Fog, a Novel Read online

  The work kept me busy. A week went by with my independent research on the back burner. But then, on the Wednesday afternoon, I was walking down the long corridor and saw her coming towards me. She looked straight ahead and passed by before I could open my mouth to greet her. It was as if I didn’t exist.

  That evening I went to Myra’s apartment to bring her up to date. “Today she walked right by me. I wasn’t even worth a glance.”

  “She’s just acting like the rich bitch she is, you know!” Myra didn’t hesitate to share her opinion of the suspect, as we referred to her.

  “Do you think she’s guessed something?” I asked. “I have her writing in my pocket, but I know there was a camera in the room.”

  “No, she doesn’t know. Don’t worry, Chuck, you’re doing great! She had the case in a freezer for twelve years and now you’ve got the corpse gently thawing! Hang in there!” Dismal as the thought was, I felt it was logical.

  That Thursday morning, I was given the pink slip, no explanation provided. The manager merely said that due to necessary cost cutting they were letting go of a number of people. They didn’t have to point out that I had no seniority. I was asked to pack my desk and leave immediately.

  And then happened the bone crunch. I was sent flying down the fire escape. The lights went out for nearly three months. The monocular sightline allowed for focus and determination. The periphery was occluded. It was then that I realized we are a composite of so many memories, skills, capabilities, characteristics, nuanced personalities, and distractions. We are a motley mix of fear, courage, strength, and weakness. We are a crowd within ourselves. Our attention span is like that of belly-gazing gnats. Suddenly, we can see better. Night vision, 20/20. Little phosphorescent creatures worm their way out and the red-circled culprit is all that one has to focus on.

  When a flood rampages down the rapids, when the snow melts, when that sluice gate in the dam is gently opened, the bottled inertia charges out. I knew what I had to do.

  Chapter Twenty

  Documentarian Dies

  We started at the Commodore and met up with Leo. The restaurant owner recognized the sketch right away and told them that Lipless was one of “them.” He didn’t want to get too involved and backed away from giving the name, although both Myra and Gerry were convinced he knew. “Sometime,” Leo said slowly, “you must stop at the limit. Keep the mouth shut. But the guy is around. He came here a few times with Boswell, who the Gabriella woman know well. Why you want to know?”

  Gerry came up with a suitably bland lie. “My son played soccer with him. He had an accident and is now on welfare. He said this guy owes him a lot of money for buying a car, and he can’t find him anywhere.” It was pretty cool how Gerry could lie on the spot. I understood Myra came by it honestly.

  “These guys are bad news,” Leo warned. “They hang out on Rachel in the German pub. Stuttgart, I think. You can find him there. But be careful.”

  By the end of the third month my mobility had increased dramatically, but so had my anger. The police had formally registered the case as a break and enter followed by egregious assault. Having finally defined the crime, they pretty much considered the case shut. Apparently cold cases are in vogue, or at least are often the preferred stalemate.

  My home insurance paid for the Tissot watch I had lost, $500 in cash, and another $2,600 in property damage, all based on the thoughtful advice and personal audit by Mr. Banks. There was no police record of any suicide attempt, nor any connection made to my short-lived employment and subsequent dismissal at Gabriel-Jacops Enterprise, Inc.

  Now, here is what happens when you finally recover from a serious head, face, and ribcage banging: you realize you are no longer the same person. Life is uncontrollably transformed and undergoes a catalytic conversion. A distance is ensured with those others who you have greeted twice a day or night every day for a decade. Those moments of slouching listless in low couches in eventless neighbourhoods, where nothing can be shared with casual acquaintances whose lives are spectacularly useless—all this comes to a dithering finale. Those pubs and restaurants, frequently visited, where butylated hydroxytoluene replaces buffered aspirin as solace, where intrepid fingers draped in transparent gloves mask the ineptitude of amateur fusion chefs to provide a clear-cut savoury flavour, where cooks boil or poach eggs on pasta and give it an Eritrean alias—that life is no longer of consequence. Those immaculate Saturday afternoons staring through finger-stained window panes, sipping coffee slowly, chewing day-old orange-peel-inserted muffins or unduly hard biscotti while reading unproductively—they, too, somehow fade in importance. They are over. You’ve been hit square on the jaw and the clock has started to tick and you better do something before they deliver the fatal blow. There is a choice: either go into hiding, seek another identity, and tuck yourself away like an invisible tortoise under a sunless rock; or plan a series of well-considered events, knocking off a merciless To Do list, one by one, while organizing life around the firm decision to win. In other words, my nerd life was over.

