‘What’s his background?’ I asked. ‘What’s he do for a living?’
Brian shrugged. ‘Lives off the other squatters, picks up anything he can. I don’t know for sure what he’s up to, but he’ll sell you beer or hard liquor any time of the day or night, whenever the government liquor store is shut, that is. Drugs, too, if you want them. And he’s not a man to cross, very quick with the knife.’ He grinned and gave a little shrug. ‘That’s what I’m told, anyway.’
‘By the swimming pool, you say?’
Brian looked up, staring at his father in the doorway. ‘Right.’
‘What’s the number of the apartment?’
His son hesitated. ‘Number fifteen. On the third floor. But if you’d been listening to what your legal adviser has been saying you’d realize your pusher has gone off down the lake in his inflatable.’ And he added with a little twisted smile, ‘Why not break down the door and help yourself?’
I didn’t find Brian any more likeable now than I had on the previous occasion when I had seen him in my office. The abrasive energy of the man, the way he assumed I was willing to follow his lead as he rose to his feet and said, ‘Well, you coming?’ made me want to tell him to go to hell. Instead, I found myself explaining to him in reasoned tones how Jim Edmundson had been sent in by the government to report on the situation.
‘What’s he going to say in his report?’
I told him I didn’t know, that Edmundson would only just have arrived at the Cascades logging camp. And I added, ‘The fact that he’s been sent there to report indicates that you’ve made your point and the authorities are now monitoring the situation.’
But he brushed that aside. ‘A forestry man, employed by government — he’ll look at those trees, work out the value on his little calculator and that’ll be that. So long as the land is replanted the government is covered.’ He was in the bedroom now, putting his things together. ‘Here’s a spare sleeping bag.’ He tossed a waterproof hold-all across to me. ‘We’ll need some food, too. You got sweater and anorak? It’ll be cold up there — wet and cold, and you’ll need a torch.’
‘It’s still blowing,’ I said.
Thought you were a sailing man.’ He said it with a lift of his brows and a little smile, going back into the kitchen and thrusting an assortment of tins and cartons into a plastic bag. ‘Okay?’
I hesitated. Tom was back on the couch, his eyes closed, but I don’t think he was asleep. ‘You staying here?’ His eyes flipped open. ‘You’re not coming?’
‘I’m tired,’ he murmured.
‘A chance to have a look at the Cascades, check that logging camp — just in case your wife…’
He shook his head. ‘Edmundson’s there now. See what he discovers. No need for me to stick my neck out. Not yet.’ His eyes flickered to his son. ‘Apartment fifteen, you said?’ And when Brian nodded, he smiled and said, ‘Maybe in the morning then …’ He sank back, his eyes closing.
I tucked the hold-all under my arm, picked up the things I needed and followed Brian to the door. ‘Is it all right,’ I asked as we went out into the night, ‘leaving him there on his own? He needs a fix and he might go looking for that Mexican.’
His son shrugged. ‘My guess is Rodrigo is down the far end of the lake by now.’ And when I reminded him again that it could just as well have been Tarasconi who had gone off in the inflatable he shook his head. ‘It’ll be Rod, and if he’s gone to the end of the lake he won’t be back tonight.’
But when we had climbed to the dam and were following our torches along the lakeside path we found the inflatable drawn up among some shrubs well clear of the water, the outboard padlocked into the tipped-up position. ‘Where’s Tarasconi?’ Brian asked, looking up at me, his fingers still feeling the chain of the padlock.
‘How the hell do I know?’ I was gazing out over the black waters, the two figures blurred in my mind and trying to sort out what I really had seen and what I had imagined. ‘Wind’s dropped a bit,’ I murmured, and then I began searching in the dark silt for the mark where the oil had been spilled, a sudden terrible thought in my mind, but it was all trampled over where the inflatable had been pulled up the steep shore, and anyway I couldn’t be sure it had been returned to the same spot.
‘Can’t do anything about the padlock,’ Brian said, straightening up. ‘Anyway, there probably isn’t enough petrol. We’ll take the canoe. Paddling it close along the shore we’ll be out of the wind, for the first part at any rate.’
‘You’re going into the Cascades from the top, is that it?’
He nodded. ‘From where I was holed up on the side of the mountain I could see right down the lake as far as the portage, to the point where the falls pour down from the upper lake. I’m told that lake is the water source of the Cascades. There’s a hut there, an old Indian hut, and a timber extraction road somewhere below it.’ He stood for a moment to look north across the black waters of the lake. ‘I don’t like being barred entry to my own property,’ he said softly. ‘And those trees … I only saw just the edge of them — ’
They’re not your trees,’ I reminded him. ‘As long as your father’s alive — ‘
‘Okay, but it could have been the same if he’d tried to walk round the plantation.’
‘Who stopped you?’
‘A couple of hulking foresters. They had a power saw with a blade on it as long as your arm. You don’t try conclusions with that sort of a weapon.’
They threatened you?’
‘Oh sure, and they’d have used it all right.’ He laughed. ‘Afterwards they could always say I just walked into it. Wasn’t anyone else there to say I didn’t.’
I stared at him. ‘But surely there must have been somebody in charge. You said in your letter — the one that was forwarded to me in Whitehorse — you said there was a man named Lorient in charge.’
That’s right. The manager, they said. When they saw I was determined to walk down the logging road to High Stand, they called him out of his office back of the quay where I’d parked my boat. He said he didn’t care what my name was or who had planted those trees, the whole stand had been sold to an American company and would be felled and shipped over the next few months. I don’t know whether he was French Canadian — could be with a name like that. He was a mean-looking bastard and when he realized I wasn’t the sort to take orders, that was when they began to get tough. By then, of course, he had figured out just who I was — I mean that I was the guy who had tried to stop a barge-load of High Stand logs in the Georgia Strait. You heard about that, did you?’
And when I told him the Canadian lawyers had given me copies of the press cuttings, he went on, ‘Okay, but what you didn’t see — what I didn’t tell the press, because I knew they wouldn’t believe me — and this is just to show how vicious men motivated by greed can be…’ He stopped there, turning and facing me. ‘You saw that picture where the bargeman is leaning over the bows with a boathook in his hands. Looks as though he’s trying to fish me out, doesn’t it? A kindly seaman trying to save a foolish demonstrator!’ The corners of his lips lifted in the little smile that was without humour. ‘What in fact he was doing was using it like the Indians used to use whale spears. That boathook had a point on the end and he was thrusting it down to puncture the inflatable, and then to puncture me. That doesn’t show either in the TV film or the press pictures, but it’s true. That’s when I dived into the water. That,’ he added, ‘was why I didn’t argue with Lorient and those two fellows at the Cascades.’
‘What about Olsen?’ I asked. ‘Have you discovered where he is?’
‘Bought off,’ he said. ‘What else? Did the police come up with anything?’ And when I didn’t answer, he said, ‘You lawyers! You want everything cut and dried, a black and white situation before you’ll take action. Well, now perhaps you’ll see for yourself. Come on!’ He turned and started off along the path. ‘If you’re coming with me I aim to be off the lake and into cover before dawn, so let’s get moving.’ And as we started off along the path he began talking about the trees. ‘You’ve been to Cathedral Grove, the red cedar and Douglas showplace on the Port Alberni road on Vancouver Island, have you? No? Well, the trees I glimpsed in High Stand will be as big one day. But they’re not old primeval forest. They’re not museum trees. They were planted this century and there’s acres of them standing shoulder-to-shoulder, great stems rising a hundred and twenty, maybe a hundred and fifty feet, rank upon rank, all exactly spaced. They’re like giant soldiers stood there on parade.’