by Howard Engel
My foot nearly froze on the brake when I saw that the man in the cab of the truck was Brian O’Mara. It took a second to react. Just like the guard, who was now closing the gate. I let the rig get ahead of me and I completed my turn and pulled out after him. I was fairly sure that he wouldn’t beat me up even if he did catch sight of me in his rear-view mirror. But with all of his side mirrors he would have to be half asleep not to catch the shape of the Olds coming after him.
He moved north-east along Pelham Road and turned off into Glendale Avenue, where it crossed the Eleven Mile Creek, and followed it parallel to the base of the escarpment through the vanishing farms and fields that are now subdivisions and shopping plazas until it crossed the Queen Elizabeth Way. This was major traffic, and for a moment I thought that I would lose my prey either to Toronto or Buffalo. But he didn’t join the highway, he crossed over to the other side and picked the old road to St. David’s and Niagara-on-the-Lake.
O’Mara’s apparent destination pricked up my ears. I took my eyes off the colouring trees, and the blowing eddies of fallen leaves and the bright red of the sumachs and thought about Jack Dowden’s shoebox of credit-card flimsies. Niagara-on-the-Lake was popular with Jack too. I was doing something right for a change.
I kept a pick-up truck with bushels of squash and turnips between me and O’Mara. The pick-up’s suspension was dragging and raised a few sparks when the asphalt got rough. O’Mara had the road ahead of him clear; he didn’t seem to be out to set a new speed record. Maybe he was looking at the changing leaves too.
Niagara-on-the-Lake has become a sand-blasted antique early-nineteenth-century town since the days when I first knew it. Then it was just a sleepy backwater with a jam factory. Now it was a tourist mecca because of the success of the Shaw Festival, an annual theatrical tribute to the bard of Ayot St. Lawrence. Apart from the theatre, of course, there was the fudge. Places like Niagara revolve around fudge in the summer. Every other store sells it, tourists munch it as they stare through store windows at paper flowers, local history books and expensive soap smelling of sandalwood. People seem to be able to concentrate on fudge, which you could see being made through other store windows, long after interest in antiques, theatre and shopping has worn off. In August the stately brick homes of Niagara, the old Presbyterian church with its Greek columns, the sand-blasted façades along Queen Street dissolve into a mad rush of tourists with a need for a sweet fudge fix.
O’Mara stopped at the lights on the way into town, then headed straight up Mississauga Street to Queen. From here, over the fairways of the golf course, I could see the point where the Niagara River empties into Lake Ontario. Across the water, on the American side, three flags flew from Fort Niagara. Three hundred years ago, Fort Niagara was the only man-made structure around here except for teepees and wigwams. On the Canadian side, the smaller of the two Canadian forts looked like an up-ended flower-pot or a child’s one-scoop sand-castle in the middle of the golf course.
The truck turned east at Queen; then, after a block, it turned off the main drag into Simcoe and headed towards the river. I followed at a safe distance, catching a glimpse of the clocktower in the middle of Queen Street further down by the old town hall. With the golf course on our left, we both continued down Simcoe to the corner where it met Front Street. The houses along the other side of the street were big and old, going back well into the last century.
O’Mara took a left at the corner, where a temporary construction road headed off across the open terrain of the golf course in the direction of the fort. I turned the Olds in the opposite direction along Front and parked in the lot reserved for guests at the Oban Inn. I watched his rig bounce over the uneven ballast of the work road, seeing it grow smaller as it approached the Canadian Fort. I dismissed the idea of following it; out on the fairway, I’d be as conspicuous as a dead fly on a white sheet. That would have got O’Mara in trouble as well as yours truly. And I needed O’Mara. There were a lot of things he’d forgotten to tell me the other night.
