The Higher the Monkey Climbs Read online

  “The guy who tried to blow up the English parliament in 1506.”

  “1605,” Sagipa corrected. “But to my point: Was Guy Fawkes a terrorist? Or was he a freedom fighter? Can’t answer, can you. But you see what I mean, right? Things are going to change in big ways and there’s nothing we can do to prevent it. What’s left to do but . . . ?” He waited for me to fill in the obvious answer. When I didn’t, he said, “Embrace it.”

  “If only I weren’t so busy,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. For you it will probably be too late, but that’s why I’m learning Mandarin.

  I folded the pages of the Le Monde article and began to gather the empty take-out containers.

  “That’s some advantage you’ll have,” I said.

  3

  I left the house early the next day for Wanstead, drinking orange juice and eating a buttered bagel as I drove, speeding past familiar landmarks: the overpass named for Constable Simmons of the OPP, the giant tomato near the exit to Mersea. Four hours of flat highway and light traffic after leaving the townhouse, a blue sign welcomed me to Wanstead, population 217,000. The sign was new since I had last been through, bigger and burlier than the old one, with a PR agency slogan, The Place to Be! scrawled across its lower half. Seeing it I felt embarrassed at its begging, insecure tone, the enthusiasm of its protest.

  I told myself that it was good to be back. As I turned onto Walmer, I counted off the familiar sights, the street names, the unlit signs for Buck-a-Shine Self-Serve Wash, Franco’s Formal, and the South End branch of the public library. Each seemed the same and also changed. A kind of dread that seized me as I drove closer to Betty’s, where Tony and I had arranged to meet. Once, I thought this city was the center of the universe. Now I felt a little like Copernicus, having discovered that the truth is otherwise though unsure how safe it was to spread the news.

  I parked the car next to the diner, across from the UCF head offices. The building still dominated Wanstead’s low-slung, retrograde skyline in the way it had when it was erected in the early 1960s. This was during the union’s golden age, a time of fruitful expansion, a time when the UCF, full of purpose and confidence, began to see itself as a sacred, enduring institution. A second parliament, an alternative supreme court, a centre of popular power. A kind of Bay Street without the homburgs and executive dining rooms. Those sixteen storeys of grey utilitarian architecture won no praise from critics when the building first went up and would not be mourned by preservationists when its offices were eventually emptied and the dynamite set. The snobs mocked it as a monument to frugality but union leadership always saw it as a freestanding, permanent protest against capitalist excess.

  At the end of the row of doors, bolted to the brickwork, a weathered brass plaque from the provincial heritage council recounted in raised letters the UCF’s finest hour—the Krull Motors strike of 1945—and praised the building’s continuing importance to the country’s labour history. But beside the marker, a vandal had spray-painted the outline of a giant, semi-erect penis with droopy testicles hanging below. Someone had tried to erase the graffiti with solvents and wire brushes but next to it, still visible from this close, there were two parallel dashes of an equal sign and the smeared initials: ‘A.F.’ It took a moment to realize that A.F. meant Alistair Forzante, the founder and president of the union, also my father’s mentor and former boss and my godfather. Initially, I was as thrown as a devout Catholic might be to see the same drawing and the initials ‘J.C.’ scrawled on the marble at the Vatican. It wasn’t that Forzante didn’t have enemies. He certainly had plenty. But they were corporate big shots, union-bashers, Ayn Rand-reciting brown-shirts in the CPC—definitely not the types who typically spray-paint giant cocks on the wall of the man’s office building.

  Betty’s door made a jangly noise when I pushed it open. Tony was already there, waiting for me at a table near the ­window with an open can of cream soda between his hands. He half-rose to greet me.

  “My God,” I said. “What happened to you?”

  The left side of his face, from forehead to jawline, was purpled with a bruise, a wound that grew redder the closer it got to his darting eyes. A line of black, twisting stiches showed under his hairline, a raspberry red scrape shone with antiseptic ointment on his square chin.

