by Jack Batten
“How ’bout a quickie?”
Annie went over to the phone and dialled for a taxi.
“Just end the suspense about one thing,” I said.
“It isn’t true,” Annie said. “I’m not seeing Ted Koppel on the sly.”
“Another subject altogether,” I said. “What in hell’s a best boy?”
“Persistent cuss you are.” Annie was organizing the notebook, pen, and other utensils in her shoulder bag. “A best boy. He’s the person on the movie set that runs the errands, fills the coffee cups, opens the limo doors, sharpens the pencils.”
“A gofer? That’s all?”
“Don’t blame me. I just supply the answers around here.”
“I was hoping for something more exotic.”
“Shoot the messenger, why don’t you?”
I went around the table and kissed Annie’s forehead.
“Did I sound like an ingrate?” I said. “Truth is, it’s a heck of a load off my shoulders. All those years, sitting in movies, reading the credits, not knowing what best boy meant, feeling stupid.”
The taxi came just after seven-thirty. Annie was cutting it fine. Metro Morning broadcast from studios over on Parliament Street, about ten minutes from my place.
I had a shower and shave and switched on the radio to the CBC. The sweet little number who reads the news and weather was in the middle of the marine forecast. Then the unflappable guy who does the traffic spoke of a three-mile backup on the Don Valley Parkway. He didn’t say DVP. Then the host made a joke about Annie’s clothes. Said she was dressed for a gala night on the town. Annie said some gala nights on the town just never ended. The host made a noise like a chuckle. And Annie talked for five minutes about A Quarter to Three. She brought up stuff that was new to me. I sat through the same movie she did, but she saw more than I saw. Amazing.
I turned off the radio and practised pronunciation in front of the mirror in the bathroom. Nhu Truong. Dan Nguyen. Nghiep Tran. My Do Thai. The four Vietnamese people Trevor Dalgleish might or might not be palsy with. I didn’t have much trouble getting my tongue around the names. The two spots where “N” and “g” ran up against one another were tricky. But I wasn’t trying to come on like a recent arrival from Ho Chi Minh City. Just a snoop looking for four guys who had an address on Oxford Street.
There were a few delays before I got out of the house and on with the quest. First came breakfast. Followed by incoming phone calls. Dave Goddard rang from Muskoka to complain about the birds.
He also said he wanted to throw himself on the mercy of the police. I persuaded him to give me until Wednesday. It took much talk. Cam Charles phoned as soon as Dave hung up. Cam requested an update.
“Update?” I said. “Cam, I haven’t been on the job twenty-four hours.”
“Trevor spoke to me this morning,” Cam said. “He’s of the opinion you should be reported to Stuffy Kernohan.”
“I’m supposed to be checking him out, and he wants to turn me in?”
“You apparently said something last night that piqued Trevor’s interest.”
“Part of my ongoing design, Cam.”
“Well, it had better not go on too long. If something’s not right about Trevor’s conduct in the firm, I want to know it fast.”
“Wednesday latest, Cam. Two days.”
I don’t know why I arrived at Wednesday as a deadline for solving everybody’s problems: Dave’s, Cam’s, mine. If nothing happened in the next two days, I could stall for more time. I wouldn’t have trouble buying an extra day or two from one of the trio. Me. The other two, Dave and Cam, might be a smidge recalcitrant.
By eleven, I was mooching through the streets behind College and Spadina. The neighbourhood had textbook Toronto history. It was the area that a lot of immigrants to the city chose as a first perching-spot. In the late nineteenth century, Jews arrived from Russia and Middle European countries. They settled in the College-Spadina environs. Portuguese and Hungarians followed to the same streets. Chinese moved in during the 1950s and 1960s. And after the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, the “boat people”—dumb term—made their appearance.
Nobody put down their roots for good in the neighbourhood. It was a way station until families got prosperous and travelled north to the suburbs. For them, suburbs equalled success. But signs of all nationalities remained behind. The Kensington Market was a monument to the foods of every Toronto culture except Wasp. Jewish businessmen ran the garment industry from their factories on Spadina Avenue. Portuguese bakeries and pool halls dotted the streets. Restaurants that were big on goulash and wiener schnitzel. Places that cooked Cantonese. Szechuan. Peking. Mongolian. Lately, Vietnamese was all the rage. Plenty of vermicelli dishes.
