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 Emile 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 attache 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 attache, 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 attache 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 scrawclass="underline" “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 a CANNES, is about a love nest in a posh hotel, with photos of the late Emile 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.