The phone started up again. One…Two…Three rings. Not another conversation. His throat was dry. His ear felt like it was pressed flat against his skull. Four…Five. The still humid air, the sweat dripping down his back, the thought of standing up was painful. Nine-thirty. Through the open windows he heard the idle chattering from Market Square where couples walked in slow-motion under the glittering streetlamps. Six…Seven, screeching now. The teletype machines joined in, clattering bulletins from London and Paris. His notebook was full of shorthand transcripts of phone conversations. It had been one of those ‘nothing-is-ready-days’, panic to deadline, reporters lost in traffic. But they had managed to put the late edition to bed. There was the bus crash out on Highway 9, three passengers killed. A grim day. A councilman was forced to resign. A leap over the Joyceville Prison wall. How an inmate could have gotten up the energy to do such a thing in this heat is best explained by desperation. Eight…Nine… Dammit! Where the hell is everybody? “Everyone’s gone home,” a voice from the other side of the newsroom. Not yet.
“Hello, city desk!”
The telephone line sang with static. He heard a voice, soft and certain. “Hello, I’d like to speak to Wallace Lloyd-Craig, please.”
She sounded like a librarian.
“You got him. What can I do for you, ma’am?” Oh no, he thought. She wants a story on the wonders of libraries.
“I need to speak with you in confidence,” she said with a whisper.
“Every call with me is in confidence, ma’am.” Silence. He heard a deep breath. “Maybe you can start by telling me who you are.”
“Well, we met several years ago and you’re the only journalist I’ve ever known…….And I have to speak to a journalist.”
The singing on the line cracked. “Where are you calling from?”
“Montréal. We met in 1939 when you came to the Dominion Shipyards. You were doing an article about the navy frigates being built here for the war.”
“Oh yes,” he said, recalling it as the last time he visited Aunt Emma but the shipyard was a vague memory. “And you remember me?”
“As I said, I’ve never met a journalist, so yes, you were easy to remember.”
Another long pause. He waited her out. Finally, “I have some very important information that I want you to look at. No one’s been killed or anything.”
“That’s a relief, but you’ll have to tell me who you are.”
“Right.” More hesitation. “For now it’ll have to be Miss Smith.”
“How original. All right, Miss Smith, why don’t you go a reporter in Montréal. There are several good ones there.”
“As I said, you’re the only journalist I know.”
Wallace racked his weary brain, trying to remember this woman he might have spoken to seven years ago. An entire war had happened since. “How long did we talk to each other?”
“About two minutes.”
“Two minutes?” said Wallace opening the desk drawers and scrounging around for old notebooks.
“Mr. Craig, if all I have to base my trust on right now is a two minute conversation, that’s going to have to be good enough for you.”
Now Wallace was silent. There was certainty in her voice. He has moved on stories with less than this. “All right. But I can’t get to Montréal for a few days yet. I have…”
“No, I’ll come to Kingston. It’s better we meet there. I don’t want anyone to see me talking to you. I’m sorry, I don’t mean it like…
“It’s all right, Miss Smith. I understand.”
It was arranged that she would take the train to Kingston the next day and rendez-vous at Morrison’s Coffee Shop next door to the Kingston Chronicle building.
The following morning Wallace was sitting in his usual window booth in Morrison’s looking out at Market Square and the train station across the street from City Hall. He had finished reading his morning dose of the first editions: The Globe & Mail, New York Times, Washington Post, Montreal Gazette. He left the front page of The Gazette face-up and stared at the stark photograph, 3 columns wide, top of the fold - the caption: July 6, 1946: 50,000 feet of radioactive cloud: Hurling itself skyward after the atomic bomb burst over Bikini Atoll. Eyewitnesses some 18 miles from the burst said there was only a small, sharp shock after the explosion, not the mighty rushing wind that had been expected.
