Once Upon a Time

by Barbara Fradkin

  “I want you to take me to Bernie’s house,” Sid said as Green guided him into the car.

  Green was reaching for the seat belt and stopped abruptly. “Why?”

  “He didn’t come to the game today.”

  “Maybe it was too cold for him.”

  Sid waved an impatient hand. His white hair stood in thin tufts, and his eyes watered from the cold. He drew his coat tightly around his throat. “Bernie never missed a game.”

  Green started the car. “So call him.”

  “Marv did. There was no answer.”

  “Dad, he was probably just out visiting friends.”

  Sid snorted. “And who are we, chopped liver? We’re all he’s got. Where would he go?” He stole a glance at Green’s set profile, and his voice dropped. “Something is wrong, Mishka. Bernie is looking very bad these past weeks.”

  With resignation, Green steered the car in the direction of Bernie Mendelsohn’s apartment, which was a crumbling low-rise mainly occupied by the elderly poor. He left his father in what passed for a foyer and went in search of the building superintendent. They were just jiggling the lock of Mendelsohn’s apartment when the door cracked open, and an old man in pyjamas peered out.

  “Bernie!” Sid exclaimed. “Why didn’t you answer our call?”

  “What call?”

  “You missed cards! Marv tried to call.”

  Mendelsohn closed his eyes briefly, then turned to make his way back inside. Green noticed that his hands shook, and he limped badly. Quickly, he thanked the super and followed his father inside. The apartment was barely fifteen feet square and lit with a single yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling. Clothes were scattered everywhere, and open food cans were piled haphazardly by the sink. Green had only been there once before, but he remembered it as scrupulously clean. Like Sid, Mendelsohn had been widowed for nearly twenty years and had his set routines.

  “I didn’t hear the phone,” Mendelsohn was saying. “I’m sorry, I was asleep.” He sat down on the edge of his bed, and Sid took the rickety white kitchen chair. As there was no other place to sit, Green leaned against the wall and waited. Both men were frail, but his father, even with his heart condition, looked far healthier. Mendelsohn’s skin had a yellowish cast and hung on his frame in folds. A quick glance around the room revealed a collection of prescription bottles by the bed. While the two friends bickered, Green went over for a closer look.

  “You think I don’t have eyes?” Sid demanded. “I can’t see you look bad?”

  “I’m eighty-four years old. You think you look so good?”

  “Bernie—” Green interrupted, holding up a vial. “These are pretty strong painkillers.”

  Mendelsohn snatched the vial away with trembling hands. He shoved it into his pyjama pocket and took a deep breath. “Michael, I have a few aches and pains. Tell your father to leave an old man in peace.”

  Sid rose and came across the dimly lit room to peer at Mendelsohn. His wheezing was erratic in the stillness. “Aches and pains nothing. You think I don’t recognize cancer? My Hannah took ten years to die, Bernie. And near the end, when it was in her liver and bones, she looked like you.”

  “Well,” replied Mendelsohn quietly, “I won’t be that long. Not ten years. Not even one.”

  Green stepped instinctively forward to take his father’s arm, but Sid did not waver. He flinched but kept his gaze on his friend.

  “When did you learn?”

  “Three weeks ago. The painkillers are strong, and they make me sleep a lot. But it won’t be so long. Thank God it won’t be long.”

  “So…” Sid murmured. “Bernie. Don’t you think it’s time to call Irving?”

  “Irving? Why should I call Irving?”

  “Because he’s your son.”

  “Son! Sure. What do you think, Sid? That everyone has a son like Mishka here?” Mendelsohn wet his lips and drew a palsied hand across his chin. For a moment his eyes misted. “I should be so lucky. Mishka would not have left an old man to die alone. But not Irving Bigshot Mendelsohn. He had to go to the United States, no law firms good enough for him here in Canada. I know his kind. Only what they want matters, and the hell with the weak old father who just gets in the way.”

