Jules said, not urgently: “Behind you.”
Dante swivelled out of harm’s way. Tripped on a crate of beets. Did not fall down.
It was close.
“Besides,” Dante went on. “This Capelli, for all her personal complexities, won’t be out of work for more than ten minutes. So you need feel no guilt.”
Which served precisely to make Jeremy feel guilty, of course. Guilty about keeping Jules in sixty-five-seat Cross-town bistro when she could take her shining black hair, her beautiful strong nose and pointed opinions right back up the street to The Tea Grill or Jonah’s, The Cedar Café or one of the others, up the street to any established kitchen you could name.
“And what would you do without me?” she once asked when he suggested she was a free agent.
“I could keep on going or go back to France,” he said.
“France.” Jules said. “France was school. We have what France prepared you for right here. What we wished for. And something with legs too. Those kids in the front window smoking roll-your-owns are bellwethers. They know when something is real and when it isn’t.”
Oliver Michaelson didn’t know the kids in the front window from squeegee kids anywhere, but if somebody had ever asked him directly he would have said he hoped The Monkey’s Paw was real. He hoped on Jeremy’s behalf, godfather to his five-year-old son, Trout, university pal and once band mate. He hoped on behalf of Jeremy’s financial solvency, which had been an ongoing issue over the years. There were certainly closer coffee shops to his loft office on Water Street, home of Michaelson Data Design, but nobody could say that he wasn’t a faithful friend to those who warranted it. Plus, there was his wife, Margaret, who had been part of the university gang and since evolved into a devout foodie. She had been a steady customer of Jeremy’s first, and suggested Olli do the same. Investment in a friend’s business was one thing, an unwise thing in Olli’s view (and he had thought about it carefully before saying no), but patronage wasn’t too much to ask.
Olli pushed open the door of The Monkey’s Paw at his usual hour, bang on seven, when the place opened for the coffee trade. He entered the long, dark space with the crazy art that his friend collected from local artists, and Olli smelled—with a nose that had grown canine-sharp since he quit drinking and smoking—both the coffee and a very slight dankness from the walls. He wondered how much the inevitable renovations would cost.
As usual, Jeremy was in the back, clattering around, when he arrived. Olli decided to wait at the counter quietly. He
could have rung the bell that was left out in the mornings. But there was the odd occasion, coming to this place owned by an old friend this early in the morning, when he opened the serial port to a very short instream burst of nostalgia. It was, for example, provocative to entertain the thought of how they had stayed friends coming from the beginning they shared. Jay-Jay and The Decoders, from the school of toxic rockabilly. Jeremy played a hollow body electric, a position he fancied most amenable to being drunk during a performance. Moss Craven on traps (Olli hadn’t heard of him in years). Olli himself played stand-up bass, poorly in fact but nobody at a Decoder gig knew the difference anyway. They each got a decoder-ring tattoo, felt so similar to one another in those months, in the weeks even, the days before they all launched off into their own utterly different futures. How did that work?
Jeremy came through the swinging door from the kitchen, glanced up sharply. Dragging his hungover ass around first thing in the morning as usual, thought Olli, not without a trace of jealousy.
Jeremy cracked a smile.
“Yo,” Olli said, smirking a rockabilly smirk in return. “Gas me up.”
“Decoders, go,” Jeremy answered. And after they had shaken hands, he tapped out coffee for the double espresso Olli favoured, burped out two black bullets into a to-go cup, the whole time watching his friend with one eye. Olli drifted in his presence sometimes, Jeremy had observed, sweeping his eyes around the room as if trying to remember something. This morning Jeremy was checking surreptitiously for indications of how his godson was doing, before committing to the question. Trout had health problems from the start, and a heart condition that persisted. They were the model sick-kid parents, Olli and Margaret, hyper-attentive without betraying the least sign of it. At dinner parties over the years, Jeremy had noted how things might
get raucous but the radar was always on, scanning for a signal from the loft bedroom above.
This morning, as Olli waited for his coffee, Jeremy found himself thinking that his friend was showing signs of strain.
