«Parlez-vous anglais?» he asked the driver.
The driver turned to look at him. “Un peu. Where you go?”
Adam made a circle with his hand. «Le Vieux Montréal.»
«Une tournée?»
“Not exactly. I’m looking for someone, but I don’t know her address.”
The driver frowned. “Then how we find her?”
“I know she works at a library.” Adam searched his brain for the French word. «Une bibliothèque.»
«Ah, une bibliothèque. Ou est-elle?»
Adam shrugged. «Dans le Vieux Montréal.»
The driver seemed to be getting interested in the quest. “Plenty bibliothèques in Old Montreal,” he said. “But, okay, we try.”
He stopped first at an old stone building wedged between a grocery store and a candy shop. «Une bibliothèque,» he said.
“Okay,” Adam said. “Wait here.”
He went in, hoping to see Colette shelving books. When there was no sign of her, he approached the elderly lady at the desk. «Parlez-vous anglais, madame?»
“But of course, young man,” she said, peering at him sternly over her glasses. “I’m a librarian, what do you expect?”
“Ah, pardon my ignorance,” Adam apologized. “I’m new here and I need help.”
Her gaze softened. “How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for a friend. She works part-time in a library, but I don’t know which one. Her name is Colette.”
“Colette.” She shook her head. “Sorry, no one of that name works here.”
Well, it was the first one he’d tried. He waited while the librarian checked out picture books for two young girls, who looked at Adam and giggled.
“Are there other libraries in this part of Montreal?” he asked.
The librarian nodded and wrote down several names and addresses. “You could try these.”
Adam got back in the cab and glanced at the meter. He’d managed to squeeze an advance on his pay out of the purser, but it wouldn’t last long at this rate. He showed the driver the addresses the librarian had given him.
The next stop also drew a blank, but at the following one, the librarian remembered a Colette who came in sometimes for books. But she didn’t work there. “This Colette is a fast reader,” the librarian said. “She says she’s read everything in the library where she works.”
“That’s her!” Adam said excitedly. “Did she say which library that was?”
The woman thought for a moment. “St. Margaret’s, I believe.” She looked up the address for him.
“Good luck,” she said as Adam thanked her and rushed out. The meter was ticking.
At St. Margaret’s, Adam hurried in and scanned the aisles, but there was no sign of Colette. The woman at the desk said that Colette had worked there part-time, but she’d phoned a few weeks ago to say she was going away for a while and another girl was taking her place.
“Could you give me her home address?” Adam asked.
The woman eyed him. “That would be most irregular,” she said.
“Her phone number then?”
She hesitated. “Well, I guess that would be all right.”
The taxi driver pulled up beside a phone booth, and Adam put in his nickel and dialed. He waited, praying he would hear Colette’s voice.
«Allô?» It was her mother.
Pulling out a handkerchief, he covered the receiver. “Could I speak to Colette, s’il vous plaît?” he said in a muffled voice. “It’s the library. I have a message for her.”
“Colette’s away.”
“When will she be back?”
“She didn’t say. Who is this?” she asked suspiciously.
Adam hung up.
Back at the pier, he handed the driver his week’s pay.
Will I ever see Colette again? he wondered. What could have happened to her?
TWENTY
As the Rapids Prince began the return trip to Prescott, Adam was gloomy.
“I was hoping Colette was the other person Lindsay saw leaving in the Packard,” he said to Scott. “But I guess she wasn’t.”
“Too bad Lindsay didn’t get a better look,” Scott agreed. “But, hey, look on the bright side. Maybe it was her.”
“Yeah, then why isn’t she home yet?”
Having no answer, Scott left to join the other deckhands to begin cleaning up the ship, readying it for the next load of passengers. Today, the deckhands had a new boss, and Scott didn’t want to be late.
Not much older than the deckhands he was now in charge of, the new boss, Charles, seemed older. Rumor had it he’d been with the army overseas, where he’d lost an arm below the elbow. Recovered from his wounds, he’d been honorably discharged back to Canada.
