12

Returning home a few days later, I found a package waiting for me, delivered by courier from Birk’s. It was a silver business card holder, thick and weighty, with my initials etched in great girlish flourishes on the face. The note was brief:

Congratulations on Newsys.

Mother.

I picked up the phone. Put it down again. That she knew about Newsys helped clue me in to her source of information on my life.

The card holder felt like a prize, a prize meant to reassure me in times of doubt, like the medallion they give you at Alcoholics Anonymous to remind you not to drink. If I ever found myself in doubt about things like Newsys and the real reason I had won the account, I needed only to touch this heavy piece in my inside pocket and be reminded that they chose me because they liked my abilities as an immigration lawyer. And there could be no other reason. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have received this prize.

Booze seemed a reasonable response to that kind of rationalizing. And so it was off with the tie, off with the jacket, and on to The Barrington to sit on a stool to suss things out. Or at least distract myself with neighbourhood gossip, the latest efforts to have a sidewalk widened or speed bump installed or to get the cops to finally do something about the crack house across the street.

And besides, if it wasn’t that my mother was suddenly keeping such close tabs, it was this: Since that first dinner, Manolo had been coming over to the townhouse nearly nightly, consulting with Sagipa on Guerrilla Warfare for Small Business. He was due again that night. Together, I imagined, they searched for things like the Guevarista equivalent of a Clearance Sale. I figured that leaving the house was also a favour to Sagipa. What he probably needed was space to get to know his father. What he didn’t need was me hovering.

There was nobody in The Barrington that night and Lena was occupied with restocking the fridge and so I read the sex advice column in the current Now magazine and once I had learned what one should do in the event that one’s husband can’t get off unless he is wearing a diaper, I gave into my need to think about everything that was happening—that resident nagging my head—both here and in Wanstead. I didn’t come to any conclusions of course, except that I felt like I was being shoved around by some unseen, distant hands, pulled one way, pushed the other, always against my will. No, not against my will. Right about then, my will didn’t seem at all capable of asserting itself. All the motion was bound to make me vomity.

With all of that in my head, and after entering the house that night to find Manolo still at the table, sketching chapter plans with Sagipa, Inés refilling their tea cups, I was spurred to go back to Wanstead and ask some more questions.

And so at work the following day, I called Drew Herringer, Tony’s old girlfriend and the mother of his son, who was surprised and happy to hear from me. She said it sincerely and so I did not hesitate to ask if I could see her.

“What’s wrong? Your wife leave you?” she said.

“No.”

“You get fired?”

“No, the job’s solid. So far,” I said. “I’ve got to be there on business and I was hoping to talk to you about something. About Tony, actually. Why did you think something was wrong?”

“A lot of people come back here when there’s something wrong in their lives. They get canned from their job or their wife announces that she’s in love with the mailman and they think that coming to Wanstead will help them reconnect to their roots and reground them.”

“And does it?”

“Usually being here just depresses them more,” she said. “See you Wednesday.”

I left work early the next afternoon to pick up the rental car, swung by the townhouse to pack a bag, and five hours later was reclining pantless on a king-sized bed in the Wanstead Marriott.

On television, Survivorman Les Stroud used a stray corn chip to light a camp fire and then dragged bundles of branches to form a sort of fence around the bed he had constructed out of dry grass somewhere on the vast African plain. “It’s not a barrier,” the Survivorman warned. “It’s a deterrent. If a lion wants to eat you, believe me, he’s going to eat you.”

I ordered a club sandwich from room service. It came piled high and held together with toothpicks wrapped in strips of coloured cellophane and on the side thick-cut, seasoned French fries, a leaky mound of creamy coleslaw, and a tiny glass bottle of Heinz ketchup. First class, this place. For many years it had been the best hotel in Wanstead. On check-in, I had given my name to the clerk, watched her fingers tapping delicately on the keyboard, and waited for the question. But then, I thought she was likely far too young to know anything about Gord or the UCF’s famous battle with Marty Schuller, the hotel’s former owner. And yet, I gave it a shot anyway.

“You probably don’t remember when this place was called the Royal Windsor?” I said.

She looked up and produced a cordial, service industry smile. “It’s always been the Marriott to me, sir. The elevators are just around the corner.”

From the safety of the bed, my head propped by four pillows, each the size of a small litter, I watched Survivorman Les Stroud use a stick to flush birds from a nest hanging low in a tree. You never reach in with your hand, he warned. “Black mambas like to nap inside and if they bite you, you’re dead.” The show cut to commercial. My mind fell back on Marty Schuller.

When did all that happen? The mid 1970s, it must have been. A hot, sticky weekday evening in summer. The house on Aberdeen. It was late enough that I was in my pyjamas. In the living room, Allistair Forzante paced between the fireplace and the chesterfield.

“We’ll kill him,” he said. “We’ll strip him naked, tie him to a chair in his kitchen, slather him with bacon grease, and let the rats in that hotel have at him.”

I sat in my pyjamas at the top of the stairs, listening. Despite the hour, I was wide awake, skin tingling. My fingers tugged at piles in the broadloom, my knees opened and closed repeatedly. From my position, I couldn’t see my father but I knew that Gord would be seated in the black leather arm chair, one leg crossed over the other, a glass of Special Old resting on his knee.

