The missing manilla envelope still inflamed her. “He didn’t lie. Not to me. The little runt took it or maybe Libby has it.”
Gitel Kugelmass, who lingered on at the Mount Sinai, never came out to his cabin, but phoned often. Most recently to report that Dr. Putterman was undoubtedly an RCMP undercover agent.
“Gitel,” Moses said, “I want you to come with me to see a doctor I know.”
“Maybe that Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial, where it was proven the CIA was paying them to experiment with mindbending drugs on old people who had no idea what was going on.”
Unfortunately he couldn’t deny that.
“Or you could put me on the next plane to Moscow, where I could join the other dissidents in the loonybin.”
The last time he had taken Gitel to lunch she had said, “Remember the letter L.B. sent me and Kronitz in Ste.-Agathe, pleading with us to think of the children? Not that my Errol Flynn of the north didn’t already have his chess set packed. Well that letter is to be included in that young professor’s book, you know the one I mean, he’s always gabbing away on TV, he’s against nuclear arms and wears Red Indian jewellery?”
“Zeigler?”
“That’s the one. Isn’t it ironic, Moishe? All those years hungering for fame and L.B. doesn’t live to see his biography published?”
Three letters from Professor Herman Zeigler lay unanswered in Moses’s cabin. The last one, a gem, had come with three enclosures.
1. A street map, detailing the exact route of L.B.’s afternoon strolls from the house with the garden and ornamental shrubs on a tree-lined street in Outremont, down to Park Avenue, past Curly’s newsstand, the Regent cinema, Moe’s barbershop, the YMHA and Fletcher’s Field, cutting left at Pine Avenue to Horn’s Cafeteria. He asked Moses to correct any errors or add variations to the route.
2. A photograph of “The Bard”, a sculpture of L.B.’s massive head by Marion Peterson, CM, OC, that now rested on a pedestal in the foyer of La Bibliothèque Juive de Montréal.
3. Thoughtfully included computer printouts that tabulated the frequency of rank-shifted clauses, tense auxiliaries, nouns with attributive adverbs, total noun phrase packers, et cetera in the poetry of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and L.B. Berger.
L.B., Moses was gratified to note, came first in the use of personal pronouns.
In the letter itself, Zeigler requested an interview with Moses in connection with a paper he was preparing for a conference in Banff on The Failure Syndrome of the Progeny of Great Canadian Artists. “Certainly,” he wrote, “your co-operation in this venture would be seminal.”
He had not seen Beatrice for years, but he continued to monitor her climb. An avid fan. She had already dispensed with the biodegradable Tom Clarkson, divorcing him for a pretty price. According to reports, she would soon be married to the man favoured to be the next Canadian high commissioner to the United Kingdom. From there it ought to be only a hop, skip, and a jump to another marriage and a coronet. Meanwhile, the urchin who had once been known as a Raven kid in Old Town would be working garden parties at Buckingham Palace. Moses, delighted for her, visualized Beatrice telling Mrs. Thatcher how to dress and quarter a caribou and reminding Prince Charles that they had met once before, in the Elks Hall in fabled Yellowknife.
Lucy sent him newspaper clippings and magazine articles about her that he might have missed. A photograph of her in People hugging Andy Warhol, inscribed, “Look at your little Lucy now!!” Reviews, largely favourable, of her productions on and off Broadway. A profile in New York portrayed her as foul-mouthed, notoriously bitchy about actresses who had worked for her, but a perfectionist, no expense spared when she mounted a production.
Lucy’s last phone call had come a long time ago, maybe a couple of years after Henry’s death.
“The cannibal was here to see me last night.”
“What?”
“Henry’s boy. Isaac.”
“How is he?”
“He gives me the creeps is how he is.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“You sound drunk.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
“Come down to New York and I’ll pay your fare. You don’t have to stay with me if you don’t want to. I’ll put you up at the Carlyle.”
“Say, I can remember when you suggested to Henry that he could pay for my company.”
“We could have been married and had grown children by now.”
“No, it would have been irresponsible. I’m an unredeemed lush and you have yet to complete your childhood.”
“I weigh 280 pounds. I can’t stop. I’m a monster. I’m going to explode one day like a sausage in a frying pan,” she shrieked before hanging up.
Gitel, Beatrice, Lucy, Kathleen. For the rest, the kind of women Moses managed to attract to his cabin offered five minutes of release paid for with hours of irritation. There had been a lady of a certain age who couldn’t abide cigar smoke and another out for a weekend who read a Sidney Sheldon paperback in his bed. Wet towels on his bathroom floor. Hairs clogging his sink. His records put back in the wrong sleeves. Women who expected chitchat at breakfast. And now, not Mary, as Grumpy’s bartender had so aptly put it, out for the weekend. Fortunately, Mary insisted on leaving at once after he reprimanded her on Saturday morning.
“Not that I give a shit what you think,” she said, “but I wasn’t snooping. I have no interest whatsoever in your fucking papers. I was just foolish enough to believe you’d be pleasantly surprised if somebody tried to put this pig-sty in order.”
Moses drove her to the bus station in Magog.
“I’ll pay my own fare, if you don’t mind. And this is for you. I sat on it last night. Do me a favour. Shove it up your ass.”
His Silver Doctor.
Eight
Moses pulled in at The Caboose on his way home.
“Wait till you hear what happened,” Strawberry said. “It’s 10:30 A.M.—yesterday—bank’s been opened a good half-hour and Bunk ain’t cashed his welfare cheque yet so’s he can start on his monthly toot.”
Bunk and his woman were now rooted in a shack up there somewhere in the hills beyond Lake Nick.
“So Hi-Test’s worried and he loads a case of twenty-four into his four-wheeler and off he goes to check things out last night.”
Entering the cabin, Hi-Test immediately sniffed something bad. He brushed past Bunk, snoozing at the kitchen table, his head cradled in his arms behind a barricade of empty quart bottles of Labatt’s 50. He pursued the smell into the bedroom, bolted right out again, and shook Bunk awake. “Hey,” he said, “your woman’s lying dead in there.”
“Oh, so that’s it,” Bunk said, relieved, “and I thought it was she was angry with me. She’s sure been awful quiet since yesterday.”
The bar was crowded, most of the regulars celebrating the arrival of their welfare cheques, but Legion Hall and Sneaker were nowhere to be seen. “They’re hiding somewhere in the hills,” Strawberry said.
Only a week earlier Legion Hall and Sneaker had set up a stall on the 243 piled high with quart cans, ostensibly filled with maple syrup. A placard nailed to the stall read:
HELP ANGLO FARMIRS
LAST OF A DYING BREDE.