by Howard Engel
The Grantham Library is a nerve-racking place. I find it difficult to read for a long time at a stretch with the sound of running water in my ears. Somehow, architects find libraries call out for fountains and waterfalls. Maybe it’s an over-compensation for all of the faceless commercial blocks they put up, without a statue, or a column or a classical detail of any kind. They have to save up these frustrations and get rid of them on public buildings. Now, I don’t mind the fountain at the new court house. On my way to get a writ or a copy of a judgment, the sound of water goes very well, but when I’m just sitting and reading, the water soaks into my brain and sends me off to the “Men’s” before I really need to go. The sound of water and the mysteries of the Dewey decimal system are equally distracting. Maybe that’s why I have for many years gone directly to Ella Beames in her office in the Special Collections Department with my problems. From her second-floor room, the world looks different, more organized, with past and present coming together in one of Ella’s hundreds of files.
I told her what I wanted and she went away sighing. Was our relationship beginning to show signs of stress? Was it time I learned how to do my own research? I was over-reacting. I guess she doesn’t get asked to bring out files on the troubles in Cyprus and the local art scene by the same customer all that often.
“Here they are, Benny.” Ella said as she plunked down a load of books and files of clippings in two separate places on the heavy table in front of me. “There’ll be things on microfilm too, of course. But this is a start. You can read yourself silly trying to follow a war in the papers. Best to find out the dates you need and then go to the Globe or the Star. On a big international story like Cyprus, the Beacon got everything through the wire services. But they’ll be your best bet on running down the stuff on the Contemporary Gallery and Arthur Tallon.” Ella tried to catch her breath and brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. I think it was greyer than when I saw it last. I liked to look at her velvety cheeks and her small, perfect nose. Her face wasn’t beautiful—in fact you might say she’d been plain as a girl—but there was the beauty of tidiness about it There was wit and humour in the way her features related to one another And she still liked helping me! What was I going to do?
My sudden interest in Cyprus was pure indulgence and curiosity. I guess I was sharpening my research instincts for the real work that lay ahead in the art clippings. The curiosity was genuine enough; I resented being left behind last night, being unable to contribute anything. Cyprus, I thought, I could bone up on so I wouldn’t look a dummy. Napoleon would take longer, a summer holiday or a long cold winter. Even I could see that.
As I opened the books and began to get a measure of the troubles in Cyprus, Ella disappeared only to return with more information. The first book was Island in Revolt by Charles Foley. I guess he couldn’t very well call it Revolting Island. Foley. I remembered hearing the name last night. It was good to feel I was this close to the inside track so soon in my research. I read on. In the 1950s, after the loss of India and Palestine, at the time of Suez, the Domino Theory of foreign policy was very big. The Brits couldn’t see how they could keep their military bases in Cyprus without running the whole island. Cyprus wasn’t exactly the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, but it was the only thing giving off a fading semi-precious glitter. From the Foley book it appeared that most of the leaders of the movement to get the British out of the island were British-trained and -educated Greeks, who loved British institutions and traditions. They were shocked that the Brits thought that as far as more selfgovernment was concerned, it was just “not on.” There were other books and key clippings to go through. I could see myself becoming an overnight expert on the subject. I checked Guenyeli in the index of Foley’s book. Yes, the massacre had occurred. A group of about fifty Greeks, hearing of trouble in Skylloura, a village north-west of Nicosia, started out to help. I checked where I was on the map. They were intercepted by a patrol of Security Police and taken first to the police station in Skylloura and then to one in Nicosia. When Security couldn’t find any grounds for holding them, they were driven by truck and let go near the Turkish village of Guenyeli, on the way to the resort town of Kyrenia on the north coast. Somehow the Turks were expecting them. As the Greeks crossed the fields on their way back towards Skylloura, a gang of Turks armed with clubs and axes came to meet them. Some were riding motorcycles. They attacked and nine Greeks were killed, one was beheaded, others were injured. There was no mention by name of any of the victims, including Pambos Kiriakis’s brother Michael. When the story of the massacre began to spread, it was at first denied and then different official versions were circulated. The Greeks, in one version, were the aggressors. In another, only two bodies had been found.
