Keeper of the Flame Read online

  I shoved the file across the desk to Gloria who gave a quick look at the sheet of paper I’d written the numbers on.

  “This is a ridiculously tiny fee,” she said. “You realize that?”

  “It’s what she can afford,” I said. “But I know I’ll be charging the Flame people a ridiculously enormous fee, which is what they can afford.”

  “Crang,” Gloria said, shaking her head a little, “this isn’t the billing system that helps big businesses stay big.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Chapter Six

  Annie and I lived in a house on a north-south street called Major, two blocks due west of my office. Like just about all the other houses on Major, ours was three storeys of brick, narrow and semi-detached. Major ran south from Bloor, in a neighbourhood named, prosaically, Harbord Village. The name came from Harbord Street, the main east-west street to the south. Lately, Harbord had been attracting a lot of trade in upscale dining establishments. I was still throwing most of my eating-out business to the older restaurants on Bloor.

  When I got home around seven, Annie was sitting at the dining room table, staring at our garden through the floor-to-ceiling window. A novel by someone named Jane Gardam lay open on the table in front of her, but she wasn’t reading it. She looked distracted, or maybe something worse. I put my arms around her from behind.

  “Sweetheart,” she said to me, “I’ve been feeling so rattled I almost did something drastic a few minutes ago.”

  “How drastic?”

  “I was on the verge of making a martini.”

  “Your martinis are undrinkable,” I said. “You never get the balance right.”

  Annie turned in my arms and looked up at me. “See what I mean?” she said.

  “It’s still almost a whole week before the book launch,” I said, “and already you’re a nervous wreck?”

  Annie straightened up, pushed the Jane Gardam novel to one side, and folded her hands on the table.

  “Crang,” she said, “just make the martinis. Please.”

  Three steps up from the dining room was the open kitchen. I hustled up the steps and mixed two vodka martinis, made with Polish potato vodka from the good people at Luksusowa. One martini on the rocks with three little olives on a toothpick for Annie, the other straight-up with a twist of lemon for me. Both with a whiff of vermouth.

  I carried the drinks to the dining room table. Annie and I clinked glasses in a small toast.

  “Here’s to your book,” I said. “Reads like a smash hit to me.”

  “Ha,” Annie said, “you’re the only one who’s read it except for the publishing people.” She took a sip of martini. “But thanks, fella.”

  Annie’s book, her first, covered a small corner of the movie world. Movies were her business. She talked about them on CBC Radio, blogged reviews twice a week, wrote occasional magazine profiles of movie people, and now she had written a biography of Edward Everett Horton.

  Edward Everett was never a movie name on everybody’s lips, but his acting won him semi-fame in the 1930s and ’40s when he worked as a character actor in musical comedies. He was a tall, funny flibbertigibbit of a guy who played second banana to Fred Astaire in a dozen films. Horton, now long deceased, grew up a New York kid and attended Columbia University. That was no doubt the reason why the university signed on to publish Annie’s book.

  They were throwing a launch party for her at a theatre somewhere in Columbia’s complex of buildings. That was the following Tuesday. The plan was I’d fly down with Annie for a day and a half, then come back after the launch. Annie would stay longer to do publicity for the book. The prospect of the launch was what got her in a tizzy. She was relaxed and funny on radio, but when she was in front of a real live audience, like the one she’d have at Columbia, she got the heebie-jeebies.

  “I heard a bit of good news today,” Annie said, sipping her martini.

  “‘We pass this way but once,’” I said, quoting.

  Annie looked at me, “Where’s that from?”

  “Old New Yorker cartoon. Guy beaten down by life arrives home to his beaten-down wife. Guy says to wife, ‘Heard a bit of good news today. We pass this way but once.’”

  “I’m going to be on the Charlie Rose show next week,” Annie said.

  “Well, look at you,” I said. “Big-time Annie.”

  “Charlie Rose reaches people who buy books.”

