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Authors: Eric Wight

BOOK: The Last Hand
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“All of them?”
Marinelli said reluctantly, “Mainly Stevenson, my number two. He got a little stressed when I wanted to borrow you from Mackenzie this spring to help out with the threat to that Balkan politician. I told Stevenson you had experience in threats to royal visitors and he said that was ten years ago. Techniques have changed. You know what he said? He said he had a college degree with a minor in crowd surveillance.”
“He's got
what!
”
Marinelli grinned, relieved. “He does have a degree, Charlie, from some police college in Wisconsin. He's not the only one. Anyway,
I put him in charge and we handled it without you, and nobody got assassinated.”
“Fine. So I shouldn't sit around waiting for you to consult me because it isn't going to happen anymore. That what you're saying?”
“Charlie, we're sitting here now because you caught me telling Mackenzie we didn't need any help, after I'd told him already, a little while ago, why we didn't need you when the Balkan guy was visiting. Mackenzie's on your side, wants to save your feelings. But for the sake of my guys, I'd prefer to think of you as … taking a back seat.
“You haven't gotten very far with that lawyer case, have you? The guy who was stabbed.”
Marinelli looked irritated, then shrugged. “No, we haven't. And I don't think we will, yet. We're not baffled, though, as in ‘Police Baffled,' nothing like that. We'll find her. You know that.”
“Might not be soon enough for that gang breathing down your neck.”
Marinelli looked out the window, waiting for Salter to go away.
After a few moments, Salter said, “I'm glad you told me. I'll stay out of your hair from now on.” He stood up.
Rising with him, Marinelli said, “Charlie, it's no big deal. Christ, you must have seen it coming. Let's have dinner. Please. Your wife's away, you said last week. Let's have a steak. Tonight. No, tomorrow. My treat. Barberian's. Meet you there at six. Okay?”
“Better not walk over together, eh? Stevenson might see us.”
“Oh, fuck off. I'll call by your office at five-thirty.”
 
 
Salter walked back to his office and sat at his desk, uncertain what to think about. He had always prided himself on keeping his illusions under control, ever since the time twenty years earlier when his then-boss and mentor retired and he learned that he had enemies of whom he had been entirely unaware, who showed their faces then for the first time. And here he was again.
How long had it been going on? Surely not all that long. It was three years since he had undertaken a case entirely on his own, the investigation into the death of a dean of a local community college. Stevenson, the number two in the Homicide Unit, had been around
then, but Salter had not been as aware of him as he might have been. Stevenson was probably in the room when the deputy congratulated Salter on his handling of the case. Salter couldn't remember.
But what had he done since then? Passed the time of day with Marinelli was all. Strolled down to Marinelli's office when he heard of something interesting happening, listened to the chat. Marinelli had always made him feel welcome, until now. But what had it looked like to the others? That Marinelli was consulting him? “Let's ask Salter?” And after that, maybe, “Salter thinks …” “Salter says …” Ah, shit.
Even now he was probably glamourizing himself. It wasn't Salter of Special Affairs they resented, but that old guy in the the deputy's office who Marinelli was constantly having to be agreeable to that irritated them, especially Stevenson, the number two. Marinelli could have just left it at that. You're past it, Salter thought. Or that's what they think. From now on–or, rather more likely, for a year already–they were waiting for him to go away.
Now he got angry. It need not have come to this. Somebody might have said something sooner. Now what? Retirement; the word had been in his head for a long time without needing to be confronted. Suddenly the need was there, not to retire on the spot but to pick a date–three months? Six months? Why wait?
He bought a copy of the
Star
, glad as ever that there were enough newspapers in Toronto that you could read one over breakfast and buy another for the subway, and another for when you had to eat alone, downtown. He walked down to the Atrium for a corned beef sandwich and a mug of beer.