Reading on, both in Foley and in other books, I found that there were other incidents, as the Government Security Police called events like the massacre at Guenyeli, between the various island communities. In fact I seemed to remember that things were still tense over there. Hadn’t the Greeks—or was it the Turks—invaded? Wasn’t the island split between the two factions, with the English staying safe in their sovereign base areas, as Palmer called them. I read on, but I didn’t learn much more. I mean, there was lots to learn, but it didn’t help me with Pambos or his late brother. The nagging question this Guenyeli thing left with me was “Who let the Turks know that the Greeks would be let out near their village?’”
The next pile of books and clippings were less impressive for a start. There was no book about Arthur Tallon and his Contemporary Gallery. There were obituaries and clippings, reviews of shows and an interview given to a Beacon reporter ten years ago. In the handsome collection of art books, Tallon was a footnote or a brief citation preceded by “And of course this would not be complete without …” His name turned up often among the acknowledgements, and reproduced pictures in several of the books about the Canadian art scene were credited to his own personal collection. After a pretty fast shuffle through these things I began to get the idea that Tallon had contributed a great deal to the development and encouragement of Canadian art, but for all his efforts the critics in Toronto were not passing around the glory. The obit in The Globe and Mail was brief and factual. The one in The Toronto Star ran two inches shorter than the obit for a former Star bookkeeper who died of lung cancer at 72. The Beacon, as I would have expected, went on and on about our local loss. There was a photograph in the file, not a clipping but an eight by ten glossy. It showed Tallon standing with his head thrust through the opening in a marionette theatre. Beside his face stood five or six variously designed puppets. It looked like the cast of Jack and the Beanstalk, judging by the hoary old ogre, the cow and the beanstalk running up the back. Tallon’s head was impressively framed in the proscenium arch. Great eyebrows, like the wings of a startled bird of prey about to take off, dominated a wide forehead. His eyes behind thick, steel-rimmed lenses looked back at me so strongly I felt obliged to look up from the page. Tallon had alert, knobbly, Lincolnesque features. With a beard and shawl, he could have passed for the assassinated president. He would have had to drop the cigarette butt that protruded from a corner of his mouth. There were other pictures of him among the clippings: Tallon with Wallace Lamb in 1944, Tallon in a canoe in Muskoka. Tallon with the Director of the National Gallery, Tallon with someone named Kahnweiler in what looked like Paris before the fall of France in 1940. Tallon looked about twenty-five.
“Having fun?” Ella Beames picked up one of the clippings. “Half the time I thought he was certifiable,” she said, “the rest of the time he was like a lanky bear. You wanted to hug him.”
“I didn’t know you knew him, Ella. What was he like?”
“I just told you. There’s a picture in the file he gave me. There it is. He made those puppets. He worked as an apprentice to some marionette-maker in the States. New England somewhere. I should be more precise than that. No wonder they’re talking about retiring me.”
“Retiring you? You’re
pulling my leg. They’d as soon put horns on the bust of Andrew Carnegie.”
“Just check around here a year from now. You’ll see.”
“Ella, the world’s falling apart. They’re talking of shutting down the United, after nearly ten years I abandon the quiet of the City House, and now this. What am I going to do without you?”
“Benny, it isn’t as bad as that. I’m not going to Victoria to live with my sister after all; I’ll be right here in town. If you get really stuck, you can always call me. Don’t look so glum. The world’s not coming to an end.” I managed to change my expression, but my heart wasn’t in it. Ella lad been my right hand for so long I always felt guilty whenever I cashed a cheque from a client. Wonderful Ella came free with the public library. What Ella didn’t know about the present and past of Grantham and vicinity wasn’t worth knowing.
