– He died of natural causes.
– Run over by a sled-dog, was he?
At this he couldn’t stop laughing and turned from the phone. He could hear her voice, tinny in the distance.
– I’m sorry, he said.
– No, that’s probably funny. Want to hear more?
– Yes.
– I’ve read the Marmora Herald pretty thoroughly.
– You’re not carrying a book?
– That’s right. I forgot you’re the man who taught me to always carry a book.… What are you doing?
– I’m lying in the dark. I’ll come and get you, Clara.
– Will you be okay? The girl said you have a broken arm.
– I’ll bring her with me. She’ll keep me awake. She’s very earnest about things like that.
– The kind of woman you always wanted.
– That’s right. She saved my life.
– Are you her father, Patrick?
– What’s the name of the restaurant?
– “Heart of Marmora.”
– Give us about five hours or so. I need a short rest … wait. Are you there?
– Yes.
– I am her father.
He rose and went to Hana’s room. He felt exhausted.
– Who is she, Patrick?
– Hana, I need you to come with me, to drive up to Marmora.
– The sled-dog capitol of Ontario?
– What? … What!
She was beaming.
– She told me, Patrick, when I asked her where the call was coming from. We’re going all the way there to pick her up?
– Yeah.
She stood by the door, watching him, wanting him to say more.
– How the hell did she end up there …
– Was she running away from you?
– I think so … with another man anyway. I need a little sleep first. Wake me in about forty minutes.
– Sure. You going to tell me about her on the drive?
– Yes.
– Great!
When Patrick had come out of prison six months earlier many dissident groups were already voicing themselves within the city. The events in Spain, the government’s crackdown on unions, made the rich and powerful close ranks. Troops were in evidence everywhere. When the last shift left the water-filtration plant the police and the army moved in to guard it. Military tents bivouaced on the rolling grounds. There were soldiers on the roofs and searchlights dipped now and then along the waves of the lake, protecting against any possible attack from the direction of the lakeshore. While most public buildings were guarded, the waterworks was obsessively watched – partly because of the warnings of Commissioner Harris, who reminded officials that the Goths could have captured Rome by destroying the aqueducts which led into the city. Cutting off the water supply or poisoning it would bring the city to its knees.
Harris saw the new building as a human body. For him there were six locations where it could be seriously crippled – the raw water pumps, the Venturi meters, the entrance to the tanks where ferric chloride was poured, the twenty-four-foot-deep settling basins, and any one of the twenty filter pools where an explosion would cause floods and permanently rust all engines and electrical equipment. There was also the intake-pipe tunnel that ran almost a mile and a half out into the lake. No boats were allowed within a half-mile of the shoreline and no one, not even military personnel, was admitted into the building at night. Only Harris, who now insisted on sleeping there in his office, was allowed in, a pistol kept beside his bed.
In his dressing-gown, at two in the morning, Commissioner Harris was happy in the cocoon of humming machines. He would get up and roam through the palace of water which he had dreamed and desired and built. Every electrical outlet blazed, lighting up disappearing corridors as if Viennese streets, turning the subterranean filter pools into cloudy ballrooms. The building pulsed all night in the east end of the city on the edge of Lake Ontario. It was rumoured that people on the south shore in New York State could see the aura from it.
The filtration plant was one corner of a triangle of light that seemed to chart the city on this Saturday night in the summer of 1938. Another was a river of lights moving north up Yonge Street from the lake. And third was the dazzle from the Yacht Club on Toronto Island – holding its summer costume ball, with water taxis ferrying bizarrely dressed society across the bay on the one-mile trip over rough water.
Such dance floors the rich spent their evenings on! Strutting like colts in a warm barn, out of the rain. And in bed the following morning they would reconstruct the choreography of temptations which had carried them from the crowded periphery of the hall to the sprung dance floor beneath the thirty-foot coconut palms – clusters of which adorned the ballroom that seemed to have no ceiling, only false stars and false moonlight. In each set of trees was a live monkey, never able to reach the diners because of a frail chain. The animals had to dodge the champagne corks aimed at them – if you hit a monkey you were brought a free bottle. Sales of champagne soared and only now and then was there a shriek followed by a cheer.
