The Smoke Room

by Earl Emerson

  “You’re going to leave her alone, and you’re not going to call again.”

  “And you are?”

  “Sonja Pederson.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Iola’s my stepmother.”

  “Oh.” Iola had never mentioned a daughter. “You don’t want me to see Iola?”

  “That’s what I said. Want me to write it out for you, or do you think you can remember it?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “You think about it for a while. You’ll figure it out. Jesus, Iola really robbed the cradle this time.”

  She’d looked familiar all along, but now it came to me. “Have I met you before? I’ve seen you down on Alki.”

  The statement and change of subject surprised her. “I . . . What?”

  “I’ve seen you skating. You show up around lunchtime. You have an older pair of K2s. Seventy-millimeter wheels that need rotating. I could fix those for you.”

  “I know you think you’re a hotshot. But leave Iola alone or I’ll make things happen you won’t like.”

  “This is a joke, right?”

  She pushed me against the car again. “Don’t piss me off.”

  “I don’t fight girls, but if you keep this up I might break that rule.” I’d barely finished the sentence before she had my thumb in her fist and was levering me until my knees were pressed into the damp sod. For a minute I thought she was going to break my thumb.

  “Okay,” I said. “I get your point. Geez. Let go, girlie.”

  She dropped my hand and stepped back. “Don’t call me girlie.”

  “Girlie, sir. I still don’t understand what this is to you,” I said, working my hand to get the blood flowing.

  She proceeded toward a small car parked in front of the house next door. “Just remember what I told you. Tick me off, Gum, you’ll be sorry.”

  “I’m already sorry.”

  I thought about Sonja Pederson while I drove up the hill to California Avenue and the West Seattle Junction near Station 32. So Sonja was Iola’s daughter. Three generations living in one house.

  One of the few things Iola had told me about her father, whom she had called Bernard, was that he was a gun nut and that he’d trained her to use just about every weapon ever made. For her birthday once she’d asked for a necklace but he’d given her a twelve-gauge shotgun instead. He must have given Sonja her share of guns, too. In addition to martial arts training.

  By the time I got to my mom’s apartment house at the Junction, she had been standing on the sidewalk with her bags for forty-five minutes. As usual, she had a complete set of maps, routes, and plans. “What do you want?” she said, asking the question she’d been asking my whole life.

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Well. Yes. But what do you want?”

  I wanted my mother to be well, but that wasn’t going to happen. “How about we drive up to the mountain, follow whatever route you pick, and see what we can?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  It had always been just the two of us, but Mom and I were closer now than ever. When we first got the diagnosis, I cried for two days, but Judy Gum took the news like a trooper, rolled up her sleeves the way she’d been doing her whole life, and went on about her business—in this case, the business of wringing the most out of what little time she had left.

  We followed Highway 410 out of Enumclaw, driving the two-lane road higher and higher through forested foothills, every once in a while catching a glimpse of the volcano we were ascending. As usual, Mom, who wanted to see every last scrap of the planet before she left it, had me stop at every viewpoint and lookout, and as usual, her enthusiasm was infectious. We had four days to explore Mount Rainier National Park and environs, or until Mom got tired, whichever came first. Four days before C shift worked again and I had to be back at Station 29. Four days in which to forget my troubles, in which to evade Iola and her fruitloop daughter. Four days in which to ponder the situation with Tronstad and Johnson and the bearer bonds.

  We camped at the White River Campground the first night, and though it was cold in the two-man tent, we made it through to morning, when I started a campfire and heated up some hot chocolate. Over a breakfast of scrambled eggs, Mom told me a joke she thought I could take to the guys at work. She’d always been fond of jokes, but I noticed as she got sicker, so did her jokes.

  It went like this: What did the seven dwarfs do after Snow White woke up? They went back to masturbation.

  It was ironic, because before her illness, Mom wouldn’t have told a raunchy joke if her life depended on it. Now maybe she thought it did.

