Timber Line

Chapter Nine

The Mountain High Society was prepared for anything from a border war to a briss. They had come a hundred strong in buses with a supporting network of trucks to carry their camping gear and field kitchens. In private cars came the persons of the media: some male, some female, and some none of the above.

The Mountain Highers were the first to disembus. Among them were a few left over hippies and back-to-the-earth types from the sixties and early seventies. A few more were trying to effect a working-class appearance by dressing in cast-off clothing they had found in thrift shops in Bel-Air and Pacific Palisades.

Most, though, had come for the occasion dressed in spiffy little snow outfits by Halston and St. Laurent and Anne Klein. The media was instantly recognizable; its fashions running to rumpled raincoats and ties that unwittingly advertised Burger King ketchup.

Remo wormed his way through a tangle of reporters and camerapersons and sidled up to a tall, dark man with short razor-cut hair and dark sunglasses on, despite the fact it was after midnight.

"Who's in charge here?" Remo said.

"Are you speaking to me?" the newsman asked.

"No," said Remo. "Actually, I was just checking to see if my vocal cords still worked. Of course, I was talking to you. Who's in charge here?"

The newsman raised one hand to the corner of his dark glasses and with the pinkie of his right hand extending defiantly into the air, slid his glasses halfway down his nose so he could peer at Remo over the tops of the frames.

"Do you know who I am?" he demanded to know.

"I thought you were somebody smart enough to tell me who's in charge here, but maybe I was wrong."

"Really?" said the newsman.

"Let's try again," said Remo. "I'll ask you who's in charge, you tell me, I say thank you, and I'll walk away. Okay?"

The newsman was silent.

Remo shook his head. He touched the newsman lightly in the center of his solar plexus. The man started to hiccup then began hicking harder and harder until he fell to the ground in a shivering spasm. Another newsman came running up. "Hey, you," he said to Remo. "I saw all that. You can't just come in here and do things like that. You can't just mess with the press and get away with it."

"Who's in charge here?" Remo said.

The newsman looked at Remo, then down at the other newsman rolling around on the ground, holding his hiccupping stomach, and said, "Over there. Honest. Over there. I've got a cat and canary at home, and I'm all they got. Over there." He kept pointing toward the front of the bus. "It's Cicely Winston-Alright. Mrs. Cicely Winston-Alright of the San Francisco Winstons and the Dayton Alrights."

The media man was pointing at a defiantly feminine woman in her early thirties, one who looked as if she had been sculpted by a straight Michelangelo inspired by the best parts of Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, and Joan Collins. She was dressed in a flame-colored nylon snowsuit that had obviously been designed to show off each one of her many curves. Her hair was jet black, her skin rivaled the snow for whiteness, and her eyes were as blue as an afternoon mountain sky.

She was standing in the front of the bus, waving people about as if she were a general, and as Remo walked toward her, he noticed something strange in her motions. It took him several steps to realize what it was. From two inches below her waist to four inches above her knees, her body was as stiff as if she were a wood-and-plaster mannequin. The center spot of the whole region was suffer still. She gave him the impression of being a rusted spring, unused, unusable, but perhaps ready to unwind violently if the right rust spots were scraped away.

When he reached her, Remo looked back and saw Pierre LaRue where Remo had told him to stay: guarding the narrow pathway that led down to the road circling the copa-iba trees.

He turned back to Mrs. Winston-Alright, tapped her on the shoulder, and said, "Hello."

She turned to face him, slowly, haughtily. Her eyes met his, then locked on them. She smiled like a schoolgirl and apparently without thinking reached up to preen her hair.

"Hellooooooo," she said.

"I want to talk to you," Remo said.

"And I you," she said.

"Good," he said. "Can we do it now?"

"I'd like nothing better," she said.

"It won't take long."

"The longer the better," she said. "I've been waiting quite a while to have a good, long, meaningful intercourse with someone like you."

"Mrs. Winston-Alright," said Remo, "I think you've got me all wrong."

She laughed a deep, throaty laugh, a laugh that reminded Remo somehow of a lioness in heat.

