by Ron Corbett
Kurtz leaned into a microphone sitting on his desk and said, “You can start.”
There was apathy in the faces of the miners as they stripped. They took off their workboots first and placed them in a plastic tub. Each man had a tub. Then they unzipped their overalls, let them slide off their backs, kicked them free, and put these also in the tub.
“We keep close track of each worker’s clothes. All their possessions, actually. There is no overlap. Nothing is missed.”
When the workers were naked, Kurtz leaned back into the microphone and said, “The screen please.”
The men lined up in front of a full-body scanning machine, the kind of x-ray machine they have in airports. The men waited, and one by one they went behind the screen. Security guards tapped keys on their computers, looked up as the men turned, bent over, sometimes asking them to bend again, sometimes asking them to step out from the screen and then back, peering closely into their computer monitors after each command.
“If one of our workers gets a kidney stone,” Merkel said with a smile, “we will be the first ones to know.”
Yakabuski looked at the workers and tried to ignore the bile rising in his stomach. Looked at them as they stripped and bent and got computer examined by people in crisp white clothing who never had to bend, never had to be examined, who flew in and out of Cape Diamond on two-week shifts and who would be gone from this place as soon as the diamonds were gone, to go someplace else, to sit behind other two-way mirrors, in the same crisp white clothing, watching the next wave of local workers strip and bend.
Yakabuski could understand someone wanting to steal from bastards like that. Now, how were they doing it?
. . .
After seeing the staging area atop the mineshaft, Merkel took Yakabuski to the warehouse, where both a security official and a woman from the company’s accounting department were waiting for them. The security guard explained how the diamonds were transported from the mine to the warehouse. The accountant explained how the gems were inventoried, an elaborate cataloguing system that made Yakabuski’s head swim. The woman went on to say she personally oversaw the daily inspection of the diamonds in the warehouse, making sure each gem matched the original intake documents.
“I haven’t lost one yet,” she said, and everyone standing with Yakabuski broke into laughter. After the warehouse, Merkel took him back to the airport terminal and into the departure lounge, which had a room identical to the screening room atop the mineshaft.
“There are no flights leaving tonight, so I can’t show you how it operates, but it’s the same drill as the staging area,” said Merkel. “All the workers need to pass through here when they leave. They’re allowed one checked bag and no carry-on. All sorts of complaints about that, but if you want to work here, there’s no carry-on. And no complaining about the checked bag.”
“What would they be complaining about?”
“Well, we just destroy those bags. After a while people figure it out. No lining. No outside pockets. The best thing to have, really, is a duffel bag.”
. . .
At 10:35 p.m. John Merkel and Frank Yakabuski sat in a deserted cafeteria in a large corrugated metal building next to the terminal, coffee cups in front of them. The plane was being refuelled. It was scheduled to take off at 11 p.m. They were the only two in the cafeteria, which had tables spread out like classroom rows that could probably seat two hundred men. The only light in the room came from a row of vending machines on the left wall and two panels of fluorescent lights directly above their table.
“So, Detective Yakabuski, do you still think that diamond of yours was stolen from us?” asked Merkel, tilting his hard hat back on his head but not taking it off.
“Given the history of the victim, I have trouble believing anything else,” he answered. “He was a man who rarely bought things. He preferred to take them.”
“He was a criminal?”
“The former head of a gang in Springfield called the Shiners. An Irish gang. Been around nearly two hundred years. Yes, he was a criminal.”
“Well, I can understand your suppositions then. You’re thinking this man stole the diamond from its rightful owner?”
“I’m thinking he stole it from you.”
“I have just shown you that is an impossibility.”
“Some people say the same thing about life on this planet. Did you know that, Mr. Merkel?”
The general manager looked at Yakabuski but didn’t speak and so he continued.
“Some supercomputer at UCLA has run the math, and the odds of human life evolving on this planet, the things that had to line up, at just the right time, at just the right place, the odds are about the same as a sea bass jumping in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and getting its snout caught in a plastic ring that someone had just tossed there. We would call that a statistical impossibility. Yet here we are.”
Merkel chuckled and tilted the hard hat back a little further. “That would seem to be a stronger argument for religion, Detective Yakabuski, than it is for stealing diamonds.”
“For some people, maybe they’re the same thing. Have you heard of a man named Gabriel Dumont?”
“He filed a land claim against us last year. Our lawyers are dealing with it.”
“He lives in a house about ten miles from here.”
“Halfway between Fort Francis and the reserve. I know where it is. He claims to be some sort of Métis leader. Our lawyers aren’t taking his claim very seriously.”
“He’s not just Métis, he’s a Traveller. A North Shore Traveller.”
“You believe that?” said Merkel, a surprised look coming to his face. “Our security people looked into Dumont when he filed the claim, and they tell me those are folk tales. That’s funny — you won’t believe me when I tell you we haven’t been robbed, but you believe there are ghost gypsies on the Northern Divide. Why is that?”
