Famous Last Meals (4 page)

She was still talking. She had been a diplomat's wife. Once, aboard a vessel cruising the Black Sea, she seduced a Soviet spy and convinced him to divulge state secrets while her husband slept three cabins away. Adam was sure that if this conversation were being monitored, he would have been cut off by now and urged to move on to more profitable game. If she really were a staunch Party booster, her vote would be assured, wouldn't it?

Her house was an all-consuming project now, with eaves troughs to be cleaned, roof tiles to be replaced, shake siding to be scraped and painted. Her son wanted her to sell the house and move into the condominium across the street from her. Her house was leaning to the north quite noticeably. He would see that when he came, she said. None of the three floors was level. Her great-grandchildren had tried lining up an intricate domino pattern in her kitchen, to their lamentable frustration. If she moved she would lose her lovely little garden. She supposed she could grow plants in containers on a balcony, but it wouldn't be the same. Perhaps she could have a southern exposure instead of a western one as she had now. The condo tower was round, like a fairy-tale turret. Had Adam ever heard of such a thing?

He waited for her to take a breath and asked if she would consider taking a sign.

“Pardon?”

“A sign. To put on your lawn.”

“You're not going to put pesticides down.”

“No, of course not.”

“But what would it say?”

“It would say, “Don Feeney Gets It Done.””

“Gets what done?”

“Well, any job he's given.”

“I should hope so. That's the least he should do, wouldn't you think, young man?”

“He wants to be your representative in Ottawa.”

“Does he now? Isn't that considerate of him. Tell him I know all about Ottawa. Tell him I don't trust the lot of them. I could tell you some things about Ottawa that would make your hair fall out.”

She told him her address, which he wrote on the same piece of paper Monica had handed him. He ran his finger over the embossed red letterhead.

“Should I bring a sign?”

“The street is quite well marked. You're not coming from Clayton Park, are you? I tried to give directions to LB once and he became terribly lost.” Adam gave the name of the hotel. “Oh dear. I suppose proximity counts for something. Quite direct, then: South Park to South, South to Wellington. If you miss it you can circle round and pick it up again off Inglis. I prefer to approach from the east off Inglis so that I'm making a right-hand turn. Cecil used to make endless fun of me for driving so far out of my way. That's the route I like and I'm too old to change now. I myself do not drive anymore, you understand.”

He didn't tell her that he would be walking. He decided to bring a window sign and another for the lawn. On each, against the Party colours and above the slogan, was Don's smiling, handsome, craggy face, his full head of silver-grey hair cropped just this side of military severe. The visit would be a welcome diversion. He crept out without Eugène
noticing.

Just as she had described it, the house faced west but leaned north. Across the street was the round apartment tower and beside it a white building that was as tall as the condominium but without balconies. A sign beside the door identified it as a student-family housing cooperative. A play structure stood empty beside it. On the other side, between it and the round condo, was a parking lot, and beyond that a grassy berm and what looked to be an elementary school in the distance.

“Please,” a man's voice. Adam could not tell where it was coming from. “Please. If you please. Up here. I find myself to be in a bind.”

He scanned the front of the white building floor by floor until he was looking up at a small brown face peering over the edge of the roof a dozen stories up.

“I seem to be locked out. Can you make your way up here, please, and let me back in?” It was the voice of someone educated in England or in an English colonial school. “Simply go inside the front door and buzz the office. I would be most grateful to you should you make the manager aware of my predicament.”

Adam passed through the outer door and found the button for the office.

“Yes?” an impatient, adult-female voice.

“I don't live here, but there's a man on the roof and he can't get down.”

“Who is it?”

“I don't know his name. I was walking by. He called out to me.”

“I meant who are you.”

“My name is Adam Lerner.”

“What apartment number?”

“I said I don't live here.”

“There's no soliciting.”

“I'm not selling anything. I'm just letting you know about the guy on the roof. I think he's from Africa.”

