A Dismal Thing To Do Page 14

  “Any idea where or when?”

  “Same as usual, I s’pose. We might’s well get started. Snowshoes in your car?”

  “I’ve a pair of cross-country skis I borrowed from Armand Bergeron last night. I meant to return them this morning.”

  Sam twitched his nostrils, went to the woodshed, and came back with two pairs of snowshoes. “I stuck my head in the door and told ’em we was goin’. Annabelle gimme this.”

  A lunch and a thermos, of course. Annabelle must keep them lined up in a row on the pantry shelf. Madoc got into the car and shoved Armand ‘s skis aside to make room for Sam. Receiving no instructions to the contrary, he headed for Bull Moose Portage. They weren’t more than halfway there, though, when Sam ordered abruptly, “Turn in here.”

  “Here” appeared to be nowhere in particular, but it had been dug out after a fashion and looked more or less navigable, so Madoc turned. After a hundred feet or so, the turnoff petered out to a snowbank on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Guided solely by the instinct of self-preservation, Madoc pulled as close as he could get to the snowbank.

  That proved to have been the right move. Sam hopped out, taking both pairs of snowshoes with him. He pawed around under a spruce that grew down over the side of the bank, dragged forth a vast sheet of whitish plastic, and draped it over the car. Commando tactics, by thunder. Madoc waited for Sam’s next move, and was not disappointed when the hired man fished again among the branches of the spruce and came out with a long rope that had a noose tied in the end of it.

  “Stick your foot in the loop, grab holt of the rope, an’ swing yourself across the ditch,” he ordered. “Aim for the bare limb o’ that big oak that’s stickin’ flat out behind them little seedlin’ firs on the other side of the ditch. See it?”

  Madoc saw it, got himself adjusted, shoved off from the bank, and made a perfect landing. The rough bark gave a good grip and wouldn’t show footprints. He sent the noose whizzing back across the ditch, and lowered himself gingerly to the crust. By the time he’d got his snowshoes strapped on, Sam was beside him, tucking the noose into a fork of the oak.

  “We’ll find it there easy enough on our way back,” he grunted. “Whole thing’s prob’ly a waste o’ time, but it never hurts to muddle your trail. Don’t matter if we leave a little sign from here on in. Ain’t nobody likely to notice.”

  He glanced up at the sun that was trying to break through the overcast, and set a course roughly west-southwest. Madoc followed, avoiding the snow-laden evergreens as best he could. That light fall of new snow last night hadn’t penetrated this thicket much, but he and Sam both watched out for soft patches and steered clear of them whenever possible.

  They didn’t talk at all. Madoc had never tracked with Sam before, and he respected the work of a master. A timber wolf would have seemed clumsy beside the elderly man. Just how old Sam was, none of the Wadmans could say. Maybe Sam didn’t know, either, but whatever his age was, it hadn’t slowed him down any. Madoc almost wished it had. He was musing on that de-squeaked bed he’d got to spend so little time in and wondering how much farther they’d have to go when Sam flopped down on his belly, slid his snowshoes under his body, and snaked himself in under a low-spreading spruce.

  Madoc did the same, and just in time. He found they were directly behind a good-sized lean-to made of overlapping fir boughs over a framework of saplings. In fact, they were so close it was possible to burrow with one finger into the needles and make a tiny peephole while keeping themselves well screened from those inside.

  Pierre Dubois was kindling a small fire just outside, where the heat would reflect back to warm the lean-to while the smoke drifted the other way. The chap was a woodsman, whatever else he might be. His cohorts were straggling in by twos and threes, each with that woven sash tied around his mackinaw or parka. Some were tying the sashes as they came, Madoc noted, and he could understand why. They wouldn’t be the sort to whom anything in the nature of fancy dress came naturally.

  He was recognizing faces and voices. These were the men who’d got the secret handshake, no doubt about that. They were crowding into the lean-to, hunkering down, talking to each other in low tones, like hunters on the stalk. None of them looked out of place in so rustic a setting. Like as not they were most of them guides or pot hunters, who depended on their guns to keep meat on their family tables.