There was a silk canopy over the band. Along the walls were dioramas. Sometimes cotton snowballs were distributed and a battle broke out promptly, the guests soaking them in champagne or butter before flinging them around the room. The ballroom was lit indirectly; it seemed they were all in a moment of time that resembled the half-hour before the sun comes up over an oasis.
There is an image of Caravaggio among the rich which Patrick will always remember: meticulous, rude, and confident. A parting in his dark hair like Yonge Street at midnight. Dressed as a pirate, he had leapt off the motor launch on that midsummer night with his dog and Giannetta and Patrick, yelled his greetings to total strangers, and strolled into the false moonlight of the Yacht Club ballroom claiming to be Randolph Frog. Society women accepted his name with a straight face – the rich, being able to change everything but their names and looks, would defend these characteristics with care. In this circle a man with the face of a pit bull was considered distinguished.
They had not been invited. Caravaggio was eating canapés with his left hand and patting women on the ass with his right. When the orchestra’s playing brought out the couples, Caravaggio lifted his dog into his arms and waltzed among them kissing August wildly, exclaiming over the beauty of his moles. For the next hour he danced with women who noted to themselves the odour of hound on his neck. Patrick and Giannetta meanwhile hung back on the periphery of the ballroom, refusing to leave it as if they might fall into a snakepit. But Caravaggio was a man who had traipsed through the gardens and furnishings of the wealthy for many years. He nudged men, told jokes, discussed china and crystal with wives and connoisseurs, complaining about getting Louis XIV chairs cleaned, and in the privacy behind his drunkenness cemented away information and addresses.
Finally he found the couple he wanted. In their early forties, drinking hard, a flirtatious wife and a bully of a husband. He danced with his eyes against hers singing “Night and Day.”
“Vicina o lontana da me
non importa mia cara, dove sei …”
She was impressed by his Italian, which he claimed to have picked up in Tuscany the previous summer. His fingers circled her shoulder blade. She leaned back.
– Do you see my husband over there near the chandelier propositioning that girl? He’s probably suggesting the yacht.
– A yacht here?
– Yes, we came in one, across the bay. Did you?
– No. I never sail.
– We’ll take you.
He laughed, dropping a half-smoked cigarette onto the floor.
– That’s my shy sister over there.
She glanced across the room to the hollow glare of Giannetta who held onto Patrick’s arm.
– Perhaps she could join us too.
Taking the bus down to the dock earlier that evening, Caravaggio had said, “Let me tell you about the rich – they have a way of laughi
ng.” And Patrick thought, Alice had said that. The exact words. “The only thing that holds the rich to the earth is property,” Caravaggio continued, “their bureaus, their marble tables, their jewellery.…” Patrick had been quiet, not even bothering to laugh.
There was an image he remembered of Caravaggio, waving goodbye with a blue hand as he hung on the prison roof. And when Patrick had come out of jail he traced the thief down through his Blue Cellar compatriots. “Mr. Wilful Destruction of Property saved my life,” Caravaggio had explained to Giannetta. They showed him the city, where everything was five years older, and they became his friends. Late into those spring nights they had talked about each other’s lives.
On reconnaissance the week before the Yacht Club dance, Giannetta had watched Patrick get drunk, and during the ride back on the ferry she had held him, his head in her lap. She leaned over him in the darkness, her hand in his hair. He looked up. There was a tenderness in this sky of her warm face he hadn’t noticed before. Then everything had leapt from focus as Giannetta and Caravaggio lifted him off the ferry and brought him home to sleep on their living-room floor.
Now they step from the last stages of the costume ball out onto the dock: Caravaggio, his two rich friends, his dog, his ‘sister,’ and Patrick, who is supposedly her escort for the evening.
