TORONTO: CHAPTER ELEVEN

     Coal Blackstone nosed her black, 2001 Plymouth Prowler into the parking lot near Didier and, with the reluctance she always felt in parting with the car, even for a short time, gave the keys to the teenaged parking attendant.  “Be careful with it,” she told him, “or the two of us will be having a very serious talk a couple of hours from now.”
     “Absolutely, ma’am,” the young man replied, dazzled equally by the beauty of both the fiercely sleek car and its sleekly beautiful owner.  “You can depend on me.”
     “I hope so.”
     The waiter at Didier seated them with the sort of elaborate fake deference Coal hated, presented them with menus, and then scurried off to fetch water, rolls, butter—talismans of the Gustatory Preliminary.  After which task, he then skulked about near their table until the two women simultaneously betrayed expressions that meant decisions had been reached.
     “Would you like to hear about tonight’s specials?” he asked them, a tad late in the game.
     “No” said Coal.  She hated the pseudo-lyricism of food descriptions.  “To begin with, bring us a couple of martinis.”
     “Very dry, yes?”
     Coal glared at him. 
     “Surely nothing else is really a martini,” she informed him curtly.  She turned then to Joy, who was feeling a little marginalized by Coal’s sense of command.  “The service here is, as you can see…well, rather trying,” Coal told Joy, “but the food is lovely.”
     The waiter was back with the drinks.
     “Did I ask you if you wanted to hear Chef Leroy’s special’s for tonight?
     “Yes, you did,” Coal replied crisply.
     “And I actually think we’ve decided,” Joy told him, with what Coal felt was an undeserved smile, which served to soften the moment by a little.
     “And so what can I get you?”
     “You can get us both cheese souffles,” said Coal.  “And before that, you can bring us a mushroom terrine to share.”  She turned to Joy.  “We don’t really want wine do we?  I’d just like to drink martinis.”
     Joy nodded her assent.
     “Very good, ladies,” said the waiter and disappeared.
     Ladies?” said Coal to Joy.
     “I guess he couldn’t say ‘very good, Women’,” replied Joy, with a half-hearted smile.
     “I wish he hadn’t said anything at all,” replied Coal.  “But,” she continued, smiling at Joy and squeezing her hand briefly, “enough about him.  What about you?”
     “Well, as you guessed earlier, back at the studio, it’s Cass.  I’m getting a bit concerned about him.”
     “To tell you the truth,” said Coal, taking the always clarifying first sip of her icy martini, “we’re all a bit concerned about him.  He is the mayor, after all.  And, if you don’t mind my saying so, a rather peculiar mayor at that.”
     “I know,” said Joy wearily.  “And he’s peculiar in lots of ways, not just politically.”
     “Is he?”
     “Decidedly.  The reason I wanted to talk to you, though, is that lately he’s been getting death threats.”
     “I guess it would be tasteless if I told you I wasn’t surprised.”
     “Tasteless, but understandable.  Nobody likes him, Coal.”
     “Except you.”
     “For some reason I can’t figure out, yes, I do like him somehow.”
     “He needs you?”
     “I don’t think he knows I’m alive.”
     Coal finished her first drink and flagged the waiter to bring two more.
     “That doesn’t sound like something you’d say, Joy.  You’re not a masochist.”
     “I never have been.”
     “And you mustn’t start now,” said Coal.  “But how do these death threats you mentioned come?  On the phone?  By letter?”
     “There have been notes.”
     “Have you seen any of them?”
     “I have one here,” said Joy, rummaging in her bag.    “This is more or less typical of the ones I’ve looked at.”
     She was about to hand the sheet of paper across the table to Coal—and hesitated.  “It’s pretty weird,” she said.
     “They always are,” Coal told her, taking the paper from Joy. 
     Then she looked at it.
     “My god!” she said.
    



CHAPTER 10:

     Coal Blackstone was posed, dainty as a daffodil, in front of a huge studio fan, happily withstanding the artificial wind that lifted and torqued the pale yellow muslin Tom Ford cocktail dress she was wearing, when one of Lincoln Ford’s studio assistants bustled in to tell her there was someone waiting to see her.
     “Now?” she asked the girl.
     “In gale-force winds?” smiled Linc.
     “She said it was very important.”
     “Alright.”
     Someone turned off the fan and everything drooped back to normal.  Studio attendants carefully divested Coal of her sunrise-coloured dress, replacing it with a shimmering black satin robe that she hastily belted around her nakedness.  Coal was curious about who would intrude so decisively into a photo-session.
     It was Joy Pommery.
     “Hello,” said Coal gaily.  “What brings you to this windswept Garden of Eden this morning?  Anything wrong?”
     Joy had known Coal Blackstone for a couple of years now and they were almost friends.  Coal rather enjoyed Joy’s tendency to be efficient about her emotions—she was, after all, the resident psychotherapist for a large, absurdly successful Toronto-based advertising agency called A.D. Inc.—and had always been curious about the degree to which she could make carefully planned, highly deliberated forays even into the mostly bleak terrain of her private life whenever she felt the need to. 
     For her part, Joy admired—as everyone did—Coal’s dark, smouldering beauty and her faultless poise.  Just at the moment, though, it was something else about Coal Blackstone that Joy was seeking out.  It had to do with the rumors she had heard about Coal’s more than casual interest in the labyrinthine ways of the criminal mind.  
     Coal wasn’t anything as banal and as earthbound as a private detective, or even something as predictable as an amateur sleuth.  But she did continue to demonstrate an abiding fascination for the machinations of the darkly bizarre, for understanding the shape of outlaw behaviours, for providing some startling and revealing excavations of motives and meanings behind psychotic enactments of every kind.  
     The police might normally have found Coal’s rummaging around in crime to be both annoying and interfering, if she hadn’t consistently proved herself so damned helpful to them.  As Chief of Police Victor Grommet had once said to her, “You know, Coal, you’d be a real scorpion in my shoe if you weren’t so fucking useful sometimes.”  Coal had thanked him, both for his tender admission and for the elegance with which he had stated it. 
     “I hate to bother you during a shoot, Coal,” said Joy, “but I’d really like to talk to you about something that’s sort of worrying me.”
     “Of course, Joy,” said Coal.  “What is it?  Something about the Mayor?”
     “Yes.”
     “You know, I simply can’t fathom what it is you find so compelling about the portly Lord Tamburlaine,” said Coal.  “I find him sort of off-putting.”
     “So do I,” Joy admitted—with a trace of relief at being able to say so.
     “So??” asked Coal.
     “It’s complicated” said Joy.
     “Like everything else.  Okay, why don’t we meet for a drink or an early dinner later today?  This is clearly not the place to discuss anything of any importance.”
     “Wonderful.  Thanks, Coal.  Where and when?”
     “How about Didier at 8 tonight?”
     “Where is it?” Joy asked.
     “You don’t know Didier?  Oh, you’ll like it.  It’s up on Yonge Street, just a bit north of Bloor.”
     “Great,” said Joy. “See you tonight.”
     “Wait till you taste chef Leroy’s soufflĂ©!”
     “It’s good?”
     “It’s to die for!”
     “Please, Coal.  Don’t say anything like that.”


CHAPTER NINE:


     Homer Rubik watched Michael exit the subway and then returned to wrestling with Angels & Demons.  Michael had got off at Keele.  His own station, Runnymede, was just a few stops later.  He just had time to read one more paragraph.   
     Homer had a job as a cook at a fast food restaurant and right now he was on his way to work.  Work was the preparation of a hundred breakfasts.  Bacon and eggs.  Bacon and sausage.  BLTs.  Toasted Westerns.  Pancakes.  Toast and coffee.  Toast and tea.  Coffee and Danish.  Muffins.   Then at 11:30, work shifted slightly to become the preparation of a hundred lunches.  Hamburgers and Cheeseburgers.  Fries.  Home fries.  Grilled cheese sandwiches.  BLTs.  Chicken salad sandwiches.  Ham and cheese sandwiches.   Fish and chips.  Meat Loaf.  Liver and Onions—which nobody ever ordered.  Strip loin steaks—which also nobody ordered.   
     There were two soups—a daily soup, which was always the same and seemed to have something to do with chicken and rice, and a more or less eternally available tomato soup—red as a stoplight and thin as water.  Homer didn’t of course make the soups.  They were brought in. 
     There were a few desserts listed on the blackboard: rice pudding, jello, and slices of rapidly mineralizing pies—coconut cream, cherry and blueberry.  They didn’t sell many desserts.  A rice pudding sometimes.  An occasional dish of rubbery jello.  The pies were left to fossilize.
     Homer hated food.  The greasy-spoon standards were all he was really capable of making.  He was glad the place didn’t offer French toast or crepes or anything weird and fussy like that.  He’d have been dismissed.
     The subway sighed into the Runnymede station.  Homer slipped his book into his briefcase and lumbered towards the door.  The clock on the platform read 6:45 a.m.   In five minutes he’d be firing up the grill.  It’d be hot as hell in the kitchen.  At 7am the place would open, and he’d start cooking.  By 3:30pm, the end of his shift, he’d have cooked six times his own weight of the stuff.  His stomach churned at the thought of it.  And he had the same thought every morning.
     Homer didn’t have any friends at the diner.  The Italian guy who owned the place hated him and found crude but effective ways to demonstrate his distaste for him.   There was a cop who came in sometimes.  Officer Sweetman.  Brice Sweetman.  He just had a coffee, never anything to eat.  He’d wave at Homer, standing over his turgid grill like a cloudbank rising up over a hot, stagnant lake.
     “Hi Homer, how’s it goin’?  Cooking up a storm?”
     Homer tried to grin but the grin sort of twisted and hurt his face.
     “Oh yeh.  Cookin’ all the time!”
    “But,” officer Sweetman observed acutely, “not at the moment.”
     Homer looked down at his quiet, congealing grill.
     “Not just at this exact moment, no,” Homer replied.
Just then the door opened and a hefty young woman came blustering in, dragging a small bottlebrush dog behind her.  She picked up the dog, scooped up a candy bar from the rack beside the cash register, tore off the paper and shoved it into the dog’s face.
     “Your lucky day, Fish!” she boomed.  “A Crispy Crunch bar!”
     Homer grinned at her.
     “Hi Bliss!”
     “Howdy Chef,” she replied.  “What’s special today?  Aside from the fact that I’m patronizing this crummy joint in the first place?”
     “How about breakfast?”
     “A brilliant idea,” Bliss guffawed.  “I never would have thought of that!”
     “So do you want some?”
     “Sure,” said Bliss. “Lots of it.”
     Fish, having wolfed down his Crispy Crunch bar, turned and, cocking his back leg, pissed copiously against the counter stool where Officer Sweetman was sitting with his coffee. 
     “You shouldn’t let him do that,” he said to Bliss.
     “Oh for Chrissake, Brice,” Bliss told him, “he missed your pant leg, didn’t he!” 
     Officer Sweetman looked to see.  Fish growled at him.
     “You realize you’re going to end up in jail some day, don’t you, Bliss?
     Bliss laughed.
     “Are you kidding?  I’m going to end up running for Mayor some day!”
     Homer looked up from his frying bacon.
     “Right after the current Mayor is totally finished with the job, right Bliss?” he asked her.
     She grinned at him and also at Officer Sweetman.
     “Or even before that,” she told them.