“We are all from Africa originally.”

“Can you let me in or go up and check on him yourself? I think he's in trouble.”

“Just a minute.”

She appeared on the other side of the glass door.

“Let's see some
ID
.”

Adam took out his
PMO
card and held it up so that she could read it through the glass of the inner door. The card had his photo and the words, “Temporary Permit” printed diagonally across it in green ink.

“Holy shit. I mean, come in.” She unlocked the door and held it open.

“Thanks.” He went to the elevator and pushed the “Up” button.

“Really sorry, eh. If I'd known—I mean, I'm sorry if I—have you, like, seen him or anything?”

“As I said, he called down to me.” Was it her purpose in life not to listen to what anyone told her?

“No, I mean, you know. God, he's so...”

“Oh. Right.”
He's taller than you think. I was at an event with him not long ago. Couldn't be bothered talking to the man. Another engagement I had to get to, don't you know.

“You have? What's he like? Do you think you could get me his autograph if I gave you the address?” Without waiting for his answer she dashed into the office, which was nearby, and came out with two identical business cards that gave her name and position under the co-op's letterhead. “Gail Sykes, Office Coordinator.” Adam signed the back of one, returned it to her, and pocketed the other.

“What's this?” she said with a sniff, squinting at his scrawl.

“Didn't you...?

“One for him, one for her.”

He patted his pocket. “As soon as I get back to Ottawa, I promise.”

“God, I can't hardly believe it.” The elevator, which had come and gone once already, opened. “Take it all the way to the top. That'll bring you to the roof.”

“Thanks so much, uh,” fishing again for her card.

“Gail.”

“Gail.”

“There are stairs, too, once you're there.”

“I'll look for them.”

“Are you like a spy or something?”

“Sort of.”

“What does he do with his—?” The door closed and the elevator began to climb.

On the roof a wooden picnic table sat beside a large metal shed that he figured housed the elevator's drive mechanism. He was alone. Remembering that he had not tested the door before letting it close behind him, he tried the handle. The door opened easily.

Adam walked over to the eastern edge of the roof and put his fingers through the links of the steel fence. The harbour spread out before him in the middle distance: George's Island, a tall, obstructive building with the green letters, “
ALIANT
” near the top, the container terminal near the tip of the peninsula, an oil refinery on the Dartmouth side. How odd to be up here, he thought. How right it felt. He was beginning to forget why he had come to this city, when he heard a deep reverberant laugh coming up from street level. Looking down he saw the same man who had tricked him onto the roof.

“Enjoying the panorama, my man?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

“Don Feeney Gets It Done. Do he indeed!”

Adam was puzzled until he saw that the man was holding a lawn sign by its wooden shaft, and he remembered that he had left both it and the window sign meant for Mrs. Fallingbrooke in the entrance to the co-op.

“What do he get done, mon? He hairdo?” Another rumbling James Earl Jones laugh, one so strong it could have moved boulders.

“Do you mind leaving that there, please?”

Riding the elevator down, Adam scolded himself for his anxiety. The election signs were inconsequential and had probably cost the Party a pittance. “You don't care, remember?” But saying this he saw that he did care.

When he got outside, the man and Adam's signs had vanished, and where he had been standing was now a sign proclaiming the virtue of voting for the local socialist candidate, Lexington Bramwell Bliss, the kind of name you gave a lap dog or a treasured teddy bear. Aside from the silly pretensions suggested by the name, the situation had now deteriorated into theft, and regardless of his waning emotional commitment to the Party and the
PMO
, Adam felt duty-bound to retrieve their property.

Looking across at the leaning house, his destination, he saw a figure briefly part the curtains drawn across the large front window on the ground floor. An elderly woman, he could make out, before the drapes closed again. He wondered if she could tell who he was. Calling on her now, without an election sign to leave, might well be futile. She didn't seem the sort who changed her mind, and she had certainly expressed no love for Don Feeney, the Party and politicians in general.

