by Ralph Dennis
MacGregor was curious about the trucks. He loafed outside the barn, examining the ten-dollar bill, until Gunny explained that they were over the border on a camping trip. The trucks carried equipment their bosses would need in the wilds. In fact, he checked his watch, the train bringing them ought to be arriving any time.
“A considerable amount of camping equipment it would seem to me,” MacGregor said.
“Rich people can’t do without their comforts,” Gunny said. “Why, they’ve even got a portable bathtub in there.”
Gunny was waiting on the platform when the captain and the major stepped off the train. Gunny had drawn the first watch, the short straw in the straw game.
Tom had taken a couple of steps toward the street when he stopped and came back. He turned Gunny so that the platform light struck him full in the face. The bruises were getting dark, going toward blue.
“Trouble, Gunny?’
“You wouldn’t think so if you saw the other two. They got the rough end of it.”
Gunny led them off the platform to the street. He told them the rest of it through a puffed mouth.
“You think that’s the end of it?” Johnny asked.
“That’s my guess. They didn’t get the full price but they got more than the going rate for the hardware.”
“How is the hardware?”
“Still in the packing grease. And first things first, I want to clean and test-fire them.”
“Down the road,” Johnny said.
“How far?”
“I’d say two or three hours to Wingate Station.”
“All right,” Gunny said, “but the sooner we get settled in, the better.”
“A hotel in town?” Tom looked over his shoulder at the part of town they’d passed through.
“I saw something passed for one,” Gunny said.
They entered the barn. Betts and Franks sat in the cab of one of the Bulldogs and passed a quart of beer back and forth between them. The lighted lamp hung from a nail on a rafter off to the side.
Johnny had his look around. “Somebody’ll have to sleep with the trucks tonight.”
“We can split watches,” Betts said.
“The straw game?” Franks got out of the truck and stretched his legs.
Gunny shook his head. “You get some sleep. I’ll do the night turn.”
“How do you feel?” Tom asked.
“Never better.” And it was true. Even with the beating, the aftereffects of that, he hadn’t been coughing, and there hadn’t been any blood spotting. “I’ve got a can of solvent. I thought I’d spend part of the night cleaning the Thompsons. I can nap on the road tomorrow.”
It was settled. Vic stayed with Gunny to help him strip down the Thompsons. Richard Betts said he was hungry, and he led the way to the hotel.
Johnny and Tom kept him company at supper. Both ordered only coffee and pie and shared a carafe of the house wine that tasted of rust.
The waiter was a dark man in his forties. He might have passed for Italian if it hadn’t been for his slight French accent. To the displeasure of the townspeople at the other tables, the waiter hovered over the Americans. The townspeople thought that he probably smelled a large tip.
His name was Gilles. Earlier in the day he’d received a request from the Movement that he watch for a party of Americans. These were Americans. He could tell that from their accents. But they seemed ordinary enough, and none of them showed the marks of the beating that was part of the description he’d received.
The three Americans finished and left, and Gilles was considering whether it would be proper to send the message. After all, these did not fit the descriptions, and it might cripple the search if he sent in the information and it was not useful.
He was in the kitchen getting an order when the other two men entered. One look at the bruises on their faces, and he knew these were the right ones. For the short duration of their meal he bustled around them. He tried to overhear what they said. These two did little but eat. They did not appear to believe that conversation was a part of dining.
Five strangers, five Americans, in one day in a town that hardly saw that many in a whole year? He assumed they were together, the three who had eaten before and these at his table now. It proved to be a correct guess. These two separated after they left the dining room. Gilles watched them from the doorway and saw one seat himself in the lobby. The other went out.
Gilles found reasons to pass the doorway every minute or two until he was rewarded. He saw the bruised man who’d remained in the lobby joined by the three that had eaten earlier. He watched them check in at the hotel desk.
The dining room did not close until ten. It took another half an hour to straighten it and set the tables for breakfast. When that was done, Gilles slipped through the back door and trotted to the train station.
The depot was closing for the night. There were no more local trains until the next morning. The telegrapher took down the message and counted the words and took payment. He told Gilles that the cable would not go out until the first thing in the morning.
Henri Leveque received the telegram while he was having breakfast.
FIVE MEN GILWAY. COULD BE MEN YOU ASK ABOUT.
He finished his breakfast—French-roast coffee, black, and fresh croissants that flaked to the fork, and country butter with the flower-mold imprint—and then he reread the message.
After a second cup of coffee he called Jean at his apartment. Jean said he was packed and ready. It would take half an hour to pick up Pierre at his residential hotel across town. He would arrive at Henri’s home in forty-five minutes, unless the traffic delayed him.
In his upstairs bedroom, Henri packed for three days. He did not believe that his business with the Americans would take more than a day or two.
