“Mmm. Well, that is kinda spooky. What am I looking at here?”
“Digitized copy of a film shot sometime before 1918, on silver nitrate stock. Might even date back as far as 1908, which’d put it among the earliest examples of Canadian moviemaking, plus part of the oeuvre of someone I think could be Canada’s very first female filmmaker. A whole chunk of completely unreported Canadian film history, in other words, so my job—yours too, if you opt to help out—would be to track it down, package it up for public consumption.”
“That’s . . . kinda cool as shit, actually.”
“I know, right?” I felt my lips curve in the darkness, shaping a smile of private (yet not totally undeserved) triumph. “Wrob tripped over it as part of the Ontario Film Recovery Project, hooked it out from under Jan Mattheius, and this is all he thinks to do with it. Lost his damn job to make this film, such as it is. But Mrs. Whitcomb here’s the real deal, the real story—you couldn’t make this shit up, man. Tragic life, eccentric habits, mysterious disappearance . . .”
“Seriously?”
I nodded. “It’s all in my notes. I’ll email ’em to you, minute I get home.”
Safie was still staring at the screen, though the clips had ended at least a minute ago; she tapped finge
rtip to bottom teeth, thoughtfully. “And you wanna move quick, I take it?”
“Well, yeah. I’ve been asking around for a month already, give or take—talked to a lot of people, one way or the other. Wrob already knows, and Jan, and Hugo Balcarras. In my experience, once you start connecting the dots, a thing like this doesn’t stay secret for very long.”
“Buried Treasure: The Films of Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb, by Lois Cairns and Safie Hewsen?”
“By Lois Cairns with Safie Hewsen, I was thinking, but sure—we can negotiate, as long as you’re in.” A beat. “So, are you?”
The answer’s probably pretty obvious, by now. But nevertheless:
“. . . Yeah, okay,” Safie replied.
What I didn’t know when I left Soraya Mousch’s installation was that Wrob Barney already had people following me. I know, this sounds paranoid; it isn’t.
Much later, after everything still to happen . . . happened, Wrob’s then-boyfriend/assistant Leonard Warsame and I sat down together and exchanged frankly on exactly how, to paraphrase the Talking Heads, we got here. I filled him in on the various details of my search for Mrs. Whitcomb, while he told me what Wrob had been doing during the same time period—reading texted reports on me and fuming, mostly; trying to figure out how most effectively to undermine me, to steal my work and take credit for it. And all this while Leonard attempted at first to talk him out of it, then gradually stopped doing so, then started to scheme ways to withdraw himself from the situation without Wrob realizing he was doing so until it was an actual faît accompli. That he never quite managed to get there wasn’t really his fault, and I certainly didn’t resent him for it, but I have to admit, I kind of wish I’d known it was going on. Because he might have been a fairly useful person to call upon, in context, once things began getting really bad.
“It’s not a good idea to turn your back on Wrob if you have something he wants,” Leonard told me, sadly. “Believe me, I know. . . .”
And here he went into a long anecdote about another guy Wrob had been involved with, before either Leonard or Jan Mattheuis—this dude who’d approached Leonard out of the blue, trying to warn him off Wrob by telling him how, when he’d tried to launch projects of his own instead of simply supporting Wrob in his dubious ambitions, things suddenly began to go subtly yet horribly wrong in every other area of his life. Oh, Wrob was sympathetic throughout, but that didn’t really help; the guy ended up losing both his day job and his health, plus a lot of his friends—a downward spiral that culminated when he came home one night to find that not only had the cult video store he lived above burned down, effectively destroying all physical copies of his artwork, but that it had done so as part of an apparently deliberate, barely controlled burn designed to clear a whole half-block of Queen Street West. The area was then bought up for gentrification, costing a bunch of people their livelihoods, and the guy in question was forced to move back home to Nova Scotia, where he worked in his parents’ hardware store for the next three years in order to pay rent on his former bedroom.
“He had no clear proof Wrob was involved, and he understood that completely,” Leonard said. “As I recall, he prefaced everything by saying: ‘You’re not going to believe a word I tell you right now, and that’s okay . . . but please, keep it in the back of your mind for afterward, when things that sound familiar start happening, because they will.’ And I blew him off, of course, exactly like he already knew I would; Wrob was everything to me, my best friend, not just my boyfriend. But—”
“He was right,” I filled in. He nodded.
“So right,” he agreed.
Across town, meanwhile, and back in the here and now, Safie was helping Soraya Mousch strike as the sun came up: not the whole ear-whorl maze of flats and padding itself, since that was frankly beyond both their physical capacities and would have to wait for a brawny bunch of movers scheduled for sometime that same morning, but the network of electronics, speakers, and night-vision cameras that supported it. As she packed the last box of bells and whistles into Soraya’s truck and turned for the subway, yawning, she felt Soraya’s hand on her sleeve.
“Let me ask you something, Safie,” she began. “Do you trust Lois Cairns?”
Safie frowned. “Trust her like how?”
“Well, let me put it another way. Is she reliable?”
“Uh . . . she’s weird, that’s for sure; always has been. But weird in a good way. Like she cares too much.”
“She looks tired, to me. Maybe a little sick.”
“Said she’s been having a hard time sleeping. I don’t know if you noticed her eyes or not, but that happened pretty recently, I think.”
“After she saw Wrob Barney’s film?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Safie stopped and thought for a moment. “And that thing about smelling stuff that wasn’t there, too, in the installation . . . that was whack.”
“I overheard, yes. Now I’ll ask you something else. How do you feel, having also seen it?”