by Scott Mackay
“What do you want?” he asked, his tone flat, direct.
The driver got in and they drove north on Spadina Avenue. The road sloped gently upward. Three-story brownstones from 1910 lined the broad avenue, and there was an inordinate number of Chinese restaurants, taverns, trading companies, boutiques, money-exchange places, and immigration agencies. They drove next to Spadina’s streetcar-only lanes. The rails were collared by concrete meridians to keep automobiles and trucks out; the intersections had duplicate traffic lights—one set for the streetcars and another for regular traffic, timed so regular traffic could still make left turns over the tracks while the streetcars waited.
“I want your help,” said Gilbert.
He gave Hope a brief sketch of his situation, how he had enough evidence to convict Tony Mok—the blood, the bullets, their witness—recounted their attempt to apprehend Mok, and his own subsequent appeal for greater resources. He told Hope how the other agencies were now backing out of the investigation.
“And Detective Support Command is easing away from the investigation as well,” he said. “They won’t allow me the necessary resources to mount an effective manhunt. I thought you might be able to help me find Tony Mok.”
He studied Peter Hope. The man’s eyes narrowed. The Mercedes turned left on College and headed for Little Lisbon.
“And why do you think I can help you find Tony Mok?” asked Hope. “Why do you think I should?”
Gilbert knew that Hope was fishing, that the deal-making had begun. “I’m sure it would be a great comfort to Mr. Wu if we were able to close the file on Pearl as a suspect in this case,” he said. Gilbert paused, looked out the window, where a short rotund Portuguese widow dressed in the usual black pulled a bundle buggy west along College Street, the buggy stuffed with a dozen board-like loaves of Portuguese bread. “We can’t do that unless we arrest Tony Mok. Mrs. Wu will continue to be investigated, as will our other suspects, until we can bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion. As much as we might wish to spare Mr. Wu and his various business enterprises any embarrassment, and as much as we’re sure Tony is our man, I’m afraid we would still have to continually inconvenience Mrs. Wu with persistent inquiries. As you’re her personal assistant, I’m sure you’re eager to prevent that.”
Was he being too hasty, he wondered?
Hope, of course, instantly saw what he was being offered. As he’d told Gilbert before, it was his job to protect Pearl; and if he had been purposely brought out of retirement by Bing Wu to extricate her from the difficulties surrounding Edgar’s murder, here was a chance he seriously had to consider. But like a good man of business he wanted the specifics of the deal.
“And you have enough evidence to convict Tony Mok?” he asked.
“We have the ballistics. We have the blood. We have a witness. What more do we need?”
Hope sighed, skeptical. “I suppose that’s…that’s good news,” he said.
“Then you’ll help?” he asked.
Gilbert let Hope consider the deal as they continued west along College Street. Gilbert glanced out the window, saw a street sweeper sweeping up cigarette butts outside a pool hall. Toronto the clean, he thought. He wasn’t going to tell Hope about his reservations in the case. The driver braked at a streetcar island and they waited while the exiting passengers walked to the curb. He wasn’t going to tell Hope how Pearl would remain a suspect no matter what. They moved on, passed a Portuguese gift shop full of silver, baby clothes, and ornamental ceramics. He was just going to play it with the facts against Tony: the blood, the bullets, and Garth Surrey’s eyewitness account.
“And will Mrs. Wu be free from further inquiries if I decide to help you?” asked Hope, seemingly not the least bit interested in what Gilbert was offering him. “She’s much too busy for anything but her work just now. And she also finds the whole business distressing.”
“Once we convict Tony, the case will be closed,” he said.
Peter Hope nodded doubtfully. “Let me think about it,” he said. Hope’s face revealed nothing. “Let me think about it, and I’ll get back to you.” And that was that. Nothing more. No questions. No wrangling. Just a dismissing I’ll get back to you. The Red Pole leaned forward, his red silk scarf falling free of his navy-blue overcoat, and spoke to his driver. “Jian, you can let Detective Gilbert off at the corner.”
