On her way back through the lobby, she stopped at the front desk. A new, more handsome boy had replaced the one from that afternoon. Smiling, she asked him to send a bottle of champagne to her husband’s room. And then she flew away.
Part III
Road to nowhere
A bout of regret
by Michael Redhill
Distillery District
It’s bad news whenever a policeman walks into your bar, but it’s worse when you’ve been having an affair with his wife. Katherine and I had been seeing each other for so long that I didn’t really ever think about her husband anymore. He was in the background, like a great-uncle, and for the last couple of years we’d stopped being careful, he was that regular in his work and in his habits. To listen to Katherine, all they had left in common was the marital home. He probably had affairs too, was how she saw it, and she believed a series of unspoken arrangements kept the balance in all of our lives. But if that was true, then what was Leonard Albrecht doing at the back of my bar, squinting at one of the old photographs behind glass, like he was thinking of sitting down for a plate of calamari and a beer?
The Canteen was the name of my bar, a name I borrowed from the original saloon that stood on this spot, more than 150 years ago. I’m down a side street in the Distillery District, one of Toronto’s oldest unwrecked neighborhoods. For a lot of years in this city, all the most interesting neighborhoods — at least the ones with a story to tell — have been taken over to build condos, but this corner of the city was so unpopular, so out of the way, that they left it alone. It stands at an angle to the shore of Lake Ontario, close enough to drink its waters, but far enough away from the city’s old wharfs that the only business done from its docks was its own. Until fifteen years ago, the distillery was a miniature city unto itself (complete with its Victorian cobblestones and cramped walkways) that churned out whiskey, rum, and during WWII, acetone. I’d never met anyone who’d been behind its locked gates, and tucked in behind the monstrosity of the Gardiner Expressway, it was all but inaccessible. But it was industrious for an invisible, unloved corner of the city: It was still putting out rum when it closed in 1990.
Some smart business types thought it might make a decent tourist destination and started cleaning it up a few years after it shut its doors. I got in on the ground floor for what was a lot of money five years ago, though now I couldn’t buy a chunk of cobblestone to paint my name on for that kind of cash. I’ve since made back what this place cost me and I’ve parlayed its status as the original distillery bar into a couple of lucrative sidelines. In general, I’ve been lucky in business. And up until now, it seemed, in love too.
Albrecht was meandering toward the bar where I was polishing glasses, getting ready for the lunch rush. It was 10 in the morning on an overcast September day. Bartenders are supposed to be good people-readers, but the truth is, you don’t need any skills to read a person who’s come into a bar to drink alone, and those are the people who like to talk. The movie cliché is wrong, though: Most of the people — men, usually — who sidle up to a bar to unburden themselves aren’t suffering from heartache. Half the conversational openers I hear are some variation on, “Fucking Leafs, eh?” and I can tell you that, after a while, all those suckers pining over the Stanley Cup or the World Series trophy make you hungry for a story about love. Just once I’d like some stubbled broken heart to sit down at my bar and say, “The day she walked into my life was the day my life ended.” Or something like that.
My point here is that I had no idea what Albrecht was thinking, although I’m pretty sure he knew what I was thinking, since he was giving me time to notice him. I don’t know the first thing about cops, but I gather from watching movies that they can figure out a lot from your body language. I just stood there trying to polish glasses in as unguilty a way as possible, but for all I knew, the angle of my arm was telling him I’d been sleeping with his wife for nine years.
He gave me a smile and a little wave when he saw me looking at him. “Nice place,” he said.
“It’ll do.”
“Mainly tourists?”
I stared at him for a second. The small talk was supposed to show me he was in complete control. “It used to be,” I said finally, “but the locals have found it.” The sweat from my palm smeared the glass I was cleaning and I had to start over. “It’s about fifty-fifty now.”
He nodded appreciatively, looking around a little more. “I live over by Queen and Bathurst,” he said. “I go into the Wheat Sheaf sometimes. But I work out of 51 Division, five hundred meters from here. You’d think I’d have had cause to come in before now.”
“I guess we keep our noses clean,” I said.
“I usually work nights, so you must. Or we would have met by now.” He pulled out a stool and sat, ran his fingertips over the old, burnished wood on the bar. He had massive, thick hands. I knew what he looked like from the pictures in his house, and I knew he was a big man, but in person he was considerably more imposing. There were a couple other surprising things about him too: His face was warm and his eyes soulful. He had a huge gourmand’s nose. If I hadn’t been on guard, I might have taken an instant liking to him. “This bar and the Wheat Sheaf,” he said, “they must be about the same vintage, eh?”
“About that. 1830s or thereabout.”
“I just love these old places,” he said. “Nobody really cares about them, though. If they’re in the way, down they come. Lucky this spot wasn’t of interest to anyone.”
I had to smile. He was playing me perfectly. I put the glass into the overhead rack and took another one out of the rotary washer. I decided it was time for him to make his point. If I had any say in the matter, I wanted this over before there were customers to deal with. “Listen, officer,” I said, “the lunch rush is coming in soon. Is there anything I can help you with?”
He seemed to shake the cobwebs out, like he just remembered he was on business, and drew a wallet out of his inside jacket pocket. He flipped his ID open to me. “Sorry, I slip into reveries I guess. Detective Inspector Leonard Albrecht,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’m not here on licensing business.”
“I figured as much,” I replied, keeping my eye on him.
“You’re Terry McEwan?” I nodded. “You got any unhappy ex-employees?” I thought about that for a minute. What the hell could one of my ex-employees have told Leonard Albrecht about where I went in my off hours? I said that there were none I was aware of. He opened his notebook. “Do you remember a Deborah Cooper?”
“Yeah. She served tables here this summer. She was seasonal, you know? I hire them in June and cut them loose after Labor Day.” A glimmer of something began to surface in the back of my mind. “What did she say?”
“Well, she came in last week to complain you were running an illegal after-hours club here.”
“Yeah?”
“Is it true?”
I tried not to show my pleasure at his line of questioning. How do you like that? I thought. Leonard Albrecht shows up in my bar not to blacken my eye for having an affair with his wife, but because he’s pulled duty to look into my underground activities. Someone up there had a very black sense of humor. “It depends what part you’re asking me about. The ‘illegal’ or the ‘after-hours.’ ”
He tilted his head at me minutely, like a huge parrot. “From that I take it’s a yes to the after-hours part, but you’re of the opinion that you’re not doing anything wrong.”