The morning was hot, humid, the sky glared through the steamed windows. The other Chronicle reporters had left, fanning out across the city for their stories. Kingston did not have the news intensity of Montréal or Toronto, and certainly not of New York, yet there was no shortage of stories to cover, between the nine prisons making Kingston the capital of incarcerations, and the councilmen who were forever lining their pockets by picking the pockets of others. Marge brought Wallace another cup of coffee and a smile. Journalists were always allowed to linger here, they were the clientele twenty-four hours a day, they paid the rent, giving Marge and the owner, Olivier, a sense of pride that their coffee shop was nicknamed Editorial Two. The remaining clientele, the students, the city hall staffers, were also allowed to linger but they would have to tolerate the arguments over proper lead-lines or the Prime Minister as a blockhead.
Nine years ago Simon O’Hara had lured Wallace away from The Sentinel, likely sensing its looming demise. Any dream that the newspaper would rise from the ashes had long since been dashed by the war. Simon had retired from The Chronicle and there was a new editor. Some things had changed but this place had not and Wallace feared that at the age of forty, something had passed him by, he just hadn’t figured out what. By his age his father had travelled the world, seeking out Henri Dunant in the Parisian underground, riding roughshod on a train through the Russian Revolution with a vainglorious Canadian. But his father was also dead, brought down by the work he loved. Wallace heard the whistle. The 10:30 was coming in.
He readied his notebook, writing left-handed the date, time and place, left the subject name blank and looked out the window. Out of the steam mist of the locomotive emerged Hoop Jr. walking alongside a tall woman. Hoop Jr. was a new Rupert’s Rogue hired on for the summer, thirteen years old, five feet tall but walked like he was six. The duo made their way past the vegetable stalls across Market Square. Miss Smith was in animated conversation with Hoop, her hands painting arcs in the air, her floral-patterned cotton dress swaying like a curtain in time with her steps. They dodged through traffic crossing the street to Morrison’s. Hoop Jr. led her to Wallace’s booth. He stood to greet her.
“This is Miss Smith, sir.”
Wallace shook her hand.
“Hoop Jr. tells me he’s named after a horse,” she said playfully.
Hoop Jr. shrugged.
“So he is. Winner of the Kentucky Derby last year,” said Wallace.
“So, you name children after a horse?”
“Everybody’s named after something, ma’am,” said Hoop Jr. “Now, is there anything you need, sir?”
“Yes, Hoop,” said Wallace handing Hoop Jr. a piece of paper. “I need you to get this book for me at the public library, please, and while you’re at it get one for yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” and he ran out.
“Shouldn’t he be in school?”
“He is in school,” said Wallace gesturing to the seat across from him, “Please,” he said, thinking: I haven’t known her one minute and already she’s asking me questions.
Once seated, she placed her briefcase gently at her side, her purse next to it. “So that’s how it is. A newspaper substitutes as school and running errands is job experience?”
This was going to be a long day. “Miss Smith, that boy has more vocabulary than most of the Queen’s University students down the street and more experience than someone twice his age. I assure you I’m not engaged in child labour, the boy is paid, he is in school, a real school, and it’s summer holidays. We have a whole slew of lads, a regular corral come to think of it. Now would you like some coffee or something to eat?”
“I wouldn’t mind some tea.”
“Fine, we’ll get you tea. Then you’ll tell me who you are and what you’ve got in that case which you’ve been holding onto like it was a bomb.”
Marge come to the booth and took her order for tea with lemon, no milk. Despite the humidity, not a bead of sweat showed on Miss Smith’s alabaster face. Her green eyes were bright and inquisitive, her hair short reddish-blonde, her lips narrow and moist, no wedding ring, mid-thirties. She possessed a formal reserve, a firmness of the chin as she leaned back. Marge brought the tea and left.
“So?” said Wallace.
She sighed. “My name is Lydia Beecher. When you saw me in ’39, I was working in the secretarial pool in administration at Dominion. I was promoted and eventually became the executive secretary to the president of the company.”
“Very impressive,” said Wallace, looking straight into her eyes.
She had never been looked at like that before with eyes so intense, almost glaring. He listened without nodding or tilting his head. She opened the briefcase on the table and took out a file folder. “I work exclusively for the president, Mr. William Larson. His office has its own budget, separate from the rest of the company, and he has sole signing authority. If he needs funds for travel expenses, or consulting fees, or office supplies, I arrange for the cheques to be written up by the comptroller and Mr. Larson signs them. He either cashes them himself or I send them out.”
