Take Five

by Batten, Jack;

  I’d reserved a table earlier in the afternoon, managing to score one in the window. It gave me a clear view of the museum, at least of its front part. My purpose in coming to the restaurant was unclear even to me. Partly, it was to work on Charles’s notion of a watching brief. Partly, I was drawn to a spot within spying distance of the scene of the crime, the final swiping part of the crime, the actual removal of Company from the museum, if it in fact happened. Or maybe I just thought it was time for action of some sort. Or I was curious. I was restless. I was sick of being alone in the house without Annie. If I tried a little harder, I could come up with lots more excuses to be dining seulement on a Saturday night in a restaurant I’d never been in before. Never even read a review of the place’s cuisine.

  I recognized that Bartello’s had one thing going for it even before I sat down. There was no music on the sound system. Maybe there was no sound system. Whatever the reason, no intrusive noises drove me crazy, just patrons chatting with one another. I hated the invasion of thumping beats and banal melodies, a female singer screeching the high notes, a male singer hectoring in the hip-hop mode. No thanks, not when all a guy wanted was a meal in aural tranquility.

  The waiter was a pleasant-looking young guy with slicked-back hair. He said good evening, addressed me as sir and didn’t offer his first name. Was I in restaurant heaven or what? I ordered a vodka on the rocks.

  “Stoli be satisfactory, sir?” the dark-haired waiter said.

  “No objections from me,” I said. “And hold the lemon slice.”

  He brought the drink without the slice and with just the right number of ice cubes. I was on a roll with this guy. He asked if I cared to order or should he return? I said I was in no hurry. He went away.

  I sipped from my vodka and looked across College Street at the Levin. The museum had cleared out of patrons at five o’clock, and there was now no movement in or out of the front door. Employees used the back door for their own comings and goings, no doubt because the Levin provided free parking in the rear. No employees were presently in view, though I expected to catch glimpses now and again of Hugette, the security person. Once every hour, Charles had said, Hugette made her rounds through each of the four floors.

  It was easy for me or any other interested party to see into the Levin since all the exterior walls were made of glass. It was still mostly daylight as I worked on the vodka, but I could tell that the interior lights were on throughout the building. If I wanted an even more intimate view of the museum from my table in Bartello’s window, I could take Annie’s opera glasses out of my jacket pocket. But not right then. I didn’t want to identify myself so early as a weirdo.

  The slick-haired waiter returned, and I ordered a green salad to start, vinaigrette dressing, followed by veal paillard with a side order of pasta in a light tomato sauce. The salad arrived soon after I ordered. It had a lot of onions in it. That was okay by me, and it was while I was working on the salad that I got the first reward for my spying.

  Walking along the south side of College, moving east to west, was none other than Hugette of the security squad. Hugette moved crisply and purposefully, nothing girly about her stride. Since she was on foot, I reached the immediate conclusion she owned no automobile. She probably got herself to work by way of the Bathurst streetcar, a couple of blocks to the east. Or maybe she’d just got off the College car. Either way, I saw her as a suburbs person. Couldn’t afford the higher rents of Kensington Market or any of the more funky neighbourhoods handy to the Levin. She commuted by public transit. Hugette’s working hours were nine at night to six in the morning. Her shift was about to begin.

  I watched as she cut down a side street flanking the Levin, no doubt headed for the employee entrance around back. Something about Hugette stirred small signs of recognition in the deeper recesses of my busy little brain, but I couldn’t quite pull them to the surface. I let the small signs go for the time being. Hugette had on a white T-shirt with some picture or symbol I couldn’t make out on the front. She wore black jeans and a black vest hung loosely, thereby covering much of the T-shirt decor. She had on black gloves. What were they all about in this warm weather? A fashion statement? I supposed so. I watched a bit longer, pondering on something about her stride. What was different about it? Something struck me as odd. It was her hands, that was it. She held them out from her body as if they were separate entities and had to be treated gingerly. Something along those lines. I kept my eyes on Hugette until she was out of sight. Then I turned back to my salad. I knew I’d catch glimpses of Hugette a few more times that evening.

