The Cooperman Variations

by Howard Engel

  When I got the chance, I wondered out loud about their presence on the lake. “Isn’t there a need for both of you to be elsewhere? Aren’t the boardrooms and the sound stages crying out ‘Where are they?’”

  “Let ’em holler,” said Peggy, and Hamp grinned his endorsement. “We both worked flat out this winter, Benny. I did two movies, back to back, no rest in between. And Hamp has been trying to step back and let his organization run things. What’s the use of setting up a big structure if you don’t stand back and see whether it works or not? Oh, I’ve brought up a few scripts with me, but, to be honest, I haven’t read one of them. Hamp sometimes reaches for one of his boxes, but he knows better than to do it when I’m around.”

  “You see the tyranny I live under, Mr. Cooperman. Not a minute to call my own.”

  “But you have had time to do some scuba diving, I understand.”

  “Not this year. Last year’s experience rather spoiled it for me. Oh, I’ve made a few small dives, just enough to keep the McCordick brothers happy. I get my diving gear from them over in Bala. But last spring, at the end of April, I dived a wreck here on the lake.”

  “The only wreck I know about is the S.S. Waome, which sank coming out of Port Carling in the mid-1930s.”

  “That’s the one! She sank in a freak squall in the fall of 1934. It was like a water spout. Came out of nowhere. Waome heeled over to port, water rushed in through the mooring chocks. She lies in eighty feet of water. I’ve seen her. By the end of the summer, I expect there will be few serious divers who haven’t seen her.”

  “Why all the interest?” I wondered out loud.

  “I expect it has to do with Dermot Keogh’s death. There are morbid sensation hunters even among skilled scuba divers, Ben.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “She looked a lot like the Segwin that still plies the lake. But Waome was built with big glass windows and large freight doors close to the waterline. When the squall heeled her over, the water rushed in faster than I can tell it. Three were lost, the captain suffered a heart attack, the rest of the crew swam to a nearby island. In the summer, the steamship would have had twenty, maybe fifty passengers, but this was early October, so there was only one. One of the ship’s officers, a man named Thompson, tried to rescue him from the saloon, but the door was closed on them by the water and both were trapped. The company called on divers from Prescott, on the St. Lawrence, to get the bodies. When I saw her, she was still in one piece, lying right side up. Hadn’t let the cold, dark waters break her up.”

  “Was Dermot Keogh on that dive?”

  “It was his idea. We planned the dive summer before last when Peggy and I were staying with him, while we were looking for a place last summer.”

  “It was horrible,” said Peggy. “I get goosebumps just thinking about it. We had to go to a hotel in Bracebridge, just to get away from the media. Some holiday.”

  “Were you in the water with him when it happened?” I watched Hamp Fisher look straight at me, as though he was trying to figure out how much of this I wanted to hear. Then he looked away in the direction of the funnel and sipped his Perrier.

  “Dermot was a good diver for an amateur,” he said. “He had been checked out on all of the equipment we took with us. The McCordick brothers know their equipment and are careful who they rent it to. I hadn’t leased Wanda III yet, so we were using a Sea Ray 200 with two inflatable rafts. There were six of us: two to stay topside and four divers. Dermot and I were teamed up, and Jeff Hetherington and Penny Freeman were buddies.”

  “She’s about five seven,” contributed Peggy, “with short brown hair. She still has traces of an English accent after thirty years in Canada.” I nodded to show that I was appreciative of the details.

  “Hetherington is a young fellow we met that summer,” Hamp said. “He’s a student, or was one, in Niagara Falls. We met him at the marina when I was renting the Sea Ray. He had learned scuba diving on a holiday in Belize, but hadn’t tried Lake Muskoka yet.”

  “I met Penny just about where I met you this afternoon, Benny. My shopping bag split and I had apples and lemons rolling all over the asphalt. She repacked her things and gave me one of her plastic bags and helped me load up the car. I brought her back for drinks. She learned her scuba diving in Alberta of all places.” Peggy was smiling at the memory.

  “So, the four of you were pretty experienced?”