Lydia opened the file folder and laid out ten cheques, spreading them open on the table like she was dealing a poker hand. She explained that at the end of the each month she renders the bank statement and balances the office account. Each of the cheques was made out to a numbered company with amounts from five thousand to twenty thousand dollars. “None of these companies exists except as a post office box in the village of Pointe-Fortune, Québec. Have you ever been there?”
“No, but I expect you have.”
“Indeed. Pointe-Fortune straddles the border with Ontario on the highway to Ottawa. It’s a lovely village, French colonial houses, charming waterfront restaurant. There’s a ferry that takes you across the Ottawa River. I wanted to confirm with the postmaster that this box was registered and if mail was ever picked up. He told me it was but he wasn’t permitted to tell me by whom.”
Lydia had figured out who it was. At the records office for corporate registrations she got the names of the owners of the numbered companies, a Mr. Paulson and a Mr. Lemieux. She knew both of these men. They were bureaucrats in the Defense Department in charge of procurements – government contracts for the production of materials by private companies. Paulson and Lemieux had been in the Larson’s office several times over the past two years. They had meetings but they also had dinners, rounds of golf, and more dinners all at very high-end restaurants. Lydia knew this because she had made the reservations. All this was happening when Dominion Shipyards was making bids to the Defense Department for the frigates and submarines.
“You’re suggesting these are bribes,” said Wallace. “But why would Dominion, with its expertise of building naval vessels, resort to that?”
“Fear of peace,” said Lydia with a bite. “A year before the war ended, military production started winding down. They had enough to finish the war. Dominion knew it was coming to an end along with the gravy train. Once the war was over, that would be it, no more frigates.”
“So why didn’t Dominion switch gears, start building other kinds of ships?”
“It’s a whole different thing to build a passenger liner and much more difficult to get contracts. No, the navy was always a sure thing until 1944. Even as it is, the contract we got was for only one frigate. And it was at double the cost of the competing shipbuilder in Quebec City.”
Wallace didn’t doubt her but he had to know her motivation and sometimes a single woman’s motives maybe more complicated than civil responsibility. “You realize if we publish this story it’ll go national. Other newspapers will follow-up. You may be putting yourself at considerable risk, you could lose your job.” He waited. He wasn’t satisfied yet. “I need to ask you a question. Are you having an affair with Mr. Larson?”
Lydia almost choked on her tea. “You think I’m a jilted mistress, out for revenge because he wouldn’t leave his wife,” she said sternly. “I assure, Mr. Lloyd-Craig, I’m not that stupid. I was never Mr. Larson’s mistress. The idea makes my skin crawl. No, my motive is exactly as you see it. Besides being illegal, it’s unethical to leverage taxpayers’ money to make instruments of war when there is no war. Yes, I may lose my job, I’m aware of that.”
“Well, I can tell you one thing Miss Beecher. If you want to be a journalist, you have all the makings of a good one. The work you’ve done here is quite something.”
“I don’t know if I’d be a good journalist. I’d get too emotionally involved. Objectivity is not one of my strong suits.”
“Nor mine. I come from a long line of non-objective reporting.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“I didn’t come to you because you’re the only journalist I know. You were quite right in saying that there are many good reporters in Montréal. I’ve come to you because I read many of the articles your mother Emma Lloyd-Craig wrote about the Persons Case. I was very interested in her stories and interviews she did with Nellie McClung.”
“Emma is not my mother. She’s my aunt, my father’s sister.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Lloyd-Craig is not a very common surname and…”
“It’s all right. But why the Persons Case?”
She paused and shook her head, looking out the window. “It astounded me that women had to go to court to prove they were persons. That’s what your aunt was writing about. Everybody thought it was a great victory. Is it a victory to go to the Supreme Court to argue such an idea in the first place? Your aunt was angry and many other women were, too, including me. I think that’s why I got the promotion. I swore I would never again accept anything that was beneath my talents.” She ran her fingers over her mouth, considering her next words. “But given what I now know, I wonder how long that will last. Would you mind,” she said putting her hand out, touching his forearm. “I am absolutely starving and it smells so good in here.”
