Paid in Plates
An auto-biographical story
about me and the Mob
Copyright (c) 2011 R. Bromfield
Smashwords Edition
Author's note: Some of the names in the following story have been changed to protect.....
well, uh, me.
I write screenplays. Sometimes I work as a script doctor, hired to rewrite another writer's movie script that the producers don't think is tight enough, or funny enough, or exciting enough. Once in a while someone will come to me with a story idea and hire me to write a screenplay based on it. Back in 1992 I rewrote and directed a feature film about the Vancouver Mafia called Cafe Romeo so it didn't seem strange when I got a call out of the blue one day from a man with a thick Italian accent asking if I would be interested in adapting the story of his involvement with organized crime for the big screen. He said, "Mr. Bromfield, my name is Paolo," and, without formality, went straight to the point. He told me that he had organized crime connections back east, that he was a wanted man who had only good fortune to thank for his freedom. He had seen Cafe Romeo and liked it, said it showed the families as real people. I don't know how he got my phone number, but I knew that when you're in with the mob, you can do a lot of things like that. Of course the proper thing would have been for him to have contacted my agent, but, then even I couldn't get in touch with my agent half the time so...
The first meeting with Paolo was to take place two days hence, 2:00 PM at the sidewalk cafe of the Pacific Palisades Hotel in downtown Vancouver. He never asked if this would fit my schedule. He didn't even confirm that I was the Bromfield he had assumed I was - or even that I was any Bromfield at all. After I said hello I don't think I said another word other than see you then and goodbye. I could have been the plumber's assistant for all he knew. But I was intrigued. Kurt Vonnegut once said that Strange travel suggestions are dance lessons from God. No writer worth his or her salt ever passes up the chance to meet a strange and dynamic character, so I cleared my schedule for the meeting. Actually, to tell the truth, all dates and times are convenient for a writer; most days we aren't busy writing anything, anyway.
I wondered whether to get dressed up or not. After all, this was a meeting with the mob. These guys respect a man who looks comfortable in two thousand dollars worth of clothing. I had what I thought was a decent suit so I decided to wear that with an expensive shirt, no tie (I don't have a tie) and my best black imitation leather sneakers.
The Mafia isn't the same everywhere. In the U.S., organized crime is very powerful because there is lots of circulating cash to attract and engage the criminal element. In eastern Canada, too, in places like Montreal and Toronto, organized crime is an unfortunate routine of a chronically anxious society. But Vancouver British Columbia is way out on the western most part of the country, and until they staged a World's Fair and put on a Winter Olympics, hardly anyone had heard of the place.
When I was prepping Cafe Romeo I'd managed easily to insinuate myself into the back rooms of the Italian men's clubs on Commercial Drive in little Italy, talked to parish priests and mob members, the mothers, sisters and brothers of mob members. We even had our production offices in the old rectory of the Catholic church that all of these people attended. And almost all of them, including local crime families, were hired on as extras in the film. Many of these people didn't go to any great lengths to hide the fact that there was something untoward going on behind the scenes of their everyday lives. In some ways I got the impression that many of them were proud of it and would just as soon have everyone know all about their not-so-up-and-up lives. It wasn't the same seriously grim scenario as it was in the big bustling towns back east.
Anyway, making the film was a very pleasant experience and we got to meet all kinds of different wonderful people and everyone had a great time. Now I was about to meet with Paolo and I sensed, somehow, that this might be a bit different. He was from back east.
It was an unusually sunny day in Vancouver as my partner, Ingrid, and I sat watching the people pass by the outdoor patio of the Pacific Palisades Hotel. I brought Ingrid with me for two reasons; one, for protection, and two, because she insisted. I wasn't going to have this story, whatever it was, to tell at parties all by myself.
The Pacific Palisades Hotel was what was referred to at the time as Vancouver's filmy hotel. It was where visiting film stars, producers and directors stayed while working on American runaway productions - the productions that Arnold Schwarzenegger was trying so hard, at the time, to keep from leaving California. Since Paolo had chosen this place to meet I assumed that he was, to some extent, conversant with the business of making movies.
It was weird the way Paolo appeared at our table, without warning. One minute Ingrid and I we were perusing the people passing in the street and the next there was a dark shadow over everything. Paolo himself didn't cast much of a shadow; he was a short, slightly chubby, curly-haired, mustachioed little man who could just as well have been a Lithuanian restauranteur. No, in more ways than one, all of the darkness was provided by his six foot seven, unsmiling friend Ono. Ono wasn't introduced to us. His presence, in fact, was never even acknowledged throughout the entire meeting and it would only be days later that I would learn his name and that Ono was short for Onofrio which meant defender of peace. Yeah, well this guy exuded anything but an aura of peace. The first thing I noticed about Onofrio was that his suit was of such fine-quality silk that you could actually make out the intricate fingerprint-proof texture on the grip of the 45 automatic he had concealed under his jacket just below his heart. Ordinary people do not go around armed in Canada. Sometimes, when I would be shopping at Safeway in California, I would become suddenly and inexplicably aware that more than half the customers in the store were carrying concealed weapons. It's a way of life, you get used to it. But, in Canada, not even security guards are armed—not with anything more than six pounds of keys. Even the Canadian police, unlike in, say, New York or Chicago, refrain from overt displays of ordnance.
