A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller) (2 page)

I scooped up his lighter out of curiosity and wiped the knife on the first man’s shirt as I passed.

Then I was back in the tent with the farm machinery and walking idly towards the exit.

By the time the rent-a-cops arrived I was hundreds of feet away and meeting up with my wife and son and friends.

Just a normal, average, ordinary kind of guy.

T
he fairground west of the city was lit up at dusk by a hundred spotlights throwing cones of brilliance into the sky like signals to the divine. And lower down in between the spotlights were ribbons of neon spelling out names and nonsense and pretty lies that I desperately wanted to believe.

Where there were no spotlights and no neon there were shadows, deep and dark and hard edged. And those places I knew very well.

It was the once-a-year, one-week, one-chance-for-fun Red River Exhibition carnival and the place was packed. The noise filled my ears and vibrated my bones. The clank of chains on the Ferris wheel and roller coaster, the clatter of children’s feet racing down the asphalt paths and kicking gravel, the cry of frightened babies, the bray of young men, the gasps of young women and the pleas of barkers and shills.

My nose opened to a hundred smells, the salt slick of sweat. The sour of vomit, the sweet of spilled drink syrup. The bravado of hot dogs and the spice of cinnamon. The butter and salt of popcorn and the sickly, slightly burnt smell of sugar turned into pink thread. A whiff of cologne from a man crossing my path, something too sweet, too complex. A young woman passing me in slight rut, flushed pink by excitement or orgasm or both.

I felt the vibration of the machinery rising up through the ground. Echoing everywhere from bone to bone, resonating my sinews.

The look and taste of the place filled me with a kind of eager expectation …

Elena Ramirez, Winnipeg police sergeant and friend, stood beside me and said loudly, “I
LOVE
the circus!”

Her son, Jacob or Jake, two years plus a few months, looked up at her from his stroller and blew a raspberry. When she looked back down at him he smiled and raised his hands to be lifted up and out, which Elena refused to do. He was an adorable baby, golden skinned and black haired with sparkling brown eyes, and he was thoroughly and completely wicked.

I checked my son Fred, who was in the second stroller, and he just pivoted his head back and forth to try to take everything in. His hair was blond, very fair and almost luminous in the June evening, and his brown eyes seemed to weigh everything against his curiosity. He fastened on a roller coaster that was painted with blue and yellow diamonds like a boa constrictor and he said, “Let’s go! Ya-ya. Ya! Go! Ya!” Loudly and with approval.

I turned partway to Elena and raised my voice to be heard. “I like the circus too, but love it? C’mon. Besides, this isn’t really a circus.”

Elena shook her head and her short dark hair swayed. “So few real circuses left. I have to be happy with what I’ve got … this is about as close to a midway as I can find. And in May there’s the Royal Canadian Circus which comes to town and has some of the elephants and the clowns. That’s almost like the big top. And every now and then the Cirque du Soleil comes to town and that’s the high wire and acrobats and the rest.”

She smiled and showed bright white teeth. “Between the three of them I get a real circus! I just have to wait a little while to get what I want. And I believe that waiting is good for my character.”

Beside us a merry-go-round started up. It was populated by centaurs and unicorns and flying horses and even a few seahorses. We watched them whirl around and crowds of people came close and eddied around us, respecting the strollers, perhaps.

I looked at Elena and shook my head. “You are strange. I get accused of being strange but you beat me hands down …”

Her eyes were alight with mischief. “You are a n’er-do-well, just like my grandma said about certain boys in her home town.”

“This is true.”

Claire and Elena’s husband Alex appeared with white plastic cups of lemonade loaded with too much ice, and corn dogs with mustard. For the next few minutes there was nothing but the sound of eating and drinking. Then both children loudly refused to eat the unfamiliar food.

“Nononononono.
NO
! Yes.
NO
!” From Jake and roughly the same from Fred.

Elena stared at her son. “Last year you loved corn dogs and now you hate them.”

I got the two brats regular, boring hot dogs with dull, uninteresting ketchup and they both shut up and ate quickly. And messily.

I knew hot dogs were bad for kids. I knew there was a choking danger. I guess that makes me a bad dad. But it was one of those risks Fred was going to have to face eventually in his life and I felt he should face it with some paternal support.

