Chapter 7

I’d never seen anything like this case. As a rule, a scarf tied over a holdup man’s face was the most sophisticated disguise a Toronto detective ever had to deal with. The big, wide, devious world — Europe and now Australia — seemed to be crowding in on our bustling but parochial town. After treating myself to a cool shower and a clean shirt, I packed clothes, passport, theatrical makeup, and all back into Lucy’s suitcase and took it and myself downtown, with a stop on the way at the lab of the University of Toronto chemistry professor.

Police headquarters overfilled the wing of City Hall into which it had been poured, spilling out by a couple of desks into the wide corridor. You’d think the brass would be grateful to me for doing my bit to relieve congestion, including staying away as much as possible. Inspector Sanderson was sore all the same. For some reason, he thought me overdue, and he told me he was docking me two days’ pay. The threat had become such an old wheeze with him that a month and a half earlier — back in the sleepy middle of July — he’d actually followed through and done it. He loved to save the department’s money. He even believed I’d thank him for punishing my absences monetarily rather than by putting a black mark in my file. I was spending nearly what I earned, so I was less than fulsome in my thanks. Keeping out of lunchrooms and coffee shops during that lean time, not to mention withholding business from the butcher and the rum-runner, had been a bore, particularly as I’d no big investigation then. Still, I was an old hand at doing without, and the sentence would seem shorter this time so long as I was able to make progress on the Beaconsfield case.

In the exams you take to become an inspector of detectives, I’ll bet Sanderson got a first-class grade in scowling. His natural advantages were a high, pious forehead, fenced off from ice blue eyes by his single, thick eyebrow — which he may have improved on nature by dyeing black. His preacherly voice was carrying, so to save him embarrassment I shut his office door whenever he dressed me down.

Today I got a five-minute scolding. With that out of the way, he started fiddling with his pipe and looked almost human. I opened the door again. Sanderson’s fumigation-strength tobacco always made me cough. Still, once he lit up I knew he was ready to listen.

Ready to a point.

“Now don’t start by cluttering my brain with all the facts and testimony you’ve collected, Paul. Lead off with your theory of this bomb blast or whatever it was. Make sense of it if you can.”

I set aside the notes I’d scribbled on the streetcar. “It looks to me like an accident,” I said, “though hardly an innocent one. The dead bird — we don’t know his name — wasn’t innocently in that hotel. I haven’t eyeballed every one of the registered guests, but either he wasn’t one of them or he has one of the clerks lying for him. It’s my belief that someone in the hotel, guest or clerk, let him in.”

“How would a guest do that?” asked Sanderson.

“By lowering the fire escape. Now what was this John Doe doing in the hotel? And what was he doing with a bomb? We can rule out suicide: he was holding the bomb away from his body when it went off. It looked like he was about to throw it. The bomb must have been defective in some way — or, even more likely if it was a grenade, the thrower lost track of the number of seconds he had left before detonation. From an analysis of residue on the deceased’s shirt, Professor Linacre has concluded that the explosive agent was the standard mixture of TNT and barium nitrate used in British ‘Mills bomb’ hand grenades since early in the war. The position of the body suggested Doe was about to launch his projectile through the transom window of Room 29, occupied at the time by a woman registered under the name Lucy Clarkson. The blast knocked the door off its hinges so that it fell on and stunned Miss Clarkson. I had her sent to the Toronto Western Hospital — where she assaulted a nurse and left before she could be seen by a doctor.”

“Oh? And where was this constable you sent with her to the Western?”

“Dipping his moustaches in a bowl of soup. Strictly AWOL.”

The inspector had nothing to say to that.

“My theory,” I went on, “is that Doe died in the course of an attempt on Miss Clarkson’s life and that she is afraid of either police scrutiny or a renewed attempt, or both.”

“So who is Lucy Clarkson,” mused Sanderson, “and what makes her worth killing?”

