Howard Shrier - Buffalo jump

I wanted to get in to work early, whip through my media clips and forward anything pertinent to Clint and his department heads, then boot back out and try to get a look at Jay Silver and family in the flesh. I figured I could do all that and still be back at my cubicle by the time Franny reeled in.

Clint’s black Pathfinder was in its reserved spot when I pulled into the Beacon lot ten minutes later. I had no idea what time he arrived in the morning. In five years I had never yet beaten him in to work. The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the office when I swiped my way in. I was in the kitchenette pouring myself a mug when Clint appeared. He made a show of looking at his watch and feigning shock at my early arrival. The good humour seemed a little forced but I appreciated the effort.

“You’re in early,” he said.

“I’m helping Franny out on his nursing home thing.”

“Good. I told him to call on you if he was overloaded.”

“Oh, he was overloaded.”

Clint smiled. He had known Franny a lot longer than I had, had no doubt witnessed many a late entrance. “Never mind, smart guy. How you doing otherwise?”

“Fine.”

“You sure?

“Yeah.”

“Bring your coffee to my office,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something. Now’s as good a time as any.”

I first met Graham McClintock at the Dojo on Danforth, where I taught the evening adult class in intermediate shotokan karate. Most of the students were in their forties or fifties, from professional women concerned about the city’s rising crime rates to film producers who wanted to look as buff as the younger actors and techies they hired. Clint was close to sixty then: an inch taller than my six feet, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist and thick, powerful legs. Photos of a younger Clint show him with flaming red hair but it was grey by then and cropped close to his skull. His eyes were a piercing blue that made Paul Newman’s look flat.

From the beginning he stood out in both his degree of fitness and his aptitude for combat. He sparred with an intensity that intimidated other students, who tried hard to avoid being matched against him. If he sparred against me, he’d compete as if I were trying to make him my jailhouse bride. After class he’d hang around and ask questions about stances, weight shifts, feints and blocks. We developed a good rapport, Clint and I. My father had been dead more than ten years, and I enjoyed having him to both learn from and teach.

One night after class, he asked me to join him for a beer and a bite, his treat, so we cleaned up and went to Allen’s, a Riverdale institution with more than 300 beers and many a fine whisky on hand. We washed hamburgers and sweet potato fries down with Dragon’s Breath ale, then ordered shots of the Macallan.

When the drinks arrived, he said, “You’ve never asked what I do for a living. This town, it’s usually the first thing people want to know about you. That and how much you paid for your house.”

“It’s not how I define people, so it’s not how I get to know them.”

“I’m not going to ask what you do, because I already know,” he said. “But can I ask what you did before?”

There was no short answer. I wasn’t like my brother Daniel; my academic past had been checkered at best. I was smart enough to know I wasn’t stupid, but I had never been able to harness it in school. I was in my own world most of the time, mourning my father, insulating myself in a haze of hash smoke. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I used to sneak over to the adjacent apartment building to smoke dope with Kenny Aber, and from his bedroom window we could identify my family’s unit by the one constant: my brother’s silhouette against his blinds as he studied into the night. “Is that a cardboard cut-out or what?” Kenny would ask. “I swear he never moves.”

No one ever said that about me. I was always moving, just not getting anywhere.

I told Clint a little about the things I had done after finishing Grade 12, starting with my years in Banff, on the eastern slope of the Rockies, where I tended bar and skied in the winter and worked construction in the summer. I also gave him a brief precis of my time in Israel, focusing on the beginning, not the end. Like many other young Jews dismayed by the materialism of their parents’ generation, I had gone there searching for something purer and more demanding of myself. A collective dream I could be part of. While I gave only the briefest details of my army time, I did tell Clint how I had begun to study martial arts there, in the form of Krav Maga, a self-defence system designed by an Israeli army man. Roni Galil was my mentor. When I returned to Toronto, I abandoned Krav Maga for karate, needing at the time to leave all things Israeli behind.

“So is that it for you?” Clint asked me. “Martial arts instructor for life?”

“Why do I feel like you’re interviewing me for a job?” I said.

He said, “Maybe it’s time you asked what I do.”

The walls of Clint’s office were covered with photos of him with high-ranking cops and city officials, certificates of courses he had taken since leaving the Toronto force and framed newspaper articles about Beacon Security success stories. His large beechwood desk was covered with neat rows of current files. A laptop on his desk was networked to a large flat-screen monitor. He pointed to the visitor’s chair in his office. I sat.

“How’s the arm?” he asked.

“It’s fine.”

“A hundred per cent?”

“Maybe ninety.”

“Let’s see.” He moved a row of files aside, rolled up his right shirtsleeve and planted his elbow on his side of the desk.

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” he said. “Show me what you got.”

I rolled up my sleeve and placed my elbow opposite his. We gripped hands and locked eyes.

“Go,” he said.

There was no use trying to pin him. Being left-handed put me at a disadvantage to begin with; nor was my right arm quite the ninety per cent I’d claimed. I forgot about trying to take him down and focused instead on resistance, hoping he would tire. But when we had been stalemated at ninety degrees for thirty seconds or so, my triceps started to quiver. He put more into it; so did I. Clint’s face grew a shade redder but I ascribed that to his Celtic roots, not any challenge I posed.

Carol Dunn picked that moment to walk in with a sheaf of messages and a stack of documents that looked like invoices. “Sir, I have Ted Sellers on the line about the number of surveillance hours we billed him and-”

We parted hands as quickly as clandestine lovers, but not quickly enough.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know Jonah was with you.” Obviously wasting your time, her body language added.

“It was my idea,” Clint said.

“Mm-hmm.”

“An evaluation of sorts.”

“I’m sure.”

“Tell Ted I’ll look at the file and get back to him. Anything I need to sign?”

“Two contracts, the letters you asked me for and we have invoices to pay.”

He patted the desk and she laid down her file.

“Do you need anything else?” Carol asked sweetly. When Clint said no, she paused to throw me a look that was all stainless steel, then went back to her guard post. He asked her to close the door behind her.

“Okay,” he said. “We have things to talk about.”

“Like what?”

“Your health, mental and physical. Your outlook. How ready you feel to get back to-”

“Ready!”

“Not so fast, champ. Getting shot leaves scars, and I don’t just mean the ones we see. I spent thirty years on the force and not every cop who got shot made it back to active duty.”