by André Alexis
– I have been, but I’m not in love now, he’d answered.
But Tancred, as a matter of principle, never spoke of such things to anyone but Daniel or Olivier, and even then rarely. His discretion was a way of protecting the one he loved. He supposed it was old-fashioned, but he believed in the sanctity of love. Not only love but also the feeling, ever-different, that exists between two who might fall in love. He did not like to read fiction or poetry for this very reason. He had never found a work that spoke of the feeling with dignity. Most were a desecration of it, save The Divine Comedy – read at the behest of a woman he was seeing – which was sublime but over-the-top. It had been more entertaining, reading Dante, to imagine the circle of Hell he, a thief, would occupy: the eighth, with its snakes, ashes and humiliation. All that for taking toys from grown men!
No, with Nigger, Willow continued, it was all about the pharmaceuticals. Whoever his supplier, Nigger’s junk was – at least in her experience – clean. Then, too, he treated her with respect. Yes, it was because she had money. But why should his motives matter to her?
In the beginning – that is, not long after her father’s death – she would take taxis to Parkdale, get off at King and Jameson and walk up to the Dolphin. In those days, she dressed normally – that is, normal for Rosedale. Not a good idea, as people either mistook her for a social worker or called her a Dickless Tracy to her face. She then, briefly, dressed down. This was worse, as it drew the attention of drunks or men who wanted to fuck her. It was then she decided to wear her mother’s clothes – that is, the fashion from her mother’s youth. A variety of old-fashioned duds, day after day, a uniform of sorts. The clothes attracted attention, but most of those who saw her in, say, her black dress, elbow-length black gloves and a plumed hat assumed she was either ‘artistic’ or ‘touched’: not wealthy, not a worth-while mark. She added to the impression of eccentricity by openly talking about her addiction. This was surprisingly effective. You could almost feel the cool breeze as people turned away. And once Parkdale knew who she was (or imagined it did), it left her alone. She would shoot up in the washroom at Bacchus or Ali’s – plastic spoon, cotton batten, needle from PharmaPlus – and then, if she was able, stumble to the lake to zone out. More than once, she’d passed out on a bench and woken in the dark, the murmuring lake before her, the shushing expressway behind.
That’s not to say she was never bothered. She was still a woman, after all. She’d had her purse stolen – grabbed in passing so they nearly took her arm off. She’d been screamed at by aggressive outpatients from Queen Street Mental. She’d been knocked into the street by people who’d have crushed her without qualms. But here, too, Nigger was helpful. As long as she was around him or Freud, people left her alone or paid immediately for bothering her. Freud, in particular, liked to hit. He was happy to sit with her at the Dolphin and quick to take offence on her behalf.
(Tancred said
– Freud’s your knight in shining armour?
– No, you’re my knight in shining armour, she said.
She was joking, but the idea – which she must, to some extent, have believed – made Tancred uncomfortable.)
Nigger, Freud, the lake, the Dolphin, the greengrocers at Queen and Jameson where she could buy sugary Indian sweets, the Coffee Time at O’Hara: these were the reasons she preferred Parkdale to Rosedale. Nothing about the neighbourhood reminded her of her father or of home. The faces, the languages she sometimes heard spoken, the accents, the slightly seedy buildings from Queen and Roncy to Queen and Dufferin – all of it reminded her, more than anything else, of somewhere south, of Key West or Freeport or Havana. At least, in summer. In winter, Parkdale was unpleasant. In winter, she preferred Rosedale, but she made the trek anyway, spending hours in the dog’s mouth that was the Dolphin with its heat on – or, once the police shut the Dolphin down, hours in the Skyline.
Getting to know Willow as Tancred did – that is, in short bursts, from just before the Green Dolphin closed to sometime after Rob Ford’s election – seeing her decline, her skin growing sallow as it clung to her skull – it was inevitable that he would come to mourn her passing: a brilliant woman with a sickness that left her incapacitated for long stretches, a sickness that sometimes brought out the worst of her and ate away at her already-meagre body. On those occasions when he imagined her passed out on a bench or sitting in the doorway to some business on Queen, he preferred to think that her soul had flown while the chemicals did to her whatever it was they did. But the thought of what she might have been troubled him less and less as he strove to accept the woman she actually was.
