by Mike Knowles
“Fine, fine. I’ll get back to you when I know something.”
“Nope,” I said. “I’m changing phones. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”
There was another pause. When Ox spoke again, he sounded sad. “You really think that’s necessary?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Wilson, I had no choice.”
“I’m taking that ability to make a choice off your plate.”
Ox sighed heavily. “Fine. I’ll put some lines in the water and see who’s biting.”
“I’ll be in touch in two hours.”
Before I hung up, Ox spoke again. “Wilson, are we cool?”
“Get me those names and we will be,” I lied.
Ox sounded hopeful. “Okay, okay, I’ll get on it.”
I hung up the phone and pulled out the SIM card. I replaced it with one of the clean cards I kept in a drawer in the apartment. The lie I had told to Ox tasted stale in my mouth. Without a number to call, Ox and I were as good as strangers. We weren’t cool anymore — we weren’t anything.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SUNDAY
I sat at a table with a naked stuffed bear in front of me. I never considered a teddy bear to be naked before I sat down today. Naked is a human concept — just ask Adam and Eve. Bears can never be truly naked; after all, they’re covered in fur. But looking at this one, lying on the table in front of me, across from shelves of bear overalls, sundresses, ponchos, and even geisha wear, it occurred to me for the first time that bears could indeed be naked.
“We’re all set for your party, Mr. Moriarty. You said you would be joined by two other gentlemen, but —” the woman consulted a clipboard. “No children.” Nancy, the middle-aged Teddy Bear Toolbox store manager, couldn’t hide her are-you-a-pedophile? stare behind her pleasant demeanour.
“That’s right, two more,” I said. “My brother and his wife just split. It was official yesterday and he moved the rest of his stuff out of the house this morning. Friday is his daughter’s sixth birthday and he really wants to make her happy. After all, her world just came crashing down around her. So, I booked me and our cousin in. I figure between the three of us at least one bear will come out looking good.”
“Oh,” Nancy said. From the look on her face, I could see all of her previous misconceptions reshaping themselves. “That is so sweet.”
“That little girl is the reason he stayed after his wife cheated on him again and again. But when she started drinking more and putting her hands on Dorothy — well, it had to be the end.”
“My God,” Nancy said. “That is terrible.”
I nodded. “Listen,” I said, leaning in a little to generate a conspiratorial closeness that was, in actuality, as real as aspartame. “If we totally screw up, are there bears we can buy? Ones that are different from the regular ones you can buy off the shelves?”
The manager smiled and put a warm hand on my forearm. “It’s not that hard. And with all the love you have for that little girl, I’m sure that you will come up with something really special that she will just love.”
“But if we don’t —”
“I can help you,” she said. “I have some things a little girl would absolutely love.”
Nancy went on and on about the art of building bears from the heart; of course, she meant the heart with a little help from the wallet. I gave her just enough attention for her to think that I was listening. In fact, I was watching a man move through the store. He walked with the grace of a dancer straight out of old Hollywood. His looks were equal parts actor and fitness instructor. He looked like a young Gregory Peck — if the actor did yoga and could run a triathlon. He saw me through the glass and nodded a cautionary greeting. I gave a nod back and he started his approach.
Nancy caught my nod and turned to look out onto the sales floor. “Is that your brother?”
“It is,” I said.
The middle-aged woman let an “oh my” slip from her lips before she unconsciously began smoothing her official Teddy Bear Toolbox smock.
The second member of my teddy bear party opened the door and paused in the threshold. He crossed one foot over the other and leaned against the door frame.
“Miles,” I said.
“Hey, James.”
“Hello, Miles,” Nancy said.
He beamed a smile at the woman that caused her to immediately run a hand through her hair. The hand stopped primping when I cleared my throat. “I’ll let you talk while you wait for the third member of your party to get here. When he arrives, we can get started.”
“Actually,” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to work on our own. I’ve done some research and I think we can handle things.”
Nancy looked at Miles even though I had been the one who was talking. “That’s not how we usually operate,” she said.
“I know and I’m sorry. We just have some things to talk about. Private things that might be a little hard to say in front of someone we don’t know.”
“Oh,” she said, remembering the sob story I had spun for her. “I completely understand.”
“Maybe I can stay after and you can check over my work,” Miles said. “You probably have tricks up your sleeve that would put what’s out there to shame.”
Nancy blushed. “Tricks, no. I just have a lot of practice. That’s all it takes.”
“Maybe that’s just what I need,” Miles said.
“Let’s see what we can get done on our own before you try and get the teacher to help you with your homework.”
Miles looked at me and saw that I was reining him in. The manager didn’t notice. She was back to playing with her hair. Miles moved the door open with his hand and she happily ducked under his arm to leave.
“Do a good job, or I’ll give you a detention,” she said.
Miles leaned in a little and said, “I’ll stop by on the way out to see if there is a way I can get some extra credit.”
Nancy put a hand on Miles’ arm as she laughed. “You are so bad.”
When the horny store manager had finally left us alone, I said, “You’re supposed to be newly divorced and making a bear for your daughter.”
