by Howard Engel
“Are you Professor Gladstone?” a man with a neat grey beard asked me.
“No, my name’s Cooperman. I’m looking for Professor Bett,” I said in an unnaturally squeaky voice.
“It’s true: Morgan Bett’s often here for coffee.” This from a tall, lean man who was looking me over. “Have a biscuit. They bring us these biscuits every Friday and we are expected to eat them. I wouldn’t care to speculate on what happens from Saturdays on.” He said this with a straight face in a voice that spoke of the southern half of this continent. As a group, they sat on ceremony: there were no introductions, no pack drill. It was like joining a group that had been sitting since the beginning of time. They had no concern for exits and entrances. I reached for a cookie and managed not to spill my coffee.
Plink, plink, went the piano.
“I was looking most particularly for a man I’ve corresponded with for many years. I think he said he was coming today.”
“Name of Gladstone?” asked the tall American with a half-suppressed twinkle, twisting his legs around one another.
“Why yes! Do you know him?”
The remaining man leaned over to me. “Are you the new writer-in-residence?”
“No, I’m not an academic of any kind.”
“He’s come looking for Morgan Bett.”
“Are you one of Angus’s acolytes? He doesn’t usually bring his fans to coffee.”
Plink, plink, went the piano, now moving up into the treble clef.
“Bill, you always pounce on people!” This from a retired professor with an old school tie.
“I didn’t pounce! I didn’t jump or take advantage. I put it to him in the time-honoured manner. When I pounce, you’ll know it.”
“It looked like a pounce from here,” muttered the grey-haired professor with the tie.
“Well, these things have to be taken up in the right perspective. One man’s pounce is another man’s spirited sally.”
“Morgan often plays chess with Angus,” the silver-haired woman whispered to me. From that moment, I began to relax. The conversation sailed around the room, quickly and with spirit.
Plink, plink, plink, went the piano.
“That piano-tuner sounds like he’s deconstructing Liebestraum.”
“Aye. Why doesn’t he go away?”
“This never happened in the old tower room.”
“Somebody pinched the clock there.”
Again the piano sounded. This time with some finality. I sat it out, enjoying their banter. After consuming two cups of coffee and two biscuits, my right to sit among them was still unchallenged. Nobody made me feel odd man out, and two of them smiled at me when they left. It was the nature of the gathering, a bit like a theatre’s green room: people were always coming and going. Even Professor Gladstone arrived, much to the delight of his pen pal.
When I asked Angus, the man with Bond’s voice, about Dr. Bett, he conferred with the man next to him, then reported that my friend was not going to appear this morning.
“Dentist!” he said with a shudder. “I hope you’ll come along next week. Aye, he’ll be here next Friday. Come see us again.”
TWENTY
“Well!” she began. “You’re back! Next time you go off without leave, you might at least take me along. You’re not the only one who’s tired of these dull walls.” Her attempt to look like an outraged fishwife, even with her hands on her hips, was a flop.
“Sorry.”
“You’ve had visitors and I didn’t know what to tell them. Dr. Collins wanted to see you. I almost told him that you had gone walkabout. But instead I just said that you were getting some exercise.”
“Sorry,” I repeated.
“All very well for you to—” she began, but she didn’t pursue it.
“Who were my other visitors?”
“Oh, those two desperate characters masquerading as police officers in plain clothes. Plain? I ask you. If they thought they could fool anyone in those outfits, they’ve got another think coming. Pals of yours, I imagine?”
“Sometimes. I don’t suppose they said what they wanted?”
“No. They took their secrets with them into the elevator. One of them took a chocolate bar from your box of treats. He seemed to be in charge.”
“Anyone else?”
“You have great expectations for a little fellow! No, the line of visitors ended with the servers and protectors.”
“I don’t know who I was expecting. I have an unquenched desire to see … I don’t know what.”
“There’s something I can give you for that. There’s a pill for everything.”
