Brazuca is immediately forced to reexamine his biases about kept women as he steps inside Clementine’s condo. Whatever bordello he’d been expecting, this isn’t it. There is nothing frivolous about this place, besides the cost of living in a condo overlooking English Bay. There is a cozy, warm feel to it, and though the furnishings aren’t cheap, they aren’t ostentatious, either. Someone with very good taste made a home here.
Soft afternoon light streams into the living room, where Brazuca finds a framed photograph of Lam with his arms wrapped around Clementine. They’re overlooking the waters of Deep Cove in North Van, where the Burrard Inlet and the Indian Arm fjord meet. Brazuca has never seen Lam look as happy as he does in that photograph, smiling into Clementine’s hair.
There’s a noise from farther in the apartment. He turns away from the picture, passes the elegant kitchen, and pauses at the bedroom door. “Hello?”
A young Chinese woman glances up at him, sweeping a strand of hair off her brow and tucking it back into her messy bun. She’s wearing sweats with the University of British Columbia logo and is sitting on the floor surrounded by piles of clothing, shoes, and handbags, looking completely lost.
What strikes him is that she doesn’t seem to be overly surprised to see a stranger here. Or concerned for her safety, for that matter. They stare at each other for a moment, then she gestures toward the bags. “Do you know what a designer handbag typically costs?” she says, finally. “Of course you don’t. I can tell by the way you dress. You’re not one of my sister’s regular boyfriends.”
Brazuca is amused, despite himself. He crosses his arms over his chest and leans against the doorframe.
“Thousands of dollars,” she continues. “There must be at least fifty thousand dollars’ worth of handbags in this room alone. What am I supposed to do with these things?”
“We should pool our resources and sell them together. We’d both be rich.”
“These labels sell themselves. And I’m not sure what exactly you’d be contributing, whoever you are.”
“Jon Brazuca,” he says, deciding not to offer a hand. The wary look in her eyes tells him to stay where he is. “A friend of Clementine’s asked me to stop by.”
She stares at him and he is tempted to step back at the sudden fury in her expression. She gets to her feet. “You mean Bernard Lam? She OD’s and he’s furious, isn’t he? His plaything is dead.”
“I don’t think Clementine was his plaything.”
“Let’s get one thing straight,” the woman says, jabbing a finger at his chest. “I don’t know why she wanted to be called by that god-awful stripper name, but she was born Cecily Chan. She was an English lit major before she dropped out of school to model. She was a person, with a family that loved her.”
Brazuca puts up a hand, a gesture for peace. He had a great-aunt by the name of Cecily and understands well why a woman under the age of forty would rather be called anything else. “Okay, I got it. She was loved. I never said she wasn’t.”
Her face falls. She kicks aside a purse that could be worth more than he made in a month. “I’m sorry. I’m not myself. I hate this. My sister is dead, and all she left behind is a bunch of expensive shit that I’ve got to deal with now.”
He goes to the kitchen and puts on the kettle. A few minutes later, she pads after him with a cardboard box full of designer handbags and drops it next to a pile of boxes already in the living room. Then she takes out a bag of loose leaf tea from a cupboard she can barely reach. Together they make a pot of fragrant jasmine tea and sit at the dining table overlooking the bay.
The room grows dim as the sun sets over the water, but neither of them bothers to close the blinds or turn on the lights. Sometimes he is reminded how beautiful this city is. Why he chose to live here in the first place. He’s so lost in his thoughts that it takes him a while to notice that she’s staring directly at him. Probably has been for a while now. “I’m Grace,” she says.
“Grace. Do you have someone who can come help you sort, um, Cecily’s stuff?”
“No, not really.”
“Your parents, maybe?”
She shakes her head. “As if they’d ever step foot in here. She and our parents had a falling-out a few years ago. She said she wished they were dead. They told her they could be dead to her, if that’s what she wanted. Then she left and they never spoke again. They refused to come to the service when she died because that asshole paid for it. It was just me and some of our cousins. I don’t think she had many friends left, toward the end.”
