Toronto Noir

The King of Charles Street West by Gail Bowen

Dundas Square

Toronto was in the tenth day of a garbage strike when Billy Merchant came back into my life. The city was sweltering, and the stench that rose from overflowing cans, fetid dumpsters, and cardboard boxes swollen with rotting produce hung above the hot pavement like a poisoned cloud. We were a city ripe for a plague, so it was no surprise when I picked up the Toronto Star that morning and saw Billy’s photo staring up at me. I hadn’t seen him in forty years. If he’d let Mother Nature take her course, I wouldn’t have recognized him, and he could have kept his empire for himself. But Billy never met a mirror he didn’t like, and he was rich enough to believe he could defeat time. Judging by the picture in the Toronto Star, he had either discovered the fountain of youth or invested in a perpetual makeover: His hair was still thick and black as the proverbial raven’s wing; his body was toned; his jawline smooth and his smile dazzling.

He didn’t look young — he looked carved, like one of those figures at the Movieland Wax Museum in Niagara Falls. Except, unlike the wax Jack Nicholson or the wax Harry Potter, Billy Merchant hadn’t been captured in his most memorable scene ever — at least, not the one I remembered. Billy with his cool, slender fingers around my throat whispering, “If you ever tell anybody what you saw, I’ll kill you.”

I hadn’t doubted him for a moment. Billy had his weaknesses, but he wasn’t given to idle threats. Besides, twenty feet away from me, at the bottom of the basement stairs of the rooming house where we lived, there was a dead man and I had watched as Billy killed him.

“It’s hard to make predictions — especially about the future.”

— Allan A. Lamport, Mayor of Toronto

For four decades, I’d kept our secret. I had my reasons, but when I saw the cutline under Billy’s photo calling him The King of Charles Street West, something stirred inside me. A preacher or a poet might have called that stirring a thirst for justice, but I wasn’t a preacher or a poet. I was an ordinary woman who lived in a nice house off the Danforth with too many pictures of my son and too many memories, so I did what an ordinary woman does when she contemplates blackmailing a murderer: I made myself a cappuccino, peeled an orange, and sat down to read the paper.

The article about Billy was nice — inspiring even. Much of it was in Billy’s own words — about how forty years ago, as a twenty-year-old with a high school education and two years working construction under his belt, he moved to Toronto, found a place to live in a rooming house on Charles Street West, got a job waiting tables, worked hard, and saved every penny. According to Billy, his landlord, a Russian immigrant without living kin, admired his work ethic, and the men developed what Billy characterized as a father-son relationship. Then came the happy ending. When the older man died, it turned out that he’d left Billy his house. Starting with the property he’d inherited on Charles Street West, Billy began to sell, mortgage, lease, invest, and purchase until he owned an impressive chunk, not just of Charles Street West, but of Metropolitan Toronto.

City Success Story was the heading above the continuation of the story on page three. There was a photo there too: It was of Billy standing in front of the Charles Street West property in 1967 with “an unidentified woman.” The unidentified woman was me.

Except for a strip of joke pictures of Billy and me mugging in the instant photo booth at Union Station, this was the only photo of the two of us together. I realized with a pang that it had been taken by our landlord, Vladimir Maksimovich Chapayev, known to us as Vova, and murdered by Billy on a soft September evening in 1967. It wasn’t hard to figure out how the picture had made its way into the paper. When it came to his triumphs, Billy was as sentimental as a schoolgirl. He would have cherished this photo of himself on the cusp of his brilliant career. The fact that he had killed the man who took the photo and threatened to kill the woman who stood beaming beside him would have been of no more consequence to Billy than the clippings his manicurist snipped from his fingernails.

“Nuts to you.”

— Motto of Toronto’s Uptown Nuthouse

(now defunct)

If you’re going to travel fast, you have to travel light. That’s what Billy always said. But it was possible Billy had underestimated the power of things he left behind. I had resources. The $64,000 question was whether I still had the nerve to use them. For forty years, I had wrapped myself in respectability, believing that each act of quiet duty separated me from the girl who believed the sun rose and set on Billy Merchant and who stood at the top of the cellar steps, heart pounding with fear and love as Billy knelt over Vladimir Maksimovich Chapayev and pinched the nostrils of his thick, maddeningly persistent snorting peasant nose until the old Russian stopped breathing forever.

As I propped Billy’s photo against my cappuccino cup, my hands were shaking. Maybe, after all, the last laugh would be Billy’s. Maybe in that instant when he silenced Vova, he had silenced me. It was possible that all the years of cautious living in my pleasant house off the Danforth had smothered the raw nerve I would need to bring Billy to his knees. I looked at Billy’s picture again. And against logic and good sense, I drew strength from it.

In my quiet, sunny kitchen, I could almost hear Billy’s voice, silky as one of the ties he was fond of fingering at Holt Renfrew: “Bring it on, babe. You’re tough, but I’m tougher. I can take you.”

“You take a chance the day you’re born. Why stop now?”

— Billy Merchant’s motto,

appropriated from the movie Golden Boy

I moved into the Charles Street West house on June 21, 1967: the first day of what the world would remember as the summer of love. There were no flowers in my hair, but there should have been. I was a virgin ripe for experience, ready for plucking. When I saw Billy, shirtless, his thin chest glistening with sweat as he mowed the postage-stamp lawn in front of the house, my loins twitched. He gave me one of his bullet-stopping grins, asked if he could carry in my luggage, and I was a goner.

That night Billy took me to see Golden Boy at a cheap theater that showed old movies. When Barbara Stanwyck told William Holden to follow his dream, Billy’s hand squeezed mine as if someone had shot 300 kilovolts of electricity through his body. Afterwards, Billy stood under a streetlight, arms extended like an actor. “Sooner or later, everybody works for the man,” he said. “And babe, you are looking at the man that, sooner or later, everybody is going to work for.” That was my 300 kilovolt moment.

From the day we met, Billy and I seized every possible second together. Vova lived on the first floor of the rooming house. A gentle accountant who spent his evenings and weekends making scrapbooks of the Royal Family lived on the third floor. Billy and I shared the kitchen and bathroom on the second floor. His bedroom was at the front and mine was at the back, but even the long summer evenings weren’t long enough for us, and by Canada Day, Billy and I knew the squeaks and hollows of one another’s mattresses as intimately as we knew the contours of one another’s bodies.

We might have been short on money, but we were long on dreams. I earned nine dollars a day selling costume jewelry at the Robert Simpson Company on the corner of Queen and Yonge. My dream was to go to Shaw’s Business College and become a private secretary. Billy earned nine dollars a day (and tips) at Winston’s on Adelaide Street West. Winston’s was the restaurant where the Bay Street elite ate prime rib and talked money. Billy, who dreamed of becoming a millionaire before he was twenty-five, said that every day at Winston’s was worth a year of college education.

That summer, he and I explored the city, not just our neighborhood — all the neighborhoods. On payday, we bought ten dollars’ worth of subway tokens, and after work, we’d hop on the subway and take turns choosing which stop we’d get off at and which bus or streetcar we’d board. Every night was an adventure. As we traveled through the muggy evenings, Billy would sit with his forehead pressed against the window looking out at the unfamiliar streets with the hunger he had in his eyes when he looked at my body.

“Toronto is the engine that drives Canada.”

— Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto

When he talked about Toronto, Billy was like a lover: His voice grew soft; his hands trembled; his eyes glittered with lust. He needed, physically, to touch every part of the city, so he could penetrate her secrets. He had a shoebox filled with the spiral notebooks in which he recorded what the men who lunched at Winston’s were saying about his city, and the information he had was pure gold. The men who drank icy martinis at Winston’s had insider information about which crumbling town houses and firetrap warehouses were going to be torn down and where new freeways might be built; they knew where the subway might be expanded, and which cheap rural land would be developed as suburbs for the people flocking to live the dream. The men with icy martinis knew what nobody else knew: They knew where Toronto was going.

“Nobody knows where the hell downtown Toronto is. But

everybody’s going to know where downtown North York is.”

— Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto

Even though Billy didn’t understand what they were talking about, he wrote it down. Later, when we rode the public transit out to the edges of the city, Billy put the pieces together, and he floated his extravagant dreams. He was a man obsessed. Many years after that, I was reminded of Billy when I read my child the story of Icarus who dreamed of touching the sun and stuck feathers to his shoulders with wax so he could fly. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell into the sea, but Billy was smart enough to calculate the odds. Nothing could bring him down.

“I’m lost, but I’m making record time.”

— Allan A. Lamport, Mayor of Toronto

During the summer of love, Toronto was filled with kids who’d hitchhiked to Toronto to get stoned in Yorkville and enjoy a little loving wherever they found it. One steamy Sunday, Billy and I were walking through Queen’s Park. As always, someone in the crowd was playing a guitar badly and the sweet smell of pot was heavy in the air. The lawns were littered with sleeping bags where girls with sunbursts painted on their cheeks and dreamy unfocused eyes were pressing their bodies against jean-clad barefoot boys with straggly beards. Billy stepped over them as if they were excrement.

