The Affinities

  “Oh. I see.” Lisa exchanged a look with Loretta, who had come in from the next room with her finger marking her place in a hardcover novel.

  “What? Is it somebody you know?”

  “Adam, did you happen to notice the license number?”

  “No—why would I notice the license number?”

  Like two gray-feathered birds of distinct species cohabiting a single telephone wire, Lisa and Loretta frowned in concert. Lisa, ordinarily the voluble one, seemed reluctant to speak. Loretta, who seldom opened her mouth unless a word seemed urgent, said, “I’ll call Trevor. Should we tell Mouse?”

  “Maybe not,” Lisa said. “I mean, until we’re sure…”

  “Sure of what?” I asked. “What’s this all about? What did I miss?”

  “I’ll let Trevor explain,” said Lisa.

  * * *

  I had learned some basic truths about what it meant to be a Tau in the three and a half months since I moved into the tranche house. One of those truths was Taus don’t gossip.

  Much. We were human beings; we talked about each other. But given how much time we spent together, I had heard very little malicious talk—and none that was really malicious. Our boundaries were pretty carefully respected, in other words, which was why I didn’t know a whole lot about Mouse, the woman who lived in the basement.

  Lisa and Loretta currently had three tenants including me, all Taus. One was a middle-aged used-bookstore owner with an income so sporadic that the money he saved by boarding here made the difference, some months, between eating and going hungry. I liked him, but we weren’t especially close. The third tenant was Mouse. She was maybe thirty years old, and Mouse was a name she had given herself; I knew her by no other.

  But she wasn’t “mousy” in the ordinary sense of the word. She said she had taken the name because she was shy and liked enclosed spaces. (She had chosen her basement room over a more comfortable third-floor bedroom.) She was so obviously working her way through some deeply personal crisis that I had been careful not to ask about it. I had seen her in close conversation with Loretta several times, but they generally clammed up when I passed by. Which was fine: it was really none of my business.

  Nor was this. While Lisa got on the phone to Trevor Holst, I set about fixing myself dinner. Lisa and Loretta were generous with living space but they weren’t running a boarding house, and apart from a few planned communal meals it was pot luck and fend for yourself. Although I was allotted a few square inches of the big kitchen refrigerator, I was saving money for a bar fridge of my own. More space for palak paneer and freezer bags of homemade chili. All I heard of Lisa’s conversation was the worried tone of her voice.

  She handed me the phone as I forked the last noodle into my mouth. “Talk to Trevor,” she instructed me.

  * * *

  Back at the end of August, when I saw Trevor leaving the tranche party with Amanda, I had guessed they were lovers. (And I had felt a pang of jealousy so unjustifiable that I was instantly ashamed of it.)

  But I was wrong about their relationship. In my first month in the tranche I learned that (a) Amanda was as interested in me as I was in her, and (b) Trevor wasn’t just her roommate, he was her gay roommate. Trev himself had detected my surge of jealousy and thought it was wonderfully funny, and I eventually managed to see the humor in it too.

  Which wasn’t too difficult, because I liked Trev. I liked everybody in the tranche, of course, but I felt a more immediate connection to some, and Trev was in that category. Not that we were much alike. He worked by day as a freelance physical trainer and on weekends as a bouncer at a Queen Street dance club, and his facial tattoos, which he called kirituhi, reflected his Maori ancestry on his mother’s side. In fact he was so many things I was not that our friendship felt almost supernatural, as if each of us had befriended a creature from Narnia or Middle Earth. All we really had in common, beyond our Tauness, was our love for Amanda Mehta.

  So I took the phone. “What’s up? Something about Mouse?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And we might need your help. Are you okay with that?”

  “Sure, yeah.” Of course I was. He didn’t really have to ask, and I didn’t really have to answer.

  “So take your phone up to the second-story bedroom facing the street.”

  Lisa and Loretta’s bedroom. “Why?”

  “It’s kind of urgent, so just do it and I’ll explain as we go.”

  I hurried upstairs.

