I shook my head, not willing to answer because we had reached the holiest moment of the day and the play, the moment in which the Lord calls upon his Father, then gives up his spirit.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t help glancing toward Arletta and Gleason. She looked truly uncomfortable now and I could see why. Gleason was staring at the good-looking high school senior Stefano DeMario. Down the unnaturally rosy cheeks of my friend, two glistening tears coursed.
Other people were crying in the church, but they were old Italian women, not boyish WASP charmers from Rosedale.
I remembered something I’d not thought much about before. I remembered that Gleason had told me he’d called our house three times and spoken to my father. My father had not given me those messages. My father clearly had not wanted me to talk to Gleason Adams.
Suddenly I realized he didn’t want me to have anything to do with Gleason at all.
Chapter 12
Before I was born, before my mother was born, the Glionna family ran Toronto’s Little Italy from their hotel on the northwest corner of Chestnut and Edward Streets. If B. Sheldrake Tuppin looked out his window in 1965, he would still have been able to see the building next door to where Glionna’s hotel had once stood—only a few blocks from Old City Hall. He would also have known, wise old goat that he was, what was going on in there. True, the Glionnas were probably fugitives from the New York City police, via New Haven, Connecticut. True, they exercised undue, if not despotic, control over a community in which they were hoteliers, bankers, employment agents and models of civic involvement. True, they had been accused of virtually enslaving street children and forcing them to work as musicians. True, they themselves had begun their dynasty as mendicant child musicians in Laurenzana, far to the south in Italy. But the Glionnas always knew the difference between those who were respectable and those who were not. Had they seen what I saw the afternoon I entered the building next door to the site once occupied by the hotel, the Glionnas would have, to quote my mother, “turned around a lot of times in their grave.”
The bar, if that’s what it was, called itself the Continental. In 1965 that name invoked images of European sophistication. Such notions were quickly dispelled the moment Gleason and I pulled up in his Jaguar. The first floor of the multistory building seemed coated in grime, as if dirt from the street had washed up against it and stuck, the way seaweed clings to the shore. Since it was four in the afternoon, I didn’t expect much of a crowd in the bar, as I reluctantly followed Gleason through a double door whose windows had been replaced by warped sheets of gray, weathered plywood.
The smell of the place hit me before my eyes adjusted to the gloom. It was a complex and layered odor, not as entirely unpleasant as I would have anticipated from the look of the outside of the building. I smelled the yeasty fragrance of fresh beer and beneath that, the hint of beers past, some spilled, some no doubt regurgitated. I smelled cigarettes and the stale reek of years of smoke captured by dirty carpets, by curtains, by walls and floors. I smelled something I could not quite recognize: musty, sweet, slightly foreign, hauntingly familiar.
“What are we doing here?” I asked Gleason.
Before he could answer, two remarkable beings materialized out of the semidarkness. After a moment I could see them quite clearly: two women nearly as tall as Gleason. One was a brunette with a pixie haircut that set off her dark, liquid eyes. Her lips were a red pout. Her skin seemed pearlescent against the blackness of her blouse with its long tight sleeves and its neckline so low I could easily see the shadow between her breasts. The other was blond, even more pearlescent and pouty. She wore a short skirt split on the side almost to her waist. As I watched in astonishment, she rubbed a lean white leg against the front of Gleason’s silk trousers. “Are you here for some entertainment?” she murmured at him.
He stepped sharply away from her, almost knocking the brunette into my arms. I stood still, frozen to the spot. The brunette reached up and stroked my cheek. Her hand was dry and cool. Involuntarily, I turned my face into her touch.
But the blonde was agitated. “Forget these two,” she said to the brunette. Then she turned toward Gleason, pretending to study his face and his physique. “You’re barking up the wrong tree in here, baby,” she said in a mocking tone.
“I’m not barking at all, baby,” Gleason replied angrily.
Despite the charms of the brunette, I was beginning to feel vulnerable. Instinctively I patted my pocket to make sure my wallet was still there. As the women receded into the shadows, Gleason seemed to regain his usual careless good humor. “Are you scared, little Ellis?” he asked.
