April Fool (25 page)

“I 'ave migraine,” says Gaston. Yesterday it was a pain in the bowels.

Faloon tries for a light subject, his plans for the day, a boat cruise that's supposed to stop at some great nude beaches. This
is interrupted from down the counter by, “I wonder if it's possible to get some service here.” Willy, impeccable in a five-thousand-euro suit he clouted yesterday from a men's store. And then Cat, at the far end of the crescent, in her new finery, indignant: “I believe
I
was next.”

Gaston is frozen for a moment in mid-stride, he doesn't know who to attend on first. But somehow he pulls it off, asking if the gentleman would mind if he first met the needs of the lady. Cat wants tourist information, Willy wants directions to a complex destination. It's a little scene, just enough to distract the attention of the few earlybirds by the coffee urn.

Less interesting to everyone is that Faloon has accidentally dropped the sports section over the counter, and has to reach way over it for twelve excruciating fumbling seconds, hitting a digit too few, having to insert his key card again to get it right.

He heads up to his room, 516, just down from 508, where Omar Lansana and Gina de Carlo share a bed. The master key card works fine. He worries about having to brace Ambassador Lansana, an athlete, the legs of a racer, fiercely protective of his jewels.

 

It's three o'clock. Cat is hanging by the pool, in a bikini under a sarong. The Hook is near the pool elevator, with a view into the lobby, where Faloon planned to nest behind a newspaper. But his choice spot is gone, a stuffed Louis Quinze in an alcove. A casually dressed young man is occupying it, studying photographs under a lamp. Strips of photos, like from a surveillance camera. Faloon sees another husky man, leaning against a pillar, equally obvious. With him is the manager of the jewellery store where he poached those watches off Harold Stein's card. Something has gone kerflooey, maybe Visa put out an alert on that transaction.

Before the Owl can change his mind about Project Lansana, Willy strolls from the pool area, giving the office, two arms crossed, a go, which means Omar and Gina are poolside. Faloon
flashes him that bulls are on the scene, three middle fingers down, thumb and little finger up, like horns. Willy hesitates, takes a turn into the can to give Faloon a minute to make up his mind.

He puffs himself up with courage, he's going to do this, he's going to take the elevator to the fifth floor, and if there's a cop waiting outside his room, he's going to nod and smile and unlock Lansana's suite down the hall, 508, and he's going to walk in like he's Jacques Chirac. And he's going to hide under the bed. And he's going to wait.

At this point, something happens to make this gamble better than a sheer impossibility. Harold W. Stein walks from the street with his client. They're in a jokey mood, this is their tax write-off holiday on the Riviera, Faloon overheard them, some kind of commodities deal.

Before they reach the elevators, the two dicks in the lobby converge followed by two more from outside. Badges come out, and identification is demanded. You can tell Stein and his friend are put out, with their stressed speech patterns. Stein makes a point of
not
showing his passport, affronted, do they know exactly
whom
they are addressing?

As Willy leaves the gent's room, he almost walks into Stein, swearing retribution as he's being led out to the bun wagon for an interview in quieter surroundings. This is the right time to go to the fifth floor. Willy sees him heading that way, then sidles out to the pool area.

There's no action on the fifth, no cops. A Do Not Disturb on the knob of 508, they don't want the maid poking around while they're at the pool. The door answers easy to the key card, and he is in. A canopy bed, king-sized, for which Faloon is thankful, he'll be under it. It shows hard loving, sheets mussed, the spread hanging to the floor. No black
portefeuille
in obvious view.

The balcony door is locked, windows curtained but with a strip of sunlight through a gap. Taking an angle through it, he spots Lansana and de Carlo rising like a handsome god and
goddess from the pool, him muscled and dusky, her lithe and golden. Puffing up to greet them is a man with less healthy colour, his face like a slice of rare beef. Émile Van Doork has arrived with an attaché case. It's a quality item, red leather with metal studs.

A few lounge chairs down, there's Cat, smearing on lotion between sips of a martini, casually watching.

A tiny flash of sunlight bounces off the key card Lansana gives Van Doork. The diamond expert is trusted to come up to 508 to evaluate the shipment before they bicker over price. Which means two things–Van Doork is on his way, and Lansana's dip bag should be somewhere in the room.

He looks behind the desk, under it, the closet, under the extra linen. Pauses to look out again, Van Doork heading for the outside elevator, it's enclosed in glass so you can see out. Cat trying not to be obvious about following him. No briefcase in the dresser drawers. Nothing in the bathroom. Another look outside, and there's the elevator smoothing to a stop, Van Doork in it, Cat too, it looks like she's flirting with him.

Faloon squiggles under the bed, a ten-inch clearance, just enough for this burrowing Owl. That's where he finds the thick black
portefeuille
.

