White Desert Page 6

  I’d been with Vivian ten minutes, long enough for him to read Blackthorne’s letter and hear my account of the palaver in the woods. His office was a one-story walk-up by way of an outside staircase next to a feed store. The room took up the building’s entire second story, with only his desk and a work table and a row of upright wooden chairs to occupy it. A skin that must at one time have belonged to a fifteen-hundred-pound grizzly managed to look small in the middle of the plank floor. Apart from that the place resembled any city lawman’s office in the American territories, complete with a row of rifles and shotguns glistening in a locked rack, a corkboard stacked with wanted readers three deep, and the obligatory blue-enamel pot boiling away on a potbelly stove that might have come from the estate of Ben Franklin. (It was a teapot; but then Canada was mostly settled by people who would never forgive Boston its party.) The maple-leaf flag hanging from a standard in one corner provided a colorful change of pace, along with a gold-fringed blue banner tacked to the wall behind the desk, featuring a buffalo head beneath a coronet encircled by the legend NORTHWEST MOUNTED POLICE. At the bottom appeared the motto MAINTIEN LE DROIT, which Judge Blackthorne had translated for me: Maintain the Right.

  A pair of tall, narrow windows looked out on Moose Jaw: all two blocks of it, log and clapboard buildings with signs in English and French advertising stores (shops, they called them there), drinking establishments, and one hotel, the Trappers Inn. The street separating them was a hundred feet wide, scored and rutted and frozen as hard as granite. It had all the appearance of a town founded by trappers and Indian traders struggling to stay alive between the crash of the fur market and the coming of the railroad (railway, they called it there). The very fact that the North-West Mounted had decided to open an office there must have given the locals hope to go on.

  “Why don’t you bring in the British Army to deal with Piapot?” I asked.

  “We don’t handle things that way. Unlike your American cavalry, we’ve managed to learn from our mistakes.”

  “You wouldn’t know that from your record in India and Africa.”

  He had a silver snuffbox on his desk. He used it, sneezing into a handkerchief he drew from his left sleeve. All he had to do now to make me like him less was hop on a pony and whack a wooden ball with a mallet.

  “I was a regular army officer for twelve years,” he said, tucking the handkerchief back into his cuff. “Worked my way up through the ranks. Fought in Abyssinia and at Roarke’s Drift. Bloody buggers, both campaigns, and all we managed to win was the contempt of half the world’s native peoples.”

  “And most of the African continent. Don’t forget that.”

  He pointed a finger at me. There was an impressive callus on the end of it, but he might have gotten that from a pen. “Yes, and in the end you Yanks will have a continent as well, and spend the rest of the century fighting to hold on to it. Blood for dirt ain’t a fair trade.”

  I had nothing to throw at that, so I withdrew from the field. “I can’t feature Piapot letting me live. I had a bead on him, but I never knew an Indian to be afraid to die. The others would have chopped me to pieces before I got in a second round.”

  “Crees are hard to predict or explain. They respect a show of sand. Or he might have thought you were daft, which is bad medicine. You’re a lucky bloke either way. You should have given up the rifle.”

  “If what you say is true, that might have gotten me killed.”

  “Perhaps. Your government doesn’t have the corner on treachery.”

  Now we were moving in circles. “What news of Bliss and Whitelaw?”

  “Nothing since that bad business on the Saskatchewan at Christmas.” He relaxed a little; his shoulder blades actually touched the back of his chair. “It wasn’t enough for them to steal every dollar and gold filling in the settlement. They had to take target practice on the locals as well, and put a tourch to everything that wouldn’t bleed. I helped bury the bodies. Some of them were burned all in a heap, their flesh melted in one lump; rather than try to separate them we dug a big hole and pushed them in like rubble. They smelled like burnt pork. I sent to Regina for troops and we tracked the buggers as far north as Saskatoon when a blizzard wiped out the trail. They didn’t pass through town. I wired the constable in Prince Albert to keep an eye out. I’m still waiting for an answer. That far up the lines are down as often as not.”

  “What’s past Prince Albert?”

