Deadlock (19 page)

The ticket agent at Air Canada told me Thunder Bay was Canada’s westernmost port on Lake Superior. I asked him why it hadn’t shown up on my map and he shrugged indifferently. One of the flight attendants was more helpful. On the way to Toronto she explained that the town used to be called Port Arthur; the name had been changed about ten years ago. I made a mental note to buy Lotty a modern atlas as a hostess present.

I checked my small canvas bag through in Chicago, since it contained the Smith & Wesson (disassembled in accordance with federal firearms regulations). I’d packed lightly, not intending to be gone beyond a day or two, just jeans, shirts, a heavy sweater, and underwear. I didn’t even carry a purse—just stuck my wallet in my jeans pocket.

After an hour’s layover in Toronto’s bright modern airport, I boarded Air Canada’s Ontario puddle jumper. We stopped five times on the way to Thunder Bay on tiny airstrips which loomed out of open country to receive us. As people got on and off they exchanged greetings and light conversation. It reminded me of a bus ride through rural Louisiana in the freedom-march days; I got just as
leg of the trip climbed down rollaway stairs into a clear, cold night. We were perhaps six hundred miles north of Chicago, a difference in latitude sufficient for winter to have barely ended.

Most of my fellow passengers were wrapped in winter coats. I shivered across the tarmac in a cotton shirt and corduroy jacket, wishing I had carried my sweater instead of packing it. A husky young fellow with red, wind-whipped cheeks and a shock of black hair followed close behind with the luggage. I picked up my canvas bag and set off in search of a night’s lodging. Thunder Bay boasted a Holiday Inn. That sounded good enough to me. They had plenty of vacancies. I booked a room for two nights.

They told me they would send a car along for me—their regular van was broken. I waited forty-five minutes inside the tiny terminal, drinking a cup of bitter coffee from a vending machine to entertain myself. When the limo finally came, it was a beat-up station wagon which I almost missed until it was rolling away. Then I could read
THUNDER BAY HOLIDAY INN
painted on its side. I went racing after it, yelling frantically, my canvas bag bumping me in the leg. I longed for the gigantic, impersonal efficiency of O’Hare with its ranks of surly, illiterate cab drivers.

The car stopped fifty feet ahead of me and waited while I came panting up to it. The driver was a heavyset man dressed in a graying white pullover. When he turned to look at me, a pungent draft of stale beer swept over me. The forty-five minutes I’d been waiting he must have spent in a bar. However, if I tried to get a cab I might be there all night. I told him to take me to the Holiday Inn and I leaned back in the seat with my eyes shut, grasping the side strap. It couldn’t be any worse than riding with Lotty sober but the memory of my own accident was too fresh
for me not to be nervous. We moved along at a good clip, ignoring honking horns.

It was well past eleven when my driver deposited me, intact, and I couldn’t find any place in walking distance still open for dinner. The motel restaurant was closed and so was a little Mandarin place across the street. I finally took an apple from a basket in the lobby and went to bed hungry. My shoulder was sore and the long flight had worn me out. I slept soundly and woke up again after nine.

My shoulder had recovered in the night—most of the stiffness was gone. I dressed more easily than I had for days, only feeling a twinge when I pulled the heavy wool sweater over my head. Before going down to breakfast I reassembled the Smith & Wesson and loaded it. I didn’t expect Bledsoe to jump me in front of the entire crew of the
Lucella Wieser
, but if he did the gun wasn’t going to do me much good with the barrel unattached to the hammer.

I hadn’t had much appetite while my shoulder was in pain and I’d dropped five or six pounds. This morning I felt better and sat down to pecan waffles, sausages, strawberries, and coffee.

I was a latecomer in the little restaurant and the middle-aged waitress had time to talk. As she poured my second cup of coffee I asked her where I could rent a car. There was an Avis place in town, she said, but one of her sons had a couple of old cars he rented out if I didn’t need anything too fancy. I told her that would be fine as long as they had automatic transmissions, and she trotted off to call her son.

Roland Graham his name was, and he spoke with a Canadian accent, a lilting drawl that sounds as if it has a trace of Scots buried in it. His car was a ’75 Ford Fairmont, old but perfectly clean and respectable. I told him
I’d only need it until the next morning. The fee, payable in advance in cash, was thirty dollars.

The Holiday Inn was in the heart of town. Across the street was the largest Presbyterian church I’ve ever seen. A modern city hall faced the motel, but the street behind us had a lot of run-down stores and premises to let. As I got down to the waterfront the stores gave way rapidly to bars and girlie joints. I’ve often wondered whether seamen really have the primitive appetites port towns attribute to them, or whether they go to sleazy joints because that’s the only thing the locals offer.

Finding the
Lucella
turned out to be a larger problem than I’d anticipated. Thunder Bay is an enormous port, even though the town itself doesn’t have more than a hundred thousand people in it. But much of the grain shipped by water in North America passes through that port heading east and south, and the lakefront includes mile upon mile of towering elevators.

My first thought had been to stop in at each elevator to see if the
Lucella
was docked there, but the miles of towers made that seem like a waste of time. I did go into the yard of the first one I came to. After bumping around the mud-filled ruts, I found a tiny, green-sided office. But a harassed man inside handling the phone assured me that he didn’t have the foggiest idea of where the
Lucella
was; he only knew she wasn’t there.

I went back into the town and found the local newspaper. As I’d hoped, it listed the ships that were in port and where they were. The
Lucella
was docked at Elevator 67, the Manitoba Grain Co-op.

There didn’t seem to be any logical order to the yard numbers. I was near number 11, but I went past yard 90 without seeing the Manitoba Grain Co-op and wasted time backtracking. I finally found it another two miles down the road, well past the town.

