The Canadian Bomber Contract, page 5
The expenditure paid off, too. On the following Sunday night she came up to the apartment early, bursting with excitement. That afternoon there had been a free rock concert in Plaza Alexis Nihon, and she had seen The Mohawk make seven sales, in alleys and at the fringes of the crowd. “Money passed, m’sieu, for the small plastic envelopes …”
I said that was fine and handed her the usual twenty-dollar banknote. She also had one of the abominable spruce beers, while I sat frowning at The Mohawk’s growing stupidity. The narcotics squad must have been on him every time he made a sale, and if he kept it up, Cartier couldn’t keep them from busting him. And that would leave me high and dry …
When I tried to inveigle Francine into bed, she declined firmly but graciously on the grounds that the moon was in the wrong phase for such frivolity. I tried to explain to her that we were living in the permissive age and, if we just got naked in bed together, could undoubtedly think of an alternative. “Never in this world …” she replied, and as I kissed her goodbye at the door, I reflected that my small surrogate spy was also a very bourgeois Gallic housewife. Still, there was no one to blame; we create these monsters ourselves. If I had just kept her a maid who screwed on the side, the problem would never have arisen …
Three days later her professional competence cropped up again. She came at noon during her short lunch break. I was sunning beside the rooftop swimming pool when I heard an indignant young voice arguing with the Pakistani lifeguard. He was explaining that she could not visit the pool area unless she was a resident or a guest of a resident Sighing, I got up and walked over to interrupt her spitfire attack on him. The lifeguard’s English was shaky, and his French nonexistent so that her “Cochons” were bouncing off him unheeded.
When I nodded, he gratefully withdrew, and I led Francine by the elbow away from the pool to the sundeck on the other side of the roof. From there I could stare down Peel at the Sheraton Mount Royal Hotel, the beautiful old Sun Life Building, and the half-mooned windows of the Château Champlain beyond Dominion Square. Francine was fuming beside me, because she was too short to see over the windy ramparts.
“Have a look at your lovely city, ma petite,” I said and, slipping my hands under her microskirt, hoisted her high enough to see all of metropolitan Montreal, including the high towers and observation platforms of Place Ville Marie. As I held her high, the long, dark hair snapped in the breeze.
“Mon dieu!” she said so softly I could barely hear her. And then, imperiously, she thrust a finger toward the north rampart of the sun deck. “Allons! We go there, so I can see the Isle Hólène, and the Exposition …” I carried her there like a small human banner, and she kept murmuring to herself. Neighborhoods and parks she could recognize. Since the Cantlie was almost at the gates to McGill University and only two blocks from Parc Mount Royal, she was seeing the city of her birth as she had never seen it before.
When I had lowered her to the sun deck, she was all business again. Smoothing the microskirt down, she said she had some very important news about Le Mohawk, but getting it had caused her extra expense, which I must bear.
“How much extra?” I asked.
“Seven dollars, m’sieu. I had to pay the landlord where he stays five dollars and the woman who scrubs the halls in that place another two. To let me in and read his mail. So I must have my regular fee with seven dollars additional.”
“All right. We’ll go down to the apartment. You don’t think I keep my wallet in these bathing trunks do you?”
“No, m’sieu,” she said. “It is obvious that there is no room there for a wallet. Or for that matter, for all of your stomach.”
“Francine,” I said sternly, “God will punish you for making mock of me.” And she covered her mouth with both hands as the impish glee changed her face. “If I am a trifle sack-like in the midriff, you must remember the great investment in fine foods and liquors it represents.”
Getting my beach towel and Dopp kit, I escorted her to the elevator and we went down to the apartment. There, after I had showered and put on a dressing gown, she said that Le Mohawk was leaving for Niagara Falls the next morning on his motorcycle. That he had been employed as the manager of a folk-rock group from North Dakota called the Stone Mountaineers, who would appear several days later at a rock festival there. Le Mohawk had a confirmation paper for a room at the Foxhead Inn in Canadian Niagara Falls, good for three days.
