Shadow Puppet

by Jeffrey Round

  Just a stone’s throw from Yonge and Bloor, at the heart of the city, Sheikh IT! Designs was one of the smallest, dingiest office spaces Dan had seen in years. His own, above a warehouse in the city’s east end, was palatial compared to this squalid two-room affair over a pizza joint, whose neighbours included an Indigenous HIV agency, an ethnic actors’ studio, and a tarot card reader. Maybe Domingo should give them a whirl, Dan thought, as he climbed the grimy set of stairs, avoiding the broken tiles on every other step.

  He knocked and entered. The inside of the office was little better than the hallway. The walls were a lurid orange. There was no receptionist to greet him. A thin, bespectacled man who looked like a private school headmaster came out of a small room at the back and looked Dan over.

  “Dan Sharp?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Hanani Sheikh. Come in,” he said simply, indicating a battered desk and chair at the back. “Please let’s get to the point. I see no reason to waste your time or mine.”

  Dan sat and placed a USB stick on the desk. “The contents of this device were taken from the hard drive of Nabil Ahmad’s computer. I understand that, among other things, you created websites for Mr. Ahmad.”

  “I run a design company, Mr. Sharp. Are you implying that there is something illegal in that?” Hanani looked at Dan over his glasses. “Has he done something I need to be careful about associating myself with?”

  “Not unless you’ve done something wrong.”

  “No, nothing.”

  “You planted software on his computer allowing you to access it remotely. You read his calendar. I have a witness who works out with Nabil Ahmad who saw you arrive at the YMCA within minutes nearly every time Nabil was scheduled. It’s called stalking.”

  “Its called a coincidence.”

  “Like hell it’s a coincidence!”

  Hanani removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I was only trying to help him.”

  “Help him how?”

  “Help him sort himself out. He’s living a duplicitous life. He’s gay, but he’s in deep denial.” Hanani glared at him. “What do you want? Money? Did Nabil hire you to squeeze me? I have nothing. I am an honest businessman.”

  “An honest businessman who supplies fake visas. Nabil emailed you a copy of Sam Bashir’s visa and asked for your help.”

  For a moment, Hanani looked frightened. Then his face took on a shrewd look. His composure was back. “And was there a reply from me agreeing to do it? No, there wasn’t. Because I never supplied him with anything. And if it ever comes down to it, it will be his word against mine.” He pointed to the doorway. “Get out. You’re wasting your time. Tell that idiot Nabil to stop bothering me.”

  Dan paused. Unless he was faking it, Hanani didn’t know Nabil was missing. But it had been worth a try. “I can still report you. A quick government search will show whether such a document was ever used. Bureaucrats love these things. They’ll put you out of business forever.”

  “Go ahead and search. Someone else may have supplied him with a visa, but it wasn’t me.” He leaned across his desk. “I know who you are. I’ve done my research. I have to say, I was impressed with what I found. When you called, I thought, Whatever he wants from me, this is a man I do not have to be afraid of. But I wasn’t expecting this cheap attempt at extortion. Let me ask you something. Do you know what happens to people like us in the Middle East?”

  “I can guess.”

  “They bury us up to our necks in the sand. Then they stand back and throw rocks at us until we’re dead. So go ahead and report me, if that’s what you intend to do. You’ll be closing the door on a lot of refugees. I am their only hope. Look around you. Do I look like I’m getting rich doing this? If someone has money, I take it. If they don’t, I spend my own. I give people their lives back.”

  “How do you know they’re legit?”

  “I don’t have time to worry about that. To me, if they’re gay then they’re legit.”

  Dan eyed him. “Does that go for Zoltan Mirovic’s underpaid dancers as well?”

  Hanani had the good manners to look embarrassed. “We can’t all be so choosy about our clientele.”

  Dan left undecided about whether Hanani had anything to do with the disappearances, though he wasn’t ready to rule him out entirely. He had just returned to his office when a knock came at the door. It opened of its own accord. In strode the chief of police hugging a small box, with an exasperated look on his face.

