This Thing of Darkness Read online

  “Ach.” Sid waved a dismissive hand. “Russian Jews are everywhere.”

  “He had an antique gold Magen David from Russia. Think, Dad. Well-off, well dressed, lived alone, might have had a Russian accent, used a cane.” Sid was still looking blank. “Could he have lived in your building?”

  “Not in my building, no. But you could ask at the shul up on Chapel St. If he lived downtown around the old neighbourhood, they might know. The alter kakers go there for services, to say kaddish for their wives and parents who’ve died.” Sid said the word for old men with contempt. He had tossed his faith, and his trust in old men, on the funeral pyres of Auschwitz.

  The suggestion of the Chapel Street synagogue was brilliant, and Green was just about to thank his father when the front door burst open, and a shriek filled the restaurant.

  “Zaydie!” Tony came charging down the aisle, his dark curls bouncing and his chocolate brown eyes shining. Sharon scrambled to deflect him from waiters laden high with trays. A good ten seconds later, to Green’s surprise, Hannah slunk through the door, her orange hair plastered up one side of her head and last night’s mascara still smudged beneath her eyes.

  Sid clapped his hands, all trace of irritation gone. His day was complete.

  Three

  Omar Adams rolled over to the wall and pulled his pillow over his head. He still couldn’t block out the incessant natter of his three younger brothers, who were crouched on the floor in the little space between their beds, playing Warcraft II on their Play Station. In the background he could hear his mother and father arguing, his mother in Somali and his father in English. As usual, his mother shrieked like a demented crow, but the scary one was his father, who got quieter the angrier he was. The old man was deadly quiet this morning.

  Morning? Omar lifted the pillow to check. No sunlight was poking through the small, narrow window in the corner of the room, and the smell of spices and onions filled the air. Fuck, had he missed half the day? His stomach lurched, and he had to swallow hard to keep the bile down. His head ached, and his mouth tasted of stale puke. When he shifted, pain shot through his arms. He couldn’t remember why. He couldn’t remember a fucking thing about last night, after that last bottle of vodka and the weed they’d passed around. Special weed, Nadif had said, scored from a new source. Some special!

  He wondered how the other guys felt. Besides Nadif and Yusuf, his street buddies, he knew there were others, even though he couldn’t remember who. Or how he’d got home, or what time. He remembered them all sitting around drinking in the gazebo in Macdonald Gardens, talking about Nadif ’s court case, about the brothers who were refusing to testify against him and the old man with the lousy eyesight who’d fingered Nadif. He remembered them all walking down Rideau Street, ogling the hookers. Yusuf said he did one once, for fifty bucks behind the construction fence for the new condo, but then Yusuf ’s big brother ran a slew of them himself, so he probably got a family discount.

  The thought of drinking brought the bile up again, so Omar tried to make his mind go blank. Blank out the pounding in his chest and the pain in his hands. Blank out the flashes that danced behind his eyelids, the clenched fists, long, glistening ropes of blood, jagged bone, panicked eyes. And the long, thin glint of steel.

  It was the last image that forced him out of bed, tripping over his brothers and staggering down the hall to fling himself over the toilet. For five minutes he heaved, resting his head on the bowl, tears and snot mingling with God knows what as he tried to purge last night from his system.

  What the hell had they done?

  Afterwards, he flopped back against the wall and cradled his head in his hands. That was when he noticed the crusted stains on his hoodie. He must have fallen into bed last night fully dressed. He pulled at the baggy shirt and peered at the stains. Blood. A shiver ran through him. Grabbing the edge of the sink, he hauled himself to his feet and propped himself against the bowl. A freaky sight met him in the mirror—his face, smeared with dirt and crusted with puke. Dark red was caked around his swollen nose. He touched it carefully, swore out loud as the pain shot through his brain.

  The bathroom door opened silently, and his father loomed in the mirror beside him. Omar recoiled in shock and gripped the sink. His father fixed him with his pale blue eyes. Those cold, creepy eyes. The only sign of trouble was the vein pulsing under the skin of his neck.“Where were you last night?”