  “I don’t know whether Penny or Jeff had ever worked at that depth or had to carry their own lights before. The waters near the reefs off Belize are very clear, Ben. You can see for miles. But here. Ha! It’s black as deep outer space down there.”

  “How did you know where to dive?”

  “The wreck’s had a buoy marking the spot for years now. Once we’d tied the boat and the rafts together, we lowered a long anchor line as well. We used the rope attached to the marker as our guide rope. Again, I can’t emphasize the blackness of this water once you get down a few feet.”

  “And Dermot Keogh was okay all this while? No problems?”

  Hamp Fisher laced his long fingers together around a knee as he picked his words. “We’d been down nearly twenty minutes before he started having trouble. We’d found Waome on her bottom, still in one piece, as I said. We did a survey from stem to stern. We located one of the open freight doors, and taking turns in pairs, we went inside. Jeff and Penny went first. When it was our turn, I followed Dermot into the ship. We went down through the freight door and through the lower saloon to the companionway leading to the main saloon. It was hard getting through the stairs, so again, I followed Dermot. When I got there, that is, in the upper saloon, I found Dermot had spit out his mouthpiece.”

  “You mean there was trapped air inside?”

  “No, Ben, we were both under water and at about eighty feet. You understand, for an experienced diver, the sight of your buddy with his mouthpiece out isn’t as immediately frightening as it might seem. We learn to make adjustments and to hold our breath while doing them. The air supply is always ready and waiting. But that wasn’t what Dermot was trying to do. He was trying to unhook his tank, his weights, everything. I went over to him, caught up his mouthpiece and tried to help. That’s when he lunged at me. I say lunged, it was more like fending me off, a warning to keep my distance. I swam around behind him. Again, I found his breathing tube and held it in place. This time, he couldn’t reach me with his hands, but he was wilder now, more frantic. Somehow, he pushed me away again and the diving mask came free. And he’d unhooked the main belt. Thinking there might be something wrong with his air supply, I took off my own and tried to fit it over his mouth. He beat me off again. That’s the part I never could understand. His brain must have been confused. That’s when I started to panic myself. You see, we were swimming free. Apart from the buoy line and the anchor rope, there was no contact with the diving raft. Dermot was smaller than I, but I wasn’t able to fix the mouthpiece in place again, and he was breathing out what air he still held. I couldn’t think of what to do. The other pair were at least a minute and a half away from me, if they were still hanging around the freight door. I tried again to approach him. I shouldn’t have come at him from the front. He got an arm around my neck even before I could find his air supply. Once he got me around the neck, I dropped the light I was carrying and it left us in relative darkness. Using my feet, I was able to free myself. I rescued the lamp and kept on swimming until I reached the outside of the hull. I indicated that Dermot was in trouble, gave the danger signal, and we swam back inside. By that time, Dermot had passed out. He was floating under the ceiling of the saloon. He’d jettisoned his tank and weights. At least we didn’t have to fight him any more. We got his air going again and strapped the tank back on his back. As quickly as we could, we evacuated him, got him out of Waome and back up to the raft. It could have been as much as three minutes in all. As soon as we got him on the raft, Jeff started the usual resuscitation routine. We took turns. Meanwhile, the boat crew called t
hrough to Bracebridge for an ambulance. We kept up the artificial respiration until the paramedic team relieved us. By then, we were back in harbour at Port Carling.” After saying this, Hamp was still. His eyes scanned the far side of the lake.

  After nearly a minute, I asked, “He never came round?”

  Hamp Fisher shook his head.

  FOURTEEN

  Hamp Fisher’s account of the death of Dermot Keogh quite dampened conversation for a good ten minutes after he finished. While looking at the wooded headlands alongside Wanda III, I thought of Wally Skeat, the Grantham TV broadcaster, from whom I’d first heard the name of the cellist at the end of April, the first anniversary of his death. I watched Hamp as he refilled my glass. I watched him with Peggy and got a good sense of their relationship through small things like the way he refreshed her drink and cleared away crumbs on the sundappled table with his napkin. Small things, but they penetrated to the heart of his affection for her. Peggy remained a little aloof from this, but I didn’t doubt her attachment to him. Again it was little things: when he pulled on a sweater, the way she tucked the label in at the back.