We’d just passed the statue of Edward VII on his horse, when I tripped over a boy in a sleeping bag and lost my footing. Billy caught me before I fell, but the boy rolled over lazily, gave me the look boys give girls, and patted the place beside him on the sleeping bag. In a flash, Billy dropped to his knees and began to pummel the boy. When I heard the sound of fist against bone, my stomach heaved, but I managed to pull Billy back, and he pushed himself to his feet. For a beat, Billy and I stood side by side, looking down at the boy as he felt his jaw. I was sure there’d be trouble, but the boy just smiled and flashed us the peace sign.

For some reason, the gesture enraged Billy. The blood drained from his face and he aimed a kick at the boy’s leg. “That’s right, asshole,” he said. “Peace and love.”

Some of the other kids were emerging from their sleeping bags, rubbing their eyes and trying to get their heads around what was going on. Billy’s wiry body was a coiled spring.

“Keep it up, you sorry little pieces of shit!” he yelled. “The more you smoke and screw, the more useless you become. And that works for me. You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are. Every day I serve your fathers their lunch. While you’re lying in parks getting crabs and blowing your minds, your fathers are transforming this city from Toronto the Good into Toronto the Great. Go ahead and laugh, but you’re the reason I’m going to be part of Toronto the Great. You want to know why? Because you’re breaking your fathers’ hearts. You’re the reason they order double martinis every day and get loose-lipped about the projects that are going to change this city forever.”

The jaw of the boy Billy hit was starting to swell, but he kept the faith. It was an effort for him to form the words, but he managed. “Chill, brother,” he said.

Billy shot the boy a look of pure hate. “Fuck you,” he said, then he grabbed my hand and dragged me after him out of the park.

“If I had $1,000,000 I’d be rich.”

— Toronto musicians The Barenaked Ladies

Billy was silent till we got to Bloor Street. “Are you okay?” I said finally.

When he turned toward me, there was a new darkness in his eyes. “Yeah, I’m okay. I’m more than okay. I’m terrific. I deserve to make it. When Toronto’s a world-class city, I should be one of the kings. I’m smart. I’ve got drive and I’ve got nerve. The only thing I don’t have is money.” His voice broke, and for a terrible moment I thought he was going to cry. “I know where this city is headed. And I’ve got plans — great plans — I just don’t have the money to get started. And that means I’m fucked.”

“You can save,” I said.

“From what I earn at Winston’s? Fuck!” He laughed. “Only one thing to do. Wait for Vova to die.”

“What would that change?”

His laugh was short and bitter. “I’m in Vova’s will. It’s supposed to be a big secret, but I’m the heir. Vova lost touch with his people in Russia years ago. He says they’re probably dead by now. Anyway, one night when he got drunk, he started obsessing about how the government was going to take his house after he died. I told him that if he had a will, the government couldn’t touch his property. So he poured himself another shot and wrote out a will leaving everything to me.”

“How come you never told me?”

“Because I made a promise to Vova.” Billy’s voice was suddenly weary. “Also because it doesn’t fucking matter. Vova has the heart of an ox. He’ll live to be a hundred.”

“He drinks a lot.”

Billy shook his head. “Yeah, maybe I’ll get lucky, and some Saturday night he’ll get loaded and walk under the wrong ladder.”

“Things work out for the best,” I said, but for once my mind wasn’t on Billy’s future. It was on my own. My period was three weeks late, and as a rule, I was regular as clockwork.

“Come in and get lost.”

— Slogan of Honest Ed’s Discount House,

Bloor and Bathurst

Years later, when my son came home from school and told me that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can cause a chain of events that ultimately causes or prevents a tornado, I thought of the summer of 1967, when the flapping of the wing of a single butterfly in Russia changed four lives in Toronto.

By the time the Canadian National Exhibition opened at the end of August, I still hadn’t told Billy we were going to have a baby. For days, his mood had been as sullen as the weather. He had a line on some land north of Toronto that was going cheap, but the regular customers at Winston’s were on holidays, and tips were down. For the first time since he came to the city, Billy had been forced to dip into his savings to make ends meet, and his anger was building. I could see it in the set of his jaw and in the new fierceness of his temper. When I suggested we forget our troubles by spending an evening on the midway, he tensed and balled his fists. I flinched, and Billy saw my fear and gave me a melting smile.

“Okay, babe. Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ll have my Saturday night drink with Vova — got to keep on his good side. Then after I pour him into bed, we’ll go to the Ex. We’ll eat some cotton candy. I’ll win you one of those fancy satin dolls on the midway; then we’ll take in the fireworks. Good times!”

Good times. But for Billy and me, good times always carried a price. The next day, when I came home from work, Billy was waiting for me on the front steps. He was ashen. As soon as he spotted me, he grabbed my hand and dragged me away from the house.

“My fucking luck,” he said, his voice cracking. “I answered the phone today when Vova was out doing errands. It was long distance, and I couldn’t make out what the person on the other end was saying. We yelled at each other for a couple of minutes trying to make one another understand, then somebody who said he was Vova’s nephew came on the line. His English was excellent. He told me that he was crying with happiness to finally locate his uncle, because he had found a way to get to Canada and be reunited with Vladimir Maksimovich. So that’s that. The nephew comes to Toronto. He gets the house, and I get the shaft. My fucking luck.”

Billy was as low as I’d ever seen him, so I did what girls in the movies did when their men were down. I put my arms around him and murmured encouragement. “You always tell me people make their own luck,” I said.

I was a naïve nineteen-year-old trying to make the man I loved feel better, but my words transformed Billy. It was as if I’d ignited a fuse in his brain and the possibilities were shooting forth. He pounded his fist into his hand. “You’re right. We make our own luck.” His eyes were burning, absorbed in a vision that only he could see. He grabbed me by the shoulders. “Babe, you’re going to have to make yourself scarce for a while.”

“What about the fireworks?”

“We’ll make it in time for the fireworks. I promise you.” His grip on my shoulders tightened.

“Billy, you’re hurting me.”

“If we don’t do this right, you’re going to be hurting a lot more. Now don’t ask questions. Just follow instructions. Go up to your room, stay there, and listen for the phone downstairs in the hall. If it rings, grab it — quickly. Tell whoever it is that Vova’s not here.”

“But if you and Vova are in the kitchen, he’ll hear the phone.”

“I’ll put the radio on the crazy station that plays Russian music and crank it up.”

“Billy, what are you going to do?”

He shrugged and gave me a sly smile. “Same thing I do every Saturday night — have a drink with my pal, Vova.”

“Toronto will never be the same again.”

— Phil Givens, Mayor of Toronto

I did what Billy told me to do. I went to my room, opened the window, and sat staring into the sultry twilight, listening. The weekly drinks were a ritual. Vova never opened a bottle until Saturday night, and then he drank till the bottle was empty. Billy’s job was to pour the vodka, listen, and get Vova safely into bed. It never took long. Vova put in long hours, and he drank fast. That night, I could hardly breathe as I listened to the mournful tunes of Russian radio and the voices of the two men: Billy’s baritone, playful, deferring; Vova’s bass, booming louder as the level of the bottle dropped. Our landlord’s conversational topics were limited: his hatred of all government; his contempt for rules and regulations; his pride in his self-reliance and accomplishments. As I heard the familiar litany, I relaxed. It was just another Saturday night, after all. Then the phone downstairs in the hall rang, shrill and insistent, and my heart began to pound. I raced to answer it. It was long distance. I broke the connection, and left the phone off the hook. In that instant, I knew that nothing would ever be the same again.

The kitchen door was closed. I crept down the hall and opened it a crack. Vova and Billy were sitting at the kitchen table. Vova was slumped over the table, his broad back toward me. Billy looked up when the door opened. I nodded, and Billy stood, went to Vova, dragged him from his chair, and began moving toward the basement stairs. The old man came to and started grumbling. “What the hell?”

“Time for bed,” Billy said, coolly.

Vova laughed. “Hey, you make mistake. That’s the basement way. What the hell? I’m the drunk one.” He laughed again; then Billy pushed him. For a beat there was silence, then a dull thud as Vova’s body hit the concrete at the bottom of the stairs. Billy disappeared after him. Mesmerized, I moved across the kitchen floor to the door that led to the cellar. I saw it all: Vova’s body splayed on the floor, twitching like a grotesque abandoned puppet; Billy sitting back on his heels, breathing hard and watching. When the twitching didn’t stop, Billy leaned forward and pinched Vova’s nostrils shut until finally he was still. As Billy came back up the stairs toward me, I felt a wash of relief; then his fingers were around my throat. The stench of death and rage that poured off his skin was overpowering.

“If you tell anybody what you saw, I’ll kill you,” he said. And I knew he would.

Billy was a man who kept his promises — all of them. That night, as Vova lay dead in the basement, Billy took me to the fireworks at the CNE. As the rockets ignited and threw Billy’s profile into sharp relief, he was so beautiful I couldn’t imagine my life without him. But the moment passed. The last exploding star arced across the sky, and the dark, cheerless night closed in on us. Coming home on the subway, we leaned against each other, exhausted by the events of the day. The house on Charles Street West was silent, and like children in a fairy tale who suddenly find themselves in peril, Billy and I held hands as we climbed the stairs. That night Billy made love to me with a violence that thrilled and terrified me. When he was through, he fell away like a sated animal and slept the sleep of the innocent.

