Violence Is My Business

by Stephen Marlowe

  He went to the window and lifted the curtain. He stood there a long time watching the snow come down, listening to the wind. “If they’re successful,” he said, “if they leave her to freeze and get out themselves, the snow will cover their tracks. If that happens, we’d only have your word against theirs.”

  “It would be murder,” Goheen said.

  “It would be murder, Mr. Goheen, and they’d stand a good chance of getting away with it.” Moriarity turned away from the window. “Well, I’m going to call in, and then I’ll get some rest. There’s no sense talking about it if talking won’t do any good. I suspect they’ll be sending me out there at dawn.”

  “I want to go with you,” I said.

  He shook his head at once. “I appreciate the gesture, but this is our job, Mr. Drum. We spend five months of the year on skis. You could only hamper us.”

  “It isn’t a gesture. I want to go.”

  Goheen rubbed the back of his neck and showed us a wry grin. “Mr. Drum is a stubborn man, sergeant, who doesn’t like to take no for an answer.”

  Moriarity shook his head again. “This time he takes it, Mr. Goheen,” He used the room phone to call Mountie headquarters at the entrance to the Park. A patrol had already gone out into the storm. They had a walkie-talkie with them but had not yet reported in.

  “Get some sleep,” Moriarity urged me. “That’s what I’m going to do. You’ll see things my way in the morning. Well, I guess it’s good night for me. The station will contact you, should anything develop. I hope to God they have good news for you before very long.”

  AFTER the sergeant left, Goheen took me down to the bar for a drink. I don’t remember what I had. I went back upstairs with Goheen at a quarter to one and said goodnight to him outside his door. There was absolutely nothing I could do now, at night. One man alone wouldn’t have a chance in the blizzard at night, even if he could handle himself on skis a good deal better than I could. And blundering out there in heroic helplessness wouldn’t help Bobby—if she was not beyond help already.

  I got short snatches of sleep interspersed with long periods of wakefulness, trying to will myself to sleep because I would need all the rest I could get when morning came. But it didn’t work. I saw Bobby huddled in a blanket in Duncan Lord’s old farmhouse and Bobby looking beautiful but fussing over me like a mother hen the night I had returned exhausted to my apartment. Then I saw her out in the snow and the wind, her skis moving slowly, agonizingly, her face a mask of pain. Then I would drift off and three times during the night I thought she called my name and I would sit bolt upright and had to will myself to sleep all over again, listening to the wind which was Bobby’s voice calling.

  At four o’clock I got out of bed, opened the closet and found a sweater and heavy windbreaker among Curt’s things. They were a tight fit but would probably keep out the cold.

  When I had put them on, Goheen knocked at the door and came in. He wore ski clothing and an unzippered lumberjacket. “Thought I heard you prowling around,” he said. “You’re going out there, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve got to?”

  He took a brochure out of his pocket and said, “This comes compliments of the hotel. It’s a map of the Park with the Cross-country ski trails marked-out.” He put on the night-table lamp and spread the map out. “The X’s are shelters along the trail.”

  That was the first optimistic news I’d had about Bobby. “Then if they left her out there, and if she could have made her way to one of the shelters …”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. There are hundreds of miles of skiing trails in there, and the shelters are few and far apart. You any good on skis?”

  “I managed to get in some skiing in New England the last couple of winters. I’ll make out.”

  “I was practically weaned on hickory,” Goheen told me. “I’m going with you.”

  “That’s crazy. This isn’t your fight.”

  Goheen showed me a hard, cocky grin. “Don’t waste your time trying to stop me. Are you ready?”

  I looked at him, then silently held my hand out. He clasped it. “What time do you have?”

  “Four-twenty.”

  “Then it will be light in an hour and a half: Come on.”

  Goheen zipped up his jacket. We went downstairs.