  “I’d shake your hand, but my shoulder’s fucked up, too,” he said.

  “Tony, what happened?”

  “Fuck,” he said, shaking his head, though I could tell it hurt him to do it.

  We sat down and I took the rest of him in. His paunch was rounder than the last time I’d seen him but his neck and arms were still thickly muscled and I thought back again to his boxing days. His hair had dulled to the colour of something deep fried too long in dirty oil and thinned into fringes of overgrown pubic curls, most of it concentrated over his ears and around the back. All in all, excepting his beat-up face, he looked pretty well.

  “You want something?” he asked.

  “If you don’t want to tell me what happened . . .”

  He rubbed the bruised side of his face. Three days of unshaven stubble showed patches of grey over skin made rough with acne scars.

  “Remember there used to be rumours about a tunnel running from the police station to the holding cells?”

  I nodded. You got to this tunnel by a narrow staircase with no handrail. It was one of a few stories about Wanstead cops, most of them concerning their tactics and their strained ideas of justice. Like the vacant lot where they used to dole out summary sentences with their billy clubs. Part of me believed the ­stories. Part of me figured the police were responsible for spreading them, a way to disseminate fear and make their jobs a little easier. I was sorry to see Tony confirming at least one of those rumours. “So you had an ­‘accident.’”

  “I tumbled the whole length of it. Concrete steps. Hands cuffed the whole way.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The cop who sent me down picked me up at the bottom. You know what he says? ‘Don’t be so fucking clumsy.’ Cocksucker.”

  “Are you alright?”

  Tony paused to consider his answer. “I guess so. My shoulder’s bad. It hurts to chew.”

  The waitress, the original Betty’s daughter, arrived at our table with an order pad flipped open.

  “Just coffee, I think.”

  She poured into a waiting mug. Tony ordered a second can of cream soda and fidgeted with a packet of sugar until she returned. He shoved the sleeve of his sweatshirt up his left arm, revealing tattoo. Menacing mythological shapes, tails, feathers and square heads coloured blue and green.

  “Do you want to talk about this arson thing,” I said.

  “Sure.” Tony casually slipped a silver flask from his pant pocket, twisted the cap and poured carefully, directing a narrow stream into the mouth of his cream soda can. From that particular tawny-red colour, I recognized Special Old.

  “You want some?”

  “Not with coffee, no.”

  “Well don’t think you can take it straight up in here. When it was Betty? Okay. But this daughter of hers is strict.”

  I looked over at the woman, now wiping spilled coffee and scattered toast crumbs from a recently vacated table.

  “It’s not even eleven.”

  “Happy hour in Paris.”

  “Clever.”

  “It used to be your excuse.”

  When he said this, my neck began to tingle and warm with the embers of bad memories. I tugged at my earlobe and a pebble of scar tissue, all that remained from a thirty-year-old sewing-kit piercing.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you tried to burn down?”

  Tony started: “First of all, I wasn’t trying to burn anything down. The fire was an accident. What you would call an ­unintended consequence. So that’s the first thing you need to consider here.”

  “That’s
probably good.”

  “Okay,” he said. “So what I accidentally set on fire was that.” He bent his head towards the window and I looked out and saw that he was referring to the UCF Building. An orange tarp I had failed to notice covered the double-doored side entrance. Uneven strokes of soot-blackness stained the surrounding masonry. I stared at the damage for a moment, biting my lower lip as a squirrel in the middle of a busy road, deciding which way to go next.

  “You don’t fuck around,” I said. “Maybe you should start with garages, move up from there.”

  “Didn’t I say it wasn’t on purpose?”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Tony leaned forward in his chair and twisted his head with a grimace to scan the restaurant. There was only one other customer now, a withered man with eyebrows like scallop shells, half a dozen empty creamers surrounding his coffee mug.

  “This is confidential, right?” Tony said. “Like between you and me only.”

  “Of course.”

