High Citadel / Landslide

by Desmond Bagley

  ‘Howard arranged it,’ I said.

  ‘I had a telephone call from God not half an hour ago,’ said Mac. ‘Old Bull is getting stirred up. He wants to know who you are, where you’re from, what your intentions are and how long you’re going to stay around Fort Farrell.’ He smiled. ‘He gave me the job of finding out, naturally enough.’

  ‘No comment,’ I said.

  Mac raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that I’m exercising my God-given right to keep my mouth shut. You tell old Matterson that I refuse to speak to the Press. I want to keep him guessing—I want him to come to me.’

  ‘Good enough,’ said Mac. ‘But he’s lost you. No one knows you’re here.’

  ‘We can’t keep that a secret for long,’ I said. ‘Not in a town as small as Fort Farrell.’ I smiled. ‘So we finally goosed the old boy into moving. I wonder what did it.’

  ‘It could have been anything, from the talk I’ve heard round town,’ said Mac. ‘Ben Parker, for instance, thinks you’re crazy.’

  ‘Who is Ben Parker?’

  ‘The guy at the bus depot. Clarry Summerskill, on the other hand, holds you in great respect.’

  ‘What kind of Summerskill?’

  Mac gave me a twisted grin. ‘His name is Clarence, and he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t think it’s a suitable moniker for a used car dealer. He once asked me how in hell he could put up a sign saying, ‘Honest Clarence’, and not get laughed at. Anyway, he told me that any man who could do in three short hours what you did to a Land-Rover must be the toughest guy in Canada. He based that on the fact that you didn’t have a scratch on you. What did happen, anyway?’

  ‘I’ll put some water on for coffee,’ I said. ‘The Land-Rover’s out back. Take a look at it.’

  Mac went out to look at the damage and came back wearing a wry face. ‘Drop over a cliff?’ he asked.

  I told him and he grew grave. ‘The boys play rough,’ he said.

  ‘That’s nothing. Just clean fun and games, that’s all. It was a private idea of Jimmy Waystrand’s; I don’t think the Mattersons had anything to do with it. They haven’t started yet.’

  The kettle boiled. ‘I’d rather have tea,’ said Mac. ‘Too much coffee makes me feel nervous and strung up, and we don’t want that to happen, do we?’ So he made strong black tea which tasted like stewed pennies. He said, ‘Why did you go up to the dam, anyway?’

  ‘I wanted to get Howard stirred up,’ I said. ‘I wanted to get noticed.’

  ‘You did,’ Mac said drily.

  ‘How much is that dam costing?’ I asked.

  Mac pondered. ‘Taking everything in—the dam, the powerhouse and the transmission lines—it’ll run to six million dollars. Not as big as the Peace River Project, but not small potatoes.’

  ‘I’ve been doing some figuring,’ I said. ‘I reckon that Matterson is taking over ten million dollars’ worth of lumber out of the Kinoxi Valley. He’s taking everything out, remember, not the less-than-one-per-cent cut that the Forestry Service usually allows. That leaves him with four million bucks.’

  ‘Nice going,’ said Mac.

  ‘It gets better. He doesn’t really want that four million dollars—he’d only have to pay tax on it; but the electricity plant does need maintenance and there’s depreciation to take into account, so he invests three million dollars and that takes care of it. He makes one million bucks net, and he has free power for the Matterson enterprises for as far into the future as I can see.’

  ‘Not to mention the dough he makes on the power he sells,’ said Mac. ‘That’s pure cream.’

  ‘It’s like having a private entrance to Fort Knox,’ I said.

  Mac grunted. ‘This smells of Donner. I’ve never known such a guy for seeing money where no one else can see it. And it’s legal, too.’

  I said, ‘I think Clare Trinavant is a sentimental fool. She’s letting emotion take the place of thinking. The Kinoxi Valley is going to be flooded and there is nothing she can do to stop it.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So she has five square miles of woodland up there that’s going to be wasted, and she’s passing up three million dollars just because she has a grudge against the Mattersons. Isn’t she aware of that?’

  Mac shook his head. ‘She’s not a businesswoman—takes no interest in it. Her financial affairs are managed by a bank in Vancouver. I doubt if she’s given it a thought.’

