Our shopkeeper mannequin, Alexandre I called him in private, had himself a healthy beard, dense and rabbinic, but it hooked over his ears with twists of wire that were way too obvious. Even the littlest kids who came in picked up that it was a fake. His clothing, though, was more convincing. Alexandre outfitted himself for practicality, not style. His trousers were hitched up with old-fogey suspenders, and his cuffs were kept up and out of the way with sleeve garters. His waistcoat, where he might have shown a little pizzazz if he had any imagination at all, was a dull gabardine. I had to give him full credit, though. His get-up was period-perfect. And I had lots of time to study it since I set up my nighttime base camp in the nook formed by the inner side of the counter. Alexandre was planted just beside me. If my mother only knew I was actually spending my away-nights shacked up with a eunuch, not a girl, she’d be having conniptions.
The arrangement might sound cramped and uncomfortable to you, but you’d be wrong. It was very cozy. Private too. Even if the guard did decide to run his flashlight round the museum from the front door, which he’d never once shown the least initiative to do, he wouldn’t catch sight of me. I was completely hidden by the counter and the place was convincingly dark. The only light I allowed myself came from a tiny read-in-bed lamp that clipped onto the spine of whatever book I had propped open. No one would suspect the premises were occupied.
I’d overnighted enough times at the museum that I’d developed a routine. It involved a bit of borrowing from the collection but I gave myself permission. There were perks at times to being boss and employee in one skin. So first off, I’d remove one of the ladies’ handkerchiefs from the shelf they shared with the shoe buckles and drape it on the floor as my picnic tablecloth. They weren’t dainty like you might imagine. What with women always getting the vapours back then those things were cut plenty big. Perfect for my purposes. Next, I’d unlock the display cabinet that housed the blue and white patterned bone china that used to fit out the tables of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s directors. The dishes were imported from England like everything fussy in those days. And finally, I’d help myself to my favourite dinner plate. It was decorated with an oriental scene, pagodas and willows and birds, some fishermen on a bridge waiting patiently for a nibble. It relaxed me just to look at it.
I’d read up some on the china pattern as was my new habit – let no topic under the museum’s roof go unresearched. The scene was symbolic, turns out. I didn’t have a clue. Back at university I sucked at finding the underlying symbolism in a novel. Some English major I was. In the essays I turned in, I always went with death and hoped for the best. In this case I wouldn’t have been that far off the mark. The birds stood in for star-crossed lovers kept apart due to their differences in station by the girl’s rich prick father. The couple manages to escape to a remote island where they enjoy a few years of conjugal bliss, but they’re eventually tracked down and murdered by the stiffed fiancé. End of story.
It made my secret dinner so much more special knowing that underneath my humble meal of Bonbels and crackers an entire opera was unfolding, a British rendition of a Chinese West Side Story. That plate, for all that it was chipped at the edges, was still elegant and eloquent. And it felt so much better in the hand than the cheapo Corelle my mother served us on. I ask you, how could you develop any affection for a plate whose sole virtue was that you could drop it off the top of the CN Tower and it wouldn’t shatter? Corelle had no voice.
So there I was. All settled in. Ready to eat and read. I’d been looking forward all week to getting into Making the Voyageur World. It promised to be a real page turner. But round about the middle of chapter one, something started niggling at me. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but something about my picnic just wasn’t right. I tried to shake the feeling off but it wouldn’t stay shook. If I didn’t figure out soon what was casting a shadow over my nosh the night would be shot. Great. Just great. Could the day I’d had really go any further south?
