Authors: Howard Engel
A sudden light nearly knocked me over. Two beams from flashlights crossed one another like searchlights looking for enemy bombers in a wartime newsreel. I
moved as fast as I could into the deepest part of the shaft, near some oil drums and tools stacked to one side. Without making a noisy clatter, I turned a wheelbarrow over and climbed under it. By now the lights were getting brighter and I could hear voices.
“Crazy, I tell you.”
“I’m not drunk like you’re thinkin’. I seen a light!”
“St. Elmo’s fire is what you saw, Kirby.”
“In October? I’m tellin’ you it was a light!”
“Well, look for yourself.” Without sticking my head out, I was all too well aware that the two beams of light were making sweeps into the excavation.
“You goin’ down to look?” dared the one called Kirby.
“Christ, you’re the one who saw the damned light. I got good pants on.”
“Well, I’ll go alone then. I’ve done it before.”
“You see lights down here all the time, eh?”
“Ah, come on, Roy, get off my back!”
“You hear anything? Listen.” The three of us listened to the night air and the distant sound of the lake for about a minute. To help, I suspended my breathing. I couldn’t do much about my heart beating against the metal bottom of the wheelbarrow, though. The first minute was lengthened towards the end of my breath. Then:
“Shit, I’m not goin’ down there again today. They don’t pay enough, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah. You could break your neck on that ladder in the dark and you won’t even see compensation ’cause we’re casual. I say,” said Roy (I think it was Roy), “since
we’re casual let’s act casual and get back outta the cold before we get pneumonia.”
“Right. It must have been Elmo’s fire all right.”
The voices continued out of hearing and the beams of light moved off in a new direction. I didn’t try to move the wheelbarrow for nearly five minutes after I heard the last of them. When I climbed out, I sat for a minute listening and searching the night sky. I felt like a cigarette, but I decided against it. Sometimes a smoke can be deadly in more ways than one.
I was already thinking of climbing the ladder and getting out of the hole, when I noticed the oil drums I’d spotted when I was looking for a place to hide. Why oil drums here? There was a large tank next to the fort for refuelling the back-hoe. What was going on? I sniffed around and then it hit me. What the hell was I looking for all over the county? I was looking for toxic waste. And here was a cache of at least three barrels of it. Was I beginning to get somewhere, or was it only wishful thinking? I took up a shovel again and found the base of a fourth drum under the recently filled-in section. After a little more excavating of my own, I uncovered a fifth. I was beginning to get the idea. The tunnel was full of drums. Drums and more drums of toxic waste! Suddenly, I wanted to put my feet on the ladder and get out of there. I had spent my share of luck in that hole. The powers that be didn’t owe Manny Cooperman’s boy another minute. That was when the end of the shovel struck not a sixth metallic barrel but something else, something that took
my mind off toxic waste, something that gave me a queer feeling under my belt. For a moment, I just stood there, not quite taking it in. Then I went back to digging. I kept at it, digging now with the shovel and now with my hands, until I could see what I had hit. I nearly brought up the undigested portion of my last meal.
I cleared the earth around what I’d found. It was a shoe, a brown Rockport, like the pair I had back at the apartment. Inside this shoe was a foot and it was cold.
THIRTEEN
I phoned Pete Staziak of the Niagara Regional Police from the pay-phone in the lobby of the Prince of Wales Hotel at the corner of King and Picton or King and Queen, depending on which street signs you read. I was feeling a little light-headed, like I’d just finished off a bottle of rye, which I hadn’t. In fact, I’ve had the heel of a bottle in a cupboard for the last six months. Pete told me to have a drink and to stay away from the scene of the crime. As I came away from the lobby, the idea of a drink began to look good. What better way could I put in the time until Pete finished up at the fort. He said to stay put and that he’d want to talk to me. The Prince of Wales’s bar was as comfortable a place as I knew in those parts.
When I caught my reflection in the mirror, I detoured to the men’s room to repair my face and clothes. I was a mess, but it made me feel better. At least finding a body hadn’t become routine. Sure, I became light-headed and even wanted a drink, but it took the sight of my face in the mirror to tell me that I hadn’t become a total professional when it comes to dealing with death. I valued my amateur status. While the tap-water was running into the sink, I thought again of the cold foot in its Rockport shoe.
