I pulled away from the curb and the hopscotch game, and drove on streets that would take us to the Cameron House. Dave was saying something about reeds. He was fussy about them. They had to be extra hard. Flip Bochner would provide the substitute saxophone, but Dave said he had to choose the reeds. That explained the trip to Long & McQuade’s.
“At the hospital, Dave,” I said, “what’d you tell the police?”
“What happened is what I told them,” he said. “A dude was following me and finally caught up.”
“You mention my name?”
“No. I told them I wanted my axe back.”
“They seem interested?”
“One cop asked questions, and the other wrote stuff down, and both of them split. No, I don’t think they were interested, man.”
“I wonder what it is with the case?” I said. “Someone steals the old case and replaces it in Los Angeles, and someone else in Toronto from Los Angeles, Raymond Fenk, steals the new case.”
“Forget the case, man,” Dave said. “It’s the axe.”
“I think I know how to retrieve both.”
“How?”
“Same way you lost them,” I said. “Steal them again.”
11
ON THE TELEPHONE, James Turkin’s polite sister told me James had a room on Howland Avenue and was given to passing his late afternoons at a café called Dooney’s. Howland and Dooney’s were in the Annex. I thanked the sister and drove to the café. It was five o’clock.
Outside Dooney’s, large block letters advertised cappuccino and gelati. Not a shamrock or shillelagh in sight. Inside, the room was long and narrow and bright. One wall was all window, and the tables were filled with talkers who looked serious about it. James Turkin was sitting alone at a table for two near the back. He had a coffee cup in front of him and an open magazine, and he was watching me walk the length of the room toward him.
“I don’t need a lawyer,” he said when I got close.
“The reason I came calling, James, I’m not selling my services. I’m retaining yours.”
I sat in the other chair.
James said, “I don’t do houses.”
“We’re still in business,” I said.
“Or apartments.”
“What’s this?” I asked. “You experience a change of calling?”
“Factories I do, office buildings. As far as houses go, I got . . . scruples.”
As a sideline, James worked at upgrading his vocabulary. The rest of the time, he was the best burglar I knew. One day the break-and-enter squad would come down on him, and I’d defend James in court. He had pale features and light-brown hair that he wore in a 1950s pompadour. He was nineteen. His nerves were as steady as the Dalai Lama’s.
“Also,” James said, “I took a course in another . . . endeavour.”
“A course sounds like you found something on the straight and narrow.”
“Picks,” James said.
“Come again.”
“Pickpocketing,” James said. Nothing moved except his lips. “A one-week course.”
“I can see it now,” I said. “George Brown College offers night classes in Pocket Picking, followed by Extortion 101.”
“This was two old Colombian guys came up from New York, and all it cost was four hundred including equipment.”
“What equipment?”
“Mannequins,” James said. “They had bells tied on them. The idea is you tried to lift the wallet off the mannequin, inside pocket, hip pocket, different places, and if the bell rang, you failed. One guy quit the first day. It was like all he had to do was breathe next to the mannequin and bells started like in a church. Anyway, soon as you got it so you could pick ten pockets and no bells happened, the Colombian guys took you down Eaton Centre. Work on humans.”
“You think you got your four hundred dollars’ worth?”
“I was the only student in the class the Colombians let do the newspaper routine for real.”
“Am I going to want to hear this?” I asked.
“You’re on the subway.” James sounded as close to eager as he gets. “You hold the Sun in one hand, and the other, you reach into the guy beside you’s pocket. Has to be quick. I got a teacher’s wallet.”
“Bad luck,” I said. “The teacher must’ve been slim pickings.”
“I mailed it back to the guy.”
The waiter came by, and I ordered an espresso.
“You heard of this writer?” James was leafing through his magazine. It was Harper’s. “Lewis Lapham?”
“He writes some very funny pieces. Acerbic.”
“What I mean, is he any good?”
“Yeah, he’s good. Got a nice style, and he keeps you turning the pages to find out what he’s saying. I’d call that good.”
“I thought so. I underlined twenty, I don’t know, thirty words in this one story.”
“Here’s one for you, James. William Safire in the New York Times, especially Sunday. You’ll go crazy underlining.”
James didn’t write down Safire’s name. He’d remember. James was a kind of idiot savant in training. His fields were words and locks and now apparently other people’s pockets. I’d acted for him on a charge of assault with intent when he was young and foolish and unfocussed. The judge put him on probation for two years. The probation had another ten months to run, and it hadn’t dissuaded James from his new life of non-violent crime. He thought he was indestructible. Maybe he was, but I kept his file in my active drawer.
“What’s the word mean?” James asked. “About Lewis Lapham?”
“A touch of the bitter. That’s how you define acerbic. Astringent, okay? There you got another adjective. Put the two on the same list, acerbic and astringent. Use them when you want to say something has a taste of sour. Harsh.”
My espresso arrived.
“End of today’s lesson in etymology, James,” I said. “I want to talk to you about a job in the category of piece of cake.”
“I already said I don’t go into houses any more or apartments, places where people live.”
“How about where they reside temporarily?”
“Like what, an office where the guy sometimes sleeps over? That happened to me in this factory out in Etobicoke. I go in, three in the morning, and a man, must’ve been an executive, was sound asleep in the dark. Office as big as this restaurant, leather couch he was laying on, girl with him asleep also. No clothes on either one of the guy or the girl. I was . . . mortified.”
“Mortified is nice, James,” I said. “Let me test your philosophy of residences vis-à-vis commercial properties. What does a hotel come under?”
“I’ve never done a hotel.”
“People come and go. Hotels, at least not this one, aren’t permanent dwellings.”
“You shouldn’t be asking me this stuff. You’re a lawyer.”
“You’re right, James, the Law Society wouldn’t approve. But, take my word, this is a worthy cause.”
James