In time, the Happening happened less: its founders were short on supplies; the kids got cranky. The adults could have sought employment on the mainland, but society was exploitative. So they pilfered from it, applying to the Columbia Record Club under false names, reselling the albums to a store in Campbell River. One mother and son specialized in defrauding chain restaurants in Victoria, while others burglarized island retirees whose homes they cased under the guise of neighborly visits. When someone heard that provincial law gave children under eleven immunity from prosecution, the parents had their youngsters shoplift to order in Vancouver. Unfortunately, most of them bungled and were caught, prompting two RCMP officers to visit the Happening for a stern chat. This petrified the other kids but not Venn. By his teens, he’d become the commune’s chief provider, a hero by dint of his gumption. A few of the grown-up women even made advances to him. But by age fifteen he’d wearied of this narrow life, surrounded by adults with unfinished college degrees, working as incompetent handymen and pseudosculptors, somewhere at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
With a fake ID and genuine manners, he trekked across Canada, sojourning in Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal, where he befriended a group of traveling Australians. After obtaining a passport that falsely stated his age as eighteen, he accompanied them home. It was his first time on an airplane and his first time out of Canada. Venn worked odd jobs on the Queensland coast for a spell, then did a summer at a mobile abattoir in the bush, butchering livestock for farms too remote to get their beasts to a slaughterhouse. At seventeen, he followed the backpacker trail through Indonesia, then Vietnam, a country whose war he’d heard about since childhood. He worked in bars across Southeast Asia. At twenty-two — just a little older than Tooly was now — he arrived in Thailand, managed a bar in Pattaya, then moved to Bangkok, where he encountered an aging Russian exile, Humphrey, over a chessboard. At which point began their long association.
Venn’s childhood at the periphery of the world had implanted a craving for its center, and he moved incessantly in search of vibrant locales. Over the past decade he’d tried Jakarta, Amsterdam, Malta, Cyprus, Athens, Istanbul, Milan, Budapest, Prague, Hamburg, Marseille, Barcelona, and now New York. His occupation changed as often as his location, from construction worker to supermarket butcher to club manager. He’d been the driver for a pawnbroker, the confidant of an aging mandarin, an independent contractor, an entrepreneur. He had no snobbery and worked lowly jobs, if needed. Yet the trajectory of his occupations charted a steady climb upward, as did the company he kept.
When Tooly first met Venn, his confederates were charlatans and crooks, drawn to him like worms from damp ground. They had intrigued her once. But criminals only enchant those who haven’t known many. Soon she found most of them repellent. But these days Venn’s cohorts were young Wall Street professionals, mini-masters of the universe playacting like mobsters, pulling up in hired limos outside the Old Homestead, each ordering a porterhouse for two, huge serrated knives spurting medium-rare blood across the tablecloth, wads of cash smacked onto the check, nobody asking for change. They were bullies in their sphere, naïfs beyond. So they idolized Venn, a man who’d seen the truly unsavory, who’d met those with really dirty money. He knew how to reach the bad guys, what to do if caught in a bind, how to procure documents, how one moved assets and boomeranged them back to place of origin. He represented access to an underworld. At least, that was the illusion he sold.
What rankled Tooly was how much time Venn had to spend in the company of creeps. “It’s the worst part about how we live,” he affirmed. “Always dealing with this awful outer circle of people. Hardly get to see my inner circle.”
“Your inner circle? Who’s that?”
“Well …” he said, pondering this, then smiling. “Actually, just you, duck.”
It didn’t matter that others had status and rank; he cared nothing about that. How else to explain his years of kindness to her and Humphrey. Indeed, Venn was fondest of outcasts who, like himself, recognized the pretense everywhere. He was a man who took no part in society, never voted. He was a being wrought of his own will, belonging to nothing. He’d not known or cared which of those bearded men wandering through his childhood had been his father. As for his mother, he’d kissed her goodbye. Family meant nothing more than did random names in a telephone directory. The relations that counted were those of choice, which made friendship the supreme bond, one that either party could sever, and all the more valuable for its precariousness.
He had no delusions about ending the long reign of fools in the world, yet he insisted on decency within the small realm that he could affect. She had seen him rent hotel rooms for addicts to whom he owed nothing, give loans to bums who would never pay him back. Once, he covered a flight home for a Filipina trafficked into prostitution in Cyprus. He intervened with great physical courage to protect the frail, such as whenever thugs bullied Humphrey, or the time a lustful drunkard in Prague tore off Tooly’s shirt. If Venn delivered violence, he did so without a shout or shove beforehand. He just struck. Aggression terrified Tooly. Yet she found herself wanting him to apply his violence sometimes, he alone imposing the justice that was everywhere absent.
The wind on the roof swept Tooly’s hair across her face. “Is there something I could do at this place?”
“There aren’t really jobs,” he answered. “It’s not that kind of situation.”
“What about a project for the two of us?”
“Our friendship is the project, as far as I’m concerned.” He looked down at the street. “What you need to do,” he said, “is go into advertising, like those girls downstairs.”
“Shut up,” she said, laughing.
In recent years, in recent countries, Venn had alluded to a project — that they’d soon work together, as she had longed to do since childhood. In fact, they had done small jobs when she was little, though it had taken her a while to realize it. He’d have her knock on strangers’ doors in new cities and ask to use the toilet. A minute later, he’d knock himself, claiming breathlessly to be the father of a lost little girl — had she come this way? He entered, touchingly relieved to find his girl, accepting a glass of water with thanks and making his targets’ acquaintance. By the time these strangers offered him something — say, a place to stay or a job — they practically forced it upon him. People loved his company, just wanted his presence.
For her help, Venn used to treat her at the best hotel restaurant in whichever city they found themselves. On the way, he stopped at a junk shop and bought them elegant used overcoats, then led her into the opulent eatery, waitstaff gliding before them to a table — it was his lovely daughter’s birthday, Venn declared, so treat her like royalty! He spun further yarns, captivating the management and drawing Tooly into his fibs. They consumed oysters and champagne (she sipping from his glass), pheasant and roast potatoes, cheese plates, and as many sweets as she pointed to on the dessert trolley. Once coffee and brandy had been ordered, Venn chaperoned her toward the washrooms. In hotel restaurants, these were typically outside the dining area through the lobby. Only after a few such banquets did Tooly grasp why they always went straight through the rotating lobby door, onto the sidewalk, and away. A steaming coffee and a glinting brandy snifter arrived at their table, along with the vast bill folded discreetly on a silver tray. That charming man and his adorable daughter must be in the washrooms still, the waitstaff reasoned. Nothing to worry about — they’d return. After all, those overcoats still hung from their chairs.