The Fourth Betrayal

by Bruce Burrows

  I thought a moment and was rewarded with a flash of inspiration. “Test for aconite. It’s a Chinese poison. Affects the heart.”

  “I’ll pass that along. It could be one more nail in their coffin.”

  The next day the warriors continued to gather. The burly brown-skinned men who were the first to inhabit this misty green land and the small brown-skinned men who were the first to seine herring in these waters, blond Finns with shoulders like plow handles, Norwegian halibut fishermen with hands like meat hooks, two second-row forwards with legs like tree trunks, the men of axe and chainsaw, east-coasters who had no love for the interior flatlanders, bearded behemoths of uncertain origin, and a skeletal mute wearing abalone-shell earrings. No one was sure who he was. It was thought that he might be somebody’s cousin. But he exuded a commendable fierceness, so he was in.

  The Barely Brothers were appointed to the transportation committee, meeting planes and buses and ferry boats and driving people to the Richmond Inn. They appointed themselves to the entertainment committee and exceeded their budget in an astonishingly short time.

  While the clans gathered, Danny and I drew up battle plans. Tap Dickens and Crude Operations presented two obvious targets. They had an office tower in downtown Calgary, but I didn’t think that terrorizing a bunch of accountants and assistant assistants would accomplish much. The pipelines seemed a more strategic target, and much more vulnerable.There were several of them, but they all converged in one area. If the beast had a heart, this was it: the Dragline Valley, in Suckless County. We would strike there.

  On a day that dawned like any other day, but a day upon whose record would be written tales of valor and deeds of destiny, our united clans began their journey to glory. We flew to Calgary and boarded four specially fitted-out tour buses.

  As we sped along the highway, the vast emptiness mocked our sense of motion. But eventually the landscape began to change. Grain fields gave way to arid nothingness. Flare stacks belched flames with a constant, numbing roar. What withered shrubs that could be seen were surely dead, killed by the nauseating fumes that crept over the land like evil itself.

  We stopped on a low rise overlooking the Dragline Valley, and Danny and I walked ahead to reconnoiter. We stood on the hot, dusty road and looked down into the enemy stronghold. Pipelines snaked all across the valley bottom. They joined with other pipelines, twisting into complexes of smaller pipes and vents that passed into the shelter of metal-roofed buildings before disappearing into the earth again. The air thrummed with a constant rhythmic beat, so low-pitched it might have come from the tortured earth itself. Men entered and left the windowless buildings in a ceaseless scurry.

  Three of the buildings bore the imprint of the enemy: Crude Operations Inc. I gripped the shoulder of my lieutenant and said, “We strike there and there and there.”

  We strode back to the buses and mustered the troops. Dividing our forces into three battalions, I placed Wall to Wall in charge of one, Danny in charge of another, and I took command of the last. “Men,” I said, “today we strike at the Dark Lord who has threatened our families, our friends, and our neighbors, all of the gentle people of the coast. We strike at he who threatens us with a black poison that will choke our waterways and kill our fish and pollute our land. We must show him our strength, demonstrate to him that the power of the people of the earth is greater than the power of the people of the money. Let us be fearless and resolute and ever mindful of the effectiveness of a punch in the mouth.” That was my internal speech. What I said out loud was, “You all know what to do. Let’s do it.”

  The three battalions filed into three of the buses, leaving the fourth by the side of the road, and with rousing cheers emboldening our spirits, we swept down into the fearsome valley. The three targets were not more than a quarter of a mile apart. My bus stopped in front of the first building and waited until the other two buses were positioned in front of their objectives. We launched our attacks simultaneously.

  There were only two workers inside the building when we burst through the door. They looked up in alarm as twenty strangers crowded into the machinery-filled space. The machines were big but less complicated than the engine room of a seine boat. There were pipes, primary and bypass, there were valves, and there were pumps. If I’d wanted to be really nasty, I could have closed the valves without shutting off the pumps and probably burned out the pumps. But being Mr. West Coast Sweetheart, I located the kill switch and shut off the pumps. The two workers protested loudly, but Johnny Hanuse told them to shush so they shushed.

