The Hidden Keys

by André Alexis

  – May I help you? he asked.

  Von Würfel? The man’s accent was English and his voice was soft.

  – Are you Alexander von Würfel, the artist? asked Daniel.

  – Yes, I am an artist, said von Würfel, and my medium is pets. As you can see, we give you so much more than a painting or photograph of your domestic companion. With my method, they’re captured lifelike and – I’m sure you’ll agree – happy. May I ask what your pet happens to be? For obvious reasons, we do not do Great Danes. Or, we do, but I discourage it.

  – I’m sorry, said Daniel, I’m afraid I haven’t made myself clear. What I meant to ask was if, in the past, you’ve made models or sculpture. I’m specifically asking about a model of Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright.

  – Oh, I see, said von Würfel. In the past, one has done a great many things, but one doesn’t do these things anymore. I am seventy and my eyesight is failing. But I’ve done Fallingwater. Yes, I have.

  – Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?

  – I don’t mind, said von Würfel, but I’m going to disappoint you. I no longer do painting or sculpture. I haven’t done for quite some time.

  – What would you say your model of Fallingwater is worth?

  – What would I say? I would say it’s worth what my client paid.

  – I ask, said Daniel, because your work was stolen.

  – Was it? said von Würfel. What an interesting development. Are you from the insurance company or the police?

  – Detective Mandelshtam, police. But I’m off-duty. If you’d prefer not to talk about this …

  – On the contrary! But if you don’t mind, I have a workroom in the back. We can speak there and keep out of Sharon’s way.

  Von Würfel’s workroom was different again. Though it was larger than the front room and its ceiling was just as tall, it felt like a more intimate space. At least, it did on first entering. It was well-lit and, at one end, there were two windows that looked out on a backyard with a green lawn. The walls were the same celadon as the front room but here the floor was cement, as opposed to wood. In the centre of the room there was a rectangular silver-metal table. Two large corkboards had been screwed into the walls and painted white. Hanging from pins in the cork were the immaculately maintained and numbered instruments of von Würfel’s trade: scissors, callipers, secateurs, eye scoops, gouges, rulers, saws, knives, scalpels, pins, brushes and tweezers.

  The room smelled of formaldehyde and vinegar. On a metal table beneath one of the windows, an impressively lifelike beaver looked on as if it were suddenly aware of the men who’d entered the room, as if it had just stopped chewing on something, curious to see what the taxidermist and the detective were up to.

  Von Würfel sat in an armchair beneath a second window by the beaver.

  – I hope you don’t mind, he said. By mid-afternoon, I need a few minutes’ rest if I’m to carry on. I want to hear about Fallingwater, though. Who owned it?

  – A Mrs. Azarian-Grau, answered Daniel. Didn’t you know?

  – Why should I know? I made it ten years ago for Mr. Azarian. It was made around the same time as I made a painting to his specifications and created a facsimile of a bottle of aquavit for him. Mr. Azarian paid me a great deal of money for all three, but I never knew whom they were for. I assumed they were for him.

  – They were for his children, said Daniel.

  – Do you know, Detective, I’m not surprised to hear that Fallingwater has been stolen. And if I were you I’d be looking into the whereabouts of Mr. Azarian’s daughter, Willow. At least, Willow was the name she gave when she came to ask me about Fallingwater and the bottle of aquavit. The woman was convinced there was some significance to them.

  – I’m afraid Willow Azarian is dead.

  – No need to be afraid, Detective. We all die. I haven’t been feeling well for years. With my blood pressure, it is a miracle I don’t fall over this instant. Still, I hope the woman did not meet a violent end. She was … excitable. Pale and excitable. So, I told her I knew nothing at all about the pieces. Which was true, Detective. I built them to specification, then I forgot about them, until she came to my shop. About three years ago, now.

  – So, you don’t think there is any covert significance to them?

