The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [140]
At last we made it as far as the lawyer’s. When I first consulted this firm, back in the 1940s, it was located in one of those sooty red-brick Manchester-shaped office buildings, with a mosaic-tiled lobby and stone lions, and gold lettering on the wooden doors with their pebble-glass inserts. The elevator was the kind that had a crisscross grille of metal bars within the cage itself; stepping into it was like going briefly to jail. A woman in a navy-blue uniform and white gloves ran it, calling out the numbers, which reached only to ten.
Now the law firm is housed in a plate-glass tower, in an office suite fifty floors up. Walter and I ascended in the gleaming elevator, with its plastic marble interior and its smell of car upholstery and its crush of suited people, men and women both, all with the averted eyes and vacant faces of lifelong servants. People who see only what they’re paid to see. The law office itself had a reception area that might as well have been that of a five-star hotel: a flower arrangement of eighteenth-century density and ostentation, thick mushroom-coloured wall-to-wall, an abstract painting composed of pricey smudges.
The lawyer arrived, shook hands, murmured, gestured: I was to accompany him. Walter said he would wait for me, right where he was. He stared with some alarm at the young, polished receptionist, with her black suit, mauve scarf and nacreous fingernails; she stared, not at him, but at his checked shirt and his immense, pod-like rubber-soled boots. Then he sat down on the two-bum sofa, into which he sank immediately as if into a pile of marshmallows; his knees jack-knifed, his pant legs shot up, revealing thick red loggers’ socks. In front of him, on a suave coffee table, was an array of business magazines, advising him on how to maximize his investment dollar. He picked up the issue on mutual funds: in his vast paw it looked like a Kleenex. His eyes were rolling around in his head like a steer’s at a stampede.
“I won’t be long,” I said, to calm him. I was in fact somewhat longer than I’d thought. Well, they bill by the minute, these lawyers, just like the cheaper whores. I kept expecting to hear a knock on the door, and an irritated voice: Hey in there. Whatcha waiting for? Get it up, get it in and get it out!
When I’d finished my business with the lawyer, we made our way back to the car and Walter said he’d take me to lunch. He knew a place, he said. I expect Myra had put him up to this: For Heaven’s sakes make sure she eats something, at that age they eat like a bird, they don’t even know when they’re running out of steam, she could die of starvation in the car. Also he may have been hungry: he’d devoured all of Myra’s carefully packed sandwiches while I was sleeping, and the brownies into the bargain.
The place he knew was called The Fire Pit, he said. He’d eaten there the last time, maybe two-three years ago, and it had been more or less decent, considering. Considering what? Considering that it was in Toronto. He’d had the double cheeseburger with all the trimmings. They did barbecued ribs there, and specialized in grilled things generally.
I remembered this eatery myself, from over a decade ago – back in the days when I’d been keeping an eye on Sabrina, after that first time she’d run away. I used to hang around her school at day’s end, positioning myself on park benches, in spots where I might waylay her – no, where I might have been recognized by her, though there was scant chance of that. I’d hide behind an opened newspaper, like some obsessed, pathetic flasher, filled similarly with hopeless yearning for a girl who’d doubtless flee me as if I were a troll.
I wanted only to let Sabrina know I was there; that I existed; that I wasn’t what she’d been told. That I could be a