Saffire

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Before you go,” Goethals said to Miskimon, “you should know that a few more men have been found unconscious along the tracks.”

  Miskimon’s forehead creased. “Same stretch as before? I’ve checked those tracks thoroughly three times already.”

  “Same stretch, same story. That the hand of God struck them from the sky. Same lack of memory of events right before. It is troublesome. You know that many of the laborers are superstitious. I don’t want them walking away from their jobs.”

  “I will continue to make inquiries,” Miskimon answered.

  “Thank you.” There was a tone of dismissal in his voice.

  “One last thing, Colonel,” Miskimon said. “You might be able to help Mr. Holt with a recent question. It’s in regard to our railway stock. He wants to establish the identity of a buffoon. I’ll take my leave now.”

  Miskimon saluted and turned on his heel. That left me alone with Colonel Goethals and my valise.

  “Let’s get to my railway car first,” Goethals said. “Out in the open, I tend to draw construction questions from just about everyone. I want us to be alone, and I want this to be private. Then you can ask your question about the railway stock.”

  Goethals led me directly to the bright yellow eyesore behind the station.

  Inside the railway car, with a table between us, Goethals spread blueprints on the table. “Ten thousand buckets of concrete a day.”

  My hat was on the bench beside me. He was across from me.

  “Crushed gravel from an island off Colón,” he continued. “Cement bags hauled from ships, thousands of gallons of water, miles of metal supports. The world has seen nothing like these locks. We made a cut into the hill on the other side for them. We pulled out five million cubic yards of dirt, and the locks will take two million cubic yards of concrete.”

  “Those are just numbers.” Numbers that could never express the vastness of the concrete walls towering above us. This truly was America coming of age. Brash. Bold. Accomplishing what no other country had been able to accomplish in all of recorded history. A person had to be here to truly comprehend.

  “Just numbers?”

  “I hope you’ll pardon a degree of loquaciousness. Normally I avoid it, but the last few days have had their impact.”

  He examined my face. “Pardoned.”

  “Life is messy. Numbers aren’t. We can understand numbers but sometimes not comprehend them. Standing here, feeling tiny, that’s the real impact this has had on me. So if there’s a point to why I’m here and why you are spouting off facts like an encyclopedia, I won’t be upset if you get to that point. I have a steamship sailing in less than three hours.”

  “I don’t like messy,” Goethals answered. “I do like numbers. There is precision in numbers.”

  “You aren’t holding my valise hostage—and the bank draft inside it— to deliver that kind of unsurprising statement from an army man.”

  Goethals pointed out the window at the ladders that reached up the massive concrete walls to a height that spun my head, where it seemed the two parallel lines of the ladders formed a single point. “A month ago, a cable snapped. Four workers died. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “I trust you have your police looking into the matter. Or Mr. Miskimon.”

  Goethals seemed to ignore my comment. “A week before that, a derailment at the Culebra Cut killed seven men—you might recall that your badge belonged to one of those policemen. That wasn’t an accident. And ten days before that, at the Gatún Dam, dynamite triggered a landslide that killed four workers. Not an accident. What do you make of that?”

  “Fifteen men died who should still be alive. If I were you, I would be angry.”

  “I am angry. And baffled. It’s unlikely that individual workers were targeted. It’s too difficult to time the accidents to kill someone specific. And even if that was possible, it’s not probable that all those individuals were linked to someone who might have enough of a grudge to choose to murder them like that. What does that leave?”

  “The obvious. That someone is trying to slow the construction of the canal by hurting workers at random. But if you think past the obvious, it doesn’t make sense. You have tens of thousands of workers.”

  “Fifty thousand. It would take a war to stop the dig. Now think like a politician.”

  I didn’t try to hide the sour tone in my voice. “Not sure that bank draft is worth that much to me.”

  He laughed. It bothered me that it felt good to have drawn laughter from him.