I got out of the car and raised the hood, just to give me something to do in case there were eyes behind the window curtains of the Oban Inn. Across the warm motor, Fort Mississauga looked like it was painted by an amateur against a blue backdrop of lake and sky. It looked squatter from here than it did from Queen Street. There were no crenellated walls, no bastions, ravelins or parapets as far as I could see, just a row of loopholes around the waist of a brick tower. For musket fire, I guess. The curved surface of the otherwise unadorned wall suffered from a skin disease; the plaster was peeling off to expose red brick underneath. For years the fort’s thick hide had withstood the seasonal barrage of countless duffers from the second tee. I don’t remember hearing whether it ever exchanged shots with Fort Niagara across the mouth of the river.
The truck disappeared behind a temporary enclosure that had been thrown up around the fort. It didn’t look solid enough to protect it from tourists’ golf balls, but it was a gesture in the right direction. A wind had come up, blowing eddies of dry leaves around in front of the Olds. There were whitecaps on the slate blue tops of the waves in Lake Ontario. It was hard to tell from where I was whether I was looking at the river or the lake. I wasn’t expecting to see a dotted line separating the geographical features, but from ground level it was confusing.
There was no movement at the fort as far as I could see. O’Mara’s truck had been swallowed up into what must be a depression in the ground close to the walls. I got the feeling that there was activity going on behind the fence, but I couldn’t prove it until another truck emerged from the gateway. It had its headlights on and it headed over the bumpy construction road in my direction. By the time it reached the corner of Simcoe and Front to turn towards the highway, I was apparently lost in thought as I contemplated my distributor under the hood. The truck had a yellow panel on its door. It read: Sangallo Restorations, Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was a Euclid truck and the hopper in back was full of Ontario real estate. I was closing up the hood of the Olds when I remembered seeing the yellow Sangallo sign on a truck parked outside The Fifth Wheel less than half an hour ago. I knew I was going to see a lot of similar signs now that I was aware of Sangallo’s existence. That’s the way life works. Alex Pásztory had mentioned Sangallo. Something to do with Tony Pritchett and his mob.
I started the engine and slowly drove down Front Street, away from the golf course, and parked again not far from the corner of Front and King. King Street is the dividing line in Niagara. Streets crossing it change their names when they continue on the other side. Front becomes Ricardo, Prideaux becomes Byron, Queen becomes Picton and so on. It made the town seem bigger, I guess.
Through the car window I could see an athletic-looking man of middle age busily raking leaves from the lawn at the corner house. It was one of those picture-postcard houses that the town is famous for. This one wasn’t given over to the fudge trade; its sign advertised Bed and Breakfast. The man with the rake paused to see what I wanted. With his pointed beard he looked a little satanic, but there was a twinkle in his eye.
“We’re closed for the season,” he said before I’d fully got out of the car.
“That’s a shame,” I said. No sense disillusioning the man whose enthusiasm causes him to rake leaves even in the off-season.
“Fellow in an antique Bentley parked outside yesterday and we had half a dozen people asking if we were open. You wouldn’t consider parking right in front, would you?”
“Sure. Anything to help.” I didn’t know whether he was joking or not, so I moved the car just in case he was serious.
“I thought of renting a Rolls to park out front when we first opened, but business caught on. It just took time and word of mouth.” He told me this when I joined him again on the sidewalk. I looked at the Olds. It wasn’t in the first blush of youth, but it wasn’t that bad.
“Do you know where I can rent a boat?” I asked.
“How big? What kind?”
I hadn’t give the idea
much thought. Vaguely I was wondering whether I might not be able to get closer to the fort from the lake than by trying to make out anything over the expanse of the golf course. “Something simple,” I said. “It’s just for me.”
“How long will you need it?” he asked, taking another pass or two at the leaves. Maybe it warmed him up; he was standing in his shirt-sleeves.
“Oh, maybe an hour, an hour and a half. I just want to have a look at the famous fort from the water. Just to see what the enemy saw, if you follow me.”
“I’ve got a small fibreglass rowboat, if that’s any good to you,” he said. “You won’t be able to rent a boat at this time of year as far as I know. The Boat Works has been closed for a few years now.”
“Oh, I wasn’t looking for anything fancy. I’ll be glad to rent yours, though.”
“I can’t rent it to you. It’s just collecting dust and spider webs in the shed. If you’ll help me down to the water, you can have it for as long as you want.”
