Stung

by William Deverell

  “Then it’s really important that you land Hoff.”

  3

  “To me, they are great heroes, your clients,” says Dieter Hoff. “For their effrontery alone, they deserve medals. But for such bravado first prize must go to the Chemican corporation, yes? — for their lies and SLAPP actions and their falsified tests. Here, in the EU, the directors would be in prison.”

  In the U.S. and Canada, Arthur complains, no one at Chemican has even been investigated, let alone charged with a crime. The governments share culpability; their regulatory bodies having failed at due diligence.

  Arthur and Hoff have been at this for an hour, roasting the enemy over kebabs and squid and fried eggplant. And, for Hoff, too much wine. Arthur sips soda water with lemon, but Hoff is on his second half-litre of Merlot. It seems to have coloured his face, though maybe he has somehow retained through the winter the ruddy outdoors look that graces the back of his dust jacket. He wears a similar bush hat, even while dining — circumstantial proof of both baldness and pretension.

  After the waiter tops up his Merlot, Hoff raises his glass in a slightly unsteady salute. “I am happy to know that observing me over-consume alcohol doesn’t make you uncomfortable. It does comfort me. Especially lately.”

  He seems unready to expand on his afterthought, so Arthur just says, “It bothers me not in the least, Dieter.”

  Hoff reaches into a bag and hauls out a hardcover copy of A Thirst for Justice. “I feel I know you, Arthur. Because your life is an open book.” He laughs at his jest, and extends his pen.

  On the title page Arthur describes Hoff as “Ein neu gefunden freund.”

  “I had a tumultuous first marriage also. Berthe was like your Annabelle. Also in the opera business, but as a singer. Not a great one — she exercised her vagina more than her vocal cords.”

  Arthur winces. The wine is getting to this newfound freund. Presumably, it will ultimately give him the courage to explain his unforeseen reluctance to testify.

  “But she was much in demand. Mostly because she was fucking the booking agent. On tour, her exertions were heroic — everyone from the lighting director to the entire woodwind section and at least two of the Three Tenors. Pavarotti for sure, she boasted of it. But it is I who got sued for divorce. I assume you are aware of that.”

  “I am only aware you were divorced.” Ten years ago, according the profile Selwyn’s team prepared. They must not have looked beyond the fact of the divorce. There were no children of that union but he is remarried and they have a daughter.

  “The grounds were cruelty. Like you, I felt emasculated, and had a long period of impotence. Berthe mocked my poor efforts without mercy, and one evening I swung blindly at her and broke her jaw.”

  The restaurant is noisy, so Hoff has raised his voice, causing nearby diners to glance their way. Arthur cautions him with a raised hand. Hoff lowers the volume: “Obviously this is news to you.”

  “I’m afraid so.” Arthur, who has never struck a woman, is shocked by this confession from a brilliant scientist.

  Hoff moves his chair closer to Arthur. “Probably it is not news to your prosecutor, or to the Canadian police, your famed Mounties. I had not such a good lawyer as you, and in family court I was found guilty of assault.”

  He dabs a wetness below his eyes. “I hoped to be brave, like your Sarnia Seven. I was ready to risk a hostile cross-examination about my bad marriage, even if I had to explain she was a lying whore.”

  Arthur assures him that his marital history is irrelevant and would not be mentioned to a jury trying the Sarnia Seven. “An act done in anger does not diminish your expertise or your credibility. An act involving deceit — perjury, forgery, theft — that would be another matter.”

  “That’s what I most fear.” Hoff finishes his glass, calls loudly to the waiter: “Mehr wein, bitte.”

  His glass replenished, he says, “Yes, there is a second troubling matter that I hesitated to raise with your remarkable colleague, Selwyn Loo. I was afraid he would judge me harshly.” He glances down at Arthur’s scribble in Thirst for Justice. “My newfound friend. It helps me to share my anxieties with you, who has been through your own struggles and pain.”

  Arthur nods, waits, hiding his discomfort.

  “I am now, recently, accused of plagiarism.”

