The place he chose was what looked to me like the most expensive restaurant in Whitehorse, a red plush copy of the rich sourdough establishments of the Edwardian era, full of engraved glass mirrors with pictures of Diamond Lil and all the other gold rush characters staring at us from the walls, and we ate lobster claws and Alaska giant crabs and drank a great deal of wine and quite a lot of whisky. God knows what the bill came to, but somehow I didn’t care. Everything had become so mad that all my training as a solicitor, all my natural caution seemed to have disappeared, Tom Halliday talking and talking — about odd places he had been, odd scrapes he had been in, small planes and forced landings, guerrillas on the border of Peru and Ecuador, the Le Mans and before that stock racing as a kid in old bangers, the crashes he had had. It was as though he needed to run through his whole life in that one evening — almost as though he were trying to justify it; to me, to himself, I am not certain which.
He was high, of course. God knows where he had got the stuff. Presumably there were drug pushers in Whitehorse same as in other towns, or maybe he had kept a little in reserve at Lakeside and had got it from Kevin. He just couldn’t stop talking. Except towards the end. Towards the end, drinking Scotch, his mood had changed.
Afterwards, lying in my bed in the overheated room with its plain wood walls, my impression of him was of a man cast in the mould of the prodigal son. It didn’t matter that he’d borrowed a thousand dollars and that he’d probably never be able to repay it, he had money in his pocket and money was for spending. And in the setting of that 19005 restaurant he had seemed so like the men of the period, the money easily got out of a good claim and easily spent in the honky-tonks of Dawson City, the main street of which was reproduced almost everywhere in Whitehorse.
There were bits and pieces of the gold rush still visible in the town. We had walked back, the night full of stars and our breath smoking, ice skimming the puddles. He had taken me along Fourth Avenue, past the old log church and the wooden skyscraper building on Third, then out to the solid mass of the Territorial Government Building and across the railway track to the road bridge over the Yukon where the SS Klondike lay with her keel on the grass of the bank, her wooden hull and towering superstructure glimmering white like a ghost ship.
He had leaned on the parapet of the bridge, staring down into the dark gurgling current of the river. ‘Almost a century ago,’ he had murmured. ‘This is the way my father came — just a kid, fresh out of school and green as a cucumber. Up White Pass to Lindeman and Bennett — you’ll see Bennett Lake tomorrow — then down the river and through the canyon to Laberge riding a raft with half a dozen horses, a big stove and a grand piano. By the time he reached Dawson he ought to have known what sort of a man Despera was. Twenty-five thousand of them came down the river in that one year, and everywhere the con men and the grafters. He should have known.’ He had laughed then. ‘And so should I! Tarasconi, I mean. Like grandfather, like grandson, eh?’ It was a laugh without any humour. ‘Later they had steamships like the old Klondike there, but when he came down the river he was rafted down … just a bundle of logs.,’ He had straightened up, stretching himself and yawning. ‘That’s how they get the timber out of places like the Halliday Arm — rafting it out, or using scows. That’s what you told me, wasn’t it —?’
‘A barge,’ I said. That’s what the caption to the newspaper picture called it.’
But he had taken no notice of that. ‘That’s how they got the first load out. By scow. Two months ago it must have been. No, more.’ And then, his voice trembling slightly, ‘I wonder what’s happened to Olsen. Hope he’s not dead. Well, a few more days and we’ll know the answer — to that and other things.’ He had turned away. ‘Better go back to the hotel now and get some sleep. God, I’m tired!’
So was I, and very glad to get into pyjamas and relax between sheets. But sleep wasn’t that easy, my mind going over and over the events of the last twenty-four hours. I had told him about his son, how he was trying to raise a public outcry against an American company felling a cedar forest planted by a Canadian who had made his money in the Klondike, but all he had said was, ‘A lot of good that is, the silly fool. He doesn’t know what he’s up against.’
Maybe it was the coffee or the chill of the night air, or the fact my room was cold because I had turned off the heat before going out, but I seemed wider awake than ever, worrying about what I should do. I didn’t have to go along with him, down to Skagway and the ferry. Instead of the train, I could take a plane from the airport, change at Fort St John and pick up a Wardair flight out of Edmonton direct to Gatwick. Another twenty-four hours and I could be home. But there was Miriam. And Tom — whatever he had done, I couldn’t just leave him.
For a man to be under such pressure that he vanishes almost without trace, dropping out of his whole previous existence and disappearing into an isolated and abandoned mine in the Yukon … I was still thinking it was gold, you see, and over dinner I had asked him about the rock slide, whether it had been done deliberately. Yes, he said, he had done it himself. He had got Kevin to bring up a drill and some dynamite, and when I expressed surprise that he could carry out a rock-blasting operation on his own, he had laughed and said quite casually, ‘Though my father lived in Vancouver Island he boarded me out, as it were, with an impecunious aunt in Edinburgh. Thought I’d get a better education in Scotland. I went to Gordonstoun and each year, in the long summer hols, I flew back to that big ranch-style house he had just north of Duncan — it had a bit of a beach, a wooden jetty and a fabulous view out beyond the Gulf Islands to the Strait of Georgia and the Rockies beyond. Fishing, water skiing, and sometimes we’d go over to the west coast, the area round Nootka Sound and Friendly Cove where Cook put in on his last voyage.’ And he had gone on to talk about surf-boarding among the rocks, nude parties on a rockbound coast where the Pacific rollers swept in from the China Sea five thousand miles and more away, fishing and hunting and camping on the shores of lonely inlets. ‘Guess I went pretty wild back there, so Gordonstoun was good for me. And then after Gordonstoun, no university nonsense for this boy, but there was a thing called National Service. ‘Course, I could have pleaded Canadian citizenship, but having both, nobody asked any questions when I reported in and signed the form. Can’t remember what I had to sign, but something; the whole thing was a bit of a dare as far as I was concerned, and since I was already hooked on stock racing and pretty mad about any bit of machinery that went fast, they put me in the REs and instead of vehicles they gave me explosives to play with.’
He had laughed then and said, ‘You mentioned terrorists, back there at the mine. I’d have made one hell of a good terrorist. Anyway, that’s how I knew about laying a charge in a rock face. Bringing down that fall was a piece of cake once Kevin had got me the tools. It kept that little bastard Tarasconi out, and anybody else who was just curious to know what was going on. Another week or so …’
I don’t know whether it was the drink or the coke that made him fantasize so wildly, but somehow he seemed to have convinced himself that, given another month or so, he and that Indian would have opened up a new mine — just the two of them working with that one tractor and the wooden rocker and sluice box he had constructed with his own hands. ‘I’d’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I know dam’ well I would. But for the onset of winter we’d have got down to bedrock and that’s where the heavy stuff is. Winter, and Tarasconi putting the finger on me, and those two bastards. I could have broken their necks, just like that — ‘ He had snapped his fingers. ‘But I wanted them to talk. And then to find they were just a couple of hit men hired to deliver that note and keep tabs on me. They didn’t know where she was.’ And he had suddenly seized hold of my arm, his face thrust close to mine, the pupils of his eyes looking very odd and his hand trembling. ‘Don’t you know? You’ve just come up here from Vancouver, you’ve seen Roy, you’ve talked to Barony over in Seattle — you must know something.’ And when I hadn’t answered — I think I just shook my head — he said, ‘For God’s sake, haven’t you any idea where she might be?’