She moved up Beverley Street at a pace she knew was unsatisfactory, but it was all she could muster. Speed was a problem for her lately; she could do nothing quickly. Often she felt submerged in water, her body struggling just to move normally. Aunt Sally had insisted at the Shiva that what she remembered most when Uncle died was the fatigue, the dense weariness that grief deposited in the bones. Don’t overdo it, Rebecca directed her solid leather-bound feet. We just want to get in shape, we don’t want to win any races.
She paced herself along Baldwin Street where narrow brick houses watched behind lawns of yellow inchoate grass that would turn green inside of a month. She approached the spectacle of Spadina Avenue. Three lanes of traffic rushed on either side of the streetcar tracks that ran along the centre of the grand avenue, ready to trip the unwary pedestrian. A deathtrap for anyone dependent on a white cane. Apparently a physician named Baldwin who practiced architecture on the side had designed the street in the early 1800s with the Champs Elysées in mind. By the time Jewish merchants opened their produce stalls along the street near the end of that century, Spadina was no longer glamorous. Now modern wholesalers with their overcrowded dry goods, hardware, and poultry shops made the street garish. But because of its elaborate width, it was difficult, from one side of Spadina, to see what was on the other. A lot, thought Rebecca, like looking across to the opposite bank of a respectable river. Across the expanse she picked out the store where David had bought his art supplies. Chinese restaurants had opened on either side.
When David was alive, she had struggled with her weight — a lifetime ago when she was ten or fifteen pounds more than she liked. But her atrophied appetite satisfied her in a morbid way though she denied she was punishing herself. She hadn’t given David diabetes. She just hadn’t been paying enough attention to realize he was hiding his symptoms. As a physician she knew it was common to deny one’s illness in the hope it will disappear. He had concealed the constant peeing, the thirst, from her. He constantly sucked on breath mints to mask the sweet ketonic breath. He didn’t want to worry her. For awhile he’d fooled his mother, poor Sarah, who had survived the Holocaust but lost her only child.
Near the end, when he was in hospital, Rebecca left him alone with his mother and took the elevator down to the main floor. Sarah had no other relatives — all were lost in the camps. Though she never talked about it, and though her auburn hair and quick smile belied it, her loss defined her to Rebecca, who now found it hard to be with the two of them — one dying and the other a reminder of death. It was August and the evening air wafted so softly against her skin refreshing her, filling her with guilt. She was alive! She stood in the shadows too numb to move while traffic floated by. Voices murmured off to one side. She absently noted two interns in white coats sitting on the cement stairs leading up to the hospital. “Fellow at rounds this morning, only thirty-five. First thing he knew anything was wrong was when he went to check his eyes for blurred vision. Diabetic retinopathy. Blind now. Pyelonephritis. That’s not the way I want to go! Crazy thing is, his wife’s a doctor....”
She had never forgotten that conversation; never come to terms with the guilt. She knew she’d failed in her primary role. Not only had she missed the symptoms that would’ve been obvious if a patient had presented with them. That was bad enough. But the changes in his painting. How could she have ignored the reaching for the light? In a year, the subdued and muted palette that had always defined his work became transformed. His canvases deepened into cadmium reds and phthalo blues that should’ve set off alarm bells in her head. The dimmer his world became, the more radiant his colours. Finally they became brilliant streaks of pigment without shape. Was there anything more ironic than an artist going blind?
Near the end he would try to engage her in discussions about God. Try to get her position, as a woman of science. She mouthed the platitudes for his sake, but in reality reserved judgment. This was her deal with the Almighty: if he let David live, she would embrace Him wholeheartedly. In her prayers she stressed that David was the kindest, most unselfish person she knew and that thirty-five was too young for a good person to die.
She had never thought much about God before, attended High Holiday services because her parents bought tickets at a Reform synagogue. After David died, she began to ruminate on the kind of God who had seen fit to take away the best man she knew. God didn’t seem to care who He made suffer, it didn’t matter if one was pure of heart. The universe was a chaotic place without justice or reason.
Though she had watched patients die over the years, she had never felt that profound hopelessness till death touched her personally. It wasn’t a transitory depression; it was a change in her world view. God had died, or He had lost interest in the welfare of the world. Nothing would ever be the same again.
Afterwards she had hit well below her target weight. Though she was average height, her bones were large; her back was wide, her wrists and ankles were not delicate and though the flesh had dissolved on her, she felt the solidity of her frame would see her through. She only wished she could do something about her energy level. The bustle of life here made her feel peripheral, restless.
She turned left at Dundas, mortified that walking three blocks at moderate speed was giving her a stitch in her side. Two streets away the white concrete facade of the Art Gallery of Ontario, spread over an entire city block, sat coolly on its wide steps. She moved amid the supper crowds in Chinatown in the firm knowledge that once she got to Beverley Street all would be quiet. It never ceased to surprise her: in the centre of the triangle comprised loosely of the Art Gallery, Kensington Market, and the University of Toronto, Beverley Street was as quiet as a suburb. It was like the eye of a storm; in the centre of things without all the detractions that the centre of things implied. Traffic was bad along Dundas where Chinatown and the Art Gallery tolerantly merged, and the market was a maze of one-way streets, but the heart of Beverley Street lay warm and beating quietly after a hundred years of affluence. She’d come upon a book that traced the history of old houses in the neighbourhood and had found a surprising number of Victorian styles: Georgian, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne, and Richardsonian Romanesque. Some had been renovated into offices like hers, some into rooming-houses.