  My veal paillard was gorgeously cooked and presented. I told the nice waiter how pleased I was. The pasta was straight-ahead spaghetti, done al dente. Everything was as I liked it. How unique an eating experience was this? Very, I decided.

  I was just polishing off the veal when I spotted Hugette starting on her first all-building security check of the night. She emerged into my view from the fourth-floor hallway, presumably from the room where she watched the video coverage of all the Levin floors. She rode the elevator to the first floor and began her sweeps of each floor in turn, moving upward, first floor to fourth. She seemed thorough about the job, not rushing but not dawdling either. God knows what she had to look for. Lurking burglars? Possible, but very unlikely. In movies, sure. In real life, not so much.

  Hugette spent about five minutes on each floor, walking up the stairs to move from one floor to the next. She paused for any length of time only on the fourth. I knew what she was examining. Company of Fools. Ah, yes, I imagined, the plot was growing thicker by the instant. Hugette finished her floor-to-floor check, and disappeared into her cubbyhole of video screens.

  I ordered a tarte au citron, though it wasn’t called that in Italian. I knew French better than Italian. The waiter didn’t seem to mind what I called it. His accent was strictly southern Ontario. While I ate the tarte—it was scrumptious—I thought about my stirrings of recognition of something or other in Hugette, failing once again to pin them down. She had still been wearing the black gloves, but my stirrings, whatever they dealt with, concerned much more than that.

  The waiter asked if I wanted coffee. I said, an espresso, please. But I told him to hold my order until I returned. I said I was headed out to do an errand. I handed him my Visa card.

  “An article of good faith,” I said.

  “Not necessary, sir,” he said, handing the card back to me.

  Both of us smiled, and I walked out of the restaurant and into the small entrance hall between College Street and Bartello’s front door. To the right was an elevator to the floors above the restaurant. I got on, and pressed the button for the fourth. I was interested in finding a more generally advantageous viewing spot than Bartello’s front window.

  The entire fourth was given over to one business, something called Smith/Wave Graphics. What did a company with a name like that offer the world? Probably IT related. Elvis Wang might want a piece. I tried the double door to Smith/Wave. Locked, as expected. At one end of the corridor between Smith/Wave and the elevator was a single door. I walked down and tried it. The door opened into a clean and tidy washroom. It had a toilet stall but no urinals. Two wash basins and a long mirror above them. The washroom was clearly intended for both genders among Smith/Wave employees. Best of all, as far as I was concerned, it faced south across to the Levin.

  The only problem was the opaque pebbled window. It seemed not to have been opened in decades, and I couldn’t at first budge it. This was going to take an effort. Not since I hoisted myself out of Steve Lazslo’s incredible sinking armchair did I require the use of so much of my own muscle. I pushed and strained and heaved. Movement in the dratted window didn’t come slowly or by increments. The lifting movement was rapid and all of a sudden. The window shot upward. I was so surprised that for one terrible sinking moment I felt as if I might plummet through the open window to the sidewalk four storeys below.

  I was slightly sweaty, not to mentio
n huffing and puffing. I leaned against the wall and waited for the recuperative process to set in. All the while, as my breathing and the rest of my bodily functioning returned to normal, I kept my eyes on the Levin. According to my timing, Hugette was due to make her second inspection tour about now. A couple of minutes crawled by, and, right on schedule, Hugette stepped onstage.

  I got out Annie’s opera glasses and took forever to bring them into focus. I was terrible with binoculars of any size. They refused to respond to my twiddling and tweaking. Eventually, half a lifetime it seemed, I had the damned things more or less in focus and more or less trained on Hugette. She was finishing up on the first floor and approaching the stairs to the second. The stairs meant she was out of sight for a minute or two. But soon enough, she emerged on the second floor, and I followed her for the floor’s entire sweep. It went the same for the third and fourth, my eyes trained on Hugette’s tall, slim, athletic form, the honker of a nose and the general contours of her head and body. By the time she finished her rounds, I’d recovered from my brain’s remote chambers the judgment the brain had intuited more than an hour earlier when Hugette first appeared on College Street.

