The Killing Circle

31

To find Sam, I have to find Angela. But to search for someone who doesn’t exist: not the best task for an out-of-work TV critic. So what would Tim Earheart or Ramsay do in my shoes? Start with what’s on the table. Not much. There’s Angela’s name (false), her age (within a decade range), her published work (lifted from others’ autobiographical accounts). There’s also what I know of her appearance (especially susceptible to the whimsies of shadow and light, so that she was one thing reading from her journal on the opposite side of Conrad White’s rug, and another the night she cupped her hands over my ears to muffle the sounds she made in her bed, as though it was me and not her neighbours she needed to save from distraction). For someone who has come to play such a cruelly important role in my life, Angela has done all the taking and in return left next to nothing of herself behind.

One thread I still have of hers takes me to the condo where, eighteen floors above, I had seen and touched parts of her that now, in recollection, fall in favour of the argument that Angela has never been anything but a creation of fantasy. My effort to return my hands to her skin renders only the most generic impression, a softcore going through the motions. The naked Angela comes to me now from too great a distance, implausibly flawless and blue-lit.

If this is the case—if I never was with Angela on what I thought was our only night together—then perhaps Angela isn’t to blame. Perhaps I’m the psychotic. There is no Angela because there never was an Angela. Which would mean she isn’t the one who has done something terrible to Sam. I am.

Only the building’s superintendent throwing me against the wall puts these dark considerations aside.

“You,” the man says. The same one who’d given me the heave-ho the last time. Now, however, he’s giving me the clinical stare of a physician checking for signs of jaundice. “Tell me. Just between us. Whisper it in my ear if you’d like.”

“Yes?”

“What is your problem?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“You’ve found him.”

“Not you. A tenant.”

“They’re not tenants when they own the unit.”

“What are they then?”

“They’re unit owners.”

“I’m looking for a unit owner.”

“Buzz them.”

“They’re not here. Or not answering.”

“If I’d known it was you down here, I wouldn’t have answered either.”

His hands have loosened their grip on his belt. It’s his calmness that makes it certain he’s going to hit me. In my experience, there’s always a moment before taking a shot to the face when you see it coming, but don’t quite believe it. Here it comes, you think. Then No, he wouldn’t. And then he does.

“She has my son.”

The super looks down at me over pockmarked cheeks. “Divorce?”

“Something like that.”

“Call your lawyer like everyone else.”

“It’s not a lawyer kind of thing. If you know what I mean.”

Apparently he does. One fist returns to his side, and the other fishes in his pockets for his keys.

“I’ll tell you what the building’s records show,” he says, ushering me through the lobby and into a small office where the Christmas tree is stored. “But I see you in here again and I’ll stuff you down the garbage chute.”

I tell the super to look up the account under the name Pam Turgenov.

“Thought you said her name was Angela.”

“She lies.”

“Most of them do.”

He pulls up the file on Angela/Pam’s financial status with the condominium corporation. The mortgage and purchase agreement solely under Pam Turgenov’s name, though the account has recently come under arrears. Unit 1808 hasn’t paid its maintenance fee for three months, and the bank has frozen the accounts.

“We’re looking for this one,” the super says. “But from what I can tell, she hasn’t been here for a while. Not since the break-in.”

“There was a burglary?”

“Took some crap jewelry, personal stuff. But left the TV.”

Personal stuff. Like Petra’s Yankees cap. So it could find its way to my house.

“I’m changing the locks this week,” the super says.

“It won’t matter. She’s not coming back.”

“All her junk is still up there.”

“Trust me.”

“But she’s got your kid.”

“I’ll find her.”

I must sound convincing. The super gives me a soldierly nod. “When you speak to her,” he says as he walks me to the door, “tell her I’m keeping the TV.”

From the condo I walk straight up Bay Street toward the gold and silver office towers on the far side of the rail tracks. It takes a while. I’m occupied with working through what shouldn’t come as a surprise, but has nevertheless: Angela not only failed to report to the authorities that it was Evelyn behind the wheel of the car she drove into a cliffside with Conrad White, but she likely had a hand in bringing about the crash in the first place. It was Angela who lured them north with breadcrumb clues. More than this, she must have been there. To make sure the job was done. And to replace Evelyn’s purse with her own.

This is how Angela managed to live so completely off the grid: she made herself disappear and become someone else. And when the debts started to come due under Pam Turgenov’s increasingly bad name she was gone again.

There’s more support for this suspicion at the offices of the law firm where Angela claimed to work as a legal secretary. This time, I assume a cover—her jilted lover, which I suppose I am, among other things. It buys me enough sympathy with the girl at reception to find out that there was a Pam Turgenov working there for a time, not as a legal secretary but as a temp.

“Never got to really know her,” the receptionist says sadly, as though this was her life’s main regret. “Always had her nose in a book. Like, Stay away, I’m into this.”

“Do you remember what she was reading?”

The receptionist looks at her nails for an answer. “Actually, now that I think of it, she wasn’t reading. She was writing.”

“How long ago did she leave?”

“A while. Like, months. She was probably only here for a couple weeks.”

“Do you know where she went after she left? Another firm maybe?”

“It’s why they’re called temps.” The receptionist shrugs. “They come and go.”

When I give her the flowers I’d brought with me (”Is Pam here today? I have something for her birthday”) I’m rewarded with a blushing thank you.