Gilbert was disappointed, unnerved by the Red Pole’s lukewarm response, and feared that the investigation might be all but over if Hope didn’t help him. The 486 leaned back in his seat with a tight civil grin on his face, and Gilbert had the fleeting fear that he might have insulted the man in some way. He thought Hope would have gone for it, no questions asked, as a way to protect Pearl from her…her more naive proclivities. But he hadn’t. He didn’t even seem to care. Jian eased up to the curb. Gilbert opened the door.
“You know where I am,” said Gilbert.
Hope nodded. “I have your card,” he said.
Gilbert got the feeling he was never going to hear from the man again. Or maybe Hope was just playing poker with him. He got out of the car and shut the door. He watched the car drive off, then looked around. He was over near Clinton Street. In front of a gelateria. Maybe this was a bad idea. Behind the shop fronts across the street he saw the steeple of a large Catholic church rise into the gray air, smog-darkened red brick, slate shingles, and a crucifix right at the peak. Was it not said that the cobra sometimes danced and swayed to hypnotize its prey? He started walking east along College. Damn. Was the Red Pole doing the exact same thing to him? Gilbert had opened negotiations with the Hung Kwan, the feared enforcer of the 14K, and now he thought that maybe he shouldn’t have. But what else could he do? Hukowich and Paulsen weren’t going to help. Nowak wasn’t going to help. And any overtime on the case was going to be gone by the end of the week. He had to make his moves. Only his moves didn’t seem to be working. Pigeons again got in his way and he stamped at them. At least the man had promised to think about his offer. Or was that just so much cobra dance too? One way or the other, he could only hope he would hear from the Red Pole soon.
Gilbert walked over to Mount Joseph Hospital. He descended the stairs to the basement and followed a long corridor past the Housekeeping Office, the Materials Management Office, the Morgue, and the Linen and Lab-coat Exchange Unit, until he finally came to the Medical Records Department. He took a court order out of his briefcase and presented it to the department’s release-of-information secretary, a pretty young mulatto woman with a faint wash of henna in her hair. She put on glasses and read the court order.
“It’s for a Foster Ling Sung,” he told her. “He was brought to your Emergency Department seven years ago for a stab wound. We understand he needed a transfusion, but that there was a problem with the transfusion. He had a delayed transfusion reaction. Your blood bank had to run some tests on him and we believe that one of those tests might have been a blood phenotype.”
The secretary looked up from the court order. “Could I see your badge and identification?” she asked.
Gilbert produced both items for the secretary. He glanced toward the main file. “What’s going on?” he asked, curious. “The last time I was here you didn’t have near as many staff. Where did all those young people come from?”
The secretary glanced at the main file. “We’re having all our charts scanned into electronic form. Those kids are from the company who’s been hired to do it. They’re packing up the charts and taking them off-site to be scanned. We’re working toward an electronic chart.” She held up the court order. “Do you mind if I show this to my department head?” she asked.
“No, not at all.”
“Have a seat,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Thanks.”
Gilbert sat down.
A few minutes later, the secretary came back with the department head, a tall black woman wearing a corporate-style business outfit and discreet studs in her ears.
Once she and Gilber
t had introduced themselves to each other, the department head said, “I’m afraid Mr. Sung’s chart has been sent off-site to be scanned. I’m not sure we can lay our hands on it right away. All we have on this patient right now is a computer list of visits, four over the last ten years, one of them for the stab wound you’re interested in.”
“Does the stab wound visit-entry list any tests that might have been performed?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But the test results won’t be listed.”
“Would it say if a blood phenotype was performed?”
The department head went to the nearest terminal and checked. She looked up from the workstation. “Yes,” she said. “A blood phenotype was performed. But like I say, we don’t have the result, just a record that the test was performed.”
“How soon would you be able to get the actual report?” he asked. “I realize you’ve got a big changeover going on here, but I—”
“We’ll try to get it to you as soon as possible, Detective Gilbert,” she said. “But I can’t promise sooner than a week.”
Eighteen
When Gilbert got home a little after eight that night, Regina was waiting for him in the kitchen. The bruises on her face had faded and she looked a lot better. She was marking papers at the kitchen table, with a dictionary and a copy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at her side for reference, a red pen poised in her hand.