  I said, ‘Doesn’t the Forestry Service have anything to say about it? It seems silly to waste all that lumber.’

  ‘The Forestry Service has never been known to prosecute anyone for not cutting,’ he pointed out. ‘The problem has never come up before.’

  ‘With three million bucks coming in for sure she could build her own sawmill,’ I said forcefully. ‘If she doesn’t want the Mattersons in on it.’

  ‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’ Mac asked.

  ‘That’s the pity of it.’ I brooded over it. ‘She’s more like Howard Matterson than she thinks; he is also an emotional type, although a bit more predictable.’ I smiled. ‘I reckon I can make Howard jump through hoops.’

  ‘Don’t think you can treat the old man like that,’ said Mac warningly. ‘He’s tougher and more devious. He’ll save up his Sunday punch and sneak it in from an unexpected direction.’ He switched the subject. ‘What’s the next move?’

  ‘More of the same. Old Matterson reacted fast so we must have hit a sore spot. I stir up talk about the Trinavants and I root about up near the dam.’

  ‘Why go near the dam? What’s that got to do with it?’

  I scratched my head. ‘I don’t really know; I just have a hunch that there’s an answer up there somewhere. We’re not really sure that it wasn’t my prowling around there that attracted Bull Matterson’s interest. Another thing—I’d like to go up to Clare’s cabin. How do I get there without crossing Matterson land? That might be a bit unwise now.’

  ‘There’s a road in from the back,’ said Mac. He didn’t ask me why I wanted to go up there, but instead dug out a tattered old map. I studied it and sighed. It was a hell of a long way round and I’d have given my soul for the Matterson Corporation helicopter.

  II

  The next day I spent in Fort Farrell, spreading the good word and really laying it on thick. Up to then I’d mentioned the name of Trinavant to only two people, but this time I covered a good cross-section of the Fort Farrell population, feeling something like a cross between a private detective and a Gallup pollster. That evening, in the cabin, I totted up the results in approved pollster fashion and sorted out my findings.

  One of the things that stood out was the incredible ease with which a man’s name could be erased from the public memory. Of the people who had moved into Fort Farrell in the last ten years fully eighty-five per cent of them had never heard of John Trinavant; and the same applied to those young people who had grown to maturity since his death.

  The other, older people remembered him with a bit of nudging, and, almost always, with kindness. I came to the conclusion that Shakespeare was dead right: ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’ Still, the same analogy applies throughout our world. Any murderer can get his name in the newspapers, but if a decent man wishes to announce to the world that he’s lived happily with his wife for twenty-five or fifty years he has to pay for it, by God!

  There was also a fairly widespread resentment of the Mattersons, tinged somewhat with fear. The Matterson Corporation had got such a grip on the economic life of the community that it could put the squeeze on anybody, indirectly if not directly. Nearly everyone in Fort Farrell had a relative on the Matterson payroll, so there was a strong resistance to answering awkward questions.

  Reactions to the name of John Trinavant were surer. Folks seemed amazed at themselves that they had allowed him to be forgotten. I don’t know why, but I haven’t thought of old John in years. I knew why. When the only source of public information
in a town closes tight on a subject, when letters to the Editor about a dead man just don’t get published, when a powerful man quietly discourages talk, then there is no particular call to remember. The living have their own bustling and multitudinous affairs and the dead slide into oblivion.

  There had been talk of a John Trinavant Memorial to face the statue of Lieutenant Farrell in Trinavant Park. I don’t know why, but it never seemed to get off the ground; maybe there wasn’t enough money for it—but, sure as hell, John Trinavant pumped enough money into this town. You’d think people would be ashamed of themselves, but they’re not—they’ve just forgotten what he did for Fort Farrell.

  I got tired of hearing the refrain—I don’t know why. The depressing part of it was that they really didn’t know why, they didn’t know that Bull Matterson had screwed the lid down tight on the name of Trinavant. He could have given the Hitlers and Stalins a pointer or two on thought control, and more and more I was impressed at the effort which he must have put into this operation, although I still had no idea as to why he had done it.

