Straight No Chaser Read online

  The Seville parked on the street that overlooked the Pits from the north side. The Datsun was at the curb about a block further west on the same street. Three or four other cars were parked in between the two. One car stood out, a red Porsche convertible. No one was in it.

  Truong got out of the back of the Seville, walked around to the front, and climbed in the passenger seat beside Tran. Truong opened the large glove compartment and slid something out. I leaned over the seat. Truong had a money tray in his lap. Each compartment was at least partly filled. Twenties, fifties, hundreds. The hundreds compartment was close to overflowing.

  I sat back and looked out the side window into the park. It took up ten or twelve acres, and it dropped about thirty feet below street level, which is where the name came from. The Pits. Christie Pits. There was a swimming pool on the far western edge of the park, a wading pool, a fenced-in baseball diamond, and three or four softball diamonds. At the south end, old men played bocce, and spread around the acres there were benches, drinking fountains, other amenities. So what brought Big Bam, whoever he was, and his activities, whatever they were, to this haven of rest and recreation?

  Tran, the muscular guy at the Seville’s wheel, got on his walkietalkie. As best I could make out, he seemed to be in touch with two or three good buddies. The guy who had the walkie-talkie under his Hawaiian shirt had to be one, broadcasting from the Datsun. Who were the others? Tran gave me a clue. As he talked, he kept glancing into the park. I followed his glances. A guy sitting on a bench beyond the baseball diamond’s right outfield looked like he was talking into his sleeve. He must be another of the communicators. And a man in a green windbreaker squatting on the slope that ran up the Christie Street side of the hill had his head hunched over a small object, probably a walkie-talkie.

  Tran lowered his own walkie-talkie.

  “Set,” he said to Truong.

  Truong looked at his watch and nodded. I looked at my watch. Two o’clock on the button. Truong and Tran were focussing on the part of the park immediately below us. I did likewise. They knew what they were watching for. I’d have to learn.

  It was a slow day in the Pits. Two o’clock on a Monday afternoon. The kids were in school, and it was too early for the office softball teams to hit the diamonds. A couple of mothers were guiding toddlers through the wading pool, and two or three dog-walkers, paper bags in hand, were airing their mutts. That was it, apart from the man sitting on the bench at the bottom of the hill on our side of the park, the north side.

  The man had his back to us, and he was reading a newspaper. Looked like the Globe. He had on a light-grey suit, no hat, and his hair was black. I guessed—his hair, build, all-round persona—that he was Vietnamese.

  Another guy was scrambling down the hill behind the bench that the Vietnamese with the Globe was sitting on. The scrambler, on the portly side, was wearing a suit, tie, and summer fedora, and didn’t give the impression he was used to coping with steep hills on foot. He stumbled to the bottom and sat on the bench beside the Vietnamese. They chatted, and in the course of the conversation, not long, the guy in the fedora looked back, first at the Seville, then, craning around, at the Datsun down the block. He was making a lot of motions that seemed to say, yeah, sure, he understood, he agreed. The Vietnamese wrote something on the top sheet of a pad of paper, ripped off the sheet, and handed it to the other guy. The two shook hands, and the man in the fedora started back up the slope. His progress was slow, and he was aimed at the Seville.

  “That Big Bam down there on the bench?” I asked Truong.

  “Of course.”

  “How about the sluggish chap?”

  Truong twisted in the front seat and gave me his version of an impatient look.

  “Oh,” I said. “Customer?”

  “Of course.”

  The customer arrived at the Seville, at Truong’s side. Truong pressed the button that lowered his window, and the customer beamed at him. His face was pink, and his upper lip was lined in small beads of sweat. Apart from that, in his nice linen suit and rep tie and new fedora, he seemed the model of respectability. He was holding out his sheet of paper to Truong.

  “Hell of a climb, heh, heh, the hill, heh, heh,” he said. He was breathing hard.

  “Twenty-eight hundred,” Truong said to him. Truong was reading the figure on the sheet of paper.