I was surprised she let me off so lightly. I had assumed that I’d be coming back to a royal fuss. This wasn’t even a slap on the wrist.
As soon as the nurse left the room, I gave myself up to a deep sleep. I wasn’t used to the world out there. It was foreign and dangerous, subject to frivolous changes in temperature and humidity. The people out there moved guardedly, while gusts of hot air blew scraps of newspapers along the sidewalks, out into the street and up into the air, where they rose like ballet dancers taking flight. Inside the hospital, the weather was under strict control, air-conditioned, unexcitable, dependable, unreal. I was going to have to adjust to reality in easy stages. The sound of the wind blowing down University Avenue, remembered from my excursion, carried me off to sleep under the warm covers. Sleep, the old whore, had cornered me again.
There are all kinds of sleep—refreshing all-nighters, fender-bending nightmares, catnaps, and deep oblivion— but for a sleep that gathers you up, seduces you, and turns off your lights there is nothing quite like hospital sleep. Sleep, the seductress of my waking hours, watched me closely, knew my weaknesses, held out lurid promises. When I was in the middle of dinner or talking to a visitor, she began gathering me into her warm embrace. I didn’t usually try to fight it: there’s not much competition in a place like Rose of Sharon. Again, I surrendered to her touch, and again, it was good.
Then there were voices, far away, against an echoing background. I can’t reproduce the words, not the exact words, one never can in a dream, but there were two voices talking about drugs and their cost. One voice, an English-accented voice, was telling the other not to be daft, that she shouldn’t play at knowing what she was doing without measuring the cost. “Ecstasy,” she said. “Have you lost your tiny mind?” The other voice was younger, guarding her ignorance with bluster.
“What’s the harm?” Where had I heard such talk? Were they nurses talking near my bed? Right now, as I slept? Or were they seeds from my memory, dropped like acorns from my resting brain? Was it a fragment of another time and place? I didn’t know, but I awoke with the idea of drugs in my head. And it wouldn’t go away.
When I got up, mid-afternoon had arrived. There was a small crowd in the dining room, sitting in front of the TV, a collection of wheelchairs, bumper to bumper, watching a quiz show. The hostess of the program wore her hair in two bright blond braids with bows of blue ribbon. She reminded me of somebody. It was one of those vague reminders of my former self that kept elbowing my memory. Maybe I’d get used to it. Of course, now I had my memory in a book. There should be no confusion.
I got a cup of juice and joined the few of us not addicted to TV. I talked to the former diplomat for a quarter of an hour. As usual, I couldn’t remember his name without a covert reference to my Memory Book. With him was a wizened ghost of a man in a wheelchair, wearing an ill-fitting, faded hospital gown. He looked both bright and ill at ease. He was introduced to me, but his name went where all good names went these days. He was a newcomer, wheeling himself out of his room for an early exploration of the corridor, like a kid testing the overnight ice on the pond. The diplomat had been talking about the brisk world trade in Canadian passports. He said that our nationality was now the favoured one for any fugitive in need of a fresh identity. The old man and I listened, enjoying an inside peek at international affairs. He was drinking a cup of cold coffee. I
think he preferred it that way. The diplomat had juice. We sat together watching traffic roll down University Avenue. A conversation started. I don’t remember where it began, but like a lot of conversations it drifted from politics to religion, and from religion to education. The man with the grey face told a story about his granddaughter getting an award at an Eastern university. We offered congratulations and basked in the diluted glory for half a minute.
“What about campus crime? For instance, drugs.” I asked him out of the blue. I didn’t know my question until I heard myself ask it. Didn’t I have a dream about dope of some kind? I retained a vague clot of a memory.
“Drugs?” the diplomat asked, looking at his companion. “Look at the beautiful day out there. Why do you want to talk about drugs?”
“I know some people, a family. Drugs are pulling the family apart.”
“You should be asking my friend, Wilf, about drugs. Wilf Carton, Ben Cooperman. Wilf just got here from Toronto General. Wilf’s a retired law professor, Benny. Wilf, watch out, Ben’s a private eye.”
