Stanley Park (26 page)

Caruzo kept him abreast of new arrivals. “Four,” he said, calling from the forest early that week. “Plus dog makes five.”

The diagram grew. Earlier that evening he had bumped into Chladek near Prospect Point. Chladek was a displaced Czech journalist-cum-merchant-mariner living under the Lions Gate Bridge. He had already earned his own circle, was approachable, talkative, only rarely incoherent.

Chladek offered a sip of Becherovka, a medicinal Czech liquor in a square green bottle, a shareable portion of which was frequently in his possession. The Professor offered back a package of saltines that Chladek accepted.

“Tell me,” the Professor said, after they had sipped from the bottle again. He gestured to take in the entire forest around them. “What is this wilderness to you?”

“Maybe not so much as it is to you,” said Chladek, who was capable of being difficult. But he turned the corners of his mouth downwards and nodded slowly, considering the question. “It is Stromovka,” he said finally.

The Professor didn’t understand.

Chladek smiled. He set the bottle of Becherovka on the pavement with a clink. He spread his arms, palms open as the Professor had just done. “Stromovka,” he said again. “The place of the trees.”

The Professor pondered this comment at the fire later, time slipping by, sketching lines and erasing them. “Stromovka,” he
said, looking up into the canopy above, then back down to his diagram. It was no kind of formal science he recognized, but the Professor followed the whisper of an impulse and wrote the word inside the largest circle, the circle at the centre of the page. The Woods. Here he wrote:
Sanctified. Stromovka. The Place of Trees
.

Then he lay back in the ferns to let it all flow over him. Jeremy stood at the centre of his own diagram, the Professor thought. In the thick of his own woods. A joined drama. People turning against the wind, returning to Eden. Those seeking reconciliation with the stable rhythms of the earth, with their own beginnings. Here, in the park, where out of desperation, for lack of options, a living theatre of rootedness had been reborn from distant tragedy. In Jeremy’s kitchen, where a sense of lost connection played out in culinary theatrics about the return to a familiar soil.

And just as the thought creased through him—the Professor hoped it might be discussed between them that very evening—he realized it was two o’clock. He jogged to the lagoon, arriving at the cherry trees completely out of breath, his case clutched under his arm. His diagrams folded into a yellow wad and stuffed into his rear pocket.

Jeremy was not at the designated spot, on the city side of the lagoon at the cherry trees. He stood high on the rise above the lagoon, past the tennis courts. The boy had chosen to stand on the lip of grass that was the absolute easternmost edge of the park. The last bit of green before the curb, before pavement and buildings began. The outside. He was looking down.

The Professor climbed up towards his son. The light glanced down from the streetlights across Jeremy’s face. It threw shadows under his tired eyes. His downturned mouth. When they were face to face, they stood in silence for a number of seconds. The Professor felt disappointment fill him. “You have not been back to the library,” he said.

“Shitty week,” Jeremy snapped. But he stopped at that, because in the Professor’s eyes, those impervious eyes, there was a colour that he recognized. A shade of bruising. A shade of vulnerability. He lowered his voice. “How is Caruzo?”

“Sends his best.”

Jeremy steadied himself.

The Professor spoke first. “There was a woman in the park on the day they died.”

Jeremy dropped his head. God.

“She saw something that day … someone …”

Jeremy turned and stepped into the street. The Professor remained on the grass. He held the last inch of his park. “The two are meant to be together,” he said, talking to Jeremy’s back. “Just as the two were drawn from the same soil, so too must the same soil hold them.…”

The strange words.

Jeremy spun, standing in the middle of the empty nighttime street. From her expensive apartment window high in the concrete and glass monolith behind them, had the resilient old lady of the West End risen for a nocturnal glass of grapefruit juice just then, she might have looked down and seen a small, charged scene on her quiet street. A rumpled figure, tired, authoritative, holding court on the grass by the curb, his arms crossed, his head back looking at the sky. And opposite him, a leaner, younger frame of a discernibly similar type, angular, also in black, hands in his jacket pockets rigidly, critically, dubiously. Staring at the older cast of himself.

“From the file in the library,” Jeremy said.

The Professor pantomimed applause.

“And if you’ve read it,” Jeremy went on, “may I ask why I—”

“Because you are a part of what is going on here.”

Jeremy stared. He didn’t want to know. He plunged.

“I accepted an offer.” Even to his own ear, the words
clanked coldly out into the night air between them, but he couldn’t have predicted that the statement would bring the Professor’s arms limply to his sides, that it would pull him a step forward. Out of the park. Onto the curb. Into the gutter. The Professor was staring at his son, his blood. Standing in the street, in the city. “Oh, you have made such a mistake.”

“It’s a good deal. It gives me freedom.”

“Freedom. So many things done in this name.”

Freedom from debt, Jeremy tried to say, but the Professor was looking past him now. Over his shoulder and up between the buildings. Beyond. He was whispering.

“Too often, I think, the desire for freedom masks the desire for destruction.”

The words a thin stream. A last breath.

“You want to destroy everything around you, everything you have created for yourself or been given by others. To be free.”

Tapering. Diminishing. Losing angularity, presence, power.

“Natural for you, perfectly natural,” the Professor whispered. “Natural to refuse the key that is given. To be blind in the darkness of knowing. To be filled with a dark light that we must shine on the people around us. A light that makes us weep and pull down our own houses.”

The wind spoke in the cherry trees, a hissing speech through purple leaves and thin black branches. The city hummed, hypnotic. Winding through the deepest part of a Wednesday night.

