started up the Mr. Coffee and went downstairs to fetch the Globe and Mail. The entertainment section had a long article on the prospects for the Festival of Festivals. It was starting that night, the third- or fourth-hottest film festival in the world measured in commerce, number of movie luminaries on site, and other such criteria. There was Cannes and New York and then probably the Festival of Festivals. Or maybe Berlin snuck into third place.
There was a small mirror, antique with a carved wooden frame, hanging on the wall inside the kitchen door. I unhooked it and took it to the bathroom. By standing with my back to the mirror on the cabinet, tilting my head, and holding the antique mirror at about two o’clock, I could conduct an examination of the crown of my head.
Didn’t seem to be anything back there except hair. No cut, no blood, nothing of a foreign nature. A check with my fingers didn’t reveal a bump. The dastardly attack from behind had left me with not much more than a headache and an extra two hours of sleep. I spent another minute on the crown. It looked fit to present in public.
I got busy. Shower. Shave. Two cups of coffee. A perusal of the Globe’s sports pages. National Hockey League teams were in training camp. I looked out the kitchen window. The sun was shining, and a slim woman in shorts and a halter was picking flowers from her garden two houses up from mine. Why didn’t the NHL wait till the ponds froze over before they started training camp? I reloaded the Mr. Coffee and put on clean jeans, a long-sleeved shirt with a lot of vertical stripes in different shades of blue, and the Rockport Walkers. Not many ponds left around Toronto to freeze over.
Peter Gzowski was delivering a little essay on the radio. It was about the Labour Day weekend he’d spent up north with the woman in his life. That was his expression, “the woman in my life”. As descriptions of female persons one isn’t necessarily married to but to whom one is committed, it beat “the girlfriend” or “my old lady”. Most of the time on Gzowski’s program, three hours of it, he interviews people. Occasionally he serves up essays he writes in the spirit of a latter-day E. B. White. Except E. B. White probably wouldn’t have said a phrase like “the woman in my life” out loud. Neither would I, come to think of it. The woman in my life was Annie B. Cooke.
I turned off the radio and looked up the number for the Cameron House in the telephone book. The man who answered my call was polite and of minimal assistance.
No, he hadn’t seen Dave Goddard that morning, and, no, there wasn’t a phone in Dave’s room. Correction. Jim Kirk’s room. I asked if he’d mind hiking up to the fourth floor and tapping on Jim or Dave’s door, and he said, no, he wouldn’t mind. Five minutes later he was back on the phone and said, no, nobody was at home in the Jim Kirk room. I thanked him for the nos, and poured my third cup of coffee.
The day stretched empty in front of me, and I liked the sensation. Nothing like a dash of sloth to comfort a man. The day before, I ended a preliminary hearing that went two weeks in Provincial Court. My client was charged with fraud in big numbers, and the Provincial Court judge had to decide if he should commit my guy for trial in a higher court. The way the crown attorney spelled out the case, my guy bought an apartment building for one million bucks. That’s how much the building apparently commanded on the market, one million, but my guy sold it to a pal of his for five million. The five million never changed hands. But the pal got a trust company to advance him a mortgage loan for seventy-five per cent of the apartment building’s value, which the pal said was the five million he was supposed to have paid my guy. Seventy-five per cent of five million works out to $3,750,000. Subtract the one million my guy paid for the building in the first place, and there’s $2,750,000 in spoils. My guy and the pal split the money and went around smiling widely. There were also allegations of a fifty-thousand-dollar payoff to a loan officer at the trust company that granted the mortgage. I spent the two weeks trying to convince the judge in Provincial Court that the crown didn’t have enough evidence to send my guy on for trial. The judge said he’d take a few days to think it over. That freed up my schedule. People in the fraud business call the kind of deal my guy and the pal allegedly pulled an Oklahoma Scheme.
I walked into the living room and looked across Beverley Street into the park. The leaves on the trees were still green, and so was the grass. Verdant, I thought. A teenage girl in white painter pants and a white sleeveless blouse was perched on one of the picnic tables gently rocking a baby carriage. Two old geezers were sitting at another table playing cards. I watched the game for a few minutes. Gin rummy, it looked like.
My headache was beginning to recede. Should I interrupt the torpor of the day by chasing after Dave Goddard? What was my obligation to Dave? Was he a client? Or a friend in need? Had I botched the tailing operation? Should I make it up to Dave? Who was the guy in the beige jacket? Many more questions like those and the headache might stage a return.
I elected to postpone all decisions until after lunch and left the house on foot. My destination was the Belair Café. Annie B. Cooke was sure to be there. I’d give odds.
5
ANNIE HAD A NOTEBOOK laid flat on the table in front of her. Her dark head was bent low, and she was writing very quickly in the notebook.
A woman I recognized, Helga Stephenson, was taking care of the talking. Helga Stephenson had lips like Sophia Loren’s, high cheekbones, a face of kinetic force. Plenty of guys must have cracked up on the shoals around Ms. Stephenson. Annie had introduced me to her a couple of times over the years. Helga Stephenson was the executive director of the Festival of Festivals.
Eleven-thirty in the morning, and the Belair was abustle. I got a table against the wall. It left a wide but mostly unobstructed space between me and Annie. I ordered a vodka and soda with a wedge of lime.
The third person in Annie’s group was an overweight guy in a checked sweater and thick glasses. He looked familiar. He had a notebook too but wasn’t writing. He was waiting, and not patiently. His legs jiggled under the table.
“I told you it was too early,” the kid at the table next to mine said to his friend. The kid was about seventeen, and he was twisting in his seat to look around the room.
“Last year, right over there, I saw Bertolucci drinking Perrier water,” the friend answered the kid. The friend was a girl the same age. “That table second from where the waiter’s standing.”
“Could you tell who he was with? Bertolucci?” the kid asked. He had fuzz on his upper lip and scarlet acne streaked across his forehead.
“Press I suppose,” the girl answered. “Somebody boring like that.”
I squeezed the lime into my drink and prepared to sip. If the vodka gave me nausea, I might have to throw a tantrum.
“We still haven’t decided about Sunday morning,” the girl at the next table said. She had skin without flaw. Life was unfair.
“Why do they make such dumb schedules?” the boy said. “The David Lynch on practically the same time as one of the Truffauts, that’s maximum dumb.”
“Not as if the tickets are exactly cheap or anything,” the girl said.
“Your father paid for yours,” the boy said with the disdain only an adolescent can summon.
“It’s still money, Don.”
I was a quarter of the way into the vodka and soda. Not a hint of upset tummy. All seemed copacetic with my gastric world. Annie was still writing in her notebook and still oblivious of my manly presence in the restaurant. Would she have sensed the aura of Dennis Quaid?
“We’ve
