Dame Agatha,” said Bill, not disguising his disbelief.
“A cat can look at a crime queen,” Pambos answered. “It was back in the 1970s. I was wondering about the same thing you are, so I sent her a copy of the postmortem report, holding back the Emperor’s name. I didn’t fool her.” He looked down at the letter and read:
Yes, I rather guessed it was Napoleon. It certainly argues a cautionary tale in the use of emetics, doesn’t it?
Pambos waited for the effect of the letter to sink in.
“No word about poison. Not a word about arsenic intoxication. Not a murmur about foul play.”
“Well, she may have said that in the 1970s, but if she’d heard from you twenty years earlier, she would have had more to say. That’s my bet,” Bill said. Pambos put the letter, which was handwritten, back into the neatly addressed envelope. I thought that they’d let the matter drop there, but they didn’t. There wasn’t a moment for me to catch Pambos’s attention for a few questions.
Bill took out a pocket flask and added a nip to his coffee. Then he went on to describe the evidence for the other side. I heard the same names tossed around again, but now there were others: Ben Weider, Hamilton Smith and David Chandler. Like the earlier batch, I wasn’t able to place any of them, but I will say this for Bill, he laid down the evidence like a good crown attorney. We heard about antimony as well as arsenic, about the contacts between Montholon and the Comte d’Artois, who became Charles X. It was a tempting theory, but the chemistry about making a poisonous almond drink from peach pits left me behind again.
I was about to ask Pambos if I could borrow his ear for a private moment, when the telephone rang. I looked at my watch. It was getting late. Nowhere in town did time disappear as fast as at Pambos Kiriakis’s. I was surprised at the hour, but reassured that he continued to be the good host I remembered.
His sheet wasn’t completely clean, however. There was the notorious Russian incident that, to hear some talk, nearly killed a Canadian-Soviet wheat deal. Pambos was giving a visiting Russian cultural attaché a mediumwell-done steak at the old steakhouse, when a cartoonist from the Beacon walked in. When Pambos introduced the attaché to the cartoonist, Hugo Macduff, Hugo thought Pambos was having him on. To demonstrate his disbelief, Hugo treated them both to a trick he was working on. He thumped the table, then briskly whipped the tablecloth out from under the knives, forks, spoons and plates. He almost had the trick down pat, but, unfortunately, t
he board with the Russian’s steak on it went sailing across the room and became lost among the rubbers and galoshes near the door. The Russian was not amused, nor was Pambos.
“By the way,” Bill said, leaning in my direction, while Pambos was talking in an animated way to somebody on long distance, “my name is Palmer. Bill Palmer. I’ve heard Pambos mention you. He gets a kick out of knowing a private eye.” He grinned. It was a beat-up, lined face, with drink written in every quarter. He wasn’t even tipsy, but I was getting good at reading the signs. I thought of that Ben Hecht play they put on at the Collegiate a year or so ago, The Front Page. He looked like he could have stepped right out of a newsroom. There was a hunch to his shoulders and a lack of precision with his razor that reinforced my picture of the crusading reporter with his cry of “Stop the press! Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite and make it snappy!”
“Have you known Pambos long?” I asked.
“I met him in Skylloura. It’s a village north-west of Nicosia.”
“That’s in Cyprus, right?”
“Yeah. I was with a paper over there and I met him when his brother was killed.” He automatically lowered his voice and cast a glance at Pambos, who was laughing into the phone and leaning back in his chair at a dangerous angle.
“They had a. lot of trouble over there once, didn’t they?” I guess it was a dumb question, but Palmer was generous.
“Yeah, they’ve been having a bad time since the days of the Argonauts and I don’t mean the Toronto football club. I was over there when the Greeks and the British were fighting about independence. During the 1950s. The Turks came into it, too, near the end. Pambos’s brother, Michael, was killed outside a Turkish village called Guenyeli in 1957. He was one of nine in what I called a massacre at the time. And since I still wake up at night when I have bad dreams about it, I guess I’d still call it that.” This time Palmer didn’t put his drink into his coffee; he took his snort direct, then offered me a pull at the flask after wiping the top with his hand. I shook my head.
“How did a Canadian reporter get to be covering a Greek war?” I asked.
“I was working on one of Beaverbrook’s papers, the Express, when I was recruited by a guy named Charles Foley, who was starting up an English language newspaper in Nicosia. That was The Times of Cyprus.” Palmer shrugged, not wanting to be taken for a hero. “The fighting hadn’t started yet and it looked like a warm place to spend the winter.”
From the telephone, Pambos shot us all a helpless look. “All I can tell you,” he said, “is that he sometimes drops by here in the evenings, but I never can be sure when. I’ll give him your message if I see him. That’s the best I can do.” When he had hung up Pambos explained that the caller was a book collector from Boulder, Colorado, who was trying to find Martin Lyster, a book-tracer and dealer in rare books, whose name I’d heard around town before. Pambos described Martin as a slippery customer, always turning up like a bad penny when you least expected him. Bill suggested that the sound of a cork popping near an open window would attract his attention if he was within a hundred miles of it.
“Martin’s a decent fellow,” Pambos said, “but he’s impossible to keep up with. He never tells you where he’s staying. That’s why I haven’t been able to pay him for the last job he did for me.” Here Pambos held up a calfbound volume with gilt edging. Bill allowed that Martin was a living legend and took another swig from his flask, which was quickly nearing the empty mark. Bill took the book from Pambos and held it up to the light, examined the binding, sniffed at the open pages and nodded deeply like it was a rare wine in his hands and not a dusty tome with liver spots. Palmer handed it to me and I frowned at it and bobbed my head sagely.