  ‘Where are the Trinavants buried?’ I asked Mac.

  ‘Edmonton,’ he said briefly. ‘Bull saw to it.’

  The Trinavants did not even have a resting-place in the town they had built.

  After a day’s intensive poking and prying into the Trinavant mystery I decided to give Fort Farrell a miss next day. If two conversations had caused Bull Matterson to react, then that day’s work must be giving him conniptions, and acting on sound psychological principles, I wanted to be hard to find—I wanted to give him time to come really to the boil.

  That cut out investigating the site of the dam, so I decided to go up to Clare Trinavant’s cabin. Why I wanted to go there I didn’t know, but it was as good a place as any to keep out of Matterson’s way and maybe I could get in a day of deep thought with some fishing thrown in.

  It was a hundred and twenty miles on rutted, jolting roads—a wide swing round the Matterson holdings—and when I reached the cabin I was sore and aching. It was even bigger than I remembered, a long low sprawling structure with a warm red cedar shingle roof. Standing apart from it was another cabin, smaller and simpler, and there was smoke curling from the grey stone chimney. A man emerged carrying a shotgun which he stood leaning against the wall not too far from his hand.

  ‘Mr Waystrand?’ I called.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘I have a letter for you from McDougall of Fort Farrell.’

  McDougall had insisted on that because this was Jimmy Waystrand’s father, whose allegiance to Clare Trinavant was firm and whose attitude to Bob Boyd was likely to be violent. ‘You cut his son and you insulted Clare—or so he thinks,’ said Mac. ‘You’d better let me straighten him out. I’ll give you a letter.’

  Waystrand was a man of about fifty with a deeply grooved face as brown as a nut. He read the letter slowly, his lips moving with the words, then gave me a swift glance with hard blue eyes and read it again very carefully to see if he’d got it right first time. Then he said a little hesitantly, ‘Old Mac says you’re all right.’

  I let out my breath slowly. ‘I wouldn’t know about that—it’s not my place to say. But I’d trust his judgment on most things; wouldn’t you?’

  Waystrand’s face crinkled into a reluctant smile. ‘I reckon I would. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘A place to pitch a camp—and if you could spare a steelhead from the creek there, I’d be obliged.’

  ‘You’re welcome to the trout,’ he said. ‘But there’s no need to camp. There’s a bed inside—if you want it. My son’s away.’ His eyes held mine in an unwinking stare.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Waystrand.’

  I didn’t have to go fishing for my dinner, after all, because Waystrand cooked up a tasty hash and we shared it. He was a slow-moving, taciturn man whose thought processes moved in low gear, but that didn’t mean he was stupid—he just took a little longer to reach the right conclusion, that’s all. After we had eaten I tried to draw him out. ‘Been with Miss Trinavant long?’

  He drew on his pipe and expelled a plume of pale blue smoke. ‘Quite a time,’ he said uninformatively. I sat and said nothing, just waiting for the wheels to go round. He smoked contemplatively for a few minutes, then said, ‘I was with the old man.’

  ‘John Trinavant?’

  He nodded. ‘I started working for John Trinavant when I was a nipper just left school. I’ve been with the Trinavants ever since.’

  ‘They tell me he was a good man,’ I said.

  ‘Just about the best.’ He relapsed into contemplation of the glowing coal in the bowl of his pipe.

  I said, ‘Pity about the accident.’

  ‘Accident?’

  ‘Yes—the auto crash.’

  There was another long silence before he took the pipe from his mouth. ‘Some folks would call it an accident, I suppose.’

  I held my breath. ‘But you don’t?’

  ‘Mr Trinavant was a good driver,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t drive too fast on an icy road.’

  ‘It’s not certain he was driving. His wife might have been at the wheel—or his son.’

  ‘Not on that car,’ said Waystrand positively. ‘It was a brand-new Cadillac two weeks old. Mr Trinavant wouldn’t let anyone drive that car except himself until the engine got broken in.’

  ‘Then what do you think happened?’

  ‘Lots of funny things going on about that time,’ he said obscurely.

  ‘Such as?’ I prompted.

