by William Bell
“I don’t pay you for the days you missed,” he reminded me before he hung up.
Mrs. Altan’s jaw dropped when she saw me next day, and she gaped as if Halloween had come early.
“Julian! What happened?”
I had worked out a story I hoped would explain the puffy, yellowish purple bruise that covered my upper cheek and encircled my eye. I told her I had fallen against the newel post on my stairway at home while I’d been vacuuming the hallway. She looked as if she didn’t buy it but didn’t pursue the issue.
Gulun surprised me. “You need more time off?” he asked when he came down from his apartment into the back room. “You don’t look so good. What—?”
“I’m alright,” I said. “Good as new.”
Then I told him the tale I had tried on Mrs. Altan. “Hmmph. Newel post with a fist, maybe,” he said.
I was up on a ladder resetting the memory of the store’s surveillance video camera when Curtis came by. He had on the grey suit today and his clip-on tie was crooked. He looked around and, seeing me, tilted his head toward the coffee machine. I finished with the camera, stowed the ladder in the back room and went to meet him, taking my broom with me. He was stirring pretend-cream into his coffee.
“Here,” he whispered, slipping a chubby brown envelope into the pocket of my apron. “That’s your expenses and fee from me, along with the, er, bonus from Mr. Rubashov. For services rendered.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I think he boosted the fee a little in light of what happened.”
“I hope it was all worth it,” I replied.
“To you or to the Rubashovs?”
“Them.”
“It wasn’t.”
“How so?”
“Marika has disappeared.”
I managed a slow, short—five-kilometre—jog that afternoon. My headache had slowly receded during the morning but the light shock wave of each footfall rippled into my face, agitating the swollen tissue. The envelope Curtis had given me put me in a good mood. For the first time since moving to the house and beginning my job I had earned more than I needed to meet my expenses. I decided to open an account at the nearby credit union and to stash whatever I could whenever I was able.
As I loped down Coxwell to Woodbine Park I thought about Marika—probably the minor pain and irritation in my face brought her to mind. Curtis hadn’t sounded all that surprised that she was gone. He probably figured—as I had, as soon as the words left his mouth—that she was with Plath and that they had cooked up the payoff scheme together. I preferred to think that he had planned it and talked her into going along with him. But for all I knew it could have been the other way around. It all came to the same thing. They had extorted money from her parents to make a new start. Before he left the store that morning Curtis had said, “We’ll probably see her again.”
Meaning Jason would drive her away sooner or later with sharp words or fists, and Marika would shrink back home. But Curtis didn’t know that Marika’s father was part of the problem. It was more complicated than he thought. That day in the Arbor Room Marika might have been telling me, not in so many words, that the bruise on her arm wasn’t the work of Jason Plath but her own parent.
Sometimes I felt sorry for Marika, making her way through the world with her shoulders hunched and her eyes to the ground, pulled in two directions by the men in her life—who should have been there for her. Trying to please one meant angering the other. A classic no-win situation.
I knew what Marika needed.
A river.
PART FOUR
NINON
Which way does the river run through this town?
Which way does the wind blow when the sun goes down?
—Lennie Gallant
TWENTY-THREE
A WEEK OR SO PASSED.
Ninon and I had a date planned for Friday but she called in the morning and croaked that she wasn’t feeling well. Whatever she had sounded bad.
“Where are you?” I asked. “Do you need anything?”
“I’m okay.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“I’ll see you soon.”
As if Nature was tuned to my mood, it began to rain, lightly at first, but soon after I arrived at the store the sky opened up, the driven rain bouncing off the pavement and cascading off the window awning. Freshets raced along the gutters, forming tiny lakes at the sewer grates.
I got back home drenched to the skin and kicked off my soaked runners at the top of the stairs, setting them in the boot tray. Inside, I changed, then slipped into a pair of beat-up moccasins and made some sandwiches. I took my plate and a glass of juice to my reading chair. Outside, the rain had faded to a drizzle, and by the time I finished lunch it had stopped altogether.
The house was silent. Rawlins was still away and Fiona was at work—on the day shift this week. I took up my novel and sank deeper into my chair, enjoying the peace. I was into my first Donna Leon mystery. With a different style altogether from the tough-guy detectives who swaggered through the books I usually read, her police detective in Venice, Italy, was more gentle, a deep thinker who didn’t seem to work very hard. I read for a while, water droplets pattering on the leaves of the oak tree as it slowly shed what remained of the rain. It was strange how, right after a rainfall, the world seemed to go still, taking a breath before starting up again.
From time to time the prolonged hiss of tires on wet pavement announced a passing car. Then a dark sedan drove slowly around the corner and slipped to the curb down the street from the house. No one got out. I kept on reading, looking up now and again without raising my head, checking on the car. Another watcher.
Maybe my mood had been soured by the disappointment of missing time with Ninon, or by worrying about her, but the idea of some stranger watching my house—again—scraped my nerves raw. I decided to go for a run to settle myself down. I made sure to zip my Chang cell into my backpack. At the front door I pulled down the brim of my baseball cap and stepped outside.