  “When I arrived,” he said, “I divided the work into three divisions. The lock. The lake. The canal. All three were attacked, but with little impact on stopping any of those projects. I have no doubt all three attacks were linked, and, I suspect, symbolic attacks. The questions I faced were simple. Who did it? And what was the motive? But an open investigation would be disastrous. I can’t tell you how much time is wasted by pandering to congressmen and senators who want to sightsee and use the excuse that they are here to ensure there is nothing fraudulent or wasted in our expenditures. You’ll remember, of course, the French.”

  I nodded. During their attempt to conquer the isthmus, they had squandered millions upon millions in a bribery scandal that rocked the financial world. Because of that, nothing seemed more important to the American project than accounting for every nail and hammer used. In the Senate and Congress, careers were made and destroyed on the progress of this project.

  Goethals lowered his voice. “You are well aware of the extra political pressure because of Cromwell and the president’s libel suit against the World. It’s a frenzy.”

  I nodded.

  “Given those allegations, any suggestion of sabotage would be sensational not only in the American media but all across the world.” He waited, apparently for a comment from me.

  “Thus the need for a tethered goat?”

  His brows arched. “Pardon me?”

  “Miskimon said he has me booked on the steamer leaving this afternoon, and I presume that is correct.”

  “He is a precise man. He will not tell you something unless it is so.”

  “But he is capable of withholding information as it suits him.”

  “What suits him is what suits me. He does not deserve your rancor. Direct it at me.”

  Despite the din of construction all around us, it seemed our conversation was taking place in a hushed office, such was the total focus of our sparring.

  “Yesterday, he booked me on that steamer shortly after meeting me at the hotel,” I said. “That’s where he first observed that I’d been held by the National Police. I think that gave him, and you, an answer that you needed. My purpose had been fulfilled. Using a girl’s missing mother as an excuse, you sent me into Panama City to bumble around with questions to see what might happen. At our first meeting, I would have appreciated the kind of information that you waited until this morning to deliver in regard to the sabotage that troubles you.”

  Goethals opened his mouth to speak. I didn’t care if he was the dictator of this little American Zone in the middle of Central America—I shook my head to silence him.

  “It speaks volumes, then, that you chose this morning to finally divulge confidential information that would have been more than helpful to me when you went through the charade of asking Miskimon to swear me to an oath as an enumerator. That tells me something has changed since Miskimon booked my passage. It tells me you need me again. The question is how badly do you need me?”

  I reached down to my boot and pulled out the badge Miskimon had given me. I placed it on top of the blueprints between us. “I’m happy to return it before I cross the planks onto my steamer. I have no obligation to you.”

  Goethals grimaced as he took the badge from me. “I’d rather not take this. Yes, we need you again.”

  “Before I even consider staying, I want full disclosure. Was I a tethered goat?”

  “No. I did not expect that you would draw the attention of the Na
tional Police. I am not a man of intrigue like that. Soon enough, I was going to tell you about the sabotage and then have it look like your questions about the sabotage were an extension of trying to learn about the girl’s mother. As if you believed the issues were related. Miskimon had strict instructions that your investigation was to end if it looked like it might put you in danger.”

  I touched my left ear. It still hurt. “I would guess, nicely enough for your conscience, that once you realized my questions drew danger from the National Police, you had your place to start and you also didn’t need me anymore.”

  “It wasn’t the National Police. Not directly. Something else is happening, and I’m not quite sure what it is. All I know is that you are the thread to help me unravel it.”

  I thought of that night in the hut and of the man with the whispered voice. Someone with influence who wanted the police to do the dirty work.

  “You’ll tell me how you know this?”

  “Not yet,” he answered. “But I promise I will when I can. I can also promise you that you are no longer of interest to the National Police and you are safe to resume asking questions.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, thinking of Miskimon’s reference to “strong words.”

  “I will not give you that answer. Either you trust me or you don’t.”

  “Fair enough.” Goethals did strike me as a man who placed value on trust. “If I stay, tell me what you want me to do.”

