The Snowfly (30 page)

“How do you suggest I go about doing that?”

“Do I gotta tell ya everything?”

Elliot Lake was quiet at night. Perhaps radium in the bedrock sapped rambunctiousness. I dined on a soggy beef Wellington at a café, had several beers, and went to bed early.

Early the next day I went to find Pierrette Rouleau. Her directions took me south on 108, then east on a crushed-stone road to a small white house with no grass around it. Visqueen was taped over the windows to keep out winter breezes. She came to the door red eyed and squinting.

“You,” she said, her face deadpan. “The word seller. Are you still looking for Bolt?” The door was cracked open and her face peering out. An invitation to come inside was conspicuously absent. She was far less welcoming than she had been in the bar. Perhaps a morning visit wasn't what she had in mind.

“I found him.”

“But?”

“I didn't have an appointment and he won't see anyone without one.”

“He's like that,” she said. “He's not exactly what you'd call social.”

“You know him?”

She shook her head. “No and I don't really care to. What's your interest in Bolt?”

“Books,” I said.

Raised her eyebrows. “Are you some kind of investigator?” I heard bemusement in her voice.

“No, not those kinds of books. Books about a certain subject.”

“I never thought of Bolt as the reading type.”

“I need to get in touch with him.”

“He doesn't let strangers in. In fact, he doesn't let many people get near him.”

I fished a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket and held it up. “So who do you know that he knows?”

“Are you one of those Americans who thinks money's the answer to everything?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“If you take it.”

She smiled at me with flashing eyes and started to swing the door shut, but I got my foot wedged in.

“I'm sorry,” I said, stuffing the twenty back into my pocket. “Can we start over?” I saw her tongue press against the inside of her cheek. “I'm a reporter and I have been following something for a long time. Bolt bought some books that could unlock some answers for me, but I need to get to him and I need help.”

“I suppose you'd better step inside,” she said after a long hesitation.

She wore a heavy red flannel robe and floppy blue slippers. The house was furnished but not decorated. She poured coffee for me, disappeared for a while, and came back dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt with a fresh face and light makeup.

“You don't live here,” I said.

“No?” Bit of a smile, which I read as encouragement. “Now you're a detective.”

“No homey touches, no eau de personality.”

She eyed me with suspicion. “You're sure you're not a cop, eh?”

“Words,” I reminded her. “I'm a reporter for a wire service.”

“After Bolt.”

“Interested in his books.”

“You know his story?” she asked.

“The barest outline. He made a wad on uranium.”

“That's true as far as it goes.” She warmed my coffee and poured her own. Her skin seemed even darker than in the bar. Long fingernails, well cared for.

“How far does it go?”

“To the root,” she said. “He's made his money, the bloody magic bundle, and now he'd like to ruin it for the rest of us.”

There was no need to prompt her; she had a story to tell. “Bolt originally drifted up from Sarnia,” she said. “Which makes him barely Canadian. He fled to the bush. There are men like him everywhere up here. Misfits, dreamers, drunks.”

“Women too?”

She raised a brow and granted an almost imperceptible nod of assent. “Chapleau, Timmins, Porcupine, all the places where there were mineral strikes; he seemed drawn to ore like a deer to salt. He learned a bit along the way, enough to look, but not quite enough to find on his own.”

“But here he did find.”

“Yes and no. In the late nineteen-forties a couple of mineral cruisers from the Soo found radioactive rock down by Quirke. A few years later a geologist from Toronto got interested. It was a puzzle. The rock was radioactive, but there was no uranium in the samples. Eventually the geologist figured out that the weather or something made the ore sink deep. This was all kept very hush-hush. They decided there had to be uranium, and a lot of it, so they organized a secret operation. They flew a hundred men into the area from the north, even had lawyers with them, and for a month they staked claims and almost nobody knew a thing was going on until the claims were filed. By then they had tens of thousands of acres all to themselves.”

