Barney's Version (14 page)

His manner beyond reproach, the inspector allowed that the sentiment was admirable but, unfortunately, the sign was illegal, because
the English lettering was the same size as the French, whereas the law clearly stated that the French must be twice the size of the English. It was past three p.m. when the inspector pronounced and a well-oiled John was already into his shouting mode. “When you can send in an inspector who is twice the size of us Anglophones,” he hollered, “we'll take down the sign. Until then, it remains in place.”

“Are you
le patron
?”

“
Fiche le camp. Espèce d'imbécile
.”

Six months later John was in the news. He had failed to pay his provincial income tax for the past six years. An oversight. So he summoned reporters to Dink's. “I am being persecuted,” he said, “because I am an Anglophone, a spokesman for my people who have been denied their constitutional rights. Rest assured I will not be intimidated or silenced. And I will survive. For, as Terence put it,
fortis fortuna adiuvat
. That's spelt T, E, R, E, N, C, E, gentlemen.”

“But have you paid your taxes or not?” asked a reporter from
Le Devoir
.

“I refuse to countenance hostile questions put to me by politically motivated reporters from the Francophone press.”

Riding a surfeit of vodka and cranberry juice, his preferred tipple, John could be truly obnoxious, his favourite foil the harmless gay hairdresser he shouts at, denouncing him as a bowel-troweller or worse, infuriating Betty, our incomparable barmaid, as well as everybody else in the bar. Betty, born to her job, sees to it that nobody who is not a certified member of our group is ever seated at our end of the horseshoe-shaped bar. She fields unwanted phone calls with panache. If, for instance, Nate Gold's wife calls, she will look directly at Nate for a sign, even as she calls out, “Is Nate Gold here?” She cashes cheques for Zack Keeler, among others, and hides them until she is assured they will not be returned
NSF
. When drink has rendered John too much to bear, she will take him gently by the arm, and say, “Your taxi is here.”

“But I didn't order a …”

“Yes, you did. Didn't he, Zack?”

John is certainly a scoundrel, but he is also an intelligent man and an original, a species this city is short of. Furthermore, I am
permanently in his debt. Even though I'm sure he suspected I was guilty, he defended me with wizardry in court. He was there for me when only Miriam's visits to the prison in St-Jérôme stood between me and a breakdown.

“Of course I believe you,” she had said then, “but I think you haven't told me everything.”

To this day when the officer who was in charge of the investigation, Detective-Sergeant Sean O'Hearne, puts in an appearance at Dink's, John does his utmost to humiliate him. “If you must impose yourself on the quality here, O'Hearne, you're going to have to pay for your own drinks, now that you've retired.”

“If I were you, Maître Hughes hyphen McNoughton, I would mind my own business.”

“
Ite, missa est
, you viper. So do not trouble my client here. You can still be charged with harassment, you know.”

Raskolnikov has nothing on me. Or, put another way, to each suspect his own Inspector of Police Porfiry. O'Hearne continues to keep tabs on me, hoping for a deathbed confession.

Poor O'Hearne.

All of us who frequent Dink's in the afternoon have suffered time's depredations, but the years have been especially unkind to O'Hearne, now in his early seventies. Once he had been built square as a boxer, a stranger to flab, Warner Brothers tough, with a weakness for Borsalinos, kipper ties, and bespoke tailoring acquired on the arm. In days gone by, his mere presence in Dink's, or any other Crescent Street watering-hole, was sufficient to empty the place of dealers in drugs, stolen goods, or call-girls, none of whom wanted him to see them spending lavishly. But nowadays O'Hearne, his residue of snowy white hair still parted down the middle or spine, stray strands slicked down either side like bleached salmon ribs, was not so much corpulent as beer-bloated, his blubber seemingly without substance. Prick him with a fork, I thought, and he would spurt fat like sausage in a pan. Jowly he was, sweaty, his double chin wobbly, his belly immense. He no longer chain-smoked Player's Mild, but he was left with, and often overcome by, such a wet, bronchial cough as to make the rest of us resolve to reread our wills when we got home. The last time he
stopped by to check me out, heaving himself into the bar stool beside me, wheezing, he said, “You know what worries
me
most? Cancer of the rectum. Having to shit into a Glad Bag attached to my hip. Like poor old Armand Lemieux. Remember him?”

