by William Bell
At Queen Street, Ninon crossed Spadina with the flow of pedestrians, then stopped and looked west, one of a crowd waiting for the streetcar. Screened by a wall of bodies, I made my way to the south side of Queen, then stepped into the shadow of a music store doorway. I had a clear view of her across the road, waiting, talking to no one. I’d just stay put until she got on the trolley—sort of see her off.
It wasn’t long before a streetcar came to a stop. She waited for the disembarking passengers to clear, then scooted up the steps. I could see her though the windows, standing by the token receptacle for a few seconds, then moving down the aisle. The light changed and the streetcar crossed the intersection.
At that moment a taxi pulled up to the curb right in front of me. A woman got out of the taxi, hung a purse on her shoulder and reached into the back seat for a briefcase. The streetcar rumbled past, no more than a few metres away. Its bell clanged. Before the woman could close the taxi door I slipped into the back seat.
“I know this is going to sound corny,” I said to the driver, a wide-shouldered man wearing a knitted cap. “Follow that streetcar.”
He studied me in the rear-view mirror.
“My sister’s on it,” I explained. “I forgot to give her something.”
Slapping the car in gear, the man growled, “Whatever you say, chief.”
The taxi crept along behind the streetcar, stopping at every intersection to exchange passengers, waiting for the traffic light to change, moving off again. I’d have been just as far ahead to follow on foot. Every metre I travelled piled guilt on my shoulders. What was I doing? Things had just begun to look up for me and here I was invading the privacy that for some reason was so important to Ninon. Why couldn’t I leave it alone?
To make things worse, the fare indicator on the meter rose alarmingly whether the taxi was moving or not. I’d be out of cash in no time at this rate. No, wait, I reminded myself. I had a credit card in my wallet. I only carried it for emergencies, and this was beginning to look like one. I sat back, relieved but sinking deeper into self-loathing, as the streetcar towed us into an increasingly downscale neighbourhood. Boarded-up storefronts. Discount stores. Rundown hotels and cafés. Lost-looking men and women on the sidewalks.
The streetcar came to a halt and I saw Ninon step down.
“Here, pull up here,” I told the driver.
I had just enough cash to cover the fare. I paid the driver, who muttered, “Say hello to your sister for me,” before he roared off.
Ninon had turned the corner and set off down a side street. I waited a couple of minutes before following. She walked quickly along the sidewalk, about fifty metres in front of me. Farther along, a sign hung out over the doorway of a blank-faced brick building. A couple of guys and a woman stood smoking by the door under the sign. Without greeting them Ninon pulled the door open and went in. I stopped. From that distance I could just make out flaking black letters on a white background.
Guiding Light Mission and Hostel.
——
In a way, I wasn’t surprised. From the beginning I had thought Ninon might be a “person of no fixed address,” as they said in the cop novels. It was possible she went to the mission to visit someone. She might be a runaway. Maybe she was passing through the city, planning to head for Vancouver when the weather turned cold, like so many others.
What was the point of speculating? If she wanted me to know, she’d tell me.
But I could do a little digging. When I got back to my neighbourhood I dropped into the library to pick up something to read. At the NEW ARRIVALS shelf I read a few dust-jacket descriptions of the stories inside, selected a couple and headed toward the checkout. Then I got a different idea. I went to the research area, presented my card and used one of their computers to go on line and check out the Guiding Light Mission and Hostel. It was run by a non-religious organization—which surprised me, given the name of the place—and was supported by private funds and grants from city and provincial governments. Latest financial statement on request. Donations welcome. The mission offered counselling—mostly for addictions but also for job searches and, according to carefully worded statements, victims of abuse. You could sleep there and get a meal, both for a “nominal” fee, but you couldn’t live there. There was a three-night limit. If you had no money you could work off the fees in the kitchen.
Probably Ninon could stay three nights, let a day pass, then go back for another stint. But where did she go in the meantime?
FOURTEEN
ON SATURDAY Mrs. Altan asked me to work all day. Gulun had taken the train to Hamilton to visit his brother in the hospital.
“Leaving me with all the work,” she complained.
I didn’t object. More hours meant more pay.
He came back around five o’clock. On my way home I picked up sandwich fixings—Calabrian bread, cheese, ham, some fruit and apple juice. I had no idea what Ninon might like, so I guessed. I stowed the groceries in the fridge and went out for my run. After dinner I watched a remake of a movie based on Raymond Chandler’s detective novel The Big Sleep. For some reason they moved the locale from LA to England. The book was better. I couldn’t concentrate on the movie anyway. My stomach was in knots. Will Ninon show tomorrow? I asked myself every ten minutes.
In the morning I woke early, unable to sleep any longer. I built the ham-and-cheese sandwiches, pestering myself with questions I couldn’t answer. Did she like mayonnaise? She must; everybody did. Should I trim the crusts from the sandwiches? No, leave them on. How about pickles? Didn’t have any, and it was too late to zip out and get some.
I packed the sandwiches, along with a blanket for the picnic, sunglasses, a map of the Toronto Islands I had grabbed from the Web after breakfast, and some breath mints. All the while I hoped that I wasn’t wasting my time. As time passed the butterflies in my stomach fluttered faster.
