LITMIR.BIZ

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looked wimpy. Mine were light brown canvas and leather. Maybe I should have left them on the floor.

      “You assaulted one of my drivers,” Nash said.

      “Hey, that’s a fancy word for what happened,” I said. “Your driver and I went a couple of rounds. But I’ll tell you straight, Sol, Tony here ought to give the guy a couple of pointers on style.”

      Nash stared at me. The colour of his eyes was as close to black as eyes get.

      “On the other hand,” I said, “Tony may not be the man for the job. From the look of his kisser, style isn’t his long suit in the ring.”

      Tony made rumbling noises from his post at the door.

      Nash said, “You’re beginning to piss me off, Crang.”

      “Just when I thought we were getting along famously.”

      “You been hanging around the dumps,” Nash said. “Tony and me spotted you twice and a couple weigh-masters said they seen that fag car of yours.”

      “What is it with you Ace guys?” I said. “All of you scorn my convertible’s sexual orientation.”

      For the first time since he had sat down in the office, Nash looked somewhere besides at me. He turned to Tony and nodded his head. Tony stepped up to the desk. He stood within left-jab distance of my head.

      “Here’s your choice, Crang,” Nash said. His eyes were back on mine. “Tell me what you got on with Ace or Tony’s gonna punch your lights out.”

      I slid my Rockports off the desk.

      “What makes you think Tony can accomplish your objective?” I said.

      “He’s younger’n you by twenty years,” Nash said.

      “Ah, but youth is only one attribute,” I said. “I have a quicker brain and a nature that’s wily.”

      “Make up your mind, Crang,” Nash said. “I’m getting tired of this crappy office.”

      Crappy? Modest, okay, but crappy was harsh.

      “You’ve made your move too fast, Sol,” I said, “and I think you know it. If I’m interested in Ace, it’s on behalf of a client. You want to find out who the client is. Sic Tony on me and I won’t tell you. I guarantee. Let me alone and maybe you’ll learn the client’s identity in due and natural course.”

      I felt sweat dampening the armpits of my shirt. Peddling a line of patter to Judge Bert Ormsby took one skill. Trying out evasive verbal tactics on Sol Nash was a dicier proposition. Nash wasn’t restricted by court decorum or a warm heart. He also possessed a more acute bullshit detector.

      “Whatever’s at stake, Sol,” I said, “could blow over with no concern for anyone, you, my client, your people at Ace. You made a mistake tossing my office the other night, definitely premature, Sol, and you made another mistake coming in here with Tony’s fists. Your play right now is to stay calm and let me and my client reach a decision.”

      Nash kept his ray-gun stare on me, and Tony hovered at my desk. His arms were at his sides and he was clenching and unclenching his fists. He made heavy-breathing noises with his mouth, the kind a fighter makes before he steps into the ring. The breathing noises were the only sound in the room. Except for my heartbeat. Tony and Nash couldn’t hear it, but I could. It was up around one hundred.

      Nash stared and Tony heavy-breathed for thirty seconds. It felt like thirty hours. Nash broke the tension with another nod of the head at Tony. Tony gave his fists one more clench and turned back to the door. He opened it, and Nash stood up abruptly and walked toward the open door.

      “Besides,” I said as Nash walked through it, “I’d bet me on a TKO over Tony, name the odds.”

      Tony slammed the door behind him and Nash, and my framed Matisse poster rattled against the wall. I watched Nash and Tony through the window. Tony pushed aside a skinny kid in American army fatigues who was leaning against the pink Cadillac’s front fender. The kid stopped whatever he was going to say when he saw Tony’s face. The two men got in the Cadillac and drove away.

      As soon as the car had passed out of sight, I went down the stairs and along Queen past the Rivoli to the Horseshoe Tavern. I ordered a double vodka on the rocks at the stand-up bar. What the bartender poured didn’t have the hit of Wyborowa and it tasted like perfume. It was made in Alberta, but there was alcohol in there somewhere.

      I wouldn’t have bet on me against Tony. I hadn’t the nerve to fight him. I just had the nerve to bait him. Two different things. I asked the bartender for another double and waited for my heart rate to drop below eighty.

      13

      AFTER FIVE-THIRTY in the afternoon, parts of downtown Toronto turn dulcet. The buildings empty, the bankers, brokers, and their minions head down to the subways and over to the expressways, and the streets are left to the strays. I walked south between the office towers on York Street and watched the setting sun bounce off the glass of the Stock Exchange Building. A good singer named Tommy Ambrose once wrote a song about Toronto. He called it “People City.” Sometimes I like it better without the people.

      At King Street, I went east. McIntosh, Brown’s offices are in the black and daunting Toronto-Dominion complex, the only Mies van der Rohe buildings in the city, maybe in the country. I signed in with a security guard who sat behind a bank of buttons and TV monitors in the lobby and rode an elevator almost to the top. McIntosh, Brown occupies three floors. Tom Catalano works out of the floor in the middle and he was waiting for me under a Tom Thomson painting in the reception area. On the opposite wall there was a David Milne and a Christopher Pratt. If all the law firms on Bay Street got together and opened a gallery, they’d put my neighbour the Art Gallery of Ontario out of business. Catalano led me down a silent corridor to a small conference room. It had four Harold Town prints.

      “Am I supposed to be overwhelmed by the display of good taste?” I said. “Is that why all you big-ticket law firms go crazy for art?”

      Catalano shrugged. “I suppose it makes our rich clients feel like they’re sitting in their own living rooms.”

      Tom Catalano has tight curly black hair and a long melancholy face. He plays squash. Plenty of lawyers in firms like McIntosh, Brown play squash. They can fit it in at seven o’clock in the morning at the Cambridge Club. Back in law school, Catalano was known as a cagey guy around the poker table; now he just works too hard.

      “Fix yourself a drink,” he said. “The booze’s in the cabinet. Ice too. I’ll go and greet our client.”

      “I thought juniors attended to the night doorman’s duties.”

      “I dispatched my juniors to the library,” Catalano said. “If they got a look at you in those jeans, they might be tempted to defect.”

      The Scotch in the cabinet was Johnnie Walker Black, the gin was Tanqueray, the vodka was domestic. Some kind of anti-communist conspiracy seemed in operation. I poured two ounces of the vodka into a tall glass, added ice and soda water, and sat down at the conference table. It was polished oak, and at each place there was a small white pad and a sharpened yellow pencil. I sketched two stick men boxing. If the vodka didn’t soothe my unease, maybe doodling would.

      My drink was a third of the way down the glass when Catalano returned with Wansborough. He had on another three-piece suit, chocolate brown this time. It was without a crease and his cordovans had a high shine. I’d be willing to wager his undershorts were pressed.

      “You know Crang of course, Matthew,” Catalano said.

      Wansborough tilted his head in my direction but didn’t offer his hand.

      “I’m keen to have your report, Mr. Crang,” he said.

      Catalano said, “Something from the bar before we start, Matthew?”

      Wansborough asked for a Scotch and soda. His eyes didn’t

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