by Winona Kent
“The old man,” Randy confirmed, passing him the phone.
Anthony had found a traveling companion. She was his own age—maybe a little younger. A Spy Squad fanatic. He recognized her name from the newsletter.
It had happened just after Evan’s spectacular departure down the cellar stairs in the alley behind the warehouse. The Squaddies were ushered back behind the barricades, Evan was whisked off to Burnaby General in an ambulance, and the BCTV reporter was busy wrapping her story on the state of B.C.’s fledgling film industry.
Somebody had pointed Charlotte out, and Anthony had wandered up to her, curious about the woman who was responsible for more Harris family trivia than anybody else in the fan club. She was short—compact was more the word—with a smattering of freckles and an untidy collection of dark curls poking out from beneath her knitted hat.
“Where do you live?” she had asked, helping herself to a cup of hot chocolate from the cardboard tray that someone had brought back from McDonald’s.
Anthony tried to look modest. “The Properties.”
“Ah ha,” she said, eyes bright. “I’m working on a rumor that that’s where Evan’s family lives. Have you ever met his kids?”
“I don’t know,” Anthony replied, with a straight face. “What do they look like?”
“Wish I could tell you,” she said. “I’ve never even seen so much as a picture.”
“Perhaps,” Anthony ventured, “they look like Evan.”
Charlotte glanced at him sideways. “I don’t look anything like my father.” She gave her hot chocolate a stir with a plastic stick.
“Neither do I,” Anthony conceded.
“I’ve been told,” she said, “that two of them go to UBC. You know anything about that?”
“Robin’s in second year Arts.”
“How do you know? Did you meet him?”
“Maybe,” Anthony answered, reconsidering. “I’m not sure. It was only a brief encounter in an elevator.”
“What did he look like? What color was his hair?”
Anthony bit the inside of his cheek; it was difficult to keep from laughing. “He looked a lot like his father,” he said. “Except his hair was blond.”
Charlotte was all over him. “How tall was he? What color were his eyes?”
“Um…I really didn’t stick around long enough to notice, Charlotte. It gets kind of awkward when one guy starts gazing passionately at another in a crowded elevator.”
She backed off. “I guess so,” she said, somewhat disappointedly. “If you see him again, though, you let me know, OK? I’m on a deadline.”
“I will,” he promised. He was enjoying this immensely. “I’m going on an Ian-hunt tonight. Want to come with me?”
Charlotte looked at him. “Where?” she asked, suspiciously.
“Not far,” said Anthony. “New Dehra Dun. It’s in Washington State. Larry Hamelin runs the place. You do know who Larry Hamelin is?”
Charlotte gave him a look of disgust. “Of course I know who Larry Hamelin is. He wrote forty-two episodes of Spy Squad. What is this Dehra Dun place—a writers’ retreat?”
“I wish,” said Anthony. “It’s a commune. It’s religious—but not really. That’s just an excuse to get everybody together. Want to come?”
Charlotte made up her mind on the spot. “Give me an hour to get some things together. This might be my best newsletter yet.”
Anthony cranked up his car stereo as “Reel Ten” from Repo Man twanged into the night, guitars eery in the splashing highway rain.
“Do you think they’ll be hostile?” Charlotte asked. She was making notes. She had her pencil sharpened and her wad of paper out.
“Who?”
“Hamelin. And Ian. They might not want to be written up in the newsletter. They might not want anything at all to do with Spy Squad. After all, Hamelin’s a High Bagraj now.”
“And Ian’s got religion,” Anthony mused. He glanced over as Charlotte’s foot kicked something that had slipped out from under the front seat; it was wrapped in part of an oil-stained sleeping bag. She reached down and looked.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Point Roberts. A couple of days ago.”
Charlotte aimed the Spy Squad gun out of the side window, taking pretend potshots at the passing fenceposts. Its attendant pieces—silencer, stock, clip, sight—lay nestled in their bag on the floor.
“Keep it sort of hidden when we cross back over into Canada,” Anthony said. “I don’t exactly want the customs people to know.”
