Riviera Blues

by Jack Batten

  “It wasn’t Archie I was thinking of.”

  “Betrayed. God, I sound like Mata Hari or someone.”

  “There was the Swedish guy in Sardinia.”

  “What Swedish guy in Sardinia?”

  “How soon they forget.”

  “Oh, him.”

  Pamela pushed out her cigarette dead centre in the deep inky-blue thing. It wasn’t a bowl. It was an ashtray. Nothing in the damn room was what I thought it was.

  “You amaze me, Crang,” Pamela said. “That was a million years ago, the Swede. Not much on talk, now that I think about it, but he had an absolutely heavenly body.”

  “Nice to hear you didn’t betray me with just any old chap.”

  “Stop saying betrayed.”

  “That was only my first time.”

  “I must have been terribly naive when we were married. To have told you about the Swedish man, I mean.”

  “You said you hadn’t committed adultery before. You wanted me to forgive you.”

  “Remind me what you answered.”

  “I said I forgave you. But I had my fingers crossed when I said it. Didn’t count.”

  “That was wise of you, because I’m sorry to say there were one or two ‘any old chaps,’ as you put it.”

  “That you had affairs with when you were my wife?”

  “Only towards the end,” Pamela said. “And none of them was a friend of yours.”

  “That doesn’t narrow the field much. I hardly had any friends in those days.”

  “And now you have one very close friend.” Pamela did little arching numbers with her eyebrows, like a bad imitation of Groucho Marx.

  “Annie,” I said. “Annie B. Cooke. Why can’t anybody in your family come right out and say her name?”

  “I know her name, and I’m grateful to her.”

  “That has an ominous ring,” I said, “coming from you.”

  “Nothing ominous. I heard the people on the radio in the morning say they envied your friend’s trip to the Riviera. Pardon, Annie’s trip. And I guessed she wouldn’t be going alone. That’s why I’m grateful to her. I phoned a friend with a rather good job at Air Canada and got the rest, about the two of you leaving Monday.”

  The hefty woman in the black dress was halfway across the pale grey broadloom before I realized she had entered the room. She must have mastered the servant’s art of stealth. She set a large lacquered wood tray on the marble in front of Pamela. The tray held a teapot, matching cups and saucers in a pretty tangerine shade, milk, sugar, lemon slices, and a plate of cookies.

  “How do you take your tea, Crang?” Pamela asked.

  “Clear.”

  That was a mistake. At home, I drink gentle herbal teas. Pamela’s was straight-ahead English power tea. Taken untempered by milk, sugar, or lemon, it tasted like shellac. I tried an oatmeal cookie to take the taste away.

  “Well, okay,” I said, “you had an affair with Jamie Haddon, maybe still are having one, which is something you’d better clear up, the maybe part, and you spoiled him rotten. Car, clothes, other treats.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a cliffhanger so far,” I said. “What next?”

  Pamela put down her cup and saucer. She’d polished off the tea. The woman had a cast-iron stomach.

  “Five weeks ago,” she said, “Jamie sprang this silly three-month leave of absence on us all. I hadn’t an inkling until he announced it one night when we were all at Daddy’s for dinner. There I was, I’d invested so much of myself in him, affection, time, gifts, God knows I even risked my marriage for him, and he decides to traipse off to Europe.”

  “I see,” I said. “A woman scorned.”

  “That’s just it, scorn didn’t come into it as far as I could make out, not the way Jamie behaved. He continued to act as passionate and attentive as he’d been all through our relationship. Nothing seemed to change in his attitude to me except that he picked up and left for three months.”

  “Ah well, the spontaneity of youth.”

  “Don’t give me that crap,” Pamela said. The harsh shift in her voice brought back memories of the tiffs we’d had during our married days. “This kind of spontaneity needs a few thousand dollars.”

  “Which you didn’t give him.”

  “For once.”

  My tea was a quarter of the way down the cup, where it was leaving a dark ring. What was it doing to the lining of my stomach? I ate another cookie and left the tea alone.

