It was an eerie feeling, not being able to move anywhere on the ship without being watched. Twice I talked to Tom, but only through the door. He seemed to have sunk into a sort of torpor, his voice muffled and surly like a bear disturbed in the middle of its hibernation. Night fell on the 150-mile passage to Ketchikan and he again refused to join me for the evening meal. I had left it till late and after I had finished, when we were already docking at the last Alaskan port, I went down once more to his cabin with the intention of insisting that I brought him something from the cafeteria before it became crowded with new arrivals.
His door was still shut and there was no answer. In sudden panic I beat upon it. A voice behind me said, ‘Is all right your friend.’ It was Lopez lurking in a doorway further down the passageway. He smiled. ‘He is going to the toilet.’ And he added, still showing his teeth below the little down-drooped moustache, ‘You see for yourself. The door is open.’
I stared at him a moment, then I turned the handle and went in. The reading light was on, clothes piled on the foot of the bunk, the blankets thrown back, no sign of a book and his rucksack on the floor with the contents spilling out, some papers tucked into a plastic folder, letters from Miriam — I recognized the writing — some newspaper cuttings … A headline caught my eye:
TEENAGE DRUG MAYHEM‹.i›
Cheap Coke Floods In
It was from a Chicago paper, the cutting two months old and faded. Another from the same paper was a few days later Violence Hits the Streets — Kids Go Crazy for Drug Money I sat down on the bunk, wondering why he should have kept the cuttings, carrying them about with him along with Miriam’s letters…
Chicago police appear totally baffled by the sudden rush of coke onto the City streets. It’s plentiful and it’s cheap — cheaper than it has ever been before. And the pushers are everywhere. Samples analyzed show that basically it is good quality, but it has been mixed or cut with anything from amphetamines to borax or even talcum powder. ‘You cut coke with speed, which is amphetamines, and you have a killer,’ says the eminent toxicologist, Professor … ‘What the hell do you think you’re up to?’ Tom reached forward, snatching the cuttings from my hand. ‘Searching my things …’ He opened the door wide. ‘Get out! Get out, do you hear?’
I had stood up, facing him. ‘I think you’d better tell me now.’
‘Tell you what?’ His eyes were very wide, an almost frightened look. ‘Why should I t-tell you?’
I reached past him and shut the door. ‘Sit down,’ I told him. He was bare-legged, his anorak covering his bare chest, his hair standing on end, an unwashed smell and his face looking drawn, almost haggard. ‘Sit down,’ I said again. ‘You’ve got to tell me now.’ And I added, ‘If you don’t, then I’ll go to the police as soon as we get to Prince Rupert. I have to know what it is you’ve got yourself involved in.’ I pointed to the cuttings in his hand. ‘What’s the connection?’
For a moment I thought he was going to lash out at me, his face gone pale and a wild, violent look in his eyes. But then he discarded his anorak and subsided onto the bunk. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose you’d b-better know.’ He nodded slowly to himself. ‘I’ve been thinking about that all day, reading those cuttings, lying here thinking about them.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t have to read them. I know them by heart, you see.’ And after that I didn’t have to drag it out of him.
It had all begun very innocently. Almost a decade ago Jonny Epinard had warned him the Ice Cold mine was showing signs of reaching the end of its life. For one thing, starting from the lowest point, they were washing silt at least three quarters of the way up the claim. The yield per ton of silt washed was still very little changed from the first records kept by Tom’s father, but the percentage of nuggets, or indeed of anything larger than straightforward dust, had abruptly declined. At first he hadn’t taken this seriously, but when the six-monthly profit cheques paid through the Swiss bank had begun to decline, then he had started to take a much closer interest in what was happening up in the Yukon.
This was about the time he had married Miriam, and after a couple of years of unusually heavy expenditure — ‘travelling, racing, a plane of my own, parties, concerts — she’s very musical, you know — well, it was either cut back or find some additional source of income.’ He had started playing the market, with a certain amount of success at first, and gambling, with rather less success. Finally, he had decided to take a look at the BC property. ‘I knew nothing about trees, but you didn’t have to be a forester to know that there was money standing there in the Cascades, not just in that High Stand down in the bottom along the Snakeskin River, but up on the slopes of the mountains.’
The trees there had never been cut over and some of them were big. ‘A lot of scrub, of course, goat’s beard, devil’s club, teaberry, huckleberry and bilberry, but all through it there was hemlock, cedar and fir that just had to be worth something whatever the problems of getting it out.’
It was the problem of extraction, of course, that had caused the original owners to concentrate on the bottom land and leave the slopes alone. But that had been back in the days of steam-powered saws, traction engines, man-built roads and primitive extraction aids. He had been put in touch with Ringstrop by one of Crown Forest’s logging-camp managers and on the basis of the forestry consultant’s report he had accepted his advice to sell the timber standing under separate agreements as and when he needed money.
In this way he had been able to control the amount cut, so that the resulting income would roughly match the shortfall from the Yukon mine. But inside of four years the yield from Ice Cold had fallen so low that he was practically dependent on timber for his whole income, so that it wasn’t long before virtually everything, other than the High Stand his father had planted, had been clear-felled.
By then several things had happened that were to have a bearing on future events. To increase profits he had agreed with Ringstrop two years before to put Thor Olsen in as manager and instead of selling the timber standing, to sell it felled and delivered. One of the big west coast towing companies was contracted to do the haulage. A year later the towing agreement was with a different company. By then Olsen had informed him that they had virtually run out of all the profitable areas, apart from High Stand, and it was at that point that Barony of SVL had offered to buy it standing, get their own people to do the felling and Angeles Georgia Towing the haulage. The price was a lot higher than any Canadian company had been able to offer and Ringstrop had advised acceptance, Angeles Georgia being a small one-tug company tied to SVL and operating close to cost.
That was when he had begun selling his inessential assets. ‘N-nothing would induce me to sell — the old man on my back, his words in my ears.’ The flat in Belgravia and the villa in Monaco had already gone. His plane and his stable of old cars, pictures and the best of the silver, that was what they had lived on for the next year. Finally, he had said to hell with it and sold off the first two hectares of High Stand. ‘I thought it was the t-timber they wanted. I’d no idea …’ He sat there, crouched on the edge of his bunk in nothing but his pants, his head in his hands. ‘Dad — if he could see me now… Christ, what a mess!’
‘Are you saying they didn’t want the timber?’ Even then I didn’t connect, didn’t see what he was driving at. And his only answer was to turn his head so that his eyes were on the cuttings which I had placed on the top of his rucksack. And when I repeated the question, asking him what they had done with the timber, he said sharply, Towed it down to Seattle, you know that.’