  Lisa and Loretta’s room was a shady cave of deep-pile broadloom and Egyptian cotton sheets dominated by an oak-frame four-post bed. The window facing the street was as old as the house, single-paned and frosted with ice. Drafty, but they had never replaced it with something more modern—I guessed they preferred snuggling under the comforter on winter nights.

  “You can see the street?”

  I used my sleeve to scrub away a lacework of frost. “Yeah, I can see the street.”

  “The car still there?”

  The Venza was still idling under the streetlight, yes.

  “Send me a picture.”

  Trev liked to mock the out-of-date Samsung smartphone I carried around, but it was good enough to capture a shot of the street, even on a dark winter evening.

  “Huh,” Trevor said. “That’s pretty sure his car…”

  “Whose car?”

  “It belongs to a guy named Bobby Botero, and I need to have a talk with him.”

  I perched on the edge of the bed as Trev told me the story of Bobby and Mouse.

  * * *

  Mouse had been working in the human resources department of the Ontario Ministry of Labour when she first met Bobby Botero. Mouse’s parents had died within six weeks of each other the previous year, and her only other close family member—an older sister—lived in Calgary, more than a thousand miles away. Uneasy with strangers and slow to make friends, Mouse had been understandably lonely. Her loneliness caused her to resort to the digital crapshoot of eHarmony, which had come up serial snake eyes, until the online dating service placed her in the hands of Bobby Botero.

  Botero impressed her on their first evening out by ordering chilled lobster salad and yuzu aioli at a restaurant called Auberge des Pêches. He was everything her other dates had not been: tall, confident, adequately groomed. The reason he was so well received at Auberge des Pêches was that he ran the city’s most successful restaurant-supply business: the plates from which they spooned their chocolate ganache and croustade aux pommes had come from Bobby’s east-end warehouse. Clearly this was a man who knew what he was doing.

  What he was doing was seducing her into a hasty marriage. Only after six months of aggressive courtship and a lightly attended exchange of vows did Mouse finally begin to sense the presence of a deeper, truer, darker Bobby Botero. Bobby, it turned out, liked to be in control. Mouse was expected to phone him at least twice daily when he was in his Danforth Avenue office, keeping him posted on her whereabouts. Eventually he convinced her to quit her job at the Ministry of Labour and take a secretarial job at Botero Food Service Supplies, where she prepared and filed invoices within shouting distance of his office door. Early in her tenure he fired a male accountant for “getting too friendly” with her, which was how he characterized what Mouse had perceived as harmless flirting. Bobby had no social life, and Mouse began to suspect she would never have any real friends of her own … unless she counted Bobby as a friend, which, increasingly, she did not.

  * * *

  “You’ll need to borrow Lisa’s car,” Trev said into my ear. “What we’re going to do, the two of us, is box in Bobby’s vehicle, make it so he can’t just drive off. Then I’ll have a word with him.”

  “Okay, wait,” I said, liking this less by the minute.

  “Just go get in the car.”

  * * *

  Mouse’s marriage to Bobby lasted as long as it took for a few of his secrets to float up from obscurity. A furtive phone call to Mouse from Bobby’s aunt Caprice revealed the existen
ce of not one but two ex-wives, both of whom had at various times caused restraining orders to be placed on Bobby, and both of whom, when Mouse eventually contacted them, shared similar stories: unwarranted jealousy and tight surveillance escalating to verbal and physical abuse. Mouse saw a grim future hurtling toward her like an ICBM.

  And there was the matter of Bobby’s business. Botero Food Service Supplies was a self-evidently successful enterprise: goods flowed from the warehouse in a reliable stream and invoices were paid promptly and in full. But from her position at the account desk it seemed to Mouse that something was—well, off.

  “Because it isn’t entirely a legitimate business,” Trev explained as I shrugged into a jacket and borrowed the keys to Lisa’s five-year-old Accord. “Botero uses it to launder money for some local guys with a trade in stolen vehicles and connections to the ’Ndrangheta—the Calabrian Mafia.”

  “Mouse figured this out?”

  “Mouse noticed some irregularities in the invoices, but she found solid evidence in Botero’s desk one afternoon when he was out talking to a corporate buyer. And there’s more to it than that.”

