‘Don’t reckon there’ll be a next time,’ the lanky RCMP officer said.
‘Oh, yes there will. For these guys there’s always a next rime. Once they’ve got the smell of the money up their nose, you’ll see — nothing will stop them.’ He was from the State of Michigan, too angry at their failure to find what they’d been looking for and too wrought up not to argue, his feelings running deep. I had barely filled my cup before he was talking about the drugs situation in Chicago and how it had grown as a result of two rival groups of the same mafioso family — the Papas and the Mamas — fighting it out in the streets.
v I was on my way back to the wheelhouse, but then he suddenly mentioned the name Wolchak. It was such an unusual name that I stopped, listening as he told how this fat little Polish-Lithuanian Jew, who was the financial brains of the paternal gang, the Papas, had been away in South America organizing the supply side of the drugs racket when the fighting broke out.
‘Most of the famiglia, both Papas and Mamas, got themselves burned, so when little Josef returns there’s only pieces to pick up, and as finance director that had always been his job, picking up the pieces. Jeez! I’d have given anything to have found the little guy right there on board that smug-looking Greek’s tug.’ And he went on to say there had only been one occasion when anybody had come near to pinning anything on Josef Wolchak and that was long before he had anything to do with the Chicago gangs, when he was trying to raise the starting price to buy in to a half-bust real estate company. He had come in to Idlewild airport — ‘it was Idlewild then so you can tell how long ago it was. He had flown in from BA. He had these walking sticks with him, half a dozen of them, the wood all beautifully carved. Souvenirs, he said, and as luck would have it the customs officer dropped one. Then, as it lay, one end on the edge of a weighing machine platform, a motorized trolley drove over the other end of it, snapping it in half. The stick was hollow and a white powder ran out. That was the only time the authorities ever came near to nailing him, and the only time, I guess, he ever ran anything himself. After that he was too big.’ I ‘How did he get away with it?’ somebody asked.
‘Story is he threatened to sue them for the price of the stick. Said they were valuable antiques, made by the Quechua Indians up in the mountains of Bolivia, the powder nothing to do with him and probably just lime put there by the Indians to fill the hollow interior and make the sticks heavier and more solid. Maybe it’s apocryphal, but even if it is, it’s in character, for he’s bluffed his way right up to the top of a very nasty, very dangerous heap. And not just bluff. He was the first of the gang bosses to recruit out of South America.
But it’s like I say; once they smell money, then greed takes over, and if they’ve got away with it once, they’ll have another go at it.’
‘Have you got a picture of Wolchak?’ I asked.
He swung round from the table, his little eyes narrowed. ‘You know him?’
‘I’ve met a man named Josef Wolchak, that’s all,’ I said. ‘It’s an unusual name.’
‘Not so unusual.’ He peered at me. ‘You’re a Limey, aren’t you?’ And when I nodded, he asked me where I’d met this man Wolchak. In the end he took my name and address, scribbling it down in his notebook, the connection between the Wolchak who had bounced into my office and the origin of the logs that filled the barge making me even more convinced that the narcotics division had been deliberately set on a false trail.
He asked me a lot of questions, but as I had only met the man that once, and for a very short time, my answers were not very helpful. He promised to send me a photograph so that I could check it against my recollection of the Wolchak who had visited me in my office, and after that I made my excuses and returned to the wheelhouse. By then we were back in the Hakai Passage, having passed seaward of the South Pointers reef, the sun burning up the fog and the salmon leaping. Twice I sighted bald eagles, once in the distance, diving from a dead tree lookout post to seize an unsuspecting fish in its claws, the second time as we rounded Kelpie Point — there were two of them, juveniles Cornish said, standing on the rock right beside the flashing beacon, watching us with complete unconcern. We were so close I could have cast a line at their feet. ‘God bless America.’ The Mate put his hand over his heart, grinning as he posed to attention.
The big, corrugated iron packing sheds and the power station at Namu shone bright silver in the sun as we ghosted in to lie alongside the wooden jetty and say goodbye to the customs men and the RCMP officers, the American Drug Enforcement officer going with them. They went glumly, knowing their search had been one hundred per cent thorough and yet with the uneasy feeling that somewhere, somehow, they’d been fooled. When they had gone, all of them heading for the hotel, Cornish stretched his arms, his mouth opening in a great yawn. ‘Well, that’s that. Anybody coming for a walk?’
I said I would, and the Chief also volunteered. His engines were shut down, the crew told they were clear of duty until we sailed at noon. Perhaps I should have slept, like Tom who was flat out, propped against the deckhousing aft, his mouth open and snoring loudly as he lay in the sunshine, his anorak bundled up under his head as a pillow. If I had known … But writing about it afterwards one always has the advantage of hindsight. At the time all is in the future and one has no idea what lies in store — otherwise, fortune-tellers, star-gazers and entrail inspectors would be out of business.
2
Ocean Falls was little more than thirty miles away, about 2l/2 hours at 1500 revs, which was our economical cruising speed of 12 knots. By the time we had finished lunch we were back in the Fisher Channel, just passing the entrance to Lama Passage. We continued northwards past Evans Inlet and into the narrows by Bold Point. I was standing on the starb’d platform to the wheelhouse looking at the mountains reared well over two thousand feet above us, bare ice-scoured rock visible on the tops but all the lower slopes clothed in forest trees, their roots bedded into fissures and crevices in the strata. Ahead of us loomed a bald, glaciated mountain, glimpses of snowfields beyond. I was thinking then about Ocean Falls, a dead town they said and the area beyond all high land thrusting deep into the Rockies.
I had caught a glimpse of what it could be like on that walk at Namu with Cornish and his Chief Engineer. It was only a short walk, less than a mile, and all of it along a narrow, raised boardwalk of red cedar planks, and when we had reached the lake there had been a bridge over a torrent outspill and after that we had scrambled along the water’s edge. Fish had been rising and there was a bald eagle. Mosquitoes, too. And the going had been rough, patches of swamp, boulders and the roots of trees interlaced — red cedar, hemlock and balsam, a few Douglas fir.
Now the mountains above us were bleak as we followed the King Island shore until we came to the Dean Channel junction and headed up Cousins Inlet. Mackenzie Rock lay only a dozen miles up Dean Channel and I wished I had read his book — the first white man to cross the Rockies and, looking up at the appalling tree-clad loneliness of it all, I wondered how he had had the nerve, what had kept him going.
It was 14.40 when Captain Cornish put Tom Halliday and myself ashore at Ocean Falls. He didn’t tie up, simply going alongside the jetty so that we could step onto the wooden planks, then the Kelsey was full astern on both engines, and I only just had time to call good luck and goodbye to Jim Edmundson before the cutter was swinging round and heading back down the inlet. By the time Tom and I had humped our bags to the end of the jetty and were walking into the town, the Coastguard cutter looked very small in the giant V of the inlet’s rock walls. Soon she would turn north-east up the Dean Channel to pass Elcho Harbour and Mackenzie Rock and on towards Kimsquit until they opened Cascade Inlet and reached the Halliday Arm of it.