by M.G. Warenycia
“Somebody forgot to put their headphones on?” The question provoked mischievous snickering around the chaotically communal office. The huffing and sniffling, however, was not emanating from a not-safe-for-work website which someone had been amusing themselves with while forgetting to mute the volume. Minnie’s tanned and rosy cheeks blanched from embarrassment at the attention suddenly surrounding her: she, in fact, been deliberately exaggerating her discomfort, hoping to draw sympathy without having to make a direct complain to higher-ups. It didn’t help that, with her too-small scarlet blouse and lycra-infused pencil skirt, she was a perfect fit for a couple of popular search categories on just such websites. Nor did it help that in her ‘work’ she was basically acting as an ornament waiting for a husband.
Mind, the same was true of most everyone in the office, female or male. Johan was finishing a book; Ting-Ting did homework for graduate courses, while Lucas rambled about recent dates and planned future ones out loud. There wasn’t much work to do, not only because it was summer but because the office itself was in a state of flux. One week, the department sent word down that they would all be removed to new quarters on Russell Street. By Friday, this would be revised, as someone whose existing office space in the aforementioned location would be shifted protested the move, lest there be competition for parking spaces or their prize ficus plant, growing since the Mulroney era, be deprived of its accustomed portion of sunlight. Their boss, a wild haired, wilder eyed bachelor who’d plunked into the tenure track almost directly upon completing a few years of intensive fieldwork in the cocaine-route jungles of the southern and the Boreal woods of the northern halves of the American hemisphere, was kind and understanding. He expected little from his numerous underlings, and, since he wasn’t paying their salaries, their mental well-being was his chief priority. For their part, the office staff dutifully collected their paychecks and made no comment on the irregularities of their situation.
Indeed, especially in the lazy days of summer when the University as a whole ran at a slower pace, the building felt like their own private castle. It certainly looked the part. It wasn’t the only grand Victorian structure which some guilt-ridden heiress had willed to the University, but it was unique for its unitary bulk and stature, cleanly separated from the crowding of neighbouring buildings and free of the barnacle-like additions imposed by architecturally ignorant modern planners upon those structures situated on the main campus grounds.
Instead, it stood alone and unmolested by modernity, stalwart and solemn on an unusually circular island in the middle of Spadina Avenue. Pedestrians were kept at a distance by default, for the sidewalks on either side of the broad avenue did not cross it and traffic hardly slowed at the pseudo roundabout created by the premises.
There was definitely something eerie about the place; some ingredient which distinguished it from other buildings in the neighbourhood which were of similar vintage. Something more than mere oldness seemed to spread a musty veil over it, darkening the mood of those who gazed upon it, regardless of hour or season, though residents and frequent visitors to the area rumoured that this unique character was weakest in dry, sunny weather and strongest in darkness and rain, or when the winter snow-heaps melted into mud.
The rain had been rolling off the bushy canopy of Norway maples like off of giant umbrellas, regular thunderclaps shattering what had been a prolonged heatwave. Dan Rodgers, of Annex Plumbing Co. Ltd., was rare in not minding doing jobs in these hot, humid conditions. Many years of an unbroken sequence of exhaustion, treated by binge consumption of the LCBO’s most generic prescriptions, themselves fulfilled by the very paychecks that rendered them necessary…Add on top of that a general disconnection from society beyond that cyclic rhythm of toil and succour for toil, and Dan’s senses were comfortably dulled. If there were pipes that needed fixing and a steak and a cold six pack at the end of it, then he might sweat litres, scuff knees and knuckles till they bled, sewing in the grime all around him until the last nut was tight and the H2O flowing again, he would do it – full of curses, perhaps, but no complaints.
He had not, however, ceased to hate being called to office-hour jobs in zones like this one, where you were away from any big parking lots and also from any street which wasn’t parked up 24/7 on account of being built before automobiles were a thing. Whatever tools they needed had to be lugged a full block from where he left the hulking white Econoline. He would have said he was lucky to have an assistant, except that the kid was a placeholder sent out from one of those temp agencies which Annex Plumbing Co. (which he was merely an employee of) had begun dealing with. Bright-eyed, full of energy and enthusiasm,; no way in hell he would be working at this job in five years. You could just tell. By the time a kid was old enough to work – legally, that is – you could tell which ones went to Maple Leaf Gardens and the demolition derby on the weekends, and which ones were examining bugs and bones in the R.O.M. and Science Centre when they were in primary school. The latter might sincerely want to ‘learn a trade’ when they started, but, in all his decades of experience, he’d never met one who didn’t run as far as they could from any kind of manual labour, straight into the softly upholstered bosom of academia or one of the hoity-toity office professions. Not one.
“The batteries on the ground mic and the angle grinder are topped up? I get the feeling this’ll be a big one,” he asked his assistant without making eye contact.
The temp fumed silently for a second before answering. “They should be okay.” He wondered why Dan hadn’t asked before they drove out to the job site. It was like this, what, two or three times already; like Dan was testing his diligence – or his nerves.
“They should be? I didn’t ask you whether they should be; you’re supposed to know that before they send you out here. Anyway, how do you spell your name again? For the time sheets; gotta fill this out…” Dan echoed back each letter, his affected airy pronunciations hinting at his view of the inefficient, illogical appellation that was Estêvão Cerqueira.