I turned off Spadina at Oxford and walked past a carwash and another half-block into the neighbourhood. The number I was looking for, the four guys’ address, was on the north side. I stopped on the sidewalk.
“Son of a gun,” I said, more or less to myself.
The address was a restaurant, another vermicelli outlet, and the sign on the door told me it was closed. “Open at noon,” the sign read. That was thirty-five minutes away.
I ambled on down the street. A chestnut tree was dropping its nuts on the sidewalk. I picked one up. It felt cool and smooth and the end of something. It felt like the lyric Johnny Mercer wrote for the Ralph Burns tune. When an early autumn walks the land/ and chills the breeze/ and touches with her hand/ the summer trees / perhaps you’ll understand/ what memories I own.
I kept on going to a mini-park and sat on a bench. I had nothing to read. Why hadn’t I packed along the Gene Lees book? I sat and looked at my watch a couple of dozen times until it got to be noon.
The restaurant didn’t seem to have a name, and I was its first customer. The furnishings and decor were rudimentary. It had a low plaster ceiling, and below it were heating pipes painted white and entwined with fake ivy leaves. The walls were covered in mirrors with patterns in them that distorted the reflected images. Plaques that advertised Canadian beers were another favourite in the place’s aesthetic scheme. I sat at a table for two, wooden table and the same in the chairs. The chopsticks were plastic.
“You care for beverage?” the waitress asked me. “Beer maybe?”
She had a tiny voice. It matched the rest of her, small-boned and fragile. Her smile was lovely and tentative.
“Sure,” I said, giving her my best grin, putting her at ease, getting her on my side, priming her for questions about my quarry. “A light beer would be wonderful. And thanks kindly.”
I like beer about as much as I like baseball, but if the waitress thought I looked like a beer guy, okay for me. She brought a Carlsberg and a menu. The menu was eight typed pages, the Carlsberg smelled vaguely skunky. To me, all beer smells vaguely skunky. I ordered an imperial roll and a dish that featured chicken and vermicelli. The restaurant had about a dozen tables, and they were beginning to fill up. I seemed to be the only patron who wasn’t Vietnamese. Maybe that’s why the waitress’s smile for me was lovely but tentative. Not used to Caucasians. That balanced things. I wasn’t used to Vietnamese.
The waitress came back with the imperial roll.
“These fellas happen to be around?” I said to her. “Nho Truong, Nghiep Tran, Dan Nguyen, My Do Thai?”
I felt proud of the way the names tripped off my lips.
The waitress’s smile turned less lovely and more tentative. She looked over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen, and left my table without answering the question about the four guys. At least she put down the imperial roll before she did the fleeing act. It was warm and had a zingy taste.
A skinny guy in his forties leaned out the kitchen door. He was wearing a white singlet and a white chef ’s apron and had a cigarette in his mouth with an inch of ash dangling at the end. If he was the cook, I’d check my chicken and vermicelli for traces of nicotine. He studied me for fifteen seconds and ducked back into the kitchen. I seemed to have aroused som
ebody’s attention.
The tiny waitress didn’t take away my empty imperial roll plate and empty beer bottle. The chore was handled by a muscular guy in a short-sleeved white shirt that hung outside his pants. He brought me the chicken dish and a second Carlsberg. I got exclusive service. The waitress looked after everyone else in the place. Mr. Muscles took care of me.
I ate and drank and surveyed the room. None of the customers appeared to be taking special notice of me. None looked suspicious. Suspicious of what? Of bumping off Fenk? Of playing fast and loose with Trevor Dalgleish? That was what I was hanging around to find out. Put that way, it didn’t seem like much of a plan.
Two guys, if I had to single out suspects, emerged as my leading candidates. They were sitting at a table next to the entrance. One had on a dark-blue warm-up outfit, zippered top and pants that ballooned at the knees. The other wore a Hawaiian shirt that draped below his waist in the same style as my waiter’s shirt. Both guys looked younger, sharper, less working-class than the rest of the restaurant’s clientele. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt had his black hair tied in a rat’s-tail at the back. Really cool.