  So great was his bitterness that even Sid was alarmed. He looked pale when they left the apartment some minutes later. As he buckled his father into the car, Green picked his words carefully.

  “I didn’t know Irving very well because he was a couple of years ahead of me in school, but I seem to remember he was always a putz.”

  Sid sighed. “Yes, Irving had a big head, but it was not easy always to be Bernie’s son.”

  Green glanced at him, wondering whether he should even stir up the memories. The two elderly men had more in common than widowhood; both had been in the camps, both had lost children there. “You mean Bernie’s second son.”

  Green held his breath until his father replied. “Bernie doesn’t talk about it, but they are there, always in his memory.”

  “They must have been very little when they died.”

  “And that makes them easier to forget?”

  “No,” Green soothed hastily. “What I meant was—how does he know how they would have turned out?”

  “You have dreams for your child. You will see. You see in the baby the man he will become. Bernie has always loved you, Mishka. He sees you like the little boy he lost.”

  “What exactly did happen to his kids?”

  As he asked, Green kept his eyes casually on the road, but he heard his father’s breath catch in his throat. For a moment, Green thought he was actually going to answer, but then his father waved a peevish hand. “Watch the puddle. I don’t want to step out in a puddle.”

  Skirting the slush, Green drew the car to a stop outside his father’s apartment and got out to help him. The senior citizens’ building was a bulky low-rise conveniently placed between a bakery and a drugstore. Sid had moved there under protest eight years earlier when he could no longer manage the stairs, but his heart still lay with the little brick tenement in Lowertown where his son had grown up and his wife had slowly slipped away. Sid scowled now at the squat, ugly cube as if it were an alien thing.

  “Are you going to be okay, Dad?”

  “Sure, sure. Eighty-three years old. All my friends are dying. I can’t walk even one block. My hands shake, I can’t open a door. A man should thank God for such a life.”

  * * *

  Green was surprised how unnerved he was by his father’s words. Both his parents were Holocaust survivors who had lost all their family in the war, but as an only child Green had seen nothing bizarre about the strange hours of silence and the lonely isolation of the home in which he’d been raised. He’d seen their fatalism and their protective paranoia as an irritating restriction on his youthful urge for adventure, and it was only when he’d started reading about the Holocaust as an adult that he’d begun to wonder about the depths of their pain. But all his parents had ever afforded him, as now, was a distant glimpse.

  Later that evening, once their son had been securely tucked into his crib, Green fixed Sharon and himself a cup of Earl Grey tea. With a grateful sigh he sank down beside her on the sofa and drew her into his arms. Slowly, between soothing sips of tea, he told her about the visit to Mendelsohn’s apartment and his father’s reaction.

  “He almost talked about it, honey,” he said. “It’s the closest he’s ever come to telling me anything, to saying he never forgets.”

  She snuggled against his chest and cradled her cup of tea. Her eyes were half shut with fatigue, but her black curls bounced vigorously as she shook her head. “I’m sure he doesn’t. I couldn’t imagine losing Tony. I’d lose my mind. But your father, he’s had loss after loss after loss.”

  The thought unsettled him, and he sipped his tea a moment to ponder. He remembered his father’s reaction to the long months of his mother’s dying. His mother had talked non-stop, even refusing morphine in order to stay alert,
so desperate was she to cram twenty years of motherly advice into nine months. But his father had spent long, unnecessary hours at the factory and ceased to talk almost entirely. It was from his mother that Green had received his first glimpse into his father’s past.

  “Don’t stop him from working,” she said. “That’s how he was in the camp after the war. Busy, busy, everything had to be just so. You stop, you think.”

  After her death, his father had sunk into a deep apathy from which he’d been roused only briefly by the birth of Green’s daughter by his first marriage, who was named Hannah in her grandmother’s memory. When Green’s self-absorption torpedoed that marriage, Hannah had been yanked from both their lives by Green’s irate first wife before either man had much chance to know her. Green winced now as he thought how he himself had been responsible for that loss.

