Chapter 16

Untypically, I bought a Star next morning — Wednesday, September 9. I told the newsboy I was supporting the strikers by boycotting the scab edition of the Examiner. Something else was at work, though. The Examiner wasn’t much for international news at the best of times, and I needed to torment myself with the headlines out of Europe:

WORLD-WAR FEUDS DIE AS GENEVA OPENS DOOR AND BIDS BERLIN ENTER

Former Foes Extend Hand of Welcome by Unanimous Vote Today

Germany’s Envoys Leave for Geneva to Sit in League

I’d had more than enough of the gushing Associated Press dispatches by the time my car reached Bathurst Street, so I jumped off and walked up to Dundas. It was nine a.m. when I got there. I was already late for work, but too early for Western Hospital visiting hours — as Daisy Bennett was not shy about informing me.

“Old friends can bend the rules a bit,” I suggested.

“Nothing doing.” The young nurse glared owlishly at me through the round lenses of her new glasses. “However, the doctor has seen Miss Clarkson this morning and authorized her discharge. If you bring her some clothes while she has her bath, you can not only see the Throttler but take her.” Benny struggled with a smile and vanquished it. “Just remind her to settle her hospital bill before leaving, will you? She owes the Western now for two admissions, plus an ambulance.”

I guessed Lucy’s green dress was too badly ripped to wear. I got her raincoat from my apartment and took her back there. I was gambling that Bea’s “stop looking” message had ended the hunt for Lucy. In the light of day, I appreciated Bea’s having taken time to make the phone call — though that appreciation wasn’t nearly enough to let me forgive her for the brutal job she’d made of Lucy’s face.

Her mouth was a heartbreak to look at — misshapen from the lack of teeth and swollen with bruises. She mumbled a droll warning against trying to make her laugh — then gave me a teasing hug and sent me back to work, with a request that I bring home something to drink.

At HQ, I ran into Ned Cruickshank, groggy after his night of following Stinson around. He said Harbinger had never shown up, but while waiting and watching he’d had an idea. We’d been thinking in terms of he and him. What if Harbinger were a woman? Why yes, I agreed, this very thought had recently crossed my mind. Then I got Ned to phone Snodgrass and ask the prof if he could vouch for the authenticity of the documents we’d had him translate.

The events of the previous evening weren’t going to give rise to any criminal charges: Lucy’s assailant was beyond the reach of the law. HQ was nonetheless left with the question of what to feed the news organizations. Clara Bain and other members of the Toronto Flying Club had already spoken to reporters from the Toronto dailies, who were now phoning City Hall for corroboration, refutation, background, foreground, and comment. Sanderson felt duty-bound to consult the RCMP Security Service on the management of these inquiries, and the Mounties weren’t slow to make their wishes known.

I was commanded to another interview with Inspector Claude Lachapelle early that afternoon. He reminded me that I owed him the tip about the property on Manor Road. I thanked him. He cautioned me that the address must on no account become public knowledge as long as the premises remained under surveillance. Fair enough, I thought. He had other demands, however. He wanted to see or hear nothing in the news about Soviet agents in connection either with Mrs. Whitehead’s passing or with Dan Ewart’s. Or, for that matter, with that of the Beaconsfield bomber, now identified as Victor Krasny. The latter two deaths were to be attributed to bungled attempts at armed robbery. Out of consideration for her husband — a hero to many if no more than a stunt flyer to the inspector — Beatrice Whitehead would be reported as having succumbed to a heart attack. Cyanide was not to be mentioned, whatever the autopsy showed. As for the use of firearms, I had shot her plane’s tire out merely to prevent what could, given the malfunction of the searchlights, have been an unsafe takeoff.

I replied that it wasn’t my job to brief members of the press — and fortunately not, as I’d have no part in spreading these fairy tales. Nor need I, Lachapelle assured me. All that was required was that I not contradict them. My final words to the inspector were that I reserved my right to spread news of the Russo-German arms buildup, cost what it cost me. As long as I spoke of treaty violations in Europe as opposed to crimes in Toronto, Lachapelle expressed himself confident that my efforts would be without either cost or benefit.