Ella asked me about my mother and how she was getting on with her television-watching. I told her that she still doesn’t miss much, but the TV doesn’t cut into her reading time. She still devours about four novels a week. The last time I looked it was Julian Symons and Ruth Rendell. “She told me, Ella, that she had a hankering to go through Dickens once again.”
“I think she’s got most of him in paperbacks. I’ve got Hard Times. She lent it to me.”
“I’ll tell her.” I took a breath. “Ella, how does the art scene work here in town? Most of the stuff in those books is about New York, Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto. Where does a place like Grantham fit in?”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I know, but that’s not much, Benny.” She settled into a wooden Windsor chair on the other side of the table. “Let me see,” she said. “Tallon was a sport, a square peg in a round hole. He belonged in a bigger place than this. He should have gone to a gallery like the Equinox in Vancouver or set up in Toronto. Toronto was always trying to get him to set up a branch there, but Arthur liked to do things his own way and in his own time. He was downright eccentric about most things. I could never guess what he was going to do from one week to another. He held on to his Contemporary Gallery, but he didn’t look after things. It was a filthy mess most of the time, if you ask me. But, then, he had all of those paintings he bought when he was young. He came back from Paris with a lot of things that were by total unknowns then, but which would fetch unbelievable prices at an auction today. But Arthur stuck by Canadian painters mostly. He collected Emily Carr and the Group of Seven. Landscape painters, most of them. You probably saw silk-screen versions of some of their stuff in school when you were a kid. You know, they did Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park and Carr did totem poles …”
“I know that bunch. They were in banks too and on calendars. So that’s the Group of Seven. Was Lamb one of them?”
“Heavens no! He came along later. But he’s just as good. Better, I think! He was a wild man, yet Tallon became his dealer. They were a very unlikely pair, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
“Was Tallon the only show in town?”
“Oh, no, Benny. There’s the public gallery at Rodman Hall, with Mrs. North in charge, and there’s Hump Slaughter’s auction room. He’s the biggest dealer in antiques and fine arts in the Niagara District.”
“Hump?” I asked.
“Humphrey, really. But everybody calls him Hump. I know a lot of people who avoid calling him by his first name. For a long time people didn’t think it was quite proper. But nowadays nobody seems to mind. What’s happening to the power of words, Benny? Time was I used to blush at the words scrawled on fences, and now I hear them—everywhere. How are writers going to write books if language is going bland on them?” I shrugged. I was still working my way through the Russians. It was taking quite a while. Crime and Punishment became easier when I saw that it was really television’s Columbo backdated. As far as language and its shocking power goes, I guess you can get sated with four-letter words as well as you can with popcorn and strawberry shortcake. In the old days in England when they used to hang people in wholesale lots, the horror may have bothered the bumpkins visiting London for a rare visit, but for the locals the slaughter only provided opportunities for pimps and pickpockets.
I spent another half-hour at the library flipping through the material on the buying and selling of pictures and the art of collecting. When I got tired of that, I went back to Cyprus. The troubles apart, it sounded like a great island. It sat with its tail pointing up into the armpit of the Mediterranean where Syria and Turkey came together. I tried to imagine the weather. In the book called Romantic Cyprus, a travel guide by Kevork K. Keshishian, I didn’t see any pictures of parkas or windbreakers. Life without winter. Now that I wouldn’t mind at all.
Out on the street, the weather wasn’t at al Mediterranean, but it would pass for late March in southern Ontario. I walked up James Street past the old Court House and the Oille fountain with the empty geranium pot at the top. Traffic along St. Andrew Street was moving along steadily. The parking spaces by the meters were all full. Everybody was making a buck. It was time I joined them.
SEVEN
“Windermere,” the voice said. “Good morning.”
“Good morning. I would like to speak with Jonah Abraham, please.”