  The portly man had money in his hand, six five-hundred-dollar bills. Truong accepted the bills. He took two one-hundreds out of the appropriate compartment in the money tray and handed them to the man. To the customer. Truong wrote something in the corner of the sheet of paper. It seemed to be his initials. He gave it to the man and raised the car window. The portly guy headed down the street in the direction of the Datsun. He wasn’t wasting any tune.

  “So far,” I said to Truong, “it looks all take and no give.”

  “Wait,” Truong said.

  “Always been a failing of mine. Waiting.”

  I waited, and didn’t get much wiser. The portly guy hurried up to the window on the Datsun’s passenger side and handed his sheet of paper to the guy in the blue warm-up suit. Was he Dan Nguyen or My Do Thai? Whoever he was, he handed the portly guy a second piece of paper in exchange for the first, the one with the twenty-eight hundred and Truong’s initials on it. The portly man pocketed the second piece of paper and disappeared out of sight beyond the Datsun.

  Somebody else was on the bench with Big Bam, a younger guy in jeans and a terrific black sport jacket. Had to be a Giorgio Armani jacket. He followed the same drill as the portly man, except he wasn’t breathing hard when he got to Truong’s window. He was in for an even five thousand. He paid, took back his initialled paper, and trotted on to the Datsun. He looked smooth.

  It kept up that way, people moving from Big Bam on the bench to Truong in the Seville to the guys in the Datsun. Money changing hands and sheets of paper getting traded. I lost track of the customers. There were two kids who were about seventeen and had on Upper Canada College blazers. There were numerous guys who looked like they sold life insurance. There was one matron in a flowered dress. One black guy about the size of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and with the same amount of hair. One tough little guy who had a lip on him and complained about the price. Truong ignored him. Truong had other matters on his mind. Mostly money. The money tray overflowed. Truong counted five-hundred-dollar bills into stacks of twenty, bound them with large rubber bands, and pushed them into the back of the glove compartment. He did the same with the hundred-dollar bills. Bound them in stacks of fifty. There was a fortune in money in the glove compartment. I lost track of it too.

  Close to four o’clock, a tall guy with the beginnings of a gut took his place on the bench beside Big Bam. They talked. The talk lasted longer than the conversations with other customers, and it was accompanied by much arm-waving from the tall guy. He left the bench, but he didn’t have a piece of paper in his hand, and he didn’t climb the hill to the Seville. He crossed the park and sat next to the guy with the walkie-talkie on the Christie Street slope.

  Two more customers went through the usual drill: a chat with Big Bam, up the hill, pay at the Seville, collect paper at the Datsun. When they were done, Big Bam waved the tall guy with the incipient gut back to the bench. This time, he gave the tall guy a slip of paper. The tall guy started up the hill. Big Bam stuck out his right hand and pointed first at the guy on the Christie Street slope and then at the guy on the bench beyond right field. Those two, it stood to reason, had to be lookouts, watching for cops or other transgressors. When Big Bam signalled them, both got on their walkie-talkies. Voices came over the walkie-talkie in the Seville. Tran took the messages without answering back. It was all Vietnamese to me.

  The tall guy arrived at Truong’s window and handed in his piece of paper. It was, on the basis of the amounts that had been established by the other customers, for comparative peanuts. Six hundred and twenty-five dollars. The tall guy was in his early thirties, and besides the swelling stomach, h
e had a face scarred by ancient acne. The six-twenty-five he passed to Truong came in a fat wad of crinkled fives, tens, and twenties. Tran gave the bills a look of disgust. Truong, the old pro, treated the money as business as usual. He initialled the paper and gave it back with a polite nod.

  Big Bam and the two lookouts had come up the hill and settled inside the Porsche. They sat there. Nothing else. No revving of engine or other indicators of imminent activity. But something was up. I could feel a tightening of the mood inside the Seville.

  The tall guy, outside the window, looked at his piece of paper and turned away from Truong’s window in the direction of the Datsun. But he didn’t step away from the Seville. He didn’t need to. The two guys from the Datsun seemed to be coming to him. Dan Nguyen and My Do Thai, whichever was which, were on the run toward us, past the Porsche, up to the Seville and the tall guy. The two of them, Hawaiian Shirt and Warm-up Suit, were carrying baseball bats, and I had a terrible feeling they didn’t plan to use them for the same purpose Darryl Strawberry wields his bat.