“Joe canceled on Jennifer,” she said. She stared at him, her eyes wide with inquiry.
He paused, trying to figure out how he could put a positive spin on this. But he found he couldn’t. “I had him cancel,” he admitted.
A wrinkle came to Regina’s brow and she put her pen down. “Why?” she asked.
He moved to the back of the chair. “I thought it would be for the best,” he said. She continued to stare, her blue eyes searching. He felt he had to explain. “I didn’t want her to think Joe…” The rain beat against the window, and the clock above the doorway chimed the quarter hour. He looked at the table, where she had a pot of tea and a half-finished raisin scone. “I didn’t want her to get hurt again.”
“She’s nineteen, Barry,” she said. Regina sat back in the chair, put her hands on top of her grade-twelve English papers, and contemplated him like a sentencing judge. “You can’t be protecting her for the rest of her life.”
“I know I can’t,” he said, wincing. “But I just…” He looked out to the hall where he saw their old Barcelona chair, something they’d owned since the place on Merrit, a relic from his bachelor days, now reupholstered in a pale green material with paler green birds stitched into the fabric. “Is she upstairs?”
“She and Nina are having dinner at Marvelous Edibles tonight.” Regina’s lips stiffened. “With some of Nina’s friends.” As if that were a punishment she wouldn’t wish on anyone.
That Jennifer should have to spend her time with Nina’s giggling fifteen-year-old girlfriends made Gilbert feel even worse. “You know what?” he said, annoyed with himself, annoyed with the rain, with work. “I’m through with interference.” He put his briefcase on the table. “She can make her own mistakes from now on.”
Regina frowned, lifted her pen, and went back to marking papers. “At least that’s better than you making them for her,” she said.
Two days later, Gilbert stood at the east end of the Bloor-Danforth viaduct, the girder-and-concrete bridge spanning the Don Valley. He peered through the rain at the oncoming traffic, looking for a green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, holding his umbrella close to his head, pointing it into the wind to stop it from blowing inside-out.
After fifteen minutes, Gilbert saw the car ease up to the curb and come to a stop just before the exit ramp to the Don Valley Parkway. The driver blinked his high beams. Gilbert walked toward the car, noted the dented fender, the rust by the front bumper, the faded STP decal on the tinted windshield. He opened the passenger door and got in.
The driver, a Chinese man in his early forties, with sloping cheeks, sloping eyes, and a pronounced brow that gave him the appearance of a Mongolian horseman, looked him over. He wore faded blue jeans, white socks, slip-on deck shoes, a brown leather jacket, a Calvin Klein T-shirt, and had thick, collar-length hair. A cigarette was clutched between the first and middle fingers of his right hand. He gazed at Gilbert, his expression showing nothing. A blue-and-green tattoo of a dragon ornamented the back of his right hand.
“You have a gun?” asked the man.
“Yes,” said Gilbert.
The driver put his cigarette in his mouth and proffered his palm. “Hand it over.”
Gilbert pulled his gun from his shoulder holster. The driver took the gun, snapped the clip from the grip, and put both components on the floor behind his seat.
“You can have it back when you leave,” he said, looking more at ease now that they had passed this first hurdle.
The man shifted gear, squeezed out into traffic, flicked on his right-hand signal, and took the steep twisting down-ramp to the Don Valley Parkway.
As they drove north on the parkway, the driver took huge drags on his cigarette. Invariably, he blew the smoke out his nose. The car had white leather upholstery and a V-8 engine. A getaway car. A string of ivory beads hung around the rearview mirror, and a compass sat on the dashboard, fixed there by a suction cup. Gray, leafless trees clung to the slopes of the Don Valley, and below, Gilbert saw the Don River, swollen and muddy with all this rain, overflowing its banks onto the grassy and willow-lined floodplain next to the six-lane highway. Take a pretty river valley and put a freeway through it—he supposed Toronto wasn’t much different from any other North American city that way.
They exited the parkway onto the 401 and drove east, all the way to Agincourt, weaving their way in and out of traffic.
