Buffalo Jump (5 page)

H
eading home on an eastbound streetcar, crossing back over the Don Valley, I saw the ornate silver inscription on the west side of the bridge glinting in the sun: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in.” White plastic shopping bags floated on the surface of the Don River. Pop cans and milk jugs bobbed alongside them. Near the west bank a rusting shopping cart lay half-submerged. What you couldn’t see—the chlorine and other spilled toxins—was even worse. A truer inscription would have been, “This river I step in will give me a wicked rash.”

I arrived home feeling wilted. I thought about having a cold beer. I thought about calling my old friend Kenny Aber, to see if he wanted to pop by with a joint, which he was always good for. I finally decided against both and got my Rollerblades from the hall closet.

Getting down to the Don River bike path on skates was easy. All downhill, as it were. As long as my weight was centred over my blades, gravity did the rest, taking me down the gentle slope of Broadview Avenue. At the south end of Riverdale Park, just past Dr. Sun’s statue, was a much steeper paved path that led down into the valley. I used my foot brake a little but mostly cut back and forth like a skier to control my speed until the path
levelled out near a pedestrian footbridge that crossed the valley east to west. Halfway across the bridge was a metal staircase that led down to the bike path. I climbed down sideways, then started up the trail that followed the Don River north. It was less industrial than the southern trail and part of it was a defunct road, much wider than the bike path, that would give me a chance to sprint.

Normally after work this path was jammed with bikers, bladers, runners and dog walkers, but the heat was keeping people away. With no obstacles to dodge, I broke a good sweat by the time I reached the Chester Marsh, a wetland that had been painstakingly restored by volunteers and was now home to a bewildering variety of grasses, reeds and birds.

I crossed Pottery Road, a steep, curving access road that leads down from Riverdale to the Bayview Extension, taking care not to become a hood ornament as cars came rushing blindly down toward a level railway crossing. On my right was a small fenced-off gravel lot with a gap on the right side just wide enough to let bicycles and strollers pass through. There began a wide, even surface that ran parallel to the river. I picked up my pace, bent at the waist like a speed skater, feeling twinges in my right tricep each time my arm extended. Who knew gunshot wounds took so long to heal?

I went past two posts, about a hundred yards apart, on which hung bright orange lifesavers. The second one also had a long metal pole with a wide ring at one end. If someone fell into the river, you could fish them out with it. Or use it to clean out some of the trash. As I went past the embankment going up to the Parkway, I had the sound of traffic on my right and the river on my left, rushing sounds on both sides. Sweat stung the skin around my eyes but it felt good to get up a head of steam. I had been pretty sedentary since getting shot, partly because of the wound itself and partly because of the depression I’d felt looming around me ever since the Ensign case crashed and burned.

As soon as I got home, I showered and changed into shorts. While I waited for Joe Avila, I opened a cheap and cheerful Australian Cabernet, checked the cork for mould, then tossed it. I was about to pour myself a glass of wine when Joe called up from the lobby. “Down in a second,” I told him.

Joe was just five-seven but looked like he’d been carved from the cliffs of his Portuguese village in the Dorro River valley. He had dark curly hair and olive skin. He wiped his right hand on the back of his coveralls and we shook. “Sorry I’m late, Jonah, but I got a call for a boost just as I was leaving. That’s seventy bucks for five minutes’ work and it was on the way here.”

“Don’t worry about it, Joe. Thanks for coming.”

“I owe you for bringing Mariela home safe.”

“You owe me for selling me a piece of shit car.”

“Come on,” he said, trying to look aggrieved. “There’s nothing wrong with that car, not for the price you paid. You want to upgrade, I can put you in a two-year-old Camry or Accord for 10 per cent less than book.”

“Just get this one running for now,” I said.

I walked down to the garage door and opened it from the outside with a key. Joe drove his tow truck out of the circular drive and down into the garage and parked next to the Camry. Once I opened the hood, he slipped the hook of a caged lamp through an eyehole along the edge. He leaned in to have a look and I leaned in over his shoulder.

“You’re in my light,” he said.

“Sorry.”

He checked the battery and pronounced it fine. I leaned in again.

“Jonah.”