I timed my arrival at the ferry dock so I’d be there a half-hour early. I was off by fifteen minutes, which didn’t leave much time. The quay was a madhouse. Mothers. Fathers. Dogs and beach balls and baby strollers. Kids with skateboards. More kids with kites, dolls, soccer balls that wanted to roll and bounce. I tried to find a vantage point to catch sight of Ninon when she arrived.
But she was already there.
She was sitting on a bollard at the edge of the quay, writing in her notebook, one ankle resting on the opposite knee, her canvas satchel at her feet. She seemed unaware of the chaos spinning noisily around her. I noticed that the blue beret was back. Behind her the calm water of the harbour stretched under a clear blue sky, the islands a lumpy green backdrop, the ferry about halfway across the lagoon, lumbering toward the dock, a V of foam at the bow.
“Hi,” I greeted the top of Ninon’s head.
She jotted down a half-dozen numbers, then marked her page with the ribbon, closed the notebook and secured it with the elastic band attached to the cover.
“Hi to you too,” she replied, shoving notebook and pen into the satchel.
“I’ll just go and get the tickets. We don’t have much time.”
“That’s okay. I got them already,” she said, and slung the bag onto her shoulder. “I didn’t know there were three drop-off points, so I took a guess. Centre Island.”
“That’s fine. You look nice.”
“I’m wearing the same clothes I had on the last time you saw me.”
“Except for the beret.”
“True,” she conceded.
“And you do look nice. Again.”
The ferry had bumbled into the slip, its reversed engines churning the water under the hull, and the crowd surged on board, impatient to begin the excursion. Jostled and bumped, Ninon and I went with the flow. We found an unoccupied spot on the bow rail. The ferry chugged across the lagoon, grey-brown water slipping under the hull below us. Seagulls wheeled overhead and alighted like a spray of confetti on the water in the boat’s wake.
“Are you keeping a journal or something?” I asked, m
ostly for something to say. “Just wondering. I’m not trying to be nosy.”
“Not really a journal, but similar. Just thoughts. Observations. Sometimes a sketch. You’re staring at me.”
“Sorry.”
Her French accent, hardly noticeable, seemed to soften her speech. The sun brought out the auburn highlights in her hair, which hung thick and loose on her shoulders, contrasting with her green eyes and the blue of the beret. Who wouldn’t want to look at her?
She pulled her notebook out of the satchel and opened pages at random, holding the book so I could see. Line after line of numbers, with the occasional sketch—a flower or two, a few faces, a narrow street.
“I write in code,” she pointed out.
“Code? Why?”
“So no one—”
“So nobody else can read it. Right. Stupid question.”
Two things were clear to me by now. Ninon was as nervous as I was. And I had learned more about her in the last ten minutes than she had revealed up until now. Why the sudden change in her? I decided not to waste time wondering.
“How does the code work?” I asked.
Ninon flipped to the last page of the notebook, fished a pencil out of her bag and printed the alphabet down the page, grouping the letters in columns.
“It’s a really old code system,” she explained, “called the Polybius square. You print the alphabet in a grid like this, five across and five down. I and J are treated as one letter. The code works when you add numbers—in this case, 1 to 5—along the top and down the side.”
“Got it,” I said. I didn’t get it.
Ninon smiled her half-smile. “I haven’t finished. The numbers can be written in any order you want, as long as the sender and receiver know what that order is. Watch.”
She jotted the numbers down, but they weren’t in sequence.
“Aha, now I do get it!”
“So what’s the code for the letter A?”
“Um … fifty-two. Or twenty-five?”
“You use the top number first. What’s V?”
“Fifty-four.”
“And how do I write THE?”
“Thirteen, thirty-one, forty-two.”
“Congratulations, you’re officially a spy.”
Ninon turned to another page, saying, “I keep a record of words I like.”
I followed the movement of her finger as she read, “Andalusia. Conundrum. Toggery. Misericordia. Carpetbagger.”
“Even if you decode the numbers, I still don’t know what any of them mean.”
“It’s not about the meaning; it’s about the sound.”
“The code seems like a lot of trouble to me.”
She put her things in the bag. “When you’ve done a few sentences, the code begins to be automatic and it goes pretty quickly after that,” she explained.
“Do my last name.”
“You never told me what it is.”
“Paladin.”
Ninon smiled. “It means ‘knight.’ ”
“Really?”
“King Charlemagne had twelve knights.”
“Oh.” As if I knew who he was.
I had picked my surname from an old black-and-white TV series I used to watch with Linda McCallum. Have Gun, Will Travel was a Western. The hero was a man dressed in black who packed a long-barrelled pistol in a leather holster with a horse’s head shaped like a chess knight embossed on it. The man, whose business card said, “Wire Paladin, San Francisco,” was a sort of detective and fixer who rode around helping his clients. Thanks to Ninon, I now understood the connection between the horse’s head and the name.
“There are lots of ways to do the Polybius,” she went on. “It’s simple code. A cypher expert could crack it in no time. But the average person has never heard of it. I like codes.”
And secrecy, I thought.
