Barking Dogs - A Mitch Helwig Book Page 10

  “No, I’m not sure. He may have lied. He may have sold it intact. I don’t know.”

  “But you can’t get it back?”

  “No.”

  “Could you buy it back from him?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “He wouldn’t sell it. It’s too rare.”

  There was a tremor of frostbite in the Archangel’s side. It was not the whole truth.

  “I’ll ask again—but only once. Why?”

  Osika looked shaken, for the first time, that even this slight nuance on the truth had been apprehended. His voice became lower as his defenses disappeared altogether. “I don’t have the money anymore. I split half of it with the others. My share is gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  The Asian felt the web wind tighter about him, squeezing. He became more stoic in response. “Debts. I had to pay debts.”

  “You were getting a good salary from us, Thomas. I’m sorry to hear you were not able to live within your means. It’s the sign of a man who lacks vision.”

  The room was silent.

  “You lack vision, Thomas. You do not see the future as it should unfold. It is a grievous shortcoming. An unaffordable one.” He mused a moment, then decided to explain further. “Gordon McKnight called me personally. He is a man we do much business with. He is very angry. The car was his personal toy, a small vanity that he indulged in with childlike joy.”

  Osika tried to explain. “I didn’t know who he was. I just knew he was a wealthy man who owned a rare car. I did not wish to cause you trouble.”

  “But you have caused me trouble, Thomas. And, you overstepped your bounds vastly by employing our equipment on such a venal and petty expedition. Personal profit, personal debts...” He shook his head. “You disappoint me. I thought you understood. In fact, I’m sure you did understand—and still do. You merely gambled and lost, is that not it? The same way you ended up with debts in the first place? Many bad habits and character flaws tumble one upon the other, the result being a man without vision—a man who will cause, at best, small interruptions within an organization such as ours, or at worst, large, unnecessary moments of internal chaos.”

  Still, no one spoke but the Archangel. He asked, finally, “Were you drinking, Thomas?”

  When he did not respond, the Archangel prompted him. “Answer, Thomas. The truth.”

  The voice was weak. “Yes.”

  Bridging his hands before him, the Archangel nodded. On the sofa, both Otis and Purdon remained frozen, knowing with a sense of vision themselves where all this was heading, glad only that they were not in Osika’s place, on the mat in front of the Archangel and the Barking Dog. The smoke from the dark cheroot gave the room a bizarre, churchly atmosphere, smelling as it did of some ancient frankincense.

  Turning his attention to the men on the sofa, the Archangel asked, “The other three...they’ve been taken care of?”

  Otis took the initiative. “Yes, sir.”

  Osika’s cheek twitched involuntarily as he heard this.

  “Fine.” He looked back at Osika. “You overstepped yourself, Thomas. There is no turning back now. You have chosen your path, fraught as it was with risk, knowing full well the possible consequences. Your vision failed you in that you could not see yourself stumbling, being exposed. One must always allow for such a possibility, always see it in the cards as a possible hand that may be dealt.” He shrugged. “It is the way it ends. Someone always scrapes up the pot in the center of the table. If it is not you, then you should be prepared to pay the price. Only then can one gamble with acumen. You, Thomas, gambled stupidly. And now, we all pay, in one way or another: time, inconvenience, money, embarrassment—for your blunder. And you,” he added, as a finale, “pay with your life.”

  The perspiration on Osika’s upper lip had spread to become the perspiration on his brow as well. To his credit, though, thought the Archangel, he did not quaver, did not beg.

  Inscrutable to the last. You had to give them credit. They knew how to face the end.

  “Daniel, Charles...”

  The two men rose to their feet.

  “Take Mr. Osika out now.”

  The Japanese man’s eyes became colorless as they bored into the eyes of the man seated in the swivel chair, who had just acted as his judge. Then they became blank, and his jaw clenched as he was led from the room. The door clicked behind them, and exhaling smoke lazily from his nostrils, the Archangel stood and strode to the window. He stood there, watching, until the three men below disappeared through a door, headed for the basement of the warehouse.

  The day had started.

  Now, he thought, to business. He made a few notes on a piece of paper: new Porsche XK9000 for Justice Gordon McKnight; repairs to garage; quick disposal of eleven thousand .38 caliber handguns.

  He paused, looked up from his paper. They had to be moved quickly, and in bulk, he knew, before they devalued to insignificance with the spate of lasers coming onto the market. It was one reason he had been so upset that Osika had taken an unauthorized laser cannon out on his own petty heist. They were being kept off the market until the handguns had been moved. If it became commonly known that they had over six thousand new lasers in stock, the bottom would fall out of the .38 market. Not that they couldn’t afford it, he knew. It just created an unnecessary headache, and he had had enough of that for today.

  Besides—it was bad business. It showed, he thought, a lack of vision.

  

  When he left the warehouse yard at 6 p.m. that evening, Arcangelo Scopellini failed to notice the lone man sitting in a car parked halfway down the street. And even if he had seen the man—or, in fact, driven right past and looked in at him—he still would not have thought anything, for the Archangel had no reason to recognize Mitch Helwig.

