High Stand

1

It was dawn before we were taken off that barge. By then the fog had disappeared and as the sun rose above the tree-clad mountains of Vancouver Island we were able to see how close we had come to disaster, for in the six hours since we had hit that first rock tide and wind had bumped the barge along the iron-hard coast of Maquinna Point and the southern extremity of Nootka Island until it had found deeper water between Maquinna and Yuquot. By then police and customs had boarded the tug by winch from a helicopter and it was the Gabriello herself that towed the leaking barge clear of the rocks past Friendly Cove and the entrance to Cook’s Channel and into the quiet of the Zuciarte Channel. This took us south and west of Bligh Island to the grey rock of Muchalat Inlet and so up to the pulp mill some eight miles south of Gold River.

That was where we stayed the night, in a motel, and in the morning Cornish came to tell us the customs officers had found no drugs. They had had every log lifted out and been over the barge inch by inch — no trace of cocaine or any other contraband. We were interviewed then, each of us separately, by the police and the customs, and most of the time there was a member of the Federal Drug Enforcement Bureau present. This was at the motel. Statements were taken, not just from us, but also from the captain and crew of the tug, and while the police were chiefly concerned with Tom’s death and Miriam’s account of her kidnapping and long incarceration in the lakeside hut, the customs officers concentrated on our rendezvous with the South American vessel among the islands of the Spider. After hours of searching, then more time interrogating the crew of the tug, I think they found it very frustrating that we hadn’t been able to poke our heads out and see what was going on. What they wanted was confirmation of the nature of the cargo being transferred to the barge and where it had been hidden. ‘You state there was a lot of hammering?’ The question was addressed to me, and when I nodded, the officer asked me where the hammering had been coming from. ‘For’ard, aft, amidships — where?’

‘All over,’ I said. ‘It was loudest aft, of course, but the sound of it was not just confined to our end of the barge.’

He had been one of those on the rummage party when the tug had been stopped the first time, and looking down at my statement, he said, ‘You say here it sounded like wood on wood, as though they were tamping something in between the tree logs.’ He looked up at me. ‘I’m considering, you see, that packages of drugs could have been forced between the logs and then at a later stage — while you people were asleep perhaps — either dumped overboard or loaded into a fishing boat or an inflatable, some inshore craft to be run in to the coast.’

‘We would have heard it,’ I said, and Brian nodded, adding that though he had slept quite heavily at times during the run from the Cascades to the Spider, he had been awake most of the time after that.

‘Wolchak,’ the customs officer said, looking down again at the statement spread out on the oilcloth-covered table still littered with the remains of breakfast. ‘We’ve checked with Bella Bella and the pilot of that Cessna confirms that he flew Wolchak and two other men, one of them answering to your description of the man responsible for Mr Halliday’s death, out to Bella Coola where there was a hire car waiting for them. Bella Coola is the coastal end of the road west out of Williams Lake and police are making enquiries now to see whether they drove on from there to board another plane. There’s an airport at Williams Lake, another at Quesnel, also at Prince George a further eighty miles or so north. In that case he could be in the States now. Alternatively, if he’d doubled back to Namu in a small hire plane he could have organized a boat …’

But I was no longer listening, for the mention of Wolchak had taken my mind back to the scene in the mess room of the Kelsey with the rummage party sitting there talking over their coffee and that American Drug Enforcement officer describing how a man, who was also named Josef Wolchak, had risen to the head of those two mafioso families in Chicago. I was remembering the story of how he had made his first drug run from Columbia to New York. ‘Walking stick,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

I shook my head. It was impossible, of course, and yet standing there on that hairpin bend, high above the logging camp, it had seemed so extraordinary to have a mobile drilling rig parked on the edge of that cliff. ‘You’ve checked the butt ends of those logs, have you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged, feeling I was on the verge of making a fool of myself. ‘It’s just an idea.’ And then I asked the American whether they had had time to check if the Josef Wolchak involved in the High Stand selling was the same man his colleague had been talking about on the Kelsey a few days ago.