"Mr. Bromfield?" Paolo said and held out his hand as if we had met before.
Oh shit. I'd forgotten Paolo's last name. Wait a minute, had he ever told me his last name? On the phone he had said "Mr. Bromfield, You don't know me, my name is Paolo." That was it. I didn't know what to do so I got up, held out my hand and said "Nice to meet you. This is my partner Ingrid."
Paolo's eyes had been riveted on Ingrid from the start. I thought Italian men were supposed to be used to the sight of sexy, vivacious, beautiful redheads. She was certainly too much for Paolo and maybe this was the attraction. In fact I found out later, on the internet, that Paolo means small. And that's what Paolo was, small. He'd probably been birthed some forty years ago by his mother on her lunch break with such ease that the name came naturally. It was suddenly as though he had come here to meet Ingrid. Ono stared at me the whole time, nodded respectfully, then sat silently to my right. Paolo sat across from me beside Ingrid. I had worried that bringing a woman to the meeting might be off-putting to Paolo, who obviously wanted to talk about his personal life, but he said almost right away, that he was glad she was there because his story was a love story, that he would be inspired by a beautiful woman. He asked her if she was Catholic and she had the sense to say yes. He never asked me what my religion was and that was good; I sensed that that wouldn't have gone well at all.
I was beginning to think this meeting might be all about Ingrid, when he suddenly turned to me and said, "How much do you get paid for a movie script?"
"Well, that depends."
"On what?"
"On the size of the film, the budget, the schedule, how many rewrites the producer wants, things like that. If you're making a movie for two million, it doesn't make sense to pay one million for the screenplay. A sixty-five million dollar picture is a different matter."
The blood drained from Paolo's face. "You get a million bucks for a script?"
I laughed. "I wish I could honestly say I do." I'm usually pretty good at teasing out how much a producer has in mind for the budget of a film, even when they keep that information close to their chest. But Paolo was hard to read. "Maybe the best thing would be for me to know what's involved." I said. "You know, what the story is about, so I can get an idea of the scope of the project."
"It's a wonderful story, and when I tell you, you will want to write the movie for free."
I seriously doubted that, and I'm sure, out of the corner of my eye, I caught Ono measuring my reactions carefully.
I decided, that in case I actually wound up doing this, now might be a good time to make a demonstration of me at work on Paolo's story so I took out a note pad and a pen and started to make notes. "So how does your story start?" I said. Paolo immediately reached across the table, placed his hand on mine stopping me from writing anything down. "Not here" he said looking around. "Too many ears." He twisted in his seat, looked up and around the cafe. "Don't they have any waiters working in this place?" Paolo said this loud enough that one of the waiters came bounding over immediately to take our order.
The conversation that followed did fill in some of the details of the story after all. Paolo was from Montreal, he was a barber by trade and there was something about a girl that kept almost coming up but only enough so I got the idea that she was young, very beautiful, that Paolo was very much in love with her and that they had had some adventure together. She seemed to be central to the story.
Paolo paid for everything and when we parted we all shook hands. When I shook Ono's enormous hand, which was the size of a large Iranian barbari bread, I, for some reason, said "Thank you," and on the way home in the car, Ingrid figured I was thanking him for not taking out his gun and blowing my head off or anything like that. The odd thing was that Paolo and I had neglected to make any further arrangements. I had asked him for his phone number but he neatly sidestepped the question. If Paolo was to tell me his story I was going to have to wait for him to call me.
It didn't take long.
Three days later he called me up and told me to come to his humble abode off the highway a few kilometres east of downtown, and to feel free to bring that beautiful German girl, too. I knew he hadn't forgotten her name, he'd used it at least a dozen times at our first meeting. He never named the mystery girl in his story either, referring to her only as the girl or my girl. I took it to be a character trait, that this was the way men, especially Italian men, are supposed to talk to each other. I wrote it down. I wrote a lot of things down as they came to mind about what little I was learning about Paolo's story. These little notes would help to flesh things out later if it was necessary to condense or expand some things into a good flow. As it turned out, I wasn't going to have to fudge or fictionalize anything in this story since, as Paolo told it, the whole thing was deceptively simple and compelling just as it was.
