I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (45 page)

The picture has also been in the newspapers, a blown-up cellphone image taken by someone unaware, until she showed it to friends, that a search was underway for this pretty girl. Kestrel disappeared from a Cree reserve at Lac La Ronge in Saskatchewan, and that has piqued my interest. It doesn't seem a typical case of flight from an unhappy home; her parents are obviously caring and quite distraught. A high school teacher and a nurse, they'd given Kestrel six hundred dollars for supplies and clothes for the coming school term and put her on a bus to Prince Albert for an overnight shopping trip. They haven't heard from her since.

My assigned room, though flashy – the style is bordello light, florid curtains, red sheets, pink pillows – will do for a short sojourn, a few days of boning up on the law with old Riley. But I haven't time to pop back to the office; I tarried too long with April Wu, reviewing her reports and interviews – an afternoon of sheer masochism, lashing myself as I recreated Mulligan in this new and awful light.
My white, polite, bourgeois brother, you worshipped him too
 …

Had his rape of a child finally, after twenty years, devoured his will to live? Had he no longer been able to stomach his own perversity? Fondling the girl's undergarments … And now, of course, I go spiralling back to 1962, those pink panties tangled in tree roots on the banks of the Squamish. And I remember Gabriel's claim:
Whatever his atrocity, whatever his guilt, I can't believe I would not have forgiven him
. But this was a sin beyond forgiveness. I can't believe Gabriel had knowledge of it.

Sebastien Snow, born March 1943, therefore sixty-eight now. Unless, like his mother, he met an early death on desolation row. Rendered to Saskatchewan Social Services as an infant, presumably put into foster care, so it's not likely he knew who his father was. Equally unlikely that Dermot Mulligan knew of his son's existence.

I must ponder how to relate this history in ways that will intrigue their lordships. If old Riley can find a way to wiggle around the rule against hearsay, and if the court buys it, then I can file Ethel Brière's affidavit and video. I must persuade them that Mulligan, ultimately overcome by guilt and self-hatred, took the easy way, the path darkly lit by Camus, Sophocles, Nietzsche, Shakespeare.

I check my cellphone messages. A lilting, husky voice too well remembered: “I just wanted to say hi, I'm here. No callbacks, please, darling, I know you're terribly busy. Ciao.” A final punctuation mark: the soft pop of puckered lips.

All the old obsessive love and measureless pain come welling up. Why so much distress? I'm too old, too wise, too damaged to fall under her sway again. It's not as if she's some kind of omnipotent, spell-casting witch. She's more like a train wreck. How captivated I was – her masochistic prisoner, her slave. Hurt me, my love, punish me … Ah, but there's nothing there any more, Annabelle. Believe me, whatever it was (mindless infatuation, compulsive bondage?), it died many years ago.

With that firm pronouncement I am able to do my business, and I wash up and return to my messages. Hubbell Meyerson, reminding me of the dinner date at Hy's this evening. I barely find the strength to text him that I am sick and must decline.

That cathouse in Grandview? You were making out with that tawny little knockout …

I remember.

W
as Caroline her name? A tiny preserved nugget of memory tells me it was that, or just Carol. In her late twenties, I assumed, though maybe the makeup hid a few years. The dark, haunted eyes hid everything else.

Law school was on break and it was my birthday, so my roommate, Hubbell, even then a prodigious partier, had insisted we celebrate with a trip to Vancouver's seamy side. This was not his first visit to the Grandview bootleg bar, but it was mine, and I was partaking only of its watered-down drinks, unable to brave the tantalizing terror of bought sex.

Hubbell had no such constraints. Promptly on entering, he began engaging the sex workers, jibing with them, coming on to them – as if he needed to. But the satyr liked to enact his fantasies of male seduction.

We were the sole customers. A house madam ran the bar and three young women were languidly arrayed on a sofa. A fourth – I'll call her Carol – was across the room, sitting on the shag carpet, hugging her knees. She looked frail, was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, presumably to hide the needle marks.

“Don't know which one of you ladies I'm in love with the most. What's your name again, honey? Charlene? Lovely name. And this can't be … Grace Kelly herself! Hey, Arthur, offer some companionship to that little lost soul over there. Cheer her up.”

We had bar-hopped our way there, so I was well oiled, sitting unsteadily on a backless barstool. Fearing I might tip over, I ejected from it and wobbled my way to a safe landing on the thick carpet near Carol. She was making no overtures, so I didn't feel threatened. I thought to entertain her, so for the next twenty minutes I recited to her the entirety of Fitzgerald's translation of the
Rubáiyát
. Then I moved on to Keats, and Byron.

Hubbell emerged at some point from his private session and
stood about for a while, hinting we should take our leave, but I was only vaguely aware of him, mesmerized by Carol's rapt, delighted smile. I was in fine form.
Maid of Athens, ere we part, / Give, oh give me back my heart!

Hubbell finally wandered off and I spent the night with her, reciting, talking, never touching. At dawn I rose from my prostrate position at her feet and paid her everything I had in my wallet – fifty dollars – for the pleasure of her audience.

I hadn't asked her a single question. She had ventured few words, though she seemed often on the verge of tears. I learned nothing about her but was somehow persuaded she was one of the nymphs beholden to the goddess Diana. I never saw her again.