“Private investigator,” I corrected to keep the record straight.
The old man’s eyes twinkled as he licked his lips. The paper-thin skin of his head was transparent. His right arm hung limply over the arm of his wheelchair.
“Why is the university a good place to have an illegal drug business?” I asked.
While we watched him, Wilf thought for a minute, his eyes on the traffic down below. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “As you know, the major trade in drugs is done in the great American cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Smaller, but still significant, is the steady traffic up here, but the big money is down in the States.” So far he hadn’t added to my knowledge, but I wasn’t going to blast him for that yet. He had stated his theme. Now he was going to enlarge on it. “The police do a lot of undercover work, looking for illicit dealers. In some cities, they have even become dealers themselves, I’m sorry to say. But, with a little intelligence, the dealers manage to stonewall most legitimate undercover operatives.” He took a breath and looked like he was about to tell me more when he said, “Where is this friend of yours? Toronto? York?”
“Simcoe College, University of Toronto.”
His eyes widened.
“You know that place?”
“If I did once, I don’t any more.” For a minute the conversation was sidetracked to the peculiarities of my hospitalization. Then we returned to the main theme.
“The suspicion is that the labs at Simcoe College are being used to manufacture drugs. You’d be looking for a common street drug that can be made in a lab. Doesn’t need fancy equipment. But you’ve got to be careful or you’ll be walking around with a drug-induced case of Parkinson’s. Whoever’s behind the operation at Simcoe has buffaloed the best efforts of the campus police.”
I nodded, a buzz beginning in my head. “Have they had any luck?”
“From what I hear, they catch the small operators, but can’t get close to the people who are manufacturing the narcotics.”
“It shouldn’t be hard to locate a lab that’s being used to make dope. If you need a lab, don’t you have to requisition it? Don’t names appear on forms? Isn’t anybody keeping records?”
“Ask the police. Now, tell me what you know. First of all, what are we talking about? Heroin? Cocaine? You won’t find them in a campus lab except under controlled conditions. Crack? LSD? Ecstasy?”
“Ecstasy. Let’s go with Ecstasy.”
“Good bet. There, the traders, the young students being picked up, are not informing on the manufacturers, who keep well out of sight.”
“So, it’s a major problem?”
“The manufacturers will get picked up one of these days and there will be a hiatus.”
“Just a pause? Not an end to the trade?”
“Mr. Cooperman, I’m too old to be an optimist. It’s human nature you’re dealing with, a notoriously unstable substance. Young people have been rebelling against the forbidden since Adam was a farmer. What are you going to do?” Wilf Carton went on looking out the window and then turned to look at me again. “If I live to be two hundred, I’ll never understand the back streets of human nature, Mr. Cooperman. In the contest between Wordsworth and Robespierre, the Frenchman wins every time.”
We continued to look out of the window. I couldn’t explain this sudden fascination with the tiny cars and trucks down below. Maybe it was because their life went on without any awareness that we were watching. It might have been the fact that we knew something that they would learn later on. Whatever it was, the sight of moving traffic held us like a scene of life on another planet. The cars, the slow-moving figures, all looked foreign, irrelevant to our lives. After five minutes, the picture grew depressing.
I went back to my bed, intrigued by the conversation I’d just had. At the edge of my consciousness was the image of that television blonde with the two braids buttressing her invisible ears. Like a puppy worrying a new pair of socks, my mind kept coming back to it. Where was the key to unlock that fugitive fragment?
I didn’t feel as tired as I had earlier, but I didn’t have energy for challenge. For a minute or two, I fought the good fight, but in the end my moth-eaten character gave way. I let myself feel the pillow under my head and closed my eyes.
It was moving on toward late afternoon when I woke up. I played a hand or two of gin rummy with my roommate, Jerry, just to be friendly, and he took me for fifty cents. I never play cards if I can help it, but Dagmar had phoned to say that she couldn’t visit Jerry today. He was a decent fellow and that overrode my dislike of card-playing.