  “Because we can’t let it get out. If it gets out, it’ll be harder than ever to prove anything.”

  Tony squeezed his pop can. A sideways diamond shaped dent appeared in the side facing me.

  “This is the thing. The fire I set at the UCF wasn’t supposed to be a fire. It was a bomb. Now don’t get upset, it was just a small one, some black rifle powder in a chunk of metal casing and a fuse cap. I was trying to bust into the building and I didn’t really know any other way. I tried to pick the locks but it was no good and the glass is tempered—it won’t shatter. But the charge, it wasn’t as small as I thought and instead of just blowing the lock like I’d planned, it started a fire inside and set off the smoke alarms. Maybe I used too much powder, I don’t know.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you want to know why I wanted to break in?”

  “Of course.”

  “To find evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  Tony lowered his voice and held the purple-pink can in front of his lips. He only had a moment to savour my ignorance and drew it out, sucking the last drop from the can before putting it down and saying: “Evidence that Allistair Forzante killed your father.”

  Then he sat back in his chair, satisfied. He picked up the pepper and shook a few grains into the open can.

  I was silent for a long moment but remained unmoved. Information of that sort takes its own time as the words slowly convert to meaning. And then, instinctively, I dismissed the accusation.

  “If you’re trying to be funny—”

  “I’m not trying to be anything.”

  “My father died in an accident, Tony. You know that.”

  “I have some very good reasons to believe different,” he said, tensing his jaw, making his voice small against his own excitement. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure Uncle Gord’s death was arranged by Al Forzante. It was murder. All that’s missing is the proof.”

  4

  The basement in the townhouse is prone to leaks from unseen cracks in the foundation. Eventually, someday, it will have to be properly fixed but for now, whenever there is a heavy rain, I listen to it drumming against our windows and worry about the damage it may or may not cause. And yet, once the rain has ceased, I avoid checking the basement for as long as possible, the door kept shut for days after a deluge. Most times the dampness takes care of itself within several hours and I can pretend our basement is watertight. Sometimes, however, if I leave it too long, the carpet gets mouldy and must be pulled up.

  The point is this: I am the kind of person who prefers to enjoy the ignorance—keeping all the doors shut—to the full and possibly distressing knowledge.

  And so my first reaction to Tony’s charge that Forzante had killed my father?

  Preposterous.

  Because aside from being long-time, lifetime partners in the pursuit of justice and a fair deal for the working men and women of this country, Allistair Forzante and my father were the best of friends. Did they always get along? Of course not, though I can only remember one major disagreement, and that was years before Gord died. Working side-by-side in the executive offices of the UCF building, lunching with members at TCs, leading annual parades and picnics, they were the very definition of the word ‘synergy’. If one were speaking at a rally or a banquet, the other would introduce him. “Here’s my Number Two,” Forzante would say. “Thanks, Number Three,” my father would reply and Forzante would laugh at the joke and wrap my father’s head in a fake headlock until my father, his face red from laughter, would call ‘uncle’ and then, after a sip of water to recover, would turn to Forzante and say, “No, but seriously, thanks . . . Number Four.”

  They shared a sense of purpose and their day-to-days had meaning I had always admired and increasingly longed for in my own life. How could I not envy their success and the way they knew the work they were doing was improving the lives of so many of their members and their families?

  Tony and I were still in the diner. He topped a new can of cream soda with spurts of whiskey. I wrapped a straw around my forefinger, unwrapped it, and wrapped it again. To anyone watching, I must have presented a profile of guilt, shifting needlessly in my seat, as though fighting an angry fistula.

  Tony, for his part, looked surprised, his cut and bruised face tilted, his eyes narrowed and digging into my inaction. It may have been that he figured I’d accept the accusation without question and then, spurred by the need for vengeance, insist we march together to the UCF Building, bust into Forzante’s office, and thrash the man until my father’s death was properly avenged. I don’t know why he would have thought this but my actual, stupefied reaction, the burst of uncomfortable laughter and the twitchy silence that followed, certainly left him unsatisfied.