Alex put his arm around his wife while she ate. They made an interesting contrast: he was white and thin with long black hair and she was West Indian, brown and solidly built. I wondered where her gun was but I didn’t have the guts to ask for fear she might show me.

Claire knelt in front of Fred and cleaned ketchup from his nose and eyebrow. Then she turned to me, sighed, and cleaned mustard from my cheek with the same napkin.

“I can’t take you anywhere.” Her voice was melodious and amused.

“Hey!”

The four of us kept walking and pushing our strollers, working our way through the fair. Fred was tired and I wanted to carry him but I was trying to be a tougher kind of parent. Frankly, I was sucking at it, but I kept pushing and tried not to think about it.

We passed plastic slides, chain and canvas swings tied to V6 engines, bumper cars and many other devices designed to zip, shake and agitate.

As we walked Elena kept talking cheerfully. “It all used to be different, back when I was a child … like the prizes. They used to give out bugs on the midway.”

Claire wrinkled her nose. “Bugs? Really?”

“They weren’t really bugs, they were bright green anole lizards given out in glass bowls. A bug butcher was a salesman, and he would wear the lizard on his lapel, tied with a piece of string to show they were harmless. My granda used to claim he caught bugs for sale to Mr. Barnum when he came down to Sarasota, Florida.”

Alex interrupted. “Your granda also used to claim he was a pirate.”

His wife gave him a swat. “That was much more believable. He was a dreadful liar and I mean that both ways. But all that’s changed. No more bugs. No more trains. And the grifts … oh the grifts. Where have they all gone?”

The word was familiar to me but I asked anyway, “Grifts?”

I had to say something. An ambulance was nosing through the crowds, preceded by two fat rent-a-cops slowly turning beet red. I guessed they were there to pick up my friends back at the bug house.

Alex spoke up. “The frauds, the cons, the schemes. Like the Fiji Mermaid, half a monkey sewed on a fish and presented to the public at five cents a view.” He had a childlike look of glee on his face. “I like circuses too. A gentler kind of crime and vice, an innocence.”

Elena laughed delightedly. “And the Cardiff Giant, a stone statue shown as a petrified man. Barnum saw it and had a copy made and was sued by the original creator. The judge ruled that there was no crime in copying a hoax.”

Claire looked at both of them as though they were insane and then she smiled as she remembered. “Something about an egress?”

Elena nodded eagerly and watched people climb nervously into a centrifuge. “Yes! There once was a circus so spectacular that no one wanted to leave so the owner put up a sign saying ‘This Way to the Egress!’ People followed it and found themselves outside again. Lots of them went back to the front and paid again.” She frowned down at her son and he mimicked her expression exactly. “So many harmless cons not done anymore. The Three-Card Monte card game and shortchanging the flat diddlies on the high counters where they couldn’t see it.”

Claire said, “Pardon?”

“Cons. Picking the right card. Giving the wrong change at the cash counters to flat diddlies, the customers, which was anyone not in the life.”

She flicked hair off the back of her neck. “People expected it. The circus came to town and they’d trade the limelight and spangles for a little harmless graft. Everyone knew the circus wasn’t honest but that was okay.”

We had gotten past the rides to the booths, and barkers called to us, “Hey Mister, win a pretty prize for a pretty lady!” And “Show who’s got the muscles in the family!” And so on.

Claire squeezed my arm. “I believe you promised me a prize.”

“I did. But didn’t I do that thing you liked last night? Doesn’t that cut me some slack?”

She spoke gently. “I don’t like that. You do. I simply tolerate it.”

I had nothing to say to that patent lie. We ignored the calls of the barkers and watched the games—the baseball tossed into the wicker basket, ringing pop bottles with a plastic hoop and bursting balloons with darts. I watched out of the corner of my eye and saw that the baskets were rigged to make them extra bouncy. And I saw the pop bottles were too close together for the hoop and that each balloon had behind it a diamond of red hardwood. Nice harmless gimmicks designed to separate the mark from the money.

I wondered if the crowd around me knew the games were rigged and I wondered if they cared.