The stretch along Yonge Street between College and Dundas was as grungy and lively as it had been for at least forty years, filled with street people, permanent and temporary; kids from the suburbs; homeless kids and their elders; beggars; tourists who think this is Toronto; people washed up from the Eaton Center–the giant bazaar that is the mecca of Ontario country folk and shoppers from upstate New York–and students from the nearby university. The area was about to be remodeled–The Gap was there already–but it was still a street of electronics stores, record shops, T-shirt stores, video arcades and currency exchanges. The sidewalks at dusk were crammed
with the people from South Porcupine, slightly excited by the energy of the crowd, holding onto each other as they made their way to the safety of the next McDonald's. Salter liked this scene; it seemed to him what a downtown should look like to folks up from Binghamton, or down from Pickerel Lake–lively, slightly cosmopolitan (there was a pornography bookstore), raffish without being dangerous. And a lot more interesting to stroll along than the street of burghers he was retiring to.
A
fter Salter had eaten, he finished reading the paper to let the worst of the rush hour go by and drove home, enjoying the drive because he rarely took the car to work, leaving it for Annie, his wife, who worked as a set decorator for a film company off Eastern Avenue.
Seth was watching television. “Did you eat yet?” he asked, as Salter walked in. “I thought you might want some company with Mom away.”
Salter felt abashed at Seth's consideration. “You should have given me a call. What are you doing here, anyway? Mum call to ask you to keep an eye on me?”
“She asked me how you were managing, so I thought I'd better find out before she asked me again.”
Seth was an actor, at the level at which he could reasonably audition for a job as principal actor at the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival. As far as Salter could tell, he was a good actor, the kind who caught your eye when he was onstage. He had carried spears on Canadian television and played some significant parts in Toronto's equivalent of Off Off Broadway, the dozen or so theaters located in old synagogues and meat-packing plants and derelict taverns.
Technically, he lived at home with Salter and Annie, but for the last few days he had not been around; lately, he had often been absent, sleeping over, Salter assumed, with his girlfriend, Tatti, who
lived in a tiny, one-room flat on Bloor Street, near Bathurst.
Tatti was from Grenoble, a lumber and farming community a hundred kilometers north of Montreal, and she had left home to attend a CGEP, one of Quebec's community colleges. There she had tried to study fashion but soon found herself in Montreal, drawn to theatrical costume design. She had served an informal apprenticeship backstage in the city's little theaters, put together a portfolio, come west to Toronto to make her fortune and there met Seth.
To Salter she sometimes seemed like a trim child of about fourteen instead of the twenty she was. She had a skin like cream-colored chamois tinged with pink along the tops of her cheeks; straight, short hair the color of bamboo; slightly crooked teeth and about a sixteen-inch waist. Her chin very nearly receded, making her overfull cheeks give her the look of a chipmunk, and when she smiled her cheeks bunched up and pushed her eyes shut. Salter thought on first sight that she was the ugliest pretty girl he had ever seen, or the prettiest ugly girl. At any rate, he gave himself credit for finding such a plain girl, if not bewitching, then enormously easy to look at and be with.
Salter said, “I'm sorry. I ate downtown. I think there's some frozen fish and chips …”
“That's okay. I'll scramble some cholesterol. Go ahead. I'll make us some coffee.”
Salter went upstairs to change out of his suit, eager to take the opportunity of sharing any kind of time with his son. With Annie and his other son, Angus, away in Prince Edward Island, where Annie's family lived, Salter was getting a foretaste of the empty house of the future, and he was becoming frightened that his family life was ending before he was ready, just when he was finding his sons interesting.
When he came down, Seth had cooked his eggs, and Salter poured some coffee and sat down opposite him at the kitchen table.
“So,” Salter said, “You can tell your mother I'm okay. What shall I tell her about you?”
Seth said, “Tell her I'm finding it hard to get by …”
This was a problem Salter could handle. He was now sure that he and Annie had more money than they needed, and he had begun to try to shuck off the Depression mentality he had inherited from
his own father, to the point that Annie, descended from the Prince Edward Island establishment and therefore much better trained than he in the ways of handling surplus money, had had to speak to him about his habit of offering money to the boys at every opportunity. But she wasn't here now.