  “It’s time to stick it to them,” said Myra, understanding my point. For her, too, it had become personal.

  I agreed. I knew my days as a documentarian were over. I could not die as a madman. A suffering documentarian, who would follow a story, then lie down and die in ignominy. Gogol was transformative.

  Within a few weeks of my jaw-aching epiphany, the following incident was widely reported in the Montreal police tabloids.

  A man with a twisted-and-tucked lip had barely stepped out of the moonlit back door of the tavern on the corner of Rachel when he was approached squarely by a cop with a strange and uncouth beard. He showed him a police badge and in the helium alley light, it could have been a kid’s tin cop badge or a flat knuckle-duster in a leather holder. The young man, who reportedly had serious connections with the Montreal underworld, was told, “Just don’t say a word. Shut up and cooperate. Okay?” The fellow looked to the side and realized another older cop was positioned behind him. “What the fuck!” is all he could say before a sack—at least that’s what it seemed like, but in reality, it was an 817-brand basmati rice jute bag—was slipped over his head and a voice from behind in a distinctly guttural accent said “Say goot bye, now, you useless prig! Your days are numbered. Yes!” He meant to say prick, but it sounded like prig, which made the young thug feel mildly honourable and righteous.

  Both cops wore long trench coats and, in some ways, did not seem to be in the greatest shape. The lamplight and the darkness of the alley made this entire operation, carried out at 2 a.m. on a Friday morning, somewhat bizarre. And, as we go along, we shall see that it became increasingly absurd and noteworthy. They handcuffed him, taped his mouth shut, put the basmati rice jute bag over his head, and bundled him into an unmarked van. The driver, according to the man’s later testimony, was a policewoman who chewed gum incessantly and noisily. Like “slap-chack-slap-chack-slap” sound and she would look in the rear view and say, “Shut the fuck up or I’ll blow yer dickhood away!” Slap-chack-slap-chack. The two men informed him they worked for the “Central Montreal Anti-Gang Squad” and flashed their badges intermittently. As stated earlier, one of the cops had an unknown accent, neither French nor English, and both wore nylons on their faces, facts which provided both confusion and grist for the tabloids. Could it be that this new and secret Montreal police tactical program had adopted a shadowy gangster visage in light of the repeated embarrassment they had faced while dealing with student protestors, who had exposed their identities all too easily?

  Two days after being picked up, the near-delirious young thug had surrendered to the police after being abandoned, still handcuffed and with the bag on his head, in front of the Snowdon police station, near Décarie Boulevard. A journalist for the local weekly had been given all the details by an anonymous caller. The police, of course, vehemently denied any such squad, or that this was their operation, and claimed to
be totally flummoxed. The gangster, however, was so terrified by the incident that he had confessed to a number of gang-style slayings and violent robberies on camera. He stated that during captivity he had made a videotaped confession about a recent break-in and attempted hit commissioned by a well-known Montreal business tycoon. When released, he stated, the tape would result in a contract on his life, so he wanted protection from the Crown and was willing to do anything to get it. The thug’s name was revealed as “Mathieu.”

  In the months following that event, I enjoyed one of the best periods of my life. I listened to three-piece bands at various bars and lounges all over Quebec in the company of Gerry Banks, Myra, RK, and my grandmother. Gerry was a jazz fiend and followed the scene with radar scanners. He had a list of shows we had to catch taped to his dashboard, and we’d pile into his vehicle and head to remote bars in Quebec City, Knowlton, Gatineau Park, Alma, Mont Tremblant, and sometimes as far away as Chicoutimi and Jonquière. There was something very family about all this. We had picnics, we stayed in spas, and we took over lonesome bars in remote locations. I recovered very well, so much so that Nat’s absence was a distant thunder roll in the skies, one could say. The music ranged from covers of Thelonius (Blue Monk and Round Midnight), Nat King Cole, Sinatra, and Wes Montgomery, as well as stuff from Cole Porter and Kurt Weill. All this was noted down carefully along the margins of my diary. Yes, noted, but not only.

