East of Suez Read Free Page A

mouth.
    I looked at the cardboard carton with my collection of phone-bugging equipment in it. I could make a gift of the whole works to Savas or Staziak at Niagara Regional Police. The last time I looked those guys were using tin cans and string to keep in touch with each other. I remember one of them saying that the only time they listened in on a conversation was when it was my quarter in the phone.
    While I was looking at the cardboard box, I suddenly realized how ancient my own bits and pieces of technology were. I could even see a metal box with space for ten B batteries to be installed. Nowadays, electronic equipment runs on things far more sophisticated than B batteries. The only word I could think of was “transistor,” and that was probably long out of date. Who could I give this junk to? Maybe my brother’s girls might know what to do with it. Damn it! What the hell!
    I wondered why the question hit me so hard. What was the point? Then I understood. This was my life I was dismantling. This was who I was. I felt like a schoolboy pulling apart a robin’s nest. No wonder I wasn’t enjoying it.

TWO
    A MONTH LATER , the office looked the same. I had moved a few things around, but the plain fact is: I wasn’t getting anywhere. An ancient file would hold me for hours as I tried to recall the details of an old case. Every scrap of paper had a claim on my time. As a result, I was standing in the center of a circle of halffilled cardboard boxes. I picked up a file, studied the face in a photograph, sighed, and took another sip of cold coffee.
    Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t spend all my time in that depressing old office. I’d been to the courthouse, watched a few short trials. I’d visited old friends, even had drinks with Savas and Staziak. I went to the movies. I visited my aunt in a nursing home who was far worse off than I was. I tried to find a place along St Andrew Street where they made a choppedegg sandwich like they used to make them at the defunct Diana Sweets. I went for walks around Grantham, trying to remember the streets. I even went to see if I could find the tunnel under the old canal that once saved my life. I kept busy, all right, but in the mornings I most often wound up in the office staring at the litter.
    I moved on, trying to outwit depression, lifting boxes from the floor to the desk and from the desk to a chair. It was like trying to hide my unwanted string beans under my mashed potatoes. It didn’t work. I told myself that the depression had nothing to do with my recent stay in Rose of Sharon Rehab Hospital. Tidying and cleaning up have always hit me this way. This was nothing special.
    One afternoon, just as I was about to open another cardboard box of aging equipment, there was a knock on my door.
    Hadn’t Anna said that she had a department meeting? I only half remembered. Having disposed of Anna as a possibility, I realized the mystery remained. “Come in!” I shouted, somewhat louder than necessary. I repeated the invitation and then wedged my back into the chair behind my desk and waited for the door to open, which, in due course, of course, it did.
    It was one of the Pressburger girls; I couldn’t tell which one. I tried to maintain my curiosity and indicated a chair with the hand not gripping the edge of my desk.
    “Benny?” she began. “Do you remember me?”
    “You’re one of the Pressburger clan, aren’t you?”
    “Yes! I’m Victoria. Vicky. Remember? You remember my sisters, Jane and Lizzy?”
    “I remember all of you. One or another of you was always winning prizes. I used to wonder whether you were triplets.”
    “No, just very close together. I’m the one in the middle. We longed to be in the same class, but the school wouldn’t do it. It’s not supposed to be good for kids’ development—their emotional development, I mean.”
    I thought I understood why she clarified that for me. Victoria Pressburger was an attractive, busty woman in her late thirties,