The Only Café Read online

  ALSO BY LINDEN MACINTYRE

  Punishment

  Why Men Lie

  The Bishop’s Man

  Causeway: A Passage from Innocence

  Who Killed Ty Conn (with Theresa Burke)

  The Long Stretch

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2017 Linden MacIntyre

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2017 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada and the United States by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacIntyre, Linden, author

  The only café / Linden MacIntyre.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780345812063

  eBook ISBN 9780345812087

  I. Title.

  PS8575.I655O55 2017  C813’.54  C2016-908252-0

  Book design by Terri Nimmo

  Cover images: (café interior) © Sonny Abesamis / Arcangel; (spilled coffee) © Igor Dutina | Dreamstime.com

  Interior image © Pixelshow1 | Dreamstime.com

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Linden Macintyre

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One: Cyril

  Two: Pierre

  Three: Ari

  Four: Testosterone

  Five: Timeline

  Six: Memory

  Seven: War

  Eight: Nader

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  To Darrow and Daniel

  who have but to ask

  Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

  James Joyce, Ulysses

  Shatila Camp, Beirut

  September 18, 1982

  She lay there as if she was sunbathing in the heat, and the blood running from her back was still wet. The murderers had just left. She just lay there, feet together, arms outspread as if she had seen her saviour.

  ROBERT FISK, Pity the Nation

  According to Lt. Elul’s testimony, while he was on the roof of the forward command post, next to the Phalangists’ communications set, he heard a Phalangist officer from the force that had entered the camps tell Elie Hobeika (in Arabic) that there were 50 women and children, and what should he do. Elie Hobeika’s reply over the radio was: “This is the last time you’re going to ask me a question like that, you know exactly what to do”; and then raucous laughter broke out among the Phalangist personnel on the roof.

  Kahan Commission report, February 8, 1983

  TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

  1.

  The reading of the will was a formality. Pierre’s widow had been running things for years, five years and two months, to be precise, since June 26, 2007, the day he’d vanished.

  Pierre Cormier had led a complicated life, much of it unknown even to his closest friends and kin, and so the mystery of his disappearance lingered. But by the summer of 2012 investigators had concluded to the satisfaction of insurers that he was dead. It was time to lay the mystery aside, embrace administrative closure—imperfect though it was from an emotional perspective.

  And so his little family assembled in a lawyer’s office late on a Wednesday afternoon in August. It was, all things considered, a congenial gathering, the young widow, the amicable ex, the adult son, all more or less resigned to the fact that how he died would remain forever unresolved. Financial realities had long ago been accommodated by the power of attorney Pierre had granted Lois in the days before his disappearance. She had been, these past five years, scrupulously fair.

  The son, Cyril, didn’t really know why he was there. He was working as a newsroom intern at a television network and an early departure from a busy office didn’t look good. But the lawyer had insisted. Formality or not, it was a necessary bit of business.

  From the corner office on the forty-second floor of the Draycor Tower they could see Lake Ontario and, through the late summer haze, at least a hundred boats—sailboats, powerboats, ferries. Presumably it would have been on everybody’s mind that Pierre Cormier had spent his final days on a boat. The visitors were unaware that the vast office they were meeting in had once been his, so diligently had he kept his corporate and private lives apart.

  The lawyer, Ethan Kennedy, was personable and frank. It was all straightforward, a matter of some explanation and some signatures. There was, however, one small item that they might find amusing, what seemed to have been an uncharacteristic bit of mischief by Pierre. It had been so out of character that Kennedy had forgotten all about it by the time he’d found the piece of paper in the file.

  It was a brief instruction for a post-mortem celebration. In the event of his death, Pierre wanted no funeral, no memorial service. He made no reference to the preferred method for the disposal of his mortal body, burial or incineration. But he did want a small social gathering of his family and closest friends, the format to be styled on a function he had once watched with interest on television, a celebrity roast. Those present at the roast would each give candid assessments of his character and life and by the end of the event each would hopefully have achieved an understanding of Pierre that no individual among them had fully known. He included a short list of people he wanted to attend.

  None of this made sense to Cyril. His father even contemplating a memorial event, let alone a roast? The father that he knew had been a very private man, a paragon of professional and personal discretion, an introvert, in fact. His only socializing had been work or golf related.

  “So, who’s on that list?” he asked.

  Everyone in the room that day was on the list, including the lawyer, and also a police officer named Nicholson. The lawyer vaguely remembered who he was. There were familiar names from Pierre’s time at Draycor, including a former Draycor chairman, M. J. Brawley, since deceased. The only name that no one recognized was “Ari.”

  “Ari what?” Aggie Lynch, the ex-wife, asked.

  “That’s it. Just ‘Ari.’ ”

  Kennedy resumed his examination of the one-page document. “He was someone he knew from a restaurant or pub they frequented, somewhere in the east end. There’s an address—Danforth Avenue.”

