by William Bell
Less than an hour later the man held a cell to his ear, then closed it, folded up the newspaper, started the car and drove away. He must have been a slow reader. He hadn’t turned the page even once.
Curtis brought Marika Rubashov’s class schedule next morning when he came into the store for his coffee and newspaper. I checked it over and found I had time to swing past Grange Park on my way to the university that afternoon. Marika had a class that ended at two o’clock. I set off from the store after work with my new cell and a map of the campus in my backpack.
I was beginning to feel like I was in the middle of a penalty-killing scenario with my team two men short, buzzing all over the ice, now here, now there, harassing and forechecking. I was searching for Ninon. I had to monitor a guy I’d never met who wouldn’t leave his ex-girlfriend alone. There were night visitors drifting in and out of the house, and now a possible mystery with the watcher in the car.
Was there a connection between the watcher and Mr. Bai? His insistence on secrecy I could understand. So far, I had put it down to his not wanting to be discovered as the man who arranged my new identity—with documentation that was both false and illegal. At first I hadn’t thought through all the details of my disappearance. I realized that I had burdened him with a huge responsibility. But who or what was he? A businessman for sure. Wealthy? Definitely. A crook of some kind? I had to admit the answer to that one was, possibly. Especially if I included the kidnap attempt by “business rivals.” But I pushed that thought aside. Bai had an iron code of honour or obligation—whatever the right word was. He thought he owed me. He had kept his promise. So I had to keep mine.
And what explained the secret, dead-of-night comings and goings? Who were the women and occasional man who came and went like fugitives in some kind of underground railway? People have reasons to travel in the shadows: they’re escaping danger or the past, or the law. I knew. I was one of them.
When I got to Grange Park, Ninon was nowhere to be seen. I backtracked north to the legislature buildings, which were situated in the middle of the campus, then I walked through an underpass toward my destination. I had never been on a university campus before. It was like entering a city within a city, with stretches of green lawn, old buildings of grey stone blackening from air pollution, newer structures, an ancient clock tower, a few aged trees. People who seemed full of purpose hurried along the sidewalks; others sprawled on the grass or sat in small groups, talking casually.
I found Marika’s building and entered through the pointy-arched doorway into a wood-panelled hall. The classroom I was looking for was on the ground floor and easy to find. I sat down on a bench along the hall from the double doors. Around me students swept past, backpacks on one shoulder, earbuds in place. I checked out their clothes, pleased to find that, even though mine were downscale, I didn’t stand out too much. I pulled out my novel and settled in to read, glancing toward the classroom doors every few minutes, Joe College taking a summer course, waiting for his pal and learning up a storm in the meantime.
But I wasn’t Joe College and never would be. I wondered how my life would have unfolded if things had been different. If I’d had parents who wanted to put me through university and had the money to do it. Where would I be right now? In this same hallway? In a classroom, on my way to becoming a doctor or engineer or teacher? On the subway, my backpack full of books and assignments, heading home to a nice room, looking forward to seeing my parents and maybe a brother or sister around the dinner table?
I found myself aching for something I’d never had, and I felt a familiar emptiness, as if a part of me was missing. I hadn’t even laid eyes on Marika yet and already, in a way, I envied her.
Five minutes before the hour I put my book away and stood against the wall, ready to move when I had to. Soon the doors opened and a stream of students poured out as if escaping a fire. In the corridor echoing with voices and the shuffling of feet on the polished floors it wasn’t easy to examine faces rushing past, but I soon caught sight of Marika.
She was wearing jeans, a dark blue sweatshirt with the university logo on it and canvas boating shoes, walking alone toward the arch of sunlight at the open door. Once outside, she wasted no time. I followed her past the clock tower and along Hoskin Avenue toward the subway stop at the Museum.
Her body language practically shouted: eyes down, shoulders hunched, fingers hooked under the straps of her leather backpack. She avoided eye contact with other pedestrians. On the subway, the same. When we reached her stop I tailed her out to the street, then through a leafy neighbourhood north of Lawrence, keeping my distance. Eventually she disappeared into a two-storey brick house with stained-glass trim above the bow window.
On my way home I logged my time and a quick account of my afternoon in my notebook. Then I sat like the other passengers, staring into the double world of train windows reflecting the car’s interior—the ads on the walls, passengers sitting and standing—overlaid by the image of the dark tunnel and lights flashing past.
Marika, I thought, seemed defeated. You could see it in the timid way she scurried home, as if she wasn’t safe until she got through the door. Had she been born that way, or had Jason Plath robbed her of any confidence and optimism she might have had? Was he like some guys I had met on and off the ice, people who pushed through life with a lit fuse, violence lurking just below the skin?
I decided to put as much time as I could into Marika’s case between now and my Sunday visit with Ninon. Back home I checked out a few social media sites that she used, according to info her parents had given Curtis, hoping to find something useful. No luck.
After dinner I took a walk up to a food market on the Danforth. The day’s heat lingered in the pavement and seeped from the buildings, and the sidewalk patios were going strong.
