Stanley Park (18 page)

“It’s remarkable really,” Jeremy said. “ ‘Pit of the Inferno.’ How can we be sure that my knife came from that factory? Sabatier had a lot of factories in the region.”

“The blade mark,” Bloom said. “A little devil stick figure running with a trident.”

Jeremy nodded slowly. “That’s the one.”

Bloom shook his head sympathetically. “The trouble is, there’s little chance you’ll replace such a blade, short of buying from another collector.”

“It has to be replaced,” Jeremy said. “Not necessarily with Sabatier, but a blade of real quality.”

Bloom ran through some high-end options. Wurstof Trident, Sabatier’s present Maître de Cuisine line. “At the very high end,” he said. “There are also handmade knives coming out of Japan. The zirconium-oxide ceramic blades won’t get dull for decades, literally. They also don’t oxidize like your old carbon-steel blade, and they’re stronger and lighter.”

“How much?”

Kyocera’s KC-200 black ceramic, hot-pressed, six-inch chef’s knife with a wooden handle retailed for $522.40, including taxes.

“And they go up from there.”

Jeremy raised his eyebrows. Something about his curiosity in the best, in the most expensive, captured Bloom’s imagination, and he went behind a glass partition into the rear of the shop, where he dialed the combination on an old green safe.

Bloom returned with a black wooden box and set it gently on the counter. Opened, the box revealed a blue satin lining, and on this satin lay a most unusual blade. A nine-inch chef’s knife. Absolutely black from the point to the butt of the handle. It seemed to absorb the light.

“Fugami,” Bloom said. “Made with extraordinary care, in batches of sixty only three times a year. The ceramic compound is thirty times harder than similar knives. Maybe the Kyocera will need sharpening in a couple of decades, but technically speaking, this Fugami will not need sharpening until sometime early in the fourth millennium.”

Jeremy exhaled. He didn’t want to hear the price.

“Are you a collector?” Bloom asked, gently anticipating the unasked question.

“No,” Jeremy said. “I’m a chef.”

“You do not need this knife.” His voice was paternal, dissuading, and he made a small motion to close the box. But Jeremy reached out quickly and touched the black wood, and Bloom’s hands dropped away. Jeremy pulled the box across the glass counter towards himself, removed the blade. The Fugami nestled firmly into the meat of his palm, nearly weightless.

“Thirty-two hundred dollars,” Sigmund Bloom said.

Jeremy actually gasped. In part it was an expression of impossibility. There was no way he could consider such a purchase. The Monkey’s Paw just now making its first small steps towards profitability. At the same time, it was perfect that the blade should cost an amount approaching the threshold of physical pain. Perfect that he should suffer for it—Jeremy’s mind was spinning forward as he held the knife in his hand—perfect that for the loss of his Sabatier he should
put himself again at the lip of the volcano, yes, staring down into the inferno itself, and with penance and risk-taking restore his talisman.

“You must think about it carefully,” Bloom said after a few seconds. “Take some time.” He left Jeremy standing there and went into the back room.

Jeremy pulled out his wallet, instinctively running his thumb down the edges of the cards. Even with a good week under his belt, even with the kite pulled in a few turns, none of them had that much room.

Bloom returned in a few moments.

Jeremy took a deep breath. “Do you take Amex?” he asked.

He dropped the knife at his apartment and went to meet the Professor. They walked to a different place, a clearing where the earth was reddened with decaying cedar. It wasn’t a secret spot, but a place where they could sit together on a log and look like any other two people stopping for a breather in the middle of a long walk.

“Well, what has happened?” the Professor said. He was dirtier, Jeremy noted, and today he seemed slightly agitated.

“The rumours of them still being buried in the park,” Jeremy began, “these are urban legends.”

“I see,” the Professor said, nodding. Not surprised.

“They were killed here, though. October 1947 is the agreed month.”

“I see. I see.”