She added, scornfully and irrelevantly, that his room was like a pigpen. Le Mohawk would not even pay the three-dollar weekly maid bill in his tenement habitation, and the place stank of sweat and garbage. I nodded idly, watching the little French-Canadian girl, who was still voluble. Gave her twenty-seven Canadian dollars, thinking that she had actually been into The Mohawk’s room. And I didn’t want her to push too hard.
I had watched the hippie boy for some time myself and had him cataloged as a foolish clown. I had even entered his world suddenly as an avenging square, belting him to his knees when he cursed me after a failing panhandle … But that didn’t mean he was really a clown. Not many stupid, dirty-footed boys with dangling scalplocks had the guts to drive two tons of high explosives with detonators all the way from Ohio to Montreal. And then stash them so successfully that no whisper of their present location had surfaced …
I was thinking about Francine and possible danger to her. After I had explained that she must forget the whole thing, that one man had already been stabbed to death in Quebec City, she nodded. She was not to interest herself in the affair anymore, unless she heard from me.
“Oui, m’sieu.”
“And I know you’re late on your lunch hour, but is the moon in the proper phase again?”
“Oui, m’sieu,” she said, smiling.
After she had gone, I booked a trip on the turbo-train to Toronto the next morning at 7:45. Even if The Mohawk left earlier, there was no way he could beat the hundred-mile-an-hour train. And from Toronto I could figure out a way to cover him at the Foxhead Inn in Canadian Niagara Falls.
Chapter 10
At 7:45 the next morning I was on the Canadian National turbo train when she eased out of Montreal for the run to Toronto. She cut conventional time for that trip in two at speeds of over a hundred miles an hour, and first-class passengers were served breakfast in their individually reserved seats. She seemed to me a much more interesting way to move than by plane, but most Canadians laughed at the bullet-shaped turbo, saying she was broken down more often than on the road.
In Toronto I rented a car, and when The Mohawk arrived at the Foxhead Inn, I was not only installed in the room next to his but had bugged it solidly, including a wireless tap on the phone. The Foxhead was a Sheraton affiliate but was run like a Coney Island concession. Tourists of a modest class surged in and out of it constantly and loudly, most of them on various holiday package plans, and they made Jones Beach look like White Sulphur Springs in comparison.
In fact, the whole area on the Canadian side had a sleazy carnival atmosphere with sex shows, wax museums, and an overall honky-tonk effect. One show featured famous cars owned by such worthy citizens as Al Capone and Il Duce. Gimcrack shops, cheap merchandise, and cotton candy … And yet, in a way, the whole thing was justified. You could always turn your eyes away from the neon frippery and shrill huckstering and look at the falls themselves.
They were impressive, set in magnificent surroundings around a great curve and divided by Goat Island. Their plunging waters, higher on the American side but wider and more regular on the Canadian Horseshoe side, plunged down to smash into perpetual mist in the gorges below. I had seen the Kaieteur Falls in British Guiana, much higher, and Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River, but neither had the total effect of the two Niagaras.
I was browsing in the glass-walled newsstand off the Foxhead Inn lobby when The Mohawk wheeled his Japanese motorcycle into the motor entrance and registered. I won’t say the tall hippie looked dapper, because nobody can do that with only a single, twisted scalplock three-feet long. But he must have been feeling his importance as an entrepreneur (manager of the folk-rock group, the Stone Mountaineers), because he had given himself a long overdue wash and was wearing boots.
I was one elevator behind when he headed for his room, and let myself into the one next to his. Through earphones I heard his toilet flush like thunder crost the bay, and then he was phoning room 917 in the hotel. A lazy voice answered, and The Mohawk said he was ready to go talk to this Parks Commission mother about the festival plans. Was the Apple-Seed there?
The other party laughed. “Yeah, man, he’s here. But when it looked like you was going to be late, he started on the Lebanese brown. If I don’t take it away, he’ll be talking Sanskrit to that Parks cat.”
“Look,” said The Mohawk, like an elderly statesman, “if he’s got a good high going, we can do it tomorrow. We got two more days.”