“Dunno, sir.” I refrained from pointing out that we’d have had a better chance of knowing if I’d been the one to watch over her at the Western. “It looks like she arrived from the United States yesterday using the passport of an Australian woman named Edna Salisbury. The passport appears to have been issued for both the British Empire and the United States, but Professor Linacre has concluded that the U.S. endorsement was added in different ink and in a different hand. Linacre further finds that the height given for Miss Salisbury has been altered from 5 feet 1 inch to 5 feet 4 inches by the addition of two pen strokes, again in that same second black ink.”

“Is Lucy Clarkson 5 foot 4?”

“If she slouches,” I said. “I suspect Clarkson is another alias, inspired by the name of a village she would have passed through on the way here from Niagara Falls. She is European in appearance and may speak one or more Slavic languages. No one I’ve spoken to yet has heard a word of English from her. She was carrying three hundred dollars in American currency, which she left behind when she fled the hospital. If the money was stolen, the grenade might have been intended as a punishment for the theft. The fact that John Doe was wearing a Macy’s department store jacket raises the possibility that he followed her here from New York.”

A ringing phone on Sanderson’s desk put an end to his cross-examination. He asked the caller to hang on and, with his hand over the mouthpiece, whispered to me my marching orders.

“See if the mob is involved, Paul — an American gang with ties to criminal organizations in Canada. That would account for the local accomplice. But not a word to the press. This is the Examiner on the line now. Leave the interviews to me.”

I said I’d be glad to.

“And for the rest, just follow your nose and let me know where it leads. You might try to find the foreign woman — just a suggestion. You’re as good a detective as I have. I don’t need to tell you your business.”

Before I could test whether the compliment was worth bonus pay, the inspector was purring into the phone and waving me out of his smoke-clouded office.

And that was that. The grenade explosion was reported in the Saturday edition of the major dailies — along with the renewal of negotiations to end the British coal strike and the Examiner management’s promise to continue publication of the paper in the event of a walkout by their typesetters. Throughout the city, most work was suspended for the Labour Day holiday weekend. While the police didn’t close up shop, the Beaconsfield investigation seemed for the next two days to mark time. The veteran Detective Sergeant Knight, Acting Detective Ned Cruickshank, a couple of constables (not including the disgraced Rutherford), and I pursued various inquiries, but got little or less to show for them.

Knight, the dean of the detective department, had had experience with the Black Hand extortion racket, so we worked it out that he’d start on the mobster angle. He soon discovered how stale his list of contacts had become. His next inspiration was to investigate the two men associated with the Beaconsfield who bore Italian names. Owner Joe Ferraro turned out to have been a Torontonian for over thirty years and had no known criminal associations. Nor could any link be established between him and either the bomber or Lucy Clarkson. Hotel guest Leo Di Giovanni provided a list of his Toronto contacts, mostly merchants along College Street west of Bathurst; all vouched for him as a sales representative of Taste of the Homeland Italian Foods. He was forthcoming also about the other North American towns where he peddled his oils and cheeses. Telegrams were sent to the respective police departments; none reported back anything against him. The Italian identity papers he showed Knight gave Florence as his place of birth and residence. Unlike the other guests, Di Giovanni admitted to having seen the woman from Room 29. He’d tried to ask her to have dinner with him Thursday night, but had given up when the two appeared to have no language in common.

Ned and the boys in uniform were meanwhile busying themselves with background checks on the other hotel guests. They reported that Dan Ewart, son of a Glace Bay miner, had served as a corporal with the Princess Louise Fusiliers during the war and through most of the years since had set type for the Halifax papers Morning Herald, Chronicle, and Evening Mail. He had got himself in minor trouble down east distributing left-wing literature. Floyd Peters, the young telegraphist, turned out to be active in the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees. He was also helping promote the formation of a super-union, but had no links to any political party. Ernest Pollard, on the other hand, the registered occupant of Room 25 the morning of the explosion, had once run (unsuccessfully) for the provincial legislature under the banner of the progressive, pro-temperance United Farmers of Ontario. Pollard had returned safely to his orchard near Brighton and therefore could not be John Doe.