“Ed?” It was a striking woman in grey on the porch. Was she going to revoke the offer, I wondered. Such was my experience in life. But no, she had a good face, both wise and beautiful all at the same time. “Don’t forget about the outside lights. They’ll have to be covered before we get a frost.”
Ed smiled up at the porch and signalled me to follow him to the shed, where he dug a small plastic rowboat out from under the rubble of rolled-up rugs, miles of green garden hose and a few spare bedsteads. We each took an end and walked across the street to Queen’s Royal Park. Apart from the trees, which had seen a lot of history, the other object of note was a green-roofed gazebo with eight delicate arches. “They sure knew how to build for pleasure in those days,” I observed out loud.
“You mean the gazebo? That was left by a film crew a year or so ago. Looks like it belongs, though,” Ed allowed. I made no more observations until we had the boat in the water and the oars fixed in their oarlocks. I said thanks to Ed and told him not to report me missing until midnight.
“What name shall I give?” Ed asked.
“Cooperman. Ben Cooperman from Grantham.”
He kept his eye on me until I started along the shore. The postage-stamp park with the gazebo slid away, and I was treated to a look into a few backyards and a view behind the clubhouse of the golf course.
The boat was light and sat like a cork on top of the water, rather than settling into it. Every time my oars got out of phase, I turned dramatically either out into the lake or pointing to shore. The lake was calmer than when I’d first seen it that day. The whitecaps were gone this close to shore, and even out towards the middle it didn’t look so formidable any more. As I began to get my second wind, I noticed that for a little boat, it handled very well. I knew that on the homeward journey I might wish for an outboard motor, but that was only natural. At the moment, I wasn’t complaining about the boat. What troubled me was the fact that the shoreline was rising. The golf course was higher than I expected. My first glimpse of the fort was disappointing. I couldn’t see the loopholes I’d seen from dry ground. Even though I was getting close enough to see individual bricks on the flanks of the partly plastered walls of the tower, I could see less of what was going on on the ground than before. I should have figured that.
But if I couldn’t see anything, I could hear motors. There was the steady drone of a compressor and the irregular din of heavy, earth-moving equipment. Facing the water, I could see a fortified gate that had been cut in the shoulders of the surrounding earthworks. The fort was standing in a depression and it was circled by built-up berms or earthworks of some kind. The fence that hid the front of Fort Mississauga from me did not hide the view from the water. The trouble was, the view was not very interesting. I should have asked my friend Ed at the Bed and Breakfast it he had a small plane for me to borrow. A low flight over the fort would have told me more about what was going on there and given me fewer blisters.
I decided to beach the boat and see what was to be learned by simply looking around. I ran it as far up the small patch of beach as I could, first moving to the stern in order to raise the bow. I walked out without getting my feet wetter than they already were. In a moment or two I’d pulled the boat over large boulders to some bushes which marked the beginning of a short, steep bank of dark, slippery soil. I pretended not to see the “No Trespassing” signs that were posted with enough frequency to awaken curiosity in a radish as I scrambled up the slope. The noise of activity was more intense now. But since it was bounced around the earthworks and the single tower of the fort, the sound could have been coming from anywhere.
Through the grill of the gate facing the lake, I could clearly see a similar gate at the other end of a short tunnel that cut through the earthwork paralleling the lake. Obscuring most of the view beyond the second gate were a sheet of plywood and the handles of some tools that had been leaned against the bars. I saw two men in hard hats cross my field of vision and a puff or two of diesel smoke. From what must have been a deep excavation, I next caught sight of the jointed arm of a back-hoe as it lifted a scoop of earth past my sight-lines and then vanished.
I tried to open the gate on my side, but the ancient bars were held fast, not by the huge lock that had been built into the gate when it was made, but by a tough modern padlock joining together lengths of formidable un-rusted chain. I watched through the two gates for some time, but saw only a repetition of what I’d already observed. I was beginning to think that I’d picked a bad time, and that I would have to make a midnight run back in this direction after a good meal at the Prince of Wales, when I heard the sound of a motor dying. A short time later, this gesture was seconded by a cough as the generator cut out. We were suddenly surrounded by silence that almost hurt the ears. It was quickly getting dark. I checked my watch; a very respectable quitting time, nearly six o’clock.