“Of course, Miss Beecher, anything you like.”
“Call me Lydia.”
Lydia suddenly reverted to an almost impish behavior, rubbing her hands together as she looked over the menu. She ordered a full course meal with vegetable soup, a plate of home fries, scrambled eggs and toast, coffee, apple pie with ice cream passing on any suggestion of bacon or sausage. A grimace passed over her face when Marge told her the sausage came with the meal but Lydia waved it away. When the food came, she dived in with the delight of a child opening presents on Christmas morning.
After lunch Wallace took Lydia up to The Chronicle newsroom on the second floor. Lydia harboured the illusion that because newspapers thrived on the written word a newsroom must be like the reading room of a library. Instead, the Chronicle newsroom was an anarchy of people in motion, either on their feet or at their desks. A bluish haze of cigarette smoke hung over the room. The Rogues ran down the stairs, hopped between the desks and two of them sat quietly on a bench at the door to the editor’s office, leaning forward, ready. The telephones, the rattle of the teletype machines – a cross between a sewing machine and a drill – the clattering of typewriters, the rumble of pneumatic tubes, shouts of “Copy!” Sunlight poured in through the large arched windows spanning two walls, all open to the Lake but offering scant relief from the heat. Wallace led the way through the maze of desks to one in a far corner. He removed his jacket and tossed it onto a cot next to the wall behind the desk. It looked like a comfort zone, the pillow and blanket had the ruffled valleys of recent use as well as books stacked on the floor and a curio lamp mounted into the wall. Wallace sat down in front of a typewriter, opened his notebook and began typing, all the while asking Lydia questions about the operations of the company, the prices on the other bids for the contract compared to Dominion’s bid; the golf course, the restaurants, the hotels.
Lydia interrupted, “How do you work in this racket?”
“What racket?” said Wallace, befuddled. He looked around the room. “Today’s a quiet day.”
“This seems like a busy town?”
“It’s going to get a hell of a lot busier soon,” he said returning to his typing. He had to bring in a Montréal reporter to follow-up on leads and to share the byline. He couldn’t be seen to be treading on another newspaper’s territory.
“Territory?” said Lydia. “You sound like the Mafia.”
“What do you know about the Mafia?”
Lydia laughed. “I live in Montreal.”
Given her exalted position with a large company, there was little doubt Lydia would know about the wide open city of Montréal: casinos, nightclubs, brothels, all paid for by protection money to the police and local politicians. It was also the centre of the most vibrant artistic activity in the entire country. The city never slept, the lights on Ste.Catherine Street were always on.
“I’m getting a reporter from Montreal anyway, help with the footwork. Regardless, The Chronicle will be the paper-of-record.”
Wallace telephoned Damien Chamberlan at the La Pressewho agreed to work on the story from there as long as La Presse could print follow-ups. Wallace had to type up the briefing notes for Damien.
“I know how to type,” said Lydia.
“I’m sure you can. Just sit back and relax. I’ll need you to write out some other things…contacts, names.”
Hoop Jr. came running in. “I got it, sir,” dropping a book on the desk.
“What did you get for yourself?”
“Gulliver’s Travels, sir.”
“Good, great book,” said Wallace writing on a piece of paper and handing it to Hoop Jr. “A Class B frigate. I want you to go over the Military College, find some naval officer and ask him for a picture of one of these. Or go to their library, there must be something in there. If you have to, make a drawing. You’re good at that.”
“Yes, sir!” he said with glee and ran out.
“Now I know why you name them after race horses,” said Lydia.
“Thoroughbreds. To be specific.”
Adding to the bedlam, Lydia felt thrumming coming up from the floor. Wallace sensed her concern: “The presses, late edition. Okay, we need a timeline.”