  During breakfast we got out the binoculars I’d bought surplus at the Army/Navy store in downtown Seattle and searched the east face of Emmons Glacier for climbers, finding two parties moving like ticks on a sheet in the sunshine. After spending the morning in the camp, I packed up and Mom drove my WRX up the mountain to Sunrise while I hiked the three uphill miles to meet her in the parking lot. When I got there she was leaning against the hood in her blue fleece jacket, basking in the sunshine. We were going through one of the warmest periods in Northwest history, and temperatures on the mountain climbed into the seventies during the day. No wonder the glaciers were wasting away.

  We did some easy hiking above Sunrise, then drove around the mountain to Paradise, stopping along the way at Panther Creek and taking in small portions of the Wonderland Trail, Mom clicking pictures all the while. We’d already explored every beach and mountain in Oregon and Washington and camped in almost every campground from California to British Columbia. We’d said good-bye to each other a hundred times without ever once putting it into words.

  11. GHANET’S SECRET HISTORY

  INFUSED WITH A dystopian premonition that when Sears showed up the cracks of hell were going to start showing below our feet, I drove to work an hour early on Friday. In the silent beanery bordered by the wall of food lockers, the sheer familiarity of my surroundings instilled a calm I hadn’t felt on the pacific slopes of Mount Rainier, where I’d become more and more worried about the bonds.

  During our trip, I’d spent an inordinate amount of time trying to dissect my two-year relationship with Johnson and Tronstad. In one sense we were family, I the little brother they’d tutored and protected since my first day in the company. Yet in another sense we were a triangle of interwoven secrets and hidden grudges.

  In public Johnson was all smiles around Tronstad, who played endless practical jokes on him, many of them later repeated in reverse by Johnson. It was funny to watch, partly because Johnson was so good-natured about it. It was also good not to be part of it, because I’m not sure I would have been so good-natured if I found my food locker stuffed full of packing peanuts every shift for a month. Or if I had a digital camera and a notebook for recording interesting alarms and then one day downloaded a picture I hadn’t taken of the notebook clenched between somebody’s hairy butt cheeks. Johnson got his licks in, too: a condom stretched over the trailer hitch on Tronstad’s truck, loaded with liquid soap so that it looked as if it’d already performed its function; a water balloon inside Tronstad’s helmet that burst over his head when he put the helmet on.

  It was as much a concession to my personality as anything else that I wasn’t included in their endless rounds of practical jokes. While I thought the gags were funny, they didn’t suit my temperament the way they suited Johnson’s and Tronstad’s, who were both capable of absolute silliness.

  At the station Johnson and I remained friendly and often engaged in long dialogues about the oddities of life, dialogues I looked forward to. Johnson made a habit of analyzing various personalities in the department, sometimes successfully, more often through a lens of wishful thinking and half-baked conjecture. It was amusing when he got it right and even more amusing when he didn’t.

  “I’m interested in what makes people tick,” Johnson said. “For me that puts the spice in life.”

  I was interes
ted in what made Johnson tick but had not quite figured it out. He was less a man who’d accrued a bank of knowledge over his thirty-seven years than one who was still in the process of identifying the basic structure of the world around him—a wandering soul who never tired of trying to puzzle out life in the same way that a hopelessly untalented but determined skier or softball player never tired of striving for skills he couldn’t achieve.

  As far as Ted Tronstad went, I liked him and for the most part thought he liked me, but the truth was, he and I had more of an alpha male thing going. I’d pondered this a lot, because the way it started was so typical, especially for firefighters, most of whom tend to be aggressive personalities to begin with. Not that I was particularly aggressive. In fact, I considered myself a relatively timid person who was capable of displaying streaks of bravado when required.

  Tronstad had been a hockey player in his youth and continued to play ice and roller hockey on city teams, hitting the trail on in-line skates three or four times a week, usually with a hockey stick and a ball.