“You said ‘
almost
nobody.'”

She smiled. “Wordman. You listen carefully. There was an American banker with a cabin on Quirke Lake. I think he was from Ohio and he came up every summer on floatplanes to fish, enjoy the outdoors. Turns out that the cabin was smack in the middle of some of the richest ore deposits and, of course, there was no way for the secret stakers to avoid the American's place. The banker was a good man. He fed the stakers and became their friend. He knew something was up but didn't press them. The day before the claims were filed the stakers told him their story. He went out and did some of his own quick staking and put together his own investment group and they all made a bundle.”

“How does Bolt fit in?”

She smiled again. “Bolt had no real money of his own back then. But he was a bit of the phantom of the backwoods. He turned up at various places and times, often unexpectedly. The American banker used to bring his family to the lake. The banker's wife made friends with an Ojibwa woman who lived up the Serpent River in a cabin with her prospector-trapper boyfriend.” Pierrette Rouleau looked at me. “When her boyfriend was out, Bolt would stop by.”

“Hanky-panky.”

“Exactly. The woman liked a bit of variety in her bed. She told Bolt about the strangers. Bolt knew rock, and he knew something was up and started watching them. He figured it out and did some staking of his own right in the middle of where all the action was. It could've turned out to be worthless, but it didn't. He had nine claims, all prime. Talk about lucky.”

“And sold his claims.”

“First he staked his claims. Then he tipped another group, chums of sorts, who sent in their own stakers. He wanted major competition against the first group. After claims became public, speculators poured in, trying to buy property all over the area. That shot the prices up.”

“Then Bolt sold.”

“For a bloody fortune. You saw the emblem on his gate?”

I had. A black cat with a dollar sign.

“Pussy money,” she said, disgustedly.

“A true romantic,” I said and she smiled in response. From her description Bolt did not seem the type to be interested in rare and arcane books.

“He's an opportunist,” she said. “And a pure predator.”

“And this makes him unpopular?” Ordinarily such people were folk heroes.

“No, people don't much mind how he made his money, but now that he's got his, he's found religion,” she said.

“A godhead.”

“No, it's not like that. It's got nothing to do with churches and such. He says the uranium makes people sick. There are mine tailings in the water system. He says there's poison everywhere.”

“Is he right?”

“That's not the point.”

A curious response. “What is?”

“Uranium's what's here. It's all that's here. One of the papers in Ottawa called us nuclear whores, which is about the truth of it.” She fell silent.

“The town looks pretty empty,” I said.

“It still has life. Maybe a lot of life. People here say ‘Thank you, A-rabs.' That oil embargo business helped us. Now Ottawa says Canada's got to become self-reliant for power. No more Arab oil.”

“A conversion to nuclear?”

“That seems to be the consensus.”

“The phoenix could rise again.”

“It would be a new boom. The Japs have already been here. The French too. Fuel's an even worse problem for them.”

“Which makes Bolt's position a threat to Ottawa and the local powers.”

“There you have it in a nutshell.”

“What's your own position in all this?”

The lifted brow again. “A girl has to work.”

“Where?”

“I have a job at the mine, the only one still open, but not underground. They pay well and they'll pay even better if demand goes up.”

“Supply and demand.”

“Right you are.” There was a catch in her voice.

“What if Bolt's right about the effects of the mines?”

“It's a dilemma,” she said sadly. “I have a kid, a nice kid. She thinks I sell real estate.”

“She's here?” There was no sign of a child in the house.

“No, she lives down in Espanola with my sister and her brood. I go back and forth. I can't risk her living here.”

I could see Espanola on my mental map. It was south and farther east of Elliot Lake. And not close at all. “Are there mines there?”

“No, but Bolt says there's radiation in the water there too. He says it starts here and goes elsewhere. How far is far enough away to be safe?”

I had no idea. “What will you do?”