The smell of wet earth floated on the air and the grass glistened with rain. I jogged along the street in the direction of the watcher, studiously ignoring him. A few yards from the sedan I stopped, casually took out the cell, flipped it open and pretended to check the screen, held the phone to my ear. I spoke a few nonsense words, nodded, stole a glance at the car, kept on blathering to nobody. Through the windshield I saw an Asian man in his forties, sporting a white short-sleeved shirt. He sat with his head forward, chin to chest, apparently asleep.
“Where did you go to acting school, buddy?” I said into the mouthpiece. I laughed, nodded again, lowered the cell. Staring at the phone, I faked confusion—hey, what’s wrong with this stupid phone?—and pressed buttons hopelessly.
“Damn,” I said out loud. I fiddled a bit more, then slapped the cell shut and jammed it into the backpack. But not before I had snapped a few photos. I began to jog, hoping my play-acting was a lot more convincing than the watcher’s.
Out of sight, I made sure the photos were clear enough before placing a call to the cut-out. In a few minutes I was talking to Chang.
“There’s someone watching the house. A new guy. I haven’t seen him before.”
“License number?”
I told him, then asked, “Do you want photos?”
“Thank you, Julian, but that won’t be necessary.” And he clicked off.
I tucked away the cell and ran for two hours. On my way back home I stopped by the motor scooter shop on the Danforth for a few minutes of fantasy. The used 150cc I liked was still on display, a sign shouting “Reduced!!” hanging on the handlebars. They’d have to cut the price a lot more before it fell into my territory.
I jogged slowly for the last few blocks to let my body cool down. I entered the house through the garage and the back door, eavesdropping outside the guest rooms as I passed. No sound. In my apartment I stood under a lukewarm shower for a while, then dressed. I filled a glass of water from the kitchen
faucet, gulped it down, refilled it and carried it to the table. When I pulled out a chair to sit on I noticed a tiny dark object, like a bit of pocket fluff, against the lighter material of the seat.
Lowering myself into a different chair, I picked the thing up and put it on the table and pushed it back and forth with my fingertip. It resembled a piece cut from the end of a round boot lace, less than a centimetre long. It was damp, compacted dirt, not fluff. Where had it come from? What had pressed the dirt into such an unusual, tubular shape?
Be logical, I told myself, remembering Occam’s razor, a principle of reasoning I had read about in more than one detective story. The idea was that when several solutions to a puzzle seemed possible, the simplest was most likely to be the true one.
So, dirt. Compressed dirt. From damp ground—a garden, a field, a bald spot on a lawn. My gardening duties kept me in touch with the condition of the yard. Until today it had been dry. The rain had changed that.
I flicked the bit of dirt around some more, stymied and ready to quit. “I’m just running around in circles,” I said out loud.
Running shoes.
The clue was dirt that had been mashed into the tread of a shoe, compressed by the pattern in the sole. But not my sole. The design of my shoes was a mass of overlapping Os. Besides, I never wore my street shoes in the apartment. I always shucked them onto the boot tray on the landing outside my door.
“Somebody else’s,” I mumbled the obvious. “But whose?”
The tension in my nerves escalated as I examined the kitchen closely, especially the floor. Finding nothing more, I moved on to the living room, crawling around like a scene-of-crime tech but without the equipment. Almost hidden under my chair lay clue number two—the leather bookmark I had used to flag my place in the Leon novel I was reading before my run. I had left it on the table beside the chair, as I always did.
A close scrutiny of the door to the apartment produced little more in the way of clues—no scratches on the lock or jamb—except a couple of pieces of caked dirt. In my bedroom another bit of earth clung to the fibre of the rug beside my bed.
Back in the kitchen, my Chang cell in my hand, I looked at the chair where I had found the first clue on the seat. The prowler must have stood on it. And the only thing near the table that you’d reach from a chair was the overhead light fixture. Unless the intruder was changing a light bulb for me, I joked to myself, why climb up onto the chair?
The idea of someone creeping around my apartment rattled me. I stopped thinking about it long enough to call the cut-out for the second time that day. When Chang phoned back I got right to the point.
“Someone’s been in my apartment,” I said, more breathlessly than I wanted to. I gave him the details.
There was a pause.
As cool as I was jittery, Chang said, “Don’t say any more. Stay on the line and leave that place.”
Outside, I spoke again. “I’m on the verandah.”
“Is the car still there—the watcher?”
“No.”
“Alright. There are probably eavesdropping devices planted in your apartment, so don’t make any more calls from there. Go back inside and turn on the TV and wait.”
To pass the time I mulled over a contradiction. The absence of entry marks on my door and the presence of eavesdropping equipment—bugs—suggested a pro. The bits of compressed earth suggested an amateur in a hurry, which was consistent with the fallen bookmark.
It was almost an hour before I heard a car in the driveway and the electric garage door operating. A moment later Chang came into the apartment followed by a thin black man in a windbreaker, toting an aluminum case. When he saw me the always cool Mr. Chang startled, as if looking at a ghost. In the excitement I had forgotten the bruise on my cheek and the black smudge on my eyelid. I was healing but still resembled a boxer who had lost last week’s bout. Chang knew nothing about my work for Curtis.
