The Floor of Heaven (25 page)

Still, there was no getting around the fact that Carmack was a strange one. A quick look and with his beads, caribou trousers, and knee-high moccasins, anyone would reckon he was one of those Stick braves from up north. But give him a second glance or, for that matter, strike up a conversation, and there’d be no doubting he was a white. Story was, he had an Indian wife and a half-breed child, too, and Charlie had heard people up at the mine dining hall having a good laugh about “Siwash George” and sneering that he was just another “squawman.” Talk like that had a nasty ring to it, and Charlie felt Carmack had every right to go box the ears of anyone jawing in such a fashion. But Carmack didn’t seem to be bothered. It was as if he was proud of his wife and child, as well as his being some sort of Indian, too. No doubt about it, Carmack sang an odd tune. Then again, Charlie noted with some amusement, who was he to be pointing fingers? After all, if he could be a cowboy turned detective, who’s to say Carmack couldn’t be a prospector turned Indian?

There was, however, one thing about Carmack that didn’t lie so easy with Charlie: The man had skedaddled. One day he was working in the machine shop; the next he picked up his pay and left. Told the mine office he was going back up-country to work as a packer, which sounded true enough on the face of it. But Charlie also couldn’t help wondering if Carmack’s sudden departure had anything to do with his interest. When Charlie had taken the seat next to him in the dining hall, it’d been plain that Carmack didn’t want to talk. He couldn’t finish his meal fast enough, get out of the dining hall, and hurry on back to work. Two days after that, he’d quit the mine. It was as if he had something to hide—such as, say, a role in the robberies.

Now, lying in his bed and unable to sleep, with only the mystery for company, Charlie turned to Mamie for advice. He knew, of course, that she wasn’t there, but he found it a comfort, when there was no one to eavesdrop, to pretend as if she were. Speaking to her, even if the words only ran through his mind like a silent prayer, made him feel less alone. So tonight, when he felt the old sadness coming back, he tried to ease things by conversing (after a fashion) with the woman he missed so much.

Now, isn’t this something, Mamie? he said silently, knowing she would’ve appreciated the irony. I finally get a suspect—and it’s the one man in the whole damn territory I’m beholden to.

Mamie, though, wasn’t Charlie’s only solace. He also kept a bottle on the floor beneath his bed, near his boots, and when the old pain returned, he found it a comfort, too. He’d take a sip; share a silent word with Mamie; and then his thoughts on that long night would return to Carmack. He wasn’t sure why. But in his relentless way, with Mamie as his audience, he picked away at Carmack as if the man were offering up some sort of challenge. It was as if Carmack somehow held the key to the case.

Which, Charlie told himself, was unlikely. He was too much an Injun to be a gold thief. Yet even if Carmack was involved, Charlie knew he couldn’t have done it on his own. There was no way a single man could’ve managed it. Why, just getting all that gold off the island would’ve been quite an undertaking. And now prodded, his mind circled back to something he’d been mulling for weeks, ever since he’d first watched a crew unloading the crates: Gold was heavy.

Like boxcars coupled together on a slow-moving train, these separate thoughts pulled one another along through the course of Charlie’s pensive, restless night. He kept trying to sort it all out. And sometime before dawn, things began to clarify. There was no hurrah cowboy shout of “Yippee!” No rushing up to Durkin’s office to alert him to the news. Charlie, in fact, understood that he was no closer to identifying the men who had taken the gold than he’d been when the night began. Nor were the precise details clear in his mind; that’d require some further investigation. But now, for the first time, he announced triumphantly to Mamie, he was pretty sure he knew the broad strokes of how they’d done it.

DESPITE HIS excitement, Charlie waited until he finished his shift to put his theory to the test. He’d considered not reporting to work, just going off first thing in the morning, but he’d decided such rashness would be a mistake. He’d put in too much time creating the cover of Lee Davis, machine oiler, and it’d be plumb foolishness to wreck it now—especially since he’d still need to round up the thieves and recover the gold. Accomplishing that would be a tall order; he’d have to win the trust of some unsavory sorts, and he wouldn’t stand a chance if they even as much as suspected that he was a detective. So that morning, patience ruled.

