The Night Bell (23 page)

“You got a name for that boyfriend?”

“Landers. That’s his last name. But the police already spoke to him. He says he hasn’t seen her.”

“Did you go pay him a visit yourself?”

“No. I don’t know where he lives.”

The man scratched his beard with all five fingers of one hand. “Ha,” he said, thoughtfully. His eyes were big behind his glasses. He walked away from her, puffing his pipe, and went down one of the rows of shelves. “You’re smart,” he called over his shoulder. “You shouldn’t poke your nose in other people’s private doings. That’s how people get hurt. Ah, here it is.”

“Listen, it’s OK,” she said, getting nervous. “You wouldn’t know her and I have to get back to –”

“I ask myself: what would Marlowe do?” He emerged from the row with a small paperback in his fat hand and he laid the book down on the counter. Hazel was already folding up the newspaper clippings and putting them away. “What’s your hurry, darling?” he said. “My name’s Izzy.”

“Hi. I’m … I’m Gloria.”

“Hello
Gloria
. Do you read much?”

“I do. I like a lot of authors.”

“Like who? Do you like Raymond Chandler?”

“I don’t know him.”

“Detective writer. What about Jim Thompson, ever heard of him?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t.”

“What would Jim Thompson do?”

Behind her, Hazel heard a door opening. She looked over her shoulder. It was an old woman with a tray of coffee and biscuits. “Sorry Izzy, I can come back.”

“That’s good, Ma.” She smiled and Hazel’s palms went icy. His mother backed away and closed the door behind her. “I know what Jim Thompson would do,” he said. “Someone would die and then someone
eltz
would die. Probably both sharp-looking chicks playing angles, had it coming. Sound like your scene?”

“No,” she said quietly.

“Have a cookie.” He pushed the plate toward her. “Then Chandler. More scenes during the daytime, won’t make you as jumpy.” He put his chin on his hand in a mockery of
thinking. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Hmm,” he said, and: “Let’s see, let’s see.” She thought of making a run for it. “Marlowe knows from living near Chinatown that Chinese people don’t call each other Carol and Joe. They got a different way of saying their names to each other.”

She knew that was true. Carol had told Hazel her birth name. “Shen Yu,” she said.

“Lim Shen Yu then. Marlowe’d go out with the real name, see if anyone twitches, you know what I mean? You tried grass yet, sweetheart?”

“No. But if I wanted to get a drink? Could someone my age get a drink in this neighbourhood?”

“I got a jugga homemade vodka upstairs. You want a schnapps?”

“No, thank you … Izzy. I appreciate your help.”

“Not enough to have a drink with me, I see.”

“Sir, I’m only fourteen.”

“Once you come a woman, you’re a woman, sweetheart. I like you, have a schnapps with me.” He leaned against the counter, his fingers laced over his belly. “I’m not so old. How old do you think I am?”

She began to calculate what she might have to do. Her mother had never minced words: if any “boy” tried to touch her, she was to shriek, and if that didn’t work, she was to slam her knee into his man parts. That always worked.

The door jingled and a customer came in. Immediately, Izzy resumed a professional affectation and smiled at his
customer. “Hello,” he said, and to Hazel he whispered, “Stick around.”

She didn’t. She ran out the door clutching her papers. If that was what the English-speakers were like, then she wanted no more of their assistance. She walked deeper into the market, looking for a girl her age or younger. Carol’s English had been perfect, and her parents knew more than they let on. But no one here wanted to talk. After her fourth rebuff, she turned up Augusta Street and walked along the middle of the sidewalk holding the clearest photo out for people to look at.

“Do you recognize this girl? Carol Lim, from Port Dundas, Ontario. Shen Yu Lim. Have you seen her, ma’am? She disappeared on October twenty-sixth.” In a store, she held the picture up before a startled crowd of spice-shoppers. “You may know her as Shen Yu Lim.” Hazel wasn’t sure if the silence she faced was friendly or menacing. She wasn’t sure if anyone in the room was breathing, and then she realized she wasn’t either. She exhaled. They exhaled. “I’m sorry if you don’t understand me.”

