by Mick Lowe
“Yes,” Gilpin nodded somberly. “That is the $64,000 question.”
Jake drove around aimlessly after he dropped Gilpin off. Normally he would have headed straight for Jo Ann’s, to share the latest news; a clear impossibility now, for so many reasons.
That realization, coupled with the morning’s events, made Jake feel lost, as if he had slipped his moorings. With a heavy heart he pointed the Chevy north finally, toward the Valley.
17
Gilpin Muses
For his part, Foley Gilpin adjourned directly to the lounge at the Caswell, a quiet, dimly lit refuge presided over by a crisp bartender who was a proud, card-carrying member of Mine Mill Local 902—the new Local that 598 had spun off to represent their newly organized food and beverage worker members. The bartender had become a prime source of information about a city that teemed with intrigue, rumour and paranoia.
How did that old saying go? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Gilpin slid onto his favourite stool at the bar and ordered a beer. He needed to think. First and foremost, he had found his killer. And sure enough, with that buzzcut the guy had ex-military written all over him.
They had seen their man, true, but he had also seen them. Would he act to silence them? He would have recognized young McCool, almost certainly, but probably not Gilpin himself. Did that mean his young friend was in danger? Gilpin doubted that. Audacious as he was, the mystery killer was unlikely to touch Jake. Two murders in a single family inside of two months would be impossible to ignore, even for this city’s semi-somnolent police force.
So, where did all this leave him? Did he have enough for a story? His gut told him yes, his head something else. First, connect the dots. He had no doubt they’d found their man, especially given Jake’s reaction at the hotel. Gilpin considered young McCool to be highly credible. Gilpin’s earlier hypothesis—that the CIA was in cahoots with the Steelworkers somehow—now also seemed highly plausible. Equally plausible was the likelihood the Agency would deny, deny, deny any involvement in fomenting Cold War hostilities—much less committing murder—in a Canadian city most Americans had never heard of. Hell, even his own editor couldn’t find Sudbury on a map. Gilpin’s heart sank at the very thought of Wally Rasmussen, that mountain of flesh who inhabited, Buddha-like, the slot at Chicago’s largest circulation daily. Even now Wally would be scowling imperturbably in the slot, surrounded by phalanxes of hovering copy clerks and wire editors attending to a cacophony of ringing telephones and the ceaseless tinkling of alarm bells on the hulking wire service teletype machines.
And here Gilpin’s brain took over. It was no secret in the newsroom that he—Gilpin—was the butt of open jokes from Wally and Hildebrand “Hildy” Norman Thayer III, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, senior White House correspondent and star reporter. Wally fairly worshipped Hildy, whose stories ran page one above the fold, as often as not. Whether they deserved such play Gilpin often wondered. But there was no doubting Hildy’s pedigree—elite Eastern prep schools, Harvard man, tall, handsome and rich—which lent him considerable cachet around the Kennedy White House. He was also a frequent invitee to the chi-chi Georgetown dinner parties favoured by so many of the Kennedy insiders. Both Hildy and Wally made little attempt to disguise their contempt for Gilpin’s personal crusade to expose the Central Intelligence Agency and all its works. They considered Gilpin’s dogged, lonely, investigative efforts to be a quixotic quest at best, paranoid lunacy at worst.
So no, in other words, he probably had no chance of getting what he now knew into print.
Gilpin sighed, and ordered another beer. And what did he really know?
Foley Gilpin could barely suppress a smile at the thought of what was likely happening now—the phone lines to and from Langley were probably already burning up as the mystery man reported that morning’s events. He was made—his cover blown—he’d have to tell his handler. And what of that handler? Why had he left his asset in place after Ben McCool’s murder, risking exposure of the mission, and of the Agency’s role in the Sudbury raids?
