The Midnight Boat to Palermo and Other Stories

by Rosemary Aubert

  It was about two days before we were supposed to head back home that Baby scooted away and disappeared behind the cottage. I went running after her.

  “Come back here,” my husband shouted. “It’s dangerous out there. Don’t go off alone.”

  I ignored him. I wanted my kitten, my companion. I ran and ran. Behind our cottage was a ridge of rock covered with thick vegetation. Vines sucked at my ankles, but I scrambled up the hard surface after Baby. I just kept climbing. Behind me, my husband gave up shouting. I heard the door of the cottage slam once, then slam again.

  I was out of breath when I finally caught up with Baby. And my heart was pounding. But when I saw what she was doing, I stopped breathing altogether.

  She was standing in a clearing on top of the rock ridge. Every hair on her little body was standing on end. Her back was arched. She was hissing. She was hissing at a wolf. Mano a mano.

  I don’t know what either of them intended. Because before I could move, I heard a loud crack and saw the wolf explode in a cloud of misty red and black fuzz.

  I heard two screaming sounds intertwined—the cat sound of Baby, who had jumped into my arms, and the human sound of me.

  Then I heard another human sound. A laugh.

  I turned. My husband was standing at the base of the rock ridge with a long-barrelled gun in his hand.

  That night, I was too upset to cook supper. So my husband took me to a restaurant. I had a hard time eating, but he covered my hand with his and told me that if I was good and got down my whole supper, he would tell me about a surprise he had for me when we got home.

  So I tried and I didn’t do too badly.

  When we got home he told me that the surprise was that he had given notice on our apartment in the city and made arrangements to have all our belongings moved to the cottage.

  “We can be happy here alone and together,” he whispered as we lay in bed. “And you’ll toughen up a bit. You’ll learn that when something is your enemy, you have to defeat it. You can’t be soft. If you’re afraid of your enemy, you can never sleep at night. But if you know you can kill it, you’ll always be safe.”

  He fell asleep right after that. It had been a long hard day, after all.

  At first, I cried. I thought about all the meals I’d have to cook and serve to him. Then I thought about the insecticide he’d used on the garden.

  I cried some more. But my heart wasn’t in it. Because I remembered how eager the trapper had been to lay traps in the woods as well as along the river bank. Maybe I could make a deal with him, too.

  Also, I had seen where my husband put the gun with the long barrel.

  I listened to the deep, even sound of his breathing, and suddenly, I did feel safe. I realized he was right. You can’t feel sorry for your enemy.

  At first, when I came to the cottage, I couldn’t stand how you had to be killing something or thinking about killing something all the time. But as I sank into sleep, it occurred to me that after a while, it doesn’t bother you at all.

  THE THIEF

  The gym is across the street from the courthouse and the courthouse is across the street from the cop shop. Around the corner is the detention center where a thousand people visiting their bad relatives park all day every day for free, unlike the hospital up at McCowan and Lawrence, where it’ll cost you twenty bucks an hour to visit somebody who’s sick.

  I wouldn’t be in the gym at all if it weren’t for Scott—the wife. I got a hundred and twenty pounds on her. She says she doesn’t want me to roll over one night and flatten her.

  She doesn’t want me around the house any more than I been around the house for the past twelve years.

  Which is how long we’ve been married. As for the badge, I carried that for forty-one years. Right up until I retired a couple months ago. I wasn’t a numbers man then, and I didn’t need a map to tell me what part of the city I was in, let alone what part of the neighborhood. But things around here are changing fast, and changing fastest is me.

  “We’re delighted that you’d like to join us. And we have a special on this month. Your spouse can join for only one-half of what you pay. You can get a card and she gets her own card. You can come separately or together…. Your choice.”

  Yeah, right. As if Scott would hang around in a gym like this. Half the people in the place are old cops and half of the other half are old, period. Scott goes to Curves. She wears a thong. She’s fifty-two years old. A knockout. I’d do anything to keep her. She’s wife number three and I’ve got ten years on her as well as all those pounds.

  So I sign up and start with the treadmill.

  I walk.

  At first, all I’m looking at is the place where my flat feet are supposed to be down there, somewhere below the love-handles that used to anchor my gun. I’m thinking the pound that sweet gadget weighed might be the only pound I’ll ever lose.

  But the second or third time I come to the gym, I start looking around.

  The thing about a treadmill is: there’s nothing to do but look around. And I see that a lot of the guys—and a few of the gals, too—are people still working across the street, people who come in on their way home from the court or the police station or the jail. And I start to listen, too, and it occurs to me that a lot of what they’re talking about is business. Law business.

  I don’t know anybody here personally, which is good because that means nobody knows me. Cops got big mouths. Lawyers, too, I think. But like everybody else in the world, they talk more freely when they think nobody’s listening, and they assume that an old guy with earphones on is listening not to them, but to his music. Which is usually true. Unless you’re a cop who’s spent so much time eavesdropping that it comes natural to wear earphones with no music.

  And that’s how I started to get daily inside reports on the hottest case going on in the big courthouse downtown, the courthouse where I spent a lot of my final hours as a cop sitting around waiting to testify.

