by Howard Engel
I made a few calls to some people who owed me a couple of favours. The harvest wasn’t a big one, but there were a few interesting things that turned up. Peter Mac-Culloch was in his seventh year as vice-president of Secord University. He was well respected in academic circles, but spent most of his time hob-nobbing with people who could build a new stadium or kick in with the cost of football uniforms when the call to the building fund was answered. He went to Toronto at least once a week, sometimes more often. He had been a chemical engineer early in his career and made a name for himself as the man who built up Godden and Garber into one of the biggest names in the Canadian petrochemical industry. He lived in Calgary and Edmonton for many years before a dramatic break with G & G eight years ago. After a year as head of a community college in Vancouver, he returned to take up the post at Secord, which had become vacant suddenly on the death of Dr. Clendennan. One thing I found that stirred my heart a trifle was the fact that MacCulloch and the late Arthur Tallon were second cousins. Did that mean that he might have legitimate claim to some of the paintings he had forgotten to confess to holding? Not certainly until the will is probated, I guessed. It raised a question of a family feud. Since I stopped doing divorce work, I’d done my best to stay away from quarrelling families. My best was not always good enough.
I thought for a moment about the inside information I’d been handed on a platter about the affair going on between Favell and MacCulloch’s wife, Mary. Shakespeare probably said something about what you can learn from guilty parties when you ask about whether it is going to rain or not.
But I was straying from my subject. Mary MacCulloch was not my client, in spite of the high heels that had followed me down the corridors and out into the Secord University parking lot. She was an unfaithful wife in midaffair and afraid of being found out both by her husband and by Nesta, probably Alex Favell’s wife and Mary’s best friend. What did that have to do with the missing pictures? Probably nothing, but it was free information, I thought, and it might come in handy before the week was out.
What did I know about Alex Favell? My telephone contacts told me he was another local product. His father was a member of the Grantham hunt when there was a Grantham hunt. He also operated the paper mill for its American owners. Alex grew up in the firm. After doing an MBA he went trouble-shooting for the owners in places like Baie-Comeau, Chicoutimi and the company’s home base, Chicago. Like his father, he was a horseman. He collected pictures, and married the former Nesta Holland, who belongs to another of the oldest families in town. I think they are still taking musket balls dating from the War of 1812 out of the Holland barn near St. Davids. What else did I learn? Oh, yes, he played golf and tennis and kept a boat at Port Richmond. I thought I recognized that competitive edge in our conversation at his office. His secretary, I remembered, suspected that his long lunches were not totally in the firm’s best interests. He was a big giver to charities, as was MacCulloch, and both served on many boards of directors and were listed on the stationery of charitable groups across the province. There was no shaking the respectability of either Mac-Culloch or Favell.
On the suggestion of Ella Beames, I borrowed a copy of the recent paperback edition of Distiller of Our Times by Paul Coldham, the former magazine editor and more recently chronicler of the doings of the rich and powerful. I flipped through this five-hundred-page opus about the Abraham dynasty and found that Jonah was not the most dynamic member of the third generation of the family. Between bites of my chopped egg salad sandwich at the Di, I studied up on the growth of this remarkable clan, whose North American career began when an immigration officer decided to stop writing after Jonah Abraham’s grandfather had given him his first two given names. The family name was never put on his landed immigrant papers. In fact it took Coldham some timeconsuming research to discover that the family name was Yakobowsky.
After trying its collective hands at everything from selling button hooks and needles to making ornamental glass beads from old bottles, the family discovered booze and the money that could be made from the manufacture and sale of it. When Ontario went dry in the 1920s, part of the operation went underground. Coldham had difficulty getting his facts about Prohibition. Survivors are still reluctant to talk into a tape recorder even at this late date. By 1976, the date of Coldham’s book, Jonah Abraham at forty-eight was about to become chairman of the board of one of the most sure-footed and diversified international conglomerates in the world. Outside business, his main interests were his investments and his remarkable art collection.
