Читать книгу The Hemingway Caper - Eric Wright - Страница 7

The next morning, Carole kicked me out early.

Ours is a one-bedroom apartment on Howland, in a neighbourhood inhabited mainly by therapists of various kinds, and by freelance creative types—writers, actors, and stand-up comedians. The rent is low, but you have to park on the street and at night, coming back from a movie, it can take some time to find a space, and you get dinted more than you would in, say, Forest Hill. This is the main reason why people with car fetishes, the owners of Mercedes, for instance, and the four-wheel drive crowd, always move away once they’ve sold a couple of scripts.

As for me, the Toyota van I drive is dinted enough for me not to even notice if I get another scratch. Plus, I appreciate the district’s other amenities. To the south, on Bloor Street, we have probably the best strip of good, cheap restaurants in the core of the city, including Mel’s, a corned beef restaurant that is open all night and will sell you a half-sandwich if you’re not very hungry. And opposite Mel’s is Book City, one of the few independent bookstores left now that the chains have gobbled each other up. So we like it here.

As well as the single bedroom we have a bathroom so cramped because of the shower we’ve installed that you have to close the door to pee even when no one is home, and if you don’t lock it you are liable to be knocked off your aim if someone walks in suddenly. (Carole suggests I cultivate the practice of sitting down on all occasions, but that way I would fear being kneecapped until I got in the habit of locking the door.)

So we have one real bedroom, and another tiny room I call my office—an unwelcoming space with no natural light or feeling for which way is north. At night I don’t mind it so much, but I can’t work there during the day. Then there’s the living room, which has a window that looks out on to a brick wall three feet away, so it is usually dusk by noon. And finally, incongruously, there is the kitchen, a big room with a big table and two big windows, one on each side. This is my ideal workroom unless Carole is home and needs it, as she did that morning.

So I left a couple of hours early and drove over to Harbord, to the love nest. I was curious to see it in daylight, and, if possible, to get a look inside.

The building housed three stores on the ground floor: a dollar store selling junk, a video rental place, and a flower shop. The woman selling flowers told me the landlord lived upstairs; I walked round the building to a side door and pressed the bell. After a while, the door opened and a small, friendly-looking man with an unshaven, Geppetto-like face, a man in his late seventies or very early eighties, smiled a greeting, saying nothing.

“My name is Joe Barley,” I said “And I’m looking for a room to use as an office.”

He inclined his head backwards, still smiling. He was one of those people so at home in the world that he had no suspicions of it, or of me. “What do you do?” he asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said. “I can’t work at home with all the kids running around so I’m looking for an office.”

“What kinds of things you write?”

We might have been chatting over a beer. “Freelance stuff at the moment, but I’m planning a novel.”

“A novel!” He made a “shooshing” noise like S.K. Sakall, wondering. “Where do you live, then, that you got so much noise?”

Geppetto wasn’t right. He looked the part still, but his words were tinged by his upbringing in some East European shtetl.

“On Markham.” I grabbed for the name of a street, faintly associated with writers. “South of College,” I said, to give it some distance from Honest Ed’s, Toronto’s biggest bargain house. I remembered that Katie Mountbatten, a sometime colleague of mine at the university, lived there so it must still be affordable.

“Not too far away,” Geppetto said, consideringly. “Be a nice walk for you if the weather’s good.”

“Do you have a room vacant?”

Now he looked me up and down. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.” He nodded and said again, “Yes. Yes, I have a room. Go to the other end of the building. I’ll meet you there.” He closed the door in my face gently, slowly, smiling at me as he disappeared.

I walked around the building to where he was already waiting for me with the door open. “I never answer a knock on this door,” he said. “There’s a fire door connecting this end of the building with my apartment,” he said. “But the tenants must not use it.”

“Why?”

“It’s a fire door. I wouldn’t have a door at all if it wasn’t for the fire department. If someone wants me, including the tenants, they use the door at the other end.”

I let it go. We went up the stairs to a narrow corridor linking six rooms: three in the front, on the street side, and three at the back. He opened a door to a back room bare of furniture, with a window overlooking a yard full of junk: two filing cabinets, a rusting set of shelves, a broken water cooler, a bicycle wheel, and so on.

