by Mick Lowe
“So you were saying you were driving your bus downtown the day of the accident,” the newspaperman prompted after laying his notebook and pen out on the table top, which was still moist from being freshly wiped down.
“Oh, it was no accident, mister, believe me. Someone wanted that poor man dead …”
“What? Why do you sat that?”
“Because he was pushed in front of my bus, plain as day.”
“Really! And you know this how, exactly?”
“Because I seen it happen! One minute he wasn’t there, and the next thing you know, there he was, right in front of me!”
“And did you get a look at who pushed him?” Foley suppressed his mounting excitement.
The driver nodded. “Sure did. The front windows a’ them buses is mighty big, ya know, and we’re sitting high up there in the catbird seat, we don’t miss much.”
“What did he look like, this man who did the pushing?”
“Big feller. Tall and fair-haired, with a crewcut, Looked like an ex-soldier, maybe.”
Gilpin swallowed hard and nodded, trying hard not to betray the jolt of adrenalin that had just hit his system. “Do you think you could identify this individual if you ever saw him again?”
“Oh, most definitely. You don’t forget a thing like that. Doesn’t happen every day, thank God.”
“And you told all this to the police?”
The driver shrugged and held his hands out, palms up as he looked at Foley with a look of wide-eyed disbelief. “They never even asked me! Chalked it all up as an accident. Nobody ever did talk to me about it ’til that insurance fella last week. And now you.”
So stunned was Gilpin that he stopped taking notes, and he still failed to notice the Nosey Parker in the booth right behind them. He had not noticed Henry Hoople, nor recognized the man who had taken a poke at him in the Mine Mill Hall some months before, as Hoople slid furtively out of his own booth. All of a sudden he had urgent business back at the Hall …
Hoople barged straight into McAdoo’s office which was, as usual, wreathed in the blue smoke of a freshly lit cigar.
“You’ll never guess who I just seen over at Gus’s,” Hoople announced.
“Oh yeah?” McAdoo closed the file he’d been reading and looked up at Hoople, who was in the Hall on grievances.
“Remember that little Commie prick reporter who was always hanging out with the old gang?”
“Oh, you mean old Fuzzy Gasbag?” McAdoo laughed. It had been some time since he’d had occasion to use the derisive nickname they’d assigned to Foley Gilpin.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Hoople affirmed with a laugh. “I think he was talking to one of the transit boys, grillin’ him about that company guy who got himself run over by a bus last summer, remember him?”
“Yeah, Henry, sure I do.” McAdoo reached for a pen and paper. “So what’d old Fuzzy want to know?”
Josef Stoptych was impressed. Most potential tenants who applied to live in the building left him cold—too many long hairs out there these days. The landlord was suspicious of their shaggy locks and slovenly ways, figuring if they were ever given half a chance to skip out on the rent they’d take it, and leave him holding the bag. But this newcomer was different. No long hair for him. With his blonde hair and crewcut and clear, blue-eyed gaze he reminded Stoptych of the Waffen SS troopers he’d known during the war. Oh, they’d gained a bad reputation since VE Day, but the landlord secretly believed it was a bad rap—the result of propaganda spewed out by the Jews and Communists, mainly. Like many residents of Silesia, Stoptych had managed to support all four sides during the war—the Nazis, the Red Army, the Allies, the Partisans—whoever had gained the temporary upper hand in the fighting that raged back and forth over his homeland, that benighted corner of Eastern Europe where Poland, Germany and the Ukraine overlapped.
