I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (52 page)

I spend the next few hours flipping through Mulligan's notes and papers, aimlessly and without reward. At mid-afternoon – noon on Garibaldi – I take a deep breath and call Stoney, who is usually up by then. All I get are a series of rings and this: “Loco Motion Luxury Rentals and Chauffeur Service, at your service twenty-four/seven. Please leave a message.”

I disguise my voice. “Hello, sir, I represent a firm of venture capitalists planning a retreat on your lovely island –”

“I'm on it,” Stoney says breathlessly. “Sorry we didn't pick up right away; my staff is on lunch break. This is Stonewell himself.”

“Has the hay been hauled away?”

“The hay?”

“The crop.”

It takes a moment to click in. “Nice try, counsellor, but I wasn't fooled for a second. I been meaning to call. Things piled up –”

“Is it gone?”

“Affirmative.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Well, I ain't sure if God had much to do with it. I'm gonna be up front with you here. We been robbed.”

A joke. He's getting back at me. Nice try, Stoney.

“What happened was, when me and Dog went to pick it up last evening, the crop, it wasn't in the loft or anywhere. Just some broken stems and leaves.”

“I see. Just disappeared, did it?”

“Yeah, and we went over to see Noki and Yoyo to ask if they seen anything suspicious, any cars, noises in the night. They didn't, like, know what I was talking about, eh. I got the impression they didn't know nothing.”

I'm no longer sure this is a gag and am growing alarmed.

“I don't think it's the cops, and if it is, they're probably tapping the line, so we're goners anyway. My theory, it's more likely some common thief. That weed was gonna tide me through the winter, man.”

He rambles on about the rampant dishonesty on Garibaldi until I cut him off. Do nothing, say nothing, I advise. I will see him tomorrow. Then I call our travel agent to book the next available flight to the West Coast.

“Windmills? How very Middle Ages, Lewison. Makes one think of Don Quixote.”

“Jump in, my boy. Huge earnings potential in clean energy. Got to be savvy, though.”

“Talk to me about it again when the oil sands run out – in about a thousand years from now.”

It is eight o'clock and I am in Vancouver, finishing dinner at my
club, eavesdropping on the filthy rich and suffering the kind of edgy feeling I long ago learned to associate with an urge to knock back a double martini. This, the Confederation Club, saw many of my extravaganzas after I'd had a few of those.

But I am sticking to tea. I am here only because I have become habituated to the jacket-and-tie atmosphere. However traditional – women have only recently breached its walls – the club gives impeccable service, and they usually have a bed for a charter member who is stopping over.

My plane got me to Vancouver shortly after seven, too late for flight or ferry to my island, but an early-bird Syd-Air charter will whisk me to Bungle Bay, where I will stage a last-ditch effort to save the reputations of a reckless old barrister and his celebrated life partner. Ex-partner, if I get busted for a hundred kilos of dope.
I'm sorry, Arthur, it was just not meant to be
.

“A sudden development after a successful day at the Archives,” I told her in a hurried call. “Anyway, I'd be boring company on the weekend. Appeal begins in five days, and it's totally occupying my mind.”

She took it in stride. Typical of the unpredictable fusspot.

On another front there is good news, though a little baffling. According to the radio, Kestrel Dubois has made phone contact with her parents. A collect call from a pay phone in Squamish – of all places – to allay their worries. She expressed her love and said she was healthy and safe and would call again in a week; she had “things to do” that she couldn't explain. Police and media have converged on Squamish but the fourteen-year-old has not been seen, has left no trail.

It is hard not to tease myself with the thought that Kestrel's journey parallels mine in some mystical way. I'm playing with asking April Wu to interview her parents, Samson and Marie Dubois, and ask if their daughter's mission might involve, in any remote way,
Gabriel Swift versus the Queen
. A lovely name, Kestrel, and so very appropriate – the fierce and determined little falcon they call the sparrow hawk.

“You actually think some of this global warming propaganda is true, Lewison?”

“Not our problem, is it? Leave it up to the next generation, old boy.”

It is getting on toward nine o'clock, and a rigorous walk is in order before bed: a stroll down Granville to the so-called pedestrian mall, the theatre district. I head off, determined to take my mind off the crisis at home, to take in the glass and chrome and glaring lights, the lineups, the beggars and buskers, the wail of car alarms and sirens. To rediscover what I'm missing on Garibaldi Island.

The world's most liveable city lacks a vibrant centre, and I have fooled myself in expecting much to be happening on a Friday night. Not many louts around – maybe there's a football game at the stadium. Coming up is Granville and Smithe, and across the street, Vancouver's fine concert hall, the Orpheum … and I stagger to a halt.

There is a party of smokers outside the Orpheum. Quite a crowd, a dozen. At the centre of their attention is Annabelle Beauchamp.

I duck into a recessed doorway. No one seems to have noticed me. But there's too much light out here; I have to make a run for it. There's Hubbell Meyerson by a streetlamp, puffing on a cigar as he shields his eyes, trying to make me out. I swivel, turn up my coat collar, and sneak off the way I came, trying to still my panic. I can't understand how I could have forgotten this is the night of her party.

