Old City Hall (26 page)

Late at night, when the lights in the white overhead arches were turned off and the city staff had gone home, a ragged collection of hockey players emerged. Mostly poor downtown kids, with a smattering of university students up late and suburban players in search of open ice, they walked through the darkened streets of the city, hockey sticks over their shoulders, like lonely samurai warriors on their way to do battle.

Laces tied up, sticks thrown in the middle of the ice and divided into teams, they played a chaotic yet organized game that lasted through to the early hours of the morning. The puck was lit from above by the refracted lights of the high-rises that towered across the street like tall trees next to a clearing and from below by the shimmering white of the hard ice. Every quarter of an hour, the sound of the cut of blades and the slap of sticks was punctuated by the ding-dong of the clock tower atop the Old City Hall, hovering just across the street like a watchful moon.

Nancy Parish started playing late-night hockey here when she came back to the city after going to college in the States. Most of the players were much younger. One night she found herself on a pickup team with Awotwe Amankwah, a newspaper reporter she recognized from the courts. They struck up a friendship based on what they called the three
h
’s: hockey, helping each other out, and high regard for each other as professionals.

The rink was a perfect place for them to meet, and talk, in secret during the Brace trial. They’d developed a simple code if either of them wanted to get together. Earlier in the day, Parish had left a message on Amankwah’s voice mail at work.

“Mr. Amankwah,” she’d said, making sure to mispronounce Awotwe’s last name, “I’m calling from Dominion Life Insurance to talk about your coverage.” She then left a phone number, with the last four digits 1145. Amankwah arrived at the rink just as the Old City Hall clock started playing. It sang out three parts of its tune. The time was a quarter to twelve.

“How are things going?” Parish asked. She was sitting, doing up her skates on a flat wood bench well away from the other skaters.

“My editors are going nuts because there was nothing to write about your pretrial with Summers,” Amankwah said in a hushed voice as he sat down beside her and pulled off his boots. “They’re on my ass to come up with another scoop. I could do a story about Brace’s kindergarten teacher and they’d put it on the front page above the fold.”

“Off the record,” Parish said, “Summers tried to force a plea to second, but the Crown isn’t budging.”

“Would Brace do that?” Amankwah said as he tugged on the laces of his skates. “Plead?”

Parish finished lacing up her skates. She stood and flexed her hockey stick on the rubber padding on the ground for protecting people’s skates. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Understood,” Amankwah said. He was still lacing up his second skate.

Over at the rink, a game was already in progress, and the grunts and groans of the players filled the thin night air. Parish twirled her hockey stick in her hand. “I need to ask you a favor,” she said.

Amankwah didn’t say anything. Silence. Good interview technique, she thought.

Parish sat down beside him again. “This might be the key to my defense. It has to do with Brace’s so-called confession.”

“Happy to help,” Amankwah said.

She exhaled, and a white plume of steam rushed out. “You’re going to need to get someone on the foreign desk to assist you,” she said.

“The foreign desk is where I’m going in my career. I’ve got great contacts there.”

The Old City Hall clock tower began to play again. This time it chimed through all four parts of its tune and then drummed out twelve steady beats.

Freedom at midnight, Parish thought, turning to Amankwah and tapping his skates with her stick. “I’ll tell you about it after. First, let’s go get some hockey therapy.”

D
aniel, you’re the last person I’d expect to see here,” a familiar female voice said from the other side of the laminated Chinese menu that Daniel Kennicott was holding up and studying. He lowered it and saw Jo Summers standing in front of him. Her great mane of hair, as always, was clipped up over her head. A nearly bald man who was immensely overweight stood beside her in a floppy double-breasted blue suit.

“Hi, Jo,” Kennicott said, standing up.

“Daniel, this is Roger Humphries, Mr. Everything at my old firm. Roger, this is Daniel Kennicott. We went to law school together.”

Humphries reached out and gave him a firm handshake. Even firmer than Terrance’s handshake on College Street, Kennicott thought. “It’s just great to meet you,” he said. “Any friend of Jo’s is a friend of mine.”

