The Fourth Betrayal

by Bruce Burrows

  Then, stripped of all the assets that made it viable, Continental Railways struggled to run an efficient and safe operation. According to Dougie’s later research, they operated so efficiently that they had over a hundred derailments and collisions during the next few years. Jesus! If that was betrayal one, I couldn’t imagine betrayal two.

  As it turned out, I could imagine the second betrayal, since I was the victim, along with most of the other fishermen on the BC coast. Fish were once a common property resource, owned, like all natural resources, by the people of Canada. You could buy a license that gave you the right to fish, but you didn’t own the fish until you actually caught them. That all changed when the Department of Fisheries and Oceans introduced Individual Transferable Quotas, ITQs, which allocated a certain amount of fish to each fisherman before he or she had even caught the fish. These ITQs were certifiable property rights that could be bought and sold. Most of them ended up in the hands of corporations, who then leased them back to the fishermen. The poor saps ended up paying over half of their income in lease fees. I’d always thought that DFO was too stupid to have organized this massive transfer of wealth. The tape made it clear that Cliff and his cronies and a couple of captive bureaucrats had engineered the whole swindle under the cover of “conservation measures.”

  By this time I was hungry. The oil stove was turned off, so I phoned for a pizza. When it arrived I opened another beer and ate half the pizza while listening to “Future Policy.” This time the non-Dougie voice was not Cliff. The new voice was less avuncular, articulated a little more precisely, sounding sort of academic. But Dougie was still in character, ego stroking and asking questions.

  Dougie: I really admire the way you guys have pulled together some useful, sort of redistributive policies.

  Other voice: Redistributive is a good word.

  Dougie: And not only developed the policy, but the implementation has been beautiful. You’ve done some amazing things.

  Other voice: Well, thank you. We have had some successes.

  Dougie: But honestly, there must have been a few projects that went sideways. Slippage, fog of war, and all that.

  Other voice: Oh yes, of course. The best-laid plans, etcetera. Our West-Coast salmon initiative hit some snags. We tried to introduce genetically engineered salmon into the ocean. Phase one went well, but the second mandate was a bit of a debacle. Personnel problems, really. Still, we managed to insulate ourselves from the fallout.

  Dougie: If I’m going to work with you on areas of common interest, my clients really need to be assured of anonymity. There must be complete separation of our . . . what shall I say . . . support activities and any sort of fieldwork.

  Other voice: Of course, that goes without saying.

  Jesus! What sort of cover had Dougie put together for himself? He was being accepted by these power brokers as someone of the same rank, a player of equal stature.

  It was eight o’clock. My cell phone rang and I flinched guiltily. That changed to irritation as I wondered why the hell I, who had committed only one teensy-weensy major theft in my life, should feel guilty in the face of larceny of this magnitude. I answered my phone.

  “Ollie. It’s Phil. I’m at YVR. Where can I meet you?”

  I was surprised that he was at the airport already. “Take a cab to the Steveston Hotel. I’ll meet you in the pub.” I broke the connection and phoned a cab, then sat for a moment and considered the current state of affairs. These tapes were dynamite. The story that Dougie was planning to write, based on these tapes and whatever other evidence he’d managed to accumulate, would blow the neoconservative ship right out of the water. All I could hope for was that Phil would do as good a job, or almost as good a job, as Dougie would have done. I would give Phil copies of the tapes and keep the originals, mainly so I could listen to the rest of them. A honk alerted me that the cab had arrived. I hid the box of tapes in the locker under the bench and went to meet Phil.

  When I walked into the pub, it was easy to identify Phil. He was the only guy I didn’t know. Also the only guy wearing a suit. It was dark and wrinkled and probably not an Armani. He was sitting at a table in the corner, and a waitress followed me as I walked over to him. We shook hands and did the “Hi, Ollie, Phil—Hi, Phil, Ollie” routine, and I sat down. Phil had dark, heavily gelled short hair on top of a slightly puzzled-looking face on top of a stocky, serviceable-looking body. The waitress waited expectantly and I ordered a cold Lucky. Phil said, “Maybe I’ll get Lucky too” and winked at the waitress. She rolled her eyes and retreated toward the bar.

