The Snowfly (29 page)

Valoretev nodded. “I think they are inclined toward a permanent solution. They don't know how much you know. They do not want you writing in the West that Brezhnev is using the people's funds for his personal benefit.”

“This can't be real.” I was nauseous. Dizzy. They killed Peshkov? “How do you know these things?”

He answered my question with a question, spreading his hands and looking around us. “Is
this
not real?”

It was, in an unreal way. Surreal. “What are we doing?”

Valoretev grinned and narrowed his eyes. “We are on lam,
da?
”

I said, “Oh shit.”

He dismissed my words with a wave of his hand. “We are going out.”

“Out where?”

“Through the Iron Curtain, as you put it. To the West.”

“How? Can't we go back? I can explain this. Really, I can,” I implored him.

“If they arrest you, you are guilty. That is the system.”

I was so focused on myself that I had not thought about him. “What about you?”

“I will go to America and fish for trout.”

“And you think
I'm
insane?”

Valoretev laughed. “Don't worry, Comrade Bowie. I have the situation under control.”

“Why are you doing this for me?”

“For you?” he said with a laugh. “I do this for me. I have been planning for a long time. You will be my insurance, my ticket, my passport into the West.”

“Insurance with whom?”

“We shall see,” Valoretev said. “Paranoia is the heart of the Russian soul.”

“It ain't paranoia when people are really after you.”

Valoretev smiled, took a piece of paper out of his jacket, and handed it to me. It was typed in Cyrillic, a carbon copy, not an original. It was the itemized contents of Oxley's collection. Near the bottom of the page was the snowfly manuscript.

“The books were bought for Brezhnev?”

“Yes.”

“He fly fishes for trout?”

“No, he invests. He likes the rare and beautiful. He has fleets of automobiles, even an American Cadillac. It is red, which he claims as patriotism.”

A red Caddy. Ironic. “How do you know these things?”

Valoretev looked at me. “I am colonel, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.”

“Fuck me,” I said. KGB. “You're too young to be a colonel.”

He smiled. “Competence is rewarded in the Soviet system. I have achieved a position of high trust, which in our system is also a position of high risk. My job is to oversee people who make acquisitions from the West for members of the Politburo.”

I was dumbfounded and speechless. “Peshkov worked for you?”

“No one works for me. I assure security. I was aware of him.”

I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt on top of me.

The next night we began walking. We walked for five nights. Each day we stopped and each place we stopped there was a cabin or shack, well provisioned. My escort had painstakingly planned this, and though such knowledge did not calm me, it boosted my confidence in Valoretev. I did not let myself dwell on the consequences of being caught.

On the sixth day we continued to walk. We were in a tangled forest, but Valoretev seemed to know his way. Eventually we came to a river. It was narrow, with glissading clear water and yellow boulders stacked neatly in retaining walls along the sides. There were long riffles down the center. Valoretev dumped his pack and began rummaging through it. In minutes he had his homemade fly rod assembled and was attaching a gut leader and a bushy brown fly. Somehow he had gotten hold of a fly line.

I was stupefied. He stepped onto the rocks and cast into a dark green slick. But casting skill in this river was nothing like on the Drake in Cornwall. The take was immediate. He played the fish to shore. It was twenty inches and fat, yellow with green and orange spots.

“Brown trout?”

“Yes. Join me?”

He carefully took a second case out of the pack and handed it to me with a bow. “A remembrance of your Russian comrades.”

I found a newly made four-piece fly rod in the case and I was moved beyond words by the gift. The fly line on the reel was not in good shape, but it would do. Valoretev gave me a leader and one of his flies and I rigged up and joined him.

We didn't fish long and put all but two fish back. Val cleaned and cooked the two large trout over a small fire made on the gravel bar under an overhanging cedar tree. He cooked the fish quickly. When we ate, the pale white meat fell off the bones, and Val dug in his pack and brought out black bread and vodka and we each had a couple of shots and grinned at each other like schoolboys playing hooky. Self-delusion is a close companion of obsession and errant judgment.

When we were done eating, we disassembled the rods, put on our packs, and headed into the forest. Mosquitoes came at dark. They were large and carnivorous. At one point Valoretev said, “I just saw a mosquito carrying a hare.” I couldn't help but laugh.

