East of Suez (2 page)

So, like I said, I’m not the fellow I was the last time I sat behind this desk. If I allowed myself to continue in this business, I would lose my shirt as well as my clients. The simple truth is that my head isn’t working the way it used to. Nowadays, I’m not surprised to discover that I have put my laundry in the oven and the dirty dishes in the refrigerator. I’m learning to live with these crazy new wrinkles in my life. After all, some of them are self-correcting. A hat placed in the freezer quickly announces itself the next time the door is opened. Garbage in the dishwasher is usually detected while I am trying to cram in another coffee cup.

Another thing: the city has become a stranger, although I can still walk down King Street or Queen without getting lost. I can find my way home from the library or the registry office, but when I hear a street name, I can no longer see where it is in my mind. I have to look it up on a map. Places have become near abstractions. The marriage between proper nouns and geography has been annulled. I know roughly where my old high school is, but I’ve forgotten the names of the streets I’d take to go there. Most flavors of geography, local, national, and international, have become a kind of melting Jell-O in my mind. Is London north or south of Paris? Is Grantham one hundred kilometers from Toronto or fifty? Is Iraq between the big rivers or is that Iran?

As I sat in my usual place behind the desk, I tried to remember the faces of clients who had stared across at me, telling me their stories and trying to engage my interest. I remembered the little speech I had memorized which I always used to scare off the triflers and jokers. With what was left, I made a living. Not that I worked that hard at it. The library, the registry office, and back issues of the papers told me most of what I needed. For the rest, there were the local cops, who could be cajoled into telling me what I didn’t already know. That way I could get them to do my work for me, and they didn’t charge. I wondered whether my current rates schedule, still stuck under the antique inkstand, needed revising. Then I remembered, with a start, that I didn’t have to worry about such things any longer.

How long had I been away from this desk anyway? Sometimes it seemed like a couple of weeks, sometimes like six months or a year. Time, I had come to recognize, was going to be a problem from now on. It had lost its familiar elasticity, like an old pair of briefs.

I began to put together the first of the flattened cardboard boxes I had brought with me because I wanted to make my retreat from this office a tidy, surgical procedure. Without complications. But I quickly tired of that. Change is never easy. It was something I was forced into; I didn’t choose it. For one thing, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Retirement is all very well in the abstract, but when it knocks on your door, when it bangs you on the head, that’s more complicated.

Of course, Anna and I had discussed this many times, both while I was still in hospital and later here in Grantham after they let me go. She frankly looked forward to having me more to herself. I could see things from her side. Now she wouldn’t come home to an unmade bed and dinner still in the freezer. I could become the perfect househusband. And, to be honest, there was a part of me that found the notion not unattractive. But, I felt like I was an unfinished box of popcorn; there were uneaten salty bits still down at the bottom of the package.

It’s never easy to let go. It took my brother and me months to get Pa to retire and give up his business. But could he imagine St Andrew Street without his store at the top of James Street? He could not. He wondered about how he would fill in his days if he didn’t come downtown for business. Still, it didn’t take him long to fill in the empty hours. He discovered the golf club, where his skill at gin rummy quickly earned him the nickname The Hammer. He lived to
savor
his retirement. Why couldn’t I? Where was it written that a private investigator had to die in harness? Hadn’t I at least put a down payment on retirement when I got myself clobbered on the job? At the hospital, one of my nurses told me to take things one at a time and not try to settle all of my problems at once. What I was hoping to do with the rest of my life was a problem that could wait. Right now I was going to sort out the office.

I thought that, once I’d sat down behind my desk, the queer look of the room would disappear, but it didn’t. So I accepted it: things were not going to be the same. Yesterday cannot be recaptured. Take that as a given. Now get on with cleaning up the mess.