“Why don’t you join us?” Summers said, tugging at Kennicott’s arm.

“No, I really wouldn’t want to impose.”

“Oh, come on,” she insisted. “Chinese food is always better with more people. We have a table in back.”

“I’m telling you, man, this is going to be terrific,” Humphries said, his big face beaming. “There’s a bunch of us from the firm. I’m the head of the social committee.”

“My old law firm,” Summers explained. “It’s a Valentine’s Day tradition. Anyone in the office who’s single, we all come here.”

“Yeah, and we still make Jo come, even though she deserted us
moneygrubbing Bay Street bums for the path of truth and justice,” Humphries said. Impossibly, the smile on his face just grew bigger. “Need her. She can order in Chinese.”

“Really?” Kennicott said, looking at Summers.

“Yep,” she said, pulling the menu out of Kennicott’s hand. “Cantonese
and
Mandarin.”

They went together through a curtain of red and white hanging beads and entered a big square room that was all fluorescent lights, plastic tablecloths, and clattering dishes. The place was packed with groups of hip young Chinese couples, chopsticks in one hand and cell phones in the other, and multigenerational families, the grandparents hovering over the babies. There was a big round table in the middle with a number of people in business suits sitting around it. They were the only white, black, and East Indian people in the room.

Summers led Kennicott over to the table and introduced him to the sea of faces as she sat beside him.

“Listen, people,” she said. “Everyone put down your menus. We’re ordering the daily specials.” She pointed to the far wall, where rows of colored construction-paper signs were filled with Chinese characters. The only things Kennicott could read were the prices.

A thin waitress approached the table. “Hello, how are you?” she said, smiling down at Summers. Her English was very poor. “We have nice food today. Which number on menu?”

Summers pointed to the wall and started speaking in fluent Chinese. The waitress’s eyes widened. Then she started nodding enthusiastically, writing away on a small pad of paper.

When she left, Summers turned to Kennicott and gave him a sly smile. She shrugged her shoulders. “I grew up around the corner from here. My father insisted that we not live a pampered suburban lifestyle. There were only two Caucasian kids in my grade-one class. Then, after university, I taught English in Hunan Province for two years. It comes in handy sometimes in court, when they arrest a Chinese gang and I hear them all talking to each other in the prisoners’ box.”

The people around the table were smart and friendly. Although Kennicott hadn’t liked practicing law very much, he’d almost forgotten
the pleasure of the companionship of working with a group of bright, energetic people.

On the police force, he was an oddity. A rookie cop in his early thirties, a former lawyer who lived downtown and wore handmade shoes. Most cops married young and, at least before they got divorced, lived in the suburbs, and in the summer they’d get together for barbecues in the backyards of their town houses. Kennicott had gone a few times when he first joined the force, and once, the wife of a young cop tried to set him up with her sister. He and Andrea were back “on” at the time. After that he’d found excuses to duck the parties, and soon the invitations petered out.

The meal seemed to fly by, and when the dishes were cleared by the waitress, who simply folded the plastic sheet at all four ends and lifted everything up with one simple pull—like a stork delivering its bundle—Summers put her hand on Kennicott’s arm.

“I have a theory about Chinese food in Toronto,” she said. “The closer you are to the lake, the better it is.”

Kennicott nodded. “Never eat Chinese in the suburbs.”

“Never go to the suburbs,” she said. “I live as far south as you can go—on the Islands.”

Toronto was originally chosen as a townsite by the early British settlers because a chain of islands about half a mile offshore formed a perfect natural harbor. The Islands, as they were known, had been a cottage destination for wealthy Torontonians at the start of the twentieth century, then were turned primarily into parkland in the 1940s. In the sixties a group of adventurers took over a number of the dilapidated old homes and, after years of fighting with the city council, established a freestanding community across the water from the most expensive real estate in the country.

“You like it out there?” Kennicott asked.

“Love it,” Summers said.

“Does it take long to get to work?”

“Exactly forty minutes, if I don’t miss the ferry. The ferry’s the only real problem. It makes me into a Cinderella. The last boat leaves downtown at eleven thirty—so at night I’m always watching the clock.”