“No, man,” said the other end. “Let’s get this good-citizenship shit over and done with, then on with the love and games. You know?”
“In the lobby,” said The Mohawk, “right away. But if The Seed is on a bummer, leave him there.”
“We’ll be down in ten minutes. Are you holdin’?”
“That’s a telephone you got in your hand, El Freako,” admonished The Mohawk, “and it has connections all over this world. I’m going downstairs.”
Three bushy-haired companeros met him in the lobby, and I figured the one who looked like he was suffering the male climacteric was The Apple-Seed, almost unhorsed by the Lebanese brown hash. The four of them walked north out of the hotel into the beautiful park with its manicured flowerbeds and borders.
They sauntered along the crowded walk for several hundred yards and turned in at the doorway of the Niagara Falls Parks Administration Building. There The Mohawk told the receptionist that they had an appointment with Mr. W. J. B. Newcombe, public relations officer for the commission. The receptionist called his office and told them to go right up, first floor, Mr. New-combe’s secretary would meet them.
They had barely made the stairway turn when I told the same receptionist that I wanted to see Mr. Newcombe. She glanced at the clock uncertainly; he was in conference, it was nearly 4:30. However, if I wished to go up and explain my business to his secretary, perhaps he could see me before he left for the day.
I went upstairs, explained to the secretary in Mr. New-combe’s outer office about my industrial medical kits. She all but yawned in my face, but said I could wait if I wished. I wished and went to sit in the far corner, covering my face with a current issue of MacLean’s magazine.
In the inner office Mr. Newcomen was being forceful. He said that as managers of four well-known groups, they had five days to come up with solid contracts and guarantees from the producers. That after the fiasco at Manseau a few months ago, when the kids were charged fifteen dollars apiece and not a single major roek group showed up, Canada was ready to cancel all such happenings, including this one at the Niagara Falls Park.
“Yeah,” admitted The Mohawk sullenly, “that was a real rip off. Like the one in Toronto sponsored by the big department store. The bastards have stopped doing things for us, and now they’re doing things to us. Okay, so in your eyes we’re freaks, but we expect thirty thousand freaks to make this scene, and they’ll bring money.”
“Only part of it,” said Newcombe, who seemed to be a choleric type. “I’ve drawn up a requirement sheet, and everything on it must be met in full, five days before the festival opens. Your producers are going to have to come up with two hundred chemical toilets—no lime pits. We’re not running a Chinese revolution. Signed contracts with approved plumbers to run water taps to the places marked on this map.
“The Parks Commission will furnish one hundred security guards, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, another two hundred. There will be a medical center available to treat bad trippers, but any pushers, and I mean of pot, hash, acid, or anything else, will be arrested right quick.”
“You don’t like us very much, do you, Dad?” asked The Mohawk, and Mr. Newcombe answered with controlled anger.
“No, sir, I don’t. I think most of you are scum. But I have two teenaged daughters, and I expect they’ll insist on coming to your festival. Neither my wife nor I will glory in that fact …”
Somebody, it must have been the stoned Apple-Seed, giggled with delight, and then there was silence from the inner office.
“Okay,” said Mr. Newcombe coldly, “you all have a copy of the requirements. To be met in the next five days. We keep this park like a garden, and that’s what we want it to remain after thirty thousand of your music-loving friends have come and gone …
Chairs shifted inside, and I nodded to the secretary and said I would be back the next day. Getting late and I didn’t want to keep Mr. Newcombe overtime. I was down the stairs and lost in the crowd before the four rock group managers got out of the building.
Back at the hotel they all gathered in The Mohawk’s room and turned on. The voices of laughing girls came down the hall and joined the acid and cannabis party. I kept the earphones on while their slurred gigglings and heavy breathing surged back and forth, until finally there were only bursts of hysterical laughter as they went, all, on the prancing nod.
Taking off the earphones, I stowed them away. Shaking my head, but not in contempt or even dislike. My generation had gotten stoned on booze to avoid the pressures and shames of their world; these kids next door were only doing the same thing but seemed a little neater about it.
