Читать книгу The City Man - Howard Akler - Страница 9

Three more scores and they call it a day. Tough to ankle when the going is good but no point burning up the place, so with tempered desire they weave and flow with the rest of the suckers. Slow down near the exit.

Chesler is counting the cash.

Mona lights up. Well?

Mm-hmm.

What’s that mean?

Means mm-hmm.

Mona takes a healthy drag. Well, she says, hand mine over then.

Chesler hands hers over.

Sunlight pale and slatted comes through the colonnade of Union Station. Dwarfed by a massive column, Mona squints out at the movement on Front Street. Even off the whiz, she is observant of gait and pace, the telltale vulnerabilities in another’s motion. She takes a drag on her cigarette and looks around. Chesler is long gone, ready to breeze the moment the last poke is pinched. Mona tends to linger – daffy habit for a stall, but spending so much time in the tip often leaves her a little twitchy in the initial open spaces. So, on the peripheries of action, she smokes. Inhale and exhale easing her out of the grift.

Strolling away from the station, she passes a pencil seller on the sidewalk. Over her shoulder are a cigar shop and an oculist and competing haberdasheries. Sees familiar faces in the shop windows because she often takes the same route home, walks the relentless city while autos zip past with growling regularity. Six-cylinder hubbub. A honking Dodge hustles past her. She flips him the bird and turns onto the side streets. Beat-up rowhouses on McCaul and Sullivan, with cracked toplights and, below them, the unemployed who drowse in the doorways. She cuts across Spadina and walks one block north of Dundas to Glen Baillie Place, an alley four houses deep. She stops at the last one, tosses away her smoke and opens the door.