How long he stared at the two of them, he couldn’t say. Maybe a minute, maybe an hour. However long it was, he was snapped out of it by a hand bumping against his. When he turned, he was startled to see Rain standing there.
“Hey, Deke.”
She was smiling when she said it, though that quickly gave way to a furrowed brow, seeing Deacon’s expression contorting into something akin to genuine alarm.
“Rain,” he said, doing his best to cover his apprehension, “what are you doing here?”
“These things are a gold mine.”
He didn’t have to ponder what she meant for longer than it took for a fan of cards to appear in her hand. Each one had on it a crystal ball and he’d barely had time to read her name spelled out in smoky letters within before Rain said, “Isn’t that Suzie Chalmers over there?”
It came as a shock, hearing her say that name. He’d never mentioned Suzie, and he glanced towards the lounge as if it was also a surprise to him that she’d be there too.
“You here together?”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean—it’s just business, you know.”
Rain was smiling at him in her wry way and it was plain she didn’t believe him.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said.
The fan of cards retracted, disappearing into her hand with the deft precision of a magician’s trick, her fingers balling to a fist and Rain bringing that to her lips, blowing into the space between her thumb and forefinger and then flaring her hand out in a sweeping motion with such flourish that Deacon halfways expected a dove to come flying out. She then spun with a twirl of her skirt and as she started off down the hall, Deacon noticed one of her business cards, lying face up on the floor where she’d just stood.
He felt a sudden pang in his chest. She must have seen him gazing longingly at Suzie and had left the card behind as a subtle rebuke. Maybe she’d even seen Suzie pick him up at the Chronicle and had followed them. A woman scorned like in some old movie, except that didn’t sound like Rain at all. Most of the time it seemed like it was she who was doing him the favour and would be just as happy if he did go off and find someone closer to his own age.
It was a thought he’d had plenty of times before, most often on the walks to Rain’s house. As a balm against the sinking feeling he always felt then and that he could feel creeping up on him now, he bent down and picked up the card. He slipped it into his breast pocket and turned back to the lounge.
Suzie was looking his way. Instead of the grimace he might have expected, she was smiling wide and waving. Deacon smiled back, catching his hand before it could produce an awkward wave of its own. He then started forward, his legs settling into a gait that conveyed the idle contempt of a father summoned from his easy chair by his daughter’s newest beau ringing the doorbell.
“Are you ready to go?” Suzie asked him, meeting him halfway.
“Any time you are.”
The young man touched her gently on the elbow.
“I have to say my goodbyes,” he said. “I’ll only be a moment.”
She watched him walking down the hall, Deacon watching her, waiting for her to breathe. When she finally exhaled, her lips parted just enough that the air whistled between her teeth and Deacon distracted himself by reaching into his jacket pocket, not looking for anything in particular but finding a loose stick of gum nevertheless.
“He’s Bus and Edina’s great-grandson,” Suzie said as he unwrapped the gum and popped it in his mouth.
“That right?”
“He’s doing his PhD at Oxford. In economics. He’s a Rhodes Scholar.”
“You don’t say.”
“He’s staying up at his parents’ cottage on Lake Joseph for the summer while he writes his dissertation,” she continued. “I said I’d give him a ride home. That okay?”
“It’s your car.”
6
On the return trip, Deacon did his best to block out their conversation, its fervour buoyant enough to make him feel like he was drowning. The young man, whom Deacon had since learned was named Rance—Rance!—had started things off by asking her how she liked Montreal.
“It’s the best,” Suzie said. “Have you been?”
“No. I’ve always wanted to.”
“It’s amaaaaazing.”
Deacon couldn’t help but recall the terseness of her reply when he had said the same and he eyed the door handle, wondering if she’d even bother to stop if he wrenched it open and flung himself out.
You should have just stayed at the Villa, he told himself. Got a ride home with Rain.
A thought that didn’t do a damn thing for him now except make him feel like he was on the verge of being swallowed into the back seat.
“You’ll have to come and visit,” Suzie continued. “I’m living in this great house right in the middle of the Plateau. It has seven rooms, and just two of us. C’est magnifique!”
“Sounds it.”
“It used to be une bordel. That’s a brothel.”
“Really?”
“It’s been in François’ family for years.”
“Who’s François?”
“My roommate.” She slapped his arm gently with the back of her hand, chiding him for the jealous tenor to his voice before continuing. “He told me that, back in the 1930s, Errol Flynn used to visit it whenever he was in town.”
“Errol Flynn?”
“You know, the silent film star. He was the first Zorro.”
“Oh, that Errol Flynn.”
“He was a real lecher too. He liked girls. The younger the better. He married a fourteen-year-old when he was, like, sixty. He died in Vancouver and, get this, the doctor who pronounced him dead stole his penis.”
“He did what?”
“François told me he cut it off when no one was looking.”
“Why would he do that?”
“It was worth a fortune.”
“His penis?”
“Yeah.”
