As she returns to her bird feeder, he entertains the shuddering thought that he could lose this woman. He knows what she wants as proof of love: stop being a feckless noncombatant. Be a proud defender of Lady Gwendolyn. Fight for her as he would for any innocent client facing life.
“Tell Mr. Santorini to come here, Arthur. Tell him to smell the air of the forest and listen to the birds. We had a purple finch here yesterday.”
Arthur doesn’t expect Justice Santorini will be interested in a purple finch.
“And if he still wants me to come down,” she says with a shrug, “tell him he can climb up here and get me.”
That evening Arthur is still flustered and bewildered by Margaret’s chilly reception. (Guiltily, he found himself examining Margaret’s sheets, on the growing mountain in the laundry room, for suspicious stains.) He calls Australia for help. Three years ago, his daughter Deborah fled a boring marriage. Three years before that, her mother ended hers with Arthur. It’s said that infelicitous events occur in cycles of three-is it Margaret’s turn to break free?
He rails on to Deborah about the louche poet, about the cruel teasing he’s been getting, the misfiring of Operation Morningstar, the negative vibrations from the high pulpit of the Holy Tree. “You told me to get active, impress her, make a famous return to the courts. Now she’s miffed at me for ignoring her.”
“Okay, Dad, but her irritation has a lot to do with that hot little number you were squiring about. Margaret’s human. You probably do have ideas, you rogue.”
“Nonsense. Margaret was affronted at my cavalier assumption I could make her jealous. Oddly, she seems even more put out that I’m running off to do a murder trial-though earlier she gave approval. The older I get, the less I am able to comprehend the female mind.”
He can hear her take a deep breath. “Okay, Dad, there’s a romantic side to Margaret you seem oblivious to. She wants you to be her knight, her chevalier. A situation has arisen where she has become the classic maiden in distress. Galahad is being called upon to save her from the clutches of the inquisition, swoop her in his arms, and carry her off. But who does he gallop off to rescue? A thief. A habitual criminal.”
After a long pause: “I see.” Margaret feels jilted not for Lotis Morningstar Rudnicki but for Nick Faloon. “Then why would she make my task harder by daring the judge to climb the tree?”
“She’s putting you on the spot. You’re going to perform like Galahad or else.”
12
The floats of Syd’s Beaver wobble unsteadily, throwing up curls of spray as it lifts from Blunder Bay. Rain, visibility poor. Arthur’s farm retreats below, a hazy splotch of beach and pasture. He hopes he won’t return to find a potted landscraper crushed under his own backhoe. Yesterday, having struck clay, Stoney celebrated by smoking a joint, then left, claiming unspecified emergencies.
The dark waters of Georgia Strait give way to the Fraser’s muddy outflow. Canada’s Pacific metropolis arrives quickly, absurdly, like a giant foot thrusting from the mainland, the city bottled in by sea and river. Grey towers looming from the mist. Cars backed up for a mile across Lion’s Gate Bridge.
“Epic pileup on the bridge,” says Lotis, looking down as the aircraft banks. She is in her long fawn dress, her courtroom guise. In counterbalance, neon-bright vermilion lipstick.
They throttle down past the cranes and container ships to the seaplane docks at Coal Harbour. Arthur alights from the plane feeling ill equipped for urban survival. This city of his birth feels oppressive with its clamour and fury: a wail of siren, a squeal of brakes, unmusical complaints from a passing car-hip hop, he thinks they call it.
A taxi brings them to the glass-panelled faux arboretum that is the Vancouver Law Courts Building, and they enter the Great Hall, sheltered by fifty thousand square feet of angled skylight, tinted blue, resting on a network of aluminum trusses. Vines trail from the concrete abutments that sheath the tiers of terraces and courtrooms.
Arthur has a sense of foreboding. He is beyond praying that Santorini, by some Jovian miracle, will decide to smell the air of the forest. This judge seems to have lost his robust sense of humour.
Tell him he can climb up here and get me. It’s Cyrano to the rescue. Saving Roxanne from the evil Compte de Guiche so she may love her false poet. Arthur played the role as a teen, his student drama club. He knows the plot, cringes at the thought it’s being re-enacted.
On the third level, lawyers and litigants are milling about, impatient, clocks ticking at hundreds of dollars per minute. In Room 32, reporters shuffle and grumble. Paul Prudhomme is pacing. Selwyn Loo has undone his ponytail, and his black hair cascades over his shoulders, a look that makes him seem in grieving. Anxiety disorder. Arthur takes a chair beside him.
“I am on message,” Arthur says. “I’ll be proud to share counsel table with you.”
“Welcome aboard. Next stop is probably the Appeal Court.”
“In which case, I defer to you. I’m the new boy on the team.” This is the young lawyer’s case to argue-he has earned it
The clerk finishes a call to Santorini. “His Lordship finally made it off the bridge and is on his way.” He lives across the inlet in the aeries of West Vancouver, was a victim of the epic pileup.
Arthur tries the meditation exercises Corporal Al taught him-they ease the strain of waiting-while Lotis chats with Selwyn about the delights of Garibaldi, insisting he pay a weekend visit.
When court is finally called, Santorini enters rigidly, white-faced in black and crimson robes, recalling to mind Virgil’s Tisiphone: a robe this Fury wore, with all the pomp of horror, dyed in gore.
“I’m not even going to apologize, because…Madam clerk, I want the Highways minister on the line. Later, call that damn injunction, let me get this can of worms out of the way. I take it there’s been no movement, except that this ring-dang-do has become some kind of media circus. The courts are not going to be mocked, we live under the rule of law.” He bangs his fist on his daybook, sending a pen aloft and papers fluttering.
The pricey lawyers for the corporate wrongdoers look nervous: they’re next.
Selwyn rises. “Surely, milord…”
“I want to hear from Mr. Beauchamp!”
Arthur rises wearily. “Ego homo nullius coloris.”
Santorini says nothing for a few moments, but surrenders. “Okay, what’s that mean?”
“‘I am a man without words.’ Strictly translated, a man without colour, in that he is incapable of the art of argument.” Arthur can see the way this is going, his best hope is to provoke him into reversible error.
“You put this into Latin, Mr. Beauchamp. Or Greek, if you want, or ancient Hebrew, it’s all going to come out the same. I am giving that eagle two more days. In the meantime, the defendants are in contempt of court. I am sentencing each of them to a five-thousand-dollar fine and seven days in jail.”
Prudhomme starts to rise, presumably to advise the judge he missed a few procedural steps.
“I’m not through! That’s for today! Tomorrow, I double it, ten thousand and fourteen days. And the day after, double again. And it’s going to keep doubling until the defendants obey this court! Call the next case!”
As Arthur ushers Selwyn and Lotis to a taxi, he still hears the echoes of the judge’s wrath. It’s not healthy to let oneself go that way-he remembers how old, irascible Judge Kincaid succumbed to a coronary in heated debate, a death that still pricks Arthur’s conscience.
The Appeal Court is uncharted ground for these young Sierra lawyers, no precedents, no experience, so Arthur escorts them to the Bank of Montreal complex where Tragger Inglis Bullingham’s oiled machinery, he assures them, will spit out the notice of appeal in the time it takes to change a flat tire.