Now I could remember the scramble up the ladder and back over the earthwork and down the bank to the rowboat. The tugging of muscles in my back told me about the difficult trip back to the silhouette of the moviemaker’s gazebo outlined against the night sky. I’d been helped by the river in my outward journey; the way home was all against the current.
I got rid of some of the mud on my pants with a wet wad of paper towels. I discarded some Dame’s Rocket that had attached itself to me with a length of bindweed. There wasn’t a lot I could do for my clothes after I’d got rid of the mud. My shoes were as soaking after a first aid job as before. The lights in the bar are lower than in the John, so I put my comb away hoping that I would pass the dress code when I get upstairs again. I found a seat in a dark corner and persuaded the waiter to get me a sandwich as well as a rye and ginger ale.
As far as I knew, no prince of Wales ever slept in the Prince of Wales Hotel. In a brochure I’d seen that the Duke and Duchess of York had visited Niagara-on-the-Lake. A guidebook documented a visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. Both of these visits took place well before my time, in 1901. For some reason I found it very relaxing trying to imagine two ducal couples running around in Niagara trying not to run into one another.
The bar at the Prince of Wales was, of course, everything that a bar should be. There was dark wood; engraved, frosted glass; lots of brass and crystal as well as beer pumps of porcelain. I’d been there only a few times
before this, and each time I regretted my usually temperate habits.
“Sorry to be so long,” said the waiter as he set down knife, fork and spoon wrapped in a paper napkin. The waiter sorted out my order from the other two he was carrying. I found myself grinning at him, foolishly. This was so ordinary: sitting in a bar and eating, surrounded by lively, talking people who didn’t have anything to do—as far as I knew—with the body back at Fort Mississauga. I was almost chuckling to myself as I cut into the chopped egg on home-made white bread with my knife and fork. In a place like this, I didn’t think you lifted anything to the mouth with fingers, not even the pickles.
“Aren’t you Sam Cooperman?” the waiter asked. In spite of the error, I jumped. Family is close enough.
“No. That’s my brother. I’m Sam’s younger brother, Benny.” I almost withheld my name. No sense throwing security out the window.
“Well, you sure look like him. I seen you come in and I was sure it was him. I could of sworn it was him.”
“Yeah, well, Sam’s in Toronto. I’m still in Grantham. He’s head of surgery at Toronto General.”
“That a fact. I used to sell brushes with him one summer.” I shot a glance towards the entrance, but the big figure coming into the room wasn’t Pete Staziak. I had more than an hour to kill before I could reasonably expect to see him, but I hadn’t taken the pledge to be reasonable, especially not after digging up a body. The big fellow joined a party of three ladies in hats in the centre of the
room. I didn’t think ladies wore hats this late in the day. But what do I know?
“He won awards selling brushes in the summer,” I told the waiter when I remembered that he was still standing there. “What’s your name?” I asked. “I’ll tell Sam when I see him.”
“Oh, ah, Des Dwyer.”
“Des, can you tell me what’s going on out at Fort Mississauga? They’ve got it fenced off and I see trucks coming and going.”
“Ah!” Des said with a new light in his eyes, “They’re putting in a lot of money there.” He rubbed the point of his lapel with his thumb and forefinger and slipped me a wink.
“Sangallo’s doing a major job on it. Going to make it into a show-place. Like the other fort.” Des pretended not to see a customer waving from a table in the corner. “They’re putting the earthworks in where they used to be according to some plan that was discovered somewhere. They’re fixing up the old ammunition bays and rebuilding the sally-port, which was just about ready to cave in.”
“What’s a sally-port?”
“That’s where they send the girls home when the colonel comes looking, I think. I dunno, really.”
“How long has this been going on?” I asked.
“Soldiers have been wenching since Napoleon was a pup, Mr. Cooperman.”
“I meant the construction.”
“Summer of last year as close as I can remember.”
“That’s a long time for putting in a few berms.”