  “Ollie, I’m glad to finally get to meet you. Dougie told me a lot about you.”

  “Really?” I felt like saying, “Did he tell you how much I dislike urban posers?” But that would prove nothing except that I was developing a bit of a dislike for this guy. So I murmured noncommittally and took a swig of beer.

  “So you’re a fisherman, eh?” Phil continued the charm offensive.

  “Yeah, right.” And I felt obligated to explain a bit about shrimp fishing and how it differed from other fisheries and so on and so forth. By this time the waitress was back, wondering if we wanted another beer.

  “I’m always good for seconds,” Phil said archly.

  “Are you flirting with me?” she asked, puzzled.

  “Sweetie, if I was flirting with you, you’d have your clothes off by now.” He looked at me with the impervious satisfaction of the truly insensitive. The waitress looked at him with the wonderment of a kid at the zoo. She left. I tried not to look at the ceiling. “Small-town girls, eh?”

  “Yeah, small-town girls.” I was beginning to feel a sense of desperation. “What I thought about the tapes is, we’ll make copies, I’ll keep the originals, and you can have the copies. You’ll get a great story. From the bits I’ve heard, it’s dynamite stuff.”

  “I’m right with you, man, right with you. I even brought a high-speed duplicator.” He gestured toward a tote bag on the chair beside him. “Only thing is, I’ll need the originals. Legal reasons, you know. We could easily get sued over this stuff.”

  I couldn’t see anything wrong with that. The waitress returned with two more beers and left quickly. I raised my bottle to Phil. “Deal.”

  The fascist dance beats of the background music were really starting to irritate me. I drained my beer. “We can get a cab outside. Let’s go.”

  Phil left his beer, grabbed his bag and followed me out into the warm evening air. I knew the cabbie, so I just smiled at him and waved toward the breakwater, and we headed in that direction. “So this is your boat, eh?” Phil said when we got to the Ryu II.

  I felt like saying, “No. It’s a B-flat reciprocating effluvium.” But I just said, “Yeah, it’s my boat.” And we climbed on board.

  We entered the galley and I flicked on the lights. Phil marveled at that. “You’ve even got electricity on here.”

  “All the bells and whistles,” I said.

  Phil put his tote bag on the galley table and took out a dual tape recorder. “This little baby can duplicate an hour-long tape in ten minutes.” He looked at me expectantly.

  I lifted the seat cover and took out the box of tapes. “Let’s do these in order. I want to make sure I get the labeling right on my copies.”

  “Good plan.” I handed him tape one, and he inserted it in the left-hand deck, a blank tape in the right-hand deck, set the toggle switch at 6X and pressed Play and Record. The machine whirred away for about ten minutes while we stared blankly at each other, then clicked to a stop. Phil took out the original tape and pressed Play on the right-hand deck. Dougie’s voice came out loud and clear.

  “It works,” Phil said. He took out what had been the blank tape and handed it to me for labeling. I passed him tape two, and he began the process all over again. Bored, I wandered up to the wheelhouse to listen to the radio. “I’ll label them for you,” Phil called.

  “Thanks,” I called back. I turned on the VHF and put it on Scan, idly hoping
to eavesdrop on some conversations. Tugboat skippers were chattering away on channel 8, coastguard announcements were coming through on channel 16, and sporties were nattering to each other on channel 6. I turned to channel 78A, which was used by a lot of fishermen. I listened to the usual litany of complaints for about half an hour before I heard a familiar voice. Drago Vukovitch ran an Option B trawler, and he was bringing a load of live sole up the river to sell at the Steveston fish dock. He was talking to his buddy on the Pearly Mae, and when the conversation lagged I butted in.

  “Drago, don’t tell me you’ve actually got some fish on that old bucket. I thought you didn’t like getting scales on your rails.”

  He chuckled. “Ollie Swanson, they never should have let you escape from Sointula. You deserve life on that rock, along with all those communist Finns.”