Once Dan had completed the documentation which would be too fatiguing to check carefully after the workday was done, the pair made their way into the half elegant, half dismembered lobby of the old building. “That’s what happens when parents don’t let their kids do Boy Scouts anymore, or Cadets or anything like that,” Dan remarked for the benefit of an imaginary audience of plaid-clad roughnecks holding conclave over a Coleman full of Molson’s, referring to the sorts of people, both staff and the handful of grad students who were milling about. “Anyway, let’s see who’s in charge. You’d think it’s gotta be some undead count who has to hide from the sunlight, eh?”
Estevao chuckled softly. By this point, at the end of the week, his feet only moved by purposeful and continuous command. To set the toolbox down, he had to rotate his shoulders and hips to bring it lower, then he dropped it, hoping it would not fall so far as to make much noise, considering it a success when he managed to perform the maneuver without bending back or knees.
It was easy enough to find the huge main doors, but with all the piled boxes, stacked chairs and extension cords snaking haphazardly around the lobby, it was hard to tell where exactly people did the regular office work and where renovations were being carried out.
Dan, mindful of his assistant, planted his feet firmly and scanned the room. He knew someone would notice their tradesmen’s clothes and tool boxes, then direct them where they were needed.
Clacking heels and balancing a heap of styrofoam boxes of pad Thai and curry, Minnie came up on them from behind. “Hey, hello, you guys are the plumbers?” she chirped.
“What do you think?” Dan thought to himself. “That’s right, Miss, just, ah, we are from the plumbing company, but nobody from here spoke to me personally. You would have been talking to the receptionist, but Mable, our regular gal in charge of dispatching everyone, like nine-one-one, y’know, she’s off on maternity leave and we have a temp filling in.” Estevao stared at the floor. “All anybody told me was there’s a leak or a smell or something. Don’t even know where exactly we’re supposed to be looking at, what unit or whatever.”
“Oh…oh, no, no, it wasn’t me that called your company, no,” Minnie said over her shoulder as she hurried to her desk to lay out the feast for her and her office mates. “You have to speak to Professor Cardinal, in room 118. He was saying he was going to call a plumber, and right now he’s in charge, so…”
“Okay, Miss. Hey – “ Dan hissed at Estevao, seeing where his eyes were wandering. “What are you lookin’ at? You want an HR complaint to get filed on us? Come on.”
The two plumbers waited a good fraction of a minute before the aforementioned academic opened the yellowish wooden door, though he welcomed them with hearty hospitality – quite the opposite of most of these ivory tower types, both workmen thought to themselves; the usual rule being to presume that tradesman are an unnatural and unwelcome intrusion into their sacred spaces – a sentiment rarely concealed.
The Professor wore a sober dark suit which contrasted in a way that he must have known people would notice (yet be afraid to admit they noticed) with the beadwork jewelry he wore, elaborate in design and emphatic in colour, as well as with the multiple necklaces of leathern cord bearing amulets visible in place of a tie. Estevao, who was a scholar no matter how he tried to deny it, observed that this surely deliberate contrast extended to the Professor’s bookshelves, which, like all tenured academics, were as fulsome with symbolism as with references. Binders bearing prosaic labels such as “Cadastral Survey: Simcoe County, 1898”and “1969 White Paper,” and dour old colonial works like William R. Caniff’s History of the Settlement of Upper Canada were juxtaposed with ideological tracts like uTOpia, The Poverty Wall, and Prison of Grass. Exotic and yet, therefore also appropriate, were esoteric volumes (based on the covers alone; Estevao had never heard of them before) with titles such as The Golden Bough and Necronomicon.
“I apologize that there is no building manager – as you can see, organization here right now is, well, there’s none to speak of!” The Professor smiled, gesturing to the activity outside the office, invisible behind the door. “This ‘ancient ruin,’ as you can probably figure just from looking at it, needs a whole lot more TLC than the administration has been giving it.”
“Yeah, you can say that again,” Dan had already made mental notes of the various patches of moss and discoloration due to dampness on numerous portions of the exterior stonework.
“They’re not even sure what to do with it.” Professor Cardinal rose from his chair, pacing thoughtfully in front of the obsolete map of the City of Metropolitan Toronto framed upon his wall. “You have to ask why they built it here,” he mused. Dan and Estevao both picked up on the unusual emphasis and were confused by it. The master plumber was oblivious, but Estevao’s imaginative eye fell upon a feather-draped circle divided into red, yellow, white and black quadrants. “They put a road – this road – right here, exactly in a straight line to the wetlands up north – and then they insisted on putting this circle, which is a terrible waste of land, if you’re thinking of developers and profits, which they usually are, and then they plunked this colossal monstrosity of a building on top of it all. Even in horse and buggy days, it must have been noisy, traffic running all around in a circle. What can I say? I’m just the messenger. So, people around the office have been complaining about weird smells lately.”
“Sewage leak?”
“Not sure, really. Nobody seems able to agree on what they’re smelling, but that’s the funny part, nobody says anything like sewage. Musty, musky, sour, cheesy, ‘dusty,’ if that’s a smell. Noises, too.”
“Uh-huh…and what kind of noises?”
“Rushing, gurgling, hissing.”
“Hissing? We talking water or a gas leak?”
“That’s just what Minnie and Tina said. Couldn’t say, myself.” Professor Cardinal stared calmly and lifted a spiral bound course reading from the shelf. Dan was flipping through the notebook he’d use to calculate the charges, but Estevao was mesmerized by the Professor – and astonished to see that the pages of the ‘course reader’ were manuscript, not printed. Alas, he was too shy to ask questions. Indeed, he was beginning to grow sorely envious of his peers who were sitting down in lecture halls and reading pdfs on their computers at home instead of mucking about in the moldy bowels of an assuredly asbestos-stuffed, lead-painted edifice. “Notes on Guiana Trip…G.H. Belzer – N.P…” Estevao could not discern the rest of the title. N.P.? Not printed, he guessed…or not for publication? Ugh, how his muscles and joints cried for a soft mattress…
Professor Cardinal led the plumbers down a long flight of stairs to a basement corridor which branched off into numerous rooms, some covered by grates, others by steel utility doors and still others were bare niches in the wall of the corridor or, to be technically precise, gouged out of the foundation itself. As he left them to their task, hunching forward and lowering his voice, adding that there may be…”dangerous animals” – he enunciated the phrase slowly and suggestively – down in the basement. “Two of the secretaries claimed to have seen something in the washroom closest to the stairwell…rat, raccoon, it was a power outage and they were hysterical; one of them was sure it was a snake or a lizard; couldn’t tell. ”
“Eh, sorry to hear that, buddy, but that’s more of a thing for animal control,” Dan dismissed his warnings.
Cardinal stared gravely, explaining that he did not want to make such a call because, based on his experience as an amateur naturalist as well as a property owner, there might be all kinds of hassles if the creature in question turned onto be on one of the “Red Lists” of endangered species sought by different government agencies and environmental activists – which practically every native reptile, from Nerodia sipedon to Pantherophis spiloides was – then it could be an enormous headache for the property owner. He reassured the plumbers that a large, enclosed concrete building was not the natural habitat of any of these species, in case they were feeling squeamish, and, therefore, they had likely come in to escape harsh weather and were likely few in number and trying to escape, if they hadn’t already.
“Not poisonous though? Not scared; just checking.”
Cardinal answered that there was nothing in this part of Ontario that was venomous – they merely bit when manhandled. “It’s beautiful in a way, when you think about it,” he reflected. “They built this City – huge, millions of people, cars, so big you can walk till you’re tired and not reach the end of it – and there’s still this highway; this network of interconnected natural highways…all the creeks, rivers, meadows running through everything like a spider web…it used to be highways for people, too; still is for Nature.”
Dan walked slowly, following the tight circles of the narrow corridor, occasionally stopping to shine a flashlight into a darkened space. There were not many of those, since the lighting was up to code, or at least the standards of the mid 1990s; no LEDs but not too bad. Every now and then he mumbled a truncated phrase or let out a restrained breath…
Estevao forced himself to stop looking at his supervisor’s face so much. “What the heck is he talking about?” Estevao wondered to himself, fretting that Dan must be making observations for mental notes regarding stuff from the chapters Estevao had skimmed over in his apprenticeship classes. Gradually, he realized, he was being overtaken by anxiety; muscles twitching sharply in irritation, forehead tense – if only Dan would just tell him what they need to do, and to get down to it, then he could push everything else out of his mind.
Dan studiously consulted the moisture gauge as he went. “Funny,” he finally confessed out loud. “Maybe it’s because this whole huge foundation – gotta be what, hundred ‘n thirty years old – probably doesn’t breathe properly…they didn’t build that in; just cared about keeping the heat inside in winter.” It appeared to both his eyes and to the meter he used for detecting subterranean water – it worked something like a sonar – that there was a pipe of some kind, and a substantial leak. Yet when he would reposition himself to investigate more closely, all of a sudden the ‘damp patch’ on the concrete would appear to blend in with the rest of the wall, as if it had been a mere trick of the light.
“He was right, that guy. I can definitely smell something…can’t say what kind, but something animal; something living,” Estevao piped up, doing his best to show Dan that he really was learning the ropes. “Eugh! It’s like…like a sewage leak or something? Right?They mentioned the office washroom, I remember, though I guess we’re way too far down the hall now…” He trailed off, realizing that, in their wandering inspection, they must have travelled at least a dozen metres from where they entered the corridor.
“Sewage leak?!? Do you smell sewage?” Dan’s tone told that only an incompetent temp would believe that a sewage leak was, in fact, the problem. On the other hand, there was definitely an odour to the place. Estevao wasn’t about to ask until he was 100% confident he wouldn’t be made to look like a helpless noob. Dan would know…What was this basement used for, exactly? None of the rooms were classrooms, nor did it appear they had ever been used as such. Furthermore, what storage there was seemed to be mainly incidental: the piling up of leftover materials from construction and renovation projects begun and finished or abandoned over the decades, along with cheap and battered tools deemed not worth the effort to haul back to the surface. No one, Estevao reckoned, had ever spent much time down there except out of necessity and in the presence of numerous colleagues. He shuddered, hoping Dan didn’t notice. The place gave him the creeps, yet there was nothing specific he could cite as a reason why this was so. The only thing he could put his finger on was the smell: revolting and indecipherable, while somehow strangely familiar…
The corridor undulated left and right at 90-degree angles but always holding the same general direction. Dan made no mention of it, but he was following the info on his moisture meter, as well as the smell and his lengthy experience which had rendered his senses finely attuned to the faintest changes in temperature and humidity.
Abruptly, just beyond the next kink in the passage, the lighting failed. Only a single, flickering fluorescent tube in one plexiglass rectangle of a drop ceiling illuminated the section.
“Huh…” Dan vocalized something for the first time in a couple minutes. He’d become suddenly aware that he had imperceptibly ceased to banter and comment, even unconsciously modulating his breathing to make less noise. It felt like an unforgivable slip-up, to have not been dispelling the silence in those past few moments. “Hmmm…” He scuffed his boot over the separations between the tiles on the floor, expecting the edge of his sole to catch on something. If there was a longstanding water or sewage leakage issue, there should have been some significant buckling. He checked the batteries on his meters and gauges. The hygrometer indicated humidity levels were rapidly increasing as they progressed down the corridor, while the groundwater detector shows that a major water flow was very near, whether man-made or natural. And the smell was almost overpowering. Taking another ‘reading’ with his nose, Dan perceived that it was not the stench of compost or decay, nor the fetor of old cheese, nor the sour reek of the residues dripped by a skip bin or garbage truck in summer, yet it possessed some of the character of all of these. Heat, rocks, stink, darkness…
“M…my brother’s gone out west…” Estevao spoke timidly. He must have been feeling the Silence, too. “I remember, you said you sued to live in Winnipeg, too. You were born there, right? He’s, uh, going into trucking…got his…whatever the license is for if you’re driving a tractor-trailer.”
“AZ.”
“Huh?”
“The license you’re talking about. AZ; class A, Z is for the air-brake endorsement. You want me to give him advice?”
Estevao opened his mouth –
“Sorry bud; that was a long time ago.” Dan’s voice suddenly grew wet and hollow.
“Yeah, but you were saying…never mind, sorry.” Estevao turned, poked around at the walls, lest Dan catch the pained expression on his face. He felt doubly stupid, since he honestly didn’t need to ask any questions about his brother or anything personal like thiat; it had simply seemed like a positive way to fill empty space in the conversation and to subtly show Dan that he respected his opinions and advice. “I dunno, thought’s maybe he could learn something from your stories, if I let him know, that’s all.”
“You did, did ya?” Dan snorted. Estevao’s hands were feeble and his hands shook on the flashlight he was holding – he was accustomed to the gruff, tough-guy attitude from his supervisor, but Dan’s biting response to his earnest attempt at building a mentor-mentee relationship were genuinely hurtful. “Can’t say he’ll learn much. ‘Cept that you oughta show up on time, keep your mouth shut, and pick up your cheque. And if you get fucked up while you’re at it, it’s on you then, buddy.”
Estevao gulped. He had been binge-watching those gruesome ‘work safe’ clips on Youtube and felt that his job of mostly holding tools and fetching coffee for plumbers was pathetic compared to what those guys who live out in the woods while chopping down trees with chainsaws, or drilling oil on the prairie do for a living.
Dan didn’t mean to snap. He was on edge, though. There was something about this gig he didn’t like. Plus, he hated multi-tasking and this was too many tasks at once. He had half a mind, in fact, to go back up, get into the outside air, drive back to the company office and get his meters and gauges tested. It was sometimes a thing – rare with professional grade equipment, as opposed to the junk you buy at Canadian Tire – but it did sometimes happen that equipment malfunctioned. Likewise, after enough practice, you could tell roughly what the readings you’d expect to get should be. When they were so out of bounds as to be unbelievable, then you knew there was something wrong with your gear.
Trouble was, all of Dan’s devices were reading total nonsense. There was no way relative humidity was 99.999%. Shutting the monitor off and restarting it didn’t help. The groundwater detector – a device which resembled a sci-fi ray gun – also appeared to be on the fritz. “Huh. Well, screw that,” Dan grunted. “If you believed this thing, we’re already underwater.” He spoke with exasperation rather than anger. He didn’t bash his tools or stomp his boots, as Estevao had seen him do losing his temper before. Estevao found this most unsettling. Cautiously, Dan packed away his tools, except the flashlight and a heavy wrench. “At least my watch still works, heheh,” he laughed weakly. Estevao was too modern to wear a watch, instinctively checking his phone instead. No signal. Dan said nothing more, but Estevao noticed he tightened his grip on that wrench and flexed his knees slightly. A curious energy had flooded into his supervisor; an energy and an attitude etched on his face that altered his mien such that Estevao barely recognized him. “What are you?” Dan whispered out of nowhere.
“What am I?”
“You’re family; where you’re from.”
“Uhh…” Estevao wasn’t ideologically trained by university to answer, perversely, ‘Canadian.’ “Brazilian Portuguese on my dad’s side and, on my mom’s, white Canadian. I think Scottish, Irish, maybe something else.”
Dan was visibly relieved, for no reason that Estevao could guess. Switching topics, Dan asked: “It’s tense, you know; don’t you feel something’s not right here? Like we’re wandering in circles? Wish they had given us a floorplan…Where the hell is that smell coming from? Fuckin’ stinks.”
“Now that you mention it…I guess it is dark and kinda creepy, yeah…” Only now did Estevao recognize that he had been walking with smaller and smaller steps as they proceeded. He dared not express just how uncomfortable he was in that situation, not because he wanted to sound tough per se, but because he feared that, if he was honest about his feelings, Dan would keep them down there longer and perhaps force him to crawl into some claustrophobic space to search for whatever (really, of course, to show dominance and boost his ego).
“It hasn’t gone away, has it?”
“What?”
“The smell.” Now and again Dan would stop and sniff the air in different directions, as if to catch the scent while it was unaware. “It hasn’t gotten much stronger since we came down here, but it isn’t going away, either.”
“Which, uh, means…?”
“Which means?!? Which means?!? It means we’re not getting any closer to the source of whatever it is, or any farther away, either. How the hell does Professor what’s his name…how does he expect…” he trailed off into indecipherable mumbling.
Right then, something squirmed past Estevao’s boot; something with roughly the mass of a cat or a Yorkshire terrier, but much longer and lower. The muscular force of its motions, easily felt through the material of his boot, startled Estevao. “Snake!” he cried out, for their could be no doubt about what it was, although he hardly saw anything before it wriggled into the shadows of a heap of stored furniture.
Dan maintained the appearance of calm, but the way he asked Estevao if it was true what he saw made the young temp afraid for his life. “W-which way was it coming from?” he asked, tongue shaking. Estevao answered that it had come from in front of them. This simple bit of information threw Dan into a shivering fugue…yet, verbally anyway, he evinced decisiveness. “Suppose we should tell him, it’s definitely a problem for an exterminator.”
By mutually understood implication, at this point they both turned around and began walking back the way they came. The smell. Estevao realized it now, the glimpse of the slithering reptile having jogged memories which had lain dormant for years…memories of how he and his siblings would go to their grandparents’ property up near Barrie for summer holidays and how they would capture all kinds of wild critters and keep them in jars and clear plastic tubs (if small insects) or a mesh-fronted wooden crate for larger beasts, including frogs, toads and snakes. Garter snakes. Brightly coloured, nonvenomous – though nonetheless sufficiently exciting quarry for pint-sized biologists. Nonvenomous, but not without their own method of repelling unwanted intrusions…Once, holding a prize specimen for photographing by his brother, the stubborn serpent defecated upon Estevao’s bare forearms and hands, filling the air with a pungent reek that required half an hour of scrubbing with dish soap to get rid of.
That was what he smelled here. Curiosity overpowered revulsion. Estevao set to lifting boxes and kicked drain grates to startle any lurking reptiles.
“Quit pokin’ around!” Dan huffed through his teeth. “Whatever died in this guy’s vents or where the leak is, I think I better get a hold of the plans, ‘cause we’re just shooting in the dark. It’s too…too…” He sneezed loudly, twice, straightened up then sneezed a third time. Estevao stood awkwardly, unable to decide for himself how to proceed.
They were in a bulge in the tunnel – where, exactly, Estevao had not the slightest inkling anymore. A wall treatment of palm-sized rectangles of glossy beige ceramic – like you find in some old TTC stations – had fallen off in places, taking mortar and cement with the tiles. Here and there, a few bundles of copper piping were partially exposed, like ribs on the inside of a rotting whale carcass which he and Dan happened to be crawling through.
“Everything okay?” Estevao couldn’t think what else to ask. Dan’s eyes were bloodshot and there was an unprofessional amount of emotion in the way he held the claw hammer which he used to clear away excess material for a better look at the pipes.
“Allergies…” Dan whispered. “Goldenrod. Along the highway. Pine trees. The pollen. Take some Benadryl ‘n I’ll be fine…Listen,” he paused, glancing over at Estevao couldn’t tell what. “You hear them…”
“Huh?” Estevao struggled to understand Dan’s speech, which was all up and down in pitch and volume, sometimes clearly directed at him, sometimes apparently mumbling private thoughts to himself.
“…It must connect to the office…where those girls are working. Yeah…yeah, the voices, coming through the pipes. If this connects to a sewage like…”
Estevao hunched over the exposed piping, then over a nearby vent, trying to act involved, but he honestly had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. It was oppressively humid, like a bus at rush hour in summer. He waged a battle between the panicked wish to appear busy and useful, and the urge to flop down on a soft surface and relieve his legs and spine from their onerous duties.
“Hey, E-Steve-oh,” Dan called out, his eyes tracing the wall like magnets on a track.
“What?”
“It’s past 4:00.” He held his watch to his face without regarding it. “Your shift’s up.”
“Already?” Estevao was about to check his cellphone till he remembered there was no reception. “Yeah, but, then you’ll be working by yourself.” He felt strangely sorry for Dan.
The latter sneezed savagely again. “Sorry, nah…What did they just say?” He spun round, hands at the ready like he was planning to combat some unseen assailant.
“Who?”
Dan relaxed somewhat. “Ah, thought maybe they were trying to shout instructions or something down to us through the vents. Guess not. Anyway, probably just need to replace the leaking section…must be around here somewhere…can’t be too bad; there’s zero sign of a big hole anywhere. Choo!” He stifled another sneeze with his wrist.
Estevao rode the TTC home. He would have much preferred the Econoline – as anyone who has ridden the bus after a day on their feet will agree, from their heel-bottoms to their coccyx. Oh well, money in the bank – it was brutally hard to convince himself to be chill about money he hadn’t noticeably damaged his body to obtain. It was only when he was home and showered, setting out a meal for himself, that he realized it was only 4:35 pm. The bus ride, plus the wait at stops, plus checking the mail, cuddling the cats, showering and dressing – it was absolutely impossible that he had left work at 4:00. The initial explanation he told himself was that he’d moved so efficiently he didn’t notice. However, he knew this was BS, so he turned to the hypothesis that Dan’s watch must have been off; that Dan had forgot to adjust for daylight savings time or something. This, he accepted for about half an hour until it popped into his mind again. He’d forgotten, because he owned no clocks that weren’t part of a self-adjusting digital device, but he knew from childhood memories that you set the clocks for daylight savings in the spring and again in the fall.
The lighting in the basement, where he’d retreated to watch TV in peace, was professionally laid out according to a consultant his parents had actually paid money to. It served its original purpose fairly well, but it proved insufficient at dispelling those shadows which are seen by the soul as much as by the eye. He switched off the TV, wanting his senses unobstructed by any interference, then hurried upstairs, where he opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the patio. The fence was low and the street was set high relative to the surrounding area, so he could see spread out before him a school and its yard, including a soccer field and basketball courts, but it was August and no people were using them. He quickly put on his shoes and went for a walk. It was well that he wouldn’t have to work the next day, since he knew it would take a great deal of walking – to the point of mild exhaustion – to clear his head. With the armour of the long summer day and the healthful vitality of the cozy suburb bubbling around him, he felt brave enough to ponder things.
On the face of it, there wasn’t anything wrong with a professor of anthropology (Estevao read the info on the little brass plaque on the door of Professor Cardinal’s office) giving them directions. They’d listened to the reports of dentists and lawyers on other jobs, when those were the people responsible for their particular workplace at the time the plumbers showed up. On the other hand, on those occasions, it was always just an exasperated “the toilet’s blocked!” “Help! There’s a leak in the wall!” “The ceiling’s dripping!” Everybody simply wanted things fixed as soon as possible and didn’t want any more questions or hassle than was absolutely necessary. Then, they wanted Dan and Estevao gone from the premises as soon as possible.
That Professor was different. Heck, he had them sit down, in upholstered chairs, to give them that speech beforehand…the leaky, fetid basement appeared to have a special fascination for him, which he was driven by some psychological compulsion to explain, at least in part, to two guys who were just there to fix whatever the problem was. Estevao’s mind’s eye kept returning to the wall map of Toronto and Spadina: how it was shaded in a colour to indicate that one of Toronto’s many ‘extinct’ underground rivers ran along it, from a lake up north (he didn’t look too carefully), down to Lake Ontario at the City’s southern rim. That would explain the absurd humidity inside the subterranean halls, though the instruments which Dan employed should have been able to endure rough environments like that, or otherwise tradesmen and surveyors couldn’t use them in places like Brazil or Florida.
Ugh. He could feel his shirt sticking to his back even now, remembering it. His supervisor’s sneezing made less sense, though, since the absurd humidity and the fact they were underground should have eliminated the source of any pollen allergies. What was it he said he was allergic to? Goldenrod? Nothing at all grew in that somber basement except mold, but there was little or nothing of that and it was kept quite clean otherwise. The goldenrod was blooming now, though – on the surface, that is; in the parks and, most of all, along the highways: once you got out of the City, it was everywhere. And the thunder and rain…the underground river…There had been no sign of any leaks, though, now that he thought about it….
…Which made it a surprise when, three days later, Estevao read in the Toronto Star a headline about a tragic workplace accident. No photo accompanied the article and his mind, which had already switched focus to selecting courses for an as-yet ‘undeclared Liberal Arts’ major which would begin in the winter semester, was no longer in tune with the rhythm of boredom, fatigue and danger which he’d briefly brown accustomed to as a blue collar temp. The article was oddly guarded in its disclosure of what would normally be printed as basic relevant info. Moreover, the crusading ethos which the Stat notoriously gushed with at every local tragedy was completely absent, replaced with an uncharacteristically restrained lament for the unfortunate situation.
Indeed, Estevao had to think like a detective to realize that the ‘veteran plumber’ whose lifeless body was discovered by dog walkers, hung up on a breakwater, was his supervisor during those days at the temp agency which he wished desperately to forget. As far as Estevao could tell, the coroner had experienced immense difficult in identifying the body, in spite of it being fully clothed and largely intact, except for a couple small puncture wounds, which different medical examiners disputed as being from a taser, implying foul play or police brutality, needles for drugs, or the fangs of a good-sized snake. In light of this uncertainty, the police asked the public to report if they knew anyone who kept exotic pets, worked as a plumber and had recently gone missing. Estevao knew it was Dan Rodgers from the description of the clothes, physique and so on; he knew it in his gut, but he was damned if he was going to go into a police station to get questioned by the cops, given that, for all he was aware, he was the last known person to have seen Rodgers before he ended up in the water on the Lakeshore, several kilometres away from the Spadina Circle job site.
Later in the week, at a press conference, the police chief finally confirmed the identity of the body, exactly as Estevao had surmised, though nothing was made of it in the papers beyond the perfunctory sympathies always published on such occasions. Estevao was mercifully spared (by the palm-fringed beaches of Puerta Plata) the transformation of his already unpleasant work experience into a cause for psychotherapy. Dan Rodgers had exacting standards for his temporary assistants, most of whom never appreciated the difference that a professional attitude can make.
He was not so old, the Toronto Police Service discovered, to have established his career before DNA became a widespread forensic tool. However, he was wise – wise enough to do his work where forensic tools were used sparingly, if something was even found to use them on. More than one RCMP officer, hands in his pockets, a bemused whistle crossing his lips, consoled himself that folks drove so fast along that stretch of highway MB-1, and you didn’t want to stop at night, what with the bears and other dangers. Heck, to stop on the roadside in broad daylight would sometimes send a chill up your spine, if you happened to be the only vehicle in view. Laypeople in Toronto and Vancouver wondered how the mysterious Suspect could be so lazy, not even bothering to dig a grave nor to take his quarry deeper into the forest. The RCMP men, and anyone with long experience of Trans Canada Country, did not wonder. They understood that the fellow who did those things tool all the necessary effort – the goldenrod and phragmites grew so thickly and the shadowy spindles of spruce crowded so conspiratorially that nobody driving by would ever observe anything. Only the rare individual, drawn by incomprehensible chance to take a leak or pick up cans at precisely that pot – perhaps five, ten, or twenty years later – only they would find anything, long after the wind and rain, and the rodents and foxes had found it first.
The fact nobody in Manitoba had ever suspected Dan Rodgers except his wife, who knew of his predilection for ‘squaws’ and who hated them for it, was proof of the efficacy of his methods. If it were not for the faded Polaroids, their margins scribbled with almost hieroglyphic notations, the detectives gathered in the hastily set-up task force room at Toronto Police headquarters on College Street would not have suspected him, either.
The digital records were scarce and incomplete. Detective Inspector Julius Ngai, tasked with liaising between the RCMP and local personnel, as well as with the officers from Saskatoon and the OPP, secretly enjoyed that the project went beyond the capacity of the office peons – who ought to have remained where they belonged, at a nearby LUSH, H&M or Starbucks. No spreadsheets converted to pie charts in Excel; no PowerPoints: for their colleagues, Ngai and his team prepared a good old fashioned photo slide presentation. After all, some of the original material was in that form, and a map – huge and topographical, with colour-coded pins and annotations. “It’s only a theory, of course,” Ngai cautioned, index finger and thumb wrapped around his jawline. “But it makes sense. Plus, you have to account for the season; for his habits and his mind…how one creates the other, and vice versa.” Ngai’s office mates gazed on, worn out from putting everything together on short notice, though nevertheless intrigued to hear his lectures, which always left them feeling either excited with puerile curiosity about the shocking labyrinths of human wickedness, or else shuddering with a fretful desire not to believe, triple-checking their door locks when they got home.
“If only…” he continued, “If only they’d saved and better stored the material from these three” – he tapped three pins situated between Lake Winnipeg and Lake of the Woods with the butt end of a Sharpie – “Martha Gilford, August 1991, Shawna Jane Morris, July 1992, and ‘Jane Doe,’ discovered May 1993 but probably put there August or September 1992 – I am sure there are a couple other Jane Does that only the wolves and the sasquatch know about…” Someone raised a hand. “I know, you’ll say that’s before he came to Toronto. Years before. And he was employed full-time as a paint mixer, or as a shipping driver when required, for the paint plant. Real workaholic; busy beaver; no free time. But, keep in mind, the early ‘90s recession had begun then, and, I suspect, he wasn’t really working full hours…maybe no hours at all, at least for a chunk of that period. The paint plant closed at the beginning of 1992, never having gotten over the recession, thus ceasing to exist before the internet was born. With the twenty-odd years since, no one will have kept every yellowed time card and every rotting binder of schedules. Many of his former coworkers are long since dead.”
Ngai was wrapped up in his presentation and did not notice how some of his listeners’ shoulders sagged, their eyes and lips overcome with weary expressions. Before that moment, none of them cared much about the record-keeping of any particular family-run industrial paints and coatings factory in south-central Manitoba during the early 1990s. It was inevitable that such things did not matter more than a year or two beyond a small company’s cessation of operations, and equally inevitable that this process, occurring in society as a whole, must cause immense frustration as sooner or later some of those stories became relevant long after they had vanished into the ether.
“…I reckon his docile, prim, permed housewife knew he was not at work mixing paint, though she would never admit it aloud, even to herself, that he was on the prowl, further and further afield. Maybe if she ran into someone of the sort she imagined hitched rides with her husband, this individual would be confused by her unexplained rudeness and nasty looks. He focused on the warmer months, I imagine, because hitchhiking is more common in those seasons, because footprints – especially with a struggling victim – going into the bush are obvious in snow, and because his rear-wheel-drive Oldsmobile Cutlass – no ABS or traction control in those days – would not have handled snowy roads well, especially if he felt compelled to take detours along poorly maintained side roads. Note that when Shawna Jane Morris went missing, her friend, who did not get into the car because she ‘got bad vibes’ from the situation, described a vehicle essentially identical to the 1987 Cutlass Supreme coupe, colour listed as ‘light copper’ with a tan interior on the registration.” Ngai pointed to a photocopied poster containing a police sketch of the suspect and also the car, which was squarish, moderately sized, and black and white – though the text on the poster described it as ‘brown or tan.’ “A man like Mr. Rodgers cared deeply about his job…even if he made plenty of cash, at least, enough to survive alright off his itinerant plumbing and handyman work, plus the loot off of his victims – cash, they might not have had, but, certainly, things he could sell. He craved the image of steady, honest toil. Moreover, it meant he was in control, whereas, if he was fired by his company, deemed incompetent; inferior…well, you can imagine how his woman knowing that would have damaged his self image, yes? Good. Then you see…the increasing instability and power in one area of his life, why, he balanced it by taking more in another. Then the divorce, and, well…” The other investigators nodded. Those who had interviewed Rodger’s colleagues at Annex Plumbing noted how he took his work very seriously. The HR department logged more than a few complaints from temps who had to work with his ‘cut-the-crap,’ red-blooded blue collar uncle style, but the company loved that he never drank, didn’t steal their property, and got the jobs done fast. Ngai ceased speaking for a moment to run through several slides on an old projector. “The old-school footage almost makes it more gruesome-looking, not so? You will notice that the victims…mmhmm, he had a type, like most do. Three quarters were Aboriginal or Métis, all of them had dark hair, usually a tan or olive complexion – drug addicts, clearly so just from their mugshots – and, naturally, Rodgers probably stalked his quarry or at least chatted them up before making his move.”
Now that everything had come to light, obviously, it was a matter of a day, at most, before the information became a flurry of headlines and flashing cameras. In accordance with the general rule, the public would seek to pin every unsolved murder of a woman aged 16 to 60 on this particular alleged serial killer, unless and until another singular boogeyman was offered in his place. “…I expect we will have to review a lot of unsolved homicides here, or disappearances where they match the victim profile, seeing as the public aren’t going to believe he simply became inactive, living quietly as a bachelor in Toronto all these years.”
“Way ahead of you!” Constable Singh proffered a Manila folder, its bulging guts braced with elastic bands…
The RCMP delegation sat through the press conference, wearing masks of benevolent patience as reporters from Global, CBC, APTN and even the Scarborough Mirror recounted the generously abbreviated biographies of beloved daughters, sisters and mothers who had met with unfortunate or unseen (though readily presumable) fates at some point vaguely within the plausible timeframe, while the TPS fed their vain hopes. After the crowd had dispersed, a droopy-eyed captain who had worked one of the Manitoba cases whispered in Ngai’s ear: “Don’t wanna be insensitive, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Ngai took the advice as an affront; a declaration of a turf war. “Eh? You weren’t even aware of his identity until you finally decided to do DNA tests on the evidence you hadn’t chucked. If you wanted the glory of identifying him, one, you should have done it while he was alive to be paraded and punished, and two, you should have done it while he was in your jurisdiction.”
The Mountie chuckled. “Cool yer heels, buddy!” incensing Ngai. “Nah, I can be pretty sure half these cases you were talking about here are our guy, unless you’re holding something back from me?”
“What? No, why would we do that?”
“Just in case, you know, policy…I guess we’re all on the same team, eh?”
“So?”
“Whelp, as always, when we suggest it’s a serial offender, we always hold something back. Had two schizo drifters try confess to your boy Rodger’s work -”
“ – He’s from your province.”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t know the signature of the killer. The signature; every serial killer’s got one. That’s what we held back. Sure, most of the killings were manual strangulation, but not all of ‘em. ‘N the brown coupe wasn’t consistent between witnesses; we hear taupe sedan, beige two-door. What all Morris, Gilford and a couple of the Jane Does had in common was these evenly spaced puncture marks on the body, neck or inner thigh, usually.”
“Vampires?” Ngai grinned sarcastically.
“Nah, from a syringe, we figured. No evidence of exsanguination. We were thinking he wanted it to look like they OD’d, just to put us off the scent. The bruising and so on might be overlooked with women living, y’know, certain lifestyles. A psychologist we consulted said it was a mental thing. Maybe a commentary on social harm or something, like how some of these guys feel they’re avenging angels, cleaning up the streets. I figure just a red herring, though.”
“Hmmm.” Ngai was perplexed. Mind, none of the bodies in Toronto, being touted by media and families as potentially related, bore such marks. Gunshots, yes, stab wounds, yes, but no pricks…none except Dan Rodgers himself, which didn’t make sense. Pricks like teethmarks of a vampire…or…a very large snake.
The late summer thunderstorm came down on the City like a sounder of famished boars upon an apple orchard. Flood warnings were issued. Even with the wipers at full speed, driving was madness and many were the employees calling in sick. Professor Cardinal excused his staff, though a dutiful Minnie showed up. Cardinal managed, somehow, to walk in dry and presentable, though, even with an umbrella, he had to have changed clothes. The environmentalists, usually all doom and gloom, were pleased to note some signs of an increasingly healthy urban ecosystem. For instance, the ready flow of water north and south which benefits summer-scorched vegetation in the City’s central corridor, and the endemic wildlife whose numbers were visibly growing, as evidenced by the turtles, toads and even rare species of Nerodia enjoying the weather and showing populations much dense than predicted by research in recent years. Luckily, too, no serious flood damage was reported, a piece of fortune which not a few downtown dwellers, echoing the ancients despite their urban modernity, attributed to the mandalas or Native trinkets they adorned their condos with, or to the general offering of spiritual energy by so many thoughtful minds which meditate and sacrifice to restore the balance of Nature.
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Snow to Sand: Poetry, Stories and Musings from Canada, the Caribbean and Ukraine 