Dear Lou,
So I got arrested.
You thought I was respectable.
In fact I am lawless. Ungovernable and wild.
I was at work. Not at the office, which I’ve described to you, but at company HQ, rubbing shoulders with the upper crust. A month and a half on the job and I’m already on the move. Soon I’ll be statistician-in-chief. They’ll call me “the Grocer.”
The meeting was over. I was about to head back north. As I was collecting my bike, a policeman emerged from the shadows like some beckoned spectre. A tall guy in a camel overcoat, a real Colombo type. Colombo? Columbo? Not Sri Lanka, Peter Falk. The downtown’s dark blues, then a man at my elbow, saying, “Je vous en prie.”
When I replied in English he switched to that. He had coiffed black hair and a pencil moustache like he was from central casting. A moonstone on his wedding ring. “Would you please come with me?” he said.
“What?”
“Would you please come with me?” he repeated. Then he showed me a badge.
I looked all around, like maybe there was a crime scene I had missed, some police tape, a riot, victims. Nothing doing. The city was busy and indifferent – red light, green light, hot air puffing out of grates. All these weird birds still cooing in the alleys. “Is there a problem?” I asked. He said, “Yes, perhaps, yes,” and this seemed like such an odd thing to say I followed him to his car.
It had a flashing light on it. That’s how you could tell it was a police car. We turned the corner and he pressed a button and set off the incandescent flash of red and blue. There’s something dreamlike about it, isn’t there? Something plugged into the subconscious, ruby and azure. Whenever I see those colours it always feels faintly as if I’m having a vision. The lights were coming from one of those car-top boxes, with a wire that trails back inside the driver’s side window and plugs into the cigarette lighter or something. The car wasn’t a proper police car, but a big old Buick, a boat, brown as a treasure chest. When we got to the car he said, “Please get in.” I was so bewildered that if I hadn’t had my bike to consider I think I would have simply obeyed. But I said, “What about this?” Then I said, “Wait, no – what the hell is going on? Are you really police?”
“Yes, I am Inspecteur Sovrencourt,” he said.
The accent, the overcoat, the matter-of-fact impression of his clear round eyes – he wasn’t physically intimidating, he was suggestively intimidating. And he seemed absolutely, completely a detective, a man who solves mysteries. “You’re a detective,” I proposed, just to make sure.
“Oui,” he said. “Please come with me.”
What mystery could I possibly be a part of? I locked my bike to one of those knotted grey metal pieces that shoots from a wall and has something to do with electricity.
“Before I come with you you need to tell me what’s going on.”
“Yes, yes,” he said.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked.
“No,” he said, and somehow this lulled me into getting inside.
Before I knew it we were driving. There was the hiss of his police radio and underneath that the murmur of a presenter talking current events – tax bills and primary challenges, ornithologists’ debates – all the news I’ve stopped following.
“Hello? Sir?” I said. “Seriously, what’s happening?”
“You are wanted for questioning.”
“I am?!”
A voice came crackling over the radio and the detective grabbed the receiver and crackled something into it. I heard the word “Theodore.”
“My name’s Theo,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I mean it’s Theo, not Theodore. Theo Potiris.”
“Yes,” he said. And we pulled into a police station.
He brought me inside and signalled to the cop behind reception – pointing at me, at a form on the desk. The cop nodded and began writing something down. Sovrencourt led me into an interrogation room.
“Wait here,” he said.
I helplessly lifted my hands. I sat behind a metal table. I checked the clock before realizing it was in fact a no-smoking sign. I could hear calypso music from under the door. “I’m a spaceman,” sang the voice. “A spaceman from the Moon!”
I got up and walked around the little room, reminding myself I wasn’t under arrest.
When the detective came back he carried fizzy water in two foam cups. The hissing carbonation played against the faint calypso in an interesting way, and I realized then that I was dazed, not thinking straight.
“It’s my birthday,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s my birthday today,” he repeated. “I am here spending it with you.”
“Happy birthday?” I said.
“Thank you. Now, Theodore: let us talk.” And he asked why I was downtown, what I was doing.
“It’s a free country,” I said, but he gave me such an amused, skeptical look that I just went ahead and told him it was for work.
“Where do you work?”
“The Rabbit’s Foot?”
To be honest by this point I figured that the association was what this was all about. Like I told you, I think they’re above board. I get payroll stubs – they deduct tax and benefits. But let’s face it, how legit could they be?
“The Rabbit’s Foot?” repeated Sovrencourt.
“They’re…gamblers?” I said.
“Gamblers?”
“Legal gamblers,” I said, after a pause.
“Oh yes,” he said, as if he had just remembered.
I cocked my head. “Is that why I’m here?”
The detective’s hound-dog frown seemed to say, “I can’t see why it would be.” But he did not reply. He wrote something down.
“Are they breaking the law?”
The detective dismissed the question with a wave of the hand. “Please go on.”
“Go on?”
“Continue,” he said.
So I went on, explaining that I had gone into a building for a meeting, to deliver some documents, and then I had come out and found that my bike helmet was missing. “Is that what this is about?” I asked, incredulous.
“No,” he said.
I told him I usually worked uptown. That I was on my way back.
