We talked until we had finished our meal and then he excused himself. ‘I got to catch up on some background notes. Trouble with driving down from the Yukon like that you can’t read at the same time.’ Camargo had left by then, and it was Lopez who was sitting alone with a coffee and some food. He stared at Jim curiously as we passed his table. Up for’ard in the saloon it was Camargo who now sat three rows back from us, keeping an eye on Tom who was slumped in his seat, fast asleep.
He didn’t stir as I sat down beside him and after reading for a bit I went outside. We were in open water then, the entrance to Princess Royal Channel over the bows, and it had started to rain, big, heavy drops that produced little rings like fish jumping on the flat, leaden-smooth surface of the water.
It rained like that all afternoon, heavy, thundery rain with thunder grumbling over the veiled mountains and occasional flashes of lightning. And then, after an early meal, it suddenly cleared to a brilliant sunset as we turned the winking light on Mclnnes Island and entered the Seaforth Channel on the run up to Bella Bella. Tom was awake then, his face haggard, and not saying anything. Even when I told him about the radio message Jim had received he made no comment, sitting there watching the approach to our final destination in a state of what appeared to be complete apathy. And then, when the engines slowed, the ship turning and Bella Bella in sight, he suddenly said, ‘Did he say when it would be, this operation — tonight?’
‘He doesn’t know,’ I told him.
He turned on me, his eyes staring, his mouth twitching.
‘You r-realize, don’t you, if it’s successful — what it means to Miriam. They’ll k-kill her.’
PART IV
1
The cutter lay alongside the quay at Bella Bella. It wasn’t at all the sort of vessel I had expected. It looked more like a miniature warship with its sharp upthrust bow, rakish black hull and the white-painted bridge structure rising abruptly to the spear-like thrust of the whip aerials either side of the mast, lights, radar, a tangle of high-tech equipment that gave her a very purposeful appearance. And the quay and the village behind sprawled on the hill, houses glimmering in the last of the day and the first of the moon; that, too, wasn’t what I had expected of an Indian reserve area. True, I couldn’t see any whites on the quay. The few people lounging around, and the little group slinging a baseball, were all dark-skinned. But the quay was solidly timbered, a large area with storage sheds, all of it looking very modern, and the houses behind ill modern and quite substantially built.
‘You got any place to stay?’ Jim asked me as we stood waiting to disembark. I told him I was relying on Halliday’s son, and if he didn’t turn up, then at least Tom Halliday knew one of the pilots. There was a little floatplane lying moored to a pontoon buoyed up with empty oil drums. Tom joined as, his gaze fixed on the quay. ‘Don’t see Brian there,’ he muttered.
I, too, had been searching the shoreline. A launch came in from old Bella Bella, arrowing sharp lines across the mirror-still water, its engines breaking the stillness. ‘If you do get stuck,’ Jim said, ‘you can take the launch over to Shearwater, which is round the promontory just east of here. There’s a hotel there, and now the main fishing season’s over there should be no problem about getting a room.’
‘Where the hell’s Brian?’ There was a nervous edge to Tom’s voice and I realized that, like me, he had been relying on his son being at Bella Bella to meet him. ‘You sent that cable, didn’t you? From Whitehorse? You told him when we’d be here?’
‘I said we were catching the ferry from Skagway the next night.’
‘Well then — where the hell is he?’ And he turned towards the shore again, muttering something about it being typical — ‘just typical of the boy’.
There weren’t many people going ashore at Bella Bella — a few Indians, the Eskimo and his family, and a young nurse and her husband who was a doctor, both of them working at the hospital. That was all. The Coastguard Captain was on the quay to meet Jim, a short man in black trousers and white shirt with a peaked cap and a beard that was just beginning to show signs of grey. Jim introduced us. His name was Doug Cornish.
An Indian called out, ‘Hi!’ He was pot-bellied and had a sort of swagger to him, and he stopped to add with a grin, ‘Yu, Mustache — yu no like razor eh?’ And before the skipper could think of a suitable reply the man was off up the slope to the village with a cheerful wave of his hand.
A young Indian girl standing near moved delicately forward. ‘Your name not Mustache.’
‘No.’ Cornish smiled at her.
‘Yu captain of that little boat?’ She nodded to the Coastguard cutter, gold earrings dancing to the movement of her head. She had a mass of black hair, breasts just beginning to bud under the red of her T-shirt and she wore a worldly little smile.
Cornish nodded. ‘What do you want?’
‘Your balls, Captain.’ And the smile broadened to a grin, the eyes coquettish as she whisked around with a toss of her black hair and went dancing away to join the youths practising with the baseball. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen.
Cornish shook his head, his cheeks red under his beard. ‘That’s the Indian for you.’ He grinned. ‘Never could get used to their uninhibited view of the human body.’ He glanced at his watch and then at Jim. ‘Shall we go on board? I’m all ready to slip.’
‘I’d like a word with you first.’ He took the Captain by the arm and walked him along the quay past a refuelling pump where they stood in conversation while we waited. Tom was staring down at the launch just mooring at the pontoon. There was a white man at the tiller and Tom called down to him, asking about Brian. ‘You seen him?’
‘A few days back,’ the man shouted back. ‘He was here at Bella Bella. Then he got young Steve to fly him up to Ocean Falls. You remember Steve, Tom — he just got in from Bella Coola, said to give you a message if you turned up. Your son’s in Ocean Falls and says to meet him there. Okay?’
Tom had moved to the edge of the quay. ‘Steve up at his place?’ he called down. ‘I’d like to talk to him.’
‘Reckon so,’ the man replied.
It was annoying, Brian not being there. I’d been relying on him, not only for additional information, but to support me in the decision I was gradually coming to and which could not be put off much longer. I was still a long way from the sort of RCMP post where I could get the appropriate high-level action I needed if I was to give the authorities the gist of that note from Miriam. Not any policeman could handle a thing like that, and I still needed Tom’s cooperation. That, above all, was where I had been relying on Brian.
My thoughts were interrupted by Jim’s voice calling us to get on board right away. The cutter’s Captain was already there, hurrying up the ladder to the bridge-housing. ‘It’s all fixed,’ Jim added as he came back for his bag and his briefcase. ‘He’s taking you both on his own responsibility, and when the operation is over he’ll drop you off at Ocean Falls.’
I called to Tom who was still talking to the launch operator. He turned, frowning. ‘He’ll take us? Why?’ He came back, looking dazed. His eyes had a hunted look as they searched my face. ‘Why?’
In telling Tom about the operation I hadn’t said anything about drug smuggling. I’d repeated exactly the words of the radio message, a routine search operation. But I could see he had put two and two together. Like me, he had guessed it was drugs the customs officers would be searching for. He stood there for a moment, uncertain what to do. But Jim was already moving away towards the cutter. I had my bags in my hands and could hear the explosive snort of the engine starting up, one of the crew already on the quay moving to throw the bow warp off. The Captain put his head out of the sliding wheelhouse door — ‘Hurry up, or I’ll leave without you.’