The Maestro

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “As a representative of the school board, I would like to know where he is,” she snapped.

  He took a step back, covering his heart with his free hand.

  “Well, so do I,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me where the boy can get in touch with you when he calls in?”

  He pretended to cower again, raising his forearm across his face as though he expected a lashing for being so impertinent.

  “Fine,” she said, stepping past him and hurrying towards her own car. She found a piece of paper and wrote her name and the school phone number on it. She handed it to him. With the open car door between them, she dared to speak again.

  “If Burl has run away, Mr. Crow, I’ll make sure that the police have been alerted. I’m sure you took that step when he first left.”

  The little joke he had been having at her expense withered on his face. She saw his fist tighten around the stock of his gun.

  “Why don’t you mind your own friggin’ business,” he said.

  “You can bet I will,” she said, sliding into her seat, turning on the ignition and revving the motor high. Then she rolled down the window and yelled, “Burl is my business.” She didn’t think there was much chance he heard her. She rolled the window up again fast.

  He shouted something, too. She revved the motor higher so that the engine squealed. She put the car in gear. He leaned the gun against the rusted-out bumper of his car and, with his hands up, walked towards her.

  She took her foot off the pedal and opened her window a crack. She’d already made sure the doors were locked.

  He leaned down so that his lips were up against the crack where the window was open.

  “He’s gone to live with his grandma up in Dryden, since you’re so concerned.” His voice was even. “Things weren’t working out here.” He tried to sound a little sad, as if it had been a hard decision. Then he stood back. “There. Does that make us friends again?”

  “We’ll see,” said Natalie, and her foot went down hard on the accelerator. The car flew into reverse; she turned the steering wheel wickedly. Then she screamed out of the garbage dump of a yard. She was out on the road shivering and hugging the wheel close to her chest before it crossed her mind that perhaps she had run over the horrible man’s foot.

  22

  A Night in the Shadow

  THE BUS CRAWLED OUT OF THE TERMINAL ON Notre Dame in the dark of early morning. Despite the hour, Bea had driven Burl into Sudbury herself. She wanted to give him one last briefing.

  He had stared out at the cratered moonscape that surrounded the city as they drove in from Intervalle. The fan in the Bronco was up high, blowing hot air in on the silence. There was no other sound. He saw the lights of the mines, an unexpected stream of traffic—a shift change. Pharaoh, where he had grown up, was only fifty kilometres away, but Sudbury might as well have been the moon for the number of times he’d travelled there. And yet, here he was travelling to Sudbury for the second time in as many days. Bea had brought him in the day before for some spook ‘em clothes of his own. How convincing would it be for Gow’s lost son to appear on the doorstep looking like a waif? There had been talk of another haircut, but his hair had grown long enough that it fell just like Gow’s in the pictures of him as a child genius. So they left Burl’s hair as it was, and he wore one of the Maestro’s monogrammed shirts.

  Bea bought him a round-trip ticket good for any time. Then she grilled him once more. He was to phone as soon as he had seen the lawyers. She explained to him about long distance phone calls. She didn’t miss a thing. Finally, when he was at the door, she handed him an envelope. She held it out of his grasp for one last moment.

  “I could have arranged with my bank for you to pick this up at a branch in Toronto, but I trust you, Burl.” He could see in her eyes just how far she trusted him: about as far as a man can hurl a moose, as his father liked to say.

  When he was on the bus, he counted the money. She had said there would be enough for expenses and a room at the Y for a week. But the cash didn’t add up to what he had earned working at Skookum.

  Somewhere past Noble, the moon still in the sky, Burl realized that he was glad Bea had short-changed him. He didn’t want to feel he owed her anything. It was kind of like freedom.

  He drifted off to sleep.

  He sat up several hours later, groggy and disoriented, to find himself barreling down Highway 400 into Toronto. There seemed to be a thousand lanes of speeding traffic stretching out to either side.