Yet all through the shift as Charlie, oil can in hand, went about his duties, his mind was elsewhere. Regardless of the tasks he appeared to be performing, Charlie passed the hours laying out in a precise, orderly way what he knew for certain about the thefts.

Fact: Gold bars stamped with the TM mark of the Treadwell mine had been taken from the warehouse. On three occasions.

Fact: The thefts had gone undetected until the weekly routine warehouse inventories.

Fact: The gold was nowhere to be found. Durkin had had teams of men scour the island, digging beneath piles of rocks, poking into rotted tree trunks, tearing apart the ferry—and they’d discover not even a trace of yellow dust. Meanwhile, the banks in Seattle and Tacoma had reported that no one had tried to cash bars marked with the Treadwell stamp.

Fact: It was the perfect crime.

Or it had been, Charlie told himself as his shift ticked slowly on, until he’d sorted it all out.

AND THEN it was six P.M. His shift was over. The previous night the facts had led Charlie to a theory, and now he was at last ready to confirm it. But once again he realized that restraint was necessary. In one more accommodation to his cover, after clocking out he went directly to supper at the dining hall. He feared that his absence might be noted; anyone with reason to be wary would very likely be keeping a sharp eye. Breaking routine, McParland had warned, will get an undercover operative exposed or, no less likely, killed. So for what seemed like an eternity, Charlie ate food he was unaware of swallowing, and made conversation without any notion of what he was saying. He sat at the long refectory table, but in truth he was in another world.

When the men finally began exiting the hall, he lingered at the rear of the crowd. He stayed back until he was all alone; and after he was certain no one was watching, he disappeared into the night shadows. Avoiding the path, he bolted into the spruce forest. Hidden among the tall trees, Charlie felt elated; after the day’s excruciating delays, he could at last proceed. Yet in the next moment another realization struck, and he cursed his stupidity. Why hadn’t he brought a lantern? But then a gust of wind moved the clouds across the sky to reveal a hunter’s moon hanging high and bright in the sky, as if put there to show him the way.

He stayed in the trees, and as the grade grew steeper, he followed it. When he reached the summit of a densely wooded hill, he stopped; he listened to the country to see if he could detect the sound of someone trailing him; and when he was certain he was alone, he took his bearings. The warehouse, Charlie knew, sat on a hilltop on the northeast corner of the island. He had climbed the same hill, but from an opposite direction. With the North Star as his guide, he’d be able to stay unseen, hidden behind the curtain of trees, until he was fairly close. And after an easy ten-minute walk, there it was.

In his mind, Charlie was imagining he was one of the thieves. His plan was to do what they’d done, except, of course, for actually making off with the gold. So he moved up to where the tree line began to thin out and, being careful to stay in the shadows, he began searching. Without having to try too hard, Charlie found what he’d been looking for. A half dozen big rocks had been moved to form a barrier, and a pile of spruce boughs had been scattered on the ground as a buffer against the cold. It reminded Charlie of one of the hunter’s blinds he’d occupied in the New Mexico hills, only these hunters weren’t after antelopes. When Charlie settled in, he discovered that it provided a perfect sight line through the trees, toward the warehouse. Which was just as he’d expected. So he sat and watched, same as he was certain the thieves had done.

He had to pass a very cold hour, far colder than he’d supposed, until he saw two guards approach the building. They opened the warehouse door, shined their lanterns around for a few curious moments, and, apparently satisfied, then moved off to complete the remainder of their nightly rounds. He’d have about an hour, Charlie judged, before they returned.

When Charlie saw the two men disappear down the hill and into the darkness, he raced from the trees. It was a good thirty yards or so to the warehouse, and all he could do was run as fast as he could and hope no one was lurking about. He reached the front door without a shout ringing out; and, buoyed, Charlie pressed himself flat against the building.

Then he saw it: A big padlock secured the front door. Charlie didn’t have a key, but he expected the robbers hadn’t had one, either. If they could figure a way in, he confidently told himself, he would, too. He walked slowly around the building looking for access: a window, a gap in the foundation he could wiggle beneath, a back door. But Charlie found nothing. After five minutes, he was back once more staring at the padlock.