  – I didn’t when I made them, Detective. Mr. Azarian told me nothing about those pieces. But now, with you standing there asking me about it, I’m sure they had some significance. And do you know why I think so? Because last year my daughter Taylor finally married a Norwegian. No, that’ll sound odd. I mean, she’s married at last and to a Norwegian named Espen, and for Christmas he brought us a bottle of aquavit. Have you ever had aquavit, Detective? It’s as foul as pigeon feathers! I was being sociable, so I had to drink a mouthful. And I was looking at the label thinking, ‘Who do I have to kill to avoid another mouthful?’ when I remembered the bottle I’d made for Mr. Azarian. I had a Proustian moment, you see. To make a little conversation, I asked Espen about the label on the bottle. The label’s meant to have the date the aquavit left Norway and the date it came back to Norway after crossing the equator twice – once going, once coming. It ages at sea. But Mr. Azarian never had me write in proper dates. He had me write in numbers and he was very firm I should get them right. Well, when I remembered Mr. Azarian telling me to get the numbers right, it struck me as significant. And now you’re here asking about it, it’s curiouser and curiouser.

  – Do you happen to have any idea what the numbers meant?

  – No, I haven’t. But if someone noticed the numbers on the aquavit, they might have the same thought as Willow did.

  – You mean they might think these mementos are clues to something?

  – That’s my thinking, Detective. Mind you, who’s to say they are clues and who’s to say what they’re clues to? If I were younger, I’d find all of this fascinating. I used to love a good puzzle. But I am old and I find this business only mildly diverting.

  The interview with von Würfel had been the worst kind of frustration. Daniel had got no real answer to any pertinent question. His curiosity had been abetted, not satisfied. He was no nearer to finding Mrs. Azarian-Grau’s Fallingwater and, worse, he now had grounds to think someone might try to steal the other mementos.

  The remaining Azarians would all have been warned about possible burglaries by their sister Gretchen. It was up to them to keep an eye on their possessions. Ah, but what if something happened in the course of a burglary? What if one of the Azarians surprised a thief or thieves and was hurt? He would feel responsible, wouldn’t he? It was a dilemma of his own making. He ought not to have gone beyond his responsibilities, ought not to have questioned von Würfel, and he had no business speculating about future predation.

  As if all that weren’t enough, Daniel also felt a twinge of embarrassment imagining the questions Baruch, his father, might have asked, had he still been alive.

  – So, Danny, would you have put yourself out this way – on your day off, even! – if these people had been poor? You’re a servant of the wealthy and you don’t even know it.

  Daniel strove always to live at the height of this question, ever ready to answer it. Whom did he serve?

  – Whose dog are you?

  is how Baruch would have put it. Now that the old man was gone, it was Daniel’s way of honouring the memory of a man who – for political and emotional reasons – had not wanted his son to enter the police force.

  Though he had been, in most ways, a great father, there’d been times when Baruch’s sense of justice had taken precedence over those close to him. He had never been abusive but his disapproval had been painful to his son. The vestiges of that pain were manifest in Daniel’s occasional self-doubt. Now, for instance.

  No, he would not have put himself out this way had the Azarians been poor. He, a detective, would not have been assigned to the case had the victims been unconnected. Then, too, thieves did not waste their time stealing clues to fortunes from people who l
ived in government housing. In this instance, Baruch’s question was not pertinent. But it still felt as if he were troubling his father’s ghost.

  Hoping to allay his unhappiness, Daniel decided to walk a ways before going home from von Würfel’s shop. It was mid-afternoon, mid-week – his days off falling awkwardly – and the middle of autumn. The streets were busy. The lake was a thing glimpsed from time to time between buildings – fleeting segments of a grey-blue expanse. Reasoning himself into a need for pain aux raisins, he decided to walk all the way to Nadège, the patisserie. At Bathurst, he decided to go on to Dufferin before heading home. Why? Because he hadn’t seen Tancred, his best friend, for months, duties at 14 Division and at home eating away at his time for friendship. If Tancred was home, they could have a drink together somewhere off East Liberty. If not, he’d still have gotten a good day’s walk and he could hop on the Dufferin bus to get himself homeward. On top of that, he would feel virtuous, as he always did, for walking.