I didn’t see that any of this got us very far.

Try to find the foreign woman. I tried, Inspector, and how! Working outwards from the Toronto Western Hospital, I spent most of Saturday visiting businesses within a five-block radius. In addition, I must have interviewed every streetcar conductor on the Bathurst and Dundas lines. I described Lucy/Edna every which way I could think of. I made allowance for the fact that I’d seen her only as a recovering bomb victim and surely not at her best — in appearance, vim, or mental capacity. My general impression was of a full-figured, sturdily built individual, close in age to myself, with somewhat exotic features. I gave details of hair and eye colour, skin texture, approximate height and weight. No one had noticed her. It was as if one of those stunt flyers had swooped down in a biplane and hoisted her into the sky.

Speaking of flying, I had an unexpected conversation on the subject with the Beaconsfield night clerk. A complete contrast to day man Frank Gabor, Alex Horvath was clean-shaven and alert. It was after nine when I dropped in Saturday night, fully dark but still so hot and muggy that the lobby door had been propped open. With long, quick fingers, Horvath was dealing himself a neatly squared patience layout without ever taking his eyes off the entrance. His kisser had enough of the Valentino look that you wouldn’t let your girl anywhere near him. I put his age at about thirty, which meant that — barring some disqualifying health problem — he’d likely fought in the war. He gave me a silent but encouraging nod when I mentioned my name and business.

“What language did Lucy Clarkson use when she registered?” I hadn’t intended this to be my first question, but my eye had caught the Mann spricht Deutsch sign on the desk, a sign I hadn’t seen there during the day shift.

Horvath’s right hand tapped the sign on the way to placing a red jack on a black queen.

“Did it sound as if German was her first language?”

Horvath placed a second ace at the top of his layout. I was wondering if I was going to get a word out of him. Then he seemed to finish his appraisal of me and decided to open up.

“Her first language? Not really, but then I perhaps would not know. It’s not mine either. I learned the rudiments in Budapest, and added a bit of polish in the Austro-Hungarian Air Force.”

“In Russia?”

“The Italian Front. There were British troops there too.” He looked me up and down. “Perhaps eight or nine years ago you and I were trying to kill each other.”

“I was crawling around trenches in Flanders,” I said, “safely out of your way. But there were Canadian flyers there, some pretty well-known ones at that. Would you ever have tangled with William Barker?”

Horvath laughed at the suggestion. “You think I’d be alive to talk about it?”

“Or Christopher Whitehead?” I asked, remembering a paragraph on Kip’s postings in Friday’s newspaper article.

The clerk demolished his layout, which was plainly doomed, and slowly put the pack of cards aside.

“Whitehead, yes.”

I waited to see if he’d say more. And he did, a lot more.

“It was February 1918 — cold already at ground level, and we were always flying at altitude to avoid ploughing into the Alps. The higher you went, the lower the temperature. Cockpits weren’t heated, forget enclosed, so every bit of clothing was needed. Even with all your kit in place, frostbite was routine.”

I saw I was in for a full-blown soldier’s tale — one rehearsed over long, empty nights at the hotel desk. But the case wasn’t dragging me in any other direction. I was happy to let Horvath talk, although I did try to move things along a little.

“Okay,” I said, “It was cold. What then?”

“Then, one morning, I was unlucky enough to be flying without gloves. I’d loaned mine to someone who’d lost his in a taverna and then got himself shot down wearing mine — a long story. But it’s the day I’m wearing socks on my hands and can hardly feel the controls that I find myself in the sights of the twin Vickers of a Sopwith Camel. I do this and this.” Horvath’s right hand sketched in the air the evasive dodging and diving of his plane.

“Were you able to return fire?” I asked.

