A multicultural nexus, Toronto hosts Indian, Portuguese, African, Italian, and Chinese communities that provide fertile backdrops for crimes of passion and perfidy. Toronto Noir proves that Ontario’s clean-cut capital hides an underworld of sin, scandal, and everyday evil.
This anthology features stories by RM Vaughan, Nathan Sellyn, Ibi Kaslik, Peter Robinson, Heather Birrell, Sean Dixon, Raywat Deonandad, Christine Murray, Gail Bowen, Emily Schultz, Andrew Pyper, Kim Moritsugu, Mark Sinnett, George Elliott Clarke, Pasha Malla, and Michael Redhill.
“With the help of some very skilled local writers, they’ve shown Toronto Noir is no oxymoron . . . Our authors also come up with rattling good and dark yarns from such yuppie hangouts as the Beach, Bloor West Village and the Distillery District.” —Toronto Reads
“The collection by no means neglects the multi-racial, multi-ethnic character of the new Toronto . . . a most successful anthology.” —ReviewingTheEvidence.com
A multicultural nexus, Toronto hosts Indian, Portuguese, African, Italian, and Chinese communities that provide fertile backdrops for crimes of passion and perfidy. Toronto Noir proves that Ontario’s clean-cut capital hides an underworld of sin, scandal, and everyday evil.
This anthology features stories by RM Vaughan, Nathan Sellyn, Ibi Kaslik, Peter Robinson, Heather Birrell, Sean Dixon, Raywat Deonandad, Christine Murray, Gail Bowen, Emily Schultz, Andrew Pyper, Kim Moritsugu, Mark Sinnett, George Elliott Clarke, Pasha Malla, and Michael Redhill.
“With the help of some very skilled local writers, they’ve shown Toronto Noir is no oxymoron . . . Our authors also come up with rattling good and dark yarns from such yuppie hangouts as the Beach, Bloor West Village and the Distillery District.” —Toronto Reads
“The collection by no means neglects the multi-racial, multi-ethnic character of the new Toronto . . . a most successful anthology.” —ReviewingTheEvidence.com
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Overview
A multicultural nexus, Toronto hosts Indian, Portuguese, African, Italian, and Chinese communities that provide fertile backdrops for crimes of passion and perfidy. Toronto Noir proves that Ontario’s clean-cut capital hides an underworld of sin, scandal, and everyday evil.
This anthology features stories by RM Vaughan, Nathan Sellyn, Ibi Kaslik, Peter Robinson, Heather Birrell, Sean Dixon, Raywat Deonandad, Christine Murray, Gail Bowen, Emily Schultz, Andrew Pyper, Kim Moritsugu, Mark Sinnett, George Elliott Clarke, Pasha Malla, and Michael Redhill.
“With the help of some very skilled local writers, they’ve shown Toronto Noir is no oxymoron . . . Our authors also come up with rattling good and dark yarns from such yuppie hangouts as the Beach, Bloor West Village and the Distillery District.” —Toronto Reads
“The collection by no means neglects the multi-racial, multi-ethnic character of the new Toronto . . . a most successful anthology.” —ReviewingTheEvidence.com
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617750991 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Akashic Books |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2019 |
| Series: | Akashic Noir Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 290 |
| File size: | 704 KB |
About the Author
Nathaniel G. Moore is the author of Bowlbrawl (Conundrum) and Let's Pretend We Never Met (Pedlar). He is the features editor of The Danforth Review and a columnist for Broken Pencil. He divides his time between Montreal and Toronto.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PART I
EAST YORK ENDERS
THE KING OF CHARLES STREET WEST
BY GAIL BOWEN
Dundas Square
Toronto was in the tenth day of a garbage strike when Billy Merchant came back into my life. The city was sweltering, and the stench that rose from overflowing cans, fetid dumpsters, and cardboard boxes swollen with rotting produce hung above the hot pavement like a poisoned cloud. We were a city ripe for a plague, so it was no surprise when I picked up the Toronto Star that morning and saw Billy's photo staring up at me. I hadn't seen him in forty years. If he'd let Mother Nature take her course, I wouldn't have recognized him, and he could have kept his empire for himself. But Billy never met a mirror he didn't like, and he was rich enough to believe he could defeat time. Judging by the picture in the Toronto Star, he had either discovered the fountain of youth or invested in a perpetual makeover: His hair was still thick and black as the proverbial raven's wing; his body was toned; his jawline smooth and his smile dazzling.
He didn't look young — he looked carved, like one of those figures at the Movieland Wax Museum in Niagara Falls. Except, unlike the wax Jack Nicholson or the wax Harry Potter, Billy Merchant hadn't been captured in his most memorable scene ever — at least, not the one I remembered. Billy with his cool, slender fingers around my throat whispering, "If you ever tell anybody what you saw, I'll kill you."