  A rambling account ensues involving a graduate student, her studies of honeybee depopulation in Eastern Europe, her prognosis of an impending collapse of fruit and berry production, her concluding, stirring words of warning in a paper she revised and submitted for publication, and the mysterious reappearance of those words, intact and unedited, in Chapter Twenty-Seven of the updated edition of De-Pollination.

  “You can see how this can happen, Arthur. Katerina was my student, and her work — which has earned her a position at Cambridge — got mingled with mine. So much paperwork, so many studies, so many accreditations to so many fine scientists. I believed I had composed that passage. A mere hundred and fifty words, but the vindictive bitch threatens action, exposure, my public shaming.”

  A vision flares in Arthur’s mind of Azra Khan rising with a gleeful look to begin his evisceration of the defence’s main witness.

  Hoff continues: “If it goes to a disciplinary hearing, or worse, a suit in damages, it is all over. My career is over, kaput. You know how these things go, Arthur, with the opposite sex. They are so unforgiving, so unrelenting, ja?”

  “Have you acknowledged her contribution in any way?”

  “Nein, no . . . It is hard to explain . . .”

  “Please try.”

  “You see . . . this was two years ago . . . there was also a romantic aspect.”

  “With Katerina, your student?”

  “Let us say she studied under me.” A hoarse laugh. “My wife found out, of course, as women tend to, and of course that ended my little liebschaft.”

  Arthur has trouble accepting that he has flown from the Pacific shores of North America to Central Europe just to learn this Nobel winner is a plagiarist and a misogynist. He waits until Hoff heads to the WC before phoning Lufthansa to book an early morning flight back.

  4

  Saturday, April 6

  Arthur slept in till nearly ten, after yesterday’s long, dismal flight and the slow, crowded boat to the Southern Gulf Islands. Now, over oatmeal and coffee, he ponders his agenda for the weekend, which will feature much garden time, much vigorous hiking with Ulysses, and not much agonizing over the Queen v. the Sarnia Seven.

  That matter goes back on the shelf. A mountain lion is on the loose and, warns the latest Bleat, is running “A Mock.” It has certainly become bolder, coming closer to home. Many of his fellow small farmers on Potters Road have livestock and own rifles. The casual killing of a cougar is a serious offence — unless you find one in your sheep pasture. Then, the defence of necessity kicks in, by law.

  Stefan and Solara, alternating long, wearying shifts, weren’t able to exercise the farm’s rambunctious Irish wolfhound, so today Arthur will take Ulysses for a long trek into the hills. The dog seems confident this will happen, because, having finished his own morning porridge of tripe, eggs, yogurt, and vitamins, he waits impatiently at the door.

  It’s sunny out, but Arthur stuffs a rain poncho into his rucksack, just in case. A chicken sandwich, a flask of water, a bone for Ulysses. His sturdy yew walking stick. Into the pocket of his down vest go his phone and his reliable but rarely used Leica, already on video setting in case he glimpses the cougar.

  Ulysses bursts free out the veranda door, sending a covey of juncos into the air, then races over to greet Solara, setting up mason bee houses, then to Stefan, hosing down the muddy tractor. Stoney and Dog had managed to excavate it from its hole without getting the backhoe stuck too — miraculously, the backhoe is back in action with a new left-hand differential side gear. According to Stefan, it was in use for sev
eral hours. Arthur will want to see proof of that.

  Recent sunny days have teased daffodils to bloom, but have also encouraged the horsetail and creeping buttercup, so tomorrow their advance scouts must be ambushed with hoe and trowel. Spring is definitely icumen in: last night he heard the first tentative voices of courting frogs.

  Arthur waves the leash at Ulysses, who obeys reluctantly, his hopes dashed that friendly old man will take him on his favourite route, the muddy north pasture, an off-leash zone. But that would mean passing Jeremiah’s well site and confirming suspicions that the two sandlot archaeologists did little more this week than lean on their shovels.

  So it’s off up Potters and Centre Roads, and then where? The day is fair, the far hills beckon: it’s time to revisit Quarry Park. Before closing the gate, Arthur takes a view of his funky waterfront farm, his angulus terrarum. He fills his lungs with the sweet, moist air of the Salish Sea. Berlin is a distant memory. Toronto seems just as far away.

