My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur

by Phyllis Rudin

  “What are you talking about? I don’t know squat about fencing to museums. How could I just show up at the McCord’s back door and try to sell them something out of nowhere. You know what I was in for. I stole cars for what they call recreational use and drove them into the ground. None of them survived long enough for me to even think about fencing them. I wouldn’t know where to start from. You really think the McCord would give me a second look?”

  He had a point. Provenance mattered to a place like the McCord. They wouldn’t whip out their triple-tiered chequebook for a stumblebum like Rossi. They liked legit. Receipts and authentications and all that. You couldn’t just stroll in and pull a bootlegged objet d’art out from under your raincoat and ask for their best offer. I could see him being buzzed into their administrative offices. They’d size up this guy with his pants slung at half mast to reveal his rear cleavage and before he could even show them the goods they’d have redirected him to the third floor ladies room to deal with the clogged toilet.

  “Look,” he said. “I know you’re in deep shit over this but you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  I chose to ignore his various declarations of innocence, however much they rang true, and bowled right on.

  “How’d you ever get the idea of substituting the plate with a phony? That was very slick, I must say. A master stroke. You must be very proud of yourself.” And then it hit me. How had I been so slow to catch on? “You weren’t alone in all this, were you? Someone had to act as the brains of the operation. God knows you couldn’t do it with those two marbles you’ve got rolling around up there. How could I have thought you were doing a solo job? You. What a laugh! You had an accomplice, right? You know what that is, don’t you? No? Too many syllables? Let’s sound it out together, why don’t we? Ac-com-plice. It means a helper, someone to do the planning when you’re too big of an ignoramus to do it yourself. Oh sorry, I mean too stupid to do it yourself. Can you follow what I’m saying if I speak slow? Your silent partner, whoever the hell he was, I’m betting the guy was shitting bricks beforehand knowing the kind of material he had to work with. Why would he ever recruit a screwup like you, a loser who could barely get it together to steal a car that had the keys in it? You’ve got to wonder. Well, he must have spotted some shred of something in you that the rest of the world overlooked ’cause you did it.”

  Rossi had jumped up to give his side but I talked right over him till he gave up. I wasn’t about to let him get a word in until I was damn well finished.

  “I’ve got to hand it to you. You missed your calling. You should have gone on stage. You actually got me to believe that you were some retard wop ex-con with a heart of gold who barely knew how to rub two potatoes together. Yeah, you snowed me start to finish. You wheedled your way into my place. Got me to trust you, confide in you. Got me to believe that we were friends. And then you stick a knife in my back. As easy to you as breathing. You shat in the well of the single solitary place on this earth I could ever hold up my head. Well let me tell you something you worthless piece of slime. You think you’re the first person I ever trusted to betray me? It might interest to know that you’re not. I’ve been fucked over by someone nearer and dearer to me than you. I survived it then and I’ll survive it now.”

  I stuck my chin right up in his face while I spewed to give him a better target. I wouldn’t fight back when he took his first punch. It would be my penance for having trusted the asshole. But he didn’t budge. Just stood there soaking me in. It was as if he was looking right through me. When I finally wound down he whispered “Benjie, are you okay?” He laid his hand gently on my shoulder the way you do to an old man you run into on the street who can’t seem to find his way home.

  Why the hell hadn’t God rigged humans up with a rewind button instead of stuffing them with pointless body parts like tonsils and an appendix? “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said. “No offence meant,” I heard myself mutter next, as if a phrase so feeble could go any way towards mopping up all the insults I’d puked in his direction.

  “None taken, man,” Rossi said. He then pulled me into one of those full-body handshakes, all squeezing and slapping and pumping. It was a manshake to end all manshakes, a peace treaty of a handshake that left me feeling remarkably cleansed.

  Rossi’s break was over. Even at this distance his specially trained cook’s ears could hear the fat sputtering in the deep fryer, calling him back to duty. For once I was in no rush for him to put his hairnet back on and take off to man the fish and chips station. And he seemed hesitant to leave. So we agreed to meet for a late lunch over pizza across the street and in a back booth meant to shelter lovers we picked up our conversation away from any possible prying ears.