--
This time, as we drove out to see Paolo, it was about to start raining. It rains a lot in Vancouver because the water evaporating from the Pacific rolls in on the ocean winds to pile up against the mountains, rises, condenses then comes thundering down on the city with great regularity. Paolo's apartment was one of two big, very new buildings on the side of a hill in Burnaby, an eastern suburb of Vancouver. They were still working on the landscaping as we drove between trucks and backhoes and past piles of dirt to the guest parking near the front door. In Vancouver, in those days they didn't have doormen in condos. This place had a doorman and a concierge. The modern art on the walls were all original paintings, the black leather of the lobby furniture sure looked and felt real to me and there was a glass and chrome table that couldn't have cost less than ten grand. Obviously Paolo's intention was to impress. Not the sort of thing you really want to do for someone with whom you intend to negotiate.
"Mr Gallo is waiting for you." the concierge announced and gestured to the brushed aluminium bank of elevator doors. "You'll find him on thirty-five."
Good, the name was Gallo, Paolo Gallo. "What's the apartment number?" I said.
"Just press thirty-five." It was obvious that he enjoyed saying this and I immediately felt like a complete idiot.
When the doors opened I thought the elevator had brought us to the wrong floor, a common meeting area or something. It was a very large expanse of pure white, without a stick of furniture, without carpets, wall hangings or adornments of any kind, empty, except for a lone ironing board, an iron plugged into the wall and a wide spiral stairway that led to a second floor. Vast windows let in the scenery that Vancouver is famous for. Surely this was the building's communal party room; the facility where you can throw a big messy bash without destroying your own place. But no, here came Paolo, this time dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tan short-sleeved shirt and sandals. His legs were extraordinarily hairy. He came down three steps from where we could see a large open kitchen. Paolo immediately took Ingrid by both shoulders and kissed her on each cheek and said "The European way huh?" Of course, being European she clicked into it immediately. I was not so smooth. I didn't know whether he was going to kiss me too or not. I think I even may have taken a step back as he approached to greet me. But he took my signals well and all he did was shake my hand vigorously in both of his. "Welcome to my home."
"It's nice to see you again Mr. Gallo." I said, proud to have sussed out his name without him telling me.
"Gallo? Who's Mr. Gallo?" He stopped pumping my hand and just held it.
"Uh, well that's, uh what the doorman downstairs told us when we, uh..." I could see that Ingrid was suppressing a laugh and I knew immediately that I would be the butt of jokes about this for at least a week.
Paolo saved the day with a laugh. "Oh, the concierge. That fool." he put a hand on my shoulder and leaned close, as if he were about to tell me a dark secret. "You can't give people your real name, not when you're on the run." I could tell he'd been drinking. Then he took us both by the hand and led us through his unnecessarily immense quarters, his voice echoing around the emptiness. "Of course you can see my furniture hasn't arrived yet, but we can sit out by the pool."
The pool? On the way I saw Ono, in his jockey shorts, at the second of two large refrigerators in the kitchen which must have been at least twenty-five feet long. He was bending over, taking a box of wine out of the fridge. It was an image I really wished he hadn't shared.
Sure enough, out on a large deck, there was what could pass for a pool. More of a giant jacuzzi really and a couple of those cheap, plastic and aluminium deck chairs.
"Merda!" Paolo said when he saw that it was starting to rain. "We have to stay inside." and he redirected us back into the apartment, to the stairs that led back to the sunken living room and the elevator. Apparently we were going to sit on the steps for our meeting. Ono came in from the kitchen, the box of wine in one hand and three coffee mugs in the tree-branch fingers of the other. He placed them on the ironing board and began to pour the drinks from the plastic spout of the wine box. Paolo took the first mug of wine then took Ingrid by the arm and guided her back out to the deck. On the way he picked up a copy of French Vogue from the floor in the hall and I heard him say "My bambuccina, you don't mind that we have just men's talk do you, me and Rexy." He would call me Rexy from then on. Where he got it from I will never know. Through the empty cavern that I supposed was meant to be a dining room, I could see Paolo drag one of the deck chairs back under the small overhang and wipe it off with a beach towel. Ingrid scowled at me back through all the rooms. When she sat down Paolo put her wine on a nearby concrete planter and handed her the magazine, smiled sweetly, then returned to the front room. She wasn't very happy about this treatment, tried not to tear the pages as she ransacked the magazine.
Paolo waved a hairy arm at the magnificent view outside; the Burrard Inlet, the North Shore mountains beyond and said "I am still very happy that we came to this place and I thank God for its beauty and for the good fortune of all that I have, including meeting you." We sat down on the steps for our meeting.
