Seaweed on the Street (15 page)

“Me too.”

“Damn your insolence! Who the hell do you think you're talking to?” Service unfolded his arms and clenched his fists.

“Up your ass,” I said and turned away. I hadn't walked five yards before Service called out. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Let's try this again.”

I turned and said, “Would you like me better if I wore a cedar cape and dentalia beads?”

My words were wasted. Instead of listening, Service was trying to get a grip on his temper. He moved closer and said, “There are things going on that you don't know about. Actually, I'm under a bit of pressure. Maybe I need a holiday.”

“I assumed you'd just had one.”

“Think again. That was no holiday.” He jammed his hands deep into his pockets and stared at the ground. “It's too much to deal with now. We'll have to leave any decision on the reward for a couple of days.” His smile was as genuine as a 50-cent pearl. “This man with the so-called information. Will he wait?”

“I don't see why not.”

Service was still uneasy, but he was under control now. “Anything else?”

“Not much. I have a so-so lead in Seattle. Maybe that will go somewhere, maybe it won't.”

“That's not very specific.”

“Well, in this business it's generally just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. Most of the time I'm doing it for the exercise; occasionally things fall into place. So far, apart from the guy who answered my newspaper ad, I've got nothing much to tell you.”

“Your informant. Is he a local man?”

“Yes,” I said evasively. “He lives in Victoria.”

“Whereabouts?”

“He's got a mobile home.”

Service wanted more, but things had gone badly and he didn't push it. He said, “Sorry, Silas. I guess I blew my stack.”

“Sure. No problem. Guy in the snoop business, people assume he's an asshole. I'm used to it.”

“Well, if there's nothing else I'll be getting along.”

“There is something else, actually,” I said.

Service waited.

I said, “It's about that maid, Effie. Why did she quit?”

“Effie?” Service shook his head. “I honestly don't know why she quit.”

“I'd like to talk to her.”

Service's eyes narrowed again.

I said, “Do you have Effie's address, phone number?”

“Not offhand. I've got it in my office, though. This way.”

I followed Service back to the house and through the front door. We went down the hall, through a butler's pantry and along a passageway, and came out in a library. Service's office was next door. We went inside. Service poked about in a filing cabinet while I looked through the windows. Wisps of smoke dribbled from the garden incinerator. Today the three-car garage's doors were all open. There was an ancient Silver Ghost in one bay and a white Mark v Jaguar in another. The third bay was empty.

Service finished rummaging in the filing cabinet, slammed the drawers shut, locked them and went behind his desk. He wrote Effie Yokwats's address and phone number on the back of one of his business cards and handed it to me.

I said, “About Paddy Coulton. You told me he got nowhere with his inquiries.”

“That's right,” Service said, sitting down and drumming his fingers on the edge of his desk. He seemed agitated now; drops of perspiration glistened on his forehead.

I said, “According to you he spent thousands of dollars before you let him go. He must have made some kind of report. I'd like a copy of that report, if I may.”

“Believe me, Silas, Coulton came up with absolutely nothing.” He smiled and said, “Sorry I haven't been more helpful.”

He noticed me looking at his drumming fingers and put his hands on his lap. When I looked into his eyes, his glance fell away but not before I noticed that his pupils were dilated. This was a man in dire need of a tranquilizer. Or a fix.

I said coldly, “Believe me, Charles. You've been more helpful than perhaps you realize.”

I drove out of the gates slowly to give the man driving the green Toyota a chance to follow me. Nothing happened. Maybe, I thought, I was becoming like Charles Service — a bit paranoid.

≈ ≈ ≈

There are at least a hundred souvenir shops in Victoria where you can purchase West Coast Native masks, miniature totem poles, handwoven baskets, drums, beadwork, Cowichan sweaters and the rest of it, a good percentage of which is imported from Asia. Folks interested in genuine Native artifacts — modern or antique — gravitate to Gottlieb's Trading Post on Courtney Street. Gottlieb buys his stuff at auction or from Native artists. He pays well and is generous to carvers down on their luck. I was walking past Gottlieb's when he came out and grabbed my arm. “Silas,” he said, “we need to talk.”