I came home to find Lucy had acquired a radio and a new rose-coloured frock with long sleeves, a low waist, and fancy embroidery around the collar. I’d had no idea they sold such things in my neighbourhood. I thought it must have taken a lot of courage for Lucy with her bruised and stitched-up face to approach the sales clerks, but she made light of that: was the war so long ago I’d forgotten what bravery was? She’d also bought me a steak which I fried with onions and masticated shamelessly while she sipped bouillon spiked with rye. After dinner, she took off her frock to show me some new underwear. When I’d said my two words about that, she took off her underwear, and we made love. She warned me not to expect much in the way of kissing or biting, but urged me to go all out — not to treat her as fragile.

“I know you’re tough as a rhino,” I said, “but if I feel like being tender you’ll just have to take it.”

We took our time and lay together a long time afterwards. Then we poured ourselves tumblers of whisky and Lucy mumbled out all she could recollect of the sorry story of the previous evening.

She couldn’t explain why she hadn’t been suspicious of Bea Whitehead. It wasn’t just that I’d vouched for Kip and Kip trusted Bea. It wasn’t just that Lucy was more used to dealing with duplicitous men than with treacherous women. It wasn’t just the carefree, fun-loving personality Bea projected. Nor yet was it the fact that, for all her verve and aviatrix sportiness, Bea appeared soft and unmuscular — no match for Lucy in combat. It was none of these, but some of each plus — what? Mesmerism? No, it wasn’t to be explained, but when Bea suggested they drive out for cigarettes in the powder blue phaeton, Lucy went.

She thought it odd that Bea should drive them to a house rather than to a store, but Bea assured her this was a house she often slept in when she was staying over in Toronto — and much closer than the store. Bea had a key. She led the way inside. Lucy might have been wary if Bea had expected her to go first. In the living room, Bea told Lucy to look through the drawers of a writing desk for smokes while Bea checked a cabinet under the bookcase. Lucy bent over the desk, but sensed a quick movement behind her and turned her head just in time to catch the blow from Bea’s wrench in the mouth instead of on the cranium. From here on, Lucy’s memory was cloudy. She was pretty sure she’d spat out a tooth and felt blood dribble down her chin. She thought she’d landed a few kicks, but Bea had managed to stay on her feet.

The problem was that Bea still had the wrench and could wield it with either hand. Lucy was backed into a corner. She couldn’t run. She couldn’t reach any object that might serve her as a weapon. Her padded vest, while it absorbed a couple of slashing blows, limited her agility. The last thing she could picture was herself lunging for Bea’s right wrist, and the wrench thrown from Bea’s right hand to her left. That’s when Bea must have got in the crack on the skull she had been aiming for. Lucy went down, and out.

And the photographs? Bea had probably — Lucy and I agreed — learned from Harry North about the two failed searches in London and concluded that Lucy had a way of keeping the film with her, but not in her clothes. Perhaps Bea would have come on her own to the idea of checking for false teeth, but her wits were never tested to that extent. The blow to Lucy’s face had broken the dental plate, and part of it had come out of her mouth. The layers of Vulcanite may have become separated. To find film hidden between them as Lucy lay unconscious would have been quick and easy. Bea needed the prints too, but they were large and easily located under Lucy’s vest.

Lucy had come to in a silent house, still too queasy to move. But then she heard someone try the door. She didn’t know it was me, but surely anyone that was coming to harm her would have a key. When I began pounding on the door, she dragged herself to her feet ... and I knew the rest.

Lucy didn’t have to ask if I’d recovered the photos. But she wanted to hear what had become of them and of Bea. So I told her all that and the day’s news from Geneva as well. Over a couple more drinks, I promised to do what I could with the translations. And suggested Lucy see what sort of stir her news might make in the city’s Polish community.