It sounded like he was buttering me up for a fee negotiation before revealing his big story. But no, he went right into the tale. In a synoptic sort of way, he covered all of the important points as if he had rehearsed the telling of his life with the mob for weeks. He probably had. "I was a barber in Montreal, a barbiere." He spoke the Italian slowly and with a flourish. "A little shop on the way to the airport in a nice old district. I was a very good barbiere and very soon all of the rich Italian men were coming to me. So much business that I had to take appointments on the telephone. So, of course you understand that this also included certain men who were..." and he seemed to be searching for a word, "you know they were the families."
"The Mafia." I said right out. We both knew what I was being asked to write about, so what was the point of being coy?
"Ci," he said, "d' mafiosi." He looked at the floor when he said this, as if he were ashamed. Then he dropped his voice and said "You do not cross with these men."
So, Paolo wasn't a member, he had made someone of importance back east angry at him. But, then, there was Ono. No one was going to tell me that Ono wasn't tight with the mob in some way. Paolo needed a little push right here. "Did you cross them, the families?"
He stuck a finger in the air. "Wait, I tell you. There was a girl. She was a beautiful little girl in the neighbourhood and one time the boss... the Don, he was in town from New York and everybody was falling over themselves for him. When he was hungry they took him to the best restaurant. When he was bored they took him to the top clubs. One day he needed a shave and so, of course, they brought him to me. I was very honoured to have him in my little shop. He wanted a haircut, too. I was very nervous to cut the hair of such a big important man but I did it. And it was while I was finishing up around the ears and in the back, he saw the safe in my floor."
"You had a safe in your barber shop?"
"Yes. Once, a long time before, it was a jeweller’s shop. They had other safes, of course, but those were all gone now and all that was left was this little round one in the floor."
I'd seen these, about five inches, round and embedded in the concrete floor with a combination dial and cement plug that would fit on top to conceal it. I told Paolo I knew what he meant.
"So, anyway, the Don asked me if I ever used it and if I still had the combination, how big it was inside and other things. Then he asked me if he could put something in it for safe keeping. I said sure, no one ever goes in there. Then he snapped his finger at one of the men who was with him and whispered something in his ear. The man went out to the car and came back with an envelope. 'Would you keep this in there for me?' the big boss said and he handed me the envelope. It was thick, like it had many pages inside. I was afraid to look. I just opened the safe, rolled the envelope over once and and slid it down inside and closed it up. That was it. They all left. I expected him to come back the next day or the day after that but he didn't. One night, when I was closing up, with a flashlight, I opened the safe and looked in the envelope. It was money; a lot of money; American hundred dollar bills. The strange thing was that there were two bills on each page. Like this," and he made the shape of a standard letter paper in the air with both hands.
"Counterfeit money?"
"It was a test. A test to see what I would do."
"How do you know that?"
"Because one day, about a month later, an Italian man I knew from the neighbourhood, a customer in fact, came in and asked for the envelope. He said that he had to deliver it back to New York. I said that I didn't know what he was talking about and he left right away without mentioning it again. This was a test."
"Yes, it was wasn't it?" This story was starting to get interesting.
"I wished he would come back and take that out of my shop. But when he finally came back he wanted to keep more things in my safe."
"What sort of things?"
"I don't know, documents, tape recordings, court evidences. I don't know, but that's not the worst part."
"No?"
"No." Paolo's eyes welled up. "The girl I was telling you about?"
"Yes."
"She was my girl. She worked at a restaurant five doors down the street. I was so lucky because, as you can see, I'm not a big important man, I'm a little barbiere. But this girl still cared for me. She was my girl. We were talking about getting married." Paolo fell silent for a time and looked at the floor.
"So, what happened?"
"Well, to make a long story short..."
"You don't have to make the story short for me."
"I don't like this part."
I was going to have to coax it out of him. "Was she Italian?"
"French."
I knew what was coming. The New York boss had met and taken up with this girl and Paolo lost her to him. I was close but it was better than that.
Paolo looked at me like a little boy who had just been told his dog had been hit by a car. "I knew something was wrong," he said. "My girl, I didn't see her so much after the boss came. One time she went away for almost a week and wouldn't talk about it when she returned."
"She'd gone to the Don in New York?"
"He treated her very badly."
"He was violent?"
"Worse than that."
I could imagine all sorts of awful things but Paolo never actually told me what the New York crime boss did to the innocent young thing from Montreal. I guess it was too painful for him. He skipped right over to "She came to me at my shop one night crying and hurt and by that time I had all sorts of important documents and other things not only in the safe in the floor but hidden in the back, in the wall behind my supply cabinets. Right then I promised her that she would never have to see him again and I took her to stay with my Mama on the other side of the city. I saw his men cruising up and down the street looking everywhere for days but they didn't find her. One morning the boss himself came into my shop. He pretended to be friendly and acted as if he didn't know that I was ever with this girl. But I knew that he knew that I was. These men know everything. In the middle of a conversation about something else, while I was shaving him, he asked me if I had seen her around the neighbourhood lately. I could say no without lying and that was good because I think he could tell when anyone was lying. I think he believed me, but that night I went to Mama's and told my girl we had to leave town right away. She didn't want to go but I convinced her and we packed up all our things. We got a cab down to the bus terminal and took the first bus out of there. It didn't matter where it was going, we just had to get away."
