THE HEMINGWAY CAPER
THE HEMINGWAY CAPER
ERIC WRIGHT
A Castle Street Mystery
Copyright © Eric Wright, 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy-editor: Rachel Sheer
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Webcom
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Wright, Eric
The Hemingway caper / Eric Wright.
ISBN 1-55002-451-5
I. Title.
PS8595.R58H44 2003 C813’.54 C2003-901650-1 PR9199.3.W66H44 2003
1 2 3 4 5 07 06 05 04 03
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Printed and bound in Canada.
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For Joe Kertes,
who encourages this kind of thing
chapter one
“The rain began again as I turned onto Harbord Street and brought the car to a stop in front of Poppy’s bar.”
No.
“The rain began again as I turned onto Harbord Street and stopped in front of Poppy’s bar. “
Better.
“The rain began and I turned onto Harbord Street and jammed my foot down hard on the brake and switched off the ignition and the headlights. It was warm in the car and soon I could not see through the steamed-up windows, not even the lighted sign for Poppy’s bar. The rain came down harder and drummed on the roof of the car and the drops fell like individual stones in the pools along the gutter.”
Okay, except for those stones. Take out “individual”.
“I stepped on the brake pedal in front of Poppy’s bar...”
(The brake pedal in front of Poppy’s bar? Shit.)
“In front of Poppy’s bar I stepped on the brake pedal. I switched off the wipers but it did not make any difference except to the sound inside the car. “
Now I’ve lost it again.
You see what I’m trying to do? Maybe not. It’s a riff, I think. (The word isn’t in my processor’s memory, but I think that’s what it is.) On Hemingway. Would you have known that if I hadn’t told you? So far I think I’ve got enough “and”s in there but the rhythm isn’t quite right, so you might not have guessed what I was up to. I would have to go into parody to be sure you would recognize it, and parody is another thing.
My name is Joe Barley. I’m employed by a detective agency on a part-time basis for some of their simpler assignments, like watching people suspected of insurance fraud who claim to be incapacitated after an accident. My job is to get pictures of these villains hang-gliding, or hot-dogging on the ski slopes.
At present I’m on a very old-fashioned assignment. A suspicious wife has hired the agency to collect evidence of her husband’s adultery. What she’ll do with it I don’t know, because she doesn’t need it these days to get a divorce. She is probably just satisfying herself that her suspicions are justified.
I’ve been watching this guy every Tuesday and Thursday night for three weeks, and so far it certainly seems like a simple case of a bit on the side. His name is Jason Tyler, a book dealer, specializing in rare and second-hand books. He has a shop on College Street that occupies two floors of an old house. His wife thinks he is having an affair because he recently joined a health club to work out twice a week. She suspects that on Tuesdays and Thursdays he actually comes home damp from another kind of work-out, so she has hired the agency to find out.
It’s a clever front he’s constructed. He really does go to a health club to pedal away for half an hour and have a shower. Then he spends an hour in a rented room on the second floor of a small commercial property on Harbord.
Tonight was typical. I was sitting in my car as he arrived in his yellow Volvo, parked in the alley, and entered the side door of this building, the tenants’ entrance, making his presence on the second floor known by switching on the light and lowering the blinds. A little later, the shadows of him and a lady appeared behind the blind, embracing in silhouette. After a bit of this, the light went out, the blind was raised, and twenty minutes or so later, the light came back on, the blind was lowered, and the silhouettes again embraced. (I’ve figured out that they must make love by streetlight). Then, the window blind was raised and I caught a glimpse of them in a quick, unscreened embrace before the light went out again and the two of them re-appeared at the side door for a hasty peck as they went their separate ways.
I followed him as he drove back to his store on College, and made a note of the time so I could finish my report at home—in the “officialese” of a detective agency, of course. Making up a report in Hemingway-speak, so to speak, is just something I do for myself, to keep from getting bored.
Not just Hemingway. I started with Hemingway, because that’s where everyone starts. I’m just learning. I work with a voice until I get it, or give up, then move on to a different voice. So far on this job I’ve tried Jane Austen, Salinger (easy, and so the choice of every pastiche creator), and typical-Russian-short-story (“At midnight, on a certain street in the provincial town of___, a young man who was due to fight a duel at dawn the next day stood picking his nose and writing in a notebook by the light of the street lamp. He had not eaten for three days, sustained only by the occasional glass