The young freelancer looked bored. She must have assumed Zoller was an interesting oddball with his buckled-on yellow fluorescent life jacket.
Virgin oil, five green peppers, sliced almonds; Arthur had written it down this time. “Where is everybody?” Arthur asked Makepeace as he tallied his purchases.
“Ferry dock. Hamish is just about to unveil his Goddess of Love. You must have forgot.”
He had. The ceremony was scheduled for the arrival of the Sunday inter-island ferry, a popular tourist run.
The freelancer, thwarted in her search for local colour, started packing up.
“Wait, I haven’t got around to the event that’s going to put Garibaldi on everyone’s lips.” Zoller launched into a spiel about McCoy’s statue.
Makepeace chimed in: “He’s gonna get the church ladies all churned up if he shows naked boobs.”
“When it’s art, it’s morally acceptable,” Zoller proclaimed, “as long as they’re regular breasts. Normal, not exaggerated, like, ah…” He stalled on seeing Emily’s venomous look.
“Like what, Mr. Art Expert?”
“Abnormal.”
“Like your two inches?”
Zoller turned petulant. “I don’t get a darn lick of gratification for all the sweat, blood, and tears I volunteer.” He checked his watch. “We don’t want to be late.” He jumped to his feet, urging his interviewer up too. “Stop the presses, all aboard, this is your lead story. I modestly admit to having a role in it.”
“What was your role, Mr. Zoller?” the journalist asked.
“If Hamish hadn’t been busted…forget it.”
In his zeal to earn kudos, Zoller had practically admitted his invidious role as fink, widely suspected and, to Hamish McCoy, undoubted.
Arthur followed them out to Zoller’s boat, not wanting to miss this. He helped with the lines as Zoller, ever safety-conscious, strapped on a seat belt. Arthur hopped on, but here came Gomer Goulet, tottering down the planks with his mug of rum, crying, “Wait for me!” Arthur helped him aboard.
The reporter was up with Zoller, so Arthur had to take one of the bolted plastic seats, with Gomer breathing alcohol fumes right behind him. “Tell me he didn’t do it, Arthur. We still love him anyway, don’t we? ’Cause he did it out of love. Love, Arthur, thass what makes the world go round.”
The Queen of Prince George was cruising into Ferryboat Bay as they barrelled around a sharp point, almost grazing the buoy. Zoller was heading for the public dock beyond the ferry slip, and he went full throttle past the ship’s stern.
Arthur was holding on, jolted by the turbulent wake. Though he was standing, Gomer Goulet astonished Arthur by keeping his balance, his legs working mechanically, like pistons, with every rise and fall of the deck. A lifetime as a crab fisher must have adapted him, Poseidon-like, to deal with the seas. “Cud loves her, Arthur, and she loves him. Thass a fact! Give them their happiness, for God’s sake!”
When the salt spray cleared from the window, Arthur could see three dozen vehicles in the ferry lineup, as many foot passengers and cyclists. All eyes were trained on Ferryboat Knoll, two upswept wings above scaffolding draped with tarps. Hamish McCoy was scurrying about, untying ropes. The Lions Club hot dog wagon was busy. The Highland Pipers were squeezing out “Scotland the Brave.” Two news vans. The railings of the Prince George’s outer decks were crammed with the curious.
Zoller decided they weren’t going to get a better view on land, so he idled and they sat in the cove. The freelancer deserted Zoller, who’d been talking non-stop, and shifted to the back. “I can’t make head or tail of what he’s saying, Mr. Beauchamp. What’s this all about?”
But now the tarps were falling, people were cheering…
And there it stood. Arthur had trouble at first discerning the artist’s intent. Sweeping curves, a snakelike creature with a great round belly and two knobby bare feet and a curling rat’s tail. No, not a snake, that was its serpentine neck, sprouting from between the wings in a graceful arc downwards, past dwarfish male sexual organs, a rat’s head seeking entrance into the anal cavity below. The creature was painted bright fluorescent canary yellow, and a similarly coloured life jacket was draped over its upper neck. McCoy had combined the motifs of snake, rat, and canary.
The pipers stopped playing, a final squeal, as from a frightened, yowling cat. A hush. Then Gomer. “Forgive him, Kurt. Oh, God, forgive him. Hamish is our pal, he loves you.”
Zoller wasn’t buying that. The water taxi jolted forward, made crunching contact with the dock, splintered a kayak, and sank a rowboat, whereupon the skipper bounded from his cabin and raced down the planks to shore.
Arthur tied the craft up and made sure all systems were off, then led the survivors along the rickety boardwalk to the ferry slip. Arthur had left his cellphone at the house, so the freelancer lent him hers before racing on ahead for her local colour.
He connected with Margaret in her truck. “I thought I’d take a quick spin out to Ferryboat Bay,” she said. “All the media are there.”
“Turn back! You don’t want to be seen anywhere near here.” Parents were sheltering their children from the sight.
It took Arthur a few moments to explain, then a few more while Margaret reversed into a driveway and turned for home. She warned him not to tarry, the barbecue was about to begin.
He hastened to the off-ramp to hitch a ride, waited for foot passengers and cyclists to disembark. Laughter from above, then yelling, Zoller’s full-tongued recriminations. Then, closer to his ear, a voice that caused as much surprise as dread. “That’s the bleeding edge, man, art as it should be, raw and real.”
Cuddles himself, lupus in fabula, the wolf in the tale, once again proving his talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The wrong place was walking off a ferry on Garibaldi Island. The right place was Wentworth’s office, where he was to have shown up two hours ago.
He was staring up at the Goddess of Love. “McCoy’s got balls of steel. I feel like a poem coming on.”
He continued to extol this masterwork as he led Arthur to a little bench behind the Winnebagel, then said, “I had a brainstorm, too heavy for your apprentice to handle, I need to talk to the top dog.” Arthur lit his pipe, waited with foreboding.
“Florenza, man. I didn’t know what to make of her at first, but then I realized, hey, this lady sounds totally up front, she’s not slagging me off like I expected. It’s like I got like a pact with her. If she’s got nothing to hide, maybe I should follow suit; it’s the honourable thing.”
“What do you mean she’s got nothing to hide?”
“Hey, she admitted it in front of everybody, she’s still carrying the torch and it’s burning bright.”
“Your ears must have been plugged when she named you as a murderer.” Plugged by ego-wax.
“I heard it loud and clear. That’s just it, maybe she honestly said what she saw.”
Arthur blew out a spume of smoke. This had the earmarks of a horror story, not the way the author wrote it. The hollering above ceased as Constable Pound’s van pulled up, emergency equipment on. If Arthur was asked to defend an obscenity charge, he would hide in bed, feign a crippling ailment.
“I’m going to give you the goods, counsellor. Trouble is, I don’t remember nothing. Not from the point I passed out in bed with her. Not until I woke up doing the Technicolor yawn with cops all around. So I must have got out of bed like she said, got dressed, gone down those stairs. I was out of it, a zombie. She said maybe I was having a nightmare. I could’ve been sleepwalking, man. She told me she wanted to be free of him, so maybe I was acting on a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion. That’s got to be a medical defence, right, Arthur? I’ve got amnesia, so you can argue I was in a trauma because of what went on, battle fatigue, what do you call it, post-traumatic stress…”