  “As you discovered, workers from all areas of the canal come in on Sunday mornings to have disputes heard. Everyone knows that I send Miskimon across the Zone, week in and week out, to investigate those disputes. It’s a public role that has allowed him to be discreet in questions about the accidents. All I want is for you to take his original reports and go back to each site to make it look like you have follow-up questions. I’ll take care of letting the rumor spread that it is related to your questions about the girl’s mother.”

  “I am not an investigator. I baby-sit cattle for a livelihood.”

  “What you learn matters little.” He paused, as though searching for words.

  I supplied those words. “Whoever sent the National Police after me will know I’m doing this. I’ll be a threat again, asking about accidents instead of a missing woman.”

  “But you won’t be a tethered goat. Tethered goats are unaware of why they are staked to a rope. Think of yourself as a hunting wolf. No rope. Fully aware that you are in pursuit of someone stalking you. I don’t believe that person wishes to see you dead.”

  “Not interested.”

  “Did the color of this train car strike you as odd?”

  “Incongruous.”

  “It was a calculated choice. I want my presence to be known, and it motivates workers. And there are other times when my presence is not so obvious. I understand you visited the National Police yesterday after Mr. Miskimon released you from an obligation to me.”

  Harry Franck had been right: “Goethals has spies everywhere.” “Care to tell me why?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “You were looking for a fight.”

  “Why ask if you already know?” I said.

  “It’s important to me to know I am dealing with an honest man. I doubt I’ll test you again. You did not fight. Why not?”

  “I’ve got a daughter who depends on me. What she needs is more important than what I want.”

  “Tell me what you think she needs. Keep in mind I’m a father too and love my children as fiercely as I can see you love your daughter.”

  “She doesn’t need a hero. She needs a father who can protect her until she can make her own way in the world.”

  “I like you. I don’t say that to many people.”

  As with his laughter, it bothered me that I cared. “I want to begin my journey back to the Dakotas this afternoon, but I have something that might help. In Panama City, there’s a man named Waldschmidt. He’s playing loose and easy that he’s working for the Germans. Maybe there’s your link. Is that enough for you to give me my valise and send me on my way?”

  I watched Goethals to see if this would be of interest to him. It told me something that he moved on without question. Trouble was, I had no idea exactly what it told me.

  “The bank draft in your valise—I understand it covers all the delinquent payments outstanding on your land mortgage, but there will still be the remaining mortgage in place.”

  Could it be…? Had the president made this kind of calculation, expecting that at some point I would need to be leveraged?

  “What if the mortgage was completely paid?” Goethals watched me. “Would that secure your daughter’s future?”

  Yes. President Roosevelt was a consummate politician. He would have made that kind of calculation.

  But I was a stubborn man. “She needs a father, not a ranch.”

  “From what I understand, you are on the razor’s edge of holding on to your ranch, even after the delinquent payments are made. Can a couple extra days in Panama be any more dangerous than being forced to head out on horseback in a blizzard because if you lose some cattle you’ll lose the ranch? Have the ranch paid off, and you wouldn’t need to take those kinds of chances.”

  Paying off the ranch, for me, was a substantial amount of money. Compared to one day of funding for the building of the canal, it was a fly that a horse flicks from its haunches with a swipe of the tail. Of course, if that metaphor had any truth in it, it meant I was just another annoying fly, settling for anything that smelled of manure…

  Still, manure had value to a fly. To sit on the porch overlooking the valley of the Little Missouri while reading a story to Winona, to ride through gullies of a homestead that would become an inheritance to my daughter—all without the crushing worry of debt?

  That could well be worth it.

  I suspected the colonel could see those thoughts on my face.

  “By meeting with Harding yesterday, you already established yourself as the determined cowboy seeking revenge for assault,” Goethals said. “Play the role a little longer. That’s all. Pay attention as you ask your questions about the accidents and you shouldn’t get hurt.”

