A gust whistled in from the sea, rustling the patio umbrella’s canvas.
The chief’s face tightened up. “About a hundred years ago there was this young Coast Salish boy who lived on Puget Sound. People said he was advanced for his age. When he was two, they had a potlatch ceremony where he received an ancestral name that had never been spoken in half a lifetime. After the naming dance, the boy’s family distributed a fortune in eulachon oil, deer meat and other gifts. That boy disappeared shortly afterwards, and when he returned many years later, he had a strange glow about his body and beams of light radiating from his eyes. And he wore a strange hat that could produce lightning and thunder. He demanded many wives and received them atop a great mountain in a house made of newly woven rush mats. The boy’s ancestral name was Filligan and people believed that Filligan was a god.
“Two of the cuckolded husbands attacked this so-called god and killed him. The way they did it, Silas, one of the husbands held a sealskin over Filligan’s head while the other clubbed him to death with a poker heated in a fire. After Filligan died, amid thunder and lightning his spirit changed into a bird and flew into the sky.”
“What did this strange hat look like?”
“I don’t know,” the chief replied slowly, lifting his clasped hands a little. “Just strange. You’d have to see it.”
“I have seen it,” I said.
CHAPTER NINE
That night I couldn’t sleep. A northeasterly whistled along the shore, making the trees ruffle and creak. After some heavy tossing and turning and thinking, I got dressed, equipped myself with a roll of duct tape, a flashlight and a cellphone embedded with a GPS chip, and then woke up the MG. Traffic was light. Downtown the bars and cabarets had closed, but on Government Street the hookers still tottered back and forth beneath the streetlights, and late-night revellers were doing their noisy best to keep the party going as another long night stretched towards morning.
Tall laurel hedges sheltered Charlotte Fox’s house from prying eyes. I drove on down the street to the next corner and parked before walking back to the house. It turned out to be one of those dark, shingled, three-storey Gothic mansions with turrets, wide porches and bay windows. Such residences are generally too large for modern families and have been converted into B & Bs or apartments, but this one had survived as a single-family home. Charlotte’s Lexus SUV was standing outside a two-car garage. A BMW was parked on the street directly across from the house. I noted the BMW’s licence plate number.
It was about four o’clock and still very dark, so I was well concealed as I stood just inside the yard against the laurels. But when I moved little by little towards the Lexus, a motion-activated lamp set on a high pole came on and showed me the grass on the front lawn, shiny with dew. I crouched beside the Lexus and kept still for a while. When the lamp went off, I tried the SUV’s front passenger door and found that it wasn’t locked. Using my flashlight, I located a suitably inconspicuous metal bracket beneath the dashboard and taped the cellphone to it.
By the time I was finished, the sky was faintly dusted with glimmers of dawn, and I returned to the MG, fired it up and pulled away from the curb. A Volkswagen beetle parked fifty yards behind started at the same time and followed me with its lights off. It was still on my tail when I reached the Moss Street/Fort Street intersection. I stopped my car, grabbed my flashlight and strolled back to the Volkswagen. Its driver—a kid who looked about fourteen years old—had three silver rings in his lower lip and another dangling from his nose. Those faint clues—and the large black swastika tattooed on the crown of his white shaven head—told me a lot about him. He gave me a cheeky grin and said, “What’s wrong, Dad?”
“You’re driving without lights.”
He switched his lights on, backed up, drove around and past my car and turned in the wrong direction down Fort, which happens to be a one-way street. I thought about giving him a ticket but dropped the idea. Life would punish him later when he collided with an eighteen-wheeler . . . or male-pattern baldness kicked in.
≈ ≈ ≈
The sun’s rays streaming onto my face woke me up. The overnight wind had blown itself out, and the sea was a limpid deep green. I opened my door and windows, put Mr. Coffee to work and shaved before I made my morning bacon, eggs and toast. At nine o’clock I switched on my Apple laptop. After figuring out how, I began tracking the GPS chip on Charlotte Fox’s Lexus. It had been driven away from Moss Street while I slept and now it was stationary on Meares.