“A few bursts, but with no feeling in my fingers I could hit nothing. My hands were like bears’ paws.” Horvath wasn’t looking at me anymore but through me to that winter morning in northern Italy. “The mountain air was so clear and we danced around each other so tightly that I could see the drops of castor oil that had splashed back from his engine onto the lenses of his goggles. Yeah, the devil of it was that his Camel could turn more tightly than my Albatros. Suddenly my engine stopped. I was going down. Now, I thought, I’m his on a plate. He followed me down, and still he didn’t fire.”

Horvath left a pause for the wonder of that restraint to sink in, but I was curious and nudged him on. “You made a deadstick landing.”

“Messing up a nice snowy field. On impact, my machine flipped, wheels and the propeller broken off. I knew I had landed on our side of the Piave River, but a long walk from our nearest outpost. I crawled out from under the wreckage.” He mimed the action, looking warily up through the lobby ceiling for his attacker at the same time. “That’s when the Camel came swooping down for one more pass. Just over my head, the pilot leaned out of his cockpit. And dropped his big leather flying gloves in the snow beside me.”

“Did you know who it was?”

“Not then. But you can bet I memorized the number on the side of his plane as he lifted its nose and headed west. I hoped he made it home to breakfast before his hands froze. When I rejoined my squadron, old-timers told me who flies that plane. Sure enough I found the initials C.W. stitched into the cuffs.”

How like Kip, I thought with a smile. In Horvath’s place, I’d have wanted to meet him. “So after the war,” I said, “you came to this country to return the gloves?”

“Return nothing! Every time Whitehead sets a new flying record, the value of these gloves goes up. When his fame reaches maximum altitude, I’ll sell and retire. My reason for coming to Canada? It’s more like Mrs. Whitehead’s.”

“Politics?”

“There’s an article about her in Maclean’s.” Horvath was gesturing towards the lobby’s tableful of old magazines. “Look for yourself!”

I flipped through the well-thumbed pages till I came to a recent photo of a broadly smiling Bea Whitehead — holding her arms out like wings, as if she could fly without the plane she stood in front of. She wore an elegant sportswoman’s tailored shirt and trousers, but no helmet. I guessed the point was to show off her abundance of blond hair freshly done up in Marcel waves. It hadn’t escaped my notice that makers of beauty products advertised in the magazine.

My own memory flashed up a similarly playful image of Bea, the one time I’d seen her. That would have been early summer, 1925. The Whiteheads were visiting Miles Sutton, a Toronto financier Kip hoped to enlist as a sponsor of his Calgary flight. The couple had driven down from Ottawa in their Hispano-Suiza, which had on the night of their arrival daringly been nicked from their host’s new Bayview Avenue estate. (The long, winding driveway was still nothing but mud, and they’d had to park near the gates.) Through contacts at an illegal drinking hole I frequented, I tracked the car to a garage in the harbour area, but repainted and with different plates: I needed Kip to confirm the heap was his. When I went to pick him up at the Sutton place, I found him on the lawn trying to teach his wife to play tennis. She was short, softly round, and bursting with style. Like the tournament winners, she wore a bandeau down around her forehead to keep the hair out of her eyes — except that Bea’s headband was evening wear, slender and all black sequins. She dithered teasingly over which hand should hold the racquet, and from what I could see, she really could hit the ball forcefully enough and equally accurately with either. The dilemma set her giggling — irrepressibly, and yet as musically as if she’d been the heroine of an operetta. Kip was making no progress, but was enjoying her high spirits too much to care.

I was pleased to find neither one of them suicidal over the loss of more than ten thousand dollars worth of automobile. Still, when I told him my errand, Kip was appreciative, and even more so upon identifying the car I’d run down. Just how often do you hear of the nicest guys pairing with the most amusing girls? I was more than ready to read something about how the Whiteheads got together.

The Maclean’s article that wrapped around the aviatrix photo told how Bea had met Kip in Treviso, near his aerodrome, and how from the start it had been more than the standard casual contact between local girl and foreign flyer. The two were separated when he was redeployed to the Western Front in the fall of 1918 and then to Hendon air base in England after the war. But they kept writing letters.