I retreated down the bank to the shelter of some bushes to wait out the time until it would be safe to have another look. This was a fine place to be hungry. I tried my pockets. Nothing. I would have gladly settled for the crumbs from a bar of fudge. I began giving myself hell for damning the town’s chief industry so roundly earlier. I checked the bushes for berries and nuts. Nothing doing. But what I did see took my mind off my stomach. I was sitting in a clump of bushes containing various sorts of leaves, but what I recognized were some pods. I’d seen them before. I recognized the dry pods peeling away from the shiny seed-carrying septum. I was sitting in a clump of Dame’s Rocket. And there was still enough light available for me to see that were other samples of it here at the bottom of the bank and at the top. I checked my cuffs. I still hadn’t collected any Hesperis matronalis there. But the night was young.
TWELVE
I watched the last of the sunset darken in the western sky. I wasn’t situated so that I caught the best of it, but the north-western horizon did have a sideshow. My best view was of the sun hitting the American fort across the river to the east. Fort Niagara looked more like a big country house with a wall around it than it did a fort. I read somewhere that the French built it that way on purpose so as not to unsettle the Indians. The “French Castle” was once bombarded from close to where I was huddled against the gathering cold. The British set up a battery near here in 1759 and sent a cannon-ball over the river and down the chimney of the French commander. That, of course, was long before the fort I was interested in was built. Back in the 1750s there wasn’t anything, not even fudge, on this side of the river. The earliest permanent settlers came after the American Ware of Independence, and Fort Mississauga didn’t come along until after the war after that, the War of 1812. They say this fort was built from the brick from an old lighthouse that used to grace this point. Others say that it was constructed from the rubble of the village of Niagara which had been burned to the ground during the war. As a fort, it was a washout because peace broke out and hasn’t been ruptured since. In the 1837 Rebellion in Upper Canada, Fort Mississauga was refurbished, and during the War between the Sta
tes it was manned for the last time. If it is written in the cards that some forts should become conversation pieces on golf courses, then Fort Mississauga was a good candidate.
I climbed up the cold bank to the top again. This time there was no noise. Since I already knew there was no entrance to be had through the back door in the earthworks, I climbed to the top of the overgrown earthwork to the left of the gate. It was a short scramble; the berms that made up the outer defences of the fort were not high. On my way up I encountered more Hesperis. It was trying to tell me something, but I was too busy to read the message just then. From the top of the scarp or whatever military engineers call what I was catching my breath on, it could be a redoubt or a bastion or chopped liver for all I knew, I could see the rest of these defences as they zigzagged around the central keep of the fort, if that’s what it’s called. From here I could see the distant lights of the town which stopped just short of the edge of the golf course. It made me feel like a rather isolated private investigator. Lights meant life and warmth. Up here I could feel the cold settling in around my bones. Looking over my shoulder I could see that the lake was beginning to mist up for the night. Thanks a lot! Damn it, even an illegal operation such as what I suspected was going on here lets its workers off at a reasonable hour. Maybe the crookeder the scam, the better the help is treated. Private investigators have no union. I can’t grieve to anybody. There’s no joint standing-committee to see that I get as much time off as the men I saw working here an hour ago.
The front and sides of the fort had been surrounded by a low plastic mesh fence. I guess they hadn’t expected trouble from the rear. They might have learned a lesson in history from the French commander of Fort Niagara. He hadn’t anticipated trouble from this direction either. As I sat on the top of the earthworks, I kept my head and shoulders as low as possible. I didn’t want to present a silhouette against the night sky. There might be a watchman out there beyond the fence, maybe taking shelter in the golf course clubhouse. In the back of my mind I could see him unchaining his half-starved Doberman pinschers. I could imagine them drooling for a taste of Cooperman flesh.