The door opens, and Faloon can see Van Doork's feet, and soon expects to see his startled eyes. But Cat is out there stalling. “Left my key at the pool. Mind if I use your bathroom?”

She's picked up the Owl is in trouble, she's slick, doing the bit where she holds her legs tight with the need to pee. No gentleman would refuse such a request, especially from a beautiful woman, but maybe Van Doork being a crooked diamond dealer is too paranoid to bite. Cat goes past him, rushing inside, Faloon can see the hem of her sarong sweeping by.

The bathroom door gets yanked open, Cat going, “Oh, God. Thank you. Had too much to drink.” To the trained ear the sound is more like running the tap than a whiz.

Now it's truth or consequences, because here is Émile
kneeling beside the bed. Faloon gently nudges the briefcase in the direction of his reaching fingers, which almost graze Faloon's hand as they touch leather. Van Doork slides his attaché case beside it, and sits on the bed with a grunt. You can tell he's out of shape, wheezing, though maybe he's panting over this lovely snockered creature.

From the can, the door a little ajar, Cat keeps up a torrent of distracting words: “God, what a way to meet. You on holiday, too? I'm celebrating my divorce. I'm a Libra, by the way, what are you, Aries, I'll bet.”

The first spoken word from Van Doork: “Aquarius.”

“I had a little accident…now this is
really
embarrassing, I think I'm stuck in the bidet.”

The mattress bounces as Van Doork stands. In the few seconds it takes for him to reach the bathroom, Faloon is out from under, and in the few seconds more it takes for Van Doork to still his heart while looking at Cat naked on the bidet, Faloon has wrestled out both cases, brief and attaché, and in two more seconds the door to 508 silently closes and the Owl is gone.

The handoff to Willy doesn't happen, it's faster to take the stairs. Faloon signals him a three, meet on the third floor, then totes the two cases toward a stairwell.

Almost predictably comes the ultimate fuddle of the day. Cat steps out of 508 looking white and wide-eyed, her sarong fluttering as she races to the pool elevator.

Because he's puzzled and concerned for her, Faloon hangs back when he should be humping it down the stairs. Then he's frozen there when Van Doork staggers from the room clutching his chest and slumps bug-eyed onto the hallway carpet.

As Cat enters the elevator, Omar Lansana exits, lavishing a blazing smile on her, losing it when he sees Van Doork keeling over, and, at the far end of the hall, a stairwell door closing behind an attaché case, a briefcase, and two owlish eyes. These eyes see Lansana charging like a maddened bull. Faloon figures he has maybe twenty seconds on him, twenty seconds to live.

 

22

“I
hear them boys like to do it with their spurs on,” says Gomer Goulet, a comment timed for Arthur's arrival at the General Store, and made the more odious by a wink that crimps half his face.

“Lay off him,” Emily Lemay says. “Poor Arthur, poor baby. I'm gonna come over and do your laundry, sugarpants.” The word is out that he is washer-challenged. The girls from Mop'n'Chop did the clothes last week–acting out of pity despite their no-laundry policy.

“The door of Blunder Bay is always open, Emily.”

“So is hers,” says Priposki, several sheets to the wind and it's only 11 a.m.

Emily scrapes back her chair and charges. Juggling his rum-laced coffee, Priposki struggles up to defend himself. She bats him in the eye and he sits back in his chair with a thud, though without a drop spilled. She returns to her seat, cracking her knuckles, while he stares at her with dazed, creeping awareness that there are limits to bad taste.

“You're barred,” Abraham Makepeace tells the loser of this one-sided scuffle. Arthur helps the wretch to his feet, walks him outside, and he lurches mumbling up the road to his shack.

Arthur remains on the steps, coffee and pipe at hand, watching an RCMP launch rip past the buoy at Hopeless Point, on its way to chalk up today's quota of arrests, kids who will later wave from the stern, showing off their handcuffs.

On the weekend, Sustainable Logging brought heavy equipment to the beach by tug and barge, intending to tow the timber to a booming grounds. But protesters chained themselves to trees and machines, and police spent yesterday cutting them free, the loggers forced to stand idly by. A similar process should be underway presently.

Lotis is still in Victoria, helping Selwyn defend the arrestees. The appeal process is moving ahead, but slowly, the Supreme Court calendar clogged by a constitutional issue.

Many more young folk trooped to Garibaldi on the weekend: students, teenagers.
Guess there'll be a lot more when university's over. I'm hip to it.
The former peace marcher won't drop his price, plays the victim role–he's just a guy trying to make a buck, he's pitted against the green hordes.

Stump Town has moved to Gwendolyn Bay: motley boats, tents on the public beach. The press too have deserted Margaret and her three musketeers. Margaret won't have to endure all that manly sweat for long. They'll soon have gravity-fed water for their makeshift shower, by PVC pipe from Gwendolyn Pond. The comforts of home, plus testosterone. Why bother coming down at all?

