When the drinks arrived, he said, “You’ve never asked what I do for a living. This town, it’s usually the first thing people want to know about you. That and how much you paid for your house.”
“It’s not how I define people, so it’s not how I get to know them.”
“I’m not going to ask what you do, because I already know,” he said. “But can I ask what you did before?”
There was no short answer. I wasn’t like my brother Daniel; my academic past had been checkered at best. I was smart enough to know I wasn’t stupid, but I had never been able to harness it in school. I was in my own world most of the time, mourning my father, insulating myself in a haze of hash smoke. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I used to sneak over to the adjacent apartment building to smoke dope with Kenny Aber, and from his bedroom window we could identify my family’s unit by the one constant: my brother’s silhouette against his blinds as he studied into the night. “Is that a cardboard cut-out or what?” Kenny would ask. “I swear he never moves.”
No one ever said that about me. I was always moving, just not getting anywhere.
I told Clint a little about the things I had done after finishing Grade 12, starting with my years in Banff, on the eastern slope of the Rockies, where I tended bar and skied in the winter and worked construction in the summer. I also gave him a brief precis of my time in Israel, focusing on the beginning, not the end. Like many other young Jews dismayed by the materialism of their parents’ generation, I had gone there searching for something purer and more demanding of myself. A collective dream I could be part of. While I gave only the briefest details of my army time, I did tell Clint how I had begun to study martial arts there, in the form of Krav Maga, a self-defence system designed by an Israeli army man. Roni Galil was my mentor. When I returned to Toronto, I abandoned Krav Maga for karate, needing at the time to leave all things Israeli behind.
“So is that it for you?” Clint asked me. “Martial arts instructor for life?”
“Why do I feel like you’re interviewing me for a job?” I said.
He said, “Maybe it’s time you asked what I do.”
The walls of Clint’s office were covered with photos of him with high-ranking cops and city officials, certificates of courses he had taken since leaving the Toronto force and framed newspaper articles about Beacon Security success stories. His large beechwood desk was covered with neat rows of current files. A laptop on his desk was networked to a large flat-screen monitor. He pointed to the visitor’s chair in his office. I sat.
“How’s the arm?” he asked.
“It’s fine.”
“A hundred per cent?”
“Maybe ninety.”
“Let’s see.” He moved a row of files aside, rolled up his right shirtsleeve and planted his elbow on his side of the desk.
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope,” he said. “Show me what you got.”
I rolled up my sleeve and placed my elbow opposite his. We gripped hands and locked eyes.
“Go,” he said.
There was no use trying to pin him. Being left-handed put me at a disadvantage to begin with; nor was my right arm quite the ninety per cent I’d claimed. I forgot about trying to take him down and focused instead on resistance, hoping he would tire. But when we had been stalemated at ninety degrees for thirty seconds or so, my triceps started to quiver. He put more into it; so did I. Clint’s face grew a shade redder but I ascribed that to his Celtic roots, not any challenge I posed.
Carol Dunn picked that moment to walk in with a sheaf of messages and a stack of documents that looked like invoices. “Sir, I have Ted Sellers on the line about the number of surveillance hours we billed him and-”
We parted hands as quickly as clandestine lovers, but not quickly enough.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know Jonah was with you.” Obviously wasting your time, her body language added.
“It was my idea,” Clint said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“An evaluation of sorts.”
“I’m sure.”
“Tell Ted I’ll look at the file and get back to him. Anything I need to sign?”
“Two contracts, the letters you asked me for and we have invoices to pay.”
He patted the desk and she laid down her file.
“Do you need anything else?” Carol asked sweetly. When Clint said no, she paused to throw me a look that was all stainless steel, then went back to her guard post. He asked her to close the door behind her.
“Okay,” he said. “We have things to talk about.”
“Like what?”
“Your health, mental and physical. Your outlook. How ready you feel to get back to-”
“Ready!”
“Not so fast, champ. Getting shot leaves scars, and I don’t just mean the ones we see. I spent thirty years on the force and not every cop who got shot made it back to active duty.”
“I am ready to go back to work. Real work, not typing Franny’s notes or covering his big ass.”
He said, “Jonah, you’re one of the best hires I ever made. You’re smart, you’re creative and you have good instincts. You can handle yourself physically and you genuinely give a damn about people. You were doing great work here until the Ensign case. We all know how badly that ended, and you went through a breakup on top of it.”
“It would have happened sooner or later. And dumping me while I was in recovery was the best thing Camilla could have done. It got me straight past denial into anger.”
“Have you talked to anyone?”
“Professionally, you mean?”
“The firm pays for it. Marital problems, trauma counselling. Depression.”
“The only thing depressing me is being stuck at my desk. I made a mistake and I haven’t been given a chance to make good.”
“There are some things you can’t make good.”
I looked down at my shoes. They weren’t doing much of interest but I kept on looking at them.
“People make mistakes all the time,” he said gently. “In most cases, my policy is ‘No harm, no foul.’ Learn from it and move on. But serious harm was done this time. The bad guys walked. You got hurt. And Colin MacAdam will never work again. Not as a cop anyway.”
I took a deep breath to quell the jumpy feeling in my gut. “I went to see him, you know.”
“When?”
“The May long weekend. I drove up to the rehab centre and spent the afternoon with him.”
“How’s he doing?”
“I guess the correct phrase is he’s doing as well as expected. He handles the chair pretty well. His detachment held a fundraiser and he’ll get a motorized one when he leaves rehab.”
“Did you talk about what happened that day?”
“No,” I said. “We stuck to the things guys talk about when they don’t know each other well. The weather. The Blue Jays’ chances in the East this year, which was a somewhat short conversation. Who’d win the finals in the NHL and NBA. Free-agent signings we’d like to see. All the big issues of the day.”
“But nothing about getting shot.”
“No.”
“Do you think he blames you?” Clint asked.
I could picture MacAdam wheeling himself along a walkway in the garden of the Trenton Convalescent Hospital and Rehabilitation Centre, his pale freckled arms moving it at a clip that was hard for me to match.
“He never said. We had our awkward moments, but there was no animosity. I think what we went through bound us together more than it set us apart.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How do you feel about what happened that day? Do you blame yourself?”
“Come on, Clint. I know I screwed up.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“You my shrink all of a sudden?”
“Answer the damn question.”
“I feel like shit, okay?” My voice rose. “I cost MacAdam his livelihood and the use of his legs and for the rest of his life he’s gonna have to piss and shit in a goddamn bag. Does that answer your question, Doc?”