Reading between the lines, it looked like Jonah partook of the family money, but did little to earn any of it. Becoming the grand old man at forty-eight is young. And living in Grantham kept him away from everything but the occasional board meeting in Toronto. The Grantham operation merely dealt with local wineries: big bucks locally, but to Windermere, small potatoes. Jonah, true to his name, was beginning to look like he was unlucky in his own family business. He was overshadowed by his more flamboyant siblings who made headlines in Toronto, Montreal, London and Paris with their marriages, divorces and separations, remarriages and one suspected murder. For some reason, Jonah had avoided all this and retired to the relatively peaceful Mies van der Rohe-designed house on the escarpment overlooking greater Grantham.
“You want coffee or milk with the sandwich, Benny?” the waitress asked. She looked like a young Myrna Loy in her starched uniform. She carried her tray with a difference.
“Milk, I think,” I said after deliberating for a few seconds. For a few more I watched her uniform swing away from me towards the front of the store, where she disappeared behind the counter. I watched traffic run eastward past the glass front door and windows. I admired the stained cherrywood booths and walls. The Di was one of the treasures of Grantham. It should have a brass plaque on the front wall protecting it from the whims of change.
I eat out a lot, I was thinking. Maybe now that I have my own place, I’ll try cooking for myself a little. My spirit is as adventurous as the next guy’s. Besides, I’ve been learning a lot about food over the last couple of years. Being trapped in my room at the City House had cramped my style. I was even getting the itch to make my own instant in the morning, instead of having to get dressed and head out to the United. There were a few things I’d like to try cooking, a few of my mother’s specialties that with practice I might be able to copy.
I knew I was going to be glad I left the City House. Ten years in a hotel room is plenty. Settling-in problems were only temporary. In the long run, I’d be glad I made the move.
I was drinking my milk when I saw Bill Palmer come into the restaurant. He was with a reporter from the Beacon that I knew, Barney Reynolds. I picked up my check and walked by their table. “Hi, Barney! You keeping ahead of the rewrite boys? Hello, Mr. Palmer.”
“Bastards!” said Barney, who was always telling me about how his pieces were cut to ribbons by the editors. Bill Palmer looked like he was trying to place me. After I let him sweat for a minute, I helped him out.
“Of course! Now I remember. We were talking about the death of Napoleon.”
“They killed all the great strips,” Barney added. “Remember Bringing Up Father? Hell, I go back almost to the Yellow Kid. Remember Abbie an’ Slats? Raeburn van Buren drew it and Al Capp, the guy who drew Li’l Abner, wrote it. Now Napoleon and Uncle Elby was a damned well drawn strip.”
“You got the wrong Napoleon, Barney,” Bill interrupted. “We’re talking about the late emperor of the French, the man of Elba and St. Helena.”
“Able was I ere I saw Elba,” Barney said.
“What?” I said.
“That old chestnut. The best-known palindrome on record, isn’t it?” Palmer smiled across the table.
“What’s a palindrome? A Persian airport?” I asked.
“In a palindrome you can read the line from either end and it reads the same,” Bill said.
“‘Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.’”
/> “What are you guys talking about?” The world was going mad.
“Sit down, Benny. ‘Was it a rat I saw?’”
“Huh?”
“That’s another. ‘Red rum, sir, is murder.’ That’s another. There are millions of them.” I sat down next to Barney, facing Bill Palmer. On the whole, I wished they would go back to the comics. I could hold my own there. When the waitress came, I ordered coffee, since the boys looked like they weren’t in a hurry to leave or in the middle of a private conversation.
“You said last night,” I said to Bill, “that you met Pambos Kiriakis in Cyprus?”
“Oh, God, here we go again!” moaned Barney.
“That’s right. Not Barney’s favourite topic. He thinks the Turks were sold down the river.”
“That’s right. The Greeks controlled the press.”
“Horse---!”
“I knew I’d get a rise out of you! Works every time. Bill’s devoted to all lost causes. Enosis is only one of them. He’ll also sign you up in the Flat Earth Society. Show Benny your membership card.”
