Vancouver was a much younger city than New York or Boston, and no established mafia or crime family had laid claim to it. The container port itself was very new, as the worldwide trend toward the containerization of ship cargos was just beginning to take root in the early ’70s. This meant that there were no other organizations taking advantage of the situation. Leon was unencumbered by conscience, had plenty of smarts and huge amounts of available cash, and possessed more than a few restricted or prohibited weapons. Mastery of the container terminal was not difficult. He didn’t even have to kill that many people to accomplish it. Before long he had succeeded in raising his game to a whole new level. Leon Lestage, importer.
A few more years saw Leon’s fortunes soaring. He owned dozens of Harleys, and even some rare antique models. He’d become successful very quickly simply because he was crafty enough to evade detection. And he was very intimidating. While many of his customers were busted, none of them dared to rat on Leon. He was wealthy enough that he could have been set for life, but his restless, moody nature forbade it. He could have stepped back and simply managed his empire, letting other people do the hard work for him, but he couldn’t separate himself from the dark turbulence and thrill of his work. He even began to grow bored with how easy it had all become. Eventually, his boredom was alleviated by the fact that he bumped into another ceiling. He developed a supply and demand problem — basic Economics 101. He had access to more heroin than he could sell. For all the media it received, there were relatively few heroin users in Vancouver. He needed a larger market.
One night, in that heightened, euphoric stage produced by combining the right drugs in just the right way, it came to him. He didn’t quite say “Eureka,” but he may as well have. The revelation was so profound that he actually lurched about his home, searching for a pencil and paper, so that he could write it down, lest the very chemical compounds that had brought on this stroke of brilliance lead to its complete destruction before the light of day. He had experienced that before — waking up in the morning, knowing that deep and profound revelations had danced through his mind during the night, but not being able to remember them. Someone had written, somewhere, that the act of genius lay in connecting two things that had been hitherto unconnected. If that were so, then Leon thought that his stroke of genius was in the same league as Galileo, in concluding that the world was round, or Newton, or Einstein, in discovering whatever it was that they had discovered.
Several days after his revelation, Leon found himself saddling up one of his Harleys and making his way back to the very hometown he’d sworn never to re-enter. He was returning to his ancestral home with a brand new plan, profound and audacious. He, Leon, lord of all he surveyed, was heading back to his roots.
He had telephoned his brother Donald the night before. He had to go through the headache of getting his number from Directory Assistance, which had made his mood even worse than usual. His other brother, Dennis, didn’t have a phone, or cell service. He lived too far out in the wilderness.
“Donald, I’m coming home. I’m going to move in with Dennis, in Grandpa’s old trailer, by the park. Tell him I’m coming over. Don’t tell anyone else. Make sure there’s someone there tomorrow evening. Make sure they have cold beer,” he had told an astounded brother. There was no “Hello, how are you?” or “Good to talk to you.” He didn’t even bother to wait for a response — at this point he was used to people dancing to his music. It never occurred to him that he’d ignored his brother, and the rest of the family, for a good four years. They had all assumed the worst and thought that he had died in the basement of some whorehouse or in some gangland brawl years before.
It wouldn’t be long before they were wishing that he had done just that.
It was midnight before a thoroughly pissed off Leon finally arrived at his brother’s home. He had miscalculated the journey. He’d forgotten about the extra distance from Fernie south to the Akamina-Kishinina, which, though short, was mostly unpaved gravel road. Not exactly the best surface for a Harley, especially not a modified low-rider like Leon’s. It hadn’t been a pleasant trip.
What Leon had recalled, on that fateful drug-infested night, was a conversation from almost 15 years earlier, when he was eight or nine. At the time, he’d been visiting his grandfather’s somewhat rundown trailer, south of Fernie, almost on top of the gateway to the Akamina-Kishinina. It was the very same trailer that Dennis now occupied. Their grandfather had been an embittered old man, having found a rich coal deposit that was too far from the railway to be viably developed. He had developed the mine himself on the strength of promises from government officials that a railway would be built eventually. After decades of work, with a fortune in sight, and another fortune spent in developing the mine, the government suddenly reversed its position. James Leon Hallett spent the next 50 years fighting for his development. Entreaties to government ministries were to no avail. Petitions to various levels of the Canadian National Railway were ignored. False hopes were raised, then dashed. It was not until the twilight of his life that Grandfather James had finally accepted that his dream of founding a vast industrial enterprise in the southeast corner of the province wouldn’t be realized — at least not in his lifetime. He had turned to drink before Leon was even born, and didn’t make sense half the time.
Leon’s mother, oblivious to her father’s treacherous physical and mental state, sometimes left her young boys in their grandfather’s custody, especially during the summers. Leon didn’t mind. He was more than happy to get away from his mother’s home in Fernie. It was crowded with more than ten children, most of the time. James didn’t mind much either. “You’re the most like me, Leon,” he would say. “The only one worth the effort.”
The high point of any visit was when they entered Devil’s Anvil, James’ half-century-old mine. The mine lay directly below Sawtooth Ridge, a high mountain that was a part of the Flathead-Boundary range. Leon had never forgotten the magic of the tunnels and the rails.
The last weekend that he had spent with his grandfather was especially memorable. Leon had begged the old man to take him into the mine again, and Grandpa James had bowed to the young boy’s pressure. Together they walked the short distance from the trailer to the mine’s opening. Leon had not noticed his grandfather’s unsteady gate, or the effort that every step seemed to be taking. Into the mine they went, down the central excavation on an unsteady ladder, and down further tunnels, to the mine’s southern-most point.
There James had sat down for a minute, sweat pouring off his face, seemingly oblivious to the youngster’s excited prattle.
“Is this where it ends? Does the mine stop here?” asked an enthusiastic Leon.
“Yes. This… this is the southern reach of the mine. Right here.” James was gasping for breath. Leon didn’t notice. “Do you want to hear a secret, boy?”
“Yes,” said Leon. “I do.”
“Every mine in the province has something called a ’development plan.’ It says where the tunnels can go and how they can be built. Well…” James’ voice trailed off, and his breathing became more labored.
“Tell me, tell me,” Leon urged him on.
“This here tunnel went further than it was supposed to. I drilled almost a mile beyond where I was supposed to stop. A whole goddamn mile. There was a particularly rich vein that I wanted to follow. Do you know what’s directly above us?”
“No,” said Leon, his sharp eyes watching his grandfather. All his boyish exuberance had vanished, and his tone was now deadly serious.
“Why, the US of A, boy. The United States.” James emphasized the “U,” and slowed down the syllables for dramatic effect.