  The tall guy looked like he was nailed to the street. He didn’t budge, and the expression on his face said he was petrified. He held out his right hand, beseechingly, to the two men with the bats. The hand held the slip of paper. The two batters didn’t care about the paper. The tall guy took a quick, scared, hopeful look at Truong behind the raised window. No use. Truong was concentrating on the money tray.

  “But I got the fucking paper!” the tall guy screeched at the men with the bats, and he started to wave his arms, the way he waved them when he talked to Big Bam on the bench.

  I didn’t think any of it—the arm-waving, the screeching, the displaying of the paper—was doing the tall guy any good. He probably didn’t think so either.

  The man in the blue warm-up suit swung his baseball bat at the tall guy’s knees. He connected. The tall guy’s feet flew about a yard in the air, and he hung up there a second or two before he dropped. I opened the door on the right side of the Seville and pushed it out. The tall guy hit the road hard, shoulder and hip first. He didn’t bounce. The man in the Hawaiian shirt was on him for more licks. He gave the tall guy’s gut three swift whacks with the bat. I got out of the car. The tall guy was a couple of feet from me. Vomit spurted from his mouth. Warm-up Suit was still on the job. He rapped the tall guy’s ankles. Once, twice, swift and vicious, a third time and a fourth. The tall guy grabbed his stomach with one hand and reached for his ankles with the other. He rolled on to his back and over on the other side, and when he rolled, the slip of white paper came loose on the pavement.

  The two guys from the Datsun had wrapped up batting practice. They were hotfooting it back to their car. Truong seemed to be absorbed in his study of the money tray. No one saw the loose piece of paper except me.

  “You!” Tran yelled from behind the Seville’s wheel. “Get the fuck back in!”

  He was yelling at me. But from where he was sitting, Tran had no line of sight on the paper. I squatted, palmed the paper, straightened up, and slid into the Seville’s back seat. One easy, fluid, sophisticated motion. So how come my armpits were dripping sweat?

  The Datsun up ahead gunned away from the curb. Big Bam and the two lookouts followed in the Porsche. And we were right behind in the Seville.

  I slipped the piece of paper into the breast pocket of my shirt and looked through the back window at the tall guy in the street. He was wrapped in the fetal position, curled up, both hands holding tight to his body, vomit running down his front. His shoes had come off, and his pants were pulled halfway up one shin. A bone seemed to be sticking out of the leg at an angle bones don’t normally choose.

  “A dissatisfied customer?” I said to the back of Truong’s head. My voice had a croak in it.

  Truong turned in his seat to face me.

  “Worse,” he said. “A duplicitous customer.”

  23

  FROM THE ROUTE Tran took back downtown, I thought we were aimed for the restaurant where I had lunch. I thought wrong. We got into the same general neighbourhood, but a few blocks further west, closer to Toronto Western Hospital. I considered suggesting to Truong we might have dropped off the tall guy at the Western. I kept my mouth shut.

  Tran drove along a side street lined with narrow, two-storey houses painted in fabulous shades. Magentas, emeralds, blood reds. In Toronto, English Canadians sandblast their brick. The other nationalities make like Robert Rauschenberg with theirs. Tran turned left off the street and through the opening in a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt was standing at the opening. He closed a gate into it after we passed by. Tran steered around to the back of a building and pulled up in a line with the Datsun and the Porsche. The gang was all here.

  The building towered over the houses to the east by two and a half storeys. It had a run-of-the-mill industrial look, yellow-brown brick, flat roof, large rectangular windows. There was something different about the windows. They were painted over and projected nothing but black. Did evil lurk within?

