Okay, the river. She stepped over to the bookcase in the den and retrieved an atlas. Happily, there was a page on world statistics: the largest countries, the highest mountains, the most populated cities, and among this fascinating lot, the one she needed — the longest, ergo best-known, rivers. Only she couldn’t imagine how anyone would work them into the name of something in downtown Toronto. The Nile What. The Amazon Something. The Yangtze Such and Such. And there were columns of them, rivers she had never heard of, rivers she had forgotten about. There was no easy way to find what she was looking for. She would just have to get on with it.
She was putting on her jacket when the phone rang.
“Rebecca? Are you all right, dear?” said the Polishaccented voice. “I saw your picture in the paper and I got worried.”
That awful picture of her coming out of Goldie’s place. “I’m fine, Sarah; thank you.” Rebecca didn’t want her mother-in-law to worry; she was still getting over the death of her son.
“Was it someone you knew?”
“A patient of mine.”
“I’m so sorry. What a terrible thing. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I’m fine, really.” Sarah was an elegant, cultured woman who loved art and had imparted that love to her son. She had been responsible for David being the man he was and Rebecca would always be grateful to her for that. But his death, instead of bringing them closer together, had formed a wedge between them, each reminding the other of their loss.
By 10:15, Rebecca was driving along College Street at a snail’s pace in the right hand lane. While she read the names of each shop on both sides of the street, drivers who found themselves behind her honked and veered to the left to pass. Gino’s Hardware, College Gifts, Margo’s Donuts and Coffee Shop. Drier than dry. No hint of river, lake, or stream.
A few blocks east of Bathurst, she made an illegal U-turn and drove back along College Street, reasoning that Mrs. Kochinsky wouldn’t have been able to run to the office from further afield. Rebecca turned down Spadina and suddenly came to a full stop. While traffic whizzed around her, she sat just north of a street that intersected Spadina and led into Kensington Market.
She felt as if she were poised on the edge of a time warp. The market, its chaotic goods stacked and sprawled on the sidewalks under sun-faded awnings, looked like it could toss her back fifty years. The genteel veneer of Beverley Street, barely two blocks away, may as well have been on the moon. She blinked at the crisply painted sign several stores down the side street: Atlantic Seafood. What if Rosie didn’t know an ocean from a river? What if her translation from the Jewish was slightly off? Rebecca parked and set out on foot.
She stood at the corner facing the noisy clutter of the narrow street jammed with small shops and cars. Pungent smells of butchers and fishmongers and God knows what else trailed into hints on the air. She approached Atlantic Seafood. Iridescent layers of whitefish, red snapper, and perch glimmered on beds of crushed ice outside the store. The effect was esthetic, spoiled only by their blank eyes, empty as glass.
Inside the store, two dark Mediterranean-looking men stood wiping down the cutting boards behind a counter piled with shrimp and snails.
“Can I help you?” one of the men asked.
She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out the photo she had taken from Rosie. “I’m trying to find my aunt,” she said, showing him the picture. “The one on the left. She may’ve come in here on Tuesday. She was wearing a beige trenchcoat and polyester pants. She had ... she has an accent.”
The man reached across the counter and took the photo, showing it to his partner. “I don’t know, lady. Lots of people come in here. I don’t know if I’d remember. Why don’t you go to the police?”
Rebecca looked at their faces. There was no guile; they didn’t know and they didn’t care. “Are there any other fish stores in the market?”
“You kidding?” he said, handing her back the photo. “Probably five on every street.”
Outside Rebecca squeezed by sidewalks that shrank around stalls of fresh fruit and vegetables and spices by the pound. A skinny cat slunk into an alley to forage through the garbage. She passed stores that sold schmatas and handbags and gifts from the Orient. Lucky for her, the other fish stores bore names like Joe’s Fish, Kensington Fish, and Ontario Seafood.
Down the street a truck was being unloaded. As little room as there was on the sidewalks, at least people could move through. The same couldn’t be said for the road where cars parked along one side left a single lane for the one-way traffic. The delivery truck was parked half on the road, half on the sidewalk, effectively blocking the only lane open. A line-up of cars that had turned down the market street could go nowhere, their exhausts humming with poison. Pedestrians managed to squeeze by single file. As Rebecca approached, a man inside the elevated back gate of the truck flipped a huge side of beef onto the waiting shoulders of another, standing on the road. Sinew-red with the leg still on, it looked alive, as if it would jump down and walk away if the man let go. He started toward her, carrying it slung between his head and shoulder the way one carries a child high above a crowd. She stopped and gasped as he carried the thing toward her. Pale cushions of fat bloated the surface of the meat; blood from the flesh grazed his hair, his collar. In her panic she retreated into some shoppers, then swung across the street between the cars.
Standing on the opposite sidewalk she stared across at the butcher’s. The morning sun glanced off the metal of the sign. In the window David hung by his feet upside down, his back to her. She began to run. The cold wind chilled the sweat off her neck and she thought of Goldie. She imagined Goldie running, running through the streets just as Rebecca was running now. From what? From herself? Shoppers moved aside from her as if she were crazy. As if she were Goldie. Rebecca was nearly back to Spadina again when she realized the shops had ended abruptly, giving way to the sudden high grey wall of George Brown College, a building wildly out of place here, too linear, too simply rendered in the complex spring sun.
Then she saw it. The noise from the cars on Spadina was suddenly deafening. She had found her river and it flowed loud. Not more than three shops in from Spadina stood Blue Danube Fish.
Then came water and quenched the fire That burned the stick that beat the dog That bit the cat that ate the goat That Father bought for two zuzim. One little goat, one little goat.
chapter eighteen
Standing at the window Rebecca could see a darkened hovel of a room whose green-grey walls did not reflect light but absorbed it. A solitary fish lay on the newspaper-clad counter just inside the window, a feeble attempt at advertisement. Behind the heavy wooden counter to the left, a woman lurked in the shadows.
The smell overpowered Rebecca as soon as she opened the door. She stood on the threshold to let her eyes and nose adjust. The place reeked. A woman stood behind an ancient, crusted counter, filleting a fish as if she could do it with her eyes closed, slow but steady. The back of her black hair hung down to her shoulders; the rest was gathered off her face into an elastic at the crown, revealing a widow’s peak. Despite the teenage hairstyle, the woman was middleaged. Her eyes were badly pencilled, her prominent cheekbones ruddy.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
A handmade wooden tub filled with water stood off to one side. Nearby a makeshift partition of plywood painted the same green-grey. In the corner was a closed door.
Moving closer, Rebecca noticed the woman’s apron was muddy with old blood. She held up the photo of Goldie. “Did you see this woman on Tuesday?”
The fishmonger stared at the photo. Her arms were plump, waiting, as she held the knife. “Why d’you wanna know?”
“I’m trying to trace her movements.”
The woman had outlined her eyes in black pencil as if they were circles. She pursed her lips while examining the picture. “She missing?”
Rebecca