  People sitting around waiting to testify was not a problem in this case. It was a gang shootout on Yonge Street, right in the heart of the shopping district and it cost the life of an innocent teenager buying her Christmas gifts.

  Most of what I overheard at the gym, I’d heard a thousand times before, maybe a hundred thousand times, but I still liked to listen to the gab about how every effort was being made to suck up to the few witnesses who might possibly come forward willingly. “We’ll even give ‘em a free ticket to stay in the country,” one cop joked. He knew, like I knew, how many illegal immigrants found their way into the criminal justice system even after they’d been deported.

  “It was a four-way,” the other guy answered. “And they got two in custody. That means two perps are still out there.”

  “Not to mention the two hundred people on the street and in the stores when the shooting went down. Time for a little hunt and hound—dig a few of them out and get them to talk….”

  Both guys—I took them for detectives—shook their heads.

  “It’s been a year and a half,” one said with a sigh. “You’d think…”

  “I don’t think nothing,” the other said. “Not anymore.”

  Maybe they kept talking, but suddenly, I got distracted by a tug on my police-issue tee-shirt. In the moment it took me to see who was bothering me, I got the absurd thought that I’d better take care of the few fragments of police clothing I still had in my possession. There’d be none to replace these souvenirs when they turned raggedy enough for Scott to confiscate them.

  “Mr. Cander?”

  I hated being called mister. Detective was good. Even officer. Mister was nobody, but mister was me.

  “Yeah?”

  Behind me, at the foot of the treadmill stood Denise. She’s a trim broad, about the size of my wife without the beauty. But a nice woman. Nice enough to offer me that half-price deal the day she signed me up. Denise is the boss around here. She can get tough if she has to. I’d seen her eject a couple of young women who were ha
ving a cat-fight over the deluxe treadmill—the one that gives you your heart-rate, blood-pressure, body-mass index the minute you step on—and does a pregnancy test, too, for all I know.

  “Can you step into the office, Mr. Cander,” Denise said, “I need to talk to you for a minute.”

  She was going to ask me some sort of favor. Forty-one years of being asked to fix parking tickets, among other things, shows a cop how to read the body-language of somebody who wants something.

  “Yeah, sure,” I answered.

  To tell the truth, nobody had talked to me as if I were a cop in months and I was starting to miss it.

  Denise was a middle-aged blond. She looked like the type who had started off blond and was bound and determined to stay one until the day she died. Determination isn’t a habit, it’s a character trait. I wondered what I was up against.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked as I took a seat across from her at her desk, which, I saw, was neat and tidy and held nothing but two sheets of paper and a statuette of a weight-lifter, labelled “Awarded to the Manager of the Year.”

  “We got a thief,” she said. “I know you’re a cop and I want you to help us catch him.”

  I thought about things for a minute.

  “Seems to me,” I said, “you gotta lot of cops around here. Why pick me? And anyway, why not call the real cops if you suspect theft?”

  Denise smiled. “Exactly,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t need a real cop.” She glanced at me. Glanced away. “No disrespect. What I mean is, I don’t want to get anybody into serious trouble. It’s not a big deal. It’s just, now that we got this card system, we have to account for every minute on every machine. Stealing time off an exercise machine, it’s not a crime. But—”

  “But you gotta account to your boss for every minute….” I didn’t add, “Or you won’t get to be Manager of the Year anymore.”

  “Yeah.”

  If she’d asked me to do a rinky-dink favor like this a couple of months ago, I would have told her where to shove it. Instead, I asked her, “So what exactly is going on? People sneaking in here without a card or something?”

  She sat up straighter. It never ceases to amaze me how the slightest little mystery sets an ordinary person off. “I think it’s more sophisticated than that. You see,” she began to rhyme off her big theory as if she’d given hours of thought to the “crime”, “if somebody had just stolen a card, then our records wouldn’t jive. We keep track of every card and match each one up to each person as soon as they come in. We write it all down. Number of the card. Name of the person. Time they came in. Time they left…”

  She glanced up at me, her dark brown eyes sparkling. “Want to see?” she asked. “Want to see our records?”

  “Uh, no thanks,” I answered. “Look, I don’t think…”

  If I’d still been on the force, I’d be working that gang case. I had no way of proving that was so, I just figured it was. I’d worked a lot of gang cases in my time, cleared a lot of them. I was a top man. Had been. Now I was reduced to listening to a blond, middle-aged Sherlock Holmes tell me about her own big “case.”

  “Somebody is figuring out how to use the machines without any card at all,” Denise declared, as if this were the worst crime in the whole evil, ugly city.

  “No!”

  She looked at me hard for a minute, and I felt bad that I’d made fun of her.

  “Look,” she said, “I could have asked one of the other officers who use the gym, you know, somebody still on active duty, but I thought that would have been a conflict of interest.” She kept her eyes down, on her hands, I thought. She had nice nails. Like Scott’s.

  “I’m sorry, Denise,” I said sincerely. “I know you run a tight ship here. I know you don’t want anybody cheating. I can respect that. What do you want me to do?” I asked, a little surprised at the sound of my own voice. Eager.