I hadn't doubted him for a moment. Billy had his weaknesses, but he wasn't given to idle threats. Besides, twenty feet away from me, at the bottom of the basement stairs of the rooming house where we lived, there was a dead man and I had watched as Billy killed him.
"It's hard to make predictions — especially about the future." — Allan A. Lamport, Mayor of Toronto
For four decades, I'd kept our secret. I had my reasons, but when I saw the cutline under Billy's photo calling him The King of Charles Street West, something stirred inside me. A preacher or a poet might have called that stirring a thirst for justice, but I wasn't a preacher or a poet. I was an ordinary woman who lived in a nice house off the Danforth with too many pictures of my son and too many memories, so I did what an ordinary woman does when she contemplates blackmailing a murderer: I made myself a cappuccino, peeled an orange, and sat down to read the paper.
The article about Billy was nice — inspiring even. Much of it was in Billy's own words — about how forty years ago, as a twenty-year-old with a high school education and two years working construction under his belt, he moved to Toronto, found a place to live in a rooming house on Charles Street West, got a job waiting tables, worked hard, and saved every penny. According to Billy, his landlord, a Russian immigrant without living kin, admired his work ethic, and the men developed what Billy characterized as a father-son relationship. Then came the happy ending. When the older man died, it turned out that he'd left Billy his house. Starting with the property he'd inherited on Charles Street West, Billy began to sell, mortgage, lease, invest, and purchase until he owned an impressive chunk, not just of Charles Street West, but of Metropolitan Toronto.
City Success Story was the heading above the continuation of the story on page three. There was a photo there too: It was of Billy standing in front of the Charles Street West property in 1967 with "an unidentified woman." The unidentified woman was me.
Except for a strip of joke pictures of Billy and me mugging in the instant photo booth at Union Station, this was the only photo of the two of us together. I realized with a pang that it had been taken by our landlord, Vladimir Maksimovich Chapayev, known to us as Vova, and murdered by Billy on a soft September evening in 1967. It wasn't hard to figure out how the picture had made its way into the paper. When it came to his triumphs, Billy was as sentimental as a schoolgirl. He would have cherished this photo of himself on the cusp of his brilliant career. The fact that he had killed the man who took the photo and threatened to kill the woman who stood beaming beside him would have been of no more consequence to Billy than the clippings his manicurist snipped from his fingernails.
"Nuts to you." — Motto of Toronto's Uptown Nuthouse (now defunct)
If you're going to travel fast, you have to travel light. That's what Billy always said. But it was possible Billy had underestimated the power of things he left behind. I had resources. The $64,000 question was whether I still had the nerve to use them. For forty years, I had wrapped myself in respectability, believing that each act of quiet duty separated me from the girl who believed the sun rose and set on Billy Merchant and who stood at the top of the cellar steps, heart pounding with fear and love as Billy knelt over Vladimir Maksimovich Chapayev and pinched the nostrils of his thick, maddeningly persistent snorting peasant nose until the old Russian stopped breathing forever.
As I propped Billy's photo against my cappuccino cup, my hands were shaking. Maybe, after all, the last laugh would be Billy's. Maybe in that instant when he silenced Vova, he had silenced me. It was possible that all the years of cautious living in my pleasant house off the Danforth had smothered the raw nerve I would need to bring Billy to his knees. I looked at Billy's picture again. And against logic and good sense, I drew strength from it.
In my quiet, sunny kitchen, I could almost hear Billy's voice, silky as one of the ties he was fond of fingering at Holt Renfrew: "Bring it on, babe. You're tough, but I'm tougher. I can take you."
"You take a chance the day you're born. Why stop now?" — Billy Merchant's motto, appropriated from the movie Golden Boy
I moved into the Charles Street West house on June 21, 1967: the first day of what the world would remember as the summer of love. There were no flowers in my hair, but there should have been. I was a virgin ripe for experience, ready for plucking. When I saw Billy, shirtless, his thin chest glistening with sweat as he mowed the postage-stamp lawn in front of the house, my loins twitched. He gave me one of his bullet-stopping grins, asked if he could carry in my luggage, and I was a goner.
That night Billy took me to see Golden Boy at a cheap theater that showed old movies. When Barbara Stanwyck told William Holden to follow his dream, Billy's hand squeezed mine as if someone had shot 300 kilovolts of electricity through his body. Afterwards, Billy stood under a streetlight, arms extended like an actor. "Sooner or later, everybody works for the man," he said. "And babe, you are looking at the man that, sooner or later, everybody is going to work for." That was my 300 kilovolt moment.