In the store, Makepeace is sorting Arthur's mail. “Book-club selection. Some personal letters, sealed, I can't help you with those. A video, Lotis must've ordered it from the States, there's customs owing. Also…where'd I put that fax?” Presumably he'd placed it somewhere for his further study and enjoyment.

He returns from his office. “Sitting right beside my coffee, couldn't see it for looking. From France. Maybe you can figure it out, I can't.”

Cat McAllister's scrawl: “The Owl pulled a real doozie. He was supposed to phone you, but I got no idea where he's at. We'll be back tomorrow.” Bringing clarification, he hopes.

By the time he gets home, depression has settled over him like a fine mist. It stays the night, percolates through his dreams,
one of which has him burrowing into a pile of laundry to escape Emily Lemay.

 

While Arthur doddles in the garden, a civil disobedience instructor demonstrates the art of chaining oneself to the back axle of Bungle Bay's old John Deere. (Are courses for this offered in colleges today, Arthur wonders.) A dozen high-energy youngsters watch and compare notes. Reverend Al, who has sequestered Bungle Bay as resistance headquarters, looks on approvingly.

Here come more guests, rolling up the driveway: Freddy Jacoby in his fin-tailed Cadillac, Brian Pomeroy asleep in the front seat, Cat McAllister and Willy the Hook barely awake in the back.

When Jacoby alights, Brian stretches out. A mickey of vodka falls from his pocket. Plotzed already, at mid-day.

The others stare confusedly at a girl being chained by ankles and wrists to the underside of the tractor. “We apologize if we have come at an importunate time,” says Jacoby.

“A school for the resistance. They hope to be arrested and jailed.”

“Gorblimey,” says Willy.

They settle on the deck, and Kim Lee brings appetizers and teacups. “Flesh pot coming.”

Cat and Willy look as if they've had their fill of fleshpots. They came by way of Nassau, Willy in tangerine shorts that clash with his red, knobby knees; palm trees on Cat's shirt.

She hands Arthur a three-day-old
Le Parisien
, a tabloid. The headline story,
SCANDALE ET MEURTRE à CANNES
, is about a love nest in a posh hotel, with photos of the late Émile Van Doork, a diamond merchant; Omar Lansana, Sierra Leone's ambassador to France; and a former Paris call girl named Gina de Carlo. No photo of Nick Faloon, who fits the description of a middle-aged man police are seeking.

Arthur puts on his glasses for the smaller print. Calling into question the headline, the author of this enthusiastic account
admits, in reluctant afterthought, that Van Doork may have succumbed to a heart attack. Lansana has disappeared, perhaps to his embassy, perhaps to Sierra Leone. Ms. De Carlo, in whose name the alleged love nest was registered, said only, “Ne sais pas, ne parle pas.”

“I don't know if Nick made it, Mr. Beauchamp,” says Willy, “or if he got nobbled.” When he last saw Faloon, the ambassador was bounding down a stairwell after him.

As his guests stir and sip, Arthur cross-examines them. In sum, it appears Faloon vanished after a dodgy climax to a thieving spree, along with, possibly, a fortune in diamonds and euros. That he hasn't phoned Arthur, as promised, bodes ill.

A loud noise, a thud, and a splintering. A yell: “Shit!” It's Brian, stumbling from the Cadillac. Somehow–in the throes of a nightmare?–he nudged the gear lever, and the car rolled down a slope into a corner post of the garden fence. Brian stands for a moment, looking bewildered.

On close examination: a smashed headlight, a twisted fender that rubs against a tire. Jacoby shrugs. “A minor catastrophe in the universal scheme of things, except we may have to indulge you, Mr. Beauchamp, for a taxi.”

Arthur has the number handy. Stoney promises to send “one of our fleet.”

“You will stay the night,” Arthur informs Brian. “You will dry out for at least the next twelve hours.” Arthur will recommend he take leave from work, go into intensive treatment.

Brian nods, uninterested, dials his cellphone. Further evidence that he has fallen apart comes as he snaps it shut. “She won't let me talk to the kids, claims they're in school. What school? Sunday school?”

“It's Tuesday, Brian.”

“That can't be right.” He fumbles with his phone. “Operator? Operator, what day is this?”

Arthur plucks it away, pockets it. “I am seizing this device.”

“Wait, no, you can't.” Frantic.

He leads the cellaholic to the house, puts him in the spare bedroom. Kim is to guard against escape attempts.

Outside, Stoney has parked the Fargo and is voraciously eyeing the gleaming classic Caddie, running a finger along the chrome behind the fins.

“Can you recommend a bodywork specialist on this here island?” Jacoby says.

Stoney smiles grandly. “No problem.”