They were already doing that. ‘I guess he’s the same man all right. That’s why we’re so sure it’s drugs.’ He was looking at Brian then. ‘I know you think those trees are valuable, but they’re peanuts compared with what’s involved if they were a cover for a regular drug run.’ He turned back to me. ‘Walking stick. You said something about walking sticks.’

I hesitated. A tree trunk was in some ways rather like a giant version of a walking stick and with the trunk hollowed out … ‘Can we go down to the pulp mill and have a look at those logs?’

I thought they were going to press me to say what was in my mind, but instead, after a momentary hesitation, everyone staring at me, they got to their feet. ‘Okay. Let’s go have another look at that timber.’ And I could see that all of them, the two customs officers, the American drugs man and the RCMP officer — Brian and Miriam, too — were mulling over in their minds the idea I had given them, unwilling to put it into words for fear it would prove as nonsensical as it seemed.

We drove down in three vehicles, turned right by the Indian Reserve on the level flats of the Gold River estuary just short of the quay and entered the pulp mill. The logs were stacked in a pile close by a great tree trunk of a boom crane. Across the water the local passenger and cargo ship, the Uchuck HI, was just pulling out from the pier past the Coastguard cutter which was still lying there. The trunks were very uniform, and in that setting, with the booming ground just below us, the great pile of the mill at our backs plumed with white smoke and the rock walls of Muchalat Inlet to the right and die even narrower gut of Matchloe Bay to our left, clouds hanging black against a shaft of sunlight, they looked so much smaller.

It was the butts I wanted to examine, for I was sure the ones I had seen up-ended against that cliff above the logging camp had been butt-end up. Unfortunately the stacking had been done regardless of the order in which they had been loaded on the barge and they were wet from having been off-loaded into the booming ground first, so that the sawdust clinging to the butts was sticky and very tenacious. In the end, we had to get the mill people to bring in a pump and hose them down under pressure.

The first two dozen or so we examined had clearly not been tampered with in any way, and after that we had to use the back of a truck to give us extra height. All the time large clutches of logs were being brought in from the forests and tipped into the pen, an unnerving bustle of big vehicle activity. And then, when I was beginning to feel I had made a fool of myself, the logging boss who had been clambering over the logs without bothering to use the truck, called for the hose. ‘Something here.’ He was on his knees, leaning over the round raw wood end of a log, feeling it with his hands. ‘Sort of irregular.’ The truck was shifted slightly and the hose jet washed the sawdust clear. We could see it then, a slight protuberance and the growth rings not quite matching.

We saw the same thing then in several others. A plug had been inserted. Brian thought it might be just that, having drilled certain logs with the intention of making a boom and then being faced with the prospect that felling would be stopped, they had decided to ship the whole lot out. But it had been very cleverly done, in most cases the growth rings matching and only the slightest crack to indicate that a plug had been inserted in the drill hole. A lot of trouble had been taken to make those plugs fit exactly.

The foreman had scrambled down from the pile and was lumbering across to his office shack. Rain closed off the inlet, grey billows of cloud between the black rock walls. He came back with a big chainsaw. Also a piece of paper, which he handed to the RCMP officer. ‘Sign that.’ His heavy-jowled features cracked in a grin. ‘All right for you, but my people, they wouldn’t like it if they got a bill for a damaged cedar log.’ The policeman signed and the foreman stuffed it into his pocket. ‘Which shall we take first, the one I picked out?’

The officer looked at the rest of us, then nodded. The saw was passed up to us and the foreman began directing the winch winder in the boom crane’s cabin. One by one the logs were lifted down until the one that had quite obviously been plugged was fully exposed. The big Canadian was standing with his feet carefully balanced. ‘I’ll take it bit by bit, okay?’ he said as we handed the saw up to him. He pulled the starter cord and the engine roared.