I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. My mind was assaulted by images that I knew not even time could erase, and I was terrified that I might have, somehow, harmed my baby. When Billy’s breathing became deep and rhythmic, I slipped out of bed and started for the door. Obeying an impulse I didn’t understand, I took the shoebox that contained the spiral notebooks Billy had filled with his plans and ideas. Then I went to my room, packed my suitcase, and walked out the front door of the house on Charles Street West for the last time.

It’s always been easy for a woman to disappear in Toronto, especially if no one really wants to find her. The day after I left Billy, a childless widower in his late fifties hired me as his companion/housekeeper. Six weeks later I married him. When my son was born, I named him after my new husband: Mark Edward Lawton.

My husband was a generous and loving father, but naming a child after a man does not make the baby that man’s son. From the day he was born, Mark was Billy’s boy. As I knelt on the floor of my bedroom closet and pulled out the shoebox that held the spiral notebooks in which Billy had recorded his dreams and secrets, I knew that Billy’s boy needed his dad.

“It’s my city. I don’t have to consult anyone.”

— Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto

I didn’t go downtown often. I could buy everything I needed on the Danforth; besides, when I got off the subway at Bloor, I felt lost. Nothing stayed the same. It was as if a sorcerer who was never satisfied had taken over the old neighborhood, replacing the solid brick houses and tiny lawns with buildings that soared and shone brightly until the sorcerer waved them away and conjured up buildings that soared even higher and shone even more brightly.

It must be hard to keep focused in a world that’s constantly shifting. Perhaps that’s why Billy, in a gesture that the Toronto Star praised, located his offices on the site of the house that Vova left him. I thought I would feel a pang when I returned to the place I had run from in the early hours of that hot night of love and death. But I felt nothing. The sleek shops and gleaming high-rises that lined Charles Street West made it so uniformly perfect that there was nothing left to recognize.

Billy’s office was on the fifty-first floor. I was counting on the elevator ride to give me time to compose myself, but the smooth soundless glide was over in seconds, and when the doors opened, I found myself in Billy’s world. The reception area of Merchant Enterprises was designed to impress and intimidate: Everything was hard-surfaced, sharp-edged, and high gloss. The woman behind the reception desk fit right in. Whippet-thin, porcelain-skinned with red-red lips and red-red nails, her close-fitted sharkskin suit had been cut to showcase her perfection. She gave me a quick, assessing look, decided I wasn’t worth her time, and glared. When I asked to see Billy, she was brusque, almost rude. “Mr. Merchant isn’t available.”

“May I leave something for him?”

She nodded.

I pulled the spiral notebook from my purse, ripped out a page upon which Billy had written the words KILL VOVA a dozen times in the margins, and handed it to her. “Give this to Billy,” I said. “Tell him it’s from the woman who was standing beside him in the picture in the paper this morning.”

She held the grimy ripped page between her thumb and forefinger and looked at it with distaste.

“Better get a move on,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes at me, decided I meant business, and then pressed a button with one of her perfectly shaped nails. “Mr. Merchant, there’s a person here to see you. Her picture was in the paper with you this morning.”

“Nicely done,” I said. Then I sat down to wait. Time-wise, Billy’s sprint from his office to the reception area must have been a personal best, but he wasn’t even breathing hard. He looked me up and down, gave me his bullet-stopping grin, and held out his arms. “It’s been a long time.”

When I didn’t walk into his embrace, Billy turned to his receptionist. “Nova, cancel the rest of my appointments for this morning and hold my calls.” He placed his fingertips on my elbow. “Why don’t we go down to my office? I have a feeling you and I’ve got a few things to discuss.”

We were silent as Billy guided me down the hall, opened the door, and led me inside. For the first time since he’d spotted me in the reception area, Billy seemed uncertain. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, but you’ve always had a way of surprising me.”

“I’m not through yet,” I said. Two walls of Billy’s office were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the view of the city was spectacular. For a few moments, I looked down on Toronto, getting my bearings.

“So what’s the verdict?” Billy asked.

“It’s a great city,” I said. “But you always knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, and from up here you can’t smell the garbage.”

There was something different about Billy that I couldn’t put my finger on. Up close, there was no doubt that his hair was dyed, and the skin around his eyes had the strange tightness that comes from too much plastic surgery. But the change in Billy was more than cosmetic. Underneath the thousanddollar suit, there was a weariness that no amount of tailoring could disguise. And his voice was different — lower and flatter. It didn’t take long for the truth to hit me. For the first time in his life, Billy Merchant had stopped looking forward to the future. There were no more mountains for him to climb. Billy met my gaze. “Time marches on, eh?”

“Yes,” I said. “Time marches on.”

“You don’t look half bad for an old broad.”

I laughed. “Still a charmer.”

“So shall we cut to the chase?” Billy examined the paper I’d ripped from his notebook. “Kill Vova,” he said. His laugh was short and bitter. “Do you know I truly don’t remember writing those words?”

“You think I faked this?”

He shook his head. “No, that’s my handwriting. And I’m assuming there’s more where this came from.”

“You’re right. The morning I left, I took your notebooks with me. Anyone who wants to know the real story of the King of Charles Street West would find those notebooks very valuable.”

Billy’s gaze didn’t waver, but as he pulled out his checkbook and pen, his hands were shaking. “You’re not capable of pulling this off,” he said quietly. “There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who betray and the ones who get betrayed. If you were going to betray me, you would have done it long before now.” He tried a smile. “That doesn’t mean you’re not going to get a payoff. You deserve something for keeping quiet all these years. So who do I make the check out to?”

“Mark Edward Lawton,” I said.

Billy’s eyes narrowed. “Jesus, that little putz! What’s your connection with Mark Lawton?”

“He’s my son.”

Billy sighed. “No offense, but he’s a shit. Aggressive. Arrogant. Ruthless. He and I are in a bidding war over some warehouses. I was in a meeting with him all morning. I’ve got him beat, but he won’t back down.”

“He takes after his father,” I said.

Billy took the lid off his pen. “Who’s his father?”

I shrugged. “He’s a real killer. Aggressive. Arrogant. Ruthless. You know what they say, Billy. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, no matter what I did, I couldn’t keep Mark from turning out like his father.”

“Am I supposed to know this guy?”

“Every morning when you shave, you see him in your mirror.” Billy froze. “You’re not saying I’m your kid’s father. That’s impossible. I’ve been married three times. Never knocked up any of my wives. I’ve been tested. I don’t shoot blanks, but I’m not exactly a potentate.”

Despite everything, I laughed. “Oh god, Billy, do you even know what a potentate is?”

“Sure,” Billy said. “A guy who’s potent. Which apparently I am not.” He leaned across the desk. His face softened. “Or am I? Do you have proof?”

“No,” I said. “My husband was listed as Mark’s father on the birth certificate. But Mark was born six months after the night Vova died, and Mark wasn’t premature.”

“Those premature babies are little, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Mark weighed almost ten pounds. He was a full-term baby. I was three months pregnant the night I left the house on Charles Street West.”

I could see the hope in Billy’s eyes. “Jesus, I can’t believe this. I always thought that when I cashed in my chips, it would be the end of Merchant Enterprises, but if I have a son... that would change everything.”

“It could,” I agreed.

“I’ll get one of those paternity tests,” Billy said.

“Be my guest. Or you could just look into Mark’s eyes or listen closely to his voice. He’s your boy, Billy.”

Billy shook his head in wonder. “I have a son.”

“Are you going to hand out cigars?” I said.

He grinned. “Why not? Better late than never, eh? At last, the King of Charles Street West has an heir.” He came around the desk and took my hand. For a moment, I glimpsed the Billy I loved. “So when are we going to tell my boy the truth? I’m trying not to be a prick here, but Mark should know who his real father is.”

I felt a stab of panic. “I’ll be taking a chance,” I said. “I’ve heard Mark talk about you, and what he says isn’t flattering. If he discovers you’re his father, I could lose him.”

“That’s not going to happen. Mark may be a putz, but he’s smart. You and I are a great package deal. I’ve got money, and you’ve got class. He won’t walk away from that.”

“Guaranteed?”

Billy reached out and stroked my cheek. “Babe, there are no guarantees in life. It’s like I always say, You take a chance the day you’re born. Why stop now?”

I removed his hand from my cheek. “Actually, the first person to say that line was Barbara Stanwyck in Golden Boy. Maybe you should start acknowledging her.”

Billy raised an eyebrow. “Why would I do that? It’s my signature line.” He held out his arm. “Time to move, our son is waiting.” He took a camera from a shelf near the door.

“Planning to take a family portrait?” I said.

Billy slung the camera around his neck. “This morning when I had that meeting with Mark, I noticed this abandoned shoe factory near his office. It’s a rat-trap, but a great location. If we’re going to be in the neighborhood, I might as well snap some pictures. People would pay big money to be that close to the lake.” His eyes were sparkling with the old lust for the future. “Do you know what a pied-à-terre is?”

“It’s a small second home rich people have in cities they love.”

Billy nodded admiringly. “You always were sharp. Anyway, everybody loves Toronto. Mark and I could turn that shoe factory into a bunch of little condos — except instead of calling them condos, we’ll call them pieds-à-terre. If we give our little shoeboxes a French name, people will be creaming their jeans to get in on the ground floor.” Billy smoothed my hair. “We’re going to make a killing. Now come on, babe. Time for you to introduce me to my son.”