I turned the Ford into the gravel yard, my heart pounding
with nervous anticipation. The Manitoba elevator was enormous, some two hundred giant paper towel tubes banked together. Huge though it was, it didn’t dwarf the ship tied up on its eastern end. The
Lucella
’s red hulk gleamed sleekly in the late morning sun. Above her, like clouds covering and revealing Mount Everest, hovered a mass of white smoke. Grain dust. The
Lucella
was loading.

The yard was a mess of gravelly mud. In the corners of the elevator, out of the sun’s reach, a gray-white residue of winter was still melting. I parked clear of the more obvious holes and picked my way through the mud, the metal shards, pasteboard, and grain clumps making up the now familiar elevator scene.

The Smith & Wesson dug uncomfortably into my side as I climbed the
Lucella
’s ladder to the main deck. I stopped for a minute at the edge of the hardhat area to survey the busy scene and ran a surreptitious finger under the leather holster digging into my diaphragm. Squinting at the whitened figures, I couldn’t be sure if any of my quarry were present. I thought I might recognize Bledsoe’s stocky body, but it was hard to say.

I went into the pilothouse and climbed the four flights to the mahogany-paneled bridge. Only the first mate, Keith Winstein, was there. He looked up in surprise when I came in. He recognized me at once.

“Miss Warshawski! What—is Captain Bemis expecting you?”

“I don’t think so. Is he around? And what about the chief engineer and Martin Bledsoe?” It would be really annoying if Bledsoe had returned to Chicago.

“They’re all in Thunder Bay this morning. Going to the bank, doing that kind of business. They won’t be back until late afternoon. Not until right before we sail, I’m afraid.”

“You’re sailing today?” I sat down on one of the
mahogany stools. “Your office said you’d be here through tomorrow.”

“No, we made good time up from Detroit. Got here a day early. Time is money in this business, so we started loading last night at midnight. We’ll finish around four and sail at five.”

“Any idea where I can find Bledsoe or Sheridan?”

He shook his head regretfully. “Everyone keeps bank accounts in Thunder Bay because we’re here so often. This is a good chance to catch up on personal affairs—I’ll be taking off myself for a few hours as soon as the second mate gets back.”

I rubbed my forehead in exasperation. “Where do you go from here?”

Winstein was getting a little irritated. “We take this load to St. Catharines, at the other side of the lakes. Why do you ask?”

“What’s your route, I mean—do you stop anyplace along the way where I could get off?”

The first mate looked at me strangely. “If you’re thinking of sailing with us, you’ll have to clear that with the captain, Miss Warshawski.”

“Yes, well, let’s assume he’s going to give his permission. Where’s the nearest place I could get off?”

He shook his head. “There isn’t anyplace on board for you to sleep—Mr. Bledsoe’s in the stateroom.”

I started to feel my temper rising. “I’m not asking for a place to sleep. That’s why I want to get off at the nearest place possible.”

“I guess that would be Sault Ste. Marie,” he said dubiously. “You could get off when we’re at the bottom of the lock. But we won’t reach there until three tomorrow afternoon, at the earliest. You’d still have to find someplace to spend the night.”

“Oh, never mind that,” I said impatiently. “I’ll lie down on the couch here in the bridge if I need to. But I’ve
got to talk to the captain and Bledsoe. To Sheridan, too. And I’m damned if I’m going to fly around the country on the off chance of meeting up with them someplace.”

“It isn’t really my decision,” Winstein said pacifically.

“You’ll have to talk to Captain Bemis.” He returned to his papers and I left the bridge.

I took the Fairmont back to the Holiday Inn, singing “A Capital Ship for an Ocean Trip” and “The Barbary Pirates.” I repacked the little canvas bag and checked out, leaving a note for Roland Graham with the Ford’s keys at the counter. It was one o’clock. If the
Lucella
wasn’t sailing until five, I might as well get some lunch.

By the time I’d eaten and found a taxi to take me out to Elevator 67 it was after three-thirty. The midday sun made the air hot enough for me to take off my sweater and stuff it into my canvas bag before once more climbing the ladder to the
Lucella
’s main deck.

They had just finished loading. The heavy grain chutes were being hauled into the elevator from above. Under the second mate’s direction, men began operating two little deck gantries to put the hatch covers back onto the hold openings. One man worked each crane, using controls in front of a small seat on the starboard side. He lifted the hatch cover while two seamen steadied it at either end—they were very large, unstable steel lids. Then he lowered the cover while the other two fitted it onto some twenty or thirty protruding bolts. The three would move along to the next cover while a fourth seaman followed behind
with an enormous wrench, screwing all the bolts into place.

As I stood watching, I felt the ship begin to vibrate. The engines had been turned on. Soon the air was filled with their urgent racket. A trail of black diesel smoke drifted upward from the giant funnel. I had no idea how long the engines ran before the ship moved out, but I noticed a couple of seamen at the guy ropes on shore, ready to loose them as soon as the signal was given. I hadn’t come back a minute too early.

I felt very keyed up. I knew I was wasting time on deck when I should have been on the bridge confronting anyone who had returned, but I was very nervous and didn’t know what to say once I got up there. In my heightened state I thought I saw someone swimming away from the port side of the ship. I moved as quickly as I could past the clutter around the self-unloader but didn’t see anything. I stood straining my eyes against the reflecting water and finally saw a figure break the surface twenty yards away, close to the shore.

When I turned back, Bledsoe was just coming on board. He stopped to talk to the second mate, then headed for the bridge without seeing me. I was about to follow when it occurred to me I might be better off just stowing away and presenting myself after castoff. Accordingly, I moved to the back of the pilothouse where a stack of giant oil drums served as both garbage cans and an effective shield from the bridge. I sat down on a metal box, placed my bag against a coil of rope, and leaned back to enjoy the view.