  “Maybe you could just keep your eye on things,” she answered.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll keep my eye on things.”

  “Thanks,” she said softly, “thanks a lot.”

  A pang shot through me that I didn’t expect. It had been a long time since I’d been a cop on the beat. I’d forgotten how touching it was when some poor decent citizen showed gratitude to me just for doing my job. “Don’t mention it,” I said. “No problem.”

  So I got back on the treadmill and I resumed looking around.

  I have to admit I envied the younger cops I could still hear talking about that big case downtown and about how the Prosecution was hampered by the lack of witnesses. “There’s people right in this neighborhood who’ve witnessed gang violence,” they said, and I knew it was true.

  But it wasn’t my job to worry about that anymore. I had a different case. I had to find the thief of minutes.

  At first, I just went through the motions. I walked the mill, mostly day dreaming unless Denise was somewhere in the vicinity, in which case, I made a point of looking around the whole room as if I were studying every lousy machine in it.

  But after a while, I got kind of interested. I noticed that even though the card system seemed a foolproof way of keeping track of who was doing what, people did a lot of things with the cards that weren’t exactly kosher, so to speak.

  I realized, for example, that the system itself had a lot of weaknesses.

  For example, when you came in, you put your card in a little box on the counter in front of the receptionist’s desk. The girl was supposed to pick up the card, record it in the book, and hand it back to you.

  Only half the time, the girl was talking to somebody—some cute guy working out or, more likely to Denise, who was quite a talker.

  So rather than stand there waiting for the receptionist to hand back the card, a lot of the gym users headed to the change room and just picked the card up on the way out to the machines.

  A couple of times, people picked up the wrong card and didn’t realize it until they’d already inserted it in a machine. Which meant that the card and the person using the machine didn’t match. Of course, nobody took this very seriously. Who cared except Denise? If somebody picked up the wrong card, mostly they just waited until the machine spit it back out again, then traded cards with whoever had their card.

  And of course, people forgot their cards. That necessitated sweet-talking the receptionist into using her card, which was sort of generic, like a master-key. Now, when the clientele is cops, lawyers and the occasional jail guard, verbal manipulation is a tool of the trade, so talking the receptionist out of following regs was a cinch for most of the people who frequented the gym.

  It wasn’t until the night that I finally got bored with the treadmill and decided to walk the track that I noticed the cleaning lady.

  She was a black woman, heavier than anybody else in the gym, but not so heavy that she wasn’t able to balance on one of those big orange balls that everybody’s so crazy about. I had seen a little Korean cop, a girl about the size of a gnat, bounce around on the thing, exercising every part of her tricky little anatomy. The cleaning lady wasn’t quite so agile, but she did seem determined.

  Speaking of determination, Denise caught a glimpse of the woman and shot her such a look that the poor thing slid off the ball, grabbed her feather duster and headed for the free-weights as if she were going to dust them down to the last half ounce. Though the gym would be open for another hour and a half, Denise had put in her twelve hours and was on her way out.

  The next night, I came a little later. By 9:30 there were only a few people left lying on their rickety backs and pushing against twenty or thirty pounds of iron with their wrinkled old feet. From the treadmill, I checked out the room. I couldn’t see anybody doing anything suspicious. It seemed to me, though, that if the big time thief was active, he or she would probably be working now that the head honcho had gone home and the little receptionist was packing up the towels for the laundry guy to pick up after the front door w
as locked.

  There were mirrors mounted on the east and west walls of the gym. On the north and south sides, the mirrors were free-standing. The track ran behind them. It occurred to me that the mirror on the north side obscured the view from every angle of the room except the north side of the track itself.

  Again I left the treadmill. Again I took to the track. I started at the west side, took a slow run—which almost killed my knees—around the loop to the south and halfway up the east side. When I got to the north side, I slowed down to a walk, a silent walk.

  I rounded the corner.

  And I saw the cleaning lady pumping a couple of barbells that I wasn’t sure I could handle myself.

  She was so intent on what she was doing that she didn’t even see me. At her feet was the feather duster and the grey rag she used to swipe the handles of all the machines. Her eyes were half closed. Her black curls, which I now noticed were streaked with grey, seemed to tremble with her effort. There was a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her skin looked smooth in the reflected florescent light shadowed by the rear of the mirror.

  As quietly as I could, I reversed direction.

  Without her seeing me, I was back on the mill.

  It took me about two more weeks to figure out how she was stealing the time on the machines.

  I saw her hop on a treadmill just as a customer was getting off. “Don’t forget your card,” she said. She grabbed it, like she wanted to make sure the guy wouldn’t leave it behind. But I saw her quickly double swipe it before she handed it back. That allowed her a half-hour on the machine, but she didn’t risk taking it. What she did do was dust the thing with exceptional care, all the while walking. Nobody but me paid any attention.

  I saw her pull the same trick on the stationary bicycle. Not to mention the abs extender. That was easy to fake because she had to sit on it to dust it under any circumstances, and you couldn’t really tell whether the thing was operational unless you were standing right behind her.

  Which I was. But she was so intent on her exercise that again, she didn’t see me.