Some books and periodicals soft-pedalled what had been happening in Italy. Not this magazine. It let Bea remind its readers that back in her country ex-soldiers and assorted louts had been dressing up in black and tormenting folks in the name of their new philosophy of Fascism. Bea’s father’s print shop was vandalized one night because he printed a newspaper the blackshirts didn’t like. When Fascist bigwig Mussolini became prime minister, Bea’s classroom references to blackshirt tactics got her sacked from the school where she’d been teaching. Worse was to come. Left jobless, Bea went to work in her father’s shop. Something printed there again attracted the attention of the thugs, during working hours this time. As Bea told it, they beat her father to death with cudgels, then set fire to the place, destroying both the business and the attached apartment. Without livelihood, home, or family, Bea ran away to Switzerland. When she was able to write to Kip, he insisted she join him in London, where he married her in the fall of 1923. He brought her back to Canada the following year. In Ottawa, she’d learned to fly in order to share Kip’s passion. And, Bea had told Maclean’s, to show that the Fascists hadn’t doused her daring spirit.

Bea a teacher? It was hard for someone who’d been taught as I had by tired, middle-aged men and women of unquestioning minds to imagine anyone so young and defiant in front of a class. Glancing again at the glamour photo of a soft, fun-loving girl with extended arms, I tried to see the inner steel she would have needed. Courage in the face of danger — that was something she and Kip shared. It must have been a large part of what drew them together.

“Politics,” Horvath said when I’d tossed the magazine back on the pile. “But for higher stakes than they put on the table in Ottawa. In my country, paramilitary bands sprang up after the war to break heads and establish a Fascist-style regime.”

“What are the odds?”

“I didn’t wait to see. The government tolerates them, even negotiates with them. They’re the mirror image of Mussolini’s gang — full of hate and hungry for another war. No more of that for me, thanks. Quietly I began to plan my exit from Hungary. For Beatrice Sarto, departure was a little more urgent. She was a marked woman in Italy.”

I asked the night clerk if he were a Communist or had ever talked about Communism to a hotel guest named Dan Ewart. He said no to both questions and had nothing else to contribute to the investigation, so I went upstairs to speak to Ewart myself.

He came to his hotel room door in pyjamas, though his bed was still made. Likely he just wanted to keep cool and wasn’t expecting visitors. He was tall, but not imposing. Stooped and tentative, rather. Black hair slicked back over either ear left his head bald in the centre. A notebook stood open on the dresser with a pen and a bottle of ink beside it. Judging by the spidery script, I thought that bottle would last him a good long time.

He claimed to be an out-of-work typesetter from Halifax. His story squared with what Ned Cruickshank had already gathered. By now I’d read the pamphlet Ewart had been distributing. It had nothing in it about armed revolution in this country or the establishment here of a dictatorship of the proletariat. All the same, I reminded him that the Communist Party of Canada had for the last seven years been an illegal organization, and that even if under normal circumstances a hard-working police detective had better things to do than throw him in jail for handing out bum-fodder, when found in the vicinity of exploding bombs he should prepare to be suspected. He took off the reading glasses over which he had been peering at me and pointed out that he had left the hotel for the day before the explosion. I asked if he had ever been on the hotel fire escape. His meek features expressed as much surprise and denial as I thought they were capable of. I showed him a photo of John Doe, whom he claimed never to have seen in his life.

The talk at the front desk about Fascism reminded me of Bartholomew Rogers’s bedside reading, so I made a call on him next. Rogers, a beefy man of medium height, left no doubt that I was intruding. He came to the door with a cigarette dangling from his lip and his book in his hand, a thick finger marking his place. By his abrupt account, the author’s view was anti-Mussolini rather than pro. I confirmed this bias on the basis of my own inspection, which his impatience tended to make more thorough rather than less. I then ran through my questions about John Doe and Lucy Clarkson. Rogers claimed never to have seen or heard about either one. When asked if he’d let anyone into the hotel from the fire escape Friday morning, he raised his voice in indignant denial.

