“Sorry, sir, the trunk latch is broken,” the driver says with a heavy Caribbean-French accent. “Are you okay to sit in the front? Put your bags in the back?”
“Sure, no problem.” Having to communicate with another human being slices the top off Janwar’s anxiety. It’s still there, filling his lungs and twisting his guts, but he has enough control to fake normalcy.
“Where to, sir?” The driver’s ID badge, hanging from the rear-view, says “Manville,” and Janwar, who, like most people, has trouble reading and speaking at the same time, almost says “Manville,” but manages to catch himself and instead says, “The airport.”
“Domestique or internationale?”
“Domestic. WestJet.”
The name Manville reminds Janwar of Boystown, the gay area in Chicago, a neighbourhood Janwar liked when he visited family in the city, with its low-rise indie businesses and chilled-out vibe, so different from the skyscrapers of—
Janwar sits up straight. “Actually? Manville?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Can we make a stop first?”
“Yes, sir.”
For a moment, as long as Janwar doesn’t look at the red numbers counting up on the dashboard of the Crown Vic, Manville and Janwar could be detective partners investigating a crime scene. One black, one brown, one French, one English, one short and stocky, one tall and thin, one with a memory honed by driving the streets, one with the analytical skills of a doctor. His reverie is interrupted by a thump as they run over a rat.
“What’s with all the rats?” Janwar asks.
“Les égouts pluvials backed up from the rain,” Manville says. “Lots of creatures living down there.”
“Like what?”
“Les rats. And le choléra.”
“Cholera?”
“One of the other drivers got it after his sewer pipes burst and merde spilled into his basement. His skin turned gris and sec but les medecins fixed him.”
“Wow, cholera,” Janwar says. “In Ottawa. In the twenty-first century.” He looks at his hands. No, that was stress. He doesn’t have cholera. And, you know what, the return of his anxiety is not that bad. The fact that he hadn’t panicked much during the most stressful moments of the last couple of weeks shows that it’s possible for him to go through life with less panic. It’ll just take work.
The condo development at Bronson and Lisgar isn’t too far of a departure from their planned route. Orange-clad workers swarm the site. Janwar wonders how quickly construction will stop once Susan breaks the story. Will the building linger half-constructed for months until inspectors complete a report, itinerant construction workers camped out in its shell over the winter, warming their hands around fire barrels full of fibreglass shards, waiting for work to start again? And then what? The tenants will file a class-action lawsuit. Despite his boasting, the developer will declare bankruptcy and jump out a window. Someone else will purchase the property, and the work so far will be dynamited, collapsing in on itself just the way Janwar imagined his bone fragments blowing out as he hit the rocks at Thetis Lake…
The site looks to Janwar like any other condominium in the early stages of construction: yellow sheeting, towering crane, and pounding generators, “Hard Hats Must Be Worn” signs, rented fencing, rebar pointing out of poured concrete at weird angles—which always made Janwar imagine that the workers were sloppy until he realized that the awkward ends would be snipped like sutures with what was, in essence, a very strong pair of scissors. A giant version of the Leatherman Raptor paramedic shears he never got to use against Llew.
Diego had spotted something that differed from the original plans and decided, rather than informing the proper bodies and spending years in court to recover his investment, to use a quick and dirty way to come out on top. And who knows, maybe he didn’t care so much about the environmentally friendly LEED status and did want the building to be completed so he could make his dirty money and still live there. Perhaps not being an avid reader of detective fiction or watcher of crime television, Diego didn’t know, like the condo developer, that every blackmailer always gets killed. Nobody ever lives peacefully in a blackmailer-blackmailed relationship. Sooner or later, something has to break; death is the only way to ensure silence.
“Okay,” Janwar says. “I might be asking too much, but can you do a Rockford turn?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Really? Like in the TV show?”
“I was un policier back in Haiti.”
Manville stomps on the gas while reversing out of the dirt parking lot, then steps on the e-brake and cranks the wheel around, spinning the car until it points forward, then shifts into drive and darts out into traffic.
Both of them with the biggest fucking grins on their faces.
Notable Inspirations & Thefts
Chapter 2 The documentary about the persecution of Roma during the Holocaust that Peter Wongsarat talks about at D’Arcy McGee’s is Aaron Yeger’s 2011 film A People Uncounted.
The hospital dead pool was inspired by Chester Himes’s 1959 novel The Big Gold Dream.
Chapter 3 I ripped off the scene with the coffee filter from Jack Smight’s 1966 movie Harper, starring Paul Newman. Harper is based on a novel by Ontario-raised noir writer Ross Macdonald, said by some to be the successor to Raymond Chandler.
Recording D The article about Venolia Parker is adapted from Laura Armstrong’s story “Mississauga Doctor Sees Male-only Patients after Sexual Abuse Discipline,” which appears in the 18 September 2014 Toronto Star.
Chapter 5 Janwar and Fang watch Juan José Campanella’s 2009 film El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes).
Chapter 6 SHROUD is a humanoid robot in Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V that was built by researchers to see how much radiation exposure a human being could take (SHROUD stands for “Synthetic Human, Radiation Output Determined”).
The article about Ellis Flecktarn is adapted from Rosie DiManno’s “DiManno: Resilient Witnesses Give Graphic Details of Doctor’s Alleged Sex Assaults,” which appears in the 18 January 2013 Toronto Star, and which also has the worst lede in the history of newspapers.
Chapter 7 Go see a Dan Deacon concert if he comes to your town. He’s great. So’s David Foster Wallace, whose first-ever story “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” published in The Amherst Review in 1984, lends its name to the band in the novel.
Chapter 11 The murderous astronaut who the two police officers discuss is Captain Lisa Marie Nowak.
Acknowledgements
After Navraj Chima, who deserves another mention, I want to thank my editor, Leigh Nash; the designer, Megan Fildes; the proofreader, Stuart Ross; my parents, Gerald Finger and Anne Hanson-Finger; my writing circle mates, Brooke Lockyer, Catriona Wright, Ian Sullivan-Cant, Shari Kasman, Ben Ladouceur, Laura Trethewey, and Ashleigh Gaul; and everyone else who’s ever read and provided feedback on any sections, including Andrew Battershill, Zani Showler, Jer Lucyk, John Nixon, Lauren Mitchell, Terence Young, Rob Mousseau, Julia Chanter, Pauline Ricablanca, Gary Barwin, Andrew Forbes, Andrew F. Sullivan, Mike Sauve, Jeff Blackman, Peter Gibbon, Heather McCarthy, Bardia Sinaee, Ryan Hilborn, Sam Hiyate, Don Loney, Stephanie Coffey, Illya Klymkiw, and Andrew Faulkner. Thanks also to Tara Cremin for acting as an Irish English consultant and Marisha Tardif for doing the same for Welsh English. Thanks also to the Toronto Arts Council for the funding. And to anyone I’ve forgotten, my apologies!
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