  “The thing that I can’t figure out,” I confessed, “is why whoever it is replaced the plate with a substitute. I mean why bother? Why not just steal it and be done?”

  Rossi clucked his tongue at my cluelessness. “It’s obvious, Benjo. You’re lucky to have me and my criminal mind on the case. He was testing things out, see. The plate switch was just an experiment. To get the lay of the land. To find out what security was like. Our thief is a step-by-step kind of guy.” Our. I liked his use of that pronoun. It reassured me that I wasn’t all alone in this mess anymore. “He’s a professional, I’d say. If he sees that pinching one little plate doesn’t make any waves then he’ll feel comfy coming back for the big payoff. The furs I’m guessing.”

  “Makes sense the way you say it.”

  “Of course it makes sense. I know whereof I’m talking here. So the next stop is the security cameras,” my consultant on the underworld continued. “You go through the footage and maybe you hit the jackpot and identify someone.” He was right. I’d watched enough police procedurals to know that’s step numero uno after a break-in, but the cameras in the museum were on a par with the collection. They were so old they probably snapped daguerreotypes. Besides, I didn’t want to involve security from the store and have the whole thing snowball. I was hoping to solve this on my own, behind the scenes, with no one from the Bay being any the wiser. It was my mum who’d backed me for this job. I didn’t want her taking any flak on my account.

  “So fingerprints are out too, then?” he said.

  “Yup.”

  “And no DNA sampling from hairs found at the scene?”

  “What do you think, I’m the RCMP?”

  “Jesus. I’m just kidding. Chill.”

  “Sorry. I guess I’m still hyped up from before.” I sprinkled extra chillies on my pizza to help blast the leftover muck out of my brain.

  “You can change the locks at least,” Rossi said. “That’ll set the guy back.”

  “No can do, not without a work requisition.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Thoroughly and completely.”

  We ordered a couple of espressos to think our way around that roadblock. Supercautious Rossi waited till the waiter left our table before he asked me, “Any ideas who it might be? Any other ideas that is. Aside from me, your law-abiding co-worker.”

  I’d been so focussed on Rossi that I’d never bothered to run anyone else through my metal detector. “No, not a one. You?”

  Rossi seemed to be sizing up if I’d gotten my sea legs back before he spoke, but I could sense he had a hunch.

  “Come on, Rossi, you can’t go that far and not say what you’re thinking.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I hate to say this, but have you ever considered that it might have been one of your kayak buddies? Maybe they planned the whole thing as a sort of joke. Among friends. They’re probably going to give you the original plate back this Sunday when they see you. Everybody will have a good laugh.” He added a feeble ha ha!

  “I wish. But that was the one cabinet I didn’t unlock that day.”

  “Too bad.”

  “It was a good theory though, Sherlock.”

  “Thanks. I put all my brains into it.”

  Lunch hour was over an
d we hadn’t made any progress in closing in on the perp. It was time to set up the stakeout.

  4

  I was determined to go it alone.

  Rossi’d been pushing me to let him play Tonto, I think so he could be on hand to douse me with ice water if I ended up going apeshit again, but no way would I cast him as my sidekick. It was too risky. I didn’t want to be at fault for involving him in any shady activities that could land him back in an orange jumpsuit. I’d already failed the museum. A bigger guilt trip I didn’t need.

  Not that he didn’t make himself useful in his way. He was my chief strategist when it came to setting the trap, but even better he was my unofficial caterer, plying me with food the whole time I was holed up in the museum. Always face your enemy on a full stomach, he advised me. It was one of those jailhouse clichés he dropped whenever they served his larger agenda. And he had one I was sure of it. The tipoff was the way I’d catch him staring at me sometimes, as if he were a mechanic under the lift trying to pinpoint the loose screw responsible for the rough ride. A handy guy, Rossi, he’d give it a few quick tightening turns with the pocket screwdriver he still carried around as a souvenir of his old avocation, and I’d be good as new. Dr. Sigmund Rossi was out to cure me, but since he didn’t have a couch handy, he went with the only tool at his disposal. Food. On the other hand maybe a cigar was just a cigar and his constant stream of food was simply to build me up with some fleshy armour so that in a one-on-one with my intruder I could lead with my belly. Who knew?

