The Chairman's Toys

by Graham Reed

  The Norwegian studied me for a moment before gesturing dismissively. “It was just a blackmail thing I was handling as a favour for the boss.”

  This took me by surprise. “Blackmail? Not dope?” I assumed the bag of powder we found beside the dead guy had been sold to him by The Norwegian, but maybe I was wrong and he was telling me the truth about getting out of the drug game.

  The Norwegian shrugged. “Obviously, I’m moving some product too. But that’s mostly to capitalize my new business.”

  Nope, not wrong, after all. Same old Norwegian. I allowed myself a small smile, which he mistook for enthusiasm.

  “Want to know what it is?”

  I totally did not. “Sure.”

  “Property development! Guess how much cash has been moved out of China over the past eighteen months.”

  I shrugged. “Millions?”

  His booming laugh started a dog barking a few houses over. “Try billions! With most of it going straight into North American real estate. The Chinese government won’t admit it, but their economy has slowed significantly and there is growing risk of currency devaluation. Plus, they limit the amount of cash that citizens are allowed to transfer out of the country. Real estate investments are a secure way to move money around while maintaining adequate liquidity.”

  I recognized his tone of voice, if not the terminology. The Norwegian had switched into MBA seminar mode, and asset diversification had always been one of his favourite topics. “So you’re going to get a piece of the action?” I interjected, hoping to foreclose on the property spiel.

  He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “And you’re going to help me do it.”

  “Me? But I don’t know anything about property development.”

  The Norwegian grinned. “But you do know a good realtor.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The meeting with The Norwegian turned out to be a decidedly mixed bag. In the win column, I suffered no bodily harm. On the other side of the ledger, the prospect of us going back into business together was a profoundly daunting turn of events. Especially since it now seemed to comprise drugs, blackmail, and property development—a sleazier trifecta I couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Even more daunting was the prospect of telling Nina that The Norwegian wanted her to be his real estate agent. I would have to find a way to extricate both of us, but it was after midnight by the time I got back to my place, so at least it wasn’t something I had to face immediately. I decided to start bright and early the next day with the easier task of tracking down an opium kingpin to prove to The Norwegian that I wasn’t one of his dealers.

  Having settled on a plan of action, I washed away my residual nerves with a slug of Cazadores tequila and went to bed.

  The city sanitation department’s diesel-powered alarm woke me at eight a.m. An unforgivably late hour for the markets. Unless you’re talking about those dealing in narcotics, in which case it was ungodly early. I killed some time showering and caffeinating before heading off on my search.

  The air along Hastings Street was grey and hazy, as if the sun was neglecting the street like everyone else. Or maybe it knew it wouldn’t be doing anyone any favours by warming up whatever biomass was emitting the various fetid odours wafting from the alleyways. The scant daylight caused me to make a rookie mistake and forget my sunglasses. To avoid making eye contact with the street preachers and screechers, I studied the overhead signs of the long-stay hotels, conjoined bars, and cheque-cashing stores that accounted for the bulk of retail services available in the neighbourhood. A listless drizzle was falling by the time I reached my destination, half a block past the jovial neon pig that presided over the entrance to Save-On-Meats.

  The Hyundai was still there, now sporting a few new parking tickets and a set of wheel locks, but Martin was nowhere to be found. After waiting in the rain long enough to be offered skunk weed, crack, and a free personality test at the Church of Scientology, I gave up and went into the Easy Mart for some breakfast.

  I placed the Twix bar on the counter, wincing as the fluorescent lights reflected off the cashier’s scalp, ill-concealed beneath the suggestion of a pompadour sculpted out of oiled strands of hair laboriously harvested from the back of his skull. The man was unquestionably a maestro with a comb, but the raw materials were sorely lacking.

  “Pay for the coffee already and get out,” he grumbled without looking away from the Playboy article he was reading. I took a half-step backwards and waited for him to spit since it sounded like he hadn’t finished gargling his daily mouthful of gravel.