As part of his ongoing investigations Gilpin had made it a point to debrief retiring Agency personnel who would never have dared to speak to him while they were still on active duty. Gilpin had learned that Langley-based handlers often had many assets in the field at once and that, while no one wanted to actually admit it, some were known to lose track of, or even, on rare occasions, to simply forget about one of the agents under their control. If the asset was operating behind the Iron Curtain the result of such neglect, however momentary, could mean his exposure, capture, interrogation and execution. In a friendly theatre like Canada, as events were showing, such dire consequences were far less likely. Which might have increased the likelihood that Langley had indeed forgotten about the stone-cold killer it had dispatched to Sudbury, Gilpin mused. If so, he could imagine the derelict handler scrambling even now to find the most expeditious route to Sudbury to assume first-hand charge of damage control over any fall-out stemming from his and Jake’s sudden visit to the President Hotel that morning.
And what to make of the presence of Jake’s girlfriend’s father with the killer in a suite paid for by the Steelworkers? Jake said the guy was some sort of bigwig with International Nickel, which certainly gave the lie to the company’s official line that it was strictly neutral in the Steelworkers-Mine Mill dispute. So what was he doing there?
Gilpin suspected he was a cut-out, a local go-between at the centre of the CIA-Steelworker-Inco axis. Certainly there was something in his servile demeanour toward the killer to suggest they knew one another—and fairly well. Still, in the end, Foley Gilpin realized with another sigh, all he really had were more unanswered questions.
Gilpin drained his beer and headed for his room.
18
Two Disappearances
Jo Ann and her mother were used to the prolonged absence of the family patriarch, so neither of them gave much thought at first to Stanley Winters’ failure to return home at the end of August.
Neither Jo Ann nor her mother knew exactly what he did at Inco; balding, bespectacled and bowlegged in a mousey kind of way, Stanley Winters worked long hours at Inco’s Ontario Division office in Copper Cliff when he was not flying to Toronto for hush-hush meetings with the top corporate brass at Inco’s Canadian headquarters in a high rise office tower high above Bay Street. Whatever he did, Stanley Winters was certainly an excellent provider—his wife and only child were ensconced in a spacious, handsome home in the city’s most exclusive and desirable residential district.
Jo Ann was, truth be told, much more worried by Jake’s absence than she was her father’s. Why, Jake hadn’t even called since their last date, that passionate, somewhat bizarre encounter at the slag pouring when poor Jake had ended up bawling like a baby with his head in her lap. Her father, both Jo Ann and her mother assumed, had gone off on yet another business trip. But Jake’s silence was not like him. He was always calling or dropping over, eager to share the latest news in his life.
Jo Ann’s mother took the call that would change their lives forever. It came on the Wednesday before the Labour Day weekend, and Jo Ann was able to overhear the conversation clearly.
“Yes?” her mother said into the telephone.
“Speaking.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, I’m afraid he’s not home right now.”
“I’m not sure … Gone to Toronto on business, I’d imagine … Why? Is something wrong? No! That’s impossible!” Jo Ann looked at her mother, who suddenly turned white as a sheet and sank into a kitchen chair. “Are you sure it was Stanley?”
“Mother, what is it?”
“It’s your father. That was the police. They say he was just hit by a bus downtown. He’s gone, Jo Ann.”
“What? Gone where? You don’t mean—”
“Yes, he’s dead.”
They collapsed into one another’s arms, weeping in great moaning sobs.
Nothing that day was destined to go as Jake expected as he joined the steady stream of black-clad mourners entering the funeral home. He was so nervous about seeing Jo Ann again that he’d almost talked himself out of attending the wake about a hundred times that Labour Day weekend. But she saw him first. Jake never did even make it to the large reception room upstairs at Jackson and Bernard where Stanley Winters’ closed coffin was on prominent display. Instead Jo Ann was in a smaller anteroom, reserved for smokers, packed with younger mourners, many of whom Jake recognized from school. Jo Ann rushed up to Jake as soon as she spotted him loping uncertainly toward the reception room.
“You came!” she blurted in evident surprise, as she stopped just short of Jake, looking up at him, those familiar green eyes scanning his with dozens of mute questions. Jake knew the questions, but not the answers. He touched her on the elbow, and steered her gently away from the crowd.
“I-I’m sorry about your dad, Jo.”