  “Not to mention his show gets rerun at all hours of the day and night.”

  “Maximum exposure,” Annie said.

  “Are you cheering up?” I said.

  Annie polished off her martini.

  “I’ve still got to give the goddamn speech at the launch,” she said.

  I made Annie another martini, same way as before. She carried it with her on a stroll through the back garden while I organized the collection of salads Annie had planned for dinner.

  Around the house, we referred to the garden as the Eighth Wonder of the World. We had it designed and installed by a woman known by her clients as the Garden Goddess. Annie and I figured she deserved the GG status. Guests to our place exclaimed over all the greenery out there. “Greenery” was missing the point. There were greens aplenty, but they shaded deceptively into greys and maroons and deep purples. We had a birch tree, a Japanese maple, a ginkgo. We had hostas and a couple of berms. The foliage, bushes, and trees were so dense at this time of year that they blocked all trace on the horizon of the architecturally offensive buildings over on Spadina, including the one housing my office.

  I arranged place mats, dinner plates, napkins, and cutlery on the dining-room table along with enough different salads in bowls to feed the whole neighbourhood. Salads of chicken, tuna, potato, and plain greens, plus coleslaw. I opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio and fetched two white wine glasses.

  Outside, Annie was nowhere in sight, concealed among the foliage. I sat at the dining-room table and sipped my second martini. A minute or two later, I caught glimpses of Annie’s white blouse and tan slacks. The entire Annie soon emerged from among the garden’s thick pleasures. Annie was a petite woman, beguilingly so to me and all other admirers of feminine beauty. She had a triangular face, thick black hair, large brown eyes, and all kinds of shapeliness.

  “I’ve finished with moping,” Annie said after she sat down at the table. “At least for tonight.”

  “The miracle of a martini,” I said.

  “Not to mention the soothing effect of the Eighth Wonder.”

  Annie dressed the green salad in a concoction of her own invention. She was world-class in salad dressing. We helped ourselves to salads and started to eat.

  “Want to hear about Flame and his problems?” I said.

  “He’s really got oodles of do-re-mi?”

  “And then some.”

  Annie made a circular motion with her left hand. “On with it, pal,” she said.

  I told her the whole story just as I’d told Gloria, soft-pedalling the lyrics to Flame’s songs but adding the Google scoop about the Reverend’s history of Catholic disgrace.

  “You know what I’d do if I were you?” Annie said when I finished.

  “You’d phone the Reverend,” I said. “Make an appointment and call on the man.”

  “Take the direct approach.” Annie said, nodding in agreement with herself. “Works every time.”

  “I prefer to take the direct approach indirectly.” I said.

  Annie made a small harumphing sound.

  She said, “What’s the word you use to describe what you do when you are, as I more accurately call it, stalling?”

  “Reconnoitre.”

  “Baloney by any other name,” Annie said.

  We were making steady inroads on the salads. My favourite was the one Annie put together with the potatoes and just the right balance of m
ayonnaise, yoghurt, and green onions. The Pinot Grigio wasn’t bad either.

  “By Friday noon,” I said, “I’ll have Gloria’s report on the target guy.”

  “The Reverend who’s an alleged scoundrel,” Annie said.

  “Also by then,” I said, “I’ll have nosed around Heaven’s Philosophers on St. Clair. Taken the measure of the sort of people who go there for their spiritual needs. Chatted up the more amenable among them about the Reverend. Observed the man himself from a bit of distance. Taken the lie of the land.” I hesitated. “Or is it the lay of the land I’m taking?”

  “To lay is to place,” Annie said, “To lie is to recline.”

  “I recall that from your previous wordsmith seminars.”

  “How that works out in practice is a horse of a different colour.”

  “How so?”

  “In Canada,” Annie said, “it’s ‘lie of the land.’ In the U.S.A., it’s ‘lay.’”

