The Night Bell (22 page)

She listened in on her father’s deals. Because he was a soft-spoken man, people had to stand close to hear.
Occasionally he would have cause to touch them on the arm or shoulder. He made friends easily and he was likeable, unlike her mother who could get angry and was at times sarcastic. Her father was soft but he was direct. He’d say, “Ivan, I don’t negotiate, I just buy if the price is right. I’ll pay you a hundred and fifteen dollars for all the pants and last summer’s blouses.” They might protest that the merchandise was already at wholesale prices, but he dealt with his suppliers laughingly. “I must be crazy offering over a hundred! Everyone in Port Dundas gets the Eaton’s catalogue. I can’t charge a lot more than I’m paying. I’ll make it a hundred and twenty-five.” He’d take the money out and start counting. “Goodness knows I have half of what I bought last year
still
in inventory!” Ivan or Mr. Wing or Mrs. Ferguson would take the money. Later, Hazel asked him if anyone ever walked away from one of his offers.

“Sure,” he said. “A good businessman knows when to turn down a deal. I respect someone who won’t accept my offer.”

“What do you think of the people who accept them?”

“I thank the lord that they exist. Or I might have to stock at Eaton’s wholesale prices.”

He put his purchases in overstock and brought them out as he needed them. Hazel’s mother used to joke that he was the Roebuck of Port Dundas. If it made him mad, she’d pinch his face and coo, “No-oo darling, you’re Sears. Everyone knows you’re Sears.”

This year, they didn’t go to the city until the twenty-fourth, in part because the weather had turned nasty around the fifteenth and the roads were unsafe. It was dark when they left Port Dundas at 6:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve, and the sky was grey and flat when they got to the city at 9:00 a.m. It was as if the sun hadn’t come up at all. It was so cold that the streetcars seemed to grind along on stone rails, screeching. Her father beat his hands together when they got out of the car. He gave her a nickel for the meter and it swallowed the coin with a rattle and a clunk.

They’d been warned to be back on the road by lunchtime so as not to be late for when their guests arrived. Three of the four grandparents were coming for Christmas dinner, and “How many more Christmases are we all going to be together?” her mother had asked him, rhetorically, at the door.

“Your mother will outlive us all,” he’d replied.

Queen Street West radiated both opportunity and danger to Hazel. Kids a lot younger than she were selling newspapers and cigars on the street; others were just on their own doing who knew what. Some of them weren’t properly dressed for the cold. Back home, when someone fell on hard times their neighbours helped them out.

They went into a store called Cardinal’s, below Queen on Bay Street. Although Cardinal’s was only three hundred metres south of the Ward, you could feel none of its
bustle and noise. South of Queen Street, life was orderly and everyone spoke English, but north of it, you were in another world.

The man behind the counter greeted her father warmly. “I thought you weren’t coming to rob me blind this year!”

“Mr. Cardinal, I still have thirty fedoras. No one wanted fedoras in 1957.”

“They’ll probably want them again in 1960,” said Mr. Cardinal, still clasping her father’s hand. “You’ll make a killing.”

“What can I take off your hands, Sam? Undershirts?”

“I have a double order of bootblack, you know. Mrs. Cardinal can’t keep a thing straight. I can give you a case for under wholesale and I also have more of the good denim overalls you took last year. And one of my customers brought me a bottle of rye, so you might as well fortify yourself before you head out into the cold again.”

“Sweetheart, Mr. Cardinal and I are going to chew the fat for a while. You must be hungry.” He took a dollar out of his billfold.

“Bowles Lunch at the corner has a fine breakfast special: two eggs, peameal bacon and sausage, two flapjacks, a rack of toast, imported butter, preserves, and a pot of tea, all for sixty cents,” said Cardinal. “You won’t need to eat again until the ham is carved!”

She took the dollar.

“Maybe I’ll fit in my visit to Mr. Yoon up Elizabeth Street
while you’re gone, sweetheart. Will you meet me back at the car at noon?”

She agreed she would. Last year he hadn’t allowed her to explore on her own.

“D’you hear?” asked Mr. Cardinal. “They’re going to raze Chinatown. All the way to Dundas, they say. They’re going to build a new city hall.”

