“Grace, my friend, I can ask for one thing more . . .”
A bang from the Lancashire’s back door interrupted my final plea. It was Rocky making a noisy exit from the club. The guy was incapable of opening a door without producing a racket.
“If he sees you, Mr. Crang,” Grace said, “all my plans could be ruined.”
“I’m not keen to duke it out with him either,” I said.
“Then go away. Please.”
“I’ll never be far,” I said. Geez, would I never stop talking in clichés? I thought of rephrasing it, but Rocky was bearing down on the Navigator. He hadn’t seen me, and I planned to make sure he didn’t. He looked supercharged and extra threatening. Probably the act of ashes-hauling had invigorated him.
I slipped away in the aisle between another SUV and a pickup truck. The Lancashire seemed to do a lot of business with customers who drove the larger-sized vehicles. I came out on the side street where I’d parked, and hustled down to Charles’s Jeep.
“What’d Grace say?” Annie asked.
“She’s in denial,” I said.
I made a U-turn, pulled the Jeep ahead a couple of car lengths and stopped just short of the Lancashire parking lot.
“Can’t we go home now?” Annie said. She sounded tired and plaintive.
“Need to finish the tail job,” I said. “Find out Grace’s home address.”
“We’re waiting for the Navigator to get going?”
“Yes,” I said, “but listen, Grace said she’s put aside the seventy-five thousand for me.”
“You believe her?”
“What I believe is she’ll give me the money the Monday after next when we get back to court.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”
Up ahead, the Navigator began to pull out of the parking lot.
“We’re on the move again,” I said.
Annie sighed. “Let’s just hope Grace hasn’t shifted addresses to Scarborough, someplace like that, the remotest suburbs.”
“Oh, lord, not way out there.”
Both of us got our hope. The Navigator drove straight along Bloor no more than a half mile, and turned right on a street a couple of blocks east of Dufferin. Rocky stopped in mid-block not far south of Bloor. He waited barely long enough for Grace to get her feet out the car door, then tore away with his trademark screeching of tires.
I parked at a hydrant and killed the lights. Annie and I watched Grace cross the street to the east side and up a walk to a triplex. The building had a small lighted foyer with a row of three mailboxes on one wall. Grace opened the unlocked front door, then used a key on the door from the entranceway into the building.
“Wonder if we can tell from out here which apartment is hers,” Annie said.
“I put my money on the top floor,” I said.
Annie poked her head forward and looked up.
“Top floor’s the only one with the lights still on,” she said.
“That’ll be hubby staying up to greet her after a long night at the kiln.”
“The Bulgarian guy? Or possibly Rumanian?”
“Hungarian,” I said. “Grace says so.”
“Bravo for us, the stakeout has solved one mystery. The husband’s nationality.”
Annie and I waited. No lights went on in the lower two apartments. The lights on the third floor remained as they were, the shining beacons in the darkened building. We watched a bit longer, then I got out of the Jeep.
“Back in a flash,” I said to Annie.
I stepped into the triplex’s foyer and checked the mailbox for the top apartment. The name on the box read “S. Lazslo.” Mission accomplished.
“S. Lazslo’s a Hungarian name, right?” I said to Annie back in the Jeep.
“The S is probably for Steve,” Annie said. “Hungary teems with guys named Steve.”
I started the Jeep and looped back to Bloor.
“Wonder if Steve’s related to Victor?” Annie said.
“Who’re you talking about?”
“Victor Lazslo.”
“The guy married to the Ingrid Bergman character in Casablanca?”
“Go to the top of the class, sweetie.”
“Annie,” I said, “maybe you’re not cut out for late-night stakeouts. Why are you bringing up Victor Lazslo?”
“Paul Henreid played him.”
“Fatigue is making you loopy,” I said.
Annie went silent and soon fell asleep. I steered the rest of the way home in the restful hush of the early morning.
