Robert Haack leaned back in his chair, sure that he had established his credentials. “I know for a fact where the Tai June opium was stored,” he said. “It is of no use to me. I do not hold with that sort of business in the first place, and in any case I have not the means to do anything with it.
“The point is,” he continued, “that I am quite prepared to tell you where it is. But we must agree on a price first.”
“Money!” the policeman cried. “I thought you said you were hardly involved at all! If you know where the opium went you were right in the thick of it! You don’t deserve a penny, not a penny. If I had my way you’d be hanged for it!”
“Please,” said the customs officer, raising his palms to silence his associate, “we are not interested in blame at this late date. If Mr. Haack is a reasonable man I’m sure something can be agreed between us. What had you in mind, Mr. Haack?” he asked. He smiled pleasantly, but Robert saw that he had drawn a gallows on his paper.
Haack returned the smile expansively. He had it all worked out. “You’ll find I’m a fair man,” he said. “I want only one third now, when I give you the location, one third when you find the opium, and the final third when I bring you Smiling Jimmy’s accomplices and you put them in jail.”
“The whole crew?” said the policeman with a snort. “Don’t tell us that you know where they are, as well?”
“I have my thoughts on the matter, but the less said now the better,” Robert advised. “There are others who would like this secret, too. This much opium is of interest to anyone.”
The two officials looked at each other, then, as if in one mind, stood up. “We shall return in a matter of minutes, Mr. Haack,” said the customs officer. “I shall tell you then whether we can agree to what you want. Any monies involved must be approved, however, by my superiors, although that can be arranged quite quickly, if necessary, by telephone.” They shut the door behind them, leaving Robert by himself.
He strolled up and down the thin red carpet. He believed he had them hooked. Once they gave him the first third of the money he asked, he would be all set. It was enough to take himself and India, once he had found her, out of the country, yet little enough in itself. After that they’d look after themselves. And once out of the country he’d be free (so to speak) of debt. For even Yong Sam wouldn’t know where he’d gone; they’d take care to tell no one. He gazed out the window. He sat down on a settee and picked up the morning paper, which the policeman had left there. He turned its pages, scarcely aware of what he read until he came to this:
D’Arcy Island Lepers: Unfounded Report of Japanese Fishermen Carrying Vegetables From the Island to their Marketing Operations on the Mainland and Vancouver Island.
It has been stated most circumstantially that vegetables grown on D’Arcy Island are being sent across twice a week to Vancouver and Victoria in Japanese fishing boats, which had been seen working in the vicinity of the island. The object of the lepers in raising and selling these vegetables, it was alleged, was to procure opium, money being of no use to them. A thorough inspection has shown that the gardening operation, which, by the way, is very limited, is not more than sufficient to supply their own wants at the very outside. Further, there is no evidence of Japanese fishing boats being involved, and absolutely no evidence of any person visiting the island, except for those who are called upon in the official capacity of supplying the wants of these poor unfortunates.
A good deal of indignation is expressed that such a statement, calculated to do a very great deal of injury to the cities in question, should find such wide currency. It is evident that the person who had supplied the information in question had drawn altogether upon a fertile imagination.
Robert Haack let the paper fall into his lap. He sat wrapped in thought. Here might be an answer to another problem—what to do with Gook Lang. For he had not been able to get the young woman off his mind. Lam Fan was willing to pay for her keep if they could just find somewhere to put her. To leave her where she was, with Tai Ho, was unthinkable.
What if, Haack thought, the Japanese fishermen, who did not seem to be afraid of leprosy, could be persuaded to look after her? Despite her appearance, she was still in reasonable health and would be able to help with their cooking and laundry. It was worth a try, he thought. The fishermen lived on the shore near Mount Douglas, not far from the cabin he had built and had shared with Charlie. It was all falling into place like magic. Each loose thread of his life was beginning to tie up. Now if only customs would give him some money, he could begin his search for India. Then his luck, he could say, would have changed character utterly.
The door opened. The policeman entered first, looking sour. The customs officer followed more cheerfully. “Well,” he said most heartily, “Mr. Haack, I think we’re in business.”
