“Just a minute!” I said. “I don’t think Brian wants to go home yet. I’m sure the restaurant can find another extra chair.” Brian peeled the hands that were clutching him off his arms and propelled himself past the hood and away from the car.
“You’re pushing it, Mr. Cooperman,” said the driver slowly.
“It was fun running into you fellows. Sorry that our plans changed so quickly. That’s life, isn’t it?”
“We’ll run into you again sometime,” the driver said, going to his side of the car. Meanwhile, O’Mara had crossed over to the side of the good guys and was looking back at his erstwhile abductors.
“We’ll see you again,” said another of the hoods as he opened the car door.
“Maybe it won’t be for some time,” I added hopefully.
“Don’t count on it,” he said as he slammed the door shut behind him.
“Nice running into you boys,” Edna said as the remaining hood stirred himself.
“Yeah, nice,” he said, brushing back his scanty hair with the palm of his hand. He shut the lid of the trunk and climbed into the back seat.
At the same time, the car’s motor jumped to life and a lot of unnecessary exhaust was piped in our direction. The car reversed, backed out and gunned its motor as it left the street to O’Mara, the Stillmans and the Coopermans.
“Those fellows look like they just walked out of television,” my mother said. I nodded agreement. “There’s still something not very kosher about this.”
“What do you mean, Ma?”
“Since when have you become such a fan of seafood?”
“I’ll tell you all about it in the restaurant.” We walked across the street and into the dining-room with its fishnets on the ceiling and a bar made from a cut-away lifeboat. O’Mara was still looking stunned, but Edna was talking a blue streak at him. I thought that with a little nourishment, he might come around.
TWENTY
“He was a decent old skin,” Frank Bushmill said as we sat in a booth at the Di on St. Andrew Street. “He was the only man in town who could talk intelligently about rhetoric. And he knew books. I got my Swift from Martin.” Martin Lyster had picked Friday the thirteenth to die in his room at the Grantham General. When I went to see him a few days earlier, he was still hoping to make it down to Florida to watch the Blue Jays in spring training. Frank and I were toasting his memory in Diana Sweets’s coffee.
“He sure knew a lot about books.”
“Sold me my copy of Flannery O’Connor.”
“Yeah, he knew all that Irish stuff.”
“American. O’Connor was American.”
“Well, he was always talking about James Joyce and Yeats and all that gang.”
“He should have died hereafter.”
“You can say that again.”
Frank and I drank up our coffee and I followed him out into the sunlight. I took a good look first to see if any green Toyotas were lurking at the curb. The sidewalks were clear of hoods as well as shoppers. Maybe it was too early for either group. I was going to miss Martin. He was always talking over my head, like Frank, but it made me feel good, like there was a real world out there far away from Grantham, where people didn’t get bundled into cars against their will, where books mattered and where all questions weren’t submitted to the test of “the bottom line.” As a matter of fact, I don’t think I ever heard either Martin or Frank use the phrase. I respected them for that.
Frank was trying to organize a wake for Martin. I agreed to go as long as it didn’t collide with Anna’s plans for my time during the next few days. Sherry Forbes’s wedding rehearsal was the main obstacle that night. In fact, I was rather curious to see all the Forbes clan acting on their best behaviour in public. The promise of a good dinner at the Grantham Club was an extra dollop of jam. The following day, Saturday, the wedding itself was scheduled to take place. I had to be there as well. Frank said that he would try to work around these events and let me know the time and place. Together we climbed the twenty-eight steps to our offices, he to his patients with their corns and bunions and me to my notes on Kinross, Phidias and now Sangallo Restorations. I played about with this for a few minutes, then remembered that there was another office where I was expected. I didn’t want McAuliffe’s opinion of me to sink to the level of his regard for Ross Forbes as a manager:
A diller, a dollar,
A ten o’clock scholar,
What makes you come so soon?
You used to come a ten o’clock,
But now you come at noon.
It was close to ten when I arrived at the sixth-floor head office of Phidias Manufacturing. I don’t know whether I beat Forbes in or not. By the time I was sitting at my parson’s table, I’d passed several busy-looking people. I spotted a Harlequin romance behind one copy of the Report on Business section of the Globe and Mail. McAuliffe’s greeting to me was warm but from a distance. I was sure that should he have asked me to show him, I would have been able to make a good case for Teddie’s arguments with American Internal Revenue, which I could now document from sources at Phidias. When the phone rang, as usual, I made no effort to answer it, although an extension was within my reach. Fred picked it up quickly, almost as though it might snap at him. I guess it often had, judging from Murdo Forbes’s boardroom manners.
“It’s for you,” McAuliffe said, almost as surprised as I was. “It’s Mr. Ross,” he added with his hand over the receiver.
“Yes?” I said, as McAuliffe hung up softly.
“Cooperman, it’s Ross Forbes here.” I nodded idiotically and waited. “You and I have a score to settle from a long time ago. I’ve been thinking of it all night and it still bothers me.”
“Why not have a word with your analyst about it?”
“Now, don’t get on the defensive. As far as I’m concerned the past is over and done with. But that’s because Teddie stays seventeen hundred kilometres away from here and I value each of them. Her coming back for the wedding has upset me. Everything about this damned wedding upsets me. But that’s neither here nor there. You and I have to talk, Cooperman. What are you doing for lunch?”
“First you hit me in the nose and now you’re buying lunch! I assume you’re buying?”
“And I won’t repeat my bad manners again, I assure you.”
“What time do you want me to meet you?”
“I’m going to be tied up in a meeting until noon. Can you make it, say, twelve-thirty at the Golf Club?”
“Will they let me in? I’m not a card-carrying member.”
“I’ll fix it. You won’t have any trouble.” It sounded like a promise, so I believed him.
When I hung up the phone, McAuliffe kept his face in a series of printouts for a few minutes. The office seemed quieter than usual. I felt I had to break the ice. “He wants to take me to lunch,” I said.
Fred McAuliffe looked across the room at me. “It’s getting hard for Mr. Ross to find people to lunch with him.” He shook his head while dusting off the printouts which had collected a fine spray of ash from the pipe he was cleaning. “It’s not just his drinking-there are plenty of drinkers over at the club, though most of them are a lot older than Mr. Ross-it’s the fact that he has been involved in the unsavoury stories about the marketing of contaminated fuel last May. People want to distance themselves from him in public.”
“Was he head of Kinross in May?”
“Oh, no, he was in charge here. Mr. Caine was in charge at Kinross.”
“Then why is Mr. Ross getting all the social heat? Shouldn’t some of it rub off on Norm Caine?” McAuliffe opened his mouth to answer, but stopped himself. He caught his breath and tried it another way.
“You make a good point, Mr. Cooperman. He should have let Mr. Caine answer the questions. I told him that. I’m not telling you anything I didn’t tell Mr. Ross to his face. Phidias was not involved at all, until Mr. Ross tried to get the story hushed up.”