TORONTO: A NOVEL--CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

     Michael hadn’t much enjoyed his brief encounter with Homer Rubik at The Lucy Crater Gallery.  His strange subway-dweller friend—or, more accurately acquaintance—Bliss Carmen, had introduced them.  And if the meeting stuck in his memory at all—and it did, like a fishbone lodged in his throat—it was because of Rubik’s apparent and highly unlikely admiration for, and slick emulation of, the art of the high renaissance. 
     Michael found it grotesque to imagine some bridge of sensibility stretching from Raphael, Leonardo, Uccello, Piero della Francesco and the other household gods of the quattrocento to the surly, roughhewn Homer Rubik.  Somebody, thought Michael—a father, a mother, a custodian?—had once given their baby the noble name of Homer, thus heading him, early and exuberantly, out onto the road to great things, a road Michael felt it was unlikely Homer could have followed for very long.
      Still Bliss had assured him Homer could draw and paint like an angel.  Even a fallen angel.  He’d like to see for himself.
     So one day when he didn’t feel either like the writing he was supposed to do or the painting he usually enjoyed doing, Michael wandered into the Spadina Subway station around eleven on a frosty Tuesday morning in search of Bliss.
     He spotted Fish first.  He was tied—too tightly, thought Michael—to a pillar.
     “Hello Fish,” he called out, with a cheerfulness he didn’t feel, “where’s your mistress?”
     Fish looked away and them cocked his leg against the pillar and peed.
     “Fish the Wonder Dog,” thought Michael.
     “Well if it’s not the Big Writer!” he heard a voice say, “Zorba the Greek!”
     “Zorba wasn’t a writer,” Michael told her.
     “But he was Greek, right?  Close enough!”
     Michael wanted to ask her straightaway about Homer Rubik, but, given Bliss’s never-ending heartiness and stridency, he had little choice but to ease into it.
     “What are you doing this morning?” he asked her.
     “Getting my bearings,” she told him.
     “How?”
     “Coffee.  Walking Fish.  Reading the paper.”
     “Did you enjoy my friend Rubel Force’s opening last week?
      “Not much,” said Bliss. “Friggin Paintings of friggin cellophane?  What the hell for?”
     “How about your pal Homer?  What did he think?”
     “Homer hated the whole evening.  But then Homer hates a lot of things.”
     Michael thought about this briefly and decided it was probably true.  But where did this angelic drawing skill of Rubik’s come from? 
     “I wouldn’t mind seeing some more of Homer’s stuff,” Michael told her. 
     “Why?’ Bliss asked.
     “Just curious,” he replied.  “He seems to be a remarkable artist.”   Michael didn’t want dilate, just at the moment, upon the ways in which Homer seemed remarkable .
     “Well, he’s just going to work around now,” she said, glancing at the subway station clock.  “We  could go and get something to eat where he’s the cook.”
     The idea of eating anything at the diner where Homer was the cook was an unappealing one, but Michael agreed they should go there.  He wanted to observe Mr. Renaissance Master in his everyday habitat.
     “You can buy me one of Homer’s all-day breakfasts,” Bliss said cheerfully.  “And you can buy Fish a Crispy Crunch bar!”
     Michael decided this wasn’t too high a price to pay for a start of a tour around Homer Rubik.
     “I still don’t get this interest of yours in Homer,” Bliss told him, as they stepped into a westbound Bloor subway train.  Bliss managed to yank Fish inside just as the doors were closing.
     “I thought I might write something about him,” Michael said.
     “Oh geez, there’s a really bad idea!”
     “Why? Most artists are desperate for coverage.”
     “Well not Homer.  He’s a real private guy.”
     “How private?”
     “Look,” said Bliss, “just don’t write anything about him, okay?”
     “It’d be more about his work than about him.”
    “Doesn’t matter,” Bliss told him.  “Don’t do it.”
     Michael was thinking this over when he noticed his left leg felt warm and wet.  He looked down.  Fish was pissing on him.
    


     