We walked all night. From time to time we rubbed mud on our exposed skin. I felt like I was being bled to death.

In the morning we came to a road. “Remain here,” Valoretev said. He bathed in a puddle beside the road, left his pack with me, and, when a truck came along, stepped in front of it and held something up. Then he got in and was gone and I was overwhelmed by fear.

Two hours later I heard a small plane. It circled once at treetop level, dipped down to the road, bounced, and taxied to a stop, scattering gravel. Valoretev motioned for me from the cockpit. I grabbed our packs, ran, and crawled in. The plane had a single engine that ran rough. There was a metal barrel lashed on its side to the floor behind me. I was cramped in my seat, but no more so than Valoretev, who looked like he had no room to move.

“You can fly?”

“Better all the time,” he said solemnly.

“Where are we?”

“Eastern Poland,” he said. “On Soviet border.”

It would be my fate to know a number of pilots who might've spent their time and effort more productively on other endeavors. Val was not smooth, but the bird stayed aloft and I took what comfort I could in this. In a tight spot a few small facts are often enough to hold us together, this the definition of a false sense of security.

“We'll be shot down.”

“No. It's easy from here on!”

We flew at treetop level. It was a rough ride and gave me the dry heaves. “Where are we going?”

“Sweden,” he said.

When we reached water, the weather got worse and the ride turned violent. I prayed we would crash but we didn't and eventually we landed on a road on a rocky island. Valoretev jumped down to the road and held the door open for me and I stumbled out, fell to my knees, and puked my guts out.

The Swedes detained us for several days until an American came down from Stockholm. He was short, fat, graying. “I expect you fellas have a story.”

He talked to us separately and I told the man as close to the truth as I was able. I did not tell him anything about the snowfly or Key's manuscript. I told them I knew that the Kremlin had arranged to buy a book collection, that Brezhnev was a sportsman, and that I was following that angle and apparently rubbed people wrong. I had no way to know what Valoretev told them.

We were taken by boat to Malmö after the initial interviews. There Valoretev and I were again separated.

Three men interrogated me. They were always polite. They asked me to tell my story and I did. They rarely interrupted, but they were anal about details. I would tell the story, they would ask questions, and I would tell the story again. It was the same routine every day.

“Do you know the man you traveled with?”

I tried to explain our relationship.

“Do you know who he is?”

“Not precisely. He is a KGB colonel who has something to do with imports. That's all I know.”

“Good,” one of the men said. “Let's maintain the status quo. It's safer for him.”

I never liked half an equation.

This is how the interrogations went: “What color was the house?”

“It had no paint.”

“What color was it when it had paint?”

“I'm not that old.”

“Was there a tinge?”

“No.”

“Do you think of a color when you picture it in your mind?”

“No.”

“We need your cooperation.”

“You have it.”

“Would you agree to hypnosis?”

“I'd rather not.”

“What color was the house?”

Ad infinitum, ad nauseum. For three weeks, sometimes days only, sometimes day and night, sometimes nights only. They were trying to wear me out, looking for inconsistencies. They would have been great reporters.

I endured. They were CIA and presumably on my side.

Sometime in the fourth week Valoretev and I were given five minutes outside together, in full view of several sets of watchful eyes. I was exhausted. He looked fresh and happy.

“My friend Bowie, I am going to America,” he said in a whisper.

“When?”

He shrugged. “When they unravel their red tape. I will come to see you.”

“You won't know where to find me.”

He smiled. “I can find a track before it's made.”

I suspected this was not an idle boast.

The next day I was given a new suit, which fit perfectly, and driven to an airport outside Stockholm. I was kept in a room in a drafty hangar and taken out to an SAS flight just before other passengers boarded.

“You've been on vacation,” my minder said. “Your Soviet companion is a clever man. He sent a confederate to Vienna, traveling with your passport and suitcase. The confederate has disappeared, and you are clean and clear. But you will not write your story.”

I was tired of mandatory obedience school. “It's a free press out here.”

My minder gave me a copy of the
Times of London.
A story had been checked with ink. The headline read,
rare angling books sold to canadian mine developer.