  “You been in here half an hour,” the cashier complained, finally glancing up at me. His face was an artistically engraved mask of aggravation and disappointment—in himself, me, the Easy Mart Corporation, life’s rough handling of his youthful dreams, and the world’s ongoing failure to make it up to him. All of it faithfully rendered in excruciating detail by the meticulous hand of fate working tirelessly against him, no doubt for decades, having started around the time his yellowed dress-shirt had last been dry-cleaned, circa 1974.

  The man’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You ain’t him,” he accused me spitefully. “Buck forty-nine.”

  I offered up a buck fifty and a magnanimous keep-the-change smile.

  “What a nice surprise,” came a reedy whisper from behind me.

  “Him’s the one,” hissed the cashier, his tone a curious mix of victory and resignation.

  Martin emerged from behind a rack of faded “I Love Vancouver” t-shirts. “Buy me a coffee?” He gestured vaguely with a stained paper cup and smiled wanly at the cashier.

  “I’ll get his coffee.”

  “Buck forty-nine,” the man grumbled.

  Martin had already ghosted out the door with the cup of joe. I spilled another buck fifty onto the counter and went after him without waiting for my change, even though I knew that the man behind the counter wasn’t interested in my two cents or anybody else’s.

  I found Martin browsing through the parking tickets on the Hyundai.

  “Any more trouble with them?” I nodded toward the car.

  He looked at me blankly. “What do you want, Jake?”

  “The other day you said The Norwegian was coming round telling everyone he was getting flush. I was just wondering, did he say who his supplier was?” It was a long shot but trying to find out who I was supposedly making deals with sounded a lot better than telling Nina of The Norwegian’s interest in her.

  Martin shook his head for a while. “Why so many tickets?” he said at last. “It’s, like, throwing good paper after bad, you know? If I couldn’t pay the first one, how’m I gonna pay the rest? And fuckin’ wheel locks? Seriously?”

  “It ain’t right, no doubt. But, Martin? What about The Norwegian’s new stuff? Any idea who he’s getting it from?”

  Martin wandered out into traffic, somehow flickering through it unharmed, and was almost to the far side of Hastings Street before he answered. Hard to make out amongst the blaring horns and revving engines, but I was pretty sure he said the “Chairman.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  My next stop was Revolver Coffee. There was nothing like the white noise of an espresso machine the size of a baby rhinoceros pumping out top-quality caffeine to stimulate cogitation. Not to mention the caffeine itself.

  Cortado in hand, I slid into one of the wooden booths and let my mind wander. With nothing better to do, my eyes soon followed. The coffee shop was packed with a lively mix of the tattooed-and-pierced sartorially monochromatic interspersed with earth-toned boots-and-plaid entrepreneurial hipsters. Both species were endemic to the quasi-gentrified borderland Revolver occupied between downtown to the west and the affordable warehouse office space, abundant drug supply, bars, and-by-the-month hotels to the east.

  None of my fellow coffee lovers looked like an opium supplier who called himself the Chairman. My
gaze wandered further, up the brick wall behind the coffee bar until I was squinting absently at the bare, industrial light bulbs overhead, wishing one would light up in the idea factory I used to carry around in my hats. Instead, all I felt was a dull ache. Martin had turned out to be a dead end. Or if not dead, not quite alive either.

  I studied the frothy bubbles in the bottom of the cup, but they were no tea leaves. At least I had that going for me. Only two items remained on my to-do list: call Nina to warn her that The Norwegian was interested in retaining her services, and write an actual to-do list. Not having a pen handy, I reluctantly pulled out my phone.

  In a last inspired gasp of procrastination, I decided to check my e-mail before dialing her number. As luck would have it, I had one. Better yet, it was from Wendy. She had replied to a message I had sent to Dante and Richard a few days earlier with Mickey Wu’s address. At first, I took it as a good sign that Wendy had gone to the trouble to dig my e-mail address out of the message history. Then I opened the message.