Now an added complication: a couple approaching at a fast clip, late for the event. I know them, gay, married, Fred and George, sets and costumes. I pretend not to see them but pause on hearing, “Arthur, I do believe you're going the wrong way.”

“Just slipping off, Fred. Early flight to catch. Carry on, enjoy the party. Lovely night.”

I meld into the crowd issuing from a movie house, then twist about to glimpse Fred and George conferring with Hubbell, confirming his sighting. By some means or other word will get back to Margaret that I was spotted decamping from Annabelle's soiree.
That word will be magnified, distorted. She will conclude that my real plan in quitting Ottawa early (“I'd only be boring company, my dear”) was to hook up with Annabelle.

I berate myself all the way back to the Confederation Club. What is happening to my mind? I see phantoms, I do bizarre things, become irrationally jealous, get into pickles of my own making. I suffer breathtaking lapses of memory –
Friday, September 16
was in bold letters on the invitation. The one I gave to Stan Caliginis, another imbecilic act. I'm sure I saw him out there, hovering around, star-struck, lighting Annabelle's cigarette.

Maybe I purposefully forgot tonight was the night, some form of subconscious subterfuge at work. Maybe I have been denying a need to be here, to celebrate Annabelle's return. Maybe I seek something from her. Answers. Closure.

Maybe I should have a drink to settle me. A short one, for my nerves.

And then turn up in Appeal Court, if I turn up at all, piss drunk. My final dishonour to my client. It will not happen, my brother.

I crawl into bed. To sleep. Perchance to dream …

T
his was the dream, as I reconstruct it in a taxi to the floatplane dock: Wentworth rises from behind Mulligan's typewriter and demands to know if I'm ready to bear the whips and scorns. I am naked, ashamed, afraid. Annabelle, in a nun's habit, flicks her whip, and I find the pain thrilling. I sense that millions are watching on YouTube.

I am still parsing the dream as Syd's Beaver grunts off the inlet on this sunny weekend morning. The thrill of pain has to do with Annabelle's return, of course, with my former role as her pet masochist. Pain excites, a therapist told me; it arouses just as sex does – a turn-on, an aphrodisiac. It releases endorphins in the brain that are as addictive as opiates. I was hooked on pain. And some addictions, I was instructed, remain with us unto death.

What most gnaws at me from this dream is the vision of Wentworth Chance at Dermot's old Remington, challenging me to bear the whips and scorns. There is allegory here. Wentworth is chiding me for having failed Gabriel Swift, for having failed to right the oppressor's wrong, the law's delay.

We have conquered the Salish Sea and the islands are below us, farms and rocky bluffs and high, thick forest descending to looping straits and inlets. Here approaches Blunder Point; our forty acres come into view, our commodious house, the woofer house, the fearsome barn with its vanished cargo of cannabis. With relief I spot no official vehicles in the driveway, no
SWAT
team ready to pounce.

Syd manages to miss my crab trap by a foot, cuts power, and drifts his craft to my rickety dock. Seventeen minutes after leaving downtown Vancouver, I am home, disoriented by the sudden shift. I feel hopeless, incapable. Disaster looms and I have arrived without a plan.

Homer is quick to greet me, circling me, barking,
Problems here
.
Problems here
. I leave my bags in his care, check to see that my Fargo is still safely chained by its undercarriage to the B.C. Hydro pole, then detour past the barn up to the goat-milking shed, where Niko and Yoki are at work.

Old Mathilda, who has become so cranky at milking time, is unusually serene under Yoki's gentle pulling. The other nannies are engaged in some playful bunting while awaiting their turns.

“Goats very happy,” Niko says. “Geeses happy too, also cow and horse. Happy farm, no problem. Maybe you buy more extra-special good alfalfa. All gone.”

THE APPEAL

T
he Appeal Court Registry has let me know that
Gabriel Swift v. the Queen
will be called at eleven a.m. It is now nine, and I am staring out my office window at foaming seas and swollen clouds being bullied landward by Poseidon.
He spake
, sang Homer,
and round about him called the clouds and roused the ocean
. And did bathe Vancouver in such wet discharge that even gulls and geese were hiding. Below my forty-third-floor eyrie, street lights are still on. Cars scamper to underground garages for cover, umbrellas bloom at the exit doors of subway and buses.

I will not allow the weather to depress me. I will be the sunshine today. I will be bright before the court, carefree, confident. I will not lower myself to seek sympathy, to play the hoary old dotard embarking on his final, fumbling comeback.

Roy Bullingham has just walked in, affording me a chance to test that cheery formula. “Cleansing, isn't it, Bully – the rain. Causes this lovely city to sparkle when the sun finally comes out.”

“It had damn well better clear up before the weekend.” He is turning ninety-three then. There will be a large celebration, a garden party at a client's estate. Bullingham has two decades on me and he's lost nothing mentally, or physically – a little more gaunt, more loose skin, but he scrambles about with agility. Maybe there's hope yet for A.R. Beauchamp.

He joins me at the window. “Good luck on this one, Arthur, though I suspect you'll need not luck but divine intervention.” He pats my shoulder. “Here we are, forty-nine years and five months after that foul-mouthed fool Pappas persuaded me to assign you this case. I ought to have resisted letting you handle it. You were too raw.”

“I was about to quit the firm that day, Bully.”