  He tapped the dottle in his pipe on the heel of his boot. ‘You’re asking a lot of questions, Boyd; and I don’t see why I should answer ’em, except that old Mac said I should. I ain’t got too much love for you, Boyd, and I want to find out one thing for sure. Are you going to bring up anything that’ll hurt Miss Trinavant?’

  I held his eye. ‘No, Mr Waystrand. I’m not.’

  He stared at me for a moment longer, then waved his arm largely. ‘All these woodlands, hundreds of thousands of acres—Bull Matterson got ’em all, ’cept this tract that John left to Miss Trinavant. He got the sawmills, the pulp mills—just about everything that John Trinavant built up. Don’t you think the accident came at the right time?’

  I felt depressed. All Waystrand had were the same unformulated suspicions that plagued Mac and myself. I said, ‘Have you any evidence that it wasn’t an accident? Anything at all?’

  He shook his head heavily. ‘Nothing to show.’

  ‘What did Cl…Miss Trinavant think about it? I don’t mean when it happened, but afterwards.’

  ‘I ain’t talked to her about it—it ain’t my place—and she’s said nothing to me.’ He shook the dottle from his pipe into the fire and put the pipe on the mantel. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said brusquely.

  I stayed up for a while, chasing the thing round in circles, and then went to bed myself, to the sparely furnished room that had been Jimmy Waystrand’s. It had a bleak aspect because it was as anonymous as any hotel room; just a bed, a primitive wash-stand, a cupboard and a few bare shelves. It looked as though young Jimmy had cleared out for good, leaving nothing of his youth behind him, and I felt sorry for old Waystrand.

  The next day I fished a little and chopped some logs because the log pile looked depleted. Waystrand came out at the sound of the axe and watched me. I had stripped off my shirt because the exercise made me sweat and swinging that axe was hard work. Waystrand regarded me for a while, then said, ‘You’re a strong man, but you’re misusing your strength. That’s not the way to use an axe.’

  I leaned on the axe and grinned at him. ‘Know a better way?’

  ‘Sure; give it to me.’ He took the axe and stood poised in front of the log, then swung it down casually. A chip flew and then another—and another. ‘See,’ he said. ‘It’s in the turn of the wrists.’ He demonstrated in slow motion, then handed back the axe. ‘Try it that way.’

  I chopped in the
way he had shown me, rather inexpertly, and sure enough the work went easier. I said, ‘You’re experienced with an axe.’

  ‘I used to be a logger for Mr Trinavant—but that was before the accident. I got pinned under a ten-inch log and hurt my back.’ He smiled slowly. ‘That’s why I’m letting you get on with the chopping—it don’t do my back no good.’

  I chopped for a while, then said, ‘Know anything about the value of lumber?’

  ‘Some. I was boss of a section—I picked up something about values.’

  ‘Matterson is clearing out his part of the Kinoxi,’ I said. ‘He’s taking everything—not just the normal Forestry Service allowable cut. What do you think the value per square mile is?’

  He pondered for a while and said finally, ‘Not much under seven hundred thousand dollars.’

  I said, ‘Don’t you think Miss Trinavant should do something about this end? She’ll lose an awful lot of money if those trees are drowned.’

  He nodded. ‘You know, this land hasn’t ever been cut over since John Trinavant died. The trees have been putting on weight in the last twelve years, and there’s a lot of mature timber which should have been taken out already. I reckon, if you made a solid cut, this land would run to a million dollars a square mile.’

  I whistled. I’d underestimated her loss. Five million bucks was a lot of dough. ‘Haven’t you talked to her about it?’

  ‘She’s not been here to be talked to.’ He shrugged rather sheepishly. ‘And I’m no great hand with a pen.’

  ‘Maybe I’d better write to her?’ I suggested. ‘What’s her address?’

  Waystrand hesitated. ‘You write to the bank in Vancouver; they pass it on.’ He gave me the address of her bank.

  I stayed around until late afternoon, chopping a hell of a lot of logs for Waystrand and cursing young Jimmy with every stroke. That young whelp had no right to leave his old man alone. It was evident that there was no Mrs Waystrand and it wasn’t good for a man to be alone, especially one suffering from back trouble.