Authors: Howard Engel
“I’ve been busier. I just got back from Martha Tracy’s.” I filled Anna in on the beer, pizza and conversation. I added: “Martha’s a fan of yours. She thinks I could learn about fish forks from you. What’s to know about fish forks?”
“She still looks out for you, doesn’t she?” Anna said. “As for fish forks, I’m sure Martha knows as much about them as I do. I eat mussels with my fingers,” she said, making slurping sounds. “Hey, Benny, when do you let your operatives make their reports?”
“What do you have, H21? I’ll take it down in invisible ink. No, I’ll have to settle for invisible crayon.”
“I found out that the person looking into the history of Kinross Disposals is the guy who writes about the environment in the
Beacon,
Alexander Pastor. He’s with Environment Front.”
“I should have guessed.”
“Thanks a lot! Next time you can do your own digging.”
“Sorry, Anna. It’s just that I saw him today for a few minutes. It makes sense that it should have been Alex.”
“What’s my next assignment?”
“Get some sleep. That’s what I’m going to do. All play and no work, you know. We should go to the movies again soon, okay?”
“There’s the weekend.”
“You’ve got that wedding.”
“That’s
next
weekend! Benny, you never listen. How do you stay in business?”
“That’s part of the secret. Good-night, Anna.”
I hung up and reached for my map of the area. Unfolding it over the desk blotter, I found the village. There was Niagara-on-the-Lake on the way to nowhere for a truck loaded with dioxins and PCBs. No bridge over the mouth of the Niagara River. Was the truck headed up the Niagara Parkway to a favourite dumping place? Was O’Mara going to speed up or retard the time on the floral clock with a watering of choice poisons? The map wasn’t passing on any answers so I pulled out the dictionary instead. I flipped through to the end where the abbreviations were kept. I was worried about the term Alex Pásztory had used on me: AV it was. What was an AV anyway? The dictionary let me down like the map. Unless Alex was talking about paying a visit to the Authorized Version or the Artillery Volunteers. There were some Latin things too but they didn’t fit either. I tried to recapture my former line of thought, but Anna’s voice kept running through my head. After another minute, I put the still unlighted cigarette I’d been holding in my mouth back in the package again and turned out the lights.
On my way through the door, the light from the hall hit something white in my mail slot. Another handbill? I reached for it. It was a folded sheet of letter-size paper with a photocopied piece of fancy calligraphy. It was a familiar quotation, I’d seen it a dozen times. It may have
been a final examination that calligraphers have to write in order to get their masters’ papers. It began:
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence …
The quotation went on and on. The part I’ve quoted had been underlined with red ballpoint. What was going on here? Was this somebody’s idea of a warning for me to keep my mouth shut? Whatever happened to notes made out of letters clipped from newspapers and magazines? If I wasn’t giving way to a persecution mania, I was standing in the way of a very classy type of goon. I shut the door behind me and reflected upon the virtues of silence as I went down the stairs.
TEN
I got up late. I’d been dreaming about Anna, Irma Dowden, Brian O’Mara and me going for a picnic to Niagara-on-the-Lake. We were being followed by an empty picnic hamper. In the end all we could find to eat was fudge. I tried to finish off the dream in the shower, give it a happy ending, but after the first minute of sweet-toothed joy, the dream became a glucose nightmare. The ringing of the telephone, as usual, ended the shower.
“Cooperman. Hello?”
“Benny! I only half-thought I’d find you there. But there was no answer at your office.” It was Teddie Forbes.
“’Morning, Teddie. What time is it?”
“I never wear a watch,” she said. I don’t know why I asked. “Benny, I’m sorry I didn’t call yesterday, but I’ve been hung over since Tuesday when some guy got me loaded in The Snug. The reference went over my head. At first I didn’t think her drinking had anything to do with me. Then I remembered her three martinis. I apologized to her.
“It was your fault. I’m not used to it any more. And there was somebody at the table I couldn’t completely trust after I got started. I don’t mean you, Benny.”
“That’s all very flattering, Teddie. What’s it going to cost me?”
“Is that the thanks I get? I’ve been in conference with Jim Colling since sun-up, as we say down in Arizona, and you don’t even want to hear what we came up with.” Jim Colling was Teddie’s lawyer, a smooth, intelligent man, with tiny corn-kernel teeth. He’d steered Teddie’s divorce into the big numbers.