  “Three flights up? Why doesn’t this place have an elevator?”

  “Luck of the draw.”

  He looked around, taking in the furniture and all the other trappings of Dan’s life as a private investigator. “This is what you prefer to working for me as an officer of the law?”

  Dan smiled. “I call my own shots. Could I do that working for you?”

  The chief seemed to consider this. “Nah. Maybe not.”

  “Busy men like you don’t usually make house calls.”

  “No, they don’t. I’m making an exception with you.”

  He set the box on Dan’s desk, reached in, and brought out a handful of DVDs. He tried unsuccessfully to place them neatly in a pile, but the slippery covers erupted from his hands and spilled across the surface. Naked bodies lay everywhere, their titles silently screaming up at them. All male action. Hard-core! Double penetration. Triple action!

  Dan looked up. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were flirting with me.”

  “Yeah, well … as I said, my wife left me. I might be open to suggestions, but keep it to yourself. For now, I suggest you look through these and see if you recognize any of the men you’re looking for.”

  Dan sat back and crossed his arms. “Why me? Don’t you have any gay cops to do this sort of thing?”

  “A couple, yeah, but I’m afraid they’d get too engrossed and miss the point. No pun intended. The straight ones would just turn a blind eye to anything they don’t want to see.” He paused. “Not to mention I’m kinda embarrassed to ask some of my guys to watch this stuff, so I figured you’re the best choice.”

  Dan reached for one of the cases: A Clear and Present Danger. A youngster dressed in a naval uniform and tied to a chair recoiled from the advances of an older man sporting an impressive erection. A submarine like that would constitute a threat, Dan mused.

  He turned it over. On the back: Star-X Productions! Beneath it, the now-familiar boy with his rose.

  The chief shrugged. “You mentioned the name Zoltan Mirovic. He runs it. Mirovic made a living in the black market during the war in Bosnia. He was rumoured to be associated with a death camp where inmates were forced to kill one another with hammers, but nothing was proved. When the war ended and the good times dried up, he came over here to avoid criminal charges. Lucky us. Now he’s transformed himself into a purveyor of kinky videos. On the surface, it’s just your local pornographer marketing his wares online to anyone desperate enough to pay for that shit. All quite legal in today’s world, of course. But there’s a bigger side to it. We suspect he’s running a flesh trade in illegals, narcotics, all that stuff that keeps me up at night and makes my wife want to leave me.”

  Dan thought of Hanani Sheikh’s underground railway. “If he’s using illegals, is it possible some of the missing men are being offered papers in exchange for their work?”

  “You’re a smart cookie, Mr. Sharp. You really should be a cop and work for me.” He looked down at the DVD cases. “Why not start there?”

  Dan studied him. “Is this an official request you’re making?”

  The chief shook his head. “Officially, I have to tell you to stay far away from this one. Mirovic and his cronies are about as evil as it gets.”

  “And unofficially?”

  “I know you. You never do what you’re told. It’s what I like best about you.” He winked. “Have a look through these and see what you can find. If those missing men are in here, I want to be the first to know.”
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  Dan squared the DVDs into a pile, running his fingers down the titles. Was the chief so naive as to think you had to watch them to know who was in them? Maybe there were other reasons his wife wanted to leave.

  One by one, he examined the covers. Sugar Is Sweet, Boy Meets Toy, Man O’War. Not exactly literary efforts. He was almost at the bottom of the pile when he saw Joe’s face on the back of a DVD entitled 1001 Arabian Knights. He was credited as Joe Slayed.

  He slipped the shiny disc into his laptop. After a jangly fanfare, a sultry voice told of a young man’s exploitation at the hands of a thousand-and-one well-endowed Arabs. These, the narrator explained, were a few of his favourite episodes. Cut to: a diaphanous curtain, a thin youth lying naked on a bed beneath a canopy. The music turned horror-flick cheesy as a shadowy figure approached. Dan fast-forwarded through the early sequences, as thuggish-looking men in skimpy costumes took advantage of the young man, whose attempts to resist were all but non-existent. Either he’s a lousy actor or he’s drugged, Dan thought.

