When I got downtown again, I looked up Brian O’Mara’s number in the phonebook. His wife, or the woman answering his phone, told me that he was at work and wouldn’t be home until just after four o’clock. She asked me who was speaking, but I pretended I didn’t hear her and continued to thank her before hanging up. I noted down the address on a scrap of paper torn from a bank-machine receipt and planned to call on him later in the day.
With a styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, I climbed the stairs to my office, shucked my jacket and then the lid from the coffee. My mind was drifting towards Friday night and Anna. I put a stop to that by getting out the phonebook. That kind of distraction I could do without. No wonder I kept nothing sharper than an electric razor in my bottom drawer.
The number I was looking for was for Environment Front. I dialled it. Every town has its media-conscious, pollution-sensitive activist who is always hard to get to. I talked to three people before I got to Alexander Pastor, who had written the newspaper articles about illegal dumping and bringing in toxic-tainted fuel oil from the United States. I remembered how these pieces kept turning up, keeping me away from my crossword puzzle.
“Yeah?” he said into my ear when I finally got to him.
“Is this Alexander Pastor?”
“You got him,” he said. “You also got Sandor Pásztory. Take your pick.” I didn’t quiz him about that. The fashion for Canadianizing foreign-sounding names is dying out. Even the business pages of the Beacon showing back-lit photographs of newly appointed directors to important companies was a harvest of non-Anglo-Saxon names. In the old days, whatever the origin of the executive, the name was suitably North American. Even actors were sticking to their own names nowadays, and the world hadn’t come to an end.
I explained to Pastor-Pásztory about my interest in the death of Jack Dowden at Kinross a year ago. I didn’t even have to remind him of the case; he was up on the details and agreed to meet me at Gosselin’s Turkey Roost up on the Scrampton Road in half an hour.
“Why that place?” I asked. “It’s right across from the Kinross yard. I’m not looking to walk into trouble,” I said with emphasis.
“There’s something I want to show you,” Pastor-Pásztory said and left it at that. It was a take-it-or-leave-it situation. I took it.
That left me travelling time and not much else to get there.
Gosselin’s Turkey Roost was one of the fast-food outlets on an industrial strip that took advantage of the workers at two quarries, a gravel pit and several trucking firms located along a concentrated three miles of chain-link fences, corrugated steel Quonset huts and aluminum-sided sheds. To me the eateries all looked alike. I was glad it was the pollution expert who chose our rendezvous.
The customers sitting at the counter of Gosselin’s Turkey Roost were mostly workers from the area: men working odd shifts, drivers of the rigs parked out front or in the lot to one side of the one-storey brick-and-cinderblock structure. Men in nylon bomber jackets with the names of their basketball teams on the front and back, or in heavy faded checkered shirts, contemplated the nuggets of turkey or their fresh French fries before putting them into their mouths. At one table, a Hydro crew nodded hard hats of yellow plastic over mugs of hot coffee. The corrugated broadside of a tractor-trailer obstructed my view across the road through big picture windows. Occasionally, as someone came in the door, the waitress or the short-order cook would look up. None of the customers showed much interest. On the wall near me, a sign, framed and covered in glass with a ketchup smear on it, read: TEENAGERS amp; YOUNG FOLK EFFECTIVE immediately there will be a time-limit of 15 minutes imposed on all the above! — Management
As far as I could see, there were no teenagers or young folk counting off the allotted time. The notice was a complete success, unless the faded ketchup smear could be interpreted as a sign of youthful protest. The music, which held sway over the din of talk in the room, came from a coin-operated, plastic-wrapped, inwardly illuminated juke-box. It played old-fashioned country-andwestern songs by Johnny Cash, Ferlin Husky, Merle Haggard and Hank Snow. This wasn’t a camp re-creation of an era; it was the real thing still happening, without even a sideways glance at fashion. I was trying to imagine what the place might look like after dark, when the man who couldn’t have been anybody else but Alex Pastor-Pásztory came in. He had the look of a low-level bureaucrat crossed with a trailer-camp operator. There was some camp counsellor, graduate student and trail guide in there too. He didn’t have trouble picking me out of the line-up either. He shambled over towards me from the door, removing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows as he came. Under it was an old sweater, either moth-eaten in places or burned. He moved into the other side of the booth I’d taken and produced a pack of cigarettes at once. As he fished one out, I found matches and struck one. He leaned into the flame, nodding at my Player’s dozing in the ashtray.
“We’re a dying breed,” he said. “In more ways than one. But I can’t fight battles along a broad front. Can’t arm-wrestle the world out there and me at the same time. Oh, well, there’s next year. What’s your excuse?”
“Me? I never thought of quitting. I like my vice. It’s a poor thing, but mine own. I can’t stand the self-righteous propaganda of the anti-smoking lobby either. They’re right, I guess, but I wish they’d find a less self-satisfied way to make their points. I supposed I’ll have to give it up one of these days, like I gave up jellybeans and licorice allsorts.” Pásztory got up and waved to the waitress. When she didn’t see him, he called out. I admired his direct approach. It brought two cups of coffee within a minute.
Pásztory had a friendly, lopsided grin that sat on a face that must have been dour in repose. Brown eyes came magnified through his thick, steel-rimmed glasses. He was going bald in front and wore the remaining fringe rather long over his neck and ears. He gave me the same sort of appraisal as we talked.
“You wrote those pieces in the Beacon about the toxic-fuel scam last spring, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I used my uptown name on those: Alexander Pastor. Did you see that the Globe took them too? They were in a lot of papers.”
“Didn’t you win some kind of award with them?”
“That’s right, the Rushton Cup. I keep pennies in it.” He was still trying to place me and not getting anywhere. “This environmental stuff, this is not your usual beat, is it?”
“Right. I’m normally a family-law man. Reading about toxic waste steals my sleep. Your article made me feel the ozone layer being peeled away. Ugh! I have to limit my exposure if I want to survive. No offence. I’m just being honest. Like it’s not that I don’t agree with you. That’s not the point. I just have to control my intake, or it’s like living through an earthquake all the time.”
“That’s a good description. We have to make this planet last at least until we have the technology to move to another one when this one won’t support us any more.”
“Yeah, ‘Beam me back to Saturn, Scotty!’ Right?”
“And what if we don’t have the technology for that?”
“Then, we’re out of luck.” Pásztory added both cream and sugar to his coffee. Rather a lot of both.
“Sorry to sound off at you, Mr. Cooperman. I get carried away sometimes. What can I do for you? What do you want to know about?”
“I’m interested in Kinross and the kinds of games they’ve been playing.”
“What’s your first name again?”
“Benny.”
“Okay. Call me Sandy or Alex. I get both. I changed my name just when it was becoming popular to be a fine old Hunky name like Pásztory. A name like Pastor comes out of Saran Wrap.”
Pásztory’s fingers were stained with nicotine. He was a messy smoker. I could see where the holes in his sweater came from.