The Feast of Stephen by Rosemary Aubert

Author:Rosemary Aubert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461622987
Publisher: Bridgeworks

I awoke before sunrise. It was too early for my fellow house rats to be stirring. I imagined them in their individual stupors and wished them further hours of peaceful slumber, enjoying the wonderful absence of communal noise.

Unlike Queenie’s landlady, Tootie allowed no food preparation in the rooms, not even boiling water. I couldn’t stand the thought of starting my Saturday in that kitchen, so I ventured into the dark December morning for my first coffee.

I wound south through the neighborhoods until I reached College Street. In the early morning light, the Christmas decorations lacked the luster they’d had the night before when the street with its quaint shops must have been ablaze, judging from the strings of lights everywhere. I was glad to have missed it.

Things had changed so much in the fifty years since I’d grown up in the streets not far from this one. Though they might look like ethnic enclaves, downtown Italian neighborhoods now had shops and restaurants that numbered among the most sophisticated in the city.

I ducked into a little cafe that smelled of fresh bread and just-ground coffee. Its few round tables were already taken by men who chatted in voices not yet as loud as they would become later in the day. Some read the paper. Most smoked. There were no women.

When I had been a boy, my father had often dragged me into such places, never paying attention when I complained about the aging relics of the old country.

But now, surprisingly, I felt warmed and comforted by the hushed tones of the Italian tongue, the hiss of the milk steamer, the rustle of the Saturday paper, the week’s thickest edition. I took a seat by the window where I could watch College Street coming awake.

I went up to the counter and bought a paper. There was nothing on the front page about the man I’d come upon in the court stairwell. I scanned the Table of Contents at the bottom of the page. When I saw the listing for the cryptic crossword, it occurred to me that it had been two weeks since the appearance of the Good King Wenceslas puzzle.

I opened the paper. What had happened in the stairwell was buried at the bottom of a routine report on cases too unimportant to rate a major story but not unimportant enough to ignore. According to the report, Carl Madison, retired professor of computer science at Toronto City College, had taken ill while in court. His condition was listed as “critical”.

Without my willing it, the youthful face of the man sprang into my memory. How could a person in his thirties be “retired”?

I turned to the puzzle page and studied the cryptic. I wondered how the person who created the puzzles for the Toronto Daily World managed to come up with a new theme every week and how the puzzle-maker thought of all the double, triple, even quadruple clues with which he or she teased faithful followers. I was about to turn

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