  Omar tried a little shrug, but his shoulders screamed in pain. “Just out with the guys.”

  “Nadif.” He said the name like it was a cockroach. “What did I tell you?”

  “Not Nadif. Just Yusuf.”

  The flat eyes never blinked. In a contest with Omar, they never blinked. Omar knew he could see right through the lie. “You got in at three o’clock. That’s unacceptable.”

  Omar wanted to ask what he was like when he got home, but he didn’t dare. He just nodded, hung his head, and his father turned away.

  “Clean yourself up before your mother and your brothers see you.”

  The bathroom door closed. Omar reached for a towel, wetted it and began to dab at his face. Slowly his ebony skin emerged from behind the puke and blood. It was scraped. Raw. What the hell? He tried to think, but his brains felt fried.

  He could phone Nadif and try to find out what he knew. But Nadif was already up for attempted murder on that Rideau Centre knifing, and he was going to cover his own ass. No matter what happened, he’d lie or rat out someone else, rather than add to his sheet.

  He could phone Yusuf, who at seventeen was still a young offender and under the cops’ radar. Yusuf would tell it straight, and he’d be on Omar’s side if it came to ratting anyone out.

  Or he could just lie low. Nurse his hangover. Wait till the fog lifted and the crazy jumble of flashbacks faded away. Maybe then he’d remember what had happened. What was real and what was from a horror flick he’d seen in some freaked-out, wasted state.

  Maybe nothing was real at all.

  As Green expected, the old synagogue on Chapel Street was locked up tight on a Sunday afternoon, but he had a back-up plan. He had a personal connection with the rabbi who’d served the aging inner city congregation for twenty-five years before being forced to face old age himself. Rabbi Zachary Tolner had not slipped into retirement easily but spent most of his spare time, when he wasn’t training for marathons, badgering the new rabbi and the board to ensure they didn’t forget how things should be done.

  When Green’s mother had been dying of breast cancer more than twenty years earlier, Rabbi Tolner had tried to visit her in hospital. Sid had thrown him out in a rage.

  “Where is your God!” he’d screamed, in one of the rare moments of animation Green had seen during his mother’s long ordeal. “Where was He in Auschwitz? In Majdanek, where she was a girl—a fifteen-year-old girl who had to sell her soul for...” He’d never said for what, but it was more than Green had ever learned in the years before. Or since. The rabbi had tried to calm him and simply to be with him, but Sid had retreated back into that numbness which had probably served him well in Auschwitz.

  At twenty-five, intoxicated with police work and with Hannah’s featherbrained but perfectly-formed mother, Green had been no more receptive to Tolner’s spiritual overtures than his father had been, but that had not dampened Tolner’s belief that he had a personal line of influence in the police department. Green had a stack of letters Tolner had sent him over the years complaining about everything from drug dealers on the synagogue steps to bums sleeping under the tree by the back door.

  Green knew where to find the man. Now it was time for a little payback.

  Tolner had changed little in the ten years since Green had last seen him. He was bent over the postage stamp-sized garden outside his townhouse, wearing a warped Tilley hat pulled down snug over his bald head and a pair of powder blue jogging pants concealing his spindly legs. His arms stuck out from his T-shirt, sinewy and tanned almost nut brown from a lifetime worshipping the out
doors. As Green approached, he straightened and drew every inch of his five-foot-four-inch frame to attention. His face was a web of wrinkles, but in their midst, his pale blue eyes lit with interest.

  “The mountain comes to Isaac!”

  Green laughed and extended his hand. “How are you, Zak?”

  Tolner peeled off one gardening glove and encased Green’s hand in a powerful grip.“Bored! I hope you brought something interesting.” Worry flickered his gaze. “How’s your father?”

  “Fine. Going to live to be a hundred, kvetching all the way. This is another old man. Maybe you’ve heard? Beaten to death just off Rideau Street?”

  The ready grin fled. “A Jew?”