“And if you miss the ferry in the morning?”

“You’re stuck for half an hour, unless you steal a boat or find Walter, the water-taxi guy who’s been there for a hundred years.”

Just as she spoke, Kennicott heard a beeping noise coming from her waist. She reached down and turned off her cell phone alarm.

“Hey, everybody,” Summers said, “Cinderella’s got to say nighty-night.” She got up and kissed and hugged her way around the table. When she got back to Kennicott, he’d already stood up. She stepped away from the table, and he followed her. “Thanks so much for joining us, Daniel. It was great.”

He considered saying he was ready to go too and walking out with her. But under her gregarious affect, he sensed that old shyness. Something told him to stay put.

“Thanks, Jo. I don’t get to socialize like normal people very often, so I really appreciate it.”

“I meant what I said about your brother,” she said under her breath. “You must miss him.”

Kennicott forced a smile. “Everyone says you must miss your family during special times like the holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries, but it’s more the everyday of it that’s not there. Going to a good movie and wanting to talk about it after, coming home from a trip and reaching for the phone to call. Sometimes I’ll go days and not think about him, then I’ll start reading a new book or hear a funny joke, and suddenly we’re having a conversation in my head.”

She touched his arm. And in a moment she was gone.

“That Jo is really something,” her big friend Roger Humphries said, coming up beside him. “We really miss her at the firm.”

“I can imagine,” Kennicott said. “Looks like she was very popular.”

“Oh, yeah. Everyone loved Jo,” Humphries replied. “And smart. Man, she was really going places. But it just wasn’t her thing.”

“I guess it wasn’t,” Kennicott said, still feeling the touch of her hand on his arm.

“Jo’s great. But no one could quite figure her out.”

“I guess not,” Kennicott said, watching the beaded curtain she’d just walked through settle back into place. “I guess not.”

T
he snowbanks on the little side street were piled almost two feet high, so Ari Greene had to circle the block five times until he finally found a parking spot. He flicked off the car radio and, before he turned off the engine, gave the heater one last blast. Not that it would make a difference. By the time he met his father at the synagogue and walked him back, the car would be freezing. But maybe, Greene thought, it will be a little less cold.

The snow was high on the sidewalks too, so Greene walked down the middle of the street. The falling snow was illuminated by the lampposts, creating an eerie, almost stagelike feel—as if the snow didn’t exist at all until it hit the light, making its quick entrance onto the streetscape and then falling to the ground to its assigned position as part of the complex theatrical set.

It was three blocks to the little synagogue where his dad went to pray every Friday night. The parking lot, which took up almost as much land as the building itself, was full every other day of the week. Tonight it was chained off, this being the Sabbath. That meant that everyone who drove—which included most of the congregation—had to park on the side streets, much to the annoyance of the local residents.

As Greene approached the white brick building, he saw four or five other men, all about his age, walking in the same direction. He nodded at them, and each nodded back. Every Friday night he saw most of
these men—or men who were obviously their brothers. They were all Shabbat chauffeurs for their fathers.

“I heard the Leafs are winning two to nothing after the second period and the new goalie stopped twenty shots,” Greene’s father whispered when he came out of the chapel to meet his son, after he made sure the rabbi was looking the other way. “I told you that young goalie was the problem.”

Greene nodded. Despite the fact that listening to radios or watching television was strictly prohibited on the Sabbath, somehow, someway, news of the latest sports scores always magically penetrated the walls of the sanctuary. How the news arrived, Greene’s father steadfastly refused to explain. “It’s like the war,” his father once told him. “We always knew how far away the Allies were from the camp. Don’t ask.”

“That older goalie was incredible,” Greene whispered back. “You were right, Dad.” He didn’t bother to mention to his father that the “goalie was the problem” theory was the fourth or fifth solution his dad had promulgated for the Leafs’ woes since the New Year.

“Where’d you park?” Greene’s father asked when they got to the front door and he stuffed his
kipa
into his pocket.