With the laptop on the passenger seat beside me, I drove over to View Royal, filled the MG’s gas tank at the Esso station there, measured the oil and checked the Michelins with my own pressure gauge. By then the Lexus was in Victoria’s Yates Street parkade. My bill for gas amounted to $35, and I went into the Esso convenience store to pay for it. Two middle-aged, overweight tourists in Hawaiian getups were cruising the food aisles, gobbling Mars bars. The kid behind the cashier’s desk had a star tattooed on the crown of his shaved head, and he put down the graphic novel he was reading to make change for me.
“That book you’ve got there,” I said. “Does the boy get the girl, or does the monster get the girl?”
“Usually the monster gets the boy,” he said.
“That tattooed star gives your bean a distinctive look.”
“Until it washes off,” he said, handing me my change.
“It’s a transfer?”
The kid nodded. “And watch out for traffic cops, Granddad,” he said with a pitying shake of his head. “Right now they’re staked out behind the Six-Mile Market.”
“Those monsters!” I said.
The male tourist thought I was referring to him and called me a smartass. I informed him that his mouth was smeared with stolen chocolate. Star boy and the tourists were in a shouting match when I went back to my car. The sun was hot and there was no wind. I drove across the Esso lot, pointed the MG’s nose westward and waited on the apron until I could merge into traffic. Two Hummers, going past at eighty, created a backdraft strong enough to wobble my little coupe.
It was about noon when I got to Donnelly’s Marsh, left my car at the creek and waded across it. Crows, hopping about on the roof of the longhouse, flapped away as I walked up. Even in full sunshine, the deep shadows, the nearby forest and the carved animal faces staring down from those ancient totems lent a sinister air to the place. I poked around in the nearby bush, searching in vain for bear scat or places where black bears or grizzlies might have bedded down. Then I had a good look at the longhouse, and I realized that parts of the roof and wall cladding had been recently renewed. I hunted for hinged planks or secret doors without seeing any.
I walked between the frog’s legs into the longhouse and stood just inside the doorway. This time the interior had the faint aroma of fresh paint, and it was dark in there except for a square of yellow sunlight below the smoke hole. This, I remembered, was the place where Andrea Crandon and I fell in love, where some of my ancestors had lived before northern warriors killed them.
I went outside. This time, instead of walking back along the road to my car, I found a winding forest trail that brought me to a steep-sided creek tangled with blackberry vines, ferns, and stinkweed plants with leaves the size of elephant ears. A bald eagle, perched on a treetop with its beak half open, was scanning the terrain. The creek terminated at a muddy beach covered with broken clamshells. A rising tide was flooding depressions where deer had walked and where the ubiquitous raccoons had been digging. Buried clams squirted water. The eagle had scared away most of the waterfowl.
I didn’t see any grizzly tracks.
CHAPTER TEN
I needed a drink and strolled over to Bartholemew’s to get one. Fred Halloran was sitting alone in a corner booth. It was overly warm that night, but as usual Fred was wearing a scruffy raincoat.
I went over and said, “Expecting global colding, Fred?”
“Sit down,” he said. “Keep me company.”
“Who, me?�
�
“No, the bartender’s dog.”
I sat down.
“Enjoy your dinner?” he said cryptically, smiling at me the way cats smile at mice.
“I haven’t had dinner yet.”
Fred’s dark eyebrows moved upwards. “Somebody told me you were dining with Felicity tonight.”
“And who might that somebody be?”
“Never mind. It’s not important. Somebody just mentioned in passing that Felicity and her boyfriend had booked a table at the Deep Cove Chalet.”
Trying to conceal my agitation, I signalled the waiter. Fred wanted a glass of red wine. I wanted something stronger and ordered a double Haig with no ice and water on the side.
“This one of your regular hangouts, Fred?”
“It is. Because there’s many a night when I’m sitting around the house, knitting balaclava helmets for our gallant fighting men in Afghanistan or playing solitaire in my fur pajamas, just me and the cat, and all the time I’m thinking how much more exciting it might be to have a little drinkie in a place like this.”