“I don't doubt it,” Salter said. “You need something to tide you over?”
“No. I want to live on what I make
. We
make. We both do.” He waited until the pronoun registered. “Tatti's a terrific manager. She figures we could make it if … if we lived together.”
Salter wondered if this meant just what he had feared. No more Seth? No more Tatti? The empty house, finally? “She doesn't spend much on clothes, I would think,” he said.
“She makes all her own.”
That wasn't what Salter meant. He meant that he had only ever seen Tatti in one outfit, a sort of brown wind sock, a woolen tubelike garment that fitted her neat figure perfectly. Salter entirely approved of this garment, but it was only one outfit, unless she had several, identical. “Then what are we talking about? You spend half your nights at her place already. You want to move in with her full time? You're a big boy, twenty-two? Do what you want. How about her? Does her mother know?”
Seth smiled, recognizing that his father was babbling in search of something light and witty.
Salter had already gone down this road with Angus, but he was still unsure how to act in response to the changing times, the new world of his sons' sexual relationships. He had tried, a year or two too late, to have the proper little chats as they reached adolescence, and after that he concerned himself with the age of consent. (A colleague of his had told him once that as soon as his sons were aware of sex, he decided that they should understand how to practice safe sex, so he had bought a package of weiners and some condoms, called the boys together and showed them how to roll a condom over a weiner. “There,” he'd said. “Understand? Always practice safe sex.”
“Right, dad,” the boys had said-Salter suspected the next bit of being apocryphal, added for the sake of a good story–“We understand. Never go on a date without a hot dog. Right?”)
When first Angus and then Seth reached the age of having eighteen-year-old girlfriends who did not become pregnant, he considered that his job as a father was done, and done well. Neither of the boys had ever consulted him about sex, thank God. Salter understood that they had had hours of expert instruction in school during the time that used to be set aside for religious studies. He had made no comment (except to Annie) when first Angus and then Seth had found lovers. Just so long as … etc., etc., which included their being entirely responsible for any consequences, not hurting anyone's feelings, and, for a long time, not forcing Salter to be aware of their activities.
When they were growing up there had been a few formal conversations around the Salter hearth that turned on personal morality, and the boys had slid successfully into adulthood with inherited assumptions about right ethical behavior without any specific citations of Judaic or Christian codes.
Questions of public morality were far more likely to generate heat, because Angus had graduated with his eye on the good life, a firm believer in the necessity of capitalism and his ability to profit from it, while Seth, apparently not sharing Angus's needs nor caring much for his toys, had sidled to the left and spent his time and energy looking for other satisfactions. He never actually joined those who came to the door on bitter January nights seeking money to save the forests, or the wetlands, or the lakes, but his instincts just seemed more charitable than Angus's. Yet Angus, while saying that panhandlers ought to get jobs, was the one who had the most trouble refusing money to an actual poor wretch wrapped in a blanket in a shop doorway, holding out a thin, dirty hand.
Together the two boys constituted the usual problem for theorists of the origins of human character, because, identical in genetic makeup as well as in nurture, only the possible effect of being born first or last allowed any room for a theory that would account for the difference between them.
“Does Tatti's mother know what?” Seth asked in response to Salter's last question.
“I was joking. You know. Pretending you were still a kid, keeping a neighbor's daughter out late. She's a grown-up, too. Nothing to do
with her mother who her daughter sleeps with, is it?”
Seth looked as if he had been slapped. “This isn't about fucking, Dad. It's about living together, being with each other.”
For a moment Salter felt almost admonished, but in another moment had bitten back an apology, because as well as the idyll Seth had constructed, of course it was about fucking. “I just wondered if her mother would see it that way. Where's she from? Grenoble? Old Quebec family? Very traditional values they get from the Church about what is a good girl, by which they mean one who doesn't sleep with her boyfriend. I just wondered.”