  Early in my tenure at 29’s he brought his skates, and one morning after shift we drove down to Alki, he in his new truck—which was repossessed several months later—and I in my new WRX—which I bought after getting my first paycheck. He’d talked all shift about how I wouldn’t be able to keep up with him, but once we started skating I could see he didn’t have the wheels or bearings to maintain the kind of speeds I routinely hit. After playing with him for a while, I skated away while he chased futilely. He never got over it.

  Sometimes friends break something small and seemingly unimportant between them, and at the time it seems like a scratch on the paint job of their relationship, when it’s actually closer to a blown engine. Most days I didn’t feel any spite between us, but other times the alpha male bullshit separated us like a tidal pool. It didn’t help that I got all that recognition for bringing the victims out of Arch Place when he knew I should have been disciplined for missing the rig.

  Because of the stolen bonds, all three of us had our necks on the chopping block. I hadn’t thought so at first, but four days on Mount Rainier had given me time to think. We’d lied to Sears—I’d lied to Sears—and if the bonds were worth anything, we would certainly be ejected from the fire department and sent to jail. It was hard to see a way around it or to know how I’d gotten into this pickle. I would have gone nuts if I hadn’t been so confident the bonds were worthless.

  In the Seattle Fire Department you could cheat on your EMT exams the way Tronstad and Johnson routinely did, and they would look the other way. You could do drugs and plead chemical dependency—they would get you therapy. You could screw up and plead stress—they would transfer you to a quieter station. You could get contentious and plead personal problems—they would get you counseling. But the minute you stole anything you were terminated.

  Maybe I should have turned Tronstad in a long time ago, but how do you justify causing a friend to lose his job because he swiped a picture frame worth five dollars?

  It was quarter to seven when I tiptoed down the hallway to the dark beanery and turned on the coffeemaker. I was scanning the newspapers when Hampsted came in and headed for the coffee machine. Hampsted, a B-shifter, was a tall, sleepy-eyed man who seemed to take life in stride. He’d been a stock-car racer before joining the department, an adrenaline junky in a department full of adrenaline junkies.

  “You seen this?” he asked, keeping his voice low so as not to wake the sleeping officers and the night watch down the hallway.

  “What?”

  He nodded at a newspaper clipping on the bulletin board, an article topped by a photo I suddenly recognized as Charles Scott Ghanet, taken twenty-five or thirty years ago. No doubt Hampsted tried to engage me in conversation over the next few minutes, but if he did, I didn’t hear a word.

  DEATH OF LOCAL MAN SPURS FBI INVESTIGATION

  BY ROB HARDING

  Seattle Times staff reporter

  When King County Medical Examiner investigators began searching a local man’s house after his body was found there late Sunday night, they made a startling discovery.

  For twenty-seven years Charles Scott Ghanet, sixty-eight, who died of natural causes, was known to his neighbors as a retired longshoreman and deck hand from San Diego. Investigators have discovered, however, that the man neighbors knew as Charles Scott Ghanet was actually George S. David, whose name has been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list since 1976, according to Fred Hagerty, agent in charge of the FBI’s Seattle office. David used various aliases during his lifetime, including Brian Wilson, David Geiger, and Renee Whipple.

  At twenty-three, David received a four-year sentence at Missouri State Penitentiary for armed robbery and assault. After his release, he is alleged to have committed a series of robberies of gem dealers, private gold collectors, and armored cars in the Midwest. In 1978 David fled Ohio just minutes in front of an IRS raid that could have put him behind bars for close to half a century.

  Dozens of bank robberies by a lone gunman in Minnesota, North Dakota, and California were eventually linked to David, and a fingerprint taken from a stolen car he used in one of the robberies tied him to the murder of a confederate, though he was never apprehended for these crimes. David has been proclaimed one of the most successful armed robbers in United States history.

  Wells Fargo and a consortium of Midwest banks eventually posted a reward of $300,000 for David’s capture, a reward that has never been collected.

  As of Monday, local police, FBI, ATF, and Treasury agents were combing David’s house in West Seattle for clues to what he might have done with some of the more than six million dollars he is thought to have stolen over a fourteen-year period. In addition, agents are looking for money David might have earned after putting large amounts of the stolen funds into legitimate investments.