"Where did you go?"
"Winnipeg. In February."
"I hope you had some money."
"That was another thing that wasn't so good. I took all of my own cash, about nine hundred dollars, but I also took a big emerald ring and some important-looking court papers and some tape cassettes, all from the safe."
"And you stayed in Winnipeg."
"I never knew that anyplace could be so cold. We got on another bus right away and came here. That was three years ago."
"When did you move into this place?"
"Last year." He said this with complete guilelessness. He'd been here for a year without furniture? I looked around at the empty apartment, wondered what was at the top of the spiral staircase. Bedrooms perhaps? Was she up there? Why would Paolo and Ono have a French Vogue magazine unless there was a woman living here? Or, I wondered glancing at Ono, still fussing around in the kitchen, was Ono more complicated than I had presumed. I had to get more information about this mysterious girl but I knew better than to ask directly. "Do you still have the ring?"
"I got forty-five grand for it. It was worth more than that but..."
I couldn't keep from whistling at this.
"It was hard to do. You don't just take something like that to a pawn shop. Oh, and I forgot, there was this, too." He held up his forearm so I could see his watch. I'd noticed it before and took it to be a knock off, but now that I could take a really close look, I saw that it was a real Breguet Double Tourbillon. Later I would look it up and learn that one of these crocodile leather-strapped pure platinum hand wound jobs couldn't be had for much less than $300,000 in rough condition. The one Paolo had on his wrist was in perfect nick. I wondered if he knew what it was worth.
Who the hell was this strange little man, this tiny barbiere, anyway? If he didn't have to sell the watch then he must be getting money from somewhere. His story just didn't add up. I pressed for more facts. "This apartment must have set you back."
"Yes, this is part of the story too, I guess." and he sighed. "It was about..." and he called out to Ono for verification. "When was it we moved in here, a year and a half ago?" Ono shrugged a half yes and Paolo went on. "About a year and a half ago, these three guys picked me up downtown in Vancouver and drove me in the back of their car to Stanley Park for a... little talk. I tell you, I was shitting myself. I thought they were going to do me and dump me out there. There are some bodies in that park you know."
I hadn't known this but it made sense. In parts, Stanley Park was a downtown wilderness.
"But these guys weren't who I thought they were." Paolo went on. "They were from Detroit and they had a photo of my girl. They'd seen me with her somewhere in Vancouver. They were following us but they lost us in the traffic. It took them a while to find me again but here I was in the back of their car in the park at sunset and they were warning me that it was only a matter of time before the guys from New York found out where we were and that would be the end of it for both of us. They protected me after that." He waved his hand at the apartment. "Got this place and put us in it." He nodded at Ono. "Sent Ono over to live here too. It probably had something to do with the documents I had from the safe. I don't know what it all was. I never looked at it."
"Where are these documents now?"
"No one knows."
"You must know."
"I took each piece and put it into ten or twelve separate sealed envelopes and made a list of names and addresses I knew from all over; Italy, the U.S., South America; all over. I gave the envelopes and the list to someone who wrote out the envelopes and put them in the mail for me."
This little barbiere was smarter than I thought he was. "And you have the list."
Paolo just put up a finger and tapped on the side of his head.
Jesus, he was even smarter than that! Now I got it. Ono was Paolo's shadow from the Detroit mob who were protecting him from the New York mob and the equalizer was the map to the evidence he had tucked away in his head. He even managed to make it clear that, though the evidence existed, they wouldn't be able to get it out of him, even through torture, because he didn't know himself which of the people he'd mailed particular items to. Though there were some flaws in the theory, it made tracking down the exact information pretty complicated. Presumably each envelope contained instructions to mail the contents to federal authorities in the event of Paolo's death. It would be better for anyone implicated in the documents to simply protect Paolo and that's what Ono was doing at his side night and day. What a strange little scheme. Now all I wanted to know was where this mysterious girl was. If I could just speak with her we could really start filling in what I knew were a lot of fascinating details of the entire adventure. I was betting she was here, right now, ten feet above where we were sitting on the steps of this ridiculous high-rise safehold. I decided to just come right out and ask.
"Where is your girl now Paolo?"
"I'm not going to tell you any more until I can pay you for your work."
"But I haven't done any work yet."
