by Howard Engel
“We’ll run into you again sometime,” the driver said, going to his side of the car. Meanwhile, O’Mara had crossed over to the side of the good guys and was looking back at his erstwhile abductors.
“We’ll see you again,” said another of the hoods as he opened the car door.
“Maybe it won’t be for some time,” I added hopefully.
“Don’t count on it,” he said as he slammed the door shut behind him.
“Nice running into you boys,” Edna said as the remaining hood stirred himself.
“Yeah, nice,” he said, brushing back his scanty hair with the palm of his hand. He shut the lid of the trunk and climbed into the back seat.
At the same time, the car’s motor jumped to life and a lot of unnecessary exhaust was piped in our direction. The car reversed, backed out and gunned its motor as it left the street to O’Mara, the Stillmans and the Coopermans.
“Those fellows look like they just walked out of television,” my mother said. I nodded agreement. “There’s still something not very kosher about this.”
“What do you mean, Ma?”
“Since when have you become such a fan of seafood?”
“I’ll tell you all about it in the restaurant.” We walked across the street and into the dining-room with its fishnets on the ceiling and a bar made from a cut-away lifeboat. O’Mara was still looking stunned, but Edna was talking a blue streak at him. I thought that with a little nourishment, he might come around.
TWENTY
“He was a decent old skin,” Frank Bushmill said as we sat in a booth at the Di on St. Andrew Street. “He was the only man in town who could talk intelligently about rhetoric. And he knew books. I got my Swift from Martin.” Martin Lyster had picked Friday the thirteenth to die in his room at the Grantham General. When I went to see him a few days earlier, he was still hoping to make it down to Florida to watch the Blue Jays in spring training. Frank and I were toasting his memory in Diana Sweets’s coffee.
“He sure knew a lot about books.”
“Sold me my copy of Flannery O’Connor.”
“Yeah, he knew all that Irish stuff.”
“American. O’Connor was American.”
“Well, he was always talking about James Joyce and Yeats and all that gang.”
“He should have died hereafter.”
“You can say that again.”
Frank and I drank up our coffee and I followed him out into the sunlight. I took a good look first to see if any green Toyotas were lurking at the curb. The sidewalks were clear of hoods as well as shoppers. Maybe it was too early for either group. I was going to miss Martin. He was always talking over my head, like Frank, but it made me feel good, like there was a real world out there far away from Grantham, where people didn’t get bundled into cars against their will, where books mattered and where all questions weren’t submitted to the test of “the bottom line.” As a matter of fact, I don’t think I ever heard either Martin or Frank use the phrase. I respected them for that.
Frank was trying to organize a wake for Martin. I agreed to go as long as it didn’t collide with Anna’s plans for my time during the next few days. Sherry Forbes’s wedding rehearsal was the main obstacle that night. In fact, I was rather curious to see all the Forbes clan acting on their best behaviour in public. The promise of a good dinner at the Grantham Club was an extra dollop of jam. The following day, Saturday, the wedding itself was scheduled to take place. I had to be there as well. Frank said that he would try to work around these events and let me know the time and place. Together we climbed the twenty-eight steps to our offices, he to his patients with their corns and bunions and me to my notes on Kinross, Phidias and now Sangallo Restorations. I played about with this for a few minutes, then remembered that there was another office where I was expected. I didn’t want McAuliffe’s opinion of me to sink to the level of his regard for Ross Forbes as a manager:
A diller, a dollar,
A ten o’clock scholar,
What makes you come so soon?
You used to come a ten o’clock,
But now you come at noon.
It was close to ten when I arrived at the sixth-floor head office of Phidias Manufacturing. I don’t know whether I beat Forbes in or not. By the time I was sitting at my parson’s table, I’d passed several busy-looking people. I spotted a Harlequin romance behind one copy of the Report on Business section of the Globe and Mail. McAuliffe’s greeting to me was warm but from a distance. I was sure that should he have asked me to show him, I would have been able to make a good case for Teddie’s arguments with American Internal Revenue, which I could now document from sources at Phidias. When the phone rang, as usual, I made no effort to answer it, although an extension was within my reach. Fred picked it up quickly, almost as though it might snap at him. I guess it often had, judging from Murdo Forbes’s boardroom manners.