Even before he got rich, Olli always looked rich. He had good posture, for one, a lean athletic frame for a guy who didn’t go to a gym until his late twenties when he was a recovering alcoholic. He wore wide-shouldered, fitted Italian suits and big, off-white, made-to-measure shirts with two sharply pressed front pockets. Wide colourful ties. Then Commotion Works bought Trout World, his original software development company (before Commotion Works went spectacularly bust). Olli pocketed the cash, looked like a genius for timing, and didn’t really change that much. Margaret picked them out a penthouse loft in Yaletown, and they both kept on working as hard as before. She was a seismic engineer, and her firm was involved in half the upgrade projects happening across the city (ongoing, frenetic preparation for The Big One. Jeremy thought there was something increasingly millennial about it.) But money didn’t stabilize the tectonic plates or Trout’s heart, and they both carried on carrying on. Emblematic of this fact, Olli stayed with the sharply creased, made-to-measure, two-pocket shirts, just like he was still looking for that first $2.35 million.
His money only came up once that Jeremy could recall, and the memory always embarrassed him. It was in the early years of his planning for The Monkey’s Paw, before Dante. Jeremy’s cheapest conceivable vision of the place could have been realized for one hundred grand, but the answer was still no. Polite, but firm. There was money, Olli had explained, and there was liquidity. Lots of the one didn’t necessarily mean lots of the other.
“You see,” Olli said, sitting stiffly in his office chair, running fingers through his short sandy hair, turning to glance at a huge monitor on his desk that had given a cock-a-doodle-doo to
signal incoming e-mail. “From the standpoint of cash, we’re both broke.”
Had Olli stopped there, Jeremy would have left resentful. He would have walked out the door thinking, Well, if you’re going to be broke, I suppose it pays to be rich first. But he remembered taking a minute to digest the words, looking out over Olli’s shoulder to the sunlit inner harbour. The stacks of shipping containers made a colourful quilt against the high blue mountains on the North Shore. And Olli, sensing a distance grow briefly between them, leaned forward on his elbows. “Jay-Jay,” he said sincerely. “You think I’m being cold about this.”
“Nah,” Jeremy said.
“You do, but you’re wrong. A) I can’t afford it. I simply don’t have one hundred thousand dollars, and I’ve borrowed all the money my bank is comfortable lending, trying to do this thing that I’m doing. And B) …”
It wasn’t exactly a stand-up-come-around-the-desk embrace, but Jeremy felt the warmth.
“B) I can’t afford us getting into a big fight, having a falling out. Trout ending up without a godfather.”
“Why would.,” Jeremy started, but he knew the risk better than most people. What were the chances of going down in the restaurant trade and losing your investor’s money entirely? Fifty, sixty percent?
Olli had leaned back in his chair and done something Jeremy hadn’t seen him do since university. He reached for his smokes. Of course he’d quit and didn’t have any cigarettes on him—they both knew that. But in that moment, flustered despite appearing otherwise, Olli’s fingers went to the lip of one of those sharply creased front pockets on his made-to-measure shirt. They found the seam of cloth, realized their own mistake and quietly withdrew to the desk top.
Jeremy now finished the espresso, added the two teaspoons of brown sugar he knew Olli liked. Stirred it and
handed it over. Olli went into his pants pocket for change while Jeremy looked again at the familiar shirt.
Ironed badly, he thought all at once. That was it. There was a crease stamped across one of the pockets and a brown mark on the collar, which was splaying out the jacket at the back. In a cascade of details, Jeremy redrew his mental picture of Olli. He was looking
frayed
, that was it. A little mad, although in a nice, middle-class way. He knew Olli had given up drinking years before, less than a year after Trout was born, in fact, but he was giving off a combination of jerky signals that Jeremy associated with drinking. (Madness accompanied his own hangovers. In Jeremy’s case this sense was sidecarred to a careening paranoia and a kind of gyroscopic rigidity in the brain, centred somewhere in the cerebrum. He’d try to look sideways out the bus window and something would strain against realignment. Push his eyes back to the front.)
He checked out Olli’s eyes. They were clear but watery. He could be using Visine.
“So, tell me about Trout,” Jeremy asked.
“Oh …,” Olli said, scratching his head. “He’s painting dollar bills. Perfect replicas of U.S. dollar bills. We have 133 now.”
Jeremy smiled. He had some godfatherly pride in the strange creativity this project suggested, and he might have liked to hear more about the boy but Olli, as usual, had to fly.
“Dinner Monday?” he said, extending his hand. “Margaret wants to show off her new Aga.”
