Stanley Park (27 page)

Jeremy lost his temper. He made a fist and hit the wall, not hard, just enough to crack the plasterboard and peel a length of skin off his knuckle.

Which only meant that he had a bandage on his right hand as he sat in the downtown Toronto Dominion Commercial Banking Centre opposite a beige individual named Custer Quan. A short man, about forty-five, plumply wedged in his swivel chair, adjusting his round glasses every ten seconds or so with a stubby forefinger and a well-chewed thumb.

Quan was fidgety. There were nine garnishees on the account already that morning. Jeremy’s mention of the Inferno payment did not appease. He insisted it would come, and Quan only became embarrassed. His hands, he said, were tied.

Jeremy promised payment Monday. He all but got down on the teal carpet and begged. Monday. End of story. No excuses. Personal commitment. Monday was fall-off-a-cliff day.…

Quan agreed eventually, visibly unhappy. But he walked Jeremy out, polite under the circumstances, hedging his bets in case the Inferno assistance really was in the wings.

Jeremy jogged back to The Paw. It was just after lunch. Zeena was bitchy about being left alone over the busy period, even by necessity, with only the sandwiches, salads and onion tarts that Jeremy had managed to prepare.

“Everyone was suitably impressed,” Zeena said. “Some people actually look forward to your hot lunch specials.”

“I trust you apologized. How’d we do?” Jeremy asked, still trying to re-oxygenate.

“How’d it go with you?” She asked him accusingly.

“How did we do? How much?”

Zeena popped the till open for him and walked slowly into the back carrying the empty wicker basket from the sandwiches.

Jeremy counted out $253 onto the counter. The phone rang.

“Papier,” said the familiar voice, tired, amused and mean spirited.

“Acer …,” he started, and he thought to himself just then: Here goes, I’m going to let someone have it. Doug Acer from Simms, Brine and Lothar. Couldn’t be more perfect.

But Acer beat him to the open air, charging onward, clearly having something to say that he wanted to get out in one chunk. “The cheque you sent me bounced, and I’m sorry to say that the Inferno didn’t catch it. I’m in an awkward position here, Papier, a position made more awkward by my discovery that there are twelve other lenders in the picture.”

Acer had to stop for a breath, which he did quickly, not knowing that Jeremy was on his heels, also out of breath.
Trying now to slow the heart palpitations, feeling a vertiginous, telescopic expansion of the space between his chin and the floor. He began to stammer a response, but Acer was off again and the words were getting harder. He heard
illegal
. He heard
fraud
. He heard
kite
. He heard
conceivable involvement of law enforcement authorities
. And when Acer was finally finished—and Jeremy had nothing, not a single word to say that might reasonably counter any of what had been alleged—the line ran silent. Acer gave him fifteen seconds of dead phone air to come up with something. Then he hung up.

Jeremy stood quivering, alone in his silent front room. Zeena, he imagined, was hiding in the kitchen.

It was worth one more shot. “Riker.” On the first ring.

“Philly!” Jeremy almost shouted.

“Who’s calling?”

“Jeremy. Jeremy Papier. What is going on? Nobody has been paid. I have the biggest reservation I’ve had in my life for tomorrow night.
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. And I’m getting smoked from ten sides here. Quan won’t pay the Happy Valley. Says he wants to lock the place up. Acer is threatening fraud charges—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Philly said. “Hang on.”

The line crackled as Philly’s hand went over the receiver.

“Gimme ten,” Philip said.

“Where is he?” He must have sounded pathetic.

“Busy, extremely. All right? Call you back.”