Days after their meeting by Masaryk Park, Willow asked him to come with her to an address on Chestnut Park in Rosedale. It being Sunday, Tancred found the request inconvenient, but he went along, thinking she needed help with some domestic chore and that it could, whatever it was, be done quickly.
The address in question was Willow’s, though she seemed ill at ease in her own home. The house was, for Rosedale, modest. A hedge formed a rectangle around a bit of lawn, a rectangle bisected by stone steps that led up to a landing. Between the top of the steps and the house there was a larger patch of lawn on which, to one side of the house, an ash tree sustained a cloud of leaves while, to the other, a dogwood – its trunk forked – shaded part of Willow’s house as well as her neighbour’s front walk.
Willow’s house was three storeys high with what looked like a gabled attic on the top floor. All the windows seemed to be French, their slats painted white. The dark brick walls were partially hidden by ivy that ran up to the two chimneys, one on each side of the house. The entrance to the house did not face the street. It was on the side, hidden from view.
Tancred had the unpleasant feeling that he’d once broken into this very place. Each step toward the house gave him déjà vu.
– I apologize for the mess, Willow said as they entered.
But it was a peculiar kind of mess. The house was immaculate and smelled of nothing in particular. Yes, the kitchen was like a room lived in by transients. There were pots and pans about. There were empty containers here and there: boxes that had held chocolate bars, boxes that had held doughnuts, containers of Häagen-Dazs. But even the kitchen was oddly antiseptic, there being no sign of anything organic or rotten. The rest of the house was elegant. That, in any case, was the word that came to Tancred’s mind, elegant. The floors were a polished, blond hardwood. There was very little furniture: Quakerish tables and chairs in the dining room, a single, ghost-blue sofa in the living room, no curtains or drapes anywhere, the windows spotless, the walls white and, from the look of them, recently painted.
– So, said Willow
pointing to the screen that stood facing the sofa
– Do you believe me now?
It was a moment before Tancred realized what she was referring to. Here was the six-panelled screen, one of the supposed clues to something or other, left to his children by a father playing games from beyond the grave.
The screen was beautiful and no doubt valuable in and of itself. It was some five feet tall and, when opened out, twelve feet wide. Its backing was thick, light-apricot-tinted paper. The front of it, a painting of willows by a bridge, was so well done that, when the screen was at its widest, the breaks between four of the panels were barely visible, unless you knew where to look. Five of the panels – thick paper – were done with black ink, coloured ink and gold leaf. The sixth and final panel was willow wood.
Had the screen been an original from sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Japan, it would have been invaluable. As authentic as it looked, however, it was not meant to deceive, not meant to pass for genuine. It was not flawed. It was what it was deliberately. But what was it, exactly? An exquisitely done memento? A work whose meaning was playfully obscure? Having seen the screen for himself, Tancred at last understood Willow’s certainty that there was more to it than one could easily figure out.
– Now that you’ve seen this one, said Willow,
will you steal the others?
– Won’t your brothers and sisters be angry? asked Tancred.
Willow ignored this and, instead, went to get something from the kitchen: a circular, covered tin that had once held Royal Dansk butter cookies.
– Here are the others, she said.
Inside the tin there were four photographs, one of each of her siblings’ mementos: a bottle, a painting, a poem, a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
– Now you know what you’re looking for, said Willow, promise you’ll do this for me.
The hepatitis that would kill her was beginning to do its worst. Willow’s face was sallow, gaunt and frightening. The disease was changing her into an emaciated, waxlike version of herself. It was partly for this that Tancred promised to do what she asked. He felt pity. The other reason was that he did not believe there was any money or treasure to be found. He did not believe a proper businessman would deliberately bury millions of dollars – or anything of great value. Not on a whim. A treasure hunt, whatever else you might call it, was a whim. So, to his mind, he was doing this for Willow, doing something to bring her peace, a kindness to one who was in need of kindness.