“With all that flirting, I guess we know whose fault it was. And all the poor kid gets is a bear? I’m not much of a father or husband, I guess.”
“It was my idea.”
“Shitty uncle then.” Miles looked around the room at the shelves of bears and bear accessories. “Nice place for a meet. I was getting so tired of flower shop after flower shop.”
“Sit down, Miles.”
“How did you know I was Miles? We’ve never met and I remember you telling me on the phone that there were two people coming.”
“You don’t walk like a car guy. Your posture is too good for a guy who has spent his life under a hood. You’re also too handsome to be a grease monkey. If I’m wrong, and the con man is another looker, I’ll consider finding someone else to drive to avoid any unwanted attention.”
“You’re not so bad yourself, handsome,” Miles said.
“I didn’t have Nancy all over me.” I didn’t mention that the manager might have been better able to keep it in her pants if Miles had just toned it down a little. It wasn’t the time for that, but I did wonder if the grifter was able to be subtle if he had to. A man who didn’t have an off switch could be a liability. “Add it all up,” I said. “You’re the con man, not the driver.”
“Con man.” From his tone, I could tell that Miles didn’t like the term.
“You’re not?”
“The term implies that all I have up my sleeve is confidence. Idiots are confident, drunks are confident — hell, small dogs are confident. To lump what I do in with them is offensive. Like calling a flight attendant a stewardess. Not to mention the title says nothing about my sex appeal.”
“Confidence does seem a little far-fetched for a guy like you.”
Miles took a seat to my right so that he could see the front of the store. A good sign. “Short notice,” he said.
“It’s a thing with these guys,” I said.
“Who are we talking about?” he said. I couldn’t pick up any hint of a bluff. Miles seemed to be in the dark about the job, meaning Ox hadn’t told him anything, or given him an opportunity to earn a bloody bonus. Another good sign.
“Let’s wait for Carl. No point doing this twice.”
“So what, we just sit here and shoot the breeze?”
“Build one of those bears for your kid,” I said.
“What’s her name?”
“Dorothy.”
“I named her Dorothy and I’m leaving her mom? We should have done this meeting at a car dealership.”
Within minutes, the handsome grifter had a bear started that looked to be the equal of anything on display. It even earned a knock on the glass followed by an enthusiastic thumbs up from Nancy, who had been pacing back and forth outside the door like a hungry tiger the entire time we had been in the room.
“Dorothy is going to absolutely love this,” Miles said.
“Hope she likes her new mommy,” I said.
Miles followed my eyes and saw the manager giving him a lingering stare out of the corner of her eye while she pretended to straighten an already uniform row of bears.
“She works at the teddy bear factory. What’s not to like?”
I saw a man angling through the tightly packed aisles with ease. He wasn’t graceful like Miles; he was just skinny — not diet skinny, but rather the kind that would make Ethiopian kids slide something off their plate to help him out. The bones in the man’s face were prominent and the veins on his neck climbed like blue vines towards the base of his chin. The manager was too fixated on Miles to notice the third man until he was inside the room.
“Carl,” I said.
The man didn’t have Miles’ posture. He had his hands in his pockets and his head jutted out from his body like a pelican’s. He looked at me, then at Miles. Under the thin man’s nose was a thick heavy moustache — the kind usually reserved for brooms. The thatch of hair was the only thick thing about him.
“You James?”
“Only to my Albanian friends,” I said.
Miles looked up from the rhinestones he was carefully gluing into place on the bear’s jacket. “Albanians?”
“This is Miles,” I said.
Miles nodded to Carl. “Pull up a bear,” he said.
Carl looked at the table skeptically, then shrugged and took a seat. He sat down across from Miles and began examining the bear left out for him.
Miles glued another rhinestone down and then looked up from the bear at me. “If it isn’t James, what is it?”
“Wilson.”
If either man had heard the name before, it didn’t show on their faces.
Carl pushed the bear forward on the tabletop. “I was told on the phone that there was money to be made.”
Miles took another rhinestone with the tips of his tweezers and dipped it into the adhesive. As he applied what looked like his hundredth stone, he said, “I was told there was a shitload of money to be made.”
“I like his version better,” Carl said.
“What does eight million dollars look like?” I said.
“Depends on the denomination,” Carl said. “In small bills you’re looking at a couple of hockey bags at least.”
“A million is twenty or so pounds in hundreds, so eight is around one-sixty. You go down to twenties, it’s just simple math. Multiply by five and you end up with just over eight hundred pounds,” Miles said as he placed a final rhinestone down on the bear’s jacket. He held the stuffed animal out at arm’s length and examined his work. “You think a cowboy hat would be too much?”
“Less,” I said.
“I thought I was going overboard too, but without the hat the bear will just look unfinished.”
“He means less weight,” Carl said. “That means what? Thousands? That is damn hard to move. Even a little at a time would be a bitch. And if we outsource the job of laundering it, we’re looking at cents on the dollar.”
“What if I said eight million dollars weighed under three pounds,” I said, “and was small enough to fit into a backpack.”
“Not money,” Carl said. “We talking stones here?”
“Do either of you like Mozart?” I asked.