“Sorry.”

“Why don’t you go outside and have a smoke or something?”

“I quit.”

“Then go outside and stick your thumb up your ass till I call you, okay? Otherwise we gonna be here all night.”

It was so nicely put, what could I do but leave the man to his work?

I sat in the shade of a Norway maple on the lawn outside the building, stretching my hamstrings, listening to starlings chatter in the trees. I wondered what it would be like to move my mother into a nursing home. Not that we were anywhere near it. My mother was in her early sixties and needed assisted living like I needed another gunshot wound. After my father died, she became a real estate agent and now owned a thriving brokerage, Ruth Geller & Associates. Mom sat on half a dozen boards and committees that raised funds for the elderly, newly arrived Russian Jews, tree planting in the Negev desert, various hospital and medical research campaigns, her local Liberal member and either the Art Gallery of Ontario or the Royal Ontario Museum, I can never remember which. I wonder how she can.

Thirty minutes later, Joe drove the tow truck out of the garage. To my immense relief, my car was not hooked up to the back.

“Ignition coil was burned out,” he told me. “Put in a new one and she started up fine.”

“A new one or a brand new reconditioned one?” I asked.

Joe sighed. “Bad enough I had to come here in prime time. I also got to listen to your jokes?”

“Sorry, Joe. What do I owe you?”

“You know I don’t like to take your money, Jonah, what you did for me and all, but I need a hundred bucks for the coil and I could use another hundred to make up for all the calls I missed.”

Two hundred. Imagine if he
did
like to take my money. “Cheque okay?”

Joe looked at me like I’d suggested he pierce his nipples.

“There’s an ATM at the corner,” I said. “Drive me up.”

I stopped at a deli on the way home to pick up some rare roast beef and sharp cheddar; nothing fancy but both would go well with the wine I had opened. It was nearly seven-thirty by the time I got home. I put the food containers down on the counter and got a wineglass down from the shelf.

And froze.

On the counter next to the bottle were three drops of wine that hadn’t been there before. Three fat drops like blood on the white Formica. Then I heard a light footfall behind me and I knew whoever had broken in was still there, between me and the only way out. I closed my right hand around the corkscrew so the spiral end extended out between my middle and ring fingers. The little blade at the end, which I’d used to strip off the foil cap, was still open. It wasn’t much as weapons go but an improvement over cartilage and bone. I took a deep breath and spun around and came face to face with a dark-haired, dark-eyed man.

Dante Ryan, Marco Di Pietra’s feared enforcer and hired gun, was standing not ten feet from me, holding a glass of my wine.

He looked at the corkscrew in my hand and said, “You’re not going to need that.”

“What the fuck?” was the best response I could manage. My heart was hammering my chest like it wanted to crack it open from the inside.

“If I wanted you dead,” he said casually, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d have taken two in the head the minute you walked in and I’d be drinking alone.”

I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to that.

“Pour yourself a glass,” he said, nodding at the bottle of wine on the counter. “You and I need to talk.”

T
he last time I’d seen Dante Ryan was outside the University Avenue courthouse, right after Mr. Justice Hugh Kelly finished ripping a nervous young Crown attorney a new one for trying to indict Marco Di Pietra and his alleged associates on the flimsy evidence presented. Ryan, Marco and a sizable entourage were lighting up cigarettes when I exited. Marco had to put on a big show, of course, calling me Jewboy, pointing his thumb and forefinger at my head like a gun, cocking the thumb and making silencer noises in his cheeks. Ryan didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The look he gave me was enough.

Now he sat in my living room, legs crossed, sunglasses up in his hair, swirling wine in his glass, watching drops slide lazily down its side. His clothes were all black, as they’d been that day outside court: an expensive linen jacket, a silk crewneck top, pleated slacks, thin dress socks, soft leather loafers. A white scar ran up through his right eyebrow and a livid purple one snaked along the right side of his jaw. His hands had knots of scar tissue on some of the knuckles but the nails had been recently manicured. His eyes were dark but not as dark as you’d expect of a man who hurt or killed people for a living. They were not without humour.

“You got a piece of cheese to go with this?” he asked.