  * * *

  It’s slow going up Centre Road, mostly because Arthur often has to pull Ulysses into the weeds to dodge the cars, trucks, and campervans pouring from the ferries — weekenders hurrying to their cottages, desperate to escape from urban toil and tension. Finally, he can see, from a rise, the turnoff to Old Quarry Road. Descending it, raising dust, are two government vehicles, the Conservation Service crew cab followed by Irwin Dugald’s Explorer SUV.

  The truck’s driver and its four passengers swivel to look at the character with the giant dog. They look tired, defeated. Arthur half expects to see Tigger’s corpse in the back, but it’s full of tools and tents and tarps.

  Curious about where everyone is going, and even more curious about the apparent bullet hole in the SUV’s windshield, Arthur signals Dugald to pull over. The hole is high on the driver’s side of the windshield, a web of glass blossoming from it. Arthur can’t dismiss the notion this has something to do with Dugald’s sole passenger, the mistake-prone Animal Control Officer, Leroy Letkow. Both roll down their windows.

  Ulysses recognizes the RCMP constable, whom his master’s voice once described as a bonehead, and growls at him. “Be nice,” Arthur says.

  Dugald gives Ulysses a loud “Woof!” and the dog backs up a step. “Real brave hound, isn’t he? We’re on a call down to Mary’s Cove. We just got word Mrs. Rollicks’s pet pot-bellied pig went missing. Hers is that yellow bungalow near the church.”

  “She left her gate open, is what I heard,” says Letkow. “That’s just asking for it. She impressed me as senile.”

  “You’re senile.” Dugald is in a foul mood. “The cat’s on the move, Arthur. The north island doesn’t do it for him anymore. Here, down south, is where the easy prey hangs out.”

  “Fish in a barrel,” says Letkow, who is eager to share his research on cougars: “This dude is trying to establish his territory here, for which males need up to fifty square kilometres, bigger than this whole island. So he kind of owns it, from a nature perspective.” He adds, dramatically: “He controls the night.”

  “Shut up, Leroy. Our orders, Arthur, are if we can’t bring it in, we do it in, it’s that simple. Right, Leroy? Isn’t that why you were practising your gun skills in the parking lot this morning?”

  “Nobody told me it was loaded. No damage except to the windshield. No one got killed.”

  “The wildlife task force aren’t willing to work with him. I’m taking him back to his B and B. Should be taking him in.”

  “I am the Animal Control Officer. Some people seem to forget that.” Letkow makes his plea directly to Arthur, as if presuming he has some kind of authority. “There’s an animal loose that I need to control. I am being inhibited in my duties.”

  Dugald continues to pretend he can’t hear or see Letkow. He is focussed on Ulysses, whose mood has improved — he sits on his haunches, enjoying the scene. “I’m sorry I suspected your wussy dog, Arthur. Can’t see him harming a bug, except accidentally stepping on one, so I don’t expect he’ll be your best friend when a rogue mountain lion decides to grab a quick lawyer for dinner.”

  This provokes a roar of laughter from Letkow that seems an effort to get on the cop’s good side.

  “Put a sock in it, Leroy. I used to own a useful dog, Arthur. A German shepherd. They guard. They bark at assholes instead of sticking their nose up them.”

  “Irwin, I think you’re jealous that I have such a spirited, handsome companion. What happened to your German shepherd?”

  “It was Roberta or him.”

  5

  Though Old Quarry Road is narrow, steep, and unpaved, federal funding has kept it well maintained — it’s the sole land route to a national park. But the colossal trucks and other rolling stock of TexAmerica Stoneworks will reduce it to four-wheel-only rubble if they ultimately get their way in court. This is a very nasty company — Arthur can see them destroy or poison nesting grounds of the swallows and falcons.

  They’ve had biologists up there, hirelings paid to play down the extent of wildlife losses. They’ve located and counted old nests and collected feathers, bird droppings, and other avian evidence. Armed with their reports, the two current Trustees would be free to again rezone this parkland for industrial use. The recall petition, which Zoller calls a witch hunt, is still collecting names. TexAmerica claims it’s not funding the incumbent Trustees’ “Stay the Course” campaign.