  Icy, snowbound Quebec with towering pine trees and the frozen stillness of brooks in February lay sprawling outside, while inside we enjoyed the keyboard influences of Oliver Jones and Oscar Peterson. Their fond imitators tickled the ivory while we sat around wood fireplaces, ate Quebec lamb, and drank Australian Shiraz—or gulped down Jameson with ice on the side, RK’s favourite. His brogues—why had I never noticed this before?—had steel toes. Yes, he wore a trench coat and a fedora tilted belligerently. Some malice there.

  Sometimes we sat outside in a hot tub, all five of us in the middle of a snowbound, deeply forested area. My grandmother, who had never worn a swimsuit before, snuggled up next to RK.

  Myra, who was now consistently Myra and not Malia, had transformed into a devastatingly attractive commander of the posse. She was our leader as we stayed in inns, B&Bs, and ski chalets, listening to the music, drinking up a storm, and returning to Montreal planning our ultimate exculpation in the Trois-Pistoles Cold Case. I knew they did it for me.

  There were, of course, unexpected complications. There were new procedures to follow, obstacles to overcome. But there was also a concerted and unflagging determination to connect the dots, to get at the full picture of what RK defined, if my memory is correct, as “the dirty, bloody, nefarious, murderous, cynical shenanigans of the rich and the powerful.” He’d light up a cigar, narrow his eyes, and a smile would spread at a crooked angle. Detailed planning mattered in such situations and I had a natural skill to go about it well.

  RK died in his sleep, six months to the date after this unsolved incident involving the thug Mathieu was widely reported in the Montreal newspapers, leaving many questions unanswered. I had now been deprived of two comrades.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Sound of the Scythe

  The urn with RK’s ashes sits on top of a desk in shrink-wrap held by rubber bands. Years ago, in Montreal, RK had introduced me to Gary at a dim sum place on a Sunday morning on de la Gauchetière. Gary was Chinese but had grown up in Calcutta. He worked at the corner of Rachel and St-Laurent in a designer clothes store. When I told him I was going to Calcutta, he gave me the address of the bed and breakfast. Before I left, he told me, “When you wake up in the morning, it will still be dark and you will hear the sound of crows congregating on the rooftop railing of the house next door. Listen carefully and you will hear the sound of a scythe slicing the moist grass on the rooftop of that house. You will see a man with blue eyes and a sharp nose. He is my dad. Say hello to him.”

  The floor-to-ceiling curtain in my room is motionless. Through a part in the fabric, I can see silhouettes moving in the dark outside. The silhouettes cannot see me. There is a lawn approximately twelve feet by fifteen feet on top of the fifth-floor roof of the house next door. I can see the black wrought-iron railings about two feet high around the perimeter of the lawn. The green of the grass is in my mind only. I remember it from the day before. Yesterday morning I had checked into this bed and breakfast in Calcutta.

  As the first rays of the sun penetrated through the dusty sky, bluish black crows appeared from somewhere and were assembling on the railing in the near darkness. One by one their silhouetted wings settle as they gather, as if they have been called to a conference. One by one they move sideways as if taking designated spots. A glow appears in the sky towards the east of the city, where the railroad line leads. The night has been impatient and ready to depart. One can hear the squealing on rails of multiple diesel engines slowly pulling an endless line of wagons carrying oil, copper wire, steel cable, and wheat at a remote distance. With the growing light the crows become more prominent. They are surprisingly quiet. Or are they being congenial, as if in a subdued and conversational mode? I expect that as the day progresses they will become ever more querulous.

  There must be a lone sweeper sweeping the narrow street with a long broom. I can hear the broom as it occasionally hits patches of water from the rain that fell last night. The crows look down upon him and nod their heads as they continue to occasionally shuffle sideways. There is nothing else to be heard. There is absolute stillness everywhere.