Over the next few hours, they reviewed the sequence of visits from Lemieux and Paulson to Dominion, timed out with the dates of the contract applications, records of phone calls, correspondence, the golf dates, the fine dining, and of course the dates of the cheques. As Wallace typed out the timeline, Lydia wandered over to the three teletype machines. Pages streamed out of the frenzied printer: bulletins from all over Europe. Lydia read one:
Dateline- Marseille, France. 6 July 1946. The Red Cross has established a camp for approximately 2,000 Jewish refugees released over a year ago from the death camp Treblinka in Poland. The refugees have walked through Germany, Belgium, France in an attempt to return to their homes that have been either destroyed or confiscated. These and several other European countries have refused to grant the Jews asylum. The Red Cross is working to secure a ship that will take them to Palestine.
“Those are wire services, Reuters, Hearst, Associated Press,” said Wallace. “We’re part of the network syndication. May I see that one?”
A copy boy tore off the other bulletins and hurried back to his desk. The Rogues ran in and out of the editorial room, their shoes clicking on the stairs, fanning out across Market Square. One remained sitting on a bench next to the editor’s office. A tall man came out of the office and looked around the newsroom. He saw Wallace, walked to his desk and picked up the copy pages next to the typewriter. He leaned against the wall next to the window and began to read. He was tall, somewhat aloof, wearing a vest over an open shirt and shining black cowboy boots covering the lower half of his suit pants. Lydia thought this odd mix of styles and the scowl on his face suggested that nothing in his life ever pleased him.
“This is our editor, John Winchester,” said Wallace.
Winchester did not look up from his reading.
“Hello,” said Lydia, “I’m….
Winchester raised his hand palm up: “I don’t want to know your name.”
Wallace glanced at Lydia, gesturing to say: it’s all right.
Winchester wrote several notes on the last page. “Make sure you corroborate those restaurants and the golf courses. We’ll need dates and times and whomever else was there.”
“And the anonymous source?”
Winchester said, “I’m fine with that,” and as he walked away he paused in front of her, said, “Thank you,” and stalked back to his office.
“What was that all about?” said Lydia.
“It’s a way of saying you were never here. He’s protecting you as a source.”
“From whom?”
“Well, if some lawyer were to ask him under oath if he ever saw you here, he’ll say, Who? It’s being rendered a nobody, like a Miss Smith and you’re obviously comfortable with that. There is one thing I want to know. All this work you’ve done…Why?”
“Shouldn’t a person have a social conscience?”
“Of course. But a story like this could close down Dominion, the workers lose their jobs.”
Lydia leaned back and stared at Wallace severely. “Where do you think that money went? Do you think if the contract came in at double the cost that the crews would get double the salary? The shareholders will make the money, not the crews. This is corruption and the house is playing with taxpayers’ money. That’s why I’m doing this.”
Night rolled in, the thrumming relentless under the floorboards, the telephones went quiet. Lydia looked over the newsroom as the reporters typed and the editors slashed through copy with red pencils. Hundreds of stories, each with meaning for hundreds of readers and hers was but one that could get lost under-the-fold on page ten. Abruptly through the open windows came the wail of a train whistle and the grinding of brakes. Lydia went to the window: “Damn! That’s my train. Can I make it!?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She grabbed her briefcase and ran out with Wallace. They made it halfway across Market Square when the Montréal-bound train pulled out under a thick cloud of black smoke. The heat enveloped them. They had to catch their breaths and let the breeze from the lake cool them.
“I’ll have to… get…a hotel room,” said Lydia.
“There’s plenty of room in my house. I have a guest room. You’re welcome to stay.”
Lydia accepted his offer. She had been with enough men to know who was sincere - who had ulterior motives - and who was not. Some had been intelligent or good-looking or a brave soldier or even rich but none of them had it. There had been talk of marriage with one. He was a “solid man”, a banker and had purchased a bungalow in one of the new suburban developments in the west island of Montréal. Lydia wanted none of it. Work. That’s what she wanted more than anything – a purpose, a career. She didn’t have the nerve to tell Wallace that she hadn’t brought enough money with her and would likely have had to sleep on a bench in the station. After having dinner in a pub off Market Square they walked up Princess Street.
Walking with Wallace proved somewhat…extended. He was the slowest walker she had ever seen, trailing slightly behind while taking in the shop windows or a car driving by. Everything seemed to merit a slow steady gaze. She asked him why.