“No furniture,” I said, looking round.

“I never get it right. I put in a desk and chair and the tenant turns out to be a masseur, asks me to take them out. The furnishings. I store a few bits in the basement. What did you want the room for? What did you say?”

My mind was on Jason Tyler as he spoke, and I nearly said, “book dealer,” but I caught it. “Remember?” I said, “I’m a writer. My wife doesn’t understand me. She keeps talking to me, especially between the hours of nine and five, when I’m trying to write. I need a room where she can’t get at me.”

“A book writer?”

“I’m working up to that.”

“Reader’s Digest, like?”

“That’s the idea. So I need a room with a window overlooking the street so I can see life as I write about it.” I glanced over my shoulder, along the corridor. I had to hope no one was listening. “Are all your rooms in the front taken?”

“When do you need it?”

“Right away. As soon as I can get it.”

“I may have one in a couple of weeks.” He paused, scratched his bottom, paused again, gave me a twinkle, looked around in case anyone had sneaked into the corridor in the last few minutes, then trotted decisively to the middle door of the three-in-front, unlocking it. “Quick,” he said, more or less whispering. “Take a peek, but stay close to the door. I don’t want the tenant walking by outside and seeing you in the room.”

There was very little to peek at: a trestle table, a straight-backed office chair, an old armchair; against a wall, a single metal army-style cot with a mattress, a blanket, and a pillow. A towel hung on the back of the door, and a wastebasket stood under the table.

“What does he do?”

“Can’t you guess?”

There was no sign of any occupation. The table was bare, the wastebasket empty except for a scrap of paper. There was no phone, no pencils, pens, or paper. “Probably an undercover man for the Secret Service,” I guessed. “He’s just using the room for surveillance.”

Geppetto stepped into the room so he could see out over the street. As he stepped forward I swiftly retrieved the scrap of paper from the wastebasket.

“Who’s he watching, I wonder? Maria who runs the fruit stand? The baker? Maybe the dress shop across the street?” Geppetto chuckled to show he was being ironical. “He says he’s a writer, like you. Only he never seems to get any ideas. Lately I don’t bother to clean this room. Once-a-week cleaning is included in the rent, but there’s never anything to clean. A bit of dust. And, yes, I’ve seen the light on once or twice in the evening, but he’s never here in the daytime. What kind of writer is that?”

“I told you, the writer thing is just a front. He’s an undercover agent for the C.S.I.S. Clever. What makes you think he’ll be leaving?”

“I don’t think it’s working for him. I know you’re joking me with that undercover stuff. I don’t mind. I mean, a writer with an empty wastebasket? I do a bit of writing myself, putting together the family history. Sometimes it takes me three or four tries to tell someone’s story, one of my great-uncles who served in the Italian army in the first war, for example. What would the retreat from Caporetto be like for a Jewish baker? Makes for a lot of waste paper. I think that the man believes, like you, that if he has a room of his own, something might happen. That’s as close to a writer as he’s got. But it hasn’t happened. There’s a lesson to you, there. Maybe you shouldn’t waste your money until you’re on the second draft.”

“What do you care?”

“I like people to stay awhile. And would this furniture do you? He saw the cot in the basement and asked me if he could use it, for taking a nap, he said. But I don’t see how he could ever have got tired.”

“As a matter of fact, it would do me fine. So what do you think? How long?”

“I’m guessing he might be gone pretty soon. It looks to me as if he’s given up. You want to hear from me when he gives his notice? I’ve got a week’s advance rent. You pay the same.”

I fished out an old card I had picked up at a restaurant, crossed out the address and wrote my name and office number at the college. I would have preferred to use a pseudonym but I didn’t think Geppetto would be interested in finding out about me. If he did, and told any of my colleagues he was my landlord, and what he believed I was doing in the room, I would confess.

“And your name?” I asked.

“Glinka,” he said, emphasising the first syllable. “Glinka. That’s my name.”

Confess to my colleagues at Hambleton College, that is, that, like them, I’m writing a novel.