“They're Catholic. Is that okay?” Seth said it quietly, but it was a challenge. No one talked much about religion in Salter's house. Salter had inherited a wispy association with Anglicanism, an association that would last him to his funeral, so that he felt slightly less uncomfortable inside an Anglican church than in a religious building of any other denomination. Annie had left her own, much stronger Anglican connections behind in the Maritimes; she had had the boys christened because her own mother expected it, but there ended the lesson. When Annie's mother visited from Prince Edward Island, the two women went to church and Annie came home cheered by having been able to sing a couple of favorite hymns again, but she never went on her own. Now Seth was genuinely asking, in the absence of any information that he could remember: were the Salters, as a family, anti-Catholic?
“If you're planning to get married, son, I'd've preferred a Jew,” Salter said, adopting a mock-solemn stance as a way of being serious as well as a defense against it if he sounded silly. “The next best would've been one of those evangelical women you see on TV, the black ones from the U.S. South. See, most of the Jewish women I know are better cooks than … our people, mine, anyway. And a singing black daughter-in-law would liven us up. Apart from those, I don't have any preferences. What's the difference? For a while, you could tell the Catholics by the size of their families. Then they stopped having big families any more, never mind the Pope. Tatti like that?”
“We practice birth control, sure …”
Salter moved to cut off any further discussion of his son's sex life. “Good.” As he said it he realized again that this kind of thinking
regarded pregnancy as if it were a sexual disease, to be avoided by practicing contraception, and he gained an insight into how it might sound to a devout Catholic; yet, certain that he could not offer any alternative, he changed the subject, or rather, pursued the original question. “Is there enough room?”
“Where?”
“At Tatti's. I thought she lived in one room over a store near Honest Ed?”
“Yes. No. There isn't enough room in her place. She just has a single futon. We would have to find somewhere else.”
“Can you afford it?”
“We could get a small place for five hundred a month. Tatti's working pretty regularly now, and I made eighteen thousand last year. I'm hoping to beat that if I get the call from Stratford. If that happens we'll still need a place here because of Tatti's work, and I'll buy an old car and commute. I think I would get off two days in six, something like that. Is there a problem?” he ended, looking at Salter's face.
Salter had begun to pick at one of the elements of his unease, one he tried not to think about, certainly not reveal to his son. It had to do with the function of marriage. At some time he had heard marriage described as “a trap baited with sex that is snapped on consummation,” which it certainly had been to some of his father's generation, and this attitude had left its mark on his own. But not many, these days, got married just to get laid regularly, did they? And yet the times, which had eliminated this necessity, and with it a lot of wedding night misery, also got rid of something else: the positive, romantic side celebrated by, as far as Salter could remember, some early poets, though not many in the last two hundred years.
Salter had no doubt that Seth's life in this arena was much to be preferred over the anxious fumbling experience of his own generation, but did that mean that the whole Old World of sacraments, and blessings-on-your-union, and virginity and all that was simply mumbo-jumbo, created and perpetuated by a gang of self-loving celibates who had no direct interest in the matter other than making a living out of it?
“What are you thinking about, Dad?” Seth asked, reminding Salter that he was waiting for an answer.
Salter said immediately, “I was just thinking that I will miss you around the house. Does your mother know what you're thinking of doing?”
Seth blushed faintly. “I already talked to her. She said when she comes back, if we still don't have a place she'll help us look for one.” He changed the subject. “How are things at work, Dad? Everything okay?”
“Sure.” The response was automatic. “Why?” Salter and Seth had lately started to move into a newer adult relationship, Seth taking upon himself the right and duty to ask after Salter's welfare, one adult to another. Salter found it exhilarating to discover Seth as a friend while being conscious that it was one more diminishment of his paternal role. Soon, he would be left with just the money.
“Mum mentioned something.”

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