We turned and looked out over the water. Small boats, their sails drooping, struggled unsuccessfully to find enough breeze to move them along. The clamouring gulls escorted the ferry to the slip at Centre Island, the crew secured thick ropes around the bollards on the pier, the ramp was lowered and we followed the crowd onshore. It seemed like half the city had been struck by the idea of spending Sunday on the islands.
Ninon looked around. “I’ve never been here before,” she told me.
“Me either.” I reached into my pocket. “But I’ve got a map. What would you like to do first?”
“Walk,” she replied. “Away from this crowd and this noise.”
And so began the best day of my life.
——
We ambled along paths leading toward the eastern tip of the islands, then turned down a different trail heading back west, the air around us heavy with humidity and the odours of water and vegetation. Occasionally a whiff of candy floss or caramel corn or barbecue smoke drifted by. We weren’t alone, but in a way we felt like we were, and our conversation was quiet and private.
The hot sun seemed to melt our shyness and coax uneasiness away, and gradually each of us opened the door into our lives and let the other in—a new experience for both of us. I told Ninon a lot of things about my past that I had never shared with anyone, but I held back everything about Mr. Bai and my new identity. I was Julian Paladin now.
For her part, Ninon unfolded much of her past, too. She had been born in a village called L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in Provence, in the south of France.
“Where the sky is bluer than anywhere in the world,” I said.
She nodded, then continued her story.
The village was an ancient community of stone buildings, cobbled streets, and a central square shaded by plane trees and anchored by a church. A village where everybody knew everybody else. What Ninon loved most about her birthplace, she said, was the river, the Sorgue, which was dammed at the eastern edge of the town and split into shallow streams that ran clear and pure around and through the village, turning the gigantic water wheels that used to power small factories. Ninon’s father, Gilbert, was cook and bartender at the little Café France on the square. His food was famous in the area. The three Bissets lived in the apartment above Ninon’s mother, Nathalie’s, seamstress shop on the quay. Ninon did needlework for her mother to help out.
Ninon related all this as if it had been a dream. “And then everything went to hell,” she said, almost whispering.
We had stopped for lunch, spreading the blanket in the shade of a beach umbrella. The sand was dotted with bathers. Kids dug in the sand and splashed at the edge of the water. Shrieks and laughter floated from the children’s park behind us. We sat shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the undulating water stretching all the way to the horizon under the hammering sun.
Ninon continued her story. The event that began her nightmare was the move from Provence to Quebec City, where Gilbert’s brother-in-law had invited him to come and take the chef’s position in his upscale restaurant in the old town. Ninon was thirteen. She didn’t like the city, hated the weather, made few friends, disliked the high school. She couldn’t seem to adapt. They spoke a kind of French there, she said, but it wasn’t like France at all. Nothing was.
One afternoon, when she was fifteen, her mother and father took her to her aunt and uncle’s house, kissed her goodbye, and drove off to Montreal for the night to celebrate their wedding anniversary. It was the last time Ninon saw them alive.
“There was a shooting,” she told me, hard-voiced and dry-eyed. “Some biker war. Retaliation for something. Papa and Maman were strolling down the street on the way back to their hotel after the celebration dinner. They got caught in the crossfire.”
Ninon had no living relatives other than the aunt and uncle in Quebec City. They adopted her. Not long after, she took off and never went back.
I wanted to ask her why, but from personal experience I knew the question probably wouldn’t be welcome. It could have been any of a dozen reasons. I kept silent. Then, after a few minutes I asked, “Were they nice?”
“My aunt was o
kay.”
“But not your uncle.”
She gave me a look that said more than her words. “He was too nice.”
“Oh.”
“And my aunt knew. And did nothing.”
I shook my head. Sometimes there’s nothing you can say.
“Anyway,” she murmured, “now there’s just me.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
We packed up our picnic and made our way slowly to the western beach. Ninon wanted to watch the sunset. Clouds were gathering, and the lowering sun set them on fire. We spread the blanket at the edge of the water. The still air remained hot and clammy. Around us adults collected kids, umbrellas, buckets and shovels and all their picnic jumble, then trickled away toward the ferry dock. By dusk we had the beach to ourselves.
We didn’t talk much, as if the unfamiliar sharing of our past experience had used up all our words. Ninon yawned.
“Aren’t you tired?” she said, curling up on the blanket and pillowing her head on her hands.
“Not really.”
She didn’t notice my reply. Her deep breathing and the sigh of the water brushing the sand were all I heard. I sat beside her, my hand on her shoulder. I didn’t think she’d mind.
For a couple of seconds earlier in the afternoon, while Ninon was telling me about her life, I had envied her. She had relatives. She knew where they lived. She had memories of the place where she had been born and spent her childhood. Good memories.
But her aunt and uncle, especially her uncle, had betrayed her. I had no relatives that I knew, but I held no bitterness about my family either. How could I, when I knew nothing about them? Did they all die? Did they stick me in a basket and deposit me on some doorstep? Was I some sixteen-year-old’s nightmare, given away? Maybe it was better not to know. Were fond memories of home just a mockery when you couldn’t go back? I had suggested to Ninon, maybe you’ll go back to Provence someday.