“But how— I mean, how would they have known it was his? A buyer, I mean.”
“I asked François the same thing. He said it was covered with warts. You know, like, genital warts. It was famous.”
“Lucky for the doctor.”
“Totally. And he used to fuck in my bedroom!”
“Maybe that’s where he got them.”
“I know. Can you imagine?”
“Crazy.”
“That’s what I love about Montreal. There’s so much history there.”
They were just then cresting the hill leading towards Main. Suzie signalled left and turned away from town.
“Do you mind walking from here?” she said into the rear-view mirror as she pulled over to the side of the road.
Forcing as genuine a smile as he could, Deacon scooched over in the seat so that at least he wouldn’t be exiting into traffic. When he’d made the sidewalk he paused a moment before closing the door.
“You’ll have the story to me first thing?” he said, leaning back in.
“Will do, boss.”
Deacon couldn’t think of anything to say other than, “Perfect.”
Closing the door and stepping back onto the sidewalk, he lit a cigarette and took a long slow drag, watching the car driving off into the almost setting sun.
* * *
His apartment over the Chronicle was only a ten-minute walk.
He’d made it about halfway there when he remembered he’d meant to drop in on George. He backtracked to Anne Street and followed that to Hiram. He took a left and thirty seconds later he turned left again onto Baker.
George didn’t answer the door. After ringing the bell three times, Deacon opened it with his key and stuck his head in. It was dark except for a faint glow from down the hall, which he knew was coming from the light above the kitchen stov
e. Stepping to the adjacent door, he opened it and checked the garage. George’s pickup truck was still there and he was just thinking that he must have taken Trixie out for a walk when the dog bumped her nose against his leg.
“Where is he, girl?” he asked as he bent, scratching the golden retriever behind her ears.
Trixie licked his face and Deacon stood again, turning and walking back through the front door, the dog trailing dutifully behind. He followed the red-brick path into the backyard.
There was a light on in the barn’s front window and as Deacon came to end of the walkway he could hear a rapid clackety-clack, a sound that immediately called to mind a train hurtling down its track. But he knew right off it wasn’t that, it was something else; something he thought he’d never live to hear, which was George hammering away at his old Remington Rand.
Coming towards the barn as if on the sly, Deacon skirted the door, open a crack, and peered through the window, seeing through its dusted glass George sitting at his desk. And just like that the weight he’d been carrying around in his belly all day was lifted by the surge of glee he felt watching the old man bent over the typewriter, his fingers a blur they were pounding so hard at the keys.
George was writing again.
TAYLOR
He’d found the Diplomat Hotel by way of a Google search he’d made two weeks previous. He’d entered “toronto bar fight” and hadn’t had to look beyond the first hit to know he’d found the place he was looking for.
“Bar Fight In City’s Eastside Sends Two To Hospital” is what it had read.
One click later, he was watching a clip from a local news broadcast, a petite, vaguely Persian-looking woman in a low-cut blouse filling in the particulars while standing in front of a row of Harleys parked at the curb.
“The details are still sketchy,” she said, “but this is what we do know.”
She went on to report that at approximately 12:30 a.m., police were called to the Diplomat after witnesses reported seeing a man beating another man about the head and back with what appeared to be a broken pool cue. Another man had then stabbed the assailant in the neck with a knife before fleeing the scene on a motorbike. Answering a question about a possible motive, the officer in charge of the investigation told the reporter that it would appear the fight had been the result of an internal conflict within the Flaming Eagles Motorcycle Club, a biker gang known to frequent the establishment. He then went on to ask that anyone who had any information etcetera etcetera, but by then Taylor wasn’t really listening anymore.
The mention of a pool cue had planted the seed of an idea in his head, and it was well germinated by the time the reporter was talking to a woman identified as a local resident whose face had been blurred to protect her identity (something that Taylor had found funny in that she must have been pushing four hundred pounds, at least half of which appeared to be oozing out from the elastic band of a phosphorescent lime-green tube top).
“Those bleepin’ bleeps are fighting ever’ damn night,” she screamed into the camera. “Only time the cops ever sho’ up is when one of ’em ends up bleeding in the street.”
To prove her point, the camera cut to a pool of blood draining over the side of the curb before returning to the woman, the sight of her lumbering away, making Taylor laugh, thinking that if they’d really wanted to do her a favour they’d have blurred out the outline of her ass, which had immediately put him in mind of two jumbo-sized beach balls half-filled with Jell-O.
“It ain’t right,” she was screaming, her hands flailing at the air. “It just ain’t right.”
“You tell ’em, girl,” Taylor had quipped as he keyed in “diplomat hotel toronto.”
That had given him an address at the corner of Sherbourne and Queen Street East in the heart of Moss Park, the poorest of Toronto’s eastside neighbourhoods, and over the next two weeks he’d driven by it a half-dozen times without finding what he was after. Then, finally, two Sundays later, he’d seen a pair of Harleys parked outside the hotel and that had told him that at least a couple of the Flaming Eagles had returned home to roost.
