The Cast Stone (18 page)

Hershel Rosche arrived not long after the Second World War on a shiny new diesel train. He liked Prince Albert, a young city, a city that would grow, become something. It had potential. He liked the wide sweeping North Saskatchewan River, liked the architecture of the hotel on Central Avenue, and Indians, the first he had seen since his arrival in Canada, there on River Street, going into a fur buyer's store. Hershel followed them in. He carried a small heavy leather case that he occasionally shifted from hand to hand, but never put down. He walked around the tiny store, pretended he was looking at the scarce merchandise, the six used rifles leaning against the wall, the bins of blue steel spring traps, and the coils of snare wire. He was there to see real Indians. He listened in while the Indian negotiated in his own gentle fashion. Both parties to the negotiation knew that there were other fur buyers and that some of them were only a short block up the street.

Hershel watched the Indian shake out a lynx pelt, hold it out at shoulder height and look down at where it touched the plank floor. Without words, he told the fur buyer.
This is a
large lynx, not a medium, it's worth more.

The buyer stood behind the counter, sifted pelts, not looking at them anymore, just moving them to keep his hands busy. “Tell you what. I like you, Adolphus; you're a good customer. Fifty dollars for the whole pile. What do you say?”

Adolphus didn't answer, he touched the pelts, moved a mink, shiny black over toward his left, sorted through the pile for another, slightly larger mink, and placed it beside the first. He might have been sorting out the pelts by species, but he might have begun to package them up.

“Tell you what.” The buyer picked up the first mink. The skinning and stretching skills were obvious. The pelt was perfectly shaped, unblemished, completely dried. “Because it's you, I might go as high as sixty. But don't you be telling anyone now.”

Adolphus moved the mink pelt back to the pile.

Hershel was not pretending to look at anything other than the transaction. He was impressed. The Indian knew negotiation, knew how to use time and timing, understood the art of it. He was a man of Hershel's spirit, a reader of humanity.

Three days later Hershel used his skills, sized up the town and its people until he found the man he wanted, someone with refined taste, who wore a good-quality coat, and clean shoes. There were a few around, in the hotel lobby or in the restaurants, who dressed well, who looked like they might have the money Hershel was looking for, but they were too flashy, too new, did not walk with the confidence he wanted: someone comfortable with his wealth, who did not have to show it.

“Excuse me, sir. Might I have a moment of your time? I have something that might interest you.” Hershel began the sale. Invited the man to a quiet corner of the Avenue Hotel lobby, the finest hotel in Prince Albert. He sat in a stuffed leather chair with the leather case between his feet, felt its sturdiness between his calves.

“It's Swiss made, very fine quality. Something not appreciated so much over here it seems. I know in Europe it would demand a much larger price, but here I am in Canada, a fine place, someday this country will rival old Europe in fashion, but today very few appreciate quality. I don't expect to get what this is worth. I am prepared to live with that.”

Hershel sold his first watch. He built a neat jewellery store just off Central Avenue, where he worked every day from when he opened it in 1951 until he took some time off in 1993, feeling a bit tired. His family buried him two weeks later up the hill. A good quality plain marble headstone marks the grave, nothing fancy, nothing flashy.

The store never did need customers. The heavy leather bag contained the wealth of a family that had presented itself modestly to the world for generations, but always with quiet dignity. Hershel's older brother Marcel had been the exception, liked to show what he had. When the soldiers came to Marcel's, before the paintings were stripped from the walls and an
oberstleutnant
drove away in Marcel's polished black-and-chrome automobile, Hershel fled.

Ben had attended Hershel's funeral. He and his parents, Adolphus and Eleanor, had stood back from the small gathering around the fresh-torn hole in the sod. Shook hands with Hershel's son John, such a simple name, and his sister Eleanor. The younger Eleanor had hugged the older Eleanor before they got in Ben's little car for the quiet ride back north.

Bells tinkled as Ben entered Rosche Jewellery and Collectables. He stood with his hands in his pockets looking into a glass-covered case as John came out of the back. Eleanor was with another customer and did not acknowledge Ben's presence with more than a nod and the faintest of smiles. John held one finger pointing downward by his side, hidden from view as he passed on the other side of the glass case from Ben. Ben did not respond. John pointed two fingers downward and still Ben did not respond. As John passed, Ben extended three fingers on the glass case. John responded, his eyebrows raised slightly, and he went out the door, tinkled bells before he went up the street toward where the banks were clustered on Central Avenue.

Ben continued to look at the selection of watches in the case, one hand in his pocket feeling the small soft metal bars that weighed exactly ten ounces each, until John returned. Without a word, Ben followed him into the back of the store.

“I didn't have that much money here.” John reached inside his jacket, inside the breast pocket. “Thirty thousand Ameros raises people's attention.” He put an envelope on the worktable, knelt and opened a safe that was out of view under the table.