  “Eight hundred miles of wilderness, clear up to Victoria Island. Beyond that’s the Arctic Ocean. Oh, there’s a river settlement two hundred miles north of Albert, founded by former American slaves, and a stronghold up on Cree Lake full of Sioux Indians who chose not to surrender with Sitting Bull last summer, but even Bliss and Whitelaw aren’t barmy enough to take on either one. They’re armed camps.”

  “The slaves are armed?”

  “Former slaves—and free up here since long before Lincoln. They’ll shoot a white American as soon as look at him. There’s not a one of them as didn’t have a wife or mother or some other close kin sold down the river at one time or another. Americans have been known to disappear in that vicinity, and there’s not a Mountie in the country could track them to where they’re burned or buried. The locals are always polite to redcoats, invite us in for dinner and a jug, but when we ask them what became of so-and-so, they roll their eyes and shake their heads, laughing at us the whole time behind that plantation-nigger show. I hope to blazes Bliss and Whitelaw tried them on; it would save Her Majesty the cost of a trial and Washington the price of extradition. But I don’t count on it.”

  “What’s the name of the settlement?”

  “Shulamite. Not that you’ll need to know it, except as the name of the place you want to ride wide around. The settlers put their trust in a hag of an African shaman, and I don’t set any store by such claptrap, but she’ll see straight through you if you try to brass it out and claim you’re anything but a wicked slave-taking white American. I suspect her hideous old face is the last thing those men who vanished ever saw.”

  “How many men are riding with Bliss and Whitelaw?”

  He took another pinch but didn’t sneeze this time. He seemed relieved not to be still discussing Shulamite and its witch queen. “The survivors of the massacre couldn’t agree on a number. As few as eight, as many as fifteen. The witnesses were in shock, and it’s usual in those circumstances to count high. Enough, anyway, to call for a company of Mounties when we find out where they’re hiding.” He glanced down at Blackthorne’s letter. “You know, I sent wires to the capitals of all the American territories where these animals committed atrocities, but Helena was the only one that offered to send help. I suppose the others think Bliss and Whitelaw are our problem now. But this letter don’t say anything about how many men are coming behind you. I frankly don’t care for the prospect of a gang of heavily armed strangers loitering about town, and neither will Superintendent Walsh. Such men become bored easily.”

  “Tell Superintendent Walsh not to worry. I’m the entire expedition.”

  “I’d feared that. Your Judge Blackthorne is disingenuous. He has no interest in assisting us, merely in protecting the United States’ claim on Bliss and Whitelaw and their accomplices when they are apprehended. You’re here in the role of a spy to see that Canada doesn’t hang them first.”

  “Blackthorne’s a low fighter,” I said. “He’s vain, too, and he cheats at billiards. But it won’t do to run down the authorities in the other territories because they’d just as soon you dealt with the situation and then run down the judge for saying it’s his responsibility too. Bad form, I think you Brits call it.”

  “Only in cheap novels written by Americans.” He refolded the letter, smoothing the seams with his horned fingers as if they needed it after riding folded in a saddle pouch for three hundred miles. He would do everything twice, minimum; I was betting that under his tunic he wore galluses and a belt. He said, “I can’t offer you a thing beyond the quarters I arranged for you and the opportunity to submit a request for extradition once the fugitives are in custody. I shan’t stop you if you volunteer to accompany any party I assemble when we receive news of their whereabouts, but I remind you that you have no official status in Queen’s country. You will obey my orders. And before you leave this office you will surrender to me any firearms you have on your person. They aren’t permitted in town.”

  I shifted my weight in the hard chair, unholstered the five shot from under my bearskin, and passed it across the desk butt-first. “What about my rifles?”

  “You can leave them with Jules Obregon at the livery when you board your horses. He’ll see they’re delivered here.” He frowned approvingly at the revolver. “English weapon. Do you not subscribe to the popular Yankee conceit that only Sam Colt made men equal?”