  AT FIRST I thought it was still snowing, but that was the wind whipping flurries off the high-piled drifts. The air was cold and very dry, so dry that you didn’t realize how cold it really was until you had gone a little ways. Then your nostrils became thick with the frozen moisture in them.

  We made our way through knee deep snow to the hotel ski-shed. The door was fastened with a rusted padlock which I broke with my gun butt. The hinges needed oil. Once inside, Goheen lit a small pocket flashlight. With its help he found his own skis on a wall rack. While he was busy with the bindings I took the flashlight and went over to the racks of rental skis. They were painted orange and had white numbers stenciled on their trailing edges. About half of them had ski boots already in the bindings. I found a pair which I thought would fit me, took off my shoes, removed the ski boots from the bindings, laced them on my feet and stuffed my trouser bottoms in. Then I took the skis down from the wall, set them out parallel on a plank bench and reclamped the bindings. Goheen brought me a pair of ski poles.

  “Let’s get going,” I said.

  “Wait” a minute.” He took the flashlight and searched around behind the counter which ran the length of one wall in the shed. His skis made clomping noises on the wood floor. He came back with about a dozen bars of chocolate, stuffing some of them in the pocket of his lumberjacket, peeling the wrapper off one and giving me the rest. I ate some chocolate and put the remainder in my pocket.

  “If you’re going,” I said, “you must think she has a chance.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think Moriarity thought so.”

  “That’s the impression I got.”

  “Better have some more chocolate now.”

  “Then why are you going?”

  Again he shrugged. “It was something Moriarity said. The Mounties know this Park. Dygert—that’s his name, isn’t it?—doesn’t. Maybe a couple of amateurs blundering in there as “Dygert must have blundered in will be able to think of something the Mounties might miss. Hell, aside, from that, the entire post doesn’t have more than twenty-five men. Mt. Tremblant is a lot of Park for them to cover.”

  “What about the trailside shelters?” I said.

  “Well, what about them?”

  “If she was out all night, without protection, she’s dead. The Mounties know that. We know it. But we probably draw different conclusions. The Mounties will look in the places Dygert might have left her to die. They’ll be looking for a body. They’ll be looking for murderers. Especially if there aren’t many of them to look. I’ll be looking where she might be—if she’s alive.”

  “But they wouldn’t have—oh, I see. You mean she might have managed to reach one of the shelters?”

  “Maybe. You got the map?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on.”

  I WAS awkward on the skis at first. The trail to the Park I entrance went down a slight grade. I stumbled along, using the poles for greater speed, in Goheen’s tracks. He must have known the area very well, because it was still too dark to see much. We were heading north, into the wind. It was icy cold, and the wind blew flurries off the drifts at us.

  When we reached the first steep drop, Goheen shoved down with his poles and went up and over in a spray of snow. Now I had to get out of his tracks or risk breaking a leg. I camp to a stop on the crest of the hill and stamped both feet to kick snow off the bottoms of my skis. Then I dug my poles in, pushed, and went swooping down after Goheen. The snow hissed under my skis and dark masses of spruce and hemlock slipped by on both sides. Before I reached bottom, where Goheen was a faint dark blur in a world of snow, I realized I had tried to go too fast too soon. I brought my weight up on the balls of my feet and the inn
er edges of my skis, turning the points together in a braking snowplow. Just before I reached Goheen the points crossed and I went over headfirst, rolling to a stop on my back with the skis sticking straight up into the air.

  I got to my feet and brushed the snow off me. “We’re not in any race,” Goheen said. “Take it easy. Snowplow all the way down if you have to. Can you Christie?”

  “Yeah. But I wouldn’t win any medals.”

  When he grinned, I realized it was beginning to grow light. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. Well, let’s get moving. The Park’s just ahead, over that hill.”