"You will and I'm not going to let you do it without pay." In a funny way Paolo had been right when he suggested that after I'd heard the story, I'd want to do it for free. I quickly held it up against other movies of the genre. It was as good as Moonstruck or Good fellas (nothing is as good as The Godfather). And as true stories go, so far, it had all the elements of solid fiction. I was starting to hope that the Don's men followed them to Winnipeg where they cleverly managed to evade them and get away again. I was starting to wonder if it would make much difference if I put them on the train instead of on a bus.
"How about a hundred thousand," Paolo said suddenly, "fifty on signing and fifty on delivery of a final draft with two drafts in between and three percent at the back end?"
Where the hell did he get all this movie jargon from all of a sudden? "Make it a hundred and fifty and four percent, gross." I countered.
"Deal," he said and shook my hand like he'd gotten a real bargain. It wasn't really that much for a whole screenplay but I figured I could have a first draft in a month or so, as long as he was a little more forthcoming on the story. I tried to imagine how he intended to come up with the money. He was obviously cash poor. He could always sell his watch, pay me and buy a small home in the mountains. But, somehow, I couldn't imagine him parting with the watch.
Suddenly Ingrid was there with Ono and she was not looking happy.
"I know you won't talk to anyone about this," Paolo said deliberately in front of her, then led us to the elevator without waiting for an answer from me.
On the way home Ingrid complained about the way Italian men treat women. "Bambuccina, what the hell is that supposed to mean? It's not even a word." Then she ranted for a while about the way all men treat women. Eventually she calmed down, turned in her seat and said "So what did he tell you?"
I guess Paolo did trust that I wasn't going to repeat the story to Ingrid and that may be the Italian way, but that's not how our relationship works. I made her promise, promise, then promise again that she wouldn't breath a word of what I was going to tell her to anyone.
"He wants to make a movie of it," she said flatly. "How's he going to keep it a secret if it's on eight-hundred screens across North America and Europe?"
Good point. Aside from the fact that there was only the very slimmest of remote chances that it would ever make it onto any screens anywhere, what would be the harm if she repeated the interesting bits of the story at parties? Most people would think it was just fiction anyway. It sounded like fiction.
We went to a nice French restaurant two blocks from the beach and, in the spirit of the day, had two $118 bottles of wine with our dinner. The bottom line was that I had to tell her the story. I needed someone sensible to talk it out with as I struggled to fill in the gaps in a way that made sense.
--
I started working on an outline for the script the next day, wanted to get all of it down before we moved on to the next level. I wondered why an English language film couldn't have an Italian title and on the top of the computer screen I typed in Il Dossier di un Barbiere and started an outline consisting of everything he had told me so far. It didn't take long; there wasn't really much to write and yet there was enough there into which one could weave all manner of intrigue and adventure for an exciting, romantic, funny ninety minute feature film—everything except the ending. The story had no ending because, apparently, it hadn't ended yet. I wasn't worried about that right now. Some stories don't have to end, they can just stop, if it's done well. I was working on the part about the meeting with the Detroit mobsters in Stanley Park, adding snippets of dialogue that I thought might flesh it out, when the phone rang.
It was Paolo.
"Rexy? It's payday. Meet me at the Palisades in an hour" and he hung up. I could see that he was always going to do this; call me up, declare a meeting and expect me to show up on time as required. What if I was laid up with diphtheria or something? I complained out loud to nobody as I got dressed. Suppose I was babysitting. I certainly wasn't going to expose our son to this mafiosi milieu. Of course, our son, fifteen at the time, had been an actor in Cafe Romeo and knew the milieu as well as I did. But Paolo didn't know that.
Ingrid was off somewhere with the car, organizing a fundraiser for Alzheimer's, so I took transit.
Paolo and Ono were already at the cafe when I came down Robson St. on foot. Paolo looked at his watch - the one that cost more than our house - as if to make the point that I was ten minutes late. I didn't make any excuses; he needed me more than I needed him. Paolo and Ono both got to their feet.
"Rexy!" Paolo pumped my hand.
"Paolo, you look good." I don't know why I said it. Ingrid would suggest later that it was Ono's presence that made me say stupid things like that. Probably right. I shook hands with Ono. This time it hurt. Ono could probably crush a brick if he concentrated. This, coupled with the fact that he could become stuck in a simple garden maze even if all the hedges were only a foot high, made him quite unpredictable and scary.
"Sit, sit." Paolo indicated the only other seat at the table and snapped the waiter over. "What will you drink?"
I ordered a glass of house white.
"Today I'm going to prove to you that I am a man of my word." Paolo said. "How long will it take til you are finished our script?"
Now it was our script. I didn't let on that I'd already started, bad business. "I'm going to have to know more of the details" I said. "I have some questions..."
"No problem. Me and Ono are available for anything you need."
