I take up my briefcase. I grit my teeth.
Gowan Cleaver, weighted with his burden of anxious city energy, is at the ramp beside the chartered float plane.
“We’re set for ten-thirty, Arthur. Not much time. We should go over some things.”
We climb aboard, and the pilot taxis into deeper water, then throttles, and we are airborne. I watch my little farm shrink into the distance, and the island recedes, and a sadness overwhelms me. I shall returnsine mora.
As the aircraft churns across Georgia Strait, the muddy outpourings of the Fraser River pass below, then its diked embouchure and alluvial plains, the flat, squared suburbs, Lulu Island, Sea Island, the international airport, and now the great clay banks of Point Grey, the buildings of the university perched high atop them. I can see the law school, where Jonathan O’Donnell and Kimberley Martin took theirfirst faltering steps towards their ultimate strange encounter.
We sweep over the steel filaments of the Lions Gate suspension bridge, then coast into Vancouver’s busy inner harbour to the floatplane dock. Surrounded as I am by monoliths of glass and concrete, immersed within the city’s roar and clatter, I feel an ill foreboding, a loss of bearing and balance, a queasiness. The passage was too quick; I have been thrust within minutes from field and forest into the unforgiving bowels of the city. I step from this flying Wellsian time machine onto the dock, where Gowan, haranguing me like a high-school coach, leads me to one of the firm’s limousines.
“Don’t use kid gloves, Arthur. I think we have to work on the reasonable assumption she’s lying through her teeth.”
“I think we ought to try to avoid bloodshed, Gowan.”
“Au contraire.You should do the slice and dice. Look, let’s say O’Donnelldoesget committed — you do a job on her today she’ll be shitting in her drawers, she won’t want to push this thing to trial.”
He carries on in this scabrous vein all the way to the Commonwealth Tower, the forty-three-storey phallic extrusion on Georgia Street wherein the minions of Tragger, Inglis, Bullingham perform their daily drudgery. Five entire floors we occupy; I have met but half the lawyers we employ.We. I am back in the firm. But I am not stopping at the offices this morning. Roberto’s Salon is just off the lobby, facing the street. He has been barber to the firm for thirty years.
Gowan tells our driver, “Pick us up in twenty minutes, no later,” then continues to offer advice as we walk to the building. “Don’t be fooled by her. I think she’ll probably come on all batty-eyed and winsome.”
“I have done this before, Gowan.” I am becoming brittle of temper. It’s the city. I can hear its tin music, its sirens, its loud, back-slapping laughter. I can smell its dense air.
Roberto, whom I remember when he was Bob and his salon a shop, has cancelled a morning appointment to squeeze me in for twenty minutes. Upon recognizing me — after some early doubt- he indulges in an effulgent display of nose-crinkling, hand-wringing, and stricken moans.
“Mr. Beauchamp, we simply don’t want you looking like they found you wandering about in the Sahara Desert. I’ll never do this in twenty minutes, it’s impossible. That beard is utterly immoral, it ought to be against the law.”
“I’m keeping the beard, Roberto. Just trim it and tidy me up on
top.”
He settles me into his chair with a great show of disdain, enshrouds me with a rubber cloak, and takes one last despairing look at the tragedy of my hair and goes to work with scissors and clippers.
“Wecouldmake a nice ponytail.”
“That will not be necessary.”
Gowan hovers near. “You want to go over your cross-examination notes while you’re sitting there?”
“No, thank you.”
“Youmadenotes”
“Ah, yes, well, they’re mostly in my head.”
“Pat Blueman, I should warn, is very pissed off that I got hold of those tapes of the complainant. Wait till Judge Pickles hears them. When his honour finds out Blueman’s been doing sendups of him, he’ll want to sendherup. Roberto, you’re not listening to this, okay? We’re short of time, I have to go over some tactics”
I say, “A man ought to trust his barber.”
“Oh my, cut out my tongue,” Roberto says.
“Okay, the scenario plays out like this,” says Gowan. “Kimberley Martin is engaged to a wealthy bore. She’s in love with Remy’s money, so she doesn’t want to blow the marriage, but at the same time she’s developed this infatuation with a prof — from whom, by the way, she needs a passing mark to get her into third year. She gets drunk, she gets loose, her hormones start to rage out of control, and before she can think about the consequences, she’s busily humping the acting dean of a prestigious law school.”
I hear all this. But what could have caused that supposedly healthy, happy, normal twenty-three-year-old woman to claim he tied her up?
“Now it’s the wee hours, and suddenly she remembers her fiance has just returned home from a business trip — where was he, South America right? She panics — she probably told him she’d be home no later than midnight. And she’s plastered, her brain isn’t exactly functioning with cool precision. Her only hope of saving the marriage is to yell rape. Following this?”
“Yes, Gowan.”
“So she runs next door, makes a big show of having been attacked.”
“Why all the lipstick on her body?”
“Oh, God, who knows, some sort of fetish. Shameless — it’s the colour of blood. Primitive self-decoration. Remember: She’s drunk, she’s abnormal, she’s seeing a shrink. And it’s only on the tits and the lower parts of her body, places she can reach. Does she call the police? No. She’s tied up and raped, and she doesn’t want the police involved? She probably hopes her boyfriend will listen to her tearful explanation and, because he doesn’t want embarrassing controversy, he’ll advise her not to pursue it. But he does. He, Clarence de Remy Brown, calls the cops. There’s no backing out. She has to play out the farce to the bitter end.”
“Why does she embellish this story with an account of being tied up?”
“To divert any suspicions Remy may have that she willingly put out. She chafes her ankles a bit, bruises herself up just a little to make the whole thing credible. Okay? See any holes in it?”
“It’s not totally implausible, I suppose.”
“So, okay, Arthur, don’t forget to ask her about her tapes: where she says pigs like Judge Pickles still run the farm. He’ll be smouldering, and he might just buy a pitch that the case is an abuse of process.”
I am having difficulty staying tuned in. The mention of pigs hasme wandering into a different courtroom. Should I subpoena a swine broker to testify as to Betsy’s value? Should I counterclaim for the total value of my recently disassembled Rolls-Royce? My small claims case seems much more fun than this atrocious business, with its inherent peril of blighted lives.
“Long in the back, Mr. Beauchamp? Something suave? Yes, I think the beard is beginning to work. Bit of salt and pepper. It says we are robust, manly, lusty.” Roberto is in a much better mood as his sculpting has progressed.
“Long in the back,” I say.
“Blueman hasn’t been warned you’re taking over as the senior. Wanted it to be a surprise. Bringing in the home-run king to pinch hit in the ninth. It’ll keep them off-balance.”
From the street outside, a sudden squeal of brakes, the sound of crunching metal. Loud curses. Roberto doesn’t miss a clip. He is humming to himself. He is an old warhorse of the city, inured to urban sound and fury.
Joining Gowan and me in the limousine are two students-at-law from the firm, excited fidgeting hod-carriers bearing valises filled with law reports that I will never use. But they are young and innocent, and believe the law has to do not with human foibles but with musty precedent.