“I know her,” came a voice near the back of the room, and instantly the other women in the shop moved toward the walls, like line dancers, and a girl came forward between them. She was eating something with pits in it and spitting into her hand. “How do you know her?”

“She ran away from home.”

“Ah-ha. Is she your father’s whore?”

Hazel was struck dumb a moment. “Carol – Shen Yu – lives in my town, in Port Dundas. She’s missing. Have you really seen her?”

Hazel saw the girl – she was about her age – wasn’t eating a piece of fruit. It was a fish head with gelatin stuck to it. She was spitting bones into her hand. “Why should I tell you anything? Who are you, anyway?”

“My name is Hazel. I’m visiting … I came here to find Carol.”

“Lim Shen Yu.”

“Is that how you say it?”

“Yes. Hazel. Do you think Shen Yu wants to be found if she is so hard to find? She must have her reasons.”

“But she’s safe?”

“Are you Carol’s chum or her enemy? How do I know?”

“Why would her enemy be concerned about her?”

“Maybe you are pretending.”

“I’m not.”

The girl shrugged. “The person who cannot be trusted will never say so. What happens if you ask a liar if he is a liar?”

“He’ll say no.”

“And if you ask a truthful person? He will also say no.”

“And they will both answer yes if asked if they’re telling the truth.” There was some snickering in the room. Apparently the girl was not the only one who understood what she was saying. “Look. Could you pass a message on to her?”

The girl considered for a long moment. “Maybe. What do you want to say?”

“That her parents are frightened for her and hope that she’ll come home.”

“That is a nice message. But still, I don’t know who you are.”

Hazel didn’t really think about it. She just knew she had to do something to make this girl see her in a different light. She took the fish head out of her hand. One side was mostly eaten, but when she turned it over there was still a lot of meat. A stupid fish wasn’t going to intimidate her. She plucked the shrivelled, cloudy eye out of its socket and put it into her mouth. She swallowed it, keeping eye contact with the girl the whole time. She handed the head back.

The girl smiled, and Hazel felt like she’d guessed something correctly. “The most delicate part is always for the welcome stranger. Why don’t you come back in two hours? Then I might have something for you.”

“Really?” She looked at her watch. “I don’t have two hours. Could you make it one hour? I could come back in one hour.”

“Is this important to you or not?”

“It is, but I’m here with my father and he says we have to get on the road by noon. It’s Christmas Eve.”

“I know it’s Christmas Eve.” The girl studied her. Hazel burped softly into her hand. “OK,” the girl said. “Come back in one hour.”

Hazel followed her nose north. She was going to have to wash down the fishy hors d’oeuvre somehow and there was a very appealing smell borne on the wind. She took out the dollar bill her father had given her and checked her watch. It was 11:00. She could kill an hour eating lunch somewhere. At the top of Augusta, close to College Street, she picked up the scent again. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it made her think of someone’s home. The food your granny makes. It turned out to be a delicatessen called Litwin’s. She rode her nose into its steamy interior and sat down at the white countertop. The lunch rush hadn’t begun yet, and she was the only kid in the place as well as the only girl. Behind the counter, a bunch of men stared at her. One came forward. “Kinna help you?”

“Are you serving lunch yet?”

He stepped out of her line of vision so she could see a man lifting a huge, wobbling hunk of meat out of a steam compartment. The meat was almost black on the outside. About six more hunks lay on a wooden chopping block, vapour wafting off them. “That appeal to you? Pastrami, corned beef, baby beef? I got smoke meat too, sliced turkey, kishka –”

“What is kishka?”

The man, whose nametag identified him as Max, flipped a steel lid and filled a ladle to show her. It looked like a pale-yellow sausage with cut-off ends. “You know what derma is, kid?”

“No,” she said.

“Then you don’t want kishka. Siddown. I’ll make you your first corned beef sandwich, from the looks of it. You want it regular?”

“Regular?”

“Mustard. Yella mustard.”

“How much is it?”

“Fitty cents a quarter pounda meat, seventy you want a halfa pound.”

She put her dollar on the counter. “Half a pound, please. And a Coke.”