  This was what I learned on the way from the back door to the carriage-house garage where Lisa’s Accord and Loretta’s ancient Volvo brooded together in wintry silence:

  Mouse had asked for a divorce. Bobby refused her request and threatened her with a beating or worse if she so much as glanced at a passing trial lawyer. He explained that he himself was thoroughly lawyered-up, and if she insisted on starting proceedings she would come out of it with nothing to show but an aching hollow where her self-respect used to be. And, he insisted, he loved her, and he wanted to prevent her from making a terrible mistake.

  Mouse bowed her head and meekly agreed. The next day she left work at noon, drove home, packed a few essentials, and moved to a motel room on the Queensway strip. She emptied a bank account she had never told Bobby she possessed and sold to a pawnbroker the few items of gold and silver she had inherited from her mother.

  Over the course of the next six months Mouse managed to find herself a new clerical job, moved into an apartment in the basement of a midtown row house, humanized that space with a selection of funky thrift-shop furniture, and saved as much as she could from her weekly paycheck. As soon as she had built up a useful surplus she did two more things: consulted a divorce lawyer and signed up for Affinity testing.

  Before long she was a registered Tau with a pending application for divorce. Bobby was well-lawyered, but the law left little room for maneuver; in the end he chose not to contest the proceeding. Mouse had brought very little personal property to the marriage and wanted nothing from Bobby, which made it easier.

  * * *

  “You in the car?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But, Trev—”

  “Good. I’ll let you know when I’m at the corner, then you pull out of the garage. Come at Botero’s car from behind, park up close to his bumper. I’ll be right behind you, and I’ll cut him off from the front.”

  “What happens then?”

  “Then I have a conversation with him. That’s all.”

  * * *

  Mouse, though shy by nature, thrived in her Tau tranche. She had almost convinced herself that her bad marriage was behind her when a series of envelopes without return addresses began arriving in the mail. Sometimes the envelopes contained brief hand-scrawled messages. WHORE was a repeat favorite, as was SICK FILTHY CUNT. Sometimes the envelopes contained photographs of Mouse taken without her knowledge: Mouse coming home from work in a yellow summer frock, Mouse dressed up for a tranche party, Mouse fidgeting in the line outside the restroom at a local movie theater.

  There was not enough evidence linking these threats to Bobby Botero for the police to get involved, and although Mouse’s lawyer applied for a generic restraining order, Mouse wasn’t convinced that it would change Botero’s behavior. He was obviously nursing a massive grudge, and Mouse knew he was capable of engineering acts of vengeance beyond her power to avoid.

  She moved across town, which was how she ended up attached to our tranche. She requested and obtained a transfer from the Ministry office where she worked to a location closer to downtown. She invested in industrial-strength locks for her doors and windows and signed up for a free tae kwon do class at the local community center. And when, despite these precautions, the letters began to arrive again (CUNT, WHORE, FILTH), she accepted Lisa and Loretta’s invitation to move into the Rosedale house, where she wouldn’t be alone.

  “And now he showed up again.”

  “Again,” Trev confirmed. “But this time it’s different.”

  “How so?”

  “This time Mouse has friends on her side. Us, plus everyone in her old tranche, plus all the local Taus we’ve ever networked with.”

  “Strength in numbers.”

  “Yeah, and more than numbers: experience, skills, connections.”

  “Even so, you really think it’s a good idea to get up in the face of a guy with Mafia connections?”

  “Well, that’s the interesting part. Like I said, Mouse has friends in two Tau tranches, and the Tau network in this city is pretty big. For instance, there’s a woman, a Tau, lives out in Scarborough, who works for a cleaning service called Daily Maid. And ever since he split up with Mouse, Botero has been a Daily Maid customer. The upshot is that we managed to acquire copies of the contents of the backup drives of Botero’s home computers. Including some very ineptly encrypted financial records, which indicate that Botero has been inflating expenses and skimming some of the cash he launders for his mob friends. He puts this down as ‘transaction expenses,’ but it’s a blatant skim. That’s our leverage.”

