Straight No Chaser (20 page)

The tall guy, outside the window, looked at his piece of paper and turned away from Truong's window in the direction of the Datsun. But he didn't step away from the Seville. He didn't need to. The two guys from the Datsun seemed to be coming to him. Dan Nguyen and My Do Thai, whichever was which, were on the run toward us, past the Porsche, up to the Seville and the tall guy. The two of them, Hawaiian Shirt and Warm-up Suit, were carrying baseball bats, and I had a terrible feeling they didn't plan to use them for the same purpose Darryl Strawberry wields his bat.

The tall guy looked like he was nailed to the street. He didn't budge, and the expression on his face said he was petrified. He held out his right hand, beseechingly, to the two men with the bats. The hand held the slip of paper. The two batters didn't care about the paper. The tall guy took a quick, scared, hopeful look at Truong behind the raised window. No use. Truong was concentrating on the money tray.

“But I got the fucking paper!” the tall guy screeched at the men with the bats, and he started to wave his arms, the way he waved them when he talked to Big Bam on the bench.

I didn't think any of it—the arm-waving, the screeching, the displaying of the paper—was doing the tall guy any good. He probably didn't think so either.

The man in the blue warm-up suit swung his baseball bat at the tall guy's knees. He connected. The tall guy's feet flew about a yard in the air, and he hung up there a second or two before he dropped. I opened the door on the right side of the Seville and pushed it out. The tall guy hit the road hard, shoulder and hip first. He didn't bounce. The man in the Hawaiian shirt was on him for more licks. He gave the tall guy's gut three swift whacks with the bat. I got out of the car. The tall guy was a couple of feet from me. Vomit spurted from his mouth. Warm-up Suit was still on the job. He rapped the tall guy's ankles. Once, twice, swift and vicious, a third time and a fourth. The tall guy grabbed his stomach with one hand and reached for his ankles with the other. He rolled on to his back and over on the other side, and when he rolled, the slip of white paper came loose on the pavement.

The two guys from the Datsun had wrapped up batting practice. They were hotfooting it back to their car. Truong seemed to be absorbed in his study of the money tray. No one saw the loose piece of paper except me.

“You!” Tran yelled from behind the Seville's wheel. “Get the fuck back in!”

He was yelling at me. But from where he was sitting, Tran had no line of sight on the paper. I squatted, palmed the paper, straightened up, and slid into the Seville's back seat. One easy, fluid, sophisticated motion. So how come my armpits were dripping sweat?

The Datsun up ahead gunned away from the curb. Big Bam and the two lookouts followed in the Porsche. And we were right behind in the Seville.

I slipped the piece of paper into the breast pocket of my shirt and looked through the back window at the tall guy in the street. He was wrapped in the fetal position, curled up, both hands holding tight to his body, vomit running down his front. His shoes had come off, and his pants were pulled halfway up one shin. A bone seemed to be sticking out of the leg at an angle bones don't normally choose.

“A dissatisfied customer?” I said to the back of Truong's head. My voice had a croak in it.

Truong turned in his seat to face me.

“Worse,” he said. “A duplicitous customer.”

23

F
ROM THE ROUTE
Tran took back downtown, I thought we were aimed for the restaurant where I had lunch. I thought wrong. We got into the same general neighbourhood, but a few blocks further west, closer to Toronto Western Hospital. I considered suggesting to Truong we might have dropped off the tall guy at the Western. I kept my mouth shut.

Tran drove along a side street lined with narrow, two-storey houses painted in fabulous shades. Magentas, emeralds, blood reds. In Toronto, English Canadians sandblast their brick. The other nationalities make like Robert Rauschenberg with theirs. Tran turned left off the street and through the opening in a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt was standing at the opening. He closed a gate into it after we passed by. Tran steered around to the back of a building and pulled up in a line with the Datsun and the Porsche. The gang was all here.

The building towered over the houses to the east by two and a half storeys. It had a run-of-the-mill industrial look, yellow-brown brick, flat roof, large rectangular windows. There was something different about the windows. They were painted over and projected nothing but black. Did evil lurk within?