—
Business. A shady business indeed, said Robert. For Jimmy Carroll had been up to his old tricks. Just like he had a dozen years previously, when he had smuggled opium on board the Idaho and he had hidden the drug at his “cannery” in Alaska. Only this time the opium from the Tai June warehouse had gone up the coast, just north of Nanaimo, to the abandoned whale fishery at Deep Bay. There, in an old whaling ship that lay rotting at anchor, Carroll had sealed up the opium. He’d been in no rush. He’d planned to wait until he was sure that customs had lost all interest before he distributed it. For this time he had wanted nothing to go wrong: he was frightened of jail, and he was not a young man. That is why he’d come back to the city so soon: to throw customs completely off track. And then, of course, he had died before he’d had a chance to put the rest of the scheme into practice.
And where, exactly, Robert was asked, was the opium to be found? In the carpenter’s room, between decks, and some in the bilge, said Robert Haack instantly.
Would you come with us? They queried him.
If you think it wise, said Robert agreeably, if you don’t think it might alert other interests before you’re ready for it.
The officers considered this. “No,” said the senior man finally. “I think it’s better if you stay here while we do the search. That way we have you in reserve if we should need your further assistance.”
The men shook hands. And Robert Haack, with a certain advance sum of money in his pocket—meant to encourage his public spirit; money for which he didn’t have to account to Yong Sam or Sing Yuen—for how would they know he had got it?—walked into the street a free man.
He turned on his heel, and, in the early autumn of the year of 1898, headed for Hillside Avenue, then took the turn north at the Jewish cemetery onto Cedar Hill Road; past the church at the crossroads and the farmhouses nestling under blankets of smoke, with cordwood stacked neatly and rain sizzling on chimneys, past the schoolhouse and grazing cows and fallow fields, all the way across the Cedar Hill plain to the foot of Mount Douglas. And farther.
Down a trail that wound through great stands of timber, with the smell of the sea growing stronger, to the sudden give-way of sand underfoot as the green-black shadows of the primeval forest separated. To show the white narrow crescent of Cordova Bay beach.
The light was grey and silvered with rain. There was a gunmetal sheen on the waves. There was a clutch of fishing shacks, one sending up smoke, nearby. Nets were laid out to dry, and there were a few upturned boats.
Robert looked out into the mist of the strait and watched a fishing boat navigate between Little Zero and Zero rocks, its mast ticking back and forth. It drew nearer: it had white-painted planks and a small green cabin from which the head of its skipper poked out. Robert turned to greet a small brown-skinned man who had come out to meet him. The man was barefoot, and he wore a tight woollen cap on his head. He bowed in greeting. The two men stood companionably side by side while Robert wondered how he could broach the subject. How to bring up leprosy, and a young woman named Gook Lang, and, “I’d like you to take care of her.” For he had to do it right. He took deep breaths as he watched the fish boat set its ancho
r and the crew move busily on deck and a blanketed figure stand up and be helped down a ladder into a rowboat.
The Japanese beside him took his pipe from his pocket. He poked at the bowl with a knife. Then he indicated the dinghy that was bobbing in and out of sight.
“Did you come for the lady?” he asked.
—
We are huddling in the rain round our camp fire on the shore at Sechart. There is almost no wind. The Rose is still up on the beach, and we are waiting for the tide to lift her off. “Hush,” says Lam Fan when I go to speak. And she points out to sea.
There is a whaler in the bay with a killed whale floating near it. And the shadows of men moving back and forth, busy at their work. It is not flesh I see, of course, but a memory. Time released from Fan and me and making a bridge between us. An alignment of place and date and ship and current. Like the aurora borealis, with its own music, the sound of coloured glass.
To the east, on a leper’s island no larger than a thumbprint on the map of the Pacific, my mother, India Thackery, took a step. To the west of her, there was Robert Haack. And where they met, just as here, at Sechart, where Fan and I sit, there were the crosshairs of a magnet: time rising from the storehouse of experience, more real than remembering, immediate and complete. Time past. Time present. Time in coincidence. Time boundless.
