She stood up. “It’s late, and I have an early day tomorrow.”
“Before you go,” Michael said, “I wanted to invite all of you to my house on Saturday. I have a beautiful pool in the back. It’ll still be hot and we can all go swimming. Those too lazy to swim can sit around the pool and sip wine. What do you say?”
Rebecca and Sarah exchanged questioning glances.
Natalka folded her arms across her stomach. “I have no clothes for this.”
“What you’re wearing is fine,” he said. “You can sit in one of the lounge chairs and sip wine in the sun.”
She smiled.
Michael jumped to his feet. “Good. Then it’s settled. Come over after lunch. I’m a bachelor and I don’t cook, but I serve lots of wine.” He took a business card out of his wallet and wrote an address on the back. “It’s on Baby Point Road just off Jane Street north of Bloor.” He handed the card to Rebecca.
“By the way,” he said sheepishly, “do you think you could drop me somewhere? Janek took my car.”
“Of course,” she said, a surprising excitement rising in her throat. She glanced at Sarah with some guilt.
“Rebecca just lives around the corner,” Sarah said. “Maybe I can call you a taxi.”
Rebecca avoided eye contact with her mother-in-law. She wasn’t sure she wanted Sarah to know what she was thinking.
Michael looked from one woman to the other. “Of course. It was thoughtless of me. It’s not far to the subway. I can get Janek’s car at the office.”
When they were heading to the door, Rebecca took heart and said, “I can drop you at the subway. I’m going in that direction.” She gave Sarah a reassuring look.
She led him outside to the driveway.
“This is a beautiful car,” he said, easing himself into the passenger side of her Jaguar XKE.
It had been David’s before he’d gone blind. He’d been so attached to it that she hadn’t had the heart to sell it, even after he died. She’d sold her own car, an Oldsmobile, and kept his. It still felt odd having a strange man in the car.
Sarah waved from the door as they pulled away.
Rebecca felt Michael watching her. “How long have you been working on your novel?” she asked as she drove down Spadina Road.
He hesitated. “A long time. I don’t usually talk about it, but I felt very comfortable in the company.” He looked sideways at her.
“How far along are you?”
“I’ve got twelve chapters, almost two hundred pages.”
“You’ve done a lot of research?”
“Years,” he said. “The eighteenth century was very exciting. It was really the beginning of the modern era — the Enlightenment, the intrigues between the major powers in Europe. And the revolutions: the birth of the United States and the rebirth of France. I’ve buried myself quite completely in the period and I’m enjoying myself immensely.”
Rebecca drove along St. Clair Avenue toward Yonge Street. She pulled over, in sight of the subway stop at the corner. During the day the volume of traffic at this intersection would have prevented her from sitting at the side of the road for more than a minute. But at this hour on a weeknight only a few cars passed by. Across the road, red lights spelled out “Fran’s” over the twenty-four-hour restaurant. The large, simple letters glowed red in a cursive script underlined in hot neon.
“Where does the king of Poland come in?” she asked.
“He’s one of my main characters,” Michael said. “A handsome, charming fellow with the best of intentions who managed, by an inevitable series of circumstances, to wipe Poland off the face of the map. It took one hundred and twenty-six years and World War One to restore it. But my story is more personal. I’m interested in the king as a man.”
He looked out to where the lights of Fran’s marquee blinked amid the surfeit of neon. “We can talk about it over coffee,” he said, pointing his chin at the restaurant.
“I can’t, tonight,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so excited about my book I become a bore. Is your husband waiting for you at home?”
“I’m a widow,” she said.
“I’m so sorry.” He paused a moment watching her.
“How about tomorrow night?” he said.
Her eyes travelled over his face, the long patrician nose, the lines creasing the skin around his clear blue eyes. He was older than she was, but cut a dashing figure. He had managed to impress her and put her at ease at the same time. She had never had coffee with a count before.
She was having dinner at her parents’ house tomorrow night. “I’ll meet you in there at nine-thirty,” she said.
chapter five
Michael
Michael gazed out the windows of his office on the twentieth floor of the Baron Mines Building. Ropes of cars snaked along the Gardiner Expressway within view of Lake Ontario. One of the perks of the job, this loft high up in the financial heart of Toronto, looking south over the lake. The iron blue water usually soothed him the way only water can. But it had been a fitful day, impossible to concentrate with the lawyers scrambling in and out, holding their briefcases in front of them like shields. Janek scowled more than usual, charging through the hallowed carpeted halls of their Bay Street offices as if the devil were behind him. He raised his voice at the lawyers but he screamed at the secretaries. They stopped telling him when a reporter called for an interview. There would be no interviews. Michael would have been willing to speak to the press — he had always handled Janek’s public relations, such as they were — but the lawyers forbade any contact with the media. Michael had questioned this at first, then retreated.
Into his leather chair watching the lake: the white-crested waves rolled over the blue surface for miles; mute seagulls rose and fell, so small from there that all he could see was the movement. That was what had happened to the miners up north. They’d become so small and far away that they had all but disappeared in Janek’s mind. Their problems were of no concern to him. Was it his fault they were dying? They worked for him, he paid them good wages, what more could they ask? The lawyers knew what more. That was why they forbade interviews. The company was guilty.
