Then he realized that it was not his patrons who were shouting and swearing — it was the intruding women.
Schmidt grabbed the nearest female by the arm and yanked her around, hissing, 'You cheap snatch, I'll…'
He stopped dead when the straight razor slashed across his belly, slicing his jacket, his shirt, and nicking the flab that covered his intestines.
Then he stood there, frozen in disbelief, as the women backed out through the door.
12:52 p.m.
Rabidowski pulled the unmarked RCMP ghost car over beside a drainage ditch and switched off the engine. Then he and Rodale climbed out. Around them harvested fields stretched for acres, most of the crops recently cut and the rich brown earth plowed under. On the edges of the fields they could see the jerry-built condominiums encroaching on farmland. The only thing holding them back was the downturn in the economy.
One hundred feet down the potholed road stood the produce outlet. Ying's Market consisted of an old shed open on one side to face the roadway. It was crammed with bin upon bin and shelf upon shelf of freshly harvested fruit and vegetables. There were several customers in the shed, each with a basket on their arm, each poking and squeezing the produce. A man wearing a leather apron was standing beside a barrel of Macintosh apples. The two policemen approached him.
'Police,' Rabidowski said, flashing the tin.
The man looked up with a wary smile and said, 'What can I do for you, gentlemen?'
Rabidowski moved off to the man's left and unbuttoned his jacket. Both he and Rodale were in plain clothes. Though the Sergeant had never worked with the Mad Dog before he knew him by reputation: word was that for action Rabidowski was the man.
'We're looking for Fritz Sapperstein,' Rodale said. 'We understand he works here.'
A look of some concern came over the man's face. He glanced at Rabidowski, then nodded and said: 'That's me. Is something the matter? I've been clean for years.'
'Mr. Sapperstein,' Rodale said, 'I won't beat around the bush. A woman was killed last night and her head was cut off. In its place someone left behind a pumpkin. That pumpkin's got your fingerprints all over it. We want to know why.'
Sapperstein blinked. Then he looked from Rodale to Rabidowski and down at the visible gun. Finally he let out a deep breath to dissipate his tension and said: 'Can I show you something? It's just out that back door.'
Rodale nodded. 'But take it easy,' he said.
When the three men reached the doorway Rabidowski stopped Sapperstein by lightly gripping his arm. Rodale walked past them and took a look outside. All he could see was a field that stretched for five hundred feet partially filled with pumpkins.
'We plant 'em near the shed cause those mothers are so heavy. Within the last ten days we harvested nine-tenths of the crop. I picked a lot myself. I must have sold a thousand. You are aware that yesterday was Halloween?'
Rodale looked at Rabidowski who let go of Sapperstein's arm.
The man with the apron tried a weak grin. 'You give me someone's description,' he said, 'and chances are better than ten to one that a person matching what you say purchased one of our pumpkins. I didn't kill anyone.'
Rabidowski took his hand off the butt of his gun.
2:11 p.m.
There are no mounted Mounties in the City of Vancouver. The only mounted officers are with the VPD.
That afternoon when the call came through from Downtown, Sergeant Scott Barthelme was sitting in his office in Stanley Park. Just down the hall were the stables and today the office smells of ink and fresh paper were overpowered by the earthy aroma of straw and manure. Except for the occasional munching of feed and shifting of hooves the stables were quiet. Bandit, the black-and-white stable cat, had tired of leaping around the bales of straw pretending to look for mice. He was now stretched out on the office window sill.
Sergeant Barthelme listened to what Downtown had to say, then he hung up the phone and groaned.
Sergeant Barthelme did not in the least like what he had been told. For the Sergeant had been around long enough to remember only too well the public drubbing that the VPD had taken over their actions against certain pot-smoking hippies who had crowded Maple Tree Square in 1971.
Sergeant Barthelme remembered only too well the day of the Gastown Riot.
3:46 p.m.
The demonstration had started out disorganized but peaceful. It was disorganized largely because the crowd that slowly congealed in Robson Square was assembling spontaneously. It was true that in the earlier hours of the morning a loose coalition of feminist groups had met and by early afternoon were well on their way to setting up audio equipment on the back steps of the old courthouse, but the audience that finally collected was really nothing more than passersby through the square, most of them working women returning from lunch who began to realize that this issue was a little more important to them than punctuality at the office. By 3:09 there were more than 7,000 people in the square.
Several women carried printed posters that read
At 3:11 p.m. two women in their forties, both wearing tight blue jeans with knee-high leather boots, one sporting blue-dyed hair, hung a mural painted on cloth between two columns of Francis Rattenbury's old courthouse. The mural depicted a man with a physique like Arnold Schwartzenegger's, all rippling muscles, rock- hard torso, but without a head. Down in the lower left-hand corner of the mural was a reproduction of the Queen of Hearts from Disney's animated version of
By 3:15 p.m. the women collected in the square had started to chant the phrase.
Now if only this were a perfect world that's how matters would have remained. A ragged but peaceful citizen's group exercising its legal right of assembly.
But this is not a perfect world.
And perhaps that's why fate intervened and allowed two things to happen. Both coincidence.
The first coincidence lay in the fact that at this very same moment, some ten miles away in a suburban sports stadium, a group of 10,000 unemployed men, 99 percent of them drunk, had gathered to watch the Annual Blue Collar Soccer Convention. By now the playoffs were over and this was the final game. At this precise moment it was half time, and for some reason some wag who had read the morning papers began to yell his own chant that went something like this:
Within minutes the bleachers were filled with men who were filled with booze who then filled their lungs with air and picked up the chant:
“
The media on this day just happened to be broadcasting live from the game to those fans who got drunk too early and never got out the door. In the background of the broadcast a listener could hear the chant. And such a listener was a woman named Joan Thistlethwaite who at that moment was caught in the massive traffic jam to the right of Robson Square and who happened to tell one of the feminist organizers of the rally who passed by her driver's window about the content of the broadcast and what its message was.
Within one minute the woman had returned to the steps of the old courthouse, had seized the microphone from an octogenarian who had been part of the original Suffragette Movement, and had told the crowd. The crowd was not pleased. And to show its displeasure the group began to shout out a chant of retort.
It is likely, however, that even at 3:46 that afternoon disaster might have been averted. For the group in Robson Square, despite all the animosity now finding verbal vent, was still under control. And it very well might