“Okay, astonish me. What did you two think up?”
“Meet us at the Di right away.”
“Make it twenty minutes and you’ve got a deal. I have to put some clothes on.”
“Right, you make yourself presentable, then hurry to the Di.”
“What kind of lawyer is Colling anyway he can afford to put a hole in his morning? There aren’t many Grantham lawyers who step out of their offices for under five hundred dollars.”
“Jim has a score to settle with Ross, too.”
“Hey, Teddie, I don’t want to get in over my head! I try to keep things simple and as honest as I can afford to be.” Teddie laughed into the phone.
“Just make it snappy,” she said. “See you in twenty minutes.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering if I had any clean socks.
There was an eddy of wind blowing dust and chewing-gum wrappers into a minor disturbance outside the apartment when I stepped out into the sunlight nearly half an hour later. I caught some of it in my left eye. It was still bothering me when I entered the Di, which is short for Diana Sweets. Gus, the counterman, paused with his chopping knife held above his sliced olives, and smiled as I walked past him looking for Teddie. I spotted them with my good eye, half-way down the aisle on the right side. They looked buoyant.
“Benny, what kept you? Aren’t you excited to know—? What did you do to your eye?” Teddie went from being generally excited and friendly to instant motherly concern in less than a second. She caught me under the chin and tilted my head up towards the suspended globes of light. “That’s dirt in there,” she said with emphasis that didn’t put me at ease. I handed her a wad of tissue from my pocket. She took it and dabbed at me with it, her long fingernails making a permanent impression in the back of my neck. “There!” she said at last, after scouring my cornea and holding up the tissue like a trophy of battle. “There, it’s out!”
“Thanks,” I said. “It was only a speck of dust.”
“Horatio Nelson went nearly blind from dust in the eye,” said Jim Colling, who had been watching Teddie’s demonstration of first aid. Both Teddie and I looked at him and he backtracked. “Well, it was gravel. Much the same.” Teddie released the vise on my neck. We both settled into the stained-maple seats of the booth, she beside
Jim and me facing both of them. I think we expected to hear more from the lawyer about Horatio Nelson, but he seemed to have shot his bolt with the information already given. A waitress approached.
“Have youse decided what youse want yet?” she asked. She was balancing the edge of her empty tray on her hip, her weight unevenly distributed so that she looked more the coquette than she intended. We ordered coffee and she was off. Colling watched the ribbon that tied her apron on as it danced up the aisle to the service centre and the silexes of coffee. Teddie made a comment about “youse” and we all said something to make us feel superior. It felt good for a moment, like I’d joined the club. In the minutes that followed the arrival of the coffee Jim said “hopefully” and I got “lay” and “lie” twisted again. Grammatical purity is an elusive brass ring on the communication carousel. It’s like a flag blowing in the Antarctic wastes, out of reach to all but the pure of heart. I thought of Scott and Amundsen for a moment, then remembered my mother saying, after watching the recreated drama of the race to the pole on television, that she had always wanted to be the first woman to get to the pole in heels. Jim and Teddie exchanged looks as they sipped from their coffee cups. Jim’s saucer, like the cup in the Twenty-third Psalm, ranneth over, and he mopped up the spillage with a paper table napkin.
“Well,” I said uneasy about what I might be getting into, “what have you two come up with?”
“Jim has a lulu, Benny,” Teddie said. She was leaning on her elbows like a little girl about to tell a secret. She turned to face each of us as she said our names, as though without the glance we might get ourselves confused. “We considered a few schemes, but they all collapsed because Ross is such a suspicious bastard.” The waitress hovered again with a silex and refilled our half-empty cups. She didn’t appear to have been offended by Teddie’s language. She didn’t look as though she listened to conversations, not so much as a matter of principle as from a desire to keep life as simple as possible. Teddie unarched the raised eyebrow and dug an elbow into Jim’s well-hidden ribs. “Tell him,” she said.