  They weren’t here for fun, that was plain. Their voices were harsh, their faces grim. There was none of the fraternal joshing Madoc had run into the night Bert took him to the Owls’ Club. Strange as it might seem, he got the distinct impression that this was a business meeting.

  When everybody was present—and they all were, because Madoc had been keeping count as they arrived, deducting one for the murdered recruit—Pierre stood in front of the lean-to with his back to the fire, and made his opening remarks. Gone was the bon vivant, the insouciant voyageur. Today Dubois was a man with a mission.

  “I don’t have to tell you, brothers, why our number is one short today. One of us—perhaps not the most important to our cause, but still one of us—was murdered last night.”

  “What do you mean murdered?” demanded one of the older men. “He got shot going home from the dance. How do you know it wasn’t an accident?”

  “I know because it’s my business to know, Brother G. You men have trusted me to be your leader. I aim to honor your trust by looking out for your interests. To do that I need everybody’s full cooperation. If any one of you knows anything about the shooting of Brother W, he’d better tell me now.”

  There was a shifting of bodies and a clearing of throats, but nobody spoke. Dubois looked from one to another, his black eyes glinting.

  “I think you all understand what I’m asking. We don’t have to know who shot him, but we do have to know why he was killed. Naturally we’re all outraged and grieved by the loss of our young brother, and extend our sympathy to those members of his family who are present”—he didn’t put quite so much punch into this last—”but what we absolutely must know is whether his being shot had anything to do with the fact that he’d become a member of our group. Because if it did, that means every one of us could be in danger.”

  “We knew that when we signed on,” grunted one of the men.

  “We knew that when it came to carrying out our avowed purpose we’d be exposing ourselves to certain risks, yes. You have to admit, though, that it’s one thing to get fired at by a security guard when you’re performing an act of sabotage, however justified, and something one hell of a lot different to get potted like a rabbit on your way home from a dance.”

  “Damn right!” From the way he pronounced his final t that must be either a Grouse or a McLumber. “What’s the sense in lettin’ ourselves get killed before we done the job?”

  “Okay then,” Dubois had to raise his voice over the chorus of agreement. “Keep your eyes and ears open. If anybody picks up any scrap of information, however small, I want it reported to me at once. By the way, does anybody know anything about an RCMP man who showed up at the Portage last night.”

  “Married Bert Wadman’s sister Janet from up on the hill in Pitcherville,” somebody replied promptly. “He come with Bert’s wife, Annabelle. Fine-lookin’ woman in a black dress that fit pretty good. Cécile knows ’er.”

  “I’m s’prised you didn’t ask to get introduced, Pierre,” said somebody else.

  Dubois wasn’t interested in kidding around. “What about the Mountie? What does he look like?”

  “Scrawny little black-haired runt with baggy britches an’ a red mustache.”

  “No mustache,” someone contradicted. “Janet made him shave it off. Smartened him up some, too.”

  “That so? I never noticed.”

  “He ain’t the kind you’d notice.”

  “Did anybody happen to notice what his name is?” Dubois didn’t sound happy.

  “Reed? Royce? Rhys, that’s it. Welsh name. His folks live in Wales mostly. Got money, they sa
y, but you’d never know it to look at him.”

  “Nice-spoken feller. Talks so soft you can hardly hear him.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Dubois. “You’re not by any chance talking about the Inspector Madoc Rhys who tracked down Mad Carew single-handed?”

  “Well, he had to, didn’t he? A Mountie does whatever he’s sent out for. That’s the rule. Always has been.”

  “It’s different these days. They wouldn’t be likely to send a single man out on an assignment like that. They use modern methods.”

  “What the hell kind of a modern method you goin’ to use against a crazy lumberjack seven feet tall with a double-bitted ax who’s already killed God knows how many people an’ won’t come out o’ the woods so’s a posse can get at ’im, eh?”

  “The meeting will come to order,” barked Dubois. “Does anybody know why Rhys took his sister-in-law to the Portage?”

  “Sneakin’ a night out while his wife’s laid up,” said either a McLumber or a Grouse. “That’s the way them rich aristocrats act. My wife’s always readin’ about them in books she gets at a paperback exchange. Has to keep ’em hid in a closet where the kids can’t find ’em.”