When they got to Agincourt they drove through a suburban commercial area of strip malls, drive-through fast-food joints, brake-and-muffler places, parking lots, furniture discount joints—the usual suburban car-oriented purgatory—to the warehouse of Kowloon Textiles, in the new Chinatown. The new Chinatown had strip malls, fast-food joints, and all the rest of it—only all the signs were in Chinese. The driver parked outside the warehouse and they both got out. They walked past stacks of empty skids to the warehouse door, where the driver pressed an intercom button and spoke in Cantonese, presumably telling whoever was inside that they’d arrived.
A minute later another Chinese man, older, stouter, reminding Gilbert of Buddha, opened the door.
The driver and the older man exchanged rapid-fire Cantonese. Then the older man patted Gilbert down.
“Are you wearing a wire?” he asked.
“No,” he said.
The older man made him unbutton his shirt. When he was satisfied that Gilbert was clean, he nodded. “Okay, I’ll take you in,” he said.
As the old man led Gilbert into the warehouse, Gilbert felt as if he were crossing a border—as if in asking the Red Pole for help, he had ventured into uncharted territory, had gone outside regular procedure, and perhaps was risking not only the whole investigation but even his own job. Crates and giant ship containers, some stacked three high, formed a network of aisles in the warehouse. Despite the risks, he knew he had to do this. He had to do it because he now felt a compelling sympathy for Edgar, this man who had escaped Vietnam in a boat all those years ago, who had been fighting to expose a corrupt police ring at 52 Division, who had evidence in a locker somewhere, who, despite all the incriminating circumstances surrounding his murder, was now turning into a dark-horse hero of sorts. In the corner, he saw a few men working on a car; they stopped working and watched him suspiciously.
“In here,” said the older Chinese man, leading him to an office at the back.
They entered the office.
And there he was. The Red Pole. The Hung Kwan. The 14K enforcer, as mysterious as an unknown river, as unreadable as a book without words.
Peter Hope sat behind a battered metal desk on a cheap foam swivel chair, legs
crossed, hands clasped over his bent knee. He greeted Gilbert with a dip of his head, then turned to the older man and said something in Cantonese. The older man retreated. The Red Pole had his shirtsleeves rolled up, revealing not only his thin mottled forearms but also a tattoo, a blue-and-green dragon, one similar to the one the driver had worn.
Hope gestured at a chair. “Sit down, Detective Gilbert,” he said. The corners of his lips rose in a bright but hard smile. With that particular smile, Hope reminded Gilbert, for some reason, of a creature—a mongoose or a snake—who ate raw eggs, eggshell and all, his teeth small and sharp, ideal for chiseling through hard substances. “I have news for you.”
Gilbert sat down. “I’m listening,” he said.
“Tony Mok is in Hong Kong.”
Hope’s hard smile remained in place. Gilbert glanced at the calendar on the wall behind Hope’s shoulder, a cheap promotional one with a lot of Chinese writing on it, and a picture of a Chinese model in a traditional red silk cheongsam serving tea next to a fountain. So. The Red Pole was going to help him after all. The Red Pole had actually found Tony Mok. In Hong Kong. Half a world away. To some detectives the great distance might have been disheartening, an obstacle all but impossible to overcome, but to Gilbert it was simply a matter of degree. This man from the other side had moved quickly and efficiently. Hope might be old, but the Red Pole was still a force. Gilbert gave Hope a small bow.
“Thank you,” he said.
The hard edges eased from Peter Hope’s smile and a genuine friendliness came to his face. Gilbert felt as if he had passed a test. Hope’s smile no longer looked so predatorial.
“Have you ever been to Hong Kong, Detective Gilbert?”
“No.”
“Because you’ll have to go. I’ve had some of my associates detain Tony Mok for you. I should point out that I was personally opposed to any cooperation with you. As far as I’m concerned, and as far as Mr. Wu is concerned, Mrs. Wu is innocent. Certainly I would like to spare her any further questioning, but Mr. Wu and I both think that any inconvenience she might suffer isn’t worth the time and trouble—and the considerable risk—we took in finding and apprehending Tony Mok for you. The police can ask her as many questions as they like, as far as we’re concerned. Mr. Wu and I feel we have nothing to gain in detaining Tony Mok for you.”