23
On Sunday morning, I took Annie to the airport. It was a quick trip, down to the foot of Bathurst Street. Annie was travelling to New York by way of a Porter Airlines flight to Newark out of the Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto Island.
I hung around Billy Bishop long enough to watch her plane take off. We’d been having a discussion in the car about whether I could see Annie’s face at a window on the plane. The Porter planes were much smaller than at Pearson International. Shorter and slimmer. On the inside, they had one aisle and seats on either side for two passengers each. No wide-bodied aircraft, no teeming hordes of passengers.
When Annie’s plane taxied out to the runway, I stared hard at the little windows. I was able to make out the pilot and the co-pilot. But passengers? Annie? I could see her only in my imagination. I waved anyway. If I couldn’t see her, I made sure she could spot me, the maniac flapping his arm like he was witnessing the first plane takeoff of his life.
I drove home, made a salmon salad sandwich, ate it at my leisure with a glass of white wine, then set out by foot down Major with the Levin Museum as my destination. The day was overcast but plenty warm. Walking west on College Street, busy and hopping even on a Sunday, took me to the eastern edges of the long strip of Italian restaurants that fight one another for supremacy in fresh pasta.
The Levin was on College’s south side, the entrance set well back from the street, a small plaza rising in long steps to the front door. The building was four storeys high, done in a nice combination of traditional and contemporary architecture, almost the entire exterior made of glass. I stepped into the airy lobby. Nothing was especially large about the building, but all the glass gave it the feeling of generous space.
To my right, there was a reception desk, also in glass. A guy standing behind it leaned his bum against a tall stool, stacks of programs and pamphlets spread on the counter in front of him. Since the Levin’s founder mandated only female employees, the guy had to be a volunteer.
The volunteer guy was beaming at me. He made me feel warmed and welcomed and singled out. This, I thought, was a hell of a friendly museum. I smiled back and prepared to buy a ticket from him. A discreet little sign advised me admission was eight dollars. I peeled a ten off my roll of bills.
“Welcome to the Levin, Mr. Crang,” the volunteer said.
He had an English accent. He was medium height and wore a small greying beard. He looked familiar, but I was damned if I could attach a name to him as easily as he could to me. The guy could sense my dilemma.
“It’s the hat,” he said. “I’m not wearing it in here, old sport.”
He made a motion like he was pulling a baseball cap onto his head.
“Charles, sorry,” I said. “Just I’ve never seen you anywhere except on the street. You’re Charles the good neighbour.”
“The Jeep did its job the other night?”
“Like a dream,” I said.
“If I have my dates correct, your dear Annie must be off to the Big Apple.”
“Landing in Newark practically as we speak.”
“And you’re devoting your first hours as a temporary bachelor to porcelain,” Charles said. “How admirable, old lad.”
“Not as devoted as you, working here among the real articles.”
Charles smiled a beatific smile. He leaned forward on the counter, appearing to set himself for a confidential chat. I could tell he had time on his hands. Nobody else had ente
red the museum since I arrived.
“Ceramics and I have what you might well call a love-hate relationship,” Charles said. “When I retired from business, I took a course in ceramic art out at Sheridan College, three years of it. Thought I’d do my own work. Be creative, you know. I put together a studio in our backyard. Kiln and all. My stuff turned out to be good enough. Workmanlike, you could describe it. But I lacked the gift of the great ceramicists. Bit of a disappointment, old bean.”
Charles hardly looked crushed. He seemed one of nature’s cheerful souls.
“You volunteering in this place,” I said, “you must still have the hots for the art form.”
“I love being close to the real artists’ work,” Charles said, waving his arm in a gesture that covered every ceramic pot and bowl in sight. “It’s just the art doesn’t love me back. Not enough to let me be one of the sodding artists myself. You see what I mean, old sport?”
A flurry of new arrivals diverted Charles’s smiles and attentions. I wandered away to look at the large pots on the first floor. They were mostly products of eighteenth-century China. Not old as Chinese history went, but ancient in terms of the western world.
