“It’s a private club, detective.”
“You charge money?”
“It pays the servers for their time.”
“I see. And there’s nothing leftover for you. So you’re basically volunteering your time, right?”
He had me there, but I couldn’t come up with something to counter him with. I was thinking of how I was going to tell Katherine all of this. You’re not going to fucking believe who walked into my bar this morning, was what I was already saying to her in my mind. I could see the dread and curiosity in her eyes, the way she’d say, NO! when I told her, like there wasn’t a chance I could be telling the truth. We’d be sitting on the couch, two glasses of wine on the coffee table in front of us, and I’d tell her and she’d slap me on the arm, her eyes wide — Get out! — and then she’d be laughing hysterically with her hand over her mouth. I heard her in my mind as if she were standing right there at the bar in front of me. Oh, how awful! Her mouth pursed in delighted horror. You poor, poor thing! I was almost of a mind to draw this out as long as I could.
Except I had a problem now. Leonard Albrecht was real.
“You still with me?” he said.
“Sorry,” I replied. “Am I going to need a lawyer?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you’re straight with me or not.”
I processed that for a moment and it dawned on me that if the man was as much a student of history as he’d said he was, he might be interested in what was below my bar for more than just procedural reasons. “This was a worker’s bar,” I said. “Mainly Irish. They opened it and ran it, but management told them what hours they could keep, what activities were allowed. I guess running a bar on the grounds of a distillery has its challenges.” Albrecht smiled. “Anyway, I guess some of them didn’t like being told their business. They secretly dug themselves a basement and they did what they liked down there.”
“Which was what?” asked Albrecht.
“Music, dancing. The occasional cockfight. And there was a boxing ring.”
“That’s what she said.” He looked down at his notes. “Cooper. She said there was fighting.”
“Is that the illegal part?”
“Oh no, it’s all illegal. Selling liquor in an unlicensed room, holding a sports contest. Both are pretty bad, but the two of them together are really bad. You sell tickets to the bouts?”
I saw Gillian and Henry, my lunch staff, come in through the side door. They shot me looks and disappeared into the kitchen. “We only have three or four fights a year.”
“You sell tickets?”
“Yeah,” I said, starting to think maybe I shouldn’t have felt so smug about Albrecht’s reason for visiting me. Maybe an accusation and a fat lip wouldn’t have been as bad as this was starting to look. “Listen, I didn’t really know—”
“You knew,” he said. “Let’s not go down that road.” He stood up. “Show me.”
“Is there any way we could do this when the bar’s a little quieter?”
“Your people can handle the first rush. You’ve got other business. Let’s go.”
When Alan Kravitz handed me the keys to the place, he held one of them up, a rusty, old-fashioned one. “There’s a little storage space under the bar, might be useful to you. Be careful, though, the floors are rotting and I don’t know how strong the beams are.”
The first time I went down there, I brought my cook with me to see if he thought it would be a good place for a fridge. “Christ,” he’d said. “You could dry salami down here.”
We’d walked through the small, dark, dusty room with two flashlights and a pair of long sticks, pushing crates aside with them. There was a disgusting stained cloth lining one of the walls, and I guess Kravitz hadn’t brought a stick with him when he first investigated because I used mine to pull the cloth away and found a door behind it. It lead in to an enormous room with a broken-down piano in it, a bar, a stage, and a tattered old boxing ring. There were some forty chairs arranged around the room. We’d shone our beams into the cold, lightless place and looked on it with genuine wonder. Under the bar was a log with a record of bar sales and admission fees and the like, and we saw that there hadn’t been a soul in that place for eighty years. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked the cook.
“You’ll need another license,” he’d said.
“Or not.”
It took two years of secretly refurbishing the place to get it up to scratch. I tried to keep as much of the old grandeur as I could, but the piano had to be replaced and the boxing ring recovered, although the ropes had survived and so had two of the turnbuckles. If I could find anyone to fight in the place, they’d have the chance to get knocked silly against a turnbuckle that had dimmed the lights on some Irishman a hundred years earlier. Katherine had been the first person outside of the bar I’d shown the finished room to. “Wow,” she’d said. “I’m not the only thing you’re doing on the side.”
I poured her a Scotch and we toasted the future. She’d been at almost every one of the bar’s traditional music nights and boxing matches since we opened. Now her husband was standing in the middle of the room.
“Cooper didn’t do it justice,” he said.
“She was only down here once. She told me she wasn’t comfortable working off hours, even for the money I was paying.”
“Expensive to keep a secret?”
“Obviously not expensive enough.”
He walked into the room, turning slowly to take in all the details. “Looks pretty authentic.”
“I had pictures of nineteenth-century saloons to guide me. I did a lot of research. This wasn’t the only speakeasy in Toronto in 1850.”
“But it’s the only remaining one.”
“I think it must be.”
He walked among the round zinc tables toward the stage. “There’re wings?”
“Dressing rooms too.”
“Wow,” he said. “These the original floors?”
“No. They were a mess. We did these ourselves. We kept as many of the old nails as we could salvage, though. Some of it’s original.”
He walked across the front of the stage to the corner of the room where the boxing ring was. For matches, I had four men simply lift the ring and bring it into the middle of the room, where we’d arrange the chairs around it. You could break it down and put it away, but I liked the look of it, menacing and lonesome, in the corner of the room under a single light. He stood beside it, wiping his hand over the canvas. “You got a champ?” he asked me.
“Ernie Paschtenko. Russian kid. He fights out of the Cabbagetown Club, but someone brought him down to us and he’s been fighting friendlies here for a couple of years. His record is ten and one.”
“You do some training here too?”
“A little.”
“And who judges the bouts?”
“I do, with a couple of the regulars.”
“Nice,” said Albrecht. “A whole secret world, huh?”
“Until now.”
“You fight?”
“I spar once in a while, but no. I don’t got much of a chin.”
Albrecht pushed one of the ropes up and threaded himself under it onto the canvas. For a big man, he was lithe. He stood in the ring, testing the platform. “I tell you what,” he said. “I know a good thing when I see it. I’ll write this up back at the station house and say everything’s in order. But you got to promise that you’ll get a license for down here. I can’t help it if someone less inclined to see the charm of this place stumbles onto it.”
You have to do a certain amount of diminishing the missing corner of the triangle to feel in your right mind when you’re cuckolding a man. Leonard Albrecht hadn’t deserved an atom of it. He was good people, but it shouldn’t have surprised me. He’d once loved Katherine. I wondered if there was a way I could make it up to him without his knowing what I was doing. “I’ll get a license then,” I said.