“Is it real?”
He shook his head. “Replica.”
“Do you know how to shoot it?”
“Not yet.” He smiled. “I don’t know very much about guns, really.”
“Are you in arts at UBC?” she asked.
“Theater—Grad Studies,” Anthony said. “You?”
“I take care of plants,” said Charlotte, “in high-rise office blocks. I’m putting my English degree to good use.”
Anthony laughed.
“Didn’t you ever have to fire a gun onstage or anything?”
“Once,” he said. “I was supposed to shoot somebody’s wife in a fit of jealousy. I couldn’t do it.”
Charlotte looked at him, her face lit by the glow from the dashboard. “Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Anthony said. “It wasn’t even a real gun. It was a starter pistol—a twenty-two loaded with blanks. We were rehearsing and I leveled the thing at this poor woman—who was doing a really good job of looking terrified—and I couldn’t pull the trigger. I just couldn’t do it.”
He felt as though he’d just given away a deep, dark secret about himself—a personal weakness, a great failing. He’d been embarrassed on the stage. Mortified.
“I tried firing at the floor, into the wings, up at the lights. That was OK. I just couldn’t shoot a person. Not like that. Play or no play.”
“So what did you do?” Charlotte asked. She sounded sympathetic.
“We got a little toy revolver for me and planted somebody backstage to fire the starter pistol on cue. Worked wonderfully for the first performance. And then, when we went on the next night, the girl in the wings jammed something and the gun wouldn’t go off.”
Charlotte groaned. “What did you do?”
Anthony grinned. “I hurled the toy gun at my hapless victim’s head and concussed her to death. Nothing like a little improv to get you through the evening.”
He flipped the Repo music out of the cassette player and substituted a tape he’d made himself, raiding Ian’s record collection. The “Peter Gunn Theme” slunk into the night.
“I don’t suppose you know any exotic methods of self-defense,” he said, not entirely in jest.
“Sure,” said Charlotte. “I have a yellow belt in judo. From the Y. I can choke you three different ways and throw you over my shoulder as long as you cooperate and promise not to fight back. That, and I can cripple you with literary allusion at twenty paces. How about you?”
Anthony grinned. “I know every line from Kung Fu by heart.” He looked mystical. “‘Snatch the pebbles from my hand, Grasshopper—’”
There was a sign coming up, pointing to a turnoff a few hundred yards further ahead. New Dehra Dun. The official Oak Corners designation was still there, but a black line had been painted through it, and the new title, on a board, had been nailed to the signpost’s legs.
Anthony dug into his coat pocket, located the magnetic tin box that held his spare car keys, and handed it to Charlotte.
“What’s this?”
“A precaution. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
Anthony shrugged. “Just in case I end up staying—and you end up going. All right?”
Charlotte looked at him. She didn’t say anything.
“I’m extremely annoyed with you,” Gwennie said into the receiver of the telephone. “Where have you been for the past three days?”
“I went to W
histler,” Robin answered, full of innocence. “Didn’t Anthony tell you?”
“Yes, he did, and I don’t think much of your little escapade at all. What about your classes?”
“They’ll keep.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m at Karen’s place,” Robin said. “You remember Karen, don’t you?”
“I thought you’d left off with her.”
“I did—but we rekindled the relationship. So to speak. Is Anthony there?”
“No,” his mother said, “as a matter of fact, he isn’t. He’s gone haring off after your brother.”
“Where did Ian go?” Robin looked ominously at Lundberg.
“To the States. To a place called—isn’t it stupid, I can’t even remember the name. Something Indian.”
“New Dehra Dun.”
“Yes, that’s it. You’ve heard of it too, then.”
“It was in the paper.”
“Well, that’s where they’ve gone, one after the other. I mean, honestly, Ian’s not likely to do anything silly, now, is he?”