  A nerve center somewhere sensed the pressure drop. Alarms sounded, and a number of clipboard-carrying importantistas converged on the scene. When they were refused access, the fight began. Most of my troops had moved outside the engine room and that is where they intercepted workers hurrying to fix the problem, so that is where the battle raged.

  Raged is a relative word. The level of violence was somewhere between that of a hockey scrum and a rugby scrum. I saw no ears bitten off, but blows were being struck and blood was being shed, although many of the silver-hatted roughnecks contented themselves with yelling and arm waving and barroom posturing.

  Johnny Hanuse, however, was having none of that. He had engaged a much larger Silver Hat and opened his eyebrow with a left hook. The Silver Hat grappled defensively, so Johnny drove his head into the guy’s nose. It was brutal and bloody, but oh so effective.

  His nephew Simon was in trouble. He’d slipped and gone down and was desperately using his arms to fend off kicks aimed at his head. Before I could get there, Johnny did, and the kicker found himself with a severely restricted airway. I got there in time to save the guy’s life by reminding Johnny that you didn’t kill slaves—unless, of course, they were terminally disrespectful.

  Someone caught me with a blow to the ear. It stung. I turned to face the guy, and he attempted to dazzle me with an array of feints and head fakes. I crouched, took one step forward and exploded upwards with my right forearm. His lower jaw crumpled like papier-mâché, and I realized why the forearm shiver has been expunged from the NFL. Unfortunately for my opponent, this wasn’t the NFL, and whatever consciousness he may have possessed was severely depleted.

  Amid the melee, the dance of angry men, the mute with the abalone-shell earrings flitted purposefully about like a melody in counterpoint. He touched no one but affected many. Dougie would have appreciated the strange beauty of it.

  I quickly turned a full circle, checking for incoming. I was under no immediate threat, so I looked across at the other two targets. I could make out lots of activity but couldn’t tell who was who or what was what or even why.

  I became aware of a shrill keening, which gradually grew louder, and I fancified that Mother Nature herself was crying out. But it was only the sound of two black-and-white vehicles that bore members of the law-and-order tribe. One of them had a bullhorn, which he used to shout over all the other noise, ordering us to stop fighting, which, after a time, we did. Then began the accusations and counter-accusations, and the law-and-order tribe could make no sense of it. I stayed out of the way, biding my time until Dickens appeared.

  In a trice (for some reason I had lapsed back into my interior monologue), the Dark Lord appeared. Borne in a flame-red chariot, he dismounted and strode toward us, his countenance radiant with anger. He stopped and stood before us, terrible in the uniform of the enemy: cowboy boots, tight jeans, cowboy hat, and fluorescent silk shirt. He spoke slowly, in a voice vibrating with malignancy. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”

  “Hi, Tap. We’re inspecting your pipelines.”

  “You have no right to be here. Get off my property. Now!”

  I waved a piece of paper at him that I’d typed up that morning. “Tap, my colleague’s company, Good Enough Repairs—motto: If it ain’t broke, give us a call—has been awarded the contract to inspect this pipeline.”

  Dickens was quivering with rage. “Bullshit! Bullshit! Fucking bullshit
!”

  “Tap,” I said, “am I to infer that you believe there’s been some kind of mistake? Good gracious. You know what? I’ll phone head office. Maybe they’ll get back to us by tomorrow.”

  The minions of law and order, sensing that this was essentially a civil matter, and not really wanting to do the paperwork for over a hundred participants in an oil-field brawl, quietly withdrew.

  Tap began to stamp on the ground with one cowboy boot, leaving little dimples in the baked clay. “I’ll sue your asses off. I’ll get every dime you have or ever will have.”

  “Actually, Tap, Good Enough Repairs is a limited company with limited assets. But if you forced us out of business, it would be a tragedy. One and a half people would lose their jobs.”

  Dickens seemed tired now. He spoke in a quiet voice. “Swanson, every day this pipeline is shut down, it costs me three-point-seven million dollars. I know we’ve had our differences in the past. I can be a bit of a hard-ass, but you’ve got to get that oil flowing again.”