  All it contained were three letters, a punctuation mark, and a link to an article on The Guardian website. Not feeling particularly satisfied with ‘WTF?’ I clicked on the link.

  It pulled up a news article on Chip Thompson. Specifically, about him getting into a slap fight with one of the Royals at the gala fundraiser he had thrown in London for his foundation to fight child obesity. It went on to explore correlations between video games and obesity with no small measure of irony, but I didn’t bother to finish the article. The last video game I played was Donkey Kong and I generally found British humour a tad superior in attitude if not quality.

  More troubling than the poor health of the younger generation was the fact that Chip Thompson was spotted over in England, duking it out with a Duke around the same time he was supposed to be cruising the Strait of Georgia with Dante. The article was a couple days old, so it was possible that Chip had jumped right back on his jet to go fetch his yacht to motor up here to party with Dante. But with everything else that had been going on, I wanted to be sure.

  I closed the phone’s browser and opened my contacts. With a swipe of my thumb, I sailed right past ‘N’ and didn’t stop until I reached ‘R’.

  Richard’s phone went straight to voice-mail. By noon I had tried him three more times and was starting to get a sense of how he must have felt when Dante dropped off the grid. Which reminded me that I also had Dante’s number. Which also went straight to voice-mail.

  Between attempts, I followed Wendy’s lead and trawled through Internet news and gossip about Chip Thompson, hoping to shed more light on the situation. By the time I had run my phone battery into the red zone, I had only managed to learn two things: (1) Chip was still carrying a torch for my missing friend, and (2) The name of his yacht: Dante’s Inferno.

  Unable to sit still any longer thanks to an electrifying combination of caffeine and worry, I resolved to donate some old-fashioned shoe leather to further investigations. I hopped in my car and headed off to do the rounds of the local marinas.

  My first stop was the Coal Harbour Marina, a short hop across downtown from Revolver Coffee. My antennae went up when I arrived to find that it had been temporarily closed to the public. Even after receiving a full-strength blast of Constable Charm, the lone, misanthropic cop at the scene would only reveal that there was an incident in progress “deemed to be a threat to public safety.” From a distance, he watched me closely as I rubbernecked my way along the barricade tape, fruitlessly trying to get a look at what was going on. I was just about to give up when I spotted another man in uniform jogging toward me along the pier, holding his side. There was blood on his shirt, and he looked pale and angry.

  “You okay, buddy?” I called out, as the man ducked under the tape.

  He ignored me and beelined toward a nearby van without breaking stride. Emblazoned on the side of it were the words “Vancouver Animal Control.”

  The man had his shirt rolled up and was rummaging through a first aid kit by the time I caught up with him. “You need any help?”

  “What?” he said irritably, without looking up. “No.”

  “That looks nasty.” I gestured at the jagged laceration just below his ribs.

  He paused to look at it. “Doesn’t exactly feel good, but I’ve had worse.”

  I nodded. “Haven’t we all.”

  He scowled at me. “Oh, yeah? You been gored by a goat, too?”

  I stopped nodding. “That happened at the marina? What the hell is going on in there?”

  “Some idiot celebrity decided to throw a rave on a yacht last night. Figured it would liven things up to have some kind of Dungeons & Dragons theme. There are people in there dressed up as wizards and witches, that kind of thing.” He shook his head in wonderment.

  “And a goat?”

  He nodded. “A rabid one, at that. Or maybe it’s just stoned. Either way, it freaked out and started goring people.” He shouted to be heard over the siren of an arriving ambulance. “That’s my cue. Gotta get back in there and help my partner.” He grinned. “The goat’s still got the celeb trapped in the head.”

  “Duty calls,” I agreed. “Just one more question before you go: The celebrity, is it Chip Thompson?”