  “Jamie has a job, right?” I said. “He must be earning good bucks of his own at C&G.”

  “Loan officer,” Pamela said. “That’s his title, not bad for someone of Jamie’s age and experience. But you know Daddy, he really does pay his junior people dreadfully.”

  “Explains how the rich stay rich,” I said.

  “To be fair to Daddy,” Pamela said, “there’s another side to the story. Jamie knows he’ll be brought up through the ranks, as far as he wants to go. He’s family, even if he does come from those addled Haddons.” She interrupted herself. “You do remember the Haddons?” she asked me.

  “Gerald’s the one who didn’t come in for mollycoddling.”

  “Honestly, the man practically cornered the market on hopelessness. He’s been very lucky Granddaddy gave him that little job at the C&G branch in Strathroy.”

  “Gerald’s still there?”

  “Who else would hire him?” Pamela said. “Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Jamie. He’s very much the Haddon exception, bright and charming. Daddy’s very supportive of him, he’s the son Daddy never had, I sometimes think. Daddy put him through school, you must remember that, Ridley College and then Queen’s. And he’ll bring Jamie along at the trust company. At Daddy’s own speed, that goes without saying.”

  “I feel like I’m on the inside of the Forsyte Saga.”

  “In the meantime,” Pamela said, “Jamie has no money to speak of.”

  “Well, maybe not for you to speak of.”

  “Crang,” Pamela said, edgy, “keep your eye on the main question. All right, of course, I wanted Jamie to live well, dress well, be fabulous, while we had the affair. Are having the affair. So I paid for things.”

  “What’s the main question I should be keeping my eye on?”

  “Where did Jamie get the money to finance three months in Europe?”

  “Ask him.”

  “I asked.”

  “And?”

  “Basically evasive.” Pamela reached for another cigarette. “He let on the trip was going to be on the cheap. A big adventure, camping out, drinking the inexpensive local wines.”

  “Nothing wrong with inexpensive local European wines.”

  “There is when somebody’s been stocking your cellar with Châteauneuf-du-Pape for a year.”

  The lighter in Pamela’s hand went snick. She took a drag on the cigarette and blew a wispy cloud of smoke.

  “So, the chores you want done,” I said. “One, I track down Jamie in Monaco and two, I ask after the source of his travellers’ cheques.”

  “Ever heard of finesse, Crang?”

  “Put my mind to it, I do excellent finesse.”

  “Please. And let me know what you’ve found out when you get back.”

  I shifted in my chair as a prelude to standing up and saying goodbye.

  “Not yet,” Pamela said. Her hand was waving me back into the chair.

  “There’s more?” I said.

  “Dante.”

  “I take it we’re not talking Italian poets.”

  “Dante Renzi,” Pamela said. “He’s a young man Jamie met through business at the trust company. That’s what Jamie said at any rate. He said Dante had lost the place where he was living and did I mind if he stayed at the apartment till he found something new.”

  “You ga
ve Jamie an okay?”

  Pamela nodded. “But Jamie knew I was annoyed.” She had a retrospective look of annoyance on her face.

  “Not your type?” I asked. “This Dante?”

  “Nice-looking. I didn’t mind that, nice-looking in a dark, soft sort of way. But, Lord, he blew it whenever he opened his mouth.” Pamela shook her head back and forth. “Completely inarticulate. No breeding.”

  “Listen, I don’t want to sound like I’m in a rush to wrap up our little chat, but is this dark, dumb chap relevant to what we’ve been hashing over?”

  “Wait for it, Crang,” Pamela said. “Dante put in his appearance five weeks ago.”

  “Aha. Do I detect an uncanny coincidence?”

  “I didn’t put two and two together until after Jamie left, but the announcement of the bloody trip to Europe and the arrival of bloody Dante happened at about the same time.”

  “Suspicious,” I said, “but not necessarily an authentic four. If we’re speculating that Dante might have some bearing on the leave of absence, wouldn’t it depend on whether Jamie and Dante left for Europe together?”