“Come stay with me,” Jeremy said. He could hardly hear his own words. “Do your research but sleep in a bed. Write your notes at a table. You could shave.”

“Stay involved,” the Professor said. Back. Alert. “Stay interested.”

No second for an answer. He turned. He descended the hill at a determined trot. He threaded through the cherry
trees, from the branches of which hung the fruits of their joint linkage to this place.

Around the lagoon went the Professor, dwindling down, then swallowed by the blackness.

At first, “business as usual” was painfully accurate. A week after coming to his understanding with Inferno International, he was still enjoying a daily flurry of hostile incoming letters and phone calls, complicated by the fact that Dante disappeared to New York City. Meanwhile, there was something like a virus loose among his various credit cards. Business was up enough to permit small payments; he was actually winding the kite in. Still, nobody was happy. Diners Club cancelled the card.
After late payments in seven of the past twelve months
 … MasterCard sent him a stern reminder about an unpaid delinquency assessment, and it was hand-signed. He’d only ever had correspondence from the computer before.

Then there was the Canadian Tire lawyer. Doug Acer called half a dozen times, each time a little earlier in the morning. He was screening calls by this point, so Jeremy never had to deal with the young lawyer directly, but he was beginning to get the impression it was a sport for Acer.
We should be able to work it out. Let me know a convenient time to reach you. If it’s too early, I can try you later in the day
.

Jeremy was forced to track Dante down in New York.

To his credit, Dante provided help quickly. He made one or two power calls of his own on Jeremy’s behalf—everybody would be paid out by the end of July—and this precipitation
of irritable calls abated immediately. Jules hadn’t noticed anything, they were still very much open and business was steady. It was like the sun had come out after a day of rain, which it had, in fact; the weather was brilliant. And then,
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booked a table for twelve for the first Saturday in August. Twelve people, they wanted a prix fixe menu, leaving it to Jeremy to decide. There could have been no better way to start the new “business as usual” era, thought Jeremy. A deliciously good omen.

Here, then, was the happy substance of Plan A as it framed up in Jeremy’s mind. By the end of July debtors would be paid out or otherwise mollified. Dante would return from New York and take him for lunch at the Terminal City Club. Maybe Philly would come. In either case, they’d talk pleasantries during the main course, about Chicago and New York. Dante would have stories, and he would tell these without the need for feedback beyond the conversational punctuation of Jeremy saying “sure” or “oh, really?” and thereby demarcating one of Dante’s observations from the next. It wouldn’t be so terrible. Over dessert, Philly would review the situation. There would be papers to sign. Inferno would buy 95 percent of the business (Paw Incorporated d.b.a. The Monkey’s Paw Bistro). The price would be a dollar, and all assets would thereby pass to Dante. In return, Jeremy imagined he would have to sign an agreement relating to his terms of employment, a commitment to work for a couple of years at a modest salary.

The plan offered stability without undue humiliation, but more than that, Plan A, in Jeremy’s calculation, meant that Jules, Zeena and Dominic would be kept on. And Jeremy was confident that, by the end of a couple months, anybody exposed to Jules would need no more proof of her abilities. Dante would learn to love her. Jules would eventually tolerate Dante. Everybody would be happy again.

Unfortunately, there was no Plan B, despite the failure of Plan A prerequisites to materialize. First, the end of July
came and Dante hadn’t played his part. Jeremy tried him at his offices, but no, Mr. Beale was still in New York. He tried the cell number repeatedly, but Dante either had the phone turned off or was deep underground somewhere. Jeremy’s signals weren’t getting through. He left messages, three in total before he stopped. Was it possible Dante had changed his mind? Jeremy didn’t think so. He didn’t think Dante changed his mind.

So August arrived without action on anybody’s part. Jeremy left his fourth message in a voice mailbox somewhere out there in phone-space; he didn’t even know what mailbox he was talking to any more.

Dante, it’s me
. And then he ran out of words, stumbling to a close with:
I’m in Vancouver
.

Brilliant, he thought after hanging up. Of course you’re in Vancouver—where else would you be? It’s only the Dantes of the world who had unplugged themselves from the planet and were doing their business on a plane that hovered just above the actual surface of the earth.

Living on the plane below that one, where passage over the ground was still measured in some fashion—kilometres, life left in a pair of soles—transactions had a stickier quality. They were tangled more in the social and personal foliage of the place, in the analogue uncertainties of human behaviour. And that might explain why, Dante’s lofty assurances not withstanding, on the Friday, the day before the
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party, it seemed that everybody in the Vancouver financial community who had ever had any association with Jeremy or The Paw boiled over at once.

He had just placed the single largest daily order of his life, and paid everyone confidently by cheque: sockeye salmon, Queen Charlotte crab, Saturna Island lamb sides, Fraser Valley ducks and crates of assorted produce from Garrulous Greens. He had walked serenely back through town to The Monkey’s Paw. And as he was sipping a coffee and contemplating the
uncomfortably large stack of mail, a courier arrived. It was an ominously thin package. Inside, Jeremy read the following on Toronto Dominion Bank letterhead:

He didn’t finish the first sentence, and his heart was palpitating. A familiar dying two-step with the associated wave of dread—sweeping, systemic dread like only the realization of personal financial ruin can precipitate. And then the eerie prickle as microscopic beads of sweat bristled to the top of every pore, minutely lubricating him for flight in response to the adrenaline coursing through him. He was, he felt emphatically, fucked from a great height.

But he didn’t pass out. He hung on. He phoned Dante again, immediately. No answer. And this time, no accessible mailbox either. Instead the robotic femininity of Nellie the mail matron informing him:
This mailbox is full. Please call again
.