I couldn't imagine Ono contributing much; since the day I met him he hadn't said a single word to me or anyone else. The thought crossed my mind, however, that if I needed someone's leg broken Ono might be just the man. I could think of a couple of candidates, but I put that idea out of my mind immediately and forever.
"But," Paolo went on "today is the day we're going to finally close our arrangement."
Finally? Usually these things take months and are rarely actually ever closed. But I wasn't dealing with the film business here. Not really. This project was some whim, a conceit of a reluctant Cosa Nostra confidant, the daydream of a disillusioned desperado.
The drinks came and we talked about Montreal and what a free spirited city it was, about how much Paolo missed the place. He told me about a trip he'd made to Sicily years ago to visit the family and how two of his brothers were in prison for life over there. I didn't ask what they had done. I could imagine.
Then it was time to get down to business. Paolo tucked a hundred dollar bill under his half-empty glass and got up, then Ono got up. "Let's go" Paolo said.
Now what?
Paolo led me between the crowded tables with Ono bring up the rear. We went into the hotel, across the lobby to the elevators. Paolo pressed the down button. I had the feeling that Ono was staying unusually close, looming. No one was saying anything and I was suddenly afraid to ask. The car came and Paolo pressed P4, the very bottom level of the parking garage.
Now, I was really getting kind of worried here. The story of the Detroit boys taking Paolo for his little ride in the park came back. "Are we going somewhere in the car?" I asked tentatively.
"No," Paolo said.
It was early in the day, a time when the hotel itself wasn't that busy. I knew the place well enough to know that there was plenty of parking to be had, no need to park away down at the bottom of the garage. When the doors opened it was upon a part of the hotel that I had never seen. Long term parking. The dusty covered hulks of cars kept by affluent occasional guests who could afford to keep several cars in different cities. And since this part of the garage was only used by valets, it was dark and dirty; lit by the light from the elevator, a broken EXIT sign and a few florescent fixtures that hadn't yet blown out or been cannibalized to serve the civilized parts of the establishment.
Paolo led the way between dull Lincoln Continentals and grungy Porsches, past side-by-side, begrimed Bentleys. There was an antique Aston Martin and a Jensen Healey, a nice old, restored, 64 Mustang. There were probably a couple of million dollars in high end and rare cars down here, all grime-coated in the same dark gray exhaust soot, awaiting the day when their owners would call down to the front desk to have them cleaned up, waxed immediately at exorbitant expense and brought up to the sunlight of the circular drive beside the hotel. I was thinking all this on purpose, to take my mind off of the groaning notion that something really odd was happening. It was like an expedition in the French caves at Lascaux. We were spelunking our way to the darkest, narrowing part of the down-sloping cavern known as P4, amidst sculptural relics of times gone by, to an area at the very far end lit only by a single flickering florescent. I'm a bit of a germaphobe who wouldn't normally venture far into a place like this, but right now, somehow, my concern was quickly becoming more for 45 calibre slugs than germs. Had Paolo decided that he'd told me too much? Had Ono convinced him that he had made a grave mistake by having me to their humble abode? The fight or flight instinct reared up full in my frontal lobes. If I ran now I would be shot in the back without ceremony or second thought. No they wouldn't do that. The sound would echo around down here for hours. Could a gun shot even be heard from way down here? Would I be left to bleed to death on the grimy floor until some movie star on the fourteenth floor decided he wanted to go shopping?
Jesus Christ it was really getting dark.
Paolo slowed down, picking his way between the cars, trying not to contact any of the greasy garage grit. My heart leapt when Ono reached inside his jacket and took out something metallic. It was a flashlight. Paolo had one too. Whatever was about to happen they were prepared. I wasn't.
Some of the things Paolo had said upstairs at the meeting came back to me in a new context; "Today is the day we finally close our arrangement." I imagined Robert DeNiro saying this and my alarm ramped up. "I'm going to prove to you that I am a man of my word." What the hell did that mean?
Paolo finally came to a dark Cadillac Deville that looked to be fairly new. I couldn't tell what colour it was, could have been pearl white for all I knew. We, all three, squeezed around the back of the car, to the narrow space where the Caddie had been backed against the wall. What were they going to do, drop me back here where my skeletal remains wouldn't be found for four years or more? My heart was going like a fourteen year old boy on his first date. Paolo took out some keys and tried three or four before the trunk of the Caddie popped open and the red and white light on the lid came on. Oh good, a body could be stashed in here for decades without anyone knowing. I looked up and around for anyone who might be around to see what was going on.
No one.