Brazuca looks at the cardboard boxes piled in the living room. “Okay, well, maybe I can help move some of this stuff. Where do you live?”
“We live in Richmond . . . Oh, don’t look at me like that!”
“Like what?”
Her hands are wrapped so tightly around her mug that she seems intent on breaking it. There is a sudden rage to her, maybe because her sister is dead, or maybe because she’s been left to clean up the mess. “Like we all drive sports cars, take violin lessons, and live in Richmond. Like we’re somehow taking over your goddamn city all of a sudden. My mom’s family has been here since the Chinese came over to build the railroad a hundred years ago, and my dad moved here from the mainland when he was a kid. They’re both engineers. We didn’t go and buy up property from under your noses. We’ve got roots here. I’m studying to be an urban planner.”
He shouldn’t be surprised that she’s on the defensive. Housing costs are so high that many blame the influx of Chinese on the astronomical real estate market. Over half the population of the city of Richmond is immigrants, and certain people are uncomfortable with the changing demographic. It is a kind of insidious racism that Brazuca sees seeping through with increasing frequency and he begins to see it now through this woman’s eyes. He feels a sudden tenderness toward her. He reaches over and covers her hands with his. “I never said your family didn’t belong here. I’m really sorry about your sister.”
“My sister, she . . . she let herself be bought and paid for.” She turns her hands over and interlocks her fingers with his. Her voice breaks, but there are no tears in her eyes. “You work with Lam, right? You know what those kinds of women are like?”
There is something unsettling about the way she’s looking at him. He takes his hands away, but doesn’t know where to put them now so just stuffs them into his pockets. “I really just help him figure out problems sometimes. I’m . . . I used to be a cop.”
“But you’re not anymore.”
“No.”
She skirts the small table and pushes his mug aside. Then she climbs onto his lap.
“Grace . . . what are you doing?” he says, wondering if he has it in him to throw a horny, grief-stricken woman off his lap.
“I want to . . . I want to feel like she did. Just for a night,” she says. Then she pulls his mouth down to hers.
Turns out he doesn’t have it in him, after all.
It wasn’t a sexy proposal, Brazuca thinks, much later, as they lie entwined on her sister’s bed. Then again, his proposals rarely are. He has a knack for attracting women who aren’t the least bit interested in a soft touch. His new leaf doesn’t seem to be helping him, even in this. They lie in bed, in the dark, for a long time. Brazuca isn’t sure if he made her feel like a whore, but he damn well feels like one himself. It is so silent in Clementine’s bedroom that neither of them misses the sound of a key turning in the lock. Brazuca catches Grace’s eyes and puts a finger to his lips. He eases to his feet and slides on his jeans. He hears rustling behind him as Grace dresses.
Moving quietly into the hallway, he pauses at the entrance to the living room.
He’s not sure what he’s hoping to find here, but a tiny woman in a fitted pantsuit isn’t it. She’s standing in the middle of the living room, holding a phone in the air. Her entire focus is on the pile of boxes stacked to the side of the room. He watches from the doorway, Grace hovering somewhere in the hallway, as the woman moves to the box with the designer purses and rummages through it. Her dark hair is so long and lustrous that, even though Brazuca has a slippery grasp on the concept of hair weaves, he is pretty sure that this woman has one. Finally, she pulls out a small vibrating phone from one of the handbags and switches off the call from her own mobile.
“You must be the dealer,” Brazuca says.
The woman pauses. She looks at him, saying nothing. He feels Grace’s anger building behind him.
He nods to the phone she’d plucked from the handbag, which is a basic burner, the kind you could find easily and fit with any SIM card. “You used a special phone to communicate with her. Kept your number separate from all her other contacts. Smart.”
She slips the phone back into the bag. When she speaks, her voice is pleasant and girlish. She has a crooked smile, one that’s oddly endearing. “Oh, keeps things neat.”