Then Billy and I, the betrayer and the betrayed, linked arms and together we rode the elevator that took us to the shining doors that opened to the city. When we stepped outside, Billy handed the doorman his camera and a twenty-dollar bill. “Take our picture, would you?” he said. “And be sure to get a nice shot of the building.”

As we stepped into position, I put my lips next to Billy’s ear and whispered, “The last person to take a picture of the two of us together was Vova.”

Billy turned and craned his neck so he could see the top of his office tower. “Wouldn’t that old man be amazed if he could see what I’ve done?”

As he had so often, Billy took my breath away. For a moment, I felt light-headed. I took his arm and inhaled deeply, and the moment passed. Even on the tenth day of a garbage strike, there’s something restorative about the smell of Toronto in summer. It’s as seductive as the scent of a lover you can never really bring yourself to leave.

Walking the dog by Peter Robinson

The Beach

The dog days came to the Beaches in August and the boardwalk was crowded. Even the dog owners began to complain about the heat. Laura Francis felt as if she had been locked in the bathroom after a hot shower as she walked Big Ears down to the fenced-off compound on Kew Beach, where he could run free. She said hello to the few people she had seen there before while Big Ears sniffed the shrubbery and moved on to play with a Labrador retriever.

“They seem to like each other,” said a voice beside her.

Laura turned and saw a man she thought she recognized, but not from the Beaches. She couldn’t say where. He was handsome in a chiseled, matinee-idol sort of way, and the tight jeans and white T-shirt did justice to his well-toned muscles and tapered waist. Where did she know him from?

“You must excuse Big Ears,” she said. “He’s such a womanizer.”

“It’s nothing Rain can’t handle.”

“Rain? That’s an unusual name for a dog.”

He shrugged. “Is it? It was raining the day I picked her up from the Humane Society. Raining cats and dogs. Anyway, you’re one to talk, naming dogs after English children’s book characters.”

Laura felt herself flush. “My mother used to read them to me when I was little. I grew up in England.”

“I can tell by the accent. I’m Ray, by the way. Ray Lanagan.”

“Laura Francis. Pleased to meet you.”

“Laura? After the movie?”

“After my grandmother.”

“Pity. You do look a bit like Gene Tierney, you know.”

Laura tried to remember whether Gene Tierney was the one with an overbite or the large breasts and tight sweaters. As she had both, herself, she supposed it didn’t really matter. She blushed again. “Thank you.”

They stood in an awkward, edgy silence while the dogs played on around them. Then, all of a sudden, Laura remembered where she had seen Ray before. Jesus, of course, it was him, the one from the TV commercial, the one for some sort of male aftershave or deodorant where he was stripped to the waist, wearing tight jeans like today. She’d seen him in a magazine too. She had even fantasized about him, imagined it was him there in bed with her instead of Lloyd grunting away on top of her as if he were running a marathon.

“What is it?” Ray asked.

She brushed a strand of hair from her hot cheek. “Nothing. I just remembered where I’ve seen you before. You’re an actor, aren’t you?”

“For my sins.”

“Are you here to make a movie?” It wasn’t as stupid a question as it might have sounded. The studios were just down the road and Toronto had almost as big a reputation for being Hollywood North as Vancouver. Laura ought to know; Lloyd was always telling her about it since he ran a post-production company.

“No,” Ray said. “I’m resting, as we say in the business.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve got a couple of things lined up,” he went on. “Commercials, a small part in a new CBC legal drama. That sort of thing. And whatever comes my way by chance.”

“It sounds exciting.”

“Not really. It’s a living. To be honest, it’s mostly a matter of hanging around while the techies get the sound and light right. But what about you? What do you do?”

“Me?” she pointed her thumb at her chest. “Nothing. I mean, I’m just a housewife.” It was true, she supposed: “Housewife” was about the only way she could describe herself. But she wasn’t even that. Alexa did all the housework, and Paul handled the garden. Laura had even hired a company to come in and clear the snow. So what did she do with her time, apart from shop and walk Big Ears? Sometimes she made dinner, but more often than not she made reservations. There were so many good restaurants on her stretch of Queen Street East — anything you wanted, Japanese, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Italian — that it seemed a shame to waste them.

The hazy bright sun beat down mercilessly and the water looked like a ruffled blue bedsheet beyond the wire fence. Laura was feeling embarrassed now that she had openly declared her uselessness.

“Would you like to go for a drink?” Ray asked. “I’m not coming on to you or anything, but it is a real scorcher.”

Laura felt her heart give a little flutter and, if she were honest with herself, a pleasurable warmth spread through her lower belly.

“Okay. Yes, I mean, sure,” she said. “Look, it’s a bit of a hassle going to a café or a pub with the dogs, right? Why don’t you come up to the house? It’s not far. Silver Birch. There’s cold beer in the fridge and I left the air-conditioning on.”

Ray looked at her. He certainly had beautiful eyes, she thought, and they seemed especially steely blue in this kind of light. Blue eyes and black hair, a devastating combination. “Sure,” he said. “If it’s okay. Lead on.”

They put Big Ears and Rain on leashes and walked up to Queen Street, which was crowded with tourists and locals pulling kids in bright-colored carts, all OshKosh B’Gosh and Birkenstocks. People browsed in shop windows, sat outdoors at Starbucks in shorts drinking their Frappucinos and reading the Globe and Mail, and there was a line outside the ice-cream shop. The traffic was moving at a crawl, but you could smell the coconut sunblock over the gas fumes.

Laura’s large detached house stood at the top of a long flight of steps sheltered by overhanging shrubbery, and once they were off the street, nobody could see them. Not that it mattered, Laura told herself. It was all innocent enough.

It was a relief to get inside, and even the dogs seemed to collapse in a panting heap and enjoy the cool air.

“Nice place,” said Ray, looking around the modern kitchen, with its central island and pots and pans hanging from hooks overhead.

Laura opened the fridge. “Beer? Coke? Juice?”

“I’ll have a beer, if that’s okay,” said Ray.

“Beck’s all right?”

“Perfect.”

She opened Ray a Beck’s and poured herself a glass of orange juice, the kind with extra pulp. Her heart was beating fast. Perhaps it was the heat, the walk home? She watched Ray drink his beer from the bottle, his Adam’s apple bobbing. When she took a sip of juice, a little dribbled out of her mouth and down her chin. Before she could make a move to get a napkin and wipe it off, Ray had moved forward just as far as it took, bent toward her, put his tongue on the curve under her lower lip, and licked it off.

She felt his heat and shivered. “Ray, I’m not sure... I mean, I don’t think we should... I...”

The first kiss nearly drew blood. The second one did. Laura fell back against the fridge and felt the Mickey Mouse magnet that held the weekly to-do list digging into her shoulder. She experienced a moment of panic as Ray ripped open her Holt Renfrew blouse. What did she think she was doing, inviting a strange man into her home like this? He could be a serial killer or something. But fear quickly turned to pleasure when his mouth found her nipple. She moaned and pulled him against her and spread her legs apart. His hand moved up under her long, loose skirt, caressing the bare flesh of her thighs and rubbing between her legs.

Laura had never been so wet in her life, had never wanted it so much, and she didn’t want to wait. Somehow, she maneuvered them toward the dining room table and tugged at his belt and zipper as they stumbled backwards. She felt the edge of the table bump against the backs of her thighs and eased herself up on it, sweeping a couple of Waterford crystal glasses to the floor as she did so. The dogs barked. Ray was good and hard and he pulled her panties aside as she guided him smoothly inside her.

“Fuck me, Ray,” she breathed. “Fuck me.”

And he fucked her. He fucked her until she hammered with her fists on the table and a Royal Doulton cup and saucer joined the broken crystal on the floor. The dogs howled. Laura howled. When she sensed that Ray was about to come, she pulled him closer and said, “Bite me.”

And he bit her.

“I really think we should have that dog put down,” said Lloyd after dinner that evening. “For God’s sake, biting you like that. It could have given you rabies or something.”

“Don’t be silly. Big Ears isn’t in the least bit rabid. It was an accident, that’s all. I was just a bit too rough with him.”

“It’s the thin end of the wedge. Next time it’ll be the postman, or some kid in the street. Think what’ll happen then.”

“We are not having Big Ears put down, and that’s final. I’ll be more careful in future.”

“You just make sure you are.” Lloyd paused, then asked, “Have you thought any more about that other matter I mentioned?”

Oh God, Laura thought, not again. Lloyd hated their house, hated the Beaches, hated Toronto. He wanted to sell up and move to Vancouver, live in Kitsilano or out on Point Grey. No matter that it rained there 364 days out of every year and all you could get to eat was sushi and alfalfa sprouts. Laura didn’t want to live in Lotus Land. She was happy where she was. Even happier since that afternoon.

As Lloyd droned on and on, she drifted into pleasant reminiscences of Ray’s body on hers, the hard, sharp edges of his white teeth as they closed on the soft part of her neck. They had done it again, up in the bed this time, her and Lloyd’s bed. It was slower, less urgent, more gentle, but if anything, it was even better. She could still remember the warm ripples and floods of pleasure, like breaking waves running up through her loins and her belly, and she could feel a pleasant soreness between her legs even now, as she sat listening to Lloyd outline the advantages of moving the post-production company to Vancouver. Plenty of work there, he said. Hollywood connections. But if they moved, she would never see Ray again. It seemed more imperative than ever now to put a stop to it. She had to do something.