“No,” I protested.
Gleason laughed. “You act like a man who’s never seen a hooker before.”
There he was wrong. I remembered then, remember to this day, the first prostitute I ever saw. She had been standing in the doorway of a store on Times Square. I was nine and visiting the uncle I was soon to visit again. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Slender, black, with a tower of curly jet hair and a little white suit made of some fluffy material, like an angel’s dress. On that early trip to New York, I had seen so many amazing things. I thought she was just one more. A wonderful lady. I’d stared at her until I felt the jerking motion of my father’s hand and was pulled away.
“Adams, is this another one of your stupid . . .” I didn’t finish my sentence. A burly waiter, or given his bulk, maybe a bouncer, stepped between Gleason and me. In his hand he held a filthy rag. He reached down to a nearby table, picked up a loaded ashtray, dumped the contents on the floor, swiped the table with the rag and moved on.
“No wonder the ladies go down to the bus station to use the can,” Gleason said, shaking his head. “Look, Portal,” he added, pointing toward a door that opened on a room with better lighting beyond, “we’re here on the advice of someone whose name I’m not at liberty to divulge, but I can say that this party is aware of several women wearing rings like the ones we found. I’ve been told this is a likely place for those people to frequent. All we have to do is ask the right questions and we can learn the identity of the deceased. If we describe her to enough people here, sooner or later, her name is bound to come up.”
His words sounded like legalese and his tone was mocking. As usual when I was with Gleason and his enigmatic obsessions, I felt I was verging dangerously on the edge of rage. “Gleason,” I protested, “this is a law project, remember, not some idiotic wild goose chase like the ones Perry Mason sends Paul Drake on.”
“Paul Drake. Right on!” was all Gleason had to say in reply. Frustrated but curious, I shuffled along behind as he cut through this second room. It had only a few tables and they seemed to be occupied by the sort of people who’d seen even fewer hookers than I had. I took them to be voyeurs, tourists from the suburbs who had come downtown for the afternoon to take in a little wicked big-city subculture. Catholic boy though I was, I held them in far more contempt than the hookers, who at least were trying to earn a living.
Gleason, too, seemed to have no use for this set of people. The bar or club, or whatever this place was, appeared to be a series of rooms laid out like a shotgun house. We passed through another door and once again I found myself plunged into semidarkness.
But this room was crowded. Shadowed couples lounged against a long bar behind which a small-eyed, black-chinned character doled out a steady stream of cocktails. At tables around the room’s perimeter, pairs of people sat in intimate arcs, their heads nearly touching, their shoulders curved forward toward each other like parentheses. I found it truly remarkable that so grubby and ugly a place could harbor such apparently tender lovers.
In the center of the room, a single couple revolved to the strains of the theme from Goldfinger. The song came to an end. Started over again from the beginning. The couple seemed unaware of the interruption.
Gleason scanned the crowd as though looking for someone in particular. I couldn’t imagine disturbing any of the lovebirds, but fortun
ately that wasn’t necessary. A pretty woman caught sight of Gleason, rose and sashayed over to us on stiletto heels. She wore a perfectly respectable spring dress with a full skirt and a fitted bodice that emphasized her tiny waist. Her hair was neatly coiffed in a style Arletta called a French twist. Her makeup was discreet and flawlessly applied. She would have surely caught the approving glances of the Italian matrons at Sunday Mass, especially since she was clearly from Gleason’s class and not mine.
“Sweetie,” she said, putting her well-manicured hand on Gleason’s arm, “if you’re playing with the ladies tonight, you shouldn’t have come all the way back.”
“You’re the only lady I play with,” Gleason said as he kissed this elegant creature on the cheek she held out to receive the touch of his lips.
In that moment I recognized her. At Christmas the Upper Canada law fellowship had put on a dance for the first-year law students. I myself had escorted Maria Delrobia, a neighborhood girl who was beautiful but not smart enough for the law school crowd. It had been an awkward, tongue-tied evening. Except for the witty repartee between Gleason and his date—this lovely slim-waisted Rosedale deb. What was she doing in a dump like this?