  Going uphill on skis is back-breaking work, especially if you’re in a hurry. The technique is the reverse of snowplowing: it’s called herringboning because of the pattern your skis make in the snow. You draw the trailing ends of your skis together and dig in with the inner, metal edges, the points thrusting up and outward at almost a forty-five degree angle from the direction you’re moving. I once saw a trick-skier do it carrying a step-ladder slung on one shoulder and a full pail of water in his free hand. But I’m no trick-skier and I’m no expert. When I reached the top I was panting like an old horse making his way to the glue factory on top of the hill, but despite that I’d gained some confidence. I began to feel more at home on the long, gliding extensions of my feet. I grew more adept with the ski poles for balancing, for increasing speed on slight declines, for digging in, right pole and left ski, left pole and right ski, up hill. And on the final long slope leading down to the Park, I plummeted down fast in Goheen’s wake, the snow hissing, the runners thrumming, crouching, leaning forward, keeping the center of gravity low and maintaining my speed until the very last, when I came to a sudden snow-spewing stop with a pretty fair Christie.

  Goheen nodded his approval. “Better take a breather,” he said, peeling another candy bar. I munched on my chocolate in a cold silent world, all ghostly gray-white in the predawn light. Then the eastern sky became pink over the smooth white snow-covered hills, and the hills in the west burned with pink fire.

  WE GOT underway again at a quarter to six and in a few moments passed a sign which said, in French, Le Pare de Mont Tremblant. The Mountie post was a big log building about a quarter of a mile to our left and then, all at once, the first long pass of the cross-country park lay before us. It was dazzling white under a bright, brittle, almost crystalline blue sky. It undulated between the higher Laurentian peaks in low white ranges of hills. There was a lot of evergreen growth in there and in the shadows, of the trees the snow looked blue.

  We went down, swooping swiftly, dropping fast with that express elevator feeling you get in your stomach. Then we thrust forward for several hundred yards over flat tundra. Then we climbed a hill, herringboning quickly because the snow was soft, there was no crust, and the edges bit deep. Goheen held up his hand, so I didn’t stamp my skis and push off for the next long drop.

  “First shelter’s about a mile and a half,” he pointed, panting for breath, “that way. The only trouble is, there are two major trails cutting across the Park.”

  Over his shoulder, I looked at the map. One of the trails went northwest, in a more or less straight line, toward a town on the edge of the Park called La Macaza. The other zig-zagged over rougher country due north to a body of water called Lac du Diable. Lake of the Devil. I pointed at that trail with my finger.

  “Lake of the Devil,” Goheen said, nodding. “That’s the way I see it. That’s the real wilderness run.”

  “Take a look over there,” I said.

  Far below us and to our right, a patrol of six men was skiing. They moved swiftly in a formation, the tiny figures spaced about fifty yards apart in two straight lines or three men each. That would make them Mounties.

  “They aren’t following the trail,” Goheen said. “See, down there, the markers?” The markers were nailed on high posts and cut roughly in the shape of arrowheads. From this distance I guessed they were spaced at quarter mile intervals.

  “I was thinking,” Goheen told me. “Maybe we ought to let the R.C.M.P. know how we’ve figured it.”

  “I didn’t know we really figured it any way at all.”

  “Well, how I figured it, then. If Dygert doesn’t know the Park, wouldn’t he have to stick close to the trails?”

  “Maybe. But the further afield he went, the more certain he’d be that when he left her he’d leave her to die.”

  Goheen scowled. “That’s what the Mounties must be thinking. They can only cover so much ground. If this patrol’s any indication, they’re ignoring the trails entirely. What do you think?”

  I didn’t answer for a minute. Then I said, “I’m with you. But I’m not all the way with you. We have an idea. The Mounties have an idea. We could be wrong, they, could be wrong. If we stick to the trail, and follow it up to The Lake of the Devil, and if they go their own way across country, that increases the odds in favor of finding her, doesn’t it?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way. Then we don’t tell the Mounties?”

  “Right. Unless you have any better ideas.”

  When he shook his head, I put my leather shell gloves back on. “Also,” Goheen pointed out, “if we stopped to tell them, and if they knew what we were doing, they might kick us the hell out of the Park.”

