Landslide

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so – not just yet. I want to get some field experience.’

He nodded approvingly. ‘Got any ideas about that?’

I said, ‘I don’t think I want to be a company man; I’d rather work for myself. I reckon the North-West Territories are bursting with opportunities for a freelance geologist.’

Susskind was doubtful. ‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing.’ He looked across at me and smiled. ‘A mite self-conscious about your face, are you? And you want to get away from people – go into the desert – is that it?’

‘There’s a little of that in it,’ I said unwillingly. ‘But I meant what I said. I think I’ll make out in the north.’

‘You’ve been in hospitals for a year and a half,’ said Susskind. ‘And you don’t know many people. What you should do is to go out, get drunk, make friends – maybe get yourself a wife.’

‘Good God!’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get married.’

He waved his tankard. ‘Why not? You find yourself a really good girl and tell her the whole story. It won’t make any difference to her if she loves you.’

‘So you’re turning into a marriage counsellor,’ I said. ‘Why have you never got married?’

‘Who’d marry a cantankerous bastard like me?’ He moved restlessly and spilled ash down his shirt-front. ‘I’ve been holding out on you, bud. You’ve been a pretty expensive proposition, you know. You don’t think a thousand bucks a month has paid for what you’ve had? Roberts doesn’t come cheap and there were the tutors, too – not to mention my own ludicrously expensive services.’

I said, ‘What are you getting at, Susskind?’

‘When the first envelope came with its cargo of a thousand dollars, this was in it.’

He handed me a slip of paper. There was the line of typing: FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT. Underneath was another sentence: IN THE EVENT OF THESE FUNDS BEING INSUFFICIENT, PLEASE INSERT THE FOLLOWING AD IN THE PERSONAL COLUMN OF THE VANCOUVER SUN – R.B.G. WANTS MORE.

Susskind said, ‘When you came up to Montreal I decided it was time for more money so I put the ad. in the paper. Whoever is printing this money doubled the ante. In the last year and a half you’ve had thirty-six thousand dollars; there are nearly four thousand bucks left in the kitty – what do you want to do with it?’

‘Give it to some charity,’ I said.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Susskind. ‘You’ll need a stake if you’re setting off into the wide blue yonder. Pocket your pride and take it.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

‘I don’t see what else you can do but take it,’ he observed; ‘You haven’t a cent otherwise.’

I fingered the note. ‘Who do you think this is? And why is he doing it?’

‘It’s no one out of your past, that’s for sure,’ said Susskind. ‘The gang that Grant was running with could hardly scratch up ten dollars between them. All hospitals get these anonymous donations. They’re not usually as big as this nor so specific, but the money comes in. It’s probably some eccentric millionaire who read about you in the paper and decided to do something about it.’ He shrugged. ‘There are two thousand bucks a month still coming in. What do we do about that?’

I scribbled on the note and tossed it back to him. He read it and laughed. ‘“R.B.G. SAYS STOP.” I’ll put it in the personal column and see what happens.’ He poured us more beer. ‘When are you taking off for the icy wastes?’

I said, ‘I guess I will use the balance of the money. I’ll leave as soon as I can get some equipment together.’

Susskind said, ‘It’s been nice having you around, Bob. You’re quite a nice guy. Remember to keep it that way, do you hear? No poking and prying – keep your face to the future and forget the past and you’ll make out all right. If you don’t you’re liable to explode like a bomb. And I’d like to hear how you’re getting on from time to time.’

Two weeks later I left Montreal and headed north-west. I suppose if anyone was my father it was Susskind, the man with the tough, ruthless, kindly mind. He gave me a taste for tobacco in the form of cigarettes, although I never got around to smoking as many as he did. He also gave me my life and sanity.

His full name was Abraham Isaac Susskind.

I always called him Susskind.

THREE (#ulink_91259d60-2f45-5986-9818-c2b610f2bf97)

The helicopter hovered just above treetop height and I shouted to the pilot, ‘That’ll do it; just over there in the clearing by the lake.’

He nodded, and the machine moved sideways slowly and settled by the lakeside, the downdraught sending ripples bouncing over the quiet water. There was the usual soggy feeling on touchdown as the weight came on to the hydraulic suspension and then all was still save for the engine vibrations as the rotor slowly flapped around.

The pilot didn’t switch off. I slammed the door open and began to pitch out my gear – the unbreakable stuff that would survive the slight fall. Then I climbed down and began to take out the cases of instruments. The pilot didn’t help at all; he just sat in the driving seat and watched me work. I suppose it was against his union rules to lug baggage.

When I had got everything out I shouted to him, ‘You’ll be back a week tomorrow?’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘About eleven in the morning.’

I stood back and watched him take off and the helicopter disappeared over the trees like a big ungainly grasshopper. Then I set about making camp. I wasn’t going to do anything more that day except make camp and, maybe, do a little fishing. That might sound as though I was cheating the Matterson Corporation out of the best part of a day’s work, but I’ve always found that it pays not to run headlong into a job.