Her shins began to hurt as she passed the wrought iron fence of the Italian consulate filling the extensive corner of Dundas and Beverley. She was in pathetic shape. She couldn’t go any faster, no matter how hard she pushed herself.
The consulate occupied a regal tawny structure built a century earlier. What was it called? Chudleigh, whatever that meant; her book had not said. But it represented what Rebecca wanted. She had picked Beverley Street for its other-century, traditional demeanour, its Victorian mansions still sturdy in a new age. She was looking for something solid, something that stood the test of time, something that would still be there when she looked up. Buildings that stood by serenely while the world changed were a good bet. Sure they had been renovated. That was their secret; from the inside out, the old had been made new again. Otherwise they would not have survived. That was the secret, Rebecca thought. Use the old structure for a base and add what is necessary. Change and survive. She had started from the bottom when she bought her formidable leather shoes. Iris was right. She would have to work her way up.
She was nearly home-free, her heart full in her throat, pulsing. How had she deteriorated into this shape? She blew out, then sucked in, refusing to let herself gasp. She stood on the steps of the medical building, catching her breath. Across the street Beverley Mansions caught the warm glow of the early evening sun. She heard sharp distant noises, like drawers opening and cutlery being laid down. People were coming home from work and preparing dinner. Normal people. Would she ever be normal again?
chapter four
Nesha
Friday, March 30, 1979
Nesha made the mistake of examining the photo under a magnifying glass. If it had been the original newsprint he might
have been able to see something among the million grey dots. But the photocopy revealed no secrets in its pools of black and white, only bald statements he didn’t know how to interpret. Yet interpret he must. He would keep trying till something spoke to him. He would be methodical as always; it was the only way he knew.
He stepped up to the living-room window that overlooked San Francisco Bay and held the photo up to the light. Starting at the bottom he read the caption, “Fowl Escape from the Market,” then the photo credit: Peter Hanson/Toronto Star. His eyes moved up the page to where a duck waddled along a sidewalk, stores in the background. Finally, as a reward to himself, he let his eyes settle on the man walking in the shadow of the store beyond the duck. A spasm gripped his heart. It felt good to hate again. Like sensation coming back to a long-dead limb: a sign of life. The man in the picture was not young. Nesha looked in the upper margin at the handwritten notation: June 10, 1978. Almost a year ago. A lot could happen in a year. By now he might be dead. Wouldn’t that be rich, Nesha thought, finally getting this new information and stoking up the old fires only to find out the man had died peacefully in his sleep in the meantime. He couldn’t bear that. He stared at the blurred face and tried to get it to speak to him. “Are you still breathing, you bastard? Are you waiting for me?”
Once a year, before Passover, Nesha allowed himself the bittersweet ritual of taking his pistol out of the cabinet and cleaning it. It had been thirty-five years since it came into his possession and each year he brought it out like a relic, the sole concrete evidence of his youth. Only the hard steel convinced him that his past was not a bad dream. He had no mother, no father, no brothers. No photos to bring out of the drawer that could comfort him with familiar faces. After all these years it was the absence of photos he regretted the most.
He tenderly dismantled the gun into its dark steel segments. His legacy consisted of the herringbone-patterned handle, the slide, the barrel, the recoil spring. Set on a piece of cotton flannel on the kitchen table, they absorbed the light from his window. The Bay shone outside, Marin County with its upscale houses set into the hills, their glass walls flaming in the sun. But with the gun before him, sucking in the light, he was in Poland again, in the woods running between villages. Mud sucking at his feet. Branches grasping at him. If he’d only had the gun then. There would have been fear in the peasants’ eyes, not contempt. He knew which ones he would’ve used the gun on. The big stupid one who beat him every day for a month with his hamfists. Nesha escaped one winter’s night, flying through the frozen fields like a ghost, the wind taking hold of him, biting his skin beneath the thin coat. In the next village an old woman wanted him to help her feed her cows. She had a good heart most of the week but on Saturdays she got into the home-made vodka and beat him with her cane. The gun came too late to save him from those floggings. But he had been lucky, too. Not all peasants were the same. Some had pity. He was alive because of them.
A plane hummed over the Bay. He removed the magazine from the handle of the pistol and dismantled it, using a patch of cotton flannel to clean off the dirt, then rubbing it lightly with oil. He applied solvent to the interior of the barrel with a cleaning rod, then ran a fresh patch of flannel through the bore to wipe out the excess. He moved an old toothbrush along the cylinder gear, then over the grip panel of the handle, always in the direction of the herringbone pattern, to remove any dirt that managed to accumulate since the last cleaning. He didn’t understand how a gun could collect dirt hidden away in a box inside a cabinet. But the Earth turned; salt air from the Pacific crept in through crevices and would pock the smooth surface of an uncleaned gun with rust.
