by Sam Wiebe
“Lovely,” I said.
I was sitting on the bleachers on the Laurel Street side, watching the convoy of SUVs and minivans pick up kids from Day Care. I watched the vehicles recede down the block. An assembly line of similar kids and similar cars.
I thought about Cynthia Loeb. I do that often. I know more about her than anyone except her mother, more even than Ben. I’d read her journal eight times. I knew the seating plan of her second-grade art class. I could draw her dental charts from memory. I felt like the host of some sort of virus.
My last girlfriend, Mira Das, walked out after seven months of listening to me babble about time tables and partial license plates. She told me she’d slept with Gavin Fisk just to feel like she mattered in some way to someone. What kind of a non-entity do you have to become to make a woman feel like that?
But at least with the Loebs I’d exhausted everything. With Django there were the pawn shop owners. They weren’t speaking, though that could be due to healthy distrust rather than conspiracy. That left me at an impasse. The Ford Taurus wasn’t recovered. Ditto the bike. I’d exhausted a comprehensive list of people who knew Django or saw him that day. Everyone else thought Django had run off or Cliff had been complicit in his disappearance. I didn’t believe either scenario.
Eventually the dog brought the ball to me. I stood up and pocketed it. We started home to get ready for the psychic.
I expected the parlor of Madame Thibodeau to be dusty and low-lit, the shelves crowded with occult knicknacks. I was half-hoping for a crystal ball. She ushered Ben and Mrs. Loeb and I into a sparse eggshell-coloured room, drew the teal drapes and sat us on a pair of L-shaped couches that formed a U facing the Madame’s rattan throne. The Madame herself eschewed kerchiefs and beads in favor of a teal pants suit with silver hoop earrings and a half-dozen silver bracelets on her left wrist. Her hands were soft and she had honey-coloured press-on nails. Her hair was blonde and swept back from a puffy pink face with a hefty amount of concealer. Her expression was earnest.
“I’m not a fortune teller or a prognosticator,” she said. “I think of myself as part of a conduit. What comes through the conduit depends on what is put in.”
Mrs. Loeb, perched on the edge of the sofa cushion, nodded. She held clutched in her hands a folded photo of her missing daughter. Ben sat on her other side, stealing glances at me over his mother’s head. I fiddled with my wallet.
It was a slick pitch, delivered directly to Mrs. Loeb’s heartstrings, ignoring the scoffs of her son and the disinterest of their family friend. The Madame cautioned her on what not to expect, in a way that would produce in Mrs. Loeb’s mind a strong hope for the miraculous without making any claims to it. At the end of the spiel Mrs. Loeb handed over her daughter’s picture and an envelope containing five hundred dollars. Madame Thibodeau did not accept checks.
Before she could stow the money in her pocket, my wallet slipped out of my hands, spilling business cards across the floor. The Madame used the toe of her slipper to scoot a pair of cards towards me. Each card said MORRISS CARGILL, INVESTMENT STRATEGIST. They’d come with the calendar.
“We’d like to speak to Cynthia,” the Madame said. “We’d like to talk to someone who knows her. This woman is her mother. She must be allowed an audience.”
Ben looked at his mother, who had closed her eyes, and at me, who shot him a look that said: patience. Madame Thibodeau did not close her eyes, but kept them trained on a corner of the room, at the juncture of walls and ceiling. I could almost imagine a disembodied torso floating there.
“Someone is telling me that your uncertainty is almost at an end,” the Madame said. “They want me to tell you to be strong. That hope is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.”
“How powerful?” Ben said.
His mother shushed him.
“They are sending me an image of water.”
“It was raining the morning Cynthia disappeared,” Mrs. Loeb said. The Madame nodded knowingly.
“The image is of two silhouettes in the rain, a larger silhouette and a smaller one. I can’t make out their faces.”
“Can you tell where they’re heading?” Mrs. Loeb said.