  “Differences, Tap? Differences? Aside from you torturing and killing a colleague of mine, and then you trying to kill my wife and family, what differences could we possibly have?” I was suddenly tired of playing games. “Pay attention, you reject from an asshole factory. The two thugs that you and Chen sent to kill me and my family? We picked them off like turkeys frozen in a pond. They’re in jail. We’ve got Novi definitely for the Trimmer killing. He’s going to roll over on Sonny Feng, Feng is going to roll over on Mr. Chen, and Mr. Chen is going to roll over on you. That’s the way it works in the wonderful world of thuggery. As far as the Ottawa branch of Corruption R Us, I’ve got enough on them to put most of them in jail and all of them out of business. And see this little army I’ve raised? I can come back next week with twice as many, and the week after that with twice as many again. So. You want to keep butting heads or what?”

  He looked skyward for a long moment but could find nothing that denied his defeat. Or, for that matter, that imagined his fate. “You win. You win. What the hell do you want?”

  “I want Chen for organizing the murder of Trimmer. And I want whoever killed Gerry Steadman. If it wasn’t you, it was one of the Committee. Who?”

  Dickens was defeated and desperate. “I’ll give you Chen, but you better move fast or he’ll be gone. As for the Steadman killing, I’d never even heard his name before he was killed. And you’re not going to like this, but unless the Chairman and those guys are running a con on me, they have no idea who killed him either. But listen, you want one of those guys gone, I’ll do it. You want to organize some kind of frame, I’m in. Anything to get you off my back.”

  This was not what I had expected to hear, and I had to think carefully. “Okay, I need whatever leverage you can give me on the Chairman. Anything. There must be lots of dirt that would hurt him if it ever became public.”

  Dickens was puppylike in his eagerness. “That’s easy. Three years ago, I gave him inside information on a certain oil stock just before the company released a geological report on its latest drilling. When the report came out, the stock went through the roof, but Salinger had got in at thirty-six cents a share. A year later, the company released another report that confirmed the oil was there but in relatively small amounts. The stock went through the floor, but I’d warned Salinger and he got out at the peak.”

  “And you can document this?”

  “Everything. I’ve got about twenty messages back and forth. I made sure I saved them. Plus I can tell you exactly where to find Salinger’s buy/sell records.”

  I asked, “Where’s the computer this stuff is on?”

  “It’s on my laptop, in my truck.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Swanson, I can’t give you my laptop. It’s got my contacts, my schedule, my business—my whole life is on there.”

  I made myself sound impatient. Maybe I actually was. “Tap, you’re arguing with me. Do you really think you’re in a position to argue with me? I was going to copy the hard drive and send it to you, but now maybe I won’t. Just get me the fucking laptop.” Which he did. And I was not unaware of the fact that the material he had given me to implicate Salinger would implicate him in the same crime. Knowledge is power, and incriminating knowledge is absolute power, and absolute power is, well, pretty fucking cool.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s Salinger. How do we nail Chen?”

  “Search his house. He’s got more of that Chinese poison. And you should be able to trace the ten grand a month that Chen was paying Sonny Feng. That’s pretty good wages for a chauffeur. And I’m not worried about him ratting me out. His bosses still need me.”

  “All right, Tap. Me and my trusty band of misfits will go back to where the air’s breathable and people are pleasant. And we’ll stay there as long as you’re a good boy. You see how easy life is when you cooperate?”

  I waved to my guys and we got back on the buses. Or rather, we withdrew from the field of battle, exulting that valor had led to victory and the vanquished were scattered before us like dust before a mighty wind. I called Stala and give him the lowdown on Chen. I hoped Stala’s Calgary counterparts were as efficient as he was and would move quickly, before Chen fled to the land of no extradition.

  When we got to the Calgary airport, I entrusted Dickens’s laptop to Danny, because I would be flying on to Ottawa for what I hoped would be my final meeting with the Chairman, Paul Salinger.

  I got to Ottawa at ten that night and thought, What the hell, the danger’s over now. I could get a hotel room like a normal person. But something, maybe nostalgia, urged me to take a cab to my old hideout.