“It’s for you,” McAuliffe said, almost as surprised as I was. “It’s Mr. Ross,” he added with his hand over the receiver.
“Yes?” I said, as McAuliffe hung up softly.
“Cooperman, it’s Ross Forbes here.” I nodded idiotically and waited. “You and I have a score to settle from a long time ago. I’ve been thinking of it all night and it still bothers me.”
“Why not have a word with your analyst about it?”
“Now, don’t get on the defensive. As far as I’m concerned the past is over and done with. But that’s because Teddie stays seventeen hundred kilometres away from here and I value each of them. Her coming back for the wedding has upset me. Everything about this damned wedding upsets me. But that’s neither here nor there. You and I have to talk, Cooperman. What are you doing for lunch?”
“First you hit me in the nose and now you’re buying lunch! I assume you’re buying?”
“And I won’t repeat my bad manners again, I assure you.”
“What time do you want me to meet you?”
“I’m going to be tied up in a meeting until noon. Can you make it, say, twelve-thirty at the Golf Club?”
“Will they let me in? I’m not a card-carrying member.”
“I’ll fix it. You won’t have any trouble.” It sounded like a promise, so I believed him.
When I hung up the phone, McAuliffe kept his face in a series of printouts for a few minutes. The office seemed quieter than usual. I felt I had to break the ice. “He wants to take me to lunch,” I said.
Fred McAuliffe looked across the room at me. “It’s getting hard for Mr. Ross to find people to lunch with him.” He shook his head while dusting off the printouts which had collected a fine spray of ash from the pipe he was cleaning. “It’s not just his drinking—there are plenty of drinkers over at the club, though most of them are a lot older than Mr. Ross—it’s the fact that he has been involved in the unsavoury stories about the marketing of contaminated fuel last May. People want to distance themselves from him in public.”
“Was he head of Kinross in May?”
“Oh, no, he was in charge here. Mr. Caine was in charge at Kinross.”
“Then why is Mr. Ross getting all the social heat? Shouldn’t some of it rub off on Norm Caine?” McAuliffe opened his mouth to answer, but stopped himself. He caught his breath and tried it another way.
“You make a good point, Mr. Cooperman. He should have let Mr. Caine answer the questions. I told him that. I’m not telling you anything I didn’t tell Mr. Ross to his face. Phidias was not involved at all, until Mr. Ross tried to get the story hushed up.”
“But that story was too big for anybody to hush it up. It was a big international exposé. Nobody could have kept a lid on it.”
“Yes, well …” McAuliffe got his pipe started, holding a box of wooden matches over the bowl and drawing down deeply. “Let’s just say it’s more complicated than that.” I felt that I was on the verge of learning something important and I hoped it wasn’t showing in my face.
“I don’t want you to betray a confidence, Mr. McAuliffe,” I said hoping he would spill
his guts to me then and there.
“I’ll only say this,” he said. “The stories in the paper didn’t get it right where Mr. Ross was concerned. Not a bit, they didn’t. I wish more people knew the truth. Maybe some day they will. But right now, it’s not my secret to break, though it festers inside me, I’ll tell you.
I could see that that was the end of the conversation, so I went back to the papers on my desk before he did. Maybe it gave me a moral advantage, like not taking the last olive or not being the last person to leave a party. Fred returned to his seat as well, but, looking up, I could see he wasn’t comfortable. I knew it wasn’t the old chair with the green almost worn off the backrest. After a few uneasy minutes, he left the room for a short time and returned with one of the minute books from the boardroom. From his desk he took a ledger key and removed the heavy binder. At this point he glanced up at me, but saw that I was deeply involved with work of my own. Actually, I could get a good picture of what was going on on his side of the room from the reflection in the glass of the picture of the Commander and his father-in-law, Sandy MacCallum. He took pages out of the ledger and put them in his desk drawer. Minute books are serious documents, records of what the board of directors does while in office. They aren’t to be added to or altered at will. How unlike Fred McAuliffe to remove pages; how like him to do it where he could be seen. What was the old man up to?