“You see, Benny,” he began, “Teddie still has a legal right to ask for favours from Phidias. She’s still on the board. She’s well known and they value her connection more than they otherwise might, considering the way things between Ross and her turned out.” Jim began to tell me about how Teddie had come into the firm and how many shares of what kinds of stock she was seized of. I kept one ear on the monologue while I tried to remember what I knew about James J. Colling. Jim was an educated farmboy from out in the township. He’d done a law degree in Toronto and had slowly built up a practice centred on the real estate he’d wandered over as a boy. All those vanished farms were now subdivisions under the brow of the escarpment, and he was one of the best-known lawyers in Grantham. I watched him talking at me, smiling with what looked like a mouthful of a hundred baby
teeth. His fat cheeks were unlined, his nose, rather piggish but well centred. He had the shoulders of a wrestler and a collar that looked too tight. I tuned in again.
“The moment Teddie wants something, Ross would know that something was up. He knows she has rights, but he watches her like a hawk. As a director of Phidias she has more rights to see the company books than you or I.” Teddie caught my eye with one of hers. I wonder when she began to get so sensitive to Jim’s rough edges. “So, I thought of a scheme that might work
because
Ross has little regard left for Teddie.” They exchanged a conspiratorial grin and faced me again. This time Teddie took up the plot.
“That’s right! If you go to the office, Benny, saying that you are doing me a favour, Ross would stall and stall. But, if you go in saying that you’re from the IRS in the States, you know, Internal Revenue, doing an audit on my status as a non-resident, or that you’re from Revenue Canada auditing my return for, say, two years ago, Ross would lead you by the hand to the minute books of the corporation just hoping that you’ll nail me good.”
“Teddie, I can’t go in there pretending to be a government officer!” I protested. “That comes under at least three criminal statutes that I can think of without even looking it up!”
“Cyrano to the life!” she said. I didn’t catch her meaning. What did this have to do with the long-nosed guardsman in a play?
“I admit it’s sailing close to the law,” Jim said, pulling at a tightly knotted necktie thoughtfully. “What about this: suppose you are working as an agent for Teddie, hired by me to check the dividends owing to Teddie in the company books. You see, Teddie has an apartment here in town and her place in Flagstaff. Teddie has chosen the Grantham place as her permanent residence and plays Canadian taxes. You follow me?”
“So far,” I said, “but you could lose me in a second. Why not get an accountant to examine the books? Wouldn’t that be more normal?”
“I thought you’d ask that. There are a few reasons. One, you’re cheaper; two, it’s not very complicated; three, bringing in a bunch of chartered accountants is bad for business—it puts the wind up; four, if you need it, you are known to have acted for Teddie in the past.” I nodded that I had heard him, but I was still just listening. I could still not agree to any of this.
“You see, Benny, residency is a grey area in tax law. The main thing is that Teddie has been paying Canadian taxes. She has to pay here or there, and since her income comes from here, there’s no reason that she should have to pay Canadian witholding tax.” Colling was quickly losing me as I had predicted.
“Benny,” Teddie put in, “Ross put my American address into the Phidias records, so they take fifteen percent of my dividends as witholding tax. That means that in spite of my paying Canadian taxes, I’m also paying extra as a non-resident.”
“But you are a non-resident, Teddie. I don’t see the miscarriage of justice.”
“As long as I maintain the apartment, I’m living here, Benny. It’s not a scam, honest.”
“Look, for years I’ve tried to get Forbes to direct the dividends to Teddie’s Canadian address and stop the nonresidence witholding tax. But Ross isn’t about to do Teddie any favours.”
Both of them were looking at me from across the table like they were selling a new brand of drug. I still didn’t like it.
“Benny,” Teddie said, “if the IRS is auditing me, and demanding that I file a U.S. return, I have a right to try to show that Phidias has exaggerated my dividends. We hire you, and that way you’ll get to see the minute books of the corporation.”
“Teddie’s right,” Colling said. “Phidias is a private corporation, so the minute books will show all share transfers and all leases, just the things that Teddie told me you wanted to have a look at.”
“The beauty of the scheme, Benny, is that the IRS isn’t going to put anybody wise. They never tell people what they are up to. They don’t explain their actions to anybody.”
“And you think that Ross would let me into Phidias just because it may put Teddie in wrong with the American tax people?”
“Exactly!” Colling resembled a happy convert to a new sect or schism.