Crang Plays the Ace (5 page)

What wasn't usual was that a short, heavy man in green pants counted off several bills from a fat roll in his pocket and handed them to the driver. It was the first time all day I'd seen money change hands.

The truck went north on Bathurst Street. Bathurst is long and narrow, and as you get farther north, apartment buildings line the street. Out of polite earshot, some Torontonians call it the Gaza Strip. It's a middle-class Jewish neighbourhood peopled by families who have moved up the immigrant corridor of Bathurst Street from the earlier ghettos downtown.

North of Steeles Avenue, about the time I began to ponder the question of our destination, the high-rises peter out. Rural Ontario breathes a few defiant last gasps, maple trees, oaks, and elms. Housing developments would take care of them in another half-generation. The truck caught the orange light at Highway 7. I pressed the accelerator and hung on its tail.

Past Royal Downs Golf Club, the truck turned left on to a dirt road. The driver hadn't signalled for the turn. My tires squealed when I followed him in. I didn't follow him far. He stopped twenty yards down the dirt road. By the time I braked, the driver was jumping down from his cab.

He waddled in my direction. His hands were hitching up his pants and he was speaking to me.

“Hey, you, shit-face,” he said.

It wasn't going to be an invitation for drinks at the Park Plaza.

The dirt road was too narrow to turn the Volks around, and accelerating backwards on to Bathurst seemed more chancy than a confrontation with fatso. I got out of the car and watched the driver come the rest of the way toward me. The waddle had been upgraded to a swagger.

“All day I look in the rearview, I see you, turd,” the driver said. He was near enough that I could smell Jerry's beer.

“Tenacious son of a gun, aren't I,” I said.

“You and that fag car.”

“Steady,” I said, “let's leave the vehicle out of it.”

Up close, with all the gut and beard and black T-shirt, the driver had a tendency to loom. He weighed about two-fifty, but he looked as fit as Oliver Hardy. That might help my cause if it came to fisticuffs. I didn't want it to come to fisticuffs. One of us would get hurt. Probably me.

“You got a smart mouth, asshole,” the driver said.

His punch began below his belt line, somewhere behind the ring of keys. He might as well have winged it in by way of Pearson International Airport, I had so much time to move my head and left shoulder inside the swing of the punch. His forearm landed on the back of my neck. It made a loud, slapping noise and rocked me forward. The slap was worse than the rock.

He'd already launched another arcing shot with his left fist. Didn't this guy watch the Saturday-afternoon fights on ABC-TV? Didn't he know rainbows like he was throwing were what Marvelous Marvin Hagler had for lunch? I kept my arms high, and his punches thudded onto my elbows and shoulders. The punches didn't have much steam, but they kept me swaying back and forth on my feet. Professional boxers call it rolling with the punches. I called it making the best of a bad situation.

Every time the driver swung his arms, his black T-shirt pulled up over his belt and showed a strip of hairy gut. I opted for a display of offence. I dropped my right shoulder and aimed a fist at his bare belly button. It seemed an efficient punch, straight, hard, and not more than a foot. It made no impression on his stomach. Either I was power-deficient or the gut was all muscle.

While my right hand was down and going about its useless manoeuvre, he landed one of his roundhouses. It hit hard on my ear. The inside of my head turned red. I staggered a couple of feet to my left and bumped up against the Volks. It didn't have as much give as bouncing off the ropes in a ring.

I squared around and faced my worthy opponent. He had a small, mean grin on his face, and his right hand was cocked over his shoulder. He was measuring me.

The redness had gone from behind my eyes. I shot out two fast left jabs. It was a reflex move inspired by fear and desperation. Both jabs landed on the driver's nose. He looked surprised. I felt surprised. He hadn't thrown his right hand.

I was the first to recover from our mutual amazement and hit the driver with two more left jabs. His head popped back. I hit him with a right to the beard. It was like punching a porcupine. He made an oomph noise and sat down in the dirt road. The man with the gut of iron had a glass jaw.

