The Killing Circle

“Buzz them.”

“They’re not here. Or not answering.”

“If I’d known it was you down here, I wouldn’t have answered either.”

His hands have loosened their grip on his belt. It’s his calmness that makes it certain he’s going to hit me. In my experience, there’s always a moment before taking a shot to the face when you see it coming, but don’t quite believe it. Here it comes, you think. Then No, he wouldn’t. And then he does.

“She has my son.”

The super looks down at me over pockmarked cheeks. “Divorce?”

“Something like that.”

“Call your lawyer like everyone else.”

“It’s not a lawyer kind of thing. If you know what I mean.”

Apparently he does. One fist returns to his side, and the other fishes in his pockets for his keys.

“I’ll tell you what the building’s records show,” he says, ushering me through the lobby and into a small office where the Christmas tree is stored. “But I see you in here again and I’ll stuff you down the garbage chute.”

I tell the super to look up the account under the name Pam Turgenov.

“Thought you said her name was Angela.”

“She lies.”

“Most of them do.”

He pulls up the file on Angela/Pam’s financial status with the condominium corporation. The mortgage and purchase agreement solely under Pam Turgenov’s name, though the account has recently come under arrears. Unit 1808 hasn’t paid its maintenance fee for three months, and the bank has frozen the accounts.

“We’re looking for this one,” the super says. “But from what I can tell, she hasn’t been here for a while. Not since the break-in.”

“There was a burglary?”

“Took some crap jewelry, personal stuff. But left the TV.”

Personal stuff. Like Petra’s Yankees cap. So it could find its way to my house.

“I’m changing the locks this week,” the super says.

“It won’t matter. She’s not coming back.”

“All her junk is still up there.”

“Trust me.”

“But she’s got your kid.”

“I’ll find her.”

I must sound convincing. The super gives me a soldierly nod. “When you speak to her,” he says as he walks me to the door, “tell her I’m keeping the TV.”

From the condo I walk straight up Bay Street toward the gold and silver office towers on the far side of the rail tracks. It takes a while. I’m occupied with working through what shouldn’t come as a surprise, but has nevertheless: Angela not only failed to report to the authorities that it was Evelyn behind the wheel of the car she drove into a cliffside with Conrad White, but she likely had a hand in bringing about the crash in the first place. It was Angela who lured them north with breadcrumb clues. More than this, she must have been there. To make sure the job was done. And to replace Evelyn’s purse with her own.

This is how Angela managed to live so completely off the grid: she made herself disappear and become someone else. And when the debts started to come due under Pam Turgenov’s increasingly bad name she was gone again.

There’s more support for this suspicion at the offices of the law firm where Angela claimed to work as a legal secretary. This time, I assume a cover—her jilted lover, which I suppose I am, among other things. It buys me enough sympathy with the girl at reception to find out that there was a Pam Turgenov working there for a time, not as a legal secretary but as a temp.

“Never got to really know her,” the receptionist says sadly, as though this was her life’s main regret. “Always had her nose in a book. Like, Stay away, I’m into this.”

“Do you remember what she was reading?”

The receptionist looks at her nails for an answer. “Actually, now that I think of it, she wasn’t reading. She was writing.”

“How long ago did she leave?”

“A while. Like, months. She was probably only here for a couple weeks.”

“Do you know where she went after she left? Another firm maybe?”

“It’s why they’re called temps.” The receptionist shrugs. “They come and go.”

When I give her the flowers I’d brought with me (”Is Pam here today? I have something for her birthday”) I’m rewarded with a blushing thank you.

“If I happen to bump into her, who can I say came calling?” she asks as I start toward the elevators.

“Try Conrad. Or Len. Or Ivan.”

It’s only as the elevator doors are almost closed that the receptionist raises her narrowing eyes from writing each of these names down.

Dusk. That pinkish light over the city that is the occasionally beautiful by-product of pollution. The chill that comes within seconds of the sun dropping behind the rooftops. I’m headed east for no good reason. Or no better reason than to avoid what I know awaits me at home: messages from the police reporting how they haven’t come up with anything yet. Maybe even the kid from the National Star camped out in my yard, a copy of The Sandman in his knapsack, the pages furry with Post-It notes. Better to keep drifting through the darkening streets than face that.

Yet it’s at this time of day, in this kind of light, that you see things. Twilight illusions.

Like the black van that slowly drives past me. A shadow behind the wheel. The outlined head and gloved hands that belong to whatever I chased into the corn rows at the Mustang.

As I start after it—noting again how the model name has been removed from the rear doors, a caking of dried mud obscuring the licence plate—the van picks up speed and chugs around the next corner.

I cross blind against the traffic. A station wagon screeches to a stop. Kisses its grille to my hip. The contact sends me spinning against a panel truck, but my feet continue to slap the pavement, righting my course on the sidewalk. There is honking and Hey! Hey!s behind me but I take the same corner the van took and all sound is gulped away. A man my age and in my shape can’t run like this more than a hundred yards without his breathing becoming the only thing he can hear. And his heart. His untested heart.

The van is gone. I keep running.

And then he’s there.

Up ahead, the shadow slides along the walls. Takes another turn into the grounds of the old Gooderham & Worts distillery. A few clustered blocks of Dickens’s London shoehorned between the expressway and condo construction sites. Long, Victorian brick barracks with smokestacks at their ends like exclamation points.

The past slows me down. It’s the cobblestone streets that turn anything faster than a walk into a tiptoed dance. During daylight hours, the doors on either side open into galleries and cafes, but they are locked now. No one else in the pedestrian-only lanes but me and the one who’s led me here.

And there he is. Slipping into a narrow alley. But slowly. As though waiting for me to catch up.

There are no lights between two of the vacant buildings, so that all I can see of the figure ahead is the rise and fall of its head against the dim brick. And then he stops altogether.

A bit further, the body language of his cocked head says. You’re almost there.

I come at him in what I intend as a rush, but there is little rush left in me. When I reach the point where he’d been standing I nearly trip over something on the ground. Heavy but with a liquid give. A bag of sand.

It gives him more than enough time. The black van is waiting for him in the parking lot. The extinguished