Snow Job (54 page)

Arthur arrived at the Vancouver airport suffering flight guilt — a phenomenon unknown to him pre-Blake but which had begun to plague him in recent weeks. He vowed to abstain from these gas-gulping journeys; he’d been soiling planet Earth with his massive carbon footprint. A train next time — if there was to be a return journey.

At the arrivals level, Augustina Sage gave him a kiss and a hug, and helped stuff his three bulging suitcases into her small car. As they were under way, she peppered him with questions about his Balkan exploits and the spectacular events in Bhashyistan. That continued over prawns and noodles in Chinatown. Finally, Arthur was able to ask if her former partner, gone native, had sent her any smoke signals.

“The good news, if you can call it that, is Brian is still alive. Somehow, he made it over the Nahanni Range to the Mackenzie Highway. This news comes from the RCMP in Fort Simpson, who called wanting to know if a haggard prospector found eating snow-shoe-rabbit stew in a trapper’s cabin was actually a lawyer.”

“And?”

“I asked them to hold him, arrest him for something, anything, a trumped-up charge. They just laughed. I asked them to have him call me collect, but he hasn’t had the courtesy or courage to do that. This was three days ago. I was booking a flight up there when they
phoned again to say he’d joined some First Nations people driving to Fort Providence, on Great Slave Lake. He could be anywhere.” Arthur couldn’t believe that Pomeroy, having re-emerged into the human community, could be unaware of world events or that his favourite former client was on course to liberate Bhashyistan. Surely, the gold claim his clients had presumably assigned to him was an illusory fee. He would find more gold in Ottawa — if appointed to represent Abzal, he could earn several thousand taxpayers’ dollars a day.

The next morning, Arthur got up early at his club to meet Roy Bullingham in the dining room. As he waited over coffee and a soft-boiled egg, he watched the wall screen, where talking heads were reciting the obvious about Bhashyistan. The received wisdom was that the Russian army was calmly waiting at the border for its invitation from the new regime to help with reconstruction. An army of Gazprom engineers would not be far behind.

Canada AM
lingered lovingly for several minutes on happy faces in a Kremlin reception hall, where President Bulov toasted the three Prairie heroines and posed with them, arms linked. The love-in did not include the five Calgarians — who’d been very bad boys in Moscow’s estimation. Military police had held them for eight hours of questioning before deporting them on an Air Canada flight.

Journalists continued to be held up at the Russian and Kazakhstan borders, so the only person filing reports was the Russian spy and intriguer Vlad Mishin, whose tendentious blog was widely read and profitably smothered in ads. Arthur hadn’t realized, when he’d met Mishin in Ohrid, that
Izvestia
was owned by the Gazprom Media Holding Company.

Nothing new today from him, but his videotaped sequence from the day before was replayed: a statue of Mad Igor being toppled in
a newly occupied town. Otherwise, there were unconfirmed reports that Igor and his family were seeking refuge in Turkmenistan, ruled by an almost equally despotic regime.

Here came Bully, frolicsome as an April lamb, briefly stopping to needle a former Conservative revenue minister, then taking a few moments to commiserate with Irwin Godswill, a few tables down, whose sour expression intimated he hadn’t got out of Anglo-Atlantic before its stock plummeted.

Bully settled beside him. “Before you rush off to your bucolic sanctuary, I hope we can chat about a few opportunities. Quilter and his crowd are still desperate to retain you. Then there’s that DeCameron matter, with all those mouth-watering hot tub orgies.”

“Neither tempt this simple farmer.”

“Nonsense.” A waiter hurried over with Bully’s morning oatmeal. He took a spoon to it, blew on it. “Now, as to Erzhan, precedent restrains McRory’s team from offering more than eight million dollars, but they’ll pay the bulk of your Albanian helpmates’ fees and a fair per diem for representing Erzhan at the royal commission — five thousand a day, and they’ll throw in junior counsel.”

“For reasons of my personal health and sanity, Margaret and I have agreed I shan’t return to the nation’s capital. She will find an Ottawa bed-sitter and I will keep the home fires burning.”

“I can see you are overwrought, Arthur. Hard to blame you — it’s been a tense and difficult time. Your dubious friend DiPalma, murdered, was he? Never mind, tell me no secrets. Yes, a few days sopping up the rustic pleasures of your island home, then you’ll be ready to take on the world again. Bullingham, Beauchamp. Reverberates with power and prestige, does it not?”

He went back to his oatmeal. Arthur couldn’t finish his egg, stared balefully at the TV screen — a news flash: Turkmenistan had just rejected a request for safe haven from Bhashyistan’s ruling family.