According to Bert, the helmsman and fountain of information, Charles had been a deckhand for a summer before the war. When he applied for his old job back, Captain Plum readily agreed, putting him in charge of the new student deckhands.
Now they were hard at work, scrubbing the decks for the next boatload of passengers to mess up. Watching Charles handle the hose, Scott marveled at how he was able to do as much with one arm as anyone else with two. He longed to ask him how he’d lost his arm, but thought Charles wouldn’t want to talk about it.
Mickey, one of the other deckhands, wasn’t so reticent. “Where were you when you were wounded?” he asked.
When Charles turned on the hose and began wetting down the deck, Scott thought he wasn’t going to answer. “Dieppe,” he finally said, in a clipped voice.
“Dieppe was the raid on Europe where everything went wrong for the Canadians, wasn’t it?” Mickey said.
“That’s about the size of it,” Charles answered.
“How come?” Mickey persisted.
Charles looked at him. “If you’d stop using that brush as a leaning post and start scrubbing with it, I’ll tell you.”
Mickey jumped to it, and Charles was as good as his word. “It was a mess from the start,” he began. “The raid had to be a surprise to succeed, but a patrol boat spotted our flotilla crossing the Channel. The Germans were ready for us. Just waiting.”
Charles stared at the canal. “It should have been canceled right then, or at least postponed, but Lord Mountbatten went ahead and ordered the troops in. Crazy. The shells were already bursting around us before our landing craft even got close to the beach. Half our guys were killed while we were still in deep water.”
“Jeez,” Mickey said, “and they never even made it to the beach?”
“Some beach!” Charles snorted. “More like an obstacle course – mostly pebbles polished by the sea. That was another thing the generals back in London forgot to tell us. You couldn’t run on the stuff, and our tanks just sat there, churning, the pebbles stuck in their tracks. We made easy targets.”
He turned the hose full blast on a nearby post as if it were one of those generals who sent them into this trap.
“Somehow I managed to make it to the shelter of a retaining wall. When I looked back, the German machine guns were having a field day. All I could see were bodies and burnt-out tanks. I recognized my best friend – his legs were missing. I would have gone back to help him, but I could tell he was dead.” Charles’ voice cracked.
Scott concentrated on obliterating a stubborn smudge on the deck, trying to dispel the grisly image.
After a moment, Charles continued, “Only a few of us managed to get back to the boats – that was when my arm was shattered by machine-gun bullets. But I am one of the lucky ones – I’m still alive. Most of the others were either dead or pinned down on the beach and had to surrender. I was with Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal, and we were one of the hardest hit. Of six hundred men, only a hundred and twenty-five of us made it back to England.”
There was silence.
Finally Mickey piped up, “Guess they’ll never try that again, eh? The generals, I mean.”
Charles bent down to straighten out the kinks in the hose. “Oh, the
y will soon enough. They have to, otherwise we’ll never liberate Europe. But the next landing will be different. I guess that’s what Dieppe came down to in the end – a learning experience. Even generals learn from their mistakes.”
Scott looked around. Everyone was busy scrubbing, heads down. We’re probably all wondering the same thing, he thought. How would we have done if we’d been the ones hitting that beach? Which we might well do in a few years’ time. But the way things are going in the Pacific, it might be a Japanese beach.
Until now, he couldn’t wait to join up. He still would, when the time came, but now he realized there was another side to war, not just adventure, the companionship of buddies, and the glamour of a uniform.
TWENTY-ONE
Colette was getting restless. It had been almost a week since they’d left the farmhouse in a rush and driven to the safe house, on a remote road north of Montreal. And Vandam still hadn’t shown up.
“I guess he isn’t coming,” she said. “I’d like to go home, Tyler. There isn’t even a phone here to call my mother. Can you drive me?”
“Not yet,” Twitch said. He wasn’t ready to give up. He’d heard the Chris-Craft cabin was found intact on the other shore and suspected his boss had survived. But he had no idea what Vandam’s plans were. Keep your mouth shut and obey orders was his credo. At least he hadn’t been fired for letting the prisoner escape.