When the war ended, Stoptych had escaped his homeland at the first opportunity, landing in an Austrian refugee camp where he’d been recruited to emigrate to Canada, with the proviso that he move to a Northern Ontario mining town called Sudbury where, he was assured, his employment application at a big mining company named Inco would be expedited and he’d immediately be granted secure, highly paid employment. In return he was expected to join the union at Inco and help combat the Reds who were secretly using the union to subvert Canadian democracy. It was a struggle Stoptych, who loathed Communists almost as much as he hated Jews, was only too happy to join—and he was not alone. The refugee camps of post-war Europe had proved fertile ground for Western companies and agencies eager to gain fresh recruits in the global struggle against Communism. The Americans, led by the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, had combed through the camps seeking not common labourers like Stoptych, but high-end scientists like Werner von Braun, who had helped Hitler develop the V2 rocket, and whose knowledge and skill with ballistics might prove useful to the Americans’ own Cold War missile development program.
Josef Stoptych and the scores like him who were sponsored into Canada because of their pro-fascist, anti-Communist leanings were welcomed with open arms in Sudbury, where they were quickly integrated into the swarm of displaced persons who flooded into the city after the war.
So diverse was the city linguistically and ethnically that it billed itself as “the little League of Nations.” But it was hardly a harmonious whole. Many of the newcomers had discreet, albeit hardcore, pro-fascist leanings which were at odds with their fellow countrymen. These differences, whether ideological, linguistic or ethnic, were often exploited by the company in a divide-and-conquer campaign designed to weaken the Mine Mill union internally. Where once there had been mainly so-called “Red Finns” now there were “White Finns” to counter their influence. Croats arrived to offset Serbs, and “Red Ukrainians” faced off against “White Ukrainians.” The splits were soon felt on the job, where Croat glared at Serb over the lunchroom table, and they quickly spilled over into the community, where a dual system of ethnic clubs—each with its own hall—proliferated. All of these rivalling groups joined—and generally looked down upon—a large French-Canadian population that was equally divided between staunch, conservative rural anti-Communist Catholics and even stauncher rough, tough Mine Mill union supporters. These conflicting allegiances were bred in the bone, and would outlast the Cold War, as would the bricks and mortar of their respective meeting halls.
Canada, and Inco, kept their respective promises to Stoptych. He had indeed found gainful and highly lucrative employment. By dint of hard work—toiling every overtime shift that was offered—combined with frugal devotion to his own personal savings program, Stoptych had soon saved enough to seek an investment outlet for his nest egg. Like many of his fellow workers, he elected to invest in Sudbury real estate by buying several apartment buildings.
Now, for whatever reason, Josef Stoptych had a good feeling about the clean-cut newcomer with the clear blue eyes …
35
The Old Provo’s Trick
He extracted the matchbook thoughtfully from his pocket, and then, with one hand, he thumbed the cover open and bent a single match out of the pack, back and over the striker. It was an old provo’s trick, this simple method of starting a fire. No accelerant—always a dead giveaway to the fire marshals who would later investigate the scene—was needed. And the fire would start, gently, gradually, and slowly, giving him time to get away safely, and the fire itself would consume this innocent, inert pack of matches, leaving no trace of the point of ignition.
He smiled at the simple beauty of the thing before placing the flaming matchbook atop the stack of newspapers on the wooden table and leaving the apartment, being careful to close the door behind him.
The apartment on the floor below was fully engulfed when Jake arrived home at the end of the afternoon shift. His first thought was of Jo Ann, who was, thankfully, still at work. He ran up the stairs without thinking, and found his apartment filled with the smoke rising from below.
&nbs
p; His Mine Rescue training kicked in, and Jake instinctively dropped to his knees to crawl into Foley’s bedroom. He had no idea how much smoke Foley had already inhaled, so Jake placed a hand over Foley’s face, and only then did his friend begin to cough and sputter, rousing finally from a deep sleep.