  In the final scene, the young man, who had clearly not learned to sleep elsewhere, was awakened by a man with a scimitar. This was Joe. Once again, the boy submitted to his aggressor’s assault. After a racy sex sequence, Joe put his hands around his neck and began to squeeze. Here, at least, the action looked real as the young man thrashed then lay still. The camera pulled back to reveal his inert body until fadeout.

  Naughty urban fantasy or something more? Dan wondered. He thought of Donny’s comments about snuff videos. No production company would distribute a real-life snuff scene, despite what he’d just watched. As the credits rolled, Dan read the fine print about all actors being of legal age plus a disclaimer that the violence had been simulated.

  He turned to the remaining DVDs. It was the next-to-last case that caught his eye. There, Edie Foxe appeared before him in all her coquettish, contortionist spectacularity. BOI Meets BOY promised “a gender-bending S&M queer fuck.” Whatever that is, Dan thought as he popped it into his laptop.

  The opening images were blurry. In a darkened room, the camera panned across a four-poster bed with several coils of ropes in view. Then it turned to Edie, who appeared in her boi drag. She seemed to be watching someone just out of range of the lens. Her heavy-lidded eyes made her look like a silent-film vamp.

  “Hi,” said a breathy male voice from off-screen.

  “Who are you?” Edie asked.

  Her deep voice and Eastern-bloc accent fit the scene well, like Bela Lugosi in his vampire drag.

  “Just a friend.”

  “What do you want?”

  A skinny male figure edged into view. “Do you like rope play?”

  Edie turned and regarded the ropes, as though she might have thought she was there for some other purpose.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you like to do?”

  “I like to submit,” she replied.

  “Do I have your permission to hurt you?”

  “Try me,” she replied.

  Dan fast-forwarded to the next scene. They were both naked now. The boy was scrawny, but he had an impressive erection. Edie lay face-down, her ankles and wrists secured to the bedposts. She’d been gagged, rendering further dialogue unnecessary, though her captor seemed determined to fill in the blanks for the unimaginative.

  “I’m going to hurt you now,” he said, slapping her buttocks hard enough to leave handprints.

  Unlike the youth in the previous DVD, Edie’s reactions were believable. She writhed and moaned, twisting her head from side to side. Her eyes flashed in what looked like genuine fear. The lights narrowed till they focused on her pearl-white skin.

  She struggled as the boy entered her roughly, without a condom. Dan thought of Woody’s comment about the prevalence of HIV in the S&M scene. Perhaps the risk was part of the allure.

  He fast-forwarded again. He was nearing the end of the video. The boy bent and whispered in her ear. Dan was unable to hear the dialogue. Edie looked panicked. She struggled and tried to pull free of her bonds as the boy vanished off-screen. When he returned, he brandished a metal rod that emitted an orange glow. His hands were gloved.

  Somewhere out there in the darkness, Dan knew, there was a camera operator, a director, lighting people. If anything went wrong or got out of hand then they would be there to stop it. None of this was real. It couldn’t be.

  He watched as the boy pressed the metal against Edie’s back. Her screams were audible despite the gag. She writhed in an impressive display of pain then lay still. The boy did this three times in succession, each time leaving a long red stain on her skin. If Dan hadn’t known better he would have sworn they were real.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Secrets and Lies

  DAN PUSHED THE DVDS ASIDE and sat gazing at the whitened trees across the river, their branches dusted with snow. There was something peaceful and annihilating in how it enveloped the city, transforming sidewalks and rooftops, filling streets and slowing traffic.

  He pulled a card from the pile on his desk and dialed the number.

  “Hello, Reggie, this is Sean Peterson. The private investigator.” There was silence on the other end. “Hello?”

  “Is that really your name?”