“And a witness came forward,” Jeremy said, watching to see what effect this information would have. “A Miss Harker. She apparently saw the murderer.”

“Yes?” The Professor said, very focused. “And what else?”

Jeremy scratched his head.

“What else did she see?” the Professor prompted.

“The kids?” Jeremy said. He had the feeling that he was being tested.

“But what else, anything?”

“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said, not understanding.

“In the park,” the Professor said, exasperated. “She saw someone.…”

And then he stopped and looked away, realizing that Jeremy had nothing more.

“There are a few newspaper articles,” Jeremy said.

“I read them. There are also some notes, which I didn’t have time to read.”

“I see,” said the Professor.

It occurred to Jeremy that he had wanted to appease, to make done with what he had promised. “I closed the restaurant for the morning to do this for you,” he said.

“Your sacrifice is appreciated. So, nothing else to tell me?”

“Business is better,” he said. “If I hold Dante and the bank off for another couple months, maybe the decision won’t be needed.”

The Professor glanced at him. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

They drifted in silence for a moment.

“Will you at least read the rest of the file at the library?” the Professor asked quietly.

Jeremy bowed his head. “I’ll try,” he said. “But you understand that it’s really important I focus on The Paw right now.”

The Professor nodded slowly.

“I came looking for you a couple nights ago,” Jeremy said.

The Professor registered surprise.

“I saw some people around a fire.”

“Did you really?” Now the Professor was smiling.

“Two men, a woman and a baby. They spoke a strange language.”

The Professor actually clapped his hands. “Brilliant. Strange how?”

“Popping. Hissing.”

“You have seen and heard a great thing,” said the Professor.
“An ancient tongue. An aboriginal language, nearly extinct. I had heard there was a group sleeping in the low area just west of the lagoon.”

“That’s them,” Jeremy said.

“Cultural holdouts,” said the Professor. “These people are taking a last stand. Homing in on a place that cannot be taken from them. You see, their language belongs to this land. The words themselves are linked to specific things: a bend in a creek, a bank of stones, the old Beaver Lake salmon run. They’ve moved back, this small family or group of families, however many there are, to the place from which they cannot be driven.”

“Well, they could be. You’re not allowed to live here.”

“Yes, of course,” the Professor said. “But the land itself cannot be taken. This great locus of civic pride, this Stanley Park. It can’t be expropriated, built up, paved over, strata-titled. These speakers of an ancient tongue, their actions are the sociolinguistic equivalent of taking sanctuary in a church. These woods, this is the church.”

The Professor was animated. His hair tufted out at the sides as he spoke. “And you don’t see the connection at all, do you?” he said, after a few seconds of silence.

Jeremy didn’t, although he found himself reluctantly interested.

“Each of these new arrivals will forge their own connection to this sanctified soil,” the Professor said. “The Babes in the Wood were only the latter-day genesis of matters.”

“What about Siwash?”

“Siwash counts everything that passes,” said the Professor, his face wide open with wonder. Dogs, joggers, bladers, pedestrians, bikes. Everything, the Professor theorized, was being catalogued.

“Why?”

“Oh dear, I am disappointed,” the Professor said.

“How should I know?” Jeremy answered, defensive.

“If somebody were to ask me, What am I trying to accomplish?” the Professor said, in a strangely flat, dogmatic cadence (it took Jeremy a moment to appreciate that he was being mimicked), “I would answer that I was trying to remind people of the soil under their feet. Of a time when they would only have known what that soil could offer.”

“Or words to that effect,” Jeremy said, but he gave a half-smile in acknowledgment of the impersonation. It was pleasing that his father remembered something he said well enough to repeat it under these circumstances, even half-right and miles out of context. “You only forgot the part about food.”

“Ah yes,” the Professor said. “It’s all about food.”

“I’m a chef. It
is
all about food.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s about roots and place. It’s about how people relate to the land on which they stand. In our rootless day and age, our time of strange cultural homelessness—and worse, our societal amnesia about what used to constitute both the rewards and limitations of those roots—I wonder if we might look to these homeless,” and here the Professor extended his thin arm, pointing into the park to signify all of its occupants, “to find an emblem of the deepest roots of all.”

