“Looking for my dad,” Katz said. He held his hand flat at the height of his chin. “About yay tall, Japanese Canadian, seventy-two years old.”
“The officer,” she said.
Katz sent a nervous glance my way before nodding to the woman. “He say where he was going?”
“I told him we weren’t open and he said he was looking for someone. Said he’d been waiting at the park all morning.”
“Which park? Stanley?”
“I think he meant Clark Park.” She pointed up the street in its direction. “He said he got tired of waiting and was going to find where this kid was hiding. Michael Something-or-Other, think he said.”
Katz thanked her. Back in the car, we drove south, in the direction she’d pointed. It was a nothing park, a few hilly, grassy blocks, with a soccer field and softball diamond, playground and swing set. A deep diagonal rut across the western slope, hardened by bikes and the odd motorcycle. Joe Itami wasn’t there.
We drove slow along the Drive, looking for anything unusual. I asked Katz if his dad had told him about his days walking the beat. Something significant might have happened to him then.
“It was a rough neighborhood, that time. We grew up three blocks from the prostie stroll, before that was all pushed down to the ports. I was in Pampers when he and your dad were busting heads.”
“They do a lot of that, you think?”
“The seventies, Dave. East fucking Van. What do you think?”
Driving back up Venables, Katz pointed, “There,” and told me to stop. On the pavement beside a Vietnamese sandwich shop, beneath a mural of blackbirds and First Nations orcas, was Joe Itami’s MagLite. We noticed a commotion up the block, and headed in that direction.
A small group of elderly men sat and stood outside Abbruzzo Café. They were talking in English and French and Italian, and regarded us as intruders. I asked them what happened.
“Gook got Mikey,” one of them said.
“Shut up, Mauro, you don’t say that to someone’s face.” Mr. Voice-of-Reason smiled at Katz and said, by way of apology, “He’s just nervous, got the jitters. Mauro’s not s’posed to drink coffee no more.”
“What happened to Mikey, exactly?” Katz said.
“We’re just sitting here. Guy drives up in his Nissan. He’s in uniform. Tells Mikey he wants to have a word. Mikey being Mikey, tells him what to do with that. Then the, uh, officer shows him his gun. Cuffs Mikey and drives off. Can hardly believe what I seen, y’know?”
“He looked Korean,” one of the seated men offered.
“Like you’d know,” Voice-of-Reason said. “You guys think he’s really with the cops?”
“I am,” Katz said. “And I appreciate your help. Anything else you can tell us?”
“Korean. I’m sure.”
“His car’s a piece of junk.”
“Smelled like he might’ve gotten sick on the ride over.”
“Or maybe Vietnamese.”
I stopped the flood of wisdom to ask how Mikey had acted at seeing Joe Itami.
“Same as all of us,” Mr. Voice-of-Reason said. “Came as a shock. We’re just killing time till the Juventus game, not expecting nothing like this.”
“Don’t you remember?” Mauro said to him. “Mikey recognized him. Said, Holy ess, it’s you.”
“Right, that’s right,” Voice said.
“What’s Mikey’s full name?” Katz asked.
“Michael.” Chortles from the seated men.
“Rosato,” Voice said. “Michael Rosato.”
The group closed ranks as soon as we asked about Rosato’s personal life. We went inside, bought espressos, and asked the barista, a thin woman with a hard smile and iron-colored hair. She hadn’t seen the abduction, but she knew Mikey. He’d been coming there for years.
“Take him awhile,” she said, “but he got himself back on track.”
“From what?” I said.
She shrugged and took the money and slapped my change on the counter. “From drinking, and I don’t know what else. He’s okay now, Mikey, but back in the day...” She looked at the ceiling as if his misdeeds were written there. “Back then he run with a pretty rough group.”
Another hour of searching produced nothing.
“You should call it in,” I told Katz. “It’s kidnapping.”
“My dad you’re talking about, Dave. He’s old. Confused. He’s no criminal.”
“Didn’t say he was.”
“I’ll call from the house, ’kay? Promise. By now he’s probably wandered back.”
But he wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t at Clark Park. Joe Itami had disappeared into East Vancouver, into 1974, into himself. Michael Rosato had been dragged along with him.
“Can you run Rosato through CPIC?” I asked. “Maybe Joe arrested him, back in the day.”
Katz nodded. I left him at his house to make arrangements, call in what favors he could. I told him I’d keep looking, and meet back with him in two hours.
I cruised up Woodland, down Clark, over Venables, and back up the Drive. It felt futile, like looking for someone else’s memories. Nick Cave played through the Cadillac’s speakers. “Wonderful Life.” For some of us, anyway.
My mother’s house is on Laurel Street. She and her husband had built it in the midsixties, anticipating they’d raise a family there. That hadn’t quite worked out. Instead, just as she reached the age and mind-set to give up on having kids, circumstances forced her to adopt her younger sister’s son.
I say circumstances, but it was my birth parents’ decision to leave me with the Wakelands. They’d been under the sway of a religious leader who preached that children (other than his own) were a spiritual drag. A tether to the flawed material world. Only much later did they recognize him as a fraud.
By then Beatrice and Matt Wakeland seemed to have the kid under control, so why complicate their own recently reclaimed lives? Easier to start over, to leave well enough alone.
I was luckier than most. And angrier than most. And tired of battling the past.
The woman I called my mother sat on the porch, smoking, looking slightly more frail than the last time I’d seen her, and just as defiant.
“What’s the occasion?” she said, standing to embrace me. She sat back in her rocking chair with a sigh, Oooof, which she covered for with an exaggerated yawn.
“Wanted to see how you’re doing,” I said.
“David.”
“And,” I said more truthfully, “I wanted to ask, do you remember Joe Itami?”
“Of course. Lovely man.”
“What exactly did he and Matt—”
“Your father.”
“Right, what did they do? How close were they?”
“Closer back in the day,” my mother said. “They were partnered up for a while. Joe was a nice man. Handsome as all get-out. He wanted off the streets, order to be home more. That’s why he got his promotion. Your father, well...” She shrugged. “He was who he was.”
“Constable for Life,” I said. I’d never quite escaped that mentality. “He or Joe ever mention a Michael Rosato?”
“I didn’t ask about his business. Like I don’t with you.”
“What about Clark Park, anything happen there?”
She turned her pipe upside down and banged out the ash into a Kirkland coffee tin. The muscles of her face tightened. “Why?”
“Because Joe ran off this morning in his son’s uniform, thinking it’s forty years ago. Katz and I have to find him before he hurts this Rosato. Something happened in that park, didn’t it?”