Less than a minute later Max put down two towering halves of a sandwich on a chipped, white plate, each half held together by a single toothpick. She could see the scent of the sandwich curling up from the brilliant red meat. A bulging pickle cut into four spears lay beside it and there was a small paper cup of creamy potato salad.

“You gonna ask it to marry?” Max asked.

She dug in. The first couple of bites, her eyes rolled up. Slowly, Litwin’s lunch crowd showed up. Workmen sat at the counter on either side of her, and the tables filled with men and women out from their offices for an early lunch. She ate slowly, keeping her eye on the Coca-Cola clock behind the slicers. When she was done, Max dropped a little plate with a piece of cheesecake drizzled with cherry sauce in front of her. “On the house,” he said, “seeing you don’t know your elbow from a pickle.”

She couldn’t imagine how she was going to eat a hunk of cheesecake after that sandwich, but it turned out to be easy.

At the end, she left the whole dollar on the change tray. A twenty-cent tip. Extravagant, her mother would have called it.

Out in the street, she checked her watch again. It was 11:48. She was in good time to see the girl, but she was going to be late for her father. She hightailed it back down Augusta to the spice shop. When she went in, she didn’t see the girl she’d spoken to. Different women were going about their varied business, oblivious to her, and she felt too shy to talk again and draw attention to herself. She walked down one of the aisles, pretending to shop for something. There were dried items in bins that she’d never seen before. Withered, speckled, black, dusty: none of them looked like something you’d eat, but the customers were filling paper bags with them.

She wandered aimlessly in the shop for five minutes and began to lose faith that the girl would show. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and almost left her shoes. “Hello. You are late.”

“I was on time!”

“Where? Where were you on time?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hazel said. “I’m sorry. Did you find her, though? Is she here?”

The girl produced a small paper scroll tied with string. “She sends a note to her beloved parents, to calm their souls.”

“Oh, that is wonderful!” Hazel cried. “And she’s well? You saw her?”

The girl slid the string off and unrolled the paper. There were Chinese characters in columns on the page. “Lim Shen Yu writes:
Beloved Mother and Father. Forgive me for leaving so suddenly. I am a woman now and must seek my own fortune. When I am married, I will bring my husband to you and you will see that I have become a wife and mother, just as you have wished for me. Forgive me my strong-headedness, and do not upset yourselves over my absence. We shall meet again
.”

She tied the note up with the string and gave it to Hazel.

“Thank you very much. Honestly, thank you. Please tell her I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”

The girl suddenly clamped her fingers around Hazel’s wrist. Her skin prickled just as it had in the bookshop and she tried to wrest her arm free.

“Excuse me?” the girl said with a snarl. “You think everything is cheap or free in Chinatown? Maybe I just like doing favours for white ghosts like you?”

“I didn’t know … I don’t have any money. But I can send you some.”

The girl bent Hazel’s hand back and she stumbled and cried out. “Hey, let go of me!”

Now everyone in the shop was looking at her again. “Longines,” the girl said. “Nice watch.”

“It was a gift from my grandmother,” Hazel said. But she stopped resisting. She would have to explain it later, or
use her own money to replace it before anyone noticed it was missing. She let the girl unstrap the watch from her wrist and drop it into a pocket.

She released Hazel from her grip. “Have a nice day. OK?”

Hazel backed out of the store, enraged and frightened to about the same degree. The girl just stared at her.

Hazel ran as fast as she could out of the market and back to Spadina Avenue. The last time she’d looked, her watch had shown 12:03. She ran toward Queen Street, her head down and her lungs aching. When she got to the corner, there was still at least a kilometre to go, but there was an eastbound streetcar waiting at the light with all its doors open. She snuck up the back steps and hid herself among the other riders. Four minutes later, the conductor called Chestnut Street. She didn’t want her father to see her coming from the west, so she waited until the streetcar got to Yonge. She got off and waited a moment on the sidewalk. Then she strode quickly, but calmly, back to Bay and turned left. She saw her father approaching the car from the south. “Ah,” he said when they arrived at the 1955 Packard at the same time. “Reliable as Old Faithful, I see.” He was lugging a number of parcels with him, all of them tied with jute string.