I followed Gottlieb through his trading post into a storeroom-cum-office at the back. Somebody had used a double-bitted axe to hack through an exterior wall from the back lane. Two women were cleaning up the mess. Gottlieb had nailed a sheet of plywood over the hole. Bits of splintered lumber lay everywhere. A thick coating of powdered gyproc overlaid Gottlieb's desk and everything else. Gottlieb ushered the cleaning women out, shut the door and invited me to sit. After eyeing the dust-covered chairs, I declined.

Gottlieb was nervous. He said, “A carpenter's on his way to fix things. A couple of days and nobody will ever know what happened here.”

“What
did
happen?”

“Gregarious George did it.”

That sounded improbable. I said, “Did you see him do it?”

“No. But I know it was George.”

“How?”

“I just know, believe me. George is the one, he did it,” Gottlieb said adamantly. “George and me, we've been having problems for about two years.”

“Gregarious George has been having problems with
everybody
for about two years. What makes you so special?”

Instead of answering, Gottlieb took a clean plastic garbage sack from a package and laid it on a chair for me to sit on. His chair already had a sack on it. “Go on,” he said. “Take the weight off your feet.”

“I'd rather stand.”

Gottlieb sat down and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. He said, “I won't lay charges because George is nuts. I won't add to his problems. But George took something and I want it back.”

“What's that?”

Gottlieb shook his head.

I've known Gottlieb for many years. This was the first time I'd seen him blush. He also coughed, sighed, hemmed and hawed, and finally managed to say, “It's confidential, Silas. Very.”

“Gottlieb,” I said, “you're being disingenuous. It's not like you.”

Gottlieb was still flushed to the roots of his hair. He took a deep breath and said, “Two years ago, George sold me an earth dwarf manikin.”

My heart jittered. Gottlieb's words hit me right down to my toenails. I sat down without taking my eyes off his face.

“An
earth dwarf manikin
,” Gottlieb said. “I didn't know what it was at first. All I knew, it was old.”

“You kept an earth dwarf manikin in this shop for two years?”

“No. And like I said, I didn't know
what
it was. Not then. George brought it in. It was obviously old, possibly valuable. I asked George how he came by it, what it was. George said he didn't know what it was. He'd found it lying on a bunch of kelp weed on the beach at Gonzales Bay. George asked $100 for it. That's what I paid him, I didn't argue.”

Gottlieb stopped talking. He was shaking. When he calmed down he said, “I phoned Peter Wool, asked him to drop in here and take a look at it the next time he was passing. You know Peter Wool?”

“Sure,” I said. Peter Wool wrote the book on Coast Salish artifacts.

“Right,” Gottlieb said. “Peter came in here and saw it a day or two later. He thought he knew what it was but wouldn't commit himself.”

I said, “What's the manikin look like?”

“It's a slab of cedar, painted with red-earth pigment and creosote. About a foot wide, an inch thick, three feet high. The colour is very faint. You can still make out a wolf's-head design on the front side. There's a half-inch-diameter hole drilled more or less in the centre of the slab. There's a wooden peg, about four inches long, projecting from the bottom edge. I took digitals of the thing and e-mailed them to the Smithsonian. I showed the same photographs to Theo Durksen at the provincial museum. Durksen said it didn't even look Coast Salish to him. He suggested I bring the actual artifact in for a proper examination.”

Gottlieb's blush had faded. Now his complexion imitated Hamlet's father's. I waited.

Gottlieb said, “That's when things started to get weird. I left the museum, came back here to get the manikin and
couldn't find it
. It had gone.” Gottlieb pointed a finger across the room. “I know damn well I left it leaning against that wall. Right there. I
know
I did.”

“Somebody took it?”

“I don't know. That's the hell of it,” Gottlieb said. He came out of his chair, opened the door to his office and asked me to check the lockset. There was a good Yale on the door, plus a TrustBankers lock with a hefty deadbolt.

