by Gare Joyce
“You mean Billy said he was coming back from Toronto after the television appearance?”
“No,” she replied. “He said that the Russian boy was going to be back.”
“From Russia?”
“No, Billy said that he hadn’t gone to Russia. People just thought that.”
The lunch appointment, whiff. The call to Buckhold, whiff. And then Ma and Pa Storms, a third strike.
As I left the Storms I saw their next-door neighbour staggering up the path to his porch steps. Harley Hackenbush looked out of sorts and unkempt. Three days of razor stubble. Shirt stained by his lunch. Blazer and pants wrinkled. One shoe untied. His property looked even less maintained. Grass kneehigh, weeds higher. Litter blown into a bereft flower bed. He didn’t look like a man something bad happened to. He looked like one who’d never been cut an even break and was now in an undignified and indignant death spiral. I saw Ma Storms looking out the living-room window at Hackenbush. The guy who was lowering the block’s property values didn’t anger her. She pitied him.
I STILL HAD Wonder Boy’s cellphone number. A last resort. I decided to make the call from a payphone and put it on my credit card long distance. Mays’s number was a Toronto exchange. The number connected and the phone picked up after one ring.
The words were unintelligible. They weren’t even English. They were angry, though. Clearly not Billy Mays Jr. Clearly the voice of someone older. The guy who picked up the phone sounded like he had a shovelful of iron filings down his throat. He sounded like he was spitting out each word through a filter of gold teeth.
To my ear, it was a Russian guy. My ear was semi-educated on that count. I had played a few weeks of my last season of pro hockey for Omsk, a cultural exchange that saw me stiffed for a paycheque. I didn’t much appreciate the billionaire oil-baron owner’s attempt to restore my amateur status against my wishes, but I was thankful just to find another gig in Helsinki a few days later.
My first guess was that it was Markov on the line, but I shelved that idea. I’d only heard the kid mumble a few words, but he had a boy’s voice. The rasp on the other end belonged to a guy who smoked two packs of unfiltered darts a day and gargled with broken glass.
A Russian had Billy Mays Jr.’s cellphone. A Russian guy who sounded like trouble. There seemed to be a pretty good shot that the Russian guy had Billy Mays Jr. or, to tamp down the drama, at least knew where he was. I had no reason to believe the kid was in Peterborough. I wondered if he might be in Russia. I turned out to be right on the first count and close on the second.
I HAD my gym stuff with me. I had planned to lift at 5 P.M. after the drive back to Toronto. It was already 6:30 and I was still in Peterborough, chasing my tail. I’m not as righteous as some guys in the trade about working out. Away from the arena, a few spend every waking hour lifting, running, riding the bike, or whatever. They’re probably in better shape in their forties than they were in their early twenties. Others spend their spare time catching up on the vices they had to forgo in order to pull down million-dollar salaries. You wonder if they’re going to live to see their pensions kick in. I’m in the middle ground, a little on the side of the health conscious without being fanatical about it. Good genes, too. Sarge never wore more than a thirty-four-inch waist, stretched across six feet two.
I ducked into the gym in Peterborough. In the weight room I found Beef at the squat rack. The Olympic bar was at rest on the rack. He had just finished a set with four plates. His chalky hands were still gripping the bar and his legs were wobbly under it. He looked like Jesus on the crucifix, albeit Jesus with a fifty on the body mass index. His green eyes looked like two basil leaves in a big bowl of tomato soup. I thought he was going to faint dead away, but eventually he staggered up, panting.
“That was pretty good,” I told him. When in doubt, flatter. Recognition wasn’t immediate. The fog lifted when his heartbeat lowered into a less life-threatening range.
“You’re the accountant.”
“I’m not really an accountant,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “My father was an accountant. When my parents divorced, my mother said that she’d never marry another one.”
I let that slide. I saw no sense in making jest of a kid’s real-life pain, though I was sorely tested.
“I know you’re a hockey scout,” he said. “That you used to be a player. That all came out after we cleaned up that mess at O’Murphy’s. I got that you used to be married to that actress when I Googled your name.”