One o’clock came, and I’d had my fill of chicken, vermicelli, Carlsberg, and surveillance. But I wasn’t leaving, not after the small signs that I’d stirred a little interest around the place. The waitress’s nervousness, the chef ’s inspection, the muscular guy’s ministrations. I ordered a pot of tea, and walked over to the counter and picked up a copy of Now from the stack beside the cash register. Something to pass the time. Now’s movie reviewer dumped on the Norman Jewison film that opened the Festival of Festivals, and its restaurant reviewer dumped on the food at the Belair. Seemed to be a pattern there. I tried the personals.
“Burt Reynolds look-alike,” I read. “Successful, huggable, and available. Seeks relationship with tall, lean, model-type woman who is bright, happy, stable, and Candice Bergen look-alike.”
Burt Reynolds look-alike? Who’s that, someone with a toupee and a silly little moustache? And the guy who placed the ad didn’t have a clear picture of the girl of his dreams. Lean and model-type was okay, but not in the Candice Bergen mould. Candice has great looks, but her figure’s too substantial to qualify for model-type. Besides, her taste in men runs to Louis Malle. Wasn’t anybody editing Now’s personals?
Two beers and a pot of tea. I needed to use the bathroom. It was through a door beyond the kitchen entrance. I was out of the restaurant for only three or four minutes, but when I came back, the place had undergone a transformation.
The two sharp guys were seated at their table. Their eyes were on me. My muscular waiter was giving me the same stare. He was leaning against the wall by the front door. The rest of the room was deserted. No patrons, no nervous waitress. Just me and the three guys. And one other Vietnamese gent. He was sitting at my table, and he wasn’t reading Now.
“How’d you do that?” I said to the man at the table. “Make all the customers disappear? I’ve heard of sleight-of-hand, but this is fantastic.”
The man had a wispy goatee and horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a shirt and tie and no jacket. He looked like an accountant who’d slipped out of the office on a coffee break.
“You do not have an appointment,” he said. He spoke in an even, civilized kind of voice.
“Well, no,” I said. “Just came on the off chance.”
“This is about a transaction,” the man said. “Sale or purchase.”
“The transaction part’s right.”
“You want Big Bam,” he said. The guy didn’t deal in questions. Only statements.
“If I want Big Bam,” I said, “my pronunciation’s a little faulty. It was four other people I mentioned to the waitress.”
The man in the shirt and tie listened while I recited the four names. I spoke them in the same order each time. Easier to keep them right that way, like memory work in public school.
“I wonder who gave you this address,” the man said.
I thought about that for a second or two and decided to invoke an old maxim: when in doubt, improvise.
“Trevor sent me, as a matter of fact,” I said. “Dalgleish.”
The man turned in his chair and said something in a language that must have been Vietnamese to the other three men in the room. My muscular waiter and the guy in the Hawaiian shirt made identical motions. Both reached under their overhanging shirts and went for something on their belts. Guns? My stomach gave a lurch. The guys unclipped metal boxes from next to their hips. Not guns. My stomach righted itself. The two guys had walkie-talkies in their hands. They spoke into them in Vietnamese.
“Nice,” I said to the man at the table. “All the technology.”
The man said nothing, and I felt a compulsion to babble.
“Had those two fellas pegged,” I said. “Your friends over there, in the Hawaiian shirt and the warm-ups. Distinctive types, you know the way it goes. Stand out every time.”
“Big Bam’s waiting for someone to make compensation,” the man said in his civilized tones. “Three days now.”
“Three days?” I said. “Not good at all.”
“No.”
The two guys were still broadcasting into the walkie-talkies. Make what compensation? And who was Big Bam? A pseudonym for one of the four men on Trevor Dalgleish’s list? Probably not. Probably someone else altogether. One fact was sure—my new pals in the restaurant knew Trevor. The two walkie-talkie fanatics wound up their broadcasts.
“Ten-four,” the guy in the Hawaiian shirt said.
“Ten-four,” the muscular waiter said.
“Some language is universal,” I said to the man at my table.
