Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

He gave me a smile and a little wave when he saw me looking at him. “Nice place,” he said.

“It’ll do.”

“Mainly tourists?”

I stared at him for a second. The small talk was supposed to show me he was in complete control. “It used to be,” I said finally, “but the locals have found it.” The sweat from my palm smeared the glass I was cleaning and I had to start over. “It’s about fifty-fifty now.”

He nodded appreciatively, looking around a little more. “I live over by Queen and Bathurst,” he said. “I go into the Wheat Sheaf sometimes. But I work out of 51 Division, five hundred meters from here. You’d think I’d have had cause to come in before now.”

“I guess we keep our noses clean,” I said.

“I usually work nights, so you must. Or we would have met by now.” He pulled out a stool and sat, ran his fingertips over the old, burnished wood on the bar. He had massive, thick hands. I knew what he looked like from the pictures in his house, and I knew he was a big man, but in person he was considerably more imposing. There were a couple other surprising things about him too: His face was warm and his eyes soulful. He had a huge gourmand’s nose. If I hadn’t been on guard, I might have taken an instant liking to him. “This bar and the Wheat Sheaf,” he said, “they must be about the same vintage, eh?”

“About that. 1830s or thereabout.”

“I just love these old places,” he said. “Nobody really cares about them, though. If they’re in the way, down they come. Lucky this spot wasn’t of interest to anyone.”

I had to smile. He was playing me perfectly. I put the glass into the overhead rack and took another one out of the rotary washer. I decided it was time for him to make his point. If I had any say in the matter, I wanted this over before there were customers to deal with. “Listen, officer,” I said, “the lunch rush is coming in soon. Is there anything I can help you with?”

He seemed to shake the cobwebs out, like he just remembered he was on business, and drew a wallet out of his inside jacket pocket. He flipped his ID open to me. “Sorry, I slip into reveries I guess. Detective Inspector Leonard Albrecht,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’m not here on licensing business.”

“I figured as much,” I replied, keeping my eye on him.

“You’re Terry McEwan?” I nodded. “You got any unhappy ex-employees?” I thought about that for a minute. What the hell could one of my ex-employees have told Leonard Albrecht about where I went in my off hours? I said that there were none I was aware of. He opened his notebook. “Do you remember a Deborah Cooper?”

“Yeah. She served tables here this summer. She was seasonal, you know? I hire them in June and cut them loose after Labor Day.” A glimmer of something began to surface in the back of my mind. “What did she say?”

“Well, she came in last week to complain you were running an illegal after-hours club here.”

“Yeah?”

“Is it true?”

I tried not to show my pleasure at his line of questioning. How do you like that? I thought. Leonard Albrecht shows up in my bar not to blacken my eye for having an affair with his wife, but because he’s pulled duty to look into my underground activities. Someone up there had a very black sense of humor. “It depends what part you’re asking me about. The ‘illegal’ or the ‘after-hours.’ ”

He tilted his head at me minutely, like a huge parrot. “From that I take it’s a yes to the after-hours part, but you’re of the opinion that you’re not doing anything wrong.”

“It’s a private club, detective.”

“You charge money?”

“It pays the servers for their time.”

“I see. And there’s nothing leftover for you. So you’re basically volunteering your time, right?”

He had me there, but I couldn’t come up with something to counter him with. I was thinking of how I was going to tell Katherine all of this. You’re not going to fucking believe who walked into my bar this morning , was what I was already saying to her in my mind. I could see the dread and curiosity in her eyes, the way she’d say, NO! when I told her, like there wasn’t a chance I could be telling the truth. We’d be sitting on the couch, two glasses of wine on the coffee table in front of us, and I’d tell her and she’d slap me on the arm, her eyes wide — Get out! — and then she’d be laughing hysterically with her hand over her mouth. I heard her in my mind as if she were standing right there at the bar in front of me. Oh, how awful! Her mouth pursed in delighted horror. You poor, poor thing! I was almost of a mind to draw this out as long as I could.

Except I had a problem now. Leonard Albrecht was real.

“You still with me?” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “Am I going to need a lawyer?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you’re straight with me or not.”

I processed that for a moment and it dawned on me that if the man was as much a student of history as he’d said he was, he might be interested in what was below my bar for more than just procedural reasons. “This was a worker’s bar,” I said. “Mainly Irish. They opened it and ran it, but management told them what hours they could keep, what activities were allowed. I guess running a bar on the grounds of a distillery has its challenges.” Albrecht smiled. “Anyway, I guess some of them didn’t like being told their business. They secretly dug themselves a basement and they did what they liked down there.”

“Which was what?” asked Albrecht.

“Music, dancing. The occasional cockfight. And there was a boxing ring.”

“That’s what she said.” He looked down at his notes. “Cooper. She said there was fighting.”

“Is that the illegal part?”

“Oh no, it’s all illegal. Selling liquor in an unlicensed room, holding a sports contest. Both are pretty bad, but the two of them together are really bad. You sell tickets to the bouts?”

I saw Gillian and Henry, my lunch staff, come in through the side door. They shot me looks and disappeared into the kitchen. “We only have three or four fights a year.”

“You sell tickets?”

“Yeah,” I said, starting to think maybe I shouldn’t have felt so smug about Albrecht’s reason for visiting me. Maybe an accusation and a fat lip wouldn’t have been as bad as this was starting to look. “Listen, I didn’t really know—”

“You knew,” he said. “Let’s not go down that road.” He stood up. “Show me.”

“Is there any way we could do this when the bar’s a little quieter?”

“Your people can handle the first rush. You’ve got other business. Let’s go.”

When Alan Kravitz handed me the keys to the place, he held one of them up, a rusty, old-fashioned one. “There’s a little storage space under the bar, might be useful to you. Be careful, though, the floors are rotting and I don’t know how strong the beams are.”

The first time I went down there, I brought my cook with me to see if he thought it would be a good place for a fridge. “Christ,” he’d said. “You could dry salami down here.”

We’d walked through the small, dark, dusty room with two flashlights and a pair of long sticks, pushing crates aside with them. There was a disgusting stained cloth lining one of the walls, and I guess Kravitz hadn’t brought a stick with him when he first investigated because I used mine to pull the cloth away and found a door behind it. It lead in to an enormous room with a broken-down piano in it, a bar, a stage, and a tattered old boxing ring. There were some forty chairs arranged around the room. We’d shone our beams into the cold, lightless place and looked on it with genuine wonder. Under the bar was a log with a record of bar sales and admission fees and the like, and we saw that there hadn’t been a soul in that place for eighty years. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked the cook.