Yakabuski didn’t answer right away. He was thinking about the miners in the staging area. Remembering the insolent slouch to their bodies when they pulled up their overalls, the eyes that never blinked, looking right at the security mirror, the lazy-dog shuffle out of the staging area. No talking, no sign of camaraderie between them. Although the men had gone through their paces with the fatigued precision of a light infantry company marching away from a battlefield. A group of men that could work together and keep a secret.
“Maybe ghost gypsies are easier to believe than perfect security protocols,” he said. “Tell you the truth, Mr. Merkel, they’re a whole lot easier.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The night sky was awash with stars when the plane took off for the return trip to Springfield. There was almost as much light on the ground: De Kirk was running three shifts, not enough hours in the day to pull out all the diamonds the company had found. There was the white glare of halogen floodlights ringing the fence around the perimeter, the headlights of trucks travelling down the service roads, and earth-moving machines lumbering around the silos. Lights were turned on in every bunkhouse. Floodlights were aimed at the warehouse. A shoal of false light, on a peninsula jutting far into the Francis River.
When they had flown far enough away, the light on the ground faded and new light appeared. An arc of rose, purple, and yellow light that shone over the plane like a nighttime rainbow. The shimmering hues of the Northern Lights. So close it seemed as though the light were flying beside the plane, so palpable it seemed as though you could find a spot on the ground and sit dead centre beneath it.
In thirty minutes the plane lost sight of the Northern Lights and was travelling over the southern tip of the Great Boreal Forest, a swath of black-loam darkness without roads or towns, people or commerce. Yakabuski stared at the ground a long time and after a while thought he could pick out differences in the darkness, in the shading and texture. Perhaps he was looking at a river. Or a range of glacier-stunted mo
untains. Nothing man-made. Could not be anything man-made in that great pan of unexplored blackness beneath the plane.
Land was a funny thing on the Northern Divide. You could travel across ten thousand hectares of land no one wanted to own or live upon, and then you stumble upon a place like Cape Diamond, where civilization did a parachute drop of everything civilization valued: money, commerce, settlement.
Except for these rare occasions of interest, ownership of land on the Northern Divide was an exercise of the imagination. Yakabuski had an uncle who died several years back, and in his will he left his one-hundred-acre family farm to his grandson. But when the grandson went to get the land surveyed, thinking he would divide it into lots, he learned his grandfather only held a deed for four acres. The family had been swindled by the first railway agent who sold them the land. They had lived there for 150 years and no one had caught the mistake.
The only time land on the Divide had been coveted was in the heyday of square-timber, when any man holding timber rights could make a fortune selling pine to the British Royal Navy. The richest men in the British Empire, for half-a-century, were lumbermen from the Springfield Valley and the Northern Divide. The Shiners had their start back then, Irish labourers who couldn’t find their way home and couldn’t find work during the economic recession of the 1830s. Under the leadership of Peter Aylin, an Irishman with timber rights in the Upper Springfield Valley, the labourers learned how to rob a bush camp and set a timber crib afire, how to weigh down a man’s body so he’d never be found if you threw him downriver from the Kettle Falls. The Shiners were running Springfield when the police arrived in 1847, their competitors fled from the city, travelling with their families upriver, where they hid in an abandoned seigneur estate with good battlements and escape tunnels leading north to the unincorporated townships.
Those were dark days on the Northern Divide. At night, people who had to journey through the region never strayed far from their fires; during day, they travelled in haste through the pine forests, anxious to be rid of this wild country, with its rolling mist and raging rivers, its night birds that swooped above their heads when they tried to sleep, the caves where old men lived, with long beards that hid everything but their eyes, which looked down on the world with fear and covetousness over clay pipes that burned in the night like fireflies.
No one knows how many people were killed in those years. Before Aylin was hunted down and executed. Before the rest of the Shiner leadership was rounded up and sent to the Perth Penitentiary. There were no newspapers back then. No civic records other than the allotting of timber rights and the selling of Crown land. It was a wide-open town. Four years ago, a mass grave was found near an old O’Hearn bush camp, thirteen men in the grave, all still clothed, workboots on their feet. Each had an axe stroke in the middle of their skull.
Trees had done that to people. Lumber, timber, forestry products, call it whatever you wanted to call it — you were still talking about trees. That’s all it ever was. But for a brief while that’s what people coveted and that’s what the land held, so people became rich, people were killed, and history was written.
A land that held diamonds? It seemed to Yakabuski that was just asking for trouble.
. . .
An hour outside of Springfield, the pilot motioned for Yakabuski to come up to the cockpit.
“I’ve got a call from Chief O’Toole,” she said, passing Yakabuski a set of headphones. “I’ve already given him an ETA of 1:45. If he asks, we can’t make it any faster than that.”
“You expecting him to ask?”
“He sounds a little agitated.”
She smiled and passed Yakabuski her headset, flashed a sarcastic thumbs up. Good luck, buddy. Yakabuski put on the headset and pushed the button the pilot was pointing at.
“Chief, it’s Yak.”
“Yak, how far out are you?”