  The last robbery attributed to David took place in Lake Oswego, Oregon, in 1981, where a local bank was robbed of $87,113 by a gunman who escaped on a stolen motorcycle.

  Neighbors in West Seattle said the man they knew as Charles Scott Ghanet was a loner, a quiet neighbor who kept to himself and had frequent medical problems.

  FBI agents say David’s home was piled with junk and that it would take a week or more to sort through papers and documents in order to track down any remaining funds.

  “Who would have thought that old guy was an armored-car robber?” said Hampsted, sipping his coffee. “This the first you heard of it?”

  “I’ve been out of town.”

  “But you guys found it? Right?”

  “We didn’t find anything.”

  “You didn’t find his body?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “You know they’re tearing that house apart board by board. They’re even digging up the backyard with a Bobcat.”

  “They find the money?”

  “Not that we heard.”

  “Why would a guy with millions of dollars be living in that little house with all that junk?”

  “You met him. He was nuts.”

  The odds of our bonds being phony had dwindled to practically nothing. There were hundreds of slips of paper in each sack, thousands altogether. It was easy to believe Tronstad’s assertion that the three bags combined were worth twelve million dollars.

  I couldn’t believe I’d hidden them in Iola Pederson’s garage as casually as if they were discount coupons for margarine.

  My throat went dry at the prospect of how much trouble I was in.

  12. CASH ME OUT, BABY, I’M BLOWIN’ TOWN

  “YOU TALKING TO yourself?”

  Lieutenant Sears breezed into the beanery and deposited a sack lunch in the refrigerator. His wife, Heather, got up in the morning before he left for work and put together a couple of sandwiches and a pile of sliced veggies, with a small bag of raisins for dessert. It seemed out of character, because according to Sears, she ruled the roost in their household and dominated their decision making. Although she didn’t have a job an
d he was often tired from having worked a twenty-four-hour shift, he ran all the household errands, did the chores, and did virtually all the shopping and cooking. Her sole concession to domesticity was the sack lunch. Johnson said it was because she knew we would see it.

  We all thought the way she made him dance to her tune was funny, considering what a ball buster Sears was inside the department.

  “You were talking to yourself,” Sears said. Hampsted had left the room.

  “Was I? I guess it was this article.”

  “What article’s that?”

  “The Charles Scott Ghanet thing.”

  “Charles Scott made the paper? I’ll have to read it when I get time.”

  I got up and walked across the bay to the firefighters’ quarters and my locker, changed into my uniform, and inspected my face in the bathroom mirror. I only needed to shave every two or three days, but I ran the electric shaver over my face anyway.

  The news about Ghanet had hit me like a falling house. If Sears didn’t nab us, the local gendarmes would, and if the local gendarmes didn’t, the FBI would, and if the FBI didn’t, some tenacious reporter would do it for them—all of which didn’t even take into account the treasure seekers who were bound to show up. I could turn myself in right now, but at this late date I couldn’t see how it would make any difference.

  My only consolation was that we hadn’t made bigger targets of ourselves by indulging in conspicuous binge spending. If you were going to be a criminal, you’d better be a smart one—like Ghanet. Look poor; act poor. Keep your money where nobody will find it. Avoid ostentatious displays of wealth.

  I relieved my man early—actually, my woman, Stanislow—and busied myself in the apparatus bay doing normal morning maintenance in the hope that keeping busy would stave off my mounting anxiety. I half expected Tronstad and Johnson to call in sick, but they showed up at their normal times, Ted at 0729, one minute to spare, and Robert six minutes later, at 0735. Sears and I were the only ones who routinely came in early. The drivers on the other shifts resented Johnson, who came in precisely five minutes late every shift. Whenever he needed somebody to trade shifts or stay over a half hour, he got stiffed, a fact he attributed to racial prejudice, when in fact it was due to his chronic tardiness, a habit that, ironically, several others unfairly attributed to race.