He carried the suitcase downstairs and left it beside the front door. He passed through the dining room and entered the kitchen. At the rear of the kitchen, near the pantry, there was a locked door. A flight of stairs led down into Leveque’s wine cellar. It was not an impressive collection. It numbered a few more than two hundred bottles. All of the wines were French. No others were worth drinking. And now, except for wines already in stock in Canada or the United States, there would be no more until after the war.
That thought, not the first time it had come to him, stopped him at the bottom of the stairs. He reminded himself. When he returned from the trip he would send letters to several wine brokers in Canada and in the United States. He would ask about certain vintages. Certain years. It might be a long war. Another ten-dozen bottles might be a reasonable purchase.
There was a single light in the center of the cellar.
High wooden racks lined the stone walls on three sides. There were spaces, altogether, for five hundred bottles.
The rear wall, the one without a length of wine rack, appeared to be solid wood panels. It was a work area with a heavy trestle table. Henri pushed the table aside. The wall panels were held in place by metal frames at the top and bottom. He leaned over and tripped a catch at the bottom left of the metal frame. Standing, he pushed the panel about four feet to the right.
The opening led to a cave that had been cut from solid rock. A candle in a dish was on the floor just inside. Henri lit the candle and stepped into his arsenal.
For the most part, the racks and shelves in the cave held a motley collection of arms. Many of them had been stolen. Others had been bought in pawnshops in Canada and below the border in the States.
The newest acquisitions, the Thompson 1928s, were stacked at the far end of the cave, still crated except for the one open case. The five he’d sold the old American were from that box, as well as the two that he’d had cleaned and test-fired.
Those two 1928s were in standing rifle racks. He wrapped them in an old blanket and placed them on the worktable outside the cave. His second trip, he carried out two fifty-round drums for the Thompsons. His final time in the cave, he selected a handgun for himself, his favo
rite, a Colt .44 revolver with a six-inch barrel and the kick of a mule.
He pushed the panel back into place. He carried the .44 revolver upstairs and placed it on top of his suitcase. The 1928s and the drums were still on the worktable in the wine cellar. Jean and Pierre could bring those up when they arrived.
After he washed his hands and patted the patches of perspiration from his face, he returned to the dining table and poured himself a final coffee.
He was a man who liked puzzles. He liked putting this part next to that part and taking this piece from far over there and moving it about until it fitted. Everything made sense if you knew there was an overall design.
The first part. Here was an old man, an American, past his prime but still with an unusual toughness. He wanted five Thompsons and spare ammunition and a case of grenades. When you asked why he needed those arms he gave flippant answers.
The second part. There was the matter of the trucks. Jean said that when he’d arrived at the junkyard, there were two Mack Bulldogs, three or three-and-a-half tons, parked outside the fence. Henri’s check with Harpur confirmed that the trucks had been bought from him that day for cash money. The man who bought them was an expert, a specialist with engines.
The third part. The radio, the day before, had noted in the news broadcast that a watchman at a construction company had been brutally beaten during a robbery. An undetermined amount of high explosives had been stolen. The newspaper that Henri read that night speculated that a German Fifth Column might be operating in Canada. Who else would need such large quantities of high explosives?
Who indeed? Another element fell into place after Henri called a lawyer he knew. Could he find out when the robbery at the Melton Construction Company took place? The lawyer could and did. The time was not exact but it was about the time that Jean and Pierre delivered the arms and did their questioning of the old man and the engine specialist. Could it be that the third man, the one who arrived at Harpur’s junkyard with the pistol like a cannon, was the same man who had beaten the old watchman and stolen the explosives? Was that a coincidence?
He did not think so.
Five men, the telegram said. His three men had grown to five. What did five men want with Thompsons and grenades and high explosives?
It was a puzzle to end all puzzles.
And there were still missing pieces.
They drove straight through to Gilway in Leveque’s 1940 Cadillac. They made good time, with the two men taking turns at the wheel while Henri dozed in the back seat.
It was Sunday; the church bells were pealing away. All morning they passed the churchgoers in their Sabbath best on the roads.
It was the supper shift for Gilles at the hotel dining room. He came to the lobby and spread his hands in helplessness. The four men who had stayed at the hotel had checked out after breakfast. The other man, the fifth one, had eaten later.
By the time Gilles was free of the dining room and could look for the men and the trucks, they had disappeared. He had, however, discovered that the Americans had stored their trucks in the MacGregor barn overnight.
The barn was clean as a dog’s tooth.
Leveque, after Gilles got the key from old man MacGregor, searched the barn without finding anything. Then he went outside and walked around the perimeter edges until he caught the scent of something strange. He squatted and reached under a low bush. His hand came away greasy. He sniffed the smear of dirt and recognized it. He had spent much time around weapons, and he knew that he had found the place where someone had dumped the wash from a weapons cleaning.
Another part. If the weapons had been bought, as he had assumed earlier, for use below the border, why were they being cleaned in Canada?
Since there was no way to learn which direction the Americans had taken, Henri decided to stay the night at the hotel in Gilway. As soon as he was settled in he placed a call to Montreal. All telegrams and phone calls from the Movement network were to be sifted and the important information passed on to him.