I managed to get the cheddar I had bought from the kitchen to the living room table, along with a cutting board, two knives, crackers and a bunch of red grapes.

Wine and cheese with Dante Ryan. What next? Champagne with Karla Homolka?

Ryan sipped his wine slowly. I held my glass so tightly I thought the stem might crack in my hand.

“Mind if I ask how you got in?”

“The building or the apartment?”

“Start with the building.”

“You got a lot of old ladies here,” he said.

“It’s rent-controlled. Some of them have been here since it was built.”

“They do their shopping at the Loblaws across the street, they come back loaded with bags or pulling their little carts. A young man in decent clothes comes over to hold the door for them, they don’t ask questions.”

“And the apartment?”

“Please. You want to keep people out, shell out for a decent lock, not the cheap shit that came with the place.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”

At least it wasn’t an Ensign brand. “No.”

“Mind?”

I never let anyone smoke in my apartment but I figured a cigarette pack was the least deadly thing Dante Ryan could pull on me. I told him to go ahead and found an ashtray in the cupboard under the sink. It had been used precisely once since I’d moved in, when Kenny Aber came by with a joint of West Coast weed as his housewarming gift.

Ryan lit up with a slim gold lighter and exhaled. “I came to see you in a professional capacity,” he said.

“Mine, I hope.”

“Don’t worry, I told you.”

“It’s hereditary.”

“Whatever. You know who I am and who I work for. You know what I do. So before we go any further, let’s agree that what gets said tonight never leaves this room. Whatever you decide. We clear?”

“Decide what?”

“Are we clear?”

“I’m not like a lawyer when it comes to confidentiality.”

“I’m not talking rules and regs. If what I say to you gets back to the man I work for, his family or his crew, it will get me killed. I’m here because I got nowhere else to go. And because you owe me.”

“Owe you how?”

He dragged on his cigarette and blew two perfect smoke rings, one through the other. “You cost my boss a ton of money on the tobacco job—at least a million—and he had to make a court appearance, which is down low on his list of favourite things.”

“Then again, he walked because I fucked up. So maybe he owes me.”

“You want to tell him that?”

Point taken.

“Anyway,” Ryan said, “after the judge threw it out, we had a meeting to talk about what to do about you. Marco, as you know, is a hothead. He was all for having you killed. But there’s an unwritten rule in our thing that you don’t kill cops unless you have to. The heat is too intense. You’re not a real cop, but your boss was and he could have called in favours. In the end, cooler heads prevailed, and that’s the only reason you’re still here.”

“You were one of the cooler heads?”

Ryan smiled again. “I could say I was or wasn’t and you’d never know the difference. So let’s say I was and leave it at that.” He butted his cigarette. I reached for my wine and drank
a third of it down. Red wine is supposed to benefit the cardiovascular system, at least over the long run. Short term, I just wanted my heart rate to decelerate into the low 200s, as I prepared to hear what this killer wanted from me.

It’s not like I had no blood at all on my hands. But his were soaked to the elbows by comparison.

An Ontario Provincial Police intelligence officer named Chris Cook once told me that Dante Ryan was believed to be responsible for as many as a dozen gangland murders over the years, but had never been convicted of anything worse than assault.

“Guy’s a walking arsenal,” Cook said. “I’m told he usually carries at least two guns and he does nice work with a knife too.”

Like he trimmed steaks for a living.

Cook was my OPP liaison on the Ensign investigation and laid the scene out for me the night before the bottom fell out.

Ryan had known Marco Di Pietra since childhood, Cook told me, but wasn’t a made member of Marco’s crew, and never could be, because his father wasn’t Italian. “Not that his old man wasn’t in the life, but he was Irish, one Sid Ryan, part of the West End Gang in Montreal. He spent time in Toronto and Hamilton in the late sixties, trying to work out a deal with the Calabrians on distribution rights for new drugs coming onto the scene. Only he knocked up a girl who’s a cousin to a cousin of Vincente Di Pietra, better known as Vinnie Nickels. He wasn’t boss then, still a capo under Johnny Papalia, but Sid still had to marry the girl or Vinnie would have killed him. You know these guys. They like to play the honor card when it suits them.”