“Okay, you got me. I’m sorry about telling you that. And about the fight.”
“That’s nothing, mister. That’s what I get paid for.”
“We all get paid for something.”
“That’s the truth. You get paid a ton of money to go watch hockey games, and I get paid minimum wage to bus tables and break up fights between drunks.”
I suspected that he didn’t resent me so much as his lot in life.
“I was just trying to do a workup on the Mays kid. Understand that my team might be risking millions on him. I’ve gotta do whatever it takes.”
“No problem, mister.”
“Have you seen him lately? I was supposed to meet with him today but he stood me up.”
“Yeah, I know that feeling. He hasn’t been at school for a few days now. I think some of the guys on the team were covering for him, saying that he was in Toronto doing stuff. But I don’t know. It seemed like he didn’t get assignments in and that’s normally stuff that he’d always get done on time, even if he was on the road or something.”
Confirmed. MIA. AWOL. Circumstances Out of the Ordinary.
“You heard anything at all? Anything around the team or whatever?”
“Mister, I work for a dollar above minimum wage and a split of tips from my waiters. You woulda had the crap beaten out of you and got arrested, and I helped you out. At the end of my night, my share of the tips was eight bucks.”
Beef was all baby fat but no child. I hinted at some sort of compensation off the books. His father wouldn’t have to declare it when he did Beef’s return.
“Supposedly the Russian guy on the team is, uh, big.”
“Big?”
“You know, mister, real big,” Beef said, glancing down at his own loins sheepishly. “Big. Bunch of the girls at school. It’s all over the league. The guys on the team make jokes about it. Not Mays, not really anyway. But they all say that if the Russian guy doesn’t turn pro he can make it in porn movies. And they said he already passed his audition.”
Beef left me hanging.
“And?”
“And anyway, they said that someone had a video of him.”
“When did all this go down?”
“Right around the time the coach was killed.”
“Right before or right after?”
“Well, I figure the video had to be before and, yeah, maybe it was right before that they were talking about it ’cause they took all the guys on the team out of class for a few days after the coach was killed. So yeah, I’d say before.”
I went to the locker room and took two double sawbucks out of my wallet. I went back onto the gym floor and gave them to Beef, who thanked me but didn’t shake my hand. He stuffed the bills in his sock and threw plates on a bar to do his dead lifts.
TWO HOURS LATER my cellphone rang. Unknown caller.
“Hello.”
“Brad?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s Paul Madison, the fellah you were speaking to down at police headquarters in Peterborough.”
“My memory is better than you think.”
“I have a personal favour to ask you. Completely unrelated to our ongoing investigation. I don’t normally like to tap my day job for this sort of stuff, but I wanted to ask you … Well, I coach a bantam triple-A team and we’re putting on a fundraiser for travel tournaments for next season. I was wondering if I could convince you to come out and talk to the kids and parents.”
“No sweat.
I’d be glad to.”
With all the retired players in Peterborough I wondered why Madison would need to import names for an event like this, but then I realized that no one was going to buy a ticket to meet their kids’ friends’ fathers. I just put it down to the price I’d have to pay for my workup on Mays. If I had an in with the Peterborough force, I’d get straight dope about the whole Peterborough team.
I gave him my email and told him to message me the details. He said he’d do it from his personal account. I told him that was a good idea. Otherwise it might go to spam.
26
* * *
I thought my glutes were calcifying on the drive back to Toronto. I arrived at the Merry Widow at a not-so-late hour. Nick, as ever, was on the bar. The Irregulars lined it. Games played out on the screens. Nick knew the betting lines, the scores, and the times left in each. He knew the starting goaltenders and those who’d been pulled and replaced. The Irregulars gazed foggily at the game directly in front of them, and some didn’t even recognize the teams’ sweaters. Nick didn’t have a deep bench. The third-liners among the Irregulars were fractured souls, some displaced, and the fourth-liners irreparably broken.