“You can read on the plane,” my escort said. “Here's the between-the-lines: You got their attention. The Kremlin bosses were scared shitless you were going to blow the whistle on them. Everybody knows they are dirty, but they don't like seeing it in print. They pulled their man back from London, arranged a resale through the original broker, and made sure Fleet Street got the word. You've got no story. The broker will say he's had the collection in his possession all along.”

“That's baloney.” How did the CIA know what books I was looking for? Had it been the CIA who threatened Danny in New York? So many questions, but I wasn't anxious to ask them.

“It's bullshit, but airtight. No paper trail.”

“They killed their man from London,” I said. “Peshkov.”

My minder shrugged as if to say that was not his business.

He walked me to the steps up to the plane and gave me my old passport. “One other thing.”

“You people always have one more thing.”

“You are to have no further contact with your former traveling companion. This is a matter of national security.”

A term that could mean anything and often changed meaning.

“He rescued me.”

“He used you for his own purposes,” my minder said.

“I don't even know where he's going.”

“We're going to keep it that way.”

I got on the SAS flight and ordered a vodka straight. The seat was in first class. That was something. I folded the Times and stuck it in my jacket. I had entered the Soviet Union as a journalist and exited as something else. Precisely what was still up in the air.

10

I found Grady Yetter waiting for me outside customs and immigration at Kennedy Airport. “I was on vacation,” I said, following the script I had been ordered to follow by my debriefers in Sweden.

“I heard.” He looked weary, his eyes puffy, the creases in his face deeper than when we had last seen each other.

“You want to hear the details?” I asked.

“Is there a story in them?”

“That depends on who you ask.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Then it can wait. The Soviets officially expelled your ass after you
officially
got to Vienna.”

I had never been anywhere near Vienna. The way he said it suggested that he knew what was going on. “On what grounds?”

“Probably because you're an obnoxious sonuvabitch.”

“That's against the law there?”

He grinned and stuck out his hand. “You wrote some great stuff over there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I did.”

“Suppose you're gonna tell me you want the summer off to fish.”

“I accept the offer. Then where?”

“Let's worry about where when then becomes now. Want a hot dog?”

“Those things'll kill you.”

“Everybody dies from something, kid.”

“Don't call me kid.”

“Okay, asshole.”

According to the edition of the
Times
I had been given in Sweden, the new owner of the Oxley collection was Lockwood Bolt of Elliot Lake, Ontario. Bolt had made a fortune in uranium in the 1950s and early 1960s and had parlayed his money into a conglomerate called Canadian Forest Products. According to the article, the book collection had cost him in excess of a quarter million dollars, an amount that made me dizzy. That much for books?

I flew to Detroit, rented a car, visited my sister and her family in Alpena, and stopped briefly to see Buzz and Fred and my other friends in Grand Marais.

I felt a powerful urge to remain in my adopted town, but I knew I had to move on. I had asked the right questions in the wrong country and now that I was out and free and knew where the books were, I was determined to find them and get this mystery solved. Buzz and Fred complained about my leaving so soon and Staley just growled at me.

I saw Janey in town with two of her kids.

“You here for a while?” She did not look haggard anymore. Her eyes were lit with unexpected intensity and brightness.

“Just for a few days.”

“Too bad,” she said. “You left money for my children.”

“You've been misinformed.”

Her lips narrowed. “Buzz told me and priests never lie.”

Damn him, I thought. I hadn't wanted her to know. It was purely a gift for someone down on her luck.

“You got thrown out by the Russians,” she said. “Did they hurt you?”

I didn't understand why, but the Soviets had announced that I had been expelled for national security reasons, which was abject bullshit. It had been in papers all around the U.S. and I had been called by too damn many reporters wanting to talk about the situation. Following my instructions, I had refused all interviews and kept my mouth shut. It made me very uncomfortable to be a news target. And I was paranoid enough to feel pretty certain that the CIA and Soviets had made some sort of a deal. I was kicked out; no specifics would be discussed on either side. All the U.S. government had said was that the expulsion was “unjustified.”

“Don't believe everything you see on TV. Nothing is the way it seems.”

Janey cocked her head. “Is it anywhere? You be careful wherever it is you're running off to this time.”

I had never really had a real conversation with her before. Usually it was hi and how are you. As I watched her walk away with her kids, I wondered why I had never noticed she was pretty and felt an unexpected surge of interest in her. That's the last thing she needs, I thought. It was just as well that I had decided to go to Canada.