One floor up, I found Hasty MacDermid, perched on the edge of his bed, whistling “Tea for Two” and sponging soot stains from his grey suit. His room smelled like a dry cleaning shop.

I asked him if at any time during his stay he’d opened the hall window outside his door, the window onto the fire escape.

“Never occurred to me. What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?”

I hadn’t decided how far I wanted to take Hasty into my confidence. For one thing, I hadn’t seen him since we’d got home from Europe in May 1919. For another, our acquaintance overseas had been comradely rather than close. Could I swear he was incapable of involvement in a crime? Honestly, no. I’d known him as a brave platoon commander, well-liked by his men, and I’d have written any complimentary nonsense about him for a job reference. Among officers, his stubborn optimism made him the butt of jokes, which he always seemed to take in good part. I couldn’t see Lieutenant Hastings MacDermid involved in any sort of gangland vendetta. But both army tradition and our own inclination had banned politics from mess conversation, and it was too soon for me to exclude international intrigue from this latest case of mine.

“We think the bomber — John Doe to his Toronto friends — wasn’t staying here, but was let into the hotel by someone that was.”

“For the purpose of killing the grey-eyed goddess with the thighs of a channel-swimmer.”

“I never said —”

“She sounds charming,” Hasty broke in. “I bet you fell in love at first sight.”

“My first sight was her feet sticking out from under her hotel room door. They were all right as feet go, but I could have been giving my heart to a corpse.”

“Who’d want her dead?”

“A swimming rival for all I know.”

“Why not ask the lady?”

“That’s a thought. Say, do you think it’s healthy to be breathing all that cleaning fluid?”

“It’s only carbon tetrachloride, the same stuff that’s in the fire extinguisher I use to put out the burning car engine. They give me this shiny new roadster to set on fire several times each day. You really have to see it.”

“Sure,” I said. Something gold-coloured on the lapel of the jacket in Hasty’s hands caught my eye. “What’s that pin?”

He unfastened it from the fabric and showed it to me up close. It was shaped like a bundle of sticks with an axe sticking out of them.

“One of the other guests gave it to me when I told him my mother’s mother was Italian. I only took it to be friendly.”

I’d never gone into family history with Hasty, and people had all kinds of grannies. Still, the Italian connection was unexpected. “Leo Di Giovanni — was that this guest’s name?”

“Exactly. He said he understood that mixed marriages happened in the past, but that this tragedy of Italians diluting their blood was now going to stop. It’s part of the message he’s carrying to Little Italies all over North America. New York, Montreal, Ottawa, Chicago, Toronto — wherever his export business takes him. He said the Italian government sees all these emigrant communities as colonies and needs them as a matter of patriotic duty to stay pure and strong. He doesn’t like Italian shops being sold to non-Italians either.”

“Any of that mean anything to you?” I asked.

“Golly no. How could a mongrel like me believe in pure blood? But I do think Mussolini’s the one great man of our age. Look at the discipline he’s managed to instill in his country. He’s chased out the Communists, abolished inheritance tax, preserved the monarchy, is making peace with the Vatican. Not to mention the improvement in the railways.”

I was surprised to hear Hasty talk this way, and wondered at first if it was just idle chatter. But he seemed to be getting more and more wound up.

“Benito’s balanced the budget, turned the telephones over to private ownership, trimmed the bureaucracy. So the business types are happy, but look at what he’s done for the workers as well. Labour peace, no more strikes or lockouts, an eight-hour day. And this isn’t just the Italian view. The man has admirers in the States and Britain too. Am I right, Paul? Tell me what you think.”

“Hasty, I don’t care who owns the telephones as long as they work. All that jawing about whose hands the means of production are in just makes my mind wander to where my next drink is coming from.”

Hasty, stout lad, pointed to a dresser drawer where I found an unlabelled bottle containing two mouthfuls of a clear liquid that smelled slightly better than cleaning fluid.

“As a policeman, though,” he persisted, “you must appreciate peace and order. The protection of private property and all that.”