CHAPTER FOURTEEN

     Joy arranged a time when Coal Blackstone could conveniently undertake a searching chat with His Worship Cass Tamburlaine.  The way things worked out, she was shown into his plushy beige office at precisely eleven o’clock on a bright sunny February morning.   
     Cass was sprawled in a lavish yet stubbornly unaccommodating cream leather chair—rather NASA in feeling—behind a vast Victorian mahogany desk, a desk so heavily worked with dark clusters of carved fruits and heavy sprays of flowers, it seemed to breathe and heave with a fervid vitality stylistically foreign both to Cass’s space-age swivel chair, and to the porcine mass of his body—which he now struggled to lift up as a courteous gesture to his stunningly beauteous caller.  Cass raised himself about eight inches from the NASA chair and, with a breathy “whouff!”—like air hissing from a punctured inner tube—fell back again into the embryonic position he had assumed before Coal was ushered into his office.
     “Is there anything I can get you, your Worship,” his aide asked, “while I’m here?”
     Cass thought for a moment or two.
     “You know what would be good?” he replied, glancing at Coal and winking.  “A big container of white chocolate ice cream!”
     The aside scurried away and Cass turned to Coal. 
     “A hot day!” he said to her, apparently unresponsive to the   room’s temperature controls, that modulated the mayor’s surroundings into an approach to conventional comfort.
       “Ice cream will cool us off.”
     “Oh no, really, none for me,” said Coal quickly.  “But you go ahead.”
     Cass nodded.
     “Joy tells me you’re a model.”
     “Much of the time,” Coal told him.
     “A High fashion model?”
     “As high as possible.”
     Cass roared with laughter. 
     “And the rest of the time?” he asked her.
     “Oh I get interested in different things….”
     “Like death threats against the mayor?” Cass asked her.
     “Things like that, yes,” Coal replied.
     “Did Joy show you some of the death threats?”
     “Yes.”
     “What do you think?”
     “Well, they’re very skillfully made.  The drawings are exquisite.  The messages are perhaps not quite as charming.”
     The mayor exploded with rage. 
     Not quite as charming??  Charming??’ Whoever sent them to me calls me a side of beef and wants me slaughtered!!”
     “There’s some strange mention of gravy as well,” added Coal softly.  “Which seems to imply that the sender has some odd culinary interest in you as well, Mr. Mayor.”
     “The sender is a cannibal!” Cass gasped.
     “Oh I doubt that,” said Coal.  “More likely a chef, wouldn’t you say?”
     All this talk of captive meat was both distressing for Cass and, at the same time, vaguely arousing.  He made a second attempt—a more successful one this time—to rise from his chair and, having attained a sweaty and approximate verticality this time, lurched around the end of his Edenic table to stand too close to Coal’s chair.  She shrunk back slightly from his massive nearness—but only slightly.
     “You,” Cass said, “are a very beautiful woman.”
     “Yes,” smiled Coal, I’ve heard that.”
     “I love beautiful women!”
     “So do I.” said Coal.
     Cass was rather taken aback.  “You like women?”
     “Of course,” Coal replied.
     “I mean like sexually—like in bed.”
     “Are you asking me if I’m a lesbian?”
     “Well…yeh. “
     “What do you care, Cass?”
     Cass thought about this for an overheated second or two.
     “Well, if you’re straight, I can fantasize about you in the usual way, and if you’re a lesbian, I’ll have to fantasize about you in a different way!  So which is it?”
     “How about you don’t fantasize about me at all,” Coal suggested.
     “You’re too beautiful.  I can’t help it.”
     “Then I can’t help you,” Coal told him, rising from her chair and turning to go.
     Just at that moment, there was a perfunctory knock at the door and the aide tiptoed in bearing a bucket of ice cream on a silver server.
     Perfect,” said Coal to Cass and his aide.  “Now you can effect a titillating relationship with your stupid ice cream.  Which I feel certain excites you more than women do,” she added, striding across the carpet to the already open door.
     “And say hello to Joy for me.”
     Cass watched Coal’s exit and then looked down at the ice cream.  He turned helplessly to his aide.
     No spoon,” he said sadly.  “You forgot to bring me a spoon.”    
           
    
           

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

     “My God!”
     Just at the moment, Coal Blackstone was grateful for her martinis, though a second glance at the death threat letter sent earlier that day to Mayor Cass Tamburlaine’s office surprised her enough to put her off Chef Leroy Didier’s soufflĂ©—which the waiter had just set before her.  She looked at Joy Pommery in some alarm.
     “And you say he’s been getting these for some time?”
     “For three or four days now, yes,” Joy replied.
     “And are they all as unsettling as this one?”
     “They’ve been getting steadily…more elaborate.  And each one is different.  They must have taken hours and hours to make.”
     Coal looked again at the note.  Where she might have expected obscenity, blood, gore and intimations of mayhem, spelled out in letters roughly cut from magazines and glued onto the page, what she was looking at instead was a dazzlingly conceived and queasily competent watercolor painting of a fallen angel—drawn and painted in an exalted high renaissance style, as if it had been limned by Raphael himself.  But while the painting offered a creepy virtuosity, the message was about par for death threats: “Hey fat Mayor Tamberlane…”
     Coal looked up.  “I see he spells Cass’s name incorrectly.”
     Joy nodded.
     And then she read the rest of it.  “You are an Incompetent Side of Beef and you will soon Hanging on a Hook, Making your own Gravy!”
     “Very nice,” she said, handing the sheet of paper back to Joy.  “Charming.  Have you contacted the police?”
     “No.  And Cass doesn’t want to.  Not yet anyhow.  It would all get out for sure and within hours, this fucking Old Master painting—she waved the pretty Fallen Angel at Coal—would be gracing the front page of the Toronto Sun.”
     “I hate to say so,” said Coal, taking a sip from her third martini, “but I suspect there are lots of people who’d be rooting for Raphael here.”
     “I know,” Joy sighed.  “But what do you think Cass should do?”
     “Nothing for the moment,” said Coal.
     “But do you think this Raphael, as you call him, is dangerous?”
     “Oh absolutely.”
     “So what’s the next step?”
     “Well, I think I’ll pay a call on His Worship.”
     “You’ll find he’s really pretty spooked about these notes,” said Joy.
    “So am I,” replied Coal.
        