“Ah, Barney’s sore because this was one war he missed.”
“The paper said that they didn’t need the old touch. Used wire copy! Pablum!”
I could tell that although this conversation might be a lot of fun for people who’d been exposed to long hours of radiation from a green word processor, it wasn’t helping me pay my rent. After another ten minutes of Barney ribbing Bill and Bill trying to explain it all to me, I picked up my two checks, paid my bill and walked east on St. Andrew Street.
EIGHT
That night I tried making Campbell’s split-pea soup. I used the same saucepan that I’d used the night before. While it was boiling—I thought I should boil it for ten minutes anyway—I called Pambos at the hotel.
“Charalambous Kiriakis.”
“Is that you, Pambos? It’s me, Benny. Is this a good time?”
“Benny! I’m glad to hear from you. Have you got good news?”
“What I’ve got won’t take long to report, but I do have a few more questions I’d like—”
“Benny, why don’t you come on over. I’ll put on some top sirloins and we can talk. Since I got so good at delegating authority around here, I got nothing to do at the dinner hour.”
“Well, actually, Pambos, I got something on the stove as a matter of fact.”
“Using that little kitchenette already. Good for you. Something complicated?”
“No, just simple down-to-earth cooking like my mother makes for me when I go home. I’m working on her style.”
“I didn’t know you had this interest in cooking, Benny. It’s a whole new side of you. Have you read Brillat-Savarin?”
“Hey, Pambos, I just moved in, eh? Give me a break.”
“Okay, why not come over when you get finished. No dirty pots in the sink. Nothing left drying on the counter. Don’t get hooked by bad kitchen habits, Benny. They’re the hardest to break. Believe me, I know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“I’ll come over when the pot is gleaming. Around seven-thirty or eight o’clock?”
“Sure. See you.” He hung up, and I turned down the heat under the soup. It looked like thick yellow lava bubbling in the saucepan. A dry crust had formed above the waterline. I stirred it back into the mix with a wooden spoon. When it looked ready, I served myself and dined at the table I’d set. I tried to find a record, but I remembered that I still had to rewire the record-player. It wouldn’t take long after I found the diagram I’d made before I pulled it apart. The soup was delicious.
* * *
Once again, the headlights broke up a convention of cats behind the hotel. I parked the Olds and climbed out into the alley.
This time there was the welcome of familiarity about the dark entrance to the back of the hotel. A busboy with a dirty apron was putting out the trolley with full garbage cans. It was good not to hear my mother’s voice in my head, adding footnotes as I went down the hall to the office door. I think I even smiled at the plastic plate with “C. Kiriakis” on it. I now knew his real name. What was it, Charalambous? Something like that. I tapped a tattoo on the door and waited for the panel to slide open. It stayed closed. I repeated the knock and tried the door at the same time. The door was open, but I waited a few moments before barging in. I tried calling.
“Pambos!” I called. My voice, I think, sounded strong. When I came yesterday, I could hear a strangled quality in it. “Pambos! It’s me, Benny!” No answer.
The office looked unchanged. The glasses had been cleaned away and replaced by brand new dirty cups. One stood on the blotter in front of Pambos’s place at his desk. The secret panel was closed. The ancient toys and banks smiled a greeting. I thought of Napoleon on St. Helena as I surveyed the leaden troops. They were comfortable things to live with, I decided. Like the brass lamp with the green glass shade: easy on the eyes, easy to live with. The wonderful thing about Pambos was that every object had been picked with love and kept close to where he could look at it every day. I looked at the oils on the wall: the Harris, the Jackson, the Lamb and the Pollock. For the first time I really saw them. With all the knowledge that my morning in the library brought to the fore, I examined the brush-work and the composition critically.
Then I sat down hard in one of the deep-breathing leather chairs. It let out a noise like a sigh that mingled with a similar sound that came from me. “Oh, God!” I said, or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I just remember the letter-opener with the words St. Louis World’s Fair written on the handle. Another of Pambos’s antiques. It was something I’d seen him playing with last night as we sat and talked about Napoleon and the town of Guenyeli in Cyprus. Now, nobody was playing with it. It was stuck up to the hilt in Pambos Kiriakis’s shirt. He lay palms up on the broadloom under his desk.
