“Right. It must have been Elmo’s fire all right.”
The voices continued out of hearing and the beams of light moved off in a new direction. I didn’t try to move the wheelbarrow for nearly five minutes after I heard the last of them. When I climbed out, I sat for a minute listening and searching the night sky. I felt like a cigarette, but I decided against it. Sometimes a smoke can be deadly in more ways than one.
I was already thinking of climbing the ladder and getting out of the hole, when I noticed the oil drums I’d spotted when I was looking for a place to hide. Why oil drums here? There was a large tank next to the fort for refuelling the back-hoe. What was going on? I sniffed around and then it hit me. What the hell was I looking for all over the county? I was looking for toxic waste. And here was a cache of at least three barrels of it. Was I beginning to get somewhere, or was it only wishful thinking? I took up a shovel again and found the base of a fourth drum under the recently filled-in section. After a little more excavating of my own, I uncovered a fifth. I was beginning to get the idea. The tunnel was full of drums. Drums and more drums of toxic waste! Suddenly, I wanted to put my feet on the ladder and get out of there. I had spent my share of luck in that hole. The powers that be didn’t owe Manny Cooperman’s boy another minute. That was when the end of the shovel struck not a sixth metallic barrel but something else, something that took my mind off toxic waste, something that gave me a queer feeling under my belt. For a moment, I just stood there, not quite taking it in. Then I went back to digging. I kept at it, digging now with the shovel and now with my hands, until I could see what I had hit. I nearly brought up the undigested portion of my last meal.
I cleared the earth around what I’d found. It was a shoe, a brown Rockport, like the pair I had back at the apartment. Inside this shoe was a foot and it was cold.
THIRTEEN
I phoned Pete Staziak of the Niagara Regional Police from the pay-phone in the lobby of the Prince of Wales Hotel at the corner of King and Picton or King and Queen, depending on which street signs you read. I was feeling a little light-headed, like I’d just finished off a bottle of rye, which I hadn’t. In fact, I’ve had the heel of a bottle in a cupboard for the last six months. Pete told me to have a drink and to stay away from the scene of the crime. As I came away from the lobby, the idea of a drink began to look good. What better way could I put in the time until Pete finished up at the fort. He said to stay put and that he’d want to talk to me. The Prince of Wales’s bar was as comfortable a place as I knew in those parts.
When I caught my reflection in the mirror, I detoured to the men’s room to repair my face and clothes. I was a mess, but it made me feel better. At least finding a body hadn’t become routine. Sure, I became light-headed and even wanted a drink, but it took the sight of my face in the mirror to tell me that I hadn’t become a total professional when it comes to dealing with death. I valued my amateur status. While the tap-water was running into the sink, I thought again of the cold foot in its Rockport shoe. Now I could remember the scramble up the ladder and back over the earthwork and down the bank to the rowboat. The tugging of muscles in my back told me about the difficult trip back to the silhouette of the moviemaker’s gazebo outlined against the night sky. I’d been helped by the river in my outward journey; the way home was all against the current.
I got rid of some of the mud on my pants with a wet wad of paper towels. I discarded some Dame’s Rocket that had attached itself to me with a length of bindweed. There wasn’t a lot I could do for my clothes after I’d got rid of the mud. My shoes were as soaking after a first aid job as before. The lights in the bar are lower than in the John, so I put my comb away hoping that I would pass the dress code when I get upstairs again. I found a seat in a dark corner and persuaded the waiter to get me a sandwich as well as a rye and ginger ale.
As far as I knew, no prince of Wales ever slept in the Prince of Wales Hotel. In a brochure I’d seen that the Duke and Duchess of York had visited Niagara-on-the-Lake. A guidebook documented a visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. Both of these visits took place well before my time, in 1901. For some reason I found it very relaxing trying to imagine two ducal couples running around in Niagara trying not to run into one another.
The bar at the Prince of Wales was, of course, everything that a bar should be. There was dark wood; engraved, frosted glass; lots of brass and crystal as well as beer pumps of porcelain. I’d been there only a few times before this, and each time I regretted my usually temperate habits.
“Sorry to be so long,” said the waiter as he set down knife, fork and spoon wrapped in a paper napkin. The waiter sorted out my order from the other two he was carrying. I found myself grinning at him, foolishly. This was so ordinary: sitting in a bar and eating, surrounded by lively, talking people who didn’t have anything to do-as far as I knew-with the body back at Fort Mississauga. I was almost chuckling to myself as I cut into the chopped egg on home-made white bread with my knife and fork. In a place like this, I didn’t think you lifted anything to the mouth with fingers, not even the pickles.
“Aren’t you Sam Cooperman?” the waiter asked. In spite of the error, I jumped. Family is close enough.
“No. That’s my brother. I’m Sam’s younger brother, Benny.” I almost withheld my name. No sense throwing security out the window.
“Well, you sure look like him. I seen you come in and I was sure it was him. I could of sworn it was him.”
“Yeah, well, Sam’s in Toronto. I’m still in Grantham. He’s head of surgery at Toronto General.”
“That a fact. I used to sell brushes with him one summer.” I shot a glance towards the entrance, but the big figure coming into the room wasn’t Pete Staziak. I had more than an hour to kill before I could reasonably expect to see him, but I hadn’t taken the pledge to be reasonable, especially not after digging up a body. The big fellow joined a party of three ladies in hats in the centre of the room. I didn’t think ladies wore hats this late in the day. But what do I know?
“He won awards selling brushes in the summer,” I told the waiter when I remembered that he was still standing there. “What’s your name?” I asked. “I’ll tell Sam when I see him.”
“Oh, ah, Des Dwyer.”
“Des, can you tell me what’s going on out at Fort Mississauga? They’ve got it fenced off and I see trucks coming and going.”
“Ah!” Des said with a new light in his eyes, “They’re putting in a lot of money there.” He rubbed the point of his lapel with his thumb and forefinger and slipped me a wink.
“Sangallo’s doing a major job on it. Going to make it into a show-place. Like the other fort.” Des pretended not to see a customer waving from a table in the corner. “They’re putting the earthworks in where they used to be according to some plan that was discovered somewhere. They’re fixing up the old ammunition bays and rebuilding the sally-port, which was just about ready to cave in.”
“What’s a sally-port?”
“That’s where they send the girls home when the colonel comes looking, I think. I dunno, really.”
“How long has this been going on?” I asked.
“Soldiers have been wenching since Napoleon was a pup, Mr. Cooperman.”
“I meant the construction.”
“Summer of last year as close as I can remember.”
“That’s a long time for putting in a few berms.”
“Well, you know it’s all being supervised by some professor from Toronto. They’ve already found bones and musket-balls and bits of broken dishes.” I remembered the string grid I’d seen and the trench next to it. But this was archaeology on a small scale. Did Toronto know about the rest of it? Or was that all Sangallo?”