Victoria rinsed off with the hand shower, towelled herself dry, and, wrapped in a thick terry bathrobe, went downstairs to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator. The dinner Consuela had prepared needed only to be heated in the microwave, but even that seemed like too much trouble. She closed the door and poured more wine into her glass. Her head buzzed and she knew she would have a headache soon.
She keyed Kit’s number into the phone, but stabbed the disconnect button before the call was completed. It would not be a good idea, she knew, considering her mood and the amount of wine she’d drunk, to be alone with Kit tonight. In the four months Victoria had known her, Kit had never made any overt moves, but neither had she hidden her feelings, apparently satisfied to let things develop on their own. Victoria wasn’t at all certain how she felt about the situation. Not that it was a line she hadn’t crossed occasionally before, but she wasn’t sure it was a line she wanted to cross with Kit. Not now, anyway.
The doorbell rang, playing the opening bars of Beethoven’s Für Elise, which she had once loved but now loathed, thanks to that doorbell. Half hoping Kit had decided not to take no for an answer after all, Victoria went to the door.
It was raining again at five-thirty when Shoe nosed the Mercedes up against the door of the garage in the lane behind the peeling, wood-frame house on West 3rd between Balsam and Larch in Kitsilano. Retrieving his purchases from the back seat, he locked the car and pushed his way through the wet, unkempt jungle of the yard to the front of the house to check the mail. Rainwater dripped off the dark green leaves of the huge old magnolia that loomed over the front walk.
January Jack Pine sat on the porch, out of the rain, leaning on a canvas duffle bag, smoking a roll-your-own, and reading a tattered copy of The Portable James Joyce by the yellow light of the coach lamps on either side of the front door. He stood as Shoe climbed the steps. He wore a long Australian stockman’s coat fastened to the chin, but no hat or gloves. Shredding the cigarette, he brushed the remains off his palm into the front yard.
“You still got that spare bed?” he asked as Shoe peered into the empty mailbox. Shoe’s spare bed was a folding cot with a foam rubber mattress that he had used with a sleeping bag when he’d first moved into the house a year and a half ago.
“What’s the problem this time?” Shoe asked as he unlocked the door. Last winter Jack had stayed for a week when the water lines to his houseboat had frozen and burst, but it hadn’t been that cold yet this winter.
“Some damn kid rammed my house with a speedboat,” Jack said. “Put a hole the size o’ yer head in one o’ the pontoons. Damn near capsized, right there at the dock. Bernie Simpson, the salvage guy, he raised her up and patched the pontoon, but it’ll take a while for things t’ dry out.”
Jack lugged his duffle inside, depositing it with a thud at the foot of the stairs. He took off his coat and hung it on the coat tree in the vestibule. Under the coat he wore a red plaid lumberjack shirt over a black denim Levis shirt. His jeans were worn but freshly laundered and his creased boots were polished.
January Jack Pine was a full-blooded Squamish Indian, or so he said. He looked the part, with strong, hawkish features, sharp dark eyes, and thick greying hair worn in two long braids. His grandfather’s father, he claimed, had been born in 1859, the year the English first came to the tidal basin that is now False Creek, in a village by a fish corral on the big sandbar that was to become Granville Island, the former industrial area that had been converted in the seventies by the federal government into a popular shopping, cultural, and tourist centre. Of indeterminate age, between sixty and seventy-five, Jack made a modest living as a poet, painter, and part-time actor. He could have lived on the Squamish reserve on the North Shore, but he didn’t. With the connivance of some of the residents of Sea Village, a community of a dozen or so floating homes moored along the seawall between the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and the refurbished Granville Island Hotel, Jack had obtained a slip in the marina adjacent to Sea Village where he moored his makeshift houseboat, an old Airstream trailer body mounted on pontoons.
“When you gonna get some furniture?” Jack asked, the worn heels of his boots clicking hollowly on the bare hardwood floors. Since moving into the house, the only major purchases Shoe had made had been a bedroom suite and a kitchen set, both from IKEA.
“It’d just be in the way,” Shoe said, gesturing toward the painting supplies piled by the entrance to the living room.
Until a year and a half ago Shoe had lived on an old converted logging tug in the False Creek Harbour Authority marina between Granville Island and the Burrard Street Bridge. The Princess Pete had been cramped and dark and worm-eaten, but she’d suited him. One evening, though, while he’d been at the launderette, some fool had flipped a cigarette or a lit match into a box of oily rags, setting fire to the dock and burning the Pete and two commercial fishing boats to the waterline. Shoe had lost everything but his car and his laundry. The house on 3rd was too big for him and suffered from years of neglect, but it was structurally sound and conveniently located within easy walking distance of Granville Island, as well as the Safeway and other amenities on 4th.
Jack hefted his duffle and went upstairs. Shoe hung his soggy coat and hat on the coat tree. The light on the answering machine on the table in the hall was blinking. He pressed “Play.”
“Um, Joe?” Muriel Yee said, her voice soft and tentative. “I’ll never get used to your answering machine.” Shoe’s answering machine picked up on the fourth ring, then just beeped. “Anyway, I’m still at the office. Would you mind picking me up here? We can grab something to eat before the concert. I know I promised you a home-cooked meal, but Bill’s been like a bear with a bellyache all day. Damn Patrick. He couldn’t have picked a worse time to quit. See you. Thanks. Bye.”
Shoe made sure there were towels, toilet paper, and soap in the main upstairs bathroom. Then, leaving Jack to his own devices, he took his purchases into the master bedroom. He showered, shaved, and dressed. At 6:15, he went out to the car. The temperature had dropped a couple more degrees. It was snowing in earnest now, big heavy flakes materializing out of the darkness above the streetlights and plummeting earth-ward. He scooped the stuff off the windshield with his hands, got into the car, and drove downtown.
William Hammond was not in a good mood, but even when he was in the best of moods, Charles Merigold could usually be counted on to piss him off somehow. “Charlie,” Hammond said, because he knew how much Merigold hated being called Charlie, “I’m seventy-five years old, for crissake, and not getting any goddamned younger. Will you get to the bloody point? And speak English. I’m not a fucking MBA.”
Charles Merigold’s blandly handsome face reddened. He disliked profanity even more than he disliked being called Charlie.
“I think we should pass,” he said stiffly.
“From what I can see here,” Hammond said, tapping the laser-printed graphs and tables spread out across his broad, black marble desk, “it’s a nice solid little business. Doing better than a lot of my other holdings.”
“Yes, sir,” Merigold agreed. “However, in the last year their operating costs have gone up almost ten percent while their revenues have increased by only three percent. Unless they bring operating costs into line, profitability will continue to be negatively impacted.”
Hammond sighed. Profitability will be negatively impacted. Goddamned bean counters, he thought sourly. When the hell had they taken over? He knew the answer, though. It had happened the day computers had got cheap enough that any idiot could have one on his desk. A pox on the inventor of the microchip, he grumbled to himself.
“Frankly,” Merigold went on, “I don’t know what Patrick and Sandra St. Johns were thinking when they put this deal together.”
“You wouldn’t,” Hammond said.
“Pardon me?”
“Forget it,” Hammond said. He leaned wearily back in