He was wearing the same pants as he’d worn while helping me with my unpacking. The shirt was different; a blood-stain beginning at the wound had followed a crease down to the belt-line. Here it had pooled, sending the overflow down the side of his shirt, soaking his back as far as I could see it and the carpet. I kept my eyes on the details. I didn’t look at the slack jaw or the surprised, protruding eyes. I was glad he was behind the desk, where he all but disappeared from sight when I stood up. In my brain I could hear my mother’s stern voice telling me not to touch anything.
“All right!” I said. It came out like the cry of a halfstrangled peacock in the zoo. It startled me. My mother bumps into all of her bodies between the covers of paperbacks. Me, I wasn’t that lucky. Just when I thought I was handling myself with professional calm and detachment, I knocked over the cup of cold coffee on Pambos’s desk. I watched the stain darken the green blotter. I cursed my clumsiness, but cut myself off abruptly. There was something in the cup. I fished it out with my trusty ballpoint pen. It was a silver bracelet made of large flat links and an oval disc inscribed “Arthur Tallon.” On the other side: “The wearer is allergic to penicillin.”
Why had Kiriakis dropped it into his coffee? Was it Pambos who did it? Or was it his murderer? I was trying to figure out the answer to those and a few other questions, when I heard that we were about to have company. I pocketed the bracelet. I didn’t hear the outer door open, but I heard it click back into place after it had been opened. There was somebody between the way to my car and where I was standing above Pambos’s body. No place to be caught with my feet this close to the bloodstained carpet. Another glimpse of Pambos and I had the familiar tugging at the top of my stomach. I tried to shelve that for the moment by concentrating on something neutral. Vanilla ice cream was a bad idea, but I was having trouble replacing the images that had recently taken root in my head. Panic was coiled in the back of my throat. I moved the curtains behind the desk to see how much room there was between them and the window. Footsteps were getting louder. I slipped behind the curtains and waited. My breath was coming quickly and noisily. I tried to make my diaphragm do what Mr. MacDo
nald, the high school dramatic coach, said I should do with it, make it control my breath. I forced myself to breathe easier, but the dusty closeness of the curtains made the noise about the same. I tried to listen for the intruder. Hell, if he was an intruder, what was I, the Flying Dutchman?
The door to the study opened. I could feel rather than hear someone making his way to the desk. Papers were shuffled, a drawer was opened. Had he missed the body? I didn’t think so. Still, I heard no gasp, no sudden intake of air. The search continued: a rattle of paper, then quiet, while he was looking through the papers. Through the curtains I could make out only the pinpoints of light at the desk lamp and the overhead light. Occasionally a shape obscured the desk light. I only got an impression of size. I couldn’t even sex the intruder, although there was something large and bulky about the shape blocking the light that made me use male pronouns as I was trying to sort out to myself what “he” was going to do next. I heard a drawer close and then a slight “ah” sound. Had he seen it, or was it something else. I hoped it wasn’t something else.
“Your shoes need shining,” the voice said. “You needn’t stay behind the curtains on my account.”
I pulled aside the curtains and stepped back into the light of the room. “Thanks for the tip,” I said. “It was stuffy in there.”
The man on the other side of the desk was bald, with eyes that were slightly oriental. He was a little taller than me, and wearing an expensive tan. The eyes looked to have a suppressed smile behind them, like he enjoyed seeing the world in its ironic underwear. Right now, he was focused on me and asking himself the same questions about me as I was about him. He hitched up the corner of his mouth on the right side; it wasn’t a smile, but it stood for an acknowledgement that we were the living in the presence of death behind the desk. I liked the face, and it now began to dawn on me that it wasn’t the face of a complete stranger. I’d seen those flat ears, the slightly uptipped eyebrows and that generous nose before.