“I spend my whole day operating at the speed of light. This is me unwinding.”
He finally unwound himself at the front door of a modest two-storey red brick house on a quiet street off Princess. He turned on the lights, walked down the hallway to the kitchen, “I’ll make tea.”
Lydia found herself surrounded by framed paintings hanging on the walls of the dining room, hallway and living room, three or four high, and it seemed to her to be at least forty, maybe fifty, panoramic landscapes and portraits and street scenes, her eyes drinking in the vibrancy of the entire colour wheel. She knew what she was seeing. The museums and art galleries of Montréal were her frequents haunts. To Lydia a painting on a canvas was what an artist actually touched, looked at, spoke to and cursed.
There was sudden incongruity on the wall next to a bay window. These were photographs, black-and-whites of a village street, women in crinoline skirts, horse-and-buggies. Also sepia tones of rugged mountains. The lower right-hand corner of each photo was embossed with: H.C. Branch – Lenox, Québec. She moved on to a small landscape oil painting. Wallace came in carrying a tray, setting it on the table and poured the tea.
“This is a Pissarro,” said Lydia excitedly. “And over there is a Degas and a Renoir.”.
“Two Renoirs actually. And there’s a Cassatt in the hallway,” he said handing her a tea cup.
“Are you an art collector, too?”
Wallace chuckled. “No. I’m more of a…more of an art minder. These are all part of my mother’s collection. She was an art curator, had a gallery in London and in Montréal. She died a few years ago and I inherited the collection.” He sips tea and scans his eyes over the paintings.
“I’m so sorry. Do you still have the Montreal gallery?”
“No, I had to close it. My work is here. I have sold many of the works but only to reputable art galleries and museums. My mother taught me who to look for and who to avoid. It’s not hard. I had a guy come in here last year, pointed to the Degas over there and said, ‘I’ll give you five hundred bucks for it.’ Hah. It’s been appraised at a hundred thousand. I asked him what turnip truck he thought I’d fallen off of and showed him the door. The last thing I want is having this art buried in some rich guy’s bunker. So I wait, until the right people come along.”
“How did your mother acquire all this?”
“Easy,” he said, leaving the room. He returned with a large folio book and opened it to a painting printed over two pages. “This is the current Lesage Auction House catalogue. Do you know this painting?”
Lydia recognized it instantly. “It’s Bar aux Folies-Bergère by Manet.”
“Excellent. The barmaid? That’s my mother, Aline.”
Lydia leaned in closer to the print: in the centre, a barmaid dressed in a black velvet jacket trimmed tightly around her narrow waist, her large, melancholy eyes seemingly looking at the viewer; the marble-top bar stocked with champagne, beer, a glass tray of oranges and two roses in a glass; the palms of her hands pressed against the edge of the bar, her arms straight in a pose of rest; and behind her the mirror filling the background reflecting gaily dressed patrons and a woman swinging on a trapeze. Then the trick: in the mirror the back of the barmaid herself, facing away from the viewer. A subtle deception for the reflection reveals that the barmaid is not looking at the patrons, but into the eyes of a moustached man, likely Manet himself, staring back at her, studying her face. “That was your mother? She’s beautiful.”
“Yes, she was. She modeled for many of the artists. Sometimes she was paid with whatever painting she wanted. And my father, George, he was always bringing home art. Every time he went out on assignment he’d come back with a trunk load of sketches or drawings from all over Europe.”
Lydia wandered off to see more of the paintings in the hallway. Wallace stared at the barmaid. He realized it was the first time he had looked at the print since his mother had died in 1942. It wasn’t so much because he had shied away from all the memories it evoked. He simply hadn’t thought about it and now that he had, it physically hurt in his head and his chest. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t done it, knowing this would happen, made all the harder because another person was present. Looking at the barmaid made him think of the scores of galleries Aline had taken him to in New York, Boston and Québec City. With his mother it was like going to church, sitting in front of a painting and worshiping it silently for hours. “If you want to be a journalist like your father,” she said once, “be an art critic. It’s safer.” He remembered when she was dying that her eyes grew even sadder when she realized it would be impossible to take her body back to Paris for burial. There was the never ending war and the Nazis occupied Paris. So they buried her on the hillside in Lenox with Samuel and Leah and Emma and Peter. At least that made it easier for Wallace to visit her grave and tell her about the galleries he had toured. Lydia roused him from his reverie. “Are there more paintings?”