This was something she’d set out to do on her first weekend in Toronto. To find where in Toronto her countrymen had clustered, she’d looked up common Polish names in the city directory: Nowak, Kowalski, Jaworski — as well as their New World respellings with v in place of w. Calling on one of these had led her to the temptation of easy money and to the rigged card game she’d already mentioned. This time I was able to direct her to St. Stanislaus Church, which was practically on my streetcar ride to work. Lucy spoke to the priest and to two or three of the leading parishioners. Pickings were sparse. Winnipeg, not Toronto, was the largest centre of Polish-Canadian life. She was told that Russo-German hostility to the homeland came as no surprise, but that there were no members of the provincial legislature or of the federal parliament that could be brought to take the threat seriously. And since she had no proof ... A shrug, a sigh — the rest went without saying.

I fared no better with my MP. “A vast ocean separates us from Europe,” he quoted our Canadian delegate to the League as saying — and the ocean only seemed to have grown vaster in the eight years since the war. Where was Poland, anyway? Russia was to be feared, certainly, but as a source of socialist ideology rather than of military force. Policing the terms of the Versailles Treaty was a matter the member was content to leave to Whitehall. Even if Great Britain got sucked into another war on the continent, that wouldn’t implicate this country, not the way it had in 1914 when we’d been no more than a colony. And since I had no proof ...

Proof wasn’t something Snodgrass was able to provide. His specialty was Leo Tolstoy, and he’d been under the impression that the pages Ned and Lucy had brought him had been part of a novel. Needless to say, I didn’t quote the good professor when I wrote to our prime minister and to members of the British government. None of these letters was answered.

One letter surprisingly did bring something in return. Nick Mazur — the Polish-American that Lucy had tried to connect with at the Woolworth Building — remembered Mary Kaminska’s missed appointment on September 1. He wrote that he’d been curious about what had happened to her, all the more so because of the unusual incident that day of the man on the roof. I’d given Mazur the dirt on the German air force and asked him if he thought the United States government might pick up the ball. On that point, he wrote:

As a Pole born and bred, and a proud American today, I wish I had sunnier news for you. My business at Public Voice magazine is measuring public opinion. We conduct surveys and often manage to predict the outcome of elections. Sometimes we get things wrong. Still, I’m going to stick my neck out and predict what American public opinion will be the week German and Russian forces invade Poland. The president, whoever he is, whichever party he represents, will declare American neutrality and his resolve to keep the United States out of the fighting. At least four out of five Americans will condemn the aggressors. The New York Times will go so far as to suggest that if the English and the French are drawn into the conflict we eventually may be also. But all will agree to delay taking up arms just as long as possible. By then, of course, it will be too late to save Poland.

It was ten days before Lucy’s mouth was healed enough for her to see a dentist about new bridgework. We wasted more time than I care to remember cursing fate. Generally, though, we ran away from the blues just as hard and as fast as we could. I had a telegram from Hasty MacDermid inviting me out to the fall fair in Streetsville to see his fire extinguisher demonstration. I replied that I looked forward to standing him a drink next time he was back in Toronto, but that I had no desire to see anything in flames, not even as part of a show.

At night Lucy and I were burning up the sheets and drinking a regiment’s ration of hard liquor, while during the day I went to City Hall and buried myself in the assignments given me. Inspector Sanderson, at his most priest-like, asked me if I was cohabiting with the Polish woman. I saw in his eyes that he desperately wanted to be lied to. I obliged.

One evening, Dot dropped by the apartment. The radio was playing “No, No, Nanette,” as it often did, and I missed the knock on the door. Lucy opened and the two made their own introductions. Lucy smiled and apologized for her busted up mouth. She had a drink in her hand, which she offered to Dot. Dot shook her head; she looked small and nervous and as pale as her white sailor’s middy. I was making scrambled eggs for supper, something that didn’t need chewing, and it was easy to add a couple more to the bowl. Dot was reluctant, but in the end agreed to eat with us. She latched onto the radio and ran through every station on the dial until she was feeling less shy.

“So are you two lovers?” she blurted out when we were all sitting down.

“Funny,” Lucy said with a friendly smile. “I was going to ask you and Paul the same thing.”

Dot took some bread. “Don’t I wish!”

“Lucy’s the one that got hit by the door in the Beaconsfield explosion,” I said chattily.

“Gee. That must have terrified the bejesus out of you.”

I could see Lucy didn’t know the expression. “She says you must have been very scared.”