 

•••

 

I drove my rental car east and crossed into Canada on the ferry at the Soo, then continued east along the north shore of Lake Huron, eventually turning north on the serpentine concrete of Highway 108, rising into the craggy granite of the Canadian shield, and suddenly there was the town on the hill, lit by the sun, a beacon, foreboding in its austerity and unexpectedness.

Along the way I gassed up in Blind River. The station attendant had long black hair and yellow teeth. “What do people around here think about uranium?” I asked.

The man grinned. “It's like sex, eh? You let her, she'll bake your balls?” Uranium as insatiable female. I wondered if bomber pilots called their nukes
she.

“I say let's cook the sand niggers,” the attendant added.

In the recent Arab oil crisis everywhere you went, somebody was someone's scapegoat-of-the-moment. In Russia they had Georgians and Chechens. And American reporters.

“Think about the nice profit you're making.” Gas prices were three times their usual in the U.S. and even higher here.

“I look like I own the bloody place?” the man replied.

Rough edges on the edge of rough territory. Cause and effect? Complementary, to be certain.

Elliot Lake did not fit my mental picture of a boom town. I had seen mining towns in Montana and Minnesota and they were gray, cluttered, and haphazard, last-leggers even at launch, born to perish, a future married to a capricious body of ore and world economics. Elliot Lake looked like the centerfold for
City Planning Illustrated,
its houses built in neat neighborhoods on spokes off the neat town center and all of it thoughtfully built above Elliot and Horne Lakes so that most of the inhabitants had a view of both. The sight made me laugh. How many times as a journalist had reality shattered my preconceptions? This is why correspondents corresponded, there being no substitute for being there. In the distance, to the northeast, I saw the head frame and surrounding metal buildings of one of the mines, the whole complex rising out of the gray-green forest like a medieval castle, an impregnable keep anchored in hot rock. I wondered how dangerous it was to live on top of uranium.

I took a room at the Algoden Hotel. The sleeping rooms were above a long hall, advertised as the Biggest Beer Parlor in the World but smaller than the average Russian nightspot. I shared the long bar with a wrinkled man with all his fingers gone at the first joints. He held a beer bottle the way Satchmo lifted his horn.

Just over a decade had passed since the confluence of the discovery of uranium in the town and the U.S. government's massive need for ore to process into nuclear weapons. But fortuitous events have a way of disconnecting. In 1955 Elliot Lake was formed into a political unit and a mining camp appeared. It was a trailer town at first with mud roads and nonexistent sanitation. Double-digit dysentery swept the miners two years later and there was no hospital until a year after that, but the boom was on; there was ore to be dug and money to be made and workers and opportunists flowed in. Trailers were replaced by simple bungalows. Churches were built. Per capita liquor sales were the highest in Canada. Income, too. Whores arrived on buses via Toronto from Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. The government sent agency workers.

Ontario's political parties sent in their hacks to organize and unions battled each other for the right to represent the miners. The Mine Mill Smelter Workers had been shown to be communist sympathizers and were booted from the CIO and CCL; the Reds battled the United Steel Workers of America. Both unions hauled prospective brothers to Sudbury, which was the closest town of any real size, for food, whiskey, and union-paid prostitutes. Mine Mill had four organizers, the Steel Workers eight. Numbers and Cold War sentiments won out. The rise of Elliot Lake to economic prominence was a familiar story in the Canadian bush and had a predictable ending. With more than twenty-five thousand people packed into an area where there had been only a few hundred Ojibwa Indians before, the U.S. government suddenly canceled orders and, in the perpetual search for security, transferred its needs to uranium producers on American soil. In six years the population of Elliot Lake plummeted to six thousand hardy souls. Most of the mines had closed. A few remained open. But the boom was bust and miners and opportunists moved on. Those who remained were not gregarious. The fingerless man stared into the neck of his bottle.

A woman came into the bar and sat two stools away. She had smooth, tanned skin that shone like brass in the bar's light. She wore a sleeveless red blouse with the collar turned up. Her dark hair was cut short and straight and she had long legs and small feet tucked into red sandals with short heels.

“You're definitely not a glowworm,” she said in my direction.

“Pardon me?”