In the little I’d learned from Annie and my own Googling, I gathered vaguely that porcelain art emerged as a form in China and Japan many centuries ago. In the 1700s, European explorers and other nosy persons began hijacking the products to the western nations. Fairly quickly, the inventive minds of European artists were applied to finding the formula for creating porcelain out of their very own local clay.
The first guy to hit on the porcelain’s precious arcanum—the fancy word they used in the field for formula—was actually looking for something else. The guy in question’s name was Johann Frederick Bottger, an employee and more or less prisoner of the heinous King Augustus the Second of Poland and Elector of Saxony. Bottger was supposed to nail down the arcanum for gold. But he failed at the assignment several times. Eventually he lucked out and stumbled on the right combination of Meissen clay and heat and other elements that created not gold but porcelain. The discovery elated just about everybody, but it didn’t persuade Augustus to spring Bottger from the royal clutches. The unlucky sap died impoverished, confined and a drunk. Meanwhile, the rage for porcelain swept across Europe.
I went at all four floors of the Levin in rising order starting at the first and looking at almost every pot and cup and mug and vase and all other household items that a person with a talent for porcelain could think of making. They were attractive enough, but my brain started going fuzzy with the repetition. My basic problem was that I couldn’t find any objects in the size and shape I was looking for.
What I wanted was an exhibit that featured smaller pieces along the lines of the thing in my pocket. I’d brought along to the Levin the unrealized figure I liberated from 32 Highbury. My thinking was that if this hunk of clay got everybody so heated up—everybody being Grace and Rocky and probably Ms. Janetta—then it must relate to something of value in the legitimate world of ceramics.
Did that make sense? Not much added up to anything coherent in this confusion of a case, not so far, but it was at least a possibility that Grace was using her talent with porcelain to make copies of some legitimate ceramic pieces. The pieces would necessarily have to be of a high monetary value. The only reason for making the copies would be to sell them at exorbitant value as the real thing to some sucker of a collector. Given that scenario, where might such legitimate pieces be on display? All signs pointed to the Levin Museum where Ms. Janetta was a director, where Grace often visited, where I was now prowling.
I reached the fourth and top floor, parading up and down the first two aisles cursorily checking out yet more damn bowls. But, aha, down at the end of the second aisle, set aside in a large space close to the floor’s big front window, stood a tall glass cabinet displaying an arrangement on three glass shelves of what appeared from a distance to be several smaller figures. Before I investigated the figures, I took a moment to appreciate the glass cabinet. It made a show all by itself, about seven or eight feet high, standing on four powerful-looking legs, pure and thick glass on all sides, a barely noticeable small door in the back equipped with a small lock. The door was no doubt the means by which the little figures were placed inside the formidable cabinet.
As I got closer, the figures revealed themselves as just about the very articles I had in mind. A sign on the middle shelf inside the cabinet read “A Company of Fools by L.L. Schwartzmann, 1774.” The “fools,” I recognized right away, were of the clownish sort. Jesters and entertainers in the Europe of four centuries ago. I counted the figures. Twenty-seven of them I got, each one in a slightly different costume, nothing too elaborate but all colourful and amusing.
And each figure came with a gimmick. None of the fools’ faces was human. All were of a different animal type. The whole arrangement seemed to be a variation on the Monkey Orchestra Annie told me about. Except here, the figures were jesters, not musicians, and their faces weren’t confined to monkeys but came from the entire range of the animal kingdom. I ticked off the beasts in the case. Three or four different kinds of dog. At least two cats. A lion and a tiger. A monkey and a gorilla. There was even a snake head if I was reading the silly-looking reptile-type figure correctly.