I decided to check out my set-up one element at a time, picking off the non-offenders. It wasn’t the cheese. It was supposed to taste like rubber. And it wasn’t the book. It delivered as advertised. The handkerchief slash tablecloth, fluffed out, was wholly unsuspicious as were the crackers. Saltines were saltines. Which brought me down to the plate, the same plate I’d eaten off of so many times before. Somehow it felt lighter than I remembered when I picked it up. It had the chintzy lack of density of one of those crap plates from home. In the cave lighting of the museum the pattern looked reassuringly familiar, all busy and blue, but when I ran my index finger around the rim, it was eerily smooth. All the chips were gone. Maybe those beers were monkeying around with my senses. It’s a well-known fact that Belgian brewskis have a seriously long afterburn. I flipped the plate over so that the Staffordshire stamp on the bottom could settle the issue once and for all, but the letters were too dim to make out. To get a clearer view I disconnected my mini reading light from my book and held it up over the writing.
Walmart, it read.
3
Rossi. That scumbag. I’d gut him like a fish. It had to be him. Who else knew my habits well enough to work around them? Who else knew about the tobacco tin where I stashed my keys when they weren’t hitched onto my belt? Who else knew when I left to take a whiz? Some caretaker I turned out to be. I might just as well have left the door to the museum propped wide open with a welcome-basket of fruit.
Here he’d been casing the joint all along. I couldn’t get past it. I thought we were tight. Sure I knew about Rossi’s juvie history; he’d never kept it a secret. But boosting cars when you’re out on a bender with your pals is one thing, burgling antiquities and replacing them with look-alikes is another. By a long shot. It required forethought, and he’d always been more of an on-impulse thief, at least to hear him tell it, a seizer of opportunities. A heist like this struck me as way too highbrow for the likes of Rossi, but maybe I’d been underestimating him all along. Could it be that he wasn’t really the space cadet I took him for, though God knows if he wasn’t, his imitation was dead-on. This was the guy who’d asked me in all apparent sincerity which museum in Toronto had the Canadian Shield in its collection so he could go and check it out.
Sleep? Forget about it. I was too wired. I had to get started on a complete inventory of the place, to see what else that Judas in a bib apron had lifted out from under me and swapped for shlock. Now if you’re ever considering doing an inventory in complete darkness, let me recommend against it. I had to bump my way around the place Helen Keller style. Christ, how’d she ever get anything done? By morning I’d only managed to check out about a quarter of the collection. It took me all the next day to finish the job and discover that out of the hundreds of items in the museum, by some fluke I’d landed on the only phony one in the place. This was good. I’d caught him early in his game. But I’d have to confront him before he made his next strike. This was not good.
Over dinner that night, my mother checked me out with her x-ray eyeballs, “You look like you just lost your best friend,” she said. Were all mothers that spooky, or was mine just gifted?
“Not my best,” was the most I was willing to volunteer. Rossi may have been on the dumbish side, but I’d always looked forward to his visits breaking up my day. Whenever I needed to come up for air from my fur trade shpiels, I’d get Rossi to feed me stories of his time behind bars in exchange, to plump up my education in the world of shivs and shakedowns. “You’ve watched Shawshank too many times,” he’d say to me. “There weren’t any bars where I was. I wasn’t in for murder. It was more like a dormitory. With doors. Hey, do you think that’s why they call it a dormitory?” I’d miss Rossi’s company. We’d had some laughs the two of us. My mother could tell that she’d hit a nerve so she chose not to push the envelope. Instead she reverted to more generic parental carping.
“Could you please take off that tuque when you’re at the table?”
“Voyageurs never took off their ha
ts to eat.”
“Voyageurs probably didn’t bathe either. Does that mean that next you’re going to stop washing?”
“What you don’t understand is that they had good reason not to wash up. See, clean skin is a lot tastier to mosquitoes and black flies than dirty. So it paid for them not to wash. On top of that, they used to schmear their skin all over with bear fat to help keep the bugs away. And if they had any on hand they’d mix some skunk urine into it. It was the voyageurs’ organic version of Off. They always kept their hair long too. For extra face cover.”
Glances heavy with meaning were darting back and forth across the table. Did they think I couldn’t see? I was laying another fur trade lesson on them, and one with a piss sidebar yet. I couldn’t help myself. It was my kneejerk reaction to bring the uneducated masses into the historical fold.
