was carrying a cloth whisky bag. I hesitated to ask what was in it. It wouldn’t be whisky.
I went out the Queen Elizabeth Way with the top down on the Volks, cut north at Kipling Avenue, and drove past the muffler outlets and body shops to Ace Disposal’s quarters. A bright spotlight illuminated the sign at the front, and all the lights inside the one-storey office building had been left on. There wasn’t an indication of human activity on the premises. I pulled into the parking lot on the south side of the bar and restaurant across the street. The lot was three-quarters full, and sounds of happy revelry came from inside the club. The exotic dancers who were its advertised feature must have been in full terpsichorean flight. Or maybe the food was just awfully good.
“That the place over there?” James said. He was twisting around in the front seat looking at the Ace building. “Can’t see much from here.”
Two cars came up the street and parked in the lot. Three young guys in T-shirts that read “University of Toronto Engineering” piled out of one car and a man in a business suit got out of the other. They went into the club. It was called the Majestic. “No G-Strings,” a hand-painted sign over the door proclaimed.
“We’ll get a table inside that looks out on the street,” I said. “Less conspicuous than the parking lot.”
We entered the Majestic. It was crowded and smoky and dark. Loud rock music came from two speakers mounted on the stage that ran along most of the back wall. There were stand-up bars on either side of the stage, and tables with customers at them spread across the floor in front of it. Pink lights were directed at the stage. A young woman danced in the lights. She wasn’t wearing a G-string or anything else.
Two or three of the tables at the back of the room were empty, and James and I sat at one that was up against a window. A waitress asked what it’d be. She was wearing high heels and a shortie jacket that proper girls put on only at bedtime. James asked for a Coke and I ordered vodka. When the waitress turned away, she flounced her jacket and offered a flash of pale buttock.
James reached into the whisky bag in his lap and took out a pair of small binoculars. He turned the focusing dial and raised the binoculars to his eyes. They were pointed through the louvred window blinds at the Ace building. The kid was all business.
There was a break in the thump of the music, and the young woman on the stage gathered up a small pile of discarded clothes she’d left at one corner of the stage. She held them in front of her as she descended the stage’s stairs. She managed to look decorous.
“Alarm box’s over the door,” James said. He was leaning forward and pressing the binoculars against the window.
The waitress brought James’ Coke and my vodka. I gave her a ten-dollar bill and got back a handful of change. The waitress paid no attention to James and the binoculars.
“Take me maybe five minutes on that box,” James said.
The rock music thudded back to life, and a well-built woman climbed up the stairs to the stage. She was dressed in a nurse’s uniform: white dress, white cap, white shoes with laces and low heels.
“You want to see what I mean?” James said.
He handed me the binoculars. Above the metal and glass door in the brick wall of the Ace building, beside an overhead light, there was a square box with wires leading from both sides. The wires ran down the edges of the door and disappeared into the brick.
“That’s your burglar alarm,” James said. His voice had the sound of expertise. “What I’m gonna do is rig in another wire that bypasses the box. That way, it won’t ring when I go through the lock on the door.”
“If it rang,” I said, “where would that be? Police station?”
“Ring like hell in the building over there,” James said. “And in two other places. Police station is one, security company’s the other. Cars from both’d be here in five, ten minutes.”
“The security company installed the alarm?” I said. “That’s what you mean?”
“Put the binoculars on the door,” James said. “Little sticker on the corner, see it? That’s the security guys. Alarm rings in their office and at the police station.”
I moved the binoculars over the glass pane in the door and found a sticker in the lower right-hand corner.
“Not worth shit,” James said. He took back the binoculars.
The nurse onstage had divested herself of the white cap and dress. She was wearing high-cut gym shorts and a formidable white brassiere. Not for long. She danced to the heavy thump of the rock and took off the shorts and brassiere. Directly in front of the stage, eight or nine men seated at two tables that had been pushed together were pointing their fingers to one side of the stage and shouting something at the dancer. The shouting solidified into a chant. “Shower,” the men pleaded. There was a shower stall at the rear of the stage closest to the stand-up bar on the right side. It had clear glass walls and an intricate arrangement of nozzles and tubes. The woman stepped into the stall. A cheer went up from the front tables.
“That padlock on the gate, I saw ones like that a hundred times before,” James said. He had the binoculars back on the Ace property.
“Add up the time for me,” I said. “How long will it take you to open the gate and get through the door into the building?”
“The padlock, that’s a wire job, twenty seconds,” James said. He was looking through the glasses as he talked. “I go across the path they got there and work on the box over the door. Three, four minutes for it, putting in the bypass wire. So that’s only the lock on the door that’s left. I don’t know, couple more minutes. I can’t tell what kind of lock it is.”
Water sprayed over the woman in the shower stall onstage. She held a nozzle in her hand and aimed the shooting water at her breasts. Her face was raised to the ceiling and her expressions let the fans at the front tables know she’d achieved a higher form of ecstasy. Her breasts shone in the water. I estimated her brassiere size at 38C.
“What’d you think?” James asked.
I said, “I think if she performs that shower routine four or five times a night, she keeps squeaky clean.”
“About the job,” James said. He had an annoyed edge to his voice.
“You’re talking seven minutes,” I said. “Is that too long to be exposed out there?”
“Won’t be exposed to anybody after this joint’s closed down and everybody’s gone home,” James said. “No reason for traffic at night around here.”
“True,” I said. “What about night patrol cars? Do the security people who put in the burglar alarm check up on their customers’ property?”
“How ’bout we stay here and watch?”
“How ’bout we do?”
The woman stepped from her shower and dried herself off with a small blue towel that didn’t seem adequate to the task. She retrieved her nurse’s whites and left the stage. Her place was taken by a woman in a long diaphanous gown and a panty girdle.
James and I had two more rounds of Coke and vodka, and in the forty-five minutes we sat at the