I took the unfinished hunk of clay out of my pocket. All I had to go on by way of a comparison test were the hunk’s pants. Did any of the animal-faced jesters in the case have pants similar to those of the half-man I held in my hand? Dumb question, as it happened. Just about all jesters, almost every single one, wore pants that billowed. It must have been the jester style. I gave each jester a good long stare, but couldn’t narrow them down to one or two with a pants shape that exactly matched my guy’s. The investigation stalled.
But surely not permanently. I counted on the search becoming ongoing.
I checked the clock on the fourth-floor wall. It was a quarter to four. At that moment, a woman’s voice on the public address system announced that the museum would close in fifteen minutes. We should all prepare ourselves for departure.
Excellent, I thought, the closing would free up Charles for a consultation.
I took the elevator to the first floor. Charles was at his post behind the counter in the lobby, alone and available as the small crowd streamed out of the place. I showed Charles my hunk of clay with pants.
“This piece remind you of anything in the museum?” I asked.
“The left shoe is all wrong, the right shoe is not bad, and the trousers are close to very good.” Charles looked up at me. “Good enough, old chum?”
“You recognize all that?” I said.
“It’s the jester with the fox face from the Company of Fools on the fourth floor. Or the beginnings of something like our fox-faced friend. Rather like it, to be even more accurate. Don’t want to overrate something that’s a primitive start to a piece in the clay you’re holding there in your hand, Crang old boy.”
“The part I don’t get, how’re you able to spot it so fast?”
“Company of Fools is the great prize of the Levin. I was up on the fourth earlier this morning, just getting my regular fix of Fools. I love it for its own glorious self, Crang old laddie. So do thousands of others. Experts come from all over the world to study it.”
“Puts a glow on the museum’s reputation?”
“Indubitably, my dear Crang,” Charles said. His phrasing wasn’t comic or ironic. That was Charles’s normal talking mode. “Replicas of Company sell briskly among even non-expert fans of ceramics, old chap.”
“But this thing I’ve got, it’s not a replica in the sense you’re talking about?”
Charles took the piece from me and turned it in his hands. “No, some overly ambitious maker of ceramic pieces seems to have set about making a copy, then flamed out badly before he finished.”
As Charles and I talked, I sensed that somebody behind me was hanging on the edges of the conversation.
Charles lo
oked up and smiled. “Hello there, Hugette,” he said to the person behind me. “What do you make of this, dear girl?” Charles said, holding up my piece for Hugette to examine.
I turned around and took in Hugette. There was a lot to take in. Hugette was very tall, more than six feet. Slenderly built, though it was the kind of slender that conveyed an impressive aura. She had large features, particularly her prow of a schnozz, but the whole package was attractive. She wore her hair cut short, and she had youth on her side. She was no more than twenty-five.
“Somebody fooling around with Mr. Fox,” Hugette said, taking the piece out of Charles’s hand.
Charles introduced Hugette and me. Her last name was Jennings. “Hugette,” Charles said to me, “is the Levin’s deputy chief of security.”
“You worked on this, Mr. Crang?” Hugette asked me, indicating the piece of clay. She seemed intense about getting the answer.
I shook my head. “Can’t tell a kiln from a kit and caboodle.”
Hugette wasn’t amused. “Who did it then?” she asked.
“A friend with aspirations,” I said.
Hugette continued to examine the piece, still giving off the waves of intensity.
Charles said, “Isn’t Sunday one of your two days of rest, Hugette?”
“Anita’s going to be late,” she said. “I’m filling in the couple hours till she gets here.”
Hugette thrust the figure in the general area of me. She turned on her heel and left without a goodbye.
“Can be a bit brusque, our Hugette,” Charles said in a whisper.
“Probably the security mentality,” I said.
“Boring job actually,” Charles said. “Hugette sits up all night in the security room on the fourth floor looking at the cameras.”
“Boring you say? I call it inhumane. Chair-bound for an entire work shift?”
“She gets small breaks, old bean. Every hour, she leaves the cameras and makes a quick in-person inspection of all four floors.”
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