“Honey, there are other topics of conversation for the dinner table,” my mother said. She was right but what was I supposed to discuss instead? “Oh by the way, my friend’s stealing from the museum and I’ll probably get fired, maybe land in jail?”
Oddly it was Zach who kept the conversation from veering off to more neutral territory. He asked me an actual question about work. Normally only Grandpa and Rena feigned any interest in my fur trade fetish. “Hey, Mr. Canoehead, how much you figure all that stuff in your museum is worth?” The very question I’d been struggling with myself. Was he turning psychic on me too?
“I have no idea.”
“Ballpark it then. Is it in the thousands? The millions maybe?”
“I don’t know, I told you.”
“Some curator you are. There must be an itemized list somewhere. Didn’t they have the collection evaluated? For the insurance?”
They probably had but I wouldn’t be let in on those details. That kind of head-office paperwork never trickled its way down to the grunt working on the floor. The only time I’d ever see it would be when the cops shoved it in front of my face in the interrogation room down at the station to shape my doom.
“You’re always yapping how the collection is so valuable.”
“It is. It has some of the finest examples of fur trade relics anywhere.”
“How do you know? It’s not like you’ve ever been to any of those other museums to compare. Only so much is on the web. Face it. It’s an afterthought operation, your place. Some kind of tax dodge I’m betting. The whole thing is probably a whim of one of the directors. Or one of the Mrs. Directors more likely.”
“Zach, you are such a pig,” Rena said.
Grandpa added to the firepower. “Leave your brother alone. Why must you always be ridiculing his interests? You should only be so committed.”
“I just want to know about the museum’s financials. Is that so strange? I am studying business, remember?”
Here Nana treated us to one of her patented snorts. Normally a great respecter of education, somehow she looked down on the study of business as a trumped-up subject of scholarly endeavour. To her it was nothing more than Money Making 101 tarted out in falsies and mascara.
“Zach, you know you’re just using it as an excuse to pick a fight.” Rena, my defender.
“I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes you are.” Polished debaters they weren’t.
“I’m just trying to learn more about the little jobbie he goes to every day.”
“Why do you insist on running it down?” Rena said. “It’s full-time, which is more than you can say about your Tuesday-Thursday slots at Future Shop.”
“May I remind you that I’m still in school, unlike Sir Benjie here. I only can work part-time. Besides, I’m learning retail. It’s professional training.”
“Some hot-shot professional. I’ve seen what you do. You load TVs and computers into people’s trunks.”
“Get off my back. I don’t see you dirtying your cute little hands with any gainful employment. Maybe you can try spreading them with bear schmaltz like your brother.”
“Just when I think you can’t sink any lower you always surprise me,” Rena said.
“Yeah, well I’m full of surprises. Maybe you should be more prepared. Didn’t they teach you that in Princess School?”
“Shut up, Zach,” I said.
“Oh, he wakes up! Had enough of your widdle sister acting as your defender? You’re taking over the job yourself finally? I didn’t think you were man enough.”
“Don’t push me.”
“Why? When it gives me such pleasure to push.”
Mum’s voice when she intervened had that on-the-edge quality that gave us all the shivers. “Okay. That’s it. I give up.” She stood up at her place so abruptly the chair teetered behind her. “I give up. Can’t you stop tearing down? Can’t you stop picking and fighting? Is it so hard? Could we manage to have a civil dinner? Please. Do I have to beg? Let me have the momentary comfort of seeing that we all get along. Or at least acting as if we do. Is that asking too much?” The only sound around the table was the metallic clunk of our stomachs clenching up. “Well is it?” I felt responsible for this flare-up, of course. My bad karma from the museum had clearly hitched a ride home in my back pocket hoping to get a crack at a wider audience.
