He had to buy presents for the kids, find a way to smuggle them in. The shops were busy, depressing. Dumbly smiling elves in tinselled windows, syrup from speakers, tunes for illiterate ears, Christmas lights everywhere, sputtering, blinking, inducing a new phobia, fear of epileptic seizure.
He tarried a while outside the Bay, listening to a pretty violin-playing busker play a stripped-down version of the Four Seasons. He gave her twenty dollars for trying out for Rosy. Then down to the pimped-up waterfront, right on Cordova, then a ramble up Water Street, and you’re at Maple Tree Square, and that’s when you realize you’re being followed again. It was the same thin guy in the overcoat, or his brother. Dark complexion, Brian hadn’t noticed that last time. Who does he represent?
He hurried into an ugly so-called heritage building, avoided the elevator, took two flights of stairs, checking behind him at every landing. Yes, he’d shaken off the thin man. He entered through the portals of Pomeroy, Macarthur, Brovak, and Sage, whose freckled receptionist greeted him with a frozen cheery smile. “Good afternoon, Mr. Pomeroy.” Loud, so everyone could be warned.
Cuddles wasn’t here yet, just a couple of white-collar criminals in the waiting room. Brian had time to powder his nose. But stepping out of a doorway in a confrontational way-arms outstretched to hinder progress-was Maximilian Macarthur III, his dear friend, his woe-sharing buddy and partner of two decades.
“We need to talk.”
“I agree, Max. I’ve got a client coming by, let’s set a time.” Brian couldn’t get by, Max blocked all the holes. He was a little guy, bald and wiry, a runner, over-healthy. He pulled Brian into his office, closed the door.
“The divorce is over, Bry. It’s time to get normal.”
Brian stared grumpily out the window. Max had a pigeonless view, a choice view, over Burrard Inlet, a tableau of sea and mountains.
“Christ, you were coming around. Why did you relapse? For the last three months you’ve been like some ghoul who wanders in occasionally to spread gloom. Was it because your secretary quit? Roseanne got married. That happens. She’s pregnant. That happens too.”
Brian listened sullenly. Max doesn’t understand. No one understands. They can’t reach me, they can’t get to where I am.
“We’ve got you another one. She’s in your office now, restoring order from chaos. April Fan Wu, two weeks out of Hong Kong, she worked in a major law office there. Knows the lost art of shorthand.”
“Appreciate it. I think my client’s here.” Brian edged to the door.
Max had to reach to put an arm around his shoulders. “We’ll look after that disturbance charge, Bry, don’t worry about it. But I want to know what’s going on with you. Everyone’s concerned…”
“Did they ask you to check me out?”
“Who?”
“Everyone. You used the word everyone. Who is that, I want to know. Who is everyone?”
“Your partners, Bry-Augie and the Animal and me. Wentworth too. The conspiracy doesn’t go any higher. Where the hell have you been staying; why won’t you tell us?” The tone was of a social worker admonishing an adolescent runaway.
“I’m in a cabin in the woods, Max. I’m centring. I’m a Buddhist now, I’m studying the ways of the ascended masters. Listen, Max, I love you for caring, but if I act a little crazy, I’m just putting you on. It’s my sense of humour, Max, noir is in fashion. How’s Ruth? How’s little Jackie?”
“Jacqueline is not little any more, she’s thirty-five, she’s doing her Ph.D.”
“I knew that.” Brian made it out the door, waving goodbye, walking backward. “Later, right? We’ll talk later.”
“Let’s hoist a beer at Happy Hour, okay?”
“Happy Hour, claro, excellent plan.” Brian escaped down the hall, relieved he’d passed the test. Max hadn’t guessed the full extent of the damage.
He locked his office door, withdrew his A’s, fished out his bindle of blow, then turned to the sound of a soft “Hello?” He’d forgotten about his new secretary, hadn’t noticed this Modigliani masterpiece by the filing cabinet.
Brian tucked the bindle away, annoyed at himself, annoyed at her for smiling in such a knowing way. Why was this woman a legal secretary? Why wasn’t she on a runway in Milan? Five-foot-eight, mostly leg, flat chest, catlike eyes, and that infuriating smile, as if she reads him, knows his addictions, his sicknesses. Poised, assured, masking her repugnance.
“I am pleased to meet you, I am April Fan Wu.” The voice was musical, the accent British over a hint of Cantonese. “You are Mr. Pomeroy?”
“No, I’m the pigeon control officer. Mr. Pomeroy asked me to get rid of them; they’re driving him mad.” Preening on the sill outside, beady-eyed, occasionally taking a shit.
“It is bad chi to kill a pigeon.”
“Who told you that?”
“My grandmother.” Still studying him.
Brian looked about-his office didn’t seem in its usual disarray.
“You have not opened your mail for two months.” Matter-of-fact, patient, as with a child. “Almost two hundred e-mails, faxes, and telephone messages, some urgent, some not, demand answer. Dr. Epstein, your psychiatrist, is anxious that you call.”
“Did she describe me as a menace to all of society or just to myself?”
“I do think you ought to see her. You are obviously unwell.”
“Where did you get your medical training, Ms. Wu?”
“Sarcasm is a tool of the unimaginative.”
“Your grandmother?”
She nodded. Her unforgiving smile.
“I’m under a court order not to see my children. I am an emotional mess, I’m having some kind of massive stress disorder. On top of that, I’m being followed. Dr. Epstein is part of it. Illegal drugs bring temporary relief. My preferred form of humour is sarcasm. I’m not sure, but I think I’m also suicidal. You will hate working with me.”
“I expect it will be interesting.”
Front desk was paging, Cudworth Brown was on the premises. Brian asked April Fan Wu to arm herself with several sharpened pencils. He wanted Cuddles’s every uttered word, he had to find a solution to Astrid Leich, the surprise eyewitness.
Before greeting his client, he slipped into the washroom, locked the door, laid out a pair, inhaled, rubbed his nostrils, and quickly felt much better. Maybe he’ll come to the office more often, get to know April Wu better. She’s quick, she gave him tit for tat. Obviously likes him. Finds him charmingly eccentric. Handsome enough with his chiselled, strife-worn features, despite his cigarette-yellowed moustache. She’s intrigued, here was someone different, the famed defender of an international assassin. The Abu Khazzam case, front-page news all through Asia. Ah, my love, did your heart skip a beat when you learned you’d be working for the great Bry Pomeroy?
He did a couple more rows, then peed, washed his hands, and went out to fetch Cudworth. A muttering of greetings, no apologies, no eye contact. He sat him on a sofa, well away from the Oriental goddess, who was cross-legged on a wooden chair, pencil poised.
“Okay, Cud, face this way, not at her. From the top.”
Of the three writers Judge Whynet-Moir invited, the most exotic was Cudworth Brown, a poet of bawdy and muscular verse, and he was the first to arrive-eager to sup at the capitalist trough, to rub elbows with philanthropists and possible patrons.
As Cudworth’s taxi pulled into the portico, Whynet-Moir came out to greet him. A thin, greying, straight-backed man, a soft city hand that went limp in Cudworth’s gnarly grip. Waving off his ill-meant protests, Whynet-Moir paid the fifty dollars on the meter.
“Bless you, Judge. That fare would’ve wiped me out.”