Forzante was a big man with a severe face and a small mouth and in those colourful days he wore bushy sideburns that stretched halfway down his cheek. I imagined their blackness against the red of his face and the fearsome animation as he paced through his fury.

“We don’t need to kill him,” Gord said. “Especially since we start negotiating this week.”

I knew then that the man Forzante wanted to kill (and Gord didn’t) was Marty Schuller, the owner of the Royal Windsor Hotel, whose housekeepers, cooks, valets, and waitstaff were all represented by the UCF. Earlier that evening, there had been a preliminary round of negotiations. Apparently, they had not gone well.

“What am I, deaf? Am I hearing you right?”

“I think we can probably get six—maybe six and a half—per cent if we give up overtime for conventions. The way the economy is going, no one will be booking anything for the next two years. By that time, we can re-negotiate.”

“I can’t believe you plan to talk to this cockbreath.”

“He’s the owner. Who else but Schuller?”

“The things he’s been saying. And in public!”

“That’s not important right now.”

“How dare he accuse us. We need to respond.”

“It doesn’t matter, Al, I’m telling you. The higher the monkey climbs, right?”

“Sure. Whatever. But this is more than the Royal Windsor. Do you know what they’re saying down at the WAW?”

“Schuller is the enemy. Not the WAW.”

“Why am I discussing it? I’m the head of this union. If I want him dead, he dies.”

“He doesn’t die. He dies and the hotel gets sold. Who’s going to buy it now? Nobody has any money, nobody’s lending. Or maybe someone buys it and converts the building into an old folks home. Either way, it shuts down and two hundred of our people get pink-slipped. It sends the wrong message. A bad temper is a vulnerability in this business. We need to be careful here.”

Forzante’s footsteps stopped. There was a pause in the conversation. Sliding down two steps, I cocked my head, straining to hear. But there was no sound. Not even the tinkle of ice in a glass. Finally, Forzante spoke.

“You’re goddam unbelievable, you know that?”

“Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

“I don’t give a damn if you know what you’re doing,” Forzante said. “And don’t you ever tell me to trust you. I didn’t get where I am by trusting people. You need to keep that in mind.”

Survivorman Les Stroud lasted his seven days on the lion-infested African plains without being eaten. I raised my beer to toast his success and then wondered why Inés hadn’t called. It was past 10 o’clock. Whenever I traveled, she was supposed to call me, we’d agreed, to save on the cost of hotel long distance charges.

“She’s not here,” Sagipa said. “She went out.”

Receiver to my ear, I rose from the bed and walked to the window. They had given me a room at the back. No view of the river, but cheaper.

“Did she say when she’d be back?”

I looked down. The streets were wet and empty. I watched a traffic light run through its cycle.

“She said she might be late.”

A drunk stumbled into a newspaper box on the sidewalk below, regained his balance, and kicked the box twice before moving on.

“Well, tell her I called, would you?” I said. “How’s it going with you?”

“I’m just reading Guerrilla Warfare.”

“Oh yeah? How is it?”

“I just learned how to build a tank trap.”

“And here I’ve been trying to trap a tank for years,” I said. “You’ll have to show me where I’ve been going wrong.”

I undressed, slid under the heavy blankets and punched numbers on the remote control, unable to decide if I wanted to learn how to debone a chicken, watch highlights from the NBA playoffs, or listen to the grim roundup of details on any one of several newscasts. Instead, I turned off the television and closed my eyes and revisited my memories of Gord and Marty Schuller.

As far as I know, Schuller didn’t die, though it was never clear to me if Allistair Forzante really meant that he would actually have Schuller killed—as in taking the life from the man’s body—or if he meant it more metaphorically, the way pretty much everyone, at some point in the ­thermal heights of an argument, has killing thoughts.

Even as I grew older and learned to appreciate the strange and often counter-intuitive machinations of these things, I had never thought about my father or Forzante as men who would have a rival killed, though it was certainly possible that they had the power. Or: At least it was important that people thought they did. But to actually kill a man?

The negotiations with the Royal Windsor Hotel went ahead and a deal was eventually signed without a strike. But then business began to suffer. Even when the economy picked up again, Schuller struggled. Service was certainly an issue. There was a good deal of employee turnover; he had a hard time keeping anyone. The building fell into disrepair.

Eventually, he sold out to Marriott. After that, I had always assumed that Marty Schuller left town, retired to some place warm with his diminished fortune, shrunken and defeated, but alive. Now, the fact that I couldn’t remember the exact location of Marty Schuller’s exile (or if I ever knew it) began to bother me and soon after my eyes opened the next morning, I called the townhouse. Sagipa answered.

“Listen,” I said. “If your offer still stands to help me out, I’d like to take you up on it.”

There was a pause and then his voice took on new buoyancy. “Sure! Anything. What do you need?”

“I need you to find out about a guy named Marty Schuller. Do you have a pen? That’s S-c-h. Two l’s.”

“Schuller, Marty. Got it. Who is he?”

“He used to own a hotel called the Royal Windsor in Wanstead but he sold it in the early seventies and left town. What I’m mostly interested in is what happened to him after that.”