  Green tilted his palm in uncertainty. “Possibly. We’re trying to identify him. Early seventies, five-ten, a hundred and seventy pounds, thick white hair, used a burled maple cane. Harry Rosen suit, out of date?”

  Tolner had been listening intently, his blue eyes flickering with each new description as though he were searching through some internal database. At the end of the list, he shook his head slowly. “You could try being more specific. You’re describing everybody.”

  “His hair was long and frizzy. Picture Einstein.”

  This time a faint glimmer of recognition shone in Tolner’s eyes, but still he shook his head. “Can’t you show me a picture? Even of the corpse?”

  “Too much facial damage.”

  Tolner winced. “Oy.”

  “You have an idea, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. You blinked.”

  “Nothing that I’m going to tell you based on ‘Einstein’s hair’. What makes you think he was even Jewish?”

  Green extracted the evidence bag containing the Star of David from his pocket. “He had this in his possession.”

  Tolner took the plastic bag and held it at arms’ length. He squinted, and Green saw another flicker of recognition. “Ahh.”

  “What do you mean, ahh?”

  “Just...” Tolner lifted his shoulders in a classic Yiddish shrug. “This I recognize.”

  “Does it fit with the Einstein hair?”

  “Yes. Damn it, yes. And with the out-of-date Harry Rosen suit.” Tolner handed back the evidence bag. “Sam Rosenthal. Been a member of the shul for years, although he doesn’t come very often. Busy man, back in the days when I knew him. Travelled a lot to medical conferences, lectures and stuff.”

  “So he’s a doctor?”

  “Psychiatrist. Very well-respected years ago, when he was at the height of his career. Got a little wonky near the end, but then half those guys are wonky to start with, so it wasn’t far to go.”

  Green had been jotting notes. “Wonky how?”

  Tolner hesitated, and Green suspected he was weighing the wisdom of discretion against his love of gossip. He brushed at some specks of dirt on his T-shirt. “This is from congregants, you understand. When his wife was dying, he got Eastern religion and started meditating and searching for the deeper meaning of life. I gather he started to question all the drugs his psychiatric colleagues were prescribing. Claimed we had to respect nature’s diversity and the patient’s right to be different. Became the darling of the new age types, I think, but his colleagues were less amused.”

  “You said his wife is dead?”

  “About ten years ago. Her death was a long ordeal— ” He broke off, as if remembering Green’s mother.

  “We’re going to need DNA for a positive ID. Does he have any other family?”

  “A son somewhere in the States.” Tolner nodded towards the west.“Sam used to live in one of those mansions on Range Road overlooking the Rideau River—it’s an embassy now— but he sold it and gave half the proceeds to some group researching meditation, and he bought a falling apart Victorian dump in Sandy Hill near the university. He lives in a cramped one-bedroom on the bottom floor and rents the rest of it out to students for bobkes. I often see him out walking along Rideau Street.”

  “Was he still practising?”

  Tolner shrugged. “He might have been, but I’d be surprised. He’d be up around seventy-five by now.”

  “Do you know the son’s name?”

  Tolner shook his head. “Like I said, he moved to the States to study right out of high school, and he never came back. That was maybe thirty years ago.”

  “Study what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sam wasn’t very active in the synagogue and his son was even less so. I met the son exactly once, at his mother’s funeral. Didn’t even stick around for the Shiva.”

  “Can you remember any details? A first name maybe?”

  “David? John? Some common name.”

  Green sighed. There were probably hundreds of John Rosenthals listed in the United States. He had to hope that a search of Sam Rosenthal’s apartment would yield a lead.

  “One more question,” he said. “Did Sam Rosenthal have any enemies or recent disputes with anyone? Assuming it is Sam, can you think of anyone who might have done this?”

  Tolner had leaned down to yank a weed from the edge of the walkway. He straightened slowly, squinting into the slanting afternoon sun for a few long seconds. Finally he shrugged. “He spent years dealing with the mentally ill. Maybe one of them? He could be a little... arrogant, you know how doctors can get. Maybe some punk accosted him on the street, and he didn’t give in quick enough. What a crying shame. It’s always the good guys, isn’t it? Like the coyote, nature’s bad guys are too wily ever to be victims.”