“I would say I was angry. Scared? Not very — maybe more when I was younger.”

“How old are you?” said Dot. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I don’t mind. I’m twenty-six.”

I thought Lucy had to be fibbing. She had impersonated the thirty-six-year-old Edna Salisbury, and I hadn’t thought she was many years younger than that. If she were telling the truth, she’d been in prison and had run away from home at sixteen. She had fought through the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the following Civil War before she was twenty. She was as old and as young as the century.

“Twenty-six, eh? I’m twenty-three today, so there’s not that much difference between us. See Paul rolling his eyes? He doesn’t believe me, but today I brought proof.”

Out of her purse, Dot pulled a graduation photo. Four rows of children stood in a schoolyard. Three of the kids sitting in the front row held a sign that read: Grade VIII Class of 1917. Standing in the second row, probably because she was shorter than the student behind, was Dot. She showed us her driver’s permit for good measure.

“It’s true you look younger,” said Lucy. “But you still have time to make your dreams come true.”

I didn’t ponder what she might mean by this. My thoughts were on the Old World where people had to grow up so quickly, and the New World where we didn’t have to grow up at all, neither our flappers nor our statesmen.

Friday I got paid. So on Saturday I gave Lucy her first exposure to baseball, at the new Maple Leaf Stadium down by the lake. Getting off the Bathurst car, we saw a well-dressed girl chaining an expensive new bike to a hydro pole. She was using one of those Danziger keyless padlocks my colleague Rudy Crate had shown me; I told her she should buy something more secure.

“That so?” she said. “Well, I can’t stop now. It’s my brother’s first start as pitcher.”

Lucy was a good sport about sitting on hard seats in the hot sun. She was bored, though, as anyone is likely to be at their first ball game. So even though some tricky pitching by our friend’s brother had kept the score tied, we left to get ourselves a drink at the end of six innings. Strolling back to the car stop with our arms around each other’s waists, damned if we didn’t spot some scamp in plus fours popping the lock on sis’s bike. He paused only half a second when I yelled at him to stop in the name of the law or some fool thing. But that half second cost him. He missed a gap in the traffic on Lakeshore Boulevard, then couldn’t get across. By now I was running full tilt. I still shouldn’t have caught him: all I can think is that the girl’s machine was too small for him and that her under-inflated tires were a drag on his speed. As he stood pumping the pedals for dear life, I leaped at him in a sort of flying tackle and brought him down. It put a good scare into him, but apart from scratches on his cheek and hand and a little paint chipped off the new bike no harm was done. I felt good. I hadn’t had enough of this kind of exercise lately.

Of course, then we had to take bike and thief to a police station. Lucy hung around while paperwork was done and was sweet enough not to mention her thirst more than twice. Fanning herself with her programme, she was also the one to suggest that we’d have no trouble finding the bicycle’s owner if — that is — she really was the pitcher’s sister.

This weekend arrest, I should point out, had nothing to do with busting the gang of bike rustlers. That nab was made thanks to Ned Cruickshank, who took it on himself to stake out the best of the decoys Crate had wangled, and to watch it night and day until it was loaded into a van Ned could take the plate number of. I recommended Cruickshank for promotion. Sanderson said he’d take the matter under advisement.

Ned was also the man that caught up with Iris, in reality a CPC member named Theo de Jong. De Jong claimed he’d been instructed to forward all Iris messages by telegram to an address in London, England. Whether Scotland Yard’s Special Branch ever tied that address to Harry North I didn’t hear.

I left some time, but not enough, after Bea’s death before telegraphing Kip in Ottawa about the German air force. He didn’t reply. I tried again a week later with the same result. And then finally, in October, he phoned me long distance at City Hall. He said that without the photos the translations would be unpersuasive and that he, in any case, would for personal reasons have to bow out of the business.

That sounded callous to me. Not callous like Bea swinging her wrench, but complacent as regards the coming conflagration in Europe. On reflection, I thought better of him — as a decent man blinded by love, and now suffering the consequences. Not hard-hearted, rather too tender-hearted to have been properly curious. He’d told me it was a mystery to him where Bea got her spunk. Not every man is made for solving mysteries. I’d already read that he had abandoned the idea of flying to the Arctic and was spending any time he could spare from the RCAF on charitable work for the Anglican church.