“They are two shadows in the darkness and the rain. They are moving through the darkness and the rain towards a green light.”
Her eyes settled on Mrs. Loeb’s.
“I’ve been given a glimpse,” she said. “It takes time and patience to interpret what comes through the conduit.” She patted Mrs. Loeb’s hand. “I know you’re eager. This will take some time. But I’m willing to make your daughter my highest priority.”
Mrs. Loeb nodded gravely, thankfully.
“I believe two sessions a week would be the most productive. I will consult the literature and try to find out exactly who is trying to contact us.”
“What will that work out to a week?” I asked. “A thousand dollars? Is there a punch card for a free session with ten of equal or greater value?”
Madame Thibodeau never looked at me. “Some people,” she said to Mrs. Loeb, “simply can’t understand or won’t accept the science of what I do.”
“What science?” I asked her. “Cold reading and five minutes on the web searching the kid’s name would’ve given you every detail you just fed us.”
Mild annoyance stoked to anger. “My gift is to ask questions of the spirit world.”
“I don’t dispute that, just that the spirit world answers you.”
“I can sense your frustration,” she said.
“Not exactly a divine revelation, is it?”
Madame Thibodeau said, “When you dropped those cards a moment ago, I knew your heart wasn’t open to this experience. No doubt you expected me to use the information and pretend it came to me supernaturally. I don’t know what your name is and I don’t claim to be clairvoyant. As I explained, I am just a woman who is open to what pours forth from the conduit. People who are deaf to it can’t help but be jealous, but I sense frustration from you, also. You have exhausted your abilities and the poor girl is still missing. I can’t guarantee a result, but isn’t it only fair of you to let Mrs. Loeb decide whether or not she wants to employ someone with a different set of skills? Aren’t you letting your jealousy and prejudice stand in the way of what’s best for Cynthia?”
The Loebs looked at me, anxious for a response. Madame Thibodeau drew herself up in her chair and rotated some of her bracelets. Feline satisfaction seemed to radiate from her, but her face remained meek, her eyes imploring me to relent, to forgive, to apologize. Her words were not without effect. She’d used the same word I’d thought of back at the park. Exhausted. It was true. I felt a trickle of shame in my blood.
I said, “You’ve got some inarguable points there. You’re perceptive. I appreciate that quality. I like to think of myself as the same. And I am frustrated.”
She smiled sympathetically.
“I don’t claim to be a great detective. Most detective work is drudgery. It’s reading through a transcript for the umpteenth time in the hope that something jumps out, some overlooked clue. I’m also prejudiced against anything that takes a leap of faith. I hear you say to a woman who’s lost her kid, ‘I see two figures in water, give me five hundred dollars,’ well, the hackles go up.”
Madame Thibodeau began to protest but I held up my hand. My turn.
“Ten minutes before we walked in here I told them how this would go down. I explained to them what a cold reading was. How you’d single out the mother ’cause she’s emotionally vulnerable, easy to manipulate. I told them you’d say something cryptic, wait for our response, then build on it. Fact is, the morning Cynthia Loeb disappeared there wasn’t a raindrop in sight. But you built your story on that, keeping it just vague enough so you’d have an out.”
“I never said her daughter disappeared during a rainstorm.”
“You never said anything substantive. You’re a fraud, how could you?”
I stood up. The Loebs followed suit.
“You’re a bastard,” she said.
“Pretty much. Mrs. Loeb would like her money back.”
Looking up at us, Madame Thibodeau took the envelope and passed it to Mrs. Loeb, but not before withdrawing two of the bills. “Cost of doing business,” she said, smiling.
I looked at Mrs. Loeb, who nodded, her stoic good cheer already returning. She knew she was getting off cheap.
“That should at least buy one fortune,” I said as the Loebs headed out of the parlor. “Any sooth for me before I leave?”
The Madame remained in her seat staring at the portraits of Robert Borden on the currency, an absent glaze to her eyes. Without looking up she said, “How ’bout, ‘beware the ides of March?’”