  It was a big, comfortable navy blue sweater from Cornwall. I saw that much before the white tag was tidied away. I was wishing that I had brought something warm with me. A rank of dark clouds had come between us and the sun. It looked temporary, but my shoulders and back felt the chill. I began rubbing my elbows, I thought with some subtlety, but Peggy got up and returned with a white Aran sweater and another for herself.

  “You mentioned the two divers who went down to the wreck with you and Mr. Keogh. Were many of his friends chosen as casually? I gather that they went on the fatal dive simply because they were in the right place at the right time.”

  “What you say was certainly true of them. They just happened to be passing through. Diving that early in the year doesn’t often find dozens of enthusiasts to choose among. But, in general, you’re right too. Lots of Dermot’s friends were just ordinary people he happened to like.”

  “Oh, Hamp, Dermot had other kinds of friends too. There were people he met at NTC and from Sony in the States, sure, but there were other musician friends, architects, painters, horse-breeders—you name it. But, usually they came up later in the year. About this time. Just when the weather is perfect and the last thing you want to think of is a sound stage.”

  “What people from NTC?” I asked.

  “There was quite a colony here last year and the year before that.” Hamp covered his chin with both hands, as though that helped him to see the faces from those vanished summers. “Let’s see, let’s see.”

  “Philip Rankin came up a lot our first summer, although we didn’t see much of him.” Peggy was adding a plastic nose guard to her sunglasses. “He says he’s allergic to the sun.”

  “Yes, and Ken Trebitsch comes up regularly. He rebuilt an old boathouse and lives above a small fleet. Remember, he introduced that lawyer, Ray Devlin. Dermot took quite a shine to Devlin. In the end it worked out to be an important relationship. Devlin’s firm handled all of Dermot’s contracts in the U.S. and in Canada. Eventually, Ray designed Dermot’s will.”

  “When would that have been?”

  “Oh, well before the spring three years back, I’d say. Yes, Ray was on the scene quite a bit then, but not here the following summer. Old Evans at the marina thought Rankin and Devlin should be banned from operating boats on the lake.”

  “Oh, Hamp, Ray was lots of fun, once you got him to shed that bogus courtroom manner of his. You couldn’t ask him to pass the salt at first without being crossexamined.” We laughed at that.

  “Yes,” Hamp said, nodding his head. “We missed him the summer before last. He wasn’t around really. There are always other people. One forgets. I will say this, Dermot thought him a very likeable chap.”

  “But you didn’t warm to him, Hamp?”

  “Me? Oh, I’m still a bit stand-offish, you know. Habit of a lifetime. I have to work at it. I work hard, and I’ve got a good teacher.” Peggy took Hamp’s hand. They smiled at one another and then both, a bit sheepishly, at me.

  “We thought we’d drive to the Inn at the Falls for dinner, Benny. I hope that you’ll be able to join us.” I tried to make an excuse, but it was torn away before I’d fixed it firmly to the mast. Hamp knew that the kitchen at Norchris Lodge wasn’t in operation yet and that if I wasn’t going to eat with them, it was because I’d chosen to eat elsewhere alone. When he put it like that, I accepted. What else could I do?

  But first, we returned to the cottage. “Cottage” isn’t really an adequate word for this mansion in the woods. It was made of squared logs with fieldstone and other masonry at strategic intervals. The massive fireplace had openings in four rooms. The interior was simply furnished except when you examined the pine closely and discovered that even the kitchen chairs were Early Canadian antiques. While wandering about on my own, according to my hosts’ invitation, I discovered a series of rooms in the back. They were filled with electronic equipment —phones, fax machines, computers, e-mail, the Internet—all manned by three men in shorts and T-shirts. Hamp’s empire was awake and active, even while Hamp was cruising in Wanda III.