He held his curiosity in check and didn’t ask. I was about to tell him the story of the newel post when he shook his head and whispered, “No talking.”
The man in the windbreaker stepped over to my TV and pumped the volume even higher. He put his case on the kitchen table, snapped the latches and took out a grey hand-held device about the size of a book, a few pinhead lights and an array of coloured buttons across its surface. He thumbed a button and a light glowed green.
“How many apartments?” he whispered, his voice like a rasp.
“Three. And two single rooms.”
“Got keys?”
I took my building superintendent key ring from the hook inside a cupboard door and handed them to him.
“Come back in an hour,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Better do the upstairs apartment first,” I breathed. “The tenant gets home pretty soon.”
He gave me a curt nod. Before we left I took a gander out the window to check the street. All clear. The techie turned up the staircase to Fiona’s apartment, and Chang led the way to the garage. His chauffeur, the same one who had driven us to the big restaurant on Spadina long before, was sitting in the dark, erect behind the steering wheel, like an ornament. Chang and I slid into the back seat. My curiosity had me by the throat.
Treading carefully, I asked, “How much am I allowed to know?”
“You needn’t concern yourself, Julian. We’ll be on our way soon.”
To my surprise I found that Chang’s icy demeanour didn’t intimidate me anymore. I decided to push him.
“That’s not really good enough.”
He didn’t reply. He seemed comfortable with silence.
“Have you thought about the possibility,” I went on, “that by keeping me in the dark you increase the chance that I’ll make a mistake and say something I shouldn’t?”
More silence. Chang looked at his watch.
I wondered how much I should admit to knowing. If I made Chang aware that I had figured out the possible people-smuggling scheme to supply workers for Bai’s restaurant—and maybe other businesses—would I put myself in danger of angering Bai to the point that he’d cancel his deal with me, evict me from the house and wipe out my job? Where would I be then?
It’s none of your business, I counselled myself for the millionth time. Keep your end of the bargain. At the same time I was irritated by the irony of the whole thing. Bai had provided me with a new identity, a home, a job, out of what Chang had insisted was a deep sense of appreciation. Bai was indebted to me. Why then was I completely dependent on him? Shouldn’t I be the one dictating the terms?
I tried another tack.
“Look,” I began as calmly as I could. “If the police get involved in whatever is going on here I might be discovered and lose everything I have. Okay, it’s a slim chance. But it makes me nervous. Somebody broke into my apartment—probably a professional—the door wasn’t forced. That technician you brought along is going to find bugs in the rooms you’re using to move people around. Whose bugs are they? Do you know? Can you tell me?”
Chang’s face was as blank as a brick wall.
“We know,” he replied.
And that was all he said.
The techie, whose name I hadn’t been told, came through the door and got into the car beside the driver. In all, he had discovered eight listening devices. Top of the line, he told Chang. Rawlins, my place, the two downstairs rooms. Only Fiona’s place was clean.
“That concludes today’s work,” Chang announced. “We’ll need to sweep the house regularly from now on. Good day, Julian, and thank you.”
I climbed out of the car and the chauffeur backed out the driveway and motored away.
Had cops planted the bugs? Or immigration officials? Both were possible actors in the drama, but professionals, either cop or government, weren’t consistent with the watchers. Those guys were amateurs.
And they were all Asian. And Chang and company were Asian.
Then again, the techie Chang had brought along wasn’t.
The pieces di
dn’t fit together no matter how I moved them around.
“Although …,” I mused as, back in my apartment, I poured tea into a mug and sat down at the table, under the light that until a few minutes ago had held a listening device.
Police forces, no matter what their category, weren’t the only people who used high-tech surveillance. You could buy all kinds of “spy” toys at any electronics store. Everybody knew that. I cast my thoughts wider, keeping in mind Occam’s razor.
Then, inspiration. “You blockhead,” I hissed with disgust. How could I have missed it?
Fact one: I got involved with Bai because of a kidnap attempt. The men who tried to grab the obnoxious little Wesley were crooks. Asian crooks.
In meeting my request for a new identity, Bai had had to break a few laws, even if his offences weren’t as threatening as kidnapping or breaking and entering.
Bai and Chang seemed to be involved in illegal activity having to do with immigration.
Was it like a TV show? Was it really that simple? A conflict between rival criminal organizations?
And was I right in the middle of the whole mess?
TWENTY-FOUR
“WHAT HAPPENED?” Ninon gasped, her eyes wide with surprise, when she met me at the streetcar stop. We hadn’t been together since before the Rubashov case wound up.
“Aw, a guy caught me off guard.”
“But why?”
“A minor disagreement. Not important.”
As soon as I said the words I wished I could take them back. Being secretive had been an automatic response for so long I’d forgotten how to talk normally. My answer was a reflex. I realized I wanted to tell her, to share more of myself.
So I did. As the streetcar carried us toward High Park I told her about the work I’d been doing for Curtis on the Marika case, including Plath rearranging my face and Fiona helping me. I was rewarded with the ironic smile.
“I didn’t know my boyfriend was a private eye,” she joked.
“Hey, it’s a living.”