He drove down a side street and parked beside what passed for a park in that corner of the city but really wasn’t much more than a vacant lot comprised of a quarter acre of grass stretched between two walnut trees, the requisite junkie slouched on a concrete bench between them. He called Trevor Lourdes, an aspiring filmmaker whom Taylor’s sister had met at York University where she was studying theatre arts, the same as their mother had even though both of them had their sights set on the silver screen. Trevor arrived twenty minutes later in his BMW Hybrid along with his assistant Darren. They were an odd pair, Trevor short and stocky, and cognizant enough of the fact that his buzz cut and oddly oversized forearms made him resemble a young Popeye that he’d had a cartoonish anchor tattooed on his arm; Darren, tall and gangly with a hooked nose and a slick of jet-black hair, himself doing a fair imitation of Olive Oyl.
“You bring it?” Taylor asked Trevor after he’d parked behind his Lexus LX 570 and was exiting the driver’s side door.
“That’s a check,” Trevor said, reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a button-hole camera mounted on the end of a retractable arm. “I’ve got an app that lets me control it from my phone.”
“What about the mic?”
“Double check.”
“What are you waiting for then?”
While Darren taped the mic to Taylor’s chest, Trevor took a few of what he called establishing shots with the handy cam he’d brought along as a backup. After he got what he needed, the three of them cut through the park on a diagonal which deposited them onto the sidewalk just shy of the Diplomat’s front door. There were two more Harleys parked at the curb, and Taylor took that as a good sign as he heard the crippling volume of ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” blaring through the grey steel door at the bottom of five cement steps leading down to the bar’s entrance.
Its ceiling wasn’t more than a foot above his head and that lent the room the impression that it was slowly sinking into the ground, a feeling reinforced by the four square columns spaced at intervals, their plaster wearing deep seams from floor to ceiling and chunks of it broken away altogether revealing the checkerboard outline of bricks beneath. To the right of the door there was a plywood stage, holes the size of boot heels dotting its warp. The only sign that they’d ever actually had a band playing there was a broken drumstick sitting on the window ledge behind it, crusted over with dust so that it looked like a mouldy cat turd.
A cloud of smoke hung in the room, though there had been a law forbidding smoking in public spaces on the books for some years. Through the haze, Taylor immediately spotted three so-called Flaming Eagles seated at a table in the middle of what would have been the dance floor. Another, smaller than the others and wearing a metal brace clamped over the jeans on his left knee, was hobbling around a pool table in the alcove to the door’s left, using his cue as a cane under the watchful repose of an even slighter man dressed the part of a shark—his black leather vest matching the fedora pulled down over a pair of acid flash sunglasses, the hat’s band ornamented with a couple or three folded twenty dollar bills.
The only other occupants were the bartender and a man leaning against the far wall with his prodigious arms folded over his chest. He bore a striking resemblance to Gimli the dwarf, though he was six feet tall and wore a black T-shirt that read, Security. Taylor would learn his name several seconds later, after catching a look at the woman behind the bar. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties but had the body of a preadolescent boy—all bones and angles—and her face was adorned with enough metal to provide a fair accompaniment to “Jingle Bells.” She too was wearing a black T-shirt, though hers was sleeveless and decaled with a headshot of Gimli the Bouncer above the words, You Got A Problem, Talk To Mike.
Neither of them looked up when the door closed behind Darren, the muffled
thud of it lost to a guitar solo. None of the Flaming Eagles paid them any mind either. Only The Shark marked their entrance by clamping a fresh toothpick between his teeth and flicking at it with his index finger, a sure sign that he knew a bunch of marks when he saw them, which had as much to do with the hundred-dollar haircuts the three young men sported to go with their tan khakis and plaid shirts as it did with the long rectangular case that Taylor was carrying in his right hand. It held the Balabushka replica pool cue his father had bought at auction along with a certificate authenticating it had been the one owned by Eddie Felson in The Color of Money. It was his father’s favourite film and had inspired in Bryson Wane an enduring passion for the game. In turn, he’d passed this on to his son and they’d spent many an evening re-enacting the ageless rivalry between the generations on a three-and-a-half-by-seven-foot stretch of felt-wrapped slate in their games room, about a million miles removed from the sleazy pool halls where “Fast” Eddie plied his trade though, it seemed, no more than a few feet, figuratively speaking, from the Diplomat’s bar.
If anyone in the room knew what his father had paid for the cue it would have been a safe bet Taylor wouldn’t have made it more than four steps into the room before someone took more than a cursory interest. The case, though, wasn’t much to look at, and while Taylor and his friends weren’t exactly the bar’s regular clientele, their kind had been known to wander in now and again, looking for a little action beyond what they could find at their country clubs and whatever cocktail lounge was in vogue that season. As such, they’d been able to breeze right up to the counter without attracting any undue attention. Taylor took the lead by yelling for a pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon above the music while Darren and Trevor did their best to blend into the background.
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