Michael was a figurehead on the board of directors, held no sway over Janek or the chief engineers. He was there to smooth feathers that inevitably got ruffled by Janek’s brusqueness, but in the end Michael’s effect was cosmetic because Janek always did what he wanted. If people called him a sonofabitch, Janek didn’t mind, as long as they continued to do business with him.
Michael had a desk full of work but he’d had enough today. He picked up his briefcase and came out of his office. His secretary looked up from her typing, surprised.
“I’m going home,” he said. “Take messages.”
He was heading down the hall when the door to Janek’s office flew open in front of him.
“Not today, Professor!” Janek barked, pushing a large man in a tweed jacket out the door into Michael’s path.
Janek rolled his eyes at Michael before slamming the door shut. Michael knew that look. It did not bode well for Professor Hauer.
He blinked at Michael, his skin blotchy with effort.
“I’m very sorry, Professor,” Michael said. “You were lucky to escape. This has been a bad day for him.”
Hauer shook his head with some force, the thick brown hair falling straight over his ears. “I must discuss the details of the project with him. Time is of the essence, he doesn’t understand. We must work out some of the finer points so I can assure the university that plans are going ahead. That finances are in place.”
Michael knew that Hauer was fishing for some reassurance from him about the money he’d asked Janek for.
Michael gestured that they should walk together to the elevator. He had no news for him and hoped the professor would not delay him talking about the infernal business. Hauer had his heart set on a Chair in Polish Studies and had taken advantage of Michael’s scholarly debt to him to ga
in access to the great man himself. Michael didn’t blame him. When he’d gotten bogged down in the details of eighteenth-century Poland, he had come to the Slavic Studies Department at the University of Toronto looking for help. He had been directed to Hauer, who’d given him a list of books, lent him some out of his personal library, and acquiesced to Michael picking his very knowledgeable brain.
Michael avoided his eyes in the elevator, pretended to study the floor numbers flashing over the door. After meeting for several months, Hauer had come to understand who Michael worked for, or at least, the reputed extent of his fortune, and without any warning, he had approached Janek with the idea of the Chair. Michael’s estimation of the man had rearranged itself. He had knocked himself off Michael’s pedestal, but still, the scholarly achievement, the respect and honour of such a profession! These were the things Michael would have wished for himself if things had been different. He escaped when Professor Hauer walked out of the elevator on the first floor of the Baron Building. Michael quietly hung back, and when the professor turned and realized his companion was continuing to a lower floor, it was too late. The surprised look on Hauer’s face was precious. The door slid shut and Michael was free. He felt a twinge of guilt, allayed by the memory of the ridiculously servile letters the man kept sending to Janek, which Janek threw at Michael without opening.
At first Janek was intrigued by the idea that the university would name a Chair after him. The John Baron Chair in Polish Studies. He agreed to a lump sum that Michael thought was very generous but that he knew Janek could well afford. Then the project hit a snag. Some bureaucracy at the university, the professor said. But Michael speculated that perhaps Hauer was overreaching; maybe his tiny office in a shabby building reflected his position in the pecking order and the university had no intention of supporting his proposal. In any case, Hauer relentlessly found opportunities to prostrate himself before Janek, either in person or by mail, to ensure the benefactor would not change his mind when the university authorities finally came through.
Michael was walking through the underground garage to his car when Janek’s limousine drove past him toward the exit. The day’s events flooded back on him, the miners, the lawyers, the shouting, and he felt his blood pressure rise. Janek had always been a ruthless man, but Michael had accepted that cold-bloodedness as a requisite for his success. Business was hard, only the strong survived. He wondered if Hauer would care how the money had been made. Michael had been supported in style by the company for years. It would be hypocritical to complain now.
He drove his Olds out the exit of the underground garage. To his surprise, Janek’s limo stood on the exit ramp like a beached whale. It was surrounded by angry men hoisting homemade signs into the air. The chauffeur was leaning on the horn, which was emitting a monotone wail. The demonstrators in their work clothes — plaid shirts and jeans and work boots — looked out of place in the core of Toronto’s financial district. The usual denizens of Bay Street, business men and women in new fall suits and stylish leather shoes, stared at them as they passed by.
The strikers looked angry but intimidated at the same time, hanging back a polite distance from the car. Instead of hurling abuse at the man in the back seat, they enclosed the car in a shy, awkward circle, murmuring among themselves. Michael knew Janek would be shrieking at the chauffeur to get him out of there.
The driver’s side window floated down. Official cap on, the chauffeur stuck out his head. “Get away from the damn car, or I’ll run you down!”