At exactly 12:05, Fred hung up his grey cardigan on a wooden hanger, put his jacket back on and removed his Irish cap from its peg in the old-fashioned hat-rack. He gave me one of his friendly twinkles as he passed my table and he was gone. I waited four minutes before discovering that he’d locked his desk. I didn’t have the time or the tools to make a tidy entry, so I settled for a trip to the boardroom to see which was the missing book. It was easy to spot: 1985 was gone. There was a space between 1984 and 1986 the size of the ledger in Fred’s drawer. Nineteen eight-five was long before Jack Dowden’s death. It predated the digging at Fort Mississauga as well. It was food for speculation if not for thought. I deserted the high-backed chairs placed around the boardroom table. I could feel the eyes of all the board members on my back as I grabbed my coat and caught the next “down” elevator.
On the way to collect my car, I tried to place Fred’s loyalties. He was surely in the Commander’s camp. His age and manner would have him there rather than standing under the Ross Forbes standard. Ross was too sloppy for Fred, who was more the Commander’s man. I couldn’t imagine McAuliffe quite as antediluvian as Murdo Forbes, however. Fred was essentially a gentle man, whereas the Commander was probably still complaining about the fifty-hour-week, unions, social security, unemployment insurance, maybe even the vote. The more I thought of it, the more I could see that the Commander wasn’t as out of touch with his age as I thought at first. A lot of this kind of thinking was very popular. I could almost hear him saying that it’s time to cut our losses on the railways, time to deregulate, time to end farm-price subsidies. For an old robber baron who had cut his teeth before the Second World War, he was sounding a very contemporary note. Paternalism has it all over creeping socialism. Had the Commander got over the shock of discovering that the working man, whose friend he was, had been replaced by organized labour?
The car cut left down the hill near the old firehall, following the twisting road down to the bridge over the Old Canal. On the other side, the road twisted back up to the original level again. The Golf Club occupied prime real estate right in the middle of town. There are many odd things about Grantham, but none odder than this. Any map of the area confirms the truth, however. The Eleven Mile Creek curved sharply where it joined the Old Canal. On the outside of the curve, the old business section followed ancient Indian trails, creating a maze of familiar blocks and corners. Across the canal, on the inside of the curve and reached by only a few bridges, the fairways of the Golf Club separated the old town from its newer suburbs.
From the street the club didn’t arrest your attention. The church next door did that. The club consisted of a random assembly of hangars and sheds adapted to leisure pursuits. A bit of ivy ran up one stucco wall and landscaping had improved matters, but it never could be said, for all the terraces looking out over the tennis courts and greens, that the Grantham Golf Club was an architectural prize. From the outside it was almost an eyesore, but it was the interior that mattered. Here you could find a shed to house and repair hundreds of golf carts, a curling rink with a heated gallery for onlookers and a card room for Manny Cooperman to spend his time in. There was a huge pool that could be opened up to the warm summer weather for three months of the year. A large restaurant served dependable if not inspired food, or so Frank Bushmill used to tell me. I always thought the food there must be the best in town since it was so hard to get a table when you wanted one.
I found a spot reserved for guest-parking and walked around to the deserted terrace in front of the restaurant. A few hardy souls were playing golf. I could see the bright colours of their jackets far away over the rolling landscape. The parking lot reserved for members made a challenging contrast to the guest lot with my beat-up Olds in it. Here I saw three Rolls-Royces, an antique Bentley and a Thunderbird of an early year. I didn’t bother to count the Corvettes and Triumphs. I was surprised to see a full lot this early on a Friday. But what do I know about such things? I suppose the restaurant was booked for every day of the year. The door to the patio was closed; I had to walk around through another door and enter the dining-room in the approved autumn manner. I could see no sign of Ross Forbes.