Going up to the top floor of the hotel, I had two martinis, a bad filet mignon with vegetables cooked hours before, and topped it off with some wretched coffee and fake Brie cheese. I wasn’t afraid of The Mohawk wandering off on any devious business, not that night. The last I had heard from him over the bug phones was that he was mouthing gutturals happily from a strong high.
After I had finished the atrocious meal, I tipped too much, because you can rarely find a complete meal like that. Everything bad. Pushing out of the restaurant, I went up the flight of stairs to the swimming pool on the roof. It was dark now and deserted, and when I turned to stare at the curving expanse of the falls, I was stunned like a poleaxed steer.
All their majestic sweep and plunging majesty was tinted by garish pastel floodlights. Green spray, pink torrents, and yellow, boiling mists … The falls of Niagara by night had been turned into a gaudy imitation of the junk shops on their shores. I felt personally affronted by this tinting of a natural wonder and wondered why God had not thought to make this marvel more palatable in his original plan.
Chapter 11
After that night The Mohawk stopped tripping, and his fellow rock group managers vanished. But he stayed busy. Three times in the next two days he rode his motorcycle across the Rainbow Bridge to the U.S. side of Niagara Falls. This was something he would never have done if he had been a draft dodger or deserter.
On the American side he went to see three ship-charter firms, a ship’s chandler, and a firm of engineers. He took two flights in a helicopter, not only over the falls but upriver of them to the end of Grand Island, where the Niagara River splits to form the two separate curtains of falling water. He also visited a ship-charter outfit in Buffalo, New York, and it became obvious that his whirlwind trips had nothing to do with managing a rock group at a proposed festival ten days away. Eight now.
Strangely, he seemed to make no effort to meet Newcombe’s deadline about the stringent rules set up for the festival. I was on him every foot of the way. After he got out of the helicopter, I hired it and in casual conversation found out exactly what he had said in his trips.
The next morning I awakened just before dawn, which was an hour earlier than I had instructed my head the night before. Reaching for the earphones, I listened for a minute and began cursing softly. There was no sound from The Mohawk’s room; ordinarily the phones would have picked up his breathing while he slept.
To check, I picked up the telephone, and asked the operator to ring The Mohawk’s room. When she did, the clangor bombed my head so loudly that I clawed off the headphones which I had forgotten to remove. Add another to my long list of stupidities; I had put one of the taps on the hippie’s phone …
No one answered the ring, so I dressed hurriedly and went out in the hall. I beat his door lock with my plastic wedge and saw with relief that the wild boy was only missing, not gone. His meager belongings were still there. I shook the place down methodically but couldn’t find anything interesting, so I left as quietly as I had entered.
After showering, shaving, and dressing again, I went down to the lobby. Even at that early hour it was swarming with life; group parties checking out and others pushing in to replace them. During a lull I dropped a dollar on the harassed bell captain, and he said yes, my hippie friend with the long topknot had come down about an hour ago. Cranked up his motorcycle and ridden toward the Rainbow Bridge.
After breakfasting on vulcanized scrambled eggs and underdone bacon, I got in the rented car and drove to Chippewa. There I boarded the cruise boat Niagara Belle with about a hundred other tourists, and the imitation Mississippi stern-wheeler thrashed out toward Niagara Falls, New York. On her way over she went around Navy Island.
The morning had been overcast, but now the sun was arrowing through the breaking clouds, sparkling off swiftly moving water. I went to the aft deck and sat down, a pleasant morning and a pleasing prospect. The Niagara Belle was not crowded, so I sprawled on the wooden seat and watched the triangular island and the approaching Stateside shore. I had driven around both falls from both sides and flown over them in the helicopter. Now, from water level, I was trying to set the great waterway and its islands in my head.
To the north of us was Grand Island, the big one. It extended almost to Buffalo, and it was at Grand Island that the Niagara River split. Its eastern branch flowed toward the Stateside and furnished most of the water for the American Falls. The other branch was the Canadian border, and after streaming by small Navy Island, they became united again, moving with awesome and increasing power toward the precipices over which they plunged.