  The Archangel was tired, and he still had to find a florist on the way home and place an order for his traditional dried-flower arrangement, something he never forgot for his mother’s birthday.

  20

  In the cafeteria of the Nishiyama building on Markham Road, Elaine Helwig sipped her morning coffee and thumbed through a copy of the Sun. The headline reported the major item of the day: “Metro Officer Loses Valiant Fight For Life.”

  Mark Fedwick had not made it.

  On page two, the feature story was entitled “Death Revives Issue of Restoring Capital Punishment for Murder.”

  For the life of her, Elaine could never fathom why capital punishment was such a contentious issue. Every Canadian referendum on the subject for the last twenty-five years had spelled out loudly and clearly that the people themselves wanted capital punishment as an option. The States had reinstated it in all but five of the fifty states to date. But Canada seemed bound by the same political arrogance that was reflected in Great Britain—even though the people always called for its legislative reinstatement, the politicians stonewalled it, acting on their own personal sense of political fragility. None of them wanted to be identified as the one who had been responsible. Elaine was constantly amazed that they read the situation in that way, for it seemed to her that the public was just waiting to find a champion for their beliefs and desires, and that the one who was finally responsible for its return would, in fact, garner many, many votes. She wondered who they thought they were shielding themselves from.

  Politics, by its very nature, she knew, could not deal with truths or with precise answers or decisions. If you asked anyone at Nishiyama, right here where she worked, what they thought should be done about a specific issue, they’d tell you. Ask them, for example, what should be done about, say, prostitution, and at least they’d come right out and give their opinion. But ask a politician, and you’d hear, “There are three ways that one can see the situation...” and then you’d be forced to sit through the tedium of listening to the old fart proselytize for five minutes without ever telling you what he thought of it all, since all he was ever really thinking about was the effect his words would have on
various pressure groups that control blocs of votes. How will the feminists read it? How will the Catholics see it? Never mind that he personally felt it should be modeled after the legalized setup existing in sixteen States below the border, with all the controls that such a situation entails. He could never say that. It might be politically imprudent.

  Fear.

  So he said nothing. But took five minutes to do it. It was an old story. Nothing new.

  Elaine flipped the page.

  But it had got her wondering. Why, she mused, are we so afraid to try anything new to stem the tide? What makes us think that what we’ve done for a few hundred years is some sort of eternal verity?

  She remembered reading an article somewhere that proposed how violent criminals should all be sterilized and kept in a wilderness camp in the North. Bars would not be necessary, it suggested, for escape would automatically entail death by exposure and starvation rather quickly. Guards would consist of well-armed, frequently rotated members of the armed forces, with orders to shoot to kill at the first sign of violence or insurrection. The camp would promote hard physical work, raising one’s own food, repair and upkeep of one’s dwelling, production of one’s own clothing and furniture. Women prisoners could sleep in camps some distance from the men’s quarters, and sexual visitations could be structured into the routines.

  When she had tried to discuss it with a few of the people at work, she had been hooted down as some form of fanatic, and the jokes and innuendos had begun to fly. Shyly, she had backed down, never mentioning that it seemed perfectly sensible to her. And still, no one had shown her why it might be unfeasible. It was merely dismissed as some sort of madman’s vision, allied with the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, although any reading of either history or philosophy would quickly put the boot to such uninformed scoffing.

  No one seemed to want to admit that some people are genuine dangers to society and that there can be no logical reason for preserving them. Our Christian ethic, the New Testament: turn the other cheek, punishment is the Lord’s; not so in the times of the Old Testament: an eye for an eye...

  And now, perhaps times had changed again. Who was to say they had not? Who was to define what constituted terms of war, when even the religionists dropped the reins?

  Certainly not the politicians.

  Elaine felt the old urge for a cigarette that crept up occasionally, fought it, conquered it. Too much happening lately, she thought. First Mario, and now Mitch...And in the middle of it, I’m supposed to just keep going to work and coming home as though nothing’s happening. Off to Nishiyama Computerworks five days a week, after getting Barbie off to school. Thank God, she thought, for Mrs. Chan, and her help after school and evenings with Barbie. I don’t know how I’d manage.

  And Jan...Let’s not forget Jan, she thought. She needs me, too. Everybody needs me. What about me? What about my life? What is my life, anyway?

  Checking her watch, she saw that she still had ten minutes before going upstairs to the office. She flipped more pages, her eyes restless and weary. The coffee was cold now.

  On page thirty-six, another item caught her eye: “Wives Work for Cash—Not ‘Self-Fulfillment,’ Study Says.” It read:

  The sheer need for money—not “self-fulfillment”—is the main reason wives exist in the workforce in record numbers, a national study indicates.

  “The notion has been put out that wives are working to fulfill their own sense of enlightened equality,” said Peter Elford, a Statistics Canada official who conducted the study. “But the basic reason appears to be the drive to maintain their family’s income, in the face of hardship caused by inflation and husbands’ falling real incomes,” Elford said in an interview. “During the last decade, the wife’s contribution increasingly sustained the family.”