  Dubois was trying hard not to lose his temper. “Anybody who has any real information on what Rhys is doing around here will also funnel it back to me as fast as possible. Now let’s go on with the business of the meeting. How are we progressing with the transport situation, Brother F?”

  “Well, I been scoutin’ around, and I come up with two possibilities. There’s a school bus we could get for five hundred dollars, but she’d need an awful lot of work. You know how they drive them things till they tear the guts out of ’em. The other one’s a delivery truck I thought we might be able to fit up with seats in the back from that old movie theater they’re tearing down over at the Fort. She’d be kind of a tight squeeze and we’d have to figure out some way to ventilate the back, but she’s not in too bad condition, considering.”

  “How much?”

  “Owner’s askin’ twenty-two fifty, but I think I could beat him down. The engine’s in pretty good shape, and the tires still got some tread on ’em.”

  “But would we have room enough for our equipment?”

  “I figured we could put racks up around the sides.”

  “Sounds like you’d have to build the goddamn thing over before we could use it,” objected a brother wearing a sealskin cap that must have been his grandfather’s. “I move we keep looking. If only we’d commandeered Perce Bergeron’s bull box before some jeezledy bastard beat us to it!”

  “That bull box wasn’t Uncle Perce’s.” A young Bergeron, obviously. “It was a family heirloom and Uncle Armand would have raised holy hell and queered the whole expedition if we’d tried to lay a finger on it. You know that as well as I do, Jock. I mean Brother Q.”

  “But Armand’s in sympathy with our aims. Hell, he’s suffered as much as anybody and a damn sight more than some, hasn’t he? Havin’ to turn a decent huntin’ lodge into a goddamn honky-tonk because the goddamn acid rain’s started to kill the goddamn lakes and the goddamn trees so the goddamn fish an’ the goddamn animals can’t live in ’em. He knows it’s got to be stopped, same as we do. And he knows those goddamn bastards down there won’t ever do a goddamn thing but sit around on their backsides claiming they got to do another goddamn study because they don’t want the goddamn bastards that’s running the factories and financing their campaigns to get mad at ’em. Why the flamin’ sweet Nellie can’t we just pile into our cars and go down there and drop our bombs down those goddamn stinking smokestacks and be done with it?”

  “Because we’d fail in our mission and be a damn sight worse off than we are now, that’s why,” Dubois insisted. “We’ve been through this time after time, Brother Q. We’re not trying to start a border war, we’re trying to call attention to the plight of our environment in a way dramatic enough to show the entire North American continent that we mean to get something done about saving it while there’s still time. But there’s no sense in making martyrs of ourselves for nothing, and that’s what will happen if we go off half-cocked and defeat our own purpose. If we go in separate vehicles, some of us are bound to get stopped at the border, found to be carrying concealed explosives, and arrested as terrorists. That will blow the lid off for the rest of us, and you know it as well as I do. We stick to our plan. We all go together, or we don’t go at all. Is that clear?”

  “What about Jase Bain’s junkyard?” yelled somebody in the hindmost row, “I wasn’t in on that.”

  “Jase Bain’s junkyard?” Dubois sounded genuinely astonished. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Brother P.”

  “Seems to me there’s one hell of a lot you don’t know for somebody that claims to be runnin’ the show. You tryin’ to tell us you didn’t sneak over there last night an’ blow the place up to test out what we was goin’ to do at the automobile plant?”

  “Nom de Dieu, no! What would be the point? A junkyard’s not a factory or anything like it. We have no explosives to waste and I don’t need the practice. I told you I learned demolition in the army. So did Brother J and Brother K, they tell me. Where were you two last night, if it comes to that?”

  “Look, I got no time to sit here listenin’ to foolishness,” either Brother J or Brother K called back. “I promised to drive Buddy’s mother into town. She’s hellbent on talkin’ to Ben Potts about the funeral.”

  A wise leader knew when to give in gracefully. “Right, brothers. I think we’ve accomplished as much as we can here today. I’m sure every one of us will want to attend the funeral of our fallen comrade. Keep up the good fight, and for God’s sake try to get a line on the person who felled him. I’ll look into the matter of the bombed junkyard personally as soon as I get my next week’s article into the mail. It’s a real zinger this time, I promise you.”

