TORONTO: CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

     They pushed through the door of the diner where Homer worked —which bore the unprepossessing name of Nick’s—paused by the cash register so that Michael, at Bliss’s urging and against his better judgment, could buy the incontinent Fish his favourite Crispy Crunch bar, and spotted Homer in the kitchen, presiding over his sweaty grill, laconically frying up a dozen eggs, a rasher of bacon and, to one side of the grill, a hillock-like mound of home fries and onions.

     “Yo, Homer!” yelled Bliss at the top of her substantial lungs, a greeting forceful enough to cause three customers to look up from their newspapers.  Homer waved.

     One of the now dislodged customers was the inevitable Officer Brice Sweetman, who was carving the final scrapings of red jam from its little plastic coffin and carefully spreading it on a slice of cold whole wheat toast.

     “Honest to god, I think you actually live here, Brice!” boomed Bliss.

     He smiled wearily. 

     “I drop in,” he replied.

     Bliss introduced him to Michael.

     You know,” Officer Sweetman said to him, looking sadly at his toast, “this jam actually tastes red.” 

     “Red?” asked Michael.

     “Yeh, red.  Not strawberry.  I wonder if an actual strawberry ever came close to it?”

     “And if it did, how long ago,” added Michael.

     “Hey Homer,” Officer Sweetman yelled in the direction of the kitchen, “why don’t you get some real jam?  Put it in a little pot on the table.”

     “Ask Nick,” said Homer, suddenly flipping the bacon so its violent new hiss drowned out everything else.

     “I’m asking you,” said Officer Sweetman.

     Homer shrugged.

     “Homer,” said Bliss suddenly, “Come out here a minute.  I what you to meet my big deal writer friend, Michael.  You can call him Zorba!”

     “No you can’t,” Michael told them both.

     “Who’s Zorba?” Homer asked, striding from the kitchen and wiping his hands on his apron.  

     “A Greek writer,” said Bliss.

     “He’s not a Greek writer, he’s a character in a novel by a Greek writer.  Damn it, Bliss, I’ve told you this a dozen times now!”

     “Weird name,” muttered Homer.

     “So is Homer,” countered Bliss.

     “I wanted to talk to you some more,” Michael explained to Homer,  speaking loudly  enough to be heard over Homer’s sizzling grease-fire, “because of what Bliss has told me about your love of Renaissance painting—and about how good you are at painting in that manner.”

     “What manner?” said Homer, walking back to his spitting grill where now lay the inert oval patty for the cheeseburger someone had ordered ten minute ago.

     “Your Old Master manner,” Michael replied.

     “I don’t know what that is,” Homer shouted, over the sizzle of the still frosty hamburger patty.

     Michael glanced at Bliss.

     “He really doesn’t.” She told him.

     “He’s just a cook,” interjected Office Sweetman.  “And not a very good one at that.”

     Bliss lumbered out into the kitchen.

     “But he’s my sweet babybaby,” she cooed affectionately, snaking her heavy arms around Homer’s apron’d waist.

     “He is?” said Michael, surprised.

     “Oh sure,” replied Officer Sweetmam taking a final sip of his cold coffee, “they’ve been at it for some time now—six months maybe.”

     “Bliss and Homer?”

     “Right.  Homer and Bliss.  Homer and Bliss and Fish.  Hard to figure, huh?”

     “Quite hard, yes,” Michael replied.

     Hearing the sound of his name, Fish padded over to Officer Sweetman’s stool and pissed against his leg.

     “Goddammit, Bliss!” howled Office Sweetman, “can’t you teach this stupid mutt some manners?”

     Homer came hustling back into the restaurant. 

     “Watch it, Sweetman,” he said, with what Michael took to be unusual menace.

     “Or else what?” said Officer Sweetman.

     “Just don’t call Fish stupid,” Homer replied.  “He’s not stupid at all.”

     “No, in fact he’s just as smart as Homer is,” added Bliss.

     Michael and Officer Brice Sweetman looked at each other and grinned.

     “Do you want the punchline?” Michael asked him.

     “Oh no, you go right ahead.   Be my guest!”

***********************************************

TORONTO: A NOVEL--CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

 

     Coal was off early, speed-kissing him through a cloud of Issey Miyake Pleats Please, and murmuring something, on her way out the door, about going to see the mayor. 