  I put the opera glasses back in my pocket, got out my cell and called I Spy Griffith.

  “I need you, I Spy,” I said when he answered.

  “How refreshing, Mr. Crang,” he said. “No longer freezing me out? Is that your meaning?”

  “Urgent piece of identification,” I said, skating past I Spy’s ridiculous grievance. “Only you can handle it.”

  “Really?” I Spy sounded flattered. “Well, well. You’re coming out here?”

  “You’re coming to me, I Spy. At the Levin Museum. Within the hour. We’ll meet in the restaurant across the street from the museum. Bartello’s.”

  “I haven’t been downtown in an age,” I Spy said, his voice giving away a bad case of nerves. “I never take the car out at night under any circumstances. I’ve no idea where to find the Levin.”

  Jesus, the guy was in total panic.

  “I’ll call you a cab, I Spy. Beck. A car’ll be at your place in fifteen minutes tops.”

  “Is it safe downtown?”

  “Ask your driver to lock all the doors.”

  I clicked off and called Beck. I ordered a cab for I Spy and told Beck to put the ride on my account. The dispatcher said the cab would be at I Spy’s in fifteen minutes. They always say fifteen minutes. I went back downstairs and signalled to the waiter that I was ready for my espresso.

  Thirty-five minutes later, I Spy stepped warily into Bartello’s. He had dressed for the occasion. Suit, white shirt and striped tie.

  “Good man, I Spy,” I said, shaking his hand. “You’d like a coffee maybe? Grappa? We’ve got twenty minutes till showtime.”

  “Neither, Mr. Crang. Just being downtown like this is making my adrenalin go mad. I’m not accustomed to leaving the Kingsway.”

  “Whatever you say, I Spy. Let’s do a rehearsal up at action central.”

  “Action?” I Spy said. The poor man was petrified.

  I patted him on the back. “Action of the passive sort, if you get my meaning.”

  We rode up the elevator to the fourth floor, and I guided I Spy into the darkened washroom.

  “Is this legal, Mr. Crang?” he asked.

  “Breaking and entering a private washroom maybe.”

  “Oh dear god!”

  I gave him another back pat. “Just a piece of legal humour, I Spy.”

  “Could we at least have some light?” he said. He reached over to the wall switch and turned it on.

  I turned it off. “Think of this as an undercover job, I Spy.”

  I led him to the window and aimed him at the Levin across the street. “That’s our point of interest over there, I Spy. We’re watching for the security person. I want you to examine that person. Use these opera glasses as your visual aid. Do an identification. Got all that?”

  We rehearsed for ten more minutes. Just as I finished with all the instructions I could think of, good old on-time Hugette stepped into sight on the fourth floor. Ready for her next round of inspection.

  “There’s our target, I Spy. Do your stuff.”

  I Spy wasted no time. “That’s he!” he said almost immediately. His voice had shed the fear and trembling it’d been lugging around all evening. “That’s the man from Mondays at 32 Highbury! No doubt about it! There he is!”

  “I Spy,” I said, “you haven’t used the opera glasses.”

  I Spy turned to me. “I don’t need any visual aids. I can see plainly enough that you’ve found the third person.”

  “Just give it one more shot. With the glasses this time.”

  “If you insist.” I Spy turned back to the view across the street, this time raising Annie’s opera glasses to his eyes.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, “there he goes. He’s on the third floor now. Crossing the floor. Inspecting. Yes, yes . . .”

  I Spy’s voice slowed its excited pace. “Oh, oh, oh. My goodness gracious. It’s the correct man all right, but he’s not a he at all, is he? I mean, is she? I am absolutely floored. It never entered my mind that the person was anything except male. Well, she does have male aspects in her appearance. I say that as no excuse, but as a partial explanation for my rather fundamental error. Her figure is a long way short of Rubenesque.”

  “Flat as a board, as we’d say when we were callow and sexist adolescents.”