I left the market weighed down by two bulging plastic bags and a full backpack, vowing not to let my food supply get so low again—a promise I had made to myself before. The Danforth had settled into a steady rhythmic hum, a peaceful contrast to the frantic daytime bustle. My street was quiet, the street lights flickering to life in the dusk, throwing the shadows of trees across the road.
I almost missed the stakeout. It was a different car this time, parked facing south, but once again with a clear view of my house. I reminded myself that the man in the car could also observe a half-dozen other houses from where he sat, that there was nothing to prove my house was his objective. But I memorized the plate number anyway.
I sauntered past as if I hadn’t noticed him. Another Asian, taller than the first one, sitting with his head back, the smoke from a cigarette curling to the ceiling. I turned up my sidewalk, strolled through the pool of darkness under the oak, up onto the verandah and through the door. I turned on my living room light, went to the kitchen and put away my groceries. In my notebook I jotted down the time and the stakeout car’s license plate number.
Two Asians hanging around outside my place went way beyond probabilities. Police? What were the chances that two different plainclothes city cops staking out the same neighbourhood would be Asian? If not cops, who? Were they in any way connected to Bai or Chang? Could they be the “business rivals” Chang had vaguely mentioned when I asked him who had tried to snatch Wesley?
I picked up the Chang phone, set to show Unknown Caller and to block my own number, and punched in the memorized number.
“It’s Julian,” I announced, and relayed my telephone number.
Chang called back five minutes later. I related the details of the two different watchers in two different cars, wondering if Chang would conclude that I was losing my brains.
“I’m not sure if it’s this house they’re watching,” I added. “Do you want me to go down and speak to the guy? I could—”
“No. Do nothing. I will deal with this.”
“Okay.”
“You did well to call, Julian,” he said, and clicked off.
Chang hadn’t seemed surprised by my information, but the
n nothing seemed to ruffle him. He seemed to accept as a fact that it was my house the watchers were scoping out, so I supposed I should too. I turned on the lamp beside my reading chair by the bow window, opened the sash and picked up my book—coincidentally a cops-and-robbers thriller set in the city where at this very moment I was pretending not to notice the guy smoking in a car on the street outside my house. The watcher had opened a newspaper, folding it lengthwise against the steering wheel. He sat there, not reading and pretending not to watch the house while I sat not reading and pretending not to watch him. It was funny in a way.
Nothing happened.
Why the stakeout? Only one answer came to mind. The mystery guests. Who were they?
The only thing I knew for certain was that I didn’t know anything for certain. Except one fuzzy detail: everything seemed to originate with Mr. Bai, who was more of a puzzle than ever.
——
Over the next few days every minute of my life was full—mostly with the Marika job. Before heading to the university in the afternoons, I varied my appearance. Sometimes I took a different backpack; always I carried a couple of baseball caps with me, switching them as I followed my quarry along the streets. Most days I took a reversible shell for variety. But for all I had gained by the end of the week I might as well have stayed home and knitted a sweater.
Plath never turned up. Marika plodded through the routines of her school day. I watched her house after dark each night, at random times, but if she was sneaking out it must have been through a window and down a fire escape. I was on the verge of going permanently insane from boredom.
Curtis’s notes said she spent a few hours at the local library on Saturdays. Worth a try. When she emerged from her house in the morning I was ready. I tailed her through the streets, noting that the upscale neighbourhood lost its shine after a few blocks, and followed her into an old stone library set in a grove of maple trees. Marika headed straight for the computers and sat down and shoved a card into a reader attached to the machine. I cut off to the side and took the staircase to the mezzanine, where I was able to observe her while pretending to glance through books on farming in the Early Middle Ages.
Soon Marika logged off and disappeared into a different room. I found her at a quiet area in the stacks by a window, where a couple of work tables had been set up. Through three ranks of bookshelves I watched her unload texts and a notebook from her backpack, along with a laptop, and set to work.
I left the library and found a bench in a parkette across the road where I could keep an eye on the library doors. I switched caps and put on a pair of sunglasses. It was hot, even in the shade of the spindly little trees planted in the dry ground around the bench. I yawned. My mind drifted, gravitating to Ninon and our upcoming meeting at the gallery the next day. I hadn’t seen her in almost a week. I hoped she wouldn’t retreat to the don’t-ask Ninon of the past.
She was unlike any girl I’d ever met and she held my attention like a magnet. She was pretty, smart, mysterious, unafraid—her own person. How different from the timorous, closed-in Marika, soldiering away on her laptop in the library.
“Hey, wait a minute!” I said out loud, startling the hungry pigeon stalking toward me.
Why would someone with a laptop in her pack bother to use the library’s computers?
“For two reasons,” I told the pigeon. “One: she wanted no record on her laptop of any websites she may have visited or e-mails she may have sent. Two: her parents were in the habit of snooping in her laptop—and she knew it.”
The pigeon was so impressed it flew away.
