I made coffee and took a cup out onto my balcony to look out at the city, as I did every morning. Indian summer was finally ending. The sky was overcast, the morning light weak. A wind was blowing down out of the north through the valley, leaving poplars trembling, stripping them of their remaining leaves.
I wolfed down a bagel and cheese, then grabbed my gym bag and drove a few blocks east to Carlaw Avenue and parked in back of a two-storey building with a sign that said Gym: By Appointment Only.
I had been studying and teaching shotokan karate for years. That's how I met Graham McClintock, the man who first recruited me as an investigator. But before karate, while serving in the Bar Kochba Infantry unit of the Israel Defense Forces, I had learned Krav Maga with my sergeant, Roni Galil. Krav Maga is a system of self-defence created by an Israeli army man. It is more elemental than karate, teaching you how to use your own strengths and instincts to fight off attackers. I had only recently gone back to it: it seemed more right for me now than the formal, scripted katas of shotokan. Krav Maga assumes that every situation is life-and-death, that your attacker has to be put down with maximum efficiency. It is not a sport; it will never be featured in the Olympics. The name itself means close combat: the only rule is there are no rules. Whether fighting one attacker or more, whether they are armed or not, you use everything you can, including objects at hand. You always run if you have the chance. If not, you counterattack at the earliest opening. You bite, gouge eyes, butt heads, rip testicles. You do as much damage as humanly-or inhumanly-possible.
This anonymous gym on Carlaw was run by a man named Eidan Feingold, a former Israeli and world judo champion who'd embraced Krav Maga during his own army stint. I had seen him disarm a volunteer assailant with a knife while the assailant was still thinking about where to stab him. I had seen him slap away a gun pointed at his face before the trigger could be pulled, then take the gun away and pretend to pistol-whip the attacker. He had demonstrated defences against shotguns, garrottes, machetes, anything short of a rocket-propelled grenade, and somehow I think he could deal with that too.
"Yoni," he greeted me. "You're too early for class. Nothing starts before nine."
"I know. I was hoping for a little one-on-one."
He looked at his watch and shrugged. "Sure," he said. "I can give you half an hour." He led me into a small locker room, where I changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants. I put on a helmet, mouth guard, protective cup and arm and shin pads. Eidan did the same. Then he strapped my left arm tight to my body with a belt. The last time I'd been in, we'd been working on a scenario where one arm had been wounded and I had to fight him off with the other.
"Ready?" Eidan asked.
"Ready."
Then he smiled and proceeded to try to kick the living shit out of me. He aimed kicks at my weak left side, punches at my head, keeping me on defence as long as he could. He tried to choke me from the front, which I broke up with a knee to the abdomen. He tried to choke me from behind: I stomped his foot, the way Brazilian jiu-jitsu teaches, then delivered a hammer strike to his head. With only my right arm free, I had to deal with my own mounting frustration as well as his relentless attacks. I finally dropped to one knee, as if exhausted. He moved in with a kick aimed at my head, and my opening came. I planted my right hand and used my legs to sweep his out from under him. As he fell onto his back, I dove on top of him, got my forearm across his neck and head-butted him across the bridge of his nose. Then I rolled away from him and looked for a weapon to use. There was a phone on the walclass="underline" in a real-life situation I'd have ripped it out of its base and either thrown it at him, hammered him with it or wrapped its cord around his neck. I sprinted to it and put my hand on it.
"Stop!" Eidan yelled. "Rip it out and I charge you sixty bucks."
"I wasn't going to. I just wanted you to know I'd found a weapon."
"Like hell," Eidan laughed. He got up off the mat and freed my strapped-in arm and patted my shoulder. I was glad to see I'd made him raise a sweat-a light one, but still a sweat.
"You did all right," he said.
"For a one-armed man."
"You put me down and you found a weapon. That's good."
"But?"
"But you should have run, Yoni. A phone might be okay if there is no way out. But to hit me with it or strangle me-that's what you were thinking?"
"Yes."
"Then you have to get close again. But maybe I'm faking, yes? Maybe I'm waiting for you to get close only to attack you again. And if I do, then maybe I end up with the phone and I am hitting you with it or strangling you. You see? We're supposed to be tough guys, yes? But if Krav Maga teaches you anything, it's that you run if the odds are against you. There is no shame in that, Yoni. There is only shame in getting killed when you can save yourself. We like to say Krav Maga is about life and death, yes? But first and most, it's about life." I was in the office by eight-forty, drinking coffee and wondering if it was too early to call Hollinger, when Eddie Solomon rapped on the door and stuck his head in.
"I heard you come in," he said. "You want to try a fabulous coffee I got? Comes from Indonesia. They only pick the beans after they've been eaten and shit out by some kind of monkey."
"That's some recommendation, Eddie. I think I'll stick with what I have."
"Why the downcast look, my white knight? No dragons to slay?"
"There's no shortage of dragons, Eddie. I'm just not sure I can slay them. You have our fee?"
"Chelsea stood me up last night, but I'm meeting her for lunch so I'll have it this afternoon. One thousand in cash for your labour."
"That's great."
"Beats cleaning out stables, mighty Hercules."
I had to smile. You can't not smile around Eddie Solomon.
"That's better," he said. "I'll drop by after lunch. Your lovely partner will be here, I trust?"
"She'll be here, Eddie. For all the good it'll do you."
"You chase your cars," he said, "and I'll chase mine." Jenn came in at nine on the dot. "I wanted to call you last night," she said, "but I didn't want to rain on your parade."
"Someone beat you to it," I said, and filled her in first on the disaster that was my date with Hollinger, then on the death of Martin Glenn.
"Jesus," she said. "Between that and Maya's email, there can't be any doubt she was murdered too."
"What email?"
"Karl Thomson came by just after you left." Jenn opened a Mac notebook computer, waited for it to come off standby, then tapped in a password. "This is Maya's sent log," she said. "A lot of the usual things you'd expect from a student: gossip, chitchat, notes on class projects, scheduling meetings. And then there were a whole bunch to someone calling himself EcoMan."
"Will Sterling?"
"None other. Look at this one, Jonah. Sent the morning of the day she died."
Will, having dinner with dad 2nite… will try to find what u need… try my cell after 12… M.
"After 12," I said. "Could have meant that night or the next day. Either way, that clinches it. This was not someone who was planning to kill herself."
"She knew something about Harbourview."
"The land. The way it was cleaned."
"Or not."
I needed to get going if I was going to catch Will Sterling before his 9:30 class. "See if you can find out who approved the Record of Site Condition at the Ministry of the Environment," I suggested.