He led me into his office and told me to make myself at home at what he called a parson’s table. Not knowing very much about parsons, I took him at his word and settled my briefcase on a long table without much depth to it. It wasn’t literally in a corner, but it did occupy space along the cold north wall. Over my head was a framed map of Grantham during its heady days as a busy canal town. There was an inset of the old courthouse at the bottom right-hand corner. I tried to find the location of my office on St. Andrew Street. McAuliffe saw me distracted and smiled with a set of discoloured teeth.
“That’s the Brosius map of 1875. It’s one of the first run, not a reprint,” he said. “I got it from my father and I coveted it every day it hung in his office on Queen Street.” He came over to look too. For a minute, we both did that. “Hasn’t changed much, really,” he said. “It’s still an Indian trail or two, only now they have a modern camber. The original survey lines didn’t make much of an impact in the downtown part, did they?” I smiled. I couldn’t tell where the original survey lines were on the map, but I could tell that he could. McAuliffe smelled of bay rum and tobacco, a very comfortable smell. “My father was a collector of these old maps, Mr. Cooperman. Got interested while he was building the present canal. He was one of the engineers working on it beginning in 1919, as soon as he got out of the army.” McAuliffe pulled a large black book from a shelf and opened it near the end and pointed at a list of those who had built the canal. There the McAuliffe name appeared twice, once as a junior engineer and then as an assistant engineer among scores of others.
“That was quite a piece of work,” I said, embarrassed by his concentration.
“Labourers, pipefitters, pitmen in those days were getting twenty-five cents an hour. Imagine what that canal would cost today, eh?” I shook my head in tune with his. He closed the book, giving me a glimpse of photographs of the Welland Canal in different stages of construction as he did so. He replaced the book and leaned back against my parson’s table. He seemed lost in thought. Was he thinking of what the pyramids could be built for if you only paid the slaves twenty cents an hour? I guess you don’t have to pay real slaves anything. He held on to his version of the thought, shook himself like an old dog, and returned to his side of the room.
“Mr. Cooperman, I have some of the minute books you need right here on this shelf,” he said indicating a wall of books between two windows. “The rest are in the boardroom, which doubles as our library.” H sat down behind his large, cluttered desk and looked back in my direction. “If there’s anything you want to know about Phidias Manufacturing, please ask me,” he said, selecting a pipe from a rack of them next to his telephone. “I’ve been with the firm for most of my sixty-four years. I remember Miss Biddy Forbes’s father. Not Miss Teddie’s father-although I knew him too; I mean Miss Biddy’s father, Sandy MacCallum. He was a friend of my father’s in the Royal Flying Corps, and he started all this when he got home from the First War. He established an airline first, but the only biplane he had crashed, so he went into making safety bicycles. Now who would think that that would lead up here to the sixth floor of the City Centre, eh?” Once again I took the cue and gave him the required response. From his manner, I began to suspect that F.P. McAuliffe was not the only chief financial officer of Phidias Manufacturing. He was the financial end’s equivalent of chairman of the board. He held an impressive title, salary, office and had very little to do except pass the time of day with strays who got past the reefs of secretaries and receptionists closer to the door. I couldn’t connect him with the death of Jack Dowden. Maybe he was part of the scheme, but I doubted it. It was a long way from this room in the office of Phidias to the yard of its subsidiary, Kinross. It was most likely that the death at Kinross involved people working closer to Dowden and the trucking end of things than the people, like McAuliffe, here at head office.
“Now,” McAuliffe said, getting up again, “I suppose you want to see some books.” He left his half-loaded pipe on his blotter next to a flat tin of tobacco, and went to the wall of books. His right hand went limply to his chin as he scanned the possibilities. “Now, where shall we start? Where shall we start?”
At this moment I heard a huge laugh come from elsewhere on the floor. It was too big to be contained by the flimsy space dividers and partitions of modern builders. The laugh was repeated and this time a woman’s voice said something that sounded like a joking protest. All typing in the reception area stopped. I looked to Mr. McAuliffe for guidance. “That would be the Commander,” he said in a near whisper. “He’s come back for the wedding on Saturday. They’ve been in Fort Lauderdale, him and Biddy.”
I heard a door open and shut, a bigger-than-life roar and laugh, like Citizen Kane was walking down the corridors of Xanadu. “Where is that old rip?” a deep, radio announcer’s voice shouted. “Where is that useless reprobate?” McAuliffe brightened.
“He’s coming in here!”
“Fred? Where the hell are you?” The door opened and the Commander easily filled the doorway. He was about the size and shape of Orson Welles.
“Welcome home, Commander!” McAuliffe said, without actually pulling his forelock. The elder Mr. Forbes kept shouting abuse while the two men approached one another and embraced in the middle of the room. McAuliffe almost disappeared in the arms of the bigger man. When they separated, the Commander held McAuliffe at arm’s length, like a brown doll, and examined him carefully.
“You don’t change, Fred. You never put on the years. Hell, man, what’s your secret?”
“Well, sir, I just try to stay busy.”
“‘Busy?’ Hell, you never worked a day in your life. You can cut the crap when you’re talkin’ to me, Fred. You-” He had finally noticed that he wasn’t alone in the room with McAuliffe. “Who in God’s name is that, Fred? Don’t tell me you have an assistant! I’ll put an end to that fast enough, you old scallywag!”
“Oh, Commander Forbes, this is Mr. Cooperman who’s doing some work for Miss Teddie.”
“How do you do, Mr. Forbes?” I said.
“What’s Teddie need with anything here?” he asked. The question was addressed to McAuliffe. He had ignored my greeting. Maybe it was the Mister. I should have brought him aboard with a toot from my handy boatswain’s whistle. Meanwhile, he had fixed McAuliffe with a bulging eye so that the little man’s eyebrows moved up and down in confusion. “What are you up to, Fred? What’s going on here?”
A slim woman wearing a silver grey suit that matched her hair came into the room quietly and stood by the door. McAuliffe couldn’t see her on the far side of Forbes’s broad back. She nodded her head slowly in my direction, acknowledging my existence and then called:
“Murdo, they can hear you all the way to City Hall.” The Commander turned and stared at her. She gave McAuliffe a warm smile when Fred moved to get a clear view. “Hello, Fred,” she said.
“Miss Biddy. Well, I declare! You don’t both of you come to the office often enough. How was Florida, Miss Biddy?”
“Everybody’s getting older, Fred. I wouldn’t be surprised to read that the whole population perished on a single night at the average age of eighty-four. They could just ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain’ and there’d be nobody left to notice.”
“Oh, dear!” McAuliffe said in mock surprise. “I don’t think Keats was contemplating such large numbers.”
“What the hell’s going on with you two?” The Commander looked from one to the other and then to me to see if I knew what they were talking about. I shrugged complete ignorance and that settled him for the moment. He took a breath to show that he had decided to skip along to something important, but came around between his wife and McAuliffe, facing me. I felt the parson’s table cornering me from behind.