     For Lincoln Ford, it was hard—virtually impossible—to bring together Coal and the avoirdupois Mayor of Toronto in the same sentence, especially in a sentence that stood there shivering by itself in time and space, beyond the reach of coffee and therefore vulnerable to misinterpretation.  Coal Blackstone sitting and talking demurely to His Worship Cass Tamberlaine?  He must have misheard her.

     But anyhow, Coal, he knew, could take care of herself.  The only danger he could envisage was her gradually expiring of boredom in conversation with the Lardly Cass.        

     But now his need for coffee was urgent, and while he usually made espresso for the two of them, he decided that just for this morning, Coal being off to the lair of the Mayor, he’d go visit his friend, dear old Peter of the Athens Astoria.    

     A diet’s a diet right enough, he thought as he came blazing up out of the parking garage in his red, 1960 Austin-Healey 3000, but a Greek coffee with a Greek custard pastry is something else again.

     Linc liked sweet stuff for breakfast and he particularly liked cold, creamy, pudding-like things—such as this devastatingly mild, milky, lemony custard Peter, the owner of the Astoria Athens, made fresh every day.

     Peter’s name was Peter something or other and while Linc had known him for seven or eight years now, he still had no idea what his last name was.  Linc knew a couple of things about him, though.  He knew, for example, that before he came to Toronto and opened his dark little restaurant on Bloor Street West, Peter had worked as the cook on a Greek freighter and made breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for twenty-five shipmates.

     Peter was a dab hand with Moussaka and with heavily herbed baked chicken legs (just the legs, never the breasts; what does he have, thought Linc, against chicken breasts?) and with olive-oil-soaked peas and rich, sodden but delicious green beans.  Sometimes he would make stuffed tomatoes and stuffed green peppers, and occasionally—all too rarely—he’d prepare his really spectacular stuffed zucchinis baked in a rich lemon sauce.  Still, it was Peter the Baker that Linc cherished, Peter the maker of morphologically inventive baklavas and innocent, angel-touched-custards like the tray of them sitting milky cool and buttery on Peter’s counter. 

     Peter had never learned much English, and a hearty “Yassou!” pretty much exhausts Linc’s Greek, so they simply nodded and smiled a lot.  Peter seemed remarkably fond of Linc and was very paternal towards him, and so whenever Linc would order a custard pastry and coffee—like this morning—Peter would bring him the coffee and two slabs of the custard.  Which he then had to consume (no problem!) with a sustained gusto (also no problem!) or Peter’s feelings—which were immense—would be hurt.

     Peter brought the two pastries to the table.  Two heavy, creamy portions of the gelatinous custard on flaky, slightly sharp, slightly vinegar’d phyllo pastry—each with a dusting of fine cinnamon on top.  Linc tucked into them—and was as delighted as always.

     “Delectable as usual, Peter!”

     Peter smiled and went to fetch coffee.  When he got back to Linc’s table with it, his hand was shaking.

     There’s been a change in Peter, thought Linc.  Every time now when he brings coffee to the table, his hand shakes.  And it’s getting worse.  Last week, Linc remembered, Peter had brought coffee and his hand had trembled so much that most of the coffee ended up in the saucer.  When that had happened, Linc had simply taken the saucer carefully from underneath the dripping cup and poured everything back inside again.  No need to mention anything.

     Today Peter’s hand was shaking so violently the full cup of coffee rattled in the saucer like castanets and the liquid brimmed over everywhere—onto the floor, onto the counter, some of it even dropped back into the cup.  Peter looked at Linc, wounded, humiliated.  Linc smiled encouragingly.  

     “Thank you,” said Linc, adding cream to the little bit of coffee that was left. 
     “You’re welcome,” Peter replied.  Linc had never heard him say that before.

     Linc was halfway through his second custard when an odd thought occurred to him.

     “Peter,” he asked, “does the mayor of Toronto ever eat here?”

     “The Mayor?  No, never.  Why?”

     “Oh I don’t know.  I was just thinking about the Mayor.”

     “Why would you think about the Mayor?” Peter asked.  “I bet he never thinks about you!  Why not think about that beautiful lady you live with instead?  Much more happy a thought!”

     “Coal?  Well, I was, as a matter of fact.  She’s in his office right now.”

     “Why?”

     “Apparently he’s been receiving death –threats.   She’s fascinated by things like that.”

     “The beautiful detective.”

     Linc smiled.

     “Tell her to be careful,” said Peter, attempting to refill Linc’s cup without slopping most of the coffee into his saucer.

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 soufflé—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.”

        

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 soufflé!”

     “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.”