took the photocopy out of his suitcase. He needed his magnifying glass to read the name of the store in the smudgy backdrop behind the duck. The Toronto phone book, thicker than he had expected, lay in the hotel dresser. Leafing through the parchment-thin pages he found the name he was looking for. He located the address on the street map he had taken from the rental car. The place was not far, as distances went. He would scout it out first by subway, maybe by streetcar. He would find it, all the while warmed by the constant bulk of the metal pinned near the small of his back.
He was surprised at how cold it was in Toronto the first week of April. The sun gave off a milky thin halo of light, hardly what he would call spring. It had been warmer in San Francisco in the winter.
The subway he rode north to Queen’s Park was brisk and clean. Climbing the stairs to the surface he found, in the shelter of a glassed-in corner, a hot dog vendor with his portable stand and a middle-aged woman in an expensive ski jacket selling daffodils. The Cancer Campaign. An excellent cause. He, himself, was planning to eradicate a deadly cancer. He only had to find it, the rest would be easy. He shifted his back to reassure himself with the weight of his weapon, his own answer to medicine.
The wide intersection roared with the tumult of six lanes of cars flying north and south on either side of sculptured stone boulevards; the whine of trolley cars rolling east and west. A short distance north, the sixlane artery split to ring around a massive rose-coloured structure, gracefully Victorian and surrounded by lawns. The seat of the provincial government, according to his Toronto guidebook. He pulled out the street map and tried to orient himself. Keep going west.
He passed large ivy-covered houses that had been converted and taken over by the university; here and there some boxy, slightly newer buildings housed the departments of botany, engineering, and architecture. Students did not linger here. All the young men and women were in a hurry, carrying their books to the next appointment. If he remembered correctly, they were probably writing exams. Many were alone, but none as alone as he. Nobody on earth knew where he was. (Maybe Louis could have made a wild guess; Louis, who had been there when the whole thing started again, in the Wiesenthal Center.) Nobody else. All he had to worry about now was God. And he did worry about God, God the instigator, God the creator of species that ate each other, of people who killed others for treasure as arcane as a Yankees jacket. God the sadist. What else could describe a being that set up a system where the large were forced to hunt the small for every meal. It was better to think of God as dead than to think of Him as evil. In either case, life was meaningless. Those who didn’t see it were just fooling themselves.
Uncle Sol had been just such a fool. What did he used to say? When God closes one door, He opens another. That little lesson had been lost on Nesha. Doors had only closed for him. What about this door? This door would be the shadowy entrance that led him into the abyss. Louis had been the gatekeeper. When he heard Louis’ voice, Nesha had hoped it was a call for contributions. Nesha’s brain had arranged fortresses around itself, prepared for onslaught. He remembered standing before Louis in the Center, what — a week ago? The man’s mouth dropped open, framing a pink “O” beneath his trim moustache. Nesha saw himself mirrored in the other man’s eyes: overgrown beard and hair, jeans, sneakers. Every year he had come to the Center to search for news of the man, and every year he had grown more ragged, whereas Louis had been a constant: compact and well-groomed, hair clipped short. Louis had left him alone in the room but Nesha couldn’t keep the excitement to himself when he finally found a scrap, a hint of what he had been looking for; couldn’t help showing Louis with shy triumph what he had found. He could hardly fathom it had been only a week.
Nesha shook California off and turned down a street with desperate lawns and dingy porches. The two-storey near-shabby Victorian houses were painted like the ones at home, but the colours were different. The gingerbread trim was white, but here the brick was painted solid red or green, strong unyielding colours to keep out the cold of the Canadian winter. In San Francisco houses like these were coloured pastel blue or yellow or pink, sometimes all at once, reflecting the dreamy seascape of the Pacific.
As he got closer to his destination, students thinned out and were replaced by shoppers. Some ragged men shambled near the ethnic shops, trying to catch a sympathetic eye for a handout. Many in the crowd were Asian. He could easily have been back home in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
A small elderly Chinese woman in trousers and drab winter jacket stood near a stall arranging apples. She looked up as he passed by and held one out to him, a large red Delicious. He stopped, charmed by this gesture, shy and aggressive at the same time.
“Is it always so cold in Toronto?” he asked, pulling some change from his pocket.
She began to chatter in some mysterious dialect, prodding the apple closer to his chest. As she opened her mouth into the strange shapes of her language, he could see she had almost no teeth. Biting into the apple, he nodded appreciation, and moved on.
All at once, he stopped, mesmerized by the shops across the narrow street. He drew the photocopy of the duck from his pocket and compared, though he knew as soon as he saw it. He had found what he was looking for. He had arrived at the location of the cancer and now it was just a matter of rooting out the centre. He had the instrument ready. Like a surgeon, he had the tool for the job. He threw the half-eaten apple into a carton of trash and looped his arm behind to stroke the comforting bulge beneath his jacket with tentative fingers.
chapter sixteen
Thursday, April 5, 1979
Bubie’s Bakery was on Eglinton, one and a half blocks from Mrs. Kochinsky’s duplex. Rebecca used to come here for bread when she still had an appetite, before David died. Before she had lost the insulating flesh on her bones. She was always surprised when she came across herself unexpectedly, like this morning in the paper. She had unfolded it and scanned the front page till she found the headline: “Senior Strangled in Own Home/Police Follow Lead.” At first she didn’t recognize herself in the photo, a grim, distracted shot. It was Mrs. Kochinsky’s duplex, the front yard skirted by police tape, that caught her eye. Then her own face, grey and blurry in the foreground. She couldn’t say it was a bad likeness of her, only one she would have preferred to keep shut away in a mirror in the privacy of her bedroom where she could still convince herself she was alive and well. She pictured the killer scrutinizing the photo. It would just make it that much easier for him. At least the reporter had gotten very little information from the police. Her name was not mentioned, nor any important details of the crime. She supposed she ought to be grateful.
In the bakery two elderly women in white uniforms stood behind the counter serving a few customers when Rebecca entered. The satisfying aroma of baking bread swelled from the back in a pervasive cloud.
“Can I help you?” one of the women addressed Rebecca in a Yiddish accent. Her stylishly short hair was dyed reddish brown; her eyes sparkled.
“I’m looking for Rosie,” said Rebecca across the glass shelves of rolls and pastries. Which of the two would it be?
“That’s me,” said the woman surprised. “I’m Rosie.”
“I’m Goldie Kochinsky’s doctor, Rebecca Temple.”
The sparkle went out of her eyes. “She’s sick, God forbid? I yesterday wondered where she is. I tried phone her ” She stopped, seeing something in Rebecca’s face.
“You haven’t read the paper?” said Rebecca.
The woman wavered on the spot, her round face turning pale. “Newspapers I don’t read. Too depressing.” She motioned Rebecca to move toward the back door where they could speak directly over a counter rather than across shelves of kaiser buns and danishes.
“If