It was a statement more than a question. Robin didn’t answer. Much as he regarded his oldest brother in something less than high esteem, he had to agree that his mother was right: Ian was level-headed. So level-headed it was sickening. If he had gone down to see the Shirda, it didn’t have anything to do with his wanting to join up. Not as one of the flock, anyway.
“So you’re all by yourself on Raymond Mountain,” he joked, changing the subject.
“All by myself,” Gwennie confirmed. “Rolf’s gone to Victoria for a meeting with some of his shareholders. Won’t be home till tomorrow.”
“You can always call the yuppette for company.”
“Robin,” said his mother. “Jennifer’s a very nice girl.”
“In a thoroughly artificial sort of way, I suppose…”
Randy was popping the cap on another Kokanee. Any more of those and he was going to be a pretty poor bodyguard in the event Grosch decided to show up again.
“I have to go now. Karen wants to read one of her haikus to me. It’s about cleaning fish.”
“Lovely,” said his mother. “All right. I’ll see you soon.”
She hung up the phone and walked back to the dining room, where red candles flickered on the table and dessert was waiting. “Robin,” she said, sitting down. “He’s met up with an old flame.” She smiled. “A poet. How are your ribs?”
“Not as painful as my hand,” Evan replied. He was resting his elbow on the white linen tablecloth, elevating the injury. In spite of that, and the bandaging they’d done down at Burnaby General, his fingers and knuckles were swelling magnificently. Blockbuster’s writer was, at that very moment, racking his brain to come up with a scene that would account for the sudden appearance of so much white gauze and a right hand that looked like it belonged to the Hulk. My luck, Evan thought, they’ll make me go down the steps again.
“More wine?”
He held his glass out. He was not pleased with Anthony. Why were they all so stubborn? Where had this perverse, single-minded streak arisen from? Certainly not his side of the family. The Harrises were a placid lot—if anything, prone to underachievement. He eyed his ex-wife with good-natured suspicion. It was those damned X chromosomes at work again.
“This really was quite nice, wasn’t it?” Gwennie was saying, putting the wine bottle back into its fired clay cooler. “For a spur-of-the-moment invitation, especially. We’ll have to do it at least once more before you go back.”
She picked up her dessert fork and slivered off a slice of cheesecake.
“Well,” Evan said, as a glint of mischief appeared in his clear green eyes. “When’s Rolf’s next meeting in Victoria?”
Chapter Ten
Thursday
Ian wasn’t altogether sure what his younger brother was doing in Dehra Dun. He wouldn’t have noticed him at all but for a chance near-meeting in the large open dining hall where the Shirda’s followers and guests took their meals. Ian, in a long yellow robe, which he felt perfectly silly wearing, but which was necessary for the transacting of certain business deals, was in the lineup for soups and salads. Anthony—and a woman Ian didn’t know—were waiting for the lunchtime special, vegetable lasagna. The two food lines ran parallel to one another. Ian, slightly behind his brother in the first, noticed the little braid of hair, tied up with what looked like a yellow shoelace, in the second. A quick excursion to the front of the two lines confirmed it. Hell, Ian thought, flipping up the very convenient hood that the Dehra Dun robes came equipped with. He slunk back to the end of the line, not wanting to be recognized, but at the same time unwilling to relinquish the lunch he’d waited for all night and half of the day with a grumbling stomach. They made you fast in this place: it was one of the Shirda’s rules. Nothing between midnight and noon except water, or a clear tea that tasted like boiled socks.
He picked up his garden salad and whole wheat bun and stuck his cup under a spout for some decaffeinated coffee, then moved up the line and paid for his lunch (a dollar; it was subsidized) and found a seat at a table as far away from his brother as possible.
Why couldn’t he have minded his own business, just for once? Why did everything have to be an intrigue-laden adventure?
Ian kept his hood up and his head down: not the best position to eat alfalfa sprouts in, but he didn’t have much choice.