  “They didn’t.”

  “You phoned your man at Air Canada?”

  “Air France. No record of a D. Renzi on Jamie’s flight. I don’t know where the little shit has got to.”

  “The apartment?”

  “Not him or his clothes.” Pamela lifted her cigarette from the blue ashtray. “Thank God.”

  “Want me to check out Jamie’s companions in Monaco for someone along the Dante Renzi lines?”

  “Do that.”

  I started shifting in my chair again, but something in Pamela’s attitude kept me in place. She was hunching forward, generating an atmosphere I interpreted as a windup to even more intimate revelations.

  Pamela tapped her cigarette lightly on the edge of the blue ashtray. She had a way of rolling the cigarette that left the ash looking like a miniature log.

  She started again. “Thinking back now, I get the feeling … or it could be I always had it and wouldn’t admit it to myself … that Jamie rushed me.”

  Pamela stopped. I said nothing. It required a mighty effort.

  “If you want it phrased vulgarly,” Pamela said, “he might have put the make on me.”

  Another pause.

  “Started the whole damned affair on purpose. In a funny way, inveigled me into it, lured me, you know what I mean? I hope to God I’m just acting crazy. The older woman-younger man relationship doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. It’s almost trendy these days. I could spin endless stories about middle-aged friends of mine and their twenty-five-year-old beaus. But I had no particular yearning to have an affair. Archie’s a perfect husband. I wasn’t thinking of straying. I certainly wasn’t thinking of straying with Jamie. Not that he isn’t divinely attractive and the rest of it. He definitely is. But he’d always sort of been around since I was a teenager, this little blond cousin stuck with the dim Haddons in Strathroy. Then he came to Toronto, and he was even more around. And then, somehow or other, I’m forty-two, he’s twenty-nine, and we’re in bed, and I’m uneasy, rightly or wrongly, about how we got there.”

  Pamela came to another stop. I judged this one signalled the end of true confessions. I tried for something to say that fit the occasion. The trouble was I hadn’t experienced an occasion before when Pamela had seemed vulnerable.

  “So,” I said, “you think Jamie might be lacking in the chivalry department?”

  “Just keep my unease in mind when you talk to him.”

  Pamela gave me the smile I used to call her hired-help smile. It accompanied tips to headwaiters, compliments to chefs, congratulations to jockeys.

  She said, “You’re being a pet about this.”

  Pamela’s hired-help smile also went with pats on dogs’ heads.

  “I haven’t much to do the next couple of days,” I said. “Why don’t I nose around? Ask about Jamie at the trust company? I know a lawyer who works there. And maybe I could rummage through Jamie’s apartment.”

  “I already rummaged.”

  “Find anything?”

  “I didn’t know what I was rummaging for.”

  “Takes a pro.”

  Pamela looked doubtful. “Well, you could be right,” she conceded. She stood up. “I’ll get the keys.”

  “And something else, if you don’t mind.”

  “A drink? You hardly touched your tea.”

  “A recent photograph of Jamie. I’ll take a rain check on the drink.”

  Pamela was gone from the living room for five minutes. When she came back, she handed me two keys on a Gucci key ring and a photograph with an address written on the back.

  “That’s where the apartment is,” she said. “The ground floor in a house on Rowanwood just over from Chestnut Park.”

  “Nobody’d accuse you of skimping on Jamie,” I said. Addresses didn’t come much more old-Toronto posh than Rowanwood Avenue in Rosedale.

  “It’s a sweet little flat,” Pamela said.

  The keys were to Abloy locks, real toughies even for break-and-enter specialists. I’d learned that from a client who pursued the B&E trade. In the photograph, Pamela was standing between two men. I recognized Jamie from the times I’d seen him years earlier, still California blond, all grin and eyelashes, slim, holding himself in a pose that said nonchalant. The other gent was older, straight as an arrow, tall, fit, good smile. The two men looked formal in dark suits. Pamela was wearing a red dress with frou-frou trimmings at the neckline and hemline. Her arms were around both guys’ waists.