All of this may be irrelevant to my narrative. In truth, I haven't the faintest idea if my rapt listener was Caroline Snow. I want it to be her, crying to listen to the words of dead poets, and maybe remembering my kindness as she took that last, mortal hit into her arm. I want to believe I gave her one night of happiness.

I
awake from a hideous dream into a strange place – a tarty bedroom, pink and frilly. Cognition comes slowly … I am in my room at the Ritz, my third morning here. The dream began in the Grandview cathouse but morphed into a vast library, an A-frame, Annabelle seductively undressing and offering herself to Dermot Mulligan, he in bra and panties. Irene drifted past us, ghost-like, and disappeared into a looking glass, and I fled for the Squamish River. My dreams are growing more freakish as the appeal date approaches.

I hope to get my work done today and make the last ferry back home, so I energetically complete my bathroom rounds, dress, pack up, and arrange for a late checkout. I am still flabbergasted over the bombshell from April Wu, and have instructed her to remain in steadfast pursuit of Sebastien Snow. Putting it in her cautious way, she has found “some further interesting details.” She is to come by my office this morning.

Outside I try to detour around the skinny man who falsely conjured up the ghost of Dermot Mulligan. I know his name by now – Conway – as each of the last three days he has approached me for bus fare, having decided I am a mark. I unfailingly succumb.

He senses me behind him and turns. “Any chance you could help a friend out one more time?”

“Bus fare, Conway?”

“If it's not too much.”

“Where do you go on this bus?”

“To visit my old probation officer. He ain't got no other friends.”

This sounds so unlikely as to be true. I fish out a toonie. “God bless,” he says, reaffirming his pledge to pay me back when his luck changes.

No longer sore-footed, I have been walking to Tragger, Inglis, and might have done so on this sunny morning, but I want my
loaner handy for a fast getaway to the island. It's in a parkade, and my route there takes me past a pitiable skid road landmark, the streetfront where, as resident alcoholic, I defended down-and-outers for a few years, an interregnum from Tragger, Inglis memorialized in a few of
A Thirst's
more depressing chapters.

My former building is boarded up, ready for demolition. A sign advises that something called the Downtown Eastside Recovery Centre will be built here. Gone will be a slice of my past. Annabelle supported me in my mission to serve the poor, I have to give her that. She must have had a social conscience at one time.

Neat car
, says an anonymous note on the windshield of the Mustang. Each time it powers into life seems a miracle, probably because Stoney has burned me so often. Maybe the rapscallion has turned over a new leaf. Probably not.

Gertrude lays Annabelle's copy of
A Thirst
on my desk, open to the title page. I fiddle with a pen.
Fondest regards
. Too strong.
Welcome back to Vancouver
. Too sterile. I settle on something complimentary but distant:
You come off admirably in these pages
. As indeed she does. A sexy, passionate, scandalous social butterfly in contrast to the dull moth flapping around the lampshade.

“Any word from her?”

“Arthur, I'm sure she has lots of other people to catch up with. I imagine that's why she hasn't called. You may not be the centre of her life.”

I'm not surprised Gertrude is siding with her; they always got along. “My sole concern is not to be caught up in one of her outrageous scandals.” I feel bad, though. Perhaps I should not be so pitiless to a woman newly divorced.

“To business. Please fetch me a clean copy of Dr. Mulligan's memoir.” I intend to spend some time reviewing it, seeking clues to the other Mulligan: the stranger, the violator of innocence. I wonder if there were others.

She produces a ring-bound copy, dusts it off. “Old Riley is waiting.”

I turn to an early chapter, relating the trauma caused by his sister's youthful death.
There followed a wretched time – years, it seemed – when I ached for the smiles and hugs and words of comfort that Genevieve had unsparingly bestowed on me
. One would need a sage analyst, a Freud, to link Dermot's intense attachment to Genevieve with his ravishing of a child of similar age. A mad misplaced impulse to recapture that love?

I settle down with Riley, who has just filed an amended factum based on the second-hand account of Ethel Brière, produced sixty-nine years after the fact. He has been beavering away, seeking a loophole that will make the retelling of Caroline's story of defilement admissible. The rule against hearsay is ancient, and subject to few exceptions. In stripped-down form: a witness may not testify to matters told by another.

“You might argue the doctrine of recent complaint.” Whereby a timely cry of rape – or even a frightened whisper – escapes the rule against hearsay. The rule was abrogated by Parliament two decades ago, but Riley will draft a Charter of Rights argument in support of its restoration.

“Just come up with whatever esoteric argument you can, something to confuse the court.”

“There is also an issue of continuity. The circumstances aren't clear as to how the deceased's ruminations found their way into the National Archives.”

After being alerted to its existence by the anonymous phoner, I instructed a lawyer from our Ottawa branch to get a certified copy. She also wangled a copy of a report from a questioned-documents examiner, who had no doubt the typing had been done on Mulligan's busy Remington on paper many decades old. The Attorney General has now conceded Dermot was the author, so I don't know why Riley is fussing over continuity.

“You might want to hire a student to comb through all his papers to see if anything else has been overlooked.”