“You don’t say. Well, it is a tip in there, isn’t it?”

“But where will all the people go?” Hazel asked.

They appeared to have forgotten she was still in the store.

“Halfa them Chinese already moved west. To Spadina with the Hebrews,” said Mr. Cardinal. “There’s two Chinatowns now, but it can’t get any worse for the ones who have to stay in this one while they tear it down around their ears. Even half empty, it’s a pestilence. Don’t you go on up there without your father, you hear?”

“I won’t,” she assured them. The doorbell dingled when she stepped back out into the cold weather. A species of arctic wind roared along the sidewalk, picking up speed, accelerating at times from gust to blast. She went up to Bowles and looked in. The room beyond the steamy window was crowded with businessmen finishing their breakfasts. A layer of pipe smoke hung under the ceiling and twisted in the fans. Since arriving in Toronto, she’d had one thing in mind and it wasn’t eggs and flapjacks. She turned her back on Bowles Lunch and hesitated before crossing Bay
Street. Then she walked west along Queen, away from the restaurant. She stood at the corner of Queen and Chestnut. Her father had spoken of Toronto’s Ward many times. He had friends in the Ward, other merchants, people who were “struggling to make it in a new place,” her father said. It was a place of gathering, where people freshly arrived, speaking neither much English nor any of the other languages they would encounter in the Ward, found themselves a spot to sleep in ramshackle rooms behind crowded shops. Her mother talked of the Ward as a place where everyone was an orphan.

In her purse, Hazel carried a small pad of paper, a sharpened pencil, and two newspaper clippings. In the first one, from the
Westmuir Record
, Carol Lim’s photograph was printed below the headline:
LOCAL GIRL GOES MISSING
. Dated Monday, October 28, 1957. The second one was a clipping from the
Toronto Telegram
, dated December 12, less than two weeks ago. It had picked up the Toronto angle, and featured two clear pictures of Carol. It asked its readers in “Greater Chinatown” to keep an eye out for the girl. This presumed the
Telegram
had readers in Greater Chinatown. The reporters from the
Telegram
had since been silent on the story. She wondered if they’d been kind and thoughtful in their approach. Or if maybe it was an assignment just like any other. Eight inches of type. They had all of Toronto to choose from, what did they care what happened to a girl from some
other town? No one had yet treated Carol as anything more than a story. Somehow there were stories but there weren’t any facts.

Hazel crossed Queen Street and walked up Chestnut, into the Ward.

Chestnut Street was not as crowded as Mr. Cardinal had said it would be. There were some closed shops, but the sidewalks in front of the boarded-up windows were alive with trade. A tarp, tied down tightly against the wind, protected one man’s wares – as well as him – from falling icicles. The few things he had for sale were arranged on crates and wooden boxes. Onions, carrots whose leaves were so frozen that they had gone a deep, translucent green, and a few pieces of salt back pork. The man had a big yellowy face and blue eyes. Her instinct was not to talk to any men if possible.

She went up to Louisa Street and turned right. Some of the Chinese restaurants that looked like they had been there forever were open. Various cooked pig and duck parts hung in the windows. None of the signs were in English. She went into the most brightly lit one first. It was halfway between breakfast and lunch, and the booths were empty, but there were a number of old men sitting at the counter. “Excuse me,” she said. “Hello.” Silence. “Can I show you a photograph?” She approached the nearest
man. He waited patiently for her to come closer. “This girl. Carol Lim,” she said. “Do you know her?”

He looked at the picture and back at her. He said something and shrugged. None of the others, nor the man behind the counter, seemed eager to look at what she was showing around.

“My name is Hazel. Carol is someone I know. Her parents think she might have run away to Toronto. Her name is Carol Lim.”

One of the men behind the counter waved the back of his hand at her. “You go please,” he said.

The command to leave made her want to try harder. She put a photograph on the bar in front of the man who’d spoken. “I don’t mean to be rude. This is important. She’s been missing for two months, and someone I know has been falsely accused –”

“Wrong place.”

She left the restaurant and crossed the street. There were a few more, mostly empty restaurants on that side and she was met with much the same response in them. The green lights running up the beacon on top of the Canada Life Building showed it was warming up, although two or three degrees would do little good in this cold.

