The unshaven, one-legged man sat at the shabby café off Spadina, reading The Toronto Mail. He by-passed the lead story about Palestinian peace talks and turned directly to local crime news--the search continued for three missing University of Toronto coeds.
Grogan reached over to an ashtray in a nearby table and fished-out a discarded cigarette stub. Two high-breasted Vietnamese girls wearing garish purple lipstick slithered through the market-stalls as he lit up.
Grogan groaned. There was that feeling rising in him as sure as the sun. He needed a woman. Unfortunately opportunities were nil, that is until he remembered the Hindu fortune-teller an acquaintance had told him about.
Madame Vishnu was located up some filthy stairs above a nearly-deserted shop for ayuverdic medicine. A faint bell grumbled as Grogan painfully thrust himself up the steps, and a plump Indian woman, wrapped in a sari that exposed her distended belly, hurried forward from where she had been ironing.
"What you want?" The woman appeared agitated."I understand you do readings.""Five dollars.""How about I trade you something instead?" Grogan said."What you got?"
Grogan took a long knife out of his knapsack and laid it on the filthy, oil-cloth-covered table in front of the woman, then watched as her eyes kindled with interest.
"I will take," she said, hurriedly throwing the knife in a grocery bag and motioning Grogan to sit.
"Let me see your hand."Grogan extended his puffy brown hand with swollen, fat fingers stained yellow at the last joint.
"You change your name," Madam Vishnu said with one glance at the hand.
"How'd she know that?" Grogan thought, thinking how extraordinary it was she should hit upon how he'd been born Rene Gagne in Halifax and changed his name to Grogan after a series of forged checks resulted in a stay in prison.
Madame Vishnu returned to his hand. "You lose your leg in boat accident. It is still much pain."
"Well lucky guess," Grogan thought. Yes, the leg had been amputated on a freighter when some steel pallets, shifted and yes he was troubled by ongoing pain in the foot of his phantom leg.
The seer stared into his palm."Your wife died five years ago."Holy Christ--three in a row! The woman was genuinely psychic.
He stared in fascination at the little red spot between her narrowly set eyes.
What was such a thing as a red spot called? Ah he didn't care; he got up his courage again."Uh, they tell me you do sex for money."
"You got car?"Grogan nodded his head--a '72 Ford that barely ran, such as it was. "You come back in an hour then.""OK,"
Grogan agreed, "but one more thing. How long am I going to live?"Madame Vishnu took a long gaze at his palm and then slowly closed his fingers into a fist."No more reading now," she said."Why? What the hell?"
"Cost more money.""Oh, I get it--a racket, huh?""You come back in an hour."
When Grogan returned, he immediately saw why the woman was concerned about a car. She had two shopping bags full of stuff, a large purse, and what looked like three hat-boxes wrapped in brown paper.
With some difficulty he helped the woman hump her day's trophies to his Ford and then discovered with amazement she insisted on sitting in the back seat.
As instructed, Grogan drove through the twilight to 170th and Keefe near the 401 Bypass. It was a drab immigrant neighborhood of grubby, two-storey-attached-brick apartments that seemed to run on forever.
Grogan tried to make conversation, but before long he realized he was doing a monologue."So how much is it going to cost me besides the knife?" he finally said.
"I no charge. You drive me home and help me carry."Grogan brightened up at that. Hell, it was almost like a date if you thought about it in a certain way.
At last the woman signaled to drive behind a row of flats and park. Grogan helped the woman schlepp the boxes and the grocery bags and her purse into the rear hallway of the apartment building, neither of them noticing one over-looked hat-box left on the backseat. "You wait here," the woman said.
Grogan stood in the filthy, unlit landing, sniffing the vaguley unpleasant odor of Indian cooking that suffused the tenement. In a few minutes, the woman gestured for him to come upstairs.
Her apartment was a paper-pealing monstrosity with a cockatoo in a cage, an old glassy-eyed man half-buried in a chair, and three small bug-eyed, under-fed urchins staring at a black and white TV.
"You come back here now," the woman said, stepping behind two cobbled-together plastic shower curtains that had been nailed to the ceiling to create a semblance of privacy.
Grogan stared with avidity as the woman unceremoniously unwrapped her sari, applied some grease to her private parts, and flung herself backwards on a low-lying trundle bed.
It was all rather repulsive, but Grogan made himself stare at the red mark on the woman's forehead and somehow completed what he'd come for without any more pleasure than the turning on of a faucet.
However, as soon as he was done, he felt a slight sense of relief and said, "Well now at least you can tell me how long I'm going to live."
"Do not ask anymore," the woman said, already re-wrapping herself in what was now clear to Grogan was a filthy sari.
"Why so damn mysterious?" Grogan said, with a rising feeling of irritation towards the woman and her red spot.
"You go way now," the woman said insistently.It was completely dark when Grogan returned to his car. Various pizza delivery trucks mosquitoed through the streets, and gangs of thugs in throbbing cars with darkened windows cruised slowly looking for trouble.
For some reason, Grogan's missing foot ached horribly as he drove slowly towards his flat in Etobicoke, and all he could think of was the woman's red mark.
Police Log...
The Toronto Metropolitan Police were at a loss to explain it. Apparently the driver of the Ford, one Robert Grogan a.k.a Rene Gagne had had a heart attack sitting at the wheel while driving, which explained why the car was found wedged into the broken plate glass window of a dingy Chinese carryout on Eglinton.
What was not so readily explicable was the hat-box found on the backseat, which contained the severed head of one of the missing University of Toronto coeds.
However, the driver, Grogan, never regained consciousness to shed any light on events, nor did Madame Vishnu come forward to explain how she had found a ready market for human flesh in the melange of ethnic restaurants that populated her end of the throbbing city, which, no doubt, was a relief to the parents of the three missing coeds.
For after all, to have one's daughter murdered is one thing, but to have her flesh eaten is a horror of another dimension.
--end--