“I really don’t want to talk about it, darling,” she said.

“You never do.”

“You know what I think of Vancouver.”

“It doesn’t rain that much.”

“It’s not just that. It’s... Oh, can’t we leave it be?”

Lloyd put his hand up. “All right,” he said. “All right. Subject closed for tonight.” He got up and walked over to the drinks cabinet. “I feel like a cognac.”

Laura had that sinking feeling. She knew what was coming.

“Where is it?” Lloyd asked.

“Where is what, darling?”

“My snifter, my favorite brandy snifter. The one my father bought me.”

“Oh, that,” said Laura, remembering the shattered glass she had swept up from the hardwood floor. “I meant to tell you. I’m sorry, but there was an accident. The dishwasher.”

Lloyd turned to look at her in disbelief. “You put my favorite crystal snifter in the dishwasher?”

“I know. I’m sorry. I was in a hurry.”

Lloyd frowned. “A hurry? You? What do you ever have to be in a hurry about? Walking the bloody dog?”

Laura tried to laugh it off. “If only you knew half the things I had to do around the place, darling.”

Lloyd continued to look at her. His eyes narrowed. “You’ve had quite a day, haven’t you?” he said.

Laura sighed. “I suppose so. It’s just been one of those days.”

“This’ll have to do then,” he said, pouring a generous helping of Remy into a different crystal snifter.

It was just as good as the one she had broken, Laura thought. In fact, it was probably more expensive. But it wasn’t his. It wasn’t the one his miserable old bastard of a father, God rot his soul, had bought him.

Lloyd sat down and sipped his cognac thoughtfully. The next time he spoke, Laura could see the way he was looking at her over the top of his glass. That look. “How about an early night?” he said.

Laura’s stomach lurched. She put her hand to her forehead. “Oh, not tonight, darling. I’m sorry, but I have a terrible headache.”

She didn’t see Ray for nearly a week and she was going crazy with fear that he’d left town, maybe gone to Hollywood to be a star, that he’d just used her and discarded her the way men did. After all, they had only been together the once, and he hadn’t told her he loved her or anything. All they had done was fuck. They didn’t really know one another at all. They hadn’t even exchanged phone numbers. She just had this absurd feeling that they were meant for each other, that it was destiny. A foolish fantasy, no doubt, but one that hurt like a knife jabbing into her heart every day she didn’t see him.

Then one day, there he was at the beach again, as if he’d never been away. The dogs greeted each other like long lost friends while Laura tried to play it cool as lust burned through her like a forest fire.

“Hello, stranger,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “A job came up. Shampoo commercial. On-the-spot decision. Yes or no. I had to work on location in Niagara Falls. You’re not mad at me, are you? It’s not as if I could phone you and let you know or anything.”

“Niagara Falls? How romantic.”

“The bride’s second great disappointment.”

“What?”

“Oscar Wilde. What he said.”

Laura giggled and put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, I see.”

“I’d love to have taken you with me. I know it wouldn’t have been a disappointment for us. I missed you.”

Laura blushed. “I missed you too. Want a cold beer?”

“Look,” said Ray, “why don’t we go to my place. It’s only a top floor flat, but it’s air-conditioned, and...”

“And what?”

“Well, you know, the neighbors...”

Laura couldn’t tell him this, but she had gotten such an incredible rush out of doing it with Ray in her own bed that she couldn’t stand the thought of going to his flat, no matter how nice and cool it was. Though she had changed and washed the sheets, she imagined she could still smell him when she lay her head down for the night, and now she wanted her bed to absorb even more of him.

“Don’t worry about the neighbors,” she said. “They’re all out during the day anyway, and the nannies have to know how to be discreet if they want to stay in this country.”

“Are you sure?”

“Perfectly.”

And so it went on. Once, twice, sometimes three times a week, they went back to Laura’s big house on Silver Birch. Sometimes they couldn’t wait to get upstairs, so they did it on the dining room table like the first time, but mostly they did it in the king-size bed, becoming more and more adventurous and experimental as they got to know one another’s bodies and pleasure zones. Laura found a little pain quite stimulating sometimes, and Ray didn’t mind obliging. They sampled all the positions and all the orifices, and when they had exhausted them, they started over again. They talked too, a lot, between bouts. Laura told Ray how unhappy she was with her marriage, and Ray told her how his ex-wife had ditched him for his accountant because his career wasn’t exactly going in the same direction as Russell Crowe’s, as his bank account made abundantly clear.

Then one day, when they had caught their breath after a particularly challenging position that wasn’t even in the Kama Sutra, Laura said, “Lloyd wants to move to Vancouver. He won’t stop going on about it. And he never gives up until he gets his way.”

Ray turned over and leaned on his elbow. “You can’t leave,” he said.

It was as simple as that. You can’t leave. She looked at him and beamed. “I know,” she said. “You’re right. I can’t.”

“Divorce him. Live with me. I want us to have a normal life, go places together like everyone else, go out for dinner, go to the movies, take vacations.”

It was everything she wanted too. “Do you mean it, Ray?”

“Of course I mean it.” He paused. “I love you, Laura.”

Tears came to her eyes. “Oh my God.” She kissed him and told him she loved him too, and a few minutes later they resumed the conversation. “I can’t divorce him,” Laura said.

“Why on earth not?”

“For one thing, he’s a Catholic. He’s not practicing or anything, but he doesn’t believe in divorce.” Or more importantly, Laura thought, his poor dead father, who was devout in a bugger-the-choirboy sort of way, didn’t believe in it.

“And...?”

“Well, there’s the money.”

“What about the money?”

“It’s mine. I mean, I inherited it from my father. He was an inventor and he came up with one of those simple little additives that keep things fresh for years. Anyway, he made a lot of money, and I was his only child, so I got it all. I’ve been financing Lloyd’s post-production career from the beginning, before it started doing as well as it is now. If we divorced, with these no-fault laws we’ve got now, he’d get half of everything.

That’s not fair. It should be all mine by rights.”

“I don’t care about the money. It’s you I want.”

She touched his cheek. “That’s sweet, Ray, and I wouldn’t care if we didn’t have two cents between us as long as we were together, honest I wouldn’t. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The money’s there. And everything I have is yours.”

“So what’s the alternative?”

She put her hand on his chest and ran it over the soft hair down to his flat stomach and beyond, kissed the eagle tattoo on his arm. She remembered it from the TV commercial and the magazine, had thought it was sexy even then. The dogs stirred for a moment at the side of the bed, then went back to sleep. They’d had a lot of exercise that morning. “There’s the house too,” Laura went on, “and Lloyd’s life insurance. Double indemnity, or something like that. I don’t really understand these things, but it’s really quite a lot of money. Enough to live on for a long time, maybe somewhere in the Caribbean? Or Europe. I’ve always wanted to live in Paris.”

“What are you saying?”

Laura paused. “What if Lloyd had an accident?... No, hear me out. Just suppose he had an accident. We’d have everything then. The house, the insurance, the business, my inheritance. It would all be ours. And we could be together for always.”

“An accident? You’re talking about—”

She put her finger to his lips. “No, darling, don’t say it. Don’t say the word.”

But whether he said it or not, she knew, as she knew he did, what the word was, and it sent a delightful shiver up her spine. After a while, Ray said, “I might know someone. I did an unusual job once, impersonated a police officer in Montreal, a favor for someone who knew someone whose son was in trouble. You don’t need to know who he is, but he’s connected. He was very pleased with the way things worked out and he said if ever I needed anything...”

“Well, there you are then,” said Laura, sitting up. “Do you know how to find this man? Do you think he could arrange something?”

Ray took her left nipple between his thumb and forefinger and squeezed. “I think so,” he said. “But it won’t be easy. I’d have to go to Montreal. Make contact. Right at the moment, though, something a bit more urgent has come up.”

Laura saw what he meant. She slid down and took him in her mouth.

Time moved on, as it does. The days cooled, but Ray and Laura’s passion didn’t. Just after Thanksgiving, the weather forecasters predicted a big drop in temperature and encouraged Torontonians to wrap up warm.

Laura and Ray didn’t need any warm wrapping. The rose-patterned duvet lay on the floor at the bottom of the bed, and they were bathed in sweat, panting, as Laura straddled Ray and worked them both to a shuddering climax. Instead of rolling off him when they had finished, this time Laura stayed on top and leaned forward, her hard nipples brushing his chest. They hadn’t seen each other for a week because Ray had finally met his contact in Montreal.

“Did you talk to that man you know?” she asked after she had caught her breath.

Ray linked his hands behind his head. “Yes,” he said.

“Does he know what... I mean, what we want him to do?”

“He knows.”

“To take his time and wait for absolutely the right opportunity?”

“He won’t do it himself. The man he’ll put on it is a professional, honey. He knows.”

“And will he do it when the right time comes? It must seem like an accident.”

“He’ll do it. Don’t worry.”

“You know,” Laura said, “you can stay all night if you want. Lloyd’s away in Vancouver. Probably looking for property.”

“Are you sure?”

“He won’t be back till Thursday. We could just stay in bed the whole week.” Laura shivered.

“Cold, honey?”

“A little. Winter’s coming. Can’t you feel the chill?”