For all Twitch knew, Vandam and the others were lying low in the United States until it was safe to come back. Then they’d finish what they had set out to do in Canada. “Wait a few more days,” he said to Colette.
He took a dish of food out for the guard dog and watched him gobble it up. “Good, eh, Pierre?” he said. He’d grown quite fond of the dog, not like at first, when he would drop the food in front of the dog and hurry back to the shelter of the farmhouse.
He wondered how long he could hold off taking the girl home. Once she told her mother what Vandam was up to, there’d be trouble. They might even go the police.
And what was he supposed to do with the Packard? Vandam and his high living! He couldn’t use an ordinary car, say a Ford or a Chevy. Oh, no, it had to be a fancy Packard Twelve Touring Sedan. “It’s part of my image as a wealthy patriot,” he remembered Vandam saying.
Before he got the job with Vandam, Twitch had been driving for the kingpin of a Montreal mob in the protection racket. It was a job he’d drifted into during the Depression, after losing his job as a security guard at the bank and searching in vain for similar work. Then, when the mobster he drove for was gunned down, he got hired by Vandam.
He knew Vandam was into something shady, too, and eventually came to realize what he and his followers were up to. He didn’t like it, but it was a job.
Lately, however, he’d begun to wonder if it was worth it. If it turns out they are planning to do real damage to the country’s war effort, he told himself, I’ll quit this business. My loyalty belongs to Canada, not to a bunch of Nazis.
When Pierre polished off his dish of food, Twitch reached down and stroked his head before returning to the house. Just as he reached the back door, the dog suddenly barked. He stopped and listened, aware of the dog’s supersensitive hearing.
It wasn’t long before he heard a car approaching. He tensed. The road was rarely used – there was just one other house and, after that, a dead end. He went around to the front to see who it was.
The car appeared in a swirl of dust. It was a taxi, and the passenger in the back stared at him as it went by. That made him uneasy. He watched until the taxi briefly disappeared around a bend. A few minutes later, it came back, empty.
Twitch had been told the house at the end of the road was unoccupied. He didn’t like the way the passenger had stared at him, so he lingered outside.
Soon a figure appeared on the road. The weather had cooled, and the rising mist and the rapidly descending darkness gave the approaching figure a phantomlike appearance. A phantom that walked with a limp. It came on, ignoring the barking dog. Twitch tensed and his hand tightened on his gun.
The figure stopped at the end of the driveway. “Hello, Twitch.”
The man had dusky skin and a mustache, and he wore a cap. Taking off one of his shoes, he shook out a pebble. “Hurts a bit, and it’s guaranteed to make you limp,” he said. “A pebble in the shoe, I mean.”
Twitch shifted nervously.
“Still don’t recognize me? It’s the skin dye and the mustache; the limp helps, too. Simple stuff, but it works. I was taught that in spy school, back in Germany. I didn’t have time to dye my hair, so I bought this to cover it.” He took off his cap, revealing his blond hair.
“Heinrik!” Twitch exclaimed. “I wondered who it was in the taxi. But why didn’t you get off here?”
“I didn’t want the driver to know where I was staying, so I had him drop me at the other house. I walked back – I can’t be too careful. What are my chances for a meal? I haven’t eaten all day. I was too busy on board the Rapids Prince.”
“Come on in,” Twitch said. “Colette will cook something for you.”
In the kitchen, Colette fried some sausages and potatoes while Heinrik and Twitch talked in the living room. She hadn’t recognized Heinrik at first either, until she took a closer look at those pale blue eyes and that tall lean build. Then, when he took his cap off, his hair gave him away.
Apparently his disguise had worked on the Rapids Prince, too, judging from what he was saying now. She strained to hear more.
“Vandam panicked,” he said. “He abandoned Operation Blockade and fled across the border when the hostage escaped. But I’m not one to flee at the first sign of trouble. I stayed to carry out my mission.”