  Then they were at the Bay Street Terminal, and he was disgorged from the bus like a frog from the belly of a hooked bass. He stood with his spook ‘em clothes all wrinkled at the knee in the middle of what appeared to be Chinatown, and stared at his map. He had stashed his duffel bag in a locker at the bus station. It cost him a loonie but he wasn’t planning on heading to the Y just yet. Nor was he planning on seeing any lawyers.

  He was looking for Spadina Road.

  Toronto was nothing like the postcards. Or maybe it was the parts of it you couldn’t show in a picture that got to Burl: the high-pitched bleep of a truck backing down an alley, the air brakes of a bus, people squabbling in foreign languages, a panhandler sobbing in no fixed language at all. The urgent wail of an ambulance threading its way through the river of traffic.

  Gow had called the city the Shadow. And that was how Burl saw it, in all its darkness and unfamiliarity.

  A girl with a shaven head and nose rings played the violin on a street corner. Burl stopped to watch her. She was beautiful in her short black dress and her legs pale as birch-bark. She played feverishly. She saw nothing, her eyes rolled into her head as if reading some music there. Then she stopped, and she looked like someone who had just woken up. In a daze she stooped and counted the change people had thrown into her case. She stowed her instrument and headed up the street, her clogs clapping. She carried the case under her arm, and a cigarette flapped from her black- penciled lips. She looked back furtively a couple of times.

  She yelled at Burl; told him to stop following her. He let her pull ahead.

  Smells pressed in on him. Exhaust and cooking fat and dusty dry goods for sale, piled in toppling heaps on the sidewalk, and fresh tar and last night’s vomit frozen, now melting.

  Burl saw in an hour more people than he had seen in his whole life. His eyes smarted with the strain of seeing and the stinging stench of the yellow air. His head ached with the blare and discord. His feet ached with the unrelenting hardness of concrete.

  He bought a sausage on a bun from a street vendor. He sat on the sill of a bank window until the pigeons got too pushy. He had never seen a pigeon before. He had never seen a bird with so little self-respect.

  In the doorway of an out-of-business store with its windows newspapered over, a woman slept in a blanket.

  Spadina Avenue was only a few blocks from the bus terminal. But that wasn’t Spadina Road, and there was a lot of the avenue before he got to the road and then a lot of the road before he reached his destination. The road climbed upward from the hullabaloo of outdoor markets. There were apartments and then houses and trees, fenced in like huge tired animals to protect them from lumbering out into the traffic. Burl walked until there was hardly anyone on the street. Then, near the peak of the hill, Spadina made a graceful curve and there sat a castle. Casa Loma. Exactly like a postcard. There was something reassuring in that.

  It was 3:00 before Burl finally crossed St. Clair and saw that the numbers were getting closer to the building he was looking for. He found it at last in a part of town called Forest Hill Village.

  There were people here, shopping with baskets on their arms. In a single block there were four bakeries featuring elaborately braided loaves and cakes topped with glazed fruit. There was a market store in which the apples appeared to have been individually polished. There was a restaurant called a ristorante. The waiters in the ristorante were all thin with black hair.

  Finally he reached the Columbine. That was the name on the
return address of Reggie Corngold’s letter.

  The Columbine sat across the street from a little park. The apartment was four floors high, brown brick, ivy-covered. The doorway was impressive with the name carved above solid wooden doors painted black like the entrance to a church. There were six windows set in each door. There was a sign warning tradesmen to use the rear entrance.

  Burl stepped into the hallway not knowing what to do. There were eight tiny mailboxes there. He checked the names. Corngold was Number Five. There was no mail in the box.

  Burl was just about to start up the stairs when he heard footsteps descending. He backed up and waited. A woman, her high heels clicking resoundingly, passed him by and pushed at the heavy door with her briefcase. Burl helped. She smiled in a frowny kind of way, as if she was annoyed at herself for not paying enough attention to what she was doing. “Thanks,” she said without looking at him, then clicked down the stairs to the street.