  Bit by bit, Green, with the help of the hopeful widows in the Jewish seniors’ club, had coaxed his father back into a meagre social existence and into the companionship of his card-playing friends. And now even that was proving a mixed blessing.

  Green sighed. “I hope Dad can bounce back. It must be hard watching everyone dying around you.”

  “And poor Bernie. He’s had such a life too, and what a way to end it. With a crummy apartment, a handful of grumpy cronies and a son who doesn’t care.”

  “I don’t know that Irving doesn’t care. He’s got his own life, and Bernie’s not the most approachable guy in the world. His motto was always ‘You think God cares?’ I know he’s gone through a lot, but as a father I’m not sure he was the best.”

  “Was yours?” she countered. “For that matter, are you? Even without the scars of the Holocaust, we fail each other in so many ways. Because of our pride and our hurts. Bernie fails his son, his son fails him. Even me—am I everything I should be to my poor parents? They want to come up for Tony’s birthday, and I put them off till Chanukah, because I don’t have the energy to deal with them. We all have needs that no one can fill. People get busy with their own lives, so in the end, one way or another, the old all face death alone.”

  That thought stayed with him, reminding him of Eugene Walker, who had faced death alone at one o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of a busy hospital parking lot. Sullivan had dismissed him as just another old drunk, Donald Reid had called it a quick and painless heart attack, MacPhail a simple “natural causes.” It was true it wasn’t top priority on the major crimes docket, but there was still that niggling mystery of the head wound, and surely the end of a man’s life—and the cause of that end—should be worth at least asking a few questions.

  Three

  November 7nd, 1939

  Winter is young, just gathering strength.

  It hurls through the flimsy walls

  into the shed where we huddle at the end of the day.

  Six strangers, made brothers by the whims of war.

  We rouse the reluctant fire, and by its flame

  I see my thoughts and fears in the strangers’ eyes.

  We are not safe, even here.

  Rumours fly eastward on the wind,

  of hangings, houses burning and young men,

  Poles and Jews alike, kidnapped off the streets,

  to stoke the Aryan madness.

  She droops against my chest, too weary for words.

  Sickness hollows her cheeks and dulls the flame of her hair.

  I am fine, she says, and the women laugh.

  Laugh. While outside, the Nazi winter descends.

  “Mike, it’s goddamn natural causes!” Brian Sullivan exclaimed the next morning. “I closed the case yesterday.”

  “Did you or did you not get photos of the scene?”

  “Ident did. Of course.”

  “Then just give me a peek. I’m not questioning your judgment. I’m just playing inspector, okay? Reviewing the file. What’s the problem?”

  “Your imagination,” Sullivan replied. “You’ve got that look in your eye.”

  “It’s just a hunch, a piece missing in the puzzle. Humour me.”

  Sullivan gave him a long, wary look, then booted up his computer, inserted a CD and pulled up the photo file. Green scanned the photos quickly. Some were closeups of the body, others of the larger area. One gave a clear overview of the death scene, showing the placement of the body and the surrounding cars. Green squinted intently.

  Chad had been right. The car next to the Dodge was a dark sedan, at first glance probably something GM. The licence plate was visible but too small to read even with maximum enlargement.

  Within seconds he had the Ident Unit on the line, and a few minutes later, he was examining a digital enhancement of the licence plate. Triumphantly he ran the number through the computer and jotted down a name and address.

  “Green, you don’t think some guy knocked off the old man and then left his vehicle sitting there to show up in the police photos!”

  Green cast Sullivan a look of exasperation as he pocketed his keys. “Lateral thinking skills, Sullivan. I’m looking for someone who might have witnessed something. This guy was parked beside Walker. Just a few quick questions, back before anyone even sees I’m gone,” he added, already halfway out the door.