  Green could have phoned the information in to the station. It was his day off and, as everyone kept reminding him, he was an inspector, whose job was to oversee and administer, not to scrabble around in the streets unearthing leads, but he was curious to see their new Sergeant Levesque in action to reassure himself that she hadn’t booked off early or settled in to conduct the investigation with her feet up on her desk.

  The Major Crimes squad room was deserted except for the familiar sight of Bob Gibbs bent over his computer. The young detective’s head shot up in alarm at his superior officer’s arrival, but he looked relieved when Green asked for the sergeant.

  “She’s out, sir. Checking s-security tape from the pawn shop on Rideau Street.”

  “Has Staff Sergeant Sullivan been in this afternoon?”

  Gibbs shook his head, and Green suppressed his frustration as he pondered his next move. He felt restless and dissatisfied. So many dangling unknowns. He should go home to spend the rest of Sunday with his family. He could simply phone Sergeant Levesque to pass on the information on the victim’s possible identity. Or he could check out just one more little piece of information to round out the story before he handed it off to her.

  His little alcove office smelled stuffy as he squeezed inside and booted up his computer. Stacks of rumpled reports, files and official manuals overflowed the bookcase beside his desk and teetered on the guest chair just inside the door.

  In the Canada 411 online directory, there were two listings for S Rosenthal in the Ottawa area, but neither were anywhere near Sandy Hill. Well, well, he thought. Dr. Samuel Rosenthal might have an unlisted phone number. Not so unusual for a psychiatrist, he supposed, since like cops, they would deal with the troubled and potentially unpredictable underbelly of society.

  He tried a standard Google search—Samuel Rosenthal, psychiatrist—and received 442 hits. He added Ottawa to narrow the search down to 164 hits. A quick scan of these revealed that Dr. Rosenthal had been a prolific author of academic papers on depression, schizophrenia, the role of stress, and the efficacy of various unpronounceable drugs. He had given public lectures, sat on the boards of mental health and community agencies, and taught at the university medical school. Almost all the references were more than ten years old, but the most recent ones dealt with drug efficacy in the treatment of adjustment disorders in adolescence.

  What the hell is an adolescent adjustment disorder, Green wondered in astonishment. Is it a label for kids l
ike me, who’d run a little wild in rebellion against the obsessive overprotection of panicky parents? Out of curiosity, he clicked on the reference but couldn’t access the article without subscribing to the journal. The brief abstract that preceded the article, however, was illuminating.

  Adjustment disorders are by definition short-lived reactions to stress, characterized by mood and anxiety symptoms or acting-out behaviour. Despite the well-documented stress of adolescence, the diagnosis of adjustment disorder in this population is generally overlooked by mental health practitioners in favor of old standbys like anxiety disorder, mood disorder and even the major psychoses, thus squandering the opportunity to provide genuine help. In this rush to pathologize them, the adolescent’s own analysis of his or her experience is viewed of no account.

  And I thought police lingo was indecipherable, Green thought, but there was no denying the challenging tone. He scanned the bio that followed. Samuel Rosenthal had been born in Capetown, South Africa and had been educated at Capetown University and Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London before emigrating to Canada in 1964 to accept a post in Montreal. He had moved across the country, working his way up the academic ladder, before ending his career as professor and a chief psychiatrist at the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital, where Sharon worked.

  Green wondered if Sharon had known him before his retirement, and if she knew anything about his reputation as a man and as a psychiatrist. He was tempted to call her, but her reaction to his mid-afternoon detour into work had not been encouraging. He could tell she was hiding her annoyance for Tony’s sake, but neither of them needed what remained of their weekend further invaded by his work. Besides, Rosenthal’s work as a psychiatrist was probably utterly irrelevant to his death at the hands of street punks.

  Green smiled wryly at the irony. Street punks—homeless, drug-addicted and alienated from the world—were the ultimate example of adolescent adjustment disorder.