  Feeling a little more reassured, Burl mounted the staircase in search of Number Five. No one home. But it was almost 4:00 by then. People would be off work soon. He decided to wait outside in the park, where he could see the residents arriving home. As he descended the staircase, the front door opened and his heart leaped, but it was only a postman. Watching from the stairs, he saw the postman open the whole panel of mailboxes with a key. There was a package for Reggie Corngold that he could not jam into the box, so he left it on the ledge below.

  When the postman had gone, Burl held the package in his hand, wanting to open it, wanting to know something—anything—about this man who was Nog’s friend. Then he placed it back on the ledge and pushed through the door.

  Night was already falling. In the park there was a sign showing a little dog with a pile of poop behind it on the ground. The picture showed a shovel and a wastebasket. Burl looked around. The sign worked. There was no dog poop anywhere.

  He sat on a bench. A gust of wind blew a placard against his leg. It was another sign: “Pesticides in Use. Please Keep Off.” He didn’t know where this new sign had come from. What was he supposed to keep off? He decided it didn’t really matter. There were too many signs in the city as far as he could tell. If you paid attention to all of them you’d go crazy.

  After another cold hour, only one person had entered the Columbine, a fancy-looking lady in furs with a small dog under her arm. Then an elderly man arrived from around the side of the building, stuffing his car keys in his pocket. He had nice silver hair. Burl thought he would make a good friend for the Maestro. Burl skittered across the street to watch him claim his mail. Mr. Coffee, Number Three.

  Soon all but Number One and Number Five were safely home for the evening. Burl caught glimpses of the other tenants in their windows: T. Pollack was having a glass of beer. S. Braithwaite was watching television and eating something from a bowl. And F. Lonsdale seemed to be lighting a fire. All the Columbine dwellers were settling in for the night, while the night itself settled in, cold and damp.

  At 7:30, Burl wandered back down to Forest Hill Village and found somewhere that wasn’t a ristorante where he could sit and have a coffee and something to eat. He killed almost an hour, then ventured up the road to the Columbine, his heart pounding. There was still nobody in Number Five.

  He stepped outside again. The wind had picked up. He dug his hands deep into his pockets. The woman in the furs was walking her little white dog in the park. The dog had a dump and the woman, with a great effort, bent down to scoop it up. She used a plastic bag. When she crossed the street dragging the dog with her, she glared at Burl.

  There was no way he could sit in the park now—it was too cold—so Burl set off south to St. Clair. He walked west along St. Clair until he found a fast-food joint. He went in. There were black people there. He’d never seen one in the flesh.

  Ten o’clock was the very latest he dared try Number Five. But when he got back to the Columbine, he could see that the lights were not on and the package was still sitting on the ledge in the hall.

  There was, by then, no place open in the village so Burl set off to see the city. He had slept several hours on the bus that morning, but he was quite tired. Still, he had no intention of spending any of his money staying at the Y. He thought of Bea waiting by the phone back in Intervalle.

  There were lots of places open. He had heard that about cities, but it shocked him. And as he journeyed on into the night, he found that he liked it better than the day. So many other people looked as if they were out of place. He didn’t stand out so much. He wondered if these night people had all just arrived in Toronto that day and had no place to stay.

  It snowed a bit around 4:30 A.M. The snow seemed to warm things up a bit. He caught a night bus to St. Clair West and—twenty-four hours after boarding the bus in Sudbury—he arrived again at the Columbine. Nobody’s lights were on. He didn’t go in. He found a retaining wall in the alley entrance to the parking lot, where he could see the windows of Reggie Corngold’s apartment. A raccoon came by looking for garbage. It didn’t seem to mind Burl being there. With fascination Burl watched the hooded burglar tip the top of a garbage can and mess around inside, then sit there munching, its eye on Burl, while Burl sat shivering. It was fatter than any coon he’d seen in the bush. Probably lived on junk food.

  They were still sitting there like that, although Burl was slumping by then, when the first hint of morning snuck down the narrow alley. Numbly Burl watched the dark begin to seep out of things, leaving them grey and lifeless, sucked dry.