“If I happen to bump into her, who can I say came calling?” she asks as I start toward the elevators.

“Try Conrad. Or Len. Or Ivan.”

It’s only as the elevator doors are almost closed that the receptionist raises her narrowing eyes from writing each of these names down.

Dusk. That pinkish light over the city that is the occasionally beautiful by-product of pollution. The chill that comes within seconds of the sun dropping behind the rooftops. I’m headed east for no good reason. Or no better reason than to avoid what I know awaits me at home: messages from the police reporting how they haven’t come up with anything yet. Maybe even the kid from the National Star camped out in my yard, a copy of The Sandman in his knapsack, the pages furry with Post-It notes. Better to keep drifting through the darkening streets than face that.

Yet it’s at this time of day, in this kind of light, that you see things. Twilight illusions.

Like the black van that slowly drives past me. A shadow behind the wheel. The outlined head and gloved hands that belong to whatever I chased into the corn rows at the Mustang.

As I start after it—noting again how the model name has been removed from the rear doors, a caking of dried mud obscuring the licence plate—the van picks up speed and chugs around the next corner.

I cross blind against the traffic. A station wagon screeches to a stop. Kisses its grille to my hip. The contact sends me spinning against a panel truck, but my feet continue to slap the pavement, righting my course on the sidewalk. There is honking and Hey! Hey!s behind me but I take the same corner the van took and all sound is gulped away. A man my age and in my shape can’t run like this more than a hundred yards without his breathing becoming the only thing he can hear. And his heart. His untested heart.

The van is gone. I keep running.

And then he’s there.

Up ahead, the shadow slides along the walls. Takes another turn into the grounds of the old Gooderham & Worts distillery. A few clustered blocks of Dickens’s London shoehorned between the expressway and condo construction sites. Long, Victorian brick barracks with smokestacks at their ends like exclamation points.

The past slows me down. It’s the cobblestone streets that turn anything faster than a walk into a tiptoed dance. During daylight hours, the doors on either side open into galleries and cafés, but they are locked now. No one else in the pedestrian-only lanes but me and the one who’s led me here.

And there he is. Slipping into a narrow alley. But slowly. As though waiting for me to catch up.

There are no lights between two of the vacant buildings, so that all I can see of the figure ahead is the rise and fall of its head against the dim brick. And then he stops altogether.

A bit further, the body language of his cocked head says. You’re almost there.

I come at him in what I intend as a rush, but there is little rush left in me. When I reach the point where he’d been standing I nearly trip over something on the ground. Heavy but with a liquid give. A bag of sand.

It gives him more than enough time. The black van is waiting for him in the parking lot. The extinguished brake lights turning my raised hands from red to pink as it shifts into drive and slides away.

Starting back, I nearly fall over the bag of sand a second time. Except now I have the time to see that it isn’t a bag of sand at all.

A body, more or less. No: less.

Propped against the wall like a sleeping drunk. Legless. Also armless, noseless, eyeless. A man dissembled into disparate parts laid out over the cobblestones. A human anthology.

It makes me grateful for the dark. Still, I can see enough. And what I can’t see my mind fills in with what it remembers from the night in the shed with Petra.

Time to go. Someone else will discover this by morning. There is nothing to be gained by lingering here aside from being seen.

And yet I stay where I am a minute longer. Partly because all the air has been sucked out of the world. Partly because the man scattered at my feet was once a friend.

We were the last ones. This is how I know it’s Len even before I use the toe of my shoe to open the wallet next to the body’s cupped hand and squint to read his name on the driver’s licence inside. If you didn’t know what I know, there would be no way of connecting the grinning face in the wallet’s ID to his corpse—there is no identity left in him, all of the features that mark someone for who they are cut away. This has likely been Angela’s lesson all along: you take a person’s story and what remains is nothing more than skin and blood. The body is worthless. What counts is what it does. The lies and truths it tells.

I’m on the news in the morning. Once again they’ve used my taped statement from the first day of Sam’s disappearance. Since then, I have continued to refuse the cameras, as it isn’t doing me any favours on the suspicion front. Not to mention that pleading for Sam’s safe return isn’t going to make any impact on the person I know has him now.

A couple of the investigators come by to give me an update on the search efforts, but their eyes now openly betray their doubts. In the name of thoroughness they ask again if I’ve told them everything. Even after I repeat the same details, they wait for me to go on. It’s alright, their seen-it-all faces urge me. Just tell us what you did. We won’t judge you.

I start packing the moment the door closes behind them.

Before I go, I put in a call to Tim Earheart at a payphone around the corner. It strikes me that he’s the only person in the world I have to say goodbye to. But I’m denied even this. He’s not home, so I’m left to stutter some nonsense into his answering machine. All I remember is attempting a joke (“You know you don’t get out enough when you’ve only got one name on your speed-dial”) and asking him to “Look out for Sam if I—if it turns out Sam needs looking out for.” The kind of tight-throated message you wish you could erase as soon as you put the receiver down.

I stop off at home one last time after that, trying to think of anything else that needs to be accounted for. I look at the rows of children’s books Sam is too old to read any more and think A father and son used to live here. But that past tense takes all the life out of it. People used to live in every empty house you’ve ever stood in, and this makes them no less empty.