  “You’re still talking about confronting somebody with money and dangerous friends and an obviously unstable, uh, personality—”

  “I’m not talking about it, I’m doing it. Or I will be in about sixty seconds. Get on out here, Adam.”

  * * *

  We can’t live in fear of this guy forever, Trevor said at some point in our conversation, and I thought, We? But he was right. Mouse was a Tau, and one intimidated Tau was one too many.

  The street was slick with snow and the Accord chunked into anti-lock mode as I left the driveway. Botero’s car was still parked where I had seen it. Probably he was waiting for Mouse to come home, either for reconnaissance or to frighten her by advertising his presence. When I pulled in behind him, almost kissing his bumper with the grille of the Accord, he gave me a sour look in his rearview mirror. His brake lights lit up as he started the Venza’s engine and put it in gear.

  But Trev came up fast in his Subaru, cutting off Botero and making it impossible for him to move. The Venza’s brake lights went dark. A moment later, Botero opened the driver-side door.

  He was tall, lean guy. He got out of the car like a flick knife unfolding. He wore a Canada Goose jacket over a logger shirt and faded jeans, a blue-collar-guy-made-good look. His jaw was thrust forward, his mouth bent into a perfect bell curve.

  Trevor left his car at the same time. Not as tall as Botero, but broader across the chest, big arms, sure of himself.

  “You need to get out of my way,” Botero said.

  “I’d be happy to do that,” Trevor said. “Soon as we have a talk about Mouse.”

  “I don’t know anybody named Mouse.”

  “I think you do. I think you know a lot of people. Like Jimmy Bianchi? Carl Giordano?”

  The names meant nothing to me, but they could only have been Botero’s mob connections. Botero’s breath hissed into the cold air like steam from a defective radiator. “If you know those names, you know you’re playing out of your league.”

  “If you continue to harass Mouse, there will be consequences.”

  “And if you continue to harass me, there will sure as fuck be consequences. You’re a member of that club she joined, right? The League of Losers or whatever. Do you really think that entitles you to stand between a man and his wife?”
r />   “I don’t want to have to go to Mr. Giordano about this.”

  “Oh, that’s your threat? You’re going to tell on me? As if Bianchi or Giordano gives a flying fuck about what I do regarding my family?”

  “They might give a flying fuck about the five grand you siphon out of their pockets every six months.”

  Botero did a pretty good job of concealing his shock. But there was no ignoring the gulp of air that hitched in his throat.

  Meanwhile, neither Trevor nor Botero saw what I saw: a police cruiser had turned onto the street and was moving toward us with a slow deliberation.

  Botero said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. And if you go to Giordano or anybody else with this bullshit story, you will be fucked beyond belief.”

  “All you need to do is stay away from Mouse. Just forget she ever existed. Do that, and Giordano won’t hear a word from me. He especially won’t see a copy of that Excel spreadsheet you have on your Mac, the one with all the notations you made. Ten grand a year for, what, seven years now? Eight?”

  The police car pulled abreast of the Venza. A bored-looking cop rolled down the side window. “Is there a problem here?”

  Botero was still working on recovering his composure. “No,” Trevor said, “no problem.”

  “You know, you can’t park here—not at that angle.”

  “Just getting ready to leave.” Trev headed back to his car.

  “And you,” the cop said. “You’re blocking a hydrant. Move along, Mr. Botero.”

  Botero went wide-eyed again. “What, do I know you?”

  “No, sir, not personally. Move along, please. And if you’re talking to Carl Giordano, tell him hello.”

  * * *

  Tipped off by Lisa about Botero’s presence, Mouse had bought herself dinner at a downtown restaurant while she waited for the all-clear.

  Trev and I were in the living room when she got home. She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t have to. She stood on her toes and gave each of us a solemn peck on the cheek.

  I met the cop again a few days later, at a multi-tranche Christmas party. His name was Dave Santos, and he belonged to a North York tranche. It was Lisa who had called him to the scene to back up Trevor. We shook hands and smiled. He didn’t need my thanks, any more than I needed Mouse’s. It was a Tau thing.