  “I won my first Deane-Adams off a stock detective in Kansas in ’76 on a jack-high straight. He bought it back from me and then used it to try to hold me up for the rest of the pot. I shot him with the Army Colt I was carrying at the time and took the English gun for my trouble. He didn’t see me palm the cartridges when I sold it to him.”

  “You killed him?”

  “Not right away, but it’s difficult to shoot someone at that range without blowing out too much to put back in.”

  He smoothed his moustache with a knuckle, evaluating me with those pale eyes. “I should think the incident was a better argument in favor of the Colt.”

  “Not really. A pistol without cartridges hasn’t had a fair comparison. I liked the feel of the Deane-Adams. It took me six months to find a replacement after I lost it somewhere between Bismarck and Fargo in ’78.”

  “Another shooting incident, no doubt.”

  “It’s a frontier, Inspector. That’s no
t a police whistle hanging from that peg.”

  He didn’t bother to turn his head to look at the cartridge belt and what looked like the handle of a Russian .44 sticking out of the flap holster on the wall where he hung his white cork helmet. “I’ve drawn that weapon once in the line of duty since I was assigned here four years ago, to disarm a drunk. Moose Jaw isn’t Tombstone. It’s a wild land, but most British subjects respect the law even when they can’t see it. If it weren’t for your Indian wars and your expatriate desperadoes, I should be sitting in a comfortable office in Ottawa, sipping whiskey and soda and discussing the fights.”

  “Well, I’ll try and take Bliss and Whitelaw off your hands at least.”

  “Right.” He placed the revolver and the Judge’s letter in the top drawer of the desk and banged it shut. “The linen in the Trappers Inn is above reproach, but if you heed my advice, you’ll sleep there only and take your meals at the Prince of Wales. I recommend the fried chicken, and I’m told the cook poaches an excellent trout. As I’m one Londoner who can’t abide fish, I’m unable to offer an opinion based on experience. Is there anything else I can do to make your stay more pleasant?” He wasn’t gentleman enough to bother to make the invitation sound sincere, but then he’d come up through the ranks. It cost him plenty to avoid dropping his h’s.

  “Just one thing.”

  I surprised him, not for the first time, nor yet again for the last during that brief meeting. He had a leather portfolio of papers on his desk and had already begun to absorb himself in them. He looked up, brows lifted. That’s when I surprised him again.

  I said, “Tell me where I can find the survivors of the massacre on the Saskatchewan.”

  9

  The lobby of the Trappers Inn was less than half the size of Inspector Vivian’s office and contained twice as many fixtures and furniture. A great shaggy moose head with a six-foot antler spread seemed to breathe down my neck while I registered for the clerk, three hundred pounds of solid fat with long gray hair and no discernible gender. A pair of crossed snowshoes hung on the wall next to the stairs and a smoothbore musket of Revolutionary War vintage decorated a ceiling beam, looking not so much like ornaments as things that were taken down frequently and used. So far everything I had seen about Canada made me feel that the entire country had been pressed between the pages of a novel by James Fenimore Cooper.

  The room I got smelled suffocatingly of cedar and soiled wool with a single discolored window, a smoky fireplace, a chipped-enamel washstand, and a cornshuck mattress on a narrow iron bedstead. The sheets and pillowcases were white and freshly pressed, as Vivian had promised. After so many nights sleeping on the frozen ground, I thought it was the presidential suite at the Palmer House in Chicago. I built a fire from a box full of seasoned pine and cedar, pried the window up an inch to let the smoke out, helped myself to a swig from a bottle I’d bought in Deer Lodge, and slept for two hours without even trying.

  I awoke at dusk, sore all over and hungry enough to order the moose head for dinner. Stripped to the waist, I washed with cold water and scraped off the top layer of stubble, then put on a clean shirt and went downstairs to ask for directions to the Prince of Wales. The clerk, who I guessed was some mix of French and Indian, but whose sex I still could not decide upon, looked at me with small black eyes like a mole’s.

  “Dining room’s through that door. Tonight’s pot roast of beef.”

  “Thanks. I asked about the Prince of Wales.”

  “You must be rich as Gladstone.” But the clerk told me the way.

