The Hidden Keys Read online

  For three years following his mother’s death, Tancred did not see Willow at all. The idea that they were destined to be close faded to grey, along with any number of assumptions and ideas that had preceded the death of his mother.

  And then Willow walked back into his life.

  It was a Sunday and it had rained. Tancred was wet and cold as he sat in one of the half-booths at the Skyline: orange leatherette seats on both sides of a white laminate tabletop. Sunday was now the day he spent alone. He would wake at seven, eat eggs and brown toast at the diner, return home, read from the King James Bible, make plans for the week to come, clear his mind and go to sleep early.

  By now, he’d spent Sundays this way for years, and even some who knew him assumed there was a religious tinge to his discipline. But there was not. What there was was devotion to his mother. For the hour or so it took for him to read twenty pages, Tancred felt her presence. Or at least he thought of her. His reading of the Bible did not lead him to God or prayer or worship. It did not lead him to a new life. Though it was no doubt less than what his mother had hoped for, he simply grew more and more familiar with what was, for him, a mostly tiresome but sometimes entertaining repository of catalogues, tales and poetry.

  He had ordered his eggs and toast, when Willow came in off the street. She saw him and, speaking to the waiter, asked that her coffee be brought to Tancred’s table. She was neither spaced out nor flagrantly high. She was thinner than she had been, however, and she wore more makeup. She greeted him, took off her raincoat and sat down.

  – I’ve been looking for you, said Willow. Freud Luxemberg told me you come here on Sundays. And Nigger told me you’re a thief. Is that true?

  – Why do you want to know? asked Tancred.

  – You think I’m a foolish old woman, said Willow. And I am. I know it. But I’m more than that, Tancred. If you’ll listen to me, I have a proposition. You don’t have to say anything. I’ll do the talking. But first, I want you to know how I ended up here.

  – Where? asked Tancred. The Skyline?

  – No, no, said Willow. Here. In this life.

  She began to rummage in a purse that was black, cumbersome and capacious, with a clip that looked like two brass moths meeting, their entangled antennae keeping the purse closed.

  – My name is Willow Azarian, she said. My family is well-known.

  – You told me all this, said Tancred, when we met.

  – Yes, she said, and you may have got the impression that I worship money and status. But I don’t. I just wanted you to know who I am.

  She took a bank statement from her purse and said

  – This is from my expense account.

  She pushed the statement to his side of the table. Tancred looked at it. Yes, it belonged to ‘Willow Azarian.’ Willow reached across and put her finger beside a number at the bottom of the page. For a moment, looking down, Tancred assumed he was mistaken about the figure he saw there:

  $15,011,957.07

  – It’s only my mad money, said Willow. I have much more.

  – Why are you showing me this? asked Tancred.

  – I want your help, she answered.

  Her eyes were blue, not big or round, but set off by her thick eyebrows. Her face was pleasantly oval, her lips thin but expressive. Her ancestry would have been difficult to guess. Her clothes, on the other hand, suggested ideas of elegance whose time had long passed. She was wearing a black dress with padded shoulders, the dress’s collar cascading from one shoulder like three dark ripples and coming to a point on the other.

  Willow was out of place in Parkdale. It would have been difficult to say where she’d have fit in. But she was not weak.

  – What can I do for you? he asked.

  2 Willow’s Inheritance

  By her own account, Willow had had a wonderful childhood. It had been everything she might have wished for. Her parents had been loving. Her siblings had helped to take care of her, changing her diapers and feeding her when her mother was tired. They had all doted on her.

  For her first eight years, she felt loved and precious. The world itself was marvellous. The Azarians lived in Toronto for most of the year but in winter they moved to Key West where Nicole, their mother, had lived as a child. Willow had had, she believed, the best of north and south: the dry quiet of Rosedale (wealthy, its big houses politely distant from the street) and the sea-shush of Old Town (thirty degrees Celsius in the morning, houses modest and close); the soft rain along streets with tall trees and torrential storms so vivid she was certain their house in the Keys would shake apart.

  Though she would not have changed a moment of her early childhood, it was not without its shadows, shadows that lengthened until they blotted out her adolescence. The worst of them was her mother’s illness: Creutzfeldt-Jakob. The eight-year-old Willow watched as the mother she loved was slowly taken from her, slowly becoming a woman Willow did not know. It took a year for Nicole Azarian to die.

  This being the first and most frightening death in Willow’s life, it would be fair to say that she never recovered from it. For one thing, her mother’s death was the beginning of an anxiety about her father. For years she had nightmares in which her father succumbed to the same disease as her mother. Awake, the young Willow watched for symptoms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob in her father: dementia, changes in personality, the shakes.

  Her father, for his part, had nothing but sympathy for his youngest. She was, maybe even to her detriment, the one child he indulged, the only one whose presence he always welcomed. Over the years, their bond was precious to both of them. She kept watch over him whenever he was home, while he came to think of her as a confidante.