“Just a moment. I’ll connect you to his secretary.” It seemed a reasonable approach, so I waited on the line, trying not to whistle through my teeth the tune I had stuck in my head. It was a hymn we used to sing in public school. Old Miss McDougall used to spend more time on singing hymns than on the rest of the curriculum. I tried to identify the present tune, but it escaped me. Something with “… where only man is vile …” in it. I looked around the office from my usual place behind my desk and tried to appraise it with a stranger’s eye. I must get around to spending a day just getting rid of the things I never use: the broken electric fan, the trio of wigless mannequins, the coat rack still marked “Size 10 & 12.” I should replace the rug with the worn patch in the middle. The file drawers too needed cleaning out. The bottom one contained galoshes I hadn’t worn in three years. They were mossy with dust, and I started wondering what kind of character it is that keeps useless junk underfoot year after year without ever once throwing up his hands and saying “Enough is enough!”
“Mr. Abraham’s secretary. Good morning.”
“Good morning. Is Mr. Abraham in this morning?”
“This was in regard to …?”
“Private business,” I said, rather more bluntly than I’d intended. I could hear an intake of air at the other end. Could her job run that smoothly, I wondered, that my answer filled her with dismay? I felt immediate sympathy for the woman. Why can’t I be as tactful as I would like to be?
“I am Mr. Abraham’s private secretary. Could I have your name, please?”
“Ben Cooperman.”
“Of?”
“Just Ben Cooperman. I’m a private investigator, if you want to tell him that.”
“Oh! Just a minute.” There was another delay. This time I mentally cleaned out the second of my file drawers. I knew it was full of plastic bags that had held lunches and other goodies. I don’t know why I started that collection, but once begun, it seemed wasteful to begin throwing them out. What I needed was to extend my trade routes. Figure out ways of taking things out of the office in plastic bags. If I ate more lunches at my desk, there would be more garbage. That was a thought, but it would also speed up my accumulation of more plastic bags.
“Yes? Mr. Cooperman? This is Jonah Abraham. You wanted to discuss a private matter?” Good. I liked the way he came to the point. Already I liked Abraham.
“I’ve been trying to trace some paintings that have strayed from the Tallon collection, Mr. Abraham. Apparently at the time of Mr. Tallon’s death, there were quite a few pictures out on loan. In order to complete an accurate inventory for the estate, we would like to identify as many of these as we can. With your help, we should be able to clear this up in a short time.”
“You’re doing this for Patrick Miles, is that correct, Mr. C
ooperman?” He’d kicked me in the knee and he didn’t even know it.
“It isn’t usual to give out the names of clients, Mr. Abraham. But we do know that your name appears on a list of people who have works from the collection.”
“That’s very interesting. Perhaps you could have Mr. Miles call me. Without meaning to give offence, Mr. Cooperman, I hardly think we need to involve a private investigator at this point. Get Paddy to call me. Naturally, I would be very glad to cooperate with Paddy and Arthur’s brother in clearing up the estate as quickly as possible. Good …”
“Just a moment, Mr. Abraham. What if my client doesn’t represent the Tallon interests?” He thought a moment before answering.
“I can’t see how there can be collateral interests. You intrigue me, Mr. Cooperman, but, if you are not representing the estate, I can’t see how I can help you without authorization from the estate. Goodbye.” It took me longer to think of an answer to that than it took Abraham to hang up the phone. I sat there looking at my dusty venetian blinds, with the phone in my hand, listening to the echo of the broken connection.
I’d now talked to all of the men Pambos Kiriakis had told me had access to where he kept the list. Where was that exactly? In his secret cubbyhole behind the bookshelf? How secret was that anyway: it was the first thing I saw in his office. It didn’t appear to be something he kept secret from his close friends or even casual acquainttances. Maybe it was less a secret room than it was a kind of folly, a childish dream realized. Maybe he saw some of the same Saturday matinées at the Granada Theatre that I did. There were enough sliding panels and secret doors in those movies to fire a few imaginations even here in Grantham. I must ask Pambos about that: where was the list, what did it look like physically, was it typed or handwritten, and on what kind of paper. I made a mental note to call Kiriakis and clear up a few loose ends.
