The Owl silently cheers on the Road Runner, who makes another miraculous escape from Wile E. Coyote. Faloon has been studying the ventilation ducts, trying to decide if he’s small enough to squeeze into them, wiggle his way somewhere, the laundry room, then over the fence to the street. It seems a better plan than to overcome the six-and-a-half-foot warder who stands by the door.
A break for commercials, and the ape with the blue veiner tattooed on his arm is no longer riveted to the screen. He is sizing up the Owl. The tranks are wearing off, God is whispering that Faloon is trying to control his mind. The other one is staring at him now too, the mother-in-law chopper, whose preferred tool was a cleaver. In such an atmosphere, Faloon has decided not to offend anyone with Gertrude Heeredam demonstrations.
Anyway, he has practically given up on the multiple identity theory, a play born of desperation. The psychiatric nurse isn’t buying it, a shrewd and unsympathetic woman. Nurse Thompson has been assigned to “work” with him, as she puts it. Now she wants to run him through a lie detector. His current counsel, Brian Pomeroy, says definitely not, it would put the final kibosh to the whole deal. She’d check into his father, discover he returned to the old country after his business folded, and is ten thousand miles away.
His parents don’t have happy memories of Canada, their boy a delinquent, always running away from home. In school, he was the little Arab kid who got stepped on. He had to stand up to them, show them something, so as a dare he stole the principal’s briefcase and entertained his new friends with the Playboy in it. That gave him honour and respect. It was the turning point of his life.
A child psychologist told his parents he suffered from kleptomania, and wrongly assured them he’d grow out of it, the problem wouldn’t grip him for life. The only side benefit was it got him some cheap sentences; Mr. Beauchamp has even been known to wring tears out of his disability.
Mr. Pomeroy lacks the satin touch and seems kind of scattered, but he has other qualities. For instance, he’s got the nuts of Godzilla. Adeline Angella has made contact with him. She wants to interview him at a quiet place for dinner. Since the same modus operandi happened in Faloon’s case, the spider inviting the fly, he tried to warn Mr. Pomeroy off, but he’s going ahead with it.
The lawyer wanted to know all about Faloon’s ill-fated date, and made detailed notes, once pausing to compliment him on his powers of observation. Faloon explained it’s how he made his living.
It was at the Kashmir Sapphire trial where Faloon first saw Angella, at the press table, giving him the eye while Mr. Beauchamp destroyed the main Crown eyewitness, who it turned out could hardly see, let alone read, the calendar on the courtroom wall. After Faloon was cleared, Angella accosted him outside, giving him the pitch about her being a magazine writer and she would love to know about the fascinating world of the jewel thief.
To his everlasting sorrow, Faloon was intrigued, everyone wants a little fame and recognition. He could spin her, his friends would have a laugh reading the story. But of course he got into the sauce before meeting her, celebrating with Cat and Willy-the Kashmir had been a three-handed play, a lawn party, a visiting maharaja, a replica in paste, two months of planning.
Angella suggested a restaurant at the Four Seasons, and Faloon had to admit he was banned from that chain, so they settled on a Spanish place in her neighbourhood, El Torro, where he continued to get oiled, with sangria then wine. She wanted to know about the Kashmir Sapphire, and he told her it was too delicate a subject right now. He laid on a lot of baloney instead, stuff like he was raised in a family of trapeze artists, and how he filched the Persian Goddess from the Constantinople Museum by swinging on a rope.
The fact is the Owl is really not a movie-hero kind of guy who swings from ropes and chandeliers and leaps over laser beams, he has always left that sort of stuff to Clint Eastwood. He doesn’t like the physical stuff, relies on nimble fingers and swift feet.
The Angella woman was better than passing grade, but not top shelf. Full-beam headlights, though. Breastacula. The Owl wasn’t counting on any sexual involvement until he picked up that she was coming on to him-leaning forward, all audience, an “Oh, goodness” here and a gasp there, her hands fluttering over her breasts. She had this way of staring intently at him as she dipped her tongue in her wineglass before taking a sip. If the idea was to make him horny, it was working. “Cognacs?” she said. “I’m just around the corner.”
Finally, on the TV there’s something for the level above five-year-olds, The Simpsons, but when it opens to Homer presiding over a family dinner, Weird Harold rises, points to the screen, and shouts, “That’s him! That’s Gary! May you rot in hell!”
The warder presses a button, sirens sound, and lights flash, and the warder is moving toward this unbalanced individual with a straitjacket, and they wrestle. Now the guy who dismembered his neighbour is again fixed on Faloon. But before the nightmare can ignite into some epic bloody climax, reinforcements pour in, syringes in hand.
Faloon looks at those ventilation ducts again.
The booths in the visiting area are full on a Sunday, but it’s a non-contact zone, the visitors separated by a window, with a kind of walkie-talkie setup that is probably bugged. Claudette approaches, smiling. She had her hair cut, it makes her look a lot younger than fifty, at which age she’s still table grade. You’ve got to be someone who likes a little extra, though.
They were a regular team for over a year, except for that brief outage over the logging whore. Until he got busted, Faloon was planning to propose she give up her rental, make Nitinat Lodge her home. He kind of thinks he loves her, and vice versa, but neither of them have committed themselves to that concept.
As endearments fly, it floods in on him how much he is going to miss her, she is the only woman not in the trade he has ever opened up with. Because he’s so scrawny and generally homely he feels privileged that she’s fond of him. She’s enamoured about him being an outlaw, a jewel thief, but has this habit of encouraging him to be straight. “Isn’t it fun running a business?” “Don’t you feel good about yourself when you’re doing honest work?” As he’s swabbing out the toilets at the Nitinat Lodge.
Claudette is Nova Scotian. She cut out of school early and meandered across the country-apple picker, cocktail waitress, road flagger, patty flipper-but she had to stop at Bamfield, it was the end of Canada, and she’s been slinging pints at the Bam Pub for the last six years.
She asks, “You got my letters?”
“Read every one ten times, but you got to cut down on the scented paper, the tears smear it up.”
“Oh, Nick, I’m gonna fall apart. What are you doing in here, you’re not crazy.”
“Yeah, but don’t say that-they’re listening. For the record, I am innocent.”
“I explained that to Jasper Flynn till I’m blue in the face. You hate violence. I told him how you look down on robbers who use weapons. I don’t believe those DNA tests, scientists are always making mistakes, testing the wrong samples, stuff like that. Either that or they’re lying, and the cops are trying to set you up.”
“Claudette, when it comes to coppers, I have no enemy. I never met one who don’t like me. We’re tough competitors, just on different teams. There’s got to be some other answer. They ought to drill that condo developer with a few more questions.”
“Maybe you want to think about Holly Hoover.”
A name he never thought she’d mention without a profanity. This is the hooker who, three months ago, traded him sex for a free room. Lying about that to Claudette was about the hardest thing he’s ever done.
“Honey, are you sure you didn’t screw her?”