He inclined his head backwards, still smiling. He was one of those people so at home in the world that he had no suspicions of it, or of me. “What do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a writer,” I said. “I can’t work at home with all the kids running around so I’m looking for an office.”
“What kinds of things you write?”
We might have been chatting over a beer. “Freelance stuff at the moment, but I’m planning a novel.”
“A novel!” He made a “shooshing” noise like S.K. Sakall, wondering. “Where do you live, then, that you got so much noise?”
Geppetto wasn’t right. He looked the part still, but his words were tinged by his upbringing in some East European shtetl.
“On Markham.” I grabbed for the name of a street, faintly associated with writers. “South of College,” I said, to give it some distance from Honest Ed’s, Toronto’s biggest bargain house. I remembered that Katie Mountbatten, a sometime colleague of mine at the university, lived there so it must still be affordable.
“Not too far away,” Geppetto said, consideringly. “Be a nice walk for you if the weather’s good.”
“Do you have a room vacant?”
Now he looked me up and down. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.” He nodded and said again, “Yes. Yes, I have a room. Go to the other end of the building. I’ll meet you there.” He closed the door in my face gently, slowly, smiling at me as he disappeared.
I walked around the building to where he was already waiting for me with the door open. “I never answer a knock on this door,” he said. “There’s a fire door connecting this end of the building with my apartment,” he said. “But the tenants must not use it.”
“Why?”
“It’s a fire door. I wouldn’t have a door at all if it wasn’t for the fire department. If someone wants me, including the tenants, they use the door at the other end.”
I let it go. We went up the stairs to a narrow corridor linking six rooms: three in the front, on the street side, and three at the back. He opened a door to a back room bare of furniture, with a window overlooking a yard full of junk: two filing cabinets, a rusting set of shelves, a broken water cooler, a bicycle wheel, and so on.
“No furniture,” I said, looking round.
“I never get it right. I put in a desk and chair and the tenant turns out to be a masseur, asks me to take them out. The furnishings. I store a few bits in the basement. What did you want the room for? What did you say?”
My mind was on Jason Tyler as he spoke, and I nearly said, “book dealer,” but I caught it. “Remember?” I said, “I’m a writer. My wife doesn’t understand me. She keeps talking to me, especially between the hours of nine and five, when I’m trying to write. I need a room where she can’t get at me.”
“A book writer?”
“I’m working up to that.”
“Reader’s Digest, like?”
“That’s the idea. So I need a room with a window overlooking the street so I can see life as I write about it.” I glanced over my shoulder, along the corridor. I had to hope no one was listening. “Are all your rooms in the front taken?”
“When do you need it?”
“Right away. As soon as I can get it.”
“I may have one in a couple of weeks.” He paused, scratched his bottom, paused again, gave me a twinkle, looked around in case anyone had sneaked into the corridor in the last few minutes, then trotted decisively to the middle door of the three-in-front, unlocking it. “Quick,” he said, more or less whispering. “Take a peek, but stay close to the door. I don’t want the tenant walking by outside and seeing you in the room.”
There was very little to peek at: a trestle table, a straight-backed office chair, an old armchair; against a wall, a single metal army-style cot with a mattress, a blanket, and a pillow. A towel hung on the back of the door, and a wastebasket stood under the table.
“What does he do?”
“Can’t you guess?”
There was no sign of any occupation. The table was bare, the wastebasket empty except for a scrap of paper. There was no phone, no pencils, pens, or paper. “Probably an undercover man for the Secret Service,” I guessed. “He’s just using the room for surveillance.”
Geppetto stepped into the room so he could see out over the street. As he stepped forward I swiftly retrieved the scrap of paper from the wastebasket.
“Who’s he watching, I wonder? Maria who runs the fruit stand? The baker? Maybe the dress shop across the street?” Geppetto chuckled to show he was being ironical. “He says he’s a writer, like you. Only he never seems to get any ideas. Lately I don’t bother to clean this room. Once-a-week cleaning is included in the rent, but there’s never anything to clean. A bit of dust. And, yes, I’ve seen the light on once or twice in the evening, but he’s never here in the daytime. What kind of writer is that?”
“I told you, the writer thing is just a front. He’s an undercover agent for the C.S.I.S. Clever. What makes you think he’ll be leaving?”
“I don’t think it’s working for him. I know you’re joking me with that undercover stuff. I don’t mind. I mean, a writer with an empty wastebasket? I do a bit of writing myself, putting together the family history. Sometimes it takes me three or four tries to tell someone’s story, one of my great-uncles who served in the Italian army in the first war, for example. What would the retreat from Caporetto be like for a Jewish baker? Makes for a lot of waste paper. I think that the man believes, like you, that if he has a room of his own, something might happen. That’s as close to a writer as he’s got. But it hasn’t happened. There’s a lesson to you, there. Maybe you shouldn’t waste your money until you’re on the second draft.”
“What do you care?”
“I like people to stay awhile. And would this furniture do you? He saw the cot in the basement and asked me if he could use it, for taking a nap, he said. But I don’t see how he could ever have got tired.”
“As a matter of fact, it would do me fine. So what do you think? How long?”
“I’m guessing he might be gone pretty soon. It looks to me as if he’s given up. You want to hear from me when he gives his notice? I’ve got a week’s advance rent. You pay the same.”
I fished out an old card I had picked up at a restaurant, crossed out the address and wrote my name and office number at the college. I would have preferred to use a pseudonym but I didn’t think Geppetto would be interested in finding out about me. If he did, and told any of my colleagues he was my landlord, and what he believed I was doing in the room, I would confess.
“And your name?” I asked.
“Glinka,” he said, emphasising the first syllable. “Glinka. That’s my name.”
Confess to my colleagues at Hambleton College, that is, that, like them, I’m writing a novel.
chapter four
Hambleton College is where I hold down my other part-time job, that of sessional lecturer in the English Department. The word “sessional” signifies that my contract lasts only to the end of the session, or term, and to keep me reminded of that they pay me by the hour, unlike the tenured gang who are paid by the year. Of course, I have to teach the leftovers, whatever the tenured faculty don’t want, which can be dismaying. Last term I was given a week’s notice to prepare “Modes of Satire 1: Theoretical,” a course for which forty students had signed up and the asshole who dreamed up the course had