  We continued in this vein for a while, and other familiar voices chimed in with stories and reports and reminiscences and whatever-happened-to-old-whoevers. Brian DePaul butted in and tried to convince me that I owed him twenty bucks. I replied that I couldn’t be speaking to Brian DePaul on the Sea Hound because my ugly-boat alarm hadn’t gone off. Before I knew it, almost two hours had passed. I turned off the VHF and went back to the galley. Phil was just labeling the last tape. “If you want to call a couple of cabs, Ollie, I think we can say that we’re finished here. It’ll take me a few days to listen to all this, and when I’m finished I’ll call you.”

  I yawned and pulled out my cell phone. Phil pointed at a box of tapes and mouthed, “Yours.” I nodded as I ordered two cabs.

  When Phil was in his cab, just about to pull away, he grinned at me through the window and shot me with his thumb and index finger. Jerk, I thought.

  But I didn’t know the half of it.

  The next day when I went back to the boat to listen to the rest of the tapes, I discovered that they were all blank. I double-checked them with an audio technician, and he confirmed that the tapes had never been recorded on. Phil had scammed me. The only tape I was left with was tape one, which he’d really recorded just to prove to me that everything was working. Good thing I’d slipped it into my pocket instead of leaving it on the table.

  When I got back to the house I was in a foul mood, which was lessened only slightly when I saw my cousin Danny drinking a beer at my kitchen table. He grinned a hello at me, but he could read me almost as well as Oshie. “What’s the problem?” they said almost simultaneously. I told them the story. And because Danny had worked for DFO, I emphasized the bit about the West-Coast salmon initiative going awry.

  That struck a nerve. “Those bastards!” he said. “I always knew the orders to transplant those mutant salmon into the ocean came from higher up, someone outside DFO.” When I looked puzzled, he sketched the events that had led to him being pulled from the waters of Georgia Strait the previous fall.

  Oshie said, “It sounds like Ottawa is a seething mass of corruption.” Neither of us denied it.

  “Do you have any idea who it was on that last tape you listened to?” Danny asked.

  “No. But I’d recognize his voice again. And it shouldn’t be too hard to identify Cliff.”

  Danny nodded. “I’ve got a pretty good idea already that it’s Cliff Ernhardt of Ernhardt and Associates. They’re the number-one sleaze spinners in Ottawa. Sort of our version of Hill and Knowlton.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m going to phone the editor of the Ottawa Times and give him shit about how Phil has acted.” But of course Phil didn’t work at the paper. They’d never heard of him.

  The three of us looked at each other. Oshie spoke for all of us. “What now?”

  I was pacing the kitchen, working off a combination of anger and embarrassment at being conned by a dimwit like Phil, and a sort of budding excitement at being involved in something important, the retrieval and resurrection of Dougie’s story. “The first thing I’m going to do is track down Phil, get the tapes back and give them to the guys at the Times so they can write the story. I want to see these scumbags exposed, naked, on the front page of every newspaper in the country.”

  Oshie said, “They’re obviously really worried about the story getting out. They went to a lot of trouble to get those tapes.”

  Danny looked serious—I would have said worried if I didn’t know that the only thing he worried about was marine biodiversity. “Cliff Ernhardt thinks of himself as a really powerful guy, but he’s just the mouthpiece for the backroom boys who like to think of the nation’s business as their business. This little stunt of grabbing the tapes was child’s play for them.” He thought for a moment. “Ollie, are you sure that Dougie’s death was an accident?”

  I was shocked. But the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that some very powerful people had had an extremely powerful reason for wanting Dougie dead. But still, we were talking about Ottawa, not New Jersey. “Let’s not get all carried away with conspiracy theories,” I said. “Lots of people fall out of canoes and drown. Experienced people. Look at Tom Thomson. Same damn lake, for Christ’s sake.”

  Danny grinned. “Maybe this powerful cabal didn’t like the direction Canadian art was going in.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “So they killed Tom Thomson to clear the way for faded watercolors on really big canvases. The bastards!”

  “I just want you to keep your wits about you as you go charging around Ottawa. You’re still a small-town kid, Ollie.”

  “I’ve lived in Steveston for ten years.”

  “A teeming cosmopolitan metropolis, to be sure. Do you lock your house?”

  “This is a quiet street.”

  “Lock your boat?”

  “I used to, until I lost the key.”