CHAPTER NINE
Three hours later, the three of us were sitting inside a warehouse in Scarborough. The parking lot had been mostly empty save for a handful of vehicles parked close to the main entrance. In the spot closest to the door was a Humvee. Not the scaled-down soccer mom type, but the kind Schwarzenegger used to roll around in when he still did sit-ups. The Humvee was parked down the centre of two spaces. I imagined what the little Albanian gangster looked like getting in and out of the military transport; Miles vocalized it.
“Do you think one of his guys is the designated boost? If not, how do you determine who does it? They got to have a plan, because who wants to make the boss have to come out and say it?”
I regretted telling him about Pyrros’ height being an issue. “Get it out now,” I said. “He won’t take that shit to his face. Not in front of his people.”
“Short-tempered, is he?”
This got a laugh out of Carl. His moustache shook like a wet dog while we rounded the corner.
The door to the warehouse was open and when we stepped inside we were met with a wave of humidity. The thick air shoved its way past me looking for a way out of the building. The large rectangular space was made for inventory; what it got instead was a wrestling ring. Rows and rows of folding chairs stretched back from each side of the raised square in the centre of the floor. A short fire hydrant of a man was in the middle of the ring along with a pack of steroid users, some abusers, all running on the spot around him. Every thirty seconds or so, the fire hydrant would blow a whistle and the spandex-clad men around him would drop to the mat into push-up position and then scramble back to their feet as fast as they could so that they could resume running. Pyrros was ringside in another Hawaiian shirt — this one green with white surfers riding blue waves. Pyrros yelled criticisms over the loud voice of the man in the middle of the ring. Each wrestler kept his eyes on the man with the whistle, but they nodded every time Pyrros finished a sentence. The only man immune to the critiques was the big man I had seen flanking Pyrros the day before. The big man wore a black wrestling singlet with two crossed swords crested onto the back. He absolutely dwarfed every other object between the ropes.
Miles, Carl, and I worked our way down the aisle to the front row as the man leading the practice blew two sharp notes with his whistle. The men took up positions against the ropes on opposing sides and then began taking turns running from one side of the ring to the other. The man running the drill called out names one by one, and each person called moved to the middle of the ring. The running wrestlers leapfrogged the man in the centre before ricocheting off the opposite ropes and coming back. The man in the centre would then drop to the mat so that the runner could step over him. When it came time for the man I met in the park to run, he covered the distance with a speed few would have thought possible for a man his size. He glided over the body in the centre of the ring like a thoroughbred jumping a fence and then took his spot back in the lineup.
We took three of the seats in the front row and watched as the exercise ended and the ring cleared out. Pyrros’ big bodyguard stayed in, and so did a man who would have seemed seriously imposing were he not standing next to the man in the black wrestling gear. The big Albanian towered over the other wrestler, and — from the look on the man’s face — he knew it. The fireplug yelled for the men to begin and the two wrestlers locked ar
ms in a violent embrace. Pyrros’ man won the contest of strength and pulled the smaller man into a headlock. The hold lasted a few seconds, but it was enough to produce a loud yelp from the man inside the muscle-and-bone vice. The Albanian shoved his opponent towards the ropes and the taut cables sent him back at the bigger man with a little extra shove. I doubted that he was grateful for the help because the Albanian used the momentum to hoist his opponent up and into the air. The man came down face first on the mat; the impact generated a loud bang and then a groan from the squeaky springs underneath. The match that followed was one-sided; it felt wrong acknowledging that another side even existed at all. When the smaller man pushed the Albanian, he went nowhere. Conversely, the bigger man manipulated his opponent with ease, and every hold and move was synced to a loud yell of agony by the much smaller practice dummy. A violent slam that put the obvious loser down on his head seemed to signal an end to the un-fake beating, but I was wrong. The big Albanian made eye contact with me before starting up the buckles joining the corner of the ring. The big man stood on the top rope with surprising balance and kept eye contact with me. He lifted a thumb and then looked to Pyrros. Pyrros held out his own fist, but his thumb was turned down.
“Do it,” he yelled.
The big man took to the air like a World War Two bomber. His bulk shouldn’t have been able to fly, but it soared through the air with the same mystifying aerodynamics as the Enola Gay. Only the Albanian didn’t keep soaring; gravity pulled him down head first towards the man lying out of breath on the mat. I saw the bodies of everyone around the ring tense as the huge steroid-infused Icarus crashed into the human sacrifice on the mat. The sudden commotion told me that something had gone terribly wrong, or right, depending on your perspective. Blood soaked into the canvas as the instructor screamed for help while simultaneously using his hands to hold the cracked skull in front of him together. Pyrros slid under the ropes, walked across the ring, and took his bodyguard by the straps the way a man takes his dog’s leash. Pyrros pulled his man’s head down and spoke into his ear for just under a minute. The hushed conversation was intense and there were a lot of hand gestures coming from the Albanian gangster, but the talk ended with a loud slap on the ass. The bodyguard took the top rope in his hands and used it to leap over the cables and down to the floor. He walked up to the guardrail, never once taking his eyes off me.