  “Where the Reverend Douglas is concerned,” I said, “I’m taking the lie of the land.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Annie said. “The part you’re ignoring, historically speaking, is that something always goes wrong on your misbegotten reconnoitre excursions.”

  “Where’s the threat on this one? From a possibly nutty clergyman?”

  Annie shook her head, looking momentarily doleful.

  We ate more heaps of the salads, but didn’t come close to polishing them off. Annie took her Jane Gardam novel up to bed while I put the leftovers into containers in the refrigerator. I loaded the dishwasher and followed Annie upstairs.

  She seemed to be getting a kick out of Jane Gardam. I got in beside her with my copy of Gary Burton’s autobiography. How a kid from a small Indiana town made musical history as the world’s greatest jazz vibraphone player, and discovered he was gay. We read for an hour, and just after we turned the lights off and just before we drifted off to sleep, Annie snuggled up to me.

  “Promise you’ll be careful, sweetie,” she whispered in my ear.

  “Mmm,” I murmured.

  It was an ambivalent murmur.

  Chapter Seven

  The quarters for the Reverend Alton Douglas’s church were on the north side of St. Clair near Jane Street in a stretch of buildings that had seen better days. A scrappy-looking bingo hall, a shut-down McDonald’s, a discount gas station. The church was the exception. Was it proper to call Heaven’s Philosophers a church?

  It was early afternoon as I coasted past it in my trusty 1983 four-door Mercedes. The building didn’t really have the air of a house of worship — not from the outside, at least. No steeple, no cross. In height, it stood three storeys, with the ground floor much larger in width and length than the two storeys above. Unlike the upper floors, glass enclosed the first level on all sides, giving it an airy look. On floors two and three, the exterior was all brick with just two tall narrow windows at the front. They weren’t stained-glass windows as best I could make out from down below.

  I steered the Mercedes north on the street running along the west side of the church building, parked, and got out. I was dressed in casual but respectable looking duds. Two-hundred-dollar jeans from Rainbow on Yorkville, black Nikes, buttoned-down navy blue shirt, summer jacket in a shade Annie called wheat. Clothes fit for a religious experience if that turned out to be on offer. I walked back to the Heaven’s Philosophers front entrance.

  Inside, the floor of the lobby was done in sleek grey marble. On either side, curved staircases, likewise marble, led to the second floor. Straight ahead, three shops ran in a line against the north wall. Left to right: a travel agency, a coffee bar, and a copy shop. Each was modest in dimensions; none of them was thrumming with commerce at the moment.

  A fortyish guy in a suit and tie sat alone at a desk in the travel office, leafing through a brochure without much enthusiasm. The young guy in the copy shop was likewise on his own, sitting at a computer with a super-large screen and playing a game that involved blasting dragons to smithereens. The coffee bar was more my speed. It was the only place doing what might be called business. I ambled in its direction.

  Behind the counter, a dark-haired kid in his late teens had two kinds of coffee on sale, espresso and an unidentified blend. The counter also sported a plate of glazed doughnuts in a round glass cage. The doughnuts gave signs of having been encased for more than a couple of days.

  Three customers standing in a group were holding heavy, white china mugs of coffee, probably the unidentified blend. Everything about the physical appearance of two of these guys was thick. Thick bodies, thick voices, possibly thick heads. The third guy was just as tall as the other two but slimmer and less rackety. Grey haired and in his early seventies, he looked to have two or three decades on them.

  What the first two guys reminded me of were people I saw in the hallways outside the criminal courts at Old City Hall waiting for their cases to be called. They looked like guys who could have been my clients. For a startled moment, I thought one of them was the real article, somebody I represented within living memory. Was that possible?