It’s the reason he came to the condo. He’d wondered why he couldn’t find records of Clem’s dealer on the phone Lam had given him. Clementine lived a very isolated life, but she had to get her supply from somewhere.
Grace appears in the doorway. “You bitch.”
The woman studies Grace’s face. She is so tiny and is smiling so sweetly that he wants to believe that she’s younger than she must be. Because her eyes are calculating, however, he figures she must be at least a decade older than he’d first thought. “You’re not wrong about that, honey.” She glances from Grace to Brazuca. “Bernie probably asked you to come find me, didn’t he?”
“How do you know that?” Brazuca couldn’t imagine anyone calling Lam “Bernie”—at least not to his face. Lam was a playboy, but there were certain things even he wouldn’t stand for.
“Oh, I know everything about Bernie,” she says, waving a manicured hand. “You must be Bazooka. Clem talked about you every now and then, but only because Bernie must have. She didn’t have much of a life of her own.”
He nods. Bazooka. It’s the nickname he can’t seem to shake. “And you are?”
“Priya.” She sighs. “There’s no use trying to hide it anymore. If you describe me to Bernie, he’ll know it’s me right away. I’m the one who introduced them, you know.”
“Lam and Clementine?”
“Yup. I help . . . facilitate parties for certain elite clientele. Bernie couldn’t get enough Asian pussy. The ones without strings, I mean. And I knew Clem would be good for him.” She deliberately ignores Grace. “Funny how people are. Even here, they stick to their own.”
Brazuca steps into the room, putting some distance between him and Grace, who looks about ready to spontaneously combust. “Tell me about what you gave her. Did you know?”
“That she would die? Of course not. It’s not something I do often, by the way. Clem just didn’t trust anyone else and I owed her a favor. She knew I had contacts. But I told her this time would be the last for a while. Her habit was getting out of control and it wouldn’t stay hidden if she kept going like she was. Then Bernie would get involved and I’d be in shit. Like I am now, I guess.”
“Where do you get your supply?”
“Wait,” says Grace, turning to Brazuca. “Is that why he sent you? This is about the drugs? For fuck’s sake! My sister is dead!”
Priya glances toward the door. “Seems like you two have some things to sort out.”
Brazuca moves closer to her, making sure to exaggerate his limp. It’s a cheap ploy, but he’s not above using it when it suits his needs. “Maybe we should speak in private.” Which, he realizes now, is what should have happened from the start.
Grace crosses her arms over her chest. “I wanna hear this.”
“No,” says Priya. “You really don’t.” Then she walks out, holding two designer handbags. One of them, presumably, her own.
Brazuca throws an apologetic glance at Grace as he follows her sister’s dealer out, leaving her much the same way that he found her. In the middle of a room, lost and grieving.
He catches up to Priya at the elevator, not bothering to disguise how fast he can move when he really wants to. And only for short spurts of time. “I can’t give you a name,” she says, as he reaches her side. “You understand, don’t you? Bernie won’t but you’re a more reasonable person. I can tell just by looking at you.”
“I think he really loved her. It’s more than just the macho bullshit this time. I can’t go back to him with nothing.”
She nods, understanding. They are all accountable to someone. The elevator doors open and she steps inside. “You a drinking man?”
“Not anymore.” Not since Nora tied him to a bed and poured rum laced with painkillers down his throat. Which he supposes was officially a relapse, but really can’t be considered his fault. He had underestimated her and paid the price for it. He’d felt a bit like a whore then, too, he remembers. It seemed to be a common theme in his dealings with women.
“That’s too bad. There’s a bar in Gastown that I hear is really good. They’ve got those fruity cocktails with umbrellas in them. The Lala Lair.”
The doors close.
Brazuca considers going back into the condo to help Clementine’s sister sort through expensive shit and deal with her grief. On second thought, he presses the down button. He has a job to do, after all, and as much as he wants to attribute his conversation with Priya about getting a drink to his sex appeal, he suspects that she had a different motivation. She told him what he needs to know, in the only way that she felt safe.
As for Grace . . . well, he hopes she got what she needed from him.