“Ah, it was worth a try,” said Mrs. Loeb. She dropped me on the corner of Beckett Street. As I climbed out of the car, she killed the engine to rummage through her purse, coming up with the envelope which she offered to me. I waved it away.
“Your money’s no good.”
Ben had climbed into the front seat. Leaning with his elbow out the window of the Town Car he said, “That was a bravura performance, Mike. Really restored my faith in you.”
“Shucks,” I said. “Pissing off the clairvoyant is easy. They never see it coming.”
He shook his head at the cornball joke. “It’s always the ides of March you have to beware of, never the nones or the calends. The calends are my favorite.”
“The calends are under-utilized,” I agreed.
Alone in my office I made tea and answered an email query about my fee structure. I made the calls that needed to be made and fired off emails to people who deserved them. During our Staples spree I’d picked up a scanner, and I spent time making digital copies of the Szabo documents, including Django James’s birth certificate and baby footprint.
It was dark out and the usual Hastings Street crowd was gathering under the awnings at the end of the block. Sex trade workers, homeless persons, a whole lot of substance abusers, some of whom encompassed both the other categories. We are all of us whores of one kind or another.
I worked until nine. When the mundane chores had been knocked off, I stood out on the balcony with the dregs of my tea and thought hard about the Szabos and the owners of Imperial Pawn. Ramsey and his daughter knew something. Theirs wasn’t a silence built around staying away from the police at all costs. If you run a pawn shop in Vancouver it’s inevitable you deal with the law. It could be gang-related: it’s hard to make a store owner talk when the person they might finger has friends who enjoy playing with matches.
I wondered if Gavin Fisk sweated Ramsey or his daughter. I wondered if he gave a shit. About the Szabo case, about anything. I hoped he made Mira happy.
The day I moved into my office on Beckett Street I was struggling up the stairs with the table when a woman named Darla spotted me from the street. She held the door open for me and helped me schlep the table into my office. I knew who and what she was: not many occupations called for fishnet stockings and a faux-leather fanny pack. I also knew she was momentarily forgoing any solicitation in anticipation of a larger contribution to the Help Darla Get High Fund once the furniture had been stowed. So we acted cordial to each other and I paid her thirty dollars for her help, making her swear she wouldn’t let the rest of the neighbourhood know I was a soft touch.
The next day she reappeared with a fresh pink and purple bruise on her jaw, her shirt stretched and ripped and her fanny pack gone. She explained that she’d cut ties with her pimp and was raising money for a bus ticket back to Banff. I suppose there are more obvious scams, but not many. I didn’t so much fall for it as allow myself to get swept up in the story, because I like the idea of being a hero. By the time I’d realized the lie, I’d been parted from another fifty dollars, and Darla was on her way anywhere but to a Greyhound terminal.
That same evening I was on my balcony when she passed below me in the slipstream of a fiery little pimp juggling burner cellphones. A look passed between us not unlike the one between me and Madame Thibodeau. I’d been outgunned by a faster draw. Lesson learned.
A month later, on a July night when I’d succumbed to depression and despair, I found myself thrusting my condom-sheathed cock into Darla as she lay face down on the office table, the tendrils of her dirty hair draped over the Loeb file. A hundred dollars, the last currency that would ever pass between us, was clutched in her palm throughout the entire transaction.
One of my grandpa’s favorite sayings: “When you’ve only got a hammer you treat every problem as a nail.” Sometimes your options aren’t limited by your tools so much as by the mindset you bring to them. But that doesn’t mean that mindset is necessarily wrong. Sometimes the problem really does call for a big fucking hammer blow.
On the balcony thinking of the pawn shop owners, I had an epiphany. I went to one of the new file cabinets and opened the bottom drawer. I had another camera like the ones planted in the Kroons’ embalming room. I had parabolic microphones and some rudimentary bugging equipment. But I doubted I had enough to cobble together what I needed.