  This particular guy was thick and meaty and loud. He wore jeans, a lightweight black sports jacket, and a tie with a design you couldn’t miss, something featuring large black balls against a deep maroon background. When the guy spoke, it was in a high-pitched voice that didn’t go with the rest of the package. I’d heard and seen the guy before, but not, I realized, as a client of mine. He was Fox’s client in a fraud case a couple of years back. I’d acted briefly for one of Mr. High-Pitched Voice’s co-accused. The representation was brief because the Crown severed the charges against my guy, and sent him to trial on his own. Before we got started on the new trial, the client fired me in favour of a lawyer his mother liked better.

  I was pretty sure I’d nailed the identity of the guy with the voice, but to make it rock solid, I needed to check with Fox. If I was right, it’d be swift progress to get the identification thing squared away. Then I could put my mind to the reason why a possible bunch of heavies were hanging out in the halls of Heaven’s Philosophers.

  I stepped up to the counter and asked the dark-haired kid what he was peddling besides espresso.

  “Today, sir,” the kid said, “I’m featuring a blend from Paraguay.”

  “You recommend it?”

  “First day I’ve gone with the Paraguay, sir,” the kid said. He had the barista patter pretty much under control. “But my customers tell me they’re cool with its flavour.”

  “Get many of them around here? Customers?”

  The guy let his cheery barista manner slip a notch.

  “Enough,” he said after a few seconds. “It, like, depends.”

  “On what? Sundays better than week days?”

  “I’m not open Sundays.”

  “Aren’t you skipping a potential bonanza? Think of all those thirsty parishioners coming out of an uplifting sermon in the room at the top of those stairs.”

  “Mister,” the kid said, a touch exasperated, “I do what I’m told, okay?”

  “I’m assuming there is Sunday church, sermon included?”

  “Yeah, Sunday afternoons, but the coffee bar is closed then, like I said,” the kid answered. “You want to order something or not?”

  I asked for a Paraguay, paid three bucks, and carried my heavy, white-china mug to another counter where milk and sugar were available. It wasn’t because I wanted either milk or sugar but because I needed to take up position where I could surreptitiously snap a photo on my cell of the guy with the high-pitched voice.

  I took a sip of the Paraguay and savoured it for a moment. This was good stuff. From Paraguay? That made it a first for me.

  I put my mug down on the counter with the milk and sugar. I was standing in a position that placed me at an angle facing three-quarters away from the trio of gents. The guy I wanted the photo of was
in the middle of the three. He was turned my way, though his head was slightly inclined allowing him to pay attention to the older guy on his right who was speaking. The third guy in the trio, the one on the left of the guy I was interested in, was notable for his aggressively jutting jaw.

  I got the iPhone out of my jacket pocket, gripping it in my right hand as if I was raising it to my ear. When the phone reached waist level, aimed past me in the general direction of the three guys, I pressed the shoot button of the camera function. It went off without any flashing lights or any sound beyond a subdued click.

  I have minimal skills at photography. Generally, I steer clear of taking photos of loved ones, never mind strangers. I’d used the iPhone as a camera just once. My subject was Annie. She said the picture added ten years to her age. It made her look like she was wearing a bad wig. She told me to delete the photo. I did as I was told.

  Putting the phone to my ear in the Heaven’s Philosophers lobby, I pretended I was listening to a message. There was no message, and I wasn’t listening to anything except the three guys behind me. If they stopped talking, it might mean they’d caught me snapping the picture. If they shouted, “Hey, asshole!” it would mean for sure they’d caught me.

  I relaxed when they carried on with their loud chat as before.

  I carried my mug with the nice brew to one of the benches along the lobby wall. I flicked the screen on the iPhone to the photo I’d just snapped. The picture was half okay. The not-okay half showed nothing except the left sleeve of my wheat jacket. The close-up of the jacket eliminated from the photograph the guy with the jutting jaw. In the other half, I had a profile of the older guy and a pretty clear full-face view of the guy I figured for Fox’s former client.

  I pressed a bunch of buttons to send the photo and a short note to Fox winging their way to Fox’s office. While I was winding up my communications, someone beside me cleared his throat. I jerked my head up in automatic surprise.