Everybody was out of the cars except Truong. The five underlings— Tran, Hawaiian Shirt, Warm-up Suit, and the two lookouts—strung themselves in a loose line between the Seville and a steel door into the back of the building. They checked rooftops, peeked around corners, seemed to be watching for anything that might move. Give them two-piece dark suits and wires plugged into their ears and they'd look like your average platoon of secret-service agents guarding the prime minister. Truong, in the Seville with the cash, had the prime-ministerial role.

Big Bam was at the steel door, fitting a key into a lock. Two keys, in fact, in two locks. He hadn't directed his attention my way. First things came first, and getting the money inside the building qualified as a definite first. I was glad to settle for second place. Gave me time to work out my strategy. What strategy? Examine the slip of paper? Not if it might cost me time in the batting cage with the two Saigon sluggers. I'd save the paper for later in the privacy of my own living room.

Big Bam opened the door, and simultaneously Truong was out of the Seville and stepping in expeditious fashion down the line of guards. He carried the tray in both hands, gingerly, like a precious possession. Which it was, probably in the vicinity of a hundred grand for the day's curious commerce.

Truong went through the steel door followed by Big Bam. Tran motioned me to take a place in the procession. The light was murky inside and got murkier when Tran slammed shut the door and threw the pair of locks. We went single file, nobody talking, up one flight of stairs, turned left, and climbed a shorter flight. At the front of the file, someone opened a door, and bright light flooded down the stairs. I was second-last in the group, trailed by Tran, and when I stepped through the door, into the brightness, and looked around, I came close to tumbling backwards into Tran the trailer.

“Well, damn,” I said.

“Fantastic, you know?” Tran said from behind me.

“And here I thought I'd seen all the city's architectural wonders.”

The space in front of me might have been smaller than the inside of Maple Leaf Gardens, but not much. The whole of the interior of the building had been ripped out from side to side and from first floor to the ceiling, three and a half storeys up. No inside walls, no floors, no skylight, no windows that let in light. There was plenty of light from other sources, and all of them were in operation. Bars of pink neon at least thirty feet long ran vertically up all four walls. Tiny red bulbs, like the kind for Christmas decorations, were strung over every available surface. And the surfaces were manifold. A bar, much longer than Abner Chase's salad bar, occupied one end of the room. It didn't peddle arugula. It was in the spirits business. Bottles of all things alcoholic sat on shelves behind the monster bar, and the shelves were festooned with the ubiquitous tiny red bulbs. Several dozen small tables and four times as many chairs were grouped around a large dance floor. It was painted midnight blue. Enormous speakers for a sound system hung about twelve feet up in the room's four corners. And giant grainy blowups of famous folks, three times life-size, were mounted at regular intervals around the walls. Marilyn Monroe. Elvis Presley. James Dean. I recognized the famous folks who were deceased. I drew a blank on most of the others. Must be rock stars. If I learned who they were, I'd put them on the list of subjects I was eliminating from my thought processes.

“What's this place called?” I asked Tran.

“Booze can.”

“I know that. But what's its name? When a guy comes here in a cab, where's he tell the driver to take him?”

“Big Bam's place.”

“Should've guessed.”

“Only word of mouth, you know?” Tran said. “Not many cab drivers can find this place, only the ones who are our friends.”

“Oh sure,” I said. “Wrong sort might get in.”

“No trash, you know?”

It didn't seem prudent to continue the conversation. Tran and I might get into a debate over trash. He was sure to win.

I knew about booze cans, but this was my first venture into one. That gave me the edge over Toronto's cops; they knew about booze cans too, but apparently hadn't been inside one long enough to make a bust. Booze cans like Big Bam's place, so I'd learned from the grapevine, opened for business around ten-thirty at night and sold liquor, drugs, and high-stepping times until the sun came up. Those activities broke many laws, but, as I gathered from the same grapevine, the police hadn't penetrated the booze cans' security and caught owners and customers in the lawbreaking. What was this informative grapevine of mine? The series of articles that the
Globe
's investigative reporter wrote on booze cans a month or so earlier. Wonder if the investigative reporter knew about Big Bam's place with the steel door and the guys with the baseball bats? That was real security.