I took a sip and passed the bottle to my host. As a policeman, I was used to distillery whisky, but for bathtub gin this wasn’t bad. I loosened my tie and hung my jacket on the doorknob.

“I’ll level with you, Hasty,” I said. “For some of the detective sergeants in my department, the job of the police is to defend the rich against the poor. They’d have it that the people that wash behind their ears and have servants to dust their china ornaments are law-abiding and that criminals have dirt under their fingernails. My mind, on the other hand, is open to the possibility that ladies and gentlemen are every bit as larcenous as the people they give or don’t give work to.”

“But didn’t the war teach us the value of disciplined, co-ordinated action? That’s what Mussolini is applying to Italy today.”

Here we go again, I thought. The lessons of the war.

“Look,” I said. “You and I volunteered for the 48th Highlanders. We weren’t conscripts. However bad things got in Flanders, I felt I’d made a choice to be there. Then, when the brass hats started calling for volunteers to raid German trenches and bring prisoners back for interrogation, I stepped forward again. Not because I was a hero, but —”

“Because you needed the thrill, from what I saw.”

“No. Well, partly — but mainly because I wanted to feel I had some power over my own fate, that I wasn’t just being tossed like a piece of meat into the grinder. Do you see?”

Hasty said he more or less did.

“Then take the next step,” I urged him. “If a person likes to choose, even within narrow limits, then that person has to be a democrat. I want to live in a country where you can speak for or against the government without getting your head broken, and where you can vote for or against the government in a free election. Those are choices I’m hearing your Mussolini doesn’t let people make, so don’t expect me to be singing his praises. Or Comrade Stalin’s either, for that matter. And as for running a country like an army — if I didn’t expect a better life in peacetime than wartime, I’d slit my throat.”

“You make it sound so gloomy, PS, when it needn’t be at all.” Hastings MacDermid’s tall face lit up like a beacon. “Democracy was all very well in its day, but I’m wondering if there isn’t something newer and shinier on the horizon.”

By the time we’d been around the course a few more times, Hasty suggesting democracy was obsolete and me arguing it had barely even been tried yet, the hour was getting late. So late that when I left him and knocked on the door of Room 38 it seemed odd that Leo Di Giovanni wasn’t in yet.

I met him coming up the stairs, however. He would have been impossible to pass. He was wide-shouldered and the way he swung his arms as he climbed made him wider still. A tight jaw combined with a projecting chin expressed determination, and the tilt of his head added a note of arrogance, but he also looked pleased with himself. His tan suit jacket flapped open, his tie was loose, and when he reached the landing where I stood I noticed an imprint of scarlet lipstick at the corner of his mouth.

I identified myself.

“Not this mafioso business again.” Di Giovanni clicked his tongue reprovingly. “Understand the Duce is making war on these thugs in the south. They are not tolerated in the new Italy.”

“From what I hear, they’re in good company.” I could see he wanted to give me an earful. “Say, can we talk in your room? We don’t want to disturb the other guests.”

He let me in without offering me a seat. I took the only chair. I thought if I could goad him a little I might catch him off guard.

“I understand you’ve been stirring up hostility between Italians and non-Italians,” I said. “Telling your people not to marry or sell their shops to outsiders.”

“What law am I breaking? Canada is a free country, no?”

“Freer than Italy, it seems. What business did you have with the woman in Room 29?”

“Man-woman business.”

“She turned you down.”

Di Giovanni flushed. “The other way if anything.” He struggled to recover his self-satisfaction. “No matter,” he said, forcing a smile. “In a city as big as this one, there are always other women.”

“What help did you give to the man that attacked her?”

“Attacking a woman is cowardly. Teaching a policeman manners, invece — that has it’s place.”

I grinned up at him. “What were you doing out on the fire escape Friday morning?”

“I didn’t go there.”

The surprised, prompt way the words popped out of his belligerent mouth told me I’d got what I’d come for, so I called it a night.