Polo was the Irregular sitting closest to the door. Nick and the Irregulars called him Polo because they’d given up trying to pronounce his surname. Polo was reading a back issue of Lidové Noviny that his sister had sent him from Prague. Polo’s an owlish, unassuming old-timer who went to the Merry Widow to immerse himself in hockey, the game he loved, and to forget the women who passed through his life, though with less frequency lately. Left to his own, he wouldn’t say much more than the name of the beer he was drinking and “I’ll have my tab.” And mostly he was left to his own. The Irregulars did not know and did not care what his story was. He’d shared his story with me a couple of years back on a night when there was only a late game. He stuck it out to watch it because it featured one of his countrymen.
Back in the ’70s Polo had been a guest in Pankrác, a barred hospice for those who couldn’t get their politics right. He would have made hard time there look like a membership at the spa. Polo was a hard guy who didn’t look like one to those who didn’t know him. He didn’t like being called a dissident because he thought the term in the West had been watered down like Nick’s Red Label scotch. “I was strident but thought no different than everybody else,” he said. “They call those who didn’t go to prison dissidents too. So I am not a dissident. I must be something else.”
I didn’t question his logic. I’m sure he arrived at his findings honestly with six years of gruel and meditation.
I wouldn’t say that you meet the most interesting people in the Merry Widow. Actually, most you meet are pitiful and predictable. Polo was more interesting than most, but his genius was being wasted at the bar, the genius being a gift for language. He spoke Czech, German, and Russian flawlessly. He spoke English and French well, if heavily accented. He could carry on a decent conversation with Nick in Greek and worked on his Italian when he played poker down the street in a men’s club of Juventus supporters.
I didn’t go to the Merry Widow to prevail upon Polo. Actually, I hadn’t given it any thought at all. But when I saw him there, catching up on events in a country that he’d forsaken long ago, it struck me.
“Can you do me a favour, Polo? Nick, get Polo a beer.”
Nick went to the Czechvar stashed on the bottom row of the fridge, Polo’s private stock.
“What it is, brudder?”
Actually, Polo’s English was better than it looks on the page. He dumbed it down for me and the other members of the Legion of Stupor Heroes.
“I have this number,” I told him. “I think it’s a Russian guy who answers it. I want to know who it is and where he is and how to find him.”
I spilled out the details in point form. A Russian kid gone missing. A Canadian kid gone to look for him. Some black bear answering the Canadian kid’s phone.
“Maybe they shouldn’t hear the sound of the bar. I’ll go in the street. Give me a minute.”
Polo exited the bar. I saw him dial his cellphone. His caller ID was hidden, maybe because it would just fill up the screen. He pressed the phone to his ear. He was talking animatedly, his free hand doing something like International Sign Language, something he must have picked up at the poker game.
Ten minutes later he walked back in the front door.
“They are in Little Moscow at Steeles and Yonge. We can go.” I never did find out what he said and how he extracted the dope. I didn’t want to know. I trusted it just as he presented it.
POLO AND I PILED into a taxi. Seventy dollars later we got out of the cab. We were at a shabby strip mall at the city limits, the 300 block of Steeles Avenue West, right up the city’s main artery, Yonge Street. I felt like I was deplaning at the Moscow airport. The architecture didn’t say Russia, but every grill and every overheard conversation sure as hell did. I was made as a foreigner, naturally. Three generations ago Shade was Shaad, German, but the pedigree was now mixed, and even a pureblood Deutschlander would stand out in a throng of Russians.
Polo, however, managed to pass. Especially as soon as he opened his mouth. He’d later tell me that he even came equipped with a backstory. He had, in fact, lived in Moscow briefly. That seemed to be an unlikely situation for someone holding a belt one degree higher than dissident, sort of like the Grand Wizard taking out a sublet in Harlem. But Polo had picked up the languages as he went from place to place. Whenever I asked him about what he did for work along the way, he changed the subject.