Lemieux was the one who'd put the cuffs on me.

“I sit in the crapper every morning now,” he said, “and an hour passes before I'm done. It comes out in angry little bits.”

“That's very interesting, your excreta. Why don't you go in for a check-up?”

“You eat Japanese?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“I tried that new place on Bishop, The Lotus Blossom, or whatever the hell they call it, and they brought me raw cold fish and hot wine. Listen here, I said to the waitress, I like
hot
food and
cold
wine. Take it away and try again, eh? Hey, I get a lot of reading done these days.”

“Sitting on the crapper?”

“Lemieux remembers you like yesterday. The way you handled it, he says, you had to be a genius.”

“I'm touched.”

“Lemieux's got himself a nice bit of stuff for an old cop. An Italian widow, with boobs out to here, who runs a
dépanneur
in the North End. But what can it be like for her, eh? I mean he's in the sack with her, woosh woosh woosh, and she takes a peek and that fucken Glad bag is filling up. Am I boring you?”

“Yes.”

“You know, after all these years The Second Mrs. Panofsky, as you insist on calling her, still has me around for the occasional dinner.”

“You're lucky. Of all my wives so far, she was the best cook. I don't mind you telling her that,” I said, hoping my calumny would be reported to Miriam.

“I don't think she'd appreciate the compliment coming from you.”

“She still accepts my monthly cheques.”

“Let's be serious for a moment. It's like her life stopped right there and then. She's got the trial transcripts bound in morocco, and she
goes over it again and again, making notes, looking for loopholes. Hey, tell me the difference between Christopher Reeve and O.J.”

“I wouldn't know.”

“O.J. will walk,” he said, guffawing.

“You're such an oaf, Sean.”

“Don't you get it? Reeve is that actor, he played Superman, who had this riding accident and is paralysed for life. O.J. is guilty as hell, you know. Just like you. Ah, come on. Lighten up. That's all water over the dam. In your position, I might have done the same thing. Nobody blames you.”

“Why do you keep coming in here, Sean?”

“I enjoy your company. Really I do. Would you do something for me? Leave me a letter, saying what you did with it.”

“The body?”

He nodded.

“But you're bound to go first, Sean. With the weight you're carrying around these days you're just begging for a heart attack.”

“I'll see you out, Panofsky. Guaranteed. You leave me that letter. I promise to read it and destroy it. I'm curious, is all.”

Irv Nussbaum was on the phone again this morning before I even had my coffee. “Terrific news,” he said. “Turn on
CJAD
. Quick. Kids painted a swastika on the walls of a Talmud Torah school last night. Broke windows. Bye now.”

And a compelling item out of Orange County, California, in today's
Globe and Mail
. A seventy-year-old woman, taking care of her cancer-ridden husband — changing his diapers, feeding him, sleeping only a few hours a night because of his incessant
TV
watching — just about snapped. She splashed her significant other of thirty-five years with rubbing alcohol and set him on fire when she discovered that he had eaten her chocolate bar. “I'd gone out for a minute to the mailbox and when I came back, it was gone. I knew there was nobody else there, so it must have been him,” she said. “He gets candy, too,
every day. But he took mine. So I fetched a teaspoonful of rubbing alcohol and threw it at him. I had matches in my pocket. It just went up. I really didn't mean to do it. I was just scaring him.”

I had a one o'clock appointment, and set out in a foul mood, but in good time. Unlike Miriam, I took pride in being punctual. Then, suddenly, I stopped. All at once I couldn't remember what I was doing on … the sign on the corner said Sherbrooke Street. I had no idea where I was going. Or why. Overcome by dizziness, sliding in sweat in spite of the cold, I shuffled over to the nearest bus stop and collapsed on a bench. A young man waiting for the bus, his baseball cap worn back to front, leaned over me and said, “Are you okay, pops?”

“Shettup,” I said. Then I began to mutter what is becoming my mantra. Spaghetti is strained with the device I have hanging on my kitchen wall. Mary McCarthy wrote
The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit
. Or
Shirt
. Whichever. I am once a widower and twice divorced. I have three children — Michael, Kate, and the other boy. My favourite dish is braised brisket with horseradish and latkes. Miriam is my heart's desire. I live on Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. The street number doesn't matter, I'd know the building anywhere.