“You're not a miner.”

“Afraid not,” I said.

“You lack the eyes,” she said.

“How's that?”

“Yours aren't desperate enough. You have more the look of a salesman. What's your line?”

“Words,” I said.

She gave me a half grin and called an order at the barkeep, a short matron with sparse white hair.

“No sass, lass, or I'll trim your sails before you're outta port,” the bartender snapped back.

“Is there job security in peddling words?” she asked.

“Until they run out.”

“Like the mines,” she said, raising her glass. “There's not a lot of call for words out here. Actions count.”

“I'm looking for a man.”

She shot me a quick questioning glance. “For business, not pleasure, one hopes.”

“It's strictly business. His name's Lockwood Bolt. Do you know him? He's supposed to live in Elliot Lake.”

She stared into her libation, cogitating. “Green flint,” she said.

“Come again?”

“Bolt loves his rocks and the rarer the rock, the more he loves it. There's green flint out near Flack Lake. He's got himself a whole hill of it, maybe all there is in northern Ontario. You want Bolt, you should try out that way.” She sipped her drink, calculating. “You have business with Bolt?”

“Words,” I reminded her.

“Not with the Bolt this town knows.”

“How far is it to Flack Lake?”

She sighed. “Twenty miles by crow flight, more in reality. The road's a twister.”

“Bolt's not popular?”

“He's a killer,” she said.

“Figuratively speaking?”

“Not if you live among us.” She looked at me, put money on the bar, and slid off the bar stool. “My name is Pierrette,” she said. “If you want to talk, I'm available.”

“Where?” She wrote her address and phone number inside a matchbook cover and left it in front of me.

I was up early and sought the library. Every planned town had one.

The keeper of the town's books was middle aged with chemical red hair piled high on her head and bright red nail polish. “Morning,” she said, more a statement of fact than a salutation.

“You wouldn't happen to have any of the works of M. J. Key, would you?”

“Key? Who would Key be?”

I gave her a very short version.

She tilted her head sharply left and locked her eyes on me. “I should imagine you might ask that question and receive the same answer in every library in the province.”

“You don't have Key?”

“This institution, such as it is, serves to enlighten, but true erudition is beyond our scope. There is nothing so hopeless as a bibliophile among
barbarians
and I would hasten to underline that final word. For work such as your Mr. Key's, one would need to forage the rare-book emporia of New York or San Francisco. There's no Key here, nor will there ever be.”

“Except in the private collection of Lockwood Bolt.”

Her head snapped to the other side. “Mister Bolt is among us, but no longer
of
us, if you take my meaning.”

That made two for two. Bolt was definitely not a popular guy in Elliot Lake.

“You know about the Oxley collection?” I offered her the clipping from the
Times,
but she only glanced at it and let it sit.

“Civilization is thin and population sparse this far north, but not absent. We subscribe to the belief that
rural
and
isolated
need not mean ‘ignorant.' I read the
Times
from both sides of the Atlantic. And the
Globe
and
Mail.
Of course, the post is slow, so I view these more as history than current events.”

“Is Bolt well known as a book collector?”

Her face remained impassive. “Lockwood Bolt is a pure capitalist. His focus is pecuniary to the exclusion of all else and I have no time to waste discussing the likes of that one. If your interest is Bolt, you should pursue your business directly with the man and good luck to you on that count. Good day, sir,” she added, abruptly ending our little conversation.

North of Elliot Lake was what Canadians referred to as the bush, meaning where the tracks ended and, near as I could tell, so did everything else. The roads went from paved to stone dust along a rocky spine. There were no houses. Some lakes were marked with crude signs. Flack Lake was one of them. I found two roads to the water's edge, one curving down to a boat launch, and the other one leading to a black steel gate guarded by a large man in a yellow rain slicker standing in a gatehouse behind a red iron barricade. A forested hill lay behind the gate, off to the side of the lake. Green flint, I guessed.

“I'd like to see Mr. Bolt.”

“It's a long queue,” the man in yellow said. “Got an appointment?”

“It's serendipitous that I'm here. I think he'll be glad I stopped by.”

There were blackflies crawling on the man's face. A trickle of blood ran down his cheek. He did not react.

“Well, that'd be a first,” he said. “Get an appointment.”