  After a swim, the inaugural swim in my new suit, off Peggy and Hamp’s dock, I opened the Dermot Keogh book where I’d folded down the page. I let the strong, late-afternoon sun dry me as I half-dozed on a white deck chair. Later, as soon as I’d showered and dressed, I excused myself for an hour or two while they read or napped. I told them I was going off to “explore.” I didn’t know exactly what I was going to explore, but I was feeling a growing connection between pieces of what I had been learning up here. It was the sort of exploration I had to do, or I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I’d been there before. There may have been no connection between the deaths I was hearing about, but I knew I had to exhaust the possibility. Peggy offered me a butterfly net to aid me in my great work. More practically, Hamp let me borrow his sleek black BMW, since my car was still back in town.

  The marina in Bala was less rustic than Ifor Evans’s establishment on Segwin Bay. The paint on the clapboard siding was fresher, the sheds for stored boats looked more permanent. It was the same lake, of course, but the highway passing through Bala carried more traffic. A large sign advertising a big American-built outboard motor dominated the cedar-shingled roof of the boathouse. It eclipsed the older and much more modest sign: McCordick Brothers’ Marina. There were extensive docking wharves, most of them empty on this sunny afternoon. There was a sense of languid bustle, of sun-fried picnic hampers, of children smeared with sunblock, of orange life preservers and of the faint smell of gasoline on the wind. Sun reflected from glass, chrome and water as the remaining flotilla in the slips moved with the breeze off the lake, metal rings sounding musically on the tall masts. I parked where Hamp’s car could be seen and walked into that back part of the marina sacred to scuba diving. Here were tanks and suits, regulators, masks, fins and other paraphernalia of the deep. I asked a sunbleached blond kid in cut-off jeans who was in charge of the underwater gear.

  “I’ll get Stan,” he said, and off he went like Peter Rabbit through a cabbage patch. He didn’t come back, but he sent along a lean six-footer in a white T-shirt with the printed slogan “Charles Wells, premium bitter” sitting over his heart. He was tanned all over, as far as I could see. From the look of him, you’d have thought the McCordicks would put him on the pink cabin-cruiser runabout detail. He couldn’t miss with the ladies.

  I was frank with him to start with; gave him my name and calling. What the hell, I thought, maybe he’ll enter into the spirit of my investigation. I gave him a short version of what Hamp Fisher had told me about the dive to the S.S. Waome a year ago. He remembered the whole thing, of course, from the coming of the Provincial Police to the exit of the reporters and TV trucks. Stan relived the event as he’d experienced it, and, what the hell, I let him. Then he asked me some good questions, which I tried to answer precisely.

  “I
f the equipment was rented from us,” he theorized, “then maybe we’ve got a record of which items went along with them to the dive site.” I gave him the date of the dive, which Fisher had mentioned, and he went to a log attached to a slanted desk, about chest high. It was mostly a record of reservations to rent and appointments for dives using McCordick boats, rafts and other equipment. He turned backwards from the half-filled page that was open, flipping back and back again towards the front of the book.

  “Here it is,” said Stan with his finger in the middle of the page. “Yeah, it was quite an expedition: two rafts and four sets of wet suits and tanks. Mike, who was here then, wrote this. Mr. Keogh made the order, let’s see, three, no four days before. He was picking up the tab for everybody. Vern and Will McCordick thought the world of Mr. Keogh.”

  “Who ended up paying? After the accident?”

  “There’s a note written by Mike. ‘Paid by cheque: B. Foley.’”

  “Bob Foley? Dermot’s man of all work. So, he was up here for the dive on Waome.”

  “On most dives they take a crew of people to work the topside. If they had a boat and two rafts for four divers, one topside person would be the minimum. Two would be better. Let me see if I can get ol’ Mike on the phone. He’s waitering this summer at the King and Country. That’s a pub outside Port Carling.” Stan started on the phone, and I began examining swimming masks and fins, all of which were new to me. The marina carried professional equipment, with only a few items intended for small fry. I’d missed underwater sport when I was young enough to wear the equipment with no self-consciousness. The sun through the big window looking over the lake was lower than it had been, although I had been there only a short time. Its effect on the boats and wharves was still strong, daunting even. I could feel the sweat in the creases of my arms. I’d have to invest in sunblock, I promised myself.