I said offhandedly, “So what’s all this about Felicity’s boyfriend.”
“You are Felicity’s boyfriend? At least that’s what I’ve long thought. Am I wrong?”
“Well, I can’t be, can I? I mean, if Felicity’s in the Deep Cove Chalet with some guy and I’m in here with you.”
“God, Silas, you’re such an idiot,” he said, smirking unhelpfully.
As frequently happens when I’m around Fred, I had the feeling that I’d ventured out of my depth. A few drinks later I dragged him out of Bartholemew’s and we walked down to the causeway. It was a lovely evening. Jugglers, painters, puppeteers, musicians and mimes entertained the crowds thronging Victoria’s Inner Harbour. On a wooden quay below Wharf Street large white tents had been erected and a music festival was in full swing. A hundred yachts were moored at the floating docks fronting the Empress Hotel. Floatplanes, ferries and sailboats came and went.
Fred and I bought hot dogs from a street vendor, found a bench in Bastion Square and had dinner. Fred burped, put a cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a match struck on the zipper of his raincoat.
I said conversationally, “Did you know, Fred, that we’re occupying almost the exact spot where, a hundred and fifty years ago, malcontents such as yourself used to be hanged in public?”
“Hanged?”
“A multi-strand knotted hemp rope and a six-foot drop, followed by a quick burial in unconsecrated ground. After public hangings were officially abolished, people still managed to watch. Crowds would gather on rooftops. Young boys would climb trees. Raise a cheer when the trap door banged open.”
“I knew that talking to you would cheer me up.”
“Did you also know,” I went on undeterred, “that this area has been important commercially since the 1840s—which is when the Hudson’s Bay Company appropriated it from my ancestors?”
Fred sighed. Maybe he was thinking what I was thinking: that once the HBC had controlled the whole of Vancouver Island and most of the American West. The Company’s presence in Victoria is now marginal. Its wooden palisade vanished long ago, as did the original HBC trading post where Scottish-born adventurers gave my Native forebears glass beads for telling them where to find gold and beds of coal.
A kid came by shoving an ice cream cart. I asked Fred if he wanted a cone.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll have vanilla. Two scoops.”
I stopped the kid, ordered what Fred had asked for and, after rejecting various options including a double maple ripple, ended up getting the same as Fred.
“That’ll be ten bucks, mister,” the ice cream kid said.
“Things have come to a pretty pass,” I said. “An ice cream now costs the same as a line of coke.”
“It’s your choice,” the kid said. “We aim to please.”
By then, it was growing dark. Fred finished his cone and drifted off home. After walking the streets of Victoria’s Old Town with its souvenir and specialty food shops and cafes, I wandered back to Bastion Square, lined with old houses that have been transformed into art galleries and restaurants. The original provincial court house, now a maritime museum, rose up on my right. A crowd of noisy revellers had gathered outside Harpo’s nightclub and I watched them for a while. I know most of the relatively few pickpockets who are active in Victoria, and when I didn’t recognize any in the crowd, I started to turn away towards the harbour. That’s when I noticed something unusual—the lights were all out in Commercial Alley.
Staring into the alley’s darkness, I saw a white gauze of mist suspended a few feet above the ground, and I was reminded—as happens in such moments—of my half-belief in ghosts. But after blinking my eyes several times, I decided that the apparition was real enough. It looked the way a woman’s filmy nightgown might look dangling from a clothesline in a breeze. Just at that moment, Harpo’s doors were flung open and the crowd began to move, and by the time I pushed my way through the revellers into Commercial Alley, the white mist had dissipated.
As I moved deeper into the alley, a flock of night birds passed overhead—their beating wings made me look up. I smelled a whiff of smoke and had the strong feeling that I was not alone, that someone or something was watching me. Turning around, I saw Harvey Cheeke standing in a deep recess, half indistinguishable in the shadows. I asked him if he’d seen anything.
“Bastards,” he muttered throatily. “Those little bastards are always bugging me.”