“You and me got to wait,” Tran said to me.

“Doesn't come as a surprise, the way my day's been going.”

Big Bam, Truong, and their protectors were across the floor, about the width of a football field from Tran and me. A door led out of the huge room at the point where the bar ended. Big Bam and company disappeared through it.

“You want a drink?” Tran asked me.

“Now you're talking.”

Tran didn't inquire after my preference in beverages, and I wasn't certain we were palsy enough for me to speak up. A guy with muscles like Tran, maybe nobody got palsy enough with him to speak up.

Tran went behind the bar, and I sat down at one of the tables next to the dance floor.

Tran came back with two cans of Sprite.

“Not exactly the kind of drink I had in mind,” I said.

“Big Bam makes the rule,” Tran said. “No booze on the job.”

“Speaking of the job,” I said, “what was going on up at the Pits? All that collecting cash and trading paper?”

“You don't know?”

“Wouldn't ask otherwise.”

“You don't know,” Tran said, “I don't tell you.”

“Another Big Bam rule?”

“You got it.”

Tran finished his Sprite and crushed the can in his right hand. It was probably as thrilling as life was going to get in Tran's company. I asked him about the other guys. He told me Hawaiian Shirt was Dan Nguyen, and Warm-up Suit was My Do Thai. I said it was nice to have the fellas straight. He told me the names of the two lookouts. I didn't commit them to memory.

Tran walked back to the bar and picked up a newspaper from the counter.

“That thing come in two sections?” I asked.

Tran separated a pair of double sheets from the paper and shoved them across the table to me. It was printed in Vietnamese. Or maybe Sanskrit. I leafed through my share of the paper. There was a photograph of someone who looked strikingly like Lyndon Johnson.

“What's this about?” I asked Tran.

He studied the photograph and the accompanying story.

“President of the United States,” Tran said.

“Not for a while now.”

It came up to six o'clock. Tran had two more Sprites and gave his newspaper a real going-over. I passed through three phases. Impatience, fear, inertia. What if Big Bam in the other room was in touch with Trevor Dalgleish, and Trevor blew the whistle on me? That thought accounted for the fear. So did the memory of the tall guy in spasms on the road by the park. I didn't think I'd suffer his fate, not immediately, and I didn't think Big Bam would be in early communication with Trevor Dalgleish. Truong's remarks in the restaurant and in the Seville, the stuff about waiting three days to resolve something or other, gave me the impression Trevor was being elusive with his Vietnamese clients. Clients? That was another question. I was developing more than a glimmer of suspicion that Trevor and the Big Bam bunch had something other than a traditional solicitor-client relationship.

Around six-thirty, things perked up. Dan Nguyen and My Do Thai came back out of the door they'd gone through hours earlier. They said nothing and left by way of the back entrance we'd all entered by. Ten minutes later, the two lookouts made a similar passage, except their exit was by way of another steel door in the far wall opposite the bar. This door was double-sized and had a peephole in its centre. Five minutes after that, I did a definite ID on one of the people in the blowups on the walls. It was Sonia Braga, world's third- or fourth-sexiest woman. She looked different in the blow-up, but still sexy. Next time Annie raised Ted Koppel, I'd counter with Sonia Braga. After that, events in the booze can calmed right down again.

“Would you come in, Mr. Crang?” Truong said. He was standing at the open doorway to the inner room. His voice caught me with my head down. Maybe inertia had given way to forty winks.

“Nice to see you again,” I said to Truong.

I followed him into the office. It was smallish and had a cluttered feel. It also had the only window I'd noticed in the place that wasn't painted over. The office window was covered by a black blind.

Big Bam was on his feet behind a desk, smiling broadly, his arms held out to the sides, expansive, a gesture of apology.

“What can I say?” he said. “Waiting like you been doing's a drag. But what can I say? Basically, it's got to be business before pleasure, you catch my drift.”