A few heads turned when I entered. I asked a waiter if there was a table with Ross Forbes’s name on it. I followed him to a place near a window and accepted the two menus he handed me. Naturally, he’d get a view. I was discovering that the club made me nervous.
I was looking at a rosy-faced bald-headed man with a white moustache as he dug into a portion of clubhouse curry. I was trying to discover why I was so sure it was curry when I could neither smell nor taste it. I’d decided that I had an irrational side after all, when Ross Forbes cleared his throat beside me. “Hello, Cooperman!” he said heartily. “Are you doing sums in your head or coming down with a migraine?”
“Oh! Hello! I didn’t see you come in. I was woolgathering. I do a lot of it these days.” I didn’t know whether to get up or not. I made a gesture and left it at that. He seated himself opposite me and deployed his napkin against future problems on his lap. Mine was still nestled in a wine glass. I didn’t want to copy Forbes in all things, so I left it there.
Forbes was well above medium height, in fact he was taller than he looked. His great barrel chest and round shoulders took inches off his apparent height. His wavy dark hair was going grey at the temples, giving a touchedup-by-professionals look to it. His brow was wide, but not high, and separated from the rest of his face by a nearly continuous dark line of eyebrow. The rounded end of his nose was echoed in the heavy chin. Add to that rather petulant brown eyes and a lower lip that returned to a pouting expression when his features were not animated with talk. He had a way of talking which seemed to add quotation marks around certain phrases in order to lift them to something more memorable than chat. His smile showed even teeth. I hadn’t seen him smile before.
“Well, now, Cooperman, I hope that we can both agree that the past is dead and buried?”
“I’m on your side there,” I said. “No sense keeping a feud alive.”
“Exactly! So, the less said about our scuffle downtown, the better.”
“It was outside your office at Kinross Disposals. But, sure, no hard feelings. I was just doing my job; you were just repelling trespassers.”
“Glad you see it in that light.” He let his eyes drop to the menu that lay across his plate, and curled his lower lip in thought. “The curry looks good,” he said at length. The thought of strange pieces of meat in a pale greeny yellow sauce did nothing for my appetite. I scanned the menu looking for a friend. Where were the chopped-egg sandwiches hiding? M
y eyes went down one column and up the next. I couldn’t understand what half of the words meant. I wondered whether on a menu in France they might not think it’s chic to use English. I finally settled on the soup and pasta of the day and hoped for the best.
“Would you like some wine with that, sir?” the waiter asked, once he had written what he thought of me on his order pad.
“Not for me, thanks.”
“Mr. Forbes?”
“Bring a bottle of Perrier, Joe.”
“Right away, Mr. Forbes.”
Once the pale green bottle came and I found myself sipping what tasted like seltzer; it seemed that Forbes was going to get down to the reason for inviting me to lunch. Some people can put business off until coffee, others bring it up casually over the last part of the main course, but Ross Forbes was a man for the direct approach. Before I had even dipped into the basket of warmed Parker House rolls, he was at me.
“May I ask why you continue doing business for my ex-wife here in Grantham, Mr. Cooperman?” He held his glass as though he had had lots of practice holding glasses. I had been surprised about the mineral water. In fact I had been ready to trade him Scotch for Scotch well into the evening if I had to. But Perrier was a new direction.
“Let’s agree not to talk about Mrs. Forbes, okay? Either you’re going to say something you’ll regret or I will. Either way it will spoil the lunch. I’m surprised you aren’t wining and dining out-of-town company for the wedding, Mr. Forbes. Tomorrow’s the big day, isn’t it?”
“People are still arriving. I’ll stay clear until this evening. There’s a rehearsal.”
I nodded, keeping quiet about the fact that I would be there. I could see him trying to think of a new way to ask the question that was bugging him.
“Do you do a lot of income tax work, Cooperman?”
“When I can get it. It makes a change from waiting around for people to check out of the Black Duck Motel. Nowadays a lot of the work is going through credit-card receipts, telephone bills, that kind of thing. It’s not like in the movies.”