“Mr. Something Lambert in Boulder wants him to call,” Pambos said as he took the book back into his possession and smiled slightly, no doubt because during my examination I hadn’t cracked the spine. “So, if you see him,” he said, looking at each of us in turn, “tell him it’s important.”
I was beginning to look at Pambos in a new light. For years I’d known about the brother who’d been executed by the mob south of town and left headless in a ditch. Pambos never tried to hide the fact. He was as up-front about such personal information as I was about my Uncle Morris’s gold stocks. But he’d never mentioned this second brother, the first of two to die violently. I tried to imagine a brace of brothers standing beside the man lovingly replacing the calf-bound book on its shelf. It was hard to add the necessary violence to the picture. But Michael had been active in the movement to free Cyprus from the British and the other brother had been an unsuccessful hoodlum. Brother Costas had a record of minor violations long enough at the time of his death to alert the cops to what the younger brother, Pambos, was trying to do legally and by the sweat of his brow.
“When did you come out to Canada, Pambos?” Pambos didn’t look at me, he looked over at Bill.
“You were talking Cyprus politics while I was trying to get Mr. Lambert to cool off?” Then to me:
“Yeah, I came out here with my parents and brother in 1960. As soon as Cyprus was an okay place to come from again. Just after your paper went out of business, Bill.” He said that with a leer, as though Bill Palmer had personally put The Times of Cyprus out of business.
“Now, wait a minute! When the Brits pulled back into those sovereign base areas, the whole island suffered a recession. All sorts of businesses went under. And where were we going to get headlines once Murder Mile dwindled into good old Ledra Street again?”
There was a brief lull in the conversation, and then they went back to Napoleon again. I excused myself. The bathroom had a print of the Mona Lisa hanging above the tub. Nice touch. When I got back, fresh coffee had arrived, and Bill Palmer had started filling a pipe from a yellow oilskin pouch.
“He couldn’t have invaded the coast of Kent,” Pambos was saying. I had a good idea who “he” might be. “You forget the Goodwin Sands. Sandwich and Dover are the only close harbours. And you have the other Cinque Ports. There’s pebble beaches around Deal and Walmer. Then you get the famous white cliffs.” I wondered if I could retreat to the bathroom again until conversation came around to famous criminal cases or the movies of the sixties. I decided against it and tried to follow what was going on. I can now name the Cinque Ports, but I can’t explain how there came to be seven of them.
About a quarter of an hour later, Pambos got up and told me to follow him. He took me into his “secret room” behind the bookcase. It was a crowded room that reminded me of the stacks behind the check-out counter at the public library. Who would have thought that the thing to hide behind a bookcase was more books? He had walls of them, some in mint condition, some in torn or faded jackets or without jackets at all. He told me about this being his treasure-trove of rare editions between parries and thrusts at Bill’s theories about the last years of the late emperor of the French. I had just started to quiz him about some of the missing pieces in the puzzle he’d handed me when the man wanted in Boulder, Colorado made his appearance. Pambos and Bill warmly greeted Martin Lyster and introduced him to me. His face rivalled Bill Palmer’s for the wear and tear of good times. “He’s a decent old skin,” said Palmer in a broad theatrical brogue, while Pambos found him a cup of hot coffee. Before he could tuck his long legs under his chair or get half a dozen sips of coffee into him, Lyster was arguing the case for the journal of the Irish Dr. O’Meara, who attended Napoleon on St. Helena. When I finally left, I’d had my fill of history all the way from the battle of Marengo to the massacre at Guenyeli. I took my weary bones home and put them into my new bath. How had I managed with only a shower all these years, I wondered, as I climbed into the bed we’d set up in the morning. I was asleep before I even noticed the clock ticking.
SIX
I’d forgotten to set the clock-radio. The telephone let me know that when it started ringing. The useless time on the dial of the clock told a tale of being unplugged at the City House and then slipped into a box full of di
rty shirts and paperbacks. It was a clear accusation of negligence. The phone rang again.
“Hello?”
“Is Phil there?”
“No. This is a brand new number as of yesterday.” There was a pause as the woman at the other end took in the news. Did she know the woman with the north of England accent, I wondered. I added “I’m sorry” and waited for a “thank you,” but all I got was a click as the connection was broken.
It was hard to orient myself in the new place. The light hit the walls differently. The morning noises were different. Gone were the sounds of heavy traffic moving steadily west along King Street. I could scarcely hear any traffic at all, but from the schoolyard, a din arose that would have rattled a VU meter at the TV station. It was all high notes, treble, no bass. I looked at my watch. It must be recess. I’d slept in on my first morning in the new apartment. A good sign, I thought, as I hoisted myself in the direction of my toothbrush.
An hour later I was sitting at the marble counter of the United Cigar Store. I hadn’t tried making coffee in my place because it needed more thinking about than I had thinking time. Besides, I liked the company of the regulars. I looked through the Toronto paper and ate most of a piece of toast before walking past the magazine rack to the street. I could feel the heat the moment I stepped out the door. St. Andrew Street was warming its old stones and bricks, flushing the winter out of its joints under a sun that was almost visibly teasing and encouraging the weeds to grow up around the telephone poles and between the cracks in the sidewalk. I headed to the library.