“… notte e giorno
Questo … mmm …
mi segue ovunque io vada”
Caravaggio sings to the night, a bottle like a pendulum in his fingers, his arm sprawled over the woman’s shoulder. He pours out monologues about cut glass and bevelled mirrors and rubs her nipple to the beat of his singing as her husband unlaces the boat from its moorings. Patrick walks behind dressed as a thief in black, a red scarf floating behind him and carrying a bag of tools with SWAG written across it.
Boarding the couple’s yacht, The Annalisa, Caravaggio flings himself down the stairs laughing, looking for alcohol. He is beyond order. He and the husband uncork several bottles and climb back up on deck. The wife winds up the gramophone, the silk dress with a thousand sequins fluttering upon her. Giannetta leans against the rail receiving the air while the husband unleashes the sails and they break loose out into the bay – from the island towards the city. Bunny Berigan pierces the air with his trumpet whirling up in scales, leaving the orchestras of the Yacht Club behind. They are off. Rich.
Caravaggio claims helplessness with ropes and asks the wife to dance. He is charmed by her flippant sexuality. They fumble against each other with the motion of the waves, Giannetta and Patrick somewhere by the prow. The boat tacks back and forth towards the city a mile away. Caravaggio and the husband and the wife drink fast. The wife winds up the gramophone and “I Can’t Get Started” emerges again under the hiss of the needle.
Caravaggio catches Patrick’s eye and raises his glass. “Here’s to impatience,” he toasts, “here’s to H.G. Wells,” then flings his glass overboard. It is a hot night and he removes his cloak. The woman touches his costume earrings with her fingernails. Ting. “Ting,” she mouths at him. “Are you hungry?”
Down below she opens the fridge door. He sits and swivels in the chair round and round passing the blur of her salmon-coloured dress, the drink spilling from his glass. He rotates to a halt and she is there by the fridge holding ice against her face for the heat, unhooking the brooch at her shoulder so a part of the dress falls revealing a doorway of skin to one side of her. The smell from the gas lamp beside him fills his head. He puts all his effort into his shoulders and bends forward so he can get up out of the chair and stand. Now he must be still. Music everywhere. He starts laughing. Can a man lose his balance with an erection? Deep thoughts. He turns to face her. Dear Salmon. She steps forward to hold him. His cheek on the moist skin under her arm, at the rib, about where they pierced Jesus he thinks. He falls drunkenly to his knees. He holds her dress at the thighs as she slips down, slips through the dress so there is a bunched sequin sheath in his hands. The music ceases. A serious pause. They jerk with the swell of waves and he holds her hair from the back. He pulls his handkerchief out of his pocket and in direct light brings it to her face and chloroforms her.
Patrick’s hand comes round the large face in the night air and chloroforms the husband.
Caravaggio is on the floor of the hold, the unconscious woman in his arms, the dress around her waist. She dreams of what, he wonders. He lies there comfortable against her, in the silence left by Giannetta’s hand lifting the needle off the record. He slides from under her, looks around, puts a blanket on top of her, and goes up on deck.
The husband lies nestled in the ropes. In his tuxedo he looks like a prop, a stolen mannequin. Above him, balanced on the rail of the boat, Patrick stands and pisses into the waves. Caravaggio mans the boat as Giannetta turns out the deck lights. “Is this the prow?” Patrick yells. “Am I pissing off the prow? Or bow?” Giannetta laughs. “I better get you ready.” “Yes,” he says. He walks to the back of the boat, scoops up the gramophone, and flings it overboard.
Caravaggio aims the yacht towards the east end of the city, towards the lights of Kew Park and the waterworks. Patrick and Giannetta go below deck. He takes some food out of the fridge, steps past the unconscious woman, and sits at the table. He is like a bullet that has been sleeping. That is how he has felt all night, in the slipstream of Caravaggio, fully relaxed, calm among his two friends. They have stopped him from thinking ahead. He wants the heart of the place. He wants to step in and destroy meticulously, efficiently. This is not to be a gesture of an egg hurled against a train window.