“Little more than an hour. Pilot says we’ll be on the ground at 1:45.”
“Can she get here any faster than that?”
“I don’t think so. Why, what’s happening?”
“The Shiners have struck back. I must have twenty patrol cars on the North Shore right now, and it’s not going to be enough. A bunch of them headed up there after the wake for Augustus. Just started beating on people. Like the old days.”
“Is Morrissey up there?”
“We think so. We’ve got a bunch of them trapped in the service road that runs between Buildings A and B. We think he’s in that group. But there are still a lot of them roaming around up there, so I don’t know. We’re going to have to tear gas the whole bluff to see what we’ve got.”
Yakabuski looked at the darkness below him. The world seemed calm from up here. He wondered why he had never thought of becoming a pilot.
“There’s something else, Yak. You know that Traveller you’ve been interviewing? The one with the brasserie on Tache?”
“Tete Fontaine?”
“We found his body fifteen minutes ago. He was hanging from that fence at Filion’s Field.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
They sat at a picnic table in Shawnee National Forest, playing cards. A retired machinist from San Bernardino, his wife, and the driver of a campervan with Texas plates.
The couple had arrived late to their campsite, pulling in after dark and then having trouble setting up the awning on their fifth-wheel. So much trouble Cambino, parked on the campsite next to them, had felt obligated to offer assistance. To do nothing would seem strange.
“This is the third night I’ve tried to set this thing up,” said the retired machinist, who was wearing a Boeing Aerospace ball cap and would have been in his seventies. “If it don’t get any easier, I’m throwing the gang-dang thing in the river.”
“It’s probably easier with two people,” said the man who had come to help.
“It’s a whole lot easier. Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
It took them ten minutes. Afterwards, the old man insisted on pouring drinks, to toast their success. His wife had already brought out a cooler and put it under the awning, along with a bottle of gin, a bottle of tonic, a bag of ice, and a stack of red plastic beer cups. They sat together at the picnic table.
“I was planning on being here three hours ago,” the man said. “But there was some silly flea market Louise had to go to.”
“I didn’t hear you complaining when you bought that Hank Snow album,” said his wife, who smiled at Cambino over the brim of her red plastic cup. An old woman nursing her first gin and tonic of the day. Her smile was beatific.
“I forgot about that. I should put that record on. It’s been years since I’ve heard Hank Snow. I’ll get us some fresh drinks while I’m up.”
Cambino tried to beg off, but the couple insisted and he decided it was safer to stay. Surely they would be passed out before long. When the retired machinist brought the drinks, he also brought a deck of cards and a cribbage board. “Do you play?” he asked, and Cambino said yes, he knew how to play. The man dealt the cards as his wife got the board ready. From the fifth-wheel came the sound of Hank Snow singing “Miller’s Cave.” They sat by a campfire Cambino had started, the machinist saying he had never seen a man do it any better.
“So what sort of work do you do in Chicago?” he asked, peering over his glasses to take a look at his cards.
“I’m a facilitator. I help with labour disputes, corporate reorganizations. That sort of work.”
“Where you from originally?”
“Many places. My family moved around.”
“Just like mine. My dad was in the army. Were you an army brat?”
“Yes. I suppose I was.”
After the first game, the old man suggested they start playing a nickel a point. He was on his third gin and tonic and insistent. Cambino said all right. They played for ninety minutes, which was a ridicul
ous amount of time to give the old man, who seemed smart and observant and for some reason, nowhere close to being drunk.
It happened finally when the old man was down two dollars and seventy cents. Not that this equated to the value of his life. Just something Cambino later remembered. The old man was down two dollars and seventy cents when it happened.
“Chicago,” he said. “My brother used to live there. Right near the zoo. Do you ever go to that zoo?”
“Not that much.”
“It’s a beautiful zoo. Last time we went, though, they wanted an arm and a leg to get in. We didn’t bother. It’s a shame.”
“It is a beautiful zoo. And it’s a shame they charge so much.”
The woman started to laugh.
“You two are so full of shit,” she said. “You’re thinking of the Los Angeles zoo, dear. When your brother lived in Los Angeles. Not Chicago. I don’t think the Chicago zoo even charges admission.”
The old man cocked his head for a moment, then snapped his fingers and said, “Dang, you’re right, mother. It was Los Angeles.”
He turned to look at Cambino. Not in a suspicious way. Not in a mistrusting way. Merely a curious way.
“Is there an admission fee at the Chicago zoo?”
Cambino looked into the old man’s eyes and knew it was over. No matter what he said, the man’s curiosity would soon turn to suspicion. After that, mistrust. Later that night, when they were alone in their fifth-wheel, the couple would start to think it was strange, a single man travelling alone in a campervan. Before long Cambino would seem more Mexican to them than American. They would talk and talk, in the way of old people, and when the sun rose, they would be convinced there was something wrong with him. He would be reported to a park ranger as they drove away. The ranger would most likely ignore the old fools, but you never knew. And it didn’t matter. Cambino was finished gambling for the night.