Gottlieb sat down again and said, “This is exactly the way it happened. I lean the dwarf against that wall, lock it in here and walk to the museum with my photographs. When I get back here that door's still locked, but the dwarf isn't where I left it. It's gone. But that dwarf came back.”

I thought I knew where we were going. I didn't say anything.

Gottlieb said, “I can still remember the number of every telephone I ever owned. I know my social insurance number, my library card number, and the licence number on the Hertz Rent-A-Car that I drove on my honeymoon in 1954. I know my children's birthdays, my grandchildren's birthdays, the birthdays of my entire extended family. I can recite the Old Testament, not excluding the begats. Plus, I'm one helluva bridge player. What I'm getting at, I don't have Alzheimer's. When I put things down, I remember where I put them down.”

“I believe you,” I said. I meant it.

“The next thing happens, George comes barging into my shop with the $100 I'd given him. He's excited. Waving his arms, wants the manikin back. But George is drunk. He knows my rule, I kick him out.”

I know Gottlieb's rule as well. Every Native carver in Victoria knows it: if you've been drinking, even a little bit, he won't do business with you.

Gottlieb said, “It's lucky George
had
been drinking, because I couldn't have sold the manikin back even if I'd wanted to. Like I told you, it had disappeared.”

Gottlieb spread his arms with a helpless gesture and looked at the ceiling. He shook his head, lowered his arms and looked at me with eyes that seemed to recede and diminish. He said, “My friend at the Smithsonian gets back to me. He's excited as hell. He tells me it's an earth dwarf manikin — there's one that's almost identical in their Myron Eells collection. My friend tells me another thing. That earth dwarf manikin is priceless. It's one of a pair made by a Twana carver in 1858. Theirs is a moneyfinder manikin. Mine is a ghostfinder manikin.

“In the meantime, Gregarious George is driving me nuts. He's pissed from morning till night. He won't give me a minute's peace till I give him the manikin back. I can't give it back because I don't have it anymore. Two years go by like this. Then something happens.

“Yesterday's my regular day off. I'm at home, in my garden shed, taking out my mower. Ready to cut my lawn. So I take the mower out and check the oil level. I check the mower blade to see if it's still sharp. Everything's Okay. My mower's a good one, it starts the first time I yank the cord. I leave the mower running and go back to the garden shed for my grasscatcher attachment. And there it is. The earth dwarf manikin. It's leaning against the wall in my fucking garden shed.”

I had been holding my breath.

Gottlieb said, “I started to take the manikin into my house, but something stopped me. Don't ask me to explain it because I can't. I just didn't want that thing in my house. What I did, I wrapped it in newspaper, taped it into a nice neat parcel and drove it downtown to my store. My store's open, of course. My manager keeps it open seven days a week in the tourist season. I park my car on the street, take my parcel into the store, unlock my office and put the manikin on my desk. Then I turn around and there's Gregarious George, drunk. He'd seen me get out of my car and followed me in. Wants to know what's in the parcel. I tell George it's none of his business. George calls me a thief. He reeks of booze. I gave him the same lecture that every drunk gets and he backed down, for once. Went out onto the street and staggered off. That was last night.

“Today I've got no manikin, and no wall. What're you gonna do about it?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Vancouver is British Columbia's best-known and largest city. Victoria, B.C.'s provincial capital, is a city of about 250,000 people built on an island about 20 miles from the mainland. It's been obvious for a hundred years that Vancouver is where the money and the power are, but instead of erecting new legislative buildings in Vancouver, B.C.'s legislators, after much deliberation, decided to leave the legislative buildings where they were and build the world's largest ferry fleet.

At 6:45 on Monday morning I drove my Chevy aboard the
Spirit of Vancouver Island
, left it on the lower parking deck and walked up three flights of stairs to the ship's dining room. I found a window seat and looked up at the sky to the east, where the sun was rising above the Gulf Islands. One oddly symmetrical white cloud shimmered on the horizon. I narrowed my eyes. It was no cloud. I was looking at the
Pallada
, a magnificent full-rigged Russian sailing ship, en route to Victoria for a sea festival.