  “Your car?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Danny looked at Oshie. “You can take the boy out of the small town, but you can’t take the—”

  “Heart out of the tree,” Oshie finished.

  Danny refused to be puzzled. “So there you go, Ollie.”

  “We’ve got a few weapons on our side,” I said.

  Danny looked at me. “Such as?”

  “Time and money. I was going to take this season off anyway. And I’ve got enough money to buy or bribe the odd informant.” When Danny looked at me quizzically, I added, “Shrimping has been really good the last few years.”

  “And my aunt left me some money,” Oshie chimed in. And then looked away quickly before her face could give her away.

  “And we’ve got you, Danny,” I said. “You know your way around Ottawa. And now that you’re a private consultant, you know a wider range of people. And because you had the good sense to marry a cop, we’ve got access to the RCMP if we need them. By the way, how is Louise?”

  “Actually, that’s what I came to tell you. She’s been promoted to second in command of the Richmond detachment. We’ll be almost neighbors to you.”

  “Congratulations! That’s great news.” Oshie was really enthused about the idea of having more family close by.

  “I’m meeting her for lunch, so I should get going. Ollie, don’t make a move without talking to me.”

  “Okay, cuz.”

  When he’d gone Oshie came over and hugged me. “Do you feel bad about not watching Phil more closely when he was duplicating the tapes?”

  “I don’t know. He could have done it with me right across the table from him. All he had to do was pretend to press the Record button. All the other moves were the same as for tape number one.”

  “And you had no reason to distrust him.”

  “But I do now,” I said. “So what’s my plan?”

  Oshie started enumerating on her fingers. “Unfortunately, you’ll need to go back to Ottawa for all of this. Step one: talk to Dougie’s editor. He may have helpful information. And check Dougie’s work computer. Step two: check all of Dougie’s stuff in storage. His personal computer, papers, books—did he have a camera? Step three: when you have as much background info as possible, contact Cliff Ernhardt to
see if he’s the guy on the tapes. Step four: if Ernhardt is the guy, find out who his close associates are so you can meet them and identify the unknown voice. You’ll need some sort of cover for that. I wonder how Dougie did it. And step five: find Phil Davis and get the tapes back.” She paused for a second. “One other thing. You might want to contact that OPP cop who handled Dougie’s search and give him a heads-up that there’s a chance the disappearance wasn’t an accident. Just a chance, mind you. Something he can keep in the back of his mind in case anything strange comes up.”

  We stared at each other while I digested all this. “Not exactly my household to-do list,” I said. “I’ve never done anything even remotely like this.”

  “Ollie, in your job you operate independently. You assimilate information, form strategies and then catch things.”

  “Oshie, I catch shrimp, for Christ’s sake! I outsmart crustaceans. Now I’m going up against some of the smartest, smoothest operators in Canada.”

  “Dougie did it.”

  I stopped myself from saying, “And where’s Dougie now?”

  That evening I phoned Danny. “I’m flying to Ottawa tomorrow. I’ll need to talk to Ernhardt and a lot of his high-powered friends. Do you think if I took a few boxes of shrimp—humpbacks, of course—it would give me access to their hallowed halls?”

  “Worth a try. If that doesn’t work, being a newspaper reporter is a good cover. You can ask lots of questions. People may not answer, of course, but they won’t question your right to be there. Talk to Dougie’s editor. He might even be able to give you some help. And Danny, trust no one. If you need backup, I’m there in a flash.”

  “Okay, cuz. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Ren and Daiki were running around in their pajamas, and I watched them as they alternated between chaser and chasee. I’d always been the chaser. I hoped to keep it that way.

  Eventually they slowed down, and I caught them and put them to bed. They insisted on a story, so I sat on the floor between their beds and regaled them with the Finnish version of the Paul Bunyan stories: A skipper dropped his anchor, but it wouldn’t hold because there were so many halibut on the bottom. Then a giant halibut took the anchor like a fishhook and towed the boat all the way from Cape St. James to Knight Inlet. It was way too big to pull onto the boat, so they took it to the boatways at Minstrel Island. The crew managed to pull it up on the ways, but it was so big it sunk the island.