Wise was bad enough for both of them. I found this out easily enough once I’d replaced the master list and pulled the file on CLELAND, JOHN. Wise was born in 1933, which put him in his seventh decade. He had been walking the thin line between business and crime since the late 1950s, when he may or may not have been behind a ring that supplied the still unnamed flower children with the weed that dreams are made of. A few of his friends did time for this, but he escaped because the local police were unable to find a link between the cannabis grown, packed and stored in a barn out Pelham Road with the owner of the property, an absentee landlord whose tenant could not be traced. In the 1970s he became interested in pre-Columbian art and made regular visits to South and Central America. Although searched at all the best airports, he still managed to stay free of the law. When a big drug bust occurred in Toronto and Wise’s name was mentioned, no charges were laid and the newspaper was advised by its legal staff to print an apology, which it did. After that, Wise managed to stay out of print until the eighties, when his great interest in pre-Columbian art extended to South-east Asia, Hong Kong and Afghanistan, from where he told one investigative reporter “all the best samples may be found.”
From drug-dealing, Abe-I started calling him Abe to myself as we got better acquainted-began to take an interest in the plight of political refugees and stateless persons. This was followed by a passion for shipping and small airlines. He was once called “the wetback’s best friend” by a Toronto magazine that not surprisingly changed its address for every issue. Local authorities thought that they had finally caught up to him when a ship loaded with “refugees” struck an abutment of the Peace Bridge near Buffalo and nearly sank with all aboard. The survivors told the police through an interpreter that they were just out for a cruise and hadn’t brought any papers with them since they had no intention of landing on the other side of the border. They denied knowing Abe Wise or any of his associates. A week later they were still sticking to their story. Abe knew how to pick his refugees.
Two years ago, a new pattern began to show up. Abe began collecting artifacts from native Canadian reserves along the St. Lawrence River. He also gathered arrowheads, beadwork and baskets from the reservations along the New York shore of the river. Quite incidentally, the increased trade in illegal cigarettes began about that time. Abram’s interest in the art and history of the original Americans took him to Poland, Romania and the former Soviet Union. Only a couple of sharp reporters specializing in organized crime ventured to link Abram Wise and the sudden appearance in both Canada and the United States of cigarettes that originally had been shipped taxfree to Poland, Romania and the former Soviet Union.
This phase didn’t last long and, unlike some, Abe was well out of it before the cigarette game went out in a sudden puff of smoke. Smuggling bonded booze across the border was a ready-made substitute. It used the same boats and trucks he had bought for moving cigarettes.
You couldn’t help admiring his cleverness: never an arrest, never more than unfounded accusations. Whenever the police or press became bolder than usual, they had to backtrack and issue an apology. The nearest thing to a bust came in the mid-eighties, when a ship that could be traced to a company he could be connected with was found to have one of its winches stuffed with heroin. It was a multi-million-dollar haul, but only those found on board did any time because of it. I noted their names. Abram explained that he only owned a piece of the company that owned the ship; he didn’t know what cargoes any of his ships carried. I rather liked the idea of hiding things in the core of a winch under hundreds of feet of steel cable. It spoke of a fertile mind, one I was learning to know and respect.
I decided that there was a limit to the amount of information I could absorb at a sitting. Now that I knew where the file was kept, I could relax a little. Not as much as I thought I might, because when I looked up from the file I saw Mickey Armstrong leafing through the pages of an 1875 atlas of Grantham. Sitting next to Stefan, the photographer who never exposed any film, he looked up long enough to see if I had any plans for lunch. Mickey had the air of being cut out for better things than shadowing the likes of me. He looked like a soldier whose wartime experience was all in administration. I had to watch him, but I couldn’t give him the slip. I needed his regular reports to Wise to keep me alive. When I returned the file to its drawer, Mickey closed up the atlas so that it blew paper off the librarian’s desk. By then I had put my coat on and was pretending not to see the photographer grinning at me.
FOUR
“My father was in junk, Mr. Cooperman. I’m in steel and my kids, Jerry and Bernie, are in the fabrication business. It’s all the same: same yard, same office, same books, same people working there. Just the names get changed, like there are innocent parties to be protected.”
Dave Rogers was fat. That’s the only word for him. He had jowls like a hound and his belly kept the rest of him a foot and a half away from the table we were sharing. I suspected that under all that jelly there were the remains of youthful muscles gone to grass, muscles that used to be able to shift loads of steel about the yard.
“The old man started with rags, bones and bottles like every other junk collector in the 1920s. Then he moved to lead pipe and copper wire and other metals. By the time I came along it was scrap metal not junk. Now Jerry is doing special jobs with I-beams and H-beams for bridge companies. He’s got a few government highway contracts. In a couple of years the boys’ll be right up there with the big guys like Bolduc. Me? I’m semi-retired. I take things easy: I go to the track, travel, spend the winters in Arizona. Just got back. I don’t go to Florida no more. That’s too violent down there. It scares the piss out of me, some of the things I’ve seen.”
Judging by the nests of broken capillaries on his nose and cheeks, I thought Dave Rogers had better start looking after himself right here in Ontario, never mind Florida. High blood pressure was shouting at me from the moment I saw him biting into an egg roll. Still, he wore an ancient windbreaker with markings of some long-dead hockey team. My impression that he had been fit once was reinforced by that, even though it had been years since that open zipper fastened any higher than his crotch. A pink-and-blue necktie was displayed over his midsection like an oversized tongue that had abandoned itself to lunacy. At the upper end, the loosened knot tried to define the impossible: Dave Rogers’s neck.
“When I first met Abe, we were both in school. Grade Four! We learned all about Columbus together. It made a big impression on Abe. It didn’t show at the time, but later on, he became quite an authority on statues and pots that come from down in Central and South America. Abe can tell you whether a pot was Inca or Aztec or Mayan as fast as I can tell a chopstick from a fork.” Dave shook his head, smiling while he chewed. With his jowls in movement, it was quite a sight. “Abe was always smart,” he said, touching a large knuckle to his forehead twice. “He always took his cover serious. You know what I mean? He didn’t fool around. He said he was an expert on pre-Columbian art, so he became one. Nothing fake about his expertise; nothing fake about his collection either.”
“What moved him into a life of crime?” I asked. “Was it the Depression?”
“It was the fifties. We were born before the war, but we grew up in the forties and fifties. They were boom years and there weren’t too many restrictions on free enterprise. Even in the scrap business, we had to use a little muscle once in a while. My old man kept two sets of books. Hell, everybody kept two sets. Abe used to work in my old man’s yard once in a while just to keep me company. He watched the way the business was organized. He didn’t break his back loading trucks when he could help it. He was knocking off burglaries before he was buying shaving cream. I went with him one time. I didn’t believe the stories he was telling about the stuff that was stashed away in those old homes up on Welland Avenue. He said he did places off Ontario Street and over on Mortgage Hill too. But I went into one house with him.”