“Is something wrong?” he asked as he handed over the money and took the three gold bars without looking at them and placed them in the safe, shut the heavy door and turned the brass handle, listening for the double click of the lock before taking his hand away.

“No, not really. Just being careful.” Ben put the additional bills into the bank deposit envelope without counting either. “In case something should come up.”

Ben felt a tinge of guilt as he drove past the building that once housed the Prince Albert Indian and Metis Friendship Centre, as though he had taken the people's money. The envelope in his hip pocket felt thick, uncomfortable to sit on. He took it out, wiggled it around the seat belt for a second before extracting it completely. He went to put it in his shirt pocket. The shirt was damp and sticky, the envelope too bulky. Finally he threw it on the dash of the truck, just as safe there as anywhere.

It wasn't the people's money. It was money that did not exist, erased money. In the first days of the invasion, annexation, everyone scrambled, everyone shifted belongings and assets toward more secure forms. Some people hoarded food, others converted their cash to carryables. The Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority wanted Ben on their board of governors, not because Ben knew anything about running casinos, but because he was a respected professor, an Indian with a position of prestige. They didn't want him there, they wanted his image: honest, intelligent, educated, a class addition.

While the planes were bombing the base at Trenton, when the 401 was jammed tighter than that multilane highway between Toronto and Kingston had ever known, Ben took a certified cheque to Sport Gold. He went alone, security guards attract attention, better to be inconspicuous with that amount of money. The exchange was quick, efficient, a heavy oak desk in a large, bare office, two uniformed security guards outside the door, another just inside, his back to the wall. They look thuggish, Ben thought as he entered. The official of the corporation handling the exchange looked too young for the job, close-cropped brown hair, glasses that made his nondescript eyes look larger than they were. His appearance, his choice of clothes, cargo pants with bulky pockets and a golf shirt, did not inspire confidence. Neither did the toothpick wiggling at the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

“So even the casinos think this is going to last. Oh well. Today's price is six hundred an ounce, ten ounce lots.”

“Stock price this morning was down to four-sixty-nine.” Ben felt an obligation to the board of governors to take care of their investment.

“It went up while you were out front with everyone else. How many lots?”

Ben looked down at the cheque, made a mental calculation. “Forty- two.” He handed over the quarter-million-dollar cheque. The toothpick wiggled while the company official made his own mental calculations. “You're short two thousand.”

“Yes,” Ben faced him confidently, the older man across the desk from the young and anxious. Negotiation is about time. Whoever has the most time will take the hurried. Ben had time. There were still people in the outer room waiting, nervously, rushed, terrorized even.

“All right.” He took out the toothpick, and Ben walked away with a cardboard box weighing slightly over twenty-five pounds. He had done well for the board, secured a large portion of their assets against the unforeseeable.

“We're done.” The voice of Timothy Bird, the chairman of SIGA crackled in Ben's cell phone.

“What do you mean?” Ben looked at the cardboard box on the car seat beside him.

“A virus wiped us out this morning. Everything's erased.”

“I have to see the board. I have something to report.” Ben did not want to explain over a cell phone, didn't know who might be listening.

“There is no board. Don't you get it? Everything is erased, absolutely everything. All of the casinos are closed, well they're not even closed, abandoned is more like it. When people found out they weren't getting paid, they just walked out. Everybody from the floor sweepers, the dealers, security, management, everybody just walked away. Nobody even had the sense to lock the doors.”

“I don't get it.” Ben needed reason, rationality that was not there.

“What's to get? They didn't like the idea of casinos so they used a military virus to wipe us out, targeted at SIGA. We no longer exist, you won't find a single byte of information that refers to us. Payroll is gone, Human Resources does not have any records of employees, Security doesn't exist. The board doesn't exist. We have no minutes of meetings, we have no records, no financial statements to review. You don't even exist Ben. The virus must've started with SIGA and spread to all of the directors, every employee's name is wiped out. There is no evidence anywhere that there ever was a board, or a corporation.”

“Listen Tim, you have to reconvene the board. It's important. I have in my possession a sizable amount of board assets.” “Whatever you might have is nothing. Keep it. Use it for your retirement, consider it your severance package. And hey, Ben. You take care of yourself, and maybe we'll see you around.”

Dean Fisher stood on his farm, he just stood there, looking north. Six-thousand-four-hundred acres of mixed grain and cattle keeps a man busy, too busy to stop in the middle of the day, but he was doing a lot of that recently, standing there, staring, always north. Not that far, he thought, not that far from South Dakota to Canada. He could almost see it just there beyond the rolling parched yellow horizon.
You have to
find some feed for those cattle
. The thought forced itself into his mind. He let it ride there a moment and went back to thinking about Canada; Saskatoon Saskatchewan Canada.