I phoned Amelia Yeats, using a number I’d gleaned from Cliff Szabo’s address book. I told her why I was calling and reminded her who I was.
“I remember you, Mike,” she said. That was heartening.
“I got a hunch that you’re a night owl,” I said. “Do you have time to meet me for coffee?”
“You know Kafka’s?”
“Is that the place where you order coffee, it never comes, and the next day you’re tossed in jail for an unspecified crime?”
“Funny,” she said. “Eleven fifteen?”
“I’ll be there.”
I pissed out two pots of tea and sat and listened to Chris Whitley scrape his dobro on “From One Island to Another”. Another brilliant musician who’d burned out early. I put my feet on the table and tipped my chair back against the wall.
It wasn’t a simple plan but it was based on who people were. The hard reality was that I could never make the pawn shop owner and his daughter talk.
To me.
VII
The Hastings Street Irregulars, Part I
Kafka’s was busy given the hour. The couches near the window were occupied by bearded, scarved screenwriter types, clacking away on their laptops. Women sat at the back tables, talking or texting on cellphones. Neither group paid much attention to the other. Fifteen adjacent bubbles of solitude. A pair of old men played timed chess at a table in the far corner. Another two looked on.
I was early; I’d brought my book but didn’t need it. Amelia Yeats pushed away a crumb-covered saucer and stood up. She deposited the section of the Province she’d been reading in the recycling bin and led me back out into the night.
“We might as well grab dinner,” she said. “There’s a noodle house round the corner that stays open till two.”
She was wearing a black warm-up jacket with an orange mesh lining, a magenta T-shirt with an indie band’s logo on it, the name something long and literary-sounding. Black leggings tucked into calf-length brown boots and half-rimmed eyeglasses. I think glasses look sexy as hell on women. I may be alone on this. As we walked up Main she pulled hers off and slid them into a case, then dropped the case into her scale-covered purse.
Most of the buildings we passed were closed and empty but not dark. Secondary lights burned in the windows of a Korean grocer’s, a Legion hall, a gelato parlor with a fenced-off patio. People congregated under awnings to smoke cigarettes and talk hockey. Others hustled down side streets clutching brown paper bags or cases of beer with the receipt th
readed through the handle. Main Street at night can be quiet and bustling and yuppie and traditional all at the same time.
The restaurant was low-ceilinged and required descending four stairs to reach the entrance. The menus and signs were in Chinese only. They were doing brisk business among a certain clientele: boisterous, drunken, middle-aged Asians. I was the only white person in there. Amelia Yeats ordered: duck feet, Chinese cucumber, a vinegary chicken dish, mushrooms, egg rolls and Cokes.
“What are you grinning at?” she said.
“I was telling someone earlier today that my job was mostly drudgery.” I gestured around, as if to add, “And yet here I am.”
“I get that sometimes,” she said, missing my point. “Any job that’s a bit off the path, people think it must be super-glamorous. You can’t believe how often I have to tell people, it’s not all about snorting coke with rock stars. Mostly it’s me alone in the control room, trying to get the drums to sit just right in the stereo field.” She cracked her Coke and jabbed in the straw. “Not that I’d ever want to do anything else. I bet you’re the same.”
“Working for myself seems to suit me,” I said. “Any situation involving red tape or a holier-than-thou boss, I become a liability. I like to be left alone to do things how I see fit. There’s not a lot of those type jobs left anymore. It’s nice to have a niche.”
“Isn’t it?” She clinked her can against mine. “To everybody everywhere finding their niche.”
After our food arrived I worked the conversation around to my plan.
“Let me put this to you,” I said. “Unlike most people our age, I’m not tech-savvy. It took me a week of reading the manual to figure out how to hook two surveillance cameras up to my Mac, and those things are supposed to be idiot-friendly. I need someone with expertise recording sound.”