“This is Ellis,” Gleason said, and I extended my hand, which the woman shook with the perfunctory politeness I’d often experienced from Gleason’s pals. “He and I are working on a little case for school.”
“Marvellous!” She laughed. “And you want me to help. How?”
“Come here,” Gleason said, and moved toward the bar, which was better lit than the rest of the room. She followed him and I followed her.
Gleason held out his left hand. When the woman saw the ring, she feigned shocked disappointment. “Sweetie,” she said, “I’m devastated! Married? Who’s the lucky witch?”
The two of them burst out laughing, their shoulders touching in the camaraderie of two people sharing an absurd joke. I wondered what was so funny about the possibility of Gleason marrying without informing an old flame. But then he wasn’t married, was he?
“I found this ring the other day,” Gleason said. “Now I need to find out who it belongs to.”
The woman took Gleason’s hand in her own. She studied the ring, turned Gleason’s hand palm up. The light from the row of bulbs above them fell on the shimmering blondness of their hair, the smooth, youthful planes of their faces, on the circle of danger and doubt that held Gleason in its gold and silver embrace. “Sweetie,” she said, “there are lots of ladies wearing rings like this now. I’m surprised you haven’t seen it before. They’re your kind of ladies.”
Gleason smiled mysteriously and shrugged, his usual gesture when someone called him to account for some small failure he could not explain.
She went on, “The ladies I’m talking about are down at Letros in the Nile Room, not up here in, uh, Rosedale.” She glanced in teasing contempt toward the corners of the squalid room where the shadowed couples continued their silent conversations.
“Are you sure about that?” Gleason asked. His voice lacked its perpetual know-it-all arrogance. Perhaps he was more bothered by her criticism than was usual for him, he who habitually found criticism of himself so ridiculous as to be amusing.
The woman smiled softly. “Don’t be nervous, sweetie,” she said. “Nobody’s going to hit you. Not here and not at Letros, either.” She thought about that for a minute. “Unless, of course, you ask them to,” she added. When Gleason didn’t respond, she went on, “Anyway, Letros is where they’re doing this thing with the rings. You steal your father’s wedding ring and the other person steals their father’s ring. Mostly the rings are made of yellow gold, but sometimes one is white gold, like this one.” She pointed at Gleason’s hand. “It’s really cool when they’re different-colored metal. Anyway, you get a with-it jeweler to cut them and put them back together the new way. The jeweler engraves the rings with whatever secret words you want, half and half. You have to get him to make sure the words cross the place where the rings are joined. That’s what seals it. Let’s see what this one says.”
She was a close enough friend of Gleason’s that he didn’t protest when she slipped the ring off his finger and squinted at the inscription.
“Oh, yes,” she said when she’d managed to make it out.
“You know that poem?” I asked in surprise.
For the first time the woman’s eyes actually met mine. “Who doesn’t?” she said coldly.
“It’s by, uh, what’s that guy’s name again?” Gleason tried to fudge.
“Sebastien d’Anjou-Nouveau,” the woman responded. “The poor guy was some seventeenth-century Quebec monk who got caught on his knees . . .”
As if the whole room had been listening to our conversation, there were twitters of laughter from every direction.
“You’re sure?” Gleason persisted. “You’re sure about people at Letros wearing rings like this?”
“Sweetie,” the woman said, “you really ought to get out more.” She turned away from the bar and toward the dimly lit room. “Girls,” she summoned, “come look at this.” As though she were in command of some odd, distaff army, a bevy of women stood up and moved toward us. As they stepped into the light, I was shocked to realize how many of them I recognized. There was the striking redhead who’d accompanied Gleason to the annual Law Day luncheon, the sweet brunette he’d brought to the Barristers’ Banquet, and even a petite, waiflike creature he’d told me was his cousin.
These beauties pressed close to study the ring, and all agreed with what their friend had told Gleason. Behind them in dark jackets and shirts and vests, their partners hovered as though forming a circle of defense on the outer ring of the gaggle.
