Nesha opened the door of his hotel room and waited, one hand leaning against the frame, the other grasping a can of Coke. The front desk had called to say a courier had arrived with a package for him. Something from his accountant. Could they send the guy up? They sure bloody well could. How long had he been waiting for this?
Down the plush distant hall, someone in a black baseball cap bobbed up and down at a gallop. A young East Indian man stopped at Nesha’s open door, eyeing the scraggly hair, probably writing off any possibility of a tip. He read the name off the front of the package.
“Mr. Malkevich?”
“Yep.”
He gave Nesha a form to sign then handed him the padded envelope.
The man was about to fly but Nesha reached into his pants pocket and brought out an American five dollar bill.
The dark eyes widened beneath the cap, then narrowed into a smile. “Thanks, man.”
In the room, Nesha took his penknife and slit open the top of the padded envelope that he had taped so firmly shut in San Francisco. He pulled out all the extra paper and crumpled junk mail filling out the empty spaces that would have given shape to the object he wanted to render shapeless.
Finally he drew out the Luger, a hard bit of reality poking out of his dream of the past. He held it flat in his palm, entranced by the silky cold of the steel. This was no ordinary gun. With his connections he could have arranged to buy something in Toronto. But this was the gun he wanted. The symbolic value was worth all the effort. He had called in a favour from a former client. The man had Nesha to thank — at least, Nesha’s experience with the intricate workings of the IRS — for the accumulation of capital that helped him expand his business. Evading taxes was a democratic right. It also helped him afford the small plane that flew Nesha’s package over the U.S. border, avoiding customs. A Canadian courier company had taken it from there.
He had taken care of the Luger these long years, cleaning, swabbing, polishing his dark token of hope with only one thought: justice. Justice for his family. And for how many others? He had waited patiently for the right time to bring out the gun. This was the right time.
The immanence of a confrontation left him winded. It had been thirty-eight years since he’d been that little boy. Thirty-eight years since he’d last seen his mother, his little brother. He gripped the textured butt, his heart racing, flying with excitement. He looked up into the mirror, half expecting to find that ten-year-old boy. He hardly recognized the face he saw there. It was like watching himself from the outside. His eyes had grown round and stark. Together with the greying beard, the hair, he looked quite mad. For once this displeased him.
If he was going to succeed, he needed to become part of the scenery, to blend in with whatever background his prey had become accustomed to. He would have to think about that. Turning himself around in front of the mirror, he worked to position the barrel comfortably inside the waistband of his pants in the middle of his back. It was time.
He took the photocopy out of his suitcase. He needed his magnifying glass to read the name of the store in the smudgy backdrop behind the duck. The Toronto phone book, thicker than he had expected, lay in the hotel dresser. Leafing through the parchment-thin pages he found the name he was looking for. He located the address on the street map he had taken from the rental car. The place was not far, as distances went. He would scout it out first by subway, maybe by streetcar. He would find it, all the while warmed by the constant bulk of the metal pinned near the small of his back.
He was surprised at how cold it was in Toronto the first week of April. The sun gave off a milky thin halo of light, hardly what he would call spring. It had been warmer in San Francisco in the winter.
The subway he rode north to Queen’s Park was brisk and clean. Climbing the stairs to the surface he found, in the shelter of a glassed-in corner, a hot dog vendor with his portable stand and a middle-aged woman in an expensive ski jacket selling daffodils. The Cancer Campaign. An excellent cause. He, himself, was planning to eradicate a deadly cancer. He only had to find it, the rest would be easy. He shifted his back to reassure himself with the weight of his weapon, his own answer to medicine.
The wide intersection roared with the tumult of six lanes of cars flying north and south on either side of sculptured stone boulevards; the whine of trolley cars rolling east and west. A short distance north, the sixlane artery split to ring around a massive rose-coloured structure, gracefully Victorian and surrounded by lawns. The seat of the provincial government, according to his Toronto guidebook. He pulled out the street map and tried to orient himself. Keep going west.
He passed large ivy-covered houses that had been converted and taken over by the university; here and there some boxy, slightly newer buildings housed the departments of botany, engineering, and architecture. Students did not linger here. All the young men and women were in a hurry, carrying their books to the next appointment. If he remembered correctly, they were probably writing exams. Many were alone, but none as alone as he. Nobody on earth knew where he was. (Maybe Louis could have made a wild guess; Louis, who had been there when the whole thing started again, in the Wiesenthal Center.) Nobody else. All he had to worry about now was God. And he did worry about God, God the instigator, God the creator of species that ate each other, of people who killed others for treasure as arcane as a Yankees jacket. God the sadist. What else could describe a being that set up a system where the large were forced to hunt the small for every meal. It was better to think of God as dead than to think of Him as evil. In either case, life was meaningless. Those who didn’t see it were just fooling themselves.
Uncle Sol had been just such a fool. What did he used to say? When God closes one door, He opens another. That little lesson had been lost on Nesha. Doors had only closed for him. What about this door? This door would be the shadowy entrance that led him into the abyss. Louis had been the gatekeeper. When he heard Louis’ voice, Nesha had hoped it was a call for contributions. Nesha’s brain had arranged fortresses around itself, prepared for onslaught. He remembered standing before Louis in the Center, what — a week ago? The man’s mouth dropped open, framing a pink “O” beneath his trim moustache. Nesha saw himself mirrored in the other man’s eyes: overgrown beard and hair, jeans, sneakers. Every year he had come to the Center to search for news of the man, and every year he had grown more ragged, whereas Louis had been a constant: compact and well-groomed, hair clipped short. Louis had left him alone in the room but Nesha couldn’t keep the excitement to himself when he finally found a scrap, a hint of what he had been looking for; couldn’t help showing Louis with shy triumph what he had found. He could hardly fathom it had been only a week.
Nesha shook California off and turned down a street with desperate lawns and dingy porches. The two-storey near-shabby Victorian houses were painted like the ones at home, but the colours were different. The gingerbread trim was white, but here the brick was painted solid red or green, strong unyielding colours to keep out the cold of the Canadian winter. In San Francisco houses like these were coloured pastel blue or yellow or pink, sometimes all at once, reflecting the dreamy seascape of the Pacific.
As he got closer to his destination, students thinned out and were replaced by shoppers. Some ragged men shambled near the ethnic shops, trying to catch a sympathetic eye for a handout. Many in the crowd were Asian. He could easily have been back home in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
A small elderly Chinese woman in trousers and drab winter jacket stood near a stall arranging apples. She looked up as he passed by and held one out to him, a large red Delicious. He stopped, charmed by this gesture, shy and aggressive at the same time.
“Is it always so cold in Toronto?” he asked, pulling some change from his pocket.
She began to chatter in some mysterious dialect, prodding the apple closer to his chest. As she opened her mouth into the strange shapes of her language, he could see she had almost no teeth. Biting into the apple, he nodded appreciation, and moved on.
All at once, he stopped, mesmerized by the shops across the narrow street. He drew the photocopy of the duck from his pocket and compared, though he knew as soon as he saw it. He had found what he was looking for. He had arrived at the location