He wasn’t paying attention to me. He was busy talking to the other three. The language wasn’t universal. It was Vietnamese, and it sounded like a set of orders. I sipped the last of the cold tea in my cup and sat by for further developments.
The man at the table got out of his seat and smiled. I did the same with a lot of emphasis on the smiling part.
“Big Bam is going to be at the park,” the man said.
“Great,” I said.
“He wants us to take you there with us.”
“Even better.”
The other three guys assembled to my right. The man in the shirt and tie nodded, and the three guys were on me as fast as a Road Runner cartoon. The one with the muscles held my wrists tight at my sides. The other two patted me down. Hawaiian Shirt took the upper half, Warm-up Suit took the waist down. It was over in a few seconds, and the three guys stepped away from me. They left everything behind, my money, wallet, keys, and a tingling in my wrists.
“The brass knuckles and the blackjack, they’re at home,” I said to the man in the shirt and tie. “I could’ve told you. Saved the bother.”
“Good business is built on precaution,” he said.
The four of them started for the door.
“Just a sec,” I said. “Two beers, imperial roll, chicken dish, tea. I haven’t paid the waitress.”
“Big Bam’s treat,” the man in the shirt and tie said.
I told him I was mad about treats.
22
TWO CARS WERE PARKED in front of the restaurant, half on the sidewalk and half in Oxford Street, and of the two, I would have chosen to ride in the Datsun coupe. It had a sporty look I liked. But I didn’t get to choose. The man in the shirt and tie, definitely the leader of the pack of four even if he was the least prepossessing, pointed me into the other car. It was a white Cadillac Seville. The Datsun was dark brown. Both were new models and had all the optionals. These guys shared something with Cam Charles. First cabin all the way.
Hawaiian Shirt and Warm-up Suit drove away in the Datsun. Mr. Muscles got behind the wheel of the Seville. Shirt and Tie and I sat in back, and we followed the Datsun.
“One thing I’m kind of a stickler about,” I said to Shirt and Tie, “is names. For instance, I’m Crang.”
“Mr. Crang?”
“That’ll do.�
�
“Very good. I’m Truong.”
“Nho Truong?”
“Exactly. Your pronunciation is excellent.”
“Been practising,” I said. “And who’s that up front?”
“Our driver is Tran.”
“Nghiep Tran?”
“Ah,”Truong said. “Not so accurate this time, your pronunciation.”
“I guess it’s back to the mirror.”
“Pardon?”
“Just a little Occidental habit,” I said. “How about the fellas in the Datsun? Dan Nguyen and My Do Thai?”
“You know us all, Mr. Crang.” Truong shook his head. “But you make one error in the pronunciation.”
“Where the ‘N’ and the ‘g’ come together?”
“Exactly.”
Truong spoke the two names, Nghiep and Nguyen, four times each, rapidly. I repeated the names after him. He shook his head again.
“Back to the mirror? ”Truong said.
“I promise.”
Truong smiled sympathetically. He and I were getting on famously. I decided to go for the whole enchilada.
“That leaves one more,” I said. “Big Bam.”
“He earned the name,” Truong said.
“I didn’t think it was Vietnamese.”
“No mirror for it,” Truong said. He was making a joke. I laughed.
“How’d he earn it?” I asked. “Big Bam?”
“Perhaps when the matter is rectified,” Truong said, “he will tell you himself.”
“The matter he’s been waiting three days for someone to make compensation on?”
“Not just someone,” Truong said. “Trevor Dalgleish. And now you.”
“Count on it.”
The Seville turned on to College Street, then west to Bathurst and north. I could see the Datsun up ahead on the same route. Whatever Trevor Dalgleish had going with these guys, principally with Big Bam, he must have screwed up. That was interesting. Even more interesting, the time frame for the apparent screw-up, going back three days, took in Fenk’s arrival in town and his murder at the Silverdore. The Seville hung a left at Harbord. How long could I keep Big Bam and his guys thinking I was connected to Trevor? That’d be delicate. It had to be long enough for me to weasel out a few more facts, but not long enough for them to figure me for a fake. The car wound north of Bloor and on to Christie Street. I knew what park Big Bam must be waiting at: Christie Pits.