The less said about dinner, the better. Somebody told me that the closer you get to being discharged, the worse the food tastes. I can believe that.
“Mr. Cooperman?” It was a complete stranger staring down at me as I was courting a post-prandial nap before seriously going to sleep. My visitor was an Indian from India. A few of the specialists I’d seen walking through the corridors were Indian. I wondered whether my pulse had developed irregularities I hadn’t been told about.
“That’s right. Who are you?”
“My name is Abul Moussuf. I’m a friend of Steve Mapesbury. Over at the university. We talked together, you and I, many, many days ago.” He was losing steam, seeing no signs of recognition from my bewildered face. His was the chubby, dimpled face of a boy, promoted to the summit of his six-foot frame. “Remember, we talked about Steve in my lab a few months ago. You came to see me.”
“You’re Boolie, right?”
His face opened up and the sun came out. “That’s what my friends call me, yes.” He smiled at this break in the clouds. “You remember now, yes?”
“No. I don’t remember. That’s why I’m here.”
He went on to explain how he tracked me down. Not hard for a trained scientist. “But I am so sorry for your trouble. It was a dreadful thing to have happened. I didn’t know.”
“But perhaps not quite as dreadful as what has happened to your friend. When did you last see Steve Mapesbury?”
“Not since your Easter, Mr. Cooperman.”
“Call me Benny.”
“Benny. Yes, and, please, call me Boolie. Everybody calls me Boolie.”
“You’re from Kashmir.”
“Yes, but I have been living abroad for so many years now that I can hardly remember it sometimes. And at other times it seems so real, I feel I could reach out and touch a familiar tree or stone. It’s very beautiful: the mountains, the rivers, the Vale of Kashmir, the tempo of life. It’s good for the heart, I think.”
“Where is your friend?”
“I do not know. We have mislaid ourselves.”
“Was Steve mixed up in the drug business going on over there?”
“I would not care to say.”
“Look, Boolie, I’m not a policeman. I’m just looking for information. I want to find him before somebody tries to kill him. Hell! He may be dead already for all I know.”
“I worked closely with Steve,” he finally said, “when I first joined the department. We were good friends, shared digs and an office. But for the past year I’ve been busy on other things, loaded with work. Whenever I saw Steve, I thought, He doesn’t look well. Something’s not right. But I didn’t get a chance to follow up on my good intentions. Damn it all to hell! You see, my vibes are from Kashmir and from England. I don’t know where the line is drawn that lets one ask questions of a once-good friend who is being evasive. He’s a good man, but he’s been hard-pressed. The life of a scientist isn’t easy, Mr. Cooperman, and there are temptations.”
“Did Steve give in to those temptations, Boolie?”
“I wish I knew. One of his daughters was sick in the winter. Something expensive.”
“Wasn’t he covered by insurance?”
“Nowadays there is coverage and coverage. There are always expenses with illness, and the health-care blanket that is supposed to cover one is getting smaller year by year.”
“Do you think he compromised his principles?”
“I know he put his savings into a down payment. That’s not a compromise. I could always tell when mortgage payments became due. He never had pocket money. Not for a long time, and then suddenly he did. He paid me back what he owed me. I hoped that he’d got lucky somehow. I didn’t even guess. Then he started looking terrible, like a character in Shakespeare gone off the rails. I should have tried to help him. I should have tried harder.” Boolie’s face looked as though it was going to melt. He was crying.
I sat up in bed and threw my feet to the floor.
“But, Boolie, you lent him money. You were a big help to him.”
“That’s very kind of you to say, but, no, I could have done more. It was an omission on my part, a serious omission.”
It took me a few minutes to calm Boolie down. He sat on my bed, while I threw the rest of my clothes on. My roommate poked his head in the door and seeing Boolie’s tears, wheeled himself to a neutral corner. I passed Boolie the box of tissue that stood handy.