  “You might have said it, Mr. Crang. I didn’t,” I Spy said. He had regained the waspish side of his personality.

  “The important question,” I said, “is the young woman over there, name of Hugette Jennings, the person you saw on Monday nights?”

  “Not a fraction of doubt in my mind.”

  “Just one thing more, I Spy. Do you notice something odd about Hugette’s hands? Apart from the gloves. She holds her hands kind of gingerly? Away from the body? You see that? Or is it my imagination?”

  I Spy got back on the opera glasses. He did another minute of observation, ending only when Hugette finished her rounds.

  “Not both hands, Mr. Crang,” I Spy said. “She’s favouring one hand only. The right. The left is more or less mimicking the right.”

  “You’re a very precise man, I Spy.”

  “Are her hands important to our case?”

  “Might be.”

  I put the opera glasses back in my pocket and escorted I Spy out of the washroom.

  “Grand piece of work, I Spy,” I said in the elevator. “A thousand thanks.”

  The two of us shook hands and stepped back into Bartello’s. I Spy again turned down offers of refreshment. I asked the maître d’ to call him a Beck cab on my account, and I Spy left. I ordered a grappa from the dark-haired waiter. When it came, I raised my glass in a silent toast to the evening’s work.

  It may have been a smallish step, identifying Hugette. But it buoyed my optimism to previously unattainable heights. Maybe the thing was going to have a decent ending after all. For certain, what we’d done this night, I Spy and I, was to definitively hook Hugette into the scheme. She was the inside contact. She represented the most logical person to make the switch, as I imagined it. She’d remove the real figures from the Company of Fools exhibit and substitute Grace’s copies. Maybe she’d already done it, but that was doubtful. She’d probably pull off the switch in the dimmer hours of the night, somewhere around 3 or 4 a.m. Then she’d get the real Company of Fools up to Elizabeth Janetta’s house. Maybe Elizabeth would drive down and fetch her and the goods. Or maybe Rocky would handle the fetching. He could drive without active participation from the little finger of his right hand.

  I was drinking the grappa, partly because I enjoyed the taste and partly because the drink smoothed the way while I pondered a big question on my mind. What was my next step? I had choices. I could take Charles’s notion of the watching brief literally and stay on duty until something else happened across the street. Somehow that didn’t appe
al. It would involve watching the Levin and hoping I was in position to spot the actual substitution of the real Company of Fools for the fake.

  Jesus, I could be holding the fort all night. Bartello’s would close, and I’d have no retreat except to the washroom outside the offices of Smith/Wave Graphics. Even then, I wasn’t guaranteed of witnessing anything criminal or incriminating. This struck me as a lousy prospect.

  Or I could go home, catch a few hours’ sleep and return Sunday morning at eleven when the Levin opened. I’d be fresh, on top of my game, ready to deal with whatever events I was presented with. Good thinking, I thought, damn good thinking.

  I paid the bill, left a very large tip for the obliging waiter and strolled home. As I walked, I whistled a happy tune. It was “Take the ‘A’ Train.” I still couldn’t get it right.

  35

  When I arrived at the Levin next morning, it was ten minutes to eleven, and I was the third person in line. When the doors opened, I was the twelfth person into the museum. A bunch of eager beavers farther back in the line had jockeyed me out of position. Who said ceramics was a genteel pursuit?

  The fuss at the door didn’t deflect me from my plan of action. I beat the eager beavers to the elevator and rode alone to the fourth floor. I was the only person on the floor and pointed myself directly to Company of Fools.

  The first figure I looked for was the jester with the giraffe’s face. He was in the front row, far right. This giraffe, the one I was concentrating on, had a smooth forehead. There was no gouge over the left eye. No other blemish, for that matter. The giraffe-faced fellow was manifestly a copy. A fake. An imitation. A figure not by L.L. Schwartzmann but by G. Nguyen.

  I checked out the rest of the figures. Every single jester was free of creases, wrinkles, lines and other signs of great age. They were smooth and unrumpled. They looked brand new. Copies, the entire lineup. The switch had been made, Grace’s copies for the originals.