"Oh, my dear man," she said. "You have me misconstrued. I hate to see that happen. I hate to be misconstrued, when it's so easy to be correctly strued. By intercourse, I merely meant a friendly chat. Discourse. Look it up in any dictionary. When I say I want to have a long, deep intercourse with you, all I'm saying — did anyone ever tell you what nice dark eyes you have? — is that I would appreciate a truly intimate, deep, probing conversation with you. See? There's nothing to be afraid of. I don't bite."

She laughed again. "That is, unless I'm asked to. And then, only my friends."

A dip, Remo decided. A sexually frustrated dip, working out her libido in half-assed projects with half-hooples.

"Now what can I do for you?" she asked. "Be explicit."

"I'm a federal tree inspector and..."

"I bet you're very good with limbs, aren't you?"

"I'm even better on trunks," Remo said.

Mrs. Winston-Alright had been closing the ground between them as they spoke. Now her body was only six inches from Remo's.

Somebody cleared his throat, and the woman turned away from Remo.

"Yes? What is it?" she demanded in the tone of an old-maid schoolteacher whose bunions hurt.

The newcomer was a small, slim, dark man with a thick, drooping mustache, curly black hair and an almost pretty face.

"Cicely, we have to talk. There's a problem."

"Isn't there always?" she asked, and turned to give Remo a quick wink.

She put her hands on her luxurious hips and stared around her at the activity. The hundred demonstrators were slowly forming up into a single-file line, some talking quietly among themselves, others beginning to chant. Gradually, all of the demonstrators joined in. At first, the chant was a relatively mild "Trees are free, free the trees," but as the volume and tempo rose, the leaders switched to another chant, harsher and more militant to the ears. "Off our land and out of our woods. Off our land and out of our woods. Tulsa Torrent's no fucking good." It was an old trick, Remo realized. When demonstrators didn't want too much television coverage of some particular action, they unveiled their signs with obscene legends and began singing obscene chants. This was usually enough to render the film and soundtrack off-limits for the evening news shows. But this was just a warmup, Remo decided. Nothing was happening yet.

He looked over at the TV men and saw them swinging their cameras around in wide circles for crowd shots. He moved around so that his back was to the lenses.

"Everything seems to be in order," Cicely Winston-Alright was telling her associate. "What's on your mind?"

He glanced sideways at Remo.

"Oh, you mean you don't want our new friend here to know what we're talking about?"

The man said nothing. She studied his face for a moment, then said, "Okay, dammit. Let's get it over with." To Remo she said, "Don't go away, please. We still have a lot of... talking to do."

She and the small man walked off about twenty yards from Remo and talked to each other in a low whisper. Remo focused his hearing as easily as most people could line up a gun with an open barn door. He listened in to their conversation.

"Our people won't wait," the man said.

"Ari, the hell with them. They'll just have to wait."

"They want action now," he said.

"Screw 'em."

"Cicely, my love, you and I both know what's going to happen, but they don't. And right now, they're tired of all this love and kisses crap. They want to fight these bastards."

"Everybody does," said Mrs. Winston-Alright. "But not now. The time will come."

"I don't know," said the man called Ari. "There are other people getting impatient too."

The woman hesitated and began to chew her lower lip.

"You have a suggestion?" she said.

"The candlelight march tonight," he said with a smile. "Suppose somebody were accidentally to drop a couple of burning candles by that stand of pines over there."

She gasped.

He held up a finger. "Not to worry," he said.

"All those beautiful trees gone?" she said.

"Not all of them. Just a few. Let's face it, Cicely, every war has its casualties. So a few trees die so a lot of trees can live."

The woman hesitated. "I'm not sure," she said.

The man's voice was harsh as he barked out, "Cicely, you know the plan." He paused and his voice softened. "You helped work it out. You agreed to it. We destroy enough trees so that the pigs find it too expensive to keep on killing them. Every time they start a tree farm, we start burning until they can't start anymore. Then we've won, and all the trees are saved."

"I'm not sure," she said again.