“Foley! Foley! It’s me, Jake!” He spoke with quiet intensity. “Listen, the place is on fire, we gotta get outta here!” And with that he unceremoniously dragged Foley bodily out of bed, still entangled in bedclothes. He grabbed one of his friend’s hands and hitched it to his belt. The smoke was already thickening, a nasty, acrid effluvia that scorched his nose and throat. His eyes were tearing up badly and his nose was running, but it hardly mattered. The evil black smoke was now so thick he couldn’t see anyway. Leading the way, Jake crawled on all fours, groping toward Foley’s bedroom door, forcing himself to resist the urge to give way to the desperation and panic that clutched at him, as cloying as the acrid, stinking air that was filling his lungs, a lethal chemical stew of burning newspapers, lead-based paints and melting plastic electrical insulation from the apartment below.
The stairs were harrowing, with both Jake and Foley, still forced to remain on all fours, rolling and tumbling by way of descent. Finally both men crawled out the front door of the building. The intense heat of the blaze had blown out the windows of the apartment below theirs, and flames licked out hungrily against the night sky, illuminating Jake’s desperate attempts to get his friend breathing again. Once again his membership on the Mine Rescue team paid off for Jake as he set to work performing emergency resuscitation on Gilpin. It took a while, but eventually the older man began to cough and sputter, chest heaving as he gasped for breath in the cool freshness of the night air. Relieved, Jake paused in his ministrations. He was still on his knees over Foley’s prostrate form as he looked up at the angry flames as they shot fire out the windows above. Even here, down below, Jake couldn’t quite clear his seared lungs of the stench of the toxic chemical soup they’d both been forced to inhale for far too long. Finally Jake forced himself to lie down on the ground beside Foley. As the adrenalin rush subsided Jake began to focus on his own breathing, inhaling lungfuls of the cool, fresh night air around him, exhaling, he hoped, the chemically laced smoky air that had almost killed them both. But the taste of it was still in his mouth, like a bad, and far too recent, memory. The sky above him was beginning to spin wildly and Jake thought he might pass out, but then he heard sirens from the direction of downtown, a scant half-dozen blocks away.
“Hey! Hey buddy! You okay?” Jake felt someone tugging roughly at his shirt. “Yeah, he’s alive over here, Mike! They both are! Seem to be okay! Hey buddy! Is there anyone else in the building?”
Jake tried to respond—wanted to respond—but he felt mired in some slow-mo quicksand. It was just too much effort, and the truth was he didn’t know. Finally he mustered the energy to lift his arms and hands, palms up, in a helpless gesture signalling the feeblest ignorance. The firefighter standing impatiently above him got the message. “Yeah, yeah, okay buddy, you don’t know, I get it. Just take it easy now.”
“Hey, Mike! Buddy here doesn’t know if there’s anybody still in there or not!” For Jake then, still lying flat on his back, the world was a simple place of two contending halves: half angry red, shot through with yellow flames licking hungrily into the other half, the peaceful infinite blackness of the night sky. And then the black won.
36
The Man Who Never Was
To Foley Gilpin the Sudbury police department had long since become a closed book—surly, mistrustful and uncommunicative in the extreme.
The sentiment was quite reciprocal: from the Chief on down, the entire department saw him coming, saw the portly, aging reporter as a well-known sympathizer of the old guard, hardcore Mine Mill, which made him a Communist sympathizer at the very least, an outright Commie at worst.
Gilpin encountered no such obstacles with the Office of the Ontario Fire Marshal, however. Whether it was the Globe’s well known pro-Tory leanings or the fact that the OFI was based in the Ontario Fire Marshal’s Office in the provincial capital of Toronto, which was buffered by some three hundred miles from the incestuous, internecine Cold War politics of small-city Sudbury, Gilpin was never quite sure. But he suspected that his paper’s pro-Tory editorial stance made all the difference to a provincial government where the Conservative Party had been comfortably ensconced for decades. It was an irony Gilpin rather relished: on the rough-and-tumble, rather hickish frontier of the Nickel Range he was regarded as an outlaw, but in Queen’s Park-Bay Street Toronto, that bastion of private school, Tory Blue cronyism, which was the seat of the financial and political power that ruled the vast inland empire that was Ontario, he was a safe, rather tame, scribbler—an insider. (And it was vast. Out of the idle curiosity that made him such a good reporter, Gilpin had one day compared the size of Ontario to the state of Texas; he discovered to his amazement that the Canadian province was more than seven times as large as the outsized American state, and contributed a goodly share of the globe’s total annual output of nickel and copper, yes, but also of gold and silver and platinum, as well as milled lumber and pulp and paper, and, to Gilpin’s surprise, of agricultural products as well.)