  The major findings:

  Ten years ago, twelve percent of all husband-wife families relied exclusively on the husband’s income. By last year, that rate had dropped to just seven percent.

  And for the last three years, husbands’ average incomes actually dropped $360 in 1998 dollars, while wives’ average incomes rose $270.

  Elford is worried about the possible social impact of his findings, especially at the start of the next decade. “The workforce can’t continue to add people like it did in the past, before the recession hit in full force,” he said. That means the trend toward more two-income families may stop or possibly even be reversed, especially in the light of technology that is cutting down on clerical and service jobs, which traditionally are held by women, Elford suggested. A litany of economic woes during the past decade—including rising mortgage and consumer loan rates, and higher home-heating costs and property taxes—placed increased economic pressures on families.

  Strains on the family caused by these changes have not yet been examined, Elford said. Early work on the subject pointed to greater influence by wives in family decisions, as their earnings increased. But Elford wants more thorough study of the psychological effects on family role definitions and tensions generated by shifts in family power and influence. “What is at stake,” he said, “is the economic health of the Canadian family and the potential need for new family policies.”

  

  Elaine looked up, pursing her lips. She thought about the money that was missing from their joint savings, thought about the sacrifices that they both made, both she and Mitch, to make it all work, and wondered what the truth was in her own situation. Mitch was not a politician. He would tell her. If she asked him. If she asked him.

  When she asked him.

  

  Elaine Helwig had been doing office and secretarial work for five years at Nishiyama, but it was only since the spring that she had been doing demonstrations. When Jan Prudhomme had asked for time off in the wake of her marital separation—a combination of domestic and personal crises that had sent her to the edge of nervous breakdown—Donald Barbour, Elaine’s boss, had asked her if she would step in and help out until things balanced out once more. Jan was her friend, too. She had been as upset as anyone could be who was not directly involved. Of course she had offered to help, especially if it meant that Jan would not be let go permanently, and it was understood that she was only stop-gapping until Jan could return to her job.

  What she had not anticipated was how much she would enjoy her new position; the other thing that had taken her aback somewhat was the bond that had grown between herself and Donald Barbour as a result of working together on common projects. The fact was that she spent more time with him than she did with almost any other human being—including her family.

  Mitch’s shift work, Barbie’s growing independence...

  She felt herself changing, too. Nothing stayed the same. Nothing stood still long enough to take root in any substantial way.

  Mostly, it scared her.

  Sometimes though, she seized it, welcoming the risk, because risk was one of the few things that she knew could make life worth living.

  Passion and risk.

  Her job. Donald Barbour. Jan Prudhomme.

  Mario Ciracella. Mitch. Barbie.

  Her marriage.

  Passion and risk.

  With five minutes to go before nine o’clock, she tossed the newspaper into the wastebasket and headed toward the elevator, ready to start another day.

  But it didn’t feel like just another day. It felt different, and she wasn’t sure why.

  21

  When the executive silver Cadillac with the spiked wheel covers and the tinted windows turned off Eglinton and began to round the cloverleaf-turn onto the Don Valley Parkway, Mitch discreetly dropped back three car lengths, letting other vehicles slide between them as a shifting, random curtain. For about five minutes they cruised north. The Cadillac, Mitch noted, never changed lanes, always remaining in the inside one, letting faster, or merely more restless, cars glide by. In a vast, undulating river of homeward-bound commuters, it moved like an ocean liner, secure and certain in its position and pr
ogress.

  At York Mills Road, it eased into the exit lane, veering east, joining the flow once again in the inside lane. Without missing a beat, Mitch followed. They continued on like this for ten minutes; then the Cadillac pulled into a small plaza and slowed, searching out a parking spot. Mitch took the cue, sliding his own aging vehicle into the same lot, hanging well back. He satisfied himself with a parking space off in a far corner, from where he could watch unobserved.

  It wasn’t really necessary, Mitch knew, to trail this man this way. He had merely become curious. For three days now he had performed his own private stakeout of Herrington, for three days watched the punctual arrival and departure of the tanned, moustached man in the silver Cadillac, and for three days he had known that he was watching Arcangelo Scopellini—the Archangel of note—perform his daily routines in an unassuming and inconspicuous manner. A check of the license number of the silver vehicle had given him a start, and coaxing the names of shareholders of Herrington from the computer had pushed him down the path. It was beginning to fall into place. Mitch even knew where he lived, and his cruise up the Don Valley Parkway confirmed that he was headed home.

  Mitch just wanted to see for himself. He wanted to get more of a feel for the man who soared between heaven and hell, arranging the world in the manner that suited him best.

  He watched as the Archangel got out of his car, adjusted his dark glasses on his nose, and then entered a small florist shop. Five minutes later, he reappeared, got back in his car, and left the plaza.

  Again, Mitch followed.

  And when the great silver vehicle turned and glided down a side street, when it slowed and maneuvered into the driveway of a sprawling, luxurious two-story house worth at least one and a half million dollars, Mitch coasted by without flinching, like a hawk riding a high night wind, circling, circling, familiarizing himself with the air currents on which he was silently soaring.