Mum was usually such a cheerleader that when she laid down her pompoms it meant something. We’d crossed the line. Occasionally our family circle minus Dad was more than she could handle. But you could never predict. Usually a table tiff like the one we’d just had would fly right past her, but once in a while it would catch her in the gut like a cannon ball and knock her flat. There were times when we were younger when it would take her days to come back to herself, days till she’d crank herself out of bed and root around in the kitchen junk drawer to find her game face. Another shut-down like those none of us wanted to see.
Boom! The conversation shifted to upbeat. Rena came in handy here. Nana served as her second. They practically dance a hora around the dinner table. We should have taken a picture to freeze that moment for posterity. Shot from the proper angle you wouldn’t even notice that the family was held together with duct tape.
Hard night, harder morning. My Rossi showdown was fixed in my mind for his eleven a.m. break. No procrastinating this time, even though I’d always thought that the mañana approach had a lot going for it. But the longer I delayed on this thing, the more treasures under my care could bolt. The museum may have been my life, but I couldn’t spend every single day and night there, planted in front of the door with a shotgun across my knees. Even for a full-out fanatic like me that was too much. I had to go ahead and tell Rossi I was onto him, force him into quitting his job. I wouldn’t report him to the higher-ups, wouldn’t lay charges. I just wanted never to set eyes on his ugly mug again. Let him go earn his cat burglar badge stealing diamond cuff-links from Birks. It didn’t matter to me who else got dinged. I just wanted him to keep his thieving paws out of my back yard.
Rossi shambled in right on schedule and plunked himself down on the rum barrel he favoured for resting his weary bones. Usually I kept right on working when he came in, chatting with him over my shoulder, but this time I swung a chair around opposite him and straddled it. I needed the spindles up against my chest to brace me. When it came to confrontation I was a wuss, board certified.
“You’re actually joining me for a break?” he said. “What’s the occasion? Is it your birthday or something? Should I have brought a present?”
I grabbed the flimsy assembly-line plate from the counter beside me and stuck it out in front of him, hoping he’d just come clean at the sight of it, sparing me the whole grand inquisitor bit. I kept my gaze clamped onto him. I wanted the satisfaction of catching his jolt of recognition that the jig was up. But he didn’t deliver. His face expressed the same puppyish innocence it always did. I couldn’t help myself. Instead of grilling him all I wanted to do was scratch him behind the ears.
“What, you’re going to serve refreshments too? Could I just men
tion to you,” and here he pointed boldly at the plate, “that you forgot to load the dish up with any brownies? Some host.” He was a smooth operator, Rossi. I had to give him that. He was prepared to tough it out.
“This plate doesn’t say anything to you?”
“It says ‘empty.’ What else should it say?”
“I know.” I jacked my voice down a register, pronouncing the two words in my deepest and most meaningful baritone.
“The plate should say ‘I know?’ ”
“No, not the plate. Me. Me. I’m saying I know.” He looked genuinely foggy now. All this talking plate business seemed to have fuzzied up his reasoning powers. Or was it just show? I decided to keep things literal.
“I know what you’ve been up to.”
“Huh?”
“Here. At the museum. Don’t play all innocent. We’re way beyond that you and me. I know you lifted the original of this plate out from under my nose and replaced it with this made-in-China imitation from Walmart.” I knocked it against the counter so he could hear its plasticky thunk.
“What are you, crazy?”
“Where’d you offload it? That’s what I’m dying to know. eBay?”
“I don’t even own a computer. You know that. What are you on, man? It’s some bad stuff.”
“So what did you do then, sucker some antique dealer down on Notre Dame into taking it off your hands by saying you dug it up in your granny’s attic? Cash on the line. You probably only got a fraction of its value that way. I hope you’re satisfied that you ripped yourself off.”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m on probation. One more month I’ve got to go. You think I want to take that kind of chance?”
“Okay, so maybe not for the measly amount an antique store would hand over out of the cash drawer. But for bigger bucks it might be worth the risk. Maybe you got ballsy and tried to flip it to another museum. The McCord maybe. A plate like that, they’d be lucky to get their hands on it. And they’d have the money. Am I getting warm?”
My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur Page 3