“Now that you mention it...”

Laura jumped out of bed and skipped over to the far wall. “No wonder,” she said. “The thermostat’s set really low. Lloyd must have turned it down before he went away.” She turned it up and dashed back, jumped on the bed, and straddled Ray. She gasped as he thrust himself inside her again. So much energy. This time he didn’t let her stay in control. He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her over on her back, in the good old missionary position, and pounded away so hard Laura thought the bed was going to break. This time, as Laura reached the edges of her orgasm, she thought that if she died at that moment, in that state of bliss, she would be happy forever. Then the thermostat clicked in, the house exploded, and Laura got her wish.

TWO DOGS PERISH IN BEACHES GAS EXPLOSION, Lloyd Francis read in the Toronto Star the following morning. HOUSE-OWNERS ALSO DIE IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT. Well, they got that wrong on two counts, thought Lloyd. He was sitting over a cappuccino in his shirtsleeves at an outdoor café on Robson Street in Vancouver. While the cold snap had descended on the east with a vengeance, the West Coast was enjoying record temperatures for the time of year. And no rain.

Lloyd happened to know that only one of the house’s owners had died in the explosion, and that it hadn’t been an accident. Far from it. Lloyd had planned the whole thing very carefully from the moment he had found out that his wife was enjoying a grand passion with an out-of-work actor. That hadn’t been difficult. For a start, she had begun washing the bedsheets and pillowcases almost every day, though she usually left the laundry to Alexa. Despite her caution, he had once seen blood on the sheets. Laura had also been unusually reluctant to have sex with him, and on the few occasions he had persuaded her to comply, it had been obvious to him that her thoughts were elsewhere and that, in the crude vernacular, he had been getting sloppy seconds.

Not that Laura hadn’t been careful. Lord only knew, she had probably stood under the shower for hours. But he could still tell. There was another man’s smell about her. And then, of course, he had simply lain in wait one day and seen them returning together from the beach. After that, it hadn’t been hard to find out where the man, Ray Lanagan, lived, and what he did, or didn’t do. Lloyd was quite pleased with his detective abilities. Maybe he was in the wrong profession. He had shown himself to be pretty good at murder too, and he was certain that no one would be able to prove that the explosion in which his wife and her lover had died had been anything but a tragic accident. Things like that happened every year in Toronto when the heat came on. A slow leak, building over time, a stray spark or naked flame, and BANG!

Lloyd sipped his cappuccino and took a bite of his croissant.

“You seem preoccupied, darling,” said Anne-Marie, looking lovely in a low-cut white top and a short denim skirt opposite him, her dark hair framing the delicate oval face, those tantalizing ruby lips. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” said Lloyd. “Nothing at all. But I think I might have to fly back to Toronto today. Just for a short while.”

Anne-Marie’s face dropped. She was so expressive, showing joy or disappointment, pleasure or pain, without guile. This time it was clearly disappointment. “Oh, must you?”

“I’m afraid I must,” he said, taking her hand and caressing it. “I have some important business to take care of. But I promise you I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“And we’ll look into getting that house we saw near Spanish Beach?”

“I’ll put in an offer before I leave,” Lloyd said. “It’ll have to be in your name, though.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I know. Tax reasons.”

“Exactly. Good girl.” It was only a little white lie, Lloyd told himself. But it wouldn’t look good if he bought a new house in a faraway city the day after his wife died in a tragic explosion. This called for careful planning and pacing. Anne-Marie would understand. Marital separations were complicated and difficult, as complex as the tax laws, and all that really mattered was that she knew he loved her. After the funeral, he might feel the need to “get away for a while,” and then perhaps Toronto would remind him too much of Laura, so it would be understandable if he moved somewhere else, say Vancouver. After a decent period of mourning, it would also be quite acceptable to “meet someone,” Anne-Marie, for example, and start anew, which was exactly what Lloyd Francis had in mind.

Detective Bobby Aiken didn’t like the look of the report that had landed on his desk, didn’t like the look of it at all. He worked out of police headquarters at 4 °College Street, downtown, and under normal circumstances, he would never have heard of Laura Francis and Ray Lanagan. The Beaches was 55 Division’s territory. But these weren’t normal circumstances, and one of Aiken’s jobs was to have a close look at borderline cases, where everything looked kosher but someone thought it wasn’t. This time it was a young, ambitious beat cop who desperately wanted to work Homicide. There was just something about it, he’d said, something that didn’t ring true, and the more Bobby Aiken looked at the files, the more he knew what the kid was talking about.

The forensics were clean, of course. The fire department and the Centre for Forensic Sciences had done sterling work there, as usual. These gas explosions were unfortunately commonplace in some of the older houses, where the owners might not have had their furnaces serviced or replaced for a long time, as had happened at the house on Silver Birch. An accident waiting to happen.

But police work, thank God, wasn’t only a matter of forensics. There were other considerations here. Three of them.

Again, Aiken went through the files and jotted down his thoughts. Outside on College Street it was raining, and when he looked out of his window all he could see were the tops of umbrellas. A streetcar rumbled by, sparks flashing from the overhead wire. Cars splashed up water from the gutters.

First of all, Aiken noted, the victims hadn’t been husband and wife, as the investigators and media had first thought. The husband, Lloyd Francis, had flown back from a business trip in Vancouver — giving himself a nice alibi, by the way — as soon as he had heard the news the following day, and he was doubly distraught to find out that not only was his wife dead, but that she had died in bed with another man.

No, Lloyd had said, he had no idea who the man was, but it hadn’t taken a Sherlock Holmes to discover that his name was Ray Lanagan, and that he was a sometime actor and sometime petty crook, with a record of minor fraud and con jobs. Lanagan had been clean for the past three years, relying mostly on TV commercials and bit parts in series like Da Vinci’s Inquest, before the CBC canned it, and The Murdoch Mysteries. But Aiken knew that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t been up to something. He just hadn’t been caught. Well, he had definitely been up to one thing — screwing Lloyd Francis’s wife — and the penalty for that had been far more severe than for any other offense he had ever committed. He might have been after the broad’s money too, Aiken speculated, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to get that now.

The second thing that bothered Aiken was the insurance and the money angle in general. Not only were the house and Laura Francis’s life insured for hefty sums, but there was the post-production company, which was just starting to turn a good profit, and Laura’s inheritance, which was still a considerable sum, tied up in stocks and bonds and other investments. Whoever got his hands on all of that would be very rich indeed.

And then there was Lloyd Francis himself. The young beat cop who rang the alarm bell had thought there was something odd about him when he had accompanied Lloyd to the ruins of the house. Nothing obvious, nothing he could put his finger on, but just that indefinable policeman’s itch, the feeling you get when it doesn’t all add up. Aiken hadn’t talked to Lloyd Francis yet, but he was beginning to think it was about time.

Because finally there was the one clear and indisputable fact that linked everything else, like the magnet that makes a pattern out of iron filings: He found out that Lloyd Francis had spent five years working as a heating and air-conditioning serviceman from just after he left school until his early twenties. And if you knew that much about gas furnaces, Aiken surmised, then you didn’t have to bloody well be there when one blew up.

Lloyd felt a little shaken after the policeman’s visit, but he still believed he’d held his own. One thing was clear, and that was that they had done a lot of checking, not only into his background, but also into the dead man’s. What on earth had Laura seen in such a loser? The man had petty criminal stamped all over him.

But what had worried Lloyd most of all was the knowledge that the detective, Aiken, seemed to have about his own past, especially his heating and air-conditioning work. Not only did the police know he had done that for five years, but they seemed to know every job he had been on, every problem he had solved, the brand name of every furnace he had ever serviced. It was all rather overwhelming. Lloyd hadn’t lied about it, hadn’t tried to deny any of it — that would have been a sure way of sharpening their suspicions even more — but the truth painted the picture of a man easily capable of rigging the thermostat so that it blew up the house when someone turned it on.

Luckily, Lloyd knew they had absolutely no forensic evidence. If there had been any, which he doubted, it would have been obliterated by the fire. All he had to do was stick to his story, and they would never be able to prove a thing. Suspicion was all very well, but it wasn’t sufficient grounds for a murder charge.

After the funeral, he had lain low in a sublet condominium at Victoria Park and Danforth, opposite Shopper’s World. At night the streets were noisy and a little edgy, Lloyd felt, the kind of area where you might easily get mugged if you weren’t careful. More than once he’d had the disconcerting feeling that he was being followed, but he told himself not to be paranoid. He wouldn’t be here for long. After a suitable period of mourning he would go to Vancouver and decide he couldn’t face returning to the city where his poor wife met such a terrible death. He still had a few colleagues who would regret his decision to leave, perhaps, but there wasn’t really anybody left in Toronto to care that much about Lloyd Francis and what happened to him. At the moment, they all thought he was a bit depressed, “getting over his loss.” Soon he would be free to “meet” Anne-Marie and start a new life. The money should be all his by then too, once the lawyers and accountants had finished with it. Never again would he have to listen to his wife reminding him where his wealth and success came from.