  Now it was Dan’s turn to reply with silence.

  “I looked you up, you know. There’s no one by that name doing what you say you’re doing. Not in this city, anyway.”

  Dan sighed. Most people weren’t as diligent as Reggie, or if they were they preferred not to confront him with his inevitable lies.

  “You’re right, it’s not my real name. I don’t always give it out for reasons of privacy and client confidentiality.”

  “You could’ve trusted me.” The voice was hurt and distrustful.

  “I apologize. If you knew the nature of my work you would understand why I can’t always do that.”

  “Was any of it true? Do you even know Sam — the guy you said you were looking for?”

  “I am a private investigator. I was hired by clients to look into the disappearance of a man who knew Sam. I thought perhaps I could find a clue to what happened to my client if I could see whether Sam still lived at the same address.”

  “So you don’t really know him?”

  “No.”

  Reggie seemed to be mulling this over. “What’s your real name?”

  “Sharp. It’s Dan Sharp.”

  Dan heard tapping.

  “I’m looking you up as we speak, so it better be real.” There was a pause. “Okay. That’s your site. At least now I know you’re a real person. What do you want?”

  “I’d like more information.”

  “I told you all I know about Sam. There’s nothing more to tell. He’s gone and I don’t know when he’s coming back.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not looking into him at the moment. I was wondering — if I came over in person, would you answer some questions about your other tenants?”

  “I’m kinda busy right now —”

  “I can pay for your time.”

  That seemed to settle the matter.

  †

  Dan showed up bearing a pen and notebook. Reggie might not have been the sharpest pencil in the case, but he was the kind to respond to visual clues. In fact, it turned out to be a good choice. The super clocked the notebook in Dan’s hand and nodded.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Because I was going to say you can’t record anything I say in case it gets me in trouble later.”

  He opened his door and Dan followed him inside the sparsely furnished apartment. The air was heavy with pot smoke.

  “If you prefer, I won’t write down anything at all. That way there’s no record this conversation ever happened. You could deny I was ever here, if that makes you feel better.”

  Reggie shook his head. “No, it’s okay. Write down whatever you want. Just don’t make me sound weird.”

  Dan held out the cash they’d agreed to on the phone. Reggie looked at him contemptuousl
y as he pocketed the bills.

  “You didn’t really need to pay me, you know. I would’ve talked to you for free.”

  He giggled.

  Dan wondered if it would even be worth interviewing him while he was stoned, but he’d come this far already. Who knew when he’d have another chance in the future. “A deal’s a deal. Do you mind if I sit?” he asked, indicating a footstool.

  Reggie made a gesture that seemed to take in much of the room. “Wherever you like. I ain’t gonna stop you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Dan sat and looked carefully at Reggie. “The other day when I was here —”

  “When you were trespassing.”

  “Yes. The other day — after you let me look in Sam’s apartment, which I very much appreciated — just as I was leaving there was another tenant coming in the front door. You said he was a pornographer.”

  Reggie sneered. “Low-life son of a bitch.”

  “I saw him in a bar a few nights ago. Do you know Zipperz?”

  The look on Reggie’s face showed confusion. Dan thought at first he was surprised to learn that his tenant had been in a gay bar, but then the super said, “I thought you said you weren’t single.”

  “I’m not single. I still go out once in a while,” Dan replied carefully.

  Reggie smirked. “So you have an open relationship? I know all about that.”

  “Whatever you want to call it. Anyway, I was out a few nights ago and I saw your tenant. The one who was at the door when I was leaving.”

  “I can’t let you in his place, too,” Reggie spat out. “What do you think I am?”

  Dan put up his hands to ward off further protest. “I wasn’t going to ask you to let me in. I just wondered if you could tell me about him.”

  “Okay, so what do you want to know? His name’s Xavier. Xavier Egeli. I can tell you that much.”

  “I already know that, thanks.” He placed Nabil’s and Joe’s photos on the table. “Do you recognize either of these guys?”