That was when the rain reached us, but he took no notice, though all he was wearing was a heavy coloured shirt, and braces of course. Water spurted from the blade as he leaned forward, the grip claws positioned about two feet from the butt, the engine note deepening as the chain sliced down through the bark and into the wood, pale sawdust pouring out and all of us watching as the rain poured down and lightning flashed somewhere in the hills above us. Suddenly the saw checked and the foreman pulled the blade out, the motor idling, the chain still. He peered down, turning the saw and picking up a smear of dust and oil on the tip of his finger. ‘That’s not wood.’ He held his finger out to us, flecks of white amongst the sawdust, a pale slime, but mixed with the oil and the wood dust it was hard to see the difference. ‘Won’t do the saw much good if I try and go through it. Have to go round. There’s something there.’

He had the crane operator lower the grappling chains, shifted the whole tree trunk several feet, so that the butt hung out over the back of the truck, and then started to cut round the trunk to a fraction over the depth of the saw blade. The rain stopped and at one point, shifting the position of the saw, he said, ‘Looks like plastic.’ Finally, with the log cut all round and hanging by just a single hinge of wood, so that the end-section trembled at a touch, he stepped back. ‘Okay boys, now see what it is.’ He paused then, looking at us. The man had a natural sense of the dramatic, holding the heavy chainsaw in his big paw as though it were a sword. Then he leaned forward, revved the motor and snicked the wooden hinge with the tip of the blade, the whole log-end suddenly hanging free.

He gave it a kick and it fell into the truck at our feet, and we were looking at a new butt-end with a hole in the centre of it about eight inches in diameter and white powder dribbling from it. The American reached forward, took some of it in his hand and stood staring down at it. ‘Jeez! It’s pure. Virgin pure coke. Uncut.’

Customs men gathered round, dipping their fingers in, staring at the powder. ‘Let’s see how much they’ve stowed there. Is it plastic bags?’

The foreman shook his head. ‘A container more like.’ His big hands were already working round the broken edges of the hole. ‘Yeah, plastic container — long one by the feel of it.’

It took three of them to drag it clear and lower it to the truck. It was a clear plastic tube measuring 20 cms by 4.5 metres and it was packed from end to end with cocaine.

‘Not much difference, is there?’ The Drug Enforcement agent had straightened up and was staring at the great pile of logs. ‘Why the hell didn’t I think of that?’ He turned to me. ‘Walking sticks! It’s just a matter of scale, isn’t it? If you can hollow out the one, you can hollow out the other.’

‘If you’ve got the right equipment,’ I said, ‘and it’s available in the right place.’ I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it, or Tom, looking down on the Cascades logging camp and seeing that mobile drilling rig and a tree trunk up-ended against that cliff.

‘Yeah.’ He took off his glasses, nodded to himself as he wiped the rain off. ‘Neat. Oh, so very neat.’ He put his glasses on again, staring at the stack of logs. ‘Wonder how much we got in that pile? One hell of a lot, that’s for sure. And only a few days back we checked out a barge-load and let it through.’

The elder of the two Canadian customs officers patted his shoulder. ‘Not your fault. You’d no means of knowing — ’

‘Of course I hadn’t. I wasn’t there. But we had our suspicions — a tip-off. Reliable, too. And we never had the sense to relate that special stand of trees to the drug concealment potential. The barge-load we let through a few nights back will have been trundled through the passes and across the plains, and right now it’ll be in the SVL Company’s timber yard in Chicago, or maybe it’s already out in the street… Just think what that means in terms of road accidents, muggings, rape. God! I never thought I’d be faced with something as big as this.’ He turned to the foreman. ‘Better take me to the manager’s office. I need a phone — lots of calls — Chicago.’ He was already clambering down from the truck. The other followed.

Suddenly we were on our own, the police hurrying back to their car, which had a radio, the customs officers heading towards the pier where the Coastguard cutter was now the only vessel. ‘I need a drink,’ Miriam said in a small voice. ‘I feel slightly sick.’ And I heard her murmur to herself, ‘Tom was right all along.’