  This was a point Willow wanted to impress on Tancred: she was convinced that she’d known her father best – his personality, his deepest thoughts, his sense of humour, his playfulness, his strange ideas, his follies. Although she’d loved her father unconditionally, love had not blinded her to his flaws. That is to say, she had a realistic idea of who the man named Robert Azarian had been. It was crucial that Tancred take Willow’s word for this, if he was to grasp a second point she wanted to make.

  At her mother’s death, Willow’s father had been forty-three and extremely wealthy. He had inherited millions and worked to make countless millions more. When he died of cancer in 2005, he died a multi-billionaire whose main company, Azarian Holdings, was involved in any number of enterprises in any number of countries.

  At her father’s death, the last thing on Willow’s mind was the state of Azarian Holdings or her father’s will or her inheritance or anything of the sort. Her grief was such that her siblings were, rightly, troubled by her state of mind. Three years after her father’s death, however, financial matters did begin to impinge on Willow’s mind. Her grief gave way to an obsession with her father’s legacy. Robert Azarian had left each of his children two hundred million dollars and a one-fifth share of his businesses and assets. He had made his eldest son, Alton, head of Azarian Holdings, but his five children were equally served by his will. In effect, each inherited almost a billion dollars.

  Along with the money and assets, he also bequeathed to each a memento mori, each memento holding special significance for the one who received it.

  Alton inherited a mounted and framed poem,

  Gretchen, a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater,

  Simone, a painting of the Emperor Nero beside a man with a raven on his shoulder,

  Michael, a bottle of Linie Aquavit,

  and Willow inherited a near-faithful imitation of a six-panelled, Momoyama-period Japanese screen known as Willows by the Uji Bridge. Willow’s screen had had its last panel replaced by a blank, lacquered, willow-wood panel. Toward the bottom of this last panel – on the same side of the screen as the reproduction – was a lozenge-shaped brass tag, two inches high and four inches long. Engraved on the tag were the words

  Salix Babylonica

  (Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon …)

&n
bsp; The screen was such a perfect memento of her father that it added to Willow’s grief. She could not see it or even think about it without remembering him.

  She’d studied languages at a number of universities. She could fluently speak English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese. But she had taken Japanese, thanks to her father. Robert Azarian, knowing that Willow wanted to add an Asian language to her arsenal, had suggested it himself. He’d had a covert motive, it’s true. Azarian Holdings – whose chief interest then was in cellphones – was opening an office in Osaka and he could not avoid spending time in Japan. So, he and Willow had travelled to the country together, Robert extending his stay so his daughter could complete her first course in Japanese.

  During their months in Japan, they had – when both were free – travelled around the country together, taking trains to Kyoto, Nara, Kobe and Tokyo. She could still recall the small towns along the way, the baseball diamonds, the fields and houses, the tall buildings and neon lights. It was on these travels that Willow discovered her love for the painted screens of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan: gesso, gold leaf, a season coming to life panel by panel as the screen is opened. Leave it to her father to remember her enchantment and remind her of the works she’d loved, to recreate a screen on which there were weeping willows, Salix babylonica, her symbol.

  Three years after her father’s passing, when she was again able to think of things other than his death or at least to think beyond her next fix, she remembered words he’d spoken in his final days. She’d been holding his hand as he lay on his bed. He had awakened briefly from his chemically induced sleep and, seeing her beside him, he’d said

  – Willow, you, your brothers and sisters … you’ll all have more than I’ve left, if you want it. But you’ll have to work for it. Promise me you will … promise me you’ll work for it …

  He’d repeated the word promise, more and more faintly as he was drawn back into his opiate antechamber. She had, of course, promised. But later, thinking about her promise to him, the words work for it struck her. At his death, her father had made each of his children near-billionaires. They would make millions more from their shares in Azarian Holdings. It was more than enough. What, then, was there to work for?

  When she’d conveyed their father’s words to her brothers and sisters, none had found them particularly significant. To her siblings, the words were banal, their meaning clear: they were all meant to help Alton run Azarian Holdings. It was their duty to work together as a family.

  But that made no sense! Where Azarian Holdings was concerned, Alton was the authority. What’s more, Alton was as prescient and talented as their father had been. And why not? Robert had taught Alton everything he knew about business, as his father, Avram, had taught him. The company was thriving. There was no work for the other siblings, save for staying out of Alton’s way. This could not have been the work their father had in mind.

  The third Christmas after her father’s death, when she and her siblings had gathered at Gretchen’s, Willow asked

  – Is all of Dad’s money accounted for?

  The young children were in the playroom with their toys, watched over by their nannies. The teenagers were with boyfriends or girlfriends or they were in the den watching television. Willow, her brothers and sisters (and their spouses) were at the dining room table, a plate of freshly baked keta, still warm, before them.

  – All Dad’s money? said Alton. A lot of it went to charity. He donated hundreds of millions to causes all over the world. The rest he put back into the company.

  – I know Dad was generous, Willow had said, but something doesn’t add up. Why did he leave us so little?

  The others had guffawed in unison – a strange sound, as if something were suddenly caught in a number of throats. How could she say that he’d left them ‘little’? None in her family accepted that it was in any way ‘little’ to be left almost a billion in cash and assets. The conversation had almost immediately turned to other matters.