  Suddenly the raccoon startled and waddled off through a gap in the fence. It took Burl’s dim brain longer to hear the car. He curled up small in the bushes. The car passed down the alley and turned into the parking lot behind the Columbine. Burl watched through the snarl of shrubbery. It was the woman he had seen leaving the building when he had first arrived. He had opened the door for her. She passed by, not seeing him in the shadows. He followed her. When the front door closed behind her, he ventured up to watch her through the window. She stood in the front hallway and took off her black gloves. She opened mailbox Number Five. Burl was paralyzed. The woman picked up the envelope off the ledge and started tearing it open as she headed for the stairs.

  Burl’s first thought was that she was stealing Reggie’s mail. Then it occurred to him that maybe she was Reggie’s wife. And then like a jolt of electricity passing through him he knew without knowing why that she was Reggie. Reggie was a she. The letter, which he knew almost by heart now, shifted in his brain, as if each word were suddenly a different colour than before, and made a different kind of sense.

  By the time he recovered from this surprising turn of events, Reggie Corngold was halfway up the stairs. Unable to wait another moment, Burl swung open the heavy black door. She had already reached the first landing, her briefcase tucked under her arm, reading whatever had been in the oversized envelope. Startled by the sudden noise, she swung around.

  “It’s all right!” said Burl. His voice sounded too loud, husky from a night without talking.

  Gathering her briefcase to her chest, she stepped down a single step. It squeaked noisily in the sleeping building.

  Burl cleared his throat. “I’m looking for Reggie Corngold,” he said. His voice echoed.

  She spoke cautiously. “What do you want?”

  Burl leaned against the door, his hand on his chest, his mouth gaping open like a man who had run a marathon.

  “I’m … I’m a friend of Nog’s.”

  “Who?”

  “Nathaniel Gow.”

  She stepped down another step. Her eyes were wide. “You called him Nog.” She was staring at him in an almost frightened way. Her face was thin, her eyes seemed far too large in such a slim face. Burl wished that he could say something to ease her mind.

  “I don’t know you,” she said.

  “I need to talk to you about him.”

  She stepped another step closer. “Nathaniel Gow is dead,” she said. “I’m not going to stand talking to
a complete stranger about him or anything else at this hour of the morning.” Then, with a firm grasp of the banister, she turned and began again to climb the stairs.

  “Please don’t go,” said Burl.

  “Shhh!”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’ve been waiting for you all night.”

  It was not the right thing to say. Without taking her eyes off him, Reggie backed up the stairs until her face was lost in shadows.

  “I can explain,” said Burl.

  “Then phone me,” she whispered, leaning over the banister. “I’m listed.”

  Burl moved to the foot of the stairs just as she rounded the corner above. “When?” he demanded.

  She sighed. “Noon.” She sounded exasperated.

  The stuffy heat of the little lobby sapped the last bit of strength from Burl as Reggie tiptoed out of sight. Burl waited. After a long five minutes, he gave up, opened the front door and stepped out into the cold.

  He made his way around back to the service entrance. There was a stairway there to the basement. As quietly as he could he went down, not daring to turn on the light. He bumped into walls wherever he turned. It was like a maze, but even if there had been a monster at the heart of it, he would not have turned back. He tripped over some boxes and landed on something soft—old clothes. Sleep, like a heavy door, closed down on top of him.

  23

  Reggie Corngold

  A HEAVY DOOR NUDGED OPEN. SOMEONE WAS playing the piano. The Maestro.

  “What are you doing here?” Burl asked with a snarl. The Maestro only mumbled. Burl re-slung his hammer in his work-belt. “I can’t strap in this insulation while you’re playing,” he said. But Gow didn’t stop, just hunkered down into a difficult passage, as if he were a race-car driver heading into a series of hairpin turns. “You’re just plain inconsiderate,” Burl said. “After all, I’m the one going to all the work winterizing this place. Take that thing outside, before I swat you.” Gow laughed. The threat only made him run farther into the music, like a toddler escaping its mother by running deeper into the playground.