And I wondered if Elena was right about everyone knowing the circus wasn’t honest.

Farther down there was a crowd shooting targets with gas-powered submachine guns firing copper-coated
BB
’s.

Claire looked at the guns and then back at me. “Wanna try your luck?”

Elena was smiling. She had a built-in cop instinct that made her always want to bash the cons (in this case me) down. On general principles. Most of the time she controlled it though. Which was fine because I had the same hard-wired need to bash the cops down to a manageable size.

There was a lineup of kids and adults around the guns. I elbowed in and then came back with a report. “Not really. The guns are old and not very accurate. They’re also leaking air like you wouldn’t believe. I’ll keep my eyes open, though. I’ve got to win you a prize, huh? You’re sure?”

“You have to win a prize. At least one. If you want to keep my respect.”

“I do. I guess anyway. I mean, if I have to.” I looked over at Elena. “Now if it was a real Thompson submachine gun, maybe I’d show this pig something.”

Elena snorted and Alex hid a smile. They both knew I’d been a thief and thug and general leg breaker for most of my life. And both knew I’d reformed and was reforming. But Elena was still sure she could take me.

Inside my larcenous little soul I wondered about calling a cop a friend, and then I shut that voice up fast.

I
looked at Claire and she smiled and my heart lit up.

It is much, much better on the outside of prison walls. That was a fundamental truth for me. A basic.

Elena, with help from Alex, talked about the circus and we wandered down the rows of game booths and past haunted houses and funhouses.

Behind me I finally heard the sounds of sirens as someone navigated an ambulance through the crowds to carry away my shit-kicked friends. Which meant the cops would be on hand soon but they’d be looking for someone rushing out of the fairgrounds. They wouldn’t be looking for someone walking with his son and wife in the company of an off-duty cop.

To celebrate I bought everyone cotton candy and listened to Elena.

“… these days it’s not the same. No more burning the territory with bent shows. Which is what happened when someone ran a really crooked circus on a tour. The next circus along would reap the whirlwind of rage and fury.” She smiled a little sadly. “Yeah, it’s all Sunday school shows these days for the lot lice and gullies. Which were the kids and the marks.”

Claire linked her arm through mine. “Elena, you are an amazing font of knowledge. Monty used to work circuses and fairs. Didn’t you?”

Elena looked at me, surprised, and I laughed. “Yeah. Back in the old days. It was a good way to travel under the radar back when I was a thief. I remember it fondly.”

I didn’t, not really. It had been hard work and no glamour, setting up and tearing down badly made stalls and tents mostly. But some of it had been good.

I remembered the face of a local girl in some forgotten Saskatchewan town as she’d climbed into my lap during a thunderstorm. I’d snuck her onto the fairground after hours to see the lions up close. She had had red hair down to the middle of her back and small breasts set far apart on her chest and her smile had been brilliant as she’d come. We were three feet from the cage, up against a pile of rope, and she’d taken off her panties and my pants and hiked her skirt up high as she’d ridden me and watched the lions. When she came the lions purred approval and she came again. It took her by surprise and she made a noise I’ve never heard again.

The memory flared and vanished and Claire looked at me suspiciously and then smiled to herself when I winked at her.

I remembered the way the children had cheered the clowns and the way the loaded trucks would cut along the highway and throw long shadows at dusk and dawn. I remembered sleeping in a stolen sleeping bag in a partially assembled haunted house, and I remembered eating day-old hot dogs forty feet up while putting together the roller coaster. And I remembered the way storms would come rolling across the horizon, black sullen clouds split with white fury, rolling forward and swallowing whole towns.

Mostly, though, my memories were of hard work and shitty pay, but working the fairs had gotten me out of my home town.

That was enough at the time.

When I’d gotten tired of the fair we were in southern Ontario. I’d waited until a dark and stormy night before I’d tied the manager up and taken the cash box from the red money wagon. Then I’d vanished.

The entirety of my circus experience until now.

Claire and Alex wandered off to check out booths selling antique china, silver cutlery, buttons and other junk at very high prices while Elena went in the other direction to check out a booth selling dirty t-shirts. In between I waited with the two strollers and the boys who urged me to “Go-go-go!”