                

CHAPTER TWELVE:


 
     Michael Moskos was sufficiently passionate about contemporary art that it caused him something like anguish to attend exhibition openings.  There were only a few galleries for which he had any respect anyhow.  On this particular Thursday night, he had made his way to one of them, impelled there by a long-standing friendship with the artist, a swaggering, amusingly arrogant, fiercely defensive painter named Rubel Force.
     By the time Michael got to the Lucy Crater Gallery, there were already a couple of hundred absurdly young people milling about—none of whom Michael knew—all of them laughing too loud, leaning out like starving baby birds for more wine, fiercely jabbing toothpicks into tiny cubes of putty-coloured cheese and exerting great care not to be caught gazing, even for an outlaw moment, upon any of Rubel’s pictures.
     Which consisted, for this exhibition, of exhaustingly detailed paintings of crumpled balls of cellophane, which, in the course of their crumpling, had come to look sort of like various creatures—a frog, a fish, a deer, a spermatozoa—and were therefore painted that way.  The name of each cello-creature, just in case its shape didn’t tell the story, was neatly lettered in black paint across the bottom of each painting.
     Michael spotted Rubel at the far side of the room, deep in conversation—or, more likely—deep in a desperate avoidance of conversation, with a massive young woman in overalls and nothing else who, ignoring all gallery remonstrances to the contrary, was dragging around with her, on a leash, an ugly little dog, shaped like a bottle brush. 
     “Michael the Big Writer!” shouted Bliss Carmen—for indeed it was Bliss Carmen loudly holding forth to a now considerably diminished Rubel Force—“come and meet Rubel!”
     “Hello Bliss.  Yes, I know Rubel.  We go way back,” he told her as he and the beleagered painter shook hands. 
     “Nice show,” he said to his friend.
     “Thanks,” said Rubel, looking around for some means of escape from Bliss’s volubility.  “Excuse me, I think I see Knox, and I’d better go say hello.”  And he trundled gratefully away.
     Knox Penworth was the art critic for The Globe & Mail.  He wasn’t as much a writer as he was a party animal, thought Michael, but he was sort of the only art critic in town.  Michael never read his stuff.
     “So,” boomed Bliss, “how’s Zorba?”
     “Who?” asked Michael.
     You, dummy,” laughed Bliss. 
Michael regretted ever telling her he was half Greek.
     “What are you doing here, Bliss?”
     “Me?  I love art.  And I’ve gut a lot of artist friends.  See that guy over by the wall—keeping to himself?  That’s my pal, Homer Rubik.”
     Michael looked, and was astonished to see that Homer Rubik was the guy who was sitting across from him on the subway only a few days before—the guy struggling through Angels & Demons.  The feral reader!
     “He’s an artist too?”
     “Oh sure, a really great artist,” thundered Bliss.  You want to meet him?”
     “Oh well…no…not right now….” 
But Bliss was already gesturing wildly to Homer, insisting, in unmistakably imperative sign language, that he join them.
     Homer came slouching up.  He didn’t seem to recognize Michael—for which Michael was grateful.
     “Homer is a classical artist!” Bliss announced.
     “Which means what exactly?” asked Michael.
     “It means he draws and paints like Raphael or Michelangelo!” Bliss told him.  She turned to Homer.  “Isn’t that right?”
     Homer emitted a sort of low growl and finally nodded his head.
     “Yeh.”
     “How do you manage that?” Michael asked.
     “I took a course at night school.”
     “What kind of a course?”
     “Old Master Drawing and Painting,” Homer told him.
     “You like all that high renaissance material, do you?” asked Michael.
     “What?” said Homer.
     “Oh you know…frescoes and popes and….”
     “I like doing things properly,” said Homer abruptly.  “I’m reading this book right now about a bunch of renaissance guys called the Illuminati and how they kill some popes who don’t believe in them. “
     A tiny shudder ran down Michael’s spine.
     “What’s the name of the book?”
     “I don’t remember book names,” Homer replied, swaying from one foot to the other and looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Something about demons.”