My right ear was ringing. I touched it and it felt hot. The driver climbed up from the dirt. He crouched over and rushed at me. His arms were reaching out in front of his body. If he got the arms around me, his weight would give him a large edge. I was faster on my feet than he was. But he had the bulk.

I got up on the balls of my feet and danced out of the path of the first rush. He turned and rushed again. I danced to the side. It couldn't last much longer, him charging, me making like Manolete. Fatigue was catching up to my legs.

On his third rush, I planted my feet and timed a right-hand upper cut. Now or never. The punch caught him under the jaw at the point where his beard stopped and his throat was exposed. He straightened out of his crouch. I hit his cheek with a left hook. He fell over backwards. He raised his head. I kicked it. Too bad it wasn't winter. I might have had my Grebs on.

I turned and opened the door of the Volks. The guy in the black T-shirt was pushing himself up with his arms. I got behind the steering wheel and started the engine. The guy fell over on his side. I drove out the dirt road and turned south on Bathurst toward the city.

My right ear hurt like hell.

7

W
HEN I GOT THERE,
the door to Annie's apartment was open and she was in it. She reached her hands up to my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and touched my lips with hers. She made me feel like we were a couple of kids. Skipping across the meadow. Picking up lots of forget-me-nots.

Annie is in her mid-thirties. She is five feet tall and has fine bones and not enough muscle on them to nudge her much past one hundred pounds. Her hair is the colour of Mr. Poe's raven, and she wears it short and flat and pulled back behind her ears. Her cheekbones are high and her chin has a slight forward thrust. The combination gives her a feisty look about which she displays no self-consciousness.

She had on beige trousers with legs that narrowed and tightened until they stopped six inches above her ankles. They went with low-heeled white leather shoes and a white silk shirt that had billowy sleeves and was unbuttoned to the space between her breasts. The first time I met Annie, I said she looked Parisian. She said other men before me had told her the same thing. I said I'd see them at dawn with pistols. She said she grew up in a village northwest of Toronto called Palgrave. So much for the male powers of observation.

Annie had a Kir going. She went into the kitchen and made me a vodka martini on the rocks according to my favourite mix. Hold the vermouth, hold the olive, hold the twist.

I'd been home, showered, changed, and applied ice to my right ear. It still hurt. It was red and stuck out a little. It didn't go with the spiffy ensemble I'd chosen.

“I'll try two guesses,” Annie said. I was watching her from the doorway into the kitchen. She had her back to me, getting out the ice and pouring the vodka. “The hot new fashion along your part of trendy Queen West is dyeing one ear vermilion. Or, my second guess, somebody's lodged a tomato in your right ear and the damned thing won't come out.”

“Wrong vegetable,” I said. “In the boxing world, we call this incipient cauliflower.”

“You aren't in the boxing world,” Annie said. She turned in the kitchen and handed me the drink. Our fingers touched on the side of the glass. “If I remember the tidbits of autobiography you've laid on me, you haven't been in it for twenty years.”

“Technically I've never been in it,” I said. We stayed talking in the kitchen. Cozy. “I boxed at university. That's as much like the real thing as Neil Diamond is like Dick Haymes.”

“To me,” Annie said, “fighting is fighting whether you do it at an institution of higher learning or at Maple Leaf Gardens.”

“True.”

“So how did you get the mean-looking ear?”

“I'll tell you over dinner. You'll love it.”

“Dinner probably, the story I doubt it.”

We ate at Costa Basque on the part of Avenue Road where the nice old houses have been converted into restaurants, stores that sell expensive
objets
, and offices for lawyers who handle lucrative divorce actions. Costa Basque is laid out on a series of balconies, each overlooking a central courtyard. We sat on the top balcony. It's more intimate up there, away from the guitarist on the ground floor and the conversation of the folks at the bar who ask him to play “Yellow Bird.” Second-most-popular request in the place. First is “Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.” Good old Basque tunes.

The waiter handed us menus. He was young and trim and fey. I asked for a bottle of white Rioja. The waiter scampered after it. I studied the menu.

“About the ear,” Annie said.