Jeremy considered this for a moment. For an instant, he had thought the Professor said
culinarily homeless
, a provocative phrase. He asked about Siwash again.

“Perhaps he’s marking the passage of these various visitors over this ground,” the Professor said. “Their movement across the soil of which you so eloquently spoke.”

“Why would he?”

“There may be a number he is waiting to reach,” said the Professor, looking disappointed with Jeremy for not trying harder.

“What number?”

The Professor rolled his eyes. “Well, we won’t know that, will we? Perhaps it’s a running total with some significance trigger, a value above which something will happen.”

“Something might happen? That’s comforting.”

“Perhaps not,” the Professor said, then changed the subject. “So, do you know how to find your way out of Stanley Park?”

Jeremy thought he knew. They hadn’t come very deep into the forest. He looked around himself, about to answer the question seriously before reading the playfulness in his father’s question.

“No, Professor,” he said. “How do I find my way out of Stanley Park?”

“Why,” the Professor responded, “you just follow the psychopath.”

“Where is she?” Margaret was fussing, something she didn’t like to catch herself doing particularly. But as soon as Jeremy came in she was taking his coat and offering him a drink. She was shooing Trout off the kitchen table. Apologizing for the mess (although there wasn’t much of one by post-weekend standards) and in advance for the dinner.

To Jeremy’s nose, everything smelled competently Silver Palate tasty.

“I told you to clean up your paints honey,” Margaret said to Trout. Then to Jeremy: “Drink?”

Trout looked up and smiled faintly when he saw Jeremy. He lifted one arm draped in a painting smock. A silent, open-palmed gesture Margaret had seen him use so many times. Maybe it was inspired by
Star Trek
, she thought, although it seemed less like Unitarian go-forth optimism and more conventionally priestly. A televangelist, maybe.

Jeremy returned the blank hand of friendship. Trout lowered his head again to the work open on the table in front of him. First he gazed at it, then he moved his head slowly to consider the colours on his palette and those in the painting. Margaret frowned as she poured Jeremy’s drink. She asked him again about Benny.

“Coming in an hour,” Jeremy said. “She works until eight.”

“Canadian Tire, you said?” Margaret answered. She couldn’t keep the little smile off. She wasn’t disdainful; she just found the detail cute. He had produced such a series of odd dates over the years since they broke up. Jeremy’s epic love poem of alternately fragment or run-on sentences.

“She left Canadian Tire,” Jeremy informed her. “It’s a bit complicated, but she had another job in less than a day. Barista at the Inferno Pender. She’s one of those people who can’t be unemployed.”

Margaret allowed her eyebrows to rise with approval. That last part was new, the industrious-sounding part. And Margaret, treasurer of the Western Canadian Women’s Business Association, believed in the power of feminist industry.

“One Bushmills,” she said, and slid a tumbler across the kitchen island. Then she stopped, her slender hands briefly motionless on the thick wooden counter, looking with more genuine exasperation at Trout, still at the table. He had just dipped a brush methodically, having settled an internal debate about colours, and was applying the result to a very precise place on the paper. Silently industrious himself, she thought. “You know,” Margaret said, more to herself than to Jeremy, “maybe I’ll have a drink.”

Fussing definitely wasn’t her. Fussing was household angst jazzed on oolong tea. It was reasonable to Jeremy that seismic engineers didn’t do fuss, especially those doing their work along the Pacific Rim’s Cascadia Subduction Zone, where popular science would have it that everything from Portland to Vancouver was spectacularly overdue for obliteration. In the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the oceanic plate was slipping irrevocably under the North American continental plate. Maybe only ten slips in the past three thousand years, but each one rumbling for minutes at a stretch, releasing energy at some point past what the Richter scale had been designed to measure.