  So, at Nadège he bought four pains aux raisins – one for him, one for Fiona, two for the fridge – a number of croissants and half a dozen macarons before calling Tancred.

  – Am I speaking to the black Cary Grant? he said.

  – Miséricorde, answered Tancred, c’est les flics!

  – Time for a drink, Tan? I’m about half an hour away.

  – I’ll come down when you get here.

  Daniel did not walk to Dufferin, however. He found it discomfiting to carry his goods in the oversized and showy paper bag from Nadège. He walked to King, climbed onto the King streetcar at Strachan and was at Dufferin in five minutes. Which is why – and the coincidence would trouble him – he was at the corner of King and Dufferin at the same time as Nigger Colby and Sigismund Luxemberg. That is, as the light was green, he crossed Dufferin, then he crossed King without paying much attention to his surroundings. And there, in front of the bank, the two men were.

  Colby was the first to speak.

  – Nice to see you, Officer, he said.

  Luxemberg looked away so as not to have to say anything.

  Daniel said

  – Nice to see you, Nigger. You still dealing?

  – Oh, no, Officer, said Colby. I cannot stand narcotics.

  This brought a smirk from the so-called ‘Freud.’

  While Tancred could not stand to call Errol Colby ‘Nigger,’ Daniel – who felt sorry for Colby and took Colby’s self-perpetuated nickname as proof of the man’s yearning to belong – could not stand to call Sigismund Luxemberg ‘Freud.’ In part, this was because Luxemberg was a twenty-two-year-old good-for-nothing, one who’d been charged with assault more often than most of 14 Division’s regular offenders. He was tall, club-footed, Nordic, and he’d grown up about a block away from Daniel’s home. In no way did he resemble the father of psychoanalysis. What really rankled, however, was the fact the man’s name was Sigismund, not Sigmund. It offended Daniel’s sensibility that a Sigismund should be nicknamed ‘Freud.’

  – How about you, Sigismund? he asked. You keeping out of trouble?

  – I don’t like to be called Sigismund, said Freud.

  – Don’t you? said Daniel. That’s too bad. Your name’s your destiny.

  – Mine fucking isn’t, said Freud.

  It suddenly seemed strange to Daniel that the man – only six years younger than he was – had come from Alexandra Park. So much separated them, temperament above all.

  – As long as you’re talking to me, he said, your name’s going to be Sigismund, same as your parents called you. If you don’t like it, keep moving.

  – No one’s unhappy about anything, said Colby.

  – Let’s all move along anyway, Daniel said. We’re blocking the sidewalk.

  They all did move but as if in lockstep, and Daniel had the unexpected idea that they were all going to the same place: Tancred’s. The idea turned to near certainty as they walked wordlessly to Temple and then toward Tyndall. Nearing the corner of Tyndall and Temple, Daniel hung back a bit, expecting Nigger and Sigismund to go up the steps to Tancred’s apartment. This they did not do. They did something more strange. The two turned right on Tyndall and walked back to King Street.

  It was none of his business if they walked in circles or squares. Perhaps they’d forgotten something on King. Perhaps they’d only wanted to stretch their legs. Perhaps they’d been flustered at the sight of him and turned south when they should have turned north. None of that really mattered. The incident – if you could call it an incident – stayed with him only because he was convinced that Nigger and Sigismund had meant to visit Tancred but had not because the police – that is, he himself – had been behind them.

  By the time he rang Tancred’s doorbell, Daniel’s mind was far from the matter that had been troubling him: the Azarians and their heirlooms. Now he wondered if Tancred ever had dealings with Nigger. More to the point, he wondered if he should bring the matter up. It was accepted by both of them that ‘business’ – thieving or policing – was not a proper subject for conversation. Tancred never asked about police matters, while Daniel avoided the subject of crime. There was a certain amount of grey area, however. Anecdotes that did not amount to snitching were fair game.