He tried to think about dinner during the long minutes that followed. It was one of the strangest undertakings of the week. Everything he had ordered for today and tomorrow had arrived: the gorgeous red salmon, the crabs still squirming in buckets of ice, the beautiful sides of lamb, ready for butchering and portioning, the ducks and all of his greens. And yet he couldn’t remember a thing that Jules and he had planned to do with them. He hadn’t made any prep lists yet, so he couldn’t even use these to jog his memory. He stood in the centre of The Zone, and all he could think of was a roast
chicken in the backyard, cooked over a fire just outside their tent. His mother turning it on a stick. And the lamb dish, what was that? She cubed it and left it in a bowl of yogurt and lemon overnight. The next day she skewered it with potatoes and grilled it on the backyard Weber barbecue that was otherwise his father’s domain.

“Nomad lamb,” he said aloud, just as the phone rang again. It had been more than fifteen minutes.

“Monkey’s Paw,” he said, trying to sound businesslike.

“You know?” It was Dante. “I never liked that name.”

And he didn’t sound particularly busy at all.

Plan B was revealed, different in a number of painful ways. The
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dinner, Dante at the very least agreed, would proceed as planned. Jules arrived Saturday morning and they got down to it. She looked tired, wasn’t talking much. He asked her if she’d been out the night before, and she nodded but didn’t say where. Nor did she look up from banging out small-dice onions for mirepoix. A technique-machine right to the end. Eight vertical cuts, three horizontal cuts,
bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam
. Perfect dice.

They had a number of other tables, including Olli and Margaret, which was unexpected. But
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closed the place down. Luke Lucas left a one-thousand-dollar tip. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Jules just shook her head. Jeremy too. So the servers split it three ways between Dominic, Zeena and the stunned dishwasher. Then they all quietly called it a night.

Plan B formally went into effect the next morning, with Jeremy reporting to Inferno International Coffee corporate offices. They were open seven days a week, it turned out. At the front desk he asked for Dante and got a short, dubious look from the receptionist. Mr. Beale was still in New York. Mr. Riker was back but in a meeting. If Mr. Papier would just
wait in the small boardroom off the entrance foyer, someone would be with him straight away.

Jeremy did as he was told, and five minutes later the Inferno delegate arrived. A junior in the legal department he guessed, an articling student. She looked about seventeen, but she had pearl-hard eyes and a brutally direct manner.

“Your signature is required in thirteen places,” she said, after shaking his hand and offering the thinnest possible veneer of social preamble. She had fanned out a sheaf of papers on the table, pages marked with purple stick-it notes where he was to endorse the various agreements and terms.

“Can’t we …,” he stammered, “… walk through it together?”

The young woman thought Mr. Riker might have explained things already. But she took the time, leafing through the pages, explaining how they would file for protection from creditors, push Paw Incorporated d.b.a. The Monkey’s Paw Bistro into bankruptcy.

“Bankruptcy?” Jeremy said. Plan B was framing up.

“I understand there were some …,” and here the pearl eyes reflected a trace of pity, “… some legal matters. Cheques and so forth.”

In any case,
starting fresh
was the term she preferred to bankruptcy. Inferno International Coffee had
started fresh
with a subsidiary corporation to re-establish a restaurant in the same location. Jeremy would be 5 percent owner of this new company, as agreed. 101239 BC Ltd. There was a disclaimer to sign about IIC’s involvement in the business before the sale. A certification that all employees of the old company had been properly terminated.

Hello.

Jeremy started to say:
terminated?
But the word didn’t make it into his mouth. It lodged in a place between his brain and his throat. Jammed there, half formed.
Term
 … And in a swirling,
suffocating instant, Jeremy’s heart—the physical ticker—was the site of a disturbing convergence of muscle memories. The first, a long ago familiar arrhythmia. A stutter, a partial resumption, a fluttering, failing, vertiginous two-step. The second, the effect of a face, from close. An effervescence behind the breastbone that seemed to lift the heart from its cavity. He was there. He was staring into that perfect face. Her strong green eyes, her magnificent nose and eyebrows and black hair. They were poised above a kiss that was never completed, that might have changed everything but did not. Hovering, Jules and Jeremy, canted an inch towards one another, absolutely ready to do what came next. Kissable over brown-crayon-flavoured coffee at the Save On Meats sandwich counter.