A lot of men – especially city men – live like pigs when they’re camping. They stop shaving, they don’t dig a proper latrine, and they live exclusively on a diet of beans. I like to make myself comfortable, and that takes time. Another thing is that you can do an awful lot of work when just loafing around camp. When you’re waiting for the fish to bite your eye is taking in the lie of the land and that can tell an experienced field geologist a hell of a lot. You don’t have to eat all of an egg to know it’s rotten and you don’t have to pound every foot of land to know what you’ll find in it and what you won’t find.

So I made camp. I dug the latrine and used it because I needed to. I got some dry driftwood from the shore and built a fire, then dug out the coffee-pot and set some water to boil. By the time I’d gathered enough spruce boughs to make a bed it was time to have coffee, so I sat with my back against a rock and looked over the lake speculatively.

From what I could see the lake lay slap-bang on a discontinuity. This side of the lake was almost certainly mesozoic, a mixture of sedimentary and volcanic rocks – good prospecting country. The other side, by the lie of the land and what I’d seen from the air, was probably palaeozoic, mostly sedimentary. I doubted if I’d find much over there, but I had to go and look.

I took a sip of the scalding coffee and scooped up a handful of pebbles to examine them. Idly I let them fall from my hand one at a time, then threw the last one into the lake where it made a small ‘plop’ and sent out a widening circle of ripples. The lake itself was a product of the last ice age. The ice had pushed its way all over the land, the tongues of glaciers carving valleys through solid rock. It lay on the land for a long time and then, as quickly as it had come, so it departed.

Speed is a relative term. To a watching man a glacier moves slowly but it’s the equivalent of a hundred yards’ sprint when compared to other geological processes. Anyway, the glaciers retreated, dropping the rock fragments they had fractured and splintered from the bedrock. When that happened a rock wall was formed called a moraine, a natural dam behind which a lake or pond can form. Canada is full of them, and a large part of Canadian geology is trying to think like a piece of ice, trying to figure which way the ice moved so many thousands of years ago so that you can account for the rocks which are otherwise unaccountably out of place.

This lake was more of a large pond. It wasn’t more than a mile long and was fed by a biggish stream which came in from the north. I’d seen the moraine from the air and traced the stream flowing south from the lake to where it tumbled over the escarpment and where the Matterson Corporation was going to build a dam.

I threw out the dregs of coffee and washed the pot and the enamel cup, then set to and built a windbreak. I don’t like tents – they’re no warmer inside than out and they tend to leak if you don’t coddle them. In good weather all a man needs is a windbreak, which is easily assembled from materials at hand which don’t have to be back-packed like a tent, and in bad weather you can make a waterproof roof if you have the know-how. But it took me quite a long time in the North-West Territories to get that know-how.

By mid-afternoon I had the camp ship-shape. Everything was where I wanted it and where I could get at it quickly if I needed it. It was a standard set-up I’d worked out over the years. The Polar Eskimos have carried that principle to a fine art; a stranger can drop into an unknown igloo, put out his hand in the dark and be certain of finding the oil-lamp or the bone fish-hooks. Armies use it, too; a man transferred to a strange camp still knows where to find the paymaster without half trying. I suppose it can be defined as good housekeeping.

The plop of a fish in the lake made me realize I was hungry, so I decided to find out how good the trout were. Fish is no good for a sustained diet in a cold climate – for that you need good fat meat – but I’d had all the meat I needed in Fort Farrell and the idea of lake trout sizzling in a skillet felt good. But next day I’d see if I could get me some venison, if I didn’t have to go too far out of my way for it.

That evening, lying on the springy spruce and looking up at a sky full of diamonds, I thought about the Trinavants. I’d deliberately put the thing out of my mind because I was a little scared of monkeying around with it in view of what Susskind had said, but I found I couldn’t leave it alone. It was like when you accidentally bite the inside of your cheek and you find you can’t stop tongueing the sore place.

It certainly was a strange story. Why in hell should Matterson want to erase the name and memory of John Trinavant? I drew on a cigarette thoughtfully and watched the dull red eye of the dying embers on the fire. I was more and more certain that whatever was going on was centred on that auto accident. But three of the participants were dead, and the fourth couldn’t remember anything about it, and what’s more, didn’t want to. So that seemed a dead end.

Who profited from the Trinavants’ death? Certainly Bull Matterson had profited. With that option agreement he had the whole commercial empire in his fist – and all to himself. A motive for murder? Certainly Bull Matterson ran his business hard on cruel lines if McDougall was to be believed. But not every tight-fisted businessman was a murderer.

Item: Where was Bull Matterson at the time of the accident?

Who else profited? Obviously Clare Trinavant. And where was she at the time of the accident? In Switzerland, you damn’ fool, and she was a chit of a schoolgirl at that. Delete Clare Trinavant.

Who else?

Apparently no one else profited – not in money, anyway. Could there be a way to profit other than in money? I didn’t know enough about the personalities involved even to speculate, so that was another dead end – for the time being.

I jerked myself from the doze. What the hell was I thinking of? I wasn’t going to get mixed up in this thing. It was too dangerous for me personally.