"If you don't have the guts, well, let's just tell these people to go home and leave the trees to the butchers of Tulsa Torrent. What are we wasting everybody's time for?"

She sighed and nodded her head in surrender.

"All right," she said. "Do it for me, will you, Ari? I have some personal business I want to handle."

"Fine, Cicely," he said, and walked away toward the chanting band of demonstrators. Within a few minutes, he had them ready to go, each of the hundred carrying a lighted candle inside an old-fashioned candle carrier. He next stopped to explain to the media the route of march and where they could set up to get the best pictures. That all done, he stopped to give special instructions to six young men, out of sight and earshot of everyone else.

The demonstration began.

Remo had not waited.

He had found Pierre LaRue standing stolidly, like a stone wall, near the footpath leading down to the copa-iba road. The big Frenchman had his arms folded across his chest. He smiled as Remo approached.

"Problems," Remo said.

LaRue nodded.

"These nut-cases are going to try to burn down the forest."

LaRue shrugged elaborately. "I expect something like that. You have idea, I think?"

Remo nodded. "Oui," he said.

The first snowball came whistling into the band of marching, singing demonstrators as they crested the road, leading toward the main headquarters of the Tulsa Torrent forest project. The packed snow caught Ari in the middle of a chant and knocked him to the ground. Three of the marchers tumbled over him. Ari got up, brushed himself off, and looked around. Then he raised his voice and addressed his followers.

"I suppose this is somebody's idea of a joke," he roared.

No one spoke. The newsmen chuckled to each other.

"Let me tell you this," Ari yelled. "It's not funny. Knock it off."

Splat!

The next snowball hit Ari from behind and knocked him flat again. The demonstrators began to laugh, a laugh that was started in the press corps as a few disconnected titters, then swelled to a real belly laugh that everyone joined in.

Ari got up, pointing an accusing finger at 360 degrees of the compass. Slowly the crowd quieted down.

Splat!

Ari went down again. For a second, there was silence; then uproarious laughter; then splat, splat, splat, splat. Half a hundred times splat.

Snowballs flew into the crowd from every direction. The laughter stopped. The press tried to protect its expensive camera equipment. A few of the demonstrators tried to defend themselves with their own snowballs, but the only targets they found were each other.

The protest march was dissolving in a rout, and Remo, moving swiftly in a semicircular path around the roadway, could not remember having so much fun in a snowball fight since one wintry day back at the orphanage in Newark.

"That's the demonstration biz, Ari," he mumbled to himself.

He looked toward the end of the line of marchers and saw that the six men to whom Ari had given special instructions had peeled off and vanished.

Time to give Pierre LaRue help if he needed it.

Remo dropped his armful of snowballs and ran through the trees to find the big Frenchman.

LaRue needed no help. He was standing beside his bulldozer, and the dozer was parked in front of a ten-foot-by-twenty-foot, six-foot-tall snowdrift.

Remo pointed at the drift.

"You got them all?" he asked.

"Oui."

"All six of them?"

"Oui."

"Good," Remo said.

"Very good," Pierre said. "Little man, you not so bad."

"Thanks," Remo said. He went over to the huge snowdrift and shouted at it. "Don't worry. Somebody'll find you when you thaw out in the spring."

Before he joined LaRue in his walk back through the woods to Alpha Camp, Remo stopped to look at the tires on the Mountain High bus. He nodded. They matched the tread marks he had seen outside the forest cabin to which he had trailed Oscar Brack and one of his attackers.

When he looked back at the demonstration, it had degenerated into a big snowball party, with the marchers seeming to take out their fury on the outnumbered and always outmanned press corps. Mrs. Cicely Winston-Alright and Ari were standing to the side, talking, out of harm's way, and the whoop of police sirens coming down the road meant that Tulsa Torrent's formal security forces would soon have the area cleared.

He would have to talk again to the Mountain Highs, Remo decided, but doing it now might just draw too much attention. It would wait till morning.

He hoped everything would wait till morning.

He wanted some sleep.

But Harvey Quibble couldn't wait till morning.