The Silver Birch explosion had not only destroyed Lloyd’s house and wife, it had also destroyed his car, a silver SUV, and he wasn’t going to bother replacing it until he moved to Vancouver, where he’d probably buy a nice little red sports car. He still popped into the studios occasionally, mostly to see how things were going, and luckily his temporary accommodation was close to the Victoria Park subway. He soon found he didn’t mind taking the TTC to work and back. In fact, he rather enjoyed it. They played classical music at the station to keep the hooligans away. If he got a seat on the train, he would read a book, and if he didn’t, he would drift off into thoughts of his sweet Anne-Marie.

And so life went on, waiting, waiting for the time when he could decently, and without arousing suspicion, make his move. The policeman didn’t return, obviously realizing that he had no chance of making a case against Lloyd without a confession, which he knew he wouldn’t get. It was late November now, arguably one of the grimmest months in Toronto, but at least the snow hadn’t come yet, just one dreary gray day after another.

One such day Lloyd stood on the crowded eastbound platform at the St. George subway station wondering if he dare make his move as early as next week. At least, he thought, he could “go away for a while,” maybe even until after Christmas. Surely that would be acceptable by now? People would understand that he couldn’t bear to spend his first Christmas without Laura in Toronto.

He had just decided that he would do it when he saw the train come tearing into the station. In his excitement at the thought of seeing Anne-Marie again so soon, a sort of unconscious sense of urgency had carried him a little closer to the edge of the platform than he should have been, and the crowds jostled behind him. He felt something hard jab into the small of his back, and the next thing he knew, his legs buckled and he pitched forward. He couldn’t stop himself. He toppled in front of the oncoming train before the driver could do a thing. His last thought was of Anne-Marie waving goodbye to him at Vancouver International Airport, then the subway train smashed into him and its wheels shredded him to pieces.

Someone in the crowd screamed and people started running back toward the exits. The frail-looking old man with the walking stick who had been standing directly behind Lloyd turned to stroll away through the chaos, but before he could get very far, two scruffy-looking young men emerged from the throng and took him by each arm. “No you don’t,” one of them said. “This way.” And they led him up to the street.

Detective Bobby Aiken played with the worry beads one of his colleagues had brought him back from a trip to Istanbul. Not that he was worried about anything. It was just a habit, and he found it very calming. It had, in fact, been a very good day.

Not because of Lloyd Francis. Aiken didn’t really care one way or another about Francis’s death. In his eyes, though he hadn’t been able to prove it, Francis had been a cold-blooded murderer and he had received no less than he deserved. No, the thing that pleased Aiken was that the undercover detectives he had detailed to keep an eye on Francis had picked up Mickey the Croaker disguised as an old man at the St. George subway station, having seen him push Francis with the sharp end of his walking stick.

Organized Crime had been after Mickey for many years now but had never managed to get anything on him. They knew that he usually worked for one of the big crime families in Montreal, and the way things were looking, he was just about ready to cut a deal: amnesty and the witness relocation plan for everything he knew about the Montreal operation, from the hits he had made to where the bodies were buried. Organized Crime were creaming their jeans over their good luck. It could mean a promotion for Bobby Aiken.

The only thing that puzzled Aiken was why? What had Lloyd Francis done to upset the mob? There was something missing, and it irked him that he might never uncover it now that the main players were dead. Mickey the Croaker knew nothing, of course. He had simply been obeying orders, and killing Lloyd Francis meant nothing more to him than swatting a fly. Francis’s murder was more than likely connected with the post-production company, Aiken decided. It was well-known that the mob had its fingers in the movie business. A bit more digging might uncover something more specific, but Aiken didn’t have the time. Besides, what did it matter now? Even if he didn’t understand how all the pieces fit together, things had worked out the right way. Lanagan and Francis were dead and Mickey the Croaker was about to sing. It was a shame about the wife, Laura. She was a young, good-looking woman, from what Aiken had been able to tell, and she shouldn’t have died so young. But those were the breaks. If she hadn’t being playing the beast with two backs with Lanagan in her own bed, for Christ’s sake, then she might still be alive today.

It was definitely a good day, Aiken decided, pushing the papers aside. Even the weather had improved. He looked out of the window. Indian summer had come to Toronto in November. The sun glinted on the apartment windows at College and Yonge, and the office workers were out on the streets, men without jackets and women in sleeveless summer dresses. A streetcar rumbled by, heading for Main station. Main. Out near the Beaches. The boardwalk and the Queen Street cafés would be crowded, and the dog-walkers would be out in force. Aiken thought maybe he’d take Jasper out there for a run later. You never knew who you might meet when you were walking your dog on the beach.

Numbskulls by George Elliott Clarke

Filmsong by Pasha Malla

Little India

The door of the Taj opened and two men came in. They moved past Aziz and stood at the sweets counter in the back. The only other customer was some old guy waiting for a take-out order. He was sitting at a table near the door, watching Gerrard Street through the window. It was close to 6 o’clock and getting dark. The streetlamps had come on and cars flashed by hissing through the slush with their lights on.

A young girl was working. Thursday nights were quiet. It was just her up front and her mum cooking in the back. She glided over and leaned her elbows on the counter.

“Ras malai,” said one of the men.

“With saffron,” said the other.

“We don’t do them with saffron,” said the girl. “Sorry.”

“What the hell, don’t do them with saffron,” said the first man. His voice was loud now. “First it’s minus bloody twenty-thirty degrees in your country. Benchod, you freeze your bloody nuts off! Now we ask ras malai with saffron, but you say no saffron.”

The girl whisked a stray bit of hair back from her forehead. “Yeah, no saffron. We’ve only got plain. You should try the gulab jamun. They’re good. Really fresh.”

The second man whispered something to the first man. Aziz scooped rogan josh into his mouth with his fingers, but didn’t take his eyes off the two men. They were dressed similarly: collared shirts — tucked into their jeans and unbuttoned to reveal great thrusts of chest hair — and leather jackets. The louder one had a mustache. The other didn’t. They both wore red threads tied around their wrists.

The second man, the clean-shaven, quiet one, said, “Gulab jamun, too sweet.”

“Try the jalebi,” said the girl.

The first one made a noise. “Benchod, even sweeter! You have ras malai, you add saffron, not too sweet. We want not too sweet.” He turned to Aziz. His eyes went from Aziz’s face to a poster above the table where Aziz was eating. On it was the actor Shahrukh Khan, mugging for the camera in sunglasses. “Is it right, Shahrukh?”

“Sorry?” said Aziz.

“Come on, Shahrukh.” He was getting into it now. “You want sweets, Shahrukh? You’re a film hero, which sweets will you order? You eat jalebi?”

Aziz looked at the girl on the other side of the counter. She looked back.

“Um,” said Aziz.

The two men advanced toward him. “What, Shahrukh?” said the one with the mustache. “Come on, yaar.”

The other one said something in what Aziz guessed was Marathi. Both men laughed. They were at his table now. The loud one poked his tin plate with a fingertip. “You eat meat, Shahrukh? You are Mussulman, just like the real Shahrukh?”

Aziz glanced down at his plate, at the half-eaten lamb. He looked up at the one man, then the other. They leaned toward him. There was beer on their breath. When the one with the mustache breathed his nose made a whistling noise.

Then a bell rang from the back. “Chicken tikka, naan, mattar paneer,” called the girl.

The old guy at the front of the restaurant got up. Aziz and the two men watched him move past their table and collect a paper bag from the girl. “Thanks,” he said.

The old guy left. Outside the snow was blowing in golden squalls in the light of the streetlamps. The two men turned back to Aziz. “Shahrukh,” said the loud, mustachioed one, “we are looking for a journalist. Do you know this journalist? His name is Meerza.”

“Shahrukhji,” said the other, “we work for a Mussulman. In Mumbai. We are not communalists. Our friends are Mussulman, Parsi, Hindu, Jain, Christian, whomever.”

The two men sat down across from Aziz. “I am Prem, this is Lal,” said the one with the mustache.

“Do you know this man, this Meerza?” asked Lal. He pulled out a photograph and slid it across the table. Aziz looked at the image. It was his neighbor, smiling before a typewriter. Aziz knew this man as Durani, the name written on his box in the building’s mailroom, and not Meerza. “We are journalists also,” said Lal. “We have come from India to meet this man.”

Aziz stared at the photograph. Once he had locked himself out and Durani had taken him into his own apartment until the superintendent arrived. The place had been empty except for a mattress on the floor and a few piles of books. While they were waiting Durani had prepared chai in the Kashmiri style, with almonds, cinnamon, and cardamom. Aziz had said nothing about this, nor had he mentioned the many books of Urdu poetry stacked around the room. The building, just west of Greenwood, was the sort of place where everyone had left a story behind somewhere else. The residents shared this, along with the understanding that no one needed to stir them up here.

In the photograph Durani looked different. There were no bags under his eyes. The skin on his face seemed less sallow. He appeared gregarious and happy, full of energy. His shirt was clean and freshly pressed. This was not how he looked now. But it was him.

“Do you know this Meerza?” asked Prem. He laid a clammy hand on Aziz’s arm. The knuckles bristled with hair. There was a time when Aziz would have taken that wrist between his fingers and snapped it like a twig. Instead, all he did now was resist the urge to yank his own arm away.

Aziz looked at the photograph again, then up at Prem. “No,” he said. “I don’t know anyone named Meerza.”

Prem and Lal sat there for a moment before Lal took back the photograph. “Okay.”

“What is playing at the cinema, Shahrukh?” said Prem, letting go of Aziz.