He gave his word.
He agreed to steal the four other mementos.
He agreed to try to work out the significance of each.
He agreed to return the mementos to Willow’s siblings along with most of anything he and Willow might find.
– You’ll get my share, she said.
– You’d give me your inheritance? asked Tancred.
– There’s nothing I need, said Willow. This isn’t about gain, Tancred. I just want to know I’m right about Dad hiding something. I want to know what’s hidden and I want to know why. That’s all. I know you, Tancred. Even if you are a thief, you’ve got principles. I want you to promise me you’ll take my share of whatever you find. And promise you’ll give the rest to my brothers and sisters.
When he thought about her words, later, it seemed pointedly significant that she made him promise to take her share, as if she’d known she would not be around to see it. Whatever the case, he’d agreed to this, too. He again gave his word.
5 The Japanese Screen
It was odd to think of a death like Willow’s as unexpected. Tancred had seen her gradually shrink into a sere version of herself. Of all the people he knew, she had been for some time the one most likely to die without warning. Yet, her death was a kind of surprise, because it interrupted the task they’d begun.
Shortly after showing him the Japanese screen, Willow had it moved to a loft she’d rented for him, a place bigger than his own where they could meet. There, late at night, Tancred – alone or with Willow – stared at the screen, breaking it down in his mind to its constituent elements, trying to find some hidden sense in it:
– wood (from a willow tree)
– gold leaf
– inks (black and coloured)
– dimensions when open: 5 feet x 12 feet x 4 inches
– dimensions when closed: 5 feet x 2 feet x 2 feet
– numbers associated with it: 5, 12, 6, 2, 137
– names associated with it: Willows at the Uji Bridge, Salix Babylonica
– biblical reference: Psalm 137 ‘By the rivers of Babylon …’
– on the wood behind the sixth panel, the letters ‘a(ա)’ thickly printed in black
Tancred felt ridiculous peering at the screen’s panels, searching for meaning. He had no idea which aspects of the thing signified and which did not. After a while, he left the speculating to Willow, though her words – those he took in – were not enlightening.
– There must be something important about Babylon, she’d whisper.
or
– Could he have meant Iraq?
Instead, Tancred did what he knew best: he prepared to steal the reproduction of Fallingwater from Willow’s sister Gretchen and the painting from her sister Simone. Willow advised him to steal trivial things along with the memento, so as to disguise his (or, rather, her) intent. And, of course, he should work as efficiently as possible, so they could examine all five together before, as she herself put it, her health worsened.
Here, there was what Willow called a ‘caveat’ – an important detail is what she meant. It seemed Michael’s bottle of aquavit would be very difficult to steal. He lived in Castle Rose, an exclusive, reputedly burglar-proof building on the lakeshore. Tancred had heard of the place, though he knew it as the ‘Hidden Castle.’ Though Willow had visited Michael, she could tell Tancred neither the number of Michael’s condominium nor the floor on which it was to be found. Her only clue to its whereabouts – the only clue she herself possessed – was that Michael’s neighbour was a one-legged military man who insisted on being called Colonel. Michael despised him. Aside from that, neither she nor anyone else had the least idea how to find Michael’s place.
And here, too, there was a lure. Willow had already begun her own inquiry. In the time between their first meeting and now, she had discovered a few things: a possible solution that led, perhaps, to a cemetery, and the meaning of the ‘a(ա)’ on the back of the screen. This was the only detail she shared with him, because she was proud of herself. But she had found nothing else of which she was certain and she did not want to pollute his mind with her guesses. First thought, best thought, she believed. She wanted his first thought, when all the mementos were finally gathered together. Only then would she share the rest of her ideas with him.