At the beginning of December, when the first snowflakes of the winter were falling, I remembered the night clerk, Alex Horvath, and wrote Kip to ask him if he’d like to meet the Hungarian pilot he’d donated his flying gloves to. The fighter ace replied that he’d rather not, that anything associated with his Italian days was painful to him.

By this time, of course, Lucy was long gone.

The day she got her new teeth, we drank bubbly smuggled in from Quebec and danced at the Palais Royale to the music of Harold Rich. Lucy’s new mouth was less distinctive than her old: the teeth stretched the lips differently. But kissing and biting no longer posed a problem. Her English was just about perfect by this time, and she’d even taught me to recognize one or two Polish endearments.

Next evening was less of a good time. I knew something was up when I got home — a way of referring to my apartment I was just getting used to — and found Lucy had the radio off. She said we were out of hooch. I didn’t buy that, but decided I’d let it lie till after supper. After supper, she sat me up on the bed, with my back against the headboard and snuggled down beside me with my arm around her shoulders, hers around my waist.

“Paul.”

“Don’t,” I said. “I’ll do everything necessary for you to stay in the country.”

“Those are good words to hear.”

“Stay then.”

I felt her head shake against my chest. Just under my nose, her wavy hair shook too, releasing a smell not of shampoo but of her. A perfume I hadn’t got nearly enough of.

“I don’t think I can do without you,” I said.

“You can.”

“Why even try, Lucy?”

“I care for you too. Believe me, kochanie. I arrived in your country alone. You helped me....”

“Look, sister, I believed in what you were trying to do. Spare me your gratitude.”

She held me tighter.

“Was sharing a bed just your way of saying thanks?” If I was trying to start a fight — and at that moment I was too unhappy to know what the hell I was doing — it wasn’t working.

“No, Paul,” she said in a small, soft voice. “I fell for you.”

“Like you fell for Harry.”

“Harry? Harry was good for a cup of tea, but he felt nothing for me as a woman. Besides, it was weak of him to give me money and let me go. You are different.”

“Yeah, ruthless. Ha-ha! If I say you’re staying, you’re staying.”

“You won’t say that.”

I thought I practically had. I adjusted my right arm so I could stroke her hair. “Why, Lucy?” I murmured.

“I failed —”

“We failed.”

“No, Paul, I lost the photos. I failed my country again. Maybe I was stupid; maybe one woman could not save Poland. But now I have to go back and share the suffering. You are in my heart, Paul, but so is my country. I have been such a bad Pole, fighting even against my own family, and I feel I only have one more chance to be — not good, but just okay.”

I remembered what I’d told Kip about love and divided loyalties.

“Still,” I said, “you could stay a little longer. We never had that walk in the park at sunrise. Wait till the leaves turn colour; the red and gold will take your breath away. Heck, wait till spring. We can go skating this winter on Grenadier Pond.”

“No, now is a good time. I have just enough money left for my steamer passage. If I wait any longer, I’ll have started a job and bought all kinds of clothes and things; I’ll have had so many more wonderful times with you, and it will just be harder to leave.” Suddenly she lifted her head, and her magnificent grey eyes searched my face. “Will you come with me?”

The fantasy lasted about as long as a soap bubble. I wanted Lucy. But I also wanted to work in my own language in my own country at a job I believed I could do and could even get better at. In Poland, all I could do was fight when the time came, if I wasn’t too old. I might not even be able to keep Lucy safe.

“No, Lucy, I can’t — and I don’t like the idea of your going back into harm’s way either.” Lucy’s impulses had so often worked against her and against what she was trying to do that I wanted her to think this return to Poland over from top to bottom. “Poles emigrate all the time,” I reasoned. “Ask anyone you like — it wouldn’t be wrong for you to stay with me.”

“I’ve made many mistakes, my love, but this time I’m sure I know the right thing without asking. I have to be in Warsaw when the bombs start to fall.”

And she was.

The End