There wasn’t anywhere to get a drink. We stood around for a while. Then more police arrived to mount guard over the High Stand logs and it began to rain again. We were finally given a meal in the mill canteen and shortly afterwards a police car arrived to whisk us half across Vancouver Island, through Campbell River and down the coastal highway to Victoria, where Brian and I were put up at that lovely creeper-clad relic of Victorian days, the Empress Hotel. It faced the inner harbour and the BC Parliament Building and was conveniently close to the Provincial Courts.

Miriam, after throwing a fit of temperament that was more than justified in the circumstances, was allowed to go out to Oak Bay with the Canadian family she had stayed with before, while Brian and I settled down to drink ourselves into a more relaxed frame of mind. It had been a long journey from Ocean Falls, longer still from the Yukon, and now we were being told we had to wait in case further evidence was required from us when those on the tug, who had now been arrested and charged with drug smuggling, made their first appearance in court.

That might have been the end of it if the authorities, both in Canada and the States, had not decided to go for Wolchak. It was a mark of the size of the operation that he had been on the spot and running it himself, and as a result he was more exposed than he had probably ever been before. He was arrested at his home in Chicago the day after we reached Victoria, but despite pressure from the public and the media, the courts released him on bail of half a million dollars pending extradition proceedings. Roy McLaren, when I saw him in his office in Vancouver two days later, told me proceedings of that sort could drag on for months. Meanwhile, Barony had already successfully avoided arrest, the SVL Timber lawyers pleading that neither he nor the company was responsible for anything that had been done in the remoteness of the Halliday Arm of Cascade Inlet. The company had purchased the trees, that was all. The felling had been arranged through the owner’s representative and delivery through Angeles Georgia Towing.

I was booked out the next day on the Wardair flight back to Gatwick, and feeling I owed myself the luxury of a view over the water, I was staying the night at the Bayshore. Brian had already left for the north again, back to Ocean Falls. That evening, after lazing for an hour in the circular pool beside the parked charter cruisers, I stood in my room with just a towel round my waist, smoking a cigarette and watching the lights come on along the North Shore. I had two windows to my room, one facing across Coal Harbour and Burrard Inlet, the other towards the city where the glass of Vancouver’s mini-Manhattan was reflecting the last of the sunset glow. A cargo ship disappeared slowly beyond Deadman’s Island and the black silhouette of the trees of Stanley Park.

It was all so beautiful, a floatplane landing, a yacht going alongside the refuelling raft and the lights twinkling right up the slopes to the ski-lift high above the First Narrows. All that was missing was somebody to share it with and my thoughts turned to Miriam, wondering what she was doing tonight, whether to ring her. And then, just as I had seated myself on the bed and started to look up the Oak Bay number of her Canadian friends, the phone rang.

Later, of course, we said it must have been telepathy. She was downstairs and wanted me to have dinner with her. ‘Something very exciting. I must tell you.’ And she added, her voice bubbling with it, ‘You’re not doing anything, are you? I must talk it over, and now Brian’s gone there’s nobody — nobody who knows it all and how Tom would feel. Can you come? Can you join me for a sort of quiet celebration?’

‘Of course,’ I told her. ‘What’s it all about?’

‘Later.’ And almost in the same breath she muttered, ‘It’s all so ironic. I’ll wait for you in the Verandah Room.’ And she rang off.

I dressed quickly and went down to find her with a tall glass in front of her frosted with ice and eating roasted nuts as though she hadn’t had a meal for weeks. I don’t know what she was wearing, trousers I think and a light woollen top, a very ordinary outfit, but she looked radiant. She had another drink with me and then we left the hotel and strolled across the lit driveway to the dim, mysterious labyrinth of the old Coal Harbour quay. She had booked a table at the Keg where I had dined the night I arrived in Vancouver. ‘We’ll have fish and lots of wine — a lovely, simple atmosphere. Then I’ll tell you.’ We passed the broken sleeper palings of the old boatyard and went round by a lot of parked cars and the entrance to the marina, laughing at the tow-away signs, her arm linked in mine. I could feel the movement of her hips against me and I was filled with a warm glow, sensing that we would sleep together in my room overlooking the harbour and that it would be a night to remember.