Anna had organized things for me to a degree. There was a plastic dustbin full of bills, with the ones that she had paid on my behalf clearly marked. Another bin held letters opened but not yet answered. I wasted a quarter of an hour or more reading, trying to work out the words of this, a typical letter:

Dear Mr Cooperman,

Thank you for locating my husband in Atlantic City. I went to meet him there and now we are both working in a gambling house. George’s compulsion to gamble is under control because he knows that he’ll be fired if he tries placing a bet anywhere in town.

Thank you for your help and I hope to be able to pay you the rest of what I owe you next pay day …

The letter was signed with a name that meant nothing to me. I couldn’t recall the case either. It sounded like the happy ending to a skip-tracing job. The letter was dated a year ago and I could find no evidence of a check in a later letter or in the pile of papers that Anna had dealt with. But I accepted the happy ending as payment of sorts. The cash didn’t seem to matter so much just then. Which only goes to show how out of it I was that first day back on the job.

I used to pride myself on how quickly I could get through the paper that accumulated on my desk while I was working on a case or was on holiday. I loved to fill up the wastepaper basket with advertising, requests for magazine subscriptions, and other trash. Now it would take me hours, and I resented it. A blockage had appeared in the hourglass of my time, the flow of the sand had been impeded. Reading was central to my life. Now it was my hang-up. I was like an assembly line with a breakdown. A Charlie Chaplin movie.

In the closet I found a few articles of clothing that looked only vaguely familiar: a jacket, a pair of gray trousers, a shirt with a necktie still attached to the collar, and a couple of pairs of shoes. The shoes were dusty, and turned up at the toes, looking like artifacts from a display in a museum: “Here are the shoes worn by the suspect at the scene of the crime;
circa
2002.”

After sorting through the closet, the drawers, and the filing cabinet, I sat down again and leaned back just to see if the usual squeak could be anticipated. I was testing the continuity of my memory. The fact that I even remembered was a testimonial to what remained of my
pia mater
. The phone rang.

“Cooperman,” I said.

“Benny, it’s me. I
thought
I’d find you at the office.”

“Hi, Anna! Yeah, I’ve been cleaning up some of the mess. How long have I been away from here?”

“It’s been a long time. You
know
this is September. The season of ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ is upon us. What are you
really
up to?”

“Just trying to get to know the guy who used to work here.”

“Good idea. Like Danton said, it’s worth the effort.”

“Who’s Danton? You didn’t tell me about him. Are you trying to let me down gently?”

“He’s long gone. No threat. You’re not getting depressed again, are you?” I’d had a bout or two of that since graduating from the rehab hospital. It was normal, they said.

“No, Anna, I’m thinking happy, constructive thoughts. I’m so healthy I’m already thinking of breaking for lunch. Are you available?”

“Nope. I’ve got a class. But I’ll see you after five or so.”

“I’ll give you a progress report when I see you.”

After I hung up the phone the room seemed more silent than when I first came through the door. It made me wonder about people who are always on the phone to one another every day. Does it take the place of a relationship? I don’t know.

Looking around the room, I tried to figure out how many cardboard boxes I’d need to clean the place out. I could store the files in Pa’s basement until I could legally dispose of them. The furniture could go to the junk dealer on Queenston Road whose name I couldn’t remember.

I should mention the fact that while I was never a hotshot at remembering names, since my time in hospital names are the hardest things to recall. As soon as I tried to reach for a name in my mind, it flitted like a sparrow out of sight. This didn’t happen only with obscure names, it happened with those I knew best. The list included my brother and even Anna. The rule seemed to work this way: most of ancient history was available to me, courtesy of James Palmer and Miss Lauder, my high school history teachers, but contemporary names seemed to rest intact until I reached out to grab one of them. My memory was a fishbowl and proper nouns swam about avoiding my fingers with skill and cunning. As soon as the moment passed, when I no longer needed the word, it slipped quietly back into its place and I could say it to myself. Of course, by that time, the occasion had passed and I stood stupidly with a no-longer-needed name in my mouth.