  “There’s that, too,” I said, kicking the snow off my skis. I stood poised for a moment on the brink of the hill until Goheen came up parallel with me. Then we dug in with our poles and dropped toward the Lac du Diable trail.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WE REACHED the first shelter a little before eight. I hadn’t known what to expect, so the shelter surprised me. It was a small log cabin with a porch on which the snow had drifted high. It had a brick chimney painted bright red. If you were lost in the snow, you could see that chimney a long way. That gave me a surge of hope for Bobby, until I realized if they had abandoned her during the night, all the bright red brick chimneys from here to British Columbia wouldn’t have mattered.

  I started to un-clamp my bindings, but Goheen touched my arm. “See how the snow’s drifted over on the porch? You’d have to shovel your way in.”

  “Unless she got here last night,” I said.

  Goheen didn’t answer. What he thought was clear: she never could have found her way here last night. I removed my skis and shouted: “Hello! Anybody there?”

  My voice echoed off the white hills. There was no answer. I floundered waist deep through snow on the porch to get to the door. Inside, there were four bunks and three canvas cots in a single large room dominated by a pot-bellied stove. On one wall, piled almost to the ceiling, was cordwood. I touched the stove. It was cold.

  Goheen smoked a cigarette while I fastened my ski-bindings. In the early morning the wind had slackened off, but now it sprang up again, blowing so hard that the flurries of snow lifted from the drifts all around us, drifts piled sometimes twice a man’s height against out-croppings of rock in the lee of the wind.

  It was cold as we started out once more. As long as you keep skiing, you stay warm, but when you stop the sweat on your body has a chance to evaporate and the chilling wind knifes through you. That made me think of Bobby, left out here somewhere to die, without food and after a while without the energy or the ability to keep moving. Gliding along behind Goheen I felt a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the biting wind.

  We covered the four miles to the next trailside shelter in not much more than an hour. As long as we went with the wind it wasn’t so bad, but the trail twisted and turned through the hills making the wind seem to change direction every few minutes. Sometimes it was like skiing against a wall of ice. That was when you went into the teeth of the wind. Sometimes, with the wind blowing from the side, we had all we could do to keep to the trail. Twice we lost it altogether and had to circle back until we found the last marker and began all over again. The wind tore at our clothing, numbed our faces, made our ears sting with pain. It took the breath from our lungs and the strength from our legs.
At times it even drove all thoughts or what we were doing out here from my mind. There was only the snow and the wind and the next hill to be climbed and the fast soaring drop down the next slope.

  At the top of a small rise, Goheen thumped my shoulder and pointed. Nestled in the blue shadow of a copse of spruce was the shelter. Because the trees protected it from the wind we could see the thin blue-black wisp of smoke rising from the chimney.

  I pointed off to the left, down the flank of the little hill. Straight, it wasn’t much of a drop, but the flank was a long gradual slope of several hundred yards. “Down that way,” I said. “If it’s them, we could get in among the trees before they saw us. We could get right up to the cabin without being seen.”

  Goheen nodded. We lifted our skis and turned them. The snow was virgin white, unmarred by ski-tracks. Whoever was in that cabin had been in there since last night.

  Crouching low, with the shoulder of the hill between us and the cabin, we went down. In five minutes we were in among the dark blue spruce shadows. The cabin was a solid dark bulk fifty yards ahead of us, through the trees. You could smell the smoke of the wood fire.

  “I’m going first,” I told Goheen.

  He shook his head and came on right behind me. Because the cabin porch was in the lee of the wind, only a few inches of snow covered the boards. I held up my hand and stopped. The snow had been trampled on the porch. And from here we were able to see what we could not see from the top of the hill: ski-trails led through the snow parallel to the cabin and a couple of feet away from it, turning and disappearing behind the cabin. I said two words. I said: “This morning.”