Riviera Blues. Jack Batten
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at home. Nice day for a walk. Tulips were starting to bloom red and yellow in the boulevards that divide University Avenue. Secretaries and guys in shirt sleeves ate lunches out of paper bags on the benches around the plaza behind the Toronto-Dominion Centre. And in the little park next to the Flatiron Building, people reclined in the grass with their faces up to the sun, getting a head start on their summer tans. If I were Gene Kelly, I’d have broken out the taps for a chorus of “It Might as Well Be Spring.”
Coaster’s was down a short sloping street that ran alongside the market. Delivery trucks jammed up the traffic, dropping off crates of lettuce and sides of beef to the vendors in the market building. The restaurant was on the opposite side of the street and up two flights of stairs. I climbed the two flights. The room was agreeably ramshackle and felt like it’d be easy on the noontime nerves. The only flaw was the place’s sound system and the owner’s lousy taste in tapes. Willie Nelson was whining about another cheatin’ woman.
Trum Fraser had a table for two beside one of the windows. The table and chairs were like the rest of the restaurant, somewhere between unpretentious and rickety.
“Know what I like about this joint?” Trum said.
“Everything except the music.”
Trum listened as if he were taking in Willie’s droning for the first time.
“Not that shit,” he said. “What I like, the bartender here understands the connection between the words bathtub and martini.”
“Makes them ample, does he?”
“The guy must be American,” Trum said. “Ever notice how unsatisfied you feel after a Canadian martini?”
Trum’s face was that of a man on a lifelong search for the satisfying martini. Flushed cheeks, veins beginning to break, nose headed in the direction of W.C. Fields’. He was about thirty pounds too heavy, stuffed into his brown suit, the collar of his white shirt digging a crease in his neck. But as lushes went, Trum was a thinking man’s lush. I’d never seen him drunk. Never seen him when his brain wasn’t taking care of business.
“You could’ve had it made, Crang,” Trum said to me. He must have arrived five or ten minutes earlier. The level of the martini in his hand was two-thirds of the way down the bathtub.
“If you’re talking about life in general, I’m not doing too badly,” I said. “If it’s the law, I never counted on getting it made. Just getting a light grip on it is sufficient.”
“I mean business, the trust company, good old C&G,” Trum said. “After you got off the phone this morning, I was thinking, when you were married to Pamela, Jesus, if you’d played your cards right, you’d be up there on the thirty-second floor today, right down the hall from Whetherhill.”
“You know how much fun that’d be, Trum?”
“Fun, hell. Think of the power.”
“About as much fun as you in partnership with the other two Frasers.”
“Oh, low blow. I’d be honoured to serve alongside my papa and sibling.”
“Bull.”
“Fortunately they never asked me.”
A waitress showed up at our table.
“Connie, my little petunia,” Trum said to her, holding out his empty martini glass, “I trust you’re keeping count.”
“When I come back,” Connie said, “it’ll be with the third.”
“What time’d you get here, Trum?” I asked.
“Noon,” Connie answered for him. “Stroke of. As usual.”
I asked for a glass of white wine. The menu was printed in small type on the place mats. Trum said he’d have the Friday special. I went for a dish billed as half an appetizer plate.
“Speaking of your shop,” I said to Trum, “how’s business?”
“Be specific.”
“Jamie Haddon.”
“There you go, old buddy, another case of nepotism. But he’s smarter than you, Crang, young Jamie is. He has tied himself to old Whetherhill’s coattails, and he’s not about to let go.”
“I think you got your metaphors mixed up there, Trum.”
“Jamie also knows which side his bread is buttered on.”
Connie made the round trip with my white wine and Trum’s third martini.
“Leaving aside family advantages,” I asked Trum, “how is Jamie on his own merits, in your humble opinion?”
“Well, one talent of his, he’s hot stuff in the boardroom. Very organized with the reports when his turn comes around. Doesn’t say a whole lot, but he drops the odd harmless witticism. Knows how to butter up the guy in the chair without brown-nosing. He’s a political guy, Jamie.”
“Young man going places is what you’re telling me?”
“Listen, I’ll lay it out for you from the top. C&G isn’t a bad place to work, not for Jamie, not for me, not for anybody. You think of it, we’re talking about the last of the old-school trust companies in this country that hasn’t been gobbled up by a bank or some marauding American. The company is solid as a rock, and it’s Whetherhill, him and his family, who built it. Swotty’s idea of a lavish salary doesn’t happen to coincide with mine, but there are other benefits. Stock options, smart people to work with, and God knows the place is going to be there forever. That’s all Whetherhill’s accomplishment, and you’re asking about Jamie Haddon, well, Swotty treats the kid like he’s seen the future and Jamie Haddon’s in it.”
Connie plunked down two plates. The Friday special was chili. My half appetizer plate held a full complement of fish, crustaceans, and molluscs. Shrimp, lobster, herring, two oysters.
“Computers,” I said to Trum, moving along my list of topics. “I assume C&G is chock-a-block with them.”
“I love those suckers.”
“You personally? You use a computer?”
“I got a little honey right beside my desk. Every day I ask myself, how did I ever work, how did I live, before whoever invented computers invented them.”
“You should understand this is coming as a cruel disappointment to me, Trum. I had you down for a fellow Luddite.”
Trum pointed his fork at me.
“I got something I want to give to my secretary … follow me on this, Crang, it’s a good example of what my computer does for me … and the secretary isn’t at her desk. Do I chase after her, wait around, look for another girl? Hell, no, I bang the message, the memo, whatever, into my computer and press a button and, zip, it’s in her computer. Or, get this, I’m setting up a short meeting with a couple of other people, say some guys two floors down from me. Am I gonna take the elevator, and it ends up these guys are out of the office, in a conference, something like that? You kidding me? I do the whole arrangement on the computer. Never leave my desk. Those examples, I save myself, easy, thirty minutes out of every day at the office.”
Trum was serious.
“That’s great,” I said. “What do you do with the extra half-hour?”
“Get out to the golf course a half-hour earlier.”
Trum was still serious.
“What about Jamie?”
“Never played golf with him. He looks more of a squash type to me.”
“Come on, Trum, you know what I mean. Jamie and computers.”
“Now you mention it, he’s pretty sharp. He talks all the time about ways we can use computers I never thought of. The truth is I don’t frankly understand it when Jamie gets on one