I looked at the cardboard carton with my collection of phone-bugging equipment in it. I could make a gift of the whole works to Savas or Staziak at Niagara Regional Police. The last time I looked those guys were using tin cans and string to keep in touch with each other. I remember one of them saying that the only time they listened in on a conversation was when it was my quarter in the phone.

While I was looking at the cardboard box, I suddenly realized how ancient my own bits and pieces of technology were. I could even see a metal box with space for ten B batteries to be installed. Nowadays, electronic equipment runs on things far more sophisticated than B batteries. The only word I could think of was “transistor,” and that was probably long out of date. Who could I give this junk to? Maybe my brother’s girls might know what to do with it. Damn it! What the hell!

I wondered why the question hit me so hard. What was the point? Then I understood. This was
my life
I was dismantling. This was who
I
was. I felt like a schoolboy pulling apart a robin’s nest. No wonder I wasn’t enjoying it.

TWO

A MONTH LATER
, the office looked the same. I had moved a few things around, but the plain fact is: I wasn’t getting anywhere. An ancient file would hold me for hours as I tried to recall the details of an old case. Every scrap of paper had a claim on my time. As a result, I was standing in the center of a circle of halffilled cardboard boxes. I picked up a file, studied the face in a photograph, sighed, and took another sip of cold coffee.

Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t spend
all
my time in that depressing old office. I’d been to the courthouse, watched a few short trials. I’d visited old friends, even had drinks with Savas and Staziak. I went to the movies. I visited my aunt in a nursing home who was far worse off than I was. I tried to find a place along St Andrew Street where they made a choppedegg sandwich like they used to make them at the defunct Diana Sweets. I went for walks around Grantham, trying to remember the streets. I even went to see if I could find the tunnel under the old canal that once saved my life. I kept busy, all right, but in the mornings I most often wound up in the office staring at the litter.

I moved on, trying to outwit depression, lifting boxes from the floor to the desk and from the desk to a chair. It was like trying to hide my unwanted string beans under my mashed potatoes. It didn’t work. I told myself that the depression had nothing to do with my recent stay in Rose of Sharon Rehab Hospital. Tidying and cleaning up have always hit me this way. This was nothing special.

One afternoon, just as I was about to open another cardboard box of aging equipment, there was a knock on my door.

Hadn’t Anna said that she had a department meeting? I only half remembered. Having disposed of Anna as a possibility, I realized the mystery remained. “Come in!” I shouted, somewhat louder than necessary. I repeated the invitation and then wedged my back into the chair behind my desk and waited for the door to open, which, in due course, of course, it did.

It was one of the Pressburger girls; I couldn’t tell which one. I tried to maintain my curiosity and indicated a chair with the hand not gripping the edge of my desk.

“Benny?” she began. “Do you remember me?”

“You’re one of the Pressburger clan, aren’t you?”

“Yes! I’m Victoria. Vicky. Remember? You remember my sisters, Jane and Lizzy?”

“I remember all of you. One or another of you was always winning prizes. I used to wonder whether you were triplets.”

“No, just very close together. I’m the one in the middle. We longed to be in the same class, but the school wouldn’t do it. It’s not supposed to be good for kids’ development—their emotional development, I mean.”

I thought I understood why she clarified that for me. Victoria Pressburger was an attractive, busty woman in her late thirties, and, judging by her obvious edginess, I could see she hadn’t quite come to grips with the idea of calling on a private investigator, even when the investigator was a former school friend. She was tall, with neatly cut black hair which she wore in a straight cascade down to her shoulders. There was a lot of straight hair about just then. I wondered whether they ironed it. She was dressed in a dark blue business suit with a white blouse and was wearing two pieces of jewelry, a pin and a bracelet, both made of jade. The effect was peculiar: a cross between the All-American Girl and the Orient. As I indicated the chair a second time, she smoothed her skirt, seating herself in front of my desk.