“Hey, first things first,” I said from behind the menu. “Man's gotta think about his nourishment.”

Annie said, “You're going to order the pâté followed by paella.”

I looked up.

“I think you just called me predictable.”

“You operate in patterns,” Annie said. “You go at something long enough until you reason out the course of action you think is going to work best. From there on in, you never deviate. This restaurant, for one teeny example, we've come here, what, four times. The last three, you've had the pâté followed by paella.”

“Maybe not predictable,” I said. “Maybe pigheaded.”

“I'm not being critical, old darling.”

“Criticism is your game.”

“Reviewer,” Annie said. “Movie reviewer.”

The waiter covered the bottom of my glass with wine. I tasted it and pronounced it splendid. The waiter beamed at me.

We ordered. Annie said she'd have green salad and grouper. I said I'd have pâté and paella. I gave the words a John Gielgud twist. Even, measured, lofty. It got a small snicker out of Annie.

“At the risk of doing an imitation of a broken record,” she said, “the ear.”

I started with the fight on the dirt road and worked back to Wans-borough's visit to my office.

“Your first respectable client in living memory,” Annie said when I was finished, “and you get yourself punched.”

“Irony makes the world go round, as somebody must have said.”

“Dorothy Parker?”

“Not sage enough for Lillian Hellman.”

“Right. Too frivolous.”

“Author unknown,” I said.

The waiter arrived with the salad and pâté. The pâté was made with ham and chicken livers and had a grainy texture that was dandy. For a few moments we chewed and made approving noises.

Annie said, “Skipping right along to topic B on the agenda, let's consider your strange clients.”

“You and Tom Catalano.”

“Case in point,” Annie said. “Your friend Tom has everything a good lawyer's brain can earn him, security and respectability and all those other qualities that our society legitimately salutes, and I don't think he feels he's compromising his standards by acting for people who actually wear ties.”

A drop of tarragon dressing hung stubbornly to the side of Annie's mouth. I didn't blame it, but I reached over and dabbed it away with my napkin.

I said, “Shall I tell you about my insatiable appetite for the freelance life? The urge to go it alone? Be my own man? The Jack London of the legal world?”

“Try for something more profound.”

“How about this: I like short stories.”

“That's profound? That isn't even relevant.”

I put down my fork and picked up the last piece of pâté on the plate with my fingers.

I said, “The police arrest a guy. We go to court. People testify. The Crown has its version of what happened. I have mine. Themes take shape. Strands unravel. We get conflict, and in the end we get resolution. Someone makes a decision, the judge, the jury. Beginning, middle, conclusion. Sometimes a surprise conclusion.”

“I'll grant you this, Crang, you give it the structure of a short story.”

“Criminal cases are like that in court,” I said. “John Cheever couldn't have written them better.”

“More like O. Henry.”

“Whoever. I'm hooked on the narrative every time I go to court. Can Tom Catalano say as much, him with his security and respectability? He expends that brain of his on civil actions that have one consistent theme, who owes how much to whom.”

The waiter cleared away the empty plates. He put the grouper in front of Annie and the paella in front of me. He wished us bon appétit.

“There's something else,” I said.

“Isn't there always.”

“A relationship develops between me and my clients,” I said. “Lousy word, relationship. Stop me before I say interface. Still, there's something that connects me and them. Guy in jail, at that moment he has only one positive element in his life, his lawyer. Family doesn't count in jail, if he has any, friends don't count, not other cons. He's cut off from what we might laughably call his normal environment except for me, his counsel. That circumstance, like it or not, means that my connection with him develops along upbeat lines. I like it.”

“You're beginning to sound more social worker than criminal counsel,” Annie said.

I shrugged. I was having a swell time with the paella. First a piece of veal, then a couple of mussels, an oyster, a tiny chunk of chicken, some rice, sniff the fumes, inhale the saffron. I felt like rubbing my tummy and saying goody goody.

“The trouble with it all,” Annie said, “the way you feel about those people in jail, is that it's bound to distance you from the rest of the world.”