“Sorry. I can’t.”
“Busy busy?”
“Bushed. I thought tonight I’d turn in early for once. Harvey, you look different. What is it?”
“I do not look different.”
“Harvey, I loved my father. But he was also something of a tyrant, wasn’t he?”
“We’ve got a problem, Lionel.” Miss O’Brien’s unfulfilled expectations. The envelope.
“Good for you, Harvey. How much was in it?”
“You were there when we opened the safe. There was no envelope.”
“Was the old goat screwing her for all those years?”
“No, but there were intimacies of a kind.”
“Hell, if that’s what he wanted, we could have afforded much better.”
“He also appears to have told her a good deal about the old days. It might be prudent to discover an envelope with, say, a couple of hundred thousand dollars in it.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
“That’s exactly what I said to Morrie.”
“What in the hell has that idiot got to do with it?”
“It was his idea. I told him it was ill-advised. Once you start on a thing like that, you could be paying out for years.”
“I didn’t say there should be an envelope or that there shouldn’t be an envelope. All I said is I want nothing to do with it. You do what you think best, Harvey. I’d like to be able to count on you.”
A copy of the drawing of a radiant Ephraim Gursky that hung over the fireplace in the boardroom of the Bernard Gursky Tower in Montreal hung in a gold frame in Lionel’s office. Harvey was so familiar with it that he hadn’t looked at it for years, but he did now. Ephraim, no taller than Mr. Bernard, was, unlike him, all coiled muscle, obviously ready to spring out of the frame and wrestle both Lionel and Harvey to the ground. Ephraim was drawn alongside a blow-hole, with both feet planted in the pack ice, his expression defiant, his head hooded, his body covered with layers of sealskin, not so much to keep out the cold, it seemed, as to lock in the animal heat lest it melt the surrounding ice. He held a harpoon in his fist, the shaft made of caribou antler. There was a seal lying at his feet, the three masts of the doomed Erebus and jagged icebergs rising in the background, the black Arctic sky lit by paraselenae, the mock-moons of the north. Harvey, unaccountably distressed, looked away from the drawing and indicated the whalebone sculpture resting on a pedestal in the corner. “That’s Eskimo, isn’t it?”
“You want it, it’s yours.”
“No. But where did you get it?”
“I can’t remember how it got here, but I think it belonged to my Uncle Solomon once. Why?”
“Nothing. Just asking,” Harvey said, lifting the piece off the pedestal to examine its underside, where he espied what, to his uninformed eye, appeared to be a ‘gimel’.
Three
Each time he reached that point on the 132 where it overtook the St. Lawrence River and hung in there, twisting with the shore, hugging it—past Trois Pistoles, winding beyond Rimouski—Moses’s spirits soared. In his mind’s eye, he would obliterate the straining Winnebagos and swarms of black-leather motorcyclists and roadside signs: TARZAN CAMPING ICI … BAR BQ CHICKEN CHEZ OCTAVE … 10 DANSEUSES NUES 10. He would shut out the slapdash little riverside towns with their souvenir shops mounted on cinderblocks, windows choked with machine-tooled carvings of cute spade-bearded habitants. He would ignore the houses framed by multi-coloured lights, the owner’s initials woven into the aluminum storm door. Plastic reindeer staked in mid-prance on lawns already adorned with geranium beds set in worn whitewashed tires, the Quebecker’s coronet.
Blinding himself to what we had made of our provenance, he would try to see the countryside as it must have looked to Cartier and his crew of sea-weary fishermen out of St. Malo in 1534. The year that they first ventured beyond the gulf, sailing into the estuary and up the fjord, anchoring at Ile Verte to scamper after hares for the pot, putting in at Ile aux Coudres to shake wild hazelnuts free of the trees. Sailing into the Kingdom of the Saguenay and beyond, drifting past beluga whales and walrus and unbelievably thick schools of salar the leaper, as the king of freshwater fish was first known. Though the river would fail to lead them to La Chine—a disappointment to François I no doubt—how the poor and pinched men of Brittany must have marvelled at the cornucopia on either shore. The abundance of virgin dark green forest and the river-enriched black soil. The moose and deer and beaver and geese and ducks. The cod. The salmon, the salmon. The silvery, sea-bright salmon rolling in the ripples and leaping free.
At Mont-Joli, grateful to be exactly where he was for once, even without her, Moses dropped sharply right into the Gaspé on the winding 132. Rising and dipping he spun into the valley of the Matepédia, riverbanks soaring like canyon walls, the spruce and cedar and birch not so much rooted there as scaling the cliffs on which they held no more than a tenuous toe-hold. Then he crossed into New Brunswick at Pointe-à-la-Croix, taking the bridge into Campbellton and then making straight for the camp of the Restigouche. Vince’s Gulch was made up of a dining lodge and a sleeping lodge and a spread of outbuildings, including an ice-house.
Bouncing into the parking space in his Toyota shortly after five P.M. Moses noted two cars, with North Carolina licence plates, already in place in the shade, a Cadillac and a Mercedes 450 SEL with a Playboy bunny mounted on the rear bumper. Big chunky Jim Boyd, the head guide, walked slowly toward Moses, his catcher’s hand extended but his eyes troubled. “They got here about an hour ago,” he said. “Barney Gursky and his girlfriend Darlene Walton and Larry and Mary Lou Logan. The Logans have a teenage boy with them. Rob. A real doozer. He didn’t know there wasn’t going to be any TV and he suffers from allergies.” Jim allowed that to sink in before he added, “They never fished for salmon before. They’re in furniture, very big, looking to set up a factory, maybe two hundred jobs, either here or in Ontario. They’re guests of that horse’s ass who passes for our minister of trade and he wants them to have one hell of a good time. So we don’t want any trouble, Moses. Where’s Beatrice?”
“We’re not together any more.”
“You’re no damn good, Moses, and you’re going to die all alone like me in a tarpaper shack somewheres.”
Moses handed over his traditional gifts, a pound of Twinings Ceylon Breakfast Tea and a bottle of Macallan Single Highland Malt.
“You’ve already had two phone calls,” Jim said. “One of them was from England.”
“I’m not even here.”
Moses unpacked his things and then stepped out on the lodge porch to look at the water. The screen door to the adjoining bedroom whacked open and out sailed a real life Barbie doll, thirty maybe, blonde, drenched in perfume, her blue eyes not so much made up as underlined and set in italics; everything glowing, twinkly, her confident manner redeemed somewhat by badly chewed fingernails. She was wearing a corn-coloured raw silk top, a necklace ending in a pentangle in the cleft between her high perky breasts, and skintight designer jeans. She was barefoot, her toenails painted black. “Blessed be,” she sang out in a drinker’s husky voice, “I’m Darlene Walton. And what, may I inquire, is your rising house?”
“Why, I do believe I have a stationary Mercury rising in Pisces,” Moses said. Then he tried to take her arm to help her down from the porch, but she withdrew abruptly from his touch. “There’s a step missing,” he pointed out, irritated.
She shrugged fetchingly, crinkling her sweet little nose and rolling her eyes, her alarm signals overlarge, like that of a silent movie actress, all to warn him against the man watching from the porch of the dining lodge.