“Well, you know it’s all being supervised by some professor from Toronto. They’ve already found bones and musket-balls and bits of broken dishes.” I remembered the string grid I’d seen and the trench next to it. But this was archaeology on a small scale. Did Toronto know about the rest of it? Or was that all Sangallo?”
There were now two customers trying to get Des’s attention. I watched the skill he displayed in not catching their waving hands in either of his eyes. “How big an outfit is Sangallo?” I asked.
“Hell, they’re about the biggest bunch in the restoration business around here. They’ll sandblast your old brick house, or reglaze your windows with wobbly glass made the way they used to make it in the olden days. They can imitate old plaster fancy-work on ceilings, replace the missing spindles in your prize staircase and even make a four-car garage look like it was an old driving shed. Oh, you see that yellow sign of theirs all over town, especially in the old parts where the houses go back a few years.”
At last Des responded to his customers’ requests. He was greeted by them as a long-lost friend. I went back to my sandwich. Soon I could look down into my plate and say, “I’ve really accomplished something today.” I tried to think of the fort, the excavation and the tunnelling under the earthworks, but it was no good. I sipped my drink and waited for Staziak.
The time went quicker than I would have guessed. A collection of familiar faces began to gather in the lobby. I could see them clearly from my seat in the bar. They stood quite close together for the convenience of five or six photographers who were busily snapping their pictures. One of their number, a red-whiskered man in a kilt, escaped into the bar briefly, then rejoined the ever enlarging crowd in front of the main desk. I began to recognize them as celebrities seen on television. There was a famous anchorman, a forthright interviewer, a tall bald-headed historian, towering over the others who stood as close to him as they could. I recognized a recent attorney general, a few newspaper columnists, a clutch of talk-show panellists and a few faces I might have recognized if I’d spent more time in front of the television set. My mother would have been able to name them all. I wondered what brought them to the Prince of Wales. Maybe it was the inauguration of a new fudge franchise on Queen Street. I grabbed Des the next time he passed my table and asked him.
“They’re celebrating some book that’s getting published,” he said. “Don’t they look like they’re having a grand time?” I watched and couldn’t help agreeing with the waiter.
It wasn’t long after the lobby cleared that Pete Staziak paused at the entrance to the bar, spotted me and came over.
“Benny, you amaze me.” He pulled out the chair opposite and sat down. When Des came over, he asked for
coffee. He was still a working man. “Now, how the devil did you stumble across that? This better be good.”
“I was just exploring the fort, Pete.”
“Yeah, like I’m having a wonderful time in your company.”
“I was just nosing around,” I said, but Pete wasn’t going to let me off with that. I decided not to try the shipwreck approach either. He glared at me and waited.
Pete and I went all the way back to grade nine together. I’d been in a play with his sister and we traded notes once or twice in five years. He’d been on the football team. I’d been about as athletic as Charles Atlas before he sent away for help. Since then, we had run into one another professionally from time to time. Pete was a good cop and I respected him, even though he was often more of a wall than a door in some of my investigations. I think that deep down he knew I wasn’t out to steal hubcaps or the fillings out of his mother’s teeth, but that didn’t stop him being careful where I was concerned. I tried to return the glare he was giving me, but I never win contests like that. That’s why I stay clear of people who show off with their bone-crushing handshakes.
“Okay, Benny, let’s have it. Nice and simple.”
“I’m working, Pete. I was following a truck into the fort, ran into a fence, so I went under it when it got dark.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “You haven’t confused me yet.”
“I went down into the hole to see what was going on, how it could involve my friend in the truck.”
“Who shall remain nameless?”
“At this stage, Pete, I’d just as soon.” Pete neither nodded agreement or made any comment. He was reserving as many options as he could. I didn’t blame him. In his place, I’d play tough too.
“Go on.”
“I’d just dug a couple of those metal drums out of the dirt. He was behind the fifth one. That’s all. I stopped digging when I saw the foot. That’s when I called you. The only thing I know about him is that he isn’t one of the garrison of the fort from back in 1837. Honest, Pete, I didn’t touch anything and I don’t know anything.”
“What’s your guy in the truck mixed up in?”
“Hauling toxic wastes. There, I’ve said it.”
“Into that, eh? How far?”
“As deep as that hole, anyway, I guess.”