  His Royal Highness might have stuck his nose up at it, but the restaurant was as civilized as anything I’d seen in months. The floor was sanded and scrubbed white, the walls were plastered and papered and hung with portraits of H.R.H. and his mother the Widow of Whitehall, and the tables were covered in white linen. The room was half full at that hour, the locals in mackinaws and woolen shirts and heavy knitted pullovers, some in stocking caps and brimmed hats with stains on the crowns where they gripped them between greasy thumbs and forefingers. Some of the diners were women, dressed like men for the most part, skirts of durable material and no particular color hanging to their boottops so that they looked like male-female combinations in a medicine show, divided halfway down. They would save their femininity for the short warm season.

  I hung up my bearskin on a peg already layered with coats and scarves and found a corner table. A waiter with a shorn head and handlebars appeared while I was reading the menu. I asked for fried chicken and a bowl of mushroom soup.

  “Anything to wash that down? We got red and white.”

  “Just water.”

  He went away with a shrug, a large man in a clean apron who walked on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter. He didn’t take the menu. I pretended to interest myself in the breakfast bill of fare while my fellow diners stole glances at me. They would know who I was by now, small towns being the same on both sides of the border, and they would want to know if the American lawman was as tall as Pat Garrett or as curly-headed as James Butler Hickok. I wasn’t either one; little by little their attention strayed back to their meals and stayed there.

  The soup was good if slightly musty, made from mushrooms dried during autumn for keeping and soaked in water when they were prepared. I’d had better fried chicken in Virginia, but I could see how it would impress an Englishman like Vivian. At that moment the man himself entered, shook the snow off his flat-brimmed campaign hat and sheepskin coat with the fleece turned inside before hanging them up, and came straight my way without appearing to have looked around. Probably he had spotted me through the window. He would be the kind of man who never wanted to look as if he didn’t know where he was headed, a man accustomed to being watched and who behaved accordingly. I hoped he wasn’t going to get me killed.

  “I see you took my advice,” he said by way of greeting. “How do you like the chicken?”

  “It’s all right. At this point anything that doesn’t taste like bacon suits me down to the ground.”

  His attempt at a smile soured. I’d intended to compliment him, but even when I try to say something polite to someone I don’t like it comes out wrong. “May I sit down, or are you one of those blokes who prefers to dine alone, like a Neanderthal?”

  “It’s a free country,” I said. “Whoops, no, it’s not. But suit yourself.”

  He sat with his hands on his thighs and watched me finish off a leg. “We’ve started off poorly, I’m afraid,” he said. “My grandfather was killed at New Orleans. What I’ve seen of most Americans who come up here hasn’t done a great deal to eradicate the family antipathy.”

  “I’m surprised you came here.”

  “I haven’t eaten since breakfast. Oh, you mean Canada.” He bared his teeth. “Rank can be purchased in the British military, if you have the wherewithal. I bought mine with blood and sweat. The wealthy class is not overrun with idiots, but they have their share, and most of them seem to think they’d look good in brass buttons. One morning a colonel whose father was serving in the House of Lords asked me if I didn’t agree that the Sikhs and Muslims ought to be able to sit down and work out their differences in the spirit of Christian good fellowship. I resigned my commission that afternoon. I was among the first three hundred Mounties dispatched to Fort Garry in ’73.”

  He paused, then recited, in a clear, pleasant tenor that turned heads at the nearby tables: “‘Sharp be the blade and sure the blow and short the pang to undergo.’ That’s what the Toronto Mail predicted when we rode west. Nobody gave us a Chinaman’s chance against the northern tribes after the massacre in Cypress Hills. And yet here we are. That wouldn’t be the case if the idiots had come out with us.”

  “Maybe. The Army of the Potomac had more idiots than Robert E. Lee had gray hairs, but we managed to beat him anyway.”

  “Fought the good fight against slavery, did you?”

  “I never saw a slave in my life, and neither did a good many of the men I helped kill in that war. It wasn’t about slavery. I can’t tell you just what it was about now, though I was pretty sure then.”