That was a mistake. Anger overcame shyness and arms reached in to pull the driver out of the window. The men became a mob and crushed around the car. Michael’s back stiffened and beads of sweat erupted at his temples. Everything began moving in slow motion; the shouts flattened into a noise that hovered above his head and he was in the gulag again, in Siberia, where prisoners were shadows of men the world had forsaken. The ground was grey dust where grey barracks squatted beneath a grey sky. It was always bone-rattling cold. The prisoners covered themselves with whatever rags they could find to keep warm. The lucky ones still had old handkerchiefs and shirts they could wrap around their faces to cut the biting wind. But one didn’t want to appear too lucky, or come to the attention of the guards. Once a guard noticed you, you were in trouble. But they didn’t have to do their own dirty work. A guard just had to mutter a name into the ears of a few starving prisoners and offer them an extra helping of soup in an exchange that benefitted them both. Then the guards stood by and watched the prisoners pound the transgressors with their fists. Michael had seen his father pounced on by exhausted, ragged men with filthy beards who had been promised another helping of mush. His father had lived only a few weeks after that.
“You goddamn bastards… let go of me!”
The shouted words brought Michael back to the car, the strikers, the struggling driver: a sudden tableau before him. Calm down, he thought, calm down.
In spite of the limbs flying and bodies lurching at sudden angles, everything was surprisingly quiet; only a periodic expletive reached his ears.
The driver’s torso was halfway out the window when one of the strikers yelled for them to stop. Everyone stopped. The leader was a wiry man with dignified posture, his shoulders erect. “Stay calm, boys,” he said. “This won’t help us. This man is a worker, like us.”
The driver was released and struggled back into his seat. The men retreated back to their previous polite distance, but their faces had changed. The anger had won out and solidified in the grim eyes, the hard set of their jaws. After a minute of pulling himself together, the driver shot the limo out of the exit ramp. Michael followed slowly behind.
His eyes darted from man to man as he passed through them. They formed a gauntlet on two sides, half-heartedly lifting their signs at his car, but no one recognized him. Janek was the only one who got his picture in the paper, but if anyone were really interested they’d find Michael’s name listed under the Board of Directors of Baron Mines as Secretary-Treasurer. Or with less digging, they’d find him in an annual report, a prospectus for one of Janek’s schemes, even the block of executive names in the foyer of the building.
Was that how the letter writer had found him? Simard or something. No, he knew more about Michael than his position in the company. He’d said in one of his letters that he’d been in the mine for twenty years. He said that John Baron was a heartless bastard but that Michael was different and would understand how a man might work in an airless shaft for twenty years because he needed the money. And anyway he was told he was lucky to have the work, only now he couldn’t work anymore because he couldn’t breathe. Maybe they’d met during Michael’s early days when he’d gone up north to act as Janek’s agent checking out prospectors and claims traders.
He could’ve seen Michael’s name in the Globe or the Toronto Star since he was the one in charge of relaying information to the press. Usually that meant offering reporters expensive liquor and the company spiel about how grateful John Baron was to Canada for giving him the opportunity to become filthy rich. Not in those words. “Giving back something to my adopted country,” or some crap like that.
Michael had always been in the background of the company, trying to balance Janek’s blunt style and bad temper, smooth any feathers ruffled after business meetings where Janek carried on with his usual acrimony. But hadn’t Michael been just as guilty? All those times people from Bear Lake had called raising questions about the safety of the mine, the poison dust they had to breathe in, the radioactivity released by the uranium. What had he ever done about it? Had he even mentioned it to Janek, to show he was concerned there was a problem? He had left it to Janek and his engineers to manage the mine and its structural defects. He was just a personal assistant, a pretty face with no real power. They were the ones who were supposed to know what they were doing. Well, maybe they did and they didn’t care. They knew there was a price to pay for success and they were only glad they weren’t the ones paying it. Maybe Janek d
idn’t set out deliberately to kill people, but he also didn’t care if they died along the way to making him rich.
Friday afternoon traffic along the Gardiner Expressway was always mad. Leaving an hour earlier didn’t help much either, but taking Bloor Street was not an alternative. It was a long way to his home in the west end of the city.
Mrs. Woronska was just locking up the side door of his house as he pulled into the driveway. She stopped when she saw him, a mountain of a woman in a homemade flowered apron, her wavy grey hair pinned back in a bun.
“I just put your dinner in fridge, Count. A delicious salmon. I didn’t expect you so early. I go back and heat up for you.” She turned to put the key back in the lock.
“Mrs. Woronska — it’s all right. Go home to your family. They’re probably hungrier than I am.” He shooed her away with a wave of his hand. “I’ll warm it up when I’m ready. Thank you.”
“Smaczniego,” she said. Then she smiled guiltily and said, “Gut appetite.”
He had asked her to speak English to him because he found that she became embarrassingly obsequious in Polish, addressing him as if he were royalty. She would fall into the ancient serf/noble pattern as if she had just come from planting potatoes on his estate. It amused him that he had been labouring for years to link his family to royalty, but when faced with someone grovelling at his feet, it distressed him.
He watched her cross the quiet street to her own house where her grown daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren were probably waiting for their supper. He paid her to prepare dinner for him during the week, good home-cooked meals that let him avoid the rich restaurant food that usually gave him heartburn.
Tonight he needed a drink. He went into the dining room where he kept his liquor and poured himself a gin and tonic. Mrs. Woronska’s salmon would wait. Usually after being in the office all day, it was a luxury to come home to spend the evening alone with a good meal, some wine, and his work. His real work. That would comfort him, but he needed something stronger tonight.
Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Page 28
