Robert Wilson - The Affinities

I hurried upstairs.

Lisa and Loretta’s room was a shady cave of deep-pile broadloom and Egyptian cotton sheets dominated by an oak-frame four-post bed. The window facing the street was as old as the house, single-paned and frosted with ice. Drafty, but they had never replaced it with something more modern—I guessed they preferred snuggling under the comforter on winter nights.

“You can see the street?”

I used my sleeve to scrub away a lacework of frost. “Yeah, I can see the street.”

“The car still there?”

The Venza was still idling under the streetlight, yes.

“Send me a picture.”

Trev liked to mock the out-of-date Samsung smartphone I carried around, but it was good enough to capture a shot of the street, even on a dark winter evening.

“Huh,” Trevor said. “That’s pretty sure his car…”

“ Whose car?”

“It belongs to a guy named Bobby Botero, and I need to have a talk with him.”

I perched on the edge of the bed as Trev told me the story of Bobby and Mouse.

Mouse had been working in the human resources department of the Ontario Ministry of Labour when she first met Bobby Botero. Mouse’s parents had died within six weeks of each other the previous year, and her only other close family member—an older sister—lived in Calgary, more than a thousand miles away. Uneasy with strangers and slow to make friends, Mouse had been understandably lonely. Her loneliness caused her to resort to the digital crapshoot of eHarmony, which had come up serial snake eyes, until the online dating service placed her in the hands of Bobby Botero.

Botero impressed her on their first evening out by ordering chilled lobster salad and yuzu aioli at a restaurant called Auberge des Pêches. He was everything her other dates had not been: tall, confident, adequately groomed. The reason he was so well received at Auberge des Pêches was that he ran the city’s most successful restaurant-supply business: the plates from which they spooned their chocolate ganache and croustade aux pommes had come from Bobby’s east-end warehouse. Clearly this was a man who knew what he was doing.

What he was doing was seducing her into a hasty marriage. Only after six months of aggressive courtship and a lightly attended exchange of vows did Mouse finally begin to sense the presence of a deeper, truer, darker Bobby Botero. Bobby, it turned out, liked to be in control. Mouse was expected to phone him at least twice daily when he was in his Danforth Avenue office, keeping him posted on her whereabouts. Eventually he convinced her to quit her job at the Ministry of Labour and take a secretarial job at Botero Food Service Supplies, where she prepared and filed invoices within shouting distance of his office door. Early in her tenure he fired a male accountant for “getting too friendly” with her, which was how he characterized what Mouse had perceived as harmless flirting. Bobby had no social life, and Mouse began to suspect she would never have any real friends of her own … unless she counted Bobby as a friend, which, increasingly, she did not.

“You’ll need to borrow Lisa’s car,” Trev said into my ear. “What we’re going to do, the two of us, is box in Bobby’s vehicle, make it so he can’t just drive off. Then I’ll have a word with him.”

“Okay, wait,” I said, liking this less by the minute.

“Just go get in the car.”

Mouse’s marriage to Bobby lasted as long as it took for a few of his secrets to float up from obscurity. A furtive phone call to Mouse from Bobby’s aunt Caprice revealed the existence of not one but two ex-wives, both of whom had at various times caused restraining orders to be placed on Bobby, and both of whom, when Mouse eventually contacted them, shared similar stories: unwarranted jealousy and tight surveillance escalating to verbal and physical abuse. Mouse saw a grim future hurtling toward her like an ICBM.

And there was the matter of Bobby’s business. Botero Food Service Supplies was a self-evidently successful enterprise: goods flowed from the warehouse in a reliable stream and invoices were paid promptly and in full. But from her position at the account desk it seemed to Mouse that something was—well, off.

“Because it isn’t entirely a legitimate business,” Trev explained as I shrugged into a jacket and borrowed the keys to Lisa’s five-year-old Accord. “Botero uses it to launder money for some local guys with a trade in stolen vehicles and connections to the ’Ndrangheta—the Calabrian Mafia.”

“Mouse figured this out?”

“Mouse noticed some irregularities in the invoices, but she found solid evidence in Botero’s desk one afternoon when he was out talking to a corporate buyer. And there’s more to it than that.”

This was what I learned on the way from the back door to the carriage-house garage where Lisa’s Accord and Loretta’s ancient Volvo brooded together in wintry silence:

Mouse had asked for a divorce. Bobby refused her request and threatened her with a beating or worse if she so much as glanced at a passing trial lawyer. He explained that he himself was thoroughly lawyered-up, and if she insisted on starting proceedings she would come out of it with nothing to show but an aching hollow where her self-respect used to be. And, he insisted, he loved her, and he wanted to prevent her from making a terrible mistake.

Mouse bowed her head and meekly agreed. The next day she left work at noon, drove home, packed a few essentials, and moved to a motel room on the Queensway strip. She emptied a bank account she had never told Bobby she possessed and sold to a pawnbroker the few items of gold and silver she had inherited from her mother.

Over the course of the next six months Mouse managed to find herself a new clerical job, moved into an apartment in the basement of a midtown row house, humanized that space with a selection of funky thrift-shop furniture, and saved as much as she could from her weekly paycheck. As soon as she had built up a useful surplus she did two more things: consulted a divorce lawyer and signed up for Affinity testing.

Before long she was a registered Tau with a pending application for divorce. Bobby was well-lawyered, but the law left little room for maneuver; in the end he chose not to contest the proceeding. Mouse had brought very little personal property to the marriage and wanted nothing from Bobby, which made it easier.

“You in the car?”

“Yes,” I said. “But, Trev—”

“Good. I’ll let you know when I’m at the corner, then you pull out of the garage. Come at Botero’s car from behind, park up close to his bumper. I’ll be right behind you, and I’ll cut him off from the front.”

“What happens then?”

“Then I have a conversation with him. That’s all.”

Mouse, though shy by nature, thrived in her Tau tranche. She had almost convinced herself that her bad marriage was behind her when a series of envelopes without return addresses began arriving in the mail. Sometimes the envelopes contained brief hand-scrawled messages. WHORE was a repeat favorite, as was SICK FILTHY CUNT. Sometimes the envelopes contained photographs of Mouse taken without her knowledge: Mouse coming home from work in a yellow summer frock, Mouse dressed up for a tranche party, Mouse fidgeting in the line outside the restroom at a local movie theater.

There was not enough evidence linking these threats to Bobby Botero for the police to get involved, and although Mouse’s lawyer applied for a generic restraining order, Mouse wasn’t convinced that it would change Botero’s behavior. He was obviously nursing a massive grudge, and Mouse knew he was capable of engineering acts of vengeance beyond her power to avoid.