“Sure, and wow,” Jeremy said. He preferred a flame himself, but he was aware how much an Aga cost. They shook again, a short firm shake like Claude’s. Like the ones you earned from countermen in French cafés but only after months of patronage. These patterns were important, Jeremy thought after Olli had left, although this comfortable thought was unsettled somewhat by the pattern suggested by his next customer.
Jeremy kicked a cowboy boot up on a chair behind the counter, ran an elbow across his knee. “Caruzo,” he said.
There were many horsepower of something coursing through Caruzo. He panted out his words in anxious, breathy gasps, and was frequently helpless to movements that flashed through his limbs. He bobbed on his feet. Head-faked. Dodged invisible punches.
“How about a cigarette?” Jeremy suggested after watching Caruzo for a while. And he pulled one out, lit it and handed it across the counter to Caruzo, already looking past him to his first film students of the day.
“Hey, Jay,” one of them said, angling around Caruzo, who stood adrift in front of the cash register, sucking on the smoke. Bobbing. “Coffee. What do you want?” he said to his friend, who answered in the slow, cadential speech of the recently stoned.
“You got eggnog lattés?”
Jeremy sighed. Wherever did people learn to like this stuff? The Inferno. “Not now. Not ever,” he said.
“Just give him a coffee,” the first one said. “Do you, like, have the fritters going yet?”
“Not until ten,” Jeremy said.
The kids took their coffee to the front window, laughing. At Caruzo, no doubt.
“Yo Jay, yo Jay,” Caruzo said. “How about a coffee? You got just plain coffee? Coffee?”
“I think so,” Jeremy said. “Black, right? That will be twenty dollars please.”
“Damn. Left my wallet in the park.” Caruzo took the coffee and started to laugh at the regular joke they shared. A hiccuping, belching, farting sound. It sent his shoulders jogging, produced white flecks at the mouth corners and, more often than not, jarred a little pendulum booger out to the edge of his upper lip. Sure enough, there was the booger.
“Oh right, I forgot. You don’t
have
any money,” Jeremy said, slapping his forehead.
“Hey, I got money. I got money, you know,” Caruzo said, who had now spilled coffee on himself, the counter and the floor. “Just not on me. It’s not on me. Hey Jay, though? Jay, I am a messenger.”
“Here’s a napkin, blow your nose. How about a seat?”
He led Caruzo across the room to a table against the brick wall. They sat down together, and Jeremy waited while Caruzo blew his nose, elaborately examining the contents of the napkin. Blew again. It was a big nose, like a sap extrusion on a cedar trunk. His eyes were a faraway storm colour, against which it was hard to pick up the pupil movements.
Finished finally with the napkin, Caruzo delivered his message. “The Professor is asking after you. Asking after you, Jay-Jay.”
“I see,” Jeremy said, glancing around the room.
“Babes in the Wood. It’s all about that, Jay, nothing else. Babes in the Woods, most of all. Needs to know soon, right?” Caruzo was staring at him intently. Staring through him. “Needs to know what you found out soon, Jay.”
“Fine, Caruzo,” Jeremy said. “Tell him I’ll be down to the library next week.”
Caruzo was a permanent jangle of ticks and repeated words, but he went absolutely still with this answer and spoke the first complex, non-fragmented sentence Jeremy had ever heard him speak. “The Professor was expecting that you would have done the research by now.”
It made an impression. Jeremy said, “I promise I’ll do it this weekend.”
Caruzo nodded slowly and seriously.
“Caruzo?” Jeremy said, trying out something he’d been wondering. How did you go about asking questions of a person like Caruzo? What did his father hear?
“Jay?” Caruzo said back, all ears.
He couldn’t think of any better way of phrasing the question. “What do you and the Professor talk about, Caruzo?”
“Oh. Phhhhhht,” he shrugged, snorted, boogered on himself again. He was talking through the napkin, eyes bulging from the incomprehensible activity that surged within. “Well, he’s writing. You know. Writing. Always writing. And listening too. Always listening. Listening and writing. Writing and listening.”
“About what, though?” Jeremy was beginning to see how these conversations could be trying.
“It’s like Siwash, Jay-Jay.”
“It is?” Jeremy said. There was always the danger Caruzo would unspool on you. Only once had Jeremy been forced to ask him to leave.