He did not believe that it would be a long wait.
The Movement’s network was as dense as a spider’s web. The flies would bumble against the web without knowing that it was there.
By a phone call he had shifted the center of the web. Now, instead of Montreal, it was located in Gilway.
It was only a matter of time before he felt the distant touch on the web. An hour or a day.
By Sunday, June 30, the major part of the construction in the second basement of the Sun Life Building in Montreal had been completed.
One drawback in the early planning sessions had been the acute shortage of steel. Contacted by the president of Sun Life, the engineers at Canadian Railways had located an abandoned spur near Quebec. A crew recovered 870 rails from that track. The steel was shipped to Bonaventure Station in Montreal and trucked the few blocks to the Sun Life Building.
Space for the construction work was limited in the second basement. That created another problem. The architect’s estimate was that a million pounds of concrete would be needed for the vault walls. There wasn’t, however, room for the mixing equipment in the basement. An experiment was suggested. Two huge compressors were set up on the Mansfield Street level at the rear of the building. Concrete was mixed there, and the compressors blew the mixture through large hoses into the basement where it was formed around the steel structure.
The Bank of Canada found a vault door. It was being fabricated in Ottawa for a bank in Toronto. In the name of the war effort, the finished door was diverted and shipped to Montreal.
In usual times two elevators connected the main lobby of the Sun Life Building with the third basement. One elevator was altered so that it would not go below the second basement. The other elevator was converted into an express that did not stop except at the lobby and the third basement.
As soon as the vault was completed, a team of specialists from the Bank of Canada arrived and installed a delicate alarm-and-detection system.
By June 30, a unit of Canadian Mounted Police guarded the lobby desk, the express elevator, and the third basement, twenty-four hours a day.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
The church bells welcomed them to Wingate Station.
They heard the tolling for more than half an hour before the two Mack Bulldogs eased over the low rise and the town was spread below.
Vic Franks drove the lead truck. Johnny sat in the middle of the cab. He leaned away to make room so Vic could shift gears.
Johnny pointed at the shoulder on the other side of the road. “Let’s have a look.”
“Here?”
“Here.”
Vic swung the steering wheel and crossed the midline. He cut in front of the Bulldog Richard Betts drove and Betts hit his horn. “Damn you, Vic.” He whipped past the first Bulldog and parked in a cloud of dust.
From the rise Wingate Station looked like a child’s model of a small town.
The ribbon of black double tracks ran toward them from the curve of the horizon. That direction was east, Halifax and the coast.
As the tracks approached the town there was a flow of gray buildings, weathered and with the dull glint of windows, like the downslope movement of lava. The tilt toward the tracks formed the neck of a pipe. The tracks funneled through the pipe for a distance before it reached the white-frame train station with its black-slate roof.
From where they stood, the train station was on the left side of the tracks. On the right, across those double tracks, there were several large buildings that were probably warehouses. Behind their high frames there were even rows of streets with a pattern of small houses. The countryside and the green farmland began there and spread south.
The main part of Wingate Station, what there was of it, was on the side of the rails where the train depot was. The taller buildings crowded there, some with three and four stories, along with the shops and stores and cafés and perhaps a hotel or two. The spires and towers of four churches
reached upward.
Beyond the center of town there was another cluster of homes and a peppering of trees, and a thick road broke out of the crowded mass and rammed its way north. It was a clean line beyond the town. This same road blurred in Wingate Station, it wobbled its way, and then it appeared on the other side of the train station. It crossed the tracks, was hidden by the warehouses for a time, and then it was free and heading directly south.
The double ribbon of tracks passed the station and squeezed through an identical pipe mouth as it headed west. When it was clear of town, the track bed began a slow incline, and the tracks passed below and within fifty yards of where the five of them stood beside the two Bulldogs.
“Toyland,” Tom said.
“What population?” Richard Betts wanted to know.
“Eight or nine thousand,” Johnny said. “Maybe ten on the high side.”
“It could be your hometown,” Vic Franks said to Richard Betts.
“Maybe,” Betts said, “if I hadn’t burned it down before I left for the Army.”
“Peaceful-looking,” Gunny said. “It could be half the towns in South Carolina.”
Vic Franks said, “It ain’t Detroit.”
Tom mashed a cigarette on the sole of his shoe and field-stripped it. The tobacco fell in a stream, and he wadded the paper before he tossed it away. “What’s the brick building by the depot? The one next to the warehouses?”
It was red brick, two or three floors high. There was a glint from the roof. It appeared to be a mass of window glass.
“Beats me,” Johnny said.
“Another warehouse?”
“We’ll check it.”
“As long as it’s not an Army barracks,” Gunny said.
They returned to the trucks and followed the bells into town. The last few miles they bogged down in the churchgoing procession of trucks, old cars, and even horse-drawn wagons.