CHAPTER EIGHT:

     It was already dawn.  Michael had left Bliss Carmen alone with her third slice of carrot cake at the all-night restaurant they had found on Bloor Street near the Spadina subway—Bliss’s home base—and was now on the subway, on his way to the apartment he had rented on the second floor of a Victorian house on Indian Road, not far from High Park.  
     He was making desultory attempts to read the scruffy old Penguin copy of Sartre’s The Age of Reason he always had with him.  He had resolved to read through Sartre’s whole Roads to Freedom trilogy, subway ride by subway ride.
     But he grew increasingly distracted by the guy sitting across the aisle.  He was distracted because there was something feral about him. 
     Perhaps not really, probably not really, but he was hunched and furtive and had small prune-pit eyes in a spreading, flaccid face, and a mean little mouth, tight as a dog’s anus.
     He was sitting directly opposite Michael and he, too, was contending with a book.  As he concentrated on his page, which happened only sporadically, he pursed his mouth into a tense little knot.  His eyes, almost lost in the uninflectable vastness of his face, grew somehow smaller and as dense as almonds.  He skulked and scowled over his book, as he were a dog just given an old bone.  His book seemed not so much a prize as simply a possession.  He acted as if he didn’t really want it very much, but now that he had it, well goddammit, he was going to keep it very close to him.
     Michael was curious about what he was reading—he was always curious about what people were reading—and leaned and shifted in his seat in order to try to spot the cover.  The man seemed somehow to know that Michael would do this, and looked up angrily, his eyes narrowing, his eyebrows raised, quickened by something like alarm.  He was like a hungry animal maniacally guarding its kill. 
     Michael quickly pretended to be looking at something else, and, partially mollified, the man returned to the agon of his book. 
     Intent, now, upon knowing what the feral man was reading, Michael tried once again to see past his beefy fists to see the cover.  The man looked up again quickly, just as Michael had craned his neck to get a better view.
     “What do you think of the Mayor?” he asked Michael abruptly, roughly, putting the book on the sear, cover down.        
     Michael was taken aback.
     “The Mayor?”
     “Yeh, the fat guy, that Tamburlaine.”
     “I don’t know.  I don’t really think about the mayor much,” said Michael.
     “Oh yeh?  Well, I do.  All the time.  The Mayor is gravy.”
     “Gravy?”
     The man stared at Michael malevolently, knotting his features, tightening his mouth even further.  His eyes grew hard and yellow as dried peas. 
     “Gravy.  And potatoes.” Then he uttered something like a growl.
     The train was slowing down.  Michael decided to get off no matter what the stop was.  He turned once more to look back at the feral reader.  He could see the book cover now.  It was Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons.
     The man met his gaze.
     “Meat,” he said again to Michael.  “And gravy.”