“Be nice,” Dr. Gloria said. “The boy’s in despair.” My body ached from a night on Bobby’s couch.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Who took your … you?”
“Two guys. Mean guys.” His hands fluttered like pigeons. “I think they were terrorists.”
“Why would terrorists want your treasure chest?”
“I don’t know! They said, ‘If you want this back, tell Lyda Rose to talk to somebody named Feeza.’ Or maybe Fiza.”
“Uh-oh,” Dr. G said.
I said, “Bobby, think hard. Was the name Fayza?”
He pointed at me. “That’s it.”
Shit.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“And they mentioned me by name?”
“Yes! Now who is this guy?”
“It’s not a guy—it’s a woman. And she runs the Millies.”
“Oh.” Even Bobby had heard of the Millies.
* * *
On the way downtown to Millie home territory, Dr. G and I worked it out. Brandy must have passed the word on what we were looking for, and that word made its way up the supply chain to the Millies. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The Millies ran a huge slice of the Toronto cannabis trade, and there was no reason they wouldn’t have branched into smart drugs. Fayza was one of those hyperentrepreneurs that make even hardcore capitalists nervous.
She and the Millies got their start in 2020 with microloans from a nonprofit that decided that charity begins at home. A dozen Afghan women, riding in on the third wave of immigration from the war zone after the Taliban reclaimed the homeland (again), formed a trust group and were given five hundred bucks apiece. They called themselves the Millionaires Club. The women set up a living room nail salon, a vegetable stand featuring bathtub-grown cardamom and saffron, a postal assistance business, and, in a metamove, a micro-microbank. Ten-buck loans, in a variety of currencies, transferrable to relatives back home.
The bank was Fayza’s idea. Utilizing her newly discovered talent for money, she began to convert other women in the neighborhood into business owners and set them up with accounts. She offered seminars on marketing, corporate strategy, and human resources (managing husbands). Then she went back to the women who ran the vegetable stand and the postal service, and explained the word “synergy.” Specifically:
Hydroponics + Shipping + Money laundering = Vast cash opportunity.
By 2025, the Millies controlled most of Ontario. They’d allied themselves with the pot farms out in the boondocks and facilitated shipments to the States, but the core of their business remained their locally grown, artisanal, organic weed, each bud glistening with enough THC to flip back your head like a Pez dispenser.
We parked the car on King Street, just inside the Afghan neighborhood. Bobby said, “I can hear them talking. I think they’ve got me under a blanket.”
The sidewalk was wet. The air smelled like an empty tuna can. Overhead, Dr. Gloria kept station between ground and gray sky. Shafts of sunlight perforated the cloud bank, which struck me as very beautiful.
“God is punching air holes,” I said.
Bobby looked up at the sky in alarm. “What? Why?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Settle.”
As soon as we walked onto Tyndall Avenue, the heart of the heart of the Millie empire, a passel of young kids ran past us flicking their pens at each other wand-style, casting spells and deducting hit points … and no doubt sending our pictures down the street to their moms and grandmothers. These free-range Harry Potters, I decided, were lookouts for the Millies.
A chubby girl jumped in front of us. “Fling me a dollar? Two dollar I can level up!”
“Kick it, kid.”
“Shopping, then? A little something from the grandmothers?”
“I’m good.”
The homes on Tyndall were tidy brick affairs, built in the 1970s, with neat lawns and midrange cars at the curb. Dr. Gloria landed gracefully in front of a house in the middle of the block.
Two kids in their twenties sat on the front steps, arguing with each other—in English. The boy in a nylon jacket, the girl wearing tight white jeans and a hot pink hijab.
I said, “I’m looking for Fayza.”
“I know,” the girl said.
I hid my surprise. First try and we’d found the headquarters? Dr. G said, “Divine providence.”
The girl nodded at Bobby. “He stays outside.”
“But I’m already in there!” Bobby said. “This is just my body!”
“Be cool, kid,” I said. “I’ll take care of this.”
He slumped to the sidewalk. Dr. Gloria patted me between the shoulder blades. “Here we go. Be polite.”
She didn’t have to remind me. Running a multimillion-dollar drug business—even a rural one—required a sociopathic outlook and a dick bigger than an ashwagandha tree. People who crossed Fayza and the Millies disappeared into the bay.
I walked up the steps and pushed through the wooden front door. The house was clean but lower middle class: twenty-year-old wallpaper, worn upholstery, pine chairs in the hallway. The air sharp with the smell of spices I couldn’t identify. In the living room, five or six old ladies, none of them younger than seventy-five, sat around a low coffee table, most of them holding old-style tablet computers on their laps. They looked like they’d stolen their clothing from a 1980s’ hip-hop crew: bright track suits, gold chains, spotless white gym shoes. Only the head scarves marked them as Muslim. They chattered at each other and tapped at the tablet screens. The grandmother closest to me glanced in my direction.
“Fayza?” I asked.
She turned back to her screen. And then I saw what she was looking at: a live picture of my silhouette, in some kind of X-ray mode. The key fob in my right front pocket glowed yellow.
Jesus, they had airport scanners? The damn thing had to be hidden behind the hideous wallpaper. I wasn’t sure what these old women would have done if I’d been carrying a weapon—bury me under a five-granny tackle?
The woman flicked her fingers at me in a gesture I took as permission to enter the living room. I skirted the circle of women and headed for the far doorway.
In the kitchen was an old man with a cloud beard, seemingly decades older than the ancients in the living room. He sat unmoving at the breakfast table, holding a fork and staring at a plate of dark meat and browned vegetables. He didn’t look up when I entered.
A woman stood at the kitchen sink, gazing out through the window at the backyard. She wore a cobalt blue jacket with a wide black belt, black high-heeled boots, a gauzy black head scarf like an afterthought. The boots alone had to cost five grand.
“I so want those,” Dr. Gloria said.
The woman turned toward me. She was holding a cleaver. Dr. Gloria’s wings rustled in warning.
“Why don’t you have a phone like a normal person?” she asked me angrily.
“I mean to buy one soon,” I said—doing my best impersonation of a person who was not talking to a drug lord holding a gigantic blade. She was seventy, maybe seventy-five years old, with pale skin. But her face was made up, and the brown hair under the scarf showed aggressive highlights. “Put together,” as my mother used to say. Give me that in thirty years.
“My name’s Lyda Rose.”
“I know who you are.” She turned and put the cleaver on the wire dish rack. “If you don’t want me to use junkies to find you, join the twenty-first century.”
The old man still hadn’t moved, and neither had the plate. A battle of wills.
Fayza walked to the back door and said, “Come this way.”
I hesitated. My only backup was a make-believe angel and a brain-damaged kid who believed that his soul lived in a plastic box. I suspected that if I left this house, no one would find me.
Fayza looked back at me. “I want to show you my garden.”
“Garden,” however, was too gentle a word: It was a horticultural brothel. The yard stretched beyond the boundaries of the lot, creating a lush, shared park that ran the length of the block. Every flower and fern seemed improbably voluptuous, especially for this time of year. Naked and half-dressed statues watched coyly from behind the trees.