“Oh Jake, what happened? You stopped coming over, you didn’t even call—”
“I know, I know … I’m sorry, Jo …” he trailed off, helpless in the face of the truth, which was the one thing he couldn’t speak, especially now.
“What happened, anyways?”
Jo Ann shook her head, fighting back the tears. “Oh, the police say it was an accident—nobody’s fault, really. They say Daddy was crossing against the light and he wasn’t in the crosswalk … You know how absentminded he could be …”
Jake nodded solemnly at her explanation before pulling her softly into his arms, his mind racing, incredulous at the news that Stanley Winters had stepped right out in front of a bus in broad daylight in downtown Sudbury, in the middle of a sunny summer morning.
Part three
In the Upper Country
19
A Skating Rink in Hell
In any sort of global, circumferential sense, Sudbury’s miners had barely scratched the earth’s crust as they drilled and blasted their way into the Sudbury ore body. But three successive generations of hardrock miners had, in their pursuit of the rich Sudbury ores, probed relentlessly to still greater depths, leading them ever closer to the molten centre of the earth. While they remained thousands of miles above the raging, red-hot magma that filled the earth’s core, Sudbury’s miners had, by the 1960s, begun to encounter the heat that radiated from that core.
The heat was intense enough, as it dissipated from the molten core through solid rock, to present another discomforting challenge to the workers who toiled in the drifts, headings and raises that honeycombed the earth beneath Sudbury’s streets like some giant ant farm.
Of course, the problems were more severe in some places than others.
As a general rule, the deeper the mine, the hotter the conditions. The heat at Creighton #9 Shaft, the Basin’s—and the Hemisphere’s—deepest mine, at 9,000 feet, was legendary.
It was not a problem Jake—cleared by his doctor to return to work in mid-September—had expected to encounter at Frood Mine, a relatively shallow operation, but that first morning in the cage he couldn’t help but overhear a conversation about the heat in the mine’s bottom country, at a mere 2,400 feet.
“Muck’s so hot you can’t pick it up, tabernouche, a hundred degrees, she burn you good, misterman.”
“Yesterday me and my partner had to wet the breast, cool it down, before we could even load our rounds,” affirmed another voice in the darkened, gently rocking cage.
“No wonder it caught fire down there,” observed yet another anonymous voice.
“Burn, baby burn,” laughed a gruff voice, just as Jake arrived at his level.
He was discharged at the 600 foot level, Frood’s “Upper Country.”
He found Bob Jesperson waiting at the loading station. Aware they had combined to form one of Garson’s most productive teams—not to mention highest bonus earners—management had decided to keep the duo together and to assign them to the high grade stopes of Frood Mine’s Upper Country.
Once again, Jesperson led the way down the drift to their stope. It was a short walk. As they surveyed their new workplace Jake noticed how chilly it was.
“Headings up here all break into the pit,” was Bob’s explanation.
It took a minute for Jake to understand. Like most hard rock mines in Canada’s Cambrian Shield country, Frood Mine had begun its life as an open pit operation. But, after ever-increasing depth had rendered the method impracticable, the mine’s owners had at last opted to sink a shaft into the ore body, to begin the more expensive process of underground—as opposed to open pit—mining. At Frood that shaft was immediately adjacent to the vast, deep—very deep—hole in the ground left by the pit.
What Bob was saying was that the levels they were extending would eventually break through the wall of the pit. As a result the ambient temperatures in the pit were felt in the stopes, as they were this frosty September morning.
“Jesus Christ!” Jake responded at last. “You mean to tell me we’re working in an ore body that’s on fire and we’re freezing our nuts off?”
Bob laughed heartily at Jake’s consternation. “No grass growin’ on you, chum. Fire’s down at 2400, been going for years, you hardly ever smell it up here. But the cold’s no joke. Works into the heading, ground freezes in the winter, thaws in the summer, expands and contracts, loosens things up somethin’ fierce. Just about as bad ground conditions as I’ve seen in all my years in the Sudbury camp.” Bob shone his cap lamp toward the screened off back. “Look’t that loose! It’s hangin’ up there like a bunch a’ grapes! You think you’re cold now, wait’ll December! What we got here is a skating rink in hell, Jake. Fire down below, freezing up above. Welcome to Frood Mine. Well, pitter-patter, let’s get at ’er.”