 

Todd Clearihue holds the courtroom door open for Arthur, who walks past him without a word–he can't bear to look at his unwearying smile, fears he will give in to violent impulse.

Again, Arthur parks himself in the last row, and again Wilbur Kroop, on mounting the bench, hunts him down with his steely eyes. But this time he smiles, as if pleased to have drawn him to his lair.

Prudhomme is also here, he's but a spectator too. This is a criminal matter now, and the Crown is represented by Jennifer Tann, a good-hearted woman of middle years who seems uncomfortable with her assignment. Selwyn, Lotis, and a few other lawyers line the defence table.

“How many new guests will be joining our company today, Madam Prosecutor?” A kind of chuckle issues from Kroop's small, pursed mouth: “Himf, himf.” The jailing of protestors has put him in a good mood. He has set the next six weeks aside, to the end of June, for bail hearings and speedy trials and all the other detritus that follows in the wake of a contentious injunction.

“Only eight today,” Tann says.

“And why is that? I understand there's been a mass migration to the logging site.”

“The police had to unshackle all these people from machines. It was a day-long process, milord.”

“Let's bring them out in one group, I don't want to spend the rest of the day at this.”

Earlier, Selwyn, desperate to disqualify Kroop, slowed proceedings with argument: his Lordship has prejudged matters; a judge innocent of the issues should sit; the presumption of innocence was withheld from these jobless roasters of hot dogs. Kroop listened patiently, thanked him, and dismissed the motion without reasons.

The clerk calls out the list, and into the prisoner's dock crowd five men and three women, none over twenty-five. Most wear Save Gwendolyn T-shirts. A young black man has a slogan embossed on his: “We've upped our profits, up yours.”

Selwyn and the other lawyers urge reasonable bail. Kroop stares at the wall clock, as if timing these exercises in futility. The Chief Justice has issued a diktat: bail will be ten thousand a head, cash down, no exceptions. It will be forfeited by anyone returning to Garibaldi Island.

One of the lawyers pleads that his client could lose her job as nurse's aide if she languishes in jail.

“That ought to have been uppermost in her mind as she was chaining herself to an excavator. Call the next case.”

“Bill Watters,” says the clerk. The fellow in the message T-shirt shuffles to his feet. No counsel rises with him.

“Where's your lawyer?” Kroop asks.

“Don't have one. What good would it do me?”

Kroop glowers, here's another upstart. “A lawyer will help you to understand the charge and the consequences that could follow.”

“Okay, well, what exactly am I charged with?”

“Being in criminal contempt of a Supreme Court order to stay off private property.”

“Who issued that order?”

“I did, as it happens.”

“If you already ruled we're in contempt, what more is there for you to decide at our trial? You called us lawless dope-smoking squatters and…”

Kroop cuts him off. “Young man, such reckless ignorance convinces me you're in dire need of legal counselling, and some lessons in manners. You would do well not to make utterances that could be construed as adding to your contempt…” He stalls, backs up. “Of which, of course, you're innocent until proven guilty.” The judge is enduring a rare moment of fluster. “Beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“The way you're setting punitive bail for everyone, it's obvious you don't have any doubt at all. That's not bail, it's a jail sentence. I don't have a nickel, let alone ten thousand dollars.”

Lotis turns, locates Arthur, winks. The message: This mini-protest has been scripted to bring home the folly of Kroop's bad snap judgments. “Call it punitive bail,” Selwyn would have told Bill Watters.

Kroop's black eyes almost disappear behind drooping folds of skin–he's fighting his fury, wants to explode at this riff-raff rebel. “The court will not be provoked by a show of petty insolence.” Tight and reedy. “I shall disregard your comments as having been made out of simple-minded naïveté.” He shouts, “Get a lawyer!”

The young man shows undue courage: “Why? You've already decided I'm guilty.” A grumbling of approval comes from the back, where the protestors' allies have gathered.

As if searching for support elsewhere, Kroop reviews the press table, sees a few disgusted looks. He doesn't have an ally on the Crown side either–Jennifer Tann proposed the defendants be released on good behaviour bonds. She too is displeased at Kroop's teach-them-a-lesson, assembly-line justice.

Kroop glances at Arthur, who's smiling, enjoying his discomfort. The Chief Justice looks quickly down, in the manner of one realizing his fly's open, exposing his prejudice. He doesn't want all his hard work to be reversed on appeal.

“Check the calendar, Mr. Gilbert. Who's available to sit this week?”

“On this case, my Lord?”

“Yes! This case! I'm not talking about someone sitting on the moon. Anyone standing idly by?” Chief Justice Kroop has power to delegate which judge sits where, and is clearly about to use it. Goodbye Wilbur Kroop. No one could be worse.

Paul Prudhomme and Todd Clearihue, who'd been enjoying this pageant until now, have sunk in their chairs. Another judge. More delay.