“Oh yes?” he said. He kept saying things like that, coaxing me to keep talking, tugging all kinds of digressions out of me. He made me ramble, like I was improvising on stage. I certainly wasn’t scared, or even mad. Sovrencourt seemed solitary, harmless. He seemed curious, he smiled at my jokes. He kept scratching his little moustache with the end of his cheap pen. It was like being stuck in an elevator with a sympathetic audience. And yet every time I remembered why or how I was there, that I had been picked up by a cop and brought to a police station, my confusion bubbled over.
“Look, am I under arrest?” I asked again.
“Should you be under arrest?”
“No!”
“Then why would you be under arrest?”
“I’m – what’s happening here?”
The detective placed his pen on the pad. “Theodore, what can you tell me about illegal imports?”
“My name is Theo,” I said. “What do you mean ‘illegal imports’?”
“Surely you understand me.”
“Importing illegal items? Or importing legal items illegally?”
“Yes?”
Then it hit me. “Is this about the cheese mafia?”
“Ah,” said Inspecteur Sovrencourt, leaning back.
“I don’t have anything to do with those guys,” I said.
Then Sovrencourt leaned forward. “No?”
Lou, maybe you already know about the cheese mafia. Maybe you heard the rumours at dinner parties. Maybe it’s something you guys talk about between meditation sessions at your retreat, as you sit with luminaries on the wine-black steppe, listening to distant camels’ gumball chewing. Honestly you might know more about it than I do. Because I do not know very much. What I know is what I told the detective: Our city is said to have a cheese mafia. A Gouda gang. A network of individuals who import or manufacture cheeses and then insist that merchants buy them. Restaurants, delis, grocery stores – the Camembert Camorra forces everyone to order their cheese, eat their cheese, crumble their cheese over toasted almonds and caramelized beets. If you don’t stock the cheese mafia’s dairy, the story goes, they’ll lob a milk-bottle Molotov through your window. If you don’t grate it over your restaurant spaghetti, they’ll leave a bullet and a cheese curd in your mailbox. There are powerful cheese-related gangsters with strong opinions about where you should acquire your cheddar. So the story goes.
“I have nothing to do with that stuff,” I said.
“No?”
“I’ve never met a cheese mafioso, never spoken to one. We’ve never been shaken down…” Suddenly I flashed to some men I saw at Mom’s funeral, a rat pack snickering with my brother. “Do you mean at the Ukrainian Federation? I’d never seen those guys before in my life!” I crossed my arms on the table. “Honestly, I’d be happy if you were investigating this stuff!”
He was writing something down. “Oh yes?” he said, lightly. But if he was trying to goad me, there wasn’t anything to goad. Provisions’ dairy section goes unmolested.
We sat in silence for a little while. I checked the clock again before remembering it was a no-smoking sign.
“Can I go?” I finally asked.
Sovrencourt stood up. “Perhaps later.” He said it like this was theatre, like he was reciting a line from a play. I tried to laugh. But he was as serious as a hornets’ nest and as he left the room I felt as if I was hearing the door slam shut even before it closed. The snick of a mechanism and its lock.
Eventually a stocky deputy let me use the phone and I called Peter. His tone was of disbelief – at me, not the police. My brother’s natural inclination is to assume that I am a hapless screw-up. After the phone call I sat for what felt like hours, running over the day’s events and what Sovrencourt had said, thinking back to past dealings with feta distributors. The detective didn’t return – eventually the same stocky deputy who had brought me the phone stuck his head in to say that my family was here. I could go.
Hanna was waiting in the station lobby, grinning. Her shoes were untied. “Is there bail to pay?” she said.
I looked at the deputy.
“No,” said the deputy.
“I brought ten thousand dollars,” said Hanna.
“There’s no bail,” I said. I thought: My thirteen-year-old niece is the richest person I know.
“Oh, well. They’re waiting in the car.”
Sovrencourt emerged to hold the door as I exited the station. “I will be keeping my eye on you,” he said in a dry voice.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Peter and Joanne drove us home. Peter kept asking me what I had done to attract police interest. “There must be something, Theo.” But I just sat with my head flat back, eyes closed, feeling half-dead.
“Theo,” said Joanne, “is there anything you want to tell us?”
“No,” I said. “I am as the pure driven snow. Just unlucky.”
“Snow isn’t unlucky,” said Hanna.
“That’s right, Hanna,” said Joanne, as a heron passed ghostlike before the windshield. “Snow is just weather.”
They dropped us off outside Provisions K and Hanna and I trudged upstairs to her apartment. Mireille was on the big Turkish carpet playing a tennis video game that required her to imitate actual tennis swings, volleying an invisible ball. Eric brought a tray with mint tea and Coca-Cola, figuring one of these beverages would cure whatever ailed me. Standing beside the TV I explained what had happened, or tried to. Mireille continued playing tennis. Each imaginary hit caused a loud ponk and I kept flinching at them, as if Mireille were pelting me with aces. Eric started to laugh. I laughed too, for a bit, but stopped. Mireille kept swinging.
“Maybe it’s karma,” Eric said. “Your lover’s in the desert; you lose your helmet; the police arrest you for no reason. Ever wonder it it’s just karma, bad karma, come home to hatch?”
“To roost,” I said.
He rolled his eyes.
“I don’t believe in karma,” I said.
Mireille’s tennis game ended. She stood panting. She said, “Maybe karma doesn’t believe in you.”