“Yes, several more. They’re stored in an old building in Lenox. Listen, you must be tired. Let’s get you settled in.”
Lydia could see that Wallace was tired, too, and pretty much all talked out. He set her up in a cozy guest room on the second floor with a connecting bathroom. The house was quiet during the night with only the sound of the curtain shifting in the breeze. She was always restless when sleeping in a strange bed and sleep was evasive. A few hours into the night she heard footsteps – slow ones- going down the stairs, perhaps up, she couldn’t tell. The front door opened and softly closed…footsteps fading into silence. She was alone.
At dawn, Hoop Jr. was at the front door ready to escort Lydia to the train station. They walked up Princess Street towards Market Square, passing the vendors opening their shops, aromas of coffee drifting out. The night’s wind had blown the humid air away. All of it made Lydia’s stomach rumble. “Can we stop at Morrison’s for a cup of coffee?”
“Don’t worry, ma’am. Mr. Lloyd-Craig has something for you at the station.”
“Wonderful. Did you find anything regarding the frigate?”
“Yes ma’am, got a photograph,” he said with certainty.
Lydia laughed; thirteen years old and he owns the world.
Wallace was waiting on the Kingston Station platform and holding a brown paper bag. Hoop Jr. dashed back across the square.
“There’s a Morrison breakfast in there,” he said handing the bag to Lydia. She could smell coffee, eggs and cinnamon, the bag was steamed moist. “Sorry I wasn’t around this morning.”
They turned their heads to the sounds of a whistle approaching.
“I figure it’s something you do every night.”
“Yes, rather than worry about bringing work home with me, I simply don’t go home.”
A hint of sadness passed over his face and in a moment was gone.
“Were you working on my story?”
“No, I wasn’t. I’m always working on others.” He paused to look out over the lake. “People think the war is over but it’s not. Europe is in shambles. No water, no food, no electricity, no trains. There are millions of refugees trying to get home but in most places, nothing is left, just mounds of rubble. I read the stories out of Germany, France, Hungary. I’ve been following that story about the Jewish refugees the one you were reading off the teletype. They escape Treblinka only to find themselves in another camp. Do you see the brutal irony of that? Hitler might be dead but Europe is not finished with the Jews. I hope they make it and I’m going to write about them until they do. They’ll set up their own country, Israel, far away from the Europeans who’ve been trying to kill them for two thousand years.”
The train blew past them and screeched to a stop. Lydia stepped onto the first step of the railcar. “So in the scheme of things, my story is small potatoes.”
“Not at all. It’s a very important story. It’ll get done. Just keep your head down.”
The train began its slow grind out of the station. Lydia stayed on the step as Wallace walked along with her.
“So you believe me?” she said.
“I wouldn’t have brought you breakfast if I didn’t.”
She smiled. The train slowly picked up speed and Wallace kept pace with it.
“I’ll be hearing from you?”
“Yes, you will,” he said, stopping abruptly as he ran out of platform.
She waved to him and entered the rail car. Another person leaving on a train. He loathed this. Every time it’s happened to him, they’ve never come back. He watched the train cross the Cataraqui Bridge and slip into the sunrise. This time he wasn’t going to let that happen.
Lydia looked out the train window wondering if she had made the right decision confiding in Wallace. Who did he think he was, asking if she was having an affair with Larson? It’s been the same with all the men she’s known: yes, women may be ‘persons’ now but men continue to assume women still get what they want by way of the bedroom. She would’ve walked out had she not already revealed so much. For this she was risking everything, perhaps even jail for stealing private documents. Maybe when she gets back to Montréal she will telephone him and call the whole thing off. But there was something about him, something she could not explain. The hot morning sun streamed through the window and she saw a young boy standing on a haystack waving at the train. She waved back.
Part I - Part II
© Richard Stanford – 2025
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