Twitch said something about the risk he’d taken by boarding the Rapids Prince a second time, when there were many other ships that used the canal.
“Yes, but they’re freighters that take only cargo,” Heinrik said. “That’s why the Rapids Prince is so important to us. She takes passengers – as long as you’ve got money you can book a passage, no questions asked. So I disguised myself for the second trip.
“Mission accomplished, in any case,” he went on. “It’s just a matter of time now. The Rapids Prince‘s days are numbered. And when she goes down, she’ll take Allied shipping down with her.”
Colette’s blood ran cold.
“But I’ll be far away by the time that happens.
There’ll be a heck of a fuss over here. RCMP all over the place. I’d suggest you make yourself scarce, too, Twitch.”
TWENTY-TWO
Adam was leaning on the rail, watching the world go by and dreaming about Colette. They were steaming up the Soulanges Canal, en route back to Prescott. It was an easy time for him – no passengers to look after, only the officers to wait on.
The ship’s whistle let out a blast, making him jump. An approaching freighter gave a return blast and churned by, with only a few feet to spare in the narrow canal. The freighters were loaded with essential supplies – iron ore from Lake Superior, guns and tanks for the armies overseas, grain and beef to feed those armies.
Cars were going by on the highway, which ran alongside the canal. A family, picnicking on the grass, waved at Adam. As did a girl in a car traveling in the same direction as the ship. He waved back casually, but when she kept on waving and gesturing, he looked more closely.
With a start, he realized the car was the Packard Twelve Touring Sedan and the girl … can it be? He peered … yes, it’s her!
Adam waved frantically, jumping up and down in his excitement. The driver – he recognized Twitch at the wheel now – slowed down enough for the car to keep abreast of the ship.
Colette was pointing ahead. What is she trying to tell me? Scott would know.
He clambered down to the working deck where the deckhands were gathered, ready to moor the ship at the next lock.
Scott caught his friend’s frantic gesturing and came over. “Hey, what’s up, Adam?”
“
It’s Colette!” Adam could hardly contain himself. “She’s here!”
“She is?” Scott looked around. “Where?”
“No, no, not here. There.”
“You’re not making sense,” Scott said. “Calm down.”
Adam pointed toward the canal bank and grabbed his arm. “Come and see.”
On the deck above, he led Scott to the starboard rail. “There. In the Packard. See?” He stood back, beaming.
Scott looked. He’s gone bananas from worrying about Colette, he thought as he watched an old Model T Ford go by.
“I hate to tell you this, Adam, but that’s not the Packard.”
“What?” Adam looked. “That’s not the car. Colette was there, Scott, I swear! In the Packard, with Twitch at the wheel.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. She kept waving and pointing ahead, as if they were going somewhere and she wanted me to meet her there. What’s up ahead?”
“The first lock. It’s a mile or two yet.”
“Then that must be what she meant,” Adam said. “She’ll meet us at the lock. Just wait, you’ll see. I’m not crazy.”
Adam paced the deck. “Are we nearly there?” he asked for the third time, like a kid on a car trip.
“Patience. Won’t be long now,” Scott said.
Presently, the throb of the ship’s engines stopped, and the Rapids Prince slowed to a crawl. “There’s a ship in the lock,” Scott said, “and another waiting in line. We’ll have to wait our turn.”
“Blast,” Adam said. “You mean we have to sit here in the middle of the canal?”
“No, there’s a dock where we can tie up while we wait,” Scott said. “I have to go below now to get ready.”
As the ship glided towards the dock, Scott prepared to jump at just the right moment. He was used to it now – too soon and you risked falling in between the ship and the dock; too late and the ship drifted away.
The instant the Rapids Prince nudged the dock, Scott leapt off and ran to catch the lightweight line that Charles threw him from the bow. He hauled on it until the heavy mooring line it was attached to appeared, like a monster from the deep. Dragging it to the nearest post, he dropped the loop over it. Charles winched in the line until the bow was secured.
Man Overboard! Page 8