My head began to swim. The sweet, perfumy scent I’d noticed before became overwhelming, and I grew dizzy as I realized that I knew what it was. The smell of Arletta’s bedroom and my mother’s clothes closet and the interior of Aunt Fay’s champagne-colored Cadillac. The smell of the geisha, the harem, the sorority. The fragrance of the exclusive and intimate world of women among women. I reeled. Suddenly I understood that, except for Gleason, me and the waiter who’d emptied the ashtray on the floor, every person in the place was female.
“WE’RE EARLY, BUT that’ll be an advantage in the Nile Room at Letros,” Gleason said as we made our way through the downtown streets. “The place won’t be packed yet.”
I sat silently, I suppose one could say furiously, as he spun around corners and frightened pedestrians with his impatient driving. I had no idea what or where this Letros was, but I was certain it would still be there if we were five or ten minutes later in our arrival on its doorstep.
In the end, I don’t think the whole trip down Yonge Street to King took ten minutes. We screeched to a stop across the street from the King Edward Hotel. You couldn’t get more respectable than the King Eddie. Still can’t. I breathed a sigh of relief when Gleason hopped out of the car, even though he signaled for me to come along as though I were his trained dog.
But we didn’t cross the street. Instead of entering the hotel, where two liveried doormen in Beefeater hats awaited the fortunate guests, Gleason took a step toward another, nearer door. It was unmarked, as far as I could see, but here, too, a gatekeeper of sorts guarded the premises, a stocky man in a well-cut blue suit. The moment his eye fell on Gleason, he raised his hand and smoothed his hair. Several rings glinted on his fingers. He smiled at Gleason with a rapaciousness I clearly understood.
“Oh no, you don’t,” I gasped. “I’m not going in there. You can just forget it. I’m—”
Gleason turned on me so fast I almost crashed into him. “What is the matter with you now, Portal, you stupid sissy? We’re doing detective work.” I stood still, unwilling to cross the threshold but uncertain what else to do. Instinctively I felt the eagerness of the doorman to make a scene. He was already snickering contemptuously at my hesitation. Even the doormen over at the King Eddie were casting glances our way.
“Look, Portal,” Gleason s
aid, “I know you’re not used to this sort of thing, but—”
“What sort of thing?” I interrupted, as if I didn’t know. The doorman chortled and rolled his eyes. “You butt out!” I shot at him. I saw a swift look cross his features, the cowering look of a man who’d been bullied a good part of his life. Then his features hardened as if he remembered he didn’t have to put up with bullying anymore. I was suddenly afraid he was going to hit me. “I’ll wait for you here,” I told Gleason. “I’ll keep an eye on your car. You go in and do what you have to do.” I shot another look at the doorman. He was stifling laughter.
I have spent time in the private company of famous men. I have spent time sleeping outside in winter with nothing for a blanket but the snow. I have spent time in which it was being decided which jail I would be sent to, which mental hospital, which woman’s bedroom, but I have never spent a more tense half hour than the one that April night standing outside the door of Letros.
I was stared at, winked at, evaluated and sometimes—though by no means each time—dismissed as unworthy of further consideration by the exclusively male clientele. I became confused. Should I be flattered when they found me attractive and insulted when they didn’t, or vice versa? Should I drop my eyes when other eyes sought mine or should I stare defiantly back? Or would that be construed as an invitation? I was alternately impatiently furious and bravely reconciled to the necessity of waiting for Gleason to return. Of course, I could have just walked away, but I didn’t want to acknowledge defeat. Or would it have been a victory?
When Gleason finally did come out, he seemed like a changed man. His usually fluid, graceful movements were jerky and abrupt. His hands seemed to shake as he lit a cigarette from the stub of the one he was already smoking, then cast the stub to the sidewalk and ground it beneath his heel.
He didn’t command me as usual to get in the car, just unlocked the passenger door, stomped over to the driver’s side, yanked open the door and thrust himself behind the wheel. I was afraid to speak to him and didn’t even try until he’d done a tight U-turn that left all three doormen gaping at us as we tore away along King Street. “What did you find out in there?” I finally asked.
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