Harvey was drunk. I phoned for a paddy wagon, put one of Harvey’s arms across my shoulder and dragged him onto Yates Street so that I could have a good look at him under the street lamps. He was thinner than ever, his face was pale and drawn and his bleary eyes gaped from a head nodding under the weight of too much cheap wine. And he was bleeding from a head wound.
I asked him what had happened.
“The little bastards hit me with a brick, tried to steal my poke.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was time to bury the remains of the young boy who had drifted onto the Warrior’s beach. The requisite longhouse ceremony, orchestrated by Chief Alphonse and Old Mary Cooke, had been eagerly anticipated, but problems of protocol had delayed it. The remains had washed up in an old coffin painted with faded Coast Salish heraldic crests, but according to tradition every human interment requires a new coffin. Artie Cramp had been given the job, and now the new one, with its bentwood corners and completely waterproof, was ready.
The undertakers were experienced elders who had prepared themselves by ritual sea bathing to cleanse their bodies of human odours offensive to a corpse’s soul. The bathing place, the formal procedure and the phase of the moon when these rites had been performed were closely guarded secrets, but once protected by these rites, the undertakers then ritually washed the fragile bones and took them to the longhouse. Certain bones—including the skull—were painted with red oil paint made in the traditional manner out of natural iron oxide mixed with chewed salmon eggs and spit, and it was applied with sea-lion bristles lashed to a stick. Afterwards, the skeleton was placed in its new coffin on a platform facing east and left on public view with the lid off.
That Saturday the Warrior longhouse pulsated with life and colour. Standing together behind the coffin, three impressive men arrayed in chiefs’ garments passed an argillite talking stick back and forth between them. One of them was Chief Alphonse, wearing a silk top hat and a red Hudson’s Bay blanket studded with pearl buttons. The second chief was a Haida, and he was wearing an ermine-tail robe and a rope necklace dangling with bone and ivory charms, gambling sticks and head scratchers. The third was a Tsimshian clan chief wearing a black business suit and a carved and painted flying dogfish hat.
Dozens of Coast Salish dancers wearing white, green, red, and black dance aprons or blanket-robes spun and whirled around two open fires. The spectators, many of whom were wrapped in blankets appliquéd with family escutcheons, squatted on the earthen floor
around the fires or watched from bleachers.
In ordinary funeral ceremonies, the relatives of the deceased have rights of precedence and show up as the first official mourners, wailing and scratching their faces. Children are generally held back. Afterwards the friends of the deceased who care to help the bereaved relatives with funeral expenses lay blankets or other expensive offerings on the coffin. Some of their friends then announce that their offerings are gifts, for which nothing is expected in return. On the other hand, if people bring gifts and say nothing, it signifies that their contributions are loans to be repaid at some future time when the lenders themselves might stand in need. This boy had come from the sea, however, and had no known relatives, so paid surrogates were acting as honorary mourners, and they put on a very convincing show of grief.
Chief Alphonse was finally prevailed upon to accept the argillite talking stick. Fortunately for the Warrior band’s finances, that talking stick, literally priceless, had been donated by the Haida Nation. The three chiefs then launched into long dramatic speeches, punctuated by sweeping gestures, but few heard them because people continued to dance, groan, weep, engage in laughing contests or doze. During the speeches a carved wooden raven mask, six-feet long and sprinkled with chopped eagle feathers—and much too heavy to be danced by one man—was briefly paraded around.
After several hours of speechifying, even argillite talking sticks lose their splendour, and boredom began to take hold of me. After all, it was late spring, the season when Nature’s beings create new life, and that, more or less, is what I would have preferred to be doing—given a clean bill of health, that is.
It was while I was watching other people sneak out of the longhouse to grab fresh air and gobble smoked salmon snacks or venison sausage that I noticed Charlotte Fox sitting in the high bleachers. She looked gorgeous in loose-fitting silk trousers and a clingy silk shirt. Beside her was a Native man about five foot ten, built like a linebacker and wearing stonewashed jeans and a red T-shirt. They made a handsome couple. Well, well, I thought.
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