“But that story was too big for anybody to hush it up. It was a big international exposé. Nobody could have kept a lid on it.”
“Yes, well …” McAuliffe got his pipe started, holding a box of wooden matches over the bowl and drawing down deeply. “Let’s just say it’s more complicated than that.” I felt that I was on the verge of learning something important and I hoped it wasn’t showing in my face.
“I don’t want you to betray a confidence, Mr. McAuliffe,” I said hoping he would spill his guts to me then and there.
“I’ll only say this,” he said. “The stories in the paper didn’t get it right where Mr. Ross was concerned. Not a bit, they didn’t. I wish more people knew the truth. Maybe some day they will. But right now, it’s not my secret to break, though it festers inside me, I’ll tell you.
I could see that that was the end of the conversation, so I went back to the papers on my desk before he did. Maybe it gave me a moral advantage, like not taking the last olive or not being the last person to leave a party. Fred returned to his seat as well, but, looking up, I could see he wasn’t comfortable. I knew it wasn’t the old chair with the green almost worn off the backrest. After a few uneasy minutes, he left the room for a short time and returned with one of the minute books from the boardroom. From his desk he took a ledger key and removed the heavy binder. At this point he glanced up at me, but saw that I was deeply involved with work of my own. Actually, I could get a good picture of what was going on on his side of the room from the reflection in the glass of the picture of the Commander and his father-in-law, Sandy MacCallum. He took pages out of the ledger and put them in his desk drawer. Minute books are serious documents, records of what the board of directors does while in office. They aren’t to be added to or altered at will. How unlike Fred McAuliffe to remove pages; how like him to do it where he could be seen. What was the old man up to?
At exactly 12:05, Fred hung up his grey cardigan on a wooden hanger, put his jacket back on and removed his Irish cap from its peg in the old-fashioned hat-rack. He gave me one of his friendly twinkles as he passed my table and he was gone. I waited four minutes before discovering that he’d locked his desk. I didn’t have the time or the tools to make a tidy entry, so I settled for a trip to the boardroom to see which was the missing book. It was easy to spot: 1985 was gone. There was a space between 1984 and 1986 the size of the ledger in Fred’s drawer. Nineteen eight-five was long before Jack Dowden’s death. It predated the digging at Fort Mississauga as well. It was food for speculation if not for thought. I deserted the high-backed chairs placed around the boardroom table. I could feel the eyes of all the board members on my back as I grabbed my coat and caught the next “down” elevator.
On the way to collect my car, I tried to place Fred’s loyalties. He was surely in the Commander’s camp. His age and manner would have him there rather than standing under the Ross Forbes standard. Ross was too sloppy for Fred, who was more the Commander’s man. I couldn’t imagine McAuliffe quite as antediluvian as Murdo Forbes, however. Fred was essentially a gentle man, whereas the Commander was probably still complaining about the fifty-hour-week, unions, social security, unemployment insurance, maybe even the vote. The more I thought of it, the more I could see that the Commander wasn’t as out of touch with his age as I thought at first. A lot of this kind of thinking was very popular. I could almost hear him saying that it’s time to cut our losses on the railways, time to deregulate, time to end farm-price subsidies. For an old robber baron who had cut his teeth before the Second World War, he was sounding a very contemporary note. Paternalism has it all over creeping socialism. Had the Commander got over the shock of discovering that the working man, whose friend he was, had been replaced by organized labour?
The car cut left down the hill near the old firehall, following the twisting road down to the bridge over the Old Canal. On the other side, the road twisted back up to the original level again. The Golf Club occupied prime real estate right in the middle of town. There are many odd things about Grantham, but none odder than this. Any map of the area confirms the truth, however. The Eleven Mile Creek curved sharply where it joined the Old Canal. On the outside of the curve, the old business section followed ancient Indian trails, creating a maze of familiar blocks and corners. Across the canal, on the inside of the curve and reached by only a few bridges, the fairways of the Golf Club separated the old town from its newer suburbs.
From the street the club didn’t arrest your attention. The church next door did that. The club consisted of a random assembly of hangars and sheds adapted to leisure pursuits. A bit of ivy ran up one stucco wall and landscaping had improved matters, but it never could be said, for all the terraces looking out over the tennis courts and greens, that the Grantham Golf Club was an architectural prize. From the outside it was almost an eyesore, but it was the interior that mattered. Here you could find a shed to house and repair hundreds of golf carts, a curling rink with a heated gallery for onlookers and a card room for Manny Cooperman to spend his time in. There was a huge pool that could be opened up to the warm summer weather for three months of the year. A large restaurant served dependable if not inspired food, or so Frank Bushmill used to tell me. I always thought the food there must be the best in town since it was so hard to get a table when you wanted one.
I found a spot reserved for guest-parking and walked around to the deserted terrace in front of the restaurant. A few hardy souls were playing golf. I could see the bright colours of their jackets far away over the rolling landscape. The parking lot reserved for members made a challenging contrast to the guest lot with my beat-up Olds in it. Here I saw three Rolls-Royces, an antique Bentley and a Thunderbird of an early year. I didn’t bother to count the Corvettes and Triumphs. I was surprised to see a full lot this early on a Friday. But what do I know about such things? I suppose the restaurant was booked for every day of the year. The door to the patio was closed; I had to walk around through another door and enter the dining-room in the approved autumn manner. I could see no sign of Ross Forbes.
A few heads turned when I entered. I asked a waiter if there was a table with Ross Forbes’s name on it. I followed him to a place near a window and accepted the two menus he handed me. Naturally, he’d get a view. I was discovering that the club made me nervous.
I was looking at a rosy-faced bald-headed man with a white moustache as he dug into a portion of clubhouse curry. I was trying to discover why I was so sure it was curry when I could neither smell nor taste it. I’d decided that I had an irrational side after all, when Ross Forbes cleared his throat beside me. “Hello, Cooperman!” he said heartily. “Are you doing sums in your head or coming down with a migraine?”
“Oh! Hello! I didn’t see you come in. I was woolgathering. I do a lot of it these days.” I didn’t know whether to get up or not. I made a gesture and left it at that. He seated himself opposite me and deployed his napkin against future problems on his lap. Mine was still nestled in a wine glass. I didn’t want to copy Forbes in all things, so I left it there.
Forbes was well above medium height, in fact he was taller than he looked. His great barrel chest and round shoulders took inches off his apparent height. His wavy dark hair was going grey at the temples, giving a touchedup-by-professionals look to it. His brow was wide, but not high, and separated from the rest of his face by a nearly continuous dark line of eyebrow. The rounded end of his nose was echoed in the heavy chin. Add to that rather petulant brown eyes and a lower lip that returned to a pouting expression when his features were not animated with talk. He had a way of talking which seemed to add quotation marks around certain phrases in order to lift them to something more memorable than chat. His smile showed even teeth. I hadn’t seen him smile before.