Through the two hours that it took him to clean and lubricate the pistol, his mother’s face rose before him. Each time, he pushed her back, unwilling to have his heart broken again. But as he reassembled the gun in the fading light, he blinked too long and her dark hair appeared in the distance, the usually tidy bun unravelling in strands to her shoulders as she lined up with the others. And when she turned — he would never forget — her face white and twisted with terror, all the blood drained as if she were dead already. And her eyes, as familiar to him as his own, pleading with him to run, go back to the forest, run, forget, never come back.
All at once he looked up, startled to find a ragged, bearded man watching him. It took him a full minute to recognize himself in the reflection of the kitchen window, a mirror now that the sun had set. One day, he thought, his mind would pull him back into those woods and he would never come out. He wouldn’t mind. They were more real to him than the fabled Bay outside his window.
He turned on the light and finished polishing the exterior of the pistol with a lightly oiled chamois. The gun was a 9 mm Parabellum. He had done his research. The word came from a Roman proverb: Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you seek peace, prepare for war.
There was nothing he wanted as much as peace.
chapter five
Tuesday, April 3, 1979
Rebecca had barely started her second week in the new building. The scent of fresh paint lingered in the air and some of her former patients, arriving for appointments, commented on the elegance of her new office. Mr. and Mrs. DaCosta were also impressed, sitting tentatively on the edge of the nubbly new chairs while Rebecca described the surgical procedure of vasectomy. She was reassuring them that it was relatively foolproof and that, no, the likelihood was that they would have no more children, when voices rose in some commotion outside the examining room. A plaintive accented voice arrived muffled through the closed door.
“You don’t understa... I must see Doctor ... life or death....”
Rebecca recognized Mrs. Kochinsky’s accent but was surprised at her level of distress. What had set off her alarm bells to come running into the office the day before her regular weekly session? She had never shown up without an appointment, though she was often upset when she came. Iris would have to deal with it.
Rebecca spent ten more minutes with the DaCostas then led them back down the short hallway to the waiting-room where she spotted Mrs. Kochinsky, grey-pale, dressed more casually than usual. She was rocking back and forth on the edge of the couch. When she saw Rebecca, she jumped to her feet. Her anxiety touched Rebecca but didn’t alarm her when she took it in the context of the woman’s usual mental state. Beside Mrs. Kochinsky sat a young woman whose little girl had turned her back on the old lady and lay tightly curled in her mother’s arms.
Iris handed Rebecca Mrs. Kochinsky’s file and whispered in her ear, “She’s ready to explode. I haven’t seen her this bad.”
The other patients, who had been waiting longer, sat stone-faced as Rebecca led Mrs. Kochinsky down the hall.
Wearing a beige trenchcoat over polyester pants, the older woman stood in the centre of the examining room wringing her hands. She nearly wept out her words, her chest heaving with exertion.
“I’m sorry — I know this not my day for appointment. But I see him. The man... He follow me here. I’m sure he there outside.”
She stepped to the window that looked out onto D’ Arcy Street. Pushing aside the vertical blind, she peered down, her face white with terror. “There. There in car, man sitting.” Her finger poked the air triumphantly.
Rebecca moved toward the window and glanced out at one of the quietest spots in downtown Toronto. The facade of an alternative high school was camouflaged by mature spruce trees. In front, across the one-way street, sat a young man in a run-down silver Chevy. “How old was the man you recognized?” she asked.
Mrs. Kochinsky’s hand flew up in exasperation. “I don’t know. Maybe fifty, maybe sixty. What difference?”
“Look at the man in the car.”
Mrs. Kochinsky bent her head toward the window again. “He’s no more than twenty,” said Rebecca. “There’s a high school across the street. He’s probably waiting for someone.”
The older woman continued to look through the blinds. “Could be anywhere. There. Cars on other street. What about there?�
�� She pointed out the corner of the window in the direction of Beverley Street. Rebecca peered sideways toward the front of the medical building. Cars were parked on both sides of the street at meters. She had picked the corner of Beverley and D’ Arcy for her new office because of its tranquillity and saw nothing out the window to make her regret that decision.
“Was he the same man who frightened you last week?”
Mrs. Kochinsky’s hand flew up again, this time to entreat the ceiling. Her dark eyes flashed impatience. “You don’t understand! They always send different man. But this it! This man... This man last one.”
Rebecca was concerned about Mrs. Kochinsky’s growing propensity for panic.
“Where did you first see him?”
She jerked open the flap of her handbag and pulled out a piece of paper. “Here! Here is it!” She waved a photocopy of a picture in front of Rebecca’s face.
“What is it?” Rebecca asked, trying to focus on the moving page. “May I see it?”
Mrs. Kochinsky handed her the sheet, which Rebecca glanced at, puzzled. She commented on the obvious. “It looks like a duck.” Before she could examine it further, Mrs. Kochinsky grabbed it back and replaced it in her purse.
“You don’t believe me,” said Mrs. Kochinsky, hurt.
Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Page 3