  Aggie was skeptical. “I never ever heard him mention anyone named Ari. And a pub? I can’t imagine Pierre ‘frequenting’ some dive in the east end. What did you say the name was?”

  Aggie was a snob about the geographic destination “east,” though she’d been born and raised on Canada’s East Coast and her ex-husband was of Middle East extraction. For Aggie Lynch anything east of the Don Valley meant vulgar and not a little unpredictable.

  Kennedy glanced again at the single page he was holding. “The pub is called the Only Café. I think I’ve driven past it. By the way, it’s also where he wanted this event, however we describe it, to be held. Furthermore, he wanted this man named Ari to preside.”

  “The east end,” said Aggie Lynch. There was a vaguely incredulous expression on her face. “When would he ever have been in the east end? Lois?”

  Lois Klein, the young widow, nodded. “I recall that there was someone he’d meet up with occasionally at a little
pub I’d never heard of. Someone from back home, I thought. He wrote that, what, five or six years ago?”

  “It’s dated…six days before he disappeared,” the lawyer said. “In June 2007.”

  “Back home? You mean Nova Scotia?” Aggie asked.

  “No,” said Lois. “Lebanon.”

  “It was five years ago,” Kennedy said. “We all know the kinds of pressure he was under. But I think we can assume that this was whimsy on Pierre’s part, his way of making light of a sad event, whenever it transpired. He was a young man—I’m sure he thought this was far, far down the road.”

  Aggie Lynch presumed to speak for all of them: “Well, whim or not, I think we all agree on what you can do with that document.” Lois was nodding. The lawyer was already reaching toward the shredder.

  “I’d like to have that,” Cyril said.

  The neighbourhood was unfamiliar to him. At the bar Cyril asked for Ari, not really expecting anyone to know him—not after five years—but the man behind the bar nodded and told Cyril that Ari hadn’t been in that evening, though he was a regular.

  “He comes and goes.” The bartender shrugged.

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Eighteen months.”

  It was a noisy place, long and narrow. It was dark, mostly lit by a row of candles jammed in bottles along the bar and old lawn-sale lamps on small wobbly tables against a wall. He sat on a stool and ordered a beer. The music was from the eighties and the crowd, mostly men, was also of his father’s generation. He recognized the Clash. “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

  It had been the question at the forefront of Cyril’s mind for three weeks, since the meeting with the lawyer. He now knew that single sheet of paper off by heart. Roast. The Only Café. Ari. He knew the words but not the purpose. The mystery behind the words intrigued the journalist he hoped he could become. But he couldn’t escape a sense of menace. Finally he shook himself: Come on, wake up—it’s just a pub; he was my dad. What am I afraid of? He went.

  The décor was self-conscious kitsch. A Rolling Stones poster, Mother Teresa, Che. Faded prints of old Impressionists. A portrait of Van Gogh with a bandaged ear. The bar seemed stocked with affordable hard liquor, Scotch and rum and rye. A few bottles of predictable single malts. But there was an impressive display of bottled beer, many brands he’d never heard of. A sign above the cooler read: The Hall of Foam. There was absolutely nothing about the place that would have appealed to the father that he knew.

  He sipped his beer, eavesdropped on a quiet conversation about city politics. Cyril hadn’t voted but was interested in the drama. The bartender paused in front of him and nodded at his glass but Cyril said that he was fine for now. Then he asked, “What’s over there?” He pointed toward a heavy curtain just as someone walked through carrying a mug.

  “Coffee shop,” the barman said. “If that’s your thing.”

  “I think I’ll check it out,” said Cyril. “Can I take my beer?”

  “No problem.”

  Though it had the same seedy ambience, it was a quieter place. There was more room and more comfortable furniture. He could see the potential on this side of the establishment for a small private gathering. The Only Café was, Cyril decided, exactly the kind of place that would appeal to him and his friends. Relaxed, ironic, respectably grungy, unassuming and cheap. Many of the tables were occupied by young, pensive people staring at their laptop screens, mugs of coffee growing cold, lager growing warm.

  He settled into an overstuffed armchair, more mystified than ever about what might have drawn someone like his father to this unlikely place.

  He drained his beer, was sorely tempted to have another, to roost for the entire evening in this antiquated armchair. But he quashed the temptation, which he recognized as just another flight fantasy. He’d been having a lot of them of late—peculiar impulses to disappear. He had no destination in mind, but that wasn’t the point. The thought was comforting to him.

  Cyril took a notebook from his backpack, tore out a page and wrote: Ari. I think you knew my father, Pierre Cormier. Can we talk sometime? And signed it. Cyril B. Cormier. Then he returned to the liquor side of the establishment and handed the note to the bartender.

  “Can you give this to Ari when you see him,” he said. The bartender nodded and placed the note on a shelf beside a bottle of Teacher’s Highland Cream.