  “Nah, wasn’t a dude.” The man closed the first aid kit with a thoughtful frown. “Some actress, I think. Kind of a hippy name. Sunny something, maybe?”

  “Sunshine Holly?”

  He slammed the door of the van. “That’s the one.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  After choking down a parking ticket and a food truck hot dog, I swung by Granville Island, where I found out that a lot more people own yachts than I would’ve guessed. None were Chip Thompson.

  I struck gold at the third marina, in Richmond, just south of Vancouver. Shoehorned into its pay parking lot was Buff’s shiny purple Hummer. The receipt on the dash showed a purchase time stamp of 08:45 that morning. So it appeared that Richard, at least, hadn’t failed to launch. But since the pugilistic Chip Thompson was in England, I wondered whose boat Richard and Dante were on. And had Richard managed to find something sufficiently “yachty” to wear? The parking permit was good for two days so I wasn’t keen on the idea of waiting there until he got back to find out.

  The salty dog in the marina office ignored me when I walked in the door. The trim, middle-aged woman behind the desk, on the other hand, wasted no time in taking my measure. She put down her newspaper and removed her reading glasses to give me a proper squint. “Help you?” she asked doubtfully.

  “I hope so.” I smiled at her, and then down at the dog—some kind of beagle-footstool cross—which sneezed twice before starting to groom its nether regions with an agility that belied its age and body morphology. “I’m looking for a yacht.”

  “We don’t do rentals. Brokers’ business cards are on the counter here. There’s also a few private sales advertised on the bulletin board over there. You’ll have to contact the owners directly.” She put her reading glasses back on.

  “Not to buy. Or rent. I mean a boat that was moored here. Or maybe still is.”

  The woman slid the spectacles down her nose and studied me closely. “You wouldn’t be looking to do a repo, now would you?”

  “No, ma’am, nothing like that. This is a friend of a friend’s yacht. He’s throwing a fancy shindig on it and my friend managed to wrangle me an invitation. Problem is, I only got his message after I got off my night shift.” I yawned theatrically. “I rushed down here but I think I might have missed them. He told me which marina they were at but not the name of the boat.” I chuckled and shook my head. “Any chance you’d be able to tell me which yachts sailed out this morning?”

  “Can’t help you.”

  “Listen, I totally get the privacy thing but maybe you could…”

  “It’s not that. We just don’t keep track of our clients’ arrivals and depart
ures, so I really couldn’t tell you. Even if I wanted to,” she added in a tone that suggested she hadn’t quite bought my repo man denial. I cursed myself for having left my blue blazer in my employee locker at the Ridge Theatre back in grade ten when I got fired for hotboxing the projection room.

  “In that case, is it okay if I take a look around to see if they might still be here?”

  “Not unless you have a vessel moored here. Or are a registered guest of someone who does.”

  “Okay, thanks anyway.” I started out the door but stopped halfway and turned back, trying to look thoughtful. It was a trick I’d seen Columbo use a hundred times (counting reruns) to pry loose a critical piece of information. “Just one more thing. Truth is, I’m a bit of a yachting nerd, which is why my friend worked so hard to get me the party invitation. I don’t suppose you have a list of the boats that moor here?”

  The woman nodded. “Of course.”

  “Do you think I could...?”

  “Can’t help you.”

  “Is it the privacy thing this time?”

  “Yep.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It was half-past dusk by the time I made it back up to Vancouver. The drive had been slow, but it seemed like greased lightning in comparison to the evening commuter traffic headed in the other direction, crawling south in search of the excessive square footage offered by suburban homesteads and big-screen televisions.

  I still hadn’t heard back from Richard or Dante so I decided to stop by Wendy’s condo. Two heads had to be better than one in figuring out what was going on, especially if one of them was hers. Unfortunately, the gruff hello that emanated from the intercom revealed that there would actually be three.

  “Hi, Barb. Is Wendy there?”

  “Who is this?” Barb’s voice sounded extra strident when amplified by a cheap intercom.