Throughout the night the giant intake pipe draws water into the filtration plant at a speed faster than during the day. Patrick knows that. From the plans Caravaggio has stolen for him, he knows its exact length, slightly under two miles, knows its angle and grade, knows the diameter of the pipe and the roughness of the metal inside and the narrower bands where the sections have been rivetted together. He knows all the places he should assault once he is in the building.
On deck Giannetta watches Patrick, a small lantern beside them, the only light on the boat. He takes off his shirt and she begins to put grease onto his chest and shoulders. He watches her black hair as she rubs this darkness onto his body. The sweat on her collarbone. Her serious face. She suddenly leans forward and he feels her mouth briefly on his cheek. Then she pulls her head back into mystery and smiles at him, covering his face with the thick oil. When Caravaggio joins them, carrying the heavy SWAG bag, Patrick is ready. Giannetta embraces Caravaggio. With her fingers she plucks a sequin out of the darkness of his hair. Then the men climb down into the row-boat, absolute blackness around them. Only the filtration plant blazes on the shore a half-mile away. They pull free as Giannetta veers the yacht away, back towards the island.
Now the two men sit facing each other, knees touching. They are twenty or thirty yards from the floating structure where the intake pipe begins. “This is a charm,” Caravaggio says, putting a metal spile attached to a leather thong around Patrick’s neck. Caravaggio begins to dress Patrick with water-resistant dynamite – wrapping the sticks tightly against his chest under the thin black shirt. They both wear dark trousers. Patrick is invisible except by touch, grease covering all unclothed skin, his face, his hands, his bare feet. Demarcation. Caravaggio can sense his body, can feel and distinguish the belt straps, the button-locks that secure the fuses. The floating structure has sentries. They see lit cigarettes as they row towards them, Caravaggio leaning forward to touch Patrick’s right arm to gesture him right, his left to gesture him left. No words. Only Caravaggio it seems can see into the weak spots of this absolute.
He attaches the tank onto Patrick’s shoulders. Just one tank. They have estimated the speed of the water and the length of the tunnel. He could travel its distance in twelve minutes, but there is one risk. At some point in the night, pump generators are switched and for three minutes there is no suction at all. Then the water in the pipe does not move, it lies still. It would be the effect
of a moving sidewalk stopping. They both know this could happen, have imagined Patrick no longer caught in the speed of the intake but languid, in a shock of stillness. The tank gives him only fifteen minutes of air. If the suction pump is off, the level of water in the normally full pipe might recede for a while and Patrick could possibly move to the top and breathe the air there. Neither of them is sure about this.
Just below the tank Caravaggio straps on the blasting-box and plunger. Small, brown, the maximum size Patrick can carry in order to get through the iron bars at the mouth of the intake pipe, which is there to stop logs and dead bodies from being drawn in. An animate body can squeeze through. In one of Patrick’s nightmares while waiting for this evening he has imagined that in the pipe somewhere is a dead body which has magically slipped in and that he will clutch it during his journey.
At the far end of the tunnel is another barrier of iron bars which he will have to squeeze through. Then he will enter a forty-foot well where just above the water level will be a metal screen to keep out small objects and fish when the water is made to rise. He has the wire-cutters to get through this. Then he will be among the grey machines of the waterworks.
Caravaggio straps the battery lamp onto Patrick’s head, then he embraces him. “Auguri, amico mio.”
Patrick nods, puts the mouthpiece of the breathing apparatus between his lips, and rolls out of the boat. He holds on, treading water. Caravaggio leans over and switches on the lamp. They have choreographed this carefully for they knew there would be men near the entrance to the intake pipe. As the light goes on Patrick drives his head under water and his body follows downwards in an arc.
This is July 7, 1938. A night of no moon, a heat-wave in the city. The lemon-coloured glare from the waterworks delineates the east end. Caravaggio could lean forward and pluck it like some jewel from the neck of a negress. He rows in a straight line towards the waterworks, knowing Patrick is underneath him in the five-foot-diameter pipe racing within the current, his movement under water like a clenching fist, doubling up and releasing to full length then doubling up, awkward because of the weight he carries.
In the Skin of a Lion Page 17