And with that Bob hefted the jackleg into place, hit the air, and collared the hole.
20
Jake Banks the Bonus
With its myriad of levels, drifts and headings a modern hard rock mine is a vast place, with hundreds of workers dispersed through many miles of vertical and lateral space.
The very nature of this three-dimensional maze makes it a difficult place to supervise, an activity made even more challenging by hardrock miners’ storied self-reliance and fierce independence. In every mine there lingered accounts, however apocryphal, of an especially mendacious shift boss being literally run off a level by a pair of exasperated, wrench-wielding partners whose patience with supervision had long since worn dangerously thin.
The fact is, most hard rock miners work unsupervised most of the time.
How then, to ensure that they toil to maximum effect, maintaining both productivity and profitability, to continue the flow of dividends to far-off shareholders in Toronto, New York City and London?
The time-honoured solution: incentivize the miners’ labour through a scheme known as the individual mine production bonus. While it seems simple (the individual is remunerated on a rate based upon the cubic measure of the muck displaced during a given pay period) the bonus system, as Bob now began to teach Jake, is, in fact, highly complex and dense with nuance.
It was lucrative, yes (bonus earnings are commonly expressed as a percentage of hourly pay; a highly successful bonus miner earns “one hundred percent bonus” or double his already lucrative hourly wage).
But the system also has severe downsides, Bob cautioned Jake. It rewards cutting corners because the metric is based strictly on tonnage—whether that muck is produced safely or not had no place in the equation. And, to the degree that working safely (properly screening the back, for example, or not drilling bootlegs) does not itself enhance production, human nature dictates that an ambitious bonus miner will too often maximize the time spent on hardcore production at the expense of safety-related matters like rockbolting and screening. Frontline supervisors were measured first and foremost by tonnage: did the headings under their purview meet pre-set quotas? The raft of serious injuries that left the lucky merely maimed for the rest of their
lives, and the unlucky dead, were an unfortunate concomitant of the hardrock mining industry. “After all, Mr. Coroner, a mine is not a chocolate factory,” the company’s pinstripe-clad lawyers were fond of reminding the coroner’s juries summoned to study the circumstances surrounding yet another miner’s death, now a monthly occurrence in the Sudbury camp.
But the conceit that accidents happened only to the other guy was a fool’s game, Bob warned Jake, especially here in the Upper Country, with its truly terrible ground conditions.
Another troublesome aspect of the bonus system, Bob, ever the shop steward, observed, was that it fell entirely outside the collective bargaining agreement between the union and the company. Unlike virtually every other aspect of the miner’s life on the job, the bonus system was not negotiated. Oh, there was a “contract” all right, in that a production team leader would “bid” on a particular heading after carefully weighing factors like ground conditions, probable tonnage and likely bonus rates. But which crew was assigned which stope was ultimately the prerogative of management. This, too, invited arbitrariness and even favouritism on the part of management, which, in turn invited the boatloads of grievances that were duly filed about work assignments.
But even those commonplace and long-running disputes were trivial compared to the visceral matter of the bonus rates. Here again the company had the men by the short and curlies, for the rates were a slippery, contentious matter under the exclusive control of the company. Suppose he and Jake consistently made one hundred and ten percent bonus, Bob would rant, waving his sandwich for emphasis as they ate their lunch on the muck pile. Then sure as shit some white hat with a clipboard would show up, right here in the stope, to study their every move. These so-called time-motion experts would measure every distance, time every move, and within a week, wouldn’t you know it, their bonus would fall to ninety percent even though they were pulling just as much muck as before. “New bonus rates” would be the company’s only explanation. And what the hell? It was true he and Jake had no say over, or even any idea about, how the bonus rates were set. If this was a chocolate factory it’d be called a good old-fashioned speed up, having to work twice as hard, to avoid a twenty percent cut in pay.
