Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

The kitchen door was closed. I crept down the hall and opened it a crack. Vova and Billy were sitting at the kitchen table. Vova was slumped over the table, his broad back toward me. Billy looked up when the door opened. I nodded, and Billy stood, went to Vova, dragged him from his chair, and began moving toward the basement stairs. The old man came to and started grumbling. “What the hell?”

“Time for bed,” Billy said, coolly.

Vova laughed. “Hey, you make mistake. That’s the basement way. What the hell? I’m the drunk one.” He laughed again; then Billy pushed him. For a beat there was silence, then a dull thud as Vova’s body hit the concrete at the bottom of the stairs. Billy disappeared after him. Mesmerized, I moved across the kitchen floor to the door that led to the cellar. I saw it all: Vova’s body splayed on the floor, twitching like a grotesque abandoned puppet; Billy sitting back on his heels, breathing hard and watching. When the twitching didn’t stop, Billy leaned forward and pinched Vova’s nostrils shut until finally he was still. As Billy came back up the stairs toward me, I felt a wash of relief; then his fingers were around my throat. The stench of death and rage that poured off his skin was overpowering.

“If you tell anybody what you saw, I’ll kill you,” he said. And I knew he would.

Billy was a man who kept his promises — all of them. That night, as Vova lay dead in the basement, Billy took me to the fireworks at the CNE. As the rockets ignited and threw Billy’s profile into sharp relief, he was so beautiful I couldn’t imagine my life without him. But the moment passed. The last exploding star arced across the sky, and the dark, cheerless night closed in on us. Coming home on the subway, we leaned against each other, exhausted by the events of the day. The house on Charles Street West was silent, and like children in a fairy tale who suddenly find themselves in peril, Billy and I held hands as we climbed the stairs. That night Billy made love to me with a violence that thrilled and terrified me. When he was through, he fell away like a sated animal and slept the sleep of the innocent.

I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. My mind was assaulted by images that I knew not even time could erase, and I was terrified that I might have, somehow, harmed my baby. When Billy’s breathing became deep and rhythmic, I slipped out of bed and started for the door. Obeying an impulse I didn’t understand, I took the shoebox that contained the spiral notebooks Billy had filled with his plans and ideas. Then I went to my room, packed my suitcase, and walked out the front door of the house on Charles Street West for the last time.

It’s always been easy for a woman to disappear in Toronto, especially if no one really wants to find her. The day after I left Billy, a childless widower in his late fifties hired me as his companion/housekeeper. Six weeks later I married him. When my son was born, I named him after my new husband: Mark Edward Lawton.

My husband was a generous and loving father, but naming a child after a man does not make the baby that man’s son. From the day he was born, Mark was Billy’s boy. As I knelt on the floor of my bedroom closet and pulled out the shoebox that held the spiral notebooks in which Billy had recorded his dreams and secrets, I knew that Billy’s boy needed his dad.

“It’s my city. I don’t have to consult anyone.”

— Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto

I didn’t go downtown often. I could buy everything I needed on the Danforth; besides, when I got off the subway at Bloor, I felt lost. Nothing stayed the same. It was as if a sorcerer who was never satisfied had taken over the old neighborhood, replacing the solid brick houses and tiny lawns with buildings that soared and shone brightly until the sorcerer waved them away and conjured up buildings that soared even higher and shone even more brightly.

It must be hard to keep focused in a world that’s constantly shifting. Perhaps that’s why Billy, in a gesture that the Toronto Star praised, located his offices on the site of the house that Vova left him. I thought I would feel a pang when I returned to the place I had run from in the early hours of that hot night of love and death. But I felt nothing. The sleek shops and gleaming high-rises that lined Charles Street West made it so uniformly perfect that there was nothing left to recognize.

Billy’s office was on the fifty-first floor. I was counting on the elevator ride to give me time to compose myself, but the smooth soundless glide was over in seconds, and when the doors opened, I found myself in Billy’s world. The reception area of Merchant Enterprises was designed to impress and intimidate: Everything was hard-surfaced, sharp-edged, and high gloss. The woman behind the reception desk fit right in. Whippet-thin, porcelain-skinned with red-red lips and red-red nails, her close-fitted sharkskin suit had been cut to showcase her perfection. She gave me a quick, assessing look, decided I wasn’t worth her time, and glared. When I asked to see Billy, she was brusque, almost rude. “Mr. Merchant isn’t available.”

“May I leave something for him?”

She nodded.

I pulled the spiral notebook from my purse, ripped out a page upon which Billy had written the words KILL VOVA a dozen times in the margins, and handed it to her. “Give this to Billy,” I said. “Tell him it’s from the woman who was standing beside him in the picture in the paper this morning.”

She held the grimy ripped page between her thumb and forefinger and looked at it with distaste.

“Better get a move on,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes at me, decided I meant business, and then pressed a button with one of her perfectly shaped nails. “Mr. Merchant, there’s a person here to see you. Her picture was in the paper with you this morning.”

“Nicely done,” I said. Then I sat down to wait. Time-wise, Billy’s sprint from his office to the reception area must have been a personal best, but he wasn’t even breathing hard. He looked me up and down, gave me his bullet-stopping grin, and held out his arms. “It’s been a long time.”

When I didn’t walk into his embrace, Billy turned to his receptionist. “Nova, cancel the rest of my appointments for this morning and hold my calls.” He placed his fingertips on my elbow. “Why don’t we go down to my office? I have a feeling you and I’ve got a few things to discuss.”

We were silent as Billy guided me down the hall, opened the door, and led me inside. For the first time since he’d spotted me in the reception area, Billy seemed uncertain. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, but you’ve always had a way of surprising me.”

“I’m not through yet,” I said. Two walls of Billy’s office were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the view of the city was spectacular. For a few moments, I looked down on Toronto, getting my bearings.

“So what’s the verdict?” Billy asked.

“It’s a great city,” I said. “But you always knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, and from up here you can’t smell the garbage.”

There was something different about Billy that I couldn’t put my finger on. Up close, there was no doubt that his hair was dyed, and the skin around his eyes had the strange tightness that comes from too much plastic surgery. But the change in Billy was more than cosmetic. Underneath the thousanddollar suit, there was a weariness that no amount of tailoring could disguise. And his voice was different — lower and flatter. It didn’t take long for the truth to hit me. For the first time in his life, Billy Merchant had stopped looking forward to the future. There were no more mountains for him to climb. Billy met my gaze. “Time marches on, eh?”