For whatever reason, his call was promptly returned, and Gilpin was greeted rather warmly by the specialist dispatched to investigate the fire that had nearly killed him.
“We’re classing the fire as suspicious, at the moment,” he confided to Gilpin.
“But do you know where it started?”
The investigator nodded. “In the second floor apartment, directly below yours.”
“What about how it started?”
The investigator hesitated, reaching for the file in front of him. “On that, we’re not so sure … There was no trace of any accelerant of any kind, or any clear point of origin …”
“Yet you’re still classing the fire as suspicious. Why is that?”
The investigator shrugged. “The tenant was absent when the fire began, which always makes us suspicious …”
“Yes, and who was the tenant?”
“Funny thing is we don’t really know … He was new, apparently. Hadn’t even moved his personal belongings in yet, which arouses further suspicion …”
“But surely our landlord must have some kind of record?”
The investigator nodded in agreement, and flipped through his file once again. “You’d think. Josef Stoptych, yes, here it is. Claims he rented the place out to this new tenant based purely on sight alone … because he liked the look of this guy.”
“Which was?”
“Clean-cut, not some kind of hippie. Tall, blonde, athletic build. Maybe ex-military.”
“Will you take this to the police?”
“Can’t, I’m afraid—there’s no proof a crime was actually committed. And no trace of this mystery tenant … He never got a phone, Stoptych got no references and he paid the rent in cash, first and last. And now he’s gone with the wind.”
“Almost like he never existed.”
“Exactly.”
37
The Go-Go Boys
On the job Jake was still at Frood, in an area remarkable for the pace of technological change it was undergoing. Already Jake and Bob were using the second generation three-boom jumbo drill, a considerable improvement over the original, which had been deemed a spectacular success on all fronts. Bob and Jake easily made their daily, oversized push—and with the expenditure of far less energy. And the mechanized drill made the job safer—the thing could be walked out past the end of the screening overhead and be left to drill off the rounds automatically—if the back caved in, only a machine would be buried, rather than a man on a jackleg.
The company was happy, too. Bob and Jake’s productivity doubled and doubled again, and plans were already underway to introduce more jumbos, not only in other headings at Frood, but in the company’s other mines, as well.
And othe
r parts of the vision Bob had outlined for Jake were coming to pass, too. New, diesel-powered trackless mucking machines, known as scoop trams, were introduced into the new, more spacious stopes carved out by the jumbos. Massive, powerful machines built low to the ground, the scoop trams ran on huge, solid-rubber tires that were sometimes taller than a man. These roaring behemoths were graded by the cubic volume of their buckets, which lifted the muck out of the heading and carried it to the ore pass. The smallest scoop, the ST-2, had a two cubic yard bucket and was dwarfed by the ST-8, the largest scoop tram in use.
As a result of all this the Frood Mine Lower Country had become a much noisier, much faster-moving place, with the headlights of scoop trams zipping to and fro and the manic pounding of the jumbos, three steels turning at once, each squirting its own stream of water out of the drillholes. The volume of ore drilled, blasted and mucked out increased exponentially, and with it, bonus earnings.
With all this frenetic activity the newly mechanized parts of Frood Mine were soon dubbed the “go-go areas.” Jake and Bob were among the very first go-go boys. Bob was enthralled by the labour-saving devices, thankful for the wear-and-tear they saved on his aging frame. His younger partner, meanwhile, wasn’t so sure. Something about the whole thing continued to niggle at Jake, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on …