  “By the way, what’s Ari’s last name?”

  “I don’t know,” the bartender said. “How do you know Ari?”

  “He knew my dad.”

  “Ah. So why don’t you ask your dad?”

  “He passed away.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” Then the bartender leaned closer and said in a low voice. “I don’t think Ari has a last name.”

  His mother often said that Cyril was the spitting image of his father, tall and lean, a mop of curly hair, fashionable glasses. He lacked his father’s intense ambition, but he shared his curiosity, his fascination with intrigue. He didn’t know much more about his father’s nature than what his mother shared, which was brief and usually bitter. When he was only twelve his dad became a stranger who would reappear occasionally from the opaque world of big business and a relationship, soon to be a marriage that, for a while at least, shut Cyril and his mother out.

  Pierre never forgot a birthday, though, and the Christmas gifts were always lavish. Once when Cyril was fourteen his father had taken him on a hiking-camping holiday but the experience, as it unfolded over three days of a Thanksgiving weekend, seemed to propel Pierre into a funk that could have been boredom or resentment and was marked by a series of lengthening silences. Silence was not uncommon during their encounters.

  Pierre was not a talker, at least where Cyril was concerned. Cyril had learned that he was powerful in a courtroom and a terror when it came to dealing with troublesome investors who sometimes tried to take him on in public. He was vice-president, legal, for Draycor PLC, a mining company with far-flung properties. But Pierre never talked about his work when Cyril was around. And he never talked about his boyhood or, come to think of it, any aspect of his past.

  When Pierre engaged at all with Cyril, he had conveyed encouragement about the value of hard work and vision. Minding his own business, appreciating his good fortune to be growing up in a stable, civilized society like Canada. Old-fashioned nostrums, earnestly delivered. Cyril always paid attention, listening attentively for warmth.

  He remembered asking, by the sizzling campfire on a drizzly night during that camping trip, if Pierre had ever gone camping with his dad when he was a boy. Pierre was silent for a minute, then laughed. No, he said eventually. There was no camping. He’d grown up poor.

  “Do you know what a refugee is?” his father asked.

  “There were some in my school,” Cyril replied, and waited. “I didn’t know them, though.” And waited. But his father had relapsed into silence.

  He recalled that brief exchange with painful clarity. He now knew that his father too had fled the chaos of a distant war, becoming a refugee in an unlikely place—Cape Breton Island—before moving on to the big time in Toronto.

  He said good night to the bartender, slung his backpack over a shoulder and stepped outside. The street was busy and suddenly exotic with clusters of men in deep conversation, men of all ages wearing skullcaps and baggy white cotton trousers, sandals, smocks to their knees; women head to toe in black, faces covered. And then he noticed, just along the street, the mosque and for a moment he had a sense of what might have drawn his father to this unlikely neighbourhood.

  It was poker night, a ritual each Thursday for Cyril and his friends, guys he’d known since kindergarten. “Poker night” had a ring of innocuous masculinity. “Poker” was a euphemism for escape from work and kids and women.

  They didn’t always play cards on poker night but when they did it was inevitably blackjack. You only had to have the clarity and concentration to count to twenty-one and that was usually possible no matte
r how much beer you drank. The guys were in the middle of a hand when Cyril arrived. Poker night always started out at Leo’s place. He, like Cyril, was single. But, unlike Cyril, Leo lived alone. The others at the table were married and had nicer places, but at Leo’s, you could be loud and clueless. Conversations could be inappropriate and dumb and dirty.

  They made space for Cyril at the table, but he fetched a beer instead and receded into a quiet corner of the room. From his backpack he retrieved the document Ethan Kennedy had given him. “Let me know how it all turns out”—the lawyer seemed to mean it.

  The guys ignored him, which was protocol. They knew that Cyril was going through a few things and would consult them if and when he had to. They all knew the generalities of his distress: the uncertainty of working as an intern; friction with his mom; a rocky patch with Gloria, his girlfriend; and, of course, the missing dad who had recently been sort of found.

  “News?” said Neil.

  “None,” said Cyril. “All good.”

  Answering nods and murmurs, everybody studying the cards.

  The others were gone and it was just Leo and Cyril.

  “I really appreciate you letting me crash here for another night,” Cyril said. They clinked their bottles.

  “No problem. As long as you like,” Leo said. Then the unasked question: What next?

  Cyril sighed. “I’ll go to Mom’s place tomorrow, hang out there for a while.”

  “You don’t have to…I mean, your mom?”

  “She’s ordered me to move back in and sort out the mess Gloria left on her doorstep.”

  “What mess?”

  The mess was mostly boxes of his father’s books—not a huge collection, but enough to clutter up his mom’s verandah with unwelcome reminders of her past. Two days after he’d walked out on her, Gloria had dumped the boxes when Aggie wasn’t home. Aggie had never cared for Gloria and it was mutual.