The trunk, lined with that heavy rough red carpeting, glistened with a nylon sheen. Stacked in there were three wooden crates, each about two and a half feet long and a foot or so wide and deep. Coffins for dwarfs. I got another, lesser, jolt when Paolo reached into his breast pocket and took out something that glinted, shiny in Ono's flashlight. It was a dinner fork secreted from the restaurant in the sunlit freedom far above. He wedged the fork into the first crate and pried it open a crack. Ono stuck his fingers into the gap and pulled the nailed lid off with ease, leaned it against the wall. Paolo cleared a layer of that shredded wood that importers use to pack objet d'art and I beheld my proposed payment for the first time.
Inside the crate were two stacks of hand painted dinner plates each separated from the next by a soft tissue and a layer of light wood chips. Paolo gently lifted one of the plates out and brushed the sawdust from it. Ono shined his light on it. "These are real collector's items," Paolo said proudly. "I got them... well it's not important how I got them, they're very valuable. Here, look, Winslow Homer," and he turned the plate over so I could read the back.
I didn't read the back. I have to tell you the truth; I was so relieved that I wasn't bleeding to death on the floor of that murky, parched parking garage that everything I heard for the next half hour could just as well have been in Cantonese for all I cared. In fact I can barely remember the image on the front of the plate; some sort of American heritage scene of people in a wheat field I think.
I remembered later that Paolo had said "By now these are worth three thousand or thirty five hundred each at least." He told me how many there were in the two crates. I think I recall the estimate of three dozen being mentioned. Everything was a blur. All I could think about was that I was going to live to see my next birthday after all. Paolo took a piece of folded paper from his breast pocket and handed it to me. "Here's the documentation you'll need," and he held the plate out to me. "Take this with you, too."
"Uh, no, that's okay," I took the paper. "This will be enough for now."
When Paolo clicked the trunk lid of the Caddie shut the sound was like the freedom of prison doors closing behind you after release from a fifteen year stretch.
I think I said thank you to Ono again when we parted outside in the driveway. I walked for a long time, until my cardiovascular returned to normal. On the bus I looked at the certificate of authentication; Winslow Homer - Commemorative - second edition... My hands were still trembling a bit, so I couldn't read the smaller print.
Ingrid had a good gut-aching laugh at my recount of the experience and, eventually, so did I. "Why didn't you get him to give you one of the plates?" she said.
"I don't know."
Ingrid had a good friend who dealt in antiques and she read every word on the certificate with a thick magnifying glass, then looked the plates up in a big book she had under her desk. "Why didn't you ask him to give you one of the plates?"
"I uh, didn't have anything to carry it in, didn't want to be walking around with a thirty-five hundred dollar dinner plate in my hand I guess."
"Well they're not that valuable," she said as she flipped to the page where I recognized the plate in question. "Between eighty-five and a hundred and fifteen dollars each plate," she announced, closing the book with a heavy fwuuump. "Depending on the condition."
That meant, at best and all together, I would get about four grand for the lot. I doubted that Paolo knew this. On top of this I was going to have to fence them myself. Terms like fence and payback, and the boys had been creeping into my regular vocabulary lately.
I thought that perhaps it would be best to break this news to him on the phone. Who knows how Paolo and his giant robot would handle real disappointment? I still didn't have his number, I don't think me having his phone number was ever to be part of the plan. I would have to wait for him to call me.
He didn't.
A week went by, then another, then a month. One sunny day we drove out to the apartment in Burnaby.
"Mr. Gallo is no longer here," the concierge announced without look at us.
"Is the apartment for sale?"
"It is."
We looked it up and, sure enough it was listed for 1.4 million. Ingrid called and made an appointment.
The place looked just as we had last seen it. The ironing board was in exactly the same spot. There was even a half empty bottle of Ernest & Julio Gallo white in the fridge. The gallon size bottle that sells for $2.75 in California. Jesus, he hadn't even offered us the good stuff. At least now I knew where he'd gotten the cover name for the concierge. Paolo never did seem to exhibit much imagination.
Ingrid talked the real estate agent, a large woman in her late thirties, down to 1.2 million just for sport and we left.
One day, when I was at the Palisades Hotel to meet a producer about adapting a stage play, I took the elevator down to P4. The Caddie was gone. All the other cars seemed to be more or less where they had been during my first adventure.
I never heard from Paolo again. I did spot Ono once getting into a black limo near the courts with two guys who looked like they had just been acquitted of some serious crime, but there was no opportunity to approach him. Not sure I really wanted to do that anyway.
From time to time I think about Paolo and wonder if he's back in Montreal cutting hair, or still hiding out somewhere in Vancouver, or buried in Stanley Park. And sometimes, when I would see a very pretty girl in the street and hear her speak with a French Canadian accent I would wonder if it could be her.
Not likely.
She probably doesn't even exist.
***
Cover Art: In The Mowing (1874) by Winslow Homer - Public Domain
Diligently proofed by Charlotte Gonder