  (How could you not tell someone about the man who broke into a home and tried to blindfold the German shepherd guarding it? Why blindfold the guard dog? Because he didn’t want it to witness what he was doing. This circumspection cost the thief – Chester Broegaard, an unforgettable name – two fingers and some blood.)

  As it happened, however, the subject of Colby and Sigismund did not come up. He and Tancred had so much to talk about that Daniel forgot about them. Tancred was now one of the few people alive who had been almost as close to Baruch as he had. Although these days, neither he nor Tancred set out to revisit the past, neither of them knew how to avoid it. Their lives were intertwined. Each was a witness to important moments in the other’s life.

  It was more than that. It wasn’t only that the past had more weight for Daniel than the law. There was also a kind of defiance in his love for his friend. Though he might not have put it in these terms, his friendship was a way of showing Baruch – the Baruch inside him – that he was not a slave to power. Tancred and Ollie were his brothers. No book of laws and statutes, no rules and ordinances, could change what was in his heart.

  How difficult it had been – how difficult it was still – to please his father. Baruch had often quoted with scorn E. M. Forster’s dictum ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ There, Baruch would say, was the bourgeois animal at its most arrogant, preferring its own to the survival of a country from which it took all it wanted. What’s more, it was always easier to choose the concrete over the abstract. If guts were needed, they were needed to help choose the collective, an abstract and more fragile thing. But Daniel could not – did not – agree. Short of destroying his country, Daniel would choose his friends, his family, a shared past. These were what made life bearable.

  Then, too, the past was a place where he and Tancred had both been happy. (Who would not be happy rushing home from school to watch tv before eating, if they were lucky, the akara – or falafel! – their mothers used to make?) Sharing that lost world as they did, they did not always speak about things they should have – Tancred’s way of life, for instance.

  Fiona, Daniel’s wife, often asked

  – You know him better than anyone. Why is he a thief?

  And he’d answer

  – I have no idea. We never talk about it.

  It was an answer Fiona resented. She could not imagine not knowing something so important about a friend. In fact, she did not believe he didn’t know. And she was right. He and Tancred no longer talked about it. But Daniel had a very good idea why his friend was a thief: the exhilaration and the skill. When they were sixteen, Tancred had shown him how to pick a pocket. By then, Tancred had been an accomplished pickpocket for some
time. But there was more to it than the accomplishment. There was pride and, at times, an ecstasy. One day, they’d been downtown together, walking on Yonge toward College, when Tan had pointed to a police officer outside a coffee shop – Daniel remembered the officer’s face still – and said he would steal the man’s wallet. Bravado, you’d have thought. No one could be so stupid. But as Daniel watched, Tan had asked the officer for directions to the Y and then taken his wallet, his watch and a pen he’d had in his shirt pocket. If he had not been there himself, Daniel would not have believed it. Just watching the performance had been thrilling.

  What had Tan done with the wallet, watch and pen? He’d given them back to the officer.

  How? He had followed the officer into the coffee shop and stood behind the man, exchanging words with him until the officer ordered his doughnuts and coffee. Daniel had watched as Tan returned the pen to its pocket and then, with timing that a concert pianist might have envied, put the wallet into the man’s hand as he reached for it and put the watch into the pocket from which the wallet had come. For Daniel, it was like witnessing a display of pure magic: enchanting, mystifying, exhilarating. That day, he’d felt sheer admiration for his friend.

  It was an admiration he felt still, despite himself. Tan’s way of dealing with pressure, drama and nerves was exemplary. Daniel had learned from him, imitating him as one would an older brother, though they were the same age. As they grew older and Tan kept on thieving, however, Daniel came to understand that his friend needed the exhilaration. Tan sought out moments that would be distressing to most people. From Daniel’s perspective, Tan’s talents and character – his quickness of mind, his reflexes, his devotion to his friends, his kindness – were wasted on thievery. It wasn’t only that theft was immoral, inconsiderate and ignoble. It was that Tan’s thieving was entirely self-serving, a means to adrenalin, a selfishness that Baruch would not have respected, despite his affection for Tan.