Heart of the City - Softcover

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Robert Rotenberg is the author of several bestselling novels, including Old City Hall, The Guilty Plea, Stray Bullets, Stranglehold, Heart of the City, and Downfall. He is a criminal lawyer in Toronto with his firm Rotenberg Shidlowski Jesin. He is also a television screenwriter and a writing teacher. Visit him at RobertRotenberg.com or follow him on Twitter @RobertRotenberg.

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Heart of the City

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

1

Every part of Greene’s body hurt. His feet ached from the weight of the steel-toed boots he’d worn all week. His legs were sore from countless climbs up and down the newly poured concrete stairs of the condominium construction site. His arm muscles burned from the weight of the metal rebar he’d been hauling around since six-thirty this morning. And he had a blistering headache. He’d worked all day in the hot sun and during the afternoon coffee break he’d smoked a cigarette with one of his fellow workers. It was the third time since high school that he’d lit up.

“Okay, ladies, weekend’s here. It’s closing time,” Claudio Bassante, the site superintendent, said as he wove his way through the clusters of workers. He was one of those people whose face falls into a natural smile.

Thirty-seven men all played their parts in a well-orchestrated ballet. The formers, who poured the concrete floors and walls. The carpenters, who created the wooden forms the concrete was poured into. The ironworkers, who handled the rebar that reinforced the concrete. The electricians and plumbers, who hopscotched around everyone else, securing the wiring and plumbing before the concrete was poured to seal everything in place. And the labourers, such as Greene, who scrambled through the two basement floors and the three storeys that had already been built, carrying an endless array of building materials. Above all this activity, a crane towered, in constant motion, swinging back and forth like a one-armed orchestra conductor, delivering all manner of supplies to the worker bees below.

In seconds the repetitive din of metal and concrete colliding, hammers banging, and circular saws whirling all ceased. It was as if the mute button had been pushed on a loud, surround-sound television, replacing the noise with silence. Hard hats were removed, tools were put away, and the bright orange safety vests everyone wore were ripped off and discarded.

This was the end of Greene’s first week on the job, and despite all his aches and pains, he had enjoyed the simple pleasure of stacking two-by-fours, carrying cans of nails, hoisting the rebar onto his shoulder, trudging up and down the stairs, and laying them out in perfect order. The feel of his body straining and strengthening day by day. Using his muscles instead of his brain.

“Before you disappear for the weekend, we’ve got to get everything spic and span,” Bassante said to the crew. “Boy Wonder will be here any minute. He’s coming to kick the tires like he does every Friday afternoon, and I want this place to look as if the queen of England slept here last night.”

Boy Wonder was Livingston Fox, a.k.a. Mr. Condo or Mr. Con Dough, depending on your point of view, the owner, CEO, and face of Fox Developments Inc. Love him or hate him, Fox was always in the news. A high school dropout, he’d rocketed to wealth and prominence by building well-designed condominium towers throughout the city core. He threw up buildings at breakneck speed, lived an over-the-top lifestyle, complete with a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce convertible, and in just ten years had played a key role in transforming the cityscape. He was thirty-four years old.

Greene had learned this first week that most of the workmen lived in suburbs and towns at least an hour’s drive from Toronto. At three-thirty, the end of the workday, they were in a hurry to hit the road and avoid getting caught in rush-hour traffic. All hands pitched in, and in less than twenty minutes they were on their way.

Bassante had asked Greene to stick around after everyone left. They hadn’t had time to talk all week. It was no problem for Greene. Unlike his commuting co-workers, he lived downtown and walked to work. Soon only the two of them were left.

They had met in high school, a multicultural mosaic of whites, blacks, Asians, Italians, Russians, Portuguese, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, and Jews. In many ways, it had been a precursor of everything that modern-day Toronto had become.

When Bassante was in grade ten, his father, an electrician, was killed while working on a hydro project down in Niagara Falls. His mother fell into a disabling depression, and Bassante, the youngest child and the only one left at home, ended up practically living at Greene’s house for the next three years of school.

Greene sat on the edge of the third floor facing south over Kensington Market, the hodgepodge of streets and stores and houses that had been the landing spot for new immigrants for more than a century. It was one of those Toronto blue-sky afternoons, when the sun was high and would be for many more hours. The first heat wave of the season had rolled in overnight, bringing with it stifling humidity, and it felt good to sit up here and take in the breeze.

Local residents, led by the high-profile lawyer Cassandra Amberlight, had formed the Save Kensington Coalition. They objected to this condominium being erected on the northern border of their neighbourhood, but they’d been powerless to stop the project. Instead they’d extracted concessions from the hated Mr. Con Dough and forced him to reduce his plans from eleven stories to seven. Fox, never one to be modest, named the building Kensington Gate and plastered photos of himself alongside happy-looking, athletic young people across the hoardings that flanked the site.

Last November, Fox announced plans for a second condominium high-rise down the street. He’d cheekily named it Kensington Gate 2 or, as he liked to call it, K2 and was promoting it as the “Peak of Luxury in Every Way.” Some people thought he was doing this just to rub salt in Amberlight’s wounds. The venom between the builder and the protest leader was public and palpable. She’d come up with the term Mr. Con Dough. He called her Ms. Red Light, because she opposed every development he proposed.

Amberlight had spent the last few weeks organizing a march that was going to take place in the market this afternoon to oppose what she called density creep. From his perch on the third floor, Greene could see television trucks already lined up along Augusta Avenue, the street next to the building, where groups of protesters were gathering. Most were young people, with a smattering of scruffy-looking veterans. A few of them had brought their dogs; others had babies in carriers. Many held aloft signs that read “Stop the Fox. Save the Market.” Others had their phones on telescopic selfie sticks and were filming themselves and the cops standing by. One man was pounding away on a big African drum, whipping up the crowd.

Greene heard boots on the concrete behind him and turned to see Bassante walking over, carrying two Corona beers.

“You’ll have to drink it without any lime,” he said, sitting down and passing Greene one of the bottles.

“I think I can handle it.” Greene laughed and took a sip.

“You’ve worked five days straight, Ari. How do you feel?”

“A little sore.”

Bassante waved his bottle in the air. “You were always a lousy liar,” he said, “even back in grade nine.”

“Okay.” Greene took a longer sip. The beer was sweet and cool. “I hurt like hell, all over.”

“That’s why God created the weekend. Rest up. Stay cool. Take your daughter to a movie where there’s air...