We stood for a time looking down at the boats lying white and deserted against the floating wooden arms of the marina. ‘I wouldn’t mind living somewhere out here,’ she said, the huskiness in her voice more pronounced. ‘A boat, a house by the shore, and the world — the European world of demos, unions, terrorism, all the mayhem of politics — a million miles away. Or would one find it too peaceful, too removed — too dull?’ She looked up at me, smiling.

The Keg, like the ships’ chandlery nearby, was a disused boathouse, all wood and bare simplicity. We had another drink, a salad, some fish and a couple of bottles of Californian wine, and we talked — about everything except what she’d come to tell me. It wasn’t until the coffee arrived, and with it the two large brandies she had ordered, that she suddenly blurted it out: ‘Stone Slide Gully,’ she said, taking a telex out and passing it across to me. ‘Jonny Epinard — he sent that from Whitehorse.’ And she went on, her words coming so fast I could barely follow her — ‘You remember that Indian, Jack McDonald — you said you’d been through the gully into that grim, volcanic-looking crater beyond — the time I saw it I thought it looked like an old-fashioned lavatory pan, the mountains rising up round it at roughly the same angle. It was always subject to rock slides — not so much where Tom and the Indian were beavering away with their tractor and sluice box, but on the opposite slope. It’s very sheer there.’ Her hand reached over, gripping hold of mine. ‘You see what he says. There’s been a slide.’

I nodded, my eyes on the telex text: … closing down for winter. Jack had look at new slide. Picked up 23 nuggets in under an hour, largest 0.4 oz. Looks promising subject evaluation next season. Sorry Tom won’t know. Jonny Epinard. Her grip on my hand tightened. ‘Gold!’ she said. ‘And even if it’s nothing big it would have got Tom out of the mess he was in. He’d have been able to tell those bastards in Chicago to go to hell.’ I could feel her nails biting into my flesh. ‘Why didn’t it happen when he was up there? Why now — when it’s too late?’

She went on talking about that for some time, what it would have meant to Tom, how, if it had only happened the previous year, or better still two years ago, he would never have got in hock to the bank, would never have considered selling even an acre of High Stand. And then abruptly she veered away from that line of thought and began talking about the future, her future — ‘Me, a gold-miner — just think of it!’ Her eyes were sparkling, her face flushed and that Titian hair shining softly in the dim light. She looked just wonderful as she went on, ‘The hours I’ve listened to Tom talking about his father, about the Klondike and the fever that gripped them all when the Bonanza was discovered. And now, here I am with nuggets in the bank. Not a Bonanza. Of course not. But another Ice Cold perhaps. That would be enough. And when spring comes we can go up there, see if it really is a new placer mine. Would that make me a sourdough?’ She drained the last of her brandy, giggling to herself. ‘Me, a sourdough!’ And she shook her head, adding in a subdued voice, ‘I’m glad about High Stand, that I shan’t be concerned with those trees. Tom was right — Brian will appreciate them. He understands about trees, and after what happened there …’ She leaned across the table to me. ‘You will handle the legal side for me, won’t you? Ice Cold, I mean — you’ll come up there with me?’ And then on a lighter note: ‘I can manage a mine. At least, I think I can,’ she added with a grin. ‘But it’ll mean a company, accounts, a lot of paperwork.’ She laughed. ‘I never was any good at that sort of thing.’

We talked it over for a while, Miriam building castles, mentally leaping ahead to a full-blown mine, and myself doing the best I could to keep her feet somewhere near the ground. It was all good fun, dreaming dreams and both of us involved. Finally she paid the bill — she insisted absolutely and I let her, because it was her evening, the start of an attempt to build a future for herself from the wretchedness of what had happened. Then we went out into the shadowy world of Coal Harbour quay, the night very still with low cloud so that the water and the old boathouses were lit by the reflected glow of the city’s lights.

We reached the uneven, pot-holed surface of the private roadway leading westward to the hotel, walking arm-in-arm, not talking now — just content to let the stillness and the magic of the night work on us, conscious of our closeness and the hours ahead. We were approaching the entrance to the marina and stopped for a moment to watch one of those fast big game fishing boats gliding in towards the pontoon. ‘That’s what I’d like,’ Miriam said. ‘A boat like that, so I could explore — ‘ She walked on.