  When I opened the door to the basement suite, the first thing I saw was Dougie’s old dirt bike propped up in the kitchen. It was a reminder that so far I had failed in my primary mission, which was to find Dougie’s killer. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. Dougie had had a plan, some weird plan that involved faking his disappearance on Canoe Lake, then trying to frame Ernhardt for stealing a million dollars, then asking for a quarter million to keep quiet about it. And all this time he was gathering information that enabled him to write a newspaper story that would have blown Ottawa apart—a story that never got published. I had known Dougie so well that I should have been able to figure out his most devious plan, but I couldn’t figure out this one. I fell asleep wishing I could talk to Dougie just like in the old days.

  And in my dreams, I did. He was standing with his back to me in the middle of a room. He turned slowly until he was facing me, and I could see his shirt was covered with blood. He stared at me with a fierce intensity, then gestured to a typewriter in front of him. I felt dread rising like a cold winter tide as Dougie began to type furiously. Then he began to talk. I couldn’t make him out at first because he was mumbling, but then he began to shriek one word, over and over again. “Betrayal. Betrayal. Betrayal!” He ripped the paper out of the typewriter and held it out to me, but I couldn’t reach it. I tried desperately to move forward, to reach out and grasp the paper, but I was bound by a creeping paralysis. Then Dougie began to recede from me. I told him to wait, wait for me, but no sound came out of me. Then he disappeared into the darkness and I was alone and crying.

  I jerked awake with dread running through my veins. Jesus Christ! What was that all about? I was too far from home and too alone and too bloody stupid to solve my friend’s murder. It was 7:00 AM. I got up and showered and then drank coffee while watching the morning news. At eight I left the place for the last time. I went around to the front and knocked on the landlord’s door.

  When he came to the door, I handed him the key and told him I’d been transferred out west. “By the way,” I said, “I left my old dirt bike in the kitchen. Do what you want with it. I won’t need it anymore.”

  I walked east for a while until I found a breakfast joint. I dawdled over steak and eggs until nine thirty, then called a cab and went to meet the Chairman. Paul Salinger’s “consulting company” was so exclusive that the
address wasn’t listed anywhere. But Stala had given it to me, and the cab dropped me in front of a glossy tower that shone with an aura of money and power and complacent blessedness.

  I went up to the fifteenth floor and opened the door of Salinger and Associates just in time to see Alex Porter leaving. “Alex,” I said. “Surprised to see you here.”

  He looked a little guilty and muttered something about covering all the bases. He didn’t linger to chat. The receptionist was dressed in a pearl-gray power suit and could have passed for vice-president of a lesser firm. When I told her I wanted to see Salinger, she looked politely doubtful and murmured that he was frightfully busy. “Tell him that Ollie Swanson is here.”

  He apparently became less busy, because after a short consultation with him, the receptionist led me into his office. It was a corner room, of course, and had a great view of the Ottawa River, if you liked looking at the Ottawa River. The furniture was expensive and the accoutrements were tasteful and the whole place made me feel sick. Salinger regarded me from behind a beautiful desk that had probably been carved from the last old-growth teak tree to be wrenched from the Amazon jungle. “What is it now, Swanson?”

  I swept all the papers and pictures and assorted decorations off his desk and then sat in the space I’d cleared. “I just wanted to tell you that I haven’t succeeded in pinning Steadman’s murder on any of you guys, but I’m not giving up. I’m just putting it on the back burner for a while. But there’s another issue. A reporter named Dougie Tarkenen ended up with tapes of all the conversations between you and Gerry Steadman. Tarkenen used the material from the tapes, did a bunch more research, tied a whole lot of pieces together and wrote a story that will put several of your committee members in jail and embarrass the rest of you into retirement. Ernhardt’s friend, Lou Bernier, killed the story and then Tarkenen went missing. However, I now have the story, and I’ll go public with it unless you agree to kill this oil deal you’re working on with Dickens. Stop harassing the bureaucrats, turn loose the politicians you’ve bought, and tell Ernhardt to can the propaganda campaign. You’re going to lose the bet you made with Gerry Steadman, even though he’s dead. I don’t want Alberta oil flowing through BC.”