My heart thudding, threatening to fly free of my chest, I groped for a Montecristo, and managed to light and then pull on it. Smiling weakly at the concerned young man who still hovered over me, I said, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude to you.”

“I could call an ambulance.”

“I don't know what came over me. But I'm fine now. Honestly.”

He seemed dubious.

“I'm going to meet Stu Henderson at Dink's. It's a bar on Crescent Street. I turn left at the next block and there it is.”

Stu Henderson, a struggling free-lance
TV
producer, who used to be with the National Film Board, was waiting for me at the bar. John, already rooted on his customary stool, sat beside him, seemingly lost in a reverie. Back in 1960, Stu had already made a prize-winning but boring documentary about the Canadair
CL-215
, a water bomber, then still being tested on various Laurentian lakes, that could scoop up 1,200 gallons of water without coming to a full stop, and drop it on the nearest forest fire. And now he had come to pitch a project to me.
He was looking for seed money for an independently produced documentary about Stephen Leacock. “That's very intriguing,” I said, “but I'm afraid I'm not into cultural projects.”

“Considering all the money you've made producing
shlock
, I —”

A glassy-eyed John intruded, “
Non semper erit aestas
, Henderson. Or, in the vernacular, no soap.”

I suffer from a wonky system of values, acquired in my Paris salad days and still with me. Boogie's standard, whereby anybody who wrote an article for
Reader's Digest
, or committed a best-seller, or acquired a Ph.D., was beyond the pale. But churning out a pornographic novel for Girodias was ring-a-ding. Similarly, writing for the movies was contemptible, unless it was a Tarzan flick, which would be a real hoot. So coining it in with the idiotic
McIver of the RCMP
was strictly kosher, but financing a serious documentary about Leacock would be
infra dignitatem
, as John would be the first to point out.

Terry McIver, of course, did not subscribe to Boogie's value system. As far as he was concerned, we were an unforgivably flippant bunch. Louche. Our shared political stance, nourished by the
New Statesman
, resolutely left-wing, struck him as pathetically naïve. And Paris was a political circus in those days, animal acts to the fore. One night the rabidly anti-Communist goons of Paix et Liberté pasted up posters everywhere that showed the Hammer and Sickle flying from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the caption underneath reading,
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE THIS
? Early the next morning Communist toughs went from poster to poster, gluing the Stars and Stripes over the Soviet flag.

Clara, Boogie, Cedric, Leo, and I sat on the terrace of the Mabillon, drunkenly accumulating beer coasters on the day General Ridg-way, fresh out of the Korean War, drove into Paris, replacing Eisenhower at
SHAPE
. Only a thin, bored crowd of the curious had turned out to look over the general, yet the gendarmes were everywhere, and the boulevard Saint-Germain was black with Gardes Mobiles, their polished helmets catching the sun. All at once, the Place de l'Odéon was clotted with Communist demonstrators, men, women, and boys squirting out of the side streets, whipping out broomsticks from inside
their shapeless jackets and hoisting anti-American posters on them. Clara began to moan. Her hands trembled.

“RIDGWAY,” the men hollered.

“
À la porte
,” the women responded in a piercing shriek.

Instantly the gendarmes penetrated the demonstration, fanning out, swinging those charming blue capes featured in just about every French tourist poster I've ever seen, capes that were actually weighted with lead pipe in the lining. Smashing noses. Cracking heads. The once-disciplined cry of
Ridgway à la porte
faltered, then broke. Demonstrators retreated, scattered, clutching their bleeding heads. And I ran off in pursuit of a fleeing Clara.

Another day a German general came to Paris, summoned by
NATO
, and French Jews and socialists paraded in sombre silence down the Champs-Élysées, wearing concentration-camp uniforms. Among them was Yossel Pinsky, the rue des Rosiers money-changer who would soon become my partner. “
Misht zikh nisht arayn
,” he said. Don't mix in here. The Algerian troubles had begun. Gendarmes began to raid Left Bank hotels one by one, looking for Arabs without papers. Five o'clock one morning they pounded on our door and demanded to see passports. I produced mine, even as Clara, hitching the blankets to her chin, cowered in bed, whimpering. Her feet protruded, each toenail painted a different colour. A veritable rainbow. “Show them your passport, for Christ's sake.”