Thirty-two years ago, during a snowstorm, a woman who was a stranger to me came calling at my apartment on Beverley Street in Toronto. She told me her name was Anna Geller, though I know now she was using an alias.
When I opened the door, she was standing on the sidewalk with her back toward me.
“Hello?”
She turned around. “Are you Harvey Painter?”
I lived on the first floor of a converted duplex that contained five apartments and a common entranceway. There was no intercom and because of the hours I kept—working through the night and sleeping until mid-afternoon—I was in bed when the buzzer went off and it took me a couple minutes to get up, get dressed and get to the door.
“Yes, I’m him. I’m Harvey.”
The weather that day was everything the word miserable was meant to conjure up. Sn