We were just passing the approach to one of the parking bays when a car’s engine started. The lights flicked on at high beam, our shadows leaping across the roadway. Startled, our eyes were blinded. Then the engine revved and in the instant that the car began moving down on us with a squeal of tyres, something triggered inside me, an instinct of preservation. I flung Miriam forward — The marina. Run!

Thank God she didn’t hesitate. We made it as the car hurtled past us, scraping the wall and screeching to a halt. The sound of doors and voices calling in the darkness. But by then we were down the ramp and onto the floating pontoon. There was a crack like a backfire and something smacked into the water beside us. Feet sounded on the ramp, the pontoon swaying. I took the second bay, a pontoon full of parked boats, hoping to God I had picked the right one, the boats all dark, not a soul about.

And then I saw it — the high, white bow of that fishing cruiser gliding in towards the end of the pontoon. ‘Jump or swim,’ I gasped. ‘We’ve got to make that boat.’ I gave one quick glance over my shoulder. ‘Can you make it?’

‘Yes.’ She was close behind me and even then I noticed her breasts, the way she moved. And then we were almost at the end of the pontoon and I was calling to the skipper high on the open bridge: ‘Mayday! Mayday!’ I yelled. ‘Need your help. Muggers.’

He reacted quite instinctively, closing the gap to the pontoon-end just as I reached it. I jumped, landing on my feet and staggering against the wheelhouse. Miriam landed beside me. ‘Full ahead — please,’ I called up to the man above me. ‘They’re armed.’

He must have seen them running towards him along the pontoon, for he didn’t hesitate, slamming his cruiser into gear, and as the screws bit, he increased the revs, lifting the bows half out of the water and swinging the boat away in a boiling arc towards the pale line of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club boat sheds.

He was the owner, an American by the sound of it. ‘You want the police?’ he asked as we joined him on the open bridge. ‘I got R/T down below.’

‘Did you see their faces clearly?’ I asked. ‘Could you identify them?’

But of course he had been too occupied getting his boat away. ‘If you hadn’t called Mayday…’ He shrugged, cutting down on the revs and settling back in his swivel chair, idling across the harbour as I said who we were and told him something of what I thought it was all about. ‘So you can’t identify them? You’re a lawyer and you don’t see what the police can do about it?’ He sat there for a moment, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, gazing out at the dark outline of the Coal Harbour buildings. A car was disappearing up towards Georgia Street, otherwise there was no sign of movement. ‘I’m from California,’ he said, ‘and down there we get to hear a lot about what drugs do to people, the way kids act — anything to get the next fix; and of course the millions to be made by the men running the racket. You want my advice?’ He turned his head sharply, leaning forward and staring at us through his gold-rimmed glasses. ‘You get the hell out, back to England, and fast. That’s my advice. And if they need you back over here to give evidence, you make damn sure you’re under police protection every second you’re here. You, too, lady. Okay?’ He stood up, increasing the revs again and heading in for the lit bulk of the hotel.

He put us ashore by backing up to the bows of one of the charter cruisers. ‘Just remember what I said,’ he called down to us. ‘I’ve been in politics as well as business and I know what these boys can do, the sort of hoodlums their money buys them. It may seem all right in England, but over here …’ He laughed, raising his hand in a casual salute, screws frothing as he eased away. ‘And look after the little lady, eh?’ The American voice came faintly back to us across the water. We went up to my room and I did my best, lying there, naked between the sheets, the lights fading, the water blackening, a world of beauty nodding off to sleep. And in the dawn, in the first greying of the light, the hills upside down in the flat mirror of Burrard Inlet and the ashtray beside our bed full of stubbed-out butts, in that dawn reality stood like a silent ghost staring in at the big windows — a golden future for us both, and all I could think of was those bloody hunters waiting up in the Yukon, the two of us lying in each other’s arms and the shadow of the drug ring hanging over us …