‘Well then…?’
‘God Almighty, man — don’t you see?’ He was staring at me wildly. ‘SVL, the towing company, those do-it-yourself and garden shed outfits in Chicago, they’re all linked. And that’s how the drugs get into the States. Somewhere along the tow route from the Halliday Arm to Seattle, some ship, a cargo vessel, a floatplane maybe — I don’t know — but somewhere along the route a consignment of coke brought up from South America is trans-shipped. In Puget Sound a barge-load of logs is a common enough sight, and then, on the long road haul to Mandola’s company depot in Chicago, who would think of unloading a great timber truck stacked high with massive tree logs to check what’s underneath? An officer would have to be damn sure before he ordered a thing like that.’
He gave a slight shrug, leaning forward, his head in his hands like a man praying. ‘Now perhaps you understand. That’s what I’ve been living with. Not just my father’s curse. Not just that — but all those kids, all the people who are being sold the stuff. God knows what it’s like by the time it reaches them. Something innocent like borax or talcum, that’s not so bad, but if it’s amphetamines, if it’s being mixed with speed, then G-God help them — speed is the killer — the fastest…’ His voice tailed away.
I asked him how long he had known all this, how he had found out. ‘Was it Wolchak?’
He shook his head impatiently, locked in on his own thoughts and too tense to answer to questions. Suddenly he looked at me, his face strained and that nerve ticking away on the line of his jaw, the hesitancy in his speech more pronounced. ‘God help me, too,’ he breathed. ‘Me — me — I’m involved, you see. That’s why they sent me those c-cuttings, so that I’d know… I can’t go to the police, to anyone. And now they want the land, the trees, everything. They want me to sign… and if I don’t, then they’ve got Miriam. And if I go to the police, if I blow the whole d-dirty racket wide open — ’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t do it, can I? Not now. And they know it.’
And then suddenly he was half down on his knees, looking up at me, imploring. ‘What am I g-going to do?’ And he repeated it, tears in his eyes. ‘Help me, for God’s sake. Do I ignore Miriam, stop the whole thing …?’
I didn’t answer and he shook his head again. ‘I can’t, can I? I can’t ignore her. The poor kid’s down there somewhere and if I d-don’t d-do what they ask …’
Even then I didn’t believe it. Terrorism, yes — that was something we in Britain had considerable experience of. But drugs … If it had been pushers, or smuggling, the sort of smuggling haul that the customs periodically unearth, but regular consignments, and on this sort of scale … ‘Who’s organizing it, do you know?’ I was thinking of Wolchak, dancing into my office with that set smile of his, and trying to visualize him as a big-time smuggler setting up a drug line that would net millions and millions over the years, destroy thousands of innocent, unsuspecting people, kids a lot of them. But he didn’t seem to fit. And the whole thing blown up too big. If it hadn’t been for that note, for the fact that both her husband and I had recognized it as her writing, then I’d have thought he had made it all up, an appalling piece of fantasizing to satisfy some psychological need. At least I could have brushed it off as wild exaggeration, the two South Americans and the cuttings from the Chicago press a coincidental basis for wild imagining.
‘We’ll see what your son thinks about it,’ I said.
‘Brian?’ He laughed and the sound of it was again that snorting neigh. ‘Brian is a son of embodiment of the Old Man’s curse, isn’t he? That picture you showed me — Man of the Trees, Greenpeace — our friends of the forest killed in action. Self-dramatizing, He sees himself as a sort of Don Quixote.’ His voice shook, but whether with anger or despair I wasn’t quite sure. And he went on, ‘Brian’s no use. Trees, whales, seals, the rain forests — that’s what he believes in, not people. Me, his mother, Miriam, anybody, we mean n-nothing to him, nothing at all.’
It was at that point that the ship began to tremble, faint shouts and the beat of the engines increasing. Feet sounded on the deck, the thud of a heavy rope against the hull, the blare of a siren. ‘The last leg,’ he muttered. ‘In the morning we’ll be at Prince Rupert with Bella Bella only hours away. I’ve got to make up my mind.’
The anguish in his voice was so real I wished I was out of the stuffy, sick atmosphere of the cabin, out on deck in the cool of the night air watching the Alaska shoreline and the dark of the spruce slide by under the moon, the lights of Ketchikan fading astern. What the hell could I say to the man, what advice could I possibly give him? If he’d read it right, if all that he had said was true — but it couldn’t be, surely. Surely what he had been saying of his son was true of himself. He was blowing the whole situation up out of all proportion, dramatizing it so that I would sympathize, so that Brian, when we met up with him, would sympathize. He wanted us to feel sorry for him, to take notice of him… He was the little boy Miriam had described, not Peter Pan, but an immature male desperately needing to hold the centre of the stage. Attention, affection, self-importance … And then the juddering of the engines caused the cuttings to slip off the rucksack and I was leaning down to pick them up, we were both leaning down, and because they were spread out across the floor we found ourselves staring down at a sort of montage of headlines, and all of them screamed the dreadful toll taken on kids who were becoming hooked, the terrible things they would do to get hold of the money to buy their fixes.
‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said wearily, and began picking them up and stuffing them into the old suitcase he had slung on the rack.
Perhaps he was right. Outside, in the passageway, I could hear people moving about, the sound of voices against the background hum of the engines and the faint murmur of water slipping along the hull. We had increased to passage speed and the normality of it all made Tom’s situation seem utterly incongruous, locked in on himself in that stuffy little cabin, a man with a problem no one could solve for him, feeling isolated, utterly alone.
I left him then and went up on deck. Lopez had been standing at the end of the passageway. He had smiled at me, a quick flash of tobacco-browned teeth below the drooping moustache. ‘Your friend all right?’ And I had nodded, pushing past him and moving quickly, in a hurry to get out into the clean, wholesome air. Just the South American watching, not doing anything, and the gun under his arm without ammunition, and yet it scared me, the present manifestation of a looming menace that was growing larger and larger in my imagination. I was thinking of Miriam, against the background of those newspaper cuttings — the money and the violence — and wondering where she was.
I suppose I got some sleep, but it didn’t feel like it as I stumbled out of my bunk at the sound of the ship docking. It was 05.45 hours. Prince Rupert, and we were on time. I shaved and dressed, then went on deck where the glare of arc lights was paling to the first silvery glimmer of dawn.
The BC Ferries vessel was already there with cars waiting on the dock to go aboard. It was scheduled to leave at nine, so we had almost three hours to get through the formalities of re-entering Canada and settle in for a daylight passage that would get us to Bella Bella at eight in the evening. I hoped Brian Halliday would be there to meet us. I desperately needed somebody other than Tom to discuss things with, even though he was probably not the sort of person who would have anything helpful to contribute.
The day dawned sunless and with a low cloud base, so that all but the base of the mountains that rose beyond the flats on which the town was built was obscured. Seaward the port was almost totally locked in by the offshore island of Digby. I don’t know why, but I didn’t wait for Tom. Just after seven I got my bags and transferred to the other ship. By eight I was breakfasting in the cafeteria, having left my things on a seat up for’ard where I would have the best view of the Inside Passage as we steamed down the BC coast, provided, of course, the clouds lifted.