She propped her left foot on her right knee and rubbed her toes. “My church has always been the path of least resistance. You get accustomed to a certain standard of living. A few more years and I will have socked away plenty for my kid and me. Then I'll get her and we'll move somewhere we don't have to worry about all this.”

It was a sickening gamble.

“So,” she said. “You still want to see Bolt?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I'm still not sure why, but I told her everything I knew about M. J. Key and the snowfly, leaving out only the cryptography history and the fact that I had been thrown out of the Soviet Union and warned by the Brits to steer clear of Key.

When I was done, she cracked a smile and shook her head. “This is about
fish?
I'll never understand men.”

“I'm not sure what it's about,” I confessed. All I knew was that I could not let go.

“Chances of seeing him aren't good. He stays to himself.”

“I have to try.”

“Effort always matters, even for fish,” she said. “It may take a while.”

“I'm rich in time.”

“Let me make some calls,” she said, getting up. “Make yourself comfortable.”

I put my feet up on her coffee table and sank into her couch. I heard her voice on the phone, then the shower running. When she came out of the bedroom a while later she was wrapping a towel around her wet hair. “We'll have to drive down to Cutler,” she said. “There may be a way for you.”

It was late afternoon before we headed for Cutler in two cars. Pierrette had a half sister, June, who had a half brother, Luc Brokendog. June had some sort of job in Iron Bridge and Luc lived north of Cutler on the Serpent River. We had to cross a wooden bridge with a sign that said
danger: unsafe.
Pierrette didn't even slow down and I inched my way across behind her with an iron grip on my steering wheel. Once across, we climbed a hill covered with thick stands of yellow and paper birches and skinny poplars. We left the vehicles on the hill and walked up a trail to a clearing on top of a granite outcrop. Below was the dark, clear water of the Serpent and, to our left, a smaller stream that tumbled down the steep hillside to form thick yellow foam in the main river. Blackflies hovered overhead in carnivorous clouds. A pile of wood was stacked to the eaves beside a house, which was covered with weathered tar paper. Several dogs bayed from an area back in the woods. A small raccoon was on the front porch and clacked its jaws as a warning. It bared its teeth at me, but retreated after the show, its self-respect intact.

We did not mount the porch. We stayed back and Pierrette called out and after a time a woman came out. She was short with black hair and brown skin and an oblong face. Behind her stood a man, shirtless, short, thin, with a too-delicate face. His black hair was loose and long, down to his shoulders, and he had hard lumps of muscle that pushed against skin the color of burnished oak. He examined me with dark, neutral eyes.

“You're the one wants to see Bolt?” the Indian woman asked.

“June,” Pierrette said, looking over at me.

I nodded.

The man stepped forward. “Could take a week, two weeks, maybe more, eh? Everybody rags on Indi'n time, but Bolt time is worse.”

“But you have a rough idea of how long?”

“None a-tall. That one's crazy for fish. That's all he cares about. His place is on good spec water, but there's a lot of beavers, eh? Coupla times a year he calls me in to take out the beaver works. I call some of the boys and off we go. He'll call anytime now.”

Bolt was crazy for fish! So Bolt's acquisition of the Oxley collection might be more than an investment. I was mildly encouraged. Maybe I was getting somewhere after all.

“I thought he could stay with you,” Pierrette told Luc, who shrugged.

“Can you pay?” he asked me.

“How much?” I sensed a little game.

Luc considered for a moment. “Twenty a week.”

A bargain was struck. There was no handshake. I walked Pierrette back to her car.

“I hope it works out,” she said.

“Time will tell. Thank you.”

She shook my hand before she got into her car. “This isn't good-bye,” she said. “I'll be seeing you.”

I had a lot of time on my hands. I visited several area towns and went through their newspaper morgues, looking for more information about Bolt. I also talked to UPI and Reuters reporters in Toronto, but Bolt was a secretive man and I could see that there was no point in further research. I tried calling him on a private number Luc gave me, but got no response.