I let Polo do the talking when we went to the Kontinental, a restaurant that catered to Russian émigrés, just like every other perogy joint and grocery store in the mall. A tableful of thugs by the door were in an animated conversation when we walked in, but they went dead silent and burned holes in the back of our heads with their heat vision as we made our way to the counter.
We sat on barstools with our backs to them and without a backwards glance. Polo spoke to the counterman, I presumed to order us coffee. The counterman brought me a double of premium vodka and Polo a large glass of kefir. Polo’s reading of the situation was a good one. In this situation he needed to be sober and I needed to be half drunk.
I made out that Polo asked for a guy named Sergei. No surname. Who this Sergei was and what we were doing at the Kontinental I had no idea. Polo hadn’t spelled out in advance any details about our meeting. Three minutes into our car ride he had fallen asleep, his head resting against the window.
The counterman pointed us to a door in the darkened back half of the restaurant. I had a notion that the Kontinental’s viability rested not on the profits from the single table at the front door, but rather on whatever went on in the back. Polo led the way. He showed no outward signs of nerves, but later he told me that he was a reasonable man and was as scared shitless as I was.
IT WAS LIKE trying to make out figures in a steam room, but instead of vapour the room was clouded with smoke from unfiltered Russian cigarettes. Two huge wooden crates of the smokes were sitting on a skid. They had been stolen out of a cargo hold and were almost certainly stolen once or twice before that. I gave the five found-ins high points for criminality but none for originality.
A poker game was running. After a brief interview and a few words between Polo and the dealer, the only Russian who was talking, my finder sat down at the table and pulled out a wad of cash that had never been in view at the Merry Widow. It was enough for a down payment on a condo and made me wonder why Polo resided in a basement apartment around the corner from our local.
Intermittent conversation ensued, Polo and the dealer being the only participants. “Intermittent” is inadequate, really. It was a couple of mumbled words from the dealer and a couple back from Polo and then a full hand played silently, cash tossed, and hands folded across a green felt table that, like the smokes, had been purloined. Half an hour into the session, Polo spoke up, seizing the initiative finally. About halfway t
hrough what passed for a soliloquy, Polo pointed at me and said “Los Angeles” in unaccented English.
“Player?” the dealer asked me.
I shook my head in the negative. At that point I was rattled enough to forget what I once was.
Polo explained that I was working for L.A. and that he was my friend and that we were looking for a Peterborough kid or kids. Markov and Mays.
Nothing more was said through the hand. Or the next. Or the one after that. For an hour.
I was going to start breathing through the sleeve of my shirt. My palate felt like a rat had crawled in my mouth, farted, and died. Polo was unbothered. He was sitting behind stacks and spires of chips that faintly resembled the Kremlin against the Moscow skyline. He went all in. A bear-faced guy who hadn’t said a word called the bet. Polo had a flush on the turn. Ungentle Ben had two pair. Polo didn’t reach for the pot. I was surprisingly all right with his hesitance. He said a couple of words and the dealer took out his wallet, extracted a Russian wholesaler’s business card, and on the back wrote down an address. Polo pulled his cash out of the pot but left the loser’s share on the table in case it was needed for bail or bribe.
I didn’t ask Polo what happened, not when we walked through the now-darkened Kontinental, out the unlocked front door, and into the parking lot.
“We can walk,” he said. I felt like running. Home.
IT WAS a Russian rave, which is to say that the vice of choice was vodka, not Ecstasy, and every leggy blonde looked like a Sharapova sister. Polo and I were a generation and a half older than anyone in attendance, save a bald bouncer who’d likely brought home the Olympic gold in Greco-Roman’s super-heavyweight division and shaken Leonid Brezhnev’s hand. I felt like turning around and walking out whence we came. Polo walked up to the noneck and tried to shout over the booming Eminem. The wrestler pointed across the room. There, standing against the wall on the far side of the room was Markov amid a cluster of girls talking animatedly. Slightly to his side, hands in pockets, head down, Billy Mays Jr. He was oblivious to our presence and to a willowy former figure skater undressing him with her Baltic blue eyes.