The curtain parted again and this time a dark-skinned face peered out: his rooftop joker.

The front door opened and out came the man, holding a clipboard and a lawn sign, a duplicate of the one that had sprouted in front of the co-op residence. Everything was suddenly clear. Adam crossed the street.

“Mr. Bliss, I presume?”

“I'll be with you shortly, young sir,” he said, driving the sharp end of the stake forcefully into the beating heart of Mrs. Fallingbrooke's crabgrass. He adjusted the tilt of the sign to match that of the house.

“Nice touch.”

“It be the touches that nudge we starward.”

“What were you doing up there, if you don't mind me asking?”

“‘My' asking. Where you acquire you mother tongue, fool?” said Lexington Bramwell Bliss, now more Mr. T than Oxonian.

“You saw me coming with my signs.”

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign!”

“You can't just—”

“What you say? Can't just? Can't what? Yes I surely just can. And did. Ha!”

Adam looked past the man, whose tight-fitting white suit and red silk tie made him look theatrical and not at all like the typical candidate from his leftist party. Left-leaning party, left-leaning house. Bliss himself stood canted parallel to the angle of the newly planted sign.

The homeowner came out to stand, humpbacked, on her top step. She wore a simple black dress and a string of pearls with matching earrings. She looked to be ninety-nine and three quarter years old.

“As soon as I rang off from talking to you, I called LB, thinking, ‘Oh, let's make this interesting, shall we?' Well?”

“Pardon?”

“You're coming in. It's your turn to persuade me.”

“I thought all you wanted was someone to drive you to the grocery store.”

“LB is coming back to do just that after he has completed his work on this street. Aren't you, LB?”

“That I am, my empress, that I most surely am!”

“I'm sorry, thank you for the invitation, but really. You got your laugh at my expense. What's the use?”

“Usefulness is a highly overrated quality. We quickly outlive our usefulness. Style trumps substance in all but the rarest case worth mentioning these days, and certainly always in the political arena. Isn't that right, LB?”

Bliss laughed heartily in agreement as he rang the next doorbell.

“I have to get back to the phones.”

“Phones, drones. Waste of time, your intrusive cold call. Or are you targeting the potentially vulnerable, lonely widows like me with too much money and not enough sense? What they can do these days with a
SIN
, a postal code and
GIS
software. Don't look so surprised; I keep abreast. As for electioneering, now your push call, that's a tool of a different temper. The self-proclaimed independent survey. The subtly skewed question set. ‘Given that the incumbent has been generally incompetent, how would you rate his chances in this election? Given Party X's colossal botch of the offshore oil and gas deal—oh, I forget, that was your party, wasn't it? Silly me.”

She looked and sounded so delighted that Adam would not have been surprised if she and not Bliss were the candidate. It struck him then just how ill prepared he had been in joining the team, making calls, telling people about Feeney without knowing anything about his opponents.

All right, he thought, everything seems to be pointing inside this Leaning House of Pisa. Let's see what we have.

What he found was a room with walls painted a lemony wash and hung with paintings all of the same style, white on white, textured, arrogantly colourless. Thick dabs of oil paint applied with a trowel, it seemed, gave each work of art turbulence and depth. Looking closer he saw that the surfaces were particleboard, their angled wood chips adding to the appearance of frozen movement, to the patchy skin, the surface of a frothy sea caught and held. He noticed little else, not the texture of the chair she bade him sit upon, not the colour or pattern of the drapes, not the flooring, which he knew was more or less level but which could have been sponge toffee or slate, so intent was he on these slabs of ice and snow that seemed to pulsate and throw inexplicable dancing shadows.

“I'm sorry, but I cannot allow this to continue. You are simply too young.”

Was she was referring protectively to something subliminal in the artwork, an image of Eros or terror or hard cynical adult reality that he had not lived long enough to see? He stopped staring and turned to her.