SEVENTEEN
THE MONET EXHIBIT was scheduled to open at ten o’clock. When I got to the art gallery at a quarter to, there was already a lineup in the shade of the massive glass and steel overhang. I joined the queue and kept watch for Ninon, recalling the day at this same place when I had first laid eyes on her blue beret. As soon as an usher unlocked the doors, the lineup began to ooze forward. A man ahead of me explained to his partner that, because the exhibit was in high demand, the gallery let only a limited number of patrons in at fifteen-minute intervals. I craned my neck, searching the street in both directions.
My anxiety escalated as I shuffled closer to the entry doors. Soon I was standing in the cool subdued lighting of the atrium, fidgeting. The queue progressed. Conversations spun around me. At last, nearly frantic, I found myself a few feet from the roped divider that formed the entrance. I’d have to go in next or go to the end of the line and start over.
Then Ninon burst through the glass doors. She was wearing leather sandals, tight white capri pants and a red T-shirt. Her trusty carryall drooped from her shoulder. Her thick hair hung loose, framing the oval face with the green eyes. Definitely worth the wait. I noticed that a couple of the men in line thought so too.
She rushed over to the coat check to store the carryall.
A voice behind me muttered, “Excuse me?”
I turned, blank-faced, to see a well-dressed older woman, her face pinched with impatience.
“Are you going in?” she demanded.
I looked at a lot of paintings that day, but not much registered, just framed blurs of colour and light—fields with poppies, lily pads on the surface of a pond, sunrises, sunsets. As if parched, Ninon drank them all in. I drank her in. Beside her, poor Monet didn’t stand a chance. She told me about his brush technique, his use of colour, his composition, and I floated along on the gentle current of her voice.
“Did you study art at school in Montreal?” I asked.
“No, in Provence.”
“Where the sky—”
“You’re beginning to repeat yourself,” she said, grabbing my hand and dragging me across the room. She stopped at a picture showing a woman in a long white dress, standing on a hill, struggling to hang onto a green parasol. Her blue scarf snapped in the wind, the grass golden at her feet, a cloud-bunched sky behind. Ninon studied her for a long time.
Then she turned to me and said, “She looks like she wants to grip her parasol in both hands and step off that hill and let the wind sweep her away.”
“Away where?”
“Home.”
Home to Ninon wasn’t Montreal and it certainly wasn’t the Guiding Light Mission. It was L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. I took her hand, hoping she’d understand why. She squeezed mine and we meandered through the rest of the exhibit. Sooner than I wanted, we came to the end.
Out on the sidewalk the harsh noontime sun hammered the pavement, and the baked air smelled of car exhaust.
“Hungry?” I asked.
She nodded. “Should we go to that Chongqing place?”
“If you’d like.”
In the unforgiving light of a hot afternoon, Ninon’s clothing, although clean, looked well worn. The hem and collar of her T-shirt had been restitched, the thread colour not a perfect match, and an odd button had been sewn onto the left leg of her capri pants where there was a small V on the cuff at mid-calf. She had learned a lot from her seamstress mother, all right.
Mama Zhu greeted us with a stern mini-lecture on the theme of staying away too long before she took us to the back of the little restaurant and set us up at the table I had used on my first visit there. She shouted, “cha!” at the kitchen door, then said to Ninon, “You got to eat more. You got no colour.”
Mama Zhu was right. I hadn’t noticed it so much at first sight that morning or in the muted lighting of the gallery, but Ninon seemed pale, with the beginnings of darker circles under her eyes. She looked tired. Maybe it was hard to get a good night’s sleep at the mission, surrounded by strangers coughing, mumbling, crying out in their sleep.
Our tea arrived and I poured us each a cup of the green jasmine-scented liquid.
“À votre santé,” Ninon said, clinking her cup against mine.
“Got something for you,” I announced, handing her a piece of paper. “My cell number.”
“Okay,” she replied, and stuffed the paper into her satchel.<
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Food arrived: steamed rice, oval plates of beef in black bean sauce, chicken with cashews, heaps of green vegetables, curried shrimp.
“I don’t remember ordering these,” Ninon said, drawing in the fragrances with deep breaths.
“I think Mama Zhu decided for us.”
“Well, I’m not complaining.”
We did our best to make a dent in the feast. We took our time, talking all the while. I got up the nerve to ask her how she supported herself, recalling the pickpocket skills she had demonstrated the first time I met her at the gallery.
“I work when I can,” she replied vaguely.
“Where?”
“Here and there.”
Wherever “here and there” was, Ninon must have been putting in long hours, because fatigue hung over her like a fog. I told her about my job at the store, and was equally unspecific when I mentioned I did “odd jobs” for a businessman I knew. We had shared our pasts during our picnic on the Islands, but we were still vague about the present. We were like a couple of spies, hiding more than we gave away.
Mama Zhu came by, topped up our teacups, thumped the pot onto the table and said to me, “You change phone now. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, no. I forgot.”
She held out a small, chubby hand. I fished my Chang phone out of my jeans and gave it to her. From her cardigan pocket she drew a different cell and a slip of paper and plunked them on the table beside my cup.
“New SIM inside. New number on paper,” she said, moving off.
“What was all that about?” Ninon inquired, balancing her chopsticks on her rice bowl and dabbing at her perfect mouth with a paper napkin.