Like clouds seeded with silver nitrate; or codes and signals, gathered in gasses, which rain down on earth from the planets and asteroids. With a beginning but no end; with its true habitation in the brain.
I reach for Fan’s hand. “Goodbye, goodbye,” I hear my mother, India, call to her leper friends. Ah Sam takes out his handkerchief and blows his nose. Then he says. “Don’t forget to say that we need sugar. If we have sugar we will be all right.” And Sim Lee says, with his face turned seawards, watching the fisherman as he sets up the oars, “Send us a little dog, a small black one to bring back sea gulls if I shoot them.” And Ng Chung, with his hat brim funnelling rain down the inside of his jacket, says, “Here, I have something for you. Please take it.” And he holds out his hand to my mother, who is even now beginning a future without him. In his palm is a Chinese coin. It is one of two he has saved to be placed on his eyelids at death. Slowly my mother opens her hand to receive it.
And then they wave until the dinghy reaches the fishing boat and the fishing boat vanishes from sight. Until Robert Haack arrives at Cordova Bay beach. Until Lam Fan and I light our fire on the coast at Sechart, and watch the shades of long-dead men bustle about at their work.
The whale carcass, big as a zeppelin, the tunnel shape of an atom bomb, the shadow that blots out cities, the cloud without end…drifts and bobbles until the whalers draw it in, and the Rose takes heart and struggles upright on her keel, and floats free.
THIRTEEN
Approaches to Juan de Fuca Strait—Navigation is simple in clear weather; but, owing to the irregularity of the currents and tidal streams, every precaution must be taken in thick weather. The strait is liable to all those sudden vicissitudes of weather common to these latitudes, and in few parts of the world is the caution and vigilance of the navigator more called into action than when entering it from the Pacific Ocean.
BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME 1
We leave Barkley Sound by Imperial Eagle Channel, then pass through Folger Passage between Folger Island and Hornby Rock. Off Cape Beale there is a sharp and choppy sea, but once around the cape we are carried along swiftly by the swells. Although the roller-coaster ride is exhilarating, and the strong northwest wind merely helps us on our way, I am far from forgetting that this is one of the most dangerous stretches of coastline that there is.
We sight Seabird Rocks, on which many a vessel has come to grief, at the entrance to Pachena Bay, with foul ground lying both southwest and southeast; then Pachena Point light. A distance-finding signal emanates from there, but we have no equipment to pick it up. If I ever sail this coast again, I will be better equipped.
I glance at Lam Fan, who sits pensively on a stool beside the exhaust shroud in the wheelhouse. She has been quiet for several hours, and in some inexplicable way seems to be absent. She looks windblown, sun-bleached, salt-stained, not the elegant Fan I’ve always known. And weary.
“Happy to be going home, Fan?” I ask her, for I am looking forward to our arrival. We could make port at Victoria, if all goes well, by the next midday. Or earlier, with favourable wind, tide, and currents. I am anxious, now that I can glimpse the end, to finish this journey, and to give myself and the Rose a well-deserved rest. We could both do with a tune-up.
Klanawa River and Tsusiat River—we can see the latter’s waterfall even at this distance; then we fly past Nitinat and Clo-oose. I keep a lookout for the local steamer, which calls there regularly.
Stretches of white beach and an unending framework of trees line the coast of Vancouver Island; and pockets of haze burn off as the sun climbs the rungs of its ladder. To the west is the Swiftsure Bank, where the fishing boats gather, and where the lightship flashes out its warnings and forecasts. To the northeast is Carmanah Point light.
“Landmarks, Fan!” I cry out happily as I mark these off on the chart. “Every one we pass brings us one step nearer home.”
Fan stirs at her post near the warmth of the shroud. Her subdued face, her travel-faded garments paint a hangdog picture. She decides, at last, to break her silence. “It’s all right for you, Robert Lam,” she says with a whine in her voice. “You’ve got a future to look forward to. But what about me? For me it’s all over.” She subsides again. Her head lolls weakly on her shoulders. Her spine—usually straight as a lodge pole—is curved.