Drugs. That’s what he’d been thinking about before he’d noticed Anthony. The mass use of. As in chemical alteration of food and drink. Well, that apparently wasn’t the case here: the boiled-socks tea that everybody seemed perfectly content to consume by the gallon had rice as its base and was suspiciously close to the stuff they served in Japanese restaurants as a complement to sushi. There were no chemicals in it, just as there were no chemicals (other than what the filtration plants added) in the water supply.
What there was, was a continuous and free supply of something called Happy Mornings—little green herbal tablets that were consumed on a mass basis by nearly everybody in the compound.
Except me, Ian thought, sensibly. Little green pills made him feel uncomfortable. So did the book that had been placed in every room of his dormitory building, like a secular Gideon Bible. This was the Bagraj version: Shirda Neeshla’s Design for Spiritual Living. He’d sat on his bed the night before and studied it carefully, searching for clues to Larry Hamelin’s character.
The Bagraj had a peculiar view of life—mostly culled from the cutting room floor of every Hollywood movie about the sixties. It was all surface gloss, anyway. Maharishi trappings, flowers and robes, a mysticism that went as far off the continent as Catalina Island, and a stated purpose that seemed to consist of having lots of parties two-thirds of the time and plenty of meditating during the remainder.
At the very end of Design was a blank section, perhaps for personal notes, and a curious appendix entitled “Conscience Exercises.” Ian had been able only to skim over the numbered steps, his tired mind already crammed too full of rules and regulations to absorb much more of the Shirda’s bizarre philosophy.
He glanced up again. Anthony and his friend were leaving. Good. He watched, protected by his hood, as they carried their trays to the rack by the door and walked out of the dining room. With any luck, he’d be done and out of this place before either of them had the opportunity to draw too much attention to themselves.
Robin pulled the sun visor down and examined his cheek in the little mirror embedded in the fabric. The bruise had faded a bit, but not enough to go entirely unnoticed.
The Prelude was sitting in the CGUL parking lot, wedged between the station’s community van and the sports director’s logo-emblazoned cruiser. A jumble of paper and plastic bags littered the back seat. Robin had been shopping, leading Randy through the jungle of shops in Pacific Centre Mall, while he bought a new shirt and sweater, navy blue cords, and yet another pair of shoes and socks.
“You got your story straight?”
“Uh-huh,” Robin said. “Under control. What are you going to do?”
Randy grinned and held up the Spy Squad book. “Read,” he said. “This ain’t half bad.”
Robin made a face, ran his fingers ineffectually through his unruly hair, and slid out of the car. “Have fun.”
“You too. And, hey, stay out of trouble—OK?”
Robin grinned. “You’re looking at Mr. Cautious,” he said. “See you later.”
Radio station CGUL, 550 on the AM dial, was located on a block of land on Broadway Avenue, east of Oak, west of Cambie. The building had begun life as a supermarket. All on one level, it was honeycombed with false ceilings and false walls, doors with no signs, and half a dozen production studios behind darkened, soundproofed windows. In the hallways, vending machines rubbed shoulders with teletypes. The newsroom looked like the command center at NASA.
Robin entered the station through the front door, which took him past Debbie the receptionist, and immediately into the long white corridor where the DJs’ pictures were prominently displayed, like a venerable line of founding fathers. He pretended he was a movie camera, dollying down the hallway. POV shots, pans, close-ups—no corner would remain undisclosed to The Roving Eye. He walked through the newsroom and past the heavy double doors belonging to the on-air studio, making note of their location with respect to desks and windows. Out back, there was the coffee room and the main rear hallway. Here were the engineering offices, shelves full of switches, the room containing the giant, turtle-slow logger tape—more candy machines—the sales department. He turned the corner. Copywriting. Executive offices. Rolf’s secretary, sealing envelopes.
“Hi, Pat.” He wandered in, to reconfirm his memory of her office.
“Robin,” she answered, busily. “What happened to your face?”
She didn’t miss a thing.
“I wiped out at Whistler. Dad here?”
“Here, but occupied. He just flew back from the island. Meetings all afternoon. Want me to tell him you’re here?”
Robin shook his head. “I’ll catch him later. Thanks.”