I crossed Pottery Road, a steep, curving access road that leads down from Riverdale to the Bayview Extension, taking care not to become a hood ornament as cars came rushing blindly down toward a level railway crossing. On my right was a small fenced-off gravel lot with a gap on the right side just wide enough to let bicycles and strollers pass through. There began a wide, even surface that ran parallel to the river. I picked up my pace, bent at the waist like a speed skater, feeling twinges in my right tricep each time my arm extended. Who knew gunshot wounds took so long to heal?
I went past two posts, about a hundred yards apart, on which hung bright orange lifesavers. The second one also had a long metal pole with a wide ring at one end. If someone fell into the river, you could fish them out with it. Or use it to clean out some of the trash. As I went past the embankment going up to the Parkway, I had the sound of traffic on my right and the river on my left, rushing sounds on both sides. Sweat stung the skin around my eyes but it felt good to get up a head of steam. I had been pretty sedentary since getting shot, partly because of the wound itself and partly because of the depression I’d felt looming around me ever since the Ensign case crashed and burned.
As soon as I got home, I showered and changed into shorts. While I waited for Joe Avila, I opened a cheap and cheerful Australian Cabernet, checked the cork for mould, then tossed it. I was about to pour myself a glass of wine when Joe called up from the lobby. “Down in a second,” I told him.
Joe was just five-seven but looked like he’d been carved from the cliffs of his Portuguese village in the Dorro River valley. He had dark curly hair and olive skin. He wiped his right hand on the back of his coveralls and we shook. “Sorry I’m late, Jonah, but I got a call for a boost just as I was leaving. That’s seventy bucks for five minutes’ work and it was on the way here.”
“Don’t worry about it, Joe. Thanks for coming.”
“I owe you for bringing Mariela home safe.”
“You owe me for selling me a piece of shit car.”
“Come on,” he said, trying to look aggrieved. “There’s nothing wrong with that car, not for the price you paid. You want to upgrade, I can put you in a two-year-old Camry or Accord for 10 per cent less than book.”
“Just get this one running for now,” I said.
I walked down to the garage door and opened it from the outside with a key. Joe drove his tow truck out of the circular drive and down into the garage and parked next to the Camry. Once I opened the hood, he slipped the hook of a caged lamp through an eyehole along the edge. He leaned in to have a look and I leaned in over his shoulder.
“You’re in my light,” he said.
“Sorry.”
He checked the battery and pronounced it fine. I leaned in again.
“Jonah.”
“Sorry.”
“Why don’t you go outside and have a smoke or something?”
“I quit.”
“Then go outside and stick your thumb up your ass till I call you, okay? Otherwise we gonna be here all night.”
It was so nicely put, what could I do but leave the man to his work?
I sat in the shade of a Norway maple on the lawn outside the building, stretching my hamstrings, listening to starlings chatter in the trees. I wondered what it would be like to move my mother into a nursing home. Not that we were anywhere near it. My mother was in her early sixties and needed assisted living like I needed another gunshot wound. After my father died, she became a real estate agent and now owned a thriving brokerage, Ruth Geller amp; Associates. Mom sat on half a dozen boards and committees that raised funds for the elderly, newly arrived Russian Jews, tree planting in the Negev desert, various hospital and medical research campaigns, her local Liberal member and either the Art Gallery of Ontario or the Royal Ontario Museum, I can never remember which. I wonder how she can.
Thirty minutes later, Joe drove the tow truck out of the garage. To my immense relief, my car was not hooked up to the back.
“Ignition coil was burned out,” he told me. “Put in a new one and she started up fine.”
“A new one or a brand new reconditioned one?” I asked.
Joe sighed. “Bad enough I had to come here in prime time. I also got to listen to your jokes?”
“Sorry, Joe. What do I owe you?”
“You know I don’t like to take your money, Jonah, what you did for me and all, but I need a hundred bucks for the coil and I could use another hundred to make up for all the calls I missed.”
Two hundred. Imagine if he did like to take my money. “Cheque okay?”
Joe looked at me like I’d suggested he pierce his nipples.
“There’s an ATM at the corner,” I said. “Drive me up.”
I stopped at a deli on the way home to pick up some rare roast beef and sharp cheddar; nothing fancy but both would go well with the wine I had opened. It was nearly seven-thirty by the time I got home. I put the food containers down on the counter and got a wineglass down from the shelf.
And froze.
On the counter next to the bottle were three drops of wine that hadn’t been there before. Three fat drops like blood on the white Formica. Then I heard a light footfall behind me and I knew whoever had broken in was still there, between me and the only way out. I closed my right hand around the corkscrew so the spiral end extended out between my middle and ring fingers. The little blade at the end, which I’d used to strip off the foil cap, was still open. It wasn’t much as weapons go but an improvement over cartilage and bone. I took a deep breath and spun around and came face to face with a dark-haired, dark-eyed man.
Dante Ryan, Marco Di Pietra’s feared enforcer and hired gun, was standing not ten feet from me, holding a glass of my wine.
He looked at the corkscrew in my hand and said, “You’re not going to need that.”
“What the fuck?” was the best response I could manage. My heart was hammering my chest like it wanted to crack it open from the inside.
“If I wanted you dead,” he said casually, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d have taken two in the head the minute you walked in and I’d be drinking alone.”
I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to that.
“Pour yourself a glass,” he said, nodding at the bottle of wine on the counter. “You and I need to talk.”
CHAPTER 6
The last time I’d seen Dante Ryan was outside the University Avenue courthouse, right after Mr. Justice Hugh Kelly finished ripping a nervous young Crown attorney a new one for trying to indict Marco Di Pietra and his alleged associates on the flimsy evidence presented. Ryan, Marco and a sizable entourage were lighting up cigarettes when I exited. Marco had to put on a big show, of course, calling me Jewboy, pointing his thumb and forefinger at my head like a gun, cocking the thumb and making silencer noises in his cheeks. Ryan didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The look he gave me was enough.
Now he sat in my living room, legs crossed, sunglasses up in his hair, swirling wine in his glass, watching drops slide lazily down its side. His clothes were all black, as they’d been that day outside court: an expensive linen jacket, a silk crewneck top, pleated slacks, thin dress socks, soft leather loafers. A white scar ran up through his right eyebrow and a livid purple one snaked along the right side of his jaw. His hands had knots of scar tissue on some of the knuckles but the nails had been recently manicured. His eyes were dark but not as dark as you’d expect of a man who hurt or killed people for a living. They were not without humour.
“You got a piece of cheese to go with this?” he asked.