Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [184]
The rest was a charade, and a crestfallen Mario Begin, QC, knew it. But all the same he went through the motions, producing witnesses of his own who testified to my violent nature, recounting insults, bar-room brawls, and other unseemly behaviour on my part.
Forget it.
I’m sure most of you have seen The Godfather, Part II, by Martin what’s-his-name. You know, like the name of that guy, the opera singer, who played the lead in South Pacific. Martin Pinza? No. Wait. I’ve got it. Well, nearly. Marty with a second name closer to Don Quixote’s squire. Martin Panza? Martin Puzo.81 Anyway, during the investigation of the Mafia in The Godfather, Part II, one of that band of criminals, a protected witness, had agreed to serve as a canary. But Al Pacino flies that man’s father in from Sicily, and just as the treacherous mafioso is about to start singing, the old man enters the courtroom, sits down, and glares at him. The would-be canary is struck mute. And now, even as a flustered Mr. Justice Euclid Lazure was summing up, my darling of a bishop smiled sweetly at the jury, his hands folded on his lap.
The jury deliberated for a respectable two hours before pronouncing me innocent in time for them to hurry home and catch an exhibition hockey game, the Canadiens vs. the Washington Caps, on Radio-Canada. I leaped up to hug Hughes-McNoughton and then rock Miriam in my arms.
One final thought. In the years leading up to my trial, whenever I was caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway leading to my cottage, creeping along behind a battered, rust-eaten pick-up truck with a sticker on its rear bumper that read JESUS SAVES, I used to think don’t count on it, buster. Now I am no longer so sure.
10
Bad news. Check out page one of these meandering memoirs and you will see that Terry was the spur. The splinter caught under my fingernail. I started out on this story of my wasted life as a riposte of sorts to the scurrilous remarks McIver had made in his autobiography about Boogie, my three wives a.k.a. Panofsky’s troika, and the scandal I will carry to my grave. Okay, okay. It’s a bummer of a first book. But not as embarrassing as the great Gustave Flaubert’s initial efforts. In Rage and Impotence he told the story of a man buried alive who devours his own arm. In Quidquid Volueris, his hero is the son of a black slave girl and an orangutan. Mind you, he wasn’t sixty-seven when he sat down to scribble those yarns, but a mere fifteen-year-old.
Anyway, my point is that after having written a kazillion words, this doorstop of a manuscript has suddenly been deprived of its raison d’être. That inconsiderate bastard has died on me. Heart attack. He was en route to a reading–cum–book–signing at McGill when he went into a spin on Sherbrooke Street and collapsed on the sidewalk, clutching his chest. Had he been rushed to the hospital he might have been saved, but passers-by took him for a lush, and simply walked around him. Bonjour la visite.
McIver never married. “I already serve the most exacting of mistresses,” he once told a Gazette reporter, “literature.” But in his declining years he did enjoy the favours of rich women: culture-vultures. I’m told he maintained scrapbooks of his reviews, each page protected by cellophane. The last years of Montreal’s very own GOM82 were rich in rewards. His study was filled with wall-to-wall honorary degrees. The Harbourfront Festival of Authors, in Toronto, paid tribute. He served on the board of the Canada Council