  “Ayup, and it’ll do about as much good as the last one did,” muttered the malcontent Brother Q. “What a goddamn waste o’ time this turned out to be.”

  Chapter 17

  “THEY WAS PRETTY QUIET today.”

  Sam had led Madoc in an unerring beeline back to the. camouflaged car. They’d stowed the tarpaulin back under the tree and were warming themselves up with Annabelle’s hot tea and gingerbread. “Usually they do a lot more ran-tin’ an’ cussin’ about them jeezledy sons o’ bitches that run the gov’ment, not that I blame ‘em none. You goin’ to run ‘em in for conspiracy?”

  “Oh, I hardly think so,” said Madoc. “I might just drop a word to the customs people at Windsor about keeping an eye out for a school bus loaded with grown men wearing fancy sashes and carrying hand grenades. How long has the Brotherhood been in existence, Sam?”

  “Last couple o’ months, since Dubois blew into town. Ice fishin’s been no damn good this winter, an’ I guess they figured they might as well do somethin’ to entertain theirselves.”

  “Who are they, do you know?”

  “Yup.”

  “Perhaps you’d oblige me by writing down their names, then.”

  Madoc held out his notebook and pencil. Sam shied away from them.

  “I ain’t much for writin’ things down. Ain’t much for squealin’, neither, as a rule. If it wasn’t for that McLumber kid gettin’ shot—”

  “I understand, Sam. Do you know where they’re getting their explosives?”

  “Ain’t got none yet, between you an’ me. That was just bletherin’. Dubois is waitin’ till he gets his master plan worked out, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. He snuck over to Detroit an’ took some snapshots an’ swiped a handful o’ street maps out o’ one o’ them tourist information places. They been passin’ ’em around at the meetin’s an’ jawin’ about strategies of attack.”

  “Diabolical,” Madoc murmured, pouring out the last of the tea.

  “Oh, it’s all that an’ then some.” Sam squinted down the mouth of the thermos to make sure none was going to waste. “They can get th
eir hands on some dynamite easy enough. Swipe it from a construction site, maybe, or get six or eight o’ the brothers to buy a few sticks each, claimin’ they want it for blastin’ out stumps or whatever. Funny thing, though, last time I looked in on ’em, that McLumber kid that got killed was gassin’ to Dubois about how he knew where to lay ‘is hands on somethin’ better than dynamite.”

  “What do you mean he was gassing to Dubois? Didn’t the rest hear him, too?”

  “Nope. The kid got there before anybody else. Then Dubois showed up an’ Bud begun tellin’ him about it, real excited. He wanted it announced with a great foofaraw at the meetin’, but Dubois told ’im this was top secret stuff just between the two of ’em an’ they wasn’t to breathe a word of it to nobody. So Bud was pretty tickled at that an’ set there the whole time smirkin’ like a dern fool Chessie cat.”

  “Did you hear Buddy explain to Dubois why this explosive was so superior?”

  “Hell, he didn’t know ‘is ass from ’is elbow. He claimed it was somethin’ brand-new that made one hell of a big bang, then set a fire that was hotter’n the flamin’ blue hubs o’ Tophet. He said it was sure top secret all right, that there wasn’t hardly nobody that knew about it. Dubois says then how come Bud knew, an’ for once in his life, the kid clammed up. So I reckon Dubois caught on that it was just a bunch o’ hot air an’ wasn’t goin’ to make a fool of hisself, takin’ Bud at ’is word.”

  Sam grinned, but Madoc didn’t. “You say the kid told him the stuff exploded with unusual violence and then burned with intense heat?”

  “That’s what he said. Melted steel, burned brick an concrete right down to a powder. Wasn’t a damn thing it wouldn’t do, to hear him tell it. An’ it was easy as pie to use an’ you didn’t need more’n about a teacupful to wipe out a whole goddamn factory.”

  “And you doubt that Dubois believed him?”

  “Would you?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Madoc, “I would. Sam, has Bert told you what really happened to Janet?”