Once aboard the
Queen of Prince George
, Arthur turned his mind to the problem of getting from the ferry dock to home. He’d called ahead to Blunder Bay, drawing Savannah from a strategy session of the Inter-island Roadside Bicycle Path Coalition. To his dismay, Arthur learned she and Zack had yet to retrieve the Fargo from Stoney, despite cajolery and threats. Their guests could offer no help — they’d come on mountain bikes.

Arthur was unsurprised when his next call, to Garibaldi Taxi Service and Hot Air Holidays, went unanswered.

His quest for a local whose vehicle might accommodate his luggage won quick success, even gushing insistence from Mookie Schloss, who insisted her Land Rover had
gobs
of room. She’d be
awed
to drop him off.

Not forthcoming, however, was a renewed invitation to her cozy cottage on Sunrise Cove — but soon an unsavoury reason for that joined them from the outer deck: the poetaster Cudworth Brown, who’d just finished a smoke. He snuggled beside Mookie, snaked a proprietary arm about her waist.

“Watch out for loverboy here,” Cud said, “he’s left a trail of broken hearts.”

Mookie slapped Cud lightly. “He’s an absolute
gentle
man — not like you.”

“Man, I feel a sad poem coming on. Broken hearts, it still smarts when Cupid’s darts miss their marks and only prick the private parts.”

“You are
so
not normal,” Mookie said.

Afterwards, on the car deck, Cud winced as he tried to heft Arthur’s bags. “What have you got in there, gold bricks?” His back was acting up, so Arthur manhandled them into the Rover.

With Mookie at the wheel, Cud beside her, the absolute gentleman in the back, they rolled from the landing ramp into the welcoming arms of Garibaldi Island, a moment that never failed to gladden Arthur. By the time they conquered Ferryboat Knoll, he’d
begun to laugh at himself, freed from the insupportable burden of his false role as loverboy, so wrongly earned, so quickly doused.

As they began the steep descent on Centre Road, past Breadloaf Hill, Arthur saw that Santa and his reindeer were still raring to take off from the Shewfelts’ asphalt roof. Historically, they tended to remain aloft until Groundhog Day. The lawn ornaments, three-foot versions of Santa’s elves that more resembled Snow White’s dwarfs, would often hang around until replaced by Easter bunnies and duckies.

On the neighbouring acreage: a blighted landscape of rusting cars and trucks. If he wasn’t mistaken, that was Stoney by his garage, with a camera crew — he could see their van, a Global TV logo. And parked nearby, silently seeking rescue from its abductor: Arthur’s extraordinarily rendered Fargo.

“Mookie, please stop behind that big arbutus and let me out. I see my truck.”

As they drove off, he toted his bags to a grassy lay-by, then slipped from behind tree cover and up a mossy path behind Stoney’s garage. The hot-air balloon, deflated but suspended by ropes from tree limbs, afforded a blind. After further advance, he could hear Stoney crowing behind the TV van.

“I figured early on this was a phony set-up, so I decided to play him along.”

A woman interviewer: “Charley Thiessen, you mean?”

“It didn’t click who he was right away. I figured him for some lowly underling.”

“And at what point did you realize it was a set-up?”

“Well, between me and you, I got real suspicious when he wouldn’t take a toke.”

Arthur finally found his way to his truck, ducking behind the cab. The tires were up, the hood warm, and the keys on the dash.
Not far away, Stoney was struggling with his recall of the mystery man, Burton. “Dude with a goatee is all I remember. I’d just crawled out of the sack, so everything was kind of out of focus, eh.”

“Okay, Bob, can we get a picture of you in front of your cool truck?”

As they approached, Arthur bent so low he could see Stoney’s untied sneakers by the wheel wells.

“Yeah, this here’s my sweetheart, my honeybun. Forty years in service, still street legal.”

“That’s a great shot. Kiss it again.”

Camera lights blazed. As they sauntered off, Stoney pitched them about Hot Air Holidays’ balloon launch. “Test run to Ponsonby Island, winds permitting, otherwise we go wherever they take us. Gala event, a spectacle you don’t want to miss. It’s BYOB. you can score your party juice at the General Store.”

Arthur slipped in behind the wheel. As the engine came quickly to life, Stoney turned, startled, but the Fargo was already pulling around the garage, down the driveway, out the open gate. A quick stop to retrieve his luggage and he was on his way.

A perfectly executed freedom ride. Ray DiPalma would have been proud.