Keeper of the Flame. Jack Batten

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СКАЧАТЬ stomach had settled, and the espresso brought a fresh jolt of energy.

      “Let’s see if you can give me more of a handle on the Reverend,” I said to Jerome. “He approached you Monday night. Where did this momentous meeting take place?”

      “Air Canada Centre, right here in your town, the place where Flame was doin’ a concert,” Jerome said. “A couple hours before the concert happened, I’m outside the Centre, just getting the feel of the crowd that’s showing up. So, there I am, tending to my duties when this dude comes up to me in a grey suit and blue shirt, nice tie. Dude’s about fifty-five, thereabouts, and he all business.”

      “Not wasting any motions.”

      “He hands me the sheets of paper. He tells me he wants eight million dollars two weeks from that day — Monday like I say. He says he be in touch with me before then, say where he wants the eight million sent. Gonna be some place offshore is what he says. Then he’s gone.”

      “Gone,” I said, “but not far. The religious institution he’s connected with? Heaven’s Philosophers? You and Mr. Carnale said it was on St. Clair West? That’s a few blocks north of where we’re sitting right now.”

      “I assume you’re gonna find him there, man.”

      “I’ll make it my first stop,” I said. “Maybe it’ll be my only stop if the Reverend is co-operative.”

      I swallowed the last of my double espresso, and Jerome signalled the waitress for the bill.

      “You don’t mind my saying,” I said, “the Reverend — this particular Reverend, I mean — makes a curious shakedown artist.”

      “Him being a reverend and all?”

      “There’s that, but he’s also going about the blackmail in a fashion that seems to me the last word in transparent.”

      “Transparent or opaque, man, it don’t matter,” Jerome said. “Just get back the sheets of the damn lyrics like you been hired to do.”

      “I’m your guy, Jerome.”

      Chapter Five

      When I got back to the office, Gloria was setting up a new coffee maker. It was a replacement for the older model that the moving guys broke during my shift in quarters from the fifth floor to the third.

      “Goodie,” I said. “A fresh source of caffeine.”

      “It’s a De’Longhi,” Gloria said. “Not absolutely top-of-the-line, but quite fine.”

      Gloria was my part-time researcher, bookkeeper, and all-round smoother of troubled waters. Part-time because I shared her services with two other criminal lawyers. Gloria was sixtyish, ten years older than me. She was tall, with silver hair that she grew long and free. She liked to wear baggy blouses and long, flowing skirts. I suspected a spectacular figure lurked under the billowy garments, but I’d never know unless we were invited to the same swim party.

      Gloria and I admired the sleekness of the De’Longhi for a minute or two. Then I went down the hall to the washroom and filled my office jug with water for the coffeemaker.

      When I came back, Gloria was examining a package of coffee I’d bought earlier.

      “‘Kicking Horse’?” she said, reading from the label. “‘Hoodoo Jo blend? Made in Canada’?”

      “Not made in Canada, if you look closer,” I said. “Blended in Canada.”

      “Were you feeling nationalistic when you bought this?”

      “There’s a lot to be said for throwing one’s business Canada’s way.”

      When I got the coffee machine started, I sat down to discuss lawyerly matters. Gloria was sitting in one of the client’s chairs, her iPad in front of her hooked up to a portable keyboard. The whole apparatus, iPad plus keyboard, probably weighed no more than a few ounces, which was a lot less than the thick file of hard copy documents in her hands. The digital age had its advantages.

      “This one,” Gloria said, raising the file in the air, “you put back in the cabinet and forgot to bill the client.”

      “It wasn’t tucked in there too long, I trust?”

      “Month maybe,” Gloria said. “It’s the murder case where the Crown dropped the charges a day into the trial.”

      “Yeah, my client was the nice girl from Sobey’s meat department,” I said. “It started out murder one. I got it reduced to manslaughter a couple months before trial. Then the Crown threw up their hands. One of my better results this year.”

      “All the more reason for being generous to yourself on the fees,” Gloria said.

      The coffee machine burbled to its conclusion. I got up and poured coffee into my two best mugs, both deep Matisse blue in colour and purchased at the Levin Ceramics Museum. Gloria and I took our coffee the same way — black, no sugar.

      “Hmm,” Gloria said, sipping and savouring. “It’s surprisingly fabulous, Crang.”

      “More specific, if you don’t mind?”

      “Hardy, an oaky taste, and a touch mysterious. That good enough for you?”

      “Label says it’s organic and fair trade.”

      “Okay, okay! It makes me feel on the side of the angels as well as caffeinated,” Gloria said impatiently. “Now can we get to the fee for the Sobey’s meat girl?”

      I sipped some more of the Hoodoo Jo, confirmed it was damn good, and said to Gloria, “Forget about the fee thing for a minute while I tell you about the juicy new file we got.”

      “Okay,” she said. “Juicy always thrills me.”

      I told Gloria all about Flame and the Reverend Alton Douglas’s machinations. She jotted notes in her iPad, and held back whatever comments she had until I finished.

      “You kind of skated over what this person Flame wrote in his songs that was so almighty horrible,” Gloria said as soon as I stopped talking.

      “Homophobically ugly, racially horrific, and so on, accept my word for it,” I said. “The point is, Flame’s people think the song lyrics are bad enough to take the Reverend Douglas’s intentions very seriously.”

      I got the pages with the lyrics out of my jacket pocket, neatly folded, and handed them to Gloria.

      “Read them if you want,” I said. “But if I were you, I’d give the whole thing a pass.”

      Gloria took the pages, not wasting so much as a glance at the words on them. “Why don’t I just open a file,” she said. “Put these pages in the file for future reference.”

      “Which may not be necessary,” I said.

      “So,” Gloria said after she’d filed the pages, “the alleged bad guy is a church minister?”

      “Seems СКАЧАТЬ