  “Okay, let’s go over it one more time,” he said to me a couple days later while we were sitting at the back of the museum sharing the baked ziti he’d brought over for lunch.

  “We don’t have to go over it again. I have it memorized.”

  “We do so. You have to have it nailed down perfect. Come on. What are you supposed to do if he has a gun?”

  “He’s not going to have a gun. And by the way, don’t you professionals call it a piece?”

  “Don’t change the subject. What do you do if he’s got a gun?”

  “I know what to do.”

  “Humour me. I want to hear you say it.”

  “Okay, if it’ll get you off my case. I offer him the contents of the museum and my firstborn child. All wrapped up with a red bow. I hand everything over like a little girl.”

  “You bet your sweet ass you do. No heroics.”

  “Right coach, I’ve got it. I’ve got it.”

  The idea of a weapon had never crossed my mind till Rossi was obliging enough to bring it up and turn me into more of a nervous wreck than I already was. He was forever reminding me that I didn’t naturally think crooked and that could put me in danger. He laid it out it to me this way. “Let’s imagine it was you who was caught mid-stickup, what would you do? First instinct.”

  “Run?” Apparently that was the correct answer. So I could think somewhat crooked. How much harder could the questions get?

  “But what would you do if you were cornered?”

  Clearly this was the million-dollar question so I chewed it over for a while, putting myself in my thief’s shoes. There I was, caught in flagrante stealing from the museum by Alexandre whose plaster-golem bulk was blocking my escape route. Would I grab at his beard which in any case would fall off in my hands?

  “Try to talk my way out of it?”

  Rossi squeezeboxed his palms together to fart at my stinko reply. “See,” he explained to me in a talking-to-a-three-year-old tone of voice, “most crooks, growing up, their mothers never said to them ‘use your words.’ These guys, when they’re cornered, if they didn’t have enough of an IQ to pack a piece – there, you happy? – they reach for anything they can use. You have to be prepared is all I’m saying.”

  When the idea of a stakeout first popped into my head, it carried with it the assumption that I’d be dealing with a gentleman thief, a thief in pinstripes, a thief whose charm and good looks had always been sufficient to lubricate his criminal path so packing a piece was overkill, so to speak. I reasoned that a burglar who chose to rob a museum rather than a dépanneur was clearly an upper crust type of thief, not a shoot-up-the-joint kind of guy; a guy with discernment, a pocket square, and an above-average vocabulary. We’d talk things out all civilized and at the end of the day I’d get my plate back and he’d get his freedom, a nice you-wash-my-hands-I-wash-yours settlement. Of course that was all before Rossi convinced me that such a thief only existed on the cartoon channel.

  “But what about you? You didn’t carry a gun.”

  “I’m the exception that proves the rule. Don’t count on running into a thief as sloppy as me. We’re a dying breed.”

  The plan we cooked up was as high tech as a hula hoop. I’d spend my stakeout nights tucked into my regular sleeping burrow behind the counter, out of sight range of anyone entering the museum. There I’d wait until I picked up the sound of the culprit approaching, and when I did, I’d reach out and grab the sonofabitch who’d defiled my kingdom. Rossi suggested I aim low, for an ankle, then yank. He thought with the surprise factor I could pull it off. It required a certain amount of muscle and self-confidence, neither of which I had in large supply, but he was convinced that by throwing the sucker off his centre of gravity I could bring him to the ground, however much he might outsize me. Then I’d sit on him and immobilize him with the cuffs Rossi’d kindly supplied. We practiced the moves together on the mats at the Y but as a crash-test dummy Rossi was overcooperative and always fell right on cue. And he didn’t flail around much so getting the cuffs around his wrists was sex-play easy. But at least I had the basics down.