  And so instead: “How’s Bernie doing?” I said, now tracing circles with the car keys on the table top. “You haven’t sent me a photo since he was a little kid.” I raised my hand, looking for the waitress and the bill. “He must be what, twenty something?”

  “Twenty-six last December.”

  “And Drew? See much of her?”

  “What’re you, changing the subject?”

  “I should get going. Back to Toronto.”

  Betty’s daughter slipped the bill under the salt shaker. I reached for it too quickly and had a twenty in her hand before she could gather Tony’s empties.

  “Aren’t you listening to me?” Tony said. “I just told you that Forzante ordered a hit on Gord.”

  “So?”

  “So you should care about that.”

  “I would care,” I said. “I certainly would. If I believed it.”

  “You will.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense. They were best friends.” Under the table, my knees vibrated. I had never been comfortable talking about personal things in public places. Few people knew this. Inés was one and she always chose restaurants or pubs whenever she wished to discuss the state of our marriage, knowing she would have the upper hand.

  “Can we at least do this somewhere else?” I said.

  Tony nodded. “We can talk more at the house.”

  The route back to Tony’s house—north on Salter, west on St. Luke, north again on Vanier—I easily remembered and so it was with some confidence that I parked the car and said, “This street hasn’t changed a bit.”

  Tony pointed to two houses across from his. “Those were just built. Maybe five years ago.”

  “Oh.”

  But Tony’s house still looked the same, a squat, two-storey semi clad in orange brick and vinyl. The walkway, which had been more or less shovelled (I remembered his beaten up shoulder) led to a small concrete porch bounded on two sides with black iron railing. A ribbon of torn strapping hung limp underneath the seat of a single lawn chair. Next to it, on the ground, an empty tuna can overflowed with cigarette butts.

&nb
sp; We went around to the side, past a blue recycling bin filled with more empty tuna cans and whisky bottles and unopened junk mail. Tony opened a squeaky screen door. I hesitated.

  “What,” he said.

  “Your mother,” I said.

  “What about her?”

  “The woman was never all that fond of me. She once banned me from this house.”

  “A long time ago,” he said.

  “As far as I know, the ban’s never been lifted.”

  “What’re you? Afraid of old women now? What’s she gonna say?”

  This, as it turned out: “What in the name of everything unholy do you want?”

  I made my voice bright, the kind of voice you might use if you were trying to sell something useless. “Hello, Aunt Louise. Wonderful to see you again. Boy, it’s been a long time!”

  She looked me down, then up. “Not long enough for me. Though time hasn’t been so kind to you either, I see. Even your damn eyes have turned grey. Just when you figured you got away with it all, I bet.”

  “You may have something,” I said.

  “Haven’t you done enough? Why are you here?”

  “Tony called me. He needs a lawyer.”

  “Tony needs a head shrinker, is what Tony needs. He goes looking for trouble and he finds it. What are you really after? You’re not even a real lawyer.”

  “Sure I am. Here, take a card.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “Keep it. I know what you do. All you do is let the Pakis and the Zipperheads in and all they do is kill their children and steal jobs from us Canadians.”

  “Well, we’re all immigrants, aren’t we?” I said. “When you think about it, I mean?”

  But there was no persuading her. She took a step at me, raising a crooked finger to my face. I smelled greasy, fake-flowery hand cream. With her other hand, she reached into a pocket for a pair of thick glasses, out-styled, oversized men’s plastic frames.

  “Listen, you. My people, the Langloises of Normandy—that’s in France, dumb-dumb—they came to this country in sixteen-hundred-seventy-two. The women were Feel the Roy. The men were Seniors. They killed the Indians! You remember that.” She lowered her finger. “I don’t even know why you’re here. Tony needs a real criminal lawyer. Even I know that. Look at his damn face!”