Unfortunately, Willow’s health worsened faster than either of them thought it would. Or, to put it another way, what had been a long time coming came at last. Her glacially paced suicide was finally accomplished, hastened in the end by a vicious pneumonia. Tancred saw her a week or so before he broke into Gretchen’s home. She was anxious that everything go right.
– Remember, she said, take other things. But don’t take anything too valuable!
She gave him money ‘for your expertise and your expenses.’ Twenty thousand dollars in hundreds – cash, so the two of them could not be linked by cheques or transfers. If anything went wrong, she would deny having anything to do with him. She’d have to. It would be too humiliating to admit to Alton, her eldest brother, that she’d stolen from them. She simply could not. She was sorry. She was very sorry, but Alton must not know.
Willow closed her purse and, referring to the twenty thousand she’d just given him, said
– It’s awkward carrying around so much paper.
They agreed to meet after he’d stolen Fallingwater or Simone’s painting. She got up to leave.
– I’m grateful you’re doing this, she said. I’ll see you in a few days. But Tancred never saw Willow Azarian again.
1 An Interview with Gretchen Azarian-Grau
Mrs. Gretchen Azarian-Grau was embarrassed, it seemed, to have called the police. From the moment Detective Mandelshtam entered her home, she was apologetic. She and her eldest daughter, Adele, had prepared an afternoon tea for him – Moroccan mint tisane, butter cookies, wildflower honey. After he made a show of dusting for prints – not straightforward, because ashes had spilled from an urn and besmirched the living room – they both entreated him so earnestly to have tea that Mandelshtam accepted so as not to hurt their feelings.
Much had been done to spare their feelings. To begin with, a uniformed officer would usually have been dispatched, not a detective. Although, to be fair, Daniel Mandelshtam, twenty-eight years old, had only recently been promoted to detective. So, this, a low-level assignment, was a good way of easing him in. Then again, an officer would not normally have dusted for prints when so little was at stake. But he had been told to dust. The Azarians were well-to-do and well-connected, and he’d been sent as a favour to someone or other. Though he did not resent the assignment, he was slightly wary of the women before him.
The Azarian-Grau house on Lowther – not far from Avenue Road – had been burgled. As they were in the Annex, you could not call burglary unusual. The nei
ghbourhood was largely middle-class with, here and there, pockets of the upper and upper-middle in renovated Victorians or renovated Georgians or strange hybrids meant to look stately. The Azarian-Graus were in one such pocket. Their house was big, old and impeccably renovated: red-brick exterior, teal doors and window frames, its antique and modern elements in harmony.
The house had been robbed twice previously and the Azarian-Graus had learned their lesson. Their valuables – documents, jewellery – were hidden in a safe in the master bedroom where Gretchen, a widow, slept on her own. The door to her room was thick and had a simple and effective lock. Their alarm system was new and, they’d been assured, trustworthy. So, it was disheartening to discover they’d been robbed a third time.
Having shown Detective Mandelshtam the alarm system – which the thieves had shut off, both women were certain of it, as they infallibly turned the system on every night at eleven – Gretchen came to the point.
– The thing is, Detective, Adele and I searched through the house and there’s almost nothing missing. They took two laptops and a model of Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. But nothing really valuable.
– That’s not the point, Mother, said Adele.
She was exasperated.
– Whoever it was broke in at night when we were home. It could have turned out so much worse! And who knows if they’re going to come back?
Detective Mandelshtam was sitting in the armchair that had been offered him. He was holding a teacup in one hand, an unbitten cookie between the thumb and forefinger of the other. He now found himself looking up at the two women, mother and daughter coming toward him as each made her case. Adele, a woman in her thirties, by the look of it, was holding a silver tray on which a white teapot, a clear-glass honey pot with its amber honey spoon, and a white sugar bowl stood. Gretchen, who was in in her sixties, though she looked much younger, held aloft a blue plate on which there were more cookies. Seeing the cookie plate and the tea tray moving toward him, like barges converging, Mandelshtam held up his cup and cookie, wordlessly indicating his satisfaction with what he had, and said