  Everybody was out of the cars except Truong. The five underlings— Tran, Hawaiian Shirt, Warm-up Suit, and the two lookouts—strung themselves in a loose line between the Seville and a steel door into the back of the building. They checked rooftops, peeked around corners, seemed to be watching for anything that might move. Give them two-piece dark suits and wires plugged into their ears and they’d look like your average platoon of secret-service agents guarding the prime minister. Truong, in the Seville with the cash, had the prime-ministerial role.

  Big Bam was at the steel door, fitting a key into a lock. Two keys, in fact, in two locks. He hadn’t directed his attention my way. First things came first, and getting the money inside the building qualified as a definite first. I was glad to settle for second place. Gave me time to work out my strategy. What strategy? Examine the slip of paper? Not if it might cost me time in the batting cage with the two Saigon sluggers. I’d save the paper for later in the privacy of my own living room.

  Big Bam opened the door, and simultaneously Truong was out of the Seville and stepping in expeditious fashion down the line of guards. He carried the tray in both hands, gingerly, like a precious possession. Which it was, probably in the vicinity of a hundred grand for the day’s curious commerce.

  Truong went through the steel door followed by Big Bam. Tran motioned me to take a place in the procession. The light was murky inside and got murkier when Tran slammed shut the door and threw the pair of locks. We went single file, nobody talking, up one flight of stairs, turned left, and climbed a shorter flight. At the front of the file, someone opened a door, and bright light flooded down the stairs. I was second-last in the group, trailed by Tran, and when I stepped through the door, into the brightness, and looked around, I came close to tumbling backwards into Tran the trailer.

  “Well, damn,” I said.

  “Fantastic, you know?” Tran said from behind me.

  “And here I thought I’d seen all the city’s architectural wonders.”

  The space in front of me might have been smaller than the inside of Maple Leaf Gardens, but not much. The whole of the interior of the building had been ripped out from side to side and from first floor to the ceiling, three and a half storeys up. No inside walls, no floors, no skylight, no windows that let in light. There was plenty of light from other sources, and all of them were in operation. Bars of pink neon at least thirty feet long ran vertically up all four walls. Tiny red bulbs, like the kind for Christmas decorations, were strung over every available surface. And the surfaces were manifold. A bar, much longer than Abner Chase’s salad bar, occupied one end of the room. It didn’t peddle arugula. It was in the spirits business. Bottles of all things alcoholic sat on shelves behind the monster bar, and the shelves were festooned with the ubiquitous tiny red bulbs. Several dozen small tables and four times as many chairs were grouped around a large dance floor. It was painted midnight blue. Enormous speakers for a sound system hung about twelve feet up in the room
’s four corners. And giant grainy blowups of famous folks, three times life-size, were mounted at regular intervals around the walls. Marilyn Monroe. Elvis Presley. James Dean. I recognized the famous folks who were deceased. I drew a blank on most of the others. Must be rock stars. If I learned who they were, I’d put them on the list of subjects I was eliminating from my thought processes.

  “What’s this place called?” I asked Tran.

  “Booze can.”

  “I know that. But what’s its name? When a guy comes here in a cab, where’s he tell the driver to take him?”

  “Big Bam’s place.”

  “Should’ve guessed.”

  “Only word of mouth, you know?” Tran said. “Not many cab drivers can find this place, only the ones who are our friends.”

  “Oh sure,” I said. “Wrong sort might get in.”

  “No trash, you know?”

  It didn’t seem prudent to continue the conversation. Tran and I might get into a debate over trash. He was sure to win.

  I knew about booze cans, but this was my first venture into one. That gave me the edge over Toronto’s cops; they knew about booze cans too, but apparently hadn’t been inside one long enough to make a bust. Booze cans like Big Bam’s place, so I’d learned from the grapevine, opened for business around ten-thirty at night and sold liquor, drugs, and high-stepping times until the sun came up. Those activities broke many laws, but, as I gathered from the same grapevine, the police hadn’t penetrated the booze cans’ security and caught owners and customers in the lawbreaking. What was this informative grapevine of mine? The series of articles that the Globe’s investigative reporter wrote on booze cans a month or so earlier. Wonder if the investigative reporter knew about Big Bam’s place with the steel door and the guys with the baseball bats? That was real security.