  The weak link in our plan was that I’d have to stay awake all night every night for however long it took. To make up for it, all I could do was withdraw a few winks from the sleep bank to spend during the day on the job. Some people had a talent for power napping. I wasn’t one of them. Kennedy, my grandfather once told me, was a master. Give him a five minute catnap after pulling an all-nighter with Khrushchev and he could still be trusted to punch in the right nuclear codes. Me, I couldn’t be trusted to put down the lid.

  By the tenth night on surveillance detail I was so sleep-deprived that if some loon in camouflage fatigues broke into the museum threatening to blow it up, I’d offer to pull the pin. But exhaustion was only the half of it. My neck had developed a permanent kink from my junior-sized hide-a-bed, my skin was bleached out from lack of daylight, my digestive system was suffering from anxiety attacks, and my personal hygiene was taking a hit. To that list Rossi added that I had a tendency towards incoherence. But not so much that I should be worried over it.

  “Yo, Benjo.” Rossi warned me the next morning as I was opening up the museum. “Mama sighting at three o’clock.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Gabai,” he greeted her.

  “Hello, Rossi. How’s it going?”

  “Can’t complain. And if I did who’d listen?”

  “I was wondering,” she asked him, “was it you responsible for the daily special yesterday at lunch?”

  “You recognized my style? I’m flattered, Mrs. G. I put some cumin in. Did you get that Middle Easty vibe?”

  “A whiff of the Maghreb in Montreal. I loved it.”

  Mum hadn’t come by to discuss recipes, but this was their routine and Rossi couldn’t politely duck out till they went through the motions. But as soon as he left, she took one look at my sorry carcass and felt my forehead with the back of her hand. Mum was still under the impression I’d left her with that I was seeing a girl, and clearly the relationship had stepped up since I was now out every night. That I’d shifted my home base didn’t bother her, but the clear evidence that the new landlord was shirking her duties, letting me go out in public looking like a vagrant who’d eaten at an iffy food bank, this was too much to tolerate.

  “Honey, you’re selling yourself too cheap,” she started in. This was probably a line she’d been storing up for Rena but never needed to deliver. Waste not want not.

  �
��Wha?” seemed an appropriate response although I knew exactly what she was getting at.

  “Wherever you’re spending your nights lately, it’s not doing you any good. Look at yourself. You’re falling apart.” She hadn’t spent all these years propping me up to let some tootsie waltz in and kick the crutches out from under me.

  “I might look a bit of a mess, Mum, but I’m fine. Honest. It’s my own fault if I haven’t neatened myself up lately the way I should have. But you don’t have to worry. Really. I’m okay.” Here I was defending my fictitious girlfriend on false charges of negligence. Funny, for some reason I didn’t want Mum to think I’d made a dud choice in the girl department, even if we were just talking about a figment.

  “It’s honourable of you to take the blame, Benjie, but you can’t let yourself go on like this. You’re ready to drop. You have to ask yourself if she’s really worth it. You’ve got nothing if you haven’t got your health. I know young people have a hard time realizing that, but it’s true. Look at your father. There, I’ve probably said way too much.” Not that this stopped her. “Sleep home tonight why don’t you? I could use the company. Zach and Rena both have plans. And between them your Nana and Grandpa only add up to one functioning ear. It’d be nice to have you for supper.”

  “No, Mum. I’m tied up tonight,” an expression I hoped wasn’t an actual foreshadowing of the night’s events.

  “Honey, there’s no law that says you can’t make a pit stop at your own home to run a load of underwear and get a good night’s sleep. If she cares for you, she’ll still be there tomorrow.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement, Mum, okay?”

  “Please honey. I only say it for your own good.”

  “I know, Mum, I know.” I gave her a peck on the cheek, put my arm around her and steered her towards the escalator. “Haven’t you left the purses on their own for too long, Mum? They’ll be sending out a search party.”