  “The other one’s Archie?” I asked.

  Pamela nodded. “It was taken last Christmas.”

  I looked again at Archie’s face. He had a great set of choppers.

  “He is handsome,” Pamela said.

  “Jamie?”

  “Archie.”

  Pamela’s eyes were fixed on the photograph in my hand. She had a wistful expression. First, vulnerable. Then, wistful. It was more than an ex-husband should be expected to fathom.

  “Jamie’s the immediate problem.”

  “Of course,” Pamela said. Her attention was back on business. “Call me the moment you return.”

  “You bet,” I said. “Three weeks.”

  Pamela saw me to the front door, stretched up on her toes, and gave my cheek a glancing kiss.

  Outside, sitting in the Volks, I took stock. No sweat in the armpits. No apprehension in the gut.

  I wheeled the car in a U-turn and drove over to Rosedale.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Somebody, somewhere in Jamie Haddon’s apartment, was whistling “Memories.”

  I was standing inside the apartment door. The first Abloy had got me into the house, the second into Jamie’s part of the house. The small outside lobby, which must have been the foyer before the old mansion was divided into flats, had dark wood panelling and shiny hardwood floors which continued into the part of Jamie’s apartment I could see from the doorway. The door opened directly into the living room. The whistler was deeper inside the apartment. As far as I could tell, he or she was whistling in tune.

  I slammed the door hard. The whistling stopped in mid-bar. Silence took over the apartment. I didn’t move. Neither did the whistler. The standoff kept up for about fifteen seconds. Maybe my tactic of the slammed door had been too impetuous.

  The whistler moved first. Firm footsteps, growing louder, echoed from a hall across the living room and opposite the door. Two lamps were on in the living room. The whistler walked into the light.

  He was a guy about five-seven, four or five inches shorter than I am, but he didn’t look like anyone’s pushover. He was solid and muscular and barrel-chested. His black hair was clipped to within a quarter inch of his scalp. The cut gave his head the aspect of a missile.

 
“Hi there,” I said. I left my hand on the knob of the shut door behind me.

  “Hello, my friend,” he boomed back. Even his voice had muscles.

  “That’s kind of a record for me,” I said. “Only been here thirty seconds and already we’ve made friends.”

  The little guy shot across the room and pumped my hand.

  “You are a friend of Jamie, why else you come here?” he said. “And this makes you a friend of mine because Jamie, I am best friends with him.”

  He had an accent. Nothing impenetrable, but he pronounced “him” as “heem.” And he didn’t use contractions, not “you’re” or “I’m,” but a precise “you are” and a definite “I am.” Italian maybe?

  I played along with the instant friendship game. “My name’s Crang.”

  “Michel Rolland,” the little guy said. “Call me Mike. All my good friends call me Mike.”

  Not an Italian name. French?

  “Jamie’s away,” I said.

  “Of course.” The two words came out like an explosion. “That is how we are friends, Jamie and me. I meet him where I live. He comes to my condo.”

  “This is where?”

  Another explosion. “Monaco.”

  “Ah.”

  He could be French or Italian. Or French and Italian.

  “Come in, my friend Crang,” Mike said. “Why not we sit down?”

  Mike acted the host, ushering me to a pair of easy chairs. The chairs were covered in chintz, large red flowers against a fawn background. Pamela’s decorating hand. Across from me, short, forceful Mike was hard on the eyes in a head-to-toe silvery getup. Silver grey shoes, pants, shirt. A solid silver windbreaker was draped over the chair he sat in. None of the silver items had little pink polo players on them or miniature green crocodiles, but they looked to be in the high-priced bracket.

  “What brings you to Canada, Mike?” I asked.

  “Cats bring me.”

  “Really? What, some special breed? You a vet?”

  “No, no, on the stage. I watch it. I know all the songs by heart.”

  “Oh, that Cats. Andrew Lloyd Webber and the other guy.”

  “Beautiful music.”