  The owner of the car lived in an opulent brick house on a quiet crescent close to but sheltered from the crush of the city. In the drive a royal blue Buick LeSabre sat sleekly without a speck of slush or salt on its sides. Green examined the side mirror curiously as he passed by. It was also immaculate. Forensics would be little help there, he thought with resignation, because the car had obviously been washed since the storm. But the mirror was rounder and thicker than the wound on Walker’s head, and more importantly, Walker’s wound was deeper at the hairline than down towards his brow. For a car mirror to have inflicted that shape of wound, Walker would have had to fall onto it from the sky.

  That’s one for me, Green thought, as he rang the bell. Dr. Kopec had been on call the night before and was not pleased to be awakened, but the word “homicide” brought him clattering downstairs in his bathrobe. He consulted his appointment book to refresh his memory.

  “Wednesday was the day of the storm. Yes, I remember, I arrived about noon. The parking lot was quite full, and I had to park near the end.”

  “Do you recall the car on your left?”

  Dr. Kopec frowned as he tried to mobilize his brain cells without the benefit of caffeine. Slowly, he shook his head. “Not specifically, no.”

  “The body was found right beside your car. Between yours and the one on your left. When you pulled in, did you see the old man? Did you see anyone?”

  Kopec was shaking his head. “I was late and in a hurry. The traffic on the Queensway had been terrible because of the storm. I just got out of the car and headed straight for the nearest entrance. But there was certainly no body.”

  “Did you see anyone inside the car?”

  Kopec sat at the kitchen table staring at the flowered table cloth and frowning as he focussed his thoughts inward. Then he raised his head slowly. “I do remember something. As I was getting out of the car, I heard voices. Male voices. I glanced at the car—just idly, you know—but I couldn’t see inside, because the windows were all frosted over. I didn’t give it a second thought.”

  “Male voices. How many?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Two, perhaps? It was just a low rumble, but it sounded like different people.”

  “Could you make out any words?”

  Slowly Kopec shook his head.

  “What was the tone of the voices—happy, angry, conversational?”

  “Something gave me the impression of anger. One voice rose for a moment. I heard several sharp words that sounded angry.”

  “What did they say?” Kopec was shaking his head. “Think!”

  “I don’t know. They may have been foreign.”

  Foreign? Green thought blankly. Eugene Walker was a retired Englishman who rarely left the sanctuary of his country retreat. What the hell would he be do
ing with a foreigner?

  * * *

  I don’t care what MacPhail says, Green thought triumphantly as he left Kopec’s house and dashed through the frigid air back to his car. The old man was murdered. No matter that all they really had was a snatch of conversation which could have been the radio and a fresh head wound minor enough to be sustained in the fall. All his instincts cried foul. As a police officer, he’d seen hundreds of beatings, and this looked all the world like a lead pipe brought down on the old man’s head.

  And he’d heard enough evasions and subterfuge in his career to suspect that Walker’s family was afraid of something.

  He glanced at his watch. He’d told Sullivan he was only going for a quick jaunt, and he had to prepare for a meeting with the Crown attorneys in the afternoon. At this rate, he’d be lucky to get back to the station on time even without one more minor side trip. But he was already out in the west end, already halfway to the Reid house as it was. Half an hour more, that was all he needed.

  * * *

  “Murder!” Don Reid exclaimed. Green had summoned the family into the Reid living room and had plunged headlong into his theory, hoping to catch their first reactions. The son-in-law leaped to his feet, effectively placing himself between Green and the two women. This blocked Green’s view of the widow, but he was able to see the expression of panic which flitted across the daughter’s face before she brought it back under control.

  “The idea hasn’t occurred to you?” Green continued blandly.

  “Why should it?” Don blustered. “The old man had one foot in the grave! Even the coroner says so.”

  “But someone might have helped him.”

  “Why! What could anyone have to gain?”

  “Precisely my question, Mr. Reid.”

  A shocked silence descended on the family as Don Reid eyed Green, speechless. After a minute, he snorted in derision. “That’s ridiculous. Eugene was a recluse, he never saw anyone. He had no friends any more, and he wasn’t involved in any activities where he could have made enemies. Right, Ruth?”