"Of course you will, dear," she said. "Should I call you a cab?"
"Please."
I followed Andrew into the hallway. He punched the down button on the elevator and stared at his reflection in the stainless steel doors. A warped reflection that made him seem shorter and wider than he was.
"I'm heading down to the site too," I said. Why not use the time to hear what the closed-up son had to say about his vibrant, stage-struck sister. "I can give you a ride if you like."
He said, "Are you a supplier?" With the frosty welcome he'd give if that's what I were.
"No," I said. "Jonah Geller. I'm a friend of your mother's."
"So why are you going to the job site?"
"To talk to your dad."
"About what?"
"Your sister."
He looked back at his reflection. "If it's all the same to you," he said, "I think I'll take the cab."
CHAPTER 5
The cranes had returned to Toronto. As I drove east along Lake Shore Boulevard, they stood out against the sky, raising girders and great buckets of cement up to the tops of buildings that grew taller by the day. During past recessions and lulls in the market, tower cranes had all but disappeared from the landscape, as landlords couldn't give away office space or condos. Now the town was booming again, buildings going up everywhere you looked, even on a narrow verge of land right next to the elevated Gardiner Expressway, built so close to it that occupants could lean over their balcony railings and high-five drivers going by.
I took Cherry Street south across the Keating Channel, a man-made canal that allowed freighters to get close enough to factories and industries for derricks to unload their goods. The port lands between the channel and the lake had long been home to heavy industry, everything from oil refineries to tire manufacturers. Any new project being built there had to reclaim the abused land. Brownlands, they were called. Turning them green was hugely expensive, which was why they'd been neglected so long. Tracts had been bought by retailers intending to build superstores, then abandoned when they realized how polluted the land really was, and how expensive it would be to treat or replace the soil.
But some developers were clearly able to absorb the costs. Either they'd been lucky enough to find land that had been used for lighter industry, or they'd conceived projects whose profit margins made remediation worthwhile. And with the blighted Gardiner supposedly coming down, the door had never been more open to reuniting the city and its waterfront.
I turned east on Unwin Avenue, the last road north of the lake. On the south side was the tree-lined shore of Cherry Beach and its marina, closed for the season now with empty slips and boats in dry dock, but a hive of colour and activity in the summer. There were trees and grass and gorse bushes turned a vibrant autumn red.
But on the north side, it was all barbed-wire fences and tired-looking buildings. At the far end of Unwin, looming like a poor cousin of the Washington Monument, was the 700-foot smokestack of the Richard L. Hearn Generating Station, decommissioned and mostly abandoned now; the new Portlands Energy Centre was being built alongside it, over considerable opposition from area residents. I drove past great piles of salt and sand used for the city's roads; hills made of gravel and aggregate; twin peaks of broken stone to be taken to landfill sites; rusted transmission towers standing like sentinels with their arms akimbo.
According to Canadian Builder, the Birkshire Harbourview was being built on a thirty-hectare tract of land between Lake Ontario and the Keating Channel. I don't know a hectare from Hector, Prince of Troy, but it seemed like a huge parcel to me. I had to pull close to the edge of the road to let a dump truck rumble past me, coming out of the site with a ghostly cloud of dust billowing out from under a tied-down tarp. I left my car parked outside the site and got a hard hat from my trunk. I keep a number of hats, jackets, shoes and other items there: surveillance work often calls for a quick change of appearance, and hats are an easy way to fool someone into thinking you're not the same guy they just saw in their rear-view mirror, or behind them on a crowded sidewalk. I also took out a clipboard and a pen, and began a slow circuit around the hoarding that surrounded the site. Each panel had been papered over with images of model suites with sweeping views of the harbour and the Toronto Islands behind them or of the glittering city skyline to the north.
Informational panels showed how the building would conform to the highest LEED standards for green living. Another showed the price range: starting at $1.5 million for a 1,500-square-foot one-bedroom and topping out at $12 million for a two-storey penthouse unit. And to think I was making do with a thousand square feet at a thousand a month. Then again, my view was every bit as good, even if it showed the city rising out of a dark ravine, and not smiling at its glittering waterfront reflection like Narcissus.
I walked around the south side to where the park would be. An artist's rendering on the rear hoarding showed a lush wooded parkland; all I saw was bare, fragile new saplings where said forest would be and fenced-off areas that had been reseeded with grass. The parkland as drawn would connect to Tommy Thompson Park and the Leslie Street Spit, a man-made five-kilometre peninsula jutting out into Lake Ontario, built with landfill as a breakwater and now a favourite spot for weekend walkers, birders, joggers and cyclists. It would host a variety of wildlife-foxes, coyotes, rabbit and groundhogs, cormorants, night herons and of course ring-billed gulls. Their colony just west of the spit is one of the world's largest: the squawking from their breeding grounds in mating season sounds like a million nails being dragged down a blackboard; the spit itself looks like it's been paved with dung and feathers.
Coming back around the north side, I found a gap in the hoarding and got my first good look at the hole itself. The size of a full city block and five or six storeys deep, a quarry whose inner walls had been lined with wooden planks, shored up at intervals by massive timbers. A steep dirt road led down into the hole, its surface showing the herringbone pattern of heavy tires. Dozens of workmen swarmed the bottom, all wearing bright yellow hard hats. Some were on scaffolding, shoring up braces in the corners. Parked down at the centre was a crane, but at its end was a massive auger boring a hole ten feet wide. Near it were holes already finished, into which great steel caissons were being lowered, each as wide around as a fuselage. One dump truck was straining up the road to ground level; another prepared to descend and gather up the earth being dug out of the foundation. The air rang with the whine of machinery, the cries of gulls and the shouts of men trying to be heard above them.
As I came to the main entrance, a truck with a flatbed loaded with caissons was entering. The driver had his window open, elbow out, cigarette dangling at the end of his fingers.
"How far down do those things go?" I asked.
"The caissons? Till you hit bedrock. A hundred and ten feet in this case, maybe one-twenty. Ask the engineer. I just drive 'em in and dump 'em."
I stepped away from the truck as the driver shifted into first, and almost turned my ankle in a tire rut. Diesel fumes soured the air around me. Maybe it would smell like a park one day but not today, not with dump trucks and transit mixers coming, going and idling as drivers shot the shit with each other.
I adjusted my hard hat, hefted my clipboard and entered the site. A sign said all visitors had to report to the office, a double-wide trailer standing on four cement posts. I was walking toward it when the door banged open and a red-faced man stormed down the three steps to the ground and stalked out toward the road. He had blond hair and a moustache and wire-rimmed glasses. Another man appeared in the doorway and called after the blond, "Martin. Martin! Don't do this. Come back here and talk to me."