“Why, Fan!” I say in an effort to raise her spirits. “It’s because of you that the future looks bright at this late date in my life. My conscience is clear at last, and I’m freed of the past. Can’t you see what that means? Anything is possible, anything at all!” I do a little dance to illustrate, although I stumble a bit as the feeling in my legs gives out. I sit down and rub and pinch them until the nerves respond.
“See, Fan,” I say to her, with my feet again under me, “I’m a new man. Reborn. I’ve got my family, my history, my sense of identity. Yes, it’s all due to you.”
She stirs again, sell-pity gaining ground on apathy. “But what about me?” she says again. “What will happen to me once you return, have you thought about that?”
I push my cap to the back of my head. It is stained, sweat-caked, and beginning to smell, but I’m proud of it. I’ve earned this captain’s headgear as I’ve earned no other. “Of course I’ve thought of it, Fan. You’ll rest in peace, presumably.”
She glares at me, her sharp black eyes sparking to life angrily. “Over and done with, is that it? Now it’s back on the garbage heap? I wouldn’t have thought it even of you, Robert Lam,” she says disgustedly.
“But Fan,” I say, “why is it up to me at all? It was your choice to come on board the Rose at D’Arcy Island. I’d already buried you. I’d said goodbye. You came to help me of your own free will. When I said ‘rest in peace,’ I meant it. For that’s what you deserve, at the very least.”
She looks sad. “I made you a promise and I kept it,” she says. There is a pause during which I try to guess what’s coming next, for it’s clear she’s not finished. “It wasn’t much of a funeral,” she says regretfully.
I look at her in surprise. “I did my best, you know. You never told me what you wanted.”
“It’s not what I wanted that matters,” she says, “it’s what I got that counts.” She wipes a tear from her eye.
“I don’t understand you, Fan,” I say. “We’ve been in this thing together all along. I can’t see why you’re unhappy all of a sudden. If there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know.” I am beginning to worry, for it’s not like Fan to be like this. I’d counted on her all these miles, and she hadn’t failed me yet.
We are now in Juan de Fuca Strait, on the homestretch. I can feel the pull of my life
on land: the pilot station and the men I work with; the little house at Christmas Hill that I don’t think I’ll sell after all, at least not for a while; there are the boundless possibilities of travel after retirement, of other journeys in other company. Of friendship and companionship. Of knowing where I fit. For I’ve almost got the whole of it. There can’t be much more left.
Fan squirms and looks supremely uncomfortable. She twines her legs round the rungs of the stool. She leans forward, then tips back. She knocks down my wet socks, which were hung on the shroud gently steaming.
“Come on, Fan, out with it,” I say a little impatiently as I look for the flashing light on the buoy by Port San Juan. “I’m here for as long as you need me, but I want to get on with it.”
She gives me a bleak look. She drops her eyes. “There is something I haven’t told you yet, Robert Lam,” she says quietly. “I’m afraid it is very important. You see, we can’t go home just yet.”
—
To Robert Haack’s thinking India had changed very little since he’d last set eyes on her. Certainly she was badly dressed, in a man’s shirt, trousers, boots, coat, and hat; and there was a streak of grey in the brown hair under the derby; and the blue eyes were pale in her sun-browned face: but he would have known her anywhere. With a great sigh of relief he threw his arms around her.
“I can’t believe I’ve found you, I can’t believe it,” he cried over and over. Tears of release from all the years of worry streamed down his face as he sobbed against her shoulder. As for how he’d come to be there, and what had occurred to bring about the chance of their meeting, he did not think to tell her. It was enough, for the moment, that they were together.
India stood with her arms around him, comforting him as she would a troubled child. She could sense that he’d suffered—was it all because of her? Had he known she’d been on D’Arcy Island? And if not, what must he be thinking now? For the Japanese had told him at once where they’d come from. There were questions she had to ask, things she had to say to him; but she also needed time to think. For it was a shock to find Robert Haack back in her life. Not that she’d never given him a thought: for of course, she had, she had loved him once: but he was part of the world she had left behind on the day of the robbery, so long ago. But what now? What was to come?
To All Appearances a Lady Page 37