  That was where things stood, as far as her siblings were concerned. Yes, perhaps, in theory, their father had been worth more than was disbursed in his will. But once you took his charitable donations into account, it was all above board and, frankly, not worth the bother.

  But between bouts of heroin-brought stupor, Willow thought about her father’s words. She was convinced that she and her siblings were meant to be doing something other than gathering money from their inheritance. The maddening thing is that there were clues this was the case, clues that her intoxication shrouded. For one thing, every one of the mementos her father left them was, in its own way, provocative. Take hers, for instance: the screen with its painting of willows by the Uji bridge was a message of some sort. It had to be. If her father had simply wanted to remind her of their precious time together in Japan, a reproduction of Willows by the Uji Bridge would have been more than enough. It would have been perfect. But her father, or whoever made the reproduction, had removed part of the screen – had removed a willow – when they’d replaced the final image with a blank panel of wood. Why ruin the work? To what purpose? To let her know that the trees painted were weeping willows? But that was obvious. Although Psalm 137 was lovely, it simply did not jibe with seventeenth-century Japanese art. And on the back of the willow-wood panel, the letters

  a(ա)

  had been imprinted toward the bottom in indelible black ink.

  The most provocative thing was: all this was so like her father. Robert Azarian had loved to devise the clues – difficult clues – for his children’s treasure hunts. As far as Willow was concerned, her screen – and each of the mementos – was a clue to something. And the work they had to do was in the uncovering of that thing.

  Had she told her siblings her thoughts about their mementos?

  Yes, she had.

  Had she asked if they, too, had found anything ‘playful’ about the mementos their father had left?

  Yes, and of her siblings, only Michael would admit his memento (the bottle of aquavit) was ‘suggestive.’ Well, why would their father leave someone who was teetotal – that is, Michael – a full bottle of alcohol? Then again, Michael had added that their father had no doubt been old when he’d chosen (or commissioned) the mementos he’d left them. So, one might have expected these incongruities. The other three – Gretchen, Alton and Simone – would not even admit that much, though their mementos were just as suggestive.

  Had she examined their pieces for herself?

  No. Willow had seen the other mementos, but none of her siblings would allow her time with their piece. In fact, it was as if they were colluding against her. Just as maddening: each one had privately encouraged her to keep on looking for answers. It was as if, in private, her siblings became reasonable, admitting the obvious, though none would help her.

  The situation was bedevilling. It was almost enough to make her go cold turkey so she could think straight for longer stretches. She hadn’t kicked, though. Instead, she lived with two things constantly at the edge of her mind: her father, his mementos.

  Her story finished, Willow took a sip of coffee. She’d put a napkin beneath her cup – the mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in restaurants. From her moth-clips purse, she took a chocolate doughnut from a Coffee Time bag and, putting her hand before her mouth, took a bite. Then, as if ashamed, she put the doughnut back in the bag and the bag into her purse.

  – What does any of this have to do with me? asked Tancred.

  – I want you to steal my father’s mementos for me.

  – From your brothers and sisters?

  – Yes, from my brothers and sisters. But I don’t want to keep them. I’ll give them back. No one else has the right to have them, but I need to examine them and I know they won’t lend them to me. I’ve asked all of them.

  – So, if I’ve got you straight, said Tancred, you think your father left you something but he hid it. How much could this whatever be worth, if it exists?

&n
bsp; – I don’t know. I suppose it’s valuable. But this isn’t about money or wealth or anything like that. It’s about finding what my father hid. If I had time with the other mementos, I know I could figure this whole thing out. I was always good at treasure hunts.

  Tancred wasn’t sure what to think. It had been impressive to see the fifteen million in her account, but difficult to think of so much as ‘mad money.’

  – Listen, he said, I’ll think about it, but first I want to see the screen your father left you.

  – Why? asked Willow.

  – Put yourself in my place, he answered. You’re an addict, Willow. You don’t always make sense. I’d like to see the screen, just so we’re on the same page.

  – That’s fair, said Willow. I’ll see to it.

  With that, she got up, pulled on her raincoat and thanked him for listening. She left a twenty on the table.

  – I’m sorry, she said. I don’t have anything smaller.

  Tancred was about to say

  – You don’t have to leave anything

  but Willow had turned away and the image that came to Tancred’s mind was of a woman pulling up her skirt as she fords a river.

  3 A Visit from Nigger Colby

  There were a number of things Tancred found disconcerting about Errol ‘Nigger’ Colby. To begin with, there was his nickname. It was unpleasant for Tancred to hear, as he sat in the Green Dolphin,

  – How you doin’, Nigger?

  or

  – What’s up, Nigger?

  Adding to the strangeness was that, although Errol Colby was albino (white hair, white skin), he was of Jamaican descent. He was ‘black under the white,’ as he himself liked to say, so that calling him ‘Nigger’ seemed both offensive and considerate. Colby himself took pride in his nickname. He was more ashamed of being albino than he was of being black. In any case, Tancred refused to call the man Nigger, calling him instead Errol, his given name.