“At the Beach or at the Gerrard?”

“The one just there.” Prem motioned with his hand down the street. The gesture traced Aziz’s walk home, past the tikka houses and stores of religious paraphernalia, past the Ulster Arms with its coterie of drunks smoking in the parking lot, streetcars clattering by in both directions.

“The one that shows Hindi films,” said Lal.

“The Gerrard?” The cinema had reopened recently after years of dereliction. Durani worked there as an usher. Aziz often saw him leaving for work in the starchy uniform, bow tie and all. “I think that place is closed.”

“No,” said Prem. “Definitely not closed, Shahrukh. Is it, Lal?”

“No,” said Lal.

“No, we are quite certain that it is open. In fact, we have come all the way from India especially to make a visit there.”

“We have heard the films are very good,” said Lal. “First-class Hindi films.”

“Perhaps you are starring, Shahrukh?” Prem grinned. A single gray tooth appeared like a tombstone amidst a row of white. Aziz stared at it. It was a dead thing.

Lal slapped the table with both hands. The smack made Aziz jump. It was a sudden, swift act of violence from the quiet man. “We will go to the cinema then,” said Lal. “What is playing, it does not matter. We will go for the songs.”

The two men stood. “Finish your meal, Shahrukh,” said Prem. “Enjoy your meat.”

They headed out into the night. The snow whirled into the restaurant on a blast of cold air as they left, and then the door closed. Through the window Aziz watched the two men zip their coats and turn their collars up against the snow, then move off down the street.

Aziz turned back to his meal. He stirred the rogan josh with his fingertips. The lamb had gone cold.

The man in 8B whom he knew as Durani answered Aziz’s knock in his shirtsleeves. He looked at Aziz without speaking, hiding most of his body behind the door. Aziz dripped melting snow onto the landing, his eyelashes trapping beads of frost.

“There are two men looking for you,” said Aziz. “From Bombay.”

Durani stared at Aziz. He said nothing.

“They’ve gone to the cinema where you work. I thought you’d want to know.”

Durani nodded. “Thank you,” he said. He went as though to close the door, then paused. “Will you come in for a moment?”

The inside of the apartment hadn’t changed since Aziz had been there last. The bed sat in the center of the room, neatly made. Perhaps there were more books, spilling in piles around the place: Hindi books, English books, Urdu books, books in Arabic, even a few in French. Outside, the wind howled and rattled the windows in their frames.

Durani had been making tea. He brought Aziz a cup, once again in the Kashmiri style. It was warm and sweet and made Aziz think of home, a place he likely had in common with this Durani. They sat cross-legged across from one another on the floor, teacups in their laps. Durani peered at Aziz, then set his teacup down and began digging through a stack of books. He produced a sheaf of typewritten papers stapled together, and passed it to Aziz.

The papers were galleys of an article written for a prominent Canadian newsmagazine, authored by a certain S.B. Meerza and annotated with a few edits in blue ink. Accompanying the text was a picture of the man sitting across from Aziz.

“Read,” said this man.

What Aziz read was a profile of a certain highly reputable Bollywood actress — an actress he knew well and whose films he had enjoyed before moving to Toronto. Now he didn’t go to the cinema. He woke up, went to his job at the bread factory, had a meal, and then headed to his job at the ice rink. He came home late and slept. Little by little, he was saving money to bring his brother to Canada.

This actress, the article explained, had recently achieved international prominence. She was a fixture now on TV entertainment programs otherwise specializing in Hollywood news, although she had yet to appear in an American movie. But she was on billboards and in magazine ads for perfumes and cosmetics in New York, London, Toronto, all heavy-lidded eyes and glistening lips. There was regular talk of her, even outside India, as “the most beautiful woman in the world.”

The first few paragraphs detailed this increasing global fascination with the girl from Malabar Hill. Aziz was familiar with her story. Everyone was. But he could feel the article moving toward something else. There was a subtle irony to how her career was being explained. And the urgency on the face of the man opposite, the author — his tea untouched and going cold — only added to these suspicions.

Sure enough, the article began to pose questions. How had it all happened so quickly? Why were international markets suddenly taking interest? India had been producing screen beauties for generations. There were countless other Bollywood starlets just as stunning, as talented, as charismatic. Why this one?

And then things turned. The actress, claimed the article, had enlisted Mob help: Producers had been threatened, politicians bribed, corporations extorted. A murder led to another, which led to another, which resulted in all-out gang warfare on the streets of Bombay. The article linked the previous year’s communal riots to the actress’s growing success. A bomb had derailed a commuter train while she presented an award at a film festival in Italy, killing dozens.

None of what the article discussed, Aziz knew, was anomalous in the Indian film industry. But glancing up occasionally at the man across from him — Durani, Meerza, whoever he was, huddled there on the floor in his empty apartment with his tea — he could see the consequences of trying to publish it in a North American publication, of smearing Bollywood’s great international hope. That it had never seen the newsstand spoke to the power of the Mob. All its author had left were a bed on the floor, a pile of books, and a galley copy of a piece that never was.

The article ended with a description of the actress making an appearance at the Toronto Film Festival on the arm of a celebrity music producer. The reader was left in a blinding array of flashbulbs and glamour. Aziz flipped the pages back into order and handed the article to Meerza.

“No,” the neighbor said, waving his hand. “You keep it.”

Aziz paused. He didn’t want this thing, and the responsibility it represented. He was doing fine. “Are there other copies?”

“No,” said Meerza. “They destroyed my computer and the magazine’s files were deleted. This is all that is left.”

“I can’t take it,” said Aziz.

“Please. They’ve found me.”

“You can’t run? Or tell the police?”

“These are goondas only. If I say anything about these, and even if police action is taken, more will come. Now that they have found me outside India I will be easy to track. Every move I make will be known.”

“So what will you do?”

“I will wait.”

“Here?”

“Where else? Perhaps they just want to talk to me, see how I am doing.” Meerza swept a hand around the apartment, sketching its emptiness with his fingers.

Outside on the street the snow had stopped. The sky was still and purple. Aziz walked west along Gerrard, snow crunching and squeaking under his boots. In one pocket was Meerza’s article, folded into thirds. In the other was the knife. As a streetcar rattled past, Aziz wrapped his gloved fingers tightly around the handle, careful not to pop the blade.

At the Gerrard Cinema he stopped. The marquee twinkled. It cast a dome of yellow light onto the street. Aziz bought a ticket to the early show, which had started nearly an hour ago. The woman working told him this but he waved his hand: no matter. He wanted to see this picture. There was an actress in it who was important to Aziz.

The cinema was dark save the band of light twirling out from the projector, silent save a sad violin and the rattle of the film threading from reel to reel. On screen, the famous Indian actress was praying silently before some sort of altar. It was night. The moonlight in the film was blue. Aziz stared at the screen for a moment, at the woman up there. Then he sat down at the end of an empty row near the door, looking around.

Less than half the seats were occupied. People were scattered around the theater, mostly in groups of two. Aziz glanced from one pair of heads to the next: a woman and her son, two elderly Sikhs, a young couple with their arms around one another. But then, there they were. Prem and Lal were only four rows up, against the wall on the left side of the theater. There was a seat separating the two men, but it was definitely them — the shorn heads gave them away. Aziz fingered the article in his pocket with one hand and the knife with the other.

The action in the film had moved to a battlefield. A handsome soldier was loading his gun while bombs exploded all around. Aziz watched as either Prem or Lal stood in the dark and shuffled his way up the aisle. He lowered his face as the hired thug walked by. The man had a mustache; it was Prem. Aziz waited until Prem had exited the theater, then slipped out of his seat.

In the bathroom there was one stall, a sink, and a single urinal. The door to the stall was closed. Between it and the floor were jeans hiked to reveal mismatched socks: one blue, one black. Aziz leaned against the sink and unfolded the article from his pocket.

“Last year’s communal violence that erupted on the streets of Bombay,” he read aloud, “can be directly attributed to the involvement of gangs in the film industry. The startling rise to the top of one actress, in particular, is irrevocably linked to an ongoing war between certain rival production studios and their respective Mob affiliations.”

From the stall there was no sound. The feet didn’t move.

Aziz continued: “North American audiences might be interested to know that the Indian actress whose ‘exotic’ look sells them cosmetics, soft drinks, and high fashion — the international face of Bollywood — has achieved prominence in her home country not by talent, or even looks, but by a methodically implemented strategy of extortion, blackmail, and even murder.”

More silence from behind the stall door. Aziz flipped the pages until he found the passage he was looking for.

Aziz lowered the article.

“This was my brother,” he told the feet beneath the stall. “Our father was an officer in Kashmir, and when the troubles became too much, we moved south to Jammu, and my brother and I both enrolled in the academy. When we graduated, I stayed in Jammu. He went to Bombay.”

The toilet flushed. Aziz tensed.

But then nothing happened. The stall door didn’t open. The feet remained where they were. Aziz thought back to Prem’s hand on his arm, the hair on his knuckles and the touch of his skin, cold and wet. That dead gray tooth.

A minute passed. Another. Still the feet remained motionless. Laying the article on the counter by the sink, Aziz pulled the knife from his pocket. He flicked the blade. The noise it made was crisp and clean. He breathed, he blinked, he stared at those mismatched socks underneath the stall door, and he waited.