  There’s a lot to worry about on Garibaldi. That’s good. It keeps Arthur from worrying about the Toronto case. It is internationally important, yet he has somehow developed a kind of grudge over it, a resentment.

  As the road coils higher he puffs harder, leaning into his walking stick, staggering a bit as Ulysses jerks him along. The pup begins to resist — this wasn’t what he’d bargained for, hauling slow, wimpy human friend — so Arthur unsnaps the leash. Ulysses romps ahead, finding a shortcut through the high dry forest of fir, oak, and arbutus.

  A few hundred metres farther along, they come upon the first limestone seams, from which blocks have broken — they lie helter-skelter by the roadside. Ahead, a dog yaps, prompting Ulysses to race around a rock pile. He races back quickly, spurred by profane and frightened yells from unhappy male human. Arthur recognizes him as one of the young fellows who often drop into the Brig. There’s no gate or fence here, just the TexAmerica guard hut and the yappy dog.

  The guard stammers on seeing Arthur: “You can’t come here with . . . What kind of animal is that?”

  Arthur puts Ulysses back on leash. Tug Cooley, the bearlike foreman, exits a trailer parked among the trucks and heavy equipment, sleeping giants that have sat on their wheels and tracks for the last six months. The yapping dog, Cooley’s famously annoying corgi, is baiting Ulysses, a mock-bravado response to the leashed interloper.

  “That animal’s a donkey, Cal, you dumb-ass. You wanna donkey ride, I’m sure Mr. Beauchamp will oblige. What can I do you for, Mr. Famous Trial Attorney?”

  “You can do nothing for me, thank you, Tug. We intend to wander about awhile in our lovely community-owned park and enjoy a lunch from our favourite viewpoint.” He looks at the rubbish strewn about. “We will pack out our wrappers.”

  “I’m supposed to tell everyone we ain’t taking blame if there’s an accident — you’re at your own risk. Shut up, Dumbbell.”

  His corgi’s name is Dumbbell? Why would one do that to a dog? But the command works, and Dumbbell shuts up.

  “Sign here,” Cooley says. It’s a legal document releasing TexAmerica from all claims from any event, past, present, or future, occurring at this site, or for that matter anywhere in the universe. A signatory is granted the one-time right to enter described lands for which the party of the first part holds mining rights.

  “Only an imbecile would sign this.”

  “I have orders from the top. We got to protect ourselves from mischief and thievery—”

  “Tug, if y
ou hinder Ulysses and me in any way I will sue you and your company for five and a half million dollars in punitive and exemplary damages.”

  Cooley is silenced, clearly unsure how much to credit a threat made with such lawyerly specificity. “Okay, look, the release is obviously not intended for normal established residents like you. We got problems with those freaks at Bleak Creek, they’re here practically every weekend, and days between, camping overnight. They think it’s a playground.”

  “It is.” Arthur assumes they come in the back way, a walking trail across Gwendolyn Park that connects Bleak Creek to the quarry.

  “A thieves’ playground. They don’t respect property. Tools have gone missing.”

  Naive, earnest escapees from the rat race. Who said that? Ah, yes, the potter with the Amazonian bosom. It’s complicated, because I also love you. Differently. He still hasn’t decided how to tell Margaret about Taba’s visit — or how much to say. Should he make light of it? Arthur, I don’t find this funny at all. She’d already collected your signature, so why was she knocking back brandy in our parlour? What else did she want, as if I didn’t know?

  Distracted by these thoughts, Arthur interrupts Cooley’s harangue about “this friggin’ island” with a wave and an adieu, and lets Ulysses pull him toward the forested path that climbs the ridge to the top of the limestone cliffs — to the escarpment that locals still call Bob’s End, sixty years after Bob went over.

  Man and beast finally arrive there, exhausted, and slump onto a bed of moss. Arthur keeps Ulysses leashed, to restrain him from following in Bob’s footsteps, and goes into his pack for his sandwich and the bone, and he and Ulysses set to.

  The panorama on this crisply sunny day is spectacular: the archipelago of islands in the Salish Sea, the distant rings of snowy peaks to north and south, the lone majesty of Mount Baker to the east. The sole view-blocker is a high, long crag, only a stone’s throw away but on the other side of a deep crevasse.