  I am lying on my bed and know that in the adjacent houses they are hearing the same sounds. I know everyone in this B&B is probably horizontal like me, but I am wide awake and only I can see through this crack in the curtain towards my own private revelation, my own special invitation to acknowledge the teasing day and the release of night. I can’t yet smell anything. Calcutta has still not released its odours. I can see, I can hear, but I can’t smell.

  The rays of the sun split open the clouds of night. The spiral stair from the fourth-floor roof curving up to this plot of green is now clearly visible, its wrought-iron filigree reminding me of a twirling flamenco dancer. In the quiet of my head the heraldic horn of Miles Davis accompanies the filigree—the Concierto de Aranjuez? The plaintive, distant trumpet releases a series of single notes. I continue to lie on my stomach and stare through the crack. No one in the neighbourhood can see any of this except me because it is only this B&B that overlooks it. There are no other buildings high enough to see this lawn with the spiral staircase. Then I hear the sound of the scythe slicing the air.

  The name of the Chinese-American-Indian gardener is Feng. No one goes up there except him. He has dark, tawny skin and his eyes are blue. The owner of the building lives three floors below. He used to design silk scarves and made a fortune doing so. Today he doesn’t climb those stairs. The Chinese-American-Indian man does, because it’s his job to maintain an impeccable lawn in the city fifty feet above ground. And no one else at this moment is experiencing this garden except me.

  On the fourth-floor rooftop terrace there are kiss-me-quicks, bougainvillea vines, chrysanthemums, rose bushes, and varied shades of green shrubbery in terracotta containers, all neatly trimmed and arranged like a horticultural paradise. There is a wrought-iron railing around that terrace, too. There is a woman who comes up every morning around ten to the fourth-floor garden to hang clothes and curtains, to wash cloths and towels that have never seen the inside of a dryer. She curves her body around the bonsai trees that grow in rectangular ceramic pots to hang everything on a large, stainless steel rack. Her blouse stretches over her body and exposes a large expanse of sculpted midriff. The sun is now firmly positioned above the horizon.

  Feng carefully trims the lawn on the fifth floor and it looks like a rice field from my large sliding windows. Beads of sweat appear on his forehead. He raises his little sickle to greet her. She brings him a glass of water. He squats
on the grass and asks her to leave it at the bottom of the spiral stairs. His thirst must wait until he has finished trimming the grass uniformly like a carpet. I wonder if she has ever seen the fourth-floor lawn. He works soundlessly like a Taekwondo warrior. His every move is coordinated, a soundless and continuous act of stealth and beauty. His calf muscles are the first to constrict and then stretch as they transfer their energy through the rest of his body like a quiet wave that passes through his torso and then the arm to end in the hand holding the handle of his sickle.

  Feng was born in Nanking to a Chinese woman and an American official. That was before the Second World War. The Kuomintang of Chiang Kai Shek had come to power around 1927 after he split from the Communists. Criminal gangs were let loose on the streets of Nanking to scalp Communists and other Nationalist factions. Foreigners scurried away. The American official had been sent in as an advisor to the Kuomintang. In all probability, he was a second-rate espionage agent who spent less time officiating than he did socializing. Young Feng was left behind in an orphanage and adopted by a British woman, named Sara Hopkinson, who moved around Southeast Asia during the Second World War collecting jade statues. Young Feng went from country to country with his adoptive parent. Eventually they settled down in Calcutta, India. Sometime after India gained independence Ms. Hopkinson decided to sell the antique store she owned on Park Street, Calcutta. She left for London, but Feng stayed behind.

  At the age of eighteen, Feng had been well employed driving a truck for the U.S. Army at Fort William. That was in the early forties, or maybe a bit later. The Americans were bored and had nothing to do other than go to the Red Cross Society and play cards or walk around in the Hogg Market Area bargaining for Gurkha bhojali knives from Nepalese hawkers. When Feng’s adoptive mother went to the Fort William Club on Saturday evenings, Feng would go with her. It was there that he met a Jewish officer from New Jersey named Berger, who hired Feng. The truck was the common mode of conveyance for the GIs and Feng knew his way around the city. While his Chinese features were vaguely discernible, his American ancestry was clear through his blue eyes and sharp nose.