And so, standing in the IIC boardroom, the beats of Jeremy’s heart were dissociating and floating from his chest. Perhaps, he thought, reaching out with the fingertips of both hands to steady himself against the boardroom table, this was what it felt like to be
terminated
.

The woman took no notice of Jeremy. She was still talking, meting out words of freezing certainty. A Professional Services Agreement for Chef Jeremy Papier would be signed and would begin immediately. After the restaurant reopened, his remuneration would be augmented by profit sharing. “A share based on profit after interest and tax as outlined in Schedule G,” she said. “This is Schedule G. Your initial is required here. And this is the agreement transferring Monkey’s Paw assets to IIC. Your signature here.”

“Assets,” he said, recovering speech and finding only this word.

“Um, yes. Lower-left corner please.”

Jeremy nodded numbly and signed in all of the places she indicated. “And the debt is paid off,” he said, more to himself than to her, although she primly responded.

“I suppose that could be seen as one of the many bright sides of the arrangement. Once you declare bankruptcy, you don’t have to pay anybody.”

Jeremy let the words register. “And why would anyone agree?”

She smiled patiently at him, shrugged a millimetre up and down. “Some arrangement?” she said. “The TD Bank is the Inferno International lead lender.… I’m not stating anything directly, of course.…”

He left a message for Jules that night, much later. “We’re closed tomorrow,” he said. “Meet me at two, please. I’ll explain. I’m sorry.”

He turned off the ringer, feeling empty and foolish. Benny pulled him down onto the couch next to her. “All I wanted.,” Jeremy started.

“What?” she whispered, leaning close.

He started to tell her about the
relais
. About the wooden walls and the low light. The regulars and the langue de boeuf à la moutarde. He wanted to tell her everything. About Patrice, resistance fighters, river sources, feelings of Blood. These simple things he had wanted to do with The Monkey’s Paw, these things that were put on at every side.

But Benny didn’t want stories just then. Benny wanted him to make love to her, and then to sleep next to her between the cool sheets. She said: “Baby.” Then again, she repeated: “Baby now, no thinking. Nothing.” She took his hand. “Here.…”

He was so nervous the next morning that he had to take beta blockers. Just thinking about their meeting made his hands shake. He tried being angry at Dante, bearing down on that feeling. Injustice. Betrayal. Hadn’t he been promised Jules would …?

But it only made him feel worse. It was his own fault, not Dante’s. It was a cluster of his own failings that had brought them all to this painful morning.

He took sixty milligrams, which was a lot, three pills where one or two would do. Since propranolol lowered your blood pressure, beta blockers had the side effect of producing lightheadedness. It was a complex trade-off between the shakes and passing out, Jeremy realized. In the eye of the observer, he reasoned, the shakes were indicative of moral and emotional weakness, while passing out was a sign of some kind of serious structural flaw. You might go either way depending on who you were facing, and for Jules, right then, moral strength seemed paramount. He sat in the front window and waited for her, and Jeremy did venture to have a coffee, watching himself carefully in the reflection of the glass as he raised the mug steadily to his lips.

“Jules,” he said when she came in, smiling weakly. He looked a bit sick, she thought. His eyes were red and bruised from lack of sleep. His hands tremored minutely.

Jules poured coffee and sat. “How bad?” she asked.

Beta blockers also had the effect of slowing his speech, or his perception of its speed in any case. He may have been pumping out the same number of words per minute, but to his ear they emerged methodically, one at a time, and dropped awkwardly into the space between himself and Jules, like blobs of spaetzle dough. “From the top,” he said, “understand that none of what has happened is your fault.”

Jules established with her eyebrows that the thought had never crossed her mind.

Then he told her the long story. The story in which his kite went aloft and his options grew fewer. His own inability to budget or handle a credit card. The story in which Dante was the only source of assistance on a bleak financial landscape. Dante’s promise of “business as usual.”