  I didn’t show surprise at his knowledge of my meeting with Harding because I wasn’t surprised. “I imagine you have a few suggestions on what kind of questions I should ask and where I should ask them.”

  “For starters, you’ll have to go to Cromwell’s party tonight and ask questions about Saffire’s mother. That will solidify your motivations among those who will soon hear that you are asking questions about the accidents.”

  “So you suspect the hunter of the tethered goat is among them.”

  “I make no assumptions. But it is a small circle of power in Panama. If the hunter is not among them, he knows them well.”

  “Do you have anything to help me with this new task?”

  Goethals reached under the blueprints for a large envelope filled with papers. He handed me the envelope and gave me back the Zone police badge.

  “Of course I do.”

  I should have felt small and invisible.

  I stood on a bank that gave me an overlook of the middle of the three Gatún locks. Neither my approach by train before the meeting with Goethals nor anything I’d read in the newspapers had prepared me for the close-up sights and sounds of construction. I tried to comprehend the audacity of the engineering marvel in front of me.

  One of the reasons the French failed was that they attempted to cut a sea-level canal directly through the isthmus, without locks at any place on the forty-eight-mile route. This was doomed to failure because of the volatile Chagres River, capable of rising thirty feet in an hour during the frequent rains of the wet season.

  The Americans decided to conquer this problem by damming the Chagres and allowing it to follow its natural course to the Caribbean, just west of the locks. The dam formed a lake that would allow ships to traverse a full third of the route.

  It was a brilliant so
lution. Not only did it tame the Chagres and create a lake that gave fifteen miles of surface water along the canal route, but the dam would store the water needed for the locks as well as supply electricity to run the locks and all the lights through the Zone.

  To use this route, however, the locks needed to elevate ships by eighty-five feet from the Atlantic to reach Gatún Lake. The bay at Colón allowed the Caribbean to reach inland, and a canal extended the ocean waters almost to the lake. At the end of this canal was where the locks would raise the ships to the inland route.

  I faced north, to the Atlantic, and by turning my head back I got a sense of the rise of the three locks. Each one thousand feet long, they were designed with a wall down the center of the chamber to allow each lock to accommodate two massive cargo ships at a time. When complete, they would each be deep enough to swallow millions of gallons of water, fed from the artificial lake by culverts wide enough to accommodate a steam locomotive, water held by steel gates seven feet thick and as tall as an eight-story building, each gate weighing four hundred tons or more.

  In this state, unfinished and empty of water, the concrete of the locks was painfully white in the sunshine. Swarms of men on layers of scaffolding poured more concrete for the locks’ walls and floors.

  Despite this marvel, I didn’t feel small or invisible.

  In my back pocket was a letter from Winona. It had been in the valise, addressed to the administration office in my name. When she concentrated on her block lettering, she had a habit of sticking the tip of her tongue out of the side of her mouth, and I glowed inside to imagine how she had sat at my writing desk in the ranch house, perhaps in the evening, using the light of an oil lamp because in Medora in December, daylight didn’t last long. I could picture her care in using the thick pencil that she favored over the blotchiness of a fountain pen, and I fought the stabbing homesickness so that instead I could enjoy the sweetness of that image.

  December 29, 1908

  Pappy, each morning Unk Hunk lets me scratch off another day on the calendar. Then I count how many days. So far, we are up to three days. Unk Hunk says that I should figure on January 31, so that means me and Teddy only have 33 more sleeps until you get home. Teddy hurt his paw, but Unk Hunk helped me put a bandage on it, and I kissed it better like you also kiss my hurts better. It is snowing hard. Unk Hunk wants me to tell you that the cattle are doing fine. Unk Hunk is helping me with my spelling, but all these words are the ones I want to write to you. I am so glad you waited until after Christmas to go because I would have cried all the time thinking how lonely you might be without me. In two more days, I get to write you another letter. I love you and I miss you.