She looked at her watch. It was not yet ten-thirty in the morning. The Ward was a ghost town of empty storefronts with signs in a dozen languages, the words in peeling paint. Behind her there was a huge field of rubble where
the houses had already been torn down. She could go to the new Chinatown and show Carol’s picture there and be back within the hour.

She wrote her father a note and ran back to Bay Street to stick it under his wiper. It read:
Went to find something special for Alan. Back before 12:00. H
.

Hazel walked back through the Ward on Elizabeth Street. The street itself still existed, but on either side, both the businesses and homes were in ruins. Here and there, like a remaining tooth in a mouth, there would be a house amidst the mess of broken stone and brick. All the trees had been cut down and their naked stumps levered out of the ground, rocks still clenched in their gnarled roots.

Farther up, she found the kiosk of an abandoned gas station. She went up to it and pushed its door open. Inside there was a banged-up cash register with an empty drawer hanging out.
The victim was found in the kiosk with his tongue hanging out
. A map of the city stapled to the wall confirmed that she was going the right direction to get to the new Chinatown at Dundas and Spadina.

When she came to Dundas Street, she saw people once more. She walked over to Spadina Avenue and went north
in the bustle. On both sides of the avenue the signs were either in Hebrew or Chinese. There were barely any in English.

There was nothing to do but begin with the first place where there wouldn’t be too many people. She didn’t want to create a scene. She went into a Chinese bookstore. Coloured lanterns hanging from the awning spun in the wind. There were hundreds of books on the walls of the tiny shop. Everything was in Chinese. A young woman approached her. “I’m sorry, do you speak English?”

“I speak a little.”

“Will you look at a picture?” she asked. She held out the clippings, as if to show her credentials. The young woman allowed her to spread the pages out on the glass countertop. “Do you know this girl?”

“No,” the woman said right away.

“Can you look at all the pictures? There are three of them. Maybe one of them looks more like her.”

The woman took her time and looked closely at the images of Carol Lim. She adjusted her glasses once and looked closer, focusing. “No,” she said once more. “Thank you.”

“Is there a place where young people go to have fun? Maybe somewhere they could drink?”

“You want to have a drink?”

“No. I wonder if there’s a place that would let
this
girl have a drink?” She tapped Carol’s smiling face.

“I don’t drink, so I don’t know.”

Hazel thanked her and left. There had been a pleasant if unidentifiable smell in the shop. Smoke and flowers.

She got nowhere in the next three stores. Some of the shopkeepers looked at her with frank distrust. There was a Jewish butcher next and then more restaurants. A store selling televisions, all its signs in Chinese. Was there anything in Chinese to watch on television?

She crossed Spadina and entered Kensington Market. It stretched away behind the storefronts on the west side of Spadina. She’d heard about the market from the grade thirteens – one of the classes had made a field trip. “Never seen so many fish and chickens and goats and pigs all in one place,” Andrew had told her. He hadn’t told her it stank like a barnyard.

She walked deeper into the market and the sounds of the city began to diminish. They were replaced with clucking and snorting, and voices calling out in different tongues. A small, fragile-looking truck on three wheels ambled by and turned into an alley. The market smelled of meat and smoke and rot and tobacco. She spied a tower of egg trays in a store window, a pile maybe three feet high, thirty eggs a layer.

The smell of roasting meat drew her to the kosher butcher. The Chinese displayed ducks, the Jews chickens. She could get a quarter roasted chicken in a paper bag for sixty-five cents. Next door was a used bookshop with English titles in a bin on the sidewalk and in the windows. She went inside. A man wearing a wool vest and smoking a
short pipe greeted her. “Can I help you find something?” he asked.

“Actually, I’m looking for someone, but there aren’t a lot of people around here who speak English.”

“Why are you looking for someone to talk English with?”

She fumbled the clippings out of her coat pocket. The folds were starting to crease and fray. He took them from her and began reading. “Uh-huh. You looking for this girl?”

“I am, sir. Her name is Carol Lim.”

“She’s not from Toronto I’m guessing.”

“She said she knew people here. Some people think she had a boyfriend.”