Charlie studied it carefully, and then held it in his hand. It was a heavy, irksome hunk of metal; Durkin must’ve thought a lock of that size and heft would be bound to discourage breakins. Sure, he knew he could find a rock and split the hasp open. But there’d been no reports of any busted locks, and such an irregularity would surely have been noticed by the guards in the course of their rounds. The alarm would’ve been immediately sounded. Only the thefts had gone undetected for days. So how had the robbers managed it? How had they gotten into the warehouse without destroying the padlock? Charlie focused all his attention on the lock, aware that if he didn’t figure something out soon, the guards would be returning. Then all he’d have to show for his three months on the island would be a lot of useless conjecture. He’d be back where he’d started—utterly dumbfounded. He was trying not to panic, but his mind was racing. Then he hit on an idea.

Charlie reached under his shirt for the scabbard he wore tied across his chest by a leather strap, and removed his knife. Using the blade, he pried off the metal hinge that had been hammered into one side of the door to hold the lock in place. When he was done, the padlock was still closed, only now it was no longer secured to the door; it just dangled ineffectively alongside the hinge. He made sure to gather up the nails that had fallen to the ground and put them in his pocket; he’d need them later. Then he gave the front door a firm push and stepped in. The room was darker than McParland’s office, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness Charlie noticed that a lantern had been thoughtfully left on a shelf by the door. He took a match from his pocket, lit the wick, and stared out at a treasure of gold.

Or so he assumed. From his position by the door, it was impossible to be certain. All he knew for sure was what he saw: The room was crammed wall to wall with crates stacked chest-high in neat rows. But when he used his knife to lift the top of one the crates, he wasn’t disappointed. It was packed with shiny bars.

Nevertheless—and this was what had dawned on him in his eureka moment the previous night—as long as the crates were nailed shut, there was no telling what was inside. A box might’ve been picked clean, and then its top nailed back on. The watchmen would stop in every hour or so while on their rounds, give a quick glance to see if the rows of crates were in place and undisturbed, and figure all’s right with the world. They never bothered to look inside any of the boxes. Nor could they’ve been expected to. There were at least two hundred crates; a careful inspection would’ve taken hours and hours, and they had an entire island to patrol.

Deceiving the watchmen, Charlie had determined, would be simple enough—as long as the thieves weren’t greedy. If they didn’t walk off with crate after crate but took only the amount of gold that two men could carry before the watchmen circled back, then it’d be as easy as shooting grazing buffaloes. Two men making two trips, say, could grab forty or fifty bars and still have time to nail the crates shut again and fix the hinge on the front door before the guards returned. No one would be the wiser until the weekly warehouse inventories.

Yes, Charlie told himself as he put the lantern back on its shelf, removing the gold from the warehouse without being discovered would be the easy part. The hard part would be figuring out a plan to get the fifty bars down the long hill and then off the island. Well, he quickly corrected, getting the booty off the island wouldn’t require too much invention. Best he could make out, there were only two possible ways: Either you swam or you had a boat. But the odds of anyone swimming across the frigid channel waters while dragging a sack of gold bars and surviving to rob the mine another day were too overwhelming. There was just no way that could’ve happened. So Charlie felt certain they must’ve had a boat, maybe even a canoe, anchored off some dark cove on the less hectic side of the island.

No, the real mystery was how they’d been able to get fifty bars of gold down the hill and across the island to their boat. And, Charlie didn’t need to remind himself, gold was heavy. Fifty bars would weigh, he guessed, near on three hundred pounds. From the front door of the warehouse down to the beach was more than two miles. And it was anyone’s guess where along the island’s coastline their boat would’ve been moored; that could add further miles to the escape route. Two men—Charlie had by now come to believe it was a two-man job or more bars would’ve been stolen—lugging that much gold would need to make several trips. Yet they couldn’t load up gunnysacks, or stack it in wheelbarrows, or, for that matter, carry it in their arms. Besides the watchmen, there were a thousand people on the island, and they worked day and night. Someone would be bound to notice. So, Charlie asked himself, how’d the robbers do it? The only answer he could come up with was—I’ll be damned if I know.