From the day we met, Billy and I seized every possible second together. Vova lived on the first floor of the rooming house. A gentle accountant who spent his evenings and weekends making scrapbooks of the Royal Family lived on the third floor. Billy and I shared the kitchen and bathroom on the second floor. His bedroom was at the front and mine was at the back, but even the long summer evenings weren't long enough for us, and by Canada Day, Billy and I knew the squeaks and hollows of one another's mattresses as intimately as we knew the contours of one another's bodies.
We might have been short on money, but we were long on dreams. I earned nine dollars a day selling costume jewelry at the Robert Simpson Company on the corner of Queen and Yonge. My dream was to go to Shaw's Business College and become a private secretary. Billy earned nine dollars a day (and tips) at Winston's on Adelaide Street West. Winston's was the restaurant where the Bay Street elite ate prime rib and talked money. Billy, who dreamed of becoming a millionaire before he was twenty-five, said that every day at Winston's was worth a year of college education.
That summer, he and I explored the city, not just our neighborhood — all the neighborhoods. On payday, we bought ten dollars' worth of subway tokens, and after work, we'd hop on the subway and take turns choosing which stop we'd get off at and which bus or streetcar we'd board. Every night was an adventure. As we traveled through the muggy evenings, Billy would sit with his forehead pressed against the window looking out at the unfamiliar streets with the hunger he had in his eyes when he looked at my body.
"Toronto is the engine that drives Canada." — Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto
When he talked about Toronto, Billy was like a lover: His voice grew soft; his hands trembled; his eyes glittered with lust. He needed, physically, to touch every part of the city, so he could penetrate her secrets. He had a shoebox filled with the spiral notebooks in which he recorded what the men who lunched at Winston's were saying about his city, and the information he had was pure gold. The men who drank icy martinis at Winston's had insider information about which crumbling town houses and firetrap warehouses were going to be torn down and where new freeways might be built; they knew where the subway might be expanded, and which cheap rural land would be developed as suburbs for the people flocking to live the dream. The men with icy martinis knew what nobody else knew: They knew where Toronto was going.
"Nobody knows where the hell downtown Toronto is. Buteverybody's going to know where downtown North York is." — Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto
Even though Billy didn't understand what they were talking about, he wrote it down. Later, when we rode the public transit out to the edges of the city, Billy put the pieces together, and he floated his extravagant dreams. He was a man obsessed. Many years after that, I was reminded of Billy when I read my child the story of Icarus who dreamed of touching the sun and stuck feathers to his shoulders with wax so he could fly. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell into the sea, but Billy was smart enough to calculate the odds. Nothing could bring him down.
"I'm lost, but I'm making record time." — Allan A. Lamport, Mayor of Toronto
During the summer of love, Toronto was filled with kids who'd hitchhiked to Toronto to get stoned in Yorkville and enjoy a little loving wherever they found it. One steamy Sunday, Billy and I were walking through Queen's Park. As always, someone in the crowd was playing a guitar badly and the sweet smell of pot was heavy in the air. The lawns were littered with sleeping bags where girls with sunbursts painted on their cheeks and dreamy unfocused eyes were pressing their bodies against jean-clad barefoot boys with straggly beards. Billy stepped over them as if they were excrement.
We'd just passed the statue of Edward VII on his horse, when I tripped over a boy in a sleeping bag and lost my footing. Billy caught me before I fell, but the boy rolled over lazily, gave me the look boys give girls, and patted the place beside him on the sleeping bag. In a flash, Billy dropped to his knees and began to pummel the boy. When I heard the sound of fist against bone, my stomach heaved, but I managed to pull Billy back, and he pushed himself to his feet. For a beat, Billy and I stood side by side, looking down at the boy as he felt his jaw. I was sure there'd be trouble, but the boy just smiled and flashed us the peace sign.
For some reason, the gesture enraged Billy. The blood drained from his face and he aimed a kick at the boy's leg. "That's right, asshole," he said. "Peace and love."
Some of the other kids were emerging from their sleeping bags, rubbing their eyes and trying to get their heads around what was going on. Billy's wiry body was a coiled spring.
"Keep it up, you sorry little pieces of shit!" he yelled. "The more you smoke and screw, the more useless you become. And that works for me. You don't know who I am, but I know who you are. Every day I serve your fathers their lunch. While you're lying in parks getting crabs and blowing your minds, your fathers are transforming this city from Toronto the Good into Toronto the Great. Go ahead and laugh, but you're the reason I'm going to be part of Toronto the Great. You want to know why? Because you're breaking your fathers' hearts. You're the reason they order double martinis every day and get loose-lipped about the projects that are going to change this city forever."
The jaw of the boy Billy hit was starting to swell, but he kept the faith. It was an effort for him to form the words, but he managed. "Chill, brother," he said.
Billy shot the boy a look of pure hate. "Fuck you," he said, then he grabbed my hand and dragged me after him out of the park.
"If I had $1,000,000 I'd be rich." — Toronto musicians The Barenaked Ladies
Billy was silent till we got to Bloor Street. "Are you okay?" I said finally.
When he turned toward me, there was a new darkness in his eyes. "Yeah, I'm okay. I'm more than okay. I'm terrific. I deserve to make it. When Toronto's a world-class city, I should be one of the kings. I'm smart. I've got drive and I've got nerve. The only thing I don't have is money." His voice broke, and for a terrible moment I thought he was going to cry. "I know where this city is headed. And I've got plans — great plans — I just don't have the money to get started. And that means I'm fucked."
"You can save," I said.
"From what I earn at Winston's? Fuck!" He laughed. "Only one thing to do. Wait for Vova to die."
"What would that change?"
His laugh was short and bitter. "I'm in Vova's will. It's supposed to be a big secret, but I'm the heir. Vova lost touch with his people in Russia years ago. He says they're probably dead by now. Anyway, one night when he got drunk, he started obsessing about how the government was going to take his house after he died. I told him that if he had a will, the government couldn't touch his property. So he poured himself another shot and wrote out a will leaving everything to me."
"How come you never told me?"
"Because I made a promise to Vova." Billy's voice was suddenly weary. "Also because it doesn't fucking matter. Vova has the heart of an ox. He'll live to be a hundred."
"He drinks a lot."
Billy shook his head. "Yeah, maybe I'll get lucky, and some Saturday night he'll get loaded and walk under the wrong ladder."
"Things work out for the best," I said, but for once my mind wasn't on Billy's future. It was on my own. My period was three weeks late, and as a rule, I was regular as clockwork.
"Come in and get lost." — Slogan of Honest Ed's Discount House, Bloor and Bathurst
Years later, when my son came home from school and told me that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a chain of events that ultimately causes or prevents a tornado, I thought of the summer of 1967, when the flapping of the wing of a single butterfly in Russia changed four lives in Toronto.
By the time the Canadian National Exhibition opened at the end of August, I still hadn't told Billy we were going to have a baby. For days, his mood had been as sullen as the weather. He had a line on some land north of Toronto that was going cheap, but the regular customers at Winston's were on holidays, and tips were down. For the first time since he came to the city, Billy had been forced to dip into his savings to make ends meet, and his anger was building. I could see it in the set of his jaw and in the new fierceness of his temper. When I suggested we forget our troubles by spending an evening on the midway, he tensed and balled his fists. I flinched, and Billy saw my fear and gave me a melting smile.
"Okay, babe. Tomorrow's Saturday. I'll have my Saturday night drink with Vova — got to keep on his good side. Then after I pour him into bed, we'll go to the Ex. We'll eat some cotton candy. I'll win you one of those fancy satin dolls on the midway; then we'll take in the fireworks. Good times!"
Good times. But for Billy and me, good times always carried a price. The next day, when I came home from work, Billy was waiting for me on the front steps. He was ashen. As soon as he spotted me, he grabbed my hand and dragged me away from the house.
"My fucking luck," he said, his voice cracking. "I answered the phone today when Vova was out doing errands. It was long distance, and I couldn't make out what the person on the other end was saying. We yelled at each other for a couple of minutes trying to make one another understand, then somebody who said he was Vova's nephew came on the line. His English was excellent. He told me that he was crying with happiness to finally locate his uncle, because he had found a way to get to Canada and be reunited with Vladimir Maksimovich. So that's that. The nephew comes to Toronto. He gets the house, and I get the shaft. My fucking luck."
Billy was as low as I'd ever seen him, so I did what girls in the movies did when their men were down. I put my arms around him and murmured encouragement. "You always tell me people make their own luck," I said.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Toronto Noir"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Akashic Books.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Introduction,
PART I: EAST YORK ENDERS,
Gail Brown Dundas Square The King of Charles Street West,
Peter Robinson The Beach Walking the Dog,
George Elliott Clarke East York Numbskulls,
Pasha Malla Little India Filmsong,
PART II: THE MILD WEST,
Heather Birrell Bloor West Village Wanted Children,
Sean Dixon Humber L oop Sic Transit Gloria at the Humber Loop,
Ibi Kaslik Dufferin Mall Lab Rats,
Nathan Sellyn Toronto Airport The Emancipation of Christine Alpert,
PART III: ROAD TO NOWHERE,
Michael Redhill Distillery District A Bout of Regret,
RM Vaughan Yorkville Brianna South,
Raywat Deonandan University of Toronto Midnight Shift,
Christine Murray Union Station Can't Buy Me Love,
PART IV